#25 Sia Ghassemi on segways that lead exactly where you needed to be
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Tim Bourguignon 0:10
Welcome, everyone, we are at the WX conference. Again, it's been a year. It's been a year of hiatus. I had plenty of things to do. But I'm finally back with some new guests for you. And today I have, like always a very special one. But this one, this was really special. And he's in front of me. And he's making silly faces. So it's hard to stay to remain to remain cool. csme is here today. Hi, see ya.
Tim Bourguignon 0:36
Hi. Um,
Tim Bourguignon 0:39
we known each other for many conferences. Yeah, around in Germany. We've seen each other.
Tim Bourguignon 0:44
Many plenty of
Tim Bourguignon 0:45
time. It's a lot of fun. It's just like family is here does it? Last time I saw you were just moving back from Canada. Now you're an
Sia Ghassemi 0:56
executive. Yes. So back to your roots. Not to my roots. But back in Germany. That's what your roots were. Well, I was born in Iran. But when moved to Germany was like, for I think it was 1989. ish. We move to Germany, we kind of refuge. So the weather. It was for me as a kid. It was like fun to see so many different places. I think it wasn't fun for my mom's to leave everything behind and just start over again. But yeah, and then I've been in Germany since I was five. robbing Germany. And then last year, I decided to just do do a year or maybe forever abroad, or went to Canada.
Well, they didn't want to keep me there. So
Tim Bourguignon 1:52
Jerry.
Sia Ghassemi 1:54
It's always hard with immigration. Right. So yeah, I returned April 18 2018.
Tim Bourguignon 2:01
We're glad to have you back.
Sia Ghassemi 2:02
Oh, yeah. I'm glad to be family. I missed the family. So
Tim Bourguignon 2:07
I'm sure you did. Um, so you grew up in Germany? And did you study how you come to, to being an observer?
Sia Ghassemi 2:14
Okay. This starts in Iran, way back in Europe, when you were four, or when I was four, which actually. So when I was four, what we had was the C 64. Okay, what a data set, actually. And I remember playing games at C 64. And I'm pretty sure there was also an Atari, not just the C six for other fun time. And what impressed me is like I'm pressing a button and the guide on the TV moves. But there's something happening based on what I do. And this was like, this got me right into it was like, I want to do something like that. Right. And my cousin, who lives in Meadowlands, he also was very deep into software Dev, he also liked it. So we're almost the same age. He's just one year older than me. So we both were totally into creating games. We're all playing a lot of games, right? Like back then, Super Nintendo game model commentary and playing Mortal Kombat free. One of the first things that we did is basically, we took Malcolm at free on a PC, and we looked up for, for all the images that were part of the game, right. So one of the things that we did first is taking those images and making them like on a button press, the change from not kicking to kicking. Right? which is which was very weird. It didn't look that good. We were seven, our seven he was, ah, this was the entry. Right? I tried to go to some some courses, like some some trainings to learn. But it was always like, they didn't get me, right. So I stayed on it. I learned it all by my own growing up. You know, how it is, as a teenager in always need money. Right? So I started creating websites and PHP for different people to earn some money on the side, so I could go out and drink.
Yeah, basically.
Spent a lot of lot of time in PHP. That was good. Because the number one thing that is good about PHP, I don't I'm not a big PHP fan. The good thing was, it was a C like syntax. So it was good for learning, right? So especially if you did a lot of basic or Pascal before that, it's good to get into C syntax. And since I was doing a lot of VB six back then. I at a certain point, I was like, totally impressed by dotnet and C sharp. So I started learning C sharp. Right? Yeah. And then from there, I took it on and there was a, there was a changing, or there was a point in time in my life where I was like, are you going to study informatics? It's the only thing to study in Germany. Or are you going for the trainee is kind of a trainee. So it's not an internship. It's the German hospital is a training kind of thing, right.
Tim Bourguignon 5:37
Am I going for
Sia Ghassemi 5:39
apprenticeship? Yeah, yeah. Right.
So if I go for rap on or if I go to the uni, to study, and I actually decided to do not either one of those. Okay, right, to just go on with the knowledge that I built up, built by myself. And I had, because everyone that I was meeting was Eddie uni, came out of the uni. And they were so behind my knowledge. So I was like, okay, where's the point? Just to get a degree? am I'm very radical. Consider those kind of things. Because I don't think piece of paper shows who you are what you are. It's basically just to satisfy the need of some people. They have something to prove. It makes sense in a lot of different occasions, right? We, I mean, like, let's say you want to be a chemist or whatever. You don't have those machines at home. You can't do it. Right. So you need to go to the bank for dance because he can have you just need your computer. And then back then it wasn't that cheap, but it was also not that expensive. Right? for it. Yeah, I suppose it was affordable. Exactly. So yeah. Since I taught myself everything I said, looking for jobs, right. Man, finding out what your salary expectations are. If you have never done this before, it's like, it's crazy. Man. You surf the web, trying to find out okay, what could you take it salaries, and then you see all those highest salaries. And no one tells you that this is like, the end. Like I so I started my first applied at a few companies with those high salaries. I didn't get a job. But I know as a company, they were like, they were talking to you. They're like, Okay, this is the this is like the top 10 you get right. And so you got to start it something very low. I did that I went to a company. That was one of the worst companies I ever worked for. No, not from like, the depths were super cool, right? But the mentality and what they were selling or whatever doing was, like so bad. I no want to go back down that road again.
Tim Bourguignon 8:01
This was this was on dotnet
Sia Ghassemi 8:04
pilots. Um, yeah, they did dotnet. But this was back then was dotnet 1.0. We didn't have any SMTP clients loving it. And they wanted to do mass newsletters, right. And the problem well, the ones dotnet 1.1, which was I think, just a year 2003 or something Happy 2002 was 1.0 in 2003 was 1.1 I think, yeah. But the company was like, they were cheap. They didn't want to spend that money to get a update. So we I had to writer for SMTP protocol mail, like fresh in as an employee in a company for some doing this professionally. And you have to write an SMTP client, right? So I wrote the SMTP client on my own all a C sharp. And they were I was in a company doing PHP. So I had to help out here and there was fine. And after half a year, I got a better job offer in my hometown Dusseldorf. So change never this was a much cooler company. They were doing C sharp, purely all the time. And they were creating, like, was it was it was a website where you can compare multiple car rentals. See, like, what is the cheapest mechanicals, like all starting over? Right? And I was at that company for four months. And then I got past I got me from the military. Like, Oh, you got to cut me. And my employee back then was like you Yeah, you're a nice guy. But you didn't make the make the provision. right because they had to they had to be landmarks in Armenia keep the position free was a small company with like three people, right? Like the CEO and two devs. And I was one of them. So they couldn't really afford it, which is fine. I'm still friends with them, I still meet with them for lunch, great people, but back then they couldn't like, afford it to keep. So I was out of a job. I had three months into my military starts to find something. So I just called around, I took the phonebook and looked up all the IT companies and called around and I was like, all the time, I was like, Well, I'm looking for a job. But I'm only available for three months. It's hard to find a job only for three months. Is that right? Say when is like your middle of the project, and you have to leave? Well, luckily, there was a company who took me in by took me a month to find them. And for that one month, I was working at a telecom booth. So I phone contracts, which was silly, but I learned a lot about selling, which is great. Yeah, so I went with that company for two months. And then I went to military service that my military service the first three months at least, because then I was thinking about going into the into German bonus, a military service and be a dev there, right? Because after department for developers and everything, but what they told me is like, okay, you can be a dev, but it is a there is a security check that takes one and a half years. And during that time, I would like it like to send you to Afghanistan, because you speak the language. And I was like, no way. Yeah, yeah, so left a military service.
Got self employed as a freelancer,
really good gigs, and worked well, until the financial crisis of 2009. And I went back to a permanent position, which was good because I was fresh, right? I didn't have that much experience. And that company that I then got involved with, I stayed there for four years. So one of the greatest companies that I've ever worked for. I think there was one thing that made this company so good. The CEO was a dev, he started this company, he started a product that himself, right, so he was not so much driven by the economy and by growth at all, like by innovation, which is great. And I learned a lot there. When I started that company, they were doing Scrum. And the CEO went on winter break. And he got bang, he's like, I read a book. This is so good, we will do this. But what he did this is amazing. He changed the whole company to a caveman approach on not just the deaths, but the whole company was doing a camera approach. And you know, how it is everyone was first complaining, why should we do this? are so so different? Why. But in the end, we could see after three months micropayments it was applied and was doing it and worked. Right? It can work the way it should work. What do you think it worked there, because it's a horror sort of story that takes decades. And I think the thing is what people try to do always, like, let's just take the development department and let them just do combat because he applied it on the whole company like from, from the CEO, like from the tops down to support everyone was in a process and the board members were all the departments in there, right. So, everyone was working on one board and I think this is why it worked. And on the other hand, we also introduced feature branches a feature branches with quality is right. So, the quality that they had back then was great because they had acceptance testing ad was running in parallel for about four hours for every build. So, the quality the test quality was was was good ML code quality was really good. But what we did predict quality gates, the P o had to sign that he got delivered what he asked for this made a pure rethink before he takes anything. And this brought us a better quality in not just code quality but also like application logic or to return what is expected. Agile worked, right it could pivot much faster because he or looked at face and reactive much much faster. So overall What this company did is like, they did everything right. They had an awesome product. They still have an awesome product, they're still around. And I learned so much from them. really thankful for that.
Yeah. And
at one point, I decided that I had enough that I want to change, I want to system me out. So I switched. Oh, by the way, before I tell that when you're in a company as switch from a C sharp part, we were doing C sharp and managed c++, and switch departments to a Java to Java progress. I did like, for two years or so I did Java. And then I decided it's time for a change. So I sign up with the direct competitor. That was a it was a it was based on my home in my hometown. That's fine, right? Yeah, one was like, every day, one half hours to work and one half hours back, which is a lot. So yeah, I signed up with a with a competitor. But this was like, it was not fun working. There was not fun. It was like being a code monkey. Right? It's like, just do this, do that, whatever. And, yeah, I didn't have much fun here. So I switched again, to a company that was smaller, and had a monopoly. I'm not sure how much I can tell about this company. So I won't do them. But one weird thing happened. a recruiter got in touch with me. And he was like, Well, how is it how you happy itself? And I was like, No, I'm not really happy. Because the company was like, really conservative. They were like, We only do things that we know is good. So they were doing WP f where everyone else was moving on, right? Like, I had to do silly things, converted delfy application into a WP f application. It's not something I wanted, obviously not. When they pitch me, son are much more interesting. What do going down and what they're doing. So I was talking to his recruiter, and I was like, I'm not so happy. So look for new things. But I didn't know is that recruiter? As caught called, my manager told him that I'm looking for something else.
Tim Bourguignon 17:27
Yeah, that's nasty.
Sia Ghassemi 17:28
Yeah, it is. And the manager got came to me and he was like, you have to leave. Take your stuff and go, you're banned. So the bed me and fired me. Right? And I was like, Okay, perfect. I've got nothing to lose. So I talked to a few recruiters and they got me a job in hammer. This is when I moved to hammer. So I'm interested off
Tim Bourguignon 17:55
anyone back to self employment.
Sia Ghassemi 17:58
No, I didn't. I first got in a permanent position hammer, where I started to grow. Because this was the first time where I got in touch with the community. I had a hard time to find a community in the slough. But thanks to meetup.com and other things, I found the community in hammered. And the position at the ad one company was good. I started as a dev as a dotnet developer, I improved a lot of my work fast got into position of a team lead kind of thing. So I was responsible for hiring, multiple firing, the responsible for the architecture of the application. And from there on, I said, I stayed with them about two years. And then I got suffered. And yeah, I learned a lot there again. And I met a lot of people at the communities, right. So we're a time
Tim Bourguignon 19:01
limited writer. I know you from your, from your recent history, as an MVP has a very, very talkative guy on conferences, who like comes with one talk planned and ends up with being five or six times on stage during the conference. How did you make this move to learn this to become this this this extrovert and this this this leading position in the industry? How did I become I
Sia Ghassemi 19:27
think I've always been an extrovert, not on the dev side. So I've done a lot of talks back then. But I've always been extroverted. I always had a very simple, it was always very easy for me to find new people to meet new people find new friends, right? That's something I think that's something that you have in right there are people that are extroverted or near people that are very introverted. Like my girlfriend, she doesn't have for her. It's not that easy to find new friends. For me. It's like I just go somewhere and meet
Um, I met new friends, right, I made new friends.
But when it comes to the conference, so what happened is,
is funny. So I moved to hammer. I was looking for the community for some meetups right. I ended up in a Microsoft meetup and turned out any handouts the past meetup. So it was all DBAs SQL servers.
Tim Bourguignon 20:29
Fuck.
Sia Ghassemi 20:31
No, no, it's the past. It's pa SS. It's a it's a whole community for SQL servers. Oh, okay. Right. They're doing like their own things. As like, it's huge. It really is. All over the world. And yeah, very well. organized. Yeah, I ended up at this meetup. And I don't know who it was. But one thing that was super interesting to me, I never talked a lot to DBAs that were DBAs. Come on, right. But one of the things that they showed me that I learned there is like, they have to go to customers. And they need to take their tools with them to customers. So what they said is they often have a hard time bringing into us because it's a USB C, and they have all these
all these permits, and all these
rules to come at their customers were not allowed to bring in foreign USB sticks. Right. So what it did, they created a PowerShell script. Put it online. And at customer's computer, it just near browser, went to the to that copied it, put it into a script file, and just run what actually did it didn't run a bunch of things. It instantiated a goon force crate, hold on furcation from that PowerShell script. So they have their tools with them. Just crazy, right? But this is this is what people do. That's what devs do. That's what engineers do. They have a problem. They try to solve it with the things they have. Cool. Yeah. And this is this is pretty cool. So yeah, from there, I went, I met the dotnet user group in hammer, kill and sent and marching. So I was there the first my first meet up with them. And I got in touch with him talk to them. And pretty much I was the next within the next meetup. I was part of the team organized, right. And this is where I brought in my first own presentation. It was on swagger.
And Azure API apps, Logic Apps.
Tim Bourguignon 22:50
And
Sia Ghassemi 22:53
through that community through that meetup, I got in touch with the DevOps space and leipsic. So asked me, Hey, you want to go there? I was like, Yeah, sure. And funny thing, the organizer of the dev space was looking for one more presenter workshop lead, right? Oh, yeah, I can do that. Never done a virtual before. But yeah, I can do that. Let me workshop on Logic Apps, API apps and swagger. I remember when we arrived there, what we did is like we arrived, I think, first a night, went to a next supermarket. But two bottles of McCarty. He got super drunk. And the next day, I had a hangover that was so bad. And I had to leave my first workshop and I had a hangover.
Tim Bourguignon 23:41
Yeah, that's not really what's the toll motors no on the manual.
Sia Ghassemi 23:45
Right, right. So yeah, so I had this workshop, I did the workshop. And what happened is, during the lunch break, I was like, Guys, I'm still so hung over, going to take a quick nap. So I had a nap for 30 minutes, take shine and went on with a workshop. And then I got a feedback perspective. You wouldn't believe it, but it said it was the most comfortable workshop. It was so so relaxed because the lead was drunk. Okay, so good. Good experience. Yeah.
For me, it was
Tim Bourguignon 24:27
really bad, but
Sia Ghassemi 24:30
it was fine. And yeah. And they after that it was the open space. So I did talk on swagger, but this was the first time that something bad happened to me as a speaker. So there was this one guy who was like, I know everything about rest. I know everything about restful and swagger is not restful. It's nice shade because it doesn't support hypermedia and blah blah blah. Turned out in the end so he was crushing my my my first ever Were talking in front of a bigger audience, which was bad because I wasn't thinking I didn't know how to react. I was kind of lost right? In the end, it turned out that this guy created issue GitHub issues, and the team told him to just go fuck himself. His swagger is not about being fully wrestled hypermedia, right? The goal is different. And he was pretty pissed about it. You can read it and get up it was it was a pretty visceral, and he took it to me ticket took it out of me, right. Which is pretty bad. But ours who are today, my friends, who are part of the family jumped in and helped me back then which was great. Yeah, and from there on, I just went to a next medium and always higher expectations of myself. Let's do this. Let's do that. Talk to something on that. Find my specialties Xamarin, Azure garden awarded as an Azure MVP. And yeah, just more and more and more, but not because I wanted to allow to to show myself or whatever. It is fun. Doing talks in front of people and seeing their eyes, like shine when they see something new is fun. This is like one of the best feeling series, right? I think people are. Yeah, so that's why I do this. And
why take them as possible?
Tim Bourguignon 26:34
I can't I keep on seeing the same faces of conferences. So one on one side is really fun. It's really fun to find. The whole family's really feels like family. But it's hard to get new people in there. What do you think? so few people are interested in this be?
Sia Ghassemi 26:51
I don't think it's not that people are not interested in it. Have you met Patrick Drexler? Yes, yeah. So I talked to him he was like he was as an attendee here, first five years, whatever is the first time now he is here as a speaker this year. So the thing is, I don't think it is. It is not because people are not interested. When I talk to people, it's more like, they're intimidated. Right. They're like, Oh, this is something that only an expert did. And what I tell them is like, it's not true. Usually what you have on conferences is very high level, right? introduction interface. Take something that you're super interested about. Interested in sorry, that you're passionate, and take that go to a local meetup and just do it there. Nothing bad will happen. You won't get your head ripped off or anything, right. Think it's just more the fear about blaming yourself. Right. and bad things will happen. It's like with everything that you you're afraid of, because you never did before. Right. And I think this is the problem that we need to do to help each other. encourage each other to do things, right. Yesterday, we had Lisa here, she had her first talk ever. And she's not from a deaf side, right. She's from HR. So she's coming from HR. And her talk was amazing. It was great sitting here listening to it. And this is, and the thing is why it was so good. So we have both seen good and bad talks, right. And I think one thing that makes a talk a good one, or a session is if you feel that that person that a presenter is passionate about it, right? It has passion, and they're not looking at their slides, but they're really talking out of their head because they know exactly out of the top of their head. They know exactly what they're talking about. Right. And this is this is the thing where you have some presenter that is doing it, but comfort, you know, does a good talk, enjoy sitting there and listening. If you feel that people are not that comfortable, because it's like you feel if it's a topic they just have to cover but they are not really interested in and talking the whole session shitty.
Tim Bourguignon 29:22
I wouldn't doing enough as more experienced speakers and industry maybe where we're the ones treating this this impression that you have to master a few tools before coming on stage. Are we doing enough? Could we do more than
Sia Ghassemi 29:37
I'm not sure if we could do more. It is the fear whenever someone has to step out. It also means that he has to step out of his comfort zone. Right. So to encourage people to do that. We have to make clear that they don't have to be an expert on anything. They don't have to do something that no one else has done before they can do things that others have done. Because everyone, every whenever I'm on stage, and I'm presenting something, but I tell the people, I sent them home, it's like, they'll forget, I'm standing here, I'm telling you about my opinion. Right? This is just my opinion, there's so many different opinions out there. Go into each one of them. Listen to each one of them. Read books, but don't forget, it's always an opinion of one individual. Right? And this is something that we need to make clear, there's no wrong or right, right or wrong. There's only opinions. And there are patterns and concepts. Right? So it's always refreshing to see the same topic from a different angle. And I think this is what what people are like, oh, someone already talked about that. Why should I do it? Am I right? And we need to educate each other to understand that multiple angles on one topic, are great, because we only can learn from each other. Right? This is why I'm not a big fan of books. Because books are date at a certain point, especially in our industry, they audit so fast. And on the other hand, if there's a book people think this is the only truth
Tim Bourguignon 31:26
is established,
Sia Ghassemi 31:27
it's established is the owner, especially if it's someone who has naming industry in order name, when he writes is this is the right thing, right? And we always forget to question things, right? And what can we do to encourage people? I don't know, just give them comfort, encouragement, tell them, Hey, come on, let's just do it. Nothing to lose. One, I live with a friend of mine, and just took him as a co author or co speaker after my sessions. He got more comfortable. Right? Now he's preparing his first old talk write something.
Tim Bourguignon 32:09
I had also the the advice, I heard the advice. If you were following some kind of class or something, you had 100 hours invested. And now you can give a talk for 30 minutes, then you spared me 99.5 hours, you're still not the master is still not an expert. But it's actually that much time. And I have a bit of experience in the same. Exactly.
Sia Ghassemi 32:33
I mean, like when you go to my talks, you will see, even if I'm talking about the same topic, or just this the same talk, I changed nothing on the slides, whatever it always is. Why is that because I don't prepare what I do is like, I know the topic that I want to talk about. And this is something that I'm that I love, and that I can talk about for hours. Right. So when I go into the talk, I first asked the audience, what they know what they don't know, right. And depending on who my audience is, for some talks, I even have multiple slide decks to take out one that is important for that audience. When you are on the other hand, it is it is not a monologue. I'm not standing here in holding a monologue, it is dialogue. Even if the other side doesn't say much. You can see in their faces the expression, right? You can you can read what they're not what they're thinking, at least how they accepting what you're saying, not to getting it. Exactly. And this is still a dialogue, right. And this is the important part, you got to understand your audience. Sometimes you have really bad audience and you can't do anything about it. They're just not interested. They're just there for the food. They have done a lot of meetups. People just show up for the food and they're not really interested, which is disappointing. And bad. But yeah, you can't you can't always have to happy path and effects. Right. Yeah, learn with your experiences.
Tim Bourguignon 34:09
Through that through that. what's what's on your plate? Where are you going? Now? What's on what's what's up with your with your journey?
Sia Ghassemi 34:16
That's a good question. So I recently started to do more business consulting, and chart consulting. So it's less about like, Hey, this is Ms. Cloud, whatever. Look at this one. And what we have here, as well. Like, I go to customers that are like, Okay, this is what we're trying to build. This is our problems. There are multiple solutions to a problem, right? Especially when people these days want to move into the cloud, right? They're like, we have a software here. We're moving to a cloud. One thing that Sal is just like yeah, you can spin up a bunch of VMs and run them there, right? Or you don't win anything. Right. So I dimension VMs and
Tim Bourguignon 35:02
listen shift, but they're exactly the point in the cloud. Okay, exactly seven
Sia Ghassemi 35:05
different. Yeah. And the hardest part is to convince companies to rebuild what they're doing. But a cloud first approach, because rebuilding is always I have something here is running. So after you get this, hey, come in and tell us how we can move our application into the cloud or make it use the microservice pattern whenever. And it's always like, well, I wouldn't even if it is a model of lithic application with you running there, it's running, let it run the way it is. Take a new project that you want, or new feature B feature you want to implement, from that point, implemented a new architecture, new pattern.
And once you have that, connect those two,
then you're moving towards distributed systems, as you use a lot of messaging and stuff. So that's something is super interesting to me. Like, how can we
change the mindset
to the to today's needs, we look at today's requirements, we always want to have dedicated systems distributed systems, right. And I think the biggest problem we have today is that at unis and many schools, still teaching monolithic applications, monolithic program, synchronous, synchronous programming, right, just do one thing at a time, instead of teaching asynchronous and distributed systems. So this is on one hand, where I'm trying to go to meetups and pick out all the students. Right, and lead them into racket right direction, even though the university is going the wrong direction.
On the other hand,
I would love to do more business consulting, less like how do you grow? Or how do you get growth in your business? More like? Do you understand your business so far? Right? This is where I got all in this in all of these DD stuff and all things around domain driven design, exactly. Driven design and event sourcing and event storming, as a practice to understand your business
Tim Bourguignon 37:38
and how you get your business. Business knowledge into software.
Sia Ghassemi 37:42
So Exactly, exactly. What this brings us with it is that we start teaching developers to speak business language, instead of trying to teach business people to speak developer language, right? probably need a bit of both. Yeah, it is, in the end, it's a meeting of on both sides, right. But for a long, long time, people try to just educate PMS, to make it very technical. To define your requirements were technical, which is bad. Because this leads to a lot of confusion, a lot of misunderstanding, right? So yeah, this is where I'm trying to get into more, which works for me so far. So since I'm back, I'm in a project where I can do exactly that, where the the knowledge is something that a customer is paying for the knowledge about, about building software instead of like, hiring me just as a dev. And this is also why I'm attending all these conferences, to be fair, I love what we're doing. But it is on the other hand, also safe marketing tool, right? We all try to get new, interesting projects, where we can
really grow, right
and so as part of that, too, so whenever I'm here at conferences, try to meet new people connect with new people extend my network, right? And even go for free to a company to see how they're doing things to understand what are the needs in the industry
because the only way you can
pivot at the right time, right
Tim Bourguignon 39:29
so so let's jump on that where can people find you working if they need some some buddy like you if they want to talk to to show you how they're working and give you an under a different headline where they can grab you or can you find it
Sia Ghassemi 39:42
there's one thing that I'm super super super bad at but I suck
at is creating my own website.
Tim Bourguignon 39:51
We still have a LinkedIn profile on
Sia Ghassemi 39:54
LinkedIn. So I'm actually I'm on LinkedIn saying Twitter. Probably on Facebook, you'll find me but don't look this one up for private and
Tim Bourguignon 40:05
I'll have the links.
Sia Ghassemi 40:07
Exactly.
Nobody Yeah. Yeah, just just best is to send me an email. Or ping me on LinkedIn.
Tim Bourguignon 40:17
I'll use some conferences in the next month.
Sia Ghassemi 40:21
Well, I am now we have summer break. Yay, summer break, right? Oh, yeah. I'm doing a summer break in July and August, I think, okay, maybe I go to a meet up. But some regular conferences at least. And
I got to ask Eric, because he's my
Yeah, he's a boogie. He knows exactly what conferences I'm writing. But there are a few that just pops up in my mind as to Kandinsky in October.
Tim Bourguignon 40:52
And September
Sia Ghassemi 40:53
now you didn't pull? You didn't?
You didn't pull the ads. Five.
I applied a few different ones. So there's a Caribbean DEF CON. Sounds
Tim Bourguignon 41:08
great. Where do I apply?
Sia Ghassemi 41:10
Yeah. Caribbean DEF CON. It really is a Dominican Republic. Cool. Yeah. So Mike and I are playing for this one. Okay, which would be right, African NC, and then right after that, run the server come
and Berlin. Okay.
Right. So these are the ones that I have in mind. And then Kostya asked me to speak at the past camp, which is in December. And I have a few our meetups that I'm attending it or speaking at. And I'm trying to find a lot of people to speak and my newly created English speaking developers community, Hamburg. Okay. All right. Well, we had our first meetup last week, I was presenting on the safe stack was great. People loved it. We had a, we had a no show rate of 40%, which is pretty cool. Yeah, it was really good. And I hope to get you there. Not only requirements. So whenever someone wants to speak at our meetup, you're welcome. We're doing a once a month, food week after month. There are only two requirements. It has to do somehow with the tech and def committee. It doesn't have to be like very technical, it can be a soft skill, too. But it has to be in English. I I know that you,
Germany, and
there are so people learnt and English. I
Tim Bourguignon 42:37
know. A little other the mythical
Sia Ghassemi 42:41
Oh, it's called English speaking developers community hungry?
Tim Bourguignon 42:46
Do you have a website on meetup Smart Moves
that link that.
Sia Ghassemi 42:54
I think I hope that at a certain point, you will have English developer. And then for English software developers, it's called writing your software developers and community hammer. And we have community Berlin created Munich, whatever. This is what I would like to have. Because the problem is, you know, we have our usual meetups. And we always have every now and then we have an English speaker. But you can see that usually the ones who are asking questions have to talk is in German. Stop, ask questions, if the targets English because they're intimidated and too afraid to say something wrong in English. And this vice, I created this new meetup just to get people more comfortable. That's fine. Yeah,
Tim Bourguignon 43:40
I see your scaling ready? Oh, yeah. That's good. That's cool. Well, um, do you wanna say something? Well, I think
Sia Ghassemi 43:49
I love you.
Yeah, I think I think whoever listens to their podcasts and hasn't been at a conference like this, or even the smaller tech media conferences, right.
On, I encourage them to go there.
As an attendee first as a speaker, whatever go there. Because as some of you said, in the first place, it is a family and meeting all these brilliant minds on each side is so refreshing is so good. And other discussions we have are so much better than and numbers stack flow, Fred, where people are just fighting over fake religious things, instead of just discussing and listening to each other. So go there, and have a seat for yourself. A member that
Tim Bourguignon 44:40
was here. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. The pleasure