The Swyx Mixtape

Listen to The Right Track: https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/the-right-track/ep-6-domain-expertise-with-laurie-voss-of-netlify/TranscriptStefania: I wanted to maybe shift a little bit in terms of how the industry is changing before we move on to how you have seen data cultures being built and data trusts being undermined and all those things.Can you talk a little bit about how you see the industry has changed in the past few years?Laurie: Yeah. I wrote a blog post about this recently.I think it's probably the thing that spurred you to invite me to this podcast in the first place.Stefania: Correct.Laurie: Which is about nine months ago, I was introduced to DBT. DBT has been around for awhile now, I think five or six years, but it was new to me nine months ago.And it definitely seems to be exponentially gaining in momentum at the moment.I hear more and more people are using it and see more and more stuff built on top of it.And the analogy that I made in the blog post is as a web developer, it felt kind of like Rails in 2006.Ruby on Rails very fundamentally changed how web development was done, because web development prior to that was everybody has sort of like figured out some architecture for their website and it works okay. But it means that every time you hire someone to a company, you have to teach them your architecture. And it would take them a couple of weeks, or if it was complicated, it would take them a couple of months to figure out your architecture and become productive. And Ruby on Rails changed that.Ruby on Rails was you hire someone and you say, "Well, it's a Rails app."And on day one, they're productive.They know how to change Rails apps.They know how to configure them.They know how to write the HTML and CSS and every other thing.And that taking the time to productivity for a new hire from three months to one month times a million developers is a gigantic amount of productivity that you have unlocked.The economic impact of that is huge. And DBT feels very similar.It's not doing anything that we weren't doing before.It's not doing anything that you couldn't do if you were rolling your own, but it is a standard and it works very well and it handles the edge cases and it's got all of the complexities accounted for.So you can start with DBT and be pretty confident that you're not going to run into something that DBT can do.And it also means that you can hire people who already know DBT.We've done it at Netlify. We've hired people with experience in DBT and they were productive on day one.They were like, "Cool. I see that you've got this model. It's got a bug. I've committed a change. I've added some tests. We have fixed this data model."What happens on day two? It's great.The value of a framework is that a framework exists more than like any specific technical advantage of that framework.Stefania: Yeah. I love that positioning of DBT.Do you have any thoughts on why this has not happened in the data space before?We have a lot of open source tools already built.We had like a huge rise in people using Spark and Hadoop and all those things for their data infrastructure awhile ago, maybe 10 years ago, and that's still happening in some of the companies.What are your thoughts on why this is happening now?Laurie: I think it was inevitable.I mean, the big data craze was 10 years ago.I recently was reminded by somebody that I wrote a blog post.It was literally 10 years ago. It was like July 15th 2011.I was like, statisticians are going to be the growth career for the next 10 years, because all I see is people collecting data blindly.They're just creating data warehouses and just pouring logs into them and then doing the most simple analyses on them.They're just like counting them up.They're not doing anything more complicated than counting them up.A lot of companies in 2010 made these huge investments and then were like, "What now?"And they were like, "Well, we've sort of figured we'd be able to do some kind of analysis, but we don't know how. This data is enormous. It's very difficult to do."It was inevitable that people would be trying to solve this problem.And lots of people rolled their own over and over.Programmers are programmers, so when they find themselves rolling their own at the third job in a row, that's usually when they start writing a framework.And that seems to be what DBT emerged from.I think it's natural that it emerged now. I think this is how long it takes.This is how much iteration the industry needed to land at this.Stefania: Yeah. That's a good insight.I maybe want to touch on then also another thing that a lot of people talk about.And ultimately, I mean, I think what most companies want to strive for, although it remains to be defined what it literally means, are self-serve analytics.What does that mean to you and how does that fit into the DBT world?Laurie: I have what might be a controversial opinion about self-serve analytics, which is that I don't think it's really going to work.There are a couple of problems that make self-serve analytics difficult.What people are focusing on right now are like just the pure technical problems.One of the problems with self-serve analytics is that it's just hard to do.You have to have enormous amounts of data.If people are going to be exploratory about the data, then the database needs to be extremely fast.If queries take 10 minutes, then you can't do ad hoc data exploration.Nobody but a data scientist is going to hang around for 10 minutes waiting for a query to finish.Stefania: Finishing your query is the new-- It's compiling.Laurie: But even when you solve that problem, and I feel like a lot of companies now solve that problem, you run into the next problem, which is, what question do I ask?What is the sensible way to ask?And also, where is it?Discovery is another thing.If you've instrumented properly, you're going to have enormous numbers of data sources, even if you're using DBT.And they're all neatly arrayed in very nicely named tables and the tables of documentation, you're going to have 100, 200, 300 tables, right?You have all sorts of forms of data.And unless somebody goes through every table by name and tries to figure out what's in that table.And does it answer my question?The data team knows where the data is and it's very hard to make that data automatically discoverable.I don't think people have solved that problem.Even if you solved that...

Listen to Screaming in the Cloud: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/learning-in-public-with-swyx/Episode SummaryToday Corey sits down with swyx, head of developer experience at Airbyte, and so much more! They begin by chatting about swyx’s career history, professional motivation, and an industry taboo: following the money. Then Corey and swyx move into a discussion about the surprisingly challenging nature of developer experience and what it means to “learn in public.” swyx talks about expertise and how to quantify and demonstrate learning. Corey and swyx discuss swyx’s book “The Coding Career Handbook” and career coaching. swyx shares about his most recent foray into management in the era of zoom meetings, and conclude the conversation by talking about data integration and swyx’s latest job at Airbyte.Links Referenced:“Learning Gears” blog post: https://www.swyx.io/learning-gearsThe Coding Career Handbook: https://learninpublic.orgPersonal Website: https://swyx.ioTwitter: https://twitter.com/swyxTranscriptCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. Some folks are really easy to introduce when I have them on the show because, “My name is, insert name here. I built thing X, and my job is Y at company Z.” Then we have people like today’s guest.swyx is currently—and recently—the head of developer experience at Airbyte, but he’s also been so much more than that in so many different capacities that you’re very difficult to describe. First off, thank you for joining me. And secondly, what’s the deal with you?swyx: [laugh]. I have professional ADD, just like you. Thanks for having me, Corey. I’m a—Corey: It works out.swyx: a big fan. Longtime listener, first time caller. Love saying that. [laugh].Corey: You have done a lot of stuff. You have a business and finance background, which… okay, guilty; it’s probably why I feel some sense of affinity for a lot of your work. And then you went into some interesting directions. You were working on React and serverless YahvehScript—which is, of course, how I insist on pronouncing it—at Two Sigma, Netlify, AWS—a subject near and dear to my heart—and most recently temporal.io.And now you’re at Airbyte. So, you’ve been focusing on a lot of, I won’t say the same things, but your area of emphasis has definitely consistently rhymed with itself. What is it that drives you?swyx: So, I have been recently asking myself a lot of this question because I had to interview to get my new role. And when you have multiple offers—because the job market is very hot for DevRel managers—you have to really think about it. And so, what I like to say is: number one, working with great people; number two, working on great products; number three, making a lot of money.Corey: There’s entire school of thought that, “Oh, that’s gauche. You shouldn’t mention trying to make money.” Like, “Why do you want to work here because I want to make money.” It’s always true—swyx: [crosstalk 00:03:46]—Corey: —and for some reason, we’re supposed to pretend otherwise. I have a lot of respect for people who can cut to the chase on that. It’s always been something that has driven me nuts about the advice that we give a new folks to the industry and peop—and even students figuring out their career path of, “Oh, do something you love and the money will follow.” Well, that’s not necessarily true. There are ways to pivot something you’d love into something lucrative and there are ways to wind up more or less borderline starving to death. And again, I’m not saying money is everything, but for a number of us, it’s hard to get to where we want to be without it.swyx: Yeah, yeah. I think I’ve been cast with the kind of judgmental label of being very financially motivated—that’s what people have called me—for simply talking about it. And I’m like, “No. You know, it’s number three on my priority list.” Like, I will leave positions where I have a lot of money on the table because I don’t enjoy the people or the products, but having it up there and talking openly about it somehow makes you [laugh] makes you sort of greedy or something. And I don’t think that’s right. I tried to set an example for the people that I talk to or people who follow me.Corey: One of the things I’ve always appreciated about, I guess, your online presence, which has remained remarkably consistent as you’ve been working through a bunch of different, I guess, stages of life and your career, is you have always talked in significant depth about an area of tech that I am relatively… well, relatively crap at, let’s be perfectly honest. And that is the wide world of most things front-end. Every time I see a take about someone saying, “Oh, front-end is junior or front-end is somehow less than,” I’d like to know what the hell it is they know because every time I try and work with it, I wind up more confused than I was when I started. And what I really appreciate is that you have always normalized the fact that this stuff is hard. As of the time that we’re recording this a day or so ago, you had a fantastic tweet thread about a friend of yours spun up a Create React App and imported the library to fetch from an endpoint and immediately got stuck. And then you pasted this ridiculous error message.He’s a senior staff engineer, ex-Google, ex-Twitter; he can solve complex distributed systems problems and unable to fetch from a REST endpoint without JavaScript specialist help. And I talk about this a lot in other contexts, where the reason I care so much about developer experience is that a bad developer experience does not lead people to the conclusion of, “Oh, this is a bad interface.” It leads people to the conclusion, “Oh, I’m bad at this and I didn’t realize it.” No. I still fall into that trap myself.I was under the impression that there was just this magic stuff that JS people know. And your tweet did so much to help normalize from my perspective, the fact that no, no, this is very challenging. I recently went on a Go exploration. Now, I’m starting to get into JavaScript slash TypeScript, which I think are the same thing but I’m not entirely certain of that. Like, oh, well, one of them is statically typed, or strongly typed. It’s like, “Well, I have a loud mechanical keyboard. Everything I do is typing strongly, so what’s your point?”And even then we’re talking past each other in these things. I don’t understand a lot of the ecosystem that you live your career in, but I have always had a tremendous and abiding respect for your ability to make it accessible, understandable, and I guess for lack of a better term, to send the elevator back down.swyx: Oh, I definitely think about that strongly, especially that last bit. I think it’s a form of personal growth. So, I think a lot of people, when they talk about this sending the elevator back down, they do it as a form of charity, like I’m giving back to the community. But honestly, you actually learn a lot by trying to explain it to others because that’s the only way that you truly know if you’ve learned something. And if you ever get anything wrong, you’ll—people will nev...

Listen to Voiceplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOGsqVTy9qM

Listen to https://share.transistor.fm/s/cf016ca5the austin powers store page screenshot mentioned: https://inventlikeanowner.com/podcast/alex-edelman-building-the-amazon-website-in-the-late-90s/

Listen to Invent like an Owner: https://share.transistor.fm/s/97560e78#t=29m26sReddit has Two Tables (2012): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32407873

Neil Roseman is the former VP for Software Engineering at Amazon. He is currently the Technologist in Residence at Summit Partners - a funding company committed to finding and partnering with exceptional entrepreneurs to help them accelerate their growth and achieve dramatic results. Jorrit Van der Meulen originally joined Amazon in 1999 and left in 2005. After working at Zillow for nearly four years, he left and rejoined Amazon in 2008 as the VP for Content Sites. He's currently the VP for Amazon European Retail.https://share.transistor.fm/s/6877d1db

Listen to Keycuts: https://www.thekeycuts.com/dear-analyst-50-walking-through-a-vba-script-for-trading-billions-of-dollars-worth-of-derivatives-with-shawn-wang/This little podcast/newsletter started as a little experiment last year. I never thought I would make it to episode number 50, but here we are! Thank you to the few of you out there who listen/read my ramblings about spreadsheets.I decided to give you all a break and invite my first guest to the podcast: Shawn Wang (aka @swyx). Shawn currently works in developer experience at AWS, but has a really diverse background (check out his site to learn more). I’ve mentioned Shawn in previous episodes (25 and 49) and was honored he agreed to be the first guest on Dear Analyst. We dig into a variety of topics including negotiating your salary, Javascript frameworks, creating, and whatever else tickled my fancy.Becoming a JediI was particularly interested in a 4,000-line Excel VBA script he wrote while working as a trader in a previous job. You can learn a lot about someone from looking at their code, and that’s exactly what we did during this episode. Shawn was kind enough to share a VBA script he built back in 2012 for his team to price billions dollars worth of derivatives. I honestly don’t understand 90% of this script, but Shawn walked through a lot of the derivative concepts he had to translate into this VBA script. You can see some of his thoughts about this script in the Tweet thread below:https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1327041894853922816?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1327041894853922816%7Ctwgr%5Ef93cc6228794ba7b8cdb0018993df1a13c16d4e9%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thekeycuts.com%2Fdear-analyst-50-walking-through-a-vba-script-for-trading-billions-of-dollars-worth-of-derivatives-with-shawn-wang%2FI think it’s amazing that his bank relied on traders using this homegrown script to price everything from interest rates to mortgages.One of the main takeaways from our walkthrough of this script is that the code isn’t pretty. Shawn had a problem that he needed to solve, picked up the tool that could solve that problem, and started hacking away at the solution. Shawn shared a story from his senior trader at the time on building tools for yourself:One of the rights of passage for becoming a Jedi is building a light saber. Once you have the light saber, you just use it, and stop building it.—Shawn WangFor the benefit of other traders out there, Shawn also believes in learning in public. Releasing this script is just one example of that. By producing content and acknowledging gaps in your knowledge, you’ll learn faster than being a “lurker,” as Shawn puts it.No-code is a lieWe talked a bit about an article he wrote called No code is a lie, and how programmers sometimes need to get over themselves. Programmers may get caught up in the style of their code, but the end-user just cares about whether the thing works and solves their problem.After finance, Shawn moved from Excel and VBA scripts to Haskell, Python, and Javascript. He still has a soft spot for Excel, however. With Excel, you have your database and user interface right in front of you. This not only gives people an easy way to create, but makes creation more inclusive.Excel is creation over code. I don’t define myself as coding, I define myself creating.—Shawn WangTaming the Javascript communityShawn got really involved with the ReactJS community and eventually became one of the moderators of the subreddit after Dan Abramov asked him to help with the community.Shawn recently stepped down from moderating the community as he started coding with Svelte, another Javascript framework. In terms of moving from community to community, Shawn made an interesting point on encouraging renewal in communities. Mods, leaders, managers, and political figures should have limited terms to encourage innovation and different perspectives. Plus, I think when you are new to a community, you get a chance to learn from the ground up from others who are more experienced. Once you’re at the top, it’s time to find a new place and rinse, lather, and repeat.Getting $50,000 added to his salaryWe both talked about our interests in Haseeb Qureshi’s blog posts on salary negotiation. If you were a developer 4-5 years ago, you most likely came across Haseeb’s posts because it shows step-by-step how Haseeb went from finishing a coding bootcamp to getting a 6-figure salary at Airbnb.Shawn also cited Patrick McKenzie’s post and Josh Doody’s guide on salary negotiation as good resources. I remember when I was interviewing, I relied on Haseeb’s concepts to get me through the negotiation process. Long story short? You should always negotiate.The fallacy of measuring developer advocacy programsI’ve read various blog posts and listened to podcasts about this subject, so figured I’d ask Shawn what he thinks about measuring developer advocacy efforts since he works at one of the largest companies on the planet. Rest assured! His team has not come up with the perfect formula either. Guess where they keep track of all their speaking engagements and content? You guessed it: in a spreadsheet.Shawn mentioned one startup called Orbit that is trying to crack this nut. They dub themselves as the “operating system of vibrant developer communities.” Their orbit model is a bit cheesy but does attempt to quantify someone’s engagement in a community:Love is a member’s level of engagement and activity in the community.Reach is a measure of a community member’s sphere of influence.Gravity is the attractive force of a community that acts to retain existing members and attract new ones.Orbit levels are a practical tool for member segmentation and used to design different programs for each level of the community.I’m currently working on a similar program and commend them on tackling this problem :).Other projectsShawn finally shared what he’s working on these days:Wrote a book called Coding Career Handbook and maintaining a community for thatGrowing the Svelte society on TwitterAngel investingScouting for a VC fundWriting on

I'm Good (Blue) clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90RLzVUuXe4Charlie Harding clip https://www.listennotes.com/search/?q=Will+the+future+of+music+sound+a+lot+like+the+past%3F

Listen to Lenny's pod: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/lennys-podcast/the-role-of-ai-in-new-wOqPsa5VyW0/ starts at 10minsOege de Moor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oegedemoor/Codex paper: https://overcast.fm/+xs-qU9hPo/05:09

Listen to Interdependence: https://interdependence.fm/episodes/open-source-ai-and-stable-diffusion-with-emad-mostaque-EzZuPFyImy unpublished research on Emad: https://lspace.swyx.io/p/3060cbd8-2c17-4fbf-a41e-3a9b23f5fe18ambient discomfort on LLM size: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/wiqjxv/d_the_current_and_future_state_of_aiml_is/  https://twitter.com/swyxio/status/1576685740825579520