The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Gotta give to get back (Interview)

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

We're on the main stage at THAT Conference with Danny Thompson. He has an amazing story and journey into tech. Thanks to our friends at Cloudflare for helping us get to THAT Conference earlier this year to enable this conversation. Special thanks to Nick Nisi and Clark Sell for coming in clutch and getting us the audio to ship this show!

Okay, friends, this is the Change Log, and we have a treat for you today. We thought we lost this interview for good, but no. Nick Nisi and Clark Sell came in clutch for us. As you may know, Nick is a panelist on JS Party, and Clark has been connecting nerds all around the world as the founder of that conference for years. Okay, so we did this awesome interview with Danny Thompson earlier this year on the main stage of that conference, and we thought that the conversation was lost to the ether, but no, we have acquired the audio source, the originals,

and we're bringing it to you today. Danny has an amazing story and journey into tech. He's a community builder and connector, and we think you're really going to enjoy this conversation we had with him on stage at that conference. Big thanks to our friends at fly.io. That is the home of changelog.com. Launch your app for free in five minutes. Check them out, fly.io. Okay, let's go to the main stage at that conference. Hey, friends.

I'm here with a friend of mine, Dave Rosenthal, CTO at Sentry. So, Dave, I've heard you say trace connected before. I know that the next big frontier for Sentry is tracing this metrics platform. How'd you get there? And what do developers need to know about how you're thinking about this product? Before I came to Sentry, Sentry was sort of working on a metrics product. We started building that metrics product in a more traditional way with the metrics just kind of being more like kind of just disconnected.

They're just like another source of data. They're another table somewhere. Yeah, you can line them up by time. Sure, you can drill into them a little bit, but really, they weren't connected to that trace. And we took a big step back from that after trying it ourselves, after trying it with users, and realizing that there was a whole class of things we wanted to be able to do that you couldn't do with this kind of disconnected metrics. And so, you know, we changed our APIs, we changed our approach, and we're kind of now really on a very clear direction of building a metric system that isn't one of these kind of like legacy disconnected metric systems. It's trace connected so that we

can get that kind of rich debugging context when you actually dig into a real problem. And, you know, there's trade-offs. It's not quite as easy to just like log random metrics at random times into a system. You have to put the thought when you're building the telemetry into how this metric actually does relate to the structure of the code that's running underneath. But we think it's the right tradeoff for users because it's like a little extra time to figure that connection out. But then when you actually go to use the data, the connection's there for you. So small investment, big return. And it's just an example of how we're kind of making decisions internally to set our users up for success with this Trace Connected idea. Very cool. It's cool to see how you think about getting to the end results with any of these products you're building.

It's so cool to see behind the scenes the way you think and the way you iterate. Okay, friends, go to Sentry.io. Use our code CHANGELOG to get 100 bucks off the team plan. That's basically almost four months for free. Sentry.io. Use the code CHANGELOG. Don't use anything else. Use our code. It's good for you. Once again, Sentry.io. What's up, That Conference? Good afternoon. Welcome to That Conference main stage. Main stage with Danny Thompson.

Day one. Yeah. What's up, Danny? What's up? How are you? Excellent. There you go. Have you ever podcasted on a stage before?

No. This is a first for you? No. This is definitely a different set of circumstances that I'm not necessarily used to. Do you podcast often? Podcast, yes. We've done quite a few podcasts. I think the latest one that I did was the Free Code Camp podcast.

That was a good one. Nice. Quincy Larson? Yeah. Amazing Quincy. Good friend of ours. I like him. Got to get him on the pod.

It's been a while. It's always good to have Quincy on the pod. Speaking of community, I mean, like, Free Code Camp is just massive. Like, can you top that, really? Paid Code Camp, maybe? Well, you're here to talk about international community building. Your story, a little bit.

Community building a lot. We'd love to hear your story. The title says, From Gas Stations to International Community Building. So I'm sure gas stations have something to do with it. Tell hear your story. The title says from gas stations to international community buildings. I'm sure gas stations have something to do with it. Tell us the story. Before I entered the field of tech or learned how to code, I spent almost 11 years of my life, over 10 years, frying chicken in gas stations. That's my entire history.

That's all I ever knew. Really? And learning how to code honestly changed everything. And to be honest, even part of my talk, Free Code Camp was the first place that I started on. And I'm a firm believer that motivation and inspiration have expiration dates. And if you don't act on the inspiration in that moment, it expires. And Free Code Camp made it to where within 90 seconds, I wrote my first line of code. It's really hard to break a habit that you start and act on. And so for me, that's why I'm always recommending that site. I don't necessarily think front end may be the way, the truth and the life when it comes to development.

But I do think those early exciting wins kind of keep people addicted to the process. And so for me, that's definitely what kept me addicted in the beginning. And so I essentially started there, started learning how to code, started making some projects and all the good stuff and it went well, but I never really started learning how to code with the idea like, oh, I'm getting a job. I didn't really know that path even existed at that time. I just thought like, I'm going to make a website and it's going to be the coolest website in the world. And everybody's going to go to it and buy stuff. I don't even know what I'm going to sell, but they're going to buy something and they're going to love it. And then you learn about SEO and you're like, this is way harder than I thought it was going to be.

And so I just kind of kept iterating on that. And over time, I started building this amazing skill set that was very in demand. And one big thing that changed everything for me was honestly meetups. And I remember to this day, I heard about meetups in a forum and I looked online and I lived in Memphis Tennessee I'm like do we have meetups here is this a thing and lo and behold we did have a meetup and I went there and at this time I had just been learning like html css I felt like I knew everything about programming spoiler I literally knew nothing. Like, I didn't know a dang thing. And I remember. What year was this?

2018. Okay. So I was 30 years old. This is recent. Yeah. I learned how to code at 30. And so I'm about to be 36. So I go to this meetup and I instantly realize that I don't know anything.

And people are like speaking like a foreign language to me. They'll talk about Java, C Sharp and Seagull see i don't know what any of the stuff meant but i kind of felt like i was excluded from the overall conversation happening because i didn't have anything i could contribute i didn't know what they were talking about but in that moment i basically said to myself that i'm never going to be excluded from conversation again and i just went home and i just started studying i started building i started getting further further in depth with the subjects. And that's when my technical breadth started growing. And over time, people in those communities,

James Q. Quick, one prime example, they started seeing how I was progressing. And so a lot of the peers started becoming recommenders. And over time, and this is kind of why I say communities are so great, you have the same people kind of returning. And so when they see a progress over month one, month six, month nine, and they start seeing you grow and your technical skillset growing, they're going to be more excited to recommend you for stuff. And so that was like my pivotal moment to start getting more connections and conversations. And then from there, I started building my own group and I built a group that

was tremendous in the Memphis area called GDG Memphis. From there, I was helping groups in North Carolina. I was helping groups in California and I was even helping groups in the Florida area, trying to like build up events because a lot of them kept saying like, you know, we can't really tap into the community, make a few adjustments here and there. And next thing you know, they're starting to not just get people coming to an event, but returning to an event. And to me, I think that's the biggest tell. It's already a battle to get them to come there. But if you're not getting them to come back and have a good time, there's a big disconnect. And so from there, I started helping people.

Helped out a group in Saudi Arabia. Helped out groups in Ireland. Literally helped out a Mongol group in Ireland. So that was pretty cool. And then over time, just kind of grew to where I think I've helped groups in like nine countries. And so they've all just kind of blossomed and grown. That's crazy, man. So how did you get connected with those foreign groups to travel and do that? How did you pay for it? How did it all work out? It didn't have to pay for it because the whole world went silent. And during the pandemic,

nobody was really doing anything. So these were virtual then? So a lot of it, it was virtual. And then after the pandemic, one of the most common things I heard was people just aren't coming back to meetups. And meetup groups were dying. So what I started doing, I had just moved to Texas at that time. And I saw all these groups all over Austin and even San Antonio and Houston, these groups that were dead. And so I started reaching out to them saying,

let's do a joint meetup. I'll do that legwork. And let's see if we can revive the community. Because you're saying you've tried everything. Let's just try that. Next thing you know, their community is getting activated again and again and again. And now those groups are doing well.

Why did you care about those groups, though? Were you connected to them? What made you want to revive them and help them? For me, I don't think I would be where i am now i wouldn't be on the stage if it wasn't for great meetup groups so we don't monetize it we don't earn anything from it it's just a way to help other developers and i've met some i've literally met lifelong friends at this point through meetup groups i've gotten career opportunities to meetup groups, and I don't know necessarily who else needs that help. And so to let that kind of like die off and not provide that resource to people, I think it's just not worth it. And so for me, that's basically where it comes down to how many people are we helping within that process? And my ultimate hope

is if we help enough people, they'll perpetuate that good and help somebody else along the way. Helping people, helping people, basically, right? That's from Wedding Crashers. There you go. Got to bring some movie trivia there. Good reference, good reference. Yeah. So you said tweak this, change that. All of a sudden people are coming back. They're coming the first time. Now we're growing. Now we're building.

What's the tweaks? What are the changes? How do you actually affect change in these situations? There's a couple things that I notice. These are like common denominators with groups. One of the biggest ones I feel is that meetups traditionally, they try to have the subject matter of the meetup be the core reason why someone is coming to that event. And so if they do another meetup and that subject matter doesn't necessarily apply to that person, what ends up happening? They don't go. For me, I feel like that's the opposite of the approach that we should be utilizing and taking. The purpose should be I'm going to where my community is.

Simple as that. My community is meeting this Thursday. I'm going to go hang out in my community. Oh, we're also talking about a tech topic. That's cool too. And so for me, my meetups never start with us talking about a tech topic. That's the thing that we're doing together. It's not the reason why I'm showing up.

So I'll do tech topics on Java, and I'll have JavaScript developers show up. I'll have a topic on Android development. I'll have non-mobile developers show up because they feel like, well, my community is coming there. The other day, I gave a meetup with two days' notice. We still had 70 people show up. Why? We're not a tech town, but they know their community is coming there. So they realize that a tech topic will be talked about, but they're more so there for everyone else that they're going to be interacting with.

And so that's the forefront of the message that I try to go with. The other thing I'll say is a lot of meetup organizers, whether they realize it or not, they're really great at punishing their guests. How so? Hey, we're going to get started in five minutes. We're just, just sit right there. We're going to get started in five minutes. If you want to just sit there or, you know, get your laptop sound and get started. Five minutes, five minutes, three minutes, three minutes. We're going to get started in three minutes. But that's what they do. So I'm punished for coming on time. Okay. Why is my time not valued? Why is the person who's late valued more in this scenario than me?

Then I showed up on time. And so what ends up happening? Well, I'm not going to show up to there at 630. They're not going to get started at 630. I'll be there at 7. And then finally get to the point where it's like, am I really going to go there for the 45 minutes? I'll just stay home. Netflix is better.

I don't have to deal with traffic. So if you punish your guests, they're less likely to return. What's up, friends? I'm here with Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly. As you know, we love Fly. That is the home of changelog.com. But Kurt, I want to know how you explain Fly to developers. Do you tell them a story first? How do you do it? I kind of change how I explain it based on almost like the generation of developer I'm talking to. So like

for me, I build and ship apps on Heroku, which if you've never used Heroku is roughly like building and shipping an app on Vercel today. It's just it's 2024 instead of 2008 or whatever. And what frustrated me about doing that was I didn't, I got stuck. You can build and ship a Rails app with a Postgres on Heroku. The same way you can build and ship an XJS app on Vercel. But as soon as you want to do something interesting, like as soon as you want to, at the time, I think one of the things I ran into is like,

I wanted to add what used to be like kind of the basis for Elasticsearch. I want to do full text search in my applications. You're kind of hit this wall with something like Heroku where you can't really do that. I think lately we've seen it with like people wanting to add LLMs kind of inference stuff to their applications on Vercel or Heroku or Cloudflare or whoever these days they've, they've started like releasing abstractions that sort of let you do this, but I can't just run the model I'd run locally on these black box platforms that are very specialized. For the people my age, it's always like, oh, Heroku was great, but I outgrew it. And one of the things that I felt like I should be able to do when I was using Heroku was like, run my app close to people in Tokyo for users that were in Tokyo. And that was never possible.

For modern generation devs, it's a lot more Vercel based. It's a lot like Vercel is great right up until you hit one of their hard line boundaries, and then you're kind of stuck. There's the other one, we've had someone within the company, I can't remember the name of this game, but the tagline was like five minutes to start, forever to master.

That's sort of how our pitching flies. Like you can get an app going in five minutes, but there's so much depth to the platform that you're never gonna run out of things you can do with it. So unlike AWS or Heroku or Vercel, which are all great platforms, the cool thing we love here at ChangeLab most about Fly is that no matter what we want to do on the platform, we have primitives, we have abilities, and we as developers can charge our own mission on Fly. It is a no-limits platform built for developers, and we think you should try it out. Go to fly.io to learn more. Launch your app in five minutes.

Too easy. Once again, fly.io. is there a structure or a format you use then to make it not about the topic that evening because i mean obviously you're probably there to talk about specific front-end things potentially as a community there's a underlying fabric that makes the reason to go there but ultimately you're like well i like danny so i'm gonna go back and see danny i like sue or i like whomever else is gonna go there. So you go because of the people, but how do you structure the night? What's the way you do it?

So it varies depending on, like, I observe over time, like, what's working, what's not working. Let's tweak it for this market, tweak it for that. The things that I've kind of noticed is, number one, when my meetup starts, it's immediately into networking. Like, we're networking, people are there. I try to be what I call the extrovert for the introvert. So if someone is very reserved and quiet, they're nervous. Their default is to just hide at a table and then they leave and they don't come back. Cause it's like, well, I didn't really get anything out of that, that I couldn't get from like a YouTube video. Right? Like a lot of these speakers that come here, they've recorded their talks anyway. Let me just catch one of those. But now, and I'm firm belief in this, if you make a friend at a meetup, that's a meetup that you're going to return to.

So I try to introduce myself right away, find out what everyone does, and I start finding common dynamics. Oh, you're a mobile developer? Well, he's also a mobile developer at XYZ organization. Let's pair you two together real fast. But the other thing is I'll do interactive things where we have what I call a pair programming jam. It's like a mini hackathon with the goal of everyone's assigned randomly on a team and you have two hours to make an MVP of XYZ. And so now you don't have a design, you don't have an idea, you don't have nothing to go off of except the theme. Everyone's trying to hack something together. So you've now kind of in a situation where you have to interact, right?

You're talking, you're trying to solve this problem. And at the end of the two hours, there's one common phrase. If I had more time, it would look better, or it would operate like this, or it wouldn't be broken. And that's the whole purpose. No one's having a finished app that works perfectly after two hours. But because of that almost struggle... Come back next time. You'll have some more time next time.

I want to share something because you made me think about the history of this podcast. I met Wynne Netherland at the Ruby meetup in Houston. Houston RB, right? And it was funny because he and I really were in the same place at the same time in terms of curiosity and exploration of content and what's different, what's new. Because we were both in transition and the early days of this podcast began because i met the original co-founder when at a meetup and we were friends i met him and i liked him he spoke well like it was it was like uh kind of instant uh friendship you know it was too easy and i didn't really consider that until this moment that the

the beginnings of this thing we're doing right now began at a meetup. Y'all, if you go to a meetup, you can start a podcast. There it is, man. There it is. That's awesome. Well, it's also interesting, not to make this too self-reflective, but thinking about we have similar things with the communities around shows or around content you create online, whether it's a meetup, whether it's a YouTube channel, whatever community you're trying to create. And we often have the problem and the happy result of sometimes people say, we have a show called Go Time. And there's a lot of people that listen to it.

They're not Go programmers, but they're like, these are good conversations by people that I like. And yeah, Go's involved, whatever, whatever. I like the show. And that's awesome. But a lot of people don't know that because the show is called Go Time, right? And so if the topic isn't first, sometimes the packaging, the name, the way you talk about the meetup really matters to help people understand, like, I can belong here even if I'm not in this particular tech stack or I'm not,

you know, front end or whatever it is. Do you help with those kind of things as well? Are the meetups very generic? Like, this is the software meetup for this area. How do you think about those things? So my meetup groups, I'm not against a group that is language specific. I want our groups to be language agnostic, meaning we can do any technology, any language, any framework, any tech talk. If we can help a certain part of the community on one night, let's do it. If we help another one another night, let's do that as well. For me, at least my focus is we should just be a place where people feel comfortable and safe regardless of technical stack. And so that's what we've sort of become in a sense.

Okay. And so, well, like, for example, I love this theme where I'm big on doing, let's be real, conferences are expensive. Especially if, like, maybe you're at the beginning stages of your career or you're trying to break in. Sure. Maybe even if you're established and you're just not having like a high paying job, it's still hard to go to conferences regularly. So what I've done is this thing that I call a night of, and we'll have seven or eight speakers and it's just completely free. No one spends a dollar and we just have people come learn. So like a night of JavaScript, a night of react, a night

of Java, a night of mobile development. And it's just eight speakers speaking on that theme. And so now, of course, obviously it's interactive. You're getting a lot of value out of it. But I'm also a very big believer in value for time and your reward for said time. So if you're coming and it's one talk, you're probably going to get a lot out of it.

But if you have eight speakers and two of them talk about something you didn't even think about, that's a brand new peak in interest. You got a lot of reward for your time. That's awesome. So how many of these are you actively involved in? I mean, so in Dallas right now, we do meetups every two weeks. So at least every two weeks, if not more sometimes. Okay. But depending on one group then? Yeah. So in Dallas, we have one group is called Dallas Software Developers. And so DSD. And we have a bunch of volunteers.

We do a lot of stuff. We do a cohort, which is completely free, where we have junior developers that are trying to break in. We essentially put them on teams over the course of six weeks, and we get professional programmers that guide them through a project. And so they're building something, and not just like something generic, but something that they could actually talk about tangibly within an interview process. They're solving a problem, delivering a solution and being able to talk about said technical solution. So that way now when they're in interview, they actually have something to combat a lot of those objections with. And that's 100%

all volunteer, random, free. Everything we do is volunteer, random, free. We don't make any money off of this, but essentially the idea is, you know, people are getting a lot of value. And so we literally just had a bunch of our last cohort graduates. They just got jobs. Like one of them particularly got job. I mean, pretty like large organizations. I don't want to say any names. Well, one of them like NBC, for example, they got a job there. One of them is like in the banking industry. So really great opportunities and they're just thriving. And so for some of them, there's them, there's that disconnect of the idea and the implementation. So sometimes they would build projects

that are like the average movie database, but what are you going to do with that? It's really hard to get an interviewer asking you follow-up questions on said things. And so we implemented that framework and it's done really well. And so we're just constantly evolving that from there. And so I help out on occasion with a group in California so I help out on occasion with a group in California.

I help out on occasion with a group in Florida still. North Carolina one is hit or miss because they're inconsistent with their meetups. But whenever they need help, I'm just literally an email away. And I still help out with the one in Memphis. How key is consistency? It's everything. I mean, that's not even just meetups. That's everything in life.

It's really hard to get long lasting and high producing results without some form of consistency there. Even podcasting, like you might miss an episode here and there. But if you miss a lot over time, it's really hard to keep that audience engaged. And so that's like a very, very, very large item as far as I'm concerned. You have to be consistent. And have you found that every other week is sustainable? Is there weekly is better, monthly? I know there's a lot of monthly meetups.

Monthly is definitely easier to maintain from the organizing perspective. For me, when I came to Dallas, I didn't really see a lot happening at that moment. And so I was like, I want to revive the community and get people excited again. So every two weeks is kind of the cadence that we're trying to saturate the market with. But I will say that if you know that there's a meetup every two weeks, maybe you miss one, you'll be at the next one. That means you're going to be there at least every month. But we seen, I'd say 70% of them coming back every two weeks. So like we have a really strong community that just keeps returning. And so I like keeping them engaged in that. And so it works.

How big is that community? I mean, we've done some pretty sizable events. Like, I wish I had a picture of the top on there. I could show you on my phone. But like, I mean, we've had some meetups with like 300 people. We've had some meetups with 50 people. Sure. Yeah.

But I mean, so we'll do some meetups that we call Code Together, which is no topic, 100% casual. You come in, you can show projects that you've been working on or whatever, or talk about what you've been doing at work. Just talking with other devs. And then we have meetups that have a talk that we're going to do, a workshop, something along those lines. I like that because it's like, well, I can go this time and it's just me pairing up with

a couple people. Or I'm learning because I'm looking over so and so's Nick's shoulder he's vimming with NeoVim and typescripting I want to learn you know you know

I didn't even think about this but like that conference the thing that I found interesting here was this whole open spaces concept but kind of

at our code together that's what's happening like people get in these little silos and they're talking about what they are interested in and so it's almost like that now that I think

I've never even put that together but that's kind of what that code together is. You have people just form up at tables and they're talking about stuff that they're learning and doing and they get to share. Or the other thing too, is you'll sometimes have someone share something that they're working on. And another dev is like, I've actually worked on something similar to this and I found a better practice and here, boom, boom, boom. Now it's just knowledge here and knowledge here. It seems like what you're doing is a lot of giving of yourself and of your time. I mean, all I've heard is giving, giving, giving.

A lot of give, yeah. What do you get back? Intrinsic value? Are there intangibles? Are there tangibles? Because giving for giving's sake is amazing. It's better to give than to receive 100%, but also it's nice to receive. And so that helps sustain an ongoing give sometimes.

Is there things that you've received just in terms of putting all this effort in for free, all this value, you're just giving value constantly. What do you give back? You want the real answer? This is real? Yeah. The real answer. Literally nothing. Okay. I'm not sugarcoating it i used to really be obsessed with this idea like my whole life i was

i grew up broke we were poor like i remember working at gas station literally 80 plus hours a week i was making just enough money to be dead broke i swear i was killing myself and when i started like making the transition and i landed my first job and it was more money than I was making at that time. And it just kept going up. I realized none of this would have happened if it wasn't for really great people around me. And so I honestly, I'm at this point where money isn't really an attractant. If I'm being completely honest, it really isn't. I've turned down like some ridiculous offers for money. Prime example, I just released a brand new

course two days ago uh four five days ago uh we have almost 2,000 students in that course it is 100% free it is not monetized in any way shape or form and it's on a platform that is notorious for having everything behind the paywall and they had to put it out 100% for free I I don't really have I'm more focused now like I know know, truth be told, I know that there's going to be a day that I expire. I don't know if it's going to be in a week, in a month, in a year, in a decade. I don't know when it's going to be, but I'm just trying in whatever way, shape or form. If I can help one person, fantastic. If I can help a thousand, cool as well. But I just want to leave it in a little bit better shape because no one's going to remember the

flavor of the month of the internet in 50 years from now or 100 years from now. So might as well help someone in the process because at least you can make generational changes at that point. I feel that because one thing we say often is we came for the tech and we stay for the people. And like that's anytime people ask us for our secret sauce or anything like that whatsoever, it's like you really have to come and be here for the people, not just for the tech we create because that's just the means to the end. That's just a means of connection.

It's a means, I said before on a podcast, I'm humanist. I love humans. I can't help it. It's just how I am. But yeah, came for the tech,

stay for the people. I mean, honestly, I lost money coming here. I spent money on a rental, spent money on the whole. I spent money coming here. But I'm here because there are people that could potentially get help from this. And the other thing, too, honestly, if people aren't already coming to this conference, this should be on their radar. The amount of value here, amazing.

Like, right now as we speak, there's little, like, talks happening on the side in many stages. Yeah. The value that I've gotten personally today, incredible. Amazing. Right now as we speak, there's little talks happening on the side in many stages. The value that I've gotten personally today, incredible. I've gotten probably 14 pages of notes that I've taken over this time. And so that by itself I think is incredible. And so when you add then the open spaces, I think that's phenomenal as well. But yeah, I lost money coming here. But the hope is someone's going to get benefit out of it.

This might backtrack a little bit, but somebody asked, what's the group in North Carolina? I think I can't see the name. If you tweet at me, I'll go ahead because I know who this person is. If you tweet at me, I'll go ahead and give you all the link details and whatnot for that group. I think they're local in that area. That's why. What's up, friends? I'm here with a new friend of ours over at Assembly AI, founder and CEO Dylan Fox. Dylan, tell me about Universal One.

This is the newest, most powerful speech AI model to date. You released this recently. Tell me more. So Universal One is our flagship industry leading model for speech to text and various other speech understanding tasks. So it's about a year long effort that really is the culmination of like the years that we've spent building infrastructure and tooling at Assembly to even train large scale speech AI models. It was trained on about 12 and a half million hours of voice data, multilingual,

super wide range of domains and sources of audio data. So it's super robust model. We're seeing developers use it for extremely high accuracy, low cost, super fast speech to text and speech understanding tasks within their products, within automations, within workflows that they're building at their companies or within their products. Okay. Constantly updated speech AI models at your fingertips. Well, at your API fingertips, that is. A good next step is to go to their playground. You can test out their models for free right there in the browser, or you can get started with a $50 credit at assemblyai.com slash practical AI.

Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI. Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI. Let's go back to the beginning because you wanted to create this awesome website, right? And you went to Free Code Camp and you got started. What was slightly before that? Was there, like, how did you know? Did you just Google how to code? How did you know about Free Code Camp?

Why did you want to build this website? What was a spark for you in the starting point? The reason why I got into tech was because of a rapper. I've said this line a million times, and it's very true. To give you the short version of the story, I was 30 years old, working in a gas station. And I kind of came the realization that like I'm almost at a fork in the road at this point and I spent days like staring at this fork to where I realized if I go right I'm literally going to be in this gas station until the day I die but if I go right this is me coming to terms with it I accept it I know what's going to happen I'm just going to die in this gas station and that's cool if I go left I got to make a change it's going to happen. I'm just going to die in this gas station. And that's cool. If I go left, I got to make a change. It's got to be now. And I don't have a clue what that

change is going to be. And so I'm sitting there and I, you know, my wife, my kid, my son was young at that time. And like, I'm telling him, like, I'm doing everything I physically can to improve our circumstances. But the truth of the matter was, honestly, I really wasn't without realizing it. I was bone tired. Like, my feet would ache. I was working all these hours. I was, like, just exhausted.

And one day, I'm at the hot box, the deli box, where, you know, we put the chicken in. I got some out to fry, and I'm stacking it in. And next to the register was a tv basically like if there's a line of customers they can like watch the tv for a few minutes so they don't feel like i guess the pressure of the line right and i hear this interview going on and this interview this rapper invested several million dollars into a tech company and i was like this is kind of weird so like i walked around the hot box i'm staring at this interview and obviously the interview asked him you, why did you invest this money?

And he said, I'm learning how to code. This literally melted my mind in that moment because I'm like staring at TV. My perception at that time was if you knew how to code, it was because you were literally a rocket scientist. You were a PhD holder. You were on that level of accolade right i couldn't fathom someone from my kind of background ever writing code and so i'm just staring and i'm looking at this and like i walk back behind that box and like i i don't even know what's upside down anymore like i'm just so confused i'm just thinking about this i'm thinking about this like

if he can learn how to code so can i right but then I'm like I need reasoning I started like coming up with reasoning like why don't I know more about my laptop why is the extent of my knowledge opening up youtube.com and watching cat videos because that's literally all I was doing like so why don't I for sure I was like why is that the extent of my knowledge like and then I'm like why don't I even know why my smartphone costs $1300

why don't I know why my laptop costs $2000 why don't I know I'm just paying it but I don't understand any of it and so

he started learning how to code and so did I and so I started going online I'm like how do I learn how to code

I googled it free code camp was the first thing that popped up I started it and I didn't know what any of this was. And I just started learning. And the thing that hit me right away is what made me so angry at myself. I spent like six hours on that website the first time. And I was like, when is the last time I read anything with the purpose of becoming better

at something I can't even remember I'm so great at making my boss money and killing myself in the process when's the last time and this was the first time ever in my life where the phrase invest in yourself ever clicked for me I never knew what that even meant and so now I'm like anytime you know

you see like these TikToks of these rich investors like if you only got a grand invest in yourself like what the hell does that even mean but that's the moment it clicked for me i'm finally making myself a priority and i'm investing myself yeah and that's where just the addicting came i heard uh i think it was on tick tock actually mentioning that that somebody said everything is find audible right like the the unlock of the world is, like for you, everything's learnable. Everything is find-outable. And she was like, this was the moment when I realized that I could build this business

I built because I had no idea how to do any of this stuff beforehand. And then my mom said, everything is find-outable. So I'm going to find out how that works. Then I'm going to find out how this works. And then that works. The next thing you know, you've skill stacked to the point where you can build this business and do your thing. You know, it's unlocked. Absolutely.

And it helps if you can unlock that for other people, which I'm sure has happened probably since then for you through the meetups and through your courses and through the stuff that you're doing online as well. Yeah. In Memphis, before the pandemic, because I didn't use social media before then, and so everything started right when the pandemic hit. And so before then I had helped 44 people land their first jobs in tech. I was geeked out, loved everything about that. And once I started realizing I can just take the same information that I'm giving people locally and we just apply it globally. But then all this new information started coming in. I start learning what doesn't work in different markets.

I started adjusting my approach. Now, for the most part, we're talking thousands at this point. It's very hard to go a few days without somebody messaging me, I finally got my first job, I implemented this strategy that you talked about in this webinar or whatever it may be, and it ended up working in the interview. And it ended up working so well to where they were recommending me for the next stage and next thing next thing you know someone prime example what was it uh last saturday someone literally messaged me i went from working in restaurants as a line cook

to now i just got my first job in tech or noah who i met over here literally fried chicken in a chicken restaurant now he got his first job in tech and what's funny about or even sam sycamore he was a construction worker heard me on one of the podcasts i'm forgetting the name now uh javascript jabber he heard me on javascript jabber decided to start learning how to code boom he's no longer living in his van like the thing for me i never knew this path was allowed once i figured it out i'm like oh this is it but now i start running my mouth because i don't know who needs to hear this. And it doesn't necessarily mean that tech has to be the thing for you. But it would be amazing for you to find out what that thing can be and start putting that effort in that right situation.

What's next for you? Where are you going from here? So we just released one course. The course was testing a theory as far as an educational method of teaching. And so now my idea is I have a similar method that I want to utilize for technical content and courses. And so that's going to be the forefront. A lot more technical courses are going to be coming out using said theory. I have an idea for a technical course that I'll be honest, I've never seen done. And I think this is going to help more junior developers than ever be job ready with actual job ready skills instead of

maybe trying to manufacture confidence in an area where they may be lacking it. And so I think that's going to go a long way. Really, really excited about that one. We're working on, honestly, one of my big goals is I want to do kind of how I mentioned the whole theme with a night of, with the meetups being like mini conferences. I want to do kind of how I mentioned the whole theme with a night of, with the meetups being like mini conferences. I want to do a big conference, but 100% free for the community. So that's in the works as well. I don't know if we're going to be able to achieve it this year.

It's my goal this year, but more than likely it's probably going to be the beginning of next year. I have a name for you. Free Conf Camp. There we go. You know what? It's so original, I think it might work. It might just work. It might just work. It might just work. FreeConf Camp. There we go. You know what? That's so original, I think it might work. It might just work. It might just work. That's amazing. It might be IP issues

there, but yeah. I like it. We'll call it FCC for short. There you go. Dot org. Dot org. We're coming for you, Quincy. Unrelated, but related question. Social media strategy for developers. you have a very large social followings right some would say how do you do that so the reality is i i've helped god knows

how many developers at the point finally build up their followings right the biggest mistake that i see majority developers make when it comes to social media, they take for granted the idea that people are going to automatically know what they're talking about. My timeline has 1,000 different accounts competing for five seconds worth of my time. I don't owe you the time to stop scrolling and read and then ponder what you're talking about and try to find the background context. You need to provide all that in the forefront. And if you provide that in a compelling way, people are going to like, engage, share, comment.

People oftentimes, I believe every post should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Simple as that. Must have a beginning. The reason why I'm supposed to be reading this, like your hook should be in the first line. You should have the meat of your post. And there has to be a conclusion there. Why did I read this? And what should I take away from

this? A lot of people miss that. And so oftentimes I'll see people where they'll have a post where it's like, I wrote a blog article. Look at this. They post a link. It doesn't get an engagement. Why? That's what I call a redirecting post. I can't even know if that post is good until I go to your blog article and read the thing. And so when I know if that post is good until I go to your blog article and read the thing. And so when I go to that other platform, maybe I drop a like on the blog article because this is the best blog article I've read all day. What are the chances of me going back to the original post to drop another like on it? Almost none. So if you're not giving me something to engage with before redirection, that post dies. The algorithm kills it. So a lot of

developers miss that. They don't give a reason to engage before redirection. The other thing a lot of developers make the mistake on, honestly, is lack of consistency within that niche. So kind of going back to the overall theme of consistency, how many developers do you know will talk about development topics? Next thing you know, they're talking about cars, they're talking about sports, they're talking about other interests. And the problem is, for me following you, I didn't sign up for that.

I signed up because I saw that great tweet on TypeScript implementation. Well, when I see this other stuff, I may give you the benefit of the doubt for a little while, but it was super easy for me to find that follow button. It's super easy to find

that unfollow button as well. So if you incentivize them to go find it, they will give the people what they came for. I mean, simple as that. Like if I signed up for tech stuff from you because you have great tech stuff, don't dilute it with the other things, especially if you're in the building stage, because they don't know who you are yet. You need that relationship built over time for them to be like, I know what Adam's about. I know his quirkiness. I know his tongue in cheek humor. Boom. I, when he hits me with that, I'm ready for it. But if it's my first interaction with you and you hit me with that right away, it's very low on the likelihood that I'll stick around for it. Right. What's your favorite online platform or community

or favorite place to build community online? It depends. So Twitter has been great at, it's my largest following, but the reality is LinkedIn has probably been my most fruitful of followings. The people on there are very serious. I get to talk to decision makers of businesses directly. And so whenever we're talking about big initiatives, I've got key holders for that business that are willing to make those moves. And prime example as well with LinkedIn, if I do a meetup and I have a hundred people that RSVP'd from LinkedIn, 95 are showing up. If I do that from Twitter, maybe 40. So LinkedIn, well, I mean, there's stats to prove it, right? Like I believe the last time I saw the stat, 75% of users on LinkedIn make over $80,000 a year. These are people that are well-established within their niche and career, right?

They're not people that are trying to break in or they're not people that are like deciding like whether they're going to stick with someone. They're in there, right? So they've already established a professional. They're going to be committed. Twitter, you don't know who's seeing your stuff. You could be someone that's a student. You could have a CEO.

You could have, you know, a sales rep. It may not even be people specific within your niche. LinkedIn, for for the most part is pretty good about pushing it to people that follow you for said topic i agree i've got great success on there too i posted recently on there and the one on the silent sacking i mean that was a good topic too but it's gotten 10 000 or more visibility if not more than that and that's 10 000 more than that show and topic would have had if I didn't post one thing on LinkedIn and so but I've been building my network there for years just haven't been given anything so I've been more encouraged with that feedback loop to give more there because it's it's sort of like a captive audience yeah you know what I mean versus Twitter which is not so much

a non-captive audience just more more scattered. Whereas LinkedIn seems a bit more narrow focused and people who are. These are tools. And I would like to utilize the tool for what it is and produce great fruitful relationships that I can continue even off of that platform. Some of the best relationships I've made on any of these platforms, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, like the YouTube channel is still growing. I need to put more content out. I know that, but I've made friends, like I've made lifelong friends that I've literally, I've met four people here today that I've been talking to for the last four years, first time we met in person.

But we've talked off of those platforms. We've talked in multitudes of different ways. So the platform doesn't necessarily matter as much as the communication and the relationship that you're having on and off of that platform. And for me, any social media platform is simply a tool and if you use it the right way,

you can make some great relationships. Yeah. It's great for introducing yourself and others to new ideas and to new people. But it's not great for actually establishing real relationships with those people. I followed people and talked to people online for years and never really felt like I knew them very well. And then you meet them once in real life and it's kind of like 100% different. Instant friendship. It's just like... Brett Cannon. Righttt cannon right yeah lifelong friendship there you go so that 100 resonates i don't know about you but after hearing this conversation and being present

in the moment for this conversation with danny it was eye-opening to see his journey, eye-opening to hear the path that it took him to get into tech. And it resonates with me so much because I came from a very small town, a very small town where it seemed like my only option was what everybody else had as options. A very small opportunity, not really much available, and kind of hopeless. And here we have Danny coming through that kind of scenario into a position where he's learning tech, he's learning software development, going to free code camp, doing all the things. And then he unites people in community and communities. That to me is cool. Links are in the show notes to check out Danny on Twitter slash X, LinkedIn, his website, etc.

Check him out, follow him, all the things. And a big thank you to our friends over at Cloudflare. We went to this conference, that conference, because of a sponsorship opportunity with our friends over at Cloudflare. And if it wasn't for that, well, we wouldn't have gone to that conference to have this conversation with Danny and all the other fun stuff we did there. So big thank you to CloudFlare. Thank you.

And while we're thanking folks, thank you to Sentry.io. Sentry is an awesome sponsor. Use our code CHANGELOG, get $100 off the team plan, get it for free for three months, almost four months. Enjoy that.

Also, our friends over at Fly, fly.io. That's the home of changelog.com, as you may know. And to our friends over at Assembly AI, the leader in speech AI. Check them out, assemblyai.com. And to the beat freak in residence, break, master, cylinder, bring in those beats. Good beats. Love those beats. Okay, that's it.

The show's done. We'll see you back here tomorrow on Friends. Thank you. Bye.