Software Misadventures - Discovering the power of story-telling in engineering | Adam Gordon Bell (CoRecursive)

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

Known for hosting the CoRecursive podcast, which dives into the stories behind the code, Adam joins the show to chat about discovering that the great engineers he had looked up to are actually great communicators, his framework for building one of the best storytelling engineering podcasts, and the journey getting into DevRel.   Chapters: (00:00:00) Highlights (00:04:23) The power of casual conversations (00:07:08) Taking the leap into podcasting (00:10:34) The hardest part of running a podcast (00:14:03) Learning to follow up (00:16:26) Storytelling in podcasting (00:20:36) The evolution of CoRecursive (00:21:19) What makes a good story? (00:24:48) Finding the right guests (00:30:26) Preparing for interviews (00:32:07) Favorite part of making a podcast episode (00:37:43) Learning from radio journalists (00:39:47) Overcoming self-doubt (00:44:27) Balancing passion projects with full-time work (00:46:38) The power of vulnerability in storytelling (00:53:29) Behind the scenes of developer relations (01:00:38) The great engineers you know are actually great communicators   Show Notes: Adam on Twitter: https://x.com/adamgordonbell CoRecursive Podcast: https://corecursive.com/ Automating follow-up emails: https://www.followupthen.com/   Stay in touch: 👋 - Make Ronak's day by signing up for our newsletter to get our favorites parts of the convo straight to your inbox every week :D https://softwaremisadventures.com/   Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

I don't know why I wanted to be the best engineer, but like there's all these people that I looked up to in that time, like Joel Spolsky, like I want to be that great. But like if you think about it, the reason we know about them is because actually they're communicators, right? They're explaining problems to us. Like I thought this guy has a blog because he's the most amazing engineer. But no, he, I know about the things that he's done because he talks about them, right? Like all these people I looked up to, what they're actually good at was communicating, right?

The person who wrote the book that I wanted to ask questions about how to do functional programming, like it's not clear they were the best functional programmer in the world. Hopefully they were decent at it. But no, they had written a book, right? They had spent a lot of time communicating. So I think that actually I maybe realized that my goal was misplaced, that there was a larger goal or something that, yeah, I wasn't seeing that all these people who communicate are the people that

I look up to, right? And it's, it can be super impactful if you can take something and explain it in a way that lets it crystallize in people's minds. And I don't know that I'm the best at it, but it feels very valuable and important. Welcome to the Software Misadventures podcast. We are your hosts, Ronak and Guan. As engineers, we are interested in not just the technologies, but the people and the stories behind them. So on this show, we try to scratch our own edge by sitting down with engineers, founders, and investors to chat about their path, lessons they have learned, and of course, the misadventures along the way.

Awesome to have you here, Adam. You're the host of Co-Recursive podcast. Before our conversation, you were telling us a little bit about your background. I love sort of the arc that you gave, the focus being the value of communication, and then how you were able to get there via the different steps in your career. So I thought maybe an interesting place to start is going back to when you were first getting started as an engineer. Was there different points where you specifically recognized these, like, oh, wow, communication is something that's quite powerful, but that's very under leveraged by like your peers. So I used to work at this place here in Peterborough called Opera Tell, made a lot of friends there. And I think like, I just really wanted to be really good coder, I guess. You know,

and they had like a large complicated code base. People were always adding, it was like enterprise software, people are adding features as fast as they could and like, nobody can keep track of any of it. And like, I just wanted to get really good at that. Right. Like, oh, you want to be the guy that they go to when something's on fire because you know, all the stuff. Right.

And there was people who knew all the stuff and I'm like, I want to be one of those people. So that was very important to me. I don't think I thought communication was important. I just wanted to have this great skill set, right. And develop it. Yeah. And then I ended up transitioning from there to working someplace remote. So it was actually a weird thing where my boss had left and I liked him and he was interviewing for this other role, but it was in another city. And he's like, yeah, you could do it remote, like from home. And I was like, that sounds awesome. It turned out the company was like

less on point with me being remote than he was, but I did end up taking it, even though it was like iffy, whether I would have to move to Kitchener, uh, for instance, but, um, I liked working from home, but I missed some of the stuff from Opertel, you know, and like it wasn't you said communication. That's like a big word. It makes me think of like writing up documentation for something. Right. But like what I missed was like being in the cafeteria, like we had this cafeteria and, you know, you're like having lunch or waiting for the free microwave or whatever, and somebody's telling some story about the something server was down last night, and I got called in, and then somebody's like, oh, did you check? Was the disk full?

And they're like, oh, I thought it was the disk full, but it wasn't the disk full. And they're like, oh, was it the whatever? This was a Windows server, so it was like, was IIS leaking memory or something? And anyways, people like go back and forth through it and it's like a fun game and you're like trying to figure out.

And the guy's like, no, no, it turned out it wasn't it at all. Like somebody had pointed something to the wrong server and blah, blah, blah. There was always these stories probably because people were moving too fast and things were always blowing up. But like a lot of the knowledge about how to solve problems, about how things worked

there, right. It was actually transferred just in people like, you know, like shooting the breeze in this cafeteria setting. And like, I didn't get that right. Once I started working remote. So that was my first inkling. I think that like, oh, this is something important, right? Nobody says like, oh, you know, we would like to give you a raise because people

have learned a lot from those crazy stories you tell at lunch, but like, it turns out that that's very important. And it's like a thing where people get a lot, like people talk about mentoring. Like a lot of it is right there in these like casual venues. So that was my first inkling that like, this is something important. Interesting. And fast forward a little bit. So you that you then got into management and then later on dev route like how did that sort of experience like evolve into something where you're like okay there's a

strategic point to it rather than just something that's very um makes the job more fulfilling there's like 30 steps but like i guess that's the problem but like yeah so i started working remotely i worked on this team really smart people some of the smartest people i worked with before and we weren't always actually accomplishing as much as as i thought we should it's like you know, you're like, man, wouldn't it be great if the whole team was rock stars? Like you imagine there's these 10x developers out there and they'd be so amazing. Or maybe you just imagine like you didn't have that guy who you keep having to walk him through things.

That was me. That was me. That's why I raised my hand. I mean, everybody's that guy sometimes. But like the team was very skilled, but we weren't getting as much done as I thought. Like it just didn't seem to be working. And so that was my entry point to becoming an engineering manager, because I thought like the problem here isn't technical skills,

like all of the people on this team are super talented. So something else is the problem, right? So that transitioned me to being an engineering manager and then eight more steps, and then I ended up in developer relations. So I wanted to fast forward a little bit and talk a little bit more about podcasting. So before, I think you started Codecursive,

you were a podcast host at SE Radio, software engineering radio for folks who might not know. I think I actually managed this podcast, but can you share a little more about how you got into podcasting? Yeah, there was, there was this podcast called Software Engineering Daily. And Jeff, who was the host, he made an episode for a long time every weekday. And was a lot so anyways i was listening to one of his episodes and he said i need some people to help me do this right so i reached out to him and like he said yeah like just find somebody and interview them and like send me the wave file or whatever like there's very little tutelage involved so no waiting almost so that was my entry point

and then like he after a while i think he took on a couple of people like this and he was like, this is unwieldy. I'm going to stop doing it. But then he recommended me to the software engineering radio. And they, yeah, they're based out of the IEEE. He had started there. They had more structure. And that's how I got into it. But I mean, the motivation was like, I was still in that world where i was like i just want

to be the best programmer like i want to know everything and be able to tackle all these problems and i was at this point like i was a scala developer and i was getting deep into like functional programming and there's like a million things to learn and it's like it's just it seems like vast right and so it was like an opportunity for me to just like talk to these experts and ask them questions. Right. It was like, I have a question about this thing. This guy wrote this book. Like I can just talk to him and ask him questions. Yeah. So like at some point you decided to start Codecursive. What made you make that jump?

Because SE Radio was kind of doing a lot of the hard work that goes into podcasting and has a good name behind it. Then why start it? Yeah, so I was doing these episodes for Jeff, so the Software Engineering Daily, and I was reaching out to people to interview them. And I didn't really run it by him, I just started booking more interviews, and some of them I booked far out.

And then one time I sent him a thing, like an episode I recorded, and he's like, "'Okay, well we stopped doing that." Like, right? And I still have more interviews booked. So it it was like I guess I'm starting my own podcast like I already have interviews oh and I remember the first interview that I did where I was like okay so I said I was interviewing for this podcast like actually you're being interviewed for as yet unnamed podcast that I just made up. Yeah, people didn't seem to care.

And I remember talking to Jeff. When I told him I was doing this, I was like, okay, well, like I booked these couple first episodes of my podcast saying it was yours because I mean, accidentally, like, how do I book for other people? And he was like, people like to talk about themselves. I wouldn't worry about it. he's just like just email people right i'm sure you guys have noticed like it's actually not that hard i've been surprised by just how kind i guess like fancy or like famous people are um about their time because i think that's the thing i worry about the most right it's like they have this busy schedule you know all these things talking to some random random dudes from the internet seems to be a little on the priority list but i think yeah if you're pretty clear about the messaging to show that you've done your homework that definitely helps i'm curious like in those

first days what were for for us i think it was the the the writing the emails i think that was the most painful to you know to actually do so it's kind of funny to hear that for you it's like you've already probably have a process at that point right if you already booked you know, to actually do. So it's kind of funny to hear that for you is that you've already probably have a process at that point, right? If you already booked, you know, quite a few. What was the hardest part about the early days of starting the podcast? That's a good question. Definitely reaching out to people feels fraught, right? Like you feel like you're putting yourself out there. And I was looking at your episodes. Like I know that there's people in that list that I have reached out to in the early days who said no. Right. And maybe they would say yes now, but I'm never going to reach back out to them.

It's just like you feel, you feel rejected. It's not like rejection. I'm sensitive to, right? Like probably somebody is just like, no, I'm busy. I can't do this. Right. But my perception is like, oh yeah, they, they look deep into my soul and said that I'm not worthy.

Right. It's like, um, that's, that's so real. And it's super funny because, uh, Ronic and I actually, we had a instance where someone that we reached out to like maybe two years ago, and then they said, no, now's not the good time. But then they actually came on the show because I didn't realize he wrote the email like two years ago. So then I was just like, oh, this person seems pretty cool. Like, let me just write the email. So that was a pretty funny moment. I remember as charity majors, I was trying to figure out reaching out to people and so

i read some articles about it by some marketers or whatever i don't know like don't look for advice on like how to cold outreach to people like it's really it's good yeah oh no it's terrible like do almost nothing that people say on the internet recommended like oh there's these things and they'll like basically like set up a chain of emails where you reach out to them and then you follow up and then you follow up, right? And so I found some tool. It's like, so I wrote the email to Charity

and then like three days later, it would send a follow-up. She hadn't responded and there's like three of those. And so I emailed her, like I set up the thing and I sent it to her. And she emailed me like back like 60 seconds later. And she's like, yeah, sure. But like, what's going on with all these emails?

And they had all sent at once. So I'd sent it. I really want you on the podcast. Would you like to be on the podcast? And then like, oh, you haven't come back to me. No, you still haven't come back to me. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. Like, would you like to be on the podcast? And then like, oh, you haven't come back to me. No, you still haven't come back to me. Here's, yeah, yeah. That's how fast I iterate.

On the order of seconds. So maybe that's the method. So one question on the follow-up. This is something that I struggle with a lot when it comes to writing an email to reach out to a guest. One part is you want to do some research to write a thoughtful email instead of a random cold email, which I think is okay. Like there's a way to do that. But then in the follow-up, at least I feel a lot of friction in doing that follow-up and I have Guang here pinging me almost every three days.

Did you follow up yet? And I don't have one of the tools that you mentioned and when i say there is friction for me that friction comes from not knowing exactly the language to use to follow up there are certain templates that i use but then for whatever reason i get bored and i don't like them anymore and then i'll go to chat gpt and waste 15 minutes just to craft like one line follow-up i'm curious is there language that you figured out that you used in follow-up emails that just makes it much easier to do that no i guess the answer is no like i it's funny because because guang you had to follow up with me for this just because i i don't know there's a lot of emails and i forgot i was like i'm gonna respond to that and then i didn't and then yeah I I did like a

little retrospective on like just like the power of like following up I think I really learned it when I was doing like the third insight boot camp to like to try to do like a VC funded company one of the advisors so Yuri who used to work at YC he was like yeah you gotta set it up you know six follow-ups I was like six like are you kidding me like i would like i would definitely report spam like so then i think we kind of settled like like who on earth anyways but then that was also kind of drilled into my head but then it was until much later when like i think i saw jake doing this so he's the founder of of insight and then he just wrote like very casually so i kind of like hey just quick

reaping you know uh in case that email got buried and then he says but if now's not the best time like no worries like that line to me was like magic because he just like absolved me from all the because i felt so bad for like i feel like i'm like begging for like oh can you please like you know do this thing can you please like take a look and then that really changed the equation to more like hey i'm trying to find like a match right to see if there's like value that we can provide and if that's something that you're interested so it's kind of like okay it's more like equal instead of like i'm trying to you know get stuff from you um so yeah so, I'm not much less scared about doing. Yeah. I have this thing. Okay. One, one second. Follow up then.com. All it is.

Follow up then.com. All it is is like a whole bunch of email accounts that you add to your contact list. And so when I message somebody, I'll just, I'll just write them a message and then I'll BCC like two weeks at followupthen.com and it just emails me the email back two weeks later so it's like that that's my system now I don't have any so you don't you keep track of it that way you can do the follow-up or if you can check to see if you still want to follow up it just puts it back to the top of my email box and then I'm like okay yeah like and I agree like saying like, no worries if it's not a fit or whatever makes

it feel, I don't know, less on the line, I guess. Right. Like, yeah. Oh, so I was reviewing Cora Kersow's profile on Apple podcasts and there are a bunch of good reviews about your storytelling where people like every story feels very unique. It's very engaging and things like that, which is pretty amazing. So I'm curious, like, how did you figure out

what sort of storytelling mechanism you want to use in the podcast? And how do you now go about structuring the episode? This is mostly me trying to learn. So software engineering radio is very technical and like dry, I would say. And they have like a very strong format. It's like,

let's interview somebody about the CAP theorem, right? And then it's like, you have to have like an outline prepared and you have to show that this person's an expert. And then you can go through like, oh, what are the trade-offs of this versus that? And it's very dry. You can learn a lot, I guess. But as I, like, as I was doing it and then kind of repeating it on my own, talking to people for a co-recursive, like I found like the parts that spoke to me were not that right. Like the, the parts that stood out to me talking to people was when people shared things, right. We go back to what I was saying at the cafeteria at Obertel and, you know, they're explaining like, Oh, the server was down and how do we look into it? And like that stuff was so much more compelling to me. And I just wanted to do more of that. The last interview I did for, for software engine radio was, uh, Steven Wolfram.

I was talking to him about his, you know, his programming language and all the things he's built. But then I forget what we started talking about. Like if he could estimate, you know, something to do with like how much he weighed based on his calories or something, and he's like, you know, coding and his language and trying to figure out how to do it. And I was like, I don't know. I don't know how to he could estimate, you know, something to do with like how much he weighed based on his calories or something. And he's like, you know, coding in his language and trying to figure out how much he weighs. And it was just like us having fun, like using his Wolfram Mathematica and stuff.

And I was like, this is better, right? It's like just an experience rather than him explaining the trade-offs of various things they cut it from the episode like they got rid of it all yeah oh wow and he was i forget what we were coming up with but it was like i was throwing problems at him and he was gonna calculate them and i was like oh i'm in peterborough and he's like peterborough uk i'm like no peterborough canada and he's like mathematica is like his baby and it's like he was like the tom cruise in minority report like he was like pulling the data from various places and I was like this is awesome but yeah they didn't they didn't feel that was like educational

but the point is I was like this is the good stuff right just like lean into the actual experiences that people have yeah so that I don't I don't have a quick answer for like how you do that but like pay attention to what you find interesting right and like double down on that i think is the key that was that must have been super uh interesting weird experience right being like oh i think i got this really golden nuggets but having that cut out like did you how do you work with the editor like in that process like do they kind of come up it's like hey you know the outline that you mentioned it's like we need to hit these things and then do you get much say in terms of like so at software engineering radio

they uh robert who runs it he has a very um in-depth process like the manual that he made for is online and uh actually like i don't think he's wrong about cutting it because the way that that podcast worked was always about the technical details, right? It wasn't like, oh, let's have some fun with Stephen Wolfram, right? It was like, tell me about Mathematica and what's the history of it

and how would you parse it and whatever the details are. But so their process was you'd come up with an outline in a Google Doc, the editors and the other hosts would review it, offer feedback, and then you record the episode. And then you can provide a list of edits. If you're like, oh, you know, we need to cut out this one part, you would just give like timestamps. And then they kind of took it from there. And usually they just went with whatever you had. But my interview with Steven was long because we were just like messing around. And so I guess he wanted to cut some stuff out. And he's like, yeah, let's get rid of this, like playing around.

Like, what's the fun of that? Along those lines, so Ron, I mentioned this as well. And, you know, you so you started out co-recursive back in 2018 being pretty technical like you said coming off like software engineering daily and now it's you know it's very like storytelling driven right i think you mentioned that the raw interviews can be like up to two hours versus like the final product right could it's like only maybe like 40 50 minutes so there's a ton of like editing you know you're thinking about the story so it's super different now and then like were there any like pivotal moments in that journey in this like evolution of the podcast that you like that comes to mind so yes but many i got so the other day i get all these emails from people who want their CEO of almost always Bitcoin startups.

But varying things to be a guest on the podcast, right? Somebody reached out. It wasn't like a blockchain thing, but they're like, oh, you should talk to our CEO, whatever. It was sort of interesting. They're like, oh, Ron can talk about our new release and we have a new feature flag on the settings page i was trying to explain to them like no that's not what i need like does he have an interesting story and like oh he's got tons of stories right uh and so like we had some back and forths but there was like a gem of stuff where i was

interested and so we we got on a zoom call to talk it out. Right. And I was telling this person, this is what I learned. And I tried to, I tried to give it to them. Right. So this is a story. I am here in Peterborough a couple months ago. I'm, I'm driving to, to see my wife at her work and I'm almost at her work and I'm at a stoplight and there's like several cars in front of me and I have to pick her up. Then, you know, the light turns green, the car in front of me goes, and then like this guy runs out in front of my car and he's on crutches, right? And he doesn't look well, but not in like the injured way, but in the, like, I've been living a rough life type of way.

And he's like screaming right just like screaming not at me but like off in some other direction and then I see what he's screaming about and there's another guy in a wheelchair that he's screaming at and they're screaming back and forth and the guy in the wheelchair like first of all I just want to go like I want to drive I can see my wife's work because it's like on the corner but like this guy's standing in front of me like having the screen match and in a way I don't want to catch his attention right but like I also want to get by him and then the guy in the wheelchair is like wheeling right and he like builds up speed and he actually smashes into the guy on the crutches and knocks

him down the crutches are on the ground like I'm still there like I still I'm like I'm gonna be late to pick up Courtney my wife I'm probably not that late but like i don't want to anger her like i borrowed her car and blah blah blah and then the the guy with the crutches like gets up and i'm like oh good he's gonna get out of the way but he takes his crutch like a baseball bat and he goes in the guy with the wheelchair and like smashes across them and they're just like fighting like out in the middle of the street right and um so i say to this lady like that is a story right like i i'm the protagonist right and i'm trying to get to my wife's work right that's my objective and then there's obstacles like the obstacle these guys like a guy in a wheelchair in it and a guy

They ended up being fine like they both Like that I don't think the wheelchair guy was a paraplegic because he kind of jumped like and they were wrestling so like he obviously could use his feet but Yeah, but I was like hey director the new settings thing on on the feature Whatever. That's not a story right? I I need like the, what did Ron do? Like what were the things that happened?

Yeah. So this is what I think about, right? It's like you need a story. And like a story is a very simple thing. It's that, right? You have a protagonist, he has an objective, and then there's obstacles. And that's like 90% of the thing, right?

It's just like you find somebody who has those ingredients. And sometimes you don't know, right? You just start talking to them and then they're like, they tell the story. But that's what I focus in on. Halfway through the story, I was like, where is Adam going with this? And then I realized, oh, this is an analogy that he's trying to draw for the code email. And then I realized, oh, wow, that's actually very spot on and well played, sir, well played.

How do you go about finding the right guests who have a good story to tell, by the way? Like, that's hard because you don't know a lot of people and you don't know their stories. Agreed. Yeah, that's the hardest thing, right? Sometimes I'll see something and I'll be like, okay, I've got to talk to this person.

Sometimes I will just talk to somebody and, like like basically I'll do a pre-interview. I'll just chat with them and see, you know, what's going on. You know, tell me something interesting that happened to you, kind of explore it. But yeah, I mean, I think that's difficult. And the story doesn't have to be like I did this episode with my friend Don. And he had worked with me at this this place I was describing with the cafeteria and the stories and whatever and like the story was just about how like he started at this place as soon as he finished university and you know he

just felt like they never valued him like he stayed there for a long time like he never worked anywhere else he never got the context for like oh maybe this isn't a great place to work and like i guess his story was like you should value yourself because i went through this thing like i was working so hard for this place and then i found out like i wasn't being paid well and there weren't good working conditions and whatever so i mean there doesn't have to be a guy with a wheelchair and a guy with a crutch it's more like it's through the eyes of the person you're talking to, right? I guess is a way to think about it. You mentioned pre-interviews. Do you do that commonly? And if so, then what does your pitch look like to the person you're reaching out to?

Yeah, I just email them and say, hey, I think you could be an interesting guest for my podcast. Do you want to have a chat about it? And then I send them like a Calendly link. And I think sometimes that it can be valuable for them too, because they get to ask me questions. I think they just get to meet me. Right. So it's not like a blind date. It's like, oh, we've, we've chatted before. Yeah. Yeah. Do many people take you up on that or is it only a handful i always talk to everybody first before i interview them yeah i didn't always but yeah it's super helpful i took some classes from the independent association of radio journalists i think it was called anyways npr type folk and they were super valuable but like one thing that proper journalists do is audition people.

Like they'll audition people all the time. And like, you know, something happened. Like, okay, the big security thing that just happened. What was the company again? CrowdStrike, right? So you're writing an article about CrowdStrike and like you need a quote from like an expert or whatever, right? Like a lot of times journalists will talk

to like seven experts right like whoever they can get a hold of quickly and they're just looking for whoever's the interesting person and like that will be the quote that they use right so basically they're auditioning people like who's going to say something that's you know poignant and gets my point across so yeah it's for radio they would call that like a pre-interview if it's like a tv show right like often they have producers who this is all they do is like try to reach out and find like So yeah, it's for radio. They would call that like a pre-interview if it's like a TV show, right? Like often they have producers who this is all they do is like try to reach out and find like, okay We need somebody to fill in this little segment, right? Like who do we got and like are they interesting?

What what are some traits you look out for during those interviews to like see if they're What do you call them? You wouldn wouldn't really crazy you wouldn't believe it story yeah so i think there's just two criteria one is that they have yeah some sort of story where they have they had an objective and like they're they're willing to to share that so that's like has a story and the other one is like, is a talker, to use, just, that's my generic term for somebody who's just like interesting to hear talk. What questions do you ask

to get these responses from them? Like, do you have a story? Is that the question? I'm assuming something else. So the talker thing, I think you'll know. Let's look. I have a checklist here. Please stand by.

Nice. I'm a big fan of checklists. Yes. So when was a time when you thought things were really bad? Usually there's something else attached to that, right? When in your experience at LinkedInin where you're like oh we're screwed now you know and we'll say like oh you know yeah and like what was the scariest thing etc attach that to something right so it's like yeah tell me about your time about linkedin like

what was the scariest thing that happened when you were there you know what was the time where you know you really those are the those are the only two questions I have in front of me but yeah it's usually like hmm in how long do you schedule these chats for like 20 minutes in after the chat have you have you said no to any guests yeah I'm not good at saying no though I would imagine that to be hard for it because you're reaching you're inviting someone to say, hey, you could be a good fit. Let's chat more. But then you may not like the stories or maybe they don't have as many as you might think.

Yeah. Have you said if you have said no, I would love to know how did you go about it? Yeah, I think I've just said to people like, I'm not sure if it's like quite a fit or. But yeah, I don't like to do that. But yeah, I mean, that's the thing that I think the journalists are good at that I'm not, right? It's like they're like, oh, I'm going to talk to six people and only use one of them. Where I feel like I'm using people's time so that there should be some end result. Yeah.

In this case, when you have this pre-chat with them and you invite them back on the podcast, what does your prep typically look like? And do they know that this is the story that you'll focus on? Yeah, I try to let them know, you know, what's interesting to me. And then sometimes though, during the interview, the directions change just because something more interesting comes up. I interviewed before this guy who he created a Google AdWords, I think, or AdSense. We were going to talk about that. So I did the pre-interview.

We chatted. It sounded pretty interesting. He was like a very early Google employee. But then when we were talking, I was like, well, you know, let's go back further. And like he had worked at the JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he had like been this person who had pushed for them to use LISP and had gotten LISP like on this spacecraft and then like had a problem with it and got like had to get a REPL going into this like thing that was like 100,000 miles away in space, like through satellites. And he's like, I don't know how this REPL works, but you know, he's printing out, I assume a thousand open braces from space. So I was like, I just changed what we talked about, right? Like we didn't, I mean, we still talked about the AdSense thing, but I guess that's the

benefit of being able to talk to somebody for two hours and then cut it down to an hour, right? Like once I had that, I was like, okay, maybe this is the story. That's really cool. So in other words, you talk to somebody, you look, you know, what's an interesting experience, but then when they tell, like, then you just pay attention to what's interesting

and keep leaning in on it, right? Maybe once you edit it, it changes as well, right? You're like, oh, the focus should really be X. Do you edit the podcast yourself or do you outsource that? Yeah, I edit it. It's a pain. I think it's super cool that you take so much effort into the editing process. Because for us, it's more of a chore.

But for you, it's like a creative process. That's where you have all the Lego pieces. And then you're putting together something. You're creating something. I'm curious, what's your favorite part of the process of making a podcast episode because for for us i feel like there's less choices versus for you i feel like there's a lot more like you're doing a lot more interesting stuff the problem is like i kept on putting more work into like polishing the episode and so sometimes i feel like it takes me so much time that I'm like oh

like what am I doing but yeah like at some point somebody told me like oh you should have music and then so I did put music in like just at the beginning and then at the end like I think this person wanted me to like like score it like Hans Zimmerman or something I was like yeah I don't even know how that works but um it turns out putting the music in is super fun. So that was just a fun part I enjoyed. Once again, I took a little class from some sort of NPR folk. And so instead of just having like, oh, we're going to play our theme song, they would try to have a song of like beat drops at the right

time to like cut you into the story. And that like putting that in, it's kind of a pain cause I'm like, oh, I still gotta do that. But it's super fun. You mentioned a class before as well. Can you talk more about that class you took? Yeah, I took this class from Christina Shockley and I took two classes from her I forget what they were called but she works for NPR does one of their morning programs I think but just

like the Michigan version of it I believe anyway she's super talented took this class it was all like journalists and radio people in it except for me which like totally freaked me out like there's a guy from The Economist and I was like, what am I doing here? Like I just interview people about like whatever. Wait, how did you get in? Like it's, so there's this thing called AIR. It's like an association for independent radio journalists.

So you just pay to join like, and then they have classes and then I paid for the class. One of the things she had us do in the class was every, so I think we had a class every Sunday for several hours and we did like various things, but she also had us make like a, there was an assignment every week and it was like making a two to five minute like audio, which, you know, like if you're listening to the radio, sometimes they'll like cut into like, oh, here's a, whatever, a small story about a man in Newfoundland who's reunited with his dog or

whatever. It's like a little thing, but she had the, she had us make them like about ourselves and like reflecting on ourselves. Right. So it was like a audio piece like it's almost like an audio essay i guess about yourself but like making it very small and uh condensed and then she was giving feedback on it and uh yeah so i don't know i forget how long the class went but it was like making these every week and it was pretty fun it's like writing like a you know a reflective little essay but instead of for your blog it's like you're speaking. So I learned a lot from that process that like, you can make something interesting in audio by just like reflecting on something that's going on in your life.

I'm very curious about like the conviction aspect of like getting enough like conviction that like, hey, this is something I want to really get good at right like i want to invest in learning all these new skills right skills that are core to like producing like this uh great piece um but before that i'm curious about like were there any engineering practices that you thought that were pretty helpful in kind of systematizing this yeah i have checklists for the process of going through an event. So we've kind of built them up over time. And then I try to write down things that don't go well.

And I keep a list of that. And so it's just like some process was a pain or I forgot to do this thing. And then I try to go back and try to knock some of the f so that's like my, I guess like refinement step, right? And so if I write them down a couple of times on this list, like, oh, this didn't go well, this didn't go well, then, you know, I can go back. Because oftentimes it's like, okay, yeah,

it was a pain to do this, but like, I got to get the episode out. Like, I don't care that it's a pain, I need to do it. But then afterwards I'll have it on the list. Like, oh yeah, that's stupid. What's an example of that? I was hoping, what's an example. Let me look.

I, uh, I was hoping there's going to be some mention of a Fibonacci numbers and story points. Yeah. So like I, I was getting transcripts done of the podcast. Um, but then I switched to, to using, I guess, the OpenAI transcribing thing. Whisper? Yeah. But it's like I ran into all kinds of problems with it.

And so I had to feed it a glossary and then had to tweak things on it. So like one time, like I have written down here, I wrote this thing like glossary generator, right? And so it takes the Whisper transcription, feeds it to like chat GPT-4, and there's probably some mistakes in it. Like can you make a list of the words that it got wrong? Right, and then I feed that back again. So that was like just something I added. Cause I was like, okay, this is wrong.

And then I'm like, okay, now I have this list and I'm feeding it back and then it gets it. Yeah. Nice. You mentioned you learned a lot from that class. What are some of the pieces you learned that would involve telling a good story? The thing I learned from Christina, there's a lot in your voice,

like a lot of emotion and power. And if I am telling a story to my wife or something even just like I was reading this book and it had this crazy story in it it was like a non-fiction book and I'm like animated and telling her all this right but then I would you know want to introduce the story for my podcast and I would be talking just into the void I'm like recording the intro and there's nobody there. And I just don't sound like a person. I just sound so bored, right? Like I don't sound excited.

Relatable, yo, yo, yo. And so like, that's hard. Like I still struggle with that. But like that was the thing where she was like, yeah, this isn't good. Like, you know, there's all these radio people in the class and then I remember because she had me like I was in this room and we were all in this big zoom meeting uh whatever I have to like practice reading so I'm like reading the intro and uh she's like okay try again but she's like leave like get out of the room and then I want you to like run in as fast as you can and then like stop and give your intro right and then i did that and she's like see it's getting

better and it was like she was like she made me just like physically move a lot um but the idea was like to try to get some of that humanness of like how i would normally talk it's like for whatever reason like a switch would flip in my head and i'd be like time to read the introduction to my podcast you know oh nice nice uh how did you come across this class by the way like i i think i found a link to this uh the it's like association association of independent audio producers is yeah um yeah they have class so training yeah yeah so i joined them and then they send out emails and they're like hey here's a class and i was like i should sign up for this and then i was very nervous about it because i don't feel like i should be part of the independent association of audio producers yeah it was fine.

Nice. So you mentioned you took another class with NPR as well, which was more about like, where can you add certain soundbites, not soundbites, but rather, what is the right word? Audio pieces to emphasize what the person is saying. What was that about? It was about that.

Like where to add? What did you learn as part of that class? Yeah, like so if you were to listen, I guess like Serial was like a really big breakthrough podcast back in the day. And like it was like scored, like it had like music and the music kind of gave it momentum and, you know, kept it moving and made it interesting. And that was created by the people who made This American Life. And if you listen to This American Life, right, it's like a bunch of 15 minute versions of that. And they use music. Sometimes it's too much and I don't like it, but sometimes it really adds a lot to the episode. And so, yeah, I, I took a class where they talked about how that's done.

You know, there's podcasts that are like full dramas with like people acting out a fiction with, with sound effects. But I just learned the very basics and, uh, yeah, I found it very powerful. And the thing that I learned was like, if I took like a, so I paid for a non, like a royalty free music service. And I found like,

if I found like a rock song and I drop out all the instruments, except just the bass. And then I can use kind of like a gritty sound bass. And then when you, you know, just like a repetitive bass chord when I'm introducing things.

And then I drop out like that. And you cut the bass and then the story starts and people are like you know it gives them an audio cue that like oh something's changed here right that was adam talking but now like boom now we're in the pretty cool pretty cool um guang you gotta add more music no you i was gonna say you should be taking notes, not I. How did you get this conviction to put in all this investment in terms of learning new skills? I imagine, yeah, it must have been pretty daunting

to be in that room with the people from The Economist. So I read this book called Ultra Learning and it's by Scott Young, I believe. Super good book. Ultra Learning, Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, Accelerate Your Career. It's quite a subtitle. So Scott Young was this guy who he finished business school and decided, why didn't I

go into computer science? Like I like computers, right? I like programming. And so he embarked, you know, this was, I don't know, 20 years ago, but it was right when the MIT like open courseware came out. So he embarked on this project, like I'm going to do the whole MIT undergrad, but I'm going to hit it like full time as a job. And I should be able to do the courses,

like do a triple course load and pass through all these classes. And he did do that. I mean, you don't get a degree for just doing all the online MIT things, but he had somebody grade him, like he got tests and whatever. And then he, I don't know, he did this a bunch of times. Anyways, he wrote a book about this. He called it like ultra learning. And I read it around the time that I transitioned to the storytelling stuff. And I guess the point of the book was like, hey, if you like really hit something hard in a short period of time, you can make a lot of progress, right? Other examples in the book included like people who, you know, develop a level of language proficiency really quickly and how they just invest a lot of

effort and surpass somebody who spends 10 years on Duolingo. You know, they get there in three months, but just by like hammering it. So I think that that's true, right? So what do you want to throw yourself at, right? So I chose to throw myself at the podcast. There's people now, you know, I mean, you mentioned data science, data science right it's like sometimes if you encounter something new and you're excited about it you can just really invest a lot of time and and level up pretty quickly nice taking a step back right like you're doing this all like while having a full-time job how did you balance this like did you treat this as just like kind of like a hobby that you like do on the side or yeah i mean so it started off when i wasn't putting much into it then it wasn't too hard like before i really started focusing on oh let's make the best

episode i can then it wasn't uh that challenging because it didn't take up that much time. At some point, I started waking up at five o'clock. And so I would work for two hours, like from 5.15 to like 7.15. Then I would get ready for my day. And then I would work. I would just do two hours of podcast work before I worked each day. And like sometimes I wasn't super, it probably wasn't my best hours for working. But cumulatively, there's actually a lot of hours there. So that worked very well. So it was just like putting in the time. I stopped.

I moved the time from five to six. Because eventually I did it, I think after two years of that, I was just kind of sleep deprived or I don't know. Like it ended up, I ended up switching it because my wife was just like, why are you an asshole all the time? She didn't actually say that, but it was like, I felt like I was, I was wearing a little bit of my social niceties. But yeah, so that was a big way. I just, I just spent two hours on it each morning that's a big commitment to be honest yeah i mean i struggle with this all the time

is there um clear i mean you know you've already talked about sort of the goal is to kind of keep on improving it and then produce the best podcasts that you can how do you go about like goal setting I guess I don't know yeah you know I've been thinking about this thing like like goal drift start with a specific goal you know doing the podcast because I want to learn about more technical stuff or I want to ask person question who I read their book and then like you know get some attention then you're excited about it and then it's like well maybe i'm gonna be joe rogan with hair like i don't know like that maybe that's my next stop right and then you know then i get into the storytelling thing nice nice what i guess what's your like current goal if you have one so my current goal it kind of relates to something you were asking

which is yeah if somebody has this big crazy story like that guy who did Lisp in space, like, that's amazing, right? But, like, what about, like, people's everyday lives? Like, how can that be interesting and how can people learn from that? Because I think, like, well, first of all, there's a limit of people deploying Lisp into space, but like also there's so much to learn from, you know, just like everyday stuff that happens to people. But how do you, you know, make that entertaining? So I think that's like a big challenge for me, right? It's like, you can write the science fiction book

where like the world is on the line. And if you don't save things, the earth is gonna explode, right? But like, world is on the line and if you don't save things the earth is gonna explode right but like can you write the the story where it's like very compelling but it's about like something much smaller right like somebody raising their kid or whatever that's a metaphor i'm not working on either of those things but like i was talking to somebody recently about something i was working on at work and how i was given this ticket to work on this area I wasn't familiar with. And like I thought I knew how to solve it and I was working on solving it. In turn, I was wrong.

I didn't understand what I was doing. But it was like three days later when I figured out I didn't like I was doing it wrong. Right. And like I was new to this. So there's expectation like I could get feedback and help, but also it had been three days. And so I was like, it's too late to like reach out and ask for help, because they're gonna be like,

well, what the hell have you been doing, right? And so I was explaining this to somebody and I thought it was like a very much my weird head space, right, that I was going over this in my head, like, oh my God, it's too late to ask for help. And this person was like, oh my God, like I think about that all the time my god it's too late to ask for help and this person was like oh my god like I think about that all the time like it's too late to ask for help like I'm stuck by that and then that made me think like there's all these things the small things of everyday work world and like how do you make those interesting and compelling stories

so that's something I'm thinking about I don't know that I have an answer but yeah I guess the obviously if it's crazy it has its own appeal but then you know the further away you get from crazy like the more normal it is like more relatable it is right so there's much more of the emphasis on how well the storytelling is versus just like sort of you dump the facts in terms of oh yeah this was outlandish yeah but like how do you make it interesting right like because like our days can be boring right but like where's the the pieces where that's not boring right and i think it has a lot to do with vulnerability right like if you're able to share the things that you are struggling with um like internally like that can be a lot uh there can be something interesting

there like even though this ticket that that was a problem for me was super minor and boring and if i described it to you like you wouldn't care but the fact that it it like got me worked up and i was worried you know that they're gonna think i'm dumb and like how did i think that this way would work and like i have to hide it like how am i gonna catch up so they don't know I went down this? Yeah, that's where it gets interesting to me. Nice, nice. So speaking of storytelling, so DevRel, so developers relations, there's also, I imagine, a ton of storytelling there. How did you first get into it, I guess?

From the management story, now fast forward like a little bit sorry yeah i mean i like i had the podcast and so somebody reached out to me about a developer relations role um and i was like yeah i like you know communicating to developers let's give it a try and yeah i didn't know what i was doing and the person who hired me had never they didn didn't know what developer relations. I mean, I guess we all had ideas, right? But so I started thinking that, like, I would go give a lot of talks at conferences. And then, you know, we tried to do meetups. And I wrote, like, tutorials talking about our product. And we didn't see a lot of success. But then we reached out to this guy, Mitch We weiner he's one of the founders of digital ocean

and uh he said like well you just need to understand the the people who might be the customers of your product like these developers like what problems they have and then like just solve those problems like write down the solutions and like, okay, and then what he's like, that's the whole thing. Like, that's like, people didn't know how to install my sequel onto a Linux server. We wrote that down, we put it like on the DigitalOcean website. And we didn't say like, check out DigitalOcean. I mean, maybe, but like, we just told them how to solve their problem. And like that happens to be, obviously,

those people might be interested in getting a virtual private server from DigitalOcean, right? So that's how I got my start. And we just tried to help people with their problems, right? One of the big first things I wrote that people really remember me by was this article about JQ.

JQ parses JSON. Super idiosyncratic tool, I guess, right? And so I just wrote a tutorial for how it works because if you understood kind of the logic behind it, like it made sense. It's like its own little JQ world. It's actually Turing complete. You could build whatever you want inside of it. I think it was on Hacker News recently,

somebody built JQ inside of JQ, like using the Turing Complete. Oh, wow. That's fancy. I just spent a lot of time writing down, you know, like here's how you use it and explaining things to people. And then that did very well.

You know, it showed up on Hacker News. People were on our website. They learned about our product. And that was like how I started to learn these skills. So I mean, I guess that's not really storytelling. It's more understanding developers and what problems they have. So one follow up on that, like when it comes to developer relations, you see many people in this role from different companies and they all do it very differently kind of going by what you said earlier in many cases you see some people building

kind of a tutorial working tutorial of sorts and they would publish it on github it's like here's how you can use tool x to achieve y which is basically a way to show how you can use one of their products to solve your problems in some cases it's tutorials like a blog post and other cases like a conference talk, for example. What are the parts which are not visible outside to people, which is sometimes talking to customers, for example, to understand what their problems are. So if I just look at the words like developer and relationships, what are the aspects here which are not public facing, which happens behind the scenes?

Yeah, I mean, that would be one of them for sure. Like talking to people, using the product, seeing what problems they have, maybe paying attention to where people are just talking about your products

or competitors or whatever, seeing what issues they have. One of the problems is like developer relations is a weird role. It means a lot of different things, um, to different, depending on the organization, right? I mean, I guess that's true of any role, right. But like some people is communicating feedback that, you know, users of the product are getting to the product team.

Right. So it can, it can look a little bit like a PM role or something, right? Where, you know, developers are using this API, they're having this issue, like, how can we prioritize this? So I worked at Earthly, it was like a seed stage startup. And like our big problem, you know, was we were competing obscurity, right? Like nobody knew we existed if you worked in developer relations for amazon on aws lambda like everybody knows it exists right so then it's a different type of problem right you don't need to let people know that lambda is a thing yeah maybe

it's much more relevant to provide tutorials that show how to use the latest feature or yeah that part where you're feeding feedback back to the product team so it varies a lot but yeah i guess i did a lot of like awareness stuff right and that's where that digital ocean perspective really made sense because if you go like, I went to a meetup to talk about earthly, it was like an online meetup and, uh, like there was the guy who hosted it and there was one other person. And then I gave some presentation and then at the end, I was like, any questions in the, the, the one person who wasn't like the host was like,

so this is a command line tool. I was like, yeah, no, it is a command line tool. I was like, yeah, it is a command line tool. But the thing is, because who wants a meetup where various dev tool startups come and show what they've built, right? Nobody does, right? So I think Mitch Weiner's point was like, what problems actually people have? And you don't need to sell them on your product. Just help them, you know, solve their problems. And often it's tangent, tangentially related, right?

Like I remember, um, earthly, for example, really good at doing builds for monorepos, which can be a challenge. And so we wrote like lots of stuff about like, here's how you can build monorepos, right? Not just here's how you do it with our tool. Like here's how you structure it monorepos, right? Not just here's how you do it with our tool. Like here's how you structure it. Here's best practices. It's like educating people.

Those people, you know, we think they would really benefit from using our product. But just putting that out there, they're aware of us. And they know, you know, maybe when they're like, hey, what build tool should I use? They might check it out. So in a way, talking about goal drifting, at the beginning of the podcast, like you mentioned, your goal was to be this amazing programmer who knows how to solve all these problems in the code. On the developer relationship side, I would say it's slightly different where it's a little more breadth than depth. Maybe I'm getting that wrong. But if that's the case, in in a way that goal has drifted,

considering that, do you want to stay on the DevRel path or would you consider changing it? Like you think I've drifted from my technical roots, I guess. Yeah. I'm curious about that as well. Because like when you said that, right? Like I was like, ooh, like kind of being like an engineer's engineer, right? Like being really like on drill down. that still important to you like do you still

want to be that or after all this experience you're kind of like you know what maybe that was kind of a pseudo goal yeah or part of the journey that got me to where i am oh that sounded pretty good yeah sorry sorry sorry i don't know why I wanted to be the best engineer. Like, I don't know. It's just I wanted to. But, like, there's all these people that I looked up to in that time, right? I'm trying to think of specific people. Like, Joel Spolsky, I remember he had this blog talking about engineering,

like, back in the day. It was the guy from Steve Yeagy or whatever. I don't know. There was all these people.'t know there was all these tv yeah there was all these people and i was like you know i want to know all the things that they know um like i want to be that great but like if you think about it the reason we know about them is because actually they're communicators right they're explaining problems to us like i thought this guy has a blog because he's the most amazing engineer. Um, but no, he,

he, he's, I know about the things that he's done because he talks about them, right? Like what he's actually good at, like all these people I looked up to what they're actually good at was communicating, right? The person who wrote the book that I wanted to ask questions about how to do, you know, whatever functional programming, like it's not clear they were the best functional programmer in the world. Hopefully they were decent at it, but no, they had written a book, right? They had spent a lot of time communicating. So I think that actually, like I, I maybe realized that my goal, you know, was misplaced, that there was a larger goal or something that, yeah, I wasn't seeing that all these people who communicate are the people that I look up to, right? And it's, it can be

super impactful if you can take something and explain it in a way that, that lets it crystallize in people's minds. And I don't know that I'm the best at it, but like, it's, it's, it's, it feels very valuable and important. Yeah. And so that's what I'm going for. Right. And like, it's weird because developer relations, it feels like it's a good rocket because I like communicating to developers. Right. And if I can find a place where they value those skills and it can help impactfully, you know, grow their business or whatever. And also I get to like write about

why we should stop using YAML like for everything or whatever my perspective is. Like it feels like a super good, it feels like it shouldn't be something I'm paid for, but, but it seems like people are willing to pay. Oh, why we shouldn't use the animals for everything. Well, there's the number, uh, hacker news number one post. Yeah. So that was like a really nice, uh, full circle, uh, in some ways, um, that,

yeah, and that's actually quite profound that I need to think more yeah if you if you think of all the people you look up to right um like i was looking up to them because i thought they were the best but but like i would never have known about them if they didn't invest time into into communicating right like i remember reading all these carl sagan books when i was a kid i loved them um you know like oh Carl Sagan is the most amazing scientist in the world well no he was amazing science writer right like I think he was a good scientist but that's not why I know of him I know of him because he's a science writer communication is everything right the people telling stories about the builds breaking at

Opertel the person I learned the most from I think he was just really good at telling these stories. You know, like somebody would be like, Oh yeah, I got called in on the weekend. Like turned out the disc was full. But Richard, that's not how he would tell the story. Right? Like he would give you breadcrumbs. This is like, get this call. I'm laying on my couch and watching Lost.

And then like, I need to drive in and you know, and he would like they're like oh richard's got another good one oh was it this was it that was the router power out again yeah and it's like i learned a lot from richard but only because he let you kind of live that debugging experience right like you got the vicarious learning of that battle. That's just because he was a good storyteller. True. Very true. I love it.

I think we've had a great time talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your journey as well as all of your experiences with software engineering, podcasting and developer relationships, and most of all communication. Thank you so much for joining us today. This was really amazing for us. Hope it was entertaining for you. I had fun.

I hope, yeah. I hope it's everything you bargained for. Thanks, Adam. Hey, thank you so much for listening to the show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about us at softwaremisadventures.com. You can also write to us at hello at softwaremisadventures.com. We would love to hear from you. Until next time, take care.