Given the current state of the world, we've been put into a position where things have lost jobs or lost in other areas of life. The panel discusses how to make the most of things when hard things come your way.

Hey, folks. This is Charles Max Wood and I just wanted to dive in real quick and talk for a minute about this episode. It was recorded for the Ifreak show. So the panel is gonna be a little bit different from whom you're usually accustomed to hearing. However, it seemed rather timely to put this out since we were talking about how to deal with going through tough times and with everything that's going on in the world and with people that I've been talking to that are between jobs.

I just wanted to highlight, okay, what do you do when things get hard? So go ahead and have this episode, give it a listen, and, we'll be back with the regular panel next week. Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the I Freak Show. This week on our panel, we have Soo Jin Ro. Hi, everyone.

Alex Bush. Hello. Hello. And, yeah. This week, we had a last minute cancellation with our guests.

So it's gonna be the 3 of us talking, and we were discussing what topic to discuss. And, something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is with the coronavirus situation, we're hearing a lot about people losing their jobs, we're hearing a lot about people, taking advantage of not having to commute, we're also hearing a lot about people feeling isolated, and in some ways I've been looking at it and thinking that in some way, and I'm not saying that, you know, people getting sick or dying or anything is a good thing in any way, but sometimes being put in a situation like this presents us with certain opportunities And I wanted to just talk through that because, I think a lot of times people focus on the bad things that happen instead of focusing on the opportunities that come of it. For example, just to to back up a little bit, you know, I went through some stuff last year. You know, basically came under attack on Twitter. I'm not gonna go into the whole thing, but, you know, there was probably some silver lining there.

Right? It forced me to rethink the way that I'm doing business and forced me to rethink the way that I need to be more resilient. I probably wouldn't be doing some of the initiatives that I'm doing right now if that hadn't happened, and, you know, and so things like that kind of come back around, and in a lot of cases, I find that you wind up in a better spot because of it. So, you know, I'm I'm gonna give one example and yeah. I mean, if you had a really great job and you were really comfortable with that job and you lost that job, one thing that just comes to mind is there might be something better out there for you and this might be a blessing in disguise where you actually, you know, have the opportunity to go and see if there's something that's a better fit that you can actually line up.

And, you know, if not, then hopefully this thing comes back in time for you to not run out of money and your company where you were working comes back and says, well, now that the economy is clicking along again, we can hire you back. But in the meantime, I mean, we'd be looking for those opportunities, and and that's some of the stuff that I'm kind of just been thinking about lately. I would say for me, it kind of coincided with the virus happening. I was actually laid off even 1 month before the whole Oh, wow. Craziness started.

And I and I thought, oh, you know, this is my time to go and do my own business now. Mhmm. And then then the virus hit, so I realized, yeah, maybe maybe wait a little. So I'm back on the job market. But after talking to a friend of mine who's he's a very good con contractor in London.

Mhmm. He's, like, professional contractor, like, doing it for 12 years or something at this point. No full time jobs, just contracts. And he kind of, and I and I used to do contracts mostly too, actually, but the last job was employment. So he after talking to him and kinda rethinking the whole situation, I think my takeaway and what I will be doing from now now on and now kind of am implementing, always be on the hunt for a job.

Always even after I get I'm talking to a few companies and I'm far far along in in the interview process probably. Hopefully, we'll get something soon. But even after I do that, I'll not I will not stop talking to recruiters. I will not stop interviewing because then I'm always sharp, always on my toes Mhmm. And always kind of up to date with the market, with the job market in this case.

Yeah. I I think it's interesting too you bring that up, Alex, because in some cases, maybe it is an opportunity to go freelance. Right? Or you were talking about, oh, this is my opportunity to start my business. And maybe it is.

Right? I mean Right. Yeah. Maybe maybe I just didn't have enough, you know, courage and all. Right?

I fully acknowledge that. Well, the other thing is is that you can also just be working on it to set yourself up so that when the economy starts coming back, right, you can take advantage of some of that money to start to move and let people know that your solution's out there to solve their problem. Right. Another version of this is, you know, with me, I had done remote conferences for, like, 5 years and I did the last one in, like, 2017 or 2018, and then all of a sudden this hits and people are coming at me from all directions going, hey, you gonna do another remote conference? And I'm like, yeah, I ought to.

And so I'm pulling that together. Right? I'm just about ready to launch iOS remote conf, website. Right? And so people can come and join in the fun and and, you know, learn because WWCDC got canceled.

They said they're gonna do some kind of digital experience, but I'm seeing that from a lot of companies and that varies from we're gonna livestream a handful of the talks to we're gonna post some videos you can watch whenever to we're gonna try and put on a full on conference online. And with some of the bigger companies, it's starting to look more like they're just gonna prerecord a whole bunch of content and drop it on the Internet. And so, you know, for a lot of folks, they want that interaction, and so I I'm going, okay, well, I'll put on the iOS remote conference and let people know that it's out there and, you know, I mean, I'm not expecting to get rich off it, but it's gonna float me for a little while. I mean, JavaScript remote conference, I've already sold, you know, a bunch of tickets and I haven't even in announced all the speakers yet. And so, you know, just finding opportunities like that where you can, even in a small way, you know, get a side hustle going to support everything while you figure stuff out.

Su Jin, you also mentioned that you had been working on, like, a side project that you found some time too because you didn't have to commute. Right? Oh, yeah. Actually. So, after my, episode, after so I came on this iFlicks show as a guest on the for the first time, regarding ARKit.

And so after that, so, actually, that was in the midst of, me getting a new job. So, actually, I moved from South Korea to Singapore. And all and so I had, like, a month in between. And then even after I came to Singapore and started, I we, immediately I started immediately working from home. So working from home and, so so saving a lot of, like, commute times and also because of the virus staying home in the weekends, I had a lot of free time.

So so so I just worked on a really small open source, using AR kits, and it was really fun. So it was my, actually, my first open source project, and it was really fun. Yeah. Yep. And and that's another area that, you know, I've been thinking about is, yeah, you know, take some time to contribute to open source or take some time to learn a new skill, You know?

Where Alex is talking about looking for a job, I mean, it could coincide with both. Right? Go figure out what you need to learn in order to get that job you want, and then go pick it up. I am literally just deep in learning algorithms. Like, finally finally, I need to learn that stuff.

Like, binary search, traversal, something something, breadth first, whatever they want. Yep. And I never ever ever learned that ever. Like, in school, they never gave it to me. I never needed that at work, and I kind of it's been a pain, I guess, what I'm trying to say throughout my career, and now I'm like, alright.

Fine. I'll learn it, and I have time time for that. Right? Yeah. By the way, if that's something you're running into, there's a really great program called, inter Interview Cake.

Yeah. I'll put a a link into the the chat, but, in that way, it can show up in the show notes. It is an affiliate link, I will admit, but they're probably one of the best places I've seen to actually go and pick up this kind of information. So, in fact, just go to devchat.tv/interviewcake, and and I'll make that work. So, anyway, it it's just it's a really terrific product, and they they walk you through all that stuff that's just basically a course.

But then you can show up to the interview and have that stuff fresh. Because, I mean, I learned it in college, but that was 15 years ago. Right? Another thing that I've I've been talking to a lot of people about is a lot of folks feel like, you know, this is the opportunity for them to make a course or, write a book or things like that. And some people feel like, oh, well, I'm gonna make a course for something like Pluralsight or Ray Wenderlich or something like that.

A lot of those folks I don't know what Ray's process is, but Pluralsight actually makes you submit a, an application and go through the process and blah blah blah blah. Right? There's a program that I really like called Course Creator Pro, and I I bought it and I'm working on a podcasting course, using their method and I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well as I I I've put shortcuts in for this because people keep asking for it, but it's devchat.tv/ccp for Course Creator Pro, And, yeah, they walk you through the whole process of filming a course, recording your screen, the whole 9 yards, editing it, getting it posted, hosting it on Teachable, doing the Facebook ads to drive people into it. I mean, it's it it does the whole thing. It gives you the whole system including the marketing.

So if you don't know if you're like, well, I could build the course but I don't know how to sell it. I don't know how to sell it. Well, there you go. Right? And so if you're, you know, if you're talking about some new technology like Alex's favorite SwiftUI or, you know, something like that in the course, I mean, you have the opportunity.

And if you don't have anywhere else to be, then, yeah, maybe your main gig is I'm gonna spend a few hours, 3, 4, 5, 6 hours looking for a new job, and then I'm gonna spend 3 or 4 hours building a course so that, you know, in a month or something, when I have it all done and I can plug the the revenue engine into it and the marketing engine into it, you know, then you start making some money off of it. And, you know, I mean, the courses they're selling, they're selling for $1,000 a piece and have made more than $1,000,000 in a year doing it. And I don't know if that's necessarily realistic for a SwiftUI course or whatever. We can probably make several 1,000 enough to pay the bills and, you know, eat. One thing to, like, one thing that's really important, I think, is so even though we have a lot of time, at at our home in indoors, I saw I recently saw a research from, like, Microsoft.

They, they analyze the their developers', like, efficiency or, like, their work hours after they switch to, remote working. So they actually found out that, that people started working earlier in the morning, and then they worked late at night. So, actually, like, that's that's the one thing that I also felt working from home is the the work the the stick distinction between work and home is blurry. So you will just sit down, and when you have nothing to do, I just sometimes, like, go go watch my, code and see what work I have. So, actually, like, it's really tough to just when you're working from home, it's really tough to just let go of the work and do your thing.

Right? So that's you have to, like, make like, actively work hard to make some time for your own side project. Yeah. Work life separation. I, yeah, I felt that a a very, very much a few years ago when I was just fully freelancing from home, and that's this is tough.

It's brutal. You just you you cooked up in your room and you, you know, you code all day for work for work project, but then you kind of either forget to stop or you don't know when to stop because, like, there's a deadline. Right? And especially if you're a freelancer and you paid for delivery of the project rather than by the hour, then it's like you kinda feel sort of afraid, but maybe I work a little more so that I can, like, make it. Right?

I don't know if I stop now and pick up tomorrow if I'll finish by the deadline. Things like that. Right? And that Exactly. Starts to creep into your life.

Brutal. Brutal. Brutal. Yeah. Another thing interesting with, what Soojin brought up was that a lot of people are really terrible about making boundaries, and so if you're working from home, all of a sudden, you know, where you work is where you live and where you live is where you work, and so you're walking by work all the time and your brain goes to that place, and then you sit down and you put in a couple another hour.

Right? And so yeah. Yeah. I would say what helped helped me, back then, and I kinda still use that sort of a trick, a brain trick, if you will. If you're don't have enough space to, like the best thing is to dedicate a certain space in your, apartment just for work and then, you know, other spaces for leisure.

But if you don't have enough space, do dedicated laptop, like, if if you can. Same, dedicated laptop just for work and then everything else for fun. And the last trick, dress. Dress up for work. And as you, like, sit at home, even though you're at home and no one sees you.

Right? But if you dress up kinda like a uniform for work, right, and you code, and then when you're done, but at at the time by the clock, let's say, 5:5 PM, then go and change in your, like, comfy pajamas or whatever you have. At least you could trick your brain not to, like, worry because now you're in something comfortable. You're not at work anymore. So that helped me.

Yep. Makes sense. Yeah. So I so at for at at the beginning, I also, like, I just woke up from bed and started working, but I I also felt that's really so that made me hard to separate. So as Alex said, I so I always, like, you know, get prepared just as I was going to work, and I just so I think that helped a lot.

Yeah. I can just see our listeners thinking, pants? No pants. Pants? No pants.

Right? I mean, why not? Right? Like, whatever the the mental flag is for you, that that switch. Like, actually, same goes for, gym.

Right? Like, exercising. This is a great opportunity to I I mean, not everyone probably has a full on gym at home. Right? Closed.

Yeah. And it's closed. But at least, like, me neither. Right? I don't have any even in the dumbbell.

Right? But every day, I do push ups, crunches, sit up, like, whatever I can with body weight. And same thing. Like, I would only do that if I'm like, put my gym pants on, basically. Like, otherwise, it's just so hard.

I'm like, I don't want to. Blah blah blah. Yep. I hear that. But yeah.

I mean and and maybe your opportunity is more along those lines. Right? Where it's, okay. Well, I'm gonna start a health habit or something like that. Right?

You know, I've taken the opportunity to be, like, reading to my kids. You know, we actually played, Dungeons and Dragons for an hour on Sunday. You know? And they they'd never played before. Right?

And it it was fun. Of course, 2 of my kids are like, we don't wanna play any again. You know, my other 2 kids are like, can we play now? So, yeah, it's it's kinda funny. I might just take over the so my daughter was, a, a cleric and they kinda need a healer with them.

So I might just take over the cleric as a, you know, as a player character and just play and DM. But, anyway, it's it's a ton of fun and so, yeah, maybe that's the opportunity. And I think a lot of time a lot of this has also just forced people to think about what's really important to them. And that's not a bad thing either. Right?

I mean, it's it's sad that we're worried about people we care about. But the flip side is is, yeah, you know, what opportunities are we getting back? By the way, one other idea I had, you know, for kind of on the money product front is writing a book. And, I took I paid for a course for that too, and I've actually published the book. I'm working on updating it because I found some issues with it that I'm not particularly happy with, but, it does work.

It's actually on finding a job. I I didn't pick this to market the book. In fact, it occurred to me as I was talking about writing a book. I was like, oh, yeah. That's kind of relevant to the other conversation.

But, yeah. Hey, Chuck Chuck. Can I can I do a selfish plug in related to jobs too? I actually wrote a book as well, and it's about iOS interviews. Oh, nice.

So kind of same, I guess, relevant for for people looking for jobs right now. Where do they find it? So it's called, the iOS interview guide, and it's iosinterviewguide.com. Nice. Yeah.

Mine's at devchat.tv/jobbook. Anyway A good book I read about how to write a book, it's called Authority by, Nathan Nathan Barry. Yep. Nathan Barry. Thinking now around this ConvertKit.

It's kind of a continuation of this whole thing that he was doing. But fantastic book. Like, I had, before writing my own, I had no clue how to do it. Like, for I had basic questions such as, oh, well, what's the size? Like, how many words?

How many chapters? What's an average? What do I need to do? He gives you all of those. It's fantastic.

Yeah. I remember that book when it came out. Yeah. Anyway, it's it's good stuff. The system that I followed to, to do the book was called Self Publishing School, and the the acronym for that is SPS, so I put it devchat.tv/sps.

But, yeah, I mean, they walked you through the whole process again, you know, as far as getting it on Amazon and the whole 9 yards, but also just the process of writing writing it. So getting it outlined and, you know, getting it getting into the groove of writing it and editing it and getting your cover together for it, and the whole 9 yards. And if you join self publishing school, you can also join their Facebook group, and so you can get feedback on all that stuff. Right? So it's like, hey, I've got these, you know, a lot of a lot of folks did their, cover designs on 99 designs.

Right? And so they got 5 or 6 back, and so they you know, everybody's chipping in on everybody's stuff, and so they get a lot of feedback on the designs that were put forward and stuff like that. So, anyway, just just really, really digging that. But yeah. So, I mean, lots of things you can do.

If you wanna be a host on this podcast, you can also email me because we are looking for a couple more of those. But, I mean yeah. I mean, there there's there's a lot of opportunities. There are a lot of ways to raise your profile. And so, yeah, just take advantage of them.

Juan, if you can't think of anything else, another thought, thing I thought of, watch all the WWDC videos. I every year, I they come out with them. There's so many, and I pick maybe if if any that I watch, maybe, like, 1 5th or 1 6th of all of them. And I always wish someone would just go through them and make a TLDR article or something or even a quick, like, YouTube video with just highlights. Ah, that's that's a good idea.

Just please someone do it because I I guess I was gonna say, I never have time. Now I guess I do, so maybe I'll do it. But seriously, that's you think it's like recycling, rehashing content, which it is technically, but it's more of a digesting it. Like, just give me the TLDR. I I get, you know, all the great whatever jokes they wanna make in those videos, but I don't care.

Just give me the the the meat. So that would be great. Well, the other angle on that is, and the reason that it's valuable is I can go get for most of those talks, yeah, it's, you know, here's kind of the core content. Right? I can consume that in written form in, like, 5, maybe 10 minutes.

Right? And the the flip side of it is is that if I get a TLDR for something that I really do need to see and understand for my job, then I go pick up that ink video. And, you know, make it nice. Like, if you have a website, like, it's just sort of the extra mile you could go, like, have a page for that. Right?

Yeah. And then have this TLDR text content and maybe, like, an audio for it as well and then the link to the original video. Yep. But worst case, just make a tweet. Like, the easiest content you could publish, a tweet.

It's, like, 2 80 characters. And and if the video is too long or, like, too many, valuable points there, make a series of tweets. I think they let you, like, publish them in one go now. Yeah. Why not?

Yeah. Absolutely. Have a hashtag, like, www dctldrs2019. I don't know. Something like that.

Yep. I like that idea. I think I'll do it. Well, the thing is if you get all of this Other other like, if a lot of people do it, this is even better. Well, you get credibility out of it.

Right? I mean, if you're looking for a job and you got that many people coming to your website and you have a little note or banner or something that says, by the way, I'm looking for a job call here to hire me. Mhmm. Right? That's just kind of a a no brainer.

Right? People are gonna be like, wow, this guy's dedicated. It's the same thing with podcasts or YouTube videos or blogs or things like that. Yeah. Because, like, other things you know, for some of the sort of ideas we have, you kinda need expertise or something Uh-huh.

Like that. Right? Or or it could at least experience. So not everyone has it. But but, again, something like this is kinda like commentary well, not commentary per se, but close enough.

Well, you need enough context to understand what's going on. Right. But, generally, they're assuming a base level of understanding, and then after that, you know, they don't assume that you know, like, all of the other frameworks backward and forward. They're just assuming that you know how to, you know, basically put an app together. You you know that there's, things like see whatever in one minute or, like, whatever in 5 minutes.

Exactly. Yeah. So something like that. Yeah. So every time, like, every year, like, see see the see double dose this keynote in 5 minutes.

So see, the session or whatever in, like, 2 minutes. Yeah. I think that's that's pretty awesome. Yep. That's how I that's how I consume, Google IO sessions.

Because I I'm not I don't do Android anymore, but I still wanna know what the competition does. So it's like Yep. Yeah. Give me give me this, in 10 minute video thing. Yep.

And I'll play it on 1.75 speed, though. Yeah. Because I'm very impatient. Yeah. Yeah.

One other thing skip. And then skip, like, 10 minutes. And then skip. Yeah. Occasionally.

Yeah. Yep. One other thing that I'm putting together just, you know, because of the COVID nineteen is the meet ups. And, you know, and so just taking advantage of any of the free training that's coming out for people or paid training, you know, like the remote conferences. But, yeah, just, you know, paying attention to that, you don't actually have to go anywhere.

So all the travel time, all the travel costs are all taken care of. Another one that I'm also putting together, and I'm just throwing this stuff out there just to see where people land with it, is I am putting together, and I'm gonna have it up this afternoon. It's coronadevjobs.com. And essentially what it is is it's a GitHub repo. You could just go to corona devjobs.com.

And, yeah, as we're talking, it's not quite up but it will be up. And so what you can do is you can submit a pull request with your, contact info on basically your own page. Right? So you can write your own summary or put your own CV or resume on there. And then, you know, you put your contact info so that job or employers can contact you.

And then, the other end of it is people who are looking for developers. You know, same thing. They can submit a pull request and list their jobs. And then what I'm hoping to do is that, I wanna connect it up to a Twitter account or something so that when it gets updated right, it it gets tweeted. I'm still figuring that bit out.

But, at the end of the day, you know, then if a new job gets posted, it's like, hey, there's a new job. If there's a new job seeker, you know, then they, you know, then they also get tweeted. Right? And you can put hashtags in for the technologies you're you're, you're proficient in. Right?

And so you can put in, you know, iOS or Swift or, you know, whatever realm. And at the end of the day, then people who are looking for people with those job skills, they can just come to the website, they can go click on the hashtag Swift and, you know, they're good to go. You know, they can go look at everybody who's who's put their information in that says they're proficient with Swift. Or if you're looking for a Swift job, you can click that that same link and it'll also list all the jobs that are available. Mhmm.

I like that a lot. And, you know, I'm just throwing it together on Gridsum, so I'm not doing anything that fancy. It'd probably take me an entire hour and a half to get it all put together, and then I'll have to set up the git hook so that it tweets, but that's it. Can I be number 1 on the list? You can, but it'll cost you.

Okay. You you'll have to help me accept pull requests. That that's what it'll cost you. Yeah. I mean, I'm unemployed.

I can labor, I guess. Yeah. I mean, that's the deal, right, is that I'm gonna have to accept pull requests. I'm gonna have to have some mechanism for doing that. But the nice thing is is I'm just gonna throw it at Netlify, and Netlify will do the the builds on the pull requests.

And so as long as they're legit, you know, as long as they build properly when I can merge them, then it'll be fine. Netlify is such a such a pleasure to work with. Yes, it is. Lately, I I've been, like, publishing just plain old HTML pages. Yeah.

Oh, fantastic. Yep. Yeah. Gridsum is just a static site generator built with Vue. So but, for example, a friend of mine, Ryan Florence, who's in the React world, you know, he runs reacttraining.com.

Well, people aren't hiring React trainers at the moment, And so he had to lay a bunch of people off because he just he couldn't he didn't have payroll for him. He couldn't pay him. And so he's like, hey, somebody hire these people. And I'm sitting there going, yeah, there's gotta be a better way than a tweet that's gonna be gone in 2 hours. Right.

And so once I have that up, I'm gonna go ping him and a bunch of other folks who have, you know, essentially said, hey, I lost my job, and I'm just gonna be like, look, you know, let's let's help these folks find jobs. Right? If your employer is, you know, is looking, then let's do it. But yeah. And so there are opportunities to help serve too.

And if that's an opportunity you wanna take advantage of, you know, do that. Also, I would say, well, I mean, we we talked about it. Educate yourself. But, specifically, since, we're in this remote situation, I highly recommend reading, remote by, 37 signals, I think, base camp now. Jason Fried and David Heidemayer Hansen.

Yep. Good book. Mhmm. Great book. I think it's, I wanna say, 7 years old, if not more, but still relevant.

Very relevant. The the situation really hasn't changed. There's just more people working from home now because they don't have a choice. So Right. And we have better tools like Zoom.

Yeah. Yeah. There have been issues with Zoom, though. I know at least a couple people have had their Zoom accounts hacked. So Oof.

But part of me wonders because they are not tech people. The people that I know that had their account hacked, I'm wondering if they just had, like, a password that's, like, my name 123 or something. That's that's my mom. I had to Yeah. Rescue her with yeah.

Yeah. I really had a chance to rethink rethink remote work. So prior, I really didn't believe, like, remote work is, like, a really valid form of work because because, like, because I just think, like, face, like, face to face communication is really important, and I I just couldn't possibly imagine how everyone like, peep how people from all over the world you know, there are some companies there are in companies just don't have office. Right? I I forgot the name, but there's a really famous company that that, I I think Notion.

I don't know. Never mind. So I think so anyway so but then yeah. And, also, I don't trust myself working remote because I, like, fool around too much, and, like, that is right behind me. So, like, when I was a student, right, before getting a real job, I just when I was doing some projects, I just, like every 10 minute, I go jumping back to my bed.

So I I really thought, like, remote work wouldn't work for me, but but it does. It, it it did. So so this is another, like this opens up a big door for me in the future. So now I can imagine myself, like, being, like, being, like, a being, like, a freelancing or even just, like, getting a remote job, so I can be anywhere. I can travel and work at at the same time.

So I think, yeah, it it it's just opened up, like, a new possibility for me. It's actually a good point. I think, kind of this blessing in disguise, if you will. Right? Could be for a lot of people exactly that.

Like, you know, just like you, they they they would realize, you know, oh, that's actually doable, and I can. So maybe even after the whole virus thing is gone, we'll just keep doing remote and then maybe go travel or whatnot. Yep. Like myself, I wanna visit Singapore, so I really need a remote job for that because why not? Yeah.

Yep. Definitely. Definitely visit if when this call goes away. Yeah. Yep.

Another thing, which I already kind of touched upon, but I think it's important for everyone, do exercise just, like, something. Yep. Do like, gym's closed. Yeah. I know.

But I don't know. I, even before this, probably, like, last 6 months, I actually switched to exercising every day. Like, going to gym every day. It was incredibly hard for the 1st 2 months. Just, like, mental, you know, because I'd be so tired the next day and all sore, but I still would drag myself there.

And now, I'm like, I can't imagine not doing that. That's just fantastic. Yep. So, again, another opportunity. If you got nothing else to do, why not do, like, 10 push ups if you can?

Then do 10 more. Yep. Well, I go jogging down the jogging trail, and, yeah, you know, I pass within 6 feet of people because it's not that wide, but, you know, I mean, hold your breath, I guess. But, you know, I I think most of the concern is over, you know, touching surfaces that other people are touching and, you know, prolonged contact. So yeah.

I think, maybe the next episode, we could talk about how to make handmade at home gloves and, masks or something. There we go. I'm not there yet. Maybe next step. So Yep.

Somebody should write a pandemic organizer app, you know, that organizes people so that it's like, yeah, we need we need 10,000 more ventilators and I mean, I saw, hack what was it? Anyway, there was an article where somebody put out that, you know, we let's let's make a design in open source, ventilator. You saw that. Wasn't it the, what what is it? The 3 d printer type of thing?

Yeah. And I'm fascinating if it could work. Well, even if, even if it it got to the point where it was, how do I put it? And I'm I'm looking it up at the same time. But, I think it was on Indie Hacker or Hackaday.

Anyway, so yeah. I think it was Indie Hacker. Anyway, so the idea was that yeah. You know, we we have people out there with, with the, you know, with 3 d printers in their house. So, yeah, you know, why not open source this so that if we need them, then it's like, okay, we're going to print all the parts that we need.

And then, you know, I mean, even if we got 90% the way there. Right? And so we just had them, like, legit manufacture a handful of parts. Yeah. Anyway, it's it's it's pretty pretty interesting.

So but, yeah, there are a whole bunch of people who have come out and, jumped on different projects to try and make it work. So what I'm finding is Hacker Noon. So I'll just put a link to that in the show notes. But, yeah, I mean, you know, turn turn your expertise to the to to the problems at hand. Yeah.

Okay. I think I'm out of ideas. Yeah. I am too. But there are so many opportunities.

I mean, whether it's, you know, building a business or building a product or whether it's, you know, going out and getting involved in some of this other stuff or leveling up your skills. I mean, you know, it's it it feels like a massive waste to just sit around and watch Netflix and hope that this all comes back because we don't know when, we don't know how, we're hoping it soon, but at the end of the day, I mean, you know, we just don't know. And so go work out, get ripped like Alex, and, you know, and and then spend the rest of your time, you know, doing something that's gonna make a difference for you or for somebody else. Don't don't tweet. Don't punch.

I'm tweeting a lot. Yeah. Alright. Well, it sounds like we've kind of exhausted this. So, let's, let's go ahead and do pics.

Soojin, do you wanna start us with pics? Yeah. Okay. Past week, I found, the game Monument Valley 2. So I'm not I'm not sure I don't know if you guys heard of it.

It's like, I I played Monument Valley 1, like, few years ago, but I found out that 2 came out, and then it's on sale. It's it's, I guess, on discount. So it's free right now. So it's actually, like, 4 or $5, the original game. But so it's like, it's a really cool game.

It's, it's like it's like the optical illusion game. So, you know, like, the Penrose triangle? Like Mhmm. The triangle looks like yeah. And then, also, like, the staircase, it it looks like you're going up, but then when you when you do a full circle, then you're back to where you are.

So it's the game is like game is like that. So the the pieces move around. You you tweak the world so the character can go from here to there, but you never thought they could because, like, it's physically impossible, but it's all tweaked. And so I so I downloaded that, and I played that this week, and it was really fun. So, yeah, go try go try the game.

It's really exciting. It's it's and it's really not it doesn't take long to finish the whole game. So it's a it's a really good, it was a really good time. Yep. Su Jin took the whole day off on Sunday to do that.

I'm just kidding. I have no idea. But So it takes, like, it takes, like, 1 hour. But if you're if you're used to it. So as it gets as it as it proceed, it kind of gets hard.

It's like it's like a puzzle game. Right? It's like a 3 d puzzle game with optical illusion stuff. So it's really cool. Yeah.

Yeah. I played Monument Valley. I saw it on House of Cards, I think, and I was like, that looks like a cool game. Yeah. And so Oh.

I'm sure I'm sure they paid for that product placement, but it got me to get the game. Yeah. It worked. Made them dollars. Yeah.

It's a cool game. I didn't know that there was a Monument Valley 2 out. So, yeah, I might have to check that out. Alex, what are your picks? Since we're picking games, I will pick Stellaris.

It's, what's the what's the genre or type of game? I think it's called, like, a grand strategy game by Paradox. They make, well, other grand strategy games. I think Europa Universalis is another, like, the most famous one. Stellaris is you pick it's like in space, basically.

It's like, you develop your empire. You just your your people just, made interstellar travel possible, and you expand and conquer the universe. Very interesting. So you could pick and customize your species and your government type however you want. There are bazillion of choices.

You could be, like, a full on democracy, with with everything's egalitarian, or you could could be, what is it called, gestalt consciousness or something like that, basically, hive mind. Like, any and any any variation in between. Has good graphics, actually. My my old laptop doesn't give me a lot of luxury to, like, enjoy the view, but, overall, it's a very good game. And it's it's not turn based per se, but you could stop the kind of playback, if you will, or or stop the time and then do all the pick the commands and do all the management and then unpause the game again.

Right. I think I just found it on Steam. Mhmm. Good deal. Well, I am going to pick, not a game.

So, I wanna remind people about iOS, remote conf. That's all I'm gonna say. I'm probably gonna try and hold it around the beginning of June to kind of replace your altconf slash WWDC experience. I know that Apple will be releasing stuff around then too, so I'm probably gonna try and not do it exactly on top of it. But, and then the other pick I have so a couple weeks ago and this is what really got me thinking about this.

I did a podcast interview with my friend Manny Bea, and, he he has a business where he summarizes books, and I've had him on JavaScript Jabber a couple of times, and we've talked about, like, mental toughness and, social skills and things like that. This time we talked about entrepreneurship and it it seemed pretty timely, you know, as people were starting to settle into or climb the walls because of being stuck at home. And, you know, and that's where it was like, well, you know, yeah, you know, if you if you got laid off or something or even if you didn't, you could start a side hustle. So I'm gonna put a link to the episode that we did, for that show and then you can check it out. I'm also going to, how do I put it?

I'm gonna share with you the discount code. Don't tell him. Don't tell him I did this. So if you go to devchat.tv/hustle and you use the coupon code hustle, I think it was like 30 or 40% off. I can't remember exactly how much it was off.

It was less than 30%. Don't blame me. I don't remember. But it was it was a lot more off than I thought it would be. So devchat.tv/hustle and then use the coupon code hustle and you'll get, like, a chunk of change off.

And, yeah, we just talked about running businesses and running a side hustle and all that stuff. And, you know, he runs a business and so do I, and so it was kind of interesting to see where that ended up. So, Yeah, just, just great stuff. And yeah, if you're looking for some options, I mean, if you're stuck without a job for 2 or 3 months, you're going to want something. And if it takes you a month to ramp it up, even if you're doing that part time looking for a job part time, you know, I just want to put people in the best situation they can be in.

And that way, when this does come back, you know, that then you can make a call as to how you want to move forward. So anyway, so, yeah, so check that episode out. And then like I said, devchat.tv/hustle. Alright. Well, good luck with your job search, Alex.

Thank you. And, hang in there, guys. And to our listener, we will be back next week. And if you wanna be a host on the show, you can send me a DM on Twitter, cmaxw.