Podcasts about Gatsby

Entrepreneurship has always been Tess Kossow's dream profession. And after having her miracle baby boy, Ferris, she realized this was a now-or-never moment to jump in and become an author with a product the world needs. Ferris was her last embryo and the answered prayer of faith, love, and science through IVF. Reading holds a very special place in Tess's heart, and this next stage of her career has her creating something she is so very passionate about in the lives of children through her picture books: in vitro fertilization. In November 2019, Tess was a finisher in the New York City Marathon. In October 2020, she survived sudden cardiac arrest and was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy. Still through it all, she loved to host parties and celebrate life, no matter the occasion! She holds a Bachelor's and Master's Degree from Elmhurst College, which is also where she met her best friend and husband, Dan. She has a Havanese named Gatsby and a Siamese cat named James Bond. (Both of which are Ferris' partners in crime). Tess is a mother, first and foremost, and everything else comes second. She believes you really can have and achieve anything you want…but you are going to have to work for it and expect nothing to be handed to you. Her husband often calls her his real-life Steve Jobs, because of how she lives her life and leads by example for her son to believe in the following: “Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they're not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” Ferris is her inspiration, and her husband, Dan, is the motivation that keeps her running the extra mile in all she does. Listen to Tess as she discusses with Ellen and Jenn: • How Tess and her husband found themselves needing fertility assistance and IVF. • How her pregnancy changed her lifestyle. • Finding ways to normalize and discuss the struggles of pregnancy and post-partum experiences. • What changed in her view of life to start to write children's books. • Tess's story of cardiac arrest and survival. • Her mission to get her story out there and help others. Want to share your story or ask a question? Call and leave us a message on our hotline: 303-997-1903. Learn more about our podcast: https://iwanttoputababyinyou.com/ Learn more about our surrogacy agencies: https://www.brightfuturesfamilies.com/ Get your IWTPABIY merch here! https://iwanttoputababyinyou.com/merch Learn more about Ellen's law firm: http://trachmanlawcenter.com/ Learn more about Tess Kossow and her blog, books and more at https://tesskossow.com/

About EmmaEmma Bostian is a Software Engineer at Spotify in Stockholm. She is also a co-host of the Ladybug Podcast, author of Decoding The Technical Interview Process, and an instructor at LinkedIn Learning and Frontend Masters.Links: Ladybug Podcast: https://www.ladybug.dev LinkedIn Learning: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/instructors/emma-bostian Frontend Masters: https://frontendmasters.com/teachers/emma-bostian/ Decoding the Technical Interview Process: https://technicalinterviews.dev Twitter: https://twitter.com/emmabostian TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. One of the weird things that I've found in the course of, well, the last five years or so is that I went from absolute obscurity to everyone thinking that I know everyone else because I have thoughts and opinions on Twitter. Today, my guest also has thoughts and opinions on Twitter. The difference is that what she has to say is actually helpful to people. My guest is Emma Bostian, software engineer at Spotify, which is probably, if we can be honest about it, one of the least interesting things about you. Thanks for joining me.Emma: Thanks for having me. That was quite the intro. I loved it.Corey: I do my best and I never prepare them, which is a blessing and a curse. When ADHD is how you go through life and you suck at preparation, you've got to be good at improv. So, you're a co-host of the Ladybug Podcast. Let's start there. What is that podcast? And what's it about?Emma: So, that podcast is just my three friends and I chatting about career and technology. We all come from different backgrounds, have different journeys into tech. I went the quote-unquote, “Traditional” computer science degree route, but Ali is self-taught and works for AWS, and Kelly she has, like, a master's in psychology and human public health and runs her own company. And then Sydney is an awesome developer looking for her next role. So, we all come from different places and we just chat about career in tech.Corey: You're also an instructor at LinkedIn Learning and Frontend Masters. I'm going to guess just based upon the name that you are something of a frontend person, which is a skill set that has constantly eluded me for 20 years, as given evidence by every time I've tried to build something that even remotely touches frontend or JavaScript in any sense.Emma: Yeah, to my dad's disdain, I have stuck with the frontend; he really wanted me to stay backend. I did an internship at IBM in Python, and you know, I learned all about assembly language and database, but frontend is what really captures my heart.Corey: There's an entire school of thought out there from a constituency of Twitter that I will generously refer to as shitheads that believe, “Oh, frontend is easy and it's somehow less than.” And I would challenge anyone who holds that perspective to wind up building an interface that doesn't look like crap first, then come and talk to me. Spoiler, you will not say that after attempting to go down that rabbit hole. If you disagree with this, you can go ahead and yell at me on Twitter so I know where you're hiding, so I can block you. Now, that's all well and good, but one of the most interesting things that you've done that aligns with topics near and dear to my heart is you wrote a book.Now, that's not what's near and dear to my heart; I have the attention span to write a tweet most days. But the book was called Decoding the Technical Interview Process. Technical interviewing is one of those weird things that comes up from time to time, here and everywhere else because it's sort of this stylized ritual where we evaluate people on a number of skills that generally don't reflect in their day-to-day; it's really only a series of skills that you get better by practicing, and you only really get to practice them when you're interviewing for other jobs. That's been my philosophy, but again, I've written a tweet on this; you've written a book. What's the book about and what drove you to write it?Emma: So, the book covers everything from an overview of the interview process, to how do you negotiate a job offer, to systems design, and talks about load balancing and cache partitioning, it talks about what skills you need from the frontend side of things to do well on your JavaScript interviews. I will say this, I don't teach HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in-depth in the book because there are plenty of other resources for that. And some guy got mad at me about that the other day and wanted a refund because I didn't teach the skills, but I don't need to. [laugh]. And then it covers data structures and algorithms.They're all written in JavaScript, they have easy to comprehend diagrams. What drove me to write this is that I had just accepted a job offer in Stockholm for a web developer position at Spotify. I had also just passed my Google technical interviews, and I finally realized, holy crap, maybe I do know what I'm doing in an interview now. And this was at the peak of when people were getting laid off due to COVID and I said, “You know what? I have a lot of knowledge. And if I have a computer science degree and I was able to get through some of the hardest technical interviews, I think I should share that with the community.”Because some people didn't go through a CS degree and don't understand what a linked list is. And that's not their fault. It's just unfortunately, there weren't a lot of great resources—especially for web developers out there—to learn these concepts. Cracking the Coding Interview is a great book, but it's written in backend language and it's a little bit hard to digest as a frontend developer. So, I decided to write my own.Corey: How much of the book is around the technical interview process as far as ask, “Here's how you wind up reversing linked lists,” or, “Inverting a binary tree,” or whatever it is where you're tracing things around without using a pointer, how do you wind up detecting a loop in a recursive whatever it is—yeah, as you can tell, I'm not a computer science person at all—versus how much of it is, effectively, interview 101 style skills for folks who are even in non-technical roles could absorb?Emma: My goal was, I wanted this to be approachable by anyone without extensive technical knowledge. So, it's very beginner-friendly. That being said, I cover the basic data structures, talking about what traditional methods you would see on them, how do you code that, what does that look like from a visual perspective with fake data? I don't necessarily talk about how do you reverse a binary tree, but I do talk about how do you balance it if you remove a node? What if it's not a leaf node? What if it has children? Things like that.It's about [sigh] I would say 60/40, where 40% is coding and technical stuff, but maybe—eh, it's a little bit closer to 50/50; it kind of depends. I do talk about the take-home assessment and tips for that. When I do a take-home assessment, I like to include a readme with things I would have done if I had more time, or these are performance trade-offs that I made; here's why. So, there's a lot of explanation as to how you can improve your chances at moving on to the next round. So yeah, I guess it's 50/50.I also include a section on tips for hiring managers, how to create an inclusive and comfortable environment for your candidates. But it's definitely geared towards candidates, and I would say it's about 50/50 coding tech and process stuff.Corey: One of the problems I've always had with this entire industry is it feels like we're one of the only industries that does this, where we bring people in, and oh, you've been an engineer for 15 years at a whole bunch of companies I've recognized, showing career progression, getting promoted at some of them transitioning from high-level role to high-level role. “Great, we are so glad that you came in to interview. Now, up to the whiteboard, please, and implement FizzBuzz because I have this working theory that you don't actually know how to code, and despite the fact that you've been able to fake your way through it at big companies for 15 years, I'm the one that's going to catch you out with some sort of weird trivia question.” It's this adversarial, almost condescending approach and I don't see it in any other discipline than tech. Is that just because I'm not well-traveled enough? Is that because I'm misunderstanding the purpose of all of these things? Or, what is this?Emma: I think partially it was a gatekeeping solution for a while, for people who are comfortable in their roles and may be threatened by people who have come through different paths to get to tech. Because software engineer used to be an accredited title that you needed a degree or certification to get. And in some countries it still is, so you'll see this debate sometimes about calling yourself a software engineer if you don't have that accreditation. But in this day and age, people go through boot camps, they can come from other industries, they can be self-taught. You don't need a computer science degree, and I think the interview process has not caught up with that.I will say [laugh] the worst interview I had was at IBM when I was already working there. I was already a web developer there, full-time. I was interviewing for a role, and I walked into the room and there were five guys sitting at a table and they were like, “Get up to the whiteboard.” It was for a web development job and they quizzed me about Java. And I was like, “Um, sir, I have not done Java since college.” And they were like, “We don't care.”Corey: Oh, yeah, coding on a whiteboard in front of five people who already know the answer—Emma: Horrifying.Corey: —during a—for them, it's any given Tuesday, and for you, it is a, this will potentially determine the course that your career takes from this point forward. There's a level of stress that goes into that never exists in our day-to-day of building things out.Emma: Well, I also think it's an artificial environment. And why, though? Like, why is this necessary? One of the best interviews I had was actually with Gatsby. It was for an open-source maintainer role, and they essentially let me try the product before I bought it.Like, they let me try out doing the job. It was a paid process, they didn't expect me to do it for free. I got to choose alternatives if I wanted to do one thing or another, answer one question or another, and this was such an exemplary process that I always bring it up because that is a modern interview process, when you are letting people try the position. Now granted, not everyone can do this, right? We've got parents, we've got people working two jobs, and not everyone can afford to take the time to try out a job.But who can also afford a five-stage interview process that still warrants taking vacation days? So, I think at least—at the very least—pay your candidates if you can.Corey: Oh, yeah. One of the best interviews I've ever had was at a company called Three Rings Design, which is now defunct, unfortunately, but it was fairly typical ops questions of, “Yeah, here's an AWS account. Spin up a couple EC2 instances, load balance between them, have another one monitored. You know, standard op stuff. And because we don't believe in asking people to work for free, we'll pay you $300 upon completion of the challenge.”Which, again, it's not huge money for doing stuff like that, but it's also, this shows a level of respect for my time. And instead of giving me a hard deadline of when it was due, they asked me, “When can we expect this by?” Which is a great question in its own right because it informs you about a candidate's ability to set realistic deadlines and then meet them, which is one of those useful work things. And they—unlike most other companies I spoke with in that era—were focused on making it as accommodating for the candidate as possible. They said, “We're welcome to interview you during the workday; we can also stay after hours and have a chat then, if that's more convenient for your work schedule.”Because they knew I was working somewhere else; an awful lot of candidates are. And they just bent over backwards to be as accommodating as possible. I see there's a lot of debate these days in various places about the proper way to interview candidates. No take-home because biases for people who don't have family obligations or other commitments outside of work hours. “Okay, great, so I'm going to come in interview during the day?” “No. That biases people who can't take time off.” And, on some level, it almost seems to distill down to no one likes any way that there is of interviewing candidates, and figuring out a way that accommodates everyone is a sort of a fool's errand. It seems like there is no way that won't get you yelled at.Emma: I think there needs to be almost like a choose your own adventure. What is going to set you up for success and also allow you to see if you want to even work that kind of a job in the first place? Because I thought on paper, open-source maintainer sounds awesome. And upon looking into the challenges, I'm like, “You know what? I think I'd hate this job.”And I pulled out and I didn't waste their time and they didn't waste mine. So, when you get down to it, honestly, I wish I didn't have to write this book. Did it bring me a lot of benefit? Yeah. Let's not sugarcoat that. It allowed me to pay off my medical debt and move across a continent, but that being said, I wish that we were at a point in time where that did not need to exist.Corey: One of the things that absolutely just still gnaws at me even years later, is I interviewed at Google twice, and I didn't get an offer either time, I didn't really pass their technical screen either time. The second one that really sticks out in my mind where it was, “Hey, write some code in a Google Doc while we watch remotely,” and don't give you any context or hints on this. And just it was—the entire process was sitting there listening to them basically, like, “Nope, not what I'm thinking about. Nope, nope, nope.” It was… by the end of that conversation, I realized that if they were going to move forward—which they didn't—I wasn't going to because I didn't want to work with people that were that condescending and rude.And I've held by it; I swore I would never apply there again and I haven't. And it's one of those areas where, did I have the ability to do the job? I can say in hindsight, mostly. Were there things I was going to learn as I went? Absolutely, but that's every job.And I'm realizing as I see more and more across the ecosystem, that they were an outlier in a potentially good way because in so many other places, there's no equivalent of the book that you have written that is given to the other side of the table: how to effectively interview candidates. People lose sight of the fact that it's a sales conversation; it's a two-way sale, they have to convince you to hire them, but you also have to convince them to work with you. And even in the event that you pass on them, you still want them to say nice things about you because it's a small industry, all things considered. And instead, it's just been awful.Emma: I had a really shitty interview, and let me tell you, they have asked me subsequently if I would re-interview with them. Which sucks; it's a product that I know and love, and I've talked about this, but I had the worst experience. Let me clarify, I had a great first interview with them, and I was like, “I'm just not ready to move to Australia.” Which is where the job was. And then they contacted me again a year later, and it was the worst experience of my life—same recruiter—it was the ego came out.And I will tell you what, if you treat your candidates like shit, they will remember and they will never recommend people interview for you. [laugh]. I also wanted to mention about accessibility because—so we talked about, oh, give candidates the choice, which I think the whole point of an interview should be setting your candidates up for success to show you what they can do. And I talked with [Stephen 00:14:09]—oh, my gosh, I can't remember his last name—but he is a quadriplegic and he types with a mouthstick. And he was saying he would go to technical interviews and they would not be prepared to set him up for success.And they would want to do these pair programming, or, like, writing on a whiteboard. And it's not that he can't pair program, it's that he was not set up for success. He needed a mouthstick to type and they were not prepared to help them with that. So, it's not just about the commitment that people need. It's also about making sure that you are giving candidates what they need to give the best interview possible in an artificial environment.Corey: One approach that people have taken is, “Ah, I'm going to shortcut this and instead of asking people to write code, I'm going to look at their work on GitHub.” Which is, in some cases, a great way to analyze what folks are capable of doing. On the other, well, there's a lot of things that play into that. What if they're working in environment where they don't have the opportunity to open-source their work? What if people consider this a job rather than an all-consuming passion?I know, perish the thought. We don't want to hire people like that. Grow up. It's not useful, and it's not helpful. It's not something that applies universally, and there's an awful lot of reasons why someone's code on GitHub might be materially better—or worse—than their work product. I think that's fine. It's just a different path toward it.Emma: I don't use GitHub for largely anything except just keeping repositories that I need. I don't actively update it. And I have, like, a few thousand followers; I'm like, “Why the hell do you guys follow me? I don't do anything.” It's honestly a terrible representation.That being said, you don't need to have a GitHub repository—an active one—to showcase your skills. There are many other ways that you can show a potential employer, “Hey, I have a lot of skills that aren't necessarily showcased on my resume, but I like to write blogs, I like to give tech talks, I like to make YouTube videos,” things of that nature.Corey: I had a manager once who refused to interview anyone who didn't have a built-out LinkedIn profile, which is also one of these bizarre things. It's, yeah, a lot of people don't feel the need to have a LinkedIn profile, and that's fine. But the idea that, “Oh, yeah, they have this profile they haven't updated in a couple years, it's clearly they're not interested in looking for work.” It's, yeah. Maybe—just a thought here—your ability to construct a resume and build it out in the way that you were expecting is completely orthogonal to how effective they might be in the role. The idea that someone not having a LinkedIn profile somehow implies that they're sketchy is the wrong lesson to take from all of this. That site is terrible.Emma: Especially when you consider the fact that LinkedIn is primarily used in the United States as a social—not social networking—professional networking tool. In Germany, they use Xing as a platform; it's very similar to LinkedIn, but my point is, if you're solely looking at someone's LinkedIn as a representation of their ability to do a job, you're missing out on many candidates from all over the world. And also those who, yeah, frankly, just don't—like, they have more important things to be doing than updating their LinkedIn profile. [laugh].Corey: On some level, it's the idea of looking at a consultant, especially independent consultant type, when their website is glorious and up-to-date and everything's perfect, it's, oh, you don't really have any customers, do you? As opposed to the consultants you know who are effectively sitting there with a waiting list, their website looks like crap. It's like, “Is this Geocities?” No. It's just that they're too busy working on the things that bring the money instead of the things that bring in business, in some respects.Let's face it, websites don't. For an awful lot of consulting work, it's word of mouth. I very rarely get people finding me off of Google, clicking a link, and, “Hey, my AWS bill is terrible. Can you help us with it?” It happens, but it's not something that happens so frequently that we want to optimize for it because that's not where the best customers have been coming from. Historically, it's referrals, it's word of mouth, it's people seeing the aggressive shitposting I engage in on Twitter and saying, “Oh, that's someone that should help me with my Amazon bill.” Which I don't pretend to understand, but I'm still going to roll with it.Emma: You had mentioned something about passion earlier, and I just want to say, if you're a hiring manager or recruiter, you shouldn't solely be looking at candidates who superficially look like they're passionate about what they do. Yes, that is—it's important, but it's not something that—like, I don't necessarily choose one candidate over the other because they push commits, and open pull requests on GitHub, and open-source, and stuff. You can be passionate about your job, but at the end of the day, it's still a job. For me, would I be working if I had to? No. I'd be opening a bookstore because that's what I would really love to be doing. But that doesn't mean I'm not passionate about my job. I just show it in different ways. So, just wanted to put that out there.Corey: Oh, yeah. The idea that you must eat, sleep, live, and breathe is—hell with that. One of the reasons that we get people to work here at The Duckbill Group is, yeah, we care about getting the job done. We don't care about how long it takes or when you work; it's oh, you're not feeling well? Take the day off.We have very few things that are ‘must be done today' style of things. Most of those tend to fall on me because it's giving a talk at a conference; they will not reschedule the conference for you. I've checked. So yeah, that's important, but that's not most days.Emma: Yeah. It's like programming is my job, it's not my identity. And it's okay if it is your primary hobby if that is how you identify, but for me, I'm a person with actual hobbies, and, you know, a personality, and programming is just a job for me. I like my job, but it's just a job.Corey: And on the side, you do interesting things like wrote a book. You mentioned earlier that it wound up paying off some debt and helping cover your move across an ocean. Let's talk a little bit about that because I'm amenable to the idea of side projects that accidentally have a way of making money. That's what this podcast started out as. If I'm being perfectly honest, and started out as something even more self-serving than that.It's, well if I reach out to people in this industry that are doing interesting things and ask them to grab a cup of coffee, they'll basically block me, whereas if I ask them to, would you like to appear on my podcast, they'll clear time on their schedule. I almost didn't care if my microphone was on or not when I was doing these just because it was a chance to talk to really interesting people and borrow their brain, people reached out asking they can sponsor it, along with the newsletter and the rest, and it's you want to give me money? Of course, you can give me money. How much money? And that sort of turned into a snowball effect over time.Five years in, it's turned into something that I would never have predicted or expected. But it's weird to me still, how effective doing something you're actually passionate about as a side project can sort of grow wings on its own. Where do you stand on that?Emma: Yeah, it's funny because with the exception of the online courses that I've worked with—I mentioned LinkedIn Learning and Frontend Masters, which I knew were paid opportunities—none of my side projects started out for financial reasonings. The podcast that we started was purely for fun, and the sponsors came to us. Now, I will say right up front, we all had pretty big social media followings, and my first piece of advice to anyone looking to get into side projects is, don't focus so much on making money at the get-go. Yes, to your point, Corey, focus on the stuff you're passionate about. Focus on engaging with people on social media, build up your social media, and at that point, okay, monetization will slowly find its way to you.But yeah, I say if you can monetize the heck out of your work, go for it. But also, free content is also great. I like to balance my paid content with my free content because I recognize that not everyone can afford to pay for some of this information. So, I generally always have free alternatives. And for this book that we published, one of the things that was really important to me was keeping it affordable.The first publish I did was $10 for the book. It was like a 250-page book. It was, like, $10 because again, I was not in it for the money. And when I redid the book with the egghead.io team, the same team that did Epic React with Kent C. Dodds, I said, “I want to keep this affordable.” So, we made sure it was still affordable, but also that we had—what's it called? Parity pricing? Pricing parity, where depending on your geographic location, the price is going to accommodate for how the currency is doing. So, yes, I would agree. Side project income for me allows me to do incredible stuff, but it wasn't why I got into it in the first place. It was genuinely just a nice-to-have.Corey: I haven't really done anything that asks people for money directly. I mean, yeah, I sell t-shirts on the website, and mugs, and drink umbrellas—don't get me started—but other than that and the charity t-shirt drive I do every year, I tend to not be good at selling things that don't have a comma in the price tag. For me, it was about absolutely building an audience. I tend to view my Twitter follower count as something of a proxy for it, but the number I actually care about, the audience that I'm focused on cultivating, is newsletter subscribers because no social media platform that we've ever seen has lasted forever. And I have to imagine that Twitter will one day wane as well.But email has been here since longer than we'd been alive, and by having a list of email addresses and ways I can reach out to people on an ongoing basis, I can monetize that audience in a more direct way, at some point should I need them to. And my approach has been, well, one, it's a valuable audience for some sponsors, so I've always taken the asking corporate people for money is easier than asking people for personal money, plus it's a valuable audience to them, so it tends to blow out a number of the metrics that you would normally expect of, oh, for this audience size, you should generally be charging Y dollars. Great. That makes sense if you're slinging mattresses or free web hosting, but when it's instead, huh, these people buy SaaS enterprise software and implement it at their companies, all of economics tend to start blowing apart. Same story with you in many respects.The audience that you're building is functionally developers. That is a lucrative market for the types of sponsors that are wise enough to understand that—in a lot of cases these days—which product a company is going to deploy is not dictated by their exec so much as it is the bottom-up adoption path of engineers who like the product.Emma: Mm-hm. Yeah, and I think once I got to maybe around 10,000 Twitter followers is when I changed my mentality and I stopped caring so much about follower count, and instead I just started caring about the people that I was following. And the number is a nice-to-have but to be honest, I don't think so much about it. And I do understand, yes, at that point, it is definitely a privilege that I have this quote-unquote, “Platform,” but I never see it as an audience, and I never think about that “Audience,” quote-unquote, as a marketing platform. But it's funny because there's no right or wrong. People will always come to you and be like, “You shouldn't monetize your stuff.” And it's like—Corey: “Cool. Who's going to pay me then? Not you, apparently.”Emma: Yeah. It's also funny because when I originally sold the book, it was $10 and I got so many people being like, “This is way too cheap. You should be charging more.” And I'm like, “But I don't care about the money.” I care about all the people who are unemployed and not able to survive, and they have families, and they need to get a job and they don't know how.That's what I care about. And I ended up giving away a lot of free books. My mantra was like, hey if you've been laid off, DM me. No questions asked, I'll give it to you for free. And it was nice because a lot of people came back, even though I never asked for it, they came back and they wanted to purchase it after the fact, after they'd gotten a job.And to me that was like… that was the most rewarding piece. Not getting their money; I don't care about that, but it was like, “Oh, okay. I was actually able to help you.” That is what's really the most rewarding. But yeah, certainly—and back really quickly to your email point, I highly agree, and one of the first things that I would recommend to anyone looking to start a side product, create free content so that you have a backlog that people can look at to… kind of build trust.Corey: Give it away for free, but also get emails from people, like a trade for that. So, it's like, “Hey, here's a free guide on how to start a podcast from scratch. It's free, but all I would like is your email.” And then when it comes time to publish a course on picking the best audio and visual equipment for that podcast, you have people who've already been interested in this topic that you can now market to.This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: I'm not sitting here trying to judge anyone for the choices that they make at all. There are a lot of different paths to it. I'm right there with you. One of the challenges I had when I was thinking about, do I charge companies or do I charge people was that if I'm viewing it through a lens of audience growth, well, what stuff do I gate behind a paywall? What stuff don't I? Well, what if I just—Emma: Mm-hm.Corey: —gave it all away? And that way I don't have to worry about the entire class of problems that you just alluded to of, well, how do I make sure this is fair? Because a cup of coffee in San Francisco is, what, $14 in some cases? Whereas that is significant in places that aren't built on an economy of foolishness. How do you solve for that problem? How do you deal with the customer service slash piracy issues slash all the other nonsense? And it's just easier.Emma: Yeah.Corey: Something I've found, too, is that when you're charging enough money to companies, you don't have to deal with an entire class of customer service problem. You just alluded to the other day that well, you had someone who bought your book and was displeased that it wasn't a how to write code from scratch tutorial, despite the fact that he were very clear on what it is and what it isn't. I don't pretend to understand that level of entitlement. If I spend 10 or 20 bucks on an ebook, and it's not very good, let's see, do I wind up demanding a refund from the author and making them feel bad about it, or do I say, “The hell with it.” And in my case, I—there is privilege baked into this; I get that, but it's I don't want to make people feel bad about what they've built. If I think there's enough value to spend money on it I view that as a one-way transaction, rather than chasing someone down for three months, trying to get a $20 refund.Emma: Yeah, and I think honestly, I don't care so much about giving refunds at all. We have a 30-day money-back guarantee and we don't ask any questions. I just asked this person for feedback, like, “Oh, what was not up to par?” And it was just, kind of like, BS response of like, “Oh, I didn't read the website and I guess it's not what I wanted.” But the end of the day, they still keep the product.The thing is, you can't police all of the people who are going to try to get your content for free if you're charging for it; it's part of it. And I knew that when I got into it, and honestly, my thing is, if you are circulating a book that helps you get a job in tech and you're sending it to all your friends, I'm not going to ask any questions because it's very much the sa—and this is just my morals here, but if I saw someone stealing food from a grocery store, I wouldn't tell on them because at the end of the day, if you're s—Corey: Same story. You ever see someone's stealing baby formula from a store? No, you didn't.Emma: Right.Corey: Keep walking. Mind your business.Emma: Exactly. Exactly. So, at the end of the day, I didn't necessarily care that—people are like, “Oh, people are going to share your book around. It's a PDF.” I'm like, “I don't care. Let them. It is what it is. And the people who wants to support and can, will.” But I'm not asking.I still have free blogs on data structures, and algorithms, and the interview stuff. I do still have content for free, but if you want more, if you want my illustrated diagrams that took me forever with my Apple Pencil, fair enough. That would be great if you could support me. If not, I'm still happy to give you the stuff for free. It is what it is.Corey: One thing that I think is underappreciated is that my resume doesn't look great. On paper, I have an eighth-grade education, and I don't have any big tech names on my resume. I have a bunch of relatively short stints; until I started this place, I've never lasted more than two years anywhere. If I apply through the front door the way most people do for a job, I will get laughed out of the room by the applicant tracking system, automatically. It'll never see a human.And by doing all these side projects, it's weird, but let's say that I shut down the company for some reason, and decide, ah, I'm going to go get a job now, my interview process—more or less, and it sounds incredibly arrogant, but roll with it for a minute—is, “Don't you know who I am? Haven't you heard of me before?” It's, “Here's my website. Here's all the stuff I've been doing. Ask anyone in your engineering group who I am and you'll see what pops up.”You're in that same boat at this point where your resume is the side projects that you've done and the audience you've built by doing it. That's something that I think is underappreciated. Even if neither one of us made a dime through direct monetization of things that we did, the reputational boost to who we are and what we do professionally seems to be one of those things that pays dividends far beyond any relatively small monetary gain from it.Emma: Absolutely, yeah. I actually landed my job interview with Spotify through Twitter. I was contacted by a design systems manager. And I was in the interview process for them, and I ended up saying, “You know, I'm not ready to move to Stockholm. I just moved to Germany.”And a year later, I circled back and I said, “Hey, are there any openings?” And I ended up re-interviewing, and guess what? Now, I have a beautiful home with my soulmate and we're having a child. And it's funny how things work out this way because I had a Twitter account. And so don't undervalue [laugh] social media as a tool in lieu of a resume because I don't think anyone at Spotify even saw my resume until it actually accepted the job offer, and it was just a formality.So yeah, absolutely. You can get a job through social media. It's one of the easiest ways. And that's why if I ever see anyone looking for a job on Twitter, I will retweet, and vouch for them if I know their work because I think that's one of the quickest ways to finding an awesome candidate.Corey: Back in, I don't know, 2010, 2011-ish. I was deep in the IRC weed. I was network staff on the old freenode network—not the new terrible one. The old, good one—and I was helping people out with various things. I was hanging out in the Postfix channel and email server software thing that most people have the good sense not to need to know anything about.And someone showed up and was asking questions about their config, and I was working with them, and teasing them, and help them out with it. And at the end of it, his comment was, “Wow, you're really good at this. Any chance you'd be interested in looking for jobs?” And the answer was, “Well, sure, but it's a global network. Where are you?”Well, he was based in Germany, but he was working remotely for Spotify in Stockholm. A series of conversations later, I flew out to Stockholm and interviewed for a role that they decided I was not a fit for—and again, they're probably right—and I often wonder how my life would have gone differently if the decision had gone the other way. I mean, no hard feelings, please don't get me wrong, but absolutely, helping people out, interacting with people over social networks, or their old school geeky analogs are absolutely the sorts of things that change lives. I would never have thought to apply to a role like that if I had been sitting here looking at job ads because who in the world would pick up someone with relatively paltry experience and move them halfway around the world? This was like a fantasy, not a reality.Emma: [laugh].Corey: It's the people you get to know—Emma: Yeah.Corey: —through these social interactions on various networks that are worth… they're worth gold. There's no way to describe it other than that.Emma: Yeah, absolutely. And if you're listening to this, and you're discouraged because you got turned down for a job, we've all been there, first of all, but I remember being disappointed because I didn't pass my first round of interviews of Google the first time I interviewed with them, and being, like, “Oh, crap, now I can't move to Munich. What am I going to do with my life?” Well, guess what, look where I am today. If I had gotten that job that I thought was it for me, I wouldn't be in the happiest phase of my life.And so if you're going through it—obviously, in normal circumstances where you're not frantically searching for a job; if you're in more of a casual life job search—and you've been let go from the process, just realize that there's probably something bigger and better out there for you, and just focus on your networking online. Yeah, it's an invaluable tool.Corey: One time when giving a conference talk, I asked, “All right, raise your hand if you have never gone through a job interview process and then not been offered the job.” And a few people did. “Great. If your hand is up, aim higher. Try harder. Take more risks.”Because fundamentally, job interviews are two-way streets and if you are only going for the sure thing jobs, great, stretch yourself, see what else is out there. There's no perfect attendance prize. Even back in school there wasn't. It's the idea of, “Well, I've only ever taken the easy path because I don't want to break my streak.” Get over it. Go out and interview more. It's a skill, unlike most others that you don't get to get better at unless you practice it.So, you've been in a job for ten years, and then it's time to move on—I've talked to candidates like this—their interview skills are extremely rusty. It takes a little bit of time to get back in the groove. I like to interview every three to six months back when I was on the job market. Now that I, you know, own the company and have employees, it looks super weird if I do it, but I miss it. I miss those conversations. I miss the aspects—Emma: Yes.Corey: —of exploring what the industry cares about.Emma: Absolutely. And don't underplay the importance of studying the foundational language concepts. I see this a lot in candidates where they're so focused on the newest and latest technologies and frameworks, that they forgot foundational JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Many companies are focused primarily on these plain language concepts, so just make sure that when you are ready to get back into interviewing and enhance that skill, that you don't neglect the foundation languages that the web is built on if you're a web developer.Corey: I'd also take one last look around and realize that every person you admire, every person who has an audience, who is a known entity in the space only has that position because someone, somewhere did them a favor. Probably lots of someones with lots of favors. And you can't ever pay those favors back. All you can do is pay it forward. I repeatedly encourage people to reach out to me if there's something I can do to help. And the only thing that surprises me is how few people in the audience take me up on that. I'm talking to you, listener. Please, if I can help you with something, please reach out. I get a kick out of doing that sort of thing.Emma: Absolutely. I agree.Corey: Emma, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?Emma: Well, you can find me on Twitter. It's just @EmmaBostian, I'm, you know, shitposting over there on the regular. But sometimes I do tweet out helpful things, so yeah, feel free to engage with me over there. [laugh].Corey: And we will, of course, put a link to that in the [show notes 00:35:42]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I appreciate it.Emma: Yeah. Thanks for having me.Corey: Emma Bostian, software engineer at Spotify and oh, so very much more. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an incoherent ranting comment mentioning that this podcast as well failed to completely teach you JavaScript.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Onshore podcast — brought to you by TechnipFMC on the Oil and Gas Global Network, the largest and most listened-to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. In this episode, Justin sits down with Marc L'heureux to discuss how Social Octane has taken over the Oil and Gas Networking space and how The Orphan Well Project is helping shape the positive story behind the oilfield. Marc also shares his journey on how he went from working on rigs at the age 18 to running one of the biggest energy networking platforms in the US. LinkedIn profile link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-l-heureux-102b3b45/ Website link: https://www.socialoctane.co/ Oil and Gatsby link: www.oilandgatsby.com We'd like to highlight some fascinating technology provided by our sponsor, TechnipFMC. Their new and integrated iComplete™ ecosystem is digitally enabled and delivers efficiency benefits by dramatically reducing components and connections while simultaneously providing real-time data to operators about the #wellpad operations. TechnipFMC is continuing to push the limits in order to achieve full frac automation. To discover more about all the benefits of iComplete™ click the link in the show notes or check them out on linkedin: https://lnkd.in/eeSVvcc TechnipFMC Giveaway https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/pcEvkKz/OGGN Ogio Dome duffle bag Yeti 20 oz purple tumbler Executive power bank Columbia neck gator AcePods 2.0 - True Wireless Stereo (TWS) Bluetooth Ear Buds Free day passes at The Cannon If you're in Houston ... The Cannon is a global membership community that is building a virtual and physical network of entrepreneurs, startups, investors, advisors and established companies to connect innovators of all types and from all backgrounds with the resources they need to succeed. If you are looking for flexible office or desk space so that you can take a break from your work from home situation, mention OGGN at the front desk of The Cannon for a free day pass! More Oil and Gas Global Network Podcasts OGGN.com – https://oggn.com/podcasts OGGN Street Team LinkedIn Group – https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12458373/ OGGN on Social LinkedIn Group | LinkedIn Company Page | Facebook | modalpoint | OGGN OGGN Events Get notified each month Justin Gauthier LinkedIn

It's another Potluck! In this episode, Scott and Wes answer your questions about corn shucking, self-hosting images, WordPress, getting scammed, portfolios, more! Linode - Sponsor Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with a $100 in free credit for listeners of Syntax. You can find all the details at linode.com/syntax. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/syntax and click on the “Create Free Account” button to get started. Sentry - Sponsor If you want to know what's happening with your code, track errors and monitor performance with Sentry. Sentry's Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners new to Sentry can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code TASTYTREAT during sign up. Auth0 - Sponsor Auth0 is the easiest way for developers to add authentication and secure their applications. They provides features like user management, multi-factor authentication, and you can even enable users to login with device biometrics with something like their fingerprint. Not to mention, Auth0 has SDKs for your favorite frameworks like React, Next.js, and Node/Express. Make sure to sign up for a free account and give Auth0 a try with the link below. https://a0.to/syntax Show Notes 02:55 - Hey guys, I love the podcast! This is a silly question and possibly the least important potluck question you'll ever get. When you get a new Apple device like an iPhone, Apple Watch, or Macbook Pro… do you keep the box? Why or why not? 06:56 - Hey guys! Awesome podcast! Could you go over the advantages and disadvantages of using local images vs external images service (e.g. Cloudinary) for displaying images on a web app? 11:26 - Heyyyy Scott and Wes! 40-year-old lady here looking to make a career change. It's taken me a year plus, but after building several tutorial React apps, I finally built a fullstack JavaScript app of my own, with lots of rad Postgres database stuff, a bunch of secure Node/Express API endpoints, role-based access control, fancy Oauth, and of course the latest React tech (context, hooks, etc). I'm pretty proud of it. I even managed to configure Nginx and deploy it to AWS. The only problem is…it looks like crap. My portfolio site itself is pretty darn slick, since I used a gorgeous Gatsby template that required only a bit of tweaking. But the site I architected and worked so hard to bring to life? It looks like an 8-bit game for toddlers, a responsive yet Bootstrapy game. My question: does this matter? I would hope that this project shows off my backend skills, but I'm afraid they'll judge a book by its cover. (I guess a second question would be: how do you show off your backend skills? I have a README in my repo, but will they actually read it? Or, can you be a fullstack React developer with no design skills?) I am very, VERY ready to apply to jobs (emotionally and financially), but I am terrified of making a fool of myself and worried I'll never get hired. I am completely self-taught and have just been plugging away at this on my own for the duration of the pandemic, so I send a massive thank you to you guys for the sense of community that your show provides! Props to Wyze sprinkler controllers! 16:14 - Scott, I just finished your “SvelteKit” course and now I'm working on “Building Svelte Components”. I have some questions regarding testing. I was listening to an interview with Rich Harris on Svelte Radio and it's my understanding that the framework is trying not to be opinionated as far as testing. What are you doing as far as testing with SvelteKit? Do you have any recommended packages/plugins/libraries? I've only ever written unit tests with Jest in Vue. I'm loving Svelte, but I really want to work on writing tests as well. Basically, everything/anything you've got on testing with SvelteKit would be much appreciated. I've been listening to the show since forever, you guys are both awesome, shout out to Wes too, you've both taught me so much! Thank you, peace, love, and happiness

Chase Dimond is an email marketing expert who is currently a Partner at Structured and Boundless Labs and an Advisor for Triple Whale. He created the popular “$75M Ecommerce Email Marketer” course and offers an email marketing guide on his website, chasedimond.com. Chase is also an Angel Investor for several companies, including Gatsby, Miracle Brand, Gainful, and Newchip Accelerator.Chase's accomplishments include scaling a product he built, marketed, and managed to 500,000 visitors in 6 months, generating 1.5 million visitors for a dating site within the first two months of launch, and acquiring 500,000 subscribers in 10 months for a travel email newsletter he helped launch — all while spending either zero or very little traditional advertising dollars.In this episode…These days, businesses need help with social media advertising, email marketing, website design, and more. How can they meet all their needs without hiring 12 different agencies?The team at Structured has your back. They handle social media, email, SMS, and content — and they do it really well. Chase Dimond leads the email marketing sector with years of success under his belt. He drove over 350,000 unique clicks and responses through cold email campaigns in 2017, acquired 20,000 users in three weeks for a polling app, and generated $175,000 in new revenue in three months while working as an intern. So, what's Chase's secret?In this episode of Agency Journey, Gray MacKenzie is joined by e-commerce email marketing expert Chase Dimond to discuss how email can revolutionize your business. Chase talks about his email marketing course, how the services at Structured can benefit your company, and his favorite online e-commerce tools.

We're trekking north to revisit the spoop of New England! Ed and Lorraine Warren make an appearance for the exorcism of Maurice Theriault, then we meet the scientist/spiritualist John Hammond Jr and his bizarre collection of gadgets. Finally, we explore the Bennington Triangle and its mysterious disappearances from 1945-1950. Happy spooky season, y'all!   -- SUPPORT SOME QUALITY SCHOOL STUFF with this fundraiser and we'll send you some stickers! Just email us a screenshot of your donation and we'll take care of the rest. Food Pantry: https://bit.ly/2RpZ4X1 OR https://amzn.to/3iqY7cJ   WE HAVE A PATREON. Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/SpoopHour Find us on Twitter/Instagram @spoophour and send your spooky stories to spoophour[at]gmail[dot]com. Want Spoop Hour merch? We've got that too! www.spoophour.threadless.com  

Monday morning...Guess it's time to pour a cup of java, head to "my office" to drop some stink off, and tune in to the best podcast known to man. And after I'm done with whatever that is, I'll be listening to YKS, the show for which these next few paragraphs should serve as the description!On today's show we're talking about the wild world of wrasslin' (with apologies to all our friends who love it), possibly renaming Green Knight to reflect how nothing happens in it (Stink Night?), and an Mike's intense love affair with the scroll wheel. Plus, we're blowing away the poopoos with compressed air, sleeping at the hospital in a pine box, and narrating a dog jumping on a fence to millions of adoring fans. It's just THAT kinda day on YKS, folks, and if you don't think that's miracle shit, then it's not for you and very little is!Music for YKS is courtesy of Howell Dawdy, Craig Dickman, Mr. Baloney, and Mark Brendle. Additional research by Zeke Golvin. YKS is edited by Producer Dan. Executive Producer lola butt.Want more YKS? And would rather it be about horror movies than Kickstarters, feature good segments instead of bad ones, and have incredible guests instead of none at all? Kind of makes you think that should be the show all the time, huh? Nope! It's just one month and it's only on YKS Premium Presents: Miketober! This week's episode: Nic Newsham of Gatsby's American Dream joins us for Halloween III: Season of the Witch! No tricks, all treats baby!This week's episode is brought to you by HelloFresh! Ohhhh Hello Fresh! They're the number one meal delivery service in America for a reason...and the reason, you have to assume, is their excellent working relationship with the Your Kickstarter Sucks podcast. In fact, things have been going SO well between us that they gave us the all clear to hook our listeners up with a deal of dare I say epic proportions? Or portions, perhaps! That's right, heading over to HelloFresh.com/yourkickstartersucks14 and using the promo code yourkickstartersucks14 is gonna get ya 14 free meals plus free shipping. Now That's Fresh! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Thanks to everyone who supports TMBH at patreon.com/thetmbhpodcast You're the reason we can all do this together! Discuss the episode here Music written and performed by Jeff Foote.

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GATSBY X Like Mike Sports 等你來挑戰核心肌力！ GATSBY陪你參一咖！趕快來挑戰： https://lihi1.com/2DX9G MixerBox連結上線了！粉絲福利都在這： 加入我們的群組一起聊～拿Juicy帽子！ https://pse.is/3cz8qh 《Juicy Talk》 (00:01:00) 2021名人堂：誰是守門員？Chris vs. Chris (00:14:00) 最想要誰的生涯？預測未來恐龍、誰能靠防守入選 (00:28:00) 第一屆台灣名人堂、新球季控衛Top 10排名 (00:42:00) Marc Gasol退休、灰熊世代結束、過時冷知識 Music: Extraordinaire by DJ Quads | Roxanne by Arizona Zervas | FML by Arizona Zervas 
------------------------------ 《Juicy Baskets 就是籃球》是一個以「NBA 美國職籃」為主的網路廣播節目（Podcast）。我們是幾個在美國加州柏克萊大學認識，現在在世界各個角落工作，和你們一樣喜歡打籃球、打2K、討論籃球、靠北Fantasy Basketball的臭男生。每集會以過去幾天有趣的NBA頭條為主題，提供我們的看法，也會有認真地辯論/不認真地預測，以及翻譯國外體育新聞或Podcast平台的內容。 《Juicy Baskets 就是籃球》以Podcast的形式，聊聊台灣電視及網路上較少討論的話題。希望透過我們的分享，帶給你不同的籃球觀點和NBA動態。若想推薦之後的主題或來賓，歡迎私訊或留言告訴我們喔。Peace! - Andy / Angus / Chase *小額贊助我們每週三地開錄！pay.firstory.me/user/juicybaskets

About LaurieLaurie is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. You can also find her creating content and educating the technology industry as an egghead instructor, member of the TC39 Educators committee, and technical blogger.Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurieontech Netflix: https://www.netflix.com Egghead: https://egghead.io The Art of the Subtle Subtweet: https://laurieontech.com/book-launch/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: You could build you go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks! Alternately, consider Courier, who is sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules. Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them I sent you and watch them wince—because everyone does when you bring up my name. Thats the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system but why on god's flat earth would you do that?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at VMware. Let's be honest—the past year has been far from easy. Due to, well, everything. It caused us to rush cloud migrations and digital transformation, which of course means long hours refactoring your apps, surprises on your cloud bill, misconfigurations and headache for everyone trying manage disparate and fractured cloud environments. VMware has an answer for this. With VMware multi-cloud solutions, organizations have the choice, speed, and control to migrate and optimizeapplications seamlessly without recoding, take the fastest path to modern infrastructure, and operate consistently across the data center, the edge, and any cloud. I urge to take a look at vmware.com/go/multicloud. You know my opinions on multi cloud by now, but there's a lot of stuff in here that works on any cloud. But don't take it from me thats: VMware.com/go/multicloud and my thanks to them again for sponsoring my ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Laurie Barth, but no one really knows that's her last name. In fact, @laurieontech is how most people think of her. She's a senior software engineer at a company called Netflix, which primarily streams movies and gives conference talks—in the before times—about how you're doing it wrong.She also creates a lot of content and educates the technology industry as an instructor at Egghead. She's a member of the TC39 Educator's Committee, and of course, is a technical blogger. Laurie, thank you for suffering the slings and arrows I'm no doubt going to be hurtling your way.Laurie: This is the most fun I've had all week. [laugh].Corey: Well, it's a pandemic on, so presumably that isn't that high of a bar for the pony to stumble over.Laurie: Yeah, unfortunately not. I think that's maybe the problem.Corey: So, you're someone that I have been aware of for an awfully long time. You're always sort of omnipresent in conversations. You are someone who has a lot of great opinions that present well; you talk about an awful lot of things that are germane to my interests, educating the next generation of engineers, for example. And of course, you recently started at Netflix, at which point, well, if you're not familiar with what Netflix is doing in the cloud, have you ever even talked to an AWS employee for more than 35 seconds because they'll go reference Netflix for a variety of wonderful reasons, both based on technical excellence, as well as because AWS is so bad at telling the story of what you can build out of their popsicle stick service collection that they just punt to companies like Netflix to demonstrate what you could do. So, you're sort of this omnipresent force on Twitter, but we've never really had a conversation before, so it was long past time to rectify this.Laurie: I mean, you sent me two cents. So… I think that was pretty—[laugh].Corey: That's what the Tip Jar is for. You just wind up hurling very small amounts of money at people along with insulting comments, and it's a new form of social media. That is the micro-transaction way.Laurie: I quite enjoyed that. So, for context, I was one of the first people to be part of the A/B testing for Tip Jar on Twitter and Corey was the first person to send me money with, of course, a very on-brand Corey message, which there's a screenshot of on Twitter somewhere. And a couple of people followed, but it was great fun. And I think that's the first time we had ever directly interacted in a message or something, other than obviously, in threads and that sort of thing.Corey: Yeah, that's an interesting point to lead into here because I'm also in the A/B test for Tip Jar and I've largely turned it off, except for when I'm doing something very small and very focused, usually aimed at some sort of charitable benefit or whatnot, and even then, it's not the right way to do it. And it's weird, there was a time I absolutely would have turned it on, but it doesn't seem right for me to do it now and that's partially due to the fact that—first, I don't need tips from the audience in order to sustain myself. I'm not that kind of creator. I have a company that solves very expensive problems for large companies and that works out really well for, you know, keeping the lights on here.I'm not trying to disparage creators in any way, folks who are in a position of needing that to cover their lifestyle a variety of different ways. And even if they're well beyond that, I don't begrudge that to them at all. I mean, from a very selfish capitalist perspective, I don't want you to feel that you've paid your debt to me for entertaining you by sending me $5. I want you to repay that debt by signing a five-figure consulting agreement.Laurie: Yeah, those aren't really the same thing, are they?Corey: No, no. Turns out signing authority caps out at different places for different folks.Laurie: [laugh].Corey: Who knew? But it was a fun experiment. I'm glad that they're doing it. I'm glad to see Twitter coming out of its stasis for a long time and trying new things, even if we don't like some of them.Laurie: Well, they have this whole Super Follows thing now, and I got waitlisted for it the other day because they said they accepted too many people, whatever that means. I think—Corey: Same here.Laurie: Yeah, I think a bunch of us got that. And I'm interested, my sense is it's sort of like a Patreon hosted in Twitter sort of thing. And I've never had a Patreon; I have a mailing list that I made based on an April Fool's joke this past year where I made an entire signup workflow for the pre-order of my new book, The Art of the Subtle Subtweet. I was very pleased with this joke.This was, like, very elaborate: I had a whole website, I had a signup flow, and I now have a mailing list which I've done nothing with. So, I have all of these things, but that's not really been my—there's too many things to do as a content creator, and so I've sort of not explored most of those other avenues. And so, Super Follows, I was like, “This could be interesting. I could try doing it,” but, you know, alas, they don't want me to. So, [laugh] I don't know that it matters.Corey: It's an interesting problem, too, because at the start of the pandemic, I had a third of the Twitter followers that I do as of the time of this recording, which is something like 63,000. When I started what I do, five years ago, and I had just left a company which was highly regulated, so, “Don't tweet,” was basically their social media policy, it was a, okay, I had something like 2000 followers at the time. I was—it had taken me seven years to get there, let's be very clear here. And since then, my following has exploded, and yours has as well. You have, I think the last time we checked, was it something like 30,000 and change?Laurie: Yeah, something like that.Corey: And it changes the way that people interact with you. This is one of those things that there aren't that many people that we can have this kind of honest conversation with because let's be very clear here, for folks who have not established an audience like that it sounds absolutely like it's either a humblebrag—which I'm not intending that to come across that way—or it's one of those, “Wish I had those problems.” And in some ways, yeah, it's a weird problem to have, and it's also not a sympathetic problem to have, but something that has been very clear to me has been that the way that people perceive me and the way that they interact with me has shifted significantly as my Twitter notoriety has increased.Laurie: Yeah.Corey: I'm curious about how you have experienced that?Laurie: Yeah, so I'm half your size and especially in the front-end universe, there's plenty of people with between 100,000 to, you know, I think Dan Abramov is at, like, 400,000 at this point. Like—Corey: Oh yeah, my Twitter following would explode if I either knew JavaScript or was funny. Either one would just absolutely kick me into the stratosphere, but we work with what we've got.Laurie: I either don't know JavaScript or I'm not funny or maybe both because apparently not. But yeah, there's these huge, huge, huge, huge scales, and I'm sure by many people's judgment, pretty, pretty large. But comparing to other people in my ecosystem, maybe not so much. And I didn't understand it until I was living it. I actually had the opportunity to meet Emily Freeman at a conference in DC, probably… three years ago now, when I had less than a thousand followers. And I thought getting my first hundred was a big deal; I thought getting my first 500—and it is. Don't get me wrong. Those things are very cool milestones. And I [crosstalk 00:07:18]—Corey: I still celebrate the milestones, but I do it less publicly now.Laurie: Yeah, exactly. And I had a whole conversation with her and she gave me some really, really helpful advice: sort of, don't look at your follower count as it goes back and forth, five people, six people you'll think people are unfollowing you; they're probably not. It doesn't matter. And recognize that the larger you get, the more careful you have to be, and try to keep me sane before I was ever there. And it's all sort of come true.There's two things that have stuck out to me, I think, during the pandemic, especially. One is I can write the most nonsensical, silly tweet and people will like it because they think it says something insightful whether it does or it doesn't. They're projecting onto the tweet something funnier, or more relevant than the reason I wrote it in the first place. Which, okay, that's cool. I'm not as smart as you're giving me credit for, but sure.The other thing which is the downside to that is, everyone assumes that if they're having a conversation with me, they're having a conversation with me. So one-on-one, back and forth. That's not untrue, but I'm having a similar conversation in parallel with—if it's a popular tweet—a hundred other people at the same time. And what that means is, if you're being a little bit of a jerk, and a little bit troll-y, you're not being a little bit troll-y, you're being a little bit troll-y times the a hundred other little bit troll-y people. And so my reaction to you is not going to be necessarily equivalent to what you say, and that can get me in trouble. But there's no mental, emotional spectrum that was designed to work with the scale of social media.Corey: Oh, absolutely not. In fact, let's do an experiment now, while we're having this conversation. I am making a tweet as we speak. “Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.” It's not particularly insightful.It's not particularly deep, and before the end of this episode, we will check and see what that does in terms of engagement just because you can say anything, and there's some folks who will wind up automatically engaging. And again, that's fine; everyone engages with Twitter in a bunch of different ways. For me, what's been very odd is I have talked to a couple of very large companies who I talk about on Twitter from time to time, and it turns out that they are reluctant to engage with me directly on Twitter or promote anything that I do or do retweets of me, not because of me, but because of an element of the audience, in some cases, of what people will chime in and say because it doesn't align with corporate brands and a bunch of different perspectives. Which, again, I have some sympathy for this; it's hard to deal with folks who are now suddenly given a soapbox and a platform that rewards clever insults better than it does meaningful heartfelt content, and that is something that I think everyone is still struggling with. Let's also be very clear here. I'm a white dude in tech; my failure mode is a board seat and a book deal.Laurie: [laugh].Corey: When I post something about Git, for example—which I did a few days ago—and someone responds explaining the joke back to me, my response to them was, “Thank you for explaining Git to me.” And that was all I said, and it's led to a mini-pile-on of this person because it's like—Laurie: Oh, yeah.Corey: “Don't you know who Corey is?” Yet I have seen the same dynamic happen with women tweeting about these things and it's not just one response that explains Git; it's all of them. And when people say—like, Abby Fuller, for example—Laurie: Yep.Corey: —will tweet about password manager challenges and how annoying some of them are, and it leads to a cavalcade of people suggesting password managers to her. That is not why she's tweeting it, and she explicitly says, “I do not want you to recommend password managers to me.” And people continue to do it. And I don't for the life of me understand what goes on in some people's heads.Laurie: Yeah. I mean, I've watched that happen countless times. I think the frustration—there's a point at which no matter how big of a following you have, you just want to be yourself. I think most people who get to that amount of interaction have been theirself most of the way, along the way. Or they're just being totally fake for the sense of growth hacking, in which case, okay, you do you.But most people, I think, are being themselves because it's exhausting to spend that much time on a platform and pretend to be someone else or be fake the whole time. So, I'm pretty much myself. And that means that sometimes when someone's being a total jerk, I really want to treat them and be like, “Yeah, you suck.” But the problem is when I say that, I'm siccing 30,000 other people on them to defend me. And I can't do that.So instead, I've become sort of famous for subtweeting. And I will wait a couple of days to do it, or I will totally change the framing of the situation so I can get out my same sort of frustration, and annoyance, and just needing to blow off steam, or venting, or whatever it is and not point at the person. Because if I point at the person, I discovered very, very quickly that there's a whole crowd of people willing to take them down. If they're being blatantly terrible, I will do it. There is a line here.Someone recommending that I use a different tool because I decided to bitch about TypeScript, for example, or telling me I don't understand TypeScript, okay, fine. Someone's saying, “You only have followers because you're a pretty girl.” Yeah, you're an asshole. No, I'm not protecting you. Also, by the way, I tweeted two minutes ago, do all tweets deserve a ‘like,' question mark, and we'll see how much that—Corey: Yeah.Laurie: —interaction gets. [laugh].Corey: I'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out. It's a responsibility, which sounds odd, but if I complain about a company, what I'm fundamentally doing is I have the potential to be calling out an airstrike on top of them. And not every customer service failure deserves that. I deleted all of my tweets prior to 2015 a while back. And the reason most people delete tweets, or the reason we hear about most people deleting tweets, there was nothing especially problematic in my tweets other than jokes that were mean in different ways and punching down in ways that I didn't realize were at the time.It was not full of slurs; it was just things that weren't particularly great. But that wasn't the real reason I did it. The honest reason was is that I looked at my early tweets and they were cringy beyond belief. I was shilling for the company I worked for in many respects, and there were swaths which I didn't engage with Twitter, and the only time I really did is I was out there complaining about various customer service failures, so it's just this neverending stream of complaints about different companies that had wronged me in trivial ways.Laurie: [laugh].Corey: And, I don't know at some point if somebody is going to build something where it's easy to explore early tweets of a particular account. I don't want them to do that and then figure out that this is how you get started being me. It's like, I succeeded in spite of that nonsense, not because of it. And it's not something good that I want to put out into the world.Laurie: Yeah. So, I have, I think, only once added a company when I was having a customer service issue on a weekend, and we were in really dire straits. And I was just like, “Okay, it's a weekend. I'm going to at.” And I've never gotten a response so fast.And my husband looked at me and he was like, “Wait, what?” And I'd done this with an ol—I have this really ancient Twitter account that I got rid of because I was mostly just screaming about politics [laugh] and I didn't want—I think I got @laurieontech in like, 2016, 2017—and I'd done that before. I'd been like, “Hey, you know”—I'm making something up—“At Spirit Airlines”—they seem like an easy one to—I've never flown Spirit, so—but I mean, I never got a response. And so there—realizing that you have power from a brand perspective is really weird.But I almost want to go back to your point when you were talking about when you worked for a company and you had your account and, you know, they don't want you to tweet, basically. Or companies are not going to tweet at you now, in your current state. I think it's really hard to be a company on the internet in tech because you're either going to make a joke that lands well, or everyone's going to think that you're shilling for yourself. There's no in-between and so—this is a hot take and I might get in trouble for that—companies have realized that the best way to get around that is to hire people who have their own personal names and get your company name associated with them. And all of a sudden, it looks less disingenuous.Corey: And even that's a problem because I've talked to companies who are hiring folks with large followings for DevRel style jobs, and—I've interviewed for a few of those, once upon a time, about midway through when I was debating do I shut this consulting thing down and get a real job again because that's always how I sort of assumed it would be for the first couple years. And then, “No, I'm going to get serious about it.” And I took on a business partner and got very serious, and here we are. But talking to folks, my question was, in the interview process, I would talk to my prospective manager and ask questions of the form, “So, what is your plan for when we eventually part ways? How are you structuring that?”And they looked at me like that was a bizarre question. It's, understand that, done right, my personal brand will, in some areas and some corners, eclipse that of the company, so as soon as I leave for whatever reason, the question is going to be, “Were you mistreated? Did someone wrong you there? We'll drag them just preemptively on the off chance.” And you need to have a plan in place to mitigate some of that and have a structured exit for what that is going to look like. And they looked at me like I was coming from a different planet. But I still think I'm right.Laurie: You are right. And, oh goodness, I've seen this in a lot of different places. I mean, I have left companies in the past and I have had to decide how I was going to position that publicly. And how much I was going to say or not say, how complimentary I was going to be or not because the thing is, when you leave a place, you're not just leaving the company, you're also leaving your colleagues. And what does that mean for their experience?You're gone. You don't want to be saying, “Hey, this place is horrible, while your really close friends you were working with on Friday are still there.” At the same time, companies don't think about this from the DevRel perspective and, I want to be very clear, I have friends who work in DevRel who are themselves brands. They are all fantastic people; they work incredibly hard; this is not a knock on them in any way—Corey: It looks easy from the outside. I want to be very clear on that.Laurie: [laugh]. It's not easy. All this stuff is great, but part of the reason I decided to go to a place like Netflix is because I knew my brand had no bearing on them and so I could be myself and just do my own thing and they weren't going to try and leverage me, or there was no hit to them based on who I was. Granted, did I go after someone the other day, sort of, in deep in a thread for being a jerk and did they try and at Netflix engineering and say, “Is this the kind of person you want representing your brand?” And at egghead.io, “Is this the kind of person wanting your brand?” Yeah, they did.So, that part's still a problem, but that's a problem for me rather than being a problem for my company, if I decide that, you know, I don't always want to—like, no one cares if I talk about the new Marvel show. No one cares. I like Marvel; I'm allowed to like Marvel. I also love the stuff on Netflix, right, but when you're at a company that isn't like that, honestly, when I was at Gatsby, I couldn't be tweeting about Next or Nuxt, or even Vue for that matter, because it just doesn't look right. Because my brand had more of an impact in that smaller pond than it does now.Corey: People have said, “Oh, well, what if AWS acquires you so you can work on their behalf?” Or, “What if Google acquires you?” Or something like that, and it's—what people don't get is that my persona—again, to be clear, I am genuine on Twitter. I emphasize aspects of my personality, but I don't get up there and say things I don't necessarily believe. We'll get back to that in a minute.But what I do as a small company, making fun of trillion-dollar publicly traded entities is funny and it works, but if suddenly I work at a different publicly-traded company, it just looks like I work for my employer, bagging on a competitor. And even if I'm speaking in ‘an opinions my own' sense, which is apparently Amazon's corporate motto, based on how often I see it in their employee's Twitter bios—Laurie: Oh, yeah. [laugh].Corey: —is going to be perceived as me smacking at a competitor regardless. Further, I will not be the person that craps on my own employer on Twitter because that sends terrible signal in many respects. I won't even crap on previous employers who frankly kind of deserve it because when you do that, it does not look good to people who are not familiar with the situation, and no one's as familiar with it as you are. It just looks like sour grapes, regardless of how legitimate your grievance was. To be very clear, I'm not saying don't call out abuse when you encounter it—Laurie: Yeah.Corey: —that's fine. I'm not going down that path—Laurie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.Corey: —let's clear here. But, “Yeah, they have a terrible management culture, and they don't promote internally, and I hate those people,” it just makes you look bad, and it doesn't help anything.Laurie: Yeah. I had always made a commitment to never talk about a former employer in any way that was easily identifiable. I've changed that policy a little bit. There's a story I shared a couple of times where my CEO didn't want to give me a pay raise because he thought it was my parents' and boyfriend at the time's job to take care of me financially. Like, that kind of stuff, I will say publicly.No one's going to know who it is; you'd have to go back and figure it out and, like, you don't have enough context so how would you know? But it's stuff like that, that I'm like, okay. I don't want to hide stories like that because that's not protecting anybody.Corey: No, I'm not talking about covering up for misbehavior. I'm talking run-of-the-mill just bad management, poor company culture, terrible technical decisions, et cetera. Yeah, if it's like, yeah, they sexually harassed every woman on the team, out. Yeah, tell that story. I—thank you, I should absolutely clarify my stance. Heaven forbid I get letters.Laurie: But yeah, it's the problem is that you can't—and everyone has a slightly different experience with this, but from what I've seen, it doesn't matter if you say their management is shitty and they didn't promote versus there was a ton of sexual harassment. If you're one person saying it—if it's the Blizzard situation where there's tons of receipts and it's made it into national media, then that's a little bit different. But if you're one person saying it about one company, people are going to think it's sour grapes. And unfortunately, it doesn't reflect on the company; it reflects on you. So, unless there's a sort of like, where there's smoke, there's fire situation where a bunch of people are doing it at once, you have to weigh stuff really carefully.Especially because your next employer doesn't want you out there talking about your previous employer because then their fear is what are you going to say about them when you leave? There's lots of nuance and it gets—if you are screaming into the void—we're screaming into the cloud here—Corey: Ahhhh. Yes.Laurie: Ahhhh. [laugh]. If you're screaming into the void, it doesn't matter if you're you. And I mean… [sigh] I hate saying, “If you're me,” right? That's such an obnoxious statement to make, but at 30,000, they probably care.Corey: There are inflection points. I started seeing—around 40,000 is when I started seeing a couple of brands reaching out to me to, “Hey, you want to promote some nonsense.” And I've never sold any social media promotion for anything. I sell sponsorships for newsletters, this podcast, I do webinars stuff, I do paid speaking engagements. My Twitter account is mine.It is not the company's and that is by design. It's me; that's what it comes down to. That does lead to challenges in some arenas because I talk to companies about their AWS bill and these companies do not have much of a sense of humor about spending tens of millions of dollars, in some cases a month, on a cloud provider. These are serious problems and they're a little worried, in some cases, the first time we have conversations that they're dealing with some kind of internet clown.Laurie: [laugh].Corey: And often with talking to folks to convince them to come on this podcast, it's, “Look, this is not me dragging you and making you look awful because if I do that, I'll never get another guest again.” And if I do it in the context of a consulting project it's, “That was a hilarious entertaining intro here. Get out and never come back.” It is not useful. People have generally taken a risk personally on bringing the Duckbill Group in.If we can't deliver and cannot present professionally, then they have some serious damage control to do, for a variety of excellent reasons. And we've never put someone in that position and we won't. I talked to brands who sponsor all of these things, and the ones that are the best sponsors intrinsically understand it, that [unintelligible 00:23:56] once I start getting after some serious maleficence style stuff—no one is going to not do business with you because I make fun of your company on Twitter—Laurie: Yeah.Corey: —but an awful lot of people are going to hear about you for the first time and advertising in the newsletter and having fun with that, or I talk about you in the podcast ads, it winds up being engaging in many cases depending how far I can stretch it. And it works. I did a tour at re:Invent last year—virtual re:Invent—where I led a Twitch tour for an hour around the virtual expo hall into a bunch of different sponsored virtual booths and made fun of them all, and I got thank you notes from the sponsors because that led to a bunch of leads because people cared about the—oh, people paying attention because Amazon did a crap job of advertising the Sponsor Expo. And it was something that people could grasp, and have fun with, and get attention for. It's top-of-funnel work and that's fine, but I just don't do it with the boring stodgy stuff. I like to have fun with it. Bring a personality or don't bother.Laurie: Yeah. And you can't take yourself too seriously. I'm not the stand-up comedian that you are. I like to fashion myself as a little bit funny but not that funny. I'm not a stand-up comedian and I don't have a consultancy to represent anymore.There was a time where I did; I was not the owner of it but I worked there. So, now it's sort of, I represent me, which is good in the way that you say it. Like, it's clearly you. It's not Duckbill Group; it's your account. But at the same time, it freaks me out when in real life people know that it's me.So, in my brain, Twitter is the internet and I have my actual real day-to-day life, and never the two shall cross. [laugh]. And my—one of my—I had this popular tweet where I talked about all the companies I'd been rejected from, and it turned into a bit of a retweet situation with everyone sharing all these companies that they'd been rejected from. And the screenshots made it onto LinkedIn and made it into my cousin's feed, and she sent me a text message with a screenshot. And she's like, “You're on my LinkedIn.”And I was like, “No, no, this is not okay. This is not”—I have my little circle of the world and it should not expand beyond that. I go to a conference, even a tech conference, and someone's like, “Oh, you're blue shirt, crossed arms.” I'm like, “No, this is not okay.” Like, [laugh] I only exist on the internet.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: My business partner was, a week or so ago, at a cafe and someone came by and saw his Last Week in AWS sticker on his laptop. It's like, “Oh, you read that, too? I love Corey's work.” Turns out the guy works at IBM Cloud. And yes, you should hear the air quotes around the word, ‘cloud' in there. But still.Laurie: [laugh].Corey: It's—I haven't been out in the world since I really started focusing on this, and now it's—like, I wear a mask so it's fine, but I'm starting to wonder, am I going to get stopped on the street when I go back into the universe out there? And it's weird because you can't really unring that bell?Laurie: No.Corey: It's a weird transition, and on some level, it's constraining in some ways. Like, at some point of celebrity—I don't know if I'm there yet or not—there's going to become a day where I can't just unload on a waiter for crappy service at a restaurant—not that that's how I—Laurie: I mean, you shouldn't do that anyway. [laugh].Corey: —operate anyway—without it potentially going viral, and, “Oh, he's a jerk when you actually get to know him.” And everyone has this idea of you and this impression of who you are, based upon the curated selection of what it is you put out into the world. I've tried to be as true to life as I can on this. In conversations, I generally don't drop nothing but one-liners, but I think I'm pretty true to life as far as how I present on the internet versus how I present in person.Laurie: More than I expected, to be honest.Corey: Yeah. That also does surprise people. Like, they think there's some sort of writing team behind me. And it's, if you look at the timing of some of my tweets where I will respond with a witty, snarky thing in less than a minute, it's, I wish I had a writing team with that kind of latency. I think that'd be terrific.Laurie: I always assumed it was you, but I figured there was like a persona that you turn on and turn off and I realize now that it's an always on sort of thing. [laugh].Corey: One thing I did experiment with for a little bit was having my team write tweets for my approval to promote episodes of this podcast, for example, because I am not the sort of person going to sit there and build the thing out correctly and schedule at the right time. And I have people who can do things like that, but it's the sort of thing that led to a situation of never getting much engagement and those tweets never did very well, so why even bother? We have a dedicated Twitter feed for that stuff and everyone's happier. Especially since I don't have to share access to this thing through anyone. Speaking of, let's see her tweets did.Laurie: Oh, yeah. Okay, hold on. How'd we do? All right. So, I have, “Do all tweets deserve a like?” Was posted 19 minutes ago. It has 12 comments, 1 retweet, and 22 likes.Corey: My, “Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.” Was posted at a similar timeframe has 10 likes and 3 replies. Someone said that, “Organic, eh? Probably better than nylon.” Someone said, “Is this an NDA subtweet?” And someone said—with a GIF of Leonardo DiCaprio, saying, “You had my curiosity. Now, you have my attention.” That's it. So yeah, not exactly a smash-it-out-of-the-park success.Laurie: Yeah, but I got to say, “Do all tweets deserve a like?” Is pretty mundane. For that amount of response.Corey: You included a question mark, which is an open invitation—Laurie: Oh, right.Corey: —to the internet randos to engage, so there is—Laurie: Oh, yeah.Corey: —a potential there.Laurie: I going to have to retweet this and say that I'm not grifting and it was done for this podcast [laugh] and they should all listen to it. [laugh].Corey: Oh, of course. By all means. I am thrilled in any point to wind up helping people learn more things about the environment.Laurie: [laugh].Corey: I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I have to honestly say that I wasn't quite sure what was coming, but of all the things you could have asked me to predict about this episode, not talking about how Netflix works in cloud was absolutely not one of them. So wow, are you sure you work at Netflix? That's one of those odd moment things.Laurie: Yeah, I got to say I'm pretty abstracted from the cloud these days, so that—maybe that means that I don't know enough to talk about it intelligently.Corey: I would argue that extends to lots of folks. To be clear, Netflix has a lot of really neat thing.Laurie: That never stopped anyone before? Bu-dum-shh.Corey: Oh, yeah. It's like, I like to get up there, sometimes I'll talk about how we do things at Netflix, periodically, on conference stages even though I've never worked there, but people don't correct me because why not? I'm a white man in tech. And I say something, of course, it's right. It's just—if you don't want them to get right, you just don't have enough context. That's the rule.Laurie: Corey, I'm going to need you to take the last minute or so of this episode, and please explain your feelings on how to optimize your use of JavaScript on the front-end, please.Corey: Oh, wonderful; you pay smart people who know what they're doing to look deep into the JavaScript side of it—Laurie: [laugh].Corey: —because honestly, every time I've tried to get into JavaScript, I go back at it and I feel even more foolish than when I started. Async stuff just completely blows my mind, especially by default. How in God's flat earth is that supposed to work? And—Laurie: You work in cloud. [laugh].Corey: It doesn't make sense to me, in a clear sense. At least with Python, which is the—I would say it's the language I know best, but it's not. Crappy Python is. And I can at least do things top to bottom and it works about like I would expect unless explicitly instructed otherwise. But the JavaScript world is just a big question mark and doesn't work the way that I would expect to. To be clear, the failure here is entirely mine.Laurie: ‘JavaScript is a big question mark and doesn't work the way I would expect it to' should be JavaScript's tagline.Corey: That's fair because I have this ridiculous belief from the Dark Ages—because I spent 20 years as a systems admin—that computer behavior should be deterministic and if there's one thing that we learned about the internet, it's not.Laurie: Yeah, no. There's that whole user thing, and then that whole browser thing, and then that whole device thing. It's a whole bunch of non-deterministic behaviors. Just stick to the cloud, and there's one consumer and one producer, and you're good.Corey: One thing I will say—in the moment of pure seriousness here—is that if I were looking at getting into tech today, the first language I would learn would be JavaScript. It is clearly the way of the future. It is a first-class citizen on every platform out there. It is the lingua franca of, effectively, everyone coming out of a boot camp. And it is going to be the way that computers are built.I say this not from a position of being an advocate for JavaScript. I don't know it; I can't stand it personally, but it is clear as day to me that is the direction the world is moving in, so if you're debating what language to pick up, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me not to recommend JavaScript as the first one.Laurie: And do you want me to be my serious self, and you're going to laugh at what I'm about to say?Corey: Hit me with it.Laurie: If you're looking to get into technology because of boot camps and some other things, we have an oversaturation of newbie front-end developers and they're all way more talented than I was at that point in my career, and yet there aren't nearly the front-door opportunities for being a—I hate the term junior, but newbie. And where there is the opportunity, it's cloud. And security.Corey: I will absolutely point out further that I understand this runs the risk of being ‘boomer gives career advice'—Laurie: Yeah, right? [laugh].Corey: —but let's be clear here. I think that if you are going to enter the front-end space—and this does speak to cloud and it speaks to security as well—distinguish slash differentiate yourself by having another discipline or area of intense interest that you can bring into it as well because when you have a company that's looking to hire from a sea of new boot camp grads that generally tend to look more or less identical from a resume perspective, the one that will stand out is the one that can bring in another discipline and especially if that niche winds up aligning with a company's business, or at least an intense interest in something that is directly germane to the company, that will distinguish you. And everyone has something like that; no one is one-dimensional. So, find the thing that is the in-between space, and focus on finding jobs in companies that do those things. And if you're a mid-career switcher, let me be very clear here.It is not a go back to entry-level roles-style story. I've never understood that philosophy. I do have steps from thing I'm doing now toward thing I want to go to. Well, is there a job I can find to do next that blends the two of them together in different ways, and then once I'm there, then make a further transition. And of course, find someone who's—in any career, in any path you're on, find someone who is five years ahead of you, and ask them for their advice.“What would you do in my shoes?” If the answer is, “Go to a boot camp,” okay. Talk to a few people who've done this and make sure it validates it. If it's, “Get a degree,” okay, but make sure you're not doing it because you think that's what you're supposed to do. You'll very rarely find me recommending six figures of debt in order to advance your career, but there are occasions.By and large, they'll find someone who's been there before who knows what's going on, you can have a conversation with and give them context appropriate to your situation and then see what's right. We turned this into last-minute career advice and I'm not even—I don't even [unintelligible 00:34:45] have a problem with that.Laurie: Well, I was about to say that it's 2020. 21 2020—wow, I—you knew what I meant—it's 2021, and I guess I need to start taking my half-steps towards becoming a Lego master before I retire. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yes, the Lego world is vast and deep, and they have gotten no worse since I was a child at separating parents from money to buy LEGO sets. My daughter's four and his way into them already. So, it's great. It's something that we can bond over.Laurie: If I ever have kids, we're going to need separate sets because they're not touching mine. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, I'm looking at stuff like, oh, well, I'd love to buy that awesome big Star Destroyer—wait, it's how much money? And it turns into this—yeah. It's wow, on some level, I never ever thought I would find a hobby that was more expensive than my mechanical keyboards hobby, but here we are.Laurie: Oh, yeah, I blame Cassidy Williams for getting me into that one, too. I have a shiny one beneath me. And that's my first.Corey: She is a treasure and a delight.Laurie: She's a treasure, a delight, and dangerous if you want to save money because she will draw you into the mechanical keyboards, and there's just, there's no resisting. I tried for a very long time. I failed, ultimately.Corey: One of these days, she and I are going to have a keyboard-off at some point, once it's no longer a deadly risk to do so. It'll be fun.Laurie: Do it.Corey: I'm looking forward to it. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.Laurie: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.Corey: Of course. Laurie Barth, senior software engineer at Netflix, also instructor at Egghead, also a member of the TC39 Educator Committee, and prolific blogger. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a horrifying comment explaining anything we just talked about, back to us.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Frank and Tim dive into Marvel's latest big-screen adventure: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Cheers! Beers of the Week La Résolution Belgian Style Dark Beer Wormtown Table Talk Blueberry Lemon Pie Ale

In this weeks episode Jordan and Kelley go over, "The Great Gatsby." This week they talk about how awful Tom is, how Myrtle does not hit city girl status, a disturbing aspect of Gatsby's parties, and Jordan's theory about Nick. Listen to us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/so-you-think-youre-iconic/id1528462095 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1sV5jnnsnI7mcCk3pA7yVT?si=rD_0rUScQS2y2arFbbJZPg&dl_branch=1 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sytyipodcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/SYTYIPODCAST --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Preston So Preston So is an expert in both omnichannel strategy and voice design, as well as a number of other digital business and design practices. As communications channels proliferate and the variety of digital devices grows, we need strategies to give our customers and users a consistent experience, no matter where they are or how they are consuming our content. Preston weaves together elements of omnichannel strategy, voice usability, and other modern digital practices into an "immersive content strategy" that can help you craft content programs that address these new challenges. We talked about: his new book, Voice Content and Usability, his product work at Oracle, and Decoupled Days, an event he organizes "immersive content strategy" - a way to deal with both channel explosion and the need for a central content repository to execute your omnichannel strategy the proliferation of devices and the implications for omnichannel strategy the importance of providing a consistent content experience across all devices and channels a pragmatic approach to single-sourcing content that arose in a project he did with the US state of Georgia the difference in mental models between content that is presented on a website vs. content that is delivered via a voice interface the implications of omnichannel delivery for your information architecture the benefits to analytics, benchmarking, and metrics of sourcing all of your content from a single CMS the use of "dialogue traversal testing" (DTT) in conversational design one of the huge differences between web and voice navigation: the lack of menus in voice interfaces the importance of a comprehensive omnichannel content audit that evaluates all of the possible contexts in which your content may be presented, and that also considers both the discoverability and the legibility of the content in each the generic navigational benefits of voice interfaces over web interfaces the opportunity that voice interfaces give us to return to more natural human communications methods the importance of "letting our users see themselves in the voice interfaces that we build and the content that we deliver to them" Preston's bio Preston So (he/him) is a product architect and strategist, digital experience futurist, innovation lead, designer/developer advocate, three-time SXSW speaker, and author of Voice Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2021), Gatsby: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly, 2021), and Decoupled Drupal in Practice (Apress, 2018). He has been a programmer since 1999, a web developer and designer since 2001, a creative professional since 2004, a CMS architect since 2007, and a voice designer since 2016. A product leader at Oracle, Preston has led product, design, engineering, and innovation teams since 2015 at Acquia, Time Inc., and Gatsby. Preston is an editor at A List Apart, a columnist at CMSWire, and a contributor to Smashing Magazine and has delivered keynotes around the world in three languages. He is based in New York City, where he can often be found immersing himself in languages that are endangered or underserved. Follow Preston online Preston.So Twitter LinkedIn email: preston dot so atsign oracle dot com Video Here's the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTYy_kWVwpU Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 105. Our customers and users need content in many different settings, and they consume it on a constantly growing number of devices. Omnichannel strategy is the new business method for dealing with this growth of communications channels and content-consumption modes. Preston So is an expert in both omnichannel strategy and in voice interaction design, one of the new user experience practices that has arisen to address these content strategy challenges. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone.

Charity Wright is a Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst at Recorded Future who specializes in Chinese threats and disinformation. Charity is a Super Mario-loving extrovert who utilizes her research and inferencing skills in both of her full-time jobs; threat analyst and mom. Charity is a Chinese Linguist who often spends her workdays scrolling through social media searching for trolls and Chinese disinformation/propaganda. In this episode, Charity joins the No Password Required team to talk about how she came to be a linguist in the U.S. military, possibilities of where China will go in the future, and why curiosity has been one of the most essential aspects of her career. Ernie, Clabby, and Pablo talk about Clabby's “Yahoo! news rule” and the channels they use to stay informed in the ever-changing cyber industry. In the Positively Cyber segment, Pablo introduces the sophisticated, yet mysterious, Jay Gatsby as the Chief Financial Officer of our fictitious cybersecurity organization.

FORCE is a DJ from Berlin, Germany. He currently holds a residency at the Weekend club in Berlin and has performed all over the world in prestigious clubs like the Gatsby, Gibson, and Mondoo. Follow FORCE on Instagram: @dj_force89 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

My guest today is Brett Bernstein the CEO and Founder of Gatsby. They make micro-influencer marketing easier than ever by automatically connecting influencer data seamlessly with your existing marketing stack including Shopify, Klaviyo, Attentive, Gorgias, Justuno, Privy, Omnisend, and more.You can run influencer campaigns with the tools you already have. Gatsby adds the influencer insights and collaboration tracking to marketing automation tools you already have, so you can get more done!What You Will Learn TodayWhy you should gather Instagram insights from your customers and potential customers.Why you should consider working with micro-influencers over traditional influencers.The benefits of starting now to get your customer and potential customers Instagram handle.How to turn your Klaviyo account into an influencer marketing platform.Links And Resources MentionedGatsbyGatsby Shopify AppGatsby Tech PartnersGatsby Success Case Studies20% off the Gatsby Basics, Business or Plus Plans for your first year - Thanks Brett!KlaviyoOmnisendGorgiasAttentiveThis episode is brought to you by Attentive, the most comprehensive text message marketing solution for modern Shopify brands. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This time out, technical difficulties leaves the crew down a member, but that doesn't stop us.Patrick McLean on RECON, the Reality Escape Convention [1:56]Blake Weil on Alterra's Gala [20:40]Noah Nelson on Gatsby: An Immersive Illumination [33:55]Hosted by Noah Nelson Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. In lieu of my usual re-runs filling out August, I'm doing something different: a full-reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, presented in three parts.This is part 2. Music for Gatsby was composed and performed by Mary Lattimore. Find and buy her music at marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com The cover art is from Jen Corace. See more of Jen's work at jencorace.com. Back with the third and final part on August 19th. Back with new episodes of The Memory Palace in September.

Noey & Eric bring videographer, Gatsby the Artist, out from behind the camera. Let's just say things took an awkward turn when his "bestie" showed up... @noeygnome @ericbernalcomedy

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. In lieu of my usual re-runs filling out August, I'm doing something different: a full-reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, presented in three parts.This is part 2. Music for Gatsby was composed and performed by Mary Lattimore. Find and buy her music at marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com The cover art is from Jen Corace. See more of Jen's work at jencorace.com. Back with the third and final part on August 19th. Back with new episodes of The Memory Palace in September.

It's August, which means it's hot as all hell in Japan. Mike and Matt share some tips on how to keep cool at the conbini covering everything from body wipes to cold noodles. The Chiki Wars cool off with just one new boneless fried chicken product out. And the new item scoreboard shows record low numbers. The Big Three product development teams may be giving in to the heat. Items to keep cool Gatsby cold wipes Hiyashi chuka noodles Grape frappe Pocari Sweat jelly Pocari Sweat slurry Garigarikun Coolish Chiki Wars Lemon Karaage-kun Winners and Losers Matt's Winner Mike's Winner Matt's Loser Mike's Loser Other ways to enjoy and support the conbini Watch us on YouTube Follow us on Twitter Buy us a chiki

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. In lieu of my usual re-runs filling out August, I'm doing something different: a full-reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, presented in three parts. Music for Gatsby was composed and performed by Mary Lattimore. Find and buy her music at marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com The cover art is from Jen Corace. See more of Jen's work at jencorace.com. Back with part two on August 12th. 

GraphQL is an open source, declarative language that you can use to source data from your APIs. In a backend landscape with disparate APIs that all need to be tied together, GraphQL is like a middle layer interface between them. Josh Oppenheim, a software engineer and one of our guests today, adds to this definition. “GraphQL allows you to declaratively say, ‘Hey, I want this data to look like this,' and expect what you get back. So every time that call is made, it's always going to come back as that structure. You can also choose and add fields onto that.”GraphQL benefitsGraphQL has a wealth of features that can make developer's lives easier, including: Reduced under- and over-fetching of dataMakes it easier to write APIsSelf-documentingChoosing GraphQL or RESTGraphQL and REST both fetch data, but there are differences between the two. “REST is a bit different from GraphQL,” Josh explains, “REST allows you to grab one resource by ID, but you don't get to decide what fields they are going to be, to put them together, or describe your data.” So how do you know when to use REST vs. GraphQL? Josh says,“Generally speaking, I think they both have their place.” He goes on to describe the differences in how each works. “REST has an over-fetching problem, right? So GraphQL, I make one call, I describe my data, I get it back. REST, I make X amount of calls, I get my data, I structure it myself, I put it where it needs to go, and I discard the rest. So using REST in this example means wasted data, time, and developer effort.”Our other guest, Developer Advocate Lucas Santos, says that REST and GraphQL are complementary, not at odds. He often uses GraphQL for a very specific use case. “In my opinion, logs are the best use case for GraphQL.”Learn Graph QL While you might be tempted to jump in and implement GraphQL right away, our guests advise a different approach. GraphQL has many online “playgrounds” where you can experience GraphQL, with no consequences. Josh says, “Learn the queries first before you try to implement it.”Try GraphQL on Platform.sh with Gatsby or StrapiPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby has dazzled readers for nearly a century. This year, 96 years after publication, The Great Gatsby has entered the public domain. This hour, we talk with Gatsby expert Maureen Corrigan about the novel's legacy.The Great Gatsby entering the public domain has opened a world of possibilities for adaptations and retellings. Author Nghi Vo's novel The Chosen and the Beautiful, puts a unique spin on F. Scott Fitzgerald's roaring 20s classic by reimagining the Gatsby story from the perspective of Jordan Baker, who she writes as a queer Vietnamese-American adoptee. We talk with Vo about the book. We want to hear from you: Are you a Gatsby fan? GUESTS: Maureen Corrigan - Book critic for NPR's Fresh Air and English professor at Georgetown Universtity; she's the author of So We Read On: So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures Nghi Vo - Author of The Chosen and The Beautiful Cat Pastor contributed to this show that originally aired June 4, 2021. Support the show: http://wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby has dazzled readers for nearly a century. This year, 96 years after publication, The Great Gatsby has entered the public domain. This hour, we talk with Gatsby expert Maureen Corrigan about the novel's legacy.The Great Gatsby entering the public domain has opened a world of possibilities for adaptations and retellings. Author Nghi Vo's novel The Chosen and the Beautiful, puts a unique spin on F. Scott Fitzgerald's roaring 20s classic by reimagining the Gatsby story from the perspective of Jordan Baker, who she writes as a queer Vietnamese-American adoptee. We talk with Vo about the book. We want to hear from you: Are you a Gatsby fan? GUESTS: Maureen Corrigan - Book critic for NPR's Fresh Air and English professor at Georgetown Universtity; she's the author of So We Read On: So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures Nghi Vo - Author of The Chosen and The Beautiful Cat Pastor contributed to this show that originally aired June 4, 2021. Support the show: http://wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's another Potluck! In this episode, Scott and Wes answer your questions about Svelte, bleeding-edge tech, best Git processes, Create React App, screencast software, FitBit API, government jobs, Syntax sponsors, and more! .TECH Domains - Sponsor .TECH is taking the tech industry by storm. A domain that shows the world what you are all about! If you're looking for a domain name for your startup, portfolio, or your own project like we did with uses.tech, check out .tech Domains. Syntax listeners can snap their .TECH Domains at 80% off on five-year registration by visiting go.tech/syntaxistech and using the coupon code “syntax5”. LogRocket - Sponsor LogRocket lets you replay what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. It's an exception tracker, a session re-player and a performance monitor. Get 14 days free at logrocket.com/syntax. Mux - Sponsor Mux Video is an API-first platform that makes it easy for any developer to build beautiful video. Powered by data and designed by video experts, your video will work perfectly on every device, every time. Mux Video handles storage, encoding, and delivery so you can focus on building your product. Live streaming is just as easy and Mux will scale with you as you grow, whether you're serving a few dozen streams or a few million. Visit mux.com/syntax. Show Notes 03:15 - I was wondering what you guys think about using the latest of Svelte (svelte-next) in serious projects? Does the improved devEx makes up for the small (but growing) community and lack of libraries? Do you think svelte-next is here to stay or maybe we will get a revamp that breaks backward compatibility in a couple of years, like svelte 2 -> svelte 3? 8:48 - Git question: My process is often that I want to be able to use my last project as a starting point for my next project, with the new project having absolutely no connection or relationship to the old project. What steps can I take to completely sever any ties to the old project? Bonus question: In the new project I would love to eliminate all commits from the old project and start the new project having just one commit, the initial commit with all the code from the old project. 11:05 - Is CRA still useful for building actual production-level web apps these days? People seem to be reaching for Next or Gatsby most of the time, and I feel CRA is mainly used for actually learning React/building personal small websites. Your thoughts? Also, for normal CSR, I feel it is better to use something like Next, and fetch data inside your component (eg: for a dashboard) rather than building one with CRA. Am I wrong? 19:40 - What are your favorite screencast tools? (Linux? Mac? Windows?) 25:53 - Is it a bad trait for beginners to “give up” easily? By that, I mean instead of taking the time to think of the answer to a problem, they would instead rely on googling the solution and try to understand how it worked afterward. 27:55 - In pursuit of better health I want to track my weight daily using a smart digital scale. The idea is to automate the process of logging my own weight (e.g. stepping on the scale will update my Apple Health and any other integrations I have). After some searching around I landed on the Aria Air (mostly because I like the design and it has the coolest name). One small problem - it does not sync with Apple Health as it is a product from FitBit. They have an API so I'm thinking about running a serverless function daily, around 8 a.m. after I weigh in, to hit the FitBit API, get the data and push it to Apple Health. This way I can stay in the Apple eco-system whilst happily getting this nice, aesthetic digital scale. Any thoughts on how you would personally implement something like this? P.S. My girlfriend thinks I'm crazy, but I know the tinkerer inside Wes will love this. 30:26 - I work for the government with good pay and benefits and love where I work, but I feel like I'm missing out. Working in government we are not always working on the bleeding edge of technology. I do try and learn on my own, but it's hard sometimes if I don't put it into practice. I do peek at other job openings and get excited about the tech stack and the things they're doing. I'm just afraid if I leave I won't have the stability and benefits I would get from working in government. Any tips or thoughts would be appreciated. 34:24 - Unpopular opinion: Authentication isn't that hard, but authorization is! What systems have you built to handle when users with specific permissions are allowed (or disallowed) to take actions within your system? What advice would you give to other developers developing permissions-based APIs, assuming their users can have 5-10 different levels of permissions? 40:21 - What are your thoughts on ReScript as an alternative to TypeScript? 44:43 - How come you guys moved to two sponsors on a Hasty and three on a Tasty? Not that it's a big deal - was just curious of it was to keep up with costs or just because you could and then you'd make more? Either way, the show is awesome and really appreciate your opinions on everything! 48:01 - Have you tried Angular 12? I'd think you'd be pleasantly surprised if you gave it a chance! 52:20 - I have to copy and paste hundreds of products with six rows of details from a spreadsheet into a web interface because there is no API or CSV upload function for this program. Any recommendation on how to automate data entry into web inputs, navigate pages / click buttons, and toggle between applications? BTW, I scored my first web developer job and have to give you guys credit for steering me in the right direction. Links Svelte Create React App Next.js Vercel iShowU Descript Screenflow Aria Air FitBit Apple Health https://www.gov.uk/ Keystone rescript TypeScript Angular Syntax 359: Hasty Treat - Making a Vaccine Bot with JavaScript Puppeteer uses.tech wes.tech ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Scott: SvelteKit Wes: Wyze Sprinkler Controller Shameless Plugs Scott: Svelte Components Course - Sign up for the year and save 25%! Wes: All Courses - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax' for $10 off! Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

On this week's episode, we're talking ~dreams~ (after we discuss Emily's inappropriate summer attire). Come hear all about our dreams, recurring and otherwise, before we get into the book talk. Speaking of books, we're discussing a thriller, folklore, a heavy romcom, and a Gatsby retelling, Thank you for listening!! Join our fan club at: https://www.patreon.com/booksandthecitypod. Grab your BATC merch (and stay tuned for a summer addition): https://www.booksandthecitypod.com/merch. Browse and shop all the books we've discussed on this episode and past episodes at bookshop.org/shop/booksandthecity. Subscribe to our newsletter on our website, and send us an email at booksandthecitypod@gmail.com-------------> Libby just read: Honey Girl by Morgan Jerkins (14:48-25:49) https://www.harpercollins.com/products/honey-girl-morgan-rogers?variant=39308755796002 Up next for Libby: Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters Becky just read: The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo (25:50-36:43) https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250784780 Up next for Becky: The Happiest Girl in the World by Alena Dillon Emily just read: The Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (36:44-46:34) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/577066/gods-of-jade-and-shadow-by-silvia-moreno-garcia/ Up next for Emily: Certain Dark Things Raybearer by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Kayla just read: The Stranger in the Mirror by Liv Constantine (46:35-52:56) https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-stranger-in-the-mirror-liv-constantine?variant=32257225031714 Up next for Kayla: The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin Music by EpidemicSound, logo art by @niczollos, all opinions our own.

Penúltima Cultureta Gran Reserva de la temporada, con Rubén Amón, Rosa Belmonte, JF León, Guillermo Altares e Isabel Vázquez. Rescatamos dos asuntos culturetas que no cupieron durante el año y que teníamos muchas ganas de tratar: la novela 'El gran Gatsby' (cuyos derechos han decaído) y la película 'La reina de África', de la que se cumplen 70 años. Además, saludamos el nuevo cargo de Miquel Iceta con una pregunta: ¿para qué sirve un ministro de Cultura? Por último, Isabel recomienda la serie 'Ted Lasso'.

Today on the show Monty and Tiff are joined by artist Gil Gatsby, and they break down his great album Bar Bully. Gil is an extremely talented rapper who gives insight into every track on this project, and also tells us what inspires him as he continues his prolific career. 

In an episode far far away, one DM rose up with evil intentions and took away mad points from the other party members. Today...that party gets their revenge! So get petty and join the party as we explore bde god energy, kip the boy, make cute little vests, throw a door kicking party, build morale through demolition, appreciate moms doing bits, feed Books, be the bad influence, befriend all the dads, bring math onto the show, get in a semicolon argument, give Katelynn a chance, determine that she went to gerund, find the comedian loophole, give credit to Gatsby, pitch Doggy Go Night Night, get mesmerized by a chicken waving in the air, take the dogs with us thanks to You're the Baby Now Dog, teach you how to ethically lie, create the Fred Flinstone stroller, go to a post pandemy day camp, read the DM's mind, become a decent human beam, suffer from resting sad face, love learning from fails, celebrate our girl gang, eat crochet kids, make some important prize store traditions, pick the correct grabby hand, and scream about tools.  Join in on the adventure by sending your quests to unnatural20s@gmail.com Check out our bonus content on Patreon Proud Member of the Scavengers Network

Girl, We Need to Talk about the Roaring 20s More specifically, one of our most beloved books from that timeframe, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Did ya'll read it in High School? Did ya fall in love like Gatsby and Daisy--but yet unlike them, the love affair lasted long past your twenties?  Join us as we do a deep dive into the novel AND the 2013 Baz Luhrmann film-  We go over some great lines, major themes, like the fleeting days of youth and the conceivable but yet unachievable American Dream. How the actors were perfectly cast in their roles and why you just can't help but love Gatsby! Aleta gives us a great overview of the soundtrack and some of the controversy and mixed reviews that came along with it.  So come along, have a listen and then maybe check out the book and movie! Click the link in our bio OR Search for "Girl, We Need to Talk" IF you like what you hear, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe #thegreatgatsby #leoDicaprio #bazluhrmann #JayZ #alittlepartyneverkillednobody #careymulligan #tobeymaguire #FScottFitzgerald #classics #classicnovel #podcast #newpodcast #gatsby #gatsbywhatgatsby #roaring20s

In this episode of the Friday Island Podcast the boys take a drive to the West Egg for The Great Gatsby. What changes were made between the book and the film? Did you know Neil's got a Gatsby tattoo? Did you know about Baz Luhrmann's extensive research into F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel? Do you know why exactly Luhrmann chose modern music for this 1920's setting? So hop on into our bright yellow Rolls-Royce and get ready to party like it's 1920!

Tonight's sleep story is the continuation of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. You can find Chapter 1 in episode 14 of the podcast. Published in 1925, the novel depicts narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. In this episode, Nick meets Tom's mistress Myrtle for the first time and spends a hazy, drunken afternoon in their apartment.If you like this episode, please follow the podcast in your favourite podcast app. Also, share with any family or friends that might have trouble drifting off to sleep. Goodnight and Sweet Dreams.... We are also now on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JustSleepPod  and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justsleeppod/

In this episode Matt and Mike discuss why React is still the #1 framework, despite all the praise and admiration that Mike has dished out for Vue in recent episodes. The duo talk about the advantages of Facebook maintaining React, why it has such a big community, JSX, the huge developer ecosystem (ie next.js, Gatsby, etc), and much more!  Show Notes You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

Tonight, we'll read an excerpt from “The Great Gatsby,” a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, the novel depicts narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.The novel was inspired by youthful romance and riotous parties the author had recently experienced.“The Great Gatsby” was a commercial failure that many critics thought was sub-par to Fitzgerald's previous work. Now, it is widely considered to be a literary masterwork and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.— read by 'N' —Privacy Policy and California Privacy Notice.

Back by popular demand! Hit the streets of Tokyo with the Squad (plus Todd) for the third installment of Book Squad Games. We finally got to inhabit our true supernatural forms as we played Urban Shadows from Magpie Games! Join us on an adventure to save the supernatural beings of Tokyo from a mysterious hunter. Tune in on July 12th for our next Bookpisode about the queer, magical Gatsby retelling "The Chosen and the Beautiful" by Nghi Vo. Then, Grady Hendrix will join us on July 26th to talk about his new novel, "The Final Girl Support Group," and discuss the entire Scream movie franchise with us! You don't wanna miss this one! TOC::30 – Intro to Urban Shadows4:55 – Game setup and intro questions20:00 – Let's begin the game! 2:03:50 – Episode wrap-up/What's up next? Urban Shadows 2e Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magpiegames/urban-shadows-second-edition

Resorts World Las Vegas is now officially open. Vegas Revealed got access inside the new resort casino BEFORE it opened to the public. Watch the video here. Sean and Dayna have a handful of interviews in this podcast! Great information and details about Gatsby's Cocktail Lounge, Fred Segal (which will sell items from the Kardashian Kloset,) Pepper retail store, and the luxurious and colorful Rolls Royce display. Sean and Dayna also talk to the Las Vegas company, Trustfall Production Group, who is in charge of all the incredible LED screens you will see throughout the 4.3 billion dollar property. Sean and Dayna also answer listener questions from social media. They found all the answers! Order your Las Vegas merchandise HERE. Vegas Revealed design available, and much more. Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=UCMULZYF325PL)

We're finishing The Great Gatsby today! This book was so much fun and I truly believe that Gatsby would have had a better life without Daisy in it. Also, what Gatsby retirement fanfiction do you fully support? I want to hear those headcanons! → Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Barelybookish → Merch: https://barelybookish.threadless.com/ → Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barelybookish/ → TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@barelybookish?lang=en → Twitter: https://twitter.com/barelybookish → Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/barelybookish/profile → Barely Book Club: https://discord.gg/RpznKHq   About Us: Barely Bookish is a podcast about all classic literature and modern literature alike. These are books that you've likely been told you should've read by now or that you may have read in school. Rachel, along with a guest, reads a new-to-her book while discussing the plot, movies, retellings, and so much more. If you're a literature nerd or if you just enjoy a bookish podcast, welcome! If you're using this instead of reading the books, I get it and I don't judge. Find out more about the podcast over at https://barelybookish.com/.   → Book Recommendations: https://bookshop.org/shop/BarelyBookish

In this episode, Ben interviews Kyle Mathews, Founder and CTO of Gatsby. They cover v3, Functions, Gatsby Cloud, and Gatsby's goals for the future (including faster builds). Links https://www.gatsbyjs.com (https://www.gatsbyjs.com) https://twitter.com/kylemathews (https://twitter.com/kylemathews) https://www.gatsbyjs.com/products/cloud (https://www.gatsbyjs.com/products/cloud) https://www.gatsbyjs.com/products/concierge (https://www.gatsbyjs.com/products/concierge) https://blog.logrocket.com/whats-new-in-gatsby-3-0 (https://blog.logrocket.com/whats-new-in-gatsby-3-0) https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/reference/functions (https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/reference/functions) https://www.gatsbyjs.com/careers (https://www.gatsbyjs.com/careers) Contact us https://podrocket.logrocket.com/contact-us (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/contact-us) @PodRocketpod (https://twitter.com/PodRocketpod) What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today (https://logrocket.com/signup/?pdr). Special Guest: Kyle Mathews.

Adam chats with Nghi Vo about their new book The Chosen and the Beautiful, their respective experiences with Gatsby, and Adam expresses his angst over naming his dog Holden a decade ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Composer, pianist, and vocalist Samora Pinderhughes writes urgent, poetic and immersive music that responds to the times and fits neatly into no genre, all while putting his heart right on the table. His large-scale projects frequently marry art song, protest song, and raw honesty. San Francisco-born Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes (named for the political leader in Mozambique, Samora Machel) is committed to liberation and art as a foundational part of movement-building, on a similar path of artists from Fela Kuti to Nina Simone, Pete Seeger, and Miriam Makeba. Samora hears music everywhere, and his work often weaves poetry, music, and theatre together as he addresses big ideas like prison reform, racial capitalism, and police brutality in his lyrical and direct radical songwriting. He studied composition at Juilliard, and also worked with the late pianist and educator Frank Kimbrough, who emphasized to him that the “inner voices are where the tension is at,” which could be applied to both piano arrangements as well as his art. Pinderhughes gravitates toward “take my heart and put it on the table” artists like Thom Yorke and Bjork, as he is also exploring the sonority of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X's speaking voices and what the voice can reveal. For him, singing was an accident, because he loved to write. Lately, he has written for string quartet (Grief) and incorporated recorded speech as he recast “The Star-Spangled Banner”, in addition to poignant and beautiful raw songs like “Process” and “No PLCE.” Samora Pinderhughes joins us remotely to perform recent work from his Black Spring EP, along with new work from his song cycle “Grief.” Set list: “Stare Straight Ahead,” “Gatsby,” “KillWar” "Stare Straight Ahead":  Pinderhughes is currently pursuing his PHD in Creative Practice and Critical Iniquiry with Vijay Iyer at Harvard and recently presented “Grief” – a Cycle of Abolitionist songs from Carnegie Hall's Voices of Hope, along with a recent appearance on The Kennedy Center's #ArtsAcrossAmerica exploring Music for Abolition. - Caryn Havlik "Gatsby": "KillWar": 

In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about SvelteKit — what it is and why you might want to use it. Sanity - Sponsor Sanity.io is a real-time headless CMS with a fully customizable Content Studio built in React. Get a Sanity powered site up and running in minutes at sanity.io/create. Get an awesome supercharged free developer plan on sanity.io/syntax. LogRocket - Sponsor LogRocket lets you replay what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. It's an exception tracker, a session re-player and a performance monitor. Get 14 days free at logrocket.com/syntax. Show Notes 03:28 - What is it? Total platform for building Svelte apps Built in Vite.js Includes all of the Vite goodness but it hides behind the scenes for the most part Host anywhere 05:16 - Is it CSR, SSR, SSG, WTF?! All of the above. Uses adapters to control the output: kit: { // hydrate the element in src/app.html target: '#svelte', adapter: adapter() } 09:45 - What you get out of the box File-based routing API routes Layouts and layout resets Fancy file titles [slug] __layout Code splitting & preloading PostCSS TypeScript support 17:03 - Neat small things Glob import https://github.com/svelte-add/svelte-add Links SvelteKit Next.js Gatsby.js Sapper tailwindcss @chriscoyier Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

Brett is the CEO & Bob is the Director of Sales at Gatsby. Gatsby helps brands capture, engage and grow their social customers at scale.In this episode we talk about identifying and automating micro-influencer marketing.Brett also talks about the origin story of Gatsby and how at the time he started the business, there was a duopoly that existed in terms of customer acquisition. Brands were largely (and sometimes solely) dependent on Facebook/Instagram and Google.He wanted to help brands create scale outside just paid advertising and help brands who did influencer marketing manually, automate those efforts.You can find Gatsby here: https://www.gatsby.ai/You can email them hello @ gatsby.ai

The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - Episode1 - Meet The Writer That Created The Fantasy Genre!      Hi, I'm Christy Shriver- and we're here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us.    I'm Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast.  This week we begin our adventure into the life and work of one of the greatest fantasy writers of all time- J.R.R Tolkien, the creator of The HOBBIT, the book we are going to read, but also the author of The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion.  Christy, those are his most important works, but they weren't his only works.    True- Tolkien was not first and foremost a novelist.  In fact, he really wasn't first and foremost a writer at all, and he didn't fit into the mold of the writers of his day.  He was a contemporary of Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald and that whole slew of modern writers, but he was nothing like them and not a part of their world at all.  He is the very antithesis of the moto “make it new”.- As Pounds famously stated modern writers should be.  And in many ways, he hasn't been accepted by the literary establishment either of his day or even afterwards.  Harold Bloom,, who I read a lot and have a lot of his commentaries, found him moralizing (which I don't see at all).  Many found and find his writing awkward and unprogressive- and in those ways,  they weren't wrong.  He can be awkward and he's deliberately REGRESSIVE not progressive.  He was doing a totally different thing- ironically- but an ancient one, not a new one- he was myth making.  You could sa, he was making something new, just not in the same way as Pound and his contemporaries.  He had no interest in doing that.    It does seem a little ironic that the establishment wanted him to make it NEW in the exact same way as everyone else.  Some might suggest that is the very opposite of new.    Well, it's incredibly ironic- and not without adversity.  CS Lewis, Tolkein's lifelong friend, had a terrible antagonism towards TS Eliot, and they have often been called nemeses- Tolkein stayed out of that fray, as far as I know.  But he was writing and defining what imagination was so differently than Fitzgerald and Eliot and all those other writers.  I'm not sure- although they both were using words to communicate, their writings should be compared at all.  So, let me compare them…    Ha! More irony….Are we going down that road again?    Well, ironically-we are NOT going down that road again.  In the modern world, and by that I mean that post ww1 world, psychology was so important.  It played such an important role in how writers were writing and what they were trying to write about.  Think about Prufrock or  Gatsby- there is this deliberate style of manipulating language with puns and metaphors and synechoche and most importantly irony- but these are all semantics= they are playing with the words. Tolkien did absolutely NONE of that.  Where as everything is a symbol in Gatsby-  Nothing is a symbol in Lord of the Rings.  Nothing is allegory, which is why I don't understand why Bloom finds him particularly moralizing.      Well, the characters do have moral codes and values.  And that is kind of a motif all the way through, especially when we start talking about Elves and things.    I guess that's what he means, but for Tolkien that is a function of the historical nature of myths – the expressions of values of a culture, not in creating personal themes to comment on modern life, modern man, how we should necessarily live our lives.  We are NOT supposed to be reflecting on ourselves when we read the Hobbit or any of his books.  We are supposed to be getting OUT of ourselves- out of “feelings” as my students say.  The stories are sheer fantasy.  In the preface to Lord of the Rings, he asserts very emphatically that the book has no symbolic meaning or message, no purpose other than to “hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times, maybe excite them or deeply move them.”    He goes on to say that he prefers “history true or feigned to allegory, the latter implies domination by the author, whereas history bestows freedom on the reader, since it represents accidents, real or imagined, as accidents, things that just happen to happen.”  And of course that is what we are going to have in the Hobbit- starting with an unexpected party.      From a historical sense, I can see why these books were so immediately successful during the time period Tolkien wrote them.  Despite the celebrations, the parties and parades that we see in all the photographs about the end ofWW1- that war left the world in a dark place.  It was  brutal.  There was a silence that characterized it- a deep quiet loss that fell over much of the world. People's hearts were broken, confused and anguished by the most destructive war the world had ever seen. Historian Paul Johnson has called the First World War “the disastrous epoch for mankind.” No one was untouched by death- that is not hyperbole; that is historical fact.    And that is so hard for people of my generation or younger to understand.  For many of us, not all of course, wars are things that happen far away to other people or people who volunteered to go as a career option with very little expectation of dying.  That was not that reality for Tolkien.  War was personal.  Christopher Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien's son said in a documentary I watched on his father that Tolkien was a jovial young man full of friends who all went to war.  He himself went to war in March of 1916, was involved in the Somme Offensive and came back to find that every single one of his former classmates, with one exception, was dead.    Well, that was the experience of the entire world.  In that offensive you mentioned the British casualty list was over 600,000 in just four months and here's another brutal reality- there was no ground gained- so basically- it was pretty much pointless death.    Of course, Tolkien's writings are about death- but not like Eliot's.  For Tolkein, the way out of despair and into delight of what he called the primary world was through the imagination and what he called the secondary world.  Another criticism of Tolkien and fantasy literature in general is that it is “escapist”.  The accusation is that you don't like your reality so you're going to live in an altered one- you deny reality by pretending it doesn't exist- you escape it.  This has always been my criticism of video game world, although I have to be honest and say, my criticism may be unfounded because I don't know enough about video game world from personal experience.  But Tolkien doesn't look at fantasy that way.  He says fantasy fiction doesn't provide escape as in the sense of a deserter of reality- but for the admirer, reader and creator of fantasy, the purpose of the fantasy is to resist domination or definition by one's current reality.  In other words, it keeps you from being consumed.  It empowers the reader to confront the challenges of the primary world.      It's an interesting but subtle distinction- escapism in the first sense is unhealthy and negative, but in the sense he is describing, he is creating a positive force of personal empowerment and coping.    Exactly, and a distinction he was not the first to make.  Lots of people have compared Tolkien to the engraver William Blake who we featured a little while back.  Blake also believed in a specific definition of imagination and tried to create in what Tolkien would call the primary world his visions of what he saw in his own secondary world- these were his engravings.  Blake thought the energy and courage to reinvent the world was the freest form of imagination.      So, Christy, since it's new book day, you know I want to get into the life and times of Tolkien himself, but since he basically did create a new sub-genre of fantasy- I think it would be helpful, at least for me, to define fantasy per se because I'm not sure I know if I could.    Fantasy literature is something we all are familiar with whether we use that term or not because there have been so many good and popular fantasy worlds that have come after Tolkein- not just books, movies too.  So many that we that we all love- Harry Potter, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean.  These are fantasies.  You might even could say Disney as a whole, really.  In some ways, even against Tolkien's insistence, lots of these are actually metaphorical, how can they not be.  But what marks them as fantasies is that they all have aspects of a supernatural world that cannot be our world.  They take us out of our world.  They have archetypal heroes- a lot of times the heroes are orphans, unlikely heroes.  They do things like go on quests. They encounter elements of the Supernatural- things that don't exist and could never exist in our world.  They often find wise counselors, they have traveling companions; they build relationships with wonderful people to travel with, they conquer evil foes.  Some of the modern ones DO have social commentary, although  Tolkien frowns on that sort of thing and insisted that was a corruption of the genre.  I want to read another famous Tolkien quote, and here he sounds very much like the stuffy professor I have him pegged as in my head, “I should like to say something here to the many opinions or guesses that I have received or have read concerning the motives and meaning of the tale.  The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of the readers, amuse them, delight them and at times maybe excited them or deeply move them….as for any inner meaning or message it has in the intention of the author none.  It is neither allegorical nor topical…I cordially dislke allegory in all of its manifestations.”        So, you're saying it's not an allegory nor does the story mean anything.  No symbols.    He is very firm in his continual insistence on that in spite of everyone trying to make something different of his work- it is NOT an allegory.  I think people just assume that since he's best friends with Lewis and Lewis' children's stories ARE allegorical than Tolkein's were too- he is not happy with that assumption.      Well, that and the fact that he was a deeply devoted man of faith.    Yes- that's true- but so was Eliot and people don't do that to him.  But anyway, I think that's a good Segway to get into his life story- at least up until the part where we meet Bilbo Baggins and then we will leave the primary world and enter into the secondary world.    Great plan- will we get past the title today, Christy, I know sometimes we don't.      Yes- the goal is to get through chapter 1, but we'll see how it goes.  You know we don't want to go past the metaphorical bell at the end of the period.    Ha!! And here I thought we weren't doing metaphors anymore.    Tolkien does not approve- that's for sure- and we quite literally are not doing bells anymore either.  If you are listening to this in real time, and if you are listening from the United States, this is the second week of June 2021, and most schools around here have finally gotten to summer break after the most notorious school year in our lifetime- Covid School.  Many students around the world didn't have real bells at all this year, but hopefully by the fall- or spring- depending on which side of the equator you live- that will be behind us.    We do sincerely hope and pray that is true.      John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892 in South Africa amazingly, where his father worked for the Bank of Africa.  The climate as well as the spiders really frightened Tolkien's young mother, Mabel, so they decided to return to England when little Ronald was just three years old.  His father was supposed to come back later on that year, but he contracted rheumatic fever and died in Africa.  So, Tolkien himself knew what it was like to have humble origins.  Mabel lived a little while with her parents but rented little cottages where she raised her two sons.  Probably the most important thing to come out of that time period, as far as we're concerned today is that Mabel converted to the Roman Catholic faith when JRR was only 8 years old.      Of course, you have to understand this was an unpopular decision for Mabel to make during this time period.  England was openly and virulently anti-Catholic during those years.  To be Catholic was to be Un-British in the minds of a lot of people.     Well, including her immediate family. They cut her off financially because of her refusal to denounce her Catholic faith.  Later in a letter, Tolkien said this about his mother,  She was a “gifted lady of great beauty and wit, greatly stricken by God with grief and suffering who died in youth (at 34) of a disease hastened by persecution of her faith.”  She died of diabetes, but the financial challenges and the stress of this rejection did not help.  Tolkien was only 12 years old when he and his brother Hilary became orphans.  Father Francis Morgan, their parish priest, became their legal guardian, took responsibility for them and raised them.      Of course, it's understandable that part of Tolkien's absolute commitment to the Catholic faith was in part a tribute to the commitment his mother showed.  It was his identity all of his life.  But more than that, the values instilled by his mother and Father Francis informed how he viewed the world.  The values of Tolkien are also the values of Middle Earth.    I guess you get to do that when you create your own world.  Changing subjects a little bit, I want to highlight Tolkien's love life- it's kind of sweet.  He fell in love with a girl named Edith who was also an orphan.  She was three years older and not a Catholic.  Father Francis did not approve of this relationship and forbade Tolkien to continue it or even communicate with Edith until he turned 21.  Dutiful sweet Tolkien obeyed his guardian and focused on his schooling.  His efforts were rewarded by gaining admission into Exeter College, Oxford.  He studied English language and literature. What we would call his junior year but five days after turning 21 he revisited Edith.  And after she converted to Roman Catholicism, they were formally engaged to be married.  Tolkien graduated in 1915, enlisted in the service, received a commission as a second lieutenant, went to training, and in March of 1916, he used his last military leave before going to France to marry Edith.  The Tolkien's were to have 4 children.      Well there you go- finally a happily ever after at least in his personal life.    He did have a happy personal life.  Although he was by no means a feminist and very much a man of that generation, they seem to have gotten on very well.  He also doted on his children.  He made stories for them, and not just The Hobbit- he wrote Christmas stories every year, letters from Santa and he went to a lot of effort, that we know of, to be a very present father.  It's nice.    So moving out of the personal and into the professional, when we see the career choices Tolkien made after the war, it makes sense that so much of his legacy has to do with names, and places, and history of places.  It was the driving focus of his life, but I think it's worth mentioning that the book that would eventually become The Silmarillion-in some sense- 60 years later after he died, he started during the war, even in the trenches but a big chunk of it while recovering from trench fever, in 1917.  The myths that are the world he created in all of his stories clearly were spinning in his head from early on and developed over the years really- kind of a sped up version of how myths actually develop.    No doubt- and next week, we will tell a bit of the story of the Silmarillion because it does play a big part in the Hobbit, although indirectly. After the war, Tolkien joined the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary, which I think is pretty cool, did well at that, but eventually became professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University where he stayed for 34 years.  Teaching was his passion, and of course I love that.  He was dedicated to research and writing and advancing students.  He graded lots of papers- something we know a little about.     To be sure.    And the truth be told, he might never have published anything were it not for his friends one being the famous CS Lewis who encouraged him both to write and publish.  In 1936, he allowed himself to be talked into submitting for publication a book he called There and Back Again, or The Hobbit.  It was a children's book so the publisher, Stanley Unwin, employed his ten year old son, Rayner to read it for. He paid him one shilling.  Garry, I've heard that term many times, but I don't know, to be honest, what a shilling is.      I know, most Americans don't, and when we study it, we get totally confused because a British pound is worth 20 shillings,  half a sovereign is worth 10 shillings, a crown is worth 5, a florin is worth two and there are 12 pennies in a shilling.    Goodness, how did people keep up with it.      Because it was money and in their best interest to do so.  The British used this system for centuries- it dates to the Roman Occupation.  But just as a reference, for young Rayner, he could buy a pack of gum for 1 penny- so for an entire shilling he could get 12 packs of gum.  Great compensation for his raving review of Tolkien's work.  I love his one paragraph critique where he said, now remember he's 10, the book “should appeal to all children between the ages of 5-9”.    So, in his case, he was too mature for the fantasy?    Maybe so.  But he was right.  It definitely appealed and more than just that crowd.  It sold well.  Unwin asked Tolkien to write a sequel, and he did.  But it would be another 12 years before we got to the Trilogy that turned him into an icon, The Lord of the Rings.      He had NO idea it would be a turning point in his life.  The story of how he even had the idea is mythical.  It was the summer of 1930- I watched of Tolkien telling the story.  He had just moved into a new house and he was grading a pile of student exams.    That sounds like work.    He did suggest it was terribly dull and mind numbing.  When he got to an exam where there was a blank page he got excited.  These are his words, “I had an enormous pile of exams…I remember picking up a paper and actually finding…there was one page…that was left  blank…So I scribbled on it, I can't think why. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”  And so it began….later on Tolkien decided he would go back went back and imagine what exactly a hobbit was.  .    Well, what is it.      Let's let Tolkien tell us.  Read for us his description from page 2.    I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded Dwarves. Hobbits have no beards. There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. They are inclined to be fat in the stomach; they dress in bright colours (chiefly green and yellow); wear no shoes, because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly); have long clever brown fingers, goodnatured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it). Now you know enough to go on with. As I was saying, the mother of this hobbit  of Bilbo Baggins, that is  was the fabulous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across The Water, the small river that ran at the foot of The Hill. It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbitlike about them,  and once in a while members of the Tookclan would go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up; but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses, though they were undoubtedly richer. Not that Belladonna Took ever had any adventures after she became Mrs. Bungo Baggins. Bungo, that was Bilbo's father, built the most luxurious hobbithole for her (and partly with her money) that was to be found either under The Hill or over The Hill or across The Water, and there they remained to the end of their days. Still it is probable that Bilbo, her only son, although he looked and behaved exactly like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father, got something a bit queer in his makeup from the Took side, something that only waited for a chance to come out. The chance never arrived, until Bilbo Baggins was grown up, being about fifty years old or so, and living in the beautiful hobbithole built by his father, which I have just described for you, until he had in fact apparently settled down immovably.   By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes (neatly brushed)  Gandalf came by.   And so we have gone in the hole into the ground and entered into Tolkien's glorious secondary world.  Let me explain a little bit more what that term means, for from what I know, that's an expression Tolkien made up.  For Tolkien the secondary word is a made up consistent, fictional world.  What he means by that is that the author creates the parameters and then respects those parameters.  There must be internal consistency or it can't be a real place in our minds. When we suspend our reality and enter into this secondary world, we must understand the rules of this new world and they can have a life of their own.  For example, in Star Wars, we can believe you can fly in an X-Wing Fighter and kill people with light sabers because those are consistent realities in that world.  We can also believe there is a force and it can make you levitate.  It makes sense according to the rules Lucas created when he created that secondary world.  In Tolkein's case as well as Lucas', the secondary world has its own geography, languages, timelines, genealogy and everything is interdependent.  It all makes sense in that imagined world.  In my copy of the book, before you even get to page one there are two maps and one of them has words written in Elvish that I can't even read because the letters aren't in a real alphabet in the primary world.    Is it true, because I've always heard this, that Tolkien made up his own languages.      It is absolutely true, and we'll talk more about this next week when we talk about the Silmarillion and the elves and the first and second ages and all the back story that goes on before the first hobbit, little Bilbo, ever shows up.  But what's so interesting, is that for Tolkien the languages came before the story. Tolkien LOVED languages and words and the history of words He spoke over 35 languages himself – several of them dead like Latin and Old Norse.  He really understood what languages were about.  So when he wrote Quenya or high elvish, which is just one of the dozens of languages Tolkien dreamed up for the inhabitants of Middle Earth- to be more specific Quenya is part of the Elvish language family which alone has over 15 languages and dialects- he wrote a complete language in the way that a language would be created.  He even invented a sign language for the dwarfs.  One time Tolkein actually said he wished the book wasn't even in English, he said, this, “I should have preferred to write in Elvish.”     WhatAnd how is that even possible?    Because he completely understood how languages evolve.  His languages, I will say, didn't have a complete vocabulary because they didn't need one.  There's no word for pepperoni pizza because he didn't need that word, but there would be a word for the things that he needed words for.  AND the words would make sense- their etymologies would align with each other.  Their phonetics were consistent.  He didn't just put any sounds together that he wanted to- they made sense within the language he was inventing.  This is what I mean, I don't speak Japanese, but I lived there for a year, so I can recognize Japanese when I hear it.  I know the sounds they make, how they fit together, and if someone were to say jibberish and call it Japanese, I would know immediately they were full of garbage.  He created languages that had unique cadences, grammatical patterns and words that were consistently connected to each other.  It's crazy.      And he did it for the sport of it?      It's incredible.  This is what he said, “The basic pleasure in the phonetic elements of a language and in the style of their patterns, and in then in the higher dimension, pleasure in the association of these word-forms with meanings, is of fundamental importance.  This pleasure is quite distinct from the practical knowlesge of a language, and not the same as an analytic understanding of its structure.  It is simpler, deeper-rooted and yet more immediate than the enjoyment of literature.     He loved words for their own sake- not for what they could do.      Exactly, and he learned them not to speak them.  I mentioned he spoke all those languages- that's probably not totally true.  He could read and write in all those languages- he may not have been a fluent speaker like we think of today.      I know we need to get back to Hobbits because that was my first question, but let me ask one more question about these languages- why make up so many?  Just because you can.    Partly maybe, Tolkien understand  language is intimately connected with culture.  He completely dismissed Esperanto- that universal make up language was supposed to facilitate communication between people.  Language has history and mythology and legends.  Names are stories.  “Memphis” is actually the Greek adaptation of “Men-nefer,” meaning “enduring and beautiful.” The Egyptian city was capital of ancient lower Egypt around 3000 BC. The Tennessee city was named for its relation to the river.  And so, for him- to create a secondary world, it just had to have all of that or it didn't exist at all.      And so where did the inspiration come from the Hobbit?    Hobbits are US.  They are identical to humans with whom we can identify., Hobbits are specifically Middle class British citizens of the early part of the 20st century who lived in the area.  They are English people coping in a world that is fantastical, challenging, far too big for them.  When we meet Bilbo Baggins he's doing what English do- drinking tea.  And he's very English in his tastes and attitudes not so much English of today, but the English of Tolkien's day.  In chapter one, the dwarfs are not impressed with him at all.  They see no value in him at first.  Gandalf insists they bring him so they won't have an unlucky traveling number and he claims he's a burglar, but every reader can tell that's not who he is.  He's running around as a good host. Offering to be at everyone's service.  What Tolkien represents for us in this first chapter is an entry point into the secondary world.  One way he does it is through the language.  Notice how Bilbo speaks.  “Don't wait to knock! Tea at Four!  What about a little light?”  He's speaking the way we speak in the real world.  But look how Gandalf speaks, he speaks with these archaic speech patterns that let us know, he's not from our world.  It's subtle, but it gives us a place to start.      We can also see the difference in the two worlds by the values.  Bilbo values respectability, hospitality, his appearance, his garden.  The dwarfs and Gandalf have these lofty values of combat, courage, things of heroes and legends.     And just like us, when Bilbo listens to them talk he gets caught up in the magic of it, the excitement of it.    Oh yes, his Took side.      Yes- because if you are reading a fantasy- you must by definition have a Took side- or you wouldn't be reading the tale.  But also, if you are reading at all, you likely have a part of you that is a Baggins.    There is a very famous letter by Tolkien where he said this, ““I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size).  I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats”.    Exactly, and just like Bilbo, we too are to be taken in- invited into this wonderful secondary world with beautiful landscapes, trolls and orcs, elves and dwarfs and of course- let's not forget     DRAGONS.      Oh no, we definitely cannot forget dragons.      For over the misty mountains cold to dungeons deep and caverns old  We must away ere break of day to seek the pale enchanted gold.    The dwarves of yore….read page 14    And next week, I guess that's where we'll go- into the caves and through the mountains looking for gold and adventure.  We hoped you enjoyed this first discussion of The Hobbit.  Next week, we'll begin our journey to the Misty Mountain, learn about elves and orcs and all the ages of Middle Earth.   

The summer of Gatsby begins with a comparison of the 1974 and 2013 film adaptations of one of the greatest American stories of all time, The Great Gatsby! Join Emma and Jack as they discuss Robert Redford, Leonardo DiCaprio, and all the hottest gossip in West and East Egg. Break out the flapper skirts and hit the speakeasy with us, this is sure to be one party you do not want to miss! Be sure to check us out onOur website: https://the-old-soul-movie-podcast.simplecast.com/FacebookTwitter: @oldsoulpodInstagram: @oldsoulmoviepodcast

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has dazzled readers for nearly a century. This year, 96 years after publication, The Great Gatsby has entered the public domain. This hour, we talk with Gatsby expert Maureen Corrigan about the novel’s legacy. The Great Gatsby entering the public domain has opened a world of possibilities for adaptations and retellings. Author Nghi Vo’s novel The Chosen and the Beautiful, puts a unique spin on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s roaring 20s classic by reimagining the Gatsby story from the perspective of Jordan Baker, who she writes as a queer Vietnamese-American adoptee. We talk with Vo about the book. We want to hear from you: Are you a Gatsby fan? GUESTS: Maureen Corrigan - Book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and English professor at Georgetown Universtity; she’s the author of So We Read On: So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures Nghi Vo - Author of The Chosen and The Beautiful Support the show: http://wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this GROUND SHAKING episode of H3 OFF THE RAILS Ethan and the boys get to work on demolishing all the hard work building the studio over the last few weeks as Ethan goes rogue on the Gatsby- we fool around with Love's new robot, try out the BTS McDonald's meal, and a whole lot more!

The first part of our new mini-series Road Trip to Long Island featuring tales of historic sites outside of New York City.  Many of you are quite familiar with Long Island; you might have grown up there or you may be a frequent visitor to its most famous recreational sites -- The Hamptons, Fire Island or Long Island wine country.  But the world is perhaps most familiar with Long Island thanks to the 1925 classic novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a tale of romantic yearning and social status during the Jazz Age -- set specifically in the year 1922, in the grand and opulent manor of its mysterious anti-hero Jay Gatsby.  A house so large and so full of luxury that it doesn't seem like it could even be real.  And yet hundreds of these types of mansions dotted the landscape of Long Island in the early 20th century, particular along the north shore. This area was known as the Gold Coast. In this episode, we present the origin of the Gold Coast and stories from its most prominent (and unusual) mega-mansions. Lifestyle of the (very old) rich and famous! PLUS: A road trip to Planting Fields Arboretum, the lavish grounds of the old W.R. Coe estate. Hidden rooms, bizarre murals and curious gardens! boweryboyshistory.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alan has never ever seen Jerseylicious. So what do we do? Force him to watch it of course! Alan has just finished season one, and has all the questions for Tray & J. What was it like filming in the off hours? What was real and what was scripted? What will it be like for Tracy to relive her glory days in the eyes of Alan? Keep your cornachello's close for this one! Become a VIP Baddie to join Alan on JerseyVicious, as he watches season 2 live, at patreon.com/badexamples! And support our sponsors! For more information visit HelloFresh at hellofresh.com/examples12, BestFiends at bestfiends.com, and Obsessed With The Best w/ Alex & Tina at dimlywit.com/obsessed. Remember to enter our show codes for your exclusive offers baddies! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices