(Anchor.fm link)

Jake and I talk about basically just getting lucky... And also about mastery and understanding the fundamentals of computer science. We talk about university and how it works well for some things (theory, longer-term understanding) and poorly for others (basic how-to-build understanding.) We also talk about the semi-lost art of whiteboard interviewing and how to prep for it if you have way too much time on your hands. And the idea that there are only so many approaches to problems in the world. And maybe a bit about how much better it would be to be a coding recluse in a cave in Norway.

Links We Mention

• JakeYesbeck.com)
• Jake Yesbeck’s Twitter
• Scott Draves
• Stanford: Problem Solving for the CS Technical Interview
• 30x500
• Year of Hustle
• HackerRank
• LeetCode
• Mastering Software Technique
• Jim Weirich’s Code Kata)
• Kai’s Power Tools
• The UK Global Talent Visa

Transcript

Noah Gibbs: Hello, I’m Noah Gibbs. And this is Computer Science: Just the Useful Bits. I’m here with Jason Yesbeck who is going to talk a little bit about the experience of being a developer and his education and how one prepared him for the other. Great to have you with us. First of all, how are you doing today?

Jake Yesbeck: Good, good. I’m doing well. It’s actually Jake Yesbeck.

Noah Gibbs: I’m terribly sorry! Jake Yesbeck. I’m…

Jake Yesbeck: You’ve been talking to a lot of Jasons.

Noah Gibbs: I have… I’m also not that good with names. Sorry.

Jake Yesbeck: No, no, no problem at all.

Noah Gibbs: Okay, um, so tell me about that education. You know, how’d you how’d you learn to do this thing we do?

Jake Yesbeck: I like to think my story is I just got lucky pretty much along the way. I was not one of these people that you hear about that’s been programming since they’re 12 or 10 years old or anything like that. I actually didn’t even have a computer until I was like 17, 18 years old. I went to college and in my college, you had to declare your major right away. Some colleges let you do like two years of exploratory but mine you had to pick right away. And so I knew that I liked computers. So I said, I’ll do it. Computer Engineering, because that seems good. And then about a semester in, I decided that I didn’t really care too much about voltages and how to make those things work. So I changed over to computer science because I liked programming. That’s the part of computers I actually liked. And I went forward with that program, learned a lot, and then kind of just decided to move across the country as far as possible from Virginia, where I’m from to California, and I landed in LA and got my first job.

Noah Gibbs: Awesome. Well, being from Texas and being convinced I was going to wind up on one coast to the other, because that was far from where I grew up as possible, that sounds great. I approve roundly of that.

Jake Yesbeck: It’s been an experience for sure. But yeah, it’s very interesting because I like to, I like the conversation about how you became a software engineer in terms of education a lot because it’s so different than when I went to college. Originally, there were no boot camps or anything. So it’s cool to see the different levels now.

Noah Gibbs: It really is. I think boot camps are probably the biggest actual innovation our industry said in a very long time, I mean, we’re still figuring them out. But that’s how every big innovation works. Right? We were bad at, we’re bad at it until we’re good at it.

Jake Yesbeck: Right? Nothing modern boot camps are doing a whole lot better than they did when they first came out. They seemed very much for profit when they first came out and kind of predatory.

Noah Gibbs: There was a lot of that. I mean, if you find the wrong one there, there still is. It’s not that they’re all great. But we’re definitely hitting the point where people understand that and they know to look for it. And there’s, there’s at least some understanding, you have to check. Right. Cool. I send out a little questionnaire just to get a very general idea of what’s going on with folks. And you mentioned getting into your major in in college, which, awesome. Some things you wrote down in this Gist you sent me was, you mentioned on the job bootcamp.

Jake Yesbeck: Right.

Noah Gibbs: Tell me about that.

Jake Yesbeck: So my first job was very much from beginning I was kind of thrown into the fire. It was a small company. It was a startup. It was in Los Angeles. And I interviewed and it felt like it was the longest day of my life. It was about a seven hour interview. I never experienced that. And by the end of the interview, luckily I was offered the job, which was great because I had almost no money left in the bank account after the move. And so I was excited about the company, excited about being able to be a software engineer professionally. And then I got the job. And what followed was about two and a half months of 14 to 16 hour days. And that’s what I mean by a boot camp because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And there’s no one more overly confident than a brand new software engineer who thinks they know anything I knew I didn’t know anything. And then I really didn’t know anything after those couple months. So that’s what I mean by on the job boot camp. Luckily, my my boss was very technical and a great mentor. And he was just very patient and allowed me to learn in a way that has really helped me out through my entire career. I can trace it all back to those first couple months.

Noah Gibbs: That’s really cool. It’s always wonderful, there’s usually a formative job for people. You know, somewhere along the line, it’s not always the first job. Sometimes there are a couple of really awful jobs and then a formative job. But it sounds like you did well. I mean, you you have kind of the living the dream LA story, right? Like you, you got there just as the money was running out. You got the good job.

Jake Yesbeck: Exactly. Yeah, it was it was an experience. And I mean that job that job gave me a whole lot of opportunity. And then, about a year after I I moved to San Francisco because I had heard that that’s where you go if you want to be a software engineer, so I said, Okay, well, I don’t have any deep roots in Los Angeles. So I’ll just sell everything I have pack up my tiny car and drive up there and hopefully get a job right away, which I did in two days. took me two days to get a job in SF and it took me three months to find an apartment in SF. So that’s just goes to show you the housing versus job availability of 2011 which is when this was that makes sense.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, I actually was in Southern California for my very first job before coming up to the bay as well though I was in Carpinteria and just south of Santa Barbara. Okay. Yeah, so not not actually LA.

Jake Yesbeck: I was in the San Fernando Valley with the hundred degree temperatures. It was great.

Noah Gibbs: I grew up in Texas, I intentionally avoided anything like that. I mean, for all the all the things you could say against Santa Barbara, the weather’s amazing.

Jake Yesbeck: Yes. And the few times I visited, it was very nice.

Noah Gibbs: I recommend it highly. It’s, it’s a great place to vacation. I wouldn’t necessarily live there. But it’s a great place to, you know, to show up and then to be there. So you talk about getting lucky, getting into computer science or in in your university. How do you feel that prepared you for for a job developing software.

Jake Yesbeck: You know, if you look at it from 1000 foot view, the skills that I got from my four years of computer science didn’t actually give me a a super head start in the industry. But over time, I recognized how the things that I learned actually were very valuable. So in the beginning of my career, I didn’t really understand too much about like, you know, efficiency of algorithms and like team collaboration and these kinds of things that I had done in my university program. It wasn’t until a couple years later that I was really looking back and saying, Oh, I actually do have some pretty good object oriented design fundamentals that I know. And that kind of, you know, education wasn’t very apparent those first two and a half months in Los Angeles, but over time, I’ve looked back and thought, Oh, yeah, that was actually really cool to learn those things.

Noah Gibbs: It’s interesting. You never you never realize what the valuable parts are, when you’re there in the middle of it. I don’t think there’s a slightest chance that Scott Draves will ever will ever listen to this and hear his name mentioned here. But I’ve got to say, like, I had the one teaching assistant. It wasn’t that wasn’t the professor. It was the one teaching assistant in a LISP class that I took at Carnegie Mellon, and I sent a really annoyed like, “when are we ever going to use this thing?”“ email, and he sent back this also-annoyed kind of ranty, "Yes, the way they’re teaching this is, is like trying to teach you how to write a novel when you’ve never read anything decent” email. But it’s just, it was more formative than I realized at the time. You know, like, I look back at that periodically and go oh, yeah, that’s our problem. Yes, he was absolutely right.

Jake Yesbeck: For sure. And there’s obviously with four years of education, not everything is going to be super applicable to a software job. But that might not have been the goal for everybody. You know, not everybody who took those courses ended up being a software engineer. Some of them might be working in fields completely unrelated. Some of them might be teachers, who knows.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, well, and the the university would be the first to point out that they try to give you a well rounded education, which means kind of, by definition, whatever job you’re doing a lot of it’s not going to be about that.

Jake Yesbeck: Right.

Noah Gibbs: And fair enough. That makes sense. So you you wrote something here that intrigued me. You said that you feel like your university education prepared you for the interview process. I’m really curious about that. Because I don’t I don’t feel like my did a lot of that. So tell me about that.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah, so not in the way that the university experience prepared me for a typical technical interview, but it allowed me to demonstrate how to solve a problem in a more or less kind of coherent terms. I didn’t go into my first software engineering interview, completely brand new and not even understanding how to do a whiteboard problem because I had done similar-ish exercises. In my classes. I didn’t do whiteboard problems, but I did solve problems and thought about different ways of doing that and communicated the ways that I did that. And while it wasn’t the quintessential reverse this string kind of problem, it was something along the lines of, yeah, I can explain to you my thought process. What it gave me was the ability to kind of refine the pattern of I know how to solve this problem. I need to learn how to communicate that I know how to solve this problem, which is all really an interview is in my opinion.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, I think that’s fair. Cool. I can I can see that. I was curious because I know Stanford and a few other universities currently actually do literally give interview prep classes. Usually it’s like a half semester mini class or something, but you can you can find like syllabuses for that online. “Syllabi,” I guess technically. And yeah, I was really curious because again, that wasn’t a, wasn’t a thing that was done when I graduated. But it wasn’t as clear there was a real career in being a computer programmer when I graduated either.

Jake Yesbeck: Right, right. Yeah, no, it wasn’t wasn’t practice problems that would have been very useful. But no, it was being able to talk to somebody in an interview about technical things, which I think I didn’t know how to do before went to college.

Noah Gibbs: That makes a lot of sense. As kind of an unexpected thing, one of the things that helped me most with whiteboard problems is the fact that I went to a high school were teaching the computer math classes and the one computer science class were kind of, Well, okay, the computer math classes were kind of a draw-the-short-straw thing. We had one one great professor who taught the computer science class, and then it was clear that the earlier classes were taught by somebody who didn’t want to be there and really didn’t want to try and manage a whole roomful of people on computers all at the same time because that was a discipline nightmare. And so she did the traditional thing where we had to write the entire program out on graph paper first, and then we would get to after she you know, gone through and checked it, we get sit down and type it into Turbo Pascal.

Jake Yesbeck: Wow.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, but it means I’d already had that prep for, oh, I’m gonna have to sit and write this out and I’m gonna have to debug it in my head because it’s not like I can, you know, run run the code if I’m writing it on graph paper. And yeah, you know, some weeks of that was very good prep for a whiteboard interview. And I can’t imagine i’d otherwise have ever put that kind of time into it.

Jake Yesbeck: I tell you what, that’s very true. And even after you after you become a software engineer for a while, I think we all have this little itch in the back of our mind of like, I really don’t want to do whiteboard interviews anymore. And you end up doing it throughout your career, but every time it’s like, oh, no…

Noah Gibbs: Weirdly, I’ve always kind of liked them.

Jake Yesbeck: Oh, wow.

Noah Gibbs: Because, well, it’s I mean, it’s not like I sit and do them for fun. It’s not like you know, I go over to the whiteboard in the corner of the room there and, and just, you know, write out whiteboard interview questions. But no, I always liked them because it’s clear other people have so much trouble with it. Which means that as a guy who’s who’s had some actual prep for it, even just a little bit, I get kind of a stupefied look from the people who asked the question, because they don’t expect people to do well with it. And I just, you know, go. I’ve never actually sat down and worked with a guy who worked on the old text editors from before they would actually show you the file… From back when you had to just memorize all the line numbers and then tell it what line number to go to to make the edits. Like that was that was what text editors were a long, long time ago. But I have to imagine it would be like that, or like a guy who counts cards and you know knows exactly how many sevens are left in the in the deck, because of course, he knows everything that’s left. It’s one of those magic tricks where it’s not even that it’s complicated. It’s that you look at it, you go, Oh, I guess people do that. Whoa. And I think the way people respond to me on the whiteboard is like that.

Jake Yesbeck: It’s like a lost art.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, exactly. I’m not sure it was ever a found art, but it’s certainly lost by now. Excellent. So we talked a little about sort of what computer science topics you might be interested in talking about, and a popular one, I think a popular one for good reason. And I’m sure it’s popular with folks listening not just to book speaking big-O notation and performance analysis. And that was one that you that you mentioned. Tell me about that. Tell me about sort of what you learned in formal education versus how it worked on the job and how those match up?

Jake Yesbeck: For sure. Yeah, the big-O notation that I learned in college was very, you know, very academic, being able to actually give you the exact big-O notation for an algorithm and understanding why an N cubed algorithm versus an N log N was so different. And you know, how that would bite you later down the road when you’re working with gigantic data sets. And then, in practice, it’s not as if I would write – where I started was PHP – I felt like I would write PHP code and then be like, Oh, that’s N squared. I should make that N log N. But it was more of like, This page has some hot code on it. And that hot code is slow. Why is it slow? And then at a glance, you can say kind of roughly Okay, this one has a little bit more complexity that it needs. We don’t have to iterate over this loop within itself. Maybe we can simplify this using something else like basic data structures and stuff to give us better speed and better performance. And later in my career tools like New Relic or similar profiling tools that could give you a high level of like your web requests, which is the world I’ve worked in mostly takes, you know, 1200 milliseconds, in those 700 milliseconds, you were in Ruby. It can’t tell you exactly what in Ruby you were doing. But you were doing something that took a lot of time there. So let’s talk let’s dive into the code. Then we kind of have a smoking gun, we can look through it and say like, Okay, here we are, this is what’s taking so long, and I think I could have gotten there without understanding big-O. But having that like, rudimentary knowledge of it, makes it click a lot faster for me.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, I like that big-O notation sort of focuses you on how the performance changes as the size of the input grows. I think that’s a really good way to do it. And for me, at least, it would probably have taken me longer to figure that out if they hadn’t pointed it out that way.

Jake Yesbeck: For sure. And you think about when you’re developing code, you’re usually using test data, like sometimes no data in your in your development environment, and then you deploy to a production environment that serves, you know, maybe thousands of concurrent users. And code that was not an issue at all during your development cycle is suddenly an issue. And it’s helpful to understand why that might happen.

Noah Gibbs: Absolutely. Cool. So yeah, that sounds like that sounds like a vote in favor of that being useful. You also mentioned basic data structures. Tell me about that. Again, same deal. Difference between the education and on the job.

Jake Yesbeck: Right, right. Yeah. So understanding, you know, basic data structures like arrays, and I was taught primarily Java in college. So we had array lists, linked list hashes, those kinds of things, basically allows you to understand the avenues that you have available to you when you’re creating, you know, different algorithms. So if I have something that I know that I need, absolutely, super quick look up, but I’m going to to hash with a constant time lookup, instead of an array, which, you know, I have to seek through an entire array to find the element I care about. And so when I was programming, especially when I began to program, I might not have known the API for the language that I was using so fully that I knew exactly which helper methods to use. So I would use a lot of these basic data structures instead to store my temporary or like my data before I processed it into a response to the user. And I found that very valuable because I knew kind of what was available to me in a language agnostic way. I knew that all languages basically had these tools, how to use them would be different, but I knew exactly kind of what they did and when to use one over another.

Noah Gibbs: Being able to rebuild the simple stuff for yourself. It’s nice because it’s probably there but you can save yourself a little bit of research. I mean, long term, you’re going to have to learn it but know that that makes a lot of sense. That’s a really good idea. You also again, mentioned as a topic… I suggest, you know, meta languages, SML, OCaml, Haskell or LISP and you mentioned ML, tell me about that. Tell me about that in your in your education. But again, also where that might relate to your job.

Jake Yesbeck: Right. So this ML is for the language meta language, which I’m not sure if that is a strictly academic language or not.

Noah Gibbs: I’m not sure if people actually use it. But it’s not strictly strictly academic. But the biggest exception, by far the most broadly used dialect is OCaml, which, instead of having the strict academic style type system, that is probably what you had, you might have used SML/NJ. That’s the usual implementation of it. And that’s the one I used. OCaml actually has an extended type system that allows some object oriented with it. Reduces the purity but increases how useful it is day-to-day.

Jake Yesbeck: That sounds a whole lot more valuable than what we learned.

Noah Gibbs: Doesn’t it? But, but tell me more about what you learned.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah, I included it because it was a language that did not, you couldn’t loop over it. So every time you had to go through a list of things, you had to do recursion. And recursion was something that was kind of a sticky, sticky point for me when I was learning about it. And you know, it was hard for me to to wrap my head around many years ago. And using this language, which was so unique than other language that I’d seen or used like c++, Java, PHP, JavaScript, any of this stuff, this was so unique that I, I really valued the exposure and the ability to, you know, play with it and have real assignments against it. So I could learn because me as a person, I always learn better if there’s an objective, I’ve never been the type of person that’s really able to just play with something and then learn it that way. I need something, some kind of objective, whether that be put on by myself or by somebody else, but there has to be something.

Noah Gibbs: I find the people who are good at playing with a thing and learning it. It’s usually because they’re good at setting that same kind of task for themselves. I think they do it in a very similar way. They’re just, you know, good at that first step. But I admit some bias there. I sell a book about the general idea of doing that by setting up that kind of assignment for yourself.

Jake Yesbeck: Okay, so you know, that’s what I’m talking about.

Noah Gibbs: I know exactly what you’re talking about. Yes.

Jake Yesbeck: Very cool. The last thing I think I would like to talk about is from the education. You know, typical university education is this idea of like teamwork and collaboration. My Computer Science program was not enormous at my college, but there was like, 50 of us, ish, at my, at my level. And they would split us up into groups. And we would have to do things like one of the biggest projects I can remember is we built a mock operating system, right? In Java. And so there was five people on my team. And it was a long project spanning a couple weeks. And really understanding how to work with other people in software, even at that very rudimentary level, I think has been impactful on me throughout my entire career of being able to read somebody else’s code without necessarily judging it too harshly, or debugging somebody else’s code that they’re unavailable to debug at the time because they have another engagement or something and splitting up work and relying on people which is saying it now it’s, of course what you do as a software engineer, but you know, when you’re College student and every single assignment that you had prior to this was please go off and build this program on your own and submitted, submitted and if the output matches the expected output, you get an A like, this was a big step.

Noah Gibbs: You know, I’m told this is different for the the younger folks who haven’t been in programming as long but back when I started, there was still that myth everywhere at the idea that computer programmers are antisocial recluses that have no interest in talking to other people if they can avoid it. I think there’s still some of that in the air. I don’t think that myth is entirely gone yet. But certainly the job isn’t much like that.

Jake Yesbeck: For sure. Yeah. I can’t remember the last time I worked completely alone on a project.

Noah Gibbs: You know, I do but that’s usually the sign that I haven’t succeeded as well as I’d like. Working alone on a project usually means I’m trying to get enough success that other people are interested but I’m not there yet.

Jake Yesbeck: Right. Yeah. So I say all in all, I believe that my college education while it didn’t prepare me for the nuts and bolts of being a software engineer, it definitely gave me a step up as if I was you know, had I been just put into my first job without engineering background computer science background.

Noah Gibbs: That makes sense. Let me ask you a hard question. Just you know, just to change it up. Boot camps, which, you know, often run between six weeks, which is clearly too short, and you know, six months or more, are intending to take a lot of the useful part of that distill it into into more like six months. Do you think it would have been a better use of your time to go through something that was a distilled six month version? Or do you think that having the additional time, maybe not the whole four years, but a substantial chunk of that was was worth spending the extra years on it?

Jake Yesbeck: This is a hard question, but for a different reason, maybe than what you’d expect. I think that during those four years, me as a person, I was going through so many different phases of growth, that if I were to be an 18 year old kid, after a six month boot camp of all like the super important bits of computer science, I don’t think that I would have been as good at my first job as I was I was when I was 21. And I wasn’t even that good at it. So, like, that’s something that I think if I were to say to someone who is a little bit older, maybe this is their second job or career or if they’ve gone through traditional college or something, absolutely take a boot camp instead of taking another four year college course for this, but me personally, I think that I needed those years to really understand how to be a professional, anything really.

Noah Gibbs: You know, that’s a that’s a really thoughtful answer. I like that because I’ve got to say, now that you say it, I absolutely agree. If I could have had a solid enough technical education to go get a full time job at 19 and then I tried it, I’d almost certainly have been blacklisted from the industry. So it doesn’t matter how good I would have been at 23. I’d have been completely unemployable that’s a that’s a good answer. I like that a lot.

Jake Yesbeck: It’s a, you know, it’s funny to look back and see all the see all the things that you’ve done and and I think a lot of people, when they look back, they think oh, if I would have done this, I would have gotten to act so much faster. Like I said before, I think I’m pretty lucky. I think things fell where they were supposed to fall in at different times of my life. And I’m happy with the way it went.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, the older I get, the more I see that I couldn’t have done a lot of things much faster because I just didn’t have the emotional maturity. Like if I could take 40-some year old me now and drop me in but in the the younger, healthier body. I don’t know, I still might have screwed it up. But I definitely would have screwed it up if it had been actual me at that actual time. After graduating, I don’t know how long ago that was for you. Have you done a lot of other kind of professional or outside of work but professional type of self improvement? Have you taken Udemy classes, read white papers, you know, kind of any other kind of self study?

Jake Yesbeck: I actually have. So I did a lot of a lot of self study early on in my career just because of all the things I didn’t know about being a software developer in the web space. I didn’t know all these things.

Noah Gibbs: Absolutely.

Jake Yesbeck: While I was learning PHP and stuff, I was also learning Linux and I was also learning how to work, so I’m also learning databases and all these like ins and outs for the things that aren’t just quote unquote programming, right? Because I think those things are super valuable for you in your job. And then around 2014, I went to a Ruby on Rails convention in Atlanta. And I’d always been very impressed with the open source community in Ruby on Rails. And I, I met some of the contributors to a lot of the the gems and projects that I’d seen, and I was like, Wow, this is amazing. And I spoke to a couple of them. And I basically was like, hey, how do I get into this world? And they said, you just do it. And I was like, oh, okay, that sounds simple enough. I’ll try that. And so I actually went on because I’m the type of person that needs a goal in mind. I went on this year long endeavor, which I’ve coined the term year of commits for myself in which I contributed to open source repos. Whether that be somebody else’s or my own every day for a year, so I had a GitHub streak for 365 days. And I think that period of my life was the biggest level up per se, for being a software engineer. I learned so much during that year, and it was almost completely out of work.

Noah Gibbs: That makes sense. Cool. That’s an uncommon degree of discipline. I mean, a lot of people say, Oh, I should do that. But very few people start and very few people finish. So congratulations on that.

Jake Yesbeck: Thank you. Yeah. Well, I once I put so I also did a blog post every Sunday. So I had 52 blog posts in this year. And once I put the first one out there saying that I was going to do this. And once people that I knew, saw that I said, Well, I have to do it. Now. There’s no way that I can, I cannot do it. And it was actually funny. I had a funny story. I was somewhere without internet, but I had my computer so I could still make commits. I just couldn’t push them up. And I think it was like a three day period and someone messaged me and they said, Oh no, you did. did not commit the last two days is everything okay? Did your streak end? And I said no, I actually was just, you know, somewhere without internet because I don’t tether on my phone. But I had the commits and I pushed them up and everything was, you know, the streak was continued, but they were very, it was fine to see someone paying so close attention.

Noah Gibbs: That’s awesome. I’ve occasionally decided I’m going to do this I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m you know, I’ve already announced it in public so people are gonna care if I… but no, to have people actually care.

Jake Yesbeck: It was cool. It was humbling to it was like, oh, wow, I had no idea that people actually cared.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, no, that’s awesome. That’s really excellent. Well, again, congratulations on this.

Jake Yesbeck: Thank you.

Noah Gibbs: I don’t know if you if you follow Amy Hoy. Does that name ring –

Jake Yesbeck: I’ve heard the name but I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

Noah Gibbs: She’s, she’s one of the originators of the 30x500 class.

Jake Yesbeck: Oh, I have heard of this. Yes.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah. 30x500 grew out of what she calls the year of hustle and it was the same it was the same kind of thing. It was the, You know what, I’m going to get serious about this, I’m gonna I’m going to make products and I’m going to start breaking out of doing consulting. And yeah, it was, although in her case, it wasn’t a commit every day thing, it was more just kind of a… we’re gonna we’re gonna release a huge amount of stuff.

Jake Yesbeck: Right, no, I found that that kind of thing exactly repetition. If you do something enough times, you’re going to be pretty good at it. And I think that that’s probably true in most industries. It’s just it, do you have the discipline to do it. And I’m not going to act like I’m the most disciplined person in the world. I definitely haven’t kept up as much with it. After that year was done as I’d like, but it has, you know, really impacted my life.

Noah Gibbs: The fact that you could do that for a year suggests you have at least a well above average level of discipline. Again, congratulations on that.

Jake Yesbeck: Thank you.

Noah Gibbs: That’s hard to do.

Jake Yesbeck: I appreciate it. I’m not sure I can do it. Now. I got a little bit more responsibilities, but maybe five years ago, I had the time.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, I got three kids. There’s no way I could do that now. But maybe when the little one’s a lot older we’ll see.

Jake Yesbeck: For sure.

Noah Gibbs: Do you wind up taking random classes or anything or reading white papers, reading Wikipedia, picking up new computer languages? Like, do you do that kind of thing in general as a continuing thing?

Jake Yesbeck: I don’t usually go that academic with it I do like to do, I dabble in like some of those, you know, like HackerRank, LeetCode kind of problems here and there just to like sharpen skills and look at things in different ways. But in terms of discovery of technologies, I usually only really get into them when I’m… when I use them at work. Like if I have use cases for things then I’ll evaluate different different technologies, but I rarely spend the time to have a, you know, a weekend dedicated to I’m going to learn Rust this weekend or something like that. I wish I would do that. But like I said, time constraints are different than they were years ago.

Noah Gibbs: It’s hard to make the time for it. And the you know, the longer you go, the more your time is worth, you know, the more things you got competing for it. That makes complete sense for sure.

Jake Yesbeck: But I think that there’s never going to be a time in which I know, I feel like I know enough. About the industry, which is a it’s a scary and a nice thought. It’s scary because it’s like you never, you’re never going to stop ever, you’re going to be you know, 70 years old doing this. But it’s nice because I feel like I would be pretty bored if it wasn’t that way. You know, if you didn’t have things to learn, and you didn’t have a drive to get better and have an ever changing ecosystem around you, seems kind of boring to me.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah. Well, you know, in case it helps, by the time you’re 70 especially if you keep at this odds are good, you’ll have your retirement well figured out way before that, like way in advance. And so a lot of the kind of breathless quality that at least I get when I used to get, you know, as I look, do I need to learn this technology? Do I need to learn this other technology? What if the sun is setting on this one that I actually care about? Having that be a fun kind of silly hobby instead of something your job depends on for me is a much more pleasant place to be. It reminds me of what I used to do. I wrote a MUD library back in the day and you know, looking back at the the source code, you know, it’s terrible. It’s something I did early in my career. I wasn’t all that good at it. But I can definitely say I was one of a handful of people in the world that was the best in the world at it. Not because I was amazing, but because almost nobody did it. And even fewer people that you would call an engineer with a straight face did it. Like just a handful, you could count them off, at least in my little corner of that world. And it’s kind of cool as long as you don’t ever think it’s going to be your job.

Jake Yesbeck: Right? Yeah, no, I heard similar advice from another mentor of mine. He said, Don’t worry about the JavaScript framework of the week, worry about the fundamentals and learn things that aren’t going to change. He was very big into making sure I had a deep understanding of Linux of using a you know, my tooling like that using text editor. He got me to try out vim for the first time in which now instead of 99% terrible at it, I’m only 97% terrible at it. And, you know, understanding like architecture and these kinds of like concepts that won’t Probably changed for a long time materially that you can get really good at and make yourself marketable because you know, we will slow down. As we get older, we don’t have the time, I already don’t have enough time to learn all of the different EcmaScript stuff. Like, you know what I mean?

Noah Gibbs: I know exactly what you mean. You know, my take on that is similar. Yeah, definitely do the fundamentals. The other thing is that if you don’t know a particular thing, but you’ve done enough different frameworks over enough years and enough different techniques, you’re going to be unusually fast at picking up something genuinely new and weird, which is going to give you a big advantage over somebody who was amazing at the last flavor of the week, but never learned the fundamentals very solidly.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah, that’s a great point.

Noah Gibbs: It’s weird how often the same things come back. I mean, I mentioned the MUD programming, and on the one hand, it’s not directly useful for anything. And on the other hand, I would have bet that the way it did prototype inheritance would never have done me any good in this world. And then JavaScript did it and now it’s everywhere.

Jake Yesbeck: It’s funny how it came back.

Noah Gibbs: Well, and some of the other techniques that it did are like Ruby. And it’s, I think there’s only so many approaches to every given problem in the world. And so if you just try, you know, about 50 different things, you’ll discover you’ve done something a lot like almost all of them.

Jake Yesbeck: I think that’s very true. If we all I see that in practice a lot to people who think up solutions to things which seemed like novel solutions at the time, you’re like, Oh, no, that’s this pattern from the 70s. These people wrote about this in this book. It’s like, Oh, okay.

Noah Gibbs: Well, and part of the trick there is just to figure out sort of what the actual activity is, which you mainly do by thinking, how would I do this if a computer weren’t involved? And then you go look at how people have been doing it before, because one way or another, they’ve had more time to think about it than you have. As soon as you can take the computer out of the equation, people have been doing it for thousands of years, and then you should just go see what they did.

Jake Yesbeck: That’s true.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, it’s interesting. You. You mentioned… coming up with Project concepts to learn things and I talked about how I write a book on that. The way I got really good advice for that book was to realise that it turns out that what we do is almost exactly what artists do and the big problems we face are the same problems they have. So if I just ignore the fact that there’s a computer there and go find out how artists do it, which I did partly by going and learning to draw, we don’t even really need to change their techniques. We can just steal their techniques.

Jake Yesbeck: Oh, wow.

Noah Gibbs: They’ve been teaching art for 40,000 years. And it turns out, they’re a lot better at it than we are having taught this since you know, the 50s generously or the 60s more realistically.

Jake Yesbeck: That’s cool. Do you have an example that you can you can draw?

Noah Gibbs: Well, absolutely. So I have a bunch of examples, but they’re mostly videos and I’m not going to, you know, play them in the middle of the podcast. But for example, one of my better example videos is ASCII art faces, animated ASCII art faces. And so the basic idea is, you pick up programming skill, and you do problem design by – in this case – drawing animated ASCII art faces. But the thing is that that only gets you so far. There are some things that’ll teach you in there other things that it won’t, but if you want to learn recursion, you should pick something that sort of basically iterated if you want to learn most things. There’s something in the world structured like that. If there isn’t, it’s not a useful technique, and you can skip it. And so what you do is you look for a problem domain, which is to say you look for a thing in the world and you sketch it, one of the first things that just smacked me in the face, I give this example all the time, because it was the one that where, where this parallel, you know, actually hit me, I was watching my kids in a park on a Merry-Go-Round. For non-US listeners, a Merry-Go-Round is a little spinning thing where you can all hang on to the bars. And, and you can, you know, spin everybody on it. And you had the big kids that wanted to spin everybody as fast as possible, throw them off if they could. And you had the little kids who wanted to spin around, but couldn’t push themselves as hard as they’d like to. And I just kind of without even thinking about it started modeling it as a system in my head, because that’s what we do. I mean, as as professional programmers, what we do all day every day is to look at a thing and model it as a system. And most systems we deal with a real world systems. If you work for a company doing bank account stuff, what you’re doing is modeling bank accounts. And that’s, you know, it’s a real world system. It’s made of people, but it’s definitely real. And so I went Oh, that’s that’s a fun technique. And then I realized that what I was doing was a life sketch. What I was doing was the same thing that all artists do from about the point where you’re two weeks in, to at least when you’re like 40 years in. You look at the world, you try to model it using your tools, they produce a visual rendering, usually, of the thing they’re looking at. And we produce a system of behaviour representing the thing we’re looking at. And it’s the same thing. And so that also turns out to be the answer to the question, how do artists handle that problem where early on, you’re bad and later, you’re good, and you don’t have a dedicated teacher? You don’t have a dedicated tutor most of the time? How does your range of exercises change over time? And the answer is mostly it doesn’t. They found an exercise that will take you from two weeks in to 40 years in and it’s nice if you have a teacher, the teacher can accelerate your progress. And if you don’t, it still works fine.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah. Wow. That’s, that’s very interesting. That makes a whole lot of sense. We can talk about that way, just viewing the Merry-Go-Round. And making kind of like a, an architecture in your head of how you would make discrete you know, objects out of this and how they would interact and how an artist wouldnyou know, turn them into lines that turn into a picture? That’s cool.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, it’s it’s very similar. And they have a lot of the same kinds of problems. I mean, you could say, yeah, but you can never model a real world system out of code, like a real world system is infinitely complex. And the answer is you can’t model it out of paint either.

Jake Yesbeck: Right, right.

Noah Gibbs: It’s the same problem.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah, no, that’s, that’s awesome. I like that a lot. I think that those kinds of learnings and little exercises, katas, I guess is, is what they’re called. Those are very intriguing to me. I watched Jim I never say his name right. Jim Weirich? Yeah, I watched his coding kata many years ago, and I was just instantly impressed at how masterful he was over very simple things. The thing he built was not complex, but the way that he built it was just, oh my goodness, I’m nowhere even near that, then. Neither am I now, but it was simple. Like you said he took a problem and he made it just but he was a master.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, I don’t know, almost all of the ways I know to talk about it are analogies to other disciplines. But again, that’s because they’ve been doing it so much longer than we have, right? It’s like watching somebody who’s amazing draw a five line picture. And you wonder how can they draw that much better a five line picture than I can? And the answer is they’re really good at lines. They kind of have to be. Similarly, there’s a there’s a wonderful Bruce Lee book about practicing martial arts. I don’t know enough martial arts to matter, but it’s still a wonderful book about practicing anything. And one of the famous things that he says is the man who has practiced 1000 kicks one time each. I’m not afraid of him. The man who has practiced one kick 1000 times, him I’m afraid of.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah, makes sense to put the time and become the master and that kind of goes back into our, our, the you know, the topic of this conversation is education and how it for how we might compare I guess if you want to compare and contrast it, traditional education to boot camps and self taught and all these things and how really the education doesn’t It helps you, but it doesn’t make you the master that you eventually will become. It’s kind of up to you and up to maybe the tools that you find along the way. For me, I was lucky. It was mentors. I had great mentors for many, many years. I think it would have gotten to where I am without them, but it would have probably taken me a lot longer.

Noah Gibbs: That is indeed lucky. That is, that is an excellent thing. One of the big moments I hear, including from me, occasionally, is Man, I wish I found somebody who really understood this earlier. So I could have stopped making the same mistake so many times.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah, for sure. It’s kind of thing we don’t realize what you have until it’s it’s gone.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah.

Jake Yesbeck: if I if I could say one thing to my previous self, it’s to pay more attention. You’re already paying attention but pay more attention. You don’t know how valuable this is. What’s happening to you right now.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, that’s gonna be a constant experience, right? You’ll keep getting older and you’ll look at young you and say, wow, what an idiot that guy was. I mean, if you’re doing it right. The other alternative is not to improve. You hope you’re gonna look back and say what an idiot that guy was.

Jake Yesbeck: Right? There’s that old the old joke that any code you read, you’ve written 6 months or earlier is just garbage no matter what it is. And it’s, you know, it’s not always true, but a lot of it you look back, like why was I doing this?

Noah Gibbs: It’s not always true. You don’t have to wait six months. Sometimes 30 minutes is plenty.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah, six minutes. That’s it. What about you? You had a traditional education at Carnegie Mellon, you said, right?

Noah Gibbs: Yep, I did. I graduated in 1998. So I had in some sense, a very traditional education. You know, as we measure things. I occasionally observed that I’ve been a computer programmer for more than half the amount of time there has been computer programmers.

Jake Yesbeck: Wow.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah. Not many mathematicians get to say that, you know?

Jake Yesbeck: That’s cool. How do you think that you would do if, you know, besides the emotional maturity and stuff, how would you how do you think you would have done if instead of Carnegie Mellon, you had some semblance of a modern non predatory boot camp?

Noah Gibbs: You know, the difficulty is that the hard part of my early career was adapting to as much of a corporate job as development was then. I mean, I had I had a genuinely hard time with that for a long time. And it’s really hard to tease that apart from my level of emotional development at the time. Had I had an easy way to do the reclusive artist thing, but I was writing code, I would have done that in a second. A lot of the people I knew, because, you know, it was a weird time to get into computer programming. Again, it was it was beginning to be clear that there was a long term career in it, but it wasn’t necessarily obvious. And so a lot of the folks that did that were not ambitious aggressive careerist types because those folks pick, you know, finance or something else that looked likely to do well for a long time. So yeah, a bootcamp that got me to graduate younger would have exacerbated that problem a lot. Whereas if I’d had a real job for, you know, 10 years first or something, I’d probably have appreciated it a lot more. So I guess the hard part would be to figure out what what real job I would have been suited for.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah. And what you graduated He said late 90s was that right before the.com bubble was that? What was it Like?

Noah Gibbs: What was it like? I mean, just a few years before that, so I worked for a little company down in Carpinteria that was, not only did I not do a good job for them, they were a terrible idea. It was it was a company that was in the in the process, final process of falling apart. You’ve probably never heard of Kai’s Power Tools for Photoshop. But it turns out the company that made a whole set of different art tools like that merged with several other companies that also made art tools. And the way the merger worked was they had far too many middle managers after that, because that’s what you get after a merger and they didn’t fire any of them. Instead, every manager was trying desperately to look relevant. And the only thing they could do to look relevant was to cancel projects. And so from the time of that merger, well before I joined that company, never again was any project at that company proposed, built and sold. They died at different points and in different circumstances, but it was over for that company. Well before the three magical months I spent with them.

Jake Yesbeck: It’s a little different than the Agile methodology.

Noah Gibbs: Little bit. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. And so what kind of a real job I could have had instead of my early few jobs? I’m not sure. But I assume it would have been a difference in who I was and what I was like. You know, doing all of this. I’ve also gotten a lot of mileage out of knowing a whole bunch of useless stuff. I have, I have a ridiculous memory. I mean, I had a much more ridiculous memory before I had three children and massive sleep deprivation, but I still have a really good memory and it was much better when I was young. And the big advantage there is that when people say, Oh, yeah, if I knew more of this, like academic stuff, or if I remembered more of what we did in college, like, I feel like this would be easier. I can then with utter authority turn and say, I remember all that stuff. And no, actually, it’s completely useless here, without the slightest shred of doubt.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah, I feel that way sometimes. I feel like oh, I shouldn’t you know, especially earlier my career like I should have known more about this. Didn’t I take a class on this?

Noah Gibbs: Well, and sometimes that’s True. I mean, sometimes there is a specific case where something that was that was taught would have worked, but a depressing percentage of the time. Like, you sort of feel like that should be true. And then you look at it, you say, Okay, nevermind, they never prepared me for anything like this.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah, for sure. I’m optimistic about boot camps as they are now. I was less optimistic earlier in my career, because I, I conducted many interviews at previous companies. And it was always very clear the background the person had, and it was a no fault of their own. Right. They’re just, that’s the way it was. And now they seem a little bit more robust. And you have to you can’t just scratch the surface and find some missing knowledge like you used to be able to. Not to say that those people didn’t have some of them that were very, very great engineers. Better than me. But…

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, boot camp has turned out some very good engineers, but it’s hard to tell if that’s because of its approach or in spite of it sometimes. I mean, it’s hard to tell how many people would have been great no matter how they figured it out.

Jake Yesbeck: For sure. You said something interesting too, about how you would have other normal jobs. And that’s not something that rings true for myself too. I had a plethora of odd jobs growing up. And I think that I’ve worked with people that had similar backgrounds and I’ve worked with people that had their first job was the programming job after a four year college. And I it isn’t the make it or break it, but I think it definitely matters of, you know, having exposure in different industries and some perspective on to, frankly, how lucky we are.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, I had the enormous abusable privilege early on of not having to worry almost at all about how a business actually runs or what makes it work. And I definitely abused it. I definitely went okay, somebody else can think about that. That’s not my thing. Which of course is a terrible handicap in an employee that’s actually any good or of any importance in the business. But again, I sort of wished I could have been doing, you know, artistic programming in a cave in Norway somewhere. So I didn’t at the time think of that as a problem.

Jake Yesbeck: You still can.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, well, it’s I mean, my retirement fund is in a better condition than it had been previously. So it’s still on the table. I’m waiting to get permanent settlement in the in the UK before I do a lot of traveling through the rest of Europe, because that’ll guarantee that I’ve still got my visa forever. But once we hit the end of the five years, you know, that would be a great time to go program in a cave in Norway.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah, kind of switching gears… Is it a harder process now because of the whole Brexit situation to become a resident?

Noah Gibbs: Only if you’re European. So the thing about Brexit is that while the UK was part of the EU, there was much freer ability to go back and forth and a lot of that got canceled or some of it’s up in the air. They’re not sure how it’s going to work. But if you’re an American as you are, and I am, we were never part of the EU. Obviously, we still aren’t. I don’t imagine that will ever change. But that means that there were not these treaties that gave us easier passage. And so when they went away, it didn’t affect us in the slightest. We already had these problems.

Jake Yesbeck: So you’re stuck in the status quo regardless, that’s kind of nice.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah. And as it turns out the UK is an amazing place to try to be getting in as a self employed programmer. The vast majority of places you could go, they want you to already have a job lined up with a company from that country. And then they’re your sponsor for whatever amount of time and you basically get to stay there on their on their sufferance. And the problem with that, combined with little frothy internet startups with a tendency to go out of business every year or two is if you need five years of residency, and your company goes out of business after three years, you have suddenly a large problem. But a visa that permits self employment and changes of employers, which the UK has, and very few other English speaking countries that will accept an American do… Is you can just get in, in a way that is not tied to the company you work for. And if the company goes out of business, you turn around and find another job just like you would in the US.

Jake Yesbeck: That’s awesome. And I’ve worked with many people in California that were working on visas and they’re very concerned, you know, if they change jobs and their visa could be invalidated somehow and have to go home and then There’s a chance that couldn’t come back…

Noah Gibbs: Oh, it’s it’s brutal on the H1Bs and it doesn’t help that the depth of the paperwork you know, the the amount of time it takes the US government to get back to you is generally so long that by the time they’ve gotten back to you all your deadlines have already expired.

Jake Yesbeck: Yet another way that I feel lucky. That’s the theme. I’m just a lucky person, I guess. At least I recognize it, right under my nose, maybe?

Noah Gibbs: Recognizing it’s a good thing. And yes, absolutely. You and I are both fantastically lucky. And yeah, being able to see it’s good. For starters, there’s this thing that people like us are vulnerable to where we decide that everything going right in our life is because we are amazing. And that means when we turn around everything is going to just keep being amazing. And if you could see the places you’re lucky, you can understand that sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it isn’t. And you can avoid putting your feet in the place that has a trap.

Jake Yesbeck: For sure. That actually kind of sparks another interesting topic in terms of education backgrounds in software engineering, and how that might relate to the rampant impostor syndrome in our industry. Have you thought about that and how maybe one person is more susceptible to the other whether it be bootcamp self taught university.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah. Here, I’m going to say something that’s going to make me sound insufferably smug. But luckily it’s late in the interview so I don’t know, people who’ve listened this far maybe they’ve already got enough affection they’ll let me get away with it. When people in our industry as individual contributors feel impostor syndrome… The impossible standard that they’re comparing themselves to that makes them feel bad about not being is basically me. When you say I wasn’t programming when I was 12 years old… I was. When you say, well, I haven’t been doing this forever… I graduated in 98. That’s when I started having full time programming jobs and I have essentially continuously since then. Also a couple of part time jobs, you know, in college. When people say I yeah, I mean, I got the education but I don’t remember most of what they did. Again, amazing memory. I do. So the worst the impostor syndrome gets… I mean, there are certainly times I feel unqualified to do what I do, but I never feel like it was because they handed me an education and I dropped it on the floor. I am very well aware that I am holding that education very firmly. Sometimes it’s just not worth a damn.

Jake Yesbeck: For sure. Yeah, I could see that I think I’ve met more of like, if you think about the traditional impostor syndrome of the waiting for someone to find out that I actually do not belong in the role that I somehow tricked them into getting me into. I feel like it would be harder if I didn’t have a university degree. I think I would feel that more personally.

Noah Gibbs: Boot campers do tend, I mean, Bootcamp, graduates do tend to worry a lot more about that. It’s weird, I mean, looking at it, the skills that matter, they are often as good or better at a given number of years of experience, as the university people would be at… Not entirely sure how to count, like, the additional years of university as experience. I mean, they definitely don’t count as job experience one for one. It’s not like you know, at four years of, of job experience, you’re the same as a six month boot camp or plus three and a half years. Like, no, the six month boot camper plus three and a half years is way ahead of where you are fresh out of a four year degree. But they do tend to feel it more keenly. And I think it’s because boot camp graduates have this much wider range of quality. Like, the thing about a university is, at least a good one, I’m not going to say they can teach you better necessarily, because that’s that’s a big can of worms. But I will say that they’re more likely to fail you out if they fail.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah, weed out. It’s almost like weed out classes exist in a lot in my, in my experience, and it’s, it seems kind of anti bootcamp that a boot camp would try to weed you out, right?

Noah Gibbs: I mean, I suppose you could do that. But that doesn’t seem to be what they do. I yeah, I could imagine a boot camp like that. But I don’t see many boot camps that seemed like.

Jake Yesbeck: Yeah, which is good thing to, you know, people should be enabled to try and become software engineers as many times as they need and university kind of shuts that down. Imagine 18 year old you fail a weed out class freshman year, you’re like, well, I guess I won’t do that profession, but maybe you could have next year.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah. Now my university was big on that. They they kicked a lot of people out and I was I was lucky I didn’t try to go in as an artist because the weeding out at Carnegie Mellon, at least for the the artistic majors is actually vicious compared to any of the other majors. Like literally depending on which art major you’re in. There’s a particular year where they will get a bunch of professors together, and they will literally decide whether you’ve done well enough that they will let you continue or whether they’re throwing you out. And you’re just done with that for this lifetime. Pick another major or get out.

Jake Yesbeck: Wow, we’re just lucky guys.

Noah Gibbs: Yeah, now the computer science department didn’t do that. They just had the thing where your credits start expiring after… I forget if it was seven, seven or eight years. The joke went at CMU, you have six years to graduate. If at the end of six years you do not graduate, you become staff. You know, the people that kept going that far were usually pretty good staffers. But yeah, at some point your credits start expiring. So you’ve got to, you’ve got to be taking classes faster than they expire, which usually that’s not going to happen.

Jake Yesbeck: Funny. I’ve always I’ve always played with the idea of going back for more degrees because I really looking back I appreciate the academics much more than when I was actually in it. But the math never lines up for me. It always is, you know, a master’s in computer science or computer science, like in terms of career growth as a Ruby on Rails engineer, it doesn’t step me up that much.

Noah Gibbs: I used to think about that. And at this point, the equivalent in my head is I could take a gap year and work on personal projects, because I would just learn so much more that way. You know, I used to think that there was a magic to the the high end grad student academics. And at some point, I realized that magic is called a thesis advisor. And they cheerfully talk to people outside the university, and they write white papers, they spend all their time trying to publish all the stuff that they know. And so if you read the white papers and talk to the guys, I mean, you’re pretty much where their grad student would be. You don’t get a grad student stipend. But the flip side is you don’t have to go teach classes either. So overall, it’s kind of a wash.

Jake Yesbeck: And you don’t have to pay tuition.

Noah Gibbs: Grad students usually get a stipend. Grad students are not usually paying tuition. Undergrads normally are but it depends. Well, I don’t know. I knew in my neck of the woods, maybe other places do it differently. But yeah, in general, you tended to assume that grad students were there to enhance the prestige of the university, which happens to as a sideline involved the university getting a lot of teaching out of them.

Jake Yesbeck: That makes sense. Now, this has been a it’s been a very interesting conversation about a topic that I didn’t realize I thought so much about until we started talking about it.

Noah Gibbs: It’s really hard to avoid talking, to avoid at least thinking about it. I meet very few people who couldn’t, after you know, being a professional for a few years, seriously say interesting things about this. So let me ask you one more question. It’s about time for us to be done. But let me ask you one more question. Before we go. Imagine this blows up. Imagine that this episode becomes incredibly popular. Everybody hears you. Jake. Yesbeck – or Jason Yesbeck, if they only listen to the first bit and they hear me wrong – Jake Yesbeck is the name on everybody’s lips and you want to point them at something. You know, what’s your SoundCloud? This is like a Twitter thread that went viral. What’s your SoundCloud?

Jake Yesbeck: My website JakeYesbeck.com is where I publish things periodically, you can find my GitHub there and my Twitter there. I’m not super active on Twitter. But I do talk about technology. Sometimes I think that I would like to do more of this kind of thing in the future. So if you have a another episode that you’d like to have me on, I’d be happy to do it. And anybody else listening, I’m always interested in talking about being a software engineer, technologies, you know, education, anything, really. There’s a pandemic, please talk to me. But yeah, no, this this has been awesome. I really enjoyed the interview. And I thought that this was really cool. So thank you so much for having me on.

Noah Gibbs: What I’ll say about that for you going forward. I mean, for your benefit, but also whoever’s listening. My experience is that podcast guests are just people like every other sort of person except they’re on a podcast. And the reason that matters is that if you turn around and you ask people who give podcasts, if you propose yourself as a topic, and nontrivial percentage of them will say yes, it turns out this is the same process that gets people speaking on a stage at a conference, but with a little less ceremony to it. But even even the big podcasts like there’s a decent chat. I mean, they’re always looking for content. They’re always looking for people saying something interesting. And if you’ve got something interesting you want to say, easiest thing in the world, for most of these folks, they’re easy to contact, because they want people to talk to them is to say, Hey, I noticed you’ve got a podcast about -subject-. I’ve got this, you know, thing I have to say about -subject-. Would you be interested in scheduling a for a podcast. Very often the answer is going to be Yes, yes, yes. Here’s our process. Which is kind of how it worked with me. You know, that’s, that’s how you got here, right?

Jake Yesbeck: Definitely. Yeah, that’s great advice. Thank you.

Noah Gibbs: No trouble. Happy to happy to do it. All right. Well, this has been Computer Science: Just the Useful Bits with Jake Yesbeck. This week. I feel he’s been a fantastic guest. And I hope to speak in front of you with another guest in about a week.

Jake Yesbeck: All right. Thanks, Noah.

Noah Gibbs: Thank you.