S9 E1 | Let's Make Stupid S**T | Jason Lengstorf - The Angular Plus Show

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome to the Angular plus Show. We're app developers of
all kinds share their insights and experiences. Let's get started.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Hey, guys, welcome to another episode of the Angular plus Show.
I'm your host, Q, and I am joined today with
two of my well, two people that I know. Uh chow,
how are you doing today, my friend?

Speaker 3 (00:35):
Uh?

Speaker 4 (00:36):
Hi, I'm pretty tired today, battling with the new baby
and the toddler.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Oh congratulations. I don't think I have to tell you congratulations.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Thank you, thank you, than awesome.

Speaker 5 (00:49):
Yeah, the new baby's fine.

Speaker 4 (00:50):
The toddler is what ties me out the most.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Oh okay, I guess. I guess your wife is tired
from the baby and you're tired from the toddler.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Sorry to hear that, my friend. All right, well, and
then I'm also joined today by the one and only,
the the Amazing, the Spectacular. Sorry I did to give
you that type of introduction, child, but uh, my good friend,
you don't are you doing? My guy?

Speaker 6 (01:19):
My guy, I'm always happy to be here. Jan Nicholas
is the way you pronounces That's what you were going for.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
You have to say both Jon Nicholas and not just yan.

Speaker 6 (01:32):
Technically, there's like the hyphen in between that kind of
makes the one word.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
I don't make the worlds. I just I'm German. I
still follow the worlds.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Okay, I won't. I won't say just anymore.

Speaker 5 (01:42):
Nicholas.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
I couldn't.

Speaker 6 (01:43):
So the worst someone called me was like Jean Cloyd,
where I was like, okay, I kind of kind of
wan a roll with that now. But as long as
it has like John or Nicholas and that, I'm usually good.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
I just always like to make fun of Brian for that.

Speaker 5 (01:57):
Gotcha? All right? Well cool?

Speaker 2 (02:00):
And today we are all hosting the twenty seven year
old Jason Linksdorf. How are you doing to day, my friend.

Speaker 5 (02:13):
I'm feeling older than the Internet would report me to be.

Speaker 3 (02:17):
Well, yes, I have to.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
I'm in I guess I'm new to the tech space
or something.

Speaker 5 (02:24):
I had to google who Jason was, And when you.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Google Jason Lingksdorf, you get this biography that he is
this twenty seven year old tech genius and he's a
prodigy in JavaScript and he makes TV for developers.

Speaker 5 (02:40):
I yeah, I wrote a bio for myself when I
wrote my I think it was my first book. And
now I can't figure out how to change it. So
it's just in the Google results until the end of time,
no matter how many times I email Google Support and say, please,
I'm not twenty seven. I haven't been twenty seven in
so long. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
I mean, I think it's awesome to be twenty seven still, so.

Speaker 5 (03:05):
I know I just need to get them get that
vampire blood or something. So I stopped looking so much
older than twenty seven, and.

Speaker 6 (03:12):
Like, one, lay, We've put you in the club of
twenty seven, right with Kirk Cobain.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
So just awesome.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Oh shoot, dont even think about that. Yeah, you're part
of the twenty seven clothes.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
Oh god, still have a while, bud.

Speaker 5 (03:24):
That's a club that I feel like I don't want
to be.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
It was funny.

Speaker 4 (03:29):
It was funny to me is that when you scrolled
out a little bit more, you saw his You saw
Jason's GitHub bios says building stuff for over twenty years.
So this is like ideal junior, develop a resume when
you have five things like the ass for the fifteen
years of experience.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Yeah, he's been building stuff since he was seven years old.

Speaker 3 (03:52):
So that's the way to make these days all right cool.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
So today we're talking well, I think the description is
let's build crazy asterisk asterisk T. I'm not sure what
that is, but I'm excited to talk about it. Tell
us a little bit about yourself, Jason, Yeah, sure.

Speaker 5 (04:11):
So I am not twenty seven. I have been building
for the web for a couple of decades now. I
got my start at the like in my high school years.
I was in a band and we needed merch in
a website and stuff, and so I kind of just
we couldn't afford to hire help. So I figured it
out and realized over the course of the band's lifespan

(04:31):
that I was better at the web and design side
of things than I was at being a musician. So
ended up pursuing the web stuff full time and since
then went from agency work to consulting work too. I
was a front end architect at IBM, moved from IBM
into the startup space, worked at Gatsby built their community program.
That was where I sort of transitioned into a lot

(04:53):
of the outward facing educational stuff, and then moved over
to Netlefi. I worked with Sarah Drasner for a while
and then ended up taking over when she left as
the VP of Developer experience there, and since the end
of twenty twenty two, I have been running this TV

(05:14):
production company where I'm making shows like my take on
The Great British Bakeoff but for developers, and a show
that's sort of like Jeopardy but for developers, and if
you kind of smashed hot ones in there, and trying
to you know, trying to get companies to think a
little more creatively about the way they approach education and
reaching communities and having a whole lot of fun with it.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
Cool. How would someone who's looking to find all this
stuff be able to find you?

Speaker 3 (05:40):
Is it all of YouTube?

Speaker 5 (05:42):
Yeah? So I run everything is under the brand code TV.
So I have a YouTube channel that is it's code TV.
Dash dev is the handle, but if you search code TV,
I should show up right up at the top. And
I also have a website codetv dot dev that lists everything.
That site kind of works like now flicks And if
you're feeling like you want to support this kind of stuff,

(06:03):
you can become a supporter and get access to exclusive
stuff and all sorts of fun things. That was a
cool project to build. And then I also have other
links if you're interested at Jason dot energy slash links,
which is where I kind of list all the stuff
that I have.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
Cool, all right, and so let's let's just dive right
into today's topic, building crazy shit, right, So just go
into it. What are we talking about in terms of
building crazy shit? What is crazy shit? That's gonna keep
saying it now?

Speaker 5 (06:33):
Yeah, Nicholas, I kind of want you to tee this
up because I feel like you had a vision for
what you wanted to talk about to.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
Yeah, you tee it up.

Speaker 6 (06:39):
I vision is a very strong word. Vision is a
very strong word. So the thing how I got to
know you, Jason is pretty much you have this Twitch
stream that you used to do on a weekly basis.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
I don't think. I'm not sure.

Speaker 5 (06:51):
I try to do it on a weekly basis, but
production schedules make it hard.

Speaker 6 (06:55):
Yeah, I bet. So it's called Learn with Jason. I'm
not sure if it's still TV with Jason or.

Speaker 5 (07:01):
Learn with Jason is the series. It's the Thursday live stream,
and then Code TV is the company that it runs under.

Speaker 6 (07:09):
Right, So within that you I think you had a
really cool concept of like, Okay, either you build like
front stuff yourself, or you had someone on the show
and just help you build something. So some I saw
one episode where you talked to Fred from the Astro
team and you build something an Astro for instance. But
like the way you tackle this approach of like continuously

(07:32):
learning by building arbitrary stuff. I think like once you
build like a parking like spot app or something like that,
if I remember correctly.

Speaker 5 (07:41):
I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (07:43):
And that's exactly what I'm saying.

Speaker 6 (07:45):
Like when I tackle like my learning journey, I always
like lack this creativity.

Speaker 3 (07:50):
So I'm wondering how.

Speaker 6 (07:51):
You approach this from your perspective to like continuously evolve
your skills.

Speaker 5 (07:57):
So I think the way that I started out was
with a high level of perfectionism.

Speaker 4 (08:04):
Right.

Speaker 5 (08:04):
It's sort of the curse of the gifted kid or
whatever you want to say, where my parents always put
me in like the accelerated programs, and you know, you
have teachers telling you like, wow, you're so you're so gifted,
and so you start to develop this sense of like
if I don't get everything exactly perfect, then I'm a failure,
which is really challenging, right because and obviously, like you know,

(08:26):
Champagne problems here, but it does create this sort of
barrier to doing new things because you paint this box
around yourself that either I am excellent at it or
I am a failure, and that kind of raises the
stakes on anything that you want to try. So when
I was younger, I had all these ideas, but then
I would like sit on them and resist actually doing

(08:48):
the work because I wasn't sure how to get it perfect.
And at some point somebody who wasn't me told me, like,
why are you so worried about this? Like, just build
something that's fun and you'll pick up some skills. But
it doesn't have to be anything. It can just be
a toy, It can just be a learning exercise. Not
everything needs to be a business, and not everything needs
to be a like raging success. You can just have fun.

(09:10):
And that kind of clicked for me where I realized
that the things that I'm best at are the things
that I never considered as work, and it was because
I didn't have any stakes attached to them, because you know,
who cares if I'm funny or if I'm able to
make a skit or if I write a tutorial, because
that wasn't my job. I was an engineer, and the

(09:31):
things that I was worried about were like how good
I was as an engineer. So everything else I like
practiced all the time. I was writing blog posts, I
was like volunteering my time in communities to help teach
people and like share things I was learning. I was
figuring out how to make video, I was live streaming.
All that stuff was really low stakes for me because
there was nothing riding on it, but I was doing
it all the time, and so I was progressively getting better.

(09:53):
And at some point in twenty eighteen, when I was
making learn with Jason, I had this realization that if
I use fun as a direct avenue toward learning, I'm
more likely to get the practice. I'm more likely to retain,
and I'm more likely to stick with it because I'm
kind of giggling because I'm making something that makes me laugh,
and all of those things lead to more rapid progress.

(10:16):
And that kind of led to me thinking, how do
I reduce scope on things, turn it into something that's
fun and silly, you know, don't worry about making it
all the way functional. I can definitely handwave some stuff
or ship something with a few hard coded parts, because
the thing I wanted to learn is the part that
I built, and it doesn't matter if, like there's no
actual user system and it's just a JavaScript function that

(10:38):
like toggles a cookie, right, and that's okay. I can
do that sometimes. And that permission that I was able
to give myself to not have to make everything, you know,
enterprise ready or super impressive on every technical level has
led to me being able to dabble in so much
of tech that I never ever would have touched had
it been high stakes, right, like, I'm not going to

(10:59):
get into OFF if I have to get it right.
But because I lowered the stakes, like putting together an
off system, it doesn't matter if it's not perfect because
I wasn't trying to sell it. I don't have paying customers,
there's no user data, it's just a demo. I'm just playing, right,
And that has led to me building skills that when

(11:20):
I do find myself in production environments or when I
do find myself needing to architects something, well, I have
this really broad base of experience because I've played with
just about everything that's come out in the last twenty years,
and that allows me to make more reasonable decisions and
have a broader view of how things could be done
so that we can dig in and figure out how

(11:40):
to do it the right way, the scalable way, the
enterprise way. And that has been a huge benefit to me.
And so now I'm trying to figure out how to
we spread that as a generalized approach and not just
like the thing that I learned that helps me.

Speaker 6 (11:56):
Am I right then, in the assumption that you're not
the kind of person I'd reads a book for ten
hours and be like, Okay, I'm an expert now and
rust or something.

Speaker 5 (12:03):
I No, I am the kind of person who likes
to read the docks front to back, though like I do.
One of my first one of my first experiences was
actually reading the PHP docs from cover to cover because
I was trying to I decided that my band needed
a content management system because I was sick of them
telling me what to put on the website. I wanted
them to do it. And that experience it gave me Like,

(12:27):
I didn't learn PHP by reading the docs, but what
it did was it gave me this like little alarm
in the back of my head that when I read
something or I saw an example, the thing would go
off and say, you've seen that before, And I would
sort of have an idea of where to go or
like what it was called or something like that, so
that I could dig deeper and become better at googling.

(12:47):
But no, my general idea is that I'm not an
expert in anything, and I probably never will be because
I don't have the attention span to go like all
the way to the bottom. But I am sixty percent
good at a whole lot of things, and so I'm
really really good in a prototyping situation or in an
idea generation situation where you want to prove out an idea,

(13:09):
and I like to be in that that zero to
ten percent space. That's that's where I really thrive. And
then I like to think, and you know, other engineers
that I've handed projects you can can vouch for whether
or not I'm lying here. I like to think that
I know enough about how to take things the remaining
ninety percent that I'm not handing them garbage, that it's

(13:30):
something that they can sort of work with and carry forward.
But yeah, I don't. I don't. I've done RUST a
couple of times, and I wouldn't say that. I actually
if you put if you put me in front of
a blank editor right now and said, right some rust
I think I would, I would fail completely.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
So do you go go ahead?

Speaker 3 (13:52):
Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead, not after you, after you, Okay.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
I was just going to ask, like, do you do
you code or do you do you generous yourself coding?
The same I got a fun project that you do
at at work or enter price setting.

Speaker 5 (14:06):
Sort of right, like I there are definitely things that
I'll do in a for fun project that I would
never do in a in a work project, like huge
corners that I'll cut or you know, things that I'll
kind of handwave over. But the way that I organize functions,
or the way that I think about how to structure styling,

(14:27):
or the way that I, you know, split up my
business logic from the database from the view layer, like
that sort of stuff is all pretty standard, and I'll
do it the same way kind of no matter what,
because I one of the beliefs that I that I
hold pretty dearly is that the best practices are the
ones that make you the most effective for long periods

(14:49):
of time. And so a lot of the things that
I'm doing are I'm trying to optimize for easy like
flexibility and maintainability, over time, I'm and like enough correctness
that when I go to use it, it's say type
so that I get autocomplete so I don't have to
go look up that function to figure out how it works,
but not necessarily like so overly type that I'm spending

(15:12):
a lot of time playing typescript golf, trying to figure
out how to throw in all the generics and the
you know, the magic stuff that you can do in
type script to like write doom or whatever it is
people are doing these days. So I very much take
a kind of like trying to find the goldilocks zone
on things. And I believe that's a good practice for
enterprise and for fun projects because it makes you faster

(15:34):
without costing you down the road if you want to
make a change.

Speaker 6 (15:37):
The thing that I'm kind of fascinated by this approach
of like saying, okay, let's just build a garbage project.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
You're iterating so much in.

Speaker 6 (15:46):
The end that you're gaining like experience just by the iteration,
like and because I think that's the thing that a
lot of particular enterprise developer lack because they see like
the same copse for like twenty years.

Speaker 3 (15:57):
They don't have that like.

Speaker 6 (15:59):
New stimuli of like, oh, why don't I not try
using that CSS library? Why shouln't I try tailwin?

Speaker 5 (16:06):
Now?

Speaker 6 (16:06):
It seems to be cool, And I think that iteration
like makes you realize what you don't have, what you
might want, and also that there's just a world out
there outside of your box that helps you in a
way you think. So I do really like that approach
and I wish that a lot more people would do that.
The thing that I'm still struggling with is that creative aspect,

(16:27):
because I'm even if I would allocate the time I'm
sitting in front of my desk and be like, well, okay,
what am I going to do now?

Speaker 3 (16:34):
I guess I check Twitter again? Right?

Speaker 6 (16:36):
Yeah, I'm liking that creativity of just saying okay, well something.
So how do you come up with like this constant
stream of like ideas?

Speaker 3 (16:45):
I mean, like you're.

Speaker 6 (16:46):
Running now, Learn with Jason said, twenty eighteen. If I
catch it right, that's.

Speaker 5 (16:49):
The Yeah, Learn with Jason started in twenty eighteen.

Speaker 6 (16:52):
It feels like two years is actually seven years by now,
so like every week that's like a ton of time
in a positive way.

Speaker 5 (17:01):
Yeah, we've done over four hundred episodes.

Speaker 6 (17:03):
Now, wow, that's crazy, Like those are probably like some
some experiments take more than one episode, but that's crazy,
Like I don't have four and cremits I might get
for positor or like probably.

Speaker 5 (17:17):
Well, I think like it's it's very much about reducing
the stakes because sometimes what we're doing, like we had
we had James Stickie Weaver on the show like last
week or the week before, and the thing that I
wanted to learn was CSS anchor positioning, And for that one,
we didn't need much of an idea. And what James

(17:39):
came up with was, let's build a like a footnote
thing that'll stick the footnote to where to where it
is in the body of text, but in a sidebar, right,
So not a not a wildly ambitious idea, not a
particularly like you know, wow, how creative idea, but a
really practical small thing. And we were able to build

(18:01):
that in a codepen in you know, we did that
in a different little demo in like ninety minutes, which
is a great way to like learn this concept, get
a couple reps. And I was immediately able to apply
that to another project I'd been working on because it
showed me a way to organize things on screen using
CSS anchor positioning that I didn't know as possible, and
it like solved this really complex problem that I was

(18:21):
trying to figure out. And then similarly, like sometimes it's
it's like, oh, well, it's I don't know, it's Valentine's Day,
and it would be fun to build something that was
kind of on theme with Valentine's Day. And Lynn Fisher
is available, so why don't we work on a thing
for making like Valentine's Day cards for OSS maintainers. And
that was the original idea, which eventually became this big

(18:43):
project at Netlifi called OSS dot Love, which Lynn has
now taken over and it's it's under it. You have
to go to Lynn's website to look at it because
the ur all change because oss dot love is like
seventeen hundred dollars a year or something ridiculous like that. Wow,
so she got a different domain. But it was a
super cool project, right, and it was just like this
kind of little silly thing, And then we had a

(19:04):
couple more ideas and Phil Hawksworth put together a way
to like customize the designs that Lynn did, and we
made a Then we had another idea to make it
so that you could like log in with your GitHub
and choose a maintainer and it would like pull their
GitHub avatar. Just little stuff like that that we could
do that made this whole thing feel very special despite
being a string of like three fairly simple ideas that

(19:27):
were just time bound, right. And I think that's something
I've been learning too, is that a lot of times,
I think people feel the urge that like it's only
good or it's only creative if it feels really ambitious.
And if you look at the projects that tend to
go really viral, they're usually something really really simple that's

(19:48):
just executed extraordinarily well. You know, Lynn Fisher is such
a good example of this, because all of her demos
are things like I made a drawing using a single
dive and a whole bunch of background, you know, drop shadows, right,
And it's like, oh, that's a really really simple idea,
but she does it so well, and she does it consistently,
and the art that she creates with that is truly

(20:11):
kind of like, holy crap, how did you do that?
But then you know, like other really simple ideas. One
of my favorite projects I just got reminded of it
yesterday was we took a cutout of Phil Hawksworth. He
like he had a he had like his niece's bachelorette
party showed up at his house and there was this
photo of him just very much looking beleaguered, like with

(20:35):
this party going on behind him. And so I took
that and I cut him out of it, and then
I took his jaw and I sliced it like the
Monty Python kind of paper puppets, and I hooked it
up to the Web Audio API so that when you
yelled into your speaker, Phil's mouth would move right. And
then we just released that as a code. It's a codepen.
It's on my on my codepen somewhere, and if you

(20:55):
turn on your microphone you can like puppets heer Phil
Hawksworth and you can change the to be whatever you want.
So we released it on I like tweeted about it
or something. This is back when Twitter was still a thing,
and it a bunch of people just started recording videos
of like what silly things they were making by puppeteering
Phil Hawksworth. And it was such a fun little moment.

(21:16):
But like the project itself, wasn't actually very ambitious. I
think it's probably, you know, a couple dozen lines of
code all in, but it was it was fun and
I could do it fast, and it was kind of
an inside joke, but it was approachable enough that anybody
could get the joke. And I think that a lot
of creativity is just sort of latching onto something that
you're thinking about right now and just playing right Like

(21:38):
I usually what i'm building is something that's somewhat related
to where I'm fixated. Like I did a bunch of
stuff that was burger related for a while because I
was in this feud with with Sarah Drausner about what
kind of burger was best, and so I made like
an exploding SVG animation where the burger would would kind
of start like this, and then you'd click on it
and it would expand and it would label the different

(21:59):
components of the because I wanted to see if I
could figure out how to do that sort of animation.
And then of course Sarah did her own SPG animation
and made me look like a fool. But that's what
I get.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
Going against Sarah dress.

Speaker 5 (22:12):
I know, it's like stepping into the ring with Mike
Tyson and being like, I'm gonna win this. But I
do think like so much of my my career is
built on small projects like can I build this in
a day or two? And is it small enough that
I can actually finish it? And typically just scoping down

(22:33):
until I get to just the kernel of the idea
that's interesting to me, and not worrying about like I
don't need an off system, I don't need a style
I don't need a style guide. This doesn't have to
be enterprise ready. It can just be like it doesn't
even have to be performing. It can be a piece
of crap website because it lets me get this one
fun idea out and then I can ship it and
forget about it.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
So one thing I'm wondering though, how do I price this?

Speaker 6 (22:57):
Probably to not sound completely ignorant, but it seems so
I get this perspective on like this attitude a lot
when you're like having like a very reliable income source
from like something like netlifie or something, but then two
years ago you said, no, I don't want to rely
on that anymore. I want to build my own stuff.

(23:18):
So how does this fit into the picture. Now, that's
a gap that I'm trying to I get the creativity
and we work together. I love you, know, I love
what you're doing. I really admire your creativity and the
production quality that you deliver with all the things you're doing.
But like there seems to be a gap for me
that I cannot bridge right now.

Speaker 5 (23:40):
I so, okay, there's a couple of things right The
biggest thing is, I don't think I could do what
I'm doing today if I didn't have ten years of
industry connections and network and goodwill built up through the
other work that I did. And I've also I think

(24:01):
that one of the things that I think about a lot,
especially with code TV, is how can we make something
valuable to the company that's being part of it? Like
me making a puppet of Phil Hawksworth is very amusing
to me, but it's not really valuable to another company.
But if I wanted to make that valuable to another company,

(24:22):
I'd start thinking, well, who's kind of invested in audio APIs,
Like maybe it's one of these AI companies that's doing
like speech to text or something like that, or text
to speech, and do I, you know, can I get
them to maybe get involved and we do a challenge
where we're going to build something funny that involves text

(24:44):
to speech, and then that puppet could be a way
to you know, maybe we take a cutout of I
don't know, the Queen of England or something, and then
we make that into a puppet. But then we can
actually like use one of their trained models to have
that puppet like read a each Suddenly it's like kind
of the same concept, but now E've involved what the

(25:05):
company's trying to sell. And when we make the show,
the show is going to demonstrate like how do these
devs approach these problems? What did they think about? What
are the creative ways they came up with to solve
these problems? And along the way we get to actually
see them use these tools and approach solving this problem
in a very realistic way, which fills the same gap
that something like a webinar would fill, but in a

(25:27):
way that people would choose to watch, right And I
think that's the key thing that I'm kind of driving
on right now, is that I think developers love to learn,
and we want to know about new tools, but I
never want to go into a sales pitch and I
never want to go watch like a webinar. I don't
want to have to sign up with my email to
then get like an email from you know whatever made

(25:50):
up name at company name once a week telling me
all the things, you know what I mean, Like, I
don't want to end up on somebody's newsletter just to learn.
And so I think that it's valuable to have a
place where you can be entertained in a way that
teaches you something, Like I think it's why we used
to love the Discovery Channel back in the day, Like
you could learn about how the world worked or how
something functioned, but it was fun. Like watching MythBusters was educational,

(26:15):
but not in like an immediately actionable way. You're not
watching it like a tutorial. You're watching it because it's
interesting to sort of peek behind the curtain of how
the world works. And I think that my thought behind
a lot of the programming I'm doing is to embrace
that same idea of MythBusters or The Great British Bakeoff
or all these shows that sort of follow that format
of it's experts doing something that they're good at and

(26:37):
explaining how it is that they're doing that thing, but
not in instructional ways, but in ways that you'll sort
of pick up a little bit of knowledge and a
little bit of understanding of how it goes where you
might want to dig deeper, but like you wouldn't immediately
be functional. You can't watch Great British Bakeoff and then
go make a cake, but you can learn what kind
of cake is. I mean, yeah, like maybe you can.

(26:58):
I can't, But I think the the thing that's interesting
about it though, is that you watch that and they
make something and you go, I've never seen that cake before,
and I want to eat that. So then you go
and google it. Now you've learned what that cake is
and you've got a recipe and now you're going to
go try and make it. And if you were the
person who like had the startup that made that cake,
you just got a conversion because somebody watched the Gray

(27:20):
British Bakeoff. And I think that's the way that I
think about it, And it does make it really challenging
because how do you attribute that, Like you can't get
attribution for almost any of this kind of advertising because
it's very much awareness and it's like, Okay, I'm going
to put this in your head so that in a
few weeks. When you're like got a free weekend and
you're thinking about building a thing, You're gonna go, oh, yeah,
I learned about that thing, and then you'll look it

(27:41):
up on Google or Perplexity or whatever did you use
these days, and you're going to end up then like
becoming a new conversion, which will appear to be attributed
to search, but it's actually attributed to awareness work. And
so this is sort of the that's actually where I
spend most of my time is trying to explain like
second and third order effects of marketing and trying to

(28:01):
get companies to understand that, Like, there's a reason that
companies like Budweiser and Coca Cola, which are some of
the most profitable brands in the world, are spending ten
percent of their revenue every year on advertising. Even though
we all know those names. You cannot say Coca Cola
to almost anybody in the world and have them say
what's that, right, It's still billions of dollars a year
spent on advertising because they know how important it is

(28:23):
to build that awareness in the market. And you know,
that's just not a muscle that we have in startups.

Speaker 6 (28:30):
So the thing I'm still wondering. And I mean, I
watch a lot of your content. I appreciate the work
you're doing. But how on a scale from one to ten,
how scared were you when you said, no, no, this
startup job is not the thing for me anymore, and
I want to be like fully creative and do my

(28:51):
own thing now, Like that must be intimidating.

Speaker 5 (28:54):
Okay, So starting with a couple of caveats, because you know,
I'm writing in on a mountain of privilege here. I
have a stable family that would back me up if
things went really bad. I could go live on my
parents' couch for a while. I've got a partner who
is employed, so I have that backup source. I you know,
I have had the fortune of being at companies like

(29:17):
IBM and Gatsby and Netlify, who all pay tech salaries,
and I have savings, so like, I had a lot
of things lined up as security nets for me. In
addition to that, I also made sure that I was
doing the work to build the next business before I
left the current one. So when I left Netlifi, I
had already replaced about half of my Netlify income with

(29:40):
what would eventually become code TV. Work right, and I
had early conversations with people I trusted at other companies
and said, listen, I'm starting to think it's time for
me to make this move. You would mentioned before that
you would maybe hire me full time. Would you be
interested in hiring me as a contractor to do some
of this stuff that I'm interested in? And enough company

(30:01):
said yes, that I felt confident that I would be
able to be able to immediately replace my Netlifi income,
and I, wow, that's crazy. It was. It was a
very like again, you know, I have I have a
lot of history in this industry, and I've worked with
a ton of people, and when I was at Netlify,
one of my largest focuses was building partnerships because that

(30:22):
was like kind of the heart of what made netlify successful.
So because of that, i'd been you know, I was
very visible and and you know when you get when
when Sarah Drasner like recruits you, it immediately raises your
profile to to other people and they're like, oh, well,
if Sarah saw something, that must be a good hire.
So I was getting recruited all the time, and that

(30:43):
led to me having I think a lot of leverage
when I when I made this decision, and so for me,
it wasn't risky. For me, it was risky to stay.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
And and I.

Speaker 5 (30:54):
Think that like risk is one of those things that
is it's so situation. You know, if I had said
I'm going to leave Netlifi to go make video in Hollywood,
that would have been a bad, like a big risk
for me because I don't know that industry. I don't
know exactly how that works, even though it would have
been effectively the same practical day to day of like

(31:17):
I'm making video, I'm trying to sell these deals, all
this kind of stuff. But because it was in an
industry that I knew really well where I had a
lot of connections where I felt really confident that I,
like I have been delivering these results. I can just
do it for other people on contract instead of just
for Netlifi. That made it pretty obvious that like the
demand was there. You know, I had been people had

(31:38):
been approaching me saying like, hey, can you come teach
our Devrell team how to make video? Can you teach
our Devrell team how to think about multi leveraging our work?
You know, devral strategy is something that a lot of
companies were like, Hey, maybe we'd be interested in like
contracting you for this. So I knew that. I knew
that if nothing else, I could become a consultant. I
really didn't want to be a consultant. I tried it once,
I did a really bad job. I got fired, Sorry

(32:01):
to that company, but I did. I did realize that
like there were and there's always a backup plan, like
I could go apply at a bunch of different startups
that I would definitely enjoy working at, and I would
be able to do good work. So I had a
lot of contingencies, and I had a lot of confidence
that the plan that I'd made had enough interest in
it that things were going to be okay, gotcha, and

(32:24):
so so, because I did all of that pre work
when I left, I actually out earned my Netlify salary
by August of the first year that I was out.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Nice, good for you, very happy for you.

Speaker 5 (32:36):
Thank you.

Speaker 6 (32:36):
The thing I'm still well wondering it's the wrong word,
but when did the first secure to you like, hey,
I could maybe do this full time? Because this doesn't
you don't see now talking to you for thirty minutes already,
you don't seem like the guy that.

Speaker 3 (32:51):
So my wife obviously knows pretty well.

Speaker 6 (32:54):
Once I have an idea, I'm like, okay, I should
do this right now, like next week, I start this
and quit my job.

Speaker 3 (32:59):
So I'm not saying I'm quitch sorr. If Jack Prince listens,
I'm not.

Speaker 6 (33:03):
Cree, but I'm very much like, once I have an idea,
it's very hard for me for me to like just
let go and like, no, I need to get those
things first in place, you know what I'm saying. So
when did it occur to your first, like, hey, I
could do this, and then I assume you had like
half a year or maybe even more leanway that you
needed to.

Speaker 5 (33:21):
Get twenty nineteen.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
COVID. Yeah, right, because the COVID stuff you're sitting in
your room and just hit you.

Speaker 5 (33:30):
It was before COVID, I before I joined Netlifi. My
intention was to go independent, and the the reason like, honestly,
when Sarah first hit me up, I told her no,
I said, no, I'm gonna go I'm gonna go solo,
and she just made a really good case for why
that was not the right thing to do. And I'm

(33:53):
really glad that she did too, because I I don't
think I would be able to do this the way
that I'm doing it now if I hadn't gotten the
VP experience, because I learned in that job what it
is that makes companies money. Like I think before I
understood how communities were grown, and that I think would

(34:16):
have helped. But what really made the difference was understanding
like when the when the spreadsheet guy at the company
starts panicking how are they going to value things? So
that I can go make a case and say, no,
this project needs to stay on the books because this
is how it's going to affect the spreadsheet. And being
able to have that conversation I think has been the

(34:37):
whole secret to why my company has succeeded. So I
mean the other thing too, is like there's never a
good time, Like it's always it's always a bad idea
to quit a stable job like full stop right right,
But at the same time, it's it's a bad idea
not to bet on yourself when you when you just
can't get an idea out of your heart, Like I

(34:58):
started doing this stuff and I knew. I knew in
twenty nineteen that like I wanted to do more with
the video stuff that I was doing like I was
having a blast. I was like putting together my home studio,
I was learning about cameras. It was very clear to
me that this was something that was like in my
heart right, But I also knew like when and Sarah
made a really good case for like, yeah, I hadn't

(35:21):
done a lot where I was working with peers. I
was always kind of the only person on my team,
and so I hadn't had the chance to like, what
does collaboration look like for real? What does it look
like when you have like a group of people who
are better than you, Like I got to work with
folks like Cassidy Williams, who's one of the most creative,
funny people I've ever met. I got to work with
Sarah Drasner, who's like one of the greatest of all time,
Phil Hawksworth, who's still the funniest person I know. Tara Mannixick,

(35:43):
who I think y'all know from the Angular community. She
freaking rules. And there's so many great And I'm like
not including a ton of names because I don't want
to spend the whole time just listing names, but like,
all these people were better than me at certain things,
And because I got to work with them, I got
to learn more things, and each one of those things
is contributed to my ability to succeed in this role.

(36:05):
Gat like it's it's kind of the same thing about
like when are you ready to build a project or
when is it ready to ship? You can continue to
refine or gather information, or do research or all these things.
If you don't do enough research, you're you're in for
a bad time. If you do too much research, you're
just procrastinating. And so trying to find that line for
you is I don't I don't know how you do it,

(36:26):
and and.

Speaker 3 (36:26):
For me.

Speaker 5 (36:28):
It was it just became very clear that like, the
priorities of Netlifi were shifting away from my priorities, and
my confidence in my ability to do what I'm doing
today had been growing because I'd been, you know, taking
on more ambitious projects with NETLFI. We made some of
the ads stuff, like we we dressed up Phil Hawksworth
as a robot and made some some spoof ads, and

(36:51):
we did a tailor to universes where we dressed up
Marisa Morbe, my wife is a in like two different timelines,
and had her go through a day with and without
Netlfi and those those productions were huge. They were the
first time I'd ever done like on set, you know,
fifteen person crew, like really big productions, and I learned
a ton and I came out of those just realizing like, yeah,

(37:12):
this is what I want to do. So I was
pushing Netlifi to do more of that. They were pushing
more toward like austerity, and I it just became inevitable,
like I had to go and do this because I
wasn't going to get to do it at Netlify, and
I kind of fished around at some other companies and
I'm trying, like, honestly, my big goal here is I'm
trying to get companies to start thinking about television as

(37:32):
a way to replace the company event. You know, don't
spend three quarters of a million dollars so on a
conference that you're maybe going to be able to get
three hundred people to show up to. Instead spend seven
hundred fifty thousand dollars making a series of a TV
show that basically highlights your product and you get to
release it every week for a year, like just constant
attention on your product by doing something like this, as

(37:54):
opposed to four hundred people come to an event in
San Francisco the same week as I have other company
events that are more or less exactly the same. Don't
I think I'm wandering at this point, So I'm gonna
stop talking.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
I want to tack onto what j Nicholas had said
a second ago, and it was like, what made you
come to the decision you wanted to start doing this?
But who are you talking to behind the scenes to
kind of help you make the financial decision? Like do
you have that financial know how? Because I know I
don't like to say, like, if I'm making X amount

(38:31):
of dollars currently at this job, I'm probably not gonna
make X amount of dollars for a few years doing
this thing myself. I'm probably gonna lose X amount of dollars.
Did how did you know that? How did you get Yeah?
Like who was your financial person or did you just
get lucky?

Speaker 3 (38:51):
Jason?

Speaker 2 (38:53):
Yeah, maybe I need to come to you, and I
need to when I want to start doing something like this,
I will.

Speaker 5 (38:57):
Happily talk to anybody who wants to start doing this stuff,
because I unfortunately it was me. I like a spreadsheet,
Like I always talk shit about spreadsheet guys. But I
like a spreadsheet, And so the first thing I did
was I built out a budget that just I went
through all of my credit card statements and bank statements,
and I figured out what we spend every month, and

(39:19):
I kind of average that out over a few months
and figured out, these are the subscriptions we have, This
is what we pay in like insurance, et cetera, mortgage,
and so on, until I understood, like, Okay, this is
how much money we need to survive, and this is
how much money we need to live at the current
lifestyle that we have, and this is how much money
we need to live if we ever want to retire.
And by understanding like what those amounts were, then I

(39:42):
could start figuring. Okay, so if you know, let me
run some scenarios here where if I sell a project
in that project, let's say costs I don't know for
round numbers, let's say ten thousand dollars. So I sell
a project, that project costs ten thousand dollars, and I
need eight thousand dollars a month to live at my
current lifestyle then, and I need to sell at least
one of those projects per month or I'm going to

(40:05):
end up in trouble. So what is my average sales cycle?
And I can go look at my emails and say,
here's where I emailed somebody the first time, and here's
all the meetings that we had, and here's where they
signed the contract. And that's seven weeks. I'm not selling
fast enough to sustain this lifestyle, right, So do I
have confidence that if I'm full time on this, that
I can actually shorten my sales cycle by three weeks?

(40:26):
And if the answer is no, then I either need
to increase my prices or I need to increase my
pipeline so that I can get more of these projects through.
And in my case, I started kind of getting to
a point where I knew that, like for something like
Webdev Challenge, I knew that I could sell ten to
fifteen of them a year. That was the idea. And
if I do the math, after I take out everything

(40:47):
I pay to the production crew, which is almost everything
that I charge, I then have enough money that I
should be able to pay the baseline, and then any
other projects that I sell become profit.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
Right.

Speaker 5 (40:59):
So that's sort of the way that I structure this
so that I understand, like, can I do this safely
and the spreadsheet. Then it just you know, if when
I'm looking at my income, if my income doesn't clear
the monthly threshold and I don't have enough in the pipeline,
I started emailing people aggressively right and I'm like, Okay,

(41:19):
we missed our we missed our target for January, and
I'd only have two people in the pipeline, and that
probably means I'm going to miss my target for February
unless i get like five more people talking to me
right now. So that's I try to be. I try
to think of like the start of my sales cycle
as the panic time and not like when I miss
rent as panic time. And I also try to keep

(41:41):
like reserves in the bank. Like when I left, I
knew I could operate for six months with no income,
and that was that was a kind of a watermark
for me where I was like, Okay, I need to
I need to be able to operate for six months
without making a single dollar, and I would like to
never be below three months of operating funds in the
in the company bank account. And when I dip below

(42:01):
three months, that's when I panic, not when I'm like
at risk of missing payroll. In payroll in this case
is just me, like I don't have employees, but like,
you know, the understanding sort of what the incoming and
outgoing is and understanding how long it takes me to
sell something, what the average sale price is, and like
what of that is profit versus revenue is really really helpful.

(42:22):
And then I have an accountant who helps me understand
what the taxes are on all that stuff, because not
all of your revenue is the same in a small business,
like some of it is is a paycheck, which is
taxed differently than the stuff you take as a distribution,
which is taxed differently than the stuff you use to
buy equipment, and so on and so forth. So I
don't know how all of that works, and I rely

(42:42):
on my accountant for that. So I just have a
line item in my budget for how much I spend
on my account.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
You said you don't have employees, so I guess you
just contract out the budiographers and whatnot in production.

Speaker 5 (42:54):
Basically everybody in the film industry is on contract at
all times, because like, why would they want to work
for me full time when like next week they could
get like an Amazon gig, right, you know, and they go, like,
I work with people who like the makeup artists I
work with worked on Twilight, and like the wardrobe person
I worked with just worked on that show on Amazon
called Criminal, and like, you know, some of the people

(43:15):
I've worked with have worked on movies with like Nicholas
Cage and Morgan Freeman and stuff, and their their credits
are incredible. But those jobs are short. You know, you
work on it for two three months and then you're done,
and in between you need other gigs. But like, you
don't want to be on my little show when you
could be working on the next Nicholas Cage movie. But
you know, it's nice to have my show when you
don't have that Nicholas Cage movie.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
Yeah, Well, would I work on that show and I
can get on the or what is it the American
Treasure or National Treasure five.

Speaker 5 (43:42):
Or whatever exactly? I would? I would cancel my show
if I could be on National Treasure five. Come on,
that's that's awesome.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
I've been I've been talking about trying to find all
the camera stuff to do a board game theme Showy Nicholas,
you kind of know how that would be, like a.

Speaker 3 (44:04):
What's his name? There?

Speaker 2 (44:06):
Was a like a like almost a Big Brother style
show that was on YouTube for like two years and
it just went away, like he never came back. Will
wheatns Tabletop? Oh yeah yeah, and it was well done.
But I asked a friend who does videography. He was like, dude,

(44:28):
that's like he watched a few episodes. He's like, no,
that's you're gonna need like a crew for that, Like
they had a crew behind the scenes. I don't know
anything about cameras, so that's something I want to look into.
But it sounds like I gotta find Nicholas Cage and
see who he knows too.

Speaker 5 (44:45):
With that. Yeah, I mean. The cool thing is is
that the film industry is actually really like it is
extremely well networked and everybody's super cool and like, unfortunately,
everybody is also having a hard time finding work right now,
so they're pretty stoke to work on stuff. And if
you've got an idea, like you gotta have fun. This

(45:05):
is why I like working with companies is because typically
you can, like, for me, if I was going to
make the show you're talking about, I'd be like, all right,
how do we how do we like put this in?
With some with some like coding companies and figure out
how to make them like they want to talk about
board games, and so i'd be you know, I'd I'd
try to find some way to do it, but get
somebody to sponsor it for twenty grand an episode or something,
which allows you to then spend a decent amount of

(45:27):
money on hiring like crew and sound, so that you've
got good cameras, good lighting, good sound, and you know,
it's it. I don't know, it's it's expensive, it's stressful.
You have to learn a bunch of different jobs, like
I'm a producer and an ad and a director and
like a million other things. But it's also like I
can't really imagine doing anything else right now, like I'm

(45:48):
having the time of my life.

Speaker 6 (45:51):
One thing I'm now wondering with the way you're talking
about it because like in your more recent shows, you're
not really anymore on camera, or not a whole lot
at least.

Speaker 5 (45:59):
Will leave specifically, I'm I'm less on camera.

Speaker 3 (46:02):
Yeah, with me, I don't think you were even at all.

Speaker 5 (46:05):
In there right first episode, I wasn't on it. Second
episode I was. I was just in for a second,
and then the third and beyond. I'm I'm a little
more involved, Like it's we were trying to set up
Marcus the host, and I'm kind of like the the
Andy Rickard to Andy Richard to Conan O'Brien kind of thing,
right right, Yeah.

Speaker 6 (46:24):
But like also in the for for depths one app
you're also most of the time you're more like keeping
it flowing in a way. You're not like you're kind
of the face, but you're not the like the important
part of that makes sense. So are you concerned because
like with Learn with Jason, for instance, it was like
very clearly your brand and you're as like the central

(46:47):
figure of that. And now with co TV, like you're
go trying it looks like you're taking steps away from
that and it's not as much associated to you anymore
as a person.

Speaker 5 (46:56):
Well I want yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 6 (46:58):
Sorry, I'm just wondering if you're concerned that, like that
asset that you have with like your name in a
way and like you're known in the community, if you're
like losing.

Speaker 5 (47:09):
That in a way with that approach, Oh, one hundred percent.
Like I'm feeling the I'm feeling the pain of a
rebrand right now, where where the stuff that I'm making
isn't getting the same, uh, the same visibility that it
did before. But I think it's necessary to go through
this pain. And you know, I've I've I've done this before,
like I went from nobody watching my stuff to figuring

(47:29):
out how to get people to watch my stuff, and
I will do it again because to me, it's really
important that code TV isn't just like what Jason thinks
about software. I want code TV to be an actual
network of creative and funny people in the tech community
making content for developers, and in my mind, for that

(47:50):
to succeed, it has to be centered around us, not
centered around me and in the the world that I
see in the future, what I would like like is
for if you know, it's built off viewer support, and
I'm following the model of like Nebula or drop out
TV if you've heard of either of those, where you know,

(48:11):
people can subscribe and kind of a Patreon model to
get exclusive behind the scenes stuff for extras or early
access to new episodes, et cetera. And what I want
to happen is I want that to become like we
have enough viewer support that I can afford to find
somebody who's really creative and like help them develop a
series on their own, and then we'll go film four

(48:33):
to six episodes of it as a pilot and release
it through Code TV and it's and then it's like
a cool thing that's you know, for for supporters because
they directly funded it. And it's a chance for somebody
who doesn't maybe have a big audience to go make
something that has the production value that they can imagine,
but they don't have to learn how to do it
because I'm there to be the producer and the director,

(48:55):
and I've got the industry contacts to like bring in
a great director of photography, in great gaffers and sound
people and like make sure that this looks as polished
and professional as we can make it. But I like
I want to the way I think about it, like
the long term vision I have is if you know,
like it's a Ray or Jon Favreau, or there's a

(49:20):
bunch of people like this in Hollywood who like they're
on camera a lot, right you see it's Ray or
John Favreau all the time. And also they're making a
ton of stuff that they're not in where they direct
or produce or or whatever. And it's because they just
that you can tell they just love it, right, and
it's it's super cool to see what they're involved in

(49:41):
and what they make possible. So in the way that
I imagine that goes, and I don't know anything about
either of those people personally, but the way I imagine
it's going is that they're just having fun and they
just want to make cool stuff and not everything needs
to like put them in front of the camera to
still be a ton of fun to make. And that's
that's kind of how I feel about it. And and

(50:03):
for a Code TV to grow the way that I
wanted to grow, I think it needs to be a
community asset, not a not adjacent asset.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
Yeah, so I think go ahead, go for it.

Speaker 4 (50:14):
I'm just I'm just gonna I'm just gonna say I'm
not talking too much today, but I'm just sitting here
like fascinating.

Speaker 3 (50:19):
About the about your story.

Speaker 4 (50:22):
I could just sit here and listen to you for hours.

Speaker 5 (50:26):
Thank you. Yeah, So, and we'll talk about grow code TV.
I was just.

Speaker 4 (50:36):
I was just wondering, is so you have lead heat, right,
and we have the challenge in real life are kind
of like part of like the in real life products
that you have right now, but they are mainly in
the US right now. You have any plan or long term,
strong term, you don't have to talk about it right
now to expand that outside of the US.

Speaker 5 (51:00):
So the biggest barriers are almost always travel, right And
the thing that like, it's not necessarily more expensive to
get somebody from like London or Amsterdam to the United States,
because that flight from Atlanta is about the same as
the flight from London in terms of like airfare. However,

(51:22):
when somebody comes in from London, I want to bring
him in for extra days because I don't want them
to be jet lagged on the show. So it also
adds like three extra hotel nights and the predems. And
if I'm keeping somebody away from their home for like
five days, I might want to let them bring their partner,
you know, or like pay for childcare if they're going
to be away from their kids. So, you know, I
want to make sure if somebody is involved in something

(51:43):
that they feel good about it right, that they're not
like massively inconveniencing themselves to be part of this show.
And so I feel like forty eight hours is one
of those justifiable like I can you know, I can
talk to my wife and be like, Hey, I'm gonna
go to this thing. It's two days, I'll be back soon,
and we can like high five and be cool. If
I'm gonna be gone for a week, She's like, Na,
we need to talk about this for real. Like, so
I want to make sure that that I'm not putting

(52:04):
people in that uncomfortable position. Correct. It's also a little
complicated right now with politics in the United States. So
the way I would want to do it is I
would want to travel to Europe or to you know,
like I really want to do some stuff in in Asia,
because like the Japanese community is so cool and active,
and like there's also just places I want to go,

(52:25):
Like I've never been to Korea before. I think that
would be incredible to go, like dig into that scene
and see what's going on in tech there. But my thought,
my thought is, at least right now, until things feel
a little less dangerous for people to travel to the
United States, let's go out into the world and try
to film in other locations and kind of highlight those communities.

Speaker 4 (52:45):
Yeah, that's not and and I would guess like one
of the challenges I guess personally is to produce the
same level of quality when you out there.

Speaker 5 (52:59):
So they're talented like crew. The hard part is is
that I've spent a ton of time and money building
this like custom studio in Portland, and so the part
that's hard is, you know, like I've worked with BenQ
to get these really good coding monitors, and I've got
Uplift Desk providing these great sit to stand desks, and
we've got ergonomic chairs, and I've got sound control and

(53:21):
great lighting, and if we go on the road, we
don't have that. So it's kind of like, Okay, what's
the office rental company got, And it's usually like a
little twenty seven inch kind of crappy monitor that we
can get, and they've got like cheap chairs that we
can rent and they're not very comfortable, so people's backshurt
after sitting for a few hours, and you know, it's
just stuff like that that it's it's difficult to work

(53:41):
out how to build a space. And that's whenever we
go on location anywhere. So I think the thing that
I'd be trying to do is almost certainly I'd want
to work with a startup, Like if there's a or
a tech company, like somebody who's got an office in
like Amsterdam, or or somebody who's got an office in
Berlin that was willing to let us take it over,

(54:02):
like even on a weekend potentially and shoot there so
that they've got all the ergonomic stuff set up, They've
got like a cool space because they design their floor
to be cool, And that's probably the way that I'd
have to do it. But yeah, ultimately it is it
just becomes more logistically challenging. Like when you're on your
home turf, you kind of know how things work. You've
got your network that you work with all the time.
Whenever you leave that network, you're basically building a new one.

(54:26):
And so like if I go to London, I've got
a pretty good network there. I already have some folks
that I've worked with. I've had a great time. If
I go to Berlin, I don't know anybody. If I
go to Amsterdam, I know like one person. So it's
one of those challenging things where once we start, it'll
be easy to keep going, but starting is really hard.

Speaker 6 (54:44):
Yeah, so I think we're slowly we should wrap us up.
But to make this a little bit also at tensible
before you our users, because they're probably not going to
fund the next start, the next co TV, even though I.

Speaker 5 (54:58):
Wish, I hope you do.

Speaker 6 (55:01):
With your you as a twenty seven year old software
developer experience, what would you recommend someone who's like, Okay,
I feel stuck in my position right now, and probably
AI is going to take over my job anyway, So
what should I do? What should would you recommend folks
feeling like they're stuck in a hamster wheel right now?

Speaker 5 (55:24):
I think that one of the things that has never
failed to serve me and the people that that I've
seen embody it is trying to just like, joyfully pursue
interesting things. I've really never seen anybody who is trying

(55:46):
things and having a blast not succeed because I and
like for several reasons. You know, if you are having
a good time, you're more likely to keep doing the
thing that you're having fun doing, so you're to get
more practice, you're going to be more you know, more
consistent with your your reps, and you're also like more

(56:07):
likely to share it if you had a good time,
If you're laughing, you want to show people the thing
that made you laugh. You're you're going to be able to,
you know, tweet that project and say, like, look at
this funny thing I built, And even if it's just
for you and your friends, it's still like a fun
thing that you shared. And the other thing that I've
noticed is that people who have a good time are
just magnetic. Like there there are these people that you
see in the community, and they are always smiling, laughing,

(56:30):
cracking good jokes, trying something that they're interested in. They're
just they're just so engaged, right And even if it's
not like I'm not talking about somebody who's like, you know,
forced positivity, like everything reads like a like a motivational
LinkedIn post, But I mean people who are just their
default state, even if they have tough moments and like
share hard things on their their social timeline, their default

(56:52):
state is to be hopeful and playful. Those types of
folks just attract so many people who want to be
in their orbit, and it opens up job offers, it
opens up collaboration opportunities, it opens up the you know,
you can get invited to podcasts or to be a
guest blogger, or to speak at a conference or whatever

(57:14):
it is that you're interested in. Doing by being somebody
that people just feel like magnetically drawn to because you're
you're clearly enjoying yourself. And I think that a lot
of times people will will look at that sort of
joy or enjoyment of things as like a thing that
some people just have and you know, I don't have

(57:36):
that like And my argument would be, we we choose.
We don't get to choose our circumstances, but we get
to choose what we do in response to our circumstances.
And given the opportunity, if we can choose the thing
that makes our day a little bit better instead of
a little bit worse, it builds momentum that leads to

(57:58):
that kind of joyful existence. And I think that putting
the time in to build that momentum so that you
really enjoy and are looking forward to the things you
do every day, it will one hundred percent lead to
more friends, more opportunities, more success, and just I think
more of a life that you'll be on your deathbed
looking back on going. Man, that was a good one,

(58:19):
What a good time.

Speaker 6 (58:21):
I honestly don't think this anyway we can top this
from here on. This was a perfect way to end
this whole podcast. Like we started with twenty seven year olds,
we ended at death Perfect the full circle of life,
truly twenty seven years old. Yeah, Jason, thank you so

(58:42):
much for joining us. I always have a great time
talking to you, so I really appreciate taking you taking
the time for joining us and just talk about random stuff.

Speaker 5 (58:49):
Of course, thank you so much for inviting me. I know,
I apologize to all the Angular fans out there that
I brought absolutely zero insight for today.

Speaker 3 (58:59):
It was that's fine.

Speaker 6 (59:02):
They're used by all right guys.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
It was nice, nice doing it, and we'll see you.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
Guys next time.

Speaker 5 (59:11):
Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 7 (59:14):
Hey, this is Prestol. I'm one of the n G
Champions writers. In our daily battle to crush out code,
we run into problems and sometimes those problems aren't easily solved.
Ng COMF broadcasts articles and tutorials from ngie champions like
myself that help make other developers lives just a little
bit easier. To access these articles, visit Medium, dot com,
Forward Slash, n GCOMMP.

Speaker 1 (59:36):
Thank you for listening to the Angular Plus show in
Chiecoff podcast. We would like to thank our sponsors, the
NGCOMF organizers, joe Eames and Aaron Frost, our producer Gene Bourne,
and our podcast editor and engineer Patrick Ky's. You can
find him at spoonful ofmedia dot com.

Speaker 5 (01:00:00):
I didn't think of

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S9 E1 | Let's Make Stupid S**T | Jason Lengstorf

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}S9 E1 | Let's Make Stupid S**T | Jason Lengstorf