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**Brian Ketelsen:** ...it just makes me wonder if I'm half of a Bryan or two-thirds of a Bryan today, and which Bryan am I half of. |
**Bryan Liles:** Well, you know, we've discussed this before. There is definitely the superiority in the concept that my name has a Y versus an I, so you know where you stand. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I do. I'm at most 95% of a Bryan. |
**Bryan Liles:** But, like I said, don't compare yourself to me, compare yourself to Brian K. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think that that's probably a good takeaway too, to constantly be evolving yourself and not look to other people. Like you said, you're comparing yourself to your perception of somebody else. Because they're smarter than you in one area, you assume they're smarter than you in all areas, and that's... |
I can do server-based stuff pretty well, distributed systems-type stuff. But you put me working on a game engine, I'm gonna be clueless. |
**Bryan Liles:** It's all triangles, don't worry about it. |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's all triangles. \[laughter\] |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Polygons everywhere. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Bringing back Katrina Owen's talk, because I think it ties in a lot to this, how to teach and how to give people small wins - what was your take on that talk? |
**Bryan Liles:** \[11:59\] Well, my number one take is, first of all, I adore Katrina. I've met her many times throughout the years and I love to see her speak. The second thing that I took from that was I liked the visualizations, I loved her slides. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Oh yeah, weren't they beautiful? |
**Bryan Liles:** It was one of those talks where, "Well, someone put some thought into that." I speak a lot, and I never use pictures in my slides, so every time I find that someone uses a lot of pictures and they use them well... I was pretty impressed. |
The third things is that I find that we... This is a point that I think she brought up - who owns tech? Who is tech? What is tech? We need to work on making tech more relatable to certain people. Some people want to just run up the hill. They're those free rock climbers who don't need any type of bracing or anything li... |
We need to work on breaking these down to make them more relatable, or these concepts down, to make them more relatable to more people. Like I said, this is not easy. It's extremely hard, and we're not gonna find answers this generation. It's gonna be a generation or two down the way, but we need to make it better. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I'm listening to you talk about how you don't compare yourself to other people. I totally compare myself to other people. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I do, too. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** ...and I think it's useful for me to do so. I hope it's in a healthy kind of way that I do that. There is totally the unhealthy aspect to it, that I'm thinking "I'm not as good as that person and I should be." But I also try to make it in such a way that I am looking at the happy path for myself,... |
Because, to make a side note, it is hard to do something until you see what's possible; then you just go for it. At least for me it happens like that. But as far as comparing myself to other people, when I look at other engineers and I see, "Wow, they have ten years of experience, or they have five experience and look ... |
For example, I've just covered Jack Lindamood. He spoke at GopherCon as well. He was not on my radar until recently, and I'm totally in awe of the things that he has done; how well he writes his blog about Go is amazing. And I'm thinking, "How did he get to work on those projects? How did he get there?" Because I didn'... |
\[16:06\] I'm trying to find a way... For example, I look at people who are at a certain level, for example Ines Sombra (she works at Fastly as well). I am totally an admirer of hers. She speaks at conferences, she runs the Papers We Love, she reads papers... So I'm trying to emulate the things that she does, to try to... |
**Bryan Liles:** I have a thought on that, and specifically with Ines. I enjoy listening to Ines speak. If you ever get a chance to hear her speak in person, it's amazing how fast she speaks and how information-dense it is. It's actually quite an event. But one thing that I would ask Ines is not really how she does wha... |
Because we look at her success and how far she's come, but we don't understand her impetus for doing it, and that's what we need to understand. I tell people all the time, it's not the How, it's the Why. Why do we do what we do? |
Once you understand why she does what she does, or why someone else does what they do, then you can understand how they're doing this and how they're getting the success. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yes. Just to clarify, because I don't want to leave people with the wrong impression. I run into a lot of things, I run into a lot of people, and a lot of things don't resonate with me. For example, when I started getting to Papers We Love, we'd just started a chapter here in San Diego - that res... |
When I look at somebody's work and that work resonates with me, I know how I feel and that's all I need to know. Maybe asking them how they feel would help me a little, too. Maybe they feel awful about it; that would dissuade me... But the point is there are things that we could be working on, that resonate with me, an... |
**Erik St. Martin:** There's two points to that, that I'd like to point out. You said how this person was relatively unknown and within five years became this... I think we see that with businesses too; it's the myth of overnight success. You see people and it looks like they were completely off the map, and then in fi... |
To the other point, I'd like to start seeing people share their stories. How did you get into tech? Because I think that humanizes people and you start to see that it was a long, hard road to travel; it wasn't just this immaculate thing where they just in two years became some prominent engineers. There was a long line... |
\[20:06\] And even backgrounds - as Bryan Lyles pointed out - the way you grew up... I didn't grow up with a lot of money; I dropped out of high-school, I went back for a GED, completely self-taught... So, like Bryan said, everybody has their own path, and there are many paths that lead to the same place. Just because ... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, I like that idea a lot. Cassandra Gil from GoBridge had the idea of a blog post series where people will write blog posts anonymously, telling about their story. We are going to be seeking people who will have what we would call a different story from the mainstream. And I think they're pro... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I love the Why question, too. I think that's a very good point, Bryan, that a Why is really what matters. Because it's always probably gonna end in passion. If somebody did something that really became a hit, it's probably because they were just really driven, for whatever reason; the technology in... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, you almost never see technology succeed just on the basis of being cool technology. That's, at least in my experience - in fact, that might even be the kiss of death for a technology. Just because it's amazing technology, if it isn't solving an interesting problem or causing you to think diffe... |
I think that same thought pattern goes with learning and programming. You could have a person who's a brilliant programmer; if they don't care about what they're doing, they're probably not gonna stay a programmer long. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I always say this... When people ask how I got into programming, I always say you have to really love it, because if you don't love it, you're not going to last a long time. You have to love it because it's very rigorous and demanding. I think you have to have a certain aptitude to dig deep and t... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think people need micro-successes too, to develop the love for it. Most people probably got into programming for one reason or another and then they did something, and that feeling that "I've built this" came out of it. This is a similar thing to a contractor. Long, hard working days, you bang yo... |
Then I think it takes a different frame of mind, but I don't think that you have to have it to begin with. You can shift it. |
\[23:43\] As an example, I had a friend over one day and we have these crazy RC cars, and you break them more than you drive them. So we're sitting there working on them, and he's getting really frustrated with his. He's like, "I don't know how you do this. How you can sit there and take it apart, put it back together ... |
I think that you can shift your mindset too, to where something not working doesn't cause you anxiety but it causes excitement, where it's a puzzle to solve. "I'm gonna figure this out." Once you shift that mindset, things become much easier. |
**Bryan Liles:** That's a pretty important point there. I use this a lot in my life. I'll give you a good example of something that I've done more times over the years than I can actually count. The impression is that Bryan is some super programmer... And yeah, I do know a lot of languages - I think I'm up to about 20 ... |
The first GopherCon that I went to, I didn't know Go. But I saw all these nice people, and I knew Brian from before, and I knew of a couple people from before, and I'm like "Well, this is kind of cool. If these kinds of people wanna come to this kind of conference, I think that I should learn their language." |
So what did I do? I said, well, I work at DigitalOcean. What can I do at DigitalOcean with Go? Because we weren't actually using Go. There was maybe one tiny Go project at that time. So I said, "Well, I wanna benchmark something with our cloud." I said, "Well, can I write an API in Go? Can I write this code in Go?" Bec... |
I've been able to take my little win from writing this a few hundred-line thing in Go, to writing now the official API client for DigitalOcean in Go. Where did that come from? Well, I actually have the ability -- I boot up hundreds of virtual machines some days, and I got tired of writing software to do it, so I said, ... |
So I just started writing it. In my spare time, when I was on the airplane, when I was at a conference speaking, when I was not doing something else. That evolved into our official command line client. And that's the thing you see. You see the success of the software that I wrote, but you didn't see that this came from... |
I have this whole theory about being rich, and I can tell you why you don't wanna be rich. You just wanna pay all your bills and actually have one more dollar than you need to spend every month. I'm talking about after you pay yourself, after you save for vacation, after you pay for retirement, after you pay all your b... |
So what I'm saying here is that we just should build up slowly. We build up our savings slowly, we build up our knowledge slowly, we build up our personalities and our brand slowly. All these things that I've been doing, I've been doing almost the same things since 1994, and it took ten years for people to realize who ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[27:44\] Yeah, that's a valid point too, financially and knowledge-wise to slow down and enjoy the journey. That's one thing that I know myself I've been trying to get out of. I raced and raced and raced... I wanted to reach what I felt was a level of success, and when you put yourself into that m... |
I don't want or need as much money; I wanna slow down, I wanna be happy day to day, spend time with my family. But the knowledge thing, it kills you; you constantly feel like you don't know enough, so you learn... And you don't take a step at the end of the year and realize how far you've grown yourself, because you've... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Maybe that's the hard part for beginners to understand, the non-linear curve of measuring your success. I agree with almost everything we've said. Everything starts really small, just having a tiny little Go API app that works against the DigitalOcean servers, turns into DigitalOcean's DO control, w... |
**Bryan Liles:** Yaay!! |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah! More than once I've heard people say, "If you're looking for a way to do an API client, go copy this code." That didn't happen because you sat down one day and wrote the best code in the world; it happened because you did uglier stuff earlier and learned from it each time. There's a progressio... |
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