Podcast appearances and mentions of brandon what

Who else in literature today could be more interesting to interview than Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans, as well as the author of popular reviews and the sweater weather Substack? We talked about so much, including: Chopin and who plays him best; why there isn't more tennis in fiction; writing fiction on a lab bench; being a scientific critic; what he has learned working as a publisher; negative reviews; boring novels; Jane Austen. You'll also get Brandon's quick takes on Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Franzen, Lionel Trilling, György Lukács, and a few others; the modern critics he likes reading; and the dead critics he likes reading.Brandon also talked about how his new novel is going to be different from his previous novels. He told me:I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. I want my books to feel like books. I don't want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation.I have enjoyed Brandon's fiction (several people I recommend him to have loved Real Life) and I think he's one of the best critics working today. I was delighted to interview him.Oh, and he's a Dickens fan!Transcript (AI produced, lightly formatted by me)Henry: Today I am talking to Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans. Brandon is also a notable book reviewer and of course he writes a sub stack called Sweater Weather. Brandon, welcome.Brandon: Yeah, thanks for having me.Henry: What did you think of the newly discovered Chopin waltz?Brandon: Um, I thought, I mean, I remember very vividly waking up that day and there being a new waltz, but it was played by Lang Lang, which I did not. I don't know that, like, he's my go-to Chopin interpreter. But I don't know, I was, I was excited by it. Um, I don't know, it was in a world sort of dominated by this ethos of like nothing new under the sun. It felt wonderfully novel. I don't know that it's like one of Chopin's like major, I don't know that it's like major. Um, it's sort of definitively like middle of the road, middle tier Chopin, I think. But I enjoyed it. I played it like 20 times in a row.Henry: I like those moments because I like, I like it when people get surprised into realizing that like, it's not fixed what we know about the world and you can even actually get new Chopin, right?Brandon: I mean, it felt a little bit like when Beyonce did her first big surprise drop. It was like new Chopin just dropped. Oh my God. All my sort of classical music nerd group texts were buzzing. It felt like a real moment, actually.Henry: And I think it gives people a sense of what art was like in the past. You can go, oh my God, new Chopin. Like, yes, those feelings are not just about modern culture, right? That used to happen with like, oh my God, a new Jane Austen book is here.Brandon: Oh, I know. Well, I mean, I was like reading a lot of Emile Zola up until I guess late last year. And at some point I discovered that he was like an avid amateur photographer. And in like the French Ministry of Culture is like digitized a lot of his glass plate negatives. And one of them is like a picture that Zola has taken of Manet's portrait of him. And it's just like on a floor somewhere. Like he's like sort of taken this like very rickety early camera machinery to this place where this portrait is and like taken a picture of it. It's like, wow. Like you can imagine that like Manet's like, here's this painting I did of you. And Zola's like, ah, yes, I'm going to take a picture to commemorate it. And so I sort of love that.Henry: What other of his photos do you like?Brandon: Well, there's one of him on a bike riding toward the camera. That's really delightful to me because it like that impulse is so recognizable to me. There are all these photos that he took of his mistress that were also just like, you can like, there are also photographs of his children and of his family. And again, those feel so like recognizable to me. He's not even like a very good photographer. It's just that he was taking pictures of his like daily life, except for his kind of stunt photos where he's riding the bike. And it's like, ah, yes, Zola, he would have been great with an iPhone camera.Henry: Which pianists do you like for Chopin?Brandon: Which pianists do I love for Chopin? I like Pollini a lot. Pollini is amazing. Pollini the elder, not Pollini the younger. The younger is not my favorite. And he died recently, Maurizio Pollini. He died very recently. Maybe he's my favorite. I love, I love Horowitz. Horowitz is wonderful at Chopin. But it's obviously it's like not his, you know, you don't sort of go to Horowitz for Chopin, I guess. But I love his Chopin. And sometimes Trifonov. Trifonov has a couple Chopin recordings that I really, really like. I tend not to love Trifonov as much.Henry: Really?Brandon: I know it's controversial. It's very controversial. I know. Tell me why. I, I don't know. He's just a bit of a banger to me. Like, like he's sort of, I don't know, his playing is so flashy. And he feels a bit like a, like a, like a keyboard basher to me sometimes.Henry: But like, do you like his Bach?Brandon: You know, I haven't done a deep dive. Maybe I should do a sort of more rigorous engagement with Trifonov. But yeah, I don't, he's just not, he doesn't make my heart sing. I think he's very good at Bach.Henry: What about a Martha Argerich?Brandon: Oh, I mean, she's incredible. She's incredible. I bought that sort of big orange box out of like all of her, her sort of like masterwork recordings. And she's incredible. She has such feel for Chopin. But she doesn't, I think sometimes people can make Chopin feel a little like, like treacly, like, like a little too sweet. And she has this perfect understanding of his like rhythm and his like inner nuances and like the crispness in his compositions. Like she really pulls all of that out. And I love her. She has such, obviously great dexterity, but like a real sort of exquisite sensitivity to the rhythmic structures of Chopin.Henry: You listen on CD?Brandon: No, I listen on vinyl and I listen on streaming, but mostly vinyl. Mostly vinyl? Yeah, mostly vinyl. I know it's very annoying. No, no, no, no, no.Henry: Which, what are the good speakers?Brandon: I forget where I bought these speakers from, but I sort of did some Googling during the pandemic of like best speakers to use. I have a U-Turn Audio, U-Turn Orbital record player. And so I was just looking for good speakers that were compatible and like wouldn't take up a ton of space in my apartment because I was moving to New York and had a very tiny, tiny apartment. So they're just from sort of standard, I forget the brand, but they've served me well these past few years.Henry: And do you like Ólafsson? He's done some Chopin.Brandon: Who?Henry: Víkingur Ólafsson. He did the Goldbergs this year, but he's done some Chopin before. I think he's quite good.Brandon: Oh, that Icelandic guy?Henry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the glasses? That's right. And the very neat hair.Brandon: Yes. Oh, he's so chic. He's so chic. I don't know his Chopin. I know his, there's another series that he did somewhat recently that I'm more familiar with. But he is really good. He has good Beethoven, Víkingur.Henry: Yeah.Brandon: And normally I don't love Beethoven, but like—Henry: Really? Why? Why? What's wrong with Beethoven? All these controversial opinions about music.Brandon: I'm not trying to have controversial opinions. I think I'm, well, I'm such a, I'm such, I mean, I'm just like a dumb person. And so like, I don't, I don't have a really, I feel like I don't have the robust understanding to like fully appreciate Beethoven and all of his sort of like majesty. And so maybe I've just not heard good Beethoven and I need to sort of go back and sort of get a real understanding of it. But I just tend not to like it. It feels like, I don't know, like grandma's living room music to me sometimes.Henry: What other composers do you enjoy?Brandon: Oh, of course.Henry: Or other music generally, right?Brandon: Rachmaninoff is so amazing to me. There was, of course, Bach. Brahms. Oh, I love Brahms, but like specifically the intermezzi. I love the intermezzi. I recently fell in love with, oh, his name is escaping me now, but he, I went to a concert and they sort of did a Brahms intermezzi. And they also played this, I think he was an Austrian composer. And his music was like, it wasn't experimental, but it was like quite, I had a lot of dissonance in it. And I found it like really interesting and like really moving actually. And so I did a sort of listening to that constantly. Oh, I forget his name. But Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, love Rachmaninoff. I have a friend who says that Rachmaninoff writes Negro spirituals. And I love that theory that Rachmaninoff's music is like the music of the slaves. It just, I don't know. I really, that really resonates with me spiritually. Which pieces, which Rachmaninoff symphonies, concertos? Yeah, the concertos. But like specifically, like I have a friend who said that Rach II sounded to her like the sort of spiritual cry of like the slaves. And we were at like a hangout with like mostly Black people. And she like stopped playing like Juvenile, like the rapper. And she put on Rach II. And we just like sat there and listened. And it did feel like something powerful had entered the room. Yeah, but he's my guy. I secretly really, really love him. I like Liszt, but like it really depends on the day and the time for him. He makes good folk music, Liszt. I love his folky, his folk era.Henry: What is it that you enjoy about tennis?Brandon: What do I enjoy about tennis? I love the, I love not thinking. I love being able to hit the ball for hours on end and like not think. And like, it's the one part of my life. It's the one time in my life where my experience is like totally unstructured. And so like this morning, I went to a 7am drill and play class where you do drills for an hour. Then you play doubles for an hour. And during that first hour of drills, I was just like hitting the ball. I was at the mercy of the guy feeding us the ball. And I didn't have a single thought about books or literature or like the status of my soul or like the nature of American democracy. It was just like, did I hit that ball? Well, did I hit it kind of off center? Were there tingles in my wrist? Yes or no. Like it was just very, very grounding in the moment. And I think that is what I love about it. Do you like to watch tennis? Oh, yeah, constantly. Sometimes when I'm in a work meeting, the Zoom is here and the tennis is like playing in the background. Love tennis, love to watch, love to play, love to think about, to ponder. Who are the best players for you? Oh, well, the best players, my favorite players are Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Stanislas Wawrinka, love Wawrinka. And I was a really big Davydenko head back in the day. Nikolai Davydenko was this Russian player who had, he was like a metronome. He just like would not miss. Yeah, those are my favorites. Right now, the guy I'm sort of rooting for who's still active is Kasper Rud, who's this Norwegian guy. And I love him because he just looks like some guy. Like he just looks like he should be in a seminary somewhere. I love it. I love, I love his normalness. He just looks like an NPC. And I'm drawn to that in a tennis player.Henry: It's hard to think of tennis in novels. Why is that?Brandon: Well, I think a lot of people don't, well, I think part of it is a lot of novelists. Part of it is a lot of novelists don't play sports. I think that they, at least Americans, I can't speak for other parts of the world, but in America, a lot of novelists are not doing sports. So that's one. And I think two, like, you know, like with anything, I think that tennis has not been subjected to the same schemes of narrativization that like other things are. And so like it's, a lot of novelists just like don't see a sort of readily dramatizable thing in tennis. Even though if you like watch tennis and like listen to tennis commentary, they are always erecting narratives. They're like, oh yeah, she's been on a 19 match losing streak. Is this where she turns it around? And to me, tennis is like a very literary sport because tennis is one of those sports where it's all about the matchup. It's like your forehand to my backhand, like no matter how well I play against everyone else, like it's you and me locked in the struggle. And like that to me feels incredibly literary. And it is so tied to your individual psychology as well. Like, I don't know, I endlessly am fascinated by it. And indeed, I got an idea for a tennis novel the other day that I'm hopefully going to write in three to five years. We'll see.Henry: Very good. How did working in a lab influence your writing?Brandon: Well, somewhat directly and materially in the case of my first book, because I wrote it while I was working in the lab and it gave me weirdly like time and structure to do that work where I would be pipetting. And then while I was waiting for an assay or a experiment to run or finish, I would have 30 minutes to sit down and write.Henry: So you were writing like at the lab bench?Brandon: Oh, yeah, absolutely. One thousand percent. I would like put on Philip Glass's score for the hours and then just like type while my while the centrifuge was running or whatever. And and so like there's that impression sort of baked into the first couple books. And then I think more, I guess, like spiritually or broadly, it influenced my work because it taught me how to think and how to organize time and how to organize thoughts and how to sort of pursue long term, open ended projects whose results may or may not, you know, fail because of something that you did or maybe you didn't do. And that's just the nature of things. Who knows? But yeah, I think also just like discipline, the discipline to sort of clock in every day. And to sort of go to the coalface and do the work. And that's not a thing that is, you know. That you just get by working in a lab, but it's certainly something that I acquired working in a lab.Henry: Do you think it's affected your interest in criticism? Because there's there are certain types of critic who seem to come from a scientific background like Helen Vendler. And there's something something about the sort of the precision and, you know, that certain critics will refuse to use critical waffle, like the human condition. And they won't make these big, vague gestures to like how this can change the way we view society. They're like, give me real details. Give me real like empirical criticism. Do you think this is — are you one of these people?Brandon: Yeah, yeah, I think I'm, you know, I'm all about what's on the page. I'm all about the I'm not gonna go rooting in your biography for not gonna go. I'm not I'm not doing that. It's like what you brought to me on the page is what you've brought to me. And that is what I will be sort of coming over. I mean, I think so. I mean, very often when critics write about my work, or when people respond to my work, they sort of describe it as being put under a microscope. And I do think like, that is how I approach literature. It's how I approach life. If there's ever a problem or a question put to me, I just sort of dissect it and try to get down to its core bits and its core parts. And and so yeah, I mean, if that is a scientific way of doing things, that's certainly how I but also I don't know any other way to think like that's sort of that's sort of how I was trained to think about stuff. You've been to London. I have. What did you think of it? The first time I didn't love it. The second and third times I had a good time, but I felt like London didn't love me back. London is the only place on earth I've ever been where people have had a hard time understanding me like I like it's the only place where I've like attempted to order food or a drink or something in a store or a cafe or a restaurant. And the waiters like turned to my like British hosts and asked them to translate. And that is an entirely foreign experience for me. And so London and I have like a very contentious relationship, I would say.Henry: Now, you've just published four classic novels.Brandon: Yes.Henry: George Gissing, Edith Wharton, Victor Hugo and Sarah Orne Jewett. Why did you choose those four writers, those four titles?Brandon: Oh, well, once we decided that we were going to do a classics imprint, you know, then it's like, well, what are we going to do? And I'm a big Edith Wharton fan. And there are all of these Edith Wharton novels that Americans don't really know about. They know Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. And if they are an English major, they maybe know her for The House of Mirth. Or like maybe they know her for The Custom of the Country if they're like really into reading. But then they sort of think of her as a novelist of the 19th century. And she's writing all of these books set in the 1920s and about the 1920s. And so it felt important to show people like, oh, this is a writer who died a lot later than you think that she did. And whose creative output was, you know, pretty, who was like a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald in a lot of ways. Like, these books are being published around the same time as The Great Gatsby. And to sort of, you know, bring attention to a part of her over that, like, people don't know about. And like, that's really exciting to me. And Sarah Orne Jewett, I mean, I just really love The Country of the Pointed Furs. I love that book. And I found it in like in a 10 cents bin at a flea market one time. And it's a book that people have tried to bring back. And there have been editions of it. But it just felt like if we could get two people who are really cool to talk about why they love that book, we could sort of have like a real moment. And Sarah Orne Jewett was like a pretty big American writer. Like she was a pretty significant writer. And she was like really plugged in and she's not really read or thought about now. And so that felt like a cool opportunity as well to sort of create a very handsome edition of this book and to sort of talk about a bit why she matters. And the guessing of it all is we were going to do New Grub Street. And then my co-editor thought, well, The Odd Women, I think, is perhaps more relevant to our current moment than New Grub Street necessarily. And it would sort of differentiate us from the people, from the presses that are doing reissues of New Grub Street, because there's just been a new edition of that book. And nobody in America really knows The Odd Women. And it's a really wonderful novel. It's both funny and also like really biting in its satire and commentary. So we thought, oh, it'll be fun to bring this writer to Americans who they've never heard of in a way that will speak to them in a lot of ways. And the Victor Hugo, I mean, you know, there are Hugos that people know all about. And then there are Hugos that no one knows about. And Toilers of the Sea was a passion project for my co-editor. She'd read it in Guernsey. That's where she first discovered that book. And it really meant a lot to her. And I read it and really loved it. I mean, it was like Hugo at his most Hugo. Like, it's a very, it's a very, like, it's a very abundant book. And it's so wild and strange and changeful. And so I was like, oh, that seems cool. Let's do it. Let's put out Toilers of the Sea. So that's a bit of why we picked each one.Henry: And what have you learned from being on the other side of things now that you're the publisher?Brandon: So much. I've learned so much. And indeed, I just, I was just asked by my editor to do the author questionnaire for the novel that I have coming out next. And I thought, yes, I will do this. And I will do it immediately. Because now I know, I know how important these are. And I know how early and how far in advance these things need to be locked in to make everyone's life easier. I think I've learned a bit about the sometimes panicked scramble that happens to get a book published. I've learned about how hard it is to wrangle blurbs. And so I think I'm a little more forgiving of my publishers. But they've always been really great to me. But now I'm like, oh, my gosh, what can I do for you? How can I help you make this publication more of a success?Henry: Do you think that among literary people generally, there's a lack of appreciation of what business really involves in some of the senses you're talking about? I feel like I see a lot of either indifferent or hostile attitudes towards business or commerce or capitalism, late stage capitalism or whatever. And I sometimes look at it and I'm like, I don't think you guys really know what it takes to just like get stuff done. You know what I mean? Like, it's a lot of grind. I don't think it's a big nasty thing. It's just a lot of hard work, right?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, 1000%. Or if it's not a sort of misunderstanding, but a sort of like disinterest in like, right, like a sort of high minded, like, oh, that's just the sort of petty grimy commerce of it all. I care about the beauty and the art. And it's just like, friend, we need booksellers to like, sell this. I mean, to me, the part of it that is most to me, like the most illustrative example of this in my own life is that when I first heard how my editor was going to be describing my book, I was like, that's disgusting. That's horrible. Why are you talking about my race? Why are you talking about like my sexuality? Like, this is horrible. Why can't you just like talk about the plot of the book? Like, what is the matter with you? And then I had, you know, I acquired and edited this book called Henry Henry, which is a queer contemporary retelling of the Henry ad. And it's a wonderful novel. It's so delightful. And I had to go into our sales conference where we are talking to the people whose job it is to sell that book into bookstores to get bookstores to take that book up. And I had to write this incredibly craven description of this novel. And as I was writing it, I was like, I hope Alan, the author, I hope Alan never sees this. He never needs to hear how I'm talking about this book. And as I was doing it, I was like, I will never hold it against my editor again for writing this like, cheesy, cringy copy. Because it's like you, like, you so believe in the art of that book, so much that you want it to give it every fighting chance in the marketplace. And you need to arm your sales team with every weapon of commerce they need to get that book to succeed so that when readers pick it up, they can appreciate all of the beautiful and glorious art of it. And I do think that people, you know, like, people don't really kind of, people don't really understand that. And I do think that part of that is publishing's fault, because they are, they've been rather quick to elide the distinctions between art and commerce. And so like publishing has done a not great job of sort of giving people a lot of faith in its understanding that there's a difference between art and commerce. But yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of misapprehension out there about like, what goes into getting bookstores to acquire that book.Henry: What are the virtues of negative book reviews?Brandon: I was just on a panel about this. I mean, I mean, hopefully a negative book review, like a positive review, or like any review, will allow a reader or the audience to understand the book in a new way, or to create a desire in the reader to pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree or that they, that they have something to argue with or push against as they're reading. You know, when I'm writing a negative review, when I'm writing a review that I feel is trending toward negative, I should say, I always try to like, I don't know, I try to always remember that like, this is just me presenting my experience of the book and my take of the book. And hopefully that will be productive or useful for whoever reads the review. And hopefully that my review won't be the only thing that they read and that they will in fact, go pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree. It's hopefully it creates interesting and potentially divergent dialogues or discourses around the text. And fundamentally, I think not every critic feels this way. Not every piece of criticism is like this. But the criticism I write, I'm trying to create the conditions that will refer the reader always back to the text, be it through quotation, be it through, they're so incensed by my argument that they're going to go read the book themselves and then like, yell at me. Like, I think that that's wonderful, but like, always keeping the book at the center. But I think a negative review can, you know, it can start a conversation. It can get people talking about books, which in this culture, this phase of history feels like a win. And hopefully it can sort of be a corrective sometimes to less genuine or perceived less genuine discourses that are existing around the book.Henry: I think even whether or not it's a question of genuine, it's for me, it's just a question of if you tell people this book is good and they give up their time and money and they discover that it's trash, you've done a really bad thing to that person. And like, there might be dozens of them compared to this one author who you've been impolite to or whatever. And it's just a question of don't lie in book, right?Brandon: Well, yeah. I mean, hopefully people are honest, but I do feel sometimes that there is, there's like a lack of honesty. And look, I think that being like, well, I mean, maybe you'll love this. I don't love it, you know, but at least present your opinion in that way. At least be like, you know, there are many interpretations of this thing. Here's my interpretation. Maybe you'll feel differently or something like that. But I do think that people feel that there have been a great number of dishonest book reviews. Maybe there have been, maybe there have not been. I certainly have read some reviews I felt were dishonest about books that I have read. And I think that the negative book review does feel a bit like a corrective in a lot of ways, both, you know, justified or unjustified. People are like, finally, someone's being honest about this thing. But yeah, I think it's interesting. I think it's all really, I think it's all fascinating. I do think that there are some reviews though, that are negative and that are trying to be about the book, but are really about the author. There are some reviews that I have read that have been ostensibly about reviewing a text, but which have really been about, you don't like that person and you have decided to sort of like take an axe to them. And that to me feels not super productive. I wouldn't do it, but other people find it useful.Henry: As in, you can tell that from the review or you know that from background information?Brandon: I mean, this is all projection, of course, but like there have been some reviews where I've read, like, for example, some of the Lauren Oyler reviews, I think some of the Lauren Oyler reviews were negative and were exclusively about the text. And they sort of took the text apart and sort of dissected it and came to conclusions, some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't agree with, but they were fundamentally about the text. And like all the criticisms referred back to the text. And then there were some that were like projecting attitudes onto the author that were more about creating this sort of vaporous shape of Lauren Oyler and then sort of poking holes in her literary celebrity or her stature as a critic or what have you. And that to me felt less productive as like a book review.Henry: Yes. Who are your favorite reviewers?Brandon: Ooh, my favorite reviewers. I really love Christian Lawrence. And he does my, of the critics who try to do the sort of like mini historiography of like a thing. He's my favorite because he teaches me a lot. He sort of is so good at summing up an era or summing up a phase of literary production without being like so cringe or so socialist about it. I really love, I love it when he sort of distills and dissects an era. I really like Hermione Hobie. I think she's really interesting. And she writes about books with a lot of feeling and a lot of energy. And I really love her mind. And of course, like Patricia Lockwood, of course, everyone, perhaps not everyone, but I enjoy Patricia Lockwood's criticism. You don't?Henry: Not really.Brandon: Oh, is it because it's too chatty? Is it too, is it too selfie?Henry: A little bit. I think, I think that kind of criticism can work really well. But I think, I think it's too much. I think basically she's very, she's a very stylized writer and a lot of her judgments get, it gets to the point where it's like, this is the logical conclusion of what you're trying to do stylistically. And there are some zingers in here and some great lines and whatever, but we're no longer, this is no longer really a book review.Brandon: Yeah.Henry: Like by the, by the end of the paragraph, this, like, we didn't want to let the style go. We didn't want to lose the opportunity to cap that off. And it leads her into, I think, glibness a lot of the time.Brandon: Yeah. I could see that. I mean, I mean, I enjoy reading her pieces, but do I understand like what's important to her at a sort of literary level? I don't know. I don't, and in that sense, like, are they, is it criticism or is it closer to like personal essay, humorous essay? I don't know. Maybe that's true. I enjoy reading them, but I get why people are like, this is a very, very strong flavor for sure.Henry: Now you've been reading a lot of literary criticism.Brandon: Oh yeah.Henry: Not of the LRB variety, but of the, the old books in libraries variety. Yes. How did that start? How did, how did you come to this?Brandon: Somewhat like ham-fistedly. I, in 2021, I had a really bad case of writer's block and I thought maybe part of the reason I had writer's block was that I didn't know anything about writing or I didn't know anything about like literature or like writing. I'd been writing, I'd published a novel. I was working on another novel. I'd published a book of stories, but like, I just like truly didn't know anything about literature really. And I thought I need some big boy ideas. I need, I need to find out what adults think about literature. And so I went to my buddy, Christian Lorenzen, and I was like, you write criticism. What is it? And what should I read? And he gave me a sort of starter list of criticism. And it was like the liberal imagination by Lionel Trilling and Guy Davenport and Alfred Kazin who wrote On Native Grounds, which is this great book on the American literary tradition and Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. And I, and then Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle. And I read all of those. And then as each one would sort of refer to a different text or person, I sort of like followed the footnotes down into this rabbit hole of like literary criticism. And now it's been a sort of ongoing project of the last few years of like reading. I always try to have a book of criticism on the go. And then earlier this year, I read Jameson's The Antimonies of Realism. And he kept talking about this Georg Lukács guy. And I was like, I guess I should go read Lukács. And so then I started reading Lukács so that I could get back to Jameson. And I've been reading Lukács ever since. I am like deep down the Lukács rabbit hole. But I'm not reading any of the socialism stuff. I told myself that I wouldn't read any of the socialism stuff and I would only read the literary criticism stuff, which makes me very different from a lot of the socialist literary critics I really enjoy because they're like Lukács, don't read in that literary criticism stuff, just read his socialism stuff. So I'm reading all the wrong stuff from Lukács, but I really, I really love it. But yeah, it sort of started because I thought I needed grown up ideas about literature. And it's been, I don't know, I've really enjoyed it. I really, really enjoy it. It's given me perhaps terrible ideas about what novels should be or do. But, you know, that's one of the side effects to reading.Henry: Has it made, like, what specific ways has it changed how you've written since you've acquired a set of critical principles or ideas?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is, part of it has to do with Lukács' idea of the totality. And, you know, I think that the sort of most direct way that it shows up in a sort of really practical way in my novel writing is that I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. Like, I don't want, I want my books to feel like books. I don't want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation and stuff like that. And so like that, that's sort of, that's sort of abstract, but like in a concrete way, like what I'm kind of trying to resolve in my novel writing these days.Henry: You mentioned Dickens.Brandon: Oh, yes.Henry: Which Dickens novels do you like?Brandon: Now I'm afraid I'm going to say something else controversial. We love controversial. Which Dickens? I love Bleak House. I love Bleak House. I love Tale of Two Cities. It is one of the best openings ever, ever, ever, ever in the sweep of that book at once personal and universal anyway. Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities. And I also, I read Great Expectations as like a high school student and didn't like it, hated it. It was so boring. But now coming back to it, I think it, honestly, it might be the novel of our time. I think it might accidentally be a novel. I mean, it's a novel of scammers, a novel of like, interpersonal beef taken to the level of like, spiritual conflict, like it's about thieves and class, like it just feels like like that novel could have been written today about people today, like that book just feels so alive to today's concerns, which perhaps, I don't know, says something really evil about this cultural stagnation under capitalism, perhaps, but I don't know, love, love Great Expectations now.Henry: Why are so many modern novels boring?Brandon: Well, depends on what you mean by boring, Henry, what do you mean? Why?Henry: I mean, you said this.Brandon: Oh.Henry: I mean, I happen to agree, but this is, I'm quoting you.Brandon: Oh, yes. I remember that. I remember that review.Henry: I mean, I can tell you why I think they're boring.Brandon: Oh, yes, please.Henry: So I think, I think what you said before is true. They all read like movies. And I think I very often I go in, I pick up six or seven books on the new book table. And I'm like, these openings are all just the same. You're all thinking you can all see Netflix in your head. This is not really a novel. And so the dialogue is really boring, because you kind of you can hear some actor or actress saying it. But I can't hear that because I'm the idiot stuck in the bookshop reading your Netflix script. Whereas, you know, I think you're right that a lot of those traditional forms of storytelling, they like pull you in to the to the novel. And they and they like by the end of the first few pages, you sort of feel like I'm in this funny place now. And to do in media res, like, someone needs to get shot, or something, something weird needs to be said, like, you can't just do another, another standard opening. So I think that's a big, that's a big point.Brandon: Well, as Lukasz tells us, bourgeois realism has a, an unholy fondness for the, the average, the merely average, as opposed to the typical. And I think, yeah, a lot of it, a lot of why I think it's boring echoes you, I think that for me, what I find boring, and a lot of them is that it feels like novelists have abandoned any desire to, to have their characters or the novels themselves integrate the sort of disparate experiences within the novel into any kind of meaningful hole. And so there isn't this like sense of like things advancing toward a grander understanding. And I think a lot of it is because they've, they are writing under the assumption that like the question of why can never be answered. There can never be like a why, there can never be a sort of significance to anything. And so everything is sort of like evacuated of significance or meaning. And so you have what I've taken to calling like reality TV fiction, where the characters are just like going places and doing things, and there are no thoughts, there are no thoughts about their lives, or no thoughts about the things that they are doing, there are no thoughts about their experiences. And it's just a lot of like, like lowercase e events in their lives, but like no attempt to organize those events into any sort of meaningful hole. And I think also just like, what leads to a lot of dead writing is writers who are deeply aware that they're writing about themes, they're writing about themes instead of people. And they're working from generalities instead of particularities and specificities. And they have no understanding of the relationship between the universal and the particular. And so like, everything is just like, like beans in a can that they're shaking around. And I think that that's really boring. I think it's really tedious. Like, like, sure, we can we can find something really profound in the mundane, but like, you have to be really smart to do that. So like the average novelist is like better off like, starting with a gunshot or something like do something big.Henry: If you're not Virginia Woolf, it is in fact just mundane.Brandon: Indeed. Yeah.Henry: Is there too much emphasis on craft? In the way, in the way, in like what's valued among writers, in the way writers are taught, I feel like everything I see is about craft. And I'm like, craft is good, but that can just be like how you make a table rather than like how you make a house. Craft is not the guarantor of anything. And I see a lot of books where I think this person knows some craft. But as you say, they don't really have an application for it. And they don't. No one actually said to them, all style has a moral purpose, whether you're aware of it or not. And so they default to this like pointless use of the craft. And someone should say to them, like, you need to know history. You need to know tennis. You need to know business. You need to know like whatever, you know. And I feel like the novels I don't like are reflections of the discourse bubble that the novelist lives in. And I feel like it's often the continuation of Twitter by other means. So in the Rachel Kong novel that I think it came out this year, there's a character, a billionaire character who comes in near the end. And everything that he says or that is said about him is literally just meme. It's online billionaire meme because billionaires are bad because of all the things we all know from being on Twitter. And I was like, so you just we literally have him a character as meme. And this is the most representative thing to me, because that's maybe there's craft in that. Right. But what you've chosen to craft is like 28 tweets. That's pointless.Brandon: 28 tweets be a great title for a book, though, you have to admit, I would buy that book off the new book table. 28 tweets. I would. I would buy that. Yeah, I do think. Well, I think it goes both ways. I think it goes both ways. I somewhat famously said this about Sally Rooney that like she her books have no craft. The craft is bad. And I do think like there are writers who only have craft, who are able to sort of create these wonderfully structured books and to sort of deploy these beautiful techniques. And those books are absolutely dead. There's just like nothing in them because they have nothing to say. There's just like nothing to be said about any of that. And on the other hand, you have these books that are full of feelings that like would be better had someone taught that person about structure or form or had they sort of had like a rigorous thing. And I would say that like both of those are probably bad, like depending on who you are, you find one more like, like easier to deal with than the other. I do think that like part of why there's such an emphasis on craft is because not to sort of bring capitalism back in but you can monetize craft, you know what I mean? Like, craft is one of those things that is like readily monetizable. Like, if I'm a writer, and I would like to make money, and I can't sell a novel, I can tell people like, oh, how to craft a perfect opening, how to create a novel opening that will make agents pick it up and that will make editors say yes, but like what the sort of promise of craft is that you can finish a thing, but not that it is good, as you say, there's no guarantor. Whereas you know, like it's harder to monetize someone's soul, or like, it's harder to monetize like the sort of random happenstance of just like a writer's voice sort of emerging from from whatever, like you can't turn that into profit. But you can turn into profit, let me help you craft your voice. So it's very grind set, I think craft has a tendency to sort of skew toward the grind set and toward people trying to make money from, from writing when they can't sell a book, you know. Henry: Let's play a game. Brandon: Oh dear.Henry: I say the name of a writer. You give us like the 30 second Brandon Taylor opinion of that writer.Brandon: Okay. Yeah.Henry: Jonathan Franzen.Brandon: Thomas Mann, but like, slightly more boring, I think.Henry: Iris Murdoch.Brandon: A friend of mine calls her a modern calls her the sort of pre Sally Rooney, Sally Rooney. And I agree with that.Henry: When I'm at parties, I try and sell her to people where I say she's post-war Sally Rooney.Brandon: Yes, yes. And like, and like all that that entails, and so many delightful, I read all these like incredible sort of mid century reviews of her novels, and like the men, the male critics, like the Bernard Breganzis of the world being like, why is there so much sex in this book? It's amazing. Please go look up those like mid-century reviews of Iris Murdoch. They were losing their minds. Henry: Chekhov.Brandon: Perfect, iconic, baby girl, angel, legend. Can't get enough. 10 out of 10.Henry: Evelyn Waugh.Brandon: So Catholic, real Catholic vibes. But like, scabrously funny. And like, perhaps the last writer to write about life as though it had meaning. Hot take, but I'll, I stand by it.Henry: Yeah, well, him and Murdoch. But yeah, no, I think I think there's a lot in that. C.V. Wedgwood.Brandon: Oh, my gosh. The best, a titan, a master of history. Like, oh, my God. I would not be the same without Wedgwood.Henry: Tell us which one we should read.Brandon: Oh, the 30 Years War. What are you talking about?Henry: Well, I think her books on the English Civil War… I'm a parochial Brit.Brandon: Oh, see, I don't, not that I don't, I will go read those. But her book on the 30 Years War is so incredible. It's, it's amazing. It's second to like, Froissart's Chronicles for like, sort of history, history books for me.Henry: Northrop Frye.Brandon: My father. I, Northrop Frye taught me so much about how to see and how to think. Just amazing, a true thinker in a mind. Henry: Which book? Brandon: Oh, Anatomy of Criticism is fantastic. But Fearful Symmetry is just, it will blow your head off. Just amazing. But if you're looking for like, to have your, your mind gently remapped, then Anatomy of Criticism.Henry: Emma Cline.Brandon: A throwback. I think she's, I think she's Anne Beattie meets John Cheever for a new era. And I think she's amazing. She's perfect. Don't love her first novel. I think her stories are better. She's a short story writer. And she should stay that way.Henry: Okay, now I want you to rank Jane Austen's novels.Brandon: Wait, okay. So like, by my preference, or by like, what I think is the best?Henry: You can do both.Brandon: Okay. So in terms, my favorite, Persuasion. Then Mansfield Park. Sense and Sensibility. Pride and Prejudice. And then Emma, then Northanger Abbey. Okay.Henry: Now, how about for which ones are the best?Brandon: Persuasion. Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park. Emma,.Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey.Henry: Why do people not like Fanny Price? And what is wrong with them?Brandon: Fanny Price is perfect. Fanny Price, I was just talking to someone about this last night at dinner. Fanny Price, she's perfect. First of all, she is, I don't know why people don't like her. She's like a chronically ill girl who's hot for her cousin and like, has deep thoughts. It seems like she would be the icon of literary Twitter for like a certain kind of person, you know? And I don't know why they don't like her. I think I'm, I am becoming the loudest Mansfield Park apologist on the internet. I think that people don't like Fanny because she's less vivacious than Mary Crawford. And I think that people are afraid to see themselves in Fanny because she seems like she's unfun or whatever. But what they don't realize is that like Fanny Price, Fanny Price has like a moral intelligence and like a moral consciousness. And like Fanny Price is one of the few Austen characters who actually argues directly and literally about the way the world is. Like with multiple people, like the whole, the whole novel is her sort of arguing about, well, cities are this and the country is this. And like, we need Parsons as much as we need party boys. Like, like she's arguing not just about, not just about these things like through the lens of like marriage or like the sort of marriage economy, but like in literal terms, I mean, she is so, she's like a moral philosopher. I love Fanny Price and she's so smart and so sensitive and so, and I guess like maybe it's just that people don't like a character who's kind of at the mercy of others and they view her as passive. When in fact, like a young woman arguing about the way the world should be, like Mary Crawford's, Mary Crawford's like kind of doing the above, not really, not like Fanny. But yeah, I love her. She's amazing. I love Fanny Price. And I also think that people love Margaret Hale from North and South. And I think that when people are saying they hate Fanny Price, what they're picturing is actually how Margaret Hale is. Margaret Hale is one of the worst heroines of a novel. She's so insufferable. She's so rude. She's so condescending. And like, she does get her comeuppance and like Gaskell does sort of bring about a transformation where she's actually able to sort of like see poor people as people first and not like subjects of sympathy. But Margaret is what people imagine Fanny is, I think. And we should, we should start a Fanny Price, like booster club. Henry, should we? Let's do it. It begins here. I just feel so strongly about her. I feel, I love, I love Fanny.Henry: She's my favorite of Austen's characters. And I think she is the most representative Austen character. She's the most Austen of all of them, right?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, that makes great deal of sense to me. She's just so wonderful. Like she's so funny and so observant. And she's like this quiet little girl who's like kind of sickly and people don't really like her. And she's kind of maybe I'm just like, maybe I just like see myself in her. And I don't mind being a sort of annoying little person who's going around the world.Henry: What are some good principles for naming literary characters?Brandon: Ooh, I have a lot of strong feelings about this. I think that names should be memorable. They should have like, like an aura of sort of literariness about them. I don't mean, I mean, taken to like hilarious extremes. It's like Henry James. Catherine Goodwood, Isabelle Archer, Ralph Touchett, like, you know, Henry had a stack pole. So like, not like that. But I mean, that could be fun in a modern way. But I think there's like an aura of like, it's a name that you might hear in real life, but it sort of add or remove, it's sort of charged and elevated, sort of like with dialogue. And that it's like a memorable thing that sort of like, you know, it's like, you know, memorable thing that sort of sticks in the reader's mind. It is both a name, a literary, a good literary name is both a part of this world and not of this world, I think. And, yeah, and I love that. I think like, don't give your character a name like you hear all the time. Like, Tyler is a terrible literary name. Like, no novel has ever, no good novel has ever had a really important character named Tyler in it. It just hasn't. Ryan? What makes a good sentence? Well, my sort of like, live and let live answer is that a good sentence is a sentence that is perfectly suited to the purpose it has. But I don't know, I like a clear sentence, regardless of length or lyric intensity, but just like a clear sentence that articulates something. I like a sentence with motion, a sense of rhythm, a sense of feel without any bad words in it. And I don't mean like curse words, I mean like words that shouldn't be in literature. Like, there's some words that just like don't belong in novels.Henry: Like what?Brandon: Squelch. Like, I don't think the word squelch should be in a novel. That's a gross word and it doesn't sound literary to me. I don't want to see it.Henry: I wouldn't be surprised if it was in Ulysses.Brandon: Well, yes.Henry: I have no idea, but I'm sure, I'm sure.Brandon: But so few of us are James Joyce. And that novel is like a thousand bodily functions per page. But don't love it. Don't love it.Henry: You don't love Ulysses?Brandon: No, I don't… Listen, I don't have a strong opinion, but you're not going to get me cancelled about Ulysses. I'm not Virginia Woolf.Henry: We're happy to have opinions of that nature here. That's fine.Brandon: You know, I don't have a strong feeling about it, actually. Some parts of it that I've read are really wonderful. And some parts of it that I have read are really dense and confusing to me. I haven't sort of given it the time it needs or deserves. What did you learn from reading Toni Morris? What did I learn? I think I learned a lot about the moral force of melodrama. I think that she shows us a lot about the uses of melodrama and how it isn't just like a lesion of realism, that it isn't just a sort of malfunctioning realism, but that there are certain experiences and certain lives and certain things that require and necessitate melodrama. And when deployed, it's not tacky or distasteful that it actually is like deeply necessary. And also just like the joy of access and language, like the sort of... Her language is so towering. I don't know, whenever I'm being really shy about a sentence being too vivid or too much, I'm like, well, Toni Morrison would just go for it. And I am not Toni Morrison, but she has given me the courage to try.Henry: What did you like about the Annette Benning film of The Seagull?Brandon: The moment when Annette Benning sings Dark Eyes is so good. It's so good. I think about it all the time. And indeed, I stole that moment for a short story that I wrote. And I liked that part of it. I liked the set design. I think also Saoirse Ronan, when she gives that speech as Nina, where she's like, you know, where the guy's like, what do you want from, you know, what do you want? Why do you want to be an actress? And she's like, I want fame. You know, like, I want to be totally adored. And I'm just like, yeah, that's so real. That's so, that is so real. Like Chekhov has understood something so deep, so deep about the nature of commerce and art there. And I think Saoirse is really wonderful in that movie. It's a not, it's not a good movie. It's maybe not even a good adaptation of The Seagull. But I really enjoyed it. I saw it like five times in a theater in Iowa City.Henry: I don't know if it's a bad adaptation of The Seagull, because it's one of the, it's one of the Chekhov's I've seen that actually understands that, like, the tragic and the and the comic are not meant to be easily distinguishable in his work. And it does have all this lightheartedness. And it is quite funny. And I was like, well, at least someone's doing that because I'm so sick of, like, gloomy Chekhov. You know what I mean? Like, oh, the clouds and the misery. Like, no, he wants you, he wants you to laugh and then be like, I shouldn't laugh because it's kind of tragic, but it's also just funny.Brandon: Yeah. Yes, I mean, all the moments were like, like Annette Bening's characters, like endless stories, like she's just like constantly unfurling a story and a story and a story and a story. Every scene kind of was like, she's in the middle of telling another interminable anecdote. And of course, the sort of big tragic turn at the end is like, where like, Kostya kills himself. And she's like, in the middle of like, another really long anecdote while they're in the other room playing cards. Like, it's so, it's so good. So I love that. I enjoy watching that movie. I still think it's maybe not. It's a little wooden, like as a movie, like it's a little, it's a little rickety.Henry: Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. But for someone looking to like, get a handle on Chekhov, it's actually a good place to go. What is the best make of Fountain Pen?Brandon: That's a really good, that's a really, really, really good question. Like, what's your Desert Island Fountain Pen? My Desert Island Fountain Pen. Right now, it's an Esterbrook Estee with a needlepoint nib. It's like, so, I can use that pen for hours and hours and hours and hours. I think my favorite Fountain Pen, though, is probably the Pilot Custom 743. It's a really good pen, not too big, not too small. It can hold a ton of ink, really wonderful. I use, I think, like a Soft Fine nib, incredible nib, so smooth. Like, I, you could cap it and then uncap it a month later, and it just like starts immediately. It's amazing. And it's not too expensive.Henry: Brandon Taylor, thank you very much.Brandon: Thanks for having me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

EPISODE 48 of Five At The Door welcomes Jonathan from Later Gator, an indie band based out of Indianapolis. Join us as we dive into their eclectic new EP, "Hard to Say," a collection of five tracks that span genres from punk to indie, with a touch of 2000s emo. Discover how Later Gator's diverse influences create a sound that is both nostalgic and refreshingly new. In this episode, Jonathan shares the band's unique origin story, stemming from a "band in a hat" project that brought together musicians from different backgrounds to form a one-off group. Learn how this serendipitous meeting led to the formation of Later Gator and the creation of their first track within minutes of their initial practice. Listeners will get a glimpse into the vibrant DIY music scene in Indianapolis, a city with a rich history of hardcore punk and emo bands. Jonathan reflects on the supportive community and the importance of venues like the Hoosier Dome, which have become staples in the local music landscape. Get ready to hear "That's So Craven," a standout track from Later Gator's new EP, showcasing the band's dynamic range and creative vision. This episode is a testament to the power of collaboration, the joy of live performance, and the unyielding passion that drives independent musicians. Here's a taste of the track that captures the essence of Later Gator's sound. Tune in: [That's So Craven – Later Gator] Remember, whether you're navigating the complexities of life or pursuing your passion for music, it's the connections you build and the dedication to your craft that keep the DIY spirit alive. Don't miss this episode and join us as we explore the world of Later Gator, where every note is a reflection of personal growth and every song is a journey through the human experience. Show notes penned by your favorite chronicler of the musical journey at Five At The Door. (00:00) Jonathan from Later Gator has a new EP coming out soon (01:29) How did Later Gator come together and what was the inspiration for sound (04:50) What made you want to start a band in Minneapolis (07:51) Tell me more about the Indianapolis scene there (10:09) The DIY scene in Indianapolis has exploded in the last few years (14:17) Brandon: What's Yalls plans for the next year after this EP (21:29) Pugs have a fairly wide ranging music taste (25:55) You're a software engineer. So uh, what do you do for your day job (27:27) Brandon is the casting director for 2K Games. Both Brandon and I work remotely (28:39) Do you think remote work is more conducive for bands than ever before (31:45) Dog: What song would you like to hear on this podcast

Patrick tackles the tough topic of euthanizing pets when they face terminal illness or extreme pain. He discusses how, according to the Church, it's not immoral to put a suffering animal to sleep, highlighting the key differences between animal souls and human souls. Euthanasia is a merciful release for pets, who can't understand their pain or time like humans do. This compassionate act spares them unnecessary suffering, unlike euthanizing a human being, which is deeply immoral due to the eternal nature of the human soul.   Monica (email) – Is it okay to put our dog, who has cancer, to sleep? (01:49) Karen - When an adult gets baptized, their original sin is washed away.  Are the sins they committed before baptism washed away as well? (15:17) Patrick comments on our comforts, such as air conditioning and medicine, which have made our lives easier (19:54) Thomas - I had a Bible Study and talked about this concept on Euthanasia, the fact that our pain and suffering has purpose and God gives us the time to soften our wills.  Give time to repent? (26:51) Brandon - What does Patrick think on rebaptism or having a second baptism? (29:30) Jude - If a person is not married in the Church (got married civilly), can they still be a Catechist? (42:44) Carlos - What are the consequences of a just divorce? (46:01)

Brandon Sherman, Cloud Security Engineer at Temporal Technologies Inc., joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his experiences at recent cloud conferences and the ongoing changes in cloud computing. Brandon shares why he enjoyed fwd:cloudsec more than this year's re:Inforce, and how he's seen AWS events evolve over the years. Brandon and Corey also discuss how the cloud has matured and why Brandon feels ongoing change can be expected to be the continuing state of cloud. Brandon also shares insights on how his perspective on Google Cloud has changed, and why he's excited about the future of Temporal.io.About BrandonBrandon is currently a Cloud Security Engineer at Temporal Technologies Inc. One of Temporal's goals is to make our software as reliable as running water, but to stretch the metaphor it must also be *clean* water. He has stared into the abyss and it stared back, then bought it a beer before things got too awkward. When not at work, he can be found playing with his kids, working on his truck, or teaching his kids to work on his truck.Links Referenced: Temporal: https://temporal.io/ Personal website: https://brandonsherman.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: In the cloud, ideas turn into innovation at virtually limitless speed and scale. To secure innovation in the cloud, you need Runtime Insights to prioritize critical risks and stay ahead of unknown threats. What's Runtime Insights, you ask? Visit sysdig.com/screaming to learn more. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G.com/screaming.My thanks as well to Sysdig for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined today by my friend who I am disappointed to say I have not dragged on to this show before. Brandon Sherman is a cloud security engineer over at Temporal. Brandon, thank you for finally giving in.Brandon: Thanks, Corey, for finally pestering me enough to convince me to join. Happy to be here.Corey: So, a few weeks ago as of this recording—I know that time is a flexible construct when it comes to the podcast production process—you gave a talk at fwd:cloudsec, the best cloud security conference named after an email subject line. Yes, I know re:Inforce also qualifies; this one's better. Tell me about what you talked about.Brandon: Yeah, definitely agree on this being the better the two conferences. I gave a talk about how the ground shifts underneath us, kind of touching on how these cloud services that we operate—and I'm mostly experienced in AWS and that's kind of the references that I can give—but these services work as a contract basis, right? We use their APIs and we don't care how they're implemented behind the scenes. At this point, S3 has been rewritten I don't know how many times. I'm sure that other AWS services, especially the longer-lived ones have gone through that same sort of rejuvenation cycle.But as a security practitioner, these implementation details that get created are sort of byproducts of, you know, releasing an API or releasing a managed service can have big implications to how you can either secure that service or respond to actions or activities that happen in that service. And when I say actions and activity, I'm kind of focused on, like, security incidents, breaches, your ability to do incident response from that.Corey: One of the reasons I've always felt that cloud providers have been cagey around how the services work under the hood is not because they don't want to talk about it so much as they don't want to find themselves committed to certain patterns that are not guaranteed as a part of the definition of the service. So if, “Yeah, this is how it works under the hood,” and you start making plans and architecting in accordance with that and they rebuild the service out from under you like they do with S3, then very often, those things that you depend upon being true could very easily no longer be true. And there's no announcement around those things.Brandon: No. It's very much Amazon is… you know, they're building a service to meet the needs of their customers. And they're trying to grow these services as the customers grow along with them. And it's absolutely within their right to act that way, to not have to tell us when they make a change because in some contexts, right, Amazon's feature update might be me as a customer a breaking change. And Amazon wants to try and keep that, what they need to tell me, as small as possible, probably not out of malice, but just because there's a lot of people out there using their services and trying to figure out what they've promised to each individual entity through either literal contracts or their API contracts is hard work. And that's not the job I would want.Corey: No. It seems like it's one of those thankless jobs where you don't get praise for basically anything. Instead, all you get to do is deal with the grim reality that people either view as invisible or a problem.Brandon: Yeah. It sort of feels like documentation. Everyone wants more and better documentation, but it's always an auxiliary part of the service creation process. The best documentation always starts out when you write the documentation first and then kind of build backwards from that, but that's rarely how I've seen software get made.Corey: No. I feel like I left them off the hook, on some level, when we say this, but I also believe in being fair. I think there's a lot of things that cloud providers get right and by and large, with any of the large cloud providers, they are going to do a better job of securing the fundamentals than you are yourself. I know that that is a controversial statement to some folks who spent way too much time in the data centers, but I stand by it.Brandon: Yeah, I agree. I've had to work in both environments and some of the easiest, best wins in security is just what do I have, so that way I know what I have to protect, what that is there. But even just that asset inventory, that's the sort of thing that back in the days of data centers—and still today; it was data centers all over the place—to do an inventory you might need to go and send an actual human with an actual clipboard or iPad or whatever, to the actual physical location and hope that they read the labels on hundreds of thousands of servers correctly and get their serial numbers and know what you have. And that doesn't even tell you what's running on them, what ports are open, what stuff you have to care about. In AWS, I can run a couple of describe calls or list calls and that forms the backbone of my inventory.There's no server that, you know, got built into a wall or lost behind and some long-forgotten migration. A lot of those basic stuff that really, really helps. Not to mention then the user-managed service like S3, you never have to care about patch notes or what an update might do. Plenty of times I've, like, hesitated upgrading a software package because I didn't know what was going to happen. Control Tower, I guess, is kind of an exception to that where you do have to care about the version of your cloud service, but stuff like, yeah, these other services is absolutely right. The undifferentiated heavy lifting it's taken care of. And hopefully, we always kind of hope that the undifferentiated heavy lifting doesn't become differentiated and heavy and lands on us.Corey: So, now that we've done the obligatory be nice to cloud providers thing, let's potentially be a little bit harsher. While you were speaking at fwd:cloudsec, did you take advantage of the fact that you were in town to also attend re:Inforce?Brandon: I did because I was given a ticket, and I wanted to go see some people who didn't have tickets to fwd:cloudsec. Yeah, we've been nice to cloud providers, but as—I haven't found I've learned a lot from the re:Inforce sessions. They're all recorded anyway. There's not even an open call for papers, right, for talking about at a re:Inforce session, “Hey, like, this would be important and fresh or things that I would be wanting to share.” And that's not the sort of thing that Amazon does with their conferences.And that's something that I think would be really interesting to change if there was a more community-minded track that let people submit, not just handpicked—although I suppose any kind of Amazon selection committee is going to be involved, but to pick out, from the community, stories or projects that are interesting that can be, not just have to get filtered through your TAM but something you can actually talk to and say, “Hey, this is something I'd like to talk about. Maybe other people would find it useful.”Corey: One of the things that I found super weird about re:Inforce this year has been that, in a normal year, it would have been a lot more notable, I think. I know for a fact that if I had missed re:Invent, for example, I would have had to be living in a cave not to see all of the various things coming out of that conference on social media, in my email, in all the filters I put out there. But unless you're looking for it, you've would not know that they had a conference that costs almost as much.Brandon: Yeah. The re:Invent-driven development cycle is absolutely a real thing. You can always tell in the lead up to re:Invent when there's releases that get pushed out beforehand and you think, “Oh, that's cool. I wonder why this doesn't get a spot at re:Invent, right, some kind of announcement or whatever.” And I was looking for that this year for re:Inforce and didn't see any kind of announcement or that kind of pre-release trickle of things that are like, oh, there's a bunch of really cool stuff. And that's not to say that cool stuff didn't happen; it just there was a very different marketing feel to it. Hard to say, it's just the vibes around felt different [laugh].Corey: Would you recommend that people attend next year—well let me back up. I've heard that they had not even announced a date for next year. Do you think there will be a re:Inforce next year?Brandon: Making me guess, predict the future, something that I'm—Corey: Yeah, do a prediction. Why not?Brandon: [laugh]. Let's engage in some idle speculation, right? I think that not announcing it was kind of a clue that there's a decent chance it won't happen because in prior years, it had been pre-announced at the—I think it was either at closing or opening ceremonies. Or at some point. There's always the, “Here's what you can look forward to next year.”And that didn't happen, so I think that's there's a decent chance this may have been the last re:Inforce, especially once all the data is crunched and people look at the numbers. It might just be… I don't know, I'm not a marketing-savvy kind of person, but it might just be that a day at re:Invent next year is dedicated to security. But then again, security is always job zero at Amazon so maybe re:Invent just becomes re:Inforce all the time, right? Do security, everybody.Corey: It just feels like a different type of conference. Whenever re:Invent there's something for everyone. At re:Inforce, there's something for everyone as long as they work in InfoSec. Because other than that, you wind up just having these really unfortunate spiels of them speaking to people that are not actually present, and it winds up missing the entire forest for the trees, really.Brandon: I don't know if I'd characterize it as that. I feel like some of the re:Inforce content was people who were maybe curious about the cloud or making progress in their companies and moving to the cloud—and in Amazon's case when they say the cloud, they mean themselves. They don't mean any other cloud. And re:Inforce tries to dispel the notion there are any other clouds.But at the same time, it feels like an attempt to try and make people feel better. There's a change underway in the industry and it still is going to continue for a while. There's still all kinds of non-cloud environments people are going to operate for probably until the end of time. But at the same time, a lot of these are moving to the cloud and they want the people who are thinking about this or engaged in it, to be comforted by that Amazon that either has these services, or there's a pattern you can follow to do something in a secure manner. I think that's that was kind of the primary audience of re:Inforce was people who were charged with doing cloud security or were exploring moving their corporate systems to AWS and they wanted some assurance that they're going to actually be doing things the right way, or someone else hadn't made those mistakes first. And if that audience has been sort of saturated, then maybe there isn't a need for that style of conference anymore.Corey: It feels like it's not intended to be the same thing at re:Invent, which is probably I guess, a bigger problem. Re:Invent for a long time has attempted to be all things to all people, and it has grown to a scale where that is no longer possible. So, they've also done a poor job of signaling that, so you wind up attending Adam Selipsky's keynote, and in many cases, find yourself bored absolutely to tears. Or you go in expecting it to be an Andy Jassy style of, “Here are 200 releases, four of them good,” and instead, you wind up just having what feels like a relatively paltry number doled out over a period of days. And I don't know that their wrong to do it; I just think it doesn't align with pre-existing expectations. I also think people expecting to go to re:Inforce to see a whole bunch of feature releases are bound to be disappointed.Brandon: Like, both of those are absolutely correct. The number of releases on the slide must always increase up and the right; away we go; we're pushing more code and making more changes to services. I mean, if you look at the history, there's always new instance types. Do they count each instance type as a new release, or they not do that?Corey: Yeah, it honestly feels like that sometimes. They also love to do price cuts where they—you wind up digging into them and something like 90% of them are services you've never heard of in regions you couldn't find on a map if your life depended on it. It's not quite the, “Yeah, the bill gets lower all the time,” that they'd love to present it as being.Brandon: Yeah. And you may even find that there's services that had updates that you didn't know about until you go and check the final bill, the Cost and Usage Report, and you look and go, “Oh, hey. Look at all the services that we were using, that our engineers started using after they heard announcements at re:Invent.” And then you find out how much you're actually paying for them. [pause]. Or that they were in use in the first place. There's no better way to find what is actually happening in your environment than, look at the bill.Corey: It's depressing that that's true. At least they finally stopped doing the slides where they talk about year-over-year, they have a histogram of number of feature and service releases. It's, no one feels good about that, even the people building the services and features because they look at that and think, “Oh, whatever I do is going to get lost in the noise.” And they're not wrong. Customers see it and freak out because how am I ever going to keep current with all this stuff? I take a week off and I spend a month getting caught back up again.Brandon: Yeah. And are you going to—you know, what's your strategy for dealing with all these new releases and features? Do you want to have a strategy of saying, “No, you can't touch any of those until we've vetted and understand them?” I mean, you don't even have to talk about security in that context; just the cost alone, understanding it's someone, someone going to run an experiment that bankrupts your company by forgetting about it or by growing into some monster in the bill. Which I suspect helps [laugh] helps you out when those sorts of things happen, right, for companies don't have that strategy.But at the same time, all these things are getting released. There's not really a good way of understanding which of these do I need to care about. Which of these is going to really impact my operational flow, my security impacts? What does this mean to me as a user of the service when there's, I don't know, an uncountable number really, or at least a number that's so big, it stops mattering that it got any bigger?Corey: One thing that I will say was great about re:Invent, I want to say 2021, was how small it felt. It felt like really a harkening back to the old re:Invents. And then you know, 2022 hit, and we go there and half of us wound up getting Covid because of course we did. But it was also this just this massive rush of, we're talking with basically the population of a midsize city just showing up inside of this entire enormous conference. And you couldn't see the people you wanted to see, it was difficult to pay attention to all there was to pay attention to, and it really feels like we've lost something somewhere.Brandon: Yeah, but at the same time is that just because there are more people in this ecosystem now? You know, 2021 may have been a callback to that a decade ago. And these things were smaller when it was still niche, but growing in kind of the whole ecosystem. And parts of—let's say, the ecosystem there, I'm talking about like, how—when I say that ecosystem there, I'm kind of talking about how in general, I want to run something in technology, right? I need a server, I need an object store, I need compute, whatever it is that you need, there is more attractive services that Amazon offers to all kinds of customers now.So, is that just because, right, we've been in this for a while and we've seen the cloud grow up and like, oh, wow, you're now in your awkward teenage phase of cloud computing [laugh]? Have we not yet—you know, we're watching the maturity to adulthood, as these things go? I really don't know. But it definitely feels a little, uh… feels a little like we've watched this cloud thing grow from a half dozen services to now, a dozen-thousand services all operating different ways.Corey: Part of me really thinks that we could have done things differently, had we known, once upon a time, what the future was going to hold. So, much of the pain I see in Cloud is functionally people trying to shove things into the cloud that weren't designed with Cloud principles in mind. Yeah, if I was going to build a lot of this stuff from scratch myself, then yeah, I would have absolutely made a whole universe of different choices. But I can't predict the future. And yet, here we are.Brandon: Yep. If I could predict the future, I would have definitely won the lottery a lot more times, avoided doing that one thing I regretted that once back in my history [laugh]. Like, knowing the future change a lot of things. But at least unless you're not letting on with something, then that's something that no one's got the ability to, do not even at Amazon.Corey: So, one of the problems I've always had when I come back from a conference, especially re:Invent, it takes me a few… well, I'll be charitable and say days, but it's more like weeks, to get back into the flow of my day-to-day work life. Was there any of that with you and re:Inforce? I mean, what is your day job these days anyway? What are you up to?Brandon: What is my day job? There's a lot. So, Temporal is a small, but quickly growing company. A lot of really cool customers that are doing really cool things with our technology and we need to build a lot of basics, essentially, making sure that when we grow, that we're going to kind of grow into our security posture. There's not anything talking about predicting the future. My prediction is that the company I work for is going to do well. You can hold your analysis on that [laugh].So, while I'm predicting what the company that I'm working at is going to do well, part of it is also what are the things that I'm going to regret not having in two or three years' time. So, some baseline cloud monitoring, right? I want that asset inventory across all of our accounts; I want to know what's going on there. There's other things that are sort of security adjacent. So, things like DNS records, domain names, a lot of those things where if we can capture this and centralize it early and build it in a way—especially that users are less unhappy about, like, not everyone, for example, is hosting their own—buying their own domains on personal cards and filing for reimbursement, that DNS records aren't scattered across a dozen different software projects and manipulated in different ways, then that sets us up.It may not be perfect today, but in a year, year-and-a-half, two years, we have the ability to then say, “Okay, we know what we're pointing at. What are the dangling subdomains? What are the things that are potential avenues of being taken over? What do we have? What are people doing?” And trying to understand how we can better help users with their needs day-to-day.Also as a side part of my day job is advising a startup Common Fate. Does just-in-time access management. And that's been a lot of fun to do as well because fundamentally—this is maybe a hot take—that, in a lot of cases, you really only need admin access and read-only access when you're doing really intensive work. In Temporal day job, we've got infrastructure teams that are building stuff, they need lots of permissions and it'd be very silly to say you can't do your job just because you could potentially use IAM and privilege escalate yourself to administrator. Let's cut that out. Let's pretend that you are a responsible adult. We can monitor you in other ways, we're not going to put restrictions between you and doing your job. Have admin access, just only have it for a short period of time, when you say you're going to need it and not all the time, every account, every service, all the time, all day.Corey: I do want to throw a shout-in for that startup you advise, Common Fate. I've been a big fan of their Granted offering for a while now. granted.dev for those who are unfamiliar. I use that to automatically generate console logins, do all kinds of other things. When you're moving between a bunch of different AWS accounts, which it kind of feels like people building the services don't have to do somehow because of their Isengard system handling it for them. Well, as a customer, can I just say that experience absolutely sucks and Granted goes a long way toward making it tolerable, if not great.Brandon: Mm-hm. Yeah, I remember years ago, the way that I would have to handle this is I would have probably a half-dozen different browsers at the same time, Safari, Chrome, the Safari web developer preview, just so I could have enough browsers to log into with, to see all the accounts I needed to access. And that was an extremely painful experience. And it still feels so odd that the AWS console today still acts like you have one account. You can switch roles, you can type in a [role 00:21:23] on a different account, but it's very clunky to use, and having software out there that makes this easier is definitely, definitely fills a major pain point I have with using these services.Corey: Tired of Apache Kafka's complexity making your AWS bill look like a phone number? Enter Redpanda. You get 10x your streaming data performance without having to rob a bank. And migration? Smoother than a fresh jar of peanut butter. Imagine cutting as much as 50% off your AWS bills. With Redpanda, it's not a dream, it's reality. Visit go.redpanda.com/duckbill. Redpanda: Because Kafka shouldn't cause you nightmares.Corey: Do you believe that there's hope? Because we have seen some changes where originally AWS just had the AWS account you'd log into, it's the root user. Great. Then they had IAM. Now, they're using what used to be known as AWS SSO, which they wound up calling IAM Access Identity Center, or—I forget the exact words they put in order, but it's confusing and annoying. But it does feel like the trend is overall towards something that's a little bit more coherent.Brandon: Mm-hm.Corey: Is the future five years from now better than it looks like today?Brandon: That's certainly the hope. I mean, we've talked about how we both can't predict the future, but I would like to hope that the future gets better. I really like GCP's project model. There's complaints I have with how Google Cloud works, and it's going to be here next year, and if the permission model is exactly how I'd like to use it, but I do like the mental organization that feels like Google was able to come in and solve a lot of those problems with running projects and having a lot of these different things. And part of that is, there's still services in AWS that don't really respect resource-based permissions or tag-based permissions, or I think the new one is attribute-based access control.Corey: One of the challenges I see, too, is that I don't think that there's been a lot of thought put into how a lot of these things are going to work between different AWS accounts. One of my bits of guidance whenever I'm talking to someone who's building anything, be it at AWS or external is, imagine an architecture diagram and now imagine that between any two resources in that diagram is now an account boundary. Because someone somewhere is going to have one there, so it sounds ridiculous, but you can imagine a microservices scenario where every component is in its own isolated account. What are you going to do now as a result? Because if you're going to build something that scales, you've got to respect those boundaries. And usually, that just means the person starts drinking.Brandon: Not a bad place to start, the organizational structure—lowercase organizations, not the Amazon service, Organizations—it's still a little tricky to get it in a way that sort of… I guess, I always kind of feel that these things are going to change and that the—right, the only constant is change. That's true. The services we use are going to change. The way that we're going to want to organize them is going to change. Our researcher is going to come out with something and say, “Hey, I found a really cool way to do something really terrible to the stuff in your cloud environment.”And that's going to happen eventually, in the fullness of time. So, how do we be able to react quickly to those kinds of changes? And how can we make sure that if you know, suddenly, we do need to separate out these services to go, you know, to decompose the monolith even more, or whatever the cool, current catchphrase is, and we have those account boundaries, which are phenomenal boundaries, they make it so much easier to do—if you can do multi-account then you've solved multi-regional on the way, you've sold failover, you've solve security issues. You have not solved the fact that your life is considerably more challenging at the moment, but I would really hope that in you know, even next year, but by the time five years comes around, that that's really been taken to heart within Amazon and it's a lot easier to be working creating services in different accounts that can talk to each other, especially in the current environment where it's kind of a mess to wire these things all together. ClickOps has its place, but some console applications just don't want to believe that you have a KMS key in another account because well, why would you put that over there? It's not like if your current account has a problem, you want to lose all your data that's encrypted.Corey: It's one of those weird things, too, where the clouds almost seem to be arguing against each other. Like, I would be hard-pressed to advise someone not to put a ‘rehydrate the entire business' level of backups into a different cloud provider entirely, but there's so steeped in the orthodoxy of no other clouds ever, that that message is not something that they can effectively communicate. And I think they're doing their customers a giant disservice by that, just because it is so much easier to explain to your auditor that you've done it than to explain why it's not necessary. And it's never true; you always have the single point of failure of the payment instrument, or the contract with that provider that could put things at risk.Is it a likely issue? No. But if you're running a publicly traded company on top of it, you'd be negligent not to think about it that way. So, why pretend otherwise?Brandon: Is that a question for me because [laugh]—Corey: Oh, that was—no, absolutely. That was a rant ending in a rhetorical question. So, don't feel you have to answer it. But getting the statement out there because hopefully, someone at Amazon is listening to this.Brandon: That's, uh, hopefully, if you find out who's the one that listens to this and can affect it, then yeah, I'd like to send them a couple of emails because absolutely. There's room out there, there will always be room for at least two providers.Corey: Yeah, I'd say a third, but I don't know that Google is going to have the attention span to still have a cloud offering by lunchtime today.Brandon: Yeah. I really wish that I had more faith in the services and that they weren't going—you know, speaking of services changing underneath you, that's definitely a—speaking of services changing underneath, you definitely a major disservice if you don't know—if you're going to put into work into architecting and really using cloud providers as they're meant to be used. Not in a, sort of, least common denominator sense, in which case, you're not in good shape.Corey: Right. You should not be building something with an idea toward what if this gets deprecated. You shouldn't have to think about that on a consistent basis.Brandon: Mm-hm. Absolutely. You should expect those things to change because they will, right, the performance impact. I mean, the performance of these services is going to change, the underlying technology that the providers use is going to change, but you should still be able to mostly expect that at least the API calls you make are going to still be there and still be consistent come this time next year.Corey: The thing that really broke me was the recent selling off of Google domains to Squarespace. Nothing against Squarespace, but they have a different target market in many respects. And oh, I'm a Google customer, you're now going to give all of my information to a third party I never asked to deal with. Great. And more to the point, if I recommend Google to folks because as has happened in years past, then they canceled the thing that I recommended, then I looked like a buffoon. So, we've gotten to a point now where it has become so steady and so consistent, that I fear I cannot, in good conscience, recommend a Google product without massive caveats. Otherwise, I look like a clown or worse, a paid shill.Brandon: Yeah. And when you want to start incorporating these things into the core of your business, to take that point about, you know, total failover scenarios, you should, you know, from you want it to have a domain registered in a Google service that was provisioned to Google Cloud services, that whole sort of ecosystem involved there, that's now gone, right? If I want to use Google Cloud with a Google Cloud native domain name hosting services, I can't. How am—I just—now I can't [laugh]. There's, like, not workarounds available.I've got to go to some other third-party and it just feels odd that an organization would sort of take those core building blocks and outsource them. [I know 00:29:05] that Google's core offering isn't Google Cloud; it's not their primary focus, and it kind of reflects that, which was a shame. There's things that I'd love to see grow out of Google Cloud and get better. And, you know, competition is good for the whole cloud computing industry.Corey: I think that it's a sad thing, but it's real, that there are people who were passionate defenders of Google over the years. I used to be one. We saw a bunch of them with Stadia fans coming out of the woodwork, and then all those people who have defended Google and said, “No, no, you can trust Google on this service because it's different,” for some reason or other, then wind up looking ridiculous. And some of the staunchest Google defenders that I've seen are starting to come around to my point of view. Eventually, you've run out of people who are willing to get burned if you burn them all.Brandon: Yeah. I've always been a little, uh… maybe this is the security Privacy part of me; I've always been a little leery of the services that really want to capture and gather your data. But I always respected the Google engineering that went into building these things at massive scale. It's something beyond my ability to understand as I haven't worked in something that big before. And Google made it look… maybe not effortless, but they made it look like they knew what they were doing, they could build something really solid.And I don't know if that's still true because it feels like they might know how to build something, and then they'll just dismantle it and turn it over to somebody else, or just dismantle it completely. And I think humans, we do a lot of things because we don't want to look foolish and… now recommending Google Cloud starts to make you wonder, “Am I going to look foolish?” Is this going to be a reflection on me in a year or two years, when you got to come in to say, “Hey, I guess that whole thing we architected around, it's being sold to someone else. It's being closed down. We got to transfer and rearchitect our whole whatever we built because of factors out of our control.” I want to be rearchitecting things because I screwed it up. I want to be rearchitecting things because I made an interesting novel mistake, not something that's kind of mundane, like, oh, I guess the thing we were going to use got shut down. Like, that makes it look like not only can I not predict the future, but I can't even pretend to read the tea leaves.Corey: And that's what's hard is because, on some level, our job, when we work in operations and cloud and try and make these decisions, is to convince the business we know what we're talking about. And when we look foolish, we don't make that same mistake again.Brandon: Mm-hm. Billing and security are oftentimes frequently aligned with each other. We're trying to convince the business that we need to build things a certain way to get a certain outcome, right? Either lower costs or more performance for the dollar, so that way, we don't wind up in the front page of newspapers, any kinds of [laugh] any kind of those things.Corey: Oh, yes. I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Brandon: The best place to find me, I have a website about me, [brandonsherman.com 00:32:13]. That's where I post stuff. There's some links to—I have a [Mastodon 00:32:18] profile. I'm not much of a social, sort of post your information out there kind of person, but if you want to get a hold of me, then that's probably the best way to find me and contact me. Either that or head out to the desert somewhere, look for a silver truck out in the dunes and without technology around. It's another good spot if you can find me there.Corey: And I will include a link to that, of course, in the [show notes 00:32:45]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. As always, I appreciate it.Brandon: Thank you very much for having me, Corey. Good to chat with you.Corey: Brandon Sherman, cloud security engineer at Temporal. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that will somehow devolve into you inviting me to your new uninspiring cloud security conference that your vendor is putting on, and is of course named after an email subject line.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Why spend your time fixing weaknesses when there are strengths that you can build on? Jonathan welcomes Brandon Miller, Co-Founder, and CEO of 34 Strong, a company dedicated to help organizations elevate to be one of the best places to work. Brandon will be sharing how he uses assessments on his own kids and cite them as examples in his discussions, and discover what StrengthsFinder is, and what 34 Strong does. So tune in and learn all these in this latest episode of The Disruptive Successor podcast.HIGHLIGHTSIntroducing Brandon MillerWhat is StrengthsFinderThe ideal assessment to useLeaders and teams should have assessmentsFocus on your strengths, not build on weaknessesWhat is 34 StrongQUOTESBrandon - The issue with parenting:“In parenting, school management, we do the exact opposite. We position them to get better at something, they're not as good at it. So why don't we just take this approach we already all know, apply it to these areas, we probably could get better outcomes.”Brandon - The right tool to use:“Any tool can be effective if it's well educated inside and where we found the gap in organizations we work with, is the intention of leaders to have effective tools to help teams become highly engaged.”Brandon - Don't turn your employees into you:“What I did worked for me, may not work for them. If I try to turn them into me, I'm essentially asking them to become who they're not, and this almost never works out well.”Jonathan - What really gives you the advantage:“It's not technology, it's not strategy, it's not finance, but it's basically teams that are healthy and engaged teams that give you the ultimate competitive advantage.”Brandon - What 34 Strong is and does:“We go into organizations that typically are starting from a place where they have a challenge, and we're helping them to grow into or become a recognized best place to work.”Connect with Brandon and learn more about her work:About BrandonAbout 34 Strong34 Strong WebsiteIf you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, review and share with a friend who would benefit from the message. If you're interested in picking up a copy of Jonathan Goldhill's book, Disruptive Successor, go to the website at www.DisruptiveSuccessor.com

This is round 2 with John Sherman aka “The Verm”. We sat in the desert near Hueco Tanks and chatted over a few beers. We talked about ‘Wheatiesgate' and the lost art of heckling, finding and developing areas before the internet, dealing with aging, photographing and studying birds, life lessons, injury stories, and John's favorite beers.*I recommend listening to my first episode with Verm (EP 108) before this episode.Check out Crimpd!crimpd.comOr download the Crimpd app! (Available for iOS and Android)Check out PhysiVantage!physivantage.com (link includes 15% off coupon)Use code "NUGGET15" at checkout for 15% off your next order!Check out Rhino Skin Solutions!rhinoskinsolutions.comUse code “NUGGET” at checkout for 20% off your next order!We are supported by these amazing BIG GIVERS:Leo Franchi, Michael Roy, David Lahaie, Robert Freehill, Jeremiah Johnson, Scott Donahue, and Eli ConleeBecome a Patron:patreon.com/thenuggetclimbingShow Notes:  thenuggetclimbing.com/episodes/the-verm-returnsNuggets:0:06:39 – The Michael Salem catalog0:09:33 – West Texas in the early 80s0:17:02 – ‘Wheatiesgate' and the lost art of heckling0:27:16 – Patron question from Eli: As bouldering has evolved, what has stayed the same?0:28:39 – Adventureland, and the experience of climbing boulders without names or stars or grades0:34:39 – Finding Ibex, UT, and discovering new areas before Google Earth0:41:40 – Patron question from Brandon: What advice would The Verm give to a new climber?0:48:09 – Aging, prostates, and swollen knuckles0:55:34 – Hangdogging, new-age tactics, and why John feels like Jason Kehl is a kindred spirit0:58:33 – What has surprised John about aging, and how baby birds poop1:02:09 – Cognitive decline, and other scary things that come with age1:06:32 – Taking his foot off the gas, getting out of shape, and calorie counting1:10:29 – Getting an amazing personal trainer, and fixing his elbow issues by fixing his shoulders1:17:52 – Patron question from Brandon: What got you into birding? And what about it got you hooked?1:24:27 – Patron question from Brandon: Has birding taught you any life lessons?1:42:27 – Injury stories and life lessons2:31:29 – Developing bouldering in Ibex, UT2:37:02 – A year in Verm's life, and tick marks2:44:10 – Return of the harrier, and more bird facts2:52:10 – Favorite books and short stories2:57:59 – Verm's memoir idea, favorite books, and sports3:07:50 – Climbing with Paul Robinson and Michaela Kiersch3:14:59 – The compression revolution, John Gill, slab dynoing, and the Hoover Maneuver3:23:59 – Patron question from Brandon: Top three beers? (and the De Garre story)3:38:20 – Patron question from Craig: What bird best represents your personality? (and duck penises)3:46:15 – Patron question from Craig: What bird would John Gill be?3:53:04 – The baboon story

In This Episode:  Molly, The Shibu Inu joins us in the studio today (she doesn't say much.) We talk about the right kind of supplements and the benefits of each. What are the right kinds of supplements and the benefits of each? Multi-vitamins Protein powders (when is the right time to consume a protein powder?)  Vitamin D Magnesium Fish Oil L-glutamine It's important to consult with your doctor before you start any supplementation regimen to make sure it is okay with your body, medicines, and hormones. Is there a point where you are taking too many supplements?   Quotes from This Episode: " If you're not changing your habits you are most likely just wasting your supplements." Brandon"What pumpkin does is it's a great substitute for flour and oil, but it's a vegetable it's full of vitamin a and all this other great stuff. And it's got no fat in it." ~LynneLinks To Things I Talk About: Free Supplements Portion of the Health Transformation Course----------------Episode Sponsor: This episode of Fire Within is brought to you by Podcast Cary, connect with your audience and grow your brand with Cary's professional Podcast Studio. Contact Podcast Cary Today to learn about starting your company's podcast today.Help Your Friends spark the Fire WithinIf you like The FireWithin Nutrition and fitness podcast, visit our website to subscribe for Refuel: TIPS, RECIPES, VIDEOS, AND INSIDER INFO all in one weekly email. Check out our Courses and Free Recipes. And if you really like The Fire Within podcast we'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). 

Nick, pondering the Texas electric grid and the 2021 power crisis posits the question to Travis and Brandon: What role does pain play in leading teams? What is the role of a manager in managing and reacting to pain on our teams? What are the dangers of hiding or deflecting this pain? This leads to a discussion of processing feedback, helping teams learn from pain, and yes, launching trains at meteors. What roles do curiosity and fear play in managing organizational pain? What role do retrospectives play in this? How do you pronounce "gigawatt"?Show notes:2021 Texas Power Crisishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisisThe lottery factor (AKA bus factor)https://towardsdatascience.com/maintaining-a-good-lottery-factor-1eeb2b2f52a6Ted Lasso: "The shower pressure is rubbish: make a note of that"https://www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/cff607e3-f79e-4a84-a38c-ab6124c596c6

The past few years have been difficult for many of us, but each and every one of us carry our own unique walk through life. We all have done the walk or the Christian walk differently and have experienced many different things. Learning about what life looks like through different lenses, especially lives in Christ, can help grow us and can help us navigate our journey with Christ better. Today we gain a perspective on what it is like to grow up around and to live life with the belief that God is legalistic (where to earn His love we must follow a set of tenets only or we are rejected), and the negative effects that belief has on our lives. Then we will hear about how God's grace and mercy apply to our own lives, and how the triune God works. Lastly, we will learn about the transforming work of the Holy Spirit or “sanctification”. Galatians 2:20 Ephesians 2:8-9 Check out this book recommended by Brandon: What's So Amazing About Grace? Participant's Guide, Updated Edition: Yancey, Philip: 9780310129806: Amazon.com: Books History Channel Series: Alone Full Episodes, Video & More | HISTORY Channel Malta Homeless Ministry, serving the Southeastern Connecticut region: Homeless | United States | Malta (maltaoutreach.org) Without further ado… LET'S DIVE IN!! Random country to pray for: Chile Music Credit: LAKEY INSPIRED Track Name: A Walk on the Moon Music By: LAKEY INSPIRED @ https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired Official "LAKEY INSPIRED" YouTube Channel HERE - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOmy... License for commercial use: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported "Share Alike" (CC BY-SA 3.0) License. Full License HERE - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

This week we discuss tech’s rich valuations, Airtable vs. Excel and the Goldman Analysts’ Presentation. Plus, some advice on when to buy a house. Rundown VC Stripe is now valued at $95 billion (https://www.axios.com/stripe-is-now-valued-at-95-billion-e04c5d89-ea62-4d75-8526-131735c28722.html) Airtable Tops $5.7 Billion Valuation On Growing Enterprise Sales And A Soaring Cloud Market (https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2021/03/15/airtable-tops-57-billion-valuation-on-growing-enterprise-sales-and-a-soaring-cloud-market/) Airtable is now valued at $5.77B with a fresh $270 million in Series E funding – TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/15/airtable-is-now-valued-at-5-77b-with-a-fresh-270-million-in-series-e-funding/) Docker Series B: More Fuel To Help Dev Teams Get Ship Done (https://www.docker.com/blog/helping-dev-teams-get-ship-done/) Coinbase Backers Register 114.9 Million Shares for Listing (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-17/coinbase-backers-register-up-to-114-9-million-shares-for-listing) Work Life This Can’t Be Normal: The Tech Industry After a Year of Burnout (https://thenewstack.io/this-cant-be-normal-the-tech-industry-after-a-year-of-burnout/) Tell Your Boss the Four-Day Week Is Coming Soon (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-02/four-day-work-week-gains-popularity-around-the-world) Can We Stop Pretending SMS Is Secure Now? (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/can-we-stop-pretending-sms-is-secure-now/) Goldman Analysts Work Too Hard (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-18/goldman-analysts-work-too-hard) Relevant to your interests Netflix cracking down on password sharing: ‘You need your own account to keep watching’ (https://wgntv.com/news/netflix-cracking-down-on-password-sharing-you-need-your-own-account-to-keep-watching/) Why you should use pyenv + Pipenv for your Python projects | Hacker Noon (https://hackernoon.com/reaching-python-development-nirvana-bb5692adf30c) Google’s plan to disrupt higher education (https://thehustle.co/03152021-Google-higher-education/) Nokia and AWS to enable cloud-based 5G radio solutions (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nokia-aws-enable-cloud-based-120000051.html) Gartner’s 2021 Magic Quadrant cites ‘glut of innovation’ in data science and ML (https://venturebeat.com/2021/03/14/gartners-2021-magic-quadrant-cites-glut-of-innovation-in-data-science-and-ml/) Stop Talking About Multicloud and Hybrid Cloud and Start Talking About Integration (https://thenewstack.io/stop-talking-about-multicloud-and-hybrid-cloud-and-start-talking-about-integration/) Swiss Police Raid Apartment of Verkada Hacker, Seize Devices (https://nz.news.yahoo.com/swiss-police-raid-apartment-verkada-161703433.html) China’s tech giants test way around Apple’s new privacy rules (https://www.ft.com/content/520ccdae-202f-45f9-a516-5cbe08361c34) Clubhouse promises its accelerator participants either brand deals or $5K per month during the program (https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/15/clubhouse-promises-its-accelerator-participants-either-brand-deals-or-5k-per-month-during-the-program/) Open-source team details the complexities in bringing Linux to Apple's M1 Macs (https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/15/asahi-linux-project-port-m1-macs/) Michael Dell: Public Cloud Isn’t More Secure Than On-Premise (https://www.crn.com/news/managed-services/michael-dell-public-cloud-isn-t-more-secure-than-on-premise) CD Foundation Announces Industry Initiative to Standardize Events from CI/CD Systems - CD Foundation (https://cd.foundation/blog/2021/03/16/cd-foundation-announces-industry-initiative-to-standardize-events-from-ci-cd-systems/) Microsoft Apologizes ‘Deeply’ For Worldwide Azure, Teams Outage (https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/microsoft-apologizes-deeply-for-worldwide-azure-teams-outage) Boosting developer success on Google Play (https://link.thehustle.co/click/23235305.126250/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmRyb2lkLWRldmVsb3BlcnMuZ29vZ2xlYmxvZy5jb20vMjAyMS8wMy9ib29zdGluZy1kZXYtc3VjY2Vzcy5odG1s/5f3be10f2c81bf6314610498Bdecac5b2) IBM's CEO and outgoing exec chairman take home $38m in total for 2020 despite revenue shrinking by billions (https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/17/ibm_exec_payouts/) AWS throws its home-grown Arm CPUs at new memory-intensive instance type (https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/17/ec2_graviton_x2gd_memory_intensive/) Historical trends in the usage statistics of content management systems, March 2021 (https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all) Squarespace raises $300M at a staggering $10B valuation – TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/16/squarespace-raises-300m-at-staggering-10b-valuation/) Azure Active Directory issue takes down Teams, Office, Dynamics and more for some users (https://www.zdnet.com/article/azure-active-directory-issue-takes-down-teams-office-dynamics-and-more-for-some-users/) Microsoft's latest cloud authentication outage: What went wrong (https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-latest-cloud-authentication-outage-what-went-wrong/) Google Nest Hello, IQ cams go down in partial outage - 9to5Google (https://9to5google.com/2021/03/17/google-nest-outage-takes-down-live-video-history-on-some-devices/) Oso announces $8.2M Series A to simplify authorization for developers (https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/17/oso-announces-8-2m-series-a-to-simplify-authorization-for-developers/) Hackers Breach Thousands of Security Cameras, Exposing Tesla, Jails, Hospitals (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/hackers-expose-tesla-jails-in-breach-of-150-000-security-cams) IAM Access Analyzer Update – Policy Validation | Amazon Web Services (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/iam-access-analyzer-update-policy-validation/) Nonsense Air travel is picking up as TSA records highest passenger screenings in nearly a year (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/13/air-travel-tsa-records-highest-passenger-screenings-in-nearly-a-year.html) Zoom Escaper lets you sabotage your own meetings with audio problems, crying babies, and more (https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/15/22331744/zoom-escaper-sabotage-meetings-fake-audio-problems) Elon Musk crowns himself ‘Technoking’ of Tesla (https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/15/22331315/elon-musk-tesla-technoking-title-ceo) IRS expected to delay filing deadline to May 15, as agency grapples with a backlog of 24 million unprocessed tax returns (https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/03/17/irs-deadline-delay-tax-backlog/) So, When Will You Be Able To Get A PS5? (https://kotaku.com/so-when-will-you-be-able-to-get-a-ps5-1846495060?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=kotaku_twitter) Sponsors strongDM — Manage and audit remote access to infrastructure. Start your free 14-day trial today at: strongdm.com/SDT (http://strongdm.com/SDT) Conferences SpringOne.io (https://springone.io), Sep 1st to 2nd - CFP is open until April 9th (https://springone.io/cfp). Two SpringOne Tours: (1.) developer-bonanza in for NA, March 10th and 11th (https://tanzu.vmware.com/developer/tv/springone-tour/0014/), and, (2.) EMEA dev-fest on April 28th (https://tanzu.vmware.com/developer/tv/springone-tour/0015/). VMware Tanzu Up Close Virtual Event (https://connect.tanzu.vmware.com/EMEA_P5_FE_Q122_Event_VMware-Tanzu-Up-Close.html), April 27, 2021, 10:00am - 5:50pm CET Cloud Native Rust Day (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/cloud-native-rust-day/program/schedule/) SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/). Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-concall/id1399948033?mt=8) and he wants you to buy it for $0.99. Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads)! Recommendations Matt: 1917 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8579674/) & Thin Red Line (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120863/) Coté: Patagonia (https://www.patagonia.com/product/mens-torrentshell-rain-pants/83812.html) Torrentshell Pants (https://www.patagonia.com/product/mens-torrentshell-rain-pants/83812.html). (Repeat?) Brandon: What you do is who you are (https://www.audible.com/pd/What-You-Do-Is-Who-You-Are-Audiobook/0062967584) by Ben Horowitz, Companies & Culture (https://overcast.fm/+BlzFlM4dQ) a16z Podcast Photo Credit (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/18/goldman-sachs-junior-bankers-complain-of-crushing-work-load-amid-spac-fueled-boom-in-wall-street-deals.html) Photo Credit (https://unsplash.com/photos/XFLY0Yp3Gow)

Welcome back to our weekend Cabral HouseCall shows! This is where we answer our community's wellness, weight loss, and anti-aging questions to help people get back on track! Check out today's questions:  Brandon: What are your favorite men’s soaps and shampoos? Looking for recommendations on regular shampoo and dandruff shampoo. Anonymous: Hi Dr Cabral- thx for all the work you do! I’m about 10 years in on my health journey. I found you 1.5 years ago and now I’m making some progress. I’m currently working with a level 2 IHP, have done the food sensitivity lab, the spit test lab, a 14 day detox, the CBO plus the finisher, and the mold protocol. I’m still getting yeast infections (I’ve already listened to all your past yeast infection podcasts) and they come at the same time in my cycle and it seems hormone related. The other issue I’m still fighting is bacterial infections on the tip of my nose and sometimes inside my nose. I’ve had maybe 20-30 over the past 4 years. They clear up w neosporin. So far, every doc that I’ve asked can’t figure either of these 2 issues out, for long term success. I’m on all your supplements and the DNS daily. I’m healthy, active and great besides these two annoying reoccurring issues. The nose infections are definitely linked to sinus stuff that I’ve worked on through the years- All linked to Candida and sinus infections etc. thx for the help! Kazz: Hi Dr Cabral, thank you for all the difference you are making in the natural health field, sharing your knowledge and being accessible to everyone who has a question, I appreciate it so much as so many do! My question today is regarding chronic eczema and supposed extreme allergy to dust mite and the treatment of ACTAIR immunotherapy. My daughter's bf who is 25yo has spent his life suffering with extreme allergic reactions; rhinitis, eczema and the occasional bouts of asthma. He has had plenty of courses of antibiotics over the years, but in recent years not so much, however recently he has had such a bad case of eczema that the scratching extended to staph. His dr prescribed antibiotics and when one course wasn't it enough, 2, 3... now onto his 4 consecutive course of antibiotics. He has had an allergy test, tested positive to dust mites and has been in consultation with specialist to possibly begin ACTAIR immunotherapy for dust mite allergy which is a 3 year desensitising process, and does come with side affects. I'm wondering if you know much about this therapy. I feel he could get great results using EquiLife products, a hair mineral analysis etc. He is concerned that there is no proof that would work. Would love to hear your comments :)) thank you so much. Kelly: i Dr Cabral, my 8 year old son completed the children’s cbo this summer. He did have an anaphylactic reaction to a scallop in the middle of it where we had to stop for a few days, but for the most part we followed it well. I had been sharing my cbo finisher with him, although not religiously. He seemed to have been doing better. Belly aches, head aches seemed better, acid reflux is gone, arm pit eczema gone. But, the last 5 days he has been getting random hives all over his body, and itching throughout the day, all over, but especially at night when he’s trying to fall asleep. The only way he’s been able to fall asleep is with a little bit of Benedryl and wet wraps. He also has blotchy red spots around his mouth area. He had terrible eczema when he was 3mo-3 years, but it has mostly been gone since then. Now, it seems like it’s coming back. We did the food sensitivity test as well as scratch testing, and try to stay away from those. He hasn’t been eating anything “new” that I’m aware of, so I don’t understand what’s happening. He is very sensitive to gluten, dairy, sugar, and many foods and did have a lot of dairy at a friends house just before this started. Any ideas on what’s happening and how to help him heal would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!! Michael: Hi Dr Cabral, what is the difference between collagen protein and bone broth protein? Thank you for tuning into today's Cabral HouseCall and be sure to check back tomorrow where we answer more of our community’s questions!  - - - Show Notes & Resources: http://StephenCabral.com/1765 - - - Get Your Question Answered: http://StephenCabral.com/askcabral   - - - Dr. Cabral's New Book, The Rain Barrel Effect https://amzn.to/2H0W7Ge - - - Join the Community & Get Your Questions Answered: http://CabralSupportGroup.com - - -  Dr. Cabral’s Most Popular At-Home Lab Tests: > Complete Minerals & Metals Test (Test for mineral imbalances & heavy metal toxicity) - - - > Complete Candida, Metabolic & Vitamins Test (Test for 75 biomarkers including yeast & bacterial gut overgrowth, as well as vitamin levels) - - - > Complete Stress, Mood & Metabolism Test (Discover your complete thyroid, adrenal, hormone, vitamin D & insulin levels) - - - > Complete Stress, Sleep & Hormones Test (Run your adrenal & hormone levels) - - - > Complete Food Sensitivity Test (Find out your hidden food sensitivities) - - - > Complete Omega-3 & Inflammation Test (Discover your levels of inflammation related to your omega-6 to omega-3 levels) - - - > View all Functional Medicine lab tests (View all Functional Medicine lab tests you can do right at home for you and your family!)

What makes you happy Brandon? What’s your view on the link between employee and customer happiness? Why are global brands using happiness in their marketing? What brands are using happiness well?

Brandon Fiegoli is the Product Manager at Butterfly Network, a company whose aim is to democratize medical imaging across the globe. The ultrasound probe they have developed is much more compact than the industry standard machines. It sends imaging files directly to your iOS or Android smartphone via their app allowing for a quicker, more flexible process.Butterfly Network launched their compact ultrasound probe and integrated app last October. Their launch was global, initially covering 11 non-English languages and 13 countries. Now they have clearance in 23 countries and their product is helping physicians battle the Covid-19 pandemic. Brandon joins us today to discuss the translation from start to launch and shares his advice for others looking ahead at doing the same.Topics: [01.14] About Brandon and Butterfly Network. [03.48] Why create this product and what applications does it have? [09.25] Why did you need language translation? [13.03] What had to be translated to meet regulatory requirements? [14.22] What were your top priorities for the translation project? [15.55] What preparation did you make going into the translation? [18.04] What technological challenges did you face? [20.24] What was your timeline for the translation? [21.50] What aspects of the process and collaborating with Smartling made it work? [23.50] What happened after launch and what happens in the future regarding translation? [32.54] How do you report back to the team about translation progress? [34.19] What kind of results have you had since launch? [35.24] What do you wish you had done differently? [38.09] How did you choose which markets to launch in? Resources and Links: Butterfly Network Website Brandon Fiegoli on Linkedin Smartling Website Full transcript which almost certainly contains typos (thanks for the forgiveness!)Announcer:You're listening to The Loc Show, presented by Smartling.Adrian:Hey, what's up, everyone. It's Adrian Cohn from Smartling. Thank you for listening to The Loc Show. My guest today is Brandon Fiegoli. Fiegoli, an Italian name. Brandon is a product manager at Butterfly Network. Butterfly Network is a digital health company whose mission is to democratize healthcare by making medical imaging universally accessible and affordable.Adrian:They have this beautiful handheld device that is able to create images that render on your iPhone or Android. Brandon is also a standup guy with a great story. So, let's get into it and thanks again for listening.Adrian:Hey, Brandon, welcome to The Loc Show. How is it going?Brandon:It is great. Thank you so much for having me.Adrian:I am pleased to have you. You're such a fantastic person to connect with. We've had the opportunity to chat on a number of occasions. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you right now and who do you work with?Brandon:Sure. So, I'm sitting in my apartment. I'm in Manhattan right now. Lived in Manhattan, and outside of Manhattan my whole life. At the moment, I work with Butterfly Network. I'm on our product team there. I lead a couple of our different product offerings, focus really across all of our core platforms, so Android, iOS, cloud, work on our international expansion, really a very broad role that has gotten me involved very, very deeply into our translation systems.Adrian:So, what exactly is Butterfly Networks?Brandon:Butterfly Network is a company that builds a handheld ultrasound system. And most people are familiar with ultrasound. If they've had a child, sometimes if you go into an emergency room. Hopefully you're not there too much, you may get an ultrasound. Ultrasound is a really, really cool technology. I think in the last 10 or 15 years, it's gained a lot of popularity largely because it's quick and also because it's safe. And I would say, most importantly because it's safe.Brandon:If you think about an x-ray or a CT scan, they're also quick, they bring that ionizing radiation. And with ultrasound, you can get a window into the human body with mere sound waves.Adrian:That's amazing. So, the innovation that Butterfly Network brought to the market though is that this thing is it's a handheld device, right?Brandon:It is. So, I'll share the story in just a second. I'll pull it out. It lives in this case. This is a handheld device that fits in my pocket. So, let me just grab the device here. Here you go. This is the entire ultrasound probe. This is actually a special probe, the butterfly probe is a special one because it actually works with your entire body.Brandon:In a traditional ultrasound system, there's usually a large cart. They get wheeled in as you imagine your 1980s computer to look on a cart, and they usually have three probes with them, a linear phase and a curved transducer. Our entire probe is very different because it actually uses semiconductor technology to function as all three of those probes.Brandon:So, we could dive into the semiconductors if you'd like or we can just keep going.Adrian:It sounds really interesting and what I think is particularly cool though is that this is a mobile device and it's corded. So you can actually plug it into your phone?Brandon:It is. So, the device comes in lightning and USB-C, works with both iOS and Android devices. It's incredibly flexible. Some people use it on tablets. Some people use it on their phones. We fit the entire spectrum.Adrian:So, what's the point of developing such a product? I mean, isn't what we had before sufficient?Brandon:Great question. So, we talked about first of all the size of ultrasound carts. You wheeled them in, but that's not really where the problem exists. The problem exists in their cost today. Their cost and the ease of use of those systems. So, if you think about a traditional ultrasound system, you may be able to get a used system on the order of $30,000.Brandon:But if you go out there and you buy some of the most advanced cardiac imaging systems, they could be upwards of $200,000. And I don't have to tell you this, but you would imagine that in many parts of the world, and even in many parts of the US, it's simply not feasible to buy one of those systems.Brandon:So, you think about it, an emergency room today may have one. A really modern very busy emergency room may have three or four. In a smaller setting, you may have one or you may have none. Now, we talked about this a lot as actually being able to replace that stethoscope. So, 200 years ago or so, you started with the stethoscope. You could hear into the human body. You start to hear if somebody has pneumonia, an arrhythmia and now, 200 years later in 2020, we're able to look into the human body. That's sort of remarkable.Adrian:It is remarkable. And because you have both an iOS app and an Android app, the image is rendered in the moment on the screen of your phone?Brandon:Absolutely. Plug the device in, sign into the app, plug in the probe and you're ready to go. We like to say pick a preset, not a probe. So, the probe actually does all the work for you in regards to focusing, in regards to adjusting the proper frequency whether it's deeper in your body, whether it's more superficial, all controlled by software.Brandon:Just for anybody out there listening, just to compare that sort of with traditional ultrasound technology, this is typically done with piezoelectric crystals. So, those are actually crystals that are grown in a lab. When you pass a current over them, they vibrate and that's how you generate the sound waves.Brandon:In our device, we're still using sound waves. However, we're using the technology that a digital camera may use today except we've added little silicon drums on the top of it and when that electric current gets passed, those drums actually vibrate to generate sound waves. We have about 9,000 microdrums on the transducer itself.Brandon:A traditional ultrasound machine has anywhere between 90 and 190 crystals. And because it's all software controlled, we can adjust how those little drums on the probe resonate. This is really where the innovation started, all with the semiconductor chip and then we sort of have built out the ecosystem with the various software platforms, with the storage, with all of that.Adrian:Wow, that technology allows you to look at a whole range of different things inside the human body to reveal whether or not a person is healthy.Brandon:Absolutely. So, I think at the most positive use of ultrasound, we talked about it a lot with obstetrics. So, pregnant women. One of the most positive experiences they can have is going and seeing their growing child. So, I think a lot of people have very fond memories of ultrasound in that sense.Brandon:The other side of the spectrum, people are using ultrasound for everything. Cardiac arrest, it's been very popular for looking at people's lungs. We call them B-lines for the COVID outbreak. The uses are sort of endless. Things like inflamed tendons, inflamed muscles, even ocular scanning. Basically anything, and when you think about the portability and the cost, and not necessarily having to go, have radiology bring you to go get an x-ray, it really is quite exciting.Adrian:That's awesome. I love technology and I specifically love medical technology. My grandfather was a surgeon. My great grandfather was a surgeon. My mother is in the medical publishing space. So, it's always like really interesting to me to see all the advances in science and technology that enabled doctors, physicians, people to take scans of their bodies or to learn more about their health or condition.Adrian:I'm particularly interested in how as COVID-19 became this global healthcare crisis, Butterfly Network was able to utilize its technology to help people diagnose themselves or others with the infection. Is that right?Brandon:That is correct. I wouldn't go as far as to say diagnosing. As people were getting more ill, we're able to go and actually take a look at the lungs and get a better sense of what's happening. We still are obviously relying on the actual test. However, this was an incredible tool and remains a really incredible tool to track how serious people are doing.Brandon:Often time, someone may say, "Hey, I'm not doing that bad or I don't feel that badly." When the labs come back, when the imaging comes back, you see something different and vice versa. So, this is just a massively helpful tool. When you think about COVID also, one of the big things they talk a lot about is contamination and the spread of it obviously.Brandon:Talk a lot about getting a CT scan for somebody's chest, those rooms that those CT scanners are in may be done for 45 minutes or an hour between patients while they get sanitized. With this, you drop it in a probe cover, covers the entire cord, covers the mobile device. You're ripping off that covering, you're patient to patient very quickly.Brandon:In COVID where every minute matter, this really became an incredibly powerful and versatile tool.Adrian:So, where, Brandon, does language translation fit into all of these?Brandon:It's a great question. So, language translation is an essential part of our business, I would say. So, if you go all the way to the top and you think about our mission from our founder, Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, his mission, our mission is to democratize medical imaging.Brandon:And to do that meant a couple of things. The first meant getting some groundbreaking technology. If you are going to democratize something, you probably need to do a little bit differently than it's being done today. So, they've been working on this technology for six or seven years.Brandon:The other thing meant, "Okay, now that we have the technology, how do you share it with the world?" And that's everything from education to commercialization and everything in between that. So, when you think about that and we've talked about this before, you really think about, okay, if we're going to give education, there has to be multiple languages. Not everybody around the world speaks English.Brandon:If you're going to sell in other languages, you obviously need to have information that's relevant, that's correctly translated all in those languages every other area of the business. So, from shipping, making sure that people's shipping information is communicated to them in a way that they understand.Brandon:I think we take for granted quite a bit that fortunately many people in the world speak English. However, democratizing this technology really means we hope to be in rural insert X country. And you could imagine that in those countries, they don't speak English. I guess the other point that I would be remiss if I mention was just about the regulations.Brandon:So, we are a medical device. We are FDA cleared, and obviously, we have CE mark and clearances in every country we ship in but part of that clearance, part of those regulations for us, especially as a medical device is that our labeling, that our information for use is in the appropriate language. And again, that's for safety reasons.Adrian:Yeah, so when did this translation journey start for you? What was it like? How long ago was it?Brandon:Yeah. So we started this, I guess, almost a year ago now. I've been asked to look at our international expansion as a company. So, everything from how do we store data safely in the cloud in other countries through how do we ship these devices and make them appear on people's doorsteps. We are sold largely via an ecommerce model, so unlike a traditional ultrasound system today, you're going online. You're certifying that you're a medical professional and you're paying and that device arrives at your door.Brandon:So, there was a lot of work streams that went on here and one of the big ones is obviously translation. And it sits, as I just described, over all of those. So, part of my role was overseeing that entire project. So, at that point, as we started looking at this, we realized it was going to be critical to our success and frankly, critical to even being able to do it.Brandon:The place we always start is at regulatory. So you can go to market and do a bad job marketing something but you're not hurting or breaking any rules. You may just not achieve your goals. For us, it really started with how do we legally sell this device? How do we meet the regulations so that we're not getting in trouble and we're not hurting anyone? And that started with regulatory.Brandon:From there, it moved on to things like data privacy and then it moved on to other work streams, how do we sell it, how do we market it, what do our websites need to look like? But our first goal is meeting those regulations and really finding a translation vendor who is going to be able to run with us.Adrian:What content did you have to translate to meet regulatory demands?Brandon:So, the information we have to translate is what they call the Information For Use, the IFU. And like many guidances you see today, it doesn't get hyper-specific. So, it says any directions that are needed to use the device in a safe and effective way.Brandon:For us, it became really important. Obviously, the instruction manual was the first place we looked. And then after that, of course, the UI of the system.Adrian:The mobile or the-Brandon:And mobile app and/or desktop app. After that, everything was sort of from there, it was about how do we commercialize it and how do we get our messaging into the right languages.Adrian:You started with how to use the product and actual product content. That was the baseline that you needed to translate to meet regulatory concerns. And then after you accomplish or started thinking about how to tackle that, you would move on to go to market content?Brandon:That's actually right.Adrian:Cool. That's still a pretty significant volume of work, I would imagine. Like I get products all the time and sometimes the user manuals are super thin and sometimes even for a simple device, they're really thick. What were some of your priorities when you started to consider how to go about accomplishing this project? What was important to you?Brandon:Yes. I think there were a couple of things and to be honest, not all of them were apparent to me when we started. I think first and foremost, we needed to make sure that the translations would be of high quality. So, again, if you think about the regulatory side of things and just the quality side of things as a brand, focusing more on the quality and the regulatory means that the translations are accurate. It means that people are "brought up to speed" with your product. What are they translating? Is it giving context making sure that they're familiar with it?Brandon:So, ours is obviously in the medical space. There's a lot of big words in our app. There's a lot of very scientific words in our app. Just last week, we were translating stuff about our fetal calculation packages which are the short name would be OB calc, so for obstetrics calculations, for measuring the size of babies, there was all kinds of abbreviations in there.Brandon:So, having translators that could work with that and understand it and ask questions when they needed to was really critical for us. So, the first thing was making sure that people had the right domain expertise. The other things were things like having a team that we could tightly integrate with and basically become part of our team.Brandon:There's nothing worse than buying a service and then you're only told, "Hey, the only way I can get in touch with these people is file a support ticket." Like that, at the volume we were running, at the rate we were running with, it would never work that way frankly.Adrian:Yeah. What were some of the things that you had to prepare as you went out to start translating all of those content? You talked about having two mobile apps, an iOS app, an Android app, you have a help center that you needed to translate and also support documentation that it sounds like it was user manual, maybe offline content.Brandon:It is offline content, yeah.Adrian:Offline content.Brandon:We did it in phases when you talk about that. Where we really started was two things. We've spoken with a couple of vendors. We had even tried a couple of passes just with some vendors in the industry as we're honing in. We wanted to understand a little bit about how they work and nobody on the team was particularly familiar with translations.Brandon:So, we would send out little bits of content and we would get them back and we would think about the experience. I'll be honest, we didn't have a lot of time. So, just given our company goals, given our volume of work, we had to move fast. When we got to Smartling, all of those things that I just mentioned, the expertise in the domain area, the reliable support team and I would say they sort of swarmed us. They sort of encapsulated us and said, "Here's the plan. Here's how we're going to implement this." And it worked.Brandon:And then obviously, the technical expertise was a big one for us. So, I personally had never thought about how this really works, but certainly putting a bunch of strings in a spreadsheet, sending them off to get translated and getting those back and pumping them in is not how it works.Brandon:There's a lot of really complex integrations that need to work seamlessly if you want this to just become part of your everyday process.Adrian:That is sort of like a requisite for a fast-moving company because the way I sometimes think about translation is it's a very layered process. From the surface of your phone like you see one language but if you turn it to the side at an isometric sort of view point, there are a lot of layers that go behind it that are each of the different languages that I don't use. I speak English.Adrian:But the Spanish user of your tool or the German user or the French user of your tool, they need to access the versions of the content that are behind the English version, right? Was that a significant technology challenge for you all to think about solving?Brandon:I will be honest. I'm thankful I wasn't the person who had to do that. I was the person sort of overseeing it. If you talked about the steps we took, so we found somebody who ... We got recommendations internally. We had one of our engineers actually recommend Smartling as they had worked with them in another company. We got, I call it swarmed on the overview. We got so many questions answered.Brandon:Everything from our quality team, how is this done? Why should I believe that these translators know anything about healthcare? Through how do you guys do your translation and edit steps? Somebody is translating it. Somebody is editing it. So, nothing is getting to us before there's at least two sets of eyes on it. Through people like Sergio as our technical solution architect, going and sitting with our engineers and looking at how our strings were set up.Brandon:For the year before we started doing this, the engineers always said to me, "No problem." When we're ready to translate this, we were wrapping our strings. We wrapped them in a special ID that says, "They're ready to translate." I said, "Great." We decided we're going to run a test. We sent something up to Smartling. They sent us back what they called pseudo-translated files, and those files basically take all the strings in the app and they doubled them.Brandon:And we found out two really important things. One, there is about 10% of the app that we just didn't have wrapped in those strings, in those IDs. So that was a bit of a project to find those. That was great, solved pretty quick. The second one was more of the important one. And that was what happens to the UI when German is doubly as long as English?Brandon:And at that point, we found out there were places were things broke. They didn't wrap properly. Buttons were pushed off the screen. That was another project that we implemented and we went through and we took an inventory of everything that broke. At that point, we had decided to go with Smartling. We were moving along on the API integrations and then we really begin to work through automation.Brandon:How do we automatically send those strings up? How do we pull them back? How do we merge that code back into our code base? And then I guess the other one would be what you just mentioned is how do you actually display those on the screen? So that required a couple of changes in our app. But it all happened. It was very quick. It was a little bit stressful but we had a really good core group of people focused on it and I think that that was critical to our success and to meet our very, very aggressive timelines.Adrian:What was the timeline? Because oftentimes, translation does sort of come in, in the last minute, and people like you are expected to make miracles happen and you do because you work hard at it but it can be a very stressful time. What sort of time were you working on?Brandon:I wish I could be lying to you and tell you it was longer. I believe these conversations started late in July and we went live October 1st in 13 countries. So, those translations were actually done, I believe our internal deadline was September 15th, and that was because for all regulatory purposes, did our own QA actually sent devices out to people in those countries and had them run QA on it to make sure everything we were sending to the public was safe and accurate. It came back really cleanly thankfully because I think otherwise it would have been really tight to hit that deadline.Adrian:That is an awfully fast deadline and it makes a whole lot of sense to me that you would have sent that out to experts for quality assurance given the value of the content and the type of content and complexity that it carries. Why do you think it went well?Brandon:I think it went well for a couple of reasons. I'll talk about us first then we can talk about you. Internally, it was a priority. It was not an option, as are many things at Butterfly. It was not an option to fail. So one way or another, that content was going to get translated. Joking aside, what that really translated to was a lot of people focused on it.Brandon:So it was a top engineering priority. It was a top priority to get the contracts with you guys through legal. It was a priority for me to be on top of it every time an issue was opened with the translators to respond to it quickly because we knew if we drop any of these balls, we weren't going to hit our deadline.Brandon:On the Smartling side, you guys really excelled in basically understanding the importance, the significance and then really running with us. And I think a lot of times you don't find that. We had a CS manager. We had a solution architect. We had someone on the language services team. We had our account manager when we realized we left something out of the initial order, we would be able to add that on. It was a really well-oiled operation, I would say, from that front. And there was daily check-ins and things were clicking.Adrian:So, you started this project in July. You finished the initial effort in September, to send devices out so that they could be tested for quality. You got thumbs up from the people who you sent the devices to. You go live with your, how many languages?Brandon:I think we got a bonus because I think we got Austria using Germany's. So I think it was 11 non-English speaking languages. I think we did adoption into English for the UK, and I think it was 13 countries. So, 11 languages, 13 countries.Adrian:Okay, so you've translated content to 11 languages ready to deploy for 13 countries. You deployed this experience in October, what happens next?Brandon:That was really the start of a lot of really exciting chaos. It was a really good problem to have. We had been building excitement for Butterfly to go global for a while. So, at that point, we activated all of our channels, marketing, digital marketing. And at that point, the requests, the sales started coming in for devices and we very quickly became a global operation. But we also learned a ton.Brandon:So, you jumped to the punch a little bit before, but things like our knowledge-base, things like our website and our website was actually part of that initial push. But things like our knowledge-base, things like video content, all of that still had to be translated. And I think one of the things that you and I have spoken about previously is, it's one thing to meet the regulations. It's one thing to launch internationally. But I think to be a global business and a global brand is a totally different ballgame.Brandon:I think it's nice to be able to say, yeah, we excel internationally. But people don't want to read your English content. They don't care. Even if they speak English, they want to see it in their language. It would be like I read a very little bit of Spanish, and even if I could get through the passage, I'm going to be more comfortable with it in my native language.Adrian:It's so interesting that you say that because all I speak is English. And the language translation problem for me is far less visible because English is my native language and so much content is in English. And when I think back as to like when I've been challenged most, it's when I'm forced to try and buy something that's not in English. I'm thinking about like holidays that I've booked in Italy or in Spain, Airbnb's or before Airbnb with a real bnb or a hotel and you're trying to decipher their content, a double bed is that two beds versus like a single bed that's a little ...Adrian:All of those things come into play and it certainly rings true with me that the effort to translate the content does have meaning that may be a little bit harder to understand for those of us that are English native speakers and don't think about language on a daily basis.Brandon:I agree with that fully. And I think we're given a lot of really amazing tools. When I read something when I get an email that's literally in Mandarin and this happens, I'll pop into Google Translate and in five seconds, I have an idea of what that email is saying. But I would say us trying to sell something and say, "Hey, Butterfly is in these countries," or not even, forget selling. Saying, "Hey, Butterfly is in these countries," but not giving the tools for the experience that, "Hey, we're really here and, hey, we've really invested in being here," I think is a whole other discussion in itself. And I think that was really important for us.Adrian:And I want to ask a question about that but before we do, I want to go back for a minute because you said something that really was interesting to me about how when you launched, it was not just that you flipped a switch and all of a sudden your translations were available through the app and on your website. It was a fully integrated company wide effort.Adrian:You're on the product team, you spearheaded and centralized this whole process. What was it like working with all of these different teams to coordinate a launch that's company-wide?Brandon:It was really fun. It was really challenging. I felt like I was running a flight crew at NASA although let's be clear it wasn't that fun. I think the last email I sent out on the night of September 30th, I think the subject line was something like "All Systems Launched."Brandon:So, it was a little bit of everything. It was excitement. It was frustration. It was everything. We're trying to meet regulatory requirements. That's our top company priority, above everything else is don't break the law and don't hurt anyone. Those are, I think, any company's priorities or if they're not, they should be.Brandon:So, make sure we meet our regulatory priorities but then it's things like you're getting pulled from the marketing team. I need this email translated or we need to start doing this. It was really a prioritization thing. We said we can do it all, we just needed to sort of stagger it. And we looked at it and we said, "Okay, regulatory, check." Now, we start getting emails in other languages for support, making sure that we can start to get that content actually sent over to them in ways that they understand. It was a little bit of everything.Brandon:Making sure that we're dealing with sending our shipping information in the right language, getting our quotes translated, it touched really on every bit of the business and I think the one thing we had going for us amongst a lot of things but the really important thing was everybody saw the importance. And while there may have been a lot of challenges, everybody was driving towards expanding imaging, expanding this device to other parts of the world.Adrian:You sure chose a great time to do that.Brandon:I promised it was completely by accident. It is really humbling and exciting to know that our device is making a difference. Our founder, Jonathan, whenever he's in the office, he loves to say he measures our success by the number of lives saved. And for anybody who's in business, I don't know that everybody can do that and I think it's really cool.Brandon:One of the things we love to do is to share those experiences, and a couple of them come in yesterday. And it just makes everybody remember how important all of these is.Adrian:Well, certainly, the product and the mission of the business is quite aspirational and humbling. So that's a really strategic advantage that you have and your colleagues have working there and serving the global community. I think that's really cool. The effort that you had to undertake to get this initial push out the door or the "All Systems Go" email that you got to send, that was just the beginning. I mean, you were able to get through that sprint. But that's not where the story ends, I assume.Brandon:It's not. Translation and localization today, I don't want to say are a part of our workflow, I would say are very close to becoming. So, on the technical side, things are running smoothly, I mean almost no thought which is great. The only thought is, "Hey, do we make sure that we merge all those strings before we send out the app?"Brandon:On the marketing side of things, things are really, really close. And that's not for lack of trying, it's that we are moving so quickly that the only thing I have to keep reminding that team is I need 24 to 48 hours to get that stuff translated. And to be honest, I think I've pushed the Smartling team really, really hard and they have not yet disappointed. I hope they don't hear this.Adrian:They probably will, Brandon.Brandon:I probably shouldn't have said that. They always deliver it and what I'm really saying is just getting people to remember there are humans looking at these strings and we can do it really quick. Just give us 24 or 48 hours before you plan to send this thing out and you'll get a really great result.Adrian:You're exactly right, like there is a human process here that has to be considered. But what you're also sharing with me is that you're still translating a lot of content. It's not like you had this initial push and then you're done. You're translating on a daily basis, weekly basis?Brandon:Absolutely. So, the way our tech systems work, actually every time code, we use GitHub for it to manage our code. Every time, what we call pool request, which is a bit of code gets pushed into our system, it actually triggers a process and that process actually calls the Smartling systems and sends those strings.Brandon:Every time every night, I believe it is, we automatically call Smartling and we say, "Bring these strings back, anything that's been translated that day." And that's where we talk about that app automation working.Brandon:On the support side of the house are knowledge-based just actually in the last few weeks. We've set that up to fully automate. We rewrote the whole thing and it's just about done. I think tomorrow everything will be back. And then we have some more ad hoc stuff. We have subtitles. I'm working with our video marketing team. We're working to get a bunch of our videos subtitled. We've done a little of it already. We're trying to scale that up.Brandon:We use the GDN, Global Delivery Network, to handle our websites, so making sure that that content, the right content is served. That's something that just runs because we're doing our user manual, I would be hard-pressed to find a service that we're not using at Smartling.Adrian:So, how do you report back to your team on the efficacy of this translation program that you're running for Butterfly?Brandon:Yeah. I think I said this jokingly to you before, the best report that I can give, no report, which is nothing is broken, nobody has said the word is wrong. We have forgotten a string, like that is my goal from a quality perspective. From an overall perspective, what do I say to people? I tell people all of our tech systems are translated. If we add a new piece of content, so the announcement that I'll be making next week when we launch it is that our knowledge base is translated.Brandon:It is now so ingrained in our processes that there's not a lot to say thankfully. And I think this is one of those things that is the less you say, the better. I don't think anybody is going to say, "Oh, wow, that's in French." But if it wasn't in French, I promise you we would hear about it. Just like if you go to Amazon.com, you're not going, "Wow, thankfully, they put it in English," but if the only way you could get to Amazon.com was in French, I bet you your top complaint would be that's it all in French.Adrian:So, measuring in terms of the number of people who can access your product or service is one of the most important benchmarks that you have as a company for language translation?Brandon:Absolutely. I think that's really well stated.Adrian:So, I think this is all really fascinating. The products now are available effective in October. How have the results been? Have you been able to ship devices around the world with some level of success and you get app downloads so that people are using those devices? Are you tracking this?Brandon:We have. It's obviously really important to our mission. So I believe we have global clearance in 22 countries, 23 possibly. And these devices are having more impact that we can ever imagine. You probably saw us tweet out the other day. Our probes are in every corner of the globe on the Mars desert testing, understanding what they can do in space. I know they went to Base Camp at Mount Everest. Whether they went up higher than that, I'm not sure.Brandon:Every corner of the globe, and it's amazing to me where we see people we can sell in those countries and deliver it at scale. But when you hear about these stories of people taking their probes with them missions all over the world, that's really where things get very interesting and I think the most exciting for me.Adrian:Yeah. Brandon, when you look back on all the success that you and Butterfly have had in delivering solution to all of those different countries, what do you wish you had done differently?Brandon:What do I wish we had done different? That's a great question. I wish we had more time. Anyone listening and any company who's about to do this, one of the reasons that we were very thoughtful about it is because we know that taking on translations, taking on localization, taking on support in other languages is a new thing that you have to account for. It's not always easy and I think having some time to develop that strategy, having some time to educate the company, your peers, your coworkers about it would be really important.Brandon:I think the other thing would just be to know a little bit more about how translation works. So, one of the things that was exciting to us about Smartling was the language pre-flight we did. It was a little painful for me in the sense that I had to go through our app and actually capture screenshots of all of our error states and everything. But being able to send up that context to the translators so that they can say, "Oh, this is what the word means in this context," improved our quality and actually, I think shortened our time to deploy so much.Brandon:I think having a platform, a transparent platform that I can go in and click through. We started this session talking about how if I had to do this over email, it would have never worked. I mean, how many emails a day could I send versus how many times do I go into the Smartling platform and actually look at something or adjust something? Doing it without that, I think, would be impossible. I would urge everyone to think deeply about their technology and the technology that they want in their partner. I think those would be the big things.Adrian:The first takeaway that you have, I think, is it's almost like a poetic one which is it's more than just setting up the integrations, translating the content and getting it out to the users. It's a commitment to your business and to your customer base that you are going to support them no matter what. It's a lot easier, let's put it in another way, Brandon. It's probably a lot easier to say you will support a new market than it is to take away that market.Brandon:I agree with that. The one thing I did know about translation when we started all these is once you start, you can't stop because people do notice. And you hold a commitment to your customers, to your users, to your patients that that content will remain high quality and frequent. And all of the things that you could imagine are really sort of prominent company.Adrian:And this is a question that probably would have been well-suited at the beginning but how did you choose the markets that you currently support?Brandon:Yeah. It's a great question. So, we looked at a couple of things. Like everything, it was multi-faceted. So everything from number of physicians and medical professionals, so looking at the biggest impact we could make, places where we were able to get regulatory clearance.Brandon:So for example, Europe, everyone in Europe or all countries in Europe use the CE mark. CE mark was something we had worked for, for many, many months. And we knew it was going to be really exciting because when you got CE mark, it opened all Europe. It also opened to all of Australia and New Zealand.Brandon:So, impact regulatory clearance developed ultrasound programs so we know that we're still in early days and we have a long way to go on how do you educate these users and how do you move past just ultrasound experts but also enabling people who are not familiar with ultrasound. And in a lot of the European markets and the Australian market, it's quite developed. So, this got a jumpstart to this democratization and now obviously, we circle back and are deeply committed and deeply focused on that educational aspect.Adrian:Wow, Brandon, I feel like I've learned so much from this conversation. And I am so impressed by all the amazing work that you and your team have put into delivering this solution to the global marketplace. Thank you, thank you for being on The Loc Show.Brandon:Of course, thank you for having me. It's fun.Adrian:Yeah, it was great to have you. And we're going to make sure that people know how to find you. The URL for your company is?Brandon:Butterflynetwork.com.Adrian:Butterflynetwork.com?Brandon:Yes.Adrian:And I really encourage everyone to go to their website and just check it out. First of all, for those of you who are marketers here, they've got a beautiful website. There's great product marketing. You can really understand the solution that they offer, see images of the product, see images of the image that the product shows on the mobile app. There's just so much cool stuff there. Brandon, we'll make sure that people can find you too on LinkedIn.Brandon:Perfect. Yeah, feel free to reach out. Lots of info to share, a really fun journey, really excited. There's more coming, so stay tuned.Adrian:We will do that. Thanks again, Brandon.Brandon:Thank you.Adrian:I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Brandon as much as I did. If you like this episode of The Loc Show, hit the Subscribe button so the next episode will be waiting for you. And if you loved this podcast, please leave a review. Five-star reviews go a long way. If you're not ready to give a five-star review, give our next episode a shot. We appreciate you're listening. If you have any feedback or want us to interview one of your favorite people in localization, just email me, acohn@smartling.com.

Want to learn from two guys who have weathered several real estate market cycles and come out on top? You’re in the right place! In this episode, Brandon and David sit down with Russell Gray and Robert Helms, longtime hosts of the Real Estate Radio Guys program. In this wide-ranging discussion, Russell and Robert cover a TON of subjects, from house hacking to investing in overseas resorts. The guys share the lessons they learned from the 2008 crash (hint: don’t rely too heavily on credit) and explain how they’re preparing for the next one. They break down how multifamily investing is just like running a business, and why hiring an assistant is the most important first step when scaling up. Russell and Robert also tell us why having an A-student mentality can hinder new investors (and make them a target for gurus), and why you don’t need to know every step in order to just get started. You’ll learn why Robert is about to make his 137th trip to Belize, why he and Russell stopped investing in Mexico and Australia, and why you should design your own personal investment philosophy, too. If you’re a big-picture thinker interested in using the tax code to your advantage and staying on top of market cycles, this show will blow your mind. Listen here or on your favorite podcast app, rate and review us, and subscribe so you won’t miss the next one! In This Episode We Cover: How these guys inspired Brandon What an entrepreneur does How gurus take advantage of hungry new investors How they are preparing for the next real estate downturn Their strategy for building big wealth in other countries How they learned the lesson about needing sufficient reserves the hard way What to do when available credit goes away Why they invest in resorts Where we are in the market cycle Why they are locking in long-term debt right now What they learned from the 2008 crash How to prepare and win for the next downturn What an opportunity zone is and how to use them Why they study global economics And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast Robert Kiyosaki BiggerPockets Podcast 052: Buying Apartment Complexes, Raising Millions, and Building a Profitable Business with Ken McElroy Peak Prosperity Brandon's Instagram David's Instagram

On this episode, the panel and I take the time to answer your questions for this episode. I'm positive everyone will be asking more questions as the show moves forward but these questions below we're asked a few days ago on my Instagram account, DM'ed and emailed to me directly. Got a question for the panel? and we're currently not live streaming, ask the question below https://CheapHomeGrow.com/ask Questions For The Panel Are Coming From Here: https://cheaphomegrow.com/gwmfg14/ Questions: (These questions were asked a few days ago via my IG account and website) https://www.instagram.com/p/ByGNhIPh_hC/ 1. Poostain3000: I am new to growing in general and am listening to your advice for growing in coco. I am having a problem right now with rising EC in the media. For example, my input EC was just under 1000, and my runoff EC was at 1700. Now, I know you recommend frequent fertigation to combat EC rise, if I'm not mistaken, but after trying watering more frequently (daily vs. every other), I noticed some algae starting to grow on the surface of the Coco. How can I water daily to fix my EC but yet not frequently enough to stop algae? 2. ramman_cann: Really enjoy the show! My question is about making feminized seed. I've got some Comatose bag seed that I'm growing, and I'd like to try making some fem seeds from one of the ladies. I've been considering using colloidal silver, but there's a lot of varying methods on the forums. What's the best ppm strength of CS to use...and when should you start spraying the chosen branch?? Thanks 3. premiumsply: How can you ride de VPD chart and talk a little bit about the emerson effect, love the show btw 4. U.K. Grower: Really appreciate the content and information provided on this platform. I'm asking about E.C and what should be an acceptable level during veg and flower period. This also ties into the question if smaller plants have different E.C to larger cannabis plants. 5. watchmegrowbud: Is trichome color the best indicator for when to harvest? I’m getting close to my first harvest and have 2 different strains. The indicas are looking more ready than the sativa. I don’t want to mess up my harvest time. Thanks in advance! 6. sammytoledo92: I’ve come across a lot of information but want to try reaching out to ppl like me learning and on a budget lol so I thought I’d ask. What’s the best grow light LED or HPS? Also what watts and lumens are best for veg and flower for the best price. Thanks, Cannabis community. 7. j0e_0ddway: Would you make a super soil out of mostly coco coir? 8. simonforgas_: Just starting out and was wondering if someone could give me any advice on which decent LED light to use for my 4x4 grow tent... for the amount that I spent on beans I want a decent light that produces quality flowers. Thanks in advance.. 9. jay973: Ask @drmjcoco what wetting agent he uses now since there’s no more SM-90.. 10. grow.start: My question is about curing! How can I control the humidity in the jars? Any curing tips would be great l! Thanks, Shane keep up the awesome work! 11. bombglass: Ever used a green grow led light? 12. electric_lettuce_: (MissNewtyGrows) What day in flower, is best to defoliate? 13. honeybear_casey: (Brandon) What nutrient line and medium did everyone use on their very first crop....fox farms and roots organic 707 here 14. nastynug420: Isn’t starlight the same as a light leak (mild and indirect)? So why would that affect an indoor grow? --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/cheaphomegrow/support

On this episode, the panel and I take the time to answer your questions for this episode. I'm positive everyone will be asking more questions as the show moves forward but these questions below we're asked a few days ago on my Instagram account, DM'ed and emailed to me directly. Got a question for the panel? and we're currently not live streaming, ask the question below https://CheapHomeGrow.com/ask Questions For The Panel Are Coming From Here: https://cheaphomegrow.com/gwmfg14/ Questions: (These questions were asked a few days ago via my IG account and website) https://www.instagram.com/p/ByGNhIPh_hC/ 1. Poostain3000: I am new to growing in general and am listening to your advice for growing in coco. I am having a problem right now with rising EC in the media. For example, my input EC was just under 1000, and my runoff EC was at 1700. Now, I know you recommend frequent fertigation to combat EC rise, if I'm not mistaken, but after trying watering more frequently (daily vs. every other), I noticed some algae starting to grow on the surface of the Coco. How can I water daily to fix my EC but yet not frequently enough to stop algae? 2. ramman_cann: Really enjoy the show! My question is about making feminized seed. I've got some Comatose bag seed that I'm growing, and I'd like to try making some fem seeds from one of the ladies. I've been considering using colloidal silver, but there's a lot of varying methods on the forums. What's the best ppm strength of CS to use...and when should you start spraying the chosen branch?? Thanks 3. premiumsply: How can you ride de VPD chart and talk a little bit about the emerson effect, love the show btw 4. U.K. Grower: Really appreciate the content and information provided on this platform. I'm asking about E.C and what should be an acceptable level during veg and flower period. This also ties into the question if smaller plants have different E.C to larger cannabis plants. 5. watchmegrowbud: Is trichome color the best indicator for when to harvest? I’m getting close to my first harvest and have 2 different strains. The indicas are looking more ready than the sativa. I don’t want to mess up my harvest time. Thanks in advance! 6. sammytoledo92: I’ve come across a lot of information but want to try reaching out to ppl like me learning and on a budget lol so I thought I’d ask. What’s the best grow light LED or HPS? Also what watts and lumens are best for veg and flower for the best price. Thanks, Cannabis community. 7. j0e_0ddway: Would you make a super soil out of mostly coco coir? 8. simonforgas_: Just starting out and was wondering if someone could give me any advice on which decent LED light to use for my 4x4 grow tent... for the amount that I spent on beans I want a decent light that produces quality flowers. Thanks in advance.. 9. jay973: Ask @drmjcoco what wetting agent he uses now since there’s no more SM-90.. 10. grow.start: My question is about curing! How can I control the humidity in the jars? Any curing tips would be great l! Thanks, Shane keep up the awesome work! 11. bombglass: Ever used a green grow led light? 12. electric_lettuce_: (MissNewtyGrows) What day in flower, is best to defoliate? 13. honeybear_casey: (Brandon) What nutrient line and medium did everyone use on their very first crop....fox farms and roots organic 707 here 14. nastynug420: Isn’t starlight the same as a light leak (mild and indirect)? So why would that affect an indoor grow?

He’s 29 but and doing what successful folks in their 40s and 50s do. He is an Emmy Award Winning Producer and Co-Host of SuccessinYourCity.com Brandon T Adams is the Man...  young man.. On his talk with Manny Patrick, Brandon talks about importance of relationships, meaning of success, what being human gets you, by what means he built his brand, where his best ideas came from and much more. Guest Highlights Brandon T. Adams is a serial entrepreneur, Co-Host and one of two Executive Producers of Ambitious Adventures, a reality television program focused on the compelling stories of young entrepreneurs around the country. Working with the Napoleon Hill Foundation for the film Think and Grow Rich: The Legacy, he is the youngest person to be featured in the film. In addition to his T.V. and film work, he is the host of the influential business podcast Live to Grind and has been the guest on over 100 shows. Brandon and his team at Accelerant Media Group work with high-profile clients like Kevin Harrington, John Lee Dumas, the Napoleon Hill Foundation, and others on successful crowd funding campaigns (raising over $1.5 million dollars in the past year), branding, PR, and digital marketing. What we talk about: What it is like to be getting married and what other people who're already married to success learn about it Brandom’s upbringing where he had parents that were very committed and loving who raised him correctly- being the reason for all his present ability Why his name is Brandon T Adams, why not just Brandon Adams What are 'deals' according to Brandon What does Brandon do when he hits a wall; when he takes these big chances and risks, what does he do to pivot out and not stay in a negative space Does Brandon ever have a hard time getting out of bed What is Brandon still scared of What's on Brandon's bucket list Impactful Quotes: “Success does not mean a shit if I don't have a person I love next me to share with“ --- Brandon “When you're married or in a relationship with another entrepreneur: it is not like just having another relationship, it's very different“ --- Brandon “If you marry someone-- that's the person you're to be with in sickness and in health“ --- Brandon “Your significant other will make you or break you, be able to decide your future“ --- Brandon “Whatever the mind can't believe, it can't achieve” --- Napoleon Hill “Success is when you set a specific goal and you achieve it“ --- Brandon “The more humanized you can be, show who you are as a human; the more attraction you're going to get“ --- Brandon “If you're trying to cut corners even on a small court, it's going to hit you hard maybe even two or three years later“ --- Brandon “When you do things that are lined with morality and you're doing good and working hard; good things will happen“ --- Brandon “If you have even the slightest hesitation for what you're offering and you don't 100% believe in your product; then you cannot sell it“ --- Brandon “How do you connect with great people: add value and help them make money“ --- Brandon “I did it all by building relationships up, investing in mentors' relationships building my brand“ --- Brandon “I made people money, and after doing this enough at a high level, people started reaching out to me“ --- Brandon “How you start your day will decide the rest of your day“ --- Brandon “My best ideas have come from the gym“ --- Brandon “I just want to make sure I'm the most efficient with what I do“ --- Brandon Be in touch with the Guest Facebook:  www.facebook.com/brandon.adams.73 Instagram: brandontadams Web: http://www.SuccessinYourCity.com/ http://BrandonTAdams.com/ http://LivetoGrind.com/

Brandon: "What do you want the description to be?"  Jackie: "I don't know, maybe something about Jesus?"  Well, here it is... Jesus is good and so is His word.    facebook.com/beyouwithjackiemoore twitter.com/jackieeemoore instagram.com/jackiejmoore jackiemoore.org  

In this episode, I answer a collection of random questions.  Hire Kyle as your coach: http://www.kylehuntfitness.com/services/ Connect with Kyle:  http://www.kylehuntfitness.com/ Instagram: @huntfitness YouTube: @HuntFitnessTV Questions: Sean: If I’m training first thing in the morning and my goal is mass gain (hypertrophy) should I try to get in a good amount of carbs the night before? Or any nutrition recommendations? Charlie: I train at 2am – 3am before going to work. I don’t eat until noon – 8pm. Should I get something in me after that early AM training? Or is it alright to wait until noon? I’ve been waiting and my body and stomach handle it well. Brandon: What does a current day of eating look like for you? Samuel: How come we don’t see more IFBB pros especially the men’s categories using a flexible dieting approach? You see more and more women doing it but not men? Austin: You talk about flexible dieting and tracking macros a lot, is there ever a time to follow a structured meal plan? Gil: How do you prepare top sirloin so it’s not so tough to chew? Last time I grilled it, mediumish doneness, it was not easy to chew. Trey: How long did you train people in person before you segmented into the online business? Also, did you have a large social media presence when you initially started the online business? When you do your bodybuilding accessories do you worry about RPE, train to failure or just chase a pump in some cases? Shawn: Hey Kyle, how often would you recommend someone train in the higher rep ranges for the main lifts (5+ reps)? The reason I ask is I feel I am big enough for my height (5'11) and simply just need to get stronger for my weight class which is the u105kg. Thanks, Kyle. Adam: How do you balance between old-school methods and new age research? Justin: If you were not in the fitness industry what would you be doing right now? Dylan: What are your favorite books, podcasts, and exercise in the gym? Will: When you go out to a bar, what do you drink? Mitch: Powerlifting has grown in popularity so much in recent years, what do you think is the future is for the sport? Luke: Do you waste time on anything unproductive? Miles: What has been the biggest challenge being a dad?    Get Strong Now with the Absolute Strength Powerlifting Program:  http://www.kylehuntfitness.com/absolute-strength/   Get 10% OFF PR Breaker Materia Pre Workout: DISCOUNT CODE: “hunt10” at https://www.prbreaker.com/   Take your mobility to the next level with a Mobility Wod Subscription DISCOUNT CODE: “Kyle15” at http://bit.ly/MWODkyle *Or just get 10 days FREE to try it out.        

Next Level Leadership course courses.xeniumhr.comEnter promo code "PODCAST" for 25% in August and September 2017   Transcript: Brandon: Hey, Brandon here, and welcome to a special edition of the HR for Small Business podcast. We have a special announcement today. We're rolling out, for the first time ever, a web-based course on Teachable.com's platform called “Next Level Leadership.” And I have Suzi Alligood with me, who is the creator of the content to discuss the course. Suzi, why did we build the course? Suzi: We have a workshop that we facilitated for years at Xenium called “Leadership Essentials” and it happens to be one of our highest attended sessions. We wanted to convert that content into an e-learning format—not only because we want to reach more people—but also we have current clients who have employees out of our local area and we wanted them to achieve the same benefits as our live workshop while remaining at their own location. So we decided to leverage Teachable.com's platform, and modify our live workshop to be a great user experience on an e-learning platform. Brandon: What can people expect in this course?   Suzi: It is a self-guided course, and it is very comprehensive. It might take the average student two hours to complete the course—but they can complete it at their own pace. It incorporates a couple different mediums, including video and video discussion between leader—where we leveraged some of our subject matter experts and actual senior leaders at Xenium to participate in discussion. Also, we have quizzes and self-guided activities for each section. The self-guided activities are the most beneficial, in my opinion, because it provides the student the opportunity to take the information that they are learning from the course and apply it in their workplace, and test it out and make improvements and ultimately gain confidence in how they might become a better leader. Brandon: Who is this course built for? Suzi: This course is for anyone who is aspiring to be a leader of others or is current a leader of others—particularly new leaders who made the recent shift from individual contributor to leader. Also it's great for people who have been in a leadership position for some time and want to brush up and hone some of those skills. Brandon: This is an exciting time for us as we launch this course in August 2017 for $49. Go to courses.xeniumhr.com to find “Next Level Leadership.” For August and September only, we're offering podcast listeners 25% off by entering the promo code PODCAST when you check out.

On This Episode: What's on the menu, Brandon? / What are you listening to that the rest of us don't get? / The Quiet Storm / The Max Emails

We say goodbye to our friend and co-host of The Frontside Podcast, Brandon Hays. Brandon Hays: @tehviking | blog Transcript: BRANDON: Hello, everybody and welcome to Frontside Podcast Episode 48. It is a podcast, as you can tell from the intro music, about woodworking and dads and dads working with wood. CHARLES: And power washing wood. BRANDON: Yes and power washing, sanding decks. Today, we'll be talking about the difference between mortise and tenon joints and dovetail joints and when it's worth going through the extra effort for that dovetail. Our guest today is Charles Lowell, woodworking expert. CHARLES: Hi, Brandon. BRANDON: Hi. I think I've never heard anybody acknowledge the fact that there's new music in the intro. I don't know if that has been publicly acknowledged in the podcast yet. But I was on the selection committee for that music and we had many options and we went with the one that sounded most appropriate for, I don't know, a woodworking show on PBS but I like it. CHARLES: I like PBS. I like woodworking. I like the music too and the best part is I didn't have to choose it. I just had to promise to make music myself for 50 weeks running. BRANDON: It was about 150 weeks. CHARLES: About 150 weeks. BRANDON: Yeah. Charles, we are here in the new Frontside HQ, which is sort of still under construction. It's kind of cool, though. It's a different space. I haven't been here much so it doesn't feel like home to me yet, I don't know if it does to you yet. CHARLES: It's beginning. It's still unfinished in many ways. It's not painted. We just kind of have the bare minimum for survival. The kitchen is stocked, there's coffee in the cabinets, the grinder is set up, the bar is set up, the wall sockets are set up, and the wireless router is set up. BRANDON: Home is where the vermouth is. [Laughter] CHARLES: And cavernous is really the word to describe it. BRANDON: This is a shop that's clearly set up for a version of the Frontside that does not yet exist and it's interesting to see current day Frontside in a space that is clearly marked for a future version of this. CHARLES: Yeah, you feel small walking in. There are not enough people to fill all the seats that we have in here. BRANDON: Which is kind of cool. I don't know if you recall, maybe we'll save that discussion for later but there was a prior iteration of this company where that was very much the same thing. So it's kind of cool, like a little bit of an emotional journey to see this process start over again. CHARLES: Yeah, it is definitely a new space and it's a new era. BRANDON: Yeah, for you. Not for me. [Laughter] BRANDON: You guys can go right to hell. CHARLES: Well, it is a new era for you too. BRANDON: Yeah, that's true -- a new era of fun-employment. We wanted to do one final 'dadcast' because basically, as of officially 10 days ago or so, I no longer work at the Frontside and I've had people ask me and I was like, "I don't want to talk about it." And so, I think it's probably time that we -- I don't want to belabor it. Nobody handed me a card when I quit as the co-founder of the Frontside that said, "You are officially invited now to Medium.com to write a think piece about my incredible journey." CHARLES: [Laughs] You'll get that in the mail. BRANDON: Okay. It may be sent to my old address. It's sent to our old office, which is the problem. It's lost in the mail. So yeah, instead I'm going to do my incredible journey podcast and really just regale everyone with stories of what an incredible, incredible journey it's been -- truly incredible. CHARLES: Don't leave out the travelling with the fish and the cat, and like a little pug dog. You know like all those incredible journey stories when we were kids. BRANDON: Yeah, like Homeward Bound. CHARLES: Yeah, there you go. BRANDON: I think it is like Homeward Bound. CHARLES: That time that you fell into the water with the kitten, that was adorable. BRANDON: I don't know where I'm stealing this joke from but there is an Incredible Journey sequel with a squid and a cow, truly the most unlikely of friends. [Laughter] BRANDON: Here we are giving my swan song on this podcast. I've actually actively took a month off to think about basically to try to recuperate and think about like, "Is this something that I can continue to do." I purposely took off from the podcast which was agony because I so wanted to have those conversations that you all did with Noel, and with Yehuda, and with Sarah. They turned out really good. I'm so happy with the result of stepping back and realizing, "Wait a minute, I think I'm redundant." CHARLES: It was your idea to create the podcast, in the first place and the podcast has been infused with your personality. Even on the episodes where you weren't present, like you were behind the scenes, arranging it, making sure that it all happened. I can understand like missing that part of it. It really was like your baby, so to speak. BRANDON: What's cool and agonizing is first off, I want to acknowledge that talking about a podcast that you're on while you're on the podcast actually should cause the podcast to collapse in on itself in a recursive loop. CHARLES: You're witnessing a podcast singularity. BRANDON: Then I'm commenting about the fact that we're commenting on the podcast on the podcast. So before we jump into a stack level too deep, I just want to acknowledge that I've had this experience before where I've stepped down as an organizer or a maintainer of something and I've watched the project get better as a result of me leaving. The biggest fear a person has when they step away from something like this is that the thing will collapse as a result of them leaving. The second big biggest fear is that it will not collapse as a result of you leaving. CHARLES: [Laughs] BRANDON: It's sort of like, "Oh yeah. Okay, well, you know..." And the amazing thing is watching it get better. It feels a little guilty like, "Why did I let go of the steering wheel of this thing sooner so that..." Yes, the podcast was definitely my baby and I took care of everything and then I realized so much of that work, there are people that are actually better at this than me. When we brought Mandy Moore in to help with the editing and then organizing and she's taking a bigger, mega-role in all that stuff, she does a way better job than I did. I think that's true of anybody who does a bunch of things and that means, if you are the founder of a company, that's you. You do a bunch of things if you are a founding member of a small organization. As you start letting those go, you find that there are people that like doing the stuff that you don't like to do or are better at the stuff that you do like to do. It's always an interesting, humbling process. Just that alone right there was sort of the lesson I took out of it was that letting go is something can actually improve it. CHARLES: That's actually, I think, critical to the process whether it's open source, whether it's a company, whether it's some side project that you have. There's a phase where -- and really, I guess it applies to the whole start up cycle in of itself, right? There's a phase where you do have to do everything. But then at a certain point, the critical path is you do not do those things. BRANDON: It's before you think it's going to be too, so you always feel like there's always a leap of faith you have to take to say, "I think it's time for me to hand this off and pay somebody else to do something that I've learned to survive doing." And it's before you're comfortable letting go of that thing. And so, people that are uncomfortable letting go of stuff will just hold on to everything forever because there's no clear point where you just point at that and go, "This is the time to let that go." It feels natural. It's time. It's like your kids' first day at school. You're going to cry. They're going to cry and then everything's going to be okay. That was one big thing. Actually, it's kind of linked to why I left in the first place, which is I have historically been so bad at that skill. I have not exercised the muscle of letting things go and it doesn't feel ever appropriate to let things go. So I just took on more and more physical and emotional work and tried to cover more and more bases and did so like borderline adequately in all these different areas to where I just really burned myself out to the point where I couldn't get up and go to work in the morning anymore. I think anybody can relate to this feeling of getting up and being like, "Please don't make me do this again. I don't want to get up." It's like getting up and driving to a place where you eat dirt all day. CHARLES: That's a division of the Frontside. BRANDON: And you're like -- CHARLES: Eating dirt. BRANDON: You know what? It's okay but I had that yesterday. CHARLES: Yeah, it was hard to watch especially like standing right next to you and seeing that process unfold month to month and then compound over the years. BRANDON: Yeah, 'Hard to Watch' is the title of the lifetime movie of my life. [Laughter] CHARLES: Also, I believe it's the title of a Steven Seagal movie from the early 90's. BRANDON: It was a Steven Seagal documentary about getting his hair plugs. [Laughter] BRANDON: "I'll take you to the bank, the hair plug bank." CHARLES: Oh, you beat me to the punch. That's the exact joke that I was going to make. BRANDON: I did it. "I'll take you to the bank, senator." CHARLES: What am I going to do? I guess, I have to carry the torch of early and late 90's movie references around here. You just got to let that fart go. BRANDON: Yeah, there is a dearth of the 40-year old contingent here. Yeah, in the process, I learned a lot of stuff. But the problem was that it was too late to fix it in a way that felt super repairable so it was too late to try to like, "Okay, we'll just make these small tweaks and your life will get better. Okay, let these things go." I was advised by several people like, "Hey, man. You should totally see this thing through. The Frontside is right on the cusp. It's just having its breakthrough moment. The business is doing really well. The employees here are fantastic. Everything is just kind of teed up for 2017 being a banner year." And I just went, "Yeah, but it doesn't matter like how awesome the next city is if you broke down on the side of the road, out of gas." CHARLES: Right. There's a certain point where it doesn't matter if there's more water coming down onto your bucket, like your bucket is full, the bucket is full and it's just the fact. BRANDON: Yep. I'm fortunate to be able to take a little bit of time to think about what's next. I don't think there's much more to say about that aspect of it than that. It is not complicated. People burning themselves out is a thing that happens all the time particularly among founders. There's usually a recovery period and usually they get back on their feet. It's a bummer because I love the people here but I knew I couldn't do it anymore. There may be people with Psychology degree who is listening to this and they are like, "No, no, no. there's plenty more to say about your stupid brain." That's all I've got. It's just I kind of ran out of gas. I stepped away about six weeks ago and you all are doing amazing work, you're in this awesome new space. I don't know... There are a couple things I wanted to talk about. One of them being maybe do a little bit of a retrospective about -- CHARLES: Yeah, let's wind back the clock. Do you want to have a flashback? BRANDON: Let's have a flashback. CHARLES: All right. You actually joined on, was it September of 2013? BRANDON: And we had been talking for about six months before that. Potentially longer but it was really like we started talking in earnest in early 2013. CHARLES: Yeah, it was a long process, like everything we do. It's painfully slow sometimes but that process, by which we came together to try and really do something special unfolded over a long time because there was a lot to talk about. There were so many conversations, meet-ups after meet-ups, phone calls, and just like discussing what would it look like, what are we trying to accomplish. At that time, we're really very focused on pinning down like, "What are we going to do here?" But that was what the focus was. We were talking about the details of how we're going to make it run, who we're going to hire, all that stuff. It was all about what is the purpose of this. It turns out that a lot of people give that short trip but it can be and should be a conversation that takes six months. BRANDON: I don't think I've really acknowledged this too much. But I didn't really have a purpose at the time. I just wanted a shot at trying to build something. Eventually, I knew that if I didn't take it, I would regret it. I found your vision very compelling. You had a vision from the minute we walked through your space. All that was in it was a ping pong table and in the corner, you crammed yourself an intern. At one point, two interns and you were all crammed into one corner room of this big office for some reason. CHARLES: Underneath a marionette. BRANDON: Yes. CHARLES: A marionette from Mexico. BRANDON: Yeah, from Juarez or something and I had you walk me through the space and you're like, "I have a really clear picture in my mind of what's going to happen here." You probably can describe it better than I can. It was like, "Over here..." CHARLES: I actually want to hear you say it. BRANDON: I don't remember this, maybe but -- CHARLES: I do. I remember it very vividly but I'm actually -- BRANDON: Okay, so I remember you walked me through the space and you were like, "Over here, I see two people pairing on a really hard problem. Over here, I see somebody writing open source software. Over here, I see somebody writing documentation for some open source program." You had this really compelling vision of like a beehive of activity around collaborative, open source oriented, good engineering work that grew developers into great developers. It was super clear in your mind that there was a way to do this that what you needed was an engine of growth to hook that vision up to. And I was like, "I've never done this before. But I'd sure give it a shot." CHARLES: Yeah, and the thing is part of what was missing was this understanding that to make all of those things happen, to build that great software, and give engineers the chance to really grow into that role of producing that good software, that you need so much focus on that growth pattern and to foster. You can't just say like, "We're going to adhere to these engineering practices," and boom! Voila! Out of the mix will just pop great engineers. BRANDON: There's a tremendous amount of intentionality in the process of doing that side of it and then there's a tremendous amount of infrastructure underneath that to create. That was the part I think, we both underestimated was how much infrastructure work you and I would have to do over the ensuing few years. But you cannot let go of that vision because if it's all infrastructure, then congratulations. You have a business that makes money and has no reason to exist. Nothing is a bigger turnoff to potential employees in a hard to recruit industry like software development than like, "Show up and we'll pay you." I have a lot of those opportunities. Thank you. So, it was never that. We would rather pack up and go home than that happen. It was always driven by, "If we can't make the kind of place that we want to work, then we should just shut it down." CHARLES: That's definitely was a mantra and it's hard too because in order to make that place, you have to earn that right which means ultimately, you have to have a solid business. You have to take in more money than you spend. BRANDON: I don't want to sugarcoat the initial because we needed money in the beginning anyway. So my first three or four months here was drowning in -- like I showed up on the client and they're like, "Oh, good. You're the Rails expert." And I was like, "I've been a professional programmer for OO for like 14 months." I had worked really hard and studied really hard and I was able to perform job duties. But I was like, "I didn't come here to be a Rails expert." CHARLES: Yeah, but also what was interesting is they wanted you to be a Rails expert. I think I might have sold you as a Rails expert. BRANDON: Yeah. [Laughter] CHARLES: But the thing is as you came in, with an uncanny ability to wrap your hand around what they actually needed so you are probably an expert. While there was the implementation side, I think one of the best things that we brought to that project was focusing on the code that we didn't need to write and only writing those pieces which were critical. But yeah, so you came in for the first, about four months? BRANDON: Yeah, between four and six months. It was September to like January, February. CHARLES: Right. You've got to be the Rails expert in order to have a business so that you can actually play these things out. BRANDON: Yep. And I remember thinking, before I came on I was like, "I want to run a business but here's the stuff that terrifies me -- I don't know how to set up QuickBooks. I don't know how to set up payroll. I don't know how to sell a client. I don't know how to even find clients." And you're like, "I have all of that stuff set up already." So when people are like, "Wow, how did you get the guts together to start a business?" I'm like, "I didn't. I totally [inaudible] one. CHARLES: Well, the thing is you have to start a business at multiple phases, right? I had a business running that could adequately support four people. But then, obviously, we ended up growing and we ended up growing beyond four people. Then the infrastructure of the place, alarmingly, became inadequate so we didn't have to build from the beginning. BRANDON: Another thing that is difficult to learn in business is like it's a truism that is so often repeated that has become trite, which is the things that got you to where you are, are not the things that are going to get you where you want to go. It's trite because it's also not always true, like having a vision is permanent. I was describing this to somebody. Basically, the Frontside policies for a long time were very much like a startup, where people go, "You do the laziest version of whatever you can do in a certain area," so HR practices are lazy. "Hey, we don't have HR people." And then you pat yourself on the back for being a laid back work environment. [Laughter] BRANDON: We're really laid back. We don't have any policies or procedures or payroll? Hang on, hang on. Too laid back. CHARLES: We take a relax policy for vacation. We don't have any. BRANDON: Yeah, you either do or don't go. We don't know. We don't care. That vacation policy of like not having a policy, turns out the laziest form of that winds up being harmful to the people that work there. So we had to discover a lot of the stuff the hard way and start designing and crafting the experience of working here. CHARLES: The thing is that part becomes difficult, like having a clear vision and an idea of what it is that you want to accomplish with this company, it puts you in chains. I don't want to say bad but basically, what it does is it sets very hard parameters on actions that you can take in the things and the practices that you can engage in. It is a good thing but it can feel like you're being squeezed by your own parameters at times. BRANDON: Yeah, I think you and I in the past have called that 'value death', where we had all these values and we started the company as a manifestation of these values where other people may start a company as a manifestation of a business model. CHARLES: Right. BRANDON: It sounds pretty awesome. CHARLES: It does sound pretty awesome. But a concrete example of that is our health plan. We want a place where people feel secure in their living situation so we want to pay them a fair market rate and what benefits we do offer if we want to make sure that they're second to none, that is a really, really expensive value to have. BRANDON: A lot of places will buy that value back out of profit and we want it back out of our first dollar. CHARLES: Right, so it's hard then because it really puts you and the tradeoff is you have a lot less flexibility when it comes to your finances and you see that again and again. BRANDON: I talked to other people that ran businesses in the other direction. When they started with a business plan and a business model, then layered values on top as they were able to afford them. I was like, "Man, that's such a better strategy." And they're like, "No. it's just as painful," because now every time you add a value, you watch it take away the business that you've built. So it's almost the same emotional work, if not more, to try to layer and add those things on top as you go along because you watch your business become less and less of what it was and every time you do it, it feels like you're risking your business. So by absorbing a lot of that risk upfront and defining what we wanted, we actually kind of like we didn't have to move the stake in the ground. It was already planted there and we just had to figure out how to build the business around that. I never recognized that as a tradeoff because it's always like grass is greener over there. CHARLES: It's true and I don't bring it up like a complaint because I don't have any regrets. BRANDON: I got regrets all over the place. [Laughter] CHARLES: I don't have any regret for doing it that way, in the sense that maybe it's just because I have to compare everything to the way that we write software or maybe I just think about software too much. But it really is the outside in paradigm, right? You start from your intentions, your purpose and the system that you want to have and then you infer the processes and tactics that are required to realize that and make it real. BRANDON: As long as it's not crystalline and you can adapt it, then that's a great strategy. CHARLES: Yeah, but when you set those lofty goals, it means that the implications for the infrastructure are bigger than either one of us estimated. BRANDON: Vastly so. And you're right that we didn't quite grasp the costs associated with embracing those things. One of the costs is it requires a lot of thought. It requires a lot of time to manage and it requires defining processes. It just requires a lot of like mental and time overhead that goes into, and then financial overhead that goes into managing all these things that we really cared about. That collected together, we said, "This is who we are." And we've had to back off of a couple of them because we got in over our heads on, "Hey, we're going to try to reinvent apprenticeship." Instead of doing exactly what other people are doing, I know that 8th Light takes a year to design their apprenticeship and it takes about eight people. They weren't able to even take their first apprentice until they hit eight or nine people so they had enough infrastructure of support underneath that apprentice. Instead of learning from them, why don't we just do exactly whatever we want to do, whenever we want to do it because we've met a really cool person and experienced a lot of pain at trying to reinvent things that exist elsewhere, instead of trying to look at what else is out there? Again, this is not by way of regret. This is just one of those things that people do when they have their own thing is they feel like, "Okay, I'm going to do it different," and then they realize why other people all do it the same. CHARLES: Yeah, and I certainly learned like you have to stick strong to your principles but make sure that they're within scope. You know, make sure that be aware that for every value you hold that sits at the top of the pyramid and there's a whole base that needs to support that value. So by all means, hold the value but be aware that's the top of the cone and you have to account for the volume of the rest of it. BRANDON: It comes back to like how closely does this align with your vision of where this thing is going and why. Like, "This is going to allow us to recruit. This is going to put us in a situation where 12 months from now, we've got more senior engineers to help mentor the mid and junior level engineers." And being able to play that really long game is key and it's really difficult and requires patience that I had never possessed in my life before this. CHARLES: You are an enigma in that sense and that you're both impatient yet incredibly patient. BRANDON: Anything that I have that looks like patience is 100% fake. [Laughter] BRANDON: I will put myself in a situation where I can't have the thing that I want to do right now on purpose because if it was up to me, I would have every stupid trinket and gadget the minute like -- CHARLES: Man, I got my eye on a drone right now. BRANDON: Yeah? CHARLES: Yeah. I'm taking it a little bit of Charles to Charles. But yeah, I see what you mean. BRANDON: But you learn the law of the harvest which is you have to plant the seeds. If you cannot, there's no such thing as impatiently getting the return of the values that you want to instill. CHARLES: For me, I don't view patience as a personality trait. I view patience as a behavior. BRANDON: Yeah, it's a muscle that you learn to exercise. CHARLES: Yeah, it's a muscle. It is about impulse like understanding. You said it best -- the law of the harvest that you plant the seeds and you wait and you will get corn or wheat or pumpkins or whatever it is that you harvest and like dance under the moon or whatever. BRANDON: Obviously, pumpkins. I guess you figured out my plan now is to live out to a farm. It's Decorative Gourd Season. CHARLES: This is G-rated podcast. BRANDON: Yeah, all right. Yeah. I want to kind of pivot the discussion with the few minutes that we have left. I want to talk about because it's fun kind of reminiscing about how we got together. Before we pivot to where the Frontside is going, I want to talk about why this partnership worked. There were a couple things wrong with it. Namely, that you and I are both big picture people. My strong recommendation to people that are like, "I need a partner for my business. Cool. Make sure one person is big picture and one person is more detail-oriented," because somebody is going to have to fill that gap and handle details and you'll both hate it if you're both one or the other. But barring that, I would say this is one of my favorite partnerships I've seen in our business, in our industry. I'm very lucky to have participated in it. So I want to talk about a couple of things that have worked well with that. I think the most important thing in any relationship or particularly business relationship is trust. That sounds obvious and stupid but you don't understand how hard that is to maintain because so much is at stake. You're going to have differences of opinion. You're going to have differences of priority. There's going to be money involved, sometimes large amounts of money and that makes enemies of people really quickly. Our relationship of trust has been founded on six months sussing each other out for the fact when like I recognized this the minute I met you but it took six months to confirm that you were going to be the kind of partner that put my needs above yours and I need that because I'm going to be the kind of partner that tries to put your needs above mine. So when two people are striving to do that, you're going to have a solid foundation for a partnership and everything else is secondary. You hope that they have the right skill sets and you hope they have the right other personality traits. But the ability to put the other person's needs above your own, on both sides of that exchange is like with a bullet, to me the most important piece of this. First off, thanks for continuing to be that kind of person, as I've bowed out, that has not changed one wit and even the conversations we've had. I have a few other things but I'm going to bounce it over to you to talk about stuff that makes a partnership work in your experience. CHARLES: I think having that trusting relationship absolutely is the cement in the foundation. Throughout all of this, for example, it did not come to me as a surprise that you were burnt out on this work. I was able to be there the whole time and we were having very honest and very candid conversations about this throughout the entire course. While you did mentioned that we're both very high-level, big picture thinkers and you do want to have someone who is very detail-oriented to make sure that the operations are going to happen, I think that it's amazing what you can accomplish when you have two big picture people who approach a problem from two radically different perspectives. I think your mind works very differently than mine and I really appreciate the way that your mind works. It was always so wonderful to be able to attack a problem. I'm thinking in terms of pairing sessions, in terms of when we were selling something or presenting to a client together, when we were doing trainings, being able to recognize that this person is grappling with the exact same problem than I am and they're bringing a completely different skill set and they are pushing the ball forward using a set of moves that I actually don't even possess. Yet we're focused on the same goal and both even find the process of pushing it forward like enjoyable. I know there have been so many times over the course of this time, this last three years. Even quite recently, I think the last time this happened was when we were interviewing a candidate and it was like you were talking to one of the candidates and kind of explaining who you were and what it would be like to work here. I was like, "Wow, I just really appreciate your mind." Almost like if I could take your mind and hang it on a wall. I know it sounds kind of like Hannibal Lecter. BRANDON: That's super creepy. CHARLES: Yeah, I know. [Laughter] BRANDON: You're like Sylar from the first season of Heroes. CHARLES: Yeah, I was like, "Should I go for it?" Yeah. So let's go there. No, but really, I do. I really have an admiration for the way that you approach things. I don't know, it's just I feel like it's very rare to meet somebody that you have such a strong values alignment with and you get along so personally with and their tactics are completely and totally different than your own. Oh, not totally different, right? BRANDON: Yeah, different enough. CHARLES: The angle of approach. BRANDON: Yep. I loved that I wrote down a blog post about what constitutes a senior developer and at no point did I have any evaluatable technical criteria because that is how my mind works, because I don't care about that. People were like, "What sort of evaluatable technical criteria do you use?" And I was like, "I don't know. That's Charles' territory." And then you did that podcast with it and I just sat there and I re-listened to that a couple times actually as I was writing my conference talk about because it's actually really important to develop those and it's really important to have the signifiers that you have developed those. I couldn't have done any part of this without you. So I will always be deeply, deeply grateful for the fact that you saw something in me that you kind of gave me the shot that I was waiting for somebody to give me, which is weird. Like I was waiting for somebody to ask me to come and found a company with them then you did. That doesn't happen. I don't recommend to people to sit around and wait for the perfect partner to come along and ask them to co-found a company. I think what I learned through the process of all of this is, "Go ahead and be bold and do that." The rest of that is that stuff but do find a partner that you can have that level of trust with and don't settle for one that you can't, that would be like all the horror stories I know in business. CHARLES: I cannot even imagine. BRANDON: I've seen it and it's really sad. When you said it wasn't a surprise to you that I was burned out is because we had such a deep relationship of trust that when we finally started having one-on-ones, I was able to confide everything in you because I knew that you would take that information in the right context. You could be trusted with the raw part of my feelings. The fact that I was scared, the fact that I was frustrated and you wouldn't turn that into either a weapon or you wouldn't turn it into something that made you like me less or trust me less. I just could always trust you that I could tell you unvarnished truth. CHARLES: Yeah, that's certainly when you talk about lessons learned, that's actually a very personal lesson that I took away from this experience. And really this relationship is something that you show is like you can give somebody very direct, very frank feedback and how it is received and how it affects the relationship going forward has everything to do with your emotional intent towards that person. So if you are coming from a place of love, you almost have a free reign of the things that you can say because you're just stating facts and people know that there is that love in there. BRANDON: Charles, I love you but you have cream corn on your face. [Laughter] CHARLES: But it's true that you can get the same feedback from someone who is trying to use that as a weapon and trying to make you flinch. It doesn't even have to be malevolence. It can just be -- BRANDON: Indifference? CHARLES: Indifference but it makes all the difference. So I always try and replicate that with the other relationships in my life, with varying degrees of success but I learned that here. That's a very personal but very powerful lesson that I took away in having experienced that first hand. While we're talking about different skills and different lessons learned and very personal lessons learned, another thing that I took away from here, I said I always like to bring things down to the concrete. I feel like obstructions are dangerous. BRANDON: Yeah, they could obscure your intent. CHARLES: Exactly. So when I say like, "I really appreciate your mind," one of the things that I like is when you're talking, you paint a very clear picture, like your analogies and your metaphors. They're just always on point and you're always able to relate, whether it's we're doing something with software, whether it's an interview, whether it's designing one of our business processes, always able to paint a very clear picture and tell a very compelling story around why it should be that way. So it is focused me that I feel like I've been able to grow as a communicator and really kind of perceive that communication is really the one true best practice, so to speak, and making clear so that you can build consensus around people who are trying to cooperate to do something. It's affected the way that we write pull requests, making sure that you're laying out the facts in the order in which they should be. It means that if you want to accomplish something, you're going to have to convince people that it's worth doing and that is the key thing. Sometimes you can convince them with code but not always. BRANDON: It is a lever that can give you leverage when you're trying to make a point. But you have to recognize it for what it is. It's just an additional lever. CHARLES: Right. BRANDON: All right. Well, as we continue this, I'll volley back one more thing and then I want to ask you about the future of the Frontside. I kid you not. I think I'm actually going to do this. I'm going to change my iPhone lock screen to say, "Is this something Charles would say?" I've told multiple people this so I apologize if I've said this on the podcast before but we were partners for three years, which is as intense a relationship as marriage, if not more so. In those three years, you have said nothing that could even be construed or misconstrued to me as unkind. Not even neutral. Just kind, like inquisitive kind, caring, and the reverse is not 100% true. I don't have anything that I sit around and regret. But I want to thank you for giving me a standard of kindness that I can hold no other people to but I will try to hold myself to. You have made me a better person as a result of our time working together and that you just the deep, deep example of human kindness and thoughtfulness in your approach to the way that you communicate with people. I just want to thank you for all the things that I've learned here, other than my own ability to kind of make my own way in the world which I did not have before this company. The other big thing as an example of this is the kind of kindness that a person four decades into their life can continue to have, the lack of cynicism, the lack of snideness, the lack of anything resembling superiority, so I just want to thank you for that. Thanks for being such a wonderful person. I assume that's inborn and cultivated. I love you so much. So let me shift the topic in our last few minutes here and ask because I'm curious and I'm sure people will be curious. Let me phrase it this way. We walked around a big empty building and said, "Oh, I see this over here. I see this over here. This is going to be a great place where people are encouraging each other and growing as developers." Has anything changed as you're in this new building and walk around in a big empty space that doesn't have enough people in to fill it? And is anything changed as your vision for the Frontside, like I know you're hiring a salesperson and there are a couple watershed moments. CHARLES: Absolutely, and I think this is a watershed moment. I think tying it back to where we were when you came on. It was basically you and me are the two full-time employees. We had this company. We had this idea. We had this dream and we were able to, I think, realize that dream to a large extent. There were people pairing and it was right next to me this morning and I was listening into the conversation and I was not even a part of it. My heart's desire was to jump in the middle of it and get right in there because it sounded like such a fun conversation to have. But I held back and I just listened to it and appreciate it. For all of the wonderful knowledge and value that was being generated right before my very eyes, like it very much was a realization. I think of those dreams that we had back in 2013. In order to make that happen, we had to grow this company beyond just you and me. Now, we were up to almost nine people. I think, with you leaving, we're going to back to seven because we're going to bring, like you mentioned, a salesperson. So there was definitely a couple of phases of growth. We've talked about this on a previous podcast but we kind of had another watershed moment back in March where we realized, “Wait a second. We've cowboy-coding our business. We need to actually write tests, we need to write documentation, we need to shore up these internal structures to make sure that this vision is financially viable and sustainable.” And so we did that. I think that I want to actually like call out and say like, "I don't see that I could have done that without you. That's been the story of this place for the last six months. It is a fundamental transformation of how this company operates. You know just as well as I do that those changes that we put in place, those checks and those parameters and those processes had a profound impact on the viability of this company. But in the process, it also like it did. It burned you out. I think that this last six months and this last year in particular, were incredibly hard. So the next question and part of the problem was that you and I were kind of the single points of failure in that system. We stop cowboy-coding, we put in these checks, we put in the balances, we put in these measurements but we still had a system that had these two single points of failure. I'm not going to lie with your departure that is going to put a lot of stress on the company but it begs the question now, "Is a company that has one point of single point of failure a viable company?" So for me, I don't think the vision has changed that much. I still want to be a place where great engineering happens and where there is a space where engineers or people can come in and grow to be great engineers. But the thing is the change that I want to make is scalable. It needs to be distributed so the changes that we're making right now, the air that is beginning now is going to be introducing scalability so that I can exit or I am not necessary and the people who are here, whether it's eight people, 10 people, 20 people, they can continue this process and live under the umbrella of that vision without there being any one that's critical to success of the entire network. That's what I see coming and that's where I'm focusing all of my energy. BRANDON: Well, I'm excited to see what happens with it. Not excited to show up here to work anymore. [Laughter] CHARLES: But you got to come by and podcast. BRANDON: Every once in a while. CHARLES: Every once in a while. BRANDON: All right. I really love this place and what it stands for. Not just because I got to help define it. It's sort of like everybody loves their own kids. But I think even if this was somebody else's kid, I would love and admire this company because it has stood on principles that are hard to stand on. It's done things that are harder than just getting a business up and running and it survived, which says a lot. I ran out of tenacity juice but it doesn't mean this company has and I'm really grateful to have had a great co-founder that made that possible. It made me feel like I was capable of more than I felt like I was capable before I came here. So this has been a tremendously life altering experience for me. Because of your willingness to give me a shot to risk your business on this guy that you just felt like, "I like this person. I like [inaudible] together." CHARLES: Don't sell yourself short. You shine and you burn brightly. That's apparent to anybody who stands in proximity. BRANDON: Well, thank you and I am so grateful for having had this opportunity. I hope I can use you as a reference. [Laughter] CHARLES: "To whom it may concern..." [Laughter] BRANDON: I guess my wife is like, "Are you going to get a job?" And I was like, "I don't know." CHARLES: I promise not to [inaudible] you on the internet. BRANDON: Yeah, that's the best I can hope for. Charles, this has been really great. I appreciate getting to do this with you. I will miss these 'dadcasts'. CHARLES: I will miss them too. BRANDON: I wonder if anybody listening doesn't know what those mean. Let me reiterate the story. We obviously didn't talk about being dads. But we totally are dads. Stanley, when he used to work here would call the podcast, with just me and Charles, 'dadcast' so that stuck. The problem is if we started a side podcast called 'Dadcast', people would expect us to talk about dad stuff and we're not going to do that pretty much. CHARLES: Yeah, no. It really has stuck, It's like, "So, what's the format of the podcast this week. Is it going to be a dadcast?" [Laughter] CHARLES: "Or should we try, you know, organize a panel." BRANDON: I've heard from other people are like, "When are you going to do another dadcast?" [Laughter] BRANDON: So the answer now is '???' but we'll figure it out. CHARLES: Yeah, we'll figure something out. BRANDON: Oh, yeah. You all are moving to weekly, which is a pretty big deal. Maybe, we'll be able to slip one of those in there in a few months. CHARLES: We're definitely thinking about taking our podcast game up to the next level. We had Mandy, actually came to Austin last week and we ran over a bunch of different options. So yeah, we're thinking about going weekly and I'm actually pretty excited about the content of the podcast. But it's going to be distributed. It's going to be a lot more people doing a lot more stuff. BRANDON: I love that you're removing a single point of failure thing because I think a lot of what my inability or unwillingness to do that was part of what contributed to my burnout, which is obviously not a great way to run your business, to burn yourself out of being able to go back in. I'm glad that you're doing that and I'm excited to see where the Frontside goes. So Charles, thank you for letting me come on for one last show here. CHARLES: Yeah. Well thank you, Brandon. When I think about the future and you can take this as one last contribution, I feel like this is somewhat of a daunting task but I actually take solace in the fearlessness that you've given me, in the sense that I've seen you be fearless in learning Emacs. I've seen you be fearless and having really hard conversations with clients and be fearless in having those same hard conversations with our own employees that we see every day and just watching you operate gives me knowledge, just in the sense of an incontrovertible fact that, "Yes, I can do this and I can try." And so thank you for that. Thank you for everything that you've done over the last three years. BRANDON: I love you, Charles. CHARLES: I love you too, man. BRANDON: Okay. All right. Everybody, please if you have questions for this podcast, send them in. It's the @frontside on Twitter and if you have any feedback, it'd be really awesome if you leave an iTunes review on iTunes that helps people find the Frontside podcast and share with people. Tell them that I won't wreck future ones as best as I can. I won't interject and remove the opportunity to listen to cool guest that you have coming up. Anyway, thanks everybody for listening. And Charles, thank you for being a friend. CHARLES: [Singing] You have a friend and a confidant... and you know what? BOTH: [Singing] And if you threw a party, invited everyone you knew. You would see the biggest gift would be from me and the card attached would say: THANK YOU FOR BEING A FRIEND!

In this episode we cover how to handle apprenticeship, share with listeners how they can start participating in mentoring and apprenticeship in their companies and communities, and help people to understand the impact apprenticeship and mentoring can have on everybody involved. Links: open-source-ember-apps: A list of open source Ember apps Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to the Frontside Podcast, Episode 42. I am Charles Lowell and with me is Brandon Hays, as well as some other really, really, really, really special guests, which I'm really excited to have on the show today. BRANDON: Really? CHARLES: Yeah. BRANDON: Just really? CHARLES: Really, really. [Laughter] CHARLES: I was thinking of 'really, truly' but no, I wanted to go back to 'really'. I don't know, Brandon, are you pretty stoked about the show today? BRANDON: I am. I'm really excited today. We've actually wanted to do this for a long time and we finally were able to line it up once we've figured out that we can record a podcast more than once every six weeks. So yeah, we're really -- CHARLES: Really. BRANDON: -- Really excited to have Taras Mankovski and Lennex Zinyando with us. We'll have you each introduce yourselves. But basically, the point of this podcast is we want to talk to you and you're doing some really cool stuff with apprenticeship through us, and Lennex is one of your earlier apprentices. From everything I've seen tremendously successful, Lennex, you're an awesome developer. So we wanted to talk to you, find out how you're doing that stuff but we'd love to have each of you introduce yourselves and talk a little bit about your background. So we'll start with you, Taras. TARAS: I'm really excited to be here. I also feel like I need to point out the fact that this is podcast number 42. Right? That's the meaning of life and everything. BRANDON: We would be very quite remiss to miss that. Thank you so much. We were so really excited that we forgot about this was the purpose of everything. CHARLES: That's right. We're sitting on the main nerve right now. This is it people. This is it. It's everything. TARAS: I'm really hoping that if you ask me questions, I'm going to answer them faster than this famous answer. I'm really glad to be here. I want to give a little bit of my story because I feel like a lot of things that I've doing over the last 10 years have been adding up to what I'm doing now. I have a pretty diverse background. Programming wasn't something I wanted to do because when I was 12, my dad gave me a Java book and he said, learn how to program and I'm like, "This is terrible." [Laughter] TARAS: That was a really rough introduction for me. Even though, I think I was always technically inclined and I did like [inaudible] for a long time. I did a lot of different things. Since I was a little kid, I always want to be a businessman before I think I even knew what that was. So my focus has always been on the business of things, and technology happened to be one of the only ways that I knew how to access that in a way that was actionable based on something that I could do. I've tried a lot of different things. One of the things that I did before was a company called Positive Sum, where we spent about four and a half years trying to figure out how do you build relationships where everybody who works with you wins. When that Positive Sum company and the being as 'zero sum' for me, I end up leaving and starting from scratch. I have another company called WRKTG, Inc which is like the mothership for EmberSherpa and that acronym refers to 'working together'. Everything that I've kind of have been doing has come from the perspective of how do we bring people to work together, and how do I make it possible for people to have a win-win-win scenarios. I think that's kind of what brings us to where we are today, with this conversation about apprenticeship. BRANDON: Cool, thanks for that. Then Lennex, how did you get into software and what was your background? I don't know if you come from a computer science background or you were doing something else. LENNEX: I'm Lennex Zinyando. I'm based in Harare, Zimbabwe. I've always wanted to work with computers since an early age. But then, access to computers was really hard to come by so I used to spend a lot of money going to internet cafes so that I could access the internet. After a few years of [inaudible], I went to work with a bank for a few years and I decided to leave because I really, really wanted to become a programmer developing software. I joined a local company that does mobile marketing as a technical support person. I worked with them for a few years and I met Taras on Twitter, sometime beginning of last year. Then, I paired with him so that he could mentor me. So now, I'm an apprentice at EmberSherpa. BRANDON: You said you met him on Twitter and you said, "Hey, I'd like to be your apprentice," but how did that interaction actually occur? Was there like a tweet that went out and said, "Hey, I'm looking for apprentices," or you just kind of saw that he was knowledgeable and you said, "Hey, can you help me?" How did that interaction first happen? LENNEX: Actually, I saw a conversation between him and another guy where the guy was - actually they're discussing how they could – I think they wanted to pair on it or something. Then, I just asked if I could join the process, be part of the team that was going to pair on it. Then Taras created this link for us and that's how it was started. CHARLES: So you just said, "Hey, can I join that pairing session?" And the rest is history at this point? LENNEX: Yeah, something like that. CHARLES: Now, you're a world famous software developer so it seems it works. [Laughter] BRANDON: Well, that's really cool. I'd like to ask you, Taras. Was that sort of intentional on your part? You said your arc was bending toward community and 'greater than zero sum' type work. As you were bending that arc toward that, did you have the idea of- I mean, your name was EmberSherpa on Twitter so clearly, you had some sort of training or guidance aspect to what you're doing. Was apprenticeship part of that model by then? Or is that something you kind of stumbled on? TARAS: I always imagine what things might look like. I imagine that there might be a scenario- I tried to do this with WordPress before which is create a scenario where I'm helping people learn and in the process they cultivate a community of people that follow what I do through helping them become like an engineer. It didn't work very well with WordPress but it seems to have worked with Ember. It's very much an [inaudible] process. I kind of went through a bunch of hardships trying to figure out a structure that is actually sustainable. That's the really hard part, I think, about creating like win-win scenarios is that you need to be sustainable and finding a way to make sustainable. That was really tricky. CHARLES: Yes, that's something that we're discovering as well, right? You identify these values and you say, "Hey, these are the things that I value," and then you discover how expensive they are in the process of trying to implement them and trying to do that in a way that you can keep going that doesn't basically require everything from you all the time. That's really hard. So it was something that clearly, like you cared about, you were trying to do it in WordPress. You said you ran into a lot of painful lessons there. I'd actually be curious and dig into a couple of those things that you are finding were not sustainable. TARAS: It's ironic actually, I found mentoring to not be very sustainable. From a business perspective, I think mentoring is a really great service but because it relies so much on people like myself who have to be like people that get to certain levels through their hard work, you end up wanting to get paid well for the work that you do. Then in that scenario, it becomes very difficult. Like offering mentoring services is very valuable but it's also a very premium service. So to be able to sustain myself and be able to offer a service, the businesses you want to pay for, and in a way that is going to benefit the company is going to benefit the apprentice and benefit me, those were difficult. But it seems to be shifting towards apprenticeship turns out to be the answer, for me at least. It was like one of things that was right under my nose but it took a really long time for me to see that actually apprenticeship is the answer to creating this scenario. It's really funny how something might be right in front of you but you might not see it for a year and a half. BRANDON: What's different about apprenticeship from mentorship, basically? TARAS: Mentoring for me is supporting a company that has a team of developers. Basically, the company is paying me to mentor their developers. It seems like a very fine distinction but the difference with apprenticeship is that the focus is on the individual and all the other things are kind of secondary. When I stop thinking about myself as a mentor or stop talking about mentoring and I start talking about apprenticeship, it becomes about creating structures for others to be successful like making that shift on creating opportunities for others to grow. It's one of those things where you shift your focus towards something else and it makes your path forward easier. That's kind of what I found with apprenticeship. Even though I was doing it for a while, like I started working with Lennex a year and a half before I made the shift, I really found focusing on the apprentice and making apprentice successful actually help me make my business more sustainable. BRANDON: So basically, by defining the problem scope as, "Hey, this is about an apprentice and not about how good a mentor I am," you basically discovered -- I think all businesses go through this at some point too, like anybody with a purpose ends up discovering that the thing that doesn't scale is your time, and the only way out of that is to develop a process that's focused on achieving an outcome. So apprenticeship is the definition of the process by which somebody gets better and focusing on them rather than non-scalable Taras' time. TARAS: Exactly. BRANDON: Lennex, you basically came on as an apprentice about a year ago. Can you describe the process, from your perspective of like what that apprenticeship has entailed and maybe even how that evolved over time? LENNEX: Initially, we worked on small apps. When I was trying to get the basics of Ember and to be honest, I didn't know a lot of JavaScript. So that process was kind of painful for me. It took a bit of time for Taras and myself to admit that and then I tried to focus a bit on knowing my JavaScript properly. But then after that, things have been going on smoothly. I would pair a lot if I would get a task to do with work on open source projects, and we've done [inaudible], actually contributing [inaudible], learning the whole thing, the whole process. BRANDON: So basically, you have commits on open source projects now out there in the world? LENNEX: Yes, I do. BRANDON: And how long have you've been developing software before you were basically doing that? LENNEX: Not that long. It was just a few HTML sites, a bit of PHP, then Ember is like the first programming thing that I've done. CHARLES: I think that's really interesting. Like part of the process, you seem to be describing as you kind of got thrown into the deep end of the pool. Like this is a new language for you, we're going to be doing open source projects that people actually use, and you were actually contributing working code into a real life. You know, thousands of people are using the code that you actually wrote in very early stages of your development career, which I think is a really interesting model. Taras, would you say that that is part of the model or is that just sort of a coincidence of how this went down? Like is that part of the design of the apprenticeship model? TARAS: It's certainly by design. I think there's something really beautiful about Ember, and it's the fact that it creates a possibility of an ecosystem of open source applications that solve the script problems and that is enabled by the fact that we have this collection of conventions. When I chose Ember as a technology to focus on, I kind of made a guess that this might happen. Then when I realized that Lennex needed to learn by doing real practical things, I went out looking for this applications and started off as being, first it was a HospitalRun, and I was kind of really uncertain whether the HospitalRun would even take it seriously because we're saying, "I'm going to help this person work on your application for free. Will you talk to us and tell us what we need to be able to make this happen and make it so that you can actually mark this code?" But it's proven that this seems to be something that maintainers of open source applications are willing to do, and now we have something like... Oh, I don't know what it is, but plenty applications. I have a list of open source Ember applications that we're adding to on a regular basis, and they're all opportunities for our future apprentices to contribute and improve their skills. Actually, they have something that they can show and say, "Look, I did this." BRANDON: So I'll grab that and put that in the show notes. That seems like something that just producing that list was important to your apprenticeship but actually, everything that you do when you do work on the public like this adds value elsewhere as well. Like that's a really cool and useful list for people to have of things that people can actually contribute to. TARAS: Yeah, and I hope that there are other applications that we don't know about that are going to get added to this list because if we can have more apprentices helping more open source applications, I think that's something that's really great for Ember. It's a win-win for everybody. CHARLES: So I'm curious, you've got this big list, 20, 25 open source applications that's actually a big list and I assume there's a lot of people. You talked about how making the shift towards apprenticeship allowed you to scale but I actually am curious about that process because like how does it scale? There is only one of you so how do you manage more than one apprentice -- two, three? How many is reasonable? How do you bump that number up and get more people coming along? TARAS: I think what's happening now is that my apprentices actually have their own apprentices. I think that's the key to scaling this because at a certain point what happens is, as I mentioned earlier, at one point, I paired with a hundred people and I realized that people have very common problems and depending on what stage they're in in they're learning, they all tend to have very similar problems. The way to scale [inaudible] a lot of people, I think, is to have the apprentice that just learned or apprentices that has a six months of Ember experience, they can support somebody who just started last week or started two months ago. They're actually really good persons to support that person. If I support somebody who just started Ember, it creates a situation where like I want to be able to help but I've answered this question so many times already that it becomes repetitive. It's actually takes away from the energy of me trying to explain this to the person. So having an apprentice support a new person is great for the apprentice because they get to grow. It's great for the person because they get really personal attention. BRANDON: I want to make a note. I feel like I should have noted this earlier. Part of the reason that we wanted to talk to you two about this is we've taken several swings at apprenticeship at Frontside, and we're in a sort of unique position in that. We don't see a lot of companies doing this very actively. I saw a company called Obtiva that had an apprenticeship model that I admired a lot. Then they got acquired by Groupon and everything that was good about that company died. I haven't seen this done a ton and our attempts have been kind of shots in the dark on this. It's been very challenging. Your approach to this seems to be working in a way that I have not seen happen elsewhere. What I'm hoping part of drawing out this conversation is the process of discovering what is working for you and what other people can adopt? Basically define how this is actually like it seems like a pretty successful case and how people might adopt that in their businesses, in their workplaces, and in even in their capacity. I love the concept of moving away from mentorship as a concept and toward apprenticeship where this becomes more of a defined process. I'm sure to you it felt like you're kind of fumbling around as well. But you seem to be landing on a lot of things that really seems to be working. Are you noticing any patterns in terms of somebody you get them working on real world applications, they tend to support each other, what other tools, I guess, or patterns are you using to help that process kind of stick with people and scale because this seems to last longer than just a couple months too, which is important? TARAS: I think one thing that I talk to our clients who - because we actually do sell apprenticeship. Part of the process of the apprentice evolving from someone who has never maybe done programming before or who is very new to Ember to actually being a good productive member of the team, is actually starting off doing something that is very low stress, doing something like open source contributions. Then, being in a situation where they're able to make a difference but there isn't a lot of pressure on them. So one of the ways that I set that up is I tell our clients that this person is an apprentice. The reason why you would want to hire this person is because first of all, if they have a problem, they can ask me. But also, this person, like a lot of things that we do on Ember are very repetitive. Their patterns that once you've taught, you can use that pattern over and over again. I think, at a certain point, if you implemented a few tables, implementing a fourth or a fifth table isn't that different than the first three, and you don't get that much more effective at it because you're still limited by how quickly you can type. So if an apprentice knows how to implement a table, then an apprentice is just as qualified to implement that table in Ember as I am, for example, especially if they have access to the immediate feedback that they need when they get stuck. What I've been doing is first, I've been very, very honest with people that I work with saying like, "This is what's going to happen. This is going to be the person working on your project, and this person is going to do be doing this work." Also kind of talking about the reality of Ember work which there are a lot of things that are really difficult that very smart and experienced Ember developers can solve, but there's a lot of work that we do in large Ember applications, that there's lots of paved paths for that, there's lots of just like assembly kind of the ground work and I think that's a really great opportunity for people who are learning Ember to get the repetition, the kind of muscle memory of understanding how to solve problems. I think the repetition of doing like 'data down, actions up', repetition of doing like working with computer properties, and repetition of writing tests. All these are things that apprentices need to do to become very good at writing Ember applications. BRANDON: That's actually my experience as well. I come from a nontraditional background and I knew that I got a sense for when I was trying to learn a new thing that it was a certain number of projects before I felt like somebody could give me something and I felt comfortable saying, "Hey, I can probably do that." It wasn't my first project and it wasn't like a hundred so have you kind of discovered a number in there of projects that somebody might have worked on when you talk about that repetition. Is there a number of times of repetition that you find people become comfortable with something? LENNEX: On number of projects, for being comfortable in Ember? BRANDON: Yeah, at what point do you start feeling comfortable and a little more confident that somebody could hand you something that you haven't seen before, and say, "Hey, I could probably tackle that." Is there a certain number of projects that you've handle before you felt like you could just jump in on that? LENNEX: Let's say for testing for example, writing an acceptance test. I wrote the initial test for HospitalRun. The next project that I did, I was really comfortable with acceptance testing. That was just one of those thing that I could do. I think just doing it once or twice is enough for you to feel comfortable doing something. I don't know about the other stuff, but then what I've done so far, that has been okay. CHARLES: That's interesting. What I'm hearing is you weren't doing like the whole slice of the application. You were focusing on, "Okay, the acceptance test. That is the thing that I'm going to take on. That's the thing that I'm going to own. I'm actually just not going to worry about everything that lies underneath it, or how to implement the acceptance test but I'm going to learn acceptance testing in an Ember application. Then once I've got that skill, now it's in my pocket and I can take it to the next problem." BRANDON: Lennex, at what point do you start feeling these things start to click together, where you have the tests over here and you have maybe understanding the router over there and you have maybe understanding components over here? Each of these things takes time, it's difficult, and it's a new concept. At what point do you start feeling that you have a full picture of how an application works and that you could kind of attack it from different angles? LENNEX: In my experience for HospitalRun, I did the tests and I did a lot of [inaudible] from Ember 1.X to 2.X. So I got to touch a little bit of everything. The next project in [inaudible], I implemented a feature. That feature has required me to use all the previous knowledge that I gained from HospitalRun to do something that actually [inaudible] and [inaudible] properly. In my next project, I'm now building an [inaudible] from the ground up using previous knowledge from all the other projects. So you're always building on top of what you got before. BRANDON: That actually sounds like an interesting pattern. Again, I don't know if this is sort of something you discovered or happens over time or even if I'm reading it right. But it sounds like you're really mixing up these tasks where some of them are kind of a deep dive on one small piece like, "Hey, I want you to write acceptance tests around this and you're familiar with acceptance testing." And then you have a thin slice of something like an Ember upgrade that touches all aspects of the code base but in a thinner area, as well as a ground up building of something, sounds like maybe later. Is that sort of mix of types of work intentional? Or is that just sort of something that, "Hey, if the work is there and if it seems like somebody can do then I'll grab it"? TARAS: I think some of things are very intentional like the last project that LENNEX is working on, I intentionally said that, "You now have enough experience doing all of them. You've been dealing with other people's problems for a while now. So I think it's time for you to make your own problems so you can actually understand that process a little bit better." But other things that are actually just very practical things like the reason why starting with testing. Why we start with testing is because without tests in place, I don't have guarantees that the things that Lennex is doing are not breaking functionality. Then what that means is if I don't have that guarantee, that means that the chances of me being pulled into something randomly is very high and then that's the kind of risk that I can't take. Actually what happens now is almost every conversation with new clients starts off with, "I know you guys want to do features but before we can do that, we need to build your acceptance tests suite." And so this is actually a very practical thing. I think part of apprenticeship program for us is actually teaching the things. It's a very practical thing. It's like we need to have tests to be able to do this work. BRANDON: Yeah, I mean it's one of those things. There is some debate in the community around like, "Well, how soon do you introduce that to somebody? Is it something that is an advanced concept?" I was not introduced to testing until much later in my development career. Basically, my first introduction to testing was somebody handed me the 'can't back' book called Test Driven Development which is all written in Java before I had learned to program, and I was like, "I don't get it." So that was my last attempt at testing for about two and a half years. It wasn't part of my process but when I did discover it, seemed like it did make everything easier. The fact that you're able to do that up front, I imagine probably saves a lot of time and frustration for people so they have something to like back up to during the course of their learning process. There's always like a place where they knew this thing was working. TARAS: I think there's another pattern that is underneath this which is very important to give people what they need to build to move forward. So with Lennex, when he started working on HospitalRun, I spent almost half a week, maybe almost a week setting up because they never had tests so we had to make it possible for him to write test, so we need to actually read the first acceptance test. What that means is that you need to go in and find all the problems with the app that prevent you from writing acceptance test and actually fix those problems. If I just said to Lennex, "You know, write an acceptance test for this," without giving him any paved path to do that, I think the chance of him succeeding would be very low. BRANDON: So yeah, you basically have to pre-shave all the yaks around getting the first one going. And from that point forward, they're likely to be able to carry the ball further. TARAS: Right. BRANDON: I have a question for you, Lennex, in that sort of vein is how do you know when you're stuck on something that is like well outside of your capabilities versus when you're supposed to stick with something because you know there's something you're supposed to learn? Is that a skill that you've had to develop or is that something that... I don't know, like I'm not sure how to deal with that with our apprenticeship, and I'm wondering how you've dealt with that? LENNEX: One thing that Taras has taught me is if I'm facing a challenge, I should work on it. Taras will say, "We're going for a day. If you fail, then come to me." It helps me to not give up easily. If it's beyond me, then after that day Taras is going to help me. By then, usually, I end up getting through that and finding a solution. BRANDON: Interesting. I have worried that a day was too long of a feedback loop to let somebody bang their head. But it sounds like you've landed on a day as being kind of the approximate amount of time somebody could spend and try to solve something themselves. Taras, is that basically a fair, like wind up being a good place to land? LENNEX: Well, for me and Taras, it will depend on different - a day usually means when you accept. So there isn't that much [inaudible]. CHARLES: But it makes sense when I think about it. I actually wasn't thinking about it in terms of that being an appropriate size feedback loop. But when you think about what you're actually doing when you're programming, a day is actually a very reasonable amount of time to struggle with a problem. So before you say, "Oh, man. I just need to find someone to pair with this on. I've done my Googling or whatever but I need to try and like roll back and look at for some prior [inaudible] on this or try and find connect with somebody who's sharing a similar problem." I think that actually makes a lot of sense, right? That's something that we all encounter in our daily lives. LENNEX: Yeah. TARAS: We know from people with experience how long sometimes it takes for us to understand something. CHARLES: Sometimes years. TARAS: Yeah, and I think it's really tricky. It's hard because learning takes time. That's one of the things that I'm a little... I'm not sure exactly how this is going to work but I know if clients are paying me to mentor their team, I'm going to be available to them within half an hour to an hour to answer that question because if the client can't afford to wait a day for them to get that answer. But for a person who is learning as their primary deliverable, I think a day is reasonable amount of time for a person to try to like even sleep on it. CHARLES: Right. It's true. It's a tough line. I think, Brandon, one time you said something that always stuck with me. You said that learning only happens when you bang your head against the wall so that your brain is soft enough to accept the answer. And you don't achieve learning without the banging your head against the wall first. BRANDON: Yeah, Brandon Hays, the king of violent metaphors. [Laughter] BRANDON: There is actually an important aspect to this that I don't want to drop onto the floor and that is the idea that part of this process is that you have people that have access to one another. That's part of how you are scaling it, that you're also kind of helping. It seems like you're helping build a small community of apprentices to help each other. So Lennex, my question is this, how often do you wind up using that network of people versus you feel like you'll just handle it on your own? How much do you want to have accessing that? LENNEX: I access it a lot. I usually get stuck, and then I know someone working on projects which is similar to what I'm doing. So again, I just easily ping him and then a few minutes or a few hours later, we're pairing on it. BRANDON: That seems like a way where you're able to do that without reaching out too much to Taras. It feels like you're asking for help and figuring it out. But it means that you don't have to roll up to the most experienced person for every single question, that you kind of started to build a network of people that stitching together your own mentorship in effect, I guess. LENNEX: Yeah, that's true. It's easier to understand the concept when someone is on your level or slightly above you when they explain it to you. Maybe for me, it's easier to understand. BRANDON: Actually, that jives with a lot of our experience. I can't remember what book this is from. I'm pretty sure it's stolen from another book but I read it from the book 'Pragmatic Programmer' where they talk about the zone of proximal development, where it's easier to learn from people who have just a bit more experience than you because they haven't completely forgotten how they learned the thing that you're trying to learn. After a while, expertise means that you actually internalize that to the point where you can no longer remember not knowing it. That can be really tough. I think that's actually something that a lot of mentor should probably know and recognize and understand. People that want to take apprenticeship on need to understand that you probably have lost a lot of the empathy. I know I have and it really bums me out because it doesn't feel like that long ago that I was a brand new developer. But I'll sit with somebody who's brand new and I forgot how I learned the thing that I'm sitting there trying to teach somebody, and you start getting that little burning sensation in the back of your head like, "How can you not know this?" You know that at one point you did not know this, but you don't remember not knowing it. It's a very strange sensation to have gone through all of that and then lose that empathy. So I feel like that's must be a really important concept. Another question I have for you Lennex is how much of your time do you wind up spending helping other people do that kind of stuff as well? Do you wind up doing participating as a mentorship stuff at this point? LENNEX: Yes, I do. Actually now, they are about three people that have reached out to me on Twitter, wanting my help. I've paired with them when they have their own projects. They're asking me questions. One guy that I helped with Ember stuff in our local community, and maybe because of the apprenticeship that I'm doing with Taras, they think I'm an expert in Ember. But I'm actually helping other people a lot. BRANDON: I think that's really phenomenal. That sounds like success to me. CHARLES: Yeah, I'm actually curious. Having been through this process and experienced success at it, were there any times where you kind of felt you wanted to throw up your hands and be like, "This is not working." What were those moments of frustration or mistakes that... Not mistakes, but were there any moment's frustration? What actually did you take to course correct on that? If not, that's fine too. BRANDON: Yeah, if not, I'll just know you're lying. [Laughter] TARAS: There were definitely challenges. Lennex and I both went through some difficult learning and questioned whether we're be able to do this. I don't want to speak for Lennex but there are certain things that you have to learn to be able to work with people, and they're not programming things. I think that's because obstacles that Lennex and I had have been related to communication and being reliable for each other, I think that's the part that's been hardest. But the reality, I think, is that this is what programming is, talking to people most of the time and building a network of people. So I think we need to, as a mentor to an apprentice, I need to help my apprentice understand this, and help them understand what makes me successful in my work with our clients, for example. BRANDON: You brought up one thing and I'm curious to get Lennex's perspective on this, which is being reliable for each other. I know it has been probably the single greatest challenge to our apprenticeship platform at Frontside, where we've brought apprentices on and the criticism that we had about our apprenticeship program is if I had 24/7 access to the mentorship that I needed, this process could have been done in three to four months. And instead, it's going to take seven or eight months. So it takes literally twice as long if they have to fight and scrap for every minute of mentorship that they get. I'm wondering, Lennex, if you've experienced something like that and how you've addressed it, if so? LENNEX: Maybe the thing with me is I really wanted to be part of the apprenticeship program. So I had to work really, really hard to make this work. But given that for me, this apprenticeship program has been 100% remote. There's no one standing over my shoulder or someone chasing me, asking me what I've done or whatever. I had to discipline myself so that if I get tasks that I should do, I should do then on time. Even if Taras is not available, he's not there chasing up to me whether I've done that. The other thing is I wasn't good at communicating early on. I would shy away from telling him when things are too complicated for me. I'll try to solve everything on my own until I discovered that some things you just can't learn on your own. You have to ask for help. Since then, things have been a bit better. BRANDON: That sounds like something almost universal to me. Every time we've attempted apprenticeship of any kind, maybe it's because we tend to select the people that we come into contact that say, "Hey, I like to do apprenticeship," tend to be people that are kind of self-starters. But they always tend to try to solve everything on their own. It becomes this coaching exercise of having to have that person communicate back to you. Is there a sort of a platform for that? Or is that just a style that you've developed where you're willing to reach out more frequently? Or do you have check-in points or something like that during the apprenticeship that are like standard? TARAS: We don't have anything specific. Something that I use in projects is like if you're actively working on something, if you work in a project and that's your deliverable, like half an hour or so much time you get to play around with it, and then let me know. But the emphasis is on the person building the responsibility of the deliverable and knowing what's necessary for them to build to move forward. So I'm seeing that now from Lennex which I didn't see before in the beginning but I see it now. Now, if he's stuck, he's willing to say like, "Oh, okay. I don't know what's going on here. This doesn't make sense to me." And I think that's really important. I'm not sure exactly how to cultivate that but for whatever reason, it's worked with Lennex. But I think we need to help people learn that that they have to take responsibility for their work. BRANDON: It seems to me that that's the process of learning to own their own thing, learning to kind of develop their own paths. Again, that's one of those things that winds up being a better apprenticeship pattern for the person and also is a thing that lends itself to making this thing scalable where you can benefit more people and have them help themselves in each other, rather than having to be the nexus point for all questions and all accountability systems and everything. So it seems to be working really well for you. I have one more question that I want to ask from both to Taras and Lennex. What you would say to people who are intimidated about taking on a role in mentorship knowing that, "Hey, that actually does sound harder taking on a role and trying to cultivate and participate in apprenticeship." What you would recommend to that person that is interested in it but maybe intimidated by it? Then Linux, the same question for you but from the position of somebody that's trying to break in and kind of scared and nervous that it seems difficult or scary or opaque. So can we start with you, Taras? What would you say to somebody that is like 'hey, this sounds fun and cool and everything but it sounds too hard'? TARAS: To be a mentor or to have an apprentice? BRANDON: Take on the idea or participate in apprenticeship in some way. Is there some way that you know that people could get involved that would not necessarily be super intimidating? TARAS: I'm curious what the person's intention is because if you want to help people and that's the emphasis, then you have things that are uncomfortable. Especially good things in a lot of times, they're uncomfortable until you get really good at them. If you feel uncomfortable, chances are you're not growing right now. For a lot of people that are very good technically, helping others, understand these things is the next step for them to evolve in their personal growth. If they really want to get better, having apprentice is a very confronting and a very challenging thing but it creates real opportunities to see that you're actually getting better and you're improving as a person and as a technical leader. BRANDON: Then, as far as [inaudible] said, "I don't see the opportunity for myself." My guess is there are people everywhere that could use help. Do you have any suggestions on where they can find people to help, ways that they can get involved? Do you have a place where - are you looking for additional people to jump in and get involved on the mentorship side or suggestions for ways that people might get involved? TARAS: I would love to help people who want to build apprenticeship systems in their companies. I would love to help those people if they're able to do that. Otherwise, I think that creating more systems in Ember community around apprenticeship, I think would be really helpful like making more systematic because right now, it's something that I do but I'd love for it to be something to the Ember community does. Then because from that, if we engage in that conversation, then we can create spaces where it will be easy for people to do this kind of things and find apprentices and find mentors. I'd love for this to be an Ember community thing. CHARLES: Well, it seems like this would be as good a place to start as any. So, here we are. BRANDON: Maybe after this call, we'll figure something out and put something together and tell people to look for that. If they want to participate in mentorship and they consider themselves Ember or Ember adjacent, I'd like to see something in the next little while that lets people participate in a more systematic fashion. That sounds like an opportunity, for sure. If there are people that want to participate in that, sounds like you're the person to reach out to. Then Lennex, for your sake, for people that kind of want to break into technology and are really intimidated by it, obviously you're in a remote part of the world and your access has been somewhat limited. Sounds like you even fight for internet access in your life, as well, which is a foreign concept to a lot of people. So what would you tell to those people that are intimidated by doing this, scared that they're going to waste somebody's time, scared that they'll fail at it? LENNEX: I think if someone really, really wants to learn, they should find a mentor or a good apprenticeship because learning from someone who's experienced, someone who has your best interest at heart, someone who's willing to put in the effort to teach yourself, you can beat that. If you find that that someone was willing to do that, then put in the effort and go through that program because usually, apprenticeship is tailored towards a specific individual helping the apprentice. Where else will you get that? BRANDON: And there's not a ton of access to that in the world so it sounds like that's a big problem. That's what they are fixing in the tech industry. So having you on to come here and talk about it, lend some expertise to it, and start putting some ideas, process and pushing that conversation forward, it matters a lot certainly to me personally. But also to what the point of what we're trying to do at the Frontside. If people want to get in touch with you all, how would they do that, Taras? How people get in touch with you? TARAS: I'm @EmberSherpa on Twitter, and Taras@EmberSherpa.com via email. I always try my best to talk to people as much as possible and be available to people as much possible. If anybody reaches out to me, I'd love to talk to them. CHARLES: Yeah, you definitely been accessible to us which is why we're talking today and I really appreciate that. I mean, you've been genuinely super helpful. We haven't really gotten into it in this podcast but we've worked with you quite a bit and are working to improve our apprenticeship program with your help. I can't tell you how much we appreciate it. Then, for you Lennex, how do people get in touch with you? LENNEX: I am @zinyando on Twitter, and lennex@EmberSherpa.com. BRANDON: Awesome. Well, thank you both very much. This was super enlightening. It's frustrating because I feel like we just barely scratched the surface. But I feel like there's some work that we need to do to put together some process around this. Maybe there's some blog posts or some further discussion around this to put this together. I would love to talk with you all again when we have something cool to share with people. But what you're doing already is so awesome. I'd like for more people to know about it because I literally have never seen it done as successfully, as consistently as I've seen the EmberSherpa apprenticeship set up work. Thanks very much for both of you all for putting that into the community and for sharing with us. TARAS: It means so much to hear you, Brandon, say this because I respect both of you very much. I think you guys have a really great reputation in our community, and it means the world to me to hear you guys say that. Thank you so much for having us here.

Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale join us to talk about the road to Ember 2.0 and "Fast Boot". They share insight about why they stick to a 6 week release cycle, and why they think JS frameworks might be the future of all web apps (especially content sites). We also chat about what "indie open source" means, and exactly how much design goes into the Ember project and community. Yehuda Katz (Twitter) Tom Dale (Twitter) Tom Dale's Klout score is 66 Tilde.io Erik Bryn Yehuda at Hack Summit: "Indie OSS" HTMLBars FastBoot: Ember's Server-Side Rendering solution Tom on Shop Talk Show on Server-Side Rendering Rendr JS Yehuda's RailsConf keynote: "10 Years!" Skylight.io: Make your Rails apps faster with actionable insights Transcript: FILE NAME: The Frontside 16 - Yehuda Katz & Tom Dale Talk About Javascript DURATION: 55:59 minutes CHARLES: Everybody, welcome to Frontside the Podcast, Episode 16. We've got Brandon and Stanley here with me on the podcast and some very special guests who need no introduction, so I'll let them introduce themselves. TOM: Maybe we just start with Yehuda because he's the most famous. Are we starting by number of Twitter followers? STANLEY: Actually, Cloud score. TOM: Yeah, it's Cloud score based. YEHUDA: I think Tom has a higher Cloud score than me. BRANDON: All right, Tom. Go for it. TOM: Hey, what's up? I'm Tom. I had the idea for Ember JS in the shower. [Laughter] YEHUDA: Hey. I'm Yehuda. I work on standard stuff and Ember a lot these days, and now Rust also. TOM: Yehuda just joined the Rust core team. I don't know if you guys saw that. BRANDON: I did see that. Rust is a programming language. YEHUDA: Programming language. STANLEY: Are we going to get to talk about that later? BRANDON: Sure. TOM: We can talk about whatever you want. I'm not going to have any insights on that. YEHUDA: We'll have some insights. TOM: Yeah. I don't know if you guys ever saw the Pokemon Movie, but basically Yehuda is reenacting that with core teams. You've got to catch them all. [Laughter] BRANDON: That's great. STANLEY: That's not just the movie, Tom. That's literally everything around Pokemon. TOM: Oh, okay. STANLEY: That is the tagline. TOM: I will definitely defer. You seem like an expert here, Stanley. STANLEY: You know; I know the most important facts of all time. BRANDON: Stanley is on the Pokemon core team actually. STANLEY: I actually just made a new Pokemon that's like a guitar, a chair, and a microwave put together. BRANDON: What's it called? STANLEY: Rock-On. TOM: That is the worst Pokemon name I have ever heard. [Laughter] TOM: Oh, my gosh. BRANDON: All right, well, off to an auspicious start here. So the two of you and Leah formed the original core team for Ember. Is that fair to say or were there other people involved at that time when you kind of were switching SproutCore 2.0 to Ember? YEHUDA: I don't think I would call the original group that switched SproutCore over to Ember necessarily the core team. I would say that there was a bunch of people that were working on what was called SproutCore 2 at the time at Strobe, and it doesn't -- what we were doing there doesn't really meet my requirements for a good core team or a good Indie Open Source project. But one of the things that we did after switching over to being Ember and announcing the separate project was to make the core team more like what I would want. TOM: Well, I would say that there was never one moment where we were like, hey, let's create a core team. I think one thing that I learned from Yehuda about managing an open source project is that it is extremely important to start delegating way before you feel ready or comfortable. So there was a point early on where we were just totally overwhelmed as people started using it and people came along and were interested. And so we just gave them commit bit without really thinking about the bureaucracy of it or the structure of it. And then it definitely got to a point where it was like, "Why is there no core team yet?" because there's a ton of people with commit. So we should probably think about this a little bit more. YEHUDA: Of the people who are on the core team now, Erik, Chris, and Steph were all involved extremely early. I think Erik Bryn was the second contributor. Well, the first contributor after people working at Strobe, and Chris and Steph got involved really early because they were building an app on Ember that was very, very mobile focused. Well, it's a mobile app, and so they needed heavy performance, and we were not necessarily focusing on that, so they got involved pretty early also. BRANDON: And you gave a really awesome talk about this recently at Hack Summit. We'll throw the link to that in the show notes. I thought it was terrific, and I thought there was a lot of amazing ideas that were clearly born of painful experience. And I want to talk about that in a moment and kind of basically running and maintaining an open source project that keeps the open source ethos, I think, was kind of the thrust of the talk and keeping the Web and Open Source Indie. But before we jump into that, I wanted to get kind of a -- without going into, like, a full state of the union, there's a really lot going on in the world of Ember right now. It can be actually kind of hard for individual developers to just keep up with the news of it. There are just so many cool things happening at once. And there are a few things in particular that I wanted to get an update about. You guys are doing some really interesting stuff right now, but some things that are shipping soon: HTMLBars is actually happening. YEHUDA: It's in the beta. BRANDON: Yeah, it's in the beta, so people -- we tested it in our app already, and with one exception with, I guess, Ember list view isn't quite ready for it yet, but. YEHUDA: I think that's ready now too. BRANDON: Oh, really? TOM: Yeah, that just got updated. BRANDON: So, yeah, it was phenomenal. I mean it just works. Like, it was pretty amazing. So the benefit to users for that has been kind of already gradually been implemented where the metamorph tags in the DOM were gone. TOM: Right. BRANDON: What else can people expect to see once HTMLBars is in place? YEHUDA: So let me just reiterate a thing that you just said that maybe people weren't clear about before I let Tom a little bit about HTMLBars, which is, one of our major goals now and probably forever is to continue to update things incrementally and without breaking apps. And that's something that takes a lot of effort, so I want to reiterate it because it's probably the driving force of everything that we do, so like you said, there's a lot of news. We've been talking about a lot of stuff. We can talk for hours on it, probably. But the key thing is that a lot of times you hear there's a lot of news in a project, and it feels overwhelming. It feels like, oh, my God, if there's that much news, it probably means I'm going to have to spend the next five years catching up with all the things that are happening. And with Ember, our major goal is to make sure that all that, all those new features don't affect your app. I mean there will be a 2.0, and at 2.0 there may be some breaking changes, but even with the 2.0, all the breaking changes will land before 2.0. They'll land on the 1x brands together with deprecation warnings so you'll learn about them as you upgrade. TOM: Yeah. YEHUDA: And so I think this is the driving force of everything we're doing now. TOM: Yeah, I think, with 2.0, it's not like oh, my gosh, there's all this new stuff I have to learn. Instead, what it's going to be is us removing stuff that you probably never even learned about anyway. YEHUDA: Or that we told you in 1.10 or 1.11 to switch away from and you had plenty of releases to remove. TOM: Yeah, you'll have ample warning, and you'll definitely -- it's not going to blindside anyone. But I think this is exactly the point is we're on a six-week release cycle, and it is impossible to do big bang stuff in six weeks. Right? Think about any big software project anyone listening to this has worked on. It's hard to build a huge thing in six weeks, which maybe seems like a limitation, but actually I think we both see that as a huge strength, which is that it really forces you, as an engineer, to think about, okay, I want to move mountains. But I need to do it six weeks at a time, so how do I basically touch back down to reality as often as possible? With HTMLBars, if you think about it, it's a pretty dramatic thing, right? We're basically entirely replacing the rendering engine of this pretty large JavaScript framework, which in some sense is like trying to change the engine on a 747 mid flight. And the only way that we can get away with doing that is to do it very incrementally. And the only way we can do it without breaking people's apps, I should say, is to do it incrementally. Step one was metal-views, which removed metamorphs. But, fundamentally, all view rendering was still string concatenation. And then the next step after that was to get actual HTMLBars in with creating DOM instead of creating strings. YEHUDA: There was actually another step in between, which was to change all the -- so the internal, whenever you use a curlies and handlebars, those curlies, in the old version of the templating engine, would go and they would have ad hoc code to observe something, observe paths, and there was all this complicated code at each point where a curlies was used anywhere in the templating engine, and the new system -- and this is again behind the scenes, so it's easy for even Tom to have forgotten about it. We refactored everything internally so that it used a stream-based system so that all the parts of the templating engine don't have to know exactly how that's all structured internally. And that makes it a lot easier to do performance optimizations, but also makes it a lot easier to avoid mistakes and bugs that cropped up from time-to-time. So that was another step in the direction that was necessary to get all the way to the end. TOM: So now that's in, and I think the next step is to actually -- the next step will be now that we've got HTMLBars integrated in a backwards compatible way, the next step is introducing nice, new syntax. So just one example of this is this gives us the ability to remove the bind-attr helper. Most people that I've noticed when I'm teaching them Ember intuitively think that they should be able to do attrf equals curly, curly URL, and that doesn't work together. You have to do bind-attr. But because HTMLBars is a much smarter parser, we're able to have that context, and we can actually just dramatically simplify the whole model. BRANDON: Okay. And you also answered another question I had, which was, there are a lot of people basically talking about how they should be building apps for 2.0 friendliness, but it sounds like if they stay with the point releases, there'll be very little work involved in moving to 2.0. So you don't have to kind of like today sit and architect your app in a certain way as long as you're staying up to date with the point releases. Would you say that's relatively accurate? TOM: Yeah, I think so. 2.0 is not going to have any new features, and one feature that Teddy Zeenny is working on for the Ember Inspector, you know the Chrome and Firefox plugin for the developer tools, is adding a deprecations pane. So what we expect to happen is that people should just keep upgrading their apps on the 1x point releases and then, every upgrade, you may see one or more deprecation warnings pop up, either in the console or in this pane in the developer tools. And you just fix those at your leisure. Then when 2.0 comes out, all that will happen is that the payload size of Ember will shrink. YEHUDA: Yeah. I think another way to put all that is, when we looked at React, so we looked at React a lot as part of the run-up to 2.0 for the past, like, six months. And when we looked at React, initially we saw a programming model that actually wasn't that different from how we thought people should build Ember apps, so things like you should have data flowing down from a single point and, in Ember, that single point is the model hook in your route, and then we always thought about data flowing down. And you should have events bubbling up, and you should use actions mostly for communication. I remember Erik Bryn very, very early on said, "I think people are overusing data bindings. People should use events more." And that's when we started adding the evented system to a bunch of the parts of the framework. TOM: Actions. Actions weren't there originally … two-way bindings. YEHUDA: Well, we added actions, but we also added, like, Ember.evented. TOM: Yeah. YEHUDA: And I think we kind of knew all this, right? And so idiomatically the way that Ember 2.0 works is actually not that different from how we thought Ember 1.x should work, but I think one of the things that ended up happening is that because data bindings are so -- two-way data bindings can be very nice and clever, a lot of times people would reach for two-way data mining because it was the first thing that was sitting there. And then they would end up building somewhat complicated systems that rely on communication through two-way data mining. TOM: The syntactic sugar pushed you in that direction. YEHUDA: And so a lot of what Ember 2.0 is is about making syntactic sugar more honest about what is the right default, and that does mean that there may be applications that were heavily relying on communication, especially communication channels through two-way data bindings. And that will work much less nicely in Ember 2.0, and it might feel painful to upgrade if you're trying to be both idiomatic and upgrade to 2.0 at the same time. But I think, for most people who are using actions and were using data down through the model hook, I think a lot of it will feel very familiar, will feel very much like how you've been doing things all along. CHARLES: Cool. I actually had a question about HTMLBars landing, and that's when we upgrade our apps, everything should just work seamless. Like Brandon said, we actually did a spike of that, and it mostly seems to be the case. You said that there are no new features, but are there more, like, newer development stories around? Like, given that the templating engine or the view layer understands the DOM, what power or APIs will users have to interact with it, like to do animations or bring things in and out and stuff like that? YEHUDA: Oh, yeah. CHARLES: Is there any of that stuff planned? YEHUDA: I don't think we meant to suggest that there are no new features in number 2.0. Just that they will land in the 1x series, I think, is the point. CHARLES: Ah, right, right. I see. TOM: I think probably the biggest feature is just speed. And I think, also, what HTMLBars' architecture unlocks is the ability to better integrate with other libraries by adopting kind of a diffing approach similar to what React does with the virtual DOM. Basically, in my mind, HTMLBars is all about a bunch of infrastructure work that allows us to make the programming model feel more natural for people who are…. YEHUDA: One way to think about it is that it's the first templating engine that was ever built specifically for Ember. Handlebars templating engine before was built as a general-purpose templating engine, and we pushed it as far as it could go to be real useful for Ember. But things like bind-attr and the metamorph tags kind of crept in as necessary because the templating engine wasn't really built for this purpose, the exact purpose that Ember was designed for. And the HTMLBars engine, part of it is that it's DOM based, and part of it is that it supports diffing, and part of it is that it's faster. But I think, ultimately, it allowed us to look at a lot of areas that are annoying about using templates in Ember and make them nicer. And, yeah, so I think that it's -- TOM: I'd say it also unlocks things like we're working on server side rendering right now, and a lot of that is due to the power of HTMLBars because we can run it in so many different environments, and we can model all of these things as streams internally. It gives us a lot of flexibility about what we can do with your applications. You know, we can do things like server side render your applications even though, of course, you never designed your app for that case in mind. But because of how expressive the templating and, in fact, the entire application architecture is, and because we all agree as a community that this is how we architect our apps, it unlocks a lot more stuff. And I think there'll be more things like server side rendering in the future that we all benefit from by sharing this very declarative application structure and very declarative templating language. YEHUDA: Yeah, I mean honestly, under the hood, the fact a lot of the innovations of the templating engine are not things that any user will ever see directly because they're just implementation. And if we wanted to go around pimping things like streams or the way that the diffing algorithm works internally and the way we clone fragments and all this stuff, we could probably spend a lot of time pimping it, and maybe that would even make a lot of people, some people happy. But I think you'll see, over the next year or so, these things will all lead towards better features or to more features that will be nice, and that's how I think we'd like to roll -- TOM: I think Web components integration is a big one. YEHUDA: Ah, yeah, that's a good point. TOM: I think HTMLBars makes it very easy. And so, in terms of actual improvements coming on top of HTMLBars, the component syntax, instead of being curly, curly to indicate that you want a component, you'll be able to use just regular angle brackets, so that'll be nice. And another thing that we're really keen to get rid of is: You know how today when you're building an Ember component if you want to customize the element associated with that component, you have to say, like, tag name, class name, bindings. You guys know what I'm talking about? BRANDON: Mm-hmm. TOM: So that's kind of annoying because all of those special properties on the component class that you used to customize the element are all duplicating features that already exist in the templating language. So it's just kind of this weird bifurcation of the programming model where, if you want to customize the element for this top level, do it in JavaScript. Everything else, do it in the template. So HTMLBars will allow us to allow you to customize your component element purely in the template, and you won't have to -- basically there are far more cases now where you'll be able to get away with a component that's just a template file, and you'll reduce the number of JavaScript classes in your app. YEHUDA: Yeah, I think, from a high level, the biggest -- the high level of the internal technical improvements are largely that it allows for contextual work. So the old templating engine wouldn't necessarily know that you're inside of an attrf when you have curlies, so we would have to spit out a bunch of extra stuff and maybe make you use extra helpers. It wouldn't necessarily know that you're in image FRC or a video tag or a component. It wouldn't be able to tell if you were using a polymer component that implements the bind protocol, right? But the new templating engine basically lets us see exactly what's happening at every curly, and that just has a large number of positive effects. BRANDON: So you said something else that I felt like was a good segue into the next part of the discussion that this basically allows you to do server side rendering, which you guys are really, like, in the thick of it right now. But for me, a lot of the talk I've seen a about server side rendering comes across as a little inside baseball. There's this sort of discussion between people who are really into React because they're suddenly doing a lot of stuff with server side rendering, and they're seeing some benefits out of it. And you see this stuff kind of pop up in the JavaScript community, but I'm curious to know if you guys can explain a little bit about the benefit of server side rendering that this is a major new feature coming to Ember now. YEHUDA: I'll let Tom maybe give the full pitch, but I think one thing that I feel somewhat strongly about is that, for most people, if you don't have a system that actually gives you something that works pretty well out of the box, in other words it doesn't ask you to do a lot of the work yourself, the idea of isomorphic server side rendering where you run your same app on the client and the server, I don't think that that ends up being worth it. And if you look at a lot of apps that use Ember today, a lot of them have spent relatively little time building non-isomorphic solutions for specifically SEO that have been very, very cheap in terms of time and very, very effective. But I think there's the: I want to not have to write that, even that little bit, and I think that that you get a lot of benefits out of if you just have your framework do it. In other words, if it's not just like your framework does 20% and you do 80%. If it's your framework does 95% and you do maybe a little bit, or you have some constraints, I think that is worth something. And I think the rehydration of fast boot is worth something, although that has even more issues and even a larger percentage that most people have to do on their own. Basically, I think the TLDR for me is that I've always saw server side rendering as indeed somewhat inside baseball because, for most people historically, and I think this is even true largely about React, the solution that you're offered is the framework will do a little bit for you, and you have to go figure out a lot of the details about how to make this work for real. And I think most people just don't have the time to figure all those details out. TOM: So it's been kind of interesting to watch this play out over the last year or two because I think there's been a big split between the JavaScript application community and old school people that create content for the Web who are really keen on this idea of progressive enhancement. And so there's kind been this split. And, for me, for a long time, I personally didn't really care about this case because, in my mind, JavaScript apps were really good for what I'll call workspace apps, which is most of them are behind a login. You log in. You have these very rich interactions. You're editing something. You know, I worked on the iCloud apps. It's a feature, not a bug, that Google can't index your calendar and your email, right? So to me that was the use case for JavaScript apps. But that was until I saw content sites. Like, I remember the first time thinking, "Wow, maybe JavaScript apps are actually the future of all Web applications," was when I saw Bustle, actually. When I saw Bustle, it was just a content site. It was just news articles. And if you would've asked me, I would have said you should probably use Rails or some other server rendered framework for this. But then I saw it, and it felt just like a website. I couldn't actually tell the difference other than how damn fast it was. And I kind of had to step back and question all of my opinions about how people should be building these kinds of applications. And especially for content sites, I think that the server rendering is really important, right, because historically your user has had to download all of this JavaScript and all that JavaScript had to be downloaded and evaluated and run before they saw anything. So having the ability to bootstrap that process on the server and have the first bits that the user starts downloading not be the JavaScript payload, but be HTML and CSS, so that the first thing that they see is useful, I think that's really going to change how people build applications because you get the benefits of server rendering while still retaining the kind of interactions that you can build with something like Ember that you just can't do with Rails. YEHUDA: But again, I think people trying to do this on their own and taking maybe a half solution and then trying to figure out how to make this work reliably ends up producing things that are pretty buggy and feel pretty bad on first boot, or they end up requiring tremendous amounts of engineering resources. And it's possible that, like, huge companies can make this work. But I mostly think about startups, and startups simply do not have the engineering resources to take on the server side rendering task on their own, so this is why I think we care about it for Ember because, as Tom said before, Ember is already pushing you down a pretty conventional path, and we think -- our hope is that by having people do that conventional path and us taking charge of server side rendering will have something that works mostly out of the box for a lot of users. Again, assuming they follow some additional constraints about what you're allowed to do on the server. TOM: And I think we should be clear here because there's, as always happens, there's ambiguity in the terminology. So first is the term isomorphic app, which I don't really love that term, but I guess we better get used to it, Yehuda. YEHUDA: Yeah. TOM: But there's really a spectrum. On the one side of the spectrum you have something like Airbnb has a library for Backbone called Rendr (with no e - well, one e, but not the second e). And that kind of lets you wire up some of the server side rendering. But again, it's very, very manual. And the whole purpose of this is just to make sure that the first thing that you deliver to the browser is HTML and not JavaScript so that the user, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled or they're on a slow connection or whatever, they get something useful. But then on the other side, you have things like Meteor or Asana where the whole idea is -- and to me, I'll be honest with you. It strikes me as extremely silly, but the idea is that you're writing both your server and your client in the same code base, and then you're deploying them both. You describe it, and it sounds like this magic bullet, but it also just seems really silly to me. YEHUDA: Well, I think the fact that even the first releases of Meteor had if Meteor.isClient and if Meteor.isServer, and even the first demos had large blocks of content…. TOM: Yeah. Conditionals. Yeah. YEHUDA: Basically means that people hadn't really figured it out exactly right yet. TOM: Yeah, the point is that even if you have a client side app, your server still has a lot of responsibilities, especially around data access to the database, authorization, authentication, and so on. And putting that in the code base with your UI and your drag and drop code just does not make any sense to me. So I want to be clear to everyone listening that that is not what we're going for. The idea is not that you're writing your json API server in Ember. The point is that you're writing the same old app. In fact, we hope that you don't have to make any changes to your app. And you can deploy it, and it will do a render using the same code. It's basically like your app running in a browser on the server, and then we'll have some way of -- YEHUDA: Except not actually a browser. TOM: -- it's actually a transferring state. YEHUDA: Except, importantly, it's much, much cheaper than being an actual browser. We're not using phantom JS or a zombie or anything. TOM: Right. Conceptually a browser, but we don't want to pay the cost. Phantom JS is a source of great pain for many people, ourselves included, so we want a pure JavaScript environment. But conceptually it's a browser. YEHUDA: I think the reason I hopped in there is I just want to be clear that the goal of conceptually a browser is actually not to be a browser, but to make Ember itself internally abstract enough so that the most expensive parts of being a browser can be replicated in a cheaper way on the server. Obviously the most important part of that is the DOM. And that's the part that React worked out for server side rendering is use the virtual DOM on the server and not a real DOM, right? And that means you don't need real phantom JS and the full scope of DOM. But there's also other stuff like how your routing works and how the model hook runs and how it makes requests, how it makes "XHRs" to get the data in the first place. Right? There are a lot of details if you think about what it takes to boot up an app in the first place. For us, the goal is to go through that whole process of booting up an app all the way through, but not including the did insert element hooks in your DOM and make sure that all that stuff doesn't require -- it has really constrained and clear abstractions, right? So rendering has a render abstraction and routing has a location abstraction, and the DOM has the HTML bars, little dom, lower case dom abstraction, right? So instead of saying we're running it inside of something that pretends to be a browser, we're saying Ember doesn't actually care whether it's in a browser or not, but it has very, very clear abstractions for what it means to be a browser. BRANDON: Okay, so is there--? It sounds like it could be a little like -- is this a little ways off? It sounds like there are a lot of benefits. Like, if you see the hand rolled stuff that Discourse has done, clearly this is something that Bustle cares enough about to sponsor, this is probably a little ways off for Ember developers. Is there anything that you want people doing Ember to know right now about server side rendering in terms of how it's going to affect them or some of the technical stuff that you're learning through this or anything like that? TOM: I think we've been thinking about this particular problem for a very long time. And in fact, we've intentionally designed the architecture of Ember specifically to handle this case, even from the beginning, even like three years ago. We knew that this is something that we wanted or at least we didn't want to paint ourselves into a corner around. So I think there are two aspects of this, and one of them, I think, is pretty well bounded and pretty straightforward. The other one is definitely going to require a little bit more research. The first step is simply getting rendering happening on the server. So because we designed Ember for this case, we were actually able to get Ember as a framework booting up in node in about a day's worth of work. So a couple things have crept in. There were areas where we had been a little bit sloppy and introduced dependencies on things like document.body, jQuery, things like that. So it was about a day to kind of encapsulate those, make sure that they weren't hard requirements for booting the framework, and that was about a day's worth of work. And then, by the end of the week -- we've only been working on this for about a week now -- at the end of the week, we actually had an app booting in node and handling route requests. So in terms of progress, it's been really great. But I guess all that we're saying is that, in a week, we were able to capitalize on the last three years of work we've been doing. That's not as impressive as it sounds. YEHUDA: It was nice that there were relatively few regressions, right? TOM: Yeah. YEHUDA: That the list of things where people were accidentally doing things that assumed the browser was actually relatively small. TOM: Yeah. And the way that we did that is basically introducing an abstraction that provides your environment to you, so a node that's different than in a browser. So that's the first part is to get the app booting, and the second part is to get it rendering. I think what's really cool is that, even though HTMLBars, of course, is a DOM based rendering engine, or despite that, we still use an abstraction around DOM access. What we're going to be able to do when we start, again, in earnest tomorrow, on Monday, is basically replace that DOM helper that we used to create DOM in the browser with something that we'll be able to build up strings so that you can build up your HTML on the server and serve that to the client. That's step one: rendering. I think we'll be able to make quite quick progress on that. I would guess probably about -- I don't know if I should give timelines here. I think we're ballparking around a month before we can at least beta it, the server rendering. BRANDON: That's a little faster timeline than I had assumed. TOM: That's purely rendering. I want to make clear that that is purely for things like SEO, for Web crawlers, for curl, things like that. Then the next phase after that, and this is where it gets into the tricky bit, is being able to -- YEHUDA: Rehydration. TOM: -- is rehydration, what people call it. What we call fast boot. And with fast boot the idea is that whatever state that we use to build up your application on the server, we also transfer that state, not just the HTML, not just the output, but the state that we use to build that output is somehow seamlessly transferred from the server to the client. And the client basically just takes the HTML that we've given it and reconnects all these bindings and goes from there, so it's totally seamless to the user. YEHUDA: And I think there's some complexity there. For example, there may be some part of your page that you can't actually render on the server because it says, like, "Hello, authenticated user," with the user's name. So thinking about ways to make sure that you can mark those as needing to be rendered on the client without causing jank. There's a bunch of stuff like that where, at first glance, it seems not too bad, but I guess the high level if there's a determinism issue, right? So the goal is to make sure that roughly what you did on the server is the same thing that you do on the client because if it's too far off, then you end up having to throw -- no matter how smart our algorithm is, we're going to end up having to throw away everything and replace it again. The idea is how to structure your app, how to structure the way that you set up your app in Ember CLI so that you tend to be putting out output that's deterministic on both sides. And, like Tom said, I think state is maybe overbroad. It's mostly modeled batter, right? Making sure that the model batter that you got on the server is equivalent and transferred together with the HTML payload so that the model hooks that you have in your client will not have to go make another XHR. They'll just have the data that the server already collected, and then hopefully rerender an equivalent DOM on the clients with relatively low…. TOM: There are just a lot of tricky cases, like imagine you have a bound helper that shows relative dates, like 30 seconds ago. So you have a clock on the server, and then you have a clock on the client. How do you reconcile those two? YEHUDA: Yeah, so the good news there -- the good news with all that, without getting too much into the weeds, is that the HTMLBars' engine is already broken up between rendering the parts of your DOM that are static, that are like the hello, the text hello inside of an H1, and updating the static parts with dynamic content. And today that's purely a performance optimization, and so that we could use the same document fragment over and over again after cloning, but that will also allow us to use server rendered content where, instead of expecting to have an empty text node that is to be filling in with dynamic content, we'll have a filled in text node. And we see, in that case, Tom, that the time that is in there already is not the correct time. It's not the equivalent time, and so we'll update it. So that's sort of like the React diffing strategy. I'm less worried about, like, there's a single text node with the wrong content because I know we can deal with that. And I'm a lot -- although if it's too much changes, it will look very bad. It will look very janky. I'm more worried about, like, this entire conditional change. So you're looking at something and then, like, your sidebar swaps out for a different sidebar, which I think would be a pretty unacceptable UI. CHARLES: Obviously there are a lot of different server side environments that people use. What requirements of the server is there going to be if I'm using a Rails app or something in Python or Java or whatnot? How am I going to interface to this? TOM: Well, you definitely need a JavaScript runtime, right, because your Ember app is written in JavaScript. Unless you're planning on pouring it into Ruby or whatever, we're definitely going to require JavaScript runtime. And I think we're starting with just supporting node. But what I would like to see, and maybe you guys can write this, is a Rails gem that you can install that will install dependencies in everything and basically get set up in a production environment. YEHUDA: I think one thing people often forget is you can definitely -- you could you have a node app running. People try to embed JavaScript. They try to use, like, The Ruby Racer, and embedding JavaScript is quite a disaster. BRANDON: [Laughter] I'm sorry. I don't know if you know. Charles wrote The Ruby Racer, and it is a disaster. STANLEY: It's cool. It's a disaster. YEHUDA: So let me be clear. It's a great idea. I use it a lot, but it just fundamentally doesn't now work. Right? It fundamentally cannot -- you cannot embed two VGCs in the same process. BRANDON: Right. YEHUDA: Okay. BRANDON: This is the greatest moment in the history of our podcast. I just want to say that. CHARLES: No, I know. There's no way to collect…. YEHUDA: Yes, exactly. CHARLES: -- for example. YEHUDA: I was about to use cycles as an example. CHARLES: The APIs just don't exist. YEHUDA: Yeah, so basically cycles, so this is why. The reason why I feel strongly about this is that we use Rust for Skylight, which is our product. And we need to embed something, and I would never in a million years embed something with a garbage collector. And I think The Ruby Racer was a pretty good -- I think, for constrained cases, it works fine if you know what you're doing, but people basically tried to use it as, "Oh, I'm just going to write part of my program in JavaScript. And, by the way, both languages have closures, so good luck," basically. The Ruby Racer is cool, but I would not -- I don't think that that's the correct strategy for having long-running JavaScript programs like Ember, like complicated stuff like Ember. I think a better thing for people to do would be to figure out a simple IPC protocol so that they could run their Ember app and then have a simple way of talking over a socket or something with the node app, so booting up your Rails app will also boot up the node app. And, if necessary, and you're serving through your Rails app, you could communicate. TOM: I think, to be clear, the Ember app, even when running on the server, still talks to the database server using json, right? So it's the exact same data marshalling flow. It's just presumably it'll be a lot faster because probably your API server and your application server are in the same data…. YEHUDA: Well, at a minimum, it'll be a lot more consistent, right? TOM: Yes. YEHUDA: I think when people -- when Twitter complained about somebody from some country connecting and getting a really slow connection, the issue there was that they were downloading the app shell and then who knows how long it took to download the json payload, right? But if the json payload is coming from the same data center, then it's, by definition, going to be downed within some range, reasonable range. BRANDON: Okay. Awesome. I'd like to shift gears and spend a couple minutes talking about something that most of the questions that I had originally for this were actually answered in your talk. But I'd like to go over it just a little bit. You alluded earlier to the way that you're running Ember as an ideal, sort of your ideals, discovering your ideals about open source projects and the Indie Web. And I think it's a really important topic, and I want to ask a little bit about that because I don't think a lot of people understand this. I think, especially I see in the JavaScript community, a lot more people establishing open source projects that are corporate run and that being considered a benefit rather than a drawback. And I've seen you push back on that a little bit, and I wanted to ask you, Yehuda, about what your definition of the Indie Web is and why you specifically run the Ember project the way that you guy run it. YEHUDA: Sure. I think there are basically two parts of what it means to be Indie, and the second one sort of derives out of the first one, but I think it's -- you wouldn't necessarily arrive at it yourself, so I'll make it explicit. The first one is that you have a diversified core team. What I mean by that is essentially diverse in all the ways you could possibly think of, and things that I learned from other projects are, like, functionally diverse. So make sure that if there's a person on your team -- if there's a person around somewhere running your events or doing documentation or doing evangelism or running user groups, make sure that if there's a person who is very skilled at doing that that they are the top person on your team in charge of that. The counter, the alternative that I've seen a lot in the open source community is that the person running events essentially reports to the core team, right? There's a person who is maybe a professional event runner, and they are not in charge of events. They're in charge of coming up with ideas for events that they run by the core team, and the core team decides yes or no. The problem is the core team has no skills in doing that, so this person ends up spending huge amounts of time being frustrated trying to explain to the core team something or other, right? That would be the equivalent of somebody on the core team writing some area of code, having to come to the rest to the core team and talking about really tiny, nitty-gritty implementation details. Of course, unlike code where I think people have an intuitive sense that you're deep in the weeds of some performance thing, and I don't really understand that. In a lot of areas that are not code, code people have a very high sense of their own understanding, right? The core teams, I've seen a lot of core teams that people come and they say, well, I happen to know a lot about how people want to read docs in this country and so I'm going to help with the translation effort. All of a sudden the core team is an expert on, like, Indian documentation. And they have all these opinions that are totally unwarranted. Step one is have a functionally diverse group of people, and have people that are not necessarily hardcore coders, but are talented and professionals in their area. Have them do that work at the top level. And I spent a little time on this just now because I feel strongly that this is an area that people miss, and it's just an area that code people are too high on their own supply. They're too impressed with their own skills. They cause a lot of pain for the people who are good at areas that are not hard-core code, so that's one. Two is be diverse in terms of the set of people that own decision-making in your project, so this is what you were talking about with the company run open source, and this is something companies can do. I've seen, for example, I worked with the Rust Project, and the Rust Project originally started at Mozilla. But they've been spending tremendous amounts of effort to try to increase the set of people who are on the core team of Rust that are not working at Mozilla. And this is something that maybe takes a lot of effort once you have an established project at a company. There's all the internal company politics you have to deal with. But the reality is that if you have a project that's at one company, you're kind of at the whims and the mercies of that one company's how they do resourcing, whether they think it's important, what their actual goals are. Maybe the thing that they built the project for doesn't necessarily match what the community is doing, right? So become diverse in the companies that own it. I think projects like Rails, Postgres, Ember, increasingly Rust are good examples of this. And, of course, I mean the regular meaning of the word diverse here, just because if you become more diverse in all areas, you actually find yourself being more function diverse just because of who ends up being in what areas. You end up finding yourself having a lot better insight. You end up sitting in a room, and when there are people of diverse backgrounds, the kinds of questions that people ask. And I can only say this. This is the thing that I've noticed personally. It's not a thing that I can empirically measure. I've just noticed that the kinds of questions that people ask, when you're diverse in all kinds of ways, ends up being -- they end up being stronger, better, and they end up pushing back on the kinds of decisions that you can make as a monoculture with group think, right? The harder it is to have group think, the harder it is for everyone to sit around and say, "You know what we're going to do? We're going to rewrite everything," right? That kind of thing is hard to do when you have a lot of people with a lot of different backgrounds with a lot of different interests. So that's, I think, the higher order bit of what in the open source means is be very diversified in a lot of different ways. But there's a specific thing that I think comes out of it that is very important, which is to do the work that you're doing incrementally. Again, the reason I think that this is a derive is that if you have a lot of people with a lot of different interests with a lot of different projects, I think it becomes very difficult for you to do full on rewrites because everybody has interests, and maybe a few people are excited about doing a rewrite, but everyone else says, "Oh, my God. What about my app?" Then you have the docs guy saying, "Oh, my God. Now we have to maintain two sets of docs?" And you have the evangelism guy hearing all the pushback from the community about the rewrite. So it becomes very difficult for you to have this situation where you're not doing things incrementally. But I think, in my talk, I spend some time on what it means to do things incrementally and what the benefits are and how to adopt the six-week release cycle and all that. I talked about that in more detail because, even though I think it's a natural consequence of being diversified, it's also something that you have to think about if you want to do it well. BRANDON: Yeah. It seems to me that that would require, like it's kind of a chicken and egg deal, but to me it seems like there was a lot of discipline in switching to a six-week release cycle, and that's important. It seems, for us at least as consumers of Ember as an open source framework, that's benefited us greatly. We find the framework much, much easier to keep up with on the six-week release cycles than pretty much most other open source projects we've worked with. YEHUDA: Which is kind of like a paradox, right, because you expect that six-week release cycle means you can never keep up with it because it's always changing. But in fact, six-week release cycle means you don't have time to ever change that much. BRANDON: Well, and even for apps that go dormant for a while, we find that, okay; we'll bring it up to one. Bring it up to the next one. The upgrade path becomes extremely obvious. YEHUDA: Yep, exactly, and there's deprecation warnings, and there's ... I think people should watch my talk on this specific area because it took me 15 minutes or something to lay out the whole thing. But I think the basic idea of just doing things incremental, and incrementally has this bad sense. It's like, oh, maybe you're hunting for the local maximum or something. All I mean by incrementally is the same way that the human body replaces its cells, right? You don't do it all at once. Maybe over an extended period of time, the thing that you're looking at is completely different. But because you did it a little at a time, you were able to move the whole community together in the direction instead of people, many, many people getting left behind, which is what used to happen a lot with Rails. I think Rails has gotten better at this over time. But it used to happen, like Rails 3 came out and a lot of people were stuck on Rails 2.3. BRANDON: I think when people hear incrementally, they can think about possibly incrementally be led in circles, right? You could incrementally be every day wake up and decide to change one degree or the other. What matters is if you have a compass that's pointing somewhere. For the Ember project, that incremental stuff doesn't work unless it's pointed somewhere very clear. And you and Tom are basically the keepers of that vision. And I wanted to ask about that, what the vision of the framework is that keeps guiding everybody. Is it sort of implicit to the project? As you use it, you recognize it. Or is it something that you've explicitly outlined somewhere? YEHUDA: I'll take this for a second and then Tom can jump in. I think, fundamentally, the main vision is just we ultimately wanted to have a full stack solution that solved the majority, the vast majority of the problems that a regular person would have writing a Web app, but we knew from the beginning that if we tried to take on that whole project, I mean even Meteor, who took on that whole project, is still struggling to have to complete the vision. And they tried to sort of boil the ocean. And so, we knew from the beginning that we were going to get it wrong if we tried to do a CLI tool and a framework and a data library and all this stuff all at once. And so I think we started off with the V in MVC, basically, right at the beginning and added routing and other stuff over time. But the mission always has been to build the thing that's a full stack of what you need to build front-end tools. Tom, you can take it from there. TOM: Yeah. I think, in the JavaScript world, I think, because JavaScript for so long was treated as a toy language that people didn't do serious stuff in, it attracted a certain type of developer who is -- which is a totally legitimate opinion, but they tended to be kind of hackers who would do these one-off experiments. And because of that, the notion of convention over configuration and having shared solutions is still a somewhat surprisingly controversial opinion in the JavaScript community. And so I think the role, as you said, for Yehuda and I, is to basically be willing to stand up and take the tomatoes that get thrown at us and say, "You know what? No, there is benefit in having a shared solution, especially when it's not just one-off hackers in their basement, but when it's a team of engineers working at a company, and you have a product that you need to ship, and it needs to have good interaction. It needs to be done yesterday. Those people need tools too. People like that deserve tools." And I think that's our goal is to have a framework that will last for at least the next ten years that is willing to incorporate good ideas as they come out and as they're embedded, move the community together, as Yehuda was saying, but without chasing the hype dragon where every six months: "Throw away everything you know because the next big thing is coming out. Rewrite your apps." I see Ember as a way of kind of tempering that instinct for engineers to chase the new and shiny constantly in a way that basically we have a community that agrees together what the next big thing is, and then we start moving towards that. I think, right now, major things that we're thinking about are one server rendering, as we talked about. Getting the CLI tools in place, that's a thing that we've wanted for a long time. But as Yehuda said, we didn't want to try boiling the ocean. And then the new HTMLBars view layer, which unlocks a lot of the cool things that React is able to do around, like, DOM diffing and so on. YEHUDA: Yeah. I usually tell people -- recently, I've come to a line, which is, if you want to tell me that there's not a place for shared solutions in some area or some abstraction, I think the burden is on you, actually. I think people in the JavaScript community, and there's a small group in the Rails community that feels the same way, they assume that the burden is on the person who is trying to abstract, right? If there's a common problem that a lot of people have, they think it's your job to prove that abstraction is a good idea. I think it is your job to prove that a particular abstraction is a good idea. But I think my de facto, my default position is that if a lot of people are solving the same problem that there's a shared solution worth hunting for. And I would say the JavaScript community is really -- big chunks of the JavaScript community are pretty anti this approach. But I think it's really the only way that you could build -- like Tom said, the only way you could build projects with large teams is to have some sense of what the shared answer is and to not have it be some genius on the fourth floor somewhere that does everything. And if you want to make any changes, you have to go to them. I've seen a lot of companies that work like this, and it works fine. Anther facet of this is that pretty much every company deciding to adopt, like, Ember, Angular, React, or Backbone, whatever, they do like this "taste test," right? A taste test is like a two-week project where they see which one is faster. By definition, the taste test doesn't successfully analyze what happens over a longer period or when you have a bigger set of developers, right? It's by definition optimized for short projects with a small number of developers, and so -- TOM: And usually it's the guy on the fourth floor conducting the taste test. YEHUDA: He's either conducting it or he is actively attacking it, right? He is saying we should not -- for example, Firefox OS refused to adopt any framework for an extended period despite the complaints of many people on the Firefox OS team because of the fact that they had a religion against frameworks. They didn't like frameworks as a concept. I've heard this from large numbers of people working on the periphery of Firefox OS and many complaints, right? And so I think we, Ember, one of the things we had to learn was that we can't get away with just saying that. We can't get away with saying, oh, you'll learn. If you just use Ember for a year, you'll figure it out. We had to really improve the getting started experience. But I think, on the flipside of that, there's no way that we could ever -- even if we get to be as nice as to optimal getting started framework, getting started tool, we're always going to have benefits that are not part of that that are very difficult to see when you're doing a quick analysis. Actually, recently we've seen a lot more big companies come out and talk about the benefits of Ember for long-lived projects, and I think that helps a lot just having people testify that they used Ember for a year within a team that wasn't three people, and they found it to be productive in these specific ways. I think that's helped a lot of people feel comfortable. BRANDON: That's been my experience, certainly, as well, just seeing that increase. I think everybody should -- honestly, I believe everybody listening to this should drop what they're doing and go watch the Hack Summit talk. I thought it was phenomenal, and I think it made me think a little differently because it's a little confusing out there, like what some of the tradeoffs are in these open source projects that are run in that kind of echo chamber. And the fact that you guys work so hard to pierce the echo chamber is really cool. I know that there may be some technical questions. We don't get a chance to have you guys on the podcast very often, obviously, so I wonder if anybody has any more questions. STANLEY: Before we get back to technical questions, I just want to cut in and say I really like Yehuda's talk from Rails Conf as well. It was really eye opening for me as somebody new to the Rails community, even though Rails has been around for a while, and kind of understanding the value of shared solutions and kind of the philosophy behind that. YEHUDA: Yeah, that was definitely the first time I tried to formulate a general theory for what shared solutions look like and why they're good, and essentially why Rails hit the nail on the head with the right amount of shared solutions and where the experimentation is happening and all that stuff. STANLEY: Cool. Back to you, Charles. CHARLES: I just had a quick question I wanted, before we wrap up. I had another question about the server side rendering, kind of a general one. I know I've definitely been burned by server side rendering in the past, you know, because it's been something that people talk about on and off, it seems like, for the last five, six years. I remember when mustache first came out. The first time that I tried it, it's like, oh, I've got this templating thing that I can run inside on my Rail server, and I can run it. There's a JavaScript implementation too. One of the things that I found was I was able to get up running very quickly, but then I felt like I was eaten alive by the edge cases. It was actually -- I think it was a blog post that you wrote, Tom, where you were talking about kind of the justification for resolving, always resolving RSVP promises asynchronously. Because, to not do so, have a different context, different stack sitting on top of the resolution was like releasing Zalgo into your application. I actually, when I read that thing about promises, it actually made me harken back to my experience with server side rendering. I was like, oh, with server side rendering I was releasing Zalgo onto my client. I had a very different context. TOM: Yeah, the thing you're describing is sharing templates across two different apps, right? CHARLES: Right. TOM: The data model diverges, and then the things that you need diverge. That specifically is something that we are going to avoid. The idea isn't, oh, you can reuse your model on the server, and you reuse your templates on the server. The point is it's your app, the same exact app, same code base that you would run in the user's browser just happens to be running on the server. YEHUDA: And I think there's also -- I think there's another important point, which is that if you look at how people do SSR, I think historically people have said, "Well, I'm going to use a view layer that's very good at SSR." And then you would have this pile of hacks that was involved in booting up your app. Honestly, Ember, in the beginning, had piles of hacks used to booting up your app. I definitely remember that period. Now the view layer maybe is very good at running on the client server and, like you said, originally was just like the template. But now maybe the whole view layer is good at it. But now the process of actually booting things is a source of non-determinism. You're saying Zalgo. I'm saying non-determinism. Zalgo is a better word. CHARLES: [Laughter] YEHUDA: And Ember has definitely held off on tackling server side rendering seriously until we felt confident that we had the full stack handled. In other words that, as a framework, we had the whole lifecycle handled. Then actually, if you look at technically what we've been doing recently, a lot of it is like separating out. We have an application right now, an application only -- there's only ever one instance of it. Now we're saying, well, there could be multiple sessions. And so we're really looking at the whole lifecycle of the application and, because we own the whole lifecycle of the application, we can actually feel confident that the path that we're going through is correct, so that's one part of it. The other part of it is essentially what React figured out at a high level. I think what we're doing is equivalent, which is you don't necessarily assume that you got exactly the same thing on the client server because probably in practice there's always going to be some thing or other, like the clock case that Tom talked about, or the hello Yehuda case that I talked about before, the authentication case. What you do is you rerender the template, and you don't say if it's not exactly the same, throw it away and start over. You say parts that are the same you can keep, and parts that are different you replace. Therefore, it's not so much a whack-a-mole problem. It's more like how much replacement can I tolerate and have it not feel janky, right? So you go use it, and if you see that there's an area that's popping in and replacing, that's an area that you have to go and figure out so, first of all, it will work. Right? It will work. It will not be broken. It might feel a little bad, and that's an area for you to go and improve the Zalgoishness of your solution. In practice, in Ember, it will almost always be something weird like you're relying on a non-deterministic DOM API or something like this, or you're relying on some XHR that even though we serialized it, you're getting a push notification, and it's different, and it happens quickly, so it's janked. Right? I think the basic point of try to control everything and also only replace things that are needed will get you to a much better starting place out of the gate with Ember than you will have if you try to do the old solutions. It may turn out to be a lot of work. And if it turns out to be a lot of work regardless, then I think it will still, even with Ember, be a thing that is used by people who really need it and not so much by people who don't. But I'm hopeful that the fact that we own the whole lifecycle of your application will let it be useful for a bigger set of people than people who are desperately in need of it as a solution. BRANDON: Awesome, so I think we're going to wrap up. Is there anything you guys want to give a shout-out to or anyone? YEHUDA: Please sign up for Skylight to make your Rails apps faster. TOM: Yeah, please. Make my Christmas a merry one. YEHUDA: We didn't talk about this at all. TOM: And sign up for Skylight. YEHUDA: We didn't talk about this at all, but Tom and I, much of our day job is working on Skylight. And if you watched my talk at Hack Summit, one of the things that I advocate and I really feel it in my gut because of Skylight is I advocate spending, even if you're full time in open source, spending some time, even a day a week or two days a week, would help a lot working on something that you have to maintain over the long haul because, like I said before, maintenance over the long haul is very difficult for you to market. It's something that you have to feel in your heart. If you're working on an open source project, work on -- use it for a real thing that you spend significant time on that you have to maintain over the long haul so you could feel, in a year, whether you're practice is holding up to being maintainable. And, yes, now that I've talked about Skylight for a second, please sign up. This is how we fund our ability to do any open source. Working on Skylight has definitely been the most enjoyable thing I've done in my career so far in the sense that I've had a lot of control over it, but it's also the most harrowing in the sense that we are responsible for getting all the revenue, so please sign up. BRANDON: All right, well, thanks very much, you all, for coming on. Everybody, go sign up for Skylight. It's very cool, very beautiful, and very actionable insight for Rails apps. Tom, Yehuda, thank you so much for joining us on this. It's been super enlightening. Again, everybody, please go watch Yehuda's talk on keeping the Web Indie. And if you've got a little extra time, the Rails Conf talk on layers of abstraction is also, I found, something that changed my views on a lot of stuff as well. Thanks again, both of you all, for coming on. YEHUDA: Thanks a lot. TOM: Thank you, guys. BRANDON: All right, talk to you later. CHARLES: Thank you, guys.