**The American Work Culture: A Complex Issue**

When it comes to work culture, many countries have their own unique challenges and differences. In this conversation, we discussed the complexities of the American work culture, including the prevalence of burnout and the impact on individuals. The speaker mentioned that while they don't identify with the US work culture, they do feel a sense of identity entrenchment in Australia, where people prioritize going home to their families.

**A Comparison with Other Countries**

The speaker noted that other countries, such as China and Japan, have different approaches to work culture, which can sometimes be unhealthy. However, they also acknowledged that no country is completely immune to the problems associated with work culture. The speaker's own experience in working long hours due to high cost of living and stressful work environment made them realize that even in countries like Australia, people still struggle with burnout.

**The Importance of Work-Life Balance**

One of the main points the speaker emphasized was the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance. They noted that people in Australia do want to go home to their families after work, which is a key aspect of achieving this balance. The speaker's own experience in feeling stressed and burnt out highlighted the need for individuals to prioritize their well-being and take care of themselves outside of work.

**Book Recommendations**

In terms of book recommendations, the speaker mentioned two titles that they found particularly inspiring. Firstly, "The Dream Machine" by Paul Grilley was a dense and engaging narrative about the history of computing. The speaker was fascinated by the story of how computing came to be and how it has evolved over time.

**Documentary Recommendations**

For documentary recommendations, the speaker mentioned several channels that they enjoy watching. One of their favorites is Nerd Forge, which creates creative content around video games and technology. They also mentioned another channel called Splashwave, which produces retro gaming documentaries with nostalgic 3D graphics and in-depth analysis of classic arcade games.

**Channel Recommendations**

In addition to book recommendations, the speaker also shared several documentary channel recommendations. Firstly, they mentioned No Clip, a channel that produces high-quality video game development documentaries. The speaker was particularly impressed by their Hades development series, which provides a fascinating insight into the making of a hit game.

**Conclusion**

The conversation with Suz Hinton highlighted the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance and prioritizing individual well-being in today's fast-paced world. By sharing their insights and recommendations, Suz provided valuable advice for individuals looking to navigate the complexities of modern work culture. Whether through books, documentaries, or personal experience, there are many ways to learn from others and find inspiration for achieving a better balance between work and life.

**Author Notes**

Su Hinton is a software developer and educator with a passion for sharing their knowledge with others. They have been working in the field of software development for over 20 years and have seen firsthand the impact that burnout can have on individuals. Su is excited to share their expertise with the Freo Camp community and is always looking for ways to improve and expand their reach.

**Recommendations from Suz Hinton**

* "The Dream Machine" by Paul Grilley

* Splashwave (retro gaming documentary channel)

* No Clip (video game development documentary channel)

By following these recommendations, individuals can gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of modern work culture and learn how to prioritize their own well-being.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is my 20th year in the industry um you know it would be sadly it would be a bit strange if I didn't have a little bit a burnout at this point right welcome back to the Freo Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org each week we're bringing you Insight from developers Founders and ambitious people getting into Tech this week we're joined by Suz Hinton she's a software engineer security researcher and she was one of the pioneers of live coding on Twitch Su how's everything going with you well it's going great thanks um I'm really excited to be on this podcast given that we've known each other for a while so yeah and this is like the first time we've actually had like a synchronous conversation I think we may have been on some podcasts together like guests on like JS party or some of these other podcast but I don't think that I've ever actually talked to you in real time back and forth like this no it's it's always been like email or again yeah it was with the gaggle of other people so yeah yeah well was so cool uh I am hyped to learn about you uh I'm going to be taking notes furiously as we go through this and uh I've already done a lot of research like rereading your awesome article that's on free C Camp about your live stream live coding setup and uh I'm going to be linking that and other cool things that Su mentions in the show notes but yeah let's let's get into it uh I always like to start with just giving people perspective and understanding your kind of origin story as a developer because you have like a really interesting twisting and turning whining path through Tech because you were in Tech very early and then you just went and basically did like every single sub area of tech over the years it seems like yeah we and and the other thing to note is I know I've been talking most of this podcast so if you heard some of what Sue said she does have a little bit of a non-north American accent she hails from Down Under yeah so you're based in Melbourne yeah that's right Melbourne Australia which is southeast kind of like on the way to Antarctica so so you can kind of stop over that's usually how I try and describe it yeah apparently yeah yeah and I had the pleasure of visiting Melbourne uh a few years ago for a conference and it was just I love that City my goodness I'm not sure if I'll ever go again just because it was a huge plane trip to get over there from California I mean like it was like a the longest flight I've ever taken was to Melbourne I think yeah but uh yeah like what was it like growing up in Australia and like what were your early Ambitions as a kid I loved going up here I think I was definitely somebody who felt very lucky very very lucky and we we used to sort of affectionately refer to our country as The Lucky Country just because we knew if you were born here that you already had a really good Head Start in life um wasn't a very ambitious person you know like I you know even just growing up I didn't have huge travel aspirations or anything so it is funny in the end that I ended up living in um in the United States for about 12 years um but yeah I just loved growing up here this city has gotten the world's most livable city award like years and years and years in a row um it's just it is actually an objectively good City even though I'm very biased because I was born and raised here but yeah um there's a reason why I'm living back here again right and I haven't chosen elsewhere so yeah well what did you like what were your early interests because I know like whenever I talk like you're like the third Australian I've interviewed for like the re recent recent history on the podcast and uh it sounds like like a lot of the technology that that we had in the states uh like a lot of like early Apple Computers uh Commodore 64 Amiga uh a lot of those computer like did you grow up did were you lucky enough to like have a computer in your home what type of gear were you working with yeah that's a great question so um I know that a lot of that stuff originated in America but it does kind of find its way to the I guess like secondary and tertiary markets so um my family growing up didn't have like a ton of money uh we I was very fortunate to to grow up middle class but it's not like we could afford to buy like the brand new computers um all the time and it was sort of hard to justify buying one back then um because it was you know the late 80s early 90s it was really only a few are very geeky about computers um this was pre- Windows and all of that so I was lucky enough to inherit a Commodore 64 from my uncle and mind you this was still this was the early '90s so we were starting to move into Windows 3.1 um but I didn't care that it was behind I didn't even know that it was a computer that was behind um but given that there's no sort of goey there's all you do is type into a prompt you know I I turned to my dad and said how do you you use this it looks cool but I don't know how to use it and so he showed me a few prompts uh he taught me a tiny bit of basic and then he just kind of left the the the computer manuals with me um and I just got really hooked straight away so I think that I was was lucky in that I did inherit an older computer because I had to sort of learn computers like the hard way um and so even when we moved into things like Windows 3.1 95 98 things like that I was still trying to code you know um regardless because I found that that was quite interesting yeah and was there anything that pushed you in like a creative Direction like were were there some applications that you were using that like really uh it what point did you start saying I want to learn more computers learn more computers more about computers and I want this to be like a thing that I do when I grow up did was that like in your mind at all yeah the last part was not in my mind at all I just thought it was a fun hobby like again I'm not very ambitious and so I just I was just like I like this computer so I'm going to keep playing with it but I think what really brought things home for me was once you once batch files were a thing in Windows and you can start automating things um that's when I got really excited because you know you can set things up so as soon as you log in to your account you can run a batch file and that batch file will you know pop up all the different programs that on games or like Windows Media Player or something and I just thought that was so cool that you could you know just script something like that um and then once I actually started getting onto the internet um I would catch the bus to my local library because we didn't have the internet at home um I just thought websites were so cool and I figured out that you can actually make them you know I found a book in the library for kids called your own website um I actually ended up finding a copy um years later for nostalgic reasons but I looked at it and I was like oh you just type stuff in notepad this is actually like way easier than I thought it would be and so I think my big moment was really learning how to use computers to do things for you so it was like the batch files but it was also making websites was just such a creative thing as a kid and then putting it on the internet being able to tell your friends they can go look at it at home as well you know there's something very magical about that experience especially back then when not a lot of your friends actually had websites or or you know were interested in that yeah yeah I mean you got to be like the first kid on the Block so to speak or one of the first kids in your class to to have their own web presence if you will yeah it was exciting it was like the late '90s and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever yeah yeah so like uh at what point did you start thinking about like School Beyond High School yeah I originally wanted to be a veter nurse um but I kind of just lost interest like I I really like animals but then I realized that it was going to be maybe a bit of a depressing job I think that unless you go on to become a full uh veterinarian you kind of don't have the nice jobs as vet nurse um so I sort of went back to the drawing board and I didn't really think of computers for the longest time until probably the last year of high school and I had never heard of computer science um I didn't hear of it until years and years later and so I'm just you know looking in the you had this big reference book back then uh in Australia of all of the different university courses you could take and so it was a physical book that you you you sort of like palmed through and I just kind of started looking up information technology and applying to random um universities that way but none of those courses were anything that I actually wanted to do so to be honest I was pretty lost and I didn't know if I could even get a job you know it was still just a hobby for me at that stage so I sort of locked out in the end I think yeah what did you end up doing like in terms of studies yeah so I got into like an information technology degree but it was going to be like a I think a 2 to 3 hour um public transport ride there and back so you know like 4 to 6 hours round trip every day I just figured out that that just wasn't feasible I wasn't ready to move out yet so um my mom actually saw like an advertisement in the local newspaper for a um I guess the equivalent in America is community college but here it's called ta which is tertiary and further education so it's more of a trade school um she found like an advertisement for like um multimedia it was a multimedia course it's now been renamed to interactive media and it just looked like everything I've ever wanted to do in one right it was like sound production and 3D modeling and um video and making interactive games and making websites and things like that so um just got just just kind of just a spur of the- moment thing we went down to the school and applied and it was past the deadline and everything but they actually let me in based on the websites I'd been making as a kid you know um so honestly it was just very serendipitous because that course that sort of twoe um associate of Arts sort of put me on a good pathway for me realizing that this might be a thing that I can do professionally yeah and what kind of uh skills did you walk out of that program with and like I don't want to gloss over the entire program because we've got so much to talk about but like while you're answering that question just like any other like interesting kind of discoveries you had about yourself or about technology during those two years uh getting your Associates yeah I think what I found was that as long as it was creative like it was as long as it was a you know using the computer in a creative sense I would just really latch on and get very engaged um with learning but the course was not really learning any programming there was a little bit of scripting and Flash but it was mostly just doing everything else but programming um which sort of gives you this huge grab bag of skills that I've been able to reach into over and over again over my career and also in my personal life as well you know especially the the sound production the video creation you know because we'll talk about that later but even just the 3D modeling you know that came in way more useful in my life than I thought it ever would um and so it was just good to learn a bunch of different things that I didn't even know was sort of you know a a path of expertise just to get a sample of everything so I sort of came out of that course as a very sort of well-rounded creative technologist I guess you could say yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense um and it sounds almost kind of like the equivalent of like going to like video game design school or something like that is yeah yeah there was actually a video game track that they opened up later on and I was really annoyed because they they released that like a year into my course and I was like oh do I switch to that one that seems so cool yeah well I mean you've described your uh your education as a quote unquote jack of all trades um and uh you know could you talk about why this process was like a big asset just having like such a grab bag of skills uh and like what your first jobs like what they were after you finished this program mhm yeah I think it definitely set me up for um my first couple of jobs I was just sort of taking contract work for a little bit and when you take contract work you know sometimes they will just ask if you um you know if you can do this or do that and they sort of try and sort of use as many skills as they can um and so it meant that I could just jump from contract to contract and not worry about the fact that I was like very Junior um because I could just sort of like use that jack of all trades to problem solve in in a lot of different cases and so for example you know one of my first jobs I was making Flash banners for like a major car company and just making cars Zoom around you know on and I was that person that made the annoying ad banners that you saw on the early internet which you know whenever you AR I'm quite ashamed cleaning of the industry yeah I was just thinking like so for people that don't know uh what sus is talking about like I just had these memories like certainly the early 2000s you you would arrive my kids are like yelling something in incomprehensible about Sour Patch Kids mom's coming to uh escort them away from the premise all right uh so what I was saying is um yeah like I remember you'd like arrive at like IGN or like some video game website and like you'd be like all right I can't wait to read this article like all this stuff starts popping out like all this animation and and of course your site like your internet connection starts chunking and everything is like super duper slow because this overly ambitious you know thing is like blocking your view of the article you're trying to read exactly so you were like developing that those kinds of things for like advertising agencies or who who were you working with yeah so that was me that was me making those annoying ads and they were particularly animation heavy back then just to get the people's attention uh it was the advertising agency Jay Walter Thompson that's who I worked for early in my career um and so yeah they one day they'd say uh we need you to do these flash banners and then another day that' say oh we have this um InDesign document that we're making into a PDF but we want you to add sort of some interactive hotspots in it do you know how to do that and then another time you know they'd be asking me to make this full-on sort of immersive video website that where the video sort of Blends in with the web page and it was it was very sort of futuristic back then um and so being being able to be on the video set as we were sort of filming and me having that background really helped me say yes this is something that I'll be able to blend in and just having all of these different pieces of um even though it was all very surface level obviously like Jack of all trades there was just these really nice instinctive moments where I could come in and and intuitively you know understand how something would be put together and in the advertising agency world that is just so bizarre are just really wild stuff happening all the time um thinking on your feate was very high highly valued at the time I guess yeah so a lot of people who are entering software development like the way I describe the free cocan podcast audience is like onethird developers one-third High School University students and onethird people who are working in other fields that want to get into software development maybe they're driving trucks maybe they are working as an accountant maybe they are uh just coming out of rehab or coming out of incarceration or any number of different things right maybe they're just getting out of like uh you know some sort of situation where they were previously like a stay-at-home spouse and now they have to reenter the workforce right so like like there's a wide variety of people and a lot of those people may have like skills from a past life like they used to work in uh one field or another like as a developer just day-to-day do you find yourself calling on all these kind of random skills that at the time may may have felt like I'm not sure if I'm ever actually going to use this in a professional capacity like have you have you found just like random things that you picked up to continue to be useful and helpful for getting things done yeah yes and no I think it greatly depends on what your profession is you know like I think that there'll be little random things that come in handy and obviously I can't comment on that because I haven't done a lot of those different careers but um um just things from time to time so for example you know I've never worked at a video game agency um and I've never you know had to do anything professional in that capacity but because we played with some of those physics a little bit in tap um I've being able to just you know intuitively understand when a certain animation needs to happen on a website when you're using CSS animations and like the the tweening or the key um you know creating the of just like drawing a blank what are they called the key key key frames no not yeah key frames is that like like when you're like animating something like you you kind of like yeah put the character in different shapes and then the software interpolates like what the animation is supposed to happen Okay M yeah I don't know anything about animation I just got lucky and knew that for that term yeah exactly and so that stuff came along for web pages like years and years and years later right like flash was already dead I thought okay I'm never going to use any of those skills over again um and then all of a sudden you know we had things like key frames and CSS and I'm like oh my God you know I can actually use that now or even when 3js came to um the web right um in JavaScript you know I was at a hackathon once and um somebody wanted to create this sort of like 3D lathing system and you know I already had some of the kind of theory on that even just like calculating the frost room and things like that and you know for actually programmatically creating it even though I'd never touched programmatic 3D modeling I had that you know intuitive background where I could figure things out and I sort of had that that that you know reasoning in order to problem solve so it hasn't come in handy all the time but it sort of surprises me when it does because it does tend to be quite spontaneous like that yeah yeah that's cool it sounds like this uh broad skill said has been very helpful so from developing uh you know banner ads and and other things that advertising agencies needed like like where did you move from there in terms of like the what was the next step step in your career yeah advertising was definitely not for me like if you've seen Mad Men um it's very much I love Mad Men I love I love that show we talk about it often it's like my favorite show of all time but I would never want to live in that world that's that's funny yeah exactly exactly it is funny that it's one of your favorite shows but yeah it it was very much like that right like every every agency is its own flavor of that depending on the decade and like you know there's just different different nuances to it it just wasn't for me I think I was there for maybe a year a year and a half or something I forget but I just wanted something a bit more quiet um and something that wasn't advertising it just didn't sit with me you know I just was like I don't like making these annoying things that people have to run into on the internet right it just didn't feel right so um I ended up just pivoting into different roles so I moved into e-learning next um I was actually teaching part-time um the back at the the tap the university that I studied at I went back to teach for 3 years to part-time so I just moved right into education actually so I was sort of I was doing QA and accessibility testing for a bunch of e-learning tools that are used in various ta institutions in Australia and then yeah I would then go in Moonlight as a teacher and so that was nice and then I just worked for a bunch of web shops right like consultancies and stuff before you know working for more SAS um companies later in the last in the sorry in the the second part of my career so far so it was just kind of stumbling around trying to find stuff that you know was was a bit more morally in line with what I wanted to work on yeah so you had problems with like working in the advertising agent agency industry if you will I mean that whole industry is based around like manufacturing desire of products that people don't necessarily need right getting them to spend money getting people going to De lots of products that are very bad for obviously Mad Men the whole the whole theme going through the entire Series this isn't a big spoiler because it comes up in the very first episode is cigarettes right like cigarettes are an unnecessary thing that are incredibly damaging to people like they're damaging to the environment they're damaging obviously to Public Health like uh a huge portion of my tax dollars that I pay are going to help people who smoked a bunch of cigarettes and are now need all this end of life care that's caused by that and you know like man like Don Draper the main character himself is like addicted to smoking and he can't quit and he just kind of like accepts that's that's one of the things I love about madman sorry to go off on a Madman tangent but like it was no I get it inconceivable that you could actually quit and he's just like really pissed off at the cigarette companies whom he's been benefiting from his entire career as an Advertiser advertising executive right um he's just upset like because he realizes like I'm hooked this is going to kill me and I can't quit like I I'm just going to be addicted to this for the rest of my life he feels like he's been hoodwinked essentially and it's like kind of like the it's like this angry chip on his shoulder throughout the series but um but yeah like I I can totally see like I have lots of friends who are in advertising and not everybody's advertising something as damaging as cigarettes but I can I can I can still see like maybe you could talk about that like don't worry about sliding the advertising industry just talk about like how you really feel about the field having worked in it like were there any moments where you really felt you look back and you regret doing certain things that you did yeah it's good because I I it's a good question because I did go in very naive right and the that was sort of the job to get back in the day if you um were kind of more on the creative side of software as well um and so it was so exciting you know I was competing with other graduates in my class for that job like we all wanted that job so badly and so to be honest you know I think there are a lot of parallels with that nowadays in certain jobs that seem really cool but might be a bit morally questionable um but that was my first experience with it really opened my eyes I don't know it was just working in advertising was really cool for a lot of different reasons it was very like fastpaced you know there were times when we were pulling all nighters to um Pitch to to win a certain account you know like there was this big Lottery account that we were trying to win and we made their entire pit into a huge game show in one of the meeting rooms so we converted one of the rooms into a massive game show and everyone had to dress up and you know and so I was being picked up at 4 in the morning to come and work on the interactive PDF because you know that's when the designers actually finally finished the work went to bed right and then I got the phone call in the middle of the night and that's like really really bad right that's a very bad thing and we don't encourage that but that was sort of the adrenaline rush of working in advertising where sometimes you get a bit Stockholm syndrom in where you you're all in it together you know and so it's exciting and we might win the pitch and things like that and you sort of feel like you're part of something um and so I would say that it was just very mixed I wasn't always creating annoying crappy things were websites for um Brands as well where you know the the the the actual user had to want to go to the website they had to want to go to kelloggs.com or something and you know visit that website and so we weren't sort of annoying them in that way and so I would just say it was mixed but after I left I definitely regretted that I added to the advertising on the internet because I think that back then it was pretty simple there wasn't there was no such thing as tracking pixels and things like that at least when I first started but by the time I moved to the industry and I saw how much more creepy and manipulative advertising was getting that's when I started feeling embarrassed that I was sort of part of the beginnings of it if that makes sense yeah that totally makes sense because like adte advertising technology like being able like there have been a lot of breakthroughs and trying to successfully get you to part with your money really or or to make some sort of big purchasing decision on behalf of your company or whatever it is uh and the thing that uh it works right like if you go raise a bunch of venture capital and you have this war chest uh you can go out and you can pretty much guaranteed get customers through running Google ads or Facebook ads right and uh because there's just this big audience and you can go through and you can microt Target and you can ab test and you can just kind of use these different processes to arrive at an ad that will convert um were you involved in any of that stuff or did that that come later after you got out of the industry yeah thankfully I wasn't involved with that um and back then because internet speeds were so slow especially in Australia you know we were required to keep those flash banners really small like I submitted I uploaded one to you know the marketing platform once and I got a this was back in the day you had a phone on your desk too yeah like I would get a call from the guy at the marketing agency totally separate from the advertising agency and he'd be like yeah so your flash Banner was 16 kiloby but we needed to be 15 and so you know we we did have razor thin file size margins back then and that's quite hard to do when you have like a car asset and the jpeg background for it and a bunch of text and a bunch of key frames and things like that you had to get really creative you know yes yeah you had to get really creative asiz yeah sorry I didn't mean to interrupt you by the way like there's like a big time difference between Texas and Melbourne uh so if it seems like I'm interrupting Sue or if Su is taking a little longer to react like it's hard to get much farther around the earth than you and I are right now when we're talking to one another so I just for the sake of the audence I'm wide into the AET yeah yeah me too I've got like 500 megabits like super duper fast internet you've got super duper fast internet the physical distance the packets need to travel is just so long so sorry anyway uh saying not that fast anyway um yes yeah so you know you really had to creatively optimize that kind of stuff and I felt that that was at least considerate right where you didn't want to encroach on the user you didn't want them to have to pay extra for like downloading extra stuffff junk and so back then um as well this was when I was doing this right when Facebook had just launched publicly right and I would say that Facebook has been responsible for a lot of the really creepy and really manipulative advertising right you know and I think that was sort of the dawn of the more sophisticated advertising the same with Google when Gmail came out and they started advertising on you know the AdSense the keywords and things it was right at the dawn of that so thankfully I didn't get to be part of that you know I'd left and it's not as if I saw that and thought I'm getting out I don't like it obviously it took me took us all a few years to really understand what was going on and and for those those really creepy tactics to come out um but yeah I was lucky enough that I sort of don't really attach myself to that but I just yeah still feel a bit dodgy while the same yeah so where do you go from there like like you've got these skills uh but you're kind of disenchanted with the industry that you're in so so you said you went back to school uh which is really cool by the way like going to teach I heard that you kind of even helped rewrite some of the curriculum that you yourself learned when you were at uh I'm going to get the the acronym wrong uh the Community College equivalent in t yes uh yeah like did teaching did that like fire you up did you enjoy teaching yeah I did actually I really enjoyed it um I'm not sure why I just really liked you I mean you you're the perfect person to talk to about this um you know you know when you get that you see that light bulb go off on in someone and you know you see them actually like really enjoy what they're learning and they feel like oh I can actually do this too and it's the same as like any hobby like I think any hobby that you do most people are very very happy to teach somebody else because just bringing them in and and sharing that Joy with someone is really really great so that was something that I think was what motivated me um to teach I wanted to spread the same joy that I felt when I sat down at the Commodore 64 for the first time um and I rewrote the curriculum mostly just because uh when we did our web design 3 semester uh it was using a Microsoft access database and cold fusion and that was sort of starting to become uh just old Legacy kind of software and so I thought this isn't Preparing People for the workplace very well so I rewrote it in PHP and basically the um we did the wamp stack in the end so the windows uh Apache uh MySQL and um PHP stuck so I just rewrote the whole curriculum to do that and instead of creating um I forget what we actually made in that c fusion class but I said okay everyone's going to make a Blog and then you can use that also as your portfolio if you want when you graduate um because back then you had to actually show portfolios to get web jobs you weren't doing like leak code or hacker ranker or anything like that right um and so I just rewrote it to make it more useful for them when they graduated and I just thought that cold fusion and access was just not going to be the way going forward so that was the main reason why I rote it I just thought it would be more engaging that way yeah well I I do want to get to live coding uh before we get to live coding though um I mean again I'm trying to like piece together the chronology of your career in real time but uh but like teaching and live coding have got to be pretty related like those skills that you got helping light bu go off in people's heads like face to face and now you're jumping on Twitch and you're basically just coding live right there and like them and like showing people everything you're doing and explaining what you're doing and talking out loud thinking out loud and interacting with chat and stuff maybe you can talk about the process of getting into live coding what inspired you to first start doing it yeah for sure I mean I got inspired by the people that were doing it really early on so um Casey from hand handmade hero um he I think was one of the very very first to do it um but I think what gave me the boot up the bum so to speak to to actually try it myself was I had a friend who was doing um he was doing open source and he just I think he just did YouTube live or something like that I forget what he did but he just um I just don't want to put him on blast so I'm just giving him some privacy by not calling out who they are but um he just did some open source he's like hi you know I work on I'm helping to maintain pouch DB I'm just like you know I just need to do some open source work I just want you to show I just want to show people like what is it like to actually maintain open source cuz I think there's a lot of sort of misconceptions at the time know I think this was back in 2015 2014 there were just a lot of misconceptions about open source and contributing to it and you know a lot of people sort of put open source maintainers on a big platform and found them intimidating so he's just like oh just you know just sit and watch what I do for an hour and watch me flipping through issues and closing them out or replying to them and he was also just showing that there's a lot of drudgery in it it's not just like heroic coding and pushing up pull requests you know there's also just a lot of staring at something and figuring out if it is a bug or not or like answering somebody you know back and forth in an issue so I just thought that was really interesting I really appreciated it at the time because all of the open source stuff I did was so small and it was only me and so seeing someone maintain something big that everyone sort of had to collaborate on I thought was really interesting so I remember putting a comment on his YouTube video saying this is actually really cool maybe I could do the same for my embedded Hardware libraries because people are scared of those kinds of projects and maybe I can show people that it's really not a big deal it's just still JavaScript at the end of the day that you're writing so that was the kind of origin story of why I started I was literally like hey I found this useful maybe I'll do my own version of it that sort of sheds some of the intimidation factor for like a slightly different angle you know yeah and we didn't really even get into like your love of embedded development but like you've been very vocal about that um over the years like being really into like building things like physical Hardware like like uh you know I think you you had like the Ada of fruit like you know chip set of the month thing or something the box that they was in you that was so cool the monthly boxes yeah that was so cool yeah it fruit is like the raspberry pie company right like they they they ship out raspberry pies no that's element 14 but they do do they do make their own stuff yeah so they make their own boards and um things like that yeah ad fruit are amazing thing they based out of New York so and and you've got like quite a bit like I mean you're kind of blocking it in the frame for people who are watching the video they can see you got like a a detailed workbench like a pegboard is that like a some sort of like uh you know CNC machine or something or a 3D printer what is that big thing behind you the big boxy thing yeah yeah so that's a it's a 3D printer laser cutter and CNC machine in one um yeah it's really it's very big it's very heavy I had to actually um so I I bought that as an Ikea table you know with the legs and everything but I had to then go and buy a new tabletop like basically a huge slab of uh plywood from the hardware store and paint it just to be able to support the weight of it which is quite funny but yeah so um I am really interested in that I've always been interested in that and that's because of it again a teacher in my T course one day brought in an arcade cabinet that he built from scratch um and it was amazing it was like the sit down coffee table one and coil he showed us how yeah is that what they called a cocktail that's what they're called in the states like cocktail model it's like basically like Pac-Man or something where you got one controller on each side and the screen kind of flips depending on that's exactly what it was yeah yes yeah it was really cool um so he made one of those and he just asked people if they were interested to come in on a Saturday so we all came in on a Saturday and he just grabbed it out of the back of his car and he took the whole thing apart and showed us how it works and back then there was no Arduino so what you did was you took the circuit boards out of keyboards old recycled keyboards computer keyboards and then you just like kind of um hacked them and solded your own sort of uh wires to different you know parts of the keyboard Matrix and you use that to you know solder your joystick buttons and and things like that to the actual um yeah to the actual arcade machine and so you know he was showing us how to do all of this and he's like here's how to avoid all the ghosting problems on your keyboard because back then there were ghosting issues what is ghosting exactly I just thought that was the yeah so ghosting used to be a thing on um old school keyboards like the PS2 connected keyboards where because like keyboards are sort of like on a on a circuit Matrix if you pushed certain key combinations too fast you'd either get the wrong keystroke or you wouldn't the keystroke wouldn't register I can't remember exactly just cuz I haven't needed this knowledge for a long time but it was called ghosting where you'd either get the wrong key press or you'd get like another different random letter because of um certain letters having certain uh or certain Keys having certain relationships in the electronic circuit um where it would just cause issues so um I guess cross wires so to speak so it was really interesting so he would he would show us how to kind of pick the different letters on the keyboard to avoid the ghosting issues when people were playing a video game cuz obviously that would be very frustrating so sorry that was a really long story but that was sort of how I got involved in it and I remember I started like I started collecting all these old keyboards I was that person that was like yes and then I'm going to make something with them these you know and then a few years later the Arduino came out and I was like oh this this is what we needed this whole time so then I went and did an Arduino course in Sydney um and the rest was kind of History I think this was 2006 2007 I did that and then I just started playing with embedded stuff like in my spare time for for basically every year since yeah and so like even today you still will like bust out like gear and just start Hardware hacking yeah so I don't have a lot of time these days just cuz I went back to UNI which we'll talk about later but um I still like make stuff like I'm just going to grab something don't judge me cuz I'm wearing my slippers cuz it's cold no worries and I'm going to verbally describe so she's got a big room she's walking across it uh she's got again this beautiful white workbench uh with like perfectly spaced and like like very deliberately planned out like where you're going to put your drill and where you're going to put all your different you know screwdrivers and stuff it's a really cool looking U backdrop uh so she's back in her chair cuz a lot of people like half the people watch yeah sorry sorry sorry I didn't me interrupt you no no go on I was just going to say cuz like about half the people that listen to like maybe a little more than half of the people will just listen to the audio Edition like I just listen to the audio Edition um I don't usually watch the video but for those of people who are watching the video Edition yes we do have a video Edition on YouTube you can go there and you can see what su's background is or if you've got like a a phot if you want to just snap a quick photo of it I can just throw it up in the show notes and people can like link directly to the photo um yeah she's given me the thumbs up so it sounds like we're going to have a cool workspace photo we might if you take a good one like and we can get it into a square we could even potentially put you at your desk on the Instagram because Freo Camp does have an Instagram it's about you know I don't know we've got maybe like several hundred images of people in their work workbenches and stuff so proud of it um but yes what' you grab show us yeah so I'm really lucky to have that space behind me by the way um so I'll just describe it again for the audio people this is something that I made years and years ago but I actually got it out recently just to repair it because it broke when you know one of my moves that I did um so it's supposed to be like a a a um one to one size replica of the metro card from New York City subway so it's like a train ticket and so the actual silk screen on the um circuit board is supposed to look exactly like it you've got the magnetic strip here which is Sil silk screened in like a big white strip um and so it's got like a little greeting card sticker that sorry speaker that you can take just out of one of those musical greeting cards um and it has like a little um 3D printed sort of like gramophone style sort of you know that horn shape yeah so it's just supposed to play Train noises that's literally all it does um but it it sort of shows the different skills that come together right and why have a 3D printer just so you can do that um and you know the soldering iron behind me you know I use that to actually repair it so the speaker actually broke off um and the wire snapped as well so I resolder that together glued this back down with a little bit of super glue and then it's it's good to go again so so that's just an example little things like that will it work right now yeah I don't know if you'll be able to hear it cuz it's very soft CU it's not an amplified speaker okay the cling doors please that's pretty cool yeah that that came through fine I think so it just does the you know stand clear of the closing doors and that was a noise that I heard every day in New York City when I lived there so it makes me very nostalgic yeah yeah and I love it like on the note of geeking out about mass transit I love mass transit whenever I go to a new city I love to like just take their train system around of course I live in a city that doesn't even have a train system unfortunately well technically we do it's just like I I've never used it before cuz it only goes in like to certain parts of town that I've never even been to basically like you can take it to get to like the the fairgrounds basically where they have this the Texas state fair with the giant cowboy guy Big Tex but that's it and I've never got an opportunity to write it anyway sorry for the the you know tangent about mass transit but yeah like so you're building things uh you're you're F you're feeling inspiration and you're just like you have the skills and you have the gear to be able to like 3D print things or use subtractive you know um technology like CNC to get metal into a certain shape that you need it um so you you have your own kind of Hardware lab that you can go into and get things done with yeah that's what I call it behind me the lab yeah are there so what's the most ambitious Hardware project you've worked on um this is going to sound unexpected but I it was actually when I was working for Microsoft um I was trying to I was working with like a medical medical equipment company for the hollow lens okay I guess that's mic the yeah yeah so I would say that that's embedded because it was like an actual kind of wearable device right and we were trying to um basically set up like the beginnings of what sort of live streamed 3D virtual experiences right so let's say we had something so the hollow lens is not like the um some of the other virtual reality headsets um although it's mixed reality everything all the processing was on the actual device so you didn't connect it to a computer like the Oculus or whatever right so it couldn't you know it didn't have as much power as something like an Oculus Rift uh and so if if something if we had to do like 3D manipulations or something like that that were like really really processor intensive we couldn't do it on the device so we were trying to figure out a way to um use like streaming technology um and I think we were trying to do it over RTC I think um and directex we were trying to figure out how to actually like have this very sort of zero latency you know like the sensors in the hollow lands would would transmit over that RTC channel the data Channel over to the server then the server would use directex to render the actual 3D view based on how you moved your head and then like whip it back to the machine to render as quickly as possible and so I thought that was probably one of the more challenging things that I've worked on because I had to like learn a I mean I'd never worked with RTC before um and I just had to just really think about how to optimize things as much as possible and just the concept of realtime streaming was sort of new back then you know I don't think stadia was was a thing and I don't think Amazon's version of game streaming was a thing so for us we were like is it even actually possible like are we going to achieve the latency we want without making people feel motion sick right with that sort of slight delay so I thought that was actually a really interesting project that I worked on yeah what was the result were you able to figure out a way to do it in a way that didn't make people emotion sick yeah so we were able to finish the Prototype and the job that I was in at the time that's all we kind of got to do yeah we're like here's the Prototype we've validated it and then you just kind of move on so I'm not sure what actually happened to that given that it's proprietary and sort of like not sort of public so yeah yeah you've worked at a lot of big tech companies and I will get back to live coding but like since you mentioned you're work at Microsoft you worked at like was like a funny thing that her sister had done she' worked at like all the different fan companies but uh what was your time as zos like yeah not a lot of people ask about that so I appreciate that um it was my first job in the US and I was moving to Las Vegas so like there weren't really a lot of places to apply for jobs there and I was just like I someone told me about Zappos because they're just being bought by Amazon they're not a thing in Australia you don't like order from zappos.com or anything and they're just like oh it's sort of a bit cooky there it's quite creative you know I think that it fits your personality you should totally apply and it was a total moonshot um but I managed to get a job there and I was there for almost 4 years and it was wild um probably one of the most formative jobs that I've had in my career just because of the timing of it and when it was good it was really good um a lot of the Amazon stuff started some of that culture started seeping in towards the end which was why I left but the first 2 or 3 years were again just really formative very influential on me the front end team there at the time was world class I mean like world class um you know they cared a lot about performance which is something that I'd never really had to um worry about in my career to a degree like I worked for mostly advertising Consulting so you just created a website for your client and then you handed it off and you never saw it again you know and they were very simple websites they weren't super JavaScript heavy maybe some Google Maps and that was about it um and so I hadn't really written a lot of JavaScript either so I wouldn't know the first thing about performance and so I learned so many things in that job and the front-end team were just so talented and so nice um and so inspiring and so I think that was when I went from just stumbling through my career to oh I actually want to be on this level I want to be at this caliber and it really sort of P me to improve a lot so um even just outside of the really cool culture of Zap where it's very creative or the meeting rooms really zany and you know the CEO uh at the time was was quite a character I just found it really inspiring because of the front-end team like they've really brought me up to the next level of skills yeah so it what was it like moving to the states I mean a huge proportion of the people listening to this podcast are from overseas and a lot of them would love to come and work for one of the big frankly like high-paying US tech companies because uh Americans may take this for granted that like tech jobs just pay a a lot of money uh often like a lot more than you know working in accounting or working in other not like non software engineering fields of engineering for example um but like moving to the US from Australia like there are lots of cultural differences even though you got the same language and everything like had you been to the US before you came to uh apply this was your first trip to the US really no um I'd been to I've been overseas once I went to venatu which is just an an island off the you know a few hours from the coast of uh Northeastern Australia no I'd never been to America um my partner scored a job in Nevada and so it was more just like we were going for his job but I quickly discovered that you can't just move to America like you sort of have to have a Visa and that usually means you have to have a job um and so that was the reason why I moved overseas um but yeah the I actually took a pay cut um because at the time like Nevada was really low cost of living and the front end engineers at zapo weren't valued in the same way they they were seen as less technical than the backend Engineers so we got paid a lot less than some of the other Engineers of the company they then corrected that a few years later but I took a pay cut actually to go work in America which I know is not the usual path but after that obviously like my the the jobs I got after that and especially at some of the larger tech companies obviously I started earning a lot more money there so it was a wild experience to go from you know being on a salary that I was relatively comfortable with but had to sort of budget carefully and things like that right and couldn't live outside my means to then being on salaries that were just almost uncomfortable for me me you know because I just thought it was so much money um really wild experience very challenging to get through the first set of immigration paperwork as well I wasn't prepared for that and that was quite stressful so for anyone who has that in mind that's something to expect how long did you live in the US total 12 years I think yeah did you get did you apply for like a green card or any sort of permanent residency or did you always have the plan to go back to a Australia yeah it sort of flip-flopped a lot when I first moved there it was only going to be for a year and then I thought I'll stay a few years but I'm definitely going back um and then I kept staying and I've been in some long-term romantic relationships over there right so if I was in a long-term relationship at the time I thought oh well this sort of has given me some incentive to actually stay um and so at some point you know I did start working on a Green Card application just to make things a bit easier for myself because it's really stressful to know that when you lose your job or if you quit you need one immediately or you have to basically Deport yourself um and I found that enormously stressful it was always a big thing in my head I felt like I couldn't really buy property or do anything permanent there until I had that permanent residency so I did actually spend a number of years trying and failing to get a green card it's not as easy as it sounds and some people just have a much harder time than other people sometimes it's just really bad luck but I never really got there so for that entire 12 years I was sort of precariously on a a work visa but I think that's very normal for people from um countries like India where the Green Card applications are oversaturated in for their quota um so it's not as if you know that's a unique experience I know some people that are waiting you know 20 to 30 years for their green card so um I don't want to trivialize that either but I was in a similar situation where I just felt like I kept running into dead ends or you know the pandemic happened which put a hold on a lot of um Green Card applications I know that right now because of all the layoffs in Tech most companies have to pause their Green Card applications for everyone because the Market's too saturated with um American citizens so uh because of the process you can't justify hiring somebody from overseas so it's it's just a very fraught process um but I did try uh to get there it just didn't happen so yeah yeah I mean how do you feel I mean it's not too back too bad of a fallback plan moving to the world's most livable City where you happen to also have grown up I was going to say yeah yeah I come from a lot of privilege and so you know there was a point where I realized that it wasn't worth all the trade-offs but also I come from an an amazing country and so you know having that up my sleeve was always something that was obviously very comforting for me so yeah that helped a lot thank you for bringing that up yeah uh so again you worked at a lot of big tech companies you got to like learn JavaScript from people who were underappreciated by you know do you know when you started actually live coding 2016 I think I think 2016 yeah yeah something like that um yeah no I just gave it a go and I just told a couple of people on social media and my family I was doing it and I think like three to five people showed up for that first one and uh I remember rehearsing it the night before cuz I was so nervous to Live code um I was like oh I need to actually have some idea of what I'm doing otherwise I'm just going to like draw a massive blank so uh yeah that was sort of when I started and then I ended up just finding it a really good excuse to work on open source task that I needed to do but I didn't really feel like doing so that's kind of why it continued I was like oh this is actually like really helpful for me and hopefully if people watch that's a bonus so that was sort of how I got started with it yeah and maybe you can talk about what like a typical session would be like when you sat down and I realized that you haven't streamed in like 3 years if you go to to noop cat twitch.com noat uh which is your your old handle n o o p k a t I believe um y yeah uh there's it just there's like literally nothing there it just says last streamed three years ago and there's no like video on demand it's like it and I went there and I was just like I really wanted to watch your old streams in preparation for this but I don't I don't know if any of those were preserved anywhere is it just lost time or do you have like some hard drive with all the they're all on the hard drive um so I was very diligent about backing them up and things like that so they're not lost of time they're just not online so yeah yeah well um what was it like like the you did it for a few years I think uh like do you remember how regularly you were like how it progressed um just what the experience was like cuz live coding is seeing kind of a Resurgence like I was just talking with the primagen like last week and uh he he's a YouTube or he he records on Twitch and then he takes it chops it up and has an editor that puts it onto YouTube and he's very um I think deliberate about how he approaches it but um you know the way that you were doing it was it when I when I watched it back in the day it felt very very different vibe it was much more chill uh much less like social commentary it was much much more just like a a love of The Craft and just like focusing on the code I didn't it didn't seem like there were nearly as many memes or inside jokes or anything it just seemed very wholesome is that how you remember it yeah that's that's how I remember it I think it was different days back then but also I think I had different motivations but I don't want to speak for the other streamers so I W elaborate on that I just think that I came in with it with those different motivations I only did it once a week which is not something that twitch really likes to do they want you to do it more often but I just knew that that was sustainable 2 hours every Sunday morning was when I did it um and I usually so for the first few I would just pick a feature I wanted to implement in a open in an open source library then after that I was like I need to make this even more sustainable for myself and enjoyable and so that I don't have to spend hours grinding before you know to figure out what I want to do I would just literally like roll out of bed put clothes on put a put a little bit of makeup on and then show up and say all right let's look through the issues and maybe the night before if I was particularly drawing a blank on like I don't even know what I'd work on I'd go through the issues and you know on one of my repos and and sort of think okay has someone opened a poor request sometimes someone would actually open a PO request the night before and I could tell they would hoping I'd review it on the stream so you know I tried to sort of look for something to prioritize um you know as far as that went so it was a very different vibe um we did have only a couple of inside jokes but they weren't sort of we would always explain them and you know we they were very subtle anyway um and so it was just it was supposed to be cozy time it wasn't my intention I never really designed My Stream in to be a certain way I just wanted to show up be myself not be a character get some work done you know that kind of thing so yeah and it was practical in the sense that you were actually working on real stuff that you'd be interested in working on like even if you weren't streaming uh open source yeah yeah pretty much what role has open source played in your career and in your life a lot yeah I actually feel really bad because I when I so I streamed for 5 years and then I decided to just sort of step away um from it for a lot of different reasons um you know none of them were like really negative reasons or anything and I stopped working on open source too it's like I didn't have that sort of reason to get up and do it on the weekend so I feel bad I have stepped away from that a bit it is something I want to get back into this year um but it's had a huge impact on my life um in a lot of different ways and it's again it wasn't something that I designed I did open source because I saw other people around me doing it and I thought it was a really cool just Concept in general right and I thought it was again it was just a a very admirable um thing to do and I wanted to be sort of part of that and contribute you know my perspective on embedded software and things like that and and you know it's a really lovely way to meet a community um and hopefully Inspire other people too and so but through that you know I accidentally got introduced to all sorts of employment opportunities and even the live coding you know I had a couple of years in in developer relations as a result of that because people saw my stuff and reached out and wanted to hire me and so there was a lot of unintentional benefits to it a lot of amazing privileges that I don't think I would have foreseen that I know that some people we're getting into streaming now they do it with the aim of achieving those things because they can see that it's possible but it was very surprising to me how much the stuff I was just doing for myself ended up sort of being noticed by other people and and and opened a lot of doors for me that I didn't necessarily um you know plan for which is awesome but it's been mostly jobs and just meeting new people and being able to speak at conferences and all sorts of stuff yeah well I want to talk a little bit about like more recently since you stepped away from live coding uh you know recently you've gone and you've got like a whole lot of different CompTIA certifications you went back and you got like a proper like four-year degree from Western Governor's University where Bo K's studied where several people who've been on the free cocam podcast got their undergrad in uh computer science uh maybe you can talk about like the back to school back like hitting the books again because you had like this pretty you were really high up in your career and from the outside from my perspective it sounds like you're like hey I want to climb down this ladder and I want to go climb up this ladder like this perched against a different bookshelf almost that that's kind of how I view it is that an accurate representation what was going through your mind you didn't want to like just stay in this one field okay sort of um I think that I see school in a different way to most people do I know that school is or school I guess college or university I know that it's very heavily um focused on like workplace career finding a job things like that um but I love learning and I love having a structured learning environment and because I had such an amazing experience with that tap course I just it just really engaged me um I still wanted to actually go and get a full degree so that is what's called an advanced diploma here um in interactive media that's what I technically have but it's not the same like I always felt like I missed out because I just like didn't end up going to college and getting an actual degree I just felt that that is a an experience for me that I would just really cherish and enjoy and and it had nothing to do with a career or anything like that it's just it felt like such a luxury Indulgence almost to be able to go to a place that is catering for you to learn things there are experts there that you can talk to to and it is a structured environment so that you understand what you you don't have to figure out what you don't know because a lot of the time you don't know what you don't know right and so someone is giving you that syllabus and saying here are the things that we think it's important for you to know and again that just felt like this huge Indulgence to be able to do and so I've been dreaming about going back to college for years and years and years and so cyber security was something I was really interested in but felt very intimidated by how broad and how huge and how deep it can go so I wanted to have that sort of expertise to sort of lead me and and give me the foundations I guess yeah what did you do like like describe kind of your path into cyber security from a more you know jack of all trades software developer type background yeah I think cyber security just kept coming up again and again and again um I think obviously it's become like a huge problem right like we've actually seen sort of the um the growth of things like ransomware and scammers and you know whing that even in the age of of you know generative AI now that's another tool that scamers are using it just kept popping up again and again and again and every time it popped up for me I just got like really excited um because I just thought it was really really fascinating and so you know I did OS training at uh zapo which I now know is a privilege that most workplace don't give their software Engineers they just expect you to know but when I started it was mandatory that I did an OAS training that was held on site at zapo and that was my first introduction actually to just hacking and threat actors and uh how you can manipulate websites to you know to gain things and that just blew the top off the lid off my brain you know and I was like this is just ridiculously cool I've never thought about software in this adversarial way and I was just obsessed um and so you know for years after that I just kept sort of reading different books you know I'd read like uh books such as cuckoo's egg which is an amazing sort of you know dramatized reenactment of um of you know something that happened at Berkeley um in California it was so cool and then stuck net I read about stuck net and I was like oh my God that's so cool um and so I just it just kept coming up as a reoccurring theme and with embedded iot stuff you know that iot devices are riddled with software um security issues and so it just kept popping up again and again and again in my career and and I'm interested in it enough on a personal level that I decided to go to school right just to actually finally learn what I could about it yeah and you also earned some certifications which I think is worth noting because a lot of people out there listening to this may be thinking about getting like some like the Security Plus or network Plus or some of I think they're all CompTIA certifications there may be some additional certifications from other vendors can you just like quickly rattle off some of the certifications you've earned over the past few years and what you learned from them what they involve for people that might be interested in getting them so just a disclaimer um all of those certifications were requirements for my bachelor degree in cyber security so WGU like puts a big sort of heavy um focus on getting indust certifications um which you know a lot of Industry actually recommends that students get that's what they desire in new grads especially cyber security new grads so I got um A+ I've always wanted to get my comper A+ actually and I I was so emotional when I finally got it um so A+ Network plus Security Plus um cyber analyst plus pentester plus um I got the um there were a bunch of other ones that I I ass squ um I think like secure it's basically the is ISC squ equivalent of Security Plus I feel so bad cuz now I can't remember them off the top of my head I also got project plus which is a project management one which was I actually found really interesting uh a lot of people hated that one but I thought it was useful because project management is useful in any kind of capacity right whether you're planning to move cities whether you're like you know writing software right so I found that really helpful so yeah just a whole bunch of them there were more I've just forgotten them so yeah and yeah the experience was really good what was the experience like like you just studied did you actually have to report to a physical testing center and like take a test with like some somebody standing over you to make sure you didn't cheat for one of them I had to um and that was the ISC squ one because they do like a palm vein scan to make sure that you are the identity you're saying w you are and I got sort of searched and I had to put my glasses on a tray and that to spin the glasses around to make sure that they weren't augmented glasses it was really intense but the the rest of them I actually did Via online proctoring and that's because I was doing that bachelor degree during the pandemic so CompTIA had actually pivoted to allowing people to test from home um so I don't know if that's still an option but it definitely was during the pandemic where they would install basically spyware software on your computer which sucked um and then you had to quit everything you had to show the Proctor that you weren't running any like cheating software or anything and then you would do your exam on the computer at home so I was lucky that I didn't have to find a testing center for most of them because I think that just adds extra stress yeah and uh so you finish the degree you finish these certifications you're going back into the job market but this time not as a general software engineer frontend developer like all the different things you were doing before but as an actual security researcher what was that process like and you know what was it like kind of assuming that new role and yeah it was really cool I think that um what gave me a soft Landing was that it was still a software role but I was just moving over to work for a research team um and so I'd be working with data scientists and um actual researchers with phds right in cyber security and things like that um and so it was more sort of a soft move over there and I got noticed because you know I was putting all these certifications on my LinkedIn and I was I was doing a security lead position at stripe at the time too so I was sort of trying to cut my teeth on more security focused roles so I sort of tried to just subtly transition and take on more and more in my current job and that's sort of what got me noticed um by my boss at crowd strike who actually cold reached out to me um and said would you be interested in you know applying for this specific job in research and it was threat hunting research specifically and so but when I joined um so I ended up applying getting the job and I joined crowdstrike and I can tell you that the bachelor's degree made my job so much easier even though I was still writing software I understood why I was writing things I knew how to use all the language and the words with the researchers and I could talk to the threat hunters and they'd mention like a hacking tool you know um they'd mention something like blood hound or they'd be talking about Mimi cats or something and like I knew exactly the even just the context of what that you know particular intrusion was that we were looking at um and that my software was trying to surface and so it was huge um it made me feel like I didn't just do that degree for my own enjoyment it ended up really just making my job much more fulfilling because I didn't feel intimidated and I I understood everything that was going on so that was a really really lovely transition that I made in my career where everything just lined up really nicely and you know the because I went so deep on all of the you know things in my bachelor degree I didn't just do things to pass exams I really engaged with things I played with the tools I really studied the certifications not for the certification but to actually learn something from the certification it ended up just being such a huge reward when I actually moved into a position like that yeah so it sounds like you're pretty happy with the transition like was it all sunshine and rainbows or like is the grass always greener on the other side like like what was it like being an actual security researcher working I mean you were working you say oh I took I cut my teeth on a job at stripe as a security leader uh what was it I mean that sounds like the type of job yeah I was the lead of my team yeah yeah but but like yeah it was it it was really more of a security Champion like you know there were security Champion programs in um different software companies where I was the tech lead of my actual team um of my software team but then everyone like the security team at stripe I did not work for the security team they wanted every team to kind of have a security lead so that were the representative for making sure that we were doing all the right things and that everyone was educated on the team when it comes to like good security practices and things like that just because otherwise they Spread Way Too Thin so that was where I could say I was cutting my teeth on something that was not super high responsibility but gave me an excuse to engage with the security team too and just like use the actively use the knowledge that I was studying in the bachelor's so that was it was actually one of the best transitions I've ever had in my career honestly like it just everything was just so lucky like when I moved over to crowd strike uh they write a lot of their software in go in goang and I learned goang at stripe and so the transition just could not have been nicer um especially given it was a remote job I was the only one in Australia working for that team at crowd strike so I really had to be quite self-sufficient even when I was ramping up because there wasn't always someone available to help me at the during the time zone um you know non overlaps I guess yeah is is crowd strike an American company sorry I know this is like a super ignorant question I could have just Googled but like uh pretty much every big company you worked at it sounds like has been an American company so you've always had to deal with the like I guess since you moved back to Australia you've always had to deal with this like substantial time difference I mean it's incredible time difference like I'm getting ready to put my kids to bed and you're literally waking up and it's like 8: a.m. there and you're you're kind of getting started with your day uh yeah so you had to learn a did you do a lot of this asynchronously do you think that a lot of your experience doing open source and doing communicating through GitHub issues and pquest and stuff was that helpful just having that experience communicating through open source for working remotely at an American company from Australia yeah 100% actually I've never drawn that link before that's very ex um that definitely helped me just being comfortable with asynchronous stuff and going to bed you know having left a message for someone and knowing that when you wake up in the morning they will have responded and just learning to be patient absolutely that was very helpful and um yeah I guess I've never thought about it before but that was very um very very similar experience um and you know in in open source sometimes you're just like well I'd open an issue but what if I just go splunking through the code base maybe I'll actually be able to find the issue and fix it myself and save everyone some time and then just open a poor request it's that same kind of thing where sometimes I'd have questions and I'm like screw it you know it's it's um like I would work from 7:00 a.m. my time till 3:00 p.m. uh my time just to get a bit more overlap with people in the states um you know I willingly did those hours but once you got to like noon my time I was like well I'm just going to smun through the source code because there's no documentation CU we're a research team you know we just have a lot of ephemeral stuff that we can't always be documenting so I'll just jump into the code base so yeah I think it was a very similar approach to that that it was to open source yeah how do you feel about like real-time communication tools like slack and things like that versus you know asynchronous communication like email and I guess ircc is more like slack but like uh systems where you communicate through the system like you open a ticket as opposed to just B you know jumping in and immediately talking to somebody in slack or something like that like do you do you think that what are your thoughts on that synchronous versus asynchronous question yeah I I don't like asynchronous at all um slack stresses me out but I think that's the case for just about everybody um I prefer real time at all times honestly um unless you know unless you need time to think so what was really nice was you know like obviously slack and emails and everything and meetings would all fall off at a certain point of my day so I would get a lot of focused time so I think asynchronous communication is really great for that where you don't you know my peers when I was studying cyber security um and so I took part in a lot of Collegiate ones actually so once for students so it's not as difficult um but also you can kind of Benchmark yourself against your your peers so I did a number of ctfs um which I really enjoyed uh it just gives you a chance to apply your skills and to see kind of where you're at and what you need to improve at and so yeah CTF stands for capture the flag and it's really just they're sort of just hacking challenges um sometimes your job is to defend something or to be um someone who reverse Engineers something so you're sort of on the the good guys side and then sometimes the um CTF events are about actually being the bad person um and you know being the threat actor and you have to try and hack into something and some are like both they're a mix you know and so I guess it's kind of similar to a software hackathon you know where there's a competition and you have to make an app this is sort of the infosec version of it where you have to apply your skills to either defend or attack something which is just really cool um and so I did code breaker which is put on by the National Security Agency the NSA n like the big bad NSA that everybody's terrified of yeah the NSA I'm going to guess something really funny for you to yeah okay so Su has gotten up from her chair she's running back to herbench to pull something off the pegboard so this is a fidget spinner from the NSA and this was what I got from them because I finished in like I was in the top 100 or whatever of their reverse engineering competition so that's my little um weird souvenir a lime green NSA fidget spinner have you taken it apart to make sure there's not like a microphone in there no but a lot of people have said that and I think it's really interesting I remember getting the um envelope in the mail the package in the mail and it just says like from National Security Agency and I think I put it on social media and I said oh well the found me it was nice knowing you all or something like that it's like every time you get a message from the IRS it's just like you you see that IRS that iconic you know typ face they use and you're just like your stomach just goes oh no you know then you open it and it's just like because I forgot exactly exactly so when it came I had a similar thought I forgot all about that I'd filled out my shipping address and everything and I was like what is oh and then I realized a second later so I definitely had that IRS moment where I was just like I hope this is what I think it is because I have gotten letters like that from the IRS and it's absolutely terrifying yeah awesome well I want I want to be respectful of your time I've got a lot of Rapid Fire questions I'm going to start asking if that's cool with you Su yes do it so just just to like kind of like uh recap your journey so far are so you you uh you started off with a computer in your house uh Commodore 64 The thankfully it was an older model and that was a that way you got to spend a lot more time in the command line and stuff like that that spurred your creativity you went on to study a great deal of different Technologies in as at a uh gosh what is the acronym T TEF T the uh Community t a f Ty yeah t a f and I I've written what that acronym stands for in here uh it stands for somewhere in my notes sorry I'm learning all about Australia um okay so I'm not going to Define that acronym I'm sorry I'll put it in the show notes uh but uh basically like community colleges so you went there and from there um you ultimately were able to work at advertising agencies you applied for a job in Las Vegas got to move and to the iconic Campus of uh zaposlite to Silicon Valley that was you know five or six hour drive away totes so you did that totes that's something only a Australians say like tot's cool am I am I correct like have you ever okay so if you ever hear an Australian cool oh is it British okay well um I've only heard so I didn't think we made it up okay yeah well um sorry if I'm uh attributing something to the Australian people that should be attributed to the Brits um okay so what I want to know is uh during your streaming back when you were live coding a lot you had this like very cool like first of all you got like beautiful taste in like mechanical keyboards and everything's like very elegant and uh like thoughtfully put together and and you know just like your your uh your background there uh with like like everything is very deliberately thought out in terms of your physical space but in terms of the software you use do you put a lot of time into customizing your tooling for when you're sitting down to write some code I do but then I just leave it like I'm not constantly tweaking it um yeah MP mpj from fun fun function back in the day I think he put it best like he stops himself doing it cuz he knows they'll just do it forever and it's just a distraction so um I've had the exact same Vim config file for years now years and years and years and years this probably hasn't changed in 5 years just set something up make it so that it's tolerable to you and then just let it go like you know that's sort of been my attitude it's not for every one but that's worked really really well for me so yeah it's just nice color scheme all of that it's got some of the basic tools that I need um and I don't try to customize anything to death anymore it's just frustrating to have to set up automated scripts to get it all back the way you want it when you have a new computer or if you know something happens and it's just a waste of time yeah so just good enough and then don't micromanage it anymore sounds like yeah and so you're yeah just leave it learn yeah if somebody wanted to learn them which is kind of like a a code editor that has a little bit steeper of a learning curve because you have to learn like all the keyboard uh shortcuts you got to learn like the different the three I think it's three different modes like insertion mode and you know like how would you recommend it like do you think it was worth learning it yes and no honestly I think it's like one of those huge it depends kind of things um if you do want to learn it you want to go C Turkey um I found it was very frustrating for 2 weeks but I wouldn't let myself go back to Sublime Text which is what I used to use just get through it um and I would say it's been really good because I do spend much more time on servers these days just like you know like into shell sessions and stuff like that it is so useful to just pop open vim and start typing but at the same time like Nano is there for people to use too and it's much easier to use so to be honest I wouldn't recommend it because it just depends on what you want to actually get out of something you know um I really enjoy it just because it feels minimal it uses not as not as much process as on my computer sorry not not as much you know resources on my computer but you know at the same time it's been a net positive for me but I wouldn't say you know it's been life-changing I think I'm just such a casual Vim User it's not like the primagen or um Gary burnhard or other people who you you see they're just like total Wizards in it I don't know I just I'm not someone who's really obsessed about my editor it's just if it's good enough it's good enough so yeah yeah it's a bit of a nothing Burger answer but I just don't think it's worth it if you're already happy with your tool whatever you know well to quote something that you said that I thought was was kind of interesting uh that interesting enough to be written down and quoted on the free cam podcast you said don't put your identity don't put your identity into a single tool and it sounds like m yeah it sounds like that's the the vibe you're good like if the tool works well enough you know Nano I use Nano all the time when I go on servers uh you can just type Nano and it's built into like I think every Linux distribution uh and it's just like a emac like environment emac curiously isn't default in a lot of like different server versions of Ubuntu and stuff so I can't use emac when I go in there so I just use Nano which is very similar uh shortcuts and stuff but you know whatever gets the job done really at the end of the day right um and I want to like reconcile the so you have spent a lot of time Shoring up the foundational knowledge of computer science of how networks work uh you know security Concepts uh how computers actually work and it sounds like early on in your career you were working with like really powerful tools that were like highly abstracted away and now as you've Advanced your skills you've gone like kind of further down the the you know veritable stack of mattresses that the princess is lying on top of to see where the P's are you know um how do you reconcile the tension between wanting to get things done and also wanting to like further cement your understanding of fundamentals so you can get things done faster in the future yeah I think that's actually a really tough thing for anybody to manage including myself I don't have a great answer for it um I think for me what I find really enjoyable when you go deep on something is when you're not having to be constantly distracted by having to look things up or feeling like you're hitting a brick wall because you're just missing some foundations on something it's not enjoyable to go deep if you know that you're missing certain foundations especially like right around that particular topic area so I think the motivation for me a lot of the time now is to zoom back even though it feels awful to rip yourself out of that you know Rabbit Hole you're in it's it's the excitement of knowing that okay I'm going to fill in these foundations I'm going to find something super interesting while filling that in anyway so it's still going to be an enjoyable process and then when I actually go deep it's going to be so much more productive you're going to have this lovely intuition you're going to have those deep flow moments you know you're going to be playing the synth music and just like churning something out I think it's just you've got to find a motivation to enjoy those deep Dives way more because you're not feeling imposter syndrome and you're not just feeling like I'm never going to get this you know the foundations have just opened up so much in my programming world where I I can just like flip-flop around and and just kind of dive in and out of different things now and I'm just not feeling like it's this awful kind of stumble in the dark um and so there are times when I still find it hard not to just go deep on something um but I think it's worth putting in the effort because things just feel way more effortless later on and it's really hard to give people this advice because it's one of those things where you don't get it until you actually do it um and so yeah it's it's really difficult for me to really give that advice just because you you don't know until you actually feel that uh and feel that reward of it sorry yeah when you were streaming for several years basically articulating your thoughts and like making them palatable you know as a teacher kind of like taking your thought process and Orting it uh uh verbalizing it do you think that that helped you um code better do you think or do you think like would you encourage people to like kind of think out loud while they're coding do you do you ever do that anymore is that like a habit like do you talk to yourself while you're coding or do you think that that slows things slows things down a lot yeah I'm I'm going to go out there and just say I think in general whenever I streamed on a Sunday as far as productivity problem solving challenge Factor it was net negative honestly you know I just sometimes it was nice to explain to other people and they they'd sort of give another perspective but a lot of the time because I had a lot of the domain knowledge of the embedded stuff like some people could jump in with like oh well what if you just like did a promise here instead or something like some of the JavaScript kind of side of things I would get some cool ideas from people but overall it was a net negative because I find it so hard to focus while I'm also talking I find it so hard to be kind of on the spot and have people watching me and so it's not helpful but the the thing that it did help me with was peir programming at work became like just not intimidating at all I'm like let's just jump into it and I was okay with saying I didn't know something and it gave me a lot more confidence with like working with other people because if you can live stream in front of a couple hundred people on a Sunday and make mistakes in front of them then you can pretty much just not feel afraid of of of working with any colleague after that in my opinion so it definitely helped with that I would say that that was actually kind of life-changing to be honest um it made my day-to-day work with other people much better cuz I used to feel very intimidated about coding in front of others um but the rest of it was honestly just a net negative yeah well it sounds like uh you did get something out of the process even if like those particular days like it was a lot of fun yeah yeah it was a lot of actual fun like we had heaps of fun I just meant programming wise and actually getting stuff done and things like that it was a bit of a a drag on that so there's the saying that like if you want to go far go together if you want to go fast go alone or something like that uh yeah I it's it's more interesting if you reverse it if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together right and so it's kind of like you had the entire you know hundreds of people like cheering you on yeah s s s and like you're trying to you know close the pr or whatever right so uh yeah it sounds like the fact that you stuck with it for so long I mean you even I think I heard you built your own streaming platform or you started to build a streaming platform just because you were unsatis what was what's the story behind the sus Hinton streaming platform yeah I just thought that twitch was crap for software programming streams I'll just come out and say it's crap it's not good for that and also twitch incentivizes you know it's a it's a company that wants to profit so you know the profit incentives just created bad experiences especially for like programming streamers like I could talk to you about this for an hour so I won't um and so I just went out and wanted to create my own platform that respected the privacy of my users that didn't that allowed them to use emotes without having to sign up for a paid subscription you know so we could have her own inside jokes and things um that allowed me to just have all these different features that were useful for programming streams that twitch would never do right um and so there were just a lot of misalign incentives I felt using twitch as a platform uh and I I had enough of a community that I felt that they would be willing to make an account on my website and then actually watch me and and interact with me there and that they'd remember I was streaming there and things like that so I went out and started making that and then the pandemic hit right when I was getting close to releasing it and you know just obviously that just put you know a lot of different things in perspective and I put it down for a bit just because you know the pandemic was a tough thing to get through and by the time I was sort of coming out of that I wanted to stop streaming so it just never got released unfortunately but it was a really cool experience actually programming it yeah maybe it'll come back one day definitely and if if there's like an open source alternative that people can just self host a website and stream themselves on it I mean streaming has got to be expensive though in terms of like all the data that is involved and like like only a company like Amazon would have the coffers to be able to do that like economically like I I don't know how expensive it is to pipe HD video to like 200 people concurrently uh is that something where you think an individual Creator could actually run like a streaming platform like let's say it was like you know a self-hosted tool and you just threw up your server would would the bandwidth on that be like crazy or How would how would it work yeah that's a good question I ended up creating like a matrix in Microsoft Excel and I looked at every single streaming option everything from Amazon's own streaming technology uh to you know uh just like smaller companies that were offering at the time and all of the different features and whether or not they had closed captioning for the live streams whether you had video on demand all that kind of thing so I did actually do all the research and it is possible so I ended up standing up a very beefy machine I got a dedicated server in a data center um wasn't actually that expensive and then um I ended up H having like several hundred gigs of like bandwidth I think it was up to a terabyte of bandwidth or something like that um per month um and so and then I did a whole bunch of tests like I spun up kubernetes to create all of these like spontaneous you up to 500 connections to see if the box would stand up and if the traffic you know how much traffic that was generating and how much bandwidth and things like that so it's definitely possible because years ago I was able to prove that as a proof of concept in 2019 and I think the tools have gotten a lot better since then anyway so yeah the answer is yes it's possible you just have to do the research and be willing to have your own dedicated piece of metal so yeah have you ever heard of cloud flare TV it's like a 247 at the time but yeah yeah our 247 stream focused on technical topics and uh it's it's kind of like what you're talking about it's like a platform but it's really just cloudfl like I'm I'm you can just press play and you can watch people like live streaming their 247 and I think some of it's probably pre-recorded it doesn't have chat uh but it is cool like the notion that like like I always fancied like free C Camp could have free C Camp TV and it would just be like an old school broadcast channel from you know the terrestrial you know uh satle like airwave you know like UHF if you ever saw the 1980s movie UHF where with weird inic like we could theoretically do that using tools that cloud fler has published but I still think that like what you're talking about is is a little bit different because it's like twitch in a box basically it sounds like yeah yeah I would be very interested if you do pursue that uh at some point or if you decide to get back into that project let me know I would be very interested in following that and uh I'll certainly try to help encourage people to uh contribute to it so what is on the horizon for Su Hinton what what are the big goals like we're basically out of the p pmic um you have an entire new skill set that you gain it sounds like you made Incredible use of that time uh what are your plans for the next few years yeah you kind of caught me at a Crossroads so I I I quit that job the research job um couple of months ago it was an amazing job um I just want to take a little bit of time off for myself that's all that was a very hard decision actually because I loved my team I just need some time off I I am carrying a little bit of burnout and I'm just finishing up my Master's Degree as well I'm working on my thesis at the moment so it seemed like good timing for me to just focus just on the thesis just spend a little bit of time like recouping um you know just being well enough again and things like that um so yeah like I'm keeping things open ended this year um I will be finished and hopefully graduating by July so that's actually not that far away it's May right now so I think 6 to 8 weeks I'll be finished with the master uh thesis and to be honest I'm trying to keep things open um and so I'll be doing a little bit of contract work for the rest of the year in software um and I'm looking to maybe start working on some online education courses because I'd love to get back into teaching so yeah just not putting a lot of pressure on myself but just getting around to personal software projects I've been putting off for years cuz I've been in school you know since the p mic started and and things like that so just you know sort of being able to slow down a bit and just come back to some of the things that are just really important to me um so that I can also just help shed a lot of the burnout of just working in the industry as well cuz this is my 20th year in the industry um you know it would be sadly it would be a bit strange if I didn't have a little bit of burnout at this point right yeah can you talk about like and I don't want to put you on the spot uh but can you talk about like how you sensed burnout was setting in like what was there some like moment that you just like damn I think I'm burning out or was it just like a gradual creeping process like be because I mean it seems like you have arrived at that conclusion I'm burning out I need to change I need to take some time off I'm curious for people that are listening to this who may also be closing in on a decade or two decades doing software development like how they can recognize this and know that they need to take time off before things get even worse yeah for sure it's a it's a really important question a lot of it is creeping up um but for me it was like a spike in anxiety every day when you just have to do normal things so if someone hits you up on slack and it's just totally normal it's they're not asking you for anything urgent they just want to talk to you and you just start feeling overwhelmed every time um or just it spikes your anxiety and you just you start withdrawing from people don't want to talk to them at work even though they're your teammates you just yeah you find yourself isolating yourself and then on top of that your productivity just takes a huge dive so you know that there'll be days where there'll be nothing wrong going in your life but getting out of bed is really hard and then you sit at the computer and you just don't do any work and you're just sort of your brain is screaming at you you're like we have to do something today and it just doesn't happen you know and then the next day there's a lot of pressure you feel guilty so you're able to kind of push through and and do it but it just feels everything just feels like you're walking through you know trying to get out of quicksand even though you're getting your job done it just feels so wrong and you're having to just absolutely force yourself and you're avoiding talking to anybody and everything just feels like a huge overload on you when it's just normal day-to-day duties I think that was the first signs for me just total disengagement but you know obviously still trying your best to do your job because you need to make money to survive right um and it just feeling wrong even though you couldn't find any other reason in your life why you're struggling to show up every day if that makes sense yeah thank you for sharing that and uh what are some things you're doing now that you have some time to yourself like how are you kind of decompressing and like rejuvenating yourself uh and uh like I guess tending to that that wound of just burn out I guess that psychic wound mhm yeah I think I've just been a would trying to find Joy um so that when I start feeling better like I'm still engaged with the things I enjoy I haven't taken a total break from everything if that makes sense so I'm reading a lot reading way more um and I'm reading about things like Computer History um and just other things you know like um watching a lot of video game documentaries on how video games are put together like just and and watching a lot of creators on YouTube do what they love so just watching other people who aren't burned out or who I don't think are burnt out really engaging with the things they enjoy so that I can get that reminder of why I you know why I love being a software engineer or why I love doing embedded stuff or or why you know I have these hobbies that I have that I just don't feel like I can engage with at the moment so just trying to stay connected um but also trying to do low energy things like that right like reading a book or watching a documentary is is quite low energy it's forgiving yourself for not being productive but it's just keeping you connected all the same to the communities that you feel inspired by I think that's been the biggest thing I've been able to do so that I'm not just sitting around feeling sorry for myself if that makes sense or feeling guilty for it you know yeah yeah I mean that sounds great like I'll you know share that like I watch lots of documentaries on YouTube uh I I read a lot uh I go for long walks with podcasts and I attribute I guess my longevity which isn't as long as yours 20 like I I've been doing free cocing for like 10 years almost uh so I'm very much trying to Pace myself because I've had so many friends who've just hit a brick wall with burnout and uh but I'm it sounds like you're doing everything you need to do to recover so we're pulling for you to be like back to full power eventually whenever that is uh but um yeah thank I really appreciate you sharing that because in Tech we have this like kind of Mythos around like productivity and it's it's an American thing right America's obsessed with productivity uh and you know uh I don't know if that was like a cultural shock when you went to the US where everybody's like so focused on work and career defines who they are so much yeah I mean was there a moment huge uh it was really hot actually was there a moment where you were like a dinner party and like people asked you what you did and like like where you realize wow this is different from like where I'm from like people don't you know immediately the difference was was immediate um and just yeah just seeing seeing people really struggle to even like leave a job because they felt like their identity was in it or like people who try to build empires in jobs because that's like their identity it's just people's identity being so deeply embedded in not just like what they do for a living but also that specific company and the team or like the the project that they're on like people putting their identity into the specific project and them feeling bad if they're working on something that's not as exciting as their their as their other colleague is is you know working on something way cooler that really really shocked me I feel very very um grateful that that's not something that I've ever really had a problem with like I can see that and see it's unhealthy and I'm not interested and um it's just been it's just been a a huge contrast and and I don't think that I just don't think that I could ever really do that and again that's probably privileged to a degree but I just I turn off I want to do the best job I can within reason and then I want to be a really great teammate to work with but I just don't want to put any identity in it beyond that if that makes sense yeah but it it really threw me when I first moved there and some people did actually judge me for that they thought that I wasn't being a team player and things like that and but I would say that what I was doing was completely reasonable I wasn't slacking off or anything like that uh I was just being realistic yeah you weren't letting my opinion so you weren't letting work completely take over your life like a lot of people allow that to happen exactly like like your employer will let will take as much of your time energy as they can they'll put you on that fancy you know Google bus and and have you writing code while you commute instead of you know uh like like as much of your time and energy they'll serve dinner really late at night so you'll stay for the free meal so you'll work a little later right like all those little tricks that they do to get you uh or or they call the company a family instead of just being you know a team right um a lot of those things that are like I don't know if they do it I mean I think they do that in places like China and Japan and stuff like other countries that have unhealthy work cultures but uh but I'm hardened to hear that it it isn't like that in Australia right like not not to the extent it is in the US not to the extent it can be I think that I think that we all fall into the Trap I think that no country is really like completely immune it's just not to the same degree for sure so I definitely feel that I fit more into the C the working culture here um people are working a lot right now just because cost of living and and working is very stressful but it's just not the same identity entrenchment here um and yeah people do want to go home to their families and stuff like that so yeah well I don't us like I want to end on a positive note and not just on on like U you know American work culture and my beef with it and and you know burnout and things like that since you've been reading a lot of books we don't usually do recommendations since you've been reading a lot of books and you watch a lot of video game documentaries what are some recommends that you have for people who've listened this far into the podcast are there any channels that you just like love watching to fire you up yeah so um one of the main channels that I love so much is nerd Forge nerd Forge um I'll yeah I'll list all of these they just do really creative stuff I'm so into them I'm trying to figure out what the documentary one I watch I think it's called cut clip cut clip but I'm trying to remember the name of the channel I'm just scrolling through YouTube right now trying to find it for you while you're while you're scrolling for it I'm going to throw in one of my recommendations this channel is so great they do like Retro Gaming documentaries and they do like the best kind of like nostalgic 3D graphics and stuff it's called uh it's called splashwave and so they'll cover like how Sonic Sonic the Hedgehog was made you know talk about Michael Jackson's involvement in the development of the music and that he was like a huge fan of Sonic the Hedgehog and he actually approached him because he wanted to make that's cool uh or um they'll talk about uh you know the history of like different like Sega games different arcade games they'll talk about like the architecture that made certain arcade games possible and they they model all this stuff so a lot of the shots are like effect shots and stuff it's so cool and it's got like that that kind of like you know synth retrowave type uh sound going on so um yeah what are some other channels you recommend yeah so the the channel is no clip no clip um that's the Video Game documentary Channel yeah they are fantastic um and as far as books go right now I am absolutely loving the dream machine it's just it's such a good book um it's very dense and very long but I just it is it is the best narrative about just how Computing came to be um it's just an absolutely delightful read I've been really inspired by that so that's the main one that I'm reading at the moment but before that I read um space Rogue I think space Rogue that one is about you know the um original Cult of the dead cow um hacking group they're really really cool and so space Rogue was one of the um pseudonyms of the one of the members of the group I believe very cool yeah I remember believe I'm blanking on all of this stuff I remember the cult of the dead cow back in like the the BBS days and stuff we would they are so cool yeah yeah very cool dream machine space Rogue nerd Forge no clip I will second that I love the no clip Hades development uh series it's like four hours worth of like how they made the game Hades I think it is called Hades right like it's like a kind of isometric perspective where you're like zipping around and fighting like all these Greek gods and stuff it's cool um so Su I just want to thank you again for like 20 years in the field and you're still sharing your wisdom and uh I'm very excited to talk with you offline about like you know software development education that's something very passionate about and uh we will take as much Suz Hinton as we can on the free C Camp YouTube channel like publishing your tutorials anything we can do to help get that wisdom out there uh to as many people as we can freely um so I want to thank you again for making time to come on the Freo Camp podcast yeah thanks for having me this has been a really fun conversation yeah and everybody listening until next week happy codingthis is my 20th year in the industry um you know it would be sadly it would be a bit strange if I didn't have a little bit a burnout at this point right welcome back to the Freo Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org each week we're bringing you Insight from developers Founders and ambitious people getting into Tech this week we're joined by Suz Hinton she's a software engineer security researcher and she was one of the pioneers of live coding on Twitch Su how's everything going with you well it's going great thanks um I'm really excited to be on this podcast given that we've known each other for a while so yeah and this is like the first time we've actually had like a synchronous conversation I think we may have been on some podcasts together like guests on like JS party or some of these other podcast but I don't think that I've ever actually talked to you in real time back and forth like this no it's it's always been like email or again yeah it was with the gaggle of other people so yeah yeah well was so cool uh I am hyped to learn about you uh I'm going to be taking notes furiously as we go through this and uh I've already done a lot of research like rereading your awesome article that's on free C Camp about your live stream live coding setup and uh I'm going to be linking that and other cool things that Su mentions in the show notes but yeah let's let's get into it uh I always like to start with just giving people perspective and understanding your kind of origin story as a developer because you have like a really interesting twisting and turning whining path through Tech because you were in Tech very early and then you just went and basically did like every single sub area of tech over the years it seems like yeah we and and the other thing to note is I know I've been talking most of this podcast so if you heard some of what Sue said she does have a little bit of a non-north American accent she hails from Down Under yeah so you're based in Melbourne yeah that's right Melbourne Australia which is southeast kind of like on the way to Antarctica so so you can kind of stop over that's usually how I try and describe it yeah apparently yeah yeah and I had the pleasure of visiting Melbourne uh a few years ago for a conference and it was just I love that City my goodness I'm not sure if I'll ever go again just because it was a huge plane trip to get over there from California I mean like it was like a the longest flight I've ever taken was to Melbourne I think yeah but uh yeah like what was it like growing up in Australia and like what were your early Ambitions as a kid I loved going up here I think I was definitely somebody who felt very lucky very very lucky and we we used to sort of affectionately refer to our country as The Lucky Country just because we knew if you were born here that you already had a really good Head Start in life um wasn't a very ambitious person you know like I you know even just growing up I didn't have huge travel aspirations or anything so it is funny in the end that I ended up living in um in the United States for about 12 years um but yeah I just loved growing up here this city has gotten the world's most livable city award like years and years and years in a row um it's just it is actually an objectively good City even though I'm very biased because I was born and raised here but yeah um there's a reason why I'm living back here again right and I haven't chosen elsewhere so yeah well what did you like what were your early interests because I know like whenever I talk like you're like the third Australian I've interviewed for like the re recent recent history on the podcast and uh it sounds like like a lot of the technology that that we had in the states uh like a lot of like early Apple Computers uh Commodore 64 Amiga uh a lot of those computer like did you grow up did were you lucky enough to like have a computer in your home what type of gear were you working with yeah that's a great question so um I know that a lot of that stuff originated in America but it does kind of find its way to the I guess like secondary and tertiary markets so um my family growing up didn't have like a ton of money uh we I was very fortunate to to grow up middle class but it's not like we could afford to buy like the brand new computers um all the time and it was sort of hard to justify buying one back then um because it was you know the late 80s early 90s it was really only a few are very geeky about computers um this was pre- Windows and all of that so I was lucky enough to inherit a Commodore 64 from my uncle and mind you this was still this was the early '90s so we were starting to move into Windows 3.1 um but I didn't care that it was behind I didn't even know that it was a computer that was behind um but given that there's no sort of goey there's all you do is type into a prompt you know I I turned to my dad and said how do you you use this it looks cool but I don't know how to use it and so he showed me a few prompts uh he taught me a tiny bit of basic and then he just kind of left the the the computer manuals with me um and I just got really hooked straight away so I think that I was was lucky in that I did inherit an older computer because I had to sort of learn computers like the hard way um and so even when we moved into things like Windows 3.1 95 98 things like that I was still trying to code you know um regardless because I found that that was quite interesting yeah and was there anything that pushed you in like a creative Direction like were were there some applications that you were using that like really uh it what point did you start saying I want to learn more computers learn more computers more about computers and I want this to be like a thing that I do when I grow up did was that like in your mind at all yeah the last part was not in my mind at all I just thought it was a fun hobby like again I'm not very ambitious and so I just I was just like I like this computer so I'm going to keep playing with it but I think what really brought things home for me was once you once batch files were a thing in Windows and you can start automating things um that's when I got really excited because you know you can set things up so as soon as you log in to your account you can run a batch file and that batch file will you know pop up all the different programs that on games or like Windows Media Player or something and I just thought that was so cool that you could you know just script something like that um and then once I actually started getting onto the internet um I would catch the bus to my local library because we didn't have the internet at home um I just thought websites were so cool and I figured out that you can actually make them you know I found a book in the library for kids called your own website um I actually ended up finding a copy um years later for nostalgic reasons but I looked at it and I was like oh you just type stuff in notepad this is actually like way easier than I thought it would be and so I think my big moment was really learning how to use computers to do things for you so it was like the batch files but it was also making websites was just such a creative thing as a kid and then putting it on the internet being able to tell your friends they can go look at it at home as well you know there's something very magical about that experience especially back then when not a lot of your friends actually had websites or or you know were interested in that yeah yeah I mean you got to be like the first kid on the Block so to speak or one of the first kids in your class to to have their own web presence if you will yeah it was exciting it was like the late '90s and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever yeah yeah so like uh at what point did you start thinking about like School Beyond High School yeah I originally wanted to be a veter nurse um but I kind of just lost interest like I I really like animals but then I realized that it was going to be maybe a bit of a depressing job I think that unless you go on to become a full uh veterinarian you kind of don't have the nice jobs as vet nurse um so I sort of went back to the drawing board and I didn't really think of computers for the longest time until probably the last year of high school and I had never heard of computer science um I didn't hear of it until years and years later and so I'm just you know looking in the you had this big reference book back then uh in Australia of all of the different university courses you could take and so it was a physical book that you you you sort of like palmed through and I just kind of started looking up information technology and applying to random um universities that way but none of those courses were anything that I actually wanted to do so to be honest I was pretty lost and I didn't know if I could even get a job you know it was still just a hobby for me at that stage so I sort of locked out in the end I think yeah what did you end up doing like in terms of studies yeah so I got into like an information technology degree but it was going to be like a I think a 2 to 3 hour um public transport ride there and back so you know like 4 to 6 hours round trip every day I just figured out that that just wasn't feasible I wasn't ready to move out yet so um my mom actually saw like an advertisement in the local newspaper for a um I guess the equivalent in America is community college but here it's called ta which is tertiary and further education so it's more of a trade school um she found like an advertisement for like um multimedia it was a multimedia course it's now been renamed to interactive media and it just looked like everything I've ever wanted to do in one right it was like sound production and 3D modeling and um video and making interactive games and making websites and things like that so um just got just just kind of just a spur of the- moment thing we went down to the school and applied and it was past the deadline and everything but they actually let me in based on the websites I'd been making as a kid you know um so honestly it was just very serendipitous because that course that sort of twoe um associate of Arts sort of put me on a good pathway for me realizing that this might be a thing that I can do professionally yeah and what kind of uh skills did you walk out of that program with and like I don't want to gloss over the entire program because we've got so much to talk about but like while you're answering that question just like any other like interesting kind of discoveries you had about yourself or about technology during those two years uh getting your Associates yeah I think what I found was that as long as it was creative like it was as long as it was a you know using the computer in a creative sense I would just really latch on and get very engaged um with learning but the course was not really learning any programming there was a little bit of scripting and Flash but it was mostly just doing everything else but programming um which sort of gives you this huge grab bag of skills that I've been able to reach into over and over again over my career and also in my personal life as well you know especially the the sound production the video creation you know because we'll talk about that later but even just the 3D modeling you know that came in way more useful in my life than I thought it ever would um and so it was just good to learn a bunch of different things that I didn't even know was sort of you know a a path of expertise just to get a sample of everything so I sort of came out of that course as a very sort of well-rounded creative technologist I guess you could say yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense um and it sounds almost kind of like the equivalent of like going to like video game design school or something like that is yeah yeah there was actually a video game track that they opened up later on and I was really annoyed because they they released that like a year into my course and I was like oh do I switch to that one that seems so cool yeah well I mean you've described your uh your education as a quote unquote jack of all trades um and uh you know could you talk about why this process was like a big asset just having like such a grab bag of skills uh and like what your first jobs like what they were after you finished this program mhm yeah I think it definitely set me up for um my first couple of jobs I was just sort of taking contract work for a little bit and when you take contract work you know sometimes they will just ask if you um you know if you can do this or do that and they sort of try and sort of use as many skills as they can um and so it meant that I could just jump from contract to contract and not worry about the fact that I was like very Junior um because I could just sort of like use that jack of all trades to problem solve in in a lot of different cases and so for example you know one of my first jobs I was making Flash banners for like a major car company and just making cars Zoom around you know on and I was that person that made the annoying ad banners that you saw on the early internet which you know whenever you AR I'm quite ashamed cleaning of the industry yeah I was just thinking like so for people that don't know uh what sus is talking about like I just had these memories like certainly the early 2000s you you would arrive my kids are like yelling something in incomprehensible about Sour Patch Kids mom's coming to uh escort them away from the premise all right uh so what I was saying is um yeah like I remember you'd like arrive at like IGN or like some video game website and like you'd be like all right I can't wait to read this article like all this stuff starts popping out like all this animation and and of course your site like your internet connection starts chunking and everything is like super duper slow because this overly ambitious you know thing is like blocking your view of the article you're trying to read exactly so you were like developing that those kinds of things for like advertising agencies or who who were you working with yeah so that was me that was me making those annoying ads and they were particularly animation heavy back then just to get the people's attention uh it was the advertising agency Jay Walter Thompson that's who I worked for early in my career um and so yeah they one day they'd say uh we need you to do these flash banners and then another day that' say oh we have this um InDesign document that we're making into a PDF but we want you to add sort of some interactive hotspots in it do you know how to do that and then another time you know they'd be asking me to make this full-on sort of immersive video website that where the video sort of Blends in with the web page and it was it was very sort of futuristic back then um and so being being able to be on the video set as we were sort of filming and me having that background really helped me say yes this is something that I'll be able to blend in and just having all of these different pieces of um even though it was all very surface level obviously like Jack of all trades there was just these really nice instinctive moments where I could come in and and intuitively you know understand how something would be put together and in the advertising agency world that is just so bizarre are just really wild stuff happening all the time um thinking on your feate was very high highly valued at the time I guess yeah so a lot of people who are entering software development like the way I describe the free cocan podcast audience is like onethird developers one-third High School University students and onethird people who are working in other fields that want to get into software development maybe they're driving trucks maybe they are working as an accountant maybe they are uh just coming out of rehab or coming out of incarceration or any number of different things right maybe they're just getting out of like uh you know some sort of situation where they were previously like a stay-at-home spouse and now they have to reenter the workforce right so like like there's a wide variety of people and a lot of those people may have like skills from a past life like they used to work in uh one field or another like as a developer just day-to-day do you find yourself calling on all these kind of random skills that at the time may may have felt like I'm not sure if I'm ever actually going to use this in a professional capacity like have you have you found just like random things that you picked up to continue to be useful and helpful for getting things done yeah yes and no I think it greatly depends on what your profession is you know like I think that there'll be little random things that come in handy and obviously I can't comment on that because I haven't done a lot of those different careers but um um just things from time to time so for example you know I've never worked at a video game agency um and I've never you know had to do anything professional in that capacity but because we played with some of those physics a little bit in tap um I've being able to just you know intuitively understand when a certain animation needs to happen on a website when you're using CSS animations and like the the tweening or the key um you know creating the of just like drawing a blank what are they called the key key key frames no not yeah key frames is that like like when you're like animating something like you you kind of like yeah put the character in different shapes and then the software interpolates like what the animation is supposed to happen Okay M yeah I don't know anything about animation I just got lucky and knew that for that term yeah exactly and so that stuff came along for web pages like years and years and years later right like flash was already dead I thought okay I'm never going to use any of those skills over again um and then all of a sudden you know we had things like key frames and CSS and I'm like oh my God you know I can actually use that now or even when 3js came to um the web right um in JavaScript you know I was at a hackathon once and um somebody wanted to create this sort of like 3D lathing system and you know I already had some of the kind of theory on that even just like calculating the frost room and things like that and you know for actually programmatically creating it even though I'd never touched programmatic 3D modeling I had that you know intuitive background where I could figure things out and I sort of had that that that you know reasoning in order to problem solve so it hasn't come in handy all the time but it sort of surprises me when it does because it does tend to be quite spontaneous like that yeah yeah that's cool it sounds like this uh broad skill said has been very helpful so from developing uh you know banner ads and and other things that advertising agencies needed like like where did you move from there in terms of like the what was the next step step in your career yeah advertising was definitely not for me like if you've seen Mad Men um it's very much I love Mad Men I love I love that show we talk about it often it's like my favorite show of all time but I would never want to live in that world that's that's funny yeah exactly exactly it is funny that it's one of your favorite shows but yeah it it was very much like that right like every every agency is its own flavor of that depending on the decade and like you know there's just different different nuances to it it just wasn't for me I think I was there for maybe a year a year and a half or something I forget but I just wanted something a bit more quiet um and something that wasn't advertising it just didn't sit with me you know I just was like I don't like making these annoying things that people have to run into on the internet right it just didn't feel right so um I ended up just pivoting into different roles so I moved into e-learning next um I was actually teaching part-time um the back at the the tap the university that I studied at I went back to teach for 3 years to part-time so I just moved right into education actually so I was sort of I was doing QA and accessibility testing for a bunch of e-learning tools that are used in various ta institutions in Australia and then yeah I would then go in Moonlight as a teacher and so that was nice and then I just worked for a bunch of web shops right like consultancies and stuff before you know working for more SAS um companies later in the last in the sorry in the the second part of my career so far so it was just kind of stumbling around trying to find stuff that you know was was a bit more morally in line with what I wanted to work on yeah so you had problems with like working in the advertising agent agency industry if you will I mean that whole industry is based around like manufacturing desire of products that people don't necessarily need right getting them to spend money getting people going to De lots of products that are very bad for obviously Mad Men the whole the whole theme going through the entire Series this isn't a big spoiler because it comes up in the very first episode is cigarettes right like cigarettes are an unnecessary thing that are incredibly damaging to people like they're damaging to the environment they're damaging obviously to Public Health like uh a huge portion of my tax dollars that I pay are going to help people who smoked a bunch of cigarettes and are now need all this end of life care that's caused by that and you know like man like Don Draper the main character himself is like addicted to smoking and he can't quit and he just kind of like accepts that's that's one of the things I love about madman sorry to go off on a Madman tangent but like it was no I get it inconceivable that you could actually quit and he's just like really pissed off at the cigarette companies whom he's been benefiting from his entire career as an Advertiser advertising executive right um he's just upset like because he realizes like I'm hooked this is going to kill me and I can't quit like I I'm just going to be addicted to this for the rest of my life he feels like he's been hoodwinked essentially and it's like kind of like the it's like this angry chip on his shoulder throughout the series but um but yeah like I I can totally see like I have lots of friends who are in advertising and not everybody's advertising something as damaging as cigarettes but I can I can I can still see like maybe you could talk about that like don't worry about sliding the advertising industry just talk about like how you really feel about the field having worked in it like were there any moments where you really felt you look back and you regret doing certain things that you did yeah it's good because I I it's a good question because I did go in very naive right and the that was sort of the job to get back in the day if you um were kind of more on the creative side of software as well um and so it was so exciting you know I was competing with other graduates in my class for that job like we all wanted that job so badly and so to be honest you know I think there are a lot of parallels with that nowadays in certain jobs that seem really cool but might be a bit morally questionable um but that was my first experience with it really opened my eyes I don't know it was just working in advertising was really cool for a lot of different reasons it was very like fastpaced you know there were times when we were pulling all nighters to um Pitch to to win a certain account you know like there was this big Lottery account that we were trying to win and we made their entire pit into a huge game show in one of the meeting rooms so we converted one of the rooms into a massive game show and everyone had to dress up and you know and so I was being picked up at 4 in the morning to come and work on the interactive PDF because you know that's when the designers actually finally finished the work went to bed right and then I got the phone call in the middle of the night and that's like really really bad right that's a very bad thing and we don't encourage that but that was sort of the adrenaline rush of working in advertising where sometimes you get a bit Stockholm syndrom in where you you're all in it together you know and so it's exciting and we might win the pitch and things like that and you sort of feel like you're part of something um and so I would say that it was just very mixed I wasn't always creating annoying crappy things were websites for um Brands as well where you know the the the the actual user had to want to go to the website they had to want to go to kelloggs.com or something and you know visit that website and so we weren't sort of annoying them in that way and so I would just say it was mixed but after I left I definitely regretted that I added to the advertising on the internet because I think that back then it was pretty simple there wasn't there was no such thing as tracking pixels and things like that at least when I first started but by the time I moved to the industry and I saw how much more creepy and manipulative advertising was getting that's when I started feeling embarrassed that I was sort of part of the beginnings of it if that makes sense yeah that totally makes sense because like adte advertising technology like being able like there have been a lot of breakthroughs and trying to successfully get you to part with your money really or or to make some sort of big purchasing decision on behalf of your company or whatever it is uh and the thing that uh it works right like if you go raise a bunch of venture capital and you have this war chest uh you can go out and you can pretty much guaranteed get customers through running Google ads or Facebook ads right and uh because there's just this big audience and you can go through and you can microt Target and you can ab test and you can just kind of use these different processes to arrive at an ad that will convert um were you involved in any of that stuff or did that that come later after you got out of the industry yeah thankfully I wasn't involved with that um and back then because internet speeds were so slow especially in Australia you know we were required to keep those flash banners really small like I submitted I uploaded one to you know the marketing platform once and I got a this was back in the day you had a phone on your desk too yeah like I would get a call from the guy at the marketing agency totally separate from the advertising agency and he'd be like yeah so your flash Banner was 16 kiloby but we needed to be 15 and so you know we we did have razor thin file size margins back then and that's quite hard to do when you have like a car asset and the jpeg background for it and a bunch of text and a bunch of key frames and things like that you had to get really creative you know yes yeah you had to get really creative asiz yeah sorry I didn't mean to interrupt you by the way like there's like a big time difference between Texas and Melbourne uh so if it seems like I'm interrupting Sue or if Su is taking a little longer to react like it's hard to get much farther around the earth than you and I are right now when we're talking to one another so I just for the sake of the audence I'm wide into the AET yeah yeah me too I've got like 500 megabits like super duper fast internet you've got super duper fast internet the physical distance the packets need to travel is just so long so sorry anyway uh saying not that fast anyway um yes yeah so you know you really had to creatively optimize that kind of stuff and I felt that that was at least considerate right where you didn't want to encroach on the user you didn't want them to have to pay extra for like downloading extra stuffff junk and so back then um as well this was when I was doing this right when Facebook had just launched publicly right and I would say that Facebook has been responsible for a lot of the really creepy and really manipulative advertising right you know and I think that was sort of the dawn of the more sophisticated advertising the same with Google when Gmail came out and they started advertising on you know the AdSense the keywords and things it was right at the dawn of that so thankfully I didn't get to be part of that you know I'd left and it's not as if I saw that and thought I'm getting out I don't like it obviously it took me took us all a few years to really understand what was going on and and for those those really creepy tactics to come out um but yeah I was lucky enough that I sort of don't really attach myself to that but I just yeah still feel a bit dodgy while the same yeah so where do you go from there like like you've got these skills uh but you're kind of disenchanted with the industry that you're in so so you said you went back to school uh which is really cool by the way like going to teach I heard that you kind of even helped rewrite some of the curriculum that you yourself learned when you were at uh I'm going to get the the acronym wrong uh the Community College equivalent in t yes uh yeah like did teaching did that like fire you up did you enjoy teaching yeah I did actually I really enjoyed it um I'm not sure why I just really liked you I mean you you're the perfect person to talk to about this um you know you know when you get that you see that light bulb go off on in someone and you know you see them actually like really enjoy what they're learning and they feel like oh I can actually do this too and it's the same as like any hobby like I think any hobby that you do most people are very very happy to teach somebody else because just bringing them in and and sharing that Joy with someone is really really great so that was something that I think was what motivated me um to teach I wanted to spread the same joy that I felt when I sat down at the Commodore 64 for the first time um and I rewrote the curriculum mostly just because uh when we did our web design 3 semester uh it was using a Microsoft access database and cold fusion and that was sort of starting to become uh just old Legacy kind of software and so I thought this isn't Preparing People for the workplace very well so I rewrote it in PHP and basically the um we did the wamp stack in the end so the windows uh Apache uh MySQL and um PHP stuck so I just rewrote the whole curriculum to do that and instead of creating um I forget what we actually made in that c fusion class but I said okay everyone's going to make a Blog and then you can use that also as your portfolio if you want when you graduate um because back then you had to actually show portfolios to get web jobs you weren't doing like leak code or hacker ranker or anything like that right um and so I just rewrote it to make it more useful for them when they graduated and I just thought that cold fusion and access was just not going to be the way going forward so that was the main reason why I rote it I just thought it would be more engaging that way yeah well I I do want to get to live coding uh before we get to live coding though um I mean again I'm trying to like piece together the chronology of your career in real time but uh but like teaching and live coding have got to be pretty related like those skills that you got helping light bu go off in people's heads like face to face and now you're jumping on Twitch and you're basically just coding live right there and like them and like showing people everything you're doing and explaining what you're doing and talking out loud thinking out loud and interacting with chat and stuff maybe you can talk about the process of getting into live coding what inspired you to first start doing it yeah for sure I mean I got inspired by the people that were doing it really early on so um Casey from hand handmade hero um he I think was one of the very very first to do it um but I think what gave me the boot up the bum so to speak to to actually try it myself was I had a friend who was doing um he was doing open source and he just I think he just did YouTube live or something like that I forget what he did but he just um I just don't want to put him on blast so I'm just giving him some privacy by not calling out who they are but um he just did some open source he's like hi you know I work on I'm helping to maintain pouch DB I'm just like you know I just need to do some open source work I just want you to show I just want to show people like what is it like to actually maintain open source cuz I think there's a lot of sort of misconceptions at the time know I think this was back in 2015 2014 there were just a lot of misconceptions about open source and contributing to it and you know a lot of people sort of put open source maintainers on a big platform and found them intimidating so he's just like oh just you know just sit and watch what I do for an hour and watch me flipping through issues and closing them out or replying to them and he was also just showing that there's a lot of drudgery in it it's not just like heroic coding and pushing up pull requests you know there's also just a lot of staring at something and figuring out if it is a bug or not or like answering somebody you know back and forth in an issue so I just thought that was really interesting I really appreciated it at the time because all of the open source stuff I did was so small and it was only me and so seeing someone maintain something big that everyone sort of had to collaborate on I thought was really interesting so I remember putting a comment on his YouTube video saying this is actually really cool maybe I could do the same for my embedded Hardware libraries because people are scared of those kinds of projects and maybe I can show people that it's really not a big deal it's just still JavaScript at the end of the day that you're writing so that was the kind of origin story of why I started I was literally like hey I found this useful maybe I'll do my own version of it that sort of sheds some of the intimidation factor for like a slightly different angle you know yeah and we didn't really even get into like your love of embedded development but like you've been very vocal about that um over the years like being really into like building things like physical Hardware like like uh you know I think you you had like the Ada of fruit like you know chip set of the month thing or something the box that they was in you that was so cool the monthly boxes yeah that was so cool yeah it fruit is like the raspberry pie company right like they they they ship out raspberry pies no that's element 14 but they do do they do make their own stuff yeah so they make their own boards and um things like that yeah ad fruit are amazing thing they based out of New York so and and you've got like quite a bit like I mean you're kind of blocking it in the frame for people who are watching the video they can see you got like a a detailed workbench like a pegboard is that like a some sort of like uh you know CNC machine or something or a 3D printer what is that big thing behind you the big boxy thing yeah yeah so that's a it's a 3D printer laser cutter and CNC machine in one um yeah it's really it's very big it's very heavy I had to actually um so I I bought that as an Ikea table you know with the legs and everything but I had to then go and buy a new tabletop like basically a huge slab of uh plywood from the hardware store and paint it just to be able to support the weight of it which is quite funny but yeah so um I am really interested in that I've always been interested in that and that's because of it again a teacher in my T course one day brought in an arcade cabinet that he built from scratch um and it was amazing it was like the sit down coffee table one and coil he showed us how yeah is that what they called a cocktail that's what they're called in the states like cocktail model it's like basically like Pac-Man or something where you got one controller on each side and the screen kind of flips depending on that's exactly what it was yeah yes yeah it was really cool um so he made one of those and he just asked people if they were interested to come in on a Saturday so we all came in on a Saturday and he just grabbed it out of the back of his car and he took the whole thing apart and showed us how it works and back then there was no Arduino so what you did was you took the circuit boards out of keyboards old recycled keyboards computer keyboards and then you just like kind of um hacked them and solded your own sort of uh wires to different you know parts of the keyboard Matrix and you use that to you know solder your joystick buttons and and things like that to the actual um yeah to the actual arcade machine and so you know he was showing us how to do all of this and he's like here's how to avoid all the ghosting problems on your keyboard because back then there were ghosting issues what is ghosting exactly I just thought that was the yeah so ghosting used to be a thing on um old school keyboards like the PS2 connected keyboards where because like keyboards are sort of like on a on a circuit Matrix if you pushed certain key combinations too fast you'd either get the wrong keystroke or you wouldn't the keystroke wouldn't register I can't remember exactly just cuz I haven't needed this knowledge for a long time but it was called ghosting where you'd either get the wrong key press or you'd get like another different random letter because of um certain letters having certain uh or certain Keys having certain relationships in the electronic circuit um where it would just cause issues so um I guess cross wires so to speak so it was really interesting so he would he would show us how to kind of pick the different letters on the keyboard to avoid the ghosting issues when people were playing a video game cuz obviously that would be very frustrating so sorry that was a really long story but that was sort of how I got involved in it and I remember I started like I started collecting all these old keyboards I was that person that was like yes and then I'm going to make something with them these you know and then a few years later the Arduino came out and I was like oh this this is what we needed this whole time so then I went and did an Arduino course in Sydney um and the rest was kind of History I think this was 2006 2007 I did that and then I just started playing with embedded stuff like in my spare time for for basically every year since yeah and so like even today you still will like bust out like gear and just start Hardware hacking yeah so I don't have a lot of time these days just cuz I went back to UNI which we'll talk about later but um I still like make stuff like I'm just going to grab something don't judge me cuz I'm wearing my slippers cuz it's cold no worries and I'm going to verbally describe so she's got a big room she's walking across it uh she's got again this beautiful white workbench uh with like perfectly spaced and like like very deliberately planned out like where you're going to put your drill and where you're going to put all your different you know screwdrivers and stuff it's a really cool looking U backdrop uh so she's back in her chair cuz a lot of people like half the people watch yeah sorry sorry sorry I didn't me interrupt you no no go on I was just going to say cuz like about half the people that listen to like maybe a little more than half of the people will just listen to the audio Edition like I just listen to the audio Edition um I don't usually watch the video but for those of people who are watching the video Edition yes we do have a video Edition on YouTube you can go there and you can see what su's background is or if you've got like a a phot if you want to just snap a quick photo of it I can just throw it up in the show notes and people can like link directly to the photo um yeah she's given me the thumbs up so it sounds like we're going to have a cool workspace photo we might if you take a good one like and we can get it into a square we could even potentially put you at your desk on the Instagram because Freo Camp does have an Instagram it's about you know I don't know we've got maybe like several hundred images of people in their work workbenches and stuff so proud of it um but yes what' you grab show us yeah so I'm really lucky to have that space behind me by the way um so I'll just describe it again for the audio people this is something that I made years and years ago but I actually got it out recently just to repair it because it broke when you know one of my moves that I did um so it's supposed to be like a a a um one to one size replica of the metro card from New York City subway so it's like a train ticket and so the actual silk screen on the um circuit board is supposed to look exactly like it you've got the magnetic strip here which is Sil silk screened in like a big white strip um and so it's got like a little greeting card sticker that sorry speaker that you can take just out of one of those musical greeting cards um and it has like a little um 3D printed sort of like gramophone style sort of you know that horn shape yeah so it's just supposed to play Train noises that's literally all it does um but it it sort of shows the different skills that come together right and why have a 3D printer just so you can do that um and you know the soldering iron behind me you know I use that to actually repair it so the speaker actually broke off um and the wire snapped as well so I resolder that together glued this back down with a little bit of super glue and then it's it's good to go again so so that's just an example little things like that will it work right now yeah I don't know if you'll be able to hear it cuz it's very soft CU it's not an amplified speaker okay the cling doors please that's pretty cool yeah that that came through fine I think so it just does the you know stand clear of the closing doors and that was a noise that I heard every day in New York City when I lived there so it makes me very nostalgic yeah yeah and I love it like on the note of geeking out about mass transit I love mass transit whenever I go to a new city I love to like just take their train system around of course I live in a city that doesn't even have a train system unfortunately well technically we do it's just like I I've never used it before cuz it only goes in like to certain parts of town that I've never even been to basically like you can take it to get to like the the fairgrounds basically where they have this the Texas state fair with the giant cowboy guy Big Tex but that's it and I've never got an opportunity to write it anyway sorry for the the you know tangent about mass transit but yeah like so you're building things uh you're you're F you're feeling inspiration and you're just like you have the skills and you have the gear to be able to like 3D print things or use subtractive you know um technology like CNC to get metal into a certain shape that you need it um so you you have your own kind of Hardware lab that you can go into and get things done with yeah that's what I call it behind me the lab yeah are there so what's the most ambitious Hardware project you've worked on um this is going to sound unexpected but I it was actually when I was working for Microsoft um I was trying to I was working with like a medical medical equipment company for the hollow lens okay I guess that's mic the yeah yeah so I would say that that's embedded because it was like an actual kind of wearable device right and we were trying to um basically set up like the beginnings of what sort of live streamed 3D virtual experiences right so let's say we had something so the hollow lens is not like the um some of the other virtual reality headsets um although it's mixed reality everything all the processing was on the actual device so you didn't connect it to a computer like the Oculus or whatever right so it couldn't you know it didn't have as much power as something like an Oculus Rift uh and so if if something if we had to do like 3D manipulations or something like that that were like really really processor intensive we couldn't do it on the device so we were trying to figure out a way to um use like streaming technology um and I think we were trying to do it over RTC I think um and directex we were trying to figure out how to actually like have this very sort of zero latency you know like the sensors in the hollow lands would would transmit over that RTC channel the data Channel over to the server then the server would use directex to render the actual 3D view based on how you moved your head and then like whip it back to the machine to render as quickly as possible and so I thought that was probably one of the more challenging things that I've worked on because I had to like learn a I mean I'd never worked with RTC before um and I just had to just really think about how to optimize things as much as possible and just the concept of realtime streaming was sort of new back then you know I don't think stadia was was a thing and I don't think Amazon's version of game streaming was a thing so for us we were like is it even actually possible like are we going to achieve the latency we want without making people feel motion sick right with that sort of slight delay so I thought that was actually a really interesting project that I worked on yeah what was the result were you able to figure out a way to do it in a way that didn't make people emotion sick yeah so we were able to finish the Prototype and the job that I was in at the time that's all we kind of got to do yeah we're like here's the Prototype we've validated it and then you just kind of move on so I'm not sure what actually happened to that given that it's proprietary and sort of like not sort of public so yeah yeah you've worked at a lot of big tech companies and I will get back to live coding but like since you mentioned you're work at Microsoft you worked at like was like a funny thing that her sister had done she' worked at like all the different fan companies but uh what was your time as zos like yeah not a lot of people ask about that so I appreciate that um it was my first job in the US and I was moving to Las Vegas so like there weren't really a lot of places to apply for jobs there and I was just like I someone told me about Zappos because they're just being bought by Amazon they're not a thing in Australia you don't like order from zappos.com or anything and they're just like oh it's sort of a bit cooky there it's quite creative you know I think that it fits your personality you should totally apply and it was a total moonshot um but I managed to get a job there and I was there for almost 4 years and it was wild um probably one of the most formative jobs that I've had in my career just because of the timing of it and when it was good it was really good um a lot of the Amazon stuff started some of that culture started seeping in towards the end which was why I left but the first 2 or 3 years were again just really formative very influential on me the front end team there at the time was world class I mean like world class um you know they cared a lot about performance which is something that I'd never really had to um worry about in my career to a degree like I worked for mostly advertising Consulting so you just created a website for your client and then you handed it off and you never saw it again you know and they were very simple websites they weren't super JavaScript heavy maybe some Google Maps and that was about it um and so I hadn't really written a lot of JavaScript either so I wouldn't know the first thing about performance and so I learned so many things in that job and the front-end team were just so talented and so nice um and so inspiring and so I think that was when I went from just stumbling through my career to oh I actually want to be on this level I want to be at this caliber and it really sort of P me to improve a lot so um even just outside of the really cool culture of Zap where it's very creative or the meeting rooms really zany and you know the CEO uh at the time was was quite a character I just found it really inspiring because of the front-end team like they've really brought me up to the next level of skills yeah so it what was it like moving to the states I mean a huge proportion of the people listening to this podcast are from overseas and a lot of them would love to come and work for one of the big frankly like high-paying US tech companies because uh Americans may take this for granted that like tech jobs just pay a a lot of money uh often like a lot more than you know working in accounting or working in other not like non software engineering fields of engineering for example um but like moving to the US from Australia like there are lots of cultural differences even though you got the same language and everything like had you been to the US before you came to uh apply this was your first trip to the US really no um I'd been to I've been overseas once I went to venatu which is just an an island off the you know a few hours from the coast of uh Northeastern Australia no I'd never been to America um my partner scored a job in Nevada and so it was more just like we were going for his job but I quickly discovered that you can't just move to America like you sort of have to have a Visa and that usually means you have to have a job um and so that was the reason why I moved overseas um but yeah the I actually took a pay cut um because at the time like Nevada was really low cost of living and the front end engineers at zapo weren't valued in the same way they they were seen as less technical than the backend Engineers so we got paid a lot less than some of the other Engineers of the company they then corrected that a few years later but I took a pay cut actually to go work in America which I know is not the usual path but after that obviously like my the the jobs I got after that and especially at some of the larger tech companies obviously I started earning a lot more money there so it was a wild experience to go from you know being on a salary that I was relatively comfortable with but had to sort of budget carefully and things like that right and couldn't live outside my means to then being on salaries that were just almost uncomfortable for me me you know because I just thought it was so much money um really wild experience very challenging to get through the first set of immigration paperwork as well I wasn't prepared for that and that was quite stressful so for anyone who has that in mind that's something to expect how long did you live in the US total 12 years I think yeah did you get did you apply for like a green card or any sort of permanent residency or did you always have the plan to go back to a Australia yeah it sort of flip-flopped a lot when I first moved there it was only going to be for a year and then I thought I'll stay a few years but I'm definitely going back um and then I kept staying and I've been in some long-term romantic relationships over there right so if I was in a long-term relationship at the time I thought oh well this sort of has given me some incentive to actually stay um and so at some point you know I did start working on a Green Card application just to make things a bit easier for myself because it's really stressful to know that when you lose your job or if you quit you need one immediately or you have to basically Deport yourself um and I found that enormously stressful it was always a big thing in my head I felt like I couldn't really buy property or do anything permanent there until I had that permanent residency so I did actually spend a number of years trying and failing to get a green card it's not as easy as it sounds and some people just have a much harder time than other people sometimes it's just really bad luck but I never really got there so for that entire 12 years I was sort of precariously on a a work visa but I think that's very normal for people from um countries like India where the Green Card applications are oversaturated in for their quota um so it's not as if you know that's a unique experience I know some people that are waiting you know 20 to 30 years for their green card so um I don't want to trivialize that either but I was in a similar situation where I just felt like I kept running into dead ends or you know the pandemic happened which put a hold on a lot of um Green Card applications I know that right now because of all the layoffs in Tech most companies have to pause their Green Card applications for everyone because the Market's too saturated with um American citizens so uh because of the process you can't justify hiring somebody from overseas so it's it's just a very fraught process um but I did try uh to get there it just didn't happen so yeah yeah I mean how do you feel I mean it's not too back too bad of a fallback plan moving to the world's most livable City where you happen to also have grown up I was going to say yeah yeah I come from a lot of privilege and so you know there was a point where I realized that it wasn't worth all the trade-offs but also I come from an an amazing country and so you know having that up my sleeve was always something that was obviously very comforting for me so yeah that helped a lot thank you for bringing that up yeah uh so again you worked at a lot of big tech companies you got to like learn JavaScript from people who were underappreciated by you know do you know when you started actually live coding 2016 I think I think 2016 yeah yeah something like that um yeah no I just gave it a go and I just told a couple of people on social media and my family I was doing it and I think like three to five people showed up for that first one and uh I remember rehearsing it the night before cuz I was so nervous to Live code um I was like oh I need to actually have some idea of what I'm doing otherwise I'm just going to like draw a massive blank so uh yeah that was sort of when I started and then I ended up just finding it a really good excuse to work on open source task that I needed to do but I didn't really feel like doing so that's kind of why it continued I was like oh this is actually like really helpful for me and hopefully if people watch that's a bonus so that was sort of how I got started with it yeah and maybe you can talk about what like a typical session would be like when you sat down and I realized that you haven't streamed in like 3 years if you go to to noop cat twitch.com noat uh which is your your old handle n o o p k a t I believe um y yeah uh there's it just there's like literally nothing there it just says last streamed three years ago and there's no like video on demand it's like it and I went there and I was just like I really wanted to watch your old streams in preparation for this but I don't I don't know if any of those were preserved anywhere is it just lost time or do you have like some hard drive with all the they're all on the hard drive um so I was very diligent about backing them up and things like that so they're not lost of time they're just not online so yeah yeah well um what was it like like the you did it for a few years I think uh like do you remember how regularly you were like how it progressed um just what the experience was like cuz live coding is seeing kind of a Resurgence like I was just talking with the primagen like last week and uh he he's a YouTube or he he records on Twitch and then he takes it chops it up and has an editor that puts it onto YouTube and he's very um I think deliberate about how he approaches it but um you know the way that you were doing it was it when I when I watched it back in the day it felt very very different vibe it was much more chill uh much less like social commentary it was much much more just like a a love of The Craft and just like focusing on the code I didn't it didn't seem like there were nearly as many memes or inside jokes or anything it just seemed very wholesome is that how you remember it yeah that's that's how I remember it I think it was different days back then but also I think I had different motivations but I don't want to speak for the other streamers so I W elaborate on that I just think that I came in with it with those different motivations I only did it once a week which is not something that twitch really likes to do they want you to do it more often but I just knew that that was sustainable 2 hours every Sunday morning was when I did it um and I usually so for the first few I would just pick a feature I wanted to implement in a open in an open source library then after that I was like I need to make this even more sustainable for myself and enjoyable and so that I don't have to spend hours grinding before you know to figure out what I want to do I would just literally like roll out of bed put clothes on put a put a little bit of makeup on and then show up and say all right let's look through the issues and maybe the night before if I was particularly drawing a blank on like I don't even know what I'd work on I'd go through the issues and you know on one of my repos and and sort of think okay has someone opened a poor request sometimes someone would actually open a PO request the night before and I could tell they would hoping I'd review it on the stream so you know I tried to sort of look for something to prioritize um you know as far as that went so it was a very different vibe um we did have only a couple of inside jokes but they weren't sort of we would always explain them and you know we they were very subtle anyway um and so it was just it was supposed to be cozy time it wasn't my intention I never really designed My Stream in to be a certain way I just wanted to show up be myself not be a character get some work done you know that kind of thing so yeah and it was practical in the sense that you were actually working on real stuff that you'd be interested in working on like even if you weren't streaming uh open source yeah yeah pretty much what role has open source played in your career and in your life a lot yeah I actually feel really bad because I when I so I streamed for 5 years and then I decided to just sort of step away um from it for a lot of different reasons um you know none of them were like really negative reasons or anything and I stopped working on open source too it's like I didn't have that sort of reason to get up and do it on the weekend so I feel bad I have stepped away from that a bit it is something I want to get back into this year um but it's had a huge impact on my life um in a lot of different ways and it's again it wasn't something that I designed I did open source because I saw other people around me doing it and I thought it was a really cool just Concept in general right and I thought it was again it was just a a very admirable um thing to do and I wanted to be sort of part of that and contribute you know my perspective on embedded software and things like that and and you know it's a really lovely way to meet a community um and hopefully Inspire other people too and so but through that you know I accidentally got introduced to all sorts of employment opportunities and even the live coding you know I had a couple of years in in developer relations as a result of that because people saw my stuff and reached out and wanted to hire me and so there was a lot of unintentional benefits to it a lot of amazing privileges that I don't think I would have foreseen that I know that some people we're getting into streaming now they do it with the aim of achieving those things because they can see that it's possible but it was very surprising to me how much the stuff I was just doing for myself ended up sort of being noticed by other people and and and opened a lot of doors for me that I didn't necessarily um you know plan for which is awesome but it's been mostly jobs and just meeting new people and being able to speak at conferences and all sorts of stuff yeah well I want to talk a little bit about like more recently since you stepped away from live coding uh you know recently you've gone and you've got like a whole lot of different CompTIA certifications you went back and you got like a proper like four-year degree from Western Governor's University where Bo K's studied where several people who've been on the free cocam podcast got their undergrad in uh computer science uh maybe you can talk about like the back to school back like hitting the books again because you had like this pretty you were really high up in your career and from the outside from my perspective it sounds like you're like hey I want to climb down this ladder and I want to go climb up this ladder like this perched against a different bookshelf almost that that's kind of how I view it is that an accurate representation what was going through your mind you didn't want to like just stay in this one field okay sort of um I think that I see school in a different way to most people do I know that school is or school I guess college or university I know that it's very heavily um focused on like workplace career finding a job things like that um but I love learning and I love having a structured learning environment and because I had such an amazing experience with that tap course I just it just really engaged me um I still wanted to actually go and get a full degree so that is what's called an advanced diploma here um in interactive media that's what I technically have but it's not the same like I always felt like I missed out because I just like didn't end up going to college and getting an actual degree I just felt that that is a an experience for me that I would just really cherish and enjoy and and it had nothing to do with a career or anything like that it's just it felt like such a luxury Indulgence almost to be able to go to a place that is catering for you to learn things there are experts there that you can talk to to and it is a structured environment so that you understand what you you don't have to figure out what you don't know because a lot of the time you don't know what you don't know right and so someone is giving you that syllabus and saying here are the things that we think it's important for you to know and again that just felt like this huge Indulgence to be able to do and so I've been dreaming about going back to college for years and years and years and so cyber security was something I was really interested in but felt very intimidated by how broad and how huge and how deep it can go so I wanted to have that sort of expertise to sort of lead me and and give me the foundations I guess yeah what did you do like like describe kind of your path into cyber security from a more you know jack of all trades software developer type background yeah I think cyber security just kept coming up again and again and again um I think obviously it's become like a huge problem right like we've actually seen sort of the um the growth of things like ransomware and scammers and you know whing that even in the age of of you know generative AI now that's another tool that scamers are using it just kept popping up again and again and again and every time it popped up for me I just got like really excited um because I just thought it was really really fascinating and so you know I did OS training at uh zapo which I now know is a privilege that most workplace don't give their software Engineers they just expect you to know but when I started it was mandatory that I did an OAS training that was held on site at zapo and that was my first introduction actually to just hacking and threat actors and uh how you can manipulate websites to you know to gain things and that just blew the top off the lid off my brain you know and I was like this is just ridiculously cool I've never thought about software in this adversarial way and I was just obsessed um and so you know for years after that I just kept sort of reading different books you know I'd read like uh books such as cuckoo's egg which is an amazing sort of you know dramatized reenactment of um of you know something that happened at Berkeley um in California it was so cool and then stuck net I read about stuck net and I was like oh my God that's so cool um and so I just it just kept coming up as a reoccurring theme and with embedded iot stuff you know that iot devices are riddled with software um security issues and so it just kept popping up again and again and again in my career and and I'm interested in it enough on a personal level that I decided to go to school right just to actually finally learn what I could about it yeah and you also earned some certifications which I think is worth noting because a lot of people out there listening to this may be thinking about getting like some like the Security Plus or network Plus or some of I think they're all CompTIA certifications there may be some additional certifications from other vendors can you just like quickly rattle off some of the certifications you've earned over the past few years and what you learned from them what they involve for people that might be interested in getting them so just a disclaimer um all of those certifications were requirements for my bachelor degree in cyber security so WGU like puts a big sort of heavy um focus on getting indust certifications um which you know a lot of Industry actually recommends that students get that's what they desire in new grads especially cyber security new grads so I got um A+ I've always wanted to get my comper A+ actually and I I was so emotional when I finally got it um so A+ Network plus Security Plus um cyber analyst plus pentester plus um I got the um there were a bunch of other ones that I I ass squ um I think like secure it's basically the is ISC squ equivalent of Security Plus I feel so bad cuz now I can't remember them off the top of my head I also got project plus which is a project management one which was I actually found really interesting uh a lot of people hated that one but I thought it was useful because project management is useful in any kind of capacity right whether you're planning to move cities whether you're like you know writing software right so I found that really helpful so yeah just a whole bunch of them there were more I've just forgotten them so yeah and yeah the experience was really good what was the experience like like you just studied did you actually have to report to a physical testing center and like take a test with like some somebody standing over you to make sure you didn't cheat for one of them I had to um and that was the ISC squ one because they do like a palm vein scan to make sure that you are the identity you're saying w you are and I got sort of searched and I had to put my glasses on a tray and that to spin the glasses around to make sure that they weren't augmented glasses it was really intense but the the rest of them I actually did Via online proctoring and that's because I was doing that bachelor degree during the pandemic so CompTIA had actually pivoted to allowing people to test from home um so I don't know if that's still an option but it definitely was during the pandemic where they would install basically spyware software on your computer which sucked um and then you had to quit everything you had to show the Proctor that you weren't running any like cheating software or anything and then you would do your exam on the computer at home so I was lucky that I didn't have to find a testing center for most of them because I think that just adds extra stress yeah and uh so you finish the degree you finish these certifications you're going back into the job market but this time not as a general software engineer frontend developer like all the different things you were doing before but as an actual security researcher what was that process like and you know what was it like kind of assuming that new role and yeah it was really cool I think that um what gave me a soft Landing was that it was still a software role but I was just moving over to work for a research team um and so I'd be working with data scientists and um actual researchers with phds right in cyber security and things like that um and so it was more sort of a soft move over there and I got noticed because you know I was putting all these certifications on my LinkedIn and I was I was doing a security lead position at stripe at the time too so I was sort of trying to cut my teeth on more security focused roles so I sort of tried to just subtly transition and take on more and more in my current job and that's sort of what got me noticed um by my boss at crowd strike who actually cold reached out to me um and said would you be interested in you know applying for this specific job in research and it was threat hunting research specifically and so but when I joined um so I ended up applying getting the job and I joined crowdstrike and I can tell you that the bachelor's degree made my job so much easier even though I was still writing software I understood why I was writing things I knew how to use all the language and the words with the researchers and I could talk to the threat hunters and they'd mention like a hacking tool you know um they'd mention something like blood hound or they'd be talking about Mimi cats or something and like I knew exactly the even just the context of what that you know particular intrusion was that we were looking at um and that my software was trying to surface and so it was huge um it made me feel like I didn't just do that degree for my own enjoyment it ended up really just making my job much more fulfilling because I didn't feel intimidated and I I understood everything that was going on so that was a really really lovely transition that I made in my career where everything just lined up really nicely and you know the because I went so deep on all of the you know things in my bachelor degree I didn't just do things to pass exams I really engaged with things I played with the tools I really studied the certifications not for the certification but to actually learn something from the certification it ended up just being such a huge reward when I actually moved into a position like that yeah so it sounds like you're pretty happy with the transition like was it all sunshine and rainbows or like is the grass always greener on the other side like like what was it like being an actual security researcher working I mean you were working you say oh I took I cut my teeth on a job at stripe as a security leader uh what was it I mean that sounds like the type of job yeah I was the lead of my team yeah yeah but but like yeah it was it it was really more of a security Champion like you know there were security Champion programs in um different software companies where I was the tech lead of my actual team um of my software team but then everyone like the security team at stripe I did not work for the security team they wanted every team to kind of have a security lead so that were the representative for making sure that we were doing all the right things and that everyone was educated on the team when it comes to like good security practices and things like that just because otherwise they Spread Way Too Thin so that was where I could say I was cutting my teeth on something that was not super high responsibility but gave me an excuse to engage with the security team too and just like use the actively use the knowledge that I was studying in the bachelor's so that was it was actually one of the best transitions I've ever had in my career honestly like it just everything was just so lucky like when I moved over to crowd strike uh they write a lot of their software in go in goang and I learned goang at stripe and so the transition just could not have been nicer um especially given it was a remote job I was the only one in Australia working for that team at crowd strike so I really had to be quite self-sufficient even when I was ramping up because there wasn't always someone available to help me at the during the time zone um you know non overlaps I guess yeah is is crowd strike an American company sorry I know this is like a super ignorant question I could have just Googled but like uh pretty much every big company you worked at it sounds like has been an American company so you've always had to deal with the like I guess since you moved back to Australia you've always had to deal with this like substantial time difference I mean it's incredible time difference like I'm getting ready to put my kids to bed and you're literally waking up and it's like 8: a.m. there and you're you're kind of getting started with your day uh yeah so you had to learn a did you do a lot of this asynchronously do you think that a lot of your experience doing open source and doing communicating through GitHub issues and pquest and stuff was that helpful just having that experience communicating through open source for working remotely at an American company from Australia yeah 100% actually I've never drawn that link before that's very ex um that definitely helped me just being comfortable with asynchronous stuff and going to bed you know having left a message for someone and knowing that when you wake up in the morning they will have responded and just learning to be patient absolutely that was very helpful and um yeah I guess I've never thought about it before but that was very um very very similar experience um and you know in in open source sometimes you're just like well I'd open an issue but what if I just go splunking through the code base maybe I'll actually be able to find the issue and fix it myself and save everyone some time and then just open a poor request it's that same kind of thing where sometimes I'd have questions and I'm like screw it you know it's it's um like I would work from 7:00 a.m. my time till 3:00 p.m. uh my time just to get a bit more overlap with people in the states um you know I willingly did those hours but once you got to like noon my time I was like well I'm just going to smun through the source code because there's no documentation CU we're a research team you know we just have a lot of ephemeral stuff that we can't always be documenting so I'll just jump into the code base so yeah I think it was a very similar approach to that that it was to open source yeah how do you feel about like real-time communication tools like slack and things like that versus you know asynchronous communication like email and I guess ircc is more like slack but like uh systems where you communicate through the system like you open a ticket as opposed to just B you know jumping in and immediately talking to somebody in slack or something like that like do you do you think that what are your thoughts on that synchronous versus asynchronous question yeah I I don't like asynchronous at all um slack stresses me out but I think that's the case for just about everybody um I prefer real time at all times honestly um unless you know unless you need time to think so what was really nice was you know like obviously slack and emails and everything and meetings would all fall off at a certain point of my day so I would get a lot of focused time so I think asynchronous communication is really great for that where you don't you know my peers when I was studying cyber security um and so I took part in a lot of Collegiate ones actually so once for students so it's not as difficult um but also you can kind of Benchmark yourself against your your peers so I did a number of ctfs um which I really enjoyed uh it just gives you a chance to apply your skills and to see kind of where you're at and what you need to improve at and so yeah CTF stands for capture the flag and it's really just they're sort of just hacking challenges um sometimes your job is to defend something or to be um someone who reverse Engineers something so you're sort of on the the good guys side and then sometimes the um CTF events are about actually being the bad person um and you know being the threat actor and you have to try and hack into something and some are like both they're a mix you know and so I guess it's kind of similar to a software hackathon you know where there's a competition and you have to make an app this is sort of the infosec version of it where you have to apply your skills to either defend or attack something which is just really cool um and so I did code breaker which is put on by the National Security Agency the NSA n like the big bad NSA that everybody's terrified of yeah the NSA I'm going to guess something really funny for you to yeah okay so Su has gotten up from her chair she's running back to herbench to pull something off the pegboard so this is a fidget spinner from the NSA and this was what I got from them because I finished in like I was in the top 100 or whatever of their reverse engineering competition so that's my little um weird souvenir a lime green NSA fidget spinner have you taken it apart to make sure there's not like a microphone in there no but a lot of people have said that and I think it's really interesting I remember getting the um envelope in the mail the package in the mail and it just says like from National Security Agency and I think I put it on social media and I said oh well the found me it was nice knowing you all or something like that it's like every time you get a message from the IRS it's just like you you see that IRS that iconic you know typ face they use and you're just like your stomach just goes oh no you know then you open it and it's just like because I forgot exactly exactly so when it came I had a similar thought I forgot all about that I'd filled out my shipping address and everything and I was like what is oh and then I realized a second later so I definitely had that IRS moment where I was just like I hope this is what I think it is because I have gotten letters like that from the IRS and it's absolutely terrifying yeah awesome well I want I want to be respectful of your time I've got a lot of Rapid Fire questions I'm going to start asking if that's cool with you Su yes do it so just just to like kind of like uh recap your journey so far are so you you uh you started off with a computer in your house uh Commodore 64 The thankfully it was an older model and that was a that way you got to spend a lot more time in the command line and stuff like that that spurred your creativity you went on to study a great deal of different Technologies in as at a uh gosh what is the acronym T TEF T the uh Community t a f Ty yeah t a f and I I've written what that acronym stands for in here uh it stands for somewhere in my notes sorry I'm learning all about Australia um okay so I'm not going to Define that acronym I'm sorry I'll put it in the show notes uh but uh basically like community colleges so you went there and from there um you ultimately were able to work at advertising agencies you applied for a job in Las Vegas got to move and to the iconic Campus of uh zaposlite to Silicon Valley that was you know five or six hour drive away totes so you did that totes that's something only a Australians say like tot's cool am I am I correct like have you ever okay so if you ever hear an Australian cool oh is it British okay well um I've only heard so I didn't think we made it up okay yeah well um sorry if I'm uh attributing something to the Australian people that should be attributed to the Brits um okay so what I want to know is uh during your streaming back when you were live coding a lot you had this like very cool like first of all you got like beautiful taste in like mechanical keyboards and everything's like very elegant and uh like thoughtfully put together and and you know just like your your uh your background there uh with like like everything is very deliberately thought out in terms of your physical space but in terms of the software you use do you put a lot of time into customizing your tooling for when you're sitting down to write some code I do but then I just leave it like I'm not constantly tweaking it um yeah MP mpj from fun fun function back in the day I think he put it best like he stops himself doing it cuz he knows they'll just do it forever and it's just a distraction so um I've had the exact same Vim config file for years now years and years and years and years this probably hasn't changed in 5 years just set something up make it so that it's tolerable to you and then just let it go like you know that's sort of been my attitude it's not for every one but that's worked really really well for me so yeah it's just nice color scheme all of that it's got some of the basic tools that I need um and I don't try to customize anything to death anymore it's just frustrating to have to set up automated scripts to get it all back the way you want it when you have a new computer or if you know something happens and it's just a waste of time yeah so just good enough and then don't micromanage it anymore sounds like yeah and so you're yeah just leave it learn yeah if somebody wanted to learn them which is kind of like a a code editor that has a little bit steeper of a learning curve because you have to learn like all the keyboard uh shortcuts you got to learn like the different the three I think it's three different modes like insertion mode and you know like how would you recommend it like do you think it was worth learning it yes and no honestly I think it's like one of those huge it depends kind of things um if you do want to learn it you want to go C Turkey um I found it was very frustrating for 2 weeks but I wouldn't let myself go back to Sublime Text which is what I used to use just get through it um and I would say it's been really good because I do spend much more time on servers these days just like you know like into shell sessions and stuff like that it is so useful to just pop open vim and start typing but at the same time like Nano is there for people to use too and it's much easier to use so to be honest I wouldn't recommend it because it just depends on what you want to actually get out of something you know um I really enjoy it just because it feels minimal it uses not as not as much process as on my computer sorry not not as much you know resources on my computer but you know at the same time it's been a net positive for me but I wouldn't say you know it's been life-changing I think I'm just such a casual Vim User it's not like the primagen or um Gary burnhard or other people who you you see they're just like total Wizards in it I don't know I just I'm not someone who's really obsessed about my editor it's just if it's good enough it's good enough so yeah yeah it's a bit of a nothing Burger answer but I just don't think it's worth it if you're already happy with your tool whatever you know well to quote something that you said that I thought was was kind of interesting uh that interesting enough to be written down and quoted on the free cam podcast you said don't put your identity don't put your identity into a single tool and it sounds like m yeah it sounds like that's the the vibe you're good like if the tool works well enough you know Nano I use Nano all the time when I go on servers uh you can just type Nano and it's built into like I think every Linux distribution uh and it's just like a emac like environment emac curiously isn't default in a lot of like different server versions of Ubuntu and stuff so I can't use emac when I go in there so I just use Nano which is very similar uh shortcuts and stuff but you know whatever gets the job done really at the end of the day right um and I want to like reconcile the so you have spent a lot of time Shoring up the foundational knowledge of computer science of how networks work uh you know security Concepts uh how computers actually work and it sounds like early on in your career you were working with like really powerful tools that were like highly abstracted away and now as you've Advanced your skills you've gone like kind of further down the the you know veritable stack of mattresses that the princess is lying on top of to see where the P's are you know um how do you reconcile the tension between wanting to get things done and also wanting to like further cement your understanding of fundamentals so you can get things done faster in the future yeah I think that's actually a really tough thing for anybody to manage including myself I don't have a great answer for it um I think for me what I find really enjoyable when you go deep on something is when you're not having to be constantly distracted by having to look things up or feeling like you're hitting a brick wall because you're just missing some foundations on something it's not enjoyable to go deep if you know that you're missing certain foundations especially like right around that particular topic area so I think the motivation for me a lot of the time now is to zoom back even though it feels awful to rip yourself out of that you know Rabbit Hole you're in it's it's the excitement of knowing that okay I'm going to fill in these foundations I'm going to find something super interesting while filling that in anyway so it's still going to be an enjoyable process and then when I actually go deep it's going to be so much more productive you're going to have this lovely intuition you're going to have those deep flow moments you know you're going to be playing the synth music and just like churning something out I think it's just you've got to find a motivation to enjoy those deep Dives way more because you're not feeling imposter syndrome and you're not just feeling like I'm never going to get this you know the foundations have just opened up so much in my programming world where I I can just like flip-flop around and and just kind of dive in and out of different things now and I'm just not feeling like it's this awful kind of stumble in the dark um and so there are times when I still find it hard not to just go deep on something um but I think it's worth putting in the effort because things just feel way more effortless later on and it's really hard to give people this advice because it's one of those things where you don't get it until you actually do it um and so yeah it's it's really difficult for me to really give that advice just because you you don't know until you actually feel that uh and feel that reward of it sorry yeah when you were streaming for several years basically articulating your thoughts and like making them palatable you know as a teacher kind of like taking your thought process and Orting it uh uh verbalizing it do you think that that helped you um code better do you think or do you think like would you encourage people to like kind of think out loud while they're coding do you do you ever do that anymore is that like a habit like do you talk to yourself while you're coding or do you think that that slows things slows things down a lot yeah I'm I'm going to go out there and just say I think in general whenever I streamed on a Sunday as far as productivity problem solving challenge Factor it was net negative honestly you know I just sometimes it was nice to explain to other people and they they'd sort of give another perspective but a lot of the time because I had a lot of the domain knowledge of the embedded stuff like some people could jump in with like oh well what if you just like did a promise here instead or something like some of the JavaScript kind of side of things I would get some cool ideas from people but overall it was a net negative because I find it so hard to focus while I'm also talking I find it so hard to be kind of on the spot and have people watching me and so it's not helpful but the the thing that it did help me with was peir programming at work became like just not intimidating at all I'm like let's just jump into it and I was okay with saying I didn't know something and it gave me a lot more confidence with like working with other people because if you can live stream in front of a couple hundred people on a Sunday and make mistakes in front of them then you can pretty much just not feel afraid of of of working with any colleague after that in my opinion so it definitely helped with that I would say that that was actually kind of life-changing to be honest um it made my day-to-day work with other people much better cuz I used to feel very intimidated about coding in front of others um but the rest of it was honestly just a net negative yeah well it sounds like uh you did get something out of the process even if like those particular days like it was a lot of fun yeah yeah it was a lot of actual fun like we had heaps of fun I just meant programming wise and actually getting stuff done and things like that it was a bit of a a drag on that so there's the saying that like if you want to go far go together if you want to go fast go alone or something like that uh yeah I it's it's more interesting if you reverse it if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together right and so it's kind of like you had the entire you know hundreds of people like cheering you on yeah s s s and like you're trying to you know close the pr or whatever right so uh yeah it sounds like the fact that you stuck with it for so long I mean you even I think I heard you built your own streaming platform or you started to build a streaming platform just because you were unsatis what was what's the story behind the sus Hinton streaming platform yeah I just thought that twitch was crap for software programming streams I'll just come out and say it's crap it's not good for that and also twitch incentivizes you know it's a it's a company that wants to profit so you know the profit incentives just created bad experiences especially for like programming streamers like I could talk to you about this for an hour so I won't um and so I just went out and wanted to create my own platform that respected the privacy of my users that didn't that allowed them to use emotes without having to sign up for a paid subscription you know so we could have her own inside jokes and things um that allowed me to just have all these different features that were useful for programming streams that twitch would never do right um and so there were just a lot of misalign incentives I felt using twitch as a platform uh and I I had enough of a community that I felt that they would be willing to make an account on my website and then actually watch me and and interact with me there and that they'd remember I was streaming there and things like that so I went out and started making that and then the pandemic hit right when I was getting close to releasing it and you know just obviously that just put you know a lot of different things in perspective and I put it down for a bit just because you know the pandemic was a tough thing to get through and by the time I was sort of coming out of that I wanted to stop streaming so it just never got released unfortunately but it was a really cool experience actually programming it yeah maybe it'll come back one day definitely and if if there's like an open source alternative that people can just self host a website and stream themselves on it I mean streaming has got to be expensive though in terms of like all the data that is involved and like like only a company like Amazon would have the coffers to be able to do that like economically like I I don't know how expensive it is to pipe HD video to like 200 people concurrently uh is that something where you think an individual Creator could actually run like a streaming platform like let's say it was like you know a self-hosted tool and you just threw up your server would would the bandwidth on that be like crazy or How would how would it work yeah that's a good question I ended up creating like a matrix in Microsoft Excel and I looked at every single streaming option everything from Amazon's own streaming technology uh to you know uh just like smaller companies that were offering at the time and all of the different features and whether or not they had closed captioning for the live streams whether you had video on demand all that kind of thing so I did actually do all the research and it is possible so I ended up standing up a very beefy machine I got a dedicated server in a data center um wasn't actually that expensive and then um I ended up H having like several hundred gigs of like bandwidth I think it was up to a terabyte of bandwidth or something like that um per month um and so and then I did a whole bunch of tests like I spun up kubernetes to create all of these like spontaneous you up to 500 connections to see if the box would stand up and if the traffic you know how much traffic that was generating and how much bandwidth and things like that so it's definitely possible because years ago I was able to prove that as a proof of concept in 2019 and I think the tools have gotten a lot better since then anyway so yeah the answer is yes it's possible you just have to do the research and be willing to have your own dedicated piece of metal so yeah have you ever heard of cloud flare TV it's like a 247 at the time but yeah yeah our 247 stream focused on technical topics and uh it's it's kind of like what you're talking about it's like a platform but it's really just cloudfl like I'm I'm you can just press play and you can watch people like live streaming their 247 and I think some of it's probably pre-recorded it doesn't have chat uh but it is cool like the notion that like like I always fancied like free C Camp could have free C Camp TV and it would just be like an old school broadcast channel from you know the terrestrial you know uh satle like airwave you know like UHF if you ever saw the 1980s movie UHF where with weird inic like we could theoretically do that using tools that cloud fler has published but I still think that like what you're talking about is is a little bit different because it's like twitch in a box basically it sounds like yeah yeah I would be very interested if you do pursue that uh at some point or if you decide to get back into that project let me know I would be very interested in following that and uh I'll certainly try to help encourage people to uh contribute to it so what is on the horizon for Su Hinton what what are the big goals like we're basically out of the p pmic um you have an entire new skill set that you gain it sounds like you made Incredible use of that time uh what are your plans for the next few years yeah you kind of caught me at a Crossroads so I I I quit that job the research job um couple of months ago it was an amazing job um I just want to take a little bit of time off for myself that's all that was a very hard decision actually because I loved my team I just need some time off I I am carrying a little bit of burnout and I'm just finishing up my Master's Degree as well I'm working on my thesis at the moment so it seemed like good timing for me to just focus just on the thesis just spend a little bit of time like recouping um you know just being well enough again and things like that um so yeah like I'm keeping things open ended this year um I will be finished and hopefully graduating by July so that's actually not that far away it's May right now so I think 6 to 8 weeks I'll be finished with the master uh thesis and to be honest I'm trying to keep things open um and so I'll be doing a little bit of contract work for the rest of the year in software um and I'm looking to maybe start working on some online education courses because I'd love to get back into teaching so yeah just not putting a lot of pressure on myself but just getting around to personal software projects I've been putting off for years cuz I've been in school you know since the p mic started and and things like that so just you know sort of being able to slow down a bit and just come back to some of the things that are just really important to me um so that I can also just help shed a lot of the burnout of just working in the industry as well cuz this is my 20th year in the industry um you know it would be sadly it would be a bit strange if I didn't have a little bit of burnout at this point right yeah can you talk about like and I don't want to put you on the spot uh but can you talk about like how you sensed burnout was setting in like what was there some like moment that you just like damn I think I'm burning out or was it just like a gradual creeping process like be because I mean it seems like you have arrived at that conclusion I'm burning out I need to change I need to take some time off I'm curious for people that are listening to this who may also be closing in on a decade or two decades doing software development like how they can recognize this and know that they need to take time off before things get even worse yeah for sure it's a it's a really important question a lot of it is creeping up um but for me it was like a spike in anxiety every day when you just have to do normal things so if someone hits you up on slack and it's just totally normal it's they're not asking you for anything urgent they just want to talk to you and you just start feeling overwhelmed every time um or just it spikes your anxiety and you just you start withdrawing from people don't want to talk to them at work even though they're your teammates you just yeah you find yourself isolating yourself and then on top of that your productivity just takes a huge dive so you know that there'll be days where there'll be nothing wrong going in your life but getting out of bed is really hard and then you sit at the computer and you just don't do any work and you're just sort of your brain is screaming at you you're like we have to do something today and it just doesn't happen you know and then the next day there's a lot of pressure you feel guilty so you're able to kind of push through and and do it but it just feels everything just feels like you're walking through you know trying to get out of quicksand even though you're getting your job done it just feels so wrong and you're having to just absolutely force yourself and you're avoiding talking to anybody and everything just feels like a huge overload on you when it's just normal day-to-day duties I think that was the first signs for me just total disengagement but you know obviously still trying your best to do your job because you need to make money to survive right um and it just feeling wrong even though you couldn't find any other reason in your life why you're struggling to show up every day if that makes sense yeah thank you for sharing that and uh what are some things you're doing now that you have some time to yourself like how are you kind of decompressing and like rejuvenating yourself uh and uh like I guess tending to that that wound of just burn out I guess that psychic wound mhm yeah I think I've just been a would trying to find Joy um so that when I start feeling better like I'm still engaged with the things I enjoy I haven't taken a total break from everything if that makes sense so I'm reading a lot reading way more um and I'm reading about things like Computer History um and just other things you know like um watching a lot of video game documentaries on how video games are put together like just and and watching a lot of creators on YouTube do what they love so just watching other people who aren't burned out or who I don't think are burnt out really engaging with the things they enjoy so that I can get that reminder of why I you know why I love being a software engineer or why I love doing embedded stuff or or why you know I have these hobbies that I have that I just don't feel like I can engage with at the moment so just trying to stay connected um but also trying to do low energy things like that right like reading a book or watching a documentary is is quite low energy it's forgiving yourself for not being productive but it's just keeping you connected all the same to the communities that you feel inspired by I think that's been the biggest thing I've been able to do so that I'm not just sitting around feeling sorry for myself if that makes sense or feeling guilty for it you know yeah yeah I mean that sounds great like I'll you know share that like I watch lots of documentaries on YouTube uh I I read a lot uh I go for long walks with podcasts and I attribute I guess my longevity which isn't as long as yours 20 like I I've been doing free cocing for like 10 years almost uh so I'm very much trying to Pace myself because I've had so many friends who've just hit a brick wall with burnout and uh but I'm it sounds like you're doing everything you need to do to recover so we're pulling for you to be like back to full power eventually whenever that is uh but um yeah thank I really appreciate you sharing that because in Tech we have this like kind of Mythos around like productivity and it's it's an American thing right America's obsessed with productivity uh and you know uh I don't know if that was like a cultural shock when you went to the US where everybody's like so focused on work and career defines who they are so much yeah I mean was there a moment huge uh it was really hot actually was there a moment where you were like a dinner party and like people asked you what you did and like like where you realize wow this is different from like where I'm from like people don't you know immediately the difference was was immediate um and just yeah just seeing seeing people really struggle to even like leave a job because they felt like their identity was in it or like people who try to build empires in jobs because that's like their identity it's just people's identity being so deeply embedded in not just like what they do for a living but also that specific company and the team or like the the project that they're on like people putting their identity into the specific project and them feeling bad if they're working on something that's not as exciting as their their as their other colleague is is you know working on something way cooler that really really shocked me I feel very very um grateful that that's not something that I've ever really had a problem with like I can see that and see it's unhealthy and I'm not interested and um it's just been it's just been a a huge contrast and and I don't think that I just don't think that I could ever really do that and again that's probably privileged to a degree but I just I turn off I want to do the best job I can within reason and then I want to be a really great teammate to work with but I just don't want to put any identity in it beyond that if that makes sense yeah but it it really threw me when I first moved there and some people did actually judge me for that they thought that I wasn't being a team player and things like that and but I would say that what I was doing was completely reasonable I wasn't slacking off or anything like that uh I was just being realistic yeah you weren't letting my opinion so you weren't letting work completely take over your life like a lot of people allow that to happen exactly like like your employer will let will take as much of your time energy as they can they'll put you on that fancy you know Google bus and and have you writing code while you commute instead of you know uh like like as much of your time and energy they'll serve dinner really late at night so you'll stay for the free meal so you'll work a little later right like all those little tricks that they do to get you uh or or they call the company a family instead of just being you know a team right um a lot of those things that are like I don't know if they do it I mean I think they do that in places like China and Japan and stuff like other countries that have unhealthy work cultures but uh but I'm hardened to hear that it it isn't like that in Australia right like not not to the extent it is in the US not to the extent it can be I think that I think that we all fall into the Trap I think that no country is really like completely immune it's just not to the same degree for sure so I definitely feel that I fit more into the C the working culture here um people are working a lot right now just because cost of living and and working is very stressful but it's just not the same identity entrenchment here um and yeah people do want to go home to their families and stuff like that so yeah well I don't us like I want to end on a positive note and not just on on like U you know American work culture and my beef with it and and you know burnout and things like that since you've been reading a lot of books we don't usually do recommendations since you've been reading a lot of books and you watch a lot of video game documentaries what are some recommends that you have for people who've listened this far into the podcast are there any channels that you just like love watching to fire you up yeah so um one of the main channels that I love so much is nerd Forge nerd Forge um I'll yeah I'll list all of these they just do really creative stuff I'm so into them I'm trying to figure out what the documentary one I watch I think it's called cut clip cut clip but I'm trying to remember the name of the channel I'm just scrolling through YouTube right now trying to find it for you while you're while you're scrolling for it I'm going to throw in one of my recommendations this channel is so great they do like Retro Gaming documentaries and they do like the best kind of like nostalgic 3D graphics and stuff it's called uh it's called splashwave and so they'll cover like how Sonic Sonic the Hedgehog was made you know talk about Michael Jackson's involvement in the development of the music and that he was like a huge fan of Sonic the Hedgehog and he actually approached him because he wanted to make that's cool uh or um they'll talk about uh you know the history of like different like Sega games different arcade games they'll talk about like the architecture that made certain arcade games possible and they they model all this stuff so a lot of the shots are like effect shots and stuff it's so cool and it's got like that that kind of like you know synth retrowave type uh sound going on so um yeah what are some other channels you recommend yeah so the the channel is no clip no clip um that's the Video Game documentary Channel yeah they are fantastic um and as far as books go right now I am absolutely loving the dream machine it's just it's such a good book um it's very dense and very long but I just it is it is the best narrative about just how Computing came to be um it's just an absolutely delightful read I've been really inspired by that so that's the main one that I'm reading at the moment but before that I read um space Rogue I think space Rogue that one is about you know the um original Cult of the dead cow um hacking group they're really really cool and so space Rogue was one of the um pseudonyms of the one of the members of the group I believe very cool yeah I remember believe I'm blanking on all of this stuff I remember the cult of the dead cow back in like the the BBS days and stuff we would they are so cool yeah yeah very cool dream machine space Rogue nerd Forge no clip I will second that I love the no clip Hades development uh series it's like four hours worth of like how they made the game Hades I think it is called Hades right like it's like a kind of isometric perspective where you're like zipping around and fighting like all these Greek gods and stuff it's cool um so Su I just want to thank you again for like 20 years in the field and you're still sharing your wisdom and uh I'm very excited to talk with you offline about like you know software development education that's something very passionate about and uh we will take as much Suz Hinton as we can on the free C Camp YouTube channel like publishing your tutorials anything we can do to help get that wisdom out there uh to as many people as we can freely um so I want to thank you again for making time to come on the Freo Camp podcast yeah thanks for having me this has been a really fun conversation yeah and everybody listening until next week happy coding\n"