restaurant management to coding w/lawrence lockhart, dev advocate at vaadin

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Lawrence Lawrence I I Know Lawrence, but Lawrence one of those guys. I want to know more and so I'm so excited to hang out with him today He's a wealth of knowledge. I think his story is incredible from what little I know we're gonna dive into that today So I asked questions. This is the one time where he doesn't bill you for it Also third thing I want to celebrate you I feel like individuals. We always move on to the next thing right Lawrence and I mentioned about being content off air to Lawrence I feel like we're never content. I feel like it's always, I got the raise.

When's the next raise? I got the title change. When's the next title change, right? So I want to celebrate you today. If you have done something that you are very proud of in your professional life, throw it up in the comments. I also feel like a lot of us are terrible. I'm talking about ourselves in interviews, which is part of the problem. So I want to try to get you all like in the mindset of just sharing about your accomplishments. It's not bragging, I'm asking you to do so please do it. And then a few other housekeeping items, First and foremost, the coffee sponsor of the show, that conference, Clark Sell, and that conference.

January is gonna be incredible. Listen, if you can drive, walk, fly to Austin, Texas, in January, the end of January, I would highly recommend doing so. Danny Thompson, Shonday Pearson, Kelly Von are all keynoting that conference in Austin. It's gonna be incredible. This is gonna be incredible. Yeah, yeah, so you should be there. I'm slipping. I know. I should be there. I have a budget to go to the conference of my choice and I'm not going. I would look and listen, here's the deal. So that conference is great. Clark has done a really good, it's really family friendly. So bring the kids. What family guy?

Yeah, I have kids. They have, it's at the Kalahari Zort in Austin. It's really nice, it's brand new. I went to it last year, it was really nice. Also want to give a shout out to the premier sponsor, the platinum sponsor, the IT sponsor of guidance counselor 2.0. Drum roll people. Render ATM. Render picked up the pod for another year sponsorship. And everybody should be there. Everybody, everybody in your mom's. You should invite your mom to render. Absolutely. I think I won't be, but I will be there. On her behalf. There you go. I'll represent the whole clan. My mother's name is Karen. If I will tell you this, if Karen went to render, she would go nuts.

She would love it. She would love it. So be at render. It's incredible. Use the code GC2.0 for a few bucks off. Okay, let me tune in a few more people. So again Alex good morning. I'm a player black isn't really my color Abraham it's good to see you mark Ryan Colin Alex Chris Alex goes just got the incredible week of challenging coding one of my clients came to you with a problem I was able to fix and felt really good taking care of their issue there you go. Perhaps you man Seriously, that's really really cool. That's cool. Colin. I see you watching you you got anything Anything that you want to brag about buddy?

You want to brag about? Anyways, all right Lawrence, let's get to it, man. Who are you? What do you do? We'll go from there. I don't know. I'm just wandering through life like Nemo, man. Trying to find my way home. I don't know. But yes, Lawrence left first. The old guy on TikTok, AKA Lawrence Decodes on all platforms. Shout out to Danny Thompson. It's good to have friends who will just correct you when you're wrong. There was a time when I had like five aliases on five platforms that he said, but you please consolidate your name so I can find you. like thanks and it helped.

But anyway, yeah, I've been doing this tech game for about five and a half years now. Being part of my story is doing a career transition at the tender age of 46. Pretend as you mentioned 46. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, so young, because one of the philosophies in my family is there's no such thing as too late. You know, whether you don't do it. I love that. So I had to also an example for my parents getting their educations later in life and going on to pursue awesome amazing professional careers and education and engineering. So I ended up doing the same thing. and started with the free code camps of the world, codingphays.com and places like that.

And just started to teach myself some good old web dev to see can I make this tech thing work because I reached a point where I could not go another day. And I knew for sure that I couldn't make it to retirement. I literally said that phrase to my wife, laying in bed when I can't do this to retirement day. I'll die first. And that was really, I wasn't like a fun, that's not like a happy moment. That's like I'll die first. I won't be able to support you. I have to do something else with my body. So you appreciate this. My dad's been the restaurant industry for 30 years.

Jesus. Wow, that's a lot. Yeah. Oh, Lawrence, there's so many places to start. I guess I wanted to jump kind of straight to it, man. Restaurant management to coding. How did you do it? You know, again, I just feel like so many people, it's just hard to get going. It's hard to find your first job. How did you break through, man? Kind of give me the origin story. Yeah, so it was not just a nice linear path. I got to try to describe for my mentees these days. Mine was a lot of starts and stops. I was not integrated with the community from the beginning.

I didn't even know that was a thing until years down the road. So I didn't have a lot of support. There was no tech Twitter. I don't think we even had was the other with clubhouse at the time. Meetup groups that was in my town. It was only for college students. I couldn't even do that. So it was just me and the attic or actually me in the loft. But the old broke down desktop, old Windows machine, just struggling my way through free code can. That was pretty. And then by virtue of the fact that I'm in the restaurant business, I'm the GM, okay, because I was always like in leadership positions, that was cool.

I was making money, but as a GM of a restaurant, you're always on it. You're always on it. There's no such thing as a day off. You could work six days a week, let something go wrong, sufficiently bad on the seventh day. You're right back at that restaurant. And you're always thinking about it, which means even with things are going great, you can't quite turn it off. And so in that environment 50, 60, 70, whatever hours a week, I would just stop counting because we didn't get paid for hours anyway. I even Chinese over time as we used to call it was a oral derogatory, don't use that phrase.

I would get off either at night or in the morning, because sometimes I'll work the evening shift, like on a Saturday night, go in at four, five at the evening, get off around three or four, eight in the next day, and just start studying, man. Just pure studying, trying to make myself confident enough to get some company, somewhere to trust me with their code. Didn't know what that would look like, didn't have a good grasp on the industry, so to speak, whatsoever. Didn't have a target company, like everything that I suggest to people now is mostly a result of what I didn't do right in my journey.

So if you ask, I had to get started. It was just random. It's going from HTML CSS, that's hitting my first true programming language and JavaScript, just getting stuck and frustrated and quitting. Just lots of people took me two and a half years and wasn't like I went to college and got a two. Like got an A degree. It was just me going through all of the problems to try to learn to code on your own without support, without community, not even feeling confident in yourself, giving it up, coming back, realizing you forgot, everything you learned the first time, which is what happens. And then having to go back and redo stuff.

So it was a lot, it was a lot. In a word, it was a lot. All right, we're gonna, man, there's so much. I like, so I get goosebumps when we're on to something. I'm getting goosebumps right now, but also if I get goosebumps, I get ADD, I want to ask so many questions. First thing is what biggest piece of advice, and now this is kind of my last question that I ask on the pub, I want to go and ask it now, if you were to do this over again as in go from nothing to something, what would you do differently? Absolutely have a human resource that you can refer to of some type.

The benefit of a professor student model in college, the big benefit is not so much the classroom activity, but the fact that there are office hours where you can just sit and chat and just dig into things deeper. When you're self-learning, you're rid of that. And it's fine to say self-learning versus college and all that, and we don't have to do that right now. But having a human who should be an SME in that particular thing that you can refer to is invaluable. Googling has a certain role to play in that. Chat GPT does a little better job, but having a human who's touched the code, who's put code into production, you can ask, well, why doesn't this for-loop work right here?

or whatever the other case may be, that is invaluable. And it's almost, I would say, worth it to make sure you're attached to some kind of a community or person or meetup group right from the beginning, from lesson one. I was just on a Twitter, then with someone who was asking about going to tech events as a beginner, they thought maybe it might be more beneficial to just dig down deep in code. Like there are so many, we're not doing tech for tech, we're doing tech for people. So why not involve people from the very beginning of your journey. You shouldn't have to learn empathy and people's, like from the very beginning of saying, I want to be in tech.

You're saying I want to deal with people, whether it's programmer, whether it's dev rel, whether it's recruiting. You're saying what to deal with people, because if you're making the most fancy product of all time, there's still an end user that you are most concerned with, because if they don't like your crap, you're out of a job. So the beginning of your tech journey, back to your question, I would make sure I'm integrating myself with people. People who are knowledgeable that can give me advice, help avoid some of the pitfalls, help tell me what, and so help me avoid like getting back coaches. You ever seen somebody marry somebody or date somebody, you're like, I want to talk to their friends.

They'll be able to tell that this person is trash. The same things happens as tech. People get horses that are trash, people sign up for coaching as trash, boot caps that are trash, but because they don't have anyone in the space to trust, they don't know who to even ask. So they just sign up because they have a really cute Twitter page or Instagram page and then months down the road they feel scammed. Integrate yourself with trusting community from the beginning, from HTML, from Hello World, with a H1 tag. Get with some community. You don't have to join 15, 20 different groups. Join one or two.

Just integrate yourself in conversations on Twitter, find Danny's group or my group or take around this group or Christian. I find some group you can get in. You can just bounce questions off, whether they're technical or even, hey, I think about mine And of course, what do y'all think? Have you ever heard of this before? Is this reputable? Tell me the difference between a certificate and a certification. I don't wanna just pin a thousand dollars for no reason. And it's actually helped me in the industry. If so, which part of the industry? Have people that can help narrow down your journey. That would help me immensely.

And say a lot of time. God preach, brother preach. I wanna get to a few comments. Also, by the way, quick housekeeping thing. I don't mean to ruin the flow already of the conversation, but there have been problems with comments on LinkedIn. I try to throw up every single comment. If I don't throw up your comment, I probably have not seen it. So just FYI with that. Let's see here, Abraham, I wanna give a shout out to him. How did it interview this week? Hopefully I'll get called for round two. Hey, Abraham again, we're coming to the best looking guys on LinkedIn with that headshot.

Also to hopefully you get called for round two, man. I'll be waiting. He's got that professor. He's got that professor. That's what I'm saying, man. I literally wanted the best dressed guys on LinkedIn. Read, read, Evan, this is so good. to see you man, reads a former guest of the show, two time former guests of the show. So that's really crazy awesome work as a CTO out of Knoxville. You can never have too many people in your corner. I could not be where I'm at today if I did not have people like Lawrence in my corner. I will tell you that right. Same. Same. Yeah.

Can I just shout some names out? Please. While you're on that topic before you before you ask another question and throw me off topic. In Memphis, I have to give a humongous shout out. Thank you, a tip of my hat to James Q. Quick. Most of you know I'm as a nice and knowledgeable guy. I know him as a guy who took himself from mentor to sponsor for me and made a humongous difference in my career. Those two things are different. There's nothing that he had to do. There's nothing that said he had to do that. I didn't pay him anything to do that. That was from the kind of business art.

Well, I have so much respect for him to see what he does because that's who he is. She humongous difference in my life. Big shout out to Joe Ferguson here in in the Memphis community, he's huge in the PHP and Larabal world. He has opened doors for me, done great things for me. Ted Patterson, who is no longer in Memphis, but he was at one time. He was actually the leader of my first real tech organization that I love talking about. Code Connector, find us online, co-connector.io. He was the leader who showed me exactly what empathy and tech really should look like. It should feel like in the times that I've had leading this organization and co-leading it.

My biggest goal is can I make this organization feel for the new people the way it felt for me when I came in because I didn't know anything or anyone and from day one he made me feel like a friend, like an equal and let's open your laptop and let's look at your portfolio together. That's cool. Let me show you this example. Have you considered that like just totally open. So huge shout out to those three people who I met at in person meetups. Shout out to meetups. Oh, so about meetups for a second. Talk about them. Why? Because I think it was interesting. You said something like junior devs, like maybe don't think they need to go to meetups.

It's kind of like the whole thing of like not going to the gym until you get in shape. Mm. Yeah, absolutely. You got to go. Yeah, so sometimes the fear is not knowing what to say. But the good thing is you don't have to say much. You should be there to learn, to learn, to listen, to observe, to find out what being taught first of all from a technical perspective, then who are the people behind the talks? What do they do? Where do they work? Do they have connections to other jobs, future jobs? What does their team like? Can you tell me about what your programming world is like?

You have the opportunity to learn so much. You don't have to say much as you're new. You're not there to it's not a competition of you know like I said if you're at the gym like who can lift more away like who knows more tech. The meetup is about learning and joining with community. And tech in any particular town is typically a very small and tight knit community when it comes to people who actually leave the house. You would be surprised. I did a walkthrough with my boss, VP of DevRel at Modern Markets, Helberg just yesterday of all the user groups, Java user groups in the United States.

Big cities, I won't name them. And you would see like number of attendees on meetup 30, 35, 40. It's a small group, which means even as a beginner, if you invest yourself in that group, start learning some people and do like I did, you know, first couple of meetups, hey, at the end of the meetup, do you need help throw away the empty pizza boxes? They're putting the chairs back in place, just short yourself as a useful person has utility as well. So yes, for the beginning, go to meetups. Go for the tech first, right? You don't walk in. Hey, y'all hiring like, no, that's not the move.

You walk in like hi, my name is Lawrence. I'm learning frontage technology. I'm learning blockchain technology. I'm learning to be a cloud engineer. I'm just eager to hear from the talk today. Talk is over. Typically the speakers will take questions. You can ask follow up questions about the talk or about them. Hopefully you have a little bit of people skills under your belt. If you don't go read a couple of books Go read how to win friends and influence people things like that So you can show interest in them you learn how to ask questions that are open ended get them talking about themselves Next thing you know you have your LinkedIn ready on your phone.

Hey, it's alright We connect our LinkedIn and you have that barcode ready You just get these certain things together that begin putting you in and now you're beginning to build your personal brand as a technologist Those are could be magical. Yes. Yes, right now you're beginning to build your personal brand as a technologist even before you have a ton of technical skills because at the end, and I'm sure we get to this later, when you get to that actual interview, it's about your brand. That recruiter that higher men is trying to assess your brand as a technologist and your utility in this role, you can start building your brand before you even build that much just showing up to meetups.

Absolutely, absolutely. Our guy Clark Sell from that conference on. What up? Clark, we were talking about. I'm just taking it in a plane ticket because I slept on that conference. I'm so afraid. Hey, everybody's going to be there. I would be still in schedule. Everybody's going to be there. Like everybody's going to be there. Everyone's going to be there. You should be there. All right. I'm going to be there. Yeah. So you're giving answers to questions that let people pull on different threads. Yeah. I mean, again, I think there's an importance of this. I feel like a lot of people just answer the like, you got to kind of give a little bit more of an answer to answers.

Does that make sense? Like, I feel like a lot of people in me are just like, yes, no, they answer things like very kind of short. But yeah, anyways. I mean, conversation skills are part of communication skills and their skills. I think that we discount that sometimes this hasn't have anything to do with tech, but it has everything to do with tech. Sometimes we equate the ability to speak with communication skills and they're completely disparate ideas Communication has a whole lot to do with how you process the input from the other person They're non-burnts their words, but they're saying what they're not saying how they're interacting with or how they're responding to what you say And they mean able to determine how to witness conversation to go Am I trying to teach am I trying to impress by trying to be humble right horrible thing to see is a person who's brand new to an industry and they come in so proud of themselves, chest just out three feet.

And it comes across the conversation, they think, well, I did a good job. No, you look silly right now. Like, why not come humble? Why not come with the questions? You're brand new, nobody even knows you. Why not come with a more of an attitude of humility and then kind of reading the room to see, where are some good places where I can fit in outside of just asserting yourself? That's the opposite of empathy, which means it's also the opposite of having good communication skills. Communication skills start with your ability to read, to listen, to interpret the inputs you're getting, right? Kelsin made a statement the other day, hopefully we can graduate from just being so enthralled with AI to getting back to the learning.

We're all built with supercomputers. But we're doing with AI artificial intelligence as a temporary to replicate what we can do naturally. But we need to start using this a little bit more. Process your input, look at people, look at them in the eye. And if there are certain conversations that go on a certain kind of way, you're not going to feel and tell, hey, this is not a good way to go. Maybe let me start the conversation another way. Maybe let me just stop talking. Maybe I've been going too long. You can learn to read people if you become more observant. That'll low-lip with your communication skills.

I would just do it on the interviewing. Exactly. Then rather than getting all nervous and anxious about, will I say the right thing, you can feel more confident that you know what's being asked. Yeah, absolutely. Graham on here. I thought I'd be better join on here as I'll chat in myself on Twitter. Yeah. Again the chats. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah. Yeah. So Graham is good to see this here and I got Twitter over there. So yeah, that's a lot. All right. So, man, as we talked about that, talk about so your was your first job in tech developer advocate or do you have a job in tech and develop and No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

So we're first job in tech. So I was working, I think the last, first of all, the last restaurant job was cookout restaurant, anybody down south of those cookout. I was a GM cookout in Oxford, Mississippi, which is a college town. So you can imagine on Saturday nights after a big game, it was pandemonium. I literally broke up a fight in my dining room because my assistant manager, who was younger, stronger and bigger than me, got scared. He's like, what was there about to fight? I got no real mid left. So anyway, I'm out there in the dining room breaking up fights and stuff. But anyway, that was my last restaurant job.

My first tech job was at a place called Friends, also known down stuff. It's not even around anymore. They went bankrupt. And they had a little part time position for a web content developer. Again, shout out to Code Connector because their select channel was where I found out about it. They had a little work channel on their select server. You got to get involved in that channel. You got to. You just wanted to. Yeah. And that works channel and the Slack server had a mention of a crazeless posting somewhere I would never look for a job for a web content developer. Turn up, it was at friends, went through the interview, how do you tidy?

Oh no, hell statement, hell statement. They just paid me, they just paid me. Anyway, we can talk about Ole Miss for a long time. I know. Anyway, what's up, Danny? I forgot my statement. Yes, they hired me on part time, went through that process, went through another video, excuse me, interview, I was hired me on full time and I was hired basically as a WordPress dev. I was doing drag and drop WordPress. Every now and then I think I may have built like two pages from scratch. One was when you started selling off all the pharmacies and then one other was something else but it was mostly a super simple drag and drop WordPress job.

That being said, I was only a few months in before I realized I'm not gonna grow this job. Like I'm not gonna grow this job at all. I was the only web developer in a marketing team. A solid marketing team too. We had great photographer, we had great designers, like solid, but I wasn't in like the tech space. I just happened to be the tech guy. The IT was like in a completely different part of the building. If anyone knows Memphis, this old Raggedy Corvish building on Get Well, like they were in a completely different part of the building. We didn't integrate. So I didn't have that interaction.

Like you have communities even within companies and I wasn't in the right community. So I was like, I need to learn something. So I applied for a bootcamp and that bootcamp, I'm not gonna name them with what? I said, well, it's called Code Crew. We love those guys. At the time, they had an age limit. And again, I was not in my 20s or 30s. I was in my 40s plus, so I couldn't go to that one. Really depressed. And then another one came around called Launch Crew. They're based out of St. Louis, but they had a cohort in Memphis, signed up for it, got in, got in there and it was like homecoming.

Cause there's my man, Danny, and there's my man, JC. And wait a minute, who's the teacher? James, quick. Oh, wow. That's crazy. All in one group, yeah, in the same cohort. We were all in there. Yeah, Daddy was a fellow student. JC was a TA and James was the main teacher. So that was awesome. That's where I learned my Java and Python and SQL, some more good core engineering, real deal concepts, which was beneficial. Because like I said, friends went bankrupt before the bootcamp even ended. So now I'm going to school, but I have no job. And a little bit panicking and things worked out in a nice way I'm gonna get some referrals and get into interview to go do it FedEx Essentially the exact same stack we just learned in boot camp Which was Java's pre-boot sequel now that like as one to one as it's humanly possible and I worked that for four years I was called software developer a couple years went down moved up to software developer too and Then later on DevRel.

I'm not sure we'll talk about the devRel conversion now or later Yeah, there's so much and we're already in this many directions crazy How long is this? How long is this? 30 minutes supposed to? Oh, no, I can go a little bit longer. We're not much You work in a day. I'm off. I know so What I think I want to get into I want to talk about is the power content creation, right? I mean and this goes with on the dev roll side of things you've really dove into it I've noticed you hustling I see you all the time. I love watching your stuff.

I really really do talk about what made you do that, talk about what, like, I guess the moment that you decide to do it and what's happened since you started doing it. Yeah, so like many things in life, I have a tendency to get bored with stuff quickly. I actually started on Instagram. I was doing tech content on Instagram of all places and it was working well. I just got bored with it. I went from like 400 to 2,000 followers just got bored with it. And hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. In my opinion, I think Instagram sucks for professional content and the fact that is impressive like nobody And it unless you're and it people like oh, that's nice 400.

No listen. It is hard to grow on Instagram I'm currently going mega viral right now. I'm super kind of crazy right now Because people like Taylor we need a space on how do people like recruiters because nobody likes recruiters except you Nobody likes recruiters except the way we like you Yeah, so but like it's hard. So I just want to give props to you on that. I get hard to grow And so shout out to you for doing that on Instagram. So yeah, I was doing TikTok content on Instagram I'm not bored with that with work with that just left it literally I'm barely over 2,000 like years later years later, but I went from TikTok to Twitter and I said I want to have big So I could make my Twitter my Twitter was like two or 300 look to a hundred to a thousand about 1500 2000 ish got bored with that left that alone didn't do any social media for a while I heard about TikTok As I always say, I thought I was just a bunch of kids dancing and shaking their behind.

I thought I had no business on TikTok. I come up there, my wife comes to the room, she's going to be like, what are you doing? But then I found out there's a tech community. But a whole lot of the tech community on TikTok was giving bad information, bad, harmful, wrong information. So I said, there's my niche. Short form to match these short attention spans. I'll get on TikTok and start making content. I was able, all the things that I ever wanted to say like on YouTube, which my YouTube was a total failure back in the day. I just started back up recently. But everything I wanted to say on YouTube, I was saying on TikTok in short form and it did well.

Took off like 0 or 2 or maybe a thousand or so, then there was like a stagnation. It was like a thousand to 5,000 stagnation and then it just kept going. So it's around 13-ish now and I've been there for a while But the point of there to get out information out. I'm not gonna see me doing the latest dances or you know, rapid-related songs I don't even know what they are. I don't understand that level rap anyway But I do give tech information where every people can be found when it go where people can be found and in as much as DE And I super important to me and specifically the number of African-American software engineers that we do not have in tech right now That is where they are and so it's kind of like Jesus going to meet Peter and you know the kids They're fishing like let me be fish from men the whole thing.

So let me go to the TikTok space And let's just talk TikTok about tech But in fact TikTok is a tech company you didn't know that so they're still hiring But you have to know how to do things. And so when I talk about transition into tech is number one, get the skills to make yourself a valuable candidate. It is good as you can. And then let's look at the transition. What good has happened from putting yourself out there? Can you give some tangible things? Yes. You know, there's a little conference in Atlanta called render ato. A little bit, a little bit. Kind of a little blip on the radar.

So I know of Justin from when he spoke at the first Magnolia JS in Jackson, Mississippi long ago. That's where he got down here. People know that. That was my next sentence. So I was there when he spoke. And from that he got the idea for render. And when he held it, I just wasn't in a position to go. So I was just having all this. It was more than fun. It was just mad like, ah, I know that guy. And he went to Mississippi State, Hail State. It's a fellow alum. I should be at render. It couldn't go. Couldn't go the first year. Couldn't go the second year.

two years ago, I managed to go. And one time when I was out on the yard in between spaces, I'm minding my business and I hear somebody yell, a TikTok guy. So being the person I am must be me, I turned around, it's Scott Hanselman from Microsoft. Oh, Blake. Yeah. No, do you know he corralled me over and we sat down on a little part bench out there inside it, rendered outside, it was hot as heck. and we just chat it like old buds. I'm a nobody tailor. It's got, because of my content, just wanted to kick it for a minute. And the next thing he knows, I know he goes, you know what, we should make a TikTok together and he pulls out his phone.

I made a TikTok with Scott freaking handsome. We continued to talk here or there, like a little DM here, or I'll send a little comment on this TikTok where he was saying, well, I'm mine, this cash, well, nothing crazy. It wasn't stalking him, though I was stalking him, it wasn't stalking him. And the next thing I know, I get an invite to come and speak and be a guest at the humongous Microsoft built conference in Seattle No, I even know that you serious all expenses paid That doesn't make sense. That doesn't even make sense And you wonder why I'm so passionate about people putting themselves out there on the Internet My stuff is so cringe, but I mean everything is not here the thing is really cringe But I mean everything I say and I don't lot of people That's like my main credit.

Just mean what you say. Mean it. Don't mean it. If it's not your thanks. If it's not in you, don't say it. Mean what you say and don't lie to people. That's it. I'm not saying there is nothing on my channel that's just mind blowing. Like I am not inventing quantum computers when I take time. Basic stuff, but I mean what I say. And I never lie to people. And on the strength of that and that very casual relationship with Scott, I got to all expenses paid invite to that conference. spoke with him on a panel. Next thing I know, not even done with that, I get to invite from Anthony Mayes from Google at the time to come speak with him at RenderATL.

Expenses paid. I love Anthony so much. That's two conferences. So now I have two major ones. It was like the biggest conferences. Like, I mean, that's... And I'm speaking with two of the biggest names in tech. And so the strength of that, that plus my content creation plus my software development experience is what boosted my candidacy to become a developer advocate invited today. Just go ahead and end on that. Let's go ahead and end on that. The chair is sitting right in. You know the comedian passed the bucket. I don't know if, yeah, seriously, passed the bucket. Everybody go ahead and bow their heads. I don't know if you know the story of Matt Reif, but very similar story.

This is why I'm so passionate about the comedian Matt Reif. He is gone viral over TikTok. He was doing comedian work for 10 years, making $40,000 to $60,000 a year. About to give it up. He had edited one TikTok that he was about to not post. And his friend goes, you've already edited the TikTok. Just posted it. He posted it unwillingly. Close this phone. Went to 30 million views. And now he has a Netflix special and is now making 25 million a year. All I'm saying is put yourself out there. I have never. I've never heard anybody who puts out content, regret it. They also wanna give a shout out to Reed too.

Reed, I'm seeing you put out content, keep doing it buddy. Yeah, which emoji is the one for mind blown and completely pumped for another human being? I love that. Let's go, let's go. That's freaking cool. All right, Lawrence, the last three questions we wrap up here, because you boys gotta go to an errand actually. First thing, the show's called Guidance Councilor 2.0. Well, no, that's the last question. I'm sorry, first question is, what do you like to do outside of work that brings you joy? Man, family stuff. I'm an old-fashioned family guy. I don't care if we're playing Uno, Jenga. If I'm cooking for my family, I love cooking for my family.

I hate cooking for myself because it's nobody to enjoy it. And I can help everybody to brag too. But when I see them sit down to a meal that I cooked, that brings me joy. So when I post my Sunday dinners on Twitter and Instagram, it's not bragging. It's showing you what I love to do. That brings me a lot of joy. It's been way too much time. Oculus Oculus 2, hopefully I need to put Oculus 3 for Christmas for my wife. We'll see if that happens or not. But I really enjoy the experiences that she does. And of course I'm a church guy, man.

So I'm in the Word and I'm prayer and I love our church events. We have like big gospel. You'll come through and stuff like that. But Senate services and joy. I come out of church really good. That gives me, that gives me what I need for the week. Same thing really does. Same thing. It was out there. I would probably be a different guy. the lawn's always you bragging man we've got we got James bragging on you I know he was bragging on you just got here late changing diapers and stuff I know being a dad. Second question what tools technologies framework's kind of techie stuff you just watching experimenting with that you want to give people heads up about.

I like what they did with the GPT that this recent open AI announcement it reminds me a lot of right now. Well it reminds me of the talk that I gave at, so I gave a talk at Connect Tech, which technically wasn't my talk. It was my boss's talk that he was double-booked. He had to be in Germany and he landed at the same time. That will work. So I took the Atlanta version. He went to Germany. And long story short, I don't know, right at time, my talk was about you. I view our integration with AI, the average person of AI on one of three levels.

Number one, as a user. You put in some input in some bot, it gives you an output. Whatever. That's the lowest level. The highest Next level is an actual AI engineer. They are the ones with these stochastic analysis, the probability, the calculus. They are writing the actual LLMs. In between, I think there's a fascinating zone for pretty much every developer. I call it an AI Explorer. You take existing tools and you programmatically put them together in a special way to get a unique output that maybe chat GBT can't do on its own. That's what I did in my talk. It's actually on the bottom, the VAADIN YouTube.

Not here, but by boss, given his version of that. That being said, what they're doing with the GPT is very similar to that to be able to simply customize with context what you want it to do and feeding it that context in advance so that the responses are more customized and useful. I think there's just a lot of integration that you can be doing that can be done on a very low level. So yes, I'm excited about AI for enhancement purposes, not a fear of lingering, you know, all the jobs going away. But I think again, back to Scott Hansman, it's entire it's intended to be your Ironman suit.

Right? It's supposed to empower you, so to give you more abilities, faster, more efficient, you can explore things so quickly using chat GBT just for quickly MVPs. So everything in that space is really exciting to me. I love it. Last question. We had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and college, but now as adults, we don't really have a guidance counselor. That's why the show is called guidance counselor 2.0. You already mentioned community, so you can't answer it again. But what would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Lawrence outside of doing community stuff. Wait, say it was a lot that was a big piece of career advice to young Lawrence.

And you can't answer community. You already said that first. I want another answer. Lawrence, just keep going deeper. Just keep going deeper into the tech. That is the thing. That is a thing. If your intention is to be able to build things, just keep going deeper. And I love it. That's it. I love it. I I love it. All right, y'all, I got to bounce. Lawrence, stay on real quick so I can see by the you off air, but I appreciate, go follow Lawrence on all social medias, especially TikTok if you're on it. I love Lawrence's TikToks. I love what also when you go live.

I think you do live really well, by the way, which is kind of an art in and of itself. Y'all have a great one. Y'all have a great Friday. Happy Veterans Day for all of you who have served. Thank you so much. I want to give a shout out. Happy Friday. I want to give a shout out to Carl Nard on Instagram. His full name is Carl Maynard. He is out of DC. He's a creator. in our Air Force and is currently running for 24 hours. He basically is trying to raise awareness for military suicide and basically the number that he came out to is that there's 24 suicides a day, I believe is what he said in the military.

So he is running, walking for 24 hours in honor of his father's, of his fallen brother. So I wanna give a shout to Carl Maynard today and also want to give another shot to my guy, Brian Gans, who is raising awareness as well for men's health and men's mental health month in out in California and he's doing a group workout. So want to get a shot to those two creators who I admire a ton outside of tech. So Lawrence, you the man, I appreciate you. Taylor, you're the best. I still want to know how you got to ride a love you because that just doesn't happen in tech.

We don't like recruiters, but we all love Taylor. And if you don't love Taylor, there's something wrong with you because you're not going to buy one better. Yeah, I've always had a few people block me recently. That's okay. So anyways, all that being said, y'all have a good one and we'll, oh, oh, by the way, I'm off next week. Wedding wife and I are going for their seventh year wedding anniversary next week. So your boy will be out Monday through Thursday. Shout out to marriages. Shout out to marriages. They can be hard, but they are also very, very good. So y'all have a good one.

We'll see y'all next week. There you go. Hey, you did it. You listened 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 finished 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 Tdastin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.