Podcasts about chuck it

This week on World's Your Oysta, we're sitting down with the effortlessly stylish Coco Schiffer, a rising force in fashion and personal styling. From talent management to fashion stardom, Coco takes us behind the scenes of her unexpected career pivot, sharing how she built her personal brand in an industry where everyone's watching.We get into it all—her viral fashion takes, the art of styling, and how she curates her capsule wardrobe guides that help people define their personal aesthetic. Plus, we play a round of Shuck It or Chuck It, debating everything from the return of maximalism to the internet's favorite controversial trend—hairy shoes.Coco also spills on her Fashion Week experiences, the power of authenticity, and what she envisions for the future of fashion (and maybe even love). If you've ever felt lost in the world of style or just want to hear a raw, inspiring story about self-reinvention, this episode is for you.Follow Coco:Instagram: @cocoschifferTikTok: @cococoschifferSubstack: What To WearShopMy: @cocoschifferJoin the World's Your Oysta community!Instagram: @wyo.podTikTok: @wyo.podYoutube: World's Your Oysta PodcastWebsite & Newsletter: WYO PodcastProduced by Peoples Media Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joining us in the studio all the way from Canada is Rick Dempsey, the Owner of Chuck-It Removal Services. Rick and his team are here at the warehouse, immersing themselves in our process, exchanging insights, and demonstrating how Chuck-It's commitment to culture and community impact truly sets them apart. Their dedication to serving and uplifting their community is more than just business — it's a mission, and we're excited to learn and grow together through this episode. Learn more: https://www.chuckit.ca/ Connect with Rick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-dempsey-b2666b11/ Experience Jobber for yourself, tell them Andy sent ya: https://go.getjobber.com/CamoCrewJunkRemoval Watch This Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1vPjdjuiTU Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@trashtalkbusinesspodcast ------- Listen in as industry expert Andy Weins of Camo Crew Junk Removal, and guests, break it down for you. Join our VIP Listeners Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/trashtalkbusinessowners Connect with Andy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyweins/ Get Andy's Book: https://a.co/d/9uIApkU

Chuck Tanowitz (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ctanowitz/) is a seasoned professional in strategic communications, with a history of building strong programs that drive media and brand growth. His experience spans more than 15 years—he has played key roles in shaping the marketing and communication strategies for various brands, including Paytronix Systems, Greentown Labs, the N-Squared Innovation District, TenMarks, and a long list of others. Chuck is back on Confessions of Marketer for the second time—having joined us in 2017 in the very early days of this podcast. Transcript Mark Reed-Edwards: Welcome to this special episode of Confessions of a Marketer. I'm Mark Reed Edwards. We're back with this mini series of shows I've dubbed the Talent Showcase. These episodes focus on people in marketing, communications, PR, and allied fields who are looking for their next opportunity. My guests share their stories, successes, and how they can help their next employer or client. Today, I'm joined by Chuck Tanowitz. Chuck is a seasoned professional in strategic communications with a history of building strong programs that drive media and brand growth. His experience spans more than 15 years. He's played a key roles in shaping the marketing and communication strategies for various brands, including Paytronix Systems, Greentown Labs, the N Squared Innovation District, 10 Marks, and a long list of others. Chuck Tanowitz is back on Confessions of a Marketer for the second time, having joined us in 2017, the very early days of this podcast. Chuck, welcome back. Chuck Tanowitz: Thank you. I I really appreciate you having me on. Mark: It's great to chat. So can you tell me more about yourself beyond what I just shared, you know, your background and career path? Chuck: You know, it's interesting. I was reading an article recently that talked about developing a career portfolio as opposed to a career path, and I feel like that's actually a little bit of what I've done. Yes, the core of my career has been in PR and marketing and brand, but I've also taken on these other roles outside. That's how I ended up, for example, at the N squared Innovation District, which was really more of an economic development effort, as much it was a marketing effort. So it's given me this broad base of very interesting kind of pieces that I've done. You know, when I look at the work I did at Paytronix, which was very much traditional marketing and PR and brand, which was: drive leads and drive interest in this company. But then you look at something like N-Squared, where it was: "How do I develop a community? How do I bring in art into the project and develop placemaking? How do I connect with local colleges and universities?" And then something like Greentown Labs, where it was: "How do you build something from zero and get it known where you're trying to not necessarily build leads, but certainly build brand around a name and what it means and giving it some brand equity?" And then also creating my own PR from, which I had done a few years ago. And then also being a local advocate and sit on the Economic Development Commission. And then most recently, I spent three days in Vermont learning how to bake croissants. So it's, you know, how do I put all those things together and begin to say, "What do they all mean and how do you move forward?" Mark: Boy, there are some analogies one can make to baking related to our profession. You know, being patient, right? And letting things rise. Chuck: Yeah, sometimes I am not nearly patient enough in my rise. But yes, that is a big part of baking. In fact, I said to my wife the other day, "What I need to do when I bake is plan out a series of bakes along the way, so that while one thing is sitting and rising, I'm working on the next thing." You're right, it does align with where you are in PR, where you're kind of, yes, you might be working on a press release over here, but that's not going out, you know, for two months, three months, six weeks, whatever it is. I also need to be doing the short- term pieces that's going to be driving things forward. But that's actually, I think, where, you know, if you want to kind of bring that analogy back out, where a lot of companies are missing the boat on PR. I know when I was doing my own agency, people would say to me, "Well, how will I know PR is working in the leads that I get?" And I heard it described recently as: demand generation is my sales in this month and next month. PR and brand are my sales in six months to a year. Looking at that over the long term is very difficult to kind of parse out how much is PR and brand doing for you and how much is demand gen doing for you. Those things have to work together, but you're right, there is a lot of patience involved in that PR and brand strategy because they are long term. You're not going to flip a switch and people are just going to know about you It's going to take some time. Mark: And croissants are layered, and it's very fine layers, so maybe there's another analogy we could make there. Chuck: I don't know if you've ever made croissants, but I was learning how to lock in butter which is a whole different thing. But yes, they are layered. There's a very careful folding process you need to do to get the right layers. You need to be patient. I was so proud of myself the other day when I made these croissants and I bit into it and I could see the honeycomb layer within it was like, Oh yes, I hit all those layers just right. But again, you don't know until you're done, right? When I bake a bread, it really takes 24 hours for sourdough to mature and come to life. And you put it in the oven and at that very last step, you could burn it. You could put it in too early, too late. And suddenly all this work you've done for the last 24 hours, is shot. And that's it. Right? So there's a lot of businesses that operate like that, but PR is definitely the end of that process. You can't rely on a single launch to make or break a company. You have to do it over time because there's too many factors that could get in the way that are often outside of your control. I mean, how many of us were working on a launch and the week before something major happens in the world and it completely changes what you're trying to do, right? Happens to Hollywood all the time. How many times have you heard a movie getting delayed or moving around because another one was coming out? Or some major event happens in the world-- a news event, a death, something tragic-- and it's like, "Well, we can't release a movie into that environment." So there's a lot of places that operate like that. Businesses need to be aware that they exist in that market and they can't plan these things out and say, "We have to hit that date, otherwise we're going to die." That's not a good way to run that company. You have to think long term and having a whole host of things moving throughout the year. It's a long growth process. Mark: It's kind of interesting. I don't want to get bogged down in this subject, but ESG and DEI have cropped up in the last several years for good reason. Prior to that, it's almost like companies existed in a different world. Most of them didn't want to get involved in what was going on in the greater society. Chuck: We dealt a little bit with that at my last position. During the George Floyd protests and Black Lives Matter, before the federal government declared Juneteenth a holiday, my CEO had decided: we are going to close the office on Juneteenth. And we are going to encourage our employees to do public service, to take some time to read and to think. And we put out, you know, internally, a bunch of reading suggestions and so on. I was on the DEI committee, so I was part of that decision. And we sent an email off to our customers to let them know that we were going to be closed that day. And our customers were nationwide. Many of them were convenience stores in the Midwest and South. And we had a very mixed response back. Some people were very supportive: "Well, this makes a lot of sense." Some people felt that we were politicizing the business world. And to my CEO's credit, he said, "This is what we're doing." We didn't lose any business over it. None of that happened. And a year later, the federal government made Juneteenth a holiday regardless. So clearly, we were heading in the correct direction, but you know, he had to look at that response to say, "That's okay. I'm going to take that." And businesses do need to do that. They do need to realize that they live in a greater world and what they stand for matters. I'm seeing that shift a little bit from where it was even a year or two ago, where people are getting a little less comfortable being out there. But I do think it's important and I do think people are making purchasing decisions, at least on the consumer side, in part by what your business stands for. Mark: So this is about you, Chuck. So let's turn the focus back to you. And can you share one of your most important career accomplishments? Chuck: It's interesting that there's actually a lot of things I can pull from that. Let me start recently and go backwards a little bit in time. I was very proud of the work that I did at Paytronix in launching the brand. Getting the opportunity to launch a brand of that magnitude where it was not just, "Hey, let's just change a few aspects of how our logo looks." But this was a complete change in what we looked like, what we sounded like, who we were, how we talked about ourselves-- across the board, the tool sets, the graphic tool sets, the conversations. To have that opportunity to build that and to say, "How do I bring that out internally? How do I bring that out externally?" That was really interesting. I learned a tremendous amount from that project. I was proud of the work that I did there. I was proud of what it did for the company. There was an, you know, some immediate jumps in, you know, that, that brand awareness that happened. You don't often see that, but you know, it was nice to see those Google searches go through the roof. So you certainly saw that impact right away. Then I was sitting in a sales meeting a few months later and the chief revenue officer stood up there and said, "this is one of the things that's really working in our company. Our brand is making our sales process move faster." There's some direct result. I can see that. I was also equally proud of some of the work I did with Greentown Labs, spending a couple of years launching them into the market and getting them going from a place of sitting empty, really, to something that became very much part of the fabric of the clean tech landscape, certainly in Boston and began to emerge as we were wrapping up that work emerged around the country. They're now in Houston. And a lot of the branding and the concepts that we laid out for them, they still use today. You know, one of the things I remember we talked about early on was we were debating how do we talk about their tenants, right? Because they were charging rent. How do they talk about tenants? And we were like, "Well, if we call them member companies and we give them a badge, that's going to help our SEO." And they still talk about member companies and alumni companies and that sort of thing as part of their language. I was very proud of that work. It seems so small and minor, but it changes the nature of the way that you think about yourself. It changed nature of the way companies think about themselves within it. And then the work I did at N Squared was spectacular. Not only did we see the results and the people coming in, but one of my favorite projects was the Greenway Arts Project. We had this greenway that was really underutilized and we were looking at how do we drive awareness for the N Squared Innovation District and engage with the local community. And I synced up with Studios Without Walls to bring in sculpture. We had looked at a lot of different directions about how to do this. And we brought in this for two years, we brought in this the sculpture exhibit and not only did it get the neighborhood excited, but it completely changed the way the neighborhood looked at the center of its being where it had been looking at other areas. This was a neighborhood that didn't really have a good center of downtown. They began to look at that greenway as their center, which they hadn't before. And considering that there's a major development happening on the other side of that greenway, the fact that they changed the center of their site to that location will change long term, the way that that whole neighborhood sees itself. Mark: I think anybody who has listened to this podcast would know the answer to this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. What do you think you can offer your next employer or client? Chuck: I certainly bring a breadth of understanding of how people think. Right? And be able to get into that conversation in a very interesting way. You know, there's the tactical: writing skills, etc., down the line. But there's certainly then the broad sweep of: "Who are we? How do we get that to market? How do we encourage people to know about us? How do we raise our awareness?" So I bring that kind of skill set. At the same time you know, I have a pretty solid track record of training people, so there's not only the ability to bring that out, but also build a team underneath me that can help execute on that and help grow that team and encourage that team and keep them engaged in storytelling. One of the things that I do take great pride in is the ability to tell that story and the ability to kind of turn that story outward. At Paytronix, I changed some things around to create what I called story- driven marketing, where we went and dug into the customer stories, figured out where those stories were, how those matched with our brand message and then move those into the various content components, the eBooks, the webinars, etc., blog posts, case studies, and pushed those out through our own marketing that we needed to get out for demand gen, but that also then fed the PR. So being able to create these systems that can run and can help build for the future is where my skill set is. And then, you need to build the infrastructure underneath it to maintain those long term. But certainly it's about: "How do you create a process that's going to continually benefit across multiple touch points?" So that's a lot of what I try to bring to the table. Mark: Well, Chuck, it was great chatting again. Always enjoy it. And I really hope this podcast helps you find your next great gig. Chuck: I appreciate it. I appreciate the time. Mark: I'm Mark Reed Edwards. Join me on the next Confessions of a Marketer.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, I speak with Chuck Leblo, founder of Interact One. Chuck shares his entrepreneurial journey from working in the corporate world, where he was overwhelmed by paperwork, to starting his own business. He offers valuable lessons learned from launching a side business while employed and the critical decisions that helped him succeed. Chuck leaves us with wisdom on building effective teams and maintaining a balanced lifestyle as an entrepreneur. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Chuck Leblo, the founder of Interact One, shares his journey from corporate America to entrepreneurship, detailing the reasons behind his transition, such as the overbearing workload in his corporate job. We highlight the importance of having a side gig while starting a business to ensure financial stability. He explains how his unique problem-solving skills were instrumental in the exponential growth of his business from a modest $14,000 to a whopping $140,000 a month. Chuck details his process of tackling a telecom company's issue of short duration calls and building a team of diverse fractionals to aid in problem-solving. He talks about the various challenges he faced as an entrepreneur, including the need to make decisions and pivot the business when necessary. We discuss the impact that COVID-19 had on his business and how he successfully managed to meet the new market needs. He emphasizes the importance of building a successful team of partners and fractionals and shares his experience in helping businesses navigate the remote working world. Chuck shares his experience of managing a large-scale door-to-door team in the deregulated electricity market in Texas and the challenges of the project. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance, sharing his personal experience and strategies. Chuck advises entrepreneurs to treat everyone with respect, earn people's trust, and widen their network to succeed in business. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller GUESTS Chuck LebloAbout Chuck TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Chuck Leblo, founder of Interact One. Through Interact One, chuck helps business owners solve problems and stresses the importance of building trust with clients as the foundation to successfully growing your company. All right, chuck, I want to thank you for joining me here on Building Texas Business. It's great to have you on the show. Now it's a pleasure to be here. So I know you've got a business or two you're involved with now and maybe others you've had before. But let's just kind of start by you telling the listeners kind of a little bit about yourself and the company that you've got and what it's known for. Chuck: Well, I'm pretty boring story, but so Interact One. Really, we're known for being problem solvers right, and not the type of problem solvers like I need a guy whacked right. Chris: Yeah, we have to stop the recording right now. Chuck: Right, right right, so I can say use the money, you can be my legal counsel, right. So, but now we solve problems for businesses right, and we've been doing that for about 17, 18 years now. I've always been known as a natural problem solver, from the time of a kid all the way through the military, through my corporate days and into my business. So it was a natural, natural evolution for me to just basically start a company that solves problems. Chris: All right. So I guess you mentioned a lot of, I guess, background going back from your childhood and military service. What was the real inspiration for you to kind of becoming an entrepreneur and actually starting a business? Chuck: Well, so 20 years in corporate America I was. I started out as a problem solver on an engineering basis right In telecom and then I got into the business side and I solved business problems which were more to do with like profitability right. And one day I was sitting there and I looked around my office and I just saw stacks in the business 20 years ago, right, everything wasn't digitized then. So stacks and stacks of invoices and contracts and lease cost, routing guides and all of this kind of stuff and I realized I was wasting my life away just doing that, just spending all my time. I was heavily compensated for what I did. Most people would die to have the job, but I was just like I'm not spending time with my family, I'm working 20 hours, sometimes 20 hours a day, right, and I said enough is enough. So I started my. At that point, you know, I had the funds available and I started my own company. Now, unfortunately in retrospect, I started a company doing basically exactly the same thing that I was doing for the telecom companies. I was controlling profitability for helping other telecom companies do that and then helping fortune 1000 clients and government agencies do it. So so that was like my little step in entrepreneurship, because I was really doing the same thing, but just doing it on my own. Then, about five years later six years later is when I really said no, we got to go full tilt into just solving problems. I want to solve them for all types of businesses. So really it was just sitting there looking at all the boxes and just to press the heck out of me. Chris: Yeah, the guy sounds like you're in a situation where you lost your motivation and you had to kind of look introspectively to go. How can I regain the motivation and inspiration I had about what it is I did? Chuck: Yeah. Chris: I wasn't excited about it anymore. Yeah, so. So you step out on your own, whether it was kind of that in that first venture or the five year later, let's talk about that. I mean, what were some of the, the lessons you learned that you were like, oh, I wish I to someone would have told me this. Right, it's like I gotta imagine some things kind of hit you in the face and you had to learn to adapt really quick to now you know, owning your own show. Chuck: Yeah, so the first thing I learned was when I took that first step, right where I owned the company, doing exactly what I was doing before, and what I learned was one it's feast or famine out there, right, as a consultant. It was a. It was feast or famine. The second thing I learned was it's okay to keep your toe in the corporate pond, right. So what I would do is, during those types of famine, I would go get a little gig you know, part time gig help a company out to pay the bills. One of the examples is we did an analysis for state government where we looked at five years of their telecom bills going back. We got them about five million bucks back, okay. So we renegotiated all their contracts, saved them about three million dollars a year going forward. Wow, it took us two years to do that analysis and to start getting that money back and we were paid on a contingency basis. We got a percentage of what we got them back. So two years without money. So if I hadn't known at the time that it's okay, it's okay to be, it's okay to be a part time entrepreneur, and in most cases it's better to get your side gig going before you take a full time side, before you take that side gig full time yeah. Chris: Yeah, that's interesting perspective because I don't know that. I've heard people use that term before, but I think there's some truth to it about that. Okay to be a part time entrepreneur, to kind of get your legs underneath yeah. Chuck: Now most people think that they have a side gig and then that side gig becomes their new job. I looked at it as that, that my business was my job, that I looked at the corporate America side as the side gig. Chris: Yeah, okay. So so you get you kind of learn that lesson and you move forward. What were some of the things, when you look back, that you feel like were the decisions you made that kind of set the foundation for your future success Because anything right, you can use any analogy you want, but also you got to have a strong foundation to be able to build from Anything that comes to mind that you really look back on and are kind of proud of the early decisions you made, in the way you set things up. Chuck: I think that you have to choose your clients wisely, right? There's an old saying out there that if everyone's your potential customer, no one's a customer. Right, you have to and I'm listening up, because I'm not perfect in any means. When I first started, I started going just after telecom companies, and that because that was what I knew. I'd spent 20 years in telecom and I had to learn all other aspects if I wanted to do this. So, you know, I became an expert at digital marketing. I already knew operations from telecom. I already knew finance from telecom. Right technology, of course I knew that one. I really know a whole lot about HR or legal, but what I didn't know was marketing and sales. So I had to become an expert in that Right. And that was really the catalyst is when I went from just being a just knowing, just doing telecom companies to now specializing in really all types of businesses, but only particular size businesses. So I learned that I didn't want to do business with those big fortune 1000s anymore. The big electric providers right, those were our clients. Telecom companies, those were the state agencies, government agencies and things like that. I didn't want to deal in that arena anymore because I can impact a small business much more. Right, if I save a small business you know $100,000 a year or fix a problem that solves, that's worth $100,000 or $200,000, that's much more impactful than getting a state agency back $5 million because it's not real money to them anyway. Right, it's just taxpayer money. It's not like they're going to give it back to the taxpayers. They're going to find someplace else to spend it. Chris: Right, right. Well, I think there's some truth to what you're saying is, as you're starting out with the new business, it's very important to be really laser focused about who your customer is and stay kind of within those bounds and not start to chase every little thing that may come your way because it may not fit your skill set, it may not fit your purpose and it can be distracting. Chuck: It can be distracting and it'll give you, you know, doubt as to what you're doing, whether or not you're competent, right, and that'll kill you as an entrepreneur. When you start doubting yourself and doubting your abilities than others will. Chris: So we've talked a little bit about kind of getting started as you were kind of moving through the process. You've talked about kind of focusing in, I guess after about five years on really just being a problem solver. Let's talk maybe a little more detail about what are some of the things you're talking about when you say you know we solve problems. I know they can vary, but I'm just curious about some kind of specifics, to the extent you can share some specifics on that. Chuck: Sure. First of all, I always tell people is your problem worth at least $2,000? Don't be gonna do me with a problem, right? That's not worth something. I'm not doing it for free, so let me give you an example. So about a year and a half ago I got called by a customer of mine, a roofer, and he goes hey, I've got this company that I want to outsource my back office to and I need you to vet them. So that's a problem. I said, okay, fine, let me vet them for you. So I did that and they were a good company, right. And about six months later after that, I get a call from that company and as owner of the company, and she held up a little sticky note and it said hire Chuck. And I said what's that? She goes. When we had our conversation I know that I knew that I needed a Chuck and I said, okay, so how can I help you? And she goes listen, I've been in business for almost a year now. We're an outsourced VA virtual assistance company and we're just not really making. We're not growing fast enough. We're going to get about $14,000 a month in revenue. And I said okay, and I took a look into our organization and we started making some changes and first thing we did was we rebranded her as a business process outsourcing company instead of a virtual assistance company. Then we made some operational changes with her personnel, helped her grow and hire the right people, got all of her people certified in the softwares that they were using so they could truly be viewed as an expert instead of just a virtual assistant. In less than a year they went from $14,000 a month revenue to $140,000 a month in revenue. Okay, just changes that. We did Another company, a telecom company, swiss telecom, a telecom company right, they were getting a lot of short duration calls that they were being billed for and they didn't know what the problem was. So we've got a problem. So we did an analysis of tens of millions of TCAP messages which are getting technical here in SS7. It's like a phone record, but it's the digital version of it, right and we found that what was happening was, down the line, one of the providers that they were connecting to, because, remember, you go through several switches. You call them the US, it might go here. Anyway, one of those switches was given back what's called false answer supervision, before the call was ever answered. So that's why they're having short duration calls. People would call, it would ring nine, 10 times, no one would answer and they'd hang up but it was showing it's answered. So we fixed that problem. So really, it's any type of problem. It's like I want to open a new location, okay, so one of the things that we do in our LinkedIn reach out, that we do how we find clients is we just ask people what their problem is and we tell them everyone. We tell them how we would solve the problem. One is what's the true problem and what's the real problem? Because a true problem or their problem might be I need more revenue. Okay, so what's the real problem? Or is the real problem you need more revenue because your costs are too high, because if your costs are too high and we bring in more revenue, we put you out of business because you're selling low cost, right? Is it because you're marketing? Is it because you just don't have the right staff in place? So we do that analysis and take them through that and either fix it for them and hand it back to them or, once it's corrected, we can monitor on an ongoing basis. Chris: So when you do these projects, you assume you're not just a one man show. You've got a team working with you, and how have you gone about, I guess, building that team around you to make sure you have the right people? Chuck: So what I? Did is listen. So experience is important, diversity is important right, and diversity from the sense of people with different backgrounds are going to have different ways that they interpret a problem and the corrective action that they would find for that right. So although I'm the chief strategist for the company, I don't really go by the title CEO, but I'm CEO and chief strategist. I'm more of a strategy kind of guy, so I do handle a lot of the problems. Chris: When you know, name of the companies interact one. Chuck: You're going to interact with me, right? In most cases, but what we did is we wanted to find people like me, because I don't know everything that lets surround yourself with people smarter than you, right? So we go out and we find fractional people just like me, right? Possibly someone that's got a full-time job, they are a CEO of a company or they're an entrepreneur that own their own company or they're an accountant, right? So we have a lot of people that are working with us for finance issues, it professionals, right, and we've built a network of these people to where we hold all of their information so that when a problem comes in, we have three or four or five in some cases, 10 people that we can send that problem to and see what their thoughts are on it and then engage that person the one that we want to engage with to help us solve that. And then we do the program management or the program project management of that and we have a lot of employees, but we have a lot of fractionals working for us. Chris: Okay, that's an interesting model. I mean it makes sense, given what you're doing, and then you can kind of pick the right person for the issue at hand, Absolutely. So we were talking a little bit earlier and I know you know we talked about challenges you faced and being an entrepreneur and I just want you know, maybe share, some of the challenges you've gone through and how that's impacted the business or changed what you've done. From you know, from a, I guess, a business strategy. Chuck: Well, I mean, if you're in business, you're always going to have challenges, right. So you know, starting from the very beginning, just being able to redirect yourself. You know don't beat a dead horse, redirect, you know, make a decision one way or the other lead, follow. Get out of the way all those little sayings they say is you know, do that? Make decisions. Some of the you know. The first one was switching from being just strictly telecom to really handling smaller businesses. That was one. Then we diversified into where we had our own public relations firm because a lot of companies, what they were, what we found is a lot of companies have an issue with actually people knowing who they were right. So we created that company and being able to to in the economy, be able to utilize, you know, both companies right. Listen when very small businesses, they can't afford a lot sometimes but they can afford a little bit and that's like the PR company. One of the challenges that we had with that diversification is when COVID hit. Right, we were leading up into COVID. We were spending probably 90% well, 70% of our business was from a revenue perspective, was coming from the PR firm and these are small clients paying $395, $500 a month, right, for our PR services. And the Interact One, the more consulting, the high dollar ones, was really just me at that time, okay, and when COVID hit, basically all those customers call me hey, we don't know what's going on. We've got to stop and we've let everyone out of their contracts, for sure, but we lost about 90% of that business, and at the time I really didn't know what I was. Yeah, it was a very big hit and they really know what to do. But then I started thinking well, people really have problems now. Right, they've got problems that need solved. A lot of problems were, you know, during COVID is. You know, how do we maintain a remote workforce? How do we keep our store open but just have deliveries? How do we keep our employees engaged out? You know, how do we give our customers engaged? How do we transfer our shop from totally brick and mortar to an online right? So it was a godsend for me as far as building back up or getting more involved in the Interact One business. But because if I didn't have that, I don't know where I'd be today. I'd probably be dipping my toe back in the corporate pond again, right, right, but you've got to be able to. Chris: Yeah, the ability to, I guess you know, kind of pivot when necessary and kind of keep going is critical, yeah, For an entrepreneur especially small business owner Yep. What other? I guess, excuse me, what other advice when you think about how you interact with your? You know your partners, your kind of your, these, maybe these what I would call maybe alliances you have with other fractionals. But maybe there are other type of partners you used to keep your business successful, whether that's you know banking relationships, you know accounting, legal. What are some advice you have on that, on you know best practices to make sure you kind of surround yourself with that kind of strong team that you need to kind of have a stable business. Chuck: Yeah. So, listen, a lot of small businesses out there, right, they try to do it all themselves, right and don't. Right, there are professionals out there that can help you and even if you want to build everything in house, you know, make sure that you know, like you said, have a strong relationship with a banker, a financial person, you know, some sort of business coach maybe to help you do things. What I do is I just try to treat everyone with respect and, as a consultant, sometimes we especially when we're solving problems, right, I can't, someone can't say something to me and me go well, crap, how stupid are you? Right, you got to treat that business owner with respect and sometimes, if they're making boneheaded decisions, there's a little bit of dance involved in it. Right, so be respectful and earn people's trust and with, whether it's your business partners like me, you know all the other C level professionals that I work with, right, because most of the people that we bring on as our partner or our hybrid or partner or fractional whatever you want to call it consultants that we lean on in areas that we don't have the expertise, they're all C level, okay, so you've got to be respectful of them and trust their decision. Now we have a leave at them. First, right, trust just isn't given. But you know, be respectful and widen your network. Right, you're only as good as the people that you're surrounded by. Chris: Yeah, no, that's for sure. And they're a reflection of you, right? If you're bringing them in, whether that's an employee and you're putting them on a project or a consultant, and you're bringing them in, whoever that client is sees them as a reflection of you. So it's important to make sure they align, you know, with your fundamental values, absolutely, absolutely so in what I think you referred to this a minute ago, when you're talking about certain problems, you've been helping people solve anything you've seen in the last couple of years where you've been involved and maybe in certain projects and develop some. I don't know if there are best practices, but I'm thinking about work, the work remote world we're in and helping companies kind of navigate to a place that can work for the business, to remain profitable but also allow for some of that flexibility. Anything you can share on that regard. Trust Right. Chuck: So one of the biggest problems Just in case. Chris: I didn't hear that clearly. I want to make sure the audio is clear. You said trust. Chuck: That's what I'm talking about Trust, right, that's my text is coming out Trust. So what happens? And it's instilled a sin from the very beginning? Oh, 40 hours a week, and this is your rate, right? And how do I know that my people are working if they're not here? And I can see what's going on behind the desk? And my answer to them is the work being done. Right, is the work being done? And you, as a manager this is what I tell the business owner you, as a manager, need to make sure that you're giving them the work that can be done in the time period that you want it done in, right? You know, if you give someone three things to do and they can do it in four hours instead of eight hours, well, those are the things you needed them to do and they did it. So why shouldn't they get paid what you would have paid them, which was eight hours, okay, but then again, if you don't have your finger on it to where you know how long it takes them to do something, then that's on you, that's not on them. And if you give them too much and they're not getting it all done, then that's when you've got to start looking into it. Am I giving them too much Right. Chris: So the main thing with work remote. Chuck: That I tell, like I said I tell people is trust your people Trust, trust yourself that you made the right decision when you hired them, right, or it's your fault anyway, and then trust the fact that they're working. I've seen businesses that are like well, they've got to log into this system and stay logged in. Okay, well, they could be logging in while they're taking a nap. That doesn't mean that they're doing the work. Well, you know, we make them have a zoom open so that at any time we can look and see if they're working. I said you know I would quit. I don't, I'm going to do the work, but if you're insisting on having a camera on me making sure that I'm doing work all the time, then it's not a right fit. Right, there has to be trust. Chris: Yeah, you're right. I mean I think you know, in addition to trust, I think what I've seen and I think you're saying this as well is you got to communicate clearly what the expectations are Right. So when you talk about these assignments, I mean you know not only is the word getting done, is it getting done timely and efficiently and correctly Right, and if so, then you know you're on to something. And if not, then you got to correct that from a work performance standpoint and be able to say look, this is what the assignment was, this is what the deadline was, and if it didn't meet the standards, be able to explain why. And then figure out what's the right corrective action from there. Chuck: Yeah, expectations are everything and then being able to you know, another thing you do is get buy in from that remote worker you know how, what can you do, how much can you do it? You know, it's like my telecom days, the old telecom days. You had what was called an occupancy rate, so you had a call center where people are answering the call and then, oh, I want 100% occupancy, which that meant that 100% of the time that people were on the phone. And it's not possible, right, even the best call centers run at 60 to 65% occupancy, right, and you got to realize the way your people are too. If you're paying them for eight hours, you know what you'll be good, you're doing really good if you're getting six hours of real work out of them. Because you got to stop and think sometimes, as, as American culture, we really, I guess we really think that our employee employees owe us when really we owe them. Chris: Yeah, that's a good point. So let's talk a little bit just about you know, maybe on your personal leadership style. How would you describe your leadership style? And first there, and then you know how do you work with some of your clients. Maybe help them with their leadership style when those opportunities present themselves. Chuck: Well, I think that in the business that I'm in, I have to be collaborative, right, you can't make all the decisions and do everything yourself, and really that's what business owners have to do all the time telling them that you're, you know, you're micromanaging your people, you know. Give them some room to breathe, let them have some creativity, let them help make decisions. Don't just tell them what to do, ask them what needs to be done, and that's kind of my leadership style, right. But then I always go back to problem solving. So I want to know what the real problem is, what, not just the problem, the problem, you think the perceived problem, but what is the real problem and how can we correct this with any decision that's made? Chris: Yeah, so kind of we talked a little bit about this maybe. But I want to ask you a maybe different way when you think about yourself and your career, any kind of setbacks that you've encountered, that you look back and go man, that was a tough time, or I made a boneheaded decision or whatever, but what I learned from it benefited me so much that I can look back and be grateful for that experience. Anything come to mind for there that you can share? Chuck: Yeah, Back when I kind of first started the Interact One on the marketing side, when I was learning marketing, I had a company come to me and it was like we want you to help us acquire more customers. You remember back when deregulation happened on electricity in Texas. Chris:So we started working. Chuck: The problem and the problem that we gave them was you need to have a door-to-door team that needs to be trained this way and done this way and do all this kind of stuff. And they said, okay, great, do it for us. And 286 people later right, five locations across the state of Texas, a lot of money, Thank you, but it wasn't worth it and it almost made me to where I didn't want to even continue. Right, it was so stressful having that many people that are working on a commission-only basis right, Selling electricity, training them, looking at Perf and all of that kind of stuff. So it was very profitable and it's one of the things that, if I had my if I go back in time, that's maybe one thing that I would have changed is I wouldn't have went down that path that took so much energy and took three years of my life to do that. I could have done much greater things. Chris: I believe, interesting. So that kind of segues well into the next question I want to ask you and that is how do you go about maintaining you know there's all the. You know the typical word is work-life balance, and I'm kind of a believer and I had some other guests on the podcast and I agree with this is more about work-life integration than how do you manage both, because you have work and you have your personal life and how do you integrate those so you can show up effectively in both? What are some of the things that you do to try to make that happen in your life? Chuck: I take naps. Chris: I love it. Chuck: I'm a big proponent of taking naps, but really OK. So I've got, maybe, a different viewpoint, because I did the corporate America gig for 20 years and I had my business, grew it very big, then pulled it back small again and I work because I want to work. There is no work-life balance. I have life and I work when I want to work. And if I want to work five hours this week, that's what I work this week. If I want to take a week off, I take a week, and I know it's different for a lot of entrepreneurs, you know. But I'm entering the, the, the twilight state. I don't look at that. I'm pretty dang old, right, and I think that for the younger people starting out, or you know, mid-mid-age, right it's important, right? Don't do what I did in the first 20 years of my career, where all I did was work and I saw my kids on weekends, which initially eventually led to a divorce, which meant that I only saw them every other weekend, right? Yeah, 14 years ago I started over again. Wonderful woman, she keeps me grounded and she is my life, makes me want to be a better man, and we started a new family, so that helps out too. So I've got an eight year old son now, right, and I've got an eight year old granddaughter and I've got an eight year old grandson right. Oh, wow, yeah. So it gives you the. It's allowing me to have a second chance with that and I'm not going to fail it. So, yeah, I don't necessarily know how you do it, whether it's working out or yoga. This is the one of the one of the people in the podcast. They were doing yoga and all this kind of stuff. I know that you have to have something that stimulates your brain at all points in time. I've got an eight year old that does that I've got. You've got to have something that exercises your body. I've got an eight year old that does that. I help coaches lacrosse team and the day after practices I can barely walk. So I don't know if I have a great answer for it. I know it's important, but I'm not there anymore. I just I work because I want to work. Chris: Yeah, no, I work great hours. I think what I love there. Everyone has a little different take on it because, look, everyone's situation is different and so you've got to get to figure out what works in your ecosystem and your environment, and that includes, right, the family and the business and the career and all those things, and those things can change over time. Chuck: There's another camp. Chris: All right. So yeah, I appreciate all this has been really good stuff. I'm going to turn it a little bit to the lighter side and ask you what was your first job? Like real job or entrepreneurial job? No, that real job, I mean I don't know, like in junior high you had to pay for route, or yeah. No, I didn't, I didn't do the paper route. Chuck: So my for my, as I was raised by a single mom, right, we didn't have anything. She was a waitress. So I went into the family business and I bust tables and lost dishes at a restaurant. Chris: That will humble you really quick right, make you hungry, and not just hungry to say I want something different. Chuck: Yeah, I know that I want. I always knew that I wanted to have something more than what I had growing up. Chris: I know you said you listened to some of the prior podcast episodes, so I know you're ready for this one Tex-Mex or barbecue. Chuck: Well, it depends where right Sure, you know. So I do my own barbecue. Okay, so if I'm eating out someplace, I don't necessarily do Tex-Mex very well, except for guacamole I'm a great guacamole. But so I would say, if I'm eating out, it's a text. I eat more Tex-Mex than barbecue, but I enjoy barbecue. Chris: Ma'am, I may have to see if you can ship me some of yours and I bet it's pretty good. Yeah, I make some pretty good barbecue. I love. The honest answer there was. It depends where, because so many of us have. Well, if it's, you know, if it's this that I'm hungry for, then it might be this barbecue joint or this different Tex-Mex place. So I have to share. I just saw and I share with my girls, you know the L L L L Roya in Austin in their signs. There, there was, I saw a picture of this. One says Texan a person who chooses a restaurant based on their chips and salsa. Chuck: You know that's very true, Isn't that true? Chris: What we need is a. Chuck: Tex-Mex barbecue. Chris: Yeah, but we have some of that here in Houston. We have some places that are using like brisket in their tacos and things, so it is. Chuck: They have Korean barbecue. Right, they have Korean barbecue, so why not? You know Tex-Mex barbecue and you know have more. Of. You know the beans would be more of the barbecue style beans with some jalapenos in there. So I put jalapenos in everything. So everything is Tex-Mex. Chris: I like it. Well, you and I may have to get offline and we may come up with a new restaurant concept here. Chuck: Yeah, so okay, last question. This one's out of the menu, yeah. Chris: Everything's out of the menu. Yes. Last question is, if you could take a 30-day sabbatical or you just get away, where would you go and what would you do? Chuck: Well. So sabbatical means something different, right, and getting yourself in a different thing. So I like, at least twice a year, we go to the Smoky Mountains, which is my, that's my spot, right. When I first went to the Smoky Mountains, I was like this is where I belong, right. But a sabbatical might be a little bit different, and I think it would be really cool to go over to Africa and do a photo safari. I don't want to shoot the animals anymore. I did that growing up. I don't need to do it anymore, but to get them on camera and to live in the camps and stuff like that would just be. That'd be something to be really cool, yeah. Chris: It's a bucket list item for sure. Yeah, that's great. Chuck: Well, Chuck, I want to thank you again for taking the time. Chris: come on the show and share your story. I love hearing kind of the career you've had and the way you evolved and I love this the way you're helping companies solve big problems, so really appreciate it. Chuck: Well, I appreciate you having me. It was fun. Chris: All right, we're going to stop the recording there. Let me see if I can actually do that. Hmm, no, here we go. I'm not the host, it won't love me, but they know where we stopped, so hey. I was talking, I talk enough. No, you did great. Look, we, you know I was watching our timer. Yeah, we were. We probably stopped the recording in minute 3435 and 30 to 40 minutes is our goal, so we were right in the sweet spot. And yeah, and it always goes so fast because you're just having a conversation and I think everyone gets amazed that I can't believe it went that well. We were actually talking for that long, but yeah. Chuck: In my business I don't talk, I listen. So it's hard for me to fathom that I'm. You know, when I listen like when I do a conference call with a client I one of the people you had said they use order. We use order also and it shows you the stats on how long each person talked and I always make sure and always tell the other people that make sure that the client's talking more. Chris: Yeah, what you're talking, you know. Chuck: you look at the the the recap and it says Chuck talked for 36 out of 60 minutes. Well, that's too much, Right? Chuck needs to talk for eight minutes out of an hour and let the customer talk. Chris: That's good, that was good. Chuck: I look forward to seeing the seeing the episode. Chris: Absolutely, we'll be back in touch. I don't know. So, josie, with my team and Mackenzie they're my marketing kind of folks and I can't remember the name I know you kind of came through, a group that was, you know, helps you book these things, yeah, thanks. We want a headshot, kind of thing and all that. Chuck: They're having great the ride up on me. All that kind of stuff yeah. Chris: Well then, what we'll do? We'll give you a little. Obviously, there'll be some advanced warning once we get it all packaged up and we have a date certain that we're going to release it, and we'll get it all to you and your people, and then it'll be, it'll hit the presses. Chuck: So also, and the next time I'm in Houston I'll look you guys up and we do lunch or something. Chris: Please do. I would love that Love to go grab some barbecue. Yeah, thank you All right man, I talk to you later. Enjoy the rest of your day. Bye, bye. Special Guest: Chuck Leblo.

They guys made it to the studio for a live show as they dive into Stefon Diggs' new contract extension. Two new people joining Brian Flores' lawsuit and juicier details on the relationship between Tom Brady and Bruce Arian. There's some new information about DeShaun Watson's legal situation and the guys play Chuck It or Tuck It.

What do we do when we face adversity in life? There are 3 simple options that we discuss in this episode. You can Accept It, You can Fix It, or you can Chuck It. 

The long dark days of the offseason are underway but there's still plenty to talk about. Spencer and Eddie spin the wheel of topics to spark convos about Brian Flores, Aaron Rodgers trolling everyone, Troy Aikman's new TV gig and more. Plus, Jarvis Landry's future in Cleveland seems bleak and the first offseason addition of Tuck It or Chuck It.

On this week's episode of Chuck It, Brandon talked with co-owner and operator of Foundation Disco Golf, Hunter Thomas. Hunter talked about his collegiate disc golf career, the formation of Foundation Disc Golf, and how athletes like five-time World Champion Paul McBeth and Brodie Smith have helped to grow the sport during the pandemic.

Join Brandon for the first episode of Chuck It, a podcast focused on the sport of Disc Golf. This week’s guest is PDGA Pro Christine Jennings. She is a member of Team Innova’s Champion Team, with a career win total of 51! Christine walked us through her disc golf journey and her goals for the upcoming 2021 season.

Krista Martins is the founder of Wukkout, a Caribbean dance fitness workout that incorporates some of the signature island moves: wukking, jukking, and whining, with lots of fun and smiles guaranteed! Listen to this episode to learn more about Krista and how she founded her signature workout, learn what these dance moves are, and stick around while we play a rapid fire round of "Wuk It or Chuck It", where Krista picks her absolute favorite Caribbean dishes! Watch the full video of this interview on Instagram @be.womenspired. Tune in and be Womenspired™!

Subscribe here!   Description Today we have on Curt Nelson, Professional Hitting Consultant. and NW bandits head coach (WA). Curt works with players from the big leagues to little league. So on the show we discuss what his evaluation process looks from when a person walks in the door for the first time, to fine tuning professional hitters mechanics. We dive deep into hitting mechanics, game planning, timing and much more. This episode is so good and here is Curt Nelson!  resources  Curt’s YouTube page  Contact Info https://twitter.com/Nelson_Hitting Show notes courtesy of Zach Casto The goal of a coach is to take each player and take them to the next level. When pre assessing a player, you need to understand the level of play of the player. Professional players you need to look up video to get a start on understanding them. You want to see how each player moves and thinks to understand what can work for the player. Lead by asking questions to learn more about each player. The more you understand the setup, his mechanics, bat path, his thoughts, and understanding are all crucial understandings. Changing the mind first will create a smoother change. “Mobility plays a ginormous role.” “There are no absolutes, but timing, balance, and bat path are close to absolutes. With that being said, the bat path can be different for each player. You can’t make any change without the relationship piece though. When asking questions, ask about their timing mechanisms, what they are trying to do to the baseball, their thoughts on the tee, and what their approach is. Understand what the hips are doing. “The ground is the number one source of power and energy. Any question that gives you insight is important. Ball flight is important to understand the approach and mechanics. Video is your friend in understanding this. Start with movement preparation drills before you go into swings. Example: Slam balls and PVC pipe connection drills. (This helps showcase the body and how well it moves.) After movement prep work on each hitters routines. Group up each hitter to work on the routine together with other players and they can talk to find solutions to situations. After the grouping you can work on team hitting and allow competition to flow between the athletes. “Everything starts with a setup.” Getting into the right setup for that hitter is paramount. Every hitter needs to start in balance. The head has to be in the center of the body. Don’t get hitters to get into their quads and legs too early. “Hitting is done more flat footed than we think.” Being on the balls of your feet isn’t conducive for balance. A quality sets up the athlete to be consistent and have success. There is a right position/setup for everyone. Mobility is a huge factor. It’s about finding the right balance. Example: If the ankle is a problem you can move it to find the right balance for each hitter. “You’re trying to maximize each individual.” The mirror is a great teacher for each hitter. It gives the hitter instant feedback on what they are feeling. When you’re in a mirror you can feel what you’re trying out. Put an X on the mirror. Tell the athlete to keep their forehead in the X to find the right setup and movement. This helps the player to find the right movement that promotes not a ton of excess movement. Have a balance beam where the hitter has to make a clean forward move and then move backwards. This will help the athlete find the right movement. “Stride our to 50-50, then back to your setup.” The setup is the key that unlocks the best results for the player. “There is not a specific move to have everyone use.” Use trial and error and work it in real time in the cage. “There is no fooling balance.” If the athlete knows where he is at in space, then he will have confidence and conviction behind what he is doing. You’re trying to gather and load against the back leg. This can help the head stay still. You’re trying to promote a powerful and balanced forward move. When gathering, the stride leg is working underneath the front shoulder or underneath the front hip. This prevents the foot from reaching out too far. When you lost balance then the body breaks down it’s efficiency. You want to get your body ready to move it’s weight to put all it’s force into the ball. To test out a forward move: Draw a line of of the back foot and video it. Guys who are in balance don’t go outside of that line. You can use a wall as well. Put the back on the wall and the player should not feel any body part touch the wall. As the front foot picks up the back heel needs to stay grounded in the forward move. The glute possesses the power in the swing. Look for the root cause that is effecting a good move or a bad move for the player. Start looking at timing and then go from there. Teach a player the difference between perceived 50-50 balance and what it actually is and feels. Look at the head first at 50-50 to find the right look for the player. Some guys are 60-40 at foot strike. We as coaches have to help the player find their best setup at foot strike. The move of the player should naturally allow the flute of the athlete to load up. Coil and scap loading takes the hitter off of his line and balance. If the hands are behind the body then the front side has to move more to compensate. Get the hands in the position of launch that stays in line. To do this have the player work on taking their hands back based off of the chalk line in the batter’s box. Some hitters have their hands back too far at launch as well. You just have to work with the player to find the most comfortable and natural launch position for success. You want to create adaptable and adjustable hitters. In the world of hitting nothing is really new. Hitting changes based off of what the pitchers are doing. Example. With sinkers/pitch to contact pitchers, hitters are trying to hit the ball in the air. The timing is crucial for the proper time to barrel up the ball. If you’re late, start earlier so you have more room for error. As the elbows are going down the hands get on plane with the pitch and the bat will lag to create whip with the swing. We are trying to run the barrel north to south to square up the baseball. An east to west barrel can roll over balls that should be squared up. One of the hardest things to do when teaching hitting is timing. Have game footage and practice footage where you can see the difference between the player in game and in practice. The video helps the hitter and coach create an understanding of what happening to the hitter whether that’s his movement, mental game, or pitch mix. Understand what each pitcher is trying to do in order to create a hitting plan. Example: with a sinker pitcher try to hit the ball in the air. The ultimate goal is to hit line drives. Find out what the fastball is doing and try to base things off of that pitch. Then you can eliminate offspeed pitches. Try to find the sequence due to patterns. Feet together go forward: The player starts with the feet together and this works the forward move. The hitter needs to try to get to 50-50 balance. You can use a mirror or video to assess the forward move. You can use a Chuck It to work on the top hand. You can use a frisbee to work on the bottom hand. Bat path drill: You can use a bat and tell the hitter to release the bat at the pitchers head. If the bat path is going east or west then the bat will land pull side or opposite side. The goal of any coach is to have the hitter self assess and coach themselves. The best players can coach themselves. Allow for communication to happen constantly so you can help them. As a coach you are going to leave some days wanting to do better and then there are days where you will feel you did a great job. Journaling is a great way for each player and coach to remember what has worked and what doesn’t. Create your own opinions based off of trial and error. Trial and error will allow for the opinion to be created. “Don’t think like everyone else. Think outside of the box.” Failure will breed success if you stick with it. Keep trying and giving your best. Keep up the energy. “Always remember that it’s about the player.”  

In today's part two of two Chuck is talking once again to Mike Nunez about his tips for being a successful buyer. We first heard about Mike's nine tips for a successful acquisition, and today he delves into the types of things he looks for in a business he is considering for purchase. We're also diving deep into one tip that Mike shared on part one of this two-part series. Finally, Mike also shares some great efficiency tools he's loving these days. Episode Highlights: What Mike looks for when buying a business. What he brings to the business with his own expertise. Examples of things that stand out to Mike in a listing. Advertising account criteria he checks for in a potential new business. Goals and intentions he has and the opportunities he looks for when on the hunt for a business. The importance of keeping criteria lists. Tips for content sites looking for affiliates. Certain synergies to look for in a search. Lessons Mike has learned through his acquisitions. Tools Mike is using and recommending these days. Transcription: Mark: Chuck in the last podcast episode that we had we had Mike Nuñez on. He offered nine very actionable tips on how to be a very good buyer; how to be a buyer that can win deals by having the right disposition. And I know you guys talked; you guys are friends, you live close to each other there in Florida and all that. So you guys are friends and naturally, your conversations are long but also Mike's got a ton of content to share with us and you guys got into a second episode. What can we expect from the second episode with Mike Nuñez? Chuck: Yeah, so let's start off by saying if you haven't watched the first one or listen to it make sure you do because it kind of leads into this. On this one, we talked about what are the types of things that he's looking for as a buyer and you should be able to get some stuff out of that to help you figure out maybe some ideas for the types of things you're looking for. We also talked about; there was like one tip that we gave that he gave us somebody at Rhodium conference a year or two ago and it gave that guy a 25% boost in his revenue like overnight. So that was a nice little take away there and then at the end of the call, one of the things I always like to do is just ask for any special tools or things that he uses so he gives us a list of additional tools he uses so a pretty little bonus at the end. Mark: Fantastic. Mike is a great guy. I'm super glad that he was able to come back on the podcast. Let's get right into it. Chuck: All right welcome back everybody this is Chuck Mullins here with Quiet Light Brokerage and this is part two of a two-part segment with Mike Nuñez. Welcome, Mike; welcome back. Mike: Thank you, Chuck. Thanks for being accepting of my long-windedness. Chuck: No, I think we had a lot of great stuff in the last one. If anybody didn't get a chance to watch it you might want to go back and watch that one first. What did we end up on; nine super-secret tips? Mike: They go to 9, yeah 9 super-secrets. Chuck: 8 or 9 super-secret tips of how to be a great buyer which Mike Nuñez is a great buyer. Now we wanted to segway in and Mike wanted to make sure that everybody know that he's not wearing, or he is wearing the same suit but only because we're recording these back to back because the last one went pretty long. So you still look great Mike. For anybody who didn't watch the last one, Mike purchased a custom-tailored suit business from us so this is probably why he's wearing the suit because I've never seen him wear a suit before he had purchased that business. So he's definitely stepped up his wardrobe game since then. So today we wanted to talk about what you're looking for when you buy a business and maybe some of the lessons you've learned along the way. So again maybe let's start off; before we jump into that just give a brief introduction for anybody who didn't watch the first part of the series about you. Mike: Well, so I think it's important if you're listening to this one you probably should listen to the first one first because it does set up a lot of the things that we're going to talk about here. But for those that just don't listen, I've been in internet marketing for about 20 years now. I spent most of it working for an agency or owning an agency. I worked for Google for four years in their paid, search division. And so today I own a company called AffiliateManager.com that manages affiliate programs as well as the performance company which manages paid search for companies as well. So that's the super brief synopsis. Chuck: Perfect. So let's jump into what is it that you look for when you're buying a business? Always people come to me and they; Chuck what kind of business should I buy? And I say okay well what are your interests, what are you good at? So I think you probably you're looking…well, let me just let you tell what are you looking for. Mike: Yeah, so I think it's important to say what I look for or what we look for; so I do have a pretty solid team around me but what we look for is going to be very different than what somebody else looks for. And so please take that with a grain of salt; everything that I'm going to say today and I think is important for everyone to just recognize, just be self-aware what is it that you are incredibly good at? If you're good at sales go find a company that has an incredible product and but they're bad at sales and you plug yourself in and you now have an incredible business overall. Or if you're fantastic at operations go find a company that's selling like crazy but their operations just can't keep up with all the offers and plug yourself in there and that's going to work. I like to say that real opportunity is at the intersection of two different expertise or two different types of expertise. So for me, it's online business and online marketing and I'm not so great at everything else. So I'm not an operations person, I'm not a finance person so I don't look for companies that are lacking in those areas. I look for companies that are strong in those areas and that are; I don't want to say lacking because I think that's potentially disrespectful to either the people that I purchased businesses from or will in the future but it's more where I see opportunity where they wouldn't know unless they worked at Google for several years or they wouldn't know unless they've been in online marketing for 20 years or they never had an affiliate program. They never thought about it and we're incredible at it. So plugging what we are really good at into things that maybe they've tried that they're above average at because you have to be above average if you're going to own an online business but they've spread themselves so thin that they couldn't be an expert at just one thing. Another nice side effect that I've seen with buying these businesses, some of the previous owners they just worked so long and hard in the business that when you're so down in the weeds like that it's hard to pull yourself out and kind of take a 40,000-foot view picture. When acquiring a company it's almost a natural thing that happens along the way and you start to say okay let me take a step back and look at this not so closely; so close I can't tell exactly what this is and what's going on. And then as you start to peel that back and say okay this is something that the previous owner did, is this something that I need to take over, do I bring the value? The previous owner either maybe they enjoyed it, maybe they liked it, or maybe they were really good at it but I'm not and so the answer there is who else within the company can take that over. And I got to say that's probably one of the biggest benefits of purchasing an online company not only for the buyer but for the seller that they're able to peel themselves out and all the while that's the transition of okay these are the daily duties that this person does and this is who can take that over. So the new buyer; so myself as an example can go focus on what we're good at. So with that caveat to what it is that you're asking some of the things that I look for and I think just another quick note on this; this is an ever-evolving list, just because I've written this today doesn't mean that there's not more to come. Every time we go through a business or every time actually we have a call we run into an issue with the current business. I say okay that sounds like an opportunity that when we purchase the next business that we need to look at and say can we help there. So some of these are super simple and most listeners might say oh well that that's kind of common sense. Well, it's not always common sense. Somebody on this call is going to really or somebody listening to this podcast is going to really benefit from it but I listed because it's things that I want to make sure that I go and check every time that we're looking at a business. So, for example, we are like I said really good at online marketing specifically affiliate marketing and paid search. So we'll go look do they have an affiliate program? Are they overpaying? Are they not paying out commission based off of the influence that each affiliate had on that actual transaction? It's actually super interesting to see how much people overpay for things. And even more interesting to see when they're underpaying affiliate. So for example affiliates, they are business just like you, just like me and they want to maximize their revenue for their inventory. A lot of people get stuck and they look oh my competitor pays 5% commission, that's what I'm going to go pay. But a really good affiliate is equivalent to an upper-funnel page search keyword. And if you're paying a two to one for an upper funnel page search keyword; let's use my custom suit business, if I'm willing to get a two to one for the keyword custom suits or men's custom suits, if I'm willing to take a two to one return on ad spend for that I should be willing to pay an affiliate who is upper funnel; who's educating customers about me, I should be willing to pay them a 50% commission because they're upper funnel. Chuck: Alright so that makes a lot of sense to use something that you do on a day to day basis with your main business to look to acquire a company. So can you give some examples of specifically what something you might look for is? Mike: Sure. I'll give two examples one of where we succeeded at this and one where we failed but then you use that failure to learn and regroup. So the first business that we acquired we identified that there was a significant amount of overspent. It wasn't the previous owner's fault. They had hired an agency who was just; they were doing good. I would give them a six out of 10. But within 20, 30 minutes we can evaluate a Google Ads account and say we can save this account 10, $15,000 a month. Chuck: And you were talking about like an Ad Words account as opposed to affiliate stuff? Mike: Correct. Yeah, a Google Ads account that maybe this ad, the Google Ads accounts is spending 50, 60, $70,000 a month and if we can look in there and say we can save 10, 15, 20,000 on this and still get the same level of sales based off of our expertise we're adding 1 to $200,000 straight to the bottom line; straight to EBITDA and we did exactly that. We actually just finished reviewing January through October and we actually generated more sales than the same period last year and we spent I think it was $160,000 less to do so in that period. Chuck: It kind of goes against the thought of ad expenses are going up, right? There's more and more competition every day for ads so people think that but yet you're able to cut ad spend and make more money with it. Mike: That's 100% correct. You have to know what you're doing. There are very, very few good paid search companies out there. And I know because I used to work with a lot of them when I was at Google. Kevin who's on our team; his job was to go out and train agencies on how to appropriately use Google Ad Words. Pat who's the mastermind on our team has been doing Google paid search since Yahoo or as Yahoo started before Google was in existence. So it's just such a level of expertise that we have on our team overall that we can go and then apply and get these level of savings overall. And again it's straight to the bottom line and we take that money; the first acquisition was partly done via an SBA loan and the savings that we've got doesn't quite cover the SBA loan but it's about 75% of it. It's almost like we acquired the company for the price of the down payment and a much smaller SBA loan so to speak. So that's got to be our number one criteria; same thing with an affiliate program again with the first acquisition they weren't doing attribution based commissioning. It was a smaller effect on the overall business. We probably saved somewhere between 30 and 40,000 for the entire year on that one. So it's again a much smaller effect but that's a part-time person. That's an initiative that we can go fund now because we're saving 30 to 40 grand that we wouldn't have to spend otherwise. Chuck: So let's call out specifically there what it is you're looking for. So Mike looks at a company, requests access to their ad account, and then Mike looks for what? Mike: So in their ad account I'm looking at are they using negative keywords appropriately, what bidding algorithm are they using on Google, what matching types are they using, are they using segmentation correctly. And this is all super 40,000-foot level things but as Pat, our behind the scenes masterminds like to say, a poorly run paid search program is typically death by a thousand paper cuts. It's not one of these things. It's a thousand of these things that we meticulously go and identify, find, correct, and improve. Chuck: Alright so you will go into an account, you see all these things and they're doing everything right does that mean okay it's a great company I'm not looking to buy this one; like are you specifically, if there's not something you can fix you're not going to acquire it? Mike: Yeah, that's a fun question. The good news is for me at least I've never seen one. That's good. And to be fair I've seen; when we are getting an RFPN for the agency business I've seen two or three that were so well run that we tell them we can't help, they're doing an amazing job. You're going to look to us for growth in three or four months and we're not going to deliver because your current company is doing fantastic so don't leave them. But when acquiring a business and the research that I do before making an offer I have not yet come across that. If that were the case yes it's not a kiss of death but it is a factor in whether or not we feel like we should purchase the business because we know that there's so many out there that do it so poorly. Investing; I know I'm not teaching anybody on the call anything new with this but investing is where's the next best place to spend your dollar? And if they're doing a bad job with paid search that's a good place for me to spend my dollar because I know we can fix that. If they're doing an incredible job well there's probably a better place for me to go spend my dollar. Chuck: Sure. And I don't think it's a negative thing for you to say nope I'm just going to move on to the next one they're doing everything right. Like you're looking for specific things in order to want to acquire and like you said you've only got so many dollars to spend. You need to place it where it's going to do the most good for you. And if somebody else is doing everything right like that's not your area of expertise to grow the business. Maybe again they're not doing sales well and that's not what you're specifically looking at so sales is where the person that is going to end up ultimately acquiring the business is good at. And there's also people who maybe they don't have necessarily an expertise at something and they're just looking for an overall good run business that can keep chugging away for the years to come. And that's not a negative like just because you don't have some really specialized thing that you're good it doesn't mean that buying a business would necessarily be a bad idea for you. Mike: Yeah it's one of those things begin with the end in mind, right? And if the if your end goal is that you want a super stable business but it's not going to grow because everything is so well optimized and you're willing to pay the same multiple for it and you just want to kind of run that business day to day as is without expectation of growth then that's it. And there are people that want that. I would even consider a business like that if it was strictly almost a lifestyle business. But the businesses that we're buying; our goal, our intention is to take this 15 million dollar company and turn it into a 25, 50, 100 million dollar company and so there has to be opportunity when we're purchasing and the bigger the opportunity that we identify that we can do so fairly quickly with what we have the more we're willing to pay for it and the more we're willing to compete for it overall. Chuck: So we were talking recently we had lunch and you said that you recently discovered something with one of your businesses that was something you know I'm going to start looking for that and it revolved around shipping. Do you remember what we were talking about? Mike: Oh yes I have it. It's on my list. And that's funny and that's yet another reason to have a list right, right? Chuck: Right. Mike: And so as we're talking like; I know I'm not alone in this, right? I know you're like this Chuck. I'm sure you, the person listening to this right now is the same way. And I'll wake up in the middle of night and I feel like sometimes not thinking about things or telling yourself think about this in the back of my mind and you'll solve problems; like I'll get things out there just to solve them. I'll wake up in the middle and be like that's the answer to this and literally I'll roll over, I'll pick up my phone, and I'll just type a note to myself and say this is the answer and I'll go back to sleep. And the one that you're talking about is we have a warehouse for both of the business but the one that we're talking about now has a warehouse, a large warehouse; tens of thousands of square feet, I'm not sure exactly how big it is but we were getting fined by the shipping company because the dimensions of our packaging was incorrect. And so as we printed out the shipping labels for it, it was off maybe by an inch or whatever it was. And so when we send it to FedEx who was our shipping carrier and they would measure it we would be off by however much and they would actually fine us and so it added to tens of thousands of dollars in fines that we are receiving; not shipping costs, fines because our dimensions were wrong. And so for less than $10,000, we purchased a dim scanner and basically eliminated that. That dim scanner pays itself in one to two months and then from that point forward we now recovered yet another 20, $30,000 back. So you see the recurring theme here; paid search, this is how much we can save by doing it better, affiliate, this is how much we can save by doing it better, shipping, this is how much we can save by doing it better and then here's the freaking key. Like this is the thing though; don't just sit on that. And again I guess this depends on your goal. If your goal is to just absolute squeeze every penny out of these companies that you want then go and do it. My goal is growth and to turn these companies into large companies so that one day I may list with Chuck and get a great multiple on these companies. But take those dollars that you're taking and now do all of the things on the list; in that plan and the things that the previous owner said I could never afford, I could never get to, I can never pay somebody to do it. Now you found the funds to go and actually do those things. Use that money to fund that growth. Again I'll refer to Pat who runs our paid search; he calls that feed the winners starve the losers, so just taking the wasted money and putting it back into reinvest on growth and winning. Chuck: So with the shipping fines that you discovered how long have you been running this business; it's been a year and a half? Mike: A year and a half, yeah. Chuck: And you just discovered it now. Is there something that you are having; we don't know what we don't know, right? So we don't know what to look for. Is this something that you could have identified on day one to have seen even more value? Mike: Yeah, thanks for pointing it out Chuck. It's always painful to look back and say oh we could have made an additional 30 to 50 grand in the last 12 months if we just would have found this. Chuck: And this is probably not a common problem, right? But it's something you're going to look for in the future. Where would they have identified that; what due diligence would you have done in order to have seen that? Mike: Yeah, looking at the shipping invoices and seeing exactly what those are. And there are some pretty cool companies out there that will A) look at that for you and B) they'll actually monitor your shipping and make sure that it arrives on time. There's one called Late Shipment it's I think the one that we use; LateShipment.com and if FedEx doesn't deliver within the agreed-upon time; the one to two days, they'll actually refund; we get a refund on that shipping cost. So that's another example if they're not using; if you send out a million dollars or if you pay a million dollars in shipping costs every year and I think I know ours is above a million but I'll just use that, so a million dollars, if you can recoup 2, 3, 4% that's 20, 30, $40,000 back in your pocket that just appeared out of nowhere. So that's another one on my list. So are they using a dim scanner? Are they getting fined for this? Are they using LateShipment.com and getting a refund on anything that's late? Again stacking up this $160,000 in savings in paid search, $40,000 in savings in affiliate, 30 to 50,000 in dim scanner, late shipment another 30 to $40,000 just stacking and stacking and stacking. Another one is credit card fees; are they using a good credit card process? Have they negotiated their rates since they grew from zero to 15 million dollars in sales? And if they haven't that's an opportunity like just a one or two; what do they call them? Bits I think is what they call it but it could mean a huge difference in your overall company. Just one or two bits is 15 to $30,000 on a 15 million dollar business. Chuck: And so in your defense, I think on the shipping thing the company that you purchased did have one of those companies in place that were looking at the delayed shipments but that company wasn't looking at the penalties you were receiving. Mike: That's right. Chuck: So even if somebody is using a company that is monitoring the late shipping and getting those refunds they may not be looking at the fees which is strange. You think they'd be doing it but they weren't. Something I've heard you say at conferences when looking at it from a different type of business, so right now we're kind of talking about e-commerce but you also work with people who are doing content sites and their affiliates with other people. So what's your number one tip if you purchased a content site that makes money off affiliates; what's your number one tip for those people? Mike: Go ask for a raise. Chuck: What does that mean? Mike: Go to the affiliate management; either the advertiser or the affiliate management company who's managing them and say I want to make more. And there's many ways that you can position that. One is if you're a content site just know that my affiliate company, AffiliateManager.com is always looking for more content sites. We want to bring that value to our clients and you are in a position; it's a content site's market, let me put it that way. We all want what you have and some make the mistake of because they've been beat down and offered 1, 2, 3, 5, 10% commissions in the past day they just turn away affiliate marketing. Don't do that. You're leaving money on the table. If you find a good advertiser or a good affiliate management company that knows what they're doing and they know that this content site is upper funnel and bringing incremental business to the table they're going to be willing to pay for that and they might pay 20%, 25%, 30%. One of our clients pays 100%. Another one pays up to $150 for an acquisition and they might make zero on it. So it's just one of those things where you have to go and be willing to ask for a raise. And again a good affiliate management company they're going to look at the incremental value, we; not to get too much into us because I know this is more about acquisition but we actually have an attribution tool that we built because it didn't exist that shows where in the clickstream each of these sites are. And if it's a content site going back to your point and we look at their overall numbers and 70% of the time they're the first touch for anybody who's making a purchase on your site, yes we want that incremental traffic and sales coming from that content site. So to you content sites out there you are in a position of desire. We all want to work with you more and go and ask for raises. Somebody who recognizes your value is going to very much be willing to pay it. And if they're not go find somebody else; they're going to be willing to pay it. You are valuable. Chuck: And just to give an example of something like that. I've got a number of content sites and one of them the affiliates that I was getting paid from is a Canadian company and they send me a Canadian check. So every time I cash the Canadian check I get hit with like a 10 or $20 cashing fee. And it's just like annoying and it's small amount of money but it's annoying so I emailed them and I said hey can you just like PayPal me the money or wire me the money or do something else because I want to get ahold of the $10 fee every time I cash your check and they go oh how about we just double what we pay you? Okay, that'll work. So they really are willing; if they see the value in what you're providing them they are willing to pay more, so just a nice little tip there from Mike Nuñez. Mike: Yeah. And there was a guy Greg; I won't say his last name at Rhodium one year and I said that at a table and one year later he came back and said by that one tip that you just said because he was a content site or is a content site, I have grown my revenue by 25%. All I did; I didn't do anything else but go back and ask for a raise and the revenue on my site grew 25%. Chuck: Amazing. Mike: Free, yeah. Chuck: Alright, so we've talked about shipping, we've talked about affiliate, we've talked about ads, is there anything else specifically that you're looking for when you're acquiring? Mike: Yeah if they're not on Amazon I think that's a pretty obvious one. If they are on Amazon and either doing a poor job or no job at Amazon ads; Amazon ads I probably the biggest opportunity right now for everyone that sells on Amazon. Chuck: And this is kind of new to you in the last couple of years, right? Mike: Yeah. Well, I mean it didn't really exist a couple of years ago or it was very nascent. So it's still one of those things like if you remember Google back in the day when clicks used to be available for a penny or five cents and such. Chuck: Yeah man they sent me a refrigerator. I had spent so much money I got a Google refrigerator. Mike: So I'm not saying that pen that clicks are available for a penny on Amazon but if you incorporate the right system and how to manage it you can gross it; like I'll give you physical numbers year over year in November even those Cyber Monday fell outside of November this year. We grew Amazon sales on that outdoor brand by 50% using Amazon ads. So it's another example of having expertise in this paid search world and finding opportunities within it. Amazon ads; I think maybe that's super-secret number 10. I think we've gotten away from the super secrets but maybe super-secret number 10 and it's probably one of the most powerful ones I see right now available for people. Chuck: So what else are you looking for? Mike: So besides being on Amazon and Amazon ads, me personally I'm looking for a strong operational foundation because I'm not an expert at that. I'm not good at that but thankfully the businesses that I purchase have that. I'm looking for a barrier to entry like how replicatable is this business and what is the barrier that people have to get through? And this is a little bit less quantifiable but this is just a general do I want to be involved in this business; how hard is it for somebody who's just as good at paid search as me or Amazon or whatever, if they just got a hold of my supplier could they replicate this and do I want that? And if the answer is it's too easy then I move on. Is it a learnable industry? One of the things I was worried about with the custom suit company was maybe before purchasing it I wasn't as sharp a dresser, Chuck. Maybe my wardrobe might have consisted of free conference t-shirts but I was worried about that and… Chuck: You're pulling it off still. Mike: Thank you. And once I got into it I learned no this is a learnable industry. I can do this and it's worked great since then. Is it Amazon resistant? And I know that's a little counter to saying are they on Amazon. Is Amazon going to move into that space? Are they going to want to replicate what it is that you're doing? And on the outdoor brand, it's more of we joined to them; we couldn't beat them so we joined them and a good 50, 60% of our sales are on Amazon on that brand. On the suit brand, we're looking to sell accessories; expand our brand awareness because you can't sell custom suits on Amazon and it's unlikely that Amazon is going to get into that realm. So we're thinking how can we use Amazon to expand our brand awareness, generate some confidence in the brand, and yet not have to; since we're not able to send custom suits and sell custom suits on Amazon directly so is Amazon a threat to the business is something that we look at overall. Inventory management optimization; so leveraging just in time inventory because anybody that's involved in an inventory-based business knows that a lot of times your profit can go straight back into purchasing additional inventory. And if you want to realize any profits before you sell the business you've got have inventory optimization. Is the current ownership leveraging that inventory optimization? Are there conversion rate optimization opportunities; have they ever even tried it before? I just had a call today for the suit company and this is going to be ultra-specific but it is an indicator of what we've done. We launched a new cart in early November and we just ran the numbers and today on desktop for new customers we have doubled our conversion rate which anybody knows that the lifeblood of a business is acquiring new customers. So to do that is pretty amazing. Now on mobile, it was pretty static but we've also generated significant amounts of more traffic on mobile to the suit company. So that's a little bit misleading to say that it's exactly the same. Well anybody who knows conversion rate optimization and knows how traffic works; if you increase traffic the quality is potentially a little bit lower and so the fact that we slightly beat our previous conversion rate on mobile is a huge win. So are there conversion rate optimization to opportunities in the acquisition? Here's one that you know is near and dear to my heart, Chuck. What is the current platform; are they on Net Suite, on Shopify, on Magento? Because the one thing I never ever recommend is changing platforms. So can you accomplish all of the things on your list that you want to do on the platform? We use Net Suite as one of them and it is extremely difficult to get changes done but we are not moving. So it's just something that I think everybody should really consider. Or are you on an archaic platform like at Yahoo stores; something that's not being updated anymore and there's seven people in the world that can code to Yahoo stores? Now you're beholden to them. You have to pay exorbitant rates for their development because they're the only one that knows it as opposed to a Shopify or a Magento that developers are plenty. Chuck: If you're on Yahoo shout out to Rob Snell, look him up if you need help with your Yahoo business. Mike: There you go. See I didn't even mean that. That helps. And I think the last thing; us particularly we enjoy custom products, so custom made suits is a really good example or even for the branded products; things that other people makes, turning them into custom products. We really think that that's a good market to be and again slightly more defensible against an Amazon. And then finally this is my last on my company acquisition algorithm that I'll share today just I know we're limited on time is what synergies can you participate in? So if you listen to the last call you heard me talking about a brand that we made an offer on that it was a full price offer, quick close, no due diligence because it was a trusted brand. And before Chuck chimes in, he recommends that you never do that but the reason why we wanted that brand is because it was geared towards outdoor enthusiasts and we have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of outdoor enthusiasts that come to our website every day. So looking for synergistic brands that are out there to acquire and diversify the income and now not only sell other people's brands but also sell your own brand; white labeling things like that, finding things with opportunities like that, that's the last opportunity that we're looking for in our algorithm. Chuck: Awesome. Alright, so now let's maybe move into what some of the lessons you've learned from the various acquisitions you've done. And you had acquired some stuff before Quiet Light as well. Mike: Yeah. So I think a lot of them are listed on what I just said but I will say there's; because every time I learn a lesson to me it's an opportunity for the next acquisition. So again I will buy another business on Net Suite but I wouldn't have bought the first one knowing what I know now about Net Suite. But now that we've had to learn it, now that we've had to; our developer is familiar with it now and can make the changes that we need and want, now I'll buy another one. And so to me there's an opportunity there, right? It's harder for people to do that than it is for me. It's yet another level of expertise. So that's one thing is a lot of the lessons are kind of listed already in that but there's one I would say recently and again it's with the custom suit business, don't get so caught up in your own expertise. Again we are really, really good at paid search and one of the reasons why is because we're so return focused. A mistake that we made with the custom suit business is we went straight for a return. If a dollar didn't turn into five; I'll just use that as an example, we didn't spend it. And because of that, we saw sales drop. And I talked to the previous owner about it and said hey we're seeing this, why? And he's like well yes cross-device tracking is good however it doesn't capture everything. And mobile devices; think about who buys suits these days, and it's somebody with a mobile life. It's a lawyer that's always in the courtroom. It's a doctor that's always walking about. It's a financial person that's not necessarily sitting at their desk, they're going to meeting after meeting after meeting and where are they searching up for their next suit? Well, it's probably their mobile device. They find it and then they go on the desktop and they go on and they purchase it. And we had pulled back pretty significantly on the mobile spend because the conversion rate just wasn't as good. And so that's one example of us kind of getting in our own way. But to our credit, we were able to kind of step back and say okay we learned a lesson here, let's get better at it and change our approach. And since then that's when we now had some of our best days that we've ever had. So I like to think of it as a lot of these owners or the previous owners they had levels of expertise; they were doing something right and so it's our job as experts that are better at it to take the lessons that they've learned and apply our expertise to it to just throw some gasoline on it. Chuck: Alright Mike so one of the ways I like to usually end these things is just to ask if you have any kind of tools that you use on a regular basis; just some things that can either help with productivity, it could even be outside of work. One example the other day I was kind of upset about it because you ordered the chicken sandwich from Popeye's through Uber Eats so that you didn't have to wait in line and you didn't bother sending me one. That's a great little life hack. So what else do you have? Do you have any tools that you might recommend or any other little things? Mike: I did the same thing with Amazon two years ago when they were operating like the one-hour delivery and we had a hurricane coming to Florida and I just ordered all the bottled water and had it delivered while everybody else is fighting each other at the store. But now that secret's out. That's no longer an advantage but yeah some tools that I like that we use; so for Google Ads, I'll say if you're using things like maximize for clicks run we prefer an enhanced CPC bidding algorithm or a target CPA. We always test to see which one's better. Prioritization, I love Air Table. I got to give a shout out to my business partner Daniel for that. Air Table is a prioritization tool and basically, it can help identify what is the easiest to implement to get the most impactful change that you can make. And so it just really helps to prioritize what it is that you're doing and the changes that you're making to the company because obviously, we all want to make the biggest impact as quickly as possible. I love Grammarly for sending emails so that I don't sound silly. Chuck: That one saves me all the time. Mike: It's so good. I haven't used their pro version but even just the regular version is fantastic. For the affiliate management company, I got to give a shout out to Mail Shake. We love Mail Shake. We use that very often. It's a terrific tool. I love Moz. So the Moz toolbar is something that I use a lot. And then I think we use a lot of the things everybody else uses like the Evernotes and Google apps and things like that. So I think the first ones that were probably some of the others may not have heard them. Chuck: Awesome. Well, I think everybody who's been listening appreciates your time. I'd love to have you back at another time. We can talk about some more stuff once you've hit that next goal of purchase through us we'll talk about that one. But again thank you for the time today and we'll talk to you again soon. Mike: Thanks, Chuck. Links and Resources: Affiliate Manager

How important is content marketing strategy to your e-commerce business? Crafting valuable content helps build brand trust with both existing and potential customers, allowing you to successfully grow your brand. Today we're talking all about content and smart ways to ramp up your strategy. Jeff Coyle is co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of MarketMuse. Coming from twenty years in the SEO and content strategy arena, Jeff's products use AI to accelerate content planning, creation, and optimization. With their spokes-of-a-wheel keyword approach, MarketMuse's content marketing strategy connects ideas, allowing clients to demonstrate product expertise. Episode Highlights: How content relates to growth and where to start assessing the need for your business. Strategies that help tell the story that you are trying to tell. How to gauge the success rate. Where the news dynamic fits into your content campaign. The breadth and depth of your content. Figuring out where the gaps are. When to hire an expert. How the Marketmuse suite of services help the writer. Using smart content to illustrate expertise. Why search volume is not the only strategy for content valuation. Some quick win strategies – aka one-page plans. Packages MM offers for different sized audiences. Tools and hacks Jeff recommends. Transcription: Mark: So there was a time early on in Quiet Light Brokerage when I was doing all of the Content Marketing for the firm and I was writing on average eight blog posts or articles per week averaging about 18,200 words in length. And I underestimated when I started on this kind of venture of can I do these eight to 10 per month; I underestimated how much work it was going to be and it was a lot of work because it's not just writing down your thoughts it's writing for the web and writing for SEO and understanding what do you write about next. It's amazing how quick the writer's block comes in. I know that you had a conversation with Jeff Coyle a mutual friend of ours from Rhodium and one of the founders of MarketMuse which is an awesome company; a great tool from an SEO and content marketing standpoint. You guys talked about everything content which is relevant to buyers, anyone looking to acquire a web-based business and grow it. I know it's been a huge part of our marketing plan. What are some of the things that you and Jeff talked about in this conversation? Chuck: It's quite great. I had a great conversation with Jeff and we're talking about if you've got a dollar spend where to spend it. Most people they're doing basic keyword research, they're looking for what's the keyword that's getting the most searches versus the keyword difficulty. And he takes it like way beyond that and they're looking at not just the specific keywords but what keywords are actually tied to other keywords that show that you're an expert in the topic. If I'm talking about like a specific thing but I fail to mention other words Google then thinks that I'm not an expert because anybody who's an expert would be using these other words or when you're just looking at keyword tools to look at the ones they're getting the most traffic you often miss the additional keywords that are in there. Mark: Right. And I know full disclosure I use MarketMuse with Quiet Light Brokerage and actually with my other company as well. I use their service and the general sales pitch is pretty simple. It's this idea of setting up pillar pages and having this kind of spokes on a wheel branch now so the example that they use I think in some of the marketing materials is if you're going to have a website on craft beer you should have a blog post on craft beer but you should also have an entire section on hops and an entire section on barley and malts and then even from there if you want to be all about hops and afford it to do a page on hops you should also have some satellite pages on imperial hops or these other types of varieties of hops and being able to have this kind of wheel with different spokes coming out. And you know what a bunch of SEO tools use this. Like I've been using Sight Bulb recently; a really cool software that diagrams out your site and the sort of hub sort of format. What MarketMuse does is they take a blog post and had topics so you say I want to focus on craft beer and they say okay if you want to really be known as an expert, make sure that you're talking about hops at least 10 or 15 times in this blog post. And make sure that you're also talking about different types of barley. And then you can use that and say well okay I'll talk about this in this blog post but what do I write on other blog post? It's made for me and I don't do a lot of the writing anymore but it makes the content creation process super easy; like the ideation part, I mean that's the hard part about all of this. How do you come up with new ideas on what you should write about? But I don't want people to think this is just a sales pitch for MarketMuse. It's a great piece of software, obviously, I believe in it from that standpoint. But I think from a buyer standpoint also from a seller standpoint having a solid content strategy is really really key. If you were to spend money; Chuck you've had a bunch of businesses in the past and I know you've used content, if you're going to spend your money somewhere for long term marketing dollar I'm kind of leading you to the answer here, where would you spend it? Would it be in the content marketing world or would it be PPC or what are the advantages in your opinion of this content marketing versus other types of marketing? Chuck: Yeah I mean it really depends I think on the type of business you have. Obviously, if you have a content-related business then you want to hop out as much quality content as you can. If you've got an e-commerce business there's different funnels and then buckets may be that you need to put your money in but you definitely need to be investing in content. Even on Amazon when you're thinking about like selling something on Amazon you go to some people's pages and the content is just horrible and it's so important. One of the things we didn't talk about but like when you're looking at Amazon you'll look at the questions people are asking and then answer those questions. So content is definitely important. We talked just a lot about what you should be writing about next. When you're looking at competitors sometimes you can actually see the direction they're going and then beat them and write a bunch of content. Actually, get in front of them because you look at their keyword list and you know the direction they're headed and you can actually get in front of them. Mark: Yeah for my money I think the two areas that are the most important for a marketing strategy at least long term return will be content marketing and CRO, conversion rate optimization. Those two things alone have such staying power where you invest now and you're going to benefit for years to come as opposed to PPC which is great because you can throttle PPCC; that's the reason people love it. You can throttle up and down. You can really find some gems and it's very immediate. But long term success I think is predicated on this content strategy frank that's something we've even bought a little bit at Quiet Light. I just got to give you a quick shot out Chuck because you are wearing a Quiet Light shirt. So for all those people that are watching on YouTube and I know it's not a ton of you that are watching on YouTube but those that are you can see that Chuck actually has a really cool shirt. I don't even have that shirt. Did you give me one? Chuck: I think I kind of bought Joe one but I didn't get you one so maybe I'll have to get you one as well. Mark: Okay, I think Brad gave me one and it was like enormous. I was swimming on the thing. Chuck: I think that's the one I have with Joe when I bought his it was too big for him so I have to get your size. Mark: Make sure you size it down and hey if we get a few extras of these maybe we can set up a contest for people that actually want a Quiet Light; I don't care what you do with it but it's kind of fun to give that away as a prize. Let's get into the episode. Content marketing is where I cut my teeth early in the Internet world. I love this topic. I think Jeff is one of the smartest people in the industry when it comes to content marketing [inaudible 00:07:02.0] good market views and this is definitely one to learn from. Chuck: Yeah absolutely and two things before we dive right into it; one they're giving a special discount. Again we're not trying to promote it. It's just a good product if you want it great but in the show notes, there's going to be a discount code to get a nice percentage off. And stay tuned to till the end of the video because I also asked Jeff for some additional tools that he likes to use. I always think it's fun to ask entrepreneurs what are some various tools that are unrelated to our discussion from what you're using so. Chuck: All right hi everybody Chuck Mullins here from Quiet Light Brokerage and today on the call we have Jeff Coyle the co-founder of MarketMuse and chief is it, product officer? Jeff: Yeah, Chief Product Officer, I manage the product data science and engineering teams as well as the marketing team at Marketing News. Chuck: Awesome. So I've known Jeff for a couple of years, we run in the same circles. I've been on the Internet world for quite a while. Jeff do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself? Jeff: Sure. I am as you mentioned the co-founder and chief product officer for MarketMuse. Prior to this, I've been in this space as Chuck mentioned for quite a long time; about 20 years as scary as that might sound in the search engine optimization content strategy game. I have generated like 50 million leads and not as an exaggeration for B2B technology primarily companies in the early part of my career. I worked as an early employee at a company called Knowledge Storm which sold to Tech Target which is also a great B2B publisher and an intent data and ABM platform for enterprise and mid-market B2B companies. I worked for them through their in-house team and in-house capabilities while I was there really focused on driving engaged users through content and content strategy. When I left Tech Target having already spoken with my co-founder about ways that we could grow MarketMuse I came on as a bit of a late co-founder and we've since grown the company to almost 50 people; really, really an amazing story about growth, building a new category about content strategy, what should you write next, what should you update or optimize next that's going to have the biggest impact on your business and everything that goes along with that from how do I assess my own authority, how do I understand where my gaps are, how do I know where my strengths are. And that's been the mission of our business is really to tell the story of I could spend a dollar on content; creating, optimizing, blah, blah, blah, tomorrow what should it be? And that's what MarketMuse is for; to tell that story. Chuck: Alright so kind of you alluded to it but today we'll get you on a call to talk about SEO and maybe more so how content is applicable to SEO. So maybe starting at the base when somebody either acquires a new site or maybe is looking at a site trying to think of how do I grow this site like where's my opportunity, what kind of analysis do you think somebody should start off with? Jeff: Well I think that traditionally the way that people have assessed sites for their strengths sometimes is only by looking at their current and existing rankings or their historical rankings. So it's a bit of you know kind of a tail wagging the dog assessment of where you're at, where you have been, but that as a starting point does provide some value as to where you are. It just doesn't tell typically the entire story about what it means to be about something. So when I'm looking at assessing a site for the merits of its; the collection of its content or its inventory of content, when I'm looking at is to say yes certainly I want to see performance. I want to look at also things that I might get out of my analytics package engagement. I have to understand the goals of the company the key performance indicators of the business. Am I driving those things? Can I peddle out of them? But divorcing those concepts for this point in discussion about conversion rate optimization and such from a search engine optimization or authority perspective I want to see where I've written great content so how much content have I created on core topics that I care about. When I do cover those topics how in-depth do I get and how successful does that; what kind of success does that yield when I write about a concept I care about when I get deep when I write high-quality content on concepts that I care about. Those two things really tell the story of your existing momentum on a concept. And so that when I'm assessing a site that's one thing I want to want to figure out is where do I have momentum? What concepts can I write about and I expect to be successful. And that's Stage 1. Chuck: Before we move on from that one how do we gauge that success rate; what do we think is successful, what are the indicators that say hey I'm already doing well here or I'm not doing well here? Jeff: Absolutely and that's the hardest part. And to run an effective content marketing team and a content production team for any company you've got to start at what are the key performance indicators? If I'm an e-commerce site the key metrics that I have is my average order size, it's my conversion rate close to a closed cart, it's my cart abandons, it's my total revenue. If I'm an affiliate site it might be an RPM metric and I have to be agnostic of and when I have agnostic a reference of affiliate and then I want specific combinations of affiliates because sometimes you can actually fake your books accidentally if you've got great affiliates on one page and not great affiliates on another. So it's really about I think engagement with affiliate opportunities in addition to revenue. You get a look at both of those things. If you are a publisher it's going to be RPM but also it's engagement with those pages. Because again how your ad server validates is do you have paid ads? So if you have a bunch of house ads and those have a different rate you want to always account for that because you might have great content this shooting off impressions engaged users clicks and such. So I always like to look at my current value per visit and then by the way from a B2B tech or something PI attorney; all these places are where MarketMuse does business so I like to kind of list a full fledge. I'm looking at my conversion to lead. I'm also looking at as far down the funnel as I can track and attribute. Every deal no matter what every situation you're looking at you always want to get it back to current value per visit and aspirational value per visit from a channel. In this case, let's say organic. So if I'm in a scenario I want to always be able to back that up. That's the only way I can truly define quantified value. And for MarketMuse obviously, that's the only way we can truly walk in the door and be confident in that ROI analysis. And that's why we've had to do this hundreds of times. When we talk to somebody it's to say how much do you really value each one of these visits? And if you can't answer that question it's okay, let's back into it, let's figure it out. How much is that truly about? Because then if you grow your traffic 20% you can say okay well that's worth this much to me. How much am I willing to invest in that? And that's how I define. So that's a long way of answering a short question that was actually really duped question. But the answer then is my quantified value metric. How much did I publish? How much did I update? How much do those act motions cost or those actions cost? And what was the efficiency rate on the content achieving some sort of baseline goal? I like to use recurring traffic from organic search as my goal. So I might get a boost from other channels and then it dies off. So I want recurring traffic at or above a particular baseline. So if I wrote 100 articles and 10 of them achieved my baseline of ongoing recurring traffic when I have 10 percent efficiency rate in that zone. If I updated 100 articles and 40 of them grew in traffic at or above a particular level. Then I've got a 40% efficiency rate on optimization. So when I talk about effectiveness of content I want to see how much should I publish, how much should I update and how often did that achieve my goals? I see ranges by the way just it scares the crap out of me sometimes, 1 to 2% of efficiency. Like I write 100 articles and only 2 get rankings. Quite often 40 and 45% at best practice that it's so wide. So you need to take stock today whomever you are and say how often did I write, how often did that yield recurring traffic; that's my efficiency rate. Am I in that 10 percent zone? I got some work to do. Am I above 20, 30, 40? I'm kicking butt. Now how do I take advantage of that? What do I do? No matter where you are there's always steps you can take to really maximize your earn. But it's a great question because so many people talk about ROI and they can't explain how they calculated. Chuck: Right. And it sounds like what you're saying is maybe like diving into your analytics but not looking at like how much traffic this page is doing but what is the segmented traffic; how much is coming from Google or Bing or whatever you're targeting. Maybe you're targeting link acquisition with an article then you got to figure out what's the value of a link that's coming in, how many did I get on this piece of content, and then maybe kind of summing up the value of all the different components. Like knowing what your KPIs are for the specific content. Jeff: Absolutely. And so the ways that I do that so it's manageable; there are ways where you can do that so it's manageable because [inaudible 00:16:38.2] I have thousands of pages or I published hundreds of pages how could I possibly do that? It's do it for the site level. Do it by site section; it's the way Google thinks about your site anyway. Do it by site section and then take your marquee pages and do a more thorough analysis of them. And marquee could mean your best pages that you feel are the best but they punch below their weight class, stuff that does really well, stuff that you invested a lot of money in. So build your plat; this is the stuff I'm going to do with deep dive but I'm also going to get my section level and sight levels metrics. An example might be that when Chuck writes an article he's on a 20% conversion rate to my effectiveness metric. But when Ron I don't know who Ron is but well just say Ron, when Ron writes an article he's 5%. So you're to get; you could do person level, you could do section level. You really want to get that slice and dice to know what's the thing that is causing success to happen or is it luck. A lot of sites a lot of B2B companies they rely on all of their authority for 5, 10 pages and they've got hundreds. Not only is it completely scary and unhealthy from a competitive space situation but if you're a Quiet Light listener it's an opportunity. I mean it's an opportunity to see a site that has a risk of ruin. It's an opportunity to see a site that has huge opportunity if they just publish the right content. So all of those things are what we're typically looking at. It's when I publish about Chevrolets it does real well when I publish about smart cars it doesn't. So when I get that site I'm shooting off about Ford and about gosh as my adjacent so I'm talking about; so it's really getting into when I get in how can I write about tangential or semantically related concepts, really expand my inventory in ways I know we'll have more success, and if I do want to cover other things. I think a reasonable expectation about investment need because I can't just go right kitty cats and crush it. But I know that if I cover what hubcaps should be on the PT Cruiser I can. And so those are the types of conceptual analysis, editorial content strategies I have been doing with years. Now you have data to support it. And that's where I think that the next phase of great Search Engine Optimization outcomes comes from this type of content strategy analysis for sure. Chuck: And one of the things I was reading the other day was just and I think everybody already knows this but they were talking about news websites and why don't news websites rank for everything. Like a news website gets all the links because everybody's linking to articles but yet they don't have the ability to rank for all topics, right? Certain news agencies actually get a lot more traffic for specific topics because that is maybe their topical relevance of their business. Jeff: Yeah. Oh, I mean news is so unique. The news algorithm has so many components and so from a Google news perspective and Google top stories there's components of real-time boosting. There's the concept of the fact that news articles appear in organic search. And they're coming from different channels of information. So they cross the chasm from just being news to being appropriate in search results. So then there's the dynamic of some of those items stay forever. Some of them are temporal and they're going to bounce out when that thing becomes less of a temporal story. We actually have a solution for that. MarketMuse allows you to analyze both serps and overlay analysis and it's called newsroom but that's neither here nor there. But the point of the message is what if you write news articles about this topic you care about but there's four to five aggressive publishers also publishing in that that have authority for news and you're just picking up the scraps. You can see that with solutions that are out there now. You're going to just see what those things are and then tracking that back to assessing performance. If I'm looking at my content items and I write 80 articles about some topic I get no news referrals and I get trickles in of organic and I'm writing it for the purposes of news, is that great? Let's say they get other KPIs, let's say they do gather links and they become powerful. But I'm not winning news, I'm not getting the organic search value that I think I should, how do I use that? How do I use the power that those pages are acquiring to my benefit? And most of the time when I see problematic content strategy; document the content strategy at a company they're not looking at their existing power pages. What content are they publishing that is gaining some value and how do we use that? Because I've got something that's a link magnet that every SEO in the world will go we need to do something with that but they don't necessarily know what that is. And a lot of times you see these link magnets and they're out there. They got a little bit of traffic upfront. They're not valuable enough to get recurrent traffic or it's not; it was a temporal staged story so they don't know what to do. And so weaving that article; weaving that item into some real good content strategy, that's the win. That's building my thought leadership, building my clusters of content, and hey this powerful battery. Plug the battery in here, plug the battery in here, and weave it in with internal link, weave it in with appropriate content, upgrade opportunities for conversions, there's so many things you can do to repurpose but when you get a winner use the winner. And we see that older people are scared to touch them because they're like it might break up. So these are the main dynamics that we run into with kind of the Assessment Authority and news as a special case. But it's so misunderstood what to do when you get a news winner. Because if you can predict that every time you publish a news story on Linux you're in the top three of Google top stories. Like, open that wallet every darn day. And I have clients that are in that scenario and we're like you must write about this every day and they cringe at first and I'm like here's the value that this produces; it's not just traffic. It's all the good stuff that comes as a result of that. It's also a long answer to a short question but I think that's usually a theme with me. Chuck: Alright, so number two you're about to say before I ask you a question? Jeff: Oh gosh I don't even remember what it was now. No, I'm just kidding. So it's kind of breadth and depth and then is the things that you see as being really high quality that you've written. These pillar pieces, the centers of the universe, the things that have acquired the KPI. How are those KPIs; they've acquired some metric that gives you that sense. So we've talked about how your existing momentum, well what are these cornerstone pieces, what are the center of the cluster pieces that exist and how are you using them today? Are you weaving them in? Are you using them to write then support pieces, etcetera? And how do you combine that with analysis of your target readership or user or buyer intent? So what's their purchase cycle; do you have coverage in the information phase, do you have coverage in the middle of funnel, do you have coverage late in the funnel, do you have post-purchase troubleshooting and adherence in ownership? So when you have a beacon of power really that's the time your mirror needs to be the most clear. I always say this. Like, stop tilting the mirror your way because you think you have success. The garbage in the game right now as I call it is people looking at search results and saying I need to write articles just like that search result item regardless of whether you want to argue differentiation it doesn't work. It only works if you have existing power to start to do things like that. What you have to do is just say with my site that I'm assessing, do I have coverage at all phases of the cycle that people would care about who are in this motion; I mean research, intent, decision, conversion, adherence, troubleshooting, whatever the metrics of the buy spying journey would be. And that comes to the why I say this way because the pragmatic approach is to say does this site truly represent my business as an authority and as an expert? What about this collection of pages or this content inventory tells a story that I actually am an expert? And so when you're looking at coverage, you're looking at momentum and what's been validated that I am an authority. But then it's also going to be like aspirationally if I truly were an expert what would I have covered? I can do that by doing competitive analysis or I can do that by doing semantic analysis and manual research. And so when you cross-reference; the punch line here is cross-reference the aspirational model against what you have and that's your gap analysis. So think about the outcomes there. I have gaps in this part of the bio journey. I have gaps, I have blind spots I don't ever cover these topics. I have blind spots here blah, blah, blah. I also have ranking gaps where I have striking distance keywords like I'm on page two that's that the SEO trick, right? Go tell them to update the pages where you're on page two and they'll go up a little and hey you did your job. So but if you weave that into this type of semantic analysis; this gap analysis, your content strategy becomes 2, 3, 10x more impactful overnight. And so compare that to keyword gap analysis, think about the outcomes. You get a word out of it. You get a word where you're ranking 12th and you think you should rank 5th. Well, now you know why. And then you know what you need to do. And that's the secret here. It's get yourself out of just keywords; get yourself into the content that's needed to plug the holes. Chuck: So we don't know what we don't know so how do we figure out what the gaps are? Are there tools you can recommend? How do we figure this out? Jeff: Yeah. Well I think that they're certainly on it and they're obviously not just the ones I present with MarketMuse but there are ways if you want to see. You want to be able to look at using your analytics, using any off the shelf Search Engine Optimization suite whether you are a higher-end person in a more enterprise or kind of using an [inaudible 00:27:29.2]. Looking at those pages; again all of your pages trying to organize them or you're looking at you don't want to buy those things, you've got analytics and you look at something that can crawl and analyze the structure of your site like a screening frog or a [inaudible 00:27:45.5] or a solution like that. Get a true understanding about your site and what it's about. What are the things where every time you publish it it's a winner or more of the time versus what's the stuff where you've been tilting at; aspirational goals. So looking at that or even looking at just traffic and revenue versions by section or by page type or by publish state because last year this was under this person's management this year this is under this person's management. Just a combination of this basic information from analytics and page-level data from a [inaudible 00:28:23.7] can get you at least started. And just to start thinking critically about your content inventory. A solution like the MarketMuse obviously is going to give you the sniper rifle to say go write this page, go fill this gap. But even if you if you're just looking to get kind of a basic understanding it can be easily put together to say gosh Chuck I don't know if we should publish any more articles about backgammon we're a chess site, it just hasn't extended. But when I write about you know particular defenses, we crush. Why don't we just lean into that? So you can make those types of decisions but then how do you get where we want to be a backgammon site. What are the ways that we can bridge the gap between chess and backgammon? How can we become more of an authority on strategic board games in general? So those are the types of questions that are out of this type of analysis, if you're real with yourself you stop publishing stuff that's not going to succeed. Try to figure out why it's not succeeding. That's where a person like a business like ours operates. But there's many out of an agency that knows the answer to these questions that can do that introspection that can do that analysis. But if you're analyzing your site I think it's truly to step back and say am I putting myself out there as an expert? Am I really showing it or was I chasing keywords? And it's always that oh man I haven't even thought about; I've just been looking up keywords, building lists, writing articles, keywords, lists, articles, keywords, lists, articles especially in the affiliate side not knocking always [inaudible 00:29:58.8] so much. It clearly comes out of a keyword list. And then I wrote the article some of them get linked together. Some of them don't. It's not leaving the web of somebody who actually knows their stuff. A great example of this; I've got uprise for every product in the world prices or reviews combination; bottom of funnel. That encompasses my contact strategy against this topic. It could have helped with that and then people wonder why they get hit when there's a quality change in the algorithm. It's because they're looking for that thing. They're looking for that stuff. You haven't told the story about buying that thing. Why are you the expert on pricing it? It doesn't make sense. And so that's the thing that; think about; get out of these search engine optimization shoes get into an editorial shoe. Hire an expert to say hey if you were writing an inventory of content about sound bafflers what would you cover; what are the things you need to know? And then cross-reference that against your stuff. Obviously, there's ways of doing both of those things taking technology like what we do. Chuck: So let's talk about that I know we don't want to like hardcore pitch your product but you have a great product that I think is a lot of value to a lot of people. So let's talk about like how your product can help and maybe even hit it as like these are the things that my product can do and some of the stuff people can do without the product so they could do it on their own but you're offering a service that makes it a lot easier. So let's talk about that. Jeff: So if I'm going to assess the value of a site; for example, if I want to see where there's areas of opportunity to create content or update content and be more successful. If I can get that hit list immediately and go execute on those plans; really move the needle quickly, that's a direct value of what one of the components of MarketMuse Suite. So MarketMuse Suite is a collection of; a combination of an automated content inventory and content auditing solution. We'll also take it to the next level and say after you build; after you say I want to create this page or update this page we'll build a comprehensive content brief for your writer. So it acts as a blueprint or an outline or a brief if you're familiar with what a brief looks like. And it tells a story so that the writer can be creative. So that the writer can research imagery; so the writer can research their sources and doesn't have to worry about is this thing going to have success after I hit publish. So many writers the anxiety they have; this is a huge pain point in the writing space is am I doing my keyword research correctly. Ask them. I mean that's the part I don't know. That's the part I really don't care about. I'm speaking from their standpoint. So take that mystery out of it. Take the SEO mystery out of it. Here's the outline we need you to follow. Be super creative. So we answer that question with that side of MarketMuse. We also have some point applications for doing competitive analysis so I can look at any search engine result page and understand who's got great content; high quality, who's got weak content, what are the gaps. And if I were going to put out true best in Class content on this specific intent, this specific topic what would it look like getting into the gritty details. Chuck: So what are some of those details? Jeff: Yeah. So what are the concepts that need to be included, what are the variants to consider, what are the questions to ask, what are the questions to answer, what are the internal linking; things you should do to internally link to other pages to tell the story that this isn't an orphan page on left field that actually weaves into your existing inventory and then grading your existing coverage and understanding how to interweave and to weave those things together. I have this great page; the one that you talked about, the news one, I want to make sure that it's linked. So all of those things we have point solutions so you can do a one-page analysis and get recommendations to improve it. You can get that one-page analysis and recommendations to make it equal to or better than your competitors every time and go head to head or against the whole field; questions and answers analysis, internal and external linking recommendations, and then we have for premium; one of our premium offerings is the newsroom solution specifically for Google News optimization. So basically the story is what should I write next, can you give me details as to how I would execute that so that you're getting me as close as you can to publishing? And then for all of my adjunct workflows; this specific analysis, this one-page analysis, we have applications to solve those specific goals to say okay why is Quiet Light Brokerage beating me for this topic? Is it because of quality; MarketMuse will tell you. Is it because of links and they have a worst page? Darn, they're more authoritative than me; what do I need to do? I need to go write a package of content. Tell me more of the story that I'm the expert because I don't have that off-page authority. So no matter where you sit it's giving you the advice as to what those next steps should be. And that's kind of the spirit of what we do. Chuck: So one of the examples I've heard you say before is like you're writing about a specific topic blue fuzzy widgets, everybody who writes about blue fuzzy widgets also includes pink monkeys and if you're not writing about pink monkeys then you clearly don't know about blue fuzzy widgets. You're not an expert. So maybe can you talk about that a little bit? Jeff: Sure. So our core technology is built on it. It's a topic modeling technology and it tells the story of what it means to be an expert on a concept. So it tells me by analyzing in some cases hundreds of thousands or millions of content items that people who know a lot about blue fuzzy widgets also know a lot about pink monkeys and so if you write about blue fuzzy widgets and you don't include pink monkeys you're not telling the story that you're an expert. So often in the market people have just looked at like the top 10 results to do this assessment. For so many reasons that I could get into there's a great article online called TFIDF is not the answer to your content and SEO problems and it goes into detail of each one of these logic challenges that exist. It's great for information retrieval. It's been around for 30 something years. Obviously, it's still being used. The challenge though is don't base your business content strategy and thousands of dollars of investment on that. And so what we were able to do is to say that but we're also then because we're analyzing so much data we're able to say that well guess what the top competitors aren't talking about orange donkeys and it's very relevant. That's a way for you to differentiate yourself. So you're covering the blue fuzzy widgets, your covering the pink monkeys but then you're going to differentiate yourself by also illustrating that you know all about those orange donkeys and that's what makes you special. And how does that drive back to true expertise? In this, we see constantly being successful with the best content strategies. They're writing about the table stakes content but they're also illustrating that they really know this stuff. And I always use more detailed examples but a cool one I always use for content marketing is a lot of people that write about content strategy don't talk about buyer personas. They don't talk about target audience. They don't talk about the roles on a content strategy team. Do you know why? Because they're chasing keywords. And if you can look at a search engine results page and go ooh, they're chasing keywords, there's my opportunity. Even if they're 9,000-word articles by HubSpot if you can find gaps in their game you can really take advantage of that and you can punch above your weight. And if you can pop a page that doesn't have as much traditional off-page authority link profile to build that beautiful cluster you can start ranking with undersized off-page pages and sections. And that's niche hunting. That's what the niche hunters talk about. That's what the UN fencers of the world; that's what they're really focusing on. How can I punch above my weight with undervalued off page sites? That's the way you get there; great content illustrates that you're an expert every time. Chuck: So we're thinking; traditional people when they're thinking about articles they're doing keyword research they're finding those low difficulty versus high search volume relative and then they're just going after that but what they're missing is just because people aren't searching for a specific word doesn't mean that it's not important. Jeff: You shouldn't have it in there. Chuck: Right. Jeff: Oh yeah. Chuck: Or specific words within content that you need to have to show you're in authority even though people; the average Joe may not be searching for that. Jeff: Exactly right. And that is the funniest thing about to watch the evolution in this market. When we first launched four years ago everyone when they would see a list of topics; this is the most interesting thing I'll say today, four years ago they used to look at that list and go why isn't it sorted by search point? And I said because that's irrelevant to what we're trying to do here. We're trying to tell you what it means to write that golden article to be an expert. Why does it matter what search volume is because you're so ingrained to use volume and PPC competition which that's another story for another day; crazy. Why don't do it? By the way, I'm not correlative to organic competition. I can get into that in a second but they're so ingrained; heavily so ingrained to use search volume as their North Star. They want everything to have search volume next to it so they can sort by it. So if we sort by that and then you discredit the stuff on the bottom, that's bananas. You're thinking about this from a content strategy perspective or from an expertise perspective. And that's what we see time and time again. Fun fact and I think you've heard me speak about this; it's totally exploitable. If you see competitors who clearly take topic lists and sorted by search volume you can; we usually call it chopping down a tree, you can chop down the tree. Every time it works because they have this strategy gap. You can predict what they're going to do. You can also chop down the tree in areas where they have blind spots. They will never fill them because they're using search point as a North Star. And so another way to say it is stop using that four square; that volume competition, you've all seen it. Alright, let's try to find those low competition high volume words. Sure those are great. Lean into those but that's not the whole picture of how you should write your content. Because the last thing I'll say about this is if you have no content at one stage of the purchase cycle and you think that you're not at risk with having content at another stage you've got another thing coming. It's going to catch up to you. Someone is going to fill that. Somebody is going to fill those intent gaps and crush you. It's just common. And we see it with publishers that have been resting on the laurels of their powerful content. They're just getting their tail handed to them by real content strategies every day. Chuck: So what are some quick wins you think people can have? Like okay, I have a let's say a site about; I don't know, let's just say a general content site, you pick the topic. What are some real quick wins I can get? Jeff: I like to call them one-page plans. So I'm going to find a page of interest. So something that's special about my site and maybe it's a small collection of pages. This is my page that's for some reason it's special. It's really long form, it's beautiful, it converts very well. Chuck: Are we defining special meaning like it's already getting traffic or I just think it's pretty? Jeff: I like it and it gets me some KPI that I think is legitimate and is giving me value. So it could be traffic already. It could be rankings that I am already getting; it ranks for lots of words. So that's a signal of comprehensiveness. A quick win could be to look at what that page is ranking for and pick out the words; this is using SEM Rush; using that to pick out the words in that list that the page doesn't actually satisfy the user intent for rewrite those pages; quickest win ever. So that one-page plan I rank this; I'll use a great example. Content Marketing Institute; I love that site, they have a wonderful page on LinkedIn profiles. It dominates LinkedIn profile marketing. They also rank for marketing profiles, not very good. And the site; the page just covers LinkedIn profiles. It doesn't cover generally marketing profiles. So they could beam their other zoom higher and now cover marketing profiles in general and write about other marketing profile presences as a cluster. All boats are going to rise. So you do that exercise, a quick win every time. You can find it. We call them content mismatches or unaddressed intent plants; always a win. You can always find one on your site because you've probably got pages that rank for hundreds of things. No one page can answer a hundred things beautifully. So when you go write that page people are like won't that cannibalize? No. I mean [inaudible 00:43:23.2]. Do I have to explain myself no? Chuck: So the key there is again you've got that one page; it's linking for a lot of words, you've got tons of words, you'll pick out the few that it's not ranking well for and then you'll link through that keyword to a new article that is specifically about that content? Jeff: Or expand it if it's a fit. If it's not a fit writing new but the key is it's not just that it's not ranking. I mean if it's not ranking for that's important but it could be ranking reasonably but not satisfying like user searches for that on Google and then they land on that page and like this sucks this isn't what I wanted. So if that intent mismatched so can you correct that and improve the page or do you need to do that in a new creation motion? So that is a tried and true technique. That's a recycle, recycle, recycle. Inside MarketMuse you just press a button and it tells you those plans which make life a lot easier obviously but you can do it. It's just that manual labor to use that one technique. And if you ask me for a quick one it's always a quick one. Look for that hundred word or more ranking page, find the word that this; read the page. You'd be surprised how many content strategists and CEOs don't actually read their sites; it's amazing. Read the page, know what value it has, and does this page get people to achieve that value. It can also be done on the back end. Andy Crestodina who works at Orbit Media; he is an expert in Google Analytics and content strategy. He wrote a book called Content Chemistry. Inside his analytics book; parts of the book, it shows you how to do this in Google Analytics by looking at exit rate and engagement gaps. So you can do it there or you can do it from keywords or any other ways but those are some quick ones. Look at your worst exit rates. So many people don't break those down by; they don't cross-reference those two things. So they've got a page, this thing is broken it's 90% in exit rate. Go back to the words that are driving the users to that page. What if all of them are out of alignment? You can just flash the content double engagement overnight. So there's so many wins that you can do with just a quick one-page plan analysis. I like to say pick one you like, get started, put few wins on the board, prove it out, and then decide is this something I want to get serious with and invest in technology that can support it. Chuck: I got you. Now when I started first looking at your product a couple of years ago and seeing kind of the wonderful amazing things you were doing, it was at a price point where I actually kind of like when high price points because it keeps; on really good things it keeps other people from being able to do it. But I guess you just launched a new price point for a self-service. Jeff: Yes. It's actually something we've been looking forward to doing. And we are a mid-market enterprise large publisher; people who have really invested in content that's traditionally been our target market. Chuck: Could you give an example of some big players that you work with? Jeff: Yeah sure. I'm trying to think of who's on this site. G2 Crowd is a customer and they're on there; we work with divisions of the Walmart Corporation, Home Depot, large e-commerce but also just great publishers. Business.com; love them so there's a lot of people who are publishing content. A lot of people I can't name and I wish I could. But if you type in MarketMuse case studies you can find a cool example from Tomorrow's Sleep on that one and how their site grew from 4,000 to 400,000 in a year with their agency that works with us. So that was always a big focus of ours. It was make sure that they can write content. Make sure that they can update content, that they've committed; they actually believe content can get them there because then life's going to be a lot easier for everybody. But we then also said let's look at the mirror. I'm always about looking in the mirror and look at the demand that we have. And so we really looked at who's coming in the front door saying we want to be MarketMuse customers. And right now having made that case internally or I just I'm not a profile of a customer that can spend tens or in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars on software. And so what we did was we right-sized for a specific target market, we right-sized a self-serve offering. And there is also a trial experience that everyone who's listening can go to the site. Go to MarketMuse trial. Go to MarketMuse, see the trial and you'll get an experience with your data; we've actually set this up so you can use your site, optimize a page, create a content brief, update some existing content like I mentioned, get that content brief and then there's also a special workflow baked in there that'll amaze you that I'm not allowed to explain but you'll see it when you get there. But you can do a competitive analysis, you can update a page, you get a content brief; by the way, take that with you it's free and make that decision of whether you want to become a MarketMuse Pro customer which is our self-serve offering at 499 a month. Quiet Light Brokerage Podcast listeners have a promo which Chuck will include in his notes which gets you a discount there. Or if you're a larger team, if you have four writers, if you write 10, 15 articles a month it's going to make more sense for you to be in one of our other packages; a bronze, a silver, or a gold, or a higher offering. So it gives you an understanding about the value that we provide, the opportunity to buy, to see if that's a fit, or to immediately recognize oh gosh this is what I need for all of my content items. I need one of the larger offerings. So the experience we typically is that people find the right car on the lot. Or they begin using and saying oh wow I need more of this. I was successful with the first thing I did. I know this makes sense. Making your content higher quality, that's the fun part about being in Market Muse; it's you never look at it and you're like oh man I wish I hadn't made that page better. You're always on this ongoing quest to do a better job, write better content that resonates more with your audience. And that's what we do every day. Chuck: Awesome. So to wrap this up I always like to ask people could you give us a few random tools not really related to what we're talking about but just things you like to use in your daily work or just regular life. What are some of the hacks you may have? Jeff: Man, there's so many. I love this. So a couple that I use, when I had some personal time management issues I tried everything. I tried boards with; con bomb boards and everything. And one thing that helped me analyze where I was spending my time was called Tomecular and it looks like an eight-sided dice and you put stuff on it. And as you're working on stuff you move the dice around and it seems so; maybe it's because I like touching things like that but it really gave me an understanding about where I was spending my time and I fixed some stuff within MarketMuse like the business organizationally just from that information. So that's cool. I love Boomerang. I think it's a beautiful solution for making sure you don't forget stuff if you get a lot of e-mails. It's a really good productivity tool. Chuck: Before you move on from Boomerang I think Google now have something similar built-in where they have the… Jeff: They have don't let me forget this. Chuck: Yeah. It's like a little reminder you can set for different dates and it comes back in. Jeff: Yeah. Boomerang has some features that I'm so used to being able to set and forget things pause so I don't know if Google's ever going to pause Google so that's something that, but I like Boomerang. It's not that expensive. You do need to watch your SaaS subscriptions though. That's another story. Another one I love, love, love, love is Full Story. Full Story isn't; they keep going a little bit a little more expensive each time you look at them. Good for them. It's like having a DVR on every user that ever comes to your site. You can watch the experiences; obviously anonymized but you can watch their experiences, build pattern matching, look at segments, and really get an understanding about why people are doing things. I mean I think that that's really valuable. Chuck: It's kind of like what is it Crazy Egg? Jeff: It's similar to a Crazy Egg but it's more of like a heat map reporting. They've got this capability and a handful of other solutions that are out. I just think Full Story has this like really robust like I can go in and I can find users that went through this specific sequence and just watch all the sessions. I mean so many times. Just learn from that to really tell a story and it really is powerful when you are already doing a new multivariate testing to really catapult that into the next level. I mean if I told you what conversion rates we have you'd blow up. But yeah I mean you really have to think critically and fly the flag of your customers so that when you do get these solutions they don't just sit on the shelf. I mean my goal every day is to make sure that the next article that every one of my clients publish is more successful than it could have been without us. And I think that comes through in our online messaging. It's not just that we're this secret weapon of the elite agencies which I know for a while that's what we were. It's that if you use MarketMuse your stuff will do better more consistently and then I will be happy. And if it does not happen then I and our entire team will not be happy. And we hope that our messaging comes through and we couldn't do it without these other solutions that we work with Full Story, like Pendo; Pendo is a beautiful thing, and some other metrics, some other things we use to really dive deep into our customer experience. Chuck: Awesome well I appreciate you taking the time to talk with everybody today. Is there a way that people can reach out to you or the company? Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. So MarketMuse.com, Chuck's going to post a promo code that's for the MarketMuse Pro self-serve offering as a discount. You can email me directly Jeff@MarketMuse.com, Jeffrey_Coyle on Twitter. I'm pretty active. LinkedIn, please. I typically don't say no unless you've sent me a weirdo request that tells me in an unreal way that you like my profile and you'd love to connect. If it's clear that you bought or sold a website before in your life I'm probably going to connect with you and want to talk in any light. So yeah please reach out and go check it out. We have a lot of content. I have a lot of; this conversation is like this throughout the web that I think can really level up your game and give you the ability to assess deals quickly without just hunches. You got to go with your hunches but it's nice to have hunches and data. Chuck: Yeah for sure. And a quick pro tip from me, if you're trying to get somebody to accept your LinkedIn profile and they don't know who you are, write a message. Don't just send the like later. Personally, I feel like if I've LinkedIn with somebody and I'm connected then I'm somewhat vouching for them so I don't just accept random LinkedIns. Like, everybody, I've accepted for the most part are people I've actually met in person. But then we go to these conferences and somebody sent me a request and I don't remember them so it's like just send a little message with them, take the two seconds to write. Jeff: Yeah, and make it from the heart. We can smell of that. Come on. I think MarketMuse is cool. Oh really do you? I do too. So I guess we are connected I love the thing but you know. Chuck: There you go. All right well I appreciate your time and thank you, everybody, for taking the time to listen and see you soon.   Links and Resources: MarketMuse MarketMuse coupon code (mentioned in the podcast): QLBMM Email Jeff Twitter LinkedIn

 The Good Life (Part 1) - Chuck ColsonThe Good Life (Part 2) - Chuck ColsonFamilyLife Today® Radio TranscriptReferences to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. The Good LifeDay 2 o 2 Guest:                        Chuck Colson  From the Series:      A Life Well-Lived________________________________________________________________ Bob:                Do the truth claims of Christianity make rational, logical, reasonable sense?  Chuck Colson says they do. Chuck:            I've gotten so convinced of the truth of the biblical worldview as applied in life against any other worldview, and I'm convinced if I could argue the case that the biblical worldview is the only one that conforms to reality, that I would win that case, hands down, intellectually – by reason, by arguments, by logic.  But that doesn't get you to God.  As a matter of fact, sometimes the more you know, the tougher it gets. Bob:                This is FamilyLife Today for Tuesday, August 30th.  Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.  What can we do or say that will persuade a watching world of the reality of who Christ is?                         And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us.  You know, the guest we have with us this week – I don't know – in fact, I'm curious – it's obvious, as you read through what he's written, that he's been influenced by C.S. Lewis and by Francis Shaffer, and I just wonder who wins the battle there – Lewis versus Shaffer?  Who has had more influence in Chuck Colson's life – C.S. Lewis or Francis Shaffer? Chuck:            I would hate to answer that question, Bob, because both of them have had a huge influence on my life.  Lewis would probably, however, if I had to chose between the two, would be number one because it was his arguments in "Mere Christianity," that persuaded me that Christianity is rational, reasonable, sustainable, as a matter of fact, nothing else makes sense.  And so you'll see a lot of Lewis through this book.                         In terms of my theology, Shaffer; and, before him, Abraham Kiper, influenced my perspective on Scripture and the relationship of the church and Scripture to the world.  So in two different areas, I am profoundly grateful to those three men. Bob:                Was Shaffer still alive when you came to faith? Chuck:            Oh, yes, I knew him.  Oh, sure, I went to LeBrie [ph] and visited with him at his invitation.  We spent a day together.  It was a wonderful time.  He was a very humble man, and then I visited with him a number of times when he came to the States and was at speeches and conferences.  I was at his funeral, the first person to come in and view the body, as a matter of fact, when he laying in his living room. Bob:                I kind of just jumped in.  I guess most of our listeners probably know our guest. Dennis:          I think they recognized the voice of Chuck Colson.  Chuck, welcome back to FamilyLife Today.   Chuck:            Thanks, Dennis, nice to be with you. Dennis:          Chuck has written a book called "The Good Life," and you don't have to turn but a couple of pages before you read a quote by Pascal, who said, "The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason." Chuck:            Blaise Pascal is one of the most interesting men ever, and his writings have affected me greatly, as well, particularly his Pensees.  But Pascal died in his late thirties, and was the inventor of the computer.  He did the first crude calculating device. Bob:                This isn't some Al Gore thing you're just making up? Chuck:            No, no, this isn't Al Gore inventing the unit.  Blaise Pascal, 300 years ago, came up with the concept that has become the computer.  He was also a great philosopher and great Christian.  What he's basically saying is that reason is a gift of God, and we can use reason to pursue with our minds facts and truth, and the more we look for the facts and truth about life, we will eventually get to the point where we realize reason takes us only so far. Dennis:          Right. Chuck:            And the more we reason – and that's what I do in this book – the more we reason, we get to the place where we have to end up in faith. Dennis:          You tell a story at the beginning of your book that beautifully illustrates that.  It's about your daughter, Emily, who is a single parent raising an autistic child, Max.   Chuck:            Yes, she's a great heroine to me, and Max is the most lovable kid in the world.  And I tell the story of why I wrote this book, basically, this book is to try to show people how the world works and how they fit into it, and it's to be non-threatening.  It's a book for seekers.  That's why it relies on reason for the first two-thirds of the book before it gets to Scripture and faith, because I want to draw people in.                         But one thing about autism, as most people perhaps are aware, everything has to be orderly in just perfect arrangement for an autistic child.  When Max comes to our house – he's 14, he's getting to be a big kid. Emily does a wonderful job managing him.  When he comes to our house, he checks where all the pictures are.  Are they all on the wall, in the same place?  Does the stove work the same way?  Has anything changed?  And then as long as he knows everything is okay, he's at peace.                         Well, one night we had a visitor come to the house, and it was unexpected, and he brought a Christmas gift for me, and when he came in the house, Max started to get agitated, and you could see he was going to have what euphemistically called a "meltdown," and they go out of control, they have a tantrum.  So Emily grabbed a pad and sat down with Max and drew pictures.  She's a good artist.  She drew little box pictures like a comic strip.  And she would say, "This man knocking on the door, he's a friend of Grandpa's, they go fishing together," and then she'd draw a little sign of a fishing boat, and then "They work together, and it's Christmas, and he's brought this gift."  She drew the picture.                          Suddenly, Max understood how his little world at that moment worked, and he calmed down immediately.  And what I'm doing in this book is drawing a picture for people the same way Emily drew a picture for Max of how the world works.  What things are true, what things aren't true, what can you find about life, and most of which is through paradoxes.  What can you find out that's true about life, and then figure out how you fit in.  And, of course, the ultimate question is what is true?  Is there truth, and is it knowable?                         The second half of the book is devoted to that question which, to me, is one that we Christians desperately need to understand how you make that case and then make it with our friends.  And, particularly, get your kids to understand there is truth, and it is knowable, and here is how it's knowable before they go to college or before they leave the home, because the first thing they'll be assaulted with is the statement, "There is no truth." Bob:                Do you remember when Timothy McVeigh was executed, and he read, as his final statement in life, the poem, "Invictus," which ends with I am the captain of my own destiny.  Do you think most people think that that is what life is all about? Chuck:            Well, I think a lot of people would say that, because I would have said that before I was converted, and that's a statement of pride.  In the case of Timothy McVeigh, it was insufferable arrogance.  He was captain of his own ship, master of his own destiny, he could control life.  That was Nietzche – the world of power.  You can will yourself to this position.                         A lot of people imbibe that because they think that's what they're supposed to think.  Deep down inside, no, they cry like a baby inside, because they know they need other people, they know they need things.  One of the great studies I cited in this book was down at Dartmouth, and it discovered that human beings are wired, literally, the way we are genetically disposed – the way our brains work, we are wired to connect.  In other words, we don't live alone.  We live in community, we live with family, we live with friends, we live in a nation. And, secondly, we're wired for God.  We are actually searching for a meaningful relationship with the One who created us.  Whether we acknowledge it or not, and most people out of pride won't acknowledge it, just like I wouldn't.  But, oh, I was so desperately hungry, and as soon as I let those defenses go, that guard go down, that night in the driveway in that flood of tears – sure, it came to me.                           So I'm trying to walk people through that same question in this book. Dennis:          Reason can only take us so far; faith is what finishes the connection between the human soul and God. Chuck:            Exactly. Dennis:          And what you've attempted to do is exhort us to come to the truth.  One of the things I want you to comment on – you just alluded to it briefly a few moments ago – you say that today there is no such thing as reality or, capital T, Truth, in our culture today.  And I think, for the average mom and dad who are raising kids, I don't think they realize, Chuck, what a battleground this is around truth. Chuck:            This is the battleground.  This is the battleground.  Is there any reality, is there any ultimate reality … Dennis:          Or is it just opinion? Chuck:            Yes, it is just your preference versus my preference, and that's what they're being taught in college.  They're sawing off the branch on which they sit, and so what I'm trying to show in this book is that there is reality, there has to be reality, we know there is, we know there are certain things that conform to the way they truly are, which is the classical definition of truth.  The job is to find it.  But, Dennis, you hit the nail on the head – you get to the point where you can prove it. I've gotten so convinced of the truth of the biblical worldview as applied in life against any other worldview, that my great dream, as I write in "The Good Life," my great dream is someday to be able to stand in the Supreme Court – every lawyers dream – and argue His case in the Supreme Court.  And I'm convinced if I could argue the case that the biblical worldview is the only one that conforms to reality, that I would win that case, hands down, intellectually – by reason, by arguments, by logic.  But that doesn't get you to God.  As a matter of fact, sometimes the more you know, the tougher it gets.  That's why the last chapter of this book is about faith as the step we have to take.  And people say, "Well, I can't profess faith because I have doubts."  Good.  If you didn't have doubts, faith wouldn't be required.  If God were as obvious as the tree in the yard, you wouldn't have to have faith. Dennis:          You know, it's interesting to hear you say that, because you're a very bright, intellectual man – well-educated.  You continue to study the world religions throughout the scope of your life, and yet as you move toward the last phase of your life, you are more convinced not less. Chuck:            I remember many years ago hearing Malcolm Muggeridge – I don't know how many of our listeners will remember that name, but he was a great writer, a great journalist, who converted late in life.  And he said, "I'm more convinced of the reality of Jesus Christ than I am of my own reality."  And he was a colorful guy – white hair going all over the place, and he'd always have a wonderful chuckle.  I was with him once for tea, and he was talking about this, and I thought, "Well, he's an old man." At that point, he was the same age I am now.  And I said this is a bit of hyperbole.  You know, it isn't. I'm convinced that the logos means all the intelligence, all that can be – but to the Greeks, everything that could be known or is known.  But the logos basically programs the little computers in the billions of cells we have within us called DNA, which has information like 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica four times over is the information in one of the DNAs that program ourselves.  Bill Gates, he's never designed as sophisticated software as the DNA.                         And I think the logos programs that.  I think we are kept alive by God because He – the spiritual world – and a British physicist converted and has written books about this – the spiritual world actually animates the physical world.  So I think it's right.  I think we're more convinced of the reality of Christ than unreality.  And the more I study the more convinced I get. Bob:                As a dad trying to raise kids who will pursue the good life, as you've defined it there, in a culture that is increasingly trying to point them in other directions – I'll tell you how I became aware of the struggle that I was in the midst of.  A year ago, when the issue of gay marriage was in the news, one of my children was asked to write a paper on it at school, and I could tell there was a real wrestle between the desire to be compassionate and the desire to be truthful, and I thought, "Where is this going to end up?"  And I really do wonder where it's going to end up in the culture – not just with my kids but with all of our kids.  How can we, today, point our kids in this direction? Chuck:            Well, I think this is, of course, a great question, Bob, and I was just talking with a fellow this morning about that very question.  First of all, you've got to explain to them that there is an order to life.  I mean, life does work a certain way.  And sin is nothing but, as Neal Plantinga, the great theologian at Calvin Seminary says, "Sin is nothing but folly," foolishness, because it's like walking into a room blindfolded, and you don't know where you're going to hit the furniture.  You've got to know how the world is organized in order to live rationally.                         And your daughter writing that paper is going to have a natural tendency to say, "Well, if these people are disposed this way, why should we tell them they can't behave this way?"  And if she were to answer that question in her paper saying, "Well, I feel sorry for these people, but the Bible says it's a sin."  She wouldn't absolutely make any points at all with her classmates or anyone else, because they'd say, "Well, that's what the Bible says.  You live by the Bible, I don't live by the Bible."                           What you have to say is there's a natural order to life.  Life works a certain way.  Sex is for procreation.  That's why we have that capacity.  It doesn't work in homosexual sex.  They cannot perform a natural act.  It is unnatural, whether you like to use that word or not, it is.  There is a natural order in life; there is a natural law.  This was C.S. Lewis's great argument that had such an effect on me when he talked about this natural law and people know it, and they've known it through every culture in every generation.  We know the world works a certain way, which is the very point I've been trying to make in here.  We know the world works a certain way, and our job is to live our lives in accordance with what works, otherwise we're dumb, we're stupid, because Neal Plantinga puts it very graphically – "When you don't live the way the world works, it's like spitting into the wind or coloring outside the lines or cutting across the grain of the universe."  So it's just good sense to figure out.                           Now, the relationship between a man and a woman in marriage is the way you perpetuate the human race.  You raise children in an environment where character can be cultivated and learned.  It's never taught, it's learned.  And you can't do that if the relationship doesn't conform to the way the world works.  If everybody were homosexual there wouldn't be any children.  So you can't tell me that it's normative.  It isn't normative, it can't be normative by definition.                         And I make the natural order arguments, which, over the years, Catholics are much better at than we are.  Evangelicals always use the Bible because it is our primary source of knowledge, obviously, but it won't wash with people.  The natural order argument is very, very important. Bob:                So that's where we've got to point our kids. Chuck:            That's where we point our kids – explaining the reality of the way the world works. Dennis:          You conclude your book talking about how the good life ultimately ends in death, which can result in new life.  And throughout the book, you use illustrations of people who illustrate the good life positively and negatively, and as you talk about the end of a matter; that is, death, you use two illustrations.  One is a funeral you and I attended where Bill Bright was honored for his life; and another illustration you use was a funeral neither of us attended, because there was none – John Ehrlichman, a Watergate figure.  Just quickly contrast John's life with Bill's life.  Chuck:            Well, John Ehrlichman, I went back to see – when he invited me to when he was in a nursing home in Atlanta, everything had collapsed in his life.  He'd been through three marriages, his family abandoned him, he had nothing.  He was penniless and powerless – once one of the most powerful men in the world.  And he wanted to see me because the doctor had told him he had renal failure.  He was on kidney dialysis.  A doctor told him that he could get a shot of morphine and put himself out of the misery.                         I was shocked.  I spent an hour talking about the dignity of life and the meaning of life.  I don't know whether it sank in or not.  A friend of mine went back and prayed with him and hopefully he received Christ.  I'd like to think he did before he died.  But he died alone in the nursing home with nobody around him, having given up on life.  I can't think of a more despairing story.  And I tell it as a tragic story because he was such a good man until the collapse came in his life, and we said earlier what happens to you doesn't matter, it's how you react to what happens to you.  Well, he reacted badly to what happened to him in the fall of Watergate.                         Contrast that with Bill Bright.  I remember being with you at the funeral, Dennis, and what a great experience that was, what a joyous day that was for Bill's celebration of his life.  But, Bill, when he learned he had pulmonary fibrosis, which is one of the most difficult ways to die, you're slowly suffocating, and it's agonizing death, and the doctor told him how bad it was going to be, and Bill said, "Praise the Lord, this is what God wants."                          Throughout that two, three-year period that Bill knew he was dying, maybe the most productive period in his ministry.  He wrote all kinds of things, did videos.  I'd go see him in his apartment, and he had the oxygen strapped to him, and he never was without a smile and always giving me ideas and "Here's something you can do in the ministry, Chuck."  He was an extraordinary man.  And when he died, Vonette was with him, and whispered to him, "It's all right," and he turned his head, and he died peacefully.                         John Paul II, the pope, gave the world a similar lesson in how to die in the midst of suffering, constantly issuing statements saying, "Suffering will be redeemed," and Christians have to know that suffering will be redeemed, and we have to know if you're going to live the good life, it contemplates a good death.  It contemplates facing it with equanimity, because you know you're going to be with the Lord, and dying with grace to the extent you can.  And, obviously, some people are in terrible pain.  But Bill Bright set the gold standard for me. Dennis:          He really did.  He showed us how to live and how to die. Chuck:            And how to die, yep. Dennis:          There may be a man or a woman listening to this broadcast, perhaps a boy or a girl, who goes, "You know what?  It's time for me to have that faith experience that you talked about where you had to pull the car off to the side of the road and receive Christ."  Would you explain to them what they need to do?  Just at their point where they are right now – how they can connect with God and know they're forgiven all their sins. Chuck:            It's maddeningly simple, and the problem with it is that people think, "There's got to be more to that.  I've got to do some good works, I've got to do something to show that I'm a good person.  I'm really not.  My life is a mess right now.  I'll clean up my life first before I come to God."  Wrong.  You can't clean up your life, you're incapable of cleaning up your life, and God doesn't want you to even try.  What He wants you to do is surrender – the humblest possible surrender.  Get rid of your pride, which is the great enemy, and simply say, "Lord Jesus, I want You in my life.  Forgive me of my sins."  Let Him worry about cleaning them up.  When I came to Him, I had a ton of sins, and there were some He could immediately erase, there were some he had to work on with me for a while, and that's part of the process of sanctification.  It's a joint process between us and between God.                         But what it takes is a simple act of faith, recognizing that your doubts are a good thing.  I loved what you said about Tom Skinner [ph], that was a marvelous quote.  Your doubts are good things, because if you didn't have doubts, you wouldn't take God seriously.  You wouldn't need God.  We need Him because He settles the question for us, and He's made it so easy for just us to turn to Him as long as we are generally repentant and ask Him to come in and take our lives. Dennis:          And He'll take us at our word at that point and make us a new creation in Christ. Chuck:            You know, people say, "Does God answer prayers?"  He answers the prayer of every single person who says, "Jesus, take me." Bob:                And that puts you on the path for a good life. Dennis:          It does, it does. Chuck:            It is the good life. Dennis:          Yeah, it is.  Chuck, I want to thank you for being on FamilyLife Today.  And, you know, someday I hope you get a chance to go to the Supreme Court and argue … Chuck:            … argue that case … Dennis:          … argue for Jesus Christ and why Christianity should be the worldview of every living human being.  Bob:                I'm just afraid you'd still get a five to four against in that verdict.  With this Court I would get it exactly right. Chuck:            Thanks for being, God bless you guys. Bob:                We've got copies of your book available in our FamilyLife Resource Center.  Again, the book is called "The Good Life," and I want to encourage our listeners – it makes the case – you don't need to hear the arguments before the Supreme Court.  The book lays out the case, and it's pretty clear, and, in fact, it's pretty tough to refute.  I think you can give this book to somebody who doesn't know Christ and just say, "I'd be interested in your thoughts as you read through this," and it could spark quite a dialog.                          Again, we've got copies in the FamilyLife Resource Center.  Go to our website, FamilyLife.com, click the "Go" button at the bottom of the screen, and that will take you right to a page where you can get more information about Chuck Colson's book, "The Good Life."                         We also have the book that was instrumental in you coming to faith in Christ, and that's the book by C.S. Lewis called "Mere Christianity," which is another apologetic for the reasonableness of Christianity – a classic book.  If you're interested in ordering both Chuck's book and "Mere Christianity," we'll send you at no additional cost the CD audio of our conversation this week with Chuck Colson.                         Again, the website is FamilyLife.com.  Click the "Go" button at the bottom of the screen, and that will take you right to the page where you can get more information about these resources, or you can order online, if you'd like.  If it's easier, you can call 1-800-FLTODAY, and there is someone on our team waiting to help you with an order.  Again, it's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY.                         And let me say a special word of thanks to those folks who have gotten in touch with us over the last several weeks, Dennis, and have made a donation to FamilyLife Today.  We're listener-supported, and we depend on donations to keep FamilyLife Today on this station and on stations all across the country.  We hope that folks who donate to our ministry have first been faithful in donating to their local church.  That ought to be your first giving priority.  But in recent weeks, as some of our listeners have been aware that we are ending our fiscal year, and that summertime is coming to a close, we've had folks calling not only to make a donation but to challenge others to make a donation as well.                         We've heard from a lot of listeners who have attended one of our Weekend to Remember conferences, and they called not only to donate to FamilyLife Today but also to challenge other people who have benefited from the Weekend to Remember to make a donation.  And we've heard from folks who have taken the resources that we created or even recommended this radio program to friends and have seen God use this in their lives.  They've called to make a donation and wanted to challenge others to do the same.                         So we're hoping that you will consider meeting that challenge and maybe issue a challenge of your own.  If you've not made a donation to FamilyLife Today in recent days, you can do that online at FamilyLife.com or you can call 1-800-FLTODAY to make a donation.  Again, it's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY or go online and donate at FamilyLife.com.                         Well, tomorrow Lisa Bevere is going to join us, and we're going to talk about why it is that women wind up losing when they give in to pressure from men.  She'll share some of her own story and some warnings for women.  I hope you can be back with us for that.                         I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team.  On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine.  We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.                          FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.  ______________________________________________________________________ We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you.  However, there is a cost to transcribe, create, and produce them for our website.  If you've benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would   you consider donating today to help defray the costs?         Copyright © FamilyLife.  All rights reserved.       www.FamilyLife.com

Jon used his "Chuck It!" for evil, Monroe is a dog grandma, and Jackson refuses to call his sweater ugly. Want to advertise on our podcast? Email camila@bwaymedia.com

Today we welcome Chuck (iii) Mullins, we are talking with him about his background, experience, his algorithm knowledge, ask him our rapid-fire questions, and pick his brain about the business. Chuck built his first profitable website back in 1996 when he was an impressionable 18 years old. He studied computer software engineering in college, which taught him the skills to analyze search results and implement strategies. Throughout his career of developing, managing, consulting, and investing in internet-based companies, Chuck has developed a keen ability to spot opportunities and develop strategies that lead to growth and profitability. Episode Highlights: Chuck's background, entrepreneurial experience, and success stories Web-based business ups-and-downs The difference in long-term cash flow from web-based businesses and get-rich-quick cash businesses Chuck's favorite web niches Chuck's favorite audience member (who is also a buyer) Websites that are more/less desirable The importance of knowing your Profit and Loss Biggest mistake buyers can make Best practices for buyers and sellers The importance of understanding the business and doing your research Quiet Light's vision and how we can help you Transcription: Mark: Joe, one of my favorite things about working with team Quiet Light is some of the camaraderie that we have with each other. The fact that we get to tease each other a little bit, egg each other on, but also help each other out; talk about deals, collaborate on our transactions because everybody at Quiet Light has so much entrepreneurial experience that it's like having this built in board of advisors for every single thing that we do. And one thing I think you and I need to do a better job of; I know we've had each of the advisors on Quiet Light at the Quiet Light Podcast. I think we need to bring them on a bit more so that others can enjoy some of the experience that they have. You had Chuck on recently and grilled him a little bit in this episode. Joe: I did. I want people to get to know Chuck for the fun experienced entrepreneur that he is. And so I mixed it up a little bit. I had some fun with him we did some rapid-fire questions. I intentionally; just let me get this upfront and out there for the audience. I intentionally mispronounced somebody's name. I butchered it intentionally. Again I did it seven or eight episodes ago and I got some email saying I think the person you're trying to find is so and so. I did it again. Mark: Same person? Joe: Same person; yeah, if he's listening. Mark: He needs to start listening to the podcast especially my episodes because frankly, I've got a leg up on you. Joe: You have overtaken me for the most popular episode on the Quiet Light Podcast. I will overcome that because I've got some great ones planned coming in here soon. Chuck is a fascinating individual. I've known Chuck for a long time and he's really, really smart when it comes to his entrepreneurial acumen. It's almost annoying to be honest because with a model that we have at Quiet Light Brokerage; we don't have employees, right? No one's an employee of Quiet Light Brokerage. We have a lot of entrepreneurs who work together in sort of a collective group. Well, one of the benefits to that is all the advice and feedback I'm able to get from people. And one of the most annoying things is all the feedback and advice I get from everyone. And sometimes; Chuck especially, Chuck is so thorough. What's the term he gives to himself? Whatever it is he just hyper focuses on the most minute little detail and I fear asking questions sometimes because of the level of detail that he's going to give to me in terms of what I have to fix and correct in a document that I'm creating. Mark: But at the end of the day even though sometimes it can be overwhelming like come on you think I'm doing everything wrong evidently because I keep getting his feedback, it's always on point. And I don't think I've ever received feedback from them where I look at it and say this is not worth considering or looking at; so a smart, smart guy. I'm looking forward to it. What are some of the things that you discussed in this episode? Joe: Well we talked about some of; he's got almost three years brokering now and over 20 years as an entrepreneur now. And he talked about some of his experiences; the pros and cons of A. being an entrepreneur, some of the things that he's found that certain buyers do better than anyone else, and how he wants new buyers to adopt that style, and then the biggest mistakes that someone's selling their business can make as well. And it's fascinating as I just said he's got 20 plus years as an entrepreneur. I'm in the same boat. You're in the same boat. So collectively the team at Quiet Light I'd say what 250 years of entrepreneurial experience that we share with our team with our clients and I think it's fascinating. Chuck is just the tip of the iceberg here in terms of the experience. So it's exciting to share this with him and we had a lot of fun. So that's the key to this one. Mark: Fantastic, well let's get to it. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe Valley from Quiet Light Brokerage on the Quiet Light Podcast. And today we have the most special guest. His name is Chucky. Now that's not what we call him. It's Chuck. I use his personal email address. I'm not going to tell you at what you can all haul in the mail anyway. You know his e-mail address its Chuck@QuietLightBrokerage. Chuck Mullins, welcome back to the Quiet Light Podcast. Chuck: Thank you, sir. Thank you. For any that's specific it's actually Charles Clifford Mullins III. That's my D-I-I-I. Joe: You know I am from New England I can't talk with a British accent; it's something about us. Chuck: Well I can't either. Joe: Alright. Well listen you know the routine. Normally on the podcast we ask people to give their own background; who they are, what they're all about so that we're not sounding like we're reading from a script which we don't. We wing these things. You know that. Our audience knows that. But before we get into that I want to ask you a series of rapid-fire questions; the first one so that people understand and establish your experience here at Quiet Light Brokerage, how long have you been brokering at Quiet Light Brokerage? Chuck: About two and a half; almost three years. Joe: Almost three years. Okay. So let's start with…I've got a total of six questions. Number one; and you've got to give me a quick answer. Number one, who's your favorite broker? Chuck: Joe Valley. Joe: Good, good, good. Alright, if you were stranded on an island with me, Brad Wayland, and Jason Yellowitz and a rash floated by and they would only carry three of us; there's four altogether, who would you leave behind and why? Chuck: Jason Yellowitz, because he would be able to burn his stacks of cash to stay warm. Joe: And he carries it with him, is that what you're saying? Chuck: Inaudible[00:06:25.8] Joe: Jason I know you all listen to the podcast so everybody make fun of Jason. That's your job here. Alright, this is a really important question. Who is the better podcast me or Andy Youderainan; I mean in Andrew Youderian? Chuck: I would have to go with Mark. Joe: You are… Chuck: Hello? Isn't it you that people come up to the Booze and ask for or is it Mark that they come up and ask for? Joe: That's me. It's me. Mark doesn't go to Booze. Alright, sid you know Walker Diabel wrote a book; and a best seller book? Chuck: Have you heard about the second book that he wrote? Joe: No. He wrote a second book? Chuck: Yes. If you go to WalkerDiebel.guru you can check out the second one that hasn't been released yet. Joe: Okay, Alright. So this is a tough question. This is not a trick question. I want to know if you can answer this one. What's the name of Walker's book? Chuck: Buy Then Build. Joe: You got it. Okay. Alright. Chuck: How can you not get it? I've heard it at every conversation. Every conference I go to there's these three books that are just floating around that conference and I'm like wait a second how did that get there? Joe: And it's the bottom of every one of his e-mail signatures. One of these days you're going to dig way back into the archives when he was actually an actor and find a clip and we're going to change his email signature line somehow some way. Alright, so as you know historically Quiet Light Brokerage does not recruit brokers. I have conversations three or four times a week these days with people who want to join the team. But we, for the most part, don't recruit. We have as you know or Mark has as you know recruited a few starting with Amanda back in the day. She was the first. And I think Brad was also recruited. And yourself was also recruited. Of all of the brokers that Mark recruited; last question by the way, what was his best decision? Chuck: Probably Brad. He's been killing it man. Joe: Man and give yourself some credit Chuck. Come on. Anybody but you would probably be the politically correct answer but essentially you just threw Amanda under the bus. But fortunately Amanda doesn't really listen to our own podcast either. Alright, enough of this nonsense; let's talk about you and your experience. I know all about you but for the audience members, Chuck has been on the podcast before Mark had him on when he first joined the team two and a half years ago, three years ago. And the focus of that podcast was a tiny little bit about Chuck but mostly about Chuck's due diligence experience. And I think you had a list of was it 25 due diligence tools? Chuck: Who can remember? Joe: Yeah, a lot. And it's all; if you Google Quiet Light Podcast, Chuck Mullins, due diligence you'll find it. It'd be at the top of the Google search engine and it's great stuff. And I learned a lot when I did it. But I would say I refer most people out for due diligence; buyers that is to our friend Chris Yates at Centurica. They do a great job. Well, let's talk a little bit about who you are and your life experience and a little bit of your brokering experience now that you're three years into Quiet Light. So who the heck are you? Tell us about your entrepreneurial experience. I know that you started way back when you were in college, right? Chuck: Yeah. I graduated high school in ‘96 and I always wanted a computer but we couldn't afford one. So finally for college I needed a computer so I got a computer and started a free website on it's like Angel Fire or Tripod or one of these things way back in '96. And I remember just putting up some content and that is an online library for college students. And I remember somebody offered me like 10 bucks at some point to put a link on my website. I'm like $10 awesome, I'm making money and then somebody offers me like a hundred bucks and I'm like what $100? So then I was; this is before I even had a domain so it was like AngelFire/blahblahblah. I started thinking about okay we'll buy a domain and back then they were like thirty-five bucks. I was talking to my mom and I'm like mom I'd buy a domain and she's like you're crazy you shouldn't buy you know like you're just wasting your money and why are you spending all this time in front of the computer and then it just started growing and then somebody offered me a thousand bucks. And before you know it I was making about sixteen grand a month off of advertising back in the ‘90s. Joe: In college, right? Chuck: In college; yeah, and so I was just… Joe: That's a lot of Jägermeister. Chuck: And the Internet bubble ended up bursting in like the 2000, 2001 and all that money like dried up overnight. So I was like okay now what? So I had to figure out how to pivot and myself and two other guys; we had different businesses. We all pooled together and started a membership site. The first month with our membership site we made like 60 grand. It was just like mind-blowing like oh my God we're in college. I didn't have keggers I had like full bottle; like full bar parties. Joe: Everybody wanted to be your friend, right? Chuck: It was fun and we'd stay at like the Ritz Carlton for Mardi Gras and like just do crazy things. We rented like a ski chalet; it was like a 15 bedroom house on the slopes and I forget where it was bit we then brought all of like; we had affiliates at the time, all our affiliates to come and ski with us and so we had a great time. And at some point, I was making a lot of money and I didn't really know what to do with it all. I was definitely wasting my fair share of it. Actually kind of going back, my mom, the whole thing with her telling me I shouldn't start the business and this and that in 2003 I think it was about my mom and sister cars for Christmas. Joe: I wrote that down when you said it because I knew that. You told me the story about Christmas and your mom went outside and there was a big ribbon on a brand new car. I guess she's happy you bought that domain name, after all, isn't she? Chuck: Yeah. Yeah for sure and I do not usually tell that story so maybe we'll have to edit that out. Joe: No. No editing. Tell the story. Chuck: I made two giant boxes and I had my mom like a box of some keys and she sees them and it had Lincoln in it which I had a navigator at the time and she's like oh it's a scavenger hunt he put his keys in here and she walks outside and sees this giant box and just like; my mom doesn't curse and she goes oh shit and she runs outside gets ready to tear into the box. And I said wait, mom, hold on hold on there's a card on there you've taught me better; open the card. And so she opens it and it says to my sister and my mom is like inaudible[00:12:57.1] my mom's like…well my sister is like to me? And again I wiggle the keys in front of my sister's face and she's like what?! So she runs and dives in and my mom looks at me like what this like WTF and I'm like you're over there. Then she starts walking and then sees it like buried on the other side of the house in a big box and like runs over and dives in. We're in Georgia at that time at a family house and it was cold and she didn't have shoes on. It was a great time. I've got the video. One day I'll have to share with somebody but I don't know that I want to share it. Joe: What a great experience and a great thing to do for your mother and your sister did. Did your mother get the nicer car or was it equal to both? Chuck: I was actually going to buy them the exact same car and then I was talking to my sister trying to like make sure that it was the kind of she would want and I said well what do you think Mom would like? And she said well my favorite car is a Sequoia and I ended up; my mom a Lincoln Aviator and my mom's Sequoia. They're about the same price. I think my sister was a little more but I did get some grief about that. Also the night before or a couple of nights before we went to Walmart and I bought every single piece of cheesy add on part you could get and added it to the car. So I got like a fuzzy steering wheel cover, dice, a little light-up things that go on the rims, and just totally like made the car look as ridiculous as possible and told them in order to get it they'd have to drive it with that stuff on it. Joe: That's hilarious. So for anybody that's listening instead of watching if you look at my chin and Chuck's chin you'll see some gray; there're probably a little more on mine than his of course. His is more his cheek mine's dead on center of my chin that's because of age and life experience. So you had some amazing times Chuck out of college making more money in a month than most people in this country do in a year; all web-based business experience. It's not always wonderful though. Chuck: No, absolutely not. Yeah, entrepreneurship is ups and downs. We've gotten hit by Google so many times I couldn't even tell you. And most of them were just algorithmic. But I have on one of my big businesses, we had about 12 that were all doing the same thing and one of my partners had used the same email address in our Webmaster Tools account and somebody from the spam team I guess noticed and went in and just manually penalized all of our businesses. I think except for two because those were the only two that didn't have those email addresses. And just overnight it's like poof gone and it's just like oh it's heartbreaking. At least when it's the algorithmic type of penalties it's easy to kind of; well maybe not easy but you're going to recover from that. The manual penalties, we hired somebody who used to work in the spam team. They told us what to do. We did it. We just haven't been able to recover from that on those other sites. Joe: Yeah I know it's always hard. Google algorithm updates I think are getting a little better, a little easier to handle and manage I think ultimately. I always used to say this actually if you do the right thing the way Google tells you to do it, ultimately it's not going to hurt you; the algorithm updates. And I guarantee there are people out there shaking their head no right now because a good friend of mine, he built a great business, a great, great content site, and sold it and there was a an update recently. And the buyer, another great entrepreneur bought it and did have some negative impact. What they both know is that sometimes when Google casts a wide net some of the wrong sites get caught up in it and over time that does get corrected but it does sting initially, doesn't it? Chuck: Yeah. And I will say like the reason we got caught up in a lot of the updates wasn't because we were doing the things that Google tells you to do. We were gaining the system and we deservedly got caught for doing those things and we would adjust our technique and then regain. So like one of our sites had like 100,000 pieces of unique content that we were in Google index for like 30 million pages. Joe: Wow. Chuck: So like how does one do that? Joe: How does one do that? Good Lord. Chuck: Trickery. Joe: Well the grey in your chin has matured you to the point that I think you're beyond the trickery because you look at the long term cash flow and benefits of owning an online business now it's not just a quick cash anymore. At least that's the way I look at it; you too? Chuck: Yeah, absolutely. And you're talking about like the algorithm updates and I feel like there's been so many and that most of the really garbage sites have probably gotten taken out by now. I feel like, and maybe I'm wrong but now it's more of like just tweaking the knobs a little bit. So unless you're in one of these like fringe business models I tend to believe and I could be 100% wrong but I tend to believe that most of the major algorithm updates have been already done and then now they're going after I guess like medical websites and things like that. Joe: Yeah. The updates are far further I'm sure in between and in many cases not as severe. Alright so I'm going to throw a question at you. I don't know if I told you this story or not or if you've heard it. Some of the audience members might have heard it so I'm going to just test your algorithm update knowledge. And if you answer within two seconds then I know you heard the story. So I bought a business, I sold my business in November 2010; yada, yada, yada. People have heard this a million times, or at least tens of hundreds of thousands of times if they've listened to every episode and keep downloading everything. No we haven't done 100,000 episodes that's totally inaccurate. I can't do math by the way apparently. Alright so I bought a content site. I sold a great site. The content was amazing. And then I bought a piece of junk. I had 42 amazing days. I bought it March 1st, 2012. I had maybe 3 or 4 keywords on the first page of Google and then boom they fell to the bottom of page 1 and then page 2 and they were gone and I lost over a quarter-million dollars in the course of twelve months. What happened? What algorithm update was that? It was; again I bought it March 1st, 2012; I had forty-two amazing days. Chuck: Panda. Penguin. Joe: Penguin. Alright, you're close. We're going to have to throw that quiz out there. Everybody in the audience wouldn't throw that quiz out there for a price. Chuck's wearing a beautiful Quiet Like Brokerage…is that a polo shirt? Chuck: Yeah. Joe: We need to get some of those packaged up and give away prizes for that kind of stuff. Alright let's jump on to your Quiet Light Brokerage life; your entrepreneurial life, amazing ups and downs, a lot of great ups and you did some good things for family and friends. The downs, we learn from them and we try to take those lessons and make sure that we are really bringing great listings to market so the buyers are making good safe investments and the sellers of those investments can move on with peace of mind to their next adventures whether that's another business or retirement. In your history of transactions here at Quiet Light, is there any particular niche that you gravitate towards and enjoy more than another because as you said a ton of content and affiliate experience, but I think some of your larger deals have been physical product e-commerce sites. But is there anything that stands out for you? Chuck: Yeah I mean so my heart is in like membership sites. I love recurring revenue. I think everybody does and that's why the multiples are higher because of that recurring revenue and the predictability. So I would say that that's kind of where I'd like to be but my biggest sales have been around physical products inaudible[00:20:53.3] an outdoor sporting equipment one that was great. One that I really love that I sold like six months ago was a company that did custom-tailored suits. That thing it's like awesome. Who doesn't want to say they have a business that sells custom-tailored suits? Like it's just; I think it's got the cool factor. Joe: That's the amazing thing about what you do and what we do at Quiet Light is that we come to this role with a lifetime of experience that; I was talking with Walker and Brad about this recently that we didn't know it but all of our entrepreneurial life was preparing us for this role. And now we get to experience so many cool different business models. You come to this role with a ton of membership experience but custom-tailored suits and you're like that's the coolest thing. Who doesn't want to say they own a custom-tailored suit business? I need to buy a custom-tailored suit. I know who bought it and I can reach out to him. I know who he is too. Speaking of that I do want to ask a random question although its timing is not very random and you have to answer this. There's only one answer to this. This buyer listens to the podcast and he comments and he tells us about us sometimes when he's riding his bike. So do you have a favorite audience member that also happens to be a buyer? Yes or no? You have to say yes and you have to say his name now because he's a… Chuck: Sure. Mike Nuñez. Joe: There you go; Mike Nuñez, this is just a shout out to you. Thanks for listening Mike. Chuck: Well I'll tell you it shouldn't just be a shout out to him. If anybody wants to know how to be a good buyer and how to buy businesses they should talk to Mike Nuñez because he is 100% the absolute best buyer I have. And not like just in a sense of like the actual acquisition of the company. When he gets on a phone call and talks to the sellers he makes them feel like they are the only person in the world; the most important person like he's just so smooth and he's not doing it as like a ploy or a gimmick. He's just a nice guy and he really appreciates these people and the businesses they've created. And it's just he's really good on a call. Joe: It's the unknown secret that we tell all the time to buyers. Look, when it's a great business it's a great opportunity. There are going to be multiple buyers. And it's not always the most money or the most cash that gets the letter of intent. In some cases, it's the buyer that the seller likes the most. And being likable on those conference calls is critically important. Mike does it very well. Chuck: And one of my businesses; actually I think two of them that Mike purchased, the sellers actually said like I want to sell to him. Make him buy this. It doesn't matter; I mean within reason, right? The price; but they were willing to take less than somebody else because they liked him so much. Joe: Oh boy. Now if Mike's listening and he paid full price now he's going to be like inaudible[00:23:49.1]. Chuck: That is the problem because of course I did make him pay more than the other people but they were willing to take less. And what's funny is one of my sellers told him as much oh like I would have taken less from you and I'm like don't say that to him. Joe: In his heart, he was willing to take less but his checkbook and his head was willing to take the highest bidder as long as it was Mike Nunez. That's the key. In your experience both as an entrepreneur and as an adviser here at Quiet Light you've seen a lot of businesses that have come up for first they reach out to us for a valuation, they start thinking about an exit sometimes the day before they want to exit, sometimes months or a year or so in advance. What do you see being the biggest thing; most consistent thing that those particular entrepreneurs do wrong time and time again that there's just if there's one thing you could just like shout into the microphone right now to everyone listening even though some of them are doing it right, what are the majority of folks not doing that that you want them to do to bring more value to their business? Chuck: Silence question. Joe: Yeah it was a long one. I kept rambling on in my sentences because I could see you thinking. Chuck: Yeah. Joe: Maybe I should have asked a little more. Chuck: What's weird about at Quiet Light is we actually get so many great businesses to sell. People bring us quality things. So what are some of the bad things people do? Joe: Let me just get some stats behind that though; because it's true what we bring to market, it's great stuff. But the reality is Chuck if you look at my numbers I've closed 105, 106 transactions in seven years. People say well that's not very many but in order to close those transactions; I've ballparked the math and I've talked to 2,500 entrepreneurs. That's 2,500 valuation calls. Your stats are similar. What is that consistent theme that if you could speak to somebody that someday may sell their business what should they be doing? Chuck: Sure. So when we talk about like specific like product-level things like when people are just selling random shots keys that aren't unique in any way; those are really difficult to sell. When you have an actual unique product that's got some sort of a brand to it that's not easily knock off-able that there's a moat around it like that makes it so much more desirable to people and so much more valuable. One of the things I also see probably is just P & L's; having clean P & L's. Oftentimes people's profit and loss statements are just a complete mess. They'll lump, they want to save; I was just thinking about a specific one, but you see people are just lumping things in because they know they had a cost but they don't really know when it was or where it was and they just kind of guesstimate things and put them in the wrong ones. So then you'll see like really lumpy P & L's. And we always try to work with people to flatten those out and figure out where the real costs are. So that often takes a lot of time to just figure out what the true P & L is on a business. And for doing add backs; what's a real add back? We fight with people a lot on what's a real add back versus something they think they should be adding back. Joe: Yeah I want to just step in and shout out that there's no question I think that preparing your business for sale is the number one thing that people don't do. They decide to sell as I say instead of planning to sell. That means they work their tail off. They launch this business. They work like crazy against all odds. They succeed. And it's producing solid revenue and profit for them. And they just burn the candle at both ends and then the candle starts to burn out. And they're emotionally tired, they're frustrated, they're exhausted, and they wake up one morning I'm just not into this. I'm going to sell. I didn't know I could sell but it just occurred to me. I'm done. I'm calling Chuck Mullins. And at that point because they're tired; because they're emotionally worn out they need to sell because trends will go down. They won't do the things that they need to do to keep the business growing and strong and in great shape for somebody else to take over. And so at that point you get those P & L's and you're like yeah Excel is not really accounting software. Ideally Quick Books and Xero or one of the other so that we can run a historical P & L and do year over year trend analysis and look at the metrics. All that is really hard and then there's the commingling. So I'm going to just mention a podcast; not ours, somebody else's. EcomCrewPodcast247. Chuck as you know I sold Mike Jackness' business ColorIt last spring. And Mike is a bright guy. Mike knew exactly what to do as most people in this audience do. They know what to do. And the mindset that Mike had was simply I'll get to it someday. What happens is you end up chasing too many rabbits and that someday comes when you get exhausted and in his case, he had four brands under one LLC and three of them were really not sellable at the time that we decide to list the business. So what does that do? You've got four brands all in one LLC, tax returns commingled, and you're only selling one brand. What does that eliminate? Chuck: SBA financing. Joe: SBA financing; exactly. Is it required to get an SBA loan? No it's not to sell a business; absolutely not. We sold multimillion-dollar businesses without an SBA loan. But what it does do is it casts a broader net; buyers. And even some of those buyers; I've had it. Have you had buyers that have more than enough money to stroke a check for a multi-million dollar business but they use SBA? Chuck: Absolutely why not leverage if you can? Joe: Yeah, so that's I'd say number one. I'm in total agreement on the documentation. We always talk about that the risk, growth, transferability, and documentation; gets your numbers right, get those P & L's in great shape and it's going to help you learn about your business and set goals and then that passion may get reignited and you may do more in the business and grow it and have a bigger exit someday down the road. It's not that I don't love it when somebody calls me and says I'd like a valuation and part of that is okay, what's your timeframe, when are you ready to sell, right now. Not that I don't mind that; I love that if everything's in great shape. It's just tougher to sell it when it's not. They get a lower value, right? Chuck: Yup, absolutely. Having those four pillars and the clean books it makes a big difference. Joe: It really does. I think I'm in total agreement. Buyers or sellers of businesses, get your documents in great shape. The best way to do that, just call, email inquiries@QuietLightBrokerage.com, Chuck@QuietLightBrokerage.com. Reach out. It's a service that we provide. I mean what do we do Chuck? We help, help, help, and then keep helping, right? Chuck: Build value. Joe: Build the value. It's my; I've got a mentor that I talked to long and hard about all my business opportunities and in this particular one as we chatted about the model and what we do here at Quiet Light he's like well it just sounds like you're giving away all your knowledge for free in hopes that maybe they'll work with you. And I' like that's exactly right. We help first and we're entrepreneurs so there are times that we wish we got good advice and we were too young to listen or there was nobody around to talk to about it. And now we share that when it comes to business values and planning an exit. The number one thing you can do is just reach out to somebody. It's free. Talk to Chuck, he's got a ton of experience. Chuck: I'll tell you kind of in my entrepreneurial days if I wasn't going to be an entrepreneur I always wanted to be a consultant and help other people. And I never had like the actual desire to go out and build a portfolio and charge people to help them grow their business. But like you said I've been do this since '96. I've met so many businesses; a lot of focus on optimization and SEO and just so many things. And one of the things I actually like about is giving unsolicited advice. So when I'm on all these valuation calls I'm constantly asking people like oh have you tried this, have you thought about this? So even if they're not ready to sell I'm often giving people advice on how to increase their business. And even when I do have listings like I think of one and particularly like I give him so many ideas and then he did those and the business just kept growing. That actually came to bite me because the business grew so much that we ended up pulling it off the market after getting multiple full-price offers because it just had grown so much and he wanted to just wait a little bit and we're going to actually getting ready to relist that here soon. Joe: It's a good problem, right? I mean I've been in situations that you say it bit you but ultimately this is a long term play for us; it's building relationships and that person respects and appreciates you obviously because he's coming back for some of your entrepreneurial life experience and it's benefited them financially. It's going to grow the business and ultimately they're going to get a bigger value and tell people about what you did. So that was a little bit more about the sellers and the things that they can do and then number one I think we both agree, plan that exit; call somebody, e-mail somebody, get a valuation. It's not going to hurt. What about buyers; biggest mistakes that buyers can make? Chuck: Disrespecting somebody's business. So getting on a call and like; I'm trying to think of a of a PC term that I could use that's not a profanity, just talking smack about somebody's business, trying to negotiate them down in price, and like trash-talking the business. That doesn't work. At least not at this size but maybe it works when you're dealing with a couple hundred million dollar business or something. I don't know. But at these levels, people care about their businesses at least the ones we sell. Inaudible[00:33:38.9] and when you talk smack like… Joe: It's personal even at the 15 to 20 million mark. Mark just closed one just under 15 million. It's owned by an individual. When you're talking about a hundred million, yes somebody is up there at the top like their shareholders and the CEOs and COOs and all that and big-time attorneys are in there negotiating. It's not you're talking to the guy across the table that actually built it and owns it for the most part, right? So he cares about it. Chuck: He worries about it like he's had the baby. I mean you wouldn't believe how many people I've talked to; sellers that cry on the phone about their business like it happens a lot. People are deeply invested emotionally in their business. When somebody comes in and disrespects it for no reason other than they're trying to negotiate, it doesn't go well. You need to be nice. That's what Mike does so well. And I want to keep talking about Mike. Well like… Joe: Should we talk about Walker again? Chuck: He's about people and he's nice. Joe: Let's talk about Walker again then. Actually you're absolutely right. I remember being at the Rhodium Weekend Conference before you were a member of the team here at Quiet Light. Now he's up presenting and talking and I could swear in that environment and I used the word that begins with an A and ends with an E; figure it out, folks. Everybody's got one. And what's the secret to being a great buyer? And I said don't be one; as simple as that. I can see you out there in the audience shaking your head up and down. And that's exactly right. Mike is very nice, very kind. When I sold my business I had people that were well I remember one, in particular, ripping my business to shreds on a conference call; initial call and I'm like why am I even talking to this guy. I'm not selling it to him even if he gives me an offer over asking. And then, strangely enough, the last call, the person that ended up buying my business first thing he said is thanks for creating such a great site. Your products have helped people exactly like me. By the way I took stuff like this and I ran the Boston Marathon actually the Chicago Marathon last month and it's because of products like yours and I said cool. It was actually a really short call; 20-minute call. I didn't ask any great questions I had going on. That was really nice but I don't see he's buying my business and he almost; he bought it almost full price offer. Chuck: I'll tell you what you just mentioned something that is often overlooked. When you get on these calls don't just wing it; do some research, educate yourself before the call, and ask the right questions. It's so important. So many times I get on a call and the seller or the buyer doesn't ask any decent questions and the seller just writes them off and says let's not take any more calls from that person. They weren't serious. So make sure that you understand the business and you're asking good questions that a good buyer would ask, right? Joe: Yeah. They don't have to be the most intelligent questions the seller has ever heard but that you've done your research and you care. I mean yeah Chuck you put there together a great package and all the great questions are in there. They just have to dig into them and digest it a little bit and ask the same question in their voice and see if you get the same or similar answer from the client on it. I think that's great. I think you're absolutely right. Too many times there has been a few buyers that they're not prepared for. You can hear them walking down the street getting in the car and it just feels like a complete and utter waste of everyone's time including the person who's making the call and asking the questions. Okay, is there anything else; before we wrap up is there anything else you'd like to say about Walker Diebel? Chuck: Visit WalkerDiebel.guru to check out his new book that's coming out in a couple of months. Joe: Let's do this; actually everybody do is too. Go to IMDB and look up Walker Diebel the actor and watch some of the movies he's been in. Add a review, let's see if we can boost that one-star rating up to one and a half. Chuck: Inaudible[00:37:37.6] tomatoes maybe. Joe: Alright Chuck, you're a good man. I appreciate you coming on. We'll wrap it up here with time. Any last thoughts for anybody out there thinking about selling their business or buying one; any last pearls of wisdom and I know I didn't prepare you but any last-minute pearls of wisdom? Chuck: Yeah. I would just say that reach out early. We're not here to be high pressure as far as trying to sign you to sell your business. We're here to lead with value. We're going to offer some hopefully some wisdom that's going to help you sell that business in the future. So don't think that like oh I don't want to reach out because I'm not going to sell it for six months or a year. Talk to us now. Let us help you get the business in shape to sell it later. Joe: Great advice. That's Chuck Mullins folks. We will be back in the next podcast. See you soon. Thanks, Chuck. Chuck: Bye-bye. Thanks.   Links and Resources: Chuck Mullins Chuck's LinkedIn Walker Deibel's IMDB

Dr. Chuck and Suzanne Lynn share the results of a recent study by the United Concordia Dental insurance company that shows how patients who take care of their teeth save thousands of dollars in annual medical costs and see a significant reduction in annual hospitalizations versus those who do not. Here is a link to the study. TRANSCRIPT: Dr.Chuck – Hi, I’m Dr. Chuck, welcome to Your Filthy Mouth. The dollars and sense of medical care. Insurance companies want you to stay healthy. Does anybody else? Stay tuned. Narrator – Your smile is beautiful and possibly deadly. Dr. Chuck is here to tell you how your mouth can hold the key to your overall health. Now, about that filthy mouth of yours. Suzanne – Hi, welcome to Your Filthy Mouth. I’m Suzanne Lynn with Dr. Chuck. And, Dr. Chuck, your intro really has my mind going here. First of all, why wouldn’t anybody want you to be healthy? Dr.Chuck – There’s a television commercial on right now from, I think Allstate has it. And there’s a gentleman sitting on a chair in the middle of the road and he says, “The facts are, all auto insurance companies “want you to drive safely, they don’t want accidents.” Well, why is that? The more premiums you pay and the less claims they have to pay, the more money they’re gonna make. Suzanne – Okay. Dr.Chuck – Makes good sense. Is the same thing true with medical insurance companies? Absolutely, medical insurance companies want you to stay healthy. In fact, one of the things we’ll be looking at today, this is from United Concordia Dental, the white paper’s called “The Mouth: The Missing Piece “to Overall Wellness and Lower Medical Costs.” Suzanne – Okay. Dr.Chuck – So do medical insurance wants you to be healthy? Absolutely, again, they’ll make more money. Suzanne – Well, you can’t get money, you can’t get premiums from dead people, right? Dr.Chuck – Well, yeah, and you’re gonna pay a lot less, you’re gonna make a lot less money as an insurance company if you’re paying out a lot of claims. Suzanne – I got you. Dr.Chuck – So the healthier you are, the more money they’re gonna save because you’re staying out of the hospital. Suzanne – Okay, that leads me to the question of who wouldn’t want you to be healthy, then? Dr.Chuck – Well, let’s see, who stands to make money if you stay unhealthy? And I know this is almost cynical on this thing. But when we start looking at it, do hospitals want you to be healthy? I think good hospitals want you to be healthy. I think caring doctors, we have a lot of caring doctors out there, we have caring hospitals, they want you to be healthy. And then we have others might have another motive on that. And when you think about it, our last episode that we talked about, why don’t hospitals have dentists? Because according to this study, there’s an awful lot of illness in the body that is caused from problems in the mouth. And these are problems that we can do something about. My thing is I can’t focus on things that we can’t do anything about. I don’t know how to do anything about pancreatic cancer. It’s horrible. 50,000 people a year die from pancreatic cancer. About 600,000 people a year die from heart attacks. And, according to the researchers, about 50% of those are caused by oral infections, we can do something about oral infections. And there’s something that the patient can do, there’s something the physician can do, and there’s something the dentist can do to really decrease oral infections in our population. Suzanne – So when you mentioned the hospital, unlike insurance, we’re not paying premiums to the hospital, they’re getting paid upon seeing people, fixing people, caring people, you know? Dr.Chuck – Well, that’s how they make money, you know? And they get their money mostly from the insurance companies, some from private pay, but the majority of hospital payments come from insurance companies. If you look at, this is again from United Concordia, the link with coronary artery disease. And by the way, this information is on the website, we’ve got a PDF that you can download, you can look, we got links, so you can look at all of it yourself and go over with a fine tooth comb, see what they have to say. But with coronary artery disease, if you will take care of your dental situation, they show that your medical situation, your annual medical costs, go down a little over $1,000. But your hospital admissions go down 28.6%. Suzanne – Wow, that’s incredible! Dr.Chuck – That’s a lot. Just by having a healthy mouth. Now that’s with coronary artery disease. Suzanne – So we could kind of do, when we call this dollar and sense, it doesn’t have to be S-E-N-S-E, it’s also C. Dr.Chuck – C-E-N-T-S, yes, Big cents. Suzanne – Yeah. Dr.Chuck – So cerebral vascular disease, if you take care of your dental needs, your medical needs go down $5,681 and your hospital admissions go down 21.2% Suzanne – Wow! Dr.Chuck – This was on my research. They’ve got, the nice thing about these hospital, these insurance companies is you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dental insured, you have hundreds of thousands of medical insured. You can compare the two and you can see if these take care of their dental needs, what happens to their medical needs? And that’s what this paper has to show. Suzanne – And right now, so far the stats you’ve shared is one out of four can not be going to the hospital. Dr.Chuck – Not be going to the hospital, that’s right. Diabetes, we have a diabetic challenge in our country right now and it’s only getting worse. If we look at diabetes, if you take care of your dental situation, your annual medical expenses go down about $2,800. But the hospital admissions go down 39.4%. That’s huge. Suzanne – Yeah, I mean, they truly they have no reason to skew these numbers. I mean, this truly is. They are comparing the medical front with the insurance. Dr.Chuck – They want you to be healthy. Again, realize the insurance company wants you to be healthy. And also on, if I can turn the page here, the outpatient drug costs for diabetic patients goes down to about $1,477. Again, so your outpatient costs decreased by taking care of your oral situation. Pregnant women, oh my gosh, your annual medical costs with a healthy mouth go down $2,433 on average. Suzanne – Wow! Dr.Chuck – So we looked– That’s a lot of diapers. and a lot of baby care that you can buy with that. Suzanne – It’s an awful lot. Dr.Chuck – It is. Suzanne – So again, the insurance company has the motivation to keep you well, to keep you healthy. Just like the auto insurance, they have motivation for you not to be in an accident, they want you not to be in an accident, medical insurance companies want you not to get sick. I don’t understand why more physicians aren’t pushing oral health with their patients. Now, there are some excellent physicians that really do this but they’re hard to find. Dr.Chuck – Right, right, right. And that’s the whole purpose we’re doing this is to try to connect the dots between oral care and the rest of your body. I’m having a hard time going back to the fact because in hospitals, there are doctors don’t they take an oath to? Dr.Chuck – Part of the Hippocratic Oath actually says if they come across something that they don’t know how to treat, they will seek the advice of someone who does know how to treat it. Well, if you’re not even looking for it, how do you know what’s going on? So this is why so many dental infections have absolute, I had a new patient this week. Nice guy, we did an oral exam on him, four abscesses four dental abscess going on inside of his jaw. Not one bit of pain from any of ’em, we’re showing them on the X-ray, you can see exactly what’s going, he has no idea these are going on. Now had we not done the examination, he would not know that they’re going on. But remember, and it’s not rocket science, every infection in your body, I don’t care if it’s in your hand, foot or your mouth, every infection produces pus. And that pus is being dumped right into your bloodstream, goes through, makes its way to the heart, to the lungs, back to the heart, and is pumped everywhere in your whole body. Is that healthy? I mean, again, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that’s not okay. Suzanne – Right, a simple dentist in a hospital, is what you’re saying? Dr.Chuck – Yeah, it’s– Dr.Chuck – I mean, an oral department would be ideal. But could we just please get a dentist in there until? Dr.Chuck – Well, at least diagnose that there’s an oral issue there, it could be gum disease, it could be dental infections, it could be an airway issue, it could be the bite, there are different things that can cause different problems within the the body. The hospital doesn’t have to be the one to fix it. But it would be nice if they would at least inform the patient, “Hey, you’ve got periodontal disease. “There’s a real good chance that that has “something to do with your cardiovascular disease. “Why don’t you go back to your dentist “and get that taken care of?” And that’s just not being done yet. Yet, they say that it takes 20 years, we’ve mentioned this before, 20 years before something that’s actually proven to be true with medical research, before it’s implemented into everyday care. Well, it was 19 years ago that the US Surgeon General wrote a large report on oral health in America that basically says you cannot have a healthy body with an unhealthy mouth, you need a healthy mouth. I’m looking forward to 2020 ’cause that’ll be 20 years. So we just got a few more months until this is gonna be widespread, maybe. Suzanne – Well, one of the ways that’s gonna help is people who are watching Your Filthy Mouth, sharing that with your dentist, having them speak up and not be afraid. Dr.Chuck – Yeah, this is not about us. This is this is about you. This is about your family. When one person has a stroke, it doesn’t affect just that one person, it affects their entire family. Suzanne – Amen. Dr.Chuck – When one person has a heart attack, it doesn’t affect just that one person, it affects their entire family. So we when we look at the 300,000 people that have deaths that could have been caused from oral infections, how many million people have that really affected in a negative way? Suzanne – Right, right. All right, well, we’re gonna come back with a question of the week and Joe’s got a good one. Hang on. Narrator – Here’s Dr. Chuck’s Question of the week. Joe – This is Joe. I wanna know if there’s a problem with using mouthwash several times a day? Suzanne – That is a good question. First of all, Joe, we’re gonna be sending you one of the Your Filthy Mouth mugs. I have to say that slow because it comes out your filthy mug mouth, if I say it too fast, but thank you for your question. Yeah, if you send your question in and we use it, you will get one also. But the question, just asked me about multiple times using mouthwash tells me that he’s maybe trying to cover something up, maybe he has bad breath. But is there a harm in that? Dr.Chuck – A lot of times that’s what’s going on. Most bad breath is caused from periodontal disease, gum disease, and so if you can clean up the gum disease, the bad breath goes away. But a lot of people have the idea that if we use the right mouthwash or mouth rinse, I’m not gonna have any more cavities and my gums are gonna be better. And that’s just really not true. You’ve got to get in there and you’ve got to clean your teeth, you’ve got to just spend that five to seven minutes, at least one time a day doing a proper job getting the bacteria off of your teeth, the mouth rinse isn’t gonna take care of that. Now, they’ve shown that about 26% of the bacteria in your mouth are on your teeth and the rest of the bacteria on your tongue and your gums, all around there. So, you know, yes, do mouth rinses help? Yeah, but you can’t rely on them to kill all of the bad bacteria. You have to still get in there and remove the bacteria off your teeth. Suzanne – Despite what the TV ads show, that that’s the magic cure. Dr.Chuck – Well, I don’t think there’s a magic bullet when it comes to oral health care. Yeah, other than doing the right things, eating less sugar, boy, that’s a big thing, and less carbohydrates. I mean, the bacteria can utilize the sugar, turn it into acid, utilize the carbohydrates, turn it into acid, and this acid gets into the teeth, it demineralizes the tooth, causes cavities, affects the gums. So, yeah, our diet, four things we need to be healthy. Number one is what we eat. Suzanne – Okay. Dr.Chuck – Okay, that does play a role. Number two, little bit of exercise. Doesn’t mean you have to pump iron, but you gotta get that body moving. Number three, a healthy mouth. That doesn’t mean a Hollywood smile. You don’t need a Hollywood smile to have a healthy mouth. But you need a healthy mouth and have a healthy heart. Okay, and the last thing is your attitude. Attitude does play a big role in our overall health. So those are four things. And by the way, all four are affordable. Suzanne – And we have control over ’em. Dr.Chuck – Absolutely. Suzanne – All right, Joe, good question. All right, well, let’s go back to talking about the topic today, is about dollars and sense of good oral health care. And before we started filming you shared a sample of, ’cause I can’t understand the idea of people not wanting to do the very best for someone that’s possible. You know, we’re talking about maybe in the hospitals if they can’t cure it or they can’t fix it, they don’t want to diagnose it or something like that. Dr.Chuck – Well, there a lot of examples in history where someone has come up with a real good idea and that idea has been squashed simply because finances, money. If you think back, there was an automobile, I think was called the Tucker, back in the ’50s, that it had a lot of advances. It had headlights that turned when you turned the wheel. It had– Suzanne – Genius! Dr.Chuck – But yeah, special. Well, that that automobile was eaten up by the big three, by Ford, GM, and Chrysler. And so we look at some other things, if you wanna look at when you get in, you know, a little bit out on a limb here, we’ll talk about Tesla. And he had all kinds of information on how we could have electricity for everybody for free. And soon after his death, all of his papers disappeared. And so you know, there’s a lot of things, you know, what’s the real motivation? So it doesn’t matter what someone else’s motivation is as long as your motivation is proper. And if you can be motivated to take care of your mouth and keep it good and healthy, oh, my gosh, the problems that you can avoid. There are other issues. The mouth isn’t the only thing, you know, and I’m not the expert. We are the messenger. And that’s the message we’re trying to get across to you. Suzanne – So the overall message of today’s show is there is a huge facts, like you said, we can show this on yourfilthymouth.com, to download this white paper, correlation between taking care of your mouth and saving a lot of money. Not just a little bit. Dr.Chuck – A lot, yeah. The insurance company wants you to be healthy. They really do. Suzanne – That’s good to know. Dr.Chuck – Yeah, they may have an ulterior motive other than your health, they make more money, and that’s okay. But at least they want you to be healthy. And we have to make sure what is the motivation of all of our health care providers? Do they wanna treat the symptoms? Do they want to get to the source? And that’s the question between every health care provider and their patients. Suzanne – Awesome, Dr. Chuck, thank you so much, great show today, thank you. Dr.Chuck – Oh, thank you. Narrator – This has been Your Filthy Mouth, a weekly podcast about how what happens in your mouth affects the rest of your body. This is important information, so please share it with your friends. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe button on YouTube, iTunes, and all the other podcast sites. And drop by yourfilthymouth.com to ask Dr. Chuck a question or find dozens of links to information about oral systemic health. We’ll talk to you next week.

JOSHER IS BACK WITH AN EPISODE ALL ABOUT ... THE MEATS!!! Since summer is officially here, Josher is sitting down with his friend Spencer Myers, from The Spirit of '38 Podcast, to talk about MEAT!!! Josher quickly finds out that Spencer is basically the Rainman of BBQ! Spencer talks specifically on to how to prep, rub, marinade, grill, smoke, BBQ and eat meat! Spencer even teaches Josher what do with the deckel of the meat (don't worry it's SFW)! This episode is truly a carnivores' delight! Plus, Josher plays "BBQ IT! GRILL IT! CHUCK IT!" with Spencer to see what's the best way to eat your meat, cookout sides and even a few ... questionable ... foods? Like should you be smoking your pizza? The answer may surprise you?!So if you want to be THE KING of your next cookout go ahead and PUSH PLAY so you can LISTEN TO MY PODCAST ABOUT THE MEATS!

Sponsors: KendoUI Sentry use the code "devchat" for $100 credit Clubhouse Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guests: Ed Thomson In this episode, the Charles speaks with Ed Thomson who is a Program Manager at Azure through Microsoft, Developer, and Open Source Maintainer. Ed and Chuck discuss in full detail about Azure DevOps! Check out today’s episode to hear its new features and other exciting news! Show Topics: 0:59 – Live at Microsoft Ignite 1:03 – Ed: Hi! I am a Program Manager at Azure. 1:28 – Rewind 2 episodes to hear more about Azure DevOps! 1:51 – Ed: One of the moves from Pipelines to DevOps – they could still adopt Pipelines. Now that they are separate services – it’s great. 2:38 – Chuck talks about features he does and doesn’t use. 2:54 – Ed. 3:00 – Chuck: Repos and Pipelines. I am going to dive right in. Let’s talk about Repos. Microsoft just acquired GitHub. 3:18 – Ed: Technically we have not officially acquired GitHub. 3:34 – Chuck: It’s not done. It’s the end of September now. 3:55 – Ed: They will remain the same thing for a while. GitHub is the home for open source. Repos – we use it in Microsoft. Repositories are huge. There are 4,000 engineers working in these repositories. Everyone works in his or her own little area, and you have to work together. You have to do all this engineering to get there. We bit a tool and it basically if you run clone... Ed continues to talk about this topic. He is talking about One Drive and these repositories. 6:28 – Ed: We aren’t going to be mixing and matching. I used to work through GitHub. It’s exciting to see those people work close to me. 6:54 – Chuck. 6:59 – Ed: It has come a long way. 7:07 – Chuck: Beyond the FSF are we talking about other features or? 7:21 – Ed: We have unique features. We have branch policies. You can require that people do pole request. You have to use pole request and your CI has to pass and things like that. I think there is a lot of richness in our auditing. We have enterprise focus. At its core it still is Git. We can all interoperate. 8:17 – Chuck. 8:37 – Ed: You just can’t set it up with Apache. You have to figure it out. 8:51 – Chuck: The method of pushing and pulling. 9:06 – Chuck: You can try DevOps for free up to 5 users and unlimited private repos. People are interested in this because GitHub makes you pay for that. 9:38 – Ed and Chuck continue to talk. 9:50 – Ed: Pipelines is the most interesting thing we are working on. We have revamped the entire experience. Build and release. It’s easy to get started. We have a visual designer. Super helpful – super straightforward. Releases once your code is built – get it out to production say for example Azure. It’s the important thing to get your code out there. 10:55 – Chuck: How can someone start with this? 11:00 – Ed: Depends on where your repository is. It will look at your code. “Oh, I know what that is, I know how to build that!” Maybe everyone isn’t doing everything with JavaScript. If you are using DotNet then it will know. 12:05 – Chuck: What if I am using both a backend and a frontend? 12:11 – Ed: One repository? That’s when you will have to do a little hand packing on the... There are different opportunities there. If you have a bash script that does it for you. If not, then you can orchestrate it. Reduce the time it takes. If it’s an open source project; there’s 2 – what are you going to do with the other 8? You’d be surprised – people try to sneak that in there. 13:30 – Chuck: It seems like continuous integration isn’t a whole lot complicated. 13:39 – Ed: I am a simple guy that’s how I do it. You can do advanced stuff, though. The Cake Build system – they are doing some crazy things. We have got Windows, Lennox, and others. Are you building for Raspberries Pies, then okay, do this... It’s not just running a script. 15:00 – Chuck: People do get pretty complicated if they want. It can get complicated. Who knows? 15:26 – Chuck:  How much work do you have to do to set-up a Pipeline like that? 15:37 – Ed answers the question in detail. 16:03 – Chuck asks a question. 16:12 – Ed: Now this is where it gets contentious. If one fails... Our default task out of the box... 16:56 – Chuck: If you want 2 steps you can (like me who is crazy). 17:05 – Ed: Yes, I want to see if it failed. 17:17 – Chuck: Dude, writing code is hard. Once you have it built and tested – continuous deployment. 17:33 – Ed: It’s very easy. It’s super straightforward, it doesn’t have to be Azure (although I hope it is!). Ed continues this conversation. 18:43 – Chuck: And it just pulls it? 18:49 – Ed: Don’t poke holes into your firewall. We do give you a lot of flexibility 19:04 – Chuck: VPN credentials? 19:10 – Ed: Just run the... 19:25 – Chuck comments. 19:36 – Ed: ...Take that Zip... 20:02 – Ed: Once the planets are finely aligned then...it will just pull from it. 20:25 – Chuck: I host my stuff on Digital Ocean. 20:46 – Ed: It’s been awhile since I played with... 20:55 – Chuck. 20:59 – Ed and Chuck go back and forth with different situations and hypothetical situations. 21:10 – Ed: What is Phoenix? 21:20 – Chuck explains it. 21:25 – Ed: Here is what we probably don’t have is a lot of ERLANG support. 22:41 – Advertisement. 23:31 – Chuck: Let’s just say it’s a possibility. We took the strip down node and... 23:49 – Ed: I think it’s going to happen. 23:55 – Ed: Exactly. 24:02 – Chuck: Testing against Azure services. So, it’s one thing to run on my machine but it’s another thing when other things connect nicely with an Azure set-up. Does it connect natively once it’s in the Azure cloud? 24:35 – Ed: It should, but there are so many services, so I don’t want to say that everything is identical. We will say yes with an asterisk. 25:07 – Chuck: With continuous deployment... 25:41 – Ed: As an example: I have a CD Pipeline for my website. Every time I merge into master... Ed continues this hypothetical situation with full details. Check it out! 27:03 – Chuck: You probably can do just about anything – deploy by Tweet! 27:15 – Ed: You can stop the deployment if people on Twitter start complaining. 27:40 – Chuck: That is awesome! IF it is something you care about – and if it’s worth the time – then why not? If you don’t have to think about it then great. I have mentioned this before: Am I solving interesting problems? What projects do I want to work on? What kinds of contributions do I really want to contribute to open source? That’s the thing – if you have all these tools that are set-up then your process, how do you work on what, and remove the pain points then you can just write code so people can use! That’s the power of this – because it catches the bug before I have to catch it – then that saves me time. 30:08 – Ed: That’s the dream of computers is that the computers are supposed to make OUR lives easier. IF we can do that and catch those bugs before you catch it then you are saving time. Finding bugs as quickly as possible it avoids downtime and messy deployments. 31:03 – Chuck: Then you can use time for coding style and other things. I can take mental shortcuts. 31:37 – Ed: The other thing you can do is avoiding security problems. If a static code analysis tool catches an integer overflow then... 32:30 – Chuck adds his comments. Chuck: You can set your policy to block it or ignore it. Then you are running these tools to run security. There are third-party tools that do security analysis on your code. Do you integrate with those? 33:00 – Ed: Yep. My favorite is WhiteSource. It knows all of the open source and third-party tools. It can scan your code and... 34:05 – Chuck: It works with a lot of languages. 34:14 – Ed. 34:25 – Chuck: A lot of JavaScript developers are getting into mobile development, like Ionic, and others. You have all these systems out there for different stages for writing for mobile. Android, windows Phone, Blackberry... 35:04 – Ed: Let’s throw out Blackberry builds. We will ignore it. Mac OS dies a fine job. That’s why we have all of those. 35:29 – Chuck: But I want to run my tests, too! 35:36 – Ed: I really like to use App Center. It is ultimately incredible to see all the tests you can run. 36:29 – Chuck: The deployment is different, though, right? 36:40 – Ed: I have a friend who clicks a button in... Azure DevOps. 37:00 – Chuck: I like to remind people that this isn’t a new product. 37:15 – Ed: Yes, Azure DevOps. 37:24 – Chuck: Any new features that are coming out? 37:27 – Ed: We took a little break, but... 37:47 – Ed: We will pick back up once Ignite is over. We have a timeline on our website when we expect to launch some new features, and some are secret, so keep checking out the website. 39:07 – Chuck: What is the interplay between Azure DevOps and Visual Studio Code? Because they have plugins for freaking everything. I am sure there is something there that... 39:30 – Ed: I am a VI guy and I’m like 90% sure there is something there. You are an eMac’s guy? The way I think about it is through Git right out of the box. Yes, I think there are better things out there for integration. I know we have a lot of great things in Visual Code, because I worked with it. 40:45 – Chuck: Yes, people can look for extensions and see what the capabilities are. Chuck talks about code editor and tools.  41:28 – Ed: ... we have been pulling that out as quickly as possible. We do have IE extensions, I am sure there is something for VS Code – but it’s not where I want to spend my time. 42:02 – Chuck: Yes, sure. 42:07 – Ed: But everyone is different – they won’t work the way that I work. So there’s that. 42:30 – Ed: That Chuck. 42:36 – Chuck: Where do people get news? 42:42 – Ed: Go to here! 42:54 – Chuck: Where do people find you? 43:00 – Ed: Twitter! 43:07 – Chuck: Let’s do Picks! 43:20 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! Links: GitHub Microsoft’s Azure Microsoft’s Pipeline Azure DevOps Erlang WhiteSource Chuck’s Twitter Ed Thomson’s Twitter Ed Thomson’s GitHub Ed Thomson’s Website Ed Thomson’s LinkedIn Picks: Ed Podcast - All Things Git

Sponsors: KendoUI Sentry use the code "devchat" for $100 credit Clubhouse Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guests: Ed Thomson In this episode, the Charles speaks with Ed Thomson who is a Program Manager at Azure through Microsoft, Developer, and Open Source Maintainer. Ed and Chuck discuss in full detail about Azure DevOps! Check out today’s episode to hear its new features and other exciting news! Show Topics: 0:59 – Live at Microsoft Ignite 1:03 – Ed: Hi! I am a Program Manager at Azure. 1:28 – Rewind 2 episodes to hear more about Azure DevOps! 1:51 – Ed: One of the moves from Pipelines to DevOps – they could still adopt Pipelines. Now that they are separate services – it’s great. 2:38 – Chuck talks about features he does and doesn’t use. 2:54 – Ed. 3:00 – Chuck: Repos and Pipelines. I am going to dive right in. Let’s talk about Repos. Microsoft just acquired GitHub. 3:18 – Ed: Technically we have not officially acquired GitHub. 3:34 – Chuck: It’s not done. It’s the end of September now. 3:55 – Ed: They will remain the same thing for a while. GitHub is the home for open source. Repos – we use it in Microsoft. Repositories are huge. There are 4,000 engineers working in these repositories. Everyone works in his or her own little area, and you have to work together. You have to do all this engineering to get there. We bit a tool and it basically if you run clone... Ed continues to talk about this topic. He is talking about One Drive and these repositories. 6:28 – Ed: We aren’t going to be mixing and matching. I used to work through GitHub. It’s exciting to see those people work close to me. 6:54 – Chuck. 6:59 – Ed: It has come a long way. 7:07 – Chuck: Beyond the FSF are we talking about other features or? 7:21 – Ed: We have unique features. We have branch policies. You can require that people do pole request. You have to use pole request and your CI has to pass and things like that. I think there is a lot of richness in our auditing. We have enterprise focus. At its core it still is Git. We can all interoperate. 8:17 – Chuck. 8:37 – Ed: You just can’t set it up with Apache. You have to figure it out. 8:51 – Chuck: The method of pushing and pulling. 9:06 – Chuck: You can try DevOps for free up to 5 users and unlimited private repos. People are interested in this because GitHub makes you pay for that. 9:38 – Ed and Chuck continue to talk. 9:50 – Ed: Pipelines is the most interesting thing we are working on. We have revamped the entire experience. Build and release. It’s easy to get started. We have a visual designer. Super helpful – super straightforward. Releases once your code is built – get it out to production say for example Azure. It’s the important thing to get your code out there. 10:55 – Chuck: How can someone start with this? 11:00 – Ed: Depends on where your repository is. It will look at your code. “Oh, I know what that is, I know how to build that!” Maybe everyone isn’t doing everything with JavaScript. If you are using DotNet then it will know. 12:05 – Chuck: What if I am using both a backend and a frontend? 12:11 – Ed: One repository? That’s when you will have to do a little hand packing on the... There are different opportunities there. If you have a bash script that does it for you. If not, then you can orchestrate it. Reduce the time it takes. If it’s an open source project; there’s 2 – what are you going to do with the other 8? You’d be surprised – people try to sneak that in there. 13:30 – Chuck: It seems like continuous integration isn’t a whole lot complicated. 13:39 – Ed: I am a simple guy that’s how I do it. You can do advanced stuff, though. The Cake Build system – they are doing some crazy things. We have got Windows, Lennox, and others. Are you building for Raspberries Pies, then okay, do this... It’s not just running a script. 15:00 – Chuck: People do get pretty complicated if they want. It can get complicated. Who knows? 15:26 – Chuck:  How much work do you have to do to set-up a Pipeline like that? 15:37 – Ed answers the question in detail. 16:03 – Chuck asks a question. 16:12 – Ed: Now this is where it gets contentious. If one fails... Our default task out of the box... 16:56 – Chuck: If you want 2 steps you can (like me who is crazy). 17:05 – Ed: Yes, I want to see if it failed. 17:17 – Chuck: Dude, writing code is hard. Once you have it built and tested – continuous deployment. 17:33 – Ed: It’s very easy. It’s super straightforward, it doesn’t have to be Azure (although I hope it is!). Ed continues this conversation. 18:43 – Chuck: And it just pulls it? 18:49 – Ed: Don’t poke holes into your firewall. We do give you a lot of flexibility 19:04 – Chuck: VPN credentials? 19:10 – Ed: Just run the... 19:25 – Chuck comments. 19:36 – Ed: ...Take that Zip... 20:02 – Ed: Once the planets are finely aligned then...it will just pull from it. 20:25 – Chuck: I host my stuff on Digital Ocean. 20:46 – Ed: It’s been awhile since I played with... 20:55 – Chuck. 20:59 – Ed and Chuck go back and forth with different situations and hypothetical situations. 21:10 – Ed: What is Phoenix? 21:20 – Chuck explains it. 21:25 – Ed: Here is what we probably don’t have is a lot of ERLANG support. 22:41 – Advertisement. 23:31 – Chuck: Let’s just say it’s a possibility. We took the strip down node and... 23:49 – Ed: I think it’s going to happen. 23:55 – Ed: Exactly. 24:02 – Chuck: Testing against Azure services. So, it’s one thing to run on my machine but it’s another thing when other things connect nicely with an Azure set-up. Does it connect natively once it’s in the Azure cloud? 24:35 – Ed: It should, but there are so many services, so I don’t want to say that everything is identical. We will say yes with an asterisk. 25:07 – Chuck: With continuous deployment... 25:41 – Ed: As an example: I have a CD Pipeline for my website. Every time I merge into master... Ed continues this hypothetical situation with full details. Check it out! 27:03 – Chuck: You probably can do just about anything – deploy by Tweet! 27:15 – Ed: You can stop the deployment if people on Twitter start complaining. 27:40 – Chuck: That is awesome! IF it is something you care about – and if it’s worth the time – then why not? If you don’t have to think about it then great. I have mentioned this before: Am I solving interesting problems? What projects do I want to work on? What kinds of contributions do I really want to contribute to open source? That’s the thing – if you have all these tools that are set-up then your process, how do you work on what, and remove the pain points then you can just write code so people can use! That’s the power of this – because it catches the bug before I have to catch it – then that saves me time. 30:08 – Ed: That’s the dream of computers is that the computers are supposed to make OUR lives easier. IF we can do that and catch those bugs before you catch it then you are saving time. Finding bugs as quickly as possible it avoids downtime and messy deployments. 31:03 – Chuck: Then you can use time for coding style and other things. I can take mental shortcuts. 31:37 – Ed: The other thing you can do is avoiding security problems. If a static code analysis tool catches an integer overflow then... 32:30 – Chuck adds his comments. Chuck: You can set your policy to block it or ignore it. Then you are running these tools to run security. There are third-party tools that do security analysis on your code. Do you integrate with those? 33:00 – Ed: Yep. My favorite is WhiteSource. It knows all of the open source and third-party tools. It can scan your code and... 34:05 – Chuck: It works with a lot of languages. 34:14 – Ed. 34:25 – Chuck: A lot of JavaScript developers are getting into mobile development, like Ionic, and others. You have all these systems out there for different stages for writing for mobile. Android, windows Phone, Blackberry... 35:04 – Ed: Let’s throw out Blackberry builds. We will ignore it. Mac OS dies a fine job. That’s why we have all of those. 35:29 – Chuck: But I want to run my tests, too! 35:36 – Ed: I really like to use App Center. It is ultimately incredible to see all the tests you can run. 36:29 – Chuck: The deployment is different, though, right? 36:40 – Ed: I have a friend who clicks a button in... Azure DevOps. 37:00 – Chuck: I like to remind people that this isn’t a new product. 37:15 – Ed: Yes, Azure DevOps. 37:24 – Chuck: Any new features that are coming out? 37:27 – Ed: We took a little break, but... 37:47 – Ed: We will pick back up once Ignite is over. We have a timeline on our website when we expect to launch some new features, and some are secret, so keep checking out the website. 39:07 – Chuck: What is the interplay between Azure DevOps and Visual Studio Code? Because they have plugins for freaking everything. I am sure there is something there that... 39:30 – Ed: I am a VI guy and I’m like 90% sure there is something there. You are an eMac’s guy? The way I think about it is through Git right out of the box. Yes, I think there are better things out there for integration. I know we have a lot of great things in Visual Code, because I worked with it. 40:45 – Chuck: Yes, people can look for extensions and see what the capabilities are. Chuck talks about code editor and tools.  41:28 – Ed: ... we have been pulling that out as quickly as possible. We do have IE extensions, I am sure there is something for VS Code – but it’s not where I want to spend my time. 42:02 – Chuck: Yes, sure. 42:07 – Ed: But everyone is different – they won’t work the way that I work. So there’s that. 42:30 – Ed: That Chuck. 42:36 – Chuck: Where do people get news? 42:42 – Ed: Go to here! 42:54 – Chuck: Where do people find you? 43:00 – Ed: Twitter! 43:07 – Chuck: Let’s do Picks! 43:20 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! Links: GitHub Microsoft’s Azure Microsoft’s Pipeline Azure DevOps Erlang WhiteSource Chuck’s Twitter Ed Thomson’s Twitter Ed Thomson’s GitHub Ed Thomson’s Website Ed Thomson’s LinkedIn Picks: Ed Podcast - All Things Git

Sponsors: KendoUI Sentry use the code "devchat" for $100 credit Clubhouse Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guests: Ed Thomson In this episode, the Charles speaks with Ed Thomson who is a Program Manager at Azure through Microsoft, Developer, and Open Source Maintainer. Ed and Chuck discuss in full detail about Azure DevOps! Check out today’s episode to hear its new features and other exciting news! Show Topics: 0:59 – Live at Microsoft Ignite 1:03 – Ed: Hi! I am a Program Manager at Azure. 1:28 – Rewind 2 episodes to hear more about Azure DevOps! 1:51 – Ed: One of the moves from Pipelines to DevOps – they could still adopt Pipelines. Now that they are separate services – it’s great. 2:38 – Chuck talks about features he does and doesn’t use. 2:54 – Ed. 3:00 – Chuck: Repos and Pipelines. I am going to dive right in. Let’s talk about Repos. Microsoft just acquired GitHub. 3:18 – Ed: Technically we have not officially acquired GitHub. 3:34 – Chuck: It’s not done. It’s the end of September now. 3:55 – Ed: They will remain the same thing for a while. GitHub is the home for open source. Repos – we use it in Microsoft. Repositories are huge. There are 4,000 engineers working in these repositories. Everyone works in his or her own little area, and you have to work together. You have to do all this engineering to get there. We bit a tool and it basically if you run clone... Ed continues to talk about this topic. He is talking about One Drive and these repositories. 6:28 – Ed: We aren’t going to be mixing and matching. I used to work through GitHub. It’s exciting to see those people work close to me. 6:54 – Chuck. 6:59 – Ed: It has come a long way. 7:07 – Chuck: Beyond the FSF are we talking about other features or? 7:21 – Ed: We have unique features. We have branch policies. You can require that people do pole request. You have to use pole request and your CI has to pass and things like that. I think there is a lot of richness in our auditing. We have enterprise focus. At its core it still is Git. We can all interoperate. 8:17 – Chuck. 8:37 – Ed: You just can’t set it up with Apache. You have to figure it out. 8:51 – Chuck: The method of pushing and pulling. 9:06 – Chuck: You can try DevOps for free up to 5 users and unlimited private repos. People are interested in this because GitHub makes you pay for that. 9:38 – Ed and Chuck continue to talk. 9:50 – Ed: Pipelines is the most interesting thing we are working on. We have revamped the entire experience. Build and release. It’s easy to get started. We have a visual designer. Super helpful – super straightforward. Releases once your code is built – get it out to production say for example Azure. It’s the important thing to get your code out there. 10:55 – Chuck: How can someone start with this? 11:00 – Ed: Depends on where your repository is. It will look at your code. “Oh, I know what that is, I know how to build that!” Maybe everyone isn’t doing everything with JavaScript. If you are using DotNet then it will know. 12:05 – Chuck: What if I am using both a backend and a frontend? 12:11 – Ed: One repository? That’s when you will have to do a little hand packing on the... There are different opportunities there. If you have a bash script that does it for you. If not, then you can orchestrate it. Reduce the time it takes. If it’s an open source project; there’s 2 – what are you going to do with the other 8? You’d be surprised – people try to sneak that in there. 13:30 – Chuck: It seems like continuous integration isn’t a whole lot complicated. 13:39 – Ed: I am a simple guy that’s how I do it. You can do advanced stuff, though. The Cake Build system – they are doing some crazy things. We have got Windows, Lennox, and others. Are you building for Raspberries Pies, then okay, do this... It’s not just running a script. 15:00 – Chuck: People do get pretty complicated if they want. It can get complicated. Who knows? 15:26 – Chuck:  How much work do you have to do to set-up a Pipeline like that? 15:37 – Ed answers the question in detail. 16:03 – Chuck asks a question. 16:12 – Ed: Now this is where it gets contentious. If one fails... Our default task out of the box... 16:56 – Chuck: If you want 2 steps you can (like me who is crazy). 17:05 – Ed: Yes, I want to see if it failed. 17:17 – Chuck: Dude, writing code is hard. Once you have it built and tested – continuous deployment. 17:33 – Ed: It’s very easy. It’s super straightforward, it doesn’t have to be Azure (although I hope it is!). Ed continues this conversation. 18:43 – Chuck: And it just pulls it? 18:49 – Ed: Don’t poke holes into your firewall. We do give you a lot of flexibility 19:04 – Chuck: VPN credentials? 19:10 – Ed: Just run the... 19:25 – Chuck comments. 19:36 – Ed: ...Take that Zip... 20:02 – Ed: Once the planets are finely aligned then...it will just pull from it. 20:25 – Chuck: I host my stuff on Digital Ocean. 20:46 – Ed: It’s been awhile since I played with... 20:55 – Chuck. 20:59 – Ed and Chuck go back and forth with different situations and hypothetical situations. 21:10 – Ed: What is Phoenix? 21:20 – Chuck explains it. 21:25 – Ed: Here is what we probably don’t have is a lot of ERLANG support. 22:41 – Advertisement. 23:31 – Chuck: Let’s just say it’s a possibility. We took the strip down node and... 23:49 – Ed: I think it’s going to happen. 23:55 – Ed: Exactly. 24:02 – Chuck: Testing against Azure services. So, it’s one thing to run on my machine but it’s another thing when other things connect nicely with an Azure set-up. Does it connect natively once it’s in the Azure cloud? 24:35 – Ed: It should, but there are so many services, so I don’t want to say that everything is identical. We will say yes with an asterisk. 25:07 – Chuck: With continuous deployment... 25:41 – Ed: As an example: I have a CD Pipeline for my website. Every time I merge into master... Ed continues this hypothetical situation with full details. Check it out! 27:03 – Chuck: You probably can do just about anything – deploy by Tweet! 27:15 – Ed: You can stop the deployment if people on Twitter start complaining. 27:40 – Chuck: That is awesome! IF it is something you care about – and if it’s worth the time – then why not? If you don’t have to think about it then great. I have mentioned this before: Am I solving interesting problems? What projects do I want to work on? What kinds of contributions do I really want to contribute to open source? That’s the thing – if you have all these tools that are set-up then your process, how do you work on what, and remove the pain points then you can just write code so people can use! That’s the power of this – because it catches the bug before I have to catch it – then that saves me time. 30:08 – Ed: That’s the dream of computers is that the computers are supposed to make OUR lives easier. IF we can do that and catch those bugs before you catch it then you are saving time. Finding bugs as quickly as possible it avoids downtime and messy deployments. 31:03 – Chuck: Then you can use time for coding style and other things. I can take mental shortcuts. 31:37 – Ed: The other thing you can do is avoiding security problems. If a static code analysis tool catches an integer overflow then... 32:30 – Chuck adds his comments. Chuck: You can set your policy to block it or ignore it. Then you are running these tools to run security. There are third-party tools that do security analysis on your code. Do you integrate with those? 33:00 – Ed: Yep. My favorite is WhiteSource. It knows all of the open source and third-party tools. It can scan your code and... 34:05 – Chuck: It works with a lot of languages. 34:14 – Ed. 34:25 – Chuck: A lot of JavaScript developers are getting into mobile development, like Ionic, and others. You have all these systems out there for different stages for writing for mobile. Android, windows Phone, Blackberry... 35:04 – Ed: Let’s throw out Blackberry builds. We will ignore it. Mac OS dies a fine job. That’s why we have all of those. 35:29 – Chuck: But I want to run my tests, too! 35:36 – Ed: I really like to use App Center. It is ultimately incredible to see all the tests you can run. 36:29 – Chuck: The deployment is different, though, right? 36:40 – Ed: I have a friend who clicks a button in... Azure DevOps. 37:00 – Chuck: I like to remind people that this isn’t a new product. 37:15 – Ed: Yes, Azure DevOps. 37:24 – Chuck: Any new features that are coming out? 37:27 – Ed: We took a little break, but... 37:47 – Ed: We will pick back up once Ignite is over. We have a timeline on our website when we expect to launch some new features, and some are secret, so keep checking out the website. 39:07 – Chuck: What is the interplay between Azure DevOps and Visual Studio Code? Because they have plugins for freaking everything. I am sure there is something there that... 39:30 – Ed: I am a VI guy and I’m like 90% sure there is something there. You are an eMac’s guy? The way I think about it is through Git right out of the box. Yes, I think there are better things out there for integration. I know we have a lot of great things in Visual Code, because I worked with it. 40:45 – Chuck: Yes, people can look for extensions and see what the capabilities are. Chuck talks about code editor and tools.  41:28 – Ed: ... we have been pulling that out as quickly as possible. We do have IE extensions, I am sure there is something for VS Code – but it’s not where I want to spend my time. 42:02 – Chuck: Yes, sure. 42:07 – Ed: But everyone is different – they won’t work the way that I work. So there’s that. 42:30 – Ed: That Chuck. 42:36 – Chuck: Where do people get news? 42:42 – Ed: Go to here! 42:54 – Chuck: Where do people find you? 43:00 – Ed: Twitter! 43:07 – Chuck: Let’s do Picks! 43:20 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! Links: GitHub Microsoft’s Azure Microsoft’s Pipeline Azure DevOps Erlang WhiteSource Chuck’s Twitter Ed Thomson’s Twitter Ed Thomson’s GitHub Ed Thomson’s Website Ed Thomson’s LinkedIn Picks: Ed Podcast - All Things Git

Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guests: Ed Thomson In this episode, the Charles speaks with Ed Thomson who is a Program Manager at Azure through Microsoft, Developer, and Open Source Maintainer. Ed and Chuck discuss in full detail about Azure DevOps! Check out today’s episode to hear its new features and other exciting news! Show Topics: 0:59 – Live at Microsoft Ignite 1:03 – Ed: Hi! I am a Program Manager at Azure. 1:28 – Rewind 2 episodes to hear more about Azure DevOps! 1:51 – Ed: One of the moves from Pipelines to DevOps – they could still adopt Pipelines. Now that they are separate services – it’s great. 2:38 – Chuck talks about features he does and doesn’t use. 2:54 – Ed. 3:00 – Chuck: Repos and Pipelines. I am going to dive right in. Let’s talk about Repos. Microsoft just acquired GitHub. 3:18 – Ed: Technically we have not officially acquired GitHub. 3:34 – Chuck: It’s not done. It’s the end of September now. 3:55 – Ed: They will remain the same thing for a while. GitHub is the home for open source. Repos – we use it in Microsoft. Repositories are huge. There are 4,000 engineers working in these repositories. Everyone works in his or her own little area, and you have to work together. You have to do all this engineering to get there. We bit a tool and it basically if you run clone... Ed continues to talk about this topic. He is talking about One Drive and these repositories. 6:28 – Ed: We aren’t going to be mixing and matching. I used to work through GitHub. It’s exciting to see those people work close to me. 6:54 – Chuck. 6:59 – Ed: It has come a long way. 7:07 – Chuck: Beyond the FSF are we talking about other features or? 7:21 – Ed: We have unique features. We have branch policies. You can require that people do pole request. You have to use pole request and your CI has to pass and things like that. I think there is a lot of richness in our auditing. We have enterprise focus. At its core it still is Git. We can all interoperate. 8:17 – Chuck. 8:37 – Ed: You just can’t set it up with Apache. You have to figure it out. 8:51 – Chuck: The method of pushing and pulling. 9:06 – Chuck: You can try DevOps for free up to 5 users and unlimited private repos. People are interested in this because GitHub makes you pay for that. 9:38 – Ed and Chuck continue to talk. 9:50 – Ed: Pipelines is the most interesting thing we are working on. We have revamped the entire experience. Build and release. It’s easy to get started. We have a visual designer. Super helpful – super straightforward. Releases once your code is built – get it out to production say for example Azure. It’s the important thing to get your code out there. 10:55 – Chuck: How can someone start with this? 11:00 – Ed: Depends on where your repository is. It will look at your code. “Oh, I know what that is, I know how to build that!” Maybe everyone isn’t doing everything with JavaScript. If you are using DotNet then it will know. 12:05 – Chuck: What if I am using both a backend and a frontend? 12:11 – Ed: One repository? That’s when you will have to do a little hand packing on the... There are different opportunities there. If you have a bash script that does it for you. If not, then you can orchestrate it. Reduce the time it takes. If it’s an open source project; there’s 2 – what are you going to do with the other 8? You’d be surprised – people try to sneak that in there. 13:30 – Chuck: It seems like continuous integration isn’t a whole lot complicated. 13:39 – Ed: I am a simple guy that’s how I do it. You can do advanced stuff, though. The Cake Build system – they are doing some crazy things. We have got Windows, Lennox, and others. Are you building for Raspberries Pies, then okay, do this... It’s not just running a script. 15:00 – Chuck: People do get pretty complicated if they want. It can get complicated. Who knows? 15:26 – Chuck:  How much work do you have to do to set-up a Pipeline like that? 15:37 – Ed answers the question in detail. 16:03 – Chuck asks a question. 16:12 – Ed: Now this is where it gets contentious. If one fails... Our default task out of the box... 16:56 – Chuck: If you want 2 steps you can (like me who is crazy). 17:05 – Ed: Yes, I want to see if it failed. 17:17 – Chuck: Dude, writing code is hard. Once you have it built and tested – continuous deployment. 17:33 – Ed: It’s very easy. It’s super straightforward, it doesn’t have to be Azure (although I hope it is!). Ed continues this conversation. 18:43 – Chuck: And it just pulls it? 18:49 – Ed: Don’t poke holes into your firewall. We do give you a lot of flexibility 19:04 – Chuck: VPN credentials? 19:10 – Ed: Just run the... 19:25 – Chuck comments. 19:36 – Ed: ...Take that Zip... 20:02 – Ed: Once the planets are finely aligned then...it will just pull from it. 20:25 – Chuck: I host my stuff on Digital Ocean. 20:46 – Ed: It’s been awhile since I played with... 20:55 – Chuck. 20:59 – Ed and Chuck go back and forth with different situations and hypothetical situations. 21:10 – Ed: What is Phoenix? 21:20 – Chuck explains it. 21:25 – Ed: Here is what we probably don’t have is a lot of ERLANG support. 22:41 – Advertisement. 23:31 – Chuck: Let’s just say it’s a possibility. We took the strip down node and... 23:49 – Ed: I think it’s going to happen. 23:55 – Ed: Exactly. 24:02 – Chuck: Testing against Azure services. So, it’s one thing to run on my machine but it’s another thing when other things connect nicely with an Azure set-up. Does it connect natively once it’s in the Azure cloud? 24:35 – Ed: It should, but there are so many services, so I don’t want to say that everything is identical. We will say yes with an asterisk. 25:07 – Chuck: With continuous deployment... 25:41 – Ed: As an example: I have a CD Pipeline for my website. Every time I merge into master... Ed continues this hypothetical situation with full details. Check it out! 27:03 – Chuck: You probably can do just about anything – deploy by Tweet! 27:15 – Ed: You can stop the deployment if people on Twitter start complaining. 27:40 – Chuck: That is awesome! IF it is something you care about – and if it’s worth the time – then why not? If you don’t have to think about it then great. I have mentioned this before: Am I solving interesting problems? What projects do I want to work on? What kinds of contributions do I really want to contribute to open source? That’s the thing – if you have all these tools that are set-up then your process, how do you work on what, and remove the pain points then you can just write code so people can use! That’s the power of this – because it catches the bug before I have to catch it – then that saves me time. 30:08 – Ed: That’s the dream of computers is that the computers are supposed to make OUR lives easier. IF we can do that and catch those bugs before you catch it then you are saving time. Finding bugs as quickly as possible it avoids downtime and messy deployments. 31:03 – Chuck: Then you can use time for coding style and other things. I can take mental shortcuts. 31:37 – Ed: The other thing you can do is avoiding security problems. If a static code analysis tool catches an integer overflow then... 32:30 – Chuck adds his comments. Chuck: You can set your policy to block it or ignore it. Then you are running these tools to run security. There are third-party tools that do security analysis on your code. Do you integrate with those? 33:00 – Ed: Yep. My favorite is WhiteSource. It knows all of the open source and third-party tools. It can scan your code and... 34:05 – Chuck: It works with a lot of languages. 34:14 – Ed. 34:25 – Chuck: A lot of JavaScript developers are getting into mobile development, like Ionic, and others. You have all these systems out there for different stages for writing for mobile. Android, windows Phone, Blackberry... 35:04 – Ed: Let’s throw out Blackberry builds. We will ignore it. Mac OS dies a fine job. That’s why we have all of those. 35:29 – Chuck: But I want to run my tests, too! 35:36 – Ed: I really like to use App Center. It is ultimately incredible to see all the tests you can run. 36:29 – Chuck: The deployment is different, though, right? 36:40 – Ed: I have a friend who clicks a button in... Azure DevOps. 37:00 – Chuck: I like to remind people that this isn’t a new product. 37:15 – Ed: Yes, Azure DevOps. 37:24 – Chuck: Any new features that are coming out? 37:27 – Ed: We took a little break, but... 37:47 – Ed: We will pick back up once Ignite is over. We have a timeline on our website when we expect to launch some new features, and some are secret, so keep checking out the website. 39:07 – Chuck: What is the interplay between Azure DevOps and Visual Studio Code? Because they have plugins for freaking everything. I am sure there is something there that... 39:30 – Ed: I am a VI guy and I’m like 90% sure there is something there. You are an eMac’s guy? The way I think about it is through Git right out of the box. Yes, I think there are better things out there for integration. I know we have a lot of great things in Visual Code, because I worked with it. 40:45 – Chuck: Yes, people can look for extensions and see what the capabilities are. Chuck talks about code editor and tools.  41:28 – Ed: ... we have been pulling that out as quickly as possible. We do have IE extensions, I am sure there is something for VS Code – but it’s not where I want to spend my time. 42:02 – Chuck: Yes, sure. 42:07 – Ed: But everyone is different – they won’t work the way that I work. So there’s that. 42:30 – Ed: That Chuck. 42:36 – Chuck: Where do people get news? 42:42 – Ed: Go to here! 42:54 – Chuck: Where do people find you? 43:00 – Ed: Twitter! 43:07 – Chuck: Let’s do Picks! 43:20 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! Links: GitHub Microsoft’s Azure Microsoft’s Pipeline Azure DevOps Erlang WhiteSource Chuck’s Twitter Ed Thomson’s Twitter Ed Thomson’s GitHub Ed Thomson’s Website Ed Thomson’s LinkedIn Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Picks: Ed Podcast - All Things Git

Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guests: Ed Thomson In this episode, the Charles speaks with Ed Thomson who is a Program Manager at Azure through Microsoft, Developer, and Open Source Maintainer. Ed and Chuck discuss in full detail about Azure DevOps! Check out today’s episode to hear its new features and other exciting news! Show Topics: 0:59 – Live at Microsoft Ignite 1:03 – Ed: Hi! I am a Program Manager at Azure. 1:28 – Rewind 2 episodes to hear more about Azure DevOps! 1:51 – Ed: One of the moves from Pipelines to DevOps – they could still adopt Pipelines. Now that they are separate services – it’s great. 2:38 – Chuck talks about features he does and doesn’t use. 2:54 – Ed. 3:00 – Chuck: Repos and Pipelines. I am going to dive right in. Let’s talk about Repos. Microsoft just acquired GitHub. 3:18 – Ed: Technically we have not officially acquired GitHub. 3:34 – Chuck: It’s not done. It’s the end of September now. 3:55 – Ed: They will remain the same thing for a while. GitHub is the home for open source. Repos – we use it in Microsoft. Repositories are huge. There are 4,000 engineers working in these repositories. Everyone works in his or her own little area, and you have to work together. You have to do all this engineering to get there. We bit a tool and it basically if you run clone... Ed continues to talk about this topic. He is talking about One Drive and these repositories. 6:28 – Ed: We aren’t going to be mixing and matching. I used to work through GitHub. It’s exciting to see those people work close to me. 6:54 – Chuck. 6:59 – Ed: It has come a long way. 7:07 – Chuck: Beyond the FSF are we talking about other features or? 7:21 – Ed: We have unique features. We have branch policies. You can require that people do pole request. You have to use pole request and your CI has to pass and things like that. I think there is a lot of richness in our auditing. We have enterprise focus. At its core it still is Git. We can all interoperate. 8:17 – Chuck. 8:37 – Ed: You just can’t set it up with Apache. You have to figure it out. 8:51 – Chuck: The method of pushing and pulling. 9:06 – Chuck: You can try DevOps for free up to 5 users and unlimited private repos. People are interested in this because GitHub makes you pay for that. 9:38 – Ed and Chuck continue to talk. 9:50 – Ed: Pipelines is the most interesting thing we are working on. We have revamped the entire experience. Build and release. It’s easy to get started. We have a visual designer. Super helpful – super straightforward. Releases once your code is built – get it out to production say for example Azure. It’s the important thing to get your code out there. 10:55 – Chuck: How can someone start with this? 11:00 – Ed: Depends on where your repository is. It will look at your code. “Oh, I know what that is, I know how to build that!” Maybe everyone isn’t doing everything with JavaScript. If you are using DotNet then it will know. 12:05 – Chuck: What if I am using both a backend and a frontend? 12:11 – Ed: One repository? That’s when you will have to do a little hand packing on the... There are different opportunities there. If you have a bash script that does it for you. If not, then you can orchestrate it. Reduce the time it takes. If it’s an open source project; there’s 2 – what are you going to do with the other 8? You’d be surprised – people try to sneak that in there. 13:30 – Chuck: It seems like continuous integration isn’t a whole lot complicated. 13:39 – Ed: I am a simple guy that’s how I do it. You can do advanced stuff, though. The Cake Build system – they are doing some crazy things. We have got Windows, Lennox, and others. Are you building for Raspberries Pies, then okay, do this... It’s not just running a script. 15:00 – Chuck: People do get pretty complicated if they want. It can get complicated. Who knows? 15:26 – Chuck:  How much work do you have to do to set-up a Pipeline like that? 15:37 – Ed answers the question in detail. 16:03 – Chuck asks a question. 16:12 – Ed: Now this is where it gets contentious. If one fails... Our default task out of the box... 16:56 – Chuck: If you want 2 steps you can (like me who is crazy). 17:05 – Ed: Yes, I want to see if it failed. 17:17 – Chuck: Dude, writing code is hard. Once you have it built and tested – continuous deployment. 17:33 – Ed: It’s very easy. It’s super straightforward, it doesn’t have to be Azure (although I hope it is!). Ed continues this conversation. 18:43 – Chuck: And it just pulls it? 18:49 – Ed: Don’t poke holes into your firewall. We do give you a lot of flexibility 19:04 – Chuck: VPN credentials? 19:10 – Ed: Just run the... 19:25 – Chuck comments. 19:36 – Ed: ...Take that Zip... 20:02 – Ed: Once the planets are finely aligned then...it will just pull from it. 20:25 – Chuck: I host my stuff on Digital Ocean. 20:46 – Ed: It’s been awhile since I played with... 20:55 – Chuck. 20:59 – Ed and Chuck go back and forth with different situations and hypothetical situations. 21:10 – Ed: What is Phoenix? 21:20 – Chuck explains it. 21:25 – Ed: Here is what we probably don’t have is a lot of ERLANG support. 22:41 – Advertisement. 23:31 – Chuck: Let’s just say it’s a possibility. We took the strip down node and... 23:49 – Ed: I think it’s going to happen. 23:55 – Ed: Exactly. 24:02 – Chuck: Testing against Azure services. So, it’s one thing to run on my machine but it’s another thing when other things connect nicely with an Azure set-up. Does it connect natively once it’s in the Azure cloud? 24:35 – Ed: It should, but there are so many services, so I don’t want to say that everything is identical. We will say yes with an asterisk. 25:07 – Chuck: With continuous deployment... 25:41 – Ed: As an example: I have a CD Pipeline for my website. Every time I merge into master... Ed continues this hypothetical situation with full details. Check it out! 27:03 – Chuck: You probably can do just about anything – deploy by Tweet! 27:15 – Ed: You can stop the deployment if people on Twitter start complaining. 27:40 – Chuck: That is awesome! IF it is something you care about – and if it’s worth the time – then why not? If you don’t have to think about it then great. I have mentioned this before: Am I solving interesting problems? What projects do I want to work on? What kinds of contributions do I really want to contribute to open source? That’s the thing – if you have all these tools that are set-up then your process, how do you work on what, and remove the pain points then you can just write code so people can use! That’s the power of this – because it catches the bug before I have to catch it – then that saves me time. 30:08 – Ed: That’s the dream of computers is that the computers are supposed to make OUR lives easier. IF we can do that and catch those bugs before you catch it then you are saving time. Finding bugs as quickly as possible it avoids downtime and messy deployments. 31:03 – Chuck: Then you can use time for coding style and other things. I can take mental shortcuts. 31:37 – Ed: The other thing you can do is avoiding security problems. If a static code analysis tool catches an integer overflow then... 32:30 – Chuck adds his comments. Chuck: You can set your policy to block it or ignore it. Then you are running these tools to run security. There are third-party tools that do security analysis on your code. Do you integrate with those? 33:00 – Ed: Yep. My favorite is WhiteSource. It knows all of the open source and third-party tools. It can scan your code and... 34:05 – Chuck: It works with a lot of languages. 34:14 – Ed. 34:25 – Chuck: A lot of JavaScript developers are getting into mobile development, like Ionic, and others. You have all these systems out there for different stages for writing for mobile. Android, windows Phone, Blackberry... 35:04 – Ed: Let’s throw out Blackberry builds. We will ignore it. Mac OS dies a fine job. That’s why we have all of those. 35:29 – Chuck: But I want to run my tests, too! 35:36 – Ed: I really like to use App Center. It is ultimately incredible to see all the tests you can run. 36:29 – Chuck: The deployment is different, though, right? 36:40 – Ed: I have a friend who clicks a button in... Azure DevOps. 37:00 – Chuck: I like to remind people that this isn’t a new product. 37:15 – Ed: Yes, Azure DevOps. 37:24 – Chuck: Any new features that are coming out? 37:27 – Ed: We took a little break, but... 37:47 – Ed: We will pick back up once Ignite is over. We have a timeline on our website when we expect to launch some new features, and some are secret, so keep checking out the website. 39:07 – Chuck: What is the interplay between Azure DevOps and Visual Studio Code? Because they have plugins for freaking everything. I am sure there is something there that... 39:30 – Ed: I am a VI guy and I’m like 90% sure there is something there. You are an eMac’s guy? The way I think about it is through Git right out of the box. Yes, I think there are better things out there for integration. I know we have a lot of great things in Visual Code, because I worked with it. 40:45 – Chuck: Yes, people can look for extensions and see what the capabilities are. Chuck talks about code editor and tools.  41:28 – Ed: ... we have been pulling that out as quickly as possible. We do have IE extensions, I am sure there is something for VS Code – but it’s not where I want to spend my time. 42:02 – Chuck: Yes, sure. 42:07 – Ed: But everyone is different – they won’t work the way that I work. So there’s that. 42:30 – Ed: That Chuck. 42:36 – Chuck: Where do people get news? 42:42 – Ed: Go to here! 42:54 – Chuck: Where do people find you? 43:00 – Ed: Twitter! 43:07 – Chuck: Let’s do Picks! 43:20 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! Links: GitHub Microsoft’s Azure Microsoft’s Pipeline Azure DevOps Erlang WhiteSource Chuck’s Twitter Ed Thomson’s Twitter Ed Thomson’s GitHub Ed Thomson’s Website Ed Thomson’s LinkedIn Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Picks: Ed Podcast - All Things Git

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Sharon DiOrio This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Sharon DiOrio who is a lead software engineer at Achievement Network (ANet) and lives in Massachusetts! Chuck and Sharon talk about how she got into programming, her education, career highlights, and more! Check it out. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:41 – Chuck: Say “hello!” You were on episode 2 back in the day! 1:16 – Chuck: Can you tell people what you are up to? 1:19 – Sharon: The Angular landscape has changed quite a bit in the past 4 years. I am still using Angular! 1:37 – Chuck: It’s nice to hear people’s backgrounds and their thought process. Let’s talk about your story. To start out how did you get into programming? 2:03 – Sharon: I have a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts. The web wasn’t a thing, yet, and it wasn’t an option. 4:04 – Chuck: How did you go from there to Angular and JavaScript? 4:12 – Sharon: I have a soft spot in my heart for Code Fusion. I did Code Fusion and PHP and that paid the bills for a long time. In the mid-2000’s that some of this stuff was going away and the idea of “old is new.” What is going to be my evolution of a developer? The frameworks (at this time) were starting to mature. 8:01 – Chuck: You run an Angular Meetup, so how did that get started?  8:05 – Sharon shares her story. 9:25 – Chuck: I would like to find a group that does this or that – and people find their niche and get together. If it grows great – if not then you begin some great friendships. I would like room for more intimate Meetups. 10:18 – Chuck. 10:23 – Sharon. 10:27 – Chuck: You spoke at NG-Conf in 2014 and what are your tips for people who want to speak at these conferences. 10:50 – Sharon: Get experience talking in front of large audiences before the ACTUAL conference! Also, start with Meetups! 12:29 – Chuck: Just the practice of building good habits and making sure that you are really prepared. Don’t they offer coaching now? 12:45 – Sharon: Yep! 12:53 – Chuck: What other things have you done with Angular? 13:01 – Sharon: I have been mostly in applications. Then I moved into educational technology. 13:55 – Chuck: Yep I identify with that a lot – getting a better career, making a better life for yourself, etc. 14:15 – Sharon: Yep! 15:34 – Chuck: I have seen things like Common Core and seeing what my kids are doing in school. 16:00 – Sharon: Most of the criticisms that people have about Common Core are... 16:35 – Sharon: I have been working in the educational space, too, yes! I have been here for 3 years now and I have “tenure” in technology. 17:18 – Chuck: What are the things that you are most proud of? 17:21 – Sharon answers the question. 19:37 – Chuck: We have shows on React, Angular and others. It’s interesting to see how people are assessing these things. 19:56 – Sharon: Yeah the landscaping is so different from not that long ago! 20:10 – Chuck. 21:03 – Sharon: Yeah our management is using version 6. I am going to do it and not tell them. 21:35 – Chuck: Anything else that you want to shout-out about? 21:37 – Sharon: How you get answers to questions will shift in your life. Learning how to ask a question well is underestimated – it’s an art. What to provide, so you know exactly what to provide to him/her. 22:21 – Chuck: Yeah my brothers 22:47 – Sharon: My father told me the same thing: you need to speak well and write well. No matter what field you are going into. Also, empathy and soft skills are great skills to have, too. 23:35 – Chuck: It is easy to work on the technology b/c it’s either right or wrong. 23:48 – Sharon: I would love to see people wanting those skills within job posts. 24:20 – Chuck: I agree! It makes a big difference. Let’s do picks! 24:35  – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly Links: jQuery Angular JavaScript Vue React Chuck’s Twitter Chuck’s E-mail: chuck@devchat.tv JSJ 335 episode AiA 002 episode Sponsors: Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Chuck Interview Cake – use our code, please. Marathon (John Sonmez, friend) – St. George Marathon McKirdy Trained Garmin Watches Sharon Brave Browser DevChat TV Programming for people who didn’t go the traditional way!

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Sharon DiOrio This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Sharon DiOrio who is a lead software engineer at Achievement Network (ANet) and lives in Massachusetts! Chuck and Sharon talk about how she got into programming, her education, career highlights, and more! Check it out. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:41 – Chuck: Say “hello!” You were on episode 2 back in the day! 1:16 – Chuck: Can you tell people what you are up to? 1:19 – Sharon: The Angular landscape has changed quite a bit in the past 4 years. I am still using Angular! 1:37 – Chuck: It’s nice to hear people’s backgrounds and their thought process. Let’s talk about your story. To start out how did you get into programming? 2:03 – Sharon: I have a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts. The web wasn’t a thing, yet, and it wasn’t an option. 4:04 – Chuck: How did you go from there to Angular and JavaScript? 4:12 – Sharon: I have a soft spot in my heart for Code Fusion. I did Code Fusion and PHP and that paid the bills for a long time. In the mid-2000’s that some of this stuff was going away and the idea of “old is new.” What is going to be my evolution of a developer? The frameworks (at this time) were starting to mature. 8:01 – Chuck: You run an Angular Meetup, so how did that get started?  8:05 – Sharon shares her story. 9:25 – Chuck: I would like to find a group that does this or that – and people find their niche and get together. If it grows great – if not then you begin some great friendships. I would like room for more intimate Meetups. 10:18 – Chuck. 10:23 – Sharon. 10:27 – Chuck: You spoke at NG-Conf in 2014 and what are your tips for people who want to speak at these conferences. 10:50 – Sharon: Get experience talking in front of large audiences before the ACTUAL conference! Also, start with Meetups! 12:29 – Chuck: Just the practice of building good habits and making sure that you are really prepared. Don’t they offer coaching now? 12:45 – Sharon: Yep! 12:53 – Chuck: What other things have you done with Angular? 13:01 – Sharon: I have been mostly in applications. Then I moved into educational technology. 13:55 – Chuck: Yep I identify with that a lot – getting a better career, making a better life for yourself, etc. 14:15 – Sharon: Yep! 15:34 – Chuck: I have seen things like Common Core and seeing what my kids are doing in school. 16:00 – Sharon: Most of the criticisms that people have about Common Core are... 16:35 – Sharon: I have been working in the educational space, too, yes! I have been here for 3 years now and I have “tenure” in technology. 17:18 – Chuck: What are the things that you are most proud of? 17:21 – Sharon answers the question. 19:37 – Chuck: We have shows on React, Angular and others. It’s interesting to see how people are assessing these things. 19:56 – Sharon: Yeah the landscaping is so different from not that long ago! 20:10 – Chuck. 21:03 – Sharon: Yeah our management is using version 6. I am going to do it and not tell them. 21:35 – Chuck: Anything else that you want to shout-out about? 21:37 – Sharon: How you get answers to questions will shift in your life. Learning how to ask a question well is underestimated – it’s an art. What to provide, so you know exactly what to provide to him/her. 22:21 – Chuck: Yeah my brothers 22:47 – Sharon: My father told me the same thing: you need to speak well and write well. No matter what field you are going into. Also, empathy and soft skills are great skills to have, too. 23:35 – Chuck: It is easy to work on the technology b/c it’s either right or wrong. 23:48 – Sharon: I would love to see people wanting those skills within job posts. 24:20 – Chuck: I agree! It makes a big difference. Let’s do picks! 24:35  – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly Links: jQuery Angular JavaScript Vue React Chuck’s Twitter Chuck’s E-mail: chuck@devchat.tv JSJ 335 episode AiA 002 episode Sponsors: Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Chuck Interview Cake – use our code, please. Marathon (John Sonmez, friend) – St. George Marathon McKirdy Trained Garmin Watches Sharon Brave Browser DevChat TV Programming for people who didn’t go the traditional way!

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Sharon DiOrio This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Sharon DiOrio who is a lead software engineer at Achievement Network (ANet) and lives in Massachusetts! Chuck and Sharon talk about how she got into programming, her education, career highlights, and more! Check it out. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:41 – Chuck: Say “hello!” You were on episode 2 back in the day! 1:16 – Chuck: Can you tell people what you are up to? 1:19 – Sharon: The Angular landscape has changed quite a bit in the past 4 years. I am still using Angular! 1:37 – Chuck: It’s nice to hear people’s backgrounds and their thought process. Let’s talk about your story. To start out how did you get into programming? 2:03 – Sharon: I have a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts. The web wasn’t a thing, yet, and it wasn’t an option. 4:04 – Chuck: How did you go from there to Angular and JavaScript? 4:12 – Sharon: I have a soft spot in my heart for Code Fusion. I did Code Fusion and PHP and that paid the bills for a long time. In the mid-2000’s that some of this stuff was going away and the idea of “old is new.” What is going to be my evolution of a developer? The frameworks (at this time) were starting to mature. 8:01 – Chuck: You run an Angular Meetup, so how did that get started?  8:05 – Sharon shares her story. 9:25 – Chuck: I would like to find a group that does this or that – and people find their niche and get together. If it grows great – if not then you begin some great friendships. I would like room for more intimate Meetups. 10:18 – Chuck. 10:23 – Sharon. 10:27 – Chuck: You spoke at NG-Conf in 2014 and what are your tips for people who want to speak at these conferences. 10:50 – Sharon: Get experience talking in front of large audiences before the ACTUAL conference! Also, start with Meetups! 12:29 – Chuck: Just the practice of building good habits and making sure that you are really prepared. Don’t they offer coaching now? 12:45 – Sharon: Yep! 12:53 – Chuck: What other things have you done with Angular? 13:01 – Sharon: I have been mostly in applications. Then I moved into educational technology. 13:55 – Chuck: Yep I identify with that a lot – getting a better career, making a better life for yourself, etc. 14:15 – Sharon: Yep! 15:34 – Chuck: I have seen things like Common Core and seeing what my kids are doing in school. 16:00 – Sharon: Most of the criticisms that people have about Common Core are... 16:35 – Sharon: I have been working in the educational space, too, yes! I have been here for 3 years now and I have “tenure” in technology. 17:18 – Chuck: What are the things that you are most proud of? 17:21 – Sharon answers the question. 19:37 – Chuck: We have shows on React, Angular and others. It’s interesting to see how people are assessing these things. 19:56 – Sharon: Yeah the landscaping is so different from not that long ago! 20:10 – Chuck. 21:03 – Sharon: Yeah our management is using version 6. I am going to do it and not tell them. 21:35 – Chuck: Anything else that you want to shout-out about? 21:37 – Sharon: How you get answers to questions will shift in your life. Learning how to ask a question well is underestimated – it’s an art. What to provide, so you know exactly what to provide to him/her. 22:21 – Chuck: Yeah my brothers 22:47 – Sharon: My father told me the same thing: you need to speak well and write well. No matter what field you are going into. Also, empathy and soft skills are great skills to have, too. 23:35 – Chuck: It is easy to work on the technology b/c it’s either right or wrong. 23:48 – Sharon: I would love to see people wanting those skills within job posts. 24:20 – Chuck: I agree! It makes a big difference. Let’s do picks! 24:35  – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly Links: jQuery Angular JavaScript Vue React Chuck’s Twitter Chuck’s E-mail: chuck@devchat.tv JSJ 335 episode AiA 002 episode Sponsors: Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Chuck Interview Cake – use our code, please. Marathon (John Sonmez, friend) – St. George Marathon McKirdy Trained Garmin Watches Sharon Brave Browser DevChat TV Programming for people who didn’t go the traditional way!

Panel: Chris Fritz Charles Max Wood In this episode, the panel consists of Chris and Charles who talk about developer freedom. Chuck talks about his new show called The DevRev. The guys also talk about time management, answering e-mails, being self-employed, and their goals/hopes/dreams that they want to achieve in life. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement – Kendo UI 0:30 – Chuck: Hi! Today our panel is Chris and myself. My new show is The DevRev. There is a lot of aspect of our job that boil down to freedom. Figure out what they like to do and eliminate the things that they don’t like to do. I think it will be 5x a week and I will have a guest every week. What does freedom mean to you? What is your ideal coding situation where you don’t starve? 2:10 – Chris: Let me take a step-back. Why I got into coding it was even before that and it was education. I wanted to work with schools and not necessarily tied to only one school. As a programmer I cannot be asked to do things that I don’t agree with. 3:21 – Chuck: A lot of this thought-process came up b/c of my initial steps into my self-employment. I wanted to go to my son’s activities. I saw freelancing as an option and then had to do that b/c I got laid-off. I hate being told what to do. I have an HOA in my neighborhood and I hate it. They tell me when and how to mow my lawn. This is how I operate it. I hate that they tell me to mow my lawn. I want to talk to people who I want to talk to – that’s my idea of freedom. Everyone’s different idea of what “freedom” is will be different. 5:36 – Chris: I want more time to create more free stuff. Chris talks about DEV experience. 6:28 – Chuck: How did you get to that point of figuring out what you want to do? 6:44 – Chris: I still am figuring that out. I do have a lot of opportunities that are really exciting for me. It’s deciding what I like at that moment and choosing what I want to do vs. not what is going to wear me down. I don’t want to die with regret. There is a distinction between bad tired and good tired. You weren’t true to what you thought was right – and so you don’t settle easy. You toss and turn. I want to end with “good tired” both for the end of the day and for the end of my life. 8:00 – Chuck: I agree with that and I really identify with that. 8:44 – Chris: How do you measure yourself? 8:54 – Chuck: It’s hard to quantify it in only one idea. It’s hard to measure. I list out 5 things I need to do to get me closer to my [one] big goal. I have to get those 5 things done. Most of the time I can make it and I keep grinding on it before I can be done. 9:51 – Chris: My bar is pretty low. Is there more joy / more happiness in the world today in the world b/c of what I’ve done today? I know I will make mistakes in code – and that hurts, no day will be perfect. I try to have a net positive affect everyday. 10:53 – Chris: I can fall easily into depression if I have too many bad days back-to-back. 11:03 – Chuck: I agree and I have to take time off if that happens. 11:13 – Chris talks about open source work and he mentions HOPE IN SOURCE, also Babel. 12:23 – Chuck: When I got to church and there is this component of being together and working towards the same goals. It’s more than just community. There is a real – something in common that we have. 12:57 – Chris: Do you think it’s similar to open source? 13:05 – Chuck: You can watch a podcast in-lieu of an actual in-person sermon. In my church community it’s – Building Each Other Up. It’s not the same for when I contribute to open source. 13:43 – Chris: I ask myself: Is it of value? If I were to die would that work help progress the humankind? By the time I die - I will be completely useless b/c everything in my head is out there in other peoples’ heads. 14:35 – Chuck: When I am gone – I want someone to step into my void and continue that. These shows should be able to go on even if I am not around. I want to make sure that these shows can keep going. 15:48 – Chris: How can we build each other up? We want to have opportunities to grow. I try to provide that for members of the team and vice versa. The amount of respect that I have seen in my communities is quite amazing. I admire Thorsten on the Vue team a lot. (Thorsten’s Twitter.) He talked about compassion and how to communicate with each other and code with compassion. That’s better community and better software. You are forced to thin from multiple perspectives. You want to learn from these various perspectives. 17:44 – Chuck: The ideas behind the camaraderie are great. 17:56 – Chris: And Sarah Drasner! 18:38 – Chuck: She probably feels fulfilled when she helps you out (Sarah). 18:54 – Chuck: We all have to look for those opportunities and take them! 19:08 – Chuck: We have been talking about personal fulfillment. For me writing some awesome code in Vue there is Boiler Plate or running the tests. 19:52 – Chuck: What tools light you up? 20:02 – Chris: I am a bit of a weirdo. I feel pretty good when I am hitting myself against a wall for 9 hours. I like feeling obsessed about something and defeating it. I love it. 21:21 – Chuck: The things that make you bang your head against the wall is awful for me. I like writing code that helps someone. (Chris: I like the challenge.) We will be charged up for different things. You like the challenge and it empowers me to help others out. 22:21 – Chris: I like learning more about how something works. I want to save people a lot of work. There has to be a social connection or I will have a hard time even attempting it. 22:52 – Chris: I also play video games where there are no social connections. I played the Witness a few months ago and I loved the puzzles. 23:45 – Chuck: What other tools are you using? 23:57 – Chris: Webpack is the best took for creating the ideal development scenario. 24:47 – Chuck mentions Boiler Plate. 25:00 – Chris: It was built to help large teams and/or large applications.  I built some other projects like: Hello Vue Components & (with John Papa) Vue Monolith Example. 27:07 – Chuck: Anything else that you consider to be “freeing?” 27:13 – Chris: I like working from home. I like having my routines – they make me happy and productive. Having full control over that makes me happy. The only thing I have is my wife and my cat. 28:12 – Chuck: Yeah I don’t miss driving through traffic. 28:44 – Chris: I don’t like to be around people all day. 30:40 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 31:05 – Chris: Online I get a couple dozen people reaching out to me for different things: completely out-of-the-blue. I want to respond to most of those people but... 33:12 – Chuck: If it’s not on my calendar it won’t happen. I will get those e-mails that can be very time consuming. 33:35 – Chris: When they are asking for something “simple” – it’s not always simple. 34:30 – Chuck: I want to help everybody and that can be a problem. 35:02 – Chris: They are reaching out to me and I want to help. 35:56 – Chuck and Chris go back-and-forth. 36:18 – Chris: How do you figure out how to write a short enough response to the email – to only do 30 minutes? 36:44 – Chuck: Can I answer it in one minute? Nope – so it will go into another pile later in the week. I’ve replied saying: Here is my short-answer and for the long-answer see these references. I star those e-mails that will take too long to respond. 37:50 – Chris and Chuck go back-and-forth. 38:06 – Chuck: Your question is so good – here is the link to the blog that I wrote. 38:37 – Chris: I want to document to point people HERE to past blogs that I’ve written or to someone else’s blog. I feel guilty when I have to delegate. 39:35 – Chuck: I don’t have a problem delegating b/c that’s why I’m paying them. Everyone has his or her own role.  40:40 – Chris: Yeah that makes sense when it’s their job. 41:30 – Chuck: I know working together as a team will free me up in my areas of excellence. 41:49 – Chris: I am having a hard time with this right now. 43:36 – Chuck: We are looking for someone to fill this role and this is the job description. This way you can be EXCELLENT at what you do. You aren’t being pulled too thin. 44:19 – Chris: I have been trying to delegate more. 45:04 – Chuck: Yeah I have been trying to do more with my business, too. What do I want to do in the community? What is my focus? What is my mission and values for the business? Then you knock it out of the park! 45:51 – Chris: As a teacher it is really helpful and really not helpful. You are leading and shaping their experiences. You don’t have options to delegate. 46:27 – Chuck: Yeah my mother is a math teacher. 46:37 – Chuck: Yeah she has 10 kids, so she helps to delegate with force. She is the department head for mathematics and she does delegate some things. It’s you to teach the course. 47:18 – Chris: What promoted you to start this podcast? Is it more personal? 47:30 – Chuck talks about why he is starting this new podcast. 48:10 – Chuck: My business coach said to me: write a mission statement. When I did that things started having clarity for me. Chuck talks about the plan for the DevRev! 55:20 – Chris: I am looking forward to it! 55:34 – Chuck: It will be recorded via video through YouTube, too, in addition to iTunes (hopefully). 55:52 – Chris & Chuck: Picks! 55:58 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! DEVCHAT code. 30-day trial. Links: Vue React JavaScript C# C++ C++ Programming / Memory Management Angular Blazor JavaScript DevChat TV VueCLI Boiler Plate Hello Vue Components Vue Monolith Example Thorsten’s Twitter Sarah’s Twitter Ben Hong’s Twitter Jacob Schatz’ Twitter Vue Vixens The DevRev Sponsors: Fresh Books Cache Fly Kendo UI Get A Coder Job! Picks: Chris Vue Vixens Charles repurpose.io MFCEO Project Podcast Game - Test Version

Panel: Eric Berry Dave Kimura David Richards Charles Max Wood In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk amongst themselves on today’s topic, which is “speculation on frameworks.” They consider where the tech community currently is right now, and where it’s heading towards the future. They bring-up topics such as: Rails, Ruby, Angular, Agile, and much more. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:47 – Chuck: Check out the DevRev 2:08 – Panel: A topic about “speculation” would be great today. What are we seeing in the community: what we like/don’t like, and what would you want to change? He talks about action text, JavaScript framework, and more. 3:41 – Chuck: Service-side rendering is what we talked about in the past. Divya does this with service–side rendering. For content sites that approach makes a lot of sense. I have playing around with this for the past week or so. I was taking it to rendering it to text. 4:39 – Panel: Yeah, that’s the way to go. 5:29 – Chuck: You are talking about a fully side UI. 5:45 – Panel: I thought it was just my age so I am glad we are talking about this. The hip kids want to make these beautiful frontend sites. I want to keep it simple and then justify more later. I guess I would never be as hip but as long as my stuff gets out there – that’s all that matters to me. 6:28 – Panel: Yeah don’t get me wrong...nobody will want to develop your product if it was built 30 years ago. If it is a startup you want it to look good with a nice UI. Nobody will purchase if it looks outdated. How much maintenance do I want to invest into this? Why add another component into that if you cannot maintain it. 7:56 – Chuck: Yeah I have come into this issue while building the Podcast Service that I am creating. 8:25 – Panel: These are good frameworks and they feel great. I don’t realize the complexity that I am taking on sometimes. I have a lot of complexity on my hands: did I need it? 9:02 – Chuck: Sometimes my problem is that I am trying to pull it in after-the-fact. Like the forms to animate or this and that have to slide in. I want a natural feel to the UX. I looked at React and then I didn’t go that way. I have been podcasting about Angular for 4 years, but it was a no-go for my project. For my solution – it makes sense to just get it going and get it rolling. 10:45 – Panel: When we do use Action Vue we are prone to get lazy. What I mean by that is making database calls. 12:01 – Panel: You can think: Inside-Out! That creates an identity around the project. If I can think of that before going in, then everyone knows what we are doing and what their role is. It’s really obvious. Simple things grow into bigger things. I am a fan of service-side objects. It’s a daily work process. That feels good to me and it’s programmatic for me. 13:24 – Chuck: You aren’t saying: I don’t want or I don’t need ... what you are saying is: I will get this tool when I need it. 13:45 – Panel: You can say: “Hey this is what we are going to do and WHY we are going to do it.” It’s nice to come back to old projects and to see that it’s still solid. It’s nice to see that and people own that software and didn’t have to keep updating. 15:06 – Chuck: It reminds me of the Agile development stuff. The approach between Angular and React and Vue are fairly different. They are reasonably different. There will be tradeoffs between which one to use. When you are making that decision then you can make the appropriate decision on that. 16:10 – Panel: I remember in the prior years when the Rails community grew their own people and you were a RAILS person; now it’s you’re a WEB person.  17:43 – Panel: In a lot of cases it’s good to see what’s out there and to see what’s new; especially early on if they end up being ahead of their time. Then you are an early pioneer in that area. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you are introducing new things into your core you are running into unforeseeable risks. I am not an early adapter of React, but I know enough of the pros and cons of the framework. 19:48 – Panel: I like that. Maybe I “should” adapt that framework and maybe I am not the right person to do so. 21:06 – Chuck: Dave brought us to a new topic and that’s: being an early adapter. Some people want a name, some people want to invent stuff and so many more reasons “why.” I don’t want to “poo poo” the idea but you need to know WHY. 21:48 – Panel: The cost of developers is A LOT. I just think if I was building a house and I had that expense then I better get a really nice house out of it. I want to do a good job and that’s important. On the business – side they have to rely on us and decisions that are in the best interest for everyone. 22:50 – Fresh Books! 23:53 – Chuck: So what do you guys think about: what’s coming? Do you feel like things are going to move away from frontend frameworks? Will there be a large adoption curve? 24:30 – Panel: If we are talking about the space of Ruby on Rails then you want it to be maintainable. You don’t want to steer too far away from its core. 28:11 – Panel: Good I like that. There are great tools that we are getting through Google, Facebook and they have great tools for these apps. They are looking for the 1-person startup very much like Basecamp. It’s all possible that we are holding onto these technologies that are great but does it fit ME. Do I want to maintain things? Do I want to make this more complicated? Especially if I really don’t fit into what I’m trying to do. 29:13 – Panel: Yeah some people in the DOT NET world they were really struggling with some modern approaches. 30:42 – Panel: One of our listeners texted me b/c we are recording LIVE. Panelist reads off from a listener’s text message that uses a quote. 31:16 – Panel: When I started Ruby it was a PHP project and I couldn’t get there. I didn’t have enough bandwidth. It was easy for me to build the RAILS way. 32:02 – Chuck: I was introduced to PHP in college, early 2000’s. I really enjoyed it and I was fairly productive and then I found Rails. 32:27 – Panelist talks about PHP, flash frontend, and more. 34:42 – Chuck: Could and will something come along that will affect the way we write code? 34:56 – Panel: Yes, b/c I think technology is sustainable for a certain amount of time before things start to change again. Look at the iPhones and the Android phones. 38:26 – Panel: I think it takes time to do something well. Panelist talks about Rails, Ruby, data, and more! 40:25 – Panel: It’s interesting b/c the tradeoff used to be much bigger. The bandwidth is better, the screens are better, the way we do things are better. There is much of a tradeoff. That’s how people are interacting with our business and our products. I tend to write these flowery articles that I don’t publish. There was something in the air and in the mid-2000’s we were launching Netflix, and all of these things were happening at that time. A lot is happening now but it’s different now. Where are we going? Where would I be happy to work? If we can get on the phone and inside of our data and it just adds more value. It’s not an easy answer to “Where are we going?” but it’s good to talk about it b/c people might be afraid to ask and to answer. 43:13 – Chuck: Anything else or picks? 43:19 – Panel: We are saying today: we aren’t trying to break-out of this bubble, but we are saying: let’s get closer to the user and there is so much opportunity in THIS space!! 44:10 – Panel: The technology is tapped-out right now. 44:50 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course The DevRev Podcast Show Angular DevChat TV Ruby Elixir Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React Jest.io Mocha.js Book: Desert Cabal Habits for Hackers Home Depot: DeWalt Harbor Freight 11ty Masterminds Webinar Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Dave Dewalt Drill Dust Collector David Habits for Hackers Desert Cabal (for funnies) Charles Mastermind Hunter 11ty.io

Panel: Eric Berry Dave Kimura David Richards Charles Max Wood In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk amongst themselves on today’s topic, which is “speculation on frameworks.” They consider where the tech community currently is right now, and where it’s heading towards the future. They bring-up topics such as: Rails, Ruby, Angular, Agile, and much more. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:47 – Chuck: Check out the DevRev 2:08 – Panel: A topic about “speculation” would be great today. What are we seeing in the community: what we like/don’t like, and what would you want to change? He talks about action text, JavaScript framework, and more. 3:41 – Chuck: Service-side rendering is what we talked about in the past. Divya does this with service–side rendering. For content sites that approach makes a lot of sense. I have playing around with this for the past week or so. I was taking it to rendering it to text. 4:39 – Panel: Yeah, that’s the way to go. 5:29 – Chuck: You are talking about a fully side UI. 5:45 – Panel: I thought it was just my age so I am glad we are talking about this. The hip kids want to make these beautiful frontend sites. I want to keep it simple and then justify more later. I guess I would never be as hip but as long as my stuff gets out there – that’s all that matters to me. 6:28 – Panel: Yeah don’t get me wrong...nobody will want to develop your product if it was built 30 years ago. If it is a startup you want it to look good with a nice UI. Nobody will purchase if it looks outdated. How much maintenance do I want to invest into this? Why add another component into that if you cannot maintain it. 7:56 – Chuck: Yeah I have come into this issue while building the Podcast Service that I am creating. 8:25 – Panel: These are good frameworks and they feel great. I don’t realize the complexity that I am taking on sometimes. I have a lot of complexity on my hands: did I need it? 9:02 – Chuck: Sometimes my problem is that I am trying to pull it in after-the-fact. Like the forms to animate or this and that have to slide in. I want a natural feel to the UX. I looked at React and then I didn’t go that way. I have been podcasting about Angular for 4 years, but it was a no-go for my project. For my solution – it makes sense to just get it going and get it rolling. 10:45 – Panel: When we do use Action Vue we are prone to get lazy. What I mean by that is making database calls. 12:01 – Panel: You can think: Inside-Out! That creates an identity around the project. If I can think of that before going in, then everyone knows what we are doing and what their role is. It’s really obvious. Simple things grow into bigger things. I am a fan of service-side objects. It’s a daily work process. That feels good to me and it’s programmatic for me. 13:24 – Chuck: You aren’t saying: I don’t want or I don’t need ... what you are saying is: I will get this tool when I need it. 13:45 – Panel: You can say: “Hey this is what we are going to do and WHY we are going to do it.” It’s nice to come back to old projects and to see that it’s still solid. It’s nice to see that and people own that software and didn’t have to keep updating. 15:06 – Chuck: It reminds me of the Agile development stuff. The approach between Angular and React and Vue are fairly different. They are reasonably different. There will be tradeoffs between which one to use. When you are making that decision then you can make the appropriate decision on that. 16:10 – Panel: I remember in the prior years when the Rails community grew their own people and you were a RAILS person; now it’s you’re a WEB person.  17:43 – Panel: In a lot of cases it’s good to see what’s out there and to see what’s new; especially early on if they end up being ahead of their time. Then you are an early pioneer in that area. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you are introducing new things into your core you are running into unforeseeable risks. I am not an early adapter of React, but I know enough of the pros and cons of the framework. 19:48 – Panel: I like that. Maybe I “should” adapt that framework and maybe I am not the right person to do so. 21:06 – Chuck: Dave brought us to a new topic and that’s: being an early adapter. Some people want a name, some people want to invent stuff and so many more reasons “why.” I don’t want to “poo poo” the idea but you need to know WHY. 21:48 – Panel: The cost of developers is A LOT. I just think if I was building a house and I had that expense then I better get a really nice house out of it. I want to do a good job and that’s important. On the business – side they have to rely on us and decisions that are in the best interest for everyone. 22:50 – Fresh Books! 23:53 – Chuck: So what do you guys think about: what’s coming? Do you feel like things are going to move away from frontend frameworks? Will there be a large adoption curve? 24:30 – Panel: If we are talking about the space of Ruby on Rails then you want it to be maintainable. You don’t want to steer too far away from its core. 28:11 – Panel: Good I like that. There are great tools that we are getting through Google, Facebook and they have great tools for these apps. They are looking for the 1-person startup very much like Basecamp. It’s all possible that we are holding onto these technologies that are great but does it fit ME. Do I want to maintain things? Do I want to make this more complicated? Especially if I really don’t fit into what I’m trying to do. 29:13 – Panel: Yeah some people in the DOT NET world they were really struggling with some modern approaches. 30:42 – Panel: One of our listeners texted me b/c we are recording LIVE. Panelist reads off from a listener’s text message that uses a quote. 31:16 – Panel: When I started Ruby it was a PHP project and I couldn’t get there. I didn’t have enough bandwidth. It was easy for me to build the RAILS way. 32:02 – Chuck: I was introduced to PHP in college, early 2000’s. I really enjoyed it and I was fairly productive and then I found Rails. 32:27 – Panelist talks about PHP, flash frontend, and more. 34:42 – Chuck: Could and will something come along that will affect the way we write code? 34:56 – Panel: Yes, b/c I think technology is sustainable for a certain amount of time before things start to change again. Look at the iPhones and the Android phones. 38:26 – Panel: I think it takes time to do something well. Panelist talks about Rails, Ruby, data, and more! 40:25 – Panel: It’s interesting b/c the tradeoff used to be much bigger. The bandwidth is better, the screens are better, the way we do things are better. There is much of a tradeoff. That’s how people are interacting with our business and our products. I tend to write these flowery articles that I don’t publish. There was something in the air and in the mid-2000’s we were launching Netflix, and all of these things were happening at that time. A lot is happening now but it’s different now. Where are we going? Where would I be happy to work? If we can get on the phone and inside of our data and it just adds more value. It’s not an easy answer to “Where are we going?” but it’s good to talk about it b/c people might be afraid to ask and to answer. 43:13 – Chuck: Anything else or picks? 43:19 – Panel: We are saying today: we aren’t trying to break-out of this bubble, but we are saying: let’s get closer to the user and there is so much opportunity in THIS space!! 44:10 – Panel: The technology is tapped-out right now. 44:50 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course The DevRev Podcast Show Angular DevChat TV Ruby Elixir Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React Jest.io Mocha.js Book: Desert Cabal Habits for Hackers Home Depot: DeWalt Harbor Freight 11ty Masterminds Webinar Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Dave Dewalt Drill Dust Collector David Habits for Hackers Desert Cabal (for funnies) Charles Mastermind Hunter 11ty.io

Panel: Chris Fritz Charles Max Wood In this episode, the panel consists of Chris and Charles who talk about developer freedom. Chuck talks about his new show called The DevRev. The guys also talk about time management, answering e-mails, being self-employed, and their goals/hopes/dreams that they want to achieve in life. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement – Kendo UI 0:30 – Chuck: Hi! Today our panel is Chris and myself. My new show is The DevRev. There is a lot of aspect of our job that boil down to freedom. Figure out what they like to do and eliminate the things that they don’t like to do. I think it will be 5x a week and I will have a guest every week. What does freedom mean to you? What is your ideal coding situation where you don’t starve? 2:10 – Chris: Let me take a step-back. Why I got into coding it was even before that and it was education. I wanted to work with schools and not necessarily tied to only one school. As a programmer I cannot be asked to do things that I don’t agree with. 3:21 – Chuck: A lot of this thought-process came up b/c of my initial steps into my self-employment. I wanted to go to my son’s activities. I saw freelancing as an option and then had to do that b/c I got laid-off. I hate being told what to do. I have an HOA in my neighborhood and I hate it. They tell me when and how to mow my lawn. This is how I operate it. I hate that they tell me to mow my lawn. I want to talk to people who I want to talk to – that’s my idea of freedom. Everyone’s different idea of what “freedom” is will be different. 5:36 – Chris: I want more time to create more free stuff. Chris talks about DEV experience. 6:28 – Chuck: How did you get to that point of figuring out what you want to do? 6:44 – Chris: I still am figuring that out. I do have a lot of opportunities that are really exciting for me. It’s deciding what I like at that moment and choosing what I want to do vs. not what is going to wear me down. I don’t want to die with regret. There is a distinction between bad tired and good tired. You weren’t true to what you thought was right – and so you don’t settle easy. You toss and turn. I want to end with “good tired” both for the end of the day and for the end of my life. 8:00 – Chuck: I agree with that and I really identify with that. 8:44 – Chris: How do you measure yourself? 8:54 – Chuck: It’s hard to quantify it in only one idea. It’s hard to measure. I list out 5 things I need to do to get me closer to my [one] big goal. I have to get those 5 things done. Most of the time I can make it and I keep grinding on it before I can be done. 9:51 – Chris: My bar is pretty low. Is there more joy / more happiness in the world today in the world b/c of what I’ve done today? I know I will make mistakes in code – and that hurts, no day will be perfect. I try to have a net positive affect everyday. 10:53 – Chris: I can fall easily into depression if I have too many bad days back-to-back. 11:03 – Chuck: I agree and I have to take time off if that happens. 11:13 – Chris talks about open source work and he mentions HOPE IN SOURCE, also Babel. 12:23 – Chuck: When I got to church and there is this component of being together and working towards the same goals. It’s more than just community. There is a real – something in common that we have. 12:57 – Chris: Do you think it’s similar to open source? 13:05 – Chuck: You can watch a podcast in-lieu of an actual in-person sermon. In my church community it’s – Building Each Other Up. It’s not the same for when I contribute to open source. 13:43 – Chris: I ask myself: Is it of value? If I were to die would that work help progress the humankind? By the time I die - I will be completely useless b/c everything in my head is out there in other peoples’ heads. 14:35 – Chuck: When I am gone – I want someone to step into my void and continue that. These shows should be able to go on even if I am not around. I want to make sure that these shows can keep going. 15:48 – Chris: How can we build each other up? We want to have opportunities to grow. I try to provide that for members of the team and vice versa. The amount of respect that I have seen in my communities is quite amazing. I admire Thorsten on the Vue team a lot. (Thorsten’s Twitter.) He talked about compassion and how to communicate with each other and code with compassion. That’s better community and better software. You are forced to thin from multiple perspectives. You want to learn from these various perspectives. 17:44 – Chuck: The ideas behind the camaraderie are great. 17:56 – Chris: And Sarah Drasner! 18:38 – Chuck: She probably feels fulfilled when she helps you out (Sarah). 18:54 – Chuck: We all have to look for those opportunities and take them! 19:08 – Chuck: We have been talking about personal fulfillment. For me writing some awesome code in Vue there is Boiler Plate or running the tests. 19:52 – Chuck: What tools light you up? 20:02 – Chris: I am a bit of a weirdo. I feel pretty good when I am hitting myself against a wall for 9 hours. I like feeling obsessed about something and defeating it. I love it. 21:21 – Chuck: The things that make you bang your head against the wall is awful for me. I like writing code that helps someone. (Chris: I like the challenge.) We will be charged up for different things. You like the challenge and it empowers me to help others out. 22:21 – Chris: I like learning more about how something works. I want to save people a lot of work. There has to be a social connection or I will have a hard time even attempting it. 22:52 – Chris: I also play video games where there are no social connections. I played the Witness a few months ago and I loved the puzzles. 23:45 – Chuck: What other tools are you using? 23:57 – Chris: Webpack is the best took for creating the ideal development scenario. 24:47 – Chuck mentions Boiler Plate. 25:00 – Chris: It was built to help large teams and/or large applications.  I built some other projects like: Hello Vue Components & (with John Papa) Vue Monolith Example. 27:07 – Chuck: Anything else that you consider to be “freeing?” 27:13 – Chris: I like working from home. I like having my routines – they make me happy and productive. Having full control over that makes me happy. The only thing I have is my wife and my cat. 28:12 – Chuck: Yeah I don’t miss driving through traffic. 28:44 – Chris: I don’t like to be around people all day. 30:40 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 31:05 – Chris: Online I get a couple dozen people reaching out to me for different things: completely out-of-the-blue. I want to respond to most of those people but... 33:12 – Chuck: If it’s not on my calendar it won’t happen. I will get those e-mails that can be very time consuming. 33:35 – Chris: When they are asking for something “simple” – it’s not always simple. 34:30 – Chuck: I want to help everybody and that can be a problem. 35:02 – Chris: They are reaching out to me and I want to help. 35:56 – Chuck and Chris go back-and-forth. 36:18 – Chris: How do you figure out how to write a short enough response to the email – to only do 30 minutes? 36:44 – Chuck: Can I answer it in one minute? Nope – so it will go into another pile later in the week. I’ve replied saying: Here is my short-answer and for the long-answer see these references. I star those e-mails that will take too long to respond. 37:50 – Chris and Chuck go back-and-forth. 38:06 – Chuck: Your question is so good – here is the link to the blog that I wrote. 38:37 – Chris: I want to document to point people HERE to past blogs that I’ve written or to someone else’s blog. I feel guilty when I have to delegate. 39:35 – Chuck: I don’t have a problem delegating b/c that’s why I’m paying them. Everyone has his or her own role.  40:40 – Chris: Yeah that makes sense when it’s their job. 41:30 – Chuck: I know working together as a team will free me up in my areas of excellence. 41:49 – Chris: I am having a hard time with this right now. 43:36 – Chuck: We are looking for someone to fill this role and this is the job description. This way you can be EXCELLENT at what you do. You aren’t being pulled too thin. 44:19 – Chris: I have been trying to delegate more. 45:04 – Chuck: Yeah I have been trying to do more with my business, too. What do I want to do in the community? What is my focus? What is my mission and values for the business? Then you knock it out of the park! 45:51 – Chris: As a teacher it is really helpful and really not helpful. You are leading and shaping their experiences. You don’t have options to delegate. 46:27 – Chuck: Yeah my mother is a math teacher. 46:37 – Chuck: Yeah she has 10 kids, so she helps to delegate with force. She is the department head for mathematics and she does delegate some things. It’s you to teach the course. 47:18 – Chris: What promoted you to start this podcast? Is it more personal? 47:30 – Chuck talks about why he is starting this new podcast. 48:10 – Chuck: My business coach said to me: write a mission statement. When I did that things started having clarity for me. Chuck talks about the plan for the DevRev! 55:20 – Chris: I am looking forward to it! 55:34 – Chuck: It will be recorded via video through YouTube, too, in addition to iTunes (hopefully). 55:52 – Chris & Chuck: Picks! 55:58 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! DEVCHAT code. 30-day trial. Links: Vue React JavaScript C# C++ C++ Programming / Memory Management Angular Blazor JavaScript DevChat TV VueCLI Boiler Plate Hello Vue Components Vue Monolith Example Thorsten’s Twitter Sarah’s Twitter Ben Hong’s Twitter Jacob Schatz’ Twitter Vue Vixens The DevRev Sponsors: Fresh Books Cache Fly Kendo UI Get A Coder Job! Picks: Chris Vue Vixens Charles repurpose.io MFCEO Project Podcast Game - Test Version

Panel: Eric Berry Dave Kimura David Richards Charles Max Wood In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk amongst themselves on today’s topic, which is “speculation on frameworks.” They consider where the tech community currently is right now, and where it’s heading towards the future. They bring-up topics such as: Rails, Ruby, Angular, Agile, and much more. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:47 – Chuck: Check out the DevRev 2:08 – Panel: A topic about “speculation” would be great today. What are we seeing in the community: what we like/don’t like, and what would you want to change? He talks about action text, JavaScript framework, and more. 3:41 – Chuck: Service-side rendering is what we talked about in the past. Divya does this with service–side rendering. For content sites that approach makes a lot of sense. I have playing around with this for the past week or so. I was taking it to rendering it to text. 4:39 – Panel: Yeah, that’s the way to go. 5:29 – Chuck: You are talking about a fully side UI. 5:45 – Panel: I thought it was just my age so I am glad we are talking about this. The hip kids want to make these beautiful frontend sites. I want to keep it simple and then justify more later. I guess I would never be as hip but as long as my stuff gets out there – that’s all that matters to me. 6:28 – Panel: Yeah don’t get me wrong...nobody will want to develop your product if it was built 30 years ago. If it is a startup you want it to look good with a nice UI. Nobody will purchase if it looks outdated. How much maintenance do I want to invest into this? Why add another component into that if you cannot maintain it. 7:56 – Chuck: Yeah I have come into this issue while building the Podcast Service that I am creating. 8:25 – Panel: These are good frameworks and they feel great. I don’t realize the complexity that I am taking on sometimes. I have a lot of complexity on my hands: did I need it? 9:02 – Chuck: Sometimes my problem is that I am trying to pull it in after-the-fact. Like the forms to animate or this and that have to slide in. I want a natural feel to the UX. I looked at React and then I didn’t go that way. I have been podcasting about Angular for 4 years, but it was a no-go for my project. For my solution – it makes sense to just get it going and get it rolling. 10:45 – Panel: When we do use Action Vue we are prone to get lazy. What I mean by that is making database calls. 12:01 – Panel: You can think: Inside-Out! That creates an identity around the project. If I can think of that before going in, then everyone knows what we are doing and what their role is. It’s really obvious. Simple things grow into bigger things. I am a fan of service-side objects. It’s a daily work process. That feels good to me and it’s programmatic for me. 13:24 – Chuck: You aren’t saying: I don’t want or I don’t need ... what you are saying is: I will get this tool when I need it. 13:45 – Panel: You can say: “Hey this is what we are going to do and WHY we are going to do it.” It’s nice to come back to old projects and to see that it’s still solid. It’s nice to see that and people own that software and didn’t have to keep updating. 15:06 – Chuck: It reminds me of the Agile development stuff. The approach between Angular and React and Vue are fairly different. They are reasonably different. There will be tradeoffs between which one to use. When you are making that decision then you can make the appropriate decision on that. 16:10 – Panel: I remember in the prior years when the Rails community grew their own people and you were a RAILS person; now it’s you’re a WEB person.  17:43 – Panel: In a lot of cases it’s good to see what’s out there and to see what’s new; especially early on if they end up being ahead of their time. Then you are an early pioneer in that area. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you are introducing new things into your core you are running into unforeseeable risks. I am not an early adapter of React, but I know enough of the pros and cons of the framework. 19:48 – Panel: I like that. Maybe I “should” adapt that framework and maybe I am not the right person to do so. 21:06 – Chuck: Dave brought us to a new topic and that’s: being an early adapter. Some people want a name, some people want to invent stuff and so many more reasons “why.” I don’t want to “poo poo” the idea but you need to know WHY. 21:48 – Panel: The cost of developers is A LOT. I just think if I was building a house and I had that expense then I better get a really nice house out of it. I want to do a good job and that’s important. On the business – side they have to rely on us and decisions that are in the best interest for everyone. 22:50 – Fresh Books! 23:53 – Chuck: So what do you guys think about: what’s coming? Do you feel like things are going to move away from frontend frameworks? Will there be a large adoption curve? 24:30 – Panel: If we are talking about the space of Ruby on Rails then you want it to be maintainable. You don’t want to steer too far away from its core. 28:11 – Panel: Good I like that. There are great tools that we are getting through Google, Facebook and they have great tools for these apps. They are looking for the 1-person startup very much like Basecamp. It’s all possible that we are holding onto these technologies that are great but does it fit ME. Do I want to maintain things? Do I want to make this more complicated? Especially if I really don’t fit into what I’m trying to do. 29:13 – Panel: Yeah some people in the DOT NET world they were really struggling with some modern approaches. 30:42 – Panel: One of our listeners texted me b/c we are recording LIVE. Panelist reads off from a listener’s text message that uses a quote. 31:16 – Panel: When I started Ruby it was a PHP project and I couldn’t get there. I didn’t have enough bandwidth. It was easy for me to build the RAILS way. 32:02 – Chuck: I was introduced to PHP in college, early 2000’s. I really enjoyed it and I was fairly productive and then I found Rails. 32:27 – Panelist talks about PHP, flash frontend, and more. 34:42 – Chuck: Could and will something come along that will affect the way we write code? 34:56 – Panel: Yes, b/c I think technology is sustainable for a certain amount of time before things start to change again. Look at the iPhones and the Android phones. 38:26 – Panel: I think it takes time to do something well. Panelist talks about Rails, Ruby, data, and more! 40:25 – Panel: It’s interesting b/c the tradeoff used to be much bigger. The bandwidth is better, the screens are better, the way we do things are better. There is much of a tradeoff. That’s how people are interacting with our business and our products. I tend to write these flowery articles that I don’t publish. There was something in the air and in the mid-2000’s we were launching Netflix, and all of these things were happening at that time. A lot is happening now but it’s different now. Where are we going? Where would I be happy to work? If we can get on the phone and inside of our data and it just adds more value. It’s not an easy answer to “Where are we going?” but it’s good to talk about it b/c people might be afraid to ask and to answer. 43:13 – Chuck: Anything else or picks? 43:19 – Panel: We are saying today: we aren’t trying to break-out of this bubble, but we are saying: let’s get closer to the user and there is so much opportunity in THIS space!! 44:10 – Panel: The technology is tapped-out right now. 44:50 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course The DevRev Podcast Show Angular DevChat TV Ruby Elixir Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React Jest.io Mocha.js Book: Desert Cabal Habits for Hackers Home Depot: DeWalt Harbor Freight 11ty Masterminds Webinar Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Dave Dewalt Drill Dust Collector David Habits for Hackers Desert Cabal (for funnies) Charles Mastermind Hunter 11ty.io

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Gareth McCumskey This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with Gareth McCumskey who is a senior web developer for RunwaySale! They talk about Gareth’s background, current projects and his family. Check out today’s episode to hear all about it and much more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:53 – Chuck: Hey everyone! Welcome! We are talking today with Gareth McCumseky! 1:05 – Gareth: Hi! 1:22 – Chuck: Are you from Cape Town, Africa? (Guest: Yes!) 1:35 – Gareth and Chuck talk about his name, Gareth, and why it’s popular.  1:49 – Chuck: I am in my late 40’s. You were here for JSJ’s Episode 291! It’s still a hot topic and probably should revisit that topic. 2:20 – Guest: Yes! 2:30 – Chuck: It’s interesting. We had a long talk about it and people should go listen to it! 2:45 – Guest: I am a backend developer for the most part. 3:03 – Chuck: Yeah I started off as an ops guy. It probably hurt me. 3:21 – Guest: Yeah, if you poke it a certain way. 3:29 – Chuck: Let’s talk about YOU! How did you get into programming? 3:39 – Guest: South Africa is a different culture to grow-up in vs. U.S. and other places. I remember the computer that my father had back in the day. He led me drive his car about 1km away and I was about 11 years old. We would take home the computer from his office – played around with it during the weekend – and put it back into his office Monday morning. This was way before the Internet. I was fiddling with it for sure. The guest talks about BASIC. 6:20 – Chuck: How did you transfer from building BASIC apps to JavaScript apps? 6:30 – Guest: Yeah that’s a good story. When I was 19 years old...I went to college and studied geology and tried to run an IT business on the side. I started to build things for HTML and CSS and build things for the Web. The guest goes into-detail about his background! 9:26 – Chuck: Yeah, jQuery was so awesome! 9:34 – Guest: Yeah today I am working on an app that uses jQuery! You get used to it, and it’s pretty powerful (jQuery) for what it is/what it does! It has neat tricks. 10:11 – Chuck: I’ve started a site with it b/c it was easy. 10:19 – Guest: Sometimes you don’t need the full out thing. Maybe you just need to load a page here and there, and that’s it. 10:39 – Chuck: It’s a different world – definitely! 10:48 – Guest: Yeah in 2015/2016 is when I picked up JavaScript again. It was b/c around that time we were expecting our first child and that’s where we wanted to be to raise her. Guest: We use webpack.js now. It opened my eyes to see how powerful JavaScript is! 12:10 – Chuck talks about Node.js. 12:21 – Guest: Even today, I got into AWS Cognito! 13:45 – Chuck: You say that your problems are unique – and from the business end I want something that I can resolve quickly. Your solution sounds good. I don’t like messing around with the headaches from Node and others. 14:22 – Guest: Yeah that’s the biggest selling point that I’ve had. 15:47 – Chuck: How did you get into serverless? 15:49 – Guest: Funny experience. I am not the expert and I only write the backend stuff. Guest: At the time, we wanted to improve the reliability of the machine and the site itself. He said to try serverless.com. At the time I wasn’t impressed but then when he suggested it – I took the recommendation more seriously. My company that I work for now... 17:39 – Chuck: What else are you working on? 17:45 – Guest: Some local projects – dining service that refunds you. You pay for a subscription, but find a cheaper way to spend money when you are eating out. It’s called: GOING OUT. Guest: My 3-year-old daughter and my wife is expecting our second child. 18:56 – Chuck and Gareth talk about family and their children. 22:17 – Chuck: Picks! 22:29 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial! END – Cache Fly Links: React Angular JavaScript Webpack.js Serverless jQuery Node AWS Cognito Gareth’s Website Gareth’s GitHub Gareth’s Twitter Sponsors: Cache Fly Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Picks: Charles Max Wood Podcasts: MFCEO Project & Gary Vaynerchuk Pokémon Go! Gareth McCumskey Serverless.com Ingress Prime

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Gareth McCumskey This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with Gareth McCumskey who is a senior web developer for RunwaySale! They talk about Gareth’s background, current projects and his family. Check out today’s episode to hear all about it and much more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:53 – Chuck: Hey everyone! Welcome! We are talking today with Gareth McCumseky! 1:05 – Gareth: Hi! 1:22 – Chuck: Are you from Cape Town, Africa? (Guest: Yes!) 1:35 – Gareth and Chuck talk about his name, Gareth, and why it’s popular.  1:49 – Chuck: I am in my late 40’s. You were here for JSJ’s Episode 291! It’s still a hot topic and probably should revisit that topic. 2:20 – Guest: Yes! 2:30 – Chuck: It’s interesting. We had a long talk about it and people should go listen to it! 2:45 – Guest: I am a backend developer for the most part. 3:03 – Chuck: Yeah I started off as an ops guy. It probably hurt me. 3:21 – Guest: Yeah, if you poke it a certain way. 3:29 – Chuck: Let’s talk about YOU! How did you get into programming? 3:39 – Guest: South Africa is a different culture to grow-up in vs. U.S. and other places. I remember the computer that my father had back in the day. He led me drive his car about 1km away and I was about 11 years old. We would take home the computer from his office – played around with it during the weekend – and put it back into his office Monday morning. This was way before the Internet. I was fiddling with it for sure. The guest talks about BASIC. 6:20 – Chuck: How did you transfer from building BASIC apps to JavaScript apps? 6:30 – Guest: Yeah that’s a good story. When I was 19 years old...I went to college and studied geology and tried to run an IT business on the side. I started to build things for HTML and CSS and build things for the Web. The guest goes into-detail about his background! 9:26 – Chuck: Yeah, jQuery was so awesome! 9:34 – Guest: Yeah today I am working on an app that uses jQuery! You get used to it, and it’s pretty powerful (jQuery) for what it is/what it does! It has neat tricks. 10:11 – Chuck: I’ve started a site with it b/c it was easy. 10:19 – Guest: Sometimes you don’t need the full out thing. Maybe you just need to load a page here and there, and that’s it. 10:39 – Chuck: It’s a different world – definitely! 10:48 – Guest: Yeah in 2015/2016 is when I picked up JavaScript again. It was b/c around that time we were expecting our first child and that’s where we wanted to be to raise her. Guest: We use webpack.js now. It opened my eyes to see how powerful JavaScript is! 12:10 – Chuck talks about Node.js. 12:21 – Guest: Even today, I got into AWS Cognito! 13:45 – Chuck: You say that your problems are unique – and from the business end I want something that I can resolve quickly. Your solution sounds good. I don’t like messing around with the headaches from Node and others. 14:22 – Guest: Yeah that’s the biggest selling point that I’ve had. 15:47 – Chuck: How did you get into serverless? 15:49 – Guest: Funny experience. I am not the expert and I only write the backend stuff. Guest: At the time, we wanted to improve the reliability of the machine and the site itself. He said to try serverless.com. At the time I wasn’t impressed but then when he suggested it – I took the recommendation more seriously. My company that I work for now... 17:39 – Chuck: What else are you working on? 17:45 – Guest: Some local projects – dining service that refunds you. You pay for a subscription, but find a cheaper way to spend money when you are eating out. It’s called: GOING OUT. Guest: My 3-year-old daughter and my wife is expecting our second child. 18:56 – Chuck and Gareth talk about family and their children. 22:17 – Chuck: Picks! 22:29 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial! END – Cache Fly Links: React Angular JavaScript Webpack.js Serverless jQuery Node AWS Cognito Gareth’s Website Gareth’s GitHub Gareth’s Twitter Sponsors: Cache Fly Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Picks: Charles Max Wood Podcasts: MFCEO Project & Gary Vaynerchuk Pokémon Go! Gareth McCumskey Serverless.com Ingress Prime

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Gareth McCumskey This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with Gareth McCumskey who is a senior web developer for RunwaySale! They talk about Gareth’s background, current projects and his family. Check out today’s episode to hear all about it and much more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:53 – Chuck: Hey everyone! Welcome! We are talking today with Gareth McCumseky! 1:05 – Gareth: Hi! 1:22 – Chuck: Are you from Cape Town, Africa? (Guest: Yes!) 1:35 – Gareth and Chuck talk about his name, Gareth, and why it’s popular.  1:49 – Chuck: I am in my late 40’s. You were here for JSJ’s Episode 291! It’s still a hot topic and probably should revisit that topic. 2:20 – Guest: Yes! 2:30 – Chuck: It’s interesting. We had a long talk about it and people should go listen to it! 2:45 – Guest: I am a backend developer for the most part. 3:03 – Chuck: Yeah I started off as an ops guy. It probably hurt me. 3:21 – Guest: Yeah, if you poke it a certain way. 3:29 – Chuck: Let’s talk about YOU! How did you get into programming? 3:39 – Guest: South Africa is a different culture to grow-up in vs. U.S. and other places. I remember the computer that my father had back in the day. He led me drive his car about 1km away and I was about 11 years old. We would take home the computer from his office – played around with it during the weekend – and put it back into his office Monday morning. This was way before the Internet. I was fiddling with it for sure. The guest talks about BASIC. 6:20 – Chuck: How did you transfer from building BASIC apps to JavaScript apps? 6:30 – Guest: Yeah that’s a good story. When I was 19 years old...I went to college and studied geology and tried to run an IT business on the side. I started to build things for HTML and CSS and build things for the Web. The guest goes into-detail about his background! 9:26 – Chuck: Yeah, jQuery was so awesome! 9:34 – Guest: Yeah today I am working on an app that uses jQuery! You get used to it, and it’s pretty powerful (jQuery) for what it is/what it does! It has neat tricks. 10:11 – Chuck: I’ve started a site with it b/c it was easy. 10:19 – Guest: Sometimes you don’t need the full out thing. Maybe you just need to load a page here and there, and that’s it. 10:39 – Chuck: It’s a different world – definitely! 10:48 – Guest: Yeah in 2015/2016 is when I picked up JavaScript again. It was b/c around that time we were expecting our first child and that’s where we wanted to be to raise her. Guest: We use webpack.js now. It opened my eyes to see how powerful JavaScript is! 12:10 – Chuck talks about Node.js. 12:21 – Guest: Even today, I got into AWS Cognito! 13:45 – Chuck: You say that your problems are unique – and from the business end I want something that I can resolve quickly. Your solution sounds good. I don’t like messing around with the headaches from Node and others. 14:22 – Guest: Yeah that’s the biggest selling point that I’ve had. 15:47 – Chuck: How did you get into serverless? 15:49 – Guest: Funny experience. I am not the expert and I only write the backend stuff. Guest: At the time, we wanted to improve the reliability of the machine and the site itself. He said to try serverless.com. At the time I wasn’t impressed but then when he suggested it – I took the recommendation more seriously. My company that I work for now... 17:39 – Chuck: What else are you working on? 17:45 – Guest: Some local projects – dining service that refunds you. You pay for a subscription, but find a cheaper way to spend money when you are eating out. It’s called: GOING OUT. Guest: My 3-year-old daughter and my wife is expecting our second child. 18:56 – Chuck and Gareth talk about family and their children. 22:17 – Chuck: Picks! 22:29 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial! END – Cache Fly Links: React Angular JavaScript Webpack.js Serverless jQuery Node AWS Cognito Gareth’s Website Gareth’s GitHub Gareth’s Twitter Sponsors: Cache Fly Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Picks: Charles Max Wood Podcasts: MFCEO Project & Gary Vaynerchuk Pokémon Go! Gareth McCumskey Serverless.com Ingress Prime

Panel: Eric Berry Charles Max Wood Nate Hopkins Special Guest: Paul Smith and Andrew Mason In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk with Paul Smith and Andrew Mason! They discuss the platforms Lucky and Crystal. Other topics include: Ruby, Phoenix, Laravel Mix, Thoughtbot, Webpack, compilers, and much more! Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:02 – Chuck: Welcome!! Eric Berry, Nate Hopkins, and myself are the panel - and our special guests are Paul Smith and Andrew Mason. Introduce yourself! 1:41 – Andrew / Guest: I have messed with every type of language, so there’s that! 1:55 – Paul / Guest: I have been here at my current company for 5 years and it’s a consultancy firm. I have been working on Crystal. 2:14 – Chuck: We are lucky to have you! Give people the elevator pitch for Lucky and Crystal? 2:33 – Guest: Let’s talk about Crystal and looks very similar to Ruby! It’s faster and it’s a compound language. It catches a fair amount of things at compile time. The other special features are... 4:17 – Guest mentions compilers. 4:23 – Chuck: Yeah we see this in the typescript. Is it language service – is that what it’s called? Pile and compile and all of this checking are a nice stage for it to run-through. Although the flipside is coding and to not worry about that – that’s nice! 4:56 – Guest: It has changed my approach for sure. 5:43 – Panel: How much slower are you? 5:54 – Guest: I am a lot faster in Crystal than I am in Ruby. 6:51 – Panel: Yeah you have to figure out where you want to save the time. 7:00 – Guest: Someone wrote a blog post and it said...the Rails service is like bolting a shelf on a wall and hoping to hit a stud and it’s not solid. But using Lucky it’s sold although it took a little longer. I think it can be true. You can do bad things with compilers, though. It depends on how you use it. 7:43 – Panelist asks a question. 7:53 – Guest: Every Friday is an investment day. Lucky is my “whatever I want thing.” I am technically getting paid to work on it. 8:33 – Panel: have you had to battle with the framework? 8:51 – Guest: Yes, even though Crystal looks like Ruby (at a high level) if you want to do it well you have to approach it in the Crystal-way. When I came to Crystal I came to it like Rails. The problem with that is I wanted to have type-saved parameters – you can’t do that in Crystal b/c...it doesn’t know when to have a parameter with... 10:48 – Panel: I have heard you talk about Crystal before on another podcast. You talked about templating and I am curious to hear about that. I have used Slim and others and now stick to ERB. 11:25 – Guest: Yes definitely. Let’s back up and talk about WHAT Lucky does! The guest talks about Rails, escaping, and more! 14:37 – Panel: So I imagine Rails partials are slow and expensive to render. I would imagine that this approach with Lucky... 15:00 – Guest: Yes exactly. It’s extremely fast! 15:20 – Panel: How is this for designers? 15:30 – Guest: Yes that was a concern of mine. With Lucky I tried to make it close to a regular HTML structure would look like! 16:32 – Panel: I spun up a Lucky app the other day. It looks like you are using... 16:50 – Guest: I have played around with a bunch of stuff. I landed on Laravel Mix. 18:27 – Panel: Yes webpack is a pain to set up and it’s hard to get it to working the way you want it to work. 18:47 – Guest: Yeah if you want React or whatever it will generate the configuration you need. I don’t like it b/c if you want to... 19:28 – Panel. 19:45 – Guest: I don’t want to maintain it. 19:54 – Panel: There is a Crystal community in Utah. I want to know – are you competing with Amber? Explain the difference between Lucky and Amber? 20:20 – Guest: Yes I did look at Amber but they are approaching it differently than us. The guest talks about the differences between Amber and Lucky. 21:54 – Guest (continues): With Lucky you will have to learn a little bit more but you get more of a pack! 23:23 – Panel: It sounds like Lucky is inspired by Elm – right? 23:32 – Guest: Yeah, I think so. The guest dives into this topic of Elm and Lucky! 24:35 – Panel: How much does the types feel like it’s getting in your way? How explicit is it? When I came to Ruby it was a breath of fresh air. I am a bit reluctant to go back to those days. 25:25 – Guest: I think Lucky does a happy medium. It doesn’t infer instant variables. I like the... 26:28 – Panel: I learned Java very early on in my computer science career. 27:00 – Guest. 27:10 – Panel: “Crystal...it’s not Java!” That should be your slogan! 27:20 – Fresh Books! 28:25 – Panel: A lot of people are moving to Elixir community. Do you see people moving from Ruby to Lucky and Crystal? How does Lucky compare to Phoenix? 28:55 – Guest: Good question! 29:10 – The guest talks about bamboo – see links below!! 29: 29 – Guest: Sure Ruby is fast but sometimes you spend more time on it then you would want to. 31:08 – Guest: Blessing and curse that Crystal looks so much like Ruby. That’s what I thought at first: why would I want to learn this if it’s so similar to Ruby. BUT there are so many benefits to Crystal vs. Ruby. 31:48 – Guest talks about Lucky catching the bugs. 32:00 – Panel: I wonder if that happened with Groovy and Rails? 32:21 – They go back-and-forth. 32:28 – Panel: Thoughtbot has always been on the forefront of Ruby. Can you talk about Thoughbot please? (See links below for Thoughtbot!) 33:15 – Guest: Great question. It’s hard to tell b/c there are different offices. I would say Ruby is our main thing. Ruby is the most mature thing that we use in-terms of web development. Guest: Actually – Rails is pretty nice! 34:54 – Panel: We went through the same thing with CodeFund! I wrote it initially in Python and then I wrote it in Elixir and it became so complex. Now we are moving everything back to Ruby and it’s been a fantastic decision.  36:30 – Chuck: You are talking about the sustainability of open source but there are benefits throughout the company right? There are tons of tangible benefits of doing it, especially when it’s your Friday schedule. You can level-up on things that could help you. I know a lot of companies cannot afford it if they are trying to hustle. 37:42 – Guest: It’s totally not charity through Thoughtbot. It’s a huge help for hiring new people. I know they are okay with letting me work on Lucky b/c it’s bringing on new developers and a good marketing tool, and finally recruiting! 39:07 – Chuck: Yeah, I have been talking about developer freedom and that’s what I am addressing through the DevRev show! It’s my new podcast show. We talk with Chris on Elixir Mix. It lends that credibility if they need to save our bacon. 40:02 – Panel: What’s your goal with Lucky? 40:11 – Guest: I would love to get it to the point where Thoughtbot could start a project and default to Lucky! Start a project and not resting every gem and be confident with launching it. 41:36 – Panelist asks a question. 41:45 – Guest: It’s not 1.0 and that means that the API will break with every release. I think that’s good to tweak stuff but that turns companies off, though. 42:40 – Chuck: Another thing that helps with adoption is Twitter used Rails to build their initial version. This blah, blah company uses important stuff and they are using Crystal and whatnot then that’s good! It sounds like you are waiting for social proof. 43:23 – Guest: Is the next Twitter going to even know about Crystal? 43:40 – Chuck: It literally only takes one enthusiast! 43:52 – Guest. 44:11 – Demo of Flickr Search is mentioned here! 45:13 – Panel: Is there something out there that you could POINT someone to? 45:27 – Guest: Not, yet. I built a small site with it! It is opensource and you can look at it. I want to show people a good example of what Lucky can do! 45:57 – Panel: You have very good docs and I am a visual learner. When I learned Rails I learned on my own and not through school. 46:20 – Panelist asks a question. 46:48 – Guest: What a huge advantage Lucky has through the Thoughtbot platform! Now that platform is kind of dried up. In terms of getting people excited it needs that killer app and they can see that it’s fast and killer! I think it takes a lot of time and finding time to do it so that’s tricky. It’s changing a lot when there is so much change. Getting Lucky to a 1.0 state so people can do videos and make apps. The hard part thing is that Lucky has to be 1.0 when Crystal is 1.0. The Lucky community is great b/c it’s encouraging and to respond in a very kind way. When you are starting something that’s new can be scary. We try to help out as much as we can and we are open and kind about it. 49:13 – Panel: “Paul is nice so Lucky is nice!” 49:19 – Guest: Everyone is super kind. It had to be short and simple. We in the dev community are very lucky – usually great pay/benefits and more w/o a college degree. What another field can you do that?! 51:00 – Panel: Great message and you need to push that! 51:10 – Panel: You were on a past podcast and you talked about how you are donating each month! Panel: Opensource maintainers are getting burned out and you want to support that. 51:40 – Guest: I think opensource sustainability what others need to do to make it sustainable. If you have the means to give we can be apart of that, too. It would be nice if companies did that. If it helps Crystal I am happy. 52:17 – Panel: I have a question about Crystal. 52:52 – Guest: Ruby right now you can do C sections right now. 53:01 – Panel. 53:10 – Guest: I don’t think so – it may but I would guess that you could do it but I don’t know how easy it would be. Note: Rust and C are mentioned. 53:37 – Panel comments. 53:46 – Guest: One thing I would say is to check-out the Lucky docs. We are happy to help! 54:10 – Panel: This is a favorite episode of mine! Both of today’s guests have been my favorite! 54:23 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course The DevRev Podcast Show DevChat TV Ruby Elixir Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React Jest.io Mocha.js Webpacker-Cli Amber Lucky The Lucky Philosophy The Bike Shed Thoughtbot CodeFund Lucky: Ruby on Rails to Lucky on Crystal... “Crystal is not Ruby Part 1” GitHub: Bamboo Ex_Machina Dialyxir Crystal Mastery Samsung T5 Carbon Copy Cloner iMazing Awesome-Lucky Paul Smith GitHub Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Nate Samsung SSD Carbon Copy Cloner Application Eric iMazing HEIC Converter Charles Mastodon Andrew Upcase by Thoughtbot Awesome Lucky Paul Tailwind CSS Phoenix Live HTML Chris McCord Elixir Mix Episodes with Chris McCord

Panel: Charles Max Wood Mark Ericksen Special Guest: Brujo Benavides  In this episode of Elixir Mix, the panel talks with Brujo Benavides (Argentina) who is a software engineer and uses a mix of Elixir, Erlang, and GO. They talk about the similarities and differences between Erlang and Elixir. Brujo talks about conferences that he organizes. You can find the guest through GitHub, Twitter, and About Me. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!  0:58 – Chuck: Our special guest is Brujo B.! Let’s talk about the topic today, which is: Lessons from a decade of Erlang! We really haven’t talked about Erlang in the past. 1:47 – Mark: Can you give us your introduction, please? 1:55 – Guest: I started programming at 10 years old. I translated a guest to Spanish. Then after school I started working with other languages, until I did my thesis at the university. I got hired and then while there they taught me Erlang. After 2 years the company went away and died. When that happened I had my honeymoon plan to go to Europe. I went to Poland and found a company that interviewed me, I passed the test, and got hired. The best solution I could ever make. I moved from developer to another position, to director and then to CEO. 6:16 – Chuck: You have been doing Erlang for a while. My brain said 10 years of Elixir and that’s not possible – my bad. When Erlang came onto the scene how did that affect you? 6:40 – Guest answers Chuck’s question. 9:06 – Chuck: See show note links, please. It’s cool to see that you took cautious approaches to the language. What’s the balance between Erlang and Elixir? 9:33 – Guest: It’s about 45/45, because I also do GO. I don’t really like GO, but it’s whatever. 9:59 – Chuck: What has changed in the last 10 years? 10:09 – Guest: It’s my personal view on this and what I see at conferences. I saw a change from beginning Elixir as much acceptance and the community is more open. The people are already so developed already. 11:53 – Mark: I know there is an effort to make the beam languages more compatible. I know using a colon in the name and there’s a lot of communication there. At the last conference, they were talking about this. I think it’s neat that the community is not fighting this. In the early days it seems that the Erlang community were fighting it – what’s that transfer been like? 13:00 – Guest: There were other languages outside of Elixir with the beam. They failed and didn’t catch-on. 15:00 – Panel: How have you liked/disliked coding in Elixir vs. Erlang? 15:14 – Guest: I like many things that Elixir and Erlang can offer. Elixir is a mature and young language. There are many things that they corrected from day one. One thing I don’t like about Amber is that... 17:36 – Mark: I also use it b/c it does give that consistency. It normalizes all the different ways you can code. When I review people’s code I will take the code formatter and get it to be normalized. I am happy with it and I will take it. 18:17 – Guest: Everybody understands everybody’s code. 18:48 – Guest mentions Elvis. See links below. 19:00 – Chuck: It’s interesting. It comes down to community and in some ways it’s not that Erlang community isn’t a good one, but sounds like... 19:17 – Guest: The other thing that happened with the Erlang community is the topic of building websites. In 2015 it was in the Elixir Conference in San Francisco – I think – this is what happened... 20:47 – Mark: I think it’s a credit to both communities. I’ve watched those talks before. I was watching these Erlang Conferences and there have been Elixir speakers there. Good collaboration and I’m happy for that. 21:19 – Chuck: Will these 2 technologies grow together? 21:30 – Guest: Great mix of talks from Erlang and Elixir and talking about how to build systems. 22:49 – Mark: This blog post that you wrote – see show note links before. Can you mention the main topics that you wrote within this blog post? General lessons you’ve learned? 23:23 – Guest: The most important is how we start building stuff over common abstractions. 26:07 – FreshBooks! 27:11 – Mark: You mentioned the behaviors and the abstraction that is available through OTP is through the genserver. Those are and yes it’s true to educate people you will start with a spawn to see how simple things are. Yes, you don’t build a system on that. 27:55 – Guest: I recommend the talk to Spanish speakers. See links below. I asked for a translation but he said no. 29:10 – Mark: You talked also about test-driven development. How has testing in the Erlang community from the past and how has it been influenced by Elixir if at all? 29:53 – Guest: I am not sure. 32:34 – Mark: I don’t know how to spawn another node and have a disconnect in a testing framework? There might be other ways to do it? I would like to borrow that between the two. I’ve built some code that is cluster aware. Yeah I would love to have integration tests. Maybe that is available through Elixir- thanks for talking about that! 33:27 – Chuck: Anything else? Let’s talk about the Sawn Fest! 33:40 – Guest: It started in 2011 and started with a contest that anybody could participate. Judicators judged it and then awards were given. 34:38 – Chuck. 34:44 – Guest: The next year in 2012 the sponsors gave prizes. We were eagerly waiting but there was no contest that year. 37:47 – Chuck and guest go back-and-forth. 37:57 – Guest: There is a team of four now. If you go to the website it actually looks amazing unlike last year!! 39:19 – Mark: People will not hear about this, though, at the time it broadcasts b/c your episode is coming out after Nov. 24th - 25th. Can you do the game/contest remotely? 39:54 – Guest: Yes, people are playing from around the world from India, Denmark, Romania, Africa, and China! So yes you can do it from your house. 40:18 – Mark: What can people do or see or read about the winners? And after-the-fact? 40:32 – Guest: Yes when judges are judging we make the depositories public!! 42:05 – Chuck: My Sunday’s are usually pretty full. 42:19 – Guest: Yes that happened to me. As an organizer I cannot quit b/c I still have to be there. Time with my wife and kid is important, but yes it’s fun! 42:43 – Mark: Yes that shows how passionate they are about the community and the language. 42:56 – Chuck: Mind-blown! 43:10 – Chuck: You organize some conferences right? 43:17 – Guest: Yes. 44:25 – Chuck: Anything else? 44:30 – Mark: Dialyzer and curious about you organizing a Meetup? I have organized an Elixir Meetup. With Meetups how can you tell us how to make it successful? Are you doing both Erlang and Elixir? How are you running it? 45:10 – Guest answers the question. 51:53 – Chuck: How can people find you? 52:00 – Guest: GitHub! Twitter! About Me! (See links below.) 52:19 – Chuck: Picks! 52:20 – Ad: Lootcrate.com END – CacheFly! Links: Ruby Elixir Elixir: GenServer GenServers Elm JavaScript Visual Studio Code React Erlang Solutions Inaka Inaka Credo_Server Erlang Solutions Elvis 114 RR Elixir Show 048 RR Show 10 Lessons from Decade with Erlang YouTube Video in Spanish Erlang: Common_Test ExUnit Smalltalk SpawnFest 2018 SpawnFest Zoom Brujo’s Twitter Brujo’s Website Credo Sponsors: Loot Crate Get a Coder Job! Fresh Books CacheFly Picks: Mark Zoom Meeting Charles Mastodon Brujo Katana Test

Panel: Charles Max Wood Mark Ericksen Special Guest: Brujo Benavides  In this episode of Elixir Mix, the panel talks with Brujo Benavides (Argentina) who is a software engineer and uses a mix of Elixir, Erlang, and GO. They talk about the similarities and differences between Erlang and Elixir. Brujo talks about conferences that he organizes. You can find the guest through GitHub, Twitter, and About Me. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!  0:58 – Chuck: Our special guest is Brujo B.! Let’s talk about the topic today, which is: Lessons from a decade of Erlang! We really haven’t talked about Erlang in the past. 1:47 – Mark: Can you give us your introduction, please? 1:55 – Guest: I started programming at 10 years old. I translated a guest to Spanish. Then after school I started working with other languages, until I did my thesis at the university. I got hired and then while there they taught me Erlang. After 2 years the company went away and died. When that happened I had my honeymoon plan to go to Europe. I went to Poland and found a company that interviewed me, I passed the test, and got hired. The best solution I could ever make. I moved from developer to another position, to director and then to CEO. 6:16 – Chuck: You have been doing Erlang for a while. My brain said 10 years of Elixir and that’s not possible – my bad. When Erlang came onto the scene how did that affect you? 6:40 – Guest answers Chuck’s question. 9:06 – Chuck: See show note links, please. It’s cool to see that you took cautious approaches to the language. What’s the balance between Erlang and Elixir? 9:33 – Guest: It’s about 45/45, because I also do GO. I don’t really like GO, but it’s whatever. 9:59 – Chuck: What has changed in the last 10 years? 10:09 – Guest: It’s my personal view on this and what I see at conferences. I saw a change from beginning Elixir as much acceptance and the community is more open. The people are already so developed already. 11:53 – Mark: I know there is an effort to make the beam languages more compatible. I know using a colon in the name and there’s a lot of communication there. At the last conference, they were talking about this. I think it’s neat that the community is not fighting this. In the early days it seems that the Erlang community were fighting it – what’s that transfer been like? 13:00 – Guest: There were other languages outside of Elixir with the beam. They failed and didn’t catch-on. 15:00 – Panel: How have you liked/disliked coding in Elixir vs. Erlang? 15:14 – Guest: I like many things that Elixir and Erlang can offer. Elixir is a mature and young language. There are many things that they corrected from day one. One thing I don’t like about Amber is that... 17:36 – Mark: I also use it b/c it does give that consistency. It normalizes all the different ways you can code. When I review people’s code I will take the code formatter and get it to be normalized. I am happy with it and I will take it. 18:17 – Guest: Everybody understands everybody’s code. 18:48 – Guest mentions Elvis. See links below. 19:00 – Chuck: It’s interesting. It comes down to community and in some ways it’s not that Erlang community isn’t a good one, but sounds like... 19:17 – Guest: The other thing that happened with the Erlang community is the topic of building websites. In 2015 it was in the Elixir Conference in San Francisco – I think – this is what happened... 20:47 – Mark: I think it’s a credit to both communities. I’ve watched those talks before. I was watching these Erlang Conferences and there have been Elixir speakers there. Good collaboration and I’m happy for that. 21:19 – Chuck: Will these 2 technologies grow together? 21:30 – Guest: Great mix of talks from Erlang and Elixir and talking about how to build systems. 22:49 – Mark: This blog post that you wrote – see show note links before. Can you mention the main topics that you wrote within this blog post? General lessons you’ve learned? 23:23 – Guest: The most important is how we start building stuff over common abstractions. 26:07 – FreshBooks! 27:11 – Mark: You mentioned the behaviors and the abstraction that is available through OTP is through the genserver. Those are and yes it’s true to educate people you will start with a spawn to see how simple things are. Yes, you don’t build a system on that. 27:55 – Guest: I recommend the talk to Spanish speakers. See links below. I asked for a translation but he said no. 29:10 – Mark: You talked also about test-driven development. How has testing in the Erlang community from the past and how has it been influenced by Elixir if at all? 29:53 – Guest: I am not sure. 32:34 – Mark: I don’t know how to spawn another node and have a disconnect in a testing framework? There might be other ways to do it? I would like to borrow that between the two. I’ve built some code that is cluster aware. Yeah I would love to have integration tests. Maybe that is available through Elixir- thanks for talking about that! 33:27 – Chuck: Anything else? Let’s talk about the Sawn Fest! 33:40 – Guest: It started in 2011 and started with a contest that anybody could participate. Judicators judged it and then awards were given. 34:38 – Chuck. 34:44 – Guest: The next year in 2012 the sponsors gave prizes. We were eagerly waiting but there was no contest that year. 37:47 – Chuck and guest go back-and-forth. 37:57 – Guest: There is a team of four now. If you go to the website it actually looks amazing unlike last year!! 39:19 – Mark: People will not hear about this, though, at the time it broadcasts b/c your episode is coming out after Nov. 24th - 25th. Can you do the game/contest remotely? 39:54 – Guest: Yes, people are playing from around the world from India, Denmark, Romania, Africa, and China! So yes you can do it from your house. 40:18 – Mark: What can people do or see or read about the winners? And after-the-fact? 40:32 – Guest: Yes when judges are judging we make the depositories public!! 42:05 – Chuck: My Sunday’s are usually pretty full. 42:19 – Guest: Yes that happened to me. As an organizer I cannot quit b/c I still have to be there. Time with my wife and kid is important, but yes it’s fun! 42:43 – Mark: Yes that shows how passionate they are about the community and the language. 42:56 – Chuck: Mind-blown! 43:10 – Chuck: You organize some conferences right? 43:17 – Guest: Yes. 44:25 – Chuck: Anything else? 44:30 – Mark: Dialyzer and curious about you organizing a Meetup? I have organized an Elixir Meetup. With Meetups how can you tell us how to make it successful? Are you doing both Erlang and Elixir? How are you running it? 45:10 – Guest answers the question. 51:53 – Chuck: How can people find you? 52:00 – Guest: GitHub! Twitter! About Me! (See links below.) 52:19 – Chuck: Picks! 52:20 – Ad: Lootcrate.com END – CacheFly! Links: Ruby Elixir Elixir: GenServer GenServers Elm JavaScript Visual Studio Code React Erlang Solutions Inaka Inaka Credo_Server Erlang Solutions Elvis 114 RR Elixir Show 048 RR Show 10 Lessons from Decade with Erlang YouTube Video in Spanish Erlang: Common_Test ExUnit Smalltalk SpawnFest 2018 SpawnFest Zoom Brujo’s Twitter Brujo’s Website Credo Sponsors: Loot Crate Get a Coder Job! Fresh Books CacheFly Picks: Mark Zoom Meeting Charles Mastodon Brujo Katana Test

Panel: Eric Berry Charles Max Wood Nate Hopkins Special Guest: Paul Smith and Andrew Mason In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk with Paul Smith and Andrew Mason! They discuss the platforms Lucky and Crystal. Other topics include: Ruby, Phoenix, Laravel Mix, Thoughtbot, Webpack, compilers, and much more! Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:02 – Chuck: Welcome!! Eric Berry, Nate Hopkins, and myself are the panel - and our special guests are Paul Smith and Andrew Mason. Introduce yourself! 1:41 – Andrew / Guest: I have messed with every type of language, so there’s that! 1:55 – Paul / Guest: I have been here at my current company for 5 years and it’s a consultancy firm. I have been working on Crystal. 2:14 – Chuck: We are lucky to have you! Give people the elevator pitch for Lucky and Crystal? 2:33 – Guest: Let’s talk about Crystal and looks very similar to Ruby! It’s faster and it’s a compound language. It catches a fair amount of things at compile time. The other special features are... 4:17 – Guest mentions compilers. 4:23 – Chuck: Yeah we see this in the typescript. Is it language service – is that what it’s called? Pile and compile and all of this checking are a nice stage for it to run-through. Although the flipside is coding and to not worry about that – that’s nice! 4:56 – Guest: It has changed my approach for sure. 5:43 – Panel: How much slower are you? 5:54 – Guest: I am a lot faster in Crystal than I am in Ruby. 6:51 – Panel: Yeah you have to figure out where you want to save the time. 7:00 – Guest: Someone wrote a blog post and it said...the Rails service is like bolting a shelf on a wall and hoping to hit a stud and it’s not solid. But using Lucky it’s sold although it took a little longer. I think it can be true. You can do bad things with compilers, though. It depends on how you use it. 7:43 – Panelist asks a question. 7:53 – Guest: Every Friday is an investment day. Lucky is my “whatever I want thing.” I am technically getting paid to work on it. 8:33 – Panel: have you had to battle with the framework? 8:51 – Guest: Yes, even though Crystal looks like Ruby (at a high level) if you want to do it well you have to approach it in the Crystal-way. When I came to Crystal I came to it like Rails. The problem with that is I wanted to have type-saved parameters – you can’t do that in Crystal b/c...it doesn’t know when to have a parameter with... 10:48 – Panel: I have heard you talk about Crystal before on another podcast. You talked about templating and I am curious to hear about that. I have used Slim and others and now stick to ERB. 11:25 – Guest: Yes definitely. Let’s back up and talk about WHAT Lucky does! The guest talks about Rails, escaping, and more! 14:37 – Panel: So I imagine Rails partials are slow and expensive to render. I would imagine that this approach with Lucky... 15:00 – Guest: Yes exactly. It’s extremely fast! 15:20 – Panel: How is this for designers? 15:30 – Guest: Yes that was a concern of mine. With Lucky I tried to make it close to a regular HTML structure would look like! 16:32 – Panel: I spun up a Lucky app the other day. It looks like you are using... 16:50 – Guest: I have played around with a bunch of stuff. I landed on Laravel Mix. 18:27 – Panel: Yes webpack is a pain to set up and it’s hard to get it to working the way you want it to work. 18:47 – Guest: Yeah if you want React or whatever it will generate the configuration you need. I don’t like it b/c if you want to... 19:28 – Panel. 19:45 – Guest: I don’t want to maintain it. 19:54 – Panel: There is a Crystal community in Utah. I want to know – are you competing with Amber? Explain the difference between Lucky and Amber? 20:20 – Guest: Yes I did look at Amber but they are approaching it differently than us. The guest talks about the differences between Amber and Lucky. 21:54 – Guest (continues): With Lucky you will have to learn a little bit more but you get more of a pack! 23:23 – Panel: It sounds like Lucky is inspired by Elm – right? 23:32 – Guest: Yeah, I think so. The guest dives into this topic of Elm and Lucky! 24:35 – Panel: How much does the types feel like it’s getting in your way? How explicit is it? When I came to Ruby it was a breath of fresh air. I am a bit reluctant to go back to those days. 25:25 – Guest: I think Lucky does a happy medium. It doesn’t infer instant variables. I like the... 26:28 – Panel: I learned Java very early on in my computer science career. 27:00 – Guest. 27:10 – Panel: “Crystal...it’s not Java!” That should be your slogan! 27:20 – Fresh Books! 28:25 – Panel: A lot of people are moving to Elixir community. Do you see people moving from Ruby to Lucky and Crystal? How does Lucky compare to Phoenix? 28:55 – Guest: Good question! 29:10 – The guest talks about bamboo – see links below!! 29: 29 – Guest: Sure Ruby is fast but sometimes you spend more time on it then you would want to. 31:08 – Guest: Blessing and curse that Crystal looks so much like Ruby. That’s what I thought at first: why would I want to learn this if it’s so similar to Ruby. BUT there are so many benefits to Crystal vs. Ruby. 31:48 – Guest talks about Lucky catching the bugs. 32:00 – Panel: I wonder if that happened with Groovy and Rails? 32:21 – They go back-and-forth. 32:28 – Panel: Thoughtbot has always been on the forefront of Ruby. Can you talk about Thoughbot please? (See links below for Thoughtbot!) 33:15 – Guest: Great question. It’s hard to tell b/c there are different offices. I would say Ruby is our main thing. Ruby is the most mature thing that we use in-terms of web development. Guest: Actually – Rails is pretty nice! 34:54 – Panel: We went through the same thing with CodeFund! I wrote it initially in Python and then I wrote it in Elixir and it became so complex. Now we are moving everything back to Ruby and it’s been a fantastic decision.  36:30 – Chuck: You are talking about the sustainability of open source but there are benefits throughout the company right? There are tons of tangible benefits of doing it, especially when it’s your Friday schedule. You can level-up on things that could help you. I know a lot of companies cannot afford it if they are trying to hustle. 37:42 – Guest: It’s totally not charity through Thoughtbot. It’s a huge help for hiring new people. I know they are okay with letting me work on Lucky b/c it’s bringing on new developers and a good marketing tool, and finally recruiting! 39:07 – Chuck: Yeah, I have been talking about developer freedom and that’s what I am addressing through the DevRev show! It’s my new podcast show. We talk with Chris on Elixir Mix. It lends that credibility if they need to save our bacon. 40:02 – Panel: What’s your goal with Lucky? 40:11 – Guest: I would love to get it to the point where Thoughtbot could start a project and default to Lucky! Start a project and not resting every gem and be confident with launching it. 41:36 – Panelist asks a question. 41:45 – Guest: It’s not 1.0 and that means that the API will break with every release. I think that’s good to tweak stuff but that turns companies off, though. 42:40 – Chuck: Another thing that helps with adoption is Twitter used Rails to build their initial version. This blah, blah company uses important stuff and they are using Crystal and whatnot then that’s good! It sounds like you are waiting for social proof. 43:23 – Guest: Is the next Twitter going to even know about Crystal? 43:40 – Chuck: It literally only takes one enthusiast! 43:52 – Guest. 44:11 – Demo of Flickr Search is mentioned here! 45:13 – Panel: Is there something out there that you could POINT someone to? 45:27 – Guest: Not, yet. I built a small site with it! It is opensource and you can look at it. I want to show people a good example of what Lucky can do! 45:57 – Panel: You have very good docs and I am a visual learner. When I learned Rails I learned on my own and not through school. 46:20 – Panelist asks a question. 46:48 – Guest: What a huge advantage Lucky has through the Thoughtbot platform! Now that platform is kind of dried up. In terms of getting people excited it needs that killer app and they can see that it’s fast and killer! I think it takes a lot of time and finding time to do it so that’s tricky. It’s changing a lot when there is so much change. Getting Lucky to a 1.0 state so people can do videos and make apps. The hard part thing is that Lucky has to be 1.0 when Crystal is 1.0. The Lucky community is great b/c it’s encouraging and to respond in a very kind way. When you are starting something that’s new can be scary. We try to help out as much as we can and we are open and kind about it. 49:13 – Panel: “Paul is nice so Lucky is nice!” 49:19 – Guest: Everyone is super kind. It had to be short and simple. We in the dev community are very lucky – usually great pay/benefits and more w/o a college degree. What another field can you do that?! 51:00 – Panel: Great message and you need to push that! 51:10 – Panel: You were on a past podcast and you talked about how you are donating each month! Panel: Opensource maintainers are getting burned out and you want to support that. 51:40 – Guest: I think opensource sustainability what others need to do to make it sustainable. If you have the means to give we can be apart of that, too. It would be nice if companies did that. If it helps Crystal I am happy. 52:17 – Panel: I have a question about Crystal. 52:52 – Guest: Ruby right now you can do C sections right now. 53:01 – Panel. 53:10 – Guest: I don’t think so – it may but I would guess that you could do it but I don’t know how easy it would be. Note: Rust and C are mentioned. 53:37 – Panel comments. 53:46 – Guest: One thing I would say is to check-out the Lucky docs. We are happy to help! 54:10 – Panel: This is a favorite episode of mine! Both of today’s guests have been my favorite! 54:23 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course The DevRev Podcast Show DevChat TV Ruby Elixir Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React Jest.io Mocha.js Webpacker-Cli Amber Lucky The Lucky Philosophy The Bike Shed Thoughtbot CodeFund Lucky: Ruby on Rails to Lucky on Crystal... “Crystal is not Ruby Part 1” GitHub: Bamboo Ex_Machina Dialyxir Crystal Mastery Samsung T5 Carbon Copy Cloner iMazing Awesome-Lucky Paul Smith GitHub Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Nate Samsung SSD Carbon Copy Cloner Application Eric iMazing HEIC Converter Charles Mastodon Andrew Upcase by Thoughtbot Awesome Lucky Paul Tailwind CSS Phoenix Live HTML Chris McCord Elixir Mix Episodes with Chris McCord

Panel: Eric Berry Charles Max Wood Nate Hopkins Special Guest: Paul Smith and Andrew Mason In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk with Paul Smith and Andrew Mason! They discuss the platforms Lucky and Crystal. Other topics include: Ruby, Phoenix, Laravel Mix, Thoughtbot, Webpack, compilers, and much more! Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:02 – Chuck: Welcome!! Eric Berry, Nate Hopkins, and myself are the panel - and our special guests are Paul Smith and Andrew Mason. Introduce yourself! 1:41 – Andrew / Guest: I have messed with every type of language, so there’s that! 1:55 – Paul / Guest: I have been here at my current company for 5 years and it’s a consultancy firm. I have been working on Crystal. 2:14 – Chuck: We are lucky to have you! Give people the elevator pitch for Lucky and Crystal? 2:33 – Guest: Let’s talk about Crystal and looks very similar to Ruby! It’s faster and it’s a compound language. It catches a fair amount of things at compile time. The other special features are... 4:17 – Guest mentions compilers. 4:23 – Chuck: Yeah we see this in the typescript. Is it language service – is that what it’s called? Pile and compile and all of this checking are a nice stage for it to run-through. Although the flipside is coding and to not worry about that – that’s nice! 4:56 – Guest: It has changed my approach for sure. 5:43 – Panel: How much slower are you? 5:54 – Guest: I am a lot faster in Crystal than I am in Ruby. 6:51 – Panel: Yeah you have to figure out where you want to save the time. 7:00 – Guest: Someone wrote a blog post and it said...the Rails service is like bolting a shelf on a wall and hoping to hit a stud and it’s not solid. But using Lucky it’s sold although it took a little longer. I think it can be true. You can do bad things with compilers, though. It depends on how you use it. 7:43 – Panelist asks a question. 7:53 – Guest: Every Friday is an investment day. Lucky is my “whatever I want thing.” I am technically getting paid to work on it. 8:33 – Panel: have you had to battle with the framework? 8:51 – Guest: Yes, even though Crystal looks like Ruby (at a high level) if you want to do it well you have to approach it in the Crystal-way. When I came to Crystal I came to it like Rails. The problem with that is I wanted to have type-saved parameters – you can’t do that in Crystal b/c...it doesn’t know when to have a parameter with... 10:48 – Panel: I have heard you talk about Crystal before on another podcast. You talked about templating and I am curious to hear about that. I have used Slim and others and now stick to ERB. 11:25 – Guest: Yes definitely. Let’s back up and talk about WHAT Lucky does! The guest talks about Rails, escaping, and more! 14:37 – Panel: So I imagine Rails partials are slow and expensive to render. I would imagine that this approach with Lucky... 15:00 – Guest: Yes exactly. It’s extremely fast! 15:20 – Panel: How is this for designers? 15:30 – Guest: Yes that was a concern of mine. With Lucky I tried to make it close to a regular HTML structure would look like! 16:32 – Panel: I spun up a Lucky app the other day. It looks like you are using... 16:50 – Guest: I have played around with a bunch of stuff. I landed on Laravel Mix. 18:27 – Panel: Yes webpack is a pain to set up and it’s hard to get it to working the way you want it to work. 18:47 – Guest: Yeah if you want React or whatever it will generate the configuration you need. I don’t like it b/c if you want to... 19:28 – Panel. 19:45 – Guest: I don’t want to maintain it. 19:54 – Panel: There is a Crystal community in Utah. I want to know – are you competing with Amber? Explain the difference between Lucky and Amber? 20:20 – Guest: Yes I did look at Amber but they are approaching it differently than us. The guest talks about the differences between Amber and Lucky. 21:54 – Guest (continues): With Lucky you will have to learn a little bit more but you get more of a pack! 23:23 – Panel: It sounds like Lucky is inspired by Elm – right? 23:32 – Guest: Yeah, I think so. The guest dives into this topic of Elm and Lucky! 24:35 – Panel: How much does the types feel like it’s getting in your way? How explicit is it? When I came to Ruby it was a breath of fresh air. I am a bit reluctant to go back to those days. 25:25 – Guest: I think Lucky does a happy medium. It doesn’t infer instant variables. I like the... 26:28 – Panel: I learned Java very early on in my computer science career. 27:00 – Guest. 27:10 – Panel: “Crystal...it’s not Java!” That should be your slogan! 27:20 – Fresh Books! 28:25 – Panel: A lot of people are moving to Elixir community. Do you see people moving from Ruby to Lucky and Crystal? How does Lucky compare to Phoenix? 28:55 – Guest: Good question! 29:10 – The guest talks about bamboo – see links below!! 29: 29 – Guest: Sure Ruby is fast but sometimes you spend more time on it then you would want to. 31:08 – Guest: Blessing and curse that Crystal looks so much like Ruby. That’s what I thought at first: why would I want to learn this if it’s so similar to Ruby. BUT there are so many benefits to Crystal vs. Ruby. 31:48 – Guest talks about Lucky catching the bugs. 32:00 – Panel: I wonder if that happened with Groovy and Rails? 32:21 – They go back-and-forth. 32:28 – Panel: Thoughtbot has always been on the forefront of Ruby. Can you talk about Thoughbot please? (See links below for Thoughtbot!) 33:15 – Guest: Great question. It’s hard to tell b/c there are different offices. I would say Ruby is our main thing. Ruby is the most mature thing that we use in-terms of web development. Guest: Actually – Rails is pretty nice! 34:54 – Panel: We went through the same thing with CodeFund! I wrote it initially in Python and then I wrote it in Elixir and it became so complex. Now we are moving everything back to Ruby and it’s been a fantastic decision.  36:30 – Chuck: You are talking about the sustainability of open source but there are benefits throughout the company right? There are tons of tangible benefits of doing it, especially when it’s your Friday schedule. You can level-up on things that could help you. I know a lot of companies cannot afford it if they are trying to hustle. 37:42 – Guest: It’s totally not charity through Thoughtbot. It’s a huge help for hiring new people. I know they are okay with letting me work on Lucky b/c it’s bringing on new developers and a good marketing tool, and finally recruiting! 39:07 – Chuck: Yeah, I have been talking about developer freedom and that’s what I am addressing through the DevRev show! It’s my new podcast show. We talk with Chris on Elixir Mix. It lends that credibility if they need to save our bacon. 40:02 – Panel: What’s your goal with Lucky? 40:11 – Guest: I would love to get it to the point where Thoughtbot could start a project and default to Lucky! Start a project and not resting every gem and be confident with launching it. 41:36 – Panelist asks a question. 41:45 – Guest: It’s not 1.0 and that means that the API will break with every release. I think that’s good to tweak stuff but that turns companies off, though. 42:40 – Chuck: Another thing that helps with adoption is Twitter used Rails to build their initial version. This blah, blah company uses important stuff and they are using Crystal and whatnot then that’s good! It sounds like you are waiting for social proof. 43:23 – Guest: Is the next Twitter going to even know about Crystal? 43:40 – Chuck: It literally only takes one enthusiast! 43:52 – Guest. 44:11 – Demo of Flickr Search is mentioned here! 45:13 – Panel: Is there something out there that you could POINT someone to? 45:27 – Guest: Not, yet. I built a small site with it! It is opensource and you can look at it. I want to show people a good example of what Lucky can do! 45:57 – Panel: You have very good docs and I am a visual learner. When I learned Rails I learned on my own and not through school. 46:20 – Panelist asks a question. 46:48 – Guest: What a huge advantage Lucky has through the Thoughtbot platform! Now that platform is kind of dried up. In terms of getting people excited it needs that killer app and they can see that it’s fast and killer! I think it takes a lot of time and finding time to do it so that’s tricky. It’s changing a lot when there is so much change. Getting Lucky to a 1.0 state so people can do videos and make apps. The hard part thing is that Lucky has to be 1.0 when Crystal is 1.0. The Lucky community is great b/c it’s encouraging and to respond in a very kind way. When you are starting something that’s new can be scary. We try to help out as much as we can and we are open and kind about it. 49:13 – Panel: “Paul is nice so Lucky is nice!” 49:19 – Guest: Everyone is super kind. It had to be short and simple. We in the dev community are very lucky – usually great pay/benefits and more w/o a college degree. What another field can you do that?! 51:00 – Panel: Great message and you need to push that! 51:10 – Panel: You were on a past podcast and you talked about how you are donating each month! Panel: Opensource maintainers are getting burned out and you want to support that. 51:40 – Guest: I think opensource sustainability what others need to do to make it sustainable. If you have the means to give we can be apart of that, too. It would be nice if companies did that. If it helps Crystal I am happy. 52:17 – Panel: I have a question about Crystal. 52:52 – Guest: Ruby right now you can do C sections right now. 53:01 – Panel. 53:10 – Guest: I don’t think so – it may but I would guess that you could do it but I don’t know how easy it would be. Note: Rust and C are mentioned. 53:37 – Panel comments. 53:46 – Guest: One thing I would say is to check-out the Lucky docs. We are happy to help! 54:10 – Panel: This is a favorite episode of mine! Both of today’s guests have been my favorite! 54:23 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course The DevRev Podcast Show DevChat TV Ruby Elixir Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React Jest.io Mocha.js Webpacker-Cli Amber Lucky The Lucky Philosophy The Bike Shed Thoughtbot CodeFund Lucky: Ruby on Rails to Lucky on Crystal... “Crystal is not Ruby Part 1” GitHub: Bamboo Ex_Machina Dialyxir Crystal Mastery Samsung T5 Carbon Copy Cloner iMazing Awesome-Lucky Paul Smith GitHub Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Nate Samsung SSD Carbon Copy Cloner Application Eric iMazing HEIC Converter Charles Mastodon Andrew Upcase by Thoughtbot Awesome Lucky Paul Tailwind CSS Phoenix Live HTML Chris McCord Elixir Mix Episodes with Chris McCord

Panel: Charles Max Wood   Guest: Olivier Lacan    This week on My Ruby Story, Chuck talks with Olivier Lacan who works for Pluralsight remotely while living in France.  Chuck and Olivier talk about his background, his education, and how he got into Ruby. Check it out!    In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Get A Coder Job!   0:55 – Chuck: Hi! Can you update people where you are at now?   1:21 – Guest: I work on the Pluralsite remotely from France. (Check it out here!)   2:20 – Chuck: It feels like Pluralsite is offering new things for students. That’s nice!    2:30 – Guest: Yes, everyone has their own unique way to learn new things. Whether it’s through podcasts, reading, etc.    3:25 – Chuck.   3:32 – Guest.   4:01 – Chuck: RR 364 was the last episode that you’ve been on.    4:20 – The guest is talking about the changes that have occurred in only 7 months!   4:58 – Chuck: Let’s talk about you! How did you get into programming?   5:12 – Guest: Frustration is how I got into programming.   The guest talks in-detail about how he got into programming. What frameworks and languages he’s learned along the way.    31:24 – Chuck: I want to call out the fact that you said: I’ve failed. That’s good for people to hear.    31:40 – Guest.    31:49 – Chuck: If I’m not failing then I’m not pushing myself. How did you get into Ruby?   32:04 – Guest: Andrew Smith is how I got into Ruby. We met through Twitter! I was looking for croissants b/c I was homesick. His handler is @fullsailor! Check him out on Twitter here!    34:56 – Chuck talks about variables.   35:00 – Guest talks about Ruby and how he got into it.    36:50 – The guest talks about starting up a business with his friend (Chris) called Clever Code.    39:38 – Chuck: How did you get into Code School?    39:40 – Guest talks about his time in Orlando, FL.    40:05 – Guest mentions Rails for Zombies.   47:15 – Chuck: Nice! It’s interesting to see how you’ve gotten into it!   47:25 – Guest: Check out Pluralsight.   50:08 – Chuck: Some of the background I was there but there is so much more!   50:20 – Guest: There are so many lessons that I’ve learned a lot the way. There is so much luck involved, too. There are so many parts of this that is jumping onto an opportunity.    51:09 – Chuck: You showed up, so it wasn’t fully all luck, though!   51:20 – Guest: Yes, I agree. Finding accountability partners. It’s like going to the gym. Yes, self-motivation is a thing.    52:17 – Chuck: How can people find you?   52:20 – Guest: Twitter, GitHub, and my website!   53:00 – Advertisement – Fresh Books!    END – CacheFly   Links: Ruby Elixir Rails Rust Python PHP Bio for Olivier through PluralSight Twitter for Olivier Lacan GitHub for Olivier Lacan   Sponsors:  Get a Coder Job Cache Fly Fresh Books   Picks: Olivier  Ruby Conf.  AutoLoad Reloder   Charles  Tile Last Man Standing  World Cup Sling TV Fox Sports  CES  

Panel: Charles Max Wood   Guest: Olivier Lacan    This week on My Ruby Story, Chuck talks with Olivier Lacan who works for Pluralsight remotely while living in France.  Chuck and Olivier talk about his background, his education, and how he got into Ruby. Check it out!    In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Get A Coder Job!   0:55 – Chuck: Hi! Can you update people where you are at now?   1:21 – Guest: I work on the Pluralsite remotely from France. (Check it out here!)   2:20 – Chuck: It feels like Pluralsite is offering new things for students. That’s nice!    2:30 – Guest: Yes, everyone has their own unique way to learn new things. Whether it’s through podcasts, reading, etc.    3:25 – Chuck.   3:32 – Guest.   4:01 – Chuck: RR 364 was the last episode that you’ve been on.    4:20 – The guest is talking about the changes that have occurred in only 7 months!   4:58 – Chuck: Let’s talk about you! How did you get into programming?   5:12 – Guest: Frustration is how I got into programming.   The guest talks in-detail about how he got into programming. What frameworks and languages he’s learned along the way.    31:24 – Chuck: I want to call out the fact that you said: I’ve failed. That’s good for people to hear.    31:40 – Guest.    31:49 – Chuck: If I’m not failing then I’m not pushing myself. How did you get into Ruby?   32:04 – Guest: Andrew Smith is how I got into Ruby. We met through Twitter! I was looking for croissants b/c I was homesick. His handler is @fullsailor! Check him out on Twitter here!    34:56 – Chuck talks about variables.   35:00 – Guest talks about Ruby and how he got into it.    36:50 – The guest talks about starting up a business with his friend (Chris) called Clever Code.    39:38 – Chuck: How did you get into Code School?    39:40 – Guest talks about his time in Orlando, FL.    40:05 – Guest mentions Rails for Zombies.   47:15 – Chuck: Nice! It’s interesting to see how you’ve gotten into it!   47:25 – Guest: Check out Pluralsight.   50:08 – Chuck: Some of the background I was there but there is so much more!   50:20 – Guest: There are so many lessons that I’ve learned a lot the way. There is so much luck involved, too. There are so many parts of this that is jumping onto an opportunity.    51:09 – Chuck: You showed up, so it wasn’t fully all luck, though!   51:20 – Guest: Yes, I agree. Finding accountability partners. It’s like going to the gym. Yes, self-motivation is a thing.    52:17 – Chuck: How can people find you?   52:20 – Guest: Twitter, GitHub, and my website!   53:00 – Advertisement – Fresh Books!    END – CacheFly   Links: Ruby Elixir Rails Rust Python PHP Bio for Olivier through PluralSight Twitter for Olivier Lacan GitHub for Olivier Lacan   Sponsors:  Get a Coder Job Cache Fly Fresh Books   Picks: Olivier  Ruby Conf.  AutoLoad Reloder   Charles  Tile Last Man Standing  World Cup Sling TV Fox Sports  CES  

Panel: Charles Max Wood   Guest: Olivier Lacan    This week on My Ruby Story, Chuck talks with Olivier Lacan who works for Pluralsight remotely while living in France.  Chuck and Olivier talk about his background, his education, and how he got into Ruby. Check it out!    In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Get A Coder Job!   0:55 – Chuck: Hi! Can you update people where you are at now?   1:21 – Guest: I work on the Pluralsite remotely from France. (Check it out here!)   2:20 – Chuck: It feels like Pluralsite is offering new things for students. That’s nice!    2:30 – Guest: Yes, everyone has their own unique way to learn new things. Whether it’s through podcasts, reading, etc.    3:25 – Chuck.   3:32 – Guest.   4:01 – Chuck: RR 364 was the last episode that you’ve been on.    4:20 – The guest is talking about the changes that have occurred in only 7 months!   4:58 – Chuck: Let’s talk about you! How did you get into programming?   5:12 – Guest: Frustration is how I got into programming.   The guest talks in-detail about how he got into programming. What frameworks and languages he’s learned along the way.    31:24 – Chuck: I want to call out the fact that you said: I’ve failed. That’s good for people to hear.    31:40 – Guest.    31:49 – Chuck: If I’m not failing then I’m not pushing myself. How did you get into Ruby?   32:04 – Guest: Andrew Smith is how I got into Ruby. We met through Twitter! I was looking for croissants b/c I was homesick. His handler is @fullsailor! Check him out on Twitter here!    34:56 – Chuck talks about variables.   35:00 – Guest talks about Ruby and how he got into it.    36:50 – The guest talks about starting up a business with his friend (Chris) called Clever Code.    39:38 – Chuck: How did you get into Code School?    39:40 – Guest talks about his time in Orlando, FL.    40:05 – Guest mentions Rails for Zombies.   47:15 – Chuck: Nice! It’s interesting to see how you’ve gotten into it!   47:25 – Guest: Check out Pluralsight.   50:08 – Chuck: Some of the background I was there but there is so much more!   50:20 – Guest: There are so many lessons that I’ve learned a lot the way. There is so much luck involved, too. There are so many parts of this that is jumping onto an opportunity.    51:09 – Chuck: You showed up, so it wasn’t fully all luck, though!   51:20 – Guest: Yes, I agree. Finding accountability partners. It’s like going to the gym. Yes, self-motivation is a thing.    52:17 – Chuck: How can people find you?   52:20 – Guest: Twitter, GitHub, and my website!   53:00 – Advertisement – Fresh Books!    END – CacheFly   Links: Ruby Elixir Rails Rust Python PHP Bio for Olivier through PluralSight Twitter for Olivier Lacan GitHub for Olivier Lacan   Sponsors:  Get a Coder Job Cache Fly Fresh Books   Picks: Olivier  Ruby Conf.  AutoLoad Reloder   Charles  Tile Last Man Standing  World Cup Sling TV Fox Sports  CES  

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Travis Tidwell This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Travis Tidwell (Dallas, TX) who is CTO and co-founder of Form_IO! Chuck and Travis talk about his background, open source struggles, and more. Check it out! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:49 – Chuck: Welcome! We had you on Episode 125. A lot has changed huh? The nice thing, though, about these changes is that we seem to be tackling different problems. 1:42 – Guest: They are stabilizing on the same on the same design patterns. I think that’s refreshing. Back in the day, everyone had their own way of doing it. It was difficult to find which one is the RIGHT one. 2:05 – Chuck: Yes, I agree. Gives us your background, please! 2:20 – Guest: I am still doing Form IO, and the co-founder and CTO of the company. My Angular Story is MY story on how the company evolved. 3:05 – Chuck: How did you get into programming? 3:09 – Guest: I am going to be 40-years old in May! I am getting up there. Everyone who I am talking to (in my age) it seems like we have the same story. We have this story of having that REALLY old computer. Parents bring home the IBM or the Commodore 64 and that really is my story. At the time, the only thing you could learn with it was to program – there weren’t any video games, etc. A book that I geeked-out about was: “DOS for Dummies.” The guest talks about his senior year in college and how he came to fall in-love with programming. 6:28 – Guest: After college, I got a job for working for a company that used C++ code. People ask: How the heck did you get into Web? My background, too, was tap dancing and in the arts. Most people don’t know that. I was giving these tap lessons to kids – and around that time YouTube was just for cat videos. At the time, I thought it would be great to teach these tap video lessons online. I found a CMS at the time that would help me with my teaching intent. Drupal took me into the frontend libraries. PHP is a backend language, and Drupal was based entirely on PHP. There was this huge paradigm-shift within my career. I really got into these tools not knowing that it would change my career. My open source has taken me to tutorial videos. Eventually, a light bulb went off and I found a solution that needed to be solved within Angular. 12:21 – Guest.  12:28 – Chuck: I love the side hustle description: I saw a need out there and we solved it! 12:40 – Guest: Side hustle is great to talk about. Open source is a bit of a struggle (at that time) it was really hard to maintain open source and providing for your family at the same time. Open source is hard b/c you work your butt off, but you aren’t getting paid for it. It’s really, really difficult. I’ve had ups-and-downs actually with open source. You have to get innovative with it. I am really big on and supportive of people who are monetizing off of open source. 14:58 – Chuck: Open source – for me – I got burned out in June. Sometimes you are putting in a lot of time and not seeing any benefit from it. You have all of these things and something changes, something is different – I can’t take another night not seeing my kids. 16:06 – Guest: You have this original motivation as an open source developer – and you build something rally cool. You share with the world, but a lot of people don’t realize the tail of it. Come to realize it worked well for you – but not for everyone! It makes your stock price go out – contributing to open source – especially if you have a popular open source library. Most of the jobs I would apply to I would just give them my GitHub repertoire. People are figuring out ways they can support themselves and monetize. The ones that can figure that out don’t burnout. 19:44 – Chuck: Babel – Henry Zhu. (See his Patreon account.) 20:08 – Guest: How does he do it? 20:20 – Chuck: It’s mostly contributions. 20:35 – Guest: I see that you are on Patreon. I urge people to go there and help support those open source people. It’s such a great thing and it’s becoming a trend. That’s one thing that drew me away from Drupal b/c at the time it had this negative connotation of monetizing on your open source. The spirit of the open source is THAT. It gives support to open source folks in order to provide for their families. 22:00 – Chuck: I talk a lot with Eric through CodeFund. It’s important to know these options. 22:24 – Guest: That is my road of open source and in creating IO. 24:01 – Chuck: You are the CTO and not the CEO. How did you wind up and forming IO? 24:15 – Guest: There were a lot of pain points. It all started with the prototype. The guest talks about the background. Travis mentions FormBuilder among other things. 30:00 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 30:05 – Guest: The Vanilla Core Renderer! It doesn’t care what framework it gets attached to. We are working on a new template engine.  31:55 – Chuck: I wish I had more time to code. 31:58 – Guest. 33:08 – Chuck: How can people find you? 33:10 – Guest: GitHub! Training YouTube Videos! Twitter! 34:56 – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly Links: jQuery Angular JavaScript Vue React Chuck’s Twitter Chuck’s E-mail: chuck@devchat.tv Travis Tidwell’s Book: Flash With Drupal “How to Build a M.E.A.N. Web Application” by Travis Tidwell Angular-Formly Angular Angular – FormBuilder Patreon Travis’ YouTube Videos Episode 125 with Travis! Travis’ LinkedIn Sponsors: Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Travis Technology: Minio.io T.V. Show: Rick & Morty AI Movie (listen for title) Chuck T.V. Show: Last Man Standing

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Travis Tidwell This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Travis Tidwell (Dallas, TX) who is CTO and co-founder of Form_IO! Chuck and Travis talk about his background, open source struggles, and more. Check it out! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:49 – Chuck: Welcome! We had you on Episode 125. A lot has changed huh? The nice thing, though, about these changes is that we seem to be tackling different problems. 1:42 – Guest: They are stabilizing on the same on the same design patterns. I think that’s refreshing. Back in the day, everyone had their own way of doing it. It was difficult to find which one is the RIGHT one. 2:05 – Chuck: Yes, I agree. Gives us your background, please! 2:20 – Guest: I am still doing Form IO, and the co-founder and CTO of the company. My Angular Story is MY story on how the company evolved. 3:05 – Chuck: How did you get into programming? 3:09 – Guest: I am going to be 40-years old in May! I am getting up there. Everyone who I am talking to (in my age) it seems like we have the same story. We have this story of having that REALLY old computer. Parents bring home the IBM or the Commodore 64 and that really is my story. At the time, the only thing you could learn with it was to program – there weren’t any video games, etc. A book that I geeked-out about was: “DOS for Dummies.” The guest talks about his senior year in college and how he came to fall in-love with programming. 6:28 – Guest: After college, I got a job for working for a company that used C++ code. People ask: How the heck did you get into Web? My background, too, was tap dancing and in the arts. Most people don’t know that. I was giving these tap lessons to kids – and around that time YouTube was just for cat videos. At the time, I thought it would be great to teach these tap video lessons online. I found a CMS at the time that would help me with my teaching intent. Drupal took me into the frontend libraries. PHP is a backend language, and Drupal was based entirely on PHP. There was this huge paradigm-shift within my career. I really got into these tools not knowing that it would change my career. My open source has taken me to tutorial videos. Eventually, a light bulb went off and I found a solution that needed to be solved within Angular. 12:21 – Guest.  12:28 – Chuck: I love the side hustle description: I saw a need out there and we solved it! 12:40 – Guest: Side hustle is great to talk about. Open source is a bit of a struggle (at that time) it was really hard to maintain open source and providing for your family at the same time. Open source is hard b/c you work your butt off, but you aren’t getting paid for it. It’s really, really difficult. I’ve had ups-and-downs actually with open source. You have to get innovative with it. I am really big on and supportive of people who are monetizing off of open source. 14:58 – Chuck: Open source – for me – I got burned out in June. Sometimes you are putting in a lot of time and not seeing any benefit from it. You have all of these things and something changes, something is different – I can’t take another night not seeing my kids. 16:06 – Guest: You have this original motivation as an open source developer – and you build something rally cool. You share with the world, but a lot of people don’t realize the tail of it. Come to realize it worked well for you – but not for everyone! It makes your stock price go out – contributing to open source – especially if you have a popular open source library. Most of the jobs I would apply to I would just give them my GitHub repertoire. People are figuring out ways they can support themselves and monetize. The ones that can figure that out don’t burnout. 19:44 – Chuck: Babel – Henry Zhu. (See his Patreon account.) 20:08 – Guest: How does he do it? 20:20 – Chuck: It’s mostly contributions. 20:35 – Guest: I see that you are on Patreon. I urge people to go there and help support those open source people. It’s such a great thing and it’s becoming a trend. That’s one thing that drew me away from Drupal b/c at the time it had this negative connotation of monetizing on your open source. The spirit of the open source is THAT. It gives support to open source folks in order to provide for their families. 22:00 – Chuck: I talk a lot with Eric through CodeFund. It’s important to know these options. 22:24 – Guest: That is my road of open source and in creating IO. 24:01 – Chuck: You are the CTO and not the CEO. How did you wind up and forming IO? 24:15 – Guest: There were a lot of pain points. It all started with the prototype. The guest talks about the background. Travis mentions FormBuilder among other things. 30:00 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 30:05 – Guest: The Vanilla Core Renderer! It doesn’t care what framework it gets attached to. We are working on a new template engine.  31:55 – Chuck: I wish I had more time to code. 31:58 – Guest. 33:08 – Chuck: How can people find you? 33:10 – Guest: GitHub! Training YouTube Videos! Twitter! 34:56 – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly Links: jQuery Angular JavaScript Vue React Chuck’s Twitter Chuck’s E-mail: chuck@devchat.tv Travis Tidwell’s Book: Flash With Drupal “How to Build a M.E.A.N. Web Application” by Travis Tidwell Angular-Formly Angular Angular – FormBuilder Patreon Travis’ YouTube Videos Episode 125 with Travis! Travis’ LinkedIn Sponsors: Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Travis Technology: Minio.io T.V. Show: Rick & Morty AI Movie (listen for title) Chuck T.V. Show: Last Man Standing

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Mark Bates This week on My Ruby Story, Chuck talks with Mark Bates who is a consultant, trainer, entrepreneur, co-founder of PaperCall, and an author! Chuck and Mark talk about PaperCall, GO, Ruby, JavaScript, and helping others within the community. Check out today’s episode to hear more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Get A Coder Job! 0:59 – Chuck: Hi! I saw we were on Episode 198! We talked about Ruby and different communities. 1:25 – Guest: Yes, we were talking about the conference we were trying to start, which never took-off! 1:50 – Chuck: You talked about how you are working with GO now. You are an author, too! 2:06 – Guest: That came out in 2009. My 2nd son was born the day before that went to print. 2:42 – Chuck: How many kids do you have? 2:47 – Guest: I have 2 kids. 3:00 – Chuck: Happy Birthday buddy! Let’s talk about your journey into and out of Ruby! 3:15 – Guest: I will be happy to. 3:23 – Chuck: 3:27 – Guest: I have a degree in music and studied guitar in England. I came back in 1999 and needed a job. If you could spell HTML then it was good – then if you could work with it then it was even better! The guest mentions Liverpool, England. 4:20 – Guest: I got a job and transitioned into other things. Fell in-love with Java at the time – and then moved into straight development. I needed money, I had skills into it, and then I fell in-love with 5:10 – Chuck: What aspect in music are you into? 5:14 – Guest: I am a singer/songwriter, and yes into guitar. 5:57 – Chuck: Yeah, they used to have jam sections at conferences. 6:37 – Chuck: I find in interesting how much crossover there is between music and programming/coding. I hear them say: I found I needed to build a site for the band and whatnot. 7:25 – Guest: Yeah, I can do view source and I can figure out that I am missing a tag. That put me ahead in 1997 and 1998! I had done some work that. 8:57 – Chuck: You don’t even have to generate a JavaScript project with that – can I find the template and can I go? 9:14 – Guest: Yes programming has come a long way. 9:22 – Chuck: It is interesting, though. When we talk about those things – it was a different time but I don’t know if it was easier/harder for people to come into the career field now. 9:52 – Guest: Yes, I am into the educational side of it, too. There was a lack of books on the subject back-in-the-day. There is almost too much material now. Guest: I do a Google search that will give me something that is most recent. There is no reason to have to dig through material that isn’t relevant anymore. Guest: I used NOTEPAD to write websites. 11:29 – Chuck: Yes, and then Notepad plus, plus! 11:39 – Guest: Those days are gone. If you want to build a website you go to a company that does that now.  The guest refers to Kubernetes, Ruby, HTML, Sequel and much more! 12:55 – Guest: I see the new developers getting overwhelmed in the beginning they need to learn 10 languages at once. I am fortunate to have come into the industry when I did. I don’t envy them. 13:56 – Chuck: Talking about how complicated the Web is getting. What led you to Ruby on Rails? 14:12 – Guest: In 2004 – I just finished a Java project that had roughly 100,000 lines of configuration!! Everything in Java at that point was XML configuration. I didn’t like debugging XML – and it wasn’t fun. I was refiguring out my career. Everything at the time was XML and more XML! I didn’t want to be in that world. I quit developing completely for 2 years. I worked as an internship in a recording studio for a while. I got to work with a lot of great people, but there was a lack of money and lack of general employment. We wanted to have kids and at the end of 2005 a friend mentioned Ruby on Rails. He told me that it’s NOT Java and that I would love it. I installed it and found an old cookbook tutorial and immediately I said: THAT’s what I want programming to be. When did you pick up Ruby on Rails? 18:14 – Chuck: I picked it up when I worked for...and I was doing Q&A customer service. 19:05 – Guest: Yeah, he hooked me for sure – that jerk! I really got into this book! Check it out! It changed my career and web development entirely. For all the grief we give Rails it did change the world. 20:40 – Chuck: What have you done in Ruby that you are particularly proud of? 20:50 – Guest: Most proud running Boston RB. We had so many people show up! 22:49 – Chuck: You talk about those things and that’s why I ask the question in the first place. And it turns out that: I did THIS thing in the community! I like talking to people and helping people. 23:31 – Guest: Yes, I get to work and help people all around the world. Sweet! I get to go in and help people. It gives me the time to contribute to open source and go to Slack. I have a career based around: Helping People! I like the code that I created, but I like the community stuff I have done over the years. 24:31 – Chuck: Yep my career coach wanted me to create a vision/mission statement for DevChat T.V. We make a difference and people make career changes b/c they are getting help and information 25:23 – Guest: Making a living off of helping people is a great feeling! 25:44 – Guest: The contents of the book are wildly out-of-date, but the origin story is hysterical. I went to a conference in 2008 and was just laid-off in October 2008. I got into a hot tub in Orlando and someone started talking to me about my recent talk. By the way, never write a book – don’t do it! 28:18 – Chuck: Sounds like a movie plot to me! 28:25 – Guest: Oh no – that’s not a good movie idea! 28:50 – Chuck and Guest go back-and-forth with a pretend movie: who would play you? 29:15 – Chuck: Let’s talk about PaperCall? 29:23 – Guest: I hated that (for conferences) you had to enter in a lot of different forms (2-3 proposals) for one conference. This bothered me and was very time-consuming. 31:45 – Guest & Chuck talking about saving time. 32:37 – Chuck: What are you doing now? 32:42 – Guest: Yeah, I get to go around and help engineers and open source exclusively. 33:48 – Chuck: How did you get into GO? 33:53 – Guest: In about 2012 I started looking into GO. The guest talks about the benefits and why he likes GO! 36:28 – Guest: What you see is what you get in GO, which is what I like! 39:13 – Chuck: It is an interesting language, and I haven’t played around with it as much as I would like to. I love trying new things, and see how it solves problems. 40:30 – Guest. 42:00 – Chuck: Picks! 42:06 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly Links: Ruby Elixir Rails Rust Python PHP Kubernetes React Native Ruby Motion Mark’s GitHub Mark’s Twitter PaperCall.io Sponsors: Get a Coder Job Cache Fly Fresh Books Picks: Chuck Book: Ultra Marathon Man Mark GO! GoBuffalo.io Boston RB Jim Weirich – In Memory of... Jim’s Bio

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Travis Tidwell This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Travis Tidwell (Dallas, TX) who is CTO and co-founder of Form_IO! Chuck and Travis talk about his background, open source struggles, and more. Check it out! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:49 – Chuck: Welcome! We had you on Episode 125. A lot has changed huh? The nice thing, though, about these changes is that we seem to be tackling different problems. 1:42 – Guest: They are stabilizing on the same on the same design patterns. I think that’s refreshing. Back in the day, everyone had their own way of doing it. It was difficult to find which one is the RIGHT one. 2:05 – Chuck: Yes, I agree. Gives us your background, please! 2:20 – Guest: I am still doing Form IO, and the co-founder and CTO of the company. My Angular Story is MY story on how the company evolved. 3:05 – Chuck: How did you get into programming? 3:09 – Guest: I am going to be 40-years old in May! I am getting up there. Everyone who I am talking to (in my age) it seems like we have the same story. We have this story of having that REALLY old computer. Parents bring home the IBM or the Commodore 64 and that really is my story. At the time, the only thing you could learn with it was to program – there weren’t any video games, etc. A book that I geeked-out about was: “DOS for Dummies.” The guest talks about his senior year in college and how he came to fall in-love with programming. 6:28 – Guest: After college, I got a job for working for a company that used C++ code. People ask: How the heck did you get into Web? My background, too, was tap dancing and in the arts. Most people don’t know that. I was giving these tap lessons to kids – and around that time YouTube was just for cat videos. At the time, I thought it would be great to teach these tap video lessons online. I found a CMS at the time that would help me with my teaching intent. Drupal took me into the frontend libraries. PHP is a backend language, and Drupal was based entirely on PHP. There was this huge paradigm-shift within my career. I really got into these tools not knowing that it would change my career. My open source has taken me to tutorial videos. Eventually, a light bulb went off and I found a solution that needed to be solved within Angular. 12:21 – Guest.  12:28 – Chuck: I love the side hustle description: I saw a need out there and we solved it! 12:40 – Guest: Side hustle is great to talk about. Open source is a bit of a struggle (at that time) it was really hard to maintain open source and providing for your family at the same time. Open source is hard b/c you work your butt off, but you aren’t getting paid for it. It’s really, really difficult. I’ve had ups-and-downs actually with open source. You have to get innovative with it. I am really big on and supportive of people who are monetizing off of open source. 14:58 – Chuck: Open source – for me – I got burned out in June. Sometimes you are putting in a lot of time and not seeing any benefit from it. You have all of these things and something changes, something is different – I can’t take another night not seeing my kids. 16:06 – Guest: You have this original motivation as an open source developer – and you build something rally cool. You share with the world, but a lot of people don’t realize the tail of it. Come to realize it worked well for you – but not for everyone! It makes your stock price go out – contributing to open source – especially if you have a popular open source library. Most of the jobs I would apply to I would just give them my GitHub repertoire. People are figuring out ways they can support themselves and monetize. The ones that can figure that out don’t burnout. 19:44 – Chuck: Babel – Henry Zhu. (See his Patreon account.) 20:08 – Guest: How does he do it? 20:20 – Chuck: It’s mostly contributions. 20:35 – Guest: I see that you are on Patreon. I urge people to go there and help support those open source people. It’s such a great thing and it’s becoming a trend. That’s one thing that drew me away from Drupal b/c at the time it had this negative connotation of monetizing on your open source. The spirit of the open source is THAT. It gives support to open source folks in order to provide for their families. 22:00 – Chuck: I talk a lot with Eric through CodeFund. It’s important to know these options. 22:24 – Guest: That is my road of open source and in creating IO. 24:01 – Chuck: You are the CTO and not the CEO. How did you wind up and forming IO? 24:15 – Guest: There were a lot of pain points. It all started with the prototype. The guest talks about the background. Travis mentions FormBuilder among other things. 30:00 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 30:05 – Guest: The Vanilla Core Renderer! It doesn’t care what framework it gets attached to. We are working on a new template engine.  31:55 – Chuck: I wish I had more time to code. 31:58 – Guest. 33:08 – Chuck: How can people find you? 33:10 – Guest: GitHub! Training YouTube Videos! Twitter! 34:56 – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly Links: jQuery Angular JavaScript Vue React Chuck’s Twitter Chuck’s E-mail: chuck@devchat.tv Travis Tidwell’s Book: Flash With Drupal “How to Build a M.E.A.N. Web Application” by Travis Tidwell Angular-Formly Angular Angular – FormBuilder Patreon Travis’ YouTube Videos Episode 125 with Travis! Travis’ LinkedIn Sponsors: Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Travis Technology: Minio.io T.V. Show: Rick & Morty AI Movie (listen for title) Chuck T.V. Show: Last Man Standing

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Mark Bates This week on My Ruby Story, Chuck talks with Mark Bates who is a consultant, trainer, entrepreneur, co-founder of PaperCall, and an author! Chuck and Mark talk about PaperCall, GO, Ruby, JavaScript, and helping others within the community. Check out today’s episode to hear more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Get A Coder Job! 0:59 – Chuck: Hi! I saw we were on Episode 198! We talked about Ruby and different communities. 1:25 – Guest: Yes, we were talking about the conference we were trying to start, which never took-off! 1:50 – Chuck: You talked about how you are working with GO now. You are an author, too! 2:06 – Guest: That came out in 2009. My 2nd son was born the day before that went to print. 2:42 – Chuck: How many kids do you have? 2:47 – Guest: I have 2 kids. 3:00 – Chuck: Happy Birthday buddy! Let’s talk about your journey into and out of Ruby! 3:15 – Guest: I will be happy to. 3:23 – Chuck: 3:27 – Guest: I have a degree in music and studied guitar in England. I came back in 1999 and needed a job. If you could spell HTML then it was good – then if you could work with it then it was even better! The guest mentions Liverpool, England. 4:20 – Guest: I got a job and transitioned into other things. Fell in-love with Java at the time – and then moved into straight development. I needed money, I had skills into it, and then I fell in-love with 5:10 – Chuck: What aspect in music are you into? 5:14 – Guest: I am a singer/songwriter, and yes into guitar. 5:57 – Chuck: Yeah, they used to have jam sections at conferences. 6:37 – Chuck: I find in interesting how much crossover there is between music and programming/coding. I hear them say: I found I needed to build a site for the band and whatnot. 7:25 – Guest: Yeah, I can do view source and I can figure out that I am missing a tag. That put me ahead in 1997 and 1998! I had done some work that. 8:57 – Chuck: You don’t even have to generate a JavaScript project with that – can I find the template and can I go? 9:14 – Guest: Yes programming has come a long way. 9:22 – Chuck: It is interesting, though. When we talk about those things – it was a different time but I don’t know if it was easier/harder for people to come into the career field now. 9:52 – Guest: Yes, I am into the educational side of it, too. There was a lack of books on the subject back-in-the-day. There is almost too much material now. Guest: I do a Google search that will give me something that is most recent. There is no reason to have to dig through material that isn’t relevant anymore. Guest: I used NOTEPAD to write websites. 11:29 – Chuck: Yes, and then Notepad plus, plus! 11:39 – Guest: Those days are gone. If you want to build a website you go to a company that does that now.  The guest refers to Kubernetes, Ruby, HTML, Sequel and much more! 12:55 – Guest: I see the new developers getting overwhelmed in the beginning they need to learn 10 languages at once. I am fortunate to have come into the industry when I did. I don’t envy them. 13:56 – Chuck: Talking about how complicated the Web is getting. What led you to Ruby on Rails? 14:12 – Guest: In 2004 – I just finished a Java project that had roughly 100,000 lines of configuration!! Everything in Java at that point was XML configuration. I didn’t like debugging XML – and it wasn’t fun. I was refiguring out my career. Everything at the time was XML and more XML! I didn’t want to be in that world. I quit developing completely for 2 years. I worked as an internship in a recording studio for a while. I got to work with a lot of great people, but there was a lack of money and lack of general employment. We wanted to have kids and at the end of 2005 a friend mentioned Ruby on Rails. He told me that it’s NOT Java and that I would love it. I installed it and found an old cookbook tutorial and immediately I said: THAT’s what I want programming to be. When did you pick up Ruby on Rails? 18:14 – Chuck: I picked it up when I worked for...and I was doing Q&A customer service. 19:05 – Guest: Yeah, he hooked me for sure – that jerk! I really got into this book! Check it out! It changed my career and web development entirely. For all the grief we give Rails it did change the world. 20:40 – Chuck: What have you done in Ruby that you are particularly proud of? 20:50 – Guest: Most proud running Boston RB. We had so many people show up! 22:49 – Chuck: You talk about those things and that’s why I ask the question in the first place. And it turns out that: I did THIS thing in the community! I like talking to people and helping people. 23:31 – Guest: Yes, I get to work and help people all around the world. Sweet! I get to go in and help people. It gives me the time to contribute to open source and go to Slack. I have a career based around: Helping People! I like the code that I created, but I like the community stuff I have done over the years. 24:31 – Chuck: Yep my career coach wanted me to create a vision/mission statement for DevChat T.V. We make a difference and people make career changes b/c they are getting help and information 25:23 – Guest: Making a living off of helping people is a great feeling! 25:44 – Guest: The contents of the book are wildly out-of-date, but the origin story is hysterical. I went to a conference in 2008 and was just laid-off in October 2008. I got into a hot tub in Orlando and someone started talking to me about my recent talk. By the way, never write a book – don’t do it! 28:18 – Chuck: Sounds like a movie plot to me! 28:25 – Guest: Oh no – that’s not a good movie idea! 28:50 – Chuck and Guest go back-and-forth with a pretend movie: who would play you? 29:15 – Chuck: Let’s talk about PaperCall? 29:23 – Guest: I hated that (for conferences) you had to enter in a lot of different forms (2-3 proposals) for one conference. This bothered me and was very time-consuming. 31:45 – Guest & Chuck talking about saving time. 32:37 – Chuck: What are you doing now? 32:42 – Guest: Yeah, I get to go around and help engineers and open source exclusively. 33:48 – Chuck: How did you get into GO? 33:53 – Guest: In about 2012 I started looking into GO. The guest talks about the benefits and why he likes GO! 36:28 – Guest: What you see is what you get in GO, which is what I like! 39:13 – Chuck: It is an interesting language, and I haven’t played around with it as much as I would like to. I love trying new things, and see how it solves problems. 40:30 – Guest. 42:00 – Chuck: Picks! 42:06 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly Links: Ruby Elixir Rails Rust Python PHP Kubernetes React Native Ruby Motion Mark’s GitHub Mark’s Twitter PaperCall.io Sponsors: Get a Coder Job Cache Fly Fresh Books Picks: Chuck Book: Ultra Marathon Man Mark GO! GoBuffalo.io Boston RB Jim Weirich – In Memory of... Jim’s Bio

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Mark Bates This week on My Ruby Story, Chuck talks with Mark Bates who is a consultant, trainer, entrepreneur, co-founder of PaperCall, and an author! Chuck and Mark talk about PaperCall, GO, Ruby, JavaScript, and helping others within the community. Check out today’s episode to hear more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Get A Coder Job! 0:59 – Chuck: Hi! I saw we were on Episode 198! We talked about Ruby and different communities. 1:25 – Guest: Yes, we were talking about the conference we were trying to start, which never took-off! 1:50 – Chuck: You talked about how you are working with GO now. You are an author, too! 2:06 – Guest: That came out in 2009. My 2nd son was born the day before that went to print. 2:42 – Chuck: How many kids do you have? 2:47 – Guest: I have 2 kids. 3:00 – Chuck: Happy Birthday buddy! Let’s talk about your journey into and out of Ruby! 3:15 – Guest: I will be happy to. 3:23 – Chuck: 3:27 – Guest: I have a degree in music and studied guitar in England. I came back in 1999 and needed a job. If you could spell HTML then it was good – then if you could work with it then it was even better! The guest mentions Liverpool, England. 4:20 – Guest: I got a job and transitioned into other things. Fell in-love with Java at the time – and then moved into straight development. I needed money, I had skills into it, and then I fell in-love with 5:10 – Chuck: What aspect in music are you into? 5:14 – Guest: I am a singer/songwriter, and yes into guitar. 5:57 – Chuck: Yeah, they used to have jam sections at conferences. 6:37 – Chuck: I find in interesting how much crossover there is between music and programming/coding. I hear them say: I found I needed to build a site for the band and whatnot. 7:25 – Guest: Yeah, I can do view source and I can figure out that I am missing a tag. That put me ahead in 1997 and 1998! I had done some work that. 8:57 – Chuck: You don’t even have to generate a JavaScript project with that – can I find the template and can I go? 9:14 – Guest: Yes programming has come a long way. 9:22 – Chuck: It is interesting, though. When we talk about those things – it was a different time but I don’t know if it was easier/harder for people to come into the career field now. 9:52 – Guest: Yes, I am into the educational side of it, too. There was a lack of books on the subject back-in-the-day. There is almost too much material now. Guest: I do a Google search that will give me something that is most recent. There is no reason to have to dig through material that isn’t relevant anymore. Guest: I used NOTEPAD to write websites. 11:29 – Chuck: Yes, and then Notepad plus, plus! 11:39 – Guest: Those days are gone. If you want to build a website you go to a company that does that now.  The guest refers to Kubernetes, Ruby, HTML, Sequel and much more! 12:55 – Guest: I see the new developers getting overwhelmed in the beginning they need to learn 10 languages at once. I am fortunate to have come into the industry when I did. I don’t envy them. 13:56 – Chuck: Talking about how complicated the Web is getting. What led you to Ruby on Rails? 14:12 – Guest: In 2004 – I just finished a Java project that had roughly 100,000 lines of configuration!! Everything in Java at that point was XML configuration. I didn’t like debugging XML – and it wasn’t fun. I was refiguring out my career. Everything at the time was XML and more XML! I didn’t want to be in that world. I quit developing completely for 2 years. I worked as an internship in a recording studio for a while. I got to work with a lot of great people, but there was a lack of money and lack of general employment. We wanted to have kids and at the end of 2005 a friend mentioned Ruby on Rails. He told me that it’s NOT Java and that I would love it. I installed it and found an old cookbook tutorial and immediately I said: THAT’s what I want programming to be. When did you pick up Ruby on Rails? 18:14 – Chuck: I picked it up when I worked for...and I was doing Q&A customer service. 19:05 – Guest: Yeah, he hooked me for sure – that jerk! I really got into this book! Check it out! It changed my career and web development entirely. For all the grief we give Rails it did change the world. 20:40 – Chuck: What have you done in Ruby that you are particularly proud of? 20:50 – Guest: Most proud running Boston RB. We had so many people show up! 22:49 – Chuck: You talk about those things and that’s why I ask the question in the first place. And it turns out that: I did THIS thing in the community! I like talking to people and helping people. 23:31 – Guest: Yes, I get to work and help people all around the world. Sweet! I get to go in and help people. It gives me the time to contribute to open source and go to Slack. I have a career based around: Helping People! I like the code that I created, but I like the community stuff I have done over the years. 24:31 – Chuck: Yep my career coach wanted me to create a vision/mission statement for DevChat T.V. We make a difference and people make career changes b/c they are getting help and information 25:23 – Guest: Making a living off of helping people is a great feeling! 25:44 – Guest: The contents of the book are wildly out-of-date, but the origin story is hysterical. I went to a conference in 2008 and was just laid-off in October 2008. I got into a hot tub in Orlando and someone started talking to me about my recent talk. By the way, never write a book – don’t do it! 28:18 – Chuck: Sounds like a movie plot to me! 28:25 – Guest: Oh no – that’s not a good movie idea! 28:50 – Chuck and Guest go back-and-forth with a pretend movie: who would play you? 29:15 – Chuck: Let’s talk about PaperCall? 29:23 – Guest: I hated that (for conferences) you had to enter in a lot of different forms (2-3 proposals) for one conference. This bothered me and was very time-consuming. 31:45 – Guest & Chuck talking about saving time. 32:37 – Chuck: What are you doing now? 32:42 – Guest: Yeah, I get to go around and help engineers and open source exclusively. 33:48 – Chuck: How did you get into GO? 33:53 – Guest: In about 2012 I started looking into GO. The guest talks about the benefits and why he likes GO! 36:28 – Guest: What you see is what you get in GO, which is what I like! 39:13 – Chuck: It is an interesting language, and I haven’t played around with it as much as I would like to. I love trying new things, and see how it solves problems. 40:30 – Guest. 42:00 – Chuck: Picks! 42:06 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly Links: Ruby Elixir Rails Rust Python PHP Kubernetes React Native Ruby Motion Mark’s GitHub Mark’s Twitter PaperCall.io Sponsors: Get a Coder Job Cache Fly Fresh Books Picks: Chuck Book: Ultra Marathon Man Mark GO! GoBuffalo.io Boston RB Jim Weirich – In Memory of... Jim’s Bio

Panel: Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Brady Gaster In this episode, Chuck talks with Brady Gaster about SignalR that is offered through Microsoft. Brady Gaster is a computer software engineer at Microsoft and past employers include Logical Advantage, and Market America, Inc. Check out today’s episode where the two dive deep into SignalR topics. Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:56 – Chuck: Hello! We are going to talk about SignalR, which is an offering through Microsoft. 1:09 – Guest: It started in 2011 that’s when I got involved, but I wasn’t with Microsoft, yet, at that point. I was working on the technology, though. Effectively you can do real time HTMP but what they did (Damon and David) let’s create a series of abstractions but not we have for Java. They basically cam up this idea let’s do web sockets and then go back to pole / pole / pole. It’s to see what the server and the client can support. Guest talks about Socket.io, too. 6:45 – Chuck: What we are talking about real time coordination between apps. 6:56 – Guest: Web sockets, 1 million...and 2.6 million messages a second! 7:05 – Chuck: I can set that up like I usually set up web sockets? 7:17 – Guest: There is a client library for each. Effectively you have a concept called a connection. 9:48 – Chuck: How do you handle authentication on the frontend? 9:56 – Guest: We have server side things that we can attribute things. 10:09 – Chuck. 10:12 – Guest: If you authenticate to the site then the site passes the token and it basically sits on top of the same plumbing. 10:38 – Chuck. 10:42 – Guest. 10:54 – Chuck. 10:58 – Guest: We recently just had the DOT NET CONF. We had an all night, 24-hour thing. 11:48 – Chuck: Here you are, here you go. You hook it all up, JavaScript into your bundle. 12:05 – (The guest talks about how to install.) 13:12 – Chuck: I could come up with my own scheme. 13:25 – Guest: The traditional example is SEND A MESSAGE and then pass you string. Well tomorrow I do that and I just change the code – it’s great b/c I send up a ping and everybody knows what to do what that ping. It’s just a proxy. 14:17 – Chuck: I am trying to envision what you would use this for? If you are worried about it being stale then you refresh. But if you want the collaborative stuff at what point do you ask: Do I need SignalR? 15:00 – Guest: When I do my presentations on SignalR and being transparent I want to send you 1,000 messages but 1 or 2 messages will be dropped. You don’t want to transmit your order data or credit card information. Do you have a hammer and you need a screw?  If you need stock tickers and other applications SignalR would work. Keeping your UI fresh it is a great thing. 19:02 – Chuck: You do that at the Hub? You set up the Hub and it passes everything back and forth. What can you do at the Hub for filtering and/or certain types of events? 19:26 – Guest: I am looking at a slide. What’s the cool thing about SignalR and the API is it’s deceptively simple on purpose. If you want to call out to clients, you can get a message to all of your clients if you select that/those feature(s).  Some other features you have are OTHERS, and Clients.Group. 20:57 – Chuck: Can you set up your own? 20:58 – Guest: I don’t know. 21:12 – Chuck: Clients who belong to more than one group. 21:23 – Guest: Dynamics still give some people heartburn. (The guest talks about C#, Dev, Hub, and more!) 23:46 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 24:23 – Chuck: How do people get started with this? Do they need Azure? 24:30 – Guest: You don’t need Azure you can go to Microsoft and it’s apart of the .NET team, too. 26:39 – Guest talks about how to install SignalR – see links below! 27:03 – Chuck: You don’t have to KNOW .NET. 27:11 – Guest: It was created by that team (*fair enough*) but you don’t have to know .NET. 27:57 – Guest: You can I could do JavaScript all the way. 29:04 – Chuck: Yes, we keep moving forward. It will look different what people are using. 29:21 – Guest: That was an early thing and I was reading through the old bugs from 2011/2012 and that’s one thing that kept coming up. I didn’t want to use jQuery to use SignalR – now you don’t. It’s a happy thing. 30:45 – Guest: Someone suggested using PARCEL. I have a question do you have any recommendations to have NODE-SASS workflow to have it less stressful?  31:30 – Chuck: It’s out of Ruby that’s my experience with Node-Sass. 31:40 – Guest: I haven’t used Ruby, yet. 31:46 – Guest: I haven’t heard of Phoenix what is that? 31:50 – Chuck answers. Chuck: It’s functional and very fast. Once you’ve figured out those features they almost become power features for you. Elixir has a lot of great things going for it. 32:50 – Guest: I tried picking up GO recently. 33:08 – Chuck: Lots of things going on in the programming world. 33:18 – Guest: I have always had a mental block around Java. I was PMing the Java guys and I asked: will this stuff work on... Once I got it then I thought that I needed to explore this stuff more! I want to learn Ruby, though. 34:16 – Chuck: Anything else in respect to SignalR? 34:15 – Guest: I really think I have dumped everything I know about Signal R just now. I would draw people to the DOCS pages. A guide for anything that could happen on the JavaScript side – check them out! We have tons of new ideas, too! 37:33 – Picks! 37:42 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 47:54 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter SignalR SignalR’s Twitter GitHub SignalR Socket.io Node-SASS ASP.NET SignalR Hubs API Guide – JavaScript Client SignalR.net Real Talk JavaScript Parcel Brady Gaster’s Twitter Brady Gaster’s GitHub Brady Gaster’s LinkedIn Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: Brady Team on General Session Korg SeaHawks Brady’s kids Logictech spot light AirPods Charles Express VPN Hyper Drive J5 ports and SD card readers Podwrench

Panel: Nader Dabit Lucas Reis Charles Max Wood Special Guests: Ben Nelson In this episode, the panelists talk with Ben Nelson who is a co-founder and CTO of Lambda School. The panelists and Ben talk about Lambda School, the pros & cons of the 4-year university program for developers, and much more. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Kendo UI 0:33 – Chuck: We have Nader, Lucas, and myself – our special gust is Ben Nelson! 0:50 – Guest: Hi! 0:54 – Chuck: Please introduce yourself. 0:58 – Guest: I love to ski and was a developer in the Utah area. 1:12 – Chuck: Let’s talk about Lambda School, but I think explaining what the school is and how you operate will help. Give us an elevator pitch for the school. 1:36 – Guest: The school is 30-weeks long and we go deep into computer fundamentals. They get exposed to multiple stacks. Since it’s 30-weeks to run we help with the finances by they start paying once they get employed. It’s online and students from U.S. and the U.K. 3:23 – Chuck: I don’t want you to badmouth DevMountain, great model, but I don’t know if it works for everyone? 3:43 – Guest: Three months part-time is really hard if you don’t have a technical background. It was a grind and hard for the students. 4:03 – Nader: Is it online or any part in-person. 4:11 – Guest: Yep totally online. 4:40 – Nader: Austen Allred is really, really good at being in the social scene. I know that he has mentioned that you are apart of...since 2017? 5:20 – Guest: Yeah you would be surprised how much Twitter has helped our school. He is the other co-founder and is a genius with social media platforms! 6:04 – Guest mentions Python, marketing, and building a following. 7:17 – Guest: We saw a lot of students who wanted to enroll but they couldn’t afford it. This gave us the idea to help with using the income share agreement. 8:06 – Nader: Yeah, that’s really cool. I didn’t know you were online only so now that makes sense. Do you have other plans for the company? 8:33 – Guest: Amazon started with books and then branched out; same thing for us. 8:56 – Chuck: Let’s talk about programming and what’s your placement rate right now? 9:05 – Guest: It fluctuates. Our incentive is we don’t get paid unless our students get employed. Our first couple classes were 83% and then later in the mid-60%s and it’s averaging around there. Our goal is 90% in 90 days. Guest continues: All boot camps aren’t the same. 10:55 – Lucas: Ben, I have a question. One thing we have a concern about is that universities are disconnected with the CURRENT market! 11:47 – Guest: We cannot compare to the 4-year system, but our strength we don’t have tenure track Ph.D. professors. Our instructors have been working hands-on for a while. They are experienced engineers. We make sure the instructors we hire are involved and passionate. We pay for them to go to conferences and we want them to be on the cutting-edge. We feel like we can compete to CS degrees b/c of the focused training that we offer. 13:16 – Chuck: Yeah, when I went to school there were only 2 professors that came from the field. 14:22 – Guest: Yeah, look at MIT. When I was studying CS in school my best professor was adjunct b/c he came from the field. I don’t know if the 4-year plan is always the best. I don’t want to shoot down higher education but you have to consider what’s best for you. 15:05 – Nader: It’s spread out across the different fields. It was a model that was created a long time ago, and isn’t always the best necessarily for computer science. Think about our field b/c things are moving so fast.  15:57 – Chuck: What you are saying, Nader, but 10 years ago this iPhone was a brand new thing, and now we are talking about a zillion different devices that you can write for. It’s crazy. That’s where we are seeing things change – the fundamentals are good – but they aren’t teaching you at that level. Hello – it’s not the ‘90s anymore! I wonder if my bias comes from boot camp grads were really motivated in the first place...and they want to make a change and make a career out of it. 17:34 – Chuck: There is value, but I don’t know if my CS major prepared me well for the job market. 17:42 – Guest: Probably you didn’t have much student loan debt being that you went to Utah. 17:58 – Nader: Why is that? 18:03 – Chuck talks about UT’s tuition and how he worked while attending college. 18:29 – Lucas: I don’t stop studying. The fundamentals aren’t bad to keep studying them. Putting you into a job first should be top priority and then dive into the fundamentals. Work knowledge is so important – after you are working for 1 year – then figure out what the fundamentals are. I think I learn better the “other way around.” 20:30 – Chuck: That’s fair. 20:45 – Guest: That’s exactly what we focus on. The guest talks about the general curriculum at the Lambda School 22:07 – Nader: That’s an interesting take on that. When you frame it that way – there is no comparison when considering the student loan debt. 22:30 – Chuck: College degrees do have a place, too. 22:39 – Chuck: Who do you see applying to the boot camps? 23:05 – Guest: It’s a mix. It’s concentrated on people who started in another career and they want to make a career change. Say they come from construction or finances and they are switching to developing. We get some college students, but it’s definitely more adult training. 24:02 – Guest: The older people who have families they are desperate and they are hungry and want to work hard. We had this guy who was making $20,000 and now he’s making $85K. Now his daughter can have his own bedroom and crying through that statement. 24:50 – Chuck: That makes sense! 24:52 – Advertisement – FRESH BOOKS! 26:02 – Guest: Look at MIT, Berkeley – the value is filtering and they are only accepting the top of the top. We don’t want to operate like that. We just have to hire new teachers and not build new buildings. We raise the bar and set the standard – and try to get everybody to that bar. We aren’t sacrificing quality but want everybody there. 27:43 – Chuck: What are the tradeoffs? 28:00 – Guest: There is an energy in-person that happens that you miss out on doing it online. There are a lot of benefits, though, doing it online. They have access to a larger audience via the web, they can re-watch videos that teachers record. 28:45 – Nader: Is there a set curriculum that everyone uses? How do you come up with the curriculum and how often does it get revamped? What are you teaching currently? 29:08 – Guest answers the question in-detail. 30:49 – Guest (continues): Heavily project-focused, too! 31:08 – Nader: What happens when they start and if they dropout? 31:22 – Guest: When we first got started we thought it was going to be high dropout rates. At first it was 40% b/c it’s hard, you can close your computer, and walk away. If a student doesn’t score 80% or higher in the week then they have to do it again. Our dropout rate is only 5-10%. In the beginning they have a grace period of 2-4 weeks where they wouldn’t owe anything. After a certain point, though, they are bound to pay per our agreements. 33:00 – Chuck: Where do people get stuck? 33:05 – Guest: Redux, React, and others! Maybe an instructor isn’t doing a good job. 34:06 – Guest: It’s intense and so we have to provide emotional support. 34:17 – Nader: I started a school year and I ran it for 1-3 years and didn’t go anywhere. We did PHP and Angular 1 and a little React Native. We never were able to get the numbers to come, and we’d only have 3-4 people. I think the problem was we were in Mississippi and scaling it is not an easy thing to do. This could be different if you were in NY. But if you are virtual that is a good take. Question: What hurdles did you have to overcome? 35:52 – Guest: There was a lot of experimentation. Dropout rates were a big one, and the other one is growth. One problem that needed to be solved first was: Is there a demand for this? Reddit helped and SubReddit. For the dropout rates we had to drive home the concept of accountability. There are tons of hands-on help from TA’s, there is accountability with attendance, and homework and grades. We want them to know that they are noticed and we are checking-in on them if they were to miss class, etc. 38:41 – Chuck: I know your instructor, Luis among others. I know they used to work for DevMountain. How do you find these folks? 39:15 – Guest: A lot of it is through the network, but now Twitter, too. 40:13 – Nader: I am always amazed with the developers that come out of UT. 40:28 – Chuck: It’s interesting and we are seeing companies coming out here. 40:50 – Guest: Something we were concerned about was placement as it relates to geography. So someone that is in North Dakota – would they get a job. The people in the rural areas almost have an easier time getting the job b/c it’s less competitive. Companies are willing to pay for relocation, which is good. 41:49 – Nader: That is spot on. 42:22 – Chuck: Instructor or Student how do they inquire to teach/attend at your school? 42:44 – Guest: We are launching in the United Kingdom and looking for a program director there! 43:00 – Advertisement – Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly Links: Ruby on Rails Angular JavaScript Elm Phoenix GitHub Get A Coder Job Income Share Agreement’s Definition DevMountain Charles Max Wood’s Twitter Nader Dabit’s Twitter Lucas Reis’ GitHub Ben Nelson’s Talk: Rethinking Higher Education – ICERI 2016 Keynote Speech Ben Nelson’s LinkedIn Ben Nelson’s Twitter Lambda School Sponsors: Get a Coder Job Cache Fly Fresh Books Kendo UI   Picks: Lucas Cypress Looking a Cypress as a Development Environment. Nader Egghead.io Nader’s courses on Egghead.io Suggestions for courses Charles Opportunity to help liberate developers Extreme Ownership Hiring a developer Sales Rep. for selling sponsorships Show note writer Ben Air Table