#31 Mario Rogic on absorbing and communicating as much as you can

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Tim Bourguignon 0:05
What is a good software developer? What do excellent developers do? There are probably as many answers to these questions as developers in the world. So let's ask veterans and newcomers what their story look like. Let's learn directly from them. Welcome to developer's journey. Hello, and welcome to developer's journey, the podcast shining light on Developers Live from all over the world. My name is Tim Bourguignon, and today I received my yo Roderick Mio is a technology efficient with a particular love for the web. You will see why very soon. He believes technology should make life simple and joyful and he enjoys being able to prove so he currently lives in London and works as head of technology for looking at.com but is about to start on a new project and maybe we'll hear what today will We'll see. Mario finally organized and runs the Elm London meetups and frequently teach and speak about Elm to differ different diverse audiences. Miko, thank you very much for joining.

Mario Rogic 1:17
Thank you very much for having me.

Tim Bourguignon 1:18
Always a pleasure. It's a pleasure. I'm about these diverse origin audiences. And this is exactly the point we we last discussed with each other. I was in London a few months ago, I think. And you were about to go to Paris to give a talk about the album at Elm Europe, I think. Well,

Mario Rogic 1:39
yeah, that's correct. Yeah.

Tim Bourguignon 1:40
Um, so of course, I want to know how that went. But I would also love to know how you ended up in a position being able to give international talks at such a conference. Can you give us an idea of how the journey looks like?

Mario Rogic 1:57
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's, I suppose it could be a very, very long story a very short story about but maybe maybe to start Yeah, Elm. Elm Europe was was really really fantastic. Personally, for me, it's super energizing. I I kind of have a feeling with Elm given that it's a it's a young new language, it's kind of similar to when I originally got into Ruby. And maybe that was oh seven. Oh, I also and it's kind of just like that there's just a huge amount of excitement in the community I think that's kind of starting from scratch and yet it doesn't have a lot of baggage yet and and it's kind of like pushing new boundaries so so yeah, no, absolutely if if folks listening are interested in functional programming and pike their interest in Elm I can I can definitely recommend Elm Europe as a as a really amazing conference. But yet so tons of the the more more windy and Tony question of how one ends up speaking at international conferences, I mean, the simple answer is you go online, you find a CFP, you apply, you get selected and you speak

Mario Rogic 3:08
really,

Mario Rogic 3:10
practically, really, there's, there's not much more to it, but I suppose that there is at least maybe from a self identity or personal confidence or skillset point of view, there's probably some more hoops that that folks probably need to jump to, at least I can say for myself personally, and it wasn't, you know, my first speaking experience, he wasn't an international conference. I think for me, it was kind of something that that I was very lucky to be exposed to when I was young through through our church and our youth group, we had a ton of various activities and kind of one way or another by being involved with that I found myself even needing to speak not to huge audiences, but you know, just slightly bigger audiences or to to kind of organize groups and, and to various things. And I don't know I kind of felt that through that you know, maybe I just got exposure and had a little bit better of a baseline comfort maybe than than some of my peers. I remember not being as of course nervous having to you know, do do kind of oral speeches or high school on some topics or you know, maybe having to present something to the teacher or whatever else that might be at those kind of younger ages was quite nerve wracking, but I don't know kind of little by little you you you realize like, okay, you know, speaking to 10 people is not that different to speaking to five and then speaking 20 is not that different attend and I think sometimes there's a tipping point where I think maybe for like a school assembly or something maybe later on in like 12 I had to do a speech and then you suddenly realize, you know, there's there's way way way more people In the room, then you can maintain eye contact with. I think that's, that's definitely a transitional boundary between you know, I'm speaking to these 10 people and I can cycle through and see how they all feeding back to me. But when you have such a such an overwhelming audience, and it's quite different, but yeah, I mean, the cliche, kind of cliche thing of just putting yourself out there and giving it a go. And then subsequently finding that it gets easier. It is definitely, I think definitely has some truth to it. And I probably also encourage people that, that maybe haven't tried doing that. There's, well, you can probably find find on YouTube, that there's quite a few talks from prominent speakers speaking about how nervous they still are speaking, which I find that I find that meta, kind of like, you're talking about the thing you're nervous about, by doing the thing you're nervous about on stage, you know, it's a crazy, crazy young utility to be able to express those ideas, but yeah, even even even even people that, that have been doing it for a very long time, and I'm necessarily comfortable with it. And then some people are just absolutely natural, right like that. Very, very kind of naturally gifted speakers that, yeah, I think like all things in life, it kind of comes down to practice. So, you know, when one is a little bit older speaking, you know, in university for assignments, or presentations, I started going to programming meetups and while I was living in Sydney, and you know, you say to people speaking, and then maybe you get excited about something, and, and I think, I think, if I remember correctly, one of the meetups that I went to, there was somebody that kind of encouraged lots of people. And he was actually quite sly about it, because after the meetup, he would go around and talk to everybody. And, you know, if you were excitedly talking about something, he would engage with you more and more boring, drag it out of you. And then he would turn around later and go, Ah, nice one, you're gonna talk about that next meetup? And you kind of go What, what what? Like, he's like, yeah, you're clearly passionate about it, you know a lot about it, like, done, like you should tell other people is going to be really, really cool. And you just casually just kind of firming people and maybe, kind of supporting the idea that what, what they have to say and what they think actually has value even if they might not think it does. You know, definitely even still, like I can say, for this, this conference talk that I did just now at the pastel meetup, you know, there's that little niggly monkey on your shoulder saying, you know, most of these people probably already know what you're talking about, you know, most of them probably going to be bored, you know, most of them, you know, the kind of imposter syndrome, I think, nobody's really immune to so.

Mario Rogic 7:48
Yeah, that's the

Mario Rogic 7:51
that's it. That's a bash at the windy, windy explanation. Um,

Tim Bourguignon 7:55
but of course, um, why would you want to speak at conferences? what's what's the rationale behind it? Is there a need behind it? is there is there really an idea that you want to to convey? And in what way in the in the speaking for in the speaking forum spoken form? And not in an article? Or were writing a book or something?

Mario Rogic 8:20
Ah, that's a really good question. Actually. I think something maybe that I've realized a lot more deeply. In the more recent part of my career is that, you know, despite all of our technological advancements, it's it's it just, there's something really fundamental about people communicating together in person. So even even though even though that I think there is definitely a time and place for blog posts or articles or, you know, other kinds of medium podcasts like this one, of course. Yeah, I think that there's a set of skills that you can gain from, from from from doing a conference to go from doing a meetup typical, just presenting something in general that I think is really quite valuable and don't really come into need in in other forums. So, you know, you might say, yes, definitely, if you're writing an article, you need to quite be to the point. But there's a little bit less of a prerogative because everybody gets to pace through the article at their own speed, right. So so you know, one person might read it slowly and other person might read it quite quickly and skim through it. Another person might get bored two sentences in and leave like the cost to the reader isn't that high. However, when you're in a conference setting, or in a meetup setting, at least the exceptionally I mean, in reality, it's still the same, it doesn't matter. Like if someone doesn't want to listen, that's their problem, not yours. From a from a from a kind of personal value point of view. It's not your fault, if they don't want to listen right? But but from a psychological point of view, there's a little bit more of an imperative to be like, Okay, well, I, I have the I actually spoke about this at the beginning of last year's talk. on Europe, it was like, I have the privilege as a speaker of having your undivided attention, which kind of in in today's day and age, I mean, I don't know, if you consider what what advertisers pay for to get, you know, half a second of view scrolling past their advertisement on a Twitter feed. And then you compare that to, you know, a full audience with 100%, undivided attention to one single individual speaking about something, there's, uh, you know, there's kind of like a compelling sense of value there, right? Like you're, you're you're taking all the people's time, you're, you've got their clear attention and a little bit more of an imperative to make the most of that, right. So I think it forces you to learn things like, what is it? You know, what is it exactly that you want to say? What do you want to convey to these people? How can you most effectively articulate that idea? How can you read your audience to understand are they? Are they grasping what you're saying? Are you giving enough detail or too much detail? Are you going too fast? Are you going too slow? Yeah, that is, I feel that those kind of human elements have really, really interesting skills. And I I guess, throughout my career, and my role in particular, I kind of gravitated towards leadership roles that come a lot of times where I've, I've, I've done things in the past, like, say, like a town hall, or, you know, a team meeting or something like that. And I've gone to give a particular message. And then having done more and more conference talks, have or meetup talks or whatever it might be kind of gone back and rethought some of those other interactions I've had going on, man, like, I really, you know, I really didn't respect those people's times. I wasn't prepared. I rambled. I wasn't sure what point I wanted to make. And yeah, I guess, I guess to me, in some ways, I find that I found that, you know, benefits go both ways, in better being able to learn the skill sets that that at least in my perception make for for for good presentations, and good. Good, good conference or meetup talks, I found that some of my other interactions with with teams and how I communicate improved, and then, you know, learning things from that relatively much more frequent practicing kind of platform, within your day job also kind of feeds back in to, yeah, to how you present a conferences and stuff. So yeah. Does that make sense?

Tim Bourguignon 12:50
Absolutely. I absolutely agree with you. And this is why I'm pushing so many of my colleagues to do this is, even if you're not interested in the in giving talks for the toxin sells, it's such a great exercise and platform for your day to day life, you will absolutely at some point, you will have to talk to your peers, even if that's just one person sitting beside you. And we call that pair programming. But you will have to do some presentation of ideas and structured complex ideas at some point. And so you have to try something.

Mario Rogic 13:25
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other that, that's really interesting point you make, just realized something I was thinking about recently is, when you're when you're doing a conference talk, because the stakes are higher, I think you're a little bit more aware of certain things. And then for me, it's really interesting house when those stakes aren't there, we kind of creep out and abuse things. So for example, something that I say a lot, or that I have seen a lot in my current job is, you know, we were very quite a large corporate so so communication of information is a pretty big deal, right? Like, it's something that a lot of people kind of do on a daily basis. And for that we you know, we use PowerPoints, we make presentations, but it's really interesting how many people you have, that maybe have never done like a public speaking, talk and have never kind of tried those skills or learn anything about that realm. But do and you know, wouldn't be comfortable doing that either. They would be very, very nervous, of a Kind of day to day, they're very, very, very comfortable doing that within the workplace. And I think part of that causes certain problems. So for example, one of the things that that I learned, kind of by trial and error is that you can't have too many messages in a presentation, because you'll lose people, right? Like if you're trying to convey 17 different things. People are gonna start losing track of what, what the point is. Now, I mean, you can have 17 detailed items, but if they're grouped up into, you know, two or three hives Key points, that's okay, that you're you're using them to reinforce those key points. But I kind of always, at least what I said to myself is, you know, what, what, two things two or two or three things? Do I want people to walk away from this talk, if they remember nothing else that I said, What do I want them to remember? And then trying to take that and apply it to like a corporate deck, you know, and especially when, you know, we sit down with a team to review a deck, and it's already at, like, 73 slides. Every slide is just completely crammed with information. And, and then trying to articulate to a group of people like, Hey, guys, like, maybe, maybe no one's gonna get it, you know, like, and so it's interesting. On the one hand, it's like, oh, we have to have all the information, because you know, we have to be ready for anything. But then on the other hand, it's like, yes, but if you're ready for anything, you'd be ready for nothing like you won't have a message. Right, like so. Anyway, as an aside, I find that quite hilarious.

Tim Bourguignon 15:56
It is it is, in my in my turn project, we had a we had we made some kind of joke and it became a very serious, sending an email and saying, Well, you know, next week on Tuesday, the Beamer is not going to work, people wet. What What do you mean, it's not going to work? Well, we kind of know already the Beamer is not going to work. So you will have to do without the presentation, you will have to find another way to present and people were freaking out. But the presentation was gorgeous. It was really fun. People came up with really creative and yours, how to convey the message anyway. And it was it was really fun. So yeah,

Mario Rogic 16:37
absolutely. I lost, I guess that temptation of that tooling is too too too large, right? Like, it's just the easy thing to do is dump information on slides. So when Yeah, if you take that away, then you're you're forced. That's a great idea. I think I'm gonna go around unplugging projectors, and pretending that they all settling down work and see what happens. And suddenly, we have a huge spike in communication efficiency in the beginning.

Tim Bourguignon 17:02
We were not so nasty. We told people beforehand, we wanted to still have a nice, a nice meeting and student should be should be okay. But that's also an idea could do that. Now also chaos monkey style.

Mario Rogic 17:17
Yeah.

Tim Bourguignon 17:20
Let's, let's roll back a second as well. So we talked about why speaking but you thought you mentioned the word imposter syndrome, you have to find something you could be talking about? How did you come up with topics or with ideas on what to talk about in stage.

Mario Rogic 17:42
I'm so sorry. Suppose there's

Mario Rogic 17:46
a part of my personality from from when I was very, very young was kind of tearing tearing things apart and putting them back together. And so my, my, my, my dad's work kind of gave gave me the opportunity during some of breaks and stuff to kind of tag along with him. And that was always there was always something to you know, like an old computer or an old printer, or what lots of lots of kind of office supplies stuff, all kind of phones, like the big phones that used to come in two parts with like, like the cold but like a mobile phone, right. But it was like a, like a home phone with this giant battery pack and all linked together, right. And these are all things that have been chucked in the trash. So that was you know, there was no way for me to break it any more than it had been broken and ripping stuff apart and seeing how it worked, I suppose was a just a, I guess kind of like an interest or a delight of mine early on, because it was just really cool to see, you know, behind the covers, how stuff works. And so I think taking that into into my life kind of later education beginning of my career, I think I was always kind of fiddling around with stuff and discovering things and I suppose as a result of that I had a lot of fodder for things to speak about or at least things that I found interesting. I mean, that I would sort of at the same time though I would kind of discourage people to think that that's necessarily what you need. Like I've I've heard so at the at the Elm meetup I often try and encourage beginners to talk about stuff even especially if they think it's something super obvious. So you know, we had one of our one of our meet up attendees spoke about spoke about like, why Elm? Like, why should you use Elm and I really encouraged him and he he I think he kind of initially felt that that was silly because you know, if you're at an Elm meetup, presumably you're already convinced that there's something interesting about it right? And that's than you would expect if you're going to do a talk about why Elm Why are you there, you know, you're kind of preaching to the choir, right? Like you. It's kind of like, you know, having a chocolate meetup, put in a bunch of people turn up and then you pitch to them why they should like Chocolate while it's like guys anything, they came to the meet up like, right. But that's not that's not really the point. And I think it also it also kind of sets a bit of a presumption that all everybody that's there already knows what's going on they have it together, which is definitely not true, you know, why actually happens is this some people that might not know if they like Elon, they might be coming to see what the communities like they, they might be on the edge or this, this particular individual talked about bringing in Elm app at their workplace, and some of the challenges they ran into and how they justified the adoption of the language and the benefits and the risks and all that kind of stuff. As at the end of the day, even though it was maybe for some of us, you know, something that we already knew and believed still just hearing it, articulate it in a different way. still kind of has value. And it's also enjoyable to be part of seeing somebody else be able to grow. So yeah, if there's listeners thinking that they have nothing interesting to talk about, it's also totally acceptable. to just talk about something that might be obvious to you. It doesn't have to be new and novel every single time. I, maybe the stakes are a little bit different when you're at a much larger conference. I think that's a little bit sad. It would be cool to have more beginners speaking about stuff. And I think some conferences do do that a little bit better. But I suppose there you have, like a kind of what's called, like mismatched incentives, right? Because like for conferences that usually very large, very expensive people pilots need to be there. They're expecting to get, you know, high quality or cutting edge context, maybe for some conferences. So maybe that's that's a little bit different. But again, I guess another skill that that comes in there is this concept of know your audience, right? So it kind of had a meetup, it's much more relaxed. Like if if your hopefully your meetup conveys to its attendees that, you know, this is a safe space, it's okay to, to kind of do whatever we're all we're all happy here to be helping each other learn rosea at a fully organized conference, maybe that's that's a that's a slightly more formal grounds where where there's a level of baseline expected, maybe not all conferences, I guess.

Tim Bourguignon 22:19
I agree. I agree. That's, that's what I've seen as well. And I was really, really amazed by your talk. Now, friend gave at a conference about solid principle, which it was something like two years ago, I thought, what solid principles and we have 2016. So people should know this by now. And most crammed with people standing everywhere, just to get this talk about solid principles, there was a bachelor's and high to realize that what you said, what you know, or what you think, you know, is not where the the other attendees are right now. And maybe they want to hear something else something different than something that's they think they should know about. And it's, it's, it's always, it's always hard to, I always have a hard time in when I'm participating to our to conference reviews, or conference committees to to align those incentives, as you say, is really it's really hard. But yeah, absolutely. Have to go through that. I guess.

Mario Rogic 23:21
Yeah. I'm sure.

Tim Bourguignon 23:23
let's backtrack. Again, we we've mentioned the word album, a lot of time. Maybe it's now it's time to define it. And and if that's possible, how did you come up to to finding out about our about Elm and being so stoked about it? So, can you guys go through this this story, and then we can maybe define what Elm is and why it's important for you?

Mario Rogic 23:50
Yeah, sure. So in short Elm, as the website says, it's a delightful language for reliable web apps. But maybe in in a few more words, it's a it's a functional language, written by a guy called Evan. So pliki, I believe is how it's pronounced. And yeah, it's a front end language. So so people that are interested in kind of visual user interfaces or doing front end kind of work. That's kind of like the very focused target for that language to be super, super excellent. But how how I fell into Elm, so Elm is a functional language. So in the realm of kind of functional languages, as opposed to the other paradigm being imperative languages, or declarative languages, maybe less popularly, but the imperative ones, a, the executional ones, that a lot of people will know, like, read JavaScript and Java and C and can even think of now Ruby pipes and, you know, most of the popular languages or at least the Mainstream mainstream languages, what we might call imperative languages or. And we might call them that because it's specific properties. So they have mutation, which is, you know, in a particular part of my code, I can write some code that does something that changes something in the real world. And it changes it then in there exactly when that piece of code gets run. And then there's also the concept of mutability. So the idea that as my program executes, I can change the state on my program. So say I have a counter, and my counter is zero, and might come to a piece of code where that counter now gets changed to one and then get to another point where it changes to two. And that change is kind of visible across the whole program. So if I have two different pieces of code in two different places that both increment the counter, but aren't aware of each other, you can get strange effects. Because you know, one piece of code are incremented, from zero to one expecting to be one. And now the code piece of code also does the same. So they both expect it to be one. But now instead, it's two. So it's the concept of mutability. The way I kind of fell into the rabbit hole was, I actually had a very good friend of mine, while I was living in Melbourne, now who had come across Haskell. And Haskell was something that I studied in university and quite naively thought it was a stupid language that couldn't be used for anything practical, is of course, it has no mutability, and it has no effects, and therefore it is dumb. And I was being very, very productive in PHP at the time. And obviously, I knew everything. And therefore, I was going to ignore that class. And I ended up dropping out, which is really sad now, because it's become one of my favorite languages. And I think so many years wasted. A useful youthful arrogance or exuberance, depending on your point of view. But yeah, I had I had after maybe seven, eight years of doing that uniqueness, I had this friend come around, and, and just be like, Ah, man, like, you know, I've learnt this language. And it's like, it's, it's like, it's the only thing. Like, there's nothing else, everything else is terrible. This is the only one and you have to learn it. And I kind of learned that out of spite. Because I was like, No, it's not possible. Like, you know, I know stuff. I've been programming for a while, I can't believe that they would really be something that fundamentally different. And so a lot of the claims that that were being made in terms of, you know, refactor ability and stability and lack of bugs in totality, and blah, blah, blahs kind of like that. Okay, you know, let me let me kind of dig into it, and see how this actually shakes out in practice. And yeah, I just kind of got got hooked, and I was just so blown away that, that that something existed, that was that was so fundamentally different yet yet, the same still, and it took me a very long time to realize like, oh, okay, you know, these concepts can be applied in other languages like you, like you can, you know, take functional paradigms and transplant them into other languages. But like all things that that is that I guess, you know, copycats, or secondhand. You, you lose a little bit of that delight and joy of seeing it in its natural environment, right. So, for me, it was kind of, like, analogy I thought of recently, it's kind of like a zoo, right? Like, the tiger is pretty cool, right? But you're like, yeah, Tiger is cool. But you know, there's also like, I don't know, rhinos over there, and giraffes and the cages, and it's a lot of work, and you got to feed them and all this kind of stuff, right? And then when you go see those animals in their natural environment, it like it's the same animal, but it's a completely different kind of context. So that's kind of how it was me with functional and as I as I kind of feel more and more into that, I thought, Okay, well, Haskell was really working for me for back end. But I was like, what, like, what is a picture of a front end, you know, I want I want this, I want these guarantees, I want these language features. I want this way of writing code, and the front end, and there were a couple of options like you can transpile Haskell to JavaScript, but it was really large and there was pure script as well, which is kind of similar but there were a couple of things that didn't, you know, it felt a bit complicated to me and I kept kind of digging around and current because Elm and Yeah, actually ignored it for the first time and then kind of came back again. maybe six months later and just kind of started to really unravel for me how simple and just delightful of a language it is. So yeah, I would really recommend if you if you um, if you're curious about functional Elm Elm is a really really nice kind of gateway drug into functional because it's very small and it's very contained but it is just absolutely one of the most delightful languages that that I've worked with and in part a kind of a reason why I took up running the Elm Elm Elm meetups in London after after they Kind of stalled for a little bit with it with the previous person that was running them. Because Yeah, I kind of finally come across a language in a community. Well, I was like, Okay, yeah, I, I really, really like this. I like the design kind of ethics behind it. I like the thinking behind it. And I can, you know, I feel myself being more productive. And and yeah, I think it's the most fun I've had in programming since learning programming. So that was pretty awesome for me.

Tim Bourguignon 30:24
Wow, that's a big statement. That's pretty cool. Yeah, a colleague of mine just started talking about Elm here in the region. And that was that was also a very first and alien topics it well, what else never heard about this. And then, okay, it's got to be about functional programming in the UI elements. And it really clicked, it was really sleek, it was really interesting. And I think I think that's something we should heard hear more from, but um, right now, it's still not completely on my radar yet. It hasn't really crossed over to the, to the circles I'm I'm roaming into. So I have to see why. It's

Mario Rogic 31:12
slowly, slowly, gently, gently.

Tim Bourguignon 31:15
How long has it been around?

Mario Rogic 31:18
Oh, that's a good question. Ah, I think probably the early versions go back as maybe far as six or seven years. But I think in its in its kind of current major incarnation, I think we're probably talking about three years or so. Actually, just recently, there was a major release zero point 19 came out with some really, really interesting stuff. One in particular is that, you know, some of the language features that that that kind of Evan has bet on without them have panned out. And in the latest release, that he's been able to do some really interesting optimizations, in particular, something called tree shaking or dead code elimination. And I was quite excited about it. Because you know, some of these properties that we harp on about on you know, how, how good having immutability is, and how good having purity is, all those particular items have allowed this version for him to be so aggressive with dead code elimination, that a full real world app is smaller in size, once compiled than just the baseline libraries of react, or the other one that I've forgotten the name of Vue js. So that that that is that is super crazy, because it kind of means that like whatever optimizations you did in those other libraries, like, already, they're bigger than the optimized, full actual application, real world app example, just for the baseline library. So to me that that was kind of like, wow, that's, you know, that's when you start, like pulling out, like the big guns of things, that it's not just about putting the tiger in the zoo, right? Like, because it just, it can't even compare to, to kind of environment. So yeah, anyway, I, as you can tell, I get quite passionate. You are.

Tim Bourguignon 33:03
It's quite listening to you. I see myself thinking code right now. Otherwise, I don't code anymore. That's cool. But let's talk about my coding anymore. Um, you've you've said a few times that you reached a time in your career where you're more drifting into leadership, more drifting into into people centric stuff. Is it true? And the second question would be how do you balance still this this desire for coding and these new responsibilities? Sure.

Mario Rogic 33:39
I think leadership wasn't something that I kind of intentionally went for. And I think by a by a kind of virtue of my early career experience, and, and running a business, it was just kind of like the de facto thing, like, you know, if you're the owner of the business, you people look to you to lead them. But at the same time, I was, you know, definitely doing a ton of code and writing a whole bunch of stuff along with everybody else that was in our company. So the kind of maybe one way that I've, that I've rationalized that, and I think I might have even expressed this to you once, once when we were catching up is I kind of think of it like, like the chief editor at a newspaper. Right? Like if he's, if he's running around at work, trying to write articles for the newspaper every single day. Like, you would expect that he would be able to do that, like you would expect that he might be able to write a feature pace. But if he's running around and doing that all the time, rather than leading the team of people that are doing that, like, you know, he's not going to be as effective. So that's not then to say that if he does step up into a leadership role, that he can, you know, now no longer read or write. And I just may not be shared by all technology leaders, but at least for myself, personally, I've kind of always felt quite wedded to the idea that just because I might be a leader at work, and just because I might focus on a higher level or bigger picture things, doesn't necessarily mean that I lose an interest in or that it's bad, or that I shouldn't ever code. For me particularly, it's kind of changed throughout, like, there's been some jobs where I've had a blend in a leadership position, I've still kind of sat down and rolled up my, my sleeves, so to speak, from time to time. And then and more recently, it's been on the other end of the spectrum where, you know, at work, I no longer touch any code. But as a result than for myself, in my own enjoyment, I do a lot of stuff as a hobby outside of work. So yeah, I feel like maybe sometimes our industry is a little bit too heavy on the ladder. Maybe we're a bit too brutal. And you know, like, for some people, it's like, oh, if you seem to be coding still, like, you know, it's been said to me, during my career, like, Oh, you know, like, he clearly Connelly, she clearly can't, you know, let go of the coding bit. And I always thought that, you know, it, if you thought of that in the writing sense, like, you know, like, you're gonna forget how to write things, right. Like, yeah, it's kind of like a basic skill. But anyway, I don't know, maybe maybe there's some people that would have a fundamentally different opinion. Yeah,

Tim Bourguignon 36:33
that is the secret approach. I mean, it's not not really a problem of forgetting how to do it is more Do you have the time to, to invest yourself in this, you know, the this the focus problem we have as creative people, you cannot just flip a switch and go from one meeting to being creative. And just do that for 10 minutes, and then go back to a second meeting. This just doesn't work like that. So you have to you have to immerse yourself and you have to get into flow, you have to get in the zone and and then maybe after one hour, you are in a disposition of really being productive and doing something awful. But I think there was a blog post from I don't remember who wrote that one of the seedings, Silicon Valley venture capitalist about the I'm not gonna have a name, right? The makers schedule versus the manager schedule, I think it was something like this. And just showing that I'm used to kind of have people working on a completely different schedule, the makers need long time of uninterrupted work. And then the managers are just jumping from one topic to the other, because what they are talking about is this jumping around. And these two just don't go really well with one of the anything that's more the discrepancy that you see in in managers still coding is how do you balance the two? But if you find a way to do it for yourself, then great. No,

Mario Rogic 38:08
no, I would definitely agree that maybe in the common, like, in the general case, that's the that's probably what you're dealing with in most companies. But yeah, I've kind of wondered for a long time if it necessarily has to be that way. This is something again, I think I mentioned this to you last time, we caught up, I've been reading a lot a lot of stuff that comes out of Basecamp. So the stuff from from DHH and Jason freed and actually have a book coming out soon, that I'm gonna assume just based on the title talks about this exact topic and also just having read a bunch of their blog post but but the new book is called the calm company. And they talk a lot about you know, like it like it doesn't have to be crazy at work. Right. And, and I definitely don't know about you, but for myself, I've definitely come home and and said that phrase to my wife, many times like oh my god, it's so crazy at work. You know, like, and? Yeah, I have quite a lot of jealousy actually, for Basecamp. I would just, I'm so curious as to what it would actually be like to work there and how it goes, but yeah, I mean, you've got, you've got the leaders that will routinely kind of step away and, and have time to do those other things. And there's a little something niggling in the back of my head, which is like, you know, is it that managers need to have a different schedule? Or is it that that happens, because you're not necessarily the best manager you could be? You know, like, if you are an awesome manager, maybe you would have time, maybe everything would be fine. I don't know maybe awesome is the wrong word. But you get what I mean, right? Like maybe maybe there's a different maybe there's a different To set up that that would result in schedules not being that different, maybe? I don't know. Anyway, something I've been pondering.

Tim Bourguignon 40:08
Mike, you, I will be pulling on pondering this, from that one as well. That's a very interesting way to see it. Um, wait while we're there in the init advisors and slowly reaching the NFL time box. If l was not an advice you could give, because you gave it already. And we heard we should this would you give to two people either starting the career or changing the career or going into a new direction? What advice could you give them?

Mario Rogic 40:43
I think there's there's probably two things and I don't know how original they are. So I'm really sorry, if someone was hoping for something more. more profound. But yeah, the two things that really strike out at me is just one absorb as much as you can like knowledge from everywhere, and anything that is someone, someone that I really kind of look up to it in my eye when I was quite young said to me, like there's something valuable in learning everything, like anything, like and I'm butchering how he said it to me, because I remember it in my head much more profoundly. But I think the the concept of what he was trying to say is like, you know, say you get the chance to do knitting, for some reason. No, no, no disrespect to people who like knitting, but I couldn't, I couldn't think of anything more stereotypically typical. as something that you find or whatever it is, they say you have to do something that you don't want to do or that you don't like, and his his, his kind of advice kind of really kind of burned into my brain that's like, even if you don't like it, even if it's not your thing, where you don't think there's this particular value to you and just like, just be patient and try and seek it out. And there will be something there to learn. And there will be something that has value and applies to something else in life later on. So I don't know, maybe you can go too far. on that front, like I definitely, I have definitely been told off sometimes. So having too many hobbies and being interested into too many things and, and kind of moving from one thing to another, you can definitely have kind of shiny, shiny object syndrome. But um, I don't know, I feel like it kind of fostered in me this idea that like, there's always something to be liked. So So I so I read quite prolifically, I I I kind of turn up to blog posts and you know, the programming Reddit even as sometimes a lot of it is trash, like, again, you could still kind of kind of look through and find something's useful. So anyway, the one side would be just just like, always learn and be open to learn and be be open to the fact that even in crappy situations or situations, you're not, you're not the happiest that there's still something that you can kind of draw out from that. And the second one, I suppose, would be the other direction out. So maybe not necessarily teaching but but communicating. Like I think I'm increasingly more baffled that it's not a bigger part of curriculum in schools, given how much of our lives dependent on it, and how much the quality of your life can change, just purely based on how good you are at communicating. Not only knowledge, but your own needs and desires, or whatever it might be. So I think, yeah, the art of good communication, which is not necessarily obvious. Again, there's tons and tons of literature and and you can kind of, I suppose you could make a Korea out of just letting a lot of this stuff, right, like, each each, each individual topic that you get into is a whole industry and field and a whole bunch of stuff. But I think kind of 8020 rule applies, right, like with kind of 20% of, of the kind of kind of kind of effort, but I think you can you can really get a good sense of that 80% chunk of the essence of something. So yeah, and just in just in just as much as you can, but also learn about how to actually leverage that knowledge, because there's no point ingesting all of that knowledge if you can't effectively use it and spread it and articulate it and communicate it. So yeah, it's I'm sorry, to prospective listeners. It's a bit of a boring cliche thing, but I think it's super fundamental. And then things stack on top of that writes, so. So whatever you're passionate about, or whatever you decide to get into kind of stacks on top of that, and I think it's always a ton more powerful if you're, if you're fantastic at absorbing information and communicating it out. So you had another question, which is, you know, what's a good song to develop And to me, that's that like, the people that I've absolutely loved working with have been people that have always been interested To learn something and they can even if it's not for them, they'll, they'll entertain it for a time. And then the communication part, you know, they can simply say, Hey, you know, thanks for sharing that with me. I see you're really passionate for about it. That's awesome. You know, it just doesn't happen to be for me. That's okay. And, and even just being able to communicate that is pretty cool. So, yeah, two birds with one stone. There you go.

Tim Bourguignon 45:22
Amen to that. It's really profound. That's, that's great stuff. That's great stuff. Thank you for that. Um, I guess we reached the end of our time box. Um, did we miss something? Did we miss a topic you wanted to talk about?

Mario Rogic 45:37
Ah, particularly, particularly, I think we, we meandered around a little bit, it was quite nice.

Tim Bourguignon 45:43
It was enjoyable with it. So one question I have for you is Where can the listeners find you and reach you and get in touch with you if you want to?

Mario Rogic 45:52
So So Twitter is probably the easiest and most public. My my Twitter handle is at real Mario. But you can also find me I'm quite active on the Elm Lang slack. If you're interested in lmia, even if you're not like the Slack channel is pretty cool. We have about I think it's coming up to about 15,000 members on there now. And so yeah, just Google, Google Elm Lang slack. And you can find that as a really awesome community that people people have insanely lovely and helpful and impatient. And it's really quite enjoyable. But yeah, you can ping me there. My handle is supermario. Which is the same as my GitHub handle, if you kind of want to poke around at some of the projects that I'm kind of like slowly meandering on with. And you can also get me by email if you really want my email is Hello at Mario dotnet that I you if you want to ask anything at all, I'm always really happy to get an email and respond to folks. But yeah, that's it, I think.

Tim Bourguignon 46:53
I think it was last question. But I just realized I have another one. Um, do you have something on your plate, you have conferences coming up? places where people can meet you? Maybe the Elm?

Mario Rogic 47:04
Actually, I do. I'm, I'm very, very excited. I I have for a very long time wanted to go to strange loop, the conference in the states and and this year, that's actually something that I've been able to line up. So yeah, in all hot, and even though it's a couple of weeks now, maybe 334 weeks away. Yeah, three weeks away. I'll be at strangely in the last week of September. So if you happen to be there, that'd be really awesome. Outside of that, no, nothing, nothing else particularly planned for the rest of the year. But I am always at the Elm London meetups. So that's another way if you wanted to come chat with me in person or go for a coffee or drink. They own London meetups run monthly, usually the last of the second last Wednesday of the month. But look for us on meetup.com. I post all the events up there. And I also tweet about them in person every single time. So yeah, both of those places in the upcoming months.

Tim Bourguignon 48:04
Awesome. Then I hope you will get a ton of messages and a lot of people bugging you and that will be fun. And it'll be very cool. Have fun as strange looking.

Mario Rogic 48:16
Alright, awesome. Thanks again for having me. I really enjoyed

Tim Bourguignon 48:17
are you this has been another episode of developer's journey. And we'll see each other in two weeks. Thank you. Bye bye. Dear listener, if you haven't subscribed yet, you can find this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google music and much more. And if you like what we do, please help your fellow developers discover the podcast by writing it and writing a comment on those platforms. Thanks again and two weeks