How to teach yourself programming with GitHub's Andrea Griffiths [Podcast #199]

Key Takeaways

Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of free codecamp.org. And today we're talking with Andrea Griffiths, who moved to the US from Colombia at age 17, joined the military, taught herself programming using free code and now works at GitHub. First, I want to share some community news. Free Code Camp just published this beginnerfriendly back-end development course. It'll teach you how to build your own web servers and APIs using Node Express, MongoDB, and Free Code Camp's website and mobile app are built using these very same tools which make up the popular MES stack. You'll also get some exposure to database architecture, security principles, testing best practices, and more. It's a 2hour YouTube course. Watch it after you finish listening to this conversation. And Freo Camp also published a comprehensive Blender and 3JS course where you'll build your own 3D portfolio piece, a render of an adorable home office. If you're watching the video version, you can see what this looks like. It's incredible. You're going to build this. If you're interested in 3D rendering and computer graphics, this is the course for you. You'll learn key concepts like quad topology, ray casting, orbit controls, and more. And by the end of the course, you'll have your own 3D model that can live on the web, so you can share it with your friends, share it with potential future employers. This is a 9-hour course on the Free Code Camp YouTube. Free Code Camp also published a handbook on using Docker with Node.js. You'll learn how to set up Docker and Docker Compose. You'll also learn fundamental concepts like volumes, images, containers. This is an excellent resource for you to read through and code along with bookmark it for future reference. access the fulllength handbook on free code camp's publication. All of this is free. It should go without saying everything I ever talk about on free co is free. Next, learn clean code best practices. You may have heard the term clean code. Well, we've got a new course that will help you level up your JavaScript implementation skills and you're going to learn how to detect code smells. Code smells. I'm holding my nose. And refactor your JavaScript accordingly. You'll also learn how to use the ESLint and prettier libraries to automate some of the more errorprone aspects of shipping code. That's a 1-hour course on the free code camp YouTube. And I'm hyped to say that the classic text adventure games Zork 1, 2, and 3 are now open source with an MIT license. Microsoft has published their full source code on GitHub. You can check it out. Link in the description if you want to play. Good luck getting past the mailbox. I spent like 10 minutes. I couldn't figure out how to get past the mailbox. All right. And song of the week is the classic 1985 song, Something About You by Level 42. I love the slap bass. I love the vocal harmonies, the falsetto, and the huge synth sounds. It's impossible to listen to this song and still be in a bad mood. Support for this podcast is provided by a grant from Algo Monster. Algo Monster is a platform that teaches data structure and algorithm patterns in a structured sequence so you can approach technical interview questions more systematically. Their curriculum covers patterns like sliding window, twoo pointers, graph search and dynamic programming, helping you learn each pattern once and apply it to solve many problems. Start a structured interview prep routine at algo.mmonfreecodeamp. Support also comes from the 10,338 kind folks who donate to our charity each month. Join them and support our mission at donate.freecodeamp.org. And if you haven't gotten a free Code Camp shirt yet, you totally should represent our community with pride. You can get this same black tribeland shirt that I'm wearing for just 20 bucks. Free shipping anywhere in the US. Go to shop.freeccoamp.org. For today's interview, we're talking with Andrea Griffiths, who taught herself programming using free code camp while working in construction. She moved to the US from Colombia when she was 17. And within 6 months, she made the fateful decision to join the US Army. Yes, she was still 17. Her mom signed the paperwork for her. She ran a chain of gyms before landing a support role at a tech company and then ascended to product manager and ultimately developer advocate at GitHub. We're going to talk about tips for busy parents who want to learn new skills. How AI tools are no substitute for your own critical thinking and problem solving skills. And how even though today it's easier and easier to learn programming for free online, people are so distracted and for many it just feels harder and harder to sit down and do it. Andrea Griffiths, welcome to the Free Code Camp podcast. >> Thank you, Quincy. I can't believe I'm sitting here talking to you. Yeah. This has been a long time in the making. Uh you were on the Free Cooking Spanish podcast like two or three years ago. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. >> Yeah. And uh my Spanish is not that great, so I didn't have the benefit of fully understanding everything in that podcast, but I'm going to clarify a lot of that today. Uh I want to start off with just learning a little bit more about how things are changing in software development. You first started learning programming using free code camp. >> Yes. >> And other free learning resources back in 2016. What have been the biggest changes since then to the software development field? >> Wow. So many especially recently, right? Um and my god, thank you because free co camp I legit owe my career to it. I'm sure I'm not the only person that said this to you, but when I started and I discovered free code camp back in yeah 2016, for me it was revolutionary, right? There was no other resource out there that had the structure, that clear path that I could then just follow. Um, and especially because I was doing this while working, I needed something that was structured but also I could break up into chunks, which is the beauty of reco camp, right? So I I will follow 15-minute chunks. Um you didn't have prerequisites. I didn't need to take a test to get started. I didn't need to have a fundamental knowledge of computer science or anything at all to get started. So you kind of prove that if you have internet access and consistency, you can learn to code. At least that was my experience. And now we fast forward 10 years and I'm doing the work that I do at GitHub where I get to teach developers how to, you know, use AI like GitHub Copilot, how to incorporate open-source software into anything that they're doing, they're growing, they're developing. I use copilot a lot to learn new concepts. Um you know with the understanding of fundamentals that I got from free co- camp. Um I think one of the most important things that I learned then and I encourage people to learn now it's that key fundamentals like learning how to learn and breaking problems down. That's something that comes very natural to some people. Uh for me I had to really learn how to break things apart because I always been a go a th000 miles an hour person. And uh when I started to learn to program in free co camp, I thought I would just, you know, hack it all out and like a month later I would have all the certificates and off I go into my new career and my new life uh well no I had to hit the brakes and and really learn to break up our problems and learn that focus on fundamentals. That's something that free co taught me taught me how to learn. Learning to think critically is more the problem now. I think uh I when I see for example my own usage of tools like copilot and some suggestions are great and some others are just setting me up for failures later on. So it's changed a lot in the past 10 years. I'm happy because you kind of broke the barrier to access and prove that people without computer science degrees could get jobs and and have brilliant careers. Um now we're in a different reality where there is more access but we're sort of missing having that deep understanding. >> Yeah. Absolutely. And one of the things that like I think you hit on is just that needing to slow down. A lot of people I think don't necessarily have the restraint in the self-discipline to slow down because they're so used to things happening really quickly for them. And in a way, I think AI tools uh can be like a huge handicap for people because they can allow them to continue to move very quickly without ever really having to slow down and and invest the time and learning the critical thinking and uh the problem solving skills that you, for example, had to force yourself to slow down and learn along the way. And a lot of that is not intuitive and it's not very fun. And if your brain is not used to slowing down and if it's been a long time since you were in school, for example, doing math problems and stuff, you may have lost that skill. Those muscles may have atrophied. Uh so it sounds like that was a huge part of your journey was just learning to slow down and not be the hey, I'm going to get everything done in a month type person. >> Yeah, for sure. And like honestly, like I was forced to learn within the constraints of what we had, right? Like I started learning obviously in free co camp and then looking at other free resources. I started to look at Ruby because like I like the syntax. It was friendly to me. It was for me and now like looking back I mean I give myself all kinds of different advice. But but the one key thing though was having that mind shift change and understanding that yes no I needed to learn why things worked the way they did. And I apply that still to this day. I think like thinking about it, I'm now I have the great privilege. I'm in this industry now, so this is literally my job. But uh back then where all I had was an hour at lunch. I needed to make the absolute most of that hour and going at it like just full speed and without structure was not going to help me. So I still apply that to how I learn now. I think that's one of the most important things I learned from pretty cool campus. is learning how to learn and that chunking out of time and and breaking problems apart which so much of it is like what engineering is. >> Yeah. And I I do want to shout out uh Barbara Oakley and uh Dr. Barbara Oakley uh who teaches the learn how to learn course uh and has written a book learn how to learn. uh it gives you strategies and kind of a toolkit for understanding the way that your human brain absorbs things and uh makes those connections and actually is able to surface and use those things. Space repetition, interle practice, uh lots of other concepts that go into uh actually learning something really well and that is something that we've deeply integrated into the free co curriculum. In fact, we explicitly cover that now. before it was just kind of implicit in the way we built it. that I actually uh in the first few minutes you're on free co camp after you finish the first demo project you start learning about those concepts because I think those are very important uh for getting the determination and kind of the discipline necessary and half the battle is just knowing right knowing is half the battle and once you understand those things then it becomes a lot easier to I guess tell yourself what you need to do every day uh and and not delude yourself into thinking oh I'll just you know drink a bunch of coffee and I'll stay really late at night and I'll just grind through all this because that's not how the human brain works generally. That's that's suboptimal. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And listen, that's something that now I see and and I my I think my my soul leaves my body once today when there there's so many young founders out there and it's not all about the grind, my friends. And that's those are lessons that you learn with time honestly like with the benefit of of time and hindsight like yeah fast forward 10 years and I now I approach learning a lot differently only because I had that I had those lessons and I was able to like take that to heart and apply it. So that's a good resource. I'm going to check that out. I feel like I seen her podcast. She might have been on Hover or something that I listen to. Um >> yeah, she's prolific and she's been doing this for like I don't know 10 years at least 12 years. She's got her uh learn how to learn course and her book. Uh strong recommend. I'll put a link to it in the description. >> The thing that I want to talk to you about starting off is uh you have worked as a product manager which is different from a project manager. If you've heard the term PM a lot of times PM refers to a product manager. A lot of times it refers to a project manager. a PM or a product manager is essentially overseeing one aspect of like a software platform like GitHub for example. Uh can you talk about what it is like being a product manager and just what the role entails real quick? >> Yeah, for sure. I mean that was like a really interesting part of my career at GitHub. I've been at GitHub for a long time now. So I've I've had the sort of the joy of being in different roles and being in product was what's was one of them. Um and we were looking at product a lot different than I think some companies do and especially at the moment in time where I was in product at GitHub. We were just coming into like the ramp up to the acceleration that was the launch of copilot and all these things. So a lot of things were in flux and changing super super fast. Um I think product managers are GitHub even from the time that I was a product manager in 2022 23 till now it's changed so much only because the industry is also changing. So yes, there's still product owners and there's still the people. I feel like product managers get such a bad vibe and and like a bad reputation because uh you know they they there's too many memes about some of us but the reality is that these are people that take the ownership of the work that engineers are doing right so it's very different from what I'm doing now in many ways but also sort of the same. I enjoyed my time in product because I had an opportunity to have full context of not only oh these are the internals these are the things that we're building and this is how we're looking at it as a company like road mapap wise or resources investment wise but also I had the power of the context of the community and being able to understand code and being able to say I use the tool right I think that that's one key thing if you're in product you need to start drinking your own champagne you need to be able Maybe you don't have the super deep knowledge of whatever thing is getting rewritten in Rust and you don't I don't write gross doesn't matter you should still sort of make the effort to understand it in both a technical and core levels but also from a usability point of view that was great that we the PM organization at the time was very focused on like learn by doing which we were shipping things so fast I mean it was still not slow down um but I had the privilege of being at a point in time where we looking at things that matter to me like localization of certain aspects of the platform like when the discussions feature was launched at GitHub like I was part of the effort to get it to where you were able to actually post discussions in multiple languages. So it was things in the platform that were super kind of niche uh they called to me because I am forged by community and I am not an English native speaker. So things like that always going to be near and dear to me. But understanding how the business look at that as a potential add-on business value to the platform users and then taking the ownership of taking that feature from idea to ship to now is it's core to anything we do like localization and internalization of of the some of the even more core features in the platform. You don't even think about it twice. It feels like it's it should have always been there, right? We're nowhere near done. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done there. that um it was a great opportunity for me to not only like sort of test those skills that I felt like I've been working towards having the understanding of the technology but also think a little bit more businessminded and also pull in the interest of the community there. So there's still product managers at GitHub, there is program managers at GitHub, there is project managers at GitHub. I think at the end of the day the one common thread on all these I guess professions at least at GitHub is that they're all owners of a specific point a specific feature or a specific characteristic of what GitHub does. Some people get to lean more into the technical parts of implementation and and truly look at road maps and truly look at realistically what are we going to chip. I loved it. I love being a product in that point of time because it allowed me to sort of apply my technical skills and my understanding of code and my understanding of how was a platform having been from like I started in support. So I've been I seen like I feel like it was full arc like I was a user I have my gripes I still have my gripes I work here I still have my gripes uh but then being in support and and seeing how that relationship changes when you are the one that has to answer why this does not work. it doesn't make any sense to actually be in part of the team that's thinking through how things are implemented and how features get prioritized. That was super fun. I really enjoyed my time in product. I like what I do now better, I think, because it's more >> and right now you're doing developer advocacy. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Um, so I'm I'm a developer advocate now. I've been with the DeL team for I guess it's coming up on two three years. Coming up on three years. So like I don't own any part of the GitHub copilot road map or GitHub road map at all. So it's not up to me to decide like what we ship or what we prioritize but I think I have even an even better role in that I do get to own the understanding of how developers might actually use the tools, how they're using them now in the real world. uh and I get to see when they succeed, why they succeeded, how we can help make sure that everyone succeeds and think through what they might need that we don't even know exists yet and even developers might not know what exists yet. So, it's it's a funner. It's more like a I don't know like a science fiction ping. I don't know what to >> like you're you're kind of like coming up with crazy ideas and like seeing whether they can actually be implemented and whether people could actually use them, I guess. uh because it's easy to come up with like ideas but an idea that's actually usable and is viable to execute. >> Oh for sure. Yeah. >> And and you know like for the time at PMing and and still now like you know metrics drive a lot of the work that gets done and this is all companies like if you don't have data you're it's going to be very hard for you to succeed. And even though you might be looking at adoption metrics a certain way and the numbers don't lie. Sure. But there's sometimes some things that are so culturally nuanced and developers, we're an interesting breed. I think the numbers sometimes don't define us in a lot of ways. And so it it's it's great for me because I I get to talk to the people who are actually like creating the features, right? Like these engineering teams that are like, okay, this is the first shipped. Everything that ships at GitHub is first being staff shipped. So we get to test it first. We get to give those teams feedback. Um, and you know, my usage of it might not be as deep as some of our larger enterprises, but still we get that feeling of like, okay, how big is that bridge between like what we're shipping and are developers actually going to use this? Is it actually worth it? Um, so yeah, super important to have sort of that technical credibility in DeLel too because I can't be talking to developers if I don't understand the technology that I'm sort of talking about, right? Um but but also I get to have to focus on the more nuance things and I get to focus on the developer love and the the things that really surprise and delight you. >> Yeah. Well, I am very excited to hear about your journey through support into working as a uh product manager and ultimately as a uh developer advocate. I want to go back a little ways because you have had a very interesting non-conventional path into technology that I that I absolutely want to highlight. Uh maybe you can walk us through your life leading up to I think you were 17 years old and you had your mom >> sign the paperwork for you to join the US military. Like what was what were those first years like leading up to that moment? >> Oh, that's I love it. Yeah, I have the most zigzaggy career path in the world, but it's it's great. I think it's definitely forged who I am today. Um, I mean, I I honestly I joined the service because I felt like I had to. Um, and it sounds hella cheesy, but I I stand by my standman and now I have a 13 year old and I as as they get closer to 17, which is the age when I join, I'm like my mind cannot compute. I I don't think I was ready to make the decisions that I made then, but I I'm very grateful for my time in the service. I did it because I felt like I owe this country everything and I still do. So, to me, it was important to give back. Um maybe there were other ways that I could have done it, but at the time that was sort of what I had. I we immigrated from Colombia to the US. I didn't have any possibilities of going to school. like that wasn't a path that I thought okay well you graduate high school and now you're looking at colleges and off you go to university and like that was never in my road map. So I moved to a place where all of a sudden those possibilities were real and I was like wait a minute what do you mean people here can be whatever they want like that to me like my brain could not understand it. So, um, I felt like I had I had to do something like it was there was a piece of service that needed to be given back and I thought, you know what, I can do this. I I'll go in and join for four years. Um, I met my recruiter. I started taking like English as a second language classes outside college and that's why I met my recruiter and I was like, shoot, I saw the American flag and the eagle flying by and I still cry when I listen to some of the songs for real because it's it's genuinely core to who I am. Um, I went in the army. Very bushy. Bushy. What is it? Bushy tail and brightey. Um, >> bushy tailed and bright eye. >> Bushy tail and bright eye. Yeah. >> Like a little dough. Like a little uh deer. >> Uh, if you look at my I just shared that picture. Um, because uh day was not it was a few weeks from the time that we're recording this. And I shared that picture on social. It's like your first picture you get taken on on on basics training. It's like day two or something. So you're still smiling, right? And you don't look too tired. And I'm like standing there just holding my M16 A2 like 17 year old with perfectly arc eyebrows because I had just gone and gotten them done. I had no idea what the hell I was getting into. But I'm grateful for that time. It definitely helped me grow, mature, taught me English. That was my free co camp for English in the military told me English. Uh taught me about service and being part of something bigger than you. That's something that I still to this day carry. like I I think I have a servant mind and in my leadership style in the way that I work with others so much so because of that time in the military. So I joined, I did the things and I I thought I was going to be alive like Quincy. I was convinced I only got out of the military to finish college. I had like a semester left. I was going at the same time uh not for what I wanted to go to school at but for what I could get to the path to the quickest get a degree because I understood one thing and that's that I needed to have a degree at that time that was it was sort of hammer into my brain. um how can I make sure that the one thing that was impossible for me to attain in Colombia I could for sure have here and the army did that for me right like they paid for my college I I studied while I was in the field I studied while I was you know at nights on the weekends and so I got out with a few time left in school and I thought I'll come back in as an officer and I'll stay there till the day I die because my gosh I was proud of my service and proud of my country uh but then of course life happens and things change and I went completely different path after. I still work as a contractor and a civil servant for several years. Still working with soldiers, still working sort of doing similar things that I was doing in the army, but um just living a completely different life. I'm glad I did. I don't think I had the family I do now. If if I had stayed in um I definitely wouldn't have had the life experiences that I've had now. Uh but it was a long it was a long road to get from that to like trying to build a career outside of the military is so tough. Those transitions are not easy. Nothing prepares you for that. Especially, I'm thinking now I have a 13-year-old and I'm like, "Okay, like in four years, oh, even closer, my goddaughter who's going to be a senior in high school next year and she's like now she's going on her college tours and things and I'm like my gosh, like I would die if she came up to me and was like, I'm joining the army." I'll be like, "Absolutely not. We're going for a walk." Like, this is not happening because, you know, I don't think your brain is develop enough honestly to make those kind of decisions. But for some of us, like I need an opportunity. I need a structure. and the army was there and it was like my god like I learned I learned things there that I don't think I could have learned in any university honestly so I'm grateful for that time it was a period in time glad I did it um and then I I got out and I work as both a government contractor and as a civil servant for several years before landing in sort of a familyowned um entrepreneurial situation. >> Yes, please talk about that. Is this the uh gyms? You had a chain of three gyms, like health clubs that you >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I lived in a really tiny town. I stayed uh at my last duty station uh which was in Louisiana and I stay there and it was a very small town. And this is like now we think about gyms that have access like all hours like it's okay. Yeah, of course there's like a million. at the time there wasn't like this was something new that you were kind of sort of I think even the technology to like unlock doors like I remember the first things that we use and I think about it now I'm like oh my gosh now you could do so much more uh but you know like even just bringing that like key fob technology to a tiny little town of however many hundred people like it it was different so it was a good opportunity there and it was sort of a familyowned thing I was able to help them grow um the the endeavors and extend it into even smaller towns. I used to drive a ton around Louisiana like scouting spaces and then doing buildups. It's fun. It was fun. I think I always been a builder. Like it's interesting because now it's like I build software things, but I always been someone that likes to see an empty room and think what can I make here? Like what can I do? Um and that allowed me opportunity to do that. So it was interesting. I I've you know I've been interested in fitness. I wouldn't say like to the degree where I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is my absolute passion." But it is kind of cool to see people change their life. And I did get opportunity to do that, you know, being a club manager like operator. I I did get to see some of those folks that would like, yeah, I don't think I can, you know, get on that treadmill every day to like being the gym rats that are now like all about health and focus and and they're looking good, they're feeling good. Like that was really cool. I I I like that. And then growing a business, you know, in a really rural type areas, um, with a very interesting demographic was interesting. Uh, not without challenges, you know, fighting with people to pick up their plates. We were making a joke about this earlier. >> Yeah. At the gym, people never like take the they never rrack the weights. >> Freaking don't. And it's absolutely infuriating when you have to be the person that goes by and picks them up. But but it was great. I learned a lot about um not just like opening businesses and like the politics of it because small towns you know like this getting the licenses like having the chamber of commerce there when you're opening the gym like so there's so many things that you don't even think about nowadays because there is a lot more resources and access to information but back then I had to learn I remember I was doing like my own marketing like scheme things like for the newspaper Quincy we advertise in newspapers back then so it's doing this um this time of year like coming up into Christmas was my favorite time of year because this is when everybody starts getting like their they think they're going to join the gym January 1 they're going to and I will get like I mean like the drives of membership and all that running all those ideas and like kind of the signing systems around that super interesting exciting times not what I wanted to do forever you know but it was an opportunity like just the situation I was saying I'm glad I did it um it was a good learning experience uh being in that position like you work so much harder when you're doing your own thing is unbelievable. Like you really do though. Like I I remember thinking at one point like this is this is wild. Like cuz you're always on, right? Um yeah, there is something happening. Something's out at 1 in the morning. Somebody's there and wants to use it, guess what? Your phone's going to ring and you got to show up. So um I think my time in the service kind of helped with that because I was used to being like everything was kind of do or die. Do or die. like there were no small problems and I approached my my style of working there like that. Not the healthiest way but it was just all I knew, right? I was like, "Yeah, this is the most absolute most important thing. I will go take care of it right now." >> So, a lot of people would perceive running a bunch of gyms, helping expand this family business as kind of like an end point in your career. Like you could easily just stop there and do that long term. What inspired you to move on and start learning programming and moving in a more technical direction? >> I love that question because part of it is like personal circumstances like I needed to leave where I was. I need to physically move and the business was there. So if I physically moved, I couldn't take the business with me. Uh but part of it actually was a lesson on staying somewhere too long. It's something that I since learned. Um I think I was ready to make a change long long long long long before. Uh but you know it's hard. You get on those loops of convenience and comfort and it was scary to to make a change. It was scary to try and think that I could have a career outside of that or do something else. I think when I left my civil service job, it was such a pivotal moment into like, okay, if you're going to do this, it's because you're really going to be like independent. and you're not going to go work because that's like I don't know at the time to me having a government job was like the pinnacle of wow you're going to be a GS you're going to be in this system forever and have a great retirement and all that. Um but I stayed there too long. I I'm glad that personal circumstances forced me to look outside of that convenience loop and stretch myself. Um, so just word of the ward of the wise to people who might be in a position where they don't want to be in but it's kind of scary and uncomfortable like push through because the other side is so much worth it. Like I'm so grateful that happened in my life at the time I did cuz now I wouldn't change the life the family I have for anything. So, um I don't know, maybe I would be making more money now, but who knows? But I definitely find a lot more like I would say I'm I'm more mentally satisfied with my career at this time, for sure. >> No more cleaning after Jim Bros. So, I like >> not cleaning up after Jim Bros. I hear you. Well, you I mean you are getting to do a broad array of different things and you've held so many different roles at different tech companies including GitHub and so I have to imagine that that experience is worth something in terms of just being a richer more fulfilling uh memory like you're not just doing the same thing for 30 years or something like that. Right. >> For sure. >> And then uh you are you able to work remotely now? >> Yes. So, I'm based out of Florida. Like, I I've been remote since before the pandemic. Um, and it's been great. The first time I worked at GitHub, I I was in person. I lived in San Francisco, but now I'm back. I'm here. And honestly, it will take a lot for me to go in office. Like, um, I love I mean, this is like to me success. This is success. I can I can do this in the middle of the day. Um, my kids are home this week from school and I can still like spend time with them. So, it's nice to have the flexibility of of remote. I think we work a lot harder when you work remote. By the way, don't add me. There'll be people who will be contrarian to this. But I think you do though because in a ways it's also like you are an owner because you you always feel like there is always to do. Uh I need to work on my balance on that. But I'm not one I have slack on my phone. Um I'm working on it to where when I walk out of the office, I don't walk out with a small laptop with me, which I was doing that forever. I've been working on it with my therapist to make sure that I stop doing that because it's not healthy. Uh, but I think that you do. Yeah. It's kind of harder to blur that line between when you stop your workday and you start whatever your rest of your day. But, but I love being able to wait remote. It's great. >> Yeah. So, I want to talk about your your path into tech. >> Uh, first of all, I agree with you on remote and and I also agree that it's very important to be able to disconnect and if you had the luxury of having an additional room in your house or even a desk like I use my closet. I just had a desk in my closet and I went in there and worked. Then I would come out and hang out with the family. Uh, and that was extremely useful now that I'm back in Texas. Like you can get a lot bigger of a place than you can in downtown like San Francisco or I was actually in East Bay. Uh, I couldn't afford to live in San Francisco when I was in the Bay Area. Um, and you have a little bit more room, but having like a dedicated space that you work y >> you can kind of mentally put yourself like almost as though you were in an office. Uh, but then you can close the door and walk out and you're not working anymore. >> Exactly. Exactly. So tough to do. So and and and thank you for mentioning that because it could literally be a closet or it could be the corner of the room. >> Yeah. So one of the things that is unique about your story is you went through support. Like a lot of people while they're learning programming, they'll work in different roles within software development. But support is I mean pretty much every consumerf facing and even like enterprise type company is going to have support staff and it's not just something you just hand over to an AI. Many companies have tried that and it doesn't sound like it's ready. >> Failed miserably at it. Yes. >> Yeah. Can you talk about like that time of your life when you were working in support and continuing to learn programming? >> Yeah. And listen, I I have the biggest and deepest respect and admiration for people who work in support. Uh there is no hardest job honestly. Like there just isn't. Um it's it's so tough. Everyone's problems are the absolute most important problems to them, right? So you have to bring that sort of energy and empathy to every conversation you have. And uh I have stories. But um I'm glad I did it though because it well for one it opened the door to many more opportunities being able to to do that and prove that I I could technically assist uh which you know again coming from the non-traditional background. There is always my own self-imposed imposter syndrome but also the perception that is like where are you going to be able to help this customer? Um do you truly understand? So it was great because that time I think really like sort of uh made concrete that I had the technical skills needed for the industry. Um and then again having the superpowers of other things being able to have the empathy and and being able to bring all of my life experiences into how I treated support helped because it it I I honestly I I had the same u concern for a customer that was a paid customer as I was a free customer as I was someone on the internet uh tweeting at GitHub help. I felt like everyone had to take a moment from doing what they wanted to do because they had to tell us something was wrong and that to me how I could stop that friction. Like I I took a lot of uh pride in being able to do that and helping people. So I enjoyed it. Um it was an adventure. Would I want to be in support now? Absolutely not. It's just that there's people that are still in support that I actually work with. Um and be like you have other companies. Some folks have just that hard that that they they truly enjoy that and they love it. And I did to a degree, right? But um um I don't know if it's like I just have to have like continuous quest or being able to see side quest from beginning to end, but like I I it's harder for me to close loops, I think. And so when you get a ticket, you help the person, you get your rating in, and then you're done. And I'm like I always want to go into these holes of like why did that happen in the first place? And how could we make it so it never happens again? So, I need to kind of look outside of that. Um, but it was a great experience and we got to remember that behind everything that you typed, everything that you put out there, there is a person and that person is doing me that had to read it. So, remember that before you make a a support inquiry next time, uh, that person is doing me and sometimes boy. >> Uh, but support at GitHub was not like support at Amazon. That was that's a whole different story. Yeah, that's that's a whole different experience. >> Well, I mean, if you could compare and contrast like if if somebody were looking to work in support while they're continuing to expand their skills because I do I do think there are those like lifer support people that just like working support. But for everybody who's just sees support as a means to get their foot into a door at a tech company, like what are some things that you think would be like flags like red flags like oh you don't necessarily want to work as support at this company or they're not prioritizing support, they're not giving people enough resources. Like uh like what are some things that people should look out for that are both good indicators and bad indicators that would maybe say, "Oh, maybe this isn't the right company for me." Yeah, I mean that's I love that and also brilliant point and I know amazing people. Shout out to Julian Duket who's now a Salesforce. He's a principal developer advocate now or he might be distinguished. I don't know. Julian, you probably got promoted already and I missed it. Uh also started as a support person. I think I and I know several people in the industry who that was sort of their first steps into the career that they wanted to have for whatever reasons. For me, I needed to legitimize my technical skills and that was one way I did it. Uh because then you know obviously I'm I'm the face of like I am troubleshooting this. I'm I'm I'm fixing problems. I'm finding the the bugs. I'm I'm following the chain of reporting. I'm actually sometimes quickly implementing the fixes myself. Uh that that was important for me at the time. Um I'd say it depends on where you want to be, where you want to go. If you see support as a means to be able to get the experience that you need to the thing that you really want to do, take the job. I think a lot of us sometimes get into this weird and I my god I preach about this a ton especially now I sound like the meme that is like back in my day but for real uh we all want to apply to be CEOs of the company like you're not the CEO of the company you got to start somewhere right and maybe one day you will be I love this picture going around of Satya Nadella that he was like the product marketing for Excel when he started on Microsoft hysterical now he's the CEO of the trillion dollar company Uh but you have to start somewhere. So uh having the humility to understand that you can't just walk in from the street, especially if you're still learning. Uh but give yourself the opportunity to prove what you're made of to learn to learn. If you want to be a self-starter, if you want to be a founder, take the support job. Why not go learn somebody else's dime like make mistakes with their money and then you go off and start your own thing and apply all those lessons. So just look at what it is that you want to take the job. if it's like this is the project I want to be in, maybe this is the company I want to work at, but they don't have the role that I think I'll be excellent at. Um, so it's more an aspirational like let me get in there and prove myself, I go for it. Um, now if you're joining a company that is like a huge tech company, one of the fangs and and you don't have that sort of clear path in your head what it is that I'm trying to get out of this job. Uh, if you're going to be a lifer and and what they're offering you is good and you see that you speak to people that are senior in the company and that same sort of role and they've been there for 15 years, they're going to be there forever, then that's the place for you. But it's more about what you want to get out of the situation really than the company itself. Because for some people, they might be ready for go be the one. My god, I seen a role recently that's like support marketing, Devril. I mean, it was like five different jobs made into one and I'm like, they are smoking something. But you know what? There's a person out there that's like, I'm ready to go in the startup and grind it and just get it done because means to an end. I want to get here and I'm going to use this time for that. So, I think it's more important that you look at what it is that you want to get out of that situation. But massive shout out to the support people because my gosh, they do the Lord's work every >> day. Well, how did you go about transitioning to other roles within GitHub? Because that's like the big dream of people is that they don't have to go right back onto the job market and start applying again. That they can pivot within their current company, the the pivot jobs. And that is like probably the least stressful and often the the most successful type of career move you can make is you're still working at the same company. you still are working with similar tools uh that you've already gotten pretty well acquainted with supporting them and now you're going to be working on helping build out additional functionality through like working as a a product manager. Can you talk about that transition? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think um and and that's sort of like part one of a two-part gripe that I have. But now with with the way that I see some folks working now, I think there is a epidemic lack of ownership right now in your roles. Like one thing that I and I tell this to my boys all the time and I'm like I don't care what career path you choose. It doesn't have to be glamorous. You know, if if whatever you want to do, if if your thing is I don't know, growing orchids, go be the best orchid grower. learn everything there is about orchids like but take ownership and pride in what you're doing. I see a lack of that now. Um so a lot of people they hone into this is my my letters of my job and all I'm allowed to do is open this ticket, read it, reply and be done with it. But you are a whole human being. You have opinions, you have experience as you're learning. You might bring perspectives into the room that were never even considered. I think I shot myself in the foot a lot earlier in my career because I didn't advocate for myself enough uh giving my voice the value that it had at the time. So for me, I was always outside of the scope of what my job was, right? Like I was always looking for opportunities to collaborate crossorganizationally with people. Like you wouldn't believe. I feel like in to this day it's like when you're in the army, you want the cafeteria people like the people who run the chow hall to be your friends because they're gonna hook you up and throw you that extra piece of chicken, right? Let me tell you something. You want the support people to be your friend at your organization because when your customer, when your lead, when whatever is you're doing a trial, you're trying to close a deal and they hit a roadblock and that's going to be your first point of of entry. that's going to be the person that can actually nine times out of 10 solve the problem for you. Um, so it's you want to you want to be the person that gets out there, talks to people, and I I did a lot of that. I always sort of was looking into community and ways that I could, hey, I learned this thing in support. How can I tell people about it? Because you might not even know that your customer might be having the same problem, but you don't know. You're not in sending thousands of tickets. You're not having to churn through this, have these conversations. So I felt like I had so much knowledge and power and I wanted to share it and leaning in community and having being again fre camp and community open source the three things that made my career I'm like I'm going to talk about it. So I did a lot of things that were outside of the scope of what my role was. You know when there was an opportunity to collaborate with Prada, when there was an opportunity to collaborate with Devrell. When I finally joined Devril, eventually one of the posts in Slack were like, "Weren't you always Devell?" And I was like, "I guess I was." I mean, because it was just like the lines were so blurred because I was always kind of finding the opportunity for me to get myself in those rooms and have the conversations. And listen, you're coming at it with the data and the knowledge and the technical skill. So, it's not just, oh, I'm going to make myself part of this conversation. It's no, I I actually have something important to say and it might actually uh make your job easier, so let's talk about it. So, if you're looking at it as a as a path to another career inside your company, start looking at what those people that are in those roles, how can you from the position that you're in benefit them? Again, you want your best friend to be the chaho person. You want your best friend to be the support person, too. No matter what you're doing, you can bring value to those other roles. And it's about like kind of going outside your comfort zone and taking ownership like this is what I wanted. I wanted I did it out of curiosity mostly because again that's why I think I wasn't a lifer and support because I wanted to know why. Well, and if it was something that let's say we deprecated a service by gosh, I was going to go ask people and the audacity of me Quincy because I have no business asking questions like that. >> Well, your customers are asking that, right? The people you're entering. Why is this deprecated? What the heck? Exactly. >> Well, it's good for you to have an an answer in the back pocket you can pull out. Exactly. >> And not just be like, I don't know. >> Exactly. >> It's above my pay grade. I I can never I I I can never understand why people's curiosity starts and ends with their proverbial pay grade. >> Exactly. So, I think that was something that for me was like I always was looking outside of like, okay, and we made that decision because of this. So, let's dig back and let's And you know, sometimes having those conversations actually help inform some of the decisions that were being made around me. And I'm like, well, heck, I guess I do have something important to bring. I guess that experience and that knowledge and power and that empathy for the community do benefit this business after all. So, um, it wasn't like a super smooth out transition. Like to be a thousand% honest. I was looking at other places outside of GitHub because I I started to have those conversations with myself where it's like, okay, are you in in a cycle in a loop of convenience? Are you I I could have stayed there. I could have stay in support but I'm like I I I was itching. I was doing so much more that I felt like I want to do it not just like I love doing things like that for my community and I will do that till the last day of my career. Doesn't matter your meetup have one person or a thousand if you ask me to come I'm going to come. But when it comes to a role in a job in a company that's making money out of your efforts I felt like okay well this needs to be repre