ai and your career w/ aaron francis

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All right. Alerting the troops. All righty. Sweet. All right. Good morning, everybody. Happy hump day. Excited to hang out with the legend himself, Aaron Francis. For those of you who do not follow Aaron, he's great. I'm going to get him to obviously talk about himself. But excited for this conversation today, I think. You know, one of the things I'm really kind of focused on, I've been doing this show now for six years. It's six years this year or six years this month, rather, because I started this thing when COVID hit and I wanted to just. get information out to the general public on career stuff and yada, yada, yada.

And it was just me talking to my mom on Facebook, basically on streams. Um, and then people started to chime in and other people started to DM me. They're like, I would love to come on the show. And this thing's kind of morphed into what it is today. And so, um, really been doing some thinking, obviously had paternity leave. Um, we welcomed our third kid. Um, quickly catching up with Aaron. But basically, I've been doing some thinking and I have focused a lot on the job search when it comes to careers with developers. I think what I want to do and kind of where the market's heading is, really trying to shed a lot of light on the uncertainty.

I think you can live on X and think you're falling behind. I don't think that's the case, and we're going to talk about that today. But I really wanted to focus and bring in on folks who have a good grasp of AI, who are building and talk about AI in your career and what you can do. But then also I want to bring on recruiters as well. So Aaron is not a recruiter. um Aaron falls into the first bucket um so that's what we're going to talk about today uh just really kind of break down what Aaron's seeing um really what you can do to improve yourself some skills you need to learn and be aware of so excited for today's episode um as always please comment we'd love to hear from you the comment section is already uh blowing up I know I've had a bunch of DMS about this episode and people are excited to hear Aaron Yap um so again we're gonna let him yap here in a second I want to give obviously shout out to a few things um if you uh want to be uh notified whenever I go live six one five two three five five six five zero uh shoot me a text this is my number my second number I guess you could say um would love to have you also listen we got a tongue going on in the torque Discord would love to have you in that um and uh also too Go check out our community page, twerk.dev backslash community.

We'd love to have you a part of that group. Oh, yeah, finally. Yeah, we launched a newsletter. We have a newsletter, but we actually have a landing page now. So if you want to be kept up to date, whenever all of our events, all of our streams, all of our workshops, all of our in-person events, we'd love to have you. If you are in the Raleigh-Durham area, we're going to be rolling in for all things AI here in two weeks, throwing a little meetup, giving away some swag. It's going to be a great little time. All right. Aaron, enough of me yapping. Let's give the people what they want, man.

Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. That is a great question. I'm Aaron. We'll start with that. That much is known. I am a software developer historically and founder of a company called TryHard Studios, which you'll see here on screen. and I do a lot of things, and it seems like it's changing day to day, if not hour to hour. Historically, I have... I've done a lot of database education, so I've taught a lot of application developers how to use databases at a more serious level. And I am now doing that same sort of thing, but with AI teaching developers how to use AI thoughtfully and conscientiously and without giving up I think not necessarily control, but without giving over our brains to the neon gods and still validating and being actual engineers instead of just saying yes, yes, yes.

So yeah, that's probably as succinct as is necessary. Let me ask you this, man, and we can go ahead and dive in. I want to start the conversation with how you've pivoted. Right? I think we are in the market right now where I think there's a ton of pivot. I've been recruiting in the tech space since, I remember when .NET MVC came out and everybody was going from web forms to MVC. I remember when React came out. I remember when Angular came out. I remember when cloud started to get hot. This feels like an entire shift. And as somebody who was doing database and giving out content, again, if you do not listen to Mostly Technical, I highly recommend listening to Aaron's pod.

I've referenced it a lot on the show. I do listen to it. I listen to Ian and Aaron in terms of trends and where things are going. Aaron, what has gone through your mind over the last... few months that has made you go from database, database, database to, Hey, I, I'm making this full shift in the AI. Yeah. That's, I think one of the benefits of having a weekly, you know, how's your father podcast where you just kind of, you just kind of jam is the whole thing is like documented contemporaneously. And so it's, You know, if you listen and I wouldn't wish this on anyone, if you go back and you listen to mostly technical from the beginning, you'll hear pre Thanksgiving of twenty twenty five pre Thanksgiving.

I was kind of a downer because you were because you see like. You see on X.com, the everything app, which I'm sure we'll talk about, you see the hype. And then I was having a lived reality where I was like, guys, this stuff sucks. Like even even pre Thanksgiving, I was like, I understand that this is useful. I do not understand what you are all talking about. Because you'd go on X and everybody would be like, oh, if you're still writing code, you're an idiot. And then you'd have it write code and you'd be like, this is terrible. Not even just like stylistically different than what I would prefer.

It is actively terrible. And so, you know, it's all well documented that I was like, this is not every, this is not a panacea that you guys are talking about. There was a point when I think GPT five came out and I told Ian, like, Hey, I feel great because this thing, I tried it and this thing is not very good. And so I think education is going to live on. Like I feel really good about this. I was nervous. My whole business was going to go away being an educator. And then GPT five came out and it was like not much better. And I was like, Oh, thank God this sucks.

And then, um, you know, I was building out the new video platform for database school.com, which is where I do the database education. Um, And I was doing that just pre Thanksgiving and Gemini three point zero was out. And I think Opus four point five was out at that time. And I tried those two models and I realized, oh, shoot, this is so much better now. Like this is actively very good now. And so. I think it was frankly just like the game on the field changed and I experienced it firsthand and I became like a believer that this is actually useful now. Yeah. And so hopefully, hopefully the record will show that like I missed NFTs altogether.

I didn't do NFTs. I thought they were stupid. Most people accept Jake Paul. I think web three was stupid. I think the whole thing was stupid. I'm not like the, I'm not much of a hype trainer. I still have never used Docker. Like I still like, I avoid as much technology as possible. And pre Thanksgiving, um, I was like, y'all are crazy for loving AI. And then the models changed. And now I'm like, okay, this is the future. Whether or not we like it, which is an interesting question, whether or not we like it, we need to know how to use this the same way we know how to use a hammer.

Like it's just a tool. And I think a lot of people are having existential dread about the tool. And I'm sensitive to that. But I think at this point, the cat is out of the bag and it's like, we gotta know how to use it. And so my hope is that we can all learn how to use it and get rich and happy and work really fast instead of get displaced. That is my hope. Yeah, I love that. Let me ask you this, and I know we've got some questions, and I'm going to try to work these in when we can. If you have questions for Aaron, please drop them in the chat, and I will moderate the best I feasibly can.

Let me ask you this. There's a lot of layers to this onion, if you will, right? There is... hey i'm gonna use chat gpt to ask some questions um there's and this is just the way i i infer which most likely is wrong but there's like using it just to ask questions and prompts then i've gotten into like cloud co-work to automate some of my stuff which is pretty tremendous obviously i don't touch the coding side but obviously you have the coding side then you obviously have like kind of the deep technology ml nlp computer vision all that type of stuff How can people get started as a developer?

What are some simple things that people need to really start to do to really start to get this thing under their belt hands? Specifically as a developer? Yeah, as a developer. Yeah, I think specifically as a developer, I think you should... I think you should download cloud code. Um, the, the CLI tool, you should spend, spend twenty dollars of hopefully your company's money, um, and get on like the low tier paid plan for one month. Like you're not committing, you're not committing to never writing code again. Um, just open cloud code on a paid plan. Um, and you can even keep it side by side with your editor or if your ide has an integrated terminal you can use it in there you don't have to close out the terminal and never look at the code again i'm sorry close out the editor um My encouragement would be to start everything in Cloud Code.

Codex five point four is extremely good, but it's a little bit more neckbeardy. I find Cloud Code to be super friendly. So I would start just like, come in on Thursday, tomorrow, come in tomorrow and open cloud code and start working there. And what you'll quickly realize is that it's stupid and it's frustrating. And that like, that is either typically, typically what happens is it depends on your point of view. Like if you're a developer, that's like, Nothing can ever replace me. You're going to use cloud code. It's going to do something stupid. And you're going to use that as confirmation of like, hi, I told you you're all idiots and I'm the genius.

Or it's going to do something stupid and you're going to be like, well, I guess this is just the new world is we're stupid now. And I think both of those are. Both of those are wrong. I think it's the same thing as when React does something stupid, which is every time React does anything. You don't just say, well, I'm going to go back to handwriting JavaScript without a framework. Some people have done that, and I think they've been left behind, frankly. So what you do is you use Cloud Code, and you say, this did something stupid. Okay. Well, how do I make it not do something stupid in the future?

Is that writing a different ClaudeMD? Maybe. Is that adding guardrails in my application that are deterministic and will prevent Claude or its friends from doing something stupid in the future? Probably. Like, you're still the engineer. And so if Claude writes some terrible code, and you know as the very smart engineer that will never be replaced, you know that there's some sort of static analysis tool or some sort of test you can write to make sure that Claude never does that thing again, do that. Lean into the tool. So all of these LLMs are probabilistic word slop cannons, right? but lean into that and have it write deterministic tools that enforce like guidelines and structure and tests.

And you don't have to take everything Claude says, like you should push back on it. You should use planning mode. You should prepare. Like, I think a lot of people get stuck as they go in and they're like, build me an app like Salesforce. And then it doesn't. And they're like, well, I told you, I guess I'll go back to, you know, carving with my chisel into the stone. And you're like, whoa, let's take a couple of steps at a time. And as you get used to where these things have limitations, because they certainly have limitations, you start to get this spidey sense of, okay, well, I know that it can't do this very well, so I'm going to take this in eight steps instead of one.

Or I know it can do this, no problem. I'm just going to have it one shot this test or this harness or whatever and move on. I think the... The main takeaway is like, you are not too late. but the time is coming when you may be too late. So it's not too late. Yeah, it's not too late to start. Like you haven't been left behind, but you need to start. Even if it's just dipping your toes in the water for an hour each morning and then saying, well, I'm going to go back to my pen and paper. That's fine. But you have to start like probably now.

Yeah. Let me, let's, and I'm kind of going to lay this up into faster.dev. Talk about that because I feel like you're taking a very pragmatic approach to this new endeavor. Yeah, so my approach to faster.dev, which is my education for engineer, AI-assisted engineering, is... you'll see a lot of stuff on the internet about like, well, if you don't have your agents running in a slop loop overnight, you're going to get left behind. And I just don't believe that. First of all, anything you read on on x.com, unless it comes from me is a lie. So like you can just, you know, you can just kind of be like, ah, this is just somebody that's like trying to get points on the internet.

Right. I think like, I think the approach that I'm trying to take with Faster is like, guys, this is real. This is actually helpful. It's not just like you're going to get left behind. It's like, no, actually, you can get ahead. And what an exciting time to get ahead. But you are still... an engineer or should be an engineer like even if you're not now's a great time to learn how to be an engineer i think the level at which uh entry uh like junior people start is much higher now like you don't have to learn all the lower level stuff about like syntax but you do have to learn all the stuff about computer science right so it's like it it's still a great time to become a developer In fact, maybe the best time ever because you have these superpowers.

But my point of view on faster.dev is like, you still need to keep your hands on the wheel. We're going to use these tools, but we're going to use them in a thoughtful and conscientious way. And... from like an engineering first perspective instead of like a vibe coding perspective. And vibe coding is great if you wanna build a workout tracking app that goes on your phone that only you ever use. Like don't look at the code, who gives a rip? But if you're working at a company or you're building a product that's gonna go out to people that trust you with their US dollars, then you need to like, you need to be serious about it.

And I think AI assisted engineering is fundamentally different than vibe coding. And with AI assisted engineering, you have to know about stuff like state machines and you have to know about stuff like idipotency and like static analysis. And that's fine. We've been learning stuff since the beginning. Like this is no different. It just feels a lot different because maybe this is our first takeoff to live through. But like the mobile revolution, the internet revolution, like everything changed back then as well. And it's just changing again. So is faster.dev like, are you working within a specific AI tool or talk to me about that? all of them yeah so right now there's uh their series on cloud code and skills and something else um but i'll do i use i use codex i use gemini i use amp um and i i am now like historically i've been a pretty pure laravel developer yeah now it doesn't really matter So now I'm writing stuff in Rust and React and all these other languages.

And a big part of faster.dev is the tracking, the real-time tracking of projects that I'm actually working on. And I think that's super important as you're like, as you're evaluating the people that you're going to like learn from and listen to not not just me but include me in that bucket like you have to look at what are they what are they doing because if it's just and there's nothing wrong with um there's nothing wrong with being a pure content creator i don't malign that profession at all but if you're looking towards a pure content creator to be like this is how you write production software Well, what are like what are they what are they building day to day?

What what consequences of their choices are they living with? So like now I have, you know, these applications that are shipped to end users. And I'm like at why I was late was I was debugging with a user in Slack. Like why this thing? I figured you had his specific machine. Yeah. And it's like, I have to live with the consequences of what I teach. And so I'm hoping that these projects that you're following on faster.dev will keep me honest to be like, listen, you could run a Ralph loop for eight hours, but I'm not going to do that because I have to ship this to users and they're going to slack me when it's broken and I'm going to have to fix it.

And so I'm hoping that that keeps me like on the straight and narrow of being a practitioner who also really has a heart for teaching rather than just making stuff up because it gets a lot of clicks. Like I have not installed open claw because I've got a business to run like this. I, it would be great content, but it doesn't do anything for me. And so my hope is that for practicing engineers, faster.dev is becomes the place that you trust. Yeah. I love that. I love that. Man, that was great. We'll clip that and send it to you. That was great. You can include it on your website.

I think, Pat, you know, I think you and Ian talked about this, about boring businesses, right? Ninety-five percent of stuff on Twitter, LinkedIn is bleeding edge. Everything will normalize over time. Make sure you are using something. But Aaron's right about this. Can you talk about kind of your thoughts around how long do you think it's going to get into enterprise business? I know you and Ian have talked about this a little bit. I think it's going to take forever. I mean, we still have, and you would know this better than me, but we still have companies that are doing lift and shift to cloud. And cloud has been around since the dawn of time.

Yeah. So I think right now, I think right now execs are probably super hot on AI. I think they're probably forcing people to implement it and they have no metrics for tracking it. They've got no support for these mandates they're handing down. Everything's going to go sideways and then they're going to roll it back and then potentially implement it in a more thoughtful manner moving forward. And so I think right now we're at the super frothy stage of, Hey, my golf buddies said that AI is everything. Let me write a memo to all my underlings and tell them to use AI. And then everybody's like, what the hell?

I have no idea. You have not prepared me in any way, shape or form for this. Now you're telling me I got to use it or I'm going to get fired. And so I think we're at a, We're at like a it's a very whiplash part of the cycle right now. Whiplash. I don't think that means that this is all going to go away. I think there will be ebbs and flows where execs and maybe managers realize like, all right, this is not, this is not like a silver bullet, but it is helpful. So what do we do now? But as far as like, how long will it take Ford to implement generative AI?

Probably a long time. I mean, you know, the fortune, whatever it's going to, the main problem in all companies is people in bureaucracy, not code. And so I don't think this solves it. David brings up a good question. Learning AI for young folks. Am I too old to learn AI? Thoughts, Aaron? You're never too old for anything, except maybe the Olympics or something. But no. If you... I think AI is a multiplier for things that you already know. I think I am way, way better at using AI than people that didn't spend twenty years being a developer. Because I can look at what Cloud is doing and be like, dude, stop.

Just implement this data structure and all of our if statements go away. What are you thinking? And then you tell Cloud that and it's like, ah, that's very smart, my friend. And I'm like, I know, you're supposed to know that. So no, I don't think it's just for young folks. I think it is just for curious folks. So I don't think curiosity has a correlation with old or young. Maybe it has a correlation, but not a causation. You can be I think you can be old and curious or you can be young and stubborn. And I think if you're curious, you can pretty much learn anything.

And if you're stubborn, it's hard to learn anything at all. Yeah. Yeah. And going back to Fast.dev, this was a question earlier. I'm getting to these. Jason, how did you decide on specific content for Faster? Yeah, so I picked Claude in the beginning because that's the one that I use the most. I think these days I'm maybe fifty-fifty Claude in Codex. But I specifically stayed away from some of the like you know, Ralph Wiggum loops, which if you're not familiar, don't look it up because it doesn't matter. I stayed away from some of that stuff because it's like, I think that is performative slop cannons.

And so I'm trying, like, I'm really, really, really trying to focus on Like I am a working developer. If I were a working developer inside of a company where there are fifty other working developers, what would I do? Well, I would be responsible for the PRS that I submit. I can't just Yolo everything. And so everything I'm doing on Fasters is in part a reflection of things I actually do in my real life and in part a reflection of what do I think the average working developer needs, not what does the person on twitter need yeah absolutely ron comes in are there any open models you like for coding i have not used any open models um i only use i only use um claude codex gemini and amp those are the only ones that i've used Where, where do you see?

So let me, so going back to like what people can, can do, you know, open up Claude code, we'll start working in that. You know, I think one of the things that you're doing with building faster and then, and then what's your other, the desktop app solo solo. Yeah. Talk about that real quick. Yeah, so Solo is one of the apps that we're tracking on faster.dev. Solo, which you can find at soloterm.com. Solo is basically like a terminal multiplexer. And so if you're working on, let's say you got a front-end project, a back-end project, an admin, an analytics, or whatever, or you're working on, like me, you're working on faster.dev, soloterm.com, Solo, the desktop app, you end up with all these processes that you need to run to boot up the application, right?

You need NPM run dev, you need queues, you need logs, you need yada, yada, yada, whatever. And you end up with eight different processes running. You don't know if NPM has crashed, whatever. So Solo allows you to set up these projects and say, anytime I want to start working on faster.dev, the website, I'm just going to hit play in Solo. I'm just going to hit the play button and it's going to spin up those four processes. And now faster.dev as a local dev stack is running. And I don't have to remember like, what was the NPM command for this? Or like, why are my logs and my queue logs and my NPM logs all interleaved?

Because I'm using NPX concurrently. All that stuff. All that stuff. So it just breaks it out. And then you can share that configuration with your team. So everyone's on the same page. Yeah. Let me see here. You got a few more questions pop up. Nick, the Codex app is pretty solid too. Do you find you use the IDE less and less? I find I'm almost never an IDE nowadays. I have not opened the IDE since Thanksgiving. Wow. Which doesn't mean I don't read the code. And I think that's something that people conflate. I haven't written code since Thanksgiving. Wow. But I am I'm also not like working in multiple Git work trees and having eight agents work in one code base at a time because I'm watching what the agent does.

Right. And so that's how I'm catching. And if I miss something, like if I'm working on two or three projects at once and I miss something, I just scroll back. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, OK, I see all the diffs that you're writing. And again, we're entering this situation where you're littering state all over the app instead of centralizing it. No, we're starting over. So no, I don't use the IDE at all. I watch what the agent does and I use GitHub desktop when I need to actually like look at a pretty diff instead of interleaved with the agent's thoughts. But yeah, I haven't opened.

Sometimes I'll open the IDE to edit a markdown file. But other than that, no, I haven't used it in a long time. crazy uh thoughts on spec driven development um as like a formal uh process i find it's a little formal i find it's a little bit like when people got super into um not agile what was the other one scrum scrum good lord like i'm a scrum master level four g and i'm like dude what happened to those people So spec driven development as a formality feels like a little bit too much of a formality. Now, planning before you work on something feels amazing to me.

And so I will often throw cloud code into plan mode in the beginning, or I have a skill called interview me where I just say, hey, cloud, interview me about adding this feature. Oh, I like that. And all it does is it asks me as many questions as it thinks it needs to. It's not strict. It's just like, oh, well, you said this. Well, what about that? Well, that raises this question. What about that? And then finally, when it's done, it outputs, hey, here's what we decided on. Here are things we decided not to do specifically. And then here are things that we haven't covered.

And then I'll throw that into Cloud Code plan mode and be like, I want you to create a plan for this. So in some regards, that is spec-driven development. But it's a little bit more loosey goosey. And I find that now the models like like maybe spec driven development was really important early on when the models were a little bit less capable. But now it's just like I start with a conversation. I make it do a plan. I validate the plan. Very important. Actually read the plan. And then I let her rip. And then we iterate from there. love it uh eduardo comes in here what are your these are great questions y'all keep them coming what are your thoughts on founders who think they don't need developers anymore especially because they have bad experience with them i would say uh go ye with god good luck i don't think it's going to work out for you i mean i think i think eduardo's question betrays the answer i don't think it's going to work i think you know he he believes that as well um i think if you've had bad experience with developers That is potentially normal.

We can be a prickly bunch. I think it's also potentially just part of running a business is you have employees. As far as you don't need developers anymore, I think a lot of founders are going to find out that that is woefully misguided. I think... I think founders and product managers and designers are frustrated with engineers because they have been kind of the gatekeepers for a long time. And I think engineers are frustrated with engineers founders and product managers and designers because engineers feel like they're doing the important work and everybody else is just larping and i think everybody's got to come to jesus and be like all right well the walls are kind of breaking down a little bit i agree everybody everybody needs everybody else and this again as smart as these gods are they're not perfect and we still need developers we still need designers i think we probably still need product managers and do those lines blur i think a little bit i don't know that on average a traditionally backend engineer is going to have a huge desire to be a product manager.

I do. I think it's fun. I love figuring out the UX, talking to customer. I think that's great. But the person who's deep in the code and pulling tickets, I don't think they want to be a product manager. And I don't think a product manager is going to be great at building out a complex backend system. And so right now everybody's like, finally, I don't need these morons. And everybody else is like, finally, I don't need these morons. And I think it's just going to normalize to be like, all right, maybe we should just work together a little bit better. Yeah. You know, I tweeted yesterday or the day before that I missed the JavaScript framework wars.

Oh, man. Simple times. Yeah. Simple times. And this is just a question to learn from Aaron here as a non-technical guy trying to mask as a technical person in this space. To me, it just seems we're heading to the language doesn't really matter, but more the problem solving and delivering value to users. Is that off base there? In fact, I think that has always been on base. I think that has always been the real value. I think it's a combination of developers not wanting to do that historically, like developers just wanting to tinker with code. I think not so much in the past, maybe, two years, but maybe like the five years before that money was free.

And so it was like, Hey, let's hire a thousand developers and have them all work on nothing. Yeah. Except JavaScript frameworks for some reason. And the money will just keep flowing. And then somebody turned off the spigot and AI came about and it's like, oh man, what if we like have to focus on shipping product and delighting our users? It's like, imagine that, that's crazy. And so I think a couple of things have conspired to the point where, and that's maybe part of the frustration of the business leaders is like, what have we been paying you all ungodly amounts of money for? If you're just going to argue on Twitter about whether remix or tan stack is better because we know next isn't good.

And so it's like, Now it's like, one, that matters way less. And two, everyone's moving faster. And the free money spigot got turned off. And so it's like, all right, well, I guess we're shipping product now. Yeah, of course we are. So do you... Okay, so this is a little bit of a put you on the spot question. Do you think the layoffs that are happening... are actually because of ai or do you think it's because of what we just talked about i think no wrong answers here it is a combination of both okay um i think specifically the block layoffs were a bloated company and uh an idealistic founder.

I think they tried to build four or five different service lines and only one or two, maybe Cash App, two worked out. And so they hired, when money was free, they hired five thousand extra people, literally. And then last week or the week before they laid off four thousand people. So now they're down to six total or five total, whatever. And so I think it's a combination of we super overhired because we could and because everyone else was we super overhired. We thought we were going to build eight businesses. We ended up building two. Also, I mean, the reports coming out of Stripe, who haven't, to my knowledge, laid people off, is they've got a team of internal minions, which is what they call their agents plus harnesses, that are merging thousands of PRs a day.

And so it's not illusory that AI is speeding things up. What I think is convenient is that you can lay off your... You're over you can you can cover some of your mistakes with the AI out. Sure. People will call you brave and smart when in reality, some portion and I'm not ascribing a percentage, but some portion is simply over hiring during the zero interest rates. Right. And so, yeah. And we've seen companies lay off customer service and then bring them back. And so I don't know, as bad as X is, I don't know that mainstream media in terms of PR is better. What is Jack Dorsey going to say?

I messed up and hired too many people? He could have, but he didn't. And so he said AI, and now it's like, oh, AI is changing the world. And I don't think that's... nobody's malicious in that case. Maybe Jack believes that maybe, you know, TechCrunch believes it, but is it at the heart of it actually true, maybe less than a hundred percent true. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Let's, let's, let's go back to, um, kind of, you know, people getting started, people using AI talked about using Claude. I, I, I hinted at problem solving, um, To me, it feels like the differentiator right now is people who understand how to use AI, but then also understand how to deliver business value.

And I feel like you can't get that. And I'm speaking from a lens of more of a junior skill set here. I feel like right now it's more important ever to try to build stuff for some sect of users that, You know, maybe maybe your neighborhood has a bunch of missing cats and you want to develop something to keep track of all the cats. I don't know what it is, but I feel like I've always talked about building in public. I think that's I mean, you're big on it. I'm big on it. You and I give very similar talks about the importance of putting yourself out there.

Yours is, of course, way better than mine. And so, like, I just feel like that's the answer, especially for the junior crowd. Thoughts on that? Yeah, I think it depends on context. So like, if you are... Let's see. The way that I broke in a thousand years ago was I was building stuff in public, right? I was working at Ernst & Young as an accountant, doing people's taxes. On the side, I was... I was writing, I was building applications, trying to do the solopreneur indie bootstrapper thing and was writing blog posts about it. And a company was like, hey, I saw your blog posts were having that same issue.

Can we hire you? And that's how I got out of accounting and into software development. And so I don't think that spiritually that path has changed. I think functionally, functionally it's changed quite a bit, but if you look at like the, if you look at the spiritual path of that, build something that you're interested in, talk about it and get noticed, I still think that that is a hundred percent viable these days and perhaps even more viable because the bar is so much lower on the knowledge you need to build something. And so I think the reason it depends on context is I wasn't looking for a job in tech when I was doing that.

If I were looking for a job in tech when I was doing that, I probably would have taken a much more focused approach. And so I can only, well, I can answer both, but they're different answers. Like if you are on the hunt, like trying to get a job, I can speak less to that. I still think having something that you've built that you can show, regardless of if it's keeping track track of neighborhood cats, which is a terrible idea or something that people are actually paying for. Having something that you can show that proves like, hey, I may not be the best in the world at this, but I am a self-starter who can learn these tools, who knows how to like stand up, even if it's just Vercel, stand up GitHub and Vercel and have a URL that points to a live project that I've actually done.

I feel like that's going to put you leaps and bounds ahead of the, like the pick me crew, which is like, look at my resume, which I know you love resumes, but like if you have something that is reachable by the worldwide web, I feel like that's going to put you further ahead. On the other hand, if you're like, I have a job, it's fine. I don't really want to go into tech. I just want to build something. I think that is the sweet spot right now. So like if you're a builder that's like looking to escape whatever suffering you're in right now at your nine to five, I think now is the time, now is like the golden age for that.

So we've heard a lot of doom and gloom about like the death of SAS. And I think that's only partially correct. I think the death of, I think the death of big box SaaS is correct. Like, I don't know, I don't know who would use, I don't know who would use Salesforce when a tailored version exists, right? And so I think the death of HubSpot, Salesforce, maybe Monday.com, those things are, Well, I would I would maybe I would maybe short those. But I think the rise of bespoke sass is not talked about enough. And maybe this is my optimistic hope for the future. But like if you're If your aunt works at a title company in a small town, Salesforce is never going to stoop so low.

But if you're seventeen or eighteen and you know that this title company does ten million dollars a year and your aunt is the only thing keeping the whole company together, if she's gone for a day, the papers don't flow. That's a great opportunity to build a local niche SaaS that serves like ten title companies and you're eighteen and you're making five hundred grand a year. Yes. And it's like and now the title company can make twelve million dollars. And it's so I feel like that is the future that a lot of people aren't talking about. We do see some people talk about personal software, like Nick just said.

I think that's also a lot of fun, like building the workout tracking app that you wish had always existed or whatever. I never work out, so I can't speak to that. But between... personal software and salesforce.com is the local title company for your aunt linda right and i think that is the software that um that's the big missing middle i agree like it used it used to be that that was really expensive and then we just skipped over that all together and went to no you just use service now or service titan or whatever they're called but now we're back to where like hey, as a as a eighteen year old kid over the summer who never sleeps, you could rip out a fully functional cred SAS that automates your aunt Linda's job so she can move up and be the manager of the software and the company can make more money and you can get rich as a kid.

And so I think that that is a totally viable path. Yeah. Also, my wife just text me. She said, I love your guest background. So just. Oh, thanks. FYI. Um, uh, it's not green screen. It's so good. It's so good. Uh, as we slowly start to wrap up here, if anybody has any questions, please ask them. I do want to get to obviously my favorite topic. You alluded to it in your last newsletter, highly recommend, uh, signing up for Aaron's newsletter. This has been just basically an hour of Aaron self-promotion, but I'm a big fan of what Aaron does. Uh, talk in person events. Hmm.

You just went to Laravel EU, right? Yep. You made a comment in your newsletter about the power still of in-person events. Obviously, we're really big on it at Torque. Talk about just some general thoughts there as we slowly start to wrap up. Yeah. So what I went to was a tech conference. Yes. And kind of the dichotomy of the tech conference is... I think in some regard, the highly technical talks from stage are becoming less valuable. That is not universally true, but I think at like a gen pop conference, which is like what Laracon is, it's like the average developer. I think, we're still early on this, but I think the highly technical talks are becoming less useful.

Now it's something like a cube con where it's like, I'm not a gin pop developer. I'm like deep in the weeds. I'm like building databases. Yes. Yes. Highly technical talks are probably going to thrive there for a long time. Um, But for like Commit Your Code or Laracon or React Miami, I don't know. And this is pure Thinkboy stuff. This is not a proclamation. I don't know how long... the tech talks will be valuable, which is not to say that the conferences aren't valuable. And that's where it gets weird, right? Because I think the conferences are more valuable than ever. I think there will be some sort of invisible hand that pushes the talks to be different.

I don't know what different that becomes, whether that is how to use AI or how to build products or whatever. I think the invisible hand will push it that way because the audience will be like, brother, I don't need to know how to scope this certain thing and react like God does that for me. I think the conference organizers will maybe be the visible hand that pushes that one way or another, but I think the market will decide on that. But what I think is important about conferences is all of the interstitial programming, which is like what happens at every moment someone is not on stage.

I think that is in some ways that has always been the valuable stuff. But I think that is becoming even more valuable. Like what happens between talks? What happens on night zero before the conference starts? What happens after all the talks are over on day one? What happens at lunch? And I think conference organizers need to pay a lot more attention to... all right, if technical knowledge is worthless, which I don't believe it is, but as a thought experiment, if technical knowledge is worthless, what does my conference become? And I think there are a lot of good answers to that. And which one you choose is more of a stylistic preference.

But I think it's an interesting thought exercise for a conference organizer to say, tech talks mean nothing. What do I do now? And then you can walk back from that. But I think that is directionally correct if not uh exactly accurate yeah i agree i've also been noticing that as well talk about still the power of meeting people in the conversations in person Yeah, I mean, that is the thing that the interstitial programming allows. So all the in-between times, the reason I think it's so valuable, not just because it's fun to hang, but that's where you get to meet all of the people that you know from the internet.

And that's where you get to have these conversations. And I'll have interacted with somebody a hundred times on the internet, And I'm like, well, this person seems cool. And then I meet him in person and I'm like, oh, okay. I got to follow them. I got to start DMing with them. Like they're awesome. I finally met them. And so, you know, you'll interact with somebody whose avatar is a rocket ship. And this is a real story. I interacted with this Twitter person whose avatar was a rocket ship for a long time. And I'm like, I don't know if this is a real person. They seem fine.

And I go to the conference and I meet them and I'm like, oh, this dude is totally normal. Yeah. you know, fourteen followers on Twitter, I'm going to be number fifteen because I like him. He's normal. We get along like he's a real person. Yeah. And like the number of The number like I the reason mostly technical started is because I went to a conference and Ian was there. And after he emailed me and was like, hey, I think we'd make a good podcast together. And I was like, yeah, turns out we do the number of like open source packages or businesses or podcasts or just general.

Generally, I categorize them as scheming. Like all of the interstitial programming, you should be scheming. You should be talking to people. Hey, what do you do? Hey, how can I help you? What can you like? Let's let's do a thing together. Let's have some fun. Let's, you know, whatever. And I think that is especially as the bots overtake the Internet. I think that is just like more and more valuable to get together in person. Talk to people who have experienced your pains and can help you skip over some of the painful spots. Or you can do that for somebody else. And you can scheme like that's the whole thing.

Like, hey, are you guys hiring? Because I hate my job like that goes really well in person. And that's hard to pull off online because it's like, who are you? And like, am I going to take a screenshot of this and post it? But like when you're in person and somebody is like, oh, my gosh, you hate your job. Well, we haven't opened it yet, but we're about we're about to open it. It's like, all right, you're in. yep yep absolutely um will you be visiting laravel japan i wish um no my uh my four children will prevent me from that what's what's your next conference you're gonna be at laracon us in boston this summer i will be emceeing uh that one so i'll be a great emcee great i appreciate that Enjoy it quite a bit.

Also, if you haven't listened to Aaron's keynote from Laracon last year, highly recommend it. A lot of similar things we've talked about today. So highly recommend that. All right. So Aaron. Time flies when you're having fun with friends. Rapid, rapid fire. You've done this before, but it's been over a year. So I don't know what you said. So we're going to do it again. I don't either. Yeah, me neither. What's the, what's the one tech tool app that you can't live without right now? Right now it is a speech to text by monologue. So monologue.to is my speech to text. Okay. Awesome. No whisper flow.

Mm-mm. Okay. There you go. What's the very first job you ever got paid to do? Software development. I was thirteen. No way. Uh-huh. Really? Yep. Yep. I was thirteen. I was doing a bunch of coding for fun and the company that my dad worked at needed a contractor to do some front-end web development and that's what I did. Yep. Uh, also as an aside, you putting out accounting content, if you were still in accounting would go super hard. I bet. Um, I thought about that as we were talking, uh, what, so when you were growing up, when you were, when, when young Aaron was young, what did you want to be when you grew up rich originally?

Just rich. That's it. That was it. There was no profession, not a lawyer, not a veterinarian. No, it was always software. Always software. So you were just hardwired for this. I think so. And I went to college and discovered that accounting is programming, just in a different wrapper. And I loved it dearly. And so I got my master's in accounting, got my CPA license, and then started practicing accounting. And it was numbers on forms. So I got out and went back to programming. there you go uh what is um what is a career moment or mistake you could say that you're oddly grateful for like is there is there a part of your career where like ah that sucked at the time but in hindsight like it it it kind of worked out i mean obviously getting laid off sucked um Which I did when I was on – Because you were at Planet Scale for – I was, yeah, for like a year and a half maybe.

And I got laid off when I was at home with my second set of twins having just been born. So I had two two-year-olds and two newborns, and I got the call while on paternity leave. So that sucked a lot. I – am proud of the things i've done since then um i hold no ill will towards planet scale for making a business decision um i'm not super pumped that i got laid off but that's the game that we play in america um like if you're in europe you get laid off and you're like i'm free for six years to live off my old salary and it's like oh that sounds awesome that's not how it works here my friend um So they made a business decision that turned out to be very smart in terms of, you know, turning their business around.

They're doing fantastic now, but it sucked for me personally. But since then, I, you know, I'm very proud of the comeback story from that for sure. I love that. I love that. If I told Aaron tomorrow morning when you woke up, but you couldn't do anything in tech, what hobby would you pursue for a living? Just hobby. It doesn't have to make money. Yeah, like money's not a thing. Oh, man, for sure. I'd buy like... hundred blighted acres somewhere and then just terraform it back to health there you go just living on the land i love it um all right last question as we wrap up here and again thank you all for the comments uh it has been uh it's been cool to see everybody chiming in um so the show's called guidance counselor two point oh because we had guidance counselors in middle school high school and college but now as adults we don't necessarily have somebody to turn to and ask for general career advice which is the whole ethos of this show what would be your biggest piece of career advice to young aaron if you can go back and tell him something Oh, I feel like I remember this one from last time.

I don't know what you said, though. I don't either. But I have so few schticks that this will probably be the same answer as last time. If I could go back to young Aaron, I would probably tell him to be less afraid of what people think and take more chances on crazy ideas or to... like act as if you couldn't fail and see what happens um i think i spent a long time worried about what would happen if i failed and then it turns out like nothing really um and so i wish i had started that arc uh at you know seventeen instead of thirty four thirty three or whatever it was i love it i love it well thank you my friend for coming on i appreciate it yeah i can say bye to you backstage you all have a good one um we are back next week i am pulling nader dabbit out of the depths of the internet and going to be interviewing him on some ai stuff as well so it's gonna be a great conversation um we all have a great rest of your week go connect with aaron check out faster.dev check out his newsletter just go Just subscribe to everything he does.

He's a great voice in the market right now. So y'all have a good one. Aaron, thank you, my friend. And we'll see y'all next week. Thanks for having me.