being nice and how to network w/ salma alam-naylor

full transcript

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

Alrighty. Good morning everybody. When I say everybody, I mean nobody. No one's here yet. Hi. Um uh excited. Uh Sal, you're the only live that I have this week. Um back on the road speak at another conference. Was just in Mexico last week uh for a huge conference. So this is it. This is the only one I have this week. So you are feeling special. You are very very special. Um but good morning everybody. Uh, please comment. Let me know uh when you're tuning in, when when this hits the interwebs. Um, excited about this one because I was just I was again I I don't come with questions, right?

I I I don't come with preset questions. I really want this to be a I've always wanted this to be a conversation amongst friends. Um, I've had people uh do this live in their car on their phone, which was which was great. And so, but I will say this, uh, you may have the best background backdrop that I've ever seen that you your house, uh, must be immaculate. So, um, it looks great. It has been said. I mean, this has taken a very long time. If you look at one of my older tutorial videos from Netlfi, you will see nothing here in the background whatsoever.

Yeah, but it's these things take time and I guess that is going to be a uh running theme today. I love it. I love it. Yes, it takes time. Um but again, so Jeff's here. It's good to see you. At least at least I know it's hit the interwebs. Um want to go through kind of some housekeeping things real fast before we dive in today. Uh first and foremost, I want to give a shout out to Appite. Uh I am an app right hero. I'm probably the only non-technical hero on a technical program. So shout out to Apprite. Love those folks. We actually did a meet up with them down at React Miami.

It was a great time. Uh Dennis and Tessa, thank you for coming out. I appreciate it. Um but give Appite a follow, check out their product. It's fantastic, even though I don't know how to code. Um also, if you want to check out uh everything we're doing, Torque Com munity, uh again, my whole thing is like I want this to just be like like your home base. Like you know when you play tag when you were younger and you always had like the like your your your safe place, the the your your home base. So like you go out, you play tag, but you always run back and tag it to make sure you're safe.

That's kind of what I want I I just came up with this by the way, but that's that's kind of what I want the torque community to be is like your job search, you're running around doing all the things, but then like if you need something or you need some encouragement or you need people to meet or you need to be a part of a really cool community, I I want I want Torque to be that. So, if you want to check out everything we got going on to community, we'd love to have you. I know we're doing a town hall. I'm going to hop over after this to do a town hall um in the Torque Discord and kind of give the community on updates what's going on.

We'd love to have you. Also, if you want to be updated when I go live with amazing guests like Selma, um text live to 6152355650. This is actually me. It's not some AI chatbot. It actually is me. Um I respond to all of them. Um so we love to have you. Um people are tuning in. Ricardus, good to see you. Sally JC, LinkedIn user, I love it. Erica's good to see you. Chris, good to see you. Also, for those of you tuning in, dad's in Nashville. I'm throwing my dad's in tech lunch today. Uh, we're having tacos, so we love to see you guys there.

Um, I'll drop the link afterwards. But anyways, enough of me running my mouth. Excited for this episode. Salma, if you want to give a quick introduction to the people who you are, what you do, and we'll go from there. I am Salma and I write code for your entertainment. There you go. That is the word on the street. Uh, I'm head of developer education at Nordcraft and have had a very varied career path and journey into technology. I love that. What is uh pit talk Nordcraft real quick . What is it? What are you responsible for? I want to give you the opportunity to do your little shindig here.

Nordcraft is a web development engine. Think like Unreal Engine but for web apps. Okay. And uh it's everything you need to create um and deploy apps and websites right in the browser without all the like finicky setup of dev environments and stuff. And there's like git like branching and version control and um inbuilt theming and everything's customizable. You can bring your own custom code if you want. It's just a different way a cool way to build apps and websites. I love that. That's great. You got that pitch down. You got that pitch down good. You've been practicing in the mirror. I take it. You know what?

I I didn't expect you to ask me to pitch it and so I just made it up. But it's all true. You know, you know, I tweeted this yesterday. I don't know if you saw. I I I I think I think more I think Devril should actually talk about their product a little bit more. Like I know it's this whole like salesy thing, but I don't know what half the people do in my network because none of y'all talk about it. So I think um I I know we might be skipping ahead here, but No, no, you're good. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. In previous jobs, like I didn't feel as comfortable talking about the product as much as I do now because I specifically chose and sought out to work for this product because I thought it was exciting.

And so it would be silly if I didn't talk about it because I think it's cool. I think it's really cool and different and refreshing. Yes. And I'm working with a bunch of super smart engineers as well, which is like always exciting and makes you want to talk about it. Yeah. So, I think that that's um about choice of place. And I know sometimes we are limited with choice in this type of hiring environment, but I think that makes all the difference. I love that. I love that. Um Kelly, it's good to see you tuning in for Pittsburgh. I love it. All right. So, u h I always get people to fill a little bit of a little bit of questionnaire, right?

So, I I can at least get people's heads thinking the right direction. and and and Selma filled it out and and there was something I really gravitated towards and it was be nice and it all works out. And you're not the first one to say that in the last month or two. So I really want to talk I I want to talk before we dive into being nice and how that pays off. I do want to talk about your career. You have an fasci nating career or or fascinating like before you be become a developer. Can you talk about that and and kind of let the folks know a little bit about you precode?

Well, I mean, my coding started for me when I was six years old in 1991 in in the early in in the uh late 20th century. And um I was uh I had a Commodore 64 at home and uh there was a big manual and I liked to copy the code from the manual into the Commodore 64 and make things like balls bounce on a screen and stripes appear. I had no i dea what I was doing, but I was writing basic, it turned out. Anyway, uh so you know this was the 90s and um the the internet didn't exist and or was a different place and there wasn't the opportunities available to random people writing basic on a Commodore 64 in the suburbs as there are today.

And so despite wanting to get into tech, I I I couldn't I didn't know how to I didn't know it was uh like available to me. So I ended up being a musician. I was playing I played loads of instruments. I w as in all the orchestras, all the clubs and I was writing music from a very early age as well from like seven which is impressive by the way like for those of you who like didn't like I grew up reading and writing and and on with percussion and it's hard to do. It's not easy. It's a lot of fun. And I guess there's another side note is that I think writing code and writing music are very very similar.

Facts. Facts indeed. Um so yeah, I was a musician. I spent my whole childhood doing that. But al so when Geio cities came out, I was building websites on Geocities as well. I was right there. And actually for one of my school exams that was like for it was it information technology. Everyone was like creating spreadsheets and stuff. I actually made a Geio Cities website to accompany my portfolio of stuff. So that that was fun. Um, and so I went off to music college and I did a composition degree and I wanted to be a film composer. Uh, at the same time I was still making websites for my friends using tools like does anyone remember ib that was on Mac.

It was like a please comment if you know IW Webb. I've never heard it was like Dreamweaver but for Mac OS. Uh the code it produced was garbage, but it allowed you to create websites. Uh you know, back in the day when you had little slices of images that you exported from Photoshop and lined up, it allowed you to do stuff like that. And I did a lot of graphic design as well and like album art and promotional materials for musicians and my friends. I was also in a band. Um we've got an album on Spotify released in 2008. Yeah. It I mean it's great.

Um it's another time. I love it. Uh and um so when when you're a musician, you often have to teach to pay the bills. So I started teaching uh children um at music colleges and I taught flute lessons and I ended up teaching kids in rock bands as well, you know, like Jack Black on School of Rock. Yeah. And um it was great. It was fun, but it wasn't paying my bills much. So, I went to get my official teaching qualification so I could teach in schools and have a uh secure income. I did that for a few years and uh I ended up working at a bad school and I had to quit and then I ended up out of necessity getting a temp job at a call center and all of that stuff that I just mentioned was on my CV, the graphic design and the website stuff.

and my manager at the call center. Such a silly story. His girlfriend used to work at a place that needed a graphic designer and I um had an inte rview there and ended up working there. And I wasn't really a graphic designer. I was one of those people that wrote blog posts with sales affiliate links in. But uh I was sat on the same desk as the one IT guy who did everything, the front end, the back end, the DevOps, the infrastructure. He even wrote his own CMS because this was like before the days of CMS's as a software service thing. Yeah. Um and so I moved my desk setup round to him and I was like, "Hey, what you doing?

Can I have a little look?" And um as I was a teacher, I was kind of teaching him how to teach me and he was teaching me like web stuff. And I didn't even have a laptop at home or a coding environment at home. So I would print out pages and pages and pages of PHP to study them at home and uh I did a big project for him um you know back in the day as well when there were like separate mobile and desktop sites. That's crazy. Uh this was like um at the dawn of responsive design and Bootstrap. So my project was to combine the mobile and desktop experiences and um release it as one experience which I did but then I got uh made redundant and but then I found a variety of other front-end jobs after that and I moved up to tech lead quite quickly and then the pandemic changed and pandemic came and everything changed and uh that's when I discovered that people were streaming tech stuff on Twitch.

Crazy. I I know, right? And I um I'd never used Twitch before or anything. And but I I quite enjoyed this and I was kind of inspired because as a tech lead at the time, I was doing less and less like real coding. I was like doing PowerPoints and Jira management and all that nonsense. So I thought, hm, maybe I could do this because also I I saw a bit of a market for someone like me on Twitch at the time because at the time it's it's different now, but in 2020 there were mainly men who were streaming code on Twitch and it was mainly backend.

So I thought I could be the front-end dev who is not a man. And I I star ted streaming on Twitch and I loved it. I as well as my full-time job, I was streaming four nights a week. Wow. I don't know how I managed it because it takes a lot out of you. Yes, it does. And um and my channel grew quite quickly. But also the main thing is that I met a lot of people through this because of you know when you when you end your stream you raid someone and you send all your viewers over to another channel. Uh, I found uh the only other British woman doing tech and I raided her and we became friends.

And uh, a couple of months later she told me that she had a friend working in Devril who needed a front-end specialist, someone like me maybe. And I got the job at Contentful. And that is when I was thrust into the world of developer relations or whatever you want to call it. And um I'm now on my fourth Devr rail job and I guess they say the rest is history. I love it. I love it. That's awesome. So much to unpack here. I What What do you think What do you think's been and and this goes into kind of like the thesis, the title of this, but what do you think's been your unlock?

Like what what what's the thing that you think you do really well that's allowed you to continue to find jobs time after time? I think there's two aspects to this. I think one aspect is being completely authentic and yourself. Um in in in another two aspects, one of them is not pretending you know everything. Why do people do that? Why do people act like at this point? It's like there's so much knowledge out there. Why even act like it? I don't know. Like I you know it's fine to say you don't know. I think it's probably a confidence thing. It's maybe a if I don't appear to know it, then I am lesser than.

But actually, I think saying you don't know something is a bit of a superpower because it kind of dissipates the tension in the room and it puts everyone on the same level. Yeah. And um and also being authentic in terms of yes, I have a job that I do on the internet, but I'm also a re al person. And so a lot of the a lot of the like blog posts I've written are not about my work and not about tech. Um they are about me and my life experiences. And there are a lot of other people who will resonate with that. And I think these are the posts that have got me more I don't want to say popularity but these are the posts that make people kind of follow me and and then engage with other things that I'm doing.

And I think showing your vulnerability and your humanness is something that cannot be um understated. The power of that cannot be understated because we're all just humans trying to navigate this weird weird world of work and and stuff. And then so there's being human, there's saying you don't know stuff, and then there's also just like making friends and being nice. Like the power the power of the network is real. And in fact, I've got I got three out of four of my Devril jobs via the network and DMs and just knowing people. But you can't just know people by following them or them following you.

You have to take time to cultivate those relationships. Yeah. And there's a lot of friends that I've met online that like now I have their phone numbers off and we have group chats and and we text each other because and that's where the real like relationship building happens offline. And it's the power of going to meetups and doing talks and just showing up at places in the real world rather than just hiding behind your keyboard and trying to get engagement from arguments. like just be nice, be cool, make friends, and lift other people up and we'll remember you for that. Like I think one of the things that um I always remember there's a quote and I think it's by Maya Angelou.

It's like people won't remember what you said, but they'll remember how you make them feel. Yes. Yes. And so I go about my day like that. I love that. talk about, you know, obviously I'm sure people who tune in probably roll their eyes like, "Oh my gosh, there's more people talking abo ut networking. I don't know how to network. I don't know how to even start. I don't know." Do you have any practical tactical piece of advice to people? Let me tell you, um, a few years ago, I, uh, felt sick at the, uh, hearing the word networking because it sounds so corporate. And so I think if if you switch it to making friends, yes, that makes it a little bit more uh exciting and friendly, doesn't it?

and building relationships but also like building mutually beneficial relationships because there are people that I have helped like find jobs and connect with other people and then they in turn will help me connect with other people and find opportunities and it's it's just about approaching it from a human perspective rather than a business perspective because we are all just human beings and the the business value and the business perspective will come as a side effect of the real human connections because you know I get a lot of people they DM me on LinkedIn hey look at me uh look at my website connect with me let's share stuff and I'm like well mate you haven't you haven't like introduced yourself we haven't made a connection correct yet right correct and so the real connections don't happen like in those kinds of situations they happen and I think I've made a lot of connections and friends actually via Twitch, you know, going live on Twitch and I have a you I've been doing it for like five years now.

And um I've got friends Yeah. Friends who I've met from who who met me via Twitch and things like that. Like real people, real friends, not just like internet acquaintances, right? Because and I think the bottom line is again these things take time as well. You can't like you can't just expect to cold DM someone and automatically your your life problems are solved. It's it's about the time. It's like any relationship like a partner or a child or you know a a best friend from school that you want to keep in touch with these things like like a plant. You need to nu rture it and water it and give it plants.

I'm terrible at plants. Uh, let me So, if people are just tuning in, we're talk, you know, we're talking about networking and and and this whole thing and and they just heard you talk about Twitch and streaming. What if what if I'm not a streamer? What if I'm not a a Twitch person? How do I go about engaging with folks? I think um so I als I also think I was going to say what not to do. Sure. Um and and I see a lot of people make this mistake on the internet, right? So say say I'll post something um like on Blue Sky, I'll post a blog post or I'll post something and then you'll you'll slip right into the reply thread with hi, I'm available for a job.

It's like I'm not going to speak to you ever again because you don't know how to read the room and you're all about yourself. And so I think it's it's about like engaging meaningfully. Yeah. And and you and you can't expect that, like I said, that relationship to blossom overnight. It takes time. So it it's a long game. I used to hate the long game, Taylor. I used to hate it so much. I used to want like instant gratification. Save save. It's like waiting for someone to review your pull request is so painful for me because I know they've got stuff to do. I need my things satisfied now.

But you got to wait. You got to be patient, right? You got to be patient. You got to be slow. You've got to be intentional. And you can't just send out your CV or resume and profile to hundreds and hundreds of people because number one, the mental overheads on you are going to be vast and significant and you're going to burn yourself out. Yeah. And also, you're not going to be able to keep track of the real stuff and you're not going to be able to dedicate enough time to developing meaningful relationships. I used to be really bad at plants, right? But I got one plant and the next plant and the next plant and now I have about eight plants in my house that I'm keeping alive.

But I couldn't have got e ight plants straight away and kept them alive. And so it's it's about the long game. So to answer your question about like where do people start if they are not that kind of online person. It's about like trying to find what's in your local area uh and and find who is who in the local area. Go to meetups. You don't necessarily have to like talk to anyone at your first meetup if you're not like feeling the confidence. you can just go and be seen and maybe maybe then you can contact someone online who you met at the meetup or who was one of the speakers and just say and and but and and but don't come to people with open-ended questions like this, right?

How do I get started in web development? I don't have time to pause that for you because I don't know what type of web development you want to do. So, you need to you need to have done some of the work before you reach out to people. It's like you wouldn't ask a chef, how do I get started in cooking? Because there are so many different types of cooking. And for those different types of cooking, you will need different types of tools. And so you need to you need to kind of figure out what you want first. But that doesn't mean that what you decide what you want now is going to be for the rest of your life because a lot of people make that mistake as well because I've had like three careers and it doesn't matter.

I might have another one. And you can change that. You can change your fate and you can change your mind and start again and but you just have to kind of have a vision of what you want. And I guess my one of my secrets maybe is that I'm always trying to plan like two steps ahead. Sure. So I I took a particular job because I know I want to get to a particular point in five years or 10 years. Sure. And I do want to retire at 55. So like I'm also planning for that. And um but you have to have you have to have taken the time to understand what you want before people can help you.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We've h ad a few comments come in here. Another LinkedIn user. Hello. Um and and also too, like what what SA said, I mean, you know, it's kind of what Jeff said, like that's kind of why I'm so excited about Torque and them letting me do my thing. I kind of just want to be this place, you know, like like I met Oscar, prime example. I met Oscar down in Mexico last week, right? We we did an AWS meetup and a little torque AWS collab situation and Oscar and I hit it up and now he's in our discord and now if talk about I mean we we I we talked about powerb I don't know what what it means but we talked about it right and so like again like again I I just think it's incredibly important.

Let me let me ask you this. I I want to I want to kind of again kind of dive into the nice thing, right? because I feel like I feel like there's I I feel like there's there there's a lot of personalities on social media. Um some personalities are really good at being negative and rage baiting and all of that. Then there's some personalities that are the complete opposite. I'm not saying one is, you know, you can pick which one you want to be, but can you It's like um when the weather is nice, when the sun is out, people want to go outside. My coffee is Yeah.

When the weather is nice and the sun is out, people want to go outside. When the weather is raining and hostile and windy, people don't want to go outside. And so I approach myself, I approach being on the internet in that way. I want to be the sun shine in people's life. But that doesn't mean I can't like be honest about how I'm having a bad day or whatever. It's again, it's the human humanness you got to bring to it. But being nice is just I mean, if you scroll through all of my um profiles, I would hope that you would not see any kind of argument starting or rage bait.

And I do that. You're very nice. You're very nice. And you even got back to me to come on my show and I didn't even know you. Exactly. Exactly. And and you know this the probl em is we are living in an attention economy and negative stuff gets a lot of eyeballs and I think there is this misnomer in the industry that if we want to get jobs or we want to get noticed we have to have x number of followers we have to have x number of engagement and then we that's what's gonna put us at the top. And fun fact actually some Devril jobs used to advertise for for people that had a minimum number of followers which is very very silly.

Very very silly in my opinion. Yeah. Uh because you can get followers and in any way you can buy followers right it it's silly. Yeah. Uh so I would just stay away from that nonsense. Don't even engage with any threads or or posts that are trying to engage people in that way. Even if you want to provide a nice opinion, there is no point in spending your energy on that. Just scroll right past it. And and the more you fill your life with that kind of positivity and you get rid of the negativity, you are then going to feel more motivated to decide what you want and to plan your future because all this stuff is designed to get in our way and distract us from the big picture.

It's all designed, not Blue Sky really specifically, but all the other platforms are designed to keep your eyes on that platform as much as possible. And that's not good for anyone, right? It's turning us into zombies and it's burning us out and it's it's creating the wrong priorities inside us. So, ignore your follower count, right? Ignore it will it will happen. your your relationships and your social graph will expand exponentially over time if you continue to be positive and nice and treat everyone with the respect. And I think one of the biggest things is is when you do get to a position where you are um you know you've got quite a few followers or you know people know you and stuff then use that platform to bring others with you and help you like and all so much stuff happens in my DMs.

People are asking me, Selma, do you know anyone at this place or can you connect with someone here or do you know do you know any jobs going and I I have been able to connect people and I feel so privileged to be able to do that because that's what people did for me and that's kind of why I got to where I am now as well as the hard work. But you know I I couldn't have done it without those ins and those back channels and those networks. Yeah, absolutely. And um uh I had a really good point and I forgot, but the big thing, the reason why I do this live, one of the reasons why I do this live, I'm stalling here for a second trying to figure out my idea.

But all that being said, that's why I tell people to comment. That's why I tell people to show up, right? Like this is a meetup. This like this is a meet like like the amount of comments like we've had over 100 comments at this point. Like like this is a meetup. Everyone's saying, "Hey." And and what I try to do is is is like I I would put my network up against anybody's. And I Oh, I I realized what I was going to say. I'll get to that in a second. All that being said, like I want you to connect with Salma. Send her a message that, hey, Song Guidance Council 2.0, right?

Like literally, if you connected with every single guest I've had on the show for five years, your network would be vast. And that is what I want. The other thing I I want to say too is I realized early on like I'm not good like I get real nervous when I say something controversial like and and and I I like you know I hate confrontation something I'm trying to work on in my marriage but that's a whole another conversation but like for me it's like like I I want to add value. I realized early on it's like I'm not going to be the person that does the memes.

I'm not gonna be the person that's going to get g get a ton of followers because at the end of the day practical tactical job career advice doesn't sell like it's like it's good but what I do know after a long period of time now I've been doing for five years I h ave the network and the community which I've been able to turn into torque which is huge. You don't always you can just be yourself. Don't worry about the followers. Just doesn't matter. And also too, if you really want to get into s social technical content, Tik Tok kind of blew up all platforms now and it's all about actually impressions now, not really followers, which that's a whole another conversation of itself.

But anyways, uh let's see here. What else? Sierra, I think the majority of my opportunities been because of the energy. Uh Roxy, I would agree with that. Roxy's a torque ambassador. She's wonderful. I would agree with that too because actually I met someone in London last week who uh I who knew me from being on the internet and was really happy and excited to uh to see me and he knew all this stuff about me but like not in a creepy way like in a weird way. Not not in a weird way in a nice way and it felt really nice. He he said that my work precedes me which I guess is another another kind of thing is that just do good work like do valuable stuff that you you enjoy creating and people will find that stuff and then positively associate it with the creator and um you know people people just want nice stuff in their lives and people want to feel good and I think we've kind of started to lose sight of that in in some areas of society.

And yes, we, you know, we we cannot um deny that parts of the world are in a dire state, but like that doesn't mean we have to obsess over it all day every day and run ourselves into the ground and create this like negative negativity bubble around us that there are and I I probably sound extremely privileged saying that, but um we we are in an opportunity kind of area. We can connect with anyone that we want on the internet. Anyone. Anyone. Like literally I have known Jason also. Hi Jason. Jason Jason. Jason Jason's on my team. He's great. Uh like prime example. Like I practice what I preach.

I did not know Sama. I I saw her . I was like she seems awesome. I saw you. I was like he seems cool. He seems to be connected. Yeah. There you go. See how it works. And I just slams like hey you want to come on my pod. Now I'm coming on her pod. I think what? Next week or the week after? Next week. Next Tuesday. Yeah, next Tuesday. Right. So again, like I eat my own dog food. Like just go for the ask. Ask somebody to hang out. Like I think I think and this is part of the talk I'm going to give this weekend up at Stir Track in Columbus.

But it's like I think people generally just want to help people right now. I really think so. And I think as long I think the I think it's like holding your breath underwater. The longer you can go for the ask, the better. Or the long the longer it takes to go for the ask, the better. Right? So, there are people on this show that I've seen consistently time and time again that I've not met in real life, but if I saw you in real life, I would think you're like my BFF, right? It just works. It works. All right, so we're going to wrap up here.

Last five minutes. S have we any last words of wisdom to people on their job search career etc. Yes. Um I okay I I get a lot of people ask me um how can I become a web dev in 10 weeks 6 weeks 12 weeks like how can I do it as soon as possible and how can I earn six figures as soon as possible and like the answer is that you can't because our brains don't work that way. uh you need to invest the time in yourself to learn the absolute fundamentals of of the concept that you you're wanting to achieve, right? The web, right?

The fundamentals of the web or whatever you you want to get a job in. And the the more you focus on those fundamentals, the easier everything else will come. like this kind of like sometimes you you'll see people on the internet and they've skyrocketed their career like in in a few months or whatever, but like it's all smoke and mirrors. They either they either um did a lot of work behind the scenes before they la unched themselves onto the internet or it's all just not real. And there I think that I think there can be people out there who are um playing the game and I don't want to be mean but like lying about what they're doing, right?

And and it's all for the clout and the followers and the engagement, but real real careers are built on time investment in yourself, in your skills. You won't achieve it overnight. Um, and I have to keep saying this to someone I mentored last year, um, who just got their first tech job in January after their first interview, which was very exciting. They they pivoted from music to tech. I went to music college with them. They live around the corner from me. I bumped into them onto the street. Long story, but they're in tech now. And um, I have to keep reminding them that they're still learning, they're still new, things take time, and um, it will come.

and he's already like improving leaps and bounds and who knows what he'll achieve in the next 5 10 years but our careers are long right our careers are most of our lives and so we have this time and and just keep in mind the long game nothing can be achieved overnight and if it is achieved overnight it's fake there you go you heard it here uh I do kind of rapid fire questions so real quick for you first off um If and I kind of know the answer to this now because you kind of told me about your background, but if I were to tell you tomorrow morning you woke up, you couldn't do anything in tech, but I'd pay the same if not more.

Money's not a problem. What hobby would you pursue? Interior design and internal space organization. Okay. That's not what I thought you were going to say, but that's awesome. I would pay you. I would pay you based off your room right there. Exactly. Right. It's great. It's great. I'm good at it. I love that. I love that. Uh if anybody wants to hire Salma um feel free to reach out to Pazar side business. Um next question. Uh anybody in the community you want to give a shou t out to um that who's doing good work that you've been following that you're you're you're pretty proud about.

Oh, I'm on the spot. So many um okay I this is really left field right but and and it's kind of to do with work but not there's a German agency called Spark Agency and they recently did some work for Nordcraft and and every bit of work they do is absolutely stunning they're not really on the internet but their names are Max and France and they are worldclass engineers and they are doing some uh more work for Nordcraft as well, but they're an agency, Spark agency in Germany and um they are present in the Nordcraft Discord a lot, so you can ask them questions about stuff, but they would be a huge knowledge resource to connect with to um understand how to be good at at your job in webdev.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Um all right, last question. I always wrap up here. The show is called Guidance Counselor 2.0 know because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, college, but now as adults who don't really have anybody to turn to and ask for general career advice. What would if you could go back in time back when Sama was writing music? What's the one biggest piece of career advice you Focus on the long game. It It's about the long game. Yep. and and and everything will come to fruition eventually. I love it. I love it. That's awesome. Well, y'all go connect Selma. She's wonderful.

Great follow. Highly recommend. Um again, last one for the week. Uh I am um I'm actually Oh, I'm on Angelo's podcast tomorrow. So, but uh a colleague of mine, we're starting a new podcast. Um basically talking about how to get into tech without being a developer, which I think is really needed. There's a lot of career paths um in tech uh where you don't have to push code. And so um I'm going live. I'm I'm Angelo's first guest tomorrow. So that is let me look at my calendar. I believe it is. So it's 10:30 central tomorrow. So Torque community, you'll be there to s upport Angelo on his very first podcast.

Um and uh some I'll see you next week. Thank you so much. See you then. Stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. Y'all have a good one.