37: Ep. 37 | Being Unreasonable with Jason Lengstorf

Bethany (00:00) Welcome to the Overcommitted Podcast, your weekly dose of real engineering conversations. I’m your host this week, Bethany, and I’m joined by…

Brittany Ellich (00:07) Hey, I’m Brittany Ellich.

Erika (00:09) I’m Erika.

Bethany (00:10) The three of us met while working on a team at GitHub and quickly realized we were all obsessed with getting better at what we do. So we decided to start this podcast to share what we’ve learned. We’ll be talking about everything from leveling up your technical skills to navigating your professional development, all with the goal of creating a community where engineers can learn and connect. Today on Overcommitted, we are joined by Jason Lengstorf the creator of CodeTV, which produces TV for developers with shows such as Web Dev Challenge and Leet Heat.

His career has taken many twists and turns, which he credits to being unreasonable and following his big ideas. Today we’ll talk about what it means to be unreasonable in the tech space and how following your big ideas can shape your career. Welcome, Jason.

Jason (00:51) Thank you so much for having me.

Bethany (00:53) Thank you for being here. I am so excited. I’m huge fan of CodeTV, so I feel awestruck right now, but awesome. You recently gave a talk at All Things Open, which was really awesome, on being unreasonable and how that has been something that has not only influenced your career, but also made you who you are today.

I’m curious, how did you develop this idea of being unreasonable and what experiences went into realizing that you had to do big things to achieve big ideas?

Jason (01:26) Yeah, think, mean, this is a really, there’s a million things that go into it, so I’m gonna probably gloss over a bunch of really important points, but I’ve been very lucky in my life to be surrounded by people that are really ambitious. And part of that is, you know, when I was younger,

I had some friends who were 10 years older than me that owned businesses and they were kind of further down the path than I ever thought I would get. And they would just kind of talk about how they did stuff because they didn’t know they weren’t supposed to. And I think when you get access to somebody who you might look at online and realize, you’d think to yourself like, well, I mean, they must have something special that I don’t. They’re clearly playing on a different playing field.

And then you spend time with him and you realize this is just a person like they they’re not magic They didn’t do anything that I’m not capable of doing they just kind of kept showing up and and that so a combination of that of you know being fortunate enough to have access to to a lot of educational information You know, I’ve been a curious person for my whole life. So I always kind of read whatever I can get my hands on and you know, I think I developed a sense of

Like, hey, can I take this thing apart and figure out why it works? And the idea of just learning for the sake of learning has always been really big for me. So that kind of whirlwind of different things has always driven me to sort of look at what I want to do regardless of whether or not it’s supposed to be possible. And so I think that my general approach to

career and to life and all this stuff is, you I started out trying to go on the predetermined path of, know, you graduate high school, you go to college, you get a job, you start a family, you retire, and it kind of goes on. And then I got to college and I looked and I was like, you know, this isn’t, one, this doesn’t feel like it’s gonna get me where I wanna go because I was looking around at the college curriculum and I was like, you know, this is a lot of the same material we covered in high school and I don’t think I went to a particularly good high school, so that’s concerning.

And you know, I’m looking around at the other kids and half of them were completely checked out and the other half were like clearly riding on their parents, you know, their parents money. And I was kind of caught in the middle of that. And I was like, this doesn’t feel right. Like something about this feels right. I don’t, I don’t know what it is, but I should be doing something else. So I dropped out, joined a band. and it like felt like that at the time felt like the right thing to do is, know, if I don’t try this, I’m going to regret it. And what’s the worst that can happen? You know, I don’t have.

I don’t have bills, I don’t have any long obligations. So if I go try to be a rock star and I fail, like I lost some time, but I’m not really like doing permanent damage to my life. So let’s try it, let’s see what happens. And my entire career, my entire life has sort of been a series of that. Like, okay, well what do I stand to lose if I try this? Probably not a lot. Let’s see what happens. And it just sort of led to this continuous chain of.

weird stuff that if you look at any of it in isolation sounds completely unreasonable, but ultimately it’s led to me, I honestly could not think of something I’d rather be doing than what I’m doing right now.

Bethany (04:31) That is so awesome. I really love that you haven’t let anything stop you from thinking about what the next step is and really just the stars are the limit or anything like that. So, or the sky’s the limit is the quote. But I’m curious if you ever encountered a scenario where a decision went from maybe risky but calculated to genuinely unreasonable. Is there any way you can tell the difference when you’re in that?

scenario or is that even a possibility?

Jason (05:03) I mean, think, you know, I kind of barely survived my first foray into this, because after the band, I started an agency because I realized that I’d had, basically I was running an agency with a single client that was my band. And so when the band broke up, I was like, well, what can I keep doing? So I started taking clients and I wasn’t very good at the business side of things. So I didn’t know how to delegate. I didn’t really do a good job of pricing or.

Managing money, so I was running on margins that were virtually non-existent I was delegating all the parts of the business that I enjoyed and that I was good at and was instead hoarding the things that I was really bad at like sales and admin and accounting and and so I was just like burning out super hard and I was falling further and further behind on projects and by the time I bailed out of that agency I think I was like 35 or 40 thousand dollars in debt and I you know, I was so burned out so stressed out that I had

patches of my beard were falling out in clumps and you know, I was physically kind of decomposing. So I’d say that’s time when my dream of sort of being this big shot agency runner, I mean, quite literally started to kill me and almost financially ruined me. And if I hadn’t had another fortunate set of circumstances, which is that following that agency, went and did.

two years of living out of a suitcase in cheap countries, which allowed me to recover from being deeply in debt. But like, you know, so I think there’s, yes, it is easy for things to slide out of control. But I was young when I made that choice, and I wasn’t looking at…

I guess let me take that from a different angle. When I was talking to one of those business owners that I was talking to, talking about earlier in the podcast, one of the things that I asked was like, well, how do you know this is the thing to commit to? Right? Because I had this belief that you, had to call your shot and then that was it. You were stuck with it forever. And I remember he said this phrase to me of forever for now. And he was talking about making a call on what to do with your life. And based on where you are, the information that you have,

You have to go all in on something, but you also have to reserve the right to change your mind if things go bad. And so I had not internalized that lesson and I had my agency going and I was hitting my road bumps, things were going wrong, I was getting into debt, I couldn’t keep up on projects, I couldn’t figure out how to delegate. And was not making me happy. I wasn’t enjoying it, it’s not what I wanted to do, but I believed that I had to stay in it because I believed that was the path I had set for myself.

And when I gave myself permission to say, you know what, this isn’t right. And it’s not a failure. Like it’s a failure in the sense that the business I wanted to build didn’t work out, but it’s not a failure. Like I’m a bad person and I don’t deserve to be, you know, to have nice things or to, to enjoy myself. It’s, it’s not a moral failure. It’s just, it was not the right business. And as soon as I was able to internalize that and set it down, it, really fundamentally changed my relationship with the world because then I went and I did.

The next thing, which was taking a contract and being fully remote and living on the road for a couple of years. And then I didn’t like that anymore because I felt like I was too disconnected from everybody. So I took a job at IBM because I wanted to be on a team again. And I was like, that’s it. I’m never gonna be an entrepreneur again. I’m done with entrepreneurial life. It was too stressful for me. And then after a few years of being in businesses, I was like, you know, actually, think it’s just as stressful to be in a business.

So I think if I’m gonna take on that stress, I wanna be more responsible about it, but I’d rather be the one holding the bag at the end of the day, because at least then when it goes wrong, it’s not because I couldn’t convince somebody in a position of power to try it, it’s because I tried it it didn’t work. so that’s a very long way of answering your question, but I think I’ve had a lot of scenarios that spun out of control.

But when I embraced the fact that none of this is my identity or my value as a human being, it got much easier to walk away from something when it felt like it was no longer serving the purpose that I had initially set out for. And that makes it easier to set it down and do something different, which kind of de-risks a lot of it.

Erika (08:51) Yeah, that kind of like idea of I’ve gone down this path, but like I know it’s not the right thing. Like, what is it like sunk costs analysis? Like, you know, I feel like that’s a tricky thing that a lot of people get stuck in of like, I mean, I’m also a career changer. It’s like, and that

Jason (08:59) the sunk cost fallacy.

Erika (09:10) that crossroads was really hard to be like, I have done this for so many years of my life. Like I’ve invested all of this time and energy into like being this person, but like that’s not right anymore. Like I need to find a different path. And yeah, it does.

Jason (09:26) Can I

ask you a question about that though? So when you changed over, how much overlap did you think there was going to be in the Venn diagram of like former career to new career?

Erika (09:35) so I mean, the like quip is like I swapped out my keyboard. like, was also like a musician, I did music directing and like music teaching and then, you know, trained as a as a software engineer. So that’s kind of the, the thing that I say is like, that’s sort of where the where the overlap was. But I mean, functionally, it was

Jason (09:40) Hahaha!

Erika (10:00) Totally, totally different. Yeah, but like the things that I enjoyed about playing piano, like the practicing, the creativity, like that stuff I guess still does kind of translate. But yeah, I guess the, like the identity piece is definitely very different. it’s, yeah, it’s like separating the two and being like, this is…

Like my work doesn’t define me, but I’m also, yeah, like I have to make the choices along the way that, you know, get me to doing the thing that I see needs to exist in the world. yeah. Yeah. Well, so you also talked about like managing risk. And so…

How did you measure the risk along the way? What are the signs to you that it’s time to course correct or do something else?

Jason (10:53) I mean, some of it is very like super pragmatic. If you have bills to pay, you know, then you have to be able to cover those bills. So if I’m doing a thing and I don’t have a backup plan and if I stop doing the thing, I’ll be broke. Like then yeah, I gotta keep doing that thing, right? So for me, what I’ve tried to look at is what are my safety nets?

what are the choices I can make to help me move toward the things that I wanna do and how do I make sure that when I make the change, it’s not stepping from something that was secure and working well into something that I have no idea how to do. I would love to, for example, be on a cooking show, right? And so I could burn my whole life down and start trying to be like a

Instagram chef and see if I could build that career and I think I could maybe figure it out But the the amount of risk in that would be so high because I don’t know how to monetize it. I don’t have relationships in that world I don’t know anything about what makes Food content work. I only know what I consume so I’d be operating off my instincts and basically nothing else Tremendously risky, but when I moved into what I was doing at code TV, I had been working in devro I had

of relationships around the engineering world. I knew people who worked at every level of companies across most of the web dev space. And I had already done a lot of collaborative stuff with those companies as part of my roles at Netlify and Gatsby and IBM. So when I started making the transition, I actually started the transition a couple years before I left my job.

because I was realizing, well, I guess I could do a little bit of sponsored content because I know it’s good. Like it works well with the company that I’m in now. I was at Netlify, which is basically anything you can deploy on the web is a good partner for Netlify. So for them, they were happy because I was still producing stuff that promoted their product. But I could do these collaborations with these companies. And I started looking at like, okay, well, how much would this cost and how much of this would replace my income? And I started realizing that I’d started to replace my income, not

100 % but enough that I felt strongly that if I had the 40 hours a week back that I was spending at Netlify to focus on this business that it would very quickly replace my income. So it didn’t feel like a risk, right? That didn’t feel like something that I was doing without a safety net. And you know, my wife works and she works in tech so I knew that we’d be able to live off of her income for a while. I’m very fortunate that I’ve got a strong family support network so if I really, really needed to, my parents would always let me sleep in their basement for a little while and they’d…

tease me relentlessly about it, but I’d be okay, right? I’m not out on the street. And so I had that support system in place that allowed me to take the calculated risk. And then I think on top of that, there’s just these things that you can do to sort of test waters without having to go all in. And it’s hard because it requires you to have side project time, which I think is again, that’s one of my privileges is that

because I don’t have kids and because I don’t have pets or a lot of extracurricular obligations, I can kind of start a side hustle and focus on that with a pretty significant amount of time to see if it’s gonna work before I make a move. And if I think, you know, when I didn’t have that kind of time when I was working as an executive and it was putting me 65 hours a week, I would try to figure out how to make the thing I wanted to do part of what I was doing.

Kind of see like can I bring a little bit of video production into my work at netlify? And that was how I did it was I started pushing projects that like okay. Let’s do some let’s do the you know a high production commercial Let’s see if we can build something that’s ⁓ that’s you know pushing the envelope on on like what a live event could look like if we had a good production crew and I was able to test those waters as well and start building those relationships so that when I did cut the ties with netlify

Again, I wasn’t starting at ground zero. I was able to step into at least a few ideas and it still took me a year and a half to get on my feet, but that year and a half wasn’t me going, okay, I said I make videos now, what does a video person do? It was like, okay, I know what I wanna do, I’ve got some basic relationships, how do I convince somebody to partner with me on this in a way that allows me to fund it at the level that I know it needs to be funded? So it became more of like a sales challenge as opposed to a baseline skills challenge.

And that all makes it all feel, you know, the risks feel lighter at that point.

Erika (15:12) It kind of reminds me of the idea that you don’t see 99 % of the work when the work is preparation. also kind of an idea of bringing ideas to the table, which already have some work behind them. I think this is applicable in the software space too, where people get really frustrated and they’re like, well, I had this.

Jason (15:18) Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Erika (15:34) pitch for a project or like, you know, some kind of something that I want to do, but nobody is listening to me. and it’s like, well, like, you know, maybe have like a stable of ideas that have been kind of worked out at least halfway. like, you know, kind of do the work before you do the work. And to your point, part of the challenge is finding the time to do that. Like,

Okay, if I’m working on what my project is all the time, like when do I actually do this investigative work or ⁓ that kind of stuff?

Jason (16:05) Right.

Well, and I had, so I had an experience in software directly where I was at IBM and this was in 2016, I think. And the project that I was working on was this sort of GraphQL middle tier. We had 30 something teams in the area of the company that I worked in and they all had different microservices that all weren’t communicating to each other. So everybody was.

maintaining these bespoke endpoints that were super hard to track and there was just a big mess and a ton of tech debt because of it. And this thing that I had created was a way for teams to register a schema centrally. GitHub knows how this works. You have a million bespoke things that you wanna do with GitHub data, so a GraphQL layer really simplifies the way that you communicate that stuff out because people can sort of construct whatever they need. So it was the same general idea. Take that to IBM.

and I met a ton of resistance on it. And I remember sitting down with one of the SVPs and I was just kinda, it was a skip level, I was complaining, I was like, why is this so hard? Like, this is something that when everybody who uses this has been really blown away by how much it saves them on time, everybody who’s willing to give this a chance has gotten great results, so why is everybody so resistant to this? And he’s like, listen, when you walk into somebody’s team, they are all extremely busy,

They’ve got a set of things that they have to get done. They are, you know, on the hook for stuff that they sometimes care about and sometimes don’t. And they’ve got the things that make them feel valuable as developers. So when you come in and you say, here’s your service, and they draw a box, and here’s my service, and they draw a box, it’s the same size. And what I want you to do is let me take over a lot of your stuff. They immediately go, well, that looks like a big.

that’s looks like a big lift. It’s going to ask a lot for me and it’s me giving up control over what I do day to day. And why should I trust you to manage this? Because this could go poorly and now I’m dependent on you for something that’s already taking way too much of my time. And he said, so why don’t you draw the box smaller? Like think about what it is that they don’t like. What is it that makes them sad? What is it that makes their life hard? And what is the thing that they value? Can you come up to them and say, here’s your service and you draw a box.

and you say, here’s all the things about your service that are burning your time that aren’t valuable, that aren’t gonna get you promoted. You’ve got security compliance, you’ve got maintenance, you’ve got all of these different rollouts, these bespoke endpoints, these 10 million teams sending you DMs on Slack asking for specialty stuff. This is all things that, that provides no valuable value to them in their business. And if you say, now look at my service, you draw a tiny little box, you draw the box as small as you can.

and you say, now what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna automate compliance, I’m gonna eliminate the support burden, and I’m gonna make sure that everybody always knows what the up-to-date schema is for your service, and all you have to do is register this schema. Suddenly, they could understand the value in a way that previously it was like I was asking them to do more work. And when I re-articulated around what they cared about and what their stress points were,

then suddenly they were thinking of it as like, so I can hand off this burden and it lets me focus on the stuff that I care about. That’s more reasonable. And we, you know, we still met resistance because some people just don’t want to change, but it was significantly lower resistance when we started reframing it that way. And so this idea of like shrink the thing that you want and frame it from the standpoint of what somebody is, what they’re motivated by, right? And I think this is true too, when you’re going to ask for time to like,

work on technical debt or if you’re trying to take a big swing at this really ambitious, weird project. I don’t want to talk about it from like, okay, as an engineer, I get really sad when I have to work on legacy code because it’s really hard and I don’t like it. Instead, you go to the PM or the sales team and you say, okay, we want to deliver features much faster. We want our customers to get things at a much higher rate. If you are willing to let me build in three days per sprint to clean up these messes,

we will be able to increase velocity by 15 % over the next quarter. And suddenly sales is going like, okay, but you’re still gonna get features out? Yeah, I’m still gonna get features out, but I’ll be able to get them a lot faster if you give me 10 % of bandwidth or 20 % of bandwidth to go after these features. It’s really difficult to sell somebody on an abstract thing like technical debt, but it’s really easy to sell somebody on a metric like velocity. And…

But if you’re willing to speak the language of the people who are doing the thing, it gets so much easier. I’m not 100 % sure how I got on this tangent, but…

Erika (20:35) I

mean, to tie it back, it’s like almost kind of making unreasonable propositions reasonable where like you’re, yeah, like on the on the surface of it, like, you know, maybe this idea that’s like coming out of left field, like doesn’t seem like the initial solution. Like it might not be the simplest path forward, but like, is it going to get us where we need to go? Like

Jason (20:44) Yes.

Erika (21:02) If so, then yeah, like maybe it’s a shortcut. Maybe it’s a bit of a winding road, but maybe it gets us to a better place. Yeah.

Jason (21:11) Yeah, yeah,

and like anytime you’re trying to sell anything, know, the the you’re already sold on it. So selling it in terms that you value doesn’t benefit anybody because you you already understand the idea and why you think it’s good. So it’s more about understanding why somebody else would value it. And and that I think really it also helps you as the idea haver make sure that your idea is good and not just fun. I think one of my big complaints about software engineering in general.

is that many of us are in software because we like working on code. And that means that in a lot of cases, instead of proposing a thing that would benefit the product, we’re proposing something that would be fun to work on. And so when somebody says like, hey, what if we refactored the whole thing in Rust? It’s like, but why? Right? And a lot of times if you dig down, the answer is because I really want to learn Rust. It sounds fun. And it’s like, okay, but that doesn’t actually benefit us, right? So as the idea have her,

me taking the time to think about like, this actually gonna help anybody? Like, what is this gonna do for the marketing team? What is this gonna do for the sales team? What does it do for the customer? What does it do for product? If I can articulate those things in a way that doesn’t feel like I’m just lying to get my way, then I know I have a good idea. And it’ll be so much easier for me to communicate the value of that idea if I can speak to it on the terms of the people who need to approve it.

Brittany Ellich (22:27) Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It sounds like you have had a huge variety of experience throughout your career and done a lot of different things. So presumably you’ve had to teach yourself a lot over the course of your career. One thing you brought up is that you originally went to college and dropped out. And so I think that sort of puts you in the bucket of people in tech from like a non-traditional background.

Jason (22:33) You

Brittany Ellich (22:49) which is like just people who didn’t go to school for CS, like Erica and like myself. Sorry, Bethany, you’re the odd traditional one. that’s true. Okay. Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. And I feel like that story is very common, especially for a lot of women that I know in tech, like pretty much all of them didn’t go to school for that. And I’m curious how, like, do you think that that held you back at all in thinking about…

Bethany (22:57) Didn’t make major in computer science though. Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (23:13) or like learning development work or do you think it’s something that was like actually, you know, helpful in some ways?

Jason (23:18) This might be my hottest take, but I think that the value of college is the network, not the skill set. Because if you go to MIT, you don’t really learn anything that you can’t learn for free on the internet. But what you get is access to a whole bunch of MIT alumni. And so it’s much easier to get a foot in the door to get an interview because people want to work with people that are like them. And so if they’re an MIT grad, they want to work with an MIT grad.

But I don’t necessarily think that skill set wise it had any positive. I mean I’ve worked with people who went on traditional paths who were absolutely brilliant and I’ve worked with people on traditional paths who literally can’t accomplish any basic task. Like they’re just full of academic useless knowledge and they want to argue minutiae that has no impact on the product. And I’ve worked with people from non-traditional backgrounds who are exactly the same. Some of them are rock stars and some of them are absolutely terrible. So it’s I think it’s far less about the background and far more about

how curious the person is and how motivated they are to overcome hurdles and push through hard problems. But yeah, I don’t think that, like I’ve been very lucky in that I was able to build a network through, I largely relied on conferences and that helped me get jobs that were at places that were sort of cool. I worked at Gatsby and.

At one point in time, Gatsby was like the center of the front end universe for like this glorious three months, which was great for my network. And then that got me recruited by Sarah Drazner. And, and, you know, if you get a chance to work with Sarah Drazner, that’s sort of like a, huge power up to your career because she knows literally everybody and is, you know, she’s so well respected. So if you, if you get connected to somebody like Sarah, to somebody like Angie Jones, to somebody like there’s these people that, are just these centers of gravity in the community.

And I’ve been very fortunate to be able to get connected to and mentored by many of them. And so that, to me, that was my major advantage, was the people I’ve been able to connect to along the way. I think that had I gone to a college, I might have been able to get connected to a different group that would have allowed me to accelerate in a similar way. But I don’t know. mean, I’m not very good at algorithms, so I guess I did lose that.

Brittany Ellich (25:26) Aren’t we all though? mean, that’s very good at them for about three weeks before I have to interview for something and then other than that then, bad thing.

Jason (25:26) Hahaha!

Brittany Ellich (25:36) Is it that one? Okay. Erica convinced me to get this AI camera that like responds to hand signals and then I talk with my hands and ⁓

Erika (25:38) What the?

Jason (25:38) Wait, what just happened?

Erika (25:40) Yeah

Jason (25:44) no.

Erika (25:48) To be clear, I

did not think of this as a positive, I don’t know. There you go. Yeah, I think we might need to. The video quality is good, but yeah, this auto zoom thing. Like, why would anybody ever… No!

Brittany Ellich (25:53) I bet you can turn it off. I bet that there’s a way to disable it. Yeah.

Jason (25:56) That’s very funny.

I thought you were just making a dramatic point.

Brittany Ellich (26:05) It does work for that, usually, yeah, but it’s usually when I don’t intend to.

Erika (26:09) Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (26:10) ⁓ back to it. All right. So there was a point in your All Things Open talk that you brought up about consolidation is thinking, not just reading summaries. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Like what does your process look like for learning things? How has it evolved?

Jason (26:17) Hmm.

So that comment,

that comment is kind of born out of a frustration I have with, I feel like sometimes people hoard information and don’t do anything with it, right? And so, I will never throw shade at people’s process, but I always kind of wonder when, you everybody’s bringing their AI assistant to a Zoom call, like has anybody ever actually read the notes from an AI Zoom summary?

And I think the answer is almost exclusively no, vanishingly small percentage of people are really putting those notes to work. And I think the same thing is true if you read like an AI book summary or things like that. Like the ingestion of information is not learning or thinking, it’s the synthesis, right? Like taking that information and doing some active work to

take those thoughts, combine them with your own thoughts and experience, and then turn that into action steps or a new spin on an idea or a change to your perspective. And so you’re kind of, it’s not amassing information, it’s actually consolidating information from the infinite points that you can get by watching every YouTube video or watching every conference talk or reading every article. And instead it’s kind of.

getting the information but then doing the work to turn that information into action. Whether that action is I’ve done the research and now I’m gonna do this project or whether that action is I’ve done the research and now I’m gonna change the way that I approach things because I learned something new. And so I’m very big on notebook. I think pen and paper is really good because it’s like a wasteful medium. It takes a really long time and you’re not gonna write something out word for word.

So you necessarily have to make information capture lossy when you are going longhand and that requires you to think about what were they actually saying and not what did they say. So you’re capturing intent. You’re not capturing verbatim, just a quote, right? And so that I think just the act of listening to somebody speak and rephrasing it in your own words. I think this is why active listening and intent like tells you to do this is once you listen to somebody talk,

say, okay, what I heard you say was, and then paraphrase it to show that you comprehend it, not just that you heard it, right? I think longhand notes are another way to do that. But you can do it a million ways. I know people do it through, they’ll like type notes throughout a meeting and that’s, you know, they’re still synthesizing there. They’ll, some people will actually take the time after a meeting to like look through the notes or look through the transcript and.

turn that into a list of action steps. Everybody thinks in different ways, so I don’t wanna say that you gotta do it a certain way, but I think the one non-optional step there is you have to actually use your brain to think about the information that was presented. Using whatever process you want, as long as that process isn’t, I listened and clearly that’s all I needed to do, and you just kinda move on and let that exit the other ear and it’s gone forever.

Brittany Ellich (29:22) For sure. Do you have any patterns or anything like that that you found that helps with that consolidation? Like we are constantly being bombarded right now with like new frameworks and best practices and architecture and all this stuff. How do you determine like what is actually useful and what’s just noise? Or is it vibes?

Jason (29:40) I,

yeah, so I’ve always been a big fan of slow adoption because I made the mistake early on of trying to adopt the newest, coolest thing and of course, everything has a pretty short life cycle with few exceptions. So if you immediately jump onto the newest state management library and then later the creator of that state management library has a new idea so they abandon that project and start a new one,

then you’re left either maintaining the old one or having to migrate again. But if you wait six to 12 months, it’ll still be good and you’ll have a better idea of whether or not it caught on. And functionally, there’s not a huge amount of risk in almost every like little software library. There’s very, very little risk in adopting something new. So what I try to do is I try to marinate in the information without actually acting on any of it. And the thing that I’ve found

is that through channels like social media, through newsletters that kind of keep up on, you know, there’s like the Bytes.dev newsletter and there’s a handful of others that are similar that are plugged into different pockets of the dev community. And they’ll talk about things and you’ll see the same names come up over and over again. And a lot of them you’ll see once and you’ll never hear about again because they were a really, really cool demo that didn’t have as much practical application as everybody thought.

And then once I’m ready to do something, like I have a new project, I’ve got this sort of atmospheric information that I haven’t acted on. I haven’t really thought about it, but I’m at least, you know, passingly aware that, okay, we’ve got to do this thing. I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about these libraries for the last year that are related to this thing. So I have a short list now to pilot and I can build little projects that allow me to start actually synthesizing this ambient knowledge into

you know, limited experience. And that then allows me to make, you know, much better choices, but it prevents you from like not paying attention at all would put me in a position where now I’m, you know, I’m like, okay, I have to do this project and I literally don’t know what’s going on. So I only know the things that I used the last time I approached this, which may have been five, six, seven plus years ago. And those might not be relevant anymore. Right. There’s probably this, this industry moves fast, but because I’ve been sort of, you know,

kind of keeping an eye on what’s going on in social media, I’m at least passingly aware of options and also passingly aware of which ones have had sustained attention so that they are actually getting adopted and being used as opposed to ones that are just very hypey and good at getting a good launch bit of attention but not necessarily any sustained adoption or investment. But yeah, I I think it’s really just a matter of

figuring out where your attention should be and not closing yourself off to other information, but being willing to passively observe information that’s not relevant to you right now with the strict goal of just being surface level aware of it until it’s relevant to what you’re trying to do so that you don’t burn cycles on stuff that you can’t act on.

Bethany (32:33) That’s so interesting. It’s like the Gartner hype cycle with like the, or your overinflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, and then the like plateau of productivity or whatnot. But I love that optimizing for that last part. Exactly. And then it just works.

Jason (32:37) you

Yeah, if you drag your feet enough, you wait until the plateau.

Bethany (32:51) That’s awesome. And I think that’s a really wise way of going about things. It’s so easy in this industry to get caught up in that hype cycle, ⁓ especially now with AI and how fast and rapid things change. But it is interesting to see what are the lasting things? What are the things that actually are worth keeping around? So I think that’s definitely wise words.

Jason (33:14) I think it’s, I mean, it’s, hard when you watch, you know, the way people talk about this on the internet, but vanishingly few things that we work on are super time sensitive or super sensitive to the specific technology. and most of the things that people are building with AI, the new joke is, okay, congratulations, you made a state machine that’s non-deterministic. You could have built that whole thing with no AI. And that’s very commonly true because people are trying to adopt this tech into their stacks.

But that was true when everybody was rushing to adopt things like Redux or everybody was rushing to adopt Rust or everybody was rushing to adopt Kubernetes or everybody was rushing to adopt Docker. And like any of these things is like they’re useful when they’re useful, but if you just shoved it in because it was new and you were like, we’re gonna make this thing work, then a lot of people I think found themselves…

doing the equivalent of like deploying a Next.js site for a marketing landing page, it’s like, why are you shipping somebody nine megabytes of nothing for a static image and a like sign up for my newsletter form? It just doesn’t really make sense. But we get swept up into this hype of like, well, we have to use this or else. And it results in us kind of having a lot of big heavy things to maintain because they were cool to ship, but none of it was actually useful. And the people using the website honestly would have been way happier.

if we would have shipped something far more boring, far more stable. And like that’s not to say that any of the things I just named aren’t useful. But now that it’s been long enough, most of us can kind of spot, hey, this thing we’re building is complicated enough and does have enough uptime requirements that standing up Kubernetes is worth it. This other thing though, isn’t. Like it would be a lot of work. It would require a lot of maintenance and ultimately if it goes down, nobody cares because it’s not a moneymaker for the business.

So let’s not invest the engineering resources in making that happen. So I think, yeah, just, like, as much as it’s kind of funny as a technologist to say, drag your feet as much as you can, I have found that being slow to adopt has saved me a lot of heartache because very, very few things that I’ve built were made or broken by the tech. They’ve all been made or broken by the value they deliver to the person using it, and that is almost never determined by the underlying stack. That’s determined by the quality of the build.

and you can build really, really, really good things with Fortran today. Like, should you? Probably not, but like, it’s still possible. The tech doesn’t go out of style. It goes out of fashion. It doesn’t go out of functionality.

Bethany (35:35) Yeah, this reminded me of your point earlier about developers wanting to build something to learn something or because it’s fun. It absolutely would be fun. A lot of these are really cool technologies, but at end of the day, it is a solution looking for a problem rather than vice versa.

Jason (35:45) Mm-hmm.

Yes, 100%.

Bethany (35:54) That’s awesome. All right, we are getting close to ending time and we do have a fun segment. But before we get onto that, I’m curious if you have any thoughts on how you continue to be unreasonable today or like day to day, if there’s anything big coming down the pipe you can share or anything like that.

Jason (36:10) Yeah, think, I mean, the idea of being unreasonable is, I guess the thesis of it is like, everything that I’ve ever imagined has been something that, you know, very reasonable people around me will say, well, couldn’t you do the same thing with like X, Y, and Z existing solutions and it would be a lot less difficult and it’s kind of already established? And I just, and like, yes, I could have, but I didn’t want to.

Like I wanted to explore and see if I could push the boundaries and figure out how to do this thing that I could imagine in my head but that didn’t exist yet. So the idea of being unreasonable is just sort of, know, if you’ve got this hunch and you feel like something’s gonna work, if you can manage the risk away, then there’s not really a downside to trying it other than the time. And my philosophy has ultimately become this form of.

I’ve heard it called sunny nihilism where I believe that the only true meaning in life is internally assigned. And so for me, time spent on a thing that is interesting and challenging is not wasted time, even if it doesn’t work. So my value of like what an unreasonable thing does is pursuing that allows me to eliminate a regret. So I’m not like

on my deathbed looking back going, you know, I wish I would have taken a swing at this TV for devs thing. Like, I feel like it could have worked and then I chickened out and I took this other job. Instead, I’m gonna look back and I’m gonna say, I did that thing. And maybe I’ll look back on it and go, boy, that ⁓ was a long hard road to nothing and I’m so glad that I stopped doing that and did whatever comes after this. Or maybe it’s not, but either way, it’s not gonna be a regret, right? It’ll just be a lesson that I learned.

And so in that same spirit, like a lot of what I’m pursuing now is seeing if we can push it further. I’m looking at right now, everything that we do is what’s called a standalone episode. They’re self-contained. You’ve got a different cast every time, a different challenge every time. There’s no continuity. I really want to get to arc seasons where we have a story that carries through the entire season. Budgets are much higher for that sort of thing. I’m also looking at getting into

interactive software hardware humanity combined experiences. So I’m working on some early prototypes with some companies for can we build a giant like contraption at events that’s powered by software powered by different hardware bits? Can we use pressure plates? Can we use RFID? Can we use actual physical cranks and knobs and levers so that we can build these fun experiences that are

you powered by humans that give people who participate in the events something super memorable, right? And then we, of course, make a bunch of content about how we made it, about the people who were there, who participated in it. You know, we can do a bunch of shows on like how we use this particular company’s technology to build this thing, which is the value for the company. And so that’s like the next big swing I’m taking is can we, like effectively, could I build something that is a

hardware and software connected escape room that we could install at events and make that a game that anybody who wants to can play. Like that’s kind of what I’m imagining.

Bethany (39:14) That’s amazing. I will be first in line for whenever that comes out, so please keep us updated. That would be amazing.

Erika (39:18) you

Bethany (39:21) Awesome. Well, this kind of goes into our fun segment, actually. So it’s been really fun seeing on CodeTV a lot of TV shows getting the treatment of the developer treatment, so making it more applicable to developers. So I thought we would go around and maybe think of a TV show that we would like to see get the CodeTV experience. ⁓

Jason (39:34) Mm.

Oh, I love this. I didn’t

realize I was going to get free market research. Hold on, let me get my pen.

Bethany (39:46) yes, exactly, exactly!

Yes! Take notes! We only, well, these are free, you can take them, so, yeah.

Jason (39:57) you’ll

all get executive producer credits.

Bethany (39:59) But I can go first because I feel like I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and I really would love to see like a developer or code technology, big tech mockumentary. So like ⁓ the office treatment or parks and rec treatment. would, I just feel like the tech space is ripe for something like this. Like dynamics between project managers, product managers and devs. Like it just, it feels so perfect.

Jason (40:10) Mmm.

Bethany (40:25) That would be mine.

Jason (40:26) Love that.

Erika (40:26) I feel like this is already kind of in the same vein of what you’re doing, but like, I always reach for musical treatments of software concepts. I think about the segments on Whose Line Is It Anyway, where they have to get up and do a song about a topic or something. Yeah, I don’t know if…

Jason (40:47) Mmm.

Erika (40:50) like the Venn diagram of like musicians and software engineers is like close enough where like that could work in any way. But like, I think that would, that would be really fun.

Jason (40:54) There’s so much overlap in that.

I love that.

Brittany Ellich (41:04) Great. So I had a couple of other ideas, but while you were talking about building like those cool experiences, I was thinking about these shows I used to love to watch. I personally don’t care about cars at all, but my dad used to watch these car shows where they would like get this old car and like completely refurbish it. And like they were so engaging because there were people like going in and like showing like all these things they did to make it super cool.

Jason (41:25) Mmm.

Brittany Ellich (41:29) I don’t know what that genre is, but like, I didn’t even care about cars and I would watch it.

Jason (41:33) Like the, yeah,

like the home improvement style, but toward like take a thing and customize it. Yeah.

Erika (41:40) you

Brittany Ellich (41:41) Yeah, like take a thing,

like build a thing for this experience or like, you know, like you really get in the weeds of like, and this is this cool thing we did to make this work for software and or hardware experiences. I think that that would be fascinating and educational.

Jason (41:49) Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that would be really fun.

Bethany (41:56) There’s so much

of that in the gaming space, like taking old game consoles and stuff and retrofitting it. That’s such a smart idea.

Jason (42:00) Yeah.

Erika (42:03) Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (42:04) Mm-hmm.

Jason (42:05) Mm-hmm. Yeah, and like even even with like game mods, know like people are get so creative with the way that they can take an engine and Like come up with something that’s nothing to do with the original game, but it’s still super fun I you know, I think there’s a ton of creativity in that space and and so finding a way to showcase that would be wonderful

Brittany Ellich (42:25) Yeah, creative coding is really cool.

Jason (42:27) Mm-hmm. Yeah any kind of creative coding and Erica to your point. Have you ever seen? There’s like these these musicians that are they’re sort of like a coding collective to like misuse technology on purpose but they do things like ⁓ live DJ sets where they code the music and they’ve got ⁓ apps like processing and and there’s another one that’s popular now that I forget the name of where you can kind of like

set up the beats for each of the instruments and then you can do randomization or you can set like the scale so that it plays within or you can add effects and you know all this kind of stuff. But then they’ll also while they’re doing their live DJ set they’ll have another programmer sitting with them live coding a shader that’s reactive to the music. So you’ve got like two people up on stage one of them is making a beat the other one’s making a shader that’s being projected so that it’s reacting to the song in real time. And they’ll do these like after party DJ it’s so cool.

Erika (42:58) ⁓ yeah.

that’s fun. Yeah. Yeah, that does sound, I’ll have to check that out. Maybe you can ⁓ send me if there’s any videos.

Jason (43:27) I have ⁓ one person I follow that I love that does this is Char Styles and I can send a link to go in the show notes but Char has been doing this for a long time, was on Learn with Jason years ago teaching me how to do some of the live programming stuff. But Char’s got a collective in Brooklyn, it’s like a warehouse of technical weirdos that just get together and kind of break stuff in creative ways and it’s so fascinating. I love the whole ethos there. ⁓

Erika (43:54) Yeah.

Jason (43:55) It’s one of those things that’s like, do I wanna move to New York just to be closer to people that do weird stuff? I’m like, probably not, but like kinda. I’m also not cool enough to be in their club, but like they’d probably let me show up every once in

Brittany Ellich (44:03) You

Jason (44:08) Like bring your dad to work day, they’d let me there.

Erika (44:10) Well, what about you? What’s coming to mind?

Jason (44:13) So I have been trying to get, so the kind of escape room concept leads me toward some of the old shows that like American Gladiators and stuff like that where they were kind of a combo of physical things. There’s a show called Legends of the Hidden Temple on Nickelodeon that I used to love that was a combo of like trivia stuff as well as physical stuff which I thought was really fun. And then I’m also

Like my brass ring, the thing that I wanna make more than anything right now is I wanna bring back Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, but I wanna make it about tech communities. So I wanna visit cities around the world and highlight how the tech communities work there through the people that work there, through the different communities and through the companies that employ them, kind of showing off what it’s like. Because I feel like a lot of people see tech on the internet and they just think it has to happen in Silicon Valley.

And so I’d love to show people what it’s like to, you you can work in tech in Medellin, you can work in tech in Amsterdam or Nashville, and it’s still a great career that has a ton of upside. You don’t have to go to San Francisco for the big opportunities.

Erika (45:14) The first startup that I ever worked, or the first job that I ever had in tech was for a company called Built-In. And it has a similar kind of like idea of like highlighting tech, like local tech to different communities. So I will send you a link, but they could be a fun like contact for you.

Jason (45:20) Hmm.

Yeah, please do.

Yeah, yeah.

Bethany (45:40) That is awesome. I love that. And I think every tech community does have its own flavor of what it does. And for example, like where I live, it’s a lot of FinTech and that has its own like problems and situations and stuff. So I love that. That’s, that would be so cool if you do it. I am, I’m staying tuned and definitely, definitely watching whenever that drops. But all right, this has been such a cool conversation. I wish I had a pen and paper here to take

Jason (46:00) Hahaha

Bethany (46:09) down half the notes that I was wanting to write in my book when I was hearing you talk. So thank you so much for joining us and chatting with us. ⁓ Where can people find you?

Jason (46:17) Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

I have all

of my links on json.energy slash links. It’s kind of a, made my own little link tree. And that’s gonna have, that’s everywhere that I am.

Bethany (46:30) Awesome. Well, perfect. Thank you so much for tuning in to Overcommitted. If you like what you hear, please do follow, subscribe, or do whatever it is you like to do on the podcast app of your choice. Check us out on Blue Sky, join us on Discord, and share with your friends. Until next week, bye.