leaving corporate america w/ cto david fannin

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All right, we got that. Try that. All right, we're gonna go live. Oh, sweet. This looks fun. Wait a minute. Hello, everybody. Good morning. I'm trying to go live on Substack. This is new. We've sent a push notification to your subscribers. Interesting. Uh, all right. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. I still got to still do this. No one's here yet, so we're just we're just yapping. Um, uh, David, I always I I asked this at the end, but I'm starting to ask this in the beginning. Um, are you a coffee or tea guy? Oh, coffee 100%. I'm actually a coffee snob, dude. Same. Let's talk about it.

Do you have Do you're in LA, right? I'm actually not. So So the majority of the company is in LA. I'm actually in the south. So I'm actually in Birmingham, Alabama. I'm the only one in Alabama. So we're a fully remote company. We are all over the US and in Canada. So we have several people, three actually in Canada in like the Toronto and the Vancouver area. We have people in Nebraska, Nashville. Most of us are in LA because that's where the film industry is and that's you know where we're all right. So coffee. So like do you give me your go-to spot in Birmingham?

Oh man, it's actually uh the coffee scene in Birmingham is actually pretty good, but some of my favorite spots just shut down um for whatever reason. Um but there's still several ones that are like either convenient. There's like June downtown. There's like Ko, which is like the closest one. Um there's this one in called Seeds over in Homewood. Really great. Um, but yeah, I I uh No, no Starbucks, no anything has to be craft level. Yeah, I will go out of my way when I travel to find a coffee shop. Yeah. Anytime I go corporate, anytime I go to a new city, like that's on my bucket list is like find all the coffee shops and visit all I can.

And you find them by finding like which shops look the most pretentious. At least that's what I do. You go to like you go look them up on Google and you're like, some pretentious coffee. Yes. Like they they definitely call it espresso and milk. I'm I'm going to go there. It's going to be great. Do you Okay. And now here's a bigger question. We have some people tuning in. Welcome everybody. Please say hey. Would love to hear from you. Um hot or iced? I think this is the biggest I can go argument that I have. I can go either way. I'm hot. You go either way.

Yeah. So, uh I I'm an ice guy. I've I I never drink hot coffee. my even in the winter, not even where I was in Boston for tort in January. It was 13 degrees outside and I was drinking iced coffee. So, um uh for me, I feel like hot coffee uh uh you just you just you can't taste it. You're just drinking hot liquid. Sounds like you're not doing it right. I know. Maybe maybe not. Maybe not. So, anyways, good morning everybody. Happy Tuesday. Pumped for uh uh this episode. Um I love talking with folks. to have some Nashville connection. Obviously, this show we we bring on people from all over the country, really the world.

Had some people in India on the show and so um excited for this one. There's some connections to Nashville. David and I are going to talk about it. Um but, uh pumped for this. Before we dive in, as always, please say hey. We'd love to hear from you. I was talking about I was talking to David about this backstage and I really haven't talked about this publicly. So, I'll kind of share why I do a morning show. So when I got so back when I was a kid, the I I visibly have the memories of listening to radio stations first thing in the morning as my mom took me to school and you know it was back in the 90s playing absolute you know '9s bangers and uh and and I just loved like the back and forth of uh you know the the the disc jockeys and all that stuff.

And so back when I was at Veco I was like well I want to do a morning show. I was telling David my original intention was just to talk about jobs like just have a morning show. yap, talk about jobs and and we still may do that here at Torque. But, you know, the the reason why I do do it in the mornings is my thought is grab a cup of coffee on your way to work or or maybe you're in between meetings and come hang out with some guests. So, that's that's kind of where that where that started. I've never shared that live, so there you go.

Um, a few other things. Uh, first and foremost, want to give a shout to Apprite. Um, me and my colleague Jason Torres are on the Heroes program at Apprite. Um, go check them out. great crew, great piece of software. Um, also too, listen, you know, David asked me backstage, you know, how are you guys doing with with Torque? And I was like, listen, like we're crushing it. If you want to check out all the events we do, again, I pull from nostalgia. Cable TV used to have the guides, right? The the guides on what you're watching, we actually have a guide on the torque. Community page.

You can I really pull from a lot of nostalgia. I didn't realize that. Um, but if you go to Torque.com community page, you scroll down a little bit, you can see the guide on all the events we do every single week. So, go check that out. Um, I had somebody join last night. Shoot me a text. Um, shout Natalie. Uh, text live 615235-5650. Um, if you want to be updated on when I go live with folks like David. Um, want to get to a few people tuning in this morning. Again, Kelly, it's good to see you. Jason, um, my guy is always late to meetings.

He's trying to turn a new leaf, hence hence him mentioning that he's early. Bonnie, it's good to see you. Ricardo, it's good to see you. Uh, I'm guessing keynote name is a play on film terms. So, so it is it's actually um like what they call cinema in Germany. So, it's a German term. It means like motion. I love that. So, Jason is a former film guy. So, I'm sure he'll have some thoughts along the way of this episode. Ice either way or iced all the way. Either way is a good answer. Jaylen, my guy from the Torque community. Good to see you. No hot coffee for me, too.

Thank you, Bonnie. I appreciate that. Jeff, it's good to see you. Uh hot coffee for the win. Jeff, it's one thing I disagree with you on. Uh one of the best ways to get my morning started, Kelly, that means a lot. Sebastian, it's good to see you. Chris, it's great to see you as well. Um, awesome. Sweet. All right, cool. Enough with me yapping. David, let's give the people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. Yeah. So, um, I am the CTO and one of the co-founders of Kino. So, we we are a technology company that works in the film space.

We've worked in both kind of the BTOC space where we um we've hosted like film festivals and um live premieres of movies so you could watch the film live on our platform before it made its way to Netflix. It was like a whole event we had the cast and crew come on you could interact and ask questions stuff like that and we also work in the B2B space which is kind of our focus this year focusing on the B2B. So we're working with film studios and providing them a way to share their film in a very very secure way um before again it goes to Netflix.

So if you think about it, you're a filmmaker, you make a movie, you want to sell your movie. So in order to sell your movie, people have to watch it, right? So you send this movie out to hundreds, even thousands of people. Um if that movie, if one of those thousands of people that you send it to is a bad actor, that movie gets pirated, it can sometimes kill the deal. Netflix isn't going to buy it. if it's not available on a on a torrent site. So what we built is a is a highly secure platform where filmmakers, studios can distribute their film before it gets picked up.

So that's just like one use case of it. That's really cool. Um but that's it. Just secure secure film distribution. So So do people So So I'm curious. So how do you make money? So we we have deals with um studios, right? So that's the B2B side. There's like enterprise level contracting. So depending on, you know, how much throughput they have, depending on how much storage they have, um depending on how many people they're sending it to. So those are very kind of unique contracts that we build that's custom for the studios. And then um one thing that's really important to us is that we're helping film and TV become more equitable.

So, we want to provide the same tools to the smaller filmmakers that may not have the budgets of the big film companies, but they still need to be able to protect their art and their IP that they so we have a a much like cheaper entry level um for the smaller film. That's awesome, man. That's awesome. All right. So, I want to talk about your career, right? I mean, I think you were once a corporate engineering manager. Fun fact. Yeah. David helped write the TSA. What was it? TSA what? Bio biometrics. What? What would you say? Yeah, the the biometric enrollment for TSA pre-check. So, built the software so when you go to the airport, you don't have to take your shoes off and it's it's fantastic.

If you don't have it, I still always promote it every time I talk to someone. $85 for five years. The the best money you can spend. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, that was really cool. There's the company here in Nashville that actually responsible for that, believe it or not. Um so talk about uh so engineering leader for you know kind of a corporate engineering leader for how long? Oh uh 10 years probably across like yeah a couple different companies. Um talk about what made you make the pivot man because I think a lot of people are like man engineering leader you got it made dude like like like what made you jump?

So, I I kind of I'll give the really quick version of um my background, kind of the the story. Yeah. Yeah. Um so, I actually grew up in a very conservative, legalistic kind of Christian home where we weren't allowed to watch movies. We weren't allowed to um wear shorts, women couldn't cut their hair, wear makeup, like so a bunch of things. But the big thing was like you couldn't watch film, you couldn't play or sports. And so I didn't get access to a lot of film. And when I was a teenager, I I got into um technology. My brother and I kind of so actually founded the company with my brother, which is really cool.

We usually play off the story together because he has his whole his whole story where he goes to the Matrix. He sneaks out, goes and watches the Matrix um in the theaters with one of his friends at the time. And it blows his mind because he's like he's watching his life play out on the on the screen, right? Yeah. He's he feels like he's Neo. Um, and so while he was doing that and he was kind of very loud and doing all these things, I just got into technology. I learned how to and I actually pirated. So I was I was That is hilarious. So you've developed the a piece the your business is essentially absolutely uh protecting what you were doing.

So I I figured out how to do that. I got my hands on basically any movie I could watch. Um, and I just watched everything until one day I got a cease and desist letter from the FBI and No way. Terrified me. Luckily, I checked the mail that day living daylights out of me. Yeah. Yeah. I checked the mail that day. So, like I actually found the letter instead of my parents. I'm not sure if I was more, you know, afraid of them finding it or the FBI letter itself, but I was drilling drilling holes through like hard drives and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. So, um, so that kind of started the journey. Um after that I uh I I got into tech. I started doing like graphic design, working at a print shop, doing like freelance stuff for businesses, setting up websites. Um uh I I worked uh doing government contracting in the biometric security space for a long time. Um and then got into real estate tech, which is actually really cool. Um because that was so that was at Real Track, right? That was at Real Track. Yeah. So um doing the the government contracting sounds really cool. biometric security like it's got to be cutting edge really it's not working in like the government space to get anything approved is a pain like you have to go through all these steps so you're always working in like a little bit dated technology it's very hierarchical so like structure you have one job you fit in that role there's definitely a hierarchy this person's been here two years longer than you so they're above you in the totem pole a lot of stuff like that that I think really um stifles creativity and innov innovation and so making that move into the real estate tech, it was for this company called Rails Tracks.

They're a real estate MLS. Um, and we really had a lot of control over how we wanted the team dynamics to be and how we wanted to build and operate. So that was really really cool because we got a the actually the technology we're building was actually way more cutting edge but especially when it comes to like the culture and how you treat one another. Um we got to try a bunch of stuff out like we completely got rid of title. So there was no senior engineer, junior engineer, senior principal architect, you know, none of that. And the idea is you you would get compensated um based off of the value that you're adding, right?

Like so there's there's it's not like everyone's being made the same. You get compensated. What's right? E equitability is the key there. But what it does is it creates an environment where you can collaborate because if you've ever been in a meeting where you have like a senior engineer and a junior, the senior always dominates the conversation when the juniors a lot of times have really really great ideas, a different perspective, a different way of I love that. And then that was at Real Tracks. That was at Real Tracks. Yeah. So that kind of started that. Um, and I was on that journey at Real Tracks.

Loved it. Still love the team there. Still talk to Doug and Nate and John and a bunch of people over there. They're they're they're awesome and doing really cool things. So when we brought when we originally came on to Real Tracks, um, the technology was really dated. They had been working on this new version of their technology for like three years. Finally released it. They hadn't done user testing. They hadn't done a lot of stuff. And so it was it was a bust. and it was hurting people's livelihood because these real estate agents like needed this to work so that they could sell houses, make money, pay their bills.

And so we were kind of brought in during this. So over the course of the um five years that we were there, we changed a lot of stuff. We we implemented all these new ideas and things and um the last year before I left, we actually won technology company of the year. you did was super super cool and that felt like kind of a good close of that chapter and that story. And so a lot of the reasons why we started, you know, came down to uh timing like everything just worked out. Um my brother uh is in the film industry. He's made shows with Jimmy Kimmel, Matt Damon.

Oh wow. Peter Berg, a bunch of really cool stuff. And so he would call me from set um and just talk about the film industry, Hollywood, all the crazy stuff they would do. Um just super backwards. They'd be handing people like envelopes full of cash, no good accounting. Um and so we had been talking about doing something film industry for 10 12 years at this point. Yeah. And um there was a lot of things that kind of just worked out at the time. I I just like sold one of my homes. I had a little bit of cash in the bank. I was like, "Okay, I can take a pay cut for a little bit." Sure.

Um which is a bit is a real thing when you're starting a startup like you can't expect to, you know, make market of what you're making. So there was a lot of stuff like that and everything kind of just worked out. Um the the story of how the company kind of got started is kind of crazy, too. Um my brother was sitting down at dinner with some friends who happened to be a Sequoia scout and was just telling him about all this stuff and he was like, "Oh, dude, you got to do this." Sea, like the investment firm. The investment. Yeah. He's like, "Man, you have to you have to go build this." And so that was actually our first check.

Um that's awesome. Just your first check. No, no big deal. Yeah. And from there it just kind of built on and as as things do like the company has changed a lot in the three and a half years. Um but still like everything comes back to trying to make film industry more equitable, more efficient and more engaging. Yeah, I love that. Talk about I I am curious. I mean you know one of the things you put on your questions that I ask when people register I mean you talked about hiring engineers and and you know feature engineers, product engineers. I mean, can you dive into that, especially as folks who may be looking for a job, what you what you like to see when you hire engineers?

And again, there's no right or wrong answer here. I'm just interviewing David. Um, but I mean, can can you talk about how you like engineers to to think and communicate and all that jazz? Absolutely. Have you ever heard of um Silicon Valley product group? No. Um Marty Kagan, there's there's a whole a whole crew of them out there. they they wrote some really great um books um inspired empowered um all these all these books and so a lot of these ideas come from them um I don't follow absolutely everything they do but a lot of it a lot of it does this idea of a product engineer versus a feature engineer comes from um the book empowered okay this this idea is if you have a feature engineer they're the ones that are like give me my acceptance criteria I'm going to go right I'm going to check every single thing off and push the ticket and it's no longer my problem, right?

I check. So, so the idea of a product engineer is you come in and it's someone who you can explain, hey, here's the intent and the expectation. Here's the problem we're trying to solve and they can go in there, they don't need an acceptance criteria list. They can go in there, they can figure out those things. They can find things that maybe the product manager missed during discovery and they can bring those ideas up. And so, when we build product, we build things that are usable, valuable, feasible, and viable. And one person can't solve all of those things. That's why we say um that's why we say discovery is a team sport.

Sure. You can't just have one person. You can. You're just going to get a subpar product because they only have one person. So, it's this idea of someone that goes beyond just checking the boxes and actually really understands the intent, really puts himself in the place of the customer, has lots of empathy. How, you know, you're you're definitely not the first person that said this recently. I interviewed another startup founder, uh, Rachel Lambert. She created the the the networking platform that's been used by like All-In podcast, Jason Calcanis and all those guys to like basically host events across the globe at one time. And she's kind of said the same thing.

And so I want to ask you this, like, how do you I love it. Pat, uh, Pat Pat goes, "Have those books on my bookshelf right now." And he sent the Amazon link. I love it. How how does one be have that mindset, right? Do do you hire for people who like love the industry? Because if people love the industry, they're going to know and kind of have that mindset a little bit more. Like what are just how can folks who watch this now or in the future really use it or or learn it? Yeah. Um I mean it's all about having a growth mindset, I think, is the thing.

It's all about being humble no matter where you're at. Like that's why we got rid of all the titles for all of our engineers, right? Is because like I think it's a great idea. No matter how high you are in the architect, no matter how long you've been doing it, there's always something more to learn. Yeah. And so um when we interview we actually have this like document that we created so during the interview process so that everyone can be involved in that and we have like different sections like there's a section of competency right like this person has to be able to come in you can't always just hire for someone that like they have a lot of great potential um because they have to be able to come in and do their job or else you're setting them up for failure.

You don't. So, you have to hit competency. Um, you have to hit the, uh, not an test, which is like, is this person teachable? Are they humble? Can you actually put them in a room with someone who is more junior than them and they will listen and understand? I love that. And then also like when you're hiring an engineer, like get your product team in there to talk to because they're the ones that are doing the discovery. They're the ones that can like go in there and really like sus out how does this person you have to be able to have a little bit of a product add-on as an engineer especially in like these new days unless you want to go work on a team of you know 500 engineers and all you're doing is writing unit test.

Yeah. Um but but if you want to be a part of a smaller team the other thing that we do is a very small team. So we set people up with like product manager and a few engineers and they are this like small nimble team that can go and work really really well. So when you're on that small team you as an individual have to take a lot more kind of responsibilities outside of what you know you would normally do if on a large team, right? Yeah. So um a lot of that comes into humility like owning up to failures, owning up to times and like how do they react to those times that they failed?

Like what was their response? I love that. I love that. That's great. Talk about, let me ask you this. I mean, obviously going from corporate into starting your own thing. You obviously made inroads obviously with your brother being in the industry. Are there any just general thoughts around job security right now in the market, tips and advice for folks who may want to start their own thing? Um, just kind of kind of around that area. Job security meaning like is AI going to take all of our jobs? No. I mean because I don't think it is anytime soon. Uh but I I I guess just meant like because I just feel that even since I've been recruiting, mind you, I've been recruiting since 2011.

Like I remember when I was recruiting when like .NET MVC was hot, like we were web forms and then NVC came out and everybody was freaking out about it, right? So I've seen the progression of the internet as as I've been recruiting engineers and I feel like nobody wanted a contract job 10 years ago. Now everyone's like, "Yeah, no, that's fine." So it's more of just like at the end of the day, you're probably not going to be at the same place. I mean, maybe not. Like I want to be at Ronad and Torque for a long time, but realistically, I just feel like the the the temperature of of corporate America shifted a little bit.

Yeah. I think there's a lot of things that play into that. I think, you know, 20 years ago, the the gold standard was stay at the same company for 50 years and get the gold watch. Yeah. Right. And so then that changes and you you start to see, you know, the the the average time that people spend at a company kind of drop, right? Which means you have more churn. Um and and now like I think AI is a real thing. I don't think that it's going to replace all of our jobs overnight, but it's going to make engineers more efficient, right? Sure. So as an engineer, if I can leverage AI correctly, then I should be able to do the job of five engineers.

Um you you see this in like the large companies, the Google's, the Salesforce, Cloudflares, they're saying like 30 to 50% of our code is now written by it's going to become better. It's going to get better. And so I do think that's a real thing because it's not that these jobs won't exist, but if you know Google's laying off their engineers because they're replacing them with AI, then the job market is going to get more tough because you have someone that's lives in Nashville, worked at a few like medical places here and there, they submit their resume alongside someone who's been at Google for 10 years.

Like it just makes it a lot more a lot more difficult, I guess. Yeah. So I got two questions here. here came in. Definitely want to get to these. Jason goes, "What made you decide to jump from one super challenging industry to another?" I often ask myself this. Yeah. So, um, if we look at the the time that I went from like the biometric security to real estate, which seems like again it's, uh, seems like a step back if you were just to look at it from like a Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Um, but but in reality, there was a lot more opportunities for me to have growth.

I think one of this whole thing whether it comes with AI or whatever is we always have to growing. We can't let ourselves get stuck. So at Morpho Trust now um I was building tech that impacted like all of the US in a high like very high visible way. We worked not on just like TSA PreCe. We had a bunch of different federal programs as well as state programs. Sure. And so like very very high impact. So when you move to real estate tech working for an MLS like it seems like it's lower lower impact and you know a smaller bucket. However, we had a lot more freedoms in how we led the team.

We had to we got to try things out that we would have never gotten approval for you know at at Morpho Trust. um we had got to build the teams in a different way and um and try these things out which is really really cool like going from you know doing scrum on a four-week sprint cycle to doing continuous delivery where you're delivering code releasing multiple times a day zero downtime deliveries in the middle of the day um like stuff like that which is like really cutting edge when it comes to like how do you build a product is really cool I love that so so what I'm hearing you say is You kind of have to decide it for yourself.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And you have to be okay with your decision, right? You can't look back like a year later and been like, man, I really missed a great opportunity. You have to say like, why am I here at this job right now? What my um one of my career coaches along my way, uh actually Doug, you all know Doug, he's awesome. Love Doug. He once told me that um was like, "David, you should go and interview for jobs like on an annual basis." And you can your your manager at the time told you that. Absolutely. Yeah. That's crazy. I love that. I love that.

He said because like if you turn those jobs down and you stay, then you're not wondering if you're missing opportunities. You're noting like am I am I here because I'm afraid that I don't know how to interview? I love that. Did I did I lose that skill? But you're staying and you know you're staying here and you're like more motivated to be here, right? Or if that other job comes up, you know, great. like congratulations. Like I'm glad you had that uh have this new opportunity. I love that. Uh yeah. No, I agree. I mean I I think I think a lot of times I think a lot of times people don't I listen I don't want any of my team to leave me.

Jason's one of them and he's obviously listening to this now. But at the end of the day, if you want to go interview and see what else is out there, that's fine. I can't stop you. But I think a lot of people just need to realize that sometimes the grass isn't always greener. Yeah. And I think a lot of times people want to scratch an itch. And listen, I I listen, I was at Veco for 11 years. Like I interviewed other places, but what I realized after interviewing other places is that I got it pretty good right now, right? And but again, if you don't have those conversations, then you don't know.

Yeah. And it wasn't like a I'm going to go interview somewhere else so I can get an offer and leverage it for a pay raise. Correct. Wasn't anything like that. It was it was something where you go and you make sure that I'm where I want to be right now and it it it builds more trust with your current employer, your current manager, like you said, like you realize like you have it pretty good. Yeah, absolutely. Uh uh Taran comes in here. Can you define leveraging AI correctly? I feel like this is an entire live stream in and of itself, but I So we work in the film industry.

one of the biggest things that like we had a we had a like historic double strike um a couple years ago, right? Because the of AI was one of the big components of that. So when it comes to generative AI and like replacing people's ability to have like art and expressive art, I I think that's a a poor use case of AI. The places where I think it really really shines and I can give a couple of examples. One of the things we do um at Kino is when we're doing our user discovery calls, we will get permission and then we'll record them on on GME, right?

And then we'll get those annotations. We'll drop that in AI and we'll say can you summarize this? Then we'll do this for 10 15 different like user discovery calls. Then we'll drop all of that in there and we'll say hey give me the patterns like what are the things? Help me pull out all of these like things. So then it bubbles up to the top like hey like most of the people were talking about this specific thing and so it really helps you like process and analyze data. So like that's one really good use case. Yeah. Um another one is uh like using AI agents when you're when you're writing code you have to be very careful right you can't just trust that the AI is going to uh write the code well.

But I I have AI built into my IDE and I will let it stub out and do a lot of the busy work because it can do that in matter of minutes and it would take me hours and then I have to go in and I have to write all the meat and potatoes of the code. Sure. But it it's like how do we get rid of that that busy work? So that's what I would say like when I'm talking about leveraging AI, it's not about replacing what I do day-to-day, but it's about helping me move faster in the like more mundane busy work areas.

I love that. Yeah. I mean, again, Teran, I I think this is so I'm working on a panel with our sales team about accessibility in AI. Um I think that's going to be a great conversation, too. So Terron, be on the lookout for that. We'll announce that in the Discord. Um, but yeah, again, great great question. Can be a longer conversation. Are you guys using any AI agents at Kino right now for coding like uh yeah, so we've tried a couple things out. We tried GitHub Copilot. Um, we've tried uh actually the thing that we're using right now is called Juny. It's we use WebStorm.

Um, okay. And Jet Brains IDEs. And so it's the Jet Brains um AI. Okay. Now I only have like I say I don't have titles. my more senior uh engineers who have been doing this for a while that like there's like a level of trust that they're going to know how to do this correctly know when not to trust AI actually read through the code and you know line by line and make sure so we're very like careful with it still. Sure. Um so we're not full-fledged like using AI agents to go build features or anything like that but it's it's again like hey we're about to do a major refactor.

um let's write a really good prompt and get it to help us get 75% of the way there and then we come in and and close out the last 25. But I feel like that's kind of been consistent what I'm hearing from other engineering leaders too. Do you let me ask you this are do you look for devs to have any sort of experience using AI right now when you hire? Uh not not explicitly but I think it's important. I think the thing when it comes to AI and being afraid, especially this fear of AI is going to take my job is there's a couple approaches you can go.

One, you can go, I'm all in on AI. I'm doing nothing but vibe coding, right? And I'm going to build this whole app. And then, you know, you try to push it out to production and it's on some Versel app and it's not secure and you have all these issues, right? So then the other extreme is like I'm not going to use AI at all because I'm gonna like I'm so afraid of it or I'm so like anti- AI that I'm And like that's the one that I think a lot of engineers might fall into where they get so far behind that they kind of get um left uh in the dust and then like five years down the road they realize that like I'm kind of obsolete because I don't know how to operate on what is the standard norms.

Huh. Okay, that's good. I feel like I made a post about this. I feel like where we're at with AI right now is where we were with like when React came out on the scene. um is where like hey you don't need to know React but more companies are going to start using it and you kind of need to start getting familiar with it. Um and I just feel like again it's it's another trend or not a trend but it's a it's another wave that is happening right now. Yeah. I mean who knows what it's going to look like five years. Yeah. Yeah. Do you do do you think we're going to live in a world again there's a little hot take here.

Do you feel like we're going to live in live in a world where we're going to have, you know, there's I I think, you know, I I like how you said the the extremes here. Um, you know, no AI to vibe coding. Do you feel like, you know, I I've heard things where there's just going to be agents coding and then there's going to be like an an engineering manager, an AI agent manager. It's just going to be checking everything. Do you think we're going to ever get there? Yeah. I mean, it would be silly if we didn't get there, right? like the the technology will get to that point.

I don't know how long it's going to take. Sure. Sure. Um but I think it it would be silly to think that this technology wouldn't anything that is is really digital like it should be able to replace. Um the the thing that's kind of crazy I think this is like engineering became so big so many people went into the engineering field and kind of got flooded, right? And so I think now the it's starting to kind of like pull back on some of this because now some of the stuff can get automated. I think of do you remember in the like earlier days of Apple when they released the app store and the app store just got flooded with all of these like Yeah.

You drink beer out of your phone like that. Yeah. Yeah. It's like oh look it's a fart app. It makes fart sounds right. So, I I feel like we're going to hit that with um AI at some point where there's all these like vibecoded apps that someone just thought up and it's going to flood the market and the market's going to have to like figure out how do you weed through the noise to find the things that are actually valuable. Um I don't know that like so I'm a parent. I have two girls. Um and I don't know that let's go. I would I would encourage them to get into programming right now.

Like I think my hot take is robotics and hardware is the next wave. Yeah. But even with robotics and hardware like at what point does that become automated? Like the majority of factory manufacturing is automated already technology, right? So there's very few like handheld I'm going to screw this in and and fabricate it by hand type thing. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Uh Pat goes, does that mean fewer meetings with with with AI agents? I would say probably more because you're gonna have to do more micromanaging. Yeah, you're gonna have to be doing more prompt engineering, less uh Yeah. Yeah. Uh I had a there's a question here and we're going to want to wrap up uh with this question.

I don't know what this means. Maybe maybe you know what it means. Can you give some pointers on blue green deployments? Yeah. So um so we have a we call it our blue green stack. We have two different live uh uh servers that are set up. Okay. And um we have our networking set up so that one of them is live, the other is what we call our staging. So doing um doing deliveries like doing multiple deployments today with with a day with zero downtime, you have to solve a lot of problems. Okay. So um that there's a lot to get into so I don't know if I can super get into it but the idea is that you have to route your network traffic in a way that whenever you you make a release so you have to separate like when you deploy code from releasing value.

So you deploy to your side that's not live click a button and then it becomes live. You have to do some network magic to make sure everyone's now writing to routing to the side. There's a bunch of different strategies you take on it, but I I think to your point, we probably don't have time to get into it. It's uh message David, whoever whoever this is. Listen, I always tell folks, please connect please connect with my guests. They're great people. I bring on great people. Um please connect with David and Esa. But yeah, I don't know what this means. It sounds great. So definitely I'm sure if you message David, say, "Hey, I saw on guidance counselor 2.0.

I was one that asked the blue green question. Give me some more information." I'm sure David will do that for you. So, 100%. I love it. I love it. All right, so uh rapid fire kind of last last few bits of questions here. Um we already went over the coffee tea debate at the beginning. Um talk to me, uh talk to me about uh about anybody in your network you want to give a shout out to is doing really cool stuff. Oh man. Um I know people always are like, "Why don't you prep me on this?" because I'm like the whole point is I want immediately who pops into your mind.

The thing is like I've met so many cool people that are solving so many really cool problems um that I I don't know that I could say just one but I know like I was in uh Toronto um for Toronto Tech Week a couple weeks ago and um met so many great people. Now again, 95% of the people I met were solving problems with AI. Like sure, every everything's a new AI company, but there were a lot of really cool implementations of this that like completely blew my mind and something I hadn't thought about. There's this company that was using AI to kind of leverage uh to see um how efficient their engineers are being like, okay, can you can you take this and apply it to like get, you know, pushes and all these things and try and get an idea of like what's basically like Whoop.

Yeah. Programming. Yeah. There was a guy that was doing like had AI for an for uh insect farms and he was helping using cameras and and like humidity things. He was helping these insect farms have higher yield. Um just like crazy things that you would never think. That's nuts. I would love to know the content marketing behind that with AntFarm. Um uh actually Angelo my buddy colleague asked a great question. as as Let's do this because I know there's a lot of Is there anything you've seen lately that you've really liked, so uh it's kind of um I don't get to watch a lot of movies anymore, which is kind of crazy, right?

You're running an organization. I've watched a lot of things that are like movies that we are considering like like distributing ourselves and stuff like that. Um, and then when I usually have time to like sit down, I'm watching something with my wife and so we usually tend to fall back to like some of the classics like New Girl. Um, a New Girl is my favorite. Yeah. Friends, you know, those types of things. She if we start a movie, she usually falls asleep like 30 minutes to it. So, sure. But but do you do you have a favorite movie? I don't know that I do. I know that's a bad answer.

Um, I think like I would say The Matrix, but that would be stealing My Brothers. So, I can't do that. You know what? He's not on the show, though. So, okay. Definitely The Matrix. It's my favorite. It changed my life. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Uh, next question I want to ask. Um, what do you like to do for fun, man? Like, what do you like to do outside of uh coding and running a business all day? I if I had time, I'm usually playing video games, uh, coaching my daughter's softball team. Nice. Do you have a favorite video game you're kind of playing right now?

I do. So, I'm actually using my streaming mic. Um, I used to I used to do uh Twitch streaming and I played a lot of like competitive Fortnite and competitive like Call of Duty. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Don't look me up. Yeah. Yeah. I want to see you in a Call of Duty chat room. Uh, you're talking about like an unhinged guidance counselor 2.0. Yeah, that's a guidance counselor 2.0 after dark. Exactly. Exactly. All right. Last question here, David. Again, thanks for everybody who showed up today. Please go connect with David. Go check out Kino. Um, uh, but so the show is called Guidance Counselor 2.0.

you know, because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults, we don't really have a guidance counselor to turn to um and ask for career advice. If you could go back to young David, um what would be the biggest piece of career advice you tell them? Oh man. Um I think it would just be like not to be afraid of of stepping out and trying new things. Yeah, I mean I think that's like the biggest thing like uh the biggest challenge that a lot of us face is like there's the fear of the unknown and um and so just getting out and trying those new things uh I think is super important.

Yep. I wish honestly I did the same. So I agree. I agree. All right y'all. Uh David stay on so I say bye to you backstage. Y'all have a good one. Tomorrow um I'm hanging out with the amazing Jasmine Vo. She is a senior front-end engineer at Synchrony. Um, but we're kind of going into a little bit, it's going to be kind of a little bit of health wellness. She's really big. She's done like the 75 hard challenge and she's been documenting her journey from a health goals perspective. So, we're going to talk about how health, mental health, physical health really plays into the job searching your career.

So, it's gonna be a great conversation tomorrow. Otherwise, y'all have a great day. Go connect with David and y'all