Hey everyone and welcome to Develop a Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and in today's episode I continue my interview with Rachel Nabors. If you missed the first part make sure you go back and listen to it. You can find that episode at spec.fm or of course in the show notes for this episode there will be a link to that first part. Today's episode is sponsored by Digital Ocean, the fastest growing cloud infrastructure provider because of their laser focus on building incredible services for developers like me and like you. We will talk more about what Digital Ocean has to offer later on in today's episode. But first let's jump straight into the second part of the interview with Rachel Nabors. Rachel, welcome back to the second episode. I so much enjoyed the first part of our interview and we could have gone on for much longer and I had a hard time figuring out where to cut that that first episode. But we cut it right when we started to talk about the web animation API and I'm really excited because you let me know that you've been learning the API but you have a fun piece of history to share. Go ahead and share that story with the listeners. The web animation API has actually quite a funny, funny story and this story is probably one of the reasons why I'm not as anti-microsoft as many people seem to be. I actually kind of like Microsoft. I think that Edge team has kind of come in and they're kind of the the state voice of reason now. So you might not realize this but your browser might have up to three different engines running at it depending on which browser and what version you're using. Three different animation engines, one for CSS transitions, one for CSS animations and another one for smile, SMIle, SVG animation language. So way back in the day when when smile was there first and all the browsers were like come on Microsoft you should pick the microsoft is like mmm so then the Safari team came over and they're like all right animations and transitions implement these now. Well everybody fell in love with them so you know Microsoft is like all right we're going to get them but before we go on implementing a third engine you guys this is getting out of hand what we really need is an underlying framework on which all these animations can be run like all these different APIs because look at this these these implementation implementations are crazy you know Firefox is doing it one way webkits doing it another way and this is this is out of hand we're we're not moving on anymore animation business until we see like some ground rules. Sure yeah. So Mozilla team and Google team they got together and they started working on this unified web animation API to rule all APIs so that edge where internet explorer developers could implement SMIle. Yay right well it turned out that it it's a huge huge API much larger than something like the battery status API which is quite small when you read its documentation. The web animation API is so large that I have read it several times over and I keep doing it to refresh my brain because it's got like a timing model and an animation model and the global clock and timelines and a lot of forward facing concepts. Right now the timeline is set by the the global the global clock right it has a starting point but this API leaves room for setting a timeline to coincide with scroll position or something else so it leaves a lot of doors open for future versions and most of the really cool features have been moved to level two like grouping and sequencing which I'm so excited about but they just couldn't go into this MVP it's big enough already. So by the time this web animation API is shaping up and it's in Firefox and it's in Google's Chrome and everything's starting to look like it's it's a reality and Microsoft internet explorer is like that's all right edge team is like all right all right moving it from the maybe we'll be interested in it if you vote on it enough pile to the we will actually get to it pile thank you for putting so much effort into this all the sudden to Google's like we're not doing smile anymore. And in the world. I know but you know we do have an animation like an animation API out of it so it's not all the waste and let's face it look at the the conversations surrounding the web animation API and there are some very tough questions from a developer standpoint here especially when it comes to dealing with time this is not something we want to do wrong so I understand why so much care and attention has been put into it and it's taken so long it's also tough because I got to say at least my perspective has been there aren't a whole lot of people who work in browser development or spec writing who are huge animation buffs so for some people who are who are weighing in and giving opinions they aren't necessarily always 100% sure that that's the right way to do it so it's moving a lot slower than if you know say I guess all the the old flash guys wrote this instead and it's kind of pity that they didn't but all right whatever it's really an amazing effort and I I just can't wait to see what it does for the future. I'm really interested in it because I do believe that animation is you know totally open on the web and there's so much that can be done and so many things that we've done kind of in hacky you know not so great ways in the past you know from writing our own kind of keyframe stuff with jQuery all the way to you know doing really terrible versions of CSS animations potentially you know destroying performance all over the place but having an a web animation API I think gives us the opportunity to start solidifying better practices when I think we even have best practices really totally solidified but I think we're moving towards better practices you know we have a huge number of people who are really interested right now there's the kind of a movement around SVG animation right as this is a really common thing that people are looking into and whether you're using green sock or if you're doing it yourself or maybe you're using something like snap or whatever tool you're using all of them are kind of created after the fact they're created not as a part of a fundamental you know web browsing thing but it's something that we've layered on top of the web browser and I'm really really excited about the idea of like a global timeline for example that's super exciting for so many reasons for the web we've done so many things with time on the web without an API for it and we use like the date API for our timing right it's like it's crazy right it is and it's not reliable I mean well speaking of I just wanted to put a give a shout out to jQuery whose animations are going to be moving over to using request animation frame in version three officially they are yeah that's it's amazing isn't congrats congratulations to actually Timmy willison is here and try to nugo with me and he's he's the one who writes all of those release notes and everything so they they just celebrated their 10 year anniversary as well so just a that's a worthwhile side note congratulations to to jQuery for making it to 10 years and still being a super thriving community and tool I still use jQuery not all the time but like sometimes it's a lot easier to use jQuery to spin a project up and use a couple of plugins that I know they're going to do what I need them to do then it is for me to go figure out how to do it by hand when you only have some limited people on your team sometimes you got to take the tool that more people have built together oh definitely I mean we we use jQuery at whiteboard on pretty much every client site because you know it is definitely in terms of you know lowest common denominator for junior developers for example most of them know jQuery like it is a very common thing to see most front end developers who have been doing this for two or three years they have learned jQuery out of necessity and so it has become in many ways ubiquitous amongst most front end developers which brings me up to an interesting comparison you mentioned green sock we're talking about jQuery and we're talking about the web animation API so sometimes they hear from people Rachel is the web animation API supposed to replace green sock and the truth is it's not the web animation API it should by passing off these animations to the browser essentially this should let the browser make informed decisions about how to optimize those animations for performance and right now we just kind of eyeball things with CSS but if we were to just say yo browser this thing here goes over there do it like so it offers whole kinds of room for Developer To add improvements and performance so it's a big you know it's a big thing that said this is the API that underlies CSS animations and transitions in the future well it's also been designed to underlie animation libraries so green sock in the future might actually be written on top of the web animation API I'm not saying this is going to happen tomorrow but that was the intent with which the API was created so that anybody could create their own animation toolset and their own timelines and it's really awesome that it was made with that spirit that said a lot of the things that people use green sock for today sort of like things people use jQuery to do in the past because browsers could not be trusted to do things the right way yeah for instance right now you said SVG animation is hot it totally is hot unfortunately browsers don't really handle SVG objects well enough to animate them with CSS but green sock has all these optimizations and takes so much of the legwork out of it for you that's so much easier just be like just slap green sock on it and go it makes so much more sense than trying to do things by hand with CSS and homegrown a hodgepodge script of course but I think in the future as browsers normalize their SVG implementations and the web animation API gets its feed under it I think we're going to see like what is that maybe you don't need jQuery site oh yeah we might see a you maybe you don't need green sock yeah maybe you don't need green sock I see people using green sock to do some stuff that would be fairly trivially able to do with the web animation API and I see people use green sock to do stuff that I personally would never use the web animation API to do so it's my hope that people will learn the best tool for the job and hopefully we will see some awesome new performance increases and animation libraries on the horizon you mentioned something really interesting there and I think it actually we can prove this point with what jQuery is doing by moving to transitions right jQuery previously you could animate things by for lack of a better way of explaining it reset resetting the CSS the inline CSS on an on an item in the DOM you would reset it a bunch of times over the course of you know a couple seconds right and that's how jQuery animation worked before and what this provided was a lot of people doing animation in the browser right it didn't set up a spec it didn't set up a future you know this is how animations will work it created a way to accomplish an effect however you believe about the performance of those things it's still accomplish the effect and now we have the transitions that are natively available and jQuery was a part of that history right jQuery is taking advantage of the new technologies not being replaced by them yes and that's exactly what jQuery should be doing any good tool really is if they want to stick around presumably they're going to appreciate and take advantage of the new technology that's available yeah and I expect to see the same out of the the web animation libraries we used today green sock included I don't think they'll ever disappear I think that they'll just get better and we're going to see more and more amazing features coming out of them or at the very least we're going to see something that everybody knows how to use and thus whenever animating something comes up on a list of a feature list you there won't be a a hue and a cry about it yeah well I mean even if these animation libraries like green sock stick around because they provide a way of combining animations together in some interesting syntax right or maybe they provide really extensive easing functions built in so that you don't have to learn easing for yourself a lot of this stuff likely I wouldn't think isn't going to make it into native browser stuff right and correct me if I'm wrong that will the web animation API have many built in easing options or is that something that you still have to kind of write your own functions for it does not have built in easing options however these spec actually has a discussion about leaving the door open for future easing options that's what I mean right I love the spec it's it's so many like we'll just leave this window open in case the cage bird wants to fly back type spots in it you know it's just that's really cool I love the idea that in the future we might have a native bounce function or we might just have a little library of easings that we insert into pages and we call them with the web animation API as we need them or maybe not it's it's however you want to grow it yeah and really it becomes defined by what people are making I really am a strong believer that the demand often drives those features right absolutely we started discussing this earlier I think but the idea that we create this thing and then now the browser is going to start supporting it natively simple thing for example border radius I was around when border radius wasn't a thing in CSS right like yes when you had to do the little pngs and you had to set them as spans inside of your div yes awful terrible time heavy mark up heavy mark up but then browser said you know what enough people are doing this I assume this is kind of what the discussion was I haven't gone and read all those boards but I assume some nobody has the time for that I don't I certainly don't somebody might I don't know but I haven't gone and read those boards so the browsers decided to look at what people were doing and then support it in a better way right because how much better of a thing can you make then what people are already doing in their own way if you support those techniques in an easier fashion then people are going to take advantage of that I am nodding my head furiously over here and even in the web animation API you can see places in discussion where it's like well people seem to like using a timeline like this with green sock you know maybe that's the established norm there's this great quote from Jon Lasseter over at Pixar about how art inspires technology and technology enables art and how the two are kind they kind of chase each other in circles like okay rounded corners did we really need rounded corners no but people who are designing things knew that if they added this rounded corner aesthetic it would make them stand out ever so slightly from their competition let's just be straight off about this it was an aesthetic choice there was no reason as flat as hind is it kind of shows us there's no reason that people couldn't get a buttony look with with square corners and gradients oh my god god help us I'm sorry I'm having flashbacks web 2.0 over here lens flares yeah all over the place but these aesthetic choices to try to stand out and be different from the other crowd they push us to try more and different things did we need gradients probably not but we have them and you know what we do beautiful things with them now things that their original designers probably could never have imagined it's the same thing with CSS filters it's wonderful and I love seeing how the web changes with every iteration yeah that is so true and I would say if there's any world that that is the most true and perhaps it is an animation because so many different techniques especially when you're talking about CG rendering so many techniques can be used to do other stuff with you know ray tracing for example this is a super powerful thing that was enabled by somebody sitting down and saying how do we how do we simulate light rays bouncing off of an object in a given space or even just perceiving the objects in the space yeah exactly that is used everywhere now in like a million different contexts right it's an incredible idea that grew out of a simple idea so for those in the audience you don't know what ray tracing is not everybody does there's a really adorable cartoon from Disney that explains it just Google Disney cartoon ray tracing rays like sunset tracing like tracing paper the idea is that if you made a computer simulation of a 3d rendered environment with a sun shining down you need to take a photo of that somehow and you do that by simulating how the light bounces off things and you have a virtual camera that perceives that light unfortunately this requires way too much computing power to be feasible but someone got the great idea that you didn't need to measure all the light in the simulation only the rays that would enter the virtual cameras lens and that's where ray tracing comes from and it's a much more efficient way to capture visuals from a 3d rendered world it is an absolutely amazing idea you look at something like a Pixar film the amount of simulation that's going on there it really is simulating in the same street for many video games not all but many video games the amount of simulation the amount of computing power that's that is happening there is incredible but it's also incredible how much they have been able to reduce the amount of computing power necessary right like it that's the that's probably the more amazing part because you're you're talking about frames like single frames that can take up to a day to render in like a rendering farm which is unbelievable it's an unbelievable amount of computing that has to go into you know some of these animations but they've done an incredible amount of work around this stuff so I say that to say those technologies are driving so many and silvery things right they're they're driving the expressive power the expressive storytelling power of the animator for example I'm so in love with the animation community and the things that it makes for people who are interested in learning more about motion design from the artistic perspective you should check out this wonderful site called motion auger for by the way I is a candy basket full of goodies from animators to educators to 3d artists and it's well respected in the motion design community and it is definitely a place that if you don't learn something new from visiting it you'll definitely walk away with a smile that's great great name by the way motion on oh my gosh I wish I could think of names that great I have a newsletter but I just named it web animation weekly oh that's I mean you know you're fitting right in with the weekly audience though well and basically the newsletter started as a way for me to clean up my tabs and my browser because every week I would find all these really cool resources on animation not just web animation but motion design were always got a link for motion auger for in there and from all these great resources and places and I never had time to read them all and I realized that I could probably get them to the people who like me wanted to learn more about animation and buff up on their motion design chops and just learn more about the world around them so now I have a little weekly newsletter that I used help organize my tabs if you want to subscribe it's at web animation weekly.com and of course there will be a link in the show notes to that as well as everything else that we've mentioned on today's episode by the way well today and the previous episode we will include a link to that so you can go back and listen to that hopefully you've already listened to it if you didn't then you're probably out of the loop on some of the things we're talking about here Rachel I'm going to take a quick sponsor break and then we're going to come back and talk about your three themes for this year I know we said we were going to talk about them on the last episode and we didn't get around to it because we got caught up in conversation but we're going to talk about it in this episode right after this quick sponsor break today's episode is sponsored by digital ocean they are no stranger to Developer Tea and that's because they are the fastest growing cloud infrastructure provider and they're focused on creating incredible tools and elegant solutions for developers just like you and for teams like the one that you may be on it's easy to deploy a pre-configured droplet with open source platforms like no js and magento or perhaps docker they have a control panel where you can do just a few clicks and you have root access on an SSD cloud server it's built to scale of course you can use their API to scale your applications it's reliable and available you can select from data centers from around the world in different regions around the world and perhaps the most important thing is that they have straightforward pricing you're not going to have surprise fees you pay only for the resources that you actually use by the hour there's no setup fee and there's no minimum spend now if you use the code Developer Teaou can get a free month on a one gigabyte droplet that's one gigabyte of RAM a free month on that droplet if you use the code Developer Teaif you go to the show notes at spec.fm you can find that code and click on digital ocean.com thanks so much again to digital ocean for sponsoring today's episode of Developer TeaRachel thank you so much for joining me on Developer TeaI've got a couple of questions for you specifically around I guess this is more the soft side of the of the interview you wrote looking ahead and behind and in that article you talked about a lot of stuff so I highly recommend that people go and read the article but one of the things or I guess three of the things that you talk about are your themes for the year now first I want to applaud you on this idea of having themes for your year a lot of people don't think about the year in depth in my opinion I think that's a really great idea but I'd love for you to share your your three themes for the year and kind of your thinking behind why you chose these as themes for the year well first off I chose themes over goals I do have some set goals behind the scenes but every time I look back at my sad year and post I always see all the things I expected to happen that didn't happen the way I anticipated them and so I thought this year I would try something different I would try having some themes that they will help me anticipate and move with any changes or upheavals that might come during the next year you really don't know what's going to happen over the year but when challenges arise or when you have a decision to make it's important to keep in mind the themes that you've set and I think my my first theme was gardening over gatekeeping gardening over gatekeeping arose out of many long conversations with Mary Williams and Patrick Neiman these are two people I really look up to they are professional business people unlike myself but that said you have to assume that if they're professional business people they're doing something right or they are an extremely lucky lucky people which may or may not be true so anyway Mary has been through a lot of things she's got a really wonderful life story well horrible wonderful hard to say but point is she is a woman who has overcome and powered through and I take her advice very seriously and Patrick is just all around steady smart person the point that they were hammering at home all year long for me was I mean I've been in web animation for a long time and now a lot of people are coming to the party what kind of role do I want to have do I want to play gatekeeper and you know say who's opinion flies and who's doesn't and you know my book is the only book my opinions are the most important opinions raw raw raw is that what I want to do or is there another way gardening growing the space helping people communicate with each other making it less about me and more about everyone and I mean that kind of sounds a little woo woo when I put it words like that and and for people who aren't in this position it will definitely sound a little egotistical that's all right that's the right reaction but the truth is community is getting bigger and it needs to communicate with itself more than it needs to communicate with me I want to make sure that this space is continues to be open continues to be safe continues to have lots of good ideas and that everybody is a recognition and loves and attention that they deserve so in the future when I make decisions going forward I'm gonna try to ask myself how does this grow the community whereas this just setting me up on a higher pedestals in the next person for instance last year I started web animation weekly my little newsletter at the start of the year that was my give back to the community and I look back on that and it's like yeah but you're still the one who's curating it Rachel it's you're giving back to the community you're just giving them your tabs and those are the only tabs that you saw fit to publish it's so easy for me to just be like I don't like this person so they're not in my newsletter trust me that that comes up sometimes so how could I make my newsletter more about gardening and less about gatekeeping well first of all I started by getting a a features editor somebody else's opinion in there who's not mine and and okay that's still you know I chose a features editor how could I do even more well one of the projects I'm working at and I've reached out to some community members to help set up the the automatic automation of it is a slack community for people to interact with one another and of course there will be a code of conduct for the community there will be rules so people won't go in and start trolling each other you know I want people to be excellent to each other that is the community we deserve but at the same time this way I'm not controlling the conversation people are having their own conversation I'm just getting the party started that's a really challenging goal because well for a few reasons one basically what you're saying is my goal is to make my goals lesser right like my personal goals in some way and instead to cultivate which is what you're saying cultivating a garden I wouldn't say my goals are lesser fostering a community is something like look my first website was a droople site and I used it to build a community around the thing I loved while I was in the middle of nowhere Japanese comics manga and I was the steward of that community building a community is tough and not everyone is very good at it a lot of people don't have the personality for it but it has to be done by somebody and if you can help out it's just a matter of helping lift other people up a little bit more than you're pushing yourself up and I'm not saying that I'm not going to continue putting myself forward for instance I will most likely write a book sometime but when writing that book I would just say my thoughts about that book have changed so much since putting this gardening over gatekeeping theme into my mind at first I wanted to write the tone on the animations the tone that everyone would reference for ever you know like the the necronomical of web animation and now it's like no I think I would want a book that would help people communicate better with their teams not a book that they could reference forever but a book that could be useful to them forever and it totally shifts the light in which you're thinking about things one sets you up to be an expert and the other sets the readers up to be the experts that's great you know that reminds me of something that Chris Coier actually said when he was on the show forever ago he mentioned I asked him I believe I asked him a couple of things around the around the theme of what is the best way to do x y or z and his response was at first it felt a little deflating to me because basically what he said was I don't know I mean let everybody figure their own thing out and that was so that was kind of like a moment of frustration as a developer you're looking for you know somebody to lead the way but so many times the way that that ends up playing out is we kind of create these pedestals that shouldn't really exist and people gain this position or their opinion gains a position it becomes like or they're put in that position yeah and they're put in the position where their opinion has become a like the scripture of that particular that particular practice and not only is it the only way but it also can be hurtful in the long run because we don't update our opinions as quickly as we should we don't update that position as quickly as we should oh my god it's so true I mean pedestals hurt everyone they hurt the people who are on them they hurt the community that they're in they hurt the people who are beneath them there's a great saying like you can't put someone on a pedestal without lowering yourself and I think there's also saying you can't climb up on a pedestal without looking down on others it's really tough especially as we see you've heard probably it seems like it's the same old people at every conference but then at the other other time you hear we need a couple of anchors or else the audience won't come yeah I speak at a lot of conferences I don't know if I be speaking it as many this year I got a lot of work to do but I hope I'll get to I'll hope I get out some so anyway it's tough because people want that direction like you said they want that a figure of authority that they can look to and it can sometimes you know even an animation I do worry because I see misinformation like 60 frames per second is realistic being passed around and I want to be like no no it's not I'm on the pedestal you pay attention to me and you know people can figure it out for themselves if you're not the person who who drives at home someone else will be the scary thing though I think is when people are on the pedestal for so long and are so attached to it that they're absolutely terrified of anything that might hate to use the expression knock them out of power but you know knock them down you get so high up you're afraid to come down you might break and so you cling desperately and you can get really defensive I've seen this in people and it's it's unfortunate because you shouldn't have to feel that way you shouldn't have to feel so self-conscious you should feel free to change your opinion you should feel free to own to miss own up to mistakes and we should feel free to hold other people accountable and we should feel free to say hey maybe maybe that's an old opinion or you know maybe you should step down let someone else have the mic for a little bit it can stagnate a community to have too many people on pedestals suppressing new thought as it were and it can also be really bad for the people who are up on those pedestals like there you start up of JavaScript library that gets incredibly popular really fast and before you know it you're being treated with kid gloves because you know you're the person who started that library and you must know everything and and tell us how should we do this thing for our library and oh man you're just a human you know you just have human ideas and suddenly the pressure is on it's so yeah um and definitely and trying to check myself about this pedestal business it's easy to do like even Justin Cohn the the guy who curates motionographer I confess I put him up on a bit of a pedestal it's like he's awesome but you gotta you know just rain it in a little bit ask yourself am I agreeing with this person because they're right and I think that you know I found similar things to be true are I agreeing with them because I've always agreed with them in the past sure yeah and that rational thought is so important I think this is partially an issue with the permanency of our publishing right so it oh gosh yes it is so common that we that we publish and that becomes an apocryphal thing especially if it gains traction right it becomes the post about you know ear fix or whatever right that's a reference for all eternity yeah and now who is it Nicholas Gallagher he is known as the guy who wrote the clear fix you know or normal as I can't remember which one he wrote but and in a way it's like getting typecast as an actor yeah oh totally I mean not only are you the guy who wrote that thing but now you know if I disagreed with the way that you wrote it that is the way that I think you write everything like I I see you in the light of that thing and so you know let's say for example you are can't outgrow your ghost yeah you wear a flash animator in the 90s and you know you haven't had a chance to publish since well people are still going to see you as that flash animator from the 90s right it is difficult to escape the things that you have published and that's that's actually one of one of the interesting things about your story is you mentioned on the in the previous episode your comics that you posted as a teenager those opinions have changed right and the ways that you the ways that we learn the ways that we grow that's not easily reflected in published material and certainly isn't easily reflected in in the minds of people who have read or been exposed to that published published material in the past so it's an interesting thing to be aware of right I have to be aware of it as a podcaster for example there's things that I've said on the show that I quite frankly like I said previously I've forgotten them and I may change my opinion there may be an episode that comes out that directly goes against another episode that I that I recorded a year before right but that's okay that's an okay thing the permanency of our publishing is is an error in our thinking in my opinion it's tough I mean that's 60 frames per second thing which I keep talking about is an example it it got stuck in our collective minds it it's something that is reinforced constantly when you listen to you know Google developer screencasts but it is patently not true and if I had written a book about animation the book to own all books about animation about a year ago I probably would have said that and it would be patently wrong right now and I would have no way to take it back and I think that's something that really terrifies me about publishing yeah uh which is why it took me so long to figure out do I want to publish do I want to just put it all up as blog posts what do I want to do with that yeah it it it is daunting because you don't want to you know expose like in the major public sphere and then all of a sudden you know a year later that thing is totally irrelevant right it's a difficulty okay so we've talked about that that first theme let's let's talk about the other two themes uh that you mentioned in your post all right the second theme is cooperation over competition uh so I actually really enjoy cooperative play last year I worked on this thing called DevTools Challenger for Firefox developer edition number 44 it's a deep sea themed uh tutorial essentially and how to use the developer editions animation tools and I had a blast making it but early on they made it apparent that this was a six week deadline and there was no way I could do all this work in six weeks so I had to ask for what I needed I was gonna need some help on the JavaScript they're gonna have to pony up a developer and I also had to hire on an illustrator to to actually do the art you'd think I'd want to do the art but no I knew I was gonna have my hands full with the CSS animations and just figuring out what exercises and animals we were going to need for this and I loved it it was such a great cooperative play I it was you know both working uh working alongside people I super respect and and adore and you know like leading the charge and I loved it and I thought I really need to do more like this you know early on in your life you want to do everything yourself you know I can draw my own comic and animate my own cartoon and as you get older you realize there's no way that you can do that and still have everything you make turn out really well and there's no time if you want to make something and have it irrelevant you need to learn how to work with other people you need to let other people take the spot like you need to let go of some of the control that is a a great lesson to learn and I I want to work more with other people like setting up a slack community I'm not gonna be in their guiding conversation I'll probably deputize all the moderation yeah and bringing in someone to help out with the newsletter I missed an issue I it was supposed to have 52 issues this year it was 51 because I got pneumonia and I was too sick to do it that's a bad system I should have people I can deputize the newsletter too and so I'm just trying to bring in more people to cooperate I'm trying to ask myself whenever I'm on a project or or setting something new up can I delegate can I bring someone else in on this does it have to be just me alone fighting it out like some kind of a heroic lone wolf but it's just gonna end sadly in bitter tears and it doesn't have to be that way it can be glorious for everyone all of that seems very you know let's talk about working with other people and let's work and share together and everything will be magical and ponies so this next one's gonna come as kind of perhaps a surprise my third theme is internal validation over external validation so back when I got into web animation so crazy back in 2013 I realized that I didn't like working the job that I had I'd always been working for companies that didn't want to give me time off to go to conferences so I got into speaking so that I could go to conferences and have at least some of my expenses covered at least the ticket right yeah absolutely that's hopefully right well after a while I realized that the things I was writing about and the people I was meeting and the work that they were doing it just all seemed way more interesting than what I was doing so I figured I quit and I go do my own thing and see what came of it all and I have been doing that for the past three years and I look back and I just I see that I have paid a lot of attention to what other people expect out of me like what people think I should be doing a lot of my tweets last year or what do you think I should be doing or you know let me post this witty opinionated thing to see if it could get some faves and after a while I mean I I did a lot of work but I didn't share a lot of work I don't feel like I gave back half of what I learned last year I wish I had and maybe that was because I was too concerned with what other people were expecting and I think this year I'm gonna spend more time asking myself does this make me feel validated from within or am I doing this so that other people will validate me that's something I've struggled with probably my whole life I think it's something a lot of people struggle with and don't own up to but it's an important question to ask before you undertake something am I doing this because it's going to make me feel good or am I doing this because I think other people will pat me on the head and that will make me feel good yeah and I'm not saying that things that make you feel good are automatically things that you should do but you should be aware of what your motives are if you're just doing this to score brownie points you should at least own up to that before you engage in it and I think for me I notice a pattern of doing things seemingly for myself but they're actually for other people that's really interesting because I actually have noticed I've noticed that this is applicable to the way that people manage relationships for example if you are like I am and like Rachel is if you are married you see your married friends around you potentially I guess assuming that you have married friends you see their relationship right and there's a natural comparison pattern that occurs and you know if you're not careful you will start making decisions about your relationship based on the way that other people make decisions about their relationships this is true in a professional environment it's true in a personal environment it's true with friends romantic interests pretty much across the board right for example in the professional environment the way that we treat our co-workers or the way that we treat clients very often the people you are around you will act like them right this is the very common theme in social psychology that the people that you run with you will act like and so you have to be very aware of these things why am I choosing to treat my significant other this way or why am I choosing to respond to my boss in this particular manner and if you start investigating how you would do it without external influence which may be difficult if not impossible to fully suss out but if you can try to remove that kind of layer of accidental comparison between you and another person oh yeah part of my internal validation over external validation thing is I'm doing a little piece of art some words in a picture every day it's not necessarily great use of my time but it does it is nice to see that I have this wonderful body of illustrations I can use on Twitter to reply to people with but one of the things I thought about because I was thinking about how I was talking with people and I remember a conversation from some time ago where somebody told me something that was really awesome and I very pleasantly said oh man I'm so jealous of you and I realized that that made me feel bad because I felt a lot of things at that time jealousy was only a fraction of what I felt I felt happy for them I felt concerned because you know this went through then they wouldn't be around anymore and I would miss them I felt a lot of things and jealousy was only one tiny component yet that was the one I let dominate so I made a little piece of art where I said instead of saying I'm so jealous of you try saying I'm so happy for you and when you say I'm so happy for you it completely colors how you took in that whole interaction that's just it's one of those things where even just how it comes out of your mouth can change how you feel but how you're saying that people act like the people who are around them consider that that joke that office culture may people find something's funny and something's not funny and some offices it makes a lot of a lot of people laugh if you make fun of flash or you make fun of Microsoft Internet Explorer that's not necessarily a charitable thing to do I actually kind of low flash jokes at conferences because they're cheap and if there are any flash developers in the crowd they're obviously not going to share any knowledge with this crowd they're probably crying in a corner somewhere yeah yeah absolutely are you laughing and making those jokes because it's going to validate you because other people will laugh with you is that the only reason why you're making those jokes do you have better reasons are there better things that you could that you could do with that joke material so it's it's just a way of I think for me it's a way of examining where you're getting your your feeling of accomplishment and good vibes which I think with all the rest of these themes being so outward facing you do need a kind of an inside coil that you can rely on otherwise it could just turn into a 2016 could turn into a year of martyrdom yeah I love that that idea of you know being aware and examining your inner kind of drivers right the the pieces that kind of say okay what and what was the reason that I evaluated that situation in that particular way and language is so important language is such a powerful thing we don't even realize how powerful it is there's this phenomena that I've experienced I don't even know what it's called where I'm talking in the same room as another person and another person uses a word and I subconsciously hear that word and I use that word and I realize it after the fact it it happens kind of accidentally I don't know if you've ever experienced this phenomena but it shows me every time that happens it reminds me how nuanced our brains work specifically with language we're born with a way of understanding linguistics that is kind of built into our brains this is a proven scientific thing that linguistics is a is like a fundamental part of our nature at this point in evolution and so it makes sense that we don't understand the power of that because it is so viscerally like imported into the way we work right it is an incredibly important part of our lives and so evaluating our language the things that we say the way we react in a given situation that is one of the key you know pieces of understanding yourself and understanding yourself is one of the key pieces to in my opinion I guess a deeper sense of purpose and happiness and wow I mean how deep can a developer podcast go but I think this is kind of the fundamental base level stuff that we have to you know regardless of whatever other beliefs you have about the universe or whatever you know these are things that are worthwhile investigating for anyone I agree it's a part of being human and I think as humans it's our number one child I agree with that this has been a fantastic discussion and I'm so thankful that you decided to join me on Developer Tea Jonathan it is been awesome being here thank you so much I love tea and I love Developer Tea I actually had tea tonight I don't I don't have it every time but I feel like tonight was a good one I actually had the like big a low which is the you know the the most easily available tea out there and like lemon ginger with probiotics oh my gosh yeah it was great wonderful well thank you so much Jonathan it's been awesome absolutely thank you Rachel and thank you for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea if you missed the first part of the interview you can find that at spec.fm of course all the show notes from today's episode can be found at spec.fm as well you can follow Developer Tea on Twitter at app Developer Tea you could send in questions to Developer Tea at gmail.com I'd love for you to join us in the spec slack community you can go to spec.fm slash slack of course that will always be free to listeners of the spec shows there are plenty of other shows at spec.fm that you should go and check out as well and of course all of those can be found at spec.fm just as easily as you find Developer Tea make sure you subscribe to Developer Tea and go and give us a rating in iTunes these are the two best ways that you can help Developer Tea to continue doing what we do thank you so much for listening to Developer Tea and until next time enjoy your tea