level up your career w/ david pine, content developer at microsoft

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it for it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me social media at tdesntes E-S-S-E-Y-N. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. All righty. Hello. What's going on friends? It's good to see you. When I say it's good to see I always say it's good to see all nobody is fucking here right now David and I can say the most outrageous shit right now and nobody would see hitting the interwebs, but I'm very excited for today David I've known David for a long time date Of course when you're kind of in engineering Twitter You see people and then you go to conferences and then you see him from afar And so David's been on my peripherals actually a lot of people lately on my show have been in my peripherals and I'm finally just like asked.

And so I'm very excited to have David on the show. David, thanks for hanging out with me. I appreciate it. Thanks for inviting me. Absolutely. Absolutely. So for those of you tuning in, welcome. Say, hey, we'd love to hear from you. David would love to hear from you. The reason why I tell people to say, hey, too, it's not just some gimmick to boost engagement, which obviously it does help. But the reason why I tell people is because I want this to be a networking platform. Like we're not in the metaverse yet. We don't have goggles. Even though guidance counts for 2.0, the metaverse would be pretty sick, not going to lie.

But we're not there yet. So the only way I know if you're watching is if you comment. You're like, well Taylor, I don't want to comment. I feel we're just thought of your favorite emoji, right? I'm kind of curious. If everybody goes to their phone right now, what is your favorite emoji? I think mine, I think at the moment, mine's the crime face laughing emoji. David, David, what's yours? What's your favorite emoji? The irony of that is my favorite emoji is what I've got here on my banner. So are you really the nerve energy? So I'm actually going to get that tattooed in the near future on my forearm over here.

But you really, you should go on your neck. I'm gonna get it with the red glasses instead. Oh my gosh, that's fantastic, that's fantastic. I love that. Yeah, so everybody comment. I'm interested to know what your favorite emoji is. So throw up your favorite emoji. I see the eyes, I see the, Michael is the hello emoji, your favorite emoji? Or are you just saying hello? Um, Victor, is your favorite emoji the smiley face emoji? Or is it just saying hello? Is that a smiley face or is that like, what are the hands? I know what those are. that emoji creeps me out because I don't know really what it is.

How? No, I always ask people on my show to say where they're from because I'm always really like genuinely curious like where they're watching from. Yeah, say where you're from. I know Rich you really well. He's an Atlanta. So I know that much. There we go. Atlanta. Yeah, y'all comment. Yeah. Again, David's a streamer too. So we have like two streamers here. So I'm gonna let David lead a little bit too. Yeah. So they have love to hear from you. So if I were you, I would connect with every single person who comments. And the reason for that is because what I've realized over the last three years is that if if you took if I want you to network off the back of me, so what does that mean?

Every single day I would go on to this show, I would network and send a DM to everybody on the show. Then what I would do is I would head on over to unicorn finders, my other podcast because a man can't have too many podcasts. And I would network with every founder that I have on that show because that's more founder startup. Right. If you did that intentionally for the next 90 days, you will have so many fucking connections. So highly recommend it. I would do it connect with David send him a note. He's great. He's very kind till we respond back to you. Second thing is ask questions.

So David is very, very good at what he does. At two time Microsoft MVP, I believe he's at Microsoft. If you ever wanted to know about big tech and get into it, we're We're gonna talk about today, ask questions for David, because he has a wealth of knowledge. Finally, wanna give a shout out to that conference. That's where actually I met David. I won. I asked Clark for a coffee mug. Clark sent me a damn goblet. I could hurt somebody with this thing. So Clark, thank you for this. I'm also drinking your coffee. If you wanna buy the coffee, go to the store, use a code GC2 for like a buck or two off your bean.

That's really good, I promise. And then also shout out for gun.io for hiring me and taking a chance on me. We're actually doing some pretty cool shit in the hiring space. So if you need engineers, like literally like immediately let us know that's what we're really good at, especially seniors, all 3,000 developers on our platform are senior. If you have problems finding senior engineers, you don't have an excuse anymore. Just gonna say that much. All right, let's get to the people who are tuning in. Joseph, our board, Demars, what's going on buddy? Victor, Michael, John, Lynn, Rich B. Ryan, Mansey, what's going on? Lyn Vegas.

Love that. Lambert Detroit. Our guy Lyn St. Louis. Rwanda. Nigeria. Look at her name. There. Nigeria. I love it. New York. It's good to see you from Boston. I got to get back up to Boston. I spent like a half a damn Boston. Love it. Austin was great. Yeah. I was there. I love it. Jess. Jeff, you get it. Wednesday. Yeah. It's Thursday. Friday. Once we get past hump day, it's Thursday. Alright, let's get to what they people what they they want David, who are you? What do you do? And then we'll go from there. Awesome. Yeah. Some David Pine. Nice to meet everyone virtually.

Like Taylor said, connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter or X or whatever we call it nowadays. Or Twitter. It's always going to be true. I mean, listen, Elon, listen, if you're walking with Joe, first of all, that'd be crazy. Yeah, I'd be nuts. Second off, retweet me. Third off, just go back to Twitter and just rebrand it. Like just get rid of the blue and just I'm fine with the black whatever, but just still call it Twitter. Just still call it Twitter. Just X is weird. It's kind of weird. Yeah. X is weird. Yeah. So connect with me. I'm a published author, Google Developer Expert, Twilio Champion, Former MVP.

Work at Microsoft now. I hooked in with the .NET product team. I kind of represent developer relations, working on content and open source and the .NET ecosystem and all things therein related. So if you hate .NET and have a problem with it. Talk to the product team. You know what's funny? Emma Bosch, Jim, on Twitter, she literally had to put, I'm not responsible for Spotify's product roadmap on her Twitter because people are complaining to her about Spotify so much. So, let's see, we got Minnesota in the house, more Boston. All right, here's a good question. I love it, Emmett, favorite record on that back wall.

Oh, okay, okay. So you may or may not notice, these are all Deftones and crosses. I don't know what that is, but. Yeah, it's, yeah. Well, so my favorite one is probably Around the Fur by Deftones. Which one's that? Which one's that? Is it on there? Yes it is, where that lives? It's not on there. I'm gonna donate this. Which one is it? This one on the far right. All right over here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this one. Yeah, hey, Dev, no more YouTube lives. I'm working with my strategy team. We're gonna be uploading these episodes in a summarized version on YouTube now. So just FYI, no more YouTube lives, just LinkedIn.

Anyways. So let me ask you this, DevTones. I have time to be popping off. I had death tones for breakfast for me, baby. I love it. Death tones. I love it. You know, I don't even know about death tones. So they were all come on. Oh, man. So David, you know, I always start off talking, you know, try to talk something about non-tent before we dive into it. So I'm kind of curious. What do you think about Aaron Rodgers and the Jets, especially because you're a Packers fan. I'm kind of curious. No, yeah. I thought it was kind of ironic, a bit of karma, you know, within the first four minutes or so.

Do Packers fans hate Aaron Rodgers? Is that like the general consensus now? No, no, I think we've got a lot of love and respect. I can't speak holistically, you know, I'm just one perspective, so. Do you hate him? No, no, I don't hate him, I don't hate him. Just strongly dislike. I mean, there's there's I'm sure it's just a point. You know, better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think it's I think it's kind of funny that, you know, he's over in the Jets now and that's where Fard went to, ironically, for that little blip. Yeah, it's very weird. But but within the first few minutes of the game, he's out, just done.

I think that's they said the entire season now, right? So yeah, I mean, he tours a KCL. So he's he's done. No, not ACL. That's Achilles. Achilles, yeah. Okay, okay, yeah. Yeah. I just remember the slow mo like you can see like it. That was wild. It like just underneath the skin. Yeah, that's gross. But anyways, Jordan love number 10. You good? Putting it down. I mean, hey, we won. Oh, you did. Oh, yeah. Big time. Who'd you up? I played the Bears. Okay. The, the longest rivalry and the history of the NFL. So it's kind of a big deal. Okay. That's awesome. Ryan will the full episodes be on YouTube.

So I'm experimenting with stuff. It's probably going to be a shortened version. But if more people want the full version, we can adjust. So more to come there. I'm messing with some stuff with some content. So just bear with me. But I want feedback real time. All right, so let's get into it, man. So top things we're talking about today. Open source, getting involved, networking and leveling up, slash getting into big tech. Where do you want to start? anywhere. I guess where do our viewers want to start? What are they curious about? Yeah, hey, so real quick, for those of you who are curious, we want to talk about open source first, getting involved slash networking or leveling up and getting into Microsoft.

The first person who answers, we're just going to go there because there's a little bit of a lag on this thing. Yeah. Yeah. So anybody have any comments? Questions? I'm just catching up on all the DevTones love here in the chat. A lot of DevTones love. Does anybody have any thoughts, comments? Because then we'll we'll jump in the first person, new comments on what topic we want to do. that's not a lot of buttered sauce. You guys are going off the rails. Oh, that's open source. Sorry. All right. Christ. That was about to go completely off the rails. All right. That's the last time I ever put it in.

All right. Open source can be the resounding thing. That's the fun part though. I think I mean, if we're honest with ourselves, Chris said buttered sausage. So let's talk about that. Not sure. What is buttered sausage? I don't even know. Chris put a link in the chat. And if it's not, no, don't put a link in the chat. Don't ever trust something from Chris. Like that. Don't ever trust something from Chris. Hey, Chris actually watched a pretty spooky thing on Netflix the other day. I need to send it to you. I hate spooky things, but it was good. So I got to send Chris. All right, open source.

So I think a lot of people, especially the viewers who watched today, you know, a lot, I think the biggest concerns I hear is like, how do I get involved? What is open source? How do I contribute? AKA get involved? Do I put it on my resume? Where do I start? So take it away. Yeah, that's a lot of questions. It's a lot of questions. Just like anything else, you start slow. There's no reason to kind of rush into it. Open Source for me has been many, many years in the making. And I have all of it to attribute to GitHub. I know there's different ways to do open source, like GitLab and other platforms that sit on top of any type of source control mechanism.

But for me, it's always been GitHub. But GitHub is really, it's a, oh, and you're gone. You're gone. You're switching. No, keep going. I got to fix my mic. Just keep talking. Hold on. Oh, yeah, yeah. But no, so GitHub, it's really like a social platform, believe it or not. You can have followers. You can follow other people. You can watch repositories. you can get involved by kind of seeing how, talking, let's throw it back to butter sausage. You can see how the sausage is made, so to speak. So anyone that has a GitHub repository, lots of companies do that as well. They'll put their software out in the open.

And what it does is it lets other engineers and around the world kind of see how things are made, see how things are implemented, understand like the under, you know, all the various aspects of how things are kind of constructed or architected. And if you've got issues with something like that, you can create an issue. You can say, hey, I want to propose a feature or, hey, there's a problem. This isn't working right. I expected it to work this way. You can interface with the different engineers. So it's really, it's a huge community. What? So I want to give a shout out to Bee Dougie, Brian Douglas for Open Sauce Labs.

He's doing some really cool shit with open source and get involved. Where does somebody go? This is naive for me. Let's say David, I've never been a developer for. Where do I go to find open source projects? The private chat there. GitHub.com. Oh, sweet. Oh, so literally just go to github.com. This is the shirt here. I get up code. That's the Octocat. That's their logo for GitHub. But yeah, so github.com, that's where it's all at. And there's, I mean, just a huge amount of code that's out there. But you can also use github.com to do private stuff. Like if you don't want it, like share what you've got, I think this morning, just last evening actually I created another repository.

I've got almost 300 repositories now. Most of which are public. So I'm always trying to put myself out there. It's very humbling. You learn a lot from the community. You can do things to help other people. But like I said, it takes baby steps. Like you're not trying to like boil the ocean because GitHub can seem like an ocean. Like there's just so much out there. So it's really, you know, find what you're excited about and go out there and learn from others and just get involved in the community. Yeah, I want to give a shout out to Richie. This is why I know Richie's a good recruiter.

GitHub is a totally underrated recruiting source. Absolutely. I know very little recruiters that use GitHub. I was trying to get my team back at my old company to use it. We just didn't have the time to really kind of invest in it. But yeah, Richie, you're the goat man. The fact that you brought that up, I know you're good. Absolutely. I already knew Richie was good, but that's awesome. Yeah, and then dev.to opensauce. Becca is doing an amazing job from a community leader perspective. And then also Brian Douglas, they've been on Unicorn Finder, so go check out that episode on my YouTube, on my unicorn finders YouTube to learn more about that.

Any more thoughts on open source before we move on to the next one? Well, there's just a bit of like perpetuity to it. And what I mean by that is, for me, it's really interesting to think about what GitHub has done for not just open source and software development and engineers, but a couple of years back, they had this initiative where they called it Arctic Code. But what they did was they took a snapshot of all of the source code that they had that was out in the public. And they put it on these like discs that will last a thousand years. And they took it to the Arctic and they put it in the cold storage down where certain seeds and stuff are.

So I've got code that's in the Arctic that will be there for a thousand years. So I'll be tied to something that's less. It's not to think about like right. I mean our lives are finite, but the code that we write Who knows how long it's gonna Comes in with a great question Jumping into a new code base is scary. Do you have any resources for new folks who are looking to get into contributing to open-source But I'm really sure how to dive into what might be a really large and unfamiliar code base Yeah, that's that's a really good question What I'll do is if there's like, is there like follow up notes I can add?

Yeah, yeah. I don't have enough to talk about that. You can send to me. We have a Discord, Scott, Gary active. Cool. We actually have a channel where it's just about the show so we can upload any. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. I will follow up with that. But to speak to it directly right now, it is scary. And most of the times when you go visit a new repository, for example, or a new code base, they will have a contributing markdown file that talks to, like if they're good at open source repositories, they'll have a contributing markdown file that lays it all out. They explain exactly verbatim what they're looking for.

But one of the most common workflows is you go there, you have access to it, you can see all the stuff. If you're consuming it, you know, there's an issues tab, you can contribute issues. And that's how the maintainers and developers will get familiar with you as an individual. because trust goes both ways. So if you're trusting their open source software, you're seeing it, the maintainers want to trust that you're an actual person, and you're not someone that's just gonna go there and spam them or be angry with them, or things like that. So it's the contributing.markdown files your friend. I love that, I love that.

And also too, man, it just really sounds like a great way to network to like just being in there just like getting in. It's almost like a group project. Like I don't know about y'all, but if you did, went to college and did group projects, you were pretty tight with those people. Except for me, I had a very bad problem of being the jokester and just the hype guy and never doing any problems. Senior year in college, I never forget it was like the entire class. All it was was case studies every week. You took a case study, you read it, you did a report on it.

I never did shit. And literally my my professor, if I came back to me, so like my strategy in college was to partner up with like the smart people, right? Yeah. And because like I was the hype guy, I was like, yeah, yeah, let's all hang out. And I'm like, I just sat in the corner like, yeah, it's a great idea. Somebody on my team went and ratted me out to the professor. And the professor pulled me aside and goes, if this, if you get called out again, I'm going to fail you. And I was like, fuck. So anyway, like that. Not many people know that story.

That's amazing. That's awesome. Christina, it's good to see you, girl. Oh, hi. All right, so let's move on to next topic, because of course time is flying by as always. So I think one thing, you were pretty aggressive on the conference circuit for a long time and you were talking about 20 conferences, probably a year, which is very aggressive. I was trying to keep up with Demars, right? Demars just lives in hotels. Demars just lives in hotels. So talk to me about, again, I talk about networking a long time. I know people are like, oh, great, here we go, networking again. But I want to hear it from you.

Yeah. What is networking done? What has conferences done? What is going to meetups have done for your career? And how can you, what would you tell people who are sitting on, who are on the fence with this stuff? Yeah. Yeah. So I would tell them to do it. It can be very fearful. Um, I, I'm, there's lots of really good talks out there. I know David Neil's got one, you know, um, public speaking without barfing on your shoes or something like that. There's like OG talk, it's so good. But it's got a lot of really good sentiment to it because my manager at the time, when I was doing consulting before joining Microsoft, I was getting into this technical evangelism role, and I was super hyped up about various technologies.

So much so that it just boiled out of me. I was literally doing, you know, started blogging, like, you know, some people do blogs and I actually stuck with it for a while. And so it got to the point where blogs weren't enough and my manager said, you know, you should really go speak to people because, you know, we had regular cadence where we were, you know, communicating and he's like, you need to tell people some of the shit that's in your head. Like, you just can't, you know, keep that to yourself. I'm like, well, I tell you, and I tell my team, he's like, that's not enough.

But I was terrible. That's a great manager to encourage you to get out there. That's all. Yeah. Well, he saw something to me that I didn't see in myself. And, you know, that's what you need. That's what you want out of a manager, someone that's, you know, rooting for you. And so it was after enough time, like I started doing like local meetups. And then I started doing, I decided to like submit to some actual technical conferences and I had this you know I've always been kind of pessimistic, you know, I've always had like a They're not gonna select me. So I just put a bunch of Abstracts out there so a lot of different places and they all got accepted and I was like oh shit Legit stuff Yeah, and it was for several years I was doing at least over you know 20 And I was traveling quite a bit But it became very taxing so there's there's like a there's a Certain longevity to it.

So for me, I'm a family man now I've got you know three sons and a wife and two dogs and So it was hard for me to you know continue to keep up that pace of traveling So I do it a lot less, but at Microsoft, I host a show on .NET Live. So the community aspect is still there, and Open Source still helps me, but in terms of networking and getting your foot in the door, conferences, it's literally the juice behind it all. Like that's the best way to get involved anymore. I'm gonna interrupt you real quick. When I was on the job search recently, two months ago, every single lead that came to me was because of conferences.

Right. Right. Every lead. I believe it. That's where it's at. That's where the community is. That's where the risk takers are. That's where the people who are OK to put themselves out there or who are humble enough to learn from others. And I want to say this too, because I feel like a lot of people put pressure. And again, this is all I know. David, we're going to have to have a part too. This is so much fun. But I feel like people put so much pressure on them. So I got to meet everybody. Listen, I'm going to be honest with you. I didn't meet a ton of people at that conference because I was so overwhelmed with giving my keynote and like I just was stressing out.

I shook David's hand like once and said, hey, dude, it was really nice to meet you. I've seen you on Twitter, I've seen you around and I'm pretty sure that's all I did with David. And then now we're here and we're kicking it off. You don't have to put so much pressure on yourself. And I feel like so many people are like, I gotta go to these conferences, I gotta have like, I gotta get married to every single person I meet at a situation. Yeah, yeah. I still remember that too at that conference. It wasn't like a month and a half ago or two months ago.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I remember you came up to me and it was crazy because I was like, oh, this is the guy they did the keynote. This guy pretty intimidating, right? Cool guy. And then you're like, oh, David Pine. Oh, I've loved you and followed you for a long time. I was like, what the fuck out of here? Are you serious? I'm serious, man. I bought you for a long time. Eric, because DeMars, again, we're talking about this catalyst in the market, man. If you can just, if you can get, like, like, DeMars, I'm gonna give DeMars a huge shout here. DeMars basically introduced me to the engineering community as a whole, because what he did is he took me under his wing, he made a bunch of introductions, but like, I saw you from DeMars' shit, and so then I followed you, and then I met you.

It's just, it's awesome. If you can get a framework down, this is what I'm so passionate about, you can meet everybody. Yeah, absolutely. I love what Demarsa is. I'm the catalyst. I'm right. Mars had bigger than already is. Love you, Demars. You should have him on and ask him the story about how we met. He came on. He came on, actually. Demars, we got a part two. Yeah. Awesome. So, yeah, again, I mean, you don't have to overthink it. We got some questions coming in. Chris Demars, the connector. Yeah. 100%. All right. Here's one. conferences so relevant. I was just say still relevant, especially for folks who don't live in the big cities.

Yeah, yes and no. I don't know for a nesting that has to happen. Yeah, I don't know. For me, it was a struggle when COVID hit. That's also a part of the thing that kind of dampened the effort that I had to putting into like traveling and and doing the conference circuit stuff was, like, I get asked to do virtual stuff. And it's hard, it is demotivating, it is not as personable, like, yummy, I can't see your face right now. And that's something I love. I love being able to go up to a podium and interact and have those human connections, right? Where I can see you, I know if what I'm saying is connecting or not, right?

Whereas here, it's just, I'm staring at Taylor's beautiful face. He's looking back at mine. Right, there's a difference. So, I mean, they're still relevant. They're still valuable. You can still get information out of them. You can still network and make connections. I would just say that it's more difficult. It's a barrier. I'm gonna push back a little bit on you, Yemi. Because all the conferences that we go to are actually tier three, tier four cities, right? So like the rest of the month, the rest of the year for me, Atlanta, Huntsville, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi. You know, that conference was in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin.

It literally is. Literally no. It's literally, we were in the Gatlinburg of Wisconsin. I was driving around like, where the hell are we? Clark, I love you, but I think it was in Gatlinburg. It is, it's yeah, it's not Chicago, it's not Milwaukee. No, yeah, in like Austin, while that conference isn't Austin, it's not in Austin, it's like 30 minutes north of Austin. So again, yeah, I mean, I would look at, and I don't know where you're located, but I would say, but also too, there's a lot of conferences in big city. I don't even know about, there has been so many conferences in Nashville recently, I have no idea about, which is terrifying, and also, Nashville's gotta get their shit together from a marketing perspective, because there was a huge Bitcoin conference that I probably would have loved to pull through on, but like I didn't even know about it.

So anyways, here's a great question. We're kind of going off of a different, well, we'll just do this. We may run a little long. David, do you have a hard stop at tell Central? I do not. We'll go a little long, so I still want to talk about getting into Microsoft, but people seem to be vibing pretty well. Canada, I don't know, Yemi, I don't know any conferences of Canada, so I don't know. Yeah, I did. But there's a few danto, I know there's a few. Yeah. Yemi, what part of Canada? DM me and maybe I can post a tweet and see if I can't find something for you.

Let's see here, Saba comes in. Also, how do I prepare myself for tech conferences? I'd love this question, because it takes a lot of effort. So Dave, I'm gonna let you answer first. Yeah, so it's twofold. If you're preparing yourself to just be there as an attendee, my recommendation is to be And what I mean by that is like if you're in a talk, sit in the front. If you're participating, don't have your phone out. You know, maybe you can have your tablet or device out. If you're taking notes or trying to follow along with something, but be engaging. Be, you know, exude humility, be willing to put yourself out there.

It's okay to ask questions. Never be afraid to ask questions. That's the biggest thing is there's so many people that are so that are so fearful of asking questions because they're like, you know, the rest of the room might judge me. But guess what? That's on the speaker. That's on you. So put yourself out there. Stay after ask questions. Go engage people in the hallway track. The hallway track is the networking area to, you know, that's any. Where's the hallway track? I think people who haven't been to Congress are like, what the hell is the hallway track? Yeah, the hallway track. So at a technical conference, there will be, you know, tracks, right?

And here's the .NET track, here's the web track, here's JavaScript, here's whatever, here's fun, which is cool. But weird me out. I want sandwiches. I know, right? But so the hallway track is the literal hallway, like where everyone goes and is, you know, crossing paths. Spend time there. Ask questions, meet people. that, you know, the on.net live show, like the entire show premise is about celebrating diversified thought and bringing people on from the .net community. We call that entire segment the hallway track because that's what we expect. We expect it to be a super low key, organic conversations, things like that. But if you're preparing yourself for a tech conference in you're a speaker, there's all sorts of things to do.

Like you have to make sure that your talk is going to deliver the points that you promised that you, you know, people put their money out there to buy a ticket if they signed up because of your abstract said it was going to deliver X, Y, and Z. Make sure that that that's what you're delivering. And there's a whole bunch of other technical things, but I just assume you're talking mainly from like the attendee perspective. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then also do research on the talks you want to go to, you don't have to go to every talk. I learned that really, early on in my career.

pick about 10 to 15 speakers you absolutely want to meet maybe even just 10 to 5 just so you don't overwhelm yourself let yourself off the hook but I do have to say if you do conferences right you should be dog tired by the end of it absolutely if you do it right let's see here a lot of comments coming in here I do want to get to the final topic here about getting into Microsoft leveling up your career David you and I were chatting off air about how you get a bunch of DMs about a bunch of random buzzwords. So can you kind of give advice to people who want to work in big tech?

How do you kind of sort of how to get on that track because there's no silver bullet, obviously? It's actually all the conversation we've been having is a great segue for it. So it's networking. It's putting yourself out there. It's just letting your passion shine through. I mean, it's great to go to a job just because it's a job and for money. But there's certain aspects where certain leadership will recognize when there's true passion in individuals. So if you have a fire that's burning within you and you want to go light up the world, that's a great way to get into Big Tech because of your passions will just take you there.

Like for me, it was all the speaking, it was the blogging, it was trying to run a show, it was doing all the open source stuff. And then because of that, I met so many different people that were connected to those same things and shared those same interests. And then I got in with some folks at Developer Relations at Microsoft and that was the doorway. Like they basically just recruited me out of it. You were never always curious. Do you remember how you got in the door? Was it a conference? Was it a live chat? What was it? Do you remember? So at the consulting firm I was a part of before joining Microsoft, when Visual Studio, that's the IDE, the integrated development environment that it's like Microsoft's flagship product for writing code.

So they would have like release parties and they would say, you know, we can't hold all of them. So we'll throw it out to the community. We'll send you stickers and you know, you get people there and get them excited and give talks. So it's like almost like a single day thing, kind of celebrating the new innovations from Visual Studio and the products they're in, like .NET and C Sharp and TypeScript and stuff like that. So I would, annually, I would, or not annually, but whenever they would release it, I would host that at the consulting firm and I'd get people in the door from the community and Microsoft, like local Microsoft folks would come.

And they'd be like, I can't believe that you just, you know, did this. because it only happened in probably like under a hundred different locations around the world. Yeah. And we were one of them. That's awesome. That's so cool. That's so cool. All right, so we're at time. There's a lot to unpack across all areas. And we're definitely going to have David on for part two. But for those of you watching, thank you so much. David, the last three questions that I always ask folks. Oh, I should have been prepared. I should have watched one of the last things. Yeah. So I'm going to ask.

So first question, we kind of alluded to it already, but you can answer it differently. What brings you joy outside of work? Outside of work. Well, I'd be lying if I said that I don't spend a lot of time writing code outside of work evenings. But for me, music, that's music. Now, do you play at all or is it just pure listening and consuming music? This is my old PA behind me. I was the lead singer and songwriter for 13 years and multiple years. Oh, shit. Yeah. That's awesome. That's really, really cool. All right. Second thing. Any tech trends, tools, frameworks that you're interested in, that you're tinkering with right now?

I've just been going deep with GitHub Actions lately. In fact, GitHub Actions is part of their continuous integration and continuous delivery mechanisms, but it's essentially GitHub web hooks but in like a YAML format. So you can just basically tie into any event that occurs with a resource, like a repository. So like say you go into a repository and you do a pull request. When that pull request happens, there could be a GitHub action that wakes up and does some sort of thing. Like it validates it, it runs a build, that runs tests and make sure like you're a real person and make sure that like you've signed any CLAs if there's that like all sorts of things.

Like, so I've just been going deep into that and actually I've been working on a profanity filter. So like if someone posts an issue and there's profanity in it, it will replace it with like emojis and just smiley faces and shit like that. That's great, I love that. I love that. Last question, the show is called guidance counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school high school and college, but now as adults, we don't really have somebody or a resource return to just ask career advice questions. What would be your biggest piece of career advice for young David Pahn? Oh, it's a good one.

Um, to, to be more patient. Really? I always expect things. For me, I get frustrated very easily with how how slow certain things can be. Like I'm a rapid fire kind of guy. Like I say, move fast. Move fast. Make mistakes. You know, fail early, fail often. Learn from it. Evolve. Yep. I love that. Yeah, I love that. Cool. All right, y'all. Well, thanks again for hanging out with us today. We appreciate David Stan real quick, so I can say bye to you, off air. But for those of you watching, go connect with David. Connect with everybody on the chat. The chat was like absolutely lit.

So go connect with everybody on the chat. say, hey, send them a DM. If you send them a DM, let them know that you saw them on guidance counselor 2.0. I've had people message me, they're like, people send me all these DMs, I don't know where they came from. Say, hey, I saw you on guidance counselor 2.0. Also number two, unicorn finders tomorrow. It's just me, Jake and Dan. We're gonna be talking about 2024, the market. Is there a September surge coming up when it comes to hiring? So we're gonna talk about that. And then Friday, very excited to have Corey Weathers on the show.

He loved Corey. He is he's an octa off zero How did their developer relations program? So that's gonna be a great conversation to finish up the week. So y'all have a great one David. Thank you again my friend I appreciate it. Thank you and we'll have to get you on part two. See y'all. Peace Hey, you did it you listen to an entire episode and I am very grateful because you know why there's a lot of podcasts out there There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finish an entire episode So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the app store.

I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me at T. S and on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.