2382 - Why Yelling at Referees Mirrors the Reality of Software Development Resilience with Apsis Labs' Wyatt Kirby

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0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it's Wyatt Kirby. Wyatt, you are the founding partner of Apsys Labs. You're found on the web at Apsys.io. Really excited to talk about the work that you do, especially now with so much evolution that's going on in your space. Before we do that, Wyatt, thank you for joining us. Yeah, great to be here, Josh. Yeah. And always love asking our founders, our leaders, you know, who are generally multi-passionate, what they're into outside of work. What have you been into or what are you geeking out on currently?

1:29Sure. So I'm actually a huge football fan in this this past year. I took a step off the couch and I actually became a high school football referee. So I'm I'm really enjoying the experience of getting on the field, working with some kids, engaging with the game that I love. wow what is it like i mean what so i you know i i've heard you don't talk to people become coaches you know and that certainly is a role um but what is it like i mean obviously you know you're a successful guy and kind of doing this uh do you have kids that play like what got you into this and then that's part one part two what do you get out of that experience sure so uh i i do have a daughter she's only uh 20 months old so she's not playing football not currently playing yeah yeah she's she probably wouldn't make the roster given that she can't run yet um so uh what got me into it is really um i i truly just really love the game of football i love to watch it i love to read about it i love to know what's going on and um i saw some news this year that that they're not really sure where the next generation of referees is going to come from and part of it is that people don't really enjoy being the referee um and i'll say after i've only been doing this one season, but I can tell you truthfully, you do get yelled at.

2:43You get yelled at by everyone on the field. And, um, it's not very, uh, it's a pretty thankless, thankless role out there. Um, and, but when I saw that, I thought I've been yelled at a lot. I don't mind being yelled at. Uh, and, and I wanted to just, you know, uh, be a part of the game. And, um, I don't have the football IQ to, uh, to be a coach and, and I'm obviously, I'm a little too old to play football. I think those dreams have passed. So I thought, you know, this, this is a role that will fit for me. Wow. What I get out of it is I think that it's just, it's really fun to be on the field.

3:21It's really fun to talk to the kids who are playing. I referee high school football here in Connecticut and just the opportunity to, to, to engage with the kids who are playing a fun game out on a Saturday afternoon. It's just really rewarding. What does it, you know, I'm still thinking about the fact of like getting yelled at and, you know, while that certainly doesn't feel nice, you know, to some extent, there's probably some benefit to that in terms of strengthening, strengthening your skin. How, how have you processed that? Sure. I mean, usually when you're getting yelled at, it's because you threw a flag or something going on the field.

4:02And really you only think one of two things. I think you either think I'm right. That guy doesn't know what he's talking about because I read the rule book more recently. I know what I'm doing out here. Or you think that dude's absolutely right. He's yelling at me for a good reason. And I got to just keep my head down and get to the next play because the game's got to keep going on. I can't, I can't stop and, um, you know, turn around and walk up to the stands and say, you know what? I did miss that hold. I'm sorry, buddy. So, um, you know, it, it's, uh, it's, it's interesting. But for me, again, especially I, I realized this segment is about my personal hobbies and not work.

4:38But you know, I've been, I've been a contract software developer for for 12 years. And while I like to think that the majority of our clients have been happy, not all of them have been happy all the time. And so, like I said, I've, I've been yelled at before. And I think it's a, you can't control other people and what's going on in their life. And sometimes, you know, sometimes you do make mistakes. I make mistakes. I make mistakes professionally. I've made mistakes as a referee and you, you sort of just, um, like you said, it strengthens, not just like the toughness of my skin, but also sort of getting over, not wallowing in, ah, man, I really messed that up.

5:12How am I going to make up for messing that up and just say like, no, the right thing to do, we got to move on. We got to do the next thing. Right. Wow. I absolutely love that. Thank you so much for sharing that insight. Well, Wyatt, Tell me about Apsys. Sure. So as I kind of already mentioned, we're a software development shop. So basically, we do custom software development for small, medium, even enterprise businesses sometimes. And we've been doing that for a little over a decade now. There's a team of, we're seven right now. We actually had a developer just graduate. We call it graduate. We didn't let him go.

5:45We're really happy for him to move on. He's become a director of engineering at one of our former clients. So we're a team of seven right now. We usually sit between 7 and 10, and we work primarily on web and mobile applications. And usually, I don't want to pigeonhole us, but usually in like a healthcare vertical or a financial vertical, anywhere where there's sort of security regulations. So we have a team who are really knowledgeable and sort of experts at protecting user data and building systems that are compliant with any regulations for specific industries. So HIPAA compliance, PCI compliance, FERPA compliance.

6:22Really, if you throw any three random letters together and then say compliance, it's probably a regulation you've got to contend with. And how did you – did you just find yourself in that space because you had a couple of early clients? And what I'm curious about is, in addition to how you got into that, more importantly, I think, is what is that world like as a developer as opposed to, say, another development shop that might not be dealing with such strict compliance issues? Sure. So how we got into it is actually you hit the nail right on the head. One of our earliest larger clients was a biotech company out of San Francisco.

6:57And so we really got in the door early as a development shop within the first year of us being a business, really learning the ins and outs of HIPAA compliance. And what we sort of realized from that process was that a lot of the compliance mandates are really effectively just security best practices. And I'm sure you know that just because something's a best practice doesn't mean it's a common practice. Uh, so what, what that means for us as a dev shop, I think is, is both that, you know, we get to work in industries where there's some more, um, interesting infrastructure decisions, how you are, um, building and securing your user data, how you're building and securing your whole platform.

7:43But what it also means is that we're really just able to, I think, exercise a little bit more of our happy developer brain where we get to say, no, we're going to do this right. We're not going to do this fast. And one of the things that I think is interesting is that for these regulated industries especially, and I don't want to steer this whole conversation towards AI, but I'll say that, you know, dev is a space where AI is a big topic. something that even the most recent frontier models are still not very good at is sort of system-wide security measures so you know when we're talking about building systems that need to be hipaa compliant or pci compliant or you're trying to get that iso 27001 certification and i apologize i realize i'm throwing a lot of a lot of acronyms out there all these people know exactly Exactly what you're talking about.

8:36The rest of us are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Effectively, what it means is when someone shows up to audit whether or not your system is actually securing your user data correctly, you can say yes, it is. What we see is that these systems, these LLMs, these AI coding agents are reasonably good at producing some amount of code. But what they're not really good at doing is they're not really good at seeing the whole picture, what all your systems are going to do when they transfer data between them, how they're going to secure that data. So it's been an interesting place for us the last couple of years.

9:11All right. So obviously, I need to ask you about the industry. What's going on? You know, obviously, AI, agendic work is probably impacting your work in a very, very big way. You know, we're into 2026 now. Now, give us, for those of us who are not watching your space regularly, and again, generally, it's a room full of leaders here that are running, a lot of SMB leaders. What's going on right now? Not much. Real quiet. Nothing's really changed for the last decade. No. Obviously, I like to think of our industry, and I guess I'll clarify. I'll say that my industry as a dev shop for higher developers, my industry is really sort of basic software development.

9:57I want to be really clear that a lot of what we do as for higher software developers is very boring tech. We are building really simple applications that are helping take businesses from pen and paper manual processes or processes that are built on top of things like Dropbox or Google Drive and Excel. And we're sort of getting them into that door of custom software. We're not on the frontier of anything. We're not, you know, interesting research or crazy like virtual reality computers, none of that stuff. So what is happening in my industry from that vantage point of sort of the basic systems is really, really reminiscent to me of around 2012 to 2014, honestly.

10:48And what we're seeing is we're seeing a lot of companies decide that there is a cheaper way to do what they want to do, just like we did with offshoring post-Great Recession. We saw a lot of this sort of entry basic work going to offshore dev teams. And so that has been, I'm not going to say it's been a challenge, but I think it's been an interesting time to sort of try to position ourselves as the necessary experts in the field. Hmm. Are you, well, how is AI impacting your coding or, you know, again, I think, you know, myself, I want to know that the dev shop that I'm working with is going to be very efficient.

11:37And so obviously using the best tools that are available. And I believe that, you know, the tools have, I mean, exponentially improved. I don't know if that's your observation or that's how you would describe it. But how would you address that when a client's like, well, tell me how you guys work. And I want to make sure that I'm not paying for the way that development was done back in 2018. You're doing development the way that I would imagine you would be so that we can get to market faster. We can get, it could be more cost efficient, get better outcomes. Yeah, absolutely. And to be perfectly frank, we're not AI pessimists or anti-AI here.

12:24Me and my whole team, we all use AI tooling every single day. But I think I've been kind of workshopping this line, trying to figure out exactly how to say it. So I'll give you another shot at it here. To me, the AI tooling is closer to a calculator than it is to Skynet. And what I mean by that is it is an extremely useful tool that lets me, the developer, do stuff faster, but it is not a human replacement. And so where I think that when I say that we need to position ourselves as sort of the necessary experts is AI tooling as it exists now still really needs someone who can keep an eye on the big picture to drive the machine.

13:06And so we use AI coding tools every single day. I already used it this morning. It's only, it's not even 1030 in the morning. I already used it today. But there is not a full release of responsibility, right? We are, we're still the ones who are designing the systems, managing the output, verifying the output, managing the input, right? So you still need to be able to ask the machine to do the right thing. and sometimes it's much less of a guessing game when you're working with experienced software developers. So yeah, we're definitely using the tools but treating them as tools. Yeah, yeah. Humans are always at the controls, humans oversight, human sanity check-in, that sort of thing.

13:53So absolutely. Well, Wyatt, to our friend that's listening and like how might they know that they would be a really good fit for you and what do they do? Sure. It's a little bit of what I said earlier, I think. If you are running a business and you are feeling bogged down by your off-the-shelf software, if you have an Excel file that has grown to 10 ,000 rows and takes two and a half minutes to boot up on your computer and that's how you run your business, or if you're entering data into multiple systems, you're copying and pasting out of one Google sheet into your email account or anything like that, I'd love to have a conversation with you and talk about whether or not you're in a situation where you are ready to start thinking about, can we speed this process up by building some custom software that is exactly tailored to our business's needs?

14:43Excellent. Your website is appsys.io. We have a link directly to that for our friend that's listening in your podcast app right now. Just kind of click around. You'll find that direct link where they can follow you, connect with you personally, and talk about their next great project. So it's been great chatting with you, Wyatt Kirby, again, co-founder of AppSys, found on the web at appsyst.io. Wyatt, thank you for joining us. Thanks, Josh. Really appreciate it.

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