Finished Hell Week - Back To The GRIND! (And CrossFit Killed Me)

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all right just leaving CrossFit here it's uh Monday morning going doing a little bit more office driving this week um one second just backing out of this spot it's kind of hard to see um yeah there's a little bit more travel this week at the office which is nice um there's a couple people at least one person that I know I want to see sorry I got very loud um sorry I'm completely out of breath and my whole all my windows fogged up so I couldn't see anything um yeah so just finished CrossFit office commute uh coming after this I'm going home first so I'm going to make three videos today cuz I was on call all last week which was hell um not complaining about on call uh cuz it's part of my job like I know I have to do it uh just

the just like it's so draining um and not every time this time in particular is very draining just because there was something I had to work on that uh just the nature of it it's like it was all it's like Murphy's Law right so I had to be monitoring a dashboard for a particular issue that would periodically show up and the shift is from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. so to be up early make sure that I'm ready to go and this is how it worked every single time I'd be looking at the dashboard everything is good when I'm actively monitoring it like no issue and then something else would come up on Call where i' have like a partner team asking a question or something and then I'd like look back and it was almost as if the last time I looked at it

was like perfect and then literally the instant that I looked away from that point things just started going bad so every time I was like no no no um so it just made it like like it felt like there was no time to rest so pretty draining uh no time to go to the gym because uh CrossFit class that I go to is at 6:00 I know there's an evening one but I don't know what time it's at but by the end of the workday from doing on call I'm like I'm exhausted so yeah last week was a bit of a blur for that but this week there's uh at least one individual from our team that's uh coming in from I guess he was in late last week but he's flying in from California so I think he's here like last Wednesday to this

Wednesday so trying to spend some time with him uh really smart engineer really good to work with so I'm kind of excited for that um what else oh um so that's probably all that's work rated that I can think of to be honest um sorry this is not telling me to turn here and it's supposed to uh that's why it was very confused I'm like wait a second this is my turn uh I'm all over the map cuz I'm so exhausted but the work stuff probably that's it so I want to talk a little bit about uh the course launch so um Ryan Murphy and I have finished our nailing the behavioral interview in big Tech course which is pretty exciting for us it's our first course together and we have more coming so excited to be working with you on that Ryan um we

were talking with Nick I want to say this morning for me I don't know probably in the afternoon or evening for Ryan and Nick because they're both in the UK so kind of woke up to some of the conversation they were having about timing and all that but um I've been in CrossFit class so I haven't seen if it's technically launched but I think we're in a position where um we're not really waiting on anything else except for for Nick to kind of uh press the metaphoric button to to make it go live maybe it is a literal Buton that he presses that does it but um which will be just super cool I'm very excited to have uh you know have worked with Ryan on this I'm excited that we get to to share this kind of content in a course form cuz it's

stuff that we're both passionate about helping people with and I know I've talked about this before for myself like yeah like my YouTube channel a lot of the content I put out is about C I don't think I don't think that that's my um like where I offer the most value to be honest so happy to kind of have a you know a bit more of a a lens on on some of this other stuff this guy's going pretty fast don't if I want to turn into that okay we'll go right after him so yeah it's kind of just the beginning of that uh I'm not going to like on my channel and stuff I'm not going to stop making C content um I just want to make sure that I can have an opportunity to layer in more stuff cuz who knows over time

um maybe my channel will shift more towards just like General software engineering that's what I'd like it to be I know that it's heavy on C right now because that's what people are coming for um I technically could have split it into two channels in hindsight like this is kind of funny like from content creation especially on YouTube like YouTube does I find you do a lot better when you're Niche is very apparent so like I put up um my general software engineering videos my C videos my interview podcast videos the problem with that on YouTube is that if you have an audience that only cares about C when they go to like start um you know feeding your video to other people they'll start with your core audience like your subscribers right they'll they'll take a subset of them and see who's interested but

if if you have people that are only following you for say C content and then you put out a podcast guess what if that podcast isn't about C they don't want to watch it so what does YouTube do like it's it's a score against you right so they're like oh I guess this video isn't isn't that great like let's try another smaller audience and see and they they don't end up like blowing it up because your core audience is almost working against you so it's a bit of a trap and I don't have obviously I haven't split my channel to prove it but um it's a little bit of a trap because you would think oh if I just have more content to put on my channel surely it will help and I think the answer is yes in the very beginning it does because

you don't even have an audience forming it my channel is only 7,000 subscribers so it's not huge or anything but I think it's already enough of an audience that if I put out um like a general software engineering video it doesn't do as well and I think that that stuff is more valuable so just kind of interesting but uh yeah so who knows longterm maybe I'll split it I I'm kind of nervous about that because like I already have all this content on my channel now it just seems like such a headache to have to worry about that so um we'll see but uh this this week in particular for Content I'm going to have uh at least one video that is not C related uh I'll probably I have a couple of ideas I'll probably do another one that's not C related but I

might wait to release that next week uh maybe get back in the groove of doing like two c tutorials and a like General software engineering video that seemed to be a good sweet spot because for a little while I was doing just uh like all C tutorials and and kind of burns me out a little bit so we'll see but yeah course launch is going to be exciting we've already uh We've signed for more courses with Dome train so we have a pretty good Runway of material to go make but it means uh like no break uh so we're meeting this week to to start putting together the next course um which is good like I like to be I like to be busy I like making sure I have things to work towards uh and it was really good working with Ryan so I

think that we'll we'll do an even better job on the next one just because we worked together and uh it's like little what's a learning curve for both of us right like Ryan hadn't done a bunch of this stuff before which is totally fine so learning curve for him and then this was the first style of course like this that I made so learning curve for me too um but if we go into the the next one I can guarantee it's going to feel easier guaranteed um even if the topic itself was more difficult to articulate it'll just feel easier because we've been through it and we know how we work now we've done one of these together right so it's uh it's night like I was telling Ryan when we were chatting about it it's nice to like kind of always have someone the

fact that we're in different time zones that we have someone from my perspective it's like there's always someone on the other side that's kind of like let's keep the ball rolling so it's not like I lost interest in making the course as we go through it but like you know there's times where I'm feeling burnt out from stuff or I'm just tired from from whatever is going on and it's like oh yeah like I got to like I can see messages from Ryan I got to make sure I'm touching base with him and just keeping things moving and then I've heard it called like activation energy right like sometimes it takes a little bit more energy to get going on something but once you're going it's easy it's just this energy to get activated and start kind of like a a coefficient of friction or

something right like just a little bit more energy to get started but once you're going good to go so I felt like I always had um like it required lower activation energy the entire time which is very nice so um yeah we'll meet this week to talk about structure and all that I do have a vacation in the end of a uh August wow we're past August at the end of October so I'm going to be going to Hawaii so I need to account for that um we should be okay I'm not I'm not concerned it just needs to I need to frontload it a little bit so that I don't like procrastinate and I'm like oh I have all this time and then I have a vacation coming up and then I stress out so I should be okay but um I figured by

the way like yeah I'm rambling a little bit and touching on a lot of stuff I'm going to be making two more videos today uh so this right now is my drive from the gym to home so I figured I'd just touch on a few more like kind of personal things what's going on and then the subsequent videos if you're like if you're already at this part and you're like dude what the hell are you talking about like you could skip ahead to the next one I'll probably have some more like software engineering stuff but I figured I'd just do a little personal update because I didn't get to make any videos last week um and on that note right like even my YouTube videos I had I didn't put out uh any new content sorry that doesn't sound right I didn't record any new

content for YouTube I had two podcasts to go out so I did that but I don't like being in a spot where um I take my foot off the gas so to speak but the like I can be very thankful that the way that I approach content creation and getting work done is that it allows me to if that makes sense so for example because I've put out I've been doing this in my blog post for months now and the idea is like yes unfortunately I have not been writing new blog posts like that sucks I don't like that but I had to get some time back in order to to build brand ghost uh to make more courses and stuff like something has to give I only have so much time so I cut out blog posts but because I had written so many

already I can still share them on social media right with YouTube it was like okay it sucks that uh last week I had on call and I was kind of burnt out from it was wrapping up the course couldn't record new content but I already had a head start I had multiple podcasts ready to go uh so I put out two last week right just to try and like keep keep the content coming and uh like this week I have one that's ready and I have two more that are being edited like at this moment so it's just like by staying ahead by putting in the extra effort I can take my foot off the gas if I need to but once I dip into that then I have to try and recover a little bit right because for example if I use up all

of my podcasts that are pending if something else comes up I don't have a bit of buffer now so I just have to be aware of that not a big deal um so yeah and even this weekend I like took it a little bit easier just because I wanted to like to not burn out right like just finish up a course finish on call I'm like okay I'm going to get I got one YouTube video done got it edited uh I'm actually pretty happy with it I I like it I I think that's a good sign when I like the videos that I'm creating um that does not always Translate and in fact it I don't think there's any correlation with how other people receive it but I enjoyed making the video I watched it back I enjoyed watching it um so that's a kind

of feel-good thing for me now is that going to translate into it gets more views it gets more watch time like I don't know um but I'm just going to keep making content right so uh obviously I want to make sure that it's I'm getting the the Right audience and everything appealing to the audience but at the end of the day like I don't want to be making content that I don't enjoy making because I might as well go do something else that I like right so um yeah didn't get much done on the weekend in terms of that but we did spend more time um like swarming on some stuff in brand ghost which is super cool I've been really enjoying the um like the sessions that we're doing again for those of you that don't know um the Engineers that I've been working

with basically just work asynchronously uh after hours so you know when I either before work or after work for me I'll try to get some some coding and stuff done and then uh asynchronously we'll just like I work on the back end so uh like primarily on the back end and the others primarily on the front end so we just sync up about what things we need for apis or what has to change and then when we get time after hours we make it work but on the weekends this past this past weekend and the weekend before at least been just doing calls and um there's been even on the calls we've been doing like if there's three of us two people are working together and the other person's just off kind of doing whatever and uh it's really nice just to be able to

kind of be on the call together and and talk about the stuff we're doing because otherwise it's like I don't know it's like it's kind of like a machine uh which is fine I like getting the work done but it's just nice to be able to interact with people uh the live problem solving like we we've all worked together before and we work really well together so there's if you haven't had this before with people that you've work closely with I would say there's classes of problems that we happen to all be very good at individually and it's really interesting when you come across one of these problems you might be totally stuck on it but you can like literally say a sentence to the other person and they give you two ideas off the top of their head and they're like two things you've

never thought of and it just so happens that they happen to be good in that space and they get you unblocked right away so I know with these other guys uh I have that a lot like what was one example was talking about uploading URL somewhere and I was complaining I'm like oh man like they have to be um have to be validated and like all this other stuff like there's requirements around it and uh the way that I was testing I was just picking a random URL from the internet and one of the other guys on the team was like before you go building all this stuff around it he's like like why don't you like actually try it out the way that it's going to look and that's files coming from our Azure blob storage and I was like man like good like

I didn't even think about it like I might have just went down a rabbit hole for hours trying to build something complicated and I wasn't even like I just wasn't thinking about it the same way and I think there's a lot of power in Just Having quick conversations like that that you wouldn't be thinking of sorry I got to turn into this traffic here um so there's a bunch of stuff like that that happen and it's uh it makes debugging easier and I'd say like we get good momentum too so I remember at least one of the nights it was like you know getting ready to kind of pack it in or whatever and uh you know kind of hit one more road block and one of us on the call was like well we've come this far already it's like 1: in the morning

for the other guys so we've come this far already we might as well just like get it done and uh it's it's funny like it just reminds me of when we were I I like to think I'm still pretty young but when we were younger and just working through problems and like literally we'd stay up all night working together to to get some stuff done so just uh reminds me of that it's funny though that when you do that at least for us now it's kind of like uh like I don't uh I don't drink alcohol much anymore but when I was younger like especially in University and stuff or you know late in high school days it was like you could go out and uh party and then the next day it'd be totally fine like like nothing happened and uh sorry I'm watching

these cars almost hit each other and now it's like if I were to go out and party like I would be destroyed the next day like maybe not even get out of bed for the whole weekend and it was kind of funny like staying up to work like this like the yeah it's pretty rough the night of but the next day it was like oh man like I'm exhausted the whole day uh and we're not that much older like I don't know hasn't even been uh like maybe like less than 10 years on average I guess for the time we work together and uh yeah it makes a makes a big difference uh so I got to be careful you know we can't be doing that every night but it was fun right like I think that's the other thing that want to mention is

like there is no strict timeline it's like no one forced us to do this it was just it was fun to be able to work together and solve problems and uh I don't I don't know I feel bad for like people that that don't get that opportunity to find either colleagues or or friends and stuff they like to build things with because it's like it's a lot of fun and you can make really cool stuff and have it not feel like a work right like there's a difference between working on like a challenging problem let's say and if you have a good challenging problem it's work but it's like there's enjoy there's like satisfaction that comes out of it accomplishment that comes out of it some type of enjoyment maybe in the moment when it's a challenging problem you don't enjoy it because it's hard

but then when you make progress on it that's where the enjoyment comes and I would say like finding people to work with that you really enjoy working with can be very similar um because I've certainly worked on boring problems I've worked on challenging problems sorry I'm yawning and trying to hold it in and if you're not uh surrounded by by people that you like working with or that you you work with effectively then yeah those end up feel like boring and challenging and you don't like doing them but when you are with the right people it can make a world of difference so I'm personally very thankful um and it's really cool to be able to kind of just work together on these hard problems um I think was it this weekend I'm trying to think if it was this weekend times a it must

have been my my mind is a little messed up from uh timing just from the on call shift but um I think this past weekend yeah it was this weekend sorry I was trying to build something that would essentially do background processing kind of like a a service that we would run that if we messed anything up could like go almost like a garbage collector let's call it right so like some type of sweeper that would run and say hey like this state isn't uh isn't the right State like we should we should clean it up for lack of better um details I guess and so I wrote this thing and seemed to work I was pretty proud of it um was a little bit more complicated than I wanted it to be but I was like running it uh locally and I'm going okay

it works I say running it locally but like on production data and I'm like it's working so cool and then um it's kind of funny because going back to what I was saying about like swarming this stuff with the other guys and we're working on these problems together I was very motivated and I was solving hard problems but I don't think that I solved um at least the context I had to focus on I don't think I solved it the right way um because I was instead of just like trying to take a step back and say like what's like the the simple way to solve this I was just adding a ton of complexity God my goodness sorry um so the next day I I saw a small bug and I remember being like hm how like when I'm looking at the code I'm

like I actually don't know how to effectively debug this now because it's more complicated than I want it to be and then when I could see how the problem was happening I was like oh like to go refactor this code I like broke a lot of my practices I guess to like to get this all to work so I'm going oh no like to go fix this I need to refactor this but to go refactor this I essentially have to go re write it and I'm going you know what like that c one of the capabilities we were talking about I'm like I don't care enough like turn it off um like there's another work around that's uh that's very easy and way less complicated this was just more automatic so I was like screw it um so at the end of the day ended

up uh turning off some of the stuff that I was building but that's okay um uh the reason I'm calling this out is like there's a couple spots in our code base that as we're iterating very fast um we are reaching a point where we have to pause and go look we should we should stop and talk about this even things like naming conventions people don't uh people don't pay a lot of attention to and I don't mean like specifically like your variable names I mean like how we refer to different concepts in our domain is very important to be aligned on because without it it creates it's a ton of unnecessary complexity and I again I don't think that tons of people think about this kind of thing um oh man there's some awkward this guy's going so slow I have to back into

my spot and this guy is going outrageously slow watch them drive past see um I have to swing the car around though um and we're finding like like when I had built some of the backend stuff originally cuz I was using brand ghost in like a headless mode and I called things by a certain name just because that's the names I thought of and when we started building the front end and trying to be more conscious about other people using it um like those names don't really work well anymore so now we have disjoint naming and we got to figure that out so um we're at the point where stuff is built using different names and it's the level of complexity is just like growing and growing so we'll probably have to pause draw a bunch of pictures say what are we talking about in

these contexts and just get on the same page that way when we go to refactor code we can take advantage of the new naming I think personally it'll help a ton so uh we're we're reaching that point in terms of how our code is structured but uh I'm gonna go in I'm probably gonna nap before work I think because I'm really beat up I need to chug a glass of water and then I'll I'll uh make another one of these on the way to work so I will see you soon take care