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The Changelog: Gotta Give to Get Back (Interview)
Episode Overview In this episode of *The Changelog*, the hosts interview Danny Thompson, a community builder and connector in the tech industry, recorded live at THAT Conference. This conversation highlights Danny's personal journey from working in gas stations to becoming an influential figure in tech, emphasizing the importance of community and the impact of sharing knowledge.
Introduction
- The episode begins with excitement about recovering a lost interview with Danny Thompson.
- Acknowledgment of collaborators Nick Nisi and Clark Sell for retrieving the audio.
- Danny is introduced as a community builder with a compelling story of his transition into tech.
Danny Thompson's Journey into Tech
- Background: Danny spent over a decade working in gas stations before discovering coding.
- Catalyst for Change: An inspiring moment occurred when he saw a rapper discussing investments in tech, prompting him to learn coding.
- First Steps: Danny started learning through FreeCodeCamp, which he credits for providing early wins that kept him engaged.
Key Points from Danny's Journey
- Community Impact: He emphasizes the role of meetups in his growth as a developer.
- Encouragement through Community: Danny found that being part of coding meetups motivated him to learn more, leading to networking opportunities.
The Role of Meetups and Community Building
- Danny discusses how meetups helped him grow technically and socially in the tech arena.
- He experienced the struggle of feeling excluded early on, which motivated him to contribute more actively to the community.
Strategies for Effective Meetups
- Community Focus: The purpose of meetups should center around community interaction rather than just technical topics.
- Networking: He introduces strategies to foster networking, such as interactive sessions and icebreakers to help attendees connect.
- Inclusive Atmosphere: Emphasizes creating a welcoming environment for all tech enthusiasts, regardless of skill level.
Lessons on Community Leadership
- Consistency is Key: He notes that maintaining a regular meetup schedule encourages attendance and builds a loyal community.
- Adaptability: Danny shares how he tailors meetups to meet the interests of the local community and responds to feedback.
The Philosophy of Giving Back
- Danny discusses his intrinsic motivation to help others, viewing it as a way to give back to the community that supported his growth.
- He emphasizes that the joy of seeing others succeed outweighs any material rewards he may receive.
Philosophy Highlights
- "Helping people helps people," a mantra that reflects his commitment to uplifting fellow developers.
- He notes the satisfaction that comes from facilitating connections among developers and addressing the needs of the community.
Future Aspirations
- Plans to create more free technical courses aimed at equipping junior developers with job-ready skills.
- A vision for hosting a free conference to further foster community learning and engagement.
Conclusion
- The episode wraps up with reflections on the importance of community in tech, highlighting how the connections formed can have lasting impacts.
- Thanks to Cloudflare for sponsoring the conference that made this interview possible, as well as acknowledgments to other sponsors.
Key Takeaways
- Personal Growth: Emphasize the importance of learning and continuous self-improvement in tech.
- Community Engagement: Building a strong community can lead to opportunities for both personal and professional growth.
- Giving Back: Volunteering time and knowledge can create a ripple effect of support within the tech ecosystem.
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This interview not only showcases Danny's unique path into the tech world but also serves as an inspiring reminder of the strength of community ties and the value of sharing knowledge.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:07Okay friends, this is the change log and we have a treat for you today. We thought we lost this interview for good, but no. Nick Neesey and Clark Sell came in clutch for us. As you may know, Nick is a panelist on JS Party, and Clark has been connecting nerds all around the world as the founder of that conference for years. Okay, so we did this awesome interview with Danny Thompson earlier this year on the main stage of that conference, and we thought that the conversation was lost to the ether, but no, we have acquired the audio source, the originals, and we're bringing it to you today. Danny has an amazing story and journey into tech.
0:44He's a community builder and connector. And we think you're really going to enjoy this conversation we had with him on stage at that conference. Big thanks to our friends at fly.io. That is the home of changelog.com. Launch your app for free in five minutes. Check them out, fly.io. Okay, let's go to the main stage at that conference.
1:12Hey, friends. I'm here with a friend of mine, Dave Rosenthal, CTO at Century. So, Dave, I've heard you say trace connected before. I know that the next big frontier for Century is tracing this metrics platform. How did you get there? And what do developers need to know about how you're thinking about this product? Before I came to Century, Century was sort of working on a metrics product. We started building that metrics product in a more traditional way, with the metrics just kind of being more like kind of just disconnected. They're just like another source of data. They're another table somewhere.
1:44Yeah, you can line them up by time. Sure, you can drill into them a little bit, but really they weren't connected to that trace. And we took a big step back from that after trying it ourselves, after trying it with users, and realizing that there was a whole class of things we wanted to be able to do that you couldn't do with this kind of disconnected metrics. And so, you know, we changed our APIs, we changed our approach, And we're kind of now really on a very clear direction of building a metric system that isn't one of these kind of like legacy disconnected metric systems. It's trace connected so that we can get that kind of rich debugging context when you actually dig into a real problem.
2:18And, you know, there's tradeoffs. It's not quite as easy to just like log random metrics at random times into a system. You have to put the thought when you're building the telemetry into how this metric actually does relate to the structure of the code that's running underneath. But we think it's the right tradeoff for users because it's like a little extra time to figure that connection out. But then when you actually go to use the data, the connection's there for you. So small investment, big return. And it's just an example of how we're kind of making decisions internally to set our users up for success with this trace connected idea.
2:50Very cool. It's cool to see how you think about getting to the end results with any of these products you're building. It's so cool to see behind the scenes, the way you think and the way you iterate. Okay, friends, go to Sentry.io. Use our code changelog to get$100 off the team plan. That's basically almost four months for free. Sentry.io. Use the code changelog. Don't use anything else. Use our code. It's good for you. Once again, Sentry.io.
3:50What's up, That Conference? Good afternoon. Welcome to That Conference main stage. Main stage with Danny Thompson. Day one. Yeah. What's up, Danny? What's up? How are you? Excellent. There you go. Have you ever podcasted on a stage before? No. This is a first for you? No. This is definitely a different set of circumstances that I'm not necessarily used to. How do you handle it? Do you podcast often? Podcasts, yes. We've done quite a few podcasts. I think the latest one that I did was the Free Code Camp podcast. That was a good one. Nice. Quincy Larson? Yeah. Amazing Quincy. Good friend of ours.
4:20I like him. Got to get him on the pod. It's been a while. It's always good to have Quincy on the pod. Speaking of community, I mean, like, Free Code Camp is just massive. Like, can you top that, really? I mean, paid code cap, maybe. But you're here to talk about international community building. Your story a little bit. Yeah. Community building a lot. We'd love to hear your story. The title says from gas stations to international community building. So I'm sure gas stations have something to do with it. Well, tell us a story. You know, before I entered the field of tech or learned how to code, I spent almost 11 years of my life, over 10 years, frying chicken at gas stations.
4:58That's my entire history. That's all I ever knew. Really? And learning how to code honestly changed everything. And to be honest, even part of my talk, Free Code Camp was the first place that I started on. Nice. And I'm a firm believer that motivation and inspiration have expiration dates. And if you don't act on the inspiration in that moment, it expires. And Free Code Camp made it to where within 90 seconds I wrote my first line of code. It's really hard to break a habit that you start and act on. And so for me, that's why I'm always recommending that site. I don't necessarily think front end may be the way, the truth, and the life when it comes to development.
5:34But I do think those early exciting wins kind of keep people addicted to the process. And so for me, that's definitely what kept me addicted in the beginning. And so I essentially started there. I started learning how to code, started making some projects and all the good stuff, and it went well. But I never really started learning how to code with the idea like, oh, I'm getting a job. I didn't really know that path even existed at that time. I just thought like, I'm going to make a website and it's going to be the coolest website in the world. And everybody's going to go to it and buy stuff. I don't even know what I'm going to sell, but they're going to buy something.
6:02And they're going to love it. And then you learn about SEO and you're like, this is way harder than I thought it was going to be. And so I just kind of kept iterating on that. And over time, I started building this amazing skill set that was very in demand. And one big thing that changed everything for me was honestly meetups. and I remember to this day I heard about meetups in a forum and I looked online and I lived in Memphis, Tennessee I'm like, do we have meetups here? Is this a thing? And lo and behold, we did have a meetup and I went there and at this time I had just been learning HTML, CSS I felt like I knew everything about programming Spoiler, I literally knew nothing I didn't know a dang thing and I remember What year was this?
6:462018 I was 30 years old It was recent. Yeah, I learned how to code at 30. And so I'm about to be 36. So I go to this meetup, and I instantly realized that I don't know anything. And people are speaking like a foreign language to me. They'll talk about Java, C Sharp, and C, I don't know what any of this stuff meant. But I kind of felt like I was excluded from the overall conversation happening because I didn't have anything I could contribute. I didn't know what they were talking about. But in that moment, I basically said to myself that I'm never going to be excluded from a conversation again.
7:18And I just went home and I just started studying. I started building. I started getting further, further in depth with the subjects. And that's when my technical breadth started growing. And over time, people in those communities, James Kukwik, one prime example, they started seeing how I was progressing. And so a lot of the peers started becoming recommenders. And over time, and this is kind of why I say communities are so great, you have the same people kind of returning. And so when they see a progress over month one, month six, month nine, and they start seeing you grow and your technical skill set growing, they're going to be more excited to recommend you for stuff.
7:54And so that was like my pivotal moment to start getting more connections and conversations. And then from there, I started building my own group and I built a group that was tremendous in the Memphis area called GDG Memphis. From there, I was helping groups in North Carolina. I was helping groups in California. And I was even helping groups in the Florida area trying to build up events. because a lot of them kept saying like, you know, we can't really tap into the community, make a few adjustments here and there. And next thing you know, they're starting to not just get people coming to an event, but returning to an event.
8:24And to me, I think that's the biggest tell. It's already a battle to get them to come there. But if you're not getting them to come back and have a good time, there's a big disconnect. And so from there, I started helping people, helped out a group in Saudi Arabia, helped out groups in Ireland, literally helped out a Mongol group in Ireland. So that was pretty cool. And then over time, just kind of grew to where I think I've helped groups like nine countries. And so they've all just kind of blossomed and grown. That's crazy, man. So how did you get connected with those foreign groups to like travel and do that?
8:56How did you pay for it? How did you, how did it all work out? It didn't have to pay for it because the whole world went silent. And during the pandemic, nobody was really doing anything. So these were virtual then? So a lot of it, it was virtual. And then after the pandemic, one of the most common things I heard was people just aren't coming back to meetups and meetup groups were dying. So what I started doing, I had just moved to Texas at that time. And I saw all these groups all over Austin and even San Antonio and Houston, these groups that were dead. And so I started reaching out to them saying, let's do like a joint meetup.
9:28I'll do that legwork. And let's see if we can revive the community. Because you're saying you've tried everything. Let's just try that. Next thing you know, their community is getting activated again and again and again. And now those groups are doing well. Why did you care about those groups, though? Were you connected to them? What made you want to revive them and help them? For me, I don't think I would be where I am now. I wouldn't be on the stage if it wasn't for great meetup groups. So we don't monetize it. We don't earn anything from it. It's just a way to help other developers. And I've literally met lifelong friends at this point through meetup groups.
10:02I've gotten career opportunities through meetup groups. and I don't know necessarily who else needs that help. And so to let that kind of like die off and not provide that resource to people, I think it's just not worth it. And so for me, that's basically where it comes down to. How many people are we helping within that process? And my ultimate hope is if we help enough people, they'll perpetuate that good and help somebody else along the way. Helping people, helping people, basically, right? That's from Wedding Crashers. There you go. Gotta bring some movie trivia there. Good reference, good reference.
10:31Yeah. So you said tweak this, change that. All of a sudden people are coming back. They're coming the first time. Now we're growing. Now we're building. What's the tweaks? What are the changes? Like how do you actually affect change in these situations? There's a couple things that I notice. These are like common denominators with groups. One of the biggest ones I feel is that meetups traditionally, they try to have the subject matter of the meetup be the core reason why someone is coming to that event. And so if they do another meetup and that subject matter doesn't necessarily apply to that person, what ends up happening?
11:05They don't go. For me, I feel like that's the opposite of the approach that we should be utilizing and taking. The purpose should be, I'm going to where my community is, simple as that. My community's meeting this Thursday, I'm going to go hang out with my community. Oh, we're also talking about a tech topic. That's cool too. And so for me, my meetups never start with us talking about a tech topic. That's the thing that we're doing together. It's not the reason why I'm showing up. So I'll do tech topics on Java and I'll have JavaScript developer show up. I'll have a topic on Android development.
11:36I'll have non-mobile developers show up because they feel like, well, my community's coming there. The other day I gave a meetup with two days notice. We still had 70 people show up. Why? We're not a tech town, but they know their community's coming there. So they realize that a tech topic will be talked about, but they're more so there for everyone else that they're going to be interacting with. And so that's the forefront of the message that I try to go with. The other thing I'll say is a lot of meetup organizers, whether they realize it or not, they're really great at punishing their guests.
12:08How's that? Hey, we're going to get started in five minutes. We're just going to sit right there. We're going to get started in five minutes. If you want to just sit there or, you know, get your laptop sound and get started. Five minutes, five minutes. Three minutes, three minutes. We're going to get started in three minutes. I love the reenactment here. But that's what they do. So I'm punished for coming on time. Okay. Why is my time not valued? Why is the person who's late valued more in this scenario than me? Then I showed up on time. And so what ends up happening? Well, I'm not going to show up to there at 6.30.
12:36They're not going to get started at 6.30. I'll be there at 7. And then finally get to the point where it's like, am I really going to go there for the 45 minutes? I'll just stay home. Netflix is better. I don't have to deal with traffic. So if you punish your guest, they're less likely to return.
12:56what's up friends i'm here with kurt mackie co-founder and ceo of fly as you know we love fly that is the home of changelog.com but kurt i want to know how you explain fly to developers do you tell them a story first how do you do it i kind of change how i explain it based on almost like the generation of developer i'm talking to so like for me i built and shipped apps on heroku which if you've never used heroku is roughly like building and shipping an app on for sale today It's just it's 2024 instead of 2008 or whatever. And what frustrated me about doing that was I didn't, I got stuck. You can build and ship a Rails app with a Postgres on Heroku.
13:32The same way you can build and ship an XJS app on Purcell. But as soon as you want to do something interesting, like as soon as you want to, at the time, I think one of the things I ran into is like I wanted to add what used to be like kind of the basis for Elasticsearch. I want to do full text search in my applications. You kind of hit this wall with something like Heroku where you can't really do that. I think lately we've seen it with like people wanting to add LLMs kind of inference stuff to their applications on Vercell or Heroku or Cloudflare or whoever these days. They've started like releasing abstractions that sort of let you do this.
14:04But I can't just run the model I'd run locally on these black box platforms that are very specialized. For the people my age, it's always like, oh, Heroku is great, but I outgrew it. And one of the things that I felt like I should be able to do when I was using Heroku was like run my app close to people in Tokyo for users that were in Tokyo. and that was never possible. For modern generation devs, it's a lot more Rusell-based. It's a lot like Rusell is great right up until you hit one of their hard line boundaries and then you're kind of stuck. There's the other one, we've had someone within the company, I can't remember the name of this game, but the tagline was like five minutes to start forever to master.
14:39It's sort of how we're pitching Fly. It's like you can get an app going in five minutes, but there's so much depth to the platform that you're never going to run out of things you can do with it. So unlike AWS or Heroku or Vercel, which are all great platforms, the cool thing we love here at ChangeLog most about Fly is that no matter what we want to do on the platform, we have primitives, we have abilities, and we as developers can charge our own mission on Fly. It is a no-limits platform built for developers, and we think you should try it out. Go to fly.io to learn more. Launch your app in five minutes.
15:15Too easy. Once again, fly.io.
15:25Is there a structure or a format you use then to make it not about the topic that evening? Because, I mean, obviously you're probably there to talk about specific front-end things, potentially as a community. There's an underlying fabric that makes the reason to go there. But ultimately, you're like, well, I like Danny, so I'm going to go back and see Danny. I like Sue, or I like whomever else is going to go there. So you go because of the people, but how do you structure the night? What's the way you do it? So it varies depending on, like, I observe over time, like, what's working, what's not working.
15:56Let's tweak it for this market, tweak it for that. The things that I've kind of noticed is, number one, when my meetup starts, it's immediately into networking. Like, we're networking. People are there. I try to be what I call the extrovert for the introvert. So if someone is very reserved and quiet, they're nervous, their default is to just hide at a table and then they leave and they don't come back. Cause it's like, well, I didn't really get anything out of that that I couldn't get from like a YouTube video. Right? Like a lot of these speakers that come here, they've recorded their talks anyway.
16:23Let me just catch one of those. But now, and I'm firm believing this, if you make a friend at a meetup, that's a meetup that you're going to return to. So I try to introduce myself right away, find out what everyone does, and I start finding common denominations. Like, oh, you're a mobile developer? Well, he's also a mobile developer at XYZ organization. Let's pair you two together real fast. But the other thing is I'll do interactive things where we have like what I call a pair programming gem. It's like a mini hackathon with the goal of everyone's assigned randomly on a team, and you have two hours to make an MVP of XYZ.
16:53And so now you don't have a design, you don't have an idea, you don't have nothing to go off of except the theme. Everyone's trying to hack something together. So you've now kind of in a situation where you have to interact, right? You're talking, you're trying to solve this problem. And at the end of the two hours, there's one common phrase. If I had more time, it would look better or it would operate like this or it wouldn't be broken. And that's the whole purpose. No one's having a finished app that works perfectly after two hours. But because of that almost struggle - Come back next time. You'll have some more time next time.
17:22I want to share something because you made me think about the history of this podcast. I met Wynn Netherland at the Ruby meetup in Houston Houston RB right and it was funny because like he and I really were like in the same place at the same time in terms of like curiosity and exploration of content and like what's different what's new because we were both in transition and the early days of this podcast began because I met the original co-founder Wynn at a meetup and we were friends I met him and I liked him he spoke well like it was it was like kind of instant friendship, you know? It was too easy.
17:59And I didn't really consider that until this moment that the beginnings of this thing we're doing right now began at a meetup. Y 'all, if you go to a meetup, you can start a podcast. There it is, man. That's awesome. Well, it's also interesting, not to make this too self-reflective, but thinking about we have similar things with the communities around shows or around content you create online, whether it's a meetup, whether it's a YouTube channel, whatever community you're trying to create. and we often have the problem and the happy result of sometimes people say, we have a show called Go Time and there's a lot of people that listen to it.
18:31They're not Go programmers, but they're like, these are good conversations by people that I like and they have Go's involved, whatever, whatever. I like the show. And that's awesome, but a lot of people don't know that because the show is called Go Time. And so if the topic isn't first, sometimes the packaging, the name, the way you talk about the meetup really matters to help people understand I can belong here even if I'm not in this particular tech stack. or I'm not front end or whatever it is, do you help with those kind of things as well? Are the meetups very generic? Like this is the software meetup for this area.
19:01How do you think about those things? So my meetup groups, I'm not against a group that is language specific. I want our groups to be language agnostic, meaning we can do any technology, any language, any framework, any tech talk. If we can help a certain part of the community on one night, let's do it. If we help another one another night, let's do that as well. We want to, for me, at least my focus is we should just be a place where people feel comfortable and safe regardless of technical stack. And so that's what we've sort of become in a sense. And so, well, like, for example, I love this theme where I'm big on doing, let's be real, conferences are expensive, especially if like maybe you're at the beginning stages of your career or you're trying to break in.
19:43Maybe even if you're established and you're just not having like a high paying job, it's still hard to go to conferences regularly. So what I've done is this thing that I call a night of. And we'll have seven or eight speakers. And it's just completely free. No one spends a dollar. And we just have people come learn. So like a night of JavaScript, a night of React, a night of Java, a night of mobile development. And it's just eight speakers speaking on that theme. And so now, of course, obviously it's interactive. You're getting a lot of value out of it. But I'm also a very big believer in value for time and your reward for said time.
20:17So if you're coming and it's one talk, you're probably going to get a lot out of it. But if you have eight speakers and two of them talk about something you didn't even think about, that's a brand new peak in interest. You got a lot of reward for your time. That's awesome. So how many of these are you actively involved in? I mean, so in Dallas right now, we do meetups every two weeks. So at least every two weeks, if not more sometimes. Okay. But depending on... So one group then? Yeah. So in Dallas, we have one group. It's called Dallas Software Developers. And so DSD. And we have a bunch of volunteers.
20:46We do a lot of stuff. We do a cohort, which is completely free, where we have junior developers that are trying to break in. We essentially put them on teams over the course of six weeks, and we get professional programmers that guide them through a project. And so they're building something, and not just like something generic, but something that they can actually talk about tangibly within an interview process. They're solving a problem, delivering a solution, and being able to talk about said technical solution. So that way now when they're in an interview, they actually have something to combat a lot of those objections with.
21:15and that's 100 % all volunteer, ran, and free. Everything we do is volunteer, ran, and free. We don't make any money off of this, but essentially the idea is people are getting a lot of value. And so we literally just had a bunch of our last cohort graduates. They just got jobs. One of them particularly got jobs. I mean, pretty large organizations. I don't want to say any names. Well, one of them, like NBC, for example, they got a job there. One of them is in the banking industry. So really great opportunities, and they're just thriving. And so for some of them, there's that disconnect of the idea and the implementation.
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21:47So sometimes they would build projects that are like the average movie database. But what are you going to do with that? It's really hard to get an interviewer asking you follow-up questions on said things. And so we implemented that framework, and it's done really well. And so we're just constantly evolving that from there. And so I help out on occasion with a group in California. I help out on occasion with a group in Florida still. North Carolina one is hit or miss because they're inconsistent with their meetups. but whenever they need help, I'm just literally an email away. And I still help out with the one in Memphis.
22:17How key is consistency? It's everything. I mean, that's not even just meetups. That's everything in life. It's really hard to get long-lasting and high-producing results without some form of consistency there. Even podcasting, like you might miss an episode here and there, but if you miss a lot over time, it's really hard to keep that audience engaged. And so that's like a very, very, very large item as far as I'm concerned. You have to be consistent. And have you found that every other week is sustainable? Is there weekly is better? Monthly? I know there's a lot of monthly meetups. Monthly is definitely easier to maintain from the organizing perspective.
22:52For me, when I came to Dallas, I didn't really see a lot happening at that moment. And so I was like, I want to revive the community and get people excited again. So every two weeks is kind of the cadence that we're trying to saturate the market with. But I will say that if you know that there's a meetup every two weeks, maybe you miss one, you'll be at the next one. That means you're going to be there at least every month. But we've seen, I'd say, 70 % of them coming back every two weeks. So, like, we have a really strong community that just keeps returning. And so I like keeping them engaged in that.
23:21And so it works. How big is that community? I mean, we've done some pretty sizable events. Like, I wish I had a picture on there. I could show you on my phone. But, like, I mean, we've had some meetups with, like, 300 people. We've had some meetups with 50 people. Sure. Yeah, but I mean, so we'll do some meetups that we call code togethers, which is no topic, 100 % casual. You come in, you can show projects that you've been working on or whatever, or talk about what you've been doing at work. Just talk with other devs. And then we have meetups that have a talk that we're going to do, a workshop, something along those lines.
23:56I like that because it's like, well, I can go this time and it's just me pairing up with a couple people. Or I'm learning because I'm looking over so-and-so's Nick's shoulder. He's Vimmin with NeoVim and TypeScripting. I want to learn, you know? You know, I didn't even think about this. That's kind of interesting, though. But, like, that conference, the thing that I found interesting here was this whole OpenSpaces concept. But kind of at our code together, that's what's happening. Like, people get in these little silos and they're talking about what they are interested in. And so it's almost like that now that I think.
24:24I've never even put that together. But that's kind of what that code together is. You have people just form up at tables and they're talking about stuff that they're learning and doing and they get to share. or the other thing too is you'll sometimes have someone share something that they're working on and another dev is like I've actually worked on something similar to this and I found a better practice and here boom, boom, boom now it's just knowledge share and knowledge share. It seems like what you're doing is a lot of giving of yourself and of your time. I mean all I've seen or heard is giving, giving, giving.
24:53A lot of gifts, yeah. What do you get back? Like intrinsic value? Are there intangibles? Are there tangibles? Because giving for giving's sake is amazing. it's better to give than to receive 100 % but also it's nice to receive you know and so that helps sustain an ongoing give sometimes is there things that you've received just in terms of putting all this effort in for free all this value you're just giving value constantly when you get back you want the real answer this is real the real answer literally nothing I'm not sugar coating it I used to really be obsessed with this idea my whole life I grew up broke We were poor.
25:33Like, I remember working at a gas station literally 80 plus hours a week. I was making just enough money to be dead broke. I swear I was killing myself. And when I started like making the transition and I landed my first job and it was more money that I was making at that time and it just kept going up. I realized none of this would have happened if it wasn't for really great people around me. And so I honestly I'm at this point where money isn't really unattractive. If I'm being completely honest, it really isn't. I've turned down like some ridiculous offers for money Prime example I just released a brand new course Five days ago We have almost 2 ,000 students in that course It is 100 % free It is not monetized in any way, shape or form And it's on a platform that is notorious For having everything behind a paywall And they had to put it out 100 % for free I don't really have I'm more focused now Like I know Truth be told I know that there's going to be a date that I expire I don't know if it's going to be in a week, in a month, in a year, in a decade.
26:31I don't know when it's going to be. But I'm just trying in whatever way, shape, or form. If I can help one person, fantastic. If I can help 1 ,000, cool as well. But I just want to leave it in a little bit better shape because no one's going to remember the flavor of the month of the Internet in 50 years from now or 100 years from now. So might as well help someone in the process because at least you can make generational changes at that point. I feel that because one thing we say often is we came for the tech and we stay for the people. And like that's anytime people ask us for our secret sauce or anything like that whatsoever.
27:04It's like you really have to come and be here for the people, not just for the tech we create, because that's that's just the means to the end. It's just a means of connection. It's a means. I said before in a podcast, I'm humanist. I love humans. You know, I can't help it. It's just how I am. But yeah, came for the tech, stay for the people. I mean honestly like I lost money coming here I spent money on a rental spent money I spent money coming here but I'm here because there are people that could potentially get help from this there and the other thing too honestly if people aren't already coming to this conference this should be on their radar the amount of value here amazing like the right now as we speak there's little like talks happening on the side many stages yeah the value that I've gotten personally today incredible I've gotten probably 14 pages of notes that I've taken over this time.
27:52And so that by itself, I think is incredible. And so when you add then the open spaces, I think that's phenomenal as well. But yeah, I lost money coming here. But the hope is someone's going to get benefit out of it. This might backtrack a little bit, but somebody asked, what's the group in North Carolina? I think I can't see the name. If you tweet at me, I'll go ahead because I know who this person is. If you tweet at me, I'll go ahead and give you all the link details and whatnot for that group. I think they're local in that area. That's why.
28:25what's up friends i'm here with a new friend of ours over at assembly ai founder and ceo dylan fox dylan tell me about universal one this is the newest most powerful speech ai model to date you released this recently tell me more so universal one is our flagship industry leading model for speech to text and various other speech understanding tasks. So it's about a year long effort that really is the culmination of like the years that we've spent building infrastructure and tooling at assembly to even train large scale speech AI models. It was trained on about 12 and a half million hours of voice data, multilingual, super wide range of domains and sources of audio data.
29:09So it's super robust model. We're seeing developers use it for extremely high accuracy, low cost, super fast speech to text and speech understanding tasks within their products, within automations, within workflows that they're building at their companies or within their products. Okay. Constantly updated speech AI models at your fingertips. Well, at your API fingertips, that is. A good next step is to go to their playground. You can test out their models for free right there in the browser, or you can get started with a$50 credit at assemblyai.com slash practical AI. Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI.
29:52Let's go back to the beginning because you wanted to create this awesome website, right? And you went to FreeCodeCamp and you got started. What was slightly before that? Was there, like, how did you know? Did you just Google how to code? How did you know about FreeCodeCamp? Why did you want to build this website? Like, what was the spark for you in the starting point? The reason why I got into tech was because of a rapper. like I've said this line a million times and it's very true to give you like the short version of the story I was 30 years old working in a gas station and I kind of came to the realization that like I'm almost at a fork in the road at this point and I spent days like staring at this fork to where I realized if I go right I'm literally going to be in this gas station until the day I die but if I go right this is me coming to terms with it I accept it I know what's going to happen I'm just going to die in this gas station.
30:44And that's cool. If I go left, I got to make a change. It's got to be now. And I don't have a clue what that change is going to be. And so I'm sitting there and I, you know, my wife, my kid, my son was young at that time. And like, I'm telling him, I'm doing everything I physically can to improve our circumstances. But the truth of the matter was honestly I really wasn't without realizing it I was bone tired like my feet would ache I was working all these hours like just exhausted and one day I'm at the hot box the deli box where you know we put the chicken in I got got some out the fry and I'm stacking it in and next to the register was a tv basically like if there's a line of customers they can like watch the tv for a few minutes so they don't feel like I guess the pressure of the line right and I hear this interview going on and this interview this rapper invested several million dollars into a tech company and i was like this is kind of weird so like i really walked around the hot box i'm staring at this interview and obviously the interview asked him you know why do you invest this money and he said i'm learning how to code this literally melted my mind in that moment because i'm like staring at tv my perception at that time was if you knew how to code it was because you were literally a rocket scientist you were a phd holder you were on that level of accolade right i couldn't fathom someone from my kind of background ever writing code and so i'm just staring and i'm looking at this and like i walk back behind that box and like i i don't even know what's upside down anymore like i'm just so confused i'm just thinking about this i'm thinking about this like if he can learn how to code so can i right but then i'm like i need reasoning i started like coming up with reasoning like why don't i know more about my laptop why is the extent of my knowledge opening up youtube.com and watching cat videos because that's literally all i was doing like so why don't i was like why is that the extent of my knowledge like and then i'm like why don't i even know why my smartphone costs 1300 bucks why don't i know why my laptop costs two thousand dollars why don't i know i'm just paying it but i don't understand any of it And so he started learning how to code and so did I and so I started going online.
32:59I'm like, how do I learn how to code? I Google it free code cam is the first thing that popped up I started it and I didn't know What any of this was and I just started learning and the thing that hit me right away is what made me so angry at myself I spent like six hours on that website the first time and I was like when is the last time I read anything with the purpose of becoming better at something. I can't even remember. I'm so great at making my boss money and killing myself in the process. When's the last time? And this was the first time ever in my life where the phrase invest in yourself ever clicked for me.
33:35I never knew what that even meant. And so now I'm like, anytime you see these TikToks of these rich investors, if you only got a grand investing in yourself, what the hell does that even mean? But that's the moment it clicked for me. I'm finally making myself a priority and I'm investing in myself. And that's where just the addicting came. I heard, I think it was on TikTok, actually mentioning that, that somebody said everything is findoutable. Right? Like the unlock of the world is, like for you, everything is learnable. Everything is findoutable. And she was like, this was the moment when I realized that I could build this business I built because I had no idea how to do any of this stuff beforehand.
34:16And then my mom said, everything is findoutable. So I'm going to find out how that works. that I'm going to find out how this works. And then that works. The next thing you know, you've skill stacked to the point where you can build this business and do your thing. You know, it's unlocked. Absolutely. And it helps if you can unlock that for other people, which I'm sure has happened probably since then for you through the meetups and through your courses and through the stuff that you're doing online as well. Yeah, in Memphis, before the pandemic, because I didn't use social media before then. And so everything started right when the pandemic hit.
34:45And so before then, I had helped 44 people land their first jobs in tech. I was geeked out, loved everything about that. And once I started realizing I can just take the same information that I'm giving people locally and we just apply it globally. But then all this new information started coming in. I start learning what doesn't work in different markets. I start adjusting my approach. Now, for the most part, like we're talking thousands at this point. Like I can't believe it's very hard to go a few days without somebody messaging me. I finally got my first job. I implemented this strategy that you talked about in this webinar or whatever it may be, and it ended up working in the interview.
35:22And it ended up working so well to where they were recommending me for the next stage and next thing you know. Someone, prime example, what was it? Last Saturday, someone literally messaged me. I went from working in restaurants as a line cook to now I just got my first job in tech. Or Noah, who I met over here, literally fried chicken in a chicken restaurant. Now he got his first job in tech. And what's funny about, or even Sam Sycamore. He was a construction worker Heard me on one of the podcasts I'm forgetting the name now JavaScript Jabber Heard me on JavaScript Jabber Decided to start learning how to code Boom He's no longer living in his van Like the thing for me I never knew this path was allowed Once I figured it out I'm like oh this is it But now I start running my mouth Because I don't know who needs to hear this And it doesn't necessarily mean That tech has to be the thing for you But it would be amazing For you to find out What that thing can be And start putting that effort In that right situation What's next for you?
36:16Where are you going from here? So we just released one course. The course was testing a theory as far as an educational method of teaching. And so now my idea is I have a similar method that I want to utilize for technical content and courses. And so that's going to be the forefront. A lot more technical courses are going to be coming out using said theory. I have an idea for a technical course that, I'll be honest, I've never seen done. And I think this is going to help more junior developers than ever be job ready with actual job ready skills instead of maybe trying to manufacture confidence in an area where they may be lacking it.
36:54And so I think that's going to go a long way. Really, really excited about that one. We're working on, honestly, one of my big goals is I want to do kind of how I mentioned the whole theme with a night of, with the meetups being like mini conferences. I want to do a big conference, but 100 % free for the community. So that's in the works as well. I don't know if we're going to be able to achieve it this year. It's my goal this year, but more than likely, this is probably going to be the beginning of next year. I have a name for you. Free Conf Camp. There we go. You know what? It's so original, I think it might work.
37:27It might just work. It might just work. It might just work. That's amazing. It might be IP issues there, but yeah. I like it. We'll call it FCC for short. There you go. Dot org. Dot org. We're coming for you, Quincy. Unrelated but related question. social media strategy for developers you have very large social followings right some would say how do you do that so the reality is i i've helped god knows how many developers at the point finally build up their followings right the biggest mistake that i see majority developers make when it comes to social media they take for granted the idea that people are going to automatically know what they're talking about.
38:09My timeline has 1000 different accounts competing for five seconds worth of my time. I don't owe you the time to stop scrolling and read and then ponder what you're talking about and try to find the background context. You need to provide all that in the forefront. And if you provide that in a compelling way, people are going to like, engage, share, comment. People oftentimes, I believe every post should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Simple as that. Must have a beginning. The reason why I'm supposed to be reading this, like your hook should be in the first line. You should have the meat of your post and there has to be a conclusion there.
38:46Why did I read this and what should I take away from this? A lot of people miss that. And so oftentimes I'll see people where they'll have a post where it's like, I wrote a blog article. Look at this. They post a link. It doesn't get an engagement. Why? That's what I call a redirecting post. I can't even know if that post is good until I go to your blog article and read the thing. And so when I go to that other platform, maybe I drop a like on the blog article because this is the best blog article I've read all day. What are the chances of me going back to the original post to drop another like on it?
39:17Almost none. So if you're not giving me something to engage with before redirection, that post dies. The algorithm kills it. So a lot of developers miss that. They don't give a reason to engage before redirection. The other thing a lot of developers make the mistake on, honestly, is lack of consistency within that niche. So kind of going back to the overall theme of consistency, how many developers do you know will talk about development topics? Next thing you know, they're talking about cars, they're talking about sports, they're talking about other interests. And the problem is, for me following you, I didn't sign up for that.
39:50I signed up because I saw that great tweet on TypeScript implementation. Well, when I see this other stuff, I may give you the benefit of that for a little while, but it was super easy for me to find that follow button. It's super easy to find that unfollow button as well. So if you incentivize them to go find it, they will. Give the people what they came for. I mean, simple as that. Like if I signed up for tech stuff from you, because you have great tech stuff, don't dilute it with the other things, especially if you're in the building stage, because they don't know who you are yet. You need that relationship built over time for them to be like, I know what Adam's about.
40:23I know his quirkiness. I know his tongue and cheek humor, boom. When he hits me with that, I'm ready for it. But if it's my first interaction with you and you hit me with that right away, it's very low on the likelihood that I'll stick around for it. What's your favorite online platform or community or favorite place to build community online? It depends. So Twitter has been great at, it's my largest following, but the reality is LinkedIn has probably been my most fruitful of followings. The people on there are very serious. I get to talk to decision makers of businesses directly. And so whenever we're talking about big initiatives, I've got key holders for that business that are willing to make those moves.
41:02And prime example as well with LinkedIn, if I do a meetup and I have a hundred people that RSVP'd from LinkedIn, 95 are showing up. If I do that from Twitter, maybe 40. So LinkedIn, well, I mean, there's stats to prove it, right? Like, I believe the last time I saw 75 % of users on LinkedIn make over$80 ,000 a year. These are people that are well-established within their niche and career, right? They're not people that are trying to break in or they're not people that are like deciding like whether they're gonna stick with someone. They're in there, right? So they've already established a professional.
41:36They're gonna be committed. Twitter, you don't know who's seeing your stuff. It could be someone that's a student. You could have a CEO. You could have, you know, a sales rep. It may not even be people specific within your niche. LinkedIn, for the most part, is pretty good about pushing it to people that follow you for said topic. I agree. I've got great success on there, too. I posted recently on there and the one on the silent sacking. I mean, that was a good topic, too, but it's gotten 10 ,000 or more visibility, if not more than that. And that's 10 ,000 more than that show and topic would have had if I didn't post one thing on LinkedIn.
42:07And so I've been building my network there for years. Just haven't been given anything. So I've been more encouraged with that feedback loop to give more there because it's it's sort of like a captive audience. Yeah. You know what I mean? Versus Twitter, which is not so much a non-captive audience, just more scattered. Whereas LinkedIn seems a bit more narrow focused. People who are there for that reason and they're there to engage and be a part of that kind of stuff. Well, I'd say one other thing, too. This is me being honest. I hate social media to a certain degree. Like there's stuff about it I just don't like about social media.
42:40But I think people lose track of one thing. These are tools. and I would like to utilize the tool for what it is and produce great fruitful relationships that I can continue even off of that platform. Some of the best relationships I've made on any of these platforms, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, like the YouTube channel is still growing. I need to put more content out. I know that, but I've made friends, like I've made lifelong friends that I've literally, I've met four people here today that I've been talking to for the last four years. First time we met in person. But we've talked off of those platforms.
43:12We've talked in multitudes of different ways. So the platform doesn't necessarily matter as much as the communication and the relationship that you're having on and off of that platform. And for me, any social media platform is simply a tool. And if you use it the right way, you can make some great relationships. Yeah. It's great for introducing yourself and others to new ideas and to new people. But it's not great for actually establishing real relationships with those people. I followed people and talked to people online for years and never really felt like I knew them very well. and then you meet him once in real life and it's kind of like 100 % different.
43:44Instant friendship. It's just like Brett Cannon. Right? Yeah, lifelong friendship. There you go. So that 100 % resonates.
43:53I don't know about you, but after hearing this conversation and being present in the moment for this conversation with Danny, it was eye-opening to see his journey, eye-opening to hear the path that it took him to get into tech. And it resonates with me so much because I came from a very small town, a very small town where it seemed like my only option was what everybody else had as options. A very small opportunity, not really much available and kind of hopeless. And here we have Danny coming through that kind of scenario into a position where he's learning tech, he's learning software development, going to free code camp, doing all the things.
44:34And then he unites people in community and communities. That to me is cool. Links are in the show notes to check out Danny on Twitter slash X, LinkedIn, his website, et cetera. Check him out, follow him, all the things. And a big thank you to our friends over at Cloudflare. We went to this conference, that conference, because of a sponsorship opportunity with our friends over at Cloudflare. And if it wasn't for that, well, we wouldn't have gone to that conference to have this conversation with Danny and all the other fun stuff we did there. So big thank you to Cloudflare. Thank you. And while we're thanking folks, thank you to Century.io.
45:15Century is an awesome sponsor. Use our code changelog. Get$100 off the team plan. Get it for free for three months, almost four months. Enjoy that. Also, our friends over at Fly, Fly.io. That's the home of changelaw.com, as you may know. And to our friends over at Assembly AI, the leader in speech AI. Check them out, assemblyai.com. And to the beat freak in residence, brake, master, cylinder. Bring in those beats. Good beats. Love those beats. Okay, that's it. The show's done. We'll see you back here tomorrow on Friends.
46:07Thank you.
46:43King of -
From the publisher
We're on the main stage at THAT Conference with Danny Thompson. He has an amazing story and journey into tech. Thanks to our friends at Cloudflare for helping us get to THAT Conference earlier this year to enable this conversation.
Special thanks to Nick Nisi and Clark Sell for coming in clutch and getting us the audio to ship this show!