Tejas Kumar joins JavaScript Jabber to discuss the advances in developer tooling and how it relates to ideas like the JAMstack to allow developers to move back and build larger applications with smaller teams. The discussion ranges over backend, frontend, and cloud technologies. 

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CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week on our panel, we have Amy Knight. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Hey, hey from Nashville. Long time no talk for everybody. It's good to be back. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: AJ O'Neill. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yo, yo, yo. I'm coming at you live from Thanksgiving in two days. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Dan Shapir. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Hey from Tel Aviv where it's summerish again. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I'm Charles Max Wood from Top End Devs. Go get your half off at topendevs.com on the pre-launch sale. This week we're talking to Tejas Kumar. Did I get that right? 

TEJAS_KUMAR: That's right. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Tejas, do you want to introduce yourself real quick? Let people know who you are and why we all like you. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: For sure. I don't know how you like me, but I'm Tejas. I have worked in tech my whole life more or less, and I currently work at Spotify, though I'm on the way out. I also speak at a lot of conferences and really enjoy the space of developer tooling and developer productivity. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Cool! Sounds like interesting stuff. And Amy was excited about that too, so we might get into that a little later. 

 

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CHARLES MAX_WOOD: You mentioned as we were getting ready to start the show that developer tooling's kind of coming along ways and that like Versal had raised a bunch of money and stuff like that. Do you want to expound on that a little bit and kind of set the stage for our conversation here? 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is like hot off the press. Just a few days ago, we heard that Netlify raised their series D funding where the companies valued at over a billion. And we just heard as well that Versal, I think today did the same thing. And with these companies, you know, going super unicorn, I think the future of tech looks a lot like a heavy focus on developer productivity and developer tooling. It's like putting jet packs on web developers in order to help them just kind of build and ship fast the stuff that they care about without having to deal with the infrastructure around it. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I think that it's also interesting, by the way, and worth mentioning, it happened yesterday or today as we're at the time of this recording, that Remix released their product as an open source. So that's also really an interesting story in the tooling space and you know they have Ken C. Dodds is a really big supporter of theirs. I think he might have actually joined them. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah, he's an employee now. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh cool. 

CAHRLES: Nice. Isn't that run by Ryan Florence and... Michael Jackson. Yeah, all three of those guys are from Utah originally. That's how I know them because they're all local or they were all local. I think all of them except Kent moved to California. So anyway. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Wow. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I was going to say speaking of those two...There is HashiCorp, which does Terraform for DevOps stuff. Also, they're going public. Their IPO is coming up. They were recently priced, but the date for their IPO isn't set yet. So yeah, this is big stuff. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Wow. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, it's really interesting. And you're seeing this pop up in other places too. Digital Ocean this summer actually sponsored to talk about their app platform, which looks a whole lot like, say, a Heroku or something, right? So if you have a little bit more involved back end. You don't want to screw with all the deployment stuff there. And this has been my experience, unless I have a Docker file that's messed up, but that's a different story. My apps just deploy, right? I just push to get off it goes and it's very happy making for me. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And by the way, Wix where I still work kind of like Tejas, I'm on the way out. Big story. Wix is also going really big into developer tooling. I don't know if we'll get the chance to talk about that probably after all the stuff that Tejas is gonna tell us about, but I might mention that towards the end. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, I think the thing that I like about that though is it's, here's all the stuff you want to do, and then if you don't want to do any of the rest of this stuff, you don't have to, right? 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah, yeah, and that's exactly it. Because I feel like a lot of companies that are starting with products, they don't really care about, like, should I choose AWS Aurora or should I choose RDS or DynamoDB? Are these decisions? are just way easier to deal with if someone else makes them for you and you focus on your product. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I don't know if I've been losing sleep over those decisions myself. No, I'm just kidding. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, it depends on whether or not it's core to your product, right? 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Right. 

AJ_O’NEAL: That's the thing. I think so I get a little frustrated because I think this stuff gets swept under the rug too much in terms of people. People take things that are relatively simple and say, well, it's no, it's way too complicated. You'll never be able to learn it here. Use the super complex, expensive tool instead. When in reality, if you just, if you learn a little bit about your stack and what you need, you can figure things out and you don't have to use the latest buzzwords. You can use stuff that's 30 years old. Well, I guess I don't know. It's not that much as 30 years old, but you can use regular databases. You get a lot done with standard tooling. That's always worked. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. But I think that it actually has to do to an extent with the lab with the shortage of experienced engineers. Like you're what you're saying, AJ more or less is get an experience engineer and do it for you and you know, a lot of these companies are saying like, but we can't, so we need to automate this somehow. Maybe have somebody else outside our company do it for us. 

AJ_O’NEAL: I agree. Automation is good. Like, I guess, I guess I look at it as more of a problem of documentation. It's, uh, it's, it's not very lucrative to explain how to do simple things. If you tell people, oh yeah, all you need to do to get a service started and running on digital ocean is just run this one command. That's not lucrative as it is to say, Hey, buy this course on AWS and use our autoscaler. But anyway, that's right on the wall. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah, but I mean, like I think the real pull that I see about these managed kind of infrastructure as a service companies like Versel and Netlify is that most startups that are VC backed have strict timelines, right? It's like investors wanna see those returns. And so if you spend like six months putting together some API, that's six months of a delay really when some tool like Hasura, for example, Hasura in my opinion is absolute magic, right? This thing like gives you, I don't know if you all have used it, but it's like a full-on like with full authentication, authorization, just a full CRUD API. And all you do is bring a database connection string. It's like point it at your database, boom, full API. And that used to take like, you know, six months or something for teams that is now instant with one person. So that's, that's kind of what I mean is. That then allows you to build something really fast and go to your investors and be like, look, look, look, we have a product. We can ship now. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I think we actually had the Sura's CTO on a previous episode or something like that. Is it GraphQL based or something like that, right? 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah, it started out being GraphQL based. It's REST as well now. So they expose REST and GraphQL. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Awesome. 

TEJAS_KUMAR:: If you had the CTO, you will know these people are really on it. So I can think of other examples. There's a great startup called Zeta an XATA that's literally just like, here you go, have a database and build whatever you need. You know, so a lot of these, they give power to the builder. And I think that's, that's quite profound because even when I started coding, like, or let's say when I started professionally working my first tech job, a lot of it was rolled your own. Like when I started, we would like upload, we would like deploying meant opening files, Zilla and like uploading by FTP or SFTP. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I'm laughing because I've been there. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah. And we've, we've come a long way from that. So the more this stuff evolves, the more I'm like, whoa, it wasn't that long ago. I was doing front page and FTP. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, you know, if your website is simple enough that you can just use our sync to copy it over, you've done a dang good job. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: WordPress, WordPress, still runs on FTP. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. I would say that if your website is simple enough, why are you even building it by hand anymore? You can either use the web or WordPress. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah, you can say that because you work at Wix.

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, I still work with Wix. I intend to remain a stock owner, so I have an incentive for their success. But yeah, but to be sure, I mean, look, I can do HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with the best of them. And still, if I need to set up a webpage unless I have a specific reason not to, why not use Wix? It's I don't have to deal with with the back end. I don't have to deal with security. I don't have to deal with updates. I don't need to deal with anything. And I build it with drag and drop. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Exactly. And that's, that's exactly what you're talking about, man, Dan, because I think that's where the powers is bringing as much like as much capability, as close to the user as possible that facilitates their apps level of complexity. So if you've got a static webpage, absolutely wix or Squarespace or whatever but then when you need a database, oh shit, what am I gonna do now? Can I swear on this podcast, by the way? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, you can swear. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Okay, good, I do that a lot. So you say, oh shit, I need a database, what do I do now? And I don't know if Wix gives you one, but that's why there's things like- 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Actually, it's relatively new. I kind of mentioned it prior to our conversation. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: It's called CORVID. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, it was called, yeah, exactly. We released this, we will, like I said, probably maybe if we have time, I'll talk about it a little bit later in the show, but we, I just mentioned that we released this programmatic tooling all around Wix and it does include a built in database that's like we host for you in the cloud and it had the original unfortunate name Corvid, which, you know, like two months later when the pandemic hit turned out not to be such a great name and we renamed it to Velo.

AJ_O’NEAL: I wonder why. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: To be fair, I didn't like the name Corvid either, even before the pandemic. But you know, I'm not in marketing, so who am I to say? But yeah, so now it's called Velo and it's, and one of its features is that you get a cloud-based database that you can then buy, you know, you can create dynamic pages and repeaters and whatnot that are data bound to collections that you store in there. All that sort of thing. So, so yeah, even, even a platform like Wix, which was intentionally originally intended for people who are totally not programmers is starting to branch out to developer tooling because like you said, it's a really hot market. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah. And I think really the, the, the thing I'm noticing the most, and I'm going to steal this idea from the CEO of Fasura, but he said there's a shift happening that's been happening for years where power to create stuff on, on the web is slowly going closer and closer to the people, like to the creators. Like it wasn't long ago, like back in the FTP days with WordPress, you know, you would have, you would buy some server somewhere in some data center that's super far away from you and essentially pay for and ship code all the way to that. But now you have things like AWS, which is bringing, you know, virtual machines closer to you. And you have tools like Asura that brings that data even closer to you. And things like Wix that is like literally like the front layer of your stuff.

AJ_O’NEAL: There is a concern there though. So for example, if you're running everything on a VPS, you're solid. Because you own the intellectual property to what you're creating. If you're using Azure functions, you don't own the intellectual property to what you're creating. Your code is useless. You are exclusively tied into a particular technology and you can't... If Amazon decides they don't like you, as has happened with numerous companies over time, then you just disappear and you have to rewrite your infrastructure. This is the thing where it may be, it's closer to you in some regards, but it's further away from you in other regards. It depends on where your intellectual property lies. If you just want to put up a blog with a marketing material, yeah, it's go at it. But if intellectual property is important, you know, there's, there's a trap here. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: That's such a good view. I totally agree. I like that you you're highlighting the whole spectrum of it because I've like, I'm myself, I'm prone to just look at, you know, the sexy new MacBook Pros and be like, shit, take my money without considering that's just an example, right? But I tend to get very excited about cool new shit without actually considering the whole picture. That's why I really appreciate you AJ highlighting that. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, but if you're talking about, you know, lock-in and being dependent on some other company, like, and you mentioned, just mentioned Apple Tejas. I mean, think about apps for the iPhone. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Exactly. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I mean, you're lock-in in the cloud is nothing compared to the world of front end native apps, where either Google or Apple more so can just kill you. If they decide that they come up with a competing product, six months in advance, they throw you out of their app store. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah, this happened with the new Apple Watch and the swipe keyboard for sure. Like someone literally built that keyboard and they just took it off the app store. In the new keynote, they were like, Oh, check it out, we have a built in swipe keyboard that used to be an app before. So yeah, I see that. But I think if, you know, as you mentioned, Ajay, if intellectual property is important, I think it ought to be considered to start kind of from day one, going at it from a multi-cloud perspective using something like Terraform, as Amy mentioned, where it doesn't really matter where your stuff deployed. So that if that happens, if AWS is like, we hate you, then you've still got code that works on Google Cloud or Azure or similar. And I mean, if it's really important, I'm not suggesting having like a virtual machine, like not even a virtual machine, like a physical server and a data center is bad or anything. It's just a comment on the accessibility of everything. Shit, when I was like 12, starting out in code, man, if we had what we had today, I would have created like three, four startups by now. One of them might be a unicorn. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, and I think, I think what you're saying, that's really what we're, or at least is the appeal, right? Is that I don't have to go manage the database or the database engine. I don't have to go manage the hosting. I don't have to run updates on my server, right. Which is a headache. And, you know, I have a whole bunch of VPS is in digital ocean. And if I forget to run the updates, I mean, they just sit there. I had one server that actually got hacked into cause I hadn't been running updates because you know, I'm busy. I'm doing other stuff. And so, you know, 

AJ_O’NEAL: they were WordPress instance. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yes. But they were, they were running a Bitcoin miner. But, but the thing is, is. You can expose yourself to all kinds of things just by not having updated packages on there. And if they figure out that that's what you're running, MySQL or WordPress or whatever. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I have to say, I have to say in that regard that, and again, it might have to do with the fact that I still have the Wix mindset, but a lot of people like tout the fact that they are self-hosted as this kind of big advantage or an advantage of whatever solution that they're using. And I'm thinking, you know, with all the security issues and like, I literally see, there's this GoDaddy thing now that turns out that all the, more or less, like, I wouldn't say all because I don't want to say something that isn't correct, but a whole lot of WordPress site hosted on GoDaddy were effectively open to everybody. You could just log, connect and do whatever. And so this whole concept of I'm self hosting. I just, I really don't necessarily see the appeal to be honest. From a security standpoint, from an uptime standpoint, and from a performance standpoint, maybe if you're like the biggest performance expert in the world, self-hosting, you'll get better performance. But otherwise you're likely to get much worse performance if you're self-hosted than if it's a platform that's been optimized by people who are like experts in this particular area.

AJ_O’NEAL: I think that depends on a matter of scale, because you're mixing apples and oranges. The people that are running outdated versions of WordPress and the people that are fine tuning every aspect of their performance are in such separate camps that putting them in the same sentences is deceptive, although that's not necessarily the intention. But I've run stuff on Digital Ocean for years and Digital Ocean has automatic migration between instances. You won't find that with Amazon. Amazon requires that everything be ephemeral. If you leave an instance running, it will eventually fail and you'll get an email that it failed and you have to log in and do manual steps. Digital Ocean, if an instance fails, it's migrated seamlessly, everything comes back up. You don't even know that it failed other than you got an email. And I don't manage my Digital Ocean instances with all the security updates and patches all the time because I just run node. I don't run tons and tons of services. I follow the same methodologies that are generally accepted. Do you want to keep things small and simple and not run tons of things and definitely don't run software that you know? Like for example WordPress is the number it's the number one root kid of the internet and that's well known. That's not it's not a surprise Oh, I forgot to update WordPress. I got hacked You know that you know going in when you choose WordPress that you are going to get hacked unless you are and so for something like WordPress. Yeah, I would recommend you go manage because you know going in there's a burden of security on that. Node has had, you know, the greatest security vulnerability node has had was that it used the same query parsing engine that Ruby used and there was a denial of service regex vulnerability. So it's simpler. If you keep things simple and within the grasp of, of your understanding, then I just, I just, I hear so many people that think that, for example, that their static website is insecure. Like they don't because there's so much talk about security that it's become it's become the opposite it used to be we never talked about security and people didn't know there were security issues. Now we talk about security so much that people think that a static website is vulnerable. I mean, 

TEJAS_KUMAR: it can be right like with cross sites, cryptic. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. And it turns out, turns out by the way, that the biggest security vulnerability with static sites is view source because people put stuff in their HTML that they shouldn't like passwords 

AJ_O’NEAL: hack the HTML for the SS, the social security numbers. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Oh, should I take the API keys out of my JavaScript? 

AJ_O’NEAL: No, so no, that's that's valid, but using a managed service doesn't solve those problems for you. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So I just sometimes they have built checks built in that'll tell you. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Oh yeah, yeah, I love that GitHub that they can get with the keys. Oh, that is so awesome. I read their blog article on it. Totally recommend doing that. So awesome. And you can register your own keys to if you have a service anyway.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I think the trade-off though here, what we're talking about is the time and effort you're willing to put in in order to get the performance and the, you know, the things that Dan's talking about, the performance, the security, those things versus doing it yourself. Where I'm trying to run all this stuff on my own and I want the site to get deployed and I, it takes a lot of that off of my plate. And so I think they're both valid options. It really just depends on what you want to trade for. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, I think you have to know enough about the subject matter to know which is better because DigitalOcean is gonna run your ish just fine. You don't need to, I don't, the performance tuning that you need to do, so say Wix, for example, Wix does the performance tuning of the semi-static site, right, the semi-static site with all the widgets in it. Wix does the performance tuning on that. So if you're talking about performance tuning of building your own site versus using Wix, I agree. You're gonna get better performance out of Wix than maybe out of creating a React app for a generic scrollable content page with a content form? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: All I can say is that there was this comparison. Google has made the Core Web Vitals data for all the various sites that they look at public, and you can actually segment it by the tools you use to build them. And so they were looking at various e-commerce platforms, some of which are self-hosted, like WooCommerce or Magento, and some of them are services like Shopify or Wix or Squarespace. And it turns out that the hosted services beat on average. If you look at like the, you know, I'm not looking at individual websites. I'm looking at the segment as a whole. So hosted services beat the self-hosted services in terms of performance hands down, like 50% faster or more accurately, the probability of having good core web vitals with a self-hosted service versus a hosted service. The hostess service is probably twice as likely to have good core vitals. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: I mean, this is why you don't host. This is why you don't roll your own crypto as well. This is you're not going to do it as good as the giants. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, that's something I also think is people get to the point where they don't realize that it's okay to use the crypto package. When they say don't roll your own crypto, it means don't invent a new algorithm or try to change an existing algorithm. So don't go into the SHA256.js file and start changing how it works to obscure it. Now, Widevine actually does this, but that's Google and the consortium of people. They actually change the way that RSA works so that it's more difficult to reverse engineer the video encryption on things like Netflix. But with a few rare exceptions, you don't go in and change the algorithm. Should you use RSA? Heck yeah. Should you use SHA? Heck yeah. But these crypto algorithms, they exist, they've been vetted. The algorithms have been vetted and then sometimes the libraries have been well vetted. And so you can use things together, but I can see Dodds switched from using, I don't know if it was Auth0 or what service he switched from using, but he switched from using that to rolling his own and ate his words on his previous year's tweet of don't roll your own off. And they did a great example of why in his case, it made sense. Now I'm going to say specifically for that. I don't think that makes sense for most people, but I just I'm just, I want to provide the counter because I think people are told this is too complicated for you. You'll never learn it. It'll take you six months to do anything. And I think that this is a little bit deceptive in that if you take the time to learn the pieces that are important to you, you'll find out what you can save time on and what will cost you more time in the long run. And it's not an automatic, Oh, because a service exists, therefore use it. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah, for sure. But I mean, that's the whole point, right? Like if you're starting a company and you want to show some stuff quickly, you don't have the time to learn those things and so on. So like, 

AJ_O’NEAL: but you have to learn them anyway. You mentioned Terraform, for example, what's going to take longer to learn a bash script that can run your node application and push it to the two API endpoints that you need at DigitalOcean or to learn all of the Terraform ecosystem. So there's a cost. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: That's a big depends. It depends on the time. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Right, right, it is. It is because the Terraform might be a lot faster and a lot better, or it might be better to look at the documentation page for DigitalOcean and say, okay, here's the two end points, Annie. You got an updated DNS record, got to start an instance. Boom, we're good. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: I want to hear what Amy was going to say actually, like more about why it's a depends. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I mean, that's just a massive depends because very quickly you'll want a tool like that. I mean, in AJ's point, yes, if it's just something like super quick that, you know, it's just like your personal website and you want to get some stuff up, sure. But just there's so many things there, like the cost to, you want to have everything codified so you know how exactly things are set. So if you want to make changes, just the dependencies of trying it. As things start to depend on each other, you can track those in Terraform and I could go on and on. But yes, as AJ is saying, if it's something super quick, then of course. But that said, when you're learning Terraform too, you're not really learning Terraform per se. It's a tool that you could probably learn in, I don't know, a day you're more learning the infrastructure of what you're trying to stand up. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Right. Yeah, but the thing is, is that again, back to that idea, you've got Terraform, you've got Ansible, you've got, I mean, I could name a dozen of them that do the same sorts of things, and then you can turn around and you can build the Docker on your own machine and deploy it to any number of cloud services. And so back to our overarching point there are all kinds of tools that people are investing in. I mean, Docker's a company. It's not just a, oh, that's a neat tool that I can run on my machine. And then I don't have the works on my machine kind of thing. And you can use Terraform to get into your Docker container, right. And do stuff in it, right. I mean, that's how you used to just deploy discourse, the forum software, right. In fact, I think you still do it. I think it uses Chef or something, but the same idea, right. And so when you run the script to install it, it installs Docker and then pulls down a Docker image and does its thing. And so, I mean, to whatever level you wanna take this, there's all kinds of great stuff. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: But I mean, I just, so the appeal, and I hear the inherent like value of learning these things for reals and building your own. But like, dude, like I'm gonna season up, cause I just quit Spotify. And as you can imagine, like it's a hot industry, right? So like the whole freaking world is in my Twitter DMs. Like I got millions of these founders of products and startups like, hey, I want you to have, I wanted to have you, hey, can you join our team and so on. And it's nuts, man. Like everybody's starting a company and I kind of feel like I'm missing out now. Cause I feel like, oh shit, where's my company? I want to have a unicorn. I want to start a company. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: By the way, I don't think it's about the tech. I think it's about the cheap money. I have to say, 

TEJAS_KUMAR: I want to hear more about that in a second. I really do. But just to finish this thought. So because everyone's starting a company, I tweeted earlier today that I said, and it's nothing new, really just a cliche. Like you, you, you miss all of the shots you don't take. And I feel like when it's so easy to deploy stuff, not just static sites anymore, but like functions as a service, um, even you get like databases as a service and so on, I feel like there's a lot of people taking a lot more shots just because they can just because I can deploy some random shit to her cell and forget about it. And six months later, I don't know what they're garbage collection policies, but I don't have to worry about it. So I can start a company, see if it's successful. And if it starts to get traction, then maybe learn how to do the security and the provisioning myself and invest more there after I've proven the concept. But, but, you know, the, the way to go from nothing to MVP is kind of nuts these days. But Dan, what were you saying about cheap money?

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, actually, I want to touch on something that you said right now, which is you said that I'll start with something that works really quickly and then think about how to maybe switch it up later on. And I'm arguing that you'll probably end up never switching it up until you're absolutely forced to because you'll probably be busy doing other things. Yeah. Marketing sales or hire recruiting, because that turns out that that's like the hardest thing right now. And, and yeah but what I was starting to say before is, yeah, all this tech is definitely making a difference. I think that the cloud has made it amazing, so much easier to bootstrap a business these days. You don't have to buy physical servers. You don't have to buy software. And it's kind of like, instead of buying a generator, you can just hook up your equipment to the electric company and start getting the juice. But I think that what we are seeing now in terms of this explosion that you're talking about has to do with the fact that there's so much money flooding the economy. I was giving the example before that two years ago in Israel there were no unicorns, zero. When I joined Wix, Wix was already a public company and was valued at under a billion dollars. Okay? And now there are more than 20 unicorns in Israel. There are 20 more than 20 companies in Israel that are worth more than a billion dollars and they're still private I'm talking about private companies companies that have not yet gone public 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: That's awesome 

DAN_SHAPPIR: salaries are going like through the roof I mean there are people are basically saying that if you haven't switched jobs in the last 12 to 18 months, then you're probably underpaid 

AJ_O’NEAL: And just so people know it is okay to speak with your employer about that you don't have to change jobs. You can work. It's probably easier. It's less stressful. You don't have to have that confrontational conversation, but you know, if you're working in a good place, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh, oh, for sure. But, uh, you tell me the last time that you heard about somebody talking with their employer and without switching position, getting a 50% raise. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. That's what I was thinking, Dan. That's, that's exactly what I was thinking. I've had those conversations with my employer where it's like, hey, I'm pretty sure I'm worth this on the market. And they're not interested until I'm walking out the door and then they still won't match the offer. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah, dude. My first job, man, like my first professional, well, second, I would say first job in Germany, second job ever. Like after two years, bro, I appreciated so much in value. And I had, I had exactly that conversation with my boss and he laughed in my face. Literally. He was like, what? No way. You, nah, you're not worth that. Come on. Come on, that's way too much of a jump. We could do like, I don't know, 5K more, which 5K more a year after taxes is kind of the same in Europe, at least in Germany. We pay like 42% tax here. 

AJ_O’NEAL: That's what we pay here too about. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And yeah, same here. Almost. Same here in Israel. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, the top tax bracket. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah, and so I was able to leave that job and move to the next one for a significantly higher amount. We're talking like 30% more or something. And as you said, Charles, they just don't match what the market matches. 

 

Hey folks, this is Charles Maxwood from Top End Devs. And lately I've been working on actually building out Top End Devs. If you're interested, you can go to topendevs.com slash podcast, and you can actually hear a little bit more about my story about why I'm doing what I'm doing with Top End Devs, why I changed it from devchat.tv to Top End Devs. But what I really want to get into is that I have decided that I'm going to build the platform that I always wished I had with devchat.tv and I renamed it to Top End Devs because I want to give you the resources that are gonna help you to build the career that you want. So whether you wanna be an influencer in tech, whether you want to go and just max out your salary and then go live a lifestyle with your family, your friends, or just traveling the world or whatever, I wanna give you the resources that are gonna help you do that. We're gonna have career and leadership resources in there and we're gonna be giving you content on a regular basis to help you level up and max out your career. So go check it out at topendevs.com. If you sign up before my birthday, that's December 14th. If you sign up before my birthday, you can get 50% off the lifetime of your subscription. Once again, that's topendevs.com. 

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, to be fair, I've seen it work out a couple of different ways. So what sometimes it's, yeah, it's well, we just don't think you're worth that. Right. And so they won't pay you. But more often than not, what I typically will see happen is somebody will go to their boss and they'll say, hey, look, I'm worth 50% more on the market. I'm gonna go look. And the boss will say, okay, good luck, right? Because they know that if they go try and sell it up the chain, it's not gonna fly, right? Because the company does, our company does not give out raises of that magnitude. Okay, fine, I'm gonna take all my expertise in your systems and I'm gonna take it somewhere else where it's not gonna do them any good, but I'm not doing you any good anymore either. It's insane. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, to be fair, it's difficult for a company to all of a sudden start paying like all of its employees 50% more. Yeah, it's tough. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I have a story to tell, but I'm not going to tell. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: I'll just add here that that's partially. So I need to say here that that's not why I'm leaving Spotify. Like it's not. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: No, that's, that's fair. I don't think anyone implied that, but that's fair.

TEJAS_KUMAR: To say extra explicit. Yeah. But, um, I, I do think though, this, this notion of like taking what you said, Charles, I wanted to comment on that because you said, you know, if a company is not willing to see how much you've grown and pay you what the market wants to pay you, then I'm just going to take my expertise in your systems and take that somewhere else is what you said. That is so valuable. The more and more we see things like Vercellen open source generally dominate the market because like, man, 15 years ago, bro, like you. You were working in mostly like closed source teams where their systems did overlap a whole lot. I can tell you like before Kubernetes was a standard, a lot of bigger companies were kind of rolling their own Kubernetes, right? And so yes, we had some type of orchestrator, but, but, and so you can maybe take bits and pieces from one company to the next. But now you can full on like use Kubernetes at scale at Google and then leave and go to somewhere else that uses it because there's these open standards, which is, I think that makes the market hotter.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: In some ways it does. One other thing I want to point out though, is that like, I just quit a job at Morgan Stanley. I'm not going to comment on why, 

TEJAS_KUMAR: but this is, this is the podcast of people who have quit jobs. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: It sounds like, yeah, it's, it's real interesting about this. But anyway, the point is, is that, yeah, I mean, a lot of the stuff and I told them this, right? I'm like, look, I'm a talented pair of hands. I can write rails better than, you know, a lot of other people, but you can replace me, right? You can find somebody else that can write rails as well as I can. But I'm walking out the door with a year's worth of domain knowledge on how, what these systems do, how they work, how they're all put together, right? And with some of this kind of gets democratized to the web. Yeah. Some of that expertise isn't applicable, but the fact that I understand, Hey, this is the data we collect. This is what it means. This is how we scrub it. This is how we put it into reports. This is how we do all this other stuff. It doesn't do my next employer any good, right? That stuff, you're just, it doesn't, and I made this point because somebody else left who had been working on this project for like seven years. Right? And I said, I can't believe you let him leave, right? Because what he knew in the context he had was super valuable to them. But- 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, for sure. And I totally agree with everything that you're saying. I always like to joke that when people ask me if I'm worried that, you know, with code being essentially visible on the web that somebody would steal my code. And I always like to say if they steal my code, good luck to them trying to figure out what it actually does and how it works. So yeah, there's a ton of expertise that has to do with being familiar with a particular code base. But I definitely do agree with Tejas that there's so much commonality these days. We all use visual code, we all use GitHub, we all use... 

AJ_O’NEAL: You forgot them, we all use VEM.

DAN_SHAPPIR: You use Vim, the cool kids use Vim. Where was I? 

AJ_O’NEAL: Don't ever. When have I ever been accused of being a cool kid? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: When you said you used Vim. 

AJ_O’NEAL: No. No one's ever accused me of being a cool kid. The cool kids are using BS code. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I think I opened Vim a while back and the only reason it's still running is that I can't figure out how to close it. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Ah, we got a dev joke. 

AJ_O’NEAL: The old joke, the old joke. You couldn't read the page that pops up when you opened it that said, here's how to quit them. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: It's okay. HH just switch modes and you won't be a cool kid anymore. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: To be fair, to be fair. I was using VI way back in like the nineties before it was cool. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So before Tejas was born. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. Well, you said that I didn't, but getting back to my point, there is so much commonality with tools like you mentioned, Kubernetes and Terraform, and everybody's using the same two or three cloud providers. And so wherever you go, you definitely do get a jumpstart for a lot of the stuff that whatever company is using. And of course, I forgot to mention React. It's React everywhere. If you know React, there are a million companies where you could work and use React. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, that's always been a thing with, well, I know Rails or I know Express or I know React or I know Angular, right? Is you walk into another Angular project and they're a lot of times organized the same way. They use the same plugins. They kind of do things in the same way. And so that's always been a thing. But now we're seeing it in our tooling. At the same time, I think there are instances where you may not want to do that, but for the most part, I agree. The reason is because if I have a specific problem to solve and you have the specialty to solve it the right way or in a particularly powerful way, you know, so that I don't have issues with it or whatever, you're more valuable to me than the generalist. The flip side is, is that especially for people who are kind of coming up into the programming community. So if you're newer, you're a junior or mid you need to round out some of those generalist skills. And the reason is, is because you're probably looking for a job and not necessarily the best job you can get. And so 

DAN_SHAPPIR: basically you're saying, you're saying start out as a generalist and then you'll know what to focus on. Is that what you're kind of saying? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Basically. And then at the end of the day, right. Cause then, then you're in a position like Tejas and somebody's going to go, Oh, you really get this particular tool or technology or problem that we need to have mastery on. And then because you're in a more limited market, right? There are only so many people who can do it, you may be the only one they can find. And so they'll pay you what that skill is actually worth instead of paying you a salary that the programming generalist skill is kind of worth. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: But I want to touch on Tejas, I just wanted to say one thing though, that the speciality that you mentioned, that is the ability to being kind of a quote unquote public figure, speaking at conferences, writing articles and whatnot, that's especially valuable these days. Because while money is relatively cheap these days, it used to be that for startups, the biggest challenge was raising funds. And now they're in a situation where in a lot of cases, money is literally thrown at them. Whereas recruiting the talent has become a lot more challenging than it ever has been. And you are an attractive figure in that context. You know, if I hear that you joined company X, I'm saying, hey, that's an interesting company. That's a cool company. Tejas works there. I know about Tejas. I know the stuff he does. I want to work there as well. Whomever hires you I bet that they market the shit out of it the fact that you joined them 

AJ_O’NEAL: I'm gonna cut y'all off here. Oh, Amy. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: That's Contrary thought here. So I would say depending on the person to me. It's a little bit of a red flag I don't want to work on a team with somebody who is speaking a ton because I see them as somebody who's not gonna be as dependable as somebody who kind of flies under the radar at work Because they're always taking time off to do those kinds of things. So it It's a little bit, I don't know. There's a catch-22 there. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Right. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Can I add to your point here real quick though? Because I've seen it also work where places that are having a really hard time finding qualified people, if they look at the podcasters, bloggers, YouTubers, speakers, and they go and they watch some of their content, they pretty readily can tell that you're capable. And so- That's true. I mean, it's all a trade off, right? Because yeah, what Amy is saying is absolutely realistically the case, right? You're not around as much because you're traveling. But on the other end, if they can't find anybody, or the last few people they've hired haven't been qualified enough to get the job done, then it's, well, Tejas is low risk because I've seen his talks, he really understands it. And so I can go and I can pick him up. And so I can see them doing that. And then yeah, coming out and touting. Hey, look, this guy that you've seen at the conferences that is clearly an expert because you see him at the conferences. Well, but it's easy to frame you that way. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Expertise is a function of perception in the category we're talking about right now. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: So if I circle us back to where I think it more or less got off, I think that the point that we were talking about was the whole concept of being a generalist versus being a specialist. And if you do specialize, then specialize in what? And you, Tej, just brought up the possibility of specializing, as it were, at speaking in conferences and being more of a public figure. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Well, it depends, right? It depends on what you're into and what your key strengths are. For me, like, I just, I tend to be good at it. But I think to your point, Dan, what I would say is specialize. I tend to see a lot of value, and not just me. Companies have paid huge amounts of money for it. I don't know how else to say it other than je ne sais quoi, right? This French phrase that means I don't know what it is. It's something, but like a subjective quality that clearly differentiates a specialist from the general. And like it's so hard to put a, to put a finger on this because like there's a ton of people who could speak at conferences, but there's no one who speaks at conferences like me. What does that mean? I have no idea. Right? It's the same as why there's really not that much of a competitive market for like standup comedy. If you think about it, like Kevin Hart, and Chris Rock and Aziz Ansari and Trevor Noah. Like they all are quite successful and they're not really at each other's throats because each of them does the special thing in like different ways. And so if you ask people what's the difference, they all tell jokes. It's, oh, I don't know, there's something about them. This is also, you see this in like everybody says there's a certain feel of Apple products and Apple has this kind of reputation. But you ask them, okay, how is this different from like an identical, like a Microsoft Surface or something. And oh, I don't know, it just feels, there's something about it, it just feels right. So I think that is the specialist's edge in a generalist world is finding the je ne sais quoi that you enjoy, if that makes sense. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Look, speaking at conferences is one form of specialization and something that I think all of us here do, to a greater extent than most, I think also, if you're ahead of all of us in that regard.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I think so. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Although to be fair, you know, we were talking about traveling and the impact that that can have on your availability at work. And I'm thinking like, who's traveling during these times? I want to be traveling. I can't. That will actually be one of my picks. But a point that I made before was that the advantage of hiring somebody who specializes in public appearances and who is a himself a public or herself a public figure is that it raises the appeal of for other developers of working at that company. I heard person X at conference, he seems very knowledgeable and you tend to like people like that and you want to be around them and work with them. And I said, you know, at the beginning of our conversation that money is much easier to get than it ever has been for startups, but acquiring talent has become really, really difficult. And therefore, if you can hire somebody who will attract more talent to your company, then that in and of itself has a lot of value. That being said, that's not the only form of specialization that you can take in order to become attractive to a company. For example, I've specialized in web performance. And that's a fairly attractive area for having expertise in these times. You can specialize in other things, obviously. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I was going to add something here, too, really quickly. I'm seeing more and more DevOps teams. If people want to take their specialization and just being a developer and joining a DevOps team, that's kind of what I did. And there's a huge need for that because I would say majority of the people in DevOps have more of a systems engineering background. And so a lot of DevOps teams are like really hungry for this kind of stuff. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Wasn't DevOps kind of invented so that developers could do their own ops and all of a sudden we have people specializing in DevOps? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: It's more an approach of doing it together. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. We did an episode about some of this on Adventures in DevOps. Yeah, and it was to dev or to DevOps, right? I mean, then we had a big conversation about it. Yeah, it's definitely an interesting place to go to. And yeah, if you're gonna do the public stuff, it doesn't have to be speaking, right? It can be blogging, it can be podcasting, it can be YouTube, it can be TikTok, it can be wherever people are gonna congregate and consume your stuff, you know, Instagram stories. I mean, if that works out for you. I mean, I don't know how realistic some of those are, but 

TEJAS_KUMAR: or you could even be open source work. Like that's, I know so many people who got hired just because they opened a pull request against some open source project. Next thing you know, they, yeah. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. But what, what it all boils down to, so you have your je ne sais quoi, but the je ne sais quoi that you put out there effectively drives people to trust you. Right. And that's what they're really after is they're, they're after a more sure bet. Right. They want to be able to trust you to get the stuff done. They want to trust you to work when you are supposed to work. And so that's the kind of thing that we're really looking at here and what makes the difference and kind of taking this full circle back to the tools and things, right? Is if they see you using some of the common tools that look a lot like the tools that they're using, that's another form of that trust, right? Where it's, Hey, you know, in my podcast, I talk about Lambda functions and Lambda functions look a whole lot like Azure functions and look a whole lot like these others, right? The APIs aren't identical, but the concepts are pretty close. And so I know that I can pull you in and you can plug into my microservices architecture and make stuff work. Right. Even if you're not using the exact same cloud technology that I am. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: And that's another form of trust. And so what we're back to here is yeah, it allows you to go deep. You don't have to be a database specialist or a deployment specialist or an infrastructure specialist. You can be a JavaScript specialist and you can still deploy your stuff. You can still put it out there where people can see it. You can still get the help that you need from some of the other tooling that exists in VS code or what have you. And at the end of the day, you're productive. You're getting the stuff done that you need to do. Anyway, I think it's really interesting where this is all kind of...

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah, for sure. We've gone from these companies have being worth a lot of money to developer tooling to setting a developer's career up for success via specialization for sure. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Now I need to take off in like 10 minutes, so I'm going to push us toward picks. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Picks? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. Yeah, we didn't explain that aspect of our show to Tejas in advance. So you just hear what we do and then you try to do the same. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Awesome. Sounds good.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. But anyway, this has been really, really fascinating. I'd love to see more discussion of it in comments on the podcast episode. So yeah, 

TEJAS_KUMAR: when is that going up? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: It'll be several weeks. I think we're about a month ahead. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And by the way, we definitely will want to hear who will be the lucky company that ends up hiring you. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Or alternatively, if you do go and raise cash and start your own thing or things.

TEJAS_KUMAR: Well, see, I don't even know. I need to raise cash to start my own thing because Bercel and Netlify just make it so approachable. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Right. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, and that's, that's the other discussion is you raise cash because you can, not because you need it. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Cause money's cheap. Right. Yeah. That's, that's the thing that I'm seeing. So many companies start up with like a hundred people who don't have any investment, but it's just like bootstrapped and they're just doing their own thing. And it's like a small family type business. And I'm into that. I'm more into that than like VC backed stuff.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah.

TEJAS_KUMAR: But yeah, we'll see. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: That's a whole other set of trade-offs, right? 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Yeah. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: And some of them work for you and some of them don't depending on what you're doing, but let's go ahead and do picks. 

 

Hi, this is Charles Maxwood from Top End Devs. And lately I've been coaching some people on starting some podcasts and in some cases, just taking their career to the next level, you know, whether you're beginner going to intermediate and immediate going to advanced, whether you're trying to get noticed in the community or go freelance. I've been helping these folks figure out how to get in front of people, how to build relationships and how to build their careers and max out and just go to the next level. So if you're interested in talking to me and having me help you go to the next level, go to topendevs.com slash coaching. I will give you a one hour free session where we can figure out what you're trying to do, where you're trying to go and figure out what the next steps are. And then from there we can figure out how to get you to the place you want to go. So once again, that's topendevs.com slash coaching. 

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I'm gonna make AJ go first. 

AJ_O’NEAL: All right, I'll do it. I will do it. Okay. Take me. So I'm gonna pick just a couple of blog articles here. I think most of them in books, most of them I've picked before, but they're all relevant to the discussion that we've had today. So the first one is why it's okay to over-engineer your blog, which I think is a great blog post that goes counter to most of my arguments about why you should you know, take it to the hilt on, on doing the Kubernetes and everything. Uh, mostly because you get experience and you get that, that generalization that we were talking about a little earlier. Another one is 12 steps to better code by Joel. And I always forget it's Spursky. Is that how we say it? That he's the stack overflow. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Joel Spolsky. Spolsky. Yep. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: No. 

AJ_O’NEAL: No, no, that is that's the other one. Coding Horror is, oh gosh, now I'm blanking on his name. Normally I'd have it. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: That's all good. 

AJ_O’NEAL: But anyway, yeah. So I think he was more on the business end. Yeah, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. Joel Spolsky, I think, is more on the business end. He's more about process and procedure. And Jeff Atwood is more in the bits. But either way, they just have such excellent blog articles, both of them. But 12 Steps to Better Code is a good one that I'm going to point out. And then there's a book. So we. We, one of the things that's a little bit, I think confusing is we, we talk as though it's a one size fits all, but, but it's not because if you're starting a business with less than a hundred people versus if you're venture backed versus, you know, if your plan is to sell and the intellectual property is not important because you're just going to sell anyway, you know, all these things make a difference. So if you are somebody that's starting your own project and you think you might want to make a business out of it. Nail It Then Scale It is one of the best books out there to help you view the perspective of when is it premature optimization to throw Kubernetes at a problem. They don't talk about this stuff, but they talk about the concepts. When is it premature automation? When are you wasting time trying to be cool versus doing what you need to do? 

TEJAS_KUMAR: That's an awesome time. That's an awesome

AJ_O’NEAL: The Phoenix Project is a story about DevOps. And I think mostly we, I would say we haven't been talking about developer tooling today as much as we've been talking about DevOps and the Phoenix Project is an excellent, if you want to get into management at any point, this is a book that you must read if you're gonna, yeah. But it's entertaining as well. It's told as a story, but it's the story of every place you've ever worked at as they figure out how to get their DevOps together. And then after that, it's just my, well, mostly normal stuff, but I am going to put special emphasis on web install.dev because that is for developer tools. That is there. We've got cheat sheets on how to do things the simplest, dumbest way possible so that you can use cool tools that well, sorry, I shouldn't use the word cool because tools that are really, really useful and help you to be effective and efficient, such as rip, grab, which is a modern replacement for grab servicemen, which allows you to turn system de-configuration into a simple one line copy and paste so that you don't have to learn all the intricate details of every option, which is perhaps what might deter you from using simple services like DigitalOcean to host on. The best way to install Node, Golang, all conflict free installs, all stuff that's just guaranteed to work without sudo, without messing up your system, et cetera, and then the rest is just my normal stuff. Createsacrossmanship.com. Feel free to drop a comment there if you've got a great blog article or video or something. I'm always adding to that list and then you can follow me on the live streams on the Twitch's, the YouTube's, the Twitter's, all the things. So I've got that there. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. Dan, what are your picks? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, as I mentioned several times throughout this podcast, I'm leaving Wix and so I wanted to pick Wix. I've spent seven and a half years there. I think the best years of my career. It's an awesome place to be at. A great company, great products, great technology, but most of all, great people. I had a wonderful time working there, and I'm leaving not because I'm dissatisfied with it, but because I'm just looking for the next adventure, as it were. And maybe I'll share what it is on our next show. And so that would be my first pick. And we were supposed to kind of talk about tooling. I kind of mentioned that Wix does have developer tooling. I know that a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, like don't consider Wix to be something that they might actually be using as developers. And, you know, maybe we should bring somebody over from Wix now that I'll no longer be there to talk about some of the stuff that's being done there because I think that that should definitely, that's the point of view that should definitely change. So that would be my first pick. My second pick also kind of has to do with Wix and it's an article that I just published on Smashing Magazine. So it's not only about Wix, it's also about me, because I wrote this article. It's a case study of the work that we've done at Wix to improve the performance of websites hosted on our platform. Just to give an example of what I mean in terms of improving performance, about a year and a half ago, only 4% of websites hosted on the Wix platform had good core web vitals, and now it's something like 35%. And so it's like, what, 750% higher, something like that. So it's quite an improvement and it's ongoing. So I'm leaving Wix with a significant sense of achievement having contributed to that. And I think it's a useful article, also includes a lot of useful suggestions, I think, about building a culture that supports performance at other organizations. So I think it's actually a nice article. So please read it and that would be my pick. And that's it. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Great. Amy, what are your picks? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I'm gonna go try to go fast here since we have four minutes. I am gonna pick an article called A Gentle Introduction to GPUs and Her Workings. I thought it was pretty good. That's it for me. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Nice. I'm gonna throw out a few picks of my own. Topendevs.com. We are doing our pre-launch sale up through my birthday. So that's December 14th.

DAN_SHAPPIR: Which is also my wife's birthday 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: nice. It's always funny to see how that happens and Anyway, so you can sign up what we're looking for is we're gonna be putting out videos Basically, the idea is is to learn something new every day. And so we're gonna be putting out content I'm working on content around like Visual Studio Code I want to talk to AJ about some of his Beyond Boot Camp stuff and see if we can work some of that in talk to some other folks just to kind of get some of the general tools that people could learn better. But the other thing is, is then have something like one or two video series about JavaScript so you can watch a video or two there every week or go pick up something else or refer you to other resources that may help you out. And then we're building a community around it to help encourage each other and keep going and allow you to meet new people as well because I feel like that's another big piece of it. So go check it out topendevs.com. I need to just put together a video and just explain what we're looking at, putting together there. But anyway, yeah, check that out. Board game pick. I'm going to pick Scythe. It is a super cool game. Basically you have a board in front of you and you move the worker from one space to another and you kind of unlock different abilities on your board and you get points for how you do it. And it's, it's a super fun game. I mean it is just a worker production game as opposed to some of the like building games and other games that are out there. But yeah, really, really enjoying that. I do appreciate a lot of my coworkers. I just left Morgan Stanley. And so I want to shout out to them because they are awesome, including the ones that left before I did. And then I had something else, but I can't remember what it is. So I am going to punt and let Tejas throw out some picks. 

TEJAS_KUMAR: For sure. It's just three picks really. The first one is, and I'm gonna pick like lesser known things because I feel like everybody knows Versal and so on. But since the topic was kind of sort of developer tooling, three picks, lesser known things. Number one, Zeta or Zata, I'm not entirely sure, but xata.io wants to be this like Jamstack database as a service kind of powerhouse for developers. It's pretty cool. I don't know if y'all remember GraphQL, but it's like that, but I don't think they have GraphQL API, but it's like, you know, it's a, here's a database. Now connect your WordPress and do everything. So it's, I mean WordPress. Okay. Bad example, but you get the idea. Number two is Hasura, which I've already mentioned, I want to pick it as the API builder of choice because it has never failed me giving me a full on API with zero effort. So huge shout out there. And the third one unrelated to code really, but since you did the board game, I'm gonna hit you up with a PS five game. Death loop is the best video game I've played to date. I can recommend that for my PS five people out there. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Cool. All right, Tejas, if people want to connect with you online, ask you questions about this, follow up on the conversation. I'm assuming you're on like Twitter and 

TEJAS_KUMAR: Twitter is the best place at Tejas Kumar underscore. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. Okay. Very cool. Well, thank you for coming. This was fun. Awesome. For sure. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. All right, folks until next time, Max out. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Bye. 

 

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