Detailed Notes
When you’re overloaded, burned out, and still trying to ship, momentum can feel impossible. In this episode of the Building Better Developers podcast (Forward Momentum season), we talk about the practical habits that keep you moving: communicating early, breaking work into small wins, and using AI with guardrails so it helps instead of creating risk.
We also dig into enterprise AI realities—why trust, cost controls, and customer data boundaries matter—and how building data literacy can future-proof your career.
Subscribe for more episodes from the Forward Momentum season.
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Transcript Text
Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuning our season where we are getting unstuck. We're moving forward. We're getting forward momentum. We are getting out of the starting blocks and starting our race. And sometimes you start at a little bit slower pace, but we're going to try to do oursel best to like get a really good start at any rate. What are we talking about? We're talking about bidding better developers, the developor podcast. And I am talking about myself for a second, Robadhead, one of the founders of developor building better developers, also the founder of RB Consulting. where we help you with a technology reality check. Take a look through your junk drawer, clean that stuff up, get you a road map for success in moving forward. Good thing and bad thing. Good thing is I have made it through January at this point. It has been a crazy month. Like weather issues, moving issues, all kinds of stuff. It's just been a really crazy month. So, the good thing is I have survived the month. Uh, on a bad note though, doing all this stuff and being very busy, I have really gotten off of my um physical fitness kind of routine and stuff like that. I'm running around doing a lot of stuff, so I don't feel like horrible, but also I think I could do a little bit better. So, it's one of the things that it wasn't on my uh my road map, my my radar for the beginning of the year as maybe a resolution was to like just make sure I'm getting my regular routine in. But now, as I get into February, maybe I need to do a February resolution and do that. Uh, another thing I resolved to do is stop running my mouth and go ahead and pass this over to Michael so he can introduce himself. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Malashsh, one of the co-founders of Developer, building better developers. I'm also the founder of Envision QA where we build and test custom software that eliminates the bottlenecks. That way, your business can run smoother and grow faster. Uh, good thing, bad thing. Uh good thing uh the snow is finally going away. It will be gone hopefully this week and uh life will get back to normal. Uh bad thing is similar to Rob because of the snow being snowed in for 10 days plus days iced in I should say not snow. Uh you really don't get to move around too much. Yes, you can move around your house, but that is very limited. Uh, however, you tend to be even more limited if you try to go walk on ice to chase your dog and you find out that living on a hill is not fun. Uh, once you slide, you are stuck till you figure out how to crunch your way back through solid ice. Yes, just yet another way that you need to figure out how to get unstuck. A nice little, you know, segue back into our conversation with Andrew Stevens is going to continue. This is part two. We're going to pick up right where we left off. And uh this is get like get your pencil and paper out because there's plenty of notes to be taken. He drops a lot of great knowledge bombs and uh I'm looking forward to you guys also experiencing part two. And here we go. One of the things uh we haven't discussed yet, which I'm curious, is given a lot of the similarities to your style that I I see with mine, how do you prevent yourself from burnout? How do you pre prevent yourself from kind of reaching that cognitive load where you have too much? It's like, yes, you you're still getting things done, but you're slowing down. things aren't getting done as completely or you're just not hitting your goals, you're not hitting your deadlines and is it uh you know when it it's you've either taken on too much or things just aren't working. How do you kind of reset? How do you kind of work through those uh kind of times? >> Yeah, I think every problem has its own focus or or own method to resolve. You know, again, I'll talk about that. lucky to have a partner that um I can work with. So sometimes her interests align with mine and we we'll carve up a particular issue or problem and and work through that. So I'm lucky to be personable. Um sometimes you know I'm working with uh great friends and co-founding things with me. So you know I can work with them from that level. I think it's about communication initially is uh you know it it's okay to be busy and it's okay to be be behind um but as long as that's communicated and and that's one thing again that it's very easy to get lost in your own thought and lost in your own deadline and and forget that people are not necessarily aware of the issue that you're working through. So you need to communicate, you need to be upfront and working with your stakeholders of of any kind. Um so that's always important. But when I'm working on my own product for myself, um, how do I handle that? You know, for me, I'll try and pick something small and make it achievable and and work through that. Sometimes you look at a big problem or a lot of deadlines, whatever, and you go, how am I ever going to do any of this? So, I'll try and achieve something small and do that. And that makes me feel better about the the issue or the item. Um, and I'll do that on whatever's in my queue or whatever I've identified. So, you know, sometimes there are things I just don't want to do. Business administration, you just put it off to the last minute and, you know, hate it. You know, we've got tax deadlines coming up soon. And, um, last year was a busy year, so I delayed my tax returns until October and now it's suddenly on top of me again. And I'll never do that again because usually you got a whole year to wait. This time it's only like six months. So, I'm not going to do that ever again. So, some lessons learned to late in life, but um uh you need to push through the compliance things and that those are always the hardest I find. Uh for me, it's fun like I can always find more time to read that um uh new technical thing that's out like meshtastic I mentioned earlier is something that I'm really into at the moment. I'm looking at uh these alternative networking methods and things like that. So there's always plenty of time to look at the product and look at what whatever's on Kickstarter or whatever um in the product space and that's always a lot of fun. So uh for me a lot of the engineering things are actually downtime and it just continues to build. So you know I'm lucky from that perspective. How do I handle my time? Um yeah sometimes I do get close to burnout. I'll just keep working those hours and I'll get to a point where I just can't sleep anymore or I need to do it and that's when you know it's good to have people around you that will tap you on the shoulder and just say you got to back off or whatever. It's good. Um you know it's something I got to guard against. So I don't have any solution for everybody. It's just something that I'll try and manage by breaking big things into smaller chunks to feel more successful. Um, from a mental perspective, uh, motivation wise, those small things, those small achievable things help me keep me motivated. The big demotivator is is compliance and taxes, getting those done on time. I think we all hate um doing that paperwork, but it's got to be done. So, um, I I think those are the two opposite ends, you know, the the cool tech stuff and and the terrible compliance stuff. The opposite ends, you know, stuff you must do. That's why there are, you know, very large accounting companies that make a lot of money because, you know, you've got no choice. Then there's all these poor struggling tech people that it's optional spend. So, you know, that that's the balance here, I guess. >> Yeah. Rob likes to uh talk about eating the frog all the time. You know, get the hard thing out of the way first. And sometimes that's possible. Sometimes you got to break it down into smaller pieces to kind of work your way through it. Uh, interestingly enough though, uh, through your explanation there, you didn't touch on AI. So are you not using AI at all to kind of help you organize things um plan things or are you just kind of keeping that out of AI and just using AI strictly for engineering and software development? >> Yeah, so I use engineering like I said for software engineering for sure. Um I do use AI um I'm using some great tool in Gemini Enterprise that helps me with my calendar with a client or two. So, it'll look at my calendar and just say, you know, I'll I'll get it to give me a daily rundown of what I need to do today from the client's perspective. It'll give me a summary of emails overnight, my um instant messages, my Jurro tickets, all those kinds of things. It'll give me a basic summary of the day. I always take that with a bit of grain of salt because, you know, LLMs get it wrong. Um, so you know, but it will give me a decent summary and I'll use that as a basis for my customer that has that enabled. I'll do that absolutely. Um, but I use nothing across the customer. So I try and keep things siloed and isolated. Uh, because you know it's still a bit of a trust factor with AI. Yeah, I I definitely don't want the wrong data into the wrong AI model in in history somewhere that is not appropriate. So I I do try and keep that separate and um I will um in those allocated times I'll use AI specifically for the customers that have it. So yes, to a degree I do do that. >> Yeah, I would say that's like that's probably one of the best um I I've said I was actually having a discussion the other day is I think my AI spin has been one of the best spins I've had on a tool in I don't know probably ever. Uh and part of it is is very valuable. It's it's very helpful to have that ability to just like have folders and have stuff completely separated out and be able to to sort of, you know, not have those things bleed over. Uh, however, like and I have a few checks along the way. So, if something does bleed over, then I'm like, "Hey, wait a minute." Like, you're getting out of your way and you're touching something you shouldn't. And >> gives me some heads up if I need to go, you know, dig a little deeper. Uh, but I did want to swing back because I think there's two things there's like one I think I've talked a lot not only about like eating the frog and just get the stuff out of the way that you don't want to do, but also the value of incremental improvement of just like get a little bit you know each day and I think it is I think sort of to follow up your thought there is the that little bit even if you can break it down to little chunks at least you get a win. you can get to the end of the day and you're like, I did this little thing and it was progress. And now when I just, you know, when you're getting that burnout, it's like you just need a win. You just like, I need to feel like I'm not spinning my wheels and stuck in a rut. And I think that does a huge amount for you. It just gets that little bit uh going. And um the other thing I'll throw out is I have found I have found that throwing my schedule at AI and I'll just say like does this make sense? Is this reasonable? And it does do a lot about saying like hey this is probably this is gonna be a long day or you know or I'll say like here's what I want to achieve over the next two months and it'll say yeah you could do that but it's going to be difficult or yeah you should be able to do it and it's like you said you got to take it with a grain of salt but it can help you get a little bit of a a sanity check sometimes as as well I felt for all of these pieces. Um >> yeah I I do use Gemini Enterprise to um reschedule meetings for me. So, I'll look at him and say, "Oh, can you email that person at that time and reschedule it and propose a new time and things like that?" So, it can it can do that for me for sure. So, I I do like that. Um, yeah. Sorry, I interrupted. Keep going, Rob. >> No, I was just going to say I was actually going to dive into a question. So, have you found yourself because now that we're sort of talking about it and you we've talked about the needing some guard rails with AI and stuff like that. Have you found yourself um like dipping a toe in and edging more and more into AI and feeling more comfortable with it or have you sort of just you have sort of like here's a guard's rails and and this is where its place is right now. This is its lane. >> Um I because I I have a number of projects on the AI trust is at different levels um for those customers or for those projects. Uh for myself, I I use AI a lot in my developer productivity. So that that that helps me a lot. Um again, never get touch of code in production. Oh, it's very good for documentation as well. So I do use it to help me document things. Um I'll get it to produce mermaid, which I use tools for diagramming and things like that. So that's pretty cool. So that's really helped me um become I don't know documentation cut my documentation time in half. So that's been great. um you know some of my customers I have a banking customer in Europe uh I've worked very very closely with them to develop um an in-house trustworthy deterministic AI agent and you know adoption 85% of the company's using it or the bank is using it with over half of the company using it daily. So, you know, that's that what I'd take I would take that as a high success uh rate and um because it's got a deterministic wrapper around the tooling. So, when you go from an AI agent into your tools, there's determinism in there and um you know, we've got an I've built an AI control plane and it's doing some really cool stuff in there and that bank is quite happy. Uh then I've got customers down the other end where the CEO accidentally left the AI recording on in a meeting said some stuff that uh they didn't want recorded and it got distributed to everybody and then it becomes you know public knowledge or whatever. So their trust in AI is very low. Whereas you know I've got a a highly regulated bank in the European system and their trust is very high because you know it's it's had the the data warehouse and the um IM and the Arbback all set up properly and everything's correct from the very beginning. So again opposite ends of the spectrum uh and you know the customer down this end that accidentally recorded the the wrong meeting with AI the AI conversation is dead in the water. It will never go anywhere. Uh whereas at the other end they're looking at other ways to do more with it. Uh you know the CEO has even talked about putting his own voice on it and stuff like that. So which I find funny but um interesting. >> That's actually you know that's a that's a funny thing. I don't think we've actually talked about that. We've not in a professional sense, but we've definitely had those conversations uh because of how we do recording and things like that for the podcast and even some of the conversations that we've had uh internal conversations and things like that we've had on the team because we uh Michael and I both we have a lot of remote people that we work with and sometimes you get conversations you get things on a call that u you know you weren't expecting and I'll just give a a brief anecdote story as I had a developer that jumped into a Zoom call early one time and it was open and it was recording from the start because I just I don't trust myself to hit record often enough and he was on there for about 2 or 3 minutes and was by himself and was working his way through a a problem and was you know was sitting there coding while he was waiting and ended up sort of cussing quite a bit cuz he was like talking his way through the problem and so I had to warn him I was like hey next time you jump onto a call make sure you mute yourself first you know there's those kinds of things it's like and I guess everybody's got those stories of like somebody left a camera on, they didn't realize or somebody walked across a shot or things like that. But particularly now with the um the AI agents that are out there that you don't always control that now is you'll have somebody that will jump in uh I've got a customer jumps. There's like three AI agents that jump in that are notetakers that jump in before he ever shows up. And it's just like you get all of these things and it's just because people are trying them out and then they forget to shut them off and you know you have to kick them out or block them and all that kind of stuff. But it's uh it's definitely I think a whole new world out there that's uh we have different things we have to be aware of. It's like it's I guess it is it's a it's now like that's just society too is people have got cameras everywhere, they've got recorders everywhere. AI seems to be everywhere. So you have to be just that much more diligent about about what you do. Now I want to because we are sort of getting there on time, but I want to swing around to uh all the way back to the stories you talked about. you're also u a board member uh plus you've been you know with a couple companies is like because I think a lot of developers struggle with that that bridge from being a developer to being somebody that's like on a board or being even I think sometimes to like a CTO CIO fractional kind of thing. So what would be and I this is actually more of I guess even a little bit of a personal thing but it's like how would you address somebody that was that was you know a midlevel developer something like that that's thinking like maybe this is something I want to do or they also may be thinking this is something that is never going to be be for me. How does that how does that fit in your uh engineer developer kind of mindset being in those positions? >> Yeah. Um, one of the biggest joys I get out of my roles in life is giving a a job to somebody or giving somebody opportunity to develop. You know, if I if I you know, if I recruit you, I want to see you become uh the very best version that I can help you become in the time that I that I'm with you. And you know, you're not going to I don't pretend you're going to be with my with me or my team forever, right? you're going to move on and hopefully it's the next thing is bigger and better and it's another step in your career. >> So for me, I'll try and work with these >> mid levels and identify where they want to go in their career and work with them and I do spend a lot of time one-on-one um with the people that want it. You know, some people don't want it, some people do. Uh and I'll try and work with them a lot. uh from my perspective um you know in my 20s I first started coding I thought it was my entire role was nothing else but knowing the tech inside out and and being the best tech person in the room right and that's what I thought my role was and maybe it was when I was like a junior or mid you know I really wanted to be the best hard no I wanted to be the person that could answer anything technical about the platform about the the language anything Um and I guess by the time I hit my 30s, I really realized that um actually technology is all about people. So the the the time you spend working with people and understanding their problems, their needs uh and what they want out of the business or out of the software you're working on is really the connecting factor, right? Um businesses only exist uh to make sales, right? And the only way you can make sales is through people. All right? So um for me my advice would be focus on the technology absolutely but also do not ignore the personal side of tech and really spend that time to connect with your customers connect with your peers uh and connect with your management. You know one of the first conversations I like to have with um you know any new customer or anybody that you know if I've gone in as a consultant or something you know what are your KPIs? what do you need to look good and to get your job done? You know, if I work with a new partner, I'll say, you know, how do you make money? What can I do to make sure that, you know, you you get um your your reward? So, you know, when I work with a hyperscaler, for example, in their sales teams or their um their partner programs, try and work out what they need from me to deliver on their KPIs and not only my own KPI. So, I try and become cognizant of what my team members need um as well that I'm working with. So I I think that goes two ways and it's all about communication for people that want to work up the ladder. you know in team in larger scale teams I work with I tend to have a fork in the road for technical people do they want to stay tech and and focus on that and you know that that takes you down say a tech lead role an architect role potentially an architect role is a bit special because there's a lot of business interpretation requirements a lot of lot of customerf facing but you know that's that's kind of one pathway or if you want to become more more peopleley you know that's the software development manager that's that sort of thing so you know I I tend to see a bit of a natural fork in the road. If you're more of a people person, you might head down that path. Um or or if you're more technical, you head down the other path. Or there's a the third path, which is the solar entrepreneur or the entrepreneurial part where you want to um take a bit of both. And um I'll try to think of a polite way of saying this, but I always said to myself, you know, I always work for somebody that I I have problems with. I don't agree with their decisions necessarily. Um, and if I was a boss, I'll do it this way. And I realized that for a long time that I I use a more colorful language when I say it to myself. And then I thought I should go out there and do this stuff myself because if someone's going to make a mistake, I'd rather blame me and influence things myself than than sit there disgruntled about, you know, that technical decision or or that product feature or or that marketing campaign or whatever. So I' I'd rather be the person making the mistakes and working for somebody I think are making mistakes. So for me it's it's about um you know taking on the accountability, the responsibility and and doing the things those things myself and I really love that fact that um I can make a decision and make influence or make a strong influence on my customers outcomes or or my software outcomes and that's great and of course you know I work for fractional CTO roles and I help them um you know deliver the best that they can in their their product spaces. as well and you know even that gives me frustration sometimes like I've got some experiences and you know I've I've delivered some really large projects my largest project had 80 million users so um that is a decent product uh 75,000 servers if anyone's interested 25 20,000 Cassandra nodes uh in three rings but um but all aside you know I've had some great experience on on product development and in the consulting or the the fractional roles, you don't necessarily get to bring that because there's somebody else's product vision that you're working with and that kind of grates for me sometimes. But those are parts the human things I talk about. You know, for me it's like it's learning. Um I'll drop into an organization, learn something new and um work out what I could do to improve things and I love to practice that as well. So the advice is is listen and learn, work with people and understand where the value comes from and where they derive the value and you can apply that to your own projects and your own products and um you know really come much closer to a great outcome. >> That's great. Um we are getting really close on time. So I just kind of want follow up real quick. Um, what are we've talked about AI on that and you've talked about using enterprise versus consumer models. Uh, what are some of the enterprise tools specifically that you use that our listeners could kind of check out because I'm kind of interested in what everyone's using because you just kind of hear the basics online. You got to dig into some of these other ones. What are some of the specific ones that you like to use? Um gez I' I've used um probably almost every paidful model that you can get out there. I think uh you know from Claude through to ChatGpt through to Gemini Enterprise you know I've developed products with um Bedrock uh I've gone open source I've I've done all sorts of things. Um, my preferred tooling, uh, you know, I love Gemini Enterprise as a product because it it hooks natively into my Google Workspace. Uh, so I can expose Jurro to it's got a whole bunch of inbuilt connectors. I can automatically surface existing things I use. So, I find that great. And then they've got their um ADK uh, which allows me to write custom software and custom agents to do tooling. And that allows me to stick in um the deter deterministic layer I've written allows me to stick in um an AI control plane. And what I mean by an AI control plane, it uh monitors my token so I don't overspend. You know, I've had a customer uh wrote an infinite loop to test their model out and they uploaded a document of 50,000 spaces or something and they they had like a $100,000 bill in 24 hours because uh you know a space is still a token or still adds towards a token. So even if you're sending up a blank document, that's still going to charge you. So you know these sorts of things to capture that uh to protect PII end to end encryption all all sorts of really cool stuff there that you should be doing. Um, you know, I I see, you know, even um prompt injection synonymous with SQL injection that we tried to solve in the early 2000s. You know, people were injecting um bad things into our databases. People are doing that today. So anyway, so I find the software development kits great. Um I completely avoid all consumer models. Totally. I never touch anything that's free. I never touch anything that's um uh I might try something as an anonymous user, but I'll certainly never put any real names, data, or anything into it ever. Um and that's why I've I've leaned towards self-hosted um open source LLMs with Alarm or other tools as well. So I I tend to use those um or Google Google Gemini Enterprise is where I've wound up. So u for my daily driver I guess is is where where I find comfortable. I find it very good because um you know I do a lot of Kubernetes work. I do a lot of um uh go as well and they both come out of the Google stable. So you know Gemini is clear clearly trained on um Google documentation. So it has a very close tie for a lot of my technical stuff and because I use Workspace as well. So that's where I'm at. Uh so I'm a bit skewed because of my Google reliance I guess in a professional manner. Um personally again it's open source. I I I self-host my own um servers and everything. I do my own email domains. Uh whitelisting my IPs are difficult as we all know for email serving. But um uh yeah there's a divide there and I keep them very very separate. Well, I think we have, as Michael alluded to, we have pretty much run out of time. And once again, it is just like flown right by. There was uh I think we could do this for a couple more hours and have no problem whatsoever. Just like lots, I said, a lot of different questions and a lot of different things to uh to unpack along the way. But, uh appreciate so much your time and want to be respectful of it. So, uh one of the things is I know that you've you've brought up a lot of of interesting things and uh cool ideas. What is the best way for somebody to get a hold of you if they have some further questions or they just want to learn more about what you guys are working on? >> Yeah. Uh what I've worked on recently um I've written a white paper uh on uh AI for execs on putting together strategies. So that's just hit white paper.d download/AI playbook. Um that'll get you to a document that I've collaborated with. It also has my LinkedIn details. So I'm happy to hear from anyone on any topic. Um I don't outsource any of my data. So I I I won't I'm not a good out provider from that perspective. But um uh data is too too protected. I think um >> Tim Berners Lee said uh you know software comes and goes but data um stays forever or whatever it is. I can't remember the exact quote but uh data is where it's all at. Anyway, so I hit white paper.download. There's an AI playbook there and it's got my contact details and um uh you can contact me without downloading the white paper if you like, but uh have a read. It's it's it's um good for execs or people that want to put together an AI strategy. >> Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time and uh we'll get make sure for those you guys that are there have that in the show notes so you can uh reach out and and check that out. Uh I think that I'm now curious about the white paper itself. I think that'll probably be a really good read for everybody. Uh you may want to like slip it under your boss's door or whatever as well depending on how that goes or under his virtual door or her virtual door. Um thank you so much for your time. Appreciate you hanging out with us today. Uh for all of you that are listening uh thank you so much for again for your time. Uh pencil's down. You can stop taking notes for now. We will return next time with another interview uh with more information and just chugging away on how you can keep that forward momentum going. Until then, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. So, bonus material. Uh let's go with this like what would be um looking over your career too is like so as going into 2026 if there's a say a mid-level engineer what would be something that you'd say like here's something that you should do this year in sort of a general sense like here's something you should do that would that would help your career or help you you know just become a better engineer. Um I think trends been understanding technology trends have been critical. So for me, you know, I saw the internet, the web, um cloud computing, uh mobile, um machine learning, AI, right? Those are the been some very very big identifiable trends. And right now AI is big. You know, there's a lot of comment about AI slop and all those kind of things. And there is some terrible stuff out there. Uh but it's going to get better and it's here to stay. you know, dialup internet was terrible, but today's um Starlink is great. You know, being out in uh upstate New York, if it wasn't for Starlink, I'd have no internet. So, um you know, it's a long way from dialup internet. So, things evolve and they start off terrible, but being across the trends. I remember um uh Amazon when S3 first came out, I I looked and just said, "Yeah, that's kind of cool, but what the heck am I going to do with it?" Today it's a backbone of the internet. Google app engine same thing. I thought that was kind of cool. It didn't have any persistent storage that's kind of cool but what can I do with it nowadays it's progressed on. So mid-level developer I definitely think um proficiency in data and understanding data and and those sorts of things and data is what drives AI. Data is what drives your software applications. So um continue to develop your data skills. Uh understanding what you can get more out of your data. Uh you know and your CEO might not be asking today for it but they'll ask for the data in in 12 months time. So just just be cognizant of the data and and stick to it. Uh so build up your data literacy because that is what persists. Absolutely. >> Yeah. That's actually it's funny. I just finished writing an article about uh the value of glue code and that's really what it comes down to is it's like it's there's all these different tools and all these different things but the bottom line is understanding how that data moves around all of those different systems and if you understand the data then that like that's half the b probably more than way more than half the battle if you understand the data and how it needs to work and how it needs to move then the rest of it becomes more or less I mean it's I'm simplifying but it becomes sort of like a mathematical you know task At that point, it's just like, okay, how do I get it to go from here to here and make sure that it maintains its its integrity essentially. So, that's a that's a great point and I agree 100%. I think that the AI uh AI is just it's going to be here. It's it has moved a lot even in the last 6 months, year, you know, two years and I think it's just that seems to be that's where everybody's betting their money right now. So, we're going to see movement there. It's going to improve. there's just there's too many smart people working on it to just not have it see that it's going to be better and better. And we're learning how to deal with the slop a little bit just like we did, you know, dealing with the thousands of Google pages early on with searches and and all of the internet sites that were out there, all of the ISPs that eventually, you know, formed into a couple of things or disappeared and went into, you know, the backbone that we have today. >> We have run out of time, so I I want to be respectful of the time. Thanks so much. This was this was awesome. Uh, I know it took us a little bit, a couple of reschedules to to get this going. So, thank you for for sticking around with us through this and, uh, this was it definitely was a great payoff. Um, like I said, we've got so many other things. We may reach out and and try to, you know, connect again at some point in the future because this was a a great conversation and I think we just hit the tip of the iceberg at best with some of the ways we can places we can go with direct conversations with you. So, thanks so much for your time, Andrew. >> I appreciate it. Love speaking with you. Happy to speak again. Glad we called up. Yep. Have a good day. >> Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
Transcript Segments
Well, hello and welcome back. We are
continuning our season where we are
getting unstuck. We're moving forward.
We're getting forward momentum. We are
getting out of the starting blocks and
starting our race. And sometimes you
start at a little bit slower pace, but
we're going to try to do oursel best to
like get a really good start at any
rate. What are we talking about? We're
talking about bidding better developers,
the developor podcast. And I am talking
about myself for a second, Robadhead,
one of the founders of developor
building better developers, also the
founder of RB Consulting. where we help
you with a technology reality check.
Take a look through your junk drawer,
clean that stuff up, get you a road map
for success in moving forward.
Good thing and bad thing.
Good thing is I have made it through
January at this point. It has been a
crazy month. Like weather issues,
moving issues, all kinds of stuff. It's
just been a really crazy month. So, the
good thing is I have survived the month.
Uh, on a bad note though, doing all this
stuff and being very busy, I have really
gotten off of my um physical fitness
kind of routine and stuff like that. I'm
running around doing a lot of stuff, so
I don't feel like horrible, but also I
think I could do a little bit better.
So, it's one of the things that it
wasn't on my uh my road map, my my radar
for the beginning of the year as maybe a
resolution was to like just make sure
I'm getting my regular routine in. But
now, as I get into February, maybe I
need to do a February resolution and do
that. Uh, another thing I resolved to do
is stop running my mouth and go ahead
and pass this over to Michael so he can
introduce himself. Hey everyone, my name
is Michael Malashsh, one of the
co-founders of Developer, building
better developers. I'm also the founder
of Envision QA where we build and test
custom software that eliminates the
bottlenecks. That way, your business can
run smoother and grow faster. Uh, good
thing, bad thing. Uh good thing uh the
snow is finally going away. It will be
gone hopefully this week and uh life
will get back to normal. Uh bad thing is
similar to Rob because of the snow being
snowed in for 10 days plus days iced in
I should say not snow. Uh you really
don't get to move around too much. Yes,
you can move around your house, but that
is very limited. Uh, however, you tend
to be even more limited if you try to go
walk on ice to chase your dog and you
find out that living on a hill is not
fun. Uh, once you slide, you are stuck
till you figure out how to crunch your
way back through solid ice.
Yes, just yet another way that you need
to figure out how to get unstuck. A nice
little, you know, segue back into our
conversation with Andrew Stevens is
going to continue. This is part two.
We're going to pick up right where we
left off. And uh this is get like get
your pencil and paper out because
there's plenty of notes to be taken. He
drops a lot of great knowledge bombs and
uh I'm looking forward to you guys also
experiencing part two. And here we go.
One of the things uh we haven't
discussed yet, which I'm curious, is
given a lot of the similarities to your
style that I I see with mine, how do you
prevent yourself from burnout? How do
you pre
prevent yourself from kind of reaching
that cognitive load where you have too
much? It's like, yes, you you're still
getting things done, but you're slowing
down. things aren't getting done as
completely or you're just not hitting
your goals, you're not hitting your
deadlines and is it uh you know when it
it's you've either taken on too much or
things just aren't working. How do you
kind of reset? How do you kind of work
through those uh kind of times?
>> Yeah, I think every problem has its own
focus or or own method to resolve. You
know, again, I'll talk about that. lucky
to have a partner that um I can work
with. So sometimes her interests align
with mine and we we'll carve up a
particular issue or problem and and work
through that. So I'm lucky to be
personable. Um sometimes you know I'm
working with uh great friends and
co-founding things with me. So you know
I can work with them from that level. I
think it's about communication initially
is uh you know it it's okay to be busy
and it's okay to be be behind um but as
long as that's communicated and and
that's one thing again that it's very
easy to get lost in your own thought and
lost in your own deadline and and forget
that people are not necessarily aware of
the issue that you're working through.
So you need to communicate, you need to
be upfront and working with your
stakeholders of of any kind. Um so
that's always important. But when I'm
working on my own product for myself,
um, how do I handle that?
You know, for me, I'll try and pick
something small and make it achievable
and and work through that. Sometimes you
look at a big problem or a lot of
deadlines, whatever, and you go, how am
I ever going to do any of this? So, I'll
try and achieve something small and do
that. And that makes me feel better
about the the issue or the item. Um, and
I'll do that on whatever's in my queue
or whatever I've identified. So, you
know, sometimes there are things I just
don't want to do. Business
administration, you just put it off to
the last minute and, you know,
hate it. You know, we've got tax
deadlines coming up soon. And, um, last
year was a busy year, so I delayed my
tax returns until October and now it's
suddenly on top of me again. And I'll
never do that again because usually you
got a whole year to wait. This time it's
only like six months. So, I'm not going
to do that ever again. So, some lessons
learned to late in life, but um uh you
need to push through the compliance
things and that those are always the
hardest I find. Uh for me, it's fun like
I can always find more time to read that
um uh new technical thing that's out
like meshtastic I mentioned earlier is
something that I'm really into at the
moment. I'm looking at uh these
alternative networking methods and
things like that. So there's always
plenty of time to look at the product
and look at what whatever's on
Kickstarter or whatever um in the
product space and that's always a lot of
fun. So uh for me a lot of the
engineering things are actually downtime
and it just continues to build. So you
know I'm lucky from that perspective.
How do I handle my time? Um
yeah sometimes I do get close to
burnout. I'll just keep working those
hours and I'll get to a point where I
just can't sleep anymore or I need to do
it and that's when you know it's good to
have people around you that will tap you
on the shoulder and just say you got to
back off or whatever. It's good. Um
you know it's something I got to guard
against. So I don't have any solution
for everybody. It's just something that
I'll try and manage by breaking big
things into smaller chunks to feel more
successful. Um, from a mental
perspective, uh, motivation wise, those
small things, those small achievable
things help me keep me motivated. The
big demotivator is is compliance and
taxes, getting those done on time. I
think we all hate um doing that
paperwork, but it's got to be done. So,
um, I I think those are the two opposite
ends, you know, the the cool tech stuff
and and the terrible compliance stuff.
The opposite ends, you know, stuff you
must do. That's why there are, you know,
very large accounting companies that
make a lot of money because, you know,
you've got no choice. Then there's all
these poor struggling tech people that
it's optional spend. So, you know, that
that's the balance here, I guess.
>> Yeah. Rob likes to uh talk about eating
the frog all the time. You know, get the
hard thing out of the way first. And
sometimes that's possible. Sometimes you
got to break it down into smaller pieces
to kind of work your way through it. Uh,
interestingly enough though, uh, through
your explanation there, you didn't touch
on AI. So are you not using AI at all to
kind of help you organize things um plan
things or are you just kind of keeping
that out of AI and just using AI
strictly for engineering and software
development?
>> Yeah, so I use engineering like I said
for software engineering for sure. Um I
do use AI um I'm using some great tool
in Gemini Enterprise that helps me with
my calendar with a client or two. So,
it'll look at my calendar and just say,
you know, I'll I'll get it to give me a
daily rundown of what I need to do today
from the client's perspective. It'll
give me a summary of emails overnight,
my um instant messages, my Jurro
tickets, all those kinds of things.
It'll give me a basic summary of the
day. I always take that with a bit of
grain of salt because, you know, LLMs
get it wrong. Um, so you know, but it
will give me a decent summary and I'll
use that as a basis for my customer that
has that enabled. I'll do that
absolutely. Um, but I use nothing across
the customer. So I try and keep things
siloed and isolated. Uh, because you
know it's still a bit of a trust factor
with AI. Yeah, I I definitely don't want
the wrong data into the wrong AI model
in in history somewhere that is not
appropriate. So I I do try and keep that
separate and um I will um in those
allocated times I'll use AI specifically
for the customers that have it. So yes,
to a degree I do do that.
>> Yeah, I would say that's like that's
probably one of the best um I I've said
I was actually having a discussion the
other day is I think my AI spin has been
one of the best spins I've had on a tool
in I don't know probably ever. Uh and
part of it is is very valuable. It's
it's very helpful to have that ability
to just like have folders and have stuff
completely separated out and be able to
to sort of, you know, not have those
things bleed over. Uh, however, like and
I have a few checks along the way. So,
if something does bleed over, then I'm
like, "Hey, wait a minute." Like, you're
getting out of your way and you're
touching something you shouldn't. And
>> gives me some heads up if I need to go,
you know, dig a little deeper. Uh, but I
did want to swing back because I think
there's two things there's like one I
think I've talked a lot not only about
like eating the frog and just get the
stuff out of the way that you don't want
to do, but also the value of incremental
improvement of just like get a little
bit you know each day and I think it is
I think sort of to follow up your
thought there is the that little bit
even if you can break it down to little
chunks at least you get a win. you can
get to the end of the day and you're
like, I did this little thing and it was
progress. And now when I just, you know,
when you're getting that burnout, it's
like you just need a win. You just like,
I need to feel like I'm not spinning my
wheels and stuck in a rut. And I think
that does a huge amount for you. It just
gets that little bit uh going. And um
the other thing I'll throw out is I have
found I have found that throwing my
schedule at AI and I'll just say like
does this make sense? Is this
reasonable? And it does do a lot about
saying like hey this is probably this is
gonna be a long day or you know or I'll
say like here's what I want to achieve
over the next two months and it'll say
yeah you could do that but it's going to
be difficult or yeah you should be able
to do it and it's like you said you got
to take it with a grain of salt but it
can help you get a little bit of a a
sanity check sometimes as as well I felt
for all of these pieces. Um
>> yeah I I do use Gemini Enterprise to um
reschedule meetings for me. So, I'll
look at him and say, "Oh, can you email
that person at that time and reschedule
it and propose a new time and things
like that?" So, it can it can do that
for me for sure. So, I I do like that.
Um, yeah. Sorry, I interrupted. Keep
going, Rob.
>> No, I was just going to say I was
actually going to dive into a question.
So, have you found yourself because now
that we're sort of talking about it and
you we've talked about the needing some
guard rails with AI and stuff like that.
Have you found yourself um like dipping
a toe in and edging more and more into
AI and feeling more comfortable with it
or have you sort of just you have sort
of like here's a guard's rails and and
this is where its place is right now.
This is its lane.
>> Um I
because I I have a number of projects on
the AI trust is at different levels um
for those customers or for those
projects. Uh for myself, I I use AI a
lot in my developer productivity. So
that that that helps me a lot. Um again,
never get touch of code in production.
Oh, it's very good for documentation as
well. So I do use it to help me document
things. Um I'll get it to produce
mermaid, which I use tools for
diagramming and things like that. So
that's pretty cool. So that's really
helped me um become I don't know
documentation cut my documentation time
in half. So that's been great.
um you know some of my customers I have
a banking customer in Europe uh I've
worked very very closely with them to
develop um an in-house trustworthy
deterministic AI agent and you know
adoption 85% of the company's using it
or the bank is using it with over half
of the company using it daily. So, you
know, that's that what I'd take I would
take that as a high success uh rate and
um because it's got a deterministic
wrapper around the tooling. So, when you
go from an AI agent into your tools,
there's determinism in there and um you
know, we've got an I've built an AI
control plane and it's doing some really
cool stuff in there and that bank is
quite happy. Uh then I've got customers
down the other end where the CEO
accidentally left the AI recording on in
a meeting said some stuff that uh they
didn't want recorded and it got
distributed to everybody and then it
becomes you know public knowledge or
whatever. So their trust in AI is very
low. Whereas you know I've got a a
highly regulated bank in the European
system and their trust is very high
because you know it's it's had the the
data warehouse and the um IM and the
Arbback all set up properly and
everything's correct from the very
beginning. So again opposite ends of the
spectrum uh and you know the customer
down this end that accidentally recorded
the the wrong meeting with AI
the AI conversation is dead in the
water. It will never go anywhere. Uh
whereas at the other end they're looking
at other ways to do more with it. Uh you
know the CEO has even talked about
putting his own voice on it and stuff
like that. So which I find funny but um
interesting.
>> That's actually you know that's a that's
a funny thing. I don't think we've
actually talked about that. We've not in
a professional sense, but we've
definitely had those conversations uh
because of how we do recording and
things like that for the podcast and
even some of the conversations that
we've had
uh internal conversations and things
like that we've had on the team because
we uh Michael and I both we have a lot
of remote people that we work with and
sometimes you get conversations you get
things on a call that u you know you
weren't expecting and I'll just give a a
brief anecdote story as I had a
developer that jumped into a Zoom call
early one time and it was open and it
was recording from the start because I
just I don't trust myself to hit record
often enough and he was on there for
about 2 or 3 minutes and was by himself
and was working his way through a a
problem and was you know was sitting
there coding while he was waiting and
ended up sort of cussing quite a bit cuz
he was like talking his way through the
problem and so I had to warn him I was
like hey next time you jump onto a call
make sure you mute yourself first you
know there's those kinds of things it's
like and I guess everybody's got those
stories of like somebody left a camera
on, they didn't realize or somebody
walked across a shot or things like
that. But particularly now with the um
the AI agents that are out there that
you don't always control that now is
you'll have somebody that will jump in
uh I've got a customer jumps. There's
like three AI agents that jump in that
are notetakers that jump in before he
ever shows up. And it's just like you
get all of these things and it's just
because people are trying them out and
then they forget to shut them off and
you know you have to kick them out or
block them and all that kind of stuff.
But it's uh it's definitely I think a
whole new world out there that's uh we
have different things we have to be
aware of. It's like it's I guess it is
it's a it's now like that's just society
too is people have got cameras
everywhere, they've got recorders
everywhere. AI seems to be everywhere.
So you have to be just that much more
diligent about about what you do. Now I
want to because we are sort of getting
there on time, but I want to swing
around to uh all the way back to the
stories you talked about. you're also u
a board member uh plus you've been you
know with a couple companies is like
because I think a lot of developers
struggle with that that bridge from
being a developer to being somebody
that's like on a board or being even I
think sometimes to like a CTO CIO
fractional kind of thing. So what would
be and I this is actually more of I
guess even a little bit of a personal
thing but it's like how would you
address somebody that was that was you
know a midlevel developer something like
that that's thinking like maybe this is
something I want to do or they also may
be thinking this is something that is
never going to be be for me. How does
that how does that fit in your uh
engineer developer kind of mindset being
in those positions?
>> Yeah. Um, one of the biggest joys I get
out of my roles in life is giving a a
job to somebody or giving somebody
opportunity to develop. You know, if I
if I you know, if I recruit you, I want
to see you become uh the very best
version that I can help you become in
the time that I that I'm with you. And
you know, you're not going to I don't
pretend you're going to be with my with
me or my team forever, right? you're
going to move on and hopefully it's the
next thing is bigger and better and it's
another step in your career.
>> So for me, I'll try and work with these
>> mid levels and identify where they want
to go in their career and work with them
and I do spend a lot of time one-on-one
um with the people that want it. You
know, some people don't want it, some
people do. Uh and I'll try and work with
them a lot. uh from my perspective
um you know in my 20s I first started
coding I thought it was my entire role
was nothing else but knowing the tech
inside out and and being the best tech
person in the room right and that's what
I thought my role was and maybe it was
when I was like a junior or mid you know
I really wanted to be the best hard no I
wanted to be the person that could
answer anything technical about the
platform about the the language anything
Um and I guess by the time I hit my 30s,
I really realized that um actually
technology is all about people. So the
the the time you spend working with
people and understanding their problems,
their needs uh and what they want out of
the business or out of the software
you're working on is really the
connecting factor, right? Um businesses
only exist uh to make sales, right? And
the only way you can make sales is
through people. All right? So um for me
my advice would be focus on the
technology absolutely but also do not
ignore the personal side of tech and
really spend that time to connect with
your customers connect with your peers
uh and connect with your management. You
know one of the first conversations I
like to have with um you know any new
customer or anybody that you know if
I've gone in as a consultant or
something you know what are your KPIs?
what do you need to look good and to get
your job done? You know, if I work with
a new partner, I'll say, you know, how
do you make money? What can I do to make
sure that, you know, you you get um your
your reward? So, you know, when I work
with a hyperscaler, for example, in
their sales teams or their um their
partner programs, try and work out what
they need from me to deliver on their
KPIs and not only my own KPI. So, I try
and become cognizant of what my team
members need um as well that I'm working
with. So I I think that goes two ways
and it's all about communication for
people that want to work up the ladder.
you know
in team in larger scale teams I work
with I tend to have a fork in the road
for technical people do they want to
stay tech and and focus on that and you
know that that takes you down say a tech
lead role an architect role potentially
an architect role is a bit special
because there's a lot of business
interpretation requirements a lot of lot
of customerf facing but you know that's
that's kind of one pathway or if you
want to become more more peopleley you
know that's the software development
manager that's that sort of thing so you
know I I tend to see a bit of a natural
fork in the road. If you're more of a
people person, you might head down that
path. Um or or if you're more technical,
you head down the other path. Or there's
a the third path, which is the solar
entrepreneur or the entrepreneurial part
where you want to um take a bit of both.
And um
I'll try to think of a polite way of
saying this, but I always said to
myself, you know, I always work for
somebody that I I have problems with. I
don't agree with their decisions
necessarily. Um, and if I was a boss,
I'll do it this way. And I realized that
for a long time that I I use a more
colorful language when I say it to
myself. And then I thought I should go
out there and do this stuff myself
because if someone's going to make a
mistake, I'd rather blame me and
influence things myself than than sit
there disgruntled about, you know, that
technical decision or or that product
feature or or that marketing campaign or
whatever. So I' I'd rather be the person
making the mistakes and working for
somebody I think are making mistakes. So
for me it's it's about um you know
taking on the accountability, the
responsibility and and doing the things
those things myself and I really love
that fact that um I can make a decision
and make influence or make a strong
influence on my customers outcomes or or
my software outcomes and that's great
and of course you know I work for
fractional CTO roles and I help them um
you know deliver the best that they can
in their their product spaces. as well
and you know even that gives me
frustration sometimes like I've got some
experiences and you know I've I've
delivered some really large projects my
largest project had 80 million users so
um that is a decent product uh 75,000
servers if anyone's interested 25 20,000
Cassandra nodes uh in three rings but um
but all aside you know I've had some
great experience on on product
development and in the consulting or the
the fractional roles, you don't
necessarily get to bring that because
there's somebody else's product vision
that you're working with and that kind
of grates for me sometimes. But those
are parts the human things I talk about.
You know, for me it's like it's
learning. Um I'll drop into an
organization, learn something new and um
work out what I could do to improve
things and I love to practice that as
well. So the advice is is listen and
learn, work with people and understand
where the value comes from and where
they derive the value and you can apply
that to your own projects and your own
products and um you know really come
much closer
to a great outcome.
>> That's great. Um we are getting really
close on time. So I just kind of want
follow up real quick. Um, what are we've
talked about AI on that and you've
talked about using enterprise versus
consumer models. Uh, what are some of
the
enterprise tools specifically that you
use that our listeners could kind of
check out because I'm kind of interested
in what everyone's using because you
just kind of hear the basics online. You
got to dig into some of these other
ones. What are some of the specific ones
that you like to use?
Um gez I' I've used um probably almost
every paidful model that you can get out
there. I think uh you know from Claude
through to ChatGpt through to Gemini
Enterprise you know I've developed
products with um Bedrock uh I've gone
open source I've I've done all sorts of
things. Um,
my preferred tooling, uh, you know, I
love Gemini Enterprise as a product
because it it hooks natively into my
Google Workspace. Uh, so I can expose
Jurro to it's got a whole bunch of
inbuilt connectors. I can automatically
surface existing things I use. So, I
find that great. And then they've got
their um ADK uh, which allows me to
write custom software and custom agents
to do tooling. And that allows me to
stick in um the deter deterministic
layer I've written allows me to stick in
um an AI control plane. And what I mean
by an AI control plane, it uh
monitors my token so I don't overspend.
You know, I've had a customer uh wrote
an infinite loop to test their model out
and they uploaded a document of 50,000
spaces or something and they they had
like a $100,000 bill in 24 hours because
uh you know a space is still a token or
still adds towards a token. So even if
you're sending up a blank document,
that's still going to charge you. So you
know these sorts of things to capture
that uh to protect PII end to end
encryption all all sorts of really cool
stuff there that you should be doing.
Um, you know, I I see, you know, even um
prompt injection synonymous with SQL
injection that we tried to solve in the
early 2000s. You know, people were
injecting um bad things into our
databases. People are doing that today.
So anyway, so I find the software
development kits great. Um I completely
avoid all consumer models.
Totally. I never touch anything that's
free. I never touch anything that's um
uh I might try something as an anonymous
user, but I'll certainly never put any
real names, data, or anything into it
ever. Um
and that's why I've I've leaned towards
self-hosted um open source LLMs with
Alarm or other tools as well. So I I
tend to use those um or Google Google
Gemini Enterprise is where I've wound
up. So u for my daily driver I guess is
is where where I find comfortable. I
find it very good because um you know I
do a lot of Kubernetes work. I do a lot
of um uh go as well and they both come
out of the Google stable. So you know
Gemini is clear clearly trained on um
Google documentation. So it has a very
close tie for a lot of my technical
stuff and because I use Workspace as
well. So that's where I'm at. Uh so I'm
a bit skewed because of my Google
reliance I guess in a professional
manner. Um personally again it's open
source. I I I self-host my own um
servers and everything. I do my own
email domains. Uh whitelisting my IPs
are difficult as we all know for email
serving. But um uh yeah there's a divide
there and I keep them very very
separate.
Well, I think we have, as Michael
alluded to, we have pretty much run out
of time. And once again, it is just like
flown right by. There was uh I think we
could do this for a couple more hours
and have no problem whatsoever. Just
like lots, I said, a lot of different
questions and a lot of different things
to uh to unpack along the way. But, uh
appreciate so much your time and want to
be respectful of it. So, uh one of the
things is I know that you've you've
brought up a lot of of interesting
things and uh cool ideas. What is the
best way for somebody to get a hold of
you if they have some further questions
or they just want to learn more about
what you guys are working on?
>> Yeah. Uh what I've worked on recently um
I've written a white paper uh on uh AI
for execs on putting together
strategies. So that's just hit white
paper.d download/AI
playbook. Um that'll get you to a
document that I've collaborated with. It
also has my LinkedIn details. So I'm
happy to hear from anyone on any topic.
Um I don't outsource any of my data. So
I I I won't I'm not a good out provider
from that perspective. But um uh data is
too too protected. I think um
>> Tim Berners Lee said uh you know
software comes and goes but data um
stays forever or whatever it is. I can't
remember the exact quote but uh data is
where it's all at. Anyway, so I hit
white paper.download. There's an AI
playbook there and it's got my contact
details and um uh you can contact me
without downloading the white paper if
you like, but uh have a read. It's it's
it's um good for execs or people that
want to put together an AI strategy.
>> Excellent. Well, thank you so much for
your time and uh we'll get make sure for
those you guys that are there have that
in the show notes so you can uh reach
out and and check that out. Uh I think
that I'm now curious about the white
paper itself. I think that'll probably
be a really good read for everybody. Uh
you may want to like slip it under your
boss's door or whatever as well
depending on how that goes or under his
virtual door or her virtual door. Um
thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate you hanging out with us
today. Uh for all of you that are
listening uh thank you so much for again
for your time. Uh pencil's down. You can
stop taking notes for now. We will
return next time with another interview
uh with more information and just
chugging away on how you can keep that
forward momentum going. Until then, go
out there and have yourself a great day,
a great week, and we will talk to you
next time.
So, bonus material. Uh let's go with
this like what would be
um looking over your career too is like
so as going into 2026 if there's a say a
mid-level engineer what would be
something that you'd say like here's
something that you should do this year
in sort of a general sense like here's
something you should do that would that
would help your career or help you you
know just become a better engineer.
Um
I think trends been
understanding technology trends have
been critical. So for me, you know, I
saw the internet, the web, um cloud
computing, uh mobile, um machine
learning, AI, right? Those are the been
some very very big identifiable trends.
And right now AI is big. You know,
there's a lot of comment about AI slop
and all those kind of things. And there
is some terrible stuff out there. Uh but
it's going to get better and it's here
to stay. you know, dialup internet was
terrible, but today's um Starlink is
great. You know, being out in uh upstate
New York, if it wasn't for Starlink, I'd
have no internet. So, um you know, it's
a long way from dialup internet. So,
things evolve and they start off
terrible, but being across the trends. I
remember um uh Amazon when S3 first came
out, I I looked and just said, "Yeah,
that's kind of cool, but what the heck
am I going to do with it?" Today it's a
backbone of the internet. Google app
engine same thing. I thought that was
kind of cool. It didn't have any
persistent storage that's kind of cool
but what can I do with it nowadays
it's progressed on. So mid-level
developer I definitely think um
proficiency in data and understanding
data and and those sorts of things and
data is what drives AI. Data is what
drives your software applications. So um
continue to develop your data skills. Uh
understanding
what you can get more out of your data.
Uh you know and your CEO might not be
asking today for it but they'll ask for
the data in in 12 months time. So just
just be cognizant of the data and and
stick to it. Uh so build up your data
literacy because that is what persists.
Absolutely.
>> Yeah. That's actually it's funny. I just
finished writing an article about uh the
value of glue code and that's really
what it comes down to is it's like it's
there's all these different tools and
all these different things but the
bottom line is understanding how that
data moves around all of those different
systems and if you understand the data
then that like that's half the b
probably more than way more than half
the battle if you understand the data
and how it needs to work and how it
needs to move then the rest of it
becomes more or less I mean it's I'm
simplifying but it becomes sort of like
a mathematical you know task At that
point, it's just like, okay, how do I
get it to go from here to here and make
sure that it maintains its its integrity
essentially. So, that's a that's a great
point and I agree 100%. I think that the
AI uh AI is just it's going to be here.
It's it has moved a lot even in the last
6 months, year, you know, two years and
I think it's just that seems to be
that's where everybody's betting their
money right now. So, we're going to see
movement there. It's going to improve.
there's just there's too many smart
people working on it to just not have it
see that it's going to be better and
better. And we're learning how to deal
with the slop a little bit just like we
did, you know, dealing with the
thousands of Google pages early on with
searches and and all of the internet
sites that were out there, all of the
ISPs that eventually, you know, formed
into a couple of things or disappeared
and went into, you know, the backbone
that we have today.
>> We have run out of time, so I I want to
be respectful of the time. Thanks so
much. This was this was awesome. Uh, I
know it took us a little bit, a couple
of reschedules to to get this going. So,
thank you for for sticking around with
us through this and, uh, this was it
definitely was a great payoff. Um, like
I said, we've got so many other things.
We may reach out and and try to, you
know, connect again at some point in the
future because this was a a great
conversation and I think we just hit the
tip of the iceberg at best with some of
the ways we can places we can go with
direct conversations with you. So,
thanks so much for your time, Andrew.
>> I appreciate it. Love speaking with you.
Happy to speak again. Glad we called up.
Yep. Have a good day.
>> Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.