How to Be a Successful Developer Experience

In this episode, we talk with SWYX, author, speaker, podcaster, and learning in public evangelist. We dive into his career history in finance and how he transitioned into development. We also discuss the challenges of Developer Experience, the advantages of learning in public, and lessons learned from podcasting. Additionally, we get a musical performance from SWYX himself.

Bonus: We have Software Engineer, Arit Amana as a guest co-host.

✨ Episode Sponsor

• Auth0: https://auth0.com
• Auth0 on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/auth0
• Auth0 on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/auth0
• Auth0 Avocado Labs online meetup events: https://avocadolabs.dev/

🔗 Episode Links

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/swyx
• Author: Coding Career Handbook: https://www.learninpublic.org/
• Website: https://www.swyx.io/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/swyxTV
• The Swyx Mixtape: https://swyx.transistor.fm/
• Swyx on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/swyx
• Build Invincible Apps: https://temporal.io/
• Guest co-host: Arit Amana
  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/aritdeveloper
  • Website: https://arit.dev/
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aritamana/
  • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/AritDeveloper
  • Github: https://github.com/msarit
  • Arit Amana on Thunder Nerds: https://youtu.be/i74Swu8Us-A
• Hosts: Frederick Weiss: https://twitter.com/FrederickWeiss

📜 Transcript

[00:00:00] Frederick Weiss: Welcome, I’m Frederick Weiss. And, thank you for consuming the Thunder Nerds. A conversation with the people behind the technology that love what they do, and do tech good. And our sponsor Auth0 is helping us do that all year long. Auth0 makes it easy for developers to build a custom secure and standard-based unified log-in by providing authentication and authorization as a service.

[00:01:08] Frederick Weiss: Try them out now by going to Auth0.com. Also, check them out at youtube.com/Auth0,  Twitch.tv/Auth0, and Avocadolabs.dev for their online meetup events. Thanks again, Auth0. And let's go ahead and welcome our guests, you know, speaking of the guests, we actually have a co-host on the show today, which I'm so grateful to have.

[00:01:44] Frederick Weiss: We have Arit Amana. Thank you so much for a guest hosting!

[00:01:48] Arit Amana: Thanks for having me. It's great to be back.

[00:01:52] Frederick Weiss: Yeah, absolutely. Appreciate it. And with that being said, and no ados being further, let's get to our guests for today. Learning in public evangelist, speaker, author, teacher writer, programmer podcaster.

[00:02:08] Frederick Weiss: SWYX himself. Welcome to the show.

[00:02:13] SWYX: Thanks. Yeah.

[00:02:16] Frederick Weiss: Thanks. I feel really lucky to have both of you on the show today. So thanks both of you, I guess, at the start for, for sharing your time. I know it's always, um, a little challenging on a Saturday, so, you know, thanks again. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, um, you know, I know you were having some issues SWYX with, uh, with traveling.

[00:02:39] Frederick Weiss: Uh, do you mind talking a little bit about that? I think, uh, you got caught up. Uh, Trump travel ban. And now you're back in Washington.

[00:02:47] SWYX: Yes, sir. Seattle. Um, yeah, I went to Croatia for a conference. They shift conferences as amazing as my first in-person conference in a long, long time. Uh, and it's always amazing to have like an all-expenses paid, uh, conference travel trip.

[00:03:05] SWYX: And so I, I went with it with all my friends who were also speakers and had a really good time there and give a, give a talk and met a lot of interesting people, came back to the immigration gates and got turned around by the customs and border patrol because they said that I came from a restricted country.

[00:03:25] SWYX: So, uh, it turns out that, uh, I mean, I knew in concept about the chunk travel ban, but like that was imposed. Early in the pandemic. And I had the vaccine and I had a negative COVID test. I just assumed that I'd be fine. Uh, cause like it's like I have American vaccine in me. Uh, but no, it just as a, as a, as a rule of law by executive proclamation, uh, I am a higher COVID risk because I have the wrong piece of paper.

[00:03:53] SWYX: Uh, so I had to go quarantine in Mexico for, for 14 days. Uh, don't really speak the language. Didn't have a place to stay. Didn't have any cash on me, uh, and just had to figure it out. Wow.

[00:04:05] Frederick Weiss: So what did, did you, did you not have a, like your COVID registration card or did that just

[00:04:11] SWYX: not count the matter? Yeah.

[00:04:13] SWYX: It didn't

[00:04:13] Frederick Weiss: matter. It didn't matter. That is so crazy. Well, you know, speaking of your travels then I, I know you said you had got caught up in Mexico. Um, you know, w within these travels, how, how was everything did you feel safe with, with the, uh, with the vid going around? Like, was everybody mask app is a little bit better than, than here?

[00:04:34] SWYX: Um, everyone's, everyone's fairly actually, I think, yeah. I would say, I'll say that Europe is actually more uptight or strict about having a mask on properly and at all times. So, uh, yeah, that's, that's even the ironically surprising bit that the US is enforcing Europe travel ban when, uh, okay. Quite honestly, Europe is doing a better job of keeping them.

[00:04:56] Frederick Weiss: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's, it's, it's interesting how that, that all works and hopefully within, um, I don't know, maybe I'm being optimistic in six months. We'll get to a place that's a little bit better. It seems that those Delta variances are kind of slowing down in certain locations in the United States and the same thing with, what is it?

[00:05:15] Frederick Weiss: I don't know how you pronounce it.

[00:05:19] SWYX: Lambda.

[00:05:20] Arit Amana: There's a new one. Yeah. Lambdas picking up.

[00:05:26] SWYX: Oh, is

[00:05:26] Frederick Weiss: that the one that's supposed to be like resistant to the vaccine or something such as that, um, maybe we'll get back to, uh, feeling safe again, you know, going to conferences and seeing people and all that, but, uh, yeah.

[00:05:41] Frederick Weiss: Yeah. I, think we have to, uh, it's, there are too many smart people out there to not get us through, uh, the situation.

[00:05:55] Frederick Weiss: So switch, tell me a little bit about yourself and your own words. I know X is from your, your name, Sean, and it's the initials within Chinese of your English and American name. Um, would you mind just giving our audience a brief, uh, context about

[00:06:12] SWYX: yourself? Yeah, I'm born and raised in Singapore and came to the states for college.

[00:06:16] SWYX: Uh, and I spent my first career in finance where I did, uh, investment banking and hedge funds mostly learn to code on the job, but I never had the title of a software engineer. So I made my own tools, but I didn't, I wasn't, I didn't do any software engineering best practices, no testing. Haha no version control.

[00:06:36] SWYX: Ha. It was fantastic. Uh, I had, I came out of investment banking with a 4,000 line, uh, uh, VBA script that I copied and emailed to myself every single time. Chemo with a new version. So that was my version control.

[00:06:55] SWYX: Uh, yeah. It's, it's on, it's on, they get up just actually, cause I, I lost it for a while and then I was like, wait, hang on. Like, that was the most significant program I ever made America years. I better figure it out. So if you search my Twitter and look for VBA, you'll see it. Um, and yeah, eventually I burned out at the finance bit.

[00:07:13] SWYX: Uh, it was very stressful, and uh, I think it's not very good for, um, just like fundamentally it's very closed. Uh, ecosystem very zero-sum like, I win you lose. And I realized that, uh, it wasn't actually compounding. That was the main thing I was okay with. Zero-sum actually because like somethings have to be, but, uh, it wasn't compounding.

[00:07:34] SWYX: So whatever trade I made, whether or not it made money, the next trade, uh, would have to top it. And if I lost money, I would have to make up what I lost. Um, and it was just like a black hole of, of ideas and, and energy. And after two years of day-to-day stress, you know, some days, uh, just sleeping under the table, cause I was just too tired to go home.

[00:07:55] SWYX: Um, I just, I had enough, I just burned out. Um, and it wasn't, it wasn't like, I think it was like a 50 50, like me and them thing. Like, uh, I think that, uh, you know, there are some people who are just really insanely talented at it. Uh, but I put in my all for two years and I there's a, there's like a company wide ranking of like analysts and I came in in the middle, um, and I looked at the people who are at the top and I was like, I'm not.

[00:08:19] SWYX: You know, so, uh, but there was one thing I was good at, which is coding, uh, which was like making my own tools. And I realized that, um, I was doing a lot of number crunching. So I did, uh, Python and Haskell uh number-crunching for my derivatives trades and for my portfolio risk management. Um, and I was often the script monkey whenever people wanted to make any changes to calculations or like, Hey, like, can you rerun the analysis?

[00:08:42] SWYX: Like in this different way, I would have to go back and punch those numbers in and get the numbers out and then like send it back to them. Um, if I could remove myself from that equation, then, uh, people would get. Use out of my, my work without me there. Uh, and that's what led me to front end development and JavaScript.

[00:08:59] SWYX: Um, I think actually front end developers, don't under, don't appreciate sometimes the power that they have in creating applications that standalone without them. And they can scale basically infinitely without any resources whatsoever, apart from the browser. That's just an amazing tool. So, uh, yeah, I, I, and, you know, even despite all the language that I learned Java was the hardest.

[00:09:23] SWYX: So I tried six months of self-learning with free code camp and I didn't feel it was enough. So I enrolled in a bootcamp and that got me my first job. Uh, so I did, uh, so just to wrap up, I did, uh, I did a year and two Sigma and then joined Netlify, that's kind of my claim to fame where I, I joined fairly, fairly early on and then, uh, grew with them and, uh, and then joined AWS, uh, to do.

[00:09:46] SWYX: More like basically five-plus plus, because like, it was a Netlify competitor to plus storage plus, you know, uh, AWS often stuff like that. Um, and then year early this year I joined Tim portal as had a developer experience. Yeah, that's it. Well,

[00:10:02] Frederick Weiss: let me ask you this question. I want to jump back to what you're doing now, but there's a lot of us that we, we, we start off in these careers that we believe are, um, you know, the best path for us or, you know, I went to school for this, or my family told me to do this, or I, I feel like I'll be able to make the most money in this.

[00:10:21] Frederick Weiss: What, what exactly got you into finance? And, um, what, what, yeah, I mean, you, you went into the turning point, but w was there an actual love or a passion for finance, and then you kind of discovered your actual

[00:10:36] SWYX: passion. I think there was a, there was passion, otherwise, I wouldn't have stuck with it for so long.

[00:10:42] SWYX: Um, I w what got me into it was honestly the 1997 and 2001 financial crisis. So 1997 is not such a big deal for Americans, but, uh, in Asia it was a big deal. Uh, there was an Asian financial crisis currency crisis, uh, entire governments collapse because of mismanagement of their, uh, economy. So, um, and also hedge funds.

[00:11:07] SWYX: But, but, uh, I realized that basically every other job, every other industry is inherently tied to the economy, except if you deal in finance, and if you can short the market when everything is going to hell, and I kind of saw that again, during college. Because I already decided on Korean finance, but during college, uh, I went through the great financial crisis of 2007, 2008.

[00:11:35] SWYX: And again like everyone, you know, out of a job or like overextended in your loans or whatever, but if you're a hedge fund, you were managed, you managed to be able to short the market. So it seemed like the only career where, uh, if you could call bullshit on those. I'm sorry. I don't know if I can swear. I think I'll be S on, on, on, uh, sometimes central bankers who are quite frankly, you know, they, they view their confidence, men, confidence, women.

[00:12:02] SWYX: Like they, the, they say things that are, may not actually be true. And if, if you, if you cash them out doing it, you can actually make a lot of money. But at the bare minimum, you can at least look after yourself. If everything is going to, you know, too, to hell in a handbasket, as you can actually, you know, move yourself to cash or like you are.

[00:12:21] SWYX: In the center of the financial transformation of assets. And I think that's a very powerful position to be in. And I thought if I could understand that and get good at it, then, um, it would be, it would be a really great position to be in. Um, I think I, I got there in understanding, but I wasn't good at it.

[00:12:42] SWYX: That's kind of the summary of it. Um, I also didn't like the people I would say like, yeah, there were a lot of, um, um, I think money, money is money is an interesting thing. And when you deal with other people's money and you deal in very large sums of it, like we were three, we're a three person team running a billion dollars in, uh, gross notional value.

[00:13:05] SWYX: Why say was a notional. Uh, it's not actually, we didn't have a billion dollars sitting around, uh, that was including the shorts that we had. So we were a market-neutral, long, short funds. So we had to buy $500 million worth of shares, but then also shorts, uh, 500 million of other shares that which will hopefully go down and make profit on a difference.

[00:13:26] SWYX: And yeah. I mean, I thought that that was my deal position. I spent 10 years getting there and I got there and I realized I didn't like it. Um, so, uh, was, that was the second part of the question

[00:13:39] Arit Amana: I'll go ahead. No, no, no, please. No, I had, that's an, that's an incredible story suite I have to say. And I guess a follow-up question.

[00:13:47] Arit Amana: I know we need to get to the rest of our talking points, but I'm curious to hear you speak about how you, cause it takes a lot of courage. I feel like you can know that something isn't working for you and you can know that I'm not happy here and I'm not as fulfilled as I thought that I was going to be, but I still think it takes a certain level of courage to walk away from the familiar.

[00:14:08] Arit Amana: So can you talk about like how, how you. More. So the, the mental and the emotional side, I mean, we know you transitioned out of that job, but if you could speak to maybe any challenges you faced either mentally or emotionally, or in terms of, yeah. Right.

[00:14:25] SWYX: I speak to a lot of, uh, finance refugees who are like me, they heard my story and then, and then they want to do it, but then they're kind of like, but I have a really comfortable life, you know, I get paid well in finance.

[00:14:36] SWYX: Like, do you want me to walk away from this? Uh, and yeah. You know, and changing careers, like, you know, I,  unfortunately, I don't have like a kids or anything, so it was a little bit easier for me, but changing careers, uh, at the, you know, at the age of 30. Is still something that's intimidating. I think it's like, you feel like you should have, you should be hitting your stride.

[00:14:56] SWYX: You should be, uh, it should be well-known in your industry by now. And to say like, ah, screw it. I'm going to start over is you have to be in certain point of like, uh, understanding that there's a lot of life left and it's life is too short to, um, to spend doing something that you don't enjoy or are not good at.

[00:15:15] SWYX: Um,

[00:15:15] Frederick Weiss: it reminds me of a tweet. You just put out the other day where, and I'm going to read this verbatim, so I get it right. There's a lot of quick quote, unquote, quit your job, indie hack your way to freedom on social media. I want to articulate a middle path, a work at a company on interesting problems, but also maintain side projects, reputation as backup and longterm game.

[00:15:40] Frederick Weiss: AKA have a job while not being your job. That kind of.

[00:15:47] SWYX: Is that fair? Um, that was that's a slightly tangential thing. Uh, but I was definitely my job, uh, went during finance. Like there was nothing else about me apart from my job. Um, and I think, but it also applies to a lot of devs who are their job and that's their whole identity and they're kind of banking on their job, treating them well to take care of them.

[00:16:07] SWYX: Long-term, uh, I don't think it serves them very well sometimes because I find that basically, you know, jobs don't have your long-term best interest at heart. They, they wants to slot you in to, um, somewhere within the hierarchy, uh, to, for you to perform according to the letters and career metrics that they've defined.

[00:16:25] SWYX: Um, but sometimes they don't know what your interests are and if your interest diverged at all from the company, then you're kind of screwed. If you don't have a network outside of your job, um, and to build a network, you probably should do something interesting to others that are interesting to them beyond the company that you work at.

[00:16:42] SWYX: So. Yeah. Th this tweet is a more recent realization, nothing to do with the finance bit. Um, but it, I guess it's related.

[00:16:52] Frederick Weiss: Yeah. I was just thinking it, thinking as a way of a, more of like advice for people that, you know, you, you don't, don't, don't, you know, if you're looking to do something, you don't have to jump off a bridge to get to a shift.

[00:17:03] Frederick Weiss: You know, you, you know, you, you can work at where you're at and kind of build up and then find that. Or, you know, some, sometimes it makes sense to just drop what you're doing and go,

[00:17:14] SWYX: go, go forward for anyone who's considering a career change or anyone who knows a friend who's considering a career change.

[00:17:20] SWYX: This is exactly what I did. I took a year to do it. Um, I left my hedge fund. I joined a startup that was serving my hedge funds. Um, so I went from customer to employee. Uh, and so I was tech adjacent, right? I was tech and Jason and still using my finance knowledge, but, uh, trying out a, uh, a startup role, I was a non-technical product manage.

[00:17:43] SWYX: And, uh, while I was there, I learned to code on decide, uh, F using free code camp. I'm a massive supporter of them. I've donated to them every year since I graduated. Um, and, uh, they really, they're really helpful in trying this on and seeing if you can hack it as a, as a developer.

[00:18:02] Frederick Weiss: Yeah. Sorry.

[00:18:02] Frederick Weiss: Yeah,

[00:18:04] Arit Amana: I do. Yes. Yes, I do. I love free code camp as well. You're so right. This is just a really robust platform. And I feel anyone, anyone who's heard my story and reaches out to me asking that they want to do the same thing. I always point them to free code camp. I'm like, if you can gain all those certificates and have fun doing free code camp, then you, you could probably, you know, um, make it as a Dell, as a developer and enjoy it, which is also important.

[00:18:32] SWYX: Yeah. Yeah. How long did you take to go through this whole thing?

[00:18:36] Arit Amana: Uh, my journey was 11 months, 11 months from. My first line of code to my first job was 11 months. Yeah.

[00:18:46] SWYX: That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah.

[00:18:48] Arit Amana: Yeah. But I had a lot of privilege working for me, so I don't want to make it sound like it was, you know, yeah.

[00:18:55] Arit Amana: I had, I had a lot of perks like I didn't have to work. And so that was a huge, you know, like burden not to have is, you know, not worry about bringing a paycheck. Yeah. I would say that was the biggest part of my privilege was not having to work, but it wasn't easy. I had, an infant daughter and a son, so it wasn't easy by, by any means.

[00:19:16] Arit Amana: Um, I would like to segue if it's okay with you switch into your current work as a developer experience, I feel like there should be a third word. I should be singing. Right.

[00:19:29] SWYX: The title is head of developer experience. It's kind of

[00:19:31] Arit Amana: head of developer experience. Thank you. At temporal.io. Uh, talk to us about what developer experience is, um, and what your day-to-day is like in that.

[00:19:42] SWYX: Sure. I, I, I've been asked to, uh, various versions of this car for quite recently, and there's a lot of interest around this. I don't really know why. Um, so I segment developer expert into a kind of two, two large segment sections, and then I'll focus on the section that I part I focus on. Uh, so internal developer experience, uh, is often formed by companies and teams that have a lot of developers internally and they want to improve their productivity.

[00:20:11] SWYX: So you see developer experience teams that like Spotify or slack or, um, Netflix, uh, their customers are not developers, but internally they have a lot of developers. And, uh, if you can improve the productivity of 1% of them, then you just gained the equivalent of like a hundred developers for free. Right?

[00:20:30] SWYX: So, uh, for those people, the way that I split it up is kind of. You there the three main buckets. And I think the Netflix model was really interesting. If you listen to their podcast, they talk a little bit about it. Uh, it was just essentially, uh, getting people started really quickly. So boots, the bootstrap phase.

[00:20:48] SWYX: That's the first bit, the second bit is, uh, getting from code to deploy really, really quickly. So that's kind of deployment, I guess, or CIC D and then the last bit is getting from production back to deployment. So getting data logs, errors, all that, uh, feeding that into the dev environment so that they can respond to incidents or outages or errors very quickly.

[00:21:11] SWYX: So, uh, that's kind of like the full software development life cycle that I really like in internal developer experience. And I think when development and developer tools companies like the one I work at or Netlify, or AWS, we try to market to developers, then that becomes external developer experience.

[00:21:28] SWYX: So, um, what we are trying to do is we're trying to serve these internal developer experience teams or the VP of edge or. Whoever, uh, is trying to make their own life more productive because obviously suffered development is as cool as it is. It's still very unproductive in some elements and we could do better with better tooling.

[00:21:47] SWYX: So external developer experience, uh, Kind of mostly right now developer relations, which is, Hey, we have an awesome, we have an awesome product. Uh, let me tell you about it. Right. Um, but, but that's a lot of content marketing. So, you know, you see people writing blog posts, giving talks and doing workshops and stuff like that.

[00:22:05] SWYX: Um, but also I think it's starting to evolve a little bit more into community management. So instead of me telling you what to do, or, uh, uh, me traveling out to, uh, you know, travel the world and do conference talks, um, let's actually have a community where people talk to each other, people hire each other people, uh, build libraries that help, uh, an open source for each other.

[00:22:27] SWYX: And they realized that a more vibrant community actually is, uh, is a more sustainable moat than turning out content day after day after. Right. So, uh, there's the concept piece, there's the community piece. And then the last piece, which in my mind is that forms of external facing developer experience is the product piece.

[00:22:46] SWYX: Uh, what I mean by products is that, um, that no amount of advocacy you can do in the content, no amount of community, user generated content or a forum support or. Uh, or conferences or what have you no mana that can fix a broken product. And if you could just give really good feedback to your engineers and PMs about, Hey, I talked to a lot of users as part of my job.

[00:23:10] SWYX: Uh, here's all, here's what, here's the pain points and here's how, what they struggle with when they go through our product right now. And if you build that into the product that people don't have to docs, they don't have to read blog posts. They don't have to read, they don't have to talk to any other humans.

[00:23:22] SWYX: It just use your thing. And it just.

[00:23:26] Arit Amana: Awesome. You know, I hear you speak about, um, just with the descriptions that you gave and thank you so much for that was very helpful for me. What's the delineation between developer experience and developer relations, which is another term that I'm hearing more and more.

[00:23:40] Arit Amana: Um, could you speak, uh, can you speak to how you manage the flow of information as head of developer experience? Because from what I hear you describe, there's like a lot of feedback, feedback loops happening either between the DX people and the developers, whether internal, external, how do you, um, handle all that flow of information and even from the applications and the technology itself, and how do you handle that and almost, um, um, like manage that information in a way that it, it becomes usable and actionable for the, for, for other.

[00:24:20] SWYX: We don't handle it very well.

[00:24:25] SWYX: Let's just be honest, right? Like we're still figuring this out. Like, um, I, I don't want to say, you know, I want to sit here in front of you and say like, I have this all on. I figure it out. Um, what we do is we hire really capable people. And then we talk a lot and we talk about the things that we've come across and we have a, what we call a CRM, a customer relationship management tool.

[00:24:47] SWYX: That's the notion essentially like we take notes, uh, when we interact with customers and potential customers. But also we, when you run an open-source tool, custom portal.io is open source. Um, there's just sometimes too many anonymous customers who, who you never really talked to again. So, uh, it's hard to take notes on everyone and it's unrealistic.

[00:25:07] SWYX: So we don't do that. Uh, we do that for, you know, large names and prospective customers that we expect to have along dealing with. Um, and then. Surfacing issues in a holistic manner. So we love the word holistic internally within temporal. To me, what that means is like, okay, where does this slot within a developer's journey through temporal, right?

[00:25:31] SWYX: Like, uh, from the landing page to onto the first page of the docs to the hello world. Um, do we throw the book at them or do we, uh, I realized though the book is an idiom. So a book at them, like, do we, like how much information do we overload you with and how much is above the fold? Cause that's quite realistically all you're going to read on your first encounter.

[00:25:53] SWYX: Um, and so what can we squeeze in there that will get you interested in and get you to come back? And then maybe the next level is after your interest, like, how do you get you to a hello world that is not only productive but also like it's insincerely is something that you cannot. Uh, on your own or something that you would take a lot longer to do with other tools.

[00:26:16] SWYX: Um, and then once you've decided to use the tool, how do we get you to production with all the best practices that we found so far, uh, deploying on your own cloud or on ours and, and then once you've deployed it, like, what are the practices for optimization and scaling? No. So, so there's a whole journey that we've been mapping out and I'm using that essentially to coordinate, um, how we structured the docs, how we do developer relations, like, uh, workshops and our content and all that.

[00:26:44] SWYX: Uh, and then community-wise, I think it's really helpful when people give you feedback, where does it slot in that, in, in that journey. So, um, and then hopefully you've you build it out, but, um, I don't mean to say it's a, any, by any means scientific, um, you know, we're a small team, um, that is serving a fairly large user base, uh, and it's a very complex product.

[00:27:07] SWYX: So a lot of things get dropped. Maybe we could do a better job of it, but also I would just need someone full-time taking notes.

[00:27:17] Arit Amana: Thank you so much. Um, and, uh, just rounding up, I guess, this section, um, it sounds like interesting work, um, very involved work, but as a developer, it doesn't sound like there's a lot of coding involved in developer experience work. And so how do you handle that as a developer individually? And how do you keep your coding skills sharp?

[00:27:38] Arit Amana: If your day job is wrapped up in that kind of.

[00:27:43] SWYX: Yeah. Um, to some extent I've already given up and being like a full-time developer. So you just have to make a piece with that. Um, and, but, uh, you know, we do we do code, uh, so I'll give you examples. Um, and Netlify where I used to work. Uh, our developer relations program formerly had a rotation onto an edge team for one quarter of the year.

[00:28:05] SWYX: So three months out of the 12 months of a year, you are on the edge team. You do not have any different responsibilities and you take tickets, you execute on them, you understand architecture, your document, you write tests, uh, all the other engineering stuff. So you keep sharp, you work on the products and then you go evangelize the product.

[00:28:20] SWYX: I think that's a really nice thing to do. Unfortunately, three months is actually quite a short time. So onboard and offboard. So people can give you long-running tasks and stuff like that. So, uh, I, on some level you're still not a real engineer, right? You're not maintaining something day in and day out.

[00:28:37] SWYX: You're not on call for the thing that you wrote nine months ago. Like, uh, there are a lot of nuances that, uh, you just don't get if you're a tourist, uh, and in that space. Whereas, um, we do write a lot of, uh, example code, so demos workshops, stuff like that. And for me, so for example, we're building out a TypeScript SDK, um, I'm engaged in API design and that's some of the heaviest technical challenges I've ever faced.

[00:29:02] SWYX: Uh, even though I'm not writing. Production code. I am determining the design of production code for years to come, which is a fairly high-stress job. Um, so I mean, it's not high stress. I mean, I'm, uh, I'm enjoying it. I'm just saying like, uh, to say that that is not technical as a joke like we're discussing, we're discussing, uh, API design and like implementation details and stuff like that.

[00:29:27] SWYX: Um, there's, there are a thousand more ways to be technical than like hands-on keyboard committing code. So, uh, I don't know. I think that's, I'm enjoying it and it's, I'm not scared if I ever have to go full-time coding again.

[00:29:47] Frederick Weiss: Well, speaking of coding, I'd love to talk about our next subject, which is the, uh, coding, a coding career handbook.

[00:29:56] Frederick Weiss: Um, so first off, when did you write this?

[00:30:01] SWYX: a few years ago. No, this is April to May, uh, April to June 2020. There was last year. Yeah.

[00:30:07] Frederick Weiss: Yeah. Sorry. That's what I meant by if your time is going by quickly. Uh, so what was the, what was the catalyst? What, what made you write this book?

[00:30:16] SWYX: I had two months off between uh Netlify and, and, uh, Amazon. So I, uh, I decided that I wanted to do it in India. Everyone was like launching their own books and like running your own courses. I was like, okay, okay, I'll get into this. And, you know, uh, I looked around for what's, which of my blog posts have had the most readers.

[00:30:35] SWYX: And my blog was on learning and public has had over a million. And constantly get shoutouts there, bots that like are written because of it there are translations. I think there are like 10 different translations now of, of that essay. And so it really resonated. And I was, and I was like, okay, probably people want this as a book.

[00:30:54] SWYX: So I expanded upon it. I was like, okay, I'll, I'll try to make this like a two-week project because Daniel Vassallo and Twitter-like encouraged me, like, you know, just to get started to get it out there. I ended up planning on 50 chapters, uh, and having to cut it down because I, I, there's no way I was gonna ship 50 chapters and, and then just wrote and wrote and wrote for two months and, uh, wrote everything that I thought was true.

[00:31:21] SWYX: What's what, there's a little bit of imposter syndrome giving out career advice because everyone's journey is different. Everyone starts from a different place, you know, depending on your privilege and, uh, your, you know, just your circumstances. Right? So, um, how do you get around that is you collect advice from other people?

[00:31:37] SWYX: So, um, it's, this is not advice, not just advice from me, this advice from 1400 other resources that I collected and put in the bibliography of the book. So it's very much a starting point for like, okay, you just graduated from your Bootcamp or your free code camp. Um, here's every, let's say you just got your first job as a.

[00:31:55] SWYX: Um, I, I try not to address the like first job hunts thing because a lot of other resources do that. So I think that's overcrowded, but, um, it's very important by the way, you don't have a job. You don't, you're not starting on the rest of the journey, but once you get in the job, um, the people stop learning and they're not reading.

[00:32:12] SWYX: They're not resources to get you from junior to senior. And guess what? Like, most people want to hire senior engineers, not juniors. Uh, so my focus was to level you up from junior to senior. And that was the entire messaging entire focus of like, okay, here's everything that they don't tell you when you start the job.

[00:32:27] SWYX: Uh, I think it's the equivalent of having a good mentor, um, at work. And sometimes you don't get to choose your mentor, you just show up and they assign you someone and they may or may not be that great. And I'm finding that so many people are mistreated by the employee or just like under-resourced by their employer.

[00:32:44] SWYX: So they come to me and, uh, I try to help them as best as I can.

[00:32:48] Frederick Weiss: Yeah. I love too that you have like a full-on, like, it's very interactive too. Like you can obviously buy the book, but you also have all this other material. Do you mind kind of touching on like the, uh, the advanced options of, of the purchase?

[00:33:02] SWYX: Yeah, I've actually simplified. I used to have three tiers and that was just like, okay. Let's like trying to make the most money out of this thing. And I realized like, I, you know, I have a, I have a good job. Uh, I don't need, I don't need to maximize the money. I just need to charge for my time. And also, I don't want to like add on another monthly charge to people's bills and stuff like that.

[00:33:21] SWYX: It's just super stressful. I'm, I'm sick of all the subscriptions I'm paying. So I made it a one-time fee if you want the book, get the book, but it's already like, you know, pirated too, to oblivion. Um, what, what really, what really matters is the community, like read the book together with other people, reading the book and me and ask me questions as you go along.

[00:33:42] SWYX: It's a one-time fee of like, I don't know, like 40, 50. Uh, 40 bucks and, and yeah, and I have a discord and I have a circled forum and we chat about the book we meet up. Uh, I show you how I wrote the book cause I have, um, you know, recorded lectures and stuff like that. Um, and I give you extra commentary. So, um, it's everything I think, uh, I think it's, I think it's just, uh, uh, steel of my time, but, uh, I love, I love running the community and like, I love the the chats that we have.

[00:34:10] SWYX: I have people showing up and saying, they asked me questions, and then you go away and come back seven months later and they go like, Hey, by the way, you know, uh, I, uh, I haven't, I've been pretty quiet, but like, this is what I've done in my, in my job. And, um, I had, I had a couple of people. Go from actually go from junior to senior.

[00:34:25] SWYX: And one of them doubled their pay, um, going from junior to senior. And, uh, I was just, you know, I mean, I can't take credit for all of it, but I can, I can at least say I helped them, uh, with allowed their questions and their interviewing and stuff like that. And it's just really cool to run a community on the side where people have a trusted place.

[00:34:42] SWYX: They can talk about career stuff apart from their friend network who may not be developers apart from the people at work who may, you know, you can't be 100% honest with them. Uh, but here you can, because we're all, we're all interested in growing ourselves and in our careers,

[00:34:59] Frederick Weiss: speaking of, uh, trusting people, uh, I wanted to talk a little bit about the whole learn in public thing.

[00:35:05] Frederick Weiss: If you don't mind, like, uh, I, I'm going to read a little bit from one of the PDFs that you had for free on here. Uh, one of the chapters, which you communicate that, you know, uh, you've been trained your entire life to learn and practice. And keep what you learned to yourself. Success is doing things better than everyone else around you.

[00:35:25] Frederick Weiss: And of course, I'm going to just, just with brevity to just kind of, I'm just reading some things here, but, and of course you don't share your secrets with competitors, uh, which I found super interesting. And then you have here a point about Eagle, this programming, where, uh, you could learn so much on the internet for the low, low price of your ego.

[00:35:46] Frederick Weiss: Do you mind just kind of speaking about this whole, um, learn in public. Y, uh, it's, it's important to let go of that feeling of, oh, you know, I don't want to put my ideas out there because, you know, I might get, um, you know, shamed for it or something such as this. And you know, one of the things that I did see, um, you talked a little bit about, you know, you don't want to build a brand of, you know, somebody not knowing things, but it's also really.

[00:36:13] Frederick Weiss: Put yourself out there and get some eyeballs and, and kind of share your learning experience with everybody, right?

[00:36:20] SWYX: Yeah, that's true. Um, I think it basically takes advantage of the fact that tech is a fundamentally open and positive industry. Uh, we are encouraged to go on stage and share our lessons and our failures and that's, what gets voted on hacker news.

[00:36:37] SWYX: You know, we open-source our code that we, we wrote, uh, in a, in an attempt mostly to hire more engineers, but also to spread good ideas. And, you know, partially the company I work at is, is a benefactor of that. Uh, you know, temper, uh, Uber had no reason to allow open-sourcing temporal, but like, uh, it got a lot of traction and externally you got a lot of contributions and then eventually the whole community benefited as a, as a result of that.

[00:37:03] SWYX: Um, and so I think if, I think if you do that for your own learning, you actually learn much faster than you. Um, by yourself. And there's a, there's a few reasons why, so the first reason that I, I, I think I list like nine reasons. So I'm not going to go through all of them. This is way too long. But, um, the, the most important reason to me is the feedback loop.

[00:37:22] SWYX: Um, because when you start off learning, it's a, it's always a burst of inspiration and motivation, like, okay, today's going to be the day I change my life. I will get good at whatever it is I'm trying to get good at. Uh, and then you get into it, and then you're like, oh, okay, this is actually hard. And then you give up, um, so what the learning public does is actually it gives you a feedback loop of like, okay, when you share what you learned and people respond to you, you have some impetus and external expectations to go.

[00:37:47] SWYX: Like actually, you know, other people are in the same boat with me or they're mentoring me, or they're looking up to me. I gotta keep. Um, and, and that feedback loop actually turns, it turns it into a positive cycle of like, okay, I'll, I'll share what I learn, get feedback on what I learned and then go fill in the gaps on what, I didn't know that I thought I, that I thought I knew.

[00:38:09] SWYX: Um, and that's just a fundamental thing. Like I've done it for maybe four to five years now. Um, and I've already had amazing success. And I just can't imagine that. What if, what happens when I do it for 40 years or 50 years? And I think a life of life lives where you learn together with others, uh, that you learned in public.

[00:38:29] SWYX: Uh, such a more fulfilling one than something where you keep everything to yourself. Um, and people have no, uh, it's just, it's just like, it's, it's just inherently better. Uh, I even have the math to prove it. So I call this a big L notation. So it's comparable to the big O notation. The algorithm for big L notation is a log of N which N be the number of years.

[00:38:51] SWYX: And it's always the question of like, how do you grow better than the average by a number of years, we all know that years of experience is not a very good metric. Um, but we still do it right. I, I, my company does it and we don't have any other better objective number to gauge the amount of experience or knowledge or skills that a person has just off of a one-line judgment.

[00:39:13] SWYX: Um, but as an, as an engineer or as a. With the, with the knowledge was it was a knowledge worker. How do you grow your skills disproportionately to your career? Um, to your years of experience? Like you need a different algorithm. Is this the same as big O right? Like if you're on the algorithm, no matter how hard you try it, you're, you're just going to grow by the big O of your algorithm that you picked.

[00:39:34] SWYX: So if the different algorithm is instead of learning private learning public, and we learn in public, you. Uh, another factor, which is P so, uh, the number of people that you learn with. Um, and so, uh, L L N times P uh, that's, that's kind of like the the mathematical improvement on that, uh, because, um, you grow by essentially the number of important questions that you are the answer.

[00:39:57] SWYX: And sometimes you answer when people ask questions of you, um, they ask they're asking something that you never know. That you didn't know. And so you, you, you should try it. You tend to uncover things a lot faster. Um, and also when, whenever you get anything wrong, um, you will just remember a lot faster. So, and people, people will crawl over broken glass to remind you of something that you got wrong.

[00:40:18] SWYX: So, uh, it's just a funny way that the internet works, but I just really like it because, um, you know, the only thing that you lose is some sense of ego that you got everything right on the first try. And if you can let go of that, you can learn so much.

[00:40:33] Arit Amana: Do you feel like, uh, what would you say to someone who may be saying, what if I put, you know, I'm learning in public and I put my mistakes, quote, unquote, out on the internet.

[00:40:45] Arit Amana: Um, what if they come back to bite me or what if they come back to, you know, like how, if I put my mistakes out, how do I then convince people that these mistakes that I made, or it may not even be a mistake? It might just be like substandard code, for example, or substandard. Um, Um, convention, you know, it could be, it doesn't have to be like a wrong thing, but it might just be maybe not as optimized, for example, how do I then convince people that I've grown past that level?

[00:41:16] SWYX: Ooh. Um, sometimes yeah, just a track record of putting up increasingly better stuff. Um, I don't think there's any shortcut to it. Uh, so by the way, uh, there are definitely repercussions for this and you do have to be careful. Um, I have lost friends over it. I have, I have, uh, put out some stuff I should not have put out because it was in private conversation or a not public yet or something like some stuff like that.

[00:41:41] SWYX: Um, and you have to recognize that there's a certain journalistic responsibility that you have when it comes to affecting other people. Like if it's yourself, you can be as public as you want. And nobody cares. But if, if it involves other people, other people may have a different preference level. Uh, sharing that they do online and you need to need to take care of not to hurt them.

[00:42:00] SWYX: Right. Um, and that's on, that's on you, that's on me. Um, and all that. Um, but uh, specifically people judging you because of bad stuff that you put out. Uh, I don't mind, I don't mind, again, that's part of the ego, right? Like, uh, it's part of the journey of like, you had to put out the bad thing in order to get good.

[00:42:18] SWYX: Um, and guess what, like a year from now, two years from now, you should look back on what you put out and you should, you should think of that. It's terrible because that's that, that way, you know, that you've grown. So, um, if you try to only put out, you know, the best perfect quality every time you might find yourself less productive than you would if you just put out the incremental steps along the way.

[00:42:38] SWYX: And I think people, um, there's a certain amount of like you can't please everybody. Um, and so the people who get it, get it, and we'll support you along the way. And the people who judge you based on your first impression of you, you don't need them in your life.

[00:42:55] Frederick Weiss: And it's also, you're going to be, uh, people are going to more appreciate that kind of level of granularity. If you're if you're putting out those details, right. It, it, it provides an opportunity for others to learn. Like if you're, I dunno if you're a designer and you go to dribble and you see all these, like, you know, beautiful designs, but you don't seem like the actual, like pen and paper sketches of how somebody got to that idea.

[00:43:17] Frederick Weiss: Like, that's, that's the good meaty stuff that really helps people learn. Right. Wouldn't you agree?

[00:43:23] SWYX: Yeah. Oh, okay. I'll say, I'll say this. Some people want, uh, different levels of signals versus noise, right? Like some people, they have more time to follow your journey. So they don't mind putting up with more noise, more work in progress, more drafts.

[00:43:37] SWYX: Uh, but some people just want the quick hits of like, give me your top three accomplishments, you know, and just give me the, uh, the best image of you then. That's quite honestly all you're evaluated on. When people look at your resume or look at your portfolio or your site to see if they want work. Um, so I do think that different mediums should have different levels of effort.

[00:43:57] SWYX: Um, and, and so if you set the expectations clearly, like this is my work in progress, uh, the channel where I share everything I go in progress and here's my finished product channel, where if you only want my finished product, um, go here, right. And have a very clear channel. Uh, and that's consistent communication across all your, all your social media and your, your personal channels.

[00:44:19] SWYX: Um, I think that that works really well. So, um, I do like having a space to experiment and to fail and to, uh, just complain and that's essentially Twitter. Uh, but then I do have more sort of professional channels, which is my blog, uh, where we're putting a lot more hours. Its kind of like the hours is the ratio of hours.

[00:44:40] SWYX: Spent in creation to the hours spent consuming. So you want higher ratios on the media that you own versus a lower ratio in a borrowed media borrowed platforms and borrow platforms are literally like YouTube. Like anything that can be taken away from you eventually like Twitter or YouTube or whatever.

[00:45:00] SWYX: Um, yeah, so, so that's kind of how I think about it. Like, um, there's, there's a, uh, I spent 600 hours writing my book. Um, you probably will not get better writing that out of me than in that book, because that's the one I, I wrote for under my own name for, for money. Um, so, uh, but everything else, like my, my tweets, like you get it for free.

[00:45:20] SWYX: Uh, I don't put a lot of thought into them. Uh, it's fine. But also, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's weird cause like it's also a semi-professional channel, but, um, I do think that people sign up for the work in progress on, on Twitter in, in, in a way that's kind of different on, then on YouTube or on a blog post.

[00:45:36] SWYX: So I like that.

[00:45:39] Frederick Weiss: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know, we're getting short on time and I do want to just quickly touch a little bit on your podcast, which I find just super fascinating. I am I'm hooked now, which is the six myths mixtape and it really is a mixed tape. I mean, you talk about things like from the six principles of influence to Pokemon jazz, like it's, it's anything and everything and you, and the mixtape part is you, you know, you bring in a lot of these pieces of media into the podcast.

[00:46:11] Frederick Weiss: And I, at first, I just want to ask you, how did you come up with the idea and, uh, what, what are people's responses to the show?

[00:46:20] SWYX: Um, how did I come up with the ideas I wanted? So I had a dabble in. Professionally or more highly produced podcasts. I love podcasts. I listened to, I subscribed to over 250 podcasts and I listened to podcasts maybe like three to four hours a day, thunder nurses on there, by the way, uh, love the show.

[00:46:40] SWYX: Uh, so, so it's an honor to be on. Um, but also I think that podcast is a very lonely experience and, um, I'm doing all this listening and I wish I had a way to take notes on the stuff that I listened to. And also, I wish I had a way to share it, share the joy and, uh, with others. So, uh, when I decided to start my own podcast, I thought that something that was that wasn't, that was kind of missing in the world was, uh, audio notes just to friends of like, Hey, um, there's nothing in common with all these topics, except that I'm interested in.

[00:47:16] SWYX: And if you're, if you're along for the ride, if you like, what I like, uh, here's a way to subscribe to it. Um, I will never make any money on this. It's actually mostly for me. Um, but if you, but you know, I'm kind of working with the garage door open is, is the ND two shock phase phrase of, of, of this. Um, but like, if you like this stuff, I like, and if you like my recommendations, then here's a daily feed of them.

[00:47:39] SWYX: I love them that people, people, people really, I mean, the audience is pretty small, it's in the hundreds. Um, but uh, people still give me good shoutouts, um, every week or so I'd say, um, and I don't really know how to grow a podcast. I, I don't think it's like the most productive hour of my day, but also, um, it makes me, I think get much more out of my own listening and honestly like that's a win in itself.

[00:48:04] SWYX: Like, um, and I love these, uh, basically what I call single-player games, uh, where that can they have the option to turn multiplayer, right? Like, um, As much as you learn in public, like you might get discouraged if you never get feedback. Right. Like if you're like, okay, I worked so hard on his blog post and I put it out there and I get one, like, which, uh, is very demoralizing.

[00:48:26] SWYX: Um, if your entire goal was to get likes and views. So if you try not to measure yourself on those things and you, you just, you, all, you say you flip the switch and you're going, okay, I'm doing this for. But I'm even open to the opportunity for others to get through, join along. That's much more authentic because you're not performing anymore.

[00:48:43] SWYX: You're literally fulfilling your own needs. Um, and you win no matter how much people respond, whether or not it's a hit. I still, I get hits and I get misses. Even today. I have over a million visitors a year to my blog. Um, I get hits, I get misses. And, uh, it doesn't matter. I still win because I wrote. And it expresses something or in notes down something that I've been researching and studying for a while.

[00:49:05] SWYX: Uh, so that's kind of how I approach my, my mixtape as well. Like I still win because I w had the chance to go over a passage within a podcast that I really liked. Um, and so, yeah, and then the eclectic mix is it's inspired by a few things. Um, I think, uh, the technique right home is like a very short daily news podcast.

[00:49:24] SWYX: Uh, the, the breakdown is, is a crypto podcast. There's also daily it with, uh, with extended pieces on the weekends. And then, uh, so what I do is, uh, on Monday Mondays, Thursdays, I do clips of other podcasts on Fridays. I do music because music is another interest of mine, and I like to share my musical pixel.

[00:49:42] SWYX: And then on weekends, I'll do long-form audio sometimes of others, but most of me, so my appearances on other podcasts or resyndicate it onto my own feed. So if people like what I do, they'll find it on my feed eventually. So, uh, I like, I like that. All those, all those things, just, just so that. It makes it easier for people to find me.

[00:50:02] SWYX: And also it makes it, uh, it preserves it in case the other podcast goes away.

[00:50:10] Frederick Weiss: Well, I'm looking forward to us being on a, on the mixed tape. No, I know what you're what you mean because I have the same thing, at least for me is where I'm like, like, I, I take a lot of notes. Like are well contested, this use all, like, I take a lot of notes.

[00:50:26] Frederick Weiss: I do a lot of research on every guest. And for me, like I, if even if we don't like ask like 10% of the questions, I still feel justified because I got to internally learn from all these things and I got to learn from you. Uh, and it's, it's very fulfilling for me. So, uh, everybody else getting a little bit of the podcast out there, like that's just a bonus, you know, for me, I do it for me.

[00:50:52] SWYX: Yeah. Yeah. Um, I think people also like a commentary on podcasts, like meta-commentary. So that's what I try to do, on most episodes. Like, why should you listen to this? What did I learn from it? What is my personal connection with this 10 minutes of audio that you're about to hear? Um, and it's basically friend, like, like you would, if you're talking in-person to a friend and saying, I heard a really good podcast yesterday, let me tell you about it.

[00:51:14] SWYX: Right. Like, um, and so I think it's great. So I don't, I don't know where to go. I don't know where to go with it because like, um, I also want to grow on YouTube. And so like there's only so many hours in a day and, uh, I

[00:51:29] Frederick Weiss: would love to see it as, as a, as a YouTube thing. I think you would do great with that.

[00:51:37] Arit Amana: I have a YouTube channel and it's, there are some crickets there now. Cause it's been a minute since I put anything on there. Video is hard when I started putting things on YouTube. Respect for video content creators just skyrocketed because it's just, I'm just speaking for myself, but it's a different level entirely from writing audio, which is more my comfort zone.

[00:52:04] Arit Amana: Yeah. But video it's another level.

[00:52:07] Frederick Weiss: Yeah. I agree.

[00:52:09] SWYX: Well, we're getting. Oh, sorry. So I have lunch, I have lunch, a YouTube version of my podcast and that's mostly interviews. So I want to do it native to the format, of each medium. Uh, so my, the first like interview a podcast interview that I did went super well.

[00:52:26] SWYX: Um, it was with Sunil PI, who is the, who is former react core team member. And just the general thought lowered on all things JavaScript. And we just went from one and a half hours talking about everything. And when you touch on every company's products, uh, they listen and then they spread and their newsletter, their, their, their followers.

[00:52:45] SWYX: And, uh, I just got a notification that we were on the react newsletter. So that's going out to like 300,000 people. So that's going to be, that's going to be pretty interesting. Um, and I don't think I can keep it up, but at least I think YouTube, the easiest format is the interview format. So I'm probably going to do that.

[00:53:01] SWYX: Yeah.

[00:53:02] Frederick Weiss: Nice. I'd love to, I'd love to see that, please. Well, we're getting to the end of the show. And I like to ask two questions a year first way. What's the, uh, what's the best way for people to get a hold of you? Obviously, we'll put all this in the show notes,

[00:53:17] SWYX: but, um, yeah. Uh, my, my side is six that I owe my Twitter is at six.

[00:53:23] SWYX: And then, um, I guess if you want to email me six at six, that I, oh, everything's available on my website anyway. So just go there. Um, that's it.

[00:53:32] Frederick Weiss: Perfect. And the last thing is if you could provide our audience with some parting words of wisdom

[00:53:39] SWYX: learning public, I think it changed my life has changed the lives of many, many, many, many, many others before me and after me.

[00:53:46] SWYX: Uh, and don't need, you don't need to credit me at all because, uh, you just take it and run with it. It's uh, and I hope it changes yours.

[00:53:56] Frederick Weiss: Yeah. So the last thing I wanted to ask you, I see that guitar in the background and it's just itching out my brain. Are you going to sing us off?

[00:54:05] SWYX: I know. I, I, I'm still learning.

[00:54:08] SWYX: I still

[00:54:12] Arit Amana: learn,

[00:54:14] SWYX: but it sounds, it sounds terrible.

[00:54:16] Frederick Weiss: Let's hear it. Come on. We've heard worse. Come on. Let's hear it. Really? Yeah, absolutely.

[00:54:23] SWYX: Okay. If you, it says I insist,

[00:54:35] SWYX: um, what am I playing?

[00:54:38] Frederick Weiss: Whatever you are comfortable playing.

[00:54:50] SWYX: Its attitude. It's. Okay. It's amazing how you can speak and it's the GSI just way out. No, no.

[00:55:05] Frederick Weiss: To stop doing that, you're sounding great. Your voice is

[00:55:08] SWYX: awesome. Um, but it really bothers me as a musician. No, no. Keep going. I can appreciate that.

[00:55:19] SWYX: Um,

[00:55:21] Frederick Weiss: don't let perfection get in the way of progress.

[00:55:30] SWYX: it's amazing. It's amazing. It's amazing how you can speak to my heart.

[00:55:49] SWYX: I'm still learning.

[00:55:51] Arit Amana: Amazing.

[00:55:57] SWYX: um, so I actually, uh, I've been advised that should not do finger-picking these finger pickings harder and I should do chords. Um, and so I, I know it's just that I like things, I like the sound, the thing of picking and I'm trying to do that. Um, and, uh, what I really should do is, is memorized some chords because I can change chords much quicker.

[00:56:20] SWYX: So I used to be a singer and a much more of a singer than I am a guitarist.

[00:56:25] Frederick Weiss: Gotcha. Yeah, you have a great voice. Thank you. Is there anywhere where people could go to, to hear some stuff?

[00:56:32] SWYX: Um, uh, I have a song called nobody knows about, um, Sure. Uh, I'll look up the SoundCloud of God. You see, you made me, you made me frustrated now.

[00:56:44] SWYX: Cause like I am not learning in public. Yes, exactly. Wow. Okay. It's in here. So soundcloud.com/twix is very on-brand. Awesome.

[00:56:55] Frederick Weiss: Oh, perfect. Nice.

[00:56:59] SWYX: Uh, so yeah, that's my acapella stuff. Um, I would like to do multiple instruments, but um, uh, that's beyond my reach right now.

[00:57:09] Frederick Weiss: Do you mind if we put that in the show notes?

[00:57:11] Frederick Weiss: Yeah,

[00:57:12] SWYX: go ahead. Go ahead. It's not active, but um, oh man, you, you flustered me you’re, uh, this is like one of my most insecure things. Cause I don't practice enough in a really.

[00:57:29] Frederick Weiss: Well, that's it for our show. Do you have any more?

[00:57:36] Arit Amana: have thoroughly enjoyed myself.

[00:57:39] Arit Amana: Thank you so much for coming on. Good. Learned a lot. And just so encouraging things.

[00:57:45] Frederick Weiss: Yeah, same. Thank you Arit for co-hosting today.

[00:57:49] Arit Amana: Absolutely. It's it's fun.

[00:57:51] Frederick Weiss: Yeah. You

[00:57:52] SWYX: got some more. I found I found my chords. You want to, do you want me to try it again? Do you have time?

[00:57:58] Frederick Weiss: Yes. Yes we do. Please.

[00:58:05] SWYX: And, uh, it didn't even put up a fight. Didn't even bake. So I found a way to let you in, but I've never really had it standing in the middle outta your hand. Gum. My angel now

[00:58:23] Arit Amana: I kept being awake. Every room I had your break.

[00:58:28] SWYX: It's the rest. I don't take it. I ain't never going to

[00:58:32] Arit Amana: shut you out.

[00:58:39] Arit Amana: I'm

[00:58:39] SWYX: surrounded by every, I can see. You know, you're my saving grey, everything in

[00:58:51] Arit Amana: over

[00:58:52] SWYX: me. I can feel you. Hello? Hey, won't fade away. There we go. That was awesome. Thank you so much

[00:59:05] Frederick Weiss: for sharing that. That was beautiful.

[00:59:08] SWYX: Give me a second shot. Cause like the person sucks so bad. I was just like, I'm not ready at all.

[00:59:13] SWYX: Like I haven't warmed up. I can play it while singing. That was my achievements. But um,

[00:59:18] Frederick Weiss: I think I put you on the spot. I apologize.

[00:59:21] Arit Amana: And I said, no, you handled it excellently slicks.

[00:59:27] Frederick Weiss: Well, thank you again for being on the show and thanks to everybody for watching. Really appreciate it. And we'll catch you next time.

[00:59:33] Frederick Weiss: Thanks all