25: Ep. 25 | Developer Advocacy with Annie Sexton

Brittany Ellich (00:00) Welcome to the Overcommitted podcast where we discuss our code commits, our personal commitments, and some stuff in between. I’m your host this week, Brittany, joined by.

Erika (00:11) Erica.

Bethany (00:11) Sorry, hi, I’m Bethany.

Jonathan Tamsut (00:13) And I am John. Hello, everyone.

Brittany Ellich (00:15) We are a group of software engineers who initially met working on a team together at GitHub and found a common interest in learning and building cool things. We continue to meet and share our learning experiences and discuss our lives as developers. Whether you were pushing code or taking on new challenges, we are so happy you are listening. This week, we are talking with the illustrious Annie Sexton, a developer advocate for fly.io and YouTube content creator, explaining hard to understand software

engineering concepts in simple terms. Welcome, Annie!

Annie Sexton (00:50) Hi, it’s good to be

well, yeah, I’m a developer advocate. I, and my, my flavor of developer advocacy is mostly YouTube content. And I actually secretly have done this for many, many years, not related to tech at all. I, I meant, I had a couple of channels that I tried to get off the ground, had some progress, you know, I learned a lot of things, learned what not to do. And when the opportunity arose at fly, I jumped at it.

Brittany Ellich (01:16) Did you work at Fly before doing the YouTube content creation, or did you?

Annie Sexton (01:21) Yes. So it’s actually a little crazy. I was hired as my title was, what is it? JavaScript specialist, whatever the hell that means to write blog posts about ⁓ JavaScript and to get the JavaScript community excited about using fly. And then last summer we decided to do a shift to video. And because I had had that experience building those YouTube channels, it was the most like hold my beer.

moment of my entire career and my first video went viral and it was great which is like I cannot say that all of my videos meet that kind of success but it was it was very hair flip kind of it felt really good and it’s been really really fun to do it I feel so lucky that I just accidentally fell into this role and now it’s absolutely transformed my career

Brittany Ellich (02:13) That’s cool. Have you always been in developer advocacy then or what was your journey to get to this point to fly?

Annie Sexton (02:18) No,

this, this role at fly was actually my first dev rel position. before that it was mostly just software. It’s just straight up software engineering. I did work as, ⁓ a support engineer at Heroku back in the hay days, back when it was cool. no shade to Heroku now, sorry y’all, but it was, I learned a lot about software development through support engineering.

basically all the things you’re not supposed to do, I learned about. And I personally think support engineers are wildly underrated because the amount of knowledge they need to know is so much more in depth than any one developer.

But that’s mostly been my career is mostly software engineering, a little bit of support engineering. And I only recently started to do dev rel in the past year or two.

Brittany Ellich (02:57) Yeah, absolutely.

Erika (02:58) Absolutely.

Yeah, mean, the interacting with customers is like another piece of the support engineer tool set that, yeah, like internal engineers don’t even have to think about. And there’s a whole like, yeah, art to having those support conversations and getting the information that you need and finding it out and.

getting all the pieces together. I have mad respect for support engineers and anyone who’s done it.

Annie Sexton (03:38) takes a lot of patience.

Brittany Ellich (03:39) How did

you go, for sure, for sure. How did you end up in like the software realm? Did you go to school for computer science or what was the path to get there?

Annie Sexton (03:50) I did not go to school for this at all. My major in college was international studies, which was useless. So I took a really strange path to get here. I taught English in Japan right out of college. had a horrible experience. I love teaching, but I had a horrible boss. It was like a really manipulative abuse of the work environment. And a friend of mine who…

I’d gone to, I’d studied abroad with in Japan. He knew that I had had a little live little live journal blog, a little, I knew a bit of HTML, knew how to make things bold and italic. And he was like, Hey, you had a live journal in college. Do you want to, we’re hiring for a web developer role. Do you want to like learn the rest of it? And I was like, Oh, okay, sure.

So bless his heart. He taught me the very basics of CSS and JavaScript and helped me get my very first job as a web developer in Osaka. And I barely knew how to write a for loop. My interview was all in Japanese with a Spaniard. It was mostly, so it was a localization company. So most of the, most of the people who worked there were foreigners.

but the lingua franca was Japanese because the few Japanese people they did employ didn’t really speak English. Everyone else, I mean, my Japanese was like, I thought my Japanese was okay. And then I come into this localization company where everyone is fluent beyond words. And yeah, anyways, so it was a really, it was a small and scrappy company. It is near and to my heart, even though the working conditions were kind of terrible. I actually took a 30 % pay cut.

from being an English teacher to get that first job, my friend who helped get me this job, just on a whim, this was when Ruby on Rails was getting really popular, and he was like, well, we need a new corporate website, so let’s try Ruby on Rails. And I was like, ⁓ so do you know Ruby? No. ⁓ I barely know how to do programming, so we just gotta learn together.

We did everything the wrong way. Like we built our own auth, we built our own pagination, we built our own, like they had gems for these things back then, but we were like, nah, nah, I’ll just make it myself. It was bad, it was very bad. But I learned so much, was drinking from a fire hose every single day, but it was, it paid very, very little. And I lived in the smallest apartment you could ever imagine. I’ve seen walk-in closets bigger than what I lived in back then.

But it was delightful and it was such a good experience for me. And then I moved back to the States after about a year of working at that job, a little less than a year. And I just started working at random little agencies, got into WordPress. I feel like a lot of people honed their skills in the WordPress days. A lot of love to WordPress. I will never touch it ever again, but I learned a lot of things.

And that’s kind of how I got into things is just through that one weird job in Japan. Everything I’ve learned on the job.

Bethany (06:56) That’s awesome. What a cool journey to getting here. I feel to even though there is there were probably gems to do all those things, you probably learned it better than anyone who else who was doing it by hand rolling all of that. So really cool. Looking at what you do today, curious if you could maybe describe to folks what what is a developer advocate? ⁓ So how would you define your job to somebody who might not?

Be familiar with that and what’s your day to day look like?

Annie Sexton (07:23) So the question of what is a developer advocate is hard to answer because everyone’s going to give you, you ask 10 different developer advocates are going to give you 10 different answers. But I think the themes you will hear are, it’s about community building. It’s about education and it’s about building relationships with your target audience. And I do say target audience because let’s be honest, it’s a marketing role. It is a marketing role.

I think a lot of developer advocates kind of shy away from that term because they’re like, no, we just want to be buddies with our customer. Like that’s not not true, but like, we’re paid money to sell you things. Like that’s, that’s not not true. think. so that is part of it, but, ⁓ you can’t market to developers in the same way as other people. not to say that like we’re so special, but, but truly like you can’t, it’s a much harder to bullshit us and.

we’re very, I would say, untrusting of a lot of of sparkly kind of marketing words. I think there’s a reason why we’ll get to AI in a second. But I do think that I would be surprised if the AI marketing tool is actually working on developers specifically, maybe other customers, right? But like,

developers are a lot better at smelling BS. And so the way you basically appeal to them is by gaining their trust, right? And showing that you are an authority on a particular subject and you educate them and you pique their interest, right? And that’s really at the core of really good developer advocacy. And I would say good marketing in general. Like I think that’s marketing done well in a non-

schmarmie way, you What I do is very specific. Some developer advocates give a lot of talks at conferences. Some of them write blog posts. I do YouTube. Again, I just sort of fell into this role. It’s kind of crazy and I’m pretty good at it. I am a big believer in education as a tool to gaining trust in users and

Even though I really didn’t like that particular English teaching job that I had, I have always been a teacher at heart. I love, love, love teaching. I have infinite patience for it. I would definitely consider myself a Jack of all trades, except for when it comes to teaching. There’s very few skills that I’m like, yeah, I’m I’m stellar at that. My ego is like way up here on my teaching abilities. I feel very confident in that, which is…

really nice to have like one thing that you can actually feel that confident about. And it’s something that really brings me joy. And I think a part of that passion for education comes from the fact that I had to learn all this stuff myself and respectfully, developers are terrible writers and terrible educators. Not all of them, obviously not all of them, but many of them are. And I found I had so many questions that were just never addressed. There was so much assumed knowledge.

Obviously you have to assume some amount of knowledge. Like if you’ve got this repository on GitHub that you want people for a library, there’s an assumption that you know how to use Git, right? To get the files, you know? So there’s like some assumptions that are understandable, but I think more often than not, people do not cater to the appropriate level in my opinion. And I would much rather cater to a lower level, ⁓ like,

not even lower level, lower level of experience than is necessary because it makes it easier for other people to understand, right? Everyone loves a explain it to me like I’m five kind of thing. like no one doesn’t enjoy those things even if they already understand the material, I think. So I think giving people a, you know, an entertaining format

to learn things, sometimes things that you didn’t even know you wanted to know is a really great way of building a relationship with the audience that you want to target. And in the case of Fly, I mean, I do make videos more specifically about, check out this cool product. I literally just an hour or two ago, I published a video on our new managed Postgres service. You should check it out.

Or that one was more just like, look at this product. at me. Isn’t it amazing? Right. Just sort of that’s, that’s more like basic. Look, we were selling you a thing, but many of the, in fact, most of the videos are me explaining a weird thing about the platform that honestly, you don’t even need to know to use fly. It’s just kind of like, Whoa, look at this weird thing we did with the CLI. We created our own like IP protocol in user space so that we can proxy this, that, and yet it’s

It was very, very, it’s very, very cool stuff how we make things behind the scenes. So I like to do a lot of how the sausage is made kind of videos because for the most part, when it comes to company videos, you know, you kind of have to minimize the number of videos that are all about your platform. As weird as that sounds, because largely people don’t care, you know,

And I think that piquing people’s interest and that like that, those are going to be the people that will return to these videos that will return to the channel. There’s plenty of people who don’t even use fly yet that are subscribed to the channel because they just like to learn these weird little things that we do and they’re super fun explainer videos. So I think focusing more on education, more on entertainment.

is a really great way of building an audience that really values your content and doesn’t just feel like, here’s another video trying to sell me a thing. So that’s been my approach and I really enjoy doing video. It’s also a great place for me to, I have a lot of different skills. Like I said, jack of all trades and it’s nice to have a, an avenue to use all of my skills in one place. That was a lot.

Bethany (13:21) soon.

No, that definitely makes sense. And I really love that philosophy. I mean, that’s why there’s a lot of student programs for software. So students learn how to use these tools and learn their skills through these tools so that when they go into the workforce, they end up using them. So I think education truly is the best form of marketing in a way.

Definitely makes sense. Also, I have been a huge fan of Fly’s blog post for a while, so I can totally see the videos being an offshoot of that and a really good way to start branching out. Very cool. yes.

Annie Sexton (13:48) you

Jonathan Tamsut (14:04) I’m really interested in like education. used to teach, pro you know, web development and computer science. ⁓

And I guess, like what makes a good teacher to you? Like what are techniques, skills, books? I don’t know, they’re just like philosophies around teaching. Because I think, yeah, there’s like so much there and I think so much of education is really bad. Like so much of our sort of historical practice is bad.

Annie Sexton (14:35) Right. I think a lot of it comes down to really knowing who you’re talking to and not assuming that they know very much. This is gonna sound a little harsh, but I always think of targeting my videos towards a like, can a mid-level, maybe even like early career JavaScript developer understand this? No shade to JavaScript developers, I am one, so.

But I just think of just like your normie. I know some Next.js kind of JavaScript developer. If they understand what I’m talking about, then I’ve done a good job. I think too often we…

will try to jump to the complicated stuff without building a ladder for people to follow you. And I think I’ve just been very good at having to ask the stupid questions along the way. This is where I’ll admit, so I use a lot of AI in my research. I always start with human written articles, books, things like that when I’m learning about a particular thing.

I always, always, always start with that. And then as I’m reading, if I get stuck on something, I’ll go to like Chagy BT and be like, Hey, I’m reading this article. It’s saying this thing about connection pooling or whatever, but what does XYZ like? This sounds like this other thing. What’s the difference between these things? I’m really, really good at identifying my points of confusion. And I know that if I’m confused about a thing, someone else’s too. I’m trying to say this in the most delicate way. Sometimes I think that.

I don’t always, like whatever amount of like stupidity I have, I mean, I’m not actually trying to like be self-deprecating here, but it’s actually a good thing when you feel confused about something because that means that, especially as a teacher, it means that, ooh, there’s a question there. And that’s a question I need to answer for the people I’m teaching, right? And so I think,

in the past, my inexperience, my, you know, all the imposter syndrome that you, you know, have to work through as a developer, everyone deals with it. That’s actually to your benefit is don’t ever try and gloss over something that you don’t fully understand. Dig into it, dig into it, dig into it, dig into it. And, and don’t, I don’t, really try not to gloss over a lot of things because I think when you do that, then you’re like, you’re missing out on some questions that people will.

So ask the stupid questions. Ask the stupid questions, because they’re not stupid. They’re not actually stupid.

And I think that is where you get a better like, I want to say curriculum. I’m not making curriculum, but you know what I mean? It’s easier for people to follow what you’re talking about. Don’t assume anything.

Jonathan Tamsut (17:16) Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. What, thing I’ve been kind of seeing a lot more, and I think it’s like, especially for technical topics is like kind of what you said, like building up like a semantic tree, like there’s like, cause I think, yeah, like you mentioned like connection pooling, like it’s hard to understand connection pooling if you don’t know what like a thread is and if, like, in order to understand a thread, you just like what is operating system and what’s the CD, like there’s like all these concepts that will kind of need you to understand. I think traditional learning doesn’t address that. It doesn’t try to like really fill in these gaps and like,

build the semantic tree of concepts that you need in order to add a leaf node.

Annie Sexton (17:53) Yeah, actually one of my favorite videos that I made on, have a, so I have the fly.io, I have the fly.io YouTube channel and I also have a personal channel that I occasionally post to. It’s kind of shifted to more AI machine learning related topics. ⁓ Like I recently did a video on tokenization because I find that really interesting, but a while back, I actually did a video on run times and like what the heck is a run time.

Erika (17:53) Yeah, I think it’s an important.

Jonathan Tamsut (17:53) ⁓ Cool.

Annie Sexton (18:18) We hear this all the time, the JavaScript runtime, the runtime. And you’re like, what is that? What even is that? And I think that it’s those kinds of terms that we just take for granted. And it’s not always possible to address those things in every single video, but I, that is what I find really interesting. You know, what’s an engine, right? What counts as an engine? You know, how much of these are specific?

that are more color wheeled to a language versus like, is this a specific thing in computer science in general? What is this? Like, we like to pretend that certain words are concrete things and they just are not. That, you know, some of them are, but not always. Even the term threads doesn’t always mean the same thing. You know, it’s bonkers. So I think that is the kind of level of

specificity that I love to get into of like, okay, so we keep saying this stuff. We pretend like we know what we’re talking about, but do we really? Let’s break it down. That’s the fun stuff.

Erika (19:23) Yeah, it’s interesting kind of zooming out on like software language as a whole and like, I don’t know, this is probably like a whole other topic of like confusing software terms that like sound like one thing but actually mean something else. Because a lot of, I mean a lot of soft, basically all of software like came from somebody’s head. Like there are like physical restrictions to computing but like

most of like the concepts are created from like, hey, I had this mental model of how this thing is supposed to work. And so I attached this term to it because that’s what made sense to me. But a lot of times, I mean, maybe not a lot of times, but sometimes, you know, it doesn’t always translate to like somebody else’s mental model. So like you mentioned threads, it’s like, well, why do we even use that word? Like, who even came up with that in the first place? And

you know, yeah, like to your point, like what does it actually mean? And I think that like depth of understanding, you kind of alluded to it in your like learning approach to where you said like, I never start with AI. And I think I’ve personally had the experience where I like I have that false expertise cliff where like all

And I think it’s made worse by AI where you’ll generate a report or generate something. And it all makes a ton of sense, but there’s a lot of jargon and a lot of like stuff in there that you kind of gloss over and you sort of like halfway understand. But by the end of it, you’re like, do I really know what this all means? Like, no. And that kind of like gut check is important to be aware of where learning is supposed to be somewhat uncomfortable.

and if you dig into something and don’t have any questions, you probably don’t understand it.

Annie Sexton (21:19) I think there’s sort of an internal litmus test of confusion of if there’s any kind of parts you read over and you’re like, I don’t know, that sounds legit, but I’ve gotten very good at reading certain things. like, that sounds like a thing, but like if someone were to prod at me and say, explain this in more detail, I’d be like, don’t You know, and if I ever reach that point in my explanations,

where I cover a thing and if someone were to ask me more and I go, I know I’ve not done. I’m not done with my research. Part of this, will fully admit, part of this is just motivated by an absolute fear of being a woman and being wrong on the internet, which is not a thing. Like, I’m talking about tech and I’m a woman. You can’t be wrong, Annie, which is such an unfair standard to hold myself to.

But I just know, and it’s happened before, I just know that they will come for you, they will attack you. So part of it is motivated a little bit by that fear, I’ll admit, but I’ve learned to be a little more forgiving of myself.

Jonathan Tamsut (22:25) I also just want to say I really like your thumbnail pictures on your videos. They’re really funny. Specifically the Kubernetes without nodes video. That’s a funny thumbnail. You’re just making funny faces. I can tell you, it looks like you have fun making them.

Annie Sexton (22:36) Thank you. That’s half my job.

I do. It’s very uncool when you see like behind the scenes of being a YouTuber when you’re making thumbnails. There’s just a lot of like usually like in order you don’t I don’t know how other YouTubers do it but usually what happens is you just like have the camera rolling and you kind of go like

You just, I’m sorry, if anyone’s listening to this podcast, have no idea what I was just saying, but I was just like pausing and making faces at the camera. That’s what it’s like. It’s very lame. Thank God no one’s actually looking at me when this is happening.

Brittany Ellich (23:10) love to see what that looks like though. that. Let’s talk a little bit because I know you do a lot of learning about AI and learning with AI now and I’m really curious sort of you know what your opinions are on it. I know there’s a lot of people that have very strong opinions either pro or against AI and I’m curious what where you’re at on that spectrum and

Annie Sexton (23:31) Mm-hmm.

Brittany Ellich (23:35) what does it look like to you? How are you learning and keeping up with what’s happening right now?

Annie Sexton (23:39) So, AI gives me a lot of anxiety. I’m not gonna lie. But I have thrown myself into learning about it and that has really helped my anxiety. It has made me feel a little more, probably not in control of things, but on top of things enough.

I’m gonna start with a good thing. So AI has drastically improved my career for the better. Like my career would not be the same without it. Excuse me. As I said, the way I found it useful is after learning about a thing from some human written content that could be documentation, that could be a book.

I will then go to some LLM and can you hear that in the background? I’m sorry if you can, whatever. I’ll go to some LLM and I will pretend like it’s just a, it’s a senior engineer who can answer my questions. I usually, if I can copy and paste something in, I will.

I don’t assume that it knows everything. If it’s like really ancient knowledge, right? About like IPv6 addresses and like how that came up. Like that’s pretty standard. It’s set in stone. There’s not a lot of opinions about when IPv6 came out. Like it’s just, it’s whatever. I’ll still fact check that kind of thing. But usually what I’ll do, let’s say I’m reading an article about a particular subject. I’ll copy that article into

Claude or Chachi B.T. and I’ll say here’s this article that I was reading. I don’t understand this one section. It says this, but that sounds like it’s contradicting X, Y, Z or you whatever my question is. By pasting in the article, I know that it has the context that it needs and it’s not just going to be like pulling things out of its ass, right? I mean, technically it’s all hallucinations, but.

Whatever. So I have found it incredibly useful because I can dig, I can dig, I can dig. And what’s good is that a lot of the things that I’m digging into are proven facts. These are not opinions. This is how a kernel works. This is what kernel space is. This is what user space is. This is what a VM is. This is what a hyperadvisor is. There are just straight up answers to these. It’s not ambiguous.

And so I feel a lot more confident leaning on AI for the type of research that I do.

And I also get my coworkers to check my work. So anytime I’m making a video, I’ll have one. mean, part of that is because if I’m talking about how the platform works, I need to make sure that I’m not lying. And so I’ll give it to one of our engineers. ⁓ Thomas usually writes a lot of stuff on the blog. He reads a lot of my scripts and is able to help me a lot. So I do my own fact checking. have other people do fact checking.

fact checking is so important when it comes to using AI, but I do think the notion that, these things can hallucinate, so just don’t use them. think baby bath water, y’all like calm down. You can be an adult and be discerning because people also lie on the internet. I don’t know if you knew that. People lie on the internet too. And so you should never just assume that you can not have to fact check.

No, of course not. And so I find that the benefit of using an LLM for research far outweighs the potential consequences of it hallucinating because you can check the answers, right? You can just, if it lies to you, okay, it lied to you, go find the right answer. You know what I mean? There are certain things that I probably wouldn’t use it as much for.

I’m not gonna talk to it about current events. It doesn’t know anything about current events. These models aren’t, and also like, there’s all sorts of room for bias in those things and I’m not even gonna, like, you can only be so biased in the technical world. Like, you know what mean? You can, there’s only so much bias that can go on, whereas in politics, it’s like, yeah, I’m not even gonna, we’re not gonna talk about politics with GVT, absolutely not. So I think that using it for research is,

Absolutely invaluable. Absolutely invaluable. And I have been able, you know what it is? I have been able in the past when I don’t understand something, what do I do? I either go and research it myself. I try and hone my Google foo, or I talk to a coworker or someone who’s an expert, but you can only ask, like you can ask the best questions to a real human. You won’t always get the best answers because

people, there’s varying degrees of people who can explain things. And also people have lives and some people are more patient than others. And even if they are very patient, you know, if you have a lot of questions, which I always have a lot of questions, there’s sort of a limit to which I feel comfortable asking them my questions and chat GPT will never get annoyed with me. And so I can just be like, but what about that? Wait, I don’t understand that. No, that doesn’t make sense. That sounds the opposite of what you’re what.

Why, why, why? can just be this like annoying little kid and my ADHD brain could just ask all the questions that it wants. And that’s how I learn is I just be like absolutely obnoxious with all of my questions. Sometimes I don’t even like have a very specific question. and I, can still be kind of vague with it and it’ll, it’ll start to put you in the right direction. Absolutely phenomenal. Highly recommend, highly recommend. There is a way of using it.

understanding that it can lie to you, it again, it’s still the benefits still outweigh the consequences, at least in the particular field that I’m researching. I’m not qualified to say if that’s true for like the medical field or the history or whatever, but at least for the stuff that I’m talking about, fantastic. Love it.

Erika (29:30) that’s your sort of overall AI assisted learning approach. And then.

Annie Sexton (29:35) Mm-hmm.

Erika (29:36) curious how you sort of like deal with the complexity of like base knowledge required for AI. Coming from someone who’s not an AI developer, I think you’ve probably talked about this a little bit and the answer might be the same, but

at least with AI itself, like the understanding of the development and the models. So much of the context is like math based or like very complex algorithms. Like, how do you get into that? Or do you kind of like, is that something you sort of take for granted? Like, yeah, what level of expertise do you kind of aim for in that base level knowledge understanding?

when it comes to the area of AI specifically.

Annie Sexton (30:21) Sure. So when I’m doing any videos about AI or machine learning, I, so I always, all of my videos happen to be for a technical audience. All of my videos happen to be for a technical audience. And so.

But. ⁓

That doesn’t mean that they know about machine learning, right? In fact, I assume most of them don’t. I’m still a student of this. I’m not a, also the term AI engineer has been commandeered by software engineers because it used to be you did machine learning. If you’re an AI engineer, are training models. were working on the algorithms. You were working with transformers. You are an AI engineer. Now an AI engineer is somebody who uses the open AI.

API key, right? Like that’s, you know what I mean? All you’re doing is you’re shipping off some context to an LLM hosted in the sky. like that’s more or less. mean, sometimes it’s a little more involved in that, but like it’s, it has changed, which is why I do think nowadays, if you’re talking about a, like the old school AI engineer, you probably are going to say ML, right? A machine learning engineer.

Erika (31:17) That’s good.

Annie Sexton (31:25) I, so I’ve read a couple of books on machine learning that’s given me a good foundation. One of them is called Deep Learning a Visual Approach. Fantastic, very little math, which the fact that I was able to get through talking about like convolutional neural networks without talking about hardly any math is incredible. Just a testament to, I think his name is Andrew Glassner who wrote this book. Highly recommend, it’s a beast. It’s like a chunky, it’s a chunky boy, but.

It’s such a good book and I made my way through that and that gave me a really good foundational knowledge. But I assume when I’m doing videos on these kinds of topics that people’s experience is that they’ve used an LLM before and perhaps, and they know what an LLM is. I don’t even know, I don’t even assume that people know what like a diffusion model is.

I don’t assume that people know what transformers are. don’t.

I assume people are only slightly more technical than a non-technical person using ChaiGBT, right? Maybe these people have worked with the OpenAI API or the Anthropic API. Maybe, but that’s about it. And then I assume nothing, right? I also think that when you’re a modern day AI engineer, you need to know a lot less. You know, you need to know

context window, you need to know what tokens are, but you don’t even need to know what tokens are. That’s the thing. You know what mean? Most people understand tokens to be, your text gets broken into little pieces. It’s not exactly words. It’s like parts of words usually. And that’s it. know, your text gets broken into little pieces, but people don’t often know, like I’d be willing to bet that most people don’t actually know what those tokens actually are.

And that’s okay. And so like, that’s a good place to start. that is the position that I like to take when I’m explaining these things. I mean, the way I’ve been doing this, the reason I started that, that second personal YouTube channel to talk about all this was because I knew I wanted to become more of an expert on this stuff because it’s the future and part of it’s, know, I don’t want to get left behind, more like if this is an incredibly powerful and also potentially very scary tool.

And I want to make sure I know what I’m talking about. And I know that I can see through the hype. and so what I do is I just become like a mini expert on one thing at a time, right? Just like a little baby, like I’m gonna get like baby, baby expert on the basics of what a neural network is and what byte pair encoding, byte pair encoding is what this other thing is. Right. And I, I am a huge believer in becoming a mini expert, just like a little micro expert. That’s my whole job.

And it’s great. So that’s how I like to approach teaching about machine learning. I don’t, I machine also, here’s the other thing. I’m mostly talking to software engineers when I’m making these videos, right? Software engineering. Some people are going to disagree with me on this. think software engineering knowledge is basically useless with machine learning. It’s basic. Cause machine learning is all math, not like a little bit, all math, all. I’m going to say it again. It’s all math.

Like, and I never took calculus, I never took statistics, and that’s all it is. You know, aside from the idea of like input-output,

Yeah, nothing about software engineering has been helpful in learning any of this stuff. So it’s easy to make these kinds of educational videos because I am my target audience. Right? I know what it’s like to come from knowing almost nothing about machine learning.

Erika (35:06) I do appreciate that part of your answer involved reading actual books as a big fan of actual books. Yeah, two thumbs up on books.

Annie Sexton (35:13) Me too. I like books.

Brittany Ellich (35:17) Well, I think we are probably getting close to time. So we’re going to move on to our fun segment and then we’ll give Annie a chance to share, you know, where to find you. But first, our fun segment. We’re all a bunch of engineers who are, you know, very passionate about software engineering or, you know, passionate about the things that they’re learning about. But not all of us, I feel like, are completely

know, we’re also all humans and doing things outside of that. So I thought we would go around and share things we do for the pure enjoyment of doing them that might not have anything to do with building software.

And I’ll give you all a chance to think. The thing that I do that has nothing to do with software at all is I crochet. I love crocheting. I love making things. And it’s a very fun activity. I sometimes end up making things that are software adjacent, like the cute gophers that I make, but otherwise just just crocheting. Annie, did you want to go next and share?

Annie Sexton (36:15) no, I’m going let y’all go first. I’ve been yapping. I want to hear from y’all.

Brittany Ellich (36:18) Okay.

⁓ Bethany, do you want to go next?

Bethany (36:23) Yeah, I’d say probably reading. Like I do read technical books, but most of what I read are non-technical and I don’t do anything with that. I don’t share my opinions typically unless it’s with close friends. So it’s just really something for me. that’s always, it’s always nice to just cuddle up with a book and get really involved in it.

Erika (36:44) I’ve always wanted to be like a dancer and I like sort of grew up dancing, but I’m not very good at it. But I still do like dance classes every once in a while. Like I try to do like one or one a week or one every other week or something. And I very much enjoy it even though I’m not good at it. So I’m choose that. It’s always like the end of a stressful day. And it’s like the last thing I wanna do. Like the thing that I really wanna do is that

my couch and do nothing. And then I force myself to get out of the house and go to a class and I always feel so much better.

Brittany Ellich (37:20) That is so cool,

I had no idea that you did that.

Annie Sexton (37:21) What kind of dance?

Erika (37:22) I’ve mostly been doing ballet. Yeah, which, you know, like I said, I probably look like a complete fool, but I don’t really care.

Jonathan Tamsut (37:30) That’s pretty cool. I don’t think I could ever do ballet. I don’t think my body would support that. Yeah, maybe actually with training, sure I could. Yeah, recently I’ve been really interested in like rockets and Mars colonization. I just got a job working at a company that makes rockets. And so I’ve been learning how rockets work and then learning about colonizing Mars and

the challenges and the, you know, reading a book on sort of the, the pros and cons of colonizing Mars and, and, yeah, there’s, there’s, there’s a lot there. So yeah.

Brittany Ellich (38:11) What book is it? Out of curiosity.

Jonathan Tamsut (38:13) It is called… I have to look it up. It’s on my Goodreads. If you follow me on Goodreads, Brittany, would know. It is called A City on Mars. Can we settle space? Can we settle space and have we really thought this through?

Brittany Ellich (38:20) Okay, I’ll go find it.

Whoa.

Jonathan Tamsut (38:29) ⁓

Annie Sexton (38:30) Hmm.

Jonathan Tamsut (38:30) yeah. So…

Bethany (38:32) I gotta know, what are

the pros of colonizing Mars?

Jonathan Tamsut (38:36) Well, I think one is, I mean, there’s, there’s, number one is like, you know, there’s natural resources that we can mine and bring back to earth. ⁓ Two is we, it can be used for exploration of the cosmos. We can build telescopes and three is it hedges. I mean, this is kind of like the Elon Musk thing. It hedges, you know, any existential risks. So if we destroy this planet, we got to back up planet.

⁓ so

Erika (39:04) plus Matt

Damon lives there, right?

Jonathan Tamsut (39:06) Matt Damon’s there so we can go hang out with him, which is think that’s a pretty big pro.

Annie Sexton (39:11) you.

Brittany Ellich (39:13) wouldn’t want that. That’s great. Okay, Annie. sorry.

Annie Sexton (39:13) That’s pretty good. Have you read the Expanse? It’s…

⁓ yeah. Have you read the Expanse series or watched the show?

Jonathan Tamsut (39:22) No, I, yeah, no, I haven’t. I…

Annie Sexton (39:22) It’s not about,

yeah. You should. From what I understand, I watched the show and I’ve started reading the books and it’s like a hard sci-fi story. And so a lot of the science-y stuff is like pretty close to believable. And anyways, they have a whole, there’s like a whole colony nation on Mars and I’d be curious your thoughts.

Jonathan Tamsut (39:26) That’s right, But I shouldn’t. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, I like have, I’ve tried to read sci-fi so many times.

But anyways, that’s a separate topic. I will let you tell us about your interest.

Annie Sexton (39:57) I draw comic books. if you’re interested, here I’m gonna do a plug. So I’m on Blue Sky. My tech one is at anisexin.com. But if you just look up anisexin, like the other anisexin on Blue Sky is all of my drawings. I’m working on, I actually published…

I say published, I printed 10 copies of my first graphic novel this year called Peach Boy. It’s not for sale. I’m sorry. But, showing myself that I could finish that was incredibly motivating. And now I’m onto my next comic book. This is a whole series. It’s going to be like 500 plus pages. I’m working with a real editor that I pay human dollars with. It’s amazing. I cannot tell you how much writing this story, working on the sketches has been healing for me.

Like there’s so much, existential crisis is like the term for the year in 2025, it’s like on so many fronts. And this little story, this dumb little story is just keeping me afloat. It’s just the, it’s the love of my life. I wholeheartedly think people should make more stories. is. I don’t understand how anyone can find anything more joyful. I just think it’s so delightful. So that’s what I do.

If you want to follow along, check me out on Blue Sky if you want.

Brittany Ellich (41:11) Yeah, absolutely. We’ll link it in the show notes so that anybody can check it out. Great. Well, thank you, Annie, for joining us. You already mentioned Blue Sky. Is there anywhere else that folks can follow you? YouTube, obviously.

Annie Sexton (41:25) ⁓ yeah, the YouTube, if you just look up Annie Sexton on YouTube, or fly.io, you can find the fly.io channel, that’s easy to find, and then just my name. I think that’s… Yeah, you can find me on YouTube as well.

Brittany Ellich (41:38) Great. All right, and we’ll include everything there in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for tuning in to Overcommitted and for hearing about Annie. This was wonderful. If you like what you hear, please follow, subscribe, or do whatever it is you’re supposed to do on the podcast app of your choice. Check us out on Blue Sky and share with your friends. And as a quick reminder, we are still working on the Looks Good to Me book club, and there’s still plenty of time to get involved. Check out the show notes for more info.

Until next week, goodbye.