Career Transition into Software Engineering w/Chris Nowicki, Eng Lead

Oh, there we go. All right, good morning everybody. When I say good morning, not everyone's here yet. I gotta send out a text real quick.

Yeah, you're good, man.

Good morning everybody. Say hey, we'd love to hear from you. This morning, man, I can't get over how good I look on this TikTok filter.

Dude, you're looking sweet, man.

This is great.

I love this.

Looks like I went to like Cabo or something on this filter.

Well, you kind of did just come back from Mexico, so I mean—

Yeah, I literally— dude, staying here's, here's what they don't talk to you about this morning, uh, or not this morning. Here's what they don't talk about, period. Staying in a hotel lobby All day sucks your soul. Oh yeah, it was awful. I literally went outside once for 30 minutes. Yeah, in 8 hours. No, I was there— we got there at 9 AM. I did not leave till 9 PM.

Oh my gosh, that's a long time.

That's for a while. They get started much later than conference in the US, and they, and they go much later. So the conference didn't even start— like, the actual talks didn't start till 10 AM. But they weren't at the hotel till 9:00 PM.

Whoa. That's a long day to be in a lobby.

Crazy. And then they after-partied afterwards, right? So like, you know how like when you watch like soccer, like in Mexico and like they're all going, like there is a passion. I'm telling you, like shout out Mexico, shout out Guadalajara. Like the passion for the tech ecosystem. I mean, everything you hear about the passion is like, it's in tech too. It's crazy. They were like, the vibe was incredible for the entire conference and then also for the afterparty. So anyways, good morning, everybody. We got people. Brian, it's good to see you. We are live. Time to hackle. I mean, support. There you go. It's good to see you. Good morning. Good morning, Richard.

Hey, Richard.

Taya, it's great to see y'all this morning. All right. Excited about this show. For those of you tuning in, welcome. Pumped to hang out with Chris this morning. Gloria Estefan. Yes. Yes, absolutely. 100%. Yeah, absolutely that. So excited for this episode. Known Chris for a long time, watched his journey, really, really pumped. Before we dive in this morning, please say hey. When I say please say hey, please comment. I tell people this, that this show is networking first, guests second. I don't mean that mean at the guests, but as Chris knows, like, I do this show as a way for you just to show up in your pajamas potentially, with a cup of coffee in hand, got mine ready to go, and you just comment and say, hey, right? Again, I think one of the things, and Chris and I, I'm sure, are gonna talk about this, is like networking behavior has changed substantially because of COVID I think there was a thread going on that, you know, basically they were like, why don't you show up to networking events? Is because you have to compete with Netflix now, right? And so again, like, I really truly think that showing up to events like this, saying hey, is the way to go. So please do that. Next thing, ask questions. Chris's story is amazing. Again, we're gonna dive into it here in a second. But again, if you have questions, I think this episode's gonna be very practical, tactical for a lot of people and help a lot of people. So please say, please ask questions. Finally, I do, I'm trying to get better at this. I wanna give a shout out. So I am, believe it or not, I am an Appwrite hero. And so I—

Love Appwrite.

Yes. Big, big fan of Appwrite, even though I don't code. Love the people a lot. So I do want to give a shout out to them. I want to give a shout out to them on every episode because I am a hero and want to give them some love. So go check them out, Appwrite.io. Fantastic little product they got going on over there and blessed to be a part of the community as well. And yeah, what else we got here? Jason, good morning. Darren, it's good to see you. Everybody loves the new setup. Everybody loves the new setup, Chris.

I love it. Yeah, it's a new— we— I just moved a couple weeks ago from Tennessee to Georgia, uh, to be closer to family. So I got a new office place going, tried to figure out best way to frame the office. And, uh, yeah, we're 3 weeks to getting settled in, so we're still— I'm almost there. I love it.

I love it, man.

I love it.

All right, well, enough for me running my mouth, enough of me yapping, Chris. Let's get the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do now? And we'll dive in.

Right on. Well, my name is Chris Nowicki. I'm an engineering lead at This.Labs.

I bet that feels good to say, don't it? I bet that feels good to say. Just saying.

I just got a little bit of chills. Just, you know, engineering lead at This.Labs. That's actually so great. Yeah, so, uh, This.Labs is a web consulting agency. They do everything from large-scale projects to staffing augmentation to training for companies on all different types of tech stacks. Our CEO, uh, Tracy Lee is phenomenal.

Incredible.

Just a wonderful, wonderful human being. Great leadership, uh, who care a lot about the development community. Um, and, and my job here is, uh, it, it's, it's really cool. It took my, and we'll get into my past, but you know, my past experience of leading teams and projects and then taking my newfound passion over the last few years of, uh, web development, uh, uh, software development coding, and it kind of combines both together.

Yeah.

So I get to— I have a client right now that I'm responsible for. I have a great team at This Dot surrounding me as I get adjusted in. I'm about 1 month in now, 1 month and a week. So it's drinking from a fire hose. But I absolutely, absolutely love the job. I get to lead a, lead a project, and I get to code as well. And both together is just, I'm living the dream. I'm in, I am in a dream job that I've been looking for for a very long time. So I'm beyond excited, man. I love that.

That's awesome. All right, so where do you wanna start? I mean, this is your show, you know, I wanna give back as much practical tactical information as possible. I mean, how'd you do it? I guess we'll start, how'd you do this?

Like, yeah, let me start with just kind of how, why, why even go into software development? So in '22, you know, I, previous to this dot, I was in I was with a company called Raytheon for 18 years. So I started off with them as a senior system administrator, training military how to maintain computer systems, Linux systems, wrote technical documentation, all that sort of stuff. So tech adjacent, right?

Yeah.

But as my career changed, they said, hey, you should be a lead. You should be a lead. And oh, we wanna make you a manager of people. And it slowly, it got to the point in my career with them where I was just Managing dollars and not even getting to do anything hands-on. And I have a creative, I don't know, my mindset, I consider myself a very creative person. So if I'm not creating something or getting my hands dirty, and then aside from that, I'm just a tech nerd, man. I love tech, everything tech. I have gadgets and all these sort of things, play with different apps all the time, you know. And so I got to the place where I said, I am unhappy in my role. I talked to my management at my old company. I said, hey, I think my role's changing a little bit. And they said, Yeah, we see that. We want you to do more hands-on. And nothing really changed. Uh, no, no shade on them. Wonderful company. I was with them for 18 years. Um, but I just decided to kind of look into what I did in college, software development. Did a coding bootcamp. So some people go self-taught, some people go coding bootcamp. I tried self-taught for a little bit and realized my brain needed a little bit more structure.

Yes.

So I did, uh, Coding Dojo. Uh, shout out to Coding Dojo. Great, great bootcamp. Um, I did a, an intensive 6-month 2-stack, uh, program where I did about 30 hours a week on top of my day job. So that's where I think I start is I, I said I, I jumped into a bootcamp and I committed to, to straight up just doing it. I studied, I did all the exercises. Great, cool. So I did that from May of '22 till November, December of '22. I love it. And then this is where the trend, this is where the really hard work came in. So you would think that That was the hard work. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're just getting started. Exactly. And, and that's where I want to start. A lot of people who graduate from boot camps— this wasn't me per se, but a lot of people go, okay, I'm out of boot camp, I am ready for a job. No, you are not. Unfortunately, they, they get you the technical knowledge, but there's so many other skills that are needed, and I didn't realize that. So, um, going into 2023, uh, I said, all right, what do I need to do? Well, what's this thing called Twitter? Right? So I went on Twitter. I never understood Twitter, what to do with Twitter. So I jumped into Twitter and started following people who were coding. I watched YouTube videos, found them on— actually, the first person that I found on YouTube was James Quick, right? James Quick, awesome, awesome dude. Found him, found him on Twitter, started chatting with him on Twitter, saw who he followed.

Mm-hmm.

You talk about this a lot in your— in a lot of your talks as well, is follow the people that you inspired by and see who they are following and then follow the people that they are following because those are people that are, yeah, that are gonna provide value.

Yeah.

Um, so then from there what happened was I started working, I was continuing to work on my own projects. I didn't jump framework stacks. I just stuck with, uh, React, Next.js. And I said, all right, I'm going all in on this to fully understand. Now I think a lot of people, go, okay, how many stacks can I learn so I can make myself valuable? I think my personal opinion is if you go in and you're like, all right, I'm brand new, I'm self-taught, and I'm gonna put on my resume, I, I know the Python stack, I know Next.js stack, I know Laravel stack, that's actually gonna hurt you. Because if you don't have a ton of projects to show for that, it— knowing more does not mean you are valuable. Knowing a lot in one does. And And this transitioned into my career at This Dot, and I'll talk about that in a little bit. So from there, I, I saw, I heard about this thing called Render Atlanta. Like, what is Render Atlanta? I was in, I was looking for maybe are there meetups or something I can go to? Uh, James Quick had a 20% discount. I, I sent him a DM, uh, connected with him, and I decided to go all in, man. I, I bought a VIP ticket, like, 2 weeks before the conference. So that, like, I went all in. I'm like, all right, I'm gonna get a VIP ticket. Went to the VIP event, met, met, uh, James, who introduced me to a ton of people. And then that's how everything kind of took off from there. I said, oh, there's something here, talking with all these individuals. And I was talking with people, I was in the VIP rooms, you know, I met Nate Codes, I met so many different people. I heard about this group called Virtual Coffee that Becca runs. And I said, oh, I want to get involved in that. So I got connected with Virtual Coffee. And then, and then, and then from there, I said, OK, I started getting connected with people, getting involved in the community. And what does that look like? Well, that was more of getting involved on Twitter, seeing what people are doing on Twitter, commenting on what people are doing on Twitter, not just for someone to see hey, who is this Chris guy? But I wanted to provide value as well somehow, right? And, and from there it transitioned to, all right, what's the next thing I can get involved in? And I just started looking around. I started looking around, I started talking some more to people, stayed in contact with James, started making more connections through Virtual Coffee. The Virtual Coffee community, I actually started volunteering with. So I became an emcee, emceeing their, their Biweekly, you know, whenever, whenever I could, maybe once a week, uh, was a note-taker, um, helped lead breakout rooms. And that didn't connect me with anything necessarily to my current role, but what it did was connect me with other like-minded individuals who were pursuing a— either they were laid off looking for their next role, or they were like me who were going, I want to look for my first job in tech.

Yep.

And that made— that gave me a space just to feel comfortable of airing my frustrations, airing my— because I started cold applying to jobs, right, around this time. I'm like, all right, you know what, let's just see what's out there. I applied for maybe 300+ roles and nothing.

Yep.

Not even a rejection. Sometimes I got the automated ones, right, but nothing. And I'm going, all right, this is not going to work. And This is also when the— 2023 was when the, the whole environment changed for those pursuing tech, right? That's when tech layoffs were at their high in 2023.

Yeah.

For— I know you talked about this as a recruiter, you know, that's when things shifted from a recruiting standpoint as well. The, the strategy for job seekers switched. And, and Uh, to fast forward this a little bit, then people can ask a lot of questions, is I, I went to— I heard about this, you know, I see Clark Sell in here.

Yeah, I was getting to this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Clark Sell, shout out to you, man, because I, I tell you, like, I love Render ATL, great community. It's a whole different vibe than what that conference offers, which is a great community that Clark has built. Um, and I went to that conference in, in Texas in January And little did I know, you know, I got a free ticket to go from Danny Thompson, who is now a coworker of mine, which is just freaking— I'm mind-blown to be a coworker with Danny. You know, it's just nuts. So I go there and I meet a ton of people. I meet Tessa Kriesel. I meet the other Tessa from Upright. I meet you know, I saw you there. We got to connect a little bit more. And, and so my strategy at that conference was, what can I do to move myself to that next level to get seen and to show my value?

Yep.

And something interesting that came from that conference was 2 things. One, just talking with individuals. I had a really interesting conversation at a table with Shashi Low, with Brad Garopi. I probably botched that name. I'm sorry, Brad. But we're at the barbecue night talking about everything. And later on we're at the bonfire chat and he goes, so who do you work for? I said, I'm looking for my first role. And he goes, I don't understand. He goes, you, you talk like you know what you're talking about.

I literally told Ryan that this, this past week at Commit Your Code.

Ryan Furrow, right?

Yep.

Dude, Ryan Furrow, good, good close friend of mine. I completely agree. He knows a ton. And so I'm going, okay, what I'm speaking and just naturally talking about, people are resonating with.

Cool.

So then I go up to James Quick and I remember James Quick being on the, uh, on, on his podcast and, and he's saying, hey, I would love for people to offer to help, but a lot of people don't. And I said, why don't I just go up and talk to him? So I said, hey James, I would love to help you out for a little bit. Um, is there something that I can help you with? I'm not looking for compensation. I just, want to work on a real project that is not a side project that is not going anywhere. Something that is going to be used. And he was working on Deals for Devs at the time. That project he had just launched the Black Friday of 2022 or 2023.

Yep.

And he goes, yeah. So, we sat down and we talked for an hour. And he goes, dude, okay. He goes, first of all, after talking with you for an hour, you seem to really know your crap about Next.js. I'm like, yeah, I love it. And here's all the things that I've done. He goes, the things that you've done, I would love your help with. I said, sure. So I jumped in, helped him out, which motivated him to get going, to get that project going up again. But then here's where the networking comes in as well. Through that conference, Shashi Low, uh, he came up to me and goes, hey Tyler. I'm like, my name's Chris, man. He just kept on calling me Tyler and I let him call me Tyler. And, uh, it was great. He reaches out to me. I get involved in Discord, you know, through— I get invited by him to his channel and a few other things. And I was in another channel with a few others. And he goes, hey, Chris, can I reach out and talk to you? And I said, sure. And he goes, I'm starting a cohort of like-minded individuals like you who are trying to break into tech, and I want to run it like we do at Microsoft. So we're going to run up a full-up team, and would you want to be one of our backend engineers on this team? And as we get it started. And I said, absolutely. And this is where things really took off because this is this, I talked about this, uh, this past year at Render ATL, Jason Torres and I both talked about this. Uh, Tyler, thanks. Um, of bridging the gap, right? And this is where I'm gonna tie it back to bootcamp, to something that actually is tangible. Working in a team, understanding how to communicate in a team, understanding how to code with the team, understanding how to resolve, you know, multiple people are working in multiple branches, how to resolve merge conflicts, how to talk about what you're doing, what you need help with. Are you blocked by someone? Reaching out to them. Or, hey, I'm not even gonna be around this week to work on anything. I got other stuff going on, right?

Right.

That stepped up my game a ton to be able to talk about working with the team and understanding how to work with the team.

Yeah.

So fast forward real quick. We're at that conference, Wisconsin, my first CFP that I was accepted for. I talked about mental health and productivity for developers. Rob Ossel was at, I'm sorry if I'm botching these names. Rob, he's one of the VPs. He's the VP of innovation at This Dot. He was at one of my talks and we resonated. We talked a lot. Uh, Tracy and I were on the same plane going back to Atlanta, and my wife and I helped her, um, help her and her family load on their, their, their kids and all their luggage. And it was, it was hilarious. Um, but Tracy goes, hey, you should reach out to Rob and just ask them to do their coding challenge, not as an interview, not as an application, just to see where you're at. You know, and I said, all right. So I reached out to Rob and I said, hey Rob, I said, can I take the coding challenge? He goes, yeah, sure. So we connected, he gave me the coding challenge. He goes, you have about, he goes, we're really taking the time limit away, but normally we give people 4 to 6 hours to create an app based on these criteria, submit it in a private repo. That way other interviewees don't get access to it. Yeah.

Right.

I did it, submitted to him. We had an hour and a half conversation and he goes, Chris, he goes, you, you, I have nothing but nitpicky things to say about the app that you built. So the, it, the app wasn't supposed to be perfect in design, really. They wanted you to focus on more of the functionality and the code.

Sure.

Um, so we talked for an hour and a half. We went detail by detail. I mean, he took the time for free to meet with me all because I asked and to walk through my code saying what I could have done better, what I did well. And the things that stood out and the things that I could do to make myself stand out. He is also from the defense. He, way back in the day, he worked contracts and defense. So we kind of connected on that level as well. And I said, you know, I wanna be a developer. He goes, yeah. He goes, I get that. He goes, really at this dot, they hire a lot of senior devs. You know, they do some junior stuff here and there for apprenticeships. But I didn't come in as a junior. I didn't come in as a senior. I was, you know, somewhere in the middle, right? But I have all of this experience as a lead. He goes, we've really been having a hard time trying to fill a role for an engineering lead. Traci and I had been talking about this. Would you be interested in pursuing this? I said, you know, let me think about it. I took a step back because I just wanted to code. That's all I wanted to do. I didn't even have leading teams on my radar. I just wanted to code. I just want to write code all day. Long story short, I ended up interviewing a couple weeks later, got contacted saying, hey, we're really interested in you. Let's start talking through it. I interviewed with the, with the CTO, with Tracy, with 2 of the other VPs.

Yeah.

Had a great hour-long conversation. And that ended up leading me to this role where I realized even in the negotiation process, the CTO, Elliot, he goes, Chris, you know, I know that Tracy knows you and Rob knows you. We're not doing this as a favor to you. We actually see value. You are a great fit for our culture.

Oh, good.

You are, you know, we understand that you're newer in the development world, but you have all of this extra experience. And I realized that, yes, I can still take these transferable skills still be a lead and not be necessarily responsible for people, because that's what I didn't want to do. I did not want to be a manager of people, but projects, sure. And I geek out over this stuff. So within the first 3 weeks at this dot, learning my client, I'm diving into their, their structure, their dev environments, how everything is put together, geeking out over it to where the customer even said, hey, Chris, We've never seen someone get spun up so quickly on our platform. And that's just because I geeked out over it, you know? So that's kind of, I probably missed some stuff in there, but that, I know we only have a half hour and we've got 10 minutes left or so.

So that's the— Man, that's so good. I mean, if you guys have questions, please ask. Well, I'll kind of hit you with some Q&A right now. The chat has just been nuts. Chris brings out the people for sure. Eva comes in here. It's good to see you, Eva. It's gotten a lot harder to transition between roles like Devin Lead. Everybody wants to hire you, same thing you did 5 minutes ago. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely, uh, definitely something like this.

Absolutely.

Uh, hey Chris, how do you work on— I'm assuming this is taming scope creep in a leadership role.

Oh, that's a great question. So yeah, definitely, you definitely have to look at scope creep. I think the first important thing is just looking at what are we— what are you on contract to do? What does that look like? Yeah. Um, right now where I am at my first 3 weeks, I haven't had to work with a lot of scope creep. However, the conversation does come up internally. And we are keeping an eye on that with our senior architects, who are heavily involved as well. So that's the other thing about this, Dot, that's great. It's, it's not just, OK, here you go, you know, their leadership is involved in all the projects.

Yeah.

You know, so I'm doing biweekly check-ins with my management on what's going on with the project. They, they want to be involved and the architect of the project. Um, um, but yeah, I, I think scope creep is something that's really easy. It's all about communication and understanding what are the risks. And I think scope creep comes down to risk mitigation, looking ahead to what do you think is going to cause a scope creep? How can we mitigate that? And how can we continue communication with the clients that they understand, uh, what's happening technically, what's happening in the overall bigger picture?

Um, I want to go back to the job search real quick.

Yeah.

Um, and again, like, uh, you know, I know there's a lot of questions going on and, and, and, um, you know, actually, Jason, I know you're watching this. We need to get everybody into the Torque Discord to continue to chat after the live. So Jason, if you're watching this, um, let's make that happen, please. Um, so, uh, if I were to recap what you just said with your, with your story, how you got a job tech? Go to meetups, go to conferences. Be engaged. Maybe offer up your services for free. Yep. Am I missing anything?

No, I think, I think that's pretty much it. Don't be afraid to get involved, get engaged. It's if you're just sitting at home. Look, developers, we're all different. We're all different. We're special kind of people, right? A lot of us are introverts. And a lot of us are afraid to put ourselves out there. But if you are in a position of looking for your first role in tech and you are one of those people, I encourage you, get on LinkedIn, start posting. Build in public, build in public, build in public, build in public.

I'm so— I think that, but like, people are like, dude, I don't wanna be, I don't wanna become a MrBeast. I feel like you, I feel like you say build in public and everyone's like, I don't wanna become a content creator.

You don't have to be a content creator. It's what are you learning?

Right?

And, and I, I've had a lot of conversations with people about this.

Right?

So, okay. You maybe don't wanna do a livestream or go on Twitch or do anything with that, be an influencer. That's, that's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is a lot of people go, I am learning, let's just say it's Next.js. I'm learning Next.js for the first time. Okay, cool. What are you learning? What did you learn today? Write a blog post about it because there is someone out there in your position who is looking for content. And just because a whole bunch of other people have written content on it doesn't mean that you're, you don't have a value. To put out there for others to consume. And it's not about getting the likes. It's not about getting the follow— follows. When you actually write about what you're learning, you retain the information more and you're putting it out there and you can post progress on what you're doing. That is when you don't have— when you don't already have a job in tech and you don't have it on your resume to show, you're building public. You know, a lot of times they might say, hey, attach some articles you wrote. Boom. Now you got a bunch of technical articles that you wrote while you were learning something and they can see your learning process, right? I mean, I jumped into this, Dot. I have experience with Next.js. The client that I'm working with, the frontend is Next.js and the backend is PHP. I've never done PHP in my entire life, but now I'm doing PHP, but I can actually transfer what I know from JavaScript to PHP. It's just learning, you know, the syntax, but I know data structures, right? Yeah.

Right. Um, uh, Dominic comes in here, um, and goes, uh, hey Chris, would you be able to, uh, would you say you feel your role at this dot has more similarities in form and function to GIS or previous job in defense?

Yeah, he, he's, uh, talking about Gridiron Survivor, the Shashi Lo Project cohort. So Dominic is one of the many who are in Shashi Lo's cohort. Um, I would say the job is a mixture of both. When I was in Gridiron Survivor, I was helping the team out from a technical perspective, um, helping with the architect, helping Shashi with the architect of the app and doing a lot of the backend stuff. Um, and then it's a, it's between that and then my leadership, uh, skills that I've built up over 18 years at Raytheon in defense. So it was a mixture of both.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Uh, let's see here, getting through the questions because we're almost already at time. Um, yeah, I want to give a shout out to Barrett too, man. I mean, he's— Barrett, I see you, I see you, right? Even if people— you gotta understand something, even if you don't get the likes and the comments, people see you, right? Like, like, like, I was in my talk when I gave my talk, Commit Your Code. Ryan Furrier was in my talk. I gave him a shout out about his, uh, F1 Mercedes page he did, and like, he was like, holy— I mean, I could tell like he was like Oh wow, like people watch you even if you don't comment or like it. So just keep putting stuff out, man. Keep putting your stuff out.

Let me tell you something. I wrote, I wrote a, an article on, on how to secure cron, on how to do a cron job in Vercel, just because I wanted to write an article about it. I was learning about it, and then I updated the article because something was updated and changed. That article found itself into one of the GitHub comments on Vercel's page. To where my, my article was the response for the fix to the solution. And that, yeah, I didn't have any views at all.

You know what I need to do? I'm gonna do it right now. I'm gonna do it on this. I'm, I'm literally gonna do it on the stream. I'm gonna message Aaron Francis and get him to come back on the show to talk about his talk at Commit Your Code.

Oh, did he talk about building in public?

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna text him right now.

Do it. He has a great—

um, dude, I am, I, I am, I'm the biggest Aaron Francis fanboy, uh, feasibly.

So I bought his course on how to record.

Tessa, I need to— I'm messaging you now too, Tessa, because I need to get you— it's been too long. It's been too long.

Tessa's awesome.

Yeah, Tessa, Tessa, I'm messaging you. Please sign up. Thanks. Yeah, incredible. So, man, as we wrap up here, any words of encouragement? I mean, listen, I would say you probably found a job in the hardest— I mean, one of the most difficult markets right now. I mean, what would you tell people?

Don't be afraid to put yourself out there. Don't be afraid to ask if you can get involved in a project. No creator that you look up to is not accessible. That's, that's not reachable. Like reach out. Like Taylor encourages you, reach out to him. I mean, I messaged you on Twitter a couple times and you responded. I messaged other people.

My response rate is like 30 days later, just FYI.

But like, listen, there was one time when I reached out, I just messaged the VP of, of, Uh, uh, Lee Robb, the VP of, uh, um, Next.js, of dev experience at, at, uh, Next.js Vercel. He responded the next day and we had a great conversation. Like it, I mean, no one is out of reach to talk to, to ask for advice, to ask for help. Um, put yourself out there, build in public, research, you know, again, not influencer, what we talked about. Go to conferences, go to local meetups, go to local meetups. You never know what you're gonna find.

Your local meetup. Start. Yeah, I think we need to start. I think we need to reframe our wording here is like either start a meetup or go to a meetup. But I think I like a lot of meetups have died out.

Yeah.

And so start something.

Yeah.

Start something.

Start some. If it's not there, start meetup.com, start a local coffee and code meetup, you know?

I'm gonna plug guild.host instead 'cause it's free to start a meetup. You gotta pay on meetup.com to be a meetup host. guild.host.

Do it.

guild.host. I'm gonna put it here. It's my buddy Taz, Taz Singh. He created a competitor and we use it at Torque. I use it for my Dads in Tech group too. And it's free to use. The only people that pay is sponsors. So, uh, use GuildUp. But, but what Chris said, just start something.

Just start.

Stop sitting on your ass. Stop sitting on your ass. Just go start something.

Get out there, do something, start something, talk to people, go to conferences, say who you are. You'll, you'll get there eventually. You will, you will land your job. Persevere. You will do it.

But you can't sit on your hands.

No, you gotta do, you gotta actively get and do something. Don't just sit there. Put yourself out there.

Absolutely. Cool. Uh, Tampa keeps them coming if you're in there. Yeah, yeah, Tampa's got a lot. Go hit up Jacqueline if you're in the Tampa area. Cool. All right, Chris, uh, rapid fire. The comments— this is nuts. I've never seen the comment section like this. So Chris brings out again the power of community. Chris is out there. Chris, obviously I'm a big fan of you. I followed you. Chris is doing the damn thing. Do— just do the damn thing.

Do the damn thing.

Do the damn thing.

Hey, reach out to me if you're in there. If you're out there and you, uh, find me on Twitter @iamwick, Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I will respond. I would love to connect with you.

Absolutely. Rapid fire here. If I told you you could not wake up tomorrow morning and be in tech, even though you just got your job in tech, but I told you you couldn't do anything in tech anymore, what would you do for your job? And I'd pay you the same, if not more.

Oh my gosh. I would become a master barbecue smoker.

I love smoking.

Oh, for real? Yes. I love smoking ribs and brisket. I'm smoking some pork, some pork belly for the meetup tomorrow in Atlanta for the JavaScript meetup. So I'm looking forward to it.

I love that. That's awesome. Second question, obviously this, the first question kind of answers the second question, but what else do you like to do outside of work and smoke meat?

Oh my gosh. I wanna get into mountain biking. So something that I've been, fell out of and I wanna get back into.

Um, Shashi showed up. What up, big guy?

Low and Slow Barbecue. Yeah, listen, I just tinker with all things tech. So I'm not— when I'm actually not actually coding, I am watching YouTube on the next tech stuff, trying to figure out my productivity, playing with apps. I, I just— I'm a geek, man. That's, that's what I do. Yeah, yeah, I love it.

Um, third question, have you done— so this is like kind of the tech nerdy type stuff. Um, anything you've been developing with, coding or coding with, tinkering with on the side or even in production that you're really, that's kind of new and exciting that you're pretty pumped about?

Yeah, I've been playing around with Vercel's AI SDK, which is pretty, pretty phenomenal to be able to easily tie into multiple AI frameworks. So that's just something I've been playing with on the side and I absolutely, I think it's so much fun and so easy to work with.

I love that. I love that. Best meat to smoke?

It depends, man. I'm going to say the easiest meat to smoke you can't go wrong with is a good pork butt. Brisket's one of my favorites. There you go.

Last question as we wrap up here. Again, thanks for everybody tuning in. We're continuing the chat in the Torque Discord, so come hang out with us if you want to. But so we had guidance counselors. So the show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0. We had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults, we don't really have anybody to turn to and ask for career advice. That's why I do the show. It's just general career advice in tech. What would be your biggest, like if you could go back to younger Chris, like young Chris, what would you say? Like what career advice would you tell him?

I would tell him to get involved. If I could have gone back, I would've gone all in on software engineering. in software development 'cause I love it. If I knew what I knew today, I mean, yes, my experience at 18 years at Raytheon, I could transition a lot of stuff over, but I, man, I wish I would've gotten involved a lot sooner. So I would've told myself, go all in on computer science, software engineering much earlier.

I love it, man. We got Anthony Mays in the chat.

Dude, I love that guy.

Everybody in the chat today. I love it. I love it. Also, Jason's going live today with Tech Commute at Gantt. with Gant. Lord have mercy.

You need to get some sleep, bro.

Words are hard. I'm surprised I still have a voice at this point. Yeah, so go hang out with Jason. Gant's always a character, so definitely go hang out with him. Cool. All right, y'all. Well, Chris, thank you, my friend. Stay on.

Thank you.

Backstage. Go connect with Chris. Shout out This.Labs. Tracy was actually texting me last night about some things, so appreciate her. Appreciate This.Labs. This and Torque did a cross-collaboration for the speaker dinner, happy hour at Commit Your Code.

That was a blast.

But again, we're in the Discord right now. You know, if Chris wants to pop in, pop in. I'll pop in. Y'all have a great one and we'll see y'all tomorrow. So tomorrow— oh, real quick, episodes this week. My guy Hank Washington, who is the designer for Render ATL, he is coming on the show tomorrow, runs his own business, gonna talk with him about running his own business. And then Thursday, I'm super pumped about, I have another, I have 2 Hanks this week. Hank Taylor, who is now, I believe, the CMO of Laravel. Hank is coming on the show on Thursday, gonna talk about developer marketing. So that's gonna be a blast. So y'all have a good one. We will see y'all tomorrow. Go hang out with Jason this afternoon with Gantt. Peace.