January 31, 2025 • 44 mins
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I am an expert in the front end, but I'm also the
back of the front end.
How do you build front ends?
Speaker 2 (00:10):
How do you build multiple front ends?
Speaker 1 (00:12):
It's about the back of the front.
I build the testing suite thatthe front end goes on.
I build the GraphQL API, thatthose go on.
I also do a lot of theKubernetes and a lot of the
containerization and a lot ofthe cloud stuff as well.
Throughout my career it's beenthe level of building framework.
I mean I do build applications.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
But I've had more success building frameworks that
build applications.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah, we don't give enough credit for people that
build frameworks.
Right, it's like templatizingthe way that you should be doing
things.
Follow this template, yoursuccess rate will increase
higher, and then if anythingneeds to be changed in the
template, we'll change it soeverybody else gets advantage of
it.
So I always loved frameworksand frameworks being like a
foundational thing in terms ofjust skills development.
(00:58):
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
What up d d hustle?
My guy holding it down guesswhere we at man the big apple
the big apple, nyc.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
We hold it down what is?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
real good and we, right on 42nd street, time
square right outside broadway.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
let's go 42nd and broad Times Square right outside
the window, and Broadway.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Let's go.
42nd and Broadway.
Big shout-outs to everybodyhere in New York City.
We got a special guest for ustoday.
Who we got?
Who we got Michael.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Froberg have you heard of that guy before?
I like him already.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Let's bring him to the stage already.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Michael, welcome, welcome.
Thank you so much for invitingme.
Oh my gosh, I'm glad to be here.
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Definitely want to make sure that everybody can
hear your voice, because my manused to kill this audio game
here and then get into techafterwards.
We got a story to tell, but,michael man, thank you so much
for pulling up.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Absolutely.
I'm happy to be here.
Yeah, for sure, I'd like toengage with your, you know, with
your audience and everybodylike that.
Yeah, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
And then we got D-Hustle in the cut right.
Yes, sir D-Hustle always holdingit down.
There we go, but Michael and Ihas had the pleasure of being
introduced by Patat right onLinkedIn Shout out to Patat, for
sure.
And the situation was is thatwe in NYC, you know, I told
y'all to pull up because we'regoing to have a pop up location
(02:27):
for the podcast and my guy'sname came through and I was like
yo, let me see what Mike got onhis plate, to see if we can get
onto his schedule, see how youknow the credentials looking
fine.
Yeah, you know, I was like yo,we got, we got to get Michael on
our show.
So thank you all so much forpulling up and we're going to
hear Michael's story.
So, to kind of kick this off,tell us a little bit about how
(02:47):
you got into tech and how thisall started for you.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Sure enough.
You know, I think to talk abouttech I have to go backwards a
bit.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, you're right Kill if a dog was, you know yeah
.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
But no, I would say I started my career as a kind of
adult working in televisionproduction.
So I worked on uh you knowthings like um top chef project
runway, making the band umapprentice yeah, yeah, we'll do
that one alone.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
We'll definitely that one alone.
I can't say anything about whatI heard.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
But yeah, so basically working in television.
You know it was a great job, Iwas very happy to do it, but I
got really kind of a.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
interestingly enough, the iPhone came out and I was
like blown away by it at thetime, and so my idea, my thought
was sorry.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
my idea and my thought was to do.
You know, I wanted to make apps, I was very much interested in
that world and you know I waslike jailbreaking phones and all
the craziness, because I was,you know.
So that was my doorway and mysort of you know my door into
tech.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
I would say is through mobile.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
And so the first thing I did, you know, while I
was working on set, you know, Ihad a bag on my chest, you know,
with gear, and on top of that,I had my iPad, I started going
to school.
I went to school for mobiledevelopment at Full Sail
University.
It was interesting.
(04:17):
I was definitely happy for it,but I just didn't feel like it
was going to, at the time,really move because I felt like
I needed to get into the gamesooner.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
He was like yo they're moving too slow.
We need to get this thing goingright.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
This three-year thing isn't happening for me, yeah
yeah, so I decided to get thedegree and then, kind of through
the process of getting thedegree, discovered that there
were boot camps.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Boot camps.
Yeah, this was the very firstgeneration of boot camps.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
And so I was like wow , this is very interesting.
And so I was like wow, this isvery interesting.
And you know, let me look intothis.
And I did look into it and Iwas.
I ended up signing up for thefifth web development immersive
Rails camp.
Yeah yeah, that they still had,like you know before that they
were still doing a lot of kindof not sorry one second they
(05:01):
were doing a lot of like startupkind of integration stuff.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Yeah, yeah At the first, where that was kind of
the focus, yeah yeah, and thensecondarily, they had classes
there.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Oh, okay, I got you, and so when I got there it was
the first sort of you knowcohort of the classes.
I was very early in boot camp,yeah, and that immediately
turned around to a job for me.
It was like I did the projectthat they asked me to do and
then we had a science fair kindof thing where we did our
(05:34):
project Show and tell type stuff, and then two of you happened
to be there or whatever, and Iended up getting a job with two
of you.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Give them a round of applause and big, big plug here,
because we're dropping gems.
Here is showing skill setdevelopment, not just from
educational, supplementaleducation is the key thing,
right, and boot camping,vocational schools, technical
schools is the avenue that I gotthrough too was through
technical school Definitely hasthose genuine experiences
(06:03):
because you're going to bedeveloping the skills hands-on
and then you get to show andtell and then you get a job
opportunity right there.
So definitely big shout-outs toyou, Michael for making that
transition and definitely bigshout-outs to the boot camp for
making that available to you.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
I think my path kind of going through tech started
off interestingly enough, I haddone that full stack, you know
development thing I got hired asa UX developer.
You know which was like, whatis this, but you know,
interestingly enough, I thinkthat was probably one of the
best things that I could havepossibly had gotten involved in
and gotten you know at thebeginning of my career.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Doing so enabled me to sort of start by like
building frameworks.
You know, I always kind ofthroughout my career it's been
the level of building frameworks.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
I mean I do build applications, yeah, yeah, but
I've had more success buildingframeworks than build
applications, yeah, I even likethe way that you dropped that,
because you said buildingframeworks to build applications
, because I don't think we takeenough or we don't give enough
credit for people that buildframeworks.
Right, it's like templatizingthe way that you should be doing
(07:09):
things.
Follow this template, yoursuccess rate will increase
higher, and then if anythingneeds to be changed in a
template, we'll change it soeverybody else gets advantage of
it.
So I always love frameworks,and frameworks being like a
foundational thing in terms ofjust skills development is
something that's extremelyimpactful.
So big ups to you reallyembracing that concept around
(07:31):
frameworks, rather than continueto pursue the idea of, hey, I'm
going to create this app,create this app, create this app
, versus creating a frameworkthat you can make all of those
apps on.
So big ups to you, I'm wonderingwhy Michael don't have his own
company yet right.
It's in the works.
Stay tuned.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Several phases of development.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Yeah for sure, that's what's up.
When year was this that youstarted off boot camping,
getting your first opportunity?
When was that?
Speaker 1 (08:01):
2013.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yeah, that was a really good year, 2013,.
The industry itself was verypopping right.
That's still very active.
A lot of opportunities in termsof skill set-wise to really
make leaps and bounds into, youknow, bigger companies and,
rather than you know, startupscene, which is kind of like
what we had, that iterationafterwards, because then
startups start to come out likecrazy but did you ever get a
(08:25):
chance to make it out to theWest Coast at all during your
time?
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Yes actually.
I did.
I worked for a company.
It was Infosys.
That's a new company, right?
They owned another companycalled Scaba.
That was an e-com company thatwas based out of San Francisco.
Oh, that's what's up.
So you know, I went theremultiple times.
You know, kind of that was ourbase of operations.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yeah, yeah, even though I was in New York.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
You know we still had to go there for various things,
and I'm trying to think there'sa couple other things I've done
there as well.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
You know kind of conference or whatever, but I've
been out there having, and myfriend was so yeah, in Amapark.
Yeah, tell me a little bitabout that.
You were saying that they kindof inspired you to get into tech
in some form or phase, or wasthat something else?
Speaker 1 (09:09):
So I had basically a cousin, a really kind of black
cousin.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know if I'm related to that.
He's my cousin too.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
We know what's up here, so yeah, I had you know
who was kind of ahead of thegame.
You know like he was involvedat Facebook early on and wound
up being able to exit out verynicely.
Yeah, yeah, from when it wasbefore it was public.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
So you know he was somebody that you know when I
was thinking about this.
I kind of don't use him toomuch in a way, but like at that
time I was like hey, I'm lookingto figure out what's the best
kind of entry in.
Right now I'm doing this thingright now, and he was like GA
and I was like bet.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
You know what I mean.
That's all I needed to hear.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, yeah yeah, and I immediately took his advice to
heart and, yeah, yeah, story totell today.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
The rest is history.
The rest is history, yeah, andthen that's always a good thing
in terms of when you have thosefamily members.
A lot of people reach out to mealso and sometimes there's some
hesitation to reach out, butfor me I'm like yo just come and
ask me a question, I can justgive you just a little bit of
this sauce here and you're goingto be gone, right, and it's
(10:29):
always great inspiration to hear, like, the other side of that,
like it was just a little bit ofgiving.
Um definitely turned out to bea wealth of knowledge, a wealth
of, you know, access anddefinitely development and
knowledge.
Um is something that's soinspiring.
Um, yeah, facebook.
Back then it was uh, twitterand facebook were fighting like
this that time and era man.
I, I remember, I rememberactually had a co-worker of mine
that, uh, left twitter to go tofacebook and came right back to
(10:50):
twitter.
It was like no hell, no, Ican't work over there.
It's just something about the,the, the, the, the fighting that
we've always had.
That it doesn't matter, he'sstill viewed as a tweet over
there.
So I was like I'd come backhome.
We always welcome you anyway,but but it's always interesting
to hear how the Silicon Valleycompetition in terms of
engineering really helpedinfluence the industry too,
(11:12):
because we're definitely goingto be talking about some tech a
little bit later.
But in terms of your skill set,so you're mostly on the front
end side, right?
No?
Speaker 1 (11:21):
No, I apologize.
No, no, it's okay.
Uh, no, I, I I'm.
No, no, it's okay.
I would say that I, I am anexpert in the front end, right,
but I'm also the back of thefront end right Like.
I'm how do you build front ends?
Speaker 2 (11:37):
How do you build multiple front ends?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
So it's about like the back of the front, like I
build the testing suite that thefront end goes on.
I build, you know, the um,graphql API, that those go on,
so uh, and also do a lot of theKubernetes and a lot of the
containerization and a lot ofthe cloud stuff as well.
So I would say like I'm mostknown for that because I've
spent the most amount of time init.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
But a lot of what I've been doing lately has been
broader than just that.
It's more full stack.
Yeah, michael said yo, don'tput me in a corner.
I'm trying to get a job rightnow.
I'm selling my life experience.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Basically he's saying he's international Shout out to
him.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Yeah, he said he goes from one side of the
infrastructure all the way tothe other side.
Don't sleep on him.
Don't sleep on him.
My bad Michael round again mybad, michael I didn't mean to be
like no no, no, no, but.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
But the thing is, is that the skill set wise.
It's always really great tohear, uh, engineers step into
that right, because someengineers will only stay in that
specific lane and be like yo.
I only mess with front endjavascript typescript.
Don't talk to me about anythingelse.
Rather than what's needed inthe climate that we're in right
now is broader skill sets rightand upskilling right.
It's like, hey, yeah, I onlyused to do front end, but I know
(12:47):
how the middleware works.
I know how the back endinfrastructure works and that
thing you call cloud thateverybody's kind of mysteriously
about.
I know how that works.
So, uh, definitely, big shoutouts to you in terms of, just,
you know, I'm broadening thescope, calling me out like yo,
whose podcast is this again,like, don't put me in this
corner like this.
But the cool thing is that it'sjust really going to help our
(13:10):
audience be mindful of like, hey, skill set wise, keep the
spectrum broad right, especiallyduring the climate that we're
in right.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Absolutely.
I think one of the things thatcame out of one of the companies
I worked at, skyva, the InfoSyscompany, was that we had the
front end.
But because the front end wasin Node and I also kind of go
back I'm a Node person From thefirst job I was talking about
Nodejs and using Grunt and usingother stuff was how I kind of
(13:38):
got my JavaScript and Nodethings in there.
And I would say, as a result ofthat, when I went to that
company we were building up thiskind of React server-side
rendering stack.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
And nobody other than us knew how to do that, so they
were like we're going to needyou to spin this up and figure
out how this all works, how toscale it horizontally or
vertically what it?
Speaker 2 (14:01):
actually entails to do it vertically what it
actually entails to do it.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
And then also, yeah, we're also using this thing
called Kubernetes Learn it, Ican learn it in three weeks, and
then from there I've knownKubernetes.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah, yeah yeah, kubernetes Big shout-outs to
Kubernetes.
It's great, and we've had a fewepisodes here on the podcast
talking about Kubernetes andtalking about containerization.
It's actually one of my expertskill sets, right, that's kind
of like my box that I check isbuilding infrastructure at
hyperscale, because that's whatI did at Twitter is build one of
the world's largest computeclusters, not running Kubernetes
(14:31):
, but running a softwarepredecessor to Kubernetes which
is called Mesos and Aurora.
So it's almost like Googlereleased this product, not
released it, but they talkedabout a white paper on Borg.
I don't know if you've everheard their orchestration system
.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
That name sounds familiar.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
And then, once they did Borg, they were going to
make Kubernetes, but there wasgrad students from Berkeley that
started working at Twitterrecreating Borg, and then that's
what we got not stuck on, butthat's what we started to
develop.
Unfortunately, you know, inthese races two products come
out.
One of them is going to comeout on top and unfortunately,
Aurora Mesos didn't really makethe cut and everybody moved to
(15:04):
Kubernetes.
And then that's where we areright now, where everybody's
taking advantage of thistechnology because it does allow
you to scale horizontally right, massively right.
I mean, one of our computeclusters we ran over like 500
containers with just one clusterright, and that was one of our
limitations, why we couldn'tmove to Kubernetes, because it
couldn't scale that way.
But there's definitely headwindthat's heading in that
(15:27):
direction and it's always goodto hear industries picking up
these technologies.
That really will change thegame for them.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
That's what's up.
That's what's up.
So if the broad spectrum, interms of full stack, what is
your programming language then?
Speaker 1 (15:41):
I would say my primary programming language is
JavaScript or TypeScript.
Yeah yeah, so if I can do Node,I will do Node.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Yeah, yeah, it's the right thing to do, not you know?
Speaker 1 (15:50):
whatever you know exactly, but I always have to
use it anyway.
Yeah, if I'm using the frontend, so I would say that's been
the most, because it's, I think,it allows more developers to do
more things.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
If we're using, say, a Node stack or whatever, then
everyone's full stack.
Even though they're used to onething they can still utilize
the same language.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Yeah, the same language so that you can
cross-platform in terms ofreviewing code, get code changed
and things like that.
So I've heard TypeScript isreally making a headwind on this
scene here.
So how do you feel aboutTypeScript?
Speaker 1 (16:29):
I think TypeScript is incredible.
Obviously, there are probablysmall things anybody can argue
about, but I think it'sbasically made JavaScript into
Java, I mean yes, I know, it'snot really that, it's like a
pile or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, you know, I thinkthat it's really good because it
(16:51):
has brought type safety atleast the idea of type safety,
you know into sort of the frontend.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
And in doing so, I think, even in the middle layer,
I think it's allowed us to beable to, you know, basically
make things a little bit easierto test.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Even sometimes not having to write a necessary test
because we know that, like theshape of the data you know will
be the shape of the data anyway.
So I think it's kind of made iteasier to test.
You know, because of that, wehave to write less tests as a
result of it.
And then also, I think it, youknow, it has made, I think, just
generally speaking developmentbetter with regards to things
(17:31):
like type safety, understandinghow shapes of these things
operate throughout our this.
You know what have you.
So I think that that's beenvery yeah, yeah.
(17:52):
I mean there's other things aswell, but I think largely you
know the ecosystem around.
It is very helpful.
They do a lot of you knowupdates and I think, just in
general, having people thinkabout interfaces and types and
these kind of things you knowanywhere along the stack is
better and safer.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
I was talking to another guest we had here.
What up, sebastian?
What's going on, player?
We appreciate you pulling up,and he was also making some
great evaluations of the valuearound TypeScript compared to
JavaScript and more or lessbecoming close to the norm in
the industry.
When you're looking for jobs,is that one of the skills that
they're looking for?
(18:34):
But more specifically aroundtypes, it's always kind of so.
I'm more Python right.
So data types, we really don'tcare.
But we got to write code thatblocks code or blocks those
invalid data types, and what youfind is a lot of new engineers
don't actually.
But we got to write code thatblocks code or blocks those
invalidated types, and what youfind is a lot of new engineers
don't actually write code likethat.
They were actually not lookingat type inside of their function
or method, but they're justexpecting it to be received, and
(18:54):
that's one of the the buggierthings about python is that you
can pass in anything and notreally define the types.
They have helpers to kind oflet you know what is expected as
input and output, but there'sreally no blocking code to
actually say, hey, you sent methe wrong crap.
Here goes the exception, gofigure it out type stuff.
So.
But I'm finding out that eventhe, the more structured
(19:16):
programming language like, uh,java or even golang, being
really uh, standing on that, youfind out why it's important to
include it.
For me, I never even cared, evencared.
I was like yo, my functionworks, I don't care what you
send, right.
And then, like you said, I usedto have to write even more
tests just to validate the datatype and what would happen if
you gave me some bad data type.
So great ideas and thank youfor bringing that to the table
(19:38):
in terms of just things to bemindful of when you're choosing
a programming language.
And hey, typescript is the newkid on the block, so I'm hoping
everybody picks it up andsharpens it up.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
It's been helpful, you know, and particularly in
building libraries.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah yeah, like I say , I only build frameworks and
libraries.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
You use my stuff.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
I don't use your stuff.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
I build apps that build apps.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
That's nice.
So, in terms of like one thingthat I think when I first
checked out your LinkedIn, it'sjust skill-wise.
You're definitely at the higherlevel of senior engineer, right
.
Shout out to that.
Big shout outs.
Right, there's like level one.
Well, there's interns, levelone, level two, sometimes a
(20:23):
level three before you get tosenior.
Then you've got the staffprincipals and then
distinguished engineers andyou're sitting definitely at the
staff principal level, whichhas had some requirements for
you to be in a leadership role.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Sure.
So I think you know a lot ofwhat I'm asked to do when I come
in for work is definitely toprovide sort of you know,
mentorship is one element ofthis right, sort of like helping
(21:03):
the engineers, kind of workingas a tech lead and sort of like
maybe a person who, somecompanies I'm the only one who
can sign off on certain thingsyeah, so some of that is kind of
like having to do that piece.
What I've really enjoyed.
It depends on where you'reworking how much of, say, ic,
(21:24):
like management they are doingyeah, and also whether or not
the management I'm doing isactually related to um uh, it is
like, am I doing one-on-ones?
Am I doing these kind of things?
Yeah uh, for career stuff, andI think like generally I've kind
of avoided that part of it andkind of was more of a tech lead.
(21:44):
Yeah, yeah, and then mentor andthen, you know, there were
direct reports I have had.
Interestingly enough, my firstdirect reports were at a company
called understoodorg andbasically they were so happy to
get me to come on because theywere going to be working with a
team called Andela, which is inAfrica, Like you know, Africa
Accelerator and then, like theybasically hire people from
(22:07):
Andela, yeah, yeah.
And they come from differentplaces like Africa and Kenya.
Yeah yeah, and that was reallycool because it gave me a chance
to sort of work with people,our people, for the first time
and you know they were suchgreat, great engineers.
I had a chance to hadopportunity to work with um and
(22:29):
you know we were able to kind ofum.
There's a lot of feedback thatI was able to give um and they
were, you know, very.
I think some of them are on myuh, yeah, I think most of all of
them written recommendations.
I see some recommendations liketwo, three paragraphs whereas I
was like damn Michael's, killingit out here.
(22:50):
So I think you know they wouldprobably say that I was very
giving in terms of, like youknow, a like opportunities, like
you know, sort of like I gavethem ownership.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
And I think you know, in a lot of ways ownership is
really important to engineers.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Yeah, so if you give them, here's your thing, here's
your slice, yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
You know and we'll work on that.
But like I think that wasimportant ownership, you know,
sort of giving ownership in mygenerally speaking, yeah, you
know, not just with that group.
But you know, giving peopleownership was an important
aspect of that for me.
Yeah, you know I did a lot ofpair programming.
You know it's kind of a hugepart.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah, yeah, I love pair programming.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Yeah, yeah, you know, so that's been, that was and I
do that even at my last job.
Lots of my jobs like that'skind of, you know, like I'll do
a deep dive in a bug and that'skind of things.
But yeah, I think, working withteams of people, there's lots
of different ways in which we dothat, I think, but ultimately,
when things are broken up intosmaller chunks, I help them
(23:57):
create the tickets.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Like.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
I think it was earlier on.
We have an understanding ofwhat a chunk of work looks like
and what should be expectedinstead of you know being, you
know within the time span youknow.
Yeah, you don't want to givesomebody too much, too little,
so sort of understanding likethat aspect of things.
He's on fire.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
I like it.
I like it.
I definitely want to give you achance to speak on, especially
for our audience, because ouraudience are mostly
underrepresented and even when Iwas describing the levels right
, from senior to staff andprincipal, there's not that many
of us at that type of levelright and first of all,
congratulations on being able to, you know, make those type of
(24:36):
impact and leading engineers andgiving them the, the gems, the,
the sauce in terms of how to besuccessful.
But tell us a little bit aboutyou know some of your challenges
of being probably one of theonly black you know, lead team,
lead staff engineers orprincipal engineers that you've
encountered.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
That's a good question.
I think probably people nottaking me like, necessarily
taking me seriously, or thinkingsomehow that because of who I
am, I must know less.
I mean, I'm not sure that I'veseen that specifically.
Like you know, somebody's beenvery like hey.
But like I think you know, justkind of noticing that, like you
(25:14):
know, people are like eh,they're trying to you know
they're going to want toquestion you more.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
And push back on things more.
Yeah, you know than on thingsmore than I have seen them do
with other people.
Facts, so I just expect it.
It's sad to say, but I justkind of expect certain things,
and so I try not to make a noiseabout it, because it's not
going to help me anymore,unfortunately.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
And let me tell you it's definitely an honor to talk
to another engineer that hasclimbed a level to get to there,
because I know you'vedefinitely had those more
challenging conversations, firstof all to justify the role and
then also just about justifyyour voice when there needs to
be a decision making.
It's something I had to dealwith and also teach my
(26:02):
counterparts.
I had a lot of obviously youknow, more represented, you know
, background engineers that youknow were amongst my peer group
and they could see that fromtheir own eyes in terms of how I
was treated versus them right,and it definitely made it more
easier for me to to get them tobe more empowered in their
(26:26):
responses and supporting me togrow and develop.
Big shout outs to you knowthose engineers Demi G what's up
?
Santos, frank and thoseengineers definitely wanted to
make sure that I wasn't somebodyleft behind because of that and
definitely opened the lanes forus.
But there still isn't enough.
There still isn't enough of usaround to see it and definitely
(26:50):
this job market that's coming upwill, unfortunately, have even
more of us on the sidelinewaiting.
But in general, definitely bigups to your journey, big ups to
becoming a staff principalengineer, much respect and he
said I build frameworks, I buildapps on top of apps.
That's probably one of thehardest things I'm gonna I might
trade my michael's gonnaco-sign it make sure you put tm
(27:13):
on top, all right, all right, so, uh, one of the next things
that I want to talk about is wekind of uh briefly talking about
, uh, kubernetes,containerizations and some of
the work that I've done.
But there's this area that Ithink is opening up, and I'm not
sure if you've been exposed toit as much as I want to dive
(27:33):
into.
It is around AI and machinelearning and machine learning
operations, or ML ops.
How do you feel about AI numberone, and have you done any work
with it in terms of your rolesas an engineer?
Speaker 1 (27:47):
I'm very happy.
Ai is very interesting,obviously because it can quickly
become.
I wrote AI that wrote code.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Ready.
I'm like damn, I'm alreadygoing to replace somebody.
No, that's not okay.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
But I do think that it's obviously it's here to stay
, and I've had some interestingexperience with it as well.
At Wayfair, where I mostrecently was employed, we had a
hackathon sponsored by Googleand Wayfair together on
generative AI and they gave us,like the toys.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Yeah, all the toys.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
You know, we had all the LLMs, we had all the
different things, and there wasthis hackathon that they wanted,
you know, to say hey, how canwe increase or do something cool
with Wayfair business, you know?
And so I sort of pitched theidea of creating automated code
review for AI of creatingautomated code review for AI.
(28:49):
So this was, you know,basically what we did was we
trained a model on like Reactdocumentation and a lot of
different code bases.
You know sort of our code bases,yeah, and you know validated it
by you know creating a PR, youknow kind of going through a
process.
So it was like more like morethan just like AI generation.
There was also AI generation inthe process of of Git, kind of
(29:13):
checking and stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Yeah, creating like a pipeline.
Yeah, pipeline exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
And so part of a pipeline was that we would you
know, basically it would take inthe you know the code and
basically say, well, this is notgood, this is okay.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
And you know so the code review would I think in our
case we used React.
You know we basically had somebad kind of like things that
would not be okay, you know interms of how we do it, and then
it was able to you know,recognize, you know essentially
various different, you knowwhether or not it was good or
(29:49):
not.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, almost like a scoring system or
something like that, or actuallyline by line.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
I would say a bit of a scoring system in essence, a
little bit yeah.
But more at this point, line byline.
Yeah, what we're trying toaccomplish at the level that we
did for the Hockathon.
Yeah, yeah, we were actuallybefore I left, we were actually
building that out.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
So that was the real thing.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
So it's one thing for what we did do, which was kind
of a proof of concept, and so,yeah, creating proof of concept
using AI has been reallyinteresting.
I've even been using it in myjob search.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you knowusing tools that allow me to
take the JD or job descriptionand then change my resume based
on the job description.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Oh, that's awesome.
Give him a round of applauseright there.
Yeah, that's using the AI toits full potential and, in my
opinion, it's definitelysomething we cover on our show
all the time.
And I tell you, know, oursubscribers, my mentees, that I
need to follow along, but notjust follow along.
I need to touch it, it,experience it, so that you can
see, um, how it's going to force, multiply you as an individual,
(30:50):
but also the things that you'reworking on too.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
um is find the right place for also finding that it's
good for, uh, writing code.
Yeah, um, and you know, sort ofjust you've been getting out
like a basic structure orsomething and then kind of going
through and figuring out whatthe problem is yeah, yeah,
there's always going to be oneproblem.
You're like ah, For sure, it'slike inverted the you know
semicolon or something is done.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Starting from a blank sheet of paper is always one of
the toughest things, for me too, and that's why frameworks are
so great.
That's why they're so great,because frameworks for me, my
starting point is how do I usethis framework?
Oh, I need to create theseinterfaces, I need this.
All right, start that, boom,we're there, right.
That's why I've always, always,enjoyed frameworks, because
starting from scratch has alwaysbeen difficult for me.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Certainly, that's what's up.
I'm a framework, you know,friend of frameworks.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
He said I got you, I got you All right that I wanted
to throw out there, michael,real quick.
Is we?
We, at our show, have reallyhoned in and supporting the next
generation of engineers thatare coming out.
That looks like me and you andmore or less just want to give
you an opportunity to reflectand give some advice on like
(32:02):
what, what they should beworking on, especially the, the
young professionals, in terms ofdeveloping so that they can get
their first opportunity,potentially in the tech industry
.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Sure, I think one of the things that's been very
helpful for me is keeping up todate with what's going on,
whether that's frameworks,whether that's latest updates,
api that you're using or thesekind of things.
But I think it's important, asyou're coming up, to have a
culture of learning.
You know, um, I know a lot ofdevelopers that have been like.
(32:35):
You know I'm not.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
You know that you kind of get to that point where
you want to learn anything new.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yeah you know, I mean like it's like you've seen them
before.
They always kind of like Idon't want to change frameworks,
you know I don't like this, youknow, but it's like that, I get
that.
You want to keep things, youknow.
Status quo.
You want to keep things fromconstantly changing.
Because, a lot of people getcaught in that sort of like oh,
what's the next thing we can do,what can we do, what can we do.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Particularly junior engineers who are in senior
positions.
This is a new toy that justcame out, exactly so it's
important, I think, tounderstand that and respect that
.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
It just came out Exactly, so it's important, I
think, to understand that andrespect that, but also always be
learning.
I think it's important, I think, as people of color look, I'm
going to say it.
I was taught from a young agethat I have to go twice as far
to get happy.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
You know that one, that statement.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yeah, yeah.
So you're going to have to bethat People are going to be
looking at people with extraeyes, so you can't.
I think you've got to just keepyourself straight, because
otherwise people are going toautomatically put you in a box.
And I hate to say it but youhave to kind of code switch.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Yeah, I mean the industry, unfortunately, is
making a shift back towardswhere that's going to be norm
right.
It was like diversity inclusionwas really popping, really
popping, and now companies aredropping diversity inclusion
like it's nothing and it's moreor less going to force us to
have to do that code switchingback to what it was.
Yeah, but definitely appreciatethe kind words for our audience
(34:05):
, because I don't think enoughof us get a chance to talk and
tell about these small thingslike love to learn, like you're
going to have to learn, like,hey, the climate we in you might
have to code switch right, andjust hearing it straight up is
always something that Iappreciate my guests coming
through and dropping.
So thank you so much for that.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
You're going to learn today.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Yeah, you're going to learn today.
You're going to learn today,awesome, awesome.
So the next thing I want togive you a chance is talk about
any you know recent projects.
You've got going on anythingyou know.
I believe you might be in themarket right now, but what do
you got going on in your currentphase in your journey?
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Sure, I think you know kind of what I'm doing
right now, actually getting outthere more talking to people
doing talks and that kind ofthing.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
A big shout out to the Tech Hustle podcast, my guy.
He says if I got to do it, Igot to do it here.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
So yeah, I think, my content creation and being able
to create a space for that aswell, which you're going to say
a space, yeah, yeah, yeah, youknow, kind of providing.
You know, I think thatproviding an opportunity, a
place and a forum throughcontent to be able to do this.
So I'm kind of just working outwhat that looks like.
Yeah, you know where that is.
(35:21):
You know, I kind of haven't.
You know, I've been on TikTokand doing my own thing for a
long time.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
I'd rather separate that out, because that's a
different thing.
We're going to have Michael'slinks all in the description
below.
I need y'all to like, subscribe, follow anything and everything
he's touching, because my guygot some knowledge and
experience that you just do notfind every day.
I had to go look in my Rolodexto find him and I had to get on
his schedule right, sodefinitely make sure you follow
(35:52):
along.
So we're getting close to thetail end of our conversation
here and I didn't give you aprep for this, but this is a
chance for you to ask Bobby Danything.
We're hanging out backstagewith Bobby D, so if you have
anything or any questions on thetop of your mind that you want
to ask, feel free to throw themout.
If not, we're going to bewrapping it up soon.
So what's up, Michael?
Speaker 1 (36:12):
I would love to know.
First of all, were you at Xwhen Elon?
Was there at the end of that,or did you manage to get out
before the shitstorm?
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Thank you for describing it like that.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
That's exactly what it was.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Actually a guest that we had in the show right before
yours.
I mentioned to him that I'vebeen off of Twitter for one
whole year Actually, yesterdaywas marked a day so I boycotted
Twitter.
Since the day changed forexactly one year.
I got back on to it last nightfor the first time and, oh my
gosh, the platform looks totallydifferent.
Lots of echoes, If you didn'tnotice advertising is our main
(36:49):
thing night for the first timeand, oh my gosh, the platform
looks totally different and, uh,if you didn't notice,
advertising is their main thing,because that's the first thing
that popped up at the top.
So elon's trying to catch acheck, but anyways, uh, so I was
at twitter for almost almost adecade, almost 10 years it was
about nine and a half years, um,and then, like I said, I worked
as a staff engineer there,becoming a site reliability
engineer.
My background is more insystems engineering, so all of
(37:10):
that cloud infrastructure stuff.
I was there since day one, frombuilding computers to putting
them on the internet, installinghypervisors.
Kubernetes as a concept aroundcontainerization is something
that I've seen developed undermy own eyes type stuff.
So I've really seen thatprogression in tech and a lot of
that was developed at Twitter.
Also, another skill set I haveis I'm kind of dual skilled, so
(37:32):
I'm a software engineer too.
So I write mostlyinfrastructure code, mostly in
Python, because it's very phonic, it's very easy to understand
what's going on.
They didn't get you into Golangwith that.
They definitely tried to get meto Golang, but no, I was Python
.
Is it for me?
But I will say Golang is thenext.
Like a TypeScript, like forJavaScript to TypeScript, I
(37:54):
would say Python to Golang wouldbe the next kind of transition
in my opinion, especially beinga more typed, compiled
programming language, lightningspeed compared to the
single-threaded Python, butthat's another subject.
It's still my preferredprogramming language, but during
my time there I worked on thecompute platform team, so I
basically help was the technicallead for all of the, the cloud
(38:16):
computing infrastructure there.
So if you say aws.
I was a part of the team thatbuilt twitter's internal aws
infrastructure just to follow upon that.
Uh, so twitter didn't has theirown version of that like, yeah,
okay, yeah, so that's the thingthat most people didn't know
twitter built data centers fromthe ground up.
Under my management, I had morethan 300 000 computers around
(38:39):
the world that my team of fivehad to support and manage,
running hundreds of thousands ofcontainers right at scale.
But yeah, we didn't mess withnone of that because it was a
hustle right.
It's like if you that becamethe new hustle is they charge
you and then they upcharge youand they keep up charging you.
Why not just own your ownhardware and then you build an
engineering team that couldsupport it, and that's what team
(39:01):
that I help lead to really justsolidify that.
They did start to run some cloudstuff, but when Elon got there,
he's like hell, no, I'm notpaying that bill but, so the
reason why I tell you all thisbackstory is is one of the cool
things is being a tech leader inthat organization that I was in
is that we kind of heard thingscoming before they got there.
(39:21):
So I remember I was in ameeting with a director one time
and he was like hey, uh, canyou tell me how much money we
spent here and what we did hereand what we did there?
And I was like, hold on, onlytime this happens when we're
about to be acquired.
You want to know assets, youwant to know this type of stuff.
So I was coming to the end ofmy time there.
I wasn't ready for a new regimechange and I was like, yo, I'm
going to be out.
And as soon as I left at leastthree weeks later that's when
(39:45):
elon was starting to pull up andthe words was in the wind I was
like, oh my gosh, thank you, Ididn't have to go through that.
But, to answer your initialquestion, I got out right before
he got there, um, so I didn'treally have to go through that,
but I had so many colleaguesunfortunately had to go through
that shit show, just like youdescribed it.
Um, in terms of um, the, themorale, the, the culture, the
tech, um, and all of that backand forth that he created
(40:08):
internally.
Just, I would have been, itwould have been a problem for me
.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
I guess I would love to ask you a question.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
This is probably my last necessary one Keep it on In
terms of like how the market isright now my question, I guess,
would be what?
Speaker 1 (40:27):
how do you feel about this?
Do you feel like this is waydifferent?
Because to me it feels likewhat the hell?
I'm sending out 100 times moreresumes than I ever have before.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Is this something that you've seen before?
And then, if so, what would yousuggest for, like strategy-wise
, for sort of getting, I guess,more resumes, the right people?
I just want to understand whatyou think about that.
Yeah, that's a good questionright there, I like that.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Thanks, steve, you're holding it down.
That's right, michael got some.
He got them lined up.
He's got the heat.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Oh, you're king of fire baby You're king of.
I mean he came to fire.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
So I go back to when I first started in 2002 is when
I first got into the industryand I started off not as an
engineer, I started off workingat the help desk.
So that was my way of gettingin.
But for me to get into thatposition I actually had to
almost switch a little bit,because I started off being a
systems administrator and theywere like, hey, you can be a
help desk guy or you cannot havea job.
And I was like, like you knowwhat, I'm going to take that
(41:26):
help desk opportunities and I'mgoing to level up that way,
through it, through it.
Yeah, so I came up through helpdesk into systems
administration and then thesystems engineering, and then
that's when I just went, youknow, crazy, especially once I
really start to level up myskills with linux administration
.
Um, but the key thing aboutthat error on that time was that
number one I had to be willingto switch it up a little bit.
(41:47):
Right, I had to be willing tosay, hey, if I really want an
opportunity, I might not be thisadministrator right now, but
I'm going to take this other jobso that I can eventually play
it out.
The other thing that I wouldsay, in terms of the climate
that we're in right now andthat's why I really enjoyed our
conversation when I tried to putyou in the corner over there
you're just a front-end typeengineer and then you say, no
fuck, that I'm more than that.
(42:09):
Right, that's what's going toget you.
The opportunity is that you canupskill and have more than just
software or front-endengineering as a skill set.
But you can talk Kubernetes,cloud, you can talk CICD
pipeline, you can talk back-endwith Node.
Those are the things that aregoing to give you the upper hand
(42:33):
against your competitors thatare out there, peers and people
that are looking for jobopportunities.
So showcasing those skills aregoing to be key for you to be
recognized as more than just afront-end engineer.
And that applies for anybodyelse that's in the industry is
like broaden the scope a littlebit, right.
Make sure that you'reupskilling and learning more
than just what everybody saysspecifically for this.
And then the third thing is Idon't think we have, I don't
think candidates spend enoughtime reading job descriptions to
(42:56):
understand what skills jobs arelooking for, right?
I have a lot of my mentees belike, hey, yeah, I want to go
and learn this and I'm like allright, so what kind of job you
want?
Oh, I want to go work there,all right?
Right, let's go to theirwebsite.
These are the skills they'relooking for.
These are the skills you'redeveloping, right, make sure
that they're aligned and thenthat's going to open up those
opportunities for you.
So, uh, definitely for thosethat are on the market, keep at
(43:17):
this hustle.
It is a different climate.
It's not the same as it wascovet time 2020 people, you know
, dropping offers left and right, um, and it's going to be those
that do the most, that do more,that reach out more.
That cold call like our errorwe used to have to pick up the
phone de-hustle right, they'relike yo uh, can I speak to hr um
?
can I speak to the hiringmanager?
Can I speak to right?
(43:38):
We're going to have to do thosetype of things to really get
there.
I miss those days yeah me too,me too, but hopefully that
answers your question, michael.
Certainly, thank you, Iappreciate.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, for sure, for sure.
And if you're out there and youare looking for opportunities,
our community is here tocontinue to support, definitely
holler at us here at the TechHustle, because we run a vibrant
community and always looking tosupport you all and level up.
(43:59):
I had to drop that plug inthere just for a little bit.
All right, all right, michael.
Anything else before we closeit out?
No, I think you know.
Oh, michael had a good time.
Turn that music up D-Hustle.
Let's see what we got going on.
I hope y'all enjoyed thisepisode of Backstage with Bobby
D.
We got my guy, Michael Froberg.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Froberg, froberg.
Yeah, I took a slow Shout outto.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Michael.
Shout out to Michael.
Yeah, big shout out to MichaelFroberg for coming through
hanging out with us todaydropping gems.
Make sure y'all listen for thatsound rewind to it.
I guarantee you there's goingto be some knowledge that's
being dropped and definitelywe're in these streets and we
got a few more guests comingthrough next up.
We're going where.
We're going to Houston next up.
Yeah, so we got Houston on thetrack and then you never know
where you might find us at inthe nation.
(44:47):
But always come through here atthe Tech Hustle.
Holla at your boy, it's Bobby D.
I am an expert in the front end, but I'm also the
back of the front end.
How do you build front ends?
Speaker 2 (00:10):
How do you build multiple front ends?
Speaker 1 (00:12):
It's about the back of the front.
I build the testing suite thatthe front end goes on.
I build the GraphQL API, thatthose go on.
I also do a lot of theKubernetes and a lot of the
containerization and a lot ofthe cloud stuff as well.
Throughout my career it's beenthe level of building framework.
I mean I do build applications.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
But I've had more success building frameworks that
build applications.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah, we don't give enough credit for people that
build frameworks.
Right, it's like templatizingthe way that you should be doing
things.
Follow this template, yoursuccess rate will increase
higher, and then if anythingneeds to be changed in the
template, we'll change it soeverybody else gets advantage of
it.
So I always loved frameworksand frameworks being like a
foundational thing in terms ofjust skills development.
(00:58):
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
What up d d hustle?
My guy holding it down guesswhere we at man the big apple
the big apple, nyc.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
We hold it down what is?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
real good and we, right on 42nd street, time
square right outside broadway.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
let's go 42nd and broad Times Square right outside
the window, and Broadway.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Let's go.
42nd and Broadway.
Big shout-outs to everybodyhere in New York City.
We got a special guest for ustoday.
Who we got?
Who we got Michael.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Froberg have you heard of that guy before?
I like him already.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Let's bring him to the stage already.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Michael, welcome, welcome.
Thank you so much for invitingme.
Oh my gosh, I'm glad to be here.
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Definitely want to make sure that everybody can
hear your voice, because my manused to kill this audio game
here and then get into techafterwards.
We got a story to tell, but,michael man, thank you so much
for pulling up.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Absolutely.
I'm happy to be here.
Yeah, for sure, I'd like toengage with your, you know, with
your audience and everybodylike that.
Yeah, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
And then we got D-Hustle in the cut right.
Yes, sir D-Hustle always holdingit down.
There we go, but Michael and Ihas had the pleasure of being
introduced by Patat right onLinkedIn Shout out to Patat, for
sure.
And the situation was is thatwe in NYC, you know, I told
y'all to pull up because we'regoing to have a pop up location
(02:27):
for the podcast and my guy'sname came through and I was like
yo, let me see what Mike got onhis plate, to see if we can get
onto his schedule, see how youknow the credentials looking
fine.
Yeah, you know, I was like yo,we got, we got to get Michael on
our show.
So thank you all so much forpulling up and we're going to
hear Michael's story.
So, to kind of kick this off,tell us a little bit about how
(02:47):
you got into tech and how thisall started for you.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Sure enough.
You know, I think to talk abouttech I have to go backwards a
bit.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, you're right Kill if a dog was, you know yeah
.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
But no, I would say I started my career as a kind of
adult working in televisionproduction.
So I worked on uh you knowthings like um top chef project
runway, making the band umapprentice yeah, yeah, we'll do
that one alone.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
We'll definitely that one alone.
I can't say anything about whatI heard.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
But yeah, so basically working in television.
You know it was a great job, Iwas very happy to do it, but I
got really kind of a.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
interestingly enough, the iPhone came out and I was
like blown away by it at thetime, and so my idea, my thought
was sorry.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
my idea and my thought was to do.
You know, I wanted to make apps, I was very much interested in
that world and you know I waslike jailbreaking phones and all
the craziness, because I was,you know.
So that was my doorway and mysort of you know my door into
tech.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
I would say is through mobile.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
And so the first thing I did, you know, while I
was working on set, you know, Ihad a bag on my chest, you know,
with gear, and on top of that,I had my iPad, I started going
to school.
I went to school for mobiledevelopment at Full Sail
University.
It was interesting.
(04:17):
I was definitely happy for it,but I just didn't feel like it
was going to, at the time,really move because I felt like
I needed to get into the gamesooner.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
He was like yo they're moving too slow.
We need to get this thing goingright.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
This three-year thing isn't happening for me, yeah
yeah, so I decided to get thedegree and then, kind of through
the process of getting thedegree, discovered that there
were boot camps.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Boot camps.
Yeah, this was the very firstgeneration of boot camps.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
And so I was like wow , this is very interesting.
And so I was like wow, this isvery interesting.
And you know, let me look intothis.
And I did look into it and Iwas.
I ended up signing up for thefifth web development immersive
Rails camp.
Yeah yeah, that they still had,like you know before that they
were still doing a lot of kindof not sorry one second they
(05:01):
were doing a lot of like startupkind of integration stuff.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Yeah, yeah At the first, where that was kind of
the focus, yeah yeah, and thensecondarily, they had classes
there.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Oh, okay, I got you, and so when I got there it was
the first sort of you knowcohort of the classes.
I was very early in boot camp,yeah, and that immediately
turned around to a job for me.
It was like I did the projectthat they asked me to do and
then we had a science fair kindof thing where we did our
(05:34):
project Show and tell type stuff, and then two of you happened
to be there or whatever, and Iended up getting a job with two
of you.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Give them a round of applause and big, big plug here,
because we're dropping gems.
Here is showing skill setdevelopment, not just from
educational, supplementaleducation is the key thing,
right, and boot camping,vocational schools, technical
schools is the avenue that I gotthrough too was through
technical school Definitely hasthose genuine experiences
(06:03):
because you're going to bedeveloping the skills hands-on
and then you get to show andtell and then you get a job
opportunity right there.
So definitely big shout-outs toyou, Michael for making that
transition and definitely bigshout-outs to the boot camp for
making that available to you.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
I think my path kind of going through tech started
off interestingly enough, I haddone that full stack, you know
development thing I got hired asa UX developer.
You know which was like, whatis this, but you know,
interestingly enough, I thinkthat was probably one of the
best things that I could havepossibly had gotten involved in
and gotten you know at thebeginning of my career.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Doing so enabled me to sort of start by like
building frameworks.
You know, I always kind ofthroughout my career it's been
the level of building frameworks.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
I mean I do build applications, yeah, yeah, but
I've had more success buildingframeworks than build
applications, yeah, I even likethe way that you dropped that,
because you said buildingframeworks to build applications
, because I don't think we takeenough or we don't give enough
credit for people that buildframeworks.
Right, it's like templatizingthe way that you should be doing
(07:09):
things.
Follow this template, yoursuccess rate will increase
higher, and then if anythingneeds to be changed in a
template, we'll change it soeverybody else gets advantage of
it.
So I always love frameworks,and frameworks being like a
foundational thing in terms ofjust skills development is
something that's extremelyimpactful.
So big ups to you reallyembracing that concept around
(07:31):
frameworks, rather than continueto pursue the idea of, hey, I'm
going to create this app,create this app, create this app
, versus creating a frameworkthat you can make all of those
apps on.
So big ups to you, I'm wonderingwhy Michael don't have his own
company yet right.
It's in the works.
Stay tuned.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Several phases of development.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Yeah for sure, that's what's up.
When year was this that youstarted off boot camping,
getting your first opportunity?
When was that?
Speaker 1 (08:01):
2013.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yeah, that was a really good year, 2013,.
The industry itself was verypopping right.
That's still very active.
A lot of opportunities in termsof skill set-wise to really
make leaps and bounds into, youknow, bigger companies and,
rather than you know, startupscene, which is kind of like
what we had, that iterationafterwards, because then
startups start to come out likecrazy but did you ever get a
(08:25):
chance to make it out to theWest Coast at all during your
time?
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Yes actually.
I did.
I worked for a company.
It was Infosys.
That's a new company, right?
They owned another companycalled Scaba.
That was an e-com company thatwas based out of San Francisco.
Oh, that's what's up.
So you know, I went theremultiple times.
You know, kind of that was ourbase of operations.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yeah, yeah, even though I was in New York.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
You know we still had to go there for various things,
and I'm trying to think there'sa couple other things I've done
there as well.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
You know kind of conference or whatever, but I've
been out there having, and myfriend was so yeah, in Amapark.
Yeah, tell me a little bitabout that.
You were saying that they kindof inspired you to get into tech
in some form or phase, or wasthat something else?
Speaker 1 (09:09):
So I had basically a cousin, a really kind of black
cousin.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know if I'm related to that.
He's my cousin too.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
We know what's up here, so yeah, I had you know
who was kind of ahead of thegame.
You know like he was involvedat Facebook early on and wound
up being able to exit out verynicely.
Yeah, yeah, from when it wasbefore it was public.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
So you know he was somebody that you know when I
was thinking about this.
I kind of don't use him toomuch in a way, but like at that
time I was like hey, I'm lookingto figure out what's the best
kind of entry in.
Right now I'm doing this thingright now, and he was like GA
and I was like bet.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
You know what I mean.
That's all I needed to hear.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, yeah yeah, and I immediately took his advice to
heart and, yeah, yeah, story totell today.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
The rest is history.
The rest is history, yeah, andthen that's always a good thing
in terms of when you have thosefamily members.
A lot of people reach out to mealso and sometimes there's some
hesitation to reach out, butfor me I'm like yo just come and
ask me a question, I can justgive you just a little bit of
this sauce here and you're goingto be gone, right, and it's
(10:29):
always great inspiration to hear, like, the other side of that,
like it was just a little bit ofgiving.
Um definitely turned out to bea wealth of knowledge, a wealth
of, you know, access anddefinitely development and
knowledge.
Um is something that's soinspiring.
Um, yeah, facebook.
Back then it was uh, twitterand facebook were fighting like
this that time and era man.
I, I remember, I rememberactually had a co-worker of mine
that, uh, left twitter to go tofacebook and came right back to
(10:50):
twitter.
It was like no hell, no, Ican't work over there.
It's just something about the,the, the, the, the fighting that
we've always had.
That it doesn't matter, he'sstill viewed as a tweet over
there.
So I was like I'd come backhome.
We always welcome you anyway,but but it's always interesting
to hear how the Silicon Valleycompetition in terms of
engineering really helpedinfluence the industry too,
(11:12):
because we're definitely goingto be talking about some tech a
little bit later.
But in terms of your skill set,so you're mostly on the front
end side, right?
No?
Speaker 1 (11:21):
No, I apologize.
No, no, it's okay.
Uh, no, I, I I'm.
No, no, it's okay.
I would say that I, I am anexpert in the front end, right,
but I'm also the back of thefront end right Like.
I'm how do you build front ends?
Speaker 2 (11:37):
How do you build multiple front ends?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
So it's about like the back of the front, like I
build the testing suite that thefront end goes on.
I build, you know, the um,graphql API, that those go on,
so uh, and also do a lot of theKubernetes and a lot of the
containerization and a lot ofthe cloud stuff as well.
So I would say like I'm mostknown for that because I've
spent the most amount of time init.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
But a lot of what I've been doing lately has been
broader than just that.
It's more full stack.
Yeah, michael said yo, don'tput me in a corner.
I'm trying to get a job rightnow.
I'm selling my life experience.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Basically he's saying he's international Shout out to
him.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Yeah, he said he goes from one side of the
infrastructure all the way tothe other side.
Don't sleep on him.
Don't sleep on him.
My bad Michael round again mybad, michael I didn't mean to be
like no no, no, no, but.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
But the thing is, is that the skill set wise.
It's always really great tohear, uh, engineers step into
that right, because someengineers will only stay in that
specific lane and be like yo.
I only mess with front endjavascript typescript.
Don't talk to me about anythingelse.
Rather than what's needed inthe climate that we're in right
now is broader skill sets rightand upskilling right.
It's like, hey, yeah, I onlyused to do front end, but I know
(12:47):
how the middleware works.
I know how the back endinfrastructure works and that
thing you call cloud thateverybody's kind of mysteriously
about.
I know how that works.
So, uh, definitely, big shoutouts to you in terms of, just,
you know, I'm broadening thescope, calling me out like yo,
whose podcast is this again,like, don't put me in this
corner like this.
But the cool thing is that it'sjust really going to help our
(13:10):
audience be mindful of like, hey, skill set wise, keep the
spectrum broad right, especiallyduring the climate that we're
in right.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Absolutely.
I think one of the things thatcame out of one of the companies
I worked at, skyva, the InfoSyscompany, was that we had the
front end.
But because the front end wasin Node and I also kind of go
back I'm a Node person From thefirst job I was talking about
Nodejs and using Grunt and usingother stuff was how I kind of
(13:38):
got my JavaScript and Nodethings in there.
And I would say, as a result ofthat, when I went to that
company we were building up thiskind of React server-side
rendering stack.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
And nobody other than us knew how to do that, so they
were like we're going to needyou to spin this up and figure
out how this all works, how toscale it horizontally or
vertically what it?
Speaker 2 (14:01):
actually entails to do it vertically what it
actually entails to do it.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
And then also, yeah, we're also using this thing
called Kubernetes Learn it, Ican learn it in three weeks, and
then from there I've knownKubernetes.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah, yeah yeah, kubernetes Big shout-outs to
Kubernetes.
It's great, and we've had a fewepisodes here on the podcast
talking about Kubernetes andtalking about containerization.
It's actually one of my expertskill sets, right, that's kind
of like my box that I check isbuilding infrastructure at
hyperscale, because that's whatI did at Twitter is build one of
the world's largest computeclusters, not running Kubernetes
(14:31):
, but running a softwarepredecessor to Kubernetes which
is called Mesos and Aurora.
So it's almost like Googlereleased this product, not
released it, but they talkedabout a white paper on Borg.
I don't know if you've everheard their orchestration system
.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
That name sounds familiar.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
And then, once they did Borg, they were going to
make Kubernetes, but there wasgrad students from Berkeley that
started working at Twitterrecreating Borg, and then that's
what we got not stuck on, butthat's what we started to
develop.
Unfortunately, you know, inthese races two products come
out.
One of them is going to comeout on top and unfortunately,
Aurora Mesos didn't really makethe cut and everybody moved to
(15:04):
Kubernetes.
And then that's where we areright now, where everybody's
taking advantage of thistechnology because it does allow
you to scale horizontally right, massively right.
I mean, one of our computeclusters we ran over like 500
containers with just one clusterright, and that was one of our
limitations, why we couldn'tmove to Kubernetes, because it
couldn't scale that way.
But there's definitely headwindthat's heading in that
(15:27):
direction and it's always goodto hear industries picking up
these technologies.
That really will change thegame for them.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
That's what's up.
That's what's up.
So if the broad spectrum, interms of full stack, what is
your programming language then?
Speaker 1 (15:41):
I would say my primary programming language is
JavaScript or TypeScript.
Yeah yeah, so if I can do Node,I will do Node.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Yeah, yeah, it's the right thing to do, not you know?
Speaker 1 (15:50):
whatever you know exactly, but I always have to
use it anyway.
Yeah, if I'm using the frontend, so I would say that's been
the most, because it's, I think,it allows more developers to do
more things.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
If we're using, say, a Node stack or whatever, then
everyone's full stack.
Even though they're used to onething they can still utilize
the same language.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Yeah, the same language so that you can
cross-platform in terms ofreviewing code, get code changed
and things like that.
So I've heard TypeScript isreally making a headwind on this
scene here.
So how do you feel aboutTypeScript?
Speaker 1 (16:29):
I think TypeScript is incredible.
Obviously, there are probablysmall things anybody can argue
about, but I think it'sbasically made JavaScript into
Java, I mean yes, I know, it'snot really that, it's like a
pile or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, you know, I thinkthat it's really good because it
(16:51):
has brought type safety atleast the idea of type safety,
you know into sort of the frontend.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
And in doing so, I think, even in the middle layer,
I think it's allowed us to beable to, you know, basically
make things a little bit easierto test.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Even sometimes not having to write a necessary test
because we know that, like theshape of the data you know will
be the shape of the data anyway.
So I think it's kind of made iteasier to test.
You know, because of that, wehave to write less tests as a
result of it.
And then also, I think it, youknow, it has made, I think, just
generally speaking developmentbetter with regards to things
(17:31):
like type safety, understandinghow shapes of these things
operate throughout our this.
You know what have you.
So I think that that's beenvery yeah, yeah.
(17:52):
I mean there's other things aswell, but I think largely you
know the ecosystem around.
It is very helpful.
They do a lot of you knowupdates and I think, just in
general, having people thinkabout interfaces and types and
these kind of things you knowanywhere along the stack is
better and safer.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
I was talking to another guest we had here.
What up, sebastian?
What's going on, player?
We appreciate you pulling up,and he was also making some
great evaluations of the valuearound TypeScript compared to
JavaScript and more or lessbecoming close to the norm in
the industry.
When you're looking for jobs,is that one of the skills that
they're looking for?
(18:34):
But more specifically aroundtypes, it's always kind of so.
I'm more Python right.
So data types, we really don'tcare.
But we got to write code thatblocks code or blocks those
invalid data types, and what youfind is a lot of new engineers
don't actually.
But we got to write code thatblocks code or blocks those
invalidated types, and what youfind is a lot of new engineers
don't actually write code likethat.
They were actually not lookingat type inside of their function
or method, but they're justexpecting it to be received, and
(18:54):
that's one of the the buggierthings about python is that you
can pass in anything and notreally define the types.
They have helpers to kind oflet you know what is expected as
input and output, but there'sreally no blocking code to
actually say, hey, you sent methe wrong crap.
Here goes the exception, gofigure it out type stuff.
So.
But I'm finding out that eventhe, the more structured
(19:16):
programming language like, uh,java or even golang, being
really uh, standing on that, youfind out why it's important to
include it.
For me, I never even cared, evencared.
I was like yo, my functionworks, I don't care what you
send, right.
And then, like you said, I usedto have to write even more
tests just to validate the datatype and what would happen if
you gave me some bad data type.
So great ideas and thank youfor bringing that to the table
(19:38):
in terms of just things to bemindful of when you're choosing
a programming language.
And hey, typescript is the newkid on the block, so I'm hoping
everybody picks it up andsharpens it up.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
It's been helpful, you know, and particularly in
building libraries.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah yeah, like I say , I only build frameworks and
libraries.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
You use my stuff.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
I don't use your stuff.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
I build apps that build apps.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
That's nice.
So, in terms of like one thingthat I think when I first
checked out your LinkedIn, it'sjust skill-wise.
You're definitely at the higherlevel of senior engineer, right
.
Shout out to that.
Big shout outs.
Right, there's like level one.
Well, there's interns, levelone, level two, sometimes a
(20:23):
level three before you get tosenior.
Then you've got the staffprincipals and then
distinguished engineers andyou're sitting definitely at the
staff principal level, whichhas had some requirements for
you to be in a leadership role.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Sure.
So I think you know a lot ofwhat I'm asked to do when I come
in for work is definitely toprovide sort of you know,
mentorship is one element ofthis right, sort of like helping
(21:03):
the engineers, kind of workingas a tech lead and sort of like
maybe a person who, somecompanies I'm the only one who
can sign off on certain thingsyeah, so some of that is kind of
like having to do that piece.
What I've really enjoyed.
It depends on where you'reworking how much of, say, ic,
(21:24):
like management they are doingyeah, and also whether or not
the management I'm doing isactually related to um uh, it is
like, am I doing one-on-ones?
Am I doing these kind of things?
Yeah uh, for career stuff, andI think like generally I've kind
of avoided that part of it andkind of was more of a tech lead.
(21:44):
Yeah, yeah, and then mentor andthen, you know, there were
direct reports I have had.
Interestingly enough, my firstdirect reports were at a company
called understoodorg andbasically they were so happy to
get me to come on because theywere going to be working with a
team called Andela, which is inAfrica, Like you know, Africa
Accelerator and then, like theybasically hire people from
(22:07):
Andela, yeah, yeah.
And they come from differentplaces like Africa and Kenya.
Yeah yeah, and that was reallycool because it gave me a chance
to sort of work with people,our people, for the first time
and you know they were suchgreat, great engineers.
I had a chance to hadopportunity to work with um and
(22:29):
you know we were able to kind ofum.
There's a lot of feedback thatI was able to give um and they
were, you know, very.
I think some of them are on myuh, yeah, I think most of all of
them written recommendations.
I see some recommendations liketwo, three paragraphs whereas I
was like damn Michael's, killingit out here.
(22:50):
So I think you know they wouldprobably say that I was very
giving in terms of, like youknow, a like opportunities, like
you know, sort of like I gavethem ownership.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
And I think you know, in a lot of ways ownership is
really important to engineers.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Yeah, so if you give them, here's your thing, here's
your slice, yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
You know and we'll work on that.
But like I think that wasimportant ownership, you know,
sort of giving ownership in mygenerally speaking, yeah, you
know, not just with that group.
But you know, giving peopleownership was an important
aspect of that for me.
Yeah, you know I did a lot ofpair programming.
You know it's kind of a hugepart.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah, yeah, I love pair programming.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Yeah, yeah, you know, so that's been, that was and I
do that even at my last job.
Lots of my jobs like that'skind of, you know, like I'll do
a deep dive in a bug and that'skind of things.
But yeah, I think, working withteams of people, there's lots
of different ways in which we dothat, I think, but ultimately,
when things are broken up intosmaller chunks, I help them
(23:57):
create the tickets.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Like.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
I think it was earlier on.
We have an understanding ofwhat a chunk of work looks like
and what should be expectedinstead of you know being, you
know within the time span youknow.
Yeah, you don't want to givesomebody too much, too little,
so sort of understanding likethat aspect of things.
He's on fire.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
I like it.
I like it.
I definitely want to give you achance to speak on, especially
for our audience, because ouraudience are mostly
underrepresented and even when Iwas describing the levels right
, from senior to staff andprincipal, there's not that many
of us at that type of levelright and first of all,
congratulations on being able to, you know, make those type of
(24:36):
impact and leading engineers andgiving them the, the gems, the,
the sauce in terms of how to besuccessful.
But tell us a little bit aboutyou know some of your challenges
of being probably one of theonly black you know, lead team,
lead staff engineers orprincipal engineers that you've
encountered.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
That's a good question.
I think probably people nottaking me like, necessarily
taking me seriously, or thinkingsomehow that because of who I
am, I must know less.
I mean, I'm not sure that I'veseen that specifically.
Like you know, somebody's beenvery like hey.
But like I think you know, justkind of noticing that, like you
(25:14):
know, people are like eh,they're trying to you know
they're going to want toquestion you more.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
And push back on things more.
Yeah, you know than on thingsmore than I have seen them do
with other people.
Facts, so I just expect it.
It's sad to say, but I justkind of expect certain things,
and so I try not to make a noiseabout it, because it's not
going to help me anymore,unfortunately.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
And let me tell you it's definitely an honor to talk
to another engineer that hasclimbed a level to get to there,
because I know you'vedefinitely had those more
challenging conversations, firstof all to justify the role and
then also just about justifyyour voice when there needs to
be a decision making.
It's something I had to dealwith and also teach my
(26:02):
counterparts.
I had a lot of obviously youknow, more represented, you know
, background engineers that youknow were amongst my peer group
and they could see that fromtheir own eyes in terms of how I
was treated versus them right,and it definitely made it more
easier for me to to get them tobe more empowered in their
(26:26):
responses and supporting me togrow and develop.
Big shout outs to you knowthose engineers Demi G what's up
?
Santos, frank and thoseengineers definitely wanted to
make sure that I wasn't somebodyleft behind because of that and
definitely opened the lanes forus.
But there still isn't enough.
There still isn't enough of usaround to see it and definitely
(26:50):
this job market that's coming upwill, unfortunately, have even
more of us on the sidelinewaiting.
But in general, definitely bigups to your journey, big ups to
becoming a staff principalengineer, much respect and he
said I build frameworks, I buildapps on top of apps.
That's probably one of thehardest things I'm gonna I might
trade my michael's gonnaco-sign it make sure you put tm
(27:13):
on top, all right, all right, so, uh, one of the next things
that I want to talk about is wekind of uh briefly talking about
, uh, kubernetes,containerizations and some of
the work that I've done.
But there's this area that Ithink is opening up, and I'm not
sure if you've been exposed toit as much as I want to dive
(27:33):
into.
It is around AI and machinelearning and machine learning
operations, or ML ops.
How do you feel about AI numberone, and have you done any work
with it in terms of your rolesas an engineer?
Speaker 1 (27:47):
I'm very happy.
Ai is very interesting,obviously because it can quickly
become.
I wrote AI that wrote code.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Ready.
I'm like damn, I'm alreadygoing to replace somebody.
No, that's not okay.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
But I do think that it's obviously it's here to stay
, and I've had some interestingexperience with it as well.
At Wayfair, where I mostrecently was employed, we had a
hackathon sponsored by Googleand Wayfair together on
generative AI and they gave us,like the toys.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Yeah, all the toys.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
You know, we had all the LLMs, we had all the
different things, and there wasthis hackathon that they wanted,
you know, to say hey, how canwe increase or do something cool
with Wayfair business, you know?
And so I sort of pitched theidea of creating automated code
review for AI of creatingautomated code review for AI.
(28:49):
So this was, you know,basically what we did was we
trained a model on like Reactdocumentation and a lot of
different code bases.
You know sort of our code bases,yeah, and you know validated it
by you know creating a PR, youknow kind of going through a
process.
So it was like more like morethan just like AI generation.
There was also AI generation inthe process of of Git, kind of
(29:13):
checking and stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Yeah, creating like a pipeline.
Yeah, pipeline exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
And so part of a pipeline was that we would you
know, basically it would take inthe you know the code and
basically say, well, this is notgood, this is okay.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
And you know so the code review would I think in our
case we used React.
You know we basically had somebad kind of like things that
would not be okay, you know interms of how we do it, and then
it was able to you know,recognize, you know essentially
various different, you knowwhether or not it was good or
(29:49):
not.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, almost like a scoring system or
something like that, or actuallyline by line.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
I would say a bit of a scoring system in essence, a
little bit yeah.
But more at this point, line byline.
Yeah, what we're trying toaccomplish at the level that we
did for the Hockathon.
Yeah, yeah, we were actuallybefore I left, we were actually
building that out.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
So that was the real thing.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
So it's one thing for what we did do, which was kind
of a proof of concept, and so,yeah, creating proof of concept
using AI has been reallyinteresting.
I've even been using it in myjob search.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you knowusing tools that allow me to
take the JD or job descriptionand then change my resume based
on the job description.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Oh, that's awesome.
Give him a round of applauseright there.
Yeah, that's using the AI toits full potential and, in my
opinion, it's definitelysomething we cover on our show
all the time.
And I tell you, know, oursubscribers, my mentees, that I
need to follow along, but notjust follow along.
I need to touch it, it,experience it, so that you can
see, um, how it's going to force, multiply you as an individual,
(30:50):
but also the things that you'reworking on too.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
um is find the right place for also finding that it's
good for, uh, writing code.
Yeah, um, and you know, sort ofjust you've been getting out
like a basic structure orsomething and then kind of going
through and figuring out whatthe problem is yeah, yeah,
there's always going to be oneproblem.
You're like ah, For sure, it'slike inverted the you know
semicolon or something is done.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Starting from a blank sheet of paper is always one of
the toughest things, for me too, and that's why frameworks are
so great.
That's why they're so great,because frameworks for me, my
starting point is how do I usethis framework?
Oh, I need to create theseinterfaces, I need this.
All right, start that, boom,we're there, right.
That's why I've always, always,enjoyed frameworks, because
starting from scratch has alwaysbeen difficult for me.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Certainly, that's what's up.
I'm a framework, you know,friend of frameworks.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
He said I got you, I got you All right that I wanted
to throw out there, michael,real quick.
Is we?
We, at our show, have reallyhoned in and supporting the next
generation of engineers thatare coming out.
That looks like me and you andmore or less just want to give
you an opportunity to reflectand give some advice on like
(32:02):
what, what they should beworking on, especially the, the
young professionals, in terms ofdeveloping so that they can get
their first opportunity,potentially in the tech industry
.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Sure, I think one of the things that's been very
helpful for me is keeping up todate with what's going on,
whether that's frameworks,whether that's latest updates,
api that you're using or thesekind of things.
But I think it's important, asyou're coming up, to have a
culture of learning.
You know, um, I know a lot ofdevelopers that have been like.
(32:35):
You know I'm not.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
You know that you kind of get to that point where
you want to learn anything new.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yeah you know, I mean like it's like you've seen them
before.
They always kind of like Idon't want to change frameworks,
you know I don't like this, youknow, but it's like that, I get
that.
You want to keep things, youknow.
Status quo.
You want to keep things fromconstantly changing.
Because, a lot of people getcaught in that sort of like oh,
what's the next thing we can do,what can we do, what can we do.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Particularly junior engineers who are in senior
positions.
This is a new toy that justcame out, exactly so it's
important, I think, tounderstand that and respect that
.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
It just came out Exactly, so it's important, I
think, to understand that andrespect that, but also always be
learning.
I think it's important, I think, as people of color look, I'm
going to say it.
I was taught from a young agethat I have to go twice as far
to get happy.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
You know that one, that statement.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yeah, yeah.
So you're going to have to bethat People are going to be
looking at people with extraeyes, so you can't.
I think you've got to just keepyourself straight, because
otherwise people are going toautomatically put you in a box.
And I hate to say it but youhave to kind of code switch.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Yeah, I mean the industry, unfortunately, is
making a shift back towardswhere that's going to be norm
right.
It was like diversity inclusionwas really popping, really
popping, and now companies aredropping diversity inclusion
like it's nothing and it's moreor less going to force us to
have to do that code switchingback to what it was.
Yeah, but definitely appreciatethe kind words for our audience
(34:05):
, because I don't think enoughof us get a chance to talk and
tell about these small thingslike love to learn, like you're
going to have to learn, like,hey, the climate we in you might
have to code switch right, andjust hearing it straight up is
always something that Iappreciate my guests coming
through and dropping.
So thank you so much for that.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
You're going to learn today.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Yeah, you're going to learn today.
You're going to learn today,awesome, awesome.
So the next thing I want togive you a chance is talk about
any you know recent projects.
You've got going on anythingyou know.
I believe you might be in themarket right now, but what do
you got going on in your currentphase in your journey?
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Sure, I think you know kind of what I'm doing
right now, actually getting outthere more talking to people
doing talks and that kind ofthing.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
A big shout out to the Tech Hustle podcast, my guy.
He says if I got to do it, Igot to do it here.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
So yeah, I think, my content creation and being able
to create a space for that aswell, which you're going to say
a space, yeah, yeah, yeah, youknow, kind of providing.
You know, I think thatproviding an opportunity, a
place and a forum throughcontent to be able to do this.
So I'm kind of just working outwhat that looks like.
Yeah, you know where that is.
(35:21):
You know, I kind of haven't.
You know, I've been on TikTokand doing my own thing for a
long time.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
I'd rather separate that out, because that's a
different thing.
We're going to have Michael'slinks all in the description
below.
I need y'all to like, subscribe, follow anything and everything
he's touching, because my guygot some knowledge and
experience that you just do notfind every day.
I had to go look in my Rolodexto find him and I had to get on
his schedule right, sodefinitely make sure you follow
(35:52):
along.
So we're getting close to thetail end of our conversation
here and I didn't give you aprep for this, but this is a
chance for you to ask Bobby Danything.
We're hanging out backstagewith Bobby D, so if you have
anything or any questions on thetop of your mind that you want
to ask, feel free to throw themout.
If not, we're going to bewrapping it up soon.
So what's up, Michael?
Speaker 1 (36:12):
I would love to know.
First of all, were you at Xwhen Elon?
Was there at the end of that,or did you manage to get out
before the shitstorm?
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Thank you for describing it like that.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
That's exactly what it was.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Actually a guest that we had in the show right before
yours.
I mentioned to him that I'vebeen off of Twitter for one
whole year Actually, yesterdaywas marked a day so I boycotted
Twitter.
Since the day changed forexactly one year.
I got back on to it last nightfor the first time and, oh my
gosh, the platform looks totallydifferent.
Lots of echoes, If you didn'tnotice advertising is our main
(36:49):
thing night for the first timeand, oh my gosh, the platform
looks totally different and, uh,if you didn't notice,
advertising is their main thing,because that's the first thing
that popped up at the top.
So elon's trying to catch acheck, but anyways, uh, so I was
at twitter for almost almost adecade, almost 10 years it was
about nine and a half years, um,and then, like I said, I worked
as a staff engineer there,becoming a site reliability
engineer.
My background is more insystems engineering, so all of
(37:10):
that cloud infrastructure stuff.
I was there since day one, frombuilding computers to putting
them on the internet, installinghypervisors.
Kubernetes as a concept aroundcontainerization is something
that I've seen developed undermy own eyes type stuff.
So I've really seen thatprogression in tech and a lot of
that was developed at Twitter.
Also, another skill set I haveis I'm kind of dual skilled, so
(37:32):
I'm a software engineer too.
So I write mostlyinfrastructure code, mostly in
Python, because it's very phonic, it's very easy to understand
what's going on.
They didn't get you into Golangwith that.
They definitely tried to get meto Golang, but no, I was Python
.
Is it for me?
But I will say Golang is thenext.
Like a TypeScript, like forJavaScript to TypeScript, I
(37:54):
would say Python to Golang wouldbe the next kind of transition
in my opinion, especially beinga more typed, compiled
programming language, lightningspeed compared to the
single-threaded Python, butthat's another subject.
It's still my preferredprogramming language, but during
my time there I worked on thecompute platform team, so I
basically help was the technicallead for all of the, the cloud
(38:16):
computing infrastructure there.
So if you say aws.
I was a part of the team thatbuilt twitter's internal aws
infrastructure just to follow upon that.
Uh, so twitter didn't has theirown version of that like, yeah,
okay, yeah, so that's the thingthat most people didn't know
twitter built data centers fromthe ground up.
Under my management, I had morethan 300 000 computers around
(38:39):
the world that my team of fivehad to support and manage,
running hundreds of thousands ofcontainers right at scale.
But yeah, we didn't mess withnone of that because it was a
hustle right.
It's like if you that becamethe new hustle is they charge
you and then they upcharge youand they keep up charging you.
Why not just own your ownhardware and then you build an
engineering team that couldsupport it, and that's what team
(39:01):
that I help lead to really justsolidify that.
They did start to run some cloudstuff, but when Elon got there,
he's like hell, no, I'm notpaying that bill but, so the
reason why I tell you all thisbackstory is is one of the cool
things is being a tech leader inthat organization that I was in
is that we kind of heard thingscoming before they got there.
(39:21):
So I remember I was in ameeting with a director one time
and he was like hey, uh, canyou tell me how much money we
spent here and what we did hereand what we did there?
And I was like, hold on, onlytime this happens when we're
about to be acquired.
You want to know assets, youwant to know this type of stuff.
So I was coming to the end ofmy time there.
I wasn't ready for a new regimechange and I was like, yo, I'm
going to be out.
And as soon as I left at leastthree weeks later that's when
(39:45):
elon was starting to pull up andthe words was in the wind I was
like, oh my gosh, thank you, Ididn't have to go through that.
But, to answer your initialquestion, I got out right before
he got there, um, so I didn'treally have to go through that,
but I had so many colleaguesunfortunately had to go through
that shit show, just like youdescribed it.
Um, in terms of um, the, themorale, the, the culture, the
tech, um, and all of that backand forth that he created
(40:08):
internally.
Just, I would have been, itwould have been a problem for me
.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
I guess I would love to ask you a question.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
This is probably my last necessary one Keep it on In
terms of like how the market isright now my question, I guess,
would be what?
Speaker 1 (40:27):
how do you feel about this?
Do you feel like this is waydifferent?
Because to me it feels likewhat the hell?
I'm sending out 100 times moreresumes than I ever have before.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Is this something that you've seen before?
And then, if so, what would yousuggest for, like strategy-wise
, for sort of getting, I guess,more resumes, the right people?
I just want to understand whatyou think about that.
Yeah, that's a good questionright there, I like that.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Thanks, steve, you're holding it down.
That's right, michael got some.
He got them lined up.
He's got the heat.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Oh, you're king of fire baby You're king of.
I mean he came to fire.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
So I go back to when I first started in 2002 is when
I first got into the industryand I started off not as an
engineer, I started off workingat the help desk.
So that was my way of gettingin.
But for me to get into thatposition I actually had to
almost switch a little bit,because I started off being a
systems administrator and theywere like, hey, you can be a
help desk guy or you cannot havea job.
And I was like, like you knowwhat, I'm going to take that
(41:26):
help desk opportunities and I'mgoing to level up that way,
through it, through it.
Yeah, so I came up through helpdesk into systems
administration and then thesystems engineering, and then
that's when I just went, youknow, crazy, especially once I
really start to level up myskills with linux administration
.
Um, but the key thing aboutthat error on that time was that
number one I had to be willingto switch it up a little bit.
(41:47):
Right, I had to be willing tosay, hey, if I really want an
opportunity, I might not be thisadministrator right now, but
I'm going to take this other jobso that I can eventually play
it out.
The other thing that I wouldsay, in terms of the climate
that we're in right now andthat's why I really enjoyed our
conversation when I tried to putyou in the corner over there
you're just a front-end typeengineer and then you say, no
fuck, that I'm more than that.
(42:09):
Right, that's what's going toget you.
The opportunity is that you canupskill and have more than just
software or front-endengineering as a skill set.
But you can talk Kubernetes,cloud, you can talk CICD
pipeline, you can talk back-endwith Node.
Those are the things that aregoing to give you the upper hand
(42:33):
against your competitors thatare out there, peers and people
that are looking for jobopportunities.
So showcasing those skills aregoing to be key for you to be
recognized as more than just afront-end engineer.
And that applies for anybodyelse that's in the industry is
like broaden the scope a littlebit, right.
Make sure that you'reupskilling and learning more
than just what everybody saysspecifically for this.
And then the third thing is Idon't think we have, I don't
think candidates spend enoughtime reading job descriptions to
(42:56):
understand what skills jobs arelooking for, right?
I have a lot of my mentees belike, hey, yeah, I want to go
and learn this and I'm like allright, so what kind of job you
want?
Oh, I want to go work there,all right?
Right, let's go to theirwebsite.
These are the skills they'relooking for.
These are the skills you'redeveloping, right, make sure
that they're aligned and thenthat's going to open up those
opportunities for you.
So, uh, definitely for thosethat are on the market, keep at
(43:17):
this hustle.
It is a different climate.
It's not the same as it wascovet time 2020 people, you know
, dropping offers left and right, um, and it's going to be those
that do the most, that do more,that reach out more.
That cold call like our errorwe used to have to pick up the
phone de-hustle right, they'relike yo uh, can I speak to hr um
?
can I speak to the hiringmanager?
Can I speak to right?
(43:38):
We're going to have to do thosetype of things to really get
there.
I miss those days yeah me too,me too, but hopefully that
answers your question, michael.
Certainly, thank you, Iappreciate.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, for sure, for sure.
And if you're out there and youare looking for opportunities,
our community is here tocontinue to support, definitely
holler at us here at the TechHustle, because we run a vibrant
community and always looking tosupport you all and level up.
(43:59):
I had to drop that plug inthere just for a little bit.
All right, all right, michael.
Anything else before we closeit out?
No, I think you know.
Oh, michael had a good time.
Turn that music up D-Hustle.
Let's see what we got going on.
I hope y'all enjoyed thisepisode of Backstage with Bobby
D.
We got my guy, Michael Froberg.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Froberg, froberg.
Yeah, I took a slow Shout outto.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Michael.
Shout out to Michael.
Yeah, big shout out to MichaelFroberg for coming through
hanging out with us todaydropping gems.
Make sure y'all listen for thatsound rewind to it.
I guarantee you there's goingto be some knowledge that's
being dropped and definitelywe're in these streets and we
got a few more guests comingthrough next up.
We're going where.
We're going to Houston next up.
Yeah, so we got Houston on thetrack and then you never know
where you might find us at inthe nation.
(44:47):
But always come through here atthe Tech Hustle.
Holla at your boy, it's Bobby D.
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