Leaving Corporate America w/CTO David Fannin

All right, we got that.

Try—

oh, try that. All right, we're gonna go live. Oh sweet, this looks fun. Wait a minute. Hello everybody, good morning. I'm trying to go live on Substack. This is new. We've sent a push notification to your subscribers.

Interesting.

Uh, all right, good morning everybody, good morning. I still gotta So do this. No one's here yet, so we're just, we're just yapping. Um, uh, David, I always, I, I ask this at the end, but I'm starting to ask this in the beginning. Um, are you a coffee or tea guy?

Oh, coffee.

100%.

Okay.

All right.

I'm actually a coffee snob, dude.

Same. Let's talk about it. Do you have, do you, you're in LA, right?

I'm actually not.

So, so, okay.

The majority of the company's in LA. I'm actually in the South, so I'm actually in Birmingham, Alabama. I'm the only one in Alabama. So we're a fully remote company. We are all over the US and in Canada. So we have several people, 3 actually, in Canada, in like the Toronto and the Vancouver area. We have people in Nebraska, Nashville. Most of us are in LA because that's where the film industry is. And that's, you know, yeah.

Okay. All right. So coffee. So like, do you give me your go-to spot in Birmingham?

Oh man, it's actually, uh, the coffee scene in Birmingham is actually pretty good, but some of my favorite spots just shut down, um, for whatever reason. Um, but there's still several ones that are like either convenient. There's like June downtown, there's like Kala, which is like the closest one.

Okay.

Um, there's this one, it's called Seeds over in Homewood. Really great. Um, but yeah, I, I Uh, no, no Starbucks.

No, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it has to be craft level. Yeah, I will go out of my way when I travel to find a coffee shop.

Yeah, anytime I go corporate, anytime I go to a new city, like, that's on my bucket list is like find all the coffee shops and visit all I can. And you find them by finding like which shops look the most pretentious. At least that's what I do. You go to like, you go look them up on Google and you're like Love some pretentious coffee. Yes, like they definitely call it espresso and milk. I'm gonna go there, it's gonna be great.

Do you— okay, yeah, now here's a bigger question. We have some people tuning in, welcome everybody, please say hey, we'd love to hear from you. Um, hot or iced? I think this is the biggest argument that I have.

I can go either way.

I'm either way. Yeah, so, uh, I, I'm an iced guy. I've— I, I never drink hot coffee, my—

even in the winter.

Not even where I was in Boston for TORC in January was 13 degrees outside and I was drinking iced coffee. So, um, uh, for me, I feel like hot coffee, uh, uh, you just, you just, you can't taste it. You're just drinking hot liquid.

Sounds like you're not doing it right.

I know, maybe, maybe not, maybe not. So anyways, good morning everybody, happy Tuesday. Pumped for, uh, uh, this episode. Um, I love talking with folks that have some Nashville connection. Obviously this show, we bring on people from all over the country, really the world. Had some people in India on the show. And so excited for this one. There's some connections to Nashville. Dave and I are going to talk about it, but pumped for this. Before we dive in, as always, please say hey. We'd love to hear from you. I was talking about— I was talking to David about this backstage, and I really haven't talked about this publicly, so I'll kind of share why I do a morning show. So when I got— so back when I was a kid, I visibly have the memories of listening to radio stations first thing in the morning as my mom took me to school. And, you know, it was back in the '90s playing absolute, you know, '90s bangers. And, uh, and, and I just loved like the back and forth of, uh, you know, the, the, the disc jockeys and all that stuff. And so back when I was at Vayco, I was like, well, I want to do a morning show. I was telling David my original intention was just to talk about jobs, like just have a morning show, yap, talk about jobs and And we still may do that here at Torque. But, you know, the reason why I do it in the mornings is my thought is grab a cup of coffee on your way to work, or maybe you're in between meetings and come hang out with some guests. So that's kind of where that started. I've never shared that live, so there you go. A few other things. First and foremost, I want to give a shout-out to Appwrite. Me and my colleague Jason Torres are on the Heroes program at Appwrite. Go check them out. Great crew, great piece of software. Um, also too, listen, you know, David asked me backstage, you know, how are you guys doing with, with Torque? And I was like, listen, like, we're crushing it. If you want to check out all the events we do, again, I pull from nostalgia. Cable TV used to have the guides, right? The, the guides on what you're watching. We actually have a guide on the torque.community page. You can— I really pull from a lot of nostalgia. I didn't realize that. Um, but if you go to torque.community page, you scroll down a little bit, you can see the guide on all the events we do every single week. So go check that out. I had somebody join last night, shoot me a text. Um, shout out Natalie. Uh, text LIVE 615-235-5650. Um, if you want to be updated on when I go live with folks like David. Um, want to get to a few people tuning in this morning. Again, Kelly, it's good to see you. Jason, um, my guy is always late to meetings. He's trying to turn a new leaf, hence, hence him mentioning that he's early. Bonnie, it's good to see you. Ricardo, it's good to see you. Uh, I'm guessing Kino name is a play on film terms.

So, so it is. It's actually, um, like what they call cinema in Germany. So it's a German term. It means like motion.

I love that. So Jason is a former film guy, so I'm sure he'll have some thoughts along the way of this episode. Iced either way, or iced all the way, either way is a good answer. Jalen, my guy from the Torque community, it's good to see you. No hot coffee for me too. Thank you, Bonnie, I appreciate that. Jeff, it's good to see you. Hot coffee for the win, Jeff. It's one thing I disagree with you on. One of the best ways to get my morning started, Kelly. That means a lot. Sebastian, it's good to see you. Chris, it's great to see you as well. Awesome. Sweet. All right, cool. Enough with me yapping, David. Let's give the people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there.

Yeah, so I am the CTO and one of the co-founders of Kino. So we are a technology company that works in the film space. We've worked in both kind of the B2C space where we've hosted film festivals and live premieres of movies. So you could watch the film live on our platform before it made its way to Netflix. It was like a whole event. We had the cast and crew come on. You could interact and ask questions, stuff like that. And we also work in the B2B space, which is kind of our focus this year. It's focusing on the B2B space. So we're working with film studios and providing them a way to share their film in a very, very secure way before, again, it goes to Netflix. So if you think about it, you're a filmmaker, you make a movie, you want to sell your movie. So in order to sell your movie, people have to watch it, right?

Yeah.

So you send this movie out to hundreds, even thousands of people. If that movie, if one of those thousands of people that you send it to is a bad actor, that movie gets pirated. pirated, it can sometimes kill the deal. Netflix isn't going to buy it if it's available on a torrent site. So what we built is a highly secure platform where filmmakers, studios can distribute their film before it gets picked up. So that's just like one use case of it. That's really cool. Um, but that's it, just secure, secure film distribution.

So, so do people— so, so I'm curious, so how do you make money?

So we have deals with studios, right? So that's the B2B side. There's enterprise-level contracting.

Okay.

So depending on how much throughput they have, depending on how much storage they have, depending on how many people they're sending it to. So those are very kind of unique contracts that we build that's custom for the studios. And then one thing that's really important to us is that we are helping film and TV become more equitable. So we want to provide the same tools to the smaller filmmakers that may not have the budgets of the big film companies, but they still need to be able to protect their art and their IP that they've worked on. So we have a much like cheaper entry level, um, for the smaller filmmakers.

That's awesome, man. That's awesome. All right, so I want to talk about your career, right? I mean, I think you were once a corporate engineering manager. Fun fact, yeah, David helped write the TSA— what was the TSA? What, bio— biometrics? What?

Yeah, the, the biometric enrollment for TSA. TSA PreCheck. So built the software so when you go to the airport, you don't have to take your shoes off. And it's fantastic. If you don't have it, I still always promote it every time I talk to someone. $85 for 5 years, the best money you can spend.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

So that was really cool. There's the company here in Nashville that actually is responsible for that, believe it or not. So talk about— so engineering leader for, you know, kind of a corporate engineering leader for how long?

Oh, uh, 10 years. 10 years, probably across like, yeah, a couple different companies.

Yeah. Um, talk about what made you make the pivot, man, because I think a lot of people are like, man, engineering leader, you got it made, dude. Like, like, like, like, what made you jump?

So I kind of— I'll give the really quick version of, um, my background, kind of the story.

Please. Yeah, yeah.

Um, so I actually grew up in a very conservative, legalistic kind of Christian home where we weren't allowed to watch movies, we weren't allowed to wear shorts, women couldn't cut their hair, wear makeup, like, so a bunch of things. But the big thing was like, you couldn't watch film, you couldn't play organized sports. And so I didn't get access to a lot of film.

Right.

And when I was a teenager, I got into technology. My brother and I kind of— so we actually founded the company with my brother, which Really cool. We usually play off the story together because he has his whole, yeah, his whole story where he goes to The Matrix. He sneaks out, goes and watches The Matrix, um, in the theaters with one of his friends at the time, and it blows his mind because he's like, he's watching his life play out on the, on the screen, right? Yeah, he's— he feels like he's Neo. Um, and so while he was doing that and he was kind of very loud and doing all these things, I just got into technology. I learned how to— and actually pirated. So I was— I was—

That is hilarious. You've developed The, uh, a piece of the— your business is essentially—

Absolutely.

Uh, protecting what you were doing.

So I, I figured out how to do that. I got my hands on basically any movie I could watch, um, and I just watched everything until one day I got a cease and desist letter from the FBI.

No way!

Terrified me. Luckily, I checked the mail that day.

That would have scared the living daylights out of me. Yeah, yeah.

I checked the mail that day, so like I actually found the letter instead of my parents. I I'm not sure if I was more afraid of them finding it or the FBI letter itself, but I was drilling holes through hard drives and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

So that kind of started the journey. After that, I got into tech. I started doing graphic design, working at a print shop, doing freelance stuff for businesses, setting up websites. I worked doing government contracting in the biometric security space for a long time. And then got into real estate tech, which is actually really cool because that was—

That was at RealTrac, right?

That was at RealTrac, yeah. So doing the government contracting sounds really cool, biometric security, like it's got to be cutting edge. Really, it's not. Working in like the government space to get anything approved is the pain. Like you have to go through all these steps. So you're always working on like a little bit dated technology. it's very hierarchical.

Yeah.

So like structure, you have one job, you fit in that role. There's definitely a hierarchy. This person's been here 2 years longer than you, so they're above you in the totem pole. A lot of stuff like that that I think really stifles creativity and innovation. And so making that move into the real estate tech, it was for this company called RealTracs. They're a real estate MLS, and we really had a lot of control over how we wanted the team dynamics to be and how we wanted to build and operate. So that was really, really cool because we got to— actually, the technology we were building was actually way more cutting edge, but especially when it comes to like the culture and how you treat one another, we got to try a bunch of stuff out. Like we completely got rid of titles. So there was no senior engineer, junior engineer, senior principal architect, you know, none of that.

Yeah.

And the idea is you would get compensated Based off of the value that you're adding, right? Like, so there's, there's, it's not like everyone's being made the same. You get compensated what's equitable, right? Equitability is the key there. But what it does is it creates an environment where you can collaborate. I love that. Because if you've ever been in a meeting where you have like a senior engineer and a junior, the senior always dominates the conversation when the juniors a lot of times have really, really great ideas, a different perspective, a different way of I love that.

That was at RealTrax?

That was at RealTrax, yeah. So that kind of started that, um, and I was on that journey at RealTrax, loved it, still love the team there, still talk to Doug and Nate and John and a bunch of people over there. They're, they're awesome and doing really cool things. So when we brought— when we originally came on to RealTrax, um, the technology was really dated. They had been working on this new version of their technology for like 3 years. finally released it. They hadn't done user testing. They hadn't done a lot of stuff. And so it was a bust and it was hurting people's livelihood because these real estate agents needed this to work so that they could sell houses, make money, pay their bills.

Yeah.

And so we were kind of brought in during this. So over the course of the 5 years that we were there, we changed a lot of stuff. We implemented all these new ideas and things. The last year before I left, we actually won Technology Company of the Year.

You did.

Just super, super cool. And that felt like kind of a good close of that chapter and that story. And so a lot of the reasons why we started, you know, came down to timing. Like everything just worked out. My brother is in the film industry. He's made shows with Jimmy Kimmel, Matt Damon, Peter Berg, a bunch of really cool stuff. And so he would call me from set And just talk about the film industry, Hollywood, all the crazy stuff they would do, just super backwards. They'd be handing people envelopes full of cash, no good accounting. And so we had been talking about doing something in the film industry for 10, 12 years at this point.

Yeah.

And there was a lot of things that kind of just worked out at the time. I just sold one of my homes. I had a little bit of cash in the bank. I was like, okay, I can take a pay cut for a little Sure. Which is a real thing when you're starting a startup. You can't expect to make market of what you're making elsewhere. So there was a lot of stuff like that and everything kind of just worked out. The story of how the company kind of got started is kind of crazy too. My brother was sitting down at dinner with some friends who happened to be a Sequoia Scout and was just telling them about all this stuff. And he was like, Oh dude, you got to do this.

Like the investment firm?

The investment, yeah. He's like, man, you have to go build this. And so that was actually our first check.

That's awesome. Just supporting your first check. No big deal.

Yeah. And from there, it just kind of built on. And as things do, the company has changed a lot in the 3 and a half years, but still everything comes back to trying to make film industry more equitable, More efficient and more engaging.

Yeah, I love that. Talk about— I am curious, I mean, you know, one of the things you put on your questions that I asked when people register, I mean, you talked about hiring engineers and, and, you know, feature engineers, product engineers. I mean, can you dive into that, especially as folks who may be looking for a job, what you, what you like to see when you hire engineers? And again, there's no right or wrong answer here, but, uh, I'm just interviewing David. But I mean, can you talk about how you like engineers to think and communicate and all that jazz?

Absolutely. Have you ever heard of Silicon Valley Product Group?

No.

Marty Cagan. There's a whole crew of them out there. They wrote some really great books. Inspired, Empowered, all these books. And so a lot of these ideas come from them. follow absolutely everything they do, but a lot of it, a lot of it does. This idea of a product engineer versus a feature engineer comes from the book Empowered.

Okay.

This idea is if you have a feature engineer, they're the ones that are like, give me my acceptance criteria, I'm gonna go write, I'm gonna check every single thing off and push the ticket, and it's no longer my problem, right? So the idea of a product engineer is you come in and it's someone who you can explain, hey, here's the intent and the expectation, here's the problem we're trying to solve. And they can go in there. They don't need an acceptance criteria list. They can go in there, they can figure out those things. They can find things that maybe the product manager missed during discovery, and they can bring those ideas up. And so when we build product, we build things that are usable, valuable, feasible, and viable. And one person can't solve all of those things. That's why we say discovery is a team sport.

Sure.

You can't just have one person. You can, you're just going to get a subpar product because they only have one person. So it's this idea of someone that goes beyond just checking the boxes and actually really understands the intent, really puts themselves in the place of the customer, has lots of empathy.

You're definitely not the first person that said this recently. I interviewed another startup founder, Rachel Lambert. She created the the, the networking platform that's been used by like All In Podcast, Jason Kalkanis, and all those guys to like basically host events across the globe at one time. And she's kind of said the same thing. And so I want to ask you this, like, how do you— I love it, Pat. Uh, Pat, Pat goes, I have those books on my bookshelf right now, and he sent the Amazon link. I love it. How does one Have that mindset, right? Do you hire for people who like love the industry? Because if people love the industry, they're gonna know and kind of have that mindset a little bit more. Like, what are just— how can folks who watch this now or in the future really use it or learn it?

Yeah. I mean, it's all about having a growth mindset, I think is the thing. It's all about being humble no matter where you're at. Like, that's why we got rid of all the titles for all of our engineers, right? Is because like—

I think it's a great idea.

No matter how high you are in the architect, no matter how long you've been doing it, there's always something more to learn.

Yeah.

And so when we interview, we actually have this like document that we created. So during the interview process so that everyone can be involved in that and we have like different sections, like there's a section of competency. Right? Like this person has to be able to come in. You can't always just hire for someone that like they have a lot of great potential because they have to be able to come in and do their job or else you're setting them up for failure. You don't. So you have to hit competency. You have to hit the not an asshole test, which is like, is this person teachable? Are they humble? Can you actually put them in a room with someone who's more junior than them and they will listen and understand? I love that. And then also, like, when you're hiring an engineer, like, get your product team in there to talk to because they are the ones that are doing the discovery. They're the ones that can, like, go in there and really, like, suss out how is this person. You have to be able to have a little bit of a product hat on as an engineer, especially in, like, these new days, unless you want to go work on a team of, you know, 500 engineers and all you're doing is writing unit tests.

Yeah.

Um, but, but if you want to be a part of a smaller team, the other thing that we do is very small team. So we set people up with like product manager and a few engineers, and they are this like small, nimble team that can go and work really, really well. So when you're on that small team, you as an individual have to take a lot more kind of responsibilities outside of what, you know, you would normally do if you're on a large team, right?

Yeah.

So a lot of that comes into humility, like owning up to failures, owning up to times, and like how do they react To those times that they failed, like what was their response? I love that.

I love that. That's great. Talk about, let me ask you this. I mean, obviously going from corporate into starting your own thing, you obviously made inroads, obviously with your brother being in the industry. Are there any just general thoughts around job security right now in the market? Tips and advice for folks who may want to start their own thing? Um, just kind of Kind of around that area.

Job security, meaning like, is AI going to take all of our jobs?

No, I mean, 'cause I don't think it is anytime soon. Uh, but I, I guess just meant like, 'cause I just feel that even since I've been recruiting, remind you, I've been recruiting since 2011. Like, I remember when I was recruiting when like .NET MVC was hot, like we were Web Forms, then MVC came out and everybody was freaking out about it, right? So I've seen the progression of the internet as, as, as I've been recruiting engineers. And I feel like nobody wanted a contract job 10 years ago. Now everyone's like, yeah, no, that's fine. So it's more of just like, at the end of the day, you're probably not going to be at the same place. I mean, maybe not. Like, I want to be at Ronstadt and Tork for a long time, but realistically, I just feel like the, the, the temperature of, of corporate America has shifted a little bit.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of things that play into that. I think, you know, 20 years ago, the gold standard was stay at the same company for 50 years and get the gold watch. Yeah.

Right.

And so then that changed and you start to see, you know, the average time that people spend at a company kind of drop, right? Which means you have more churn. And now, like, I think AI is a real thing. I don't think that it's going to replace all of our jobs overnight, but it's going to make engineers more efficient, right?

Sure.

As an engineer, if I can leverage AI correctly, then I should be able to do the job of 5 engineers. You see this in like the large companies, the Googles, Salesforce, Cloudflares. They're saying like 30 to 50% of our code is now written by AI. It's gonna become better. It's gonna get better.

Yeah.

And so I do think that's a real thing because it's not that these jobs won't exist, but if, you know, Google's laying off their engineers because they're replacing them with AI, then the job market's gonna get more tough cuz you have someone that lives in Nashville, worked at a few like medical places here and there. They submit their resume alongside someone who's been at Google for 10 years. Like it just makes it a lot more, a lot more difficult.

Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

So I got 2 questions here. It came in. Definitely wanna get to these. Jason goes, what made you decide to jump from one super challenging industry to another? I often ask myself this.

Yeah. So if we look at the time that I went from biometric security to real estate, which seems like, again, it seems like a step back if you were just to look at it from like a high level. Yeah, absolutely. But in reality, there was a lot more opportunities for me to have growth. And I think one of this whole thing, whether it comes with AI or whatever, is we always have to be growing. We can't let ourselves get stuck. So at MorphoTrust, now Idemia, I was building tech that impacted like all of the US in a high, like very high visible way. We worked not on just like TSA PreCheck, we had a bunch of different federal programs as well as state programs.

Sure.

And so like very, very high impact. So when you move to real estate tech working for an MLS, like it seems like it's lower, lower impact. and, you know, a smaller bucket. However, we had a lot more freedoms in how we led the team. We had to— we got to try things out that we would have never gotten approval for, you know, at MorphoTrust. We had got to build the teams in a different way and try these things out, which is really, really cool.

Yeah.

Like going from, you know, doing Scrum on a 4-week sprint cycle to doing continuous delivery where you're delivering code, releasing multiple times a day. Zero downtime deliveries in the middle of the day, like stuff like that, which is like really cutting edge when it comes to like how do you build a product. It's really cool.

I love that. So what I'm hearing you say is like you kind of have to decide it for yourself.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And you have to be okay with your decision, right? You can't look back like a year later and be like, man, I really missed a great opportunity. You have to say like, why am I here? At this job right now. What my, um, one of my career coaches along my way, uh, actually Doug, you all know Doug, he's awesome. Yeah, yeah, he once told me that, um, he's like, David, you should go and interview for jobs like on an annual basis. And you can—

Your manager at the time told you that?

Absolutely.

Yeah. That's crazy.

He said—

I love that. I love that.

He said, because like if you turn those jobs down and you stay, then you're not wondering if you're missing opportunities. You're not feeling like, am I, am I here because I'm afraid that I don't know how to interview?

I love that.

Did I, did I lose that skill? But you're staying and you know you're staying here and you're like more motivated to be here, right? Or if that other job comes up, you know, great. Like, congratulations. Like, I'm glad you had that, uh, have this new opportunity.

I love that. Uh, yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I, I think, I think a lot of times I think a lot of times people don't unders— I listen, I don't want any of my team to leave me. Jason's one of them and he's obviously listening to this now. But at the end of the day, if you want to go interview and see what else is out there, that's fine. I can't stop you. But I think a lot of people just need to realize that sometimes the grass isn't always greener.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of times people want to scratch an itch and listen, I, I listen, I was at Vayco for 11 years, like I interviewed other places, but what I realized after interviewing other places is that I got it pretty good right now, right? And, but again, if you don't have those conversations, then you don't know. Yeah.

And it wasn't like a, I'm gonna go interview somewhere else so I can get an offer and leverage it for a pay raise. Correct. Correct. It wasn't anything like that. It was, it was something where you go and you make sure that I'm where I want to be right now. And it builds more trust with your current employer, your current manager. Like you said, like you realize like you have it pretty good.

Yeah, absolutely. Taryn comes in here. Can you define leveraging AI correctly? I feel like this is an entire livestream in and of itself, but—

I, so we work in the film industry. One of the biggest things that like we had a, we had like historic double strike a couple years ago, right?

Yeah.

Because AI was one of the big components of that. So when it comes to generative AI and replacing people's ability to have art and expressive art, I think that's a poor use case of AI. The places where I think it really shines, and I can give a couple of examples. One of the things we do at Kino is when we're doing our user discovery calls, we will get permission, and then we'll record them on, on GMeet, right? And then we'll get those annotations, we'll drop that in AI, and we'll say, can you summarize this? Then we'll do this for 10, 15 different like user discovery calls. Then we'll drop all of that in there and we'll say, hey, give me the patterns. Like, what are the things? Help me pull out all of these like things.

Interesting.

So then it bubbles up to the top like, hey, like most of the people were talking about this specific thing. And so it really helps you like process and analyze data. So like, that's one really good use case.

Yeah.

Another one is like using AI agents when you're writing code. You have to be very careful, right? You can't just trust that the AI is going to write the code well. But I have AI built into my IDE and I will let it stub out and do a lot of the busy work because it can do that in a matter of minutes and it would take me hours. And then I have to go in and I have to write all the meat and potatoes of the code. Sure. But it's like, how do we get rid of that, that busy work? So that's what I would say. Like, when I'm talking about leveraging AI, it's not about replacing what I do day to day, but it's about helping me move faster in the, like, more mundane busy work areas. I love that.

Yeah, I mean, again, Taran, I think this is— so I'm working on a panel with our sales team about accessibility in AI. Um, I think that's gonna be a great conversation too. So, Taran, be on the lookout for that. We'll announce that in the Discord. Um, but yeah, again, great, great question. Can be a longer conversation. Are you guys using any AI agents at Keno right now for coding?

Like, uh, yeah, so we've tried a couple things out. We tried GitHub Copilot. Um, we've tried, uh, actually the thing that we're using right now is called Junie. It's— we use WebStorm. Um, Okay. And JetBrains IDEs. And so it's the JetBrains, um, AI.

Okay.

Now I only have, like I say, I don't have titles, my more senior, uh, engineers who have been doing this for a while that like there's like a level of trust that they're going to know how to do this correctly, know when not to trust AI, actually read through the code and, you know, line by line and make sure. So we're very like careful with it still.

Sure.

So we're not full-fledged like using AI agents to go build features or anything like that, but it's, it's again like, hey, we're about to do a major refactor. Let's write a really good prompt and get it to help us get 75% of the way there. And then we come in and, and close out the last 25. But I feel like that's one of those things.

That's kind of been consistent what I'm hearing from other engineering leaders too. Do you, let me ask you this, are, do you look for devs to have any sort of experience using AI right now when you hire?

Uh, not, not explicitly, but I think it's important. I think the thing when it comes to AI and being afraid, especially this fear of AI is gonna take my job, is there's a couple approaches you can go. One, you can go, I'm all in on AI. I'm doing nothing but vibe coding, right? And I'm gonna build this whole app. And then, you know, you try to push it out to production and it's on some Vercel app and it's not secure and you have all these issues, right?

Sure.

So then the other extreme is like, I'm not gonna use AI at all, cuz I'm gonna like, I'm so afraid of it, or I'm so like anti-AI that I'm— and like, that's the one that I think a lot of engineers might fall into where they get so far behind that they kind of get left in the dust. And then like 5 years down the road, they realize that like, I'm kind of obsolete cuz I don't know how to operate on what is the standard norms.

Huh. Okay. That's good. I feel like I made a post about this. I feel like where we're at with AI right now is where we were with like when React came out on the scene, is where like, hey, you don't need to know React, but more companies are gonna start using it and you kind of need to start getting familiar with it. And I just feel like, again, it's another trend or not a trend, but it's another wave. That is happening right now.

Yeah. That's just my two cents. I mean, who knows what it's gonna look like 5 years from now? Yeah.

Yeah. Do you, do, do you think we're gonna live in a world, again, there's a little hot take here. Do you feel like we're gonna live in, live in a world where we're gonna have, you know, there's, I, I think, you know, I, I like how you said the, the extremes here. Um, you know, no AI to vibe coding. Do you feel like, you know, I, I've heard things where there's just gonna be agents coding, and then there's going to be like an engineering manager, an AI agent manager, it's just going to be checking everything. Do you think we're going to ever get there?

Yeah, I mean, it would be silly if we didn't get there, right? Like, the technology will get to that point. I don't know how long it's going to take. Sure. But I think it would be silly to think that this technology wouldn't— anything that is really digital, like, it should be able to Replace. The thing that's kind of crazy, I think this is like engineering became so big, so many people went into the engineering field and kind of got flooded, right? And so I think now that it's starting to kind of like pull back on some of this because now some of the stuff can get automated. I think of, do you remember in the like earlier days of Apple when they released the App Store and the App Store just got flooded with all of these like—

Yeah, you drink beer out of your phone.

Yeah, yeah, it's like, oh, look, it's a fart app, it makes fart sounds, right? So I, I feel like we're gonna hit that with, um, AI at some point where there's all these like vibe-coded apps that someone just thought up and it's gonna flood the market. Yeah, the market's gonna have to like figure out how do you weed through the noise to find the things that are actually valuable. Um, I don't know that like— so I'm a parent, I have 2 girls, um, and I don't know that— No dads.

Let's go.

I would, I would encourage them to get into programming right now.

Like, I think my hot take is robotics and hardware is the next wave.

Yeah, but even with robotics and hardware, like, at what point does that become automated? Like, the majority of factory manufacturing is automated already, technology, right? So there's very few like handheld, I'm gonna screw this in and, and fabricate it by hand type thing.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Uh, Pat goes, does that mean fewer meetings with, with, with AI agents? I would say probably more because you're gonna have to do more micromanaging.

Yeah, you're gonna have to be doing more prompt engineering, less—

Uh, yeah, yeah. Uh, I had a— there's a question here and we're gonna want to wrap up, uh, with this question. I don't know what this means. Maybe, maybe you know what it means. Can you give some pointers on blue-green deployments?

Yeah, so, um, so we have a— we call it our blue-green stack. We have 2 different live servers that are set up. And we have our networking set up so that one of them is live and the other is what we call our staging. So doing deliveries, like doing multiple deployments a day with zero downtime, you have to solve a lot of problems.

Okay.

So there's a lot to get into, so I don't know if I can super get into it.

Sure, sure.

But the idea is that you have to route your network traffic in a way That whenever you make a release, so you have to separate like when you deploy code from releasing value. So you deploy to your side that's not live, click a button, and then it becomes live. You have to do some network magic to make sure everyone's now routing to the side. There's a bunch of different strategies you can take on it. But I think to your point, we probably don't have time to get into it. It's—

Message David. Whoever Whoever this is, listen, I always tell folks, please connect, please connect with my guests. They're great people. I bring on great people. Um, please connect with David and Esther. But yeah, I don't know what this means. It sounds great. So definitely, I'm sure if you message David and say, hey, I saw on Guidance Counselor 2.0, I was the one that asked the blue-green question, give me some more information, I'm sure David will do that for you.

So— 100%.

I love it. I love it. All right, so, uh, rapid fire. Kind of last, last few bits of questions here. Um, we already went over the coffee tea debate at the beginning. Um, talk to me, uh, talk to me about, uh, uh, about anybody in your network you wanna give a shout out to that's doing really cool stuff.

Oh man.

Um, I know people always are like, why don't you prep me on this? 'Cause I'm like, the whole point is I want immediately who pops into your mind.

The thing is like, I've met so many cool people that are solving so many really cool problems that I don't know that I could say just one. But I know like I was in Toronto for Toronto Tech Week a couple weeks ago and met so many great people. Now again, 95% of the people I met were solving problems with AI. Like, Sure. Everything's a new AI company, but there were a lot of really cool implementations of this that like completely blew my mind. It's something I hadn't thought about. There's this company that was using AI to kind of leverage to see how efficient their engineers are being. Can you take this and apply it to get pushes and all these things and try and get an idea of what's basically like Whoop for programming? Yeah. There's a guy that had AI for insect farms, and he was helping using cameras and humidity things. He was helping these insect farms have higher yields. Um, just like crazy things that you would never think. That's nuts.

That's nuts. I would love to know the content marketing behind that with Ant Farm. Um, uh, uh, actually, Angelo, my buddy colleague, asked a great question. As a movie guy, let's do this because I know there's a lot of— is there anything you've seen lately that you've really liked?

So, uh, it's kind of, um, I don't get to watch a lot of movies anymore, which is kind of crazy, right?

You're running your own organization.

I've watched a lot of things that are like movies that we're considering, like, like distributing ourselves and stuff like that. And then when I usually have time to like sit down, I'm watching something with my wife. And so we usually tend to fall back to like some of the classics like New Girl.

New Girl's my favorite.

Yeah. Friends, you know, those types of things. She— if we start a movie, she usually falls asleep like 30 minutes into it. So.

Sure. But, but do you have a favorite movie?

I don't know that I do. I know that's a bad answer. I think like I would say The Matrix, but that would be stealing my brother's. Yeah, I can't do that.

You know what, he's not on the show though.

Okay, definitely The Matrix. It's my favorite. It changed my life.

Yeah, yeah. I love it. I love it. Uh, next question I want to ask, um, what do you like to do for fun, man? Like, what do you like to do outside of, uh, coding and running a business all day?

I— if I have downtime, I'm usually Playing video games, uh, coaching my daughter's softball team.

Nice. Do you have a favorite video game you're kind of playing right now?

I do. So I'm actually using my streaming mic. Um, I used to, I used to do, uh, Twitch streaming and I played a lot of like competitive Fortnite and competitive like Call of Duty. Yeah. Nice.

Nice.

Don't, don't look me up.

Yeah, I wanna see you in a Call of Duty chat room. Uh, are you talking about like an unhinged guidance counselor 2.0?

Yeah, that's a Guidance Counselor 2.0 after dark.

Exactly, exactly. All right, last question here, David. Again, thanks for everybody who showed up today. Please go connect with David, go check out Kino. Um, uh, but so 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 a guidance counselor to turn to, um, and ask for career advice. If you could go back to young David, um, what would be the biggest piece of career advice you tell him?

Oh man. I think it would just be like not to be afraid of stepping out and trying new things. I love it. Yeah. I mean, I think that's like the biggest thing. Like the biggest challenge that a lot of us face is like there's the fear of the unknown. And so just getting out and trying those new things I think is super important.

Yep. I wish honestly I did the same. So I agree, I agree. All right, y'all, uh, David, stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. Y'all have a good one tomorrow. Um, I'm hanging out with the amazing Jasmine, uh, Vo. She is a senior front-end engineer at Synchrony. Um, but we're kind of going into a little bit— it's gonna be kind of a little bit of health wellness. She's really big. She's done like the 75 Hard Challenge, and she's been documenting her journey from a health goals perspective. So we're going to talk about how health, mental health, physical health really plays into the job search in your career. So it'll be a great conversation tomorrow. Otherwise, y'all have a great day. Go connect with David, and y'all have a good one. Peace.