Pivot Now: Developer Strategies to Stay Relevan

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the DeveloperNord Podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hola, we are back. This is Building Better Developers, the DeveloperNord Podcast. And yes, we have added a little Spanish the last couple of times, just because. If you're offended by my use of Spanish because I speak it like a non-Spanish speaker, I apologize profusely. Shoot me an email at info-developer-nord.com and I would love to, especially if you're a Spanish speaker, just talk to you for a while, listen to it, and hopefully I will get better. But that's not what we're about. We're about better developers. This season, in this episode, this season we are working on building better developers with AI. What we're doing is taking two seasons back, taking all the topics, throwing it into ChatGPT and just letting it regurgitate some stuff. And then we discuss what it sends back. And it's done a really good job of giving us a great way to go back to some of these topics and touch on sometimes some topics and things that we didn't cover the first time around. May have covered them elsewhere, but I think we've even had more than a few times where there are things that it throws at us that we're like, this is important to cover it. I don't know when we ever have covered that. This episode might be just such a thing. So we're going to have that little hanging out there for you until we get done with our introductions. My introduction, I am Rob Broadhead. I am one of the founders of Developineur, Building Better Developers. Also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you use technology. We help you leverage technology, whether you're a small business, a startup, whether you have no idea where you're going and no idea about technology or whether you have been doing this for a long time and just need to figure out how to do what you do better. We will sit down with you, help you through a technology assessment and figure out which way do you need to go. Do you need to simplify? Do you need to integrate? Do you need to automate? Do you need to innovate? We'll help you think outside of the box or we'll help you build a better box, whatever needs to be done, because it's really about we sit down with you, understand your business, use our experience across a lot of industries and a lot of technologies and find the best way to craft a special recipe, a custom recipe for you, your business and your way forward. Some people will call it a roadmap and we can either help you execute on that roadmap or hand one over to you and say, here you go. We've talked through this. You know what you're doing. Drive away. If you have any more information, shoot me an email at rob at rb-sns.com or you can check us out at rb-sns.com. Good thing, bad thing. Wow. There is, like I said, this is the end of July, basically, and July has been a month. It has just been crazy. So good thing is that in moving around and doing a bunch of stuff, I stumbled across an internet provider that I, it's been around forever, didn't realize that they have a really cheap monthly plan that you can just connect to their devices pretty much everywhere. I know there's a couple of providers that do something like this, but this is something there's no contract, no nothing, no limits other than the number of devices that connect. And really awesome. They're not paying me, so I'm not going to use their name right now, but I may find ways later to do so. So that was really cool. I said, I was like, you know what, I need something, found it. I went onto there, like, you know, tried to connect to their little hotspot and they said, here's what you can do. Just pay us a small amount of money. And we're off and running. I'm like, cool, done. Take my money. And now I'm on the internet. So I've been on the internet in many ways, but now I'm more on the internet when I'm out in the middle of nowhere. Basically bad thing. I have been out in the middle of nowhere for way too much time in the last two weeks due to actually, I guess, let's go three weeks, basically almost due to helping a child move and hilarity ensues, as my wife says, we have been on the road, I think, 40 hours or more of drive time in the last three weeks. And that's including that's like driving from long distances. That's not including running around town in various towns and stuff like that. If you actually do our foot, like I have a car that I got the oil change at the beginning of the month and it is already 2000 miles past or actually it's a thousand miles past. It's recommended next oil change. So, ah, it's been a week, it's been a month and it feels like it's been a year, but only in the last three or four weeks. But now to make all of us happier, the good thing of all good things, Michael is going to introduce himself. Hey everyone. My name is Mike Moulash. I'm one of the co-founders of development, building better developers. I'm also the owner of InVision QA where we help startups and growing companies build better software faster and with fewer problems. Our services cover software development, quality assurance, test automation, and release support. Companies come to us when they have problems. They want to avoid delays, reduce bugs and launch with confidence. Whether you're building your first MVP or scaling a live product, we make sure that your software is reliable, efficient and ready for growth. You can learn more about us at InVisionQA.com. Good thing, bad thing. Well, bad thing right now is my windows are cracked. It's pouring, but it is so bloody hot outside and my car is over a hundred degrees inside. I am not going out and closing my windows. Good thing. I mentioned a while back that I managed to get my hands on a Switch 2 and I wasn't going to be allowed to get it until Christmas. My wife relented on that and gave it to me last week. So it's a quote unquote early birthday gift, which is great, but I still only have a lot of time to play because I'm super busy with work. The life of a gamer. I was talking to one of my developers the other day. We were talking, we're building out our, some of our social media presence and stuff like that. And one of the things that we're talking about, like, let's get yourself a good bio and include some stuff about you. And, you know, what was said is like, don't just say I'm a gamer, you know, give something more specific about that. And one of them is like, ha, I haven't been able to do games in a long time. I wish I could get back. It's like, this is a young guy. This is so it's not just us old folk that get just a little too busy. Now let's dive into, because we've gone, gone busy enough into other directions. Let's talk about this episode. So the original episode was titled pivoting how to embrace change, embrace change and fuel your professional growth. Now, chat GPT comes back and says, now it's like, it's wanting to like pet us on the back again. It says great title. It's perfect for developers, audience of developers, entrepreneurs, and lifelong learners. Here's a structured podcast episode plan with topic ideas and talking points. Episode focused this episode. And this is interesting because we just did one I'm on like the same conversation thread. It's giving me a very different layout this time around. So, I mean, it's, it's still like, you know, topics and bullet points, but it's a little bit different how they've set this up. So it's pretty interesting that it said, okay, we'll try something different. All right. Now opening a hook when everything changes, tell a brief story or example of a major pivot, for example, a startup shutting down, a developer switching stacks or AI disrupting a product. Pose the central question. What do you do when the path you were no longer, you were on no longer leads where you want to go? I'm going to go ahead and dive into the second one. That's the opening hook. Uh, and we may come back and tell them story of a example of a major pivot. Uh, what is the pivot and what's not. So define a pivot in the context of business strategy, changing product, customer segment, or model career shifts, for example, developer to project manager, agency to indie front end to all, uh, to AI. Yep. Front end to AI, uh, or personal growth, changing your mindset, work style or goals, clarify pivoting is not quitting. It's redefining direction based on feedback and clarity. I think we have not used the word pivot enough in some of our past discussions because I think a perfect example of a pivot that we have used as an example over and over again is actually in technology that you use itself. We have talked many times about, um, tangential technologies and skills and ancillary skills and things like that. So for example, let's say you are a Java developer. Well, while you're doing, let's say you're building Java web applications and in doing so you're going to learn, obviously you're going to know Java. You're probably going to learn a little bit about databases. You're going to learn a little bit about HTML and CSS and JavaScript and some things like that. Now those skills translate to, let's say you're, you're going to move to a C sharp. There are language constructs in Java that are almost the same in C sharp. If you're building C sharp web applications and you're going to see some of the same, you can use literally some of the same HTML, CSS, JavaScript. For example, I have, which I have not completed yet. I do have sitting out on the YouTube channel. I started doing a conversion of an old Java JSP application to a norm modern spring boot using a time leaf is the, is basically the front end piece for the templating and I'm going to use the same thing for the other applications. A lot of that stuff was like really simple, like just copy paste and then change a few variable names and then boom, it's, it's off and running. And we talked about where there's some, you know, some changes and things like that, but they really weren't that bad. Those are pivots. If you are in a, in a job on a project and for example, the technology starts to die. You're on something that now people aren't doing anymore. And it may be because it's now moving to a new version or it could be a completely different technology, then maybe it's time to pivot, you know, like the people did back in the Y2K world where they were like, I don't think cobalt is going to be around anymore, so I've got to find a way to go from cobalt to something else. And some people pivoted, some people retired. So pivoting is not that you're just quitting that thing. And particularly in the things that we're going to talk about is it's not necessarily that that just never comes up again. There is a lot of stuff that came out of it. There's skills that were learned. There's knowledge that came, there's experience that you had that does apply to the new place and that's what a pivot is. If you're in a business and then I'm going to toss it over to Michael, I'm going to do this one sort of a little lower is it could be that you pivot from a specific market focus to another one. So for example, you could be dealing with, let's say you're dealing with pet stores. Your primary customer is mom and pop pet stores and for pet supplies. And then you realize that basically the pet supplies are the same as, I don't know, let's say liquor stores or something like that, or toy stores. Or maybe you can think of, there's going to be things like that that are, they're similar enough. And so you can pivot, you can take what you learned in this one silo and then you can now apply it to a new one and hopefully give yourself a jumpstart in that. So taking that, I'm going to hopefully that's a good springboard and a jumpstart for you to talk about maybe your thoughts about pivots. Yeah. So I'm going to probably take this in a slightly different direction speaking, but you kind of set up the stage for this. So how do you embrace change and, you know, fuel your professional growth? The best thing I can, I guess to me, what really personally resonates is my career path, how I got to where I am today. And just to give you a quick little background, I actually, computers was a hobby for me back in the day. It was video games, computers. I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a surgeon so bad. I went as far as to be accepted pre-med to most of my colleges. And then I got into the actual medical classes and found out I could not handle the needles and some other things. Like personally, once I got to that point, it's like crap. I have made a bad choice in where I was going and I had to. Quick pause. Any of you that if you're, it depends on how old you are, go look for YouTube Quincy Q, U I N C Y, uh, TV show intro. And you're going to see probably exactly the kind of things that Michael was worried about, uh, as far as needles. And I say that as somebody that is also not a fan of needles. So go ahead. That was just, it was a music thought I had to throw out there. So that was kind of my school journey. That was kind of my career path when I got into college. And then it's like, well, crap, what am I going to do? You know, I'm three years into college thinking I'm going to be a doctor. And all of a sudden, whoops, I can't do this. Well, I like video games and I like computers. Well, back then video games was like the super Nintendo, the Genesis, and a couple other generations after that. But becoming a video game developer wasn't really a huge career opportunity. Back then there wasn't really schools you could go to. So I jumped into my hobby. I went into computers. I'm like, okay, well, I like playing around with computers. What can I do with this? And I got into this and there's many facets to computers. And like Rob mentioned, even within software, you can, uh, within Java, you can touch on webpage development. You can do Java development, JavaScript development, you know, databases. Interestingly enough, early on with software, the other areas that are now called DevOps, but you had networking, you had Oracle databases. So back then it was actually split into segments. You were either going to be an engineer. You were going to be a database developer. You were going to be a network analyst, or you were going to be a software developer. You really only had four flavors to choose from. And I will tell you right off the bat, I tried every single one of them. 100%. Well, I can do it. I love networking. I hate running cables. I hate switches. I can do it. I just not my cup of tea, but that is where pivoting to me comes in. It's as you learn these things, but you have to expand, you have to try everything to find out what it is that you love to do. If you stick to one thing and you think it's okay, you may not be giving yourself the benefit of the doubt of the right tool or the right tool. The benefit of the doubt of the right tool or the right language or career path that you're on. Try other things, keep yourself open and constantly learn. And the other thing I'll throw out in this case is well, books have become more digital, audio books are great. YouTube videos are fine, but pick a medium and just go listen to something new at least once a week and try to learn and figure out, Hey, it's just something I want to learn. Take something outside of your comfort zone and see if it's something that you want, it may bore you to death. That's fine, but stick with it and then pivot and try something new. If you find something that you like better, let us know because you know, we want to know these success stories. Moving along. And that's great. So I'm not even going to add to it. When and why you should pivot, discuss signs it's time for change, lack of growth or challenge, burnout or loss of passion, market signals, declining revenue, users and relevance, new opportunities in the line better with your values or skills, quote, sometimes the market doesn't reject you. It redirects you end of quote. I want to go with the market signals. There is a, my mentor and I talked, this is now years ago. And it was something we were, had a discussion about business cycles, basically about technology in general. And this is not going to be very helpful if you're watching, if you're on the podcast and not watching, but I'm going to do like a, like, think of a bell curve, sort of like, you know, you start low and it grows up and then you sort of flatten off. So not a bull bell, more of like a, with a platter or plateau, and then things start to fade away. That is typically what you're going to see with technologies is they're going to start off early on. There's the, you know, early adoption, stuff like that. They're going to grow. And this includes a lot of solutions and things like that. They're in modern business world. For example, right now, think of AI go back a few years ago. Well, now several years ago, think about search engines, think about. And then there's a cyclical thing to it. So you can think about like data centers versus now having, you know, cloud services and software as a service and things like that. This includes development languages and things like that is that they're going to start off, they're going to grow. They're going to have some sort of a plateau and they're probably going to fade away. Well, what you want to do is when you're at the sort of at the plateau of one is B that's like a good time to try to find maybe another one that's starting out. So you're, you know, you're plateauing, but now you're trying to find something new. So as the one comes down, the other's coming up, you can switch those suckers out and hopefully you get like a level playing field of, you know, I'm going to level this way for those of you visually. And you're going to come through. So instead of like the ups and downs, the roller coaster, what you have is you've got more of a smooth ride because you are essentially starting to get into the new one coming up before the other one has gone down the hill. If you think about a roller coaster, it'd be if you had like roller coasters running next to each other. And every time you started to get towards like the bottom, you know, got toward about the midpoint of a fall, you were able to jump on one that was climbing up to the other one. And then you were able to jump on another one's coming down and you're just, you're just now leveling that thing out. So. I think it's very important to look at the market signals and the things they talk about here is great. It's things like revenue, your users, and even the relevance as far as like, what are you seeing in the, you know, in the industry news or the tech rags or on the, you know, the five o'clock news, you know, things like that. It's like, what is, what's hot, what's not look at that market sector, maybe as far as like you can go look at how those stock stocks are doing in the market sector and look at all kinds of different places you can look at, but figure out, are we on something that's still essentially growing or is it flat or is it starting to decline? And if you're not growing as fast as you used to, and you know, it's getting close to that flat point, then maybe it's time to go find something else and start that pivot because the best way to pivot is when you haven't like, you're not burning the light boats where you're pivoting while you're still cruising along on something that you've already done. It's like the old adage, I guess it's the old adage will say it is that it is easier to find a job when you have a job than it is when you don't have a job. So those are my thoughts on it. Where do you want to go with this? How do you want to pivot into this topic? So I'm going to take the burning because I deal with this one more often than I should, but that's just because of life. Typically, like Rob was talking about there with like the belter, the roller coaster idea, we as developers, as people, we have a certain amount of bandwidth that we can actually get things done, that we can actually stay focused on things and stay positive about. If you feel that your mood or your momentum is going down or you are, it's taking you longer to complete a task. You really need to be conscious of where you're at. You need to do a self check because burnout is more than just detrimental to your workflow, it can actually be detrimental to your health and to your mental state and it can burn a lot of bridges. So as you work through these things, understand that it is okay that, Hey, I've been stuck in this problem for 15 minutes, pivot, go for a walk, go do something else, change your mindset for five minutes, 10 minutes, do the Pomodoro technique and just change a little bit. You don't want to pivot, pivot, pivot, because then you're going to get into that firefighting mode and then you're in a different mindset and a different type of burning. So the recommendation here is use things like the Pomodoro technique, create scheduled tasks for yourself to do self checks, especially if you are on a difficult project or you find yourself that your mental state, you're either in a bad mood or you just something's off. Like you're not being as productive as you normally are. Oh, I don't know why this came to mind as an example from the other night is that we were dancing and my partner was, I had turned them to the left like three or four times in a row, cause that was part of what we were walking through at the time. And she gets done and she just, instead of, you know, we turned to left, turn to left, turn to left, turn left. And she just surrounded the blue, decided to turn to the right. And I looked at her with a little, little quizzical thing and she's like, I just needed to unwind. Like literally it's like, you know, you get, and that's exactly the pivot is sometimes you get stuck in this. And like, think about it. If you turn, if you sit there and you just turn to left, turn to left, turn to left, you're going to get dizzy and stuff like that. And if, as soon as you turn to the right, suddenly you can go to the right, to the right, to the left, to left. Even one of those little dance things. So I think this is a very good general, like pulse kind of thing. A little like checking on the pulse of, is it feeling redundant? Is it feeling like it's not what it needs to be? This could be like Michael said, it could be that it's more exhausting. It takes more time. Maybe it's just not as fun. I mean, there's a lot of different things that you can run into that are indicators that are check engine lights that say, maybe it's time to think about a pivot. I will give you an example that you can go back and look over time. Uh, hopefully we've hidden it, but it's still there is look at the developer nor site and look like if you go look way back and I don't know how you, I think you can go look at like our blogs. You can sort them based on, uh, date and even go back to the earliest. Posts. And then if you start just walking to just looking at titles, you'll see that we have done some pivots along the way. If you go through all of the podcasts episodes haven't helped you, there's a lot of podcasts episodes, but if you do that, you will see that there have been pivots along the way. If you can go look out at, I don't know what we've got for like RB consulting, you'd have to go to the internet time machine, but you can go see some very strong pivots there. We talk about the pivots from a business sense that we've done on a regular basis. We, we pivoted and suddenly, boom, Michael up here. That's like, that's a pivot suddenly going from always one person that you, you know, that's all you ever hear. And suddenly there's two people on the podcast. That's a pivot. We've talked to, we talked to so many people in the interview season that they did a pivot like this, where they, usually the pivot is like a down payment, where they niche down on something. They find a problem and they say, this is what I'm really going to focus on. And suddenly things explode in the success area for them. So with that, I think we're going to keep this one a little bit shorter because we go long way too often on these, uh, these things have actually been really good. And you may realize that both of us get a little bit excited about some of these topics where like, wow, there's like, there's an entire seasons we could do on some of these suggestions, uh, that we, and we've mentioned that before and who knows, we may do entire seasons on these in the future, as always, I'm going to ask you for an email, shoot me an email info at developer nor.com. Let us know what you think. What do you like? What don't you like? Recommendations, all that kind of stuff. Even if the recommendations are like, part your hair differently or, you know, get a haircut kid or shave or whatever, you know, we don't care. We just feedback is what we crave because it helps us become better podcasters. It helps the site become a better site. That being said, we're just going to wrap this one. I'm not going to give you all the other places you can go to development.com and all that kind of stuff. I'm not going to give you that this time, either listen to the next episode or the prior episode, because we're going to keep it a little simpler for you. Go out there. And I mean this sincerely. I appreciate you guys. Appreciate the time you've given us. So 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 developer 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.