To start today's episode, I want you to take a moment. Just find a quiet place if you can, and even better if you can close your eyes. We're going to do a little bit of visualization. Once you visualize one or two places or situations where you recently felt completely content, or maybe you felt excited or just a simple sense of happiness. And to make this visualization kind of come to life for you, I want you to think about the details around you. And don't strain doing this, but try to imagine that moment or that feeling that you had when you were doing something that really kind of aligned with what you really love in life. Today I have an inspiring email to read to you from a listener. And hopefully this visualization kind of prepares you for this listener's message. It's a really exciting thing that I have people listening to this show like today's guest listener, Basil, Basil sent an email. And it was just such an inspiring email that I wanted to share it with you. My name is Jonathan Cutrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal is to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose in life and to excel at the work that they do so that they can have a positive impact on the people they influence. That's what this show is for. It's for developers who care about their work and ultimately who view their work as an integral part of their purpose of what they're here on earth to do. And I hope that you fall into that category. If you don't, then certainly some of the things we say on the show you may disagree with. This is definitely a opinionated show. And even more opinionated as we continue to grow. Developer T is over 450 episodes now. Coming close to 8 million, we're not quite 8 million unique downloads yet. So there's tons of content in our backlog. But we have a lot of great content that's coming up. And if you consider yourself to be a part of that kind of driven developer group, I'd love for you to subscribe and whatever podcasting app you use. We produce three episodes a week and they're always free. So the only thing that you're trading here is a few moments of your time. And then a few moments of your day, we try to keep these episodes short on purpose so that I'm not getting in the way of your daily progress, your mission each day. The thing that you have to focus on, my goal is not to become that thing, but instead to empower you to focus on that thing even more. One of the ways that we do that is making these episodes short. So I definitely want for those of you who fall into that group to carry these conversations into your daily work and into your communities and that kind of thing. That's really where this stuff comes alive is when you have someone else to discuss it with. I'm really thankful that those of you who are in that group that you're subscribing and I'm really excited about what the future holds for Developer Tea and for you. And I love to hear stories like today's story from Basil. Basil emails me and says, this year I graduated in my apprenticeship in Switzerland as an application scientist and you helped me out a lot, but more on a personal and emotional level. I made a bold choice to not apply as a web developer, but to switch the industry that I work in entirely. Now I'm going for photography and videography without any special education or degree in my backpack. During my whole life up until now, I've used a camera every now and then and I've made some silly videos and photos. And after a recent hike on the St. Jacobs way, I discovered my real passion. I wanted to take the photography game a little bit more seriously, but are the four years of apprenticeship a waste of time? The way I see it, they absolutely are not. After starting to tinker around with Instagram, I received so much positive and honest feedback both from users around the world and my closer family circle. The confidence boost was so high that I finally made my own website with Squarespace. Why did I use something like Squarespace? Well, the answer is simple. So many people are so much better at programming than I am and I don't want to spend the time doing everything from scratch, but not even with the best framework. I wanted to set my focus entirely on design, not worrying about anything else. A few days ago, I started to submit my stuff to unsplash.com and again, so much positive feedback came. Now, do I do this for the fame? Not at all. My goal is to reach out to people and show them how I see the world as someone with Asperger Syndrome and also to tell stories. On the flip side, I want to listen to other people's stories and what they have gone through. In the grand scheme of things, you and many other programmers and designers have helped me out a lot to paint my own picture. So once again, I want to say thank you. I wish you a great rest of the day or night, depending on when you read this, with kind regards from Switzerland, Basil. Basil, thank you so much for writing in. I hope I'm saying your name correctly. I'm probably not, but I apologize if that's the case. I'm really inspired by this. I want to talk about a few things that Basil mentioned in this email. We're going to take a quick sponsor break, but then we're going to come back and talk about some of the things that Basil mentioned. But first, before we do that, I just want to say thank you for being vulnerable and honest and reaching out to me and sharing the story, Basil, just because you have the skills of a programmer doesn't mean that your job title has to say programmer in front of it. That's not always the ultimate goal. It's not always the end point that everyone who learns how to program, that doesn't mean that you have to work with a job title programmer. Some of the things that you learn along the way are going to, as Basil put it, help you paint your own picture. And I want to encourage people who are listening to this show right now, you do not have to be a developer. And really, we aren't just talking to developers on the show anyway. As it turns out, tons of people who listen to this show are not even developers at all. And some of the people who are listening to this show who think they want to become developers, what you actually want is to work in a digital industry or you want a job that has a positive outlook and outlook of growth and outlook of stability, but you don't necessarily want to be writing code. And that's totally okay. You can still listen to the show by the way, but I certainly encourage you to do exactly what Basil has done and use your experiences and your own introspection to determine your own path. We're going to talk about that in just a moment right after we talk about today's awesome sponsor, Linode. Linode has been sponsoring Developer Tea for quite a while. And here's the reality. Linode is caring for developers. By continuing to support this show, they're investing in the development community, the software developer community. And they're allowing for us to continue what we do because cultivating developers is the first step to creating a positive sense of value in the industry. And Linode provides an excellent, excellent value. In fact, as far as I know, they have the best dollar per ram or ram per dollar ratio, whatever that is, you can get a server starting at a gigabyte of ram for $5 a month. You can do two gigabytes of ram for $10 a month. Of course, you can also do two five dollar servers that add up to two gigs of ram, but you have two separate boxes. Right. Now, why would that be useful? Well, imagine that you have an application that doesn't use a lot of memory, but it does need concurrency. It needs a multiple request endpoints. You can spin up these two separate servers, the one gigabyte ram servers, and then connect them with node balancer. This is another service that Linode provides. Linode also has expert customer service that's available to you 24-7. And they have high memory plans as well. For example, there's 16 gigabytes of ram for $60 a month. That's an excellent plan if you are looking to scale your product up. And Linode also works on top of an internal 200 gigabit network. That's incredibly fast. The messages that are sent between your multiple nodes, they're going to basically be almost real time with that kind of speed on the internal network. And it's built on top of Intel E5 processors. By the way, you get native SSD storage on all of these servers. Again, Linode provides this service for such a good price. And you can get boxes spun up in just a few minutes. Go and check out what Linode has to offer. Spec.fm slash Linode. Remember the code Developer Tea 2017, and you'll get $20 worth of credit whenever you check out. And that $20 can be spent on pretty much any of their resources. So you can go and do that node balancing with that $20, for example. Go and check it out, Spec.fm slash Linode. Thank you again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. So shared with you a story from listener Basil who's decided that his passion is photography. And he used Squarespace and he's submitting to Unsplash. I certainly will try to find a link to include in the show notes of Basil's work. But I want to point out a few things that Basil mentioned. Number one, the idea that a platform like Squarespace that you can use that and focus on one thing. This is really important. That's something that developers often ignore or maybe they don't feel like is valid. The idea that you can utilize the work with someone else or a platform that may even have a bad reputation. And if it provides value to you, that value is independent of other people's opinions. Let me point out that a little bit closer or maybe more articulately. The value that a product that you use or some kind of framework, some kind of tool, whatever it is that you want to use. The value it provides to you is not a factor that is determined by other people's opinions of the value that it provides to you. This is a fundamental thing to understand as you grow as a developer. You have to blaze your own path. You have to decide the tools that you're going to use for your situation. No matter what new tool has come out, no matter what the benefits are that are being claimed of using that tool or using that framework or buying into that ideology, whatever those things are, it's important to recognize the data. It's important to understand why those tools are being praised for that, why these other tools are being despised for some of their shortcomings. But if the tool or if the thing that you're buying into, if it provides you sufficient value and if you understand those value trade-offs and you still decide, yes, this provides main sufficient value, that is really all that matters. It doesn't matter that people don't, for example, if you're a developer and you build websites, then it's very possible that using something like WordPress or even Squarespace as Basil pointed out is perfectly suited for your particular application. Now does that mean that you can blindly pick tools or blindly pick ideologies or methods without evaluating the risk? Absolutely not. But what you can do is make an unpopular decision. And that feels very strange, especially for young developers. It feels easier to go with the crowd. It feels easier to trust that social backing, social proof of a given thing, but sometimes you will find that your own research in your own specific situation calls for you to make your own decision. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I encourage you to be like Basil to make your own decisions to forge your own path and to determine the things that you believe are going to be best for you. Basil, I really appreciate you reaching out. I also appreciate you letting us in on the fact that you have Asperger syndrome. There are very likely other people who listen to the show in similar situations. And I just want to encourage you and thank you for being here and to you, Basil, specifically congratulations on finding things that you really enjoy that kind of lineup with your talents and your passions. And give you excitement about the future and I'm so glad that I could be a small part of that journey. Thank you so much for listening to this show. I hope you will subscribe if you again, consider yourself a part of that group of people who want to connect to your purpose and ultimately want to create a positive impact on the people that you have influence over. Thank you so much for listening to this show. Thank you to Linode for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. You can use Linode to leverage your dollars, right? In the best way, you're going to have a tool at your disposal that is worth every single penny. Go and check it out. Specs out of FEM, slash Linode. Remember the code Developer Tea2017 to get $20 worth of credit at checkout. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure you subscribe and until next time, enjoy your tea.