
Pybites Podcast
The Pybites Podcast is a podcast about Python Development, Career and Mindset skills.
Hosted by the Co-Founders, Bob Belderbos and Julian Sequeira, this podcast is for anyone interested in Python and looking for tips, tricks and concepts related to Career + Mindset.
For more information on Pybites, visit us at https://pybit.es and connect with us on LinkedIn:
Julian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliansequeira/
Bob: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bbelderbos/
Pybites Podcast
#147 - Chris Williams: The Art of Cloud Therapy and Embracing Vulnerability
Welcome back to the Pybites podcast! In this exciting episode, we delve into the world of cloud computing and personal growth with the remarkable Chris Williams, a renowned AWS Hero and "cloud therapist."
Discover Chris's unique approach to demystifying cloud technology and how he uses his skills to solve complex problems in this field. We'll explore:
- The fascinating role of a "cloud therapist" applied to challenges in cloud computing.
- Chris’s insights on effective communication and his top tips for mastering this skill.
- The mindset that has propelled Chris to success and how you can adopt it.
- The power and importance of being open to vulnerability and admitting when you’re wrong.
- Insights from the vBrownBag show and how it's shaping tech discussions.
- Chris's journey as an AWS Hero and what it means for tech professionals.
- The impact of AI and latest tech trends on our world, and how Chris uses it for coding.
- Chris also shares a cool personal hobby and book tip.
Don’t miss this engaging discussion and Chris’s final piece of invaluable advice. And if you like what you hear, remember to like, subscribe and share this episode with fellow tech enthusiasts!
Chapters:
00:00 Intro podcast
01:30 Intro Chris Williams
02:51 Win of the week
04:21 Cloud therapist
07:20 Communication
09:00 Crucial mindset
13:15 Communication resource (tip)
15:21 Willingness to be wrong
15:59 Pybites ad segment
16:43 AWS hero
18:40 vBrownBag podcast
21:56 Unexpected benefit of show
23:45 Mentoring advice
27:30 Tech trends and AI
29:45 Using AI for coding
32:00 Digital photography
33:32 Books - Deep work
37:50 Final piece of advice
39:00 Wrap up / outro
Links:
- vBrownBag
- Reach out to Chris:
- on X
- on LinkedIn
- Make 2024 your breakthrough year with Python, check out our 1:1 coaching.
I do the exact opposite. I come in and I say, hey. I do the exact opposite. I come in and I say, hey, I'm the dumbest person in the room. I'm here to learn from everybody and ask stupid questions. And we're going to all get to where we need to be at the end of the day. And so I repeat their statements back to them, and 99% of the time, there's something that was missed or some piece of communication that fell through the cracks, we get to clarify that. We get to move on much faster. Hello, and welcome to the Pibytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Valdebos. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn the mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the PY Bytes podcast. This is Bob Elderboss, and today I talk with Chris Williams, who is a cloud therapist, Aws hero, co host of the V Brownback show, mentor, and incredible human being. We talk about all these things, a lot of mindset, career tips and more. So, without further ado, let's dive straight in. Right, Chris, welcome to the show. Welcome to Piebyte's podcast. I'm excited to have you here. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Bob. Thanks for having me on. I'm a longtime fan, first time caller. This is a very fun experience for me because I've been a fan of yours for a very long time, and I've been admiring the work that you do from the periphery for a long time. Nice. That's nice to hear. And, yeah, we recently met. And then seeing your background and seeing the prep, I'm excited because I'm going to definitely learn a couple of things. So you're working in areas that I'm not that familiar with, but you're doing some really cool stuff. So, yeah, before we dive into the questions, maybe you can give the audience a short intro, who you are and what you do. Sure. Hello, everyone. My name is Chris Williams. So I'm the developer relations manager for Hashicorp for North America. Prior to that, I was an enterprise architect for the majority of my career. I've been in and around data centers and clouds and virtualization for a very long time, but currently I'm a dev advocate for Hashicorp and cloud therapist. Oh, yeah, yeah, we're going to dive into that one. Before we do, do you want to share a win of the week. So my win of the week is the ember coffee mug. I found the. So I love coffee. During the lockdown, I became a coffee snob because I started having to make my own coffee and I learned how to make good coffee for myself. And I recently came across the ember mug. It is a bluetooth enabled link to your phone. It's so bougie coffee mug that keeps your coffee at a perfect temperature. And you can dial up and dial down the temperature and it'll warm it up or cool it down as you are enjoying it. So it keeps your coffee at the temperature. So that is my massive win of the week for myself. Okay, we need to dive into this. I'm a big coffee fan as well, and this sounds too nerdy to be true. This got to be my Christmas present, I guess. Oh, it's amazing. Bob, do you have it at hand? I don't. I just set it back to charging. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I'll link it in the show notes. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, I don't have a win at hand. I guess we just rerecorded the PDM onboarding materials and just realizing how much has changed in the program and how far we've become. We've moved from slack to circle and everything changed. Right. So there was a nice awareness that we're constantly iterating. Yeah. So cloud therapist at Hashicorp. That's an intriguing title. Yeah. Maybe you can tell us what that involves on a daily basis. And how did this role or title came about? It was an evolution in my titles over the course of my career. When I was working as an enterprise architect and a consultant, I was being put into large companies working on their projects. And invariably I got a reputation for being the person that was the firefighter. You could drop me into really on fire projects that were going terribly and I could help right the ship and get the project moving in the right direction. And the salespeople that were leveraging me, the people that were putting me in these companies and in these projects, they started calling me therapist because nine times out of ten, the project wasn't technically the problem, wasn't technology. The problem was usually communication or project management or some form of people issue. And my background is actually in psychology. I have a degree in psychology. I stopped using it immediately after I got out of university and got into technology. However, as I started getting higher and higher up into these different companies as a consultant, I started relying more on my psychology and communication skills than my actual technical jobs. So one time somebody I was working on an AWS migration project, and the engagement manager said, this is our cloud therapist, Chris Williams. And it stuck, and it became like, I actually even have a pen. Like, my good buddy, Aws hero, Andrew Brown, gave me a pen that has cloud therapy on it. And it's a great introduction when I'm being introduced to a new customer or a new company, because they're like, well, tell me, what does this cloud therapy thing mean? And so I get into, I say to them exactly what I just said to you. It's a great icebreaker. It's really, really true, and it's something that people don't realize, that 95% of the problems that you're going to run into when you're trying to deploy some at scale, you know, in large environments with a lot of people trying to do very different things, sometimes the left, a lot of times the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. So you need somebody to help facilitate communication. And so they come to my couch, I put them down on the couch, and we have a little therapy session. Nice, nice. Would you have ever expected that to happen? I did. Well, if you had asked younger career Chris, I would have said no. But after I'd been through, you know, 1020, how many, however many large projects that I've been through, invariably I came to realize that it's usually communication. It's usually some kind of people problem, and people just need to work things out sometimes. My specialty as a psychologist was conflict resolution, so it helped a lot more than I thought it would. And you said the higher up you go in teams and organizations, the more that becomes an issue. Right. Why is that? It does. Because the people on the ground, the ones that are actually in the weeds, on the keyboard, they're dealing with the actual problem. When they tell their boss what the problem is, and then that boss tells their boss what the problem is. Then the SVP goes to the director, and the director goes to the, the EVP, and then the EVP goes to the C suite person. That message gets watered down. And it's the old telephone game. Remember when you would whisper into your classmate's ear, and then it would go around the room, and then by the time the message was completely different. That's what happens in these large enterprises. So I short circuit the telephone game because I can speak both to the engineers and to the C suite, and I can change the words that I use, but I don't dilute the message. And so they get what's actually happening versus this telephone game. And it's not malicious. It's not. People like trying to obfuscate things most of the time, but messages can change depending upon what people think you want to hear. Interesting. On a related note, we find a similar situation where people come to us and, you know, become a python developer, technical things, and then when we start to work more intensively together and things get more complicated, then the mindset issues take over. Right, right. So in that sense, yeah. If you. If you found, like, apart from the communication stuff, have you found mindset challenges in this all? And maybe even an example where there was a moment where the mindset actually made all the difference? Well, I mean, we are technologists, we love computers. We kind of got into this business because humans are hard. We're like, oh, I put in commands and things come out, and if it breaks, I know why. When we communicate with humans, that's a little stickier. So we are naturally predisposed to inputs and outputs and logic. So when we have to, because we're in an organization or in a consulting role or in a large scale project, when we have to start interfacing with other humans who don't speak in inputs and outputs, sometimes that can be a challenge for us. Folks that get into computers usually don't like talking to people, and people that like talking to people usually don't get into computers. And it's the. It's the rare person that can speak to both sides of that coin and be able to communicate effectively. That's where the therapy part came from. And it's not a knock on anybody. Some people just like the things that they like. Everybody likes the things that they like. So it's a very fun challenge. I really enjoy it. Yes, it can get frustrating a lot of times, because if it wasn't frustrating, it'd be easy and all these projects would be running, truly. But, yeah, I honestly have so many examples. I'm paralyzed with choice here. Oh, yeah. I totally would like to hear an example where you see that complexity and frustration. So there was this one DevOps role at a company where we were trying to put out a project, and we were. The security team was struggling with the containerization team because they wanted to inject a certain. They wanted to use Chekov instead of the enterprise version of the container. It's a container scanner. And the rationale behind it was simply misinformation and, well, not miseducation. The person didn't understand what Chekhov was, and they thought it was like a russian malware or something like that because of the name Chekhov, they're like, oh, it's russian. We can't do that. Russian writer. Right, right. And this was close enough to the fed space that people were like, had a heightened sense of security about what was being deployed. They didn't want to admit that. They didn't know that the name was because of Star Trek, because of the engineer from Star Trek. And so it turned into this big thing, and I finally sat down with him. I had a little one on one, and I walked through this is the thing, and you could see the light bulb turning on over his head. It was like, oh. And so then after that, security had zero issues with implementing the checkoff container checker in the pipeline. It's just one of those silly little things that happens over and over and over again. And if you can just break through those communication barriers early enough, then these projects don't get nine months behind the curve. Awesome. I almost want to pivot. But for people that are not having a psychology background, is there one resource that they can hone to? Yeah. Take their communication skills to the next level. Just up the top of your head? Yes. One thing that I really like to do that's a really valuable tool is when somebody tells me something, I say, okay, this is what I heard. And then I repeat back to them the exact same information that they told me in my own words. And if I, if I got it right, then, then both parties are happy. If I got it wrong, they get a chance to correct me, and I get a chance to learn. That is a very valuable tool. And I don't see a lot of people utilizing that in the consulting space, primarily because a lot of consultants and a lot of folks in the rent a programmer space, I guess you call it, they're brought in because they're the expert, and they have to exude this aura of, I know what I'm talking about and stuff like that. I do the exact opposite. I come in and I say, hey, I'm the dumbest person in the room. I'm here to learn from everybody and ask stupid questions, and we're going to all get to where we need to be at the end of the day. And so I repeat their statements back to them, and 99% of the time there's something that was missed or some piece of communication that fell through the cracks, we get to clarify that, we get to move on much faster. So repeating back information that I've heard the way that I think I heard it, and then giving them the chance to correct me is very, very valuable tool. Awesome. So we don't have to read a whole book, we can just implement it right now. Exactly. Basically, listen, more than talking, being curious, being humble, and really get clarity on what this person is conveying, even between the lines. And if you're not really on the same page, that then enables the rest. Your mental state has to be one of being okay with being the vulnerable. You have to be able to be wrong. You have to be able to not know all of the answers. And that's tough for some people. That's, that. That can be hard. That's easier said than done, right? You don't see that a lot. It really is. Yeah. Especially when you're like, supposed to be the expert. If you wrote the open source project, then sometimes they come to you and say, hey, what's the answer for this? Like, I don't know. But you can't say. But you think you can't say that. I say it all the time. I say, I don't know, nine times a day. It's very liberating, honestly. Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, start your year with a python breakthrough at Py bytes. Escape tutorial paralysis, and jump into practical just in time. Learning our personalized coaching beats imposter syndrome and sharpens your python skills. Join our pibytes community, a network where passionate developers grow together. Whether you're a beginner or leveling up, we tailor the journey to your pace. Visit pibytesdevelopermindset.com now this year, transform into the confident, in demand python developer you're meant to be. Your python mastery begins today with pibytes. Check out the link in the description below. So you're also an AWS hero, which is a significant accolade. Thank you. Can you share with us one of your contributions to the AWS community that you particularly feel proud of? Sure. So the AWS hero program is an amazing thing that AWS set up for folks that learn in public and teach in public, and get excited about AWS services in public. So I have. Over the course of my career, I've had up to three different user groups running simultaneously, plus the v. Brownback podcast, plus my blog. I love learning in public. I love chatting with people in public about the things so that I'm a firm believer that all boats rise with the tide. So if I'm out there, if I just figured out something, then I want to write an article about it and share that with everybody. One of the big things that I've done that I really enjoy are these community days. So AWS has these regional community days where a bunch of different AWS groups will gather together, rent out. We actually rented out Gillette Stadium, a football stadium here in the states, and had a day of learning. We had keynote speakers, we had an expo hall, we had breakout sessions, and we just did a giant day on different AWS services and had a wonderful time, you know, fed a bunch. I'm greek, so I love feeding people. So. So we gave everybody breakfast, lunch and dinner. We had a nice little after party. Everybody learned the things that they wanted to learn. We, and, yeah, so that was, that was super fun. I really enjoyed that. That's awesome. Yeah. And thanks for clarifying as well what the AWS hero is actually about. Yeah. And you mentioned v. Brownback, the podcast. How long have you been running that now? So I'm not running, I mean, I don't ever say I'm doing the thing. I always co organize. I don't like to, it's, you know, it's always a group effort. There's a bunch of people that do v. Brown bag. I have co organizers for the different user groups and everything. There's no way that any one human can do all of these things. It's a group effort. V. Brown Bag has been a podcast that's been running for 13 years now. I've been involved with it for, I want to say, seven or eight years. And it's
a weekly show every Wednesday night, 08:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And we have technologists. It started as a, I want to pass this certification, so let's get together with a couple of people and talk about it live online and go through, and go through the study material. And it started with VMware. Way back in the day, AWS came out and I was like, holy mackerel, this is going to be a game changer. So I immediately pivoted to AWS cloud, started studying for all of the AWS certifications and getting people on to co present for stuff like that. Then we went to Python, we went to Kubernetes, we did containers. We just expanded the scope of it and just, it's whatever we are really enjoying at the time. Currently we have three different series is going one on generative AI, one on Python, and one on infrastructure as code and DevOps in general. And so we get speakers in the field to come on and talk about their aspect of it. We currently had an AI policymaker from DC come on the show. We're going to have a prompt engineer come in. We're having an AI lawyer come on to talk about the ramifications of the legalese of artificial intelligence. And we have also, I work for Hashicorp, so I also like to talk about terraform because that's what I'm learning and that's what I enjoy. So we've got folks coming in and talking about GitHub actions and creating pipelines and doing Ci CD DevOps work, leveraging terraform and ansible and all the things. So it's a fun program where we all get together and I always want the audience to have something fun to play with afterwards. So we have somebody, come on, do a little presentation. This is the thing. Thing. Here's my repo. Go have fun with it, fork it and then enjoy. Have fun. Play with something new, really cool. Yeah, I saw some cool names in the python space as well. I think you had Sean Tybur and Chris may refactoring and wonderful human beings. We've had Brian akin on there, Mike Kennedy, Eric Mathis, al Swigart. Just a bunch of genuinely warm, wonderful human beings. Yeah. But I also really want to learn about the AI branch. I think that's very important right now. I hear it's going to be a big thing. I don't know. I'm on the fence still, maybe. Who knows? Who knows what's going to happen with this AI nonsense? It's like the cloud. It's a passing fad. So what's an unexpected benefit you've gained from doing that work? Hosting the show? An unexpected benefit. I don't have to look for work anymore. It's something that when I was, when I was younger, when you wanted to look for a new job, you go to recruiter, you start asking around, everything like that. Because of the connections that I have in the industry, I am now able to help other people get into companies and organizations and fields that they want to get into. So, so I'm able to leverage, I'm, I'm still, I'm stealing my friend's statement here. I'm actually a good human router. I can route humans to each other and make connections and allow folks to who otherwise wouldn't have been able to have an opportunity, get an opportunity in the field. You know, people, people of color that want to get in that don't have, you know, they just don't have the right connections. They want to meet somebody or they need a little bit of guidance. I love doing, I work with diversify thinking here in New Hampshire and the local women and engineering stem crew and the college, you know, with, like, career advice and resume building and salary negotiation, how to, you know, get what you're worth. So those are some of the things that I are an unexpected benefit for me now. That's amazing. So a huge networking boost, you could say? Absolutely, yeah. If you need to find somebody in New England, I'm a good first stop to get you on the right way. Cool. And I saw in your bio that you also do mentoring. So what is one piece of advice you often give to your mentees that really resonates with them? Could be technical, career mindset, anything. I think the mindset thing is the one thing that really resonates. Always be curious, always be in a learning frame of mind. Put yourself out there, get yourself in the public space, and don't be afraid to fail in public. A lot of people see tech influencers and they see folks on TikTok and they see the shiny end product, and they don't see all of the bumps and bruises that it took to get to that end stage. And honestly, a lot of my most highest engaged pieces are the ones where I've just screwed up in public, like, you know, just fell flat on my face. And, you know, I did. I did a live demo and it didn't work out well, but I figured it out and troubleshot the problem live and then brought the thing back up. That's huge. People want to see that they are also human, and so put yourself out there. Don't be afraid to fail in public. Everybody's human. Everybody has a bad day. And if you can make a connection that way, you're going to be ten steps ahead of anybody else that's trying to do the exact same thing. That's awesome advice. Yeah. There's a bit of toxicity with all this social media, right. You see that perfectly crafted post or video, and that doesn't have to be the standard necessarily. I think it's much. I agree with you. I think it's much more valuable if you have it more raw. Like, and it's live coding and you fail and you debug. I often, once I heard that feedback on my videos, like, wow, when you actually start to mess up and debug, that's actually where I learn that was a huge liberation because then I could just be raw, and that's what v brown bag is all about. It's getting on camera and just screwing up in public for every 30 or 62nd Instagram reel that you see, where everything's just running perfectly. There's hours and hours of setup and retakes and all kinds of stuff in the background, and folks don't realize that nobody's perfect out of the gate. You got to mess up. Yeah, I struggle with it because if that's the norm, I'm not sure if I want to be part of that norm where with pie bytes we're more like show the failures and being a bit more raw. But that's great advice, and I think that's actually stopping a lot of people from getting out there. So this is already really inspiring because it's failing, but also, as you said, building public, being curious. So, yeah, that's really useful. And honestly, I'm okay with the brown bag being lower engagement. I mean, we're not going to be like a mister beast or a Marcus or anything like that, and that's perfectly fine. I would rather be showing the bumps and bruises and having lower engagement, but having people feel better about themselves afterwards, not that people feel bad about themselves after watching those guys, it's just they're the most popular people out there right now. Yeah. It's not only all about the views and the likes, right? It's about what is your community? Right? Do they really engage with your content? And then it's probably more important to have high engagement with fewer people, I guess, and be your authentic self. Be authentic self. Nice. So with your extensive experience, what emerging technologies or trends do you believe are set to shape the cloud computing landscape in the near future? So as an AWS hero, I actually have a lot of, and we are now coming up to reinvent in a couple of short weeks. So I've got a bunch of NDA stuff locked up in my head that I can't talk about, but I think AI is going to be a big deal. Maybe. Maybe that's not a huge revelation at all, but I think that there's going to be a lot of enablement both in the developer space and in the learning space on leveraging AI, leveraging chatbots, getting help when you get stuck to facilitate making your code better, being able to write tests faster, things that the side work that we kind of sometimes neglect, creating tests, creating documentation, doing things like that is going to be automated. And I want to preface when I say automated. I don't want people to take like, oh, AI is coming for our jobs. I do not think that's going to happen. I think that there's always going to be a place for developers. I think it's going to be a good enabler and that people are going to need to learn AI as a tool to better enable themselves as opposed to it's coming for our jobs. There's a lot of hysteria around there and a lot of uncertainty because this is an uncertain field that we're in right now. I still encourage people to get into coding. I'm not saying, oh, don't even bother, because AI is going to write you out of a job in three years. Yes. One of the coaches in PDM said, you're not going to be replaced by AI, to be replaced by the engineer that uses AI. Because firstly, I do see a huge productivity bump already. How much have you embraced AI in your work, specifically coding? I use it a lot. I mean, if I'm unfamiliar with a particular module or something like that, I'll say with terraform there are providers out there that I'm just not familiar with. So I'll say, hey, chat GPT, assume the role of a terraform programmer and write me blah. And it'll create something that's, you know, 70% there. And then I have to wiggle it around and move things around to get it going. But that's a lot faster for me than delving into the API right away and then going, no, no, no. Yes. Okay. There's the one thing I needed, you know, 17 pages down. So as you said, it's a, it's a huge enabler for me and it's making, it's making my end product get to fruition faster rather than me being concerned about it coming after my job. Yeah, I noticed the same productivity gain docs are great, even if they're well written, but you still, or Google or stack overflow for that matter, you're still sifting through a lot of stuff. And now you can get to the answer very specifically, very fast. It's funny, you said about the role, I'm not doing that enough. Is it better if you say assume the role of blah blah blah? Yes, okay. Yeah, absolutely. Because of the podcast, I often have a conversation with chat GPT, and I say assume the role of a content creator coach. What keywords should I use for this? YouTube to get high engagement and high click rates. And then it'll just give me keywords and tags and things like that. And so by saying, assume the role first. Assume the role of a python tutorial, assume the role of a small engine repair mechanic, whatever thing you want it to be, say, assume the role first and then have it give you the information. It becomes much more detailed and focused. Solid mouse that uses better filters. Right. Gives you more relevant information, better targeted. Exactly. Okay, awesome. That was the bulk of the interview questions there. Another passion, something we haven't covered you want to bring up. So I am actually just now getting into digital photography back when I was in high school. And this is going to tell you how far back in the day it was. It was using film, 35 millimeter film with a little dark room, developing your own chemicals and developing your own photos. And honestly, other than a camera I have, other than my mobile phone, I haven't picked up a camera since. And recently I got bitten by the, by the digital photography bug. And I am now going to start going out and taking pictures of sunrises and whatever. Whatever things I'm going to take pictures of. So I'm just now, I just bought a book on digital photography, and I'm very excited about, you know, going out and buying the gear for it. Nice. Yeah. Especially as it people, we need. We need side hobbies to get away from it. It's a lot of mind work, a lot of sitting. I see also some, some taste for music. Yes. I'm a, I'm a bassist. I'm a guitarist. I love playing funk, funk, bass, stuff from the seventies like earth, wind and fire, chili peppers, rage against the machine. I have a very large palette of musical tastes. And every now and then, I'll sit down and try to play some of them. Nice. So we always wrap up with the reading and the books. Is there any book you're reading you want to recommend or have read or resource for that matter? So I am just finishing, and I'm going to actually restart deep work. It's a book by Cal Newport, and I think it's very relevant for us nowadays. It's. It explains. So it's the, the whole title is deep work rules for focused success in a distracted world by Cal Newport. Oh, you've got a copy right there. Wonderful. My copy's on my nightstand. I can't. I don't have it for the camera. That's very short of it. Right. And basically, it walks you through the rules for how to maintain focus in today's world. And it does walk you through some of the no brainers, like turn off social media, make your phone stop dinging, turn off slack and things like that. But the real brilliance about this book, I think, is that it explains the why behind it. It gives you the rationale, because everybody says, we'll turn off social media and get out of there. It's toxic. But when you have explained to you the way that he does, using references to psychological studies and getting really into the nitty gritty of how your brain really is affected by focus and lack of focus and being and having your focus split into different areas. It really hits home and it really makes it relevant in a way that allows you to grok it fundamentally. And so I'm going to reread it and I'm putting into practice the rules that he's using. And it's helping. It's genuinely helping, which is why I'm going to read it again. Yeah, to be, it's one of those productivity staples, I think the one thing, essentialism and deep work and especially with how interruptive things are at the moment and how, you know, how the pressure of instant responding. This book is needed more than ever. Yeah, it's pretty brutal. Ironically, one of the things, as a dA, as a developer advocate, I have to spend more time on social media, the things that the company's doing. Here's some learning materials. They hired me, this is funny. They actually hired me to do my evening hobby as my, I'm doing my hobby as my day job now. So when I was in EA, I was still doing all these things, user groups and the v brown bag and stuff like that. Now I do that for the company during the day, which is amazing until I forget to,
you know, stop working at 05:00 p.m. And then I, you know, I go into the evening. So I've got to get better about that, which is why I'm reading the book. But another byproduct of that is you kind of have to be on social media more. You have to, you know, drop in what you're doing, where you're conferences, you're going to, to give speech, to give presentations and whatnot. So the, the Vi, the bile of social media starts to, you have to, you have to have a really good filter for getting on, posting the things, seeing what the other teammates are doing, and then getting the heck out of there so that, so that you don't get caught up in the stuff that's happening and that, and that can be tough. So deep work by Cal Newport. Exactly. Have you read his other book as well, specifically so could, they cannot ignore you. I haven't. That is next on my list after I've reread his deep work. Yeah, that's that. You all like that one as well because that kind of goes back a little bit with you said, like, I was doing this in the evening and now I do it, you know, as work. So in a sense by getting out there and, you know, kind of crafted your own space as well. Right? So that's what that book is all about. It's actually number two on my list, so I'm definitely going to be reading it next. Cool. Thanks for the recommendation. Yeah, sure. Well, I was going to ask you final piece of advice, or call to action, but you already gave so many good tips, so completely optional. Final words before we wrap. Don't be afraid. So my tagline on social media is fearlessly stupid. And that's my tongue in cheek response to people when I say, don't be afraid to be wrong. Don't be afraid to be fearlessly stupid. Get out there, ask questions. If you don't know the answer, chances are really good that the other people in the room don't either. When I go into C suite boardrooms and talk to these folks, I tell them I'm the dumbest person in the room. I'm fearlessly stupid. I'm going to ask a lot of dumb questions, and I'll go in and I'll just ask basic questions about why are we doing this? What is the process? What is this rationale? Things like that. And we will walk out of that room. And every single time I've walked out of that room, somebody has come up to me and said, thank you. I've been wondering about that for two years, and I didn't have the courage to ask. So be that person that will ask that question. Amazing. Couldn't wrap it up better than that. Thanks so much for hopping on today, Chris, Bob, thanks for having me on this super fun. Tell Julian I said hi. Yeah, he was bummed to not being able to make it. It's like midnight there, so. Yeah, it's a bit late for him. Time zones, but we'll meet with him another day. Yeah. This was so much fun. Thanks. Cool. Have a great one. Bye. You too. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pibyte friends. That is Pibit es friends and receive a free gift just for being a friend of the show. And to join our thriving community of Python programmers, go to pibytes.com community. That's Pibit es community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.