Do What You Love and It Just Works Out w/Kevin Blanco, Sr. DevRel

Alrighty, what's going on everybody? No, no one's here yet. No one's here yet. Hold on, let's hold on. Send anywhere. All right, cool. Good morning everybody. Uh, well dude, Kevin, what's, what's the weather like in Costa Rica right now?

Uh, right now it's really nice. It is sunny.

Uh, I need to go to Costa Rica. I've never been to Costa Rica.

Oh really? You should, man. I mean I saw that right now there's like a storm in some places in the US.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like blowing like 50 mile an hour gusts. My power went out last night multiple times.

So yeah, right now it's pretty sunny. It's been really sunny for like the last week. We had little— like normally January is like extreme summer, like really hot and beautiful, but we didn't have those things on January. And February, it was kind of bad, but now it's Getting a lot better.

Yeah. That's awesome. Good morning, everybody. Happy Wednesday. It's been a minute, um, since I've been live. TikTok, good morning. LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter— I still call it Twitter. Um, it's great to see y'all. Please comment, say hey. We'd love to hear from you. Excited for this episode. It's been, you know, I, I, it's been, uh, about— it's been 2 weeks since I've been live. Um, uh, you know what, Amsterdam last week, spoke at Dev World. Shout out to Jos Gerard, puts on a hell of an event. So shout out to Jos, highly recommend checking out his conference. He also does— what did he do? He does another conference too. JS World is his thing too. So check him out. It's great. But excited for this episode this morning because first off, it's been the first episode back in 2 weeks, but get to hang out with my guy Kevin. Um, Kevin and I got connected, uh, with my boss actually, Dave Messinger. So shout out Dave for getting us connected. Um, and so, uh, pumped to hang out with him. His story is great. Um, we have a bunch of topics we're going to try to get through today, but you know, it, it— I always catch up with folks backstage before we go live, and I was asking Kevin, I was like, Kevin, talk, you know, you know, about your career and, and all this stuff. Like, talk to me about it. And Kevin said something that was so profound, and basically it's what the title is. It's Do What You Love and It Just Works Out. So we're going to talk about it today. Hopefully it's an encouraging word for you all this morning, um, uh, and to really jumpstart what you want to do, right? I think a lot of people just are scared to get started, um, and also like try to conform a little bit. And, you know, I think as you can see, Kevin, Kevin's a vibe, right? Kevin's a vibe. And so Uh, you can absolutely be a vibe, uh, and, and be very successful with the vibe you want to bring. So again, uh, please say hey, would love to hear from you. The reason why I tell people to do that is this is a networking platform. I've been doing this 5 years this month, Kevin. 5 years.

Wow.

Yeah, 5 years. Uh, and so, um, this is a networking platform. I've had people get jobs off this live show. They've connected with speakers. You know, one thing I've realized in my career is I want to give back my network to others. Um, I've spent 13 years in the trenches sending DMs every single day, having lunches, having coffees. You know, Kevin, you get a lot of hand-to-hand combat, as I like to say. And so what I tell people is that if you do this correctly, I would network with everybody in the chat, um, and just, uh, all of my speakers. And if you do that, you are going to have a heck of a network. And so I want to do that. So please say hey. We'd love to hear from you. We started a few minutes early, so we're getting some people trickle in now. Roxy, number one supporter, appreciate you, girl. And then Mark, it's good to see you. Mark from Minnesota.

Nice.

I love it. All right, so we got people tuning in or chiming in slowly, so y'all keep commenting, but let's go ahead and dive in. We got a lot of good stuff today. Before we do, JK, I wanna give a shout out to Appwrite. I'm an Appwrite hero. Jason Torres on my team's an Appwrite hero. Really cool product. I'm not technical, so I don't quite know what they do. Just kidding. Um, but I think it's gonna— but I think it's a great product. I love the DevRel team over there. Yeah, that's right. Aditya. Um, so check them out. That is great. Um, I have a referral code and some credits off. I'm gonna drop that in the Torque Discord, so please check that out. Um, also, uh, I do want to give a shout out, um, uh, to, uh, again, my boss again, Dave. He hooked us up with the Torque .community link. So if you wanna check out everything we got going on in the Torque community, we got a lot going on. We have like 4 or 5 live streams. All of us live stream. We have a pretty active Discord. And one of my focuses over the next 30, 60, 90 days is to really dive in to provide incredible value for people on the job search. And so check that out. Also, if you wanna get updated when I go live, text LIVE to 615-235-5650. This is literally me. It's my other number, so it goes directly to me and I text every live whenever I text who I'm going live with every time I go live. So check that out. All right. And then what else here? Joseph, it's good to see you as well. Fantastic beard, my guy. Fantastic beard. All right, Kevin, let's get to people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there.

Well, first of all, I'm a passionate about education, about what I do. So we have to put a title. I'm a Senior Developer Relations Advocate. That's what I do at Appsmith. Uh, but if I put it into simple words, I have fun. I had fun creating videos.

You do.

I had fun talking to developers. I had fun recording stuff that I enjoy. And somehow people also engage with that, uh, because going back to what you said at the beginning, like, when you do what you love people will feel that, like there's a transmission of love in whatever piece of work you do, whatever that is. Doesn't have to be video specifically.

Yeah.

So in my case is whether I'm writing articles or I'm going to an event to speak at some audience, which is something that I also been doing for the last 2 years, uh, for a couple of times. And that, that's, that's how I can put my, my title to, to the simple words. Just I do what I love and I do fun stuff.

I love it. Do what you love and do fun stuff. I, I could not agree with you more. So, so you put— so again, Kevin, I can tell he's very thorough at his job because he basically gave me the rundown of what he wants to talk about today. So here are kind of the 5 bullet points that Kevin said to kind of set expectation. So we're gonna talk about how he broke into the US-Canadian tech market from abroad, building a successful career path without formal education. I'm really big on that right now. Transitioning from development into developer relations and creating opportunities when starting from scratch. Kevin, where do you wanna start? You wanna give a quick background about you, kind of your story, um, and then we'll just go from there?

Yeah, yeah, totally. Let's, let's talk about the story.

I love it. Look, look at the camera angle shift. My guy is on it today. I love it. Go ahead, brother.

So, okay, so I, I was born in Costa Rica. I live in Costa Rica. This is where I work from. I travel back to back a lot of times during the year, but I, I, I love here. Costa Rica is amazing. It's a safe place, a beautiful place. If you haven't come here, you should. But so I was born in Costa Rica. I come from a very humble family, and like my story is that we don't have land, we don't have money, we don't have connections, uh, and my mom and dad, they're very humble. My dad is a plumber, my mom is, uh, just a person who takes care of me and my brothers. And so I go to the public school system and never had access to a computer. So that's the first thing I, I have to say, that it really blows my mind when I go to, uh, high school and all my, you know, my friends and everyone have their own computer at their houses. I never touched a computer. And so we go to, uh, computer science basic, you know, school, and they're going to teach us how to use Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and, and all that stuff. And I never touched a computer in my life before. I even know what a mouse is. And so everyone's just moving their mouses, you know, the kids are crazy with the computers trying to play games, and I'm just like, how the heck do I use this? So that was pretty shocking for me, and I fell in love with computers at that moment, and I said, I want to work with these things. Um, so again, coming from a very humble family, a farm-ish place, uh, on the east side of, uh, Central Valley here in Costa Rica, and so, uh, I I tell my parents that that's what I want to do, and they say, you know, we don't have money. Uh, I think that the best thing you can do is go to something that exists here in Costa Rica that I don't know if it exists in the US. It's called like a technical institute. So basically it's like a combination of the standard high school system plus some technical degree.

Okay.

So they give you like a basic technical degree that you can go off and have a job with the basics, and then you can pay off your own university and things like that. And so they said, you know, that's the best thing you can do. It's a public system. So because we don't have money for the university, and like, you know, that, that's the best thing you can do. Uh, and so they have to take tests because since it's very, a very unique type of educational system, uh, they take tests just to get the best people out of it. So I take the test. Fortunately, I get in, and that's where I take the computer science degree, technical degree. So they teach you everything related to the basics like computer science, maths, logical systems and learning to program in Python, Java, HTML, JavaScript, SQL databases, like, you know, the basics so you can get a job. It's a 3-year thing. So in parallel to the standard educational system, like the standard thing, you know, language, what have you, you take that thing and you stay all day at high school.

Okay.

And so when I get that degree, I go out to you know, find a job and I realized that it's not easy.

Yeah.

As usual.

Yeah.

But as usually in my life, I was blessed. After 3 months of looking for a job, I see a position on a digital agency, very small shop. They were looking for their first hire. It's just 3 friends who created their agency building websites for, you know, a basic agency and they were looking for their first hire. They're growing, but they don't have enough money to pay like somebody who is middle. a junior position. I go there, they interview me, they say, you know, you have the basics, you have like the courage, we'd like to hire you. Very basic payoff. But it was amazing because that's where I realized and found out about the beauty of working with communities. So the boss said, you know, one thing we'd like you to do if we hire you is we contribute back to the product we use. So we use a lot of Drupal.

Okay.

And so the thing that we'd like you to do is if you join us here is to contribute back And we normally go to the Drupal camps and I'm only Drupal meetup. So we would like you to do that. So I say yes. I mean, I need the job.

Sure.

But basically that's what happened. So I joined this small agency. They teach me everything about Drupal. I knew PHP, HTML, JavaScript, but not Drupal as a content management system. So they teach me that. I'm always thankful to them about that. And so that's how I started my journey going to the community. So I gave my first presentation being 21 years old. I think I have a picture. I'll try to bring it up.

Yeah.

Super bad presentation. Like, I was extremely scared, couldn't go through the whole thing. It was pretty painful to watch, but it was the first presentation I did. And I'm also thankful to them about that. So that's how my journey starts. And then after 2 years working with them, I see a position related to Drupal as well on a company called Mobiquity. They're located in Boston. Um, my English level isn't that bad at that moment. So I said, you know, I think they're, they're getting— they just have better pay. I think I deserve to start growing. So I apply, they give me an interview, um, and everything went pretty well. They were looking for somebody to start building like APIs out of their, uh, institute system. So they have a mobile application, they had everything in a content management system, which was Drupal, and they wanted to expose APIs to it. So I started that job, which was amazing. And I remember my first meeting with the technical manager of that account or that project. He was a guy from Texas and I thought I knew English. I thought I could understand English. Like the interview went pretty well. Yeah, the HR guy was amazing. But this guy's from Texas. I couldn't barely understand anything what he said.

Yeah.

Yeah. I was, it was extremely fast. So I remember that the first meeting, at the end I said, can you send me a recap on email? Because yeah, just to make sure that I understood the right thing.

Texas is its own language.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. It was insane. Uh, but I started to practice and I was— after a few months I was able to prepare my ear for those type of things. Yeah. Um, and somehow I think I got some, some of that like Texas stuff because when I go to the US, people tell me like, are you from Texas?

Oh, that's—

I'm from Costa Rica. But anyway, and that's how it started. Like, we can continue talking about the journey as we move forward. But that's how it got started. And it's been beautiful, continue to working with the community. So I stayed with the Drupal community for maybe 6 years, first as a community member, then I started to do presentations, then I joined the organization team. And I went to the DrupalCon 2016 in New Orleans.

Oh, wow.

Beautiful experience. I got the chance to give a presentation there. And again, going back to the importance of the community, I meet people at DrupalCon from the Canada community. And they said, you know, we love your presentation. Why don't you just go to— we invite you to the Canada meetup that we have. And so they invited me to the Drupal North, which is like the Canadian Drupal meetup or DrupalCon. And I go there and I speak about that, and it was just beautiful. Like, once you get in the community, like, you cannot go away. Like, you go in for the product, but you stay for the community.

I love that. I love it. And so I really— man, you've said so many good things we could like break down right there. I mean, I think— talk— it's what you just said, like, you kind of get into the design. Dude, those camera angles are fantastic. Um, talk about like— I mean, I know I talk about all the time About community, right? Torque, we're, you know, we're very community first. It's our focus of ours. But like, a lot of people don't know, like, talk about— because like, I'm trying to— and honestly, like, Roxy on the call and Jeff on the call, like, they're very active in the Torque community and I see them and I appreciate them. And, and, and, and like, I feel like sometimes like people like, well, if I get involved in the community, like, will it give me a job? And like, it's not always a one-to-one, but can you just talk about the importance of just really just showing up? Because I feel like a lot of people are like, well, if I don't get something immediately, then I'm not going to be a part of it.

Yeah, that, that's the problem. I think that once you go into the community knowing that the reason is just to support each other, and you have to go to the community not to get things for you, it's just to help other people. So once you do that, you'll realize that the community will eventually pay you back. I can tell you, I spent 10 years of my life being with communities, first the Drupal community, then the JavaScript community, then the Google community. I was never given a job as a developer advocate. I was never given a single buck of money. I did everything by myself. I spent my own money, my own gasoline, then organizing. I spent my whole time. And it was something that, you know, something that my wife also told me, like, uh, like, you're investing a lot of time on this. What— and I knew eventually that will pay off. And so when I interviewed for my first DevRel position, it was like, what is your background? Because it was my first time applying for a DevRel position.

Yeah.

I don't have a formal DevRel background. But I've been working with developers over the last 10 years all by myself. Here are all the presentations I've done, all the events that I've helped organize, and all of the different things that people can say about Kevin.

Yes.

And that helped me get the Developer Relations job after 10, 15 years of working with community alongside my full-time job as a developer. So again, you go to help people, not to help yourself. That will eventually come off. And it's beautiful. I can tell you that probably 80% of the new positions or new jobs that I've gotten in my career has been because somebody reached out to me after they knew me from a community engagement. It was never me applying for a job, or HR people reaching out to me. It was always, hey, Kevin, I met you at this meetup, JavaScript meetup. It seems you know a lot about Node.js. We have a position. Would you look, you know, would you like to apply? And, and so yeah, it takes some time.

Right.

And I think that's one of the things that I always try to find is, once you identify your path, you have to build momentum through consistency. And the only way you build consistency is going and helping the community. Like, I know it sounds like that sounds like bullshit, but it's not.

I know, I know, I know. It just— well, it's so, it's so interesting. Like, this morning I've been on a bunch of calls already, which I typically don't like to do because it takes me a second to wake up. But like, I had a call with a data engineering leader here in Nashville this morning. His name's, his name's Ed Pearson. He's great. And he threw a data conference here in Nashville His first conference, like 400 people showed up. It was amazing. And he told me on this call this morning, he goes, Taylor, he goes, I was so burnt out with networking that— oh dear. Um, my buddy Ed goes, I was so burnt out with networking that I took 2024 off.

Oh wow.

Yep, you get it.

That's incredible.

You get it.

Yeah.

And he goes, he goes, that was a bad idea because he goes, people forgot me. And he goes, I don't mean it to be mean. He goes, I— and I don't mean it to be mean towards anybody. He goes, but if you're not— he goes, and again, he said this, he goes, it's a muscle. And he goes, if you just like let it atrophy, it becomes harder to get off your couch and go to a networking event. It becomes harder to go and be a part of a webinar. It becomes hard to go get on a podcast because you're just not doing So literally he like called me today, he goes, what can I do? How can I help Torque? Like, what are you guys doing? How can maybe we help with like some data, you know, initiatives here in Nashville? And so it's one of these things where it's like, you, you, it just builds on itself, right? I mean, I, you know, I was at an AI meetup in Amsterdam and one guy said that too. They were like, it, it just builds on itself and it's really hard to explain. And I think people don't realize that.

Yeah, that's true. And, and last year I went to a conference in Vancouver, um, and also another one in Calgary. Beautiful community in Calgary. Shout out to the Calgary community. And one of the things that I found interesting is how people go to these events in some sort of a mindset that they have to pretend they know everything, or they have to pretend that— and I was talking to one of the guys that we have a roundtable, and I was like The reason why I'm here is because I understand that everybody thinks that everyone else have it figured out, and I want to be the guy that says no, I don't have it figured out. Even though I have 15 years in the career, I still don't have it figured out. Sometimes I don't even know where I'm heading.

Yes.

I have a goal, I have a mindset, but yes, the path will change along the way. And so when I said that, everyone's like, oh dude, man, so glad you said that. I feel the same way. I feel burned out. I feel I don't know where I'm going. I feel that everybody else have figured out— everybody else know about AI. Everybody's building their AI product and they're getting to $1 million ARR like super fast. And I don't. I was like, that's the beauty of the community, that you can open yourself and be transparent and be very raw. And then from there, we can all build together to try to achieve our goals together. That's That's the end, I believe.

Yeah, absolutely. And again, going to— and I'm going to transition off this topic here in a second, um, because we still have some stuff to cover and time's going by quick. But again, I want to give a shout out to Jason Torres. I mean, you know, I hired him because he was a part of the community before ever having a job, and I saw what he was building. I said, I want that. I want that person on my team, right? And that— I mean, that took over a year. He was in kind of my network for over a year, and And then boom, pulled the trigger. So again, it's incredibly, incredibly important. Jeff, I see you. Yeah, Jeff, email me, taylor@torque.dev. I'll make the connections. Would love for you to connect with Ed when we get something going in Nashville. All right, next thing I wanna talk about, the lack of formal education. I know you touched on it. I wanna go back to it because my hot take is don't go get a degree in tech. just start building, spend 4 years that you're gonna go get a degree.

Definitely.

Take that money, get that loan, and take that money and just build stuff for yourself and you're gonna come out way further along. That's my hot take. What are your thoughts on all that? What are your thoughts with education, bootcamps? Kind of give me kind of lay of the land from that perspective.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. So like I said, I got my first job and the whole idea was with that salary I will start paying my, you know, my degree, my university. And so I did, I started to do that and I go to, the university and I start to realize like everything they're teaching here, I'm doing 10 times higher in that digital agency as a junior person. Like, I'm understanding because since I was, uh, their first hire, I was also involved in all of the other processes they had. They were very transparent about that. So I was able to understand how to receive a customer to the meeting, how to prepare scope of work, how to make a proposal.

Yeah.

How do you manage their servers? I was, I was, I wasn't just building the the website, like the HTML. I was actually doing front-end and theming, but in the end I started to do everything with the guys because they were doing everything. So I remember that after 2 years paying my degree, my university, with the salary, I realized like this is a waste of money. It's nothing against universities or the formal education systems, but the way technology is moving, uh, compared to other like fields of education like medicine or something like that, I understand they need a degree. But for us, we don't— like, you need to know what to do. I was never asked for my degree on an interview. I was always asked, give me your GitHub profile, give me your LinkedIn profile, show me the code you have built, the contributions you have done. They never asked me for a degree. And so if that's the nature of the field that we're at, then you have to take advantage of that. And I have you know, friends who took the entire 5, 7 years degree thing, and at the end they have to start from the background, from a junior position, because although they have this engineering degree and yeah, they learn a lot, they, they didn't have experience. And at the end, companies would like to have your experience because, you know, everybody knows this, the things you learn in whatever education systems you will be is not the same as the real life. It is, it's not always like that. And the other thing I will say is and it's something that I learned maybe a little too late in my career, is there's also a big investment in things that are not related to technical stuff. Invest in your communication skills, invest in your soft skills.

Yes.

I will say that a lot of the decisions from people hiring me came because I connected with them. It— yeah, I had the background, I had my GitHub. Yeah, I knew how to code. All of the other people have, you know, interviewing for that position also knew how to code, maybe better than me, honestly. But I had something that connected with them. It was because I knew how to communicate, how to build empathy. And so I learned that I had to invest also in the way that I speak and the way I communicate. And that also helped me build my career. So yes, take that money, invest it in yourself.

Yeah.

Get certified. I think certifications are a really good way to build up, like, they're fast, You can learn things, you can pick up things really quick, and it can help you, uh, get that, uh, let's say formality you might be looking for, but without spending that amount of money on a formal education system, I will say. So yeah, I love that.

I love it. I want to go back, I want to go back to Barrett's comment here. That's part of why I keep submitting to conferences. It's easy to get discouraged and burnt out. I nearly passed on submitting to Star Trek because I never got accepted, but I did it anyway and got accepted this year. Don't give up even when you really, really want to. Yeah, thoughts on this?

That's true. Um, well, you know, I've been telling the good things about my career, but it's been a lot of bad things. Like, I've applied— I've applied to, uh, a conference speaking like hundreds of times. I've, I've done like very bad presentations. Things have gone wrong and I've learned, uh, how to do things, uh, sometimes the bad way.

Yeah.

But yeah, I think the thing is what, what separates the winners from the not-so-winners is consistency. Like, if you just said, oh, I applied for this, for this particular event, they didn't accept me. F them. I'm not gonna do it again. They don't know me. Like, you know, put yourself down and understand there's other people that are probably well prepared, better prepared than you, but still go to that event. So here's the thing that I always do, uh, by myself. I've ha— I have to be in a room where I'm, I'm the dumbest guy. If you're in the room where you're the smartest guy, you just hit a roof. You're not gonna grow. So if, if probably they didn't accept your presentation because maybe there are better people than you going there. So it means that if you go there and you connect with them, you will be the dumbest person in the room and you will learn something.

Yeah.

Still try to go, still try to connect with those peers and understand what they're doing right that you didn't do correct. Try to ask them, hey, can you like tell me, you know, what, what, how do you apply to that CFP and how do you get accepted? And, and learn from that. Like, never just try to let your ego take on yourself. And what Barrett said is don't give up even when you really want to. That's beautiful advice for sure.

I love it. So we're getting close to time. I do have a hard stop in 6 minutes, but I'll go a little over because I just love chatting with you. I, I want to go back to do what you love and it just works out. I do want to make sure we highlight this, drive this home. Give me, give me your thoughts on this.

Yeah, totally. Um, when, when you do what you love, you will eventually find out that you won't be doing job, you will be just doing what you love. And I find myself what people so-called working on vacations, working on my free time during the weekends, because it's just what I love. I love creating videos, I love producing, I love being in touch with developers. And so when you do what you love, it doesn't become a job and it won't be a pain. And eventually it will grow because people will see how transparent and, uh, Good, you're at that. Since we're getting out of time, I'm going to give you like the 5 steps that I normally take when I try to achieve something—

I love it.

That I love, and somehow that have worked. Because I know we don't have time, but I'm also a private pilot. I'm also being successful with people, successful in other fields, and it's always a repetitive path that I understood that if I take this path, I'll be able to achieve things. Um, that I'm passionate about.

Yeah.

So the first thing is you have to quit the noise. And what I mean by that is don't look up other people like they, they might be way ahead of you or way back of you. So if you look at the people on the back of you, you will build your own ego. And if you see people ahead of you, you will start to be depressed or maybe anxious. Don't do that. Quit the noise. You're at the best place you can be. The other thing is identify your path. And what I'm saying path is the end goal, like not the, the exactly path to get there, because the path will change, but eventually you'll get there. So once you say this is what I want to achieve, I want to be speaking at DevRelCon, uh, 2025. All right, that's the end goal. What you have to do to get there, that's what you have to take the third step. My third step is take relentless action. You have to work, you have to work, work, work. Nothing comes easy, uh, but what you do, what you love, it becomes something that it is enjoyable. I will say. The fourth thing is, once you start taking action, eventually you build momentum. And again, I talk about building momentum, but it's so important that once you start getting momentum, you have to continue to have consistency, because it's the momentum that will take you to that final stage to achieve your goal. And the other thing is, the final thing is surround yourself with the right people. Like, a lot of people say this, but it's true. You know, you are at the average of the 5 people you surround yourself to. So yeah, pay attention to that. And eventually, if you achieve this, if you use these 5 steps, you will eventually achieve your goals. But it takes consistency, be with the right people, taking action, quitting the noise, identify your end path.

I love that, man. So good. All right, as we wrap up here, um, first off, everybody go connect with Kevin. There's a lot of comments about his camera angles. Kevin's a great video, uh, just video creator, editor, uh, you know, creative brand directioner thing. Like, he's great. So follow him, he's fantastic. Um, uh, you know, I was telling him backstage, like, in terms of like really interesting dev content, it's like him, Langsdorf.

Yeah, he's great.

That's about it. So, uh, again, follow Kevin, um, because he's fantastic. All right, Kevin, kind of rapid fire here. First off, Um, if, if, if, if I were to tell you, you, you tomorrow morning you couldn't wake up, or you could wake up, but you could— you couldn't do anything in tech, but I'll pay you the same if not more, what would you, what would you do? Uh, chef.

I'll be cooking.

Really?

Yeah, I love cooking. I cook every meal in my house, so my wife loves it.

Yeah, that's great. All right, I'm gonna come over. I'll book a flight. You can cook for me and I'll take you flying because I'm a pilot. Yeah, yeah, I know, seriously. Um, second question is, um, outside of war, outside of tech stuff, what do you like to do just for hobbies?

Um, video games and yeah, flying, like pilot. I love airplanes.

I love that. What are you, what are you playing a lot of right now on the video game front?

Uh, right now I'm taking it slow because it takes a lot of time, so I'm just playing like soccer, FIFA.

Just I love it, guys. Who's who's who who's who's the team you're playing with right now?

Arsenal. Go go.

There you go. I love it. I love it. Next question. This kind of a new one I've added to my quickfire arsenal. Who who do you want to give a shout out to in the tech community that's doing some cool stuff?

My friend Joseph, like, is has been doing amazing. He's my friend, my left hand, my right hand at Appsmith. Big shout out to Joseph. He built his own whiteboard neon stuff to present, uh, things. Like, that whiteboard is extremely expensive at Amazon. He said, crap, I'm gonna do it myself. He built it himself, and now he's doing amazing videos. Like, big shout out to Joseph because I know he's, he's doing— he's sticking it hard.

I love it. That's awesome. Last question of the day, and again, thank you, my friend, for hanging out. It was a pleasure. Um, uh, the show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because 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 general career advice. What would be the number one piece of career advice you would tell young Kevin as he started out in his career?

Uh, forget about your career. I mean, I mean it. Whatever you do in career is cumulative. Go travel, talk to people, walk on a different street every day, uh, watch a different movie, go to an art gallery, listen to music, develop your taste and judgment, because whatever you are put in front of of an opportunity, your personality that you nurtured has something to bounce off. You're unique.

I love it. Love that so much. All right, y'all, thank you again for hanging out. Kevin, stay on backstage so I can say bye to you real quick. Y'all have a great one. This is the last live for this week. Got a lot of Internal Torque stuff we're trying— nope. Ah, actually, I'm just kidding. Lord have mercy. Tomorrow I have the great Leon Noel on the show. It's so funny, I was gonna forget him. Leon Noel, 100Devs. He's an absolute legend. I was pumped. I was able to get him on the show at Commit Your Code in Dallas. So tomorrow, 9:30 AM Central, Leon Noel on the show. It's gonna be amazing. Y'all have a great one. We'll see y'all tomorrow.

Peace. Take care.