navigating a 20 year career in tech w/ sunil pai

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All right, we're live. All right, here we go. Alerting the troops. All right, cool. Awesome. All right. Good morning, everybody. Afternoon, where Sunil is, across the ocean, across the pond. Excited to be back after the holiday yesterday. It's always interesting. It's like I told Sunil backstage, obviously the power of Twitter, I still call it Twitter, just like seeing people and and you know I've I've followed sinear for a while and um I don't know I I'm sure he I'm sure you posted something that prompted me to get into your dms but I'm really appreciative that he said yes um and he and I were chatting backstage and I think it's gonna be a great conversation you know I I presented this talk three weeks ago in raleigh all things open meet up and and I think it's very gonna be very similar to what we're gonna talk about today so um in that basically hey listen like The web's changing.

You're not late. Sunil obviously has a ton of experience that we're going to talk about his background, but before we dive in, please say, Hey, we'd love to hear from you. I know we're going live. People are, it's just now hitting the interwebs. So please say, Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Let us know where we tune in from. But I want to give a kind of a few shout outs, kind of housekeeping things as always. First off, an app right hero me and my guy jason torres on the torque team are upright heroes I always say I'm the only non-technical app right I'm the only non-technical hero probably on a technical heroes program um I am I'm the true definition of a personality hire um so I don't know how to code um but I feel like app right's great you should go check them out if you do check them out tell them a torque boy sent you me and jason like I said are both heroes and listen we got a lot going on in torque community We have so much.

We have lives. We have public lives. We have Discord lives. We're helping people write resumes. We're helping people do interviews. We're doing all this stuff. If you want job search, if you want to source job search tips, jump in our Discord. But to get all that information, go to Torque.community. We'd love to have you. Also, too, if you want to know when I go live, shoot me a text, six, one, five, two, three, five, five, six, five, zero. And of course, we'd love to have you there. um I I just shout out text to my community that I'm going live with sunil so we'd love to have you um all right sunil let's let's uh give the people what they want man who are you what do you do now and we'll dive into uh your background Well, personality higher to personality higher.

Yeah, it's a thing. It's a thing now. I mean, engineers could stand to have more social skills, of course, in general. Yeah, of course. First of all, Taylor, thank you so much for having me on. Followed you for such a long time now, and I'm so happy to be here. My name is Sunil Pai. I'm currently a principal engineer at Cloudflare, I do a bunch of stuff around AI agents. I've done a bunch of stuff around real time at Cloudflare. I helped rewrite their developer CLI from Rust to TypeScript, which is the opposite direction that a bunch of things. I was about to say, I'm not technical, but that does seem like a very different thing.

It worked. It worked. It saved the product. So for the four Rust engineers out there who are mad at me, send it to my DMs. Um, so yeah, I am, uh, uh, that's what I do. Um, that's what I currently do. I have a lot more behind me, hopefully a lot more in front of me as well, but that's what I currently do. Yes. I love that. I love that. Well, man, you know, kind of really what, what the titles say is navigate a you know we were chatting backstage a lot of the waves a lot of the trends um man just just just give the folks when we have people starting to tune in now chris good to see you naz jalen it's great to see you this morning again please continue to say hey um as this hits the interwebs but man give give a background where did you start you know talk talk to me kind of through your career at a high level to set the stage of the conversation today I'll try to keep it short because yeah I uh I'm from India.

I'm from West Coast, India, which is the best coast of India. I love it. I love it. Which is to say, like, I have opinions on seafood and curry that are long and varied. Wait, wait. I want to hear that. I want to hear that, right? Because I have not been to India yet. It's on a bucket list for sure. I have a lot of friends out there. Never been to London, but I hear that's like, I hear England is like Indian food central. Oh, yeah, yeah. In fact, people think that London is where the great Indian food is. And for context, I moved to Newcastle just in the north of England about nine months ago.

And the Indian food here in a town with a hundred sixty thousand people is like S tier. Is it really? it's I was surprised I didn't expect it like we went to like seven different ones just to try it out and each one was amazing they have a legit indian style buffet restaurant here oh dude I I could hurt myself on indian buffet bro that yeah you it's like twenty five pounds and you sit down for like two and a half hours and then it sounds like my jam yeah if I'm ever in newcastle It's crazy. It's like forty dishes. And the thing about an Indian buffet is they have a little bit of everything.

They'll have a live pasta counter, a little Chinese, twelve types of desserts, forty other dishes, four types of biryanis. I'm like, who is this for? Why is this place here? But it's packed. All the students, of course, love it. It's a uni town as well. Anyway, I am from India and I've done a bunch of things along the way. I was explaining to you that... I got into a really good uni for computer science. And then I proceeded to discover, I had my first serious girlfriend. I joined the college band. I discovered substance abuse. So it took me about seven years to do a four-year degree.

And I've now spent the last twenty years just making up for it, just to get the chip off my shoulder about Just to get the chip off my shoulder that I can do as well as my roommates. And suddenly it's been working out pretty well so far. Don't get me wrong. I know some people from my batch who have now spent fifteen years in NVIDIA and I only found out like three months ago. I'm like, oh, buddy, you have like money, money. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so people might know me from a bunch of things. In India, I used to I was a senior architect at a place called Myntra.com, which was an e-commerce site.

But it was also like the hotbed of a bunch of JavaScript stuff that happened. You might know me, you might be mad at me for making a CSS in JS library. It was called Glamour. At one point, it was everywhere. I think like Office, we used it for the longest time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. That's awesome. And in the most unexpected places all over. You might know me for my one year that I spent on the React core team, again, as the personality hire. That team could use a little more personality. Hi to Ricky. I love him. He's my best friend and he's probably.

Yeah, he's. I love it. I love it. You might know me from doing my time at CloudFlare, where I've otherwise written the developer CLI and I now do that AI agents work. A bunch of people might know me from the startup that I built called Party Kit, which is a real time multiplayer stuff. Hey, Riley, how's it going? Hey, I know Riley. I'm mad about the work I did. I introduced the testing APIs, which pissed off a bunch of people. I've done a bunch of things, but the theme around it is, like I was telling you, I think between See, in twenty twenty thirteen react launch and everybody got mad.

Then they were like, wait, there's something special here. And then between twenty fourteen and twenty eighteen, which I consider as the golden years of the react community, not necessarily of react. I think react is still I mean, I use react. Only react. Well, I'm wearing the damn react. I saw that. I saw that. I had to wrap it, had to wrap it. I love it. That was not planned. Yeah. Well, I saw it this morning. And twenty fourteen to twenty eighteen is when a whole bunch of names in the community just came out of the woodwork. And that was I mean, those nice Zerpy days when people would send you to conferences all across the world.

So we had a lot of friends that we had a circuit of meeting people. I think that was interesting for me and it helped me get my name out there, the work I'm doing, the things I care about. and I made lifelong friends uh so one of these things either made you mad or helped you out at work and uh I assume that's how some people know me and for those who don't yes it's been a varied and weird career I think I was telling you that I think I've done all the major food groups I worked in startups big companies design firms work for the government My first, first job was writing embedded software for trains.

There you go. There you go. There you go. It's, it's been a lot. Just like, like, so it's, now I just consider myself like the JavaScript guy, like it's running everywhere. So I'm, I'm usually around. Does that help? I love it. That's great. People, people, people definitely resonate with the Indian food conversation. I want to go back to that real fast. And then, and then I'll get you up some questions. What's your favorite, What's your favorite dish, man? What's one, two on the list? Easy. Number one is the chicken curry that I make. And the reason that I think it's good is... I have a recipe that I've modified over the last few years.

It's made with coconut milk and it's not spicy. Okay, like the base is coconut milk. I'm a wimp. I'm a wimp. No, no, no. That's why you like this. It isn't spicy, but it's like super flavorful. And I love the recipe because it's so forgiving. Like on a day you can... I drink when I make this curry. It's like, you know, today I'm going heavy on the garlic. I'm doing this. I like listening to like Metallica and shit while I'm cooking this. My chicken curry is easily like my favorite Indian food. I've cooked and made it for friends. If you're around me, I will make that shit for you.

How long are we marinating the chicken for? No, no, this is a non-marination one. Okay, non-marination. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do this because it's like a one-pot thing. Okay. My other favorite Indian food is coastal seafood, specifically around the Konkan coast, which I want to say is like between Bombay and the very bottom. The reason that if people have ever been gone partying to Goa, which is like the party capital of India. Yeah. They're very intense flavors. They're like forty types of chilies, all with a different variety. There's no one type of chili. Like it's all types and mixed with six hundred types of spices.

And you're going to go out. The reason you're going to go out is the alcohol is tax free, which makes it super, super cheap. And all the food is just shacks on the beach. Like you will start at like four thirty in the afternoon and you'll end at two in the morning. Just try. Eating and drinking down the thing. That is the experience. That is like what food does for you, right? I've done fine dining. I've done all of that. But I'm not joking when I say my top is the chicken curry I make because it usually means I'm making it for myself and other people and we sit around and drink.

And the second one is walking down the beach, eating seafood and go out. I love it. I love it. There you go. There you go. All right. So I want to talk about just the internet. I mean, you know, you and I were chatting backstage. I mean, I've been recruiting the web since two thousand eleven. I've seen a lot of changes. You've been actually hands on through the changes. Let's just talk super high level. We're going through a big change right now. We're going through another big change with AI, right? And, you know, of course, some people may roll their eyes, oh great, another AI talk, but it's here, we talk about it, but let's just talk about trends as a whole.

What are your thoughts on them? What people should be aware of? Just give me kind of some Sunil hot takes on this Tuesday morning. Okay, I'll just go for it. Feel free to interrupt. We can- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Highly hot take, just, yeah, unfiltered. The first thing you need to know And you need to remember this every morning when you wake up because I know everyone reaches for their phone the moment they wake up because I do. You have to understand that social media is adversarial. I mean this in a very specific way. you are hearing not just only the good things that happen to people, you're hearing from people who want you to think that things are going only great for them.

So I mean this in terms of companies, CEOs, people shilling you their products, trying to tell you what is important. You will miss like AI thread boys on Twitter, right? Google just launched a new model yesterday. Everything has changed. And if you don't read and retweet my thread right now, You're donezo, my guy. You're donezo. So I know for a fact that everyone is in a state of confusion. I know that everyone feels like there's this daily need to keep up with what's going on. And I'm here to tell you that that's all bullshit. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to be a boomer about it and say invest in fundamentals, even though you should.

But like I was telling you earlier, this has happened before multiple times. And for two of them, I was around. That's crazy. When JavaScript was just starting to become popular, there used to be a website called ajaxian.com. Now, any of the thirty five plus forty year olds in the chat might know what I'm talking about to those three people. Hey, what's up? How's it going? Take an ibuprofen for your back, I guess. I took ibuprofen for my back this morning, Sunil. Yeah. At this point, everything's kind of broken anyway. Yeah. OK. Can I have my drugs to go? I need to be in bed by ten thirty.

Seriously, seriously. I'll throw a party, but everyone's got to leave by nine. Anyway, so and Ajaxian was run by Dion Almir and Ben Galbriot. Amazing, amazing people. And they did this. That was the website you would go to on a daily basis just to know what new things were happening. It wasn't even about hype. Like no one was like paying them. I think they occasionally had ads and stuff. But I remember the feeling. To be clear, I want to give context to the people here. I was doing web development back when dev tools weren't a thing. I'm also handsome as hell. You can say both things at the same time.

Ten out of ten. Can confirm. I'm funny and horny. I wish I had that facial hair. It's good. It's growing in. It's a little patchy. There are guys who do like... Anyway. I digress. So... was amazing because that was the time when jquery was just starting jquery was I think some cars somewhere around there prototypes cryptoculus dojo moodles moodles which is the progenitor of react like half the react team were from the moodles uh from the moodles group tomokino sebastian mark book krishna kazawa so many people sure hell even guillermo wasn't guillermo doing stuff with moodles I forget I don't know I don't remember uh anyway I remember I remember very at I was mentioning that there were no dev tools you'd have to debug your code by using alerts like you'd have to write alert this value as a string that would pop up and there would be bugs that showed up only when you did alerts and it was all a mess and uh joe hewitt he launched firebug zero point one in firefox it was the first way to do um uh to debug your code and do console.logs.

And I remember that feeling like, oh my God, this changes everything. Because until then, and maybe even now, JavaScript was very much considered a toy language. Point being, I'm older than most of you here, even though I have the great hair and the facial hair. I remember having a very strong feeling that I'm late to the game. Even then? In two thousand eight. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Geez, that's that's a while ago. A while ago, dude. It's a while ago. You have to remind me to talk about the thing about going from being the youngest person in the room to being the oldest person in the room and not happens overnight.

We'll talk about it in a minute. Anyway, so I remember thinking I was done for. What am I even doing in this space? All the big names, all the problems are solved. But I just went with it because you're so lucky if you have a job in front-end development that you get paid for because it's so visually satisfying. The feedback cycles are so fast. It's always interesting because it's not just about algorithms, but about human interactions and stuff. I remember feeling like that in The second time that I felt this, and this is a feeling that we both share, was in twenty eleven, twenty twelve.

Angular was the name of the game. Yeah. Yeah. Like what? Right. We're like, oh, man. And Angular kind of particularly sucked on Indian networks at the time. I mean, India solved that Internet problem. But back then, an Angular app would barely load. It was really bad. I remember again thinking, well, it's kind of boring, but it's a job and I enjoy it. And I enjoy writing code and solving business problems. The reason that we all got into React wasn't because we thought it would get big. In fact, we thought it wouldn't. It was all the rebels and the weirdos who got into React. Like, what if you could render CSS in your JS?

What if you made a server component? XML in JavaScript is so weird, and that is what is appealing about it. Every conference, every meetup was just about experimentation and things that people had learned that could do hey angular has actually gotten pretty good after sarah drasner got there by the way yes and I think angular is not bad anymore I said anymore like it was bad you know what yeah that dude no I like I like it anyway I remember feeling that way then and for us react was an escape not into something bigger but just to keep things interesting And I know for a fact everyone thinks about that, about AI programming like today.

And oh my god, you are so, so, so wrong. And especially just pattern matching on what's going on. It is so strange. And I guess that's the context you wanted me to bring, right? Like there is all, which is why I started by saying social media is adversarial. The reason you feel this way is not only because you think people around you are saying it, but you think everybody else is also feeling like it's done. And I'm here to tell you, it's not even close. We are like less than, it's not even like step one of a hundred step journey. It's, there are like thousands of things.

Like this is going to be, Whether AI or not, I promise you that software development is an unsolved science, and it's going to take another twenty, thirty years. I don't care whether AI writes most of the code, whatever it is. It's just going to... If you've been keeping an eye on these things, you'll notice that Everybody changes their mind every six weeks anyway. Everybody. Yeah. So let me ask you this, man. I mean, I think obviously in your circles, you've heard it. In my circles, I've heard it. I think there's a lot of eye roll groaning right now with where we're at with AI, right?

You know, there's, again, like I said, social media pundits. It's a mess, blah, blah, blah. What would be your biggest encouragement or words of wisdom to folks right now who are maybe scared to get in on it, think it's a fad? I mean, I tweeted something the other day and I had like three or four comments like, oh, it's a fad. It's like everything else. What are your thoughts on that? First of all, the tech is really old and good. Okay. It's only a fad if it's... Well, if it's new, but Transformers, forget about the fact that Transformers paper only came out, I want to say seven or eight years ago.

The AI space has been alive for a good sixty, seventy years. Sixty years. Explain that. Explain that to me as a non-technical guy. Why? Why is the AI space been alive that long? So, I mean, it's kind. OK, so. If you go all the way back. Jesus, not even that much. But I'm thinking more specifically... I was about to say pulling books off the shelf. No, no, no. Bletchley Park. Alan Turing at Bletchley Park wins the war against the Nazis with the Code Breakers. If you've seen the movie Imitation Game. It's a great movie. Great movie. Bletchley Park. By the way, in the UK, one hour north of London, this is my temple.

I go there like twice a year. I'm not joking. Okay. I recommend it. Bletchley Park is the OG. It's crazy. You get to walk around the campus and they tell you stories of all the things. I like that. I like that. Particularly after the war got over, but I think they were thinking about one human machines, Babbage, they were all thinking about it even before the war, even before we had transistors or anything. There's always been the desire to create intelligence out of nothing. I don't know how many people here are aware of the programming language Lisp, for example. I am part of it. Lisp is a programming language you can learn in about twenty minutes.

It's wonderful. It's inspired. JavaScript was invented by a Lisp programmer at it was called Mozilla at the time. Ben, what's the name of the guy who invented JavaScript? Shit, why am I forgetting this? Invented JavaScript. Brendan Eich. He was a Lisp programmer and his research when he was working in Mozilla was to bring Lisp to the browser and they entered in a marketing deal with Sun Microsystems where Sun was going to announce Java applets in the browser and they needed a lightweight scripting language. Interesting, did not know that. Which is why it's called JavaScript. That's crazy. And Brendan basically gave a C slash Java-like syntax to Lisp, which is why if you know JavaScript, it is so easy to learn Lisp, by the way.

It's crazy. You're like, oh, they just copied JavaScript. And then you learn- You heard it here first, folks. Lisp is going to be hot. I'm just kidding. Well, people have been saying that about Lisp since the, since the sixties and it's not happened. I love it. Lisp is very much the, we invented it first. We, we had lambdas and we had, anyway, point B, it was invented by, I want to say his name is McCarthy. McCarthy, uh, as a language for computers to generate for artificial intelligence. There's also a language called Prolog, which is a logic programming language, again, written in the desire to give machines thought.

And the first thing you do is you almost give them a language to be able to speak. Point being, AI has been People have been working on this space for decades now. And the idea of large language models being the solution for it is crazy. Point being, to go back to your original question, it's not really a fad because the tech is very solid. It's very expensive because it says let's, it's called the scaling law, which is, you know, Chuck, As much hardware, the more hardware you throw at this, the smarter it becomes. That's basically where it comes from. And it's only until Ilya was like, yeah, let's throw like a billion dollars worth of GPUs at this and see how smart it can become.

And then OpenAI kicked off the whole thing. Yeah. There's lots to go there. Point being, the tech is actually very good. The tech is unfamiliar for those of us who have been in the space for a while. By the way, it's why you'll see nineteen year olds and eighteen year olds get so much better at using AI tools than, well, people like me, simply because they don't have like preconceived notions of what programming should be like. Interesting. Interesting. One hundred percent. In fact, a nineteen year old intern taught me how to use cursor. I was like, it's not really a good tool. And then I was pairing with him and I saw him doing these things.

I was like, OK, OK, OK, I need I need to I need to do this. Yeah, the tech is good. It's unfamiliar because there are new patterns. And that is where the opportunity for everyone, hopefully, who's listening, this should be Yes, AI is a broad term. I'm talking about LLMs because that's the flavor du jour, right? Sure, sure. this is the time just like javascript in the late two thousands react in the mid twenty tens uh where you are you can even say cloud engineering too you could throw that in there because that was a trend as well I didn't even realize aws invented the term lambdas for functions by the way I didn't know that either actually a really good name I'm learning a lot from you like a walking encyclopedia dude damn I've been You've been around a lot.

Those gray hairs, they just appear. That's right. The salt pepper is showing recently. I had to dye mine. No, no, no. I've been enjoying it because I've started getting white hairs on the beard. Listen, the gray is in, man. Gray is in. It's distinguished. I'm into it. It's working for me. Don't get me wrong. The rest of my body is just coins in a meat purse at this point. I'm going to go lie down after this podcast, but the rest of it is pretty decent. uh your job as a technologist is not to call for a winner okay or not even to decide who the winner is you can apply this to anything I applied the same thought to crypto okay I was like okay my job right now is not to decide whether it's good or bad or you know what while I'm working when I'm sitting in front of a laptop that's not my job my job is to become familiar You are a technologist.

You can go down to levels that the normal person on the road usually wouldn't. You have to form very detailed opinions about what these things can do, can't do. where it's going. Can you look back at the six months and say, okay, fine, it was able to do this. An agent could run for five seconds. Now it can run for about a minute, which means probably in another six months, it'll be able to run for twenty minutes without falling apart and context and all of that. Your job is to become, well, you have to become a subject matter expertise at everything. I think a lot of people confuse a job with the work.

I keep telling this to people. I love work. Work, and I don't know whether it's because, like I said, I have a chip on my shoulder because of university or because I'm an immigrant and work gives me validation and took me all the way from a tiny uni town in India all the way to here, back to another uni town, but still pretty nice places along the way. Your You have to, the work is good. Your job is so nice. You get to like sit and drink little matcha teas and all of that. But the job is very different. The job is a responsibility and you should never make the mistake of like confusing the two.

Your job is to solve business problems. It'll be some version of the statement. You're usually working, either you're, It's not even like you're an independent person working only on your problems. The entire point of technology is scale. You're trying to solve other people's problems. You're trying to make it accessible to them. You're trying to make it cheap for them. In fact, you're trying to protect your users against themselves. I keep thinking about this. I was thinking about this back during my e-commerce days. If humans were perfect robots, then every e-commerce website would simply be a database that you open to the public. And you say, yeah, write SQL queries against this.

Go for it. Cart, checkout, inventory, just write SQL. But the truth is that users are not perfect robots. They're smelly human beings. And you want to not just protect them against themselves, like, oh, you can't actually add six hundred of one item into a shopping cart, but you want them to feel good about it. Well, you're a JavaScript programmer. After one point, it's even less about the data structures and algorithms, which we are famously bad as a group at. But about building human-computer interaction systems, which sometimes can be measured by A-B testing systems, but a lot of it is wide. You're like, oh, that looks pretty.

That looks nice. The animation goes on for too long. Let's let them not have them scroll here. The red on yellow doesn't have good contrast. Let's fix these things. You develop those opinions by doing it a hundred times. You have to be able to explain how you feel about it. Look, I have my own bets about AI, and I'm not here to pitch them to you. Though you should build AI agents at cloudflare.com. There you go. If Cloudflare wants sponsored pod, let me know. But yeah, no, I mean, but I want to hear your... Where do you see this going, man? I mean, again, hot take central, right?

Yeah, I... Look, I don't know if the... scaling if the scaling intelligence with current systems means that it's going to be ten x smarter next year all signs point to no by the way there's right now we are in that uh winter of intelligence is what they're calling it yeah aaron francis's tweet the other day about chat gbt five come out he goes I'm actually thrilled that it's not great right it's uh it's a kind of plateauing uh uh Even, look, let's say there were no model releases for the next five years. Correct. There are still fifteen years worth of improvements to existing software systems you have.

This is my belief. Okay? Every input box should have autocomplete. Every text area should have autocomplete. There are no open source components that let you do this right now. that's great you can look you can look hell people talk about how voice agents are the future of ai there is no open source react hook or component that I can drop and make this work out of the box right now that's kind of weird right I looked I I've even tweeted about this a couple of times if you want open source glory today build that voice component it doesn't even have to do with llms but like you can wire it up to whisper sure sure you will become an open source legend today if you build that component.

There's so much work to be done. My point being, even if nothing changed with intelligence, we have at least five, if not, fifteen years worth of improvements to take. Also, it hasn't reached the normal person yet. AI is not out there in the world. My dad started using ChatGPT. A lot of people in India use ChatGPT, by the way. He loves it, but he doesn't know the half of it. The analogy I have is, When Google came out, Google came out in two thousand and one, I want to say so by two thousand and eight to actually, you know, way past that, there are two types of Googlers.

They're ones who know how to use Google. So you know how to use keywords. You know how Google works. You're like, oh, if I get the keywords right, you'll find the page. Sure. And then there are people like my dad back in the day, he's actually pretty hardcore now, who would type questions into the Google input box. Hey, can you take me to the news about so-and-so? It would be phrased as English questions, which you and I know it doesn't matter. In fact, you know that Google is stripping out all those words just to look for the keywords and then do a search on it.

Actually, it's weird because now we have AI that actually uses that context and is going the other way around. AI LLM systems actually do work better when you talk to it in English. I digress. But like this normal, like nobody is using AI out there to automatically answer emails. Let's say the boring ones to clear out. You have Gmail maybe applying spam filters, but there's so many things that get past it. I think Gmail has been getting worse at catching spam anyway. You don't have Apple tried and they failed miserably with Apple intelligence. They tried so hard to make your phone smart and everybody hated it.

And it was pretty bad. You know who hates it the most? Tejas. He talks about it all the time. I bet Tejas hates it. He talks about it all the time. Hey, how's it going, Tejas? If you see this in the future, what up? See, Tejas is brown excellence. Tejas is someone I look up to. He's a G. He's a G. He is. He is. Your job as a technologist right now is definitely not to be an absolutist about this. You know what? You're looking for hot takes. I'll say the thing that everyone's afraid to say. If you're an absolutist about this to the point where you're like, I don't want to use AI.

It's unethical. I don't want to work with people who want to use AI. I don't want to touch AI. You're making yourself unemployable today, like you're done for. Hey, my guy KCD, how's it going? Again, I'm not saying AI is good or bad. You can absolutely have those opinions, but you work in an industry. Trust me, I have problems with a lot of systems in the world today, which are just absolutely unfair and biased towards billionaires and corporations and armies and empires. Take it from an Indian immigrant who's traveled the world, okay? That is not your job. Your job is not to have an absolutist view about tech, which is not done changing.

Like if you made this decision about React in, uh, twenty thirteen, you would have made yourself unemployable. Well, well, I'm going to chime in. I know devs who have. How did they manage? What did they do? They've had problems finding jobs ever since. And then they wonder why they can't find a job. I feel bad for them because they're like, I have twelve years of experience and I find it hard to find a job. I know you go into their social media and their posts and you're like, and they're just bitching and complaining. It's just like, dog, what are we doing? My guy. What's again, what's worse is they will have four hundred people in their replies saying, yeah, bro, this is so unfair.

How can people treat you this way? Exactly. They will applaud them into unemployability, right? And I'm like, this is embarrassing. Like, you're seeing this thing happen in slow motion. This person doesn't have friends. Take it from me, okay? Like, being an absolutist in this industry that changes every three to six months is a death knell. You're kind of done for. So what do people do? Like, what do people do right now? And Kenzie does, she knows, right? Down to earth, realist, practical. Yeah, a hundred percent. So what do we... What do we do? What do devs do? Do we all learn cursor and we're all an AI expert now?

What does it look like? It's not a destination. It's about the daily routine. So the way I think about it is everyone likes saying this about the California gold rush, right? They're like, oh, it was a great time to be selling picks and shovels. That's not true anymore. You know what a great time it is to be buying picks and shovels. Like every single AI company out there is losing money on their products right now. Which is to say your investment in this can be zero. But like I give myself about thirty dollars a month to spend on things. OK, so I spend twenty dollars.

No, I spend forty dollars and on only two products. correct myself, forty six dollars. I'll tell you what I spend on. I spend twenty dollars a month on Cursor. Uh, a month on chat GPT plus and six dollars a month on granola granola. I love because love granola. It's such a good product, such a good product. Also, I know the team and it's six dollars because they very foolishly did a sale in December where they're like, oh, it's going to be six dollars for life. I'm like, done. You're going to regret this. Yeah. That's a bad move on your part. Uh, but. I did it because you can do it for a month and you can give up.

There are other tools that are cheaper, better. It doesn't matter. You spend way more on, I don't know, coffee and beer or whatever it is. The job is not to decide whether cursor is the tool that you will use. You might decide that. Don't get me wrong. Your job is to develop a routine on a daily basis. Weekly, if not daily, but go for daily. Where you're learning, you're learning about what these things are doing, what new patterns are popping up. That's what I meant about social media. Even though it's adversarial like this, a lot of alpha is still on Twitter. Taylor, it drives me mad, bro.

I have to get my AI news from the most racist website on the planet. Like, it's so weird, bro. Like, I try so hard. Like, on the one hand, like, and they don't even tell you who liked the tweets anymore, right? And I'm like, oh my God, somebody I'm following. Just like this absolutely horrible tweet. But like two tweets down, I learned about OpenCode's SDK launch, which they just had yesterday. Looks amazing. And you're like, wait, OpenCode did an SDK launch. Cursor is looking to do an SDK. CloudCode is doing an SDK. Now, I know people on these teams, and they do it if their users or customers are asking for it, which means more people are building tools with this.

Immediately, that's a signal for me to put aside try to build something shitty with the SDK. I need to know what this is capable of, what it's not capable of. Yeah, so I grew up sailing, which is... you know, kind of ridiculous to say out loud, but one of the things that one of the things, so I, I raced competitively in college on, on sailing teams, right? Probably the widest thing I could say. And so basically for me, one of the things when you sail is you look at where the wind is going to be. And you look at the way the wind goes across the water.

Prime example, me and my dad, we put a B team together. We raced in a regatta. There was thirty five boats. It was a national qualifier. And we were pretty much dead last every race. Right. Because it's the B team. It was my dad. It was it was it was it was a crazy, crazy weekend. The last race, the tenth race of the weekend. We saw the wind take a turn that very few people saw, and we finished tenth out of thirty-five boats. Okay, okay. And I think in this case, you're looking at data points and where the wind potentially is going to go here, and you've got to get familiar with watching the wind.

And I think that's very similar in tech right now where you see one thing, you see it now, it's like, okay, the wind may be going this way. Let me try it to get that experience under your belt. I love that you brought up sailing because I want to say roughly two or three weeks ago, I don't know if it came up on Reddit or something else. Sailing is fucking cool, because A, I love sports. I mean, I like watching sports, especially with friends. That's my thing. I don't play a lot of sports, but watching sports, sports movies, amazing. Sailing, you need to be on the move constantly.

against an invisible force. And the best thing about sailing is if you do it right, you can sail into the wind. Bro, that's the craziest shit I've ever heard of. Totally unintuitive. Until you look into the science, you're like, oh, shit, that makes sense. you kind of felt it when you're like riding a cycle against the wind and you're like this is how I adjust constantly sailing is a bonkers good analogy for like how to deal with systems going on right now when you think everything is against you you can actually like make moves that again because social media seems like everybody's doing well you would be surprised how if you put in a little bit of effort a little bit of by the way uh I'm uh I I don't have any children I'm not having any children.

And I know a lot of people have told me, well, you get to do this because you don't have your time to spend on these things. There are so many people I look up to with families who are doing way more than I am. Kenzie Dodds is one of them. Kenzie Dodds is the animal. Is number five or number six on the way? No, I want to say number six. I think we got number three on the way. right you figure it out one of my favorite founders is steve ruiz tldraw he has a wonderful daughter he tells me the thing that happened to him uh after uh because of the because of his daughter is that he makes sure that his nine to five is super like effective because five past five pm it's his daughter's time like he doesn't get to do anything and if you're telling me tldraw team is like not shipping and learning new things and finding the barriers of human computer interaction bro like sorry cope hard hardcore yeah um so no you're I keep going back to this your job is to learn and what a wonderful job that is how lucky you are how how uh how blessed your life is that you get to do this and you're complaining yeah sorry let's go to let's go to naz's question here how should a beginner approach this whole ai thing well The nice thing about being a beginner in AI, of course, is you actually get to sketch out your own journey right now.

And for the record, most people are beginners. Most people are beginners, yep. Sunil, very senior. I mean, maybe you're a little bit more than a beginner, but you were a beginner six months ago. You know how I became tech lead of AI agents at Cloudflare? It's because in October last year, I had no idea what it was. And I started writing internal blog posts like, hey, I just learned this new thing. This looks cool. Then I started writing external blog posts on my personal blog, sunilpay.dev. this was literally in my talk this was literally my talk to three weeks ago I'm so glad I just like hey I learned something new the act of writing is also like learning you're like oh like you'll be writing something you're like wait that's stupid that's not what it is let me write it again I'm like okay now I know what I actually understood um you can share with people don't don't do it don't do this learning imagining that you're going to become a famous tech youtuber or like Do it for an audience of one.

Do it for yourself. Develop a little bit of a routine, like the discipline of doing it every day, every three days, every week, whatever it is. Pick your thing. But the one thing, you know what? I have another hot take here. a lot of older people and I say older people I mean people in my age like me and you yeah yeah I think you're only a few years older than me uh they will tell you about how important the fundamentals is you better learn about closures and arguments array uh before you do all these cool ai things don't learn react before you know javascript really well I'm here to tell you that's all In fact, the only thing that has worked for me and so many, so many other people I know is being able to build something shitty and then making it better.

And you have a magical friend in your computer now who will help you do that. So the mistake you could make, and a lot of people make this mistake, is not reading the code that the LLM has written for you. It just wrote it for you. Sit down, read it, have a good time. And that's how you learn. You have a magical... When I was learning JavaScript... Actually, I say learning JavaScript, but by the way, this is my reputation in Cloudflare right now is I will bother you with questions, the most basic questions. It would be embarrassing. Get out of town. I'm not joking. I don't know shit about cloud computing, distributed systems.

I bother the creator of Cloudflare workers twice a week. I'm like, please explain this extremely basic thing to me. And he's a very, very nice guy. He's like, okay, fine, I'll tell you. And then I get to take credit for all of his work on Twitter. So win-win. So... Man, what a wonderful, wonderful job and life I have that I can be learning the entire time. I get to ask questions. Now, a lot of people get annoyed at what might get annoyed if you ask them for too much help. You're not doing it yourself. Well, magically, in twenty twenty five, you have a friend in your computer who's answering all your questions without doubt now some of those it's a very helpful intern some of those answers might be complete it'll make things up and it'll gas you up like it'll gas you up like what a wonderful question taylor you are a munch and a god among among human beings for asking me about typescript types wow So get rid of that stuff.

Put it in your prompt saying, calm the hell down. We don't do this stuff. And just be curious about the routine. That's just it. So many people want to be done with the learning. They're like, oh, if I can't be done with the learning, I'll never be good at something. But you will never be done. And the earlier you realize that, and the sooner that you pivot to finding a routine instead of a goal, you will do really well. So if I was starting programming today, Google what the most popular IDE is. Maybe I'll use Copilot. Maybe I'll use the free version. I don't care.

I will just tell my, oh, and I will try to copy things I see online. This is how I've always done it. Hey, underscore JS looks cool. Maybe I should try building my own version. Hey, React looks cool. Maybe I should try building my own version. Hey, this website looks interesting. What if I try to build just the front-end HTML of it by myself? It will be really bad and the code will be bad and nobody might ever see it. It doesn't matter because you do this a hundred times. And the thing, if there's one takeaway, you take away from this. Like I said, like social media is adversarial.

You will find yourself in the one percent of people, not even above average. You will be surprised at how few people give a shit out there. giving even a little bit of a shit, like just a little bit of reading, a little bit of experimentation, just trying to be better on a daily basis, you will magically get way better. By the way, this is, I'm now forty-one, Taylor. Okay, I'm thirty-six, so you're older. I am, I am. I buy CDs. I have a little CD player. Those are filled with CDs, by the way. You're that old boomer, elder millennial walker on a Walkman or something.

I like Chapel Rowan and Sabrina Carpenter, but I have no idea who they are. I know the three songs each that they have. No idea. Like I said, I work with interns who haven't seen The Matrix. If you haven't seen The Matrix, why do you want to program? I thought that's why everyone does it. Anyway... Oh, shit. I kind of forgot the point I was making. My point is, people look up to me now for opinions. Hey, how should I do this? What should I do here? And part of me is like, well, that's a question I've never heard. You want to figure it out together?

And they're like, no, I don't want to take your time. I'm like, it's okay. I learned something new. It's okay. We can work together and do this. I've become fairly decent at learning new things. And that's through a lifetime of not being good at it. my, my, my, I had to put it down into a few sentences. I would say, look to build learning routines. You might think that the annoying thing about learning routines is that it's actually hard to measure progress because there are very few milestones. You can give milestones to yourself, but you've got to trust in the process. Maybe, I don't know, maybe, see, KCD is a way better teacher and educator than I am.

Not only do I bet he has opinions, but I bet he has like four blog posts on this. uh because he's he's somebody who writes down everything he learns yes uh well I I want to talk too because this was part of my talk and we're coming up on time an hour went by way too fast with you um but the talk about just putting yourself out there like like so I I actually mentioned kent I don't know if you're still watching but I I mentioned kent c dodds I mentioned andy andy jones Kenzie Dodds, in my mind, React. Angie Jones, in my mind, Java.

Guess what those two have done over the last six to nine months? They have consistently put out blogs, content, what they're learning, and guess what? They're now getting Paul to speak in AI events, and it's only been the last six to nine months. It's insane. You're telling me things are done when... In under a year, that would be weird. No, that's like completely not true. And you're absolutely right. Ken C. Dodd's latest obsession is MCP. I know this because- Yeah, MCP everything. Everything that put MCP this. If I had a dollar, I'd be rich. You shouldn't be depressed because MCP is solved because it isn't.

You should be glad that all this shitty infrastructure-y JavaScript library, TypeScript stuff is done. You get to learn these things now when it's a little more stable. Don't get me wrong, it's going to change again in six months. But what a wonderful time to sit down and be like, I'm going to make an MCP server. And I'm just going to talk to it with an LLM. Again, use Cloudflare Worker's AI. Bro, our shit is so cheap, man. And I'm not even saying that as a shill. I'm like, maybe we are not making enough money. It's absurd. Bro, I was telling you about this. When I was learning JavaScript, we didn't have compilers, bundlers.

We had to copy-paste these files together to form little script tags on pages. And it was still joyful. And like I said, ajaxian.com on shitty Indian internet at the time. With no cell phones, I had to go sit in front of a computer to do these things. Are you mad? Forget about YouTube and all this stuff. And you should consider yourself lucky and liberated that it's a little more easier to get access. What I also think is that... I think social media has ruined people's attention spans, including myself. That's a whole other conversation. That is the big fight, by the way. Being able to sit down for...

...thirty minutes, forty-five minutes, without interruption, without checking what's going on on Twitter or Reddit or whatever it is. Honestly, I have no answers for that. And I genuinely believe that is the problem to solve. Because... Well, I think and I think what I want to drive home to is we kind of wrap up here and I have some rapid fire questions for you to to end it out. But I think I think the big thing is, is that you're not late and everybody I would say now is more on an even playing field than ever. I look forward to hiring someone on my team who says my shit is trash and they can do a better job.

That is like the best outcome for me. And the reason I say this is that's how I got my job in Cloudflare. I tried out their stuff and I was complaining about how bad the DX is online. And I don't know if you know this about Cloudflare employees, they're extremely online. So they got into my DMs and they were like, are you going to keep complaining or do you want a job to come fix this? I was like, okay, let's go. I've never done this sort of thing before, but I'll try. And that counts, putting yourself out there, saying the things. I thought I had it scheduled to go out today.

But, oh, here it is. Here it is. I literally have this tweet scheduled today. If you can create a demo of a product of the company you want to interview and lead with that in a DM to the manager, the response rate in your DMs is going to be incredibly high. Holy, it is a cheat code. Why don't more people do this? That's what I don't understand. Like, literally, if I was like, hey, Sunil, I don't know tech, but like, I mean, I do, but I don't. But it's like, hey, Sunil, I don't like the way Cloudflare does this. I created a quick proof of concept.

What are your thoughts on this? I'm pretty sure you're probably going to respond to that person ten out of ten times. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You're using my stuff. I'm so lucky that you bothered giving me five minutes out of your day. I know. Dude, yeah, the resume, which is like, hey, here's all my feedback. I tried out these things. By the way, I already sent you two quick PRs. Your interview questions are not going to be, tell me about yourself. It's like, hey, let's talk about the projects we're working on. It changes the entire mode of the conversation. Hundred percent. And by the way, this is not about senior, junior.

I'm not joking. Like you can be fresh out of college and this gets you like. Yeah. I mean, you just said an intern taught you how to use cursor. Dravya, dude, it was crazy. That day I was like, yeah, that was crazy. Sunil, it's like that day is etched in my memory. All right, let's go ahead and wrap up here. I want to be respectful of Sunil's time again. Thank you all so much for tuning in. The comments have been off the chain. I don't know. I date myself when I say that. But the comments have been great. Thank you so much. So first question for you, Sunil.

What's one tech tool or app you can't live without right now? Oh, man. Like, what is it? Cursor? Or... Granola, I think granola, because like, I think I have like ADHD. It's so useful to just record. I'm doing it for this conversation and I'm going to go back and be like, what did I say? What did this? Cursor, like one of those tools and not cursor, granola and that family of tools, a hundred percent. I sometimes open it up and I'll talk to it just out loud. And then like, I love that. I love that. What's, all right, let me ask you this. What's the very first job you ever got paid to do when you were a kid?

I was selling CDs that would hook you up to dial up internet when I was twelve. Wow. So that was in nineteen ninety five. Wow. That's that was the year I also discovered Nirvana and I was like, oh, this is a great band. I wonder what else they're doing. And I was like, oh, no. Yeah. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Let me ask you this. If you were to have your pick, right, are you a fully remote guy? Do you like on-site? I don't know what Cloudflare does on-site stuff. I know my preference is always one week a quarter, having the whole kind of everybody in the office.

I just always ask this to get folks' thoughts on this remote culture right now. I work fully remote right now, but Cloudflare is extremely remote friendly to the point they actually don't care whether you come into office or not. But I think those are two different types of work. I think the work you do when you're like, I'm, yeah, don't enter the door. I'm just locking in, writing a bunch of code versus actually hanging out with teammates, whiteboards. Those are two different types of work. There's a third type of thing, which is not work, but equally important, which is having a beer and actually like- Incredibly important.

We don't talk enough about this. Maybe that's a whole. Learning to like the people that you spend over eight hours a day with. Networking for your future too. Come on. Oh, you know, so by the way, despite my bad academics, one thing I'm extremely proud of is the relationships that are built in this community. Uh, At a time when tech hiring is so bad, the relationships and network I've built mean that I can get a job with a single tweet. I'm not showing off. I'm saying it's taken fifteen years of work to get to this point. You should invest in it. Just to say, don't trash people online, don't pick fights.

uh be intelligent and be social yeah yeah a hundred percent um what okay so back in I mean you were selling tech stuff when you were twelve years old did you always want to be in tech when you grow up or do you have another profession in mind I thought I'd do computer science research I didn't think I'd do it commercially yeah I was always always fascinated with computers uh for a while I did think I'd become a writer and join a band and stuff actually I thought that was what I was going to do then I did poorly in uni and I took the programming job uh to pay the bills uh and I never stopped I love it I love it I love it uh nas comes an important question pineapple on pizza yes or no hundred percent oh so neil where'd you go come back He turned off his camera.

Sunil! That question upset him so much that he had to log off. Sunil, you there? Sunil? You there? The pineapple on pizza was such a big thing. Sunil, you there? What happened to his camera? Can you hear me? What happened to your camera? That question upset you drastically. Yeah, I know. No, not me. My entire computer went on the fritz. I had to disconnect everything. Pineapple on pizza, yes or no? Click. The answer is yes, hundred percent yes. But obviously the gods don't want it. They're looking at me. That was such a great cliffhanger right there. Am I going to lose my citizenship over saying this?

I feel like I'm on a list. You upset somebody. You upset somebody. No, pineapple on pizza. Sweet, salty, spicy, crunchy, everything on the same. Of course, a hundred percent. There you go. I love it. Last two questions here. What is a career mistake you're weirdly grateful for? I did very, very badly on the React team and I left and I thought my life was over because that was my dream team to be on. That brought me to Cloudflare. There you go. There you go. All right. Last question to wrap up here. This show is called Guidance Counselor. Because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college.

But now as adults, we don't really have guidance counselors to turn to and ask for career advice. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Sunil? Young Sunil. Invest in health and healthy routines. Three square meals a day, a twenty minute walk, maybe a little lifting. That has done way better for my code and my life and my career than any other form, static type systems, TDD, anything like that. The days I'm healthy and happy, I do a much, much better job than anything else. And I wish we could go back and do a little less grinding. Yeah, I love that. All right, y'all.

Well, thank you again for hanging out with us today. Sunil, thank you, my friend. Stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. Y'all have a good one. We have our fellow TORC ambassador, Will Klein, on the show tomorrow. We're going to talk about how he's overcome social anxiety and ADHD to present in conferences and navigate kind of the in-person circuit. So pumped to see you guys tomorrow. Sunil, thank you, my friend. Y'all have a good one. See y'all tomorrow morning, nine thirty a.m. Central.