Jesse Spevack currently works at Stripe and specializes in Ruby on Rails. He talks about his success story of shifting careers from being an Educator to a Software Engineer. Jesse returns to show to share his humble beginnings when he started out his first job in the Tech world. 

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the RubyRogues podcast. I'm your host today, Valentino Stoll, and we're joined today by a very special guest, Jesse Spivak. Jesse, you want to introduce yourself today and maybe tell us a bit about yourself?

 

Sure. Valentino, thanks for having me. My name is Jesse Spivak, he, him pronouns. I work at a company called Stripe and I've been a Ruby developer for a while now. I have kind of a non-traditional background. I got into tech not through a computer science program or anything. I went to one of those newfangled code schools in the mid-20 teens when those things were kind of proliferating. fortunate enough to go to, you know, there's sort of like a spectrum of code schools. There's like the charlatan snake oil. You go for like two weeks and you and they say you're ready to go. And then there's like kind of a class of very legitimate ones. So I was in the latter where I went to a pretty reputable place called the Turing school. And after that, I worked at a company called I bought a, which is a cash back for shopping app in Denver, Colorado. me. I'm also a dad. I got twin, almost seven-year-olds, so pretty stoked on that. And yeah, that's me.

 

Congratulations to both of you. That's awesome. So, I mean, the Turing School is awesome. We actually have a couple of people from there at Doximity. What got you into that kind of program versus something more traditional? What made you go that direction? I'm curious.

 

Yeah, so I'm of the eight. I know I look very young. I look like an 18 year old or something. I'm actually quite a bit older than that. But I think when I was growing up, you were sort of, at least in my experience in primary school and high school, you were sort of either good at English or good at math or good at English. And if you were good at math, a trajectory laid out for you. And if you were good at English, then you had a different set of outcomes available to you. So I sort of viewed myself in that, like, I am good at writing, good at reading, and math is hard category. So engineering, software development, computer science, like none of that was even on my radar when I was making when I was when I was actually 18 years old field, I went into the teaching field and I taught for a bunch of years and I became an assistant principal. And then I did some consulting for New York City public schools. And then I went back and became an assistant principal again. And you know, the listeners to Ruby Rose may be surprised to hear this, but the educational world is very difficult. And the stress level is high and the pay is very low and the hours are very long. And it's really not a sustainable career for the vast majority of people. At least that was experience. And when my kids were born, it was basically like, okay, this is not going to work, we need to find something else. And by that time, I had spent enough time in spreadsheets and kind of hacking through technical systems to realize that, hey, maybe there's like a career, maybe I can find someone to pay me to automate things or do things like that. And through some research, I found the had some experience within the education world. So it felt like the vibes were right. And I went there and actually learned some technical chops and was able to get a job from there.

 

That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, it's always good to hear a success story. And it's interesting to hear how the code schools work coming out of it, right? Because

 

Yeah.

 

I know we were talking about this before the show, but interviewing really sucks. And the interviewing process for anyone is really like if you don't have anything built up, which it seems like code school is kind of a good path for that, right? Is that it helps you build up work people can look at, which is kind of like for software, you know, that's what most people look at, I would say. But it's interesting

 

Yeah, it-

 

to see like, you know, that you had no problem coming out and getting a job, right? I'm putting words in your mouth.

 

Yeah,

 

Did you?

 

so let's dig into that a little bit. Let's sort of interrogate that statement for a second. So I think when I started Turing, this was in 2016, June of 2016, in my head I was like, okay, cool, I'm gonna do this program. And a few weeks before I finish it, someone is going to come to me and say, we would like to pay you a six-figure salary to write software. And that was not actually my experience. There was definitely like a grind where it was just like, I need to reach out to people, cold outreach to people, email people I haven't talked to in a while, just trying to get connections, network, find opportunities that were available before I could actually get hired. And so I wouldn't say that it's definitely not like you get a certificate and then there's like 15 companies who are ready to sign you up. If anything, it's the opposite of that. It's definitely a pathway there. They're like the outcome, Turing publishes outcomes and with respect to like how long it takes people to find jobs and what starting salaries are. And they're very impressive and the numbers are good. But when you're in that few weeks or months between when you finish the program and get your job and get that paycheck, that can be very stressful, especially if you have twins.

 

Yeah, I bet. So like what are what the nerves are high, like do you just accept the first one you get or like what what is that process like?

 

Yeah, so some folks managed to actually get multiple offers, which is awesome. That was not my experience. I feel just super lucky, super fortunate that I was able to get an offer at the company that I started my first professional software development job at, which was Ibotta. It was just such a great place to start my career. Great people, great opportunities to learn. I joined the company when they were about, 30 developers and I saw, and I think when I left, there was closer to 300 developers. So I kind of saw like different phases of the startup, of the tech startup world in that one job. But yeah, I think, you know, if, if I had, you know, if a week before a crappier company was like, we would like to pay you to work for us, I would have been like, yep, cool. And, and you know, we were talking,

 

And you're

 

we were,

 

really great.

 

we were talking about this, software developers have it pretty good once you're in you can be a little choosier so I feel like now I'm quite a bit choosier than oh you'll pay me I'll do it.

 

Right. Right. At what level would you say that you felt comfortable like that?

 

Well,

 

Like

 

I- I-

 

how long? Because

 

Yeah,

 

I know

 

sure.

 

I meet a lot of like, you know, I used to do the Ruby guides. Every once in a while I'll go back and do those at the RubyConf or RailsConf. And like a lot of the, you know, people coming in to the community, they're like, you know, worry like, okay, like, so I've got this job. Like, I don't wanna feel, I feel trapped or, you know, how long is too long? How short is too short? Like, What made you feel comfortable where you were like worthwhile? You felt worthwhile, right? Like because

 

Yeah.

 

I know when I first started, like as a Ruby, they're like, I felt it was a long time. It was probably like four years, five years

 

Ha!

 

before I felt personally comfortable to be like, OK, now I know something.

 

That's interesting. Yeah, I'm curious to hear more about that from you, because I know that you were saying that you've been at DocSimi for quite a while, and you were at your previous gig for a long time also. I think what your question makes me think of is just imposter syndrome in general, and always feeling like, oh, I don't know this, I don't know how to do this. And I think that the truth of the matter are asked to solve problems that either that nobody knows how to solve or don't have clear answers. And that is like the difference between being like a professional software developer and just and I guess not being a professional software developer, sort of being able to like persist in that space of I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Okay, I think I have an idea. Let's go. So yeah, I don't think that like, you know, I don't want to put out there that like, I'm the 10x developer or whatever, like that's nonsense. But I've also been on the other side of the interview table enough where I do know that I have some skills and some knowledge that is marketable.

 

Yeah, I hear that. I mean, I would say the biggest thing that I came, because I came from like, I had like almost zero Ruby experience and then I joined a consultancy. My Ruby experience was basically through Rails that I learned Spree as like an add-on e-commerce service to like some advertising agency. So it was like, kind of just like me, like in a console, like, you know, Spree install worked, right? Like, that there would be not many customizations, you know, and then as customizations came up, then I learned more and more, you know, but so my transition into like a consultancy was probably like, it was, it was very hard, I thought. And because like the people that I had ended up working with at the time, and this is maybe like, almost 10 years ago now, you know, they seem to have it together. And maybe like a common theme is trying to benchmark yourself against other people is probably never a good idea, no matter how much experience you have. All

 

Yeah,

 

right.

 

that makes me think of a story where when I was originally working at Ibotta, there was like a DevOps team. I don't know if DevOps is the right term, but more of a DevOps team. They kind of handled the Terraform for the company. And I remember I had to set up like an SQSQ or something and reach out to a person on that team. I think her name is Erin Adkins. And we paired on setting this piece of infrastructure up. And I was like, oh my gosh, you're a real developer. I don't know what I'm doing. This is the real stuff here. You're setting up the pipes and you know all this information. And she said something pretty meaningful to me. She said, you know what? Everyone here has very specialized knowledge and a very specialized skill set. And this is just my specialized skill set. totally that would be totally alien to me. And I was like, oh yeah, that kind of is true. There's like a layer, a business logic layer that like I know pretty well that would not, that she had very little experience with. And so that was like very affirming. It was an engineer who I looked up to who was saying, you're valid. You know things, you can do this.

 

Yeah, I hear that. I mean, that's that's kind of the first RailsConf experience I had is because like all the talks are very niche, right? Like they have the tracks that they go on to. But the most part is somebody giving like their years or maybe just like a full year, months, who knows how much time that they spent, but a decent amount of time they spent in this thing, specific thing they're talking about before they even made their talk, which takes a long time, talk before because it's a lot of work. I've only given them at like, you know, small meetups or like the doximity, you know, lunch and learn or something. And even those are a lot of work. I can't imagine getting up in front of like, you know, something that gets recorded forever, right on YouTube. And so I totally get it. Like, because you go in and you see all these people focused talks about a specific thing and it's like well I don't know half of the stuff that they're talking about like I'll come away maybe knowing a little bit more right like my window has opened a little bit right but in the grand scheme of the whole conference there's no way you could take in all of it right like over over the full year I'll probably watch all these YouTube videos and still not take away you know the a lot of the you know talk specifics right I totally get it. It's like hard to come out of that and be like, okay, like I know These things right and I'm okay with that Definitely it's it's tough tricky in general in software I think because there is so much you do need to know but also so much you don't need to know So it's hard balancing that right?

 

It's definitely hard to balance that. And if you are new on the job, even if you have a lot of experience, you sort of, in a lot of ways, go back to zero. Cause a lot of the tooling might be new. A lot of the systems might be new. Certainly the code is new. And so yeah, the things that you, the domain knowledge that you accrued in the past may not be relevant at all anymore. Uh, and so I guess it's interesting to think about what are the skills that actually transfer, uh, job to job.

 

Yeah. So you've come out of a Bata and into a new role I've heard

 

That's true, so yeah.

 

into into the bigger space. So how big of a company we're talking with a Bata. So how

 

So

 

big were

 

yeah,

 

they?

 

I think I about had on the order of like 300 people when I started and like 30 devs roughly. And then four and a half years later, it was probably like 800 people, close to 800 people and like 300 devs or something, 250 devs.

 

Okay.

 

Don't quote me, those numbers may or may not be true.

 

Hahaha

 

So yeah, you can just like splice in like the real numbers production. And yeah, so that was really interesting to see. And I think I do, I guess, like, I really appreciate that kind of opportunity to see that growth. Because I remember, the first team that I was on at Ibotta, we would have, you know, stand up every every morning. And there were about like six or 10 folks who'd go around the room and say, here's what I'm working on. here's something I might be blocked on or whatever. And each of those check-ins became a new domain in the tech ecosystem of Aibata. So because I was there in the room when there were eight people talking about this system, when each of those eight people became multiple teams, it became a lot easier to keep that in for, kind of keep the big picture in mind. So I really appreciate that. I would just say like folks who have the have the opportunity to kind of be in that space should not take it for granted. And it's very different than where I'm at now, where I certainly don't have the entire ecosystem like in my brain at all.

 

I see. So I mean, so you've moved to a much bigger company, it sounds. And so like, what is that experience like? So

 

Yeah.

 

like you're, you're at a smaller place where maybe you have, you know, more of the stack or more pieces of the tooling that you're involved with and exposed to. Is that your experience? Does that go away? Like, what is that transition like?

 

Yeah, I guess I had, I guess like, at Ibotta, I could open up the schema file in our Rails monolith and kind of have pretty, have a pretty good sense of like what all the tables were for. Not all the tables, but like a good majority of the tables I felt like, okay, I kind of know what this is. Now that is definitely not the case.

 

I'm out.

 

But yeah, I think that I guess now the issue is more understanding the interface between what my team is directly responsible for and other teams that either consume data from us or give us data, that sort of thing.

 

Yeah, that was actually one of the biggest things that... Because I was at a consultancy with like three or four people before this.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And so now, I mean, Docsimity maybe has like 200 engineers. Probably more than that. I lose track. But, you know, that's even smaller than Stripe.

 

Yeah.

 

And so like, it's hard to keep track of... of amazing firsts like your jobs that you have to do like day to day like start to drop off into different departments like

 

That's right. Exactly.

 

right like QA which is a process to just make sure something works right is like you know its own division right like you have a group of people and they go and they check their job is to make sure that they could set up an environment and go through and make sure all the and the changes you made, right? Did what they you say they want to do, right? And so like those jobs change, right? So like before you'd be going in and doing those checks yourself and be like, okay, this looks good. Like, let me just deploy this thing. And now, you know, that gets broken up and somebody else says, okay, these changes look good, right? And

 

Yeah,

 

it's almost

 

I-

 

like you get an incremental like PA like coming with you, you know, like, even like the deployment process, right? Like a lot of that, you know, Doesn't go away, but you are less involved in it, right? Like

 

Definitely.

 

From what I remember I remember having to build like, you know custom capistrano stuff and having to make sure that that works and You know all the ins and outs of the server and things like that and now, you know, that's abstracted away and you know some Infra team is involved in making sure that that works and more performant and XYZ, right?

 

Yeah.

 

What are some other stuff that you've realized that... Let's focus on the positives.

 

Yeah, for sure. I don't want to get fired. But yeah, it's interesting you say that you kind of talk about like tooling as kind of a difference as you grow in scale. And I think that's definitely true. And I would say there's sort of two groups of employees at Stripe in terms of developers. They're the folks who came from smaller shops like me. And then there are folks who came from like much larger shops. So like the people who came from Amazon, Google, These folks come in and they're like, wow, this place is the wild west. You can move so fast and there's no tools for anything. And the folks in my camp come in and are like, wow, there's tools for everything and there's systems for everything. This is incredible. So I think the way that you see this sort of scalability of the systems in place depends a lot on where you sit and where you come from. examples there. So like, when you start at Stripe, as a developer, you get a spin up buddy. And I know you this happens at a lot of companies that was definitely the case that I bought it as well. But just there's more

 

you

 

systems around that at Stripe because of the size. So there's more automation. Like I have a spin up buddy now where you're I'm spin. I'm a spin up buddy for someone right now. And I just got a automatic email that in about the following things and then like report over here and do this. So all that stuff is kind of automated and you need that in the size company that that stripe is at this point. Because if you I think. You can't really rely on on like the on individuals being consistently executing on something.

 

Right.

 

If you're once you hit a certain scale, because individuals are individuals a little bit differently. So you have to have systems to sort of account for that. That is definitely a difference. Another thing that I would say, and this is something that surprised me, and I'm curious if you've had a similar experience or how this will kind of resonate with you at Doximity. When I started at Ibotta, it was in the before times where you would go to an office and you didn't have

 

Thanks for watching!

 

to wear a mask and you didn't have to show proof of negative tests. And when we went remote, originally, it was just intended to be like, Hey, we're closing the office for a few weeks. We'll see you all in a few weeks. Once this whole COVID thing blows over. And eventually it just became permanent remote. But for me, that was great. It just meant that I didn't have to commute. I sort of knew all the people still. There wasn't a ton of awkwardness, just transitioning in-person meetings into Zoom. But then when I started at Stripe, I was fully remote and this was the first job that I started fully remote in the current times, in the pandemic times. And I was surprised by sort of how alienating or how isolating that can be initially, because basically I'm only interacting with my immediate manager and maybe one or two people on my team. And it's like, wait, am I even in, am I in this company? Like, do people know I show up to work, what happens?

 

Right.

 

And all that kind of anxiety around being a new person just, I feel like it was a little bit higher. You know, that period ended pretty quickly, but it was definitely a surprise and something that I'll be more cognizant of if and when I start a new job fully remote.

 

Yeah, that transition is tough. I was lucky enough to have been remote before the before times.

 

Hehehehe

 

So the company I was at, I mean, again, it was three or four people in the consultancy. But we just noticed, why are we in an office? Why are we paying for an office? All of our clients are remote. We basically just chat amongst ourselves. in a chat room, right? It was a, you know, we use campfire at the time, which no

 

Mmm.

 

longer exists. But, you know, we were like, all right, let's see what this looks like if we just work remote from home. And you know, we pick one or two days in the week that we would always do that. And I was like, Okay, well, this is working. Why are we coming in the rest of the days, like we would come in and then put headphones on and, you know, check go to the chat room, right? And maybe have lunch together, maybe not like, as it became like, more of a, you know, finding made more financial sense for the business, it would seem to close down and just work from home all the time. So we ended up doing that and transitioned out of that. And it must have been two or three years that I continued to do that. And it was great, you know, like, every once in a while, you meet up with your co workers. And again, this is only like three or four people. So we all lived in the area and we could meet up for lunch or whatever, you know, or have a a you know co-working space day and so that is it does take some time though getting used to that remote lifestyle for sure and I can't imagine having started that when like you couldn't go to a coffee shop as an example

 

Right, right. Yeah, it's.

 

that was definitely a saving grace being able to change your workspace right like being cooped up cooped up in your house all the time if you're if you've never done or unfortunately everybody has done for some period of time recently, right? But you can go a little mad, you know, you got to change up the environment or you get that like, you know, cabin fever.

 

Absolutely. Yeah,

 

And yeah, go ahead.

 

we were saying earlier before we started recording that I've been doing these quarterly onsights where we go to the office once a quarter to do some planning for the next quarter or two. And I've really, really enjoyed that cadence and just getting FaceTime with my teammates and getting to kind of see the organization in person. It feels like the right cadence. often because it would require more plane travel and

 

Right.

 

I don't really love plane travel and if it was less frequent it might feel like not enough face time. So it feels like kind of like the perfect combo right now.

 

Yeah, I'd have to agree. We do quarterly at Docs70 too, and it is a good distance. And it lines up with your transition of work, right? Like when you're doing planning, it does help being in person.

 

Yeah, absolutely.

 

Right? Like it's hard, like everybody like changing their video on screen, like, okay, all right, hold on. Let me share my screen. You know, like those transitions are so like, you know, everybody wants to strangle their computer at that point. Right? Like, oh, it's not. That's where the technical glitches happen, right? When you're transitioning in in any video thing.

 

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see where folks kind of land on what needs to be in person and what can stay on Zoom and how do you work efficiently asynchronously. And a lot of what you're describing, to me, can be, ideally would be documentation or documents created and like DHH and Basecamp and they're huge proponents of like writing stuff up. And that's something that I've been trying to grow on where like, if there's a task that I've been given to kind of run down, instead of just starting like a thread in Slack, it's like, no, I'm going to start a document and start like recording my notes, almost like a, like a, like a scientific journal almost where I'm like keeping, keeping it's like inspected the logs and found this and then like found this line of code, which was surprising for the following reasons and just starting to document stuff. And then when appropriate, share that document with other teammates for collaboration. And not really expecting them to be as deep into the problem as I am immediately, but like when it's right for them, when they've got like 30 minutes to read a doc, that's that's kind of a collaboration style I'm trying to go for.

 

Yeah, I will say I do like that. What is that? The book by?

 

Rework.

 

Yeah, we work.

 

Yeah, rework. WeWork is the the

 

A rework, right.

 

the

 

That's what I was going to say. Ha ha ha.

 

the billion dollar, multi-billion dollar

 

failure.

 

crazy Netflix story at this point.

 

Yeah, I mean, I do like the idea of a lot of asynchronous stuff kind of stacked on top of your synchronous work, right?

 

Yeah.

 

There's like way too much to explore right now.

 

Yeah.

 

But that mentality of like just pushing off stuff to be reviewed at your leisure, it's a hard balance though, right? Because like some things are like urgent to some people and some aren't, right? things. And so it's like, hard to find that balance sometimes, right? Of like, okay, how do you set deadlines

 

Hehehe

 

for something that's asynchronous, right? Like,

 

Right.

 

you can't really, it ends up becoming very synchronous, whether you like it or not, for some things, you know.

 

Yeah, that's something that I notice more experienced developers seem to be good at. I'm not saying that, and I'm not saying that I'm good at it, because for me, it's very much like my instinct is like, give me this answer now or like look at this immediately because it's in my short-term memory at this point. But

 

Right.

 

I think really good developers or more senior people in the organization are sort of able to like navigate that a little more elegantly.

 

Thanks for watching!

 

and can kind of get those deadlines set and get people to sort of adhere to those deadlines and can kind of navigate that, you know, in a way that allows them to get what they need done, but also

 

Right.

 

in a way that's like respectful of other people's time. So definitely something that I would like to get better at.

 

Right. Yeah, I do wish there was a and maybe it does exist, but like a Google Doc, you know, plug in, but you could just say, all right, highlight the saying and like, you know, expires at this time, right? Like lock the comments after this, you know,

 

Right,

 

like,

 

right.

 

get it in now. Like you can see, you know, it'd be a big, like just ticking time bomb, you know, next to

 

I'm out.

 

it. You're like, all right, this is your chance. You know, a little more, add a little more urgency cues.

 

Yeah, I think I think Justin Searles, he's the testable founder

 

Yeah.

 

and prolific Ruby on Rails speaker RailsConf Ruby Comp speaker and gem author. He I believe has a gem where you can like put in a to do comment that like has like an explosion period where like it breaks your code if the to do isn't done by a certain date.

 

do or die. I love that.

 

Yeah,

 

Yeah.

 

yeah, yeah. Is that what it's called?

 

Yeah.

 

I don't think I have the guts to put to actually put that into anything I work on but the

 

I put

 

the

 

that

 

spirit

 

on side

 

is

 

projects

 

right

 

because

 

Okay

 

truly it does work.

 

I'm gonna go.

 

Oh, that's funny.

 

Yeah, shout out Justin.

 

Yeah, truly great work. I mean, testable team keeps pumping out great stuff.

 

For sure, for sure.

 

So the other topic I wanted to transition to here is your podcasts.

 

Yeah,

 

Well,

 

absolutely.

 

tell us, tell our listeners about the, you know, we're all about sharing love here and,

 

Okay,

 

you know,

 

okay. I'm gonna pick

 

Ruby

 

up a couple

 

Road

 

listeners.

 

is not the only podcast if you don't know that.

 

There are other podcasts, no, but no, I appreciate that. So we started or relaunched the Hello Turing World podcast. And that is a podcast kind of very closely affiliated with the code school that I mentioned earlier, the Turing school, which is where I got my, my, my coding certification. But which is where I, you know, I learned Ruby and rails and software development. And it's just got such a strong community around it that we sort of felt like we needed a podcast. And there had been a Turing podcast years ago. It was run by students. And so the downside of that was that students would graduate or students would have busy upcoming deadlines and were not able to consistently get out episodes. So inevitably, whoever picked up the podcast would eventually hit one of those moments where they're like, okay, I got to choose between finding a job and completing a project and graduating this program and that choice is very obvious. And so it would always kind of discontinue. So a few alumni got together and we decided to relaunch it. And the alumni community of Turing is actually pretty large at this point. There's, I want to say like 1500 people who have completed

 

Wow.

 

the program, who are out in the developer world now doing cool things. And some folks are junior developers at new companies or in new roles. And some folks are, you know, directors of engineering or CTOs or staff engineers. There's sort of a pretty wide range of folks. Some people have moved into product and we wanted to kind of have a way to connect that community and get people in that community talking to each other and just thinking about ways we can make the industry better. And so we relaunched this podcast and it's been a lot of fun. And so I'm super interested from your perspective, How do you make podcasting sustainable? Like it's not guys. It's not as easy as it looks.

 

I'm curious how you've made that happen. I've only joined an existing working podcast. So from my experience, having several co-hosts seems to be part of the magic in that, if somebody can't make it, which happens a lot, you still get the regular recording in and just keeping consistent recording times. And we have a very casual format.

 

Yeah, yeah, for

 

So,

 

sure.

 

you know, it makes it easier where you know we still do research before on, you know, I'll go and I'll read your blog and make sure that I know what you're doing and what we're talking about, you know, beforehand. But it is hard, you know, sometimes I'm there, you know, a few minutes before like reading through everything, hoping that one of the other co-hosts has enough to say, you know, It's hard and yeah, it's hard.

 

Okay, so maybe you don't have the answer quite yet, but what do you think about, like, how do you define success? Like, what do you get out of this, Valentino?

 

I mean, to me it's fun just talking to other people. I

 

Yeah,

 

mean, everybody

 

for sure.

 

has their own perspective, you know? And we both work at fairly large organizations, very large companies. Our experiences are probably completely different, you know? Even though we do a lot of the same language stuff, we have similar stacks in some ways, you know? A lot of the technologies might even be the same, but the processes aren't, especially as you scale. Sure, you could have like the very typical structure of like, okay, QA people, you know, DevOps people, XYZ people that are grouped in very similar ways. But the things that people do are not. And the way that the company is run is always different. You know, like when you get into bigger organizations, you know, okay, the organization itself could be great, but some departments might not be. And so you may even work in the same company depending on the team. And so like there's so many different variables out there, right? Like, that's what I get out of it. I just, I love talking to people that do kind of the same stuff, but they have a completely different experience. And it does make their work completely different, you know? And so what I think I know, you know, don't come in and, you know, somebody like you, well, you'll show me what, you know, making a podcast really is, you know,

 

Yeah,

 

I, I don't know.

 

yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. I think like Ruby, RubyRogues is like always in the conversation around like most popular Ruby podcasts. So I don't know about that, but

 

Sure. Well,

 

I agree.

 

I mean, you know,

 

I agree with you that

 

there

 

like.

 

is a certain audience, right? But, you know, you have a market on Turing graduates, right? And so like.

 

Yeah, and we're going to capitalize on that market.

 

You're a capitalist, you're capitalizing on it. You have cornered the market there, you know.

 

Yeah, there is there is that we are the only Turing School affiliated podcasts that I know of.

 

Well,

 

But

 

you know,

 

like

 

that's awesome. And I know, uh, was it a Jason Karnes? Uh,

 

Yep.

 

and the folks, right? Like they're always talking about, you know, go out and make a pocket. If you feel like you have something to talk about, talk about it, right? Like,

 

Yeah.

 

cause you'll end up making an impact to somebody, right? And I think that's what anybody that's interested in giving a talk at any conference, like go and make a proposal. Like you

 

Yeah.

 

And I have been impacted personally from people giving talks at conferences, like so many people, right? And people that are maybe at a lower level than I am, have impacted me positively and changed the way that I work. So that's kind of another positive of doing these podcasts, is getting people like Jesse on here. You've come on and you've created this whole community and podcasts that's gonna reach other people. I mean, Turing is not the only school to, there's

 

Yeah,

 

like

 

we're-

 

Flatiron School, there's so many different schools that are boot camps

 

We don't-

 

or do the certifications and there's people can relate. And I think what you're doing is great.

 

Thank you.

 

You get out of it. I'm curious.

 

Well, yeah, we're not biased against any other code school. If you come from a different code school, we welcome your listenership. And, you know, I get the last RubyConf, I gave out a workshop on RSpec and the room was surprisingly full, shockingly, scarily full. And I don't know, there's probably a hundred or so people in the room. But I know for a fact that all of our episodes so far have at least way more downloads than that. So it's interesting to see the scale of podcast listenership and how many folks you can get to sort of attend to things that you think are interesting. For me, what do I get out of it? My co-hosts are awesome. So our mutual friend, Mark Miranda, he was the one who had the idea. He actually, he slacked me and was like, hey, I've got an idea. And I was like, immediately I'm like, are we doing a podcast? I'm in." And he was like, actually, that is what I was going to say. And

 

That's really funny.

 

so, so Mark, you know, getting to hang out with Mark is very cool. And then my other co-hosts are Marshall Houston, who's a good buddy of mine, and then Jeannie Evans. And they're just people that I, I like to hang out with. And so it's a good excuse to have kind of sacred time on the calendar every week to hang out with these people. And then the bonus is we get to bring someone interesting in. we do this, we started making a list of people who we'd be interested in talking to. And like in five minutes, I had like over 100 people where I was like, I want to talk

 

Wow.

 

to this person and this person and this person. And these are people that like, legitimately, we could have conversations with like it wasn't like, you know, we're bringing in like the, you know, some famous CEO or something like that. These are people that we have connections with that would be willing to that we think would be willing to talk with us. So

 

I'm sorry.

 

that really gratifying. And I think part of, and just tying this back to like working in kind of big tech, my job is very, very, very specialized. And I think the bigger the company, the bigger the tech stack, the more specialized the software development becomes. And like the domain focus is very, very, very narrow. And so I guess like for some people, that that is, that is enough for that is a way to for me, it's interesting work, but it doesn't necessarily flex all the creative muscles that I feel like I want to flex all the time. And so podcasting kind of flexes another set of creativity muscles that I feel like I need to work on. And then,

 

Yeah, I agree with

 

yeah, it's like...

 

you there. Communication is hard enough.

 

Oh my god, yes!

 

And

 

I

 

when

 

was-

 

you're

 

I-

 

actually being remote too, you talk to people less and those communication skills fade.

 

Yes, it's

 

They

 

like

 

drop off, especially with COVID, it's just like, alright, Cliff, you

 

It's like

 

can

 

a

 

talk

 

Tom

 

to people.

 

Hanks movie where you're trapped on an island and you like forget how to speak.

 

Right.

 

And it's definitely, honestly, it's helped me in my marriage. Like realizing, you know, so many times I've thought something and then thought that by me thinking it, my wife somehow knows that I've thought that thing. And then that's the source of a lot of problems. And now, in a podcast, you're sort of really forced to reckon with being very clear both to the person that you're speaking to, but then this like invisible third, like third or fourth wall of the audience that is listening asynchronously. And like, how can I be

 

Great.

 

really clear to this person, but also clear to this audience? And that has, I've actually feel like it's helped me with my personal communication quite a bit.

 

I still have a problem with that, you know?

 

Hahaha!

 

Because you want to be entertaining, but at the same time, you want to be clear. It is tough, you know?

 

Absolutely, absolutely.

 

So what are some challenges that you face like making this podcast? Have you found it difficult to get guests? How does that communication work even amongst the people you're co-organizing?

 

Yeah, that's interesting. I think that right now we're still in the... It's still pretty new. We have got one season recorded and about half of it has been released and we're kind of starting to record the next season. And so I think that we're still... I don't think we've systematized enough things yet. And so I would say that that is kind of the challenge right now of like, manually, we're doing email invitations manually, setting up recordings manually. So it'd be nice if that was automated. And that way you could just show up at the recording time and just do the thing.

 

Yeah.

 

So that would be good. Yeah, I think it also says a lot about what kind of developer you are, how long you can persist in that state of knowing something needs to be automated doing it. I feel like there's some developers who can't be... As soon as there's an opportunity to automate something, they're like, I need to do this. I think I definitely dragged my feet a little bit more. I'm willing to brute force it. But that's been a challenge. Getting folks hasn't really been a challenge. I think that the community around Turing is strong enough and the experience is so meaningful to so many people who have really been able to pivot from being fairly the state of their lives to being very satisfied and having kind of a high fulfillment technical career such that they're willing to put the time in to do the conversation and and share their experience with a bigger turning audience. So getting folks on has has not been a problem at all. We have kind of a queue of people that we're excited to talk with. So yeah, so far so good.

 

Yeah, that's nice. I always, you know, I hear people making their podcasts and I always just think how much work it must go into like fitting all of the boxes in right like,

 

Yeah.

 

you know, it's because there's editing involved and, you know, you got to make sure all the sound sounds right. You know, not everybody, you know, records with, you know, the greatest mic in the world, you know.

 

Right, right.

 

have a consistent end result, it's so hard. And thankfully, there's a lot of great products out there and a lot of things to help, but a lot of those are, you have to pay for them. And where does that funding come from, right? How

 

Right, right.

 

does that work for you? Have you hit that wall

 

I'm gonna go

 

yet

 

to bed.

 

of funding is a problem or?

 

Yeah, right now it's a labor of love for sure.

 

Yeah.

 

So we're not trying to capitalize on this too much. So we're still kind of in the free tier of everything. But yeah, and I think there's sort of like, there's enough goodwill, I think, that we wanna support Turing in this way. Turing's a nonprofit, which is different than a lot of other co-schools that are for-profit.

 

Great.

 

it feels like, hey, this is a community I care a lot about. This is a way that I'm giving back to the community or trying to keep the community active. And so if it came down to, if someone twisted my arm and was like, you need to pay 20 bucks a month for Riverside or whatever it is, I'd be like, all right, 20 bucks a month, we'll do it.

 

Right, yeah.

 

Worth

 

That

 

it.

 

totally makes sense, yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Ha ha ha.

 

That said, if there are any rich donors out there, we will accept donations.

 

Honestly, you never know, you know, support Jesse and the podcast for sure.

 

I'm always looking for a wealthy benefactor.

 

That's my out too, you know.

 

Yeah. Yeah, that's not just for the podcast. That's just if you if you just like if you like how I'm living and you want to support me, I'm open to it.

 

I always, that was kind of my hope out of, you know, GitHub sponsorships is,

 

right?

 

you know,

 

I'll just

 

somehow

 

set this up,

 

somebody

 

I'm sure

 

out there

 

so.

 

was just like, yeah, this guy looks sounds good. Like, let me give him like a few hundred dollars a week. You know,

 

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

 

I think I'll be waiting

 

I like

 

forever

 

this guy's

 

on that,

 

smile.

 

you know.

 

Let's start donating him. I definitely signed up for that with that exact thought process.

 

Right.

 

Someone's gonna really like the random side projects that I post on GitHub.

 

Right? I mean, thankfully, it does seem that, you know, GitHub sponsors is helping, you know, some people that are doing some great things, specifically

 

Oh, for sure.

 

in the Ruby and Rails community, you know, so there are good things that came out of it. More than, you know, just me not wanting to work too hard.

 

Yeah, we still haven't gotten our benefactors yet,

 

Right.

 

but for the people who actually deserve it, then yeah, good on them and good on their supporters.

 

Oh, that's funny. So what have a? What have you taken out of this whole podcast generation, organizing and stuff? Is it for other people that want to do this themselves,

 

Yeah.

 

is there value that you've taken away or maybe something that you're like, okay, it is worth this labor of love?

 

Yeah, well, unlike unlike the friendly Ruby on Rogues folks, I would say there's no more room in the podcasting world. Like don't start a new podcast. There are no no. I think like I said, there is definitely like a creative itch that this scratches for me. And like I think, you know, I've also started to do more writing. And these are just other ways that I can like express myself and like get my content out there. I used to I used to maintain a more technical blog. And I would try to like write up here's like this Ruby hack or this thing that, you know, this API thing that I figured out or whatever. And I think I ran out of steam there because I'm not always like a hundred percent dialed in on like, I don't always have like a new tech thing that I'm working on. I know that's maybe sacrilegious, but that is my reality. But there are, you know, there are things that Every week or two, there's stuff that I could write about in terms of here's just the latest thing that I'm thinking about that I think is cool or worthwhile, whether it be another hobby that I'm working on or a cool book that I read or something like that. So I've been writing more and I also bring that into the podcast. So for me, there's just this creative itch that this scratches. want who's kind of yearning for this creative outlet. It's it's great. It's super fun.

 

Yeah, yeah, totally.

 

Re-recommend.

 

I mean, the creative itch is definitely, you know, especially in Ruby, right, which is so expressive. It like

 

Yes.

 

makes you want to be more creative, you know, because you can do things so many different ways and so easily. And, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen the tricks contest. It's

 

Oh!

 

just absolutely incredible. Blows your mind every time they do it. Ruby Kaigi. And this, this one guy, I hope I'm saying his name right you see key endo He's just like incredible like the stuff that he makes And like he has this one like circle of quines where he goes through and like as a program Generate a program in another language that generates a program in another language and it goes in a circle for like a hundred and ninety two languages, I think just like incredible stuff like they just like You know I love seeing that stuff and like basically like of like your code, you know, but there are different ways of

 

Yeah.

 

doing that, right? Like podcasts are, you know, they're basically an art form, scratching that creative itch, you know, writing like, like you said, you don't have to write up something crazy technical to, you know, talk about what you're working on, right? Like, it's funny, I wish there was something where I could have like a captain's log and like, you know, some AI would go and make it, you know, a starter article for me.

 

Hey, you should do it, man.

 

You know, I should, I should just work on that. That should be my side tech, you know.

 

Yeah, is Valentino's log.com available?

 

I hope so.

 

Yeah.

 

Is.log a domain

 

Ooh. Yeah,

 

yet? You

 

mine

 

know,

 

is

 

TLB.

 

verynormal.info. So if you're interested in very

 

Very

 

normal

 

normal.info.

 

information, you can check it

 

OK,

 

out.

 

I'm going to check that out. All right, awesome. Is there anything else you want to dive into before we move to pics here?

 

Yes, let's do pics.

 

All right. So if you're not familiar at the end of every episode, we just pick something, can be anything, doesn't have to be tech that you find interesting or that you want to share with the listeners. You can go first, I don't have any yet.

 

Okay, okay. So I'll do full disclosure. The production of the thing that I'm about to recommend is affiliated with my employer. So I wanna put that out there. So the pick that I wanna recommend is a book called The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop. Came out in 2001 and it's currently being published by Stripe Press, it's affiliated with my employer. And it is the story of a guy named JCR Licklider of personal computing. So if you're interested in history, history of ideas, computers, basically like if you're listening to this podcast, you might really like this book. It's definitely the best book that I read this year. Super interesting to think about like what early computers were like, what the people who worked on early computers were like, and kind of how visionary some of these folks really were who could, you know, in the 40s and the 50s really predict like the internet even though there was nothing like that. They were inventing those ideas out of nothing. So I love that book, recommend it, and yeah, that's my pick. The Dream Machine.

 

That's awesome. So I've just got one pick today. One of my coworkers, Michael Fezenden, wrote this article on Doximity's blog, The Cyclical Nature of In-House Tooling.

 

Ooh.

 

Basically just talking about standardized processes and how they improve the delivery of our products for our customers. you know, automated processes and just setting very, you know, specific, you know, feedback and cycles can really help make a solid product. So I would recommend checking that out. And I'll leave a link to that in the show notes.

 

Awesome. I'll check

 

Jesse,

 

it out.

 

thanks for coming on. And it was great talking to you. And if people want to, you know, reach you on the internet, how can they reach out?

 

Yeah, Valentino, thank you for talking with me. It was good to hang out with you for an hour or so. Yeah, people can find me. I'm on Twitter at PlanetEfficacy. And you can find my blog at verynormal.info. And then we podcast. It's called the Hello Turing World podcast. So if you Google Hello Turing World, you'll find the podcast.

 

Awesome, awesome. Yeah, go check that out. I'm gonna start listening myself. It sounds really cool. And, you know, until next time folks, Valentino out.

 

Peace.