how to excel as a human outside of coding w/ michael eaton

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

Mike, what do you do? Who are you and we'll go from there? Oh, man. I'm a currently principal consultant at Improving, a consulting company that's got offices all over the US, Canada and Mexico. I've been here just over a year. This is one of those companies that I found I'm looking for after a little bit of churn. I do work for multiple clients, whatever they need. So, but you live in Ohio after born and raised in Michigan, came to Ohio a few years ago. Two adult kids, they went to the Freddie movie. What was that one let that just came out? I don't know, I'm not a big movie.

Chris, tomorrow you're still watching. Cause you're a guy right here. Five nights or whatever. Anyway, they went to see that last night. They dressed up and my wife handed out candy. She loves doing that stuff. And then I was just a grumpy old man. Can't buy a door. Same. So I'm always a grumpy old man. So Mike, again, so I don't have any agendas when I go live. And Mike and I were chitchelling, Mike, man, like, what are you passionate about right now? So Mike, what are we talking about today, ma'am? So one of the things that has really kind of jumped up on me doing talks and stuff, I took a break from the community for a long time.

And as I was deciding to kind of come back in and start speaking again. One of the things that's been on my mind for a few years now, a couple of years at least, is how can we improve as developers? How can we just get better at what we do? And so it started out as kind of some blog posts and things like that. And then I got to thinking more about it. I was trying to write a blog post on what makes a senior developer. And then I realized that's silly, like it doesn't matter if you're a senior or a principal or a junior or whatever.

what makes a good developer. But I realized it's just like, it all comes down to being a good human. So I started out as- Matt, I imagine that. It started out as an idea for a blog post and then I kind of built a talk and I was thinking back over the years, I've been doing this for almost 30 years and I was thinking back across all the people I worked with all the teams, like what has made the developers that I've looked up to, what has made them be the developers I looked up to? What did they do differently? And so I built this talk, five skills you must master to excel as a developer.

And then I had the privilege and benefit, honestly, of driving to St. Louis from Columbus with Guy Royce. And we were talking about, well, actually I drove to Grand Rapids more than first. I drove from Columbus to Grand Rapids. And as we were going up, I was telling him about this, this, essentially doing my talk in the car, you know, and it was to excel as a developer and he was talking about it. And he's like, well, here's kind of an idea. You should do this. So in the end, I realized that it's not about just being a developer. If I say that, it's gonna limit an audience.

It's gonna, you know, I want everyone to show up because I think they're all important. So it really is all for anybody, these five skills. skills and I thought long and hard about them. And it's still evolving, right? I guess some of these could change. But in the end, I came up with these skills that kind of build on each other. And these are things that my teams I've worked with over the past few years have heard me talk about, have heard me preach. And some of these, like I said, the original idea for this blog post was based on some experiences I was having out of teen.

And then I reached out, I was looking at some old books. I have all sorts of books in my office. And I picked up an old book from the 90s called, I can't even think of the other name, it's an old school, it's a sold hard cover. But this guy was talking about personal software process. So I thought, oh, that could be a cool talk. So I actually called my friend Corey House, and we were talking about it, and I was kicking this idea around it. And so that kind of fed into it. So all of this kind of is what became this talk. And so it's something I'm passionate about.

I run a meetup here in Columbus called Tech Support, the softer side of tech. And we talk about everything but code, right? Because code is the easy part. And I mentioned this to one of the, we tend to get a lot in this meetup. We tend to get a lot of tech elevator students, alumni, a lot of people new to the field. And I had said that, that coding is the easy part. In fact, I think what I said in our way with Discord, and I said coding and technology is the least of our problems. And I said, really? And I said, yeah, it all comes down to people.

It all comes down to people and how they are and how they communicate, how they act. So yeah, so one of the things that I stress in this talk that I think are really important are, we should all start by writing stuff down. Right, and I don't care where you do it, how you do it, you wanna use Obsidian Cool, you wanna use a text file, I don't care. when he's one note. I recently got a new iPad with a pencil. So I am all about writing my hand writing my notes. Prior to that, I have a moleskine. Yeah. It was my developer notebook, right?

Yeah. This was my developer notebook. And so this is where all my decisions went in. This is where all those things in. But I also journal, I just journal. I've been journaling since 2019. I've got, if I look up, there are probably 20 volumes I've filled. Yeah. Since 2019. And so there's a spectrum of writing stuff down. So there's everything from day to day, what am I working on? What decisions did I make? Why did I do that? Sketching out ideas so I don't forget. And we all work in a time of it's hard to focus. Yes, Chris Demaras, I do love my notebooks. He follows me on Instagram.

So he sees. I love it. So there's a spectrum, but we're all, it's so hard anymore to start working at eight o'clock and be done at five, right? It's always, you know, we'll pull the side. We have this meeting, that meeting. For me, I have multiple clients. So I need these checkpoints of like, where did I leave off? And so I have that technical aspect of it. And then I have the personal side of it, which is, which is, uh, Is everybody okay over there? Yeah, I think it's a cat somewhere. That's great. That's a great noise. So, but so to me, the journals, like the personal writing, right?

That's where I could flesh out a lot of things that I'm going through, those types of things or beliefs, right? Why do I believe what I believe? So it gets very deep with those. But you can look at, I think it was in Moonwalking with Einstein is a book. And I think he talked about the idea of externalizing your memory. Ah, interesting. So when you think about thousands of years ago before written language, how were things, how were ideas spread, right? It was all verbal. It was all these stories that were told or these things. And so once we were able to print things, that's when we started externalizing our memory.

Socrates was worried about it. He thought that was the end, right? Once things were being printed and we had these books, that was the end. But that to me is a really big piece of it, is just write stuff down. And another facet of writing stuff down is, how many times have you rolled on to a project where there were no onboarding documents? Yeah. It was all tribal knowledge. It was all word of mouth on the team. It was, hey, go talk to John because he knows how to get that set up. Right? So when I stress to my teams, especially as a consultant is write stuff down.

Like when we leave, which we eventually will as consultants, when we leave, leave it better than we found it. So if they don't have any of those documents, write them. If they have a wiki, awesome. Put them in the repo as a reading. I don't care where you put them, put them somewhere that they have them. So I'm always telling people write stuff down. So to me, that's a big bucket of stuff. So then that kind of leads into the idea of continuous learning. And one thing that I realized, there's a lot of things in life that we were never taught how to do. Learning is one of them.

You get into school and they're just like, here's the ABCs, learn them. It's like, what do you know? But there's a science on how the human brain works, how the typical person, right? And I understand there are people who aren't neurotypical. I get that. So for the most people, we learn in certain ways. And there's a great course on Coursera called Learning How to Learn. It's from a professor of Barb Oakley from the University of Michigan, Dearborn. And she's got a couple of books. But that was kind of a turning point. I watched that several years ago. I was like, oh, it's not just like cramming.

It's not just trying to memorize something. That's not what learning is. And we've all had that, I would assume a lot of developers had the experience of, yeah, there's a problem you're working on and you haven't solved it and you go to bed and at three o'clock in the morning you wake up and you're like, oh, I have the solution. It happens to me all the time. And I'm trying to figure out going back to the most in a little bit I'm trying to figure out the best way to process my thoughts because like I'm all over the place Like I have a sticky a virtual sticky note on my Mac.

I have my notes My note app. I have my reminders and I have a molesk it and I quite I haven't quite figured out how to keep dragging everything yet But I think that's incredibly important as well and and then and then when it comes to obviously continue a certain, I mean, it all kind of works together, right? It just, it all kind of flows together. And I feel like again, this is why I'm, I'm, I'm lucky to have you on to talk about this. Because no one talks about this stuff. Everyone's like, what's the latest version of a reactor? What's the hottest framework? And no one's like, Hey, listen, there's a lot of black and intact bullshit that we got to do first.

Right. Yeah. And this, this is, this to me, should be table stakes, these types of things. Put up, Sean. It's great that you can do so many things with technology. You can create projects. It's so much easier than it was 30 years ago when I started. But there's all these fundamentals. I put a poll out in LinkedIn probably late last year, year, maybe year-old this year. And I said, how much time do you spend on professional development outside of the stuff you have to do for work, right? We're not talking to security training, which I just did, by the way. We're not talking that, right?

We're not talking things. Yeah, like course training does not matter. Yeah, we're not talking about that. And I said, and so the buckets I gave were, you know, once or twice a year, you know, I don't know, a few times a year, at least once a month. Not a year or none and the results the initial results were I had people say you know once a year My company sends me to a conference and I just kind of cringe at that that hurts. Yeah and But I also have to realize that that not everyone is in We're not all in the same place, right? For sure.

We're not all in the same place. Right. I learned My answer of that is is daily But that's not, I'm not talking necessarily technology. I'm talking, my desk, you can't see it, thank God, because it's blurred. There's books all over my desk. I am everyday, it's history, it's philosophy. It might be some technology thrown in there. It's all those things, again, it's about being a better person. And so I read those things, I'm learning that way, but I'm also watching Pluralsight. I'm also watching, you know, reading MS Learn content. I'm doing those things, right? So for me, again, it's just like with the writing, it's these different levels of learning.

So, can you talk about, maybe on both sides, I think as an individual, I think we know why it's important to do continuous learning even though we don't do it, because we don't have the time. Can you talk to an employer to a higher manager right now and tell them why they should allow continuous learning more often than they do to the individuals? because I have some thoughts, but obviously you're the guest. So yeah, well, so I have a couple of strong opinions on that. We shouldn't have to ask permission to learn. It should never, you know, and I get employers, they expect you to be working.

I've been lucky enough the places I have were to always carved out time, whether it's 20% time, whatever. There's always been time to do that stuff. But, you know, you can't, if you hire someone and they are today an expert in react, and you're not giving them time to learn new things in two or three years when there's something different. Are they still gonna be doing react? Right, like you need to give them the chance to grow and to learn new things to do. I'm lucky at improving. Improving, that's, it's cheesy as it sounds. You know, the kind of one of the tag lines is, it's not just who we are, right?

Right. Right. And it's what we do. We're always improving. And so I'm lucky that I have that. And so to me, employers should be giving time. If not every day, you know, once a week, right, give someone, give people Friday afternoons to just learn what they want to learn. It's great if it's great if it's toward the project or toward what your goals are, but people should have time to do that stuff. Now, I'm a big believer in, you know, you said earlier, you know, well, we just don't have time. Everyone has the time. It's really how you prioritize that time. Right? So like, like, for example, I said to a friend of mine a few years ago that I prioritize sleep and she looked at me like I was a mutant, like, what do you mean you prioritize sleep?

God, you brought this up. It's like, no, man, it's like, I, I, I prioritize sleep. I'm literally in bed between eight and nine every night. I'm reading before bed and then I get seven and a half, eight hours of sleep. So that way the next day I get up and I'm good to go. I'm fresh. Yeah. And some people, well, you can do that. I can't do that. Well, okay, now I get if you have little kids and stuff like that gets harder. But I prioritize reading too. It's the same thing. People, how do you read some of these books? Well, because I carve out time.

I have some priority to be. I don't watch TV. I'd rather read than watch TV. It tells him that Sean goes, Mike is conquer how to get 30 hours out of a day. What would you say to this? Like what would be your biggest tip? If other people are saying this about you, what would be your biggest tip to optimize your day like this? To me, this is a glowing response right here. So, I used to make fun of Corey House because he was the outlier, who he would, if he wasn't working, He would be on the treadmill eating. That's where he was at Connect Tech in Atlanta.

He was on the treadmill working on a React talk. And I didn't see it, somebody else saw, but we talked on the way to the speaker dinner. And he was saying out like the way he budged, the way he like bungee jumped the whole laptop for it to stay on was terrifying. But yeah. And I love Corey, but I'm not that had an outlier. I just, again, I just, I don't think I, we all have the same 24 hours. We do. And again, I'm in a different place. I have adult kids, right? I work from home, it's not everyone does. I don't have to go into an office.

So I do have that time, but I do, like I set reading goals every year. I try to exceed them, but I set reading goals. And so to get that reading goal, I know I have to read every day journaling. It's a, you know, the Seinfeld had the thing where if you put some X on the thing every day, for me, I've got a streak of journaling that goes back years. And if I don't get my three pages in every day, I feel a little empty. Yeah. You know, so I have to get those in. So I do that and I, and I, and if I, to me, so let's get to learning this for a second.

So with the learning, it doesn't have to be an hour. It could be 10 minutes. It could be, I'm between meetings. I'm going to spin up this, this, by the way, one of the best things on Pluralsight. If you watch a Corey house video, turn it up for like one and a half speed. because it sounds like a chipmunk and it's one of the best things ever. But so I'll do that. I'll put something on for 10 minutes. I'll make sure my video guys clip that part right there. I'll put that on for 10 minutes. I'll watch something quick and then I'll come back or I'll have an article up and I'll read it between meetings.

I'll do those so you can get little bites in throughout the day. They would say, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So I look at it that way. And so if you don't have a four hour block every week, well, you can find that time between meetings at lunch at any number of times. So talk about, I think two, I'm interested in your thoughts on this. One thing that's fascinating to me is, and I've been experiencing my own life, right? I mean, part of the reason why I do this podcast is really just to hold me responsible and accountable. What I've noticed is that, especially the last three years of my career have been very stressful.

And I feel like I have been burning up both ends. And one of the things that I've realized is that I'm trying, like I'm actually more productive when I'm not productive. Let me explain. Is I have found myself, when I give my mind the ability to wander and I give myself the time to not get behind a computer. I come back and I'm in my opinion, I think twice is more effective when I can sit down and work instead of having just to sit in front of my computer and try to grind it out. So for me, one thing that I've done and if you all wanna take this into account, you can and Mike, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Like the moment I feel myself start to get tired of the computer, I step up and I do something else. whether it's go make my bed or go wash the dishes or go for a walk outside with my daughter and my dog or something like that, even for 10 minutes, like you said, I can come back and I can pound out even way more work in those 50 minutes than I could have maybe done an hour and a half. Right, yeah, I take frequent cat breaks. One of the cats picked me, so he'll come in and just want some attention. So other than that, or I'll take a walk around the block or any number of things.

And sometimes that's when my kids just bought me for my birthday last month, they bought me a- A happy birthday. Thanks, they bought me a Nintendo Switch. Nice. So now I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna play a quick Mario level. Again, it's that get my mind off from the silly thing I'm working on at work that I can't figure out. Or like I, I realized if I sit here trying to write something, So I like to write. And if I'm stuck, I realize that I'm here and I put the technologies, what's sticking with, right? So I have a writing journal. There's another one. I have another writing journal just for writing.

It's just for flushing out talk ideas, it's for flushing out blog ideas. And if I take that in and, you know, I'm kind of a nerd, I use fountain pens and I care about paper and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, I love it. So I'll go, I'll go sit somewhere quiet and I'll just write and that helps too. And then when I come back, I'm not focused on, how do I format this word or whatever, right? You get caught up in the tools instead of like the purpose that you're trying to accomplish. All right, so we've gotten right down to your mind. We also have continuous learning.

Kind of learning. Oh, yeah, for sure. What are some one or two bullet points that we can hit before we wrap up here? So I think that the big one that I've really been pushing lately is this share your knowledge. Yes. Everyone should share. You should share. And it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be getting up in a conference. It doesn't have to be getting up in front of a user group. Cause that's not for something. That is what they've been saying. They look at me and you and they say share like, gray here we go again. I'm gonna go speak at a freaking conference.

Yeah. For some people that like doing it and that's cool. I dig that. But it doesn't have to be that. And it doesn't even have to be anything big. Now, I like to push, I like to stress writing, right? Because to me, I can get up and talk and at a conference and it's there. Whoever was there saw it. It's not recorded. It's there. If I write a blog post, it's there. I can share it. I can keep linking to it. I can give it to clients. There's all sorts of things I can do. And it doesn't have to be huge blog posts. I started a series on my blog called Things I Learned.

And they're just little bite-sized things that are just, a lot of people might look at them and go, well, that's kind of dumb. But for example, I wanted to know, How do I control Spotify from the terminal on my Mac? Because I don't want to use the mouse. Well, I learned and I wrote a blog post about it, right? It's things like that. It's things like I'm having a problem, something in Azure, and I figure it out, and I'll blog about it. It's things like that. But it's also, when I say share, it can be just with your own team. Can you learn something new?

Just share with your team. Doesn't have to be anything official, It's just like, hey, can we do a half an hour? I wanna show you guys something cool that I learned. That's what I'm talking about. It's blogging, it's sharing with your own team. And it can be if you wanna get up in front of an audience and speak like we do, cool. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. But I know some people get up and they do it once and they're like, no, that's not for me. And you shouldn't have to feel like you have to force yourself to do that. share somehow. And I think too, in my case, especially because you're senior in your career, I think one of the biggest things I continually hear from engineering leaders is that younger, younger people in their career don't know how to communicate what they've done, why they do things, the way they do things.

And I feel like sharing is a way to get better at doing that, right? And if you're not out here sharing even internal or even to somebody at work about what you're doing and how you're doing it, you're not getting those reps in, right? It's all about getting those reps in. and I feel like there's just a wonderful way to do it. Right. Yeah, the more you teach something, the better you learn it. And that's important. And to Sean's point in chat, absolutely those things I learned post, it's a selfish thing too, because I know for sure I'm gonna forget, I'm gonna, six months from now I'm gonna be like, how do I do that again?

Yes, seriously. And if I can Google and I'm the first hit, cool. I'm good at it. So. Absolutely, absolutely. All right, man, as we wrap up here, anything else on your list, do you wanna hit real quick? No, just just just just just try to get better. I would whatever it is you do. And it doesn't have to be just about people get better with people. Yeah, get better with people. I think that's really important and Yeah, I don't that's a lot of all I could say. Cool. All right. So last three questions we wrap up here, kind of a lightning round type situation. First question, what do you do outside of work that brings you joy?

Read. Reading brings me a lot of joy. for sure. Any, any, any really good books you want to recommend to, uh, to the people of the internet? That's, that's too hard. I, I read such a, I read such a wide array of books. I can give you history. I give you philosophy. I give you all sorts of books. Um, probably if I had to refer, recommend any one single book to anybody, yeah, it would be how to win friends and influence people by, by, by Dale, by Dale Carnegie. That, that book had, had an impact on me 25 years ago. And it's It's still one that I refer to regularly that I think people should read.

I love it, I love it. Second question, tools, technologies, trends, frameworks that you're either reading about tinkering with that you wanna share that you find kinda cool. I just started tinkering with GitHub Co-pilot. I was resisting, literally I was hoping I could get through my career about having to deal with any of this AI stuff. And obviously that's not gonna happen. So I- You just tried, just tried your best. I'm not gonna do it. I don't want to. So I had a friend of mine say, here's how you should treat things like chat GPT. Here's how you should treat things like Google Co-pilot. And it should be like as an intern.

And I've started to use it that way. And I still struggle with it. But that's probably the biggest thing. I've kind of stuck my fingers into you lately. Somebody said it. I put out a post yesterday. The base was like, is AI going to take over developers and somebody said it, somebody said it best, they said, AI is a calculator like if we were students in school still. It's a tool that helps us do our jobs more efficiently. What are your thoughts? The difference between a calculator and chat GPT is a calculator gets it right. As long as you put the inputs in correctly. Yeah, right, exactly.

And like the number of times I've given it a prompt and it's spit out things that are incredibly wrong, whether it's just hallucinating or it gives me like code that uses a library that hasn't been in use for years, things like that, right? But I'm still trying to get there. I think it is good to look at it as a tool like Sean said, a tool in the toolbox. It doesn't necessarily replace anything yet. It's not going to replace us. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. This show is called Guidance Councilor 2.0 again. For those of you tuning in today, thank you so much. It means a lot.

It's really good to see you all. Last question of the day, Mike. So this show is called Guidance Councilor 2.0. Guidance Councilor the Middle School, High School College, but now as adults, we don't really have a Guidance Councilor turned to and asked for career stuff. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Mike? I'm just gonna comment on this. Um, lose the ego. Really? Early on. Early on. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was, I was. Yeah. What? What changed it for you? I'm curious. Um, is it a moment? Was it over time? Was it a conversation? Did someone call you out? Um, like.

Probably all of the above. I think that I think that I think some of it too is this agent experience, right? I think it's just realizing what I don't know. Yeah. And that there are things that I don't know that I don't know, right? Like it's just There's still so much to learn and all this especially in technology, but I know for fact I've had hard conversations. I had a boss and probably 97-98 pull me aside and and laid down to me straight, and that was that many years ago. And I've struggled through the years with it. And I've had things happen, but that's again where the journaling comes into play.

There's a lot of introspection of like, okay, what just happened? And then I realized, oh, that was me. And then I pull out my copy of Ego's The Enemy and I read it again and chill out for a while. But to me, that's the big thing is, And it's it can be hard. Right. And I try to be leading people is the other thing I think that that helped change that, right? When you start leading people, you're definitely putting them ahead of anything 100% that you care about. Love it. Love it. All right, y'all. Thanks again for hanging out with us today. We appreciate it.

Guys, it's got a stupid little mic. Stay on real quick. So I can say, I'm about to you off air, off stage, or off, yeah, off live, whatever. But anyways, go connect with people in here. engage with people in the DMs, listen, I am not joking. I've had a bunch of people on the show that are in the comments that have gotten jobs, apprenticeships, mentor mentees, just DMing people. So connect with each other. Again, Nashville, techie meet up tomorrow. Mike, wish you live closer. We'd love to host you. But y'all have a fantastic Wednesday tomorrow morning, 930 AM Central Unicorn Finders. My other podcast is a man can't have too many podcasts.

We are interviewing a founder that is trying to bring local farming produce to the hands of the local people in that area. So think like Instacart, but on a much more organic local type vibe. So sad to hang out with that founder tomorrow. I mean, of course, he is using technology to solve that issue. So y'all have a good one. Mike, thank you, my friends. And we'll see y'all tomorrow. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful. Cause you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes, and I myself rarely finish an entire episode, so I appreciate you so so much for listening.

Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others, and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it. Please, like, right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again if you need to reach out to me at T. Dessin on all social media handles, and I hope you have a fantastic day.