The Swyx Mixtape

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddKDPikKbNkTimestamps00:00:00 Intro[00:00:11] Four Components of Developer Experience [00:02:08] API Design [00:03:27] Documentation [00:06:52] Learning Journey [00:07:59] Feature Mapping Presentation [00:11:10] Companies With Great DX [00:12:58] Most Misunderstood thing about Developer Experience [00:15:46] Docs as Service Team not Endpoint [00:19:33] How to Focus

Listen to The Changelog: https://changelog.com/podcast/466Stdout's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/stdout/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid

watch Steve Yegge's podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GurMGEDHUYTranscript[00:00:00] So this week we've been going through Steve yogis podcasts and his greatest hits his updated perspectives on the big clouds and what they're doing right. And what they're doing wrong. But the other thing that Steve is really well known for is his views on tech interviewing. And he's done in big tech interviews and quite a lot of them.  And we all know they're broken in some way, but it's often in very stark reminder of how broken it is. I think there are two anecdotes here. I want you to look out for, which is the first, the one on Jeff Dean. Just look out for that name. And second, the one on them reviewing their own packets and applying too high of a bar saying too many nos. There's a lot of false negatives in the industry.  Both false negatives and false positives. R a problem. Of course. And he's just some ways to handle them. But overall, I just think we, we deserve some reminder of how flawed it is when we do our own interviewing. I thought I had a bad run of it doing two interviews a week. And he did multiple a day, sometimes three at once. And i just think this is a fantastic story to go over So the thing about interviewing is it's a terrible signal. It's, it's better than a phone screen. And a phone screen is better than a resume screen. If you just look at someone's resume, how sure are you that they're good. I mean, in any, in any discipline, right? You know, you wanna, you wanna, you want an airplane, airline, pilot, you look at the resume. Will you just hire them based on the risk? Not usually. So the resume is, is your first filter. It's the first thing where you basically take a stack of resumes and there's an art to reviewing resumes and looking for people that are kind of trying to cover up, uh, things that, that, that, uh, they may not know. And they don't want you to know that they don't know. So they try to cover it up in their resume. So you can look for. Weasel words, and it's all kinds of things you need, but basically you're taking the resumes and you're, you're sorting them into two piles, right. That the keeps in the don't keeps and there's of course, the old running joke in the industry about how you want to take some resumes and just throw them in the trash can because you don't want to hire unlucky people. And so if you throw in the trashcan, that person was unlucky, but they do sort of the resumes into the I'm gonna follow up. And the ones that you just say pass. So writing a resume is really important. And part of, um, a book. Passing technical interviews would be on how to write a great resume. And this comes up again when you're writing your resume, so-called resume for what you've accomplished your company. When at time it's time to get promoted. So the art of resume writing never, never gets old. It never leaves you and is always an important part of your career. Being able to represent yourself. But that's a, that's just step one and it's a bad filter. You don't want to just base your decision on a resume. Would you marry somebody based on their race? Maybe, but probably you'd want to meet them first. Right? So the next step is a phone screen and everybody hates doing phone screens. I actually love doing phone screens. I, for some reason have, um, never really had an issue with them unless there's a bad connection or something, but a lot of people just hate talking on the phone and they even more hate having to ask people technical questions on the phone. So I often got stuck with phone screen duty at every company that I ever worked. Because you can actually do a pretty good job, not a great job, but a pretty good job of predicting whether they're going to pass their interviews based on my phone screen. Cause my phone screens would go for two hours if necessary to sort of, you know, get a comprehensive look at what this PR this candidate is good at because the general rule is like the longer you spend evaluating somebody than the better. Idea. You're going to have of whether they're going to work out. Long-term just like the longer you have a relationship with somebody before you decide whether to marry them or not the better you're going to know how that marriage is going to go. Most likely there is a point of diminishing returns and we'll talk about that. But by and large, The amount of vetting that we do in the industry today is nowhere near enough. And I'm going to, I'm going to talk about the consequences of that and how we, how we arrived at that conclusion. And so on in this, in this talk, but at a high level, I don't believe in interviewing anymore. I, I ha I'm a strong skeptic. I think that interviewing is so flawed. It's it re any company that really wants to get ahead of their competitors and succeed needs to spend some time re-inventing their interview process. And probably having people spend more time with candidates than they're spending today. It's, it's just not a very good signal. And I said that at Google once, uh, Google, I said it in, in an email, uh, replied on some public thread somewhere, um, in the early days, maybe 2008. And. Some director got mad at me and said, oh, we didn't like that. We didn't the [00:05:00] records in life that you said that you had, that you're a skeptic of the interview process. We were talking about a company that hires scientists. We're talking about a company that, you know, one of their models is speak truth to authority, and this director was an ass and, uh, he got what was coming to him eventually. At the time, you know, he was just like, well, everybody's upset because you're, you're, you know, you're questioning the sacred interview process. You farted in church is what he told me. And so, uh, and so I haven't really been able to tell people this for my entire career because they feel that it's undermining their, um, ability to attract the best. I guess, but the reality is if you marry somebody after dating him for four hours, you're probably going to get a surprise. Maybe it's a good surprise. Uh, but most surprises are not so good in that department. And interviewing is the same way. So if you're going to keep your interview. Uh, panels the exact same way that they've been doing it since Silicon valley was invented by the arse hole shot shot key. Uh, then, um, then you're going to need a better process for getting rid of people who are no good. You're you're going to need a, you're going to need to double down on your process for managing people out. That's actually how Amazon gets by and gets such great. They aggressively manage out under performance because they know that underperformers are gonna sneak in. And, uh, it's because the interview process is fluid. So it's just a best effort. The problem with the interview process is that it takes a lot of time. It's really miserable for engineers to do more than two or three interviews per week. And most companies try to cap it so that you're not talking to more than maybe two people per week. Okay. Or three, if they're really busy, uh, because it takes you. Uh, an hour out of your day to, to interview the person. And you may have a interview pre briefs where everybody gets together and maybe divides up what people are going to talk about. It's not recommended at some companies, but some companies do it anyway. And then you may have a post brief where everyone gets t...

Listen to Steve Yegge's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0xmHrQJdAwthefirst in this little series was i talkedabout their ability to root out diseaseand dysfunction in theorganization and squash it immediatelythe second one was about their focus onretail customers and individual peopleand how they put that front and centerin first and foremost and there was noalso customer service mentality therein this episode what we're talking aboutisthat situation where grabs servers wouldrun on amazon's cloudso it's like a rental service it's likewe rent computersfrom from amazon and we have otheroptions we could have been on google'scloud we could have been on microsoft'scloud and there were some effortsactually to get onto microsoft's cloudat least part of the computing just toreally mostly i think for negotiatingleverage butbut the reality was grab was not reallythat importanti mean there are a lot of companies oncloudessentially someday all companies thathave any sort of computing in thebackground which is most companies willhave uh a cloud presence okayand so you know huge huge names you knownetflix runs on amazongo figure they don't have their own datacenters as far as i knoweverything you know i certainly knowtheir biggestthey're uh they're amazon's biggestcustomer or they have been and they goin and out of being amazon's biggestcustomeryou look at the top 50 customers foramazon and uh grabs not in that listyou look at the top 100 customers andgrabs probably not in that list just interms of how much they're spending okaycorporate customers uh you know prettypretty sizable chunk of money but notnot really a blip at amazon scaleand yetuhwhenever i had a question uh aboutamazon's cloud let me tell you what iwhat i didokayumi would sayhey bob can you come over here for a secyeahnotice i'm not touching a phone or acomputer uhi'm talking to bob over here who who isfrom amazon he's an amazon employee he'sa cloud specialist and uh knows how toanswer a lot of customer questions uhhe's an engineer uh and and sue you knowbob and sue she would do the same thingthey'd come in we had all these thesedifferent account reps in a rotationuh and they would uh they would comeover and say yeah what do you need whatdo you need what were they doing in myoffice in graham's office in downtownbellevue we're not a top 100 customerthey can't that how does that even scalethey can't have enough people to go andsit on site with every single customernow you could make the argument oh wellgrabs kind of important because you knowthey're going to be the gateway tosoutheast asia and so on and so they'remasasan's investment they're big and youknow there's a lot of you know smoke andmirrors and you know it's it's all trueand it's going to come true and and grabis going to be dominant but it's neverbeen a foregone conclusion i mean uberwas competing with him and then nowgojek's competing with him and gojek hasa bunch of really big investors and it'snot clear-cut right you know thatthey're that they're gonna be big andwhy would you bet on a customer that'sgonna be big when you've already gotcustomers that are already bigand yet amazon had people sitting in ouroffices you know uh they offered we saidyesuh you know microsoft got into that andthey sent some people too and that wasthat was fine you know you know us tooumbut it was never really the sameso so i'm gonna i'm gonna close with awith a story about uh i'll close thisoff with a story about umthe conferences okay the developerconferences because those are sort of acustomer interaction sort of a way thattheycan demonstrate customer obsessionand it's kind of um it's not a directthing it's more of an indirect thing youknow and how successful the conferenceisbut you know it's a it's a it's a signaluh so the story is i was at my grab inmy ummy first yearit was 2018uh i joined just late the previous yearand uh my boss mark porterhe said hey steve yeah let's uh let's goto re inventreinvent is amazon's cloud conferenceokay it's about awsand it's in las vegas and you know i'min seattle and so it's only like a twoand a half hour flightand so it made sense you know for forfor me to go and represent uh you knowas a head of engineering and ads and allthat stuff uh but i didn't want to go uhyou know i like i don't like conferencesi don't know why i don't like them ijust don't like them like they'rethey're a waste of time they justthey're just like umi could go on and on about how howshallow they are but they're they'renothing gets done at a conferenceand they'rei don't see the point a lot of people dolike them they like they got their badgeand their lanyard and their packagesswag and they're like i'm in aconference and they feel important orsomething and people speaking atconferences feel important i've donethat too and then it was ultimately itwas like why did i do that what was whatwas the goal here right just buildingbrand recognition with developers iguessyou know fine fineit's fine that they have them and it'sfine that some people like them but ididn't want to go okay because i wasbusy like my job was very stressful andi'll talk about my job at grad and howworking with asia from the united statesis just in general in in another episodeand mark's like oh come on man you got ayear to come you got to come it's likeyou have toand he was very insistent and i'm likeokay fine you know fine i'll take thehit for the team and i'll go to lasvegas and bring my wife along and we'llupgrade our hotel room at our own on ourown dime and we'll try to make it a funtrip because conferences suck and idon't want to gobut we'll do some gamblingso we go to re invent which i've neverbeen to before in 2018anduh well i went and i learned umthere were basically three components ofthe conference that i want to compare tothe microsoft conference that i went toa couple of months laterthe uh the first one was the keynotespeechi want you to remember these things wheni talk about the microsoft ones uh thekeynote speech is you know by andy jassyi don't know if he still does it but atthe time you know for many years andyjassy would give the keynote and youknow what a keynote is right a keynoteis some self-important person standingup there and going well i'm really superglad that you all came and boy i'm suremaking a lot of money off this and let'shead u...

Watch Steve Yegge's podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v4z46Ea35Qacompany is like a bodyit's not like a person like a humanbeing it's like a thing it's an entitythat has its own agenda and its owngoals and its own control of resourcesand its own value systemand uhthe individual members of the companykinda don't matter as long as they'redoing their joband the company cares about them rightthe way you care about your heart andyour lungs but if you had a chance toreplace them with a better heart andlungs you would and that's the waycompanies operate too a company you knowsort of maintains its own healthuh uh or asks for government handoutsthose are the sort of two optionsand um and so to understand you know andthe original people who started thecompany sure when it's small and it'sjust a small group of people it's just agroup of people but when it grows to acertain size everybody becomesreplaceableokayand this is important to understandingwhy amazon is so dominant across the theboard okay in everything that they doit's it's really crazy soso what happens is umgroups can get diseasesand sometimes we call it dysfunction butit's it's really a disease it's anailment right uh you know to give you areally simple example you might have onefamily member who's uh a real problemsomebody who's in and out of jail andalways you know uh getting in troubleyou know with the law or always stirringup trouble at family gatherings or justgenerally a problem rightyou can have those in companies tooright maybe not getting in and out ofjail they won't last long at the companymost likely unless they're the ceobut you have people that are creatingproblems okayuhand uhso that's not really a disease so muchas like a wound you know like apulled muscle you know or a sore that'shaving trouble healingssdsdbut it's still a problem an illness anailment with the companybecause it's preventing other peoplefrom getting stuff doneif you have a whole bunch of those allover your body then it's a diseaseif you have a whole bunch of people inyour company who are holding on tokeeping other people from beingproductivein any way there's lots of differentways they can do this then your companyis diseased a great example of this ismicrosoft and we'll go into great detailabout this uh down the road in anotheranother episodeumit's a really common pattern there arethere are there are companies have awhole host of diseases that they can getand they're common like many companieswill have the same diseaseand the diseases could potentiallythere's a taxonomy you could name themand you could uhyou know learn how to diagnose them andlearn what the symptoms are and learnhow to treat them and learn which onesare fatali mean like nobody's done this you knowi'm going to start talking about them inmy show you can call me dr steveuh you you know it's really kind ofadvanced to the state of maybe veteranyou know horse medicine at this pointlook at a company and just like shoot itbut um you know the the reality is thatuh companies you know they get their owndiseases just like populations getdiseases they can get real diseases orthey can get diseases like beinganti-facts now i'm not blaminganti-vaxxers if you're anti-vaxx uh youknow don't angrily turn off my show youknow i'm not blaming you for beinganti-vaxxed it's really a failure of theeducation system and of uh science uhmarketing and of the government and abunch of other reasons uh that thatbecause it's a very real phenomenon imeanthere you know some 30 40 of the entireworld's population maybe is isfirmly anti-vaxuh but it is a disease in in aggregatebecause it's killing people i meanthat's kind of the definition of adiseaseand so you know how does this happen imean diseases can be diseases of themind in a sense and companies they donot have the willto cure their diseases i mean if you ifyou're like you're talking about the oldwest and you know you you get you knowan arrow to your to your knee and youhave uh you know uh an infection and youknow you're looking at it and it startsto gangrene and the docdoc you know who's your buddy who youknow drinks you know as much whiskey asyou says man we're gonna have to takethat offokayand so saw you know sawing your leg offto save the body to save your lifei mean it happens today still right it'svery painful and traumaticand breaking up a companycan be very painful and traumatic orrooting out a systemic illness from acompany because companies are made ofpeopleand even if companies don't reallymatter people do you know and uh and andthere's also a lot of like legalobstacles to companies just snuffingthings out we do have at will employmentwhich means they can fire you anytimethey wantat least in the united states and thatisabsolutely huge for productivity i'm noti'm not uh trying to justify ituh and you know in europe they protectpeople's rights workers rights more thanthey do in the united states or in asiabut in the us and asia which are farmore productive than europein the tech sector uh you can firepeople at will and it's that constantthreat of being fired that keeps peoplesort of behaving keeps the the lungs andthe circulatory system and everythinglike workinguh because people know that they'rebeing held accountable right for beingyou know for not not diseaseduh but diseases do happen and you knowamazon i'm i'm gonna just say it rightnowthe number one reason that amazonexecutes so well is that they aremerciless about rooting out disease assoon as they find itand i told you i'm going to talk about alot of different specific diseases thati've seen in action at corporations oreven been a part of okay it's a learningexperience for all of usuh and uh you know we'll talk at greatlength about them but basically there'ssituations wheregroups of people within the company canhold the company hostagethis happens all the time a specificgroup of people becomes large enough tobecome sort of like a a political lobbyor a labor union or you know some sortof you knowa sub entity within the company that hasits own agenda and it's starting tofight the host rightand uh and it it's just to give you anexample so that i'm not you know you'renot guessingbeing territorialis a huge diseasein companies a very common one beingturfy that's mine you can't work on thati'm not working on it and you can't workon it eitherso ...

Listen to Stevey's Tech Talk (10mins in) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUtUAc_ew9YPlaystation ad talked about in the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaAhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/06/11/playstation-4s-price-and-policies-humiliate-microsofts-xbox-one-at-e3/?sh=377dd8aa133fhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_MattrickListener Jeremy Jung emailed in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbWgUO-Rqcwand I really liked this comment: "They got their target audiences mixed up, when they studied the data from the 360 it showed masses of casual users primarily using it to stream Netflix and other video, play EA sports titles, and Call of Duty. They pitched the presentation as if that was who was watching. However casual users don't typically watch these types of presentations. The hardcore gamers who do watch these presentations were more interested in unique gaming experiences, console exclusives, upgraded game features like higher resolution, better graphics, higher framerate, and high end hardware specs. This pitch fell very flat with the hardcore crowd that tuned in."

Listen to the full episode on PodRocket: https://podrocket.logrocket.com/sveltehttps://podrocket.logrocket.com/swyxhttps://podrocket.logrocket.com/rich-harrishttps://podrocket.logrocket.com/elderjs

Listen to Software Defined Talk (17 mins in) https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/297https://www.enterpriseready.io/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing

Listen to the Nathan Barry podcast https://nathanbarry.com/048-ali-abdaal-building-multiple-income-streams-content-creator/ (7 and 21 mins in)TranscriptSo, I started the YouTube channel in my penultimate year, so I, I, I, I done five years of med school at this point. I’d set up a few businesses. I had like two SAS products that I was using to side hustle, income, most my, my way through med school. And then in 2017, when I was in my final year, the YouTube channel actually started out as a content marketing strategy for my, my business, that business was helping other people get into med school.It was like that standard thing. Once you do something, you then teach other people how to do the thing. and it was like, you know, the creative economy before it was really called that where[00:07:20] Nathan:Yeah,[00:07:20] Ali:You kind of follow that model. And so the YouTube channel started.[00:07:23] Nathan:Because you were you teaching people like test prep[00:07:25] Ali:Exactly. Yeah. And it’s so similar to pet Flynn story as well.You know, he, he started off teaching people how to do some architecture exam. I started up teaching people how to do the med school admissions exams, and that’s kind of transitioned into a coaching business, which then transitioned into the YouTube channel.[00:07:40] Nathan:Okay. And so as the YouTube channel started to grow, like, what were some of those first milestones, you know, as you’re getting to, how long did it take for you to a thousand subscribers and then maybe, you know, 5,000 or 10,000? Like what milestones stand out.[00:07:52] Ali:Yeah, so I started in the summer of 2017 and it took me six months and 52 videos to get to the first thousand subscribers, six months in 52 videos. I was putting out two videos every week while preparing for med school finals and kind of neglecting my exams for the sake of YouTube, because I could see the YouTube thing was like, oh, I really want to do this.I think the ROI on being a YouTube or is going to be higher than the ROI and getting an extra 2% in my med school finals. that was, that was the theory. Anyway, So, yeah, it took six months of the channel to get a thousand subscribers, another like four or five months for it to get up to 5,000 subscribers.And at the point where I was at around 4,005,000 subscribers, there were two like really good things that happened. Number one was a collab with a much bigger utuber. his name is Ibz Mo. So he and I got to know each other through university and he had 60 K at the time. And so he and I did a collab which took off and helped the channel get exposure.But also there was a video that I made my, my very first video that actually went viral, which was a video about how to study for exams. now this video is a bit weird because like I’d actually planned for it to happen like a whole year before I made it. So when I started YouTube, I, I sort of consumed the hell out of everything on the internet, around how to be a YouTuber and, Sara Dietschy and Casey Neistat had this thing whereby Casey Neistat, enormous YouTuber, Sarah DG would take YouTube who was smaller at the time.She went from 40 cases. Over to like one through over a hundred, a hundred thousand, basically overnight because Casey Neistat shouted her out. and the way that she described that, and I, that I found in some random interview, like on the YouTube grapevine, was that you, you benefit from a collaboration with a bigger utuber, but you only benefit from it.If there is already a backlog of really high quality content on your channel. And so I took that to heart and I knew that, okay, at some point I want to do a collab with a bigger utuber. And at some point I want to try and make specifically a video on how to study for exams, but I knew number one, I needed to have a backlog of hot, cold, high quality content because otherwise no one would care.And secondly, I knew that it would take me about a hundred videos to get good enough at making videos to actually be able to make a decent video about exams. And so that was like my 82nd or something video, which I, I, I I’d had in the back of my mind for so long since, because since getting started button, you know, I need to get my skills up.I need to put in the quantity so that I can actually make videos that are hopefully.[00:10:06] Nathan:Okay. That’s interesting. Yeah, because coming, doing a collab and coming to a channel and it’s like, okay, they have four videos. And the one that I saw in the collab is actually the best one they’ve ever done. Like it’s sort of, it doesn’t have the same ring to it as if you come in and be like, wow, this is incredible.Like, one of my favorite bloggers, you know, it’s separate from the YouTube space, but I got him, Chris Guillebeau was an author and blogger and I followed him in the early days. And I had the experience of, he had written a guest post for Tim Ferris and I was reading Tim versus blogging. This was probably 2011, maybe.And I was like, oh, this is really good. I love it. I think it was on actually on travel, hacking, you know, credit card points and all of that. And so I clicked over to his site and I think. Over the next, like two days, I just read the entire website, you know, Nate, it was like years worth of blog posts and all that, but that was the experience.Right. The guest posts is a collab of some kind and then coming over and you’re like, you’re just deep dive and consume everything rather than the experience of coming over and be like, oh, okay. That’s interesting. You know, and like moving along and the back catalog is what, what, drives that?[00:11:09] Ali:Yeah. Yeah. I had, I had that exact experience with Derek Sivers who I discovered through the Tim Ferriss show and Mr. Money mustache, but it’s coming through a temporary. I was like, all right, I’m spending the next week of my life. Just binge reading all of your blog posts that you’ve ever written for the last 20 years.And now it’s like, I’ve got this information downloaded into my brain.Clip 2So in the process of building a team around, which is something I wanted to talk to you about because you’ve built a big team over time, I was speaking to Derek, you’re a director of marketing as well about building a team and he had, so he had loads of advice to share.So that’s, that’s a challenge for me right now. It’s like, you know, two years ago, it was just me last year, this time, last year, there were three, three of us full-time well, two full-time. It was me working as a doctor and a part-time assistant, and now there’s 12 of us, but now we’re hiring another 10 people.So by next month it’s going to be maybe like 20, 20 of us a hundred. It’s all those problems associated with scaling a team and leadership and management. And that’s the kind of stuff that, I’ve been really as sort of very much on the steep learning curve of, and that I’m very excited about getting better at,[00:21:44] Nathan:Yeah. what’s the reason that you’re growing the team so quickly.[00:21:48] Ali:Well, let’s see, because we just have a lot of money. once, once we launched our, yeah, it’s a, it’s...

Listen to Brian Clark's podcast https://unemployable.com/podcast/intersectional-positioning/ 20mins inhttps://www.nerdfitness.com/Transcript [00:00:00] Hey folks. It's Swyx so today's clip is the longest one. I'm sorry about that. Basically. It was such a good story from beginning to end and I could not cut any of it out. It covers nerd fitness, which is one of the fitness blogs I've been tracking for many years. Um, I fell off the radar. A while ago, but I still have very high opinion of it.  Um, I have been one of the passive leaders, but I think the message definitely resonates that it finds a niche, which is nerds. And then it tries to do something to serve that niche. And I think the journey of Steve as a creator, as a writer who went through SEO, Uh, just the exploration and understanding how to do contents for living.  And then starting to build a business on top of it, and then exploring how to productize this stuff that he did. Like don't teach me what to do, just do it for me. I think it's a very typical business journey for bootstrappers that is extremely successful. He's essentially one guy, maybe if a team of 20 something, people making millions of dollars a year. And I think. What's great about that is that it also helps people be fit so it's just one of those ideal bootstrap businesses that is just win-win. So my origin story. After college, I was living in San Diego and I was selling construction equipment. I was in sales because I didn't know any better. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. Both my parents were in sales, so I just figured get in, get into sales. I've lived by the beach. I worked in sales and I was terrible at it. So, so bad. I had very little experience with construction equipment, renting. I was renting out forklifts and boom lists. Giant downtown projects in San Diego 22 or 23 at the time. And just have no idea what I'm doing and on a particularly miserable. Day at work on my lunch break. I walked into a bookstore and I felt like the sun was shining through the window and spotlighted this book that had just come out. I had no idea who the author was or what it was all about, but I saw the cover and the book is called Tim Ferriss's four hour workweek. So I see this book as like, it was literally the first week it came out. So this was 2007, I think, or somewhere in there. And I picked it up and I read it and. A big part of the book was like, pick something that you're good at and a social group that you're a part of and see where you can find that overlapping, gap. And for myself, I was like, well, I just cracked the code for myself personally, about my health and fitness. And I was spending an inordinate amount of time playing video games. I was like, well, I don't think I could write like the best fitness website, but. I could probably help people that are beginners. And who else has big, is a beginner fitness. That's self-conscious and like, can think of fitness, like a video game nerds do that. It's like, all right. I Googled nerd and fitness, nothing popped up. I was like, huh. All right, let's do that. So I bought nerd fitness.com and then I did nothing with it for like two years. Cause I was so afraid to get started. Eventually quit. The first job started a sec or went to work at a different company. It was while I was at that second company, I got certified as a trainer. I got further education and finally worked up enough. To start writing basic articles about beginners getting started with health and fitness. And that was it, but like, I didn't start it because I saw that nerd culture was going to become popular. Like, I didn't know, Disney was going to acquire star wars and Marvel and like, it was just going to become cool to be a nerd. I was just like, I'm playing 40 hours a week of EverQuest, which was like, even nerdier than world. Like I'm playing all of these video games and I want to talk about nerd stuff. Like let's just stick the two together and see what happens. And fortunately I didn't know any better, which is what I started at before.  Yeah, that's amazing. Because now of course you look like a genius, like just a complete marketing guru who saw how these two things would work together because the stereotype of course, is that nerds don't work out. Did it well, but you were an exception, I guess. So in many ways it seems like you created this. That someone like you would want. And it just happened to also resonate with a lot of  exactly. I, so when I was starting my fitness journey I did what most guys do. I went out and bought like muscle and fitness magazine and I followed like the bodybuilder workout programs. And after like three weeks, I'm like, well, I don't, I look like that guy. It's like, well, because you're not on steroids and you don't eat like that dude. And he's been training for 25 years. So I most stuff that I found. I felt either disconnected from like, I have nothing in common with this guy, or I felt almost like, I want to say ashamed, but rather like most of the fitness marketing is built around like, Hey, you're not. And you're not good enough, but if you buy this thing, then you will be good enough and everything will get better. And I was like, that's [00:05:00] just that's bad shame on you for doing that. And let's try to give people like actually helpful information without the hype and the nonsense. And just like, here's what you need to know. Here are the, all the mistakes that I made. Like let's get rid of all that. Let's do some basic stuff and get you started. And then we can also still talk about Harry Potter and star wars and talking,  right? Yeah. The whole shredded bro aspect of fitness. They're all trying to outmatch show each other. And I think that turns a lot of people off it doesn't work with me at all. So I, for further, I linked to nerd fitness guides all the time, because you've got the humor you've got the pop culture references, which is something I did at Copyblogger early on. I mean, that's literally how I was able to make myself write two long articles. Like it's because I would go, well, how can I use a prince metaphor to explain content? So when you first started, was it was just you, right? You were  writing about the content. It was just me a long time. And interestingly, so I guess I started really working on the blog at night while I was working the day job in 2009. And back at that, then. Which is the same today. Everything I read on the internet was like, you need to write short posts. You need to publish five days a week because nobody has the attention span to read long stuff. So for like six weeks, I think again, I didn't know any better. I didn't know what I was doing. I spent six months writing like 400 word articles. A lot of them were like very topical, but quickly out of date. Cause it was about something that happened that week and after like five months, six months, something like that, I had. I don't know, 20 subscribers. Like I don't even think I had an email list yet. I was just like, people could subscribe the RSS and who's like, oh man, this is cool. 20 people are reading. And then I started stumbling across Bloggers that were writing long form content. And almost overnight, I ...