The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Motivated by play (Friends)

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

Annie Sexton has been on quite a journey since she was last on the show back in early '22. On this episode, Annie takes us on that journey, shares her new-found perspective & tells us about how she's approaching her side project this time around.

Welcome to Changelog and Friends, a weekly talk show about side project moderation. Shout out to our partners at Fly, the home of changelog.com. Launch your app near your users. For peak performance, Fly makes it easy. Learn how at fly.io. Okay, let's talk. What's up, friends? This episode is brought to you by one of my good friends, one of my best friends, actually, one of our good friends, Tailscale. As you know, around here, we love Tailscale. At least I do. I don't think Jared uses it. I know Gerhard loves it. I love it. So maybe you'll love it, too. So Tailscale is the easiest way to connect devices, services, anything to each other, wherever they are. Runs on Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, Windows, everywhere. Anything you want to connect to, you can run Tailscale on it and it's too easy to

connect to it, whether it's a remote desktop environment. Here's one thing I do that's pretty cool actually. I often will remote desktop into a different Mac machine at my home. So I come to the studio, I'm doing my thing, but for some reason I need to go onto my iMac Pro back at the house, which is my home desktop that I use for work. And there's things that I do there that I need to check on. And I just open up remote desktop. It's an Apple application. And because my iMac Pro and my laptop that I have at the office are both on the same tail net, guess what? I can remote desktop right into the machine.

Too easy. But I can also SSH to my Plex server. I can also SSH into my Pi hole. I can also SSH into my whatever I want to SSH into because it is just too easy. It's intuitive. It's blazing fast. It runs everywhere. And I love Tailscale.

And I think you might love them too. So you can try Tailscale for free today for up to a hundred devices and three users for free at Tailscale.com. No credit card required. Again, Tailscale.com. So we have Andy Sexton back on the show from the famed Get Your Reset On episode. Oh, yeah. A couple of years back where we nerded out about our Git flows for way too long, but people seem to like it. Welcome back, Annie. Thank you. It's great to be here. I guess you got a different kind of reset on this time.

I didn't even plan that, but it worked out, didn't it? I mean. Oh, yeah. That's a good pun. Yeah, it's been a ride. It's been a ride. So you were with Render back when you were on the pod, I think, 21, 22. What year was that, Adam?

That's right. 21, yeah. And then a lot happened in 2021 and since then. I mean, in the tech industry, it's been a roller coaster and mostly downs more than ups, I think. But how has it been for you? I mean, we're mostly on the sidelines. Of course, we felt it financially as well here at Changelog, but we aren't employed traditionally.

Adam and I don't do the traditional job search things, although maybe we'll have to at some point. We just haven't had to. We wondered for a minute there, might we have to go get real jobs here soon? But we seem to be surviving. What happened from your perspective, Annie? Help all of us catch up. Well, let me just say, if I could go back and talk to myself, I would advise myself that 2023 is not the year to be unemployed in the tech world,

to take a break from the tech world. So I, at the end of 2022, I was feeling really burned out on the tech world for a lot of different reasons. And I really wanted a break. I think part of it was, actually, I would say a lot of it had to do with my own adoption of the side hustle mentality and how many years I had gone through that and let that be a huge part of my life and how damaging that became, I hit a point where I really just needed to stop altogether. And I thought that at the end of 2022, that was the end. I'm done with tech. And I actually went on to pursue something completely different. I actually took a course in interior design. I got certified. I wanted something

wildly different. And it was great for a time. There's also a lot to... I took away some notes being in a very female-dominated industry for a short time. Better or worse? Oh, better. Better. Definitely better. Okay, that's good. But that brought a lot of thoughts back to the tech world when I finally did return. I did find that just even though I love interior design, I love design, I love art in general, I don't want to be in that world.

I don't want clients. I don't want to be a freelancer for one thing. And it's also really hard at like, I think I was 34 at that time. It's really hard to start over in a new industry, starting those low-level jobs where they're really quite unfulfilling, I found. And you just got to it. You got to pay your dues. And I realized I did not want to do that. And I also wasn't excited enough about where that would have taken me.

So anyways, it didn't work out. And I decided I would, you know what, I'm kind of running low on money. I'm going to get myself an engineering job again. And so I started to search in the summer. And granted, I was not looking for traditional engineering jobs. I was trying to look more for product work and then later into developer relations, which is where I am now. But I did not anticipate how long it would take in 2023 to get a new tech job. I know I was making things a little more difficult for myself and not looking for an engineering job specifically and looking for something that was engineering tangential. But it was very difficult, very, very difficult. And I ran out of money twice and it was, it was terrifying

and it was terrifying. And I think part of the worst part is that it was nobody's fault, but my own and me just underestimating how scary the market was at the time, because the last two jobs that I had gotten, I had gotten because of referrals and I knew somebody or I'd met some people at meetups and within like a month and a half I had a job so I was like I know tons of people in the industry now it'll be fine it'll be fine can you define run out of money what's what's run out of money look like like define what you mean by run out of money like literally zero in the bank how close to the terror were you zero in my bank not zero in my I tier were you? Zero in my bank, not zero in my, I had a 401k that was still fine. So like, that's, that's good. But I had to dip into a Roth IRA, drain that.

So unless I was going to touch my retirement accounts, which I'm very, very, very, very grateful to have that. But in terms of money that I could touch without worrying about losing my retirement funds, gone. I had to borrow money from my parents. It was really not a high moment in my life. It was really scary, and I didn't have anyone to blame but myself. That was very humbling. Was that while you were doing the interior design freelance,

or that was while you were looking for an engineering role, or both? Both. There was a period of time when I was working at a showroom and I very quickly realized it was not for me. What were the indicators? I can kind of empathize. I've been in zones like that. What were the indicators? Yeah, let's hear it because this is not for me. This is interesting. Yeah, so I was working at a tile showroom in town. This is how a lot of

interior designers will start. They'll start at a showroom where they sell furniture or maybe fabric or tiles or materials. Maybe they work at a stone yard, whatever. And then they work their way up from there and gain some sort of industry niche specific knowledge. And so I started in tile and it was a sales position. And I'm a people person. So I thought sales, that's great for me. I only lasted a month, not because the sales side of things wasn't bad, but rather because I did not have anything to do. And when I say I did not have anything to do, I'm not being hyperbolic. I literally sat at my desk for eight hours a day doing nothing because they didn't have clients for me yet. I could

occasionally talk to people who came in. That's not super frequent. But when I asked my manager, my boss, please, can I help organize something? Can I do something? Please give me a job. I'm, I don't have anything to do. You're paying me to do nothing right now. I want to be helpful. I want to be useful. And he said, you can look at the vendor websites. You can read up on our vendors. So I was basically asked to look at tile websites for eight hours a day for weeks on end. I'm sorry, I can't. I can't do that at all. That is after going from a much more intellectually stimulating job in tech and going to that was very hard for me.

And I also don't want this to sound like in any way that I'm talking down about people who do work in the industry, who do perform that. I want to acknowledge that that was early in that particular career. And so as a salesperson, that's how it starts out in any new sales position is that you don't have clients. And so you kind of don't have a lot to do. It was too much for me to handle to be sitting on my butt for eight hours, staring at my computer doing nothing, nothing. It was very, very difficult. And I had to get out. You have an itch to like bust open the text editor and just start coding and something. So you say that. That's what I would do.

Let me tell you, let me tell you what I, let me tell you how I spent my day. Let me tell you how I spent my day. They had an inventory system that was so old. I think it was, I mean, this is what, it's one of those really old inventory systems that I think they're paying like thousands and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. I'm not going to, I can't speculate too much, but they're spending thousands of dollars per year on this piece of software that I swear is stuck in 1995. And I was like, this is terrible. There's so much room for human error here. There's like, we're losing money, not only because this is very expensive software, but also because it's so easy

to make a mistake. Like this is a reason why UX is so important is because of things like this. There are just enough no code or at least low code tools out there. Like I think Zoho offers some stuff like this, stuff that just gets the job done, where you can build forms and workflows through these low-code tools that would be sufficient for any small business. And so I started putting one together. And the reason I went for a no-code tool was because I knew that they're not actually hiring me as an engineer, but I have nothing better to do and I just want to build something. And so I put together a complete system that would replace what they already have, because I had nothing to do for eight hours a day.

And I built this system for them. Nobody asked me to, this is just what I, you know, this is just what I do. And I knew that it could have been rejected. I knew that, but I was like, I really don't even care. I just need a project. It's fine if it gets rejected. I just want something to do. And so I built this thing from scratch and I was giving, and again, like, I think there were maybe like a couple of places where I had like a couple of lines of, I don't know if it was actually JavaScript, but it was pretty much JavaScript. And so I said, here, this is like a starting point. Like, I want to be useful.

You guys are, you have an ex-engineer on your staff. Please let me like be of good use. I want, I want to be useful to this company. And, and the response I got was like, thank you for being excited. Like, calm down. We don't need this right now. Like, please, you know know don't put too much energy into this at least you try i mean yeah yeah give it a shot yeah which i won't say the disappointment

of that was surprising at all it was just the staleness of every day and i and i also want to say that many people would kill to have a job like that where they just get paid to do nothing and i think that's fine to want that. And I don't want to say like, oh, I'm just like way more intellectual than other people. And so I'm just different. I don't want to come across that way. I want to acknowledge that I'm very lucky to have had a job in the first place. And so I'm grateful. I was very, very grateful for that income, but it was no good for my mental health. I am. So I'm only speaking about my personal experience and I don't want to, I don't want this to turn into commentary of people who have types of job like that, because having a job is a wonderful thing. Having income is a

wonderful thing. That's okay to acknowledge that a particular job is not for you though. And I think that's what's important because, you know, here on this particular show, we're not necessarily digging into like this interview stuff, but more like topically. I think people come to this particular kind of show to think like, wow, what were their experiences? How did they experience it in life? And they made a change. They saw something different and they wanted to sort of eject like you had done. I think it's okay to acknowledge that that particular job is not stimulating for you.

That's totally fine. for you. That's totally fine. Like masonry, that's an amazing job. People do that. And for me, I don't lay tile and build walls and stuff like that or even retaining walls in my backyard. I'm thinking about that, by the way, building retaining walls in my backyard. So I might become a slight masonry kind of person, but it's okay to acknowledge that that's not for you. Totally cool. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm also, I would also say I, so I quit that job because it was, I can remember very few times in my life when I was that low. And also just realizing that I had taken a risk. I had taken a leap, a financial leap, a creative leap, trying to get into an industry that I thought would be fulfilling. And then realizing as I was slowly running out of money, that this was not the industry for me. Very, very humbling. Very scary as I started to see my savings dwindle. That was around the time

that I had to withdraw from my Roth IRA. I had to drain my Roth IRA and then later had to ask my parents for money. And, you know, at 34, that's a, that's a bit humiliating. That feels really humiliating. And I was able to carve out some amount of compassion for myself, but it was still not great. It was not a great feeling. And I managed to land a couple of, let's say I landed a job, a contractor position with daily.dev. They're fantastic. They are a web RTC company and I was doing some dev role for them. I did a couple of videos working with my old buddy, um, Chad from Heroku. I think he's their dev role person. I don't know his exact position, but finding again, it was, it was my connections that eventually landed me that first waypoint on my journey back to tech.

And I was very grateful for that. And that was a really fun position because I had never done video content for tech companies before. I had never had that level of creative freedom before. And I really excelled at it. So I was very, very grateful to have that stop to work for them for a couple of months and do a bit of video developer relations work. Those are well done, by the way. I saw those on YouTube.

So is daily.dev and daily.co, those are the same company? I don't know that. I have to double check this. I think daily.dev is like a news portal. No, I messed up. Daily.co is what you're portal. No, I messed up. Daily.co. Is what you're talking about. Yes.

How offensive. I'm so sorry to the daily folks. There's only daily.co. It's all good. Daily.co. Daily.co. Yes. They just say daily anyways.

Yeah, daily is there. I'm talking about the WebRTC company. There you go. So sorry for the people at daily for getting the URL wrong. I thought I prepared well and then you said. And I'm like, I did not prepare very well. Those are two really well done videos, by the way. I think both of those were very spot on. I loved seeing your face speak Spanish, basically. Your whole, everything was cool. And then you said

you'd done that in minutes. That was kind of cool how you used that Civ, I believe, was the API to make that possible. But that that was kind of cool how they how you use that i think civ i believe was the api to make that possible but like that's just kind of cool stuff like your demos there those were if if you haven't done that much you should keep doing it because that was really good stuff i've actually taken i i've put a lot of my videos to private but i used to have a couple of youtube channels that got a few thousand followers so i've i've done the youtube thing for a bit but um it never was a full-time gig and um granted it still isn't a full-time gig that was you know i was technically working as a contractor for daily but it takes a special person to want to be a youtuber like yes we're on youtube as part of clips but we're not youtubers

i think it takes a special kind of person. And not negative or necessarily positive. But just a special kind of person to do that kind of video work. And be on video. And be that candid. And be that vulnerable I suppose to a camera. You know I'm on video now. But at the same time I'm more of a radio kind of guy. You know while this is also podcasting.

It's not radio necessarily, but better in this case where it's conversational rather than... Performative. Yeah, performative. Great. Thank you, Jared. Yeah. Well, it is.

I mean, life is different strokes for different folks. And there's a diversity of ways that you can make a living. So many different ways. Part of the fun and sometimes painful part of life is like figuring out what fits you and what you're good at and what you like to do. And it's easy to think that the grass is greener somewhere else. I mean, we all romanticize, I think, real world jobs because we deal with digital things so much. That was just linking up a recent,

uh, and change log news, an article about a guy who's doing woodworking, you know, and he goes through like the stuff he's building, but also like what he's doing with woodworking as a hobby and how like, could that become a thing that replaces a substantial part of his income so that he could be a woodworker and not a software developer who

woodworks. And like, there's a giant leap between those two things, but you don't know until you try. I mean, you know, I think interior design has always sounded like a really awesome thing. I went to your website. I think it's still linked up from your LinkedIn, the sextant.design. And I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, this looks awesome. Like, I'm sure you're really good at it. But the reality of the business of things is often way different than the idea of doing the thing. I mean, I was going to be an architect when I was younger. And I started going down that path. And then I saw what the business of architecture was. And I was like, this is massively different than the idea in my head of what architecture is.

But sometimes you don't know that until you get into it and you realize, oh, I'm going to sit here for eight hours a day and do nothing. And this could last years until I actually build up a client base. And like, it's not easy. It's not easy. So I'm sure it was very difficult.

And like you said, humbling, thankful that you have a good relationship with your parents and everything worked out okay. But I mean, it wasn't for nothing you learned something very I think very valuable through the process and you know you're still breathing on the other side so sounds like not all was lost oh definitely and I would say that having gone through that scary time where I really didn't know for months on end how I was going to eventually pay the bills. I think it's actually a very privileged thing to say that I had never been in a position like that

before. So I want to acknowledge that, but it was still scary. And now that I have a job that I absolutely love and I have the biggest salary that I've ever made. And I have a type of freedom in my job that I've never had before. And then contrasting that with what I had just experienced at the end of 2023, there's this very freeing sense of play and joy that I seem to be able to take to my job in a way that I hadn't before. I think part of it just has to do with the fact that I in no way have any desire to build a side hustle, maybe a side project every now and then, but not a side hustle. And I'm not saying I won't ever again. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

But it is very refreshing to no longer feel that pressure to do something extra on the side to have even more freedom. I think that especially millennials have been, maybe not so much anymore, but my generation was very sucked into this idea of a side hustle. And I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but I do think that we need to be a little self-aware and understand where that's coming from, because a lot of that came from, for me, a place of wanting complete financial independence, complete control over my schedule, making good money and having complete control of my life and complete freedom. And I know that there are, there have to be some people who are either doing that through freelance or running their own business who are chuckling at that idea because they're like, oh, you think you get

freedom when you run your own business? Oh, that's cute. It's not all rainbows and puppy dogs. And I think the underlying problem with the mindset I used to have is that I thought that I was seeing all of the value in if I can find a project that earns money, then it is a valuable project to do. And frankly, that's capitalist brain worms. And I lost my ability to play. And that is very detrimental to learning, to living a good human life. And I don't think those, to be clear, I don't think side hustles and the ability to play are mutually exclusive at all. But I do think that it's something I forgot to be aware of, of this value in play. And when I say play, I mean doing something for the joy of it. And that's the only reason. That's the only reason. And in my new job,

so I work at Fly.io now, I am effectively in developer relations, although that's not exactly my title. It's a little confusing. I'm like JavaScript specific developer relations. I actually have a ton of freedom in what I focus on. Sometimes it's testing out new technologies. Sometimes it's writing blog posts. The fact that I get to write is so fulfilling. The fact that I get to go to conferences and interact with people, I can even, you know, to some degree work on the platform, making it better for people deploying JavaScript apps on fly. I have so much creative freedom in my job. And I feel very fortunate that not only was I able to find a tech job again, it happens to be one that pays better than anything I've had before. And with a level of

freedom and space to play more than any other job that I've had. And I feel so, so lucky to have stumbled upon that because it's exactly the kind of job that I really needed was if we're going to get back into tech, we have to approach it with a sense of joy. We have to, we have to like it as groundbreaking as that statement might sound. You have to like it. As groundbreaking as that statement might sound. You have to like it. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of disillusioned tech workers right now for good reasons and probably for some bad reasons.

And you don't really care about something or consider its value sometimes until it's gone. And then you realize like, oh, I had a really good thing, you know, and now it's gone. And now I know that I had a good thing, even though I didn't know it before. Now I know it acutely. And for you getting to come back to that good thing

and actually have a better thing on the other end is awesome. So I'm over here getting a little bit jelly of your job. That sounds like a sweet setup. I mean, come on. It's a sweet setup. mean come on it's a sweet setup i love it yeah what's up friends i'm here in the breaks with sama alam nailer from century senior developer advocate let's talk about the levels of error monitoring so let's talk about error monitoring with medium to large ish teams and i don't even know how to quantify that necessarily to say maybe it's a team of five or eight maybe that's a medium team maybe a largest medium to largest is like 20 plus 50 plus engineers you got multiple

teams you got multiple services you got multiple disciplines within the engineer organization how does sentry go from indie dev solo application developer or a small team to scaling to support larger to mid-sized teams? What changes? So it's interesting that you mentioned microservices. And often these days, when you have larger teams or you have multiple teams in an organization working on a product, you will have your application split out into little projects, different repos, microservices. And sometimes it can be difficult to know where an error is coming from, for example, if you just send all your errors to one place. And sometimes it might be difficult to know where the error started and where the error finished up.

But what's really good with Sentry is that we have this concept called tracing. With Sentry tracing, you essentially connect your back and front ends together. If you want to know the details about it, it's through an HTTP header. And that's how Sentry will trace your requests from one service to the next, from the back end to the front end. And so in the Sentry app itself, you can physically trace what happened from where the request originated on the front end, then all the different services that the request passes through to, and then back to the front end, and then be able to identify exactly where the problem happened and exactly what in the front end triggered it or what in the back end triggered it. You can view the source codes and the stack traces all related to it. And then what you can do is based on where the error came from, you can then automatically assign those issues to particular

members of particular teams using things like maybe custom tags or other kind of identifiers on the issue itself. And so it helps you triage, like essentially gives you that separation, yet also brings it all together to help you understand the bigger picture, the smaller things about what went wrong in like a fine grained way. And then allows you to configure the app itself to perform particular actions, depending on what happened. You know, like a lot of the time, large teams can actually get inundated with a lot of noise. I remember working for a company where we had two teams, a back end and a front end team, but everyone was getting every single error from everywhere. And so what happens eventually is you ignore all of the errors. Oh, it's failing as expected.

It's just noise. It's getting in the way of my day-to-day coding. But if you are more selective about the types of alerts that you send and that you receive as someone who's doing a particular job, you'll be less likely to ignore them, more likely to address the root cause. And then eventually you will have no alerts and no bugs and your application will be perfect. Okay. Get Sentry. Go fix it. Too easy. Check them out at Sentry.io. That's S-E-n-t-r-y.io and make sure you use our code changelog and you'll get a hundred dollars off the team plan which is super awesome again use

the code changelog get a hundred bucks off the team plan sentry.io Adam, do you ever want to just go back maybe and do a nine to five or, you know, just like, cause some of my friends, they have a traditional nine to five. They go to an office, they work eight hours, you know, nine hours with a one hour lunch. Then they go home and then they just get a paycheck and then they go back. You know, I'm describing typical things in extreme detail. And sometimes I'm like, that would be nice. And other times I'm like, that would be awful. But what about you, Adam? Do you ever desire just the traditional life? I mean, I would be remiss to say no, but I think, you know, when you start to exercise the actual doing of that kind of thing or think about that, it's like, well, we at the same time may see, as you alluded to earlier, the dip in 2023, which is pretty clear for a lot of people in or adjacent to the software industry, which we are in as well as adjacent to which is strange right you know i think you can look at that and say well sure i can go get a job at a phenomenal place like fly

we love fly by the way fly is one of our partners and sponsors so we have to say that but i do love kurt and the team and then obviously the fact that you're there and i'm sure that it's amazing i've always been a fan of what they're doing and jared and i get to be fans of so many flies and renders and retools and cloud flares and fastlies and all the people out there that are doing amazing things but we don't get to work there we get to work with and in a lot of cases we get to dream with them but never get the experience and maybe more so me jared that i get to dream with them more frequently than maybe you do i mean we do in podcast form but i'm working with these folks pretty frequently and dreaming with them where their future may go and never actually walking

the walk with them and there are definitely times that i'm like man it'd be so cool just to work on one team and do that one thing but i'm like we get to work on one team here so there's like there's a double-sided thing where sure it, it could be, as you said, sunshine and, what did you say, puppies? Yeah. Puppy dogs? I assume you get puppy dogs. Oh, I get a pup.

Is that not part of the contract? I don't know. I didn't get a puppy dog. Oh, okay. Rainbows is the other part that you missed out on. Rainbows, yeah. Maybe some rainbows here and there. But I think at the same time, we have a level of freedom as well in what we do that we get to be agnostic free agents of the tech world in a lot of ways. We get to be the dev rel for everyone in a lot of cases.

We get to choose what we dev rel for. And there's freedoms we have. When you choose a team it's like well we're team fly you know beyond any beyond any rationale of anything being better potentially team fly whereas we get to be team what is the best what is what people should focus on and i think there's some true value to that that is really challenging to quantify until you're in Jared and I's position, getting to do what we do for 15 years or whatever the number of years are, steeped deeply like we are, so deeply like we are. I think there's a lot of value we have that it just changes things if you choose a team. Annie, what were your side hustles you were doing prior?

Like the stuff that burned you out? Were you just taking freelance gigs? No, definitely no freelance. I don't like freelance at all. I don't like kissing up to people. I like how confidently you know what you like and you don't like and you don't cut corners. You're just like, no, not for me. A lot of people hem and haw about certain things, but you seem to know. I definitely don't like freelance. I tried that early on in my career and I was like, oh you seem to know. And just we'll come out and say, I do not like freelance. Yeah, I definitely don't like freelance.

I tried that early on in my career and I was like, oh, people are awful. And I did work with some clients that were wonderful. Yeah, that's the thing is the right clients changes the equation. The wrong client, I mean, everybody has a little bit of both. And so I did freelance for many years. And one of the things that I found was

you have to price yourself into the right clientele because there's like a correlation between the people that are hiring cheap and the people who are not the people you want to work with, you know, and the people that value, even you just price out some of the worst clients. Now there's still people who will pay good money and are still bad clients. I'm not saying it's a hundred percent, but that was one of the things I learned is like, oh, I don't want to find somebody who doesn't value my time because they already don't value my time. And so it's not going to go well from here. So there are ways you can kind of like hedge around bad clients, but for sure there's people that are terrible and working with them

is terrible and it makes your life a living hell. One thing that many freelancers say is if you leave a nine to five to go freelance or to go contract, you know, you go from having one boss to having 10 bosses and it's actually less freedom and more headaches. Anyways, I cut you off. You were saying how you don't like it. Oh, yeah. In fact, I think my last freelance client was granted. I was very early on in my career. I was like only a couple of years in and her business was a, it was a coupon business

and it may not shock you to learn that she didn't have the biggest budget, but you know, I was not being picky. And she specifically gave me the advice of like, you, you're starting out, you need to price yourself as low as possible. Okay. That was the advice I was given. I was like, okay, great. Wonderful. That's pretty self-serving advice yeah but i won't i won't go down that rabbit hole um talking about that client but what i was actually doing was working on a note-taking app called typist and uh it was just the note-taking app that i always wanted this is how you know both of the applications that i would had had attempted to turn into profitable businesses were just things that I wanted and didn't exist yet. The first one that I built was a translation app for building vocabulary. I originally built

it for learning Japanese because that's what I was doing at the time. And then once again, got burned out on that. It just because I had let it become my whole identity, like any kind of spare time that I had, I was like, time to work on that side hustle. And that became very toxic. So same thing happened when I was working on Typist, which I built and I actually used every single day. It's basically Apple Notes with a markdown WYSIWYG. Really easy, clean to use.

It wasn't perfect. I had a couple of, I had a you know, a few dozen users, but it was definitely, you know, buggy enough that like it wasn't ready yet. And I really loved it. And I really saw a future for it, but I just happened to burn out. And I, I've actually recently picked it back up again, but I've, I've set some ground rules for myself, which is if I'm going to re-approach this, I'd like to redo it in First of all, I'm rebuilding it because I'm a software engineer and that's what we do. And ironically, maybe not ironically at all, I'm rewriting it in the most common, oh, I want to rewrite this in Rust. I feel like it's almost become a meme now

of people who learn about Rust and are just like, oh, I'm going to rewrite everything in Rust. I feel like it's almost become a meme now of people who learn about Rust and are just like, oh, I'm going to rewrite everything in Rust. And I say this, I've barely learned Rust. The only reason I'm considering this is because of, I think it's called Tori. It's like an electron alternative. Rust is very intimidating to me, but I'd like to learn it because one of the big complaints about Typist was that it's massive because it's an electron app. And I had many people who were like, please not again. I already have too many things that are electron on my computer. So I was like, all right, okay, let's try it. Tori's awesome. It's probably if I was going to learn Rust, that would be the reason as well would be Tori. It wouldn't be any other

reason. So I agree with you there. So you're going to, are you just starting fresh? What are the kind of rules? You said you have some ground rules. This is like X hours per week you're going to do this? Or what are you thinking? Not even. So one thing is, whatever I build, I want it to be open source. At least for the foreseeable future, monetization is off the table. For the love, for the joy. Do it for the love. Because I genuinely, the reason I decided to pick it back up again is I've been doing a lot more writing and I've been learning and I wanted to take notes. And I was like, dang, I'm in this place again where I don't like any of the note-taking apps

out there or the writing apps. They're all like, they're either way too simplistic or they are like giant complex beasts that I don't actually want. So I wanted something in the sweet spot, you know, what I would consider a sweet spot. And so I was like, all right, I guess I got to pick this thing up again. Cause I actually do want the thing. So open source, no monetization, not until it sees like a serious traction. But even then, like I say that I'm being very strict about like, don't even think about it, Annie. Don't even think about it. Because like the moment you get a whiff of that, you're like, this could be big. Oh, man.

This could be my whole life. I could build like a lifestyle business around that. Toxic. Toxic for me. Don't do it, Annie. Don't do it. I just know myself well enough. I have gone after that dragon for so many years and I need to pivot.

So the other one is I have to document my progress. So I'm going to write about everything as I go. And I've just started. And then I have to have fun with it. And so there's no number of like hours per week. I just have to be constantly checking in of like, am I enjoying myself? There's kind of this, there's a sense of, I don't even know what the emotion is. There's this sense of exhaustion driven by passion that I have to be very careful of because also I have ADHD. So that's like my jam is just getting sucked into something that I love because that's how you burn. That's how you burn out of flame. And I don't want to do that again. I want to do something to a small degree, enjoy it, then move

on, go hang out with friends, do a hobby that's not in front of a screen and enjoy my life. Because that is what ultimately will keep up the momentum to do other side hustles. But I am constantly keeping tab of like, am I getting sucked into this too much? Because that's very important to be aware of. Because number one, it just doesn't feel good. And also, it often comes at the detriment of other aspects of your life. And I don't want to do that again. For sure.

I always tell my children with simple things, like treats, let's just say. Moderation. If you only ate that, you would not sustain, right? And it seems easy to have that advice. I'm not saying like, oh, just, yeah, you've got sustain, right? And it seems easy to have that advice. I'm not saying like, oh, just, yeah, you've got it, moderation. But to be in a place where you can have a processed document and self-reflect and be self-aware of how you feel, those are guardrails that are very, very healthy, very mature of you to have. Whereas in a past Annie moment, you had less of that maturity,

less of that discipline, and it got you into places where you were less comfortable. So that's awesome. Moderation seems to be obviously key, but at the same time, self-awareness is so key for most folks. Like you mentioned earlier, Jerry, people that are disillusioned, I think those are people who are maybe less self-aware than they should be or could be. And if they were, then they would be less disillusioned. Yeah, good spot to be in, Andy. Good for you. We've talked with hundreds of people about their software creations, maybe thousands, and so many perspectives

around why they do what they do, which usually informs how they're doing what they're doing and one of the things that we care about is the sustainability of the software ecosystem and of the software community right the people building the ecosystem and so we often ask them about things and so we and one of the things we ask them about is like well how are you going to make money with this because you're going to do it for a long time and it's going to drain you. And so part of sustainability is offsetting that time, offsetting that cost. And some people have plans and they're trying to do the thing.

This is a side hustle or this started off as a passion project, now I'm monetizing. And other people have just been like, no, like it has to be for the joy. It has to be for the love. And they'll say like, I already have a job and now I have a hobby. I think I love and I care about. And if I turn it into a hustle, now I have two jobs. And the thing I love is now something that I work for. And sometimes that's just the answer for certain personalities. So I like that you're saying Guardrail's now like no monetization for now. You're not saying this is a law forever and all time because then you go breaking your own law and feeling bad about it. But you're already making a living, the best living you've ever made. And so why take something that you love and that you're passionate about

and that you enjoy and then start toiling at it in a way that it has to be changed into some sort of money-making endeavor? Seems like that could just very easily for you destroy all that joy. Absolutely. And you know what I just thought of? I think what burned me out on having a side hustle was this underlying belief that until that side hustle is my full-time gig and I am doing that fully. And it was obviously a thing that I love building brands. I love all of the aspects that go into it because I'm a very multifaceted person. And I think I'm exceptionally well-suited to that type of work. I like wearing a lot of hats. I like my current job because I'm wearing a lot of hats. But I think when I let myself get so sucked into the image of what my life could be, the reason I was so driven to work on my project day and night was this belief that I'm not going to be truly happy until that becomes my full-time job. And I just need to get there and then I can be properly happy. And that is a nasty,

nasty cognitive distortion that we all need to pay attention to if that gets into our brain. I think that's what often drives this obsessive burnout culture on side hustles is that people, I mean, this is true for even outside of side hustles, anything that we believe like, if I just do this and I get to this point, then I will be happy. And a lot of the times it doesn't come across like those thoughts in our mind may not be it's not that clear it's a lot more subtle but when you boil it down it's really that thought that's driving a lot of it um and at least it was for me and that was the part that's the part that i am warding against is the reason i have i'm so so focused on joy and play and gratitude is that I do not want to lose sight of what I

already have and know that I have full capacity to enjoy everything fully right now because I have so much and I also know how easy it is to lose. So I am squirreling away all the gratitude that I have and all the joy and sucking it up as much as I can, because it's not guaranteed at all. It's not guaranteed. So I'm, yeah, gratitude is a big thing for me right now, especially gratitude for joy. Yeah. No, I mean, thankfulness is huge.

That is an antidote to resentment and discontentment. Like if you're thankful or have gratitude for the things that you have and do and are, then you are de facto not discontent with those things, right? And so if you acknowledge that and think about it and say it, because things that go out of our mouth come back in our own ears and they're more clear when we say them, that's going to ward off all kinds of bad things in your life.

Discontentment, like I said, is a huge problem. And I tell people this all the time. If you're discontent right now, whatever that thing is that you're chasing, when you catch it, you're going to be just as discontent then as you are now. You think it's going to solve your problem, but it's not going to. Trust me, I've chased a lot of things and I've caught some things and I catch it. I'm like, okay, what now? What next? What else can I catch? Cause I'm still discontent. Right? So that's a, that's a bad cycle, but it sounds like you have landed on one of the key aspects of life, which is gratitude. Yes. I also want to call out, you're right that if you're constantly

chasing this thing and like, well, then I'll be happy. That can be very dangerous. But I also want to hold a little bit of space for people who are in the job market, who don't have a regular income, who don't, who are, especially people who are new in their career, who are trying to break into tech, how scary it is to get that first job. This is particularly on my mind because I saw this huge wave, it's still happening, this huge wave of people who are sort of early in their career and they decided to get into tech because of the pandemic. And they wanted a way of having better income, a better life for themselves, and to be able to work from anywhere. And that's

amazing. It's not that all tech jobs are like that, but I get that allure. And so we had this huge wave of people doing bootcamps and sometimes self-educating, getting into this. So I will say it is okay to just keep striving for a job. And like the likelihood that like, if you don't have a job right now and you don't have income, yeah, having an income will make you happier.

That will happen. But when it comes to side hustles at least or anything that has that sort of like toxic draw that makes you believe that you're not going to be happy until you have that thing, that's something to be aware of. Yeah, I'm not saying I'm not advocating for people not to try to improve their lives or their circumstances. Right, right. aware of. Yeah. I'm not saying, I'm not advocating for people not to try to improve their lives or their circumstances. I'm saying that you, if you can find contentment even without, then you'll just be more content when you have. But if you're discontent and think that catching something, whether it's a raise or a job or a side hustle that turns into a business and or a YouTube channel that blows up and you think that that just that one thing is going to solve all your problems, that's just a fallacy. It's just not true. And so many people have caught the thing or found the celebrity

or the millions of dollars, and they are still unsatiated, unsatisfied, empty. And it's sad. So that's what I'm talking about. No, absolutely, go get the job. Go get the money. I've got no problem with any of it. But it's your attitude along the way that I think matters so much. Truth.

You gotta be careful. She isn't them dreams. What's your, uh, to do app called? It's called typist. I might rename it. I'm pretty sure we talked about it.

Didn't we talk about it on the get your reset on? I think we touched on it. Oh, maybe briefly. Yeah. The site is up. It rings a bell. Yeah.

If you look up typist.app, it's, I think if you download it, it's going to break because I disconnected all of the MongoDB Atlas clusters that were storing the notes. So it don't work, but eventually it will. Is it open source yet? Is it out there yet? No, no, no. This is a thing I decided in like the last week or two.

That's cool. That's exciting. Yeah. Have you used Obsidian? Yes. That's one of those like beasts that I just, a lot of it has to do with, I haven't used it in a while, but I have tried Obsidian and I found it to be a little too bells and whistles. I also have a thing for things that have too much metadata that you can set on a note.

Because what I want is to do command N and then just start brain dumping. If I have to click in between like a title and a body text, I don't want any of that stuff. That is too much friction. I need, like my brain moves too fast. I need to just get my thoughts out. And maybe Obsidian is different now. I don't know. I'll tell you, that's exactly how I use Obsidian.

I want you to build your thing. I'm not saying don't build your thing. I'm just curious, you know, when you talk about, I mean, everybody has their way of doing notes and to-dos and like, that's why there's so many apps. And most of them don't map onto too many people's workflows is what you find. So that's why, again, there's a diversity of them

because you just can't find one that you like. The only one that you're going to like is probably the one that you're going to build. That's great. It makes it hard to make a business out of it because there's so many of them and it's hard to find so many people that work just like you do.

People tend to make note-taking and to-do apps that have all the things because they're trying to appeal to a large enough audience to get enough sales to continue to do the thing. And so I've long despised most software in this space. And we have no commercial relationship to Obsidian, but they probably should sponsor us at this point. They should sponsor us.

I found it to be, if you like to just take notes and mark down, it's got tons of stuff. I don't use any of that stuff. I just use it, command N, write some stuff, or command L, switch between notes. I don't do any tags. I don't do any folders. Well, I got one folder for the today note,

because the today note will automatically go in. Nick Nisi taught me this. You can have a today note that will just go into a folder of 2024 slash March slash whatever. That's kind of nice. Otherwise it gets kind of gnarly in your home directory. But anyways, not an ad for Obsidian, but I'm just a guy who's found one that finally I can ignore

all the things and it's still fast and it still just does markdown rendering. And I like it. That's really cool. I actually am just looking at the website and it looks different thandown rendering and I like it. That's really cool. I actually am just looking at the website and it looks different than the last time I tried it. I think I tried it a few years ago. My fear is it's going to change

because they have kind of become big now and they're adding more things and I'm sure there's AI in there and there's product roadmaps and all the things that businesses have and that's usually when i start to dislike products over time and i'm like ah like i liked the 1.0 you know well the good thing about it is even if they do change it i suppose for the most part unless you're like knee deep in plugins is that

in the end it literally is just a dot md file yeah portability is amazing that's really good it's not a database somewhere it's you know there is syncing if you're using ios and whatnot of course but that's why i thought well i can buy into this even if it does change because at some point someone's gonna say the new obsidian you know oh yeah or whatever it might be uh you know in obsidian version one that's in stays there right versus version two that as the ai or as the bells and whistles because like i think the challenge is that these things they start out simple and that's probably why you have the passion for typists is like you want to keep it simple and

you also want to satiate that engineering side of your brain to kind of like tinker and have fun and have those boundaries on a you know a side thing not even a side hustle just a side thing just something you do for yourself and then at some point it just turns into something else and it's not the original thing anymore but my experience is very similar to jared's like command n for new obviously commando to find things i put everything in there like literally everything that i can ever think of goes into obsidian because of how fast it is and how simply it's just driven on type whether it's docs code anything not like literally code but like code blocks and stuff like that just sort of like

mostly like linux stuff like how do i set up a new ubuntu machine or how do i do this or that i like document my own processes and refer to those documents for various things and so that's that's a lot of how I use Obsidian personally but it's been very very very very organizing whereas it's been disparate things have been in iRider or at one point Dropbox paper or just various places that were not fast and Obsidian is just fast that's what i'm looking for i'm gonna give this a try honestly the fact that it is a little bit different and now what i remember i'm like we've sold one like it does look a lot cooler can you use our affiliate link when you click on that no just kidding i'm just yeah i'm kidding as well but i'm a big we don't want

to crush your dreams just because obsidian exists. Oh, what dreams? I'm looking at Typhus, the old version, and it looks beautiful. Thank you so much. So I'll give you that much. More beautiful than Obsidian even, which is a pretty good looking app. It's not like the most amazing looking app, but yours already looks nicer. It could be improved. There's a lot about Obsidian that could be improved to increase efficiency, increase speed, a lot of different stuff like that.

But I think mostly it's just like distraction. There's a lot of things that can be distracting with the interface. Like if you're somebody who likes when you do prose and you're writing, everything else goes away. Maybe there's a plug-in for that that I'm not aware of, but Obsidian default does not disappear into writer mode where you're just like, there is no obstructions in your view and distractions around you to shiny object you or whatnot. Do you guys write in writer mode? Is that, are you, are you writer mode people? No, I just know it's pretty common for folks who probably like any, who want to build their own tool to be like, I want it as simple as possible. And that's often like when I want to write,

don't distract me with the sidebar that has all the notes ever, which is like I'm looking at my sidebar and it's like literally all the notes ever is like there. Yeah, the sidebar is ridiculous. It is ridiculous. I've never been on a distraction-free writer though. I'm also not a writer writer. So I found that when I did try the distraction-free style

where it's like birds chirping and coffee and macOS full screen mode on iA Writer, right? Like just a cursor and me and the keyboard. I can't write like that. It feels lonely. I just stare at it. I'm like, what am I going to do here? And they're like, I'm going to go check Twitter. There is nothing more intimidating than a blank piece of paper.

Seriously. Or a blank screen. It's very intimidating. It's very intimidating. It is very intimidating. Which I think is probably the one use of language models that I'm still appreciating. Because I'm pretty much disillusioned about everything because I've used it for so long now that I use it in disgust. But just not giving me a blank, mostly with code. Like, just write this function for me.

It's going to be wrong. I'm not going to like it. But I'm going to copy paste it and change it to be a function that I would have written. And for some reason, that's faster than just me writing the function myself. Because I'll just sit there and think, what should I name this thing? You know? Oh, my gosh. And the same thing with prose.

Just give me some copy. It's going to be generic, you know? But I'm going to make it not generic or i'm gonna throw it away just gets rid of that blank page problem yeah it's a lot easier to well for me at least it's it's a lot easier to edit than it is to start afresh i do think that there's a muscle to build of just turning up completely turning off your editor self and just learning how to brain dump but having that extra little foothold of using an llm to just like just write me an intro paragraph i'm gonna rewrite every word of

it but like give me something yeah it's nice to get you started i use that too What's up, friends? This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda brings teams and tools together for a more organized workday. It's your all-in-one collaborative workspace. They bring together the best documents, spreadsheets, and apps into one single platform. And best of all, Coda helps you stop playing ping pong between different tabs and tools. You centralize all of your processes and shared knowledge. And down in the photo, they mentioned a few popular templates, which I think are pretty cool. They have Team Hub,

OKR Tracker, Meeting Notes, Product Roadmap, Decision Dock, and a lot of others to choose from. But one in particular was this Team Hub, which is so cool because it's a one-stop shop for everything related to your team, your projects, projects and your processes you can see weekly kickoff meetings retrospectives daily stand-ups who is on your team where things are at the calendar the initiatives the resources it's all there and it's so cool so if you want a platform that empowers your team to collaborate effectively and focus on shared goals you can get started with Coda today for free. Head over to coda.io slash changelog. Again, that's coda.io slash changelog, C-O-D-A dot I-O slash changelog.

And you can get started for free. Let me throw out a topic here then since we're on this LLM kick. And it's not deeper into AI necessarily, but I'm just curious. When you drive or you travel, do you pretty much mostly use a map application to get there, even if you've been there a thousand times? A lot of the times, yes. Some places, if I've been there enough, I don't. Right. For the most part, though, you use the map application

because there might be traffic, right? No, not in the city. Unless I want to know my ETA or something like that. So you drive just free? Yes. In most cases. Okay. So I went to my men's group this morning.

I did not map there. So that's an example of not. But if I'm going to go from Dripping Springs to Austin, I live in Austin, by the way, Annie. If I need to go into town, and that's 30 minutes away, 25 minutes away, and it's downtown, I know how to get there. I'm going to map it, right? So my shtick here is not maps. It's that the world, when the maps became ubiquitous on our phones, in our cars, a part of the operating system of driving, basically, we became became people who even if we've

been there before we're mapping it i wonder if the same might happen with generative ai and the way we're leveraging it for pros like can you actually function that first step without having the the generative you know what i mean like will we get there that's my that's my topic i'm kind of bringing up is like well you did it this morning and it worked out for you uh right right exactly and i recognize that it's not always there but at the same time like if i need to go into austin into town i'm probably gonna use a map even if i've been the the literal same parkin garage i'm probably gonna map it just because that's what you do. Because why not? Right. Because it's there. Right.

So I wonder if we'll become so seemingly dependent in some way, shape, or form to safely drive to a place as we may safely drive to a prose, to an outcome in our possibility of writing down our thoughts or like you had said, having this discipline of brain dumping, but like you just mentioned blank screen. Can you just generate or give me a function? You want to start from a generative state and work backwards and that's somehow faster so i'm just curious if because now this is the state of the art if we'll get to a place where it's like well i can't really begin until i've been assisted into the into the beginning well extending your metaphor when i'm mapping okay and my wife makes fun of

me constantly i just do whatever it says. I'm like Michael Scott driving right into the water, right into the lake. Make a right turn. Wait, wait, wait. No, no, no, no. It means bear right. No, it said right. It said take a right.

No, no, no, no. No, look. It means go up to the right, bear right over the bridge and hook up with 307. Make a right turn. Maybe it's a shortcut, Dwight. It said go to the right. It can't mean that. There's a lake there.

He knows where it is going. This is the lake. The machine knows. This is the lake. Stop yelling at me. No, it's up there. There's no road here. Right.

And I don't want to be that way with my words. And maybe I shouldn't be that way with my driving. But a lot of times you're using it, even like you said, if you know where you're going, because you want to know the fastest way right now, and maybe there's a lane closed on this road, and it may know that, and you don't know that. And so I understand all that. And I do use it sometimes in the city for that reason,

for those reasons. And my wife definitely uses the map every time, even though she knows Omaha inside and out and doesn't need to, but she just does. She likes it. But man, if Siri says take a right, I'm taking a right, you know? And I might take a right right into a phone pole, but I'm going to do it. And so that sounds like a dangerous thing for generative AI in me. Yeah, I think when it comes to pros, I see what you're getting at. And it's something I'm concerned about, in myself at least, is I like the foothold and I'm going to use it.

But I also really want to be aware of making sure that it's not too much of a crutch. I like it as like a buddy to get started. That's really helpful. But I also want to make sure that I'm still cultivating the skill of... It's a very vulnerable place, in my opinion, to start writing on a completely blank page because the first thing you write will probably be awful and you'll want to change it to some degree. And I think that it is a good habit to get into, to learn to overcome that. And so that's something that I try and be aware of. If I'm feeling that writer's block, at least for the first few minutes, I will try and just write whatever comes to my mind.

Even if it's like very conversational, said really poorly, just start with something. I think that's a really healthy skill to cultivate. There's nothing wrong with occasionally using AI to help you with that a little bit because that's essentially what you're doing is like you just need to get something on a page so you can start to mold what you're trying to say.

But I think it's a skill that we need to make sure we maintain because that's really valuable. Yeah, emotion creates emotion and momentum, obviously. Motion creates emotion is a sales term. I've been in sales for a long time. It was a term from Boiler Room, the movie. Ben Affleck, a few others were in there. Get on the phones. It's time to get to work.

Move around. Motion creates emotion. Well, I wonder if even it's like a progress blocker. So here's an example. I'll reveal a little bit. So I know that in your Twitter bio, you still say you're neuro spicy. I think it's cool. And I don't really know what that means necessarily.

I think I might have an idea when I think about what neuro spicy means. I think you're kind of a spicy person. Generally, we've spoken to you before. I thought maybe it was an anything. No, it's a real thing. This is a thing that's emerging with folks that I think are neurodiverse. I'm not well steeped in it. You can certainly school me on it, but I went to the LLM and say, just define neuro spicy because I know if I take that same idea, that same prompt and put it into Google, the result I get is way different than a single paragraph that gives me just enough to have a non-embarrassing conversation

with Andy about being neuro-spicy. It doesn't have to give me all the resources ever, all the Wikipedia entries and every blog post ever or whatever it might be. It gets me right to the nugget, which is what exactly is it. So this is an example of like progress blogging like now i'm sort of hooked in a way that this response from the thing the magic box gives me something just enough like what do i do in the future if this doesn't exist i cannot map my way

to the quick definition you know what i mean like i don't know yeah i think like low risk non-controversial knowledge right like inter information which is a great way just to like quickly come up to speed on something did they have real animals fight in the filming of where the red fern grows you know like that would be a that would take a while to google that you know i don't know if you guys seen that movie we watched the other day from the 70 He's a boy, Jenny. A boy ought to have a dog. Sometimes I think God don't want me to have any. You ain't doing your fair share.

How long you been saving this? Long time. You can get them dogs. You know, at the end, this mountain lion attacks his dogs. And it's like a scene where the mountain lions and the dogs are really going at it. My wife's like, that looks like they didn't have CGI back then. That looks pretty real. I wonder if any animals got hurt. And so I just asked it real quick. But that's like low risk if it's wrong, you know, then I'm just like, I'm informed about something that doesn't matter anyways. It's non-controversial. It's

kind of maybe it was controversial back then, but maybe it could be. But like that kind of stuff, I quickly get an answer, move on with my life. That kind of stuff i quickly get an answer move on with my life that kind of stuff is useful but high risk you know how do i concoct this particular medicine i don't know what would be high risk lots of things are high risk for sure it's like i don't use it in any sort of uh email like i think chat gT in a tab is my current wall around it where it's like I have to go, even when I'm coding, I don't do the inline stuff because A, Z, for some reason still isn't working for me with their assistant.

I don't have Copilot. And so I might go over there and say, write me a function that does this and come back and copy and paste or just look at it and write and so i'm not like writing my emails with any help i'm not writing anything with help unless i go over to it and say help me same that feels like a good barrier for me where i might be more tempted just to like tab complete an email out and become a robot you know yeah a lot of like, thank you for allowing us to apply

to your esteemed company. For some reason, the term esteemed company is the red flag that I'm like, absolutely not. No, thank you. Yeah, the spammer emails have gotten slightly higher quality in the last year and a half. It's like, oh, this is definitely not a human that wrote this, but it's better than

the gobbledygook they used to send. It's good for writing bullshit. Amen. Not that we need more of that. Not that we need more of that. It's destroying the web as we knew it, but it sure helps me when I got a blank piece of page. I think, I don't know what your practice is, Annie, if you concur, but I'm with you, Jerry. I have to go to the tab and explicitly

conjure the magic box it's not in my everywhere and i don't at this moment i don't want that to be in my everywhere because i think that you become again back to the maps you become reliant on this thing to get to a place and i still want to invoke my own cognitive behavior my own ability to think but i don't mind the momentum that it can give you to help you get through. Like, hey, I'm thinking about a topic. Can you give me five ways or five ideas that just kind of helps me think more? And it's not like you're using that to copy and paste into something else and you're like selling it as a book or something. It's more like give me something.

Prime my pump. Prime my brain on some things. But even that is kind of a crutch, right? Like if you can only positively think in the future about hard things by getting primed, you kind of lose that opportunity to self-prime. And then you kind of, again, back to the maps, you're kind of crutched to this thing. And I want to be aware as I move forward with how it works and how it's, you know, coming more and more into our lives in different places to have that awareness, I suppose.

Yeah. I've thought about this there for many, many years. I don't know how long, how long has Copilot been around? Two-ish. Only two? Oh my gosh. No, it predates OpenAI, chat GPT for sure. So yeah, I was really, I wouldn't say against. It just didn't appeal to me for the longest time. And it wasn't until this year that I started to use it.

And I'm fully on board with it. I'm very skeptical of a lot of AI things. Copilot is not one of those. I think because I learned that it was really just fancy autocomplete. I don't even like, I tend not to give it prompts of like, write me a function that does blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I find it especially useful when I'm trying to debug things because I can just type like C and it knows that I want to log out the variable that I just wrote or something as I'm debugging. It's very great for when I don't want to write a long object for like defining headers and the methods for a particular post

request or something. I love that feature. I really, really love that feature. And I find that I don't use it when I use it for autocomplete and not for writing new code. And it's just, it's the repetitive work. I love that it's smart enough to know that. Sometimes I think it's a little terrifying how well it knows what I'm thinking because I remember one time I looked at a screenshot of some code and I like somewhere else,

somewhere else like in Slack or something and then I go to copilot and I start typing like two letters into it and it gives me the exact because I was test I wanted to test out that code and it gave me like verbatim everything that was in that screenshot it was I was like wow this is a little. But that spooks me a little bit. But I do like it as an assistant that's just doing sort of the drudgery of programming. That's fantastic. That's what we need robots for. Absolutely.

Clears up headspace, you know? Don't memorize that API anymore. Just know that there's an API and then ask it for the code to use the API and then you look at it and then you decide whether or not that code's an API and then ask it for the code to use the API and then you look at it and then you decide whether or not that code's good or wrong. Don't write any looks there, it's going to be wrong. Also, who memorizes things in programming

anyways? Obviously there's some degree. I certainly had jQuery APIs memorized when I was a kid. There are certain things that you use frequently enough that you obviously memorize, but so often. Can you do your job without Google? there are certain things that you use frequently enough that you obviously memorize, but so often, I mean,

can you do your job without Google? Like all of us. More and more so. Yes. That's very good. But without looking up, without asking for help, right? Because of chat GPT, not because I'm getting smarter. Exactly. And so, you know, our jobs are not difficult because we have to memorize a lot of things. No, that's not the difficult part. So if I'm getting help on the, hey, what was that one method on this

thing, that and the other? Love that it remembers it for me. Love that. I wrote a Node.js based server starting Friday, coded a little bit over the weekend, and I want to use Puppeteer, which is why I used JavaScript.

Not TypeScript. I don't use TypeScript. I use JavaScript. But I haven't written a Node server for probably years. So I was very ChatGPT influenced on this one. And it was so easy. It was so nice. Modern day Node is actually kind of nice.

I mean, async await everything and ESM imports and I mean, it was a pretty simple screenshotting thing, but we're talking like under 100 lines of code. Deployed it to Fly today, by the way, so use your guys' stuff. Was not sponsored to say that,

but have a sponsored Fly account, so maybe that was one reason. Easy button. So nice, but yeah, ChatGPT made it so much easier just because I know JavaScript and I've written Node but how many years has it been and what's the API for this thing and how do you write a file to temporary disk and then delete it later and all that kind of stuff. Who wants to know that? Not me. I'm actually curious to see as we progress,

as we see more early career developers use things like Copilot, whether that's for a net good or a net bad. I feel kind of mixed on this because I know that when I'm in a code base in a language that I'm not as savvy as JavaScript, such as like a Go project or Python, don't know those languages as well. So having something like Copilot help me out with a lot of the syntax is really helpful. And I do find that I'm learning and eventually I don't need Copilot to suggest things. And so I think it can be a good learning tool, but I also don't know, you know, we're reviewing applicants and I can sometimes see when I think this has just been generated.

First of all, it doesn't work. That's one thing. It'd be great if it worked. That's not on Copilot. That's on the applicant, right? Yeah, that's what I'm saying is if you're solely relying on generated code. Then you're not a programmer.

We cannot be shipping code. Yeah, if we are not, we can't be shipping code that's just been generated that we don't understand at all. That's not, that's no good. That's no good. And so that's where I feel conflicted is, I think time will tell. If we have new developers that heavily rely on generated code, what is the long-term effect of that? Because on the one hand, I think it could be helpful in teaching. But on the other hand, I think it could be a really bad crutch. And I don't know which way it's going to swing right now. I think we need more time and more people using it to see what kind of programmers is this outputting.

Let me throw one more out there just to go back to my maps analogy. Could you imagine somebody out there navigating with this gigantic piece of paper in front of them? And then maybe they even ask you, where am I at on this map? Like how foreign that would look to somebody in today's age but back in the day i remember having a map in my car like a literal paper on paper map that's why you have a co-pilot i'm trying to say like literally sit next to you and they read the map they got the map out that's right like fold it back up when they're done well yeah literal co-pilot i mean that's that seems so it's not that long ago like that's like 90s i remember doing it with my brother-in-law.

We drove to Chicago for a Chicago Cubs game. And I had to be in my 20s. So we're talking the 2000s. And I remember having the map on my lap. That was the last time I ever used a map. But it probably was like 2007, 6, 5. Because even the first iPhone, unless you had a Garmin the first iPhone didn't have

maps the App Store allowed Google Maps to come onto it that was probably the start but did that have turn by turn? I can't remember. Anyways that's 2009 2010 time range as late as 2006 so 20 years ago we were just folding maps into

the glove box and unfolding them. And literally looking up and trying to see where you are and then looking at the map again. It was crazy. But we did it. If you can go back and be that person, talking to the person now, embracing map technology. This is the same person like the pre-LLM, not embracing LLM technology or generative technology how do you think that person would say no no no use the maps they're amazing on your phone that whatever that is that magical device don't stop using that because this way is like I don't even know our

map on this map yeah I mean I think that the analog there is like not the person who's using an old map it's the person who already knows the way. Because they're an expert. And so they don't need it. They're like, I don't need a map. I know where I'm going. And they get lost anyways because they're just arrogant and don't know where they're going. But I think that's more like that.

Because I don't think anyone's saying, no, let's use a compiler from the 90s. Or let's write an assembly code. No one's really saying that. But they are saying. Kind of what Annie's saying. Which is like. If people are just going to completely.

Turn themselves over to this. And just ship code that way. Then they're going to be like Michael Scott. Driving himself into the lake. True. Yeah. You know. And they're going to take other people with them.

I mean Dwight was also in the car. You know this very well Jared. What episode was that? What season? What episode? I don't remember, but it was a hilarious moment. Well, I do agree with the sentiment that you shared, Danny. Like, who would want to remember all that? Like, who memorizes this stuff? Because if you're using ChatGPT to query the docs, let's just say, that's no different than navigating the docs on your own. You're speeding up the process

and, you know, kind of boiling it down to the real thing you really care about in the docs not reading all the theory or the whys and the hows like just literally to the tutorial or the code block or the function call or whatever it might be you know it's just a it's the high speed way to to reading the docs more fastly like who wants to who wants to memorize docs that's what they're there for is to not memorize right and i think what it comes down to is i think it's a useful tool if you know what you want to build and basically how to build it it's just a matter of syntax like syntax is like the least important part of programming you should know it because if you don't do it, it will break.

So you need to have the right syntax, obviously. Yeah, it's almost weird. It's like it makes the better programmers better. Right, exactly. But the new ones, not necessarily good. Exactly. So I think that's where, that's why I feel comfortable using it because I know what I'm going to build. I also know how I'm going to architect it. That part, that creative work is still a part of the process. And so I don't feel like I'm cheating in any way. I just feel like I have an assistant. So I think the more that's sort of my metric of, am I going to use this AI tool? Is it an assistant versus is it doing my work for me? And they're going to get better. I mean, one of the things we're seeing in the music world is, you know, generate a song in the style of blank. And I think we'll get to a point where you could say, write this function in the style of blank. And if blank is a very good engineer,

what if you said all C code must be written in the style of Daniel Stenberg, who wrote and maintains the curl library and has some of the most battle-hardened and long-lasting C code in the world deployed in the most places in the world. And every time somebody needed a C function, the LLM would write it like Daniel Stenberg would write it. That's going to be better than 99% of humans because he's better than 99% of humans.

I'm just giving him massive props here. I think he deserves them. He's a very good programmer over a very long time frame. What if we have our tools not just trained on all publicly available, liberally licensed or permissively licensed open source, but also then curated from there and said, this is good software. Write it like this guy or this gal. That's going to be better. Right, because you run into the problem of

there's a lot of code out there. It's not all good code. If we're just pulling from all of GitHub, especially if our LLMs are drawing from Stack Overflow. If you're listening to this, you can't see my face, but it's like, oh gosh, got to be careful. So I think the people who are doing the training and stuff and the fine-tuning and all this stuff, they are working on that problem.

And they are highly incentivized to make Copilot and AI Codex and Kodi and Tab9 and all these tools way better. And so the people that do that have a lot of money to be made and so I think it'll get done. The question is how much better can it get from here? And I still think it's going to be assistive

and not replacement, but I've been wrong before. Happened once in 2020. I mean, there are people who are being replaced by AI and that's really depressing yeah we're we're at in particular that you're aware of artists they they have like many of them have completely lost their business and are dramatically affected by this and it's even more grim when giant companies like disney are AI to generate graphics. When they have the money

to throw at artists, they have some of the best artists in the world and they're using AI to generate some things. I think that has more to do with them jumping on a trend than anything. At least I hope. And I hope that is not a trend that sticks like I one thing I'm very proud of at fly is that we hire an artist her name is also Annie and she does basically all of the art for our blog posts for our website she's phenomenal and I'm so so happy that we actually hire a human artist but I feel it is a much more bleak situation for anyone in a creative field because most like most of the time like none of them consented to this to their art being used and um copied so blatantly much like to the to the detriment of their own career. So I feel very bleak about that.

And so anytime people decide to actually pay a real human artist, that's awesome in my mind. That's such a tough one, really. I mean, obviously the bleakness for those particular artists, but it's such a tough one because then I can't recall the newsletter, but I just stumbled upon somebody who was a UI designer and they're like I'm all in on generative stuff I want to use an LLM to and all this assistive stuff to make me a better designer to move faster and do more things and I paraphrasing some of the things I heard but I was like wow I want to follow this newsletter and it's a new one so I'm like this is literally a ui designer someone who's not brand new they've been in the industry for a while and they're leveraging this stuff to to be a multiplier

versus a a replacer so to speak and then you got those cases where you know that's not literally taking this wall art or whatever this art might be and saying well let me be disney and generate new graphics because we've got the old stuff and we fire up the person who created the old stuff and now we have the this you know this gpu that generates the new versions of it so you know see a human kind of thing that's not the same thing that's a tough one really because like it's just generally just like it's it's just so hard to to map your your mind around the long-term effects of this generative state of art in particular and how it will replace augment or just remove folks and then some places where it's a multiplier it's like how do you how do you navigate that it's just really a big problem to navigate but as you

said when it's an artist who is in the field and knows how to use it as a tool, that's a very, very different thing. Like I have a friend who is, she's been in the game industry for over a decade and she is a concept artist. She's easily like the best illustrator I've ever met. She's phenomenal. And she's used AI in certain companies where they use it to generate a lot of, again, doing a lot of that grunt work. So if you have a particular style of tree or item in the environment that you just need to have a lot of varieties of, give me 12 varieties of this type of tree drawn in this style so that we can use that throughout our level design. That's amazing.

That's amazing. And that saves a lot of just grunt work. But when it comes to like character design, something that's got to be more inventive and isn't just repetitive work. In fact, like artists using physical mediums will often do this. I don't know if people know this, but a lot of like great artists have artistic assistants that go in and they, if they're working on a giant canvas and maybe they just need like a giant sky scene and they just need to draw, like they need to like paint the sky, do a whole bunch, like thousands of little dots to do the stars. They will often just like pay a younger artist to do a lot of that grunt work. It's the same kind of

thing with AI. And I think that having that as an assistant can be really amazing in doing big, complex projects. So that's an amazing tool to use it as such. But when it starts to replace people and mimic their work without their consent, that's where we have a problem. It's the replacement of people that I'm the most concerned about. Yeah, I concur with that. I think the second part of what you said is where it gets really dirty. Whereas the first part is kind of what technology has always done, is replace people because it's deflationary.

That's what it does. But replacing people by using art that they put into the world and didn't consent for you to use to train a thing to replace them, that's when you're like, all right, this is wrong. But just to use an advancement in technology to replace a worker with the technology, that's the way that the world works. And so we would be stuck with paper maps.

We would be stuck with the old school printing press. Like all the things that have advanced humanity have also taken people out of their work. So that's less what I'm, I mean, it's always a little bit more nuanced. I do agree with you. That's so gross though. That's so gross. When you use, isn't it?

Like you're using their work to like create a thing that no longer needs them. And they didn't say you could do that. You capture their essence. Like you literally steal their essence. Like the thing that makes them uniquely human and uniquely powerful and creative as an artist. You take it. Like you no longer want this person's art. It's like Trolls 2.

Or was it the Trolls, the most recent Trolls movie? Have you seen this movie? No. What's the latest Trolls movie? Gosh. Seven. Trolls 7. Well, it's Trolls, like the animated version of it.

Yeah, yeah. I think, let me, give me one second. Well, Troll 2, that was the worst movie ever, wasn't it? There was a movie about how bad that movie is. But that's not the animated version. That's Troll 2. Banned together. Trolls banned together. This latest one. They've done

so many that they quit numbering them. They just have subtitles now. Well, yeah. I mean, I don't even... I think it's like three. I think it's the third one. But I'm going to spoil it real quick, so blow the horn. Alright, blow the horn. And, Amy, tell me if I shouldn't spoil this for you if you haven't seen it, if you're that concerned about it. Oh, go for it.

I'm not going to watch it. You can't spoil Trolls band together. Well, maybe. Well, in there, there were two characters that bottled up, literally took a troll. And trolls are known to be musically inclined. And Justin Timberlake, JT, is obviously part of this movie right and he's a character and they're called branch and we know jt from n-sync and then now he's just simply justin timberlake and he's transcended his original boy band uh scenario and n-sync is a part of this movie it's

really cool if you're a fan of n-sync you should go and like get into this my kids are into n-sync right now so i'm you can't help it i'm a dad right i gotta satiate their their curiosities anyways they took it took all these trolls and put it into this perfume bottle and they would spray it on to themselves and they would now extract the talent from this troll they could sing was part of the in-movie n-sync band could sing all that good stuff had very good talent and they were not good but they sprayed the troll onto them basically through this perfume bottle stealing the essence like we just talked about and now they can sing it's the same thing that we're talking about like it's literally a version of that in metaphor in movie it's the same it's like you're stealing the essence

from somebody ai trolls yes and i want i And I have a couple of comments about this. Because at least when it comes to replacing people, and that's how technology works, I totally get that. I think that there is something a little more sinister about replacing artists because of just the nature of art. It is a deeply human act. Since the beginning of time. Yeah. yeah right but it's never been art has never been commercially viable in a in a sustainable way and so people don't make not for many people yeah people don't make art to make money they make art to make art and you can't replace that and you won't replace that but keep going sorry well and so so the people who are able

to make a living off of it i cannot tell you how hard those people have worked to get to that point. And to now know that they can easily be replaced is very depressing. So I've heard this point a little bit, but not as often as the technology just replaces people. That's the way of the world. I'll also point out that artists, what is it? What's the phrase? Good artists copy. Yeah. Great artists steal kind of thing, right? Which is very true, but there is a very big difference between artists that borrow from and are inspired by other artists because

they still put in their own creative energy into their work versus artists who plagiarize. And so a lot of the, the the the major complaint is that ai has created a very easy way of plagiarizing and in a two very very sinister effects in the real world so you don't believe that uh prompting an llm is a skill set i'm being i'm being facetious here when i'm saying this but yeah i was gonna say you don't believe it takes talent to prompt an LLM? I would say no, no, not. It's not a skill, especially compared to, I know some people will disagree with me on that.

Come at me. I'm kidding with you. I don't believe that. Yeah, exactly. I was joking. I hear you, I hear you. But there are people who genuinely believe that like, listen, creating a very unique prompt

is equivalent to putting in God knows how many hours to get good at a skill and creating a piece of art from that. Not even remotely comparable. And the fact that there are people who like to compare those things is laughable to me. Yeah, it is not the same. At the same time, I've got a good friend. I don't know if he still listens to the show. Jared, I think you met him at least once, right? Ben Gillen, remember Ben Gillen? Yeah, he did some work with us at Good for Con a while back. Now, Ben, my friend Ben, is an artist.

And he will create. And I think it's really interesting watching his particular journey just from afar. I'm not really even steeped in all of it, but i know that he's deep in this generative ai art world and he has done some really really cool stuff as a result of being an artist knowing what good art is and leveraging it to create uniquely better art that leverages other people's art while also being an artist. And while he may be doing these prompts and conjuring things and connecting things and leveraging the latest APIs that might be out there and whatever it might be, I've seen him from afar and I've watched some of his stuff, and it's really astounding.

I'll link it up, and you can check out his Instagram. And I would say after the show, Annie, go check it out and tweet about it if you like like or whatever. I know you do a lot of tweeting and you share your opinions a lot on there. So I figure if you have post-show, not in the real time opinions about my friend Ben, our friend Ben, and how he leverages this, I think it's really interesting. So that's why I say it's challenging and a really hard problem to solve because we see loss now and i don't discredit by any means an artist losing their possibility what we don't see is the future right and there's always hindsight is 2020 and we don't see the future and what changes as a result

and there's always pain in change there's always disruption, displacement even in change, and that is not ever really a good thing to go into as a first person, second person, or third person, like to watch somebody go through that. So I'm not discrediting that by any means. But I've seen what Ben has done with some of this stuff, and I know he's an artist, and I know he's a very passionate artist. He lives, eats, and breathes art in every way he can. And he's a very creative thinker. And I see what he's doing with it. And I think it's like, that's kind of what gives me a hope. Like maybe there's something happening here.

Because I see what an artist has done with the possibility. Not just somebody who's like, well, I've learned how to conjure these things and prompt these things. And there you go. He's literally an artist leveraging his own style, leveraging other people's styles, and all the stuff that's available and doing some really, really, really cool stuff. Honestly, I'll link him up in our show notes on Instagram in particular. And I would encourage you to check him out and see what you think. Yeah, I will. And leveraging is the key word there.

Yeah. And that's amazing. Right. Leveraging is the key word. He's not replacing anybody. That's for sure. I mean, maybe he is insofar as that maybe he's not like, hey, so-and-so famous artist, will you collab with me? It's maybe an unsolicited, non-solicited, whatever the term is, collab, you know, through the LLM gobbling up their essence, that troll essence out there, just leveraging that essence. That's why it's tough

well every podcast does have ai in it yes devolves into a conversation about ai and this was no difference we have a new sound effect for when we like begin to talk about ai like there's like a digital sound i don't know like it's a trigger warning it's kind of like a spoiler alert but it's like yeah it's like here comes the ai just a warning like alert, but it's like, here comes the AI. Just a warning. Just an alarm bell. Here it comes. It's hard not to talk about it. It's perhaps the most disruptive thing in digital workers' worlds in the last 20 years.

And maybe not also. It's strange to have a topic that's so divisive amongst people of otherwise like minds. There's very smart people that are completely on the Doomer side and completely on the, what's the E-A-A-C thing? I don't know what it's called anymore. The altruistic side. The opposite of the Doomer side. And they're brilliant minds. what's the EAAC thing? I don't know what it's called anymore. Effective altruism, like the altruistic side, you know,

non, like the opposite of the doomer side. And they're like brilliant minds, completely disagreeing on where this is headed. And so none of us know where it's headed. We see of it, we see what it can do now. And we see that it has been,

at least on the pros and code side, has been overhyped to, for, to make people believe that it's better than it actually is, but then also to see in our own lives that it's still super valuable in these small ways, or maybe in some big ways. Certainly we haven't been hit as hard as artists have,

as software developers, but we're right on the edge of that, and potentially it doesn't have to go very far from where it is to be able to do all the things they're promising that it can do, like write entire programs. Even though it's not doing that today,

that's the kind of thing where I'm like, could it get there in three to five years? I don't know, maybe it could. At which point, you're just hiring less devs or you're just doing more work. I don't know. It's hard not to talk about it because there's so many facets and opinions

and more questions than answers at this point. But hey, ChatGPT, how do you end a podcast? You ask Annie. What's left? Yeah, what else, Annie? What else? What's left, Annie? What have we not talked about

that we can close out this show with that's important to you? I hope to see more people spend time in their craft as engineers, motivated by play. I've said it before, but I want to see more of that and a little less seriousness, because I think that's kind of all we have. I don't know what the future is going to hold with the future of AI, how that's going to transform the job market. No idea. And what we can do now is enjoy what we have, which I hope that doesn't sound too bleak. I hope that sounds optimistic, but I found it to be really transformative. And it is what has enabled me to learn even more and much faster

than I have before. And that's what we need to do. We have to keep learning. Always good talking to you, Annie. Good to have you back. Glad you're back to well. Glad you have some good disciplines in your life to keep you guarded and guided. Very proud of that fact that you just, you've put it down there, you've written it, you're following it, and you're here on the podcast sharing with others too.

To be inspired by your guidance for for yourself that's that's a good stuff that's the good stuff all right bye friends thank you bye bye and he wants to see more people motivated by play. I love that. If you are working on something just for the love, hop into our Slack community and share. We would love to hear from you. Join today for $0 at changelog.com slash community. Oh, and for our Changelog++ supporters,

stick around for an extended conversation about AI taking artists' jobs. Thanks once again to our partners at Fly.io, to Breakmaster Cylinder for being our beat freak in residence, and to our friends at Sentry. Use code CHANGELOG for $100 off the team plan when you sign up. Why not, right? Next week on The Changelog, news on Monday,

Burke from Polar, a monetization platform for open source and indie devs, on Wednesday. And Alex from Tailscale, right here on Changelog and Friends, on Friday. Have a great weekend. Tell your friends about the Changelog if you dig it. And let's talk again real soon. I thought y'all would be like trolls fans though. I was like, oh my gosh, here I am describing trolls in this podcast.

Listen, I love kids shows actually. I do love, I watch a lot of like. It's a kid show, but it's like barely a kid show. It's better.