navigating your career w/ ai as a junior dev w/ will king

full transcript

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

Alrighty. Perfect. All right, y'all. Good morning. Happy Thursday. We're We've almost made it almost made it to the weekend. Uh Will's a first time guest. First time guests on the show. Yeah. Uh I love having first- time guests. Um do you have a lot of repeat guests? Yeah. Yeah, I do. I do have repeat guests. I think um you know I've been doing this thing for five years now really five years um you know I started this when COVID hit because I was kind of your traditional heads down recruiter and um you know and I was very focused on just Nashville so I only recruited Nashville engineers and then I saw when COVID hit that the whole entire landscape was about to shift to like fully global distributed uh remote teams.

So, I was like, well, I was like, I need to be out there and help devs at scale um just navigate the job search in their careers. And so, I started I got um I got LinkedIn Live super early like when it was like you had to apply to be on it and I got it and I started to go live and and uh five years later. So, yes, after five years, you know, you kind of you kind of have some repeat guests. to say, but our community is only our community is giant, but it's also like the number of people who like are happy to jump on camera and stuff is Yeah.

Yeah. 100%. So excited for Will. Y'all go connect with Will. Um uh Will, what's your what's your ex handle? W King_. Okay. Yeah. One of these days I'll kick as Go follow him. He's got a great great profile picture. It's kind of wild looking, so you won't miss them. Um, but before we dive in, as always, please comment, say, "Hey, would love to hear from you." Again, I I tell people this every every time I go live. This is a meet. This is a virtual meetup. Show up in the comments, network with people. Um, you know, I tell people my whole goal, um, really for Torque and and really what we're building is is I want y'all to network off the back of me and then obviously Jason J.

Jason in here. Um, you know, and and and so, you know, I tell people if you've been a g if you've like tuned into my show for five years andworked with everybody in the comments and you've shot every single guest an invite and said, "Hey, it was great to see you." Uh, you'd have a pretty expansive network at this point. So, but we're not in the metaverse yet. I don't know if you're watching unless you comment. So, please say, "Hey." Would love to hear from you. As we get people kind of to uh streaming in, first off, want to give a shout to Appite. I'm probably the only non-technical hero on a technical program.

great software or great product as far as I can tell is what I've been told. Um so if you want to create an app pretty quickly um use their product, it's great. I I love the Devril team over there. Um also we have a lot going on within the Torque community. Um so go check out torque.com community um to check out all of our live streams. I know Jason went live with Franchesco yesterday for an hour and a half talking about vibe coding and they they developed something. I don't know what it was but they did something in vibe coding. So go check that out.

Um, and then also too, if you want to get if you want to know when I go live with guests like Will in certain topics, um, please text me. This is actually my number. Text live and it'll immediately kind of like loop you into that texting thread. Not texting thread, but just texting community. Um, and so I will, uh, yeah, you won't get lumped into like a bunch of people, but um, so yeah, just text me. Um, would love to have you a part uh, of that community. Um, so today's conversation, so I've been kind of uh, I've really been interested. And I've seen a lot of conversations around AI obviously, but how it affects kind of juniors, right?

And so, uh, Will, uh, graciously slid into my DMs or comment on my tweet was like, "We'd love to talk about it." So, uh, let's go ahead and dive in. Will, let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. Uh, my name is Will King. I am a design engineer at Crunchy Data. Crunchy data is just uh it's a managed the best managed Postgress um that you can you can find on the internet. We've got the smartest database and Postgress developers that I know. Uh and I am just there to make sure that all of the normies can use the database as well.

So um that's that's what I do for my day job. Otherwise, uh I would just say like I am uh two years ago I made this goal of like making more dope friends and doing more dope things with friends on the internet. Uh and so I'd say like that is what motivates a lot of like what you'll see if you're following me on social. So build cool things, hang out with cool people, hence the shooting that message out to you because you are definitely in that category of people. So appreciate We we won't tell my wife that cuz she'll just roll her eyes. Speaking of wives, either one of our wives, if you do follow Will, his wife will uh chime in.

And the dynamic between the two is fantastic. Um so highly recommend. Um and then yeah, Will talk about the green chairs podcasting. Talk talk about that. You got interior design projects going on. So we we do a podcast. It started off with like just me. Um it was called Strong Opinions Weekly held and it was just like, "Oh, I'm just going to like riff. I've got some buddies who do like solo podcasts where they just talk about like what they're building, what's on their mind. I was like, feels like a good way to like, you know, think through things publicly. And then one episode I had Ally on uh and because it was like something to do with like our kids and all this kind of stuff and we just had so much fun.

She's hilarious. Like her love language is busting my balls. I've never met her, but based off her Twitter interactions, she's a gem. Her like love language is busting my balls. And I am like not like I'm just like the easiest person to make fun of. Like oh there's a target on our like it's a huge target for me and you. So it's just it's a fun dynamic. We did that once and have just started doing it ever since. And then we just we're were like why don't we just like really do this up. So I've like started setting up like a studio in our house with like cool chairs.

Let's do it. If we're going to do it and have fun, let's have some like real fun with it. I'm I'm all about like if you enjoy something, go all in. So, yes, I love that. I love that. Um, we got some people tuned in. Ricardo, good to see you. Emry, we're talking Are we talking about We're talking No, not talking about Target. Just Target's on our backs with our wives making fun of us. Um, same thing. Um, talking about Southern Wives, Target's probably going to come up at some point. Yeah, exactly. Seriously. All right, so let's dive in, man. Um there's there's a lot of I guess ways we can go about this, but can you ju just give a quick introduction about just who you are and kind of how you got into development just to kind of set the stage.

So I uh had to teach myself development. I came from a design like industrial design background which if you aren't familiar that's like physical products like sketching 3D models like CAD like a thing. Yeah. My first my first job out of college was with a company who made like cherry picker but like the bucket trucks. Oh wow. And I did like the manufacturing modeling for all that. Nice. Um which sounds dope. Um but like the company had been around for so long all the parts had been made at some point. So you're just like putting the right pieces together and it was like building Legos but like Legos gets boring after a few months.

Yeah. So, I decided that um I wanted to like be able to work remote and I started getting into like development. Um and the I I taught myself how to develop and design for web and then ended up getting a job with one of the companies that I had used to like learn development on. Sure. and worked there for about seven years uh on their like learning platform and also being part of like the teaching like community for like the designers and the developers there. So not like I'd say that's probably like half my career. So like half my career was was helping other people learn and like get into the junior position.

Yeah. Um and then the rest of my career's just been building since then at like startups and stuff. I love that. I love that. So talk I mean let let's just rip the band-aid off. Just some initial thoughts on how AI is affecting kind of the junior search. I mean you had a lot of good thoughts when we were backstage. So let's let's let's bring those back up. Um let's see. I would say like the my one of my like main thoughts uh for with like AI is that like AI helps normalize the the market on the lower end which is like the barrier like the barrier to entry like AI can help you grow.

Um, I think one one problem that people can get into is thinking that like uh companies are not like I I'll phrase it like this like AI code writing is non-deterministic or is is deterministic. Um, okay. Nondeterministic. I think it's non-deterministic. Like uh it it doesn't always like give you the same answer back even if you gave it the exact same question. Sure. Sure. But but software is like very deterministic and I think companies lately have started to like realize that. Um so like I think what people will get into trouble with with AI um is that um it will become a crutch. Yeah. That they lean on uh and that instead of it being like a crutch and relying it on to write your code, I think what developers need to be using it for is like fuel instead like rocket fuel.

So like instead of putting um instead of like leaning on AI code, you should be using like AI code to like level you up. Like it should be like an focused internally. Yeah. Um I talk about I was telling somebody about this where it's like yeah it's like don't be using agent mode like be using mentor mode like use AI to to teach you more about code. Um yeah. So how how how can folks like so coming out of boot camp or whatever, you know, I think the general sentiment is AI is taking junior jobs. I think that's the general sentiment. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I do. I do. I have some thoughts on it. Um and listen listen, spicier the better, right? So yeah, Phil feel feel free to go a little unfiltered here. I'm I'm all about it. Well, listen, you you can ask my wife. Um there there's no such thing as a filter. Uh she reminds me before we hang out with all of like people from like she teaches kindergarten and she's like always remind like Will remember like I'm a teacher here. Yeah. So um I I think I think that is like not true um in in some perspectives because like I I think that AI will definitely like make us more like level up our productivity.

Yeah. um in certain ways but and like make us be able to develop more to try more but I think it also like with other technologies it opens the market wider because like there are now more people who who can do more and because like people can do more there are going to be more companies there are going to be more like people trying to achieve things so like yes there may not be like giant companies with tons of developers but I I think there will be a lot more companies with a like a smaller subset of developers. Yeah. It's like fewer companies but more more like fewer giant companies but more companies in total.

So like there will still be tons of jobs. Yeah. And the the difference is is that like um AI doesn't help you this is like this is like a one important thing where it's like AI can help you write code but AI can't help you like solve your business problems. Correct. That's what people are for. Correct. you know, um, one thing that I I thought about leading into this that like I think is important for people is that um, with like AI, like you can't always have AI to help you like communicate. Like you can you can communicate with AI and you can like help it write code, but at some point at some point like you're gonna have to be able to like talk to other people about like why you're solving something the way that you're solving it.

Yeah. Um and like business owners like aren't going to understand that the technical like unless they're developers, but like the developer jobs aren't going away. Um, and a developer, part of a developer's job is like not writing code, but communicating to the company like what code needs to be written and why it needs to be written. Uh, and go ahead. No, no. And and I think that's great and and I think it's good that Will brought that up because if you listen to my live stream with Rey, was it I think it was just yesterday. Ray is a founder of a platform and she talked about I need to know why you do things, right?

I need you to bring specific business case studies, right? Just showing me a bunch of code and say we need to do this and not have any reason behind it. Like AI is not going to replace that. And and also too, I I I want to make a point here. I feel like the AI scare is an excuse to where just the job market is in general. Like the job market is not, you know, I said this on a live the other day. I said, "We we we we we think of the job market like a a crazy ex, right? We've all dated. We all have exes, right?

And I feel like a lot of times when things go south in a relationship, you hold, at least I at least I have in my past, right? You always hold on to what it was and not what it is." And the actual situation, the actual situation is hiring was crazy during COVID and it will never hit that again. So like get that out of your brain. We're now in the new normal and I feel like a lot of that previous notion is now being attached to AI taking people's jobs and I just I I I I just disagree with that sentiment. I Yeah, 100%. I I think that it will I think that like just generally speaking, it's hard to get a job when you think of it as like the job market.

Yes. Like that's like my opinion is like if you're thinking about like finding your next job is like, "Oh man, the the job market is terrible. I'm not going to find a job." Like yeah, you're not going to find a job because you got the wrong mindset about it. Y your your mindset should be like where do I want to work? And like what do I have to do to get that job? Y and if you can't answer like where you want to work, then like that's where you need to start. Uh, and I think AI is great for like all of those things, you know, like the we were talking about like like how you're the person who's hiring wants to know like well how did you make these decisions like how do you think through like what how to solve the problem and like AI does help you with that but like have instead of telling AI to solve the problem tell AI how they thought through solving the problem and study like short shortcut like the the proc like the m the mental process like have AI help do like and the the good thing about it is is like if you don't know like what type of development you want to get into, guess what is really good from getting to like zero to one on like pretty much every language and every like type of development out there like AI.

So like leverage AI to be like well like what does it look like day-to-day to do this type of job? Like what type of software am I writing? What type of problems am I solving? Like what are the common architectures for this? like get all of those like those kind of more like uh like gray area questions out of the way because it's like you said like it's not just about like whether you can write a for loop it's like when is the for loop the right time like the right solution you know like that kind of thing. Yeah. And there's um so Colin Colin's a a former repeat guest of the show engineering leader engineering manager.

It's it's arguably more important to be able to communicate what code is being written than actually writing code. Exactly. Exactly. So again, coming from somebody who is actively hiring people, let me ask you this. If you were to go based off the current where everything is now with vibe coding and AI and blah blah blah, how would you approach the job search if you were coming out from the industrial side now? Is there is there anything that you would change? Anything you would do a little differently? Um I think I I I don't think I would change much. uh really just just because I would I would change I would change the tools in which I use to do it talk about that talk about that but I would not change how I approach job searching so I'll explain kind of at a high level like the way I think about job like finding a job and then I'll explain like how it's different for me today um so the way that I think about finding a job like I mentioned earlier is like I decide where I want to work because it's my career it's my future it's like what I'm doing every day.

So like I'm not just going to say please give me a job and shoot like my shot everywhere at once like thousand resumes kind of thing. Um I'm going to find and it doesn't have to be just a single company either. Like your eggs shouldn't necessarily always be in a single basket. Sure. But like you need to like do the work of like identifying places that you want to work and understand that company like what type of work do they do? what like what type of in like what would the dayto-day probably be like? Maybe you have a way to talk to somebody there, but like I didn't in my past.

Um, but like understand that company, understand like what they care about, what they believe in, like the type of person that they want to hire and then like build build a resume or a website or something that tells them not I'm a good engineer, but tells them I'm the engineer for you. like I am who you're looking for because like they're not looking for like words. They're not just looking for like the best developer out in the market. They're looking for like someone a trusted developer like someone that they trust because like hiring is expensive both like emotionally and also like from like a time and money perspective for a business.

And you don't want to like you're making a bet like a risk that like if I hire this person I'm not going to have to hire for the same role again in a few months because it didn't work out right. So it's like how can you remove as much doubt as possible when they are looking at you as a candidate and the way that I do that is by like understanding the company building something that speaks to that company that tells them like I understand you like I understand what you are looking for and like what you need out of the job like and that's like that's what I do like that's how I approach the job search and so so I want to highlight something that you said which is I mean again you've said so many so many nuggets.

I the the one one thing I want to one of the many things I want to highlight is one is like pick your shot and be intentional. That's what Lawrence Lockheart said last week on my show where he was like he submitted 47 apps in 89 days and he was like I had a specific I wanted to work for I think he said like the best of class of whatever industry it is. Right. Right. And so he was very specific there. The next thing that you just said that I want to highlight too is build something with the product which I think nobody talks about a lot, right?

Can can you talk about how that's why that's so important? Yeah. So the I mean I guess and I guess it depends on like the the size of the company a lot because like it's a lot different the type of work that you will be doing if you're going for like somebody like a company like Google that has like thousands and thousands of engineers where like maybe your day job isn't actually like using a Google product per se, you know, like maybe it's a little more like nebulous, but for majority of companies that are hiring, they are they are like you are more valuable if you understand how their product works.

Yes. So like yes the the way I talk about this is like I'm a design engineer. I do design and engineering. I am like crossf functional which means like I can communicate the importance of design from an engineer's perspective and I can communicate the importance of engineering from a designer's perspective. I also like invest a lot of time in like understanding like the com the business of the company and like the reason you do all that is so that you can make the best possible decisions to bring success to the company. So the reason why you might would want to build something with the product is like you are showing to them that like I understand what like I'm not here because like engineering is what makes the company successful.

Like the product is what makes the company successful and I understand how the product's used. Like if you can communicate that like oh like I I'm an engineer but I also like understand you and your business that's just like one more like feather in the hat of like trust, you know, like trust me more because I cared enough to like understand you. Yeah. It's it's like about it's about they talk about like networking as like you know sch smoozing people and all this kind of stuff but like really like networking should just be like building relationships and like so it's like how would you build a relationship with like a girl or like a significant other uh that you're like trying to like date like show them that you care about their interests you know like take them do things that they like you know it's not just like you don't just go up to a girl and be like yeah I like 250 and you you know, like I've got a really good job.

Like you're not just sitting there like listing off like how good you are, right? It's like show them that you care about them, that you understand them. Yep. Would let me let me ask you this and and and kind of continuing on this this kind of train of thought here, would you if you were to go back and do your job search again? I mean, do do you learn vibe coding? Do you learn lovable? Do you learn Bolt? Do you do you do that? like like what does that look like? H that's a okay so that's an interesting question. Um I I don't think you I don't think you learn vibe coding from the like okay you learn vibe coding I think you learn anything like anything you learn it's never a bad thing to learn um the the but you need to be able to answer if you're in the in the market for a new job and like that's the reason you want to learn something then like do it from the from the instance of like how does this make me more valuable to a And if you don't have an answer for that, then like find something else to to learn first.

Y or like learn something in your free time like the way that something like lovable for engineers. Now like for me, I've got a lot different opinions on that because I have like a big design background. So I've already got that skill set. Sure. But for an engineer who like only wants to ever be an engineer like as far as their like hard skills go, then I think that like lovable and things like that can be valuable because it it shortcuts design, you know, like um you can like prototype an experience a lot faster because you can explain the underlying system usually a little better than your average person.

Sure. and you can get like a much higher fidelity output that could like the way that fits into a business is like hey like I am an engineer but like here's like how I leverage AI to be able to like quickly iterate and prototype like potential ideas to get them in the hands of customers faster and get actual fe like that's like explaining the business value of that skill like it all comes back to business value doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And sometime 99% of the time there's like the 1% of of the time where it's like oh like this is like a purely um academic role but n like that's not most jobs and like you'll know you'll know when that's the case but like for everybody else like for all the rest of us yeah it's it's all about like what's the value you bring to the business.

Yeah. Absolutely. Like this is this is capitalism. If you're if you are not bringing value and money to the business, like jobs aren't charity, unfortunately, you know. Yeah. So, any other any other tips? Anything that we haven't covered because we're already we're already at 10 minutes left, which is just time flies. Anything else you you you want to highlight or that's popped in your brain since we've been chatting? Yeah. Okay. So there's like there's two things that I want to like that I would point out and just in terms of like how like I would be using AI. Yeah, please. Which is like I would use AI in two ways as a junior.

One, I would use it to build more. Um Okay. Like words, right? Like nobody wants words. Like I'm like if somebody's hiring, I don't want to read a giant wall of text. I want exactly what that founder said two days ago. I want to see like actual artifacts of like that you are doing and like you can either go like very deep and build like a bunch of stuff at like varying levels of complexity in a very specific field. You can go broad so that you can like be able to show like oh hey like I can learn quickly and then grasp things quickly and output things of like a varying like pick whichever way you want your career to go and do that.

you know, that signals to hire like people hiring the type of person that you are. And then two is um I saw this tweet um let me see if I can grab the link and put it in in chat for people um which is uh it was by John I can't put anything in chat so we'll share it later. Um follow me on X and I'll I'll retweet it. um by John Linquist and he his his tweet was the best prompt will always be give me three variations of X then make an argument for the best one. Now the reason why this is valuable for anyone is that it means like you can understand how the AI is thinking so that like for experienced people like me I can also identify like oh that actually makes sense like they made the right reasoning like that is the best choice or I can be like they weren't they didn't have all the context this other other choices why it might be better for us.

Yep. Uh but for like juniors it's like oh like I wouldn't even know how to tell you like how to think through that process in the first place. So it's like helping train you into how to when when being presented with any problem never jump to like the first solution that you know like try to always think about different perspectives and different ways to solve a problem because like depending on like factors there's not always a best choice. there's just like the right choice for your your context and like AI can help you practice thinking through that. So it sounds like based off kind of the the overarching theme of this is really use AI kind of like what you said like as a mentor like basically endlessly helpful never gets tired of your questions mentor you know like I think the fastest way to learn is to sit with somebody who's senior doing the type of job that you want to do and just like watch them work and ask them questions but like we're remote now like 99% of us are remote at this point and we I never have had that experience.

So like leverage any tooling that you can to get that experience. Are you guys Let me ask you this again as we slowly wrap up here. And if you guys have any questions in the chat, please ask them. Um like are you guys where you're currently working? Like are you guys using AI? How are you guys like have you Man, let me uh while we're waiting, I can tell you something that I did recent. So, like I really like games. Um Okay. And so recently, I've been making an effort to like learn how to like develop games and stuff. Okay. Um and like AI has been super help like cuz I've never done that before.

So like uh one of the the valuable things is like learning a new domain. Like I don't know the words to like look up sure the information but like AI solves what I call the cold start problem which is like like I don't know what the right words are to solve this but like AI can help me with the language that I do have to like get the next layer down and like oh now I know more of the language of this domain now I can ask even better questions and get even deeper and deeper. Yep. I love that. And then right now current but and like in your role right now are you guys using AI at all?

Oh, I thought you were asking chat. Oh, no. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I I sorry. No, you Sorry. You specifically within your day-to-day. Yeah. So, yeah. Um, we I use it. Um, so like we're a database and like the one thing you don't ever want is like a non-deterministic system touching your database because like who knows what will happen. So like we do not use it in our actual like software as like a tool as part of our software. Um, but I know I personally use it a lot. Uh, especially for like what we call paper cuts at our company. So there's like a whole host of problems when you build software of a certain age and scale where there becomes so many corners of your product that can like have a rough experience.

Sure. Where it's like it doesn't break the experience for people, but like you slowly lose trust over a longer period of time because there like the app feels buggy a little bit. Yeah, that makes sense. In like little areas. Um, and we have an incredible customer service team who like identifies these and puts them in this like big list. Like normally it's like okay when you can find time to bust through a couple of these in between like the big projects that actually push push the business forward. Sure. Um, do those and like the number of those type of things that I can just bust a move on.

Interesting. Because it's like okay the code base is like purposefully structured. there's an architecture to it. Y and so like when you have these little paper cuts, it's very easy to not vibe code but to say like hey in these files there is this issue. Can you identify that issue? And so like suggest solution for it and you can like I could have identified that really quickly myself if I'd like but not as fast as like a computer can. So like yeah it it can identify those. it can suggest like the solution for it and if I like the solution after I've evaluated it then I can just let them implement it in cursor or whatever or if it's like okay you identified the right problem but like you didn't quite understand the like the details of like how we do engineering here so like I will write the code myself to be like better um but that like I we move so much quicker on like paper cut type stuff so it's like we can keep our our products quality really high on these like very low impact.

We've already like coded this system. There's just like a rough edge. Fix it. I like that. I like that. That's awesome. That's awesome. Um, sweet, ma'am. All right. So, if Yeah. Sorry about that. Makes sense. You got quiet for a second. I was like I was like, did I lose him? No. No. You You said like y'all put your questions in the chat and I was just like, oh, so he's talking to them now. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I love it. I love it. Um, all right. All right. So, as we wrap up here, kind of a few rapid fire kind of uh fun questions.

First off, I always ask people, are you a coffee or tea guy? Coffee. I've got Let me just Hot or iced? Hot or Oh my gosh. So, are you hot or you iced? Me and Ally got matching. We iced for me. Ally thinks it's an abomination, so she's always hot. Coffee. Iced is the true taste of coffee in my opinion. So good. So good. I already drank mine. I'm gonna have to This might be a two cup day, though. I love it. I love it. That's awesome. That's awesome. Uh, next question. Um, when it comes to kind of giving some people in the, uh, in the community a shout out, I always like to like to give props to to folks.

Is there anybody who's doing really cool stuff that you follow um that you want to give a shout to? Anybody in the community who's doing cool stuff that you've just been following on X, maybe that that you you've enjoyed what they've been putting out? 100%. All right. So, there's this account on Twitter. Uh, it's called his handle is measure plan. Okay. Um and he has been doing this stuff where it is like uh it's using 3JS and a like um I guess it's like machine learning thing where it like does video for your hands and can can track your hand movement and he does all these experiments of how he can use his hand to manipulate 3D models on screen.

Whoa. Uh, and like the videos are in like a VR perspect like that's overlaid on top of him so you can see him manipulating his hands and what's getting like manipulated on the screen. Sure. And they are just so cool. They So that's awesome. And then and then and then then what was the handle of that again? Measure measure plan. I like that. So that as far as like doing really cool stuff, he's doing like super cool stuff. And then another shout out for somebody if y'all don't know Emit. Emit Nton. Like Emit is just like the biggest hype boy um like of all time.

Like he is like so supportive. I had my first talk on Monday and like I I'm pretty sure I it was like when I woke up that morning I had a DM that was like dude like you're going to crush it today. Like good luck. I'm like man Emit is like if you need to just have quality people in your corner. Yes. Is Emit's on like the top of that list for me. Yep. I agree with that. Go follow go connect with EMTT. He is absolutely wonderful. Um, uh, next question. Is there anything that you're tinkering with internally, even just on your, you talk about game development, but is there anything else you're tinkering with?

Any frameworks? Anything that's kind of fun right now? Okay. So, I'm gonna give a talk about this in July, but Laravel, um, Laravel and I keep hearing about it. I keep hearing about it. Um, and there's a reason I I think that it's really good. um is because Laravel's been around for decades at this point. Yeah. I used to recruit a lot of Laravel back in like 2012 and it's also been like actively worked on and improved a ton. So it's like one it's a really good framework. Two it's been around for a very long time. Um, which means AI is extremely good at like knowing best practices.

Like they've had like the community as itself is like has very strong opinions on like the right way to do things. Y so like AI it doesn't get confused about how to do things because it just like it's just a really good framework for like having AI help you understand how to build more and build better. Yeah. So I've really enjoyed using it. Um I'm a big React fan. They've got other solutions and stuff, but I like React. But they have this tool called Inertia, which lets you like you don't have to write APIs for everything. It just works like your controllers are connected to your front end and like it just passes the data straight.

I don't know what that means. That sounds cool, right? It just makes it great. It makes it super easy. And that's in Laravel, right? It's in Laravel. It just makes it super easy to like use your backend data in your front end without having to do all the in between stuff to like make it work. So, it's great. love that combination with AI. And then like the number three reason is like the people in Laravel, the community, some of the best, most positive people that there are. So, it's just like you can't lose. Yeah, they hired a good crew for sure. Um, all right, last question as we wrap up here.

And again, thanks for everybody who tuned in. A lot of comments. Please go connect with Will. Um, so show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but not necessarily as adults. We don't really necessarily have a guidance counselor to turn to. Yeah. What would be your biggest piece of career advice if you can go back and tell young Will something like young Will, cherry picker, industrial will? Biggest career advice? I would say just like say hey to people sooner. Wild my biggest career advice for myself because like I already I already had like the gene to like want to build and put stuff out there, but like which is like a really important one like be public.

like if you're doing work make like share it with other people. Somebody's gonna find it interesting and you'll connect with them. But two, like the biggest thing for me, even though I was doing all that, was just to like if you think somebody's cool, just tell them, "Hey, you're cool." You know, like build relationships, like say hey to people, like comment on people's things, like let them know that you're interested, ask questions, all that kind like the sooner you start interacting with people, like you're just building like friendship and relationships. And like at the end of the day, that's like for me personally, that's like what makes I think it's everything.

So fun is like just that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I I I you know the the more I get into this and you were talking about AI and blah blah blah blah. Like at the end of the day, man, it's who you know. Like it's who you know. Yeah. So double down on that. And uh just a final final quote from a good buddy of ours, Aaron Francis. Um he says that like if you want people to take note of you, to notice you, then do something noteworthy, which is which is a thing. Like yes, build relationships, get to know people, but like the way that you get to know people is like the people that you want to be friends with who are doing interesting things, like make sure that you're being that type of interesting person, too.

Yeah. because like they're also like wanting to make friends with other people who are who are like interesting in in that kind of thing. So it's like identify the things you like about other people and like make sure you're looking at yourself too to try and Yep. Like I love that have those qualities. I love that. Sweet. All right y'all. Well, thanks again for tuning in today. Last one of the week. Yes, Roxy, you can just do things Michael say. Um but y'all have a good one. Thanks again for tuning in. Will stay on. say bye to you backstage. Um, but we will uh we'll see y'all next