**The Power of CS50 and Supplemental Learning**

One of the biggest questions that comes to mind when considering learning to code is what harm can come from going through a course like CS50? For those who are new to coding, CS50 is an online introductory programming course offered by Harvard University. While it's easy to get caught up in watching YouTube videos and browsing online resources, actually doing the projects is where the real value lies. By working through the exercises and projects, learners can gain a deeper understanding of the material and develop practical skills that are essential for success in the field.

**The Importance of Space Repetition**

Another key concept that is essential for learning to code is space repetition. This refers to the process of reviewing previously learned material at increasingly longer intervals to help solidify it in long-term memory. As learners go through the process, their brains become more efficient at recalling the information, making it easier to access and apply later on. The wrinkles in the brain's neural pathways become deeper, allowing for faster and more efficient transmission of electrical signals between neurons. This process is critical for learning any new skill, including coding.

**The Talent Code: Interest + Practice = Success**

In his book "The Talent Code," author Daniel Tammet argues that talent is not something that people are born with, but rather it's the result of a combination of interest and practice. When learners are passionate about a subject and put in the time and effort to develop their skills, they begin to see significant improvements. The more they practice, the more efficient they become, until it starts to feel like second nature. This virtuous cycle is what drives success in any field, including coding.

**Embracing Your Unique Path**

One of the biggest misconceptions about learning to code is that you need to be an outlier or a prodigy from the start. In reality, most people are not born with natural talent, but rather they develop it through hard work and dedication. The outliers in any field are often those who have dedicated themselves to their craft for many years, honing their skills through practice and repetition. As John so eloquently put it, "if you're 6 years old and not as good as Mozart, should you just quit?" The answer is no. Instead, focus on developing your own unique path and finding what works best for you.

**The Value of Open-Source Learning**

One of the most significant benefits of CS50 is its availability under an open-source license. This means that learners can access the course materials without worrying about paying a fee or being locked into a proprietary system. Furthermore, many of the resources created by John and other contributors to the course are available for free, including flashcards, notes, and even code snippets. By making these resources freely available, CS50 is helping to democratize access to quality learning, making it possible for people from all over the world to benefit from its content.

**A Shout-Out to John and the CS50 Community**

Finally, we want to take a moment to express our gratitude to John and the entire CS50 community. By sharing their wisdom and expertise with the world, they are helping to create a more open and accessible learning environment for everyone. From their blogs to their podcasts, they are dedicated to spreading knowledge and making it easier for people to learn to code. As someone who has been inspired by their work, we can only hope that our readers will follow in their footsteps and join the movement.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enand I thought that the talent you have is the talent you're like you're born with and that's it's it's that's all you've got right so if if as good as you are in high school that's probably the best you're ever going to be and boy that's dumb welcome back to the free Cod 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 John wasam who's both a developer and a Founder John is a software engineer at Amazon and creator of one of the most popular open source projects of all time coding interview University John welcome to the free Cod Camp podcast thank you Quincy so I'm so glad to like I'm honored to be here like you are you're a leader in this uh in this space of like learning to code and it's just yeah I'm I'm honored to be on so thank you so much yeah well I've learned so much from you over the years just like reading your blog and of course uh just going through the many many resources through your open source projects you've got like a kind of like a computer science flashcards project is as well which we can talk about in a little bit uh and just like learning how you assimilated this massive Corpus of knowledge and went out there and uh you know went into the software engineer you know Fang tier company interview process yeah yeah well let's I mean people probably have heard of coding interview University but for people who haven't maybe you could talk just really quickly about what is is and um and we'll go into your story about why you built it but what is the resource itself and what is the value proposition to people who are hoping to break into Tech and work as software developers yeah so coding interview interview University is like it's basically just a long list of resources uh broken up by topic so that you can kind of like guide yourself through a computer science education um and then learn how to interview so that you can get hired at pretty the goal is kind of anywhere right to get hired anywhere but um you know a lot of folks are going for the the big companies and it uh it the resources there um prepare you to uh to have the knowledge and the uh information you need to get hired yeah absolutely and you yourself famously uh this is maybe a spoiler alert for people that are excited about like hearing John's entire developer origin story which we will get to in a second but um it was originally called Google interview University and uh of course uh you know that wasn't meant to be but it sounds like something just as good or better came out of that which is your long career at Amazon as a software engineer both at Amazon and at like zapo which is uh pretty big e-commerce company that Amazon acquired maybe 10 15 years ago so um very unique culture in itself and a very inspiring founder uh who's no longer with us uh but who is just like really really cool like if you've ever been out to like the Las Vegas Tech scene it's basically built around Tony sh and the uh the so when I started at Amazon it's uh it was like I I went into we'll we'll we'll I'm sure we'll discuss more of this but like so I won't talk about like how kind of how I got in there but um but yeah Amazon like Amazon is a big company it's real big and uh I was on a on AWS config team so it's like one of the many many services within AWS and I was one member of that team um uh and I had never like like I knew a little like I knew a little Java um but like I had never really written any unit tests to speak of like just a handful and um basically when I jumped into Amazon it was I knew I was going to have a lot to learn and I had a lot to learn so um uh yeah so getting you know working at Amazon and and and work working at their high standards as far as like the code reviews and and like getting your designs signed off and like stuff like that um uh yeah it it definitely leveled me up and then working at and like the uh like the term workplace culture came from company and people to grow with and uh like yeah and and zaposlitev the word I'd use to describe what they do whereas if you you might think of like Google as like less focused for example famously kind of like trying a lot of different things like uh Amazon strikes me as like incredibly like metric driven and just like really focused on the bottom line at the end of the day which you know delivering value to customers I guess is like customer obsessed culture and everything and uh it sounds like zap OS has a little bit of a different culture but uh and it I guess the reason I asked you this question right off the bat is was it worth all the work that you put into learning computer science for people who are like should they continue uh their studies like is is it worth it to become a Dev yes it's worth it um I mean this wasn't my first rodeo I had I had T I had kind of taught myself web development back in the uh uh the post-bubble period of the you know that ended in like 2000 U the early.com days yeah um and so I had worked at a lot of a lot of places but um like going to go you know trying to like teach myself computer science was like a whole new it's almost like getting a whole new job right like it's almost like changing a career so um when I uh like so when I went into that world is like yeah it's it's different it's big it's also really good pay and if you're at Amazon you get stock options and there was a there was a big stock up swing at the time so yeah um like financially it was great um and as far as like getting my skills up and kind of opening me up to a different world of of uh software development uh definitely worth it so I mean and and of course once you get into like one of these big companies and you've got that on your resume like you can kind of go anywhere yeah absolutely and that's what I tell people even though Fang probably isn't going to be your first developer job uh and when I say Fang I mean like really any big name brand tech company it doesn't have to be specifically one of the Fang companies fa G which is Facebook Apple Amazon Netflix Google right like those are the kind of The Prestige companies when that was coined and yeah you know that people people like reconfigured exactly who like Microsoft why isn't Microsoft on the list you know I know I was just thinking that but um I think that uh one thing that's really uh interesting about you is that you did like have kind of like good enough developer chops to be able to get things done for a long time and then you knuckle down and you're really like I'm going to go to like next level and so that is going to be the story we're telling but I just want to reiterate to people straight from John's mouth he said that uh it's worth it like it is worth going deeper on your skills and not merely you know having kind of like a quotequote lifestyle business type consultancy or project or something like that but actually uh really tooling up and going and working alongside I guess you could say like the most uh learned and capable like software Engineers on Earth in many cases like working alongside them I mean assuming that they are in Private Industry and they aren't just like c tech uh like teaching or U you know working for NASA or something like that but but like the actual people that are in Industry uh you can work among them right if you spend the time and the energy to learn the fundamental skills to learn the math to learn the computer science so what I want to do is like go way back back cuz you've had like this really interesting career that this is the is this the first podcast you've ever been on yeah yeah so you never gotten a chance to really tell your developer origin story and we're going to do that here I want to start from Little John wasam just the little TI right that's not knows Brett what were you doing when uh like what were your aspirations as a kid and like where did you grow up maybe just walk us through kind of your life at whatever PA you feel cuz this is fascinating to me like this guy just just to reiterate this guy chose to leave you know startup life he probably had a comfortable existence and everything and like aspire to more even if you know there there's this saying in like startup land like if you have like a hill climbing algorithm right and you want to get to the highest point on the the entire surface that you're on right like a lot of times you get to the top of a hill and you'll think oh wow I got to the top of the hill I'm at the highest point you look over and you see an even higher Hill and well yeah of course you want to get to the top of the hill but what does that involve that often that involves climbing down and then climbing all the way up another Hill and I mean it sounds like from my perspective that's what you've done right like a lot of people would have just stopped where you were um and probably just figured out a way to make you know consultant cons consulting or having a smaller start up work but you you were willing to go work for somebody else which takes a lot of humility after you've been independent right and uh and and to climb your climb your way up like a giant hierarchy right I mean it's it's an Endeavor I imagine both psychologically and of course in terms of just raw work that you had to do to get where you are so well I'm going to shut up and back up let you tell your D origin story but I just I just want to like kind of Grant it sufficient gravity for people that are listening like this is not like an everyday ordinary thing that just anybody does like it does take a certain amount of gumption and audacity and humility frankly to do this so with that John washams origin story oh man this better be good uh so um like honestly when I was a kid I uh there were there were two things that kind of consumed well three like uh I I drew I drew a lot like I really like drawing uh I played with Legos a lot and I played with my Star Wars toys almost constantly um like I was a kid in the um and in the early 80s like Star Wars was and Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi was all like in that prime those Prime you know kid consumption years and I wanted all the toys so uh like yeah Star Wars was was was the only thing I really uh only thing I really cared about like even when R of the Lost Arc and all that came out and Ghostbusters and all these like big and Back to the Future all these big movies from the uh you know early 80s came out if it wasn't Star Wars I didn't care so like I didn't watch a lot of that stuff until years in the years later so um yeah Star Wars and like that whole thing really consumed me um but yeah I liked drawing and I drew a lot and like people are like oh you're so talented you're going to be artist when you grow up and like I even remember one uh career day I came in and like a beret and a a this is elementary school and like a smok and like I had a little pallet on my on my thumb and like yeah I'm going to be an artist someday um so yeah that's that's crazy and then like I think Lego is kind of like my first step into like building things yeah um so but I think the P the the the kind of the thread that winds through my story is I like I like building things um I like I like creation of things whether it's through drawing or through um Legos or through computers or through startups like just like making things is what I really like to do yeah yeah that that was me as a kid yeah and maybe you could talk a little bit about like you start to grow up and you start to look around and you realize like hey I can't get paid probably to build Legos maybe there are like competitive Lego builders out there I mean probably just as just as rare would be professional like you know artists who actually like draw or like there are lots of artists that work you know in architecture um you could argue that a lot of people building you know software applications are artists or certainly Artisans um but it you know those aren't like skills to pay the bills so to speak like uh and you know was there a point where you realized like hey I've actually got to like you know kind of pay my way through life and was there any sort of Temptation to go to Art School or like what were you thinking kind of coming of age like high school age yeah so like in in Middle School like I think the thing that really broke it out for me was um my brother had a trs8 color computer that we hooked up to the TV and like you could write programs on it and um and I thought that was really cool and like after the the school like I think he had gotten it and then done some stuff for the school year for like a computer class and then it just kind of sat on the side and I was like hey can I play with your computer and he's like sure go nuts so I spent the entire summer with a little manual I have a copy of it back here on my shelf uh that I picked up later but um yeah I just went through I started going through that manual and like learning the commands and uh I fell in love with this thing and like that was the summer of just um of like just living in this computer uh and it's funny I didn't even get through the whole book I think I stopped at the chapter on arrays because I was like I don't need that like I'm fine with just uh writing code and loops and functions that that works I can get everything I need done with that um and uh yeah so but there was something about it like I could make things and like see things move and like see things happen uh and it was like this little kind of perfect world where everything went just exactly as I wanted it to and I think that kind of um and like it was like a you know you could think of it like a Lego box with like a trillion Legos in it and like you just build whatever you want as long as you have enough memory I guess and hard dis space which today I mean it's it's Bountiful but back then it was a serious limit like I mean trs8 like what year was this do you remember when when your brother got his trs8 uh this was 8 this was 85 and uh it was I think it was it was 84 or 85 and uh I know that like when the next school year rolled around I took a like there was a computer like middle school computer course you could take and and um I love that I didn't love the History part like learning about all these old like you know engineers and babage and love lace and all this stuff but like I was but you know like okay now we're going to actually touch computer I was like yes let's go and it was like a real computer with like a real processor not a not a 16 kilobyte uh computer like I had at home yeah um and so that was that was a lot of fun but I didn't own a real computer until um a decade later yeah9 what do you remember the first computer that you had like what model it was yeah it was um like so it was 95 and I delivered pizzas so I could cuz I was in my my 20s by this point I delivered pizzas so I could pay off my uh because I had some debt you know credit card debt and stuff so I was like okay I'm going to pay I'm going to deliver pizzas and basically worked two jobs I worked at a department store and then I delivered pizzas at night I was like I'm going to pay off my my debts and then I'm going to get a loan and buy a computer and like all the software that I want to get for it um and I remember the computer was 2,000 bucks and it was a uh it was a compact pereria and I think it had a uh I think it had like it was like a 700 megabyte hard drive and like uh something like 8 megabytes of Ram or something it so long ago but um but to me it was like everything but I it's funny enough I didn't really program on it I just used software and played around with it did flights sem me later and stuff so yeah uh and I'll just interject it like so many people like self included like I was very fortunate and privileged as a kid to have we had these Amiga an amga computer um and it was amazing and I but really all I did with it was um just play video games uh I would use it as a word processor like I would create like my Mortal Kombat move cheat sheets like all the different moves for Mortal Kombat and then i' print those out on my old do Matrix printer i' take him to the arcade and I'd sell them and that was like my first business was selling all the moves and fatalities to mortal combat to other kids of the arcade and uh but that was like what I used my computer for I didn't use it for really anything creative it was just consuming right and that's how most people use their phones today they probably primarily use it to consume watch Netflix or scroll through Reddit or something maybe they interact a little bit on social media but um but yeah I will go back to you did have a question earlier I do want to answer on and that was um when it when it came time to go to college um I wasn't too smart about it like I knew I liked computers and I even looked through the computer courses at the the school this was LSU and sheveport so yeah LSU Louisiana State University yeah but this was not like this was just a satellite school we didn't even have the same like mascot as like big LSU um we didn't even have a football team at our like it was just a little uh satellite campus but um when I when I would look through like the book of like okay well what you know what courses like what do I want a major in um I did look at the computer courses but for some reason I was like I'm going to do economics cuz like I was I think I was just tired of being like a like a broke kid and know and I was like I want to find out where the money goes like make that make that money and uh that was dumb most most popular major in the United States business uh 20% of college students go study business and I think it's because they think if they study business they're going to be able to make money but if you really want to make money just study computer science right heck yeah but anyway we you know you and me both like I didn't really care that much about making money cuz uh I was just focused on like like I I don't know I was like one of those kind of gen xers who's like totally cool with like the you know the uh bookshelf that had was made out of like cinder blocks and like the creaky mattress that was on the floor and I would just go to the library and that was my life like going to the library getting books going back read like you ever seen like Goodwill Hunting where that's his his hob that he lives in he just checks out books and he just stays there and then he goes works his day job of course he he worked construction which I was not tough enough to do for very long uh I worked at like Taco Bell and grocery stores and like retail you know but uh but you know so many people so so I studied liberal arts like I everybody on listening to the podcast probably knows I studied English um which is not the field that you want to go into if you want to be able to like support a family in 2024 but um it was very you know I enjoyed it did did you enjoy economics at all I thought it would be I thought it'd be cool and like give me a little status I think and like make me look smart but um there were some there were some things about it like I would go to the uh the library and there was like this this this magazine was like it was like a journal called econometrica and I would look through that and had like all these cool mathematical formulas of like and the like papers on the like stochas ftic variability of the such and such and I'm like a this is so cool but like um like I didn't really have a passion for economics um and even during the time where I was at college and learning this like I was teaching myself other things like on the side like I learned about electricity and circuits and stuff like that and that also was like painting so I was keeping up with like art stuff and like drawing and painting and stuff and um I even had a couple of my pieces like I went to a coffee shop in shreport and was like hey could you could you put up my artwork it was kind of like dark artwork um because I was like big into horror movies at the time so they ended up put they ended up putting it in the favorite 80s horror movie uh the thing is amazing yeah oh man such a cool movie if anybody hasn't seen you have to watch it on Halloween you have to watch these at night uh man uh yeah I i' say the things up there I mean is probably my favorite is that 79 or is that technically 80 um but uh but yeah like that in the blob the The Blob remake I guess 1980 that yeah that was cool my kids have heard about these but they like I always joke oh let's watch the vlob they're like no you know let's watch alien no U but yeah so you were really into hor horror movies like John Carpenter of course amazing Visionary uh you know I mean that that did pass but like like because I'm your art was Ed something yeah it was it was a little edgy and like they ended up they did end up putting it up in the coffee shop but like in the back room next to the bathroom but hey you're on display more than a lot of artists can say yeah um but like I didn't go to I didn't go to art school because one I thought like I saw that there was other people that could draw better than me and I thought that the talent you have is the talent you're like you're born with and that's it's it's that's all you've got right so if if as good as you are in high school that's probably the best you're ever going to be and boy that's dumb so um I've learned a lot about like Talent since then but I also didn't want to I didn't want to draw things for other people I didn't want them to tell me what to make I wanted to make what I wanted to make and so that was a big reason I didn't get into like go to art school and like get into Commercial Art and stuff just because I don't know I thought that's just going to take the fun out of this so yeah I mean I'm sure like a lot of AR is commissioned uh there's like some Patron who's like hey can you do like this really cool painting of me with my dog or something like that I don't know like I I imagine that's a lot of like the typical artist like income comes from not just pursuing their you know I don't know if you ever saw the movie art school confidential uh yeah uh what's it what's his name the John malovich character and like he he just draws triangles and like that's his thing he's like he settled into this he found his Lane and he never deviates from that because that's what he's known for and so he's trapped in this like drawing different like geometric shapes even though it's like every piece looks the same and stuff it's like what he's known for it's kind of like a Rothco esque thing like did Rothco get trapped there I mean Picasso broke out do broke out they do all kinds of stuff but that that's like at the very tip top where you can basically do anything dami and H and stuff right but um sorry uh Art School Confidential great comic book turned into a a pretty good movie too U about art school and the absurdity of kind of the overlap between art and commerce as it pertains to Fine Art uh I mean like again as I've said I believe Artistry is present in all kinds of work that people do but specifically creating art that's going to be displayed in a gallery you know iway way type stuff you know you do you do want to like uh that's like its own kind of like I guess Fine Art is what they call it right mhm so so you didn't want to do fine art uh I mean I want to drill deeper into that because I suspect and this is I'm not like a psychologist I'm not somebody who studied this extensively but I am a person who runs you know a training charity that helps people learn new skills I suspect a lot of people have that misconception that uh oh I'm not very good at programming be like I see all these people who are way better at programming they must have natural programming Talent but the reality is those people were probably just been programming a lot more and a lot of people forget what it was like to suck at doing something because they started doing it when they were at a really young age so they just think oh I'm like just naturally good at it or or they you know it's like the anthropic or what's what's that thing like you don't know what you don't know like uh you kind of project upon yourself like these these uh the limits of your own knowledge kind of limit your imagination and you it's hard to imag imine that somebody could have tens of thousands of hours practice programming when they're only like you know 22 years old or something in college and you see them in your class and you're like holy cow I can never be as good as this guy um but it's totally possible life is long and people if they you know monom manically focus on a single thing for a long time they're naturally going to get good at it through practice probably right like any anything you do where whether it's like and I'm big into like I'm back into drawing and like digital painting now so we can talk about that later but like now that I have like a normal life I can enjoy the things I used to enjoy but um like with anything like learning a foreign language or or or or learning a new skill like drawing or programming or anything or even walking like nobody comes out of the womb walking and nobody comes out of the womb like like painting or you know programming computers like all of us start at at at Z zero and some people have a talent but I think a I think a talent is um I think Talent when you're young is made up of a couple of things one it's you're you have a great interest in something so you do it more right and then you just get better at it by doing it more um and then um uh what's the other thing but like yeah just um like having a passion for something will make you want to do it more and then you get better at it and then people see that as talent but it's like no like I spent you know as a kid I've probably spent like a 100 hours drawing like like adats and other Star Wars things and like just kind of got good at it adats are the big walking tanks that like so I for people that aren't watching the video version of this like most people just listen to the audio but if you're watching the video version you could see John's beautiful bookshelf behind him which has like lights inside of it and he's got like tons of Star Wars figurines and things like that in the background along with like a looks like a pretty uh broad collection of books oh wow is that's like a Boba Fett it's a stormtrooper and and it's an Adat yeah uh so cool man uh so that's really cool that like now that you have the time and the energy and you've got some degree of work life balance and you you have like income and all these things taken care of you can kind of like Get Back To Your Roots and that that that's pretty awesome um so I'm sorry I didn't mean to interrupt your flow but I just wanted to point out the that back there make sure make sure people knew that like yeah this guy really is into Star Wars yeah I mean this is all I have now and this is stuff that was bought like within the last probably 10 years uh like all the stuff I had when I was a kid I gave that I gave that away to another kid um and uh yeah when I was in my 20s and uh so yeah I don't have any of that old stuff but that's okay it would just it' just be probably Gathering dust anyway but I got I got these guys yeah um just something to something nice to look at so you're basically like the the thrust of what you're saying is because people are passionate about something they do it a lot and because they do it a lot they get good at it and then that it's it's a virtuous circle a feedback loop and so you know like a worldclass filmmaker like George Lucas for example uh probably spent a great deal of time not being good at film making before he was good at film making and then because he enjoyed it so much because he was getting better at it he kept doing it more and more um a world class uh I mean that that can be applied to anybody who's good at anything I think that positive feedback loop and so I guess a question I have not to interrupt your your developer origin story because we haven't even touched on you know your Foreign Service uh for example like the the the Foreign Language Institute uh that the Department of State runs and stuff like that we're going to talk about that for sure but do you think that somebody can be good become good at programming if they don't really enjoy programming do you think somebody can kind of brute force and slog it and become good enough to work at like a fan company if they don't enjoy it I don't think so you need you need something to drive you through the hard times and through the times where you doubt yourself like you need a motivation to get you through um and sometimes it's not programming that will that will give you that like maybe it's to give your family a better life um and that's enough um but I think having a good motivation and being being interested in it and being it something that you you would do even if somebody wasn't paying you to do it like you just do it as a hobby just for the just for the fun of it um I think that's what's really going to going to get you there because yeah if if if money like if money is the only motivation it's going to be real it's going to be real hard unless you are have a A desperate situation or like an environment you're trying to get out of that can be that can be the motivation you need because we know like if people aren't desperate enough they'll like they'll they'll bulldoze through anything they have to um luckily I didn't have that I I wasn't in that situation but I had I did have a passion for it but I did have some you know I did have some motivation Beyond just the the Love of the Game as well so yeah well um so you're delivering pizzas you um doing another job too I can't remember what you said it was and um you're basically just like able to get a computer using it mostly for entertainment and like kind of stuff people did in the 90s uh when they had a computer like I don't know about you but I like downloaded like every song that I ever wanted to listen to I'm like yeah I can downlo off 50p I'm a pirate you know did you get that did you get that Bruce you got that okay you would a car but you would download like every Bor song you know so uh like stuff like that um so uh well like how do you go from there to going to Korea like I do want to get to that like make make a path of that yeah so um I did have like so I did have regret about doing the uh you know the whole like economics thing and and I did have a so I I'm going to I'll be I'll be frank I did have a path I was like okay I'm GNA do this degree I'm going to like work in like a bank and I'm going to work in maybe Finance I didn't know the difference between finance and economics I was dumb like I was 18 so um but I did have a plan and so I was like you know to to kind of like Get Up the ranks and like make some money right but um I was working in a store at the time and somebody came in and they like basically got me into a like an MLM and that derailed me for a good two years right um yeah and an MLM multi-level marketing um scheme frankly like something that should in my opinion be illegal in the United States but for whatever reason they're not illegal proba because they make a lot of money that is some of which is to the government through taxes some of which is pra through lobbying I don't know how it works I don't know how it was legal can you can you describe that like yeah there and there was lobbying in the uh I think the 70s by a large founder of one of these big mlms and his uh um uh his his kind of cronies in office and that's that's how it became where it's this is not illegal this is totally a legitimate business operation um but yeah so basically any kind of business where uh it's a it's kind of a two-part business one you're selling things and mostly you're trying to sell them to people that you know um which is called social selling uh in in today's parlament and the other part is like recruiting other people to do the same like those are the two Hales of of an MLM um and it it's there are I mean there are people that I mean they they say that there are people that make you know big money and like all that but the majority of the people don't make anything uh majority of people lose money and the the problem with like it it would be great if everybody made money then everybody be doing it and it would like take over the whole USA or the whole world but yeah Infinity money glitch yeah but money um but and I I'm very passion about this CU I just I I just hate them so much yeah um and I was a person that was very ambitious and I would have like you know done any job like I needed to do to like make money and so what they tell you is oh if you're ambitious enough and you're hardworking enough like you'll make money and I was ambitious and I was hardworking and I worked really hard and I was like nights and weekends like a startup like working on this stuff um and yeah I lost money it's just it's it's I think there are some people that like have the right combination of factors and they they do make money but it's such a tiny percentage you you might as well just buy a lottery ticket well my understanding is like virtually all of these and like there's a there's a channel called coffeezilla which I've been on uh coffeezilla huge fan of his channel uh if he's watching if you're watching coffee keep doing what you're doing exposing these terrible uh I'm not not going to call them businesses the these scams a scam uh but one of the things that like I think he and like a lot of other people in the space of like basically revealing huers and stuff like that uh it if you're one of the first people to join then you're you know but like almost all the people that make money are just there early because it's like a pyramid scheme essentially right it's a legal pyramid scheme uh so anyway I I'm very sad to hear that two years of your life got derail that you lost money due to this while working very hard while probably taxing a lot of your interpersonal relationships cuz that's the Insidious thing about this be one thing if you just like lost money and it was like you know a casino type business model where uh you're at least having fun while you lose money or whatever like not that I I'm not I'm not a fan of gambling um and I don't I've never gambled before um but uh I can see that like some people enjoy that and we should probably have that be legal otherwise we're just going to have a bunch of underground you know um gambling that's probably going to involve a lot of crime and stuff like that at least it's legal this way um but if it were that where there was kind of like an expectation that the house wins and everything but instead what they do is they get you to go out and like recruit your friends recruit your parents recruit everybody like and of course everybody else is getting sucked into this horrible kind of like cult type thing and uh they're all going to point at you you're the person who introduced this thing that cost me a whole bunch of money and soaked up a bunch of my time and then went on to like damage my own personal relationships I mean it's like almost kind of like this mind virus that spreads through the population in the sense that it jumps from one family member to another or one close friend to another it's so Insidious and it's all just so some guy at the top can have a yacht or whatever it's crazy what what happened with that like it took two years but like maybe you can talk very quickly because I don't want to focus this isn't a show about like you know bad beat stories from like getting scammed essentially but like what was it like for those those two years and like at what point did you how did you see a path out of that um yeah it was like I was always like I was always trying to meet new people to recruit them uh I didn't really involve I didn't really involve my family because I was kind of ashamed of it I kind of knew it was not a good thing and I didn't want them to judge me so I didn't even talk to them about it um but like yeah I would go to the big like I I remember the the guy that brought me in uh I I went with him on on like a couple of road trips one I think one to Phoenix and a couple to Dallas um which was the furthest the Phoenix was like the farthest I'd ever been from home yeah where did you grow up by the way I don't even think I grew up in Louisiana you GRE near streetport okay and that's why you went to the streetport school okay yeah I was in treport which is basically I was I was I I was a kid of the suburbs so I didn't I didn't ride an alligator to school or anything like that like yeah so um uh shoot where were we uh but yeah road trips road trips the guy that got you into it yeah so we would like and I was buying like I spent I spent more money on tapes than I did on like the products for the business cuz they're like oh you got to buy these tapes so you can stay motivated and so I would like Popp in a tape every time I'm driving like I'm going to work I'm you know I'm putting in a tape I'm like going on these road trips I'm like we putting in tapes and like so anytime I was like driving to Dallas or Fort Worth or whatever to like to find you know to like try to find people to recruit had these tapes and so these tapes basically just brainwashed me like that was their whole thing was their whole purpose of these tapes is to just keep you in um and it's it's it's it's Insidious so um but yeah like I and I spent money on these trips you know to go to go to these places and stuff and like stay at these hotels and everything and go to these big Rah conferences um but yeah if anybody's in that and you're like oh well this guy just didn't try hard enough like he's uh you know he's he he failed because he he wasn't really deep into it I like man I was as deep as you could get and uh I was I was in no way SL Laing off or making excuses and it just it did not happen um but the one thing that really I learned from that is um from that experience is that if you're sitting on the couch night after night just watching TV and you're not building your future um you're going to stay where you are and that so that that was kind of like a running thing that like all the time that I was thinking of like I can't just sit here and watch TV I need to be working on my future CU you know while I'm while I'm young and healthy and have all this energy I might as well right and then uh do the hard work now so I can have a great future later and but you don't need an MLM to do that you can just do that you can do it and build whatever future you want um as long as it's you know the right uh as long as it's the right vehicle for building it mlms are not the right vehicle um take you backwards so um but yeah so that's that's what kind of got me into once I so once I so the way that I left the business is I told the guy like hey I'm taking a break for uh the holidays uh and then I just never I never called him back or or anything like that just just dropped it uh he never came a calling either so um so he I'm sure he dropped out too um and that guy had like he was was in the military and he was like on a local base and he had a house and he ended up selling his house and living in an apartment and like yeah it just it's not good it's not good for anybody um so but yeah that did ingrain in me to like work hard for your future so uh once I left that that next year uh is when I started um is when I like work my worked that second job got that computer and then once I had the computer uh and like messing around with that and got really comfortable with a computer and like you know fixing things that went wrong and like all that stuff and this was like the nent days of the internet this was 95 um yeah I had a lot of fun with that computer I didn't do any programming and then in the next year or the end of yeah basically New Year's Day of 96 I was like I'm GNA like I want a job where I can feel like I'm doing something important like I can wake up and feel like I'm I'm making the world better um and like that I have like a a mission right so um so I was I had an old friend that uh and he he was had basically said like you can go into the army as an officer if you um like go through this kind of like board interview and stuff so I drove down to New Orleans and tried that uh and I just didn't really have any experience to like lead people at all so U which was good cuz I didn't have any experience to lead people that would have been awful um and then I that year I that spring i' walked into um I'd been looking at uh like looking at the Army and looking at the jobs that they have and one of them was programmer and so I was like hot dog I'm gonna I'm gonna they're going to teach me how to program and I'm going to have a programming job that's going to be super so uh um I I knew that they had there was a test called the ASVAB and it's like a vocational aptitude battery and it it's basically it's a test you take to tell what job you'd be good at and so um I so I studied for the test so I could be I could do as well as I could because you know why not so uh you're not supposed to study for it but I I it's supposed to be an aptitude which suggests that it's not something studied for it's just you come in and be your who you are but I mean come on every test can be studied for and prepared for right yeah but I think you know going along the side of like you know build your future I was like well I want to be excellent at this like I want to get I want to make my chances as best as I can make them so yeah so studyed for that test I I scored really well on the test so they were like you can kind of have any job you want uh and we have this Military Intelligence thing um where you could kind of live the James Bond life and uh you know they're they're looking for people who can speak a foreign language and I had done some German in high school wasn't I wasn't very good at it but um they they said if you if you do this we can put you like if you do well on this test we'll put you into military intelligence and send you to like language school and stuff I was like okay cool and like you'll have like you know top secret clearance and like live James Bond life I like okay let's let's go you know who needs programming so uh so yeah I did well on that test and the test is basically a a it's a test that uses a fake language and it it just determines how well you can see patterns and understand like a language that that isn't real right um that has some logic to it but um yeah but it's not a real language yeah and so I did really well on that so they put me into um uh they put me in they didn't say what language I was going to get but like I went off to boot camp did that whole thing and then at the end of boot camp they're like okay you're going to go to Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center which is a a a it's basically a it's kind of a military um it's a school in montere California and there are mil there are like Army it's like on a base there's army barracks and stuff I think people can go there like I think at the time maybe people could go there if like they were civilians and they wanted to pay the money um um I don't know if that's a situation anymore but yeah I mean they might send like reporters to it maybe because I I talked to like a New York Times Reporter who had to like learn manderin in six months which is like a tall order um yeah I I don't think he actually learned it they he learned as much as he could and they send him over there but uh yeah like this is like the elite you know place that probably I've heard and I'd love for you to like myth bust this I've heard that like like everything is like you know they've done so much social science around this like understand optimal ways of like acquiring a language and uh you know retaining things and learning very quickly and efficiently so uh you know they probably have really good like you know pronunciation uh coaching and things like that like I am very excited to learn firsthand what that was like there because I am somebody who studies a lot of foreign languages I lived in China for six years um I I study Japanese before I studyed Chinese and I try to keep my language skills sharp but I didn't have the benefit of the defense Language Institute I was just using flash cards and like reading books and stuff and I did do an intensive Chinese program in China but you know with with like where every everything was in Chinese the instruction was in Chinese I didn't even have any english- speaking classmates my teacher couldn't speak English like it just like Chinese you had you you had to like you know what what is it sink or swim basically yeah wow but um what was your experience like uh so it was a it was a 9 to-5 job uh um so you you live in the barracks and you're doing your ex your your your ex physical training exercise and all that the the army stuff but then um your your job basically day-to-day Monday through Friday is to is to go to class but our teachers so this was 1996 to 97 so anybody going there now like I mean this was a long time ago so things may have changed but at the time know yeah the teachers the teachers were bilingual um and they were trying out a new textbook uh course on us so we were like the first to to use this new uh course whereare um it was all it was like all just it's all Pap it was all paper books at the time um but yeah it like yeah you're just you're all day you're just um you're you're learning new you know learning new words and pronunciation and vocabulary and uh grammar patterns and stuff and you know reciting it in class like and all that kind of stuff but it's not like immersion where you have to like speak you know I was I was in the Korean uh deal so if you do really well on that like language test they'll put you into like Chinese or Korean or like what do they call a category five language English as well as a category five language because it's so English is such a mess um it's hard to learn so congrat so my hats off to everybody who's learned English uh as a fore language nonnative English speakers listening to this yeah Kudos well done yeah um so but yeah it wasn't like it was it was intensive as like it was what you were doing all day long but it wasn't an immersive thing where like like no English is allowed or anything like that like but you know maybe that's changed I don't know but um uh but I think it it got me to it was a 63e course so it was pretty long and I I feel like it got me up to a decent level of proficiency um and it's funny as I was going through that course to kind of help myself um I took all the words from the the textbooks and like stuck them into a um like a like a like a text file and uh I started messing around with like web development at the time so oh we're about to transition uh so um cuz like the web was a thing and like I I liked to create so I was like well I want to make like a website and like I want to make I want to do something related to Korean because it's something I'm really into and so I want to uh I want to play around with it so um I ended up like manually writing all of the words from the the books into this website and like to make a little like a dictionary for myself I had paper dictionary and all that stuff but uh I was like I just want to make something so the first website I really made with about career was called the Korean situation and it was uh really all it was was was articles that I copy pasted from around the web that had to do with like North and South Korea relations and stuff and uh that lasted not long and then I changed over to uh making a u a Korean Education website it's called it Korean online and that's where I had the uh like the dictionary but it was just like this is old school stuff but like when I was learning like I would didn't even know HTML at this point so I was using a program called net objects fusion and it was like word and you would like inter text and put in pictures and all that stuff and like you could change the fonts and then you push a button and it would publish it it would make it all HTML and I would like up I would FTP that to like the one of the the cheap uh hosts at the time yeah so literally like dragging and dropping the HTML files uh over to a server and then that would be like literally rendered at the file path so FP back before get and uh cloud and all this stuff FP for the wind so yeah I would I would just drag and drop those I didn't I didn't know how to read the stuff or anything um but I did that and then um so uh when school was and and I ended up getting a um an award for uh for that website that I had put together and so like when I graduated from from school so I was very happy about that um and this also like you'll see this thread I kind of go above and beyond especially for things I'm passionate about because I wanted to I wanted to pass this class because if you don't pass the class with like so there's a there's levels of proficiency it's like one one two 2+ 3 3 plus or whatever but you have to get a two and you have to get it in uh Reading Writing and listening Reading Writing no reading listening and speaking there's no I don't think there's a writing portion um so you have to get two two in each of those and if you don't you either get kicked out or you have to repeat the whole thing again we had a guy in our class who had like yeah who had failed and like had was repeating man that's rough it's like more than a year of your life yeah this is like high stakes exam so of course I wanted to knock it out of the park um and I ended up doing really well on reading like I was reading from like um like real Korean news uh sites and like reading news articles which really upped my uh of my skills um but anyway so like I didn't go to I didn't take get a CS education I didn't um uh I didn't do computers in the Army and uh here I am like uh in like now I'm in Korea they sent you they they say they sent us to Korea uh to do our you know the rest of our time so you four year uh so it was it took me two years so there was boot camp language school and then after language school once you get your security clearance they send you to another school I won't tell you where it is or anything or what we learned but top secret but it's it was another army base and we went there and we that's where we learned the skills to do our job right um that involved like the Korean language and um and that was for I don't I even remember how long that was it was a few months and then once that was over then it's like okay everybody you're going to Korea here's your unit you're going to uh the it's funny the people that had their name I think it was like uh if you were a through M then you went like up north to the like northern part of South Korea not North Korea but the northern part of South Korea and like into the field and so the field being like living in Soul or something like that or was there like a military base up there that you living in like like doing like field work in like tents and stuff like literally the field yeah and then people that were like at the higher level of the um the you know the alphabet we went we went to a different last name basically so was him the the the twist of fate that your your name is like at the very back end of the uh alphabetic order landed you in southern part right yeah yeah so it's not like yeah but in South Korea but just a different part and like I had Ace like like down there by like Busan or some place like down there farther south no not that far south but it's uh it's what's today is called camp humph Camp humph I don't know if they still do this job on Camp humph and and I don't want to I wouldn't want to like you know give away too much obsc or any of that stuff I don't know where the like I don't know Camp hum is like a amusement park now like it's interesting it's way better than what it was when I was there like we didn't even have internet we had to go out of the base and into the uh like to go to the what's called PC bang or PC room yeah and then we that's where you got on the internet and so I spent a lot of time in there but like now they've got a water park and they've got like shopping malls and they like it's crazy like it's it's it's like you're living in the it's like you're living in the US now yeah so kids today with their internet these spoiled these spoiled Army kids that are that like join just 20 years later have all the amenities of like a university student with like a you know amazing um so um but anyway so I was in South Korea and was living on this base and so I was do and I was doing my job and um and yeah I I worked in like a nice air conditioned like building it was great I didn't have to live in a tent um but so yeah I looked out because I'm a w um but with uh so um and during that time I uh I was likew I want to like learn more like I'm I'm I I don't want uh at that point I was kind of like okay as time went on I was like all right this is this was fun but I don't want to wake up and every morning and do exercise like this and and and like basically not be able to take like vacation when I want or whatever and like CU you're you know you're you're serving your country they're not serving you like you have to um uh you have to like you're you're limited in your freedoms right as a as a soldier and and my understanding is like basically all your rights as a normal civilian like me as a natural-born American citizen I have all these rights when you join the military everything's like kind of like curtailed and like even the courts and everything are like a completely different system and like there there's just like all these additional things imposed upon you obviously I didn't serve military I have profound respect for those who do and and for you uh but uh but yeah like I can I can basically do what I want like I can just leave my job and go get another job and all that stuff in the military my understanding is like you get an assignment and if you don't want to do it anymore you can't just like quit or you can't just like there's a lot less flexibility right yeah so I was like this was a cool ride and I learned some cool stuff but like I'm I need to get out into I need to get down into the real world yeah and uh um you know have some have some of this Freedom that you know I worked hard to preserve so uh and I do feel like the mission I was I was there for was to help protect South Korea and like I don't I uh I don't think at all that that was like wasted like South Korea is a you know a wonderful place and uh great people and the situation they're in with uh with with North Korea being you know their neighbor and like the splitting of that country and like the families that were divided during the Korean War and like what's happened with North Korea it's yeah it's it's awful but uh I was I'm glad I was able to um like to do my small part so I knew that I was able I was going to have to like kind of get out into the real world and I was like well let's let's get back to let's get back to computers John let's let's let's let's get this thing started back up again so um I started learning Visual Basic and uh I didn't know really anything like I didn't know what it was about uh but it was kind of a thing at the time and because it was so different from what I learned on like the like my little computer you my little trs8 and stuff and uh I let's see um yeah and then like I was interested in web development um and I wanted to do like like I it would I wanted to keep going with Korean so I thought I'll do a job with like programming and Korean and like maybe I'll do like translation and write the software you know somewhere so um I started learning programming but I just I I was like I don't know what I'm doing with Visual Basic like it's all this drag and drop stuff and I have I don't know what any of this is and so I picked up a C++ book and that didn't make it any easier um cuz it was all like well now you got ins and floats and ruls and I'm like I everything was just a whatever it was when I was you know programming in basic and so I was like well this is uh this is pretty rough but all the kind of the while while I was trying to learn this stuff I was still like working on my website and trying to make it better but like through this drag and drop software so I was like um like well I'm going to teach myself web development and at the time like it was the.com boom and like I was PE I heard somebody say like dude if you know HTML you can get hired like it's like just like you need to get in here now and uh so I was like okay I'm going to teach myself web development so um and at the time so this is so at the time I met um I met this lovely lady uh through a friend and uh she was taking English classes at so my friend he's a uh he's a Mormon and M uh they would do like these free English classes for like people like Korean people that wanted to come in so uh she was she was attending that and I told him I was like yeah I just want to meet somebody nice and like not some like crazy party person or anything but just like somebody who you know I can like you know settle down with and like not settle settle now but like just have like a nice like a good life with and somebody I can you know build a real relationship with and uh he was like oh I got the girl for you she's she's the sweetest thing and so I was like okay great um so we met and uh and fell in love and uh so um but I knew like the plan was like okay when the Army is over and like now at this point it was like um the end the end was getting close cuz I had spent years in school and like two years in South Korea and the the time was coming short so I was like okay well I'm going to learn web development and while I'm doing that I need to stay I want to stay in country so I can be with her and like also make some money so uh I got a job as an English teacher and um so at the same time I had got the job as the English teacher is when I bought my first book uh actually my wife bought it for me it was in a Korean bookstory and it was like Web Master in a nutshell I think um from O'Reilly and so I took took that and I started learning HTML and then um so as I was teaching during the day and so I was teaching English but it was it was like a lot of kids so like in the morning it was like real little kids and then like as the day went on the kids got like older and older um because they're like getting out of school and stuff and uh so it was um uh it was like little it was like little kids to um kind of high Middle School like almost high school and then in the evening they also had like an adult class where I was teaching some like some of the older folks so um well older than me but at the time and um so I would teach during the day and then at night I would go back to my little apartment that the school paid for which was great uh like little one it was just a one room it was like a little Studio no air conditioning it was awful um but uh I would sit and like on my computer and I was like learning HTML and and learning CSS and JavaScript and um and and that's what I did until like you know way early in the morning like 3 4 5 in the morning and then I would like uh you know go to sleep for a little bit and then wake up and like get get back to school I was not a good teacher I did not have a passion for teaching it was a was a way to make money um I feel like I wasn't terrible I I had a lot of fun like I was you know the but teaching kids is a challenge that was the hardest job I ever had in my life um and uh so my hats off to all the teachers out there um teaching is hard so um but yeah I did that I did um uh so at night I'm like learning all this like web Tech and here's a here's a real hint for folks that are like looking to change to a different career and do something different um look at job postings for the job you want and look at the requirements that they list because I didn't know what to study like I knew HTML was a thing but like so I looked through um all these job boards and probably looked at 100 jobs and just made a list on the side of like every time I saw some technology I would put like a little you know put a a check or whatever right like a little you're kind building like almost like a distribution of the skills that are generally sought by the market by employes and at the time it was uh it was HTML CSS CSS was new when I was learning it like it was kind of the new hot thing and then JavaScript uh Pearl was huge at the time and then like Java and SQL and stuff so I was like okay I'm going to learn CSS HTML JavaScript Pearl I'm going to learn SQL and then if I have time I'll learn some like Java and stuff yeah but those those five skills not Java but like those five skills is how I got hired so um I spent a year as a teacher and then near the end of that I was like okay it's time to start putting out some resumés and I put out a I sent a bunch of resumés all over the us because like I I would take a job anywhere right um and my motivation at the time was twofold one I wanted to have a cool programming job but two I needed to be able to take care of my wife when we got to the US like I didn't want her to have to work uh and you know to help support us um like she speaks English like at the time she spoke English pretty well but it wasn't like you know fluent or anything and uh I just I was like I wanna if I'm if she's coming to the US with me I want to support her I don't want her to have to feel some burden because moving to a different country is burden enough yeah absolutely yeah so yeah so you applied for jobs all over the US and uh with your nent programming skills and it sounds like even back then you were a big fan of doing research on the job market which of course your big project that you're very well known for is essentially a giant research pro project um but uh like like where did you ultimately get a job uh at a little company in Seattle that was um that it served the mortgage industry so like mortgage lenders and stuff and so we would like we had information on like mortgage rates and things like that and we built tools for uh lenders and Originators to do mortgages so yeah and I did that for uh for four years and then uh moved on to like another a smaller company where um it was and so while I think six months after I got that first job I was already starting to feel the itch of like doing something else not that the job wasn't great but it's like I a guy I worked with we were like you know we could start a startup we could start our own like little company so like okay yeah let's do that and he's like have you heard of PHP I like yeah I've heard of PHP I don't know any of it and he's like yeah let's build this new thing and pH HP and so what we built was a website it was kind of like a Squarespace it was but this was 2002 and 2003 that we built this and it was like yeah it's like you it was um yeah you'd like enter your text and you'd like upload pictures and stuff like that and like you'd make the web it was kind of like it wasn't cool like squares spaces today I mean come on yeah but but essentially it was like a precursor to the kind of like build your own website like low code tools almost yeah this was a no code thing and um we I I had to learn so much to do it like I had to learn how do you um like I had so to get that first job I had done a couple of things one I had kept building that Korean website and I had turned the dictionary into and into a into a pearl thing using a database uh and sorry I bump my mic um and the um and then the other thing was I built a website for school and I built them a forum uh and also just in Pearl with like a I think I think it I don't even remember what kind of database was it was like a some flat file database though and so in order to get that figured out I had to like figure out like how to set up Apache and everything so um with this new business I had to figure out all sorts of stuff like yeah like there's there's Apache and we also wanted to allow people to to like have an email address and like get mail and stuff so I'm setting up like a mail servers and like uh I had to figure out DNS and like all these different things um to build this and like of course learn learn PHP as well this is great so it's basically like goal directed learning like like I have to do XYZ so I'm I just need to learn how to do this and so you were essentially teaching yourself it sounds like over the course of years just maintaining this big project which is something I always Advocate to people have a big project that you continue to maintain and extend over time so you can continue to bring more skills into the fold and use it as an excuse to learn and practice with different tools and and Technologies uh I mean you did precisely what I encourage people to do uh and you just kind of independently were feeling around in the dark this was long before there were accepted best practices in learning the code and things like that um but so you built this squares Squarespace like website using PHP um which you know wigs there there's so many like WordPress itself also a big PHP lamp stack project lamp being like Linux Apache PHP and MySQL yeah um so that stack is probably something similar to what you were working with and that's what everybody worked with in the early 2000s it was Cutting Edge at the time and a lot of people still use it like I've I think Facebook still uses PHP for some of their codebase for example um what was the startup like like what were the early days like were you a were you able to acquire customers yeah um so I'm I like building things but I don't like selling things so um uh he so my my business partner he had like a there was a church that he went to and uh he ended up selling uh the idea to them and so they like they signed up and stuff uh but we just we didn't have like we had that customer and I don't even remember what other customers we had that might have been it but and we spent yeah we spent nights and weekends for about a year and a half building this thing and uh and we were actually living in his basement at the time uh you know because it's cheaper to live and we could also work on the business and yeah um it's like a true kind of like garage startup yeah true garage startup basement startup in this case and uh but yeah it didn't really go anywhere but you know through all that learning of of building that that's how I got my my next job uh cuz they were looking for like a PHP person who could do kind of a little bit of everything and that was me and it was a really small um software company in SE in the in Redmond and uh I think it like we were just in a little tiny office at first yeah feel like it was like maybe six people or something yeah and red I loved it Red's the suburb of Seattle yes and it's where Microsoft is based largest corporation in the world right Amazon's like not far from there so you were already in this region with like tons of softare like you were in the right place where a lot of activity was happening right there's probably Silicon Valley and then there's redwind uh okay so uh so you were able to Parlay your skills that you acquired even though the project didn't really work out everything you learned along the way just like you were able to ladder that over into uh an opportunity um tell us a little bit about like were you working on a team how many devs were you working alongside uh so I was the only so there was there was the the guy who ran it he was a ex Microsoft person you're going to a lot of people who work at like big companies they end up getting tired of it and they like want to break out on their own and he was one of those folks so he was x Microsoft like classically trained CS guy and stuff and um so I just work I worked alongside him like I worked on the website and like the the card and checkout system for uh for that and like um and then but it was a software company so they were selling um software and the but the people doing that development was him and the this team in I don't know if it was Ukraine or Russia at the time but um outsourced that and then he would work closely with them and like I I wouldn't have been able to understand any of the stuff that they wrote at the time but um they did that and then I took care of the website and I did that for um a couple of years until he had to like like lay off a bunch of people cuz yeah yeah business is rough uh running your own business that's uh not easy so yeah where did you go from there uh so from there uh and at this point I felt like I was kind of becoming like a hot commodity because I was I could do I could do your database stuff and your server stuff and like write all your websites and do all your interactions like original full stack developer OG full stack uh yeah so I was like okay I'm yeah I got uh I got what it takes like I'm not I'm not scared like I can find a place now um and I actually found a job on Craigslist and it was a it was a company whose customers were uh medical coders so people who like take medical procedures and turn those into like codes for insurance and stuff so I was um I was writing software for that and basically it was uh my job was to take all this like reference material that they had and make it searchable and so you could find the the information you needed and and um like references for that that data and stuff yeah CU you know if you do the wrong like if you do the wrong medical stuff that's uh it's that's bad that's serious yeah or people don't get their claim you know and you're you're not upsetting some random person you're potentially upsetting yeah the customer but you're also potentially upsetting Medicare which is a big you know giant uh agency with the government that will throw you in jail yeah um so I did that for a few years um and uh during that time I actually during the time of like working at the little other company I was like um I was like I want to start another business but I don't want to like I just want to do it myself I don't want to have like a co-founder or anything I just want to make it and like run it and um so I made one called photog grinder and it was a because I I saw some like Craigslist posting where somebody was asking for like hey I've got all these pictures and I need to add like watermarks to them or I need to add like change them to black and white or resize them or something and so I thought m i could make a tool for that so it's basically a tool where you uploaded a you know a bunch of photos and then you select all the transforms you wanted to do those photos like resizing or cropping or you know adding noise or like whatever you wanted to do it was kind of like photos shy yeah and then uh uh yeah so you would select it and you hit go and then you'd pay for it and then I would like generate all the you know transform all the files just like FFM Peg or something on the back end like how are you doing it it was image magic on the magic okay yeah so if you know how to use image magic you could have just done it yourself but you know who knows how to use all these obscure tools so I did that that you know that got a few customers but it was just kind of a fun thing to make I didn't think I was going to get rich off of it but I was always looking for ways to like make some extra money um yeah so I did that um and then kind of when I was in at that that new job I I kind of took a break from stuff but I was I kept improving the the Korean website like that thing along this all this time was just kind of keep going and so I did uh turn on like monetization for that uh and it gave people access to a forum and like gave them access to kind of like unlimited like dictionary searches and I made all these extra tools on top of it like a translation Helper and basically all the stuff to add value so that you would want to pay like five bucks a month uh for that that was called that's called Z Korean that's still around but um there are way better tools out there nowadays so um like that you you can get dictionaries online for free yeah and translate for free you can do yeah you can do everything you want in Korean without paying me five bucks a month that's quite a sales pitch thank you thank you don't sign up now awesome so you're still like at this point it's been years and you're still maintaining and extending and it sounds like you're like a traditional Web Master in the sense of like like what are people asking for the one thing that like thread that I see going through all this is like you're seeing some sort of external stimulus some sort of Quee from like some person posting on a Craigs List or uh you know like hey I've got this problem or like my classmates have this problem they need a better tool for you know referencing their Korean vocabulary or something and like you're taking action you're like I can do this and so you have this confidence uh where you can like learn things and then you can you can build something to address that underlying need and that's what business is all about right people think business is about flying on private jets and wearing a fancy suit and like shaking hands with some old dude you know you do if you do it right yeah if you do it right do it right yeah it's just like build something that people want right like uh figure out what it is people need and give it to them right yeah yeah that's cool yeah a lot of I mean and a lot of a lot of businesses you see uh are basically people creating something that doesn't solve any problem it's like I just want to make money hopefully this will hit and like we can all get rich but nobody's interested or they don't see you solving enough of a problem that they want to pay you for it yeah I mean getting people to open their wallet it's it's like the hardest thing on earth unless you're just like literally like I mean you could start a business right now you you could probably go to another curb set up a lemonade stand and you might get some people to give you lemonade but then how do you scale that how do you figure out a way to like automate that so you're not just constantly Tethered to that lemonade stand you know anyway this isn't a bus bus podcast but I do want to point out that like a lot of people have misconceptions about business they they see shark tank or something like that and they're like by the way one of our former podcast guests jabrils the YouTube creator has fake shark tank and it's just like he wrote like all these prompts and all the software to like GPT generate fake shark tank and reactions it's great it's like in there's video too you could see like all those sharks like that's a terrible idea what what about the liability you know like all these ridiculous ideas so uh again shout out to jabrell for coming on that's another episode you can check out a great interview and uh and watch some mov fake shark tank but I the thing I'm like to point out like I'm not going to try to teach you business here or anything like that but I will tell you like there's a lot more to business than what you're going to see on like Tik Tok or Instagram or something like that like um yeah uh it's it looks a lot more like what John's doing and a lot less like the flashy stuff you see yeah I think the best the best business businesses are created by people who know of a problem that can be solved with your technology uh they're willing to pay for it and the person that's that that is kind of behind it all is a subject matter expert in this field and knows the market and knows what they need like if you're like if I'm trying to start like a like let's say you know I'm I'm I'm trying to start a company and like uh I want to start selling like industrial mixers to like the restaurant industry and I know nothing about that but I'm like I see a I see some I see a place in the market where I we could like make money on like maybe cheaper mixers or something like that that's a terrible idea because even if it's something that you think could be really good if you don't know anything about that market you're not going to be able to reach those people um so it's yeah it's a yeah and uh as as pointing out yeah like uh ideas are easy and also another trap that people fall into that's related to what you just said firsttime Founders focus on technology second time Founders focus on distribution precisely what you were saying like you don't know the chefs you don't know the people working at all these restaurants you don't understand why they're using this mixer instead of some cheap mixer that you can order off alib Baba or something right so yeah um okay so to get back to uh just like your entrepreneurial Journey so you know you got Z Korean which you made a very impassioned sales pitch for earlier you've got um just these these other things you've been building over time like the photo grinder I think is what you said um so you you are at this point I guess technically a Serial entrepreneur did you ever like sell any of your companies or anything like that or did they just like stay kind of in your stable of like cash cows slowly generating Revenue over time yeah I I call myself a parallel entrepreneur parallel entrepreneur yeah cuz I just run all of them at the same time um but no I didn't sell any of them um you know back in 99 I remember I was like on a military exercise and I got an email from some company and was like hey we want to buy your dictionary and uh I forget I forget how much money but they were like you need to have at least 25,000 entries and I was like I don't have that many in there and so 25,000 like that's that's more than the typical vocab of like an English speaker yeah it's it's a lot but um yeah so I had to I had to pass on that but it got me thinking like you could make some you could you could sell something make some money um and then back in 20 so I kind of jumped around to a bunch of jobs like every few years I was like I was jumping getting bored and jump in to some other place um and I started a while I was at one place like that had had big like it was a new startup had big funding uh but after about a year and a half we were like yeah this is not living up to the original premise so we're going to Pivot um that's when I started to think of like okay uh I'm kind of burned out on like this let me let me see if I can find something interesting that I can do yeah uh nights and weekends and like let's just make more money right so um I so I had an idea that uh I will I will not I won't say this in like this is not a great origin story but I was like reading Tech crunch on the toilet and uh something I can't find the article that spurred this thought but it spurred this thought of have a way for businesses and customers to communicate anonymous ly by text message so that business can get feedback and the customer can give it give the feedback freely knowing that they're not going to get hassled but the business can can respond to the customer and like fix the issue but they can have this conversation where they don't see each other's phone number so uh so that turned out to be talked to the manager which was like the the final like business that I made yeah um which is still going but uh what I did for that was because I thought well this would be great for restaurants but I'm not in the restaurant industry right here we go again so um so I was but at that point I was pretty steeped in the startup world and I was like going to like start up like meetups and um you know I watching Shark Tank wow like all that stuff so you were like in the business kind of like meta so to speak yeah and I knew that there were like there were tons of startup up since Seattle like tons of them a lot of x Microsoft folks and all that and uh lots of investment money from people who used to be you know work at Microsoft and now have like tons of money from all their stock that they had because they were in in the 80s or whatever yeah there's something like 10,000 Microsoft millionaires who just had like some very small portion of stock but there was so much you know money value created I guess that they have millions of dollars worth of stock even if they were like you know just like a entry-level software engineer or something like that yeah cuz if you look at like the trajectory of Microsoft between like the early '90s and 2010 if you were if you got in in the '90s man yeah you made you made a bundle um if you were able to you know stick it out invest of course but um so uh I was like okay let's do let's do another startup but the but I knew I had a formula in mind for a startup and that was to not go after customers like don't go straight to the consumer right because most consumers like they don't have a lot of money to slash around anyway I mean I guess they do now because like streaming is making big bucks all but I think we're all getting like subscription fatigue but like most people aren't going to spend 20 30 bucks a month on something unless it gives them a great amount of um uh a value and I knew I wasn't going to make any money trying to sell for five bucks a month right you can't even run ads that you know for five bucks a month yeah to get people enough people to sign up so I was like okay I need the price point to be higher um and in order to do that I should go after businesses um and so this was perfect for that because it let businesses communicate with their customers but it also like the business was paying for it so um so what I did was I before I built it when I was still kind of ID this thing I went to um I went to a local restaurant and I said hey can I can I talk to the the manager real quick I want to like bounce an idea off and so we sat down and like I bounced the idea off and like yeah this is what I think it would be like what do you think and she's like yeah that's that's pretty good I was like yeah would you would you pay for this like and she's like yeah I'd pay for that uh and then through some like contacts I reached out to other business people like not even in Washington but in other states they were like hey you know my cousin or my friend owns a restaurant or whatever you can talk to them and so um I validated that it was not a junk idea right because I don't want to because at this point I was very precious with my time and I did not want to sacrifice time away from my wife if I had to um and like for something that's just like a dumb ego Pursuit right so because I felt to me that felt like is just being selfish right yeah so um so I was like this needs to be something real if I'm going to invest the time I'm going to invest into it so um so I validated that it was a good idea and then I spent uh I want to say like three or four months nights and weekends just jamming on this thing till you know midnight 2 am. or whatever and then like all weekend long I'm just in front of the computer so there's a lot of it's a lot of any any suit it takes a lot of sacrifice and I think if you know if it's for you know improving your family's position and like being able to retire and not worry about like not having enough money when you retire and stuff um I feel like you really need to um be be be precious with your time and have a good motivation for it so you know I thought well maybe I could get rich from this but also thought well if it if I if go high enough if I if I set my goals high enough and it falls short then I've still made it worth it right um yeah the old aim for aim for the Stars even if even if you uh don't make it maybe you'll hit the moon like yeah yeah so um so uh I thought you know if like 10% of the businesses in America use this like man I'm rich right I'm Big Rich so um so yeah so I built it and then I sent out a bunch of letters to PE this was getting close to the like I launched close to the time where uh South by Southwest was happening back when I mean South by Southwest is still a thing but back in like 2012 it was like the startup started like where startups launched so I reached out to all the big restaurants around there and like uh you know the ones that get like all out of the press and stuff during that during that time and I was like okay I'm going to reach out to them give it to them for free send them signs and everything they can put on their tables and stuff and then that will Market that would be like free marketing for me um and none of them responded none of them cared and uh I tried to call and like yeah that that didn't work either so um yeah so I just kind of uh so my my marketing for this was was really terrible but uh like I'm not a marketing guy so uh I tried to um also tried to send out letters to like around the around like Seattle that that didn't result in like really anything uh and then um yeah well I mean to like jump forward a little bit just yeah let's do that just to reassure people like yeah you thrashed essentially it sounds like you were trying a lot of different things not everything worked but eventually it did work because yeah I'm on talk to the manager yeah uh which is a great product name I mean it's like very literal uh you know somebody who created free Coke Camp I can appreciate literalness and unambiguity in what you're doing here uh I mean join these customers Burger King Papa John's Yogurt Land like you the Texas State Aquarium that's cool I'm here in Texas so like yeah like uh it's cool to know that if I go to the aquarium I can potentially you know anonymously text the people and be like hey I noticed there was like a mop just sitting on the floor or something like that I don't know yeah like like how did you get this to work so I mean it did take off like I remember my wife and I we were like watching a movie and I got a I got an email I was like you got a customer signed up I was like what and I think it was like a fireworks stand or something like it was like something totally out of the blue and um so we started like I I put out some blog content and I put a I like nobody had an article on there was no article on Wikipedia about comment cards so I made a page and like at the bottom I was like talk to the manager and like the the links or whatever so that actually got a pretty decent amount of like hits and then I had a blog post about how common cards are terrible and here this this is a way better way to go and that one did really well until like you know SEO stopped working um so that was good but I also um I had also brought in like a consultant to kind of help and um soon soon like when when we were going to start working together I was on an airplane with uh and and was sitting next to someone who was like from the food Beast which is a big a big food blog restaurant blog and so I was like hey would you you know could you uh could you say something about my business like because it it's really cool and I think it would be really helpful for people and so they did put out that and that caused a big boom like a big viral boom wow wow ask ask and you shall receive right like if you hadn't been if you'd been too polite like oh I don't want to impose upon this stranger sitting next to me on the airplane he already had the displeasure sitting next to me for the last two hours or something like that no I'm asking him to go out and use his professional you know platform to no but I mean you you asked right you were bold and you just probably like figuring like 90% chance he says no or or he says yes but he doesn't actually do it yeah you put you took your shot that's great yeah and uh and that like I was attending a lot of startup meetups so I would like run into people and so yeah I ran into this uh consultant and she was like yeah I can help your business and stuff and like um I don't honestly I don't remember very much about what she did but it did it did help oh she she got into another um another uh blog like restaurant blog and then that that also like took off so was kind of like a onew punch and uh yeah so that was great and then like it was like on the news all over the place wow okay great so you so you know kind of Gorilla Marketing with Wikipedia which or may not break their terms of service but but like essentially getting some backlinks uh SEO and then uh PR it sounds like essentially yeah yeah yeah um so but like over the years um and like I I did bring in I so through a local startup uh kind of community I uh I brought in a co-founder who's a uh he's a college student um and he was studying entrepreneurship and so uh okay I'll bring in this guy and he can kind of help with like the marketing of things and stuff and together we went to uh we went to like the local restaurant convention and we joined like the local restaurant um Association did some ads with them and we did uh the Chicago National Restaurant Association show which is like it's like the biggest it's huge and we were in their restaurant technology area um but like honestly none of none of the like none of the U the trade shows helped at all um and I I don't really know why but I feel like the I feel like a lot of restaurant owners like they're they're busy and I did make the product with the idea of like these folks are busy and they don't have time to like learn a new tool or mess around with something um so those that do use it see benefit and it's easy to to like basically takes two minutes to set up and you're like Off to the Races but I feel like a lot of business owners are like I don't need one more thing like I've got enough headaches like um I don't want to try anything new and I don't blame them at all for that so um especially with they've got people salespeople talking to them all the time about things that are going to change their business so um it just never really hit and we did Instagram ads and Facebook ads and Google ads and like talked with a Google ad like employee who was like a consultant or like he was trying to like help increase the business and stuff yeah and if you're trying to launch some new product that nobody is searching for on Google ads like yeah you got to give that up because if they're not searching for it you're going to get dinged when you try to show it to them U because it's not a relevant search so um yeah so like the business where it is it's like it's it's good like can I you know can I quit my job and like retire no but um but it it it's a good side income and it's like uh so I'm glad to have it but I've kind of reached my end as far as like what I can do with it and I've had a couple of com couple of companies come like like knocking on the door and saying hey you know we interested in you know potentially buying your business and stuff but since there's really no like they would have to invest so much I think at this point into getting like putting marketing the marketing and everything behind it it's just um yeah it's just not it's not worth it for them to buy so but I so I keep it going and I keep it up to date and you know but it's it's pretty easy because like all the bugs have really been fixed and like it's just it's kind of on autopilot which is great really great so it's kind of like just a mature product in a suite of products like a lot of uh I guess you could you could call them like uh I guess side hustle people like uh Peter levels for example um levels that ioe he starts a ton of different projects and most of them don't go anywhere but some of the ones he do are just generating revenue and he's able to strap together all these different businesses and that provides for his lifestyle um so so it sounds like you tried a lot of things uh and this one was the one that worked and it was a modest success it's worth keeping it going and everything but at the same time uh is this when you started to consider going and getting like a job as a software engineer yeah so we're coming to the we're coming to the crest of the wave here all right 100 minutes in we're there we're gonna start talking about it the thing that everybody tuned in for yeah like yeah like I started this on Monday as Wednesday is still not to the point yet uh how many commutes I got to do to get to you know it's like it's like if you want to make like Texas barbecue or something you you don't just like throw it in like it takes all day right like I I hope that like and again to the audience I established that like I don't edit these because I want you to feel like you're really listening to this conversation that that John and I are having like unfiltered full access and a big part of these conversations is like yeah there's a lot of context that goes into these things a lot of little stories that I like to tease out of my guests and I like to step back and give the conversation plenty of room and not make us feel like we're on this regimented rails thing plowing through trying to hit all the highlights and and end at the one hour mark yeah so yeah this is great great and it's been great learning so much about you and again like John has never publicly talked about this stuff to my knowledge other than on his blog which uh I am linking to in the show notes he's got tons of blog posts from I don't know like 10 years or something it's like a huge amount of post over the years and uh I learned a great deal from Reading those and I hope you do too but now we're going for the main course coding interview University let's go yeah so I was working at a um uh I was working at a company that was out of um Chicago so I was working remotely and um I saw that the business was going well and I had like a little dashboard that said like what the revenue was and everything and like customer turn and all that and um and I was like you know what I think I think I could quit my job and just do this full-time and like really like give it my give it my all as far as like marketing this thing this was before I realized it like yeah it was like a kind of a a lifestyle business rather than like a venture stage business yeah so I thought and we did try to get Venture we tried to get Angel Investors in the beginning we were actually in a few competitions and like we tried get into Tech Stars and stuff but yeah we never took investment so which is good I never had to there's no convertible bonds I have to pay back or anything like that it's like it's free it's free and clear so um no investors on the hook I have to have to please so um yeah so I was I was like okay I think I can quit my job and do this full-time and I talk to my wife and she's like yeah um yeah let's give it a go and we can you know kind of see where we are in like six months or something like that and so my my motivation was high to like turn this into like a big thing so I didn't have to go back to like a job um and soon after uh I noticed that I had made some errors on my my little dashboard oh no and the customer count wasn't what I expected and I was like oh no this is so you made like a life-changing decision based on bad data yeah yeah no biggie we'll fix that yeah oops oopsie um little bug little bug there so um but yeah so after I noticed that I was like well and and by the time I noticed that I was like I don't like I I had tried a whole bunch of stuff and it was just yeah I just was not seeing any growth and I was like trying to do like viral content and like it wasn't going viral and trying to uh yeah I was just trying to do I was trying to do anything I could anything I could think of and like no bad ideas just do it all because nothing was hitting so um I was like man I'm gonna I'm gonna run out of money at some point and that's not good right I'm GNA burn through my my savings and might have to like dip into my you know little the little money that I have invested and like start you know converting that and like yeah uh so so there's this time bomb essentially time bomb and yet like rather than just rushing out and just getting another job that looked very similar to the job you had before you had a different idea one that might seem counterintuitive because like the hill climbing algorithm right do I actually have enough cash on hand that I can go all the way down this hill and climb with this higher Hill that I see over here so so I was like uh um so remember back in when I was talking about like getting that one job and I felt like I was like I was like the thing I was like man I can get a job anywhere like I rock um well during this time uh I had I was listening to a lot of I still listening to like a lot of startup stuff so this weekend startups was one of the startup uh podcasts I listen Jason calanis I've been on this week startups oh cool if you want to hear my interview uh I had very bad quality okay um and um but on that there was an episode this was like 2015 uh was it 2015 yeah it was late 2015 when I was like you know doing my my business full-time and the guy he had on was basically running the shop where they would like oh you need a website you need like reg registration and you need like a whatever database like for your customers and this and that like all these Solutions he's like yeah you just come to us and we've got everything's pre-written libraries and we'll like snap it together and like give it to you and I that scared me I was like oh man I don't I can't I can't compete with that like I'm just a little old PHP developer like I don't like there's that's going to you know that's going to make it really hard to get a job if like that kind of thing grows and like you only need you know a 100 people or 200 people in your company to build you know solutions for you know thousands of businesses and so so it it kind of scared me and in in hindsight like I haven't heard anything from that company since so but it was a nice kick in the pants uh because I realized that like I PHP is good and PHP has definitely paid the bills for many years but like it's on the decline and like yeah a lot of the web is built on it like Magento and WordPress and like face Facebook is a highly optimized highly modified version of PHP but like I've um I'm like I feel like that's nearing its end and I and I need to do something else but uh the web had changed out from under me right like so full stack of what I was used to was lamp stack and now full stack is like angular or react and node and and and JavaScript and I was like man I don't I'm so behind I don't know any of this stuff right so I was like okay well I got a choice here I can learn all of this new stuff and get up to speed with it but then do the same jobs that I've always done which is web development and making people's like sign up forms and registration systems and you know make pulling stuff from a database and putting it on the screen in a nice table like can I can learn to kind of like relearn all that and do the same job I've done before or I can learn computer science and build anything like I could build a database I could build you know stuff for Rockets I could build really any solution right doesn't have to be a web solution so I was like well if I'm going to do anything I'll do that and then that opens me up to a wider world of opportunities right where there's more jobs than just web development right um and also like um you know was getting older this is my this was I was in my 40s and I was like I want to have like like and I'm and I'm tired of startups I'm tired of like working all the time like nights and weekends all the time and not having time like with my wife and like enjoying life like I'm like I should be enjoying life where I am right now M and I'm still just working as hard as I ever have so I was like I don't want to do startups anymore like if I'm going to go back to a job I want it to be like a really good job with a really good salary uh and I don't want to have to worry about like my my professional future and I don't want to have to worry about like our financial future so getting a a job at like one of the big companies uh was was top of my list one of the big reasons is if you're new to this stuff like I was you know I had never written statically typed languages like I didn't know like I I I didn't know a float from a double so um if I'm if I'm new at this and I'm going to be starting a new job I need to be at a place where they can like let you come in kind of dumb and then help and Mentor you to get you up to like their level and bigger companies have this bandwidth because they have big teams and lots of people and so they can kind of handhold you a little bit if you're new because most of the people are coming straight out of college um but even people straight at College had more experience writing like Java or C++ than I did um so I needed I needed that mentorship and then I also needed a place that was just going to be able to you know I could I could grow in for the rest of my career because I really didn't I really wasn't interested in going back to like little companies or little startups where there was a lot of risk and that company may not be around or you know the founder may be terrible and like you know you're going to want to jump anyway or something so uh that's why I went for the big companies and Google was Google was not it was it was the goal but only as far as the aim for the stars and if you fall short you hit the moon right everybody wants to work at Google but everybody can't work at Google and Google doesn't want everybody to work at Google like they only want like the best of the best right uh and I knew I wasn't the best best of the best but could I get pretty darn good in like a year I was like yeah I could I could do that um so uh so I was like yeah I'm gonna I'm going to take the shot and just learn this stuff and the the thing that really kicked off like that planted the seed of like learning computer science was when I was back at that little tiny software company working with that x Microsoft guy he was like he was like John you need to learn about like computer science Concepts so that when I talk about like you know the Big O or like linear you know linear algorithms or like whatever like do you know what I'm talking about like you need to you need to be able to understand the stuff if you're going to be in the computer world and be able to like solve problems efficiently and I was like okay so back then I was like 2007 I had picked up a bunch of books that were on like the MIT book list there was a MIT Oran courseware and they had a list of books so great resource uh yeah I mean and and I can see like a clear kind of lineage uh in coding interview University going back to the MIT open courseware reading list and things like that I I just want to jump in with two quick things yeah first uh the difference between a double and a float if anybody's curious they're two different uh I guess data types uh and a float is like a decimal it's just a fancy name for a number that can include a decimal and a double a float is four bytes I I believe and a double is eight bytes so you can just have a whole lot more digits in your number essentially that so when he says I didn't know the difference between a float and a double I actually didn't know that myself I had to look it up while you were talking CU I was like what is a double because I've never really done C++ but like one of the analogies that I would make to so when I was studying Chinese um I go over there and Chinese is not like a language that a ton of people are studying and like 2003 when I was over there uh when I first arrived I stay there for like six years I established and and worked in a lot of different capacities there were a lot of people who were like I'm not going to learn Chinese characters it's just too much work and and so it's kind of like learning computer science is like learning the Chinese characters of Chinese yes you can go out you can speak Chinese really well there were a lot of people who were like second generation Chinese uh who had grown up speaking Chinese with their family but didn't know the characters and the problem is if you don't know the Chinese characters it significantly hobbles your ability to acquire new vocabulary because all the vocabulary is like smashing two different Chinese characters all the idioms are like four Chinese characters smashed together and if you don't know the Chinese characters you're just memorizing like the the actual like word phonetically you don't have like a framework a rubric to like hook all that knowledge onto and your development is just going to be like I I think somebody who learns Chinese and learns Chinese characters their development is going to be like this right like it'll be slow at first but it's going to pick up speed and somebody else is just going to have like kind of a linear cuz every everything they're just trying to memorize the underlying phones right associated with uh the uh given you know word and that might seem like a weird analogy but I do think that like understanding the fundamentals of computer science makes it so much easier to learn like a new algorithm because you can like oh this is in like linear time or quadratic time or something like that and you have kind of like mental scaffolding that you can like put things on top of otherwise you're just memorizing facts and you don't have kind of like the framework for how those different things fit together yeah would you say that's an accurate like kind of spitball yeah like yeah and I and I like I remember writing a I wrote a when I was working with him there was like a I didn't do any like crazy like graph problems or like link list like there were there was no real CS stuff that I was doing on my on my job but I did there was like a permissions hierarchy thing that I was building so it was like a tree and I I needed to Traverse that tree I didn't even know I knew what a tree was cuz I could visualize it but i' never took any classes on it but I knew like things can like recurse right so um there was a I needed to Traverse that tree to see if like this person had like permissions that were up here or something so uh and the way I did it was like really bad and he's like you know you could just go from the route and go like down or there was something where I was like doing it really or the opposite oh anyway I was doing it really inefficiently and he's like uh so he's like yeah if you knew some CS stuff you could you know this would be this would be better so so for years this guy's voice was in the back of your mind like oh I gotta if I just knew this did was there ever a point in your life where you just kind of like kind of shrugged and said you know what I Life's too short I'm just never going to get to that I mean I did I started reading through those books and like uh structure and interpretation of computer programs and like reading through all this list and I'm like a this sucks I I hate this so much and like reading through uh like books on distributed systems and stuff and I was like I don't do this in my job like this is just such a waste of time and then over time I'm like yeah I don't there's no applicability here for my daily work so what am I studying this for and I yeah and I stopped so but that lasted about a good year year and a half um but yeah yeah but importantly you've got this time bomb though as we discussed yes you misread your analytics and you're running out of money and you just happen to uh have benefited from this Insight from this very experienced software engineer who who worked over you who was telling you just learn computer science so okay so you're working through the MIT yeah why not yeah uh so you're working through like this MIT reading list like how did you create such a structured approach because a lot of people would thrash they just flop from one resource to another that's certainly what I did when I was learning to code I mean did did was there a lot of jumping from one resource to another was there a lot of second guessing what what you're learning is is actually useful what was your learning process like so back then yes I did question if it was useful like so for that I was like well I need a CS education so MIT open course were I think was like one of the top Google searches and so I was like okay well they got a bunch of books I'm just going to read those books um and yeah I did get a good bit through it like I probably I I even bought all the books um but I only got like maybe four or five books in I mean that's a lot of reading too and uh like and including and then included calculus and stuff like to and algebra to kind of get you up to speed with like college math which I hadn't done in a long time and uh but yeah just I was like yeah this is not stuff I'm using every day it's just going to go one in you know go in my eyes and and go like that it's going to just disappear so I'm gonna so I I gave it up but um with this this time bomb of like okay it's um it's 2016 is here and it's uh and if you want to get like a job doing this stuff you need to learn this stuff so I was like okay um so I found a uh I found a blog post you probably even you probably read it like Steven Yi yeah Steve oh man that guy get that job that guy does not pull any punches man he is somebody who does not care he's worked at the highest levels of Amazon the highest levels of Google great interview with software engineering daily from him from like a year ago that I listened to where he talks about like Ai and his how he thinks he impacting the field uh yeah amazing developer that everybody here should read some of his writing in my humble opinion I check hold on I got to check that out so um but I found his I found his blog post uh on software engineering daily um and it was basically it called get that job at Google and it was everything you needed to pass the Google interview I was like okay cool so I was like so I'm gonna take that list and I put it in like a text file and then I'm gonna find stuff for each of those topics so I can learn the stuff right and I I did start with some things that were just like um MIT had some online classes at this point uh and so I took some of those and was like intro to computer science and like uh Python and stuff like that so I did start off with with some like real courses um but then soon I kind of went off into like YouTube University and like found a bunch of YouTube videos and because I had thought about when I was thinking about like what can I what can I do I had thought about doing a master's in computer science but it was going to take too long and it was going to cost way too much and I was like I need to compress this um and find a way to get this done faster because of this time bomb I was like okay I'm going to treat this effort like a startup and I need to get a job before I run out of money and like with a startup you need to get this business off the ground before you run out of money and so I'm going to treat it like a startup I'm gonna I'm gonna and I'm GNA Market it like you would Market a startup so um I can basically Market myself as someone to get hired that's a good way of looking at it like the the enter the startup of you I think that was a while back yeah so I'm building a product which is my my education and then like I'm trying to sell it right sell my my my brain you're trying to sell yourself as an an educated candidate who understands computer science and also has a lot of programming experience but the computer science component you identified that as the thing you're missing is the actual kind of conceptual theoretical knowledge the math knowledge things like that yeah so uh so I took so I took his list like I said I put in a text file and then I started filling in the topics with YouTube videos and courses and stuff like that right that I would just find or like articles or whatnot um and my presence on GitHub at the time was was pretty much nothing right like I had it was pretty much an empty repo um and so I was like well I need to have a GitHub presence if I'm going to get a job so I'm just going to stick this list up there and so I put the list up and then I just kept adding to it and I'd find another video and i' adding to it because at this time like you you got to remember I had the luxury of like not having to work so and the business was on like I had done enough development work so it was like it was on autopilot didn't have to worry about it like maybe I'm answering a couple of like customer emails here and there but or like questions or whatnot yeah but most of the time like I'm studying and my wife is cool with it because she knows like we're it's for the it's for the future and this is like a big leap and um so she's like do what you need to do so I was like all right so I'm not going to squander this time I'm going to do it as efficiently as I can and um so because I'm not doing this again like I'm not doing another startup I'm not going to change careers again like this is it like this is this is the big one and then the last stand this is the last stand and then you burned the boats on the shore you're you're you're stuck in this strange land that you've landed yourself computer science land uhuh so um so like I said I started kept adding to the the list and adding to the list um and then just and going through and like doing these courses and man I really hate like I don't like going through courses um I recently got into like back into art like I said like several years ago I got back into it and I've been taking some courses recently man I'm tired of courses because learning like taking courses is hard you got homework and you've got like you know projects you have to finish and stuff and like with this MIT course where it's like yeah you have to like write this program that sorts this stuff and you have to do this and that and like uh I feel like that's kind of where I kind of lose interest with things is when I have assignments but assignments are honestly the best thing to do because they give you practice in what you're learning but it just it it it felt tedious and slow to me even though that's like the better way to do it um so I was like I'm going to watch videos and I'm going to learn how to make this stuff so let's start with Big O notation okay Big O notation I read through a bunch of stuff watch a bunch of videos think I got this okay let's next all right link lists and honestly I was afraid of Link lists I thought this is going to be really hard and I'm I'm gonna this is going to take forever to get through this it was way easier to thought because it's like the Legos of computer science is like link list um yeah use all over the place in memory intensive or like where you don't have a lot of memory like C you know um makes heavy use of them with like pointers and stuff so um yeah so I was like okay link list and I so I did a bunch of um you know like okay I'm going to code it up and like all right and I'm GNA like write some tests or whatever okay that looks good and um but when I didn't but I made a mistake in doing was learning the stuff but not doing assignments like not really applying it um so I I I think I remember like I do a topic and then I would like do some programming problems but honestly I don't remember um but the way I did it is not the best way so the way I tell people now is if you're trying to learn this stuff from zero go through the topics like yeah they you still have to go through all the topics and learn those and there's a lot of stuff that's optional in that coding interview University there's like a bunch that's you don't need to learn it for an interview it's just nice to know if you yeah if you're interested um but uh so there is kind of a line in there that says everything below here is optional um so uh but going through like the main topics my suggestion is learn how to code them them like learn what they are learn how to implement them like in code uh learn know how to write a test that tests your code um so you know that you didn't make any mistakes and then use leak code or cracking the coding interview or one of these books that uh or one of these like websites that gives you coding problems and solve I don't know three to five problems using what you learned right and you're going to be terrible at it in the beginning and you're going to be like I don't know how to solve this problem even though I know it's a linkless problem like how do you you know reverse a link list or how do you like eject a a node you know given the node how can you get rid of it and like an efficient manner and like but like I didn't know how like I had the problem I had the knowledge and I had the problems but I could it was so hard to solve these problems but you try to get through it you you like see what the solution is okay that's where I was wrong like my thing my solution was terrible and like here's the better way yeah but I would say do a few problems and then move to the next topic and then learn the next topic do the same thing and uh learn how it works learn how to write code to implement it write tests uh and then start solving problems with it and then do a few of those and then move on to the next topic and then after a few topics go back to the beginning and solve more problems and what that does is it it lets you review what you learned before you're still solving problems with it um and so you're learning and then you're applying the knowledge and then you just keep going in a circle um until you're ready to go um but like I read a whole C++ book that was a dumb thing to do like I there was uh like there was there was so much that was wasted and like books that I didn't need to read through and like like if you read something that doesn't mean you know it right yeah like you can read I can read I read through that whole C++ book and like a month later I could probably tell you like a handful of things that I remembered from it because if you don't use it you lose it um so that's my big advice learn it learn it solve problems with it move to a new topic and then come back to it later and that's when I was um changing from Amazon to I always felt underprepared because it's scary you know I still feel underprepared because I haven't looked at that stuff in you know four years so um but technical interviews are the way that you get hired and even though I don't like it um because a lot of stuff in those that you're learning man I don't deal with link lists on a daily basis yeah and I don't deal with graph problems what I deal with is I do use a lot of hash tables and I use a lot of libraries that other people have made to solve problems and connect to services and all that stuff so but if you're depending on the job you get you might need to know some like really really basic stuff and solve algorithmic problems on a daily basis um it just turns out that like that's not not what I yeah deal with on a daily basis so so to I you wrote this excellent article that free Cod Camp published uh and uh the article like tons of people read it because a lot of people at the time were like really trying to get and I'm sure today I think Google gets like I don't know I think they get like a thousand applications a day or some 10,000 applications it's a lot it's a lot of hopefuls that would like to work at Google right um and I'm sure Amazon gets a lot of applications as well all all the big tech companies um you at the time originally it was called Google interview universe and uh maybe you can talk just very briefly I mean you talk about this in the article that I'm linking to in the show notes so everybody go read John's article but what was the process this was like was it like nine months or something some really long period of time where you're just like intensively doing what you said you're you're reading a little bit then you're going and applying that to try to solve uh algorithm problems like and you know of course you mentioned some some you know leak code and cracking the coding interview project Oiler is a great place to do this fre has like a browser based project version of project oer we have Rosetta code we have our own algorithm and data structure problems that you can solve using JavaScript using python um so you were doing this kind of loop for a while like learn apply come back and review and so you were doing this how many months were you doing this before you actually felt ready to apply for Google I didn't feel ready so I I had gotten through the so I I hadn't so I learned topics and then moved on and learned topic and moved on I wasn't I don't think I was solving problems in the middle like I think I waited until the end till I been through all the topics and then I started solving problems that was a big mistake but so so based on sorry to interrupt you but like just just because I think a lot of people listening to this are probably asking this question like had you applied what you know now how long do you think it would have taken you to go through through like the the entire contents of uh coding interview University like you think you could shaved several months yeah yeah full-time I could have it could have probably been like just um I don't know like three or four months like yeah it didn't need to be it didn't need to be so long like like I said there were books I was reading that I didn't need to do and like it was just uh so a lot of people are like listening to this podcast are like man man this is a long podcast I spent two hours so far listening to this podcast but what John just said essentially is that you can save five or six months of your life potentially by doing what he says not what he did so to speak uh by applying the the lessons the learnings that he had from this arduous journey of preparing and feeling in the dark and because there wasn't like a p a path that was blazed for some person in their 40s to transition from you know mere web developer Web Master to like proper software engineer with a computer science kind of like Corpus uh the knowledge if you think about London taxi drivers know like every street in London right they have to do that and they have to pass the test in order to get their taxi Medallion thing right um and and in computer science you have to stand up in front of a bunch of Engineers and like answer awkward whiteboard questions and like draw on the board and you know uh or you have to get through some phone screen where you're in like the Google Docs you know typing out code in like this horrible environment without any syntaxing or anything trying to like uh solve whatever problems they just throw at you right um so yeah like before there wasn't something like this you brought that into being and you're potentially saving all these good folks who want to transition into the field and who do care about getting the more rigorous computer science jobs cuz I think like there was certainly an era for for a long time when if you knew like some PHP if you knew how to use MySQL you could go out and you could get a job at like a web design consultancy or you could maybe you know you could do a lot of things right and and what we've seen is over time you've needed more and more skills and uh it's it's getting more and more competitive just like any field right like every field has this kind of wild west days where um where it's relatively easy to get in and you just have people you know Prospectors kind of stepping up and and trying but uh software engineering is becoming more professionalized and certainly at the at the upper echelons of software engineering there is an expectation that you know the difference between you know a float and a double that you know how to reverse a link list that you know these kinds of things and it may seem like ritual hazing because as you just said John you don't use a lot of these things dayto day like like that you're just putting people through this kind of arduous write a passage everybody has to walk on coals in order to be able to get these coveted jobs but the reality that doesn't change the fact that this is how it works and you do need to learn these things right yeah yeah yeah so so I just want to emphasize that that like you know John you're very uh you know I I think you're understating like the sheer value that you've created here and you're a very modest person but like you can save yourself and and that is with you going full out and already having a lot of development experience and all this stuff even you at that point kind of you know spent a whole bunch of time that you didn't need to spend and so again you you've crystallized a lot of those learnings there and that is an incredibly valuable resource for anybody who does want to get a computer science degree without actually going back to school and getting a degree and getting all the debt and spending like four years learning a bunch of General Ed and other random stuff is not related to being able to pass the coding interview if you just want the shortest path to being able to perform well in these whiteboard coding interviews and impress your probably classically trained computer science degree holding peers at these big companies this is it this is the shortest path probably like there are plenty of optimizations to be made and who knows maybe somebody listening to this comes and like I can build an even better one and like 10 years from now everybody's looking at that you know but hopefully it'll be an open just your project will continue to grow and improve through open source uh contributions and stuff like that uh I do want to emphasize that like your project is the fifth most starred project on all of GitHub that is a massive achievement like you know Microsoft Facebook you know Amazon like all these companies have these big open source well-funded projects and your project is like I guess certainly in stars that metric people liking essentially a project because they found it useful your project is doing incredibly well yeah yeah I'm very I'm very proud of it and I'm just like I I I can't believe it either um like it's very it's very exciting to see and like I like and I I got to say like a lot of there's been a lot of contribution over the years like people suggesting like adding resources um people putting in translations like there's so many translations now for probably close to 20 translations of uh uh that people have done like of the project in different languages and it's just like wow this is this is really great yeah um yeah awesome well um what I'm going to encourage people to do is to of course check out your project and to learn from you I feel so honored to have you here like kind of like giving this background origin story uh rather than try to rehash all of the details from your journey into it I encourage people to spend that time going and reading your article which I've linked to in the show notes and also um just going through and spending some time reading through coding interview University there's so much there and uh I am what is next for John wasam you're working at zos you've got this great company culture that you've written about at Great length yeah I mean zapo yeah zapo is great I so what's next is just living a normal life so I've uh like zapo is really great and I see myself you know staying there until I retire um it's really super I love the people I work with like it's just really great and um so yeah I want to stick it out there as you know as long as they'll have me and I think they will I think they like me a lot of people have reached out to you over the many years since this project has gone live on GitHub and maybe they've just had GitHub issues maybe you've you've seen threads on um on Reddit or uh tweets and things like that like a lot of people have opinions about how to learn computer science right you are simply probably the most you know out there like advocating for learning these Concepts I mean David men also a former podcast guest on the free cocam podcast uh Harvard cs50 Professor other people like that that are out there trying to teach computer science what you're doing is you're kind of steering people and curating resources and providing a general Philosophy for approaching this giant task that's how I would describe it naively would you agree with that sentiment yeah I agree yeah okay so um what are some of the things people reach out like what are some of the most common questions that people ask or the common things that people say about uh your project and like how you encourage people to approach learning computer science of preparing for the coding interview yeah um so a lot of folks will reach out and they're like uh they they like the project and they're they're glad I made it um and you know they they want to get hired at like these big companies uh I think the one of the big questions I get is like can I get a referral to like Amazon or whatnot and uh uh honestly I I can't like one if I haven't if I haven't worked with you before I don't don't know of you or your skills or you know what you can accom what you can accomplish like I can't I can't vouch for you and that's really what a referral is um in the beginning like actually right when I got hired at Amazon I put like a few of them in um but I don't I don't think they went anywhere um Amazon's a Amazon's a big place um so uh and also like if you're I so I don't I'm not up on like International like laws and visas and stuff like that um but from the folks I've talked with at Amazon who got hired um from you know from from outside the US um most of them came to Amazon while they were working on a master's degree in the United States so like they're in you know they were in Mississippi or they were in Colorado you know and they were on their Master's program for Cs and then that's when they applied um and that makes it much easier for Amazon to hire you um because you're already here um if you're in let's say so let's say you're in India um I know there's a presence at Amazon in India uh I know there's because we work with like so that and we interact with a lot of folks that are in uh in India so uh there is a presence there so if you you can't make that jump to get to the US to to um for like the Masters or whatnot I would suggest trying to get through um uh with your local Amazon office or Google office or um whatever company it is um and don't be afraid to take don't be afraid to get a job at like a company that's not one of these um I know it's like the slam dunk is to graduate from college and then boom like you're at Amazon or boom you're at Google but man that's there's a there's so much competition it's a it's a tall order to to to pin your hopes on on that um I mean I didn't do that my first job was um uh you know working at that little mortgage originator company so yeah your first developer job yeah I mean like on two hands you can count the number of like Mega tech companies that there are but you know there are tens of thousands probably hundreds of thousands of like smaller companies that need software engineers and that's a great place to get experience and once you have experience even though the job may be you know awful and it may be uh you know not the best conditions but you're writing software um once you have that then it makes it easier to make the jump to to somewhere better and somewhere better maybe Amazon or it might just be you know it might be a bigger company or it might be a startup um but um you know I know that these big huge companies are the goal and you you can get there uh you just might have to take a a little bit longer route um but don't feel like oh I'm like I'm I'm I'm you know I'm I'm too old to start at these companies or like all my friends are working there and I'm not so I've missed the you know I've missed the the train and now I'm behind where I should be in life like you're never where you should be in life like should is a should to me is kind of a bad word um like don't judge yourself against other people don't judge just like just know that are you doing the best you can do um and if so then you're on the right track um and don't feel like you have to work at some big company like right out of college um to be a success because success isn't about like winning immediately success is about winning over time um with small incremental wins um yeah um and also when you're reaching out to the these big companies um you're not going through one HR department like let's say you've send in your resume um like at Amazon there are there are hundreds of teams and there are hundreds of recruiters there might be thousands of teams I don't know it's it's huge but but there are probably hundreds and hundreds of Compu of recruiters and those recruiters are assigned to individual teams uh maybe maybe a handful of teams would be under like one like a few recruiters so when you're applying for these companies apply for a like apply for like basically when you're looking through all the job postings look for stuff that you're interested in um maybe it's like on I don't know some AWS team or maybe it's some you know ads team or like but I know you're probably going to apply to whatever they have because it's like you'll just take whatever and I I don't I wouldn't discount that like that works but um you know to kind of narrow it down yeah find something that you think is interesting and that maybe your experience or your passion or your interests align with because that's what you're going to do better at because you're going to care more about it um and then put in your put in your application with like as many of those teams as you can because it's not going to one huge pool of resumés it's going to one pool of resumés for one set of like one small set of like maybe one or two recruiters yeah so so just to recapitulate don't think of I'm applying to Google or I'm applying to Amazon think I'm applying to aws's um billing team or something like that right uh and that way uh you can kind of more tailor like who you're likely to interview with what sort of skills are likely to come up what the traditional pathway into that team is what is that through a recruiter is there a separate like application process so just to make sure I understand correctly like can I only apply to Amazon one time in like a six-month period will they like penalize me for applying to several different positions or something or how does it work from and and I understand some of this may be proprietary like like we have a a team member at freeo Camp who also works at Google for example and uh she's not allowed to talk about the recruiting process at all or anything related to it because it's like the moment she talks about it then like everybody adapts and like just tries to game their application process I totally understand you know so uh yeah like and there are there are people out there that are probably like high paid Consultants that help people try to get into these and you know CU a job at like a big tech company is a a coveted thing and people are willing to you know big borrower steal their way into that job right in some cases right so uh so I just want to emphasize like I'm not trying to squeeze like proprietary information or anything that like I just want to help help people and I think you want to help people adapt to the way the process actually is and not game it and you don't get the vibe at all from reading through coding interview University it's like the exact opposite of those kinds of shortcuts it's like okay here's the hard work that you need to do do this hard work but don't necessarily do this hard work it's basically like what I get from reading through it so just just to get back to my question though like can I potentially apply for lots of different positions and lots of different teams or is there is that likely to you know raise a flag like this person is just spamming out applications to every team we have how how does that work how how would you advise people on that honestly I don't know so I I'm not a recruiter I'm not in that you know area um but I know that when uh uh so when I applied at Google right I applied for one one job and I went through a referral because that guy knew me before I even started studying this stuff right and so he saw my journey and he was like yeah I'll put him in a referral for you cuz he's seen like what I can do yeah and uh like I remember talking to him in the beginning and before before I even started and he's like he's like let me give you an example of a question like what's the difference between a you know an an array and a list and I was like I don't know which is pretty basic question like you you'll you'll get pretty uh pretty quickly like once you start studying this stuff but yeah I basically knew nothing and so he saw where I had gone to and he was like yeah I'll put in a referral he did so he did put in a referral and I just but with this one team and uh because I didn't know how this stuff worked and I didn't I didn't even get um I didn't even get a phone call I didn't didn't even get a phone screen so Google's tough I mean but maybe I was maybe maybe I was burned because like my thing was like all over the place and they're like well we don't want to hire the the embolden everybody yeah it'll look like he hacked our you know like he hacked into our uh our process and like you know found a way in and like by doing this like crazy thing so we don't want to we don't want to encourage that I do I don't honestly I don't know I never got an answer but um I did reach out to so but what's funny is the the xhr guy uh who he wrote a who wrote a book on like Google and its whole like human resource stuff I did I DMD that guy on Twitter this back when I used to be on Twitter back and used to use it back in the day um but I dm'd him and said hey like here's my here's my story and like thing and I didn't even get like a phone screen like what's going on and he was like that's uh that's pretty ridiculous um let me see if I can get you in touch with some and he doesn't even work there anymore but he kind of put in a nice word for me but like even then then I applied then he told me like oh there's bunch of teams like you got to find the team you're interested in I was like oh okay so and you got to remember Google in Seattle at the time was small it was like one office building in the like the suburbs of Kirkland like it was not in the like the thriving Seattle Metropolitan you know Metroplex or whatever it was like one little office one office building with like a cafeteria and so yeah there's probably not that many open jobs there and so what he said was uh find some teams that you're interested in working with but these were all like just Seattle teams and there weren't that many um but I did put through with those I still didn't get I still didn't get like a phone screen or anything but um so even even with that additional Boost from somebody who was essentially a former Insider uh you still couldn't penetrate the veil of you know whatever goes on whatever black magic is happening behind the scenes where they use to determine whom to bring on to the team so how did I get in I I so so after that like after that failure I was like well this sucks and then I ended up changing the the name from Google code Google interview University to coding interview University because I was like well if I didn't get H to Google that's a bad look and this is more this is and it's not just Google out there like there a bunch of companies like I should just change the name so I did change the name yeah um but after that I was like oh there's a bunch of teams that I need to like connect with a team I want to work with okay so then I looked over at like a bunch of Microsoft postings and put in stuff there uh and then with Amazon I found a guy on LinkedIn that I knew that I was connected with who worked at Amazon and we had met at a startup event the year uh like three years before I think and I didn't even remember who he was or like what we had talked about but he knew that I had like started talk to the manager like that business and everything and he was like yeah I'll put in a referral for you and he like knew that I had like done this whole uh coding thing and like taught myself CS he's like yeah I'll put in referral and then he was the hiring manager well not he wasn't the hiring manager but he was on the he was a manager on the team uh I was actually worked for a different manager who was the hiring manager but that's how I got in was a referral but he was very close and but I also still had to go through the like the phone screen and the the interview but um I don't remember if I applied to a bunch of stuff at Amazon or not or if it was that just the one so yeah yeah well you got in and that's a big deal like how old were you when you got your job there do you remember uh it was seven years ago so what is that I was 45 you were 45 when you got your first big Tech job I'm definitely like a lot of people ask me like how do I get into Tech like I've been doing I'm too old to get in now I started learning tood when I was 30 um so I was just an English teacher before that and the school director uh so yeah like uh I think it's really inspiring and you've laid out this very clear path I mean in terms of how to actually have the actual interview process you don't really have any advice for that so much as just like that tip I mean at the end of the day there's no substitute for hard work this is not a fake it till you make it type thing you need to actually know what you're doing right I mean so yeah for some reason I think you can't fake a coding interview like yeah good luck with that I feel like people are like somewhat entitled to getting like a really good I I talk with computer science grads all the time who are you know fraternity types and like didn't take school that serious ly like did the minimum to get through and they're like I can't get a job at Big Tech what the heck like I'm a failure like no you just need to like just because school's over doesn't mean you don't need to go tighten up your fundamentals and actually be able to pass these interviews and uh yeah so it's it's a hurdle for everybody it's certainly a hurdle even here in the US where we're a little bit more Progressive in terms of not like requiring everybody to have a degree and their field of study or even necessarily requiring people to have a degree uh although importantly you do have did you finished your University degree mhm yeah yeah so and and you were able to go into the army as an officer which is one one thing no I went in as a a uh uh it was like what is it it's been so long it was basically like rank four I was I was a specialist okay because i' I've heard that you have to have a degree to be an officer is that true so uh I think so yeah but I just like after that did that like uh board interview thing and failed that I didn't try to go the officer route okay but uh sorry for like going back to those details but like you do have a degree even though it's not in computer science and then you have all the supplemental learning and you have preponderance of proof of that supplemental learning in the form of this top five GitHub repo that like has like tons of people using it and following your footsteps so um I guess my takea away from this conversation other than the specifics of like your Learning Journey and like all the entrepreneurial advice you sh that I think is very actionable for people who do want to write software and like be their own boss so to speak uh and I mean that's a good reason to go into entrepreneurship is because you don't want to have somebody standing over it sounds like you enjoyed that but you were very happy to subvert your own I guess like full authority over what you're working on when you're a startup literally nobody's telling you what to do except for maybe investors or a board of directors and like a charity standpoint like I I ultimately have to answer to freeo Camp's Charities board of directors um but now you you like kind of like went back and you're working under probably a manager who probably also has a manager who probably also has a manager so you're you're part of a hierarchy again what was that like that adjustment to going back to work life after being I I guess you were only like because of your miscalculations and stuff you were only like truly free from work uh and running your business for you know a year or two but like what was that like going back in did it did it feel like Billy Madison going back to like you know grade school and like suddenly have just sit at the the desk and like listen to the teacher and when You' already previously been able to just do whatever you wanted I mean I had worked at such small I had worked at so many small companies that it was it felt different because this was so big um and yeah and you're like several levels away from the CEO you're just part of a huge organization um like Amazon Amazon has so many teams um like at zos we have to interact with these teams quite a bit to like you know get get features accomplished and stuff and like we'll reach out to one team and we're like okay this is the team that gives us like delivery options and it's like oh but it's not the team that gives you the delivery dates for the delivery options it's a different team and then like there's so there there's like so many special izations and so many teams that it's it's just amazing but yeah like it it it felt it felt good to be inside something so large and safe um and it felt good that I had people that were helping me and like saying like yeah this code not so good this could be better and like you could write this test a different way um and so it felt good to have that kind of um that mentorship to kind of help me get up to speed and everything and uh my managers were great like they were all great and like um so yeah I mean it was nice it's interesting like the US military like the Army has half a million people in it right and Amazon has more than a million people if you include like everybody in the giant apparatus so did it feel like a return to like a large did it feel anything like being in the army no um I mean I guess maybe but like it's yeah it just felt like a new world um but I I welcomed it I mean it would it's nice to Be Your Own Boss but it's also hard because everything's on you like the success of the thing is on you and you're constantly trying to make decisions like you're you're OPP you have opportunities and you have to make decisions and like you're trying to it's almost like you're trying to um it's trying almost like you're trying to do a speedrun of like Mario Brothers or something where you can't make any if you make any mistakes you fail right yeah you have to reset yeah but there's reset is like starting a new business right then you're you start all over again so with businesses it's like well I got to make all the right decisions and like pass on the opportunity that sound don't feel right or whatever or like and and it's years of your life essentially like building this thing that can be very fragile yeah yeah so do I do I would I like to be my own boss like yeah but I'll just wait till retirement and then I can be my own boss and and you think you're going to do anything entrepreneurial in your retirement no I'm just going to not have a boss just gonna just gon to enjoy your hobbies and enjoy life um yeah and and I mean speaking of enjoying life uh i s like I saw on your blog I did you go to like Disney uh Disneyland like Star Wars um did you make it out to that thing I can't remember what it's called but like Disneyland has like a big Star Wars experience now yeah it's great um yeah so we went to Disneyland and uh and yeah they have that kind of like that Star Wars world I forget what it's called but they also have that at Disney world as well so you you can go either place which is geographically convenient to you but uh yeah that place is really cool the rise sorry your audio just cut out oh I I hit I hit I was clicking and I clicked the wrong thing stop click stop touching stuff um but yeah the rise of the resistance ride is man that's a that's a blast like it it feels like you're in Star Wars it's so cool um yeah that's great but then like on my blog that Star Wars thing yeah that was at and stuff like that uh petting zo are the best awesome man well uh again this is like maybe one of maybe the longest podcast I've recorded this is a long one uh but we we've covered so much ground uh is there anything else like any other questions anything that that we can tease out of you while we have you in terms of like things misconceptions things people think about the Java application process planning like hunkering down to learn computer science uh any any other wisdom we can get yeah I'm going to hit a few things so one I think you had mentioned 10,000 hours at some point um 10,000 hours gets thrown around a lot and there's no scientific basis to that that's just like aant like meme thing essentially way to go right way to go writer I forgot your name um Malcolm GL I think yeah so and and the thing even if it did take 10,000 hours the thing that people have to remember is that 10,000 hours is for Mastery it's not for actually getting the job um so whether you're going to be a software engineer or like a concept artist that's a game company or like whatever it is like the skills you need you don't need 10,000 hours to get there like maybe 10,000 if you're going to be like a person who's been at that job for 15 years but if you're just getting hired you're nowhere close to that so you can throw that number right out the window um uh uh and like let's talk real quick about AI because um yes yeah I can't believe this is the first time we've talked about Ai and this yes the thing that everybody talks about asks about yeah so I I had a guy so sometimes people inside Amazon will reach out to me as well like through our little internal messaging thing and um and and because they want to change jobs and become like a software engineer or something um and one of them asked me um he's like with AI is there do should I even try to learn this stuff like what's the what's the point and what I think AI is turning into is is it going to take our jobs uh I don't really think so because here's the thing with software software is so specific um if you're like hey give me a web page that shows like a button on it sure you can make a web page with a button on it with AI like um but if you need to make business decis decisions and get a product manager to answer your questions and say like uh when we do this registration form like how long should should we like have password uh verific like validation on here should we like what length should these be like should we do email validation like okay and then all these questions that come around each of these like any new feature has like this kind of uh branching of all these possible like product decisions you could make around it and then somebody's got to answer all those so basically if they took away the engineers and said we're going to let a product manager use AI to build this thing now then or let's get rid of all the product managers and just have the CEO like talking to Ai and making the whole website it's going to take the person just as long to specify every possible decision that needs to be made in the generation of this code and the generation of these features they're going to have to specify every little thing and if you're going to do that you might as well just be a programmer because that's what we do so yeah it's like yeah they can make some cool stuff but like there's always there's always going to be a need for programmers like yeah and what I like to tell people is like in my opinion programmers are just computing indicating what needs to be done to the machine right uh they are also probably making a whole lot of decisions along with the PMS along with the quality assurance security all the other people that are you know thinking about this feature or or this giant codebase or whatever like those are all decisions and code is just a very crisp way of encapsulating exactly what to do in each situation and communicating all those details to the machine right um it's like taking a taking a spec and converting it into code that spec you know the the code cannot be more precise than the spec that like I guess generated it I guess or maybe that's not the right way of thinking of it but but like an AI is not going to make those decisions because uh I guess the best you could help for would be an AI That's steeped in all the best practices and is read clean code and like all these different books which I'm sure gp4 has but but like actually understands appreciates and and can make those kind of like tradeoffs and yeah I mean you would have to have such a broad understanding of every facet of you know the business and the domain and all these different things in order to make those decisions that a human programmer the biggest problem I think is that a lot of people have misom misconceptions about what programmers do and they think I just turned coffee into code and that that like you know being able to take a picture of like a wireframe and have that converted into a website is web development is solved you know um and I don't I don't believe that at all I believe that I mean it could be many decades before we have ai that can function on the level of like you know a software engineer who has a few years of experience um so yeah I mean I'm hopeful that it'll make productive developers like yourself even more productive uh but at the same time uh I my theory is people just use it as an excuse so they don't have to do the extremely hard work of learning math programming computer science so that they can become software Engineers because it's so much easier to just you know sit on the couch and and you know uh say like H it doesn't matter it's all going to be automated anyway right when it in the reality I who was I I was talking with Ken G uh Ken's nearest neighbors podcast data science podcast and he said like basically every time some new tool comes out like people use that as an excuse not to you know um focus on building up their fundamentals and everything like that and every single tool every time has been wrong people have been making tons of money as developers uh getting things done throughout you know Microsoft front page sky falling web V's over you know um no code this guy is selling everything's over you know but you know I talk to lots of devs who make heavy use of no code and and they already understand the fundamentals and all they're doing is kind of like QA the machines and making sure the machine has good output kind of like a high level scripting language right so you could like Joel spolsky Joel on software he said that uh he does believe that llms are a huge Improvement and that uh he thinks they're like the next big thing for programmers after like garbage collection right uh in terms of just simplifying the developer experience but even he conceding that he thinks these are this massive tool just kind of laughed when I asked him whether it was going to actually dramatically impact the the employer workspace so I the reason I share all that uh is just because I I agree with you and uh you're definitely not alone in fact I have yet to have any guest on the the show who was just like oh yeah it's over you know very few people seem to believe that except for you know if you listen to like the people that are trying to sell gpus people that are trying to sell you know Enterprise AI Solutions and stuff like that I'm sure they'll overstate you know uh or or maybe underappreciate the amount of decision- making that an individual developer makes throughout the day I mean how many decisions do you think you make a day I mean every line of code is more is just more decisions so right and somebody's got to make those and so you either let the product person do it or you you count on the you know the developer to do the right thing and do I count on AI to do the right thing no um you know like I mean yeah if you look back at I I won't I won't write on this uh this topic too long but yeah if you look back at like when Squarespace and like Wix and like those are now big and like at some point you were spending you know thousands of dollars to somebody to like make your website and to make your photo album on the website and to make the you know turn your brochure into a website and now they have this thing to do it and are we are we decrying the loss of those jobs no those people went on to do more interesting jobs yeah than just making turning brochures into websites nobody you are walking embodiment of somebody who to some extent some of your earliest work is probably just a series of tools that people would use and what did you do you just went and upskilled yeah yeah yeah yeah um one other thing I want to mention real quick is uh is the difference between like front-end engineering and like software engineering and I front engineering you call it web development like whatnot um it's got It's got a few different names at Amazon it's called a um front-end engineer which is wasn't something that the title that existed when I started that kind of a came in after um we used to have web development Engineers but if you're looking to get into like front-end development and like react and node and all that stuff like honestly I can't help you cuz that is is just not my world um so if you're looking to get into that like I would hit uh develop a road map that project to learn what you need to learn to get to get there um at one point on the on coding interview University I think I made mention of like if you're doing front end you don't need all the Cs stuff and some some guy at Amazon reached out to me like through the internal chat and he's like hey you know if you look at the requirements at Amazon like you have to have CS knowledge to like do like you need to know your data structures and algorithms to do front engineering I'm like okay I all right sure I'm I I believe you um but like like I said that's not my world so I just don't know so look into the jobs that you want look at the requirements that they're asking for and make sure you match that you know whatever your curriculum you have to to to be what they want to higher so yeah it's interesting you say it's not my world but like for a long time I mean obviously you were doing full stack lamp development back in the day but you you did spend a great deal of your time doing HTML CSS development um yeah but we're in a post lamp World bro we're in a m m I think m is mer I don't know TV expressjs no. JS and react are we still using expressjs I don't even know like would it be M now or m r n I have no idea so yeah um it's not my world so yeah but I just say JavaScript stack if you will because most most of it's full stack JavaScript but um yeah man it's been so great learning from you I cannot tell people enough that like investing in your skills taking the time to actually learn these things instead of just saying oh I probably won't need that like if if somebody told me like oh you probably don't need data structures and algorithms for doing front-end engineering like I I would probably say like well does it hurt to have that ability I mean uh by learning a little bit more of this you're You're Building fundamentals that you can later build upon you're creating a scaffold that you can hang things on later on there is no knowledge that is not power right uh this is from the Mortal Kombat 3 title screen and I gen L believe that I I I am so grateful that I did spend time like actually you know learning fundamental CS granted my knowledge is not nearly as broad as yours um but uh I'm I'm grateful that I I did it and I'm grateful that I spent a lot of time coding algorithms and data structures and solving a bunch of project Oiler problems and things like that and uh it's given me appreciation if nothing else like I mean in the grand scheme of things what is three or four months of your life that you're just you know after work after school just sitting down and learning a little bit of supplemental CS right what is what harm comes from going through cs50 right and building the projects not just watching the big YouTube video on Freo gam Channel but actually going through and doing a lot of the projects right um and another big thing I want to pull out is like your you know space repetition which you didn't really call it space repetition earlier but just like going back and reviewing things regularly and each time you review it it becomes a little bit easier to remember it the the uh the wrinkles in your brain are etched a little bit deeper and the myin sheath increases on your your neurons yes yes so so the electricity can travel a little bit more efficiently through there and yeah yeah we're going to have a neurology Elixir now that was from that was from the I think the Talent Code which is a Talent Code yeah which is like a big it's a book among artists it's a like I said I've been big into drawing but uh yeah talent I haven't actually heard of that book Yeah the more you um like you're not born with Talent like the more you do like you're you're born with an interest the more you do things uh the more that myin builds up on your neurons and you you you get more efficient at making this like it all just becomes second nature yeah and I always say talent and practice and interest they all fuse together like the better you get at something the more you're going to enjoy doing that and the more you're going to do it it's it's like just a virtuous circle and so like with programming like with learning languages which is something you and I have spent a lot of our time doing like with um like with maintaining open source projects you know anything uh the the more success you have the more early wins you have the more momentum you're going to build up and uh yeah so yeah there's no there's there's no there's so there's there's always like the you know will I ever be as good as like lennis tals or so and so like like you don't have to be like you're like there's if you're if you're a musician and you're 6 years old and you're not as good as Mozart so should you just quit no it's because those there are there are people in every sphere of Music art uh Linguistics software engineering like there's there are outliers in every field and you should not you should not attempt to like be that you because those people are like one in a million right like don't try to be the outlier just try to be because most of us are not right like if if the outliers were the only ones that got hired then there would only be like 12 employees in the whole software industry so like the there there's there's them and then there's everybody else there's the rest of us like all the normal people like me that uh just have to learn it that's it yeah 100% John it's been such a pleasure having you on the free Cod Camp podcast I hope everybody enjoys checking out the links in the show notes and I hope everybody enjoys learning from your teaching and that you save them a tremendous amount of time in their Journey uh you know do as John says not as John did learn from the time that he spent unnecessarily uh thrashing about and learning what the path forward was and and uh yeah I I just I greatly appreciate not only you sharing your wisdom as you blog but also just creating this amazing resource uh for people and making it open source making it free uh making creative comments I've reached out to you a while back and say hey can we add a creative commments license on this because freeo Camp would love to incorporate some of this into our learning platform as well so we're hoping to do that and especially with like flashcards and stuff like that in the future so just thank you again for being like a chill human being in the open- source world and uh I mean you could have you didn't have to do any of this publicly you could have just done it all privately and gone and had you know a good career and kind of just it's a lot of work to actually share knowledge right most people don't do that how many software Engineers are there in the world how many people are there in the world that got their first big Tech job at age 45 and how few learning resources are there um yeah thanks for being one of the people to put pen to paper paper and uh share your wisdom thank you very much like I said it's been an honor to be here like you're you're one of my heroes in this uh in the the coding world so yeah this guy rocks awesome man well uh everybody until next week happy codingand I thought that the talent you have is the talent you're like you're born with and that's it's it's that's all you've got right so if if as good as you are in high school that's probably the best you're ever going to be and boy that's dumb welcome back to the free Cod 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 John wasam who's both a developer and a Founder John is a software engineer at Amazon and creator of one of the most popular open source projects of all time coding interview University John welcome to the free Cod Camp podcast thank you Quincy so I'm so glad to like I'm honored to be here like you are you're a leader in this uh in this space of like learning to code and it's just yeah I'm I'm honored to be on so thank you so much yeah well I've learned so much from you over the years just like reading your blog and of course uh just going through the many many resources through your open source projects you've got like a kind of like a computer science flashcards project is as well which we can talk about in a little bit uh and just like learning how you assimilated this massive Corpus of knowledge and went out there and uh you know went into the software engineer you know Fang tier company interview process yeah yeah well let's I mean people probably have heard of coding interview University but for people who haven't maybe you could talk just really quickly about what is is and um and we'll go into your story about why you built it but what is the resource itself and what is the value proposition to people who are hoping to break into Tech and work as software developers yeah so coding interview interview University is like it's basically just a long list of resources uh broken up by topic so that you can kind of like guide yourself through a computer science education um and then learn how to interview so that you can get hired at pretty the goal is kind of anywhere right to get hired anywhere but um you know a lot of folks are going for the the big companies and it uh it the resources there um prepare you to uh to have the knowledge and the uh information you need to get hired yeah absolutely and you yourself famously uh this is maybe a spoiler alert for people that are excited about like hearing John's entire developer origin story which we will get to in a second but um it was originally called Google interview University and uh of course uh you know that wasn't meant to be but it sounds like something just as good or better came out of that which is your long career at Amazon as a software engineer both at Amazon and at like zapo which is uh pretty big e-commerce company that Amazon acquired maybe 10 15 years ago so um very unique culture in itself and a very inspiring founder uh who's no longer with us uh but who is just like really really cool like if you've ever been out to like the Las Vegas Tech scene it's basically built around Tony sh and the uh the so when I started at Amazon it's uh it was like I I went into we'll we'll we'll I'm sure we'll discuss more of this but like so I won't talk about like how kind of how I got in there but um but yeah Amazon like Amazon is a big company it's real big and uh I was on a on AWS config team so it's like one of the many many services within AWS and I was one member of that team um uh and I had never like like I knew a little like I knew a little Java um but like I had never really written any unit tests to speak of like just a handful and um basically when I jumped into Amazon it was I knew I was going to have a lot to learn and I had a lot to learn so um uh yeah so getting you know working at Amazon and and and work working at their high standards as far as like the code reviews and and like getting your designs signed off and like stuff like that um uh yeah it it definitely leveled me up and then working at and like the uh like the term workplace culture came from company and people to grow with and uh like yeah and and zaposlitev the word I'd use to describe what they do whereas if you you might think of like Google as like less focused for example famously kind of like trying a lot of different things like uh Amazon strikes me as like incredibly like metric driven and just like really focused on the bottom line at the end of the day which you know delivering value to customers I guess is like customer obsessed culture and everything and uh it sounds like zap OS has a little bit of a different culture but uh and it I guess the reason I asked you this question right off the bat is was it worth all the work that you put into learning computer science for people who are like should they continue uh their studies like is is it worth it to become a Dev yes it's worth it um I mean this wasn't my first rodeo I had I had T I had kind of taught myself web development back in the uh uh the post-bubble period of the you know that ended in like 2000 U the early.com days yeah um and so I had worked at a lot of a lot of places but um like going to go you know trying to like teach myself computer science was like a whole new it's almost like getting a whole new job right like it's almost like changing a career so um when I uh like so when I went into that world is like yeah it's it's different it's big it's also really good pay and if you're at Amazon you get stock options and there was a there was a big stock up swing at the time so yeah um like financially it was great um and as far as like getting my skills up and kind of opening me up to a different world of of uh software development uh definitely worth it so I mean and and of course once you get into like one of these big companies and you've got that on your resume like you can kind of go anywhere yeah absolutely and that's what I tell people even though Fang probably isn't going to be your first developer job uh and when I say Fang I mean like really any big name brand tech company it doesn't have to be specifically one of the Fang companies fa G which is Facebook Apple Amazon Netflix Google right like those are the kind of The Prestige companies when that was coined and yeah you know that people people like reconfigured exactly who like Microsoft why isn't Microsoft on the list you know I know I was just thinking that but um I think that uh one thing that's really uh interesting about you is that you did like have kind of like good enough developer chops to be able to get things done for a long time and then you knuckle down and you're really like I'm going to go to like next level and so that is going to be the story we're telling but I just want to reiterate to people straight from John's mouth he said that uh it's worth it like it is worth going deeper on your skills and not merely you know having kind of like a quotequote lifestyle business type consultancy or project or something like that but actually uh really tooling up and going and working alongside I guess you could say like the most uh learned and capable like software Engineers on Earth in many cases like working alongside them I mean assuming that they are in Private Industry and they aren't just like c tech uh like teaching or U you know working for NASA or something like that but but like the actual people that are in Industry uh you can work among them right if you spend the time and the energy to learn the fundamental skills to learn the math to learn the computer science so what I want to do is like go way back back cuz you've had like this really interesting career that this is the is this the first podcast you've ever been on yeah yeah so you never gotten a chance to really tell your developer origin story and we're going to do that here I want to start from Little John wasam just the little TI right that's not knows Brett what were you doing when uh like what were your aspirations as a kid and like where did you grow up maybe just walk us through kind of your life at whatever PA you feel cuz this is fascinating to me like this guy just just to reiterate this guy chose to leave you know startup life he probably had a comfortable existence and everything and like aspire to more even if you know there there's this saying in like startup land like if you have like a hill climbing algorithm right and you want to get to the highest point on the the entire surface that you're on right like a lot of times you get to the top of a hill and you'll think oh wow I got to the top of the hill I'm at the highest point you look over and you see an even higher Hill and well yeah of course you want to get to the top of the hill but what does that involve that often that involves climbing down and then climbing all the way up another Hill and I mean it sounds like from my perspective that's what you've done right like a lot of people would have just stopped where you were um and probably just figured out a way to make you know consultant cons consulting or having a smaller start up work but you you were willing to go work for somebody else which takes a lot of humility after you've been independent right and uh and and to climb your climb your way up like a giant hierarchy right I mean it's it's an Endeavor I imagine both psychologically and of course in terms of just raw work that you had to do to get where you are so well I'm going to shut up and back up let you tell your D origin story but I just I just want to like kind of Grant it sufficient gravity for people that are listening like this is not like an everyday ordinary thing that just anybody does like it does take a certain amount of gumption and audacity and humility frankly to do this so with that John washams origin story oh man this better be good uh so um like honestly when I was a kid I uh there were there were two things that kind of consumed well three like uh I I drew I drew a lot like I really like drawing uh I played with Legos a lot and I played with my Star Wars toys almost constantly um like I was a kid in the um and in the early 80s like Star Wars was and Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi was all like in that prime those Prime you know kid consumption years and I wanted all the toys so uh like yeah Star Wars was was was the only thing I really uh only thing I really cared about like even when R of the Lost Arc and all that came out and Ghostbusters and all these like big and Back to the Future all these big movies from the uh you know early 80s came out if it wasn't Star Wars I didn't care so like I didn't watch a lot of that stuff until years in the years later so um yeah Star Wars and like that whole thing really consumed me um but yeah I liked drawing and I drew a lot and like people are like oh you're so talented you're going to be artist when you grow up and like I even remember one uh career day I came in and like a beret and a a this is elementary school and like a smok and like I had a little pallet on my on my thumb and like yeah I'm going to be an artist someday um so yeah that's that's crazy and then like I think Lego is kind of like my first step into like building things yeah um so but I think the P the the the kind of the thread that winds through my story is I like I like building things um I like I like creation of things whether it's through drawing or through um Legos or through computers or through startups like just like making things is what I really like to do yeah yeah that that was me as a kid yeah and maybe you could talk a little bit about like you start to grow up and you start to look around and you realize like hey I can't get paid probably to build Legos maybe there are like competitive Lego builders out there I mean probably just as just as rare would be professional like you know artists who actually like draw or like there are lots of artists that work you know in architecture um you could argue that a lot of people building you know software applications are artists or certainly Artisans um but it you know those aren't like skills to pay the bills so to speak like uh and you know was there a point where you realized like hey I've actually got to like you know kind of pay my way through life and was there any sort of Temptation to go to Art School or like what were you thinking kind of coming of age like high school age yeah so like in in Middle School like I think the thing that really broke it out for me was um my brother had a trs8 color computer that we hooked up to the TV and like you could write programs on it and um and I thought that was really cool and like after the the school like I think he had gotten it and then done some stuff for the school year for like a computer class and then it just kind of sat on the side and I was like hey can I play with your computer and he's like sure go nuts so I spent the entire summer with a little manual I have a copy of it back here on my shelf uh that I picked up later but um yeah I just went through I started going through that manual and like learning the commands and uh I fell in love with this thing and like that was the summer of just um of like just living in this computer uh and it's funny I didn't even get through the whole book I think I stopped at the chapter on arrays because I was like I don't need that like I'm fine with just uh writing code and loops and functions that that works I can get everything I need done with that um and uh yeah so but there was something about it like I could make things and like see things move and like see things happen uh and it was like this little kind of perfect world where everything went just exactly as I wanted it to and I think that kind of um and like it was like a you know you could think of it like a Lego box with like a trillion Legos in it and like you just build whatever you want as long as you have enough memory I guess and hard dis space which today I mean it's it's Bountiful but back then it was a serious limit like I mean trs8 like what year was this do you remember when when your brother got his trs8 uh this was 8 this was 85 and uh it was I think it was it was 84 or 85 and uh I know that like when the next school year rolled around I took a like there was a computer like middle school computer course you could take and and um I love that I didn't love the History part like learning about all these old like you know engineers and babage and love lace and all this stuff but like I was but you know like okay now we're going to actually touch computer I was like yes let's go and it was like a real computer with like a real processor not a not a 16 kilobyte uh computer like I had at home yeah um and so that was that was a lot of fun but I didn't own a real computer until um a decade later yeah9 what do you remember the first computer that you had like what model it was yeah it was um like so it was 95 and I delivered pizzas so I could cuz I was in my my 20s by this point I delivered pizzas so I could pay off my uh because I had some debt you know credit card debt and stuff so I was like okay I'm going to pay I'm going to deliver pizzas and basically worked two jobs I worked at a department store and then I delivered pizzas at night I was like I'm going to pay off my my debts and then I'm going to get a loan and buy a computer and like all the software that I want to get for it um and I remember the computer was 2,000 bucks and it was a uh it was a compact pereria and I think it had a uh I think it had like it was like a 700 megabyte hard drive and like uh something like 8 megabytes of Ram or something it so long ago but um but to me it was like everything but I it's funny enough I didn't really program on it I just used software and played around with it did flights sem me later and stuff so yeah uh and I'll just interject it like so many people like self included like I was very fortunate and privileged as a kid to have we had these Amiga an amga computer um and it was amazing and I but really all I did with it was um just play video games uh I would use it as a word processor like I would create like my Mortal Kombat move cheat sheets like all the different moves for Mortal Kombat and then i' print those out on my old do Matrix printer i' take him to the arcade and I'd sell them and that was like my first business was selling all the moves and fatalities to mortal combat to other kids of the arcade and uh but that was like what I used my computer for I didn't use it for really anything creative it was just consuming right and that's how most people use their phones today they probably primarily use it to consume watch Netflix or scroll through Reddit or something maybe they interact a little bit on social media but um but yeah I will go back to you did have a question earlier I do want to answer on and that was um when it when it came time to go to college um I wasn't too smart about it like I knew I liked computers and I even looked through the computer courses at the the school this was LSU and sheveport so yeah LSU Louisiana State University yeah but this was not like this was just a satellite school we didn't even have the same like mascot as like big LSU um we didn't even have a football team at our like it was just a little uh satellite campus but um when I when I would look through like the book of like okay well what you know what courses like what do I want a major in um I did look at the computer courses but for some reason I was like I'm going to do economics cuz like I was I think I was just tired of being like a like a broke kid and know and I was like I want to find out where the money goes like make that make that money and uh that was dumb most most popular major in the United States business uh 20% of college students go study business and I think it's because they think if they study business they're going to be able to make money but if you really want to make money just study computer science right heck yeah but anyway we you know you and me both like I didn't really care that much about making money cuz uh I was just focused on like like I I don't know I was like one of those kind of gen xers who's like totally cool with like the you know the uh bookshelf that had was made out of like cinder blocks and like the creaky mattress that was on the floor and I would just go to the library and that was my life like going to the library getting books going back read like you ever seen like Goodwill Hunting where that's his his hob that he lives in he just checks out books and he just stays there and then he goes works his day job of course he he worked construction which I was not tough enough to do for very long uh I worked at like Taco Bell and grocery stores and like retail you know but uh but you know so many people so so I studied liberal arts like I everybody on listening to the podcast probably knows I studied English um which is not the field that you want to go into if you want to be able to like support a family in 2024 but um it was very you know I enjoyed it did did you enjoy economics at all I thought it would be I thought it'd be cool and like give me a little status I think and like make me look smart but um there were some there were some things about it like I would go to the uh the library and there was like this this this magazine was like it was like a journal called econometrica and I would look through that and had like all these cool mathematical formulas of like and the like papers on the like stochas ftic variability of the such and such and I'm like a this is so cool but like um like I didn't really have a passion for economics um and even during the time where I was at college and learning this like I was teaching myself other things like on the side like I learned about electricity and circuits and stuff like that and that also was like painting so I was keeping up with like art stuff and like drawing and painting and stuff and um I even had a couple of my pieces like I went to a coffee shop in shreport and was like hey could you could you put up my artwork it was kind of like dark artwork um because I was like big into horror movies at the time so they ended up put they ended up putting it in the favorite 80s horror movie uh the thing is amazing yeah oh man such a cool movie if anybody hasn't seen you have to watch it on Halloween you have to watch these at night uh man uh yeah I i' say the things up there I mean is probably my favorite is that 79 or is that technically 80 um but uh but yeah like that in the blob the The Blob remake I guess 1980 that yeah that was cool my kids have heard about these but they like I always joke oh let's watch the vlob they're like no you know let's watch alien no U but yeah so you were really into hor horror movies like John Carpenter of course amazing Visionary uh you know I mean that that did pass but like like because I'm your art was Ed something yeah it was it was a little edgy and like they ended up they did end up putting it up in the coffee shop but like in the back room next to the bathroom but hey you're on display more than a lot of artists can say yeah um but like I didn't go to I didn't go to art school because one I thought like I saw that there was other people that could draw better than me and I thought that the talent you have is the talent you're like you're born with and that's it's it's that's all you've got right so if if as good as you are in high school that's probably the best you're ever going to be and boy that's dumb so um I've learned a lot about like Talent since then but I also didn't want to I didn't want to draw things for other people I didn't want them to tell me what to make I wanted to make what I wanted to make and so that was a big reason I didn't get into like go to art school and like get into Commercial Art and stuff just because I don't know I thought that's just going to take the fun out of this so yeah I mean I'm sure like a lot of AR is commissioned uh there's like some Patron who's like hey can you do like this really cool painting of me with my dog or something like that I don't know like I I imagine that's a lot of like the typical artist like income comes from not just pursuing their you know I don't know if you ever saw the movie art school confidential uh yeah uh what's it what's his name the John malovich character and like he he just draws triangles and like that's his thing he's like he settled into this he found his Lane and he never deviates from that because that's what he's known for and so he's trapped in this like drawing different like geometric shapes even though it's like every piece looks the same and stuff it's like what he's known for it's kind of like a Rothco esque thing like did Rothco get trapped there I mean Picasso broke out do broke out they do all kinds of stuff but that that's like at the very tip top where you can basically do anything dami and H and stuff right but um sorry uh Art School Confidential great comic book turned into a a pretty good movie too U about art school and the absurdity of kind of the overlap between art and commerce as it pertains to Fine Art uh I mean like again as I've said I believe Artistry is present in all kinds of work that people do but specifically creating art that's going to be displayed in a gallery you know iway way type stuff you know you do you do want to like uh that's like its own kind of like I guess Fine Art is what they call it right mhm so so you didn't want to do fine art uh I mean I want to drill deeper into that because I suspect and this is I'm not like a psychologist I'm not somebody who studied this extensively but I am a person who runs you know a training charity that helps people learn new skills I suspect a lot of people have that misconception that uh oh I'm not very good at programming be like I see all these people who are way better at programming they must have natural programming Talent but the reality is those people were probably just been programming a lot more and a lot of people forget what it was like to suck at doing something because they started doing it when they were at a really young age so they just think oh I'm like just naturally good at it or or they you know it's like the anthropic or what's what's that thing like you don't know what you don't know like uh you kind of project upon yourself like these these uh the limits of your own knowledge kind of limit your imagination and you it's hard to imag imine that somebody could have tens of thousands of hours practice programming when they're only like you know 22 years old or something in college and you see them in your class and you're like holy cow I can never be as good as this guy um but it's totally possible life is long and people if they you know monom manically focus on a single thing for a long time they're naturally going to get good at it through practice probably right like any anything you do where whether it's like and I'm big into like I'm back into drawing and like digital painting now so we can talk about that later but like now that I have like a normal life I can enjoy the things I used to enjoy but um like with anything like learning a foreign language or or or or learning a new skill like drawing or programming or anything or even walking like nobody comes out of the womb walking and nobody comes out of the womb like like painting or you know programming computers like all of us start at at at Z zero and some people have a talent but I think a I think a talent is um I think Talent when you're young is made up of a couple of things one it's you're you have a great interest in something so you do it more right and then you just get better at it by doing it more um and then um uh what's the other thing but like yeah just um like having a passion for something will make you want to do it more and then you get better at it and then people see that as talent but it's like no like I spent you know as a kid I've probably spent like a 100 hours drawing like like adats and other Star Wars things and like just kind of got good at it adats are the big walking tanks that like so I for people that aren't watching the video version of this like most people just listen to the audio but if you're watching the video version you could see John's beautiful bookshelf behind him which has like lights inside of it and he's got like tons of Star Wars figurines and things like that in the background along with like a looks like a pretty uh broad collection of books oh wow is that's like a Boba Fett it's a stormtrooper and and it's an Adat yeah uh so cool man uh so that's really cool that like now that you have the time and the energy and you've got some degree of work life balance and you you have like income and all these things taken care of you can kind of like Get Back To Your Roots and that that that's pretty awesome um so I'm sorry I didn't mean to interrupt your flow but I just wanted to point out the that back there make sure make sure people knew that like yeah this guy really is into Star Wars yeah I mean this is all I have now and this is stuff that was bought like within the last probably 10 years uh like all the stuff I had when I was a kid I gave that I gave that away to another kid um and uh yeah when I was in my 20s and uh so yeah I don't have any of that old stuff but that's okay it would just it' just be probably Gathering dust anyway but I got I got these guys yeah um just something to something nice to look at so you're basically like the the thrust of what you're saying is because people are passionate about something they do it a lot and because they do it a lot they get good at it and then that it's it's a virtuous circle a feedback loop and so you know like a worldclass filmmaker like George Lucas for example uh probably spent a great deal of time not being good at film making before he was good at film making and then because he enjoyed it so much because he was getting better at it he kept doing it more and more um a world class uh I mean that that can be applied to anybody who's good at anything I think that positive feedback loop and so I guess a question I have not to interrupt your your developer origin story because we haven't even touched on you know your Foreign Service uh for example like the the the Foreign Language Institute uh that the Department of State runs and stuff like that we're going to talk about that for sure but do you think that somebody can be good become good at programming if they don't really enjoy programming do you think somebody can kind of brute force and slog it and become good enough to work at like a fan company if they don't enjoy it I don't think so you need you need something to drive you through the hard times and through the times where you doubt yourself like you need a motivation to get you through um and sometimes it's not programming that will that will give you that like maybe it's to give your family a better life um and that's enough um but I think having a good motivation and being being interested in it and being it something that you you would do even if somebody wasn't paying you to do it like you just do it as a hobby just for the just for the fun of it um I think that's what's really going to going to get you there because yeah if if if money like if money is the only motivation it's going to be real it's going to be real hard unless you are have a A desperate situation or like an environment you're trying to get out of that can be that can be the motivation you need because we know like if people aren't desperate enough they'll like they'll they'll bulldoze through anything they have to um luckily I didn't have that I I wasn't in that situation but I had I did have a passion for it but I did have some you know I did have some motivation Beyond just the the Love of the Game as well so yeah well um so you're delivering pizzas you um doing another job too I can't remember what you said it was and um you're basically just like able to get a computer using it mostly for entertainment and like kind of stuff people did in the 90s uh when they had a computer like I don't know about you but I like downloaded like every song that I ever wanted to listen to I'm like yeah I can downlo off 50p I'm a pirate you know did you get that did you get that Bruce you got that okay you would a car but you would download like every Bor song you know so uh like stuff like that um so uh well like how do you go from there to going to Korea like I do want to get to that like make make a path of that yeah so um I did have like so I did have regret about doing the uh you know the whole like economics thing and and I did have a so I I'm going to I'll be I'll be frank I did have a path I was like okay I'm GNA do this degree I'm going to like work in like a bank and I'm going to work in maybe Finance I didn't know the difference between finance and economics I was dumb like I was 18 so um but I did have a plan and so I was like you know to to kind of like Get Up the ranks and like make some money right but um I was working in a store at the time and somebody came in and they like basically got me into a like an MLM and that derailed me for a good two years right um yeah and an MLM multi-level marketing um scheme frankly like something that should in my opinion be illegal in the United States but for whatever reason they're not illegal proba because they make a lot of money that is some of which is to the government through taxes some of which is pra through lobbying I don't know how it works I don't know how it was legal can you can you describe that like yeah there and there was lobbying in the uh I think the 70s by a large founder of one of these big mlms and his uh um uh his his kind of cronies in office and that's that's how it became where it's this is not illegal this is totally a legitimate business operation um but yeah so basically any kind of business where uh it's a it's kind of a two-part business one you're selling things and mostly you're trying to sell them to people that you know um which is called social selling uh in in today's parlament and the other part is like recruiting other people to do the same like those are the two Hales of of an MLM um and it it's there are I mean there are people that I mean they they say that there are people that make you know big money and like all that but the majority of the people don't make anything uh majority of people lose money and the the problem with like it it would be great if everybody made money then everybody be doing it and it would like take over the whole USA or the whole world but yeah Infinity money glitch yeah but money um but and I I'm very passion about this CU I just I I just hate them so much yeah um and I was a person that was very ambitious and I would have like you know done any job like I needed to do to like make money and so what they tell you is oh if you're ambitious enough and you're hardworking enough like you'll make money and I was ambitious and I was hardworking and I worked really hard and I was like nights and weekends like a startup like working on this stuff um and yeah I lost money it's just it's it's I think there are some people that like have the right combination of factors and they they do make money but it's such a tiny percentage you you might as well just buy a lottery ticket well my understanding is like virtually all of these and like there's a there's a channel called coffeezilla which I've been on uh coffeezilla huge fan of his channel uh if he's watching if you're watching coffee keep doing what you're doing exposing these terrible uh I'm not not going to call them businesses the these scams a scam uh but one of the things that like I think he and like a lot of other people in the space of like basically revealing huers and stuff like that uh it if you're one of the first people to join then you're you know but like almost all the people that make money are just there early because it's like a pyramid scheme essentially right it's a legal pyramid scheme uh so anyway I I'm very sad to hear that two years of your life got derail that you lost money due to this while working very hard while probably taxing a lot of your interpersonal relationships cuz that's the Insidious thing about this be one thing if you just like lost money and it was like you know a casino type business model where uh you're at least having fun while you lose money or whatever like not that I I'm not I'm not a fan of gambling um and I don't I've never gambled before um but uh I can see that like some people enjoy that and we should probably have that be legal otherwise we're just going to have a bunch of underground you know um gambling that's probably going to involve a lot of crime and stuff like that at least it's legal this way um but if it were that where there was kind of like an expectation that the house wins and everything but instead what they do is they get you to go out and like recruit your friends recruit your parents recruit everybody like and of course everybody else is getting sucked into this horrible kind of like cult type thing and uh they're all going to point at you you're the person who introduced this thing that cost me a whole bunch of money and soaked up a bunch of my time and then went on to like damage my own personal relationships I mean it's like almost kind of like this mind virus that spreads through the population in the sense that it jumps from one family member to another or one close friend to another it's so Insidious and it's all just so some guy at the top can have a yacht or whatever it's crazy what what happened with that like it took two years but like maybe you can talk very quickly because I don't want to focus this isn't a show about like you know bad beat stories from like getting scammed essentially but like what was it like for those those two years and like at what point did you how did you see a path out of that um yeah it was like I was always like I was always trying to meet new people to recruit them uh I didn't really involve I didn't really involve my family because I was kind of ashamed of it I kind of knew it was not a good thing and I didn't want them to judge me so I didn't even talk to them about it um but like yeah I would go to the big like I I remember the the guy that brought me in uh I I went with him on on like a couple of road trips one I think one to Phoenix and a couple to Dallas um which was the furthest the Phoenix was like the farthest I'd ever been from home yeah where did you grow up by the way I don't even think I grew up in Louisiana you GRE near streetport okay and that's why you went to the streetport school okay yeah I was in treport which is basically I was I was I I was a kid of the suburbs so I didn't I didn't ride an alligator to school or anything like that like yeah so um uh shoot where were we uh but yeah road trips road trips the guy that got you into it yeah so we would like and I was buying like I spent I spent more money on tapes than I did on like the products for the business cuz they're like oh you got to buy these tapes so you can stay motivated and so I would like Popp in a tape every time I'm driving like I'm going to work I'm you know I'm putting in a tape I'm like going on these road trips I'm like we putting in tapes and like so anytime I was like driving to Dallas or Fort Worth or whatever to like to find you know to like try to find people to recruit had these tapes and so these tapes basically just brainwashed me like that was their whole thing was their whole purpose of these tapes is to just keep you in um and it's it's it's it's Insidious so um but yeah like I and I spent money on these trips you know to go to go to these places and stuff and like stay at these hotels and everything and go to these big Rah conferences um but yeah if anybody's in that and you're like oh well this guy just didn't try hard enough like he's uh you know he's he he failed because he he wasn't really deep into it I like man I was as deep as you could get and uh I was I was in no way SL Laing off or making excuses and it just it did not happen um but the one thing that really I learned from that is um from that experience is that if you're sitting on the couch night after night just watching TV and you're not building your future um you're going to stay where you are and that so that that was kind of like a running thing that like all the time that I was thinking of like I can't just sit here and watch TV I need to be working on my future CU you know while I'm while I'm young and healthy and have all this energy I might as well right and then uh do the hard work now so I can have a great future later and but you don't need an MLM to do that you can just do that you can do it and build whatever future you want um as long as it's you know the right uh as long as it's the right vehicle for building it mlms are not the right vehicle um take you backwards so um but yeah so that's that's what kind of got me into once I so once I so the way that I left the business is I told the guy like hey I'm taking a break for uh the holidays uh and then I just never I never called him back or or anything like that just just dropped it uh he never came a calling either so um so he I'm sure he dropped out too um and that guy had like he was was in the military and he was like on a local base and he had a house and he ended up selling his house and living in an apartment and like yeah it just it's not good it's not good for anybody um so but yeah that did ingrain in me to like work hard for your future so uh once I left that that next year uh is when I started um is when I like work my worked that second job got that computer and then once I had the computer uh and like messing around with that and got really comfortable with a computer and like you know fixing things that went wrong and like all that stuff and this was like the nent days of the internet this was 95 um yeah I had a lot of fun with that computer I didn't do any programming and then in the next year or the end of yeah basically New Year's Day of 96 I was like I'm GNA like I want a job where I can feel like I'm doing something important like I can wake up and feel like I'm I'm making the world better um and like that I have like a a mission right so um so I was I had an old friend that uh and he he was had basically said like you can go into the army as an officer if you um like go through this kind of like board interview and stuff so I drove down to New Orleans and tried that uh and I just didn't really have any experience to like lead people at all so U which was good cuz I didn't have any experience to lead people that would have been awful um and then I that year I that spring i' walked into um I'd been looking at uh like looking at the Army and looking at the jobs that they have and one of them was programmer and so I was like hot dog I'm gonna I'm gonna they're going to teach me how to program and I'm going to have a programming job that's going to be super so uh um I I knew that they had there was a test called the ASVAB and it's like a vocational aptitude battery and it it's basically it's a test you take to tell what job you'd be good at and so um I so I studied for the test so I could be I could do as well as I could because you know why not so uh you're not supposed to study for it but I I it's supposed to be an aptitude which suggests that it's not something studied for it's just you come in and be your who you are but I mean come on every test can be studied for and prepared for right yeah but I think you know going along the side of like you know build your future I was like well I want to be excellent at this like I want to get I want to make my chances as best as I can make them so yeah so studyed for that test I I scored really well on the test so they were like you can kind of have any job you want uh and we have this Military Intelligence thing um where you could kind of live the James Bond life and uh you know they're they're looking for people who can speak a foreign language and I had done some German in high school wasn't I wasn't very good at it but um they they said if you if you do this we can put you like if you do well on this test we'll put you into military intelligence and send you to like language school and stuff I was like okay cool and like you'll have like you know top secret clearance and like live James Bond life I like okay let's let's go you know who needs programming so uh so yeah I did well on that test and the test is basically a a it's a test that uses a fake language and it it just determines how well you can see patterns and understand like a language that that isn't real right um that has some logic to it but um yeah but it's not a real language yeah and so I did really well on that so they put me into um uh they put me in they didn't say what language I was going to get but like I went off to boot camp did that whole thing and then at the end of boot camp they're like okay you're going to go to Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center which is a a a it's basically a it's kind of a military um it's a school in montere California and there are mil there are like Army it's like on a base there's army barracks and stuff I think people can go there like I think at the time maybe people could go there if like they were civilians and they wanted to pay the money um um I don't know if that's a situation anymore but yeah I mean they might send like reporters to it maybe because I I talked to like a New York Times Reporter who had to like learn manderin in six months which is like a tall order um yeah I I don't think he actually learned it they he learned as much as he could and they send him over there but uh yeah like this is like the elite you know place that probably I've heard and I'd love for you to like myth bust this I've heard that like like everything is like you know they've done so much social science around this like understand optimal ways of like acquiring a language and uh you know retaining things and learning very quickly and efficiently so uh you know they probably have really good like you know pronunciation uh coaching and things like that like I am very excited to learn firsthand what that was like there because I am somebody who studies a lot of foreign languages I lived in China for six years um I I study Japanese before I studyed Chinese and I try to keep my language skills sharp but I didn't have the benefit of the defense Language Institute I was just using flash cards and like reading books and stuff and I did do an intensive Chinese program in China but you know with with like where every everything was in Chinese the instruction was in Chinese I didn't even have any english- speaking classmates my teacher couldn't speak English like it just like Chinese you had you you had to like you know what what is it sink or swim basically yeah wow but um what was your experience like uh so it was a it was a 9 to-5 job uh um so you you live in the barracks and you're doing your ex your your your ex physical training exercise and all that the the army stuff but then um your your job basically day-to-day Monday through Friday is to is to go to class but our teachers so this was 1996 to 97 so anybody going there now like I mean this was a long time ago so things may have changed but at the time know yeah the teachers the teachers were bilingual um and they were trying out a new textbook uh course on us so we were like the first to to use this new uh course whereare um it was all it was like all just it's all Pap it was all paper books at the time um but yeah it like yeah you're just you're all day you're just um you're you're learning new you know learning new words and pronunciation and vocabulary and uh grammar patterns and stuff and you know reciting it in class like and all that kind of stuff but it's not like immersion where you have to like speak you know I was I was in the Korean uh deal so if you do really well on that like language test they'll put you into like Chinese or Korean or like what do they call a category five language English as well as a category five language because it's so English is such a mess um it's hard to learn so congrat so my hats off to everybody who's learned English uh as a fore language nonnative English speakers listening to this yeah Kudos well done yeah um so but yeah it wasn't like it was it was intensive as like it was what you were doing all day long but it wasn't an immersive thing where like like no English is allowed or anything like that like but you know maybe that's changed I don't know but um uh but I think it it got me to it was a 63e course so it was pretty long and I I feel like it got me up to a decent level of proficiency um and it's funny as I was going through that course to kind of help myself um I took all the words from the the textbooks and like stuck them into a um like a like a like a text file and uh I started messing around with like web development at the time so oh we're about to transition uh so um cuz like the web was a thing and like I I liked to create so I was like well I want to make like a website and like I want to make I want to do something related to Korean because it's something I'm really into and so I want to uh I want to play around with it so um I ended up like manually writing all of the words from the the books into this website and like to make a little like a dictionary for myself I had paper dictionary and all that stuff but uh I was like I just want to make something so the first website I really made with about career was called the Korean situation and it was uh really all it was was was articles that I copy pasted from around the web that had to do with like North and South Korea relations and stuff and uh that lasted not long and then I changed over to uh making a u a Korean Education website it's called it Korean online and that's where I had the uh like the dictionary but it was just like this is old school stuff but like when I was learning like I would didn't even know HTML at this point so I was using a program called net objects fusion and it was like word and you would like inter text and put in pictures and all that stuff and like you could change the fonts and then you push a button and it would publish it it would make it all HTML and I would like up I would FTP that to like the one of the the cheap uh hosts at the time yeah so literally like dragging and dropping the HTML files uh over to a server and then that would be like literally rendered at the file path so FP back before get and uh cloud and all this stuff FP for the wind so yeah I would I would just drag and drop those I didn't I didn't know how to read the stuff or anything um but I did that and then um so uh when school was and and I ended up getting a um an award for uh for that website that I had put together and so like when I graduated from from school so I was very happy about that um and this also like you'll see this thread I kind of go above and beyond especially for things I'm passionate about because I wanted to I wanted to pass this class because if you don't pass the class with like so there's a there's levels of proficiency it's like one one two 2+ 3 3 plus or whatever but you have to get a two and you have to get it in uh Reading Writing and listening Reading Writing no reading listening and speaking there's no I don't think there's a writing portion um so you have to get two two in each of those and if you don't you either get kicked out or you have to repeat the whole thing again we had a guy in our class who had like yeah who had failed and like had was repeating man that's rough it's like more than a year of your life yeah this is like high stakes exam so of course I wanted to knock it out of the park um and I ended up doing really well on reading like I was reading from like um like real Korean news uh sites and like reading news articles which really upped my uh of my skills um but anyway so like I didn't go to I didn't take get a CS education I didn't um uh I didn't do computers in the Army and uh here I am like uh in like now I'm in Korea they sent you they they say they sent us to Korea uh to do our you know the rest of our time so you four year uh so it was it took me two years so there was boot camp language school and then after language school once you get your security clearance they send you to another school I won't tell you where it is or anything or what we learned but top secret but it's it was another army base and we went there and we that's where we learned the skills to do our job right um that involved like the Korean language and um and that was for I don't I even remember how long that was it was a few months and then once that was over then it's like okay everybody you're going to Korea here's your unit you're going to uh the it's funny the people that had their name I think it was like uh if you were a through M then you went like up north to the like northern part of South Korea not North Korea but the northern part of South Korea and like into the field and so the field being like living in Soul or something like that or was there like a military base up there that you living in like like doing like field work in like tents and stuff like literally the field yeah and then people that were like at the higher level of the um the you know the alphabet we went we went to a different last name basically so was him the the the twist of fate that your your name is like at the very back end of the uh alphabetic order landed you in southern part right yeah yeah so it's not like yeah but in South Korea but just a different part and like I had Ace like like down there by like Busan or some place like down there farther south no not that far south but it's uh it's what's today is called camp humph Camp humph I don't know if they still do this job on Camp humph and and I don't want to I wouldn't want to like you know give away too much obsc or any of that stuff I don't know where the like I don't know Camp hum is like a amusement park now like it's interesting it's way better than what it was when I was there like we didn't even have internet we had to go out of the base and into the uh like to go to the what's called PC bang or PC room yeah and then we that's where you got on the internet and so I spent a lot of time in there but like now they've got a water park and they've got like shopping malls and they like it's crazy like it's it's it's like you're living in the it's like you're living in the US now yeah so kids today with their internet these spoiled these spoiled Army kids that are that like join just 20 years later have all the amenities of like a university student with like a you know amazing um so um but anyway so I was in South Korea and was living on this base and so I was do and I was doing my job and um and yeah I I worked in like a nice air conditioned like building it was great I didn't have to live in a tent um but so yeah I looked out because I'm a w um but with uh so um and during that time I uh I was likew I want to like learn more like I'm I'm I I don't want uh at that point I was kind of like okay as time went on I was like all right this is this was fun but I don't want to wake up and every morning and do exercise like this and and and like basically not be able to take like vacation when I want or whatever and like CU you're you know you're you're serving your country they're not serving you like you have to um uh you have to like you're you're limited in your freedoms right as a as a soldier and and my understanding is like basically all your rights as a normal civilian like me as a natural-born American citizen I have all these rights when you join the military everything's like kind of like curtailed and like even the courts and everything are like a completely different system and like there there's just like all these additional things imposed upon you obviously I didn't serve military I have profound respect for those who do and and for you uh but uh but yeah like I can I can basically do what I want like I can just leave my job and go get another job and all that stuff in the military my understanding is like you get an assignment and if you don't want to do it anymore you can't just like quit or you can't just like there's a lot less flexibility right yeah so I was like this was a cool ride and I learned some cool stuff but like I'm I need to get out into I need to get down into the real world yeah and uh um you know have some have some of this Freedom that you know I worked hard to preserve so uh and I do feel like the mission I was I was there for was to help protect South Korea and like I don't I uh I don't think at all that that was like wasted like South Korea is a you know a wonderful place and uh great people and the situation they're in with uh with with North Korea being you know their neighbor and like the splitting of that country and like the families that were divided during the Korean War and like what's happened with North Korea it's yeah it's it's awful but uh I was I'm glad I was able to um like to do my small part so I knew that I was able I was going to have to like kind of get out into the real world and I was like well let's let's get back to let's get back to computers John let's let's let's let's get this thing started back up again so um I started learning Visual Basic and uh I didn't know really anything like I didn't know what it was about uh but it was kind of a thing at the time and because it was so different from what I learned on like the like my little computer you my little trs8 and stuff and uh I let's see um yeah and then like I was interested in web development um and I wanted to do like like I it would I wanted to keep going with Korean so I thought I'll do a job with like programming and Korean and like maybe I'll do like translation and write the software you know somewhere so um I started learning programming but I just I I was like I don't know what I'm doing with Visual Basic like it's all this drag and drop stuff and I have I don't know what any of this is and so I picked up a C++ book and that didn't make it any easier um cuz it was all like well now you got ins and floats and ruls and I'm like I everything was just a whatever it was when I was you know programming in basic and so I was like well this is uh this is pretty rough but all the kind of the while while I was trying to learn this stuff I was still like working on my website and trying to make it better but like through this drag and drop software so I was like um like well I'm going to teach myself web development and at the time like it was the.com boom and like I was PE I heard somebody say like dude if you know HTML you can get hired like it's like just like you need to get in here now and uh so I was like okay I'm going to teach myself web development so um and at the time so this is so at the time I met um I met this lovely lady uh through a friend and uh she was taking English classes at so my friend he's a uh he's a Mormon and M uh they would do like these free English classes for like people like Korean people that wanted to come in so uh she was she was attending that and I told him I was like yeah I just want to meet somebody nice and like not some like crazy party person or anything but just like somebody who you know I can like you know settle down with and like not settle settle now but like just have like a nice like a good life with and somebody I can you know build a real relationship with and uh he was like oh I got the girl for you she's she's the sweetest thing and so I was like okay great um so we met and uh and fell in love and uh so um but I knew like the plan was like okay when the Army is over and like now at this point it was like um the end the end was getting close cuz I had spent years in school and like two years in South Korea and the the time was coming short so I was like okay well I'm going to learn web development and while I'm doing that I need to stay I want to stay in country so I can be with her and like also make some money so uh I got a job as an English teacher and um so at the same time I had got the job as the English teacher is when I bought my first book uh actually my wife bought it for me it was in a Korean bookstory and it was like Web Master in a nutshell I think um from O'Reilly and so I took took that and I started learning HTML and then um so as I was teaching during the day and so I was teaching English but it was it was like a lot of kids so like in the morning it was like real little kids and then like as the day went on the kids got like older and older um because they're like getting out of school and stuff and uh so it was um uh it was like little it was like little kids to um kind of high Middle School like almost high school and then in the evening they also had like an adult class where I was teaching some like some of the older folks so um well older than me but at the time and um so I would teach during the day and then at night I would go back to my little apartment that the school paid for which was great uh like little one it was just a one room it was like a little Studio no air conditioning it was awful um but uh I would sit and like on my computer and I was like learning HTML and and learning CSS and JavaScript and um and and that's what I did until like you know way early in the morning like 3 4 5 in the morning and then I would like uh you know go to sleep for a little bit and then wake up and like get get back to school I was not a good teacher I did not have a passion for teaching it was a was a way to make money um I feel like I wasn't terrible I I had a lot of fun like I was you know the but teaching kids is a challenge that was the hardest job I ever had in my life um and uh so my hats off to all the teachers out there um teaching is hard so um but yeah I did that I did um uh so at night I'm like learning all this like web Tech and here's a here's a real hint for folks that are like looking to change to a different career and do something different um look at job postings for the job you want and look at the requirements that they list because I didn't know what to study like I knew HTML was a thing but like so I looked through um all these job boards and probably looked at 100 jobs and just made a list on the side of like every time I saw some technology I would put like a little you know put a a check or whatever right like a little you're kind building like almost like a distribution of the skills that are generally sought by the market by employes and at the time it was uh it was HTML CSS CSS was new when I was learning it like it was kind of the new hot thing and then JavaScript uh Pearl was huge at the time and then like Java and SQL and stuff so I was like okay I'm going to learn CSS HTML JavaScript Pearl I'm going to learn SQL and then if I have time I'll learn some like Java and stuff yeah but those those five skills not Java but like those five skills is how I got hired so um I spent a year as a teacher and then near the end of that I was like okay it's time to start putting out some resumés and I put out a I sent a bunch of resumés all over the us because like I I would take a job anywhere right um and my motivation at the time was twofold one I wanted to have a cool programming job but two I needed to be able to take care of my wife when we got to the US like I didn't want her to have to work uh and you know to help support us um like she speaks English like at the time she spoke English pretty well but it wasn't like you know fluent or anything and uh I just I was like I wanna if I'm if she's coming to the US with me I want to support her I don't want her to have to feel some burden because moving to a different country is burden enough yeah absolutely yeah so yeah so you applied for jobs all over the US and uh with your nent programming skills and it sounds like even back then you were a big fan of doing research on the job market which of course your big project that you're very well known for is essentially a giant research pro project um but uh like like where did you ultimately get a job uh at a little company in Seattle that was um that it served the mortgage industry so like mortgage lenders and stuff and so we would like we had information on like mortgage rates and things like that and we built tools for uh lenders and Originators to do mortgages so yeah and I did that for uh for four years and then uh moved on to like another a smaller company where um it was and so while I think six months after I got that first job I was already starting to feel the itch of like doing something else not that the job wasn't great but it's like I a guy I worked with we were like you know we could start a startup we could start our own like little company so like okay yeah let's do that and he's like have you heard of PHP I like yeah I've heard of PHP I don't know any of it and he's like yeah let's build this new thing and pH HP and so what we built was a website it was kind of like a Squarespace it was but this was 2002 and 2003 that we built this and it was like yeah it's like you it was um yeah you'd like enter your text and you'd like upload pictures and stuff like that and like you'd make the web it was kind of like it wasn't cool like squares spaces today I mean come on yeah but but essentially it was like a precursor to the kind of like build your own website like low code tools almost yeah this was a no code thing and um we I I had to learn so much to do it like I had to learn how do you um like I had so to get that first job I had done a couple of things one I had kept building that Korean website and I had turned the dictionary into and into a into a pearl thing using a database uh and sorry I bump my mic um and the um and then the other thing was I built a website for school and I built them a forum uh and also just in Pearl with like a I think I think it I don't even remember what kind of database was it was like a some flat file database though and so in order to get that figured out I had to like figure out like how to set up Apache and everything so um with this new business I had to figure out all sorts of stuff like yeah like there's there's Apache and we also wanted to allow people to to like have an email address and like get mail and stuff so I'm setting up like a mail servers and like uh I had to figure out DNS and like all these different things um to build this and like of course learn learn PHP as well this is great so it's basically like goal directed learning like like I have to do XYZ so I'm I just need to learn how to do this and so you were essentially teaching yourself it sounds like over the course of years just maintaining this big project which is something I always Advocate to people have a big project that you continue to maintain and extend over time so you can continue to bring more skills into the fold and use it as an excuse to learn and practice with different tools and and Technologies uh I mean you did precisely what I encourage people to do uh and you just kind of independently were feeling around in the dark this was long before there were accepted best practices in learning the code and things like that um but so you built this squares Squarespace like website using PHP um which you know wigs there there's so many like WordPress itself also a big PHP lamp stack project lamp being like Linux Apache PHP and MySQL yeah um so that stack is probably something similar to what you were working with and that's what everybody worked with in the early 2000s it was Cutting Edge at the time and a lot of people still use it like I've I think Facebook still uses PHP for some of their codebase for example um what was the startup like like what were the early days like were you a were you able to acquire customers yeah um so I'm I like building things but I don't like selling things so um uh he so my my business partner he had like a there was a church that he went to and uh he ended up selling uh the idea to them and so they like they signed up and stuff uh but we just we didn't have like we had that customer and I don't even remember what other customers we had that might have been it but and we spent yeah we spent nights and weekends for about a year and a half building this thing and uh and we were actually living in his basement at the time uh you know because it's cheaper to live and we could also work on the business and yeah um it's like a true kind of like garage startup yeah true garage startup basement startup in this case and uh but yeah it didn't really go anywhere but you know through all that learning of of building that that's how I got my my next job uh cuz they were looking for like a PHP person who could do kind of a little bit of everything and that was me and it was a really small um software company in SE in the in Redmond and uh I think it like we were just in a little tiny office at first yeah feel like it was like maybe six people or something yeah and red I loved it Red's the suburb of Seattle yes and it's where Microsoft is based largest corporation in the world right Amazon's like not far from there so you were already in this region with like tons of softare like you were in the right place where a lot of activity was happening right there's probably Silicon Valley and then there's redwind uh okay so uh so you were able to Parlay your skills that you acquired even though the project didn't really work out everything you learned along the way just like you were able to ladder that over into uh an opportunity um tell us a little bit about like were you working on a team how many devs were you working alongside uh so I was the only so there was there was the the guy who ran it he was a ex Microsoft person you're going to a lot of people who work at like big companies they end up getting tired of it and they like want to break out on their own and he was one of those folks so he was x Microsoft like classically trained CS guy and stuff and um so I just work I worked alongside him like I worked on the website and like the the card and checkout system for uh for that and like um and then but it was a software company so they were selling um software and the but the people doing that development was him and the this team in I don't know if it was Ukraine or Russia at the time but um outsourced that and then he would work closely with them and like I I wouldn't have been able to understand any of the stuff that they wrote at the time but um they did that and then I took care of the website and I did that for um a couple of years until he had to like like lay off a bunch of people cuz yeah yeah business is rough uh running your own business that's uh not easy so yeah where did you go from there uh so from there uh and at this point I felt like I was kind of becoming like a hot commodity because I was I could do I could do your database stuff and your server stuff and like write all your websites and do all your interactions like original full stack developer OG full stack uh yeah so I was like okay I'm yeah I got uh I got what it takes like I'm not I'm not scared like I can find a place now um and I actually found a job on Craigslist and it was a it was a company whose customers were uh medical coders so people who like take medical procedures and turn those into like codes for insurance and stuff so I was um I was writing software for that and basically it was uh my job was to take all this like reference material that they had and make it searchable and so you could find the the information you needed and and um like references for that that data and stuff yeah CU you know if you do the wrong like if you do the wrong medical stuff that's uh it's that's bad that's serious yeah or people don't get their claim you know and you're you're not upsetting some random person you're potentially upsetting yeah the customer but you're also potentially upsetting Medicare which is a big you know giant uh agency with the government that will throw you in jail yeah um so I did that for a few years um and uh during that time I actually during the time of like working at the little other company I was like um I was like I want to start another business but I don't want to like I just want to do it myself I don't want to have like a co-founder or anything I just want to make it and like run it and um so I made one called photog grinder and it was a because I I saw some like Craigslist posting where somebody was asking for like hey I've got all these pictures and I need to add like watermarks to them or I need to add like change them to black and white or resize them or something and so I thought m i could make a tool for that so it's basically a tool where you uploaded a you know a bunch of photos and then you select all the transforms you wanted to do those photos like resizing or cropping or you know adding noise or like whatever you wanted to do it was kind of like photos shy yeah and then uh uh yeah so you would select it and you hit go and then you'd pay for it and then I would like generate all the you know transform all the files just like FFM Peg or something on the back end like how are you doing it it was image magic on the magic okay yeah so if you know how to use image magic you could have just done it yourself but you know who knows how to use all these obscure tools so I did that that you know that got a few customers but it was just kind of a fun thing to make I didn't think I was going to get rich off of it but I was always looking for ways to like make some extra money um yeah so I did that um and then kind of when I was in at that that new job I I kind of took a break from stuff but I was I kept improving the the Korean website like that thing along this all this time was just kind of keep going and so I did uh turn on like monetization for that uh and it gave people access to a forum and like gave them access to kind of like unlimited like dictionary searches and I made all these extra tools on top of it like a translation Helper and basically all the stuff to add value so that you would want to pay like five bucks a month uh for that that was called that's called Z Korean that's still around but um there are way better tools out there nowadays so um like that you you can get dictionaries online for free yeah and translate for free you can do yeah you can do everything you want in Korean without paying me five bucks a month that's quite a sales pitch thank you thank you don't sign up now awesome so you're still like at this point it's been years and you're still maintaining and extending and it sounds like you're like a traditional Web Master in the sense of like like what are people asking for the one thing that like thread that I see going through all this is like you're seeing some sort of external stimulus some sort of Quee from like some person posting on a Craigs List or uh you know like hey I've got this problem or like my classmates have this problem they need a better tool for you know referencing their Korean vocabulary or something and like you're taking action you're like I can do this and so you have this confidence uh where you can like learn things and then you can you can build something to address that underlying need and that's what business is all about right people think business is about flying on private jets and wearing a fancy suit and like shaking hands with some old dude you know you do if you do it right yeah if you do it right do it right yeah it's just like build something that people want right like uh figure out what it is people need and give it to them right yeah yeah that's cool yeah a lot of I mean and a lot of a lot of businesses you see uh are basically people creating something that doesn't solve any problem it's like I just want to make money hopefully this will hit and like we can all get rich but nobody's interested or they don't see you solving enough of a problem that they want to pay you for it yeah I mean getting people to open their wallet it's it's like the hardest thing on earth unless you're just like literally like I mean you could start a business right now you you could probably go to another curb set up a lemonade stand and you might get some people to give you lemonade but then how do you scale that how do you figure out a way to like automate that so you're not just constantly Tethered to that lemonade stand you know anyway this isn't a bus bus podcast but I do want to point out that like a lot of people have misconceptions about business they they see shark tank or something like that and they're like by the way one of our former podcast guests jabrils the YouTube creator has fake shark tank and it's just like he wrote like all these prompts and all the software to like GPT generate fake shark tank and reactions it's great it's like in there's video too you could see like all those sharks like that's a terrible idea what what about the liability you know like all these ridiculous ideas so uh again shout out to jabrell for coming on that's another episode you can check out a great interview and uh and watch some mov fake shark tank but I the thing I'm like to point out like I'm not going to try to teach you business here or anything like that but I will tell you like there's a lot more to business than what you're going to see on like Tik Tok or Instagram or something like that like um yeah uh it's it looks a lot more like what John's doing and a lot less like the flashy stuff you see yeah I think the best the best business businesses are created by people who know of a problem that can be solved with your technology uh they're willing to pay for it and the person that's that that is kind of behind it all is a subject matter expert in this field and knows the market and knows what they need like if you're like if I'm trying to start like a like let's say you know I'm I'm I'm trying to start a company and like uh I want to start selling like industrial mixers to like the restaurant industry and I know nothing about that but I'm like I see a I see some I see a place in the market where I we could like make money on like maybe cheaper mixers or something like that that's a terrible idea because even if it's something that you think could be really good if you don't know anything about that market you're not going to be able to reach those people um so it's yeah it's a yeah and uh as as pointing out yeah like uh ideas are easy and also another trap that people fall into that's related to what you just said firsttime Founders focus on technology second time Founders focus on distribution precisely what you were saying like you don't know the chefs you don't know the people working at all these restaurants you don't understand why they're using this mixer instead of some cheap mixer that you can order off alib Baba or something right so yeah um okay so to get back to uh just like your entrepreneurial Journey so you know you got Z Korean which you made a very impassioned sales pitch for earlier you've got um just these these other things you've been building over time like the photo grinder I think is what you said um so you you are at this point I guess technically a Serial entrepreneur did you ever like sell any of your companies or anything like that or did they just like stay kind of in your stable of like cash cows slowly generating Revenue over time yeah I I call myself a parallel entrepreneur parallel entrepreneur yeah cuz I just run all of them at the same time um but no I didn't sell any of them um you know back in 99 I remember I was like on a military exercise and I got an email from some company and was like hey we want to buy your dictionary and uh I forget I forget how much money but they were like you need to have at least 25,000 entries and I was like I don't have that many in there and so 25,000 like that's that's more than the typical vocab of like an English speaker yeah it's it's a lot but um yeah so I had to I had to pass on that but it got me thinking like you could make some you could you could sell something make some money um and then back in 20 so I kind of jumped around to a bunch of jobs like every few years I was like I was jumping getting bored and jump in to some other place um and I started a while I was at one place like that had had big like it was a new startup had big funding uh but after about a year and a half we were like yeah this is not living up to the original premise so we're going to Pivot um that's when I started to think of like okay uh I'm kind of burned out on like this let me let me see if I can find something interesting that I can do yeah uh nights and weekends and like let's just make more money right so um I so I had an idea that uh I will I will not I won't say this in like this is not a great origin story but I was like reading Tech crunch on the toilet and uh something I can't find the article that spurred this thought but it spurred this thought of have a way for businesses and customers to communicate anonymous ly by text message so that business can get feedback and the customer can give it give the feedback freely knowing that they're not going to get hassled but the business can can respond to the customer and like fix the issue but they can have this conversation where they don't see each other's phone number so uh so that turned out to be talked to the manager which was like the the final like business that I made yeah um which is still going but uh what I did for that was because I thought well this would be great for restaurants but I'm not in the restaurant industry right here we go again so um so I was but at that point I was pretty steeped in the startup world and I was like going to like start up like meetups and um you know I watching Shark Tank wow like all that stuff so you were like in the business kind of like meta so to speak yeah and I knew that there were like there were tons of startup up since Seattle like tons of them a lot of x Microsoft folks and all that and uh lots of investment money from people who used to be you know work at Microsoft and now have like tons of money from all their stock that they had because they were in in the 80s or whatever yeah there's something like 10,000 Microsoft millionaires who just had like some very small portion of stock but there was so much you know money value created I guess that they have millions of dollars worth of stock even if they were like you know just like a entry-level software engineer or something like that yeah cuz if you look at like the trajectory of Microsoft between like the early '90s and 2010 if you were if you got in in the '90s man yeah you made you made a bundle um if you were able to you know stick it out invest of course but um so uh I was like okay let's do let's do another startup but the but I knew I had a formula in mind for a startup and that was to not go after customers like don't go straight to the consumer right because most consumers like they don't have a lot of money to slash around anyway I mean I guess they do now because like streaming is making big bucks all but I think we're all getting like subscription fatigue but like most people aren't going to spend 20 30 bucks a month on something unless it gives them a great amount of um uh a value and I knew I wasn't going to make any money trying to sell for five bucks a month right you can't even run ads that you know for five bucks a month yeah to get people enough people to sign up so I was like okay I need the price point to be higher um and in order to do that I should go after businesses um and so this was perfect for that because it let businesses communicate with their customers but it also like the business was paying for it so um so what I did was I before I built it when I was still kind of ID this thing I went to um I went to a local restaurant and I said hey can I can I talk to the the manager real quick I want to like bounce an idea off and so we sat down and like I bounced the idea off and like yeah this is what I think it would be like what do you think and she's like yeah that's that's pretty good I was like yeah would you would you pay for this like and she's like yeah I'd pay for that uh and then through some like contacts I reached out to other business people like not even in Washington but in other states they were like hey you know my cousin or my friend owns a restaurant or whatever you can talk to them and so um I validated that it was not a junk idea right because I don't want to because at this point I was very precious with my time and I did not want to sacrifice time away from my wife if I had to um and like for something that's just like a dumb ego Pursuit right so because I felt to me that felt like is just being selfish right yeah so um so I was like this needs to be something real if I'm going to invest the time I'm going to invest into it so um so I validated that it was a good idea and then I spent uh I want to say like three or four months nights and weekends just jamming on this thing till you know midnight 2 am. or whatever and then like all weekend long I'm just in front of the computer so there's a lot of it's a lot of any any suit it takes a lot of sacrifice and I think if you know if it's for you know improving your family's position and like being able to retire and not worry about like not having enough money when you retire and stuff um I feel like you really need to um be be be precious with your time and have a good motivation for it so you know I thought well maybe I could get rich from this but also thought well if it if I if go high enough if I if I set my goals high enough and it falls short then I've still made it worth it right um yeah the old aim for aim for the Stars even if even if you uh don't make it maybe you'll hit the moon like yeah yeah so um so uh I thought you know if like 10% of the businesses in America use this like man I'm rich right I'm Big Rich so um so yeah so I built it and then I sent out a bunch of letters to PE this was getting close to the like I launched close to the time where uh South by Southwest was happening back when I mean South by Southwest is still a thing but back in like 2012 it was like the startup started like where startups launched so I reached out to all the big restaurants around there and like uh you know the ones that get like all out of the press and stuff during that during that time and I was like okay I'm going to reach out to them give it to them for free send them signs and everything they can put on their tables and stuff and then that will Market that would be like free marketing for me um and none of them responded none of them cared and uh I tried to call and like yeah that that didn't work either so um yeah so I just kind of uh so my my marketing for this was was really terrible but uh like I'm not a marketing guy so uh I tried to um also tried to send out letters to like around the around like Seattle that that didn't result in like really anything uh and then um yeah well I mean to like jump forward a little bit just yeah let's do that just to reassure people like yeah you thrashed essentially it sounds like you were trying a lot of different things not everything worked but eventually it did work because yeah I'm on talk to the manager yeah uh which is a great product name I mean it's like very literal uh you know somebody who created free Coke Camp I can appreciate literalness and unambiguity in what you're doing here uh I mean join these customers Burger King Papa John's Yogurt Land like you the Texas State Aquarium that's cool I'm here in Texas so like yeah like uh it's cool to know that if I go to the aquarium I can potentially you know anonymously text the people and be like hey I noticed there was like a mop just sitting on the floor or something like that I don't know yeah like like how did you get this to work so I mean it did take off like I remember my wife and I we were like watching a movie and I got a I got an email I was like you got a customer signed up I was like what and I think it was like a fireworks stand or something like it was like something totally out of the blue and um so we started like I I put out some blog content and I put a I like nobody had an article on there was no article on Wikipedia about comment cards so I made a page and like at the bottom I was like talk to the manager and like the the links or whatever so that actually got a pretty decent amount of like hits and then I had a blog post about how common cards are terrible and here this this is a way better way to go and that one did really well until like you know SEO stopped working um so that was good but I also um I had also brought in like a consultant to kind of help and um soon soon like when when we were going to start working together I was on an airplane with uh and and was sitting next to someone who was like from the food Beast which is a big a big food blog restaurant blog and so I was like hey would you you know could you uh could you say something about my business like because it it's really cool and I think it would be really helpful for people and so they did put out that and that caused a big boom like a big viral boom wow wow ask ask and you shall receive right like if you hadn't been if you'd been too polite like oh I don't want to impose upon this stranger sitting next to me on the airplane he already had the displeasure sitting next to me for the last two hours or something like that no I'm asking him to go out and use his professional you know platform to no but I mean you you asked right you were bold and you just probably like figuring like 90% chance he says no or or he says yes but he doesn't actually do it yeah you put you took your shot that's great yeah and uh and that like I was attending a lot of startup meetups so I would like run into people and so yeah I ran into this uh consultant and she was like yeah I can help your business and stuff and like um I don't honestly I don't remember very much about what she did but it did it did help oh she she got into another um another uh blog like restaurant blog and then that that also like took off so was kind of like a onew punch and uh yeah so that was great and then like it was like on the news all over the place wow okay great so you so you know kind of Gorilla Marketing with Wikipedia which or may not break their terms of service but but like essentially getting some backlinks uh SEO and then uh PR it sounds like essentially yeah yeah yeah um so but like over the years um and like I I did bring in I so through a local startup uh kind of community I uh I brought in a co-founder who's a uh he's a college student um and he was studying entrepreneurship and so uh okay I'll bring in this guy and he can kind of help with like the marketing of things and stuff and together we went to uh we went to like the local restaurant convention and we joined like the local restaurant um Association did some ads with them and we did uh the Chicago National Restaurant Association show which is like it's like the biggest it's huge and we were in their restaurant technology area um but like honestly none of none of the like none of the U the trade shows helped at all um and I I don't really know why but I feel like the I feel like a lot of restaurant owners like they're they're busy and I did make the product with the idea of like these folks are busy and they don't have time to like learn a new tool or mess around with something um so those that do use it see benefit and it's easy to to like basically takes two minutes to set up and you're like Off to the Races but I feel like a lot of business owners are like I don't need one more thing like I've got enough headaches like um I don't want to try anything new and I don't blame them at all for that so um especially with they've got people salespeople talking to them all the time about things that are going to change their business so um it just never really hit and we did Instagram ads and Facebook ads and Google ads and like talked with a Google ad like employee who was like a consultant or like he was trying to like help increase the business and stuff yeah and if you're trying to launch some new product that nobody is searching for on Google ads like yeah you got to give that up because if they're not searching for it you're going to get dinged when you try to show it to them U because it's not a relevant search so um yeah so like the business where it is it's like it's it's good like can I you know can I quit my job and like retire no but um but it it it's a good side income and it's like uh so I'm glad to have it but I've kind of reached my end as far as like what I can do with it and I've had a couple of com couple of companies come like like knocking on the door and saying hey you know we interested in you know potentially buying your business and stuff but since there's really no like they would have to invest so much I think at this point into getting like putting marketing the marketing and everything behind it it's just um yeah it's just not it's not worth it for them to buy so but I so I keep it going and I keep it up to date and you know but it's it's pretty easy because like all the bugs have really been fixed and like it's just it's kind of on autopilot which is great really great so it's kind of like just a mature product in a suite of products like a lot of uh I guess you could you could call them like uh I guess side hustle people like uh Peter levels for example um levels that ioe he starts a ton of different projects and most of them don't go anywhere but some of the ones he do are just generating revenue and he's able to strap together all these different businesses and that provides for his lifestyle um so so it sounds like you tried a lot of things uh and this one was the one that worked and it was a modest success it's worth keeping it going and everything but at the same time uh is this when you started to consider going and getting like a job as a software engineer yeah so we're coming to the we're coming to the crest of the wave here all right 100 minutes in we're there we're gonna start talking about it the thing that everybody tuned in for yeah like yeah like I started this on Monday as Wednesday is still not to the point yet uh how many commutes I got to do to get to you know it's like it's like if you want to make like Texas barbecue or something you you don't just like throw it in like it takes all day right like I I hope that like and again to the audience I established that like I don't edit these because I want you to feel like you're really listening to this conversation that that John and I are having like unfiltered full access and a big part of these conversations is like yeah there's a lot of context that goes into these things a lot of little stories that I like to tease out of my guests and I like to step back and give the conversation plenty of room and not make us feel like we're on this regimented rails thing plowing through trying to hit all the highlights and and end at the one hour mark yeah so yeah this is great great and it's been great learning so much about you and again like John has never publicly talked about this stuff to my knowledge other than on his blog which uh I am linking to in the show notes he's got tons of blog posts from I don't know like 10 years or something it's like a huge amount of post over the years and uh I learned a great deal from Reading those and I hope you do too but now we're going for the main course coding interview University let's go yeah so I was working at a um uh I was working at a company that was out of um Chicago so I was working remotely and um I saw that the business was going well and I had like a little dashboard that said like what the revenue was and everything and like customer turn and all that and um and I was like you know what I think I think I could quit my job and just do this full-time and like really like give it my give it my all as far as like marketing this thing this was before I realized it like yeah it was like a kind of a a lifestyle business rather than like a venture stage business yeah so I thought and we did try to get Venture we tried to get Angel Investors in the beginning we were actually in a few competitions and like we tried get into Tech Stars and stuff but yeah we never took investment so which is good I never had to there's no convertible bonds I have to pay back or anything like that it's like it's free it's free and clear so um no investors on the hook I have to have to please so um yeah so I was I was like okay I think I can quit my job and do this full-time and I talk to my wife and she's like yeah um yeah let's give it a go and we can you know kind of see where we are in like six months or something like that and so my my motivation was high to like turn this into like a big thing so I didn't have to go back to like a job um and soon after uh I noticed that I had made some errors on my my little dashboard oh no and the customer count wasn't what I expected and I was like oh no this is so you made like a life-changing decision based on bad data yeah yeah no biggie we'll fix that yeah oops oopsie um little bug little bug there so um but yeah so after I noticed that I was like well and and by the time I noticed that I was like I don't like I I had tried a whole bunch of stuff and it was just yeah I just was not seeing any growth and I was like trying to do like viral content and like it wasn't going viral and trying to uh yeah I was just trying to do I was trying to do anything I could anything I could think of and like no bad ideas just do it all because nothing was hitting so um I was like man I'm gonna I'm gonna run out of money at some point and that's not good right I'm GNA burn through my my savings and might have to like dip into my you know little the little money that I have invested and like start you know converting that and like yeah uh so so there's this time bomb essentially time bomb and yet like rather than just rushing out and just getting another job that looked very similar to the job you had before you had a different idea one that might seem counterintuitive because like the hill climbing algorithm right do I actually have enough cash on hand that I can go all the way down this hill and climb with this higher Hill that I see over here so so I was like uh um so remember back in when I was talking about like getting that one job and I felt like I was like I was like the thing I was like man I can get a job anywhere like I rock um well during this time uh I had I was listening to a lot of I still listening to like a lot of startup stuff so this weekend startups was one of the startup uh podcasts I listen Jason calanis I've been on this week startups oh cool if you want to hear my interview uh I had very bad quality okay um and um but on that there was an episode this was like 2015 uh was it 2015 yeah it was late 2015 when I was like you know doing my my business full-time and the guy he had on was basically running the shop where they would like oh you need a website you need like reg registration and you need like a whatever database like for your customers and this and that like all these Solutions he's like yeah you just come to us and we've got everything's pre-written libraries and we'll like snap it together and like give it to you and I that scared me I was like oh man I don't I can't I can't compete with that like I'm just a little old PHP developer like I don't like there's that's going to you know that's going to make it really hard to get a job if like that kind of thing grows and like you only need you know a 100 people or 200 people in your company to build you know solutions for you know thousands of businesses and so so it it kind of scared me and in in hindsight like I haven't heard anything from that company since so but it was a nice kick in the pants uh because I realized that like I PHP is good and PHP has definitely paid the bills for many years but like it's on the decline and like yeah a lot of the web is built on it like Magento and WordPress and like face Facebook is a highly optimized highly modified version of PHP but like I've um I'm like I feel like that's nearing its end and I and I need to do something else but uh the web had changed out from under me right like so full stack of what I was used to was lamp stack and now full stack is like angular or react and node and and and JavaScript and I was like man I don't I'm so behind I don't know any of this stuff right so I was like okay well I got a choice here I can learn all of this new stuff and get up to speed with it but then do the same jobs that I've always done which is web development and making people's like sign up forms and registration systems and you know make pulling stuff from a database and putting it on the screen in a nice table like can I can learn to kind of like relearn all that and do the same job I've done before or I can learn computer science and build anything like I could build a database I could build you know stuff for Rockets I could build really any solution right doesn't have to be a web solution so I was like well if I'm going to do anything I'll do that and then that opens me up to a wider world of opportunities right where there's more jobs than just web development right um and also like um you know was getting older this is my this was I was in my 40s and I was like I want to have like like and I'm and I'm tired of startups I'm tired of like working all the time like nights and weekends all the time and not having time like with my wife and like enjoying life like I'm like I should be enjoying life where I am right now M and I'm still just working as hard as I ever have so I was like I don't want to do startups anymore like if I'm going to go back to a job I want it to be like a really good job with a really good salary uh and I don't want to have to worry about like my my professional future and I don't want to have to worry about like our financial future so getting a a job at like one of the big companies uh was was top of my list one of the big reasons is if you're new to this stuff like I was you know I had never written statically typed languages like I didn't know like I I I didn't know a float from a double so um if I'm if I'm new at this and I'm going to be starting a new job I need to be at a place where they can like let you come in kind of dumb and then help and Mentor you to get you up to like their level and bigger companies have this bandwidth because they have big teams and lots of people and so they can kind of handhold you a little bit if you're new because most of the people are coming straight out of college um but even people straight at College had more experience writing like Java or C++ than I did um so I needed I needed that mentorship and then I also needed a place that was just going to be able to you know I could I could grow in for the rest of my career because I really didn't I really wasn't interested in going back to like little companies or little startups where there was a lot of risk and that company may not be around or you know the founder may be terrible and like you know you're going to want to jump anyway or something so uh that's why I went for the big companies and Google was Google was not it was it was the goal but only as far as the aim for the stars and if you fall short you hit the moon right everybody wants to work at Google but everybody can't work at Google and Google doesn't want everybody to work at Google like they only want like the best of the best right uh and I knew I wasn't the best best of the best but could I get pretty darn good in like a year I was like yeah I could I could do that um so uh so I was like yeah I'm gonna I'm going to take the shot and just learn this stuff and the the thing that really kicked off like that planted the seed of like learning computer science was when I was back at that little tiny software company working with that x Microsoft guy he was like he was like John you need to learn about like computer science Concepts so that when I talk about like you know the Big O or like linear you know linear algorithms or like whatever like do you know what I'm talking about like you need to you need to be able to understand the stuff if you're going to be in the computer world and be able to like solve problems efficiently and I was like okay so back then I was like 2007 I had picked up a bunch of books that were on like the MIT book list there was a MIT Oran courseware and they had a list of books so great resource uh yeah I mean and and I can see like a clear kind of lineage uh in coding interview University going back to the MIT open courseware reading list and things like that I I just want to jump in with two quick things yeah first uh the difference between a double and a float if anybody's curious they're two different uh I guess data types uh and a float is like a decimal it's just a fancy name for a number that can include a decimal and a double a float is four bytes I I believe and a double is eight bytes so you can just have a whole lot more digits in your number essentially that so when he says I didn't know the difference between a float and a double I actually didn't know that myself I had to look it up while you were talking CU I was like what is a double because I've never really done C++ but like one of the analogies that I would make to so when I was studying Chinese um I go over there and Chinese is not like a language that a ton of people are studying and like 2003 when I was over there uh when I first arrived I stay there for like six years I established and and worked in a lot of different capacities there were a lot of people who were like I'm not going to learn Chinese characters it's just too much work and and so it's kind of like learning computer science is like learning the Chinese characters of Chinese yes you can go out you can speak Chinese really well there were a lot of people who were like second generation Chinese uh who had grown up speaking Chinese with their family but didn't know the characters and the problem is if you don't know the Chinese characters it significantly hobbles your ability to acquire new vocabulary because all the vocabulary is like smashing two different Chinese characters all the idioms are like four Chinese characters smashed together and if you don't know the Chinese characters you're just memorizing like the the actual like word phonetically you don't have like a framework a rubric to like hook all that knowledge onto and your development is just going to be like I I think somebody who learns Chinese and learns Chinese characters their development is going to be like this right like it'll be slow at first but it's going to pick up speed and somebody else is just going to have like kind of a linear cuz every everything they're just trying to memorize the underlying phones right associated with uh the uh given you know word and that might seem like a weird analogy but I do think that like understanding the fundamentals of computer science makes it so much easier to learn like a new algorithm because you can like oh this is in like linear time or quadratic time or something like that and you have kind of like mental scaffolding that you can like put things on top of otherwise you're just memorizing facts and you don't have kind of like the framework for how those different things fit together yeah would you say that's an accurate like kind of spitball yeah like yeah and I and I like I remember writing a I wrote a when I was working with him there was like a I didn't do any like crazy like graph problems or like link list like there were there was no real CS stuff that I was doing on my on my job but I did there was like a permissions hierarchy thing that I was building so it was like a tree and I I needed to Traverse that tree I didn't even know I knew what a tree was cuz I could visualize it but i' never took any classes on it but I knew like things can like recurse right so um there was a I needed to Traverse that tree to see if like this person had like permissions that were up here or something so uh and the way I did it was like really bad and he's like you know you could just go from the route and go like down or there was something where I was like doing it really or the opposite oh anyway I was doing it really inefficiently and he's like uh so he's like yeah if you knew some CS stuff you could you know this would be this would be better so so for years this guy's voice was in the back of your mind like oh I gotta if I just knew this did was there ever a point in your life where you just kind of like kind of shrugged and said you know what I Life's too short I'm just never going to get to that I mean I did I started reading through those books and like uh structure and interpretation of computer programs and like reading through all this list and I'm like a this sucks I I hate this so much and like reading through uh like books on distributed systems and stuff and I was like I don't do this in my job like this is just such a waste of time and then over time I'm like yeah I don't there's no applicability here for my daily work so what am I studying this for and I yeah and I stopped so but that lasted about a good year year and a half um but yeah yeah but importantly you've got this time bomb though as we discussed yes you misread your analytics and you're running out of money and you just happen to uh have benefited from this Insight from this very experienced software engineer who who worked over you who was telling you just learn computer science so okay so you're working through the MIT yeah why not yeah uh so you're working through like this MIT reading list like how did you create such a structured approach because a lot of people would thrash they just flop from one resource to another that's certainly what I did when I was learning to code I mean did did was there a lot of jumping from one resource to another was there a lot of second guessing what what you're learning is is actually useful what was your learning process like so back then yes I did question if it was useful like so for that I was like well I need a CS education so MIT open course were I think was like one of the top Google searches and so I was like okay well they got a bunch of books I'm just going to read those books um and yeah I did get a good bit through it like I probably I I even bought all the books um but I only got like maybe four or five books in I mean that's a lot of reading too and uh like and including and then included calculus and stuff like to and algebra to kind of get you up to speed with like college math which I hadn't done in a long time and uh but yeah just I was like yeah this is not stuff I'm using every day it's just going to go one in you know go in my eyes and and go like that it's going to just disappear so I'm gonna so I I gave it up but um with this this time bomb of like okay it's um it's 2016 is here and it's uh and if you want to get like a job doing this stuff you need to learn this stuff so I was like okay um so I found a uh I found a blog post you probably even you probably read it like Steven Yi yeah Steve oh man that guy get that job that guy does not pull any punches man he is somebody who does not care he's worked at the highest levels of Amazon the highest levels of Google great interview with software engineering daily from him from like a year ago that I listened to where he talks about like Ai and his how he thinks he impacting the field uh yeah amazing developer that everybody here should read some of his writing in my humble opinion I check hold on I got to check that out so um but I found his I found his blog post uh on software engineering daily um and it was basically it called get that job at Google and it was everything you needed to pass the Google interview I was like okay cool so I was like so I'm gonna take that list and I put it in like a text file and then I'm gonna find stuff for each of those topics so I can learn the stuff right and I I did start with some things that were just like um MIT had some online classes at this point uh and so I took some of those and was like intro to computer science and like uh Python and stuff like that so I did start off with with some like real courses um but then soon I kind of went off into like YouTube University and like found a bunch of YouTube videos and because I had thought about when I was thinking about like what can I what can I do I had thought about doing a master's in computer science but it was going to take too long and it was going to cost way too much and I was like I need to compress this um and find a way to get this done faster because of this time bomb I was like okay I'm going to treat this effort like a startup and I need to get a job before I run out of money and like with a startup you need to get this business off the ground before you run out of money and so I'm going to treat it like a startup I'm gonna I'm gonna and I'm GNA Market it like you would Market a startup so um I can basically Market myself as someone to get hired that's a good way of looking at it like the the enter the startup of you I think that was a while back yeah so I'm building a product which is my my education and then like I'm trying to sell it right sell my my my brain you're trying to sell yourself as an an educated candidate who understands computer science and also has a lot of programming experience but the computer science component you identified that as the thing you're missing is the actual kind of conceptual theoretical knowledge the math knowledge things like that yeah so uh so I took so I took his list like I said I put in a text file and then I started filling in the topics with YouTube videos and courses and stuff like that right that I would just find or like articles or whatnot um and my presence on GitHub at the time was was pretty much nothing right like I had it was pretty much an empty repo um and so I was like well I need to have a GitHub presence if I'm going to get a job so I'm just going to stick this list up there and so I put the list up and then I just kept adding to it and I'd find another video and i' adding to it because at this time like you you got to remember I had the luxury of like not having to work so and the business was on like I had done enough development work so it was like it was on autopilot didn't have to worry about it like maybe I'm answering a couple of like customer emails here and there but or like questions or whatnot yeah but most of the time like I'm studying and my wife is cool with it because she knows like we're it's for the it's for the future and this is like a big leap and um so she's like do what you need to do so I was like all right so I'm not going to squander this time I'm going to do it as efficiently as I can and um so because I'm not doing this again like I'm not doing another startup I'm not going to change careers again like this is it like this is this is the big one and then the last stand this is the last stand and then you burned the boats on the shore you're you're you're stuck in this strange land that you've landed yourself computer science land uhuh so um so like I said I started kept adding to the the list and adding to the list um and then just and going through and like doing these courses and man I really hate like I don't like going through courses um I recently got into like back into art like I said like several years ago I got back into it and I've been taking some courses recently man I'm tired of courses because learning like taking courses is hard you got homework and you've got like you know projects you have to finish and stuff and like with this MIT course where it's like yeah you have to like write this program that sorts this stuff and you have to do this and that and like uh I feel like that's kind of where I kind of lose interest with things is when I have assignments but assignments are honestly the best thing to do because they give you practice in what you're learning but it just it it it felt tedious and slow to me even though that's like the better way to do it um so I was like I'm going to watch videos and I'm going to learn how to make this stuff so let's start with Big O notation okay Big O notation I read through a bunch of stuff watch a bunch of videos think I got this okay let's next all right link lists and honestly I was afraid of Link lists I thought this is going to be really hard and I'm I'm gonna this is going to take forever to get through this it was way easier to thought because it's like the Legos of computer science is like link list um yeah use all over the place in memory intensive or like where you don't have a lot of memory like C you know um makes heavy use of them with like pointers and stuff so um yeah so I was like okay link list and I so I did a bunch of um you know like okay I'm going to code it up and like all right and I'm GNA like write some tests or whatever okay that looks good and um but when I didn't but I made a mistake in doing was learning the stuff but not doing assignments like not really applying it um so I I I think I remember like I do a topic and then I would like do some programming problems but honestly I don't remember um but the way I did it is not the best way so the way I tell people now is if you're trying to learn this stuff from zero go through the topics like yeah they you still have to go through all the topics and learn those and there's a lot of stuff that's optional in that coding interview University there's like a bunch that's you don't need to learn it for an interview it's just nice to know if you yeah if you're interested um but uh so there is kind of a line in there that says everything below here is optional um so uh but going through like the main topics my suggestion is learn how to code them them like learn what they are learn how to implement them like in code uh learn know how to write a test that tests your code um so you know that you didn't make any mistakes and then use leak code or cracking the coding interview or one of these books that uh or one of these like websites that gives you coding problems and solve I don't know three to five problems using what you learned right and you're going to be terrible at it in the beginning and you're going to be like I don't know how to solve this problem even though I know it's a linkless problem like how do you you know reverse a link list or how do you like eject a a node you know given the node how can you get rid of it and like an efficient manner and like but like I didn't know how like I had the problem I had the knowledge and I had the problems but I could it was so hard to solve these problems but you try to get through it you you like see what the solution is okay that's where I was wrong like my thing my solution was terrible and like here's the better way yeah but I would say do a few problems and then move to the next topic and then learn the next topic do the same thing and uh learn how it works learn how to write code to implement it write tests uh and then start solving problems with it and then do a few of those and then move on to the next topic and then after a few topics go back to the beginning and solve more problems and what that does is it it lets you review what you learned before you're still solving problems with it um and so you're learning and then you're applying the knowledge and then you just keep going in a circle um until you're ready to go um but like I read a whole C++ book that was a dumb thing to do like I there was uh like there was there was so much that was wasted and like books that I didn't need to read through and like like if you read something that doesn't mean you know it right yeah like you can read I can read I read through that whole C++ book and like a month later I could probably tell you like a handful of things that I remembered from it because if you don't use it you lose it um so that's my big advice learn it learn it solve problems with it move to a new topic and then come back to it later and that's when I was um changing from Amazon to I always felt underprepared because it's scary you know I still feel underprepared because I haven't looked at that stuff in you know four years so um but technical interviews are the way that you get hired and even though I don't like it um because a lot of stuff in those that you're learning man I don't deal with link lists on a daily basis yeah and I don't deal with graph problems what I deal with is I do use a lot of hash tables and I use a lot of libraries that other people have made to solve problems and connect to services and all that stuff so but if you're depending on the job you get you might need to know some like really really basic stuff and solve algorithmic problems on a daily basis um it just turns out that like that's not not what I yeah deal with on a daily basis so so to I you wrote this excellent article that free Cod Camp published uh and uh the article like tons of people read it because a lot of people at the time were like really trying to get and I'm sure today I think Google gets like I don't know I think they get like a thousand applications a day or some 10,000 applications it's a lot it's a lot of hopefuls that would like to work at Google right um and I'm sure Amazon gets a lot of applications as well all all the big tech companies um you at the time originally it was called Google interview universe and uh maybe you can talk just very briefly I mean you talk about this in the article that I'm linking to in the show notes so everybody go read John's article but what was the process this was like was it like nine months or something some really long period of time where you're just like intensively doing what you said you're you're reading a little bit then you're going and applying that to try to solve uh algorithm problems like and you know of course you mentioned some some you know leak code and cracking the coding interview project Oiler is a great place to do this fre has like a browser based project version of project oer we have Rosetta code we have our own algorithm and data structure problems that you can solve using JavaScript using python um so you were doing this kind of loop for a while like learn apply come back and review and so you were doing this how many months were you doing this before you actually felt ready to apply for Google I didn't feel ready so I I had gotten through the so I I hadn't so I learned topics and then moved on and learned topic and moved on I wasn't I don't think I was solving problems in the middle like I think I waited until the end till I been through all the topics and then I started solving problems that was a big mistake but so so based on sorry to interrupt you but like just just because I think a lot of people listening to this are probably asking this question like had you applied what you know now how long do you think it would have taken you to go through through like the the entire contents of uh coding interview University like you think you could shaved several months yeah yeah full-time I could have it could have probably been like just um I don't know like three or four months like yeah it didn't need to be it didn't need to be so long like like I said there were books I was reading that I didn't need to do and like it was just uh so a lot of people are like listening to this podcast are like man man this is a long podcast I spent two hours so far listening to this podcast but what John just said essentially is that you can save five or six months of your life potentially by doing what he says not what he did so to speak uh by applying the the lessons the learnings that he had from this arduous journey of preparing and feeling in the dark and because there wasn't like a p a path that was blazed for some person in their 40s to transition from you know mere web developer Web Master to like proper software engineer with a computer science kind of like Corpus uh the knowledge if you think about London taxi drivers know like every street in London right they have to do that and they have to pass the test in order to get their taxi Medallion thing right um and and in computer science you have to stand up in front of a bunch of Engineers and like answer awkward whiteboard questions and like draw on the board and you know uh or you have to get through some phone screen where you're in like the Google Docs you know typing out code in like this horrible environment without any syntaxing or anything trying to like uh solve whatever problems they just throw at you right um so yeah like before there wasn't something like this you brought that into being and you're potentially saving all these good folks who want to transition into the field and who do care about getting the more rigorous computer science jobs cuz I think like there was certainly an era for for a long time when if you knew like some PHP if you knew how to use MySQL you could go out and you could get a job at like a web design consultancy or you could maybe you know you could do a lot of things right and and what we've seen is over time you've needed more and more skills and uh it's it's getting more and more competitive just like any field right like every field has this kind of wild west days where um where it's relatively easy to get in and you just have people you know Prospectors kind of stepping up and and trying but uh software engineering is becoming more professionalized and certainly at the at the upper echelons of software engineering there is an expectation that you know the difference between you know a float and a double that you know how to reverse a link list that you know these kinds of things and it may seem like ritual hazing because as you just said John you don't use a lot of these things dayto day like like that you're just putting people through this kind of arduous write a passage everybody has to walk on coals in order to be able to get these coveted jobs but the reality that doesn't change the fact that this is how it works and you do need to learn these things right yeah yeah yeah so so I just want to emphasize that that like you know John you're very uh you know I I think you're understating like the sheer value that you've created here and you're a very modest person but like you can save yourself and and that is with you going full out and already having a lot of development experience and all this stuff even you at that point kind of you know spent a whole bunch of time that you didn't need to spend and so again you you've crystallized a lot of those learnings there and that is an incredibly valuable resource for anybody who does want to get a computer science degree without actually going back to school and getting a degree and getting all the debt and spending like four years learning a bunch of General Ed and other random stuff is not related to being able to pass the coding interview if you just want the shortest path to being able to perform well in these whiteboard coding interviews and impress your probably classically trained computer science degree holding peers at these big companies this is it this is the shortest path probably like there are plenty of optimizations to be made and who knows maybe somebody listening to this comes and like I can build an even better one and like 10 years from now everybody's looking at that you know but hopefully it'll be an open just your project will continue to grow and improve through open source uh contributions and stuff like that uh I do want to emphasize that like your project is the fifth most starred project on all of GitHub that is a massive achievement like you know Microsoft Facebook you know Amazon like all these companies have these big open source well-funded projects and your project is like I guess certainly in stars that metric people liking essentially a project because they found it useful your project is doing incredibly well yeah yeah I'm very I'm very proud of it and I'm just like I I I can't believe it either um like it's very it's very exciting to see and like I like and I I got to say like a lot of there's been a lot of contribution over the years like people suggesting like adding resources um people putting in translations like there's so many translations now for probably close to 20 translations of uh uh that people have done like of the project in different languages and it's just like wow this is this is really great yeah um yeah awesome well um what I'm going to encourage people to do is to of course check out your project and to learn from you I feel so honored to have you here like kind of like giving this background origin story uh rather than try to rehash all of the details from your journey into it I encourage people to spend that time going and reading your article which I've linked to in the show notes and also um just going through and spending some time reading through coding interview University there's so much there and uh I am what is next for John wasam you're working at zos you've got this great company culture that you've written about at Great length yeah I mean zapo yeah zapo is great I so what's next is just living a normal life so I've uh like zapo is really great and I see myself you know staying there until I retire um it's really super I love the people I work with like it's just really great and um so yeah I want to stick it out there as you know as long as they'll have me and I think they will I think they like me a lot of people have reached out to you over the many years since this project has gone live on GitHub and maybe they've just had GitHub issues maybe you've you've seen threads on um on Reddit or uh tweets and things like that like a lot of people have opinions about how to learn computer science right you are simply probably the most you know out there like advocating for learning these Concepts I mean David men also a former podcast guest on the free cocam podcast uh Harvard cs50 Professor other people like that that are out there trying to teach computer science what you're doing is you're kind of steering people and curating resources and providing a general Philosophy for approaching this giant task that's how I would describe it naively would you agree with that sentiment yeah I agree yeah okay so um what are some of the things people reach out like what are some of the most common questions that people ask or the common things that people say about uh your project and like how you encourage people to approach learning computer science of preparing for the coding interview yeah um so a lot of folks will reach out and they're like uh they they like the project and they're they're glad I made it um and you know they they want to get hired at like these big companies uh I think the one of the big questions I get is like can I get a referral to like Amazon or whatnot and uh uh honestly I I can't like one if I haven't if I haven't worked with you before I don't don't know of you or your skills or you know what you can accom what you can accomplish like I can't I can't vouch for you and that's really what a referral is um in the beginning like actually right when I got hired at Amazon I put like a few of them in um but I don't I don't think they went anywhere um Amazon's a Amazon's a big place um so uh and also like if you're I so I don't I'm not up on like International like laws and visas and stuff like that um but from the folks I've talked with at Amazon who got hired um from you know from from outside the US um most of them came to Amazon while they were working on a master's degree in the United States so like they're in you know they were in Mississippi or they were in Colorado you know and they were on their Master's program for Cs and then that's when they applied um and that makes it much easier for Amazon to hire you um because you're already here um if you're in let's say so let's say you're in India um I know there's a presence at Amazon in India uh I know there's because we work with like so that and we interact with a lot of folks that are in uh in India so uh there is a presence there so if you you can't make that jump to get to the US to to um for like the Masters or whatnot I would suggest trying to get through um uh with your local Amazon office or Google office or um whatever company it is um and don't be afraid to take don't be afraid to get a job at like a company that's not one of these um I know it's like the slam dunk is to graduate from college and then boom like you're at Amazon or boom you're at Google but man that's there's a there's so much competition it's a it's a tall order to to to pin your hopes on on that um I mean I didn't do that my first job was um uh you know working at that little mortgage originator company so yeah your first developer job yeah I mean like on two hands you can count the number of like Mega tech companies that there are but you know there are tens of thousands probably hundreds of thousands of like smaller companies that need software engineers and that's a great place to get experience and once you have experience even though the job may be you know awful and it may be uh you know not the best conditions but you're writing software um once you have that then it makes it easier to make the jump to to somewhere better and somewhere better maybe Amazon or it might just be you know it might be a bigger company or it might be a startup um but um you know I know that these big huge companies are the goal and you you can get there uh you just might have to take a a little bit longer route um but don't feel like oh I'm like I'm I'm I'm you know I'm I'm too old to start at these companies or like all my friends are working there and I'm not so I've missed the you know I've missed the the train and now I'm behind where I should be in life like you're never where you should be in life like should is a should to me is kind of a bad word um like don't judge yourself against other people don't judge just like just know that are you doing the best you can do um and if so then you're on the right track um and don't feel like you have to work at some big company like right out of college um to be a success because success isn't about like winning immediately success is about winning over time um with small incremental wins um yeah um and also when you're reaching out to the these big companies um you're not going through one HR department like let's say you've send in your resume um like at Amazon there are there are hundreds of teams and there are hundreds of recruiters there might be thousands of teams I don't know it's it's huge but but there are probably hundreds and hundreds of Compu of recruiters and those recruiters are assigned to individual teams uh maybe maybe a handful of teams would be under like one like a few recruiters so when you're applying for these companies apply for a like apply for like basically when you're looking through all the job postings look for stuff that you're interested in um maybe it's like on I don't know some AWS team or maybe it's some you know ads team or like but I know you're probably going to apply to whatever they have because it's like you'll just take whatever and I I don't I wouldn't discount that like that works but um you know to kind of narrow it down yeah find something that you think is interesting and that maybe your experience or your passion or your interests align with because that's what you're going to do better at because you're going to care more about it um and then put in your put in your application with like as many of those teams as you can because it's not going to one huge pool of resumés it's going to one pool of resumés for one set of like one small set of like maybe one or two recruiters yeah so so just to recapitulate don't think of I'm applying to Google or I'm applying to Amazon think I'm applying to aws's um billing team or something like that right uh and that way uh you can kind of more tailor like who you're likely to interview with what sort of skills are likely to come up what the traditional pathway into that team is what is that through a recruiter is there a separate like application process so just to make sure I understand correctly like can I only apply to Amazon one time in like a six-month period will they like penalize me for applying to several different positions or something or how does it work from and and I understand some of this may be proprietary like like we have a a team member at freeo Camp who also works at Google for example and uh she's not allowed to talk about the recruiting process at all or anything related to it because it's like the moment she talks about it then like everybody adapts and like just tries to game their application process I totally understand you know so uh yeah like and there are there are people out there that are probably like high paid Consultants that help people try to get into these and you know CU a job at like a big tech company is a a coveted thing and people are willing to you know big borrower steal their way into that job right in some cases right so uh so I just want to emphasize like I'm not trying to squeeze like proprietary information or anything that like I just want to help help people and I think you want to help people adapt to the way the process actually is and not game it and you don't get the vibe at all from reading through coding interview University it's like the exact opposite of those kinds of shortcuts it's like okay here's the hard work that you need to do do this hard work but don't necessarily do this hard work it's basically like what I get from reading through it so just just to get back to my question though like can I potentially apply for lots of different positions and lots of different teams or is there is that likely to you know raise a flag like this person is just spamming out applications to every team we have how how does that work how how would you advise people on that honestly I don't know so I I'm not a recruiter I'm not in that you know area um but I know that when uh uh so when I applied at Google right I applied for one one job and I went through a referral because that guy knew me before I even started studying this stuff right and so he saw my journey and he was like yeah I'll put him in a referral for you cuz he's seen like what I can do yeah and uh like I remember talking to him in the beginning and before before I even started and he's like he's like let me give you an example of a question like what's the difference between a you know an an array and a list and I was like I don't know which is pretty basic question like you you'll you'll get pretty uh pretty quickly like once you start studying this stuff but yeah I basically knew nothing and so he saw where I had gone to and he was like yeah I'll put in a referral he did so he did put in a referral and I just but with this one team and uh because I didn't know how this stuff worked and I didn't I didn't even get um I didn't even get a phone call I didn't didn't even get a phone screen so Google's tough I mean but maybe I was maybe maybe I was burned because like my thing was like all over the place and they're like well we don't want to hire the the embolden everybody yeah it'll look like he hacked our you know like he hacked into our uh our process and like you know found a way in and like by doing this like crazy thing so we don't want to we don't want to encourage that I do I don't honestly I don't know I never got an answer but um I did reach out to so but what's funny is the the xhr guy uh who he wrote a who wrote a book on like Google and its whole like human resource stuff I did I DMD that guy on Twitter this back when I used to be on Twitter back and used to use it back in the day um but I dm'd him and said hey like here's my here's my story and like thing and I didn't even get like a phone screen like what's going on and he was like that's uh that's pretty ridiculous um let me see if I can get you in touch with some and he doesn't even work there anymore but he kind of put in a nice word for me but like even then then I applied then he told me like oh there's bunch of teams like you got to find the team you're interested in I was like oh okay so and you got to remember Google in Seattle at the time was small it was like one office building in the like the suburbs of Kirkland like it was not in the like the thriving Seattle Metropolitan you know Metroplex or whatever it was like one little office one office building with like a cafeteria and so yeah there's probably not that many open jobs there and so what he said was uh find some teams that you're interested in working with but these were all like just Seattle teams and there weren't that many um but I did put through with those I still didn't get I still didn't get like a phone screen or anything but um so even even with that additional Boost from somebody who was essentially a former Insider uh you still couldn't penetrate the veil of you know whatever goes on whatever black magic is happening behind the scenes where they use to determine whom to bring on to the team so how did I get in I I so so after that like after that failure I was like well this sucks and then I ended up changing the the name from Google code Google interview University to coding interview University because I was like well if I didn't get H to Google that's a bad look and this is more this is and it's not just Google out there like there a bunch of companies like I should just change the name so I did change the name yeah um but after that I was like oh there's a bunch of teams that I need to like connect with a team I want to work with okay so then I looked over at like a bunch of Microsoft postings and put in stuff there uh and then with Amazon I found a guy on LinkedIn that I knew that I was connected with who worked at Amazon and we had met at a startup event the year uh like three years before I think and I didn't even remember who he was or like what we had talked about but he knew that I had like started talk to the manager like that business and everything and he was like yeah I'll put in a referral for you and he like knew that I had like done this whole uh coding thing and like taught myself CS he's like yeah I'll put in referral and then he was the hiring manager well not he wasn't the hiring manager but he was on the he was a manager on the team uh I was actually worked for a different manager who was the hiring manager but that's how I got in was a referral but he was very close and but I also still had to go through the like the phone screen and the the interview but um I don't remember if I applied to a bunch of stuff at Amazon or not or if it was that just the one so yeah yeah well you got in and that's a big deal like how old were you when you got your job there do you remember uh it was seven years ago so what is that I was 45 you were 45 when you got your first big Tech job I'm definitely like a lot of people ask me like how do I get into Tech like I've been doing I'm too old to get in now I started learning tood when I was 30 um so I was just an English teacher before that and the school director uh so yeah like uh I think it's really inspiring and you've laid out this very clear path I mean in terms of how to actually have the actual interview process you don't really have any advice for that so much as just like that tip I mean at the end of the day there's no substitute for hard work this is not a fake it till you make it type thing you need to actually know what you're doing right I mean so yeah for some reason I think you can't fake a coding interview like yeah good luck with that I feel like people are like somewhat entitled to getting like a really good I I talk with computer science grads all the time who are you know fraternity types and like didn't take school that serious ly like did the minimum to get through and they're like I can't get a job at Big Tech what the heck like I'm a failure like no you just need to like just because school's over doesn't mean you don't need to go tighten up your fundamentals and actually be able to pass these interviews and uh yeah so it's it's a hurdle for everybody it's certainly a hurdle even here in the US where we're a little bit more Progressive in terms of not like requiring everybody to have a degree and their field of study or even necessarily requiring people to have a degree uh although importantly you do have did you finished your University degree mhm yeah yeah so and and you were able to go into the army as an officer which is one one thing no I went in as a a uh uh it was like what is it it's been so long it was basically like rank four I was I was a specialist okay because i' I've heard that you have to have a degree to be an officer is that true so uh I think so yeah but I just like after that did that like uh board interview thing and failed that I didn't try to go the officer route okay but uh sorry for like going back to those details but like you do have a degree even though it's not in computer science and then you have all the supplemental learning and you have preponderance of proof of that supplemental learning in the form of this top five GitHub repo that like has like tons of people using it and following your footsteps so um I guess my takea away from this conversation other than the specifics of like your Learning Journey and like all the entrepreneurial advice you sh that I think is very actionable for people who do want to write software and like be their own boss so to speak uh and I mean that's a good reason to go into entrepreneurship is because you don't want to have somebody standing over it sounds like you enjoyed that but you were very happy to subvert your own I guess like full authority over what you're working on when you're a startup literally nobody's telling you what to do except for maybe investors or a board of directors and like a charity standpoint like I I ultimately have to answer to freeo Camp's Charities board of directors um but now you you like kind of like went back and you're working under probably a manager who probably also has a manager who probably also has a manager so you're you're part of a hierarchy again what was that like that adjustment to going back to work life after being I I guess you were only like because of your miscalculations and stuff you were only like truly free from work uh and running your business for you know a year or two but like what was that like going back in did it did it feel like Billy Madison going back to like you know grade school and like suddenly have just sit at the the desk and like listen to the teacher and when You' already previously been able to just do whatever you wanted I mean I had worked at such small I had worked at so many small companies that it was it felt different because this was so big um and yeah and you're like several levels away from the CEO you're just part of a huge organization um like Amazon Amazon has so many teams um like at zos we have to interact with these teams quite a bit to like you know get get features accomplished and stuff and like we'll reach out to one team and we're like okay this is the team that gives us like delivery options and it's like oh but it's not the team that gives you the delivery dates for the delivery options it's a different team and then like there's so there there's like so many special izations and so many teams that it's it's just amazing but yeah like it it it felt it felt good to be inside something so large and safe um and it felt good that I had people that were helping me and like saying like yeah this code not so good this could be better and like you could write this test a different way um and so it felt good to have that kind of um that mentorship to kind of help me get up to speed and everything and uh my managers were great like they were all great and like um so yeah I mean it was nice it's interesting like the US military like the Army has half a million people in it right and Amazon has more than a million people if you include like everybody in the giant apparatus so did it feel like a return to like a large did it feel anything like being in the army no um I mean I guess maybe but like it's yeah it just felt like a new world um but I I welcomed it I mean it would it's nice to Be Your Own Boss but it's also hard because everything's on you like the success of the thing is on you and you're constantly trying to make decisions like you're you're OPP you have opportunities and you have to make decisions and like you're trying to it's almost like you're trying to um it's trying almost like you're trying to do a speedrun of like Mario Brothers or something where you can't make any if you make any mistakes you fail right yeah you have to reset yeah but there's reset is like starting a new business right then you're you start all over again so with businesses it's like well I got to make all the right decisions and like pass on the opportunity that sound don't feel right or whatever or like and and it's years of your life essentially like building this thing that can be very fragile yeah yeah so do I do I would I like to be my own boss like yeah but I'll just wait till retirement and then I can be my own boss and and you think you're going to do anything entrepreneurial in your retirement no I'm just going to not have a boss just gonna just gon to enjoy your hobbies and enjoy life um yeah and and I mean speaking of enjoying life uh i s like I saw on your blog I did you go to like Disney uh Disneyland like Star Wars um did you make it out to that thing I can't remember what it's called but like Disneyland has like a big Star Wars experience now yeah it's great um yeah so we went to Disneyland and uh and yeah they have that kind of like that Star Wars world I forget what it's called but they also have that at Disney world as well so you you can go either place which is geographically convenient to you but uh yeah that place is really cool the rise sorry your audio just cut out oh I I hit I hit I was clicking and I clicked the wrong thing stop click stop touching stuff um but yeah the rise of the resistance ride is man that's a that's a blast like it it feels like you're in Star Wars it's so cool um yeah that's great but then like on my blog that Star Wars thing yeah that was at and stuff like that uh petting zo are the best awesome man well uh again this is like maybe one of maybe the longest podcast I've recorded this is a long one uh but we we've covered so much ground uh is there anything else like any other questions anything that that we can tease out of you while we have you in terms of like things misconceptions things people think about the Java application process planning like hunkering down to learn computer science uh any any other wisdom we can get yeah I'm going to hit a few things so one I think you had mentioned 10,000 hours at some point um 10,000 hours gets thrown around a lot and there's no scientific basis to that that's just like aant like meme thing essentially way to go right way to go writer I forgot your name um Malcolm GL I think yeah so and and the thing even if it did take 10,000 hours the thing that people have to remember is that 10,000 hours is for Mastery it's not for actually getting the job um so whether you're going to be a software engineer or like a concept artist that's a game company or like whatever it is like the skills you need you don't need 10,000 hours to get there like maybe 10,000 if you're going to be like a person who's been at that job for 15 years but if you're just getting hired you're nowhere close to that so you can throw that number right out the window um uh uh and like let's talk real quick about AI because um yes yeah I can't believe this is the first time we've talked about Ai and this yes the thing that everybody talks about asks about yeah so I I had a guy so sometimes people inside Amazon will reach out to me as well like through our little internal messaging thing and um and and because they want to change jobs and become like a software engineer or something um and one of them asked me um he's like with AI is there do should I even try to learn this stuff like what's the what's the point and what I think AI is turning into is is it going to take our jobs uh I don't really think so because here's the thing with software software is so specific um if you're like hey give me a web page that shows like a button on it sure you can make a web page with a button on it with AI like um but if you need to make business decis decisions and get a product manager to answer your questions and say like uh when we do this registration form like how long should should we like have password uh verific like validation on here should we like what length should these be like should we do email validation like okay and then all these questions that come around each of these like any new feature has like this kind of uh branching of all these possible like product decisions you could make around it and then somebody's got to answer all those so basically if they took away the engineers and said we're going to let a product manager use AI to build this thing now then or let's get rid of all the product managers and just have the CEO like talking to Ai and making the whole website it's going to take the person just as long to specify every possible decision that needs to be made in the generation of this code and the generation of these features they're going to have to specify every little thing and if you're going to do that you might as well just be a programmer because that's what we do so yeah it's like yeah they can make some cool stuff but like there's always there's always going to be a need for programmers like yeah and what I like to tell people is like in my opinion programmers are just computing indicating what needs to be done to the machine right uh they are also probably making a whole lot of decisions along with the PMS along with the quality assurance security all the other people that are you know thinking about this feature or or this giant codebase or whatever like those are all decisions and code is just a very crisp way of encapsulating exactly what to do in each situation and communicating all those details to the machine right um it's like taking a taking a spec and converting it into code that spec you know the the code cannot be more precise than the spec that like I guess generated it I guess or maybe that's not the right way of thinking of it but but like an AI is not going to make those decisions because uh I guess the best you could help for would be an AI That's steeped in all the best practices and is read clean code and like all these different books which I'm sure gp4 has but but like actually understands appreciates and and can make those kind of like tradeoffs and yeah I mean you would have to have such a broad understanding of every facet of you know the business and the domain and all these different things in order to make those decisions that a human programmer the biggest problem I think is that a lot of people have misom misconceptions about what programmers do and they think I just turned coffee into code and that that like you know being able to take a picture of like a wireframe and have that converted into a website is web development is solved you know um and I don't I don't believe that at all I believe that I mean it could be many decades before we have ai that can function on the level of like you know a software engineer who has a few years of experience um so yeah I mean I'm hopeful that it'll make productive developers like yourself even more productive uh but at the same time uh I my theory is people just use it as an excuse so they don't have to do the extremely hard work of learning math programming computer science so that they can become software Engineers because it's so much easier to just you know sit on the couch and and you know uh say like H it doesn't matter it's all going to be automated anyway right when it in the reality I who was I I was talking with Ken G uh Ken's nearest neighbors podcast data science podcast and he said like basically every time some new tool comes out like people use that as an excuse not to you know um focus on building up their fundamentals and everything like that and every single tool every time has been wrong people have been making tons of money as developers uh getting things done throughout you know Microsoft front page sky falling web V's over you know um no code this guy is selling everything's over you know but you know I talk to lots of devs who make heavy use of no code and and they already understand the fundamentals and all they're doing is kind of like QA the machines and making sure the machine has good output kind of like a high level scripting language right so you could like Joel spolsky Joel on software he said that uh he does believe that llms are a huge Improvement and that uh he thinks they're like the next big thing for programmers after like garbage collection right uh in terms of just simplifying the developer experience but even he conceding that he thinks these are this massive tool just kind of laughed when I asked him whether it was going to actually dramatically impact the the employer workspace so I the reason I share all that uh is just because I I agree with you and uh you're definitely not alone in fact I have yet to have any guest on the the show who was just like oh yeah it's over you know very few people seem to believe that except for you know if you listen to like the people that are trying to sell gpus people that are trying to sell you know Enterprise AI Solutions and stuff like that I'm sure they'll overstate you know uh or or maybe underappreciate the amount of decision- making that an individual developer makes throughout the day I mean how many decisions do you think you make a day I mean every line of code is more is just more decisions so right and somebody's got to make those and so you either let the product person do it or you you count on the you know the developer to do the right thing and do I count on AI to do the right thing no um you know like I mean yeah if you look back at I I won't I won't write on this uh this topic too long but yeah if you look back at like when Squarespace and like Wix and like those are now big and like at some point you were spending you know thousands of dollars to somebody to like make your website and to make your photo album on the website and to make the you know turn your brochure into a website and now they have this thing to do it and are we are we decrying the loss of those jobs no those people went on to do more interesting jobs yeah than just making turning brochures into websites nobody you are walking embodiment of somebody who to some extent some of your earliest work is probably just a series of tools that people would use and what did you do you just went and upskilled yeah yeah yeah yeah um one other thing I want to mention real quick is uh is the difference between like front-end engineering and like software engineering and I front engineering you call it web development like whatnot um it's got It's got a few different names at Amazon it's called a um front-end engineer which is wasn't something that the title that existed when I started that kind of a came in after um we used to have web development Engineers but if you're looking to get into like front-end development and like react and node and all that stuff like honestly I can't help you cuz that is is just not my world um so if you're looking to get into that like I would hit uh develop a road map that project to learn what you need to learn to get to get there um at one point on the on coding interview University I think I made mention of like if you're doing front end you don't need all the Cs stuff and some some guy at Amazon reached out to me like through the internal chat and he's like hey you know if you look at the requirements at Amazon like you have to have CS knowledge to like do like you need to know your data structures and algorithms to do front engineering I'm like okay I all right sure I'm I I believe you um but like like I said that's not my world so I just don't know so look into the jobs that you want look at the requirements that they're asking for and make sure you match that you know whatever your curriculum you have to to to be what they want to higher so yeah it's interesting you say it's not my world but like for a long time I mean obviously you were doing full stack lamp development back in the day but you you did spend a great deal of your time doing HTML CSS development um yeah but we're in a post lamp World bro we're in a m m I think m is mer I don't know TV expressjs no. JS and react are we still using expressjs I don't even know like would it be M now or m r n I have no idea so yeah um it's not my world so yeah but I just say JavaScript stack if you will because most most of it's full stack JavaScript but um yeah man it's been so great learning from you I cannot tell people enough that like investing in your skills taking the time to actually learn these things instead of just saying oh I probably won't need that like if if somebody told me like oh you probably don't need data structures and algorithms for doing front-end engineering like I I would probably say like well does it hurt to have that ability I mean uh by learning a little bit more of this you're You're Building fundamentals that you can later build upon you're creating a scaffold that you can hang things on later on there is no knowledge that is not power right uh this is from the Mortal Kombat 3 title screen and I gen L believe that I I I am so grateful that I did spend time like actually you know learning fundamental CS granted my knowledge is not nearly as broad as yours um but uh I'm I'm grateful that I I did it and I'm grateful that I spent a lot of time coding algorithms and data structures and solving a bunch of project Oiler problems and things like that and uh it's given me appreciation if nothing else like I mean in the grand scheme of things what is three or four months of your life that you're just you know after work after school just sitting down and learning a little bit of supplemental CS right what is what harm comes from going through cs50 right and building the projects not just watching the big YouTube video on Freo gam Channel but actually going through and doing a lot of the projects right um and another big thing I want to pull out is like your you know space repetition which you didn't really call it space repetition earlier but just like going back and reviewing things regularly and each time you review it it becomes a little bit easier to remember it the the uh the wrinkles in your brain are etched a little bit deeper and the myin sheath increases on your your neurons yes yes so so the electricity can travel a little bit more efficiently through there and yeah yeah we're going to have a neurology Elixir now that was from that was from the I think the Talent Code which is a Talent Code yeah which is like a big it's a book among artists it's a like I said I've been big into drawing but uh yeah talent I haven't actually heard of that book Yeah the more you um like you're not born with Talent like the more you do like you're you're born with an interest the more you do things uh the more that myin builds up on your neurons and you you you get more efficient at making this like it all just becomes second nature yeah and I always say talent and practice and interest they all fuse together like the better you get at something the more you're going to enjoy doing that and the more you're going to do it it's it's like just a virtuous circle and so like with programming like with learning languages which is something you and I have spent a lot of our time doing like with um like with maintaining open source projects you know anything uh the the more success you have the more early wins you have the more momentum you're going to build up and uh yeah so yeah there's no there's there's no there's so there's there's always like the you know will I ever be as good as like lennis tals or so and so like like you don't have to be like you're like there's if you're if you're a musician and you're 6 years old and you're not as good as Mozart so should you just quit no it's because those there are there are people in every sphere of Music art uh Linguistics software engineering like there's there are outliers in every field and you should not you should not attempt to like be that you because those people are like one in a million right like don't try to be the outlier just try to be because most of us are not right like if if the outliers were the only ones that got hired then there would only be like 12 employees in the whole software industry so like the there there's there's them and then there's everybody else there's the rest of us like all the normal people like me that uh just have to learn it that's it yeah 100% John it's been such a pleasure having you on the free Cod Camp podcast I hope everybody enjoys checking out the links in the show notes and I hope everybody enjoys learning from your teaching and that you save them a tremendous amount of time in their Journey uh you know do as John says not as John did learn from the time that he spent unnecessarily uh thrashing about and learning what the path forward was and and uh yeah I I just I greatly appreciate not only you sharing your wisdom as you blog but also just creating this amazing resource uh for people and making it open source making it free uh making creative comments I've reached out to you a while back and say hey can we add a creative commments license on this because freeo Camp would love to incorporate some of this into our learning platform as well so we're hoping to do that and especially with like flashcards and stuff like that in the future so just thank you again for being like a chill human being in the open- source world and uh I mean you could have you didn't have to do any of this publicly you could have just done it all privately and gone and had you know a good career and kind of just it's a lot of work to actually share knowledge right most people don't do that how many software Engineers are there in the world how many people are there in the world that got their first big Tech job at age 45 and how few learning resources are there um yeah thanks for being one of the people to put pen to paper paper and uh share your wisdom thank you very much like I said it's been an honor to be here like you're you're one of my heroes in this uh in the the coding world so yeah this guy rocks awesome man well uh everybody until next week happy coding\n"