In today's episode, we're going to be talking about things like books versus audiobooks. And that's relevant to you as a developer, and you're going to find out how in this interview with Ben Halpert. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to coach you through some of the hard parts of your career, give you advice, give you ideas and inspiration, and hopefully answer your questions. And to that point, if you have any questions for me, you can always email me at developertea at gmail.com. We try to uncover tools and processes and ideas that are going to help you in your career, help you level up and become a great developer to adopt the great developer mindset. So thank you so much for listening. I'm going to get out of the way and we're going to get straight into the second part of the interview with Ben Halpert. If you missed out. On the first part, you may want to go listen to that first. Thank you again for listening. Let's get to the interview with Ben Halpert. Like there's there's absolutely nothing wrong with cutting your your content in half and people will come back and read the second part. Oh, yeah. And and to the point of posting it on on your own blog on Dev 2, we actually tried to. It's not always clear. Like we sort of need to get better at describing all the features. But we. We try to make it really easy for you to cross post from your own blog in terms of we use Jekyll compatible markdown as our basic editor. We we provide the opportunity to add a canonical URL to the post. So Google knows to send all the link juice back to your own post. And and my mindset with that, I think, is that like really we we want you to sort of own your ideas and you should have a sort of. A. Canonical source for your writing. But the way the Internet has evolved and and some of the just kind of fundamentals of how CSS work, honestly, it's really nice when everything is packaged up in a in a in a consumable reading environment where where every blog post sort of looks the same. And it's and you don't have to move your eyes to find the text and everything. So that's a lot of the value we provide. But we we actually encourage people. To. To cross post. To. It doesn't have to be original work. They can find an old post they've written and sort of give it some new life on our platform. For a while I was concerned whether things needed to be original. And then we just decided we can go the 100 percent 180 and let people let people go crazy with with with cross posting old posts or anything that's obviously still relevant. A lot of ideas are kind of fundamental. And if you even think it's still relevant. It probably is. And and you know, this is honestly like I don't get a lot of chance to just talk about the platform and give people ideas about how to use it. I think sometimes I'm a little shy about being self-promoting, but it's yeah, honestly, like we have a. I have a thousand Twitter followers I talk to every day and I never even say this stuff because I don't want to annoy them. But I like I like interviews because I don't think people are annoyed to. Sure. I think it's really important to find out to find out about these things once you really get to to like open up and talk about it. So, you know, obviously, thanks a lot for for giving me that opportunity. But I really think when I hear from people who don't who want to who want to post or who want to get better at this stuff and they don't know how I'm always just really excited to talk to them. And I'm sometimes not as good at expressing. At bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and bringing these things together and and she was all about it. And I'm kind of excited to talk with her a little bit more and getting her up and running on the platform. Yeah, it will be interesting to see, you know, how people respond to this episode as well and people who go and sign up for an account at Dev2. I signed up and went through the onboarding, really cool onboarding process for anybody who wants to create a community platform. This is a really good blueprint. Like go and look at the ideas on Dev2 because it's actually really, really interesting. I love the tone of the whole thing just feels very, you know, I hate to say it's a social network because it's not, but it feels inviting as a developer, which I think is really unique. Yeah, well, I don't really use the phrase social network because it's kind of a buzzword, but we provide, we like, we hope, and when I talk about this, like half of this stuff is just like what we hope the platform can grow to. Like, I don't even think of it as like, as it's just kind of getting started. Like we really, for 99% of the work that's gone in, it was me solo. I mean, you know, but this summer, I brought in some more help and I'll talk about that in a sec, but we really are like taking the sort of, the approach that developers kind of need to be grounded and need support. And we sort of provide that support by giving sort of a place for, to discuss the technical parts. You know, we don't, the groundedness you need sometimes is not strictly, is we don't necessarily address some of the underlying things that make you feel this way. Although I'm sure we do do that, of course, as well. But, but we, we sort of, we just kind of try to provide that value and we, and we sort of have an abstract platform. So, so whatever that thing that you need is, we hope will ultimately kind of surface itself for you because, because we try to do a good job with our sort of ranking algorithms in combination with our editorial oversight for the whole thing to, to really kind of help people fill in the gaps and get to the nuance. And if I, if I can for a minute, I feel like I've, I haven't really talked about anyone else involved in this venture, which is kind of a, just not sort of a good thing for them. But yeah, so it's, it started myself and, and it very was very much was a solo project. So I'm not being dishonest to talk about the origin story that way. But this summer I brought in my friend Jess and I was introduced to her because she, she wanted, she just graduated from bootcamp and she really wanted a, some help with some stuff and just, she just wanted to get rolling with her career. And I met her through a friend and we got working together on some stuff, different stuff altogether, different project. And, and ultimately we just wound up being really great partners. And I brought her in and we were doing it part time. And I work, I, I'm a co-founder of this startup, Argo, and I'd been doing that for most of my day and then practical dev and dev.to on the side. But we've just recently sort of combined all these things because it was getting to be too much. The platform was taking off too much. I didn't have enough hours in my day. So it's, I wouldn't say like we know exactly what our organization structure is right now, but now we have, yeah, we have the rest of our small team at Argo and involved in the project. And my co-founder Peter at Argo is now sort of a co-founder of the whole venture along with Jess and I and, and Jess's involvement coming into our little organization has been awesome. She is, she really brings a lot to the table from a, from an organization and just personality perspective. We've, and we've really been firing on all cylinders ever since the five of us. And we are, we're just having a lot of fun with it and, and doing just really fun things every day. And we often go home pretty tired because we've really been working hard, but it's been, it's been, it's been a lot of fun. So you're living what a lot of developers would like to be doing. Like you're doing what a lot of developers, like we would like to be doing, engaging yourself on a product and doing it with, you know, a couple of people who are really involved. The team isn't so big that it's, you know, that it's limiting or that you have a lot of, like you said, you're not even certain what the structure is at the moment. But that, that's kind of where a lot of developers want to end up. Another thing that, that is marking, you know, marking what you guys are doing today, for example, and we, we mentioned, we mentioned this earlier, but you had this, this, this Twitter conversation or what would you call that? Yeah. It was a Twitter chat. That's the word we will use. There you go. It's not like an official thing that Twitter does, but it's a hashtag that you can, you know, that you could follow. It was called, I believe it was stack chat. Is that right? What was it? Survey 17 was the hashtag. Stack survey 17. And of course we can link that in the show notes, but I'm, I'm certain actually that a lot of developers here, listening to the show probably saw that on Twitter. If you are on Twitter today and by the time that this releases, it will have been, you know, a couple of weeks ago. But there was some, you know, first of all, having a chance to do something in tandem with the people at stack overflow. That's, you know, that's a pretty big moment for you know, we all know about stack overflow, right? It seems like that's kind of like a distant, you know, big entity. And, and I feel like that's, that's a huge moment to experience. So can you kind of talk about how you actually went about, you know, garnering, garnering that opportunity first of all, but also I'd love to know some of, you know, maybe two or three really interesting findings from, from that conversation today. Oh yeah. So so every Tuesday at 9 PM Eastern time, we do one of these Twitter chats called dev discuss. And we have just a bunch of, a bunch of our followers who show up every week to, to discuss a new topic. And our European and Asian and Australian followers are kind of annoyed that we don't have one that's more better for their hours. And we will, by the time this airs, I hope we have a second one every week. That's, that's better for, for their time zones. Anyway, we, so we do this and it's not even the biggest thing we do. It's just kind of one of our, our weekly things. And but Stack Overflow sort of recognized that we sort of understood the nuance a little bit and we had a fun community and a really welcoming, loving community. And and they, Caitlin from Stack Overflow reached out and she, I forget exactly how it came about. She, she asked about, she let us know that there, they were going to release their annual survey and I, my ears perked up. Like I know all about that. It's a, it's an incredible, it's an incredible yearly thing. There's 60,000 people who took the survey. It's remarkable. And I was so excited to help partner with them on the release of this thing. So what we did today was we just hosted the same sort of chat. We did it during the day this time in my time zone. And that was a little nicer for, for the rest of the world. Except I think it's a little less nice for America because everybody's at work and and it's not really a great time to just be hanging out on Twitter all day. But ultimately we had a really great time. We sent about, we, we just sort of started a lot of conversations and the team at Stack Overflow is really excited to just be kind of having this live conversation a little bit. They have such a huge community, but they just don't kind of, have the same kind of, kind of community and they don't have the same kind of established practices and stuff. And, and they were really excited to, to work with us about the things we do well. And I was just, and we were so excited to, to, to get to work with them. And we didn't even need to go to the office, but we did anyway. And we did, we, we went to their office and we, we just hung out with, with a bunch of members from their team. And we, we had a fun, fun chat on Twitter for two hours. I'm pretty burnt out from preparing for the whole thing and getting it done now. But so I'm glad it's over, but we, we, we had a blast and, and I think they really enjoyed the partnership and it's really surreal because the, that we, that Stack Overflow reached out to us. It's kind of, there's, there's a lot of lore around it. There's a lot of lore around Stack Overflow, at least in my mind. And I think, and I think there is a lot of genuine things that we do differently. And there's a lot of, you know, Stack Overflow can't be everything to everyone as a community. And there's a lot of reasons we, we provide value to people. And, and it's, it's, it's pretty clear to them that they, that they saw a lot of that same community and attempts to sort of just foster a great culture that we've worked so hard to do. That's really cool. And so these questions that, that were asked were, you know, basically asking developers to explain, you know, what they are doing in their careers, right? So different, different methodologies, different languages, you know, how, how they learn that kind of stuff, right? Oh, yeah. And, and there's a lot of, of different types of questions. So there's a lot of interesting opportunities to compare the two, like Ruby, developers feel this way about their, the future programming, their salary and Clojure developers feel this way. And, and it's, it's a lot of fascinating data and we're only really getting started to unpack it. We on dev, on, on dev two, we're gonna be trying to write as much about this, this data as we can. And we're encouraging our members to also write about the data because it's just so fascinating. And like, as with the sort of libraries and, as with these things, the data itself is only that is only so interesting as the stories it tells. And, and we intend to tell some interesting stories. And of course, Stack Overflow themselves, they have a whole team trying to, trying to tell interesting stories. But the data is going to be 100% public and I really hope people dive into it and, and find out some things about our, our industry and our community that people didn't quite realize. Yeah. Yeah. So if, if you don't mind sharing maybe one or two things, one or two insights that you came across today that were either surprising or, you know, maybe they're, they're verifying some of the things that we've talked about already. Yeah. So one thing I, I, that really stuck with me was that programmers on average consider themselves underpaid. Pretty much like that's pretty definitive. You know, it was, it was a spectrum, so it wasn't exclusively that way. But, but a lot of programmers consider themselves either somewhat or quite underpaid, which is interesting because in general, at least from my experience, we get paid pretty well. Like programming is a pretty lucrative field. Not everyone makes Silicon Valley money, but there's, there's a lot of money in the industry and yet people still genuinely sort of consider themselves underpaid. And I thought I really want to sort of investigate that a little bit more. Once the data comes out. Interestingly, my mind went to the idea that there, there are sort of, this is a global survey and it's not the same. The American experience is not the same everywhere in the world, but early indications were that it wasn't all that strong in, in, in the differences across countries and some were, there were some differences, but it wasn't, it wasn't, like a, a direct correlation between earnings. It was, it's a, it's a really interesting, it's very psychological, you know, considering yourself underpaid. It's a, it's a, it's a fascinating idea. And that one really stuck with me. And, yeah, a lot of this was about, about career stuff. So some of it, you know, a lot of it tied into people's earning potential and stuff. And another one, it was interesting to see a closure. Closure is the, is the most highly paid programming language you can be in. But that doesn't mean going out and learning closure is your best bet because it's sort of, so happens that people choose closure for problems that are sort of fundamentally more difficult. Like if you choose closure to make a simple application you're going to be wasting a lot of time, but closure has, is like fundamentally very, very powerful. So, so, But if you look at the data, you say, like, if I learn Clojure, I'll make more money. Well, that's probably not the case. It's probably more of a correlation. The second highest paying language, interestingly, was Smalltalk, which is kind of funny. You know, it's sort of a, it's not really a living language in a lot of senses. It's probably got, there's probably just existing applications that need to be upkept. But the people who program in Smalltalk are likely, and the data indicated they're extremely experienced. And it's just interesting to see the hottest, most upward trending sort of language slash implementation of languages, Node.js, which is super surprising. You definitely see that rising quickly. From my anecdotal experience, I find that any, any. Environment or language that's gaining a lot of popularity and is also kind of more loosey goosey and it's typing and it's environment sort of like JavaScript or Ruby. When it, when Ruby was a little more newer, less mature. It gets a lot of sort of, you know, a lot of flack, but it's also gaining in popularity. So there's a lot of, it's a, it always creates a lot of, you know, divide or. You know, flame wars that people are really being jerks to each other. But, you know, just fundamentally Node.js is just, just skyrocketing popularity these days. Yeah, it's, it's pretty amazing. And I think a lot of it, you know, we, we, we can postulate, you know, why a particular language ends up being super popular. You know, you have Java, which is still an incredibly popular language. Tons of jobs in Java. Still unpopular. There's still a lot of big companies relying on Java as, as their underlying thing. Right. And you can say, you could say at least globally that Java is also the dominant language for, for mobile application programming as well. On the flip side, you know, on the flip side, you have the rate of growth of something like JavaScript or a little while back, the rate of growth of something like Ruby, which is certainly highly influenced by Rails. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, you may have the evolution of evolution and evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution ecosystem um there's nothing all that uh there's nothing about the english language that made it take off to the extent that all our programming languages are also the english language it just kind of happened to be that it uh that it caught on with the right crowd and um it's uh programming languages are as much about the ecosystem um as they are about the fundamentals of the language yeah yeah and i mean they need to be good but they also need to be popular so it's uh it's uh it's a really it's a it's a study in um you know anthropology and communities as much as it is about computer science and semantics absolutely i mean it's a marketing right so you have large huge companies behind uh popular popular languages java and oracle and you have mozilla which i wouldn't say is nearly as big as a company like oracle but mozilla and facebook are behind javascript pretty heavily uh obviously you know apple being behind objective c well when they moved to swift objective c took a pretty big hit at that moment you know and so it's easy to think about these languages in terms of their uh in terms of them kind of living on their own but really they do rely very heavily on uh on they do rely very heavily on on these languages and they they they they they they they they they they do rely very heavily on business energy to keep them moving forward. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think languages, programming languages, you choose, I think as you advance in your career, it doesn't matter as much the languages so much as understanding the context of a type of apps and the important things that go into the sort of the nuance of the protocols and stuff. I think it's easy to get caught up on which languages and frameworks become popular. Because in the moment that can be very either frustrating or it really depends. I mean, for new programmers, if you feel like you're learning the wrong thing, it can be really demotivating. But there's never a loss in value of learning something. I don't feel like I rarely use jQuery anymore as a library. But I feel like that context in my mind of having worked with it and having been able to compare it to how modern browsers have made some of jQuery's features less important or how the frameworks have sort of taken on the abstractions that jQuery provides and built them into a more complex framework. Structured environment. None of that makes me feel like I wasted time learning jQuery. Sure. Yeah, no, not at all. Yeah. And if anything, if any frustration you have learning jQuery, that maybe you learned it instead of learning some of the more basic primitives in web development or something like that. But it's a long journey and every experience is valuable. And I feel like in the evolution of evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution be uh it was really a pleasant experience but i am so thankful that i uh that i have this yeah very different experience um with the type system and with like what else is out there and um and as we uh as long as you're open to learning new things um i don't think there's ever a uh a situation where um there's a worry that you're learning the wrong thing um if uh if you get into that situation i think uh it's because you um weren't open-minded uh from the beginning uh i've certainly talked to people who will sort of be just so set in their ways that uh that i just hope their um i hope their environment never goes away or anything yeah no matter no matter how much they like the environment i'm um they uh they'll i i think um as long as they're they realize that just coding is coding and um and you can pick up new things and you can uh you can always keep learning and you'll never you'll never lose the ability to learn if you really think you can and and that's really been uh that sort of allowed me to keep coding in uh in ruby when i sort of don't see it being around as the most popular thing forever um i really think uh it's just super nice and convenient these days but i i genuinely don't think ruby is going to be like it's declining in popularity but that's fine with me because at some point in my distant future i have no idea when um and it might be sooner rather than later i'll probably start um doing more of my coding in another language and uh and that's like totally fine i think there's no reason to to hang on to um to sort of something in when you know things are progressing but there's also no reason to uh no reason to think you have to jump off of something you just kind of allow yourself to be open-minded and uh and i think it it it takes a lot of weight off your shoulders i couldn't agree more with that i think it's so important that we realize that learning um it's not like uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh you you you you! you Voice Voice Voice Voice Voice for some reason that we're going to collect our stuff and we're going to invest in this learning process and that eventually we're going to run out of the ability to learn and we're going to run out of space to shove things into our brain. And so we better pick the right things and organize them in the right way and do it in the right time or else something's going to blow up, something's going to break. And the reality of that is so different. And I think it's because we don't really think about learning from the perspective of, you know, what it from a physiological level, what it's actually doing and it's actually changing our previously gathered knowledge, right? This is what we were talking about earlier with, you know, taking this information that you have in Java and then applying Ruby on top of that. Well, that's very different than learning Ruby from scratch, right? You can compare things. You can use the information. You already have to contextualize the information that you're getting. And we do this automatically. And this is something our brain is actually really good at. We learn to compare things with our existing schema, with the thing that's already in our brain. And we say, oh, that's kind of like that. This is why, you know, music tends to change in slow, you know, large cultural changes tend to happen in a way that is connected to the thing that happens. Right. It's one thing progresses after the other. The way that you learn Ruby is largely going to be informed by whatever you learned before. And so if we if we treat these things as if they were discrete from each other, then that's missing a lot of the potential value in combining learning. You're really expanding your potential for knowledge every time you add something new to the plate. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And and you're constantly learning. You're constantly learning about yourself. And and I think we should be examining sort of what's working and what's not what's not working and develop strategies to cope and to and to advance our our abilities and to be OK with ourselves when we're not learning something as quickly as possible. I'm personally sort of a slow learner. I'm not the quickest to sort of engage in a topic. And eventually I sort of get a pretty deep understanding. But I'm sort of amazed sometimes when people can jump in. And I'm like, OK, I'm going to jump right in and really figure something out right away. And I just have to try to put myself in situations where I'm given a little bit of time to think about things. And I also sort of, you know, you're constantly learning things about yourself. I I've come to realize lately and I want to sort of examine this more about myself, but I've never been a big reader. That probably is part of my bias towards shorter, more digestible content. But I've never really. Read a lot in my life and I I've been learning more about sort of attention issues I have. And and I discovered that. Audiobooks have been my sort of. It's been and I actually got into audiobooks after getting into podcasts and stuff and podcasts like yours. And and I sort of took the next step and I've now been. Wow, that's awesome. Books at a rate like 50 times more. Than I would have normally read before. Like I've actually I've read like 75 books this year and like in audio form and and I've actually started reading more more physical books as well because it kind of like I don't know. It gave me a little confidence to. Yeah. Tweaked your brain a little bit and the value of books. Maybe. Yeah. And this is like this year sort of thing. It's a brand new thing for me. And and not that I like never read. It was just always kind of a. A struggle more so than something I could could really, truly enjoy unless I really, really got into something. But I think we're constantly learning about these things and making discoveries and and and these are sort of general human things. I think everybody has to learn this these sort of things. But programmers especially have have a have a very interesting relationship with learning. There's not a lot of industries where. Where. Constant learning really is the skill you need forever. And there's a lot of pressure on it. It's a you're paid well usually to to keep learning. And there's a lot of pressure and there's a lot of stress and there's and there's a lot of, you know, production code. You're sort of responsible for if you're if you're advancing in your career and and it can be stressful. And it can be a tough environment to just sort of get over the mental hump sometimes. But but we've we've got to somehow do it. And so we so we do it. And so we we try to ground ourselves. We try to cope and we try to just keep learning forever. Yeah, absolutely. This is this fantastic, fantastic inspiration for for developers. And I'm really very thankful that you came on the show today. I have a few questions for you before we wrap up today. If that's all right. The first one actually is kind of a good segue from your discussion on on reading and having read so many books as of late. I'd love to know. And this can be a book or it can be something else or it can be multiple things if you want to if you want to share them. But, you know, what is something that you have invested in and by invested in? I just mean bought a service or a product or a book, something that you feel has been incredibly valuable to you. And you think. You know, I think that's something that I would like other developers could find value from as well. Oh, that's a good question. All right. I'll just give you a few books. Yeah. So a few books I've read this year that that come to mind right away. The Rosie Project is a fictional book about a sort of a scientific person. I think. It's. Ever. Really. Made. Of. The book. But it's a it's a man with just sort of, you know, a real analytical mindset. He probably has Asperger's syndrome, but it's told first person. And it's just kind of a fascinating book. And if you're if you're at all of that kind of mindset, the sort of analytical type, the sort of people that you find doing this career a lot of the time. They may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may find it may are described really well in this book. And the science is really, really wonderful. The book Originals, and I don't really remember the author for any of these books, but the Originals is a book I really liked. Well, actually, I liked the first three quarters and I felt like it got kind of boring, but it was still worth reading. There were some really interesting ideas there about how people come up with ideas, how people think through problems, and how people sort of take, sometimes they take a long time to come up with, or to follow through with ideas. And I felt like it gave me a lot of permission to really take my time with some things, whereas previously I would have rushed and then become discouraged if they didn't immediately take off. And I read the book Disrupted, which was, which was an interesting kind of one person's take in Silicon Valley. And if you're at all, if you're anything like me, where you kind of think, you sort of roll your eyes at some of the Silicon Valley buzzwords, this book will bring you a lot of delight because it was one person who really didn't enjoy his experience in the industry very much. And whether or not you do kind of enjoy yours, and I love what I do, but this was very wonderful for sort of getting at some of the ridiculous parts. So three books I would absolutely recommend. And I've been meaning to put together a longer list of books I like, but I don't know, I haven't really gotten around to that yet. Well, there's a platform that you can do it on that I heard about recently. It's called Dev2. Yeah, absolutely. I actually wrote about The Rosie Project on Dev2. And I hope I'm remembering the name of that book correctly. It might be The Rosie something else. But anyway, you'll find it if you Google it. It is. It is. It's The Rosie Project. I've been looking these up as you finless thing them off. Yeah, I wrote a little article on the site about that. And there's a bunch more. I liked the book about John Carmack and John, John, what's the other John? And the two Johns behind the game Doom and their whole history. I can't, Masters of Doom is the name of the book. I love that one. I really liked. I really liked. I don't know, lots of books, but there's four for you or five. That's that's pretty, pretty incredible that you've read as many books as you've had as you have recently and inspiring. I'm sure for people like me, I have a bad, bad habit of reading. I wonder if this is something that's common amongst developers, because I've noticed that a lot of the people that I meet that are in business that are not developers seem to read exponentially more than me for some reason. So so it's definitely, you know, on my list of things that I want to I want to do better at, you know, up there with lose weight and and and write. Well, I have a bad habit of sitting down to read and starting to code or starting to do something else that's also productive, but just not reading. So I the audio the audio books are great because I get out of the house and I go for a walk and like that's my like number one. Activity on weekends. And I take time from, you know, the other people in my life. You know, sometimes it's it's hard depending on your current situation. But I you know, the people in my life know that, you know, part of my weekends needs to be spent walking around listening to a book. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, fantastic. So really good, good stuff there with the book. I feel like books are such a great and rich resource to to share. And I'm really thankful that you've that you've gone through those and that you can share those with the readers as well. So I appreciate that. Oh, yeah. Any anything else I can do for you, Jonathan? Sure. Final question for you today. If you had 30 seconds to give every developer a little bit of advice, what would you tell them? OK, so one quick piece of advice is to really think about things as is going to take longer than you think. In general, side projects, your businesses, your learning. I think people really rush to get things done and they give up on things too quickly. So expect to be in in in activities for the long haul and and go out of your way to think that something might last longer than it will. And you'll probably set yourself up for more success that way. That's a fantastic piece of advice. I do think that we as as a general statement on not just developer culture, but really culture in large. Being rushed is a is a endemic issue. I guess it's as widespread that we want everything immediate. And so another book on this topic, I've mentioned it on the show before, but it's called Essentialism. And it talks about one of the things that talks about is the effect of this immediacy and the desire for immediacy and how it actually changes our perspective of not understanding progression. Like we don't understand how how we've gotten to where we are today. And we don't really have a perspective on how we're progressing through time because so much of what we do is right now at our fingertips. We don't really have the space or the I'm not sure what the what the correct word is here, but we don't really have the perspective of time that we need to be able to understand, you know, history. Right. And where we came from, where we're headed. We only understand this kind of hyper version of now. Yes, absolutely. Well, great. This has been this has been fantastic. And I really appreciate your time and people can find you if they aren't already following you. I imagine that most of them are at this point. But if people are not following you on Twitter, it's the practical dev, correct? Yeah. And you can follow my personal account, Ben D Halpern as well. It's not as popular, but we but, you know, I certainly if you're a that's sort of another way to keep in touch with me personally. Fantastic. And sign up for an account at dev.to. That's dev2. And just a disclaimer, by the way, Ben and Dev2 have not sponsored the show in any way. I reached out to Ben because I think what he's doing is really cool. I think that other developers can gain a lot of inspiration and value from the stuff that he's doing. So if it sounded that way, then then it's not that way. So totally, totally transparent on the show about the people who are sponsoring this. So so again, thank you again to Ben for for both creating a really fantastic platform that's engaging a bunch of people and teaching people that things are OK. Things are more OK than you may feel like they are in the moment. And supporting developers. Thank you so much for that. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. To all the listeners, if you want to do something that would make me smile, write a little technical piece on on dev on dev2 and do it as a favor to me. And I'll be forever grateful, or at least as long as I kind of remember that I'm supposed to be grateful. There's that's a good piece of homework for for developers who are listening to the show. I mean, it's it's it's just it's a lot of fun. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks again for listening to developer T today. Thank you again to Ben Halpern for joining me on the show. Go sign up at dev.to. That's dev2. Of course, you can find Ben on Twitter. You're probably already following him. But if you're not, go and check out the practical dev. You can probably Google that and find it pretty quickly. It's a popular account. Thank you again for listening to today's episode of Developer T. The only thing that you need to do at the end of today's episode is to subscribe to the show. And the last thing you need to do at the end of today's episode is go and subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes if you haven't already done that. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.