28: Ep. 28 | From Engineer to Entrepreneur with Brad Heller

Brittany Ellich (00:00) welcome to the Overcommitted Podcast where we talk about our commitments and some stuff in between. I’m your host this week,Brittany joined by fellow host.

Erika (00:09) Erika.

Brittany Ellich (00:09) And, and that’s it. That’s just us today. We are a group of software engineers, just two of us today, who initially met working on a team together at GitHub and found a common interest in building cool things. So we decided to start talking about it on the internet. We continue to meet and share our learning experiences and discuss our lives as developers. So whether you are pushing code or taking on new challenges, we are so happy you’re listening.

Today we are joined by Brad Heller, the co-founder and CTO of Tower, a data and AI company building a serverless Python native data platform that basically gives data engineers superpowers in the cloud. If you’ve ever wrestled with deployment pipelines, infrastructure headaches, or just wished you could focus on the fun parts of data engineering instead of DevOps, Brad’s been thinking about…

how to solve exactly those problems. Brad’s journey to tower was not a straight line. He was in the trenches as a software engineer, navigated the wild world of startups and learned firsthand what it takes to go from writing code to building companies after having a successful exit in the past. Today, we are diving into that evolution, how you know when it’s time to stop being an employee and start being a founder, and what it really means to wear the CTO hat as your company grows. So…

Let’s get into it. ⁓ Yeah, I’m so glad that you joined us. One other thing, Brad is also my brother, I should say. I did not include that in the intro, but I feel like it’s interesting because we’ve had a very similar background.

But very different ways of getting to the world of software engineering and very different experiences within it. So I’m really excited to talk to you and learn about your experience in startups because that’s not a thing that I’ve done and where, you know, how that has evolved over time. So what drew you to startups initially while you were planning your career?

Brad Heller (02:02) Yeah, good question. Planning my career, that’s probably a big word. When I was at university, I always wanted to work at big companies afterwards, after I was done. I thought that’s where you go to make impact, where impact in my mind is ideas I have somehow affecting, hopefully improving, other people’s lives. And I thought, that’s where you go to do these things.

At the same time, like towards the end of my university career, I learned about this guy named Paul Graham, who like maybe you guys have heard of him. He’s kind of a big deal in the startup ecosystem. But back in 2008 or whatever it was, like he was just getting started with this thing he was calling Y Combinator. The first few batches of Y Combinator. Back then, I think it was like 10 companies per batch or something like that with like super small.

super small investments going into them. But I kind of fell in love with this idea of people like me going out and taking their ideas into the world and driving impact on their own. After university, I did go on to work at big companies. I worked at Microsoft for a little bit. I went to work at WebMD, which is kind of a internet dinosaur at this point, kind of dates me. But…

Anyway, like I just, after struggling through that for a couple of years, I just really couldn’t like take corporate life, you know? Like I said, I wanted to do impactful work. I didn’t want to have to worry about like performance reviews and like keeping time sheets and like having like, you know, these horrible like corporate meetings with people and stuff, you know? I wanted to be treated like an adult, I guess. That’s how I felt at the time. Anyway, so I went and…

you know, found my first startup job in like 2010 maybe. I remember I was like 24 years old maybe and one of the, one of my coworkers at WebMD, this girl who was like maybe 22, she was like, wow, that’s so risky. You’re going to work for a startup. And I was like, what does risky even mean at 22 years old? You know, like what are you?

risking. You’ve got to work for another 40 years anyway, right? So like, maybe we should just go do something. But I mean, actually, I guess things are kind of a little bit different today, like for junior engineers, like right after university. But, you know, let’s see what we can do about that. But yeah, I went and go join this startup, and it kind of like set me on this path where like in the next two, three years, I feel like I learned like

a thousand X more than I would have slogging it out in big tech, about building software, about selling software, about shipping software. like I’ve kind of feel like in big tech, you don’t really learn how to build software. You learn how to like follow company guidelines and how to like make architects happy, you know, which can kind of be like a proxy for building software, but like in the end, you know, yeah. So I don’t know. It was really cool moment.

that was really impactful. I met my first co-founder actually at this startup. And I think more than anything else, it really opened my eyes that there was other people out there that cared about these things the way that I cared about them and wanted to do things. At the same time, I was kind of coming out of the .NET ecosystem and into the Rails ecosystem for the first time. That was also a huge eye-opener because all these ideas that the ecosystem had.

that weren’t well reflected in the .NET ecosystem back then. Especially, again, these were like Balmer days, know? So, super different. that was pretty, I don’t know, very impactful time.

Brittany Ellich (05:36) Yeah, no, that makes sense. I have worked in both .NET and now in Ruby and Rails and can confirm that it’s very different ways of thinking between the two. ⁓

Brad Heller (05:44) Yeah, but there’s good

ideas making their way back into the dot net ecosystem now. ⁓ I’ll never, hopefully never get paid to write dot net again, but you know, here we are.

Brittany Ellich (05:49) Yeah.

You never know.

You never know what the future is going to hold. I like that idea, too, of thinking that it’s, you know, the 40 year career was that Paul Graham or no, that was it was another I have to look up that article. I’ll say save that as well. And the show notes. But yeah, the 40 year career about how like you don’t need to just like rush through this and hit everything.

Brad Heller (05:57) Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, totally. Yeah,

absolutely. Huge topic with like, you know, the topic of the show is like helping engineers improve. Like one of the like pigeonholes or traps maybe that people fall into is this idea that like, to be the best like front end engineer, I need to focus entirely on like just doing front end work, you know, or whatever. And yeah, similarly with careers, people, people actually like in big tech in particular, people think like, you know, they need to speed run.

the corporate ladder also, you know, how do I get to be, everyone wants to be a principal engineer. I was working at, before I did Tower, I did a little segue in big tech actually, cause I hadn’t done it in a while and I was like living in a new place though. Thought it would be kind of fun to try out and like everyone wants to be a principal engineer. Like the only conversation you have with even like junior engineers is like, okay, how do I become a principal engineer? And then when you go talk to these principal engineers, they’re like, man.

Brittany Ellich (07:09) Hahaha

Erika (07:11) How do I not become a principal engineer? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, feel like it also kind of speaks to some values. like you mentioned, like, wouldn’t like I want to do something like I don’t I don’t want to like follow everyone else’s instructions. And like, to me, that speaks of like passion for the work and

Brad Heller (07:12) Yeah. How do I go back to being a senior engineer? Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (07:14) a bag.

Erika (07:35) Yeah, like really doing it for yeah, doing it for you, like navigating your own career. Like it sounds like you you would be an entrepreneur no matter where you are. Yeah, like even in a big tech situation, like like you’re you’re you’re an entrepreneurial spirit, making your own path. And I mean, I would argue that that’s like that. That is

a tenant of success for anybody. But I think depending where you fall on that entrepreneurship spectrum, it can be really grating to like not have the opportunities to realize those ideas and some kind of scale.

Brad Heller (08:14) Yeah, totally. mean, I think your point about aligning your passions with the things that you do is one of the most important things to being successful in anything. If you are swimming upstream against your own intuitions or values, you can do that. You can slog it out. Maybe you’ll have varying degrees of success. But the magic in

happens in like all aspects of life, feel like when you align like your values, the thing you care about and like the things that you do fundamentally, right? yeah, entrepreneurship, I think is yeah, one of those one of those things for me. And it turns out actually like building things is one of those things for me too. Like, I got into software originally because like, I just like to make things, you know.

And when I was a little, little kid, I was like, man, this is so cool that with a computer, you can build whatever you want. Like you don’t need any resources, right? Like it’s just like what you can imagine, you know? And you can make it do all these different things. You know, that’s what like attracted it to me originally. And yeah.

Again, like a long time ago, like in university, like I met a lot of people that also kind of thought that way. The ecosystem has changed a lot, you know, it’s like so focused on, you know, what’s that app where everyone goes to complain about their job that managers hate ⁓ has a red icon. Blind. Yeah. Blind is like the total comp race, you know, it’s not about like, how do I do something impactful? It’s about how do I get like, who’s got the best signing bonus, you know, and like,

Brittany Ellich (09:43) blind?

Brad Heller (09:54) How can I… And I guess that’s like important for some. Like that’s an important thing too, right? But anyway,

Brittany Ellich (10:00) Mm-hmm.

I’m curious how that landscape has changed over time, actually. When you first entered software, were people coming to it because of the compensation at the time? Or how has that changed over time? And have you seen how people who came into this just for the comp, if they’re still happy doing it throughout their career or not?

Brad Heller (10:20) Yeah.

Yeah. No, think, yeah, like it was much more niche back in when I got into the industry, like for context, like my first job, like where I got paid to write code, I got it in 2005. And so that means this is my like 20th year doing this stuff, which is a bit difficult to say out loud.

But yeah, it was much more niche back in the day. People came to it because they loved it, they cared about it. They were builders also and they wanted to, or they were in love with technology or something like that. And yeah, I think it was just at the beginning of this rise to Google, I think they IPO’d in what, 2006? Facebook was just coming on the

Like literally was founded in 2004, 2005, was just becoming like, you know, by 2008 was like this behemoth that it was becoming, you know, like the concept of quote unquote big tech back then was like sun microsystems, you know, or IBM, maybe Microsoft back then, you know, which are not like sexy jobs, right? Like it was not like, you know, like the position of the way it is now.

Brittany Ellich (11:20) IBM.

Mm-hmm.

Brad Heller (11:33) So,

yeah, it was much more niche and like people were coming at it for because of the love, I guess, or just starting to come at it because of the money. I know loads of people who’ve gotten into it because of money now, and they’re doing fine. I think there’s definitely a gap between the people who are doing this because they love it and it happens to pay well at the same time, you know?

But, and I always ask myself, like, how can you just, how can you do that, man? How can you get up and go to work? But actually loads of people like get out too, you know, like the joke I always tell is that like, you know, the like typical career path on LinkedIn is like, you know, junior engineers, engineer, senior engineer, principal engineer, shepherd, or like woodworker or something like that, you know? And maybe that that’s kind of part of the, you know, other side of it.

Erika (12:27) you

Brad Heller (12:27) The other thing that’s

changed is that we didn’t have the concept of, or like influencers in the tech industry were like, there was like Joel Spolsky, there was like Scott Goo, know, like there was like two or three dudes that either had their own company or they were working for like Microsoft or something like that. And now there’s like, I get like Instagram reels for like Temporal, like by like these like comedians.

who specialize in making comedy for engineers, software engineers, know? It’s like so bizarre to me. But it also means that people have a lot more leverage over their networks and everything now, right? So it’s good thing and a bad thing, yeah, yeah. And maybe the last thing I would say is like, would be remiss to not mention how AI has changed everything, right? Like the way that we work.

Like if you asked me a year ago, I’d be like, I don’t know. But now like, I hardly remember like having to write all the code in a file. It’s really crazy.

Erika (13:27) Well, let’s go back to your personal journey here and dig into that moment when you decided to start your first company and what the moment was when you thought, I need to solve this problem. I need to build this rather than complaining about it or hoping that somebody else would.

Brad Heller (13:32) Mm, sure.

Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know if there was like one problem. Like I have a collection of problems in my brain that I like keep thinking about, you know, like with tower, like I, one of the like initial things was like, I think there needs to be like a good platform as a service. And like, I happen to be working a lot with data engineers, you know? And so like that, that was the like impetus to go like work on this problem, right? my first startup was.

a GitHub for designers. GitHub had changed the way the engineers were working because you could do it collaboratively, but that didn’t exist for graphic designers. And now we have Figma, which is like, you So there’s a collection of problems, I guess, that I keep working on. other ones that I’ve got in there that I’ll probably work on in the future as well. But…

Yeah, like I think the driver was more like, I need to do something myself, you know? Like maybe it’s like a social thing or maybe it’s just like, I don’t know, but I just have this thing inside me that was like, I have to go do this myself, you know? And so, yeah, once I kind of had the right problem, had the right partner, it was like, okay, let’s go check it out, see what happens. Yeah, take the leap, as they say.

Erika (15:01) And did you have sort of a checklist before you took that leap or did you go without really thinking too much of the next steps?

Brad Heller (15:13) Yeah, that’s a good question. thought I had this, or I had a checklist at the time and like, I now realize how wrong that was. Like I spent, like I said, I, you know, I learned about this guy, Paul Graham and all the work he’s doing. He’s got these great essays online that you can go read and follow. And like, he’s the guy, Y Combinator obviously like founded the hacker news community. And I could like have great conversations on there back in the day and today, but back then too.

with other people who are doing this startup stuff. But I other friends that are interested in startups as well. We would meet and talk about them. One buddy of mine and I, we had endless conversations about them. But in the end, I was just sort of getting ready to get ready, I think. I was probably a bit afraid. I didn’t know where to start.

And I think getting my first real startup job was the first catalyst for that. People who want to be founders, I often recommend they go work at a startup if they’re not ready to go do one themselves. Because you have to kind go through the founder journey in terms of not just writing the code and all that stuff, but seeing, hey, what’s it like to get early customers? How do you talk to?

these people, like how, what’s the pre-sales process like in the post-sales process and fundraising and get exposure to that, you know? So like, these startup jobs were like very formative that way. Yeah. And in the end, the thing that I think really like made me take the leap into being a founder was my, I mentioned at that first startup I worked at, I met my co-founder there. We applied to join an incubator, kind of like a Y Combinator, but for the like Portland area, right?

and we got in like magically somehow. have no idea how these like two 26 year old idiots got selected for this, thing, it ended up being like transformative. Obviously for me, it ended up being really great for, the ecosystem as well. Like we ended up like working with a lot of companies in the Portland area where I come from originally, along the way.

In fact, was actually there in Japan, I was in Tokyo, and there’s a bar there called the PDX Tap Room, where they have like Portland themed stuff. I don’t know why. I think it is in Harajuku in Tokyo. But there’s a book there that talks about Portland makers. they have an interview with a guy, Rick Turoczy

who’s like the grandfather of all the startups in the Portland area. And he was the founder of the Portland incubator experiment. like my story of like starting that company and then like crashing and burning it terribly and joining another company and like how that affected the Portland ecosystem and everything is like documented in this book in Japanese in this bar in Japan. Like just such a weird like, you know, way that impact, I guess. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, taking that leap can be really scary, but I think also people need to realize that you’re not reading another book, reading another business book is not gonna make you a better businessman, know? Reading another, you just need to go do this stuff, right? So I encourage everyone, either go do it or go join a startup and figure it out, yeah.

Erika (18:31) How about engineering specifics of anything from your background that was helpful for you from an engineering perspective in your startup ventures?

Brad Heller (18:42) Yeah, I like I still spend the majority of my day writing code, you know, like the, uh, uh, probably if I had to guess, it’s like 60 to 80 % of my time is spent coding still. Like obviously have loads of meetings and stuff like that. Like all of the things that you learn to do in your like day to day, you also do in startup land, right? Um, like we have a daily stand up.

in the morning that looks a lot like the stand-ups that we would do as like teams everywhere else, you know? We have design reviews for the things that we do, you know? When I first started in startups, by the way, I thought like, you don’t need to do all this stuff. And then obviously horrible things happened, right? So like I’ve brought all this stuff with me now and it’s like gotten better as a result. So like all those skills that you learn are like part of it, you know?

The organizational skills that you get in big tech also I think are really useful in that context. Another thing that’s really important about just being an engineer in general is learning. We’re constantly having to learn new things. Good engineers are constantly learning new things. That’s one of the core things that differentiates good and bad engineers, I think. And so having a good system for learning and understanding what things you need to learn and how to develop.

Like to be a founder, you need to be good at learning. because there’s a ton of stuff you’re to have to do and figure out that like, there’s no one else to do it. Obviously you can go to your network and I can talk to the CMO of some like other portfolio companies. They, should I structure my marketing or whatever, but like all of this stuff, you don’t have to be good at it. You just have to be like a little, you just got to be good enough at it until you can hire someone to do it for you, you know? So you need to have a little bit of a develop a good bit of an intuition for good marketing and like.

of understand the sales process and like how to structure customer success and all these things. Learning, I think, something that makes engineers particularly good, well suited for this. And then finally, networking, think. Being good at networking will take you very far.

Like I developed a lot of networking skills like inside, like big tech, because you have to do it to get things done, you know? So, yeah.

Brittany Ellich (20:58) That makes sense. Yeah, I think it sounds like there’s a lot of skills too that are very far outside of the realm of engineering as well that you’ve had to develop over time. Things like sales, that’s something that I don’t, I’ve never really had to worry about. And it’s kind of nice not having to worry about those because that feels like a very different skill set from building things.

Brad Heller (21:07) Yeah.

Yeah, true.

Yeah, yeah. But I think it’s, I find that to be the interesting part. Like understanding how the entire like business fits together is super interesting. I still get to go focus on writing code and that sort of stuff, but I like being part of the whole process. so, yeah, maybe it’s the entrepreneurial kind of side of me. Yeah. and again, you don’t have to be good at it. You just got to do enough of it to like survive.

until you can hire someone that can do it.

Brittany Ellich (21:47) Makes sense. I’m curious now, so you’ve started several startups now, and so you’ve gone through this experience a few times. How do you scale yourself over time? Like, how do you know when, okay, it’s time to hire somebody to do this role or something, or how do you, do you continue writing code for, you know, 60 to 80 % of your time, the entirety of the lifetime of the startup or yeah.

Brad Heller (22:09) I wish. Yeah,

I wish. That’s a good question, actually. I think I’ve not done a good job of that before. I because engineers, we tend to want to solve problems, right? And that means that we take responsibility for things. Like when something’s broken, like I go and fix it, you know.

because that’s just like the way that my brain works. And so as a result, like taking responsibility for all these things, also maybe have a little bit of a, like, maybe a little bit of a control bent in me or something like that. makes it difficult for me to give things up or to admit when I need help with something, you know? So anyway, like I found myself like over my career either as like the head of engineering at companies,

or as the CTO, kind of like overwhelmed with so many things that I gotta do. then, the answer to the question is just like, give it to someone else, man. Which is like really easy to say. It’s like more difficult to, a little bit more difficult to implement, right? So yeah, I’ve done really poorly at that over the years and I’ve had to kind of learn to like, when, how to feel those inflection points a little bit with.

Tower, I’m actually kind of like trying to solve that problem even earlier. Like if you go to our job site, we’re hiring by the way, and we, I’m looking for like a head of engineering that seems like 10 people, but like offloading the actual work of like, know, building the team, doing the management work, all of that stuff earlier, I think will.

for make for a better outcome. think the other side of this is like understanding like what you are truly good at, you know, what you or what you are uniquely good at perhaps like, yes, I can go do the management stuff. Like I’ve been like in the leadership team in big tech companies, I can do those things, but it’s not like what I’m like good at. It’s definitely not what I’m like uniquely good at, you know, like the company.

is better off with me like going and like writing code, working with a team, being an architect or working with customers, you know? That’s, so yeah, that’s maybe that in terms of like where to look at, like how to scale yourself, find the stuff that like you’re uniquely, like you’re uniquely good at and like make someone else deal with the rest. Yeah.

Erika (24:29) Yeah, delegating itself is a skill and it’s, you know, even more complex when you’re the one deciding who fills the spot where you delegate or like what the role of, you know, that delegation even looks like. Like there’s a question of who, there’s a question of what they’re doing, there’s a question of how to make them successful, how long is it gonna take to ramp them up? Like it’s, yeah.

Brad Heller (24:32) Yeah.

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Erika (24:57) Yeah, simple like assign a task to somebody else and have them do it does not really exist in any world, but especially not in like startup scaling.

Brad Heller (25:08) Yeah,

totally. And then keeping them accountable to getting it done on time and helping unblock them if they get in trouble or whatever is like difficult too. When I first started doing all of that stuff, like my first like real leadership job was the head of engineering for this startup in the Portland area. you know, like I started as like engineer and then they like raised a bunch of money and they needed to hire some people. I was like, I can do that, I guess.

And so, you know, I kind of started scaling out the team and kind of got this, became the head of engineering. And yeah, I really struggled with delegating to people because like, I don’t want to like overload this person. don’t really, you know, like, I just be faster if I do it myself, you know, those sorts of like, that sort of internal dialogue, you know.

⁓ but yeah, I think like, I realized that like people are capable of a lot more than like what you think that they are, you know? yeah. There’s something in there.

Brittany Ellich (26:07) I’m curious, were there any ideas that you had romanticized about starting your own company that did not turn out to be as like the way that you had dreamed about when you were first getting into it?

Brad Heller (26:19) Yeah, totally. You know, like, especially like my friends today, even today, like still think, ⁓ you work for yourself, man. Like, why can’t you just like, you know, why can’t you come on this vacation? Why can’t you like, just go travel with us or whatever? It’s like, no, man, it’s job just like every other job. Like I wake up in the morning, I attend daily stand up. Like I said earlier, I like do like design reviews with the guys. I have one-on-ones with them. Like I have like features. I got a ship. We’ve got.

you know, production issues we got to work on. My day looks exactly like your guys’s day, you know, in the end. So like this idea that you’re like, have this like, freedom. Yeah, it’s true. You have a little bit more, you know, like I can, like, I don’t really have to worry about like PTO, you know, like, I mean, I do for myself and for the team, I can’t let them down and all that stuff, but I don’t really have to count PTO days, right?

And I have a bit more control, like when I really don’t want to do something, yeah, I just like, I’m just not going to do it, you know? Sometimes, I guess there’s some things you got to do. But yeah, it’s not like this, like, I’m just going to go like work, build a company from the beach, know, Tim Ferriss and the four hour work week did a lot of damage to the world, I guess. Yeah. So that was like one thing that was big. Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (27:34) And if you had any advice to anybody getting started in software engineering in general right now, what would that be? Because it’s like we’ve talked about, it’s a very different world now. You’ve talked about how to get into being a founder if you’re already an engineer, but what about somebody just getting into software engineering in general?

Brad Heller (27:40) Mmm.

Yeah.

Yeah,

One of the bits of advice I gave like senior engineers that are looking to move into like a staff role or a principal role is like go.

work outside of your area entirely. Do something outside of your area entirely. Like if you are like a front-end engineer, go create a toy database. Or if you are like a backend engineer, go build something for an Arduino. Or sort out how to make a game engine, or even just how the graphics pipeline works or something like that.

Like by going and working in a different area entirely from what you’re used to working in, you’ll take ideas that these engineers have and bring them back to your work and become a better engineer. Kind of like artists, know, painters going and studying sculpting or something like that. I don’t think it’s too dissimilar. On a related note, I think, to like couch it in 2025, I think that like actually going and writing the code yourself.

is like, don’t lean on the AI too much, you know, yes, AI can make you massively more productive, but you have to really understand like what’s happening. there’s loads of pull requests that I get even today that are like, ⁓ you know, like the guy, the doesn’t understand the code and he also doesn’t understand what the AI emitted, you know, like that’s basically vibe coding, right? and,

Like you have to have like one of these two things like true in order to like kind of have a grasp of the situation. Right. so like, actually going through the putting in the reps as they say, I guess in like actually writing code, understand what’s happening. Like all that stuff is important. That’s what I would sell. Don’t just because like AI can make you super productive. Like, yes, that will come. You know,

Erika (29:39) makes me laugh because when you’re talking about like the four day work week and that kind of stuff, I’m like, well, I bet, you know, there are companies you could have started where that was possible. you know, Python data architecture is maybe not the simplest thing in the world to build. like, you know, like same, same, same, same with AI. It’s like, yeah, you know, I

Brad Heller (29:54) Sure, yeah, true.

Erika (30:02) I can write code. Like, do I know what it’s doing? Do I know how to do anything with it once it’s written? Like, hmm, well, guess I gotta use my brain there.

Brad Heller (30:08) Yeah.

Yeah, dang it. I gotta use the brain. But I I think about this a lot. And I think that if you truly don’t care what happens under the hood and the AI admits something that works, great, go for it. But we work in a collaborative area where we kind of owe it to our coworkers to, you know, or maybe the abstractions will get so good that at some point we’re not thinking in terms of code anymore, but our jobs as engineers is…

Erika (30:15) Yeah.

Brad Heller (30:40) I don’t want to say thinking in terms of prompt, you know, think, something like that.

Erika (30:45) Yeah, I mean, it all comes back to the source code. unless it, yeah, unless it’s implemented correctly, like it’s garbage. So.

Brittany Ellich (30:45) That makes sense.

Brad Heller (30:56) But dudes in the 70s would say, like, if the machine code’s not perfect, you know, what are we doing here? So, I don’t know. Yeah, exactly. So, I don’t know what the answer is. I know that I prefer it when the dudes on my team go and, like, read the things that they wrote, that they had their tools wrote, had their tools write for them. So, yeah.

Erika (31:03) Like the abstraction you’re talking about. Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (31:19) That makes sense. ⁓

Yeah, I always think about it in terms of like learning math. You don’t just like get a calculator and start doing math. Like you learn the fundamentals of math and you know how it works. And then yeah, the calculator can make you way faster at it, but like you can’t just jump into it and start using a calculator. You have to, you know, take the steps to understand. I feel like it’s the same thing with engineering and AI.

Brad Heller (31:37) Totally.

Yeah,

probably like everything really in life. Like I can’t really think of a thing where you can just like read a book, you know, besides like trivia perhaps, right? ⁓ But yeah, anything practical.

Brittany Ellich (31:44) Yeah, true.

Cool, well I think we are going to pivot to our fun segment to start closing things out. So we do a different fun segment every time and I figured it would be fitting to do something related to starting an app or company. our fun segment this time we’re gonna do a round robin of if you could invent any app right now, what would it be? And it doesn’t have to be like, it can be silly, it could be anything or anything important.

Brad Heller (32:00) Great.

Mmm.

Hmm

any app, okay

Brittany Ellich (32:22) So I’m going to let Erika go first.

Erika (32:25) I definitely have an answer with this one because Isabelle’s in her toddler phase where she says no for literally everything, but sometimes she says no when she means yes. And so I wish there was a toddler setting on the new AirPod translation mode where she says no and can actually translate what she’s actually trying to say.

Yeah, that’s what I would invent if it was in any way possible.

Brad Heller (32:52) I love that. It’s

Brittany Ellich (32:53) That’s genius.

Brad Heller (32:54) a great idea.

Brittany Ellich (32:55) Yeah, I think that would be cool to have like if my Google could actually like hear my children and understand what they’re saying when they’re asking for the same song over and over. It’s only like three things that they ever asked for. So you would think that it’d be easy.

Brad Heller (33:06) fair enough.

Erika (33:07) Yeah. And

then like also like tell me what to say. Like what’s the right thing to say when she’s asking me for Baby Shark for the hundredth time? Like I’m gonna say no. How do I say no in a way that she’s not gonna like have a tantrum?

Brittany Ellich (33:11) Yeah.

That makes sense. I actually did not really prepare a very good question for this. think actually one thing that I’ve been thinking about recently is I do a lot of crocheting and I would be really interested in, there’s a way to crochet that you can build graphs. Like you go from like corner to corner and I want to build an app that can create a pattern from your GitHub commit graph and make a commit graph GAN.

I think that that would be really fun. Yeah.

Brad Heller (33:52) a commit graph can. ⁓

I love that. Can the graph can, I feel like that’s if commit graph can is not registered yet. commit graph can.com. It’s not registered yet. You should go register it.

Brittany Ellich (33:56) Yeah, so that’s that’s fine.

you

I’m gonna go add that to my list of domain names that I’m paying for. I don’t know, AI exists now, so I could make this happen probably pretty easily. I’ll check that out before this episode goes live.

Brad Heller (34:16) Yeah, definitely.

All right.

Brittany Ellich (34:21) Brad, what would you do?

Brad Heller (34:23) ⁓ good question. What would I do? well, I just moved to London. I was living in Berlin before, and then I just moved to London like a few weeks back and I’m like looking for an apartment in London right now and the ecosystem around apartment hunting apps in London is like absolutely miserable. So if someone wanted to come solve that problem, like everyone would be happier in the end.

Brittany Ellich (34:49) I’ve heard the same actually from my friends that live in the area.

Brad Heller (34:52) If they have any tips for me, I’d love to hear them.

Brittany Ellich (34:54) Yeah,

I’ll figure it out. I’ll ask them around and see. Great. Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Brad. If people want to find you, where should they go?

Brad Heller (34:58) Cool.

Let’s see, obviously tower.dev to learn more about the product that we’re building. I would love to chat with any of the data engineers in the audience to see if we can help make your lives better with a Python native data orchestration tool. Outside that, you can find me on LinkedIn in slash Brad HE or on GitHub as well. My GitHub username is at BradHE on there.

⁓ and, would love to connect with folks. Am I going to any conferences anytime soon? think I’m going to some Python conferences, Pi data, Boston, think we have planned. yeah, none of the other big ones though. Yeah. Would have been a good plug to have here.

Brittany Ellich (35:43) Well, thank you so much for tuning in to Overcommitted. If you like what you hear, please do follow and subscribe or do whatever it is you like to do on the podcast app of your choice. Check us out on Blue Sky and please share with your friends until next week. Goodbye.