Dive into an insightful conversation with Fabio Akita, a prominent figure in the tech industry with a successful YouTube channel dedicated to programming techniques and a thriving software development company in Brazil. Join us as we explore Fabio's journey in content creation, his experiences in the tech industry, and his valuable insights on navigating the ever-evolving landscape of programming. From discussing career decisions to the shift in the Ruby community, we uncover practical advice and thought-provoking perspectives that are sure to inspire and inform developers at all levels. Get ready for an engaging and enlightening discussion that delves into the true essence of the tech industry and the skills necessary for success.

Charles Max Wood [00:00:05]:
Hey, folks. Welcome to another episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast. This week. I'm your host Charles Max Wood, and we have a special guest. It's, Fabio Akita. Fabio, do you wanna tell people how awesome you are and remind them that we like you?

Fabio Akita [00:00:21]:
Yeah. Thank you for having me again. I think it's my 3rd time maybe in the show. So, if you, heard I I we talked about Krysto and Elixir, like, 5 years ago. And, from there, I I started a YouTube channel called Aquitando, here in Brazil. It's a all Portuguese web YouTube channel devoted to programming techniques, the foundations of programming. And, from at the same time, I still have my company, which is called Miner 42. It's a software development boutique here in Brazil.

Fabio Akita [00:00:58]:
We work primarily for US companies. We have, like, 80 developers working full time in several projects coast to coast, the US. And many people from the old days could, probably remember me from the Ruby, RubyConf Brazil events as well. I was the former organizer, of the event until 2016, I think. So I've been around for a long time.

Charles Max Wood [00:01:25]:
Yep. Yeah. And that's how I know you. I think we bumped into each other at conferences or, you know, I've seen you speak at different events and things like that. And so, yeah, it's, it's, it's fun to just kind of catch up and, you know, I sent you a message on LinkedIn, last week, and we chatted for a little bit. And so yeah. Anyway, just great stuff. And we were talking we were talking about your YouTube channel, and I was like, that's cool.

Charles Max Wood [00:01:53]:
We should just get on and and and talk about some of the things you were talking about on the channel. And then I'm always interested in the content game. Right? So how does that work? You know, how many people did you have listening or watching and all that stuff? So, do you wanna just explain briefly what the channel was about? And then we can kinda dive into some of the specifics.

Fabio Akita [00:02:15]:
Absolutely. So I was in the I was, generating content from a very long time. Actually, my my blog, I was just checking checking the, first blog post I ever did. It was, it's gonna come it's gonna, make 18 years next week, next Friday, actually, on, April 5, 5th. So it's, my my here in Brazil, my blog would be old enough to drink already. So it's been Nice. A long time. And I've been doing the blog stuff.

Fabio Akita [00:02:48]:
I've been doing, as you said, the participating in events, doing as a speaker. So I here in Brazil, I've been traveling around, across the country for many years, so I did, like, more than 200, speeches here in in several different locations. And after that, I had the conference. And because of all that content generation stuff that I I thought the next step could be trying the video stuff and see how YouTube actually works and if, it would be any interesting for me to, generate content on that. So I didn't have an exact goal in mind, but, I I had some principles that I wanted to follow. For example, it was early on I I had in my mind that I wouldn't want my channel to be monetized in terms of having sponsorships or selling products, selling courses, particularly because, one of the reasons I started the channel was a reaction to the to the whole, boom of online courses, especially here in Brazil, where we had so much demand, so the demand was so high for online courses that many of them were borderline frauds, and they were Oh, man. Off. Yeah.

Fabio Akita [00:04:11]:
So, like, pay us in advance. You're gonna have 12 months of great courses, and then people jump in, and they see that it's like, they were copying content from other places, like other YouTube channels and stuff like that. So it was really bad, and it was creating a really bad reputation among people that actually wanted to teach about programming. So how do you separate who's good, who's not good? And many started to see the the teaching community here in Brazil as at at the same level as cryptocurrency coaches and stuff like that. So I I wanted to create a YouTube channel that primarily focused on not teaching in terms of the classical step by step procedural, procedure, but more on terms of what is computer science, why all those boring, subjects are actually interesting, stuff that people don't really get in the 1st couple years in college, like, algorithms, like, calculus, like, all the the boring stuff that is not creating React JS components. So I wanted to do all that that stuff at the same time explaining more about what the market is, how the careers work, how, even a little bit of how financial markets work because the IT market is, a part of bigger scale financial markets and all the bubbles and all the hypes, why we have bubble cycles, what's going on. So really get a a a grasp of the larger picture, let's put it that way, while at the same time diving deeper than most online courses in terms of explaining how computers work, what is, for example, what is, low level coding, what is machine code, and how do how does that progress into larger languages or higher level languages, even getting as far as explaining what is what is optimization, what is performance, what is relevancy, how do you calculate relevancy, how does Google, how is Google able to provide you everything you wanna know in the first couple pages, of the search results? So all of that stuff, I wanted to explain in in a real deep way. So many of my videos are more than an hour long.

Fabio Akita [00:07:00]:
So I had, like in 5 years, I I produce a 150 videos, give or take.

Charles Max Wood [00:07:08]:
Oh, wow.

Fabio Akita [00:07:09]:
And most of them are on the range of an hour. A couple of them, an hour and a half. I actually started the the the channel without knowing the exact structure, so I shot at 2 videos every week of 15 to 20 minutes. Then I started consolidating to 1 video a week of half an hour long, then, a video every 2 weeks of an hour long, and that format stayed for 3 to 4 years. And I the what I wanted to do was to not only explain all of that but also mix with my own experience in the working, as a proper programmer, engineer, architect through the through the last 30 years. So my career starts in the early nineties, and I think I had enough experience to explain what happens, in your whole career starting from college all the way to becoming an entrepreneur, content generator. Because another frustration that I had was many people starting those online courses didn't even have, like, 5 years working properly

Charles Max Wood [00:08:27]:
Right.

Fabio Akita [00:08:28]:
As a programmer. And they were explaining, oh, I'll I'll teach you advanced stuff that Google wants. So I I I'm saying, no. You won't, And I'll explain why. Yeah. So Yeah. I I think that was the gist of it.

Charles Max Wood [00:08:41]:
That's awesome. Yeah. Just talking a little bit about, you know, how some of this goes together. I mean, we've been we've been producing Ruby rogue since, what, 2011? So, you know, we're we're almost to 13 years here. And, yeah, it's it's interesting to see where people find the value. Right? And and, you know, that level of experience. We've had a number of of just highly experienced people as hosts on the show and it makes a huge difference. And you you can figure out pretty quickly whether or not somebody is the real deal or not.

Charles Max Wood [00:09:21]:
So, and I think that's important. The, the whole course thing kind of well, not kinda. It really bothers me. But I don't know that I have a whole lot more to say about it than what you said. You know, if if you're gonna promise somebody something, deliver it. But yeah. So let's dive into some of the aspects of, algorithms and career decisions and things like that. Because what I find is I'm talking to a lot of people who are at a crossroads at their, you know, where they're working.

Charles Max Wood [00:09:57]:
Right. And so for some people it's, Hey, I'm new or new ish, trying to decide what to learn, which direction to go, what technologies to use, things like that. And then the other group that I seem to be talking to quite a bit more these days is people who have been laid off. Right? And so, hey, I've been programming in rails for, you know, teen years. And, you know, I I'm having trouble finding a job and, you know, first of all, you know, they they're not understanding the economic forces that will at work that kind of put us in this position, but then also, yeah, you just, what do I do about it? So let's kind of take these in reverse order, for the people who are out of work. Right? I actually did a Twitter space this morning and, talked to some folks about who were, you know, between jobs about what what they were doing. And it's tough out there. It's really tough.

Charles Max Wood [00:10:57]:
So if if you're sitting there between jobs, you know, maybe you're Ruby or Rails developer, What do you recommend people do?

Fabio Akita [00:11:05]:
Yeah. So I I this is a question that many people having everywhere, not only in the United States. Here in Brazil as well, we had our fair share of big layoffs as well in the

Charles Max Wood [00:11:16]:
Oh, I'm sure.

Fabio Akita [00:11:17]:
Yeah. So a lot of people are trying are struggling to find good, good jobs nowadays. So, and that was another pillar of my channel. My channel started in August of 20 18. So since 2018, I was already, because, I'm I'm not only a programmer, not only a company owner, entrepreneur. I I also invest in the financial market, so full disclosure that I am an investor, start with the stock market as well. And I I was the way I see how we got here is in 2,008, we had that big, economic The housing bubble. Yeah.

Fabio Akita [00:12:03]:
Housing bubble. It was a disaster. People were foreseeing the end of times and stuff like that. And, we were we were able to jump back in. And, actually, the decade that followed, 2008, was possibly the best decade that the technology market has ever seen. So not only we had a fast recovery, but we also had big breakthroughs. For example, it was in 2,008, 2,009 that the whole mobile ecosystem was actually built. We had the long to the App Store.

Fabio Akita [00:12:40]:
Then we had the big apps such as, Uber, Airbnb, and all of those actually started around that time, and the demand for technology grew very fast. And many considered, programming as the kind of like a savior more or less to that financial crisis and going back up, creating new opportunities, new markets that never existed before. For example, for people that could now work for, making deliveries for DoorDash or renting their, their, houses, apartments at Airbnb and stuff like that. So created a whole new market for many people, not only in the programming space, but the echo the ecosystem as a whole. So 2014, I think it was the peak where, the the awareness of programming caught up to the mainstream. Many people, was wondering what the hell is this programming thing that I'm hearing about all the time, new millionaires, new billionaires coming out of nowhere. So everybody wanted to jump in this bandwagon. That's when we started we start to see, the rise of the boom of online courses, coaches, workshops, whatever, trying to sell to to a whole new generation about this gold mine called programming.

Fabio Akita [00:14:13]:
So many people that wouldn't consider programming as their first option started to jump into this market. And the whole, the whole marketing approach that I think was very, very wrong was that, oh, program is too easy. Anyone can do it. If you just copy and paste to follow these simple steps, You can build things that Google wants, and they will hire you for whatever, whatever you wanna you you want as your payment, and it's gonna work. So we and and and more than that, we because of the financial crash and the the way the the governments and the, the the Fed, for example, they they tackle that problem. So interest rates went to all time lows that meant that many many, most of the money that would be on treasury bonds started to flood the the markets, so now we have liquidity for lots of investments in very dubious entrepreneurship. And, it was it was exactly like in the year 2000 with the Internet bubble. We saw the if you were a programmer back in in in those days, I saw that in the year 2000.

Fabio Akita [00:15:36]:
I saw that in 2 1010 as well. So, it was the same it was the same motivation. It was the same height, but much bigger this time. And because of that, I think 2018, I was starting to see cracks in in that model. It couldn't last forever. You you can't just, generate an army of people that knows not a lot more than copy and pasting things into a text editor and calling it programming. So there's a limit to where you can go, and the limit came. And I think the the the whole then we had the pandemic, and the pandemic, instead of instead of popping that bubble, it actually expanded it.

Fabio Akita [00:16:24]:
People doubled down

Charles Max Wood [00:16:25]:
Right.

Fabio Akita [00:16:26]:
On technology during the pandemic because people are staying at home. Now more than ever, apps and technology were, again, the safe haven. So people were staying at home, receiving deliveries through DoorDash, buying through Amazon, watching Netflix, doing, work using Zoom calls. And all those startups, they they doubled in price, and they Right. The demand for that was so big that they doubled the the amount of people they were hiring. So, from 2021 to 2022, many of those tech companies doubled their head account. So it was crazy like that. But then we had the big crash.

Fabio Akita [00:17:13]:
Inflation came in. Interest rates went up. So now liquidity was out. There were there were no more liquidity in the market. And how most of those tech start ups, they didn't have any profit. They were depending on the next round of investment that never came. So now we we are entering 2022, and most of those companies were having to do big, mass layoffs. And now we have dozens of thousands of people without a job.

Fabio Akita [00:17:44]:
And they were all I wouldn't say they were fooled. I think many of those people, they knew what they were getting into, but they they had that mindset that was, yeah, that I think the future is gonna be that easy, and that's fine. I don't need to invest more than that because I I get a paid I have a job, and it pays me well until it doesn't. And Right. Many most of those people, they don't care a lot about how the money comes in. They just, they just, assume that it's a thing that happens. They they don't think about, oh, does my employer actually has any profits? Does my work has any value? So they don't make those, reflections on their actual work. And sooner or later, bubbles like that explode in 2022, I think, was the, the last drop in the bucket, and it came crashing down.

Fabio Akita [00:18:48]:
It's still not a a crash like it was in the year 2 1,000, 2,001. It it it's it's not it's not close to that because we're still, many of those companies are still not profitable, but they still have investment. They still have investment. They still have some hype. So the the Mhmm. This market is still going, particularly in the, AI space now because of what what we have with chat GPT and NVIDIA and stuff like that. So most of those investments are are moving towards companies like Snowflake and, other tech start ups that are focused on that. And now those, we can talk about that later, but that's a new bubble.

Fabio Akita [00:19:32]:
But the web development and mobile, mobile apps development bubble kind of, crushed it down and corrected a little bit. Still not as bad as one could have predicted. But because of that, I think we now have the situation where competition is more difficult. It's more difficult to find good jobs. The demands are more people are expecting more, of the programmers.

Charles Max Wood [00:20:00]:
Yep. Absolutely. So, and I think you explained it really well. Where do we go from here? I mean, and, and not just as a community, but, you know, I mean, I'm, I'm talking to some people that are, I mean, they're, they're really scared, really worried. Right? They don't, they don't know where to go next. And yeah. So what do they do?

Fabio Akita [00:20:24]:
Yeah. So the other thing is during during that, exuberance phase where most tech companies had all the money they wanted, the technology kind of reflect that reality as well. So from 2,000, I'd say 2,012 until 2018, more or less, something like that, We had a lot of new, for example, web frameworks doing exactly the same thing. Just they they were just inventing reinventing the wheel all the time, especially in the front end space. So you had, like, from React all the way to Svelte, going through TypeScript, new Angular, whatever. So it it was a lot of effort that was wasted. It was a big it was one one of the biggest waste of times I've ever seen in the programming world because we were just discussing the, at the end of the day, we were just discussing how do I change the color of the button all over again. So it was the same thing.

Charles Max Wood [00:21:34]:
Little bike shedding going on,

Fabio Akita [00:21:36]:
Yeah. A lot of bike shedding. A lot. I I I'd say 90% of all the discussions that we had in the past 10 years in the front end space were big bikes. And, of course, we had a good, good, evolutions, but it was incremental evolutions. Now we didn't it took 10 years, and we we're still discussing the same CSS problem and stuff like that. So we we didn't fix anything. We just made it more more complicated.

Fabio Akita [00:22:04]:
And we we could afford having more complicated because we had an army of people that we could that we could use just to actually change the color of them buttons, for example. But now now the discussion, it shifts to efficiency. So, again, when when we are closer to a recession where money is is not easy anymore or we you don't have, free lunch, you you actually have to start thinking, how do I properly invest this revenue money that I just got? I can't just go spend in whatever. Mhmm. So efficiency becomes the new priority. And efficiency is not something that you just learn through a course. There's no courses aligned that I'm gonna teach you efficiency in 10 easy steps. That that's not how it works.

Fabio Akita [00:23:02]:
Productivity, efficiency, stuff like that. So only only people that actually, invested the time to learn the foundation of stuff, can understand optimization, for example, can understand what to cut and still get good results, what, not what to add, but what to cut off and, make a bigger difference. I I usually I spend a lot of years saying that the best code a programming can do is 0 code because you're not adding new bugs. You're not adding maintenance. You're not adding a lot of stuff that is actually cost and not, but most of the the beginner programmers, they think that adding stuff is actually the same as adding value, but it that's not the same. And that distinction only comes with a lot of practice, a lot of study, a lot of patients actually caring about your craft to know what to do at this time. And and in this this kind of market, the market's gonna, is gonna reward people that knows the the craft properly and can deliver actual value instead of just bike shedding.

Charles Max Wood [00:24:18]:
Right. So, I mean, there's a lot that you said here, and I'm gonna try and summarize it so I can ask the next question. But, effectively, what you're saying is is that, so these companies, they they just had all this money, so they just poured money into things that they didn't even necessarily need to measure as far as its effectiveness for what they were doing. And, you know, that's the the example is changing the color of the button, but, you know, it could be any number of things. Right? And so, now what what we're getting down to is now that money's less easy to come by. That's what you were talking about earlier with the liquidity and, you know, the ability of these companies to raise money, whether it's through investment or other means, they're they're now letting people go because that money has to go further. So it actually has to matter more what what they're working on. So they they can't bike shed over, you know, do we use the next greatest react blah blah blah, unless it's it's going to help us achieve these outcomes and, you know, do some kind of work for us.

Charles Max Wood [00:25:30]:
So the question I asked was, what what do Ruby on Rails developers do if they're one of those people that got laid off? And it seems like the implication is learn how to be able to bring that value to what you're doing. Right? So you need to be able to demonstrate that you can do more than bike shed over what tool to use or what hosting to put it on or things like that, and actually identify areas in the code base where adding code adds value or where removing code adds value or where there may be a better solution than sort of the obvious thing you would reach for. Am I reading that right? Is that is that what you're saying? Yes.

Fabio Akita [00:26:17]:
In for for for us, the Ruby on Rails community, I think this is again a a good a good timing. And Ruby on Rails is still one of the only, if not the only, web framework that works top to bottom, from front end to back end. It's an entire solution, instead of just having pieces and that I have to search search myself and try to weave together in some gerry rigged way. So I think Ruby is still the most cohesive web frameworks out there. And, DHH has been focusing on bringing on trying to get rid of all that complexity, especially on the front end side, the script side. It, of course, is controversial. Of course, there's lots of things that we we don't agree. But in terms of the general the general vision, I think it's correct in terms of simplifying the getting rid of all the bike shedding discussions and making possible again to be a a full, a full, not only just a front end developer, not only a back end developer, but a full stack developer, I think, I think that term is gonna come back again because it was impossible to be a full a full stack developer because only in the front end side, you had to know, like, 12 different web frameworks and a combination of, like, 30 other Yeah.

Charles Max Wood [00:27:51]:
Node packages. Tools and yeah.

Fabio Akita [00:27:53]:
Yeah. It was a matrix of stuff that you needed to know. It was impossible. What CSS framework should I use? Tailwind, whatever, bootstrap again. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So it it was it is it's still crazy, and, I think we we are going to I hope we're going to see a more focused effort on things that actually work instead of trying trying to discuss, a new reimplementation, a news, a new react again and again and again instead of of of getting stuff done.

Fabio Akita [00:28:30]:
And in the in the idea of getting stuff done, again again, we we go back to the roots of the agile movement. The agile movement itself kind of died 10 years ago because of because of that that situation. So, in terms of discussing things that doesn't add value, people are discussing, they were they were they were thinking that efficiency was having a report where I estimated 10 points whatever, and I delivered 10 points, wow, were efficient. But that's not efficiency. Efficiency is act is actual value, not not trying to fit useless metrics into a report and calling that efficiency. So I think all of those things are coming into into discussion again because we need to get rid of all of that and start getting, things done, which ironically is the first, 37 signals book getting, getting real to get things done properly. And maybe we're going back to that. And if we are, Ruby on Rails is, in the best position to be, again, the one that starts to deliver value faster with more quality, with maintainability in mind because we had all those agile principles imbued into the web framework.

Fabio Akita [00:30:00]:
We never opted out of testing, for example, because, oh, no one needs to test because we have an army of people that can do manual testing. So, many companies were doing that. They were calling that QA. They have, like, a 100 people just to start clicking things, because they the developers were too important to waste time doing, unit test or automated testing. So so, and that that's the thing that actually happened. I saw companies that were this they they were mandating no testing code because we have a QA department or company that's responsible for that, and developers are are in short supply. We don't we don't want them doing testing stuff. We need them coding new features new features, whatever they are, and churn code as fast as possible.

Fabio Akita [00:30:54]:
And that was the the mindset a couple years ago. And I think now we're gonna go back to developers that can deliver features that work with minimal bugs, with test coverage, with, proper designs in mind, with proper principles in mind. So all of that becomes the new, the new priority. And, when we say, that the bubble crash, that we are now coming to recession, layoffs, stuff like that, it feels doom and gloomy. But, actually, that's an opportunity because anyone that can leverage that position out of creating companies or creating tools or creating whatever that adds value, that brings back productivity, efficiency, profits, stuff like that, they're gonna be better positioned to surf the next wave, whatever that is. Because that there's gonna be a next wave. I don't know if it's AI, if it's whatever. But if you have that mindset instead of the let's let's waste time with whatever, you're gonna be better positioned to to conquer that new, way, whatever that is.

Charles Max Wood [00:32:13]:
Right. So, I'm just gonna make it really simple then. Are you telling the Ruby people to just hang in there? Or are you are there other concrete steps that they can take to position themselves for what's coming?

Fabio Akita [00:32:32]:
Yeah. I think the Ruby community the the original, mindset of the Ruby community shifted because of that period of time that people are not paying attention to quality anymore, to efficiency. Mhmm. So it was not Ruby on Rails was not a great framework in that scenario because, oh, I can do microservices in Go. I can rewrite stuff in Rust. I can rewrite my front end 10 times in 10 different web frameworks. And, I I ran this

Charles Max Wood [00:33:02]:
all of these things so many times.

Fabio Akita [00:33:05]:
So many times. So I think most ray true Rails developers were disheartened to, not be able to participate in that bigger discussion because Ruby on Rails was not sexy enough because it was too efficient. It was too easy. It was too it was not flashy enough. It was not wasting time, so we needed to waste more time to be flashy. And I I'd waste more resources. Why why be efficient if we have money to spare? But now that we don't, that's I think the message is all of the principles that Rails are built upon, the, built over, I think those are now the new priorities, and I think one can be more motivated to learn more about how Rails works, how the ecosystem work, how we did things back in 2,008 when we launched stuff, that was influential, like GitHub, for example. Every every CI platform that we know was basically made with Ruby on Rails.

Fabio Akita [00:34:10]:
So we built all the proper tools that people dismissed for 10 years, and now they're they're again, important. So, I think anyone that's beginning in the Ruby community should learn the proper values, what quality is, what proper coding is, and and not and not try to jump into whatever new hype, comes up just because it's new. But, Ruben on Rails now is not the the new kid on the block, but I think it still holds as one of the, bastions of, the best practices that I hope are gonna start to be more valid in companies again.

Charles Max Wood [00:34:56]:
Makes sense. So I'm hearing that you think that Ruby and Ruby on rails is a good longer term bet. So, yeah. So where are things going to go from here? Right? I mean, if I'm betting on Ruby on rails, I know some people have to go find work now, and they may be not be able to find the rails jobs. Right? Because some of them went away. So should they be picking up things like AI? Or

Fabio Akita [00:35:29]:
Yeah. And that's, that's another question that I hear of the what should I start learning or what books should I read or what courses should I do? Because, it's urgent. I don't have time to waste, and I need a new gig right now. What should I do? And that's that's the unfortunately, if I had that answer, I would be selling it for a $1,000,000 because no one has it. Right. Let me let me try to share what I think about it. Of course, this is really just my opinion, and there is no proper way. I think most people, they they they are so insecure in feeling that they are not able to decide that that they try to hear someone like me, someone like you, all the other influencers, asking them for that kind of answer, and there is no answer.

Fabio Akita [00:36:28]:
None of us can give an answer to everybody because each person's condition or situation is gonna be very, very different. Maybe you are a father that has to provide for your family 3 kids. Maybe you're, someone that is not married. You live with your parents. You're a freelancer. Whatever. Maybe you have, I don't know, loans to pay. Any you you have a a 100 1,000 of different situations, and there is no one answer that's gonna be good for everybody.

Fabio Akita [00:37:03]:
So in terms of principles, yes, you should start learning if you don't know already something that's very practical, something that can be used in a in a couple months. You're gonna be productive in something. There there's a a lot a big list of stuff that you should probably know, web frameworks, dev op tools, all of the traditional things that most online courses already have, you should start learning some of that. It's gonna take you, I don't know, 6 months, maybe a year. It feels like a long time, but that's not a long time. It's a very a very short window, and, try to find your next gig, your next job, whatever that is. If you are able to to to, to jump into new job, then you use that time to not only get better at that, at those specific tasks, but also trying to experiment with new stuff that are not gonna be used in the, your current job. So be it AI, be it content generation, be it, social network stuff.

Fabio Akita [00:38:17]:
I don't know. Something that feels like a hobby, but you actually have to study a little bit more. And, again, there's no course on that. Maybe you like cryptocurrencies. Maybe you like the new crop of AI tools. I don't know. You can start reading books. There's no one single book.

Fabio Akita [00:38:36]:
There's no one single course that's gonna teach you all you need to know, so you're gonna have to do experimentation. And this is the part that I think most people are afraid of when I say experimentation. It's exactly as the word implies. You have to learn by trial and error. You're not gonna be able to target a specific learning program that's gonna be a 100% correct, and you're not gonna waste any time. That's not gonna happen. Actually, most of the learning is gonna come from stuff that you do wrong instead of stuff that you think is right. I think the learning process is more productive when you're not afraid to make mistakes because the mistakes are the stuff that, make you actually mature and grow.

Fabio Akita [00:39:28]:
If you're not making mistakes, you're not actually learning anything. It's impossible to just learn by reading a book and not actually trying to do something. You have to accept that you're gonna make mistakes. It's gonna feel like you're wasting time, and that's part of the learning process, and you have to accept that. The sooner one accepts that, I think the faster they're gonna learn new stuff.

Charles Max Wood [00:39:57]:
Cool. You you talked a little bit about if you're new to Ruby, you need to learn these ideas and principles that were in vogue and important to learn 10 years ago. Can can you kinda and and you've you've talked about some of those as we've gone along. But what are those ideas that get you from, you know, bike shedding to being a contributor that actually brings real value?

Fabio Akita [00:40:26]:
Sure. So I think one of the first mistakes that beginners do is they think of languages or web frameworks or tools like sports teams. So they cheer for that team. They feel like they have to be loyal to that team. Some some people actually tattoo the languages or frameworks, whatever, permanently because they feel like they own something, they owe something to the those technologies. But technologies, at the end of the day, they're just simple tools. They're not different from hammers or screwdrivers. You never you're not gonna see I I don't think someone's gonna tattoo a hammer just because it's your job to use a hammer.

Charles Max Wood [00:41:12]:
Right.

Fabio Akita [00:41:14]:
Yeah. That would be silly, and it is silly to be loyal to a language. Even though I love Ruby, love Ruby on Rails, I'm not loyal to it in terms of, I'm gonna my all my decisions are gonna be live or die by Ruby, so it's not gonna be that. Languages to technologies are every every technology is a tool. It doesn't matter, for example, if I like or dislike, I don't know, cryptocurrencies. Let's say so that's something that's controversial. I don't need to like Bitcoin to actually learn the algorithms behind it. There's a lot of interesting stuff that many people don't even realize, for example, in terms of, Byzantine consensus.

Fabio Akita [00:41:56]:
That's the same algorithm that we use for distributed systems to actually have coherence in their communications. So you have to have some kind of consensus. And Bitcoin is 1 maybe if you like that that theme, you should use that to learn the underlying technologies behind it, the blockchain. It's basically learning to use hashing. If you don't know hashing, you don't know cryptography, you need to know something like that. If you don't know hashing, you don't know what it means if a data is corrupt or not. You don't know how to index it. You don't know how to, find that data in a bigger dataset.

Fabio Akita [00:42:39]:
So you have to learn the basics. And if you can use something that a theme that you like to use and use it to learn the underlying technology, the better because it's more practical than actually opening a cryptography book, going to the hashing chapter, and trying to memorize what hashing means without a practical usage for that. So I think you should, you you should start at something practical and trying to, go deep in the, in the underlying foundations that make that thing work. Once you understand what makes that work, you can apply it to other stuff. Then comes the creative part, the experimental part. Could I use this technology to this other thing? And then then you start to see, for example, the AI stuff. GPUs were made for graphical, stuff. They it was made for CGI.

Fabio Akita [00:43:37]:
It was made for games. Someone a lot during during the evolution of GPUs thought, oh, maybe I can use that to process large, datasets and do something with that because images are basically matrices of data. In, artificial intelligence deals with matrices of data. Maybe I can use the same hardware and boom, then you now have the NVIDIA, the the NVIDIA market going up like crazy nowadays. So but you never know. Someone had to try that 10 years ago to figure that out and, make that work. No one no one knew it could work. It was an experimental work.

Fabio Akita [00:44:25]:
Not everybody can do that kind of experimentation, but it's not as rocket science y as most people think. It's basically someone with a terminal open doing random code, and some of that actually work because he didn't know it wouldn't work. He just tried it. Most things actually work like that. It's not many people think that advanced stuff like AI, for example, is probably a 100 lab coded people in the war room focusing on trying to solve that problem. That's not how how innovation works. We don't we don't actually do that. It's mostly people that that do not accept limits trying to push limits.

Fabio Akita [00:45:14]:
I think that's the and everybody has to start somewhere in your own limitations, your own learning process and prejudices of, oh, I can't do that. I don't think it's a good value for my time. It's gonna be a waste of my time. I'm not gonna be able to achieve that. And every time you start thinking about that, you're not pushing your limits. You're not practicing pushing that limit, and that's how you become obsolete fast instead of actually learning. The learning process, and that's another thing that I've been explaining in my channel, because it's not obvious, is that people think the learning is receiving a list, a checklist of stuff, and reading through that stuff step by step, and that is learning, and that is far from learning. Learning is prob is learning how to solve problems.

Fabio Akita [00:46:07]:
Learning how to learn is to actually problem solving. If you don't know how how to tackle a problem that you never saw before that was not documented anywhere, how how do you tackle a problem that you never saw before? It's not opening a book. It's not going step by step for some tutorial. You have to analyze that problem. You have to see the boundaries. You have to experiment just hypothesis to see if it works or not and and go gradually step by step, eventually, you solve that problem, and that's learning.

Charles Max Wood [00:46:44]:
Awesome. So we're kind of getting toward the end of the our time. But going back to the YouTube channel, so did you just start putting content out and then people kind of found you or did you promote it in some way? And and how many people did you have following along when you finally stopped making the content?

Fabio Akita [00:47:06]:
Yeah. So I was very late in the YouTube game, so there were already many, software development focused channels or technology focused channels. So I was trying to figure out something that was different from most of them. So I was not going to do product reviews. I was not going to do easy tutorials because many channels were actually basically going to the website, getting the getting started tutorial, and making a 10 minute video with the step by step stuff, then that's that's not valuable. That's not interesting because anyone can Google the original source and just go there. So I wanted to do a more in-depth analysis of the computer science stuff, and I didn't know exactly how to do that, but I had in my mind that if I could reach, I don't know, 10,000 subscribers in 1 year, that would be my, all time goal. Because I didn't I didn't know.

Fabio Akita [00:48:08]:
It was for I I was starting from 0. I was able to to reach the 100,000 in the 1st 2 years. So the silver plate came very early, actually. And the I didn't I didn't try to follow anything that most people would say. So I was asking people, and they would say, oh, do short videos, do easy to digest video with step by step stuff. The all all of those best practices that most people would repeat 5 years ago. I was hearing that and disagreeing and saying, I don't like that format. I don't like easy to digest videos.

Fabio Akita [00:48:50]:
I actually want I I I actually want a one video that tells me everything that is to know about that subject. So I don't want to see a playlist with parts 1 through 10 and have to see introductions, 5 minute long introductions advertising or whatever. I just want something that's very no nonsense, not waste my time, very dense, and that's what I did. And by doing that, I didn't know that many people actually wanted something like that. So, 5 years ago, I say I'm gonna do a 1 hour video with no interruptions, edited out in a way that feels like I'm not even briefing. People say that most people on YouTubes, they say that they play videos on 2 x speed. My videos, they say they're playing in half the speed because, otherwise, they can't they can't what I'm saying. And I I the whole the whole idea was to be the most comprehensive kinds of videos of about a certain subject.

Fabio Akita [00:49:59]:
And I have these all the scripts, are on my blog, the kiddooreos.com blog. It has the video and the transcript. If someone wants to read it through, especially if there's code, I think it's better. So I was I I wasn't making it for for sponsorship or for the clicks. And even then, I was able now, 5 years later, I had in my mind that I wanted to end the the my run-in around 5 years. I didn't want to do a 10 year career out of YouTube, especially because it was not my my it's not my primary means of, I I don't get any money from that. So it was not for the money. It was primarily to dump my brain into video format, and have, like, how would I explain all my knowledge and experience about database or about how to optimize code or how low level coding works or how cryptography works.

Fabio Akita [00:51:04]:
And I did one single video, at most, 2 videos for all of those, subjects. And I think there's a point because my career is finite that I would, reach some some corpus that makes me satisfied, about it. So 5 years later, my my channel now has 420,000 subscribers, which I think it was good. But better than that, there are many channels, even here in Brazil, that has 600,000, maybe a1000000. But what what is most important is the number of views in the videos themselves. It wouldn't matter if you have a 1000000 subscribers, but each of your videos has just, like, 5,000 views or 10,000 views. So my videos were I was keeping the 50,000 to a 100,000 views per video as well, which I think is a good ratio for the number of subscribers. So I I know that people are were actually watching it and not just, not just browsing through.

Fabio Akita [00:52:12]:
So I think I started with videos, 15 to 20 minutes, which is not short at all. I think, when when when I when people say short, I think they think 10 minutes or less. For me, short was 20 to 30 minutes. And then my normal videos would be an hour, and my longer videos would be an hour and a half to 2 hours sometimes.

Charles Max Wood [00:52:37]:
Oh, wow. Crazy. Well, we're kind of at the end of our time. But if if people wanna connect with you or see what you're doing these days, where do they find you?

Fabio Akita [00:52:54]:
So there's my blog atkitonreos.com. I'm I'm still gonna post there even though my channel is is paused for the time being. Maybe I I come back and do more videos, but I think the goal of having a a a video a video collection of my knowledge and experience in computer science. I think it's largely complete. Then I I'm mostly on, x Twitter. So Akita on Rails on Twitter, Akita on Rails on Instagram, Akita on Rails on LinkedIn. So I'm usually posting, new stuff. I'm currently discussing about the new AI stuff.

Fabio Akita [00:53:35]:
For example, people keep asking me, oh, is AI gonna replace my job? And I have to explain to them what AI actually is and whatnot, and that that keeps the, keeps me occupied for for for for some time.

Charles Max Wood [00:53:50]:
Awesome. Alright. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and roll us into the picks. You've been on the show before, so you know the drill there. I'm gonna start us off with picks. The first thing that I'm gonna pick is a card game. So I always start with a board game. So I'm gonna do a card game this time.

Charles Max Wood [00:54:07]:
It's called For Sale. It came out in 9 1997. It's a fast game. Board game geek says it takes 30 minutes. It doesn't take 30 minutes to play the game. Might take you 30 minutes the first time while you figure it out. And even then I doubt it, has a board game weight of 1.25 out of 5. So, you know, really, really simple game.

Charles Max Wood [00:54:33]:
And essentially what you do is you start out with a certain amount of money and you bid on different houses. Right? So you have the the lowest level house, which is level 1, and that's a cardboard box in an alley. Right? And then it goes all the way up to 30, and 30 is a space station, right, as a house. So, you know, pretty pretty broad range there. Right? And so you're you're buying these houses. And then what you do is in the next round, the the payments, the checks come out. Right? And so you pull out the number of checks per, you know, number of players, and then, you blind bid your house. So, you know, if if the highest is 15,000.

Charles Max Wood [00:55:20]:
Right? So 15,000 comes out, You're probably dropping your 30 if you have the 30. Right? And, you know, and then you're gonna try and figure out, okay, well, you know, he has the 30 and she has the 29. I have the 28. So if I put the 28 down to try and get the 15,000, because the next one's a 5,000 and then bottom one's a 2,000. I, you know, I'm probably gonna wind up with the 5,000 or 2,000. So instead of using my really high one, maybe I'll drop a 17 and see if I can get the 5,000. Right. Cause you get them in order of, of your value of your house.

Charles Max Wood [00:55:57]:
So anyway, fun game, whoever has the most money at the end wins. I mean, that's, that's the whole game. The artworks fun. Yeah. I really have enjoyed that. So, and it's a quickie one that I played with my buddies a bunch. I played it for the first time at Salt Con, which is local board game conference. So, anyway, fun stuff there.

Charles Max Wood [00:56:23]:
I'm just trying to think through what else I've been things have been nuts because I I would I'm involved politically here in Utah and been pretty involved in the whole process of getting people nominated and stuff like that. So, anyway, I encourage people to get involved in the political process. You know, I'm not going to cast any judgment on either, you know, if you believe one way go get involved, Right? If you believe different from me, go get involved. It's just anyway, it's it's really fascinating, way of getting into that. One thing that I have been using to reach out to delegates in the process here in Utah is, SaaS called click send. And, I mean, it's real simple, but you just you import the phone numbers and then you can send them messages. So I sent out a message this morning, encouraging people to come out for the school board debate tomorrow that, incidentally, I'm also the moderator for. So, anyway, just just fun stuff like that that that the party's putting on because I'm a party officer.

Charles Max Wood [00:57:28]:
And, so yeah. So I guess that's the other big thing that I'm into right now. How about you, Fabio? What what do you have? What do you wanna pick?

Fabio Akita [00:57:40]:
It can be any subject.

Charles Max Wood [00:57:42]:
Anything. Yep.

Fabio Akita [00:57:45]:
Okay. So as I said, I think, nowadays, what's what has been fascinating me the most is the reaction. Apart from the all the political stuff, I I I try to see what people are doing, but I'm not as Mhmm. Active because especially here in Brazil, it's very, very polarized. And whatever you say, people are just gonna try to cancel you either way.

Charles Max Wood [00:58:06]:
It is here too. And that's that's why I didn't mention any parties or any movements that you're part of because it's not really relevant to what we're talking about here.

Fabio Akita [00:58:15]:
Yeah. And, again, as as always, I'm I try to be as welcome as possible to people to from any side. Usually, I'm trying to discuss technology and stuff like that through the social networks because, I think it's, first, it's easier because it's technical. I think we can we can have fun discussions and useful ones, especially, as we were discussing. People are trying to figure out what's the best tool, what's not. And in terms of my picks, I've been I've been people have been very insecure. They dread the current the next generation of AI stuff. Some some people really think they're the devil.

Fabio Akita [00:58:57]:
They're gonna replace my job, whatever. But I I what I try to say to people is instead of being afraid or or trying to give up your career because you think you're gonna be replaced, try to I think instead of waiting for the tool to dominate you, I think you should be first to dominate the tool. So I think you should learn as much as possible on how can you make your life easier using tools like that. So I my picks would be tools such as the GitHub Copilot. If you're a programmer, it's actually really useful. It's, autocomplete on steroids. So you don't you don't want to be expecting the AI to do the entire code for you. It's not gonna happen.

Fabio Akita [00:59:47]:
But for the boring part, oh, let's refactor this big ass CSS file that's so boring to do. So that's the kind of stuff that maybe c s the the Copilot thing can be very, very useful and actually save you a lot of time, especially, for example, if, testing testing people one of the justifications for people not to do testing because it's boring. Oh, it's boring code. It's not fun to do, and the Copilot thing is very, very good to understand your, code and suggest unit tests for your code as well. So I I think for programmers, they should try that. And the chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, things that are already available online. Again, it's not supposed to be a replacement for anyone, but it's actually a very good tool to summarize stuff. So let's say you are overwhelmed without knowing where to start, learning Ruby on Rails, for example, because there's so many different topics that you you want.

Fabio Akita [01:00:54]:
So there's active storage. That's active channel. That's, what what how do I manage database? What a migration is? So there's lots of documentation that you can try. You may find that overwhelming, and you will find that tools like chat gpt can help give you an overview, and explain certain topics in a in an easier, way that you can digest faster, and that can actually speed you up in the learning process. So I think those, new couple tools can be kind of like your personal assistance in helping you in where you're overwhelmed or where you find it boring, to help you get that productivity back and learn faster.

Charles Max Wood [01:01:43]:
Mhmm. Awesome. Alright. Well, thanks for coming, Fabio.

Fabio Akita [01:01:48]:
Yep. Thank you. And, I hope we we can talk again soon.

Charles Max Wood [01:01:52]:
Yep. Absolutely. Alright, folks. We're gonna wrap it here, and until next time,

Fabio Akita [01:02:01]:
Max out.