Podcast appearances and mentions of gant laborde

In this episode, Rob Ocel sits down with Gant Laborde, CIO at Infinite Red, to explore Gant's journey in the tech industry, his transition into leadership, and his role as a Chief Innovation Officer. Gant shares insights into the challenges and rewards of innovation within a company, how to manage upward and downward effectively, and the importance of trust in leadership. They also discuss the evolving landscape of AI, the significance of experimentation, and the courage needed to make bold decisions.  Chapters 1. Introduction and Opening Remarks - 00:00 2. Gant's Background and Journey in Tech - 02:05 3. Transitioning to Leadership at Infinite Red - 05:08 4. Defining Innovation at an Agency - 07:28 5. The Role of AI in React Native - 09:39 6. Navigating the Hype and Troughs of Technology - 11:35 7. The Challenges of Middle Management - 15:12 8. Building Trust and Managing Upwards - 16:25 9. Empowering Teams and Passing the Torch - 19:40 10. Developing Courage and Taking Risks - 22:30 11. Why Leadership is Worth It - 30:28 12. Final Thoughts and Wrap-Up - 31:53 Follow Gant Laborde on Social Media Twitter: https://x.com/GantLaborde Github: https://github.com/GantMan Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gant-laborde/ Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@gantlaborde

Robin and Mazen are joined by Gant Laborde to explore the world of on-device AI in React Native. They discuss ways of integrating AI on mobile devices, as well as how Infinite Red's ML Kit simplifies the process—enabling developers to add advanced AI features with ease.This episode is brought to you by Infinite Red! Infinite Red is an expert React Native consultancy located in the USA. With nearly a decade of React Native experience and deep roots in the React Native community (hosts of Chain React and the React Native Newsletter, core React Native contributors, creators of Ignite and Reactotron, and much, much more), Infinite Red is the best choice for helping you build and deploy your next React Native app.Show NotesWe're hiring! Interested in working for Infinite Red? Go to https://careers.infinite.redConnect With Us!React Native Radio: @ReactNativeRdioGant: @gantlabordeRobin:  @robin_heinzeMazen: @mazen_chamiInfinite Red Slack Community: https://community.infinite.red 

In this conversation, Simon Grimm interviews Gant Laborde, CIO at Infinite Red, about his role, his sci-fi novel, and the React Native Paradox. Gant explores the reasons behind React Native's success and its consistency and care as key factors. They also touch on the competition between React Native and Flutter, and the challenges faced by Google in maintaining consistency and community support. In this conversation, Gant Laborde discusses the future of AI and its integration into mobile and web projects. He highlights the importance of understanding the business logic and using AI as a feature to enhance the user experience. Gant also explains ML Kit, a Google initiative that provides pre-trained models for image and text recognition, face detection, and more. He emphasizes the need for developers to explore and experiment with AI to discover innovative ways to improve their products. Gant encourages developers to think about how AI can add value and increase the quality of life for users.Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devGant LabordeGant X: https://x.com/GantLabordeGant website: https://gantlaborde.comGant GitHub: https://github.com/GantManLinksThe React Native Paradox (Chain React 2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo2LjKJp0aA&list=PLFHvL21g9bk0XOO9XK6d6S9w1jBU6Dz_U&index=6React Native Ignite: Building an AI app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivfXKYPS6Xw&list=PLSk21zn8fFZDMGB9UCnqz4WqLbnOgLnp5&index=3Infinite Red React Native ML Kit template: https://github.com/infinitered/react-native-mlkit Google ML Kit: https://developers.google.com/ml-kitTakeawaysAs CIO at Infinite Red, Gant's role is to drive innovation and explore new technologies for the company.The React Native Paradox refers to the success of React Native despite other technologies attempting to bring web technology to mobile.Consistency and care are key factors in the success of React Native.Flutter, while popular, faces challenges due to Google's history of discontinuing projects and lack of consistency.The community support and open-source nature of React Native contribute to its longevity and adoption.Google's focus on multiple technologies and lack of consistency can hinder the success of its projects.Long-term success in technology requires multi-generational thinking and community support. AI is becoming an integral part of mobile and web projects, and its integration should focus on enhancing the user experience and adding value to the product.ML Kit, a Google initiative, provides pre-trained models for various AI tasks such as image and text recognition, face detection, and more.Developers should explore and experiment with AI to discover innovative ways to improve their products and solve real-world problems.Understanding the business logic and the problem being solved is crucial for effectively integrating AI into projects.

Come hang with us! Like what you hear? Connect with me - Website: ⁠gun.io/taylor⁠ Email: taylordesseyn@gun.io LinkedIn: Taylor Desseyn Tweet me: @tdesseyn Pics of the life, wife, daughter & dog: @tdesseyn

Jamon Holmgren is the founder of Infinite Red, a consultancy specializing in React Native. He discusses his journey and insights into technology and leadership and highlights how Infinite Red stands as a testament that businesses can be run ethically while still achieving success. The conversation shifts to leadership styles and the principle of "one-minute praise" from the book "One Minute Manager." Both Jamon and Will agree that acknowledging others' efforts openly can make a significant difference, enhancing leadership skills and building stronger relationships. Will points out how this simple principle has been a game-changer for him in various aspects of life, including his personal relationships. Towards the end, the focus turns to motivation and long-term strategy. Jamon is driven by his enthusiasm for learning and the thrill of tackling diverse challenges in his consultancy work. He also shares his philosophy of keeping the company "10 degrees above the horizon," emphasizing steady, sustainable growth rather than erratic leaps and bounds. Infinite Red (https://infinite.red/) Follow Infinite Red on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/infinitered/), X (https://twitter.com/infinite_red), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwpSzVt7QpLDbCnPXqR97-g), GitHub (https://github.com/infinitered), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/infiniteredinc/), or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/infinitered_designers/). Follow Jamon Holmgren on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamonholmgren/) or X (https://twitter.com/jamonholmgren). Visit his website at jamon.dev (https://jamon.dev/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. And with me today is Jamon Holmgren, Co-Founder and CTO of Infinite Red, a software consulting agency that specializes in React Native. Jamon, thank you for joining me. JAMON: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. WILL: So, Jamon, what's going on in your life? How's everything going? JAMON: You know, things have been obviously very busy, like, I guess, pretty much everybody. You know, school has started. I have four kids, so that keeps me quite busy, going to various school events, going to volleyball, you know, bringing kids here and there, running the company. I have some side projects I'm doing. I am playing hockey. So, it just seems like every waking hour is filled with something. [laughter] WILL: I totally understand that. I have three kids of my own. So, they're a little bit younger than yours, so mine is 4, 3, and, like, 17 months, so... JAMON: Okay. Yeah, so you're just getting started. And you're doing all of the, like, physical labor associated with being a parent. WILL: Yes, yes, yes. So, I want to start there. Tell me a little bit about your kids. I know their ages are 10 to 18. JAMON: Yeah, so I have a boy, Cedric. He's actually a programmer as well. He's just starting his career. He is the oldest, and then we have three girls. We have a 15-year-old who's a sophomore in high school. And then we have a 12-year-old who's in middle school and a 10-year-old who is in fifth grade in elementary school. And it's a lot. My wife and I both came from very large families, so we're kind of used to it. And it's a lot of fun. A lot of challenges at this age, I mean, teenagers especially, you know, as they kind of all come into that same era, you know, it's more of a challenge. I guess the thing that I think about it is a lot of the skills that I learned as a young kid parent don't really translate super well to being a teenager parent. And I'm having to learn a lot of new skills. And I actually talked to a guy the other day. His kids are, I think, 32 and 28, or something like that. And he said, "Yeah, the learning never stops." [laughs] WILL: So, I'm going to ask you for the secret sauce because I'm still in the temper tantrums and those type of emotions and stuff. So, how is it different in the teenage years from the temper tantrums? JAMON: Well, I think that they can act like adults in a lot of cases, and you start thinking of them as adults, and you start developing a relationship there. But their brains are also not fully developed. And so, they will also do things that are very inexplicable, like, you'll just be like, why? Why would this be a thing? Like, I don't get it. Like, you act like an adult for half the time, and then the other half, you act like a kid. Navigating that, and the fact that they change all the time, and all the other challenges. And they're all different. Like, if we had only had one kid, you know, my boy was pretty easy. He was pretty straightforward. It would have been like, well, shoot, being a parent is pretty easy. Like, I don't know what everybody else is complaining about. Like, he never did tantrums. He was just a really quiet, you know, like, well-behaved kid and kind of went through life like that. But then, obviously, developing a relationship with him is more of the challenge because he's quieter, where with my girls, it's easier to develop the relationship, but then you [laughs] deal with a lot more volatility as well. So, they're all different. Every kid's different. It's hard to really apply that directly. I would say that the thing that I've learned the most in the last few years is just kind of continuing to be, like, even through some of the tougher times, continuing to be there, continuing to develop that relationship. A lot of times, it feels like you're not getting anywhere, but you are. It is actually happening. You just don't see it until later. WILL: I'm writing that down. That's great advice [laughter]. You mentioned hockey. Tell me about it. I've never played hockey. I grew up in the South, so we didn't have that. So, tell me about it. And you're a goalie also, correct? JAMON: Yeah, I play goalie. I didn't discover hockey...I played basketball in high school. I played four years of high school basketball. I even played a little bit at college. And I didn't really discover hockey until I moved to Southwest Washington, about an hour away from where I grew up in the coast of Oregon. When I got there, a lot of my friends that I made were playing hockey. And one friend, in particular, he was a goalie, and he had grown up in Upper Michigan. So, you know, like, he grew up playing hockey. He was a very good skater and things like that. But there was one weekend I was coming to watch him play just rec hockey. And he's like, "You know what? I can't make it. Would you want to jump in and, like, be my sub?" And it was just a pick-up game. So, it wasn't like there was anything on the line. And I was like, "All right, I'll give it a try." You know, put on the gear. He showed me what to do to put on the gear. He kind of gave me some tips. Like, in the living room where we were, he was, like, showing me how to play. We were, like, I would say, 19, I think. Nineteen years old, something like that. Anyway, I show up, and I put on the gear, and I go out there. And I actually had a decent game, considering I barely knew how to skate and barely knew how to do anything. But I'm kind of big; I'm six foot four, almost six foot five. And having all that gear and everything, I filled up a lot of the net. And it wasn't a very high-level game, so I did pretty well. And after that, the team was like, "Well, we'd love to have you back." And then my friend really was not interested in continuing, so he was like, "You can have it, like, just roll with it." I kept playing for about three years, and then, I don't know, I took over a decade off. The team dissolved. It wasn't even a league team. It was just, you know, pick-up hockey. And then a friend called me and was like, "Hey, I'm starting up a game. It's going to be Finnish Americans," because I'm half-Finnish myself. "So, it's going to be all Finnish Americans. We're going to call it the [Foreign language]," which is the Finnish boys in sort of Finnish. It's not exactly supposed to be like that in Finnish. Anybody listening who's Finnish is going to be like, "Yeah, that's bad Finnish." But it kind of means Finnish boys or Finland boys. And we put together the team, and I've been playing for the last three-plus years. It's been kind of, like, a rec league team. We've won the championship four times, which was really fun. This year, I'm actually playing in two leagues. I'm playing in rec league, and I'm also playing the next league up, so a little bit faster, better skaters, better shooters, things like that. And I just love it. It's so much fun. WILL: Wow, that's amazing that you started later and that you're still playing it. Because when I look at hockey, I'm like, that's really hard. I don't know if I could do that. I can skate. I can't stop. JAMON: [laughs] WILL: Like, I can get a lot of speed [laughs]. But it's just something about turning sideways and thinking I'm going to fly over the skates. JAMON: [laughs] WILL: And yeah, it's a whole thing [laughs]. Is goalie harder than playing any of the other positions? JAMON: I would say it's different. Like, I don't have to be as good of a skater, you know, things like hockey stops are still not supernatural for me. I don't skate backwards super-fast. You know, I'm not a fast skater in general. But the difference is, of course, you have to be reading the flow of the game. You have to know the body language of the players that are coming at you. You have to kind of see what's happening. At the end of the day, lots of things can happen, so you try to put yourself in the best position. It's a lot of, like, positional, like, where are you in the net? What does your position look like? And then, once they shoot, how do you react? Are you dropping down, or are you staying up? Are you using your glove? Are you using your blocker? Are you just trying to block with your body using your stick? Then, once the puck hits you, then what do you do? How do you control the rebound? Are you trying to cover it up and ice the puck so they do a face-off? Are you trying to kick it out to one of your skaters? And then, once that happens, you have a little bit of a rest, hopefully, while they're down on the other side. But you're continually alert and watching to see what's going to develop because it could be a breakaway. And then it's just you and the skater and trying to anticipate what they're doing and try to make it so that they have to make a play. Like, just be big, be in position. Don't get out of position. Don't make a mistake. And I've had really great games where I've, you know, had 45 shots on me, and I've only let one in or something like that. And I've had some bad games too. I know there's one game in a championship where they only had six shots on me. But we ended up losing because I let in two, so that was not a fun game. I only had six opportunities, and I failed on two of them. But that happens, and so you just have to be mentally tough. WILL: Wow, that's amazing. The limited knowledge of hockey...I'm going to assume here, so I hope it's right. With you being 6'4, 6'5, I'm guessing that the five-hole, if I'm correct, was probably your toughest position to defend. JAMON: You know, you would think so. And just for the audience, the five-hole is, like, between your legs, you know, the puck going between your legs underneath. But I play a style...a little bit older style of goalie because that's what I watched. You know, in, like, the early 2000s, I watched Patrick Roy of the Colorado Avalanche, one of the greatest goalies of all time, and he played what's called a butterfly style. So, as the play develops, you're standing, but then you go down fairly early, and you're protecting the bottom. You have your stick in front of you protecting the five-hole, and you have your legs, you know, spread out. So, I used my height really more for blocking as I'm down rather than standing because when I'm standing, I'm above the net. It's better for me to get down. And I think that that's worked out pretty well. You know, Patrick Roy was a pretty big goalie as well. Most modern goalies play a more hybrid style. But, you know, we could get into all that. I'm a big kind of hockey nerd in this way. But that's what I do. I play butterfly, so most of the time, people don't beat me five-hole; when they do, it's usually they're picking a corner. WILL: Wow. Now that you've painted the picture, I can see how that's smart because you do have the goal, I mean, the gloves plus the stick and then your height. Yeah, I can see how...that's smart. That's very smart [laughs]. JAMON: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's kind of the goal. And also, because I wasn't a great skater, it sort of played into it as well, playing down on the ice where I was just more comfortable that way. It's worked out. I've had a pretty decent record over my career here [laughs]. WILL: That's awesome. Well, let's transition a little bit into consultant agencies. You've been doing it for 18 years. Tell me about that. How did you get started? JAMON: Well, when I started, I was working in construction. I was working for a home builder. And, you know, everybody I knew pretty much worked in construction, including my dad, who owned a business. And I went on my own. I had always dreamed of owning my own business, but I didn't start really thinking about websites. I was coding. I loved coding, and I was coding since I was 12. So, when I got to 23 years old, I thought, I'll start a business, and I'll do home design because that's what I was doing for the builder was, I was drawing homes. I was designing homes and remodels and things like that. And so, I started it doing that. But I also needed a little bit extra work. I didn't have enough work. Like, I had people, you know, sending me work, you know, home design and whatnot, but I didn't have quite enough. So, I would also build websites on the side, PHP and HTML, MySQL, and JavaScript. And I just sort of continued to do that. But in 2008, there was the housing crisis, and all of the design work for homes just dried up. There wasn't much there. In fact, it actually really dried up in 2007 because things kind of started a little early for designers. And so, I was like; I got to do something to stay busy. I've got a wife. I've got a young kid (Actually, at that point, I had two kids.), and I need to make sure that I'm staying busy. And so, I really ramped up trying to find work, you know, as a programmer, as a web developer. And there were plenty of companies at that time that were really trying to drum up business. So, they were putting money into their websites trying to get new projects, and they were all construction companies. And so, that's how I started. And I started doing more things like internal web apps for managing orders and managing sales leads, and that sort of thing. And that led me into web apps and eventually to Ruby on Rails, which became sort of my bread and butter for a while. As I was doing Ruby on Rails, you know, obviously, the iPhone was out, but the iPad came out. And I was more of an Android guy at that point. But I bought an iPad because it looked really cool, and my dad had one. When I started playing around with it, I'm like, I need to build apps for this. This is super cool. So, I took some Stanford courses online, which you could do back in those days, iTunes U, and learned how to use Objective-C. This was previous to Automatic Reference Counting and stuff. So, you had to manage your own memory, and this was a lot of manual work; very different environment than JavaScript, and PHP, and Ruby. But I actually enjoyed it quite a bit and then eventually transitioned into React Native later. But really, getting over to mobile and that sort of thing was...once I found mobile, I really didn't want to do web anymore. Mobile is what I really enjoy doing. WILL: Wow, I love that. If I'm following you correctly, you said in 2007, that's kind of when everything dried up. So, you were almost forced to find something different, correct? JAMON: Yeah, that's right. I mean, I kind of sat around feeling sorry for myself for a while. And then I was like, well, it's my business. I got to figure out what to do. It's not anybody else's fault. Like, you know, it doesn't matter that this is forces out of my control. I do have control. I have the ability to go in there and figure out, okay, what do I do next? Well, I know how to program, and it seems like people want me to program. So, let's lean into that. WILL: Wow. I love that. Because it's funny, that's how I got started in programming. I lost my job. And I was working at Buckle, the clothing store. If you know me, that is not me at all, like, at all [laughter]. I love gym shorts and athletic clothes. Like, fashion is not my thing. It's just not. So [laughs], I got into programming because I was just struggling. And it was a very pivotal moment in my life. And I'm thankful that I lost my job. Losing your job is just hard, and I think it makes you rethink things. JAMON: Yeah, absolutely. It was a growth moment for me as well, one of many. But that was definitely a point that I look back on and say, I mean because I can actually point at almost the day when it all dried up. It was, like, April 2007. And my uncle had been sending me a lot of work, you know, he had extra work. He didn't have barely enough for himself anymore at that point. And I finished up my last project, and he's like, "I don't have anything else." And I had some other clients as well and called them up, and they were like, "No, we don't have anything. Like, nobody is buying right now." And it just kept going like that. And it was weird because 2005, 2006, most of 2007, it felt like things were really rolling, but it just dried up all at once. And so, I was really lucky that I did end up getting a bunch of web work to do in 2008. I was still doing home design till probably late 2008, 2009. But then I eventually just hung that up and was like, okay, this is over. I'm definitely focusing on programming. WILL: Wow, how was the initial traction when you moved into ramping up the web development? JAMON: It was really good because it didn't take much to keep me busy. And I ended up getting some big contracts from, like, a cabinet manufacturer was a big one. I did some other things as well. And I ended up hiring my first employees in 2009. So, really, less than two years later, I was starting to hire employees. And I just hired, like, junior developers who had barely learned to code and taught them to code. So, I hired probably, over the years, next few years, like, ten programmers, many of whom are actually still with me today, and I taught them to code back in the day. And as time went on, they became senior and really high-level programmers who are now leading projects for big companies that you've heard of. But they started with me building, you know, PHP and MySQL and whatnot for small, like, regional construction companies. And we learned together. So, it was definitely a progression you can go look back and see. WILL: Yeah, I saw a tweet that you tweeted, and I loved it because I totally understand. JAMON: [laughs] WILL: And so, I'm glad you mentioned the junior devs and stuff. The tweet that I'm talking about was, "I got into this industry to code; ended up becoming a founder because I was the only person who would hire me." JAMON: [laughs] WILL: I want to ask you about that. [laughter] JAMON: Yeah, it's really that I grew up in a small logging town, like, very tiny logging town in Northwest Oregon. I didn't know...I knew one programmer, and the guy was, like, an incredible genius. And I just thought that that was the only way that you could professionally be a programmer was to be an incredible genius. I was coding, but I was, like, coding games, you know, in QBasic. And so, for me, every time I looked around, it was just, like, construction, or logging or, you know, blue collar, like, working at a mill. Like, these were the things that I saw around me. And so, that was the path I went. And I didn't really think of using this passion that I had for coding to turn it into, like, actual money. And when I did start thinking about it, I was like, I don't know anybody who does software. Like, even when I moved to Southwest Washington, I was closer to Portland. But I thought you had to have a CS degree, and I didn't have a CS degree. So, I was like, okay, well, I'll start my own business then, and that will be the thing that kind of leads me into tech. And that's what ended up happening. And it's kind of funny because I did go to, you know, one semester of community college for basketball and for...until I got cut. And then I studied some things there. But I never finished for the community college. What's kind of cool, though, is today, I'm actually on their, like, tech advisory committee. Like, they actually have me advising their professors on the current state of tech, which is kind of cool. WILL: Wow, that is really cool. It is interesting because I remember when I first started out and that feeling of probably over 300 applications just trying to get a job. And it was just hard. And my first job, to be honest, I think it was because of networking is why I got the job. If I didn't know the person that introduced me to the company, I probably wouldn't have gotten the job, if I'm being honest. But I am very sympathetic for junior devs anytime. If a junior dev asks me a question, I will take time, help them out. Because I remember...it's very hard as a junior dev trying to get that first job. So, when you said that, I was like, yeah, I can see your heart towards junior devs. JAMON: Absolutely. That's where I started. You know, the first developers that I hired were all juniors. We don't hire juniors anymore because of the style of business that we are. But I miss that. I miss that to some degree. We really can't. And we've looked at it from just about every angle. But I did my time [laughs]. I spent a lot of hours teaching junior developers when I could have done it quicker myself. WILL: Definitely. Like, you end up losing some money when you do a junior dev and you're hiring for the future. So, like, in a consultant agency, I totally understand that, yeah. JAMON: Yeah, absolutely. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it's time to design, build, and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Liftoff brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we'll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today's new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow today. Get in touch at thoughtbot.com/liftoff. WILL: So, I want to ask you about the transition from ClearSight Studio to Infinite Red. How did that happen? JAMON: ClearSight was my first company. And it sort of evolved from being a, you know, a home design/website company to just a website and web app company, and then mobile apps. And, at a certain time, we had, I think, around 12 employees, something like that. I had a design department. We were building websites and whatnot. And I was really interested in iOS development. That was really my passion. And so I actually ended up working on some open source with iOS developers across the globe and then got invited to a conference down in San Francisco in 2014. And I went and gave a talk there. It was my first tech conference that I'd ever been to, much less given a talk, and I was the first talk [laughs]. So, that was kind of an interesting little anecdote there. And as I did it, I got to know some other developers. I had one in particular, Todd Werth, who I really hit it off with, and we ended up chatting a lot after the conference. And it felt like he and I had a very similar outlook. And he had an iOS agency. That's all they did. Well, 2015 rolls around, and I had had some rough times toward the end of 2014 in terms of the business, and I was kind of complaining to Todd. He had had some issues as well, and we started commiserating. And he's like, you know, he just started joking. I still have this conversation in Slack way back if I go look. And he's like, "Well, maybe we should just merge our businesses together," because it felt like we had maybe complementary skills. And we had a similar outlook on what we wanted from our businesses. And so, we ended up eventually solidifying that. I flew down there, talked to him and his business partner, Ken, at the time. We ended up making that happen later that year. So, just a few days ago, October 1st was our eighth anniversary running the companies, running the new company, the merged company, which is Infinite Red. So, that was kind of how that all came together. Eventually, Ken left, and we had a new business partner who was our top employee buy-in; that's Gant Laborde. And so, there are still three owners. We have three directors and then the rest of the team. We're about 30 people altogether, and we focus entirely on React Native. WILL: Wow, congratulations on eight years. That's a lot. That's amazing. JAMON: Yeah, thank you. I was just thinking the other day that I ran ClearSight for ten years. Infinite Red is getting close to how long I ran my first business. And, like, my youngest is, like I said, 10. So she was only two years old when I merged the company. She does not remember my old company, which is weird to me. [laughter] WILL: Wow. So, can you walk me through your decision to go here with React Native and specialize in that? Because it sounds like right around the time when React Native was created, and people started using it in production. JAMON: That's right. The iOS technology that we had sort of bonded over at that conference was called RubyMotion. But in 2015, the founder ended up going to work for Microsoft for a while and then went back to Apple. He had been from Apple before. So, it was sort of going down. And we were looking for a different technology, both of our companies were, and then, of course, the merged company. React Native looked interesting, but it didn't have an Android version yet. But then, in September of 2015, Android came out, so it was iOS and Android. So, we were able to take a look at that one month before we ended up solidifying the actual merger. So, basically, day one, October 1st, 2015, we were, like, we are now doing React Native for mobile, but we kept doing web. We kept doing Ruby on Rails. We did some Elixir. We did some Elm. We did some...I think we had some old Ember stuff going on. We had all kinds of things going on. But over time, we got more and more traction with React Native because that's really where our interest was. And so, we ended up saying, okay, well, this is where we really want to be. It took us a few years. It took us probably five years, six years, something like that, to really develop the confidence to say, "Hey, this is all we want to do," because it's a risk. Like, you put yourself on one technology. We had that before with the other technology that went down. But we had the confidence that we knew we could step off of a sinking ship onto another one if we needed to. So, we said, "You know what? Let's do this." And I got to give my co-founder, Todd, a lot of credit because he was the first one to say, "Let's go all React Native. Anywhere that React Native is, React Native is on a lot of different platforms. You can do tvOS. You can do Mac. You can do Windows. You can do web with React Native web, all kinds of things. So, let's just focus on React Native. Our team will just focus on that. We will only hire React Native developers. All of our marketing is going to be around React Native. Let's just focus on that." And it ended up being a great call. We did that. We made that happen. And for probably the last, I would say, three, four years, something like that, that's all we've been doing. WILL: So, what's your opinion on, I guess, the argument that's being held right now with native iOS and Android, even the Flutter, and I think Ionic is the other one that I've heard of, versus React Native? What's your pitch on React Native over those? JAMON: There's definitely reasons to use any of those. But I wrote this article a while back. It was specifically about Flutter, but I think it applies to a lot of the other competitors as well. The title of the article was provocatively titled, "Flutter Is Better Than React Native in All the Ways That Don't Matter." And the idea behind this is that, yes, Flutter gets a lot of things very right. A lot of their developer experience is actually better than React Native; some is worse, but, you know, some is better. But really, when it comes down to it, the things that matter are more business level. React Native is good enough. It's like native views. So, you have the native performance. With Hermes, you have really good performance in JavaScript. So, you know that you can get really high-level JavaScript performance. You can ship JavaScript, which really helps because then you can bring in JavaScript developers, and specifically React developers. So, a lot of companies already use React. It's a no-brainer to then use React Native if you're already using React Web. It doesn't really make sense to go to Flutter. It makes maybe some sense to write it in native, but then you have to write it twice. And you have three teams. You have a web team. You have an iOS team, and you have an Android team. And you also have three codebases, and one's always lagging behind. That's always what's happening. Marketing is like, "Okay, when can we announce this?" "Well, iOS isn't done," or "Android is not done," or "Web is not done." Where if you can combine all of those things and combine just the culture of your team, then it becomes more tight-knit because everybody's working on all aspects at one time. You can take a feature, and you can build it in web, and you can build it in iOS, and you can build it Android with all the same skills. Now, there are some deeper parts of React Native. It goes really deep. But in terms of just being productive out of the gate, a React developer can be productive in week one, and that's, I think, a huge deal. So, it really comes down to is the performance and developer experience good enough? And the answer is absolutely yes. And then, secondly, like, what's the business case for React Native? Well, you can have the same developers doing iOS, Android, and web, and even if you don't, you can share techniques. You can be like, "Hey, here's this cool JavaScript thing," and the Kotlin developers aren't just like, "Ugh, you know, JavaScript." Or you can be like, "Hey, here's our TypeScript configuration across the whole codebase." You can even have a monorepo with everything in it. It just makes a lot of sense that way. And especially now with Expo, it makes it even more that way because Expo removes a lot of the barriers for web developers that they would have coming into native. So, with that in mind, I still see React Native dominating the apps that are at the top of the App Store. One of the Expo developers, Evan Bacon, has put out a bunch of tweets about, you know, like, 24 out of the top 100 food and drink apps are written in React Native, as opposed to 8 in all the other options combined other than native, you know. So, it gives a good sense that React Native is still growing and continuing to. It has a lot of steam behind it. WILL: Yeah, I totally agree with you. I'm a big React Native fan, and I do a lot of React Native work here. So, yes, totally agree with you. And one of the most frustrating things that I've come across is, I'm a big researcher, and so I'll research things, and I'm like, oh, there's an app for this. And I'm a big Android fan, so when I go to them, it's like, oh yes, I can use this app. And then it's like, no, I can't. It's only for iOS. Okay, like, you lost me as a customer. JAMON: [laughs] WILL: I was willing to pay whatever on this because I've been looking for it. So yeah, I like how you said that. JAMON: Yeah. It treats all of the platforms as first-class citizens. WILL: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Totally agree. How does your company handle the backend? Do y'all do any of the backend, or how is that handled at Infinite Red? JAMON: We used to do that, like I mentioned. But a few years ago...we had a very, very small back-end team by then. Most of the time, and now pretty much 100% of the time, when someone comes to us, they already have a back-end team, so we work directly with them. A lot of our developers were back-end developers, and so they understand the backend really well, but they're obviously React Native specialists now. So, you know, I came from that. I did PHP. I did Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Elixir, Node, all kinds of back-end technology. So, I understand it really well as well. But yeah, we lean on our clients for that. We might partner with an agency like you folks over there at thoughtbot and have them do the backend, or just have the client, you know, come up with their own solution. WILL: Yeah, I love that, yeah. And we've done that with numerous agencies, so yeah, that's awesome. What does success look like for Infinite Red now versus, you know, six months or five years from now? Do y'all have any goals in mind that you're trying to hit? JAMON: In the Infinite Red leadership, we are currently reading John Maxwell's 21 indisputable Laws of Leadership, which is a good book. And we had this really great conversation at our first book club meeting in leadership, which John Maxwell defines success in a very different way than we do. You know, he measured it as, like, McDonald's, or Starbucks, or something like that, like, giant, becoming huge, becoming big, making tons of money. And it was sort of just implicit in the book that that was the case. We had this great talk internally. Why didn't this resonate with us? And that's because we don't really measure success that way. So, I love that question, Will, because measuring success is you really have to start there. Like, you have to start there and say, "What do we want from this?" So, ultimately, we want to build cool things with our friends. I'm a coding nerd. I want to code. I want to be in the code. That's why we're an agency. Like, if we were a product company, if we were building, I don't know, podcasting software or something, we'd have to become experts in podcasting rather than experts in React Native, or experts in TypeScript, or whatever we want to do. So, we really love code. We want to build that. We want to have an amazing family-first environment. We want to treat everybody super well. We want to have really low turnover, which we've been able to achieve. Hardly anybody leaves Infinite Red. Maybe every other year, we might lose one person. And even with those people, they tend to come back [laughs], which is a great sign. They go out and find out that, yeah, actually, Infinite Red is pretty awesome, and they come back. So, we really look for that. We really focus on that. We want that to happen. And it's really less about making the most money we can. Obviously, everybody wants to be well paid. And so, we're going to try to make sure we have a successful business in that way and that we want to be around for a long time. But, really, measuring success is less about business success and it's more about life success. It's really more about family success, being with my four kids, being there for them when they need me to be. That's why we're remote, you know, as another example. So, everything really hinges off of that. It's around happiness. It's around fulfillment. It's not around financial success. WILL: I'm a huge John Maxwell fan, by the way. JAMON: [laughs] There you go. WILL: So, yes, I love it. And I love how you explained, you know, because one of my questions I was going to ask you is about the core values, but I'm going to switch it up a little bit. So, I'm just going to say, in my opinion, I feel like there's almost leadership talk void at times, especially in the tech space. Like, we don't talk about leadership a lot. But it plays a huge part in what we do day to day. Like, you named a couple of core values and principles that you're following because of the leadership. So, for you, why is the leadership so important and I guess you can say have a seat at the table at Infinite Red? JAMON: I'm a strong believer, and I've become more of a strong believer over time, that it all starts at the top. If you don't have buy-in from your top leadership, it does not really matter what happens otherwise because they will continually undermine, and they have the power to continually undermine that. So, these core values have to apply to the top leaders. They have to be held accountable to that. And these leaders also need to be developed. So, we have three owners. We have three directors. And the three directors who are underneath us were not directors when we hired them; you know, they started out as developers. They started out as designers. They started out as project managers. But they became Director of Operations, Director of Engineering, Director of Communications. And we developed them. We poured a lot of time into them, and we continue to do that. In fact, even reading this book with them and going through that exercise is continuing to invest in them. Not that we as owners don't have growth to do; we also do. And so, we learn from them, and we learn from our team. So, you have to start there. And on that same vein, we do have some core values. We call them our foundation and our pillars. We have three foundational things, and we have four pillars. So, the three foundations are: one, we control our own destiny. We are not going to be beholden to some other company. We're not going to ride someone else's coattails. We're not going to be in a situation where someone else can kill us. And it can be easily done that way where we're in a position where, you know, we're too reliant on one whale client or something like that. We just won't do it. The second foundational thing is that we have...it's a word bonitas, which means kindness, friendliness, benevolence, blamelessness. And it's basically just being a good person to everybody and doing the right thing. And the third one is having a significant positive impact. That's why we do so much media. That's why we try to have an impact outside. And we're only 30 people, but people think we're way bigger because of how we kind of present ourselves in the world. And then our pillars all support those things, so high personal support. We support each other. We have high expectations, but we also support each other not just at work but also as a whole person. Long-term viewpoint, we think way beyond this year. We think about what is Infinite Red going to be when I retire? You know, I'm 41; that's a ways out, hopefully. But what's that going to look like? The next one is collaborative creativity. Creativity by yourself is just a solo thing. We're a team, so it has to be collaborative. We have to do it together. All our creative work, whether it's our conference, Chain React, or our work, it's all collaborative, and we love being creative. And the last thing is being pioneers, pioneering spirit. We like to be pioneers in technology. We put out a lot of open source. And we try to bring that pioneering spirit everywhere we go. And then, there's a lot of different things that kind of come out of that. For example, we have this internal saying, which is, "Don't do hard things alone." So, you have a hard thing coming up? And it could be hard in various ways. It could be a technically challenging thing. It could just be hard because of the mood you're in that day. But don't do it alone. Ask someone to help you, you know, jump in with you, pair with you. Do it together. And we love that. That's part of the high personal support and the bonitas. So, all these things come out of the foundation and pillars that we have. WILL: Wow, I love all those. I want to pick one of them out and ask you a question around it. So, you're talking about having an impact. I'm loving this conversation just talking to you. It's just been amazing. So, for you, what do you want the impact on the world to be from your perspective? JAMON: That's a hard question to answer, and it tends to be something that I think about a lot. I'm more of an opportunistic person. I react more than I plan ahead, that sort of thing. But with that said, I think that we have had significant positive impact through a lot of different ways. So, on Twitter, for example, I try to present a...and this is authentically who I am. But I try to present a positive force out there, someone who's excited and enthusiastic about the technology, who supports other people, even who you might consider competitors, for example. I just retweeted recently a Callstack thing. I mean, you might consider them a competitor. They're another React Native agency. But I love Callstack. They're great people. And I retweeted one of their really amazing resources, which is the ultimate guide to React Native performance, which, by the way, is really good. And if you do React Native, you should check it out. So, I think what goes around comes around, and I really want to have that positive impact out there. I want to give talks that inspire people. You know, I'm a nerd, and I'm going to nerd out about stuff. And I feel like that has an impact all of its own. So, that's kind of my personal side of it. And then Infinite Red is a showcase that you can run a company the right way. You can treat people the right way. And the company can be successful along our own metrics of success. WILL: So, one of my biggest principles that I've learned in life that's changed my leadership 100,000% is from this book called One Minute Manager. And I think it's called one-minute praise. And, essentially, the background behind it is, if you think something, just tell the person because so many times...and I get in my head, and I think amazing things about people, but I never say it. JAMON: [laughs] WILL: So, I want to just tell you, like, you said, the impact that you're making. You are doing that. Like, one of the reasons why I invited you on the show was because of your impact that I see that you're having on Twitter and LinkedIn and just everything that you're doing at Infinite Red. So, keep going. I want you to know that you are making a difference. I see you, and it's making a big difference in my life. JAMON: I love that, and it makes me feel great. And I appreciate you sharing that one-minute praise there. It is something that sometimes you put it out there, and you don't really know what the impact is, you know, it's sort of hidden in maybe the likes, or the replies, or whatever. As an example, I just reached out to my friend Aaron Francis last night, and I told him, "Hey, I love your videos." I don't even do the tech that he does. But I watch his videos on YouTube because I just love the vibe that he has. And I told him that. I was like, "You're doing a great job. You're being a very good advocate for your company." And I agree with you; I think that just taking the moment to reach out and say, "Hey, I think you're doing good work," it encourages people to do more of it. So, I appreciate it a lot, Will. That's really nice of you to say. WILL: Yeah, definitely. If you can go back, what is some advice that you would give yourself? We could do both at the beginning when you did ClearSight and whenever you merged and did Infinite Red. Was there any advice that you're like, wow, I learned these lessons, and they were game changers for me? JAMON: [laughs] Boy, this could be a whole nother podcast, to be honest. There are so many different things that I've kind of learned over the years. I feel like, you know, there's value in, you know, there was actually...I forget exactly where I heard this, but it was about Cloudflare, the company. And a long time ago, as they were sort of launching, one of the people that worked on the...I think it was their founder, actually. One of their investors told him, "Hey, running a company is sort of like flying an airplane. You want to make sure that it's well-maintained at all times. And then, when you're flying, you keep the wheel steady and the nose 10 degrees above the horizon so you continue to rise. And you don't need to shoot for the moon. We're not a rocket here. Just continue to execute well, make sure that it's well maintained, make sure that you're continually rising." And Cloudflare is a good example of this, and I think that Infinite Red is as well. Every year, we try to do something where we're continuing to keep that nose 10% above the horizon. That doesn't always mean growing. Like, we don't hire all that often. We don't grow in terms of headcount, but we grow in other ways. And you can see that looking back over the years. Every year, there was something that we continued to, you know, improve, keeping that nose 10 degrees above the horizon. And so, that's a big one. And you can just go do all the little things really well and continue to think long term and where are you headed. And if you do the right things long enough, good things happen. WILL: I love that because, especially when I'm working out, I try to shoot for the moon. JAMON: [laughs] WILL: I go all out. So, that was some amazing advice. I don't even remember who told me, but when I first started programming, I tried to shoot for the moon. And, oh, I crashed and burned so many times [laughs] because it's just something you can't just master it, and just like, I got it, da da da. And I love that advice. That's amazing advice. So, that's perfect. JAMON: Yeah, it really stuck with me, and I have so many more lessons. I have actually kept a notebook of profound things that I've heard over the years, and I actually really enjoy that minute praising you said. And I'm going to look up the quote after this, and I'm going to put it in my notebook. [laughter] WILL: Yeah, yeah. It's been a game-changer because I'm a very straightforward person. And so, a lot of times, like, I don't mind addressing an issue just head-on. But what I found is I'm just always doing that. And I never had equity in the bank at times. This is when I was a very young leader. I didn't have equity. And so, it was just hard to tell people, "Hey, can we tweak this? Can we do that?" And then I had to sit back and say, okay, what can I change to be a better leader? And it's like, I can connect better. And I see so many things. Like, I'm very observant, I think. To be honest, it's helped me in every area, even with my spouse, with my kids, with friends. It's just saying, "Hey, I see what you did. I see that you made breakfast." Or "My kids, I see that you made this beautiful mud pie for me. And it's amazing. So, thank you. Thank you." And so, yeah, it's been a game changer for me. JAMON: Yeah, one of my friends, his goal was...and he's a leader. And he said that his goal with everyone on one was to give them one thing to change and highlight one thing they did well like you said, equity in the bank. He was talking about when he was a leader of, like, a call bank. And he said, "No matter how bad the call was, I wouldn't give them more than two things to improve because there was no way that they could take ten critiques and improve. They would just be defeated." And then, he would review and see if they could improve one more thing, avoided negative language, things like that. So, that's a really interesting concept. WILL: Yeah, definitely, definitely. So, I have one other question for you. What motivates you? What's your wind in your sails? What keeps you going? Because I know running a consultant agency is not easy. What keeps you going? JAMON: For me, motivation tends to be enthusiasm for learning, really more than anything, like going into something new and, like, exploring. I see it more as exploring even than learning. With a consultancy, there's always so many different...it's never the same, you know, there's always some other challenge. And that's one of the reasons I've loved being, you know, a consultancy owner for so many years. You're never dealing with just the same stuff over and over. So, I would say it's really about the exploration that happens, and just loving code, and talking shop, and being around great people. To me, that continues to motivate me. WILL: I love that. Do you have anything that you would like to promote — personally, Infinite Red, anything? JAMON: Well, Infinite Red, of course. If you're looking for React Native, we are all senior-level React Native developers. We've been working together for a long time. So, big companies, the biggest ones you can think of, many of them have hired us to, you know, be the experts with their team. We usually put 2 or 3 people on a project, and then the client will come in with 2 to 10 people or whatever they have on their side. And we work with them side by side, teaching them as well as delivering code. So, that's really our bread and butter. We also put on the biggest and, I think, only U.S.-based React Native conference, and it's called Chain React. It's in Portland. Next year, it's going to be in July. So, go check it out: chainreactconf.com. We'd love to see you all there. I'd love to see you there, Will. And network with all these different React Native developers. There's people from Meta, and Microsoft, Amazon, all over the world, really. And they're some of the best React Native programmers you're going to ever meet, and some great talks, and great food, and a great city. WILL: Yeah, I would love to be there. Let me ask you this: how is Portland in July? JAMON: Portland is amazing in July. Sometimes, it can get hot, but for the most part, it's just beautiful. It'll be like 85 degrees, not really any humidity, nice, little breeze. It's just a beautiful weather pattern around Julyish. That's why we chose that time of year. So, definitely, if you're going to be coming to Oregon, Portland, you know, West Coast, July is a great time to come. It's not going to be super, super hot, usually. Sometimes, I mean, we get over 100 sometimes, but no worries, you know, there's AC as well. But for the most part, it's beautiful. WILL: You sold me already. JAMON: [laughs] WILL: So, I live in South Florida, so...[laughs] JAMON: Yeah, it's going to be different in South Florida in July. [laughter] WILL: Awesome. Well, this has been an amazing chat, and just great getting to know you and learning more about Infinite Red. Thank you for being a part of the podcast. JAMON: Yeah. Thanks for inviting me, Will. It was a lot of fun, and you're a great host. I appreciate it. WILL: I appreciate it. JAMON: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions. Special Guest: Jamon Holmgren.

In this episode Robin is joined again by Gant Laborde and Justin Huskey! We just finished up a week of fun at Chain React, and today they'll be recapping the conference and all the wonderful goings-on that happened.  This episode is brought to you by Infinite Red! Infinite Red is a premier React Native design and development agency located in the USA. With five years of React Native experience and deep roots in the React Native community (hosts of Chain React and the React Native Newsletter), Infinite Red is the best choice for your next React Native app.Connect With Us!React Native Radio - @ReactNativeRdioRobin - @robin_heinzeGant - @gantlabordeJustin - @justinhuskey

Chain React is back!! Take a peek behind the curtain in this Chain React-themed episode. Robin and Mazen are joined by Gant Laborde and Justin Huskey, the organizers of the premiere U.S. React Native conference!  We dive into everything you've ever wanted to know about the Chain React conference: how it started, who it's for, and why now is the perfect time to bring it back. This episode is brought to you by Infinite Red! Infinite Red is a premier React Native design and development agency located in the USA. With five years of React Native experience and deep roots in the React Native community (hosts of Chain React and the React Native Newsletter), Infinite Red is the best choice for your next React Native app. Helpful Links: Buy Tickets to Chain ReactConnect With Us!React Native Radio - @ReactNativeRdioRobin - @robin_heinzeMazen - @mazenchamiGant - @gantlabordeJustin - @justinhuskey

From developing programs on a Pentium computer as a kid and programming in Visual Basic 6 to becoming a leader in software development for Machine Learning on the Web, join us as we learn about Gant's journey to where he is today. And the secret sauce to all this? Gant's creativity and curiosity that he mixes into his work, creating fun and amazing experiences for developers around the world.    Learn more about how to be a Google Developer Expert → https://goo.gle/3oaXxr7    Resources: Website: https://goo.gle/3GFCWlc  Company: Infinite Red: https://goo.gle/3KWDzcW  Title: CIO – Chief Innovation Officer   Social Twitter: @GantLaborde  Medium: https://goo.gle/3ZYmFig  GitHub: https://goo.gle/3KUqsJb  LinkedIn: https://goo.gle/3muSUrC     Books: TensorFlow.js Book: https://amzn.to/3GzR9QK  All Books: https://goo.gle/3zR1zYq    Stuff Gant has made:  Harry Potter-inspired AR Sorting Hat: https://goo.gle/3MAn0ED  Enjoying the Show: https://goo.gle/3Uw2zL0  Time Warp Scan https://goo.gle/43vahZQ  NSFW JS: https://goo.gle/406OFQN  AI Trainable Tic Tac Toe: https://goo.gle/3MA5ErH    Rock Paper Scissors:  https://goo.gle/3o7r70O  TensorFlow.js - RGB channels to Red-Green Color Blind: https://goo.gle/3KAFfYd    Guest bio:  Gant Laborde is the owner of Infinite Red and author of the popular O'Reilly book, “Learning TensorFlow.js”. By day he is a mentor, adjunct professor and award-winning speaker. For 20 years, he has been involved in software development, and is recognized as a Google Developer Expert in Web and Machine Learning. By night he is known as an “open sourcerer”, aspiring future mad scientist, illustrator and appears as an avatar in his latest children's book, dedicated to his daughter and wife. #AI #ML

I am joined by Gant Laborde, CIO of Infinite Red a React Native FIRST consulting company. Gant is brilliant and has so many thoughts so come hang on this Fri-Tay! Like what you hear? Connect with me - Website: www.vaco.com/taylor LinkedIn: Taylor Desseyn Tweet me: @tdesseyn Pics of the life, wife, daughter & dog: @tdesseyn

In this episode, Rob Ocel is joined by Gant Laborde (CIO @infinite_red, Author of “Learning TensorFlow.js: Powerful Machine Learning in JavaScript”, Chain React organizer), to talk about React Native, conference organizing, and the promise of AI in development.  They discuss the flexibility and power of hybrid native apps, the upcoming new architecture of React Native, the trials and tribulations of organizing conferences, the state of AI tooling and education, and the opportunities and challenges for developers in a future working alongside AI.   Guest Gant Laborde - CIO at Infinite Red, Author of “Learning TensorFlow.js: Powerful Machine Learning in JavaScript”, Chain React organizer, Google GDE and Microsoft MVP   Host Rob Ocel - Architect and Engineering Lead ThisDotLabs   Sponsored by This Dot Labs

In this episode, I speak to one of my favorite Artificial Intelligence (AI) people, Gant Laborde! Gant is an owner of Infinite Red, mentor, adjunct professor, published author, award-winning speaker, and random coin collector. We talk about AI, how accessible AI can be, his book on TensorFlow JS, and much, much more! Intro/Outro music graciously given permission to use called, "Settle In" by Homer Gaines. Sound editing by Chris Enns of Lemon Productions. Transcripts can be found at: https://toddl.dev/podcast/transcripts/laborde/ Show Notes: Gant's Home Page - https://gantlaborde.com/ Gant on Twitter - https://twitter.com/GantLaborde Infinite Red - https://infinite.red/ Chain React - https://cr.infinite.red/ Tensorflow JS Book - https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-tensorflowjs/9781492090786/ React Native - https://reactnative.dev/ Connected Events - http://connectevents.io/ Nic Or Not - https://nicornot.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/frontendnerdery/support

Machine learning models must first be trained.  That training results in a model which must be serialized or packaged up in some way as a deployment artifact.  A popular deployment path is using Tensorflow.js to take advantage of the portability of JavaScript, allowing your model to be run on a web server or client. Gant The post Learning Tensorflow.js with Gant Laborde appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Machine learning models must first be trained.  That training results in a model which must be serialized or packaged up in some way as a deployment artifact.  A popular deployment path is using Tensorflow.js to take advantage of the portability of JavaScript, allowing your model to be run on a web server or client. Gant The post Learning Tensorflow.js with Gant Laborde appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Machine learning models must first be trained.  That training results in a model which must be serialized or packaged up in some way as a deployment artifact.  A popular deployment path is using Tensorflow.js to take advantage of the portability of JavaScript, allowing your model to be run on a web server or client. Gant The post Learning Tensorflow.js with Gant Laborde appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Machine learning models must first be trained.  That training results in a model which must be serialized or packaged up in some way as a deployment artifact.  A popular deployment path is using Tensorflow.js to take advantage of the portability of JavaScript, allowing your model to be run on a web server or client. Gant

Gant's back!!! He's releasing a book with Manning Publishing about Tensorflow.js and he's here to discuss all the details with us. He explains the difference between Teonsorflow and Tensorflow.js and goes into some of the pros and cons of using it. He also explains the concepts he goes over for new ML engineers and for ML engineers learning JavaScript. Panel Charles Max Wood Guest Gant Laborde Sponsors Dev Influencers Accelerator Links Learning TensorFlow.js by Gant Laborde Learning TensorFlow.js: Powerful Machine Learning in JavaScript  by Gant Laborde Twitter: Gant Laborde ( @GantLaborde ) gantlaborde.com Picks Charles- monday.com Charles- The Sales Development Playbook Trish Bertuzzi Gant- Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 

In this episode of the Virtual Coffee podcast, Dan and Bekah talk to Gant Laborde, an owner of Infinite Red, mentor, adjunct professor, published author, and award-winning speaker, about overcoming challenges, being authentic, and finding your voice. They share some of the struggles they've faced, talk about how practice can lead to growth, and the importance of recognizing your body's signals in the process.

Ken Youens-Clark regales us with his history through Jazz, Microsoft Tech, and Python and bioinformatics. Regular expressions are a fundamental part of data identification and cleaning. Also, we touch on the importance of types and tests as a specification for yourself and others. Python, as a data-science starting point, should be clean, functional, and friendly. Aspiring data scientists can learn a lot about the importance of fundamentals and clear encodings that fit the desired needs. Panel Beril Sirmacek Gant Laborde Guest Ken Youens-Clark Links Manning | Tiny Python Projects by Ken Youens-Clark Tiny Python Project PDF by Ken Youens-Clark Tiny Python Project by Ken Youens-Clark ROSALIND | Problems | Locations Twitter: Ken Youens-Clark Picks Beril- Youtube Channel: Beril Sirmacek Gant- Twitter: Jason Mayes Ken- Netflix Series: " The Queen's Gambit"

Alexey Grigorev is the lead data scientist for one of the biggest classified ads companies in the world. He walks us through gathering, mining, and understanding data to improve things. One big component of this is Machine Learning. It optimizes business processes and helps data scientists understand the data they have. Panel Beril Sirmacek Daniel Svoboda Gant Laborde Guest Alexey Grigorev Sponsors Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io Audible.com Picks Alexey- DataTalks.Club Beril- Rise of AI | Building an European AI Ecosystem Daniel - dair.ai- Medium Daniel- Quantum Stat- Medium Daniel- Towards Data Science Gant- AI and Machine Learning for Coders: A Programmer's Guide to Artificial Intelligence by Laurence Moroney

In this episode of We Belong Here, Lauren interviews Gant Laborde. They talk about how Gant was, in fact, “really bad” at computers when he was a kid. His light bulb moment was when his neighbor showed him how to make his computer *talk back* to him and say, “Hey Gant,” instead of “Hello World.” Books and learning resources were not available to him. So instead, he had to learn by breaking things. Gant had many limitations working against him: he always had the oldest computer and was pretty bad at math. But he refused to give up on his goals and dreams. Eventually, he did enroll in a Computer Science program but found it damaging in that it was painfully uninteresting or inspiring. However, he stuck with it and discovered the value in pursuing roles that challenged him to think beyond the basic execution of a problem and actively welcomed his unique perspective to the job. Lauren and Gant chat about burnout and how the industry can sometimes beat the passion out of you in the industry. Open Source was the thing to reignite his love for the community and the tech industry itself. Today, as the Chief Innovation Officer at Infinite Red, he gets to go out into the wild and research cool things and bring that learning back to the company and essentially functions as a mad scientist for them! He shares loads of wisdom and advice for the listener who might be curious to break into tech. This is not an episode to miss! Resources: Follow Gant’s adventures at GantLaborde.comGant on Twitter: @GantLaborde Two Minute Papers Infinite Red

In this episode of Adventures in Machine Learning, the amazing author and course creator Frank Kane entertains our panel with information and examples. Beril Sirmacek, Gant Laborde, Daniel Svoboda, & Charles Wood talk with Frank Kane about recommender systems. The discussion elaborates on collaborative and content based recommendation systems, how they all work and how amazing they can be. Frank’s variety of experience provides fun stories, exciting examples, and a roadmap for beginners filled the complex domain with friendly stories. This episode is a MUST LISTEN for people interested in getting into Machine Learning or recommender systems. Sponsors Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io Audible.com CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Gant Laborde Daniel Svoboda Beril Sirmacek Guest Frank Kane Links https://gabriellecrumley.com/ Picks Daniel Svoboda: Silicon Valley machinelearningmastery.com Beril Sirmacek: XAI course 2020 ~ Module2 ~ Introduction to AI & ML Gant Laborde: https://mlconf.eu/ Charles Max Wood: Stroopwafel (dutch food) https://www.podcastgrowthsummit.co/ Frank Kane: https://sundog-education.com/ datascience.com Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe Follow Adventures in Machine Learning on Twitter > @podcast_ml

In this episode of Adventures in Machine Learning, the panelists chat with Laurence Moroney about the history of AI in the UK. We talk about the AI overlords, ethics, and the need for teaching. Industry revolutions and how we can adapt them to improve life. Laurence is working on new synthetic datasets so tune in and check it out! Sponsors Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io Audible.com CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Gant Laborde Jason Mayes Daniel Svoboda Guest Laurence Moroney Picks Jason Mayes: TensorFlow.js Show and Tell on Youtube Gant Laborde: https://www.tensorflowtictactoe.co/ Daniel Svoboda: Youtube: Kaggle Laurence Moroney: Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems The Manga Guide to Machine Learning Follow Adventures in Machine Learning on Twitter > @podcast_ml

In this episode of Adventures in Machine Learning, Charles and Gant chat with Milecia about applying AI to UI/UX and the conversation takes a creative turn as they discuss plenty of other fun-filled and exciting topics she’s working on. There’s banter about self-driving cars and golf carts as they apply AI/ML to practical and non-practical uses. The epic mind-powered guitar takes the stage and classic movies get referenced. Be sure to follow Milecia on her adventures in Machine Learning on her Twitter at https://twitter.com/flippedcoding. Sponsors Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io Audible.com CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Gant Laborde Guest Milecia McGregor Links HalfStackNYC talk Hawaii https://github.com/google-research/bert https://scholar.google.com/ https://audible.com/code Picks Gant Laborde: http://virtualcoffee.io/ Charles Max Wood: The Black Prism Milecia McGregor: War of Art https://javascript-conference.com/node-js/reading-thoughts-with-javascript/ Follow Adventures in Machine Learning on Twitter > @podcast_ml

This episode brought to you by Infinite Red! Infinite Red is a premier React Native design and development agency located in the USA. With five years of React Native experience and deep roots in the React Native community (hosts of Chain React and the React Native Newsletter), Infinite Red is the best choice for your next React Native app.Show Notes:Helpful Links:Gant's blog post: React Native Final StepsWho Said It AppChain React AppRed Shift blog post about FastlaneRed Shift blog post about releasing React Native apps on the Google Play Storebabel-plugin-transform-remove-consolehttps://squoosh.app/Want to get to know the new hosts of React Native Radio? Follow them on Twitter! Harris Kalash - https://twitter.com/brunostmannAdhithi Ravichandran - https://twitter.com/AdhithiRaviRobin Heinze - https://twitter.com/robin_heinzeJamon Holmgren - https://twitter.com/jamonholmgrenGant Laborde - https://twitter.com/GantLabordeMake sure to subscribe on any the major podcasting platforms (search for "React Native Radio"). And follow us on Twitter at our new handle, @reactnativerdio.

In this week’s episode of Adventures in Machine Learning we have Hassan Kane, data scientist lead at Entropy Labs. Hassan discusses his journey from being raised in Ivory Coast, Africa to getting his education in computer science from MIT, to his discovery and embracing of machine learning. Hassan discusses various applications of machine learning, including that of NASA, satellites and edge devices.. Sponsors Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io Audible.com CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Gant Laborde Guest Hassan Kane Links www.kaggle.com/c/birdsong-recognition Picks Gant Laborde: My daughter turning 2 years old twitter.com/funmachinelearn Charles Max Wood: Black Prism writingexcuses.com blastoffbootcamper.com Hassan Kane: AI-Superpowers-China-Silicon-Valley twitter.com/black_in_ai Follow Adventures in Machine Learning on Twitter > @podcast_ml

TensorFlow is a machine learning library that allows a user to program deep learning architectures. It is normally associated with backend programming languages like Python and is written in C++, but what if you can utilize it in Javascript to program deep learning models for frontend web applications. Guest Jason Mayes talks about doing this with Tensorflow JS. Sponsors Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io Audible.com CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Gant Laborde Guest Jason Mayes Links https://medium.com/google-developer-experts/improve-your-virtual-setup-sound-eee8c22036fc https://github.com/jasonmayes http://www.jasonmayes.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/creativetech Github Code Google Group codepen.io/topic/tensorflowGlitch glitch.com/@TensorFlowJS Picks Gant Laborde: Beginning Machine Learning with TensorFlow.js Charles Max Wood: https://podcastplaybook.co Legends (TV show) Jason Mayes: #MadeWithTFJS Follow Adventures in Machine Learning on Twitter > @podcast_ml

Beril Sirmacek is a data scientist and an assistant professor at Jonkoping University. She explains what computer vision is, what type of projects are done with it, and her own work regarding it. Sponsors Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io Audible.com CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Gant Laborde Guest Beril Sirmacek Links https://www.youtube.com/user/DrSirmacek/videos http://www.berilsirmacek.com/ Sequential image processing methods for improving semantic video segmentation algorithms DEEPLAB vs YOLO Understanding model predictions with LIME Picks Gant Laborde: React Native EU Charles Max Wood: Warbreaker Mass Market Beril Sirmacek: Fast Academic Success: Little Book of The Life Changing Secrets Follow Adventures in Machine Learning on Twitter > @podcast_ml

Benson Ruan talks about his experiences as a machine learning tech lead for a fintech company in Sydney, Australia. He goes over his education in machine learning from Coursera, especially doing Andrew Ng’s deep learning course that started his journey up to his current position. Sponsors Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io Audible.com CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Gant Laborde Guest Benson Ruan Links Real-time webcam background change with body segmentation technique Face mask virtual try on with face landmarks detection technique Twitter Sentiment Analysis Picks Gant Laborde: My Hero Academia Charles Max Wood: The 12 Week Year The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday Benson Ruan: TensorFlow.js Community Show & Tell Follow Adventures in Machine Learning on Twitter > @podcast_ml

One of the hottest fields right now in machine learning is natural language processing. Whether it’s getting sentiment from tweets, summarizing your documents, sarcasm detection, or predicting stock trends from the news, NLP is definitely the wave of the future. Special guest Daniel Svoboda talks about transfer learning and the latest developments such as BERT that promises to revolutionize NLP even further. Sponsors Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io Audible.com CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Gant Laborde Guest Daniel Svoboda Links towardsdatascience.com/bert-explained-state-of-the-art-language-model-for-nlp ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/open-sourcing-bert-state-of-art-pre.html ai.googleblog.com/2017/08/transformer-novel-neural-network.html www.nltk.org spacy.io https://www.kaggle.com   Picks Charles Max Wood: Traffic Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Filling Your Websites and Funnels with Your Dream Customers Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World Gant Laborde: AI-QuickStartGuide.pdf Daniel Svoboda: Star Trek: Picard Follow Adventures in Machine Learning on Twitter > @podcast_ml

Implementing deep learning algorithms require knowledge of various DL libraries, how to interface outside files or streaming data to it, along with tuning all sorts of parameters. Deep Learning also does not give you much explanation on what features contribute to a model working well. Jorge Torres discusses MindsDB, a new framework for AutoML that simplifies implementation of neural network models for researchers, along with providing explanation of features. Sponsors Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Gant Laborde Guest Jorge Torres Links www.mindsdb.com pytorch.org tensorflow.org www.geeksforgeeks.org/confusion-matrix-machine-learning www.pyimagesearch.com/2020/02/17/autoencoders-with-keras-tensorflow-and-deep-learning https://www.kiwibot.com/ Picks Gant Laborde: NVIDIA RTX Voice: Setup Guide Charles Max Wood: Russell Brunson’s books Jorge Torres: Iain M. Banks, Author on Amazon krisp.ai Follow Adventures in Machine Learning on Twitter > @podcast_ml

Machine learning is a complex subject that requires knowledge in many various subjects such as linear algebra, probability, algorithms, calculus, etc. But what if you could simplify machine learning to the extent that a child would be able to grasp it? Robert Plummer discusses incorporating machine learning for Javascript and opens up a whole new paradigm. Sponsors Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Gant Laborde Eric Chalmers Guest Robert Plummer Links Javascript for machine learning? Get a real language www.learnwithjason.dev maxcoders.io Picks Eric Chalmers: The problem with metrics is a big problem for AI Gant Laborde: Spooky Fun with Race Recognition Charles Max Wood: The MaxCoders Guide To Finding Your Dream Developer Job Robert Plummer: Abstract: The Art of Design | Netflix Follow Adventures in Machine Learning on Twitter > @podcast_ml

News!We have a YouTube channel for React Podcast

GANS are one of the revolutionary breakthroughs in machine/deep learning as they are able to create authentic facial images. One of the latest breakthroughs has been with reconstructing actual images of the Roman Emperors using their busts and frescos. Special guest Jason Antic talks about GANs and his work with deOldify, an application to color and restore images. Sponsor Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Gant Laborde Eric Chalmers Guest Jason Antic Links fast.ai DeOldify Facebook F8 Movie Colorization Demo TensorBoard: TensorFlow’s visualization toolkit pytorch.org Picks Eric Chalmers: The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself Gant Laborde: Building Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models on Google Cloud Platform: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners Charles Max Wood: The 360 Degree Leader: Developing Your Influence from Anywhere in the Organization Jason Antic: TV Show: Adam Ruins Everything Follow Adventures in Machine Learning on Twitter > @podcast_ml

In this first episode of Adventures in Machine Learning the panel talks about what machine learning is and what the podcast is about. Machine learning is rapidly becoming the future for many industries like banking, telecommunications, advertisements, etc. Yet there are so many subjects involved with it that novices may find it intimidating to get into, let alone start with. Sponsor Machine Learning for Software Engineers by Educative.io CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Gant Laborde Eric Chalmers Links We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning Picks Eric Chalmers: Rodney Brooks: Robots, AI, and other stuff Gant Laborde: Beginning Machine Learning with TensorFlow.js Charles Max Wood: The Dev Rev Follow Adventures in Machine Learning on Twitter > @DevChatTV

Robby speaks with Gant Laborde, CIO of Infinite Red. They discuss the unique challenges of maintaining React Native apps and the importance of sync points in an asynchronous work environment. Gant also shares an overview of the types of projects that Infinite Red focuses on and his experience being an open-source maintainer.Helpful LinksGant on TwitterInfinite Red on TwitterGant's WebsiteAI-FYI Website[Book] The War of ArtSubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.

Spencer and Jon welcome Gant Laborde, CIO of Infinite Red, AI Enthusiast, Tech genius and all around great guy to talk about a plethora of items.  Our main topic is UI Kitten, a way to get a new app up and running without having to worry about design. 0:00 - Introductions4:14 - Typescript or Not Typescript8:13 - The argument for Typescript11:21 - All about Gant13:09 - Hot dog Not Hot dog15:30 - AI-FYI Newsletter16:12 - Free AI Course16:21 - Deep Fake Drawing and MIT's Nixon / Moon Disaster film18:39 - AI is a magic power20:35 - Gant's status update21:12 - Jon's status update22:19 - Specner's update24:57 - Clients and understanding skills25:18 - The Hammer Invoice26:20 - Virtual Coffee28:22 - UI Kitten40:00 - Ignite CLI44:28 - Spencer's not a designer45:19 - Repo in life46:21 - Open source contributions50:02 - Wrap up Links:MIT creates disturbing ‘deepfake’ video of Nixon announcing Apollo 11 disasterhttps://nypost.com/2020/07/20/mits-deepfake-video-of-nixon-announcing-apollo-11-disaster-surfaces/In event of moon disasterhttps://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events/centennials/nixon/images/exhibit/rn100-6-1-2.pdfApollo 11 ‘disaster’ video project highlights growing danger of deepfake techhttps://www.space.com/apollo-11-disaster-deepfake-video-tech.htmlMoon Disaster Projecthttps://moondisaster.org/Moon Disaster Filmhttps://moondisaster.org/filmGant’s Nicholas Cage Talkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJXaIoRZdBMGant’s Websitehttps://gantlaborde.com/React Native EU Virtual Edition (Free Registration)https://www.react-native.eu/AI FYI Site and Newsletterhttps://ai-fyi.com/AI Demystified: 5 day Mini-Coursehttps://academy.infinite.red/p/ai-demystified-free-5-day-mini-courseInfinite Redhttps://infinite.red/Chain React Conferencehttps://cr.infinite.red/React Native Schoolhttps://reactnativeschool.com FastLane Cheat Codes (Sign Up Now)https://fastlanecheatcodes.com

Gant Laborde joins us this week to talk about the lastest and greatest in AI/ML, his new course kickstarter, and more.

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Connect with the owners on Twitter!• Todd Werth: @twerth• Jamon Holmgren: @jamonholmgren• Gant Laborde: @gantlaborde

Connect with the owners on Twitter!• Todd Werth: @twerth• Jamon Holmgren: @jamonholmgren• Gant Laborde: @gantlaborde

Episode Links• Startup Package blog post.• Interested in learning more about our Startup Package? Head over here!Connect with the owners on Twitter!• Todd Werth: @twerth• Jamon Holmgren: @jamonholmgren• Gant Laborde: @gantlaborde

Connect with the owners on Twitter!• Todd Werth: @twerth• Jamon Holmgren: @jamonholmgren• Gant Laborde: @gantlaborde

On this episode of Tales From The Script, my guest Gant Laborde and I discuss what AI and ML are, how we are building on the web with it, and some of the awesome applications out there using AI and ML.Gant on TwitterLinks:Machine Learning: how to go from Zero to HeroInfinite Red AcademyNSFWNic Or NotInfinite RedOpenAI

Connect with the owners on Twitter!• Todd Werth: @twerth• Jamon Holmgren: @jamonholmgren• Gant Laborde: @gantlaborde 

Machine learning models can be operationalized anywhere and we’re getting to a point now where it’s actually possible to do a lot with Javascript in your browser. In this episode of the AI Today podcast we interview Gant Laborde, Chief Innovation Officer at Infinite Red. He discusses how he has seen this transformation evolve over the past year, which industries are seeing the most AI adoption, and how companies can get started with AI projects. Read more ...

This week, fan-favorite Gant Laborde comes around to discuss his work at Infinite Red using React Native and Native development, Progressive Web Apps and what they aim to solve, and organizing Chain React Conf in Portland. We also get into our Cocoa pods gripes, how Fastlane is amazing after you go through the pains of it's setup, and how to effectively create a workplace playlist that makes everyone happy (not, it's not as simple as shuffling Weezer's first two albums and early B-sides...). Follow Gant on Twitter: @GantLaborde React Native Fastlane tutorials: https://shift.infinite.red/simple-react-native-ios-releases-4c28bb53a97b https://shift.infinite.red/simple-react-native-android-releases-319dc5e29605 AI tutorial: https://academy.infinite.red/p/ai-demystified-free-5-day-mini-course Plug DJ for workplace community radio: https://plug.dj/

In this episode, we talk to Gant Laborde, CIO at Infinite Red. We talk to Gant about how he has helped a number of different clients find value from ML and why he developed his new class: ML for TensorFlow.js! Gant is an owner of Infinite Red, Google Developer Expert in Web and ML, mentor, adjunct professor, published author, and award-winning speaker. For 20 years, he has been involved in software development and aspires to one day become a mad scientist.

Remember Face/Off? Classic. We revisit two very important aspects of that film in today's episode: Nicolas Cage and Nicolas Cage's face. Gant Laborde joins me to discuss how he built nicornot.com and what it's like to get started developing in the world of AI. Follow Gant on Twitter: @GantLaborde UI Arch Conference: http://uiarchconf.com/ AI Demystified: https://academy.infinite.red/p/ai-demystified-free-5-day-mini-course Infinite Red Academy: https://academy.infinite.red Curious if you're standing next to Nic Cage? Snap a photo and check here: https://nicornot.com/

Gant Laborde is the Chief Innovation Officer of Infinite Red who is working on a course for beginners on machine learning. There is a lot of gatekeeping with machine learning, and this attitude that only people with PhDs should touch it. In spite of this, Gant thinks that in the next 5 years everyone will be using machine learning, and that it will be pioneered by web developers. One of the strong points of the web is experimentation, and Gant contrasts this to the academic approach.  They conversation turns to Gant’s course on machine learning and how it is structured. He stresses the importance of understanding unicode, assembly, and other higher concepts. In his course he gives you the resources to go deeper and talks about libraries and frameworks available that can get you started right away. His first lesson is a splashdown into the jargon of machine learning, which he maps over into developer terms. After a little JavaScript kung fu, he takes some tools that are already out there and converts it into a website. Chris and Gant discuss some different uses for machine learning and how it can improve development. One of the biggest applications they see is to train the computers to figure monotonous tasks out while the human beings focus on other projects, such as watching security camera footage and identifying images. Gant restates his belief that in the next 5 years, AI will be everywhere. People will grab the boring things first, then they will go for the exciting things. Gant talks about his creation NSFW.js, an open source train model to help you catch indecent content. He and Chris discuss different applications for this technology. Next, the panel discusses where machine learning can be seen in everyday life, especially in big companies such as Google. They cite completing your sentences in an email for you as an example of machine learning. They talk about the ethics of machine learning, especially concerning security and personal data. They anticipate that the next problem is edge devices for AI, and this is where JavaScript really comes in, because security and privacy concerns require a developer mindset. They also believe that personal assistant devices, like those from Amazon and Google, will become even more personal through machine learning. They talk about some of the ways that personal assistant devices will improve through machine learning, such as recognizing your voice or understanding your accent.  Their next topic of discussion is authenticity, and how computers are actually incredibly good at finding deep fakes. They discuss the practice of placing passed away people into movies as one of the applications of machine learning, and the ethics surrounding that. Since developers tend to be worried about inclusions, ethics, and the implications of things, Gant believes that these are the people he wants to have control over what AI is going to do to help build a more conscious data set.  The show concludes with Gant talking about the resources to help you get started with machine learning. He is a panelist on upcoming DevChat show, Adventures in Machine Learning. He has worked with people with all kinds of skill sets and has found that it doesn’t matter how much you know, it matters how interested and passionate you are about learning. If you’re willing to put the pedal to the metal for at least a month, you can come out with a basic understanding. Chris and Gant talk about Tensorflow, which helps you take care of machine learning at a higher level for fast operations without calculus. Gant is working on putting together a course on Tensorflow. If you’re interested in machine learning, go to academy.infinite.red to sign up for Gant’s course. He also announces that they will be having a sale on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Panelists Christopher Buecheler With special guest: Gant Laborde Sponsors React Round Up Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan Adventures in Angular Links Machine Learning: How To go from Zero to Hero NSFW.js Tensorflow.js PyTorch Keras Academy.infinite.red Gantlaborde.com  Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter Picks Christopher Buecheler: Next.js Big Wreck, But For The Sun Gant Laborde:  Nicornot.com Free 5 day mini course on academy.infinite.red

Gant Laborde is the Chief Innovation Officer of Infinite Red who is working on a course for beginners on machine learning. There is a lot of gatekeeping with machine learning, and this attitude that only people with PhDs should touch it. In spite of this, Gant thinks that in the next 5 years everyone will be using machine learning, and that it will be pioneered by web developers. One of the strong points of the web is experimentation, and Gant contrasts this to the academic approach.  They conversation turns to Gant’s course on machine learning and how it is structured. He stresses the importance of understanding unicode, assembly, and other higher concepts. In his course he gives you the resources to go deeper and talks about libraries and frameworks available that can get you started right away. His first lesson is a splashdown into the jargon of machine learning, which he maps over into developer terms. After a little JavaScript kung fu, he takes some tools that are already out there and converts it into a website. Chris and Gant discuss some different uses for machine learning and how it can improve development. One of the biggest applications they see is to train the computers to figure monotonous tasks out while the human beings focus on other projects, such as watching security camera footage and identifying images. Gant restates his belief that in the next 5 years, AI will be everywhere. People will grab the boring things first, then they will go for the exciting things. Gant talks about his creation NSFW.js, an open source train model to help you catch indecent content. He and Chris discuss different applications for this technology. Next, the panel discusses where machine learning can be seen in everyday life, especially in big companies such as Google. They cite completing your sentences in an email for you as an example of machine learning. They talk about the ethics of machine learning, especially concerning security and personal data. They anticipate that the next problem is edge devices for AI, and this is where JavaScript really comes in, because security and privacy concerns require a developer mindset. They also believe that personal assistant devices, like those from Amazon and Google, will become even more personal through machine learning. They talk about some of the ways that personal assistant devices will improve through machine learning, such as recognizing your voice or understanding your accent.  Their next topic of discussion is authenticity, and how computers are actually incredibly good at finding deep fakes. They discuss the practice of placing passed away people into movies as one of the applications of machine learning, and the ethics surrounding that. Since developers tend to be worried about inclusions, ethics, and the implications of things, Gant believes that these are the people he wants to have control over what AI is going to do to help build a more conscious data set.  The show concludes with Gant talking about the resources to help you get started with machine learning. He is a panelist on upcoming DevChat show, Adventures in Machine Learning. He has worked with people with all kinds of skill sets and has found that it doesn’t matter how much you know, it matters how interested and passionate you are about learning. If you’re willing to put the pedal to the metal for at least a month, you can come out with a basic understanding. Chris and Gant talk about Tensorflow, which helps you take care of machine learning at a higher level for fast operations without calculus. Gant is working on putting together a course on Tensorflow. If you’re interested in machine learning, go to academy.infinite.red to sign up for Gant’s course. He also announces that they will be having a sale on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Panelists Christopher Buecheler With special guest: Gant Laborde Sponsors React Round Up Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan Adventures in Angular Links Machine Learning: How To go from Zero to Hero NSFW.js Tensorflow.js PyTorch Keras Academy.infinite.red Gantlaborde.com  Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter Picks Christopher Buecheler: Next.js Big Wreck, But For The Sun Gant Laborde:  Nicornot.com Free 5 day mini course on academy.infinite.red

Gant Laborde is the Chief Innovation Officer of Infinite Red who is working on a course for beginners on machine learning. There is a lot of gatekeeping with machine learning, and this attitude that only people with PhDs should touch it. In spite of this, Gant thinks that in the next 5 years everyone will be using machine learning, and that it will be pioneered by web developers. One of the strong points of the web is experimentation, and Gant contrasts this to the academic approach.  They conversation turns to Gant’s course on machine learning and how it is structured. He stresses the importance of understanding unicode, assembly, and other higher concepts. In his course he gives you the resources to go deeper and talks about libraries and frameworks available that can get you started right away. His first lesson is a splashdown into the jargon of machine learning, which he maps over into developer terms. After a little JavaScript kung fu, he takes some tools that are already out there and converts it into a website. Chris and Gant discuss some different uses for machine learning and how it can improve development. One of the biggest applications they see is to train the computers to figure monotonous tasks out while the human beings focus on other projects, such as watching security camera footage and identifying images. Gant restates his belief that in the next 5 years, AI will be everywhere. People will grab the boring things first, then they will go for the exciting things. Gant talks about his creation NSFW.js, an open source train model to help you catch indecent content. He and Chris discuss different applications for this technology. Next, the panel discusses where machine learning can be seen in everyday life, especially in big companies such as Google. They cite completing your sentences in an email for you as an example of machine learning. They talk about the ethics of machine learning, especially concerning security and personal data. They anticipate that the next problem is edge devices for AI, and this is where JavaScript really comes in, because security and privacy concerns require a developer mindset. They also believe that personal assistant devices, like those from Amazon and Google, will become even more personal through machine learning. They talk about some of the ways that personal assistant devices will improve through machine learning, such as recognizing your voice or understanding your accent.  Their next topic of discussion is authenticity, and how computers are actually incredibly good at finding deep fakes. They discuss the practice of placing passed away people into movies as one of the applications of machine learning, and the ethics surrounding that. Since developers tend to be worried about inclusions, ethics, and the implications of things, Gant believes that these are the people he wants to have control over what AI is going to do to help build a more conscious data set.  The show concludes with Gant talking about the resources to help you get started with machine learning. He is a panelist on upcoming DevChat show, Adventures in Machine Learning. He has worked with people with all kinds of skill sets and has found that it doesn’t matter how much you know, it matters how interested and passionate you are about learning. If you’re willing to put the pedal to the metal for at least a month, you can come out with a basic understanding. Chris and Gant talk about Tensorflow, which helps you take care of machine learning at a higher level for fast operations without calculus. Gant is working on putting together a course on Tensorflow. If you’re interested in machine learning, go to academy.infinite.red to sign up for Gant’s course. He also announces that they will be having a sale on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Panelists Christopher Buecheler With special guest: Gant Laborde Sponsors React Round Up Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan Adventures in Angular Links Machine Learning: How To go from Zero to Hero NSFW.js Tensorflow.js PyTorch Keras Academy.infinite.red Gantlaborde.com  Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter Picks Christopher Buecheler: Next.js Big Wreck, But For The Sun Gant Laborde:  Nicornot.com Free 5 day mini course on academy.infinite.red

Mad Scientist Gant Laborde joins us to explain how you can get into Machine Learning with a little JavaScript knowledge, no math required. We answer what ML/AI is, how TensorflowJS fits in, as well as make a few Skynet jokes.

In today’s episode of the 3factor Radio Podcast, Vladimir Novick talks with Gant Laborde, Chief Technology Strategist at Infinite.red - a consultancy specializing in Web and App development and design. In this episode they discuss GraphQL, Serverless and software architecture in general.

To mix things up from our usual magazine format we have just one long substantive interview for you today, where we really dig into the detail about how one organisation manages their communications using Slack. We’re sure you’ll find it interesting to go really in-depth into this example, and reflect on how you select and use tools within your own organisation. And a quick shout out to listener Stephan for recommending our show to someone on Twitter, and in turn we recommend an episode in the show Reasons to be Cheerful, episode 55, (https://pca.st/0IN0) where they interview the founder of Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand, where they have been experimenting with the four day week (which we mentioned in episode 179 https://virtualnotdistant.squarespace.com/podcasts/values-driven-culture but didn’t talk to them directly). Why not let us know what you think, we’re easy to reach on Twitter, either @PilarOrti or @Virtualteamw0rk Meantime, on with the great big chat: 08.25 Voice behind the blog: Jamon Holmgren Jamon is the cofounder and CTO of Infinite Red https://infinite.red/, and author of the post “5 Slack Channels Every Company Needs.” https://shift.infinite.red/5-slack-channels-every-company-needs-dd0f103e0f9d With a team of 25 fully remote colleagues, Infinite Red have been building apps since forming from a merger in 2005. (We interviewed Gant Laborde earlier this year https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/wlp174-problem-with-remote-work about a great blog post he also shared with the world).  But Jamon remains conscious that their setup is unusual, that society is still not ready for remote universally – something those of us immersed in this space can easily overlook. So they had to find their own ways of getting things done, as they created their team and found ways to collaborate effectively. Infinite Red use Slack very extensively to segment their conversations, through channels which evolve organically (and get archived after use), and also guest channels for external collaborators - in fact, they insist that their clients use Slack, as part of their terms of operation, either in shared workspaces or via guest channels. Jamon and Pilar discuss how in a larger team, Slack can evolve from being an asynchronous collaboration platform to more of a real-time communication tool, with higher expectation in terms of response time. To manage this requires some forethought and alignment of expectations, such as use of threading to control the signal to noise ratio, especially in important channels – whilst other channels can fill the need for more casual chat. For Infinite Red this led to the creation of the 5 channels which were the subject of the blog post in question: 20.56 The 5 Channels Roll call: For checking in, rather than checking up on, saying “hi” when you arrive at the office. They use it for really brief greetings and signalling - it’s a little more personal and connected than just indicating through your status when you are working or not, or popping out for lunch or into a meeting. It creates a good snapshot of where everyone is at at any given moment, particularly in a team spanning multiple timezones. Kudos: For recognising the accomplishments of co-workers, in as authentic a way as possible. A good way to make different aspects of the work visible across the organisation (though private praise matters too). They also use to reward effort and endurance as well as obviously positive outcomes, and try to keep it spontaneous and genuine. Chitchat + Funny: These are actually two channels at Infinite Red, split from the default Slack ‘Random’ channel. Separating them in this way allows all employees join in chat without needing to dive down the rabbit-hole of memes and GIFs (and some ultra-geeky stuff that is really only funny to developers anyway) - and recognises that people bond over different kinds of content and humour. Announcements: Some things need a destination of their own, things which have an impact on the company as a whole: team updates, role changes, policies etc. Responses in here should be threaded, to allow for rapid skimming and updating of these important messages, without diving into the discussion of it. They advise everyone to have visible alerts for this channel, and people can check-off that they’ve read each item with an appropriate emoji.  Scheduling: For longer term scheduling type topics, eg discussing planned absences and use of shared resources, they have this dedicated channel for “determining how we’re going to spend our time as a company”. So as well as syncing plans, they work out loud at a high altitude in here - stating what they’re working on in any given week, to create that overview of the big picture for everyone on the team to see. Jamon recognises that he is the power user and evangelist when it comes to Slack, and that perhaps every team needs one, to keep the channel usages on track and consistent (whilst also being dynamic and evolving), leading by example at all times. Of course they do have other channels - so be sure to check out the article!   42.40 Podcast Pilar and Jamon also discuss the podcast, Building Infinite Red https://building.infinite.red/ This project enables Jamon and his co-founders to work on something cool together outside of their client work, and share and reflect upon what they’re doing and how they make decisions. It lets them be quite straightforward and authentic, and develop their thinking out loud together – in the spirit of podcasting, as a conversation between people in a synergistic and fun way to evolve creativity. Season 2 launches soon (but there are already 13 to get stuck into from last time). Thanks Gant Laborde for tipping us off to this one.   47:25 Academy Finally, we also discuss their Academy.   It’s in Infinite Red’s DNA to share their learning with the world, as they’re all from an open source background. So the Academy offers online and on-site workshops and on-demand resources, and it’s all based on things they have tried and tested and used with their own clients acadmey.infinite.red  They also teach workshops at conferences  https://twitter.com/jamonholmgren (especially if you like jokes, apparently) Jamon@infinite.red            

Panel: Charles Max Wood Lucas Reis Justin Bennett (guest host) Special Guests: Gant Laborde In this episode, the panel talks with Gant who has been programming for twenty years. In the past, he has been an adjunct professor and loves to teach. Finally, he talks at conferences and enjoys sharing his ideas. The panel talks about the React State Museum, among many other topics, such as: React Native, Flux, Redux, Agile, and XState. Show Topics: 1:24 – Chuck: What do you do? 2:02 – Chuck and Gant: We met at React Rally at 2016. 2:17 – Gant: I have my own sticker branding with a friend in Japan who is genius. She draws all these characters. They are my business card now. 2:41 – Chuck: React State Museum- talk about its brief history and what it is? 2:54 – Gant: React is this beautiful thing of passing these functional capsules around and managing them. Once you start creating another component, the question is how do you actually manage all of these components? We are all so happy to be on the cutting edge, but state management systems come up and die so fast. For like Facebook, there are 2 people who understand Flux. What happens is Redux is the one thing that shows up and... 6:34 – Chuck: I want to say...I think we need to change the topic. You said that JavaScript USED to be bad at classes, but it’s still bad at classes! 6:52 – Gant: Yep. 7:21 – Chuck: Typescript gets us close-ish. 7:31 – Chuck: Do you get feedback on the library? 8:12 – Gant: The requests that I’ve got - it’s from people who are better at (that0 than me. I wanted to test the lines of code. But that’s unfair because there are a lot of things to do. It really was a plan but what happens is – components that are used in this example is that in this node module... 9:41 – Panel: This is an interesting topic. When you assess any technology...if you are not a technology expert than you really can’t say. That’s interesting that you are doing this an open-source way. 10:25 – Gant: I am a huge fan of this vs. that. I am okay with say “this” one wins and “that” one looses. I don’t declare a winner cause it’s more like a Rosetta Stone. I had to find pitfalls and I respect that for the different perspectives. At the end of the day I do have opinions. But there is no winner. They are all the same and they are all extremely different. Are you trying to teach someone in one day? I learned Redux in 2 different days. 12:00 – Panel: Is there a library that helps with X, Y, Z, etc. 12:16 – Gant: I love for teaching and giving people a great start. I just set state and live life. I had to show what X is like. 13:59 – Chuck: Like this conversation about frameworks and which framework to use. Everyone was using Redux, because it was more or less what we wanted it to do. But at the time it cleaned up a bunch of code. Now we have all these other options. We are figuring out... How to write JavaScript if web assembly really took off? Do I write React with X or with Y. And how does this affect all of this? We had all of these conversations but we haven’t settled on the absolute best way to do this. 15:50 – Panel: This is great, and I think this is from the community as a whole. 17:20 – Chuck: I need to ask a question. Is this because the requirements on the frontend has changed? Or... I think we are talking about these state management systems, and this is what Lucas is talking about. 17:45 – Gant: I think it’s both. 18:43 – Panel: Websites have gotten bigger. We have always been pushing CSS. Panelist mentions Facebook Blue, among other things. What does your state look like? What does your validation look like? We are on so many different devices, and so on. 20:00 – Gant: I agree to echo everything that you all have said. I think the expectations are tighter now; that we have less drift. People are being more cognoscente and asking what is our brand. And it’s about brand consistency. And we are expecting more out of our technology, too. We keep pushing the envelope. What about these features? We want to be feature rich, and pushing these envelopes – how can we build more faster with less complexity while building it. You have to put that complexity somewhere. It’s interesting to watch. 22:00 – Chuck: How do we use this React State Museum...where are we going next? 22:19 – Gant: It’s a loaded question. Being able to ID new and interesting concepts. If you had a terrible version and Redux comes along, Redux is great for some companies but not all. You won’t see bugs that are crazy, there is a middle-wear, and maybe for your team going into Redux will make things more manageable. 25:25 – Advertisement – Digital Ocean 26:05 – Panel: Understanding your problem is the first thing to do. Talking about evolutionary architecture – to build your software to evolve. What does tha fit really well? So if you have to pick something new you are in a good position. What are my needs? Don’t look too much forward or 27:38 – Chuck: Advice on looking at your problem-sets? 27:52 – Panel: We have gone from planning too much to not planning at all. I don’t need to plan for too much or else it will “hurt” me. 28:42 – Chuck comments and mentions Agile. 29:29 – Panel and Guest chime in. 29:39 – Panel: I worked on a project (3 months) we needed to do a big change. I asked them why didn’t we take that into consideration. And their answer was... 30:30 – Gant: You might get away with... 30:55 – Chuck: What are some of the knobs on this? If I turn this know Redux is looking good, but if I do this... 31:12 – Gant: There are a lot of attractive knobs. Using app sync, not using app sync. 32:33 – Gant: Is your app really effective? That’s your first important question. How much state do I need on the frontend. And vice versa. 34:02 – Gant: How easy will this be to test? Can I teach someone how to do this? If I cannot teach it then it won’t do my team any good. 34:35 – Panel adds in comments. 35:08 – Gant: Looking at tests. 37:25 – Panel: If you have a great backend team then you can move the work across the team. You have a strong team to move that work along that line – normally you can’t cross that sort of thing. 38:03 – Chuck: There are so many options, too. I see Apollo getting reach here. I don’t see it as a statement tool instead I see it as... 38:31 – Panel: Apollo State – seems like they are pushing the envelope. It’s interesting to watch. 38:54 – Chuck. 39:12 – Gant: I am going to go ahead and use this tool – I am not going to worry about it. But now you are being held accountable. 39:29 – Panel: Question for folks: React not having a blessed ecosystem can hold people back in some ways? You have the freedom to use what you want. Here are the tools that you can use. Do you tink it be better if the Facebook team could do... 40:20 – Gant: I find that I don’t like (being told) this is what you will be using. I am a person with idea. We’d all be using Flux and all be very upset. 41:00 –Then there would be 3 people who don’t understand it. 41:17 – Gant: I loved Google Wave. Fool on my once and shame on me twice... Google Video! Google comes out and says here is BLESSED and you don’t have any choice. But it’s any author for themselves. It’s a little bit silly 0 I would like a beacon from Facebook saying: Here is a guide. It seems that they can’t focus. They are running a large company; I would like to keep it open – friendly energy. 42:24 – Chuck: I am mixed feelings about this. It only plays as far as people play into it. IN a React community there are so many voices. They all have opinions on what you should/shouldn’t use. The one thing that I like about a blessed / recommended stack – brand new person – it’s a good place to art. After that if they realize that Flux is hard then they can go and try other options. There are other things out there; there is a good balance there. 43:36 – Panel: That is the Angular way right? 43:38 – Chuck: Yes but Angular is more opinionated. It’s a different feel. 44:38 - Panel + Guest continue this conversation. 45:00 – The book DRIVE is mentioned. 45:21 – Gant: ... we need more recommendations. 45:43 – Chuck: Let’s talk about Repot and how to use this? If you go and get Repot – Google React State Museum it’s really easy. How should people come to this and pick it up? 46:18 – Gant: The table that comes in there – it links to the main Repot. A lot of people showed up and contributed. First of all show up. Gant mentions a sandbox link – and he talks about getting your hands dirty. React Native is mentioned, too. 48:10 – Gant: There are many opportunities for contributors. I could use my links. Typos, documentations, etc. - anything friendly is accepted here. 49:20 – Gant continues this conversation. 50:33 – Chuck: Anything else to dive into? 50:41 – Panel: I think there could be other things you can bubble up 51:26 – Gant: I would love some help with that. I did have some contributors write some tests. I wrote a test – 4 hours later – and it tells me if it passed or not. It has to go into a new directory, and work in Android, etc. It’s insane testing library. Then there are some checks to see if there is a link in the README. Animation if there is anyone who wants to do some cool stuff – like modules. Maybe it’s apple to oranges comparisons there. I would like to identify that for people. We would like some outside feedback out there. The more the merrier to help with the data is out there. Sanity check complete – yes! 53:24 – How to do that? 53:31 – File a ticket to help contribute. So you can say: I will do this. If you do it in a reasonable amount of time, then heck yes. If you do some open source...Do 10 (I think) and you get a free t-shirt? 54:28 – Advertisement. Links: Kendo UI Ruby on Rails Angular Get A Coder Job Redux Agile A Philosophy of Software Design – book XState Book: Spellmonger Did Someone Steal the Declaration of Independence Again? Book: The Culture Code Gant Laborde’s Twitter Lucas Reis’ Email: lucasmreis@gmail.com Charles Max Wood’s Twitter Sponsors: Kendo UI Digital Ocean Get A Coder Job Picks: Charles My journey – it’s been a rough year – with my dad passing. Willing to think it and process it, and it’s a healthy thing. Book: The Traveler’s Gift by Andy Andrews Book: The Shack by William Paul Young Gant Book: Harry Potter - Methods of Rationality Magicians XState is amazing! Culture Code - especially if you work remote. The pains that can happen by working remotely. Helps you identify those issues. Talk in Poland – Secret project. Lose the Declaration of Independence. “Where’s Waldo?” I am going to find Nicholas Cage in the audience and he will have the Declaration of Independence in backpack. Fake government website. Justin XState – Not Reactive specific Spellmonger: Book One of the... by Terry Mancour Book: Building Evolutionary Architectures Lucas Book: A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout

Panel: Charles Max Wood Lucas Reis Justin Bennett (guest host) Special Guests: Gant Laborde In this episode, the panel talks with Gant who has been programming for twenty years. In the past, he has been an adjunct professor and loves to teach. Finally, he talks at conferences and enjoys sharing his ideas. The panel talks about the React State Museum, among many other topics, such as: React Native, Flux, Redux, Agile, and XState. Show Topics: 1:24 – Chuck: What do you do? 2:02 – Chuck and Gant: We met at React Rally at 2016. 2:17 – Gant: I have my own sticker branding with a friend in Japan who is genius. She draws all these characters. They are my business card now. 2:41 – Chuck: React State Museum- talk about its brief history and what it is? 2:54 – Gant: React is this beautiful thing of passing these functional capsules around and managing them. Once you start creating another component, the question is how do you actually manage all of these components? We are all so happy to be on the cutting edge, but state management systems come up and die so fast. For like Facebook, there are 2 people who understand Flux. What happens is Redux is the one thing that shows up and... 6:34 – Chuck: I want to say...I think we need to change the topic. You said that JavaScript USED to be bad at classes, but it’s still bad at classes! 6:52 – Gant: Yep. 7:21 – Chuck: Typescript gets us close-ish. 7:31 – Chuck: Do you get feedback on the library? 8:12 – Gant: The requests that I’ve got - it’s from people who are better at (that0 than me. I wanted to test the lines of code. But that’s unfair because there are a lot of things to do. It really was a plan but what happens is – components that are used in this example is that in this node module... 9:41 – Panel: This is an interesting topic. When you assess any technology...if you are not a technology expert than you really can’t say. That’s interesting that you are doing this an open-source way. 10:25 – Gant: I am a huge fan of this vs. that. I am okay with say “this” one wins and “that” one looses. I don’t declare a winner cause it’s more like a Rosetta Stone. I had to find pitfalls and I respect that for the different perspectives. At the end of the day I do have opinions. But there is no winner. They are all the same and they are all extremely different. Are you trying to teach someone in one day? I learned Redux in 2 different days. 12:00 – Panel: Is there a library that helps with X, Y, Z, etc. 12:16 – Gant: I love for teaching and giving people a great start. I just set state and live life. I had to show what X is like. 13:59 – Chuck: Like this conversation about frameworks and which framework to use. Everyone was using Redux, because it was more or less what we wanted it to do. But at the time it cleaned up a bunch of code. Now we have all these other options. We are figuring out... How to write JavaScript if web assembly really took off? Do I write React with X or with Y. And how does this affect all of this? We had all of these conversations but we haven’t settled on the absolute best way to do this. 15:50 – Panel: This is great, and I think this is from the community as a whole. 17:20 – Chuck: I need to ask a question. Is this because the requirements on the frontend has changed? Or... I think we are talking about these state management systems, and this is what Lucas is talking about. 17:45 – Gant: I think it’s both. 18:43 – Panel: Websites have gotten bigger. We have always been pushing CSS. Panelist mentions Facebook Blue, among other things. What does your state look like? What does your validation look like? We are on so many different devices, and so on. 20:00 – Gant: I agree to echo everything that you all have said. I think the expectations are tighter now; that we have less drift. People are being more cognoscente and asking what is our brand. And it’s about brand consistency. And we are expecting more out of our technology, too. We keep pushing the envelope. What about these features? We want to be feature rich, and pushing these envelopes – how can we build more faster with less complexity while building it. You have to put that complexity somewhere. It’s interesting to watch. 22:00 – Chuck: How do we use this React State Museum...where are we going next? 22:19 – Gant: It’s a loaded question. Being able to ID new and interesting concepts. If you had a terrible version and Redux comes along, Redux is great for some companies but not all. You won’t see bugs that are crazy, there is a middle-wear, and maybe for your team going into Redux will make things more manageable. 25:25 – Advertisement – Digital Ocean 26:05 – Panel: Understanding your problem is the first thing to do. Talking about evolutionary architecture – to build your software to evolve. What does tha fit really well? So if you have to pick something new you are in a good position. What are my needs? Don’t look too much forward or 27:38 – Chuck: Advice on looking at your problem-sets? 27:52 – Panel: We have gone from planning too much to not planning at all. I don’t need to plan for too much or else it will “hurt” me. 28:42 – Chuck comments and mentions Agile. 29:29 – Panel and Guest chime in. 29:39 – Panel: I worked on a project (3 months) we needed to do a big change. I asked them why didn’t we take that into consideration. And their answer was... 30:30 – Gant: You might get away with... 30:55 – Chuck: What are some of the knobs on this? If I turn this know Redux is looking good, but if I do this... 31:12 – Gant: There are a lot of attractive knobs. Using app sync, not using app sync. 32:33 – Gant: Is your app really effective? That’s your first important question. How much state do I need on the frontend. And vice versa. 34:02 – Gant: How easy will this be to test? Can I teach someone how to do this? If I cannot teach it then it won’t do my team any good. 34:35 – Panel adds in comments. 35:08 – Gant: Looking at tests. 37:25 – Panel: If you have a great backend team then you can move the work across the team. You have a strong team to move that work along that line – normally you can’t cross that sort of thing. 38:03 – Chuck: There are so many options, too. I see Apollo getting reach here. I don’t see it as a statement tool instead I see it as... 38:31 – Panel: Apollo State – seems like they are pushing the envelope. It’s interesting to watch. 38:54 – Chuck. 39:12 – Gant: I am going to go ahead and use this tool – I am not going to worry about it. But now you are being held accountable. 39:29 – Panel: Question for folks: React not having a blessed ecosystem can hold people back in some ways? You have the freedom to use what you want. Here are the tools that you can use. Do you tink it be better if the Facebook team could do... 40:20 – Gant: I find that I don’t like (being told) this is what you will be using. I am a person with idea. We’d all be using Flux and all be very upset. 41:00 –Then there would be 3 people who don’t understand it. 41:17 – Gant: I loved Google Wave. Fool on my once and shame on me twice... Google Video! Google comes out and says here is BLESSED and you don’t have any choice. But it’s any author for themselves. It’s a little bit silly 0 I would like a beacon from Facebook saying: Here is a guide. It seems that they can’t focus. They are running a large company; I would like to keep it open – friendly energy. 42:24 – Chuck: I am mixed feelings about this. It only plays as far as people play into it. IN a React community there are so many voices. They all have opinions on what you should/shouldn’t use. The one thing that I like about a blessed / recommended stack – brand new person – it’s a good place to art. After that if they realize that Flux is hard then they can go and try other options. There are other things out there; there is a good balance there. 43:36 – Panel: That is the Angular way right? 43:38 – Chuck: Yes but Angular is more opinionated. It’s a different feel. 44:38 - Panel + Guest continue this conversation. 45:00 – The book DRIVE is mentioned. 45:21 – Gant: ... we need more recommendations. 45:43 – Chuck: Let’s talk about Repot and how to use this? If you go and get Repot – Google React State Museum it’s really easy. How should people come to this and pick it up? 46:18 – Gant: The table that comes in there – it links to the main Repot. A lot of people showed up and contributed. First of all show up. Gant mentions a sandbox link – and he talks about getting your hands dirty. React Native is mentioned, too. 48:10 – Gant: There are many opportunities for contributors. I could use my links. Typos, documentations, etc. - anything friendly is accepted here. 49:20 – Gant continues this conversation. 50:33 – Chuck: Anything else to dive into? 50:41 – Panel: I think there could be other things you can bubble up 51:26 – Gant: I would love some help with that. I did have some contributors write some tests. I wrote a test – 4 hours later – and it tells me if it passed or not. It has to go into a new directory, and work in Android, etc. It’s insane testing library. Then there are some checks to see if there is a link in the README. Animation if there is anyone who wants to do some cool stuff – like modules. Maybe it’s apple to oranges comparisons there. I would like to identify that for people. We would like some outside feedback out there. The more the merrier to help with the data is out there. Sanity check complete – yes! 53:24 – How to do that? 53:31 – File a ticket to help contribute. So you can say: I will do this. If you do it in a reasonable amount of time, then heck yes. If you do some open source...Do 10 (I think) and you get a free t-shirt? 54:28 – Advertisement. Links: Kendo UI Ruby on Rails Angular Get A Coder Job Redux Agile A Philosophy of Software Design – book XState Book: Spellmonger Did Someone Steal the Declaration of Independence Again? Book: The Culture Code Gant Laborde’s Twitter Lucas Reis’ Email: lucasmreis@gmail.com Charles Max Wood’s Twitter Sponsors: Kendo UI Digital Ocean Get A Coder Job Picks: Charles My journey – it’s been a rough year – with my dad passing. Willing to think it and process it, and it’s a healthy thing. Book: The Traveler’s Gift by Andy Andrews Book: The Shack by William Paul Young Gant Book: Harry Potter - Methods of Rationality Magicians XState is amazing! Culture Code - especially if you work remote. The pains that can happen by working remotely. Helps you identify those issues. Talk in Poland – Secret project. Lose the Declaration of Independence. “Where’s Waldo?” I am going to find Nicholas Cage in the audience and he will have the Declaration of Independence in backpack. Fake government website. Justin XState – Not Reactive specific Spellmonger: Book One of the... by Terry Mancour Book: Building Evolutionary Architectures Lucas Book: A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout

Rubyists in Other Languages with James Edward Gray II and Steve Klabnik TableXI is offering training for developers and product teams! For more info, email workshops@tablexi.com. Guests Steve Klabnik (https://twitter.com/steveklabnik): Blog (https://www.steveklabnik.com/) James Edward Gray II (https://twitter.com/JEG2): Blog (http://graysoftinc.com/) Summary Ruby is great. But it's not the best tool for everything. On this episode, I talk to James Edward Gray II and Steve Klabnik. Both James and Steve have made substantial contributions to the Ruby and Rails community, and they now both spend lots of time using other languages. We talk about what makes Rust and Elixir interesting for Ruby developers to learn, what some other interesting languages might be. Notes 01:48 - Moving Towards Other Programming Languages from Ruby: Why? 03:39 - Rust - The Rust Programming Language (https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/) - The Elm Programming Language (http://elm-lang.org/) - The Rust Programming Language (Book) by Steve Klabnik (https://www.amazon.com/Rust-Programming-Language-Steve-Klabnik/dp/1593278284) 17:54 - Other Cool Programming Languages for Rubyists - Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) - Logo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)) - GameSalad (https://gamesalad.com/) - GameMaker Studio 2 (https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/features) - Prograph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph) - Abstract Syntax Tree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_syntax_tree) 29:22 - Elixir - The Elixir Programming Language (https://elixir-lang.org/) - Erlang (https://app.workte.am/timeoff/team) - Prolog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog) - Pattern Matching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_matching) Related Episodes Programming Languages and Communication With Kerri Miller (http://www.techdoneright.io/34) React Native with Gant Laborde, Ed LaFoy, and Brent Vatne (http://www.techdoneright.io/32) Ruby Tapas and Avoiding Code with Avdi Grimm (http://www.techdoneright.io/24) The Elm Programming Language With Corey Haines (http://www.techdoneright.io/17) Special Guests: James Edward Gray II and Steve Klabnik.

Gant Laborde joins us as the special guest to talk about state management in React.

Gant Laborde joins us as the special guest to talk about state management in React.

In today’s busy episode we look at the networks and constellations that surround us in our work, the human kind and the virtual respectively. Some great guests and conversations come your way, as we connect with unique expertise in the remote working space.   And special thanks to previous guest Gant Laborde for sending us some great new connections, as well his own podcast Building Infinite Red - we love to hear your feedback, so please connect with us over at Virtual Not Distant! 3.04 The Voice Behind the Book – David Burkus It’s always a pleasure to talk with David Burkus, award-winning speaker, business school professor, and author of “ Friend of a Friend: Understanding the Hidden Networks that Will Transform Your Life and Your Career”. David is an old friend of this podcast, and joined us back in episode 137. His latest book looks at the fundamental principles of network science, based on 50 years of experimental evidence, to analyse universal truths you can make use of in any setting. It’s definitely not yet another book about how to ‘do’ networking – but by better understanding the principles in play, you can enrich the way you connect with others and grow your social capital, whilst maintaining authenticity in your interpersonal relationships. And as we keep saying, it’s not about the platform or the tool – but you can use various modes of technology to supplement your networking. Getting out of your comfort zone matters too – truly effective networking is always unscripted. Finally, you need to know that David is a past master at networking a book launch, building a great marketing ecosystem and bonus product selection around the content, and being very clear about how people will benefit from it. (Sign up on the title link above, to observe this in action). And as he does point out, writing a book about networking is a great way to grow your network! Make sure you check out David’s website for more information, and his TEDx talk, ‘How to Hack Networking’.   27.17 Satellite, Cluster and Nebula Teams: What do you mean by that? And again it’s great to welcome another returning guest (from episodes 77 95 and 117!); our good friend from Virtual Team Talk Mark Kilby is an agile coach and author, and explains he needed better ways of describing different configurations of team set-up. Satellite teams revolve around a central hub – like a main office, where most are colocated. Clusters happen in larger organisations, with groups coalescing in different locations. Clusters may be near (perhaps even by floors in a building), or far distant from each other, perhaps by many time zones. Nebulas are truly out in space – genuinely diffuse clouds of people, remote, collaborating and communicating completely virtually. Mark and Joanna Rothman will explain more in their upcoming book “From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams”, and we’ll welcome then back to be future ‘voices behind the book’ to hear more.   33.19 Tools: Linoit Lino.it is one of the simplest online planning tools, completely browser-based and no account necessary (though there is a mobile app). The beauty is in just being able to share a link and have everyone jump in and start collaborating. It’s very simple and frictionless to use. It’s great for brainstorming, thought-dumping, idea capture – using virtual post-it notes, which you can move and pin and cluster at will, with intuitive drag-and-drop ease. And it’s free – what’s not to like? 36.10 Oh no, my team’s gone remote... And I’m afraid we’ll lose visibility within the organisation! Just as it’s important to stay visible to each other as you transition to an office-optional setting, you may also need to initiate and engineer opportunities for connection and collaboration between your team and the rest of the organisation, indeed, your wider industry and world.  You can become more conscious of your networks and connections, and use the tools and opportunities you’re given, both to make your own team’s activities visible, but also to pick up on what else is going on, and further potential for collaboration.  How can you map your network, and see who is already connected to whom, formally or informally? As with much in the remote working world, intentionality is important. It’s all about relationships and networking after all. Celebrate your accomplishments, intentionally bridge the distances, and keep your networks and constellations strong.

A shorter number of longer sections for today, including an extended featured interview looking at some of the difficulties behind the kind of working we love best. Don't forget to tell us what YOU love best, by tweeting @VirtualTeamW0rk, or visiting virtualnotdistant.com.  04.28 The Voice Behind The Blog : Gant Laborde Today’s “voice” is Gant Laborde, author of an article entitled  5 Things that Suck about Remote Work - The Pitfalls of Remote Work + Proposed Solutions https://shift.infinite.red/5-things-that-suck-about-remote-work-506b98dd38f9 We often celebrate all that we love about remote and flexible working, but it’s important to reflect on the challenges. Some of them come from other people and their attitudes and expectations…  and their lack of respect for your boundaries, especially when you’re first transitioning and figuring things out. Gant has some good suggestions for tackling this, and for talking about how you work to those who don’t get it. Other challenges come from ‘office only’ things you might miss out on, because everyone else’s grass is greener sometimes. Our interview discusses some ways of bringing the sociability of working life back into remote working, and dealing with temporal disconnects – which don’t only come from being in different time-zones, but have cultural and lifestyle roots as well, and bring additional challenges to internal and external meetings. An ‘open source’ mindset, with an eye on the future and evergreen value, really helps in making effective communications – and the extra effort of this additional thinking and planning adds compounded value down the line.  The same goes for using tools smartly, combining different modes of communication, and mixing up synchronous and asynchronous messaging… But we need to remember that written words can be misinterpreted when removed from their non-verbal context. Humour can be misjudged… and what is that silence supposed to mean..? Try an emoji or two, to put that emotion back in, and close the loop. And don’t forget to find ways to celebrate the ‘wins’ as well  - large and the small. Every remote team needs to think about this, create the right channels and opportunities –you can’t leave it to chance (as we keep saying). There’s an interesting backstory to the branding of Gant’s business and blog too; enjoy the interview. http://gantlaborde.com/ @gantlaborde https://infinite.red/   39.25 Recommended Tool: Retrium retrium.com A tool for retrospectives or review sessions, Retrium is also useful for idea generation – we talked to one of the co-founders of Retrium back in episode 129: https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/retrium-distributed-business. Pilar uses it in retro-style meetings, as it’s purpose-built to take you through the phases – starting with individual idea generation, (with others ideas masked), then ‘big reveal’, where you see everyone else’s contributions and start to collaborate together.   43.14 Wellbeing: Communications addiction Alerts and notifications are cleverly designed to feed our deep psychological needs - we all crave that little rush of dopamine when someone ‘likes’ your content or sends you a message.  It’s creeping from the social space into the workplace though, and we need to be aware of its addictive potential. Remember you can control your notifications, rather than having them control you. Have a listen to: ReWork podcast https://rework.fm/dont-like-this/ , and also our own blog post https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/blog/notifications-settings.  And to think people worry about lack of social contact, when they transition to remote!  

In this episode, the founders of Infinite Red—Jamon Holmgren, Ken Miller, and Todd Werth—are talking about Chain React, Infinite Red’s React Native tech conference this July 11-13th in Portland, OR. Hear the story of how the conference came about, how Infinite Red's remote team worked together to create an in-person event, the value of hiring people with diverse interests and backgrounds, and all of the things that go into making the best conference possible. Show Links Chain React 2018 Derek's Food Report Episode Transcript CHRIS MARTIN: In 2017, Infinite Red started Chain React, a conference devoted to React Native. So the question that I have for the three of you to start is: why start a conference and what was the need that you saw? JAMON HOLMGREN: This is Jamon and I was on Twitter and I was looking for a React Native conference because we had been doing React Native for about a year at that point. And I was thinking, well, it'd be really nice to see if some of our team could attend a conference and potentially maybe share some of the things that we had learned along the way. So I actually put out a tweet saying, "is there a React Native conference around? I'm not seeing one." And got no responses, which partially had to do with my very small Twitter audience at the time and partially just because there wasn't one. Now, it turns out there was one over in Europe, React Native EU, put on by our friends over at Callstack. TODD WERTH: But that was after. JAMON: I believe it was after that. KEN: We didn't learn about that until after. TODD: Not at that time. JAMON: Right. I was just kinda chewing on that. Wow, I didn't get any response to that. I would normally get two or three options if I were to put out something like that. And I woke up one morning, I'm like, you know what, maybe we should do a conference? And what is funny is independently two or three people contacted me after that, that same week saying, "Do you think we should do a React Native conference?" Just independently and it just seemed like that all kind of came together all at once. TODD: And this is Todd, Todd Werth, by the way. Some background here. We've never done a conference at all. We've of course all attended conferences. We're familiar with that. Although Shawni Danner, who ran the conference had never attended a conference, which was funny, but anyways, so Jamon came up with the idea, talked to some other people in our company, they liked the idea and then pretty quickly we decided and then we started building the conference. KEN MILLER: At what point in there did Gant ... Because Gant, who is our social butterfly... TODD: Gant Laborde. KEN: ...so he asked around various people to see whether they would speak. And I don't remember if that was before we decided or after. I feel like that was before. We were kind of mulling the idea around and he was like, "hey, we're thinking about doing this conference. Would you want to speak?" And when a bunch of people were like, yeah, hell yeah. We were like, okay, sounds like the stars are aligning, and it was very much a feeling of the stars aligning to be honest. JAMON: It really was. KEN: This signal is kind of like once we started putting the idea out, it just gathered momentum from a bunch of different places and we're like, okay, and then once you commit, the momentum increases. TODD: And as far as I know, it was the first React Native conference in the world. JAMON: As far as the first one that was held, I think Callstack announced their conference before we announced ours. But yeah it was right in that same time. TODD: Correct, they announced, but theirs came after ours actually. JAMON: Yeah, theirs was in September, ours was in July of 2017. CHRIS: So when you're putting on a new venture, like a conference that you have no experience in and you start seeing the stars align and you start seeing this momentum form: how do you really go from zero to one? KEN: I don't want to say it wasn't hard because a lot of work went into it, but it wasn't super difficult. At the end of the day, the hard part about making a conference is making a good conference. You get a venue, you get speakers, you get food, you get swag. I mean, I don't mean to oversimplify it, but if you've planned a wedding, you can plan a conference, right? It's probably not even as hard as a wedding because it's not quite as emotionally wrought, but where we put the most effort into well how do we make it a good conference? And we sort of came up with a list of things, some of which I think turned out to be true. Like getting good speakers, making sure that there's at least a certain amount of diversity. I think we always want more, but there needs to be at least enough that people can kind of go, look, hey, there's someone like me there. I was big on having good food. I think that wasn't as important as I thought it was. It's important to me, but the things that people cared about it, we're actually different than what we thought. So there was definitely things that we learned from the process, but the process of getting it organized—and a lot of credit goes to Shawni for being an amazing organizer of things—but the process of getting it made, while stressful and hectic at points, went off pretty smoothly overall. TODD: Yeah. So that's all true. One thing we did do though is as a leadership team, is we decided to put a decent amount of resources into it. I think a lot of people are like, this is a little side project and it was a side project for us. But we're 26 people, so we can put a little more wood behind the arrow of a side project like this if we decide to. And we'd probably put a little too much resources in to it, to be honest. And we'll talk about this later, but the results were well worth it. JAMON: Yeah. One of the things you have to remember is back in 2016 when we were first starting to do this, we had been doing React Native for a year. We weren't necessarily quite as well known back then, we were still fairly new player in the space. We had done some things in other technical realms that we were more known for, but React Native we were still a relative newcomer. So for us this was, it was a bigger, maybe bigger deal than just necessarily putting on a conference for the revenue or something along those lines. We wanted to be connected. We want it to be in that space. And so we did put it, as Todd said, we put a lot of resources behind it. We put a lot of thought into it. As a founder team, we put a lot into it. TODD: And it was probably a half of Shawni's main job, which is a significant amount. JAMON: Absolutely. And another person I'll point out here that who was instrumental was Gant Laborde. He's typically the most active in the conference circuit from Infinite Red and he's been to a lot of conferences as both speaker and attendee and he had a really good sense, good instincts about what worked well at those conferences and what didn't. And early on I read an article about how you should really treat your speakers well and I brought it up to Gant and he absolutely agreed with that. The speakers are so key to a great conference and so we spent a lot of time, energy, and money, making sure that the speakers felt comfortable, that they had a good spot, that they were well supported all the way up to the conference and that was definitely time well spent. It was a good investment. All of the speakers that we've talked to felt like they had a fantastic experience. Some said that it was the best conference that they had ever spoke at, which was, a lot of them were very accomplished speakers so for a first time conference, we felt that was very good. TODD: That's a good example of making decisions that produce good quality products, whether they're a conference, software, whatever. A lot of people read those articles. The article says the most important thing is treating your speakers right. They read it, they think about it, they talk about it, they don't actually do it. We accept that we knew nothing about throwing a conference, so we took Everyone-on-the-Internet's advice like that very seriously and we asked our team and then we put resources behind that and we went way out of our way for the speakers. I've spoke at conferences and it is true. Some are very well organized and you feel very comfortable and it makes for a great presentation and some are not. So I definitely think the number one lesson we learned, spoiler alert, was treat your speakers well. CHRIS: Todd, I have a question for you in terms of a follow-up. When you are reading these articles and they say what to do, what is the difference between just reading them and not acting on them and choosing to act on them? Was there just a moment where you're like, okay, we're actually going to do that? TODD: We make make decisions fairly quickly. We do make decisions as a quorum of elders. All the leaders make decisions together. We have no king here at Infinite Red. So we do make decisions pretty quickly, especially if one person doesn't have a passionate opposite position. So when Jamon brought that up and then Gant and some other people, Darin Wilson, for example, other people who spoke at a lot of conferences, agreed with it. We decided almost instantly. Well, I mean there's a lot of things that get in your way. The first one is admitting you don't know anything about something you actually don't know anything about. And so listening is tough for people and especially tough for companies. The second thing is hubris. I've never done a conference. It doesn't stop me from doing the best one I can do and I'm not gonna listen to anyone and you know that happens. And the third one is making the right decision fairly quickly, listening to your team, and then actually putting no one in charge of that, giving no one actual time to work on it, and putting no money into it. This is basically Congress's full time job doing that. (laughter) So we try to avoid that. I mean, I'm not just, it sounds like I'm just cheerleading the leadership team, which is kind of self-serving as I'm on it. But it's not just us, it's just the whole team. When we say we decided, Jamon read this article, a bunch of people have talked to agree with this concept of treating speakers well. We're gonna treat speakers well. The team doesn't roll their eyes and go, "sure." The whole company culturally said we're going to do this and they're going to do it. And truthfully, the leadership, we helped the decision-making but we didn't do much of the actual work for the conference. KEN: I think there's conferences where their idea of treating speakers well is to just throw money at them. And that was not ... I mean, I don't think that's the feedback we got from speakers. I mean everybody likes money. I mean don't get me wrong, but it's about making their experience smooth because no amount of money will stop the nerves or the feeling of not being appreciated. TODD: If you make it easy for people to shine, that's what they remember. People remember the way they feel about things way more than they remember what was said or the logic to it. CHRIS: So when you're doing something that's outside normal business parameters or normal business operations, how does something like putting on a conference cause distractions or disruptions and how have you worked through it as founders and how have you seen the team work through it as well? JAMON: That's a great question and I think one of the early pain points was just in process because ... we're a consultancy and so we have a certain process that's set up for clients. And in this case we didn't have a client. We had an internal project, we had an internal champion, Shawni, but it's still a very different feel. Shawni wasn't handing us all of the requirements and saying go build this thing. We had to do it as a group, so we had to develop processes around that and that was something that was very interesting that took time to develop and in fact, we're still kind of working through some of those things, but I feel like we've learned a lot and there's a lot more shared understanding around how we make those decisions and things like that. So I think process was a pretty big adjustment for us. Another thing that comes to mind with that is allocating actual team time as a consultancy. If anytime that you're spending on that, you're obviously not billing and you're not making revenue for the company. Obviously the hope is that the conference pays for itself by the revenue that comes in for it, but we still had to put a lot of time in on speculation that this was going to work. That's a very different thing than: give us a deposit and we'll start working and we'll send you bills. Again, internal allocation of resources was another adjustment that we had to make and also planning for the future and making sure that we had the revenue, the cash flow to make that happen. And Ken was really good at kind of identifying what we could sustain and what we couldn't as a company. KEN: Part of the initial "should we do this" consideration was like okay, how many people would we need to do to break even? And we were prepared to be happy with break even and that turned out to be a smaller number than we thought. That made it something that we could grapple with and be like okay, if we can get 150 people into a room where, we think we can do that even if we have to go and individually invite 300 people in order to get that hit rate or whatever. And so it ended up being a lot more than that and that was awesome. But it gave us this margin of psychological safety when we went into it. It's kind of like, okay, yeah, we can do this, and we know at what point were losing money, what point where we're making money, at what point we can up the experienced because we've got enough margin to do that. TODD: That's super important. What Ken just mentioned is any time we have an idea we go to Ken and say the main thing is what's our worst case scenario goal to make this viable? That helps us make a decision whether or not it's even a good thing to even try. Because obviously if it was 2000 people we'd be like probably not going to do that. You can tell me Ken, but I don't think it's super accurate. You do it for a couple of hours and come back and tell us what. Is that correct? KEN: I can't predict the future. I don't actually know exactly what's going to happen, but if you can give it enough margin to be like, yeah, I think we'd be safe at this point, then you can usually get to a model like that pretty quickly. TODD: I'm a little confused, to be honest. When we hired Ken, Jamon, he said he could predict the future. JAMON: Yeah, this is a little concerning. TODD: The weird part is Ken was here before Jamon and our companies merged, but doesn't matter. It's time travel. So anything's possible. Just watch Star Trek. Knowing kind of the base goal gets us all a point to reach to. And then going back to Chris's question, how to get from 0 to 1, which is actually a very difficult problem. If you're an engineer, it's very difficult problem, if you're building a company and is just a very difficult problem period. But having a goal and then determining at least the first step direction and then you can see if it's kind of leading towards that goal is very helpful for taking that first step. I do want to mention something else, as well. We did put a lot of resources. We have a tendency sometimes to put too much resources because we're designers and because we're software engineers, we like to build things and so we put a lot of resources into our app that was used for three days. We had beautiful design done and that kind of stuff. Not to skip ahead, but we're re-doing the conference this year. We thought, well, we could just reuse a lot of our designs and stuff and just change it to 2018. We didn't do that. (laughter) We decided to redesign the whole thing again because we just simply can't help ourselves. JAMON: Yeah. And going back to the concept of if it's only 150 people, I think that was our initial number. It rose a little bit later because we had some additional expenses, but if we only had to sell 150 tickets we could literally go and individually pitch people and say, "Hey, come to our conference," and try to sell them tickets. And we kind of actually did that in some ways. We went to our community, our Infinite Red Community Slack team, which is community.infinite.red and if you're listening to this podcast you should definitely join it. And we went through and kind of just said, hey, have you heard about our conference? Is that something you'd want to look at? Individual direct messages, individually crafted. We weren't trying to like spam everybody, but it was just more, let's get the word out there and the response from that because we had built a lot of goodwill with the community up to that point by helping them a lot of times with React Native problems and by releasing open source and doing all the things that we do in that community channel that a lot of people don't realize. We had built a lot of goodwill and so the response was amazing and we were able to, in my opinion, just through the community Slack efforts that we were doing, probably sell that minimum number of tickets. We had obviously sold a lot more than that, but that was more additional beyond that. So it was definitely a factor. Well we at least know that we can go sort of virtually door to door and say, hey we have this conference. Hey, do you want to come? CHRIS: What's interesting is like you're painting this picture that everything worked out perfectly. There were no hiccups in the process at all, and so what popped up as you're going through that was like, oh my gosh, didn't anticipate that one, or was it all just perfect? TODD: Everything's perfect here at Infinite Red, Chris, any other questions? (laughter) KEN: It really was pretty smooth. We were a little surprised by that. Some of the feedback that we got, we definitely overdid it on the food in some ways. That what people want from food is like fast and convenient and not terrible and we went for good but somewhat inconvenient and nobody wanted that, really. I mean they were like the food is good, but this was a pain in the neck and that was a pain in the neck, so that was something that we screwed up. That was partly my biases to be honest. I take responsibility for that one, but in the run up, in the planning, there wasn't a ton that really went wrong. Right? We didn't get major speakers bowing out. The things that we've heard of going wrong at conferences. To some extent we may have just been lucky, but there wasn't a lot of disasters along the way. There were things that we didn't do as well as we could have done, but we didn't get major disasters. JAMON: Yeah. And obviously this is from our perspective, Chris. And Shawni and Gant and some of the others that were more deeply involved in the process may have other perspectives and I think that—no promises, but maybe this isn't the only podcast we do here at Infinite Red and if there is another one, then maybe the team can share some of those more kind of operational things that happen—but certainly from our perspective, it went super smoothly. There was an energy to it and things did kind of align. I do think we probably got lucky. We probably got lucky in a lot of ways and the timing was right and the mood was right. Everything seemed to come along pretty well. KEN: And Shawni worked really hard. I'm really trying not to swear so that Chris doesn't have to edit me as much this time, but Shawni worked really, really hard at the end of it. So a lot of it was that, to be honest. TODD: Yeah. I want to do a quick couple of shout outs. Shawni worked really hard. Gant was our emcee, he's amazing in front of audience. Frank Von Hoven, which is one of our intermediate developers, he has a background in stage, which we had no idea and he ran the stage like a clock and he took care of all the backstage stuff, getting the speakers set up. It was amazing. That was just serendipity. You don't just happen to have that person. So I do want to shout out. There's more people we can shout out later, but yeah. JAMON: And I do want to give a shout out also to the Armory - The Portland Center Stage. It's a great venue and they did an amazing job. They made our lives a lot easier. There were a lot of things where we could just kind of pay them to do it and they did a great job. That was definitely a good find. Actually, Jason Brown who lives in Portland, a developer who I have been connected with for awhile, he was the one that recommended the Armory and it was a great choice. TODD: There were some things that went wrong. The food was good, the situation and how it was served and stuff was a little bit problematic and stuff. And we learned from that. So that was a problem. KEN: That was not our caterer's fault by the way. That was how we set it up and- TODD: It was a little bit our caterer's fault (laughter), but I won't go into that. Another thing is we really tried to take the time to do a proper code of conduct and we are really going to enforce it and we took a lot of time and I think we did a pretty good job. We gave numbers out to text, if there's anything people to approach, if there's any problems. The snafu was we forgot to actually put a link on our website to it. So, that's just a really minor little thing. Another problem of course is resource allocation when you have a bunch of client work. So we had our internal people, who aren't designers or developers working on it and that's just carving off a section of time for them, but we also needed our designers and developers to do work, which means they wouldn't be doing client work. And so sometimes there was resource allocation issues where someone was really busy with a client project and so that's very challenging for a company like ours with the people you have to bring off the field. And then the last thing I would love to talk with everyone is we did have a little debate and issues around do we have our whole team there. We're 26 people. It's basically going to be a week. Do we have our whole team attend? Do we make our whole team attend? Do we ask them, do we have volunteers? What do we do? So that was one of the most challenging things in my opinion. JAMON: Especially since we're a remote team and some people are going to have to fly from Florida or Toronto or all over and so it wasn't just a matter of hey, you're here in Portland, can you make the drive down to Portland? But yeah, that was an interesting thing and I think that it speaks to how much we really cared about the experience of the attendees and the speakers that we did bring most of our team. There were a few that couldn't make it, but most of our team did go and we had roles for them. That's actually something we're going to I think we're going to do better this year where we're going to actually provide some training for our team. Some expectations around how they'll work and stuff, but they wore a specific T-shirt so people could identify them. They weren't just necessarily venue people or volunteers or something. They were actual Infinite Red employees and I actually feel pretty strongly about that representation because this is representing us to the broader technical community in a very strong way. And going back really quickly to the code of conduct. Prior to our conference, there was an incident I think at Facebook's conference, I forget what it's called, and one of our speakers was affected by it and- TODD: Was it F8? JAMON: Yeah, F8 I think. And so I kind of put a stake in the ground on Twitter saying, hey, this is not going to happen at Chain React. We're not gonna allow this sort of thing. It's gonna be a very strong stake in the ground. And so in my opening remarks I said, we have a code of conduct. You need to read it. You need to abide by it. This is not negotiable and I'm six foot four and I will find you. (laughter) TODD: And it's even more challenging because you have to guess the URL. (laughter) JAMON: And by the way, quick shout out to React Native. We were able to deploy a very quick update to our app to get that URL on there and have it working. TODD: Yeah, I think it was the app it wasn't on. Not our website. JAMON: And we're able to get that deployed in a hot fix. That was very cool. So we did stress that we made that very much a centerpiece and we were very, very happy that there were no incidents that were reported or anything like that, which was nice. TODD: I do think assigning roles during the conference for our own team was something we didn't do as well as we could and we're going to work on it this year for sure. Some of our team was much more interested in working it. I mean they've worked it, but they weren't as jazzed about talking to people and that kind of thing. For me personally, it was great because my role was photographer. This project was a project I didn't personally work on internally. Jamon and Ken did, but I didn't. I was working on other projects at that time and so I wasn't really involved. I was the photographer and it was kind of funny because people saw me for the conference as a photographer, you have to constantly get in front of people, look at them with a camera, crawl under the stage to get a good shot and that kind of stuff. I'm just an amateur photographer by the way, but I have good equipment and whatnot. So everyone saw me and sometimes people will talk to me like, Oh you're the photographer for Infinite Red. I'm like, yes, I am. (laughter) JAMON: This is our CEO crawling under the stage to get a photo. TODD: Yes, but what's very cool, I would go, well, what do you think of the conference? And they would tell me the truth because I'm just the photographer. And that was actually kind of cool. CHRIS: That is pretty cool. And now that you've blown your cover, it's not gonna happen this year. TODD: Oh no one's listening to this, Chris. (laughter) CHRIS: Jamon you touched on the fact that Infinite Red is a 100 percent remote company putting on an in-person event. What kind of challenges went into making this event happen as a remote company? JAMON: We cheated a little bit in that we held it in Portland, which is where half our team is. But I will point out that our primary champion of the project lived in ... Did she live in San Diego at the time or was it Reno? KEN: She moved from Reno to San Diego while planning it. JAMON: So this is happening. She wasn't there to look at the venue. We sent some people in-person to the venue from the local area. And then we also flew Derek up. So this was I think it was actually Todd's idea. Did you come up with this idea, Todd? TODD: Did it work out well then? (laughter) Then yes I did. JAMON: I think it actually did. TODD: Then of course it was my idea. JAMON: Talk about Derek's experience there. TODD: This is an example of putting proper resources. Derek Greenberg is one of our senior engineers, which from a business standpoint means one of our most expensive engineers, but he's a super foodie, kind of like Ken. KEN: He's way beyond me. TODD: He is beyond you. And Derek is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful chef. I've been at his house multiple times and him and his lovely family hosted me and served me ridiculously good food. So he was the obvious person to choose what food we had. Now, the question is there's a lot less expensive people. That's horrible to say, but true. And Derek does not live in Portland. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area. So anyways, well we sent him up for, I think a day or two, and he went around and tasted all the food. And then typical Derek-style, he gave us an extremely detailed information about it. And that's how we decided on the food. KEN: Amazing, he had the entire company hanging on his every word as he lovingly described this experience. It was actually pretty amazing. JAMON: I'm going to see if I can dig up the description and we can link to it in the show notes because I kind of want people to see this. TODD: If you listened to our previous podcast, we talked about this a little bit. This is one our core tenants of Infinite Red is find where people shine best and don't judge them for things they do poorly. Judging a dog by how well it climbs a tree is not an appropriate judgment for a dog. KEN: Carve the hole to the fit the peg. TODD: Yes. Now none of us are the dog in this scenario. Well, just to be clear. But anyways, having Derek do that, finding out that Frank has stage experience, of course he's going to be there being the stage manager and that kind of stuff. We have such a cool creative team that have so many different personal hobbies. We really had a grab bag of awesome resources. It's really amazing. JAMON: Even Derek with his incredible attention to detail, one of the things he brought up in one of the meetings was that he was very concerned that we make sure that there isn't garbage around during the conferences, very clean. That we make sure that we keep the garbages emptied and stuff like that. So we made sure, I think with the venue staff, that that was going to happen. So just little touches like that I think go a long way and the team really stepped up to it. They took ownership really of the conference in a way that was maybe a little surprising even. KEN: This is yet another benefit of hiring a team with with what we call nontraditional backgrounds, is that you end up with this much more interesting diversity of life experience and talents and skills, and it enables you to do things that you weren't originally planning your company to do. It's awesome. Honestly, it creates this opportunity for serendipity that is harder if you're full of Stanford CS grads. JAMON: Nothing against Stanford CS grads of course. KEN: Nothing against Stanford CS grads. They're awesome, right? But any monoculture is going to have that issue. JAMON: Like Frank's background, I think Frank was in sort of a corporate America. He has an MBA and his background, he's done a lot of, like Todd mentioned earlier in the podcast, he's done a lot of stage work and performances and things like that. And he actually started coding fairly late. Well he had, he had been coding when he was a teenager and stuff, but he wasn't coding professionally until much later in life. So a lot of times you look at someone who maybe switches careers like that and they're kind of behind in some ways in the technical realm. But what is amazing about that is that they bring all of these other outside experiences and skills to our industry. We kind of need that. KEN: That brings up a really interesting sidebar about career changers, who I think sometimes have a hard time breaking into tech because everybody wanted a cheap person straight out of college or not even college. I think we found that the career changers, the later quote unquote juniors, although it'll take them a little while to ramp up, but once they ramp up, they can accelerate. Once they hit third year, they can pull ahead of a regular junior junior because of all those other experiences that come to play. JAMON: Didn't Robin, one of our software developers, didn't she work for a paper company, like a Dunder Mifflin-style paper company? (laughter) KEN: She had a math degree and she worked as an analyst I think for a paper company for a couple years before taking a coding class and people love to rag on the coding classes. But to be honest, if you're good and you just need to learn to code, they're great. It's a very efficient way of doing that. TODD: This is totally off topic, but we'd look in nontraditional areas and we find sometimes overlooked people who are truly awesome and frankly, I'm glad other companies are blind to this. JAMON: Well, this is a reflection of certainly Todd and my background. Ken came from a little more of a traditional path in that way. TODD: Just a whee bit more? JAMON: I'm Jamon Holmgren and I did not go to Harvard. I worked in construction. I have a thousand hours on heavy equipment like dozers and excavators and stuff. Most people probably don't know that. I spent a lot of my career packing boards in construction sites before I started working in technology and so I was certainly a career changer and I think Todd, you had that experience as well? TODD: Yeah, a little bit different. I started professionally programming at 25, I think. So I did not go to school for it. KEN: Well, it helps that my own father was a career changer. He was physicist, meteorologist, like an academic meteorologist, and just kind of found his way into programming. A, I have some sympathy for that track, but B, honestly my experience with elite institutions also showed me that there's plenty of people at elite institutions who are not that good. It's actually no particular guarantee. It's not, as a gating factor, it's not all that. And when you take into account how much competition there is for those elite people, it just makes sense to look harder. TODD: Just to clarify, we really don't discriminate against elite people. We just don't stack the weight on that side of the scale. CHRIS: Ken, I have a quick question? You said your Dad was an academic meteorologist. Did he have a stage name for like all meteorologists? Like Jackson Hale, or something like that? KEN: He wasn't a weatherman. He just had, he just had a degree in meteorology. TODD: Jackson Hale. That's comedy gold right there. CHRIS: Bringing it back to Chain React a little bit. So was the conference worth it in terms of the investment that you put in and if so, what will you do differently this year? TODD: I don't know financially if the ROI was worth it. Ken can talk to that because we're a consultancy that does a lot of development in React Native, even if we lost money on it and Ken can talk to that, it would still be worth it as long as we didn't lose too much just for the marketing, the goodwill and the branding part of it. I feel we ended up selling out, for example, we never told the end of the story. JAMON: We actually did not sell out. I think we got close though and we certainly almost doubled our prediction, so that was a really good thing. This year we probably will sell out. TODD: We made every speaker wear a bunch of logos. That's how I think we sold out. (laughter) KEN: They all look like NASCAR drivers. JAMON: That's actually a good idea. I'll send that to Shawni. KEN: Financially, it worked out fine. I don't think we ever are going to treat it as a massive profit center. I think the more money we're able to make, most of that we want to pour back in. We do have to account for our own opportunity costs as well as direct outlays, but I think we're fairly confident that we can run it that way. But I would say it was a success, sort of all the way across the board. We're not doing that much different. Like I said, we've tweaked the food. We've dropped a couple of things that no one seemed to care about. So like the social, nobody wants to stick around for the social. They just want to go out and interact socially with the people that they've met or the people that came with or whatever. And so we just gonna let them do that and not waste money on that. But I can't think of anything really big that we're doing differently. Can you guys? TODD: I want to make one quick comment about the social. The cool thing about the Armory in Portland is it's smack dab on a street where you can literally go across the street to good restaurants. You can go down two blocks to good restaurants. So in that scenario, at some conferences I've been to, they're kind of out in the middle of nowhere. So you definitely want some social events. But in this case everyone wants to go out. KEN: Yeah. For those of you who know Portland, it's in Pearl District. For those of you who don't know Portland, it's one of the best sort of visitor friendly walkable neighborhoods in the country, not just in Portland. I mean it's a really, really great neighborhood and that helped. And so our little catered thing probably was not as exciting as the other opportunities out there. TODD: Now we did have a sponsor, Squarespace, who threw a before party. And that was actually a lot of fun. So that's the caveat on that. We're just talking after, I think the first day we had a social immediately after the conference. JAMON: I think bringing it back to the financial side of things, I would actually, from what I looked at, I would actually consider it a financial loss. Maybe if you just look at hard expenditures, we were probably in the black, but we also spent a ton of time and if you look at opportunity cost, we probably lost money on it. That again, like what Todd said, it wasn't necessarily the focus of what we were trying to do as far as making a profit center. And I think there's a little bit of a perception maybe in the tech industry that the conferences make tons of money. I don't think that's the case. If you think so maybe you should make a conference and see what you think. But at the same time, part of that was due to our refusal to kind of let anything be substandard, we kind of overdid it in a lot of ways. I think that this year we will probably sell more tickets. We have some things figured out already. We've sorta refined what we're doing. We might actually do okay on this year, but we're also giving more concessions to the speakers and things like that to try to make it easier for them. So there's a little bit of a mitigating factor there too. TODD: Yeah. Even if it didn't make an actual profit, that's not super relevant to me. I think the return on investment is many fold. CHRIS: Looking into the future, how does Chain React and starting your own tech conference, create a model or framework for maybe future ideas or big ideas that you might want to accomplish? TODD: One thing it did, because we're a consultancy, because we do client work, we have that process down pat. We've redone that process over the years many times and keep on refining it. Internal projects for us is challenging. We don't do that very often, so this is our very first big internal project, so purely as a training or a learning device for our team it was awesome for them. KEN: The first big project that isn't an open source project. JAMON: We actually regularly point to Chain React lessons and experiences when we're talking about other internal projects. It's actually been really good as a reference point. Do you remember this with Chain React? You remember that with Chain React? And it kind of gives a reference point for other internal projects. It exposed certain aspects of our team that we hadn't really considered before. Because it was such a different thing. I know that we as founders had a meeting after Chain React and talked about some of the lessons learned from that and I don't think we'll necessarily go through every last little detail of that, but it was very kind of eye opening to us about the way that we had structured Infinite Red. The title of this podcast is Building Infinite Red and I think that Chain React was a key forcing mechanism within Infinite Red to expose some things that we hadn't been exposed to before. If we just did consulting work, you tend to get some blind spots. So Chain React was amazing for that. It was really, really good for that because it was so different from what we had done otherwise. TODD: Worse case scenario, the team had a lot of fun doing it. JAMON: I think my favorite memory from Chain React was when it was done. (laughter) KEN: I think that's Shawni's favorite memory. JAMON: Thanks a lot, Ken. KEN: Sorry. JAMON: When Chain React was over, I think half the team went to a nearby restaurant and we were all exhausted. We had been up for two days just working from pre-dawn to dusk and there was kind of this feeling of let's just go get some food to eat and let's collapse into bed. We went to a restaurant and we sat in this booth and there were probably, I don't know, nine of us, 10 of us, something like that. And some spontaneous kind of reflective conversations started happening that were just amazing. One of our developers said, this is nothing I expected signing up at Infinite Red. This was an incredible experience to be involved in this. TODD: Was that Kevin? JAMON: Kevin was was certainly on those same vein, but the person who actually pointed this out was Frank and I remember that very clearly. His wife was able to come and help us with the conference. It was really great. TODD: Camille was awesome. JAMON: She was great. And then also my son Cedric, who at the time was 12 years old. He of course was on summer break from school and and he helped out. He had a t-shirt on. He was able to- TODD: Cedric was awesome for a 12 year old. It was amazing. JAMON: Yeah, he's a good kid. And he helped out. He was great. He would talk to people, he would give them directions. If someone needed someone to run and get something. He was very on top of things and he was there at that table as well and kind of just kind of absorbing the vibe. It's one of my favorite moments at Infinite Red. It was kind of a result of all of the work that we had done and what we had accomplished at that point. TODD: Correct. And Robin Heinze's father came and did some volunteering and we had a lot of people come and want to help. It was really, really fun in that regard. One thing I would like to bring up is the Armory is a very cool intimate setting. I'm not using that as a nice way to say small. It's actually not that small and it has a big theater, but it only holds about 500 people, which is about what we sold. So we're redoing in the Armory this year and so we have a cap on how many people can show up because it only holds 500 people. We actually had a big discussion after the first Chain React on whether or not we wanted to get a bigger venue because we could probably sell more tickets. We decided against that because we sent out a survey to all the attendees. We sent a survey to the speakers and we got some feedback. Everyone loved the intimacy of the Armory. And the Armory, just real quick, it has a bottom floor where we had vendor booths set up. It's like an atrium. There's a big hole cutout of the top floor, so the top floor is like a donut. There is a staircase in the middle of the bottom floor that circles around and goes up to the top floor. So we had the whole bottom floor. We had a whole top floor. Up to the top floor, there was chairs, there was the coffee station, an alternative food station when we were serving lunch. And there were some vendors out there as well. Even if you were on the second floor, you're always in this room where all the action's going on. You could look down and see people. So although it's large enough to hold 500 people, which is a fairly large area, you can't put 500 people in a very small area. Fire marshals am I right? Because of the structure of it now and then you left that room and went into the theater, which is more like a traditional theater, like a movie theater, but it was course has the stage and stuff because it's for presentations, but when you weren't in the theater you were always within earshot and always within line of sight to everyone in the conference and so although it was 500 people, it felt like there was 20 people there and I personally got to talk to at least half the people. Anyways, long story short, it was a big decision to say no. We want the feel of the conference to be the same, so we're going to cap on how many people we can attend, which does affect finances and that kind of stuff. Obviously when you scale higher, all of the little expenses get smaller and it's always better financially to be bigger than smaller.

Episode Transcript CHRIS MARTIN: To kick off this episode, let's start with introductions and the hardest project you've ever worked on. JAMON HOLMGREN: Hi, my name is Jamon Holmgren and I'm one of the co-founders of Infinite Red, Chief Operating Officer. Chris asked what's a difficult project that I've worked on in the past and I think early on when I was first sort of getting outside of just building marketing websites, I took on a project for a social media platform. Of course, this was probably 2009, Facebook was sort of coming into its own and they wanted to build a social media. It was a guy that really didn't understand what social media was. He was on no social media platforms himself. He was an older dude who was annoyed that his daughter-in-law kept inviting him to the Facebook and he did not want to deal with that. So he decided instead that he was going to build his own, so he wouldn't have to join Facebook. It was ... it sounds kind of ridiculous and made up, but I swear this was an actual project that we did. KEN MILLER: Well, that is my kind of lazy. (laughter) Really, I mean I'm serious. Where you will recreate the site, from scratch, in order to not have one annoying experience. Ken Miller, CTO/CFO, founder of Infinite Red. I'm trying to think about a hard project. For me, the hardest projects are the ones where you have to keep at for years. A massive, blast through it, kind of hard project is much easier. I've always been a little ADD and I think that some people thrive on that emergency situation, but a long haul where you have to keep at something for a long time is harder. In terms of work technical things, a couple companies ago, we had a very email dependent company and so we had to get a huge number of emails sent in a very narrow window every day. That was a very long back and forth process because you have to keep up with the amount that you are sending out physically, you have to manage the deliverability, you have to monitor your changes and make sure a small change in your rendering doesn't completely blow up your delivery window. And so the process of managing that over time definitely taught me a lot about how you set something up so you can do it over time. TODD WERTH: How many emails did you send out Ken, just curious. KEN: I think we were at 3 million. This was pre-Mailgun, pre-AWS. This was, we had to actually size the hardware- TODD: Is that per week? KEN: Appropriately. Every night. And it had to be finished in about a two hour window. TODD: So you're responsible for most of the spam in the early 2000s. KEN: Yeah, that was me. I'm sorry. (laughter) My bad. Delivering legitimate email is actually pretty tricky because of all the anti-spam measures that are a necessity of modern communications. So that was probably, in terms of the technical project, that has been the most challenging. That, organizationally, was the most for me. TODD: Hi, I am Todd Werth. I'm the CEO and the founder of Infinite Red; long time listener, first time caller. So Chris asked us to talk about a hard problem we've had in the past. So I think most hard problems I've dealt with in the past haven't necessarily been technical, because even though they're difficult, they're fairly straight forward to go through. Some just take a little longer. KEN: That's true. TODD: Most of the problems have been human related. One that comes to mind, and I'm sure there are better examples but, circa 1998, 1999 or something, I did a project for the San Francisco 49ers. The scouts would go out preseason and they would scout out new people and they would go all over the country and they would take notes. Traditionally this was done on paper and then when they finally made it back to the home office they would go over their notes with whomever and what not. So we were developing a system where we gave these peoples laptops for them to take out and then when they got back to their hotel room they would hook up to the phone line and use a modem and upload the data to the database; which was hugely advantageous to the San Francisco 49er corporate office. The problem is, none of these gentlemen have every used a computer before. Didn't know how to use a mouse, didn't know how to use a laptop, so the challenging part there ...actually, a colleague of mine, his name was Milton Hare, he did the training and taught them the very basics of using a computer. That was actually quite challenging. The user interface that we designed had to be geared towards that. It had to be, not just simple, but absurdly simple. It was very fascinating. The bad part of that project was that I got to see a lot of data on professional football players, including things like their criminal records and I will not go into it, but it's not a pretty picture. CHRIS: What we're going to do in this episode is we're gonna look at the art of doing difficult work in three main areas: extreme personal support, collaboration, and transparency. But before we get there, what is difficult work? We've had a couple of different responses. We've had technical, we've had human, but what is difficult work? TODD: I would say...that's a hard question. KEN: Difficult work is work that is not easy. (laughter) TODD: Yes, Ken. That's why we have you here. It's tough to say. As far as from our culture and our perspective, difficult work is what's difficult for individual people. So for example, I'm an engineer and designer, not a sales person. Jamon is also an engineer, not a sales person, but Jamon and I for a long time did sales together. That is difficult work for us, we didn't come natural to it, we didn't have any experience with it. So one of the things we decided early on is, we have a couple of rules. One, you don't have to do something the way other people in the world do it. We're engineers, we're doing sales, we approached it from an engineering standpoint and we engineer our sales process. Later we can talk about that. Two, is anything that is difficult for individuals, they shouldn't be doing alone. They should never be alone on an island. If someone, whatever it is, talking to a tough client, dealing with a tough technical problem, doing something that's outside of your comfort zone such as sales or maybe giving a presentation or whatever it is, we do at least in pairs or more. It's one of the things I really, I beat the drum beat with our team is, if there is something you're dreading, use the buddy system and get people to be there with you because that helps a lot. For example, in our sales calls, Jamon and I would do this thing where if I'm talking and I'm starting to fumble, he would interrupt me and take over, or if I felt like I had nothing to say and I was having a particularly anxious moment or something, Jamon would take over and we would support each other that way. Eventually we became pretty decent sales people. KEN: If I were to take a crack at defining difficult, I would say, something like work where you don't already know how you're supposed to do it. As distinct from hard work, for the purposes of discussion, I would define as more you know how to do it there's just a lot of it and you need to do it quickly or intensively for some reason. One of things that we actually like to do around here is turn hard work into difficult work. Find a way to automate in terms of process or literally automate in terms of code, things that would otherwise be hard work. It's not always possible, but we try to when we can. JAMON: I have a personal example of this, wasn't done within Infinite Red per se, but on Christmas Eve I suffered a house fire and it obviously was quite traumatic but one of the things we have to deal with as sort of a fall out of this house fire is submitting personal items to insurance for reimbursement, to kind of restore what we had. It's a very labor intensive process, to go to the insurance company's website and individually type in items because most people with a normal sized home would have thousands of items. The restoration company had done a spreadsheet for us and they had done a lot of the work, where they had gone through, and I would characterize that as very hard work, where they had to go through a bunch of soot-stained things and inventory them, take pictures of them, describe them in a spreadsheet. They did a really good job with that and they put it into a spreadsheet, but to put those items in was still a manual process of transferring from a spreadsheet over to the State Farm website. I decided that, maybe what I'll do is I'll figure out some way to automate that and that took me like an hour. I could've gotten a lot of things done during that time, I could've entered quite a few items in that amount of time. It took a lot of frustration, of like going down the wrong road, and kind of reverse engineering the web app. But once I had it done, I got it to work and I ran this cURL script for like 45 minutes and at the end of 45 minutes we had 3,000 items entered into the website. So this was a situation where we could've just buckled down and done the hard work, but instead of doing that I did more difficult work of thinking of a way to automate it and that was a net positive. KEN: And if the FBI or State Farm are listening, we had no knowledge of this. (laughter) TODD: State Farm is definitely not listening. KEN: For the record. TODD: Jamon, two questions. One, do you think State Farm intentionally makes it super hard to enter items that they're going to reimburse you for? Two, how long do you think that would take you if you hadn't automated that? JAMON: You know, we've been asked that before. I don't actually think that's the case necessarily, because I've been involved in enough software projects where you're not intentionally making something difficult for users, but when you don't use it, when you are not the end user, when you are not the person sitting there whose been through a fire who has to go through it and do it. It's not as easy as it seems when you're testing it with 14 items, 14 test items. I think actually this speaks more to a lot of what we do where yes, entering 8 dummy items in the course of testing it on localhost, it's actually a pretty good experience. They've actually done a pretty good job of making that pretty decent, but the overall user experience of a real person in a real position of needing to do this- KEN: For a large loss, not just like hey someone stole my bike, but yeah ... JAMON: Exactly, it falls on it's face. So I actually don't think at all that this was intentional. I think that it's entirely within the realm of possibility that this is simply they haven't user tested. It's a fairly new system, hopefully they'll add bulk import at some point. As far as the second question which is how long do you think it would've taken to enter those items. I think I'd gotten through maybe a couple hundred in the previous hour. It was taking me probably between 15 seconds to 30 seconds to enter each item. It would've taken a long time and been very tiring. TODD: We'll give State Farm the benefit of the doubt. KEN: I think this impulse, this is exactly the kind of impulse that leads some people to computers, to programming. This allergic reaction to tedium and repetition and when you find computer programming for the first time, if you're that kind of person who hates that sort of tedium, you're like 'this is the best thing that I've ever seen in my life,' right? I only have to think in enough clarity about what's happening to describe it to the computer, and then it'll do it for me. That's a really powerful feeling and as you get into it of course you discover that you've just traded one problem for another problem, but we're the kind of people who find that to be a higher class, more interesting, better, more rewarding problem. CHRIS: There was an intriguing phrase used the other day: We make difficult things doable through extreme personal support of each other. So can you paint a picture of what extreme personal support means to you at maybe the founders level and then maybe at the Infinite Red team level? TODD: Who said that Chris? CHRIS: That was the brilliance of a guy named Todd Werth. TODD: I do not recall saying that. I wouldn't phrase it that way, even though I literally phrased it that way. (laughter) I don't remember saying that, but it makes sense. It's not only do we give people support when they're doing work that's difficult for them including all of us, and including the three people here as well. Let me tell you a little story. When I was a young man I worked in a warehouse, I drove a forklift around at a job. One thing I noticed in that job, it didn't suit me very well because I like to talk and I like to think about stuff and it was just very tedious. What I noticed a lot of the people in the warehouse, all different ages, young person like myself all the way up to older people, is a lot of people in the warehouse were not in the right job. This one gentleman would constantly get in trouble and the bosses did not like him because he loved to chat and he was really good at it and he was really personable and I have no idea why he was in the warehouse, it made no sense at all. Later on he went to become a successful real estate agent, which is completely appropriate. Now this company I worked for, it was a big company, it was one of the largest companies in the state, so it's not like they didn't have a place for this gentleman to work well, so he ended up leaving. The reason I tell that story is because you have to know everyone individually and what's hard work for one person is not hard work for another. If it's not hard work for another person, one way they can support people rather than just direct interaction is for them taking on jobs that other people find hard. So that's kind of support and of course there's just day to day, I will show up with you on the battlefield, type of support and that kind of stuff. JAMON: I think one of the ways that this manifests itself is how we deal with failure and the inability to get something done here. We're not quick to reach for blame the individual who's there. Sometimes that's the case where someone just falls down and they kind of do their own thing and that needs to be corrected and move forward. TODD: We so don't look to blame. JAMON: We don't look to blame. No it's really, let's look at this from a collaborative approach. How can we, as a group, do this better in the future? How can we adjust our systems? One of the things I don't like is to identify a gap in our system, for example, and then say that the answer is that the people involved need to just try harder. I really don't like that answer. Unfortunately that's something that a lot of lazy leadership will do. They'll just be like, 'you need to get your act together,' and that's the answer. The reality is that's often not the answer. The answer is usually to work with the system until it's at a point where doing the right thing is the easy path, where doing the right thing is the natural and intuitive path. That takes thinking, that takes understanding the problem, it's harder for leadership to accomplish that. KEN: It is occasionally the right answer though. TODD: It sometimes, sure. KEN: But not very often. It's rarely that simple, but I think one of the hard things that I've found in leadership was actually saying to somebody, 'Look, you need to step up. You have what you need right in front of you, the next part is up to you.' Actually saying that is part of it. I think what Jamon is referring to is that if the support is not there, then saying that is meaningless. JAMON: Yes. TODD: Well, I mean, it's like someone is pushing a rock up a hill and you're just saying you need to push harder, push harder. When the person's telling you and you're not listening, why don't I just walk over the hill and get the rock that's already over there? You know what I mean? So- KEN: Yeah, I completely agree with that. TODD: I do agree that asking somebody to step up in a real way, not just a nose against the grindstone type of way. KEN: When you get to the point where you've got all of the easy rocks on one side and what we actually need to do as a team is get this one huge freaking rock on the other side of the hill, and some people are not pushing with you, that has to be addressed. JAMON: Right KEN: But it's much smaller part of the pie than I think some management philosophies would tell you. TODD: I personally convince everyone that pushing rocks is one of the neatest things in the world, it's a rarity, and for a low price they can push my rocks for me. (laughter) JAMON: I think one of the things Ken has said in the past is what we want to be is a high support, high expectations company. Low support, high expectations is just toxic. KEN: That's a sweat shop. JAMON: Yeah, it's a sweat shop. High support, low expectations is a nursery and low expectations, low support that's- KEN: I don't even know what that is. CHRIS: How does this picture of extreme personal support enter your relationship as the three founders? JAMON: I can kind of personally attest to this. There are certain tasks that I'm well suited to, my personality, that I enjoy doing. There are other ones that it's like pulling teeth to get me to do and that's just been exacerbated since I had the house fire and am kind of displaced from my normal routine and I really just want to focus on the things that I really enjoy doing. What we did, actually earlier this year, up until this point we've made a lot of decisions together, we've done a lot of things together and that's was appropriate for the first couple years of Infinite Red. But we've gotten to a point where we kind of understand each other, we kind of have a lot of aligned shared goals and we've actually started to specialize. This was a way for Todd and Ken to support me, in that Todd could focus on a lot of team-oriented things and Ken's been doing a lot of things with the financial and bookkeeping side of the business, which I am not good at. I can focus more on business development and that's actually the part of the business that I find really interesting, so rather than just telling me, 'work harder at managing your projects, work harder at being an account manager, work harder at doing these other things,' which yeah, I could work harder and do a better job. Instead of doing that we've found a solution that wasn't centered around just working harder it was centered around doing things that we felt effective at. TODD: As we are three founders and we govern as a quorum of elders as it were, as opposed to a hierarchical company, supporting ourselves, each other, the three founders, is just as important as supporting the team in my opinion. When there is a financial problem, thankfully we haven't had too many of those, we all have to step up and so we tend to understand each other's personal finances, each other's personal stuff. It's almost like a pseudo-marriage in a way, although there are three of us so it'd be a polyamorous marriage in this case. It's a requirement to be more, I don't want to use to word intimate, but intimate in each other's lives and I think we're really good... What's cool about three as opposed to two or one, for example, because Jamon's done one and I've done one, I've been in another company ...but what's cool about three is, typically it's one person having a communications problem or arguing or having difficulties with another person and the third person mediates. It's either Jamon and I are having an argument and Ken mediates or Ken and I are having an argument and Jamon mediates. Hey wait- KEN: Wait, when do you mediate, Todd? (laughter) TODD: I don't think I've ever mediated, that's funny. KEN: I don't think you have actually. I'm noticing a pattern here, yeah. JAMON: That's not true. TODD: But it is totally true. But it's okay. I tend to draw lightning as well away from people and because I deserve it. I don't know if that answered your question, but I think it's uber important, sorry, it's Lyft important that we do that. (laughter) You know, it starts and then we can all support the team if we are supported ourselves. JAMON: It sets the tone, all the way down and we have to. We have no other way of working. We have to support each other and it's not just when we're having interpersonal problems with each other, but also when someone's just literally having a tough time. What I think we've done really well as a founder team is go into our shared channel and post, 'I'm having a tough time.' It can be for any reason, it can literally be like, I didn't sleep very well last night; I just am so bored with this task, I cannot get started with it. All those things are valid and the answer is never just suck it up, or if it is, it's one of those things where it's an empathetic suck it up. If that makes sense. It's like, I totally get it, I understand where you're at, we really just need to get this done. And sometimes that's what you need, you need a little boot in the rear and that's something that you can take from the other side too. It's been great, really, the last two and a half years having that. TODD: Obviously we're talking about supporting each other as founders, but it's the same with the team. One key thing is if someone is vulnerable, they say they've made a mistake, they say they're having a problem, even if you personally think 'is that really a problem?' Or whatever, it doesn't matter. Whatever your personal feelings are is irrelevant. If you stomp on that person, if you make fun of that person, if you tell them to suck it up buttercup, everyone, not just them, the entire team will contract. They will put up a little more walling around them and they won't do that in the future. They'll do it, they just won't do it around you. It is hard because we're all emotional beings and sometimes you have an emotional reaction to something. But you have to be super careful to not ...when that flame is just starting you need to be very gentle with it and not blow it out. KEN: It's more than just avoiding stomping on people, not that Todd was saying that's all it was, but you have to go out of your way to solicit, to get people to talk about what's going on with them, to check in with them, to reiterate that you're available for that. You can't say it once and assume that everyone will remember that, they won't. Right? People's own internal dialogue about how worthy they are, all that stuff will keep coming back if you don't actively do it. Also, we will make mistakes sometimes, right? So you have to keep doing the active things as well to keep the ship steered in the right direction. TODD: When we make mistakes it's important that we apologize to the team. Not fakely like 'oh, I'm so sorry.' Everyone can smell fake, but if you're genuinely made a mistake because you had an emotional moment and you didn't act appropriately, you have to apologize to them as well. CHRIS: So the interesting thing as you're talking, I get a sense that this isn't something that you just read in a book and you're like, 'I'm an expert at this.' I sense that there are some really real stories behind learning what it means to be not only supporting others but to feel supported. TODD: Yes, for sure. Ken actually is super good at advice in this kind of thing, having been a leader in the past. Typically, leader of only senior people in the last two jobs. Actually, the last one I had some more junior. Infinite Red, when we first started, we had quite a few junior people, so that was a little new to me. One of the things you have to learn ...leadership is hard by the way, I just want to interject that. Leadership is very difficult, it's hard work and that's why we get the support of each other. We not only get the support of the three founders, but the entire leadership team here at Infinite Red and there's a variety of people: Gant Laborde, Shawni Danner, Jed Bartausky, Justin Huskey. It's difficult and not only are we supporting each other, we're coaching them, especially the more junior leaders on how to do it and one of the things Ken said and it's just one of the great gems of wisdom that he gives, is he goes "you have to remember you have very wide arms, when you swing them you hurt people." So you don't have the luxury to be how you were when you were as an employee. I could say things as an employee, I enjoy making people laugh, it's one of my things. I can do a lot of things as an employee that I simply can't do as a leader because when I say something it's taken much more seriously, whether I meant it or not. When I hear other managers, let's call them, say something like employees suck, it's like, 'no they don't, you suck.' Employees don't suck. That's crazy, that's like the coach of the San Francisco 49ers saying my players suck. Well, you chose the players, you're coaching the players, so they don't suck. KEN: One of the things that we do when we're working on a difficult project as a team is make sure there's an owner. One of the things that will kill any difficult project is diffuse responsibility. Partly what we're striving for is that everyone can take responsibility for something. Everyone can be like, 'I'm going to execute my part of this as skillfully as I can,' but if there's not one person who owns the whole vision, it's going to fail. Almost guaranteed. Creating an environment where it's okay for that owner to say, 'hey I need your help to get this done.' Where the culture is like, somebody needs something from you and they specifically ask you, that you try to do it. And that makes ownership less scary. One of the things that I've seen go wrong, if someone is given responsibility but no power, no ability to actually follow through on that responsibility- TODD: That happens all the time. KEN: That is the most demoralizing position, possible. TODD: That's toxic. KEN: Yeah, so that's how you kill your budding leaders by saying 'hey get this done and by the way, all these people over here have their own priorities and they're not going to help you.' That is the worst. So, assign ownership and then back them up. That's been one of the keys to getting certain things done. Chain React is a good example of that. Chain React is our conference for React Native in Portland this July 11-13. So we did it first last year and now we're doing it again this year. Shawni, who basically runs it, had ever run a conference before, had never been to a conference before, but is good at just marshaling resources and taking charge and that's a great example where she could pull on whoever she needed for help. When it came to actually knowing specifically what to do for other peoples' expertise, like we flew somebody up who was a serious foodie, to go and test the caterers, for example. JAMON: That was our team member Derek Greenberg and Derek is such a foodie and it was just a joy to watch him work on that. KEN: He had the most comprehensive report for that kind of selection process that I have ever heard. It was amazing, anyway. None of these things that we're saying are we perfect at. We're not, we don't hit this every single time and I hope that we're not saying that's the standard. What we're saying is here's our guiding star, here's what we try to do, here's how we evaluate whether we're doing the right thing or not. So this is how we nurture leadership within the team, is to say 'here's what we need you to do, and by the way, the team is your oyster.' You can go and pull in what you need in order to make this happen. **CHRIS: This is really bringing up a really interesting point now, we've got this extreme personal support but then when you add the component of leadership and helping each other out, it introduces the layer of collaboration. So how is collaboration different from extreme personal support? TODD: You can have a group of people who hate each other and they can collaborate if they're given the proper motivations. This happens all the time in corporations every day. Sadly, many people work at those corporations. So I don't think those are necessarily required for each other. I do want to digress just for one second. So Ken was saying how we try to give people in leadership positions or in a leadership role in a particular project, whatever it is. We try to do empowering stuff, but we're not perfect at all. One of the coolest things about having Ken and Jamon around is when I do something boneheaded, typically Monday-Friday, they let me know and they help me get through it and they identify it and on the flip side for whatever reason the team is pretty comfortable talking to me. It's just my personality, I talk to people a lot. And so if they have a problem with say Ken or Jamon, they'll let me know, and then I go talk to that person or we talk and try to do it in the most supportive way possible with the goal of improving that person's, how they're performing as a leader and that's awesome because we're all human so having the support. For the team it's the same way. A lot of programming, I wouldn't say design because design's a little different, we do design and development. A lot of development shops are kind of little dog eat dog, kind of situation. People can be arrogant, they can make fun of other people's work, and that kind of stuff. We really hire and try to promote a, you can be critical and explain problems, but do it in a supportive way and that can't be in a mission statement, it can't be something you announce in a meeting. They have to live it every day and especially new people, it takes them awhile to get deinstitutionalized and understand that you can make mistakes, you can put your head above the fray and it will not get chopped off. Every once in a while someone does and I have a private conversation with them and let them know how they were really not being supportive and our team's awesome, they all want to be. It's almost never malice, it's always just they miscommunicated and they didn't understand what they were doing. KEN: Well people are messy, right? That's just the nature of the beast. JAMON: This highlights one of the aspects of almost everything within Infinite Red and that's where we try to design things for iteration over perfection. So even things like support, supporting our people we are iterating on how to do that. We're trying to have a feedback loop, there has to be some level of learning from our mistakes and then continually getting better. There are some things where someone will take on a task as a group that we decide, were going to do this thing and it's actually a very difficult technical thing or it's a very difficult societal thing, where we're going to build a new AR system or something and the tools are not there and we have to build all that. So there are hard technical things that are... KEN: There are, but- JAMON: But I think you're right Ken, in the interpersonal stuff kind of always comes back to that, as far as the things that end up feeling very difficult and very hard. KEN: So just to take that, so let's take like, the Manhattan project. TODD: Why not, take it... JAMON: And of course that was the project in World War 2 where they were developing the nuclear bomb. KEN: Right, so definitely some complicated ethical angles on that one, but how do you do that? Well, you attract the world's greatest scientists and put them in one place in New Mexico, and then you give them the tools that they need to work with and you give them a goal that you can align on. In this case, win the war. TODD: Kind of like Breaking Bad. KEN: Boy, our examples ar going really dark here. (laughter) TODD: Well they brought world class scientists to New Mexico- KEN: Let's pick a better one because it still works, right? If you're not just one person sitting in a room, working on something hard. Not to take anything away from that because a lot of amazing things have come out of one person sitting down with a problem. I think that's a different question than what we work with ever, right? I think we could probably have a whole podcast on how do you recognize a good engineer for example and I think that's an interesting question but it's a little different from the question of how do we as a company work on that. Because that really is about: how do you set up an environment where people can do their best work? And how do you hold people accountable? But also make sure that they are not held back by lack of resources. And those resources can be physical, tangible but in many cases they are emotional resources or organizational resources. Especially in a software business, I think that it's exaggerated in a software business and that dynamic also is worth a whole podcast because of the dynamics of software and how they're different. Because there's nothing to buy, right? Once you have the computer, you're done. What that leaves is all these other kind of softer, squishier resources that people need to do their best work. JAMON: One example of this is an internal tool that we've been working on that is intended to increase the efficiency of certain types of tasks. It's not something that's open source at this time, so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, but I asked the team that was behind it why we weren't necessarily realizing some of the gains that we had anticipated to start with and interestingly, a lot of the responses were, really had nothing to do with technical issues or anything like that. It was policy related things. Some things that we were doing that were sort of handcuffing them in some ways and there were reasons behind those, there were sort of organizations reasons, strategic reasons behind some of those policies, but it allowed us to look at the end result of this difficult problem that we were trying to solve, and make some decisions based on values and trade offs that were more strategic in nature that we didn't realize were holding them back as much as they were. So that's an example where we had a hard problem and, unbeknownst to us, we were making some decisions that were making it more difficult for them. CHRIS: When does extreme personal support diverge into collaboration? Todd mentioned that you can hate the people that you're with and still collaborate, but what does successful collaboration look like? TODD: I would say successful collaboration is a multi-faceted thing. One, is the stress level of the people doing the collaborating. Two, the most obvious, is a successful work output of that collaboration. Meaning you accomplish your goals, hopefully in a creative, high quality way. And then three, from a business standpoint, that it was the return on an investment of that collaboration was good. JAMON: I think those are good kind of high level metrics that you can use. Another way to do this from a more granular level is to watch how people interact. So some people, for example me, may come into a meeting and may want to kind of expose that this other person is not doing their job or something like that and that's not a very particularly constructive way to approach this. But if you watch the successful collaborations that happen, they go into the meeting with a question and they go into the meeting, we have a challenge in front of us. How can we solve this? They get the people involved that need to be involved and don't make the meeting too big, but they make it just big enough and that's a characteristic of a good collaboration when everyone can go into it with an understanding of a problem, be able to provide their perspective and then the group can come to a conclusion. It's part of this overarching concept of psychological safety that we talk about a lot at Infinite Red that leads to better and better work. CHRIS: We've got extreme personal support, we've got collaboration, what about transparency? How critical is transparency in difficult work and in doing remote work? JAMON: One of the things about transparency that's important, or why transparency is important is this idea of trust. Because trust underlies a lot of dynamics within a company and if people feel like you're being purposefully opaque, they may feel that you're hiding something, they may feel that you don't trust them with the information, you don't trust their opinion, you don't trust ...and then when you don't have a high level of trust than a lot of other things fall apart. You don't get that collaboration, you don't get a lot of other things that you really need. So transparency is a prerequisite to building that trust. When we're able to be open and honest with our team about struggles or how we approach things or issues, were not necessarily saying wide open, everything is just hanging out there, but at the same time we do want to have a high level of transparency and ultimately we have to actually trust our team in order to do that. It can't just be something artificial, it has to be something where we actually do trust our team. Again, it's like there's not this formula where you just say do a whole bunch of transparency and everybody will trust you. No, what you have to do is do the hard work to build that trust. The transparency is a part of that and then that is something that you continue to do. There was a situation where we implemented some new business policies, business way of doing work. Todd was intimately involved with that throughout and all of us were really and some feedback we got afterward was that they didn't feel that there was quite the transparency that they had expected. Felt like a bit of betrayal of trust, and we heard that, we heard that loud and clear. We told people we heard that loud and clear and we changed the way that we implemented larger company-wide changes in that way. It can be a little difficult, just being wide open sometimes will expose you to knee jerk reactions, or a lot of different things that can sometimes bite you, but it's worth it in the interest of establishing that sort of trust. TODD: In what ways are we transparent and what ways are we not transparent? JAMON: Well one obvious way is that for most of our engineers and designers, we actually have a transparent pay scale. People actually know what other people make salary-wise. We get this feedback sometimes, someone will say, 'I think this person is leveled too low, I think they need to level up, I think they've been doing good work.' Without that level of transparency we'd never get that feedback because people wouldn't know and you could easily have a situation where someone is underpaid and we're not getting the feedback that that's the case. KEN: Chronically underpaying someone can be extremely expensive. TODD: Ironically. KEN: Because you can lose your best people that way. So we try to be super involved and see everything. Of course, we try, but that stops being scalable after a while so we have to have mechanisms in place that encourage the right information to come forward. TODD: Jamon mentioned our transparent pay scales. If your company is telling you not to talk to your co-workers about how much you make; A, it's ridiculous because you're going to do that anyways, especially with people you're close with and B, it's a red flag because why? I know why they do it because it's easier. Having a pay scale, everyone can look at a spreadsheet to see where everyone is placed and that kind of thing. It's much more challenging from our perspective because you can't just, such and such you know we want to give them more money for whatever reason, maybe a political reason or whatever, it doesn't matter. You can't just give them that because that's not the level they're at, so it's very fair and the transparency is nice but, I'm not going to go into it right now but we've had many situations where that's been difficult for us. Would've been easier just to have a normal secret pay for everyone, but not all of our team enjoys that as much as some other people. Some people really enjoy that and it also gets rid of problems like inequity between say genders, or race or anything like that because everyone knows what everyone makes. So that kind of transparency is great. Some transparency, I don't think we are transparent, not because we don't want to be, we'd love to be, I personally am a very open book person. Literally if someone asks me a question I'll answer pretty much anything. I won't answer about someone else, like if someone's told me something in confidence, or I won't talk about my wife or whatever but anything about me I'm very open. But, I know not everyone is that way and there are various reasons why but as a company, we try to be as transparent unless it's actively going to hurt people and sometimes that happens. You have to weigh hurting people against transparency sometimes. Sometimes people really, it's not good if they see how sausage is made, just because they may not have the full information. Let me give you an example. So let's say, this is hypothetical, this isn't really what's happened, lets say we're going over financials once a month and we understand what's going on and we've had lots of conversations about financials and then one month we're going to be drastically under and us founders are going to have to put money into the company to keep it rolling. That's one of those things where, if you just announce that we're doing really poorly, we're going to put money in so we can pay payroll, it can make people very nervous. Not because they're not smart enough to understand, they just haven't been sitting in those meetings and they don't understand the big picture. You can say all you want that it's totally okay, it's fine don't worry about it, but when someone's doing a bank robbery with a gun, you don't pay attention to what their wearing, you're looking at the barrel of the gun. It's just situations like that where we choose specifically not to be transparent. We default to transparency, but there are time when we choose not to be. KEN: The first time I really extensively used what I would call social media at work was at Yammer, who semi-invented that. JAMON: Ken, what was Yammer? What was the product? KEN: Yammer was, I think it began life as basically Twitter for companies and it kind of turned into Facebook for companies. It's very similar to that, so it's, you have threaded conversations and notifications and likes, but it was aimed at organizations. It's still going. They were bought by Microsoft, it still exists. Slack pretty much came in and sucked all the air out of that market, but, nevertheless, they had some pretty good norms for how you use a tool like that in business. One of them was, they had private groups, but they would always ask the question: Why is this private? Why is this conversation happening in private chat and not in a channel? Not that you couldn't have things private, because there are certainly cases where you'd want that, but those cases had to argue for themselves, whereas, the prevailing mindset before had been private by default unless you needed to collaborate and so our default is: default to open, default to open channels and we do that in Slack too. The things that we keep private are: client channels are private so that they don't have to worry that random drive-bys are coming in and looking at their stuff. Few things like HR and finance are private and anybody on the team can make as many private groups as they want for themselves. In terms of the official channels, they're as open as we can make them and that's been part of that ethos is that it's not all transparent, it's transparent by default. JAMON: But that even extends outside the company. On my Twitter I'll answer questions and I'm often quite transparent about some of the challenges that we face. This podcast being another outlet for it, where we talk about what we do. It's even outside of the company itself and I think that helps, it's a part of who we are. Todd, Ken, and I initially started on some open source software and that's the height of transparency there. CHRIS: So kind of bringing this episode to a close; What advice would you give to other founders who are looking to build a culture of doing difficult work together as a team? TODD: I would say the number one tip is just try, and keep on trying. There's no magic bullet, I don't know of any particular books you can read, every organization's different and different type people and different type jobs have different needs, but if you just keep on trying and keep on making an effort towards it, if you stumble and you have an emotional moment and you swing your arms too strongly, get back up, apologize, and keep on trying. JAMON: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. You start there and you start in a way that is, you don't have this master plan where you have to follow it exactly all the way through. You design something that has a feedback loop. Feedback loops are extremely important. You'll hear us talking about that more, very often. You start with the first thing, then you start with the next thing and you keep working at it. We've never done a podcast together, for example, so we start with the first episode and we iterate on it and we look at what we've done and we see what we like and what we don't like. We provide feedback and we provide feedback in a way that hopefully is constructive and is something that we can learn from. Todd mentioned another time when he and I collaborated on sales and how we would engineer the process. We did it that way. We started with the first sales lead and we evaluated how we did and we continue to chip away at it. Any company that is going to take on a hard problem like that, start with the first bite and see how you did, and have a feedback loop and have a way of iterating, getting better and by the end of that elephant, you're going to be pretty dang good at eating elephants. KEN: That's terrible. TODD: Yeah, we apologize to the elephants out there. KEN: Can we eat Republicans? (laughter) TODD: Can we eat people at Google? JAMON: I get the reference: elephants and GOP. TODD: I don't understand... KEN: See, this is why we had to bring Jamon on because Todd wasn't smart enough to get my jokes. (laughter) TODD: This is all going to be cut anyways so ... I know Chris. JAMON: I hope not. (laughter) TODD: We eat Republicans, really? KEN: Yeah, no you're right. They're probably tough. (laughter) TODD: It's all the wrinkles from too much makeup.

Show Links The Day They Invented Offices Episode Transcript TODD WERTH: Hi, I'm Todd Werth, the CEO and one of the founders of Infinite Red, and I'm located in a very sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. KEN MILLER: I'm Ken Miller, I'm CTO of Infinite Red, and I am based in the east bay, the bay area. JAMON HOLMGREN: I'm Jamon Holmgren, and I am just north of Portland, Oregon in Washington state in Vancouver, Washington, and I am the Chief Operating Officer here at Infinite Red. CHRIS MARTIN: Excellent, so let's start with just defining from each of your perspectives what remote work is. JAMON: For me, a lot of people think remote work is like working in your spare bedroom, or something like that. Which it often is, it can be. But remote work is really more about the ability to be able to do your work at full capacity kind of in a place other than one centralized office. A lot of companies are built around having an office in an office building. I had a company like that before, where everybody is in physical proximity. But remote work is about being elsewhere, and distributed. TODD: Remote work is not, as Jamon said, working from home. Although, I work from my studio here in my house in Las Vegas. Really remote work is working on whatever you're particularly working on at this time in the most efficient place that is efficient for you. For example, some of our team members work in co-location places, because they enjoy being around other people. They work maybe in coffee shop, or that kind of stuff. Personally, I need pretty quiet environment. KEN: I would actually shift the rhetorical frame around this slightly, and say that for us, work needs to happen someplace where you have the resources you need. And what we're calling remote work is just an acknowledgement that for certain kinds of work, a growing segment that I would say is kind of centered around the tech industry, where being next to the people you're working with physically just doesn't matter. Not that it can't be helpful, but that it's no longer required. To the point that we have started referring to non-remote work as commute work. JAMON: Yeah, I love that term. KEN: Meaning instead of saying well there's this normal kind of work where you drive into an office, which we've come to accept as normal. And recognizing that that's actually a phenomenon that's less than 100 years old. It's saying that like there is this thing that developed when you have a car, and before that, the train, where you could live some place that's relatively far away from where you work. Move yourself physically into that office during the day, and then move yourself physically back. And we're saying let's move the office out to where the people are, instead of moving the people to where the office is. That's really the core for me, right? That it's more to do with do you have the resources you need? Meaning do you have a good internet connection, do you have someplace quiet to work that is conducive to the way that you think? And less about where your body is. JAMON: Ken's exactly right. And what we found is that people sort of gravitate to where they work best. One of the things that's a little challenging is this perception that people just kind of slack off, and things like that. But really, people want to work efficiently. They want to find a place where they feel comfortable, like Todd said before, it's quiet. It's not a lot of interruptions. CHRIS:So when Infinite Red started out, was it a remote company to a certain degree? TODD: Yes. JAMON: No. TODD: Yes. KEN: It depends on where you start counting. It depends on which of us you're asking- TODD: Yeah, because- KEN: Because we were two companies before we started. TODD: Yes, there was Jamon's company, which he ran for 10 years. They were not remote. Infinite Red, the previous Infinite Red before the merge, and we became the new Infinite Red, we started out as 100% remote company on purpose, and our intention was to remain that way for the life of the company. JAMON: Yeah, and it was kind of an interesting transition for us. Because we were not remote for sure, and we were all working in an office here in Vancouver, Washington. It was right about the time that I met Todd, and I don't remember exactly to be honest, whether it was influence from Infinite Red that kind of moved us toward remote, or whether we were ... I know that I had some employees asking about it already, so that was certainly a factor. But the other Infinite Red, the original Infinite Red being a model was really helpful to us, for ClearSight, because Todd and I shared a lot of information, and he would tell me about things that he was passionate about, and one of them was obviously remote work. And we were able to start transitioning that way, and by the time the merger happened, we were pretty much all remote, except for me. Because I was building a home, and living with my in-laws. So I didn't really have a great spot to work, so I ended up staying in the office for another year. TODD: Yep. Ken and I originally discussed, I've worked throughout my 20 years of being a software engineer, I've worked in the office full-time. I've worked partially remote, and I've worked 100% remote. I personally feel that in the office full-time, or 100% remote are the two superior options. I don't like the hybrid view for many reasons. So we were very specifically going to be 100% not 99, not 98%, but 100% remote for everyone for all time. KEN: I feel like I should mention something ironic, which actually proves the point a little bit, which is that as we speak, I am in the same room as Todd, which is in his house, and we are here because it's my daughter's spring break, and we just decided to come and visit. But as far as the team is concerned, there's zero difference. They don't care, it doesn't matter, the only hassle is that we had to set up fancy microphones set up in order to make this work. Right? Which kind of proves the point, right? Which is that when everybody's in their own room, there's actually a lot of things are much simpler. Yes. We don't discount the benefits that can come from being in the same room sometimes, it's just we don't value it so highly that we're willing to sacrifice everything else on that altar, which is what tends to end up happening in commute-oriented companies. JAMON: Ken wrote a really great article on our blog, The Day They Invented Offices. It's a hypothetical conversation between a real estate developer, and a knowledge worker, like an engineer. KEN: It's satire. JAMON: And it talks about a world where basically if offices were not invented, people worked remotely by default. But the real estate developer's trying to convince the knowledge worker that they need to change to a commute company. And all of the benefits that that would entail, and all of the costs as well. TODD: Yeah, it's interesting, because when you do that thought experiment, you realize how ridiculous it would be to go from default remote working situation into a commute working situation, because you'd have to build trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure to make it work. So it was fascinating. I do want to say one thing, Ken mentioned that he was sitting in my office, which he is. I feel him breathing down my neck at the moment. Even if, and we actually have a physical office in Vancouver, Washington, which is in the Portland area. Very few people go there. KEN: It's a mailbox with a couple chairs attached. TODD: But sometimes people will go there and work, and anyone on the team is welcome to do that. Or Ken is in a situation. But we have a basic rule where even if you're physically next to someone, we still work the same way. Meaning we don't have a meeting where Ken and I are talking to each other in person, and everyone ... All the remote people are second class citizens where they're not seeing our conversation. We're looking at each other, and we're making body motion, that kind of stuff. So we still work as if we're remote, even if we're physically in the same location. CHRIS: That's really interesting too, I mean what kind of discipline goes into keeping things where everyone can be a part of it, not just defaulting to that person to person conversation when you're in the same room? TODD: I'm in charge of discipline. We tried writing things on the chalkboard many times, it did not work. Detention seemed a little juvenile. So we went to the old classic of cat of nine tails. KEN: Keelhauling. JAMON: Yes. KEN: Yeah. As an escalation. TODD: To answer your question seriously, which I have difficulty doing, there are a lot of difficulties. Fundamentally, they come from the fact that a lot of people have not only never experienced remote work, have never seen it. We're too many generations removed from the 1800's, when almost everyone worked at their house, basically, and their house was downtown. Your parents didn't work that way, your grandparents didn't work ... they've never seen it in existence. So they really don't know how it works. Not only they don't know how it works, their family definitely doesn't know how it works. And probably the number one problem we have is family, and friends, local family and friends not respecting that the person's actually working. One of the tricks I tell people, and it works pretty well, is just tell your family member that your boss is getting mad at you, or your boss wants you to do something. Because even if you're remote, everyone understands the boss. And just throw me under the bus, it's totally fine, and that seems to work. But that's part of the biggest challenge, is family not respecting your space. JAMON: I think Todd touched on something really important, and that's that this is actually not that new. That was the default way to work. People didn't commute to work. They worked on a farm. KEN: Maybe they walked down the street, but in most cases, not. JAMON: This idea that we have gigantic super highways, and huge transit systems and stuff, just to move people from one location that they could work to another location that they could work for no apparent other reason, it's a little bit mind boggling. Now I understand, I understand why it came to be. Remote tools, which we're not going to talk about much in this episode, but remote tools have not historically been that great, and the experience has been pretty bad. But that's changing, it very much is changing. TODD: The industrial revolution when people started working at factories, and started commuting, and the transportation revolution that facilitated a lot of that. Most of human history, work was not separated from life. Their work life didn't make sense, because you're either relaxing and drinking lemonade, or you're making dinner, or you're sweeping your house, or you're pulling out the potatoes in your backyard, if you're a farmer. The reason we have work life balance now, is because work can be fairly distressing, and you need a break from it. But typically back then, let's say you're a blacksmith, your shop would be on main street, and your house would be behind your shop, or above your shop. So your children would live within feet of where you worked, and where your spouse worked. Whether your spouse worked in the home, or did other things. So your children would eat all your meals with you, they would go to school, school is probably pretty close if they were older. If they were younger, they would eat your meals with you. They'd be around your work, they would see work going on all the time. It just wouldn't be work, it would just be normal, for instance, if you're done with your particular task today, and there's a customer coming in who wants something built for their wagon at two, you might hang out with your children, do some housework, or just play games, or whatever. And then when your customer comes in, you go into the shop, and you service that customer. The industrial revolution made it where adults had to start to pretend to work so they didn't get in trouble. JAMON: So my six year old daughter had an assignment at school, and one of the questions was where does your parent or guardian go to work? And she wrote, "The gym." Because to her, that's when I left the house, was to go work out at the gym. TODD: That's so awesome. KEN: The phenomenon that you're talking about Todd, where the industrial revolution began this process where people started working out of the home, there was a really good reason for that, which is that it was the beginning of humans having to collaborate in a large scale way on bigger problems than they had had in the past, right? Before that, the only place where you would see really large scale collaboration like that would have been I suppose- JAMON: Warfare? KEN: What? JAMON: Warfare? KEN: Warfare, yeah. That's the place where people would leave the house, and collaborate in large numbers, that was really it. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Maybe large farms, I don't know, you could kind of consider that. But culminating in the 20th century, where that was the norm for people to go and collaborate in relatively large numbers some place away from their home. It enabled them to solve problems that you couldn't solve without involving that many people. And of course, we don't want to give that up, and so that's what the modern remote telecommuting company does, is it creates this new kind of collaboration layer, and we've been very deliberate about how we construct that. And I think that's one of the places where companies that kind of dabble with remote tend to fall down, which is that they have all these inherited ways of collaborating that you do when you're in an office together, and some of them don't work anymore. You can't just tap your coworker on the shoulder, you can't just go and like sit next to their screen. You can't all pile into an office on an impromptu basis. So you have to reconstruct habits, technologies, whatever, that can replace those things, and augment them. And we think that, overall, you end up with a better result having gone through that effort of being deliberate about that. And that in a generation, no one will think about these things anymore, because they will simply be the inherited defaults that people who work in an office together enjoy today. And we sometimes meet in person, right? Once a year we get the whole team together, the executive team comes together more often than that. It's not that we don't value that, but we think of it is as a luxury. TODD: Well, it's not necessarily a luxury perhaps, it's important socialization. So Ken and I actually discussed, we went over a pros and cons, like what's good about working in an office? Or in a cubicle, or in hell? What's good about that? Well, you're around other people, and every answer we came up with that was good was all social. It had nothing to do with actually producing any kind of work product. And I basically tell people I commute to socialize, as opposed to commuting to work. So instead of commuting to work five days a week, and socializing one of those days in the office at an office party or something, I work remotely, and I commute to the office party once a week. Not our office, but just local friends, and that kind of stuff. JAMON: It's kind of a funny thing, but yeah, you want to hang out with your friends, not necessarily just with your coworkers. And that may sound kind of weird, and the environment we are now, where often you do make friends with coworkers, and that's all great. But your social life can be something that is a little more deliberate outside of work. KEN: It's not like we discount the social value of people working together in an office, like I enjoyed that when I did it. But I think you're seeing with the rise of WeWork, and similar places, like just in the last five years I've seen the number of co-working facilities explode. And I think that that's part of the same trend, which is that you can have that experience without having to drive for an hour each way, every day. TODD: Yeah. One of our team members, Darin Wilson, he works every day out of a co-location place, and he walks for 10 minutes to the co-location area. That for him is the most efficient, he enjoys that, and that works out well. It's a great example of what works for one person doesn't work for others. I would not like that personally. I also don't like listening to music when I work, other people do. When you remote work, if you like to listen to death metal at extremely high volumes, well have at it. It's great, it's wonderful. KEN: Just turn it off before you get on Zoom please. TODD: Yes. So one of the things I think we shouldn't overlook is some of the great benefits of working say in a cubicle. I would probably estimate 99% of all the funny videos, cool things you find on the internet, were created by extremely bored people sitting in a gray cube. I call them employee fattening pins. So the zombies will appreciate this lifestyle. Not that I dislike commute working, I hope I haven't given off that vibe. JAMON: Not at all. CHRIS: How does remote work make a more engaged worker? JAMON: You know, you have to work at it. There isn't just this appearance of working, right? The only thing that really surfaces is what you actually do, not what it looks like you're doing in your cubicle, right? And because of that, the only way to tell that you are working is to actually work. TODD: Well to actually produce work product, to be more specific. KEN: Yes. JAMON: Actually produce work product, exactly. And we go to great lengths to try to not tie work specifically to time. Because while an eight hour work day is pretty normal, and generally okay, if there are ways to accomplish your work more efficiently, you should be rewarded for that, and not penalized for that by having to sit in your seat for another two hours. It's more about stripping away the appearance of work, and turning to the actual product. TODD: One of our team members moved from Reno, Nevada, to San Diego, California. She moved over a weekend, Friday she worked, and Monday she worked. From the team's perspective, absolutely nothing had changed. Although, she moved I don't know how many miles that is. Hundreds, tens of miles. So that kind of stuff is uber cool. One of our new team members said, "I'm going to New York for a week, can I still work?" And I said, "I assume you can still work in New York. I haven't been there in a few years, but I imagine they still allow that." Turns out they do. Strangely. So I'll tell you a personal story of mine. After I eat at lunch, I don't know if it's my digestive system, or whatever, it sucks the energy out of me so bad. When I worked in a smaller place where people trusted me, I would just kind of take a little nap in my chair. When I worked for bigger companies where such things were frowned upon, I would sit there for two hours from say 1 o'clock to 3 o'clock, trying my best to keep my eyes open pretending to work, and sort of reading Facebook. It's just stupid, and I did that when I was 34 years old. It's just stupid to have adults behave in this way, it really is. JAMON: Yeah, we don't look at that as some sort of a weakness. TODD: Nowadays, I did made a little bit of fun, that's fine. I really enjoy the siesta. I'll go take literally an hour nap after I eat, and then I come back refreshed, and I get lots of work done. And I tell people, I'm going to take siesta, there's no shame in that whatsoever. JAMON: And I think that's important, when the CEO's doing it, it kind of gives people permission to work in the way that is most efficient for them. TODD: Exactly. I personally believe it's super important to have 100% of people remote. The CEO on down. A lot of companies out there that claim to be remote, they're partially remote, and that's fine. I'm glad it works for them. But when you're CEO, and your other executive team have to use all the same tools, remote tools and everything that everyone does, it's not fair, but it's true. Those tools get a lot better. It's true. So if you have the CO sitting in an office, and they don't have to experience the horribleness that is a poly comm conference call, then it's never going to improve. CHRIS: What are some of the common misconceptions of remote work that you often have to explain, or even defend? TODD: Oh, there's lots. One, you're not really working. That's the biggest thing. Two is that you're probably doing your laundry, playing video games, and other such things that people imagine. Those are the kinds of- KEN: Sometimes you are, I'll get to that. TODD: Well sure, sometimes you are and that's fine. But the biggest one if you're at home, people can bother you. Like my mother, which I love very much, she's funny. She comes to visit, and I've worked remote off and on for a long time, so she should understand this by now. But she'll be like, she'll come in and talk to me. And she'll say, "Oh I know you're working," and I have a separate office, so it's very apparent that you're walking into my office. And she goes, "I know you're working so that's fine. Finish your work up, and then we'll talk in an hour or so." And I'm like, "Mom, remember," my mom's retired. I go, "Remember when you worked? You had to go there for eight hours? It was like from 9 AM to 5 PM? It's the same for me, it's not exactly the hours, but it's not like one hour." And so bless her heart, she's going to give me an hour to get my work done, and then we can talk about whatever she wants to talk about. KEN: I think one of the misconceptions that's not a misconception is that it can tend to blur your work time and your personal time. Then one of the things that people say that they like about having a commute and an office to go is that their work time is over there, and their personal time is over here. And I wish I could say that that's not an issue with remote work. It is kind of an issue for the reasons that Todd mentions. Right, it takes a certain amount of discipline to set that boundary. I'm going to make the case that that's not a problem. It is a problem if you hate your work. If you need to like recover from the boiler room that is your work, or the boredom room, or whatever it is that makes your work uncomfortable. That is a problem. I think of this as a feature of remote work, and it echoes what Todd said about it needing to be the CEO on down. Because if it is the CEO on down, the CEO is going to have the same problems that you are. Right? The three of us have the same pressure about when does work begin and end? Are we kind of always working, are we never working? What is that boundary? And it forces the company to either become a good enough place to work that people want to work, and they're not bothered by the fact that it kind of mixes in with their personal life, or die. Like as the evolutionary pressure on the remote work niche, is that you have to be good communicators. You have to be respectful, and you have more ways that you can be respectful, because you're not having to share as much space with people. You don't have fights over what people put in the damn refrigerator. You don't have fights over who's playing what music, and who put up what offensive poster, or all of these things that come when you're forced into this little box together. TODD: The one I really miss is when someone leaves the company, and everyone kind of looks at each other and says, "Is two minutes too soon to go raid everything out of their office?" KEN: Yeah. TODD: And you see these 50 year old people scrambling around like the hunger games, trying to get the better stapler. KEN: The chair, it's always the chairs and monitors. Those are the real prizes. TODD: Yes, and I've worked for places, like I like a very nice monitor. And I always bring my own, because companies never provide that, typically. I've been told, "Oh, we can't have that because if you have a big monitor, other people will be jealous, and so you can't have that." And I'm like, "Well, okay, I'm going to have it. So either this conversation's escalating, or you have a wonderful lunch." JAMON: I think that's something really insightful about this that we'll probably touch on a lot in our podcast, but that is that we're purposely putting these constraints on ourselves that require that we become a better company. That we become a better, we continue to work on culture. We don't have the easy outs that many companies do. And people will look at that and say, "Well, but you can't do that easy out thing that we all do." And we say, "Exactly, we have to do it differently, we have to do it better. We have to work on it." Remote tools are terrible, exactly. We have to go find better remote tools, we have to work on that. Those constraints are good. They're very good. They're healthy. There's something that forces us to continue to innovate, and to self reflect, and look at how we work. I mean the blurring of the lines between personal and work as Ken said, I totally agree. It's about loving your work. And it brings up some positives too, I mean I just spent two weeks in California. We're not at the stage right now where I necessarily want to take two weeks completely offline. I still want to be somewhat available for Todd and Ken. But I was able to be on Slack on my phone at various times. Let's say waiting in line at Disneyland, or something like that. And that may sound terrible to some people, but it wasn't a big deal to me. It was totally fine, and I loved that I could actually take two weeks for my family to be away, and enjoying the sun, which we don't get a lot of here. KEN: In a way, it also makes your vacations more enjoyable, if you know that you're not coming back to two weeks of email. JAMON: Exactly. KEN: Or things that have fallen apart, or who knows, right, where ... yeah. TODD: I love that spin, that's fantastic. JAMON: I don't see it as spin- KEN: Not for me, anyway. I think some people might not feel that way. JAMON: I understand that. KEN: Yeah. JAMON: A lot of people don't, and I am speaking personally here. This is not for everybody, some people totally on the uninstall Slack when they go on vacation, that's fine. For me though, I was on the plane, and I was basically archiving a bunch of emails, and I get into work this morning, and I could hit the ground running, and I'm good to go. What is the real cost of totally disconnecting? The real cost would have been I couldn't take two weeks. I couldn't be away that long. That's what it would have been. I was able to benefit from that, you may only see the downsides, but there's positives there. KEN: And to be clear, this is how it is for us as founders. Right? When it comes to our employees, we pretty much encourage them to mute, or uninstall Slack while they're away. JAMON: That's right, that's right. KEN: They don't have as much need to be sort of always on that we do. Yeah, but for us, it's actually ... I mean from my point of view, it's a benefit. JAMON: But even that, we have some employees that want to travel, and they want to be gone for a couple months. Three months, even. Taking a three month vacation, that's pretty tough, that's pretty tough to do. So with some of them, they may work in the early mornings, or they may work in the late evenings to coincide with their time zone, and then they can be out on a trip for three months. So they are able to continue to be productive during that time. KEN: And that's a perk that Google cannot match, period. That is just something that you cannot do if you work for Google. TODD: Yeah, screw you Google. KEN: Or whomever, right? Any of these companies that expect a physical presence. TODD: We're coming for you, Google. KEN: The point is, so we have one person who doesn't have a permanent home. Right? He moves around pursuing his hobbies, and makes it work. We have other employees who have done exactly what Jamon has said, and they've gone on extended workcations, right? Where they're able to get their work done, and they have the experience of frankly, actually living in another country, as opposed to just being a tourist. And we have high standards for how they get their work done while they're doing that, but because we've had to develop standards that really measure people's impact rather than their face time, it works. TODD: Copyright Apple. KEN: There was a space, you couldn't really hear it when I said it- TODD: Space? JAMON: Face. TODD: Face. KEN: So there was a face, space time. Yeah, right, anyway. TODD: Yeah, we talked about people who want to take longer physical trips around, whether it's around the US, around the world, what not, the benefits. But there's a benefit for another set of people, and I would probably consider myself in that group, as well as some of our other team members, and that's people who choose to live rurally. JAMON: Yes. TODD: We have one person who lives really rurally, and he has a lot of land and stuff, and he can have the lifestyle that he enjoys, and still have a very productive and successful career. Myself, I do live in Las Vegas, but I live in rural Las Vegas. I have a little bit of land. It allows me to live in this way, when I used to have to live in San Francisco, which I enjoyed for a long time, but as I got older I wanted to go back to living on the land and stuff. So for people who want to live rurally, or not just the typical urban or suburban lifestyle, it's fantastic. CHRIS: So when it comes to the client experience of working with a 100% remote company, how do they respond to this way of work? TODD: That's a great question, Chris. Various ways depending on the client. Some clients, that's the way they work, and they love it. Like they see us kindred spirits, that's the way they like to work. Other clients especially if maybe they're more enterprise city type clients and stuff, maybe aren't as familiar with it. We kind of insist on it to be honest, even if the client's local to some or many of our employees, our team. And we just explain it, and we are very articulate in the way we describe how we work. And sometimes they have to have a little faith in us, but after they work through our process, they probably never seen a remote company that works well. I think our company works as well as I've seen. We work with a few companies who are both I think do a good job like we do. A lot of them do not, and I'm very proud to say that quite a few customers who maybe have part-time remote work started opting our procedures, which is a fantastic compliment, and it makes me proud. Because we do spend a huge amount of time thinking about this stuff, and working on it. JAMON: That's actually more common than you think, that we influence our clients in the way that they work. TODD: Can you expand on that Jamon? JAMON: When clients come in, and they experience the Infinite Red way of working, and they see the thought and care that we put into it, and how we're all kind of bought into it, and how we also iterate on it, because it's an ongoing process. We don't have it perfect yet, we're continuing to work on it. They see that things get done, that it can be done well, and that they have the flexibility that remote work affords. It's a pretty neat thing to see them working the way that we love to work. TODD: I don't want to digress, but we use Slack quite a bit for chat communication, that sort of thing. We use email next to nothing. But we have a channel we call rollcall, and the channel is very simple. It's just kind of describe where you are, and if you're working or not. It's analogous to walking in the office and saying, "Good morning everyone, gosh my back hurts, I've been at the gym." And it works really, really well, because it's not forced on people, and people really enjoy the back and forth. So let me just go through this morning's rollcall. One of our team members signed on at 3 AM, and then she went out for breakfast at 6 o'clock. Other people started signing in, one person signed in. It said they laptop issues that they fixed, they explained why. People gave some reactions. Other people just signed in, I said, "Good morning." One person said, "Short break," this is at 9 AM, "Picking up the car from the mechanic." We won't have exactly specific times people have to be working, or available, we want people to be so many hours a day where they can coordinate with other people, have meetings, have work sessions, that kind of stuff. But it's not uncommon people say, "My daughter's having a recital, I'm going to leave after lunch, I'll be back and probably work some this evening." No client meetings, no one's being impacted by that, great, we all give him thumbs up, we say, "Hope it goes well." No one asked if they can do that, no one says, "Hey Todd, can I go to that?" And then around lunchtime, everyone says they're lunching. They might talk about what they ate, some sort of friendly conversation, and you just kind of get a feeling of your team going about their day. And I will finish this long story up by saying it's kind of fascinating. So one of the people I work a lot with is Gant Laborde, who lives in New Orleans. And we work a lot during the day. And when he comes and visits me physically, or I go to New Orleans and visit him, it doesn't feel like I'm visiting a friend I haven't seen in a while. There isn't a lot of chat about how things have been going, it's nice to see you again. Because I've seen him every day for hours, and I just saw him this morning. And by see him, I mean interacted with him either in a video call, or on Slack, or whatever. It doesn't feel like I'm just finally meeting him, it's like we're just continuing what we were doing this morning, it's just we happen to physically be in the same space. It's very interesting phenomena. JAMON: I find it kind of flabbergasting in a way that companies would care about someone taking a break, or going to pickup their daughter, or having to go pickup the car from the mechanic. TODD: Lazy leadership. JAMON: That's exactly right. TODD: I recommend if you're a lazy ... for the lazy leaders out there, or the bad leaders, yeah, don't do remote work. Stick with cubicles, make the cubicles as comfortable as possible to get the worst employees so the rest come to us. KEN: It's probably worth talking about people for whom it wouldn't be a good fit. Obviously there's still plenty of jobs out there where physical presence is implicitly required. Anybody who works in retail, anybody who works with their hands, has to actually physically manipulate things. I think our point has always been that there's just not as many of those as people think. And to be honest, I suspect that over the next 20, 30 years, as robotics and telepresence, and that sort of thing start to really come into their own, that even those sorts of jobs will start to diminish. You already have that even with like medical, the medical field, legal field, things that used to be sort of a high, high physical presence will become more low physical presence. TODD: Surgeons right now are doing surgery with a DaVinci system, both physically, and I think they can do it remotely now. Like they're standing next to it typically, but I think they can do it remotely at the moment. JAMON: What's kind of funny about that is my dad owned an excavation company, and he was one of the first people to get a cell phone, because for him, everything was remote. Like he had to be remote, because he was driving his dump truck to the job site, he had to be there working, and he had to do his office work, because he was like the only guy. He didn't have an office, he didn't have someone handling the paperwork, he had to create invoices on the fly and stuff. So in some ways, some of those blue collar jobs had some of these things figured out way before we did. TODD: That's actually a super interesting point. Logistic companies, or shipping, truck drivers and stuff. They've had to deal with this, I don't know how old you all are out there in listening land, but if you remember Nextel phones, with the automatic walkie talkie feature- JAMON: Totally. TODD: They're useful, very useful. Kind of like an analog Slack, really. So yeah, it's fascinating. A lot of the so called blue collar work has had to deal with this for a very long time. KEN: And it's worth mentioning that even for the core of jobs that will always be physical in person, if you took every office out there that didn't need to be an office, and you converted that to a remote job where people can live anywhere, the reduction in pressure on the real estate market, on the transportation system that would ensue, would make life better for everybody. TODD: Right. KEN: Right? The people who have to commute can commute, because I mean you have this phenomenon as cities grow, where they'll build a new highway, and for five, 10 years if you're lucky, things are great. Because there's all this extra capacity, but what happens in the meantime, is that further down that highway, developers start cramming new houses in, because suddenly it's a doable commute. And then within that five, 10, maybe 20 years, it's back to the way it was, maybe worse than it was, because now there's even more people trying to cram into this road. But if you just snap your fingers, and moved all of those offices out so that that knowledge workers, the people who are working with their brains, and with words, and with digital images, and that sort of thing. And they all scatter to the winds, and live where they want to live, and not in Fremont, or wherever it is that they're living to commute to San Francisco. I feel like, right, maybe like I don't think I've ever seen a study like this, but it seems like it would stand to reason at least that the pressure on transportation would reduce to the point that everybody's quality of life would improve. I don't know, we'll see I guess. JAMON: Yeah, even when you look at something like a dentist office, which is probably extremely resistant to this sort of thing, there's just the robotics are not there yet. And maybe even if they were the trust isn't there yet, with the general public. But how many other people are in that office that don't need to be drilling on teeth? They could be elsewhere. And you're exactly right, the infrastructure, and it's actually kind of happening in some ways. You look at some of the high rises in downtown Portland and stuff, people are coming and living in the city because they want to live in the city, and not because it's next to their office. And a lot of these offices are now being converted into apartments and condos, and being kind of near offices, where you can work from your house. And what would cities look like if every job that could be remote was remote? KEN: I mean yeah, can you imagine a world where the city center is the bedroom community, right? JAMON: Right. TODD: That would be awesome. KEN: Where people live because they want to be next to the cultural opportunities in the city. And the minority of people who actually have to physically work at some job in the city, can live next to their work, because there's just more housing, because like much less of the city is taken over by the kind of white collar workplaces that have been traditional for city centers. TODD: That's actually really interesting to think about. KEN: Yeah. TODD: I imagine somewhere in hell, there is an eight hour bumper to bumper commute, and you're not in a car, but you're literally in a cubicle with a steering wheel. CHRIS: One of the things that I want to go back and touch on is this idea of leadership, and how remote work isn't for the lazy leader. So let me ask the question of the three of you, how has being 100% remote made you a better leader? JAMON: Well, I can speak to my experience going from ClearSight not being remote to being remote. I'm kind of in some ways a forceful personality. I'm kind of a person who likes to move fast, and bring everybody along with him. And in an office, there's actually a sort of almost like a physical component to that. Like the leader's right there, and he's enthusiastic about something. He's moving fast, and he's doing his thing, and he's talking about it where everybody can hear. When I look back at it now, that was sort of lazy leadership. It was. It wasn't necessarily the type of leadership that was people coming along because they were enthusiastic about it, it was more that they were just kind of following the force of nature that was moving that direction. Now that I'm remote, I don't have those physical cues, verbal cues, things like that, to bring everybody along. And it requires a lot more thought and planning around how to get people on board with concepts, and how to get people moving in the right direction. It's a really interesting thing, and it's not something I've totally figured out yet, but it's something I'm moving toward. KEN: I would say that it has forced me to be more explicit about expectations, since you don't have this inherited set of defaults. You have to say, "This is what we expect from you." It's not, "We expect you to come in the office at nine," it's, "You need to be available to clients during an agreed upon window," for example. Or as we had mentioned before, "Here's our productivity benchmark, and this is what we're looking at." You might have to develop some of those in any kind of company, and you should. But our setup, it exposes any fault lines in your expectations, and you have to address them. As Todd said, like if you want to be a lazy leader, don't do it. TODD: I would pile on what Ken said, you have to be able to measure what people, their work output, their work product. That is not easy, even in industries where it's obvious what their work product is. Say they paint paintings, you can see that they painted a painting. That is probably the most challenging thing, and then there's the emotional part. Where if you can't measure their work product, and you can't see them sitting in a seat, you're just going to have to have faith in them, and get over yourself worrying about it. But it is challenging to make sure that you have a semi-accurate view of who's actually being efficient, and who's not. And just not 100% thing. JAMON: That's more on the management side of things. Leadership side of things too is difficult, because getting people to see a vision is much easier when you can just say, "Okay," kind of the Michael Scott thing. "Everybody in the conference room in five minutes." That's a very different thing than what we do. TODD: I think it's challenging, but to be honest, I'm not staying awake at night worrying about those challenges. I find them fairly straightforward, you just have to put effort into it. Keep on walking down that road, and I think it works out really well to be honest. It's not a big deal to me. JAMON: You just have to strike the right balance. TODD: There was a tweet last week where basically it said, "During any meeting, you don't have to listen, just at one point you have to comment and say, 'I think the solution to this problem is just striking the right balance', and then everyone in the meeting nods, and you were involved." KEN: Because it's always true. JAMON: It's always true. TODD: Yes, so that's a running joke here at Infinite Red, where in the meeting at some point someone says, "We just need to strike the right balance." We all laugh. CHRIS: Looking into the future, do you see more and more companies adopting remote work? TODD: It's one of our missions, our side missions as a company, to make it more. It's probably other than software engineering, and software design, which is obviously our main focus of our company. Other than that, probably the number one thing that we're interested in promoting in the world is remote work. So I hope the answer is, it's more I don't know, I'm sure Ken and Jamon have some good insight in what they predict. JAMON: I think that one of the factors that will influence this is I look at my kids, like generation Z. And they don't know what it's like not to be connected, and they don't know what it's like not to be able to just talk to their cousin via FaceTime, no space, and who lives in South Carolina. This is normal to them, this is a normal thing to them, this is a normal way to live and to work. Well, they don't really work, but just to do things. KEN: We'll fix that. JAMON: Obviously for my kids, they're around remote work all the time. But it is a way of life, and I think that you'll also see other things like there are more ways to learn online, versus going to a university and sitting in a classroom. There are plenty of other opportunities for them to get used to this way of doing life. And I think that will have an impact. It may not be moving as quickly as we would like, we would like to see a lot more industries move into being remote work for a variety of reasons. But I think that that is a factor. KEN: I will echo that and say that both my wife and I work from home. And my daughter makes the same face when you say that some people have to like drive to a special place, as when you say that you used to have to come to the TV at a particular time to watch your show. Right? But even before the generational shift, I think it is happening more and more. Ironically, Silicon Valley, which should be at the vanguard of this, is one of the most resistant to the idea. I think that's partly because they've had so much money flowing through, that they've been able to afford the enormous luxury of moving everybody to this expensive place, and then putting them in an expensive office. And to be honest, for a company that is chasing a multi billion dollar idea, and trying to beat their competitors over the next six months, there's a case to be made for doing that. But I think way, way more of those companies think that they are doing that than actually are. JAMON: I actually have a question for you Ken, do you think that this will ... you know you said Silicon Valley is resistant to this, and that's a very location based geo fence there. Do you think that the revolution of remote work will happen irrespective of where people are located, but maybe in a different cohort? A different type of people will bring remote work to the forefront more so than a specific place. Let's say for example Detroit, or something, decided it all of a sudden is all remote. That's probably less likely to happen then- KEN: I think that that's one of the key pieces of this, is like it's like it's creating it's own virtual location. That there's a set of people who don't have the same relationship with place, and that sounds really pretentious kind of. But like they just don't think about physical locations in the same way. The cost aspect of it has caused it to grow in more cost sensitive industries than venture backed startups. And it's not that they don't have those, but I think it's also a certain amount of bias on the part of the venture capitalists themselves, and the kind of people that appeal to them. This is my guess, they will crack eventually. TODD: Having worked in Silicon Valley for 20 years, I do love Silicon Valley, and love San Francisco for sure. But when it comes to remote work, they have an inherent bias against it, because when you endure the heavy cost of relocating to Silicon Valley, and you've got your foot into that door, and you're part of that community, anything that would diminish the rewards from that suffering diminishes you. In other words, it's wonderful being there as an engineer. Everyone you meet is engineers, they're all working on interesting projects. There's a real benefit, I think there's other cities too. Especially some secondary cities like Portland, Oregon, or- KEN: Seattle. TODD: Seattle yeah, and Texas. KEN: Austin. TODD: Thank you. Austin, Texas. I think these are up and coming and stuff. And there's still benefits socially to it, but I think a lot of times they resist it because it diminishes their specialness in many ways. JAMON: Yeah. TODD: And really when we started Infinite Red, and we decided that this will be a remote company forever, and that this is my third and hopefully last company I build, it allowed me to move back to my home state of Nevada without worrying about my career, and that is an incredibly powerful thing.

React Native with Gant Laborde, Ed LaFoy, and Brent Vatne Get your FREE career growth strategy information and techniques! (https://stickynote.game) TableXI is now offering training for developers and products teams! For more info, email workshops@tablexi.com. Rails 5 Test Prescriptions (https://pragprog.com/titles/nrtest3) is updated and available for purchase! Guests Gant Laborde (https://twitter.com/GantLaborde): Chief Technology Strategist at Infinite Red (https://infinite.red/). Gant on Medium (https://medium.com/@gantlaborde). Ed LaFoy (https://twitter.com/edwardlafoy): Director of Mobile Development at TableXI (http://www.tablexi.com/). Brent Vatne (https://twitter.com/notbrent): React Native and Expo Developer at Expo (https://expo.io/). Summary After many attempts at cross-platform mobile application tools, React Native seems to be the real deal, easy to use, powerful tools, and native look and feel. On this show, Ed LaFoy, Table XI's Director of Mobile Development, is joined by two longtime members of the React Native community: Gant Laborde of Infinite Red and Brent Vatne of Expo. We talk about why React Native succeeds, and how to be successful using it, and also give some resources for people who want to get started. Notes 02:18 - What is React Native (http://facebook.github.io/react-native/) and when would someone us it? 03:50 - The Competitive Advantage of React Native 05:48 - What makes React Native succeed as compared to other tools? JSX (https://facebook.github.io/jsx/) Redux (https://redux.js.org/) redux-saga (https://github.com/redux-saga/redux-saga) react-native-web (https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web) 13:15 - The Immediate, Out-of-the-box Experience Snack (https://snack.expo.io/) React Navigation (https://reactnavigation.org/) 20:23 - Limitations and Boundaries and Skills to be an Effective React Native Developer 29:18 - The React Native Core 38:03 - The React Native Community 38:52 - Resources The React Native Newsletter (http://reactnative.cc/) The React Native Conference (US) (http://infinite.red/ChainReactConf) The React Native Conference (EU) (http://react-native.eu/) React Native Express (http://www.reactnativeexpress.com/) ReactEurope 2017 React Native Workshop with Expo (YouTube Playlist) (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCC436JpVnK2RFms3NG9ubPToWCNbMLbT) Animated (https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/animated.html) React Native Training (https://reactnative.training/) react-native-storybook (https://github.com/storybook-eol/react-native-storybook) Related Episodes Navigating the JavaScript World: A Panel Discussion (http://www.techdoneright.io/19) The Elm Programming Language With Corey Haines (http://www.techdoneright.io/17) JavaScript: Islands, Sprinkles, and Frameworks with Zach Briggs and David Copeland (http://www.techdoneright.io/005-javascript-apps) Special Guests: Brent Vatne, Ed LaFoy, and Gant Laborde.

Panel:  Charles Max Wood Guest: Gant LaBorde This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Gant LaBorde. Gant is a regular in React Native Radio of Dev Chat TV. Gant works for Infinite Red and works with Ignite, a toolkit/framework for React Native. Infinite Red is a mobile app consulting company. Gant talks about his journey in programming and working in the development world. Gant describes his early introduction to programming through the fascination of home computers and friends. Gant talks about his experience in learning  Javascript, PHP, Data Base, Desktop apps, and much more. Lastly, Gant talks about his contributions to React Native, and other platforms, and his current projects. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: How did you get into programming? Got into programming by help his dad with technology and computers Started his intro into programming through a friend programming on their home computer Basic AOL world - Visual Basic Programming Backend web ASP PHP Javascript talk Typescript talk Cardboard talk How did you get into React Native? Ruby Motion Building the Story How does React Native allow you to build the story? Components and structures Reactotron  What are you working on now? Out of sync Yarn files and much, much more! Links:  https://infinite.red https://infinite.red/ignite http://blog.npmjs.org/post/81600398588/npm-install-ben-coe-g Yargs InstanbulJS gantlaborde.com   Picks Gant Chain React Conference Charles Avengers Infinity  forum.devchat.tv Donate React Podcast for Dev Chat TV 

Panel:  Charles Max Wood Guest: Gant LaBorde This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Gant LaBorde. Gant is a regular in React Native Radio of Dev Chat TV. Gant works for Infinite Red and works with Ignite, a toolkit/framework for React Native. Infinite Red is a mobile app consulting company. Gant talks about his journey in programming and working in the development world. Gant describes his early introduction to programming through the fascination of home computers and friends. Gant talks about his experience in learning  Javascript, PHP, Data Base, Desktop apps, and much more. Lastly, Gant talks about his contributions to React Native, and other platforms, and his current projects. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: How did you get into programming? Got into programming by help his dad with technology and computers Started his intro into programming through a friend programming on their home computer Basic AOL world - Visual Basic Programming Backend web ASP PHP Javascript talk Typescript talk Cardboard talk How did you get into React Native? Ruby Motion Building the Story How does React Native allow you to build the story? Components and structures Reactotron  What are you working on now? Out of sync Yarn files and much, much more! Links:  https://infinite.red https://infinite.red/ignite http://blog.npmjs.org/post/81600398588/npm-install-ben-coe-g Yargs InstanbulJS gantlaborde.com   Picks Gant Chain React Conference Charles Avengers Infinity  forum.devchat.tv Donate React Podcast for Dev Chat TV 

Panel:  Charles Max Wood Guest: Gant LaBorde This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Gant LaBorde. Gant is a regular in React Native Radio of Dev Chat TV. Gant works for Infinite Red and works with Ignite, a toolkit/framework for React Native. Infinite Red is a mobile app consulting company. Gant talks about his journey in programming and working in the development world. Gant describes his early introduction to programming through the fascination of home computers and friends. Gant talks about his experience in learning  Javascript, PHP, Data Base, Desktop apps, and much more. Lastly, Gant talks about his contributions to React Native, and other platforms, and his current projects. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: How did you get into programming? Got into programming by help his dad with technology and computers Started his intro into programming through a friend programming on their home computer Basic AOL world - Visual Basic Programming Backend web ASP PHP Javascript talk Typescript talk Cardboard talk How did you get into React Native? Ruby Motion Building the Story How does React Native allow you to build the story? Components and structures Reactotron  What are you working on now? Out of sync Yarn files and much, much more! Links:  https://infinite.red https://infinite.red/ignite http://blog.npmjs.org/post/81600398588/npm-install-ben-coe-g Yargs InstanbulJS gantlaborde.com   Picks Gant Chain React Conference Charles Avengers Infinity  forum.devchat.tv Donate React Podcast for Dev Chat TV 

Max Stoiber, Gant Laborde of Infinite Red, and Nader Dabit talk about Styled Components and creating and maintaining successful open source projects.

Max Stoiber, Gant Laborde of Infinite Red, and Nader Dabit talk about Styled Components and creating and maintaining successful open source projects.

In this episode, Nader and Gant discuss the importance of developer conferences, meetups and the React Native community.

In this episode, Nader and Gant discuss the importance of developer conferences, meetups and the React Native community.

We talk with Gant Laborde about open source at Infinite Red, including both Ignite and Reactotron

We talk with Gant Laborde about open source at Infinite Red, including both Ignite and Reactotron

Remember phone books Jessie Haynes has a couple of cocktails and next thing you know she s transported back to the 1950 s. Jessie escaped the clutches of practicing law because it wasn t as much fun as Perry Mason even though Perry Mason whatever his real name is had long since quit acting at being a lawyer before Jessie quit art history to misguidedly go to law school. Christian Turner and Christian Thompson met in school in 2012. In high school art class. This is their very first media interview on the cusp of what might be their big break a gig at Buku Fest. The Christians have an electronic music project by which they are known collectively as Chris Cross. Although they re 19 and 20 respectively they also have solo music careers. And, by the way the come from Geismar, Louisiana. Remember you heard it here first. Gant Laborde s father was a nominal psychic. That is to say he was a predictor of names. He reportedly foresaw the runaway popularity of the name "Heather" and thought he was onto the next trend with "Gant." However, the only other Gant that Gant Laborde has met is a label on a European clothing line. He has a brother with a perfectly placed "r" in "Eric". Gant and Eric are the driving forces behind the infamous BLT Mardi Gras Ball. BLT in this case is Boxers, Lingerie and Togas. Dust off your speedo and get ready to party. All the photos on this page were taken at Wayfare by Douglas Engel. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.