Detailed Notes
In the final episode of season 21, the Developer podcast hosts Michael and Rob reflect on the lessons they've learned about becoming better developers over the past few months.
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Transcript Text
[Music] what do you think for our final episode of the season so I I kind of was bouncing some ideas around on this so the whole concept of this season was kind of behind the scenes at least from the YouTube side of things and even from the podcast side we kind of dived into our day-to-day you know what are the things that are really bugging us or what are some of the challenges we really run into do we want to kind of go even further like kind of wrap that up with of a reintroductions of ourselves like who we are what we do or is that just kind of too much I don't know it was just kind of an idea I was playing around with but I wasn't where to take it that's an interesting it's typically I like to um oh welcome back for those of you that you somewhere along the way we've already been welcomed back because we recording all way and we just got edited into the beginning so apologies that you just got added in Midstream so the final episode typically I want to do a some sort of summary overview something like that and since this is it's now a couple months ago when we started so it could be something where we can look at our growth like sort of it could be a little bit of a recap like where do we where have we come from in the last four month how have we become better developers what are some things that we've done some things that we've changed or what are some let's say some thematic topics that we've had things that have run through the course of all of these discussions maybe you know sort of simplify it down to hey here's three things that we hope you've learned in this season or that we have learned in this season um that may you something like that that may not be a bad one for a a back and forth is it I'll say hey here's some here's three things that I'm doing better or where I've improved or where I've changed or where I've fixed bad habits or you know reversed bad Trends and then you do the same and then we can talk about those there's a couple ways we what's what feels what feels better to you at this point which is feels a little more comfy to to dive into I kind of like the recap idea like where we're at you know at the Q&A or kind of questions back and forth because that still follows the model we've kind of been doing through the season and I guess from my side I mean I could go from you know at the start I was just getting ready to launch and vision QA and vision QA is now launched so I mean I could kind of tie that into some of the topics we've talked about um yeah we can do that sounds good so we'll go we'll give that a shot we'll just see where it goes because that has always worked for us anyway so why not Why Stop Now well hello everybody and welcome back we are in the final episode of season 21 I lost track a long time ago but we are on a steady March towards a thousand episodes no we're not going to hit that even this year but we are on that March it's a long march and we're just like marching along doesn't mean that we're going to stop them doesn't mean we're even going to get there who knows world could end tomorrow I know that's a bad note to start an episode but I will first just like let's just like back that track up and I want to introduce myself my name is Rob Broadhead I am one of the founders of developing order and building better developers where we get together and we just try to share our our war stories in a sense from the from the front line which has really been this season and this episode we want to talk about sort of like a a summary of like Lessons Learned where we at how have we become better developers since we started way back not that long ago on season 21 and I'm going to go ahead and toss over so Michael can introduce himself hey everyone my name's Michael malash I'm another co-founder developer ner and founder of Envision QA where we help small to midsize businesses and Healthcare clinicians build uh documentation or applications that they need to help better their business so I G start I'll I'll go first and I think what I'm going to do is I'll give you just a couple here's a couple of we'll say bullet points of some things that I know some things that I have adjusted in the last four months and this is part of becoming a better developer now the first one is really um it's one of these things that part of part part of becoming a better developer is is building good habits and maintaining those habits and sometimes those habits and this goes back to actually our prior episodes sometimes we fade away from those a little bit and we need to reel ourselves back in and get back on track and so one of the things that has been a a focus for me in the last uh last few month actually this year is really going back to I spent too much time working in my business and not on my business and so it's really been me adjusting my schedule back to do regular working on my business make make stuff better working on marketing marketing and branding and all of the business development is a a category that i' use on a regular basis and business development for me is a a pretty broad thing but it's things like finding potential customers working on proposals sales calls uh it's all of the material related to that and that includes the website that includes uh any kind of newsletters that go out and emails and weekly status type things that go out to the customers that I have follow ups that go to potential customers all of that is in sort of this um umbrella of Business Development that I gotten away from and I've sort of adjusted into it's I think of it as sort of like the Google approach they have I they did and I think they still do they had a certain period of every week certain amount of time that their employees were just told to go do stuff do what you like but you know something like go pursue something within you know technology so go work on your own app or play around with the tools that we have and and find a way to create a better solution and that's where a lot of if you go to Google Labs there's a lot of stuff out there that's what's culminated with years and years and years of all of these employees doing those things so for me I said you know what I'm going to take and I'm gonna take a block of time every week and that's going to be my business development time now my problem is that I'm still working on that because I've had too many times that I've punted that moved that lost that shifted that U I usually try to do like on a Friday afternoon get me at least two or three hours uh early on I did better because I would just I would go away from my office I would go sit down at a Panera somewhere or something like that or a little coffee shop or somewhere or leave a little early and go over to a local you know bar for wings and beer and just get into that kind of you know development mode and work through some of this stuff a lot of that was is branding and um Automation and some of the tools so it's the things it's like I'm struggling through with the week but it's making sure I spend some time investing in doing those things better so it's things like along those lines I built a I've talked about like built a time reporting app for for myself and and my team and then it also the way we did it make it easier to do daily standup statuses and and weekly statuses and invoicing and keep stuff up so that uh return to working on my business versus in my business is one of the things that has been a an improvement now another thing you know that's a second one is the the brand Focus Michael started out working on en Vision QA and he was he was sort of launching that I think this was pre-launch was when we started this and so in our discussions a lot of this is while I'm sitting there you know on the outside looking in and saying hey you can do this or you can do that or here's a recommendation or here's a suggestion a lot of that is me looking reverse it to myself and I'm like oh I need to listen to that and I need to go do that or I need to adjust that and it's things like well how do I adjust my brand how do I adust my vision how do I adjust the the Spiel that I'm going to give when I'm trying to you know bring a customer in and what are some of the tools or the the approaches I need to take to better bring customers in and introduce to them and and figure out what's out there and how we can help people in the best way that we can help help people so there's definitely that again it's working on my brand on my business for the most part and it's figing out how to uh better craft our sales strategy I had I had a lead Management Group or a lead you know leads group that would go out there and find me leads for several months and they would feed stuff in and I would go through calls and I was you know I was working through all of these things like what's the what's the message you want to do what's the little thing that you want to put out there so that it'll drag them in so they'll come in for a conversation so that or a zoom conversation so you can find out you get to know them and then figure out how you can help them and then I guess I'll throw a third after I cough something up there um I'll throw in a third and it really is the um I I touched on I think it's one of our bonus materials I think we've one of the things is we have grown adjusted shifted and I think in a good way the whole developing or podcast and YouTube experience I would love to get back to from a Time point of view I'd love to get back to our U regular like code stins and stuff like that and those are still out there at some point we'll get those added back in but this has been I think really beneficial to us to talk through some of these things but it's also allowed us to really in a very easy way upgrade what developer or provides to you we've done had the podcast forever but now we've shifted that a little bit and it hasn't changed as much but definitely the YouTube side we've we've changed that and and expanded in some new areas and we also did I think we sort of we clipped our wings in a couple areas as well and said okay we're not going to chase this stream because it just doesn't work for us so we we've made some you know some house cleaning kinds of things and developed develop anur we've built better develop anur people and processes and content and we're still working on that but I think those are a couple things that have been really you know in the next last few months have been some great advances what are a couple of them that you've got so before we started this season at the end of last year I decided to kind of blow up masas Consulting I was kind of reached a point in that business where I was too spread out too doing too many things for too many people not having enough time to work on the business and at the beginning of the year I started that co-starter class I went through the whole rebranding model uh really really got back to understanding how to work on my business not just in my business um I've went through a lot of kind of soul searching trying to figure out who my core customer is going to be uh how to serve these new customers and to really kind of prune the things of the Consulting side of things that well I can do it's not really something I want to do or something that yes I can do it to get a paycheck but is that really what I want to build as a brand so I learned a little bit more about how to kind of refocus and push a brand of services instead of just a catchall Internet of Things model uh so that was kind of the beginning of this journey now throughout this uh season of developer Nur I have uh completed the course I have launched Envision QA I even have a my first customer who hopefully within the next week or two I will have the first assessment wrapped up and it's been going real well uh I've actually been told by many people that uh my idea of fun is their idea of hell so uh either I'm on the right path or I'm going to crash and burn but hey that's the whole point that's the journey we go through as entrepreneurs the second point is I've learned to be more organized so at the start of the Season again uh because I was kind of in that rebuilding mode uh trying to figure out how to go from a company that had been running for 20 some years what do I want to pull out of that so I had to get more organized I had to figure out okay what do I need to keep how do I need to embed that into the new company and it made me really have to go through old projects I had to go through all my code repositories okay what works for this what doesn't work for this do I need to move this do I need to Archive it and I really had to spend a couple of weeks just going through file structures and projects and try to figure out what made sense to put together for a product base or for this new service I was offering within Invision QA and that was kind of an interesting Journey because it's like oh hey uh this particular application well it works is outdated so I needed to kind of rewrite things like Rob was saying so I have updated my test generation tool it is now running uh it builds Java applicate or Java test Frameworks but I've now rebuilt it in Python and I also uh almost have it to a point now where it will not only generate you a Java framework test framework but it will also do c and python so it's kind of gotten me back into that code mindset um of things also within the start of this journey we at develop Nur kind of made a shift so Rob uh has kind of stepped back from the editing side of things and I have now gotten back into doing video edits audio edits which I haven't done in a while so it was kind of fun to dust off that hat and relearn these tools so at the beginning of the Season these edits actually took me hours to get through because I was fighting the tools again trying to remember how to do things uh which tools were good again to do audio edits versus video edits and it it was frustrating at first but now it's fun now I'm even looking at writing AI apps or automated apps to automate some of the processes so it it was kind of a fun Journey it's like well this is what it takes to do this now how can I make it better or how can I streamline things now here we are at the end of the season and really to do a lot of our edits and that only takes a couple of hours uh so I've gone from like a day or two to getting these edits out to just maybe a morning's coffee uh over a couple of days this also got me back into writing again so I have been out of the uh blog side of things for a while because we had done so many courses we've been teaching for so long we wrote our new courses for the school of developer ER and I just kind of got burned out for a bit it's like if you are doing a side hustle or teaching or just blogging you may reach a point where you get writers blocked or you just burn out of what it is is you're doing and from the beginning of the Season we I was kind of at that point I was just like okay I don't want to write any more content for a while I don't really want to uh write any new courses I just need a break but by doing this model I was able to get back into writing blogs consistently every week trying to get new material out and it got me organized again it got my juices flowing and I'm able to kind of refocus and we're knocking out content now we're not quite knocking out those video courses like we were before those are coming so keep an eye out for those but this was a fun Journey so hopefully a lot of the things we've talked about like the organizational you know the optimizing uh your code agnostic Frameworks these are all the things that we actually went through all these challenges that we went through this season and we've talked about are things that we went through we learned and we've discussed the pros and cons with you I do want to you touched on a couple things that I do want to you know bring up that I found the same thing is that sometimes um there's a there's an old phrase sometimes A change is as good as the rest is sometimes it's just doing something different is GNA you know energize you and it's going to get you out of your your dos or a rut or something like that and even if you're doing stuff that you like for example I have enjoyed RB Consulting I've been full full-time RB Consulting for 10 years now and and really pushing it and doing all of the different things they're involved in like running a consulting company and bringing people in and finding work and all of those pieces but recently I've had a couple of of areas where I've I've had I've been dragged back into well not me say drave but it has worked out good for me to be the primary developer and really run a project from start to stop and and not had you know it's it's been more individual so it's been much more just like downcoding building that stuff out the the whole thing the whole software development life cycle I've realized how much I really do enjoy that part of it and so it's it's been refreshing to be able to get back into some of the things that are what gets us into our career in the first place and it is something that even as we go through there are you know our career our life our professional life there are may be Seasons that we do certain things that we are in a certain role and it really works for us but then maybe there's some point where that season changes and we've sort of either sometimes as we've run sort of our course it's run the it's course for whatever that skill set is or whatever it is that we want to do think about it like some people it's a second career or third career like if you're a professional sports person of some sort you win some championships and then you get to Point like okay I've sort of done that now I want to go do something else sometimes that's what we do but it's just we don't have to change careers we can just change a little bit our focus and it may be you know for us maybe it's like hey you know like Michael said maybe it's like I'm in Java a lot and have been in Java for a couple of years and now I want to go back and spend some time in C or I want to go work on Ruby or python or you you name it so you know these are the things part of becoming a better developer and this again actually is something you know one of the things we talked about in the the book is finding ways to keep stuff fresh figuring out what it is you like and while we really do Focus early on about as you know as you're starting your career is like try a bunch of different stuff figure out what you like and what you don't like I would say now as I'm looking back over a a longer career period I think you regularly need to go back to that there are things now for example bill out I've always I guess I've always sort of liked you know installing operating systems and putting stuff up and spinning things up and things like that but it got out of hand it was just it was there was just not much I could do back when you go back 25 30 years and I was you know I was just like okay you can dual triple quadruple boot operating systems and you can set those up and you can do some things but moving data back and forth between them was a pain and all that so it became much more efficient to just pick one and go with that and then I ended up doing that and then I got into the Apple world back world and have just sort of like gotten away from dual boot almost completely but then refound it several years later with Amazon and some of these cloud services and and Azure and and going in and and building out a system and configuring it and and stalling stuff and getting your applications run and now you've got a you know full web server and all of that kind of stuff a whole solution and not just like a little app you're running on your machine that's fun it's like it's something that's now fun again so you check out what's out there it maybe that there's a language that you didn't like because and I remember early days at Java there was some stuff was very painful to do with because it just didn't have that it wasn't refined it wasn't there it wasn't complete and now as they've gone on now there's a lot of things that you can do with it that it's very easy as long as you find the right library and you you know it's like two or three commands and boom you can do some cool stuff so don't don't seal off stuff as options as you get further into your career you may want to go back and some of those and say do I and it may be something like oh yeah I really hate doing that I don't ever want to go back that's fine you go take a little bit of time look at it and say no I really I still don't like doing that cool move on to the stuff that you do because there's so much stuff out there I think it's it we are not serving ourselves or our customers or our families or anybody else if we're not doing the stuff that we enjoy because that's what we're going to do best that's what we were made to do unless it's sitting you know sitting on a couch watching and binge watching Netflix that look a little further try a little harder than that um there's there's going to be something out there that is productive for other people that is valuable to other people you may be like I've had the same thing with some of the stuff I do like Michael said everybody else thinks this is their living hell if that's your Heaven you're set because people will be more than willing to to support you doing that for them because they're like hey I hate doing this you love doing it I will throw bags of money at you get it done so that's maybe the best Niche is to find the one that you love and you're the one person in the world loves to do it so everybody that when they get to that job they're like I got to go find that person because they actually enjoy doing it so they're not going to you know they're not going to complain and moan the whole time that they do it that's part of becoming a better developer is stuff like this periodically do a little house cleaning do a little retrospective look back at what have you done and and this is what I would put to you each of you look back yeah beginning this year so look back but just for you wherever you're at look back say five months five six months where were you at five or six months ago and where are you at now and what has what has transpired in that let's say that six-month period how have you changed how have you grown have you changed and grown if you're in the exact same place doing the exact same thing you were 6 months ago unless this is like absolutely what you want to do then and okay maybe you need to look at a change but also maybe you look at that and you go like wow I have accomplished a lot in that period of time I can look at like for myself I can look on my personal life there's a whole lot of stuff I got I got married we were we changed our date I've got like I've got kids are gradu I've got all kinds of stuff that's happened in such a short period of time that you look back and you like no wonder I'm tired this is we got a lot done and so that sometimes when you're you feel like maybe you're in a rut or that it's like you're spinning your wheels you can look back you realize oh no wait I have I'm not spinning my wheels we I am making progress and you can have that uh optimistic point of view of looking forward but also that fulfillment of hey I I have gotten some stuff done and I'm G to let Michael get something done right now because I'm going to just sit back and bask in my getting done that little monologue so your thoughts well I'd like to continue you know getting it done when you're doing those reviews of yourself and of what you've been working on or what you've accomplished also look at what you haven't done and you haven't accomplished these could be your check marks or your road map of things that okay I have not been focusing on these enough I need to refocus re prioritize and kind of move forward along with that what came to my mind as you were kind of recapping this Rob and we haven't really touched on this enough especially for those of you that aren't entrepreneurs yet or even if you are are make sure you review your skills make sure that you're what you're doing is still relevant you know you don't want to necessarily be working on a technology that in six months time is going away you don't want to be those people working on an as400 that could die and go away and whoops you have no job no technology tomorrow you know so always make sure you're pushing the boundaries make sure you're learning the skills and keeping up to date on things that's a lot of what we did even with in this season you know I've gotten AWS certified again in Cloud uh Computing I've relearned python I have gone from java 9 to Java 17 and I'm starting to learn Java 21 again with the new stuff and even AI you never stop learning the trick is to make sure you're always kind of got your eye on the ball as to the direction you want to take things with that with these skill reviews dust off your resume just off those profiles uh you know if you're on upwork or if you're applying for companies look at your resume make sure that you are relevantly keeping up with your tasks what are you working on what is it that you've done this quarter these are also things that you can do if you work for people at the end of the year or at the end of the quarter you can go to your manager and say hey I've done X YZ I've done this I performed at this I've excelled at this now even if there are negative like oh you're struggling in this you can turn that to a positive when you go to those meetings you can say hey I've noticed I'm struggling in this or I'm having problems in this can we add to my skills or my track to send me to some training courses or pay for some online training so that I can get the help I need so that I can become a better person better coder and a better employee for you so that at the end of the year you can say you can check all those boxes and say hey I've done this that negative now turns into a positive so now you're not necessarily getting a negative review you're continually showing that you're growing and that you're willing to work through your problems and that's I think that's the approach we can always look at is we can how do you improve is you can either reduce your weaknesses or your negatives or you can improve on your strengths and your positives and there is there's a lot of philosophies around what you should do more of and how all that works and some of it does actually flow back into what do you it's a personal thing what do you do best or what do you want to do because some people they they really struggle to correct the negatives or it's a negative that you you don't like that anyway so you're happy to keep it a negative you it may be something that it's a you want to just work on that positive because that's what you enjoy so you would rather strengthen that and and that now it again there's a lot of philosophy so there is like a diminishing point of return and some things like that to take into account but that's all on an individual basis it goes to where do you want to be and I think Michael made a perfect point is even if you don't have if you work somewhere where you don't have like you know six month or 12 month or you know 18mon reviews or something like that it doesn't hurt to just initiate that anyways is go to your boss and just say hey I'm just I've been looking at what's been going on and here's some things that been going well but here's some things that aren't and here's where I want to improve so you you can then sort of drive that process and then you can come back 6 months later or whatever it is and you say hey look I improved these things and now here's some other things I want to improve and if you know over time that suddenly you have that track record of basically coming to your boss and saying here's what I can do here's what I'm going to learn and you've shown that you will go learn that and that will now erase negative so you are bringing them value they are seeing Returns on their investment in you and even if you're not in that situation you can look at it yourself let go assess yourself figure out where those negatives are figure out what that time frame is to re erase them and then you can now see oh it is maybe it is it's worth it for me to invest some time to take a couple days off or to to order that class or whatever it is because I know that it will put me in a a better situation in the future we will be in a very different situation in the future because this is the last episode of season 21 next episode we you hear that we put out will be Season 22 and we're still thinking about what that season's going to be as far as we know I mean maybe we've figured it out but I don't think we have so we're going to Jump Right In we're always open to suggestions and recommendations and feedback and all that kind of goodness because we're doing this for you I mean yeah we have a we sure have fun we get a lot out of this we are becoming better developers as we've noted in this episode as we are going through these things but we also want to do that for you we want to give back we want to help out where we have learned to improve to make sure that we're helping others do the same and of course we're not like the you know we're not Lan gurus we can learn from you as well so love to have that feedback whether it's info@ developer.com whether it's the the contact us on developer.com our Facebook page uh you can reach out us on X you know that thing that used to be called Twitter developer or and again dve l p r n e r this wh there we go for the video people it's like right here for your audio people sorry it's out there look it's probably written like six times in the on the little show notes so you should be okay with that that being said we want to wrap this one up thank you so much for hanging out with us for yet another season and we look forward to the next one with more with you guys looking at where we can erase our negatives make more positives and do the same for you go out there and have yourself a great day a great week and we will talk to you next time and any bonus material you want to throw in on on this one uh yeah so we kind of touched on being a little proactive there at the end you know trying to improve yourself with your job one of the things we have not touched on really a lot this season is go out periodically and check the job sites check out like indeed.com careerbuilder.com monster.com see what what positions are out there see what the industry is driving towards and also do searches along those Technologies so if you're doing Java do search on Java and find out what Java Frameworks or what Java Technologies are current right now what is the trend you know are you you know what is the bleeding edge are you on the edge are you pushing the edge or are you starting to fall behind so these are just some indicators you can do to try and keep yourself moving in the right direction within your industry I I I double you know I I I second that triple that whatever it is is it so there's two things one there's like there's this curve oh because we're visual I can do this there's like this curve if stuff goes up and it becomes popular and then it fades away and then usually what happens is one's fading is the other one's coming up and so what you want to do is as one Fades you want to jump to that next one before it becomes like a Y2K issue or something like that that's nobody want is doing it anymore so you do need to keep regular l a breast of such things and that's actually one of the things I haven't touched on is that I have done recently is I've gone back to I've expanded where I've looked for work and projects and customers and things that are out there and what I didn't go into as much was the details and one of that is that I actually have started using LinkedIn i' I've gone to I had I had not used indeed in I don't think i' been on the site in 15 years and there's some other places uh solid gigs.com is one that and it it actually i' used it but then they changed their algorithm so now they were actually they're pulling more information from places like that or dice.com I used to go to dice all the time and so it's gotten me now going out to these sites and one of the things that's that I think is is worthwhile doing these is actually going apply periodically because it it's amazing that one it will make you update your resume to some extent and it will help you understand what the tools are so like I I haven't done this I haven't used my resume in years and years and years and years and years but there's now a lot of tools that allow you to just like it'll just suck your resume in and fill out all of these insanely long processes of forms which if anybody knows me knows I hate form that's why I'm in this business is to just kill forms everywhere I hate the forms you should have to like you enter your data once and you should never have to enter your data again that's the goal but now my wife has done a bunch of this kind of stuff and so she said oh yeah I've got this I've got I like work with some people people I've got a resume that's built for those systems and I'm like wow that's exactly the kind of stuff that I go talk to other people about is like how do you build your documents your data so that it is easiest to integrate with other systems so that's one of the things I'm I have got on my to-do list for myself is to rewrite my resume in a format that is much more importable into these systems how much I'm going to use that I don't know because it's one of those like I don't know how long I'm going to be using these but it is still often an entryway into talking to somebody about a position that they have or openings that they have or what's their C company like and it is also I know I've always said I think doing regular interviews is a benefit to you because like Michael said one you figure out what's out there what's hot what's not what's fading what's Cutting Edge what's bleeding edge what's dying out also you're going to figure out what are what is the market price for this skill set if you're out there and you're a consultant and you're having to figure out how to price your skills then you want to see what that what does that look like in the in the market and that's also so if you get into like pricing discussions and stuff like that with your customers and they say wow that seems like a lot of money then you can say well look if you do it out in the market this is what it's going to take you that's the whole you know the difference that it's like hey yeah it's it may be ridiculous that it's going to cost you know that you may think it's too much for me to charge $75 an hour for three months on a project but if you had to hire somebody they're going to ask you for $150,000 salary well guess what you're basically going to pay them but now you're locked into all of that extra stuff for having employee so there's those kinds of conversations you can have and you're G to have them best when you have the backing knowledge of this is what the market has and you're also going to find sometimes gems of your skills things that you've done that you may not realize that it's now that's like a very like you know Niche and valuable skill as things have progressed so it could be like a like Python's one I I first touched python I don't know 15 20 years ago it's been a long time ago and it was a thing it was it had its like little niches and stuff like that well now it's like the number it's in the top three languages I think it may be number one growth language for the last few years so this stuff that I had in the past I had really thought of and I sort of enjoyed doing it but now as I'm getting back into that it feeds itself because it's like hey there's also a lot of jobs out there so I think those are those are some excellent points uh parting thoughts before we sort of wrap this one up and right off into the sunset before we come back around on Sunrise and start our next season yeah just you know believe in yourself don't you know there are times as developers as entrepreneurs where you might get into a rut or you might be in that position where I'm not sure where to go work through that you know listen to what we've talked about read our blogs you know go look at other material online about you know presenting yourself working on your business uh getting better you know the these are it it's a never-ending Journey you you can't just say hey I know this I'm going to go out there I'm going to be successful you will never succeed if you just don't continue to learn if you just go out and just try to push through it's not going to work constant learning constant growing and you're going to have to build a community you're going to have to work through things and don't go at it alone find a friend find a mentor and work through I think that's a good I think that's like I'm just going to let that sit because I that's a really good like finishing thought so for all of you thank you again for hanging out with us for this season as we said before and we look forward to stepping into the next one and exploring just all the other ways to become better developers as we go into uh for us is now going to be the second half of the Year and that may be that may be where we end up maybe it be around the end of this year most likely it will be actually I guess as we finish the next season uh and then we'll get in because we'll have some of our standard holiday specials and some things like that along the way because those are always fun and Michael hasn't been able to enjoy those in the past so we'll get to do all of those fun little things going into the the latter part of years that being said go out there and have yourself a great day and we will talk to you next time [Music]
Transcript Segments
[Music]
what do you think for our final episode
of the season so I I kind of was
bouncing some ideas around on this so
the whole concept of this season was
kind of behind the scenes at least from
the YouTube side of things and even from
the podcast side we kind of dived into
our day-to-day you know what are the
things that are really bugging us or
what are some of the challenges we
really run into do we want to kind of go
even further like kind of wrap that up
with
of a reintroductions of
ourselves like who we are what we do or
is that just kind of too
much I don't know it was just kind of an
idea I was playing around with but I
wasn't where to take it that's an
interesting it's typically I like to um
oh welcome back for those of you that
you somewhere along the way we've
already been welcomed back because we
recording all way and we just got edited
into the beginning so apologies that you
just got added in
Midstream so the final episode typically
I want to do a some sort of summary
overview something like that and since
this
is it's now a couple months ago when we
started
so it could be something where we can
look
at our growth
like sort of it could be a little bit of
a recap like where do we where have we
come from in the last four month how
have we become better developers what
are some things that we've done some
things that we've
changed
or what are
some let's say some thematic topics that
we've had things that have run through
the course of all of these
discussions maybe you know sort of
simplify it down to hey
here's three things that we hope you've
learned in this season or that we have
learned in this
season um that may you something like
that that may not be a bad one for a a
back and forth is it I'll say hey here's
some here's three things that I'm doing
better or where I've improved or where
I've changed or where I've fixed bad
habits or you know reversed bad
Trends and then you do the same and then
we can talk about those there's a couple
ways we
what's what feels what feels better to
you at this point which is feels a
little more comfy to to dive into I kind
of like the recap idea like where we're
at you know at the Q&A or kind of
questions back and forth
because that still follows the model
we've kind of been
doing through the season
and I guess from my side I mean I could
go from you know at the start I was just
getting ready to launch and vision QA
and vision QA is now launched so I mean
I could kind of tie that into some of
the topics we've talked about
um yeah we can do
that sounds good so we'll go we'll give
that a shot we'll just see where it goes
because that has always worked for us
anyway so why not Why Stop
Now well hello everybody and welcome
back we are in the final episode of
season 21 I lost track a long time ago
but we are on a steady March towards a
thousand episodes no we're not going to
hit that even this year but we are on
that March it's a long march and we're
just like marching along doesn't mean
that we're going to stop them doesn't
mean we're even going to get there who
knows world could end tomorrow I know
that's a bad note to start an episode
but I will first just like let's just
like back that track up and I want to
introduce myself my name is Rob
Broadhead I am one of the founders of
developing order and building better
developers where we get together and we
just try to share our our war stories in
a sense from the from the front line
which has really been this season and
this episode we want to talk about sort
of like a a summary of like Lessons
Learned where we at how have we become
better developers since we started way
back not that long ago on season
21 and I'm going to go ahead and toss
over so Michael can introduce himself
hey everyone my name's Michael malash
I'm another co-founder developer ner and
founder of Envision QA where we help
small to midsize businesses and
Healthcare clinicians build uh
documentation or applications that they
need to help better their business
so I G start I'll I'll go first and I
think what I'm going to do is I'll give
you just a couple here's a couple of
we'll say bullet points of some things
that I know some things that I have
adjusted in the last four months and
this is part of becoming a better
developer now the first
one is
really um it's one of these things that
part of part part of becoming a better
developer is is building good habits and
maintaining those habits and sometimes
those habits and this goes back to
actually our prior episodes sometimes we
fade away from those a little bit and we
need to reel ourselves back in and get
back on track and so one of the things
that has been a a focus for me in the
last uh last few month actually this
year is really going back to I spent too
much time working in my business and not
on my business and so it's really been
me adjusting my schedule back to do
regular working on my business make make
stuff better working on marketing
marketing and branding and all of the
business development is a a category
that i' use on a regular basis and
business development for me is a a
pretty broad thing but it's things like
finding potential customers working on
proposals sales calls uh it's all of the
material related to that and that
includes the website that includes uh
any kind of newsletters that go out and
emails and weekly status type things
that go out to the customers that I have
follow ups that go to potential
customers all of that is in sort of this
um umbrella of Business Development that
I gotten away from and I've sort of
adjusted
into it's I think of it as sort of like
the Google approach they have I they did
and I think they still do they had a
certain period of every week certain
amount of time that their employees were
just told to go do stuff do what you
like but you know something like go
pursue something within you know
technology so go work on your own app or
play around with the tools that we have
and and find a way to create a better
solution and that's where a lot of if
you go to Google Labs there's a lot of
stuff out there that's what's culminated
with years and years and years of all of
these employees doing those things so
for me I said you know what I'm going to
take and I'm gonna take a block of time
every week and that's going to be my
business development time now my problem
is that I'm still working on that
because I've had too many times that
I've punted that moved that lost that
shifted that U I usually try to do like
on a Friday afternoon get me at least
two or three hours uh early on I did
better because I would just I would go
away from my office I would go sit down
at a Panera somewhere or something like
that or a little coffee shop or
somewhere or leave a little early and go
over to a local you know bar for wings
and beer and just get into that kind of
you know development mode and work
through some of this stuff a lot of that
was is branding and um Automation and
some of the tools so it's the things
it's like I'm struggling through with
the week but it's making sure I spend
some time investing in doing those
things better so it's things like along
those lines I built a I've talked about
like built a time reporting app for for
myself and and my team and then it also
the way we did it make it easier to do
daily standup statuses and and weekly
statuses and invoicing and keep stuff up
so that uh return to working on my
business versus in my business is one of
the things that has been a an
improvement now another thing you know
that's a second one is the the brand
Focus Michael started out working on en
Vision QA and he was he was sort of
launching that I think this was
pre-launch was when we started this and
so in our discussions a lot of this is
while I'm sitting there you know on the
outside looking in and saying hey you
can do this or you can do that or here's
a recommendation or here's a suggestion
a lot of that is me looking reverse it
to myself and I'm like oh I need to
listen to that and I need to go do that
or I need to adjust that and it's things
like well how do I adjust my brand how
do I adust my vision how do I adjust the
the Spiel that I'm going to give when
I'm trying to you know bring a customer
in and what are some of the tools or the
the approaches I need to take to better
bring customers in and introduce to them
and and figure out what's out there and
how we can help people in the best way
that we can help help people so there's
definitely that again it's working on my
brand on my business for the most part
and it's figing out how to uh better
craft our sales strategy I had I had a
lead Management Group or a lead you know
leads group that would go out there and
find me leads for several months and
they would feed stuff in and I would go
through calls and I was you know I was
working through all of these things like
what's the what's the message you want
to do what's the little thing that you
want to put out there so that it'll drag
them in so they'll come in for a
conversation so that or a zoom
conversation so you can find out you get
to know them and then figure out how you
can help them and then I guess I'll
throw a
third after I cough something up there
um I'll throw in a third and it really
is the um I I touched on I think it's
one of our bonus materials I think we've
one of the things is we have grown
adjusted shifted and I think in a good
way the whole developing or podcast and
YouTube experience
I would love to get back to from a Time
point of view I'd love to get back to
our U regular like code stins and stuff
like that and those are still out there
at some point we'll get those added back
in but this has been I think really
beneficial to us to talk through some of
these things but it's also allowed us
to really in a very easy way upgrade
what developer or provides to you we've
done had the podcast forever but now
we've shifted that a little bit and it
hasn't changed as much but definitely
the YouTube side we've we've changed
that and and expanded in some new areas
and we also did I think we sort of we
clipped our wings in a couple areas as
well and said okay we're not going to
chase this stream because it just
doesn't work for us so we we've made
some you know some house cleaning kinds
of things and developed develop anur
we've built better develop anur people
and processes and content and we're
still working on that but I think those
are a couple things that have been
really you know in the next last few
months have been some great advances
what are a couple of them that you've
got so before we started this season at
the end of last year I decided to kind
of blow up masas Consulting I was kind
of reached a point in that business
where I was too spread out too doing too
many things for too many people not
having enough time to work on the
business and at the beginning of the
year I started that co-starter class I
went through the whole rebranding model
uh really really got back to
understanding how to work on my business
not just in my business um I've went
through a lot of kind of soul searching
trying to figure out who my core
customer is going to be uh how to serve
these new customers and to really kind
of prune the things of the Consulting
side of things that well I can do it's
not really something I want to do or
something that yes I can do it to get a
paycheck but is that really what I want
to build as a brand so I learned a
little bit more about how to kind of
refocus and push a brand of services
instead of just a catchall Internet of
Things model uh so that was kind of the
beginning of this journey now throughout
this uh season of developer Nur I have
uh completed the course I have launched
Envision QA I even have a my first
customer who hopefully within the next
week or two I will have the first
assessment wrapped up and it's been
going real well uh I've actually been
told by many people that uh my idea of
fun is their idea of hell so uh either
I'm on the right path or I'm going to
crash and burn but hey that's the whole
point that's the journey we go through
as
entrepreneurs the second point is I've
learned to be more organized so at the
start of the Season again uh because I
was kind of in that rebuilding mode uh
trying to figure out how to go from a
company that had been running for 20
some years what do I want to pull out of
that so I had to get more organized I
had to figure out okay what do I need to
keep how do I need to embed that into
the new
company and it made me really have to go
through old projects I had to go through
all my code repositories okay what works
for this what doesn't work for this do I
need to move this do I need to Archive
it and I really had to spend a couple of
weeks just going through file structures
and projects and try to figure out what
made sense to put together for a product
base or for this new service I was
offering within Invision QA and that was
kind of an interesting Journey because
it's like oh hey uh this particular
application well it works is outdated so
I needed to kind of rewrite things like
Rob was saying so I have updated my test
generation tool it is now running uh it
builds Java applicate or Java test
Frameworks but I've now rebuilt it in
Python and I also uh almost have it to a
point now where it will not only
generate you a Java framework test
framework but it will also do c and
python so it's kind of gotten me back
into that code mindset um of
things also within the start of this
journey we at develop Nur kind of made a
shift so Rob uh has kind of stepped back
from the editing side of things and I
have now gotten back into doing video
edits audio edits which I haven't done
in a while so it was kind of fun to dust
off that hat and relearn these tools so
at the beginning of the Season these
edits actually took me hours to get
through because I was fighting the tools
again trying to remember how to do
things uh which tools were good again to
do audio edits versus video edits and it
it was frustrating at first but now it's
fun now I'm even looking at writing AI
apps or automated apps to automate some
of the processes so it it was kind of a
fun Journey it's like well this is what
it takes to do this now how can I make
it better or how can I streamline things
now here we are at the end of the season
and really to do a lot of our edits and
that only takes a couple of hours uh so
I've gone from like a day or two to
getting these edits out to just maybe a
morning's coffee uh over a couple of
days
this also got me back into writing again
so I have been out of the uh blog side
of things for a while because we had
done so many courses we've been teaching
for so long we wrote our new courses for
the school of developer ER and I just
kind of got burned out for a bit it's
like if you are doing a side hustle or
teaching or just blogging you may reach
a point where you get writers blocked or
you just burn out of what it is is
you're doing and from the beginning of
the Season we I was kind of at that
point I was just like okay I don't want
to write any more content for a while I
don't really want to uh write any new
courses I just need a break but by doing
this model I was able to get back into
writing blogs consistently every week
trying to get new material out and it
got me organized again it got my juices
flowing and I'm able to kind of refocus
and we're knocking out content now we're
not quite knocking out those video
courses like we were before those are
coming so keep an eye out for those but
this was a fun Journey so hopefully a
lot of the things we've talked about
like the organizational you know the
optimizing uh your code agnostic
Frameworks these are all the things that
we actually went through all these
challenges that we went through this
season and we've talked about are things
that we went through we learned and
we've discussed the pros and cons with
you
I do want to you touched on a couple
things that I do want to you know bring
up that I found the same thing is that
sometimes um there's a there's an old
phrase sometimes A change is as good as
the rest is sometimes it's just doing
something different is GNA you know
energize you and it's going to get you
out of your your dos or a rut or
something like that and even if you're
doing stuff that you like for example I
have enjoyed RB Consulting I've been
full full-time RB Consulting for 10
years now and and really pushing it and
doing all of the different things
they're involved in like running a
consulting company and bringing people
in and finding work and all of those
pieces but recently I've had a couple of
of areas where I've I've had I've been
dragged back into well not me say drave
but it has worked out good for me to be
the primary developer and
really run a project from start to stop
and and not had you know it's it's been
more individual so it's been much more
just like downcoding building that stuff
out the the whole thing the whole
software development life cycle I've
realized how much I really do enjoy that
part of it and so it's it's been
refreshing to be able to get back into
some of the things that are what gets us
into our career in the first place and
it is something that even as we go
through there are you know our career
our life our professional life there are
may be Seasons that we do certain things
that we are in a certain role and it
really works for us but then maybe
there's some point where that season
changes and we've sort of either
sometimes as we've run sort of our
course it's run the it's course for
whatever that skill set is or whatever
it is that we want to do think about it
like some people it's a second career or
third career like if you're a
professional sports person of some sort
you win some championships and then you
get to Point like okay I've sort of done
that now I want to go do something
else sometimes that's what we do but
it's just we don't have to change
careers we can just change a little bit
our focus and it may be you know for us
maybe it's like hey you know like
Michael said maybe it's like I'm in Java
a lot and have been in Java for a couple
of years and now I want to go back and
spend some time in C or I want to go
work on Ruby or python or you you name
it so you know these are the things part
of becoming a better developer and this
again actually is something you know one
of the things we talked about in the the
book
is finding ways to keep stuff fresh
figuring out what it is you like and
while we really do Focus early on about
as you know as you're starting your
career is like try a bunch of different
stuff figure out what you like and what
you don't like I would say now as I'm
looking back over a a longer career
period I think you regularly need to go
back to that there are things
now for example bill out I've always I
guess I've always sort of liked you know
installing operating systems and putting
stuff up and spinning things up and
things like that but it got out of hand
it was just it was there was just not
much I could do back when you go back 25
30 years and I was you know I was just
like okay you can dual triple quadruple
boot operating systems and you can set
those up and you can do some things but
moving data back and forth between them
was a pain and all that so it became
much more efficient to just pick one and
go with that and then I ended up doing
that and then I got into the Apple world
back world and have just sort of like
gotten away from dual boot almost
completely but then refound it several
years later with Amazon and some of
these cloud services and and Azure and
and going in and and building out a
system and configuring it and and
stalling stuff and getting your
applications run and now you've got a
you know full web server and all of that
kind of stuff a whole solution and not
just like a little app you're running on
your machine that's fun it's like it's
something that's now fun again so you
check out what's out there it maybe that
there's a language that you didn't like
because and I remember early days at
Java there was some stuff was very
painful to do with because it just
didn't have that it wasn't refined it
wasn't there it wasn't complete and now
as they've gone on now there's a lot of
things that you can do with it that it's
very easy as long as you find the right
library and you you know it's like two
or three commands and boom you can do
some cool stuff so
don't don't seal off stuff as options as
you get further into your career you may
want to go back and some of those and
say do I and it may be something like oh
yeah I really hate doing that I don't
ever want to go back that's fine you go
take a little bit of time look at it and
say no I really I still don't like doing
that cool move on to the stuff that you
do because there's so much stuff out
there I think it's it we are not serving
ourselves or our customers or our
families or anybody else if we're not
doing the stuff that we enjoy because
that's what we're going to do best
that's what we were made to do unless
it's sitting you know sitting on a couch
watching and binge watching Netflix that
look a little further try a little
harder than that um there's there's
going to be something out there that is
productive for other people that is
valuable to other people you may be like
I've had the same thing with some of the
stuff I do like Michael said everybody
else thinks this is their living hell if
that's your Heaven you're set because
people will be more than willing to to
support you doing that for them because
they're like hey I hate doing this you
love doing it I will throw bags of money
at you get it done so that's maybe the
best Niche is to find the one that you
love and you're the one person in the
world loves to do it so everybody that
when they get to that job they're like I
got to go find that person because they
actually enjoy doing it so they're not
going to you know they're not going to
complain and moan the whole time that
they do it that's part of becoming a
better developer is stuff like this
periodically do a little house cleaning
do a little
retrospective look back at what have you
done and and this is what I would put to
you each of
you look back yeah beginning this year
so look back but just for you wherever
you're at look back say five months five
six months where were you at five or six
months ago and where are you at now and
what has what has transpired in that
let's say that six-month period how have
you changed how have you grown have you
changed and grown if you're in the exact
same place doing the exact same thing
you were 6 months ago unless this is
like absolutely what you want to do then
and okay maybe you need to look at a
change but also maybe you look at that
and you go like wow I have accomplished
a lot in that period of time I can look
at like for myself I can look on my
personal life there's a whole lot of
stuff I got I got married we were we
changed our date I've got like I've got
kids are gradu I've got all kinds of
stuff that's happened in such a short
period of time that you look back and
you like no wonder I'm tired this is we
got a lot done and so that sometimes
when you're you feel like maybe you're
in a rut or that it's like you're
spinning your wheels you can look back
you realize oh no wait I have I'm not
spinning my wheels we I am making
progress and you can have that uh
optimistic point of view of looking
forward but also that fulfillment of hey
I I have gotten some stuff done and I'm
G to let Michael get something done
right now because I'm going to just sit
back and bask in my getting done that
little monologue so your thoughts well
I'd like to continue you know getting it
done when you're doing those reviews of
yourself and of what you've been working
on or what you've accomplished also look
at what you haven't done and you haven't
accomplished these could be your check
marks or your road map of things that
okay I have not been focusing on these
enough I need to refocus re prioritize
and kind of move forward along with that
what came to my mind as you were kind of
recapping this Rob and we haven't really
touched on this enough especially for
those of you that aren't entrepreneurs
yet or even if you are
are make sure you review your skills
make sure that you're what you're doing
is still relevant you know you don't
want to necessarily be working on a
technology that in six months time is
going away you don't want to be those
people working on an as400 that could
die and go away and whoops you have no
job no technology tomorrow you know so
always make sure you're pushing the
boundaries make sure you're learning the
skills and keeping up to date on things
that's a lot of what we did even with in
this season you know I've gotten AWS
certified again in Cloud uh Computing
I've relearned python I have gone from
java 9 to Java 17 and I'm starting to
learn Java 21 again with the new stuff
and even AI you never stop learning the
trick is to make sure you're always kind
of got your eye on the ball as to the
direction you want to take things with
that with these skill reviews dust off
your resume just off those profiles uh
you know if you're on upwork or if
you're applying for companies look at
your resume make sure that you are
relevantly keeping up with your tasks
what are you working on what is it that
you've done this quarter these are also
things that you can do if you work for
people at the end of the year or at the
end of the quarter you can go to your
manager and say hey I've done X YZ I've
done this I performed at this I've
excelled at this now even if there are
negative like oh you're struggling in
this you can turn that to a positive
when you go to those meetings you can
say hey I've noticed I'm struggling in
this or I'm having problems in this can
we add to my skills or my track to send
me to some training courses or pay for
some online training so that I can get
the help I need so that I can become a
better person better coder and a better
employee for you so that at the end of
the year you can say you can check all
those boxes and say hey I've done this
that negative now turns into a positive
so now you're not necessarily getting a
negative review you're continually
showing that you're growing and that
you're willing to work through your
problems and that's I think that's the
approach we can always look at is we can
how do you improve is you can either
reduce your weaknesses or your negatives
or you can improve on your strengths and
your positives and there is there's a
lot of philosophies around what you
should do more of and how all that works
and some of it does actually flow back
into what do you it's a personal thing
what do you do best or what do you want
to do because some people they they
really struggle to correct the negatives
or it's a negative that you you don't
like that anyway so you're happy to keep
it a negative you it may be something
that it's a you want to just work on
that positive because that's what you
enjoy so you would rather strengthen
that and and that now it again there's a
lot of philosophy so there is like a
diminishing point of return and some
things like that to take into account
but that's all on an individual basis it
goes to where do you want to be and I
think Michael made a perfect point is
even if you don't have if you work
somewhere where you don't have like you
know six month or 12 month or you know
18mon reviews or something like that it
doesn't hurt to just initiate that
anyways is go to your boss and just say
hey I'm just I've been looking at what's
been going on and here's some things
that been going well but here's some
things that aren't and here's where I
want to improve so you you can then sort
of drive that process and then you can
come back 6 months later or whatever it
is and you say hey look I improved these
things and now here's some other things
I want to improve and if you know over
time that suddenly you have that track
record of basically coming to your boss
and saying here's what I can do here's
what I'm going to learn and you've shown
that you will go learn that and that
will now erase negative so you are
bringing them value they are seeing
Returns on their investment in you and
even if you're not in that situation you
can look at it yourself let go assess
yourself figure out where those
negatives are figure out what that time
frame is to re erase them and then you
can now see oh it is maybe it is it's
worth it for me to invest some time to
take a couple days off or to to order
that class or whatever it is because I
know that it will put me in a a better
situation in the future we will be in a
very different situation in the future
because this is the last episode of
season 21 next episode we you hear that
we put out will be Season 22 and we're
still thinking about what that season's
going to be as far as we know I mean
maybe we've figured it out but I don't
think we have so we're going to Jump
Right In we're always open to
suggestions and recommendations and
feedback and all that kind of goodness
because we're doing this for you I mean
yeah we have a we sure have fun we get a
lot out of this we are becoming better
developers as we've noted in this
episode as we are going through these
things but we also want to do that for
you we want to give back we want to help
out where we have learned to improve to
make sure that we're helping others do
the same and of course we're not like
the you know we're not Lan gurus we can
learn from you as well so love to have
that feedback whether it's info@
developer.com whether it's the the
contact us on developer.com our Facebook
page uh you can reach out us on X you
know that thing that used to be called
Twitter developer or and again dve l p r
n e r this wh there we go for the video
people it's like right here for your
audio people sorry it's out there look
it's probably written like six times in
the on the little show notes so you
should be okay with
that that being said we want to wrap
this one up thank you so much for
hanging out with us for yet another
season and we look forward to the next
one with more with you guys looking at
where we can erase our negatives make
more positives and do the same for you
go out there and have yourself a great
day a great week and we will talk to you
next
time and any bonus material you want to
throw in on on this
one
uh yeah so we kind of touched on being a
little proactive there at the end you
know trying to improve yourself with
your job one of the things we have not
touched on really a lot this season is
go out periodically and check the job
sites check out like indeed.com
careerbuilder.com monster.com see what
what positions are out there see what
the industry is driving towards and also
do searches along those Technologies so
if you're doing Java do search on Java
and find out what Java Frameworks or
what Java Technologies are current right
now what is the trend you know are you
you know what is the bleeding edge are
you on the edge are you pushing the edge
or are you starting to fall behind so
these are just some indicators you can
do to try and keep yourself moving in
the right direction within your
industry I I I double you know I I I
second that triple that whatever it is
is it so there's two things one there's
like there's this curve oh because we're
visual I can do this there's like this
curve if stuff goes up and it becomes
popular and then it fades away and then
usually what happens is one's fading is
the other one's coming up and so what
you want to do is as one Fades you want
to jump to that next one before it
becomes like a Y2K issue or something
like that that's nobody want is doing it
anymore so you do need to keep regular l
a breast of such things and that's
actually one of the things I haven't
touched on is that I have done recently
is I've gone back to I've expanded where
I've looked for work and projects and
customers and things that are out there
and what I didn't go into as much was
the details and one of that is that I
actually have started using LinkedIn i'
I've gone to I had I had not used indeed
in I don't think i' been on the site in
15 years and there's some other places
uh solid gigs.com is one that and it it
actually i' used it but then they
changed their algorithm so now they were
actually they're pulling more
information from places like that or
dice.com I used to go to dice all the
time and so it's gotten me now going out
to these sites and one of the things
that's that I think is is worthwhile
doing these is actually going apply
periodically because it it's amazing
that one it will make you update your
resume to some extent and it will help
you understand what the tools are so
like I I haven't done this I haven't
used my resume in years and years and
years and years and years but there's
now a lot of tools that allow you to
just like it'll just suck your resume in
and fill out all of these insanely long
processes of forms which if anybody
knows me knows I hate form that's why
I'm in this business is to just kill
forms everywhere I hate the forms you
should have to like you enter your data
once and you should never have to enter
your data again that's the
goal but now my wife has done a bunch of
this kind of stuff and so she said oh
yeah I've got this I've got I like work
with some people people I've got a
resume that's built for those systems
and I'm like wow that's exactly the kind
of stuff that I go talk to other people
about is like how do you build your
documents your data so that it is
easiest to integrate with other systems
so that's one of the things I'm I have
got on my to-do list for myself is to
rewrite my resume in a format that is
much more importable into these systems
how much I'm going to use that I don't
know because it's one of those like I
don't know how long I'm going to be
using these but it is still
often an entryway into talking to
somebody about a position that they have
or openings that they have or what's
their C company like and it is
also I know I've always said I think
doing regular interviews is a benefit to
you because like Michael said one you
figure out what's out there what's hot
what's not what's fading what's Cutting
Edge what's bleeding edge what's dying
out also you're going to figure out what
are what is the market price for this
skill set if you're out there and you're
a consultant and you're having to figure
out how to price your skills then you
want to see what that what does that
look like in the in the market and
that's also so if you get into like
pricing discussions and stuff like that
with your customers and they say wow
that seems like a lot of money then you
can say well look if you do it out in
the market this is what it's going to
take you that's the whole you know the
difference that it's like hey yeah it's
it may be ridiculous that it's going to
cost you know that you may think it's
too much for me to charge $75 an hour
for three months on a project but if you
had to hire somebody they're going to
ask you for $150,000 salary well guess
what you're basically going to pay them
but now you're locked into all of that
extra stuff for having employee so
there's those kinds of conversations you
can have and you're G to have them best
when you have the backing knowledge of
this is what the market has and you're
also going to find sometimes gems of
your skills things that you've done that
you may not realize that it's now that's
like a very like you know Niche and
valuable skill as things have progressed
so it could be like a like Python's one
I I first touched
python I don't know 15 20 years ago it's
been a long time ago and it was a thing
it was it had its like little niches and
stuff like that well now it's like the
number it's in the top three languages I
think it may be number one growth
language for the last few years so this
stuff that I had in the past I had
really thought of and I sort of enjoyed
doing it but now as I'm getting back
into that it feeds itself because it's
like hey there's also a lot of jobs out
there so I think those are those are
some excellent points uh parting
thoughts before we sort of wrap this one
up and right off into the sunset before
we come back around on Sunrise and start
our next
season yeah just you know believe in
yourself don't you know there are times
as developers as entrepreneurs where you
might get into a rut or you might be in
that position where I'm not sure where
to
go work through that you know listen to
what we've talked about read our blogs
you know go look at other material
online about you know presenting
yourself working on your business uh
getting better you know the these are it
it's a never-ending Journey you you
can't just say hey I know this I'm going
to go out there I'm going to be
successful you will never succeed if you
just don't continue to learn if you just
go out and just try to push through it's
not going to work constant learning
constant growing and you're going to
have to build a community you're going
to have to work through things and don't
go at it alone find a friend find a
mentor and work through
I think that's a good I think that's
like I'm just going to let that sit
because I that's a really good like
finishing thought so for all of you
thank you again for hanging out with us
for this season as we said before and we
look forward to stepping into the next
one and exploring just all the other
ways to become better developers as we
go into uh for us is now going to be the
second half of the Year and that may be
that may be where we end up maybe it be
around the end of this year most likely
it will be actually I guess as we finish
the next season uh and then we'll get in
because we'll have some of our standard
holiday specials and some things like
that along the way because those are
always fun and Michael hasn't been able
to enjoy those in the past so we'll get
to do all of those fun little things
going into the the latter part of years
that being said go out there and have
yourself a great day and we will talk to
you next time
[Music]