Cloud Development Habits- How to Stay Ahead in Tech

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noor podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Developers. This season is actually Building Better Habits, and we are here to help you become a better developer on Developer Noor. I happen to be one of the founders. My name is Rob Broadhead, also a founder of RB Consulting, where it's called Boutique Consulting basically. I guess it's because it's small and it's pretty with little flowers in the window. I'm not really sure why they got to that. Actually I am, but that's a different story. We like to help you with your technology, figure out how to get your hands around it and actually do something with it instead of let it just sit on a shelf or have some guys on the other side of the world that are telling you how to use your software and they have no idea what your business is. We help you through simplification, automation and integration to take all that stuff, get it together, turn it into a nice little productive piece of stuff and make the most on your investments. Habits. Out of the habits that we've done, that we've talked about and we've gone through quite a few of them. I've talked about the Pomodoro one too much. The list one is one that's actually, like I said before, is a little bit challenging to me because I like a bigger list, like this big kind of thing. It's outside of the screen. You can't see it. It actually wrapped around the world. You can have like, I like the big list, but I think sort of a modifier to that if you're like me and you really struggle to do like three items on your list, something like that, is build your list, but then put one at the top or two at the top because that to me has really helped. It's been more about having those two priority items, which for me it's usually because I want something, something I need to get done in the morning, something I need to get done in the afternoon. That really helps me from a list perspective and as I've started into that, that's starting to become a habit that has been involved in something I think very useful for me. Another one that has continued that brings me joy actually is the learning new stuff. We talked about just like find a site, find something and just like improve your skills a little bit every day, even if it's in something that you already know. So it's literally just spending some time effectively coding for fun, 10 to 15 minutes every day like, hey, I want to learn more about this or I want to see how this language does that. You know, whatever it is, it's literally honing your technology skills. It's been very valuable to me. So I highly recommend taking a look at those episodes of nothing else and adding those to your challenges and to your habits. Good thing, bad thing. This is another one that's sort of like a, it's literally like two sides of the coin. So we went to see a movie the other night, which is a good thing because we went to see Red One and it turns out it's actually a good movie even though my kid had told me a couple days before it sucked and it was horrible and nobody likes it. We liked it. So if you don't, we don't care. We had a good time with it. The sort of bad thing was that we went there and we were like, this is, we said, we're just going to pay cash at the theater, which like nobody does that anymore apparently. So we show up 10 minutes before our movie and it was sold out. I didn't know movies even got sold out post COVID. I thought like every time I've been to a movie in the last three years, there's been like three people in the theater. It's been empty. Not this time. Totally sold out. So as a bonus thing, now we were able to buy tickets for the one later. So as a follow up on that bad thing was that the heat was out in the theater when we watched it and it actually got pretty dang cold. I was like, I was like to point, I never get cold. And I was actually a point where like I was cranking on the heat when I drove home. The good thing out of all of that was the movie itself. And because we had to wait till later, we shifted our, our shopping and eating schedule and actually had a really good meal, got all of our shopping done. So by the time we're done with the movie, we're ready to go home and go to sleep. That being said, it's time to switch it over to Michael and see what, you know, let him go through all of his good and bad stuff and how are these challenges helping you out? You know, the AC or the heat being out at the theater, that was a feature. It could be true for a winter movie. It made that's at 4DX or whatever it is. 4D. I never see, I, I didn't even have to pay extra for that. Wow. Sorry, everyone. My name is Michael Mulash. I'm one of the co-founders of developer. I'm also the founder of envision QA, where if you're struggling with your software, your small to midsize business, you don't know if your software is really helping you be productive or if you have a piece of software that you have built or are exposing to your, or selling to customers. If you are having problems with that, we can help you through software assessments. We can do deep dives into your processes, identify pain points that your customers might be having, and we can offer you solutions to those problems. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing this week, weather's getting colder. I'm loving it, but fall is finally done. We're in winter time. So my allergies are finally getting over the, I'm, I'm loving it. Bad thing is got so cold this week that I had to worry about the pipes freezing. So I'm now having to re-insulate the attic. Uh, talking about our habits here. I know I skipped around just a little bit. So we've talked a lot about different things. One of the biggest things that I have been working on this week is trying to be a little more prepared for meetings. Uh, I've been jumping around a lot more between calls lately, and I've been a little bit behind, so I'm working on getting better at meeting preparation. The other thing I'm struggling with, and I'm really trying to focus on a lot is our discussion on criticism and code reviews and not taking things personally and making sure that when I put something out there and we want to make sure that we get the criticism, the critiques we need and, and you look at it and you accept that criticism, it's not that they're personally attacking you. You're really trying to get help to make sure that you build the best part. And the last thing I've been working on, especially since we're getting towards the end of the year is that personal branding and kind of resume building. So I've been working in the business a little bit more, working on some more marketing materials to prepare for a media blast at the first quarter of next year. So that can hopefully draw in more customers and hopefully kickstart the next season. Well, as a bonus, if you guys ever watch the, if you are watching the, uh, the YouTube version, or if you don't, you can go check it out and you will see how well we're doing on the whole, like being prepared before a meeting sometime. That's a little kind of thing, but that's beside the point because this time we're going to talk cloud. This has been an, this has been an area that has been a favorite of mine since 2007 or eight or something like that. When Amazon AWS first like came onto the scene and they had like three services had the EC2, they had S3 and they had the EFS. They had the file system. They may have had a couple others, but that's all anybody ever talked about. Now, if you look, they've got like, it's like, I'm not even exaggerating. They've got like 4 billion services. Okay. I'm just exaggerating a little, but it's literally the point. If you guys go back and this is where you can, if you haven't go back and listen to the season where we did every episode was on one of the Amazon services. We had a blog series where we had Amazon services. And by the time we were done, there was a whole new, like everything that we, and we just went through families of services. We didn't even talk about the specifics. We touched on them, but we talked about all the families by the time we were done, you know, three months later, there was, I think there were new families and there was probably 50 new services and they're not alone. Azure Microsoft's world does the same thing. They have stuff all the time. They're kicking out. Google's GCP, same stuff, tons of stuff out there. So the habit is how do I know this stuff? How do I get comfortable with this stuff? Now, if you work in a day to day, particularly if you're like DevOps or something like that, you probably spend a lot of time in these. If you're a developer, you probably don't, I mean, maybe you spend time in them, but not as much understanding it as much as you're a consumer or a user, as opposed to, you know, a knowledge worker or an admin. And so the best way to build this habit is to get off your butt and go play around with it. Now we've talked before. Every one of these have some level of a free tier. Now some are better than others and some are more expansive than others. But with every one of them as a developer, I think it's highly valuable, even if it's not a free tier, even if you're spending, spending 15, 20, 30 bucks a month, something like that. It is worth it to go out there and have a server of some sort that is a virtual machine, a virtual server, virtual environment that you can work with, that you actually like connect to, put something on there, like have a database, put some data out there, take that crap that's on your local machine and put it out in the cloud just to put it out in the cloud. It is, especially if you want to, like me, I've got an EC2 server out there and I use cloud nine, so I actually can do development matter where I am. I don't really need it because I have a laptop I can carry everywhere, but there is a lot of times where I'm like, you know what, I'd rather just like log into my machine, fire up AWS and I'm off and running. No, I'm not going to use a phone because that's like too, like, I have man fingers, I don't have like little like pixie fingers or something like that. Um, and even using like an iPad or something like that, which actually, that is the best way to start using that stuff. Cause what you'll find out is how frustrating all of the things are that we take for granted on a desktop are when you go to a tablet, because all of those clicks and double clicks and all those little things you can do with your mouse, they don't exist or not the same way. They're not the same functionality when you get on a little tablet or a phone. And the next thing you know, you're like, why the heck doesn't this work? It's like, Oh, because it doesn't read it and do the same things as it does. Even in the same browser on a desktop, slight venting session slash done. The thing you want to do is get a, get an understanding of like what these cloud services provide. Ideally pick one that you don't know. Ideally, if you're, you know, if you spend all your time, like maybe I have worked a lot of time in AWS, then go play around with like Google's or go play around with Microsoft or just go find one of these providers, most of them live on top of one of these major people, but pick one of these and like the, uh, the drops, the droplets and some of those kinds of stuff that are out there. Digital ocean. I'm trying to think, forgot the name. Some of those kinds of places go spend something up and just get sort of comfortable with how those things work. Better yet get comfortable with the command line interface for those, because then you can start getting an idea for things like infrastructure as code and some of those things that are the kinds of things that the, yes, DevOps people know them and that's why they get paid and that's where they get brought in. But if you, as a developer know it, it will help you quite a bit when you get in front of your customers and you're helping them build out an environment or you're building out a suite of applications or something along those lines that you can build your own servers. You can administer them. You can get in there and you can fix stuff if they're broken. And it doesn't take a lot. It just take it, but actually it probably takes more to keep you to not spend too much time on it. But again, it's one of those things, type box it a little bit and. Play around with these tools. If nothing else, go to their sites, look at the services offered, and then just periodically go, wow, the heck is satellite tracking doing on Amazon site and then go figure out what that thing is. What are your thoughts on this one, Mike? So I know I was throwing up devices like phones and iPads. The interesting thing is through the history of applications and software development before cloud, we had started getting like the iPhone, smartphones, we had our laptops. But yet we didn't have a really great way to log in the companies other than maybe through a VPN, through Citrix, and like VMware nowadays with cloud. There's so much you can do with these cloud applications like AWS, Azure, you know, Google, and it's funny because as we were talking about this, I was thinking back to almost 12 years, 13 years ago where I was literally, I insulted SSH client on my phone just so I could log into work to fix a problem with a server on the company machine. So even if you don't think you need to know anything about cloud, which in today's world, you absolutely do, but there's so much you can do if you have an idea, play around with it with cloud. You know, I just, you know, I love iPads. I love tablets. And one of the biggest problems I've had over the years was you can't really write software on a tablet. Now, as Rob mentioned though, we now have online software as a service through these cloud environments like cloud nine, where I can write code anywhere. You can stand up your own instances in these cloud environments to go develop from any place on the planet. Now, with that being said, it can get costly, but as Rob mentioned, most of these services have free tiers. Now, if you're struggling with the free tier idea, stand up your own personal cloud, you know, you can set up your own machine, open it up to the cloud, play around with it. You got Kubernetes, you got Docker, you know, there are container based ideas or container based applications you can use to set up your own virtual cloud. So clouds are wonderful. It is also a great way to get your application out there quickly and have different people hit it from many different locations. So if you have an idea and you want to play around with it and maybe like poke the bear, like, Hey, I have this idea. I want to see if it can hit the masses. If it's popular, throw up like an AWS EC2 tier. Now there are caveats to these free tiers and that where they track your credit cards and emails and things like that. But there are ways around that sort of the gray area. I'm not endorsing it, but you can potentially have multiple free tiers for different things. Just read the fine print and then try and play around with it. Amazon is a great place to do that. Amazon is wonderful for their EC2. It gives you a lot. You can do so much development. You can spin up a database. You can spin up JIRA. Rob mentioned in the last episode, you know, where we could download the, uh, like a $10 version of the unlimited license for JIRA versus paying the $10 a month for the licensed version. Well, you could actually download a licensed version of JIRA, install it in an AWS instance, and then voila, you now have a cloud-based instance of JIRA. Granted, you still have to maintain it yourself. It's still cheaper to do it time-wise for Atlassian, but anyway, I digress. Um, cloud-based ideas. The other thing I want to mention with this is certifications. So I'm not really a fan of certifications just because I have test anxiety, it's on me, certifications are wonderful for developers. Now with the cloud-based applications, there are so many certifications out there, especially on the low tier that you could easily go get a couple certifications in a couple of different applications, a couple of different cloud-based services with little or no effort. Um, I just recently got, uh, the AWS, uh, I think the low tier, uh, foundational certification that last year, I panicked, I thought, oh my God, this is so hard. I spent 60 hours on it. And then I walked in and I'm like, this test is freaking easy. Even if you have test anxiety, look at things like certifications, especially when it comes to cloud. The other thing is look at what's online. There's so many playgrounds out there. If you're a JavaScript person, there's like a JavaScript or was it JS fiddle that is actually a cloud-based tool that allows you to write real time CSS HTML and JavaScript and see it work right there. That's just one idea of how cloud is useful. Another idea, if you like IDEs, I mentioned cloud nine, Rob mentioned cloud nine. You also have Eclipse chai. Uh, if you're are chi bad with pronunciation sometimes, but it is another cloud-based IDE service that allows you to write, uh, your favorite, uh, coding language in an Eclipse like IDE, but in the cloud. So you can actually spin up services behind the scenes, deploy your code, test it, um, and have fun with it. So. Cloud-based services isn't just about deploying applications or playing around with software. It is the, it's playground. You can go have fun doing many different things online and play around with it. And you can spin it up, take it down, throw it away, spin it up another instance. So play around with this. It is a playground for a reason. So have fun with cloud and just, you know, if you're worried about costs, just, you know, maybe go buy a gift card and, or a visa card, prepaid visa card, and just make sure it has no money on it when they go to charge it. Wow. That was just too upbeat. I think that was just too much. I need to find a way to bring us down, but I'm not going to do that. So the challenge for this week is again, you may think it's a little bit self-serving, but it's not entirely. You need to is go sign up for one of these things, go sign up for one of these cloud providers, go get a little account. Yeah. It may cost you a couple of bucks or something like that. Make sure that you, you know, you can maybe get a limited card, put it on an account that's like, you know, got a very limit to it. You can put spending limits on a lot of them and things like that. So it'll just shut down once you're done with it. Uh, if you ever deal in the Google world of like any of their APIs, I highly recommend that because you can crank up some costs really quick if you don't watch out Amazon, the same thing. They will, if you use their wizards to create stuff, you can create a really nice environment, but it's also going to be a very expensive environment. And then you're going to be like, Oh, I messed up. So keep it, keep it sort of cheap. Check out, this is where the self-serving thing is, is check out launching an internet business. If you go to developer.com and just search for L Y I B for launch your internet business, we've got a, it's a 21 day. I believe it's a 21 day thing. We send you something once a day. You also can find like, if you just want to binge it, you can run through the first seven days, you can find it out there. You can find it out on our YouTube. The thing about it is it's going to take you probably seven days because it takes a little bit for like to register and for them to validate it for you to get back. If you'd have built a server, if the server to be ready and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but it will get you by the end of the week that you'll have a little server and you can go put around on it. You can go like take and continue on the course and you can, we teach it. We walk through it, put WordPress on it, put a database on it. Teach you a little bit of a little bit of Linux, Unix type coding, or really just like navigating the Unix world. It's really simple. It's, it's less than 15 minutes a day. It's a great way for you to get comfortable with the cloud. If you haven't done it, if you're comfortable with Amazon, which is what it's focused on, the go essentially do the same thing is take seven days and decide that you're going to go spin up a server, a low end server, for example, or create a database in Azure or Google or whatever it is and just say, okay, I'm going to take seven days. I'm going to do 10 to 15 minutes a day. I'm going to see how far I can get. You're going to get far enough that you'll have something to play around with. You'll have some more knowledge. If you, while you're doing that, if you're poking around some of the other services, at least you'll have an idea of what the offerings are and just a rough idea of it. You're not going to master them. It's going to take a lifetime of 15 minute days. I'm sure there's just a lot of stuff out there. As Michael's mentioned though, if you want to really monetize it, go get a certification. Pick something, look at the certifications that are out there. Pick one that appeals to you and then go chase it down. It is, yes, it can be super simple. Also it can take quite a while because sometimes they are very nitpicky and you have to understand their environment, their tools, their lingo and everything else. But once you do, it's actually very valuable to have that. Those are good certifications. I've done that. I recommend that you do that because it's a great way to like, just make sure that you have useful knowledge in that area. That being said, I would like to have useful knowledge about what your feedback is. Shoot me an email, info at developerneur.com. You can always leave us comments wherever you hear this or see this, or I guess even smell this or whatever, if you get into the 4D world. Leave us comments, leave us feedback. You can check out all of our past content out there. Still leave content there. We've got any kind of feedback you give there. We still hear about it. We will reply back and let you know what our thoughts are and help you out if you have questions. That's why we're here. One of the many reasons we're here. Go out there now though. We're not done. We're coming back with more in this season. This season will continue all the way into next year. We've got some holiday episodes coming up the next few weeks, and then we're going to wrap up this and go to season 24 now. And I don't even know what that season is going to be. So stay tuned because it could be really interesting or it could be a crappy little season. We'll find out. You be the judge. Go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.