Being Nice and How to Network/Salma Alam-Naylor

All righty. Good morning, everybody. When I say everybody, I mean nobody. No one's here yet.

Hi.

Excited. Salma, you're the only live that I have this week. Back on the road, speaking at another conference. Was just in Mexico last week for a huge conference. So this is it. This is the only one I have this week. So you are special.

Feeling special.

You are very, very special. But good morning, everybody. Please comment. Let me know. When you're tuning in, when, when this hits the interwebs. I'm excited about this one because I was just— I was— again, I, I don't come with questions, right? I, I, I don't come with preset questions. I really want this to be a— I've always wanted this to be a conversation amongst friends. I've had people, uh, do this live in their car on their phone, which was, which was great. And so— But I will say this, uh, you may have the best background backdrop that I've ever seen. That you— your house, uh, must be immaculate. So, um, it looks great.

It has been said— I mean, this has taken a very long time. If you look at one of my older tutorial videos from Netlify, you will see nothing here in the background whatsoever. But it's— these things take time, and I guess that is going to be a running theme.

I love it. Yes, it takes time. But again, so Jeff's here. It's good to see you. At least I know it's hit the interwebs. I wanna go through some housekeeping things real fast before we dive in today. First and foremost, I wanna give a shout out to Appwrite. I am an Appwrite hero. Probably the only non-technical hero on a technical program. So shout out to Appwrite. Love those folks. We actually did a meetup with them down at React Miami. It was a great time. Dennis and Tessa, thank you for coming. Coming out. I appreciate it. Um, but I give Appwrite a follow, check out their product. It's fantastic, even though I don't know how to code. Um, also, if you want to check out, uh, everything we're doing with Torque Community, uh, again, my whole thing is like, I want this to just be like, like your home base. Like, you know when you played tag when you were younger and you always had like the, like your, your safe place, the, the, your home base? So like, you go out, you play tag, but you always run back and tag it make sure you're safe. That's kind of what I want to— I, I just came up with this, by the way, but that's, that's kind of what I want the Torque community to be. It's like your job search, you're running around doing all the things, but then like if you need something or you need some encouragement or you need people to meet or you need to be a part of a really cool community, uh, I, I want, I want Torque to be that. So if you want to check out everything we got going on, torque.community, we'd love to have you. I know we're doing a town hall. I'm gonna hop over after this to do a town hall, um, in the Torque Discord and kind of give the community updates what's going on. We'd love to have you. Also, if you want to be updated when I go live with amazing guests like Salma, text LIVE to 615-235-5650. This is actually me. It's not some AI chatbot. It actually is me. I respond to all of them. So we'd love to have you. People are tuning in. Ricardo, it's good to see you. Sally, JC, LinkedIn user. I love it. Erica, it's good to see you. Chris, good to see you. Also, for those of you tuning in, dads in Nashville, I'm throwing my Dads in Tech lunch today. We're having tacos. So we'd love to see you guys there. I'll drop the link afterwards. But anyways, enough of me running my mouth. Excited for this episode. Salma, if you want to give a quick introduction to the people, who you are, what you do, and we'll go from there.

I am Salma and I write code for your entertainment.

There you go.

That is the word on the street. I'm head of developer education at Nordcraft and have had a very varied career path and journey into technology.

I love that. What is— talk Nordcraft real quick. What is it? What are you responsible for? I want to give you the opportunity to do your little shindig here.

Nordcraft is a web development engine. Think like Unreal Engine but for web apps. And, uh, it's everything you need to create, um, and deploy apps and websites right in the browser without all the like finicky setup of dev environments and stuff. And there's like Git, like branching and version control and inbuilt theming and everything's customizable. You can bring your own custom code if you want. It's just a different way, a cool way to build apps and websites.

I love that. That's great. You got that pitch down. You got that pitch down good. You've been practicing in the mirror, I take it.

You know what? I didn't expect you to ask me to pitch it and so I just made it up. But it's all true.

You know, you know, I tweeted this yesterday. I don't know if you saw. I, I, I, I think, I think more— I think DevRel should actually talk about their product a little bit more. Like, I know it's this whole like salesy thing, but I don't know what half the people do in my network because none of y'all talk about it.

So I think, um, I, I know we might be skipping ahead here, but—

No, no, you're good. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

In previous jobs, like, I didn't feel as comfortable talking about the product as much as I do now because I specifically chose and sought out to work for this product because I thought it was exciting. And so it'd be silly if I didn't talk about it because I think it's cool. I think it's really cool and different and refreshing.

Yes.

And I'm working with a bunch of super smart engineers as well, which is like always exciting and makes you want to talk about it. So I think that, that's, um, About choice of place. And I know sometimes we are limited with choice in this type of hiring environment, but I think that makes all the difference.

I love that. I love that. Kelly, it's good to see you tuning in from Pittsburgh. I love it. All right. So I always get people to fill out a little bit of a questionnaire, right? So I can at least get people's heads thinking in the right direction. And Salma filled it out, and there was something I really gravitated towards, and it was Be nice and it all works out. And you're not the first one to say that in the last month or two. So I really wanna talk, I wanna talk before we dive into being nice and how that pays off. I do wanna talk about your career. You have a fascinating career or fascinating life before you become a developer. Can you talk about that and kind of let the folks know a little bit about you pre-code?

Well, I mean, my coding started for me when I was 6 years old in 1991, in the early— in the late 20th century. And, um, I was, uh, I had a Commodore 64 at home and there was a big manual and I liked to copy the code from the manual into the Commodore 64 and make things like balls bounce on a screen and stripes appear. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was writing BASIC, it turned out. Anyway, uh, so, you know, this was the '90s and, um, the, the internet didn't exist and/or was a different place, and there wasn't the opportunities available to random people writing BASIC on a Commodore 64 in the suburbs as there are today. And so Despite wanting to get into tech, I, I couldn't. I didn't know how to. I didn't know it was, uh, like available to me. So I ended up being a musician. I was playing— I played loads of instruments. I was in all the orchestras, all the clubs, and I was writing music from a very early age as well, from like 7.

Which is impressive, by the way. Like, for those of you who like didn't— like, I grew up reading and writing and, and with percussion, and it's hard to do. It's not easy.

It's a lot of fun. And I guess there's another side note is that I think writing code and writing music are very, very similar.

Facts.

Facts indeed. Um, so yeah, I was a musician. I spent my whole childhood doing that. But also when GeoCities came out, I was building websites on GeoCities as well. I was right there. And actually for one of my school exams that was like for, it was IT, information technology. Everyone was like creating spreadsheets and stuff. I actually made a GeoCities website to accompany my portfolio. stuff. So that was fun. Um, and so I went off to music college and I did a composition degree, and I wanted to be a film composer. Uh, at the same time, I was still making websites for my friends using tools like— does anyone remember iWeb that was on Mac? It was like a—

Please comment if you know iWeb.

I've never heard of it. It was like Dreamweaver but for macOS. Uh, the code it produced was garbage, but it allowed you to create websites Uh, you know, back in the day when you had little slices of images that you exported from Photoshop and lined up, it allowed you to do stuff like that. And I did a lot of graphic design as well, and like album art and promotional materials for musicians and my friends. I was also in a band. Um, we've got an album on Spotify released in 2008. Yeah, it— I mean, it's great. Um, it's Another Time.

I love it.

Uh, and, um, So when, when you're a musician, you often have to teach to pay the bills. So I started teaching, uh, children, um, at music colleges, and I taught flute lessons, and I ended up teaching kids in rock bands as well, you know, like Jack Black on School of Rock.

Yeah.

And, um, it was great, it was fun, but it wasn't paying my bills much. So I went to get my official teaching qualifications so I could teach in schools and have a, uh, secure income. I did that for a few years and, uh, I ended up working at a bad school and I had to quit. And then I ended up out of necessity getting a temp job at a call center. And all of that stuff that I just mentioned was on my CV, the graphic design and the website stuff. And my manager at the call center— such a silly story. Here's girlfriend used to work at a place that needed a graphic designer, and I, um, had an interview there and ended up working there. And I wasn't really a graphic designer. I was one of those people that wrote blog posts with sales affiliate links in. But, uh, I was sat on the same desk as the one IT guy who did everything— the front end, the back end, the DevOps, the infrastructure. He even wrote his own CMS because this was like before the days of CMSs as a software service thing.

Yeah.

Um, and so I moved my desk setup round to him and I was like, hey, what you doing? Yeah, can I have a little look? And, um, as I was a teacher, I was kind of teaching him how to teach me and he was teaching me like web stuff. And I didn't even have a laptop at home or a coding environment at home, so I would print out pages and pages and pages of PHP to study them at home. And, uh, I did a big project for him, um, you know, back in the day as well when there were like separate mobile and desktop sites.

That's crazy.

Uh, this was like, um, at the dawn of responsive design and Bootstrap. So my project was to combine the mobile and desktop experiences and, um, release it as one experience, which I did. But then I got, uh, made redundant. And but then I found a variety of other 10 jobs after that, and I moved up to tech lead quite quickly. And then the pandemic changed, and pandemic came and everything changed. And, uh, that's when I discovered that people were streaming tech stuff on Twitch.

Crazy, right?

I, I know, right? And I, um, I'd never used Twitch before or anything, and— but I, I quite enjoyed this, and I was kind of inspired because as a tech lead at the time I was doing less and less like real coding. I was like doing PowerPoints and Jira management and all that nonsense. So I thought, hmm, maybe I could do this because also I, I saw a bit of a market for someone like me on Twitch at the time because at the time, it's, it's different now, but in 2020 there were mainly men who were streaming code on Twitch and it was mainly backend. So I thought I could be the frontend dev who is not a man. And I, I started streaming on Twitch and I loved it. I, as well as my full-time job, I was streaming 4 nights a week.

Wow.

I don't know how I managed it because it takes a lot out of you.

Yes, it does.

And, um, and my channel grew quite quickly. But also the main thing is that I met a lot of people through this because of, you know, when you, when you end your stream, you raid someone and you send all your viewers over to another channel. I found the only other British woman doing tech and I raided her and we became friends. And a couple of months later, she told me that she had a friend working in DevRel who needed a frontend specialist, someone like me maybe. And I got the job at Contentful.

Wow.

And that is when I was thrust into the world of developer relations or whatever you want to call it. And I'm now on my 4th DevRel job. And I guess they say the rest is history.

I love it. I love it. That's awesome. So much to unpack here. What do you think? What do you think's been— and this goes into kind of like the thesis, the title of this, but what do you think's been your unlock? Like, what's the thing that you think you do really well that's allowed you to continue to find jobs time after time?

I think there's 2 aspects to this. I think one aspect is being completely authentic and yourself. Um, in, in, in another 2 aspects, one of them is not pretending you know everything.

Why do people do that? Why do people act like— at this point, it's like there's so much knowledge out there, why even act like it?

I don't know, like, I, you know, it's fine to say you don't know. I think it's probably a confidence thing. It's maybe a, if I don't appear to know it, then I am lesser than. But actually, I think saying you don't know something is a bit of a superpower because it kind of dissipates the tension in the room and it puts everyone on the same level.

Yeah.

And, um, and also being authentic in terms of, yes, I have a job that I do on the internet. but I'm also a real person. And so a lot of the, a lot of the like blog posts I've written are not about my work and not about tech. Um, they are about me and my life experiences, and there are a lot of other people who will resonate with that. And I think these are the posts that have got me more— I don't want to say popularity, but these are the posts that make people kind of—

Touch.

follow me and, and then engage with other things that I'm doing. And I think showing your vulnerability and your humanness is something that cannot be, um, understated. The power of that cannot be understated because we're all just humans trying to navigate this weird world of work and, and stuff. And then, so there's being human, there's saying you don't know stuff, and then there's also just like making friends and being nice. Like the power of the network is real. And in fact, I've got— I got 3 out of 4 of my DevRel jobs via the network and DMs and just knowing people. But you can't just know people by following them or them following you. You have to take time to cultivate those relationships.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of friends that I've met online that like now I have their phone numbers And we have group chats. Nice. Yeah. And, and we text each other because, and that's where the real like relationship building happens offline. And it's the power of going to meetups and doing talks and just showing up at places in the real world rather than just hiding behind your keyboard and trying to get engagement from arguments. Like just be nice, be cool, make friends and lift other people up.

Yeah.

And we'll remember you for that. Like, I think one of the things that, um, I always remember, there's a quote and I think it's by Maya Angelou. It's like, people won't remember what you said, but they'll remember how you make them feel.

Yes. Yes.

And so I go about my day like that.

I love that. Talk about, you know, obviously I'm sure people who tune in probably roll their eyes like, oh my gosh, there's more people talking about networking. I don't know how to network. I don't know how to even start. I don't know. Do you have any practical, tactical piece of advice to people?

Let me tell you, um, a few years ago I, uh, felt sick at the, uh, hearing the word networking.

Yeah, right.

It sounds so corporate. And so I think if, if you switch it to making friends, that makes it a little bit more, uh, exciting and friendly, doesn't it? And building relationships, but also like building mutually beneficial relationships because there are people that I have helped find jobs and connect with other people, and then they in turn will help me connect with other people and find opportunities. And it's just about approaching it from a human perspective rather than a business perspective because we are all just human beings.

Yeah.

And the business value and the business perspective will come as a side effect of the real human connections. Because, you know, I get a lot of people, they DM me on LinkedIn, hey, look at me, uh, look at my website, connect with me, let's share stuff. And I'm like, well, mate, you haven't, you haven't like introduced yourself. We haven't made a connection yet, right?

Correct.

And so the real connections don't happen like in those kinds of situations. They happen, and I think I've made a lot of connections and friends actually via Twitch. you know, going live on Twitch.

Yeah.

And I have a, you know, I've been doing it for like 5 years now. And, um, I've got friends. Yeah. Friends who I've met from, who, who met me via Twitch and things like that. Like real people, real friends, not just like internet acquaintances.

Right.

Because, and I think the bottom line is, again, these things take time as well. You can't like, you can't just expect to cold DM someone and automatically your, your life problems are solved. It's, it's about the time. It's like any relationship, like a partner or a child or, you know, a, a best friend from school that you want to keep in touch with. These things, like, like a plant, you need to nurture it and water it and give it light.

I'm terrible at plants. Uh, let me— so if people are just tuning in, we're talking, you know, we're talking about networking and, and, and this whole thing, and, and they just heard you talk about Twitch and streaming. What if, what if I'm not a streamer? What if I'm not a Twitch person? How do I go about engaging with folks?

I think, um, so I also, I also think I was going to say what not to do.

Sure.

Um, and, and I see a lot of people make this mistake on the internet, right? So say, say I'll post something, um, like on Bluesky, I'll post a blog post or I'll post something, and then you'll, you'll slip right into the reply thread with, hi, I'm available for a job. It's like, I'm not gonna speak to you ever again because you don't know how to read the room and you're all about yourself. And so I think it's about like engaging meaningfully.

Yeah.

And, and you, and you can't expect that, like I said, that relationship to blossom overnight. It takes time. So it's a long game. I used to hate the long game, Taylor. I used to hate it so much. I used to want like instant gratification.

Same, same.

It's like waiting for someone to review your pull request is so painful for me because I know they've got stuff to do, but I need my things satisfied now. But you've got to wait. You've got to be patient, right? You've got to be patient. You've got to be slow. You've got to be intentional. And you can't just send out your CV or resume and profile to hundreds and hundreds of people because number one, the mental overheads on you are going to be vast and significant and you're going to burn yourself out.

Yep.

And also you're not going to be able to keep track of the real stuff and you're not gonna be able to dedicate enough time to developing meaningful relationships. I used to be really bad at plants, right? But I got one plant and the next plant and the next plant and now I have about 8 plants in my house that I'm keeping alive, but I couldn't have got 8 plants straight away and kept them alive. And so it's about the long game. So to answer your question about like, where do people start if they are not that kind of online person? It's about like trying to find what's in your local area and find who is who in the local area.

Yeah.

Go to meetups. You don't necessarily have to like talk to anyone at your first meetup if you're not like feeling the confidence. You can just go and be seen. And maybe, maybe then you can contact someone online who you met at the meetup or who was one of the speakers and just say— and, and, but, and, and, but don't come to people with open-ended questions like this, right? How do I get started in web development? I don't have time to parse that for you because I don't know what type of web development you want to do.

Yeah.

So you need to, you need to have done some of the work before you reach out to people. It's like you wouldn't ask a chef, how do I get started in cooking? Because there are so many different types of cooking.

Yeah.

And for those different types of cooking, you will need different types of tools.

Yeah.

And so you need to, you need to kind of figure out what you want first. But that doesn't mean that what you decide what you want now is gonna be for the rest of your life.

Right.

'Cause a lot of people make that mistake as well. 'Cause I've had like 3 careers and it doesn't matter. I might have another one. And you can change that. You can change your fate and you can change your mind and start again. And, but you just have to kind of have a vision of what you want. And I guess my, one of my secrets maybe is that I'm always trying to plan like 2 steps ahead.

Sure.

So I, I took a particular job because I know I want to get to a particular point in 5 years or 10 years.

Sure.

And I do wanna retire at 55. So like, I'm also planning for that. And, um, But you have to have, you have to have taken the time to understand what you want before people can help you.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We've had a few comments come in here. Another LinkedIn user. Hello. Um, and, and also too, like what Salma said, I mean, you know, I, it's kind of what Jeff said, like, that's kind of why I'm so excited about Torque and them letting me do my thing. I kind of just want to be this place, you know, like, like I met Oscar, prime example. I met Oscar down in Mexico last week, right? We did an AWS meetup, a little Torque AWS collab situation, and Oscar and I hit it up, and now he's in our Discord. And now if anybody wants to talk about—

There you go.

I mean, we talked about Power BI. I don't know what it means, but we talked about it, right? And so like, again, like, again, I just think it's incredibly important. Let me ask you this. I want to kind of, again, kind of dive into the nice thing, right? Because I feel like I feel like there's— I feel like there's a, there's a lot of personalities on social media. Um, some personalities are really good at being negative and rage baiting and all that. Then there's some personalities that are the complete opposite. I'm not saying one is— you know, you can pick which one you want to be, but can you just talk about the power of being nice?

It's like, um, When the weather is nice, when the sun is out, people want to go outside.

Yeah.

When the weather is nice and the sun is out, people want to go outside. When the weather is raining and hostile and windy, people don't want to go outside. And so I approach myself, I approach being on the internet in that way. I want to be the sunshine in people's life, but that doesn't mean I can't like be honest about how I'm having a bad day or whatever. It's again, it's the human humaneness you've got to bring to it. But being nice is just— I mean, if you scroll through all of my, um, profiles, I would hope that you would not see any kind of argument starting or rage bait. And I do that.

You're very nice. You're very nice. And you even got back to me to come on my show, and I didn't even know you.

Exactly, exactly. And, and, you know, this— the problem is we are living in an attention economy And negative stuff gets a lot of eyeballs. And I think there is this misnomer in the industry that if we want to get jobs and we want to get noticed, we have to have X number of followers, we have to have X number of engagement, and then we— that's what's gonna put us at the top. And fun fact, actually, some DevRel jobs used to advertise for, for people that had a minimum number of followers, which is very, very silly.

That's wild.

Very, very silly in my opinion. Yeah, because you can get followers in any way. You can buy followers, right? It's silly.

Yep.

Uh, so I would just say stay away from that nonsense. Don't even engage with any threads or posts that are trying to engage people in that way. Even if you want to provide a nice opinion, there is no point in spending your energy on that. Just scroll right past it. And, and the more you fill your life with that kind of positivity and you get rid of the negativity, you are then going to feel more motivated to decide what you want and to plan your future.

Yes.

Because all this stuff is designed to get in our way and distract us from the big picture. It's all designed— not Bluesky really specifically, but all the other platforms are designed to keep your eyes on that platform as much as possible. And that's not good for anyone. Right? It's turning us into zombies and it's burning us out and it's creating the wrong priorities inside us. So ignore your follower count, right? Ignore it. It will happen. Your relationships and your social graph will expand exponentially over time if you continue to be positive and nice and treat everyone with the respect. And I think one of the biggest things is when you do get to a position where you are, um, you know, you've got quite a few followers, or, you know, people know you and stuff, then use that platform to bring others with you and help you. Like, and so much stuff happens in my DMs. People are asking me, Salma, do you know anyone at this place? Or can you connect me with someone here? Or do you know, do you know any jobs going? And I, I have been able to connect people, and I feel so privileged to be able to do that because that's what people did for me. And that's kind of why I got to where I am now, as well as the hard work. But, you know, I, I couldn't have done it without those ins and those back channels and those networks.

Yeah, absolutely. And, um, uh, I had a really good point and I forgot, but The big thing, the reason why I do this live, one of the reasons why I do this live— I'm stalling here for a second trying to figure out my idea. But all that being said, that's why I tell people to comment. That's why I tell people to show up, right? Like, this is a meetup. This is like, this is a meet— like, like the amount of comments, like we've had over 100 comments at this point. Like, like this is a meetup. Everyone's saying hey. And, and what I try to do is, is, is like, I, I would put my network up against anybody's and I, oh, I realized what I was gonna say. I'll get to that in a second. All that being said, like, I want you to connect with Salma, send her a message that, hey, Song Guidance Council 2.0, right? Like, literally, if you connected with every single guest I've had on the show for 5 years, your network would be vast. And that is what I want. The other thing I want to say too is I realized early on, like, I'm not good. Like, I get real nervous when I say something controversial. Like, and, and, and I like, I hate confrontation, something I'm trying to work on in my marriage. That's a whole nother conversation. But for me, it's like, I want to add value. I realized early on, it's like, I'm not gonna be the person that does the memes. I'm not gonna be the person that's gonna get a ton of followers because at the end of the day, practical tactical job career advice doesn't sell. It's good. But what I do know after a long period of time now, I've been doing it for 5 years. I have the network and the community, which I've been able to turn into torque, which is huge. So you don't always— you can just be yourself. Don't worry about the followers. It just doesn't matter. And also too, if you really wanna get into social technical content, TikTok kind of blew up all platforms now. And it's all about actually impressions now, not really followers, which that's a whole nother conversation of itself. But anyways, let's see here. What else? I think the majority of my opportunities have been because of the energy. Roxy, I would agree with that. Roxy's a twerking bastard. She's wonderful.

I would agree with that too, because actually I met someone in London last week who, uh, I— who knew me from being on the internet and was really happy and excited to, uh, to see me. And he knew all this stuff about me, but like not in a creepy way, like in a weird way— not, not in a weird way, in a nice way. And it felt really nice. He said that my work precedes me. Which I guess is another, another kind of thing, is that just do good work.

Yeah.

Like, do valuable stuff that you, you enjoy creating, and people will find that stuff and then positively associate it with the creator. And, um, you know, people, people, people just want nice stuff in their lives, and people want to feel good. And I think we've kind of started to lose sight of that in, in some areas of society. And yes, we, you know, we, we cannot, um, deny that parts of the world are in a dire state, but like, that doesn't mean we have to obsess over it all day, every day, and run ourselves into the ground and create this like negative negativity bubble around us that there are. And I probably sound extremely privileged saying that, but, um, we, we are in an opportunity kind of area We can connect with anyone that we want, anyone on the internet, anyone.

Like, literally, I have known Jason also.

Hi, Jason.

Jason. Jason's on my team. He's great. Uh, like, prime example, like, I practice what I preach. I did not know Salma. I saw her. I was like, she seems awesome.

I saw you. I was like, he seems cool. He seems to be connected.

Yeah, there you go. See how it works? And I just slid in their DMs like, hey, you wanna come on my pod? Now I'm coming on her pod, I think, what, next week or the week after?

Next week.

Next Tuesday.

Yeah, next Tuesday, right?

So again, like, I eat my own dog food. Like, just go for the ask. Ask somebody to hang out. Like, I think, I think, and this is part of the talk I'm going to give this weekend up at StirTrack in Columbus, but it's like, I think people generally just want to help people right now. I really think so. And I think as long— I think the— I think it's like holding your breath underwater. The longer you can go for the ask, the better. Or the long— the longer it takes to go for the ask, the better. Right? So there are people on this show that I've seen consistently time and time again that I've not met in real life. But if I saw you in real life, I would think you're like my BFF, right? It just works. It works. All right, so we're gonna wrap up here. Last 5 minutes. So I'm like, have we any last words of wisdom to people on their job search, career, etc.?

Yes. Um, I— okay, I, I get a lot of people ask me, um, how can I become a web dev in 10 weeks, 6 weeks, 12 weeks? Like, how can I do it as soon as possible? And how can I earn 6 figures as soon as possible? And like, the answer is that you can't, because our brains don't work that way. Uh, you need to invest the time in yourself to learn the absolute fundamentals of, of the concept that you, you're wanting to achieve, right? The web, right? The fundamentals of the web or whatever you, you want to get a job in. And the, the more you focus on those fundamentals, the easier everything else will come. Like this kind of— like sometimes you'll see people on the internet and they've skyrocketed their career like in, in a few months or whatever, but like it's all smoke and mirrors.

Right.

They either They either, um, did a lot of work behind the scenes before they launched themselves onto the internet, or it's all just not real. And there, I think that— I think there can be people out there who are, um, playing the game, and I don't want to be mean, but like lying about what they're doing, right? And, and it's all for the clout and the followers and the engagement. But real, real careers are built on time investment in yourself, in your skills. You won't achieve it overnight. Um, and I have to keep saying this to someone I mentored last year, um, who just got their first tech job in January after their first interview, which was very exciting. They, they pivoted from music to tech. I went to music college with them. They live around the corner from me. I bumped into them onto the street. Long story, but they're in tech now. And, um, I have to keep reminding them that They're still learning, they're still new, things take time, and, um, it will come. And he's already like improving leaps and bounds, and who knows what he'll achieve in the next 5, 10 years. But our careers are long, right? Our careers are most of our lives. And so we have this time, and, and just keep in mind the long game. Nothing can be achieved overnight, and if it is achieved overnight, it's fake.

There you go, you heard it here. Uh, I do kind of rapid-fire questions, so real quick for you. First off, um, if— and I kind of know the answer to this now because you kind of told me about your background— but if I were to tell you tomorrow morning you woke up, you couldn't do anything in tech, but I'd pay you the same if not more, money's not a problem, what hobby would you pursue?

Interior design and internal space organization.

Okay, that's not what I thought you were gonna say, but that's awesome. I would pay you based off your room right there.

Exactly right.

It's great.

I'm good at it.

I love that. I love that. Uh, if anybody wants to hire Salma, um, feel free to reach out to her. She can start a side business. Um, next question. Uh, anybody in the community you want to give a shout out to, um, that who's doing good work that you've been following that you're, you're, you're pretty proud about?

Oh, I'm on the spot. So many. Um, okay, I— this is really left field, right? But, and it's kind of to do with work but not. There's a German agency called Spark Agency, and they recently did some work for Nordcraft, and, and every bit of work they do is absolutely stunning.

Wow.

They're not really on the internet, but their names are Max and Franz, and they are world-class engineers. And they are doing some more work for Nordcraft as well. But they're an agency, Spark Agency in Germany. And they are present in the Nordcraft Discord a lot. So you can ask them questions about stuff. But they would be a huge knowledge resource to connect with to understand how to be good at your job in web dev.

Cool. That's awesome. That's awesome. Um, all right, last question. I always wrap up here. The show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, college, but now as adults, you don't really have anybody to turn to and ask for general career advice. What would— if you could go back in time, back when Salma was writing music, what's the one biggest piece of career advice you could go back and tell her?

Focus on the long game. It's about the long game.

Yep.

And, and, and everything will come to fruition eventually.

I love it. I love it. That's awesome. Well, y'all go connect Salma. She's wonderful. Great follow. Highly recommend. Um, again, last one for the week. Uh, I am, um, I'm actually— oh, I'm on Angelo's podcast tomorrow. So, but, uh, a colleague of mine We're starting a new podcast, basically talking about how to get into tech without being a developer, which I think is really needed. There's a lot of career paths in tech where you don't have to push code. And so I'm going live. I'm Angelo's first guest tomorrow. So that is— let me look at my calendar. I believe it is— so it's 10:30 Central tomorrow. So Torque community, you be there to support Angelo on his very first podcast. And Selma, I'll see you next week.

All right. Thank you so much. See you then.

Stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. Y'all have a good one. We'll see y'all tomorrow.

Peace.