#64 Guillermo Rauch learned with communities
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Tim Bourguignon 0:07
Hello, and welcome to developer's journey. The podcast shining a light on developers lives from all over the world. My name is Tim Bourguignon, and today Steve Guillermo Rouch. Guillermo is a serial entrepreneur. He's the founder of site, also socket.io and mongoose, j. s. He's also the CO creator, creator of now of next.js. of learn boost and cloud up. And finally, here, who is a former mentor, and the author of the book, smashing node.js. Guillermo, welcome to Jeff's journey.
Guillermo Rauch 0:42
As we're having me,
Tim Bourguignon 0:43
this is quite a track record of creating products that you have here. I'm sure we're going to talk about this during the podcast. But before we go there, why did your developer's journey start in the first day?
Guillermo Rauch 0:54
Yeah. So my developer journey really started back when I was a kid. And I was very fortunate to have two parents that were very much into engineering, not software engineering, but chemistry and industrial engineering. And for the longest time, they were very intrigued by the upcoming wave of computers and the Internet. And we got a computer at home very early on. I was very intrigued by playing video games, obviously. But the idea of creating video games was also made apparent to me very early on. So that was kind of the first inkling that I had of one day becoming a developer, even though I didn't know the word or anything like that. The idea that first I could trace back in my mind was, oh, wow, I could create something like this. So back in those days, we had, you know, Windows computers at home. But really what really, in my mind, sort of made my career take off, was getting acquainted with Linux and the open source software community. That's where I actually started finding some of my first mentors online. An episode that happened in my life early on was, we got our first internet connection that was DSL, and it was 128 kilobytes per second. It works quite well on Windows, the internet service provider gave us sort of everything we needed. But on Linux, just like it happens today, and a lot of people make fun of it for this. The drivers and everything was just very, very difficult to figure out. So that's why I first found an online community and a mentor, that could help me, I remember having this the CD ROM that contains the driver for establishing Point to Point connection is called RP, pp o E. And I had to switch back and forth between Windows and Linux, because I'd done a dual boot installation, I would go to Windows to try to get internet because we only had one computer, ask questions online, and this IRC channel of Linux enthusiasts in Argentina, where I'm from, then reboot the computer, try the commands, try the incantations that it would memorize, like configure, make make install to compile this piece of software. But looking back, I think, and relating it to your idea of mentoring people that are coming into the industry, what really helped me was the open source community was very open to teaching, spreading knowledge and information for free. Later on, I became a teacher myself, and I would spend a lot of time answering people's questions online, kind of before Stack Overflow was around. So I think that's really how my developer journey started. Linux, open source and getting, you know, with acquainted with this idea of hacking and taking other people's software and playing with it.
Tim Bourguignon 4:07
And at the time you were studying for computer sciences, or we were something
Guillermo Rauch 4:13
different defining part. This is the final part. This is story that I'm talking about. I think I was probably like 10 years old. When this first edition, I found this initial community. In fact, the whole thing is just blowing my mind now, but I remember episodes of like, a lot of uncertainty because I was so young. I remember this one guy that helped me so much in the beginning one time he was kind of like, noticing that I was struggling with rebooting my computer every five minutes and so on. So he just asked questions. He literally called me on my landline and we spoke a bunch about how to solve this one problem. So he must have been strange for both sides. I was kind of super curious, but it's super scared of elders, different interactions with older people. And at same time, he was so just friendly and easygoing, and he helped me so much. It was just funny how strangers along the way helped me so much, especially at such a young age.
Tim Bourguignon 5:13
And when does this passion of yours transform into something that you could do for your for your thing?
Guillermo Rauch 5:19
That's that's a good question because he was another stranger. So what is in common in all this many stories is there was this one community online, it was a forum hosted on this technology called phpbb. That which is united people that had all this interest on, some people were like Windows users, but were had an interested in hacking or hardware. Some people were Linux users, but also had an interest in gaming. And it's just like, there were forums for every kind of interest that you could have. And the thing that unites us all was, in this case, we're all from Argentina, we would write a lot of forum posts in Spanish. And I developed another close friendship with this kind of pseudo anonymous guy, I never know he's his first and last name. But he noticed that it had this kind of addiction to answering questions online. So like, early on, I had this drive to teach others even though Okay, let's be frank, looking back, I really had no clue what I was doing. But it was always find, somewhere to teach what I was learning to. And I guess now looking back, it's really odd is that idea of forcing myself to teach others was really helping me solidify all these concepts in my brain. But this guy noticed that, oh, like you seem to be answering questions about programming and CSS and HTML. And this PHP, pieces of software that I took an interest in, like phpbb, and sort of the early versions of the CMS is that were written in PHP. And he was like, you know, there's this one website called script, Lance comm that you can join, and we will also pay you for answering these questions. And another interesting side stories, I was the number one person with the most answers and points on this kind of like local, very early days of stack overflow of the 1990s. And I was obsessed with sort of like answering and getting more points, which I'm sure there's some mechanics that are similar today on StackOverflow, as well. And so this guy was like, hey, like, you should totally just try this. I remember he was chatting, we're chatting on jabber, which was like this early instant, open source, open network, open protocol, instant messaging technology. And I remember, he was like, yeah, you should try this out. He could make some money then. And then again, you know, I was probably now I trace it back like this was before I started high school. So it's really like 11 or 12. Era goals of being a super like, I don't think this is possibly can make money from this. I don't know if I know enough. But it just went with it. And I remember my first job was changing a CSS, the width and background, like that's how simple it was. And but at the time, you know, it was I remember talking to them, webmaster of this, and he had been left with a website that was solving a business need, now looking back on it, and he just didn't, he wasn't there program. So he needed someone to even make simple aesthetic changes. And as a PM, he kind of had this strategy, which is breaking it down to very tiny tasks. That key here, or she I didn't even remember could shift to prod and then move on to the next one. So my first one was very simple, was changed some CSS and stuff and things like that. And in order to remove CSS to be frank, he could have been like HTML tables. But I remember thinking, Oh, well, this is so easy, and I can make money. And that was my first like, 15 or $20 job, it probably took a few hours, the contract was, here's the FTP credentials, do it, you know, hack it in prod directly. And that's, I think that's what really put them in a completely different path. Because now I was dealing with the pressure of doing something that was answering a real world need. And that's very different from just, you know, hacking around in forums and chats all day long.
Tim Bourguignon 9:33
How do you progress
Guillermo Rauch 9:34
is really there's a lot of funny stories here. Because if you if you kind of think about where I am and a little kid and I'm about to start a high school that was super demanding. My parents found this public high school in Argentina had an entry exam. That was super competitive. Only the top end scores make it in and so it's Kind of in between these two crazy worlds because the world of me just hacking all day long and having clients. Like I remember there was this crazy guy from the Netherlands that would became like sort of my largest client. And he and he and I were sort of working on like, really awesome stuff for makeup brands and fashion brands in the Netherlands. On the cost projects, I remember my first project was with him was like, I fixed his payment gateway. So it was this weird, unusual, unexpected partnership of a kid in Argentina and the sort of quote unquote, business guy in the Netherlands. And I was starting to make really good money, like I was lending money, even to my parents, I remember, like something would break around the house and I would pay for it, I would get it, I would be the one buying the latest technology at this point. Yeah, like imagine just going from nothing to like, now this kid has 100 100 hundreds or thousands of really valuable currency. Because in order to do currency, it's really bad. So having US dollars is a really big deal.
But at the same time, it had to like deal with
also continuing on my school career. And at the same time, my professional career was starting to add a lot of stresses that it was really not familiar with, like deadlines and communicating with the client. And, you know, this was sort of making money and my clients had promises to to other clients, and language I'm, you know, a native Spanish speaker, and this is solid in English. So it's really a very entertaining time in a variety of different dimensions. But this really just put them in the path to think of programming and development as work and also something solving a real world need, then put me into connecting with the people that were building the tools that I was using in the open source world, pushing the boundaries of what tools could do. So it was is quite quite an interesting journey.
Tim Bourguignon 12:07
Did you always have this this intrapreneurship mindset?
Guillermo Rauch 12:11
Yeah, me and my brother, I think we're always just always trying to come up with interesting ideas of connecting the internet, to, you know, just technology and doing something cool and new. In the form of providing a service or product to people like Eric, one of my first entrepreneurial ideas was making music CDs that I would sell in my elementary school. And this was even at a younger age, I was now probably like, eight or nine. And that was kind of like one of my first ones. Another one was when the eBay of South America was called Mercado Libra. So it was emerging. And they had a referral program for just getting more signups. And everyone was, I think it was five pasos, which right now is like at inflation adjust that is probably $1 or less per sign up with arrow. So we build this kind of like, quite intricate web system for generating leads onto that system. And that was actually the first time that I made an interesting amount of money because I just built a great system for getting signups website. And this is probably even before I got very much into Linux, I was actually hacking on windows at this point. And his story is quite interesting because like Linux was so difficult to use at the time that I would go back and forth between these two operating systems a lot. And I will always try to like push myself to use Linux like that was sort of my I felt kind of like now that all the Twitter dramas going over tags engineers, like if I use Linux, and I use the command line more, and I use text UI rather than graphic UI, I felt more like a hacker. And it felt more like a quote unquote, Dennings engineer. So um, but yeah, you know, entrepreneurship was always kind of always there, I think and, and really, it's always been, you know, attached to the development of technology here in Silicon Valley, where I am now. So it kind of makes sense, I think.
Tim Bourguignon 14:25
When did you decide to move to Silicon Valley?
Guillermo Rauch 14:28
Yeah, it was weird in that it wasn't really a decision as much as it is really drew me here. Because so the story long story short is as I develop more of my portfolio of clients, and I was freelancing, I was always I was also learning about what the things were that it was really interested in. Because when it first started programming, I was doing C and I was thinking about traditional All programming have the kind of Oh GTK, I played a bunch with GTK and Qt. The Visual Basic, I was getting into the, as I was saying, I was going back and forth between Windows and Linux 11. And so I was trying to do native stuff. But then what really started to resonate with me a lot was everything had to do with the web. And the web started creating an incredible open source momentum of software that was very easy to reuse for change. So that's where I was telling you the forum software like phpbb. And then came WordPress, PHP frameworks, like Code Igniter, and Symphony and but even all along that journey, the thing that it was always different for me was that I wanted to do rich, interactive, dynamic experiences. And I was starting to select a lot for jobs that were heavier on the JavaScript side of things, and on the UI interaction side of things. And that's how I met this new community. And I would say this is my community that was really important to me, like the first one was that a community in Argentina, but the first online community that is very important to me, that has spent a lot of time in was the mootools JavaScript community, which is sort of around the tense of jQuery was this framework that was introducing a lot of novel concepts into JavaScript. In fact, it introduced the idea of a component. And a lot of the people that today are working on the core react team, or people that were working on mootools, back in the day. And mootools was just pioneering a bunch of really awesome things like graphics and animation. And real time communication, which is what I obsessed about is helped sort of Pioneer with something eo, x HR is sort of Ajax, the idea of sending requests on the client side, as well as bundle optimization, and just making micro libraries of j s, as opposed to big monolithic libraries of the time, like prototype and script calculus. So JavaScript is drew me in and through mootools, I got my first very serious, or at least I was like, second or third is really serious job, which is through a consulting agency in San Diego, that put them in touch with this company in Switzerland, that company in Switzerland, I did really amazing stuff there with them. I really also awesome JavaScript stuff and IoT stuff very early on. But then that company opened an office in San Francisco. And that's when just I think it all clicked for me. Because when I arrived here, I was like, Whoa, like, there's all these people that take super deep interest in the things that I take super deep interest in, which is quite unusual, you know, like, you can go to a meetup about a very specialized subject. And there you can meet the people that are at the forefront of this, as well as the entrepreneur, spirit in the idea that, you know, you have the resources available to you that will help create companies as well as partnerships and things like that. So that's when a lot of the incentives for me, sort of were born.
Tim Bourguignon 18:38
How was it personally and socially to move from Argentina to to the Silicon Valley.
Guillermo Rauch 18:43
So, you know, it wasn't quite easy. I think just looking back nothing was because we're talking about like, my journey Getting Started hacking. So early on was fraught with, you know, the challenges of different worlds pulling you to different directions. And I think part of that happened as well for me because I was really young as I think that first time I came here I was 17 or 18. And the ideas there were okay, like, where really, am I gonna live? And am I gonna live in between two countries? I'm gonna move here definitely. And, you know, at the time, I was really struggling with my spoken English, my written English has always been good because I was always dealing with, you know, chatting with people and open source and chats and forums in my English is really good. So I think there were numerous challenges along the way. But the thing that made it all work, regardless, for me, was the cultural there was great cultural affinity. I liked the way that things were done here. I like the kind of just set of cultural values around work. around what's you know how to do great work, how to
Guillermo Rauch 20:04
partner how to,
Guillermo Rauch 20:07
you know, find the people that can complement your skills, and a lot of those things, which is absent where I was born. And I think that just kind of was a heavier motivation than all the other downsides.
Tim Bourguignon 20:23
It makes sense. You mentioned, meetups and, and meeting developers. Is this something that you sold out early on?
Guillermo Rauch 20:32
Yeah, definitely. I just know, you mentioned I remembered it for the very first one that I went to. And yeah, I think looking back, you know, I would encourage everyone to do the same. I really didn't know much. And it wasn't, I was completely new to the environment and everything. But just go to meetups, just, you know, it's not clear exactly what I learned there. It just felt right. It is connecting with the people that share your interests. And even just having one positive conversation about the work that you're doing, even though actually funny enough, like, it's not always the best experience. I remember early on, I even had a bad experience with like, someone said, I made a comment about like, moodles not being great. And in my mind, I was like, No, like, moduls is the greatest thing in the universe. But, but even just still, like getting in touch with people is such a valuable and positive thing. And I truly think that that that really makes a difference.
Tim Bourguignon 21:33
Do you have some awesome advice for people that would be looking to to go into meetup for the first time?
Guillermo Rauch 21:40
Yeah, I think the first one is to not have like lots of expectations about you know what can happen there. Because it's always a mixed bag, you might either find, you know, your future business partner, and you know, someone that you're going to work with for the next 20 years. Or you might find people that strongly disagree with your beliefs, you might learn something interest from a speaker and just then just go home, you might put something in the back of your mind that maybe at the time, you don't fully grok. So what was interesting about this is, I was able to go to a lot of meetups that spoke about things that I had no clue about. But I had deep interest in anything, just the exposure was hugely beneficial. And some of the things that were discussed by people that were very senior at those meetups would only click, you know, five years later, and it didn't matter. I think just planting those seeds was just really, really, really critical. So I would say, you know, just go, I think it's, and then you know, nowadays, we didn't even have this back in the day. But nowadays, everything is just a lot more friendly, I think. And there is a lot of guidelines about interaction and welcoming people of all backgrounds and expertise levels. So even today, I think it's even more of a welcoming environment. So I would really, really encourage everyone to go, especially ones that don't fit the mold of what do you think, you know, best? So let's say that you're learning CSS, well then go to a jazz meetup. Or let's say you really have mastered front end development, then go to distributed systems meetup. So I think that's really the the beauty of it, it's just so good of a tool to expand your horizons.
Tim Bourguignon 23:35
I completely agree with you in which you say no, I think that a lot of conference lately, and I found them very, very dull after after some point. And I realized I was only attending to all the topics that I really was was interested in. And once I started doing exactly what you said, trying to seek the opposite, trying to seek some things that I didn't know, started having fun being adieus conferences, again, really learning something new and expanding my horizons. That's, that's very,
Guillermo Rauch 24:09
I think there is a there's a famous quote or saying or even a meanie methodology that is quite interesting. So it's like every 10 years, just switch gears completely. I think it might be a little too aggressive, especially for some of us that try to go so deep into things and really mastered them. But you know, at some point, you do have to get out of the comfort zone of of what's become your expertise, anything it's important to switch gears,
Tim Bourguignon 24:41
I would say amen to that. And it was um, I was given an advice A long time ago, which was if you're, if you're be shy or if you don't know how to how to go to such a meeting on meetup or conference and start talking with people and try to find someone who looks knowledgeable or maybe the the the organizer Have the meetup or whatever, and ask them to refer you to someone else that would be interested in and just give one topic. And so this way you're asking the person, so the person is not is not, is not forced to give you an answer and talk to you for half an hour. If they want to talk to you, then they can just refer you to somebody else. And, and and have your, but if if they are indeed welcoming, and nice to see, this isn't an interesting topic, and it can start discussing to you, and this is a trick I've used very often. And it gets a you get an answer, oh, either from this person, or you get a referral and you can talk to somebody else. And then at some point you are, you are deep in discussions with with other people, that's a really neat treat to get to get going. If you're bit shy or introverted Maybe,
Guillermo Rauch 25:47
yeah, for sure. My advice there would be you know, the beauty about this meetups is that it's a lot of people like you in the end, it's a lot of people that have, you know, shared interests, but also shared insecurities sometimes, and you know, what better place to go and meet people that one with the one on the same sort of mental space as you are. So looking back, I remember finding a lot of people that were like me, you know, the, the, they were interested in the same topic, so we could quickly Connect over something. And just sometimes, as I said, it's a good idea to not focus too much on a particular goal. I think, in fact, the negative things that I've heard about people attending meetups is when they, when they have too much of an agenda, like, Oh, I need to like, network with 100 people and collect 100 business cards or this and that. So I think it's just going with no agenda and just, you know, taking it taking it in for what it is whether it's just, it's totally okay to just watch the presentation and go home. So I think just getting into the habit is a good idea for for people that feel a little bit more confident, try to speak is the next sort of great milestone, I think. And my recommendation there is lightning talks, even for myself today that I'm quite comfortable speaking in front of audiences. But the perfect format in my mind, for a lot of what we do is the lightning talk, because it forces you to summarize it. It's compelling, it's engaging, even if the content is bad. The worst case scenario is that it's bad only for five minutes. So lightning talks are just really, really excellent. And in many, many cases better than the regular talks. So some of the most memorable talks that if they go back in my mind, in terms of meetups are lightning talks, because I was like, Whoa, it just, you know, learn so much in five minutes. So I would recommend giving that a try at some point.
Tim Bourguignon 27:56
And just start at whichever meetup doing, they're always looking for lightning talks. I can tell you,
Guillermo Rauch 28:01
yeah, meetups are always in demand for speakers. That's another beautiful thing. It's with conferences, especially the really well known ones, you know, they have the opposite problem. So many call for speakers and so on. But meetups will never turn you down.
Tim Bourguignon 28:17
That's true. Switching gears a little bit, do you have a failure in mind from which you learn something very important.
Guillermo Rauch 28:25
I mean, to be honest, is just mostly fade out along the way. And then
we're mostly remembered as successes, I think.
In terms of my journey, I would say,
I have a lot of funny stories, like one time I got hacked by someone similar, because I was very much a went very deep in the Linux community at one point, and I was bragging on this IRC channel about my server, because we were all just hosting home servers. And someone just and I still don't know how until this up to this day, someone routed me, it overnight. It was really funny. And then kind of along the journey, a lot of it was, you know, I think, try to do too much too soon. I hadn't, I had very high expectations for myself, sort of all along the way. And, you know, she's from a very young age. The schedules that I would impose on myself and things like that, were probably pushing the unhealthy boundaries. So I would say, you know, don't take my story and try to replicate it with your children. But I would say you know, the, there's no rush, you know, like, finding out forget yesterday watch the great match of tennis between Federer and Djokovic. And the great story here is that if you look at all the stats at the end of the match, unforced errors, winners, even meters run during the match, it just ever imagined that it could measure, the older player who's 37 years old, did better. So I'd say, you know, there's there's no rush, really, I think there's just so much left to be invented. There's so much to explore. And there's the value always in packaging things and combining things in creative and new ways. So my recommendation would be, you know, just don't listen to stories like this, which I'm sharing. And take them actually for the funny parts, but not so much for low I have, there's that there's a time bomb. At the end of the day, I need to learn this, this, this and that I need to go to 20 meters by the end of the week. I was just, you know, take it easy. There's so so much to do. Yeah, I would say that's the primary part. I think another one is
Guillermo Rauch 31:07
the
Guillermo Rauch 31:10
seeking mentorship. earlier on, although I did have it in ways that were non obvious to me. But even seeking more of that mentorship actually is more valuable than, you know, 10 nights of coding, sort of until dawn, if that makes sense. The idea of just reaching out to someone that is very experienced, like someone that has already been a CTO, someone that has already been a senior developer or a principal developer, that tool is, even today I find myself always reminding me, Hey, you should utilize the power of email, emailing dming, tweeting ads, just commenting on a forum posts, or or dev to or Stack Overflow, and so on. Just ask them questions. That remains another huge piece of advice for everyone that's listening is I even routinely answer questions myself, like randos on the internet, that just dropped into my mailbox? Now sometimes, it depends on where you find me what you find me with and so on. But it's incredible how much people are willing to help you. And then when you're making yourself available for doing the same?
Tim Bourguignon 32:27
How do you balance your your work life and your private life? You seem to be very passionate about what you do? How do you not let it Gulf your whole life as a whole?
Guillermo Rauch 32:44
That's a great question. I think I'm a bad example of this, because I do. I mean, my my private life has always been so influenced by my work. And I take so much joy out of it. And I welcome that, like a lot of my friends are in the industry. I am I enjoy that I love that. I take time to explain what I do to my friends and family, people that, you know, are not even in the industry, like engage the conversation about tax tech, because they think is interesting. So I think one thing that I that has helped me tremendously is learning a lot about fitness and a lot about my body and a lot about diet and what makes me feel good, and what fuels my mind and my body and all kinds of meditative techniques and ways of getting out of creative slumps as well as techniques for self reflection and journal taking and just ideas for, okay, where am I at? Where do I want to be planning, talking to mentors, so there's a lot that is the metalwork that I do. And that I think a lot of us do some more consciously and some more subconsciously. Because if you think about the action of waking up and having breakfast this is, you know, the fuel for the rest of your day and it's maintenance for your body and your mind, but you're on autopilot about it, literally in autopilot like studies show that the hormones that create the feeling of appetite are based on a number of signals, like the fullness of your stomach, but also the time of day. This is a clear sort of relatable stories that maybe you ate a lot in the past day, but then a certain time arrives the next day and you get hungry again and you're like I shouldn't be hungry. So being more conscious about what goes on with relate with regards to maintaining your, your body and mind, I think has made a huge difference for me. It's, it's almost like a sport, in a sense, it's like you, you want to make sure that you're, you're in a good place and you're not pushing yourself too hard and you have the time to recover. And you have the time to make meaningful connection with other people. even getting, you know, things out of your mind. So that you can let the back of your mind do some of the work. So that is, not everything gets done when it's front and center. That's another thing that I've learned is you can put a problem, sort of into the background queue. And it's surprising how much me This is, again, my just my intuition, but for me, it's surprising how much work can get done without doing any conscious work.
Tim Bourguignon 36:01
Are you involved in hiring processes?
Guillermo Rauch 36:04
Yeah, very much. So
Tim Bourguignon 36:06
what would be the the one skill or the mindset trait that you would always be looking for?
Guillermo Rauch 36:15
I would say it's a combination of things that just quickly come to mind as a top priority, I would say one of them is communication skills. I mentioned early on that, for me, just having really good written English skills. Did a huge did a lot for my career. I was an early digg.com user, making the front page of Digg, with my technical articles became kind of an obsession for a while. For those of you that don't know, Digg, it's kind of like Reddit, today is actually the exact same system. And they both have an origin story in appeal in Twitter as well, you know, appealing to technical audiences. And, and being on the front page of Digg meant having to dig effect, which was a lot of traffic to your website. And they made the front page of Digg probably like, five, six times, too, with a lot of votes and major articles at the very top article and big. And so that was all about communication, it was all about having ideas in my mind and trying to like distill them in a way that were, like, easily accessible. So that's I pay a lot of attention to is like how people are communicating, drive and consistency over time. And just hard work is also very top of my mind, when I think of the ideal or an incredible not ideal, but like an incredible dev journey that I was thinking about is Jennifer DeWalt. She's a self taught engineer who created a system and challenged herself. It's called 180 days coding or something like this, if you search, if you Google, Jennifer 180, you probably will arrive to it. Where every day, she said the goal of creating a little demo of what she'd learned. So she created sort of bite sized mini challenges of that had a kind of visual output, very clear visual output of what she'd done. And then it just kind of like the cherry on top. Not only does she do that for learning, but then she wrote about it, eloquently shared it with the world kind of like that'd be game a resume. But I think that's a great summary of all the skills that I'm particularly biased towards, like hard work persistency hundred 80 days, a creative challenge created for herself. Visual creativity, because a lot of these demos were like visually very interesting, great communication skills about how she argued for the challenge that she created for herself. Why, why she was making career move. I don't remember a lot of the details now, but she's really fun to read and entertaining. Yep. And I think, you know, not not noticed, I didn't mention anything about like, being a great coder, or like having lots of GitHub related, lots of commits. It's just it's usually a mixed set of signals really. And, you know, now nowadays, this topic of the tenants engineer is top of mind. And and I think the reason that that narrative is not compelling is that the archetypical 10 x engineer has over optimized for one of those signals. So the sort of TEDx narrative is that there's a mythical individual that produces 10 times more code 10 times more or requests 10 times more And that's interesting to me, because it means that you're optimizing for one variable at the expense of everything else. Whereas in any system that you're optimizing, you almost never do that, you wouldn't make the trade off of, oh, I'll make my software 10 times faster, but really hard to use, or I'll make, or I'll be a 10 times at 10 X. Office jokester, I'll be the funniest person at the office at the expense of doing my work. So I think that kind of takeaway is I, I think one has to build out all these skills in parallel. Even if they're all at the beginner stage, that's more interesting than only having an expert stage of one particular skill. And that's why I usually cite examples of people that are getting started, I think, you know, we evaluate all those people with the same set of brothers.
Tim Bourguignon 40:59
Make sense? Thank you very much for this advice. Unfortunately, we've reached the end of the time box already, if the audience wanted to continue this, this discussion, not necessarily about the 10 x developers, which is going crazy on Twitter right now. But about your your life, your experience, your journey, and you coming from Argentina, to San Francisco and JavaScript, and so on, where would be the place to start?
Guillermo Rauch 41:27
You feel free to especially, there's a wonderful opportunity for every listener of this podcast, you feel free to reach out to me over dm on Twitter, if you have any particular questions. So twitter.com slash grouchy. And let me know that you listen to the podcast. And if you have any follow up questions or need advice on something or even if you want my opinion on something you've done that you think is relevant to J s or some sort of things that you take interest in. Just Yeah, Twitter comm slash Ru, ch, G, I think it's the best place to start.
Tim Bourguignon 42:03
Do you have something coming up in the next month that you would like to plug in?
Guillermo Rauch 42:07
Yeah, I think by the time this is out, we're making website deployment, the easiest possible process in the universe ad site. So go to z it.co. And you'll learn how to deploy any website with no configuration whatsoever, no managing of servers of infrastructure. And what's neat about it is that it's literally the easiest, but also fastest way for a front end developer or front end team to deploy and serve websites website, that can be anything like a marketing website logs, just a single page applications, anything you want to build, especially for those of you that want to show off your work, we make the deployment tool to make this possible.
Tim Bourguignon 43:01
And you have a some kind of trial. For the for the listeners, they can go on your website and try it out a website isn't.
Guillermo Rauch 43:09
So the free tier is actually optimized for a lot of the people that are working on open source projects, or side projects or their own personal websites and blogs, so it's completely free. And then our business model is based on making teams productive. So once you sort of learn business skills, and you take them to your company, that's how we make money. So yeah, feel free to get started using it for free.
Tim Bourguignon 43:37
Goods here, hear Thank you, then, I guess we have it. Do we forget to speak about something?
Guillermo Rauch 43:45
No. You know, this is the first time that because of your focus on journey, I actually went down the memory lane to come up with all this stuff is really interesting because a lot of podcasts, try to do everything. Anything what you're doing is smarter because you're focusing and a lot of podcasts try to engage me on story for one part, and then they go too much into technical matters. But this Yeah, this is funny because this is fun for me because it was strictly about how someone would go about building a skill or career like this. So it's is quite fun.
Tim Bourguignon 44:23
Thank you. This has been another episode of developer's journey. Thank you very much. We'll see each other next week. Bye.
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