Ep. 8 - Printers Are My Nemesis with Carter McKay | Devs:After Dark

Yeah. Oh, we're live, by the way. Oh, I know.

Yeah.

Okay. Oh, we— okay, good.

But I wanted to make sure we got a rib in on Dennis once or twice before we got officially started.

So that's usually—

that's par for the course. But here we are. I mean, this is exciting. We're on episode 8 of Developers After Dark. I'm your host, Nick. And then, of course, with me as always, the— I would say the Robin to my Batman.

Oh, wow.

Dennis. Isn't that great?

I don't know how I feel about that. Robin.

Yeah. I mean, it could be worse. Could be worse, right?

I will— I will say that I've stuck it out longer than your brother did. So, you know.

That's— that's— he's even family and he abandoned quicker than I thought, right? So it's— but no, he's technically— just to be fair for people that are listening, he's not— he hasn't abandoned. He's— he's out right now on sabbatical.

So he's—

He'll be back, maybe, if we're lucky.

I want to— I want like a partial refund for my down payment to get on this show because like I only got 2 of the 3.

That's true. You need like a 3rd discount, at least 33% back. Yeah, we apologize for that. It's, it's kind of— but we're working on that. Yeah, it's one of those— he may not come back after watching the episodes we've just done. Maybe he won't come back. I don't know. We'll have to see.

True.

But, um, but with us today, we have a really, really special guest, uh, a good friend of the show and a good friend of us, uh, Carter McKay. I'm gonna let you introduce yourself and tell everyone who you are and what you do.

Yeah, Carter McKay, exactly that. I, I'm a big fan of HubSpot and, uh, and I just build cool things on HubSpot and try and break HubSpot and sometimes get in trouble for that. But I, I primarily run a small agency that helps other partners build technical things on HubSpot and explore new solutions.

Tries— builds cool things on HubSpot, Tries to break HubSpot and sometimes get in trouble. Those are all actual facts, and I can, uh, you know, attest to every one of those things.

It's not a— it's not— it's not a bad couple of bullet points to have on your belt, let's put it that way. That's a— it's very good, and we appreciate that though. It keeps— keeps people on their toes, so you have to look at it from a positive aspect, of course.

Yeah, exactly.

Why don't you tell us, to get started, why don't you tell us how you pretty much got into the business? Like, tell us from the very beginning what drew you into just Coding technology in general?

Yeah, I mean, like, very beginning, it was— I was about age 11. So a long time ago, long time ago. But I was really young. And I was always playing around on a Mac, having fun, just like opening up settings, changing the password, getting locked out way too many times, because you click the wrong button there and you're locked out. And there's no coming back from that. So, but eventually my dad, who's also in technology, was like, hey, you should probably start doing something in the programming space, you know, as a career because like you obviously enjoy this and you have a passion for it. But like let's put that towards a drive and start on building skills in that area. But obviously as a young kid, you don't necessarily just want to like open up Java and C++ and be like, here's a textbook.

Right.

So yeah, so there was actually a great course that I took, and I think the company— I'm 90% sure the company went under after I completed the course because I was asking so many questions. But they were like a boot camp for building JavaScript Java mods on Java Minecraft. And so you could add in your own swords and your own items, your own blocks. You could create this whole environment on Java Minecraft, vanilla Minecraft. And it was like this wonderful experience to be able to see like code directly running in-game. And you write one bad piece of code, the entire game does not launch or crashes mid-game.

Wow.

And so there was like very real consequences. Instead of like the drag-and-drop programming that like kids are doing these days where it's like, oh, you drag a block and the robot moves 3 to the right. It's like that never felt like it had any consequences or had any direct effect. But like programming, seeing the objects and the creations like end up in real Minecraft was like super cool. From there, like I quickly like expanded past that and started doing stuff with like microcontrollers and Arduino and all that fun stuff, robots. And then I realized like, oh, this is, this is like a really fun passion for me. And so I started building out websites and going through web development courses. And then got an internship for a company called Pivot Global, which I'm still with. I'm actually still wearing my Pivot hat. And I started growing the technology team there. I like came on as an intern and built out HubSpot stuff. They were running HubSpot and I was like, what is HubSpot? Never heard of it.

Yeah.

I'm an HTML and CSS and JavaScript dev. And HubSpot was like a pretty awesome platform because I was like, this is a platform. This is no longer me writing in Notepad++. This is an actual tool that could be used to deploy enterprise-grade websites and interfaces and experiences for your customers. So it like very quickly got like super deep down the rabbit hole of HubSpot, building out custom themes and custom modules and all that fun stuff for a big website rebrand that we were doing at the time. And after finishing that rebrand I was like, oh, this was like, this is something I could be really passionate about. And I don't, I honestly don't know how I found it, but eventually I stumbled into the HubSpot Dev Slack. And I, I think like 3 and a half years ago was like my very first question in the Dev Slack. It was some very idiot question, uh, if I was to look back on it now. Hey, hey, hey. But that's, that's how we all start. That's how we all start. Yeah, there's no such thing as an idiot question. But this was, this was a question that probably could have been worded very very differently and made a lot more sense if I knew what I was talking about. But in my— I was very naive and I thought I knew what I was talking about. But yeah, looking back, I have no idea and I'm still very much learning. But I stumbled into the dev Slack and I got an answer like immediately pretty much. And I was like, this is magical. Like there's—

Yeah, right?

There's actual nerds and experts that are just like giving away time and answers and resources To help other people. It's insane.

But that's typical. Like that, that asking that first question though, and like not feel like that's, I mean, that's par for the course. I think everybody has come across that. Even when I first started working here, like even answering a question, like the first, I was like, oh my God, I hope I don't sound like a complete, you know what I mean? Like, and even to this day, even, you know, it's, you still like when you go to answer something, I'm constantly like rereading my answer before I post or even rereading a question before I ask it internally where I'm just like, oh, I hope I don't sound like a complete idiot when I post this.

So it's like, yeah, but then you come off like a little too confident in your answer and you're like, I don't think I was being cocky about that. Or—

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So many things.

There are very few people like Dennis that can go in there and just answer questions and just get it right. And like, I mean, that's—

Thank you. Now you're totally correct on this. But no, actually, I, I just have the assumption that I'm a fool at all times and that I'm I'm gonna make a fool of myself, so why not just do it publicly?

That way you could talk— that way everybody can know right away.

Exactly. Yeah, here's the fool.

I've definitely had to roll back some answers and be like, okay, that was actually incorrect. And, and I'm gonna go back 3 days later and be like, that was totally incorrect, and I actually just ran into the same issue, and you're not crazy. I'm actually crazy for answering it that way.

Yeah. Yeah.

We're gonna have to open a support ticket on this one.

You know, the biggest thing I, I, I come across is what I said was true at one point. However, things have changed enough that it is no longer valid. You know, that, and that happens more often than I'd like because things move so quickly.

Instead of, yeah, you're in an evolving industry. You can't expect that answer to always stay. Yeah. No, that, that's fair too. And that's a good excuse even if you do get something completely, like, definitely wrong. So it works out well.

Oh, yeah. The amount of times I've had code break on HubSpot and be like, oh man, HubSpot just changed that, and then realize, oh wait, HubSpot didn't actually change that. That code just suddenly started failing and I, I need to go update it. But it is such a good excuse because HubSpot sometimes does that. But I, I use that about 50% more than I should.

Uh, small plug for the HubSpot Developer Changelog. Uh, you should be, uh, subscribed and getting your notifications on it on a daily basis.

Absolutely.

Most definitely.

So from an early age, instead of most kids, I would say at 11 are just playing Minecraft or just doing that, you're actually going in and reworking code and customizing your own stuff as far as that's concerned. So from there, you move on. Are there things that throughout your career so far that you've done as far as events, conferences, and any type of workshops and stuff that have really stood out to you, especially within the last year or so?

Yeah, no, totally. I mean, you can't really be a HubSpot developer without going to like the HubSpot conference, especially over the last 2 years. It really feels like the HubSpot inbound team has made at least a little bit of an effort to like bring developers into the conference a little more and create spaces for them to interact with each other and see what everyone else is building and Do meetups and spotlights and all that fun stuff is now happening at Inbound. So HubSpot Inbound '24, excellent experience. There were several— there was a great developer meetup event at F1 Arcade that SJ put on. It was fantastic. I had a super fun time at that. And then there was a ton of great sessions that were specifically marketed towards developers. And I was really impressed. The room filled up. I mean, you guys, did a, did a whole session, uh, that was excellent.

Golly gee whiz.

I was front row for that.

Check is in the mail. Check is in the mail.

You guys can find it on YouTube.

I, I just, I just Venmo'd the money, so come on.

Yeah.

But no, actually, special shout out to SJ for that because that was, uh, yeah, that one was absolutely fantastic. That was, that was something where it was, it was really nice to be able to get to see, um, you know, just get to see everyone that you're talking to from a professional standpoint, like outside of quote unquote the office, right? Like outside of like, you know, technical talk and outside of just HubSpot talk and just really getting to know them. That was kind of one of the things too that kind of sparked, um, this kind of thing coming about, like this podcast and this kind of these discussions, right? Because it was like you got to talk to people and you got to really get to know them like this, and it's like we should do this on a more continual basis with everybody. And then also too, like, a big shout out to you as well because you, you, you were there at that, um, that talk with me and Dennis and you were, you know, in the audience helping out. Like, so you, John, and everybody else, it was a, you know, huge shout out there too as well because that was fantastic to have familiar faces, you know, to see when you're up there, you know, making a fool of yourself essentially. You know, this was, you know, Dennis had to put up with that with me, but— But yeah, but no, it's, it's a really good thing and I'm glad that you enjoy it. And just a really kind of amazing coincidence, you say the last 2 years, those are the first 2 years I attended Inbound. So I think that's what makes— I think that's what kind of like elevates it and puts it just at that level. Like the Mohawk.

It was— I went to Inbound the last 2 years expecting to see AJ at Inbound because he told me he was going. And then I was like, this dude who looks like AJ. He acts somewhat like AJ. He's not AJ. This is a fake. AJ's brought his AI to this conference. And then I— You also know AJ actually—

he's not here either, just by the way.

I was just gonna say, oddly enough, he has ditched you. That's like, what, at least 2 times already? So I mean, he owes you— if anyone owes you a Venmo transaction, it would be that individual right there, not me.

So yeah, but, uh, exactly. But no, I mean, it's, it's really important to like get developers to interact with each other because Like, developers are not always the most social of characters. We're not in marketing, we're not in sales, we don't have to be on that many external-facing calls. And so it is like you do have to kind of make an effort to interact with the developer community, especially in the HubSpot developer community, because there is so many different spaces that you can interact.

Mm-hmm.

And HubSpot has a lot of different community forums and boards and Slacks. I think I'm in like 5 or 6 different Slacks, and it's like there's so many different spaces. But if you make an effort and like there's community-led events, I mean, awesome things happen. We have the HUG events that are just HubSpot User Group events that are absolutely excellent. You got the CRM boot camps that are great, the Slacks, the community forums. There's so many different spots, but it is really awesome to be able to get face-to-face with people at Inbound and at the other events. You guys were just at, uh, React, um, uh, the React conference. Yeah.

Yeah.

In New York.

Yeah.

Yeah. Bree and John were. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Now, is that one of the things you're gravitating towards currently is doing React or is, is there like a, is there a, is there like a program language or something that's come like aside? Let's, let's take AI and put it off to the side because every, that's the answer for everybody. But like outside of that, is, is, is there something that's going on right now that's kind of like drawing you towards it more so than everything else?

No, that's a great question. I mean, the entire HubSpot ecosystem is shifting more towards React as a programming language, and it's a really smart play because there is such a market of React developers that are looking for work and that have skills that don't necessarily have the ability and the time to go learn themes and modules and Hubble and all these fun things. That's really valuable, but if they're only going to use it for 1 or 2 jobs, they don't necessarily want to go and invest a lot of time and energy learning those things. So HubSpot's building out a way to tap into the existing market of React developers using React and themes and React on CMS, which is excellent. And I actually have a group that's— we're trying to build out a new theme on React CMS. And so—

Nice.

I'm going to let you guys know how that's going.

Awesome.

And then React CRM card extensions, which are mind-blowingly powerful for customizing HubSpot experiences. And yeah, that's a lot of where my, uh, a lot of where my customers are asking, uh, for things right now is React CRM cards and building out new experiences there, creating custom calculators and quote builders and Just built an AI card because someone didn't want to pay for Breeze Intelligence. And so like, there's, there's always a new thing that can be built there and building out and customizing those experiences.

I'm curious to know how much you have to, um, for your customers, how much they're coming to you with requests or how often you have to, uh, show them the possibilities. Like, you know, this is, by the way, you can do X, Y, and Z.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's kind of the special part. And I'll plug the CRM components library real quick because it is really powerful. You don't have— and when I first started building out CRM cards 2 years ago, I thought this was a huge limitation. You don't have the ability to create custom components.

Right.

Or like build out your own HTML and CSS and change what the styling looks like on your CRM cards. And 2 years ago I was like, oh, that's a major limitation. People are not going to like this. People are just going to open up iframes to create their own experiences. And then about 6 months later I was like, this is actually the most powerful feature of this because you can't mess it up. Like, you can make it look bad, but you can't like mess up the CRM and make it look terrible.

Yeah, yeah, right.

But it's actually really easy to make it look good if you understand a little bit of the HubSpot toolkit and how HubSpot experiences flow. A customer can come to you with a problem of, hey, I want to build out a sidecar that can show objects and allow me to associate objects based on a couple of filters. Okay, like that's all they can say. And in your mind, you can mentally think, okay, where is that experience already in HubSpot? Oh, there's already an association sidebar. Here's how they're laid out in the tile format. Maybe we add a checkbox and a button to associate them at the bottom. It'll look like HubSpot. I've built out extensions to send swag to customers before. Big swag store, people can pick their swag options, go in, send it, input addresses, all that fun stuff. And sales reps have hit up HubSpot support because the swag store shut down, and they think it's HubSpot that's shut down.

Oh, really?

And so they've hit up sales reps, and sales reps are— and support reps are like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Swag store, HubSpot, this doesn't exist. And they're like, No, it does exist. And, and I, and I, and I've been searching through the support logs and I'm like, oh my gosh, he's really asking that support rep. And that support rep, thank you for all of your help, but you had no idea what was happening and I feel so bad for you. And, uh, and I'm— and I, and I fixed the swag store so you don't have to worry about it anymore. But yeah, you can build out experiences that look and feel like HubSpot.

For sure. And if that is a limitation, you can always put a link in that And send to your own app elsewhere to do whatever.

Yeah. Or pop up a modal. Yeah.

Yeah.

Going through them and reviewing them, it's been, it's, it's been amazing to see just how like intuitive and just like the feel. Do you know what I mean? Like, cuz there's, I, I've, I've done stuff in other like custom built, um, CRMs where like, it's just like, there's a huge disconnect between like what you could be looking on one, you know, one page of it versus another, like within the same, uh, CRM and it just like, you feel like you're in a completely different world. Like in the real estate business, that, that was like constantly happened.

But yeah, you know, the real estate business does not have to make it to every single—

it does. I tried to actually on purpose.

Unfortunately, I don't have the real estate experience yet.

Nor do I. No one does.

See, Dennis, there you go. There you go. This is the one. See, now Dennis can be happy now because we finally have an episode where somebody—

yeah, rank him.

But yeah, no, I just find like the, just the fluidness of it is, you know, it's amazing.

It really is.

Like, it's just, it— you can't really tell the difference. And like you said, there's, there's such a connection there. And it's, yeah, it's just, it's one of the things that I've been probably the most excited to do. And then while, whilst doing it, have been like, it's just been amazing the amount of stuff I've learned. And then just being able to experience it and be a part of that is, um, It's pretty cool, I have to say.

Yeah, for sure.

Well, so, but with all this, with all this, you—

Well, Nick, you just mentioned you review these CRM cards. While I have you live, like, what's the secret to getting the— to getting through this door?

Well, okay, usually it's a— it's a Venmo link that I have to send you, like, after the fact. No, I'm just kidding.

I just— Sure, but Isaac don't listen.

Yeah, that's true. Um, But it's probably safe to say that you are very, very knowledgeable in quite a few things with respect to tech. How do you keep— like, for me, and I think for a lot of people, one of the biggest probably hurdles in life is keeping up with X, right? Whatever your niche is or whatever your vertical is or whatever your expertise is, keeping up with that. Especially in an industry that's ever-changing, right? There's always a new language. There's always a new thing. How, how do you keep up with the world in which you operate in professionally?

Yeah, I mean, it's quite simple really. Just be a chronic X addict and X and Twitter addict. And I mean, you're gonna, you're gonna get all the information you ever need and a lot more. So that's, uh, that's about, uh, that's about all you need. But no, all in all seriousness—

End of the show, end of the show.

We're good. Yeah, thank you.

Been good. And that'll solve all your problems in life. No, in reality, it probably creates a lot more. But, but Hacker News, I, I love Hacker News. I love opening up Hacker News in the morning and I find like 3 stories and I just get so much cool information in there. I mean, you get to see people putting Doom on PDFs. I don't know if you guys saw that, but you can play Doom on a PDF.

I did not see that.

On the Doom PDF trend.

Doom. It's always Doom.

Didn't somebody try to do that with an app card too? Like, I think I thought I saw that like somewhere.

It was an iframe then. It was not actually—

yeah, it wasn't real Doom. Oh yeah, unfortunately. I've thought about doing it with like emojis, but the render time is not enough. for it. It doesn't render fast enough. Um, but yeah, there, there's always a lot of fun stuff on, on Hacker News that gives you like general tech overview or economics overview. But yeah, X is, X is awesome. And then, and then for HubSpot stuff, you have to subscribe to the changelog on, uh, developers.hubspot.com/changelog.

Subscribe there. Yes.

And then I also have a, I have a 34-inch monitor. It's flipped vertical. And the only app that sits there is Slack, primarily HubSpot Dev Slack. And it just sits and I can see like, I can see like 2 years worth of conversations with my small font. And, and I mean, that's like all you need in life is—

Why are you limiting yourself to 32 inches? I don't even know. You need a projector.

Yeah, exactly.

Like a whole wall. Yeah, you get a whole wall. Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.

With all your Slack instances, just all of them side by side.

Yeah, but I, I mean, in all seriousness, you also have to play around with it. Like, if you're not building and you're not playing around with it and trying out new projects and building out client work on the new things, you're never going to learn the limitations. HubSpot's always going to say everything works first try, and like, you, you get in and try it and you're like, Okay, this doesn't quite work how I would expect it to. Maybe it is working as intended, but that's not how I would expect it to. And I just spent 3 hours like going down the wrong rabbit hole to now understand, okay, that's probably not the way forward. I have to go change course, move this direction. And it's— you only get that knowledge from trying and building and asking questions and being curious. And that's, that's where I learned most of my stuff from. It's like throwing 10,000 things at the wall and seeing what sticks. I can't tell you how many Postman tabs I have open right now because Postman literally doesn't buffer. When I try and swipe to the left to see what tabs are open, it doesn't buffer. So, like, I'm just chronically opening up new Postman tabs to send new requests to endpoints to figure out what's working and not working.

Nick, I apologize.

You got to deal with Justin, I was just gonna say, I was just gonna take a quick call out to Justin there for avoiding the question. He got his approved. He got his approved. I still haven't gotten the money yet, but he got his approved. So it's, it's fine. It's fine. But so now another thing I wanted to ask you about that, as far as like we always talk about and, you know, an entire conversation can get filled up about like the tech-heavy stuff. Now there's always for me and maybe it's just because like I like doing things like this, like having podcasts and other things of that nature. There's always gotta be something. And, and I assume this for everyone, but there's always gotta be something that pulls you away from all of the kind of chaos of this industry and of work in general. That's kind of as least techie as humanly possible.

Right.

Like I always say, like every episode, like you're never gonna get away from it no matter what you do in a certain respect.

Yeah.

Engineers are gonna engineer, whether that be like software Uh, like they're still like problem solvers at the end of the day. Right.

No, that's very true. But is there things that are, that you do outside of work, like that are, or maybe even if it is work related sort of, but that is non-techie that kind of takes you away from everything?

Yeah. Outside of work, we're, we're, I mean, we're in middle of January right now. So right now it's not super applicable. But when it's warmer out, I'm playing a lot of pickleball with my family.

No joke.

You're a pickleballer. We have a pickleball group. We have a big pickleball group and a ton of guys, and we just do a ton of pickleball when it's actually warm out. Not like right now. I think it's supposed to be like 9 degrees tomorrow.

No excuse. No excuse. I played pickleball last night, but, you know, find an indoor court.

Yeah. And Justin just put in the chat SpaceX. I, yeah, I was most definitely watching a SpaceX launch at 4:30 last night, and then I got a call from my parents, and they were like, where are you at? And I was like, what do you mean? And they're like, you're coming for dinner, right? And I was like, huh? I'm watching a rocket launch right now. Dinner? This is not important. And so, yeah, I am absolutely obsessed with watching all types of rocket launches. Huge nerd, huge nerd when it comes to that. I watched New Glenn this week. I was supposed to be down in Texas this week to watch the SpaceX launch. It just kept on moving back. And so I didn't, I had to cancel that trip, but I'll be out there for IFT-8, the 8th flight test.

Wow, that's awesome. Did you, I was gonna ask you, did you get involved in pickleball because you actually liked it or was it because it was like a trendy thing and because it was catchy? 'Cause first, I'll be honest, I never, even heard of pickleball until I went down. I don't know if it was the last time I went down to Boston, not the— not just— yeah, I had never— in the area, nothing like, what is— I've never heard of it. And all of a sudden I heard of it there. And then not more than maybe like 2-3 weeks after that, then all of a sudden it must have went from the East Coast west, because then all of a sudden it was like the talk of everybody in around here, at least in Illinois. So did it— was it something that you were like, oh, this is cool, I really like this?

Or was it because I hopped on the bandwagon? I hopped on the trend. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

No, I just, I just asked cuz there's some people that like will defend it to the death and be like, no, no, no, no, no. I, I was first. I was into pickleball before it was. Yeah. And I'm like, for sure. I'm like, okay.

No. I was watching those older people on the court and asking what they're doing so close to it the entire time. And then I discovered it.

Yeah. And you're like, oh, if they're playing, I could probably play. And then it turns out that they're like, they're like 10 times better than you.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Playing with a 70-year-old man and I was like, Okay, I can clearly take him just based on age alone. And then yeah, don't get a single point in. Age does not matter in pickleball for some reason.

I do have a question. Now, this is a controversial question because I know there's people on both sides of this. You are an avid reader. But me personally, I'm an audiobook person. Is audiobooks reading? Because my wife will, my wife will contest it's not. She'll say, no, no, that's not— you're not actually reading books, you're listening to them. That's not really— that doesn't technically count. Because I'll be like, oh, I read like— I can't remember the look on her face. I was like, I read like 3 books. And she's like, when did you have time to read? I was like, oh, audiobook read them. She's like, oh, okay.

Okay, now, now that's, that's a great question. I most definitely have like an Audible 3-credit-a-month system. I'm on like the highest tier of Audible because I love Audible. If you're listening and working at the same time, I don't think it's— I don't think it's reading. So like, if you're listening in the car, or if you're listening like to have like some quiet time and maybe you're taking notes, like that could probably be considered like reading. But, but like, if you're listening and doing something else, I don't think that's reading. I think that's just like consuming.

I would argue the car's not even— because I mean, you're, you're not fully concentrating on, on the, uh, Yeah. What's being said, right? You have to actually— hopefully you're not fully concentrated. Nick, are you paying attention to the road?

My—

don't—

well, my car doesn't auto self-drive yet, but yeah, I drive a truck, so it's a little bit driving. Yeah, I gotta get a— I gotta get a Cybertruck. I can't— I gotta get that— get rid of the old, uh, Colorado and, uh, upgrade to a self-driving, uh, vehicle, uh, and then I could do it. Yeah, but no, most of the time it's, you know, I don't do audiobooks when I drive. It Sorry, Dennis, again. When I worked downtown in the city for real estate, I used to listen to it. I used to listen to it on the train because it was such a— it was like an hour train ride each way. So that I was like, that I could do it. But no, when I drive, it's usually podcasts or something like that that I'll listen to.

It's not really audiobooks. I also listen to a ton of podcasts. What usually happens is I'm getting like really deep into a good book and then I have to go work and I actually have to do something like productive. And I'm like, well, I want to keep on— like, I don't want to lose this, this book, and, and I want to keep it, keep it going. So I then purchased the audiobook.

Yeah.

And I listened to like a quarter of the audiobook, and then I listened, and then I read the rest of the book. But now I have a full audiobook that's only been like a quarter of it's been listened to. And but, but I've, I consumed that book in about a day. So that's, that's usually how it happens.

Excellent.

Excellent. I'm, I'm looking at Justin in the, uh, in the chat, and he said his wife does the same thing and has the same— I mean, we're right, obviously, but I'm not, you know, it's, it's not the— I'm not dying on that hill. I'm not dying on that hill.

You should, though.

When you enter your library contest, are you, are you counting it?

Could you, could you safely, uh, um, write a, uh, you know, a book report?

I mean, ChatGPT could. I mean, that's safe. I mean, defined safely.

I mean, what is—

what do you mean by safe?

Plagiarism.

Plagiarism.

Oh my God.

Helping out. That's not plagiarism.

I worry about your children. We'll change a word or two.

I'll change a word or two. It's not plagiarism.

Oh yeah, yeah. It's all good then.

No, it's not. I've been trying to tell my professors that for a long time.

Excellent. Now, you mentioned something too about also as a kind of like a side hobby too about building custom keyboards. I was gonna ask you, do you partake as part of the PC Master Race? Do you also partake in building computers out as well? Or is it just— did you just kind of stick with keyboards?

Yeah, so I, I have a custom-built computer. Um, I, I love Mac though, and so like I'm just on Mac right now, but like I game—

Inferior, but okay.

On my, on my, on my PC that I, that I custom-built.

Your Hackintosh?

I used to have a Hackintosh, but now it's just running Windows, Windows 11, because Windows 10 is losing support for all Windows apps on like October. It's crazy. Windows 10 is losing support for everything. So I don't know why they're doing that, but they're, they're destroying the world and replacing it with Windows 11, which is still jank in my opinion. But yes, I primarily build keyboards, and thank you for bringing that up to solidify my nerdiness with the world.

Badge, wear that like a badge of honor.

Like, I Yeah, I put it in the questionnaire, Nick. Like, I was—

I know—

willing to share it, but you brought it up in such a way that I felt like, now, now, now I'm— now I am certified.

It's true, it's true. It's something I appreciate, honestly. I like— I, you know, I, I can't remember if I mentioned it, uh, with you, Dennis, and AJ maybe once, but like, that's how I— like, my first, my first like dive into like just building computers in general was breaking like my family's first computer that my dad spent a ton of money on because that, you know, back in the time it was like Yeah, you know, luxury. And it was just like, I'm pulling it apart and spray painting it, and I thought he was gonna die. I'm like, he's just looking at me like, what are you doing? I'm like, no, this is gonna be cool, trust me.

Of course.

Yeah. Oh yeah, like custom, you know, like doing custom paint jobs on and stuff. Like, yeah. But I mean, I broke, you know, a good dozen of them, you know, between then and now. But like, it's one of those things where like, I don't know, there's, there's a rewarding aspect of it. And it could be just— it doesn't have to be a whole computer, like keyboards, just built like Doing that and building something like that that then functions after the fact, you know, if you do it right, there's something like super rewarding about that. So I, I don't know, that's me personally, but that's why I brought it up because, you know, you have that same type of mentality and I like that, honestly.

Yeah, no, I got into it because like I, I was, I was kind of done with the old keyboard layout and I wanted something new. So I built out these split keyboards and they were ortholinear. So Instead of being in rows, the fingers are now in columns. And I mean, your fingers are in columns, so it's, it's so much better for you. And now I just alternate between my split keyboards and a regular keyboard. And I've actually been able to like mentally map it somehow that I can keep like the same words per minute, like, and I can transfer like all of it within 10 seconds. It's, it's very strange, but now I'm able to do that. My, my brain has like remapped Excellent.

I believe Hannah has— I think she's in the chat right now. Doesn't she have like a custom keyboard?

She's talking about switches right now. Yeah, she's talking about split keyboards are so comfy.

What was it? Um, uh, Lord of the Rings?

Was it? Yeah, yeah.

Please tell us now, right?

Like, yeah, because I, I thought it was Zelda, but that was something else. That was— no, that was Breeze. Breeze's talk was about Zelda. Yeah, I think yours is Lord of the Rings. Hannah's was Lord of the Rings, the keyboard. Yeah.

Yeah, which I don't understand because I can barely type anyway and I still reference letters on keys if I— if necessary.

And on the thing like this, dude, I think Hannah— Hannah, you bought this one from Drop, right?

She might have.

Okay, bro, we're gonna— I, I'm gonna— I'm gonna mess— uh, Hannah bought that one from Drop. I saw that one.

Yeah, to the listeners who are not watching this and seeing the live, uh, feed, just, uh, heads up, there might be pauses because, uh, we're interacting with the chat presently.

Yeah, okay. I'm gonna have to message Hannah about that separately. And so we don't completely derail the conversation with another 40 minutes of keyboard talk.

That's fine. That's cool. I wanna ask you a little bit about, actually this, I'm doing this a little bit out of order, but when you first started your career, what is one of the things that kind of surprised you the most? I mean, this obviously answers vary from like vertical to vertical and, you know, depending on, You know, when you actually— and for— it depends like what you want. Like, because again, like you can start working. Like, I started working at 16. That wasn't when I first started my career. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's a, there's a certain job you might attain where you say, okay, this is it. This is, this is where my thing starts. So it doesn't necessarily have to be like the first job you ever had, but like at the point where you thought, okay, this is what I could do for the rest of my life. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, what surprised you the most at that point?

Yeah, I mean, I would have to say I am like incredibly lucky that the thing I like was passionate about, I'm still passionate about, and I still want to do for the next good while. Granted, I'm still very young, so maybe that'll change in the next couple of years, but for the time being, it's excellent. To answer your question, the thing I was surprised about is And coming from being like self-taught, there's obviously a little bit of, am I actually smart enough to handle this situation or to solve this problem? What's the correct— what's the correct name for that, Nick?

Imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome. That's the word I was looking for. Exactly.

I live it every day.

Yeah, my life.

Imposter syndrome. And it wasn't until I realized that, oh, everyone actually has imposter syndrome. And everyone's thinking that same thing. I was like, okay, that, that means we're all at the same level.

Yeah.

Or we're all using Google, or we all forget how to do a for loop in JavaScript sometimes because it needs the 3 little sections. And yeah, so I definitely had that for a little bit. And, and I mean, obviously still do to, to some degree, but it wasn't until I realized, oh, actually everyone in this room has imposter syndrome at some level and they don't understand how to do some level. of this project, or they're going to need to seek external advice on this project. That was kind of mind-blowing, especially coming from self-taught and thinking, oh, I don't necessarily have the education for this. And I was like, oh, wait, no one has the education for this. We're solving this live and for the first time. This is a very unique solution.

If you don't think the person next to you has been to Stack Overflow once, you're kidding yourself. You're absolutely kidding yourself. We've all been there. So it's like—

Also, isn't it amazing how much better solutions you can get if you have like a community of people actually working together and admitting that, I don't know the answer to this, maybe we could work on it together?

Oh yeah.

Isn't that like beautiful?

That's the HubSpot Dev Slack. That's why, that's why I love it. Like you get an absolute like genius that's been doing it for 15 years and they're asking what could be a basic question for someone that's just starting this, but it's a new, it's a new thing. And they're like, hey, I don't remember how this new thing works. Here's how I did it the old way. Does that convert to the new way? And you can answer that, or you see someone even new answering that, and it's like a really cool thing. It's just like knowledge sharing between levels. There's like no levels in the dev Slack unless you like add levels to your name.

And for that new person, honestly, that's probably one of the most powerful things because that makes you like— that builds your confidence right there and says, I have worth, you know, like I'm valuable to this community, which is huge.

Yeah.

Especially if you come from a, like, especially if you're in the developer Slack and you are in a business or you're working for a place that is almost like kind of skeleton crew-ish, right? Where you don't have a lot of, um, internal resources, right? Like, because depending on the size of the company you work for, you may only have like one other tech person that works with you, or maybe like a CTO or something like that, where it's like you don't have that constant communication or that soundboard where you can have a confident not even a confident discussion, but just have a discussion that kind of like where you can kind of just spitball these concerns and ideas and you kind of feel, you almost feel like you're on an island by yourself.

Right.

And that's just a very scary, do you know what I mean? Especially when like, 'cause we've all been there where you've been in a position where it's like, well, we're gonna expect this of this person. And it's like, okay, well, that's a little bit more than I'm supposed to do, but I have no resources as far as like, I can't lean over to the person next to me and say, hey, what do you think about this? Like, hey, second pair of eyeballs on this code. Like, the developer Slack and that community itself is just like one of those powerful things that—

Huge.

Yeah, well, again, like, not to reference where I came from to here, but like, it, it made it— it made a huge difference. It made a huge impact because I constantly felt like that. Like, I was on an island. I worked at a place with one other person who was a good friend, but still, like, it was like I couldn't constantly be— they had their own thing to do, right? And it wasn't necessarily in my realm, so I was by myself, right? It was almost like You know, they're like, hey, you know SEO? No. Well, you're going to know it now, or you better. You know what I mean? Like, you have those scenarios, you know, insert SEO with something else. But yeah, for it to have a community where you can like— and not just having it there, but the reception when you arrive.

Right.

The Dennis's, the John's, the AJ's, and then the other people that like Carter who give their time without any— without asking anything in return and just answering questions. Once you see that, that just changes your whole, you know, you can get pretty cynical pretty quickly, right? When you're by yourself and you feel like you're just, the pressure is piling on you. When you see that, it's like a weight lifted really. And it's, um, you know, I, you know, I could keep praising it all day long, but it's just that important, honestly.

So. It's so much more important even in 2025, you know, when we're all working more and more remote and we don't have that, like everything is hard on Slacks and everything. You don't, you don't know what the other person's really thinking. You can interpret it so many ways. You can't, Because you don't vocally communicate, right? So yeah.

I know.

Absolutely.

It's an awesome community. I would, uh, yeah, I would say it's the single, single biggest impact on my career, uh, thus far. I mean, it's, it's absolutely launched my agency and I, I've never had to, never had to ask for work. There's always been work provided and problems that needed solving. And so, yeah.

And it's all because of Dennis. Incredible.

And I mean, I literally If I had to name one person, Dennis.

Right. Right. Well, I did send you an answering machine, so, you know.

Yeah.

You, you sent me an answering machine. It's still under my desk.

I— And it's still unused. Have not, uh, pressed.

I haven't connected it to my, um, 888 TubSpot, uh, hotline. Yeah.

For those of us unfamiliar with what's going on here, uh, which would be probably everybody but you two, what, what is this? What is this about an answering machine? What are we, what are we doing here?

I once solved a question that Dennis had put a bounty on. The bounty was, was Chris Riley would create a voicemail message, like an answering message.

Yeah.

And come to find out, Chris Riley never recorded an answering message.

Yeah, I never asked him.

We should have, we should have, should have mentioned something earlier. We just had him on last week. We could have grilled him about that, about not going Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. But Dennis Ant made the answering machine, and I purchased the phone number that's 1 digit different than the HubSpot support phone number. So I own 888-TUBSPOT.

This is all good. Yeah. And it's, it's the old school answering machine. So, like, this is, like, you know, with a tape.

That's brilliant. So what then? Who's gonna be the, who's gonna be the person on, on the recording then if, if Chris isn't gonna?

Yeah, we'll give him one more chance. I'll reach out to him again, and hopefully other people who are watching this are all right now— actually, everyone who is, uh, in the chat, please go ahead and Slack Chris to, uh—

Yeah, yeah, if you can, he's in, he's in Dev Slack, @ChrisRiley. Yeah, all at the same time too, if you could, like all within like a 5-minute span, just to be like a WTF moment where you're sitting there, you're like, oh my God, what broke? Yeah, that'd be great. I'm sure he'll— and we'll blame it on Dennis because I don't want to—

I know, we're all going to delete this part of the, uh, Interview.

We are, we are live, but okay. Oh damn. Oh shoot. We definitely need like a dump button and just in case like something happens, right?

You always need a button.

We'll put that on.

We should always be 15 seconds ahead.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true. Right.

Right.

No, that's fair. That's fair. We'll put it on Dennis's, uh, ever-growing list of things.

Yeah, Dennis, add that to your list, please.

Will do. Will do.

Contact StreamYard about emergency, uh, emergency cut button.

Right, right.

Or just call it the Nick button because that's essentially probably what it'll be used for most often than not. But, um, let me, uh, shift gears just a little bit, uh, going from, you know, just starting out and, you know, what would be probably one of the things as far as like advice that you've gotten from someone, like let's say like a mentor, that, um, kind of helped you out within the industry, like within your job now, right? Like, because again, there's always that my career didn't start to— like, I, I first started working at a video store and, and that wasn't going to be— oh, thank you Netflix for ruining all that. But, um, I really liked that job too.

But, um, I could so see you working at a video store right now.

I did.

It was kind of like—

now, that would be a great job. Yeah, I would do it all day long. I love it. I love movies. Like, that's all I did was— because I mean, that's all you could do working at a video store. You just watch movies all day. So I've seen like Almost every movie ever made. It's, it's quite remarkable, uh, the amount of time that you have to spend just like staring at a screen. But, um, mentorship, like, what, what is like one of the things— yeah, I was trying to bring it back after I just derailed my own conversation. Uh, what is some advice that a mentor has given you that's been, uh, very influential in, in your career thus far?

Yeah, I mean, in the enterprise world In the corporate world, it's very easy to get sucked into meetings that discuss the next meeting, that discuss what we're going to achieve on the following meeting. If you're a person that has a bias towards action and just starts on building and builds out an MVP and just starts on thinking and ideating and creating, You're ahead of 95% of people. Like, there's so many people that won't ever do anything until it's like, okay, you have a deadline of tomorrow to get this done. And I'm most definitely guilty of that. But if you're, if you're the type of person that starts on building and showing it off and just being the first one, you're, you're way ahead.

Do you ever find that— was that hard to get into that mindset? Because I like, just from like a website building perspective, right? Like I was always, oh, this isn't perfect. I need to do this before I can launch it. It's still not like this. Before I would just, where most people now, you know, looking back on it, it was like, you should have just got it out the door and then you could have made iterations, you know, improvements later. Was that hard for you to get? Or maybe you haven't, I don't know.

But like— I remember busy times starting. And getting to 70%. Yeah, 80% and the 90% to launch is where I get stalled.

How?

Why is it so hard? Why is that last 3% so freaking hard?

Like, I worry about server load for a lot of my applications, and I'm like, well, if this gets 50 installs, then I'm gonna have real problems. All the while I have 30 installs, so I like— I don't see a path towards 50 installs anytime soon, but I'm worried about the 50 and the 100.

Yeah.

And so I think that's where most of my, like, problems come from. And then you gotta set up Stripe and you gotta connect up billing and you have to send the emails. And like, it's easy to write code and get business logic in, in place, but the last 20%, that's where you over-engineer it and new projects get created and then that untitled folder is left to the wayside. So I definitely still have that problem. One thing I found for me that helps, I pay a designer, like when I want to build out a tool, I pay a designer and I'll shell out $3,000 and I'm like, okay, I now have a sunken cost fallacy that I have to fight with. Nice.

That's good.

And so like, I, I, that's, that's what I've found that helps. Like you get a valuable thing, you get a beautiful design that you're going to use for your project, and now you have some sunken cost fallacy that you have to fight with.

That's great advice. May I borrow $3,000, uh, so I can—

No. How, how good of a designer are you?

That's awesome. It's just this little side project I'm starting. It's kind of, it's like Facebook, but it's not, it's, you know, sort of different. You know, I always love that.

Is there AI?

Oh, of course.

If so, like, yeah. Yeah. All right.

Use Face.

Uh, shout out to Dustin for the, uh, we over-engineer the last 20%. Comment.

Absolutely. Justin knows that all too well. I, I call Justin and I'm like, hey, is this a good idea? And he's like, yeah, but what happened to the last one? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that one's gonna be rolled into this one.

For me, it's actually— there's diminishing returns. Like, when you start building something, you can actually see the progress very clearly, and like, it's, you know, you get that little high on that. And then, well, that last 20% are all those fixes and things that you don't really get to see the fun stuff.

And I think you can also get caught in the trap of just ideating and talking about your idea.

Yeah.

And like, I've heard it described as like idea porn before, where it's like, oh, I have this great idea, and people are like, sign an NDA, I don't want to talk to you about my idea, it's the best idea. I'm like, no one's stealing your idea, Bob. If you go build it and you have a ton of success, you might get people that copy you, but no one's stealing your idea. It's not that good of an idea. I've never heard an idea where I'm like, oh, I want to go steal that idea. Because it's that good of an idea. Until you start on building and you start on getting customers and you start on selling, like, your idea is worth actually $0 because you haven't made any money from it.

Sorry, Bob.

That's right. Bob sounds like the Winklevoss twins at this point. Yeah, that's such a thing. What is, um, I want to ask you, what is, um, kind of like a common myth about your current position, like your, your job in general? Like, and it doesn't have to be as general as like tech, because I mean, probably one of the, um, the biggest things, uh, as far as in the tech industry— and I have a feeling your answer is probably gonna run along these lines— is people asking you just kind of off-the-wall questions. Would that be a—

Oh, that's—

yeah, I mean, all tech, all tech enthusiasts have that issue where their family members, their friends are convinced that The tech person is literally the only person on this earth that can solve my printer issue. So I don't know how I became that person, but I'm the only person on this earth that can solve the printer issue. So obviously I solve about 10 printer issues every year. It's a monthly occurrence where the printer goes down and I'm like, press the power button. I don't know how to do that. I don't know where the power button is. I think it disconnected from Wi-Fi. I'm like, I don't even think you know what Wi-Fi is.

HP should have you on Retainer.

You could also Google just as well as I can.

Yeah, but yeah, printers are my arch nemesis. But in reality, in reality, I— it is sometimes tough to communicate what I do to the average person that's not in tech or that doesn't necessarily understand A lot of technical terms because I'm so used to describing. I'm like, oh, I work with CRMs and I integrate systems. They're like, okay, great, that tells me nothing. You could be a drug dealer. And I'm like, yeah, that's basically true. I deal solutions. But, but it is, it is tough to sometimes describe it. And I haven't found the solution for that yet. I still have a very tough time describing what I do to the To the normies.

Become a developer advocate and tell me how it goes for you. Let's see, like abstract a little bit more.

Yeah. Yeah. Abstract it a little more. So the people that do the dealing of solutions, I didn't advocate for them.

Yeah. Right. What? What? Just call me Bob.

Just call me Bob.

I'm, I'm reading in the chat there. Uh, get my Facebook account back.

I had someone ask me, yeah, I did. I got locked out of my Instagram account.

A realtor, a realtor had that happen to them and they wanted me to like fix the problem. And I'm like, I don't know why you got banned, right? Yeah, why did you? I'm like, I don't know how you got banned to begin with. And like, I'm not gonna sit there and fight for you if I don't— I don't even know the person. I was just like, yeah, this is gonna be weird. I'm gonna be like fighting for this person and I'm gonna find out that they like committed murder or something and like I'm the one defending their Facebook.

It's like, give them their Facebook account back. Yeah, you're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I did that actually.

Let it be known, if you have any social media issues, Nick LaPorte is going to help you out with all your problems. You can find him on the developer Slack.

Yeah. I've had people contact me before like, hey, could I have issues with my Instagram account? I'm wondering if you could help me get back into it. And it's like perma-locked. And I'm like, there's no— that like you can't even password reset that. That's like you have to elevate a case to Instagram support. There's nothing I can do there.

And I don't know anyone on the Instagram trust and safety team.

They're not in my contacts. No.

Yeah. Speed dial it. I got it. Hold on. Yeah.

Hold on.

I have to imagine that Instagram trust and safety person just has their phone blowing up all day long. I bet they can't tell anyone what they do.

No, sure.

Like, that's like working for the CIA right there. Like, you can't tell anyone what you do.

I always equate that kind of stuff to like telling, uh, because my, my wife sometimes does that same thing where she's like, well, this is broken, can't you just fix it? And I'm like, okay. And she works, uh, in, in the medical industry, right? So I'm like, imagine if— and, and this usually works, but I say like, imagine if, you know, I said I was a doctor, right? But I didn't tell you what kind of doctor. And you came to me and said, oh my God, I need you to fix, you know, my foot. And I'm like, well, I'm not a podiatrist, I'm a heart surgeon. And you're like, well, what's— it doesn't matter. You're a doctor. Just fix this. And it's like, it doesn't work that way because I don't have literally no experience in feet. I'm a heart surgeon. Like, there's a difference. Like, and, you know, because it's always hard to like— and it's not— and it's not a knock on, you know, you know, anybody that has that approach, but it's like, it's really hard sometimes to explain that because it just, people like, it's very easy to like wrap all of that up into one nice little package and say, well, that's tech and you are, you work in tech.

Right, right.

Therefore you are, you know, and it's, yeah, because it's such a black box compared to like other things. Like even the doctor example is a little bit like, people understand that a lot more where they're like, well, I've been to the doctor. I've been like, people haven't worked in tech or people don't understand like some of the inner workings. So even that example is a little bit more easier people to digest. It's— yeah, it's just one of those very, very weird things.

So such a bad doctor. We lucky he is a dev.

Screw him then.

Do not go to Nick for any—

yeah, yeah.

But all your foot issues, you actually, uh, send them photos of, uh, any issues you have.

I'm just gonna have an inbox full of feet pictures. That'd be great. Yeah, that's fantastic. I'd be like Dr. Nick from The Simpsons, essentially. That, that would be like the equivalent.

The biggest thing I get is like, oh, I can fix your printer issue.

That's not what I do. Yeah. Yes, I can fix it.

That's, that's the thing. Or it's like, or it's the instant graph. Like, you know, someone's like, you can build that, right? Oh yeah, sure. I guess. Uh, we'll have it tomorrow, right? It's like, no, no. And that's not how any of this works whatsoever. My wife has a billion and a half ideas for me to, uh, all these apps that I should be building concurrently for her.

I got called about one. the other day, and I was like, you know, this could probably be a Google Sheet, and you just input information on the Google Sheet and share it publicly.

Whoa.

They're like, yeah, but it would be really nice if there was an interface and like you download the app and you sign up and you take pictures. And I was like, but you could make it a Google Sheet just to start and see if you have like any product-market fit and just like get an MVP out there. If it grows from there, like, let's grow it, but Start simple, start small.

That's very good advice. Yeah, absolutely. Let me flip the script on you a little bit here. Let me say, pretend I'm—

I'm asking questions.

Well, technically, but let me pretend I'm brand new to tech. Let's say I'm fresh out of school and what advice would you give to somebody if you were mentoring? Let's say I'm a programmer and I'm just fresh out of school. What kind of life advice would you pass down to somebody who is just starting out?

Yeah, that's, that's, it is a tough question because there's always like this little deep down part of your, part of your brain that's like, if I mislead them, they're about to spend 2 years of their life and not get anywhere, and they're gonna blame me for all their career if it messes up. And I'm like, part of that's on you, and part of that is You needing drive. If you're asking me like, hey, what do I do? And just like, what do I do? And I don't have any interest in anything, that's like a really tough question to answer. And it's kind of like you have to do some soul-searching there to find what you're interested in and what you're passionate about. I think school and college can sometimes beat that out of people, and you can go in with a passion and you can come out and you're like, okay, now I got a lot of knowledge that's— that was useless 8 years ago, and it's even more useless today.

Mm-hmm.

But I need to go get a job, so I guess I needed my degree for that. So I think you have to keep a passion for, for a particular subject, and it could be a small passion. It could be, hey, I just like building cool websites that are unique, that use unique fonts. Like, that's great.

And— Is it me, or did Carter just say mute?

Yeah, it didn't mute just for like a quick second.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh.

It was such a good talk too. I was really enjoying it. Yeah.

I, I know I was getting into it. There was a flow. There was flow state.

Oh, that's so nice.

I had entered.

Yeah.

At first I thought my subscription expired. I thought I had to re-up. I was like, what happened?

Yeah.

And for 2 more minutes of that talk, you, you can Venmo me $10. But you have to have a passion. You have to have a passion for it. And like, you have to continue your passion and find a community that will, like, that'll make your passion even stronger. Bri was talking about the other day, it was like, hey, you don't do tech without a community, and you have to have community meetups. Hopefully you have like a physical community, but if not, there's so many great online communities. If you're passionate about HubSpot or you do HubSpot at your job, come join the dev Slack, um, connect on LinkedIn. Love to chat with you and make sure you're connected and get to learn all the new things. Come join one of the boot camps. The, the HubSpot boot camps are great ways to meet people.

Nice plug. Nice plug.

Same situation. Yeah, I, I teach one of the boot camps, so, so come join my boot camps here at the Customization Boot Camp.

So yeah, and, and those products you do on the side don't have to do anything, right? It's just like you don't have to make a million dollars with it. Just like, no, like I love how Bree's doing these little, uh, She did something CSS building, uh, was a Pokémon ball. Yeah, like, yeah, I was like, yeah, awesome, do that, right?

Yeah, it's the small stuff that you can keep yourself up to date and keep yourself sharp. Because I think that's one of the things, like, you can—

one of the—

I think one of the easiest pitfalls to fall into is to lose kind of your— is to get dull when it comes to, like, your coding expertise. Like, I've noticed that just in, like, you know, being like an ecosystem quality, it's just, it, there's a lot of reviewing. So it's not like you're, you know, devoid of code altogether. It's just you're rarely writing it versus critiquing it. And it gets, you know, you get that kind of staleness. And then that's where I would say like most of all, the imposter syndrome starts to creep in sometimes.

Mm-hmm.

'Cause you're like, I haven't done this in, you know, X amount of time. Like, do I still remember? You know, and then you're like scrambling and you're like Codecademying like everything you possibly can think of all of a sudden because you're just, you're, you know, you get that overwhelming fear, and then you like, you force yourself to do a project whether it's good, bad, or has any use whatsoever. You just kind of like— fear is a good motivating factor. So it's, um, but yeah, that's just one of those things that I've always noticed that creeps up, uh, when you're not paying attention.

I think it's increasingly easier to fall into that trap nowadays with AI. Oh, I just said it.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Tried to go a whole episode and, uh, here we go.

I know, I'm sorry.

Here we go.

I, I'm just trying to get us a higher rank on YouTube, but it, I think it's increasingly easier to fall into that trap because you're like, oh, AI could do this and maybe I review it 3 times, but eventually it could do it. I've had people that are like, hey, I just sent, I just had 500 lines spit out for a 2-line change and I knew where the 2-line change was. And I was like, yes, I get that. I totally get that.

Mm-hmm.

Like, you're, you're not crazy for doing that because I've done that. I've asked for a 2-line change and I've known where the 2-line change is all just because I was lazy and I didn't necessarily want to make that code change. And it's not, it's not bad, but you do, you like dull your technical knowledge.

So true.

And like you have to practice it to keep it sharp. And so definitely find a project that you're passionate about. Hopefully it's personal, but if you don't have like a fun personal project that you're working on, find a little piece of code at your job or find a technical solution that you can build and build it in a fun way and build it in a way that you would have like enjoyed building it when you were younger. I think that's the easiest way to keep it sharp.

Build a pickleball round robin app to generate teams. There you go.

That's it. And coding with AI is super fun. So I'm not saying don't code with AI. I love coding with AI. But code in a way that makes Do you feel like you're still a developer?

Yeah, that's right.

Remember that AI is your assistant, not the, uh, not your senior.

Well, I'm just gonna put it on the record now that when they do become our overlords, I am all for AI. Just, just, you know, just, just in case.

I've been hedging my bets this entire time, Nick. Everything I've said has been like negative and then like too positive.

So yeah, there you go.

You're just keeping that balance, but just being a little bit on the pro side so that way when they take over You know, we'll be the last to be sacrificed. That's good, that's good. I like that. That's a good, uh, that's a good thing. Well, I want to thank you, uh, Carter, because this has been absolutely fantastic. And, um, these are the type of comp— like I say, I say this quite often, but it always rings true that these are the type of conversations that make this not only enjoyable but is literally the dream come true. Like, again, me, AJ, and Dennis, when we sat around and we talked about this, like, these are the conversations and the way they come about and And not just, you know, insightful, but fun. Like, and I want to thank you for joining us. It's, you know, it's always a risk. It's always a risk. And I mean, less of a risk because AJ's not here, but, um, it's always a risk. But, uh, why don't you tell everybody where they can find you and, you know, any of the projects that you're working on? I know you said that you're actually running one of the boot camps.

Yeah.

So definitely people should sign up for that. But tell everybody where they can find you and if they want to get in touch with you, if you want them to. Where they can do that?

No, I'm more than happy to talk with anyone that lasted an hour and 3 minutes into this. So, like, I think maybe 3 people are gonna come to the end of this and be like, oh, yeah, never mind, I can find him here. But you can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Dev Slack. Connect on LinkedIn, connect on Dev Slack, chat, hit me up. Join the Dev Bootcamp if you're looking to build out React cards and learn React and HubSpot and all that fun new stuff and just like level up your customers' HubSpots and learn and join a big, there's like massive community that's now building out these CRM cards. So it's an awesome community there. But yeah, connect over there. Hit me up. Always happy to chat.

Carter, a question from Alexander. RevOps was mentioned, but let's just change that to CRM dev. What's the experience level needed for that? I don't think we can answer the RevOps bootcamp one.

The DevOps bootcamp, we can't necessarily answer, but I'll send you, Alexander, I'm snippeting your name right now, and hopefully I grab the correct one in Dev Slack if you're in Dev Slack. But I'll shoot you over the instructor for the RevOps bootcamp and can get you in contact with them. Usually you can get in with very minimum experience. For the Dev bootcamp, you do need a curiosity. To learn. I would say that's bare minimum experience, but along with that, you probably should have about a year worth of knowledge or just playing around experience in JavaScript. That's going to really set you up for success. You could jump in with no experience. It's just going to be a little bit of a tougher hill to climb. Not saying you can't do that, but I— and we've had students that have had success with that. But if you really want to have fun, probably have about a year worth of experience in JavaScript and you're going to be set up for success.

Sweet.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, that's— we've wrapped up another episode successfully, I must say. And, you know, if I do get an inbox, just a little side note, if I do get an inbox full of feet pics, they're going directly to AJ. So when he comes back, he'll have a nice little surprise for him when he returns. So go ahead, send those in. That's great. I just want to say from everybody here—

Where do we reach out for the feedback? Is there a feedback form somewhere? Do we— can we, can we ask for guests on here?

See, we, you know, there— what we have something that we're setting up. I'm just afraid to open it up because then if there is an email address you could send stuff to, then the feet pics will start coming in. Uh, but no, but no, if you— yeah, no, definitely, if you, uh, we will set that up if you do want to be a guest. And because I've talked to a couple people, uh, just recently that asked about being guests on here and, you know, how they go about doing that.

Community members.

Oh, absolutely.

Like, community members, that would be awesome to have.

The one, the one thing I must say is the outpouring of community members that want to actually be on here and do this. Because again, the anticipation of starting something like this was just, yeah, you know, we'll start talking with people and maybe people will listen, maybe. And it's like, the more we keep doing this— because I have like delusions of grandeur and Dennis is the one that kind of keeps me grounded, uh, so it's one of those things where it's like, but as we keep doing this more and more and more people keep like, like I just spoke with a developer just recently on a Zoom call about a question about a theme and he mentioned it. He's like, oh yeah, I saw you on this. I'm like, you watched it? I was like, oh, okay. He's like, yeah, I saw your name, so I watched it. It was one of those things where I was like, it was a nice feeling because like anything, whether you're making an app or you're making anything, like you said, you've got that initial, I'm going to build this, are people going to use this, or is this going to be like a thing? Or so, yeah, it's out to the world.

You got it out to the world. Yeah, that's the important part.

Yeah, it— yeah, truly, truly, absolutely. Oh, I like that. Nice. Thank you, Dad.

See what we did there?

After Dark Pod.

We spare no expense. We spare no expense.

Right, right, right. It's a $10 million, uh, URL, right? The domain. Um, but yeah, well, if there's going to be a forum, it'll probably be on that. And yes, you can submit there. I don't think there is presently, but we'll, we'll work on that soon.

Right now there's a form to get notified when a new episode gets posted. Um, but yeah, we don't have a guest, uh, form yet, but we'll, we'll put that up there for sure, uh, because that's something where I do— I like— and then just in it, to be clear too, it doesn't have to just be developers or anything like that within the community or with— within HubSpot. Like, I want to talk to developers. I mean, there's people that I know that I've worked with that are developers that are just fantastic people that I want to get on here and talk with and just those type of insights. Yes, we always want to tie it back to HubSpot because, you know, there's, there's a, there's a certain, a certain connection there that you can't deny. We all work there.

Mm-hmm.

But yeah, but at the end of the day too, it's like, it's one of those things where I want to be able to tell the developer story from everybody's perspective. And then yeah, that's what makes it magical. And your story, absolutely 100%, is one of those things, like I said, that Gotta— I can't thank you enough because it's, it's good. It's fantastic. Yeah.

And, and, and just to say, just plug, you know, uh, upcoming episodes, we've got a pretty good lineup already actually, uh, set.

You guys let Chris Riley on, so you let anyone on.

Yeah, it was hit or miss, hit or miss there, uh, Carter. We, we weren't sure if we should.

Plus we made— plus we made AJ a co-host, so I mean, it's not like— I don't know, you know, the bar is very, very low. But no, we do. Yeah, we have some really great guests coming up. I know next week We'll be talking with Jana, who's a member of the ecosystem quality team. That's going to be fantastic. Yeah, so we've got— and there's, there's a bunch of names out there that we, um, have talked with and we're just trying to set up some times. But yeah, no, it's— I'm excited because I like doing this. And like, and again, Carter, like, you coming back for another episode, absolutely, 110%. Like, as we go— yeah, so it's like I have delusions of grandeur, right? And I'm just like, they're coming to fruition. I'm just— I'm I kind of run at like 150 miles an hour, and Dennis is the one that needs to kind of be the police officer that's just like, hey, going a little fast there, buddy. What's the rush? It's like, you know, it's one of those things. But, um, but, but again, uh, just to kind of wrap things up for everybody, I want to thank you again, Carter, for coming on. Fantastic guest. And, and really, thank you for everything that you've done. Like, you don't have to answer all those questions, right? You don't have to take all of that time.

Hey, don't stop though. Don't stop.

No, no, that's what I'm saying. You did like—

no, no.

You do have to, and, uh, it is a requirement.

When cloning becomes legal, uh, you will be— about 5 of you will be the customer service end of the developer Slack, essentially. Yeah, so you'll be— yeah, that's, uh, we're just waiting for that time, right? Dolly the sheep, and then we move on to Carter. So we'll be good there. We'll be good there. So, but again, from everyone here, uh, thank you for, uh, listening, and we'll be seeing you next week.

Peace out.