Building Better Foundations as a Long-Term Discipline

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are wrapping up season 26, Building Better Foundations. We are the Building Better Developers podcast, the Developer podcast. I am Rob Broadhead, one of the founders of Develop and we're also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you leverage technology to do business better, to help your problems just go away. Get that kitchen sink app of technology and get it cleaned up so it's nice and sparkly for you and your year ahead as it may be. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing is I am sitting in Portugal. I am now officially a digital nomad after a long and torturous journey that you could see more about it on RoamingWithRobbie.com. We have sort of thrown some of our stories together. It is in some ways, it is way better than I thought it was going to be, but getting here was way harder than I thought it was going to be. The good thing is I'm here. The bad thing is it is a little bit of a challenge sometimes to do these kinds of... My studio is now not what my studio was. I spent years perfecting and honing the studio for my podcast and now I have to sort of wing it a little bit and figure it out each time I do it. Things like where I had very set cameras and mics and stuff like that, no longer I have the time to do it on the fly, which may make things a little more interesting as we go into 26, but the cornerstone of the podcast is still there and Michael will introduce himself now. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Molloch. I'm one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers, also known as DeveloperNUR. I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where we build and test reliable custom systems so you can focus on your growth of your business. Good thing, bad thing. Not really any bad this week. We're into a new year. Last year was the bad thing, I guess. Just getting to the end of the year, there was a lot going on, a lot of pivots, a lot of things going on, but this year off to a good start, starting to build some new courses and building the business. And so let's talk about season 26. It was Building Better Foundations. We did almost everything was an interview. We had a lot. Why is my camera there? I hate it when the camera decides to be smart and adjust stuff to you. Those of you guys that are listening have no idea what I'm talking about. Those of you guys that are watching, sorry that was the camera deciding to auto adjust some stuff. So we had almost the entire season was interviews. We did have a couple of just us talking. Of course, it was split by the holiday episodes, but I think we'll just dive right into the concept, the Building Better Foundations piece. I want to go back and revisit that a little bit. And really what it is, what our goal was when we got into this was to focus on the things that matter and they always matter and making sure that we continue to keep that focus on them. Maybe not, I guess, 100%, but not let them drift away or not let them just sort of fall into the background. And those are things that we talk about all the time that we get frustrated as developers that people don't do it. People being usually our boss or the customers or whoever it is, the they that we like to complain about. Where we, you know, it's maybe we're not getting the testing in or the comments in or the time to design stuff that we want to, or it's not as pretty as we would like it to be or whatever it is. All these things come back to some foundational stuff and it is things like when you're writing code you need to design first. You need to think about what you're doing. You need to comment it. You need to actually commit it to a repository with useful comments, not I wrote some more code on this. Those kinds of things, those foundational things. And then with the business, the foundational things of like you do have to always work on the business and not just in the business. If you're just if you can write bill every hour, then bully for you. But at some point your business is not going to grow. You've got to find a way to actually be doing the we'll call it, you know, the non billable work for your business for it to grow. You are investing in your future at that point. And I think we have had a we've had a broad range of discussions through this season and touched in a lot of those areas. And I guess I'll put you on the hot seat first and say like what is what's been one or two things that really has stuck out to you in the season that we've just gone through? So a lot of things like building foundations like you touched on, you know, you have to work in the business, work on your business to grow the business, because if you're always working in your business, you're not out there growing the business. You're not finding new customers. So at some point, your funnel dries up and you're just you have no choice but to go find work. But at that point, you could be in a situation where you have no money coming in. So now what do you do? You kind of you can't pay the bills. These things are a little more stressful than they needed to be. We actually have some very good interviews and conversations around branding and marketing and the sales and funnels, which I thought was very interesting because we've talked about that. And I know personally, I'm not the greatest at doing those sales in the funnels. You know, talking to people, looking for customers is one thing, but kind of do the whole social media, digital marketing thing. I don't have time for that. So I've had to kind of offshore that a little bit and hire people to help me do that. But you can't forget about doing that because if you don't do that, you kind of lose that digital footprint. People don't see you. You know, you're that solo person standing in a crowded room, chanting at the top of your lungs. No one's hearing you because you don't stand out. So those were some of the things that keep coming back to my mind. It's like, yes, I gotta keep working on that. I gotta remember that. I gotta focus on that. And then some of the other things that were, that came out of it, not necessarily foundational, but some of the conversations we had about where AI was changing things. And as you continue to grow your business and working on the foundations, you do need to start considering AI. AI as a tool, not necessarily a replacement, but as a way to start improving and growing your business and looking for inefficiencies so that you can perform better. So you can get rid of the stupid tasks that take you too long. Find a way to automate it. If you can't think about or figure out how to automate, throw in an AI, ask, hey, how can I streamline this? How can I make it better? And those were some of the things that came out of some of the discussions. So it was like, oh, hey, that's an idea. Went and tried it and it's like, oh, hey, already I've improved. Like even if you improve 1% or automate a few things, you got time back. So now you can work on the business or you can have more available hours. What about you? Yeah, I think that's, it's funny. I was just in a conversation yesterday with a group. Think of it like a mastermind group kind of thing. And we were talking about like, how do you, it was really focused on starting in the next year and what is it that you're, what is it you're spending a lot of your time on and where can you find efficiencies in your schedule? And then it ended up sort of pointing to, so what can you do with AI? And the funny thing is by the time I got to the, what can you do with AI? I'd actually already done that because I started looking, I think this is one of the best things I've done for my business. And this came out of a lot of the conversations we had here and some of the conversations I had in, on other podcasts because AI is everywhere. People are talking about it all the time. Is there's so many things that you can do that are very redundant, that are very just time consuming and very easy to automate. We talked about this a couple of seasons ago when we talked about just having, like we did the challenges. One of them was every week automate something. And I think now you could take that same challenge and every week pick something and automate it. And if you don't know how to talk to AI about it, have a, run it through AI and see what you can do because between, sometimes just between some scripts or something like that, or just throwing it in AI and allowing it to do most of the work or building an agent or building an app or something like that. I've built tons of apps now to just automate and scripts and all these things to just automate stuff all over the place. Every time I do something now, I'm getting more and more in that focus of like, how do I automate it? When I talk to any business owner, I'm looking at what they do, what are their processes? How can we automate it? How can we simplify it? And it's just, it's always been part of my makeup and part of my modus operandi as it would be. But also now with AI, it's like the time consumption of it becomes like minimal. Like virtual assistants, I think are gonna just disappear. I think I've said that before. It's because AI is now a perfectly good, perfectly serviceable virtual assistant. The stuff that I always was hesitant to do by spending the money and training up a VA, now I don't have to worry about it because I've been able to train an AI to do that for me. And if I don't like that AI, I can fire it and I can go check another AI engine and go run it through that and see how it does. And for what I need, it has kicked butt across the board. And I think that's the foundations that we, where we got into that on a couple of situations is the foundations of things like marketing and branding and being able to do the testing of that is now so much easier because you can spin up A-B comparisons of your pages and your funnels and images even and things like that so quickly that it's almost like a no-brainer to just go do it, run it for a while or run it side by side for a while and see which one works better and then pick it and move on. I think that's one of the foundational things that we're seeing was a change that coincided during the season is that there's a lot of things where AI is starting to drop some of those barriers. And I think for you guys in the audience, that's something to think about. It's like the years it took to learn to develop and to do things, there's a lot of value in that, but you're gonna now have to be able to know how to differentiate that from somebody that can say, well, I just built an app yesterday because I just vibe coded my way into this thing. And you're gonna have to be able to understand what does that mean? What is the difference between somebody actually designing and thinking through and building real software versus somebody that told an agent to go out and just build it and it said, here, here's a bunch of code, go run it. And it may look good, but there's gonna be issues and you've gotta be able to identify those and be able to say, no, that is not ready for prime time. And I think people are seeing it, but I digress a little bit from the foundational side of this. I do wanna go back, swing back into the season. It was, as always, it was really interesting to see how we took people from very different situations, different areas of ownership of where they were in their organization, younger people, older people, technologists, not so technologists. And there was a lot of themes that kept coming back. My favorite foundation that I use all the time is why. It's like, know your why. Understand why it is that you're doing this, which is very closely right in line with know your customer. Who is your ideal customer? I think that is, that's gold to you. If you understand your why and can talk about that in a sentence or two, your elevator pitch, and then you can understand and you know your avatar to the point that you can be like, I can draw a picture of what this person looks like, even if they don't exist. But as far as I'm concerned, in my head, they do. And then being able to share that with your team, I think those are a couple of great cornerstone ideas that came out of the season, a lot of our conversations. Thoughts? Yeah, to kind of piggyback off that, some of the other themes that I was taking a lot of through all these different conversations is process before tools. Michael Taguchi mentioned this, but we heard this kind of throughout. It's like, you need to make sure that you understand your why, like you said, but you also need to understand what you're doing. Are you on task? Are you doing what is important? Or are you going down many rabbit holes? Because if you have bad processes, using AI or automation to automate those bad processes is not gonna make you more efficient. It's just gonna make you, basically you're gonna end up with more spaghetti and less single line focus. So if you wanna get to your goal, you need to redefine your why, redefine what it is that you need to do and stay on task and avoid the noise. Mr. Productivity, we were talking to him about, staying on task, not getting distracted. Not just with his conversation, but with many other conversations, it's that same thing. You need to stay focused on your task, but what is your task? You have to clearly define that. And it's not just the why, what it is you're doing, but it is why, what am I doing right now? What am I supposed to be getting done? Or ask yourself, is what I'm doing the most value use of my time? Am I working on something that I should be doing later and working on something that is more high focus, high intensity, get that done, get it out of the way? And then if I have time to come back to that menial task later. I've asked myself after those quite a bit, at least once a day, am I working on what I need to be working on or have I scoped creeped, have I task creeped? Am I off on doing something I shouldn't be doing? Especially with AI, because AI, just like Google, you go Google something, it's like trying to solve a problem and it's like, okay, here's like a keyword or something. Okay, here's a better way to ask a question. But if you ask the wrong question, you end up down those rabbit holes where you don't need to be. So you need to start focusing on how to reel that back, get back on task and stay focused. Yeah, I think that's also something we've hit on, maybe not specifically, but definitely hinted around it is understanding what questions to ask when you're sitting there trying to figure out how to do things better and how to, it is like defining your processes, but how do you question and test the processes that you have? And it is things like, well, is this really moving the ball towards the goal line for what my business needs to do? This is something I had in a conversation yesterday as well where it was like, yes, there was a, one of the things that I went through in fourth quarter last year was that I was able to get a lot of stuff out of my head and create concrete things, but there were a lot of those things that didn't necessarily need to be created or moved forward. It's like, okay, cool, I've got it out of my head. I'm gonna go sit outside because that's not really where I need to go. And that was, it does take you away from it and it is, it's just like anything else. If you don't watch out, you can end up on a rabbit trail that you really don't need to be on. So you need to keep yourself focused, which goes back to one of my all time favorites is like use like Pomodoro or something like that and make sure that you're like keeping yourself, especially I found that the shorter Pomodoro cycles, the 25 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe 40 minutes really helped me like have that, like almost that kicking in my head where I'm like, I need to be focused on this. I will put this thing aside, especially when you're waiting for AI. This is like, it has reintroduced something that I got in the past where you would, in the past, you would go compile your code and it would take five minutes, 10 minutes, an hour, whatever it is. So while you're waiting for the machine to do its work, you can go do something else. You can write an email, you can check email, you can do whatever. It's very easy right now when you're waiting for AI to kick a response back to go like jump on your phone for a second or something like that. And the next thing you know, a few seconds has now become a few minutes and now you're wasting time and you've lost time getting distracted. Those distractions have picked up and taken you off of your course. So those are some things to keep looking for. And it gets back to like, I say it always goes back to the foundations. That is your why. Why am I doing this work today? What is it that is my goal? What am I supposed to be doing? What do I wanna have done at the end of the day? And periodically do a little self check of like, is this moving me in the direction I need it to or am I wasting time or at least if not wasting time, at least not spending time on the things that need to be my focus for the day. Closing thought. Yeah, the final thing I would like to say about building better foundations is, like you said, what is your why? What is it that you're trying to accomplish? Write down some tasks or some bullet points for what it is that you want your business to be, what's your why, how you want it to grow. And then finally put together a roadmap or a plan. And I challenge you to stick to it. I know we're already into 2026, but this is a great way to kick off a new year is to kind of reset your foundation, reset what it is that you want your business to be or what your side hustle needs to be. And then go for it. Start working it, start building it and try to keep to that foundation and let your business grow. Yeah, that's a great idea. I actually built a little to-do app that is to allow myself to focus on those kinds of things that I sort of keep an audit trail of what have I done? Am I focusing, am I in the business, on the business? Is this overhead, what is it? I highly recommend doing something like that if you want to scratch your own itch, basically. If you want to just, you're looking for an excuse to build an app in whatever technology, build something like that, because to-do apps are super simple. You can keep it to probably just a couple of tables in a database or maybe even a couple of files if you just don't even want to bother with the database. Give it a simple user interface and it gives you a tool that you can use and an excuse to build a tool or an app. And just something like that, whatever it is, I think that's a great way stepping into 26 is to get yourself into the habit of focusing on what you need to focus on. We are going to focus on the next season and it is literally, there's no break, we're coming right back around and we're going to dive right in. Next episode, kicking off season 27. I'm not going to tell you what it is though yet because we might as well not. We're going to give you a little bit of a cliffhanger as we go from this season into the next one. As always, thank you so much. I appreciate your time in hanging out with us for yet another season. It is always just incredibly amazing to me. The numbers that we have racked up in episodes and blog posts and stuff out on YouTube and all those kinds of things. Definitely appreciate all you guys and the times that you have spent with us, that you have invested with us over the years now, almost a decade of this. And feel free as always, we don't want to ask you enough, I guess, but share us with your friends. Go out there and tell people about us. Go out and yell out in the street that, hey, there's developing-whore people and this is a great podcast. Even if you think it's an okay podcast, lie a little bit. Give us some more people out here to just come and be entertained. That being said, thank you so much. Have a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. This was sponsored by RB Consulting, your partner in building smarter, scalable tech. From startups to established teams, RB Consulting helps you turn tech chaos into clarity with proven roadmaps and hands-on expertise. Visit rb-sns.com to start your next step forward. Also sponsored by Envision QA, they help businesses take control of their software by focusing on what matters most, quality, reliability, and support you can count on. Find out more at envisionqa.com. Thanks for tuning in to the Developing Whore podcast, where we're all about building better developers and better careers. I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback, so drop a note to info at developinwhore.com. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen. And remember, a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success. Keep learning, keep growing, and we'll see you in the next episode.