Hey, everyone. Welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. This episode is a little bit unconventional. I was contacted by Joel Beasley, who I've been in contact with for many years now. Because Joel runs another podcast, a very popular podcast. You've probably heard of it or listened to it. It's called Modern CTO. You can find that at moderncto.io. So Joel and I have wanted to have each other on each other's shows for quite a while now. So we finally did it. And in fact, we had a conversation that kind of went back and forth. We interviewed each other at the same time. This first part was pretty heavily Joel kind of interviewing me. So it's a little bit different from the average interview that you hear on this podcast. But hopefully, this is an engaging discussion. You get a little bit more of a look into my working life. And some of my personal belief and philosophy and that kind of thing. And I'm really excited to share this with you. But I'm more excited to send you over to learn more about Modern CTO. That's moderncto.io. Thank you again to Joel for joining me for today's episode of Developer Tea. Let's get straight into the discussion. So I was curious to know a little bit about your plane flying hobby. Can you tell me about that? Yeah, I wish I could carry the camera. Although the plane right now is actually... Out for maintenance. So back in, I think it was 2000... Oh, geez, I'm going to lose time here. I believe it was 2017. I came to the realization... A friend of mine actually was going to get his pilot's license. He's going to training and that kind of thing. And I came to the realization that I'm an adult now. I can do this stuff. I can just kind of go and get my pilot's license if I wanted to. And I never had... I never had really thought about it from that angle. My dad has flown since I was... Actually, since before I was born. And we had an airplane in our family, a Cessna, that he rebuilt the engine with his father. And it's still in our family. And so I thought, well, this kind of kills a bunch of birds with one stone. I'm going to get closer to my dad. We're going to have a shared hobby. Because I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if there's other software engineers that have experienced this. But it's kind of hard to explain what you do, right? Especially if you're a manager of software engineers. So it's a little tough to connect on that professional level. Or we don't really have a lot of shared hobbies. But this is something I've been interested in. When I was a kid, I would get sick. Air sick. Motion sickness. I thought, oh, let's try it out. Let's see what it's like. Because I get motion sickness in the car as a passenger. But I don't... And I'm driving. So I thought, well, maybe getting in the pilot seat, I might actually be able to do this. So I went and got the training. I loved it. Absolutely invigorated with the idea that I'm able to fly an airplane. It's mind-boggling to me. And fast forward a few years. I'm flying dad's airplane. And actually, I'm talking to my wife. Because we have this airport that's just down the road from our house. We actually moved. We moved to a house that's kind of close to an airport. So if we wanted to hop in the airplane on a Saturday morning and fly to the beach, we could do that. And there's a lot on the airport. Like a house lot. Land for sale. And I'm talking to my wife. And I'm like, would you want to live there? Like if I could snap my fingers and we're living on the airport, would that be something you would even want? I imagine a lot of people would not want that. I don't want to hear airplanes all the time. She said, yes. So fast forward a few more years and we're here. I actually live on an airport now, which is just wild. There's so many changes that have happened in this short span of two years. The least of which is a pandemic, I suppose. Or not the least of. But all of that to say, that hobby was fueled in so many ways by the opportunity to work remote. The flexibility in my job, I feel like it really dovetails really nicely with being an engineer. I think a lot of engineers end up becoming pilots. So it's a blast. I love flying. And I love flying with my family, especially. It's a ton of fun. That's exciting. Yeah. There's a couple of neighborhoods near us that the neighborhoods are flying neighborhoods. So they have their own. Yeah. Like air parks, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm curious. Most people listening to this podcast, are they flying? Yeah. Yeah. They're listening. They'll know you from other podcasts from the Developer Tea, right? And I want to know about that podcast. But first, I want to know about you and what do you do for your day job? So I am a director of engineering at PBS. PBS, like the one that you know about, the Cookie Monster PBS. And most of what we do, the team that I work on is responsible for orchestrating a bunch of other services that are disparate. At the same time, they may not have the evolution of evolution, they may not have 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 Essentially, like I said, it's really hard to explain what you do as a manager, but essentially kind of greasing the wheels on new initiatives for, for example, technical initiatives that non-technical people wouldn't necessarily understand the value of. It's my job to translate that. So I'm working pretty closely with the developers, working really closely with product folks to make all of that happen. Right now, we're in the process of working on a GraphQL implementation, for example. That's pretty cool. So you identify and execute on opportunities. Yeah, that's, that's a much, much simpler way of putting it, right? You can also put a filter in there. You identify, filter, and then execute on opportunities. Yeah. And quite a bit of like, I think, you know, you can think about the job as functional. I like to think about it also as environmental, as kind of being available and present, communicating, being kind of a translation conduit in a way. I think it's easy to try to shoehorn a lot of our work into what process does this follow when sometimes the process isn't really sufficient, right? You have two or three people that are all kind of trying to work together and things aren't really working well. And somebody comes in and tries to institute a process to fix it. And really, it's just a process. Now, it's a process laying on top of all. Of that conflict. And what you really need is something that resolves the conflict that isn't just mechanization, right? Nothing mechanical is going to solve that issue. And that's something that I've learned going from startups to much larger kind of legacy organizations like PBS. Very different environments and very different thinking involved. Tell me about some of those differences. Yeah. Oh, man. Well. So probably the most stark difference between a startup environment, especially early stage, like maybe first round, second round, you know, certainly not public versus something like a huge super organization like PBS. I say super organization. There's a very large, longstanding organization, sustainable, etc. Like PBS. In the startup environment, everything you do is thinking. About the next three to six weeks. If you're if you know, if you're really thinking long term, you're going six months out. And that changes the way that you make decisions about technology. It changes the way you make decisions about team. All of the decisions you would make, like all of the kind of theoretical correct ways of doing things have to kind of be put on the back burner in a lot of startup environments. And for some people, that's exciting. It's a challenge. It's fun. It's, you know, part of that decision making process and you kind of earn the ability to go back and refactor, for example, right? You you earn the ability to pay down the tech debt that you took on to get to whatever that, you know, landmark was that you were trying to get to the milestone. On the flip side. Well, and I should talk about the kind of the positive of that is. Yeah. You do move quickly. Right. The organization is is fluid. You often can suddenly have a lot more responsibility, which tends to go with a lot more experience. You know, spending one year in a startup kind of equates to spending like five years in a much larger organization in terms of the kinds of things that you're going to do, how much you're actually going to get done. If you were to go and and join a long standing work. And if you joined a. For. Example, Microsoft. In a more traditional long standing team kind of role, most of what you're going to be doing is figuring out how can you make changes that don't break the sustainability that's in place? So much longer term thinking. Much more. Very often there's fragile things that you have to work around. And part of your job is. I. Identifying where those fragile things are and trying to make them. Less fragile. Ideally, something as far as anti-fragile, which is the word for it. But even if they're resilient, which is the middle ground between fragile and anti-fragile. That's much better. Right. So a lot of your job is about slowly kind of cultivating gardening around an existing infrastructure versus rapidly building something. That. That could easily fall apart. Under a certain amount of stress. Are these the type of things you talk about on developer T? Oh, yeah. Well, this stuff certainly I a lot of this show. So it's it's nine hundred and seventy five something episodes now. So. I don't know. I think I could say I get to safely say I talk about everything now. We've talked about certainly these kinds of differences in the long term, short term and the value. And context. Both of those other stuff that we've talked about on the show, though, especially more recently in the past year or two years has been much more about introspective understanding yourself. Because it's such a fundamental kind of building block to be able to learn, to be able to improve introspective thinking and recognizing, for example, understanding how you specifically use. You are going to. Fall prey to certain biases. Right. Which ones are you most likely to. To be hurt by. Right. Or which ones have you used to your advantage? These are things that typically are not really it's not something that you're taught in school. Critical thinking is rarely taught even in school, much less thinking critically about your. Self and recognizing your own confirmation bias, that kind of stuff. So we talk a lot about that, but we also talk about how that kind of we try to take these ideas that come from psychology or even economics and apply them to your career. Right. How does this actually affect you today in your career? And that's a challenge sometimes. Sometimes it's a challenge to come up with the right kind of angle. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. At the same time, you may find yourself bringing up theijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijij insight and advice and making it actionable to how you can apply it to your job today, that ended up turning into quite the project to figure out the formula on how to do that. It's hard. It's tough. And I think the hardest part is it really depends on you experiencing it and then kind of retroactively recognizing that that's where it applied, right? You kind of have to review a situation. And so I try to find something that's almost like a trigger flag, something that signals, hey, when this happens, try to think about this. Granted, when you have 975 episodes, you're not going to remember all this stuff. Nobody is, right? It's not really about creating this catalog of perfect knowledge. I don't remember everything I've said on this show. Certainly not. I don't. It's just like reading, right? You don't remember everything you've read. There's no way. There's frameworks that you read about. You forget the entire framework, right? There's all these things that we, I think, theoretically, we want to apply all of this knowledge that we've gained. But there's even some guilt, I think, in feeling like, oh, I don't even know how to apply it because I can't remember. How do these things dovetail together? How do these things even fit together? These two separate methodologies or architectures of thinking, how can I even make them work together? I don't know. So I think, I'm not even sure where I was going with that other than to say, there's all these concepts that we want to hold on to and apply. But most of it, I think, is about building intuition and looking back and trying to improve incrementally rather than trying to revolutionize your life with this new model of thinking. Yes. I love that you and I have come to similar conclusions on separate paths. And I'll go a little deeper to say that you said that after all of these episodes where your focus has kind of been drawn more recently for the past two years is introspection and working on yourself first. And for me, my evolution was, if I just know this new skill, if I just figure out polymorphic associations when I was really young and starting programming, I would be able to do that. And I would be able to do that. And I would be able to do that. And I would be able to do that. And I would be able to do that. And I would be able to do that. And I would be able to do that. And I would I mean, if I could just wrap my mind around this, and then I built skill after skill, and then I need to know this language and this framework. And then when I had this, like after you go through a decade of it, or 15 years of it, and you stumble into this area of improving yourself, you realize, oh, man, if I would have started with myself, I would have started with my health, my fitness, my mindset, my relationships. If I would have focused on all of that first and put effort into that, then it would have amplified everything else and gotten me so much farther. So now I want to go out and tell the world about this. Like, if you want to be a better programmer, you know, do something very physically intense and difficult. Yeah, it's 100% that. When people come to me and ask me, what should I learn? Or really, when they ask me anything, right? My answer is almost always, it depends. And I try to get them, as soon as I can, to express the things they care about. And that's kind of the turning point for most people. It's amazing. It's amazing how many people haven't even thought about that question. They're going through their careers and I think kind of implicitly following a previously determined path. Which is... Which is exactly kind of what you're saying is, oh, I know that if I get these skills, then I can get this job, which means that then I can grow into this one. And I think I want that job, right? Maybe that's as far as that articulation is gone. But if you were to say, well, what specifically do you want from that job? Like, what does that give you? Does it give you money that you want? Is there another way to get that money? And when people think about it that way, they... I think they change... Their path naturally. Rather than saying, oh, well, then I don't need to learn Python. I need to learn Ruby. I don't know. Whatever. So often, the pathway kind of expands a little bit wider, right? There's more ways to get what you want, which is, I think, more optimal. You become a little more flexible in what you... In the specifics of your career. Would you say that that has happened for you? Yeah. I mean, yes. I've seen people... Try to master the tool specifically and just try to do really cool things with the tool. And that tends to work. It's a long, hard path. I think all the ways are a long, hard path. But I've seen the people go the tool route where I'm just going to fall in love with a tool and figure out how to use this really well. And then I've seen the people that go on the outcome route where I just want this outcome and what tool is best suited to get me to this outcome. I am personally... I started as a tool person because I was geeky and it was cool. And I liked the tool. I liked the tools. And then I quickly realized that that doesn't generate revenue. And from the entrepreneurial side of me, I realized that I have to switch my love from tools to outcomes. And when I switched my love from tools to outcomes, I started to have more success and then help more people, which is ultimately the thing that feels really good. Right. Yeah. And it is interesting that you can find success in both of those routes, but that the people who tend to be the most successful... They choose the route you're talking about. They start with outcomes. And then they say, okay, the tools that exist are not good enough. Now I'm going to build something or I'm going to help somebody else build. I'm going to collaborate on a tool that does reach that outcome. And so it's almost like both ends kind of meet each other in the middle in the best case scenario where you have entrepreneurial work that's happening towards a specific goal. a specific end. Oh, but also I need this tool, right? I need, I need something that doesn't exist yet. And so you develop tools and the end, kind of the end goal at the same time. Yeah. Beautifully said, you know, when I go out before COVID and was giving all of these talks, you know, after trying to condense the knowledge I've learned on the podcast, I would keep the talk short. If it was an hour session, I would keep the talk at 15 minutes and 45 minutes of crowd engagement because I wanted to bring them. Everyone comes with their own questions, but usually the Q and A is the smallest part and that's backwards. So I said, all right, let's flip it. And I would so often get like, what's the secret or what's the key or what's the one thing. And so I've tried really hard to come up with a good answer for that. And the best thing I can think of is persistence. Like you have, it's kind of a balance. You have to keep trying, you have to want to improve. You have to want to grow. You want, you have to have good intentions. You have to want to help others. And then you're going to constantly face challenges and your reward for overcoming the challenges are larger challenges. So, so fall in love with that process. Yeah. Persistence can, can, can certainly be the fuel, right? And without fuel, you go, you don't go anywhere. I, you know, you saying that makes me like kind of realize that basically every question that I've gotten is exactly that, just a different form. Right. It's, Oh, I've, I've met this, this challenge. I need to know what the secret is. What is the shortcut, you know, to get me from here to there. And it's funny, your answer is actually, there are no shortcuts really. Right. That's, that's not really the point, but that it's also okay. That it's okay that it's more work because that's true for everybody, right? There's going to be somebody, who has kind of an odd experience. Maybe they jump from one place to another faster than you did. That's okay. That's just kind of the nature of not just the industry, but life, right? Let's, and again, this is why I come back to the introspective thinking. And, you know, of course we want the short way. That's our, that's our nature as humans. We want to find ways that get us the most for the least input. That's we should probably, right? Like it's probably not a bad instinct, but also recognizing reality. And I think resisting reality is probably the biggest detractor in, in people's careers that I've experienced watching people, for example, be so afraid of failure when failure is just part of the fabric of their reality. And if you can't accept that, you're stuck. And the, the, the outcome, as, as we're saying, outcome is really kind of the goal here. The outcome is the same as if you failed, right? If you can't accept it, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter because you're basically accepting failure by not accepting failure. Seems kind of counterintuitive, but that's the case, right? And anyway, so, so all of that to say, I think, I wonder, you know, in your experience in talking to these, leaders that you've had so many opportunities to talk to, did you find that theme with them? The theme I found with all of these leaders is they genuinely love what they do. They, they care a lot. They work and they're persistent. So they have a high quality of standards. They raise their own bar. So they're competing against themselves most often. And for me personally, I found that to be very effective. Those are some of the trends that I've seen across all of these, these leaders I've gotten to talk to. I wonder what is something that you feel like was totally unexpected or maybe something that like when you originally started this, you're saying, okay, I was seeking tools. And now you're realizing that's not really the route to, to what you, you know, to your path to success or whatever. What is something that you learned and hopefully even thematically that you're like, wow, I would have never thought that this was the case. Well, one, uh, Jason Warner, CTO of GitHub used to write fitness books. That was pretty unexpected. Uh, he's going to hate me for that, but, uh, we, our research team found some old stuff on him, but, uh, I I'm kind of kidding. Uh, the, the most unexpected thing or the most important thing, if I had to like pass one, one, learning, uh, learning, uh, learning, uh, learning, uh, learning, uh, learning, uh, learning, uh, learning, uh, learning, uh, learning, uh, learning, uh, learning, uh, learning, uh, to a past self of mine would be, I didn't understand the weight of relationships. Relationships are so incredibly valuable and then how to get those relationships and how to develop those relationships over time. Um, typically you want to develop the relationships when you, when you don't need them and you want to find something that's beneficial, uh, to both parties and, and then just build relationships for the future and go into it with a positive intent and put time into your calendar, like, block it out, put an hour on Friday. Here's the relationship building time. It's just a block on my calendar. And whoever happens to pop into my head, I'm going to reach out to them, say hello, write a message to them, go look into their profile, see how they're doing and just caring about people. I, I literally have a section, uh, in, in my schedule that says love on people, right? Just like have time where I go seek out some, some people I know and show them some love. That's so interesting. I, I actually have this, a very similar practice. And as mechanical as it sounds, I'll start my phone and I'll start with autocomplete. I'll type a into a text message and I have a huge contact list and you know, I've been building this thing forever. Thanks to Google, I think. But, uh, I start out with a, and I'll just say, Hey, how are, how are you? And go down that list and people who I haven't talked to in years sometimes. And typically the conversation doesn't go very far. Everyone, once in a while, it'll open up a whole new discussion. And it's not always just to be clear. I think some people listening to this might believe, you know, there might be taking notes on how to improve their careers. Okay. Yes. This is good for your career. Also, this is good for your life, right? It, this is not just like a sleazy sales tactic to build a network of people that are going to, you know, improve your earning power. This is good for, it's actually quite literally proven to be good for your health, right? To have a community of people. And so if you like me, this doesn't really come naturally, you know, it doesn't, I don't, I work from home, right? I don't have a natural community. This is something that you may want to take those intentional steps to, to step out of what might even be your comfort zone and talk to somebody you haven't talked to in a while. Yes. We, the number one request that we got from people reaching out to us had been for, for a while had been to create a community, but I wasn't in the community business. I never ran a community. I didn't really have a desire to run a community. I enjoyed interviewing people and learning from great leaders, but community wasn't my thing. So I met this gentleman named Etienne DeBruin who owns seven CTOs. And he said, you know, they do like executive peer groups. And he said, you know, I'm going to do a community business. And he said, you know, I'm going to do a community business. And he said, you know, I'm going to do a community business. I'm going to do a community business. And he said, you know, I'm going to do a community business. For technology leaders, VPs of engineers, CTOs, they're on the more like premium side where people are paying like $20,000 a year. And it's facilitated by a professional facilitator, you have to pay and all that. So it's definitely a good value, but he wanted to create something for the mid-level of the market. Like, you know, people that are, you know, they're, they want to become a manager for the first time, or they want to move from manager to director. And that was at a price point that was like much cheaper than that, like super affordable, even if they wanted to pay for it for themselves. So I said, okay, because I have the audience, and you have the knowledge of how to run these communities and the staff and the support. So we created elevate150.com. And the idea was elevate, you know, bring people up to the next level. And then 150 was like one of Dunbar's numbers of community size. So we capped the community at 150 people. And so we have 100 people now. And we've grown that over like the past eight months. And every week, we have speakers. And then so it's like a 10 minute topic conversation. And then you go into a small group with like three to four people. And that that speaker has set you up with something. It's not like a generic cycling of speakers that are doing sales pitches, like they have to adhere to our format. And so what it does is it gets you in these communities having these small discussions, and building relationships. And that's been like, unbelievable. So now I've now I've got this like community where I can go. And then every, every week, every other week, I'm getting introduced to three or four new peers. And we're having legitimate conversations. Thanks for listening to this sort of unconventional version of a of an interview. And a lot of ways Joel's kind of flipped the script and interviewed me. And you can find the modern CTO episode, basically anywhere you listen to podcasts. And so go and listen, you can hear the full interview on modern CTO. Of course, we will do the second part of the interview with Joel on this feed as well. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Thank you to Joel for having me on to modern CTO. And I'm so glad that he came on to developer T kind of an exchange here. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.!