In this episode, we discuss how you progress through your career as a developer. Do you pursue path of developer to senior developer to manager? Is this the only way to “level up” in your career? We challenge this in your journey as a developer and what it means to be a “T” shaped person and how leveling up is not all about the hard skills.
References
Soft Skills (book by John Sonmez)
8 Part Accessibility Blog Series (by Kris)
Let's Choose Kaizen Instead Of "The Rewrite" (talk by Brandon)
Over Mocking, Under Delivering (talk proposal by Toran)
Do you have feedback about the show? Want to hear more about a specific topic or say hello? Write us at [email protected] or follow us on Twitter @developfatigue
Download MP3 (48.35 MB)Transcript
Toran Billups - 00:07 - You're listening to Developing Fatigue. Today we're going to be talking about developer career paths on the show today. My man Kris Van Houten. What's up, dude
Kris Van Houten - 00:14 - Not Too much. Just chilling out here in Colorado still, uh, enjoying the weather while I still have it, uh, from the, uh, also introduce my good buddy from the Hollywood for a country music rock stars and Mr Brennan Williams. How you doing buddy
Brandon William - 00:30 - Hey Man, I'm doing great. It was a fantastic day here in Nashville. Seventy nine degrees. It was just gorgeous outside. Um, but we've got my other buddy here. Toran Billup
Toran Billups - 00:43 - yeah, we had some snow here. So I'm looking across at Brandon and little bit, but uh, you know, one day we'll actually get summer again. I just know it. So, uh, the topic today, it's, it's, uh, initially one about career paths and how different those look for different people. But one of the sticking points, I think we have to kick off his little prereq discussion about what is classically referred to as the junior developer, senior developer or as I like to think of any kind of early developer career. And the later developer career help us distinguish, how do you know when you're your crossing over Kris from junior to more senior ish
Kris Van Houten - 01:23 - Yeah. No, I think, I think that's a really good question because it tends to get really political very quick for a lot of people because, you know, some junior people think that their senior people and it just, it turns into a heated topic really fascinating. I've been on several discussion threads where moderators of slack have to get involved because it just gets out of control. But I think as we were kind of prepping for this episode, I, we were just thinking about it and talking about it and you know, for me I tend to have a lot of, lot of self doubt. Like I wrestled a lot with imposter syndrome as it's classically called and you know, on the particular team that I'm working on right now, you know, or the particular company I've always wrestled, like know, can I, can I call myself a senior developer yet
Kris Van Houten - 02:10 - Like, am I there? Is that like, am I that status? Uh, and so I've, I've always hesitated to do so. And it was actually a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting down with one of the managers, one of the teams that were discussing some challenges that we've been facing and he just came right out. He's like, Kris, like you are these senior developer on your team, you make the decision, it's your call and I'll back you up and your team will follow you. And you know, I just kind of thought about that for a second. Like, oh, like I, I, I guess I'm there. Okay. And then, you know, a couple of weeks later had a conversation with another manager who basically said the same exact thing. And so like, you know, managers across multiple teams were basically giving me that title as, as this the senior developer on my team and given me the to make those senior level developer, uh, decisions
Kris Van Houten - 03:03 - And so I think, you know, as we're talking about when it comes to car cells, you know, senior versus junior, whatever, I think it's kind of like, you know, if you come home from school one day and you tell your mom like, mom, I am cool or I'm popular, chances are you're probably not popular, you know, if it's a title, you're giving yourself a, you know, I think you should consider calling yourself whatever you want to call yourself a senior developer, if that's, if that's what you're striving for. Whatever somebody else, somebody else gives you that title and not just like your buddy who works at Starbucks, but like someone who's in a position of authority to say like, you are here, you are the senior developer, you are the person who leads your team in this area. And you know, as we're talking about this episode, we just decided like, oh, I think that's, that's a good way to determine where you're at personally. So yeah, I mean I think that that's how I define it
Toran Billups - 03:59 - Yeah. So beyond junior senior, what other roles are there as a developer? What is a career path, uh, one particular career path look like? And Brandon from your experience, you know, beyond, Oh, I just have a few more experience, years of experience than I did five years ago. Uh, are there other roles that you remember people having a different companies or that you're aspiring to have yourself
Brandon William - 04:27 - Yeah, there's a, there's this idea of two different paths for technologists. You can either be continue to grow in your knowledge of technology and getting better at your craft, becoming a craftsman or you can move into more of the, the leadership or the management side of things. Um, so a lot of times we hear about developers coding for awhile. They get so good that then they get promoted to just managing people instead of managing the systems. Um, but there's, I feel like there's starting to be more. People are starting to realize that there is this other alternative journey for programmers to just continue to get better at their craft and to continue on and become that master craftsman. Um, we think about if we, if we widen up our scope a little bit and think about electricians, uh, as an electrician, you come in and you apprentice, um, I believe it's for four years, you, you are an apprentice and it's like going to college, um, and you are apprenticing underneath a licensed journeyman and when you're a journeyman, then you can continue that journey of being a journeyman until you become the master journeyman
Brandon William - 05:48 - Um, and you just continue to get better at your craft where somebody gives you some, a conduit and you just take that piece of metal and take the crimping, the bending tool and you crimp that thing, just make the perfect 90 degree angle. And there's, there's no kinks in it. There's nothing. I mean, you're just that good because every single time you pick up that tool, you know exactly how much pressure to apply and how to, how to manipulate that conduit and that tool just right to get the exact angle that you're desiring. So, um, if we translate that back into technology, you just continue to learn the tools that you use. You continue to learn the different technologies, you continue to stay up to date with all the different techniques that are or are you just learn all the different techniques because I don't think that there's new techniques that are coming out, like there's, there's functional, there's OOO, OOP, um, and, and just kind of figuring out which, which one works best in each scenario, but you, you continue to develop your skills and become that master craftsman
Toran Billups - 06:50 - I like what you said there, Brandon, about the journey. The craftsmanship journey knows no age. Funny enough, I was talking to a friend of mine locally about, you know, I don't know this particular framework or library, uh, there's this new ecosystem that I'm unfamiliar with and feeling like if I don't know these things, I'm not going to be able to get hired and you're from these statements. I was sort of trying to draw out that programming is feeling like a young person's game. And he kind of laughed and said, no, Toran, life is a young person's game, but how do we avoid this idea of being aged out
Kris Van Houten - 07:30 - Yeah. I think if I could hop down on that one a little bit, I think about, you know, the company that I'm at, we have a few people who have been coding for 15, 20 plus years now. These guys are in their late forties, early fifties and you know, at previous companies I've worked with people who were in that same age range and you know, as I was sitting down and jotting down some notes for this episode, I was thinking like, you know, what problems are they solving that does that their level, like, you know, what are they being challenged with? And, and I noticed, you know, from what I see these guys doing, they're not sitting back trying to solve a CSS bug. They're not sitting back trying to figure out, you know, where's this, where's this, uh, issue within the, in the JavaScript
Kris Van Houten - 08:15 - Like they're solving really complex problems in areas of like performance, you know, how to, how to configure the system, how to, uh, manage data across large enterprise level architectures. And, uh, and so I'm thinking about, you know, at this point in time, um, at this point in time, you know, I feel really comfortable in a number of areas for and how I program and just so I am pretty confident in JavaScript and CSS and html and accessibility and all those things, but looking towards like if I want to keep programming, which I do, like I've seen myself as of a more of a craftsman than a leader. I want to, you know, continue to stretch myself and to solve more challenging problems so that, you know, 15, 20 years on the road I'm solving the same problems that these guys I look up to right now are solving and feel confident to do so
Kris Van Houten - 09:13 - And so I think that's one way to prevent yourself from aging out is to keep growing yourself
Toran Billups - 09:19 - Yeah. I wanted to get Brandon's take on staying sharp as well, but before I do, I wanted to mention that, uh, there's definitely some challenges for me as I've gotten older. I'm mostly more in trying to get more sleep, uh, as I'm older now and a lot of the early learning, you know, for me staying sharp many nights and weekends, staying up on something new and just sort of grinding additional hours and because that becomes harder as you get older because life happens, you have more dependencies and often more relationships. Uh, one of the things I thought that was interesting is like taking on work that will stretch you at your day job, uh, and that way you're sort of learning and new and interesting tack or new initiative problems, but you don't have to stay up till two in the morning to solve it. What about you Brandon? What do you think, man? How do you stay sharp
Brandon William - 10:11 - Great question. So, uh, I agree with what you just said. There Toran. I'm in technology. It feels like there's so many different things that you can learn. Uh, you know, on the one end, there's a down at the systems level, there's docker, but docker also applies to developers. Um, and what does, what does that look like and how do you orchestrate it? And then, then there's the newest js framework that's out there, and then then there's your back end technology, which one are you going to choose are going to keep up to date with Spring boot and all the new things that are coming out there. You're going to keep up with Django, with rails, with, um, come with a Wordpress, whatever your back technology is. They move at a rapid pace because there's so many people that are working on those open source tools, continuing to iterate on them
Brandon William - 10:56 - Um, I guess what I found for me works really well and, and I, I recommend other people is just to pick a couple of things and Toran really taught me this. Uh, he, he described that that craftsman, that master craftsmen to me, or now I can put words to it that master craftsman is a t shaped person, but that, that t shaped person has multiple depths to them. So they have multiple deep dives of that T. um, so that t just continues to get wider and wider, you know, for the trunk of that thing. So you know, a lot about, um, many are a little bit about a lot of things up at the top, but then you go down deep and a couple of different things. So I pick one thing and I, I go down deep and I learned that thing and I spent a couple of months really, um, or maybe even years learning that thing really well and then at that point it's just maintenance to keep going on that, to keep up to date. Once I've once learned that thing really well and then it can pick another thing and say, okay, now I'm going to learn this thing really well and I'm going to go down deep in this thing. And the more years of experience you have, the more time you have to build those deep, a foundational understanding of the, of the different technology or the different techniques or whatever it is. So you can become that really solid t shaped person
Kris Van Houten - 12:15 - Yeah, I think that's good. Yeah. I, I of, I mean I fully agree with everything you're saying. Just to kind of add to that, you know, I think that software development is really big, you know, there's so many different components to it and that's one thing I think makes it attracted to so many different people is because, you know, I know we've mentioned on other episodes, you know, I have friends who went and got degrees in molecular biology and then they went to software development. I have friends who dropped out of college. I dropped out of college or got kicked out of college and like I sell a modest, well, you know, I want to be here. Um, and I ended up diving into software development. You know, you don't need to have a Phd, uh, any don't need to have a GED really to become a software developer and it's
Kris Van Houten - 13:01 - And because that it's wide open to so many people and there's so many different things you can build with it and there's so many different areas that you can specialize that, like everybody can find a home here. I know it's kinda like that the happy story to hear, but it's like, are you into design cool? Like you can take a picture and turn it in or a designer someone gives you and learn how to turn that into a webpage or an application on do you care about people with various disabilities. Being able to use technology, like accessibility is a great area to, to learn and as a area that's, you know, needs a lot more people who care about it, you know, do you care about writing clean code, then there's a, there's a place for you here. And, and so it's like I always feel, and I know I talked a little, I'll quite a bit about like this pressure that I feel to constantly be learning new things, but I think at the same time in my heart, I know it's like if I just continued to learn about the areas that I care about, that I'm passionate about, that I'm excited to dig into, I will always find work because software development's big and we need a lot of people to solve our problems. And so, uh, yeah
Toran Billups - 14:08 - yeah. One area that I was going to hit on, we've been pretty hard skill focused. Obviously there's tons of different hard skills, ecosystems, languages you can learn, but we haven't talked a lot about the career trajectory or path for someone who sort of hits the technical bar, they have the aptitude and the problem solving down. Um, what about the soft skills, you know, can you learn soft skills, can you grow, can you get better at it over, you know, x years in your career and should you get better at it? Softball, wink, wink
Kris Van Houten - 14:40 - Yeah, man. I think there's, there's an entire book written by a guy named John Sonmez, a who wrote a book called Soft Skills and it was basically written for software developers to learn, you know, the base. It's almost, it's almost like, like a home EC class in a book for software developers. That's kind of how I think of it because he talks about managing your finances, managing your home, being fit, eating right, taking care of yourself, things that, you know, stereotypical last offer. Developers aren't great at a. and B also talks about like how to learn a new system and how to learn new languages and frameworks and all that stuff. And how to optimize your learning aptitude. So I definitely think that there's, you know, for the most part these are skills that can be learned, you know, some depending on your personality, easier or harder than others obviously
Kris Van Houten - 15:27 - But, but yeah, I think, uh, you know, soft skills go, go a long way. I've been talking to, uh, one of our developers who's actually been told he can't move up in the company right now because he doesn't communicate well enough and actually drives people away and like he's really wrestling with that. But I've been kind of encouraging me couraging him saying, Hey, you can get better at this then here's some tips and some tactics. Here's some things you can go through to get better at this one area because honestly, you're now standing developer, but if this is something that's legitimately holding you back, the let's figure it out. Um, but you know, even him, I believe that he can get better at his communication skills and, and become an excellent leader as he desires to move up the chain. So yeah
Toran Billups - 16:10 - Yeah. I think there's this fallacy, like when we were coming up, you know, I say we as in a generation of developers that started learning this about 10 years ago or so at 10:15 and that you would come into work and you would be slid a pizza under the door, you wouldn't talk to another person and you would just crank out code. And I remember that like that was what programmers were sort of known or that was the idea about programming back in the day and now being someone who's working in teams and agile and xp and tdd and pairing, all those things have definitely transformed the way that we do software and the way that I think about it. But I think that, uh, in some ways you might make an opinion that soft skills would actually be more valuable to a hiring manager. Uh, you know, assuming you can hit a certain technical low bar. So Brandon, what do you think about that opinion
Brandon William - 17:04 - Oh man, I was not expecting tha
Toran Billups - 17:08 - you have some good opinion on soft skills. So I wanted to throw you a softball there
Brandon William - 17:13 - Yeah. So I think that as a technologist we need to, we need to expand our horizons, like, like I was saying, I'm taking a look at electricians or whatever other fields are out there, business sales, marketing, customer service, and really understanding their problems and empathizing with them. And that word empathizing is very specifically chosen because that's something that a Toran and I have talked about a lot and just making sure that we empathize with our fellow developer and then empathizing with the other people that we interact with and we work with. And um, so just making sure that you're reading other things besides just hard technical books. Uh, you know, we've, we've talked about this book a lot on this podcast, but crucial conversations
Brandon William - 18:05 - Um, I just heard that book mentioned on another podcast that I listened to. I listened, you know, I have several technology podcasts in my, in my app, but I also have a lot of, a lot of other non technical podcast that I listened to just to kind of fill me up to, to build my ideas, to expand my horizons beyond just technology. There's way more to life than, than just technology. Um, my family and I, we're, we're building a raised garden beds and we're learning what that, what that means and how many seeds to plant in each square foot plot that we've put together a, you know, built a, built a fire pit this last weekend. So learning how to do that, learning how to use my hands to build something and um, there's, there's so much more to life than just technology and so making sure that we're like towards taking care of our, our whole selves. Um, s
Toran Billups - 19:00 - yeah, it's funny. I think it's context specific, like where, you know, what industry are you working on, what problems are you trying to solve? I mean, if you're actually trying to get us to Mars right now, there's probably a fair bit more emphasis on hard skills to the Max, uh, but in most of the industries that we work on, are we work in right now? I'm going to guess that you could almost favor people with exceptional, what do they call it? A exceptionally high Iq and maybe a little bit lower experience level with hard technical things or even a lower problem solving aptitude just because they're going to be able to work together and ultimately it's those teams that compose well together that I've seen be more successful and those are the teams I often wish I was still on to this day. You know, if you actually have a group of people that are very different but all come together and sort of have some, some ability to share and communicate
Toran Billups - 19:51 - Those are the teams that are a lot more fun than A. I can't remember actually a team where I had someone on someone on staff that was just brilliant, but I could never talk to them most of the times. I didn't last very long at those companies. You know, I wanted to be able to collaborate and communicate with folks. So I'm, I'm a bit biased there. I think if I was a hiring manager today, there's a certain type of developer that I look for and that's someone who's asking questions, isn't afraid to, uh, know that they're wrong or be wrong. And maybe he feels like an imposter all the time. I, Kris is talking about those folks seem to be a bit more humble and open to the idea that they might be wrong, which is often not the case when you're talking to someone who maybe grew up a very hard technically and a meaning, meaning that they have very good hard technical skills and maybe they were told they were really smart
Toran Billups - 20:41 - That person is maybe less likely, uh, at times to feel like I'm wrong. And I'm speaking mostly myself more than anyone else here because I remember those times where I knew this problem I was facing. I was absolutely right. I had to be certain that I was right. And uh, you know, at the end of the day it was actually, I was completely wrong, but I wasn't open minded enough to even believe that. And so that's the type of developer that I think can be shaped by these, these books that you're talking about, Brandon, and has some hope like you're talking about Kris, because ultimately if you've got the hard skills down, there are just a plethora of great books. Lectures, ted talks, things like that. It gives you a kind of a different perspective on what it's like to talk to somebody else or why you might be intimidating to somebody as you're talking to them
Kris Van Houten - 21:29 - Yeah, I think a lot, you know, from my years of experience in working for several different companies as a software developer, every place I've been in various conversations I've had with other developers all agree that companies tend to desire people who know how to learn more than people who know, like x, y, z framework tool set. All this stuff like, you know, my first job in tech I got because I showed that I knew how to learn something new and complex and uh, and that's, that's taken me very far. Uh, and, and I'm very grateful for that. But, you know, I think we think about, well, companies want to hire people fresh out of college, uh, because these guys are young and, you know, they just got done learning all this new stuff. And uh, I'm trying. Remember where I heard this, so I could be wrong because my source was wrong, but uh, but it's talking to the guys talking about how, you know, don't think the disco, someone graduated from school, the Cs degree that they know all kinds of stuff like that
Kris Van Houten - 22:25 - They know all the, most of the day stuff about programming because a lot of the school curriculums at a college level are actually five to 10 years behind because they have to go through a process of updating their curriculum, updating what they're teaching is set and that process can take multiple years. Um, whereas something like code camps are more 10 more to be on the cutting edge of technology because they don't have to go through the whole review process. So they can be on the latest version of react or amber or whatever you know. But those go to camps and to only last a few months. And you know, in my opinion, I don't think in that amount of time that you can go deep enough to be more desirable than someone who has years of experience. Who was showing you how to learn new technology. Who knows how to compare different technologies back and forth to each other. And so, um, you know, so like at most, you know, most code camps in the last few months, so hot most if you're really behind, you can go to a coed camp or you can take a course and react or something like that and, and be up to speed pretty quick and still be just as valuable as anyone else's coming out there
Kris Van Houten - 23:23 - But um, yeah, I think showing that, you know, how to learn it is pi the most valuable skill in my experience at developer that employers tend to look fo
Brandon William - 23:33 - along those lines. I think what you're kind of hinting around, or at least the way I'm hearing it is systems level thinking. Just being able to think about a more than just the little that you're supposed to be thinking about and developing those skills is extremely important. So making sure that even though you're just writing JavaScript will, um, make sure that you understand the CSS a little bit. And how does, how does JavScript and CSS, how do those two interact with each other? Then how does JavaScript interact with your API? Um, and then you know, as you start to develop your boundaries and just kind of encroach on, into the other space of where your boundaries are and then just say, okay, now that I, now that I've established those, how can I go just a little bit further? How can I understand what, what that back end that I'm consuming from is doing? Um, and then you just find those boundaries and say, okay, now it's interacting with the database. Then just trying to get the whole picture and think about. And like you, you mentioned earlier just making, being able to, with those years of experience, make those trade offs between the different technologies and what's the right solution there? For sure
Kris Van Houten - 24:41 - Yeah, and I have to say like a lot of the career path success that I've had did not come just by me alone. You know, it wasn't my effort sitting in a corner saying I will learn this. It was often someone either in the community or a coworker that decided to invest some time in me. And so I think part of this, a brief moment here on this trajectory is that earlier in your career, you're going to be borrowing people's time and just keep that in mind as you get a little bit more experienced that you should also think about those lesser experienced developers on your team when you are the top dog. Maybe it's time for you as Mr. senior or Mrs Senior to invest in the juniors. As somebody spent time investing in you, there is this a joke about, well, you know, we can't hire any more senior developers that we can't afford to. Then we need to grow them, you know, from the company itself. So those, those developers that are not going to grow without the right nourishment. So as the senior person, whether you have time to do it or not, or whether your manager thinks you have time to do it or not, someone has to help encourage and grow the younger developers on the team. So keep that in mind
Toran Billups - 25:48 - Definitely. Definitely
Brandon William - 25:50 - If I can jump back in there. I just a real quick story about somebody investing time in me. I remember we're working with RabbitMQ and that's written in Erlang and we were working with that and we're trying to figure out the API, try and understand what it was doing and he said, let's just go look at the source. I said, wait, what are we going to do? He goes, it's opensource. Let's just look at the source. So he, I said, do you know Erlang, he goes, no, but we can read the code together and that's when, that's when the light bulb went off in my head is like, okay, I don't have to be an expert in this language. He's going to give me a tour of this language. He's going to help me understand just because he's written in several different languages and he can kind of make correlations between, oh, I've seen, I've seen this kind of pattern or I basically understand or we can deduce just from looking at the code what it's doing. Um, and so just like that, that no fear that he took the time to say, hey, it's okay. I know your, your earlier on in your journey, um, I'm going to bring you along with me. And we're going to learn this together. Um, I loved that. That was so, such an amazing experience to get to sit with him and have him kind of be my tour guide and I've gotten to pay that forward several times and it's just so much fun to do
Toran Billups - 27:11 - That reminds me of this really amazing quote on how to raise your kids or how not to raise your kids. It was this study, it was a real, based on a real study were kindergarteners in sort of two different classes put together these puzzles. And the puzzles would range from very easy, too much harder over the course of a couple of weeks. And one of the classrooms, the people in there, the adults would sort of encourage the kids saying things like, oh, you know, when you finished it, oh, you're really smart. Look how smart you are. This puzzle is so easy because you're so smart. And in the other classroom they would make a point to never say that the kids were smart and if anything they would just sort of say, you know, oh, you worked really hard. Um, and so there, there was different incentive models and at the end of it what they found is kids in one classroom who were told that they were very smart, uh, when the more challenging puzzles came out, they were actually more interested in impressing people with how smart they were and they didn't really care so much about actually solving the problem
Toran Billups - 28:09 - And so when they went to attack it, they had all of this weight on them. Like I have to continue to look smart, I just want to look smart. I want to be smart. And the other classroom, because they weren't encouraged that way. They just continued to work hard and they never really cared if they were smart. And then so they ended up being a little bit more successful. And I think that's the story that you just told is someone that's very smart guy mentoring you was saying like, I don't care if I look stupid or smart, I just want to come in and read the source. And I think sometimes that little nudge in that direction will completely turn the light bulb on, as you said, Brandon, because I know it did that for me too
Brandon William - 28:47 - Yeah, that's a really great way to describe what, a much better way to describe what I was trying to say
Toran Billups - 28:57 - So, Kris, do you have any other topics before we jump into our big wins
Kris Van Houten - 29:01 - You know, I think we covered everything that I thought we possibly could on this topic. A lot of good stuff in here. I think I'll have to go through this and this and again, so I can learn some stuff from you guys. So
Toran Billups - 29:11 - uh, so big wins for the week. I'll kick this off if you're not familiar. We kind of give a, one of our big successes from the last week or so that jumps out in our minds. And it's kind of interesting. Uh, this idea came about when I was listening to another podcast a while back called the rabbit hole. And they talked about one on ones with your manager. And one of the really cool one on one ideas they had as kind of an icebreaker was the manager saying, give me one of your big wins and it force their employees to start looking for big wins and sort of this big cultural change and positivity and so on are small podcast here with what all of our moms listening. Then we try to bring that same interesting positivity. So, um, let's see what I had here for my big win. Uh, so I, I put a talk together and haven't, haven't spoke at a big conference in what feels like a lifetime now a few years
Toran Billups - 30:06 - And so I actually got some of this courage because I have this perfectionist complex back to the kindergartners were I just want to look perfect all the time and when I speak I want it to just come off perfect. And so I've been afraid I think to get in front and speak at bigger venues since I had success for years and years ago now. But I did finally write a talk and I submitted it and hope to be picked up later this year. It's actually on, over mocking. So, um, just to cover that very difficult testing topic, uh, when to mock how much to mock and it's called. I thought that the title was quite clever. It's called Overmocking. Underdelivering. So look for that later this year. Kris, what do you got, man? What's your big win
Kris Van Houten - 30:45 - All right. Um, so yeah, I about a year ago, actually, yeah, almost exactly a year ago I, I wrote a series of blog posts about accessibility in a more pointedly how to take accessibility into consideration, uh, in our applications an
Toran Billups - 31:03 - shout out to ember
Kris Van Houten - 31:05 - shout out to ember. And so accessibility is one of those topics and those areas that I kind of fell into but ended up getting really passionate about. See, I wrote a series about a year ago and haven't really thought about it since. And I was actually watching a screencast. Let's see, last Wednesday or Thursday where, uh, you know, a, a big voice in the accessibility community is this a woman by the name of Melanie Sumner and she works, she works with the, uh, inner core team and she's broken ember on accessibility. And I was watching this a live meet up where she's giving a talk on accessibility and at the end, uh, you know, she, she gave, she was pointing out to references or places that she says, Hey, if you want to learn more by accessibility, check out these resources. And she like totally plugged my blog post series and uh, and had a lot of really great things to say about it
Kris Van Houten - 31:59 - So, uh, for me is just seeing that, you know, I put, I don't know how many hours of work into that blog post series, making it as friendly, as an easy to read as possible and just seeing that, you know, it's getting accessed by, by people, you know, across the industry, uh, in part because Melanie Sumner is promoting it like crazy a year later. So, uh, yeah, that, that, that's my big one, just to kind of feeling good. That work's paying off
Toran Billups - 32:25 - Just, just a big, when you right here is I talked to Melanie at ember camp this year and legit, uh, she said no, that's the best thing that's ever been written on the subject of ember and accessibility. So I'm not going to write, I couldn't write anything better, I'm just going to point people to Kris's blog post, which I thought was actually really cool as well because she's a, obviously a big name and accessibility, but I think it's a testament to be the number of actual hours you spent writing that content. And for folks who haven't seen that, it is an epic post blog series, I think
Kris Van Houten - 32:56 - Yeah, it's a part blog series. Basically, if you know nothing about accessibility, you can read this blog series and uh, no, uh, good to know what you need to get started. And then if you're using ember or really any, a single page framework, uh, you could jump in and solve some, you know, more complex problems that are, that go beyond just adding rel labels and stuff like that to your html text. So yeah, it was fun but challenging, right what do you got Brandon
Toran Billups - 32:56 - Yeah. What you got Brandon
Brandon William - 33:24 - so along the lines of conferences and talks. Uh, I just gave one of my, I prepared to talk and gave it at a conference last week. So that was a lot of fun. I'm going somewhere new, meeting a meeting, members of the community. I haven't, I also haven't spoken at a conference in quite a while, um, but believe it's coming up almost on three years. And so just getting back out there into the community and being a speaker. Um, I'd forgot how much fun it is to, to go and, um, and just hang out with, with the other members of the community and spend time developing those relationships. Um, and then just kind of sharing what you know. Uh, so that was, that's my big win. It was a lot of fun. Awesome
Kris Van Houten - 34:13 - Now were the board of the topic that you're speaking, what's the topic that you're speaking on next week
Brandon William - 34:19 - Uh, so next week I'll be giving the same talk. It's called let's choose kaizen instead of the rewrite. And I wish I would have named the talk the right way to do a rewrite because so many people told me what does that, what does that mean? And uh, so I guess I, I guess I should have chosen better words for the, for the title
Kris Van Houten - 34:39 - Awesome man. Very cool
Toran Billups - 34:41 - I'm excited actually. Yeah, I'm going to try and sneak in through a side door and catch Brandon and do this live since he's coming up to the wine. So, uh, you know, they're see me in handcuffs or I mean I might be waving directly with a secret badge. I laminate myself. All right, well I can't think of a better way to wrap this up for now. If you want to catch us on Twitter and continue the conversation, we're @developfatigue if you want to hit us up and more long form over email. We are [email protected] and we'll see you all next week