You are techY podcast

Ellen (00:02):

You are listening to the You are techY podcast, episode number twenty-eight.

Intro (00:10):

Welcome to the You are techY podcast where it’s all about growing in your techy-ness so you can find the tech job of your dreams and now your host technology learning coach, Ellen Twomey.

Ellen (00:30):

This podcast is sponsored by our all new course, What Tech job is Right For Me? Visit us at youaretechy.com/start to check out our new course and find what tech job is right for you!

Ellen (00:47):

Erik Guffrey is the founder and CEO of fugitive labs. He’s a self-taught developer with over a decade of experience in building production level, full stack applications. His day to day includes clients, spec meetings, development and hiring developers. He taught himself to code in 2008 to build out his first startup, a mobile payments infrastructure company. That was just a little too early. He worked at a hedge fund building, high frequency trading algorithms before getting back into code in 2012 he did that as the head of engineering and product at an eCommerce startup. He holds two patents, one on reusable adhesives based on gecko physiology. And the other a document protection was an encryption scheme that spun out of his mobile payment startup. Eric has a ton of experience and knowledge and we’re so excited to have him on the podcast. Eric, welcome to the show. Alright, let’s just jump in and tell us about your career. How did you start out? I gave a little bit of the high level but dig into what got you to where you are now.

Erik (02:06):

So I have one of these uh, kind of meandering career paths where I was an undergraduate Mmm. In mechanical engineering but never practices as a Emmy. I, uh, one when I graduated, um, I had a childhood dream of, of going to live at a ski resort for a little while. And so my now wife and I moved out to Aspen, Colorado intending to ski bum for, for a season and ended up staying for two years. After two years we decided, we kind of woke up and we’re like, we need to leave now or we’re never going to leave.

Erik (02:47):

So we moved back to the East coast. We were got engaged in the back of East coast. Um, and I ended up stumbling into, uh, commercial real estate, private equity. And then in 2008 ish, 2008, 2009, I had a, and idea I was, I was in line at a Walgreen’s filling a prescription and I had left my wallet in the car, but I had my phone in my hand and I was like, Oh, why can’t I just make a payment prescription from my phone? It was an old black phone. Yeah. You know, light bulb went off. And, uh, so that kind of got my interest in the engineering stuff back again. Mmm. And I, I’ve, you know, I’ve been entrepreneurial my whole life. My, my, uh, my first business was selling mix tapes in the middle school.

Erik (03:39):

I did, I did t-shirt screen printing in high school. And, and so anyway, this is, this is all kind of always a part of me to try to start my own thing and build that. And Mmm. You know, being in a mechanical engineer, I’m very like, uh, tactical by nature and I wanted to touch and feel stuff. Um, and I, I didn’t really see the appeal of software until I started working on this project for mobile payments. And I realized that like, the feedback loop in software is so tight, then I can, you know, I can like, right, right. Something on the, in the code and to see it on the screen immediately instead of having to wait for, you know, do designs and wait for somebody to go mill it and bring it back and it just takes forever and in the physical world.

Erik (04:24):

Um, so that really got me interested in software and, and um, startups in general. Mmm. I had a chance, uh, pretty close chance, um, to get a major grocery store in line to use my system as there as, as a way to make payments through their rewards program. And, uh, that ended up falling through and I was just kind of looking for the next thing. And then I got hired as a, um, to implement trading algorithms for this petite hedge fund. Um, moved to, uh, the triangle North Carolina too. Um, join the, that eCommerce company we started. And that one, uh, so I helped run products for that and I had hired several engineers and, um, that startup folded in 2012, 2013, sorry. And one of the engineers that I hired, he and I have become pretty good friends and, um, we were trying to figure out what we were going to do next. And, and a friend of a friend reached out and said, Hey, I need an app built. Do you think you can help me do that? And I was like, yeah, I can do that. We finished that app. Somebody else had kind of caught wind of what we were doing and we started building another app. And then after two years we kind of pick their heads up. I’m like, well, I guess this is what we’re doing now.

Erik (05:50):

This is what we do. Um, yeah. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. And so, um, so you talked little bit about like the transition, but what did that really look like when you were, so you knew you were writing algorithms, but you wanted to get into pure tech? Like how did you leap into that? How did you, how did you, you’re like, so we’ve figured out how to write an app, like what did that look like in detail? Yeah, that’s a good question. So when I did my mobile payment startup, I did not know how to actually write code. Um, I have, I, you know, with my engineering education and just kind of being that mindset, I know yeah. Technical, right. And I knew how to like structure the problem and, and basically the fundamentals of what everything worked. I didn’t know how to actually, how to write the code myself.

Erik (06:41):

I found that very frustrating. So around that time I started kind of picking it up just because I was like that I couldn’t do it. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, and then when I went to the hedge fund, I started to write more code, but it was, it was, um, yeah, functional programming, right? Yep. Which is a little different than application development or sure. And, but that kind of got me into it. But when I decided when I decided to make the switch, I wanted to get really back into tech is that was where the interesting problems were for me in building building products, not, not just, you know, moving money and financial instruments. Right. I wanted to build products. I realized that like in order to really build the products, I need to understand what I’m doing. I want to be able to do it myself, learn a little bit of Django and Mmm.

Erik (07:32):

Yeah. Fundamentals of Python and, and then when I got hired at eCommerce company, I learned Ruby on rails. C-sharp uh, and again it was all this sort of, yeah. Lot of trial and error banging my head against the table. Well you said a couple of things. First of all, you were talking about the feedback cycle and software. That’s 100% why I was drawn to it. It’s like I’m in, I just got this feedback group and they like, I’m always working on my patients. I’m an impatient person, which I think makes me a great entrepreneur. But I love that. I’m like, it was, it was like mind blowing to me where you could like get immediate I error message has never bothered me. I’ve heard, you know, newbies be like, Oh, I got your, I was like, yes, that’s information. That’s information. I always loved that.

Erik (08:19):

And then the other thing you said is, um, about products and about solving a problem and about, this is one of the things I harp on all the time. It’s really hard to learn code. It’s much easier to solve a problem product. There’s a bigger motivation there. And I think it’s just more, it’s more interesting. Like it’s, it’s, that’s where the, the kind of, um, fun happens because you know that you’re building something that is going to really solve a real world problem. And I think maybe that’s that tangibility that you were looking for. Um, kind of out of engineering. It is. Yeah, because I had a, you know, I took C plus plus in college. Uh, it was a prereq for, you know, one of my baseline courses. And I, it was like, this is lane. I didn’t, I didn’t get it right. And I was in college during the.com bust.

Erik (09:15):

And so I like watched that happen and all my CS undergrad friends, I was just kinda like, you know, like you guys are so you guys are in such trouble. Um, and it, so it kinda, it took me a really long time, uh, to find out that that feedback loop exists. And it wasn’t really until I started to solve a problem, try to solve a problem that I had right when I discovered it. Yeah. Yeah. Totally curious to hear what role Parenthood played in your career decisions. Because I know like not everyone’s going to say, Oh, uh, I have, I want to have a lot of kids, or I have a lot of kids. I think I’ll start a company too. That makes a lot of sense. But like what, how did those, how did that kind of play out for you?

Erik (10:01):

Yeah, so I, um, as I said, I’ve always been entrepreneurial and wanted to, I run my own thing. That entrepreneurial side of me comes from, um, or a lot of the reason for that is cause I have a pretty high comfort level for the risk. Right. Like I, I, um, I’m willing to accept a pretty decent amount of downside in order to achieve the upside that comes with being an entrepreneur longterm. But having kids definitely changed that calculation a little bit. Well, yeah. You know, I always tell, I tell her if I didn’t have kids, I’d be living on a couch and somewhere eating ramen every day until I made it. Right. I can, I could personally live in squalor. Um, it wouldn’t bother me at all. But you know, having Robin’s not going to do that and having kids is like, I don’t want my kids to live in smaller.

Erik (11:02):

So like it’s, yeah, it’s a, it definitely changes the calculation for, for, um, the decisions that I make and kind of the, what I’m, but it also changes kind of how I, how I spend my time. Cause again, I, you know, I would Hmm. Um, you know, if I didn’t have, uh, family life to balance, um, then I would probably work, you know, 16, 18 hours a day, um, a lot of days. And that’s not something that I’m, you know, having a family that’s not something I’m even remotely interested in doing. Like I don’t, in fact, I think it’s very unhealthy to do that. Um, and so yeah, you know, it’s made me a much more patient entrepreneur, um, forced me to be a more patient entrepreneur and it’s, I think that being a fathers and a parent has made me a much better leader um in the company. So.

Ellen (12:04):

Good.

Ellen (12:04):

I love that. I love it. That was fun. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I think it’s always, um, you know, cause our community, we’re, we’re mom focused and we’re female focused and um, so often I think moms think, you know, that they’re the only ones thinking about this. And that’s not true. All of us who are parents or this is the other thing I say all the time, people who are not parents but they’re taking care of their own parents. Like that’s really common. If you don’t have kids, you’re typically the one who’s helping with your parents and when, when they’re not super elderly, that might not be super hands on, but as they get older and so we all have, um, you know, responsibilities that, you know, can seem like this thing. Oh, well it’s slowing me down, but it actually can help us be a better person.

Ellen (12:55):

I know. I definitely, I definitely am, can handle so much more after having four kids. I mean, when you have four kids, it’s like other things aren’t as stressful, you know, like we’ll make it, we’ll figure it out. Whatever it is.

Erik (13:10):

Right. If I don’t get it done today, I’ll get it done tomorrow or next week or whatever. It’s fine.

Ellen (13:14):

Yup. Totally.

Erik (13:15):

It’s not the end of the world. Yeah. Yeah.

Ellen (13:17):

Okay. So a little bit more about your work. What about, is there a time where you had like a really hard deadline? Can you tell us about what it was like and how you handled it?

Erik (13:25):

Yeah, I, uh, I have had to huge deadlines in tech that we’re both PR related. So yes. So the, the, the leader in charge of the project, um, I won’t, so your names or companies or anything but in each, this is two separate cases, but follow this same pattern.

Erik (13:51):

The leader in charge of the project had, uh, published a, a a launched with, with a, um, to like their PR channels promising that we’re launching on this date weeks, two weeks in advance. Like I think one case, it was like two months in advance. Well, really even before engaging, engaging us in the, you know, the project, Oh my God, I was going to say, did you know that this was the deadline? Even if they weren’t even your client yet, they weren’t even our client yet. And well, one of the, yes, they weren’t even our client yet and it, it’s Mmm, if you’ve ever been in that situation, it’s just, it’s just horrible. And you know, everyone’s kind of optimistic at the beginning and things are going well, but you’ll learn as you get into the project, so you get 80% of the way done.

Erik (14:49):

You have 20% of the project left. That is a, that is when everything hits the fan and things get really hard and that lasts 15, 10, 15% of the project takes 90% of the time and effort cause it’s, it’s all about, you know, Polish and getting it right and fixing bugs and doing all these things. And when you’re on a, when you’re on a hard deadline like that where you know, you have, um, journalists that are embargoed, uh, but I’ve already written their piece on this thing coming out the next day or you know, in a week and you’re probably realistically another two or three weeks away from actually being done correctly. It’s just a terrible experience. That’s the one thing that I don’t like necessarily about startup culture as it’s portrayed is that it’s, but, you know, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. No matter what. I don’t agree with that sentiment. I don’t like it and I don’t think it’s necessary and, but there are some, um, company cultures that are just like that and I don’t, anyway, this, this one, this one particular project, um, what that hard deadline kind of forced me to live that for awhile and uh, made me very grateful for not doing that. So how I handled it now is I don’t get involved with heart.

Ellen (16:18):

I love it. I think, um, I couldn’t agree more. I, I lived that, that was like, that was my entrance into the work world after graduating college. Cause I was one of those CS majors and I, yeah, I’m just this, I’m just a shade shade older than you work. So I wasn’t just a shade ahead. I actually had a job, but which quickly, which quickly transitioned into not a job, but um, but we, they called it a flex leave where I was right. But they paid us like I got paid like I think 20% of my salary and then I got to work at another job. So I was actually cool with it. It wasn’t, it was fine, but it was, it was programming around the clock. And now like in retrospect, I love and I’m like, well of course I wasn’t very good at two in the morning. And I know a lot of developers, like they do the late night thing. And I am for sure in early bird, like I like getting up early. But I would argue, I mean it’s fine if you like programming it too in the morning, but if it’s your 19th hour, I now know you’re not being effective. Like your brain, your cognitive, it’s fine. I know when you’re 22, you can stay up all night and it’s not that big of a deal, but you’re not as good.

Erik (17:30):

Yeah.

Ellen (17:31):

And I think that that’s a big part of, uh, the, you know, I mean, we, you know, we both live in Raleigh, Durham area. We love that culture. It’s very hard working. People aren’t lazy here. They just aren’t sure. They just aren’t insane. They just don’t do that. Um, so I, I really appreciate that and think that it does make sense. And so you’ve been able to get other deadlines accomplished without working like that? Is that, is that what you’re telling me?

Erik (17:58):

Yes. Uh, yes, I think so. Get hub, uh, has it, uh, pretty interesting policy on, on or how they approach deadlines is they don’t, they don’t, um, in in particular deadlines set internally for as, as a goal to hit are perfectly fine and reasonable and like you should do that, right? The hard deadline that is, uh, coming from outside of your control. Yeah. But you can’t move. This is just a terrible policy. Super interesting. Okay. I like that. That’s, that’s cool to know. Okay. So you have some control, you’ve had some challenging clients, I’m sure you’ve had some amazing clients. You’ve worked for these systems over the years. What do you like best about your job and then what do you find most challenging? What I like best about my job is I really enjoy working on new problems frequently.

Erik (19:00):

So my company does, um, we do some of our own product development internally, but we don’t have a, the one product that we work on constantly. So, you know, we have three or four new projects at minimum a year that we kind of get to flex our brains on and, and work out like new things. It’s like, Oh, this is a completely different situation. Mmm. Or it’s a totally different business than we’re used to dealing with. Um, and it’s, that’s fun to get involved with those new, new, uh, new problems. Right. And new projects and the newness of it is great. Um, okay. The thing that I find challenging about my particular business is that…

Erik (19:48):

It force it, we don’t often have the privilege of singing very long term. Yeah. It’s just a, I guess it’s just a personal preference of like whether or not you would want to work on a bunch of different things or if you want to focus on one thing for a very long period of time. Um, but yeah. Yeah. But I do know that some of the more talented, um, developers, they can get bored. Like I’ve definitely heard that sentiment, like if they’re working on, if they’re internal and they’re working on the same, um, products for a long time. Yep. You know, maintenance and tweaks. And sometimes it’s not that interesting of a problem. It’s just like code you’ve written a bunch of times, you know, I know that that can be a problem. And the frustration. Tell me a little bit about like, more about your ideal client. Like who do you, so you want to go from zero to kind of product concept, conception. Cool. Who do you, what do you want to show up at your, in your inbox and seek out your services?

Erik (20:57):

So I don’t know that I have necessarily an ideal client, but I can tell you that we have, uh, you know, I’ve observed a pattern of people that, that come to us. Um, and that is typically somebody, whether an individual or entity that has a, uh, tremendous amount of domain expertise in their particular market and have a defined, like a pretty well defined problem and some semblance of a solution that they’re already selling, whether that’s consulting services or some various off the shelf components that they’ve kind of patched together into a makeshift product. Um, things like that. And then they, they, they kind of come to the conclusion that we need a, like our own product that is ours, that we can then sell to, you know, as this, as the solution. And then that’s when they come to us and we will help them build that product out so that, um, yeah, that’s been, that’s, that’s led to, uh, us working in a, in a wide range of industries.

Ellen (22:10):

Right.

Erik (22:12):

But that profile of really, um, you know, having the, having a problem and a makeshift solution that needs a product around it, that’s, that’s kind of where we fit in.

Ellen (22:25):

Yeah. Cool. Super interesting. Thanks for going into that. So I, I know that um, a question a lot of people, a lot of listeners are going to have, uh, because you, you hire, you have, you have a team and Mmm. I want to know, like, what do you look for when you hire and then can you give us, this is one of the favorite questions. Can you give us like two secret weapon questions that you have? Like from an insider is higher. Yeah. The CEO, you’re going to hire someone, give us your good stuff, what are you going to ask people so that my community can, they can prep and get ready to answer those.

Erik (23:00):

So the go getter, self-starter, um, I try to do that. I don’t do that. Okay. When I, when I interview people, it’s more, um, I want to get to know them. So I don’t know that I have, it’s very, I try to be very conversational. I don’t have a specific set of questions that I ask. Okay. Mmm. The, the two things that I do is I try to go into a restaurant setting. Okay. When I’m face to face, I want, I like to see how people interact with, with servers and waiters, uh, how they, do they clean their, do they, you know, participate in cleaning up the plates? Do they say please and thank you. Do they, you know what I mean? Are they gracious? That kind of thing. Um, I just like observing that it kind of gives me, uh, a little bit of an insight there into their personality and their character. Um, and then for the self-starter thing, I, I, what I try to do is I take a, uh, uh, depending on what skill level they’re coming in or they, you know, state that they’re coming in, I give them a coding challenge that is a take home and, um, I can, I can learn a lot from that based on how they approach it.

Ellen (24:24):

That’s awesome. Okay. So two, two questions on that. I can never talks about server backgrounds. I mean, that’s how maybe I told you no, I waited tables. That’s how I pay for college. Kevin and I both, that’s how I do that. Yes. So I have this straw, Mmm. Opinion that everyone should, like my kids are gonna, they’re going to work in some type of service food service industry. That is, I actually think everybody should have to do that. I think that’s one of the best educational, you know, subjects you can learn.

Erik (25:02):

It helps in, in networking too. Just breaking the ice. Uh, yeah,

Ellen (25:08):

totally.

New Speaker (25:08):

Particularly for engineering types who like, you know, we’re not known for our people’s skills usually, so. Right, right. Okay. Yeah. I think that the, you know, the mark of a true leader is what, how they, how they help the people that they’re…

Ellen (25:23):

Yeah.

Erik (25:24):

That they, you know, that worked for them, right. It’s how do they work for the people that, you know, reportedly worked for them. Right. You can, you just get a lot out of kind of watching people do that.

Ellen (25:33):

Yeah. That’s good. I’d like to dive in. So we talked a little, you’re hiring is great. That’s great for general, but you hire junior developers and so I think what would be really interesting is if you could help articulate, what would you expect a junior developer to do? Even just a few examples and then maybe contrast that with what would you expect someone to do at like three or five years when you’re kind of out of that junior phase.

Erik (26:05):

Sure. Um, so my, my business partner and I, have you ever heard of something called the mere cat method?

Ellen (26:12):

Hmm. I don’t think so. The mere cat method of learning. Oh my gosh, I got to get this. No,

Erik (26:20):

uh, supposedly it’s been a long time since I’ve read up on this, but supposedly your cats out in the wild, the way that they teach their young kind of survive as they like let them go figure things out. Okay. And then they only help them when they get stuck. Okay. And a grant and I take that approach really kind of throughout the life cycle of, of all of our engineers, whether they’re it’s day one or you know, they 500, um, it is, we give them something to do or an assignment or um, you know, directive that is perhaps slightly out of their comfort zone or you know, Mmm. Just past where, where they would typically be right. And say go figure it out and then, but encourage the, you know, then to come back and once they bump up against the wall, Mmm. To come, come to us and we do this. That’s why we do this with our coding challenges. Pre hire, we do this post-hire it’s sort of how we onboard people. Um, we’ll give them, if we have a live project to work on at the time, we’ll give them a piece of the live project to do.

Ellen (27:45):

Oh, cool.

Erik (27:46):

That, uh, you know, again, it’s like slightly out of their comfort zone. So it kind of depends on how junior junior we’re talking about, you know, are you somebody who’s fresh out of a coding bootcamp or are you a recent CS undergrad? Cause those are again, slightly different profiles. Mmm. Or have you already been, you know, in the field for a year, but maybe you’re where you’ve been working or being in Wales and now you’re coming to us somewhere, you know, a no JS job. So, um, I would say that in general, the for at our company, a junior developers should be able to touch everything on the stack. But, uh, anything that requires significant architecture considerations or is, um, it’s something that’s critical to the business function of our client, whether it’s, it’s, um, security, uh, in anything to do with financial transactions. Um, those are the really the two big ones. Uh, we would not expect a junior developer. We wouldn’t assign that to a junior deal, but that would be one of the senior groups, senior guys.

Ellen (29:03):

So I just want to clarify a little bit. So a junior developer is gonna really, um, maybe improve an area, add elements, maybe add functionality to elements, thought a UI stuff, but not, not add anything in the architecture, not…

Erik (29:22):

They may do basic scaffolding things, but there’s, you know, there’s, there are, um, yeah, instances where it’s like, how should, how should this, Mmm. How should these two database models interact in such a way so that it can be extensible down the road. You know, that’s where, that’s where a senior person would come in.

Ellen (29:47):

Got it. Cool.

Ellen (29:48):

Super cool. All right. So if someone, you’re, you’re a no JS shop, someone’s going to learn Java script, what are, can you, can you give us some tips on learning it and then maybe the three skills that a newbie should focus on so they’re trying to get hired? Well, I always tell them like, they always try to learn too much. So I’m always, I’m always saying, okay, let’s focus on skills that are really going to get you higher or get you to the next level. What are like three skills? Like just focus on those three. Do those really well. What would you say those are

Erik (30:24):

For a junior person…I would probably say that you’re prospects of getting hired our best focused on the front end. Okay. And learning one of the popular front end libraries. Mmm. At least to a familiar sense. Uh huh. It is going to improve your chances for us. That’s react. We use, we use react exclusively and that is a world. Once you say I’m going to learn react, well that leads you down a path of a thousand. Other things, other shops would be angular shops. Uh, other shops would be, um, Vue JS is another popular one. Um, I think that I haven’t checked in a while, but I believe that react is still the most popular and then go to those. And I don’t know that I could. So I would, I would probably, I try to dive deep into one of those libraries. Okay.

Ellen (31:36):

And then within that, focusing on, what would you say within react, what are some…?

Erik (31:44):

Proper state management is a loaded term.

Ellen (31:49):

Got it.

Erik (31:50):

React is a, the big difference between react and angular is angular as two way binding and react is one way binding. Um, and so managing the flow of data that’s coming through the front end components, uh, is, uh, it’s probably the most difficult thing to wrap your head around when you’re getting into react and doing it correctly or under with, with the best practices that the state of the art of the time. Right? That’s correct. It’s pretty important. Um, yeah, so that’s again, that’s, that’s pretty deep if you’re looking at JavaScript in general. Um, there’s a, uh, a guy named Dan. Yeah. I don’t if you’ve heard of him. I have. Yep. Yeah, he’s the star. Uh, I believe that he invented Redux, which is the state management, the state management library that’s commonly commonly used with the act, but he has a, yeah, if you just Google him, he has great resources all the way from learning basic vanilla, JavaScript up to like high level concepts. Um, yeah.

Erik (33:05):

And he’s really dedicated a big portion of his career to educating on JavaScript. So cool. So most of most of my learning is, is uh, uh, Googling and stack overflow and just kind of, I think that one of the big secrets about programming in general is that a good programmer is a really good Mmm. It’s really good at query structure. You know, I love it. I’m good at good at searching Google. I love that. Definitely one of the biggest misconceptions for newbies. They’re like, I like, they don’t just have it all in their head. Trust me, I have, I think in the 10 years that I’ve been doing this, I can count on one hand how many times that I’ve come across a truly novel situation that I couldn’t find. It’s help Melbourne on stack overflow. That’s super cool. That’s really good. Yeah. Stack overflow is awesome.

Ellen (34:01):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean it’s the go to resource for…

Erik (34:04):

But again, you have to kind of like going, just going to stack overflow to learn JavaScript or coding would be, uh, overwhelming. Like you wouldn’t be able to get anything out of that. You have to be trying to solve something specific and know what to know, how to ask the question that you’re trying to figure out. And then stack overflow is a great resource.

Ellen (34:27):

I love it. I love it. That’s all awesome. That’s why we recommend like in our, in our programs where we just start with a project because it’s very much like back to what we talked about at the beginning. If you have an interesting problem to solve, then you start to solve it. It’s not about memorizing the code. And I know like a lot of times newbies are like, just give me the line of code.

Ellen (34:51):

Well what’s the line of code? And that is the mistake, right? Because it’s understanding what the problem is and then knowing how to search appropriately to find the specific way to solve that. That’s the skill. Not the line of code, but it’s hard to, it’s hard to conceptualize that. But if you don’t have a specific enough problem and a question, like you’re just saying you’re not, you can read stack overflow, tail flew in the face, but if you don’t, if you don’t know how to ask that and it’s going to take a few times to ask it correctly in the beginning probably.

Erik (35:25):

Sure. Yeah. And you know, I think the, you know, there is, there is skill in elegance and you know, becoming elegant and writing code or you know, doing writing some really nifty recursion function instead of a whole bunch of if then statements. Right. Mmm. But, uh, that comes, that comes with time. And that’s really the difference between junior and senior year. Yeah.

Ellen (35:52):

Yeah. That’s super interesting. Okay. So we’ve got a woman in the audience right now and she’s considering a career in tech she’s thinking that JavaScript developer could be the path for her. What advice do you have for her?

Erik (36:09):

Take the you are techy course on JavaScript.

Ellen (36:18):

Awesome advice. Thank you so much. So in general any other advice besides, yeah, sign up for our, for a JavaScript course that we have coming out very soon.

Erik (36:27):

Um Hmm. As you said before, you know, tried to try to try to build something using JavaScript and see how far you get. Mmm. See if you like it. JavaScript is a weird language. It’s super powerful, but it’s also like messy and gross to a lot of people. Like it’s not..

Ellen (36:44):

Yeah.

Erik (36:45):

It’s not. Um, it’s not always pretty to look at and people, if you get into projects where there’s Java script written ugly or badly or everything in between, it’s difficult to deal with. But it’s also, my goodness, you can do anything with it. Um, so it’s also amazing, but um, it’s uh, yeah, I would just, my advice would be to try to build something real as possible, but you know, kind of dummy if not possible. Ideally several things. But yeah, I try to build something.

Ellen (37:22):

That’s a great advice. Eric, thank you so much for being here. I enjoyed our conversation as I always do and I look forward to the next one. Thanks.

Erik (37:31):

Thank you.

Ellen (37:38):

Hey, if you enjoyed listening to this podcast, you have to sign up for the You are techY email list. Imagine being in the tech job of your dreams. Join me to get the strategies, training and never ending support to get hired. Sign up at youaretechy.com that’s Y-O-U-A-R-E-T-E-C-H-Y dot com. I’ll see you next time.