The Power of Putting Yourself Out There w/Aaron Francis

All right, good morning everybody. Say everybody, I mean nobody's— no one's here yet. Good morning, good morning. Uh, Aaron, how's the weather in Dallas? We got, we got snow in Nashville. We have snow on the ground.

It is, uh, it is merely bitterly cold here. Um, we got a little bit of dusting yesterday, but no, it's just freaking cold. It's like 14 degrees Fahrenheit when I got in my car today. And yeah, not great.

It was lit— it's 12. Yeah, right now. Absolutely.

And of course last week, you know, or not last week, but in the past few weeks it was, you know, 80.

Uh, right.

But that's just, you know, growing up in Texas, I'm quite used to that. But still—

Oh, I didn't realize you grew up in Texas.

Yeah, it's still like, man, we're doing this again this year.

But, uh, we're still at it. Well, Nashville, we had 70-degree weather Monday and tornado chances.

Yep. So, um, that sounds about right.

Amazing we're all still here. Um, but good morning everybody. Please say hey, would love to hear from you. Excited, uh, about this chat. Uh, you're probably like, Taylor, um, there wasn't a Guidance Counselor 2.0 this week. Yes, it is. Uh, this, this new— what we're building at Torque is special. We have a lot on our plate, and to be honest with you I'm trying to cut back a little bit, to be honest. I'm celebrating 5 years of this show next month. And I started this show going every single morning, 5 days a week, Monday through Friday, new guest every day. And I'm getting to the point now where I'm like, you know what, like, maybe we can just like pump the brakes a little bit. And, and, you know, So I can like have more meaningful guests. Not that any of the guests I haven't had weren't meaningful, but really just kind of slow it back so I can get some work done at Torque. Um, so this is the only one this week, so Aaron, you are special. Uh, uh, you were, you were the only one, so I'm very excited about this one.

Uh, 5 guests a week is, is— that's madness.

That was aggressive. So my personality is— I mean, obviously we've met in person now. I don't know if you can tell, it's kind of like a little ridiculous. I kind of am like 1,000 miles a minute. Um, I, I go 1,000 miles a minute until I crash, which is not healthy. Um, I'm currently working on that in counseling. That's a whole other conversation in and of itself. But for me, I was like, you know what, I'm gonna do a podcast. I'm gonna do it every day, 5 days a week. And I've obviously maintained that clip for a long time. So, um, again, changing things up. Uh, I, I started a, um, I'm not even gonna call it a podcast because I don't need another thing to promote. It's called Voice Notes. Uh, it's like marketing voice notes.

Mm-hmm.

where I've started to yap it up about marketing content. And it's like 3 to 5 minute voice notes when I go on a walk every day. So that's in the App Store too. It's called Marketing Voice Notes. I'm not calling it a podcast. But anyways, please say hey. Would love to hear from you. I'm excited about this one because Aaron gave an amazing talk at Commit Your Code in Dallas. If you were not there, you missed out. And I was literally in the back of Aaron's talk and I was like, yes, yes, yes, yes. I mean, it was just so good. Everything he said was great. And so then obviously slid into his DMs. I was like, hey, we'd love to have you back on the show. So Aaron, second time on the show. And really just, I'll ask him some questions, but I really want Aaron to kind of really just kind of walk through his talk, not necessarily give his talk, but just walk through it and some important parts of his career. But before we dive in, a few things. First off, I wanna give a shout out to Appwrite. Me and Jason Torres, both at Torque, are Appwrite heroes. So highly recommend their product. I highly recommend their people. I'm probably the only non-technical hero I think any software company has. So you should check them out. They're great, even though I don't know how to code. I also wanna give a shout out to Torque. Listen, we have a— actually, I need to update this slide because we actually updated this. But if you go to cal.torque.dev, my community team, we've done just an amazing job of really getting all of our events out there. So we have, I mean, on average, I mean, we're averaging a stream every single day. That you can get involved with, that you can network with other people in our community, both in the Discord and externally like this. So please go check that out. I really would love to have you a part of the community in the Discord. We're doing a lot of great things. And then finally, if you do want to get text updates when I go live, I shoot just text live to this number. This is actually me. It's not some sort of automated thing. I get all these texts. And so would love to have you, especially if you want to get updated every time I specifically go live. Um, and we got some people tuned in this morning. Michael, it's good to see you, man. Texas represent, not necessarily a good way.

Well, there we go.

Hey, it's good to see you, JC. It's good to see you, Richard, Chris, Roxy. It's great to see y'all this morning. Uh, let's see here, Mr. Ricardo, it's great to see you. Um, all right, Outside, what's going on? It's good to see you. There we go. Big Aaron fan. I'm a big Aaron fan too, so you are in a great spot. Um, cool. All right, sweet. Well, Aaron, let's Let's get the people what they want, man. Like just high level, who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there.

Yeah, both tough questions. Who am I? Let's see. Yeah, so like it says on the screen, Aaron Francis and co-founder at a company called TryHard Studios with my friend Steve. Historically, I would have called myself a Laravel developer. That is still true, but that's not really what I do day to day for a living anymore. Um, before that, I was somehow a CPA. I was an accountant for a minute. Um, that's crazy. Awful. Yeah, that's crazy.

You said that like, wow.

I know, it's one of those things that's like a fun, like a fun thing to drop because it's like, hey, that was 5 years of my life and in college and then a full year of working, and now I just— it's just like a little anecdote. Um, so yeah, I used to be a CPA. Um, but now what we do, so what Steve and I do at TryHard is we, um, we produce technical content. And so that spans databases. So somebody here just a second ago said Mastering Postgres fan. That's one of the courses we've done, Mastering Postgres. We've done one on SQLite. And right now we are working on— so those are our database offerings. But right now we're working on something that is completely different but also very exciting, and that's screencasting.com. So I've got a site With a great domain, um, that teaches people how to do like high-quality video. And now that I have like a proper video guy, Steve, as my partner, we're gonna reshoot the whole thing. Um, and so that's what we're working on, uh, for the next several weeks.

I love that. So like what— so like what— so like what is like TryHard Studios?

Is it a—

is it a people can come get educational content? You said you really aren't taking on clients. Like what— what is the essence of TryHard Studios?

You know that it's almost been a year, so it hasn't been very long that we've been an entity. And, you know, in the beginning we were trying to be all things to all people and somehow that didn't work out very well.

Get outta town. That's wild.

Yeah, that's crazy. So we approached, we approached the market with, here's our offering and our offering is we're very good at video. We'll help your team be very good at video. That was the first thing we went out to sell and companies were like, that sounds great. why don't you just make the videos for us?

Right. Yeah, yeah.

I can't make videos for every dev tool company ever because I lose credibility. I don't have expertise, and that sounds exhausting, right? And so we approached the market with this idea that we thought was genius, and the market said terrible idea. And so we quickly pivoted into, um, we produce, we produce in-house courses. And so we still do work with companies like Mastering Postgres and High Performance SQLite. We have sponsors where like we go out to a company and say, do you want to be associated with this? Like what we believe is high-quality education. They say yes, they give us money, we put their name all over the stuff. And so we still do work with companies, but it's not producing, producing videos for them. We will occasionally take a, like a YouTube sponsor, but that's very traditional. It's not like I'm going to do a course for your company.

That makes sense. Cool. Awesome. I'm gonna be honest, I just asked you for me more than anything else, so I'm glad we got that out of the way. All right. So let's— so what was your talk? What was the title of your talk at Commit Your Code? Let's talk about that.

That's a good question. I think it was, uh, Publish Your Work, Change Your Life, something like that. Um, I think that was at least the, the gist of it. And yeah, so, you know, this— we were both there.

I—

when was this? October, November, December? Maybe November.

No, it was December. It was December.

Yeah, something like that. Here, here in Dallas. Um, and yeah, I gave this talk, um, which the thrust of it was like put yourself out there and good things will happen. And kind of the, the structure was a narrative of like my past many years. You know, Steve and I started this company less than a year ago, but the inciting incident was we both got laid off.

Yeah.

And so it was kind of one of those things where it's like, how did I, uh, how did I set myself up for success? And what are the things that like I think other people can do? to increase their positive optionality. Right. And you have to be real careful how you say, like, what promises you make. Right. Because I can say if you write a blog post, you'll get a job. But I don't know that that's true. Right. That feels unfair to say, like, because it happened to me once, I can't make a rule out of it because that's just like survivorship bias.

Right.

Yeah. And so the whole point of Like the thesis of the talk is if you do things publicly, which is very vague, good things will happen to you, which is very vague. But I feel confident enough in that correlation that I can say there is causation there. And so that was the whole— that was the whole pitch. And I'll let you dive in on any of that. But the whole pitch is like, do things and then other things will happen. And that's crazy. Gave a bunch of stories. Isn't that crazy how that works? Yes. And it works. Every single time.

I love it. Publish your work, change your life. Just found the photo. There you go. Yes, thank you. Thanks, Roxy, appreciate it. You know, there's so many places to start in this talk, and I know I talked about a lot about just putting yourself out there, but I wanna hear from Aaron. I think your story is so unique, right? Accountant, developer, went into this kind of your own endeavor, which is not easy, even over really the last year, which has not been easy. I want to hear from you. Like, can you give kind of some kind of pillars or some, I guess, some— what do I want to say? So I was told earlier in my career that as you go through your career, you kind of reach these plateaus, but not in a bad way, but more of like you kind of reach a new mountaintop, right? You're like, oh, wow, this is really, really good, right? And then like you keep climbing and it's like, oh no, this one's really, really good. And you had some of those in your talk, I remember too.

Mm-hmm.

So can you just kind of give 5 to 7 minutes of just like, hey, listen, here's where I started, here are some key mountaintops that have occurred because of XYZ, because I really want the people to hear it from you on what really putting yourself out there has done.

Sure. Yeah, totally. Um, yeah, so prior to, prior to, uh, God, when did, when did COVID start? Was that 2020 or 2021?

Bro, it's been 2020.

Good Lord, we've entered a time warp since then and everything is fuzzy. OK, so 2020, 2020, let's set the scene. I'm working at a local property tax company here in Dallas. I know, all over the place. And at this point I've gone from being the only programmer to being the COO of the company. So I'm running this company, right?

Nice.

Yeah. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, you know, I don't really want to be in property tax. As sexy as it sounds to the outsider, property tax, in fact, not that sexy. And so I'm thinking, I'm thinking, this, this is not what I want to do.

Right.

I want to, I want to enter into the tech world more. Right. And so at that point, I like leave the property tax firm. I go work for a tech company and I'm starting to like enter into this scene and I'm realizing Like, man, I'm seeing a lot of these people. I'm seeing a lot of people that I know, like, and trust and respect online. And they're always like out there doing something right. And they're getting all these opportunities. They're going to like— they're meeting friends at conferences, they're speaking at conferences, they're getting new jobs, they're doing all of this stuff that I'm like, boy, I wish I could do some of that stuff. And the, like, the, the realization I had at that point was I could either— like, I could either watch these other people do this stuff and, like, be frustrated that it's not happening for me, be mad, be bitter, or I could, like, introspect and see, well, are they doing something differently? And the answer came back very quickly. Yes, they're doing something differently. Whenever they do a thing, they then talk about it. Whenever you, Aaron, do a thing, you don't talk about it because you're afraid that people are going to say, Aaron, that is very stupid. And so like, that was the, that was the realization that came to me was like, oh, if you want, if you want some of these opportunities to flow your direction, you've got to be in the stream where these opportunities are happening, right? You can't just sit at home and like be bitter that other people are getting neat things and you're not when other people are willing to take the risk.

Yeah.

To be embarrassed, like to put themselves out there and to like open themselves up to risk. And so at that point, like at that point, you know, I'm— I think I'm either leaving or have already left this property tax firm. I'm trying to figure out what to do with my life. And I start— I realize like the answer is just start sharing everything that you're working on. Like just start putting yourself out there.

It's so simple. And it—

and like lower the bar. I think this is a place where a lot of people get caught up is like lowering the bar of what's shareable. Not in terms of quality, but in terms of like insight, I suppose. So I think a lot of people think I have to have a, a novel to the universe insight before I'm able to—

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

In reality, or at least in my opinion, what you have to have is a novel to you insight. If you learn something, if you're working on something, you discover something that is new to you, neat to you, clever, weird, whatever, you can just put it out there. Like, you don't have to— you don't have to play defense to the imaginary critics in your mind who are going to say, I already knew that. Like, great. This post is not for you, my friend. That's fine. And I think the place people get caught up is when they are when they, when they go to share something, they try to posture themselves as the expert. Right. So the way that that looks is you'll go to share something and be like, this is the way that you should be doing this always. And then what that opens yourself up to is people saying, no, no, you shouldn't be doing this always. And that's a trap, right? So then you put yourself out there as an expert on something that you might be a novice on. and you make these bold claims and then they're easily refutable. And then you're like, oh shoot, I'm not going to do that again. I think the, the, the true and better way to do that is to say, I just did this. Who's going to argue with that?

Right?

Who can say you didn't do that? Or who can say like, that doesn't meet your needs because you don't know what my needs are. So you can put it out there and say like, I did this. It worked for me because of this. You can even say, I don't know if this is the best way. But this is a way that is working for my situation, my use case, my company, my library, my whatever.

Right.

And then, then when people come in and like have counterpoints or something, then you're just yucking it up with your friends. You're not defending this hard position that you maybe shouldn't have taken in the first place. You're just saying like, oh, hey, that criticism that you lobbed at me, that's actually good. But it doesn't apply to this use case. It doesn't apply to this constraint that we have inside of our company. And then you get to have a conversation. Then you're making friends, you're making connections, you're getting, you're getting to show like the, the depth of the thought that you went through for your specific use case. And in fact, you may be super wrong. And that's an easy position to walk back from when you say like, hey, I did this and somebody says you should consider this and you're like, hey, that's fine. I didn't hold myself out to be an expert.

Yeah.

So now I don't have this like social-emotional thing about saying, ooh, I was wrong. You can say, no, great, that's a, that's a great change. I will make that change. And so it lowers that pressure on everything that you're not holding yourself out to be the final answer on every question. You're just saying, here's my lived experience. And that will go— also, that has the benefit of being way more approachable in terms of like a making friends, making connections kind of thing. Yeah, if somebody— if somebody's always like, I'm the expert, here's how you're supposed to do it, and everyone else is wrong, then you're pedestaled and you're either going to get taken down or people won't approach you. So it's like, just be a normal person, for goodness' sake. So yeah, just—

Yeah, be a normal person.

That was kind of the realization I came to, was like, oh man, you're holding yourself back here. And the reason you're holding yourself back is because you're afraid that people on the internet are going to laugh at you. It's like, yeah, all right, reasonable fear. Like, truly, it's, it's, it's tough to be laughed at and it's tough to be embarrassed. I think the, the, the bigger fear is like holding yourself back for your entire career and then regretting it at the end.

Yes.

Like, what's more devastating? What's more devastating than looking back on a life full of regret? Don't know, but I'm not going to find out. So like, I made that— like, that realization came to me that I could be laughed at by strangers and I could embarrass myself, but at least I'm not gonna be 65 and say, boy, Aaron, you could have been a lot more. Like, I'm not, I'm not doing— I'm not playing that game. And so that was kind of when, when things, when things flipped for me. And I'll, I'll pause there for any, uh, interjections.

No, I love that. I wanna, I wanna get to— I wanna get to Jordan's comics. I am curious. I feel like people— I have thoughts, but I wanna hear your thoughts. Getting into the habit of sharing is a hard part for me. My brain just wants to keep going onto the next thing rather than stopping to share. How have you overcome this?

Okay. Are you ready? Yep.

Ready.

We're ready for a little prop comedy here. Boom. This is it right here. Yellow legal pad. So whenever I'm working, I have this yellow legal pad and of course only a Zebra pen. I have that next to me. And whenever I'm doing something like I'm in the game, right? I'm developing something. And I think there's just like a flash of, oh, that was clever. Oh, we write it down on the clever list. And then at some point, like when I'm, when I'm done working or whatever, I'll look at the clever list and be like, oh yeah, let me like, let me take a screenshot of that little bit of code and go fire off a tweet. Or if it's better, it's like, oh, that's a good, that's a good video. Let me think for, you know, 15 minutes about how to turn that into a video and then we can hit record.

Yeah.

So I think getting in the habit There's like a, there's like a derogatory way to say this, but it's like content brain. Like if you can get content brain, which sounds bad, but in fact it's like, it's very good.

It's great.

If you can be working and train your brain to think, like to notice these things that are good pieces of content, you can write it down, you can tweet it in the moment, whatever. But my, my promise to you is that if you develop content brain, it will not go away. You won't have trouble coming up with stuff to share. You won't want to sit down on a Monday morning and schedule tweets for the entire week. That would feel like— that would feel so lame.

I've tried it once or twice.

It's awful. It's so— it's so dead. Like, it's so devoid of humanity. But if you can develop content brain, you'll never be at a loss for things to share ever again. Right now, some of them will be hard. Some of them you'll have to sit down and write a 2,000-word article to, like, do the thing justice. And that's It's still a lot of work, but the like actual generation of ideas becomes way easier when you develop content brain. 100%.

I'm gonna share, I'm gonna share my screen real quick. I, I, I don't have a yellow legal pad. I have, I use Things.

There you go.

Um, and I have a content idea and anytime I just pop it up, I literally have it on, um, like a widget on my phone and I'm driving, press it open, boom, like this. And this, I mean, this is probably a month worth of content right here in and of itself.

Yep.

Love that. All right. I want to give the audience, and again, the comments have been, y'all are insane. So thank you so much. I see them all. I can't even keep up. I want, Aaron, I want you, you talked about some specific key things. It was one of your slides about how like you got an MC spot at GitHub and it's that picture. It was GitHub, right? Or Laracon or something?

It was, yeah.

And like, there was no one there, right?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Which, I mean, I'm telling you that your talk like really stood out to me. Um, can you just talk about some things where you thought you were at the mountaintop but you weren't quite there?

Sure.

Mountaintops that were actually mountaintops. Give me some— give the audience some specifics.

Yeah, there's, there's some good ones. And like you mentioned, there are some really painful ones. I mean, in, in the beginning, I thought and continue to think Still that like, this is it. Like, I've made it. Like, there's, there's nothing, there's nothing higher. I've been wrong every time. But in the moment, I've really thought like, wow, what a great run. And so like initially, so the, the kind of like stair-step level-up story of how I got from there to here is I started working on an open source library, which again is something that's available to every single person.

I even know that.

You could just go do that, which is one of the nice things. Like, nobody knighted me. Nobody said, all right, we pick you. I picked myself. I was like, I'm gonna do this. And so I started working on an open source library. I had realized, like I had talked about, that, boy, you gotta put yourself out there if anybody's ever gonna notice you. So I'm working on this library, I'm talking about it a whole bunch, and somebody from the Laravel community reaches out and is like, hey, I run an online meetup. Do you want to talk about this thing you're building? And I was like, it's happening.

I'm sure you were pumped.

It's happening. And so I was freaking out. I was like, this is, this is it. It wasn't a conference. It was an online meetup. Like, I mean, I know, but I'm like, I, you know, I run inside, I tell my wife, she doesn't understand, but she's happy. And I'm like, this is it.

That's like my wife too. My wife was like, okay, great.

Yeah, I'm happy for you, bud. So I do this conference talk or this meetup talk and then This is like, this is the— I think this is one of the hidden advantages of doing stuff like this is now you start to have this little portfolio, right? So you have a video of you speaking somewhere and presumably somebody, somebody picked you, right? So now you have this external validation of like, look, I was good enough for the organizers of this meetup. here's the video. Here's my, here's my proof that like it's undeniable that I did this thing. I don't have to tell you. I don't have to convince you that I can do it. I can just tell you that I did do it. And so I took that video, submitted it to an online conference, Laracon Online, and they accepted me. And that was my first ever conference talk. So I gave a conference talk on the same topic at that conference. And then we kind of walk forward, we do a few more conferences and it's just like building up over time.

Right.

Just like, um, proof of work all the way up, right? So you leverage one thing into the next and you're just proving your work all the way through.

Yep.

So we get to a point where, um, we get to a point where, uh, and this is another, I think, um, another pattern that people should adopt more is you can start asking for stuff. You can always just ask for stuff. Isn't that crazy? People can say No, that's fine. That was the default state anyway. However, people could say yes, and that is not where you were before. Now you have something you didn't have before merely by asking. And so I, I noticed that like GitHub did these like developer profiles and I thought, I wonder what it takes to be, you know, get on one of these developer profiles. I saw that I had a friend who had done one, somebody that I'd known online had been featured. And so I reached out to him and I was like, hey, Here's my idea. I've got this great story about, you know, overcoming fears and open source and put me in touch with GitHub. And he was like, sure, don't know if it'll work, but here's the person I know. So, you know, long story long, I did this like profile for GitHub.

Yeah.

Write this article. Wrote an article called Publishing Your Work Increases Your Luck. I think it was their GitHub README's number 1 article that year, like just blew everybody else out of the water. And they invited me to come to GitHub Universe.

And I'm like, this is— I know where this is going. So, so that article blew up.

Blew up. Yeah, blew up. Like I'm getting the person that I'm talking to, their boss and their boss all personally thanking me for writing this article and telling, telling me how it made their like Q whatever numbers like skewed. Yeah, on the GitHub README. And I'm like, oh, maybe, maybe I'm onto something here. Yeah, so it was crazy.

Keep going, keep going. I know what you're saying.

So they, they invite me to come out to GitHub Universe as a, you know, know, as a part of this like imprint of GitHub, you know, it's GitHub README. And so it's like the customer marketing developer-facing kind of thing, right? And so now I'm like, oh, this is, this is a big boy conference. Like, I'm, I'm here in Dallas, Texas with all the oilmen, but like, I'm going to California. I'm going where— I'm going to where the tech happens.

Yeah.

And so I'm freaking out. I'm telling, I'm telling everybody I got a big deal coming. I'm telling, you know, I'm telling friends, I'm telling family, I'm telling my wife's parents. Like, it's like, this is, this is big and I want you guys to know about it. And so I show up at GitHub Universe first time, just completely overwhelmed, just massive, like massive. I think it's at Yerba Buena maybe. I don't really know, but it's huge. And I'm there for soundcheck the day before and I'm looking at the program and it turns out like my talk is not listed on the physical program. And I'm like, oh, not great. Not a great start. There are many stages. I'm in the garden stage, which sounds like— which sounds very carefree and easygoing. It's definitely like the science stage.

Santa Claus is—

Yeah, it's not. It's not great. So I'm not on— I'm not on the program. I'm on the garden stage. So I go out to do my sound check. Everything goes fine. And I, that night I'm worried like nobody's gonna show up because it's like kind of like a soft talk at a developer conference and it's not listed. And I'm like, it's okay, it's still gonna be livestreamed. It's still gonna be livestreamed. Nobody on the stream will know. I can tweet it, I can send it to my friends and family. It'll be fine. And I get there and my talk is not livestreamed and I'm like, boy, this is going from worse to worse. And so they tell me, you know, they tell me an hour before, hey, yours isn't livestreamed. It will be recorded. More on that later. And so I go up there on— I, I'm like standing on the side of the stage. It's like the garden stage, so there's no backstage. You're just kind of like standing up there like an idiot waiting for your turn. And so I'm looking out and, and Taylor, there's, there's nobody out there. There's nobody. There are zero people. There were 3 people. It was the woman that, um, was like in charge of GitHub README and 2 of her employees. So it was the 3 people that basically convinced GitHub to bring me there. It was just them and some staff and some people that had like grabbed the chairs for lunch because I'm in the garden area. And so they're like, I can use these chairs, nobody else is using them. And so like the audience is completely empty and the guy, the guy on the stage is like, please welcome to the stage Aaron Francis. And there's no— he's not talking to anybody. And I'm like, It's like, thanks, man. Like, it's you and me, brother. And I tell you in that moment that, like, I'm of two minds. One mind is I wish that the earth would swallow me whole and that I would cease to exist.

Yeah.

Because I'm about to go on stage. And this is the other part of my mind, do my job. And you know what my job is? To do a good job. And so, like, I can't, I can't sacrifice what I believe is my, is my duty, which is to go out there and give it my all. But I don't want to do it because it's embarrassing. And that was like the most, like the most— imagine being an author and doing a book signing and nobody shows up except your mom and like you feel so mortified. So I go up there and I give, I give a 25-minute talk like this, more or less the same talk I gave at commit your code. So I'm like baring my soul and nobody's there.

40 people, not even livestreamed.

Awful. Not even livestreamed. And so I'm up there, I'm up there doing my duty, which I do think is important and is very important to me, is to do your duty. And I did my duty well. And my job is not to get people to show up and sit in the chairs. My job is to give the freaking talk, and I gave the talk with everything I had. It was the best I could do. Um, and then afterwards, I, you know, I learned that they messed up the recording, and so there's no recording. And so it was just like hit after hit after hit.

And this is after you had something go mega viral for them.

Uh-huh.

Top of the world, holy cow, to like mortified.

Beyond embarrassed. Like, yes, yes. And so, and so I think that, like, the lessons there are many. One is this will happen. Like, I think there's a— I've had it happen. There's like a— on both sides of this relationship, there's like the, the person, me in this case, is incentivized to tell a rosy story. And gloss over these things, right? So on the, on the speaker side, it's like, look at my, my line of successes. Look at how I just, I just danced from win to win to win. I feel like a lot of very successful people do that. On the other side, on the audience side, there is the like the desire to ascribe that to people that they see because as, as an audience member, as somebody that's like, I want— I I want to make it. You look at people who have made it and you're like, well, they had it easy. It was success to success to success. I can't do that, and so I'm gonna quit. And I think both of those are wrong, and both of those are like a lie, because I thought that like this was the— this was the big break. And I went up there and I was super embarrassed and mortified, and it was awful. And I think if more people— like, if more people realized that that can happen and that you're almost guaranteed that that will happen, it makes you a lot more resilient when it does happen because you're like, yeah, Aaron told me this was going to happen.

Yeah.

He said that like you, you're going to feel like you're on top of the world and you're going to be laid low and humbled and it's going to suck. Well, here I am. He was right. I guess I'll just keep going. So that's like, that's, that's one of the lessons that I have taken away from that is this will continue to happen. And the other lesson is that's not my job. My job, my job is to show up and to do the work. That's it.

Yeah.

And like, did good things come out of GitHub Universe? Yes. Do I wish it would have gone differently? 100%.

Yeah.

But now, like, now I've learned this great lesson. I'm able to share it with these people. But also, like, I gave the best talk that I could and it was a dry run for that same talk that I gave again later. And it was better the second time I gave it.

Yeah.

And, and you know what? Performing a noble duty under dire circumstances is always the right thing to do. And the fact that like the GitHub universe or the GitHub README people sat there and witnessed me perform this noble duty under this like mortifyingly embarrassing circumstance was a good thing. Like now these people inside of GitHub, she's since moved on to be VP somewhere else. But she feels like indebted to me for like bringing me out there. And then the— it was— it wasn't actually her fault. It was the larger GitHub's fault. She feels like Aaron really did his job even though I put him in a tough spot. And that's, that's a good thing. And so I think there's like, there are many lessons that you can take away. One is like, know what your job is and do your job to the best of your ability regardless of the circumstances.

Love that.

And the other is like, Hey, this is tough. This is a tough game, and you're going to be laid low, and you're going to want to cry, and you should cry, and then you should get up and keep going.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, man. It's so good. We have a comment here on TikTok. Um, so, uh, for the individual who's asking, I'm talking to Aaron Francis right now over on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. You should come hang out. TikTok doesn't allow easy streaming. Um, so yeah, I mean, again, Jason, you know, could you imagine Michael Jordan giving up after he got cut high school basketball. Yeah, I mean, listen, I think it's— and I will tell you this, I mean, kind of a prime example too, and I want to encourage people like to never, never take the small things lightly. And kind of Aaron's thing where he got invited to do a virtual conference, I got invited. I'll never forget my very, very— and it's crazy now even saying this again— my very first like virtual thing as a recruiter, being asked to speak as a traditional recruiter, was a code school in Toronto called Mint Bean or Beam. Bean, Beam. Anyways, like I was so pumped. I was like, holy cow, I'm gonna speak to a bootcamp. Like this is insane. I'm a recruiter. Why am I even being asked? I talked with my current boss at Torque when I was in Boston in January. I said, how did I come across your radar? 'Cause he said he's been following me for years. He goes, oh, well, so-and-so said that he got you to speak at Mint Bean years ago. And he loved your talk.

Yep.

And if I would have been, I'm too good to speak at a boot camp or school, I would have never been on my boss's radar and I never would have been here.

Yep.

It's crazy.

Yep. I think it is the— I think it is the morally correct and ethically right thing to do to give everything your all. It is also the strategically optimal thing to do to give it your all. So like you show, you show up to a, you show up to a meetup. I have, I you know, post all of this, I've done meetups where there have been 10 people there. And you know what? I give it everything I've got because it is the right thing to do.

Yeah.

That is my opinion. You have a duty to do your best work regardless of what the circumstances are. I also think, and that's nice when this happens, I think the right thing is the selfish thing, is the strategically optimal thing. It is the best thing for your career If you are known as a person who, no matter where you show up, you are doing your job to the best of your ability, that gets around. Like, people talk. And what you want people— what you want people to talk about is, hey, you know what? I saw that guy talk to 6 people, but boy, it felt like he was talking to a stadium. That guy gave it everything he had. I bet we should put him in a stadium. It's like You don't know when that's gonna happen. You don't know who's there. You don't know who's gonna find the recording. You don't know who's gonna tell who's gonna tell who, who's gonna go on to be a VP at Microsoft. You have no idea. And your job, the right thing to do is do your best. The best thing to do is do your best. So let's do your best. I love it.

I love it so much. All right, we're about at time. Aaron, any final words of encouragement before I kind of do a little rapid fire question on you?

I would just say start, start today. Start with anything. Just build the habit of—

Talk about this talk.

Yes, that's what I say about this. Yeah, right. Write a 500-word article about how this applies to you. Put it on some blog and just don't stop. Just like keep going. So post a tweet, post a LinkedIn post, post a Bluesky. Do a blog post, make a short video, do anything and just keep going.

Yeah. And again, I don't wanna call out names here, but I saw in the chat, oh, I'm still getting my outline ready. Oh, I want to do this. I'm still waiting to get the Notion doc ready. Post the damn thing.

Like, just go.

Like, just go. Like, literally, if I had waited— so I started vlogging like 4 years ago.

And it wasn't good. Yep.

Right. And, and if I would've just waited, I would've been 4 years behind. So again, just start. Just start. All right, Aaron, a few quick questions here. We just missed Valentine's Day. Hopefully you had a good Valentine's Day.

Mm-hmm.

Um, what's your go-to candy? I always gotta ask individuals around this time, what's kind of your go-to candy? Easter is kind of upcoming. Maybe we can go there too. But like, if you, if If you got to have a piece of candy, what would it be?

Oh, if I got to have a piece of candy, I'm probably leaning chocolate. I'm avoiding peanuts. I'm going crunchy or caramel. So I'm landing on— I'm landing on, depending on the mood, the vibes of the situation, Milky Way or Kit Kat. There you go.

Love it. Love that. We're answering some heavy-hitting questions this morning. Next question. If I told you tomorrow that when you wake up you can't do what you're doing now, you have to pursue a hobby, which technically I guess in a way you did pursue a hobby, but nothing in tech, what would you do?

Um, I would do hobby electronics and/or, uh, terraforming. So I would probably buy, you know, if money's not an option, I would buy 50 to 100 acres of rundown, you know, blighted land. I'd buy some tractors and I'm not going to be a farmer. I don't want to do that. That sounds crazy. A lot of responsibility. Yeah. So I'd have a, I'd have a workshop where I could do hobby electronics, robots, that sort of stuff. And then I would go out and I would build swales and plant stuff and build, you know, do earthworks. That's probably what I would do. That's probably what I will do once I, you know, retire is like, I love that. Get some land, get a shop, do some hobbies. I love that.

That's fantastic. Always. This is a new question I started to ask. Who do you want to give a shout to in the community? Somebody who's on your radar right now that you like what they're doing, like what they're building, like what they're putting out there.

You know who's you know whose vibe I really like, and you know who I think is putting in an incredible amount of work is Roxy.

Yes.

So I'll get the full name here. Roxanna. Roxanna Rodriguez Becker.

Second shout out Roxy has gotten over the last 2 weeks on this show.

Listen, I don't, I don't know who, um, I don't know who works harder than Roxy with the— I have twins, she has twins, um, Scott, she's got another kid, she's got a, you know, full-time job trying to do this thing on the side, waking up at the freaking crack of dawn to do handstands. I'm like Boy, I'm tired. I can't imagine what she's doing. So—

Yeah. Shout out Roxy. Shout out Roxy. You're killing it. When it comes to any frameworks, technologies that you're kind of tinkering with, I don't know either. TryHard, I know you just released something. I don't know if you want to give a plug there to the folks.

Yeah. My go-to stack is always going to be Laravel. I find it to be massively productive. Um, just with the ecosystem that they've built. Um, so I would always use— I would always use Laravel. I would always use— I prefer Vue.js as the front end. I really like that. And I'm working on, like you mentioned, a library to combine Laravel and some of these JavaScript frameworks to be a little bit closer. Um, so that's kind of the, the stack that I like to hang out in.

I love that. All right, last question. You kind of answered it. The show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0, who has 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. If you can go back in time and tell Aaron one thing, maybe not like put stuff out, let's do something else, because this whole talk was that. Is there another piece of advice that you would give young Aaron?

Yeah, I would say try more audacious things. Um, not like, um, and the more belongs to audacious, so like try try bigger ideas. Try something that is stupider. Try something that is like more insane. Try something that— because I think a lot of people end up in this loop where they're like, oh, I'm, I'm going to like just play it safe. I'm going to do like a Notion to Obsidian connector. And like, that's fun. Like, that's a fun, like, you know, side project.

Sure.

The, the mindshare for that is just incredibly small. And so what I would say is like, What's a big idea that seems like really painful? And can you, can you absorb that pain? I'm thinking primarily about open source libraries. Can you absorb that pain on behalf of all those other people? Because if you can, then, Brian, I don't know if you've actually done that, but that may, that may be very well true. I would like to. So like the first library that I did that got traction was a way for you to write functions in your Laravel application and deploy them and execute them on AWS Lambda. And it's like, that's a lot of moving parts. And I wish I had thought earlier on in my career, what's kind of like a big meaty problem in the space that I could solve that people are currently experiencing a lot of pain around? And so I would just say dream a little bit bigger. I love that. I love that.

Well, y'all, thank you again. For hanging out with us today. Aaron, thank you, my friend, as always. Um, I hope you all have a great rest of your weekend. We're off all next week, so I'll be in Amsterdam speaking at DevWorld, and of course we will be documenting the whole damn thing. Um, so we'll see y'all next week online. Otherwise, go connect with Aaron, go connect with somebody in the chat, set up a conversation, and, uh, we'll see y'all in 2 weeks. Peace.

Thanks. See ya.