accessibility, hobbies, and the job search w/ chris demars

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

oh all righty oh we're live finally uh good morning everybody um I'm very excited to hang out with my BFF Kristen Mars you know it's it's like I posted and I really truly mean this Chris you know I my my close friends now of course I say this and everyone everyone's be like well am I Taylor's close friend now or not all that being said people who I've known for a long time I don't even think about bringing on the Pod because I know them so well because really what the podcast is is a way to meet new people right so I'm like oh yeah

I know Chris like I don't need to hang out with Chris and chrisland in my DMs I was like yo bro let's let's go live together I said oh yeah that'll be nice so here we are we're live um very excited for those of you tune in welcome say hey would love to hear from you as always um this is a this is a two-sided thingamajigger um this is a I'm pretty sure a thingamajigger is a fishing lure that Chris and I will talk about here soon but um uh it is uh this is a networking platform so please say hey um and connect with

people on the platform um I can't tell you the amount of people I have on who are who have found mentors mentees apprenticeships internships new jobs new connections um there's a lot of people who um so I encourage you to network off the back of what I do um one of the reasons why I do this every day the reason why I do unicorn finders consistently is because I want to provide a network for you to test up into so if I were you and I'd watch this now in the future I would go through every single person who comments that says hey just connect

with them hey I saw you on guidance counselor 2.0 this morning we'd love to connect then I'd hop on over to unicorn finders I connect with every single founder that I've had on a unicorn finders listen guys guys gals I've been doing this for three years now if you do that you're gonna be pretty networked in and so um so go connect with Chris Chris is an amazing follower both on Twitter uh main ly on Twitter mainly on Twitter um so go connect with him um and then uh and the second thing is ask questions guys like Chris um are are are awesome um they

bring a lot of knowledge in a lot of different areas and so uh ask questions this is the one time we don't get billed for it um so I want to give shout out to a few more people tuning in Todd it's good to see you buddy uh Mark Join Eugene it's great to see you as well love the energy uh Noah my guy it's good to see you shout out to Noah Allen Noah actually helps with some of my video editing um and Noah actually just got accepted to Nashville software School here in Nashville um remotely so I'm very very excited for him so

congrats buddy Michael good to see you Chris Gracie as well no Chris is not in Nashville I wish you if Chris was in Nashville he'd be at my house right now Chris where are you I think he's talking about Chris Jervis oh yeah Northeast duh yeah Chris Jarvis Crystal Mars is not Nashville though I'm not Nashville uh let's see here I love it break it was yo-yo Chicken on my lunch break loving that Tim Hortons mug man since moving to Chicago I truly missed my teammates you have never had it Timmy's is the best coffee hands never had it if you like Starbucks those are

fighting words we're gonna throw Knuckles baby I like pumpkin way better sucks I'm not saying it's good I'm just saying that like you know I I don't have a Tim Hortons over here Chris so I gotta I gotta know I got to make it sounds like you need to come up to where I live you get that Detroit style I still want to come hang out with you I still want to come hang out with you come on baby let's go I've never been to Detroit um Kevin Stephanie LinkedIn usually what's up to Mars I don't know who that is what's up what's up LinkedIn

user user uh I'm just down the street in Memphis uh Brady it's good to see you Alex Chris is the homie he's the one who got me into Taylor's over uh right baby that's awesome that's awesome and then and I have to go shout out to Chris everyone's just giving shout outs today Chris was the first one with the help of Kyle Welch Kyle gets butt hurt if if I don't give a shout out Chris and Kyle Welch basically introduced me to the engineering community and opened me with welcome arms so Chris I've known I've honestly known Chris I think longer than most people um

so Joe it's good to see you um no the other Chris okay cool uh Michael let's see here no I can't follow the conversation it's been very difficult this morning I had my I was I was I was uh hanging out with Chris backstage and my founder called me and it was just it's just been a lot this morning uh see here oh Brady moving to Nashville near Nashville awesome well definitely hit me up um if you're closer to Memphis hit up James um Braden Starbucks is garbage I love it Ricardo uh yeah I'm down to a national Meetup 100 um I can help uh

Scott from Boston I love it Eric it's good to see you as well all right cool another mouth uh well first off I have to give the play I have to give a shout to that conference first off Chris now both be there next week second off their official coffee sponsor of the show so I'm drinking uh some some that conference coffee beans it's really good highly recommend it um but go check it out great conference Chris will be there etc etc um all right cool uh yeah listen Todd Duncan is much listen I get it but I don't have many choices up here Todd

chill out anyways love you buddy all right Chris it's good to be what they want who are you what do you do and we'll go from there Crystal Mars from Detroit Michigan currently living outside of Detroit Michigan unemployed developer Advocate I'd like to consider myself a free agent I am one of the best in the Deborah not just joking uh but for real though developer Advocate uh free agents unfortunately uh looking for a gig but yeah that's me I love community I love Taytay I love everybody that's in this chat we're all friends and uh we're just here to Vi be we're just drinking coffee

on this beautiful uh Tuesday morning just just two tatted dudes drinking coffee hanging out that's that's right baby that's right that's right I just got more tattoos than I do I'm just trying to I'm just trying to catch up Chris that's true that's true um so Chris so you're in Detroit so I I want to get the pleasantries out of the way um what is uh what's what's the favorite pizza spot in Detroit for you right now man like like like if people are coming through Detroit for maybe maybe it's a layover overnight you know maybe they're driving through where do people gotta go right

now to uh to get some good Za I got two spots for you and they are original original Detroit style pizza spots which is my favorite by the way my wife calls it fancy breadsticks oh no I don't know I know I know but I love Detroit style pizza I love the choice not pizza she does I love it so if I had two so I I mean everybody knows this I'm on a pizza Hiatus I've been on a pizza hey this is going gonna be a six months dang dude all right yeah I gave up pizza I'm giving up pizza well I gave up

pizza for six months it's over in September so I haven't had uh and since March 22nd was the day and a bunch of people on Twitter said oh you Aaron you're not going to be able to do it you're going to give in well I just read between the lines you know what I'm saying that's that's how I feel about that because I'm gonna push through it's all about willpower you know uh and I haven't had popping over a year and so that's pretty good that's awesome but if I had if I had two two spots it's either gonna be buddies or Cloverleaf and buddies

is the original Buddy started uh back in the 50s buddies Rendezvous Six Mile and Conan here in Detroit okay and then the the founders of buddies sold it opened up or bought Cloverleaf in Roseville okay and Cloverleaf now there's only one indoor location for Cloverleaf the others are uh uh carry out Cloverleaf is still the same recipe as the O G buddies but if I had two to pick it'd be buddies or it would be Cloverleaf uh Todd Libby with the jokes Pizza Hut and Domino's right can you can you boot Todd out of the stream I know I know uh let's see here um

uh Ellis good to see you more and everybody ribs yesterday and pizza yeah we're on a big we're on a uh we we talk ribs yesterday um so I love it I love it um so Chris the next question man Detroit Red Wings how y'all looking for this upcoming year well you know a lot of people were pissed off about uh what Eiserman did this year with the trades and getting rid of people and bringing people on but you got to trust the eyes are playing man there's a method to his Madness and he you know he brought into brincat he's got a couple really

really fast Sharp Shooters you know he kept moan he kept Lukey on he kept it you know Larkin of course for Tuesday you know you saw for Tuesday for Tuesday went to Boston now he's going to be in Toronto hopefully we get burnt back at some point but uh I don't know but you got to trust the Eiser plan you know what I mean we got we got kosa who uh was playing on the Toledo Walleye which is one of our farm teams and he was like one of the best goalies in the league so and he's like six six I guess a big goalie

you know what I mean so uh you're gonna trust the eyes are playing man you know you got to trust you guys are playing We we played a goalie last night in uh in beerley we won seven to two but he was a big guy we just we just picked him apart so big goals or big having size is is good we actually Chris funny enough I didn't realize that Toledo walleyes were the pharmacy for Detroit Red Wings um one of our goalies that plays with us uh with a backup on the Toledo walleyes for a year so oh nice yeah yeah yeah they're like

they're like the third one on the list like our main our main team is the Griffins Grand Rapids Griffin oh I didn't know that I didn't know that that's AHL yeah so like when we're pulling like when we're movin g people back and forth we're pulling from the Griffins and we're sending up to the Griffins yeah okay well like Flint has a team and then Toledo Walleye like if you look at pulses if you look at Costas yeah if you look at kosa's goalie mask it's got a red wing on it like it's a red wings mask so that's awesome and for those of you

who have they're like who the hell are y'all talking about what's up I'm talking about hockey by the way um it's good to see you buddy it's really really good to see you um all right man so Chris let's talk about the job search right so uh I'm fresh off of it you're fresh on it thoughts comments observations let's just go ahead and kick it off man well first off I see a go ABS go kick out of trading right now kick Brady out of this chat there's a lot of hate we got Todd throwing Pizza Hut and dominoes and we got Brady going ABS

man people that's all right that's all right Todd drinks coffee with coffee milk so you know what he can he can get out of this chat too he can get rocks with open-toed shoes anyways oh so June 20 actually I found out I'm sitting in the same spot drinking the same coffee and it's almost 11 o'clock 20 minutes to 11 on June 27th in the same spot as when I got laid off so I've been all laid off since June 27th uh developer advocate at a company where I built the developer relations program from the ground up I was the devrel team so I would

joke about saying you know I was the director team lead and the VP of devrel and also the developer Advocate because devrel and developer Ed it's two different things right your developer advocating Debra L team so I used to joke around all the time but I did all of that I built strategy I built processes and tracking for success in metrics and did all that stuff and then I was canned uh almost about nine months and I've been applying everywhere shots and applying everywhere I probably applied to 100 gigs since June 27th um like one night I applied for like 16 jobs yeah one night

s weet and yeah and like I'm either getting uh like a couple I've had a couple interviews a couple two promising interviews I'm hoping one comes through if anybody's on the stream from this company hey let your boy know uh but I've had two interviews so far and uh like a prelim and then the other company I've had three interviews so far and we're still waiting to see what happens but it is hard man like a lot of companies are freezing hiring or they're they realize how much it takes to pay a developer Advocate yeah and you're like no no no like we can't afford

developer Advocates like that's a lot of money it's like I always say if you're not gonna if you are a gung-ho on your product and you are going to want a devrel team you better invest in it and really take it seriously because if not your your product is going nowhere in my opinion yeah and and listen man I mean I I use Chris and I'm not just saying this is Chris on the call I say this all the time I have learned about more software products in companies because of the devrel model then any other type of marketing like I only knew about split

because of Chris right and and there there's a lot of other companies out there that I've learned because of the devrel developer Advocate model because I think at the end of the day and Chris I'm interested here thoughts people want to buy from people right like like your your company marketing could put out canva post on Instagram and Linkedin at the end of the day you don't have anybody out in the community which which may be a good segue for both of us about the importance of community so Chris can you talk about people buying from people and kind of that model why it's so

important yeah you know I I struggled um the devrel space to make the big separation between community and product like product events like reinvent cubecon stuff like that right and then you have you know community events like that and Quebec Tech and kcdc like those are community events developers are going to be at those events that the people signing the checks not people looking for buying products right those people are at product and showcase events they're the ones with the checks if you are going to like a re invent or something like that and you're a developer unless you're like like super super nerdy and

you want to go for the tech you're going to pay out of pocket but that is not cheap no right if you're a developer and you're there you're either there because you really really want to be and you have the money to go or your company sent you right you're not there to sign checks and that's the big difference between community events community in general and product and product events in general you want to get in front of developers if you're a developer you know I've been a firm developer for 27 years you want to be on the front lines where those developers are going

to be and they're not going to be the product event they're going to be in a developer Community event and you want to be able to Vibe with them you want to be able to empathize with them you want to be able to understand their issues and their concerns because you chances are nine times out of ten ten times out of ten you've been in that same position before yeah and you've you've had to sympathize with somebody else or somebody else has had to sympathize with me right you have to be there to understand those are the people right a customer and a client is

not the developer I'm sorry I'm going to put that right on the table right now what do you mean by that the whole customer and client think oh well we got to reach out to our customers who who's your customer company ABC is the customer Jane Doe is the developer I'm not trying to reach out to company ABC reaching out right oh I'm trying to reach out to Jane Doe they are the developer you know what I mean yeah I had that's the hardest thing to get across to organization is there's a difference between developer and customer and clien t yeah the customer is the

company the developer is the developer right yeah I'm not I don't give a about the company at that point you know what I mean I'm not trying to sell to the company people that are writing checks don't care about the code right I want to talk to the developer and get with them on the same level and then we can vibe from there 100 uh Scott comes in here with a pretty good question if any aspect of your platform is going to be developer facing I.E you have Integrations hooks sdks APS sounds like you need devrel though I'd love for your breakdown difference if any

between devrel and Dev advocacy this is actually an interesting question I don't know Chris is it just a difference of terminology or is there a difference so developer relations and I mean it really depends on who you talk to okay for me developer relations is a team of different things interesting Community managers are devrel Developer Advocates are devrel developer relations it would be no different than saying uh let's see how can I put this um if you had an overarching team yeah right the overarchy team has a name right or like a classification then you have the people under that that have different areas of

that that roll up to that team right right you have a team lead you have a community manager you have a community lead you have a technical evangelist you have a Content writer even though your content writer does not have the term developer Advocate if they're putting out content they are essentially a developer Advocate right they're putting out content for the developer Community sure everybody in a sense is a D.A but we all work Under the Umbrella of the developer relations team that's what we do like product relations we'll have might have a sales person an engineer right A Team lead sure and you can

see yeah I'm product realm okay what do you do under product realm oh I'm an engineer the same thing okay that's that's that's the difference okay I love that I love that um talk about you know I I I've had you know James you've had James on the show you know I've had a few other I've had a lot of Advocates on the show and I think it's always an interesting question how do you address and maybe you're doing this in interviews right now which I'm sure you are how do you address metrics vanity metrics real relationships um you know even I have a talent

Advocate title at gun dot IO at the end of the day I'm actually devrel and let's just be honest right with what I do and it's something I've had to deal with with during interviews I mean you got to have some metrics right yeah so how do you approach that that's a that's a tricky one because yeah metrics in the devrel space is always like the talk like it's extremely difficult to tie one thing to another in what we do right so I mean you have those vanity metrics you have those success metrics you have those attribution metrics I tried to like section things off

right so like attribution metrics right like if you're if you're tweeting about stuff or you're like putting out links or you're writing content you're putting out links like having like links to track that stuff like UTM links with like the like the medium as to where it came from whether that's like LinkedIn Twitter twitch Blue Sky Mastodon whatever and being able for like a uh like a that's a bunch of content team that's sort of like a Content team or like a data person that's on the content team to see the influx of traffic and where that's coming from and if that's from a link

that you possess as a developer Advocate okay cool we can track that engagement back to what you did right so that's one way uh you know Mary Fang ball if anybody knows everybody think of all is uh they are like the the person in the space and I look up to Mary they have the the book on devrel if anybody doesn't have it it's the business uh business value development relations it's the book with the avocados on the front yes great great great book I su ggest anybody that's in the devrel space or wants to get in developer relations to purchase it read it five

times so great um in that book there's a lot there's talk there's there's are there's Pages or articles or whatever content about devrel qualified leads and what devrel qualified leads are it's like if let's say you're at a conference and you talk to somebody in marketing you talk to an engineer you talk to a QA you talk to product you talk to sales you talk to somebody and you get them interested you can't make them do anything right but you can take that information and you can pass it off to a sales person you can pass it off to an engineer now you've already helped

in the middle that middle space as the funnel from point A to point C and your point B and you just funnel that through right same thing with you could talk to somebody we could talk to somebody at that conference next week about a product right they might show interest whatever I'm not they're going to show product that's the one thing we don't do is developer relations developer advocacy you're not there to show and sell product that's what sales are for and market like other pieces of marketing but like I could talk to somebody you could talk to somebody next week they might show a

little bit of interest but they might not do anything until a year from now right but if you make an impact and they know oh oh I talked to Taylor at that conference in Wisconsin yeah that conference was awesome but Taylor he really talked about this product and you know we we were using this other product for this this amount of time I think we should switch then you can start seeing that stuff roll in it's not going to happen overnight it's not going to happen in a month it's not going to happen in six months it takes time and that's why when sea level

people or board members don't see the needle moving and it's like well if we're not seeing any uh you know action here we need to start figuring out our money situ ation and maybe we really need to rethink devrel and that's the problem let me this may be a kind of a a hot take here but I love Hot takes on a on a Tuesday morning yeah baby um in my opinion I think the way this the way we do it right you do it I do it devrel the long-form relationship building is the way to go I do think that you need to have

some true salespeople to outbound dials Just Dial Dial I get that yeah in your opinion do you think uh and let's just do software team just for the sake of this conversation should almost have more a bigger Dev Advocate team nobody's ever asked me that that's a great question well and the reason I'm asking this is because I mean in my experiences from Staffing to now what I do it's it's been interesting kind of following some Trends and stuff I told my team at when I was at vaco like I can't be the only salesperson because I am not the outbound 100 calls a day

and I don't want to be that that's not what I'm good at I'm good at this right this but I do think you need sales people doing that so what are your thoughts on kind of building that out I think having more people on the governor team is great and there's a handful of different examples out there but like I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about OCTA as being one you know you I we have a lot of friends over at octo that are DA's even at progress you know on the Kendo Dev Advocate team there are different disciplines for each piece of that product right

Kendo for example you know you got Catherine you got Sam you got Ed you got Alyssa and they all are DA's for different languages for Kendo that is great because I don't believe anybody unless you are very very intelligent very smart and you can just pick languages up if you can know 10 languages and you could be a D.A in all those 10 languages for your company if your company let's say your company has Integrations for all those languages sdks great knock yourself out but for me like I can't do all that and I think having a bigger da team is very crucial when it

comes to stuff like that now if you have if you're if your cut product is one SDK one language okay fine one person is cool more people is better but let's say you have a global sales team right you can't be a D.A in London England if you have five London England you know you have five sales people in London right and if they're not open to hiring DA's in London then you're only limited to your to to you know the US sure so your hands may be you know a little tight on that one but I do think that having more DA's than sales

could be a good thing that way you have more of the information out there and you're going to have more information coming funneling in to the sales people to keep them consistently busy yeah talking to companies where you talk to developers right right there might be there might be sales people like I said in London I'm not I'm not out there in London at conferences and meetups and doing all these things so how are the sales people talking to developers in London they're not they're talking to the customer or the company and that's how they're trying to funnel it in so I mean I could

I could definitely see it yeah yeah I'm just curious again no no right answers here right um so you know one one thing Chris that I admire about you is is well is one your openness of talking about Mental Health on the internet you know you're doing well you're not doing well um you know another thing too is you know I was talking with you backstage just how I love you post about fishing and paintball and stuff like that let's talk about let's kind of pull back out of work for a second and and talk some mental health stuff I mean why do you think

it's important to have hobbies you know especially in Tech um especially as it relates to mental health yeah so I I'm a big big advocate for mental health and normalizing it everywhere workplace public everywhere and it should be normalized because amen most of us are broken in one way or an other I am diagnosed with health anxiety with accompanying OCD and if anybody knows me like knows me knows me being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder like than what I specifically have is a death sentence every day I wake up every day I wake up and to keep going is one of the hardest things in

my life and it sucks like it sucks but you know one of the things that helped a little bit and didn't help was distractions and you know Erp doesn't work for me CBT doesn't work for me so if anybody's familiar with Erp it's exposure and response therapy uh so that's where you expose yourself to what causes the anxiety the anxiety should level down and come down and come down and come down yeah Erp and uh okay it's okay here's a perfect example I besides my health anxiety when I was seeing my counselor I also have a fear or had a fear of raw meat raw

meat now I'm an angler I'm an Outdoorsman uh you know I I eat meat I'm a meat eater but I could not touch raw meat without gloves on and if I was handling meat and I would move it from one place to another and had to take the gloves off I've had to sanitize real quick because I thought that there were molecules of the meat that were have fallen off and I'm going to get sick and die so I had and like this is being I'm being extremely vulnerable vulnerable right now you know I mean but that's fine because it needs to be normalized so

it would take me forever to cook a meal so my counselor wanted me to do Erp first with the raw meat here before we jumped into the heavy stuff which was the health anxiety sure because part of the raw meat thing was a fear of getting sick as well so I had to stand there in the kitchen and I had her on the phone with me I had to stand there in the kitchen and hold a piece of chicken in my hands or raw pork or raw beef in my hands and hold it there and I'm losing my mind yeah losing my mind no gloves

right yeah and she's watching me and she's counting down time and she's telling me you're doing great you' re doing great you're doing great until the anxiety came down I had to do that so many times through the week and so many times through the week and like for multiple weeks and eventually that fear that anxiety of raw meat went away now I can touch me with my bare hands I'm not worried about it it all doesn't bother me at all that's exposure and response to therapy you get exposed to it you find your response and you prevent the response which is freaking out or

like the OCD that comes along with it right that's BRP CBT cognitive behavioral therapy you know it's just a lot of talk yeah thinking yeah right so and I'm doing brain mapping right now which is which is an interesting form as well so yeah so yeah so that and you know distractions never worked the one distraction that always worked for me being at conferences with the developer Community because I never worried about my health because I was always out having a good time I was distracted when I'm away from that you know the health anxiety really starts to creep in but you know I have

so many hobbies I do so many things and people are like geez tomorrow's like we could do so much I ride dirt bikes I hunt yeah I forgot dirt bikes yeah yeah I play paintball like I just played a tournament over the weekend came in second place baby Motor City horsepower let's go that's my team uh I fish in fishing tournaments I go fishing a couple times a week I got a fish tournament this week on Detroit River for Major League Fishing if you don't know Major League Fishing shout out Major League Fishing the bfl Phoenix series bass fishing league on the Detroit River I

do that like I gotta keep going like I gotta keep moving and it's been that way for a long time I don't like sitting at home I don't like being here and stuck here like these tattoos right here these these spider webs yeah spider webs you know if you know tattoo culture spider webs start off as a prison tattoo it's a prison tattoo because and I've never been to pri son I have a clean record I'm college graduate you know don't I've never been to prison Todd and you know that uh but spider webs you know the culture behind spiderweb tattoo is you feel trapped

you know ah A fly flies into a spider they're trapped right you're behind bars the meaning for these is because I'm trapped in here right I'm always trapped in my head and it's hard to get out so that's why I want to be consistently going farmers markets the park riding bikes doing anything Motocross paintball because when you're focused on paintball you're focused on the field layout you're focused on what you're going to do with your team when you're fishing you're focused on presentation and where you're going to go next and see where the fish are like you have to be focused on these things and

you can't focus on yourself and your mind right that is why being part of the community is so great because you're oh in the Paranormal stuff you know I'm doing paranormal conventions that's how Alex and I met our first relationship we bet on Twitter through the Paranormal Community found out he was a developer and then I found in a conference that's our friend Cecilia was his mentor that's awesome so like it's full circle you know what I mean but distractions in community and doing all these things help tremendously when it comes to mental health I don't I know I don't I know that you don't

like looking at a machine in the screen all the time I don't like clicking on the screen all the time this is stressful I don't care what you're doing in I.T it is stressful whether you are a designer a recruiter VP it's all stressful yeah it's one of the it's one of the most stressful jobs that's out there yeah I mean yeah and if we don't take time for ourselves to like just chill and kick it and Vibe out burnout is a thing oh yeah burnout is a thing so 100 100 I love it I love it well y'all as we wrap up here uh

Chris I always ask everybody two questions first question what tools Technologies trends are you kind of looking into or tinkering with right now that you want to share Oh So currently right now I'm actually building a new app uh with ionic shout out to Mike Hartington Big Mike beautiful blue eyed Mike with his beautiful beautiful beard um he does have a beautiful beard uh so I'm building an actually a fishing app with ionic and I'm going to be using clerk which is a an authentication Service drag and drop authentication Service uh just to do like a sign in like a simple sign in just to

see if I can play with it a little bit Yeah but I'm building the app currently uh where it's going to be a mobile app it might be a pwa I might push it up to Android and iOS we'll see but it's just an app where you can track your weight out of five fish it's called I'm not gonna tell you what it is I'm actually talking about right now because somebody's gonna stealing when you get track it tracks all your fish that you're catching throughout the day and then it will cull your fish for you so it'll find the if you get Thai fish

and let's say you have a small fish on your list in the next switch you catch is bigger than that one when you input it it pulls that small one off and it puts the big one nice so that way it automatically calls it for you so you don't have to like try to figure it out or like weigh your fish at the end of the day or like when you get five fish there's a cup there's a culling scale that you can have and it's just got two slots on it and you put your cold Clips on it whichever one tips you know you

know it's the bigger fish and you throw the smaller one back you put the bigger fish in so you can still have five so they have to do that this app can do it automatically nice it's calling calling Clips are numbered one two three four five you'll know on the list it's one two three four five in the order you catch them that's cool so it'll go through yeah take that one small fish off put the big fish on and you can keep going and keep fishing so yeah that's awesome um last questions we wrap up here and again please go connect with Chris um

he's an awesome follow and a good friend um uh what would be your biggest piece of career advice to your younger self right because we had this guidance counselor 2.0 the reason why it's called guidance concert 2.0 is because we have a guidance counselors middle school high school in college but now as adults who don't really have a guidance counselor right and so um what would be your biggest piece of advice oh this might turn into a little story how much time we got wait we got as much time as you need to tell this story well a lot of people know this story uh

but if I had anything to tell my younger self so I would say when you get the gut feeling to pursue anything in I.T do not wait to do it do not wait to do it don't go out somewhere else looking for Fast Cash do not do it so I started writing code in 1996 right I didn't think when I was a kid I didn't think I could get a job doing the other stuff I thought you had to work for like a Fortune 500 or yeah you know big company like that right I I don't know like little little Chris didn't have an allowance

he didn't have a domain like he used Angel Fire right because it was free get out of college or get us get out of high school I was writing code in high school get out of high school go to college go to college for web developments I thought back then you needed a degree like 2003 2004 I wasn't like self-taught like if you didn't have a degree nobody was hiring you right so I'm like I know all this stuff mostly anyways so I'll just go back to it dropped out four times dropped out of college four times because I was consistently looking for Fast Cash

I've had any every job under the summit you can think of because I thought I could make money quick and then it hit me in my 20s I'm like this is not working like I've always got still slinging code on the side doing all these odd jobs I love doing this like I really real ly really need to take this serious and I stopped everything I was doing I got back into college graduated with a 396.

there you go Dean's academic an achievement worked for my field of study experience and B's I had one b in college all A's 1B uh Dean deck uh Dean's List presidents list all this other stuff and I finally got like a full-time job with benefits in the IT world like as a blue badge you know uh in like 2013 2014 after you know all the years of doing it on my own since 1996 but I waited I waited too long to get back into it and I and I get it like you know any age you can start doing this stuff sure it's true any

age you can start doing this up but for me I feel I would have benefited a lot more if I would have kept going with it when I was younger yeah but you know what we understand here in Michigan or in Detroit Detroit hustle's harder like you want something you got to go for it and there ain't no nobody's gonna do it but you so you got to be able to hustle and if you don't you're just gonna be left behind because you know Michigan Detroit we got a bad rap here and it's you know it's not a bad place but we've gone through a

lot of in Michigan and Detroit with you know layoffs and the big three and the crash of 2008 2009 like bankruptcy and all sort of stuff big you know big things that happen you're like you need to be able to push and hustle because we don't play no game we don't play games here like I will leave you in the dust yeah because I have to hustle I have to push myself or I'm not going to get anywhere and that's just that's how I was raised and that's how I just came up so start early keep pushing keep pushing keep pushing don't burn yourself out

but hustle because you're gonna you're gonna get it and you keep hustling you're gonna get it and I don't mean hustle like code on the weekends code at nights take all your time live your life your work life balance yeah sure super crucial don't hustle to the point where you're gonna bring yours elf out but make stuff happen because you know what when you don't have a job your job is to find a job 100 last question that came in here before we wrap up bright and Chris one question best way to prep for my first tech interview today oh well I guess it really

depends on the role right if you are a front-end Dev back-end Dev if you're going to be like a product owner of stuff like that um there are great questionnaires out there for like and they're on GitHub like front end interview questions if you can find that go through that and start reading it because there'll be different sections on like CSS JavaScript uh HTML excuse me Product hopefully accessibility because an accessibility Advocate if you can go through those and kind of study those that's a great one same thing for the back end doing that there's a book out there called cracking the coding interview or

cracking the code interview I know a lot of people have read that or have gone through that I would definitely start with that but I would also have a handful of questions and Taylor will back me up on this have a handful of questions in your back pocket yeah just throw it down because it's a two-way street an interview is just not about you it's about that person that's interviewing you and they might not know anything about the technology yeah right you might be able to stump them because they might just be reading from a list like I've had to interview people about stuff I

had nothing I knew nothing about right right and they'd asked me of like oh well you know somebody else is more qualified to answer that question for you and I'd pass my feedback on recruiters but always make sure that you have those questions in your back pockets yeah absolutely all right y'all well that was great Chris stay on so I can say bye to you uh thanks again for everybody hanging out with me today and Chris guidance counselor 2.0 uh and then tomorrow I'm very excited I have Cyrus Harbin on the show Cyrus is one of the h osts at render ATL this year um

so he and I are hanging out but again go connect with Chris um and we'll see y'all tomorrow morning at 9 30 a.m Central y'all take it easy