The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Human skills to pay the bills (Friends)

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Long time friend KBall makes his "first" appearance on The Changelog by way of Changelog & Friends. You likely know Kevin from his panelist position on JS Party. Today he's sharing his passion for coaching and developing human skills.

Welcome to Change Logging Friends, our weekly talk show about human skills. Thank you to our partners for helping us make world-class podcasts for you every single week. Fastly.com, fly.io, and typesense.org. Okay, let's talk. Well, we're here with our old friend, K-Ball. What's up, man? Hey, good to be on the show. I've never been on a full changelog episode, I don't think. Or maybe one. Oh my goodness.

But I'm excited to be on something else besides JS Party. Well, we're excited to have you on something else besides JS Party. Although you haven't been partying with us much recently. I have not. Well, I started a new gig and there's like standing all company meetings at our old recording slot. So folks have been talking about moving around and having some Friday recordings, which is great. I was on a show just recently that we recorded on a Friday, but yeah, our old slot has become suddenly challenging. That happens to folks that happen to Michael Rogers as well, where he's just like, every Thursday is booked in my entire life. I'm like, I guess you're off the show then, because that's when we record JS Party.

And we were doing it live for a very long time, and we finally realized this is a constraint that's optional, and we could actually remove that constraint and provide a lot more flexibility for everybody and still share the link with our JS Party channel. So we're live to just our friends inside of the ChangeLog Slack, but not on YouTube. And that's actually been kind of a nice change,

and it's allowing you at least to get on the pod every once in a while versus never. I'm trying to think of when you were on the ChangeLog, Kevin. I don't recall. I might not have been. I feel like I was on... Maybe like an all things open thing. So you guys met at all things open.

Yeah, 2017. That never showed showed i know that oh what do we talk about all we talked about uh foundation i think i was there giving a talk on foundation yeah exactly yeah foundation zurb foundation yeah i worked there for a while so yes, you did. Now I'm scanning. How come you never shipped that, Adam? Was he that big of a dud or just? Well, I think like all conferences, we limit what we put out from there. Yeah. I don't remember, honestly. I think that was actually the proving ground of us going to conferences and how to do it. Well, I think it was just you. I wasn't even there. Yeah, I went solo to all Things Open. Enjoyed it. I don't know. I can't remember that far back to know for sure the specifics of why. I feel like you told me. Now, whether this is accurate or not, you told me you lost it.

Oh, no. You lost the interview. No way. Did I say that? I don't know. I mean, I feel like I heard that somewhere. It was probably in a Slack channel and Slack expires now. So, I cannot verify, but I can neither confirm nor deny. Well, we don't usually lose stuff. Okay.

Editor's note here. We don't lose anything. Okay. Sometimes we do lose audio, but I know we did not lose this. So this was a surprise to me so i had to go back into our archives and pull out a clip from the unaired first conversation with k ball at all things open so here's the opener just about 30 seconds or so from that conversation zerbians like their nickname so i kind of i had that nickname before that's my online moniker, so I kind of got ahead of it

and didn't let them pick a nickname. I was like, I go by K-Vol, too, so if you want it. Well, I go by Stack or Stacks or Adam Stack or Adam. Thank you for being patient, though. So I'm going to do a quick sound check and kind of give you some instructions on proximity. You got it. But it's based on your voice because everybody has a different sounding voice,

different loudness or whatever. You're a professional. You tell me what to do. I'm about here. This is what works for me. So we do have some live listeners. I'm not sure how many live listeners we actually have, but a huge fan of Foundation. We've talked about Foundation on the podcast. Then the last one we talked about was Foundation 5. Very possible. So what version are we at now? We're at 6. We actually just released 6.2.4. So we released 6 about a year ago. And I don't mind saying it was actually a little bit of a flubbed release. We rewrote the entire code base for a couple of different reasons to build accessibility in from the ground up

and rework how we were doing some stuff. Sort of the legacy of the framework. I mean, it can happen, especially maybe at your first conference. Did you ship anything from that conference? Because I can't remember an episode from All Things Open that I wasn't part of. Well, that's when we were doing Spotlight. And so we weren't putting things onto the changelog from conferences. We thought, for whatever reason, that that content didn't belong on our main channel.

We were weird people back then, okay? We made strange choices. We went to conferences and we put that conference conversation on Spotlight, a whole separate show that had much less listeners. And that's what we did. So I'm trying to remember exactly why.

I know that Anna is her first name, but I can't recall her last name. I can easily pull up changelog.com slash spotlight and jog my memory because that's where all the content went from that engagement. So Anna Derbikova,

we're talking about blockchain and hyperledger. I think we only shipped one thing from that conference. And that was it. We must have lost everything else. Spotlight number four. Either that or we were all that bad. You know, honestly, I mean, that was December 2016. We shipped that.

So I think if we went around that range in our feed, we'd see potentially something else on the changelog. And I just don't know for sure. So barring that, and I was just scanning, so there were two crossover episodes y'all did where you pulled content from JS Party into changelog that I was on. State of the log. I guess we're breaking new ground here. Via crossover, you've been a participant in this podcast.

There you go. Well, now you're here and now you're our sole focus. I mean, we're just here to talk to you. Yeah. Oh my goodness. All right. I mean, we're just here to talk to you. Yeah. Oh my goodness. All right. You've had all of 17 minutes to prepare your thoughts.

I thought, of course, we should talk about human skills because this has been a focus of yours over the last few years. One that I kind of watched congeal to a certain extent into a formalized thing. Hey, I'm still holding out. Maybe we'll partner on something in that too, you know? Okay. Well, tell us about this and give us the old partner pitch. All right, here we go. So big picture, this is something I've been interested in for a while. It's something I've been starting to bring in, you know, pieces of to JS Party, which is really this idea of like, what are all the non-technical skills that factor into success in the tech industry? And we see this with engineers a lot, right? Folks, kind of your first

couple of positions, junior, mid-level, maybe even into senior, you're riding entirely on your technical skills. And then at some point, those skills, you kind of tap out where it's like the skills that got you there are no longer what are going to determine your success. They're table stakes. It's not to say they're not important anymore. Your technical skills are still important, but they're not enough to keep advancing or keep having more impact or however you want to measure yourself. And so, there's a whole swath of skills from personal effectiveness to one-on-one interpersonal effectiveness to one-to-many interpersonal effectiveness that drive your impact from there out. And that might be like, how do I manage my own emotions? That might be, how do I have a hard conversation with somebody? It might be, how do I bring along

a cross-functional partner and try to get something to happen there? But there's a whole bunch of different things. So as I said, I've brought some of that content into JS Party, but for a while I've been noodling on, could we do a podcast specifically focused on this, specifically focused on all the non-technical things that go into success in tech? And we were talking about this a little bit last year, but this is also like tech crash and recession or whatever. And so, you know, y'all didn't have the bandwidth. And I said, well, F it. You know, I had at that point left my previous job for other reasons, but I was like, I have a bunch of bandwidth. I'm going to see if I can get this thing off the ground and had this idea of wanting to not just do another long form interview podcast. Cause like, as much as I love talking and talking with you all and interviewing

people, like there's so many of those. And so I wanted to see if, could I do something that's a little bit more kind of topic focused. Each episode would have a topic, cut in pieces from multiple interviews. But it turns out if you want to do that, you need a whole bunch of interviews up front to make that happen. And so I started going and interviewing people and stumbled on why people ship long form interview podcasts. Because it takes a lot less editing to ship those interviews and there's good stuff in there. Right. So, since roughly the beginning of this year, I've been shipping interviews with people, leaders in technology about non-technical skills that go into success. I've been shipping those interviews on YouTube and doing a little sub stack newsletter that

like summarizes them. Now, I am still holding out that someday I'm going to pull these things together into an edited form of the podcast. But since I started a new job a little over a month ago, the timeline on that has slipped out far enough that I'm waiting for y'all to come back around and say, hey, maybe we can do something together again. The ball is in our court, Adam. Wow. He's just teasing out some content and just waiting for us to, you know,

to bite, to bite on that content. It's a hard pitch right here, Jared. I mean, we'll see, right? I could do it. I could do a trailer for you all. I've been doing these interviews. I have shipped at this point, 25 of these interviews, all in the order of an hour long. And I think at this point, I probably have enough content to slice together for an episode or like a season, right? So, like maybe 12 episodes or something like that. But there's enough scatter that I don't know how much beyond that. But I don't know.

We'll see. Right now, I'm super busy with other stuff. So I'm just kind of keeping the interview train going and building up this content library. And eventually, it'll turn into something a little bit more edited. Gotcha. Where would you find it on YouTube? Let me see if it actually shows up in search.

Human skills. Oh, it's called human YouTube? Let me see if it actually shows up in search. HumanSkills. Oh, it's called HumanSkills? It is called HumanSkills, but the audience is still pretty small. I think I have like 100 subscribers or something like that. A lot of competition for that term. There is. So if you go to, you know where you can find me easiest is the sub stack. So humanskills.co. Okay.

And that includes you know links to the youtube videos gotcha immediately click the no thanks button yeah just want to do want to go to sub stack i want to close the loop on one thing real quick so we did ship one episode from and it was our first anthology jared so So the one I did was Hacker Stories from OzCon, All Things Open, and Node Interactive. Because we had gone to Node Interactive in Austin. I went to All Things Open roughly around the same time. Okay. And I think you went to OzCon in Europe.

I did. And we were early in our spotlight slash going to conferences and bringing back content phase. So I think we decided to like munch it all together. Okay. So we did that. We didn't know what we were doing. We're trying to figure we decided to like munch it all together. Okay. So we did that. We didn't know what we were doing. We're trying to figure out what to do. We were early days.

So it's overwhelming going to conferences and getting so much content. Conferences are back now though. Conferences are back. We're going to conferences. We have three this fall. We just got back from Strange Loop. We go to All Things Open two weeks from now.

That's right. And then we're also hitting up KubeCon slash CloudNativeCon because they're not into brevity over there. For the first time together, Adam and Gerhard and I, which have never the three of us gotten together, that's in early November. So we have three events

on our calendar. Are you hitting up any conferences at Skateball? So I'm going as just an attendee to Lead Dev West Coast. I'm talking with the folks at Play-Doh about doing some sort of interviews or something at Elevate, which is another engineering leadership style conf. We're trying to figure out what that might look like. I'd love to get back on the road to JS conferences and doing interviews or live panels or other things there.

Yeah, conferences are back in full force. And it's fun and it's irreplaceable to just be with people talking about these things non-digitally. It's really cool. Totally. Human skills, this is a phrase that you've been on. It sounds like everybody's on it, on YouTube at least. I'm curious.

Simon Sinek is on it at least. I mean, he's a pretty big human skills person out there. You're in good company. So a lot of competition there. Yeah. It reminds me of an old Mitch Hedberg joke, which goes something like, every book is a kid's book if the kid can read. Every book is a children's book if the kid can read. And that makes me think about human skills because aren't all skills human skills if the humans are humans? Yeah. So, I'm pushing this as a phrase because I think the sort of nomenclature of hard skills and soft skills has set us back. And the words that we use shape the way that we think

about things. You know, people think, oh, you know, hard skills. Yeah, that's challenging. I'm smart. I'm going to do the hard stuff. I'm going to do hard skills. Soft skills, that's like easy, weak. I don't need to touch those things, right? And like not everybody feels that way, but I think there's a solid set of people who have taken that nomenclature and then become disdainful of this whole set of non-technical skills that are actually extremely impactful. The other part of that is soft makes people think fuzzy. It makes people think undefined, where there are often very definite tactics and like concrete things that you can learn that will increase your effectiveness and your impact. And so I've been for a while trying to

push, instead of talking about hard skills and soft skills, like, let's actually call them what they are, right? One set of skills is technical skills, skills for dealing with technology and technical problems. And one set of skills is human skills, things for dealing with humans. And those humans might be ourselves, or they might be other people out there. But, you know, there's nothing hard or soft about one or the other. It's really about what is the domain that these skills are relevant for that hard and soft divide i think is very real and i had a boss who i appreciate in many ways he's passed on now and he used to always say he very much valued engineering and hard technical problems. And then he used to say,

well, we'll do all the hard work or whatever, and then we'll give it to the arts and crafts people, which was like such a condescending way to refer to a group of skills. And that was more like design versus dev thing, which is very much a divide and has ire on either side for reasons of lack of human skills and tribalism to a certain extent over the years. And I would always like raise my hand as the engineer that's like, hey, it's not like arts and crafts are lesser. You know, I mean, first of all, that term makes it sound like it's something that children do in their free time at school or something. But unfortunate that there's this divide between hard and soft just in our heads that is like leftover baggage from, I would say the past, but maybe even the present. And I do think that the words matter. And I think human skills is a

better way of framing it. And one that I've adopted just from talking with you, I usually call them soft skills. And, you know, I know what that means to me and doesn't, I don't think it's a bad thing to be a soft skill, but I think that a human skill tells a better story. What is the actual definition of soft skill and hard skill? Like, what does it truly mean and how have we conflated to mean something else? Yeah. So, as I understand it, it actually came out of an old military sort of training regime. And they said hard skills literally meaning technical skills. I don't know why they chose the word hard for that, but hard skills meaning like rigid and interacting with technical things. And soft skills was everything else.

Just a useful distinction that turns into, I guess, more connotation than denotation over time. Yeah. I mean, I think technical skills is a useful connotation. And if you want to call it hard skills, like I don't in theory have a problem with that, but I've seen the downstream impacts of how people then take those words and shift them, right? Like if we were really able to say, okay, they said hard skills and they were just using that as a bucket. So, let me divorce in my head how I think about hard and the other ways that's used in language from just this is defining that bucket and similarly soft. Okay, that's just defining this other bucket, then there's no problem. But one of the things about humans is we don't do that.

We don't have like hard and firm boundaries in our heads. Things leak between different areas. And so other connotations that come into soft versus hard leak into our thinking about these buckets of skills. Yes. Chet GPT gave me a definitive answer and actually broke it down into definition, examples and assessment for each. i won't bore you with all the details but do that on your own i just said what is the meaning of soft and hard skills and got back when i got back but basically it seems like teachable abilities things you have to go to school for formal education a foreign language things that seem to take rigorous training and on-the-job experience, things that you have to like seemingly intentionally do. That's what it seems to me. And then the soft skills are less tangible.

Basically like it's fungible, it's blurred. Like you're not really sure how to define those and so they just end up being soft. Right. That's the everything else. Yeah. But I'm going to pick a bone with that a little bit because I think that a lot of things that get bundled into this soft skills arena around communication, around empathy, around emotional management, there are actually very definite, like humans are not all consistent to the level of computers, but we have a lot of patterns about us. Like there are learnable, tangible things that you can teach, that you can learn, you can practice. And so, I mean, that's another reason why I want to bend them under human skills. And a lot of what I'm trying to do in the interviews

that I'm doing and with the podcast there is like break down to tactics that you can apply, even if you don't understand why this works and see increased effectiveness. It does say that they are often referred to as people skills or interpersonal skills. I think that's obviously less brandable than human skills. I agree with your nomenclature that you've chosen. I agree. I think empathy is a practice thing. It's something you can learn to do.

It's something that can come natural, but it also can get improved upon with practice and i think intentional practice considering my involvement and founding of brain science despite its status right now the podcast that was a lot of my thrust was like there's so much to our human brain that connect us then more than divide us regardless of race color creed geolocation barrier, whatever it might be. Like, we're all still just humans. And we all have this thing above, you know, the rest of our body or, you know, like the most important organ. Like, if your brain does not operate, nothing else you do can be you. Like, you are only you because of what your perception is through your own life with your brain.

And so I was like, well, we got to discover that more. We have to like improve who we are by learning more about our brain. I think that's kind of what you're doing in a way, but in a different niche and subset of that, essentially. Totally. Well, and there's kind of three different levels you can tackle this on, right? So, you can tackle like, here's a mental model for how I think about some domain, how I think about empathy or how I think about something. There's like, here's sort of a strategy I can take for approaching it. Like, here's my big picture. But you can even break down to like micro tactics of this is a thing you can change behaviorally that will impact how you are perceived. So one really tiny example that I love because it is so tiny and concrete.

In English speaking communication, if you ask someone a question that starts with the word why, they will instantly feel more defensive. Why did you do that? Why did you choose to do that? Instantly, you're like, oh, I got to defend my choice. If you change your phraseology to say, you know, what were you thinking that led you to do that? It's immediately perceived as more neutral, even though the information that I am asking for is exactly the same. And so, if you can systematically remove why from your vocabulary when you're asking questions, and then you can like in a targeted way reintroduce it when you want to have a little bit of that impact or make this a little more cutting but if you can just make that tiny tactical shift it will instantly make the people that you are asking questions of feel less

defensive which will usually result in you getting better answers for sure yeah it's um we talked about mindset a lot too there's a certain certain, you have a superpower in your choice. So your choice is your individual superpower and your choice to change your phraseology, so to speak, whenever you speak to people is part of that superpower you have. Mindset, I think is a big thing. Brings to mind Jocko Willink's thing where he says, good.

So if you have a bad thing happen to you, he's like, rather than think about the negative of it, he says, you broke your leg. Good. What's the positive from that? I'm paraphrasing his bigger thing, but you know, you got to run two miles. Good. One of my direct subordinates, one of my guys that worked for me, he would, he would call me up or pull me aside with some major problems, some issue that was going on. And he'd say, boss, we got this and that and the other thing. And I'd look at him and I'd say, good. And finally, one day he was telling me about some issue that he was having some problem. And he said, I already know what you're going to say. And I said, well, what am I going to say? He said, you're going to say good.

He said, that's what you always say when something is wrong and going bad you always just look at me and say good and I said well yeah when things are going bad there's gonna be some good that's gonna come from it didn't get the new high-speed gear we wanted good didn't get the new high-speed gear we wanted? Good. Didn't get promoted? Good. More time to get better. Oh, mission got canceled? Good.

We can focus on another one. Didn't get funded? Didn't get the job you wanted? Got injured? Sprained my ankle? Got tapped out? Good. Got beat?

Good. Learned. Unexpected problems? in my ankle got tapped out good got beat learned unexpected problems good we have the opportunity to figure out a solution that's it when things are going bad don't get all bummed out don't get startled don't get all bummed out don't get startled don't get frustrated if you can say the word good guess what it means you're still alive it means you're still breathing and if you're still breathing well now you still got some fight left in you so get up dust off reload recalibrate re-engage and go out on the attack it's a reframing a redesign so to speak of how you look at different things i think it's a

i'm down i mean jared and i behind the scenes we were totally for this i think the challenge and i'm not this is not a long roundabout to say no but when you get into a position where you're creating so much content like we do across the board and kevin you know this because you're part of you know the larger change law podcast universe is that to remain focused you have to say no to certain things to keep the things you have on the rails as a yes yeah no i don't judge y'all for saying no to me i know you don't i know you don't and so i totally believe in this and a bigger angst i might have is getting into the details of how you've delivered this. You were so motivated that you literally went out, talked with other human beings about this idea of human skills. You took their time. You took your time. You took up digital space

with bits and bytes of audio. You took your time to edit it, format it, and refigure it and put it out into the world. And what was the result of that? You know, what was the result of that effort? You know, how can, how do you measure the result? No, it's a great question. I think about this for us too. This isn't scrutinizing. It's more like we get so motivated by these things we care about. We do something about it and we put it out there and we want this feedback from the world. What was that feedback? Yeah, no, it's a great question. And it's one that I've asked myself because, you know, if I'm honest, the audience for this has stayed pretty small. I find myself

getting a tremendous amount of value out of these conversations. And so in some ways, the thing that has kept me going is like, every time I have one of these, I learned something that I then can go apply in my work. And I've had other people tell me, oh my gosh, like I learned so much from that, right? Like I have maybe a hundred subscribers on YouTube right now. Like it's tiny, a little more than that on Substack. But you know, in the podcasting world, like you don't get much feedback, right? With 100 people, I've hardly had 10 of them independently say like, oh my gosh, I've gotten so much value from this. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for doing this, right? Like 10% of people giving feedback on something like that. Like, I mean, maybe some of that is early audience is more

passionate, but also like it's creating value for those folks. So long as it's creating value for me, I want to keep going for it. I think there is a question in my head of like, how big is the audience for this type of stuff? Is the audience small right now because it's undiscovered or is it small because actually most people don't care? I don't know the answer, but I am continuing to publish interviews every week. Caveat, I skipped this week because my wife is traveling. I'm single parenting and editing is a lot of freaking time. I didn't realize how much time y'all saved me editing JS party. Man, it's a lot. And so, you know, I've got a backlog of things that I just need to get to editing and I haven't

had time. But anyway, that's a long about understanding of like, I mean, and some of this comes to why do I keep doing JS party? Some of it is because other people like it, but also I get a lot of value out of every conversation that we have. It helps me think, it helps me shape my thinking and it helps me learn about stuff that I wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to learn. Yeah, for sure. You're probably remote, right? Like you, you go into an office now. So I'd imagine that JS party is part of your community. It's part of your interpersonal-ness. Oh, absolutely.

It's a requirement in a way. It's like meeting up with friends, but instead of meeting up with friends. And in the evening, it's a podcast, and you're talking about work-related matters that interest you. And you get a chance to lead, too. You get a chance to be an emcee and bring the topic up and carve out that thing and make it not just useful for you but it also has an audience so you get to transplant those ideas to other people as well absolutely no podcasting is one of the most fun things i do every week yeah and certainly the most fun thing i do that can be called work amen to that Thank you. What's up, friends? We're working closely with.tech domains to feature but also who is building on.tech domains.

And I'm here with Bastian, co-founder of iWear. You can find them at iWear.tech, E-Y-E-W-A-R-E.tech, where they build AI-powered webcam eye-tracking software used by AMD, Microsoft, and even Intel. Bastian, give me the backstory. What does Eyewear do? We're a deep tech spin-off, computer vision and AI spin-off from a Swiss research lab. We turn your webcam or 3D sensor into an eye tracker so you don't have to buy expensive hardware to get a reliable and robust eye tracking performance on your PC so we have two main products one is the gay sense SDK which is an eye tracking SDK that companies like AMD have used in collaboration with us to build for example the AMD privacy view app that is now part of the Radiant software driver suite.

There you can use eye tracking for certain features like privacy view. It blurs out parts of the screen that you're not looking at. We also took that app and built our own solution called EyeWare Beam that is targeting gamers where you can turn your webcam into a gaming eye tracker for more immersive gameplay in, for example, simulator games, over 200 of them through the OpenTrack extension. Or you can use it for streaming or game recording

to improve your own gameplay by re-watching your recordings with that overlay and seeing when you missed something during essential sections of your gameplay or just share it with your audience and seeing when you missed something during essential sections of your gameplay or just share it with the audience and engage better with them. Well, this is definitely the next frontier. Are you only licensing focused

or do you have any offerings that's ready for developers to consume and leverage in their projects? So with iWordBeam, we are facing consumers directly with this app. You can download it. There's a free trial on our website and on Steam, so you can give it a go and see how you like it. The idea is still that we provide licensing solutions to big players, to OEMs,

and allow them to integrate eye tracking. I think there's going to be a world where you're going to have headsets. They're for sure going to come. I'm going to be one of the users and eye tracking. I think there's going to be a world where you're going to have headsets. They're for sure going to come. I'm going to be one of the users and eye tracking is an essential part of it. But then you'll have a lot of just interfaces, surfaces, screens where you will want to interact with them without a headset on and their eye tracking will also matter. So there's, for example, these 3D screens, 3D stereoscopic displays where you would need eye tracking and similar situations. So it's going to be a hybrid setup. And I think our technology is an essential part of that.

Talk to me about the choice of using a Diatek domain. I think it was a logical decision to make. I think every startup will first take their name and then add a.com behind it and try that out. And then it's probably going to be too expensive or taken already. And then look for alternatives. We are a deep tech company that has already part of it in the name. So if we put iwear.tech, it makes it clear for third parties, specifically for these potential clients that we want to license to,

that we are a tech provider. We're a deep tech company. We're a deep tech company. We're a spinoff. And I think that represents it pretty well. Okay. Make sure you check out iAware.tech. That's E-Y-E-W-A-R-E.tech. And of course, go to startups.tech slash changelog.

If you want to have your startup that's building on a. tech domain featured on a show like this don't wait go to startups.tech slash changelog again startups.tech slash changelog I wonder if it's a packaging thing. This is, I think, Jared, something that you can help me with here, too, is that in a lot of cases, the idea is the thing. But it's how you package it and share it with the world is the whole other thing. You know, we have long form content through some, you know, brainpower of Jared. Primarily clips form in the world and they go out on YouTube and Twitter and other places. And in some cases not even A show that he's on or I'm on

It's Practically I and you've got this person That speaks of Patenting or trademarking A billion whatevers With music, that whole one It's blown up, that clip was Less than two minutes On Practically I, it was about

Tell the story Jared of this one because i'm i'm butchering the specifics but it was it blew up it transcended our audience and went to mainstream in many places it was in reddit it was on tiktok it was on you know instagram and a lot of places where they're just like commenting back and forth about the subject matter and i think packaging is a big part of helping your content live it's how do you package it how do you deliver to the world and because we don't have a lot of time when we're first beginning to learn how to create content and deliver it and edit it and package it we sort of take some perceived easy roads because we don't want to build the infrastructure for it or whatever it might be

but the way people want to consume it might be a whole different way like if you did the same content in a different package would it transcend the hundred on youtube or several hundred on substack is the is the rough thing i'm trying to say but share the story jerry what's the that gigantic piece of practically i content that just blew up. What was that? So we had a clip from Damien Reel, who's a programmer slash lawyer. So anybody who operates at such intersections has a high chance of being interesting or having an interesting thing to say or having done. And he told the story of the time that he and a friend decided to brute force the creation of 471 billion melodies write them to

disk copyright them and then submit them as evidence as prior art in ip legal cases and that changed the landscape of intellectual property in our u.S. court systems because everybody could refer to this as prior art and win when they previously would lose being sued for copying certain melodies and stuff. He tells it much better than I do. He tells it in 60 seconds with a nice rhythm to the way he speaks. He's done TED Talks, so this is a guy who's told that particular story many times and can tell it very compellingly. And has crafted the way to tell it. And he's told it in a way that has a twist ending because this entire time you're thinking this guy is an evil villain because he's a lawyer who copyrighted a bunch of stuff.

And you're thinking, and then he suited everybody into oblivion because that's what lawyers do. And no, he took it all and put it in the public domain. And so at the last minute, you have a reveal, which was very compelling and made everybody want to share that because their mind was blown. Plus, certain people in the comments didn't listen to the whole thing, so they still think he's a villain.

And then they were getting arguments in the comments about you don't actually even watch the whole clip, you didn't pay attention, blah, blah, blah. Which of course then surfaces it to more people because, yeah, controversy is how you make things go. Yeah, exactly. So then the controversy, I ended up having to delete a few. I became a moderator suddenly because two particular people just descended into not just name calling, but like really, really nasty name calling. And so I just was like, this is ridiculous. You know, it's the scale of the internet, law of large numbers and all that.

So the packaging was there. Interesting, it crossed multiple thresholds. It was both musical, it was intellectual property, it was programming, it wasn't actually AI, but it was on a show called Practical AI. That was part of the argument. It's like, this isn't AI. They just brute forced it.

It's like, of course it wasn't. But anyways. Like so much of what gets called AI sometimes. Yeah. So that was that clip. And that's a situation where you can retrofit all the reasons why it was compelling, which I have kind of just done for you all. But also it's the internet, baby. You just never know what's going to happen. Like sometimes a thing blows up and the algorithms love you and you can't possibly reproduce that even if you try. Totally. Well, and you know, in my head, there's a phrase that I love from back when I was a startup co-founder, which was,

you work hard so you can get lucky, right? You show up every day, you ship stuff and someday you'll get, maybe you'll get lucky. You'll get that flash. I think you're right, Adam, about packaging. And like right now, I frankly don't have the time to experiment with it. I've had in the back of my head, like, do I pay somebody to come in and experiment with this and do things with it? Do I partner with somebody? But also I'm getting so much value from just having the conversations for me right now that it doesn't feel urgent. It doesn't feel like it's a problem that I have to solve right at this moment. I'm having these great conversations.

I'm building this library of content and continuing to ship every week. And when I have bandwidth or funding or whatever to invest in exploring more packaging, maybe I'll do that. Well, on the other hand, a blog post that I have never written, but I titled and think about writing is called the change log has never gone viral. And it's not me complaining about the fact that we never gone viral, but like our podcast, the change log, which has been around for 14 years now, we've had shows that are more popular shows that are less popular. We've had blog posts and stuff that make it to hacker news.

We've had clips that go viral. That one's practically AI. So the change log still hasn't done that. But throughout all these years, I mean, we haven't had our viral moment, Adam. I mean, we may never will. We just kind of slow and steady it. And we just keep putting out what we think is good content. We hope is good content and it is what it is i mean i think that should be an encouragement of course it does mean that you sometimes have to play the long game but the question is how long do you continue when do you stop and if you're getting

intrinsic value yourself k ball yeah you have to judge that you can also measure impact in a couple of different ways, breadth and depth. And so you're demonstrating depth of impact with your human skills conversations because the number of people you're reaching, you're reaching them in a deep way, a way that it reaches them enough that they will tell you. And that's an actually a pretty high threshold because most people will just listen to your show and never talk to you your entire life until you see them in a conference and they're like i've been listening to you for years and you're like how come you never told me before you know yeah no absolutely so the people that do tell you it means that you've actually there's a few different kinds of people of course some

people just tend to be more communicative on the internet and so they're the kind of person who will email you. But then there's also the fact that like you help them enough that they felt compelled to email you. And that's depth of impact. So if you can get both breadth and depth going, now you have a hit. But if you have one or the other, I guess I personally would take depth over breadth myself. Yeah.

Even though numbers games appeal to our dopamine things, you guys can probably help me with the brain science on that, but that could keep you going until you just slow and steady build up a base. I mean, that's what we have done. We've never had a viral moment with the change log. We've had, I think our, the very first time we had the react team on the change log years and years ago, I think that show did probably outperform like double the shows around it. Like it was a very successful episode, but not like you see with, you know, YouTube, Tik TOK, Instagram kind of virality podcasts. Just don't do that unless you have an existing audience, right? Like MKBHD,

millions of followers on YouTube starts a podcast. He immediately has a huge reach on his podcast. Like that one went viral, so to speak, because that's just him extending his reach. Yeah, you can do the cross channel thing. Absolutely. Yeah. But starting from scratch, I mean, most podcasts never have 100 listeners. I was just telling Richard Feldman this the other day. Most podcasts never reach 100 listeners.

If you've reached 100 and you're still kicking like that's success yeah for sure yeah well and as i said i'm still getting a ton out of the conversations i i once before built a newsletter up on front-end development and i built it up to probably around 4,000 4,500 subscribers something like that but i got bored i was a subscriber of yours. Yeah. Well, and thank you. Thank you. This was Zendev, right? This was with Zendev. Yeah.

Which was, I was doing consulting and some training and like, you know, it clearly created value, but I eventually canned it because I got bored with the content and I'm nowhere close to that with the human skills interviews. And I think there's a whole swath of things I might explore around writing for this as well. And that's an untapped arena here. But to me, the creator piece of it, something I learned from that experience is this has to not just be something that I think other people want to read. It has to be something that holds my attention, where I am like, every time I'm editing an episode, I'm listening

through and I'm like, oh yeah, oh yeah, that's great. I got to try that. That was, that was a great idea. Like, let me pull that in. So as long as I have that experience, I'm going to keep going. Well, share some nuggets of wisdom with us. Like what have you learned so far? You know, our listeners probably sitting here thinking, I would like some human skills. Like you did the why one, which I appreciate. I actually work with a coach. I coach with a coach in basketball who asks an interesting question in that vein. When a player executes a play either improperly or not the way he was coached to execute it and he will stop and sometimes he'll yell and stuff because he's a basketball coach,

but he'll also just say, what did you see? Yeah yeah and really what he was asking is why did you do that like that's what the natural thing like you're trying to get like why did you do that that's not what you're supposed to do but he says what did you see and then that child will replay what he saw that made him come to that decision and it's a very constructive moment that i'm not going to start copying and ask him what did you see? So I like the reframing of why questions into other forms. That's another example of that being effective. What else have you learned?

Give us some nuggets. All right, so a few different things. So let's see, what are some good ones? So one super fun conversation that I had was actually with Sean Swicks Wang. Never heard of him. Swicks is an interesting guy, as you all know. He's seeing a lot of success right now in the AI space. But I think of him as somebody who's extremely productive, right? He gets so much

stuff done. He's always executing. So I asked him about that. And his reaction was, everyone asks about productivity systems, and we can talk about that but productivity is for people who don't have leverage so let's talk about leverage and first off like that switch of like here's somebody that i perceive as extremely productive and he tells me you know what productivity is not the right thing to be optimizing for you may see me as productive i don't see myself as that productive but i'm is not the right thing to be optimizing for. You may see me as productive. I don't see myself as that productive, but I'm productive on the right things. And so that was like brain switch. And then we talked about like, what are the things that can create leverage for

you as an individual? Like how do you do personal leverage? And one thing that he was talking about is he said, code and content both give you tremendous leverage because those are things that you do once and they can be shared and they can do all these different things. So they have abnormal power in terms of leverage. His highlight, he says, they're permissionless, right? Like you don't need somebody else's permission to write code or to write content. And as compared to forms of financial leverage or other different things you might do where you have to bring other people along. So I thought that was interesting. He also talked about kind of being pointy, figuring out a thing that you are particularly good at, leveraging that.

And sometimes he said, you want to resist being put in a box because you contain multitudes, but people want to put you in a box. And so you may as well help them. Right. So if you become known for something, leverage it, leverage the heck out of it, use that to go. So, you know, if you have your viral episode of, in this case, the brute forcing mechanism, like, are there ways that you can leverage that further? Certainly, you know, this gentleman that you interviewed is leveraging the heck out of that. Oh yeah. People love that. He takes it and he runs with it. Are there ways you can do that?

Things like that. So I think those were pretty interesting areas. Yeah. To go one layer deeper that would to cue him that permissionless factor, like Damien and his colleague didn't ask anybody for permission to brute force, whatever billion number of melodies, like they just did it

wrote at the disc which makes it copyrightable and then on their own whim with no permission from anybody else gave it to the public domain and so that now is high leverage for him to be on podcast share that story be on ted which is a you know a stage that everybody would love to be on with their speaker they require zero permission to execute that mission essentially yeah permissionless leverage meaning when you say leverage you mean more output than input like much higher output than input so i think the way he described it i'm gonna see if i can find a place to quote him i was skimming it with you when you were talking there so there's if you go to that page and search for the word leverage, there's 31 matches.

Yeah, exactly. 31 matches of leverage on this page for your interview with Sean. Well, and that's, I will note, this is what I do is I listen through these interviews, and I try to pull out a theme that I can then wrap up in the newsletter for it. And for some folks, like you should, if you, if you like some of what Sean said, you should go listen to that whole episode because like we didn't only talk about leverage, but it came up enough times that that was the theme

that I pulled out. His definition of leverage, he says impact over effort. And some people would describe, you want to maximize impact while minimizing effort. And he's like, no, don't do that. You don't want to think about minimizing effort. You have a fixed effort budget. You have some amount of effort. What's the highest impact things you can do with that amount of effort? And so that's thinking about work that's going to scale. Another place that came up in that conversation is thinking about where in an organization do you want to work? You know, different code in different parts of the organization have different amounts of leverage. One could think about this a little bit in terms of, are you writing a feature? Are you writing a library? As you see people moving up in their careers, often they're writing tools

for other developers to impact, increase their impact, increase their leverage, things like that. You can also look at where, what is valued within the organization you're in and make sure you're working on things that you will see value from because the organization perceives their value. So that's like front office versus back office kind of distinction where the people who are generating the revenue, their perceived value is higher than the people who are reducing the costs, right? Like the two levers that software can pull in any organization is increase revenue, reduce costs. And of those two levers, if you want to be perceived as high value and survive layoffs and whatnot, you may be just as high value in the back office reducing costs. But if you are on the generating revenues side of that equation, you're going to be perceived as higher value.

It's just the way that we think. Yeah. Though it varies some by organization as well. Sure. Right. And so like a startup in particular usually doesn't care much about reducing costs. Right. Because they're trying to hit frontline revenue and they said, we can reduce costs later.

We got to show that there's a business here. A mature business might actually care more about reducing costs. And if you can say, oh, I'm going to say, and you've got scale such that a change will have a bigger impact and you can tell that story. So like that's one domain we could talk about. I think I've gotten a lot of value from interviews with people about management because I work now largely as a manager. I still am in code. Lovely thing about being in- What are you coding? What am I coding? Yeah, like what What are you coding? What am I coding? Yeah, like what tech are you using? What stuff are you working on?

Get nerdy for a second. Oh, oh, get nerdy. So that's a simple SaaS app. We're actually migrating right now from a purely Next-based system to one that's just React on the front end and a Rails app in the back end. So you're going off of Next.js? Yes.

Why? Because, oh, don't want to talk about it or too big of a can? This contains multitudes. Okay. I think part of the answer is more to do with how the particular Next app was implemented rather than Next per se. I will say that full stack Next is kind of a pain in the butt. I have yet to find, and I've tried, but I've yet to find a JavaScript backend that matches the productivity and simplicity of Rails or Django or some of these other things. I know lots of people love Node servers, and there are many great things about Express apps and you can make them simple and whatever. And to me, the ORM technologies are not there.

I have yet to find one that just matches the affordances and gets you there. The simplicity, like there's just, if you're doing a tiny app, works great. If you're decomposing a bunch of stuff into microservices, great. If you're doing a SaaS app that's pretty straightforward and you want a monolith, it's nice to have a little bit more scaffolding and supports

and a best-in-class ORM. And I have yet to find a JavaScript ORM that I would call best-in-class. We'll leave it right there. This sounds like a good upcoming JS Party episode where we can dive deeper into those details. But you were trying to go somewhere else and I derailed you, so we can move on from that.

I mean, no, it's all good. I mean, we can go into that. I still am looking for good JavaScript ORMs. We had an episode on ORMs with Steven Haberman. Haberman? I'm blanking on his name. Tell us what was wrong with his ORM, K-Ball. You didn't like it.

No, I did like it. I'm just trying to get you there. It was getting me part of the way to what I am used to with ActiveRecord, but not all the way. And it's young and there's rough edges. And they're working on it and they're iterating on it. But it's a small team working on it. And so I don't want to say that there's no innovation happening

in the JavaScript ORM space. There absolutely is. I'm at a startup where the business innovation is not the technology side. I just want something that gets me there faster. That episode called The OR-mazing Show. And it was OR-mazing. And it was great. We dove really deep into some of the cool stuff they do with that ORM. And it is awesome. And there's some things around sort of speed and parallelization and the ability to do things that are really, really cool.

It works async out of the box in a way that ActiveRecord doesn't. However, as a developer where I don't need all those optimizations and I'm just purely optimizing for productivity and having all these different things, it's not quite as easy. Fair enough. Well, you're trying to drive towards more human skills. You're talking about some of the stuff that you're working on. I'm curious if you picked up anything on communication, because I think it was our episode with Chris Brando recently, Adam, where we talked about the difficulty of engineers, I want to say explaining themselves, but really advocating for their positions and their

decisions. Specifically, he was talking about how to justify a refactor or the difficulty of talking about technical debt when you are trying to define things in like numerical terms. And I think I said to him, communicating is hard. And I was about to qualify it. And I just stopped because I realized realized that's just a true sentence. And it's sometimes especially hard for engineers. And so have you learned any communication? Because I think that in terms of leverage, I think if software developers can be better

communicators, then they're like, that takes you to the stratosphere, doesn't it? Yeah. So there's a few episodes that went pretty deep on communication in different ways. So a couple that I will point to. One was with my good friend Bradford Foltz. I worked with Bradford 15 years ago, and we were still regularly in touch. He's just a wonderful guy, has risen up in leadership. So he's now doing an independent consulting thing.

But before that, he was leading an engineering org with a couple hundred people in it. We talked a lot about communication. And one of the things that he really talked about was kind of having in mind, when you go into a conversation, who is the person you're talking to? What tools do they have? What levers do they have? What do they care about? What does success look for them? I mean, fundamentally, it's about empathy, right?

Starting from a place of, I forget who said it, but somebody else I interviewed said it. Like, your job, I think it was Leah Kistner said this, your job is not to say your thing. Your job is to say whatever it takes to get the other person to understand your thing. And that, I think, is where a lot of engineers fall down. Because we want to say our thing, and we say it in the terms that matter to us, right? We need to refactor this because it's terrible, and it's causing all these bugs, and whatever, whatever, whatever, right? But if we're talking to a business stakeholder, we need to say what we were trying to say in a way that matches what they care about.

So maybe they care about revenue and customer renewals. And you can say, hey, you know, our systems as they are right now are really hard to maintain. And they've got all this stuff going on in them that results in all of these bugs and that's causing customers to not renew because they have a frustrating experience my proposal is we invest a bunch of time to clean this up and rewrite it in a way that prevents or dramatically reduces those bugs from going out and that we think that will impact customer renewals right and so what we're doing there is we're framing the thing that we're talking about in terms of what the person we're talking to cares about.

And that I think is the big, I mean, there's lots of pieces of that and there's a, how do I do that? How do I understand what this person cares about? And honestly, like the first step there is just to like put in a little work, building a relationship, like have a conversation with them before you have to sell them on something. Understand who is this person? What are their challenges? What are their frustrations? One of the things that I suggest to engineers all the time is like, if you're interacting with

customer success or someone else and you interact with them in a ticket and you have never spoken to them face to face, reach out to them and be like, hey, like we were just interacting in this ticket and I realized we don't even know each other. Can we set up 30 minutes for a coffee date and just get to know each other a little bit? Because if you don't have in your head who is this person and what do they care about, it's almost impossible to effectively communicate with them. And over time, you can build up kind of categories that will be less perfect than if you know this person in particular, but you can know, okay, people who work in customer success usually care about this set of things. People who work in sales usually care about this other set of things. And so you can kind of use that as a proxy if you don't have a pre-existing

relationship. But to get that, you still need to build relationships with individuals in those positions. What's up, friends? There's so much going on in the data and machine learning space. It's just hard to keep up. Did you know that graph technology lets you connect the dots across your data and ground your LLM in actual knowledge? To learn about this new approach, don't miss Nodes on October 26th at this free online conference. Developers and data scientists from around the world will share how they use graph technology for everything from building intelligent apps and APIs to enhancing machine learning and improving data visualizations. There are 90 inspiring talks over 24 hours. So no matter where you're at in the world, you can attend live sessions.

To register for this free conference, visit neo4j.com slash nodes. That's N-E-O, the number four, j.com slash notes. Adam, you convince people of things all the time. How do you do it? Ask questions, listen way more than I pitch. I think that you can't really present an idea to somebody unless you understand what Kevin's talking about, what their position, their challenges, what they truly care about,

even what they believe is true. Because you might have the knowledge and the depth and understanding as someone that has value to offer but unless it can be received then it's dead on the vine so i find that i there's a maturity level to people we help through particular things that we sell so in a lot of cases i'm just asking questions like where are you guys at what are you doing what's What's resonating? Do you work with podcasts before? Have you sponsored content? How comfortable are you in creating content? How valuable is it to your organization? Do you really care to reach the world's developers or do you

care to reach a UX-centric audience? What are you trying to achieve? Who are you trying to speak to? What titles even? I might even be like, hey, if you're trying to reach iOS folks, don't advertise with us because it's not that we don't reach them. We don't reach them in large swaths to get you value. So why even sell them something we can't really give them value in? I like to ask a lot more questions than I do with the menu, so to speak, because what we have to sell is pretty finite. It's not challenging to present the menu. And we can get super creative. But unless they will see value in the meal, so to speak, they will get comfort in the appetizing nature of what we offer. Then it doesn't make any sense to give them the pitch.

It just doesn't make any sense. And I'm super relational, too. We will often talk to folks 20 minutes, maybe more just about what's going on or even the growth of our organization, just relating, so to speak. So I like to ask a lot more questions than I offer a pitch. And I don't like to present the menu. I never start a call with, here's what we sell. Do you want to buy it? It's never like that. It's more like, where are you guys at? What are you doing? How are things working for you? How, how priority is this? Budget's always a factor, obviously, like how much are you investing into this? What's a good place to begin for you? What

are you comfortable with? You know, and I think that translates to many things, not just a, I have something to sell, you buy it scenario. It's more like I have an idea. For example, what you said, Kevin, you said, I have ideas of how to change things for our organization for the better. But before I present them to you, what are the challenges you're facing? What do you care about most? What are you dealing with right now? else is much higher priority, I'm not going to bother you with this presentation of my idea because it's premature or you're not ready to hear it right now. I need to know more about what you care about before I can say, I can actually solve your problems. You have to know the person to some degree or know what they're dealing with to truly present some value. Yeah. I interviewed with Mark Freeman. I don't think I quoted this piece of it in the newsletter, but like, you know, he's a data scientist. That's his background. And he

talked about, he will have conversations with all the main stakeholders in his organization and basically be like, Hey, not making any promises about what we can do, but I'd love to know what problems do you have that you think data might be helpful for? And he'll have that upfront and he'll gather this whole list of, oh, this person's interested in these things related to data. This person's related to that, whatever. And then when he's got all that, now he sees something he wants to do. He knows, oh, that's connected to this thing this stakeholder wanted. Let me go and pitch them so that now I can get buy-in and an ally and somebody to help make this happen because I know the problems they're having and I can now

connect the things that I think we should be doing with problems that are being felt elsewhere in the organization. I think a lot of this really begins with being back to the human skills, being the best human. I think that's probably why you camp't out there. I think there's a lot of just lack of emotional intelligence and even self-regulation and self-awareness to be the best human to offer the best value for organization. I just think that's a norm in society. A lot of us live unhealthy lives in many respects, whether it's relationally, whether it's, you know, exercise or health or food or sleep, like all these things.

And then you've got like the news and the constant cycle of, you know, negativity out there. I think we live in a very stormy atmosphere, at least here in the U.S. Particularly, I think probably it's a global situation, but I can't speak globally because I'm not all different places in the u.s particularly i think probably it's a global situation but i can't speak globally because i'm not i'm not all different places in the world but i think that we deal with a lot of stuff to make it challenging to show up as the best version of us every single day and i think that plays into a lot of this function into organizations and so just having things that help people be better human beings like reading certain books or even with you, like Kevin, like you mentioned,

like why you have not amassed an army of subscribers. You have amassed a lot of things that give you value in the product itself. And I'm sure there's a lot of people that you're influencing through the content that you're creating and the, the things that are interesting to you to pursue that make it valuable. You know, I think that's a super big challenge that's why i like the idea of human skills we just haven't found a way to package it

yeah in a way that really makes sense to you know to carve out together it's all good in a sense what are your thoughts on that what are your thoughts on the immaturity of individuals and emotional intelligence and best selves etc yeah i mean i think it's hard i think we have to give ourselves a little grace right every person out here is dealing with something. They're dealing with challenges as you have, there's a lot of stuff going on at a societal level. You never know what somebody is dealing with at home, dealing with other different things. One of the things I try to do in all of my kind of interactions at work is give people permission, to just be people and be human. I remember I had a get to know you conversation at my last job with someone who was new there. And like, we just started going

off on books. We were talking about books and it was fun. And like, we're talking about books we like and going and we get 25 minutes in and she goes, oh my gosh, like we have five minutes left and we haven't talked about work at all. Like, is this, did we screw up? And I'm like, no, we didn't screw up. We're connecting as humans. This is great. Like, that's okay. And I think especially in the like remote centric environment, we need to make explicit the work that goes into connections. And I think like, I honestly, I love a lot of things about remote work. I love not having a commute for one. But I also I love being able to work with people all over the world and have it not be a problem. But the challenge with remote work is a lot of the kind of natural relationship building that happened around the edges, if you're all co located in an office,

doesn't happen. And so if you want to create relationships as human beings, you need to go out of your way to make that happen. I do it by scheduling one-on-ones with random people, or not random people, but with everyone, essentially. And like, just putting in time and energy to that. As a manager, meetings are part of my job, so I can do a lot of that. If you're an engineer, maybe you do one of those a week, where you're just like reaching out to somebody and you're like, hey, let's connect. Let's just talk about stuff and be humans together. There's lots of different ways you can do it. Some companies will have like, I've heard it called mandatory fun, right?

Where it's like, oh, we're going to do this fun thing together. And like, there's pros and cons to that. But the underlying idea that relationships are a part of work, They are an important part of work, even if you are not a manager where relationships are explicitly part of your job. For engineers, having relationships at work, knowing the people that you are serving and interacting with will help you do your work. And so conceptualizing part of my job

is to make sure that I'm building at least some amount of relationship with my team and my stakeholders. And I'm going to explicitly put in time and energy to make that happen. And that relationship is a human relationship. It's just like, I want to get to know these people, you know? Like, that's okay. We just need to make it explicit because it's not going to happen in the lunchroom and the water cooler the way it does if you're in an office together. But what if you don't like people? I mean, that sounds snarky, but I think that that's a real concern for a lot of people. They're

like, you know what? I just don't really like people. I don't like talking to people. I don't care what they're doing. I know that maybe that's selfish, but that's just who I am right now. Like, how do I, what do I do? Are you asking for a friend, Jared? It's very rare that somebody doesn't like anyone. I know a lot of engineers who don't like interacting with people who are not engineers. Right. But usually there's some engineers that they enjoy interacting with.

If you don't enjoy anyone that you're working with, I would recommend trying to find a new job. Now, not everybody can do that. You may be in a position you can't, you may, you know, other different things. But like, honestly, you deserve to like the people that you work with. That's my opinion. You deserve as a human being to like your job and to like the people that you work with. And within the constraints that you have for whatever they are, if that is not true, I think you should feel justified in looking for a new job or be required to.

I halfway agree with that. Yeah. I agree that you should definitely feel justified in looking for a new job. I don't know about deserving to like the people. Like sometimes, I don't know. I guess it depends on what you mean i deserve we could probably bike shed that probably not worth it but definitely agree that if you don't like any of the people that you work with logically you should be probably searching for somewhere else to work yeah i mean you don't you're not going to love everyone people are hard there's going to be some people who rub you the wrong way right but if you don't like

anyone that you work with, that sounds terrible. Why would you do that to yourself? I think it goes back to the fundamentals of the human being, too. Like, if you're someone in the world, and I get it. There's a lot of people who are just curmudgeon. They just like less people. You know, there's introverts versus extroverts. There's a lot of studies around, you know, the different traits and characteristics that come with people who ebb and flow through that spectrum. But I think if you're generally a person who doesn't like anybody or a lot of people

based on what Jared said, I think there's something going on internally. Look inside. Yeah. Like there's, there's something that's not, I wouldn't say normal necessarily, but if you're someone who doesn't like the people you work with or people, you said people in general, Jared, is that, is that what you mean by that? People in general, you don't like people. So, yeah, therefore, I just want to do my job and not interact. Exactly. OK, well, that's that's cool.

I suppose to some degree, if you want to be that person, but you're going to be less viable to an organization. Right. Because you're hard to work with. You're in quotes an a-hole. You're going to stay right where you are, basically. And if you're OK with that, then that's what you do. Yeah, totally. And you may go through periods in your life where that's what you want, right? Like it's okay to choose to say, you know what? I am happy doing my work on my own. I don't want to

interact with any of these people. I don't care if I advance. I don't care if I have greater impact, all these other things. Like that's totally legit. It's okay to say that, but know that you're saying that. Know that that's a choice, right? Like if you want to advance. Don't wonder why you're not advancing. If you want to have greater impact and honestly, well, it depends on who you are, right? But for me, if you want to have more fun, like find the people that you like interacting with, figure out how to interact with them more. Find the people that you like interacting with, figure out how to interact with them more. Find the people that you maybe could learn to like to interact with and figure

out how to interact with them in a way that's going to be fun for both of you. Relationships are fundamental to impact in organizations. Now, coming back to, all the way back to the conversation about SWIX, right? Like, this isn't to say there's no way to have impact without having relationships, right? You can write some killer code, you could write some killer articles as a lone wolf. There are ways to do that. It's a lot harder, in my opinion, to have impact inside of an organization if you don't invest in some relationships. So, if human skills, to a certain extent, are a means to an end, if my end is I would like to make more money, what's your advice there? So I'm an engineer.

I make X dollars. I like to make more than X dollars. How do I do that inside my organization? What do I need to do? What do I need to say? Who do I need to talk to? How do I position myself, et cetera? What's your advice? So it's going to vary based on where you're already at right now. And this is actually

something that's come up for me because one of the things I was doing this last year is I'm working as a coach. I'm coaching engineers. I'm still coaching some engineers, even though I have this full-time gig, which is why I'm busy and haven't been shipping more podcast stuff. But you may be in a place where you need to transition from solving problems to defining problems, right? So this is often a transition that happens somewhere between mid-level or senior and then like high senior and staff engineer up to a point. People are essentially saying, here's the thing we need done. You're very junior. Here's the thing we need done. We're going to break it down into tasks. You do tasks.

Okay, great. Higher level. Here's the thing we need done. Break it down into tasks and make sure it happens. Okay. A level up from that is starting to say, you need to be identifying the things that need to be done and figuring out how to convince people that those are the things that need to be done. So, some of the skills that go into that is just starting to observe where are the friction points? Where are things not working? Whether it's on the product side or the team side or something else. And figuring out how to package together something to improve on that. And that packaging, you don't necessarily have to be the one who knows the answers.

But you might be wrangling the one who knows the answers but you might be wrangling the people who know the answers where you're like we keep having the bugs of this type and they're impactful they're causing us user problems we're losing money whatever whatever we need to solve that i think if we get this really smart engineer and that really smart engineer in a room together then they will make that happen. And you, you kind of bring that together and make that happen. Like that is increasing your impact, even if you're not the one solving the problem. And what you've done is you've identified the problem, you've labeled it and presented it to the organization, this is a thing we need to solve. And you've gotten together

the people to make that happen. So that's kind of moving up the value hierarchy. And you can keep going. And you know, there's a you can look at these like, job level charts, right? And they'll, they'll talk about these different things. And they talk about scope of impact. That's what you're trying to optimize at most organizations to move up the hierarchy. And that's moving up the hierarchy, whether you're deciding to go into management, or you're going up the hierarchy as an engineer, you're increasing the scope of your impact. And usually that involves moving from solving problems to identifying problems, moving from working on a single project to working across projects, moving from interacting with people on your team to interacting with people across

teams or upwards in the organization. That's good advice right there. I think I'll take that. So if you're listening and you take that exact advice and then you make more money as an end result, you know, maybe, maybe let us know. Change a little plus plus. Or subscribe to KBall's sub stack or something, you know. Or just send me a thank you or a hello. You don't even have to send a thank you. Send a, hey, I heard you and it sounded cool. appreciate you those go a long way and if you really want this human skills project to be repackaged into tight well-formed musical edited amazing podcast episodes uh here on a changelog podcast definitely let us know because maybe that would be a way of convincing Adam to turn that no into a yes.

What do you think, Adam? I don't think it's my yes or no here, Jared. I think it's just, you know, you know where we're at. You know where we're at. To give some credence to that, we've tried to reduce our footprint to some degree by not producing so many podcasts. We went horizontal versus vertical. And I think this year we've seen many dividends be paid back to us in the feedback loop of just creating because we've gone more vertical with the change look in particular.

Like this show, Change Look and Friends, like this show has given us some room to play, I would say. Maybe room to wiggle a little bit that isn't just it has to be a serious interview, a finite project. It has to equal X amount of minutes. It gives us room to explore a bit. And I think the rhythm of Monday, Wednesday, Friday has really paid well to us. I think I'd be happy having you back here frequently on this show talking about human related skills or you know finding ways to have you kind of co-host in some cases versus like a dedicated thing i think you're going to be better off to some degree on your own with your own sub stack maybe even a tiktok you know where you're sort of like going you know one to two minutes and you're pulling i might be too old for tiktok we gotta say i don't think so adam pushes don't think so. Adam pushes everyone into TikTok.

That's his move. I got to try it, actually. The most innovative content happening out there, in my opinion, the proving ground is happening in virality as well as consumability on TikTok. Like there is a lot of remix. I just think it's a proving ground for a lot of great things. It's not the only ground, but I think there is a lot of people on that platform and it's rewarding to those who can find ways to present certain things in a way that people want to consume

them. I think the algorithm rewards you well as well. I think a hub and spoke multifaceted approach is the right way. Maybe long form or clips on YouTube, maybe very personal things on TikTok. I mean, the newsletter is still very great. I think you'll see some dividends be paid to you if you, like even in this case here, you're exposing your idea to a larger audience. Like do this again, but on a whole different podcast. Go on a little podcast sprint. Mention your, but on a whole different podcast. Totally.

Go on a little podcast sprint. Mention your love for JS Party, of course. Mention your desire for being a better manager. You get to talk about the organization you're in. You get to share more thoughts around your choice of Rails versus a React backend, etc. or a Node backend. You get to share all these different things. And then you get to also supplant some human skills in there as well. I think that, you know,

if you put a little more effort into that versus just the content itself, now keep in mind, you got a family, you got a full-time job. And so that you might be like, I'm not going to do that. I don't have time for it. And that's okay. Cause sometimes we just create just to just enjoy not to go viral or to get big yeah i always think like what's your goal in this like do you want this to be a big thing because if you want this to be a big thing like 10 000 20 000 plus well there's a whole different playbook to enact and engage in you know and if you want to remain not so much in quotes small but achievable something that you can easily keep doing while keeping your full-time job, while maintaining your balance with your family, then where it's at right now is perfect. Literally perfect for you.

And at some point, maybe it gets bigger. One of the things that I've seen is that I, as a human being, operate best in sprints. Right? So, I will have times when I'm pushing really hard on this and I'll have times when I'm stepping back and it's just keeping the background publishing going and sometimes we're pushing hard. But I mean, I love hanging out and talking with y'all.

Yeah. I love going on and talking with other folks. And, you know, as I said, I do this because I'm fascinated by it. There are so many layers to how we can do better as human beings interacting with human beings. And yeah, no, I love it. Well, thank you guys for having me on. This has been super fun. That felt like a bit of a wrap up. So, I'm just gonna jump on it. Like, this is super fun. Yeah, man. Wrap it. See, you're a podcaster too. He's like, I can feel a wrap when I do. I mean, we can, we can keep going, but I can feel a wrap coming a mile away. No, wrap it up, K-Ball. Wrap it up for us. Well, and I will say, right, like

to your point, I feel like all of my interests are aligning at this point, right? So the new job is a platform for coaching, right? It is, I'm working at a company that is doing both direct to consumer and B2B helping, you know, coaching and especially coaching people in the tech industry right now, though we're expanding among other things. So like that aligns with the podcast aligns with the stuff we talk on JS party aligns, like it's all coming together in a great way. So like, I appreciate the ideas, you know, Adam, I know you've thought a ton about this and I'll keep pricking your brain for how to make it go more. But it also is just like, these are all

things that are, to your point, bringing me into the world, right? Like, this is what I love at this point. Well, it's good too that you say that you haven't become bored with it yet, at least. Because I mean, that's half the battle with like being a content, in quotes, content creator, somebody who curates ideas, funnels them into a piece of content that's distributable to not be bored with the thing itself. Because that's a sad place to be, really. It's not good. It's not good. Change it if you can.

It's not good. So humanskills.co is where people can go to subscribe to the Substack. And that also has the YouTube videos in it as well. Plus some pros from you and some quotes from the content, etc. Some deep dives. It seems to be about 40-ish minutes per interview. Is that roughly the rhythm? Yeah, typically I'm talking with folks for on the order of an hour.

And then there's some editing. So, you know, it ends up somewhere between 30 to 40 minutes and a couple of them get close to an hour. I would encourage you to pull some of those clips out, personally narrate them and share some of them on TikTok, like two minutes, three minutes or less. All right. Bring in some close captions, so to speak, so that you can read as well as listen. There's a lot of cool things that you can do on there, and it's permissionless.

I think TikTok is very permissionless. And you can watch the trends, and the platform encourages remix. So the best artist still kind of aspect, totally cool there. Still the best ideas, still the virality ideas that go well there. And I bet you, you'll reach a different

kind of audience that cares about human skills that also happen to be in software-related cultures. And I think that's kind of where you're at right now. You're kind of in a coaching, not just, we're a dev environment only. We're sort of in a place where you do B2B, you do direct-to-consumer, as you mentioned. You have a chance to

be a manager and be a, you know, somebody who coaches and educates. So I think that's a great place to be, but that's, I would encourage you to check it out and do some play. All right. From your words to my brain, we'll see what happens. Yeah. And then come back and let us know how it worked out and see where it goes from there. What else, Jared? Is that it? Come tell us the story of your viral TikTok that you created. Yeah. Is that the show? This is the friends? This is it right now, this moment?

That's it. This is it. Okay. Bye friends. Bye y'all. Bye cable. Thanks cable. Human skills, tons of fun to talk about.

Not always fun to implement because it's a little painful to be self-reflective and to be self-aware and to be emotionally regulated and all these fun things to show up as our best possible human being. But I encourage you to deeply think about Jocko Willink's good speech. I don't know what to call that thing, but I know that when I listen to it, I think that's a reframing I need to have when I'm negative, down, or just not in the right place mentally. I need to shift my mindset to the positive and not the negative.

And I will often reference parts of that, if not all of it, to get back to good, to get back to thinking good, not the negative. So hopefully that helps you too. Something I want to mention here in the post show as we tail out the podcast is I did find the audio from Kevin and I's conversation way back at All Things Open. And by the way, to correct myself, it was All things open 2016, not 2017. For many years, I've had 2017 in my brain to that year, and it was 2016 all along. So if you want to hear the full length episode, the full length production, the conversation that Kevin and I had, we will edit it and we will find a way to put it out as a bonus, either straight up as plus plus or something else. We don't know. I'm just throwing it out there.

If you want that, say what's up in the comments or in Slack or on Twitter or wherever. But thank you to our partners, Fastly, Fly and TypeSense. Of course, the beats master in residence, break master cylinder,

bringing those awesome beats every single week. And we are announcing something fun on Monday. So pay attention on Monday. If you're not a subscriber of Change Law News, well, you got this podcast. So maybe you are. But if not, check out changelog.com slash news and pay attention to Monday's edition. That's all I'm saying. That's it. The show's edition. That's all I'm saying. That's it.

The show's done. Bye, friends. Game on.