Hey, books, Welcome to another episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast. This
week, I'm your host, Charles Maxwood and we have a special guests,
Fabio Akita, Fabio. Do you want to tell people how awesome you are
and that I like you? Yeah? Thank you for having me again.
I think it's my third time maybe the show. So if you heard,
were talked about Crystal and Aliksture like five years ago, and from there,
I started a YouTube channel called Akitando here in Brazil. It's an all Portuguese
web YouTube channel devoted to programming techniques, the foundations of programming and from At
the same time, I still have my company we just called Minor forty two,
the software development boutique here in Brazil. We work primarily for us CO.
We have like eighty developers working full time in several projects coast to coast
the US and many people from the old days could probably remembered me from the
Ruby comf Brazil events as well. I was the former organizer of the event
until twenty sixteen. I think, so I've been around for a long time.
Yeah, yeah, and that's how I know you. I think we've
bumped into each other at conferences or you know, I've seen you speak at
different events and things like that, and so yeah, it's it's fun to
just kind of catch up. And you know, I sent you a message
on LinkedIn last week and we chatted for a little bit and so, yeah,
anyway, just great stuff. And we were talking. We were talking
about your YouTube channel, and I was like, that's cool. We should
just get on and talk about some of the things you were talking about on
the channel. And I'm always interested in the content game, right, So
how does that work? You know, how many people did you have listening
or watching and all that stuff? So do you want to just explain briefly
what the channel was about and then we short dive into some of the specifics.
Absolutely. So I was in the I was generating content from a very
long time. Actually my my blog. I was just checking the first blog
post I ever did. It was it's gonna it's gonna make eighteen years next
week, next Friday, actually on April five, the fifth, So it's
my my here in Brazil. My blog would be old enough to drink already.
So it's nice a long time and I've been doing the blog stuff.
I've been doing, as you said, the participating in events, doing as
a speaker. So I here in Brazil, I've been traveling around across the
county tree for many years, so I did like more than two hundred speeches
here in several different locations. And after that I had the conference, and
because of all that content generation stuff that I thought the next step could be
trying the video stuff and see how YouTube acually works and if it would be
any interesting for me to generate content on that. So I didn't have an
exact goal in mind, but I had some principles that I wanted to follow.
For example, it was early on I had in my mind that I
wouldn't want my channel to be monetized in terms of having sponsorships or selling products,
selling courses, particularly because one of the reasons I started the channel was
a reaction to the whole boom of online courses, especially here in Brazil,
where we had so much demand. The demand was so high for online courses
that many of them were borderline frauds and they were yeah, so like pay
us in advance, you're gonna have twelve months of great courses. And then
people jump in and they see that it's like they were copying content from other
places, like other YouTube channels and stuff like that. So it was really
bad, and it was creating a really bad reputation among people that actually wanted
to teach about programming. So how do you separate who's good who's not good?
And many started to see the teaching community here in Brazil as at the
same level as cryptocurrency coaches and stuff like that. So I wanted to create
a YouTube channel that primarily focused on not teach in terms of the classical step
by step procedural procedure, but more on terms of what is computer science,
Why all those boring subjects are actually interesting, How stuff that people don't really
get in the first couple of years in college, like algorithms, like calculus,
like all the boring stuff that is not creating real JS components. So
I wanted to do all that that stuff at the same time explaining more about
what the market is, how the careers work, how even a little bit
of how financial markets work, because the IT market is a part of the
bigger scale financial markets, and all the bubbles and all the hypes why we
have bubble cycles, what's going on? So really get a a grasp of
the larger picture. Let's put it that way, while at the same time
diving deeper than most online courses in terms of explaining how computers work. What
is for example, what is UH low level coding? What is machine code?
And how how does that progress into larger languages or higher level languages?
Even getting as far as explaining what is UH? What is optimization? What
is performance? What is relevancy? How do you calculate relevancy? How does
Google? How is Google able to provide you everything you want to know in
the first couple of pages of the search results. So all of that stuff
I wanted to explain in a real deep way. So many of my videos
are more than an hour long, so I had, like, in five
years, I produced one hundred and fifty videos, give or take, and
most of them are on the range of an hour, a couple of them
an hour and a half. I actually started the channel without knowing the exact
structure, so I shot at two videos every week of fifteen to twenty minutes.
Then I started consolidating to one video a week of half an hour long,
then a video every two weeks of an hour long, and that format
stayed for three to four years. And what I wanted to do was to
not only explain all of that, but also mix with my own experience in
the working as a proper programmer, engineer, architect through the last thirty years.
My career starts in the early nineties, and I think I had enough
experience to explain what happens in your whole career starting from college all the way
to becoming an entrepreneur content generator. Because another frustration that I had was many
people starting those online courses didn't even have like five years working properly as a
programmer, and they were explaining, I'll teach you advanced stuff that Google wants.
So I'm saying, no, you won't, and I'll explain why.
So k, that was the gist of it. That's awesome. Yeah,
just talking a little bit about you know, how some of this goes together.
I mean, we've been we've been producing Ruby Rogue since what twenty eleven,
so you know, we're we're almost thirteen years here, and uh yeah,
it's it's interesting to see where people find the value, right and you
know, that level of experience. We've had a number of just highly experienced
people as hosts on the show, and it makes a huge difference, and
you you can figure out pretty quickly whether or not somebody is the real deal
or not. So and I think that's important. The whole course thing kind
of well not kind of. It really bothers me, But I don't know
that I have a whole lot more to say about it than what you said.
You know, if you're going to promise somebody something, deliver it.
But yeah, so let's dive into some of the aspects of algorithms and career
decisions and things like that, because what I find is I'm talking to a
lot of people who are at a crossroads at their you know, where they're
working, right, And so for some people it's hey, I'm new or
new ish trying to decide what to learn, which direction to go, what
technology to use, things like that. And then the other group that I
seem to be talking to quite a bit more these days is people who have
been laid off, right, And so, hey, I've been programming in
rails for you know, teen years, and you know, I'm having trouble
finding a job. And you know, first of all, you know,
they're not understanding the economic forces at work that kind of put us in this
position. But then also you know, just the what do I do about
it? So let's kind of take these in reverse order for the people who
are out of work, right. I actually did a Twitter space this morning
and talk to some folks about who were, you know, between jobs,
about what they were doing. And it's tough out there, It's really tough.
So if you're sitting there between jobs, know, maybe you're Ruby or
rails developer, what do you recommend people do? Yeah, so this is
a question that many people having everywhere, not only in the United States,
here in Brazil as well. We had our fair share of big layoffs as
well in the Oh I'm sure. Yeah, So a lot of people are
are struggling to find good jobs nowadays. So and that was another pillar of
my channel. My channel started in August of twenty eighteen, So since twenty
eighteen, I was already because I'm not only a programmer, not only a
company owner entrepreneur, I also invest in the financial market, so food disclosure
that I am an investor stock in the stock market as well, and I
was the way I see how we got here is in two thousand and eight,
we had that big economic yeah, housing bubble. It was a disaster.
People were foreseeing the end of times and stuff like that, and we
were able to jump back in. And actually the decade that followed two thousand
and eight was possibly the best decade that the technology market has ever seen.
So not only we had a fast recovery, but we also had a big
breakthroughs. For example, it was in two thousand and eight two thousand and
nine that the whole mobile ecosystem was actually built. We had the long to
the app store, then we had the big apps such as Uber, Airbnb,
and all of those actually started around that time, and the demand for
technology grew very fast, and many considered programming as the kind of like a
savior more less to that financial crisis and going back up creating new opportunities,
new markets that never existed before. For example, for people that could now
work for making deliveries for DoorDash, or renting their houses apartments at Airbnb and
stuff like that. So created a whole new market for many people, not
only in the programming space, but the the ecosystem as a whole. So
twenty fourteen, I think it was the peak where the awareness of programming caught
up to the mainstream. Many people was wondering what the hell is this programming
thing that I'm hearing about all the time? New millionaires, new billionaires coming
out of nowhere. So everybody wanted to jump in this bandwagon. That's when
we started. We start to see the rise of the boom of online courses,
coaches, uh, workshops, whatever, uh trying to sell to a
whole new generation about this uh gold mine called programming. So many people that
wouldn't consider programming as their first option started to jump into this market. And
the whole, the whole marketing approach that I think was very, very wrong
was that all programming is too easy. Anyone can do it. If you
just copy and paste to follow these simple steps, you can build things that
Google wants and they will hire you for whatever, uh whatever you wanna you
want as your payment, and it's gonna work. So we and more than
that, we because of the financial pressure the way the governments and the the
Fed, for example, they tackle that problem. So interest rates went to
all time lows. That man, that many many, most of the money
that would be on treasury bonds started to flood the markets. So now we
have liquidity for lots of investments in very dubious entrepreneurships. And it was exactly
like in the year two thousands with the Internet bubble. We saw that if
you were a programmer back in those days, I saw that in the year
two thousand. I saw that in twenty ten as well, So it was
the same. It was the same motivation, was the same hype, but
much bigger this time. And because of that, I think twenty eighteen,
I was starting to see cracks in the model. It couldn't last forever.
You can't just generate an army of people that knows not a lot more than
copy and pasting things into a text editor and calling it programming. So there's
a limit to where you can go. And the limit came, and I
think the whole then we had the pandemic, and the pandemic instead of instead
of popping that bubble, it actually expanded it. People doubled down on technology
during the pandemic because people are staying at home now more than ever. Apps
and technology were again the safe haven. So people were staying at home,
receiving deliveries through door buying, through Amazon, watching Netflix, doing work,
using zoom calls and all those startups. They doubled in price and they the
demand for that was so big that they doubled the amount of people they were
hiring. So from two thousand twenty one to twenty twenty two, many of
those tech companies doubled their headcount. So it was crazy like that. But
then we had the big crash. Inflation came in, interest rates went up,
so now liquidity was out. There were no more liquidity in the market.
And how most of those tech startups they didn't have any profit. They
were depending on the next round of investment that never came. So now we
are entering twenty twenty two and most of those companies were having to do big
mass layoffs, and now we had dozens of thousands of people without a job,
and they were all I wouldn't say they were food. I think many
of those people they knew what they were getting into, but they had that
mindset that was, yeah, I think the future is going to be that
easy, and that's fine. I don't need to invest more than that because
I get paid. I have a job and it pays me well until it
doesn't. And many most of those people, they don't care a lot about
how the money comes in. They just they just assume that it's a thing
that happens. They don't think about, oh, does my employer actually has
any profits? Does my work has any value? So they don't make those
reflections on their actual work, and sooner or later, bubbles like that explode.
In twenty twenty two, I think it was the last drop in the
bucket and it came crashing down. It's still not a crash like it wasn't
the year two thousand, two thousand and one. It's not close to that
because we're still many of those companies are still not profitable, but they still
have investment, they still have some hype. So thet is still going,
particularly in the AI space now because of what we have with GPT and and
BD and stuff like that. So most of those investments are moving towards companies
like Snowflake and other tech startups that are focused on that, and now those
we can talk about that later. But that's a new bubble. But the
web development and mobile apps development bubble kind of crash it down and correct it
a little bit. Still not as bad as one could have predicted. But
because of that, I think we now have the situation where competition is more
difficult. It's more difficult to find good jobs. The demands are more.
People are expecting more of the grammars. Yeah, absolutely so, And I
think you explained it really well. Where do we go from here? I
mean, and not just as a community, but you know, I mean,
I'm talking to some people that are I mean, they're really scared,
really worried, right, They they don't know where to go next, and
yeah, so what do they do? Yeah. So the other thing is
during that exuberance phase where most tech companies had all the money they wanted,
the technology kind of reflect that reality as well. So from two thousand,
i'd say twenty twelve until twenty eighteen, more or less something like that,
we had a lot of new for example, web frameworks doing exactly the same
thing, just they were just inventing reinventing the wheel all the time, especially
in the front end space, so you had like from React all the way
you spelt going through Typescript, new Angular, whatever. So it was a
lot of effort that was wasted. It was a big It was one of
the biggest waste of times I've ever seen in the programming world because we were
just discussing the At the end of the day, we were just discussing how
do I change the cause of the button all over against So it was the
little going on, huh, A lot of bike shedding, A lot.
I say ninety percent of all the discussions that we had the past ten years
in the front end space were big bike shod. Of course, we had
a good, good evolutions, but it was incremental evolutions not We didn't.
It took ten years and we were still discussing the same CSS problems and stuff
like that. So we didn't fix anything. We just made it more more
complicated, and we could afford having more complicated because we had an army of
people that we could that we could use just to actually change the color them
buttons for example. But now now the discussion it shifts to efficiency. So
again, when when we are closer to a recession where money is not easy
anymore, where you don't have free lunch, you actually have to start thinking
how do I properly invest this revenue money that I just got. I can't
just go spending whatever. So efficiency becomes the new priority. And efficiency is
not something that you just learn through a course. There's no courses online that
I'm going to teach you efficiency in penny steps that's not how it works,
productivity, efficiency, stuff like that. So only people that actually uh invested
the time to learn the foundation of stuff can understand optimization, for example,
can understand what to cut and still get good results, not what to add,
but what to cut off and make a bigger difference. I usually I
spent a lot of years saying that the best code a programming can do is
a zero code, because you're not adding new bugs, you're not adding maintenance,
you're not adding a lot of stuff that is actually cost and not But
most of the beginner programmers they think that adding stuff is actually the same as
adding value. But that's not the same, and that distinction only comes with
a lot of practice, a lot of study, a lot of patients actually
caring about your craft to know what to do at this time and in this
this kind of market, the market's gonna it's gonna reward people that knows the
craft properly and can deliver actual value instead of just by shedding. Right.
So, I mean, there's a lot that you said here, and I'm
gonna try and summarize it so I can ask the next question. But effectively,
what you're saying is is that so these companies, they just had all
this money, so they just poured money into things that they didn't even necessarily
need to measure as far as its effectiveness for what they were doing. And
you know that's the example is changing the color of the button, but you
know, it could be any number of things, right, And so now
what we're getting down to is now that money's less easy to come by.
That's what you were talking about earlier with the liquidity, and you know the
ability of these companies to raise money, whether it's through investment or other means.
They're now letting people go because that money has to go further, so
it actually has to matter more what they're working on or so they can't bike
shed over. You know, do we use the next greatest react blah blah
blah unless it's going to help us achieve these outcomes and you know, do
some kind of work for us. So the question I asked was what do
Ruby on rails developers do if they're one of those people that got laid off?
And it seems like the implication is learn how to be able to bring
that value to what you're doing. Right, So you need to be able
to demonstrate that you can do more than bike shed over what tool to use
or what hosting to put it on, or things like that, and actually
identify areas in the code base where adding code ads value, or where removing
code ads value, or where there may be a better solution than sort of
the obvious thing you would reach for. Am I reading that right? Is
that? Is that what you're saying yes in for for us the Ruby on
Rails community, I think this is again a good a good timing and Ruby
on Rails is still one of the only, if not the only web framework
that works stop to bottom, from front end to back end. It's an
entire solution, uh instead of just having pieces and that I have to search
myself and try to weave together in some Jerry ragged way. So I think
Ruby RAI is is still the most cohesive web frameworks out there, and uh
DH has been focusing on bringing on trying to get rid of all that complex
especially on the front end side, script side. It of course is controversial,
of course there's lots of things that we don't agree, but inters of
the general the general vision, I think it's correct in terms of simplifying getting
rid of all the bike shedding discussions and making possible again to be a full
a full not only just a front end developer, not only a back end
developer, but a full stack developer. I think that term is going to
come back again because it was impossible to be a full a full tech developer
because only in the front end side you had to know like twelve different web
frameworks and a combination of like thirty other note packagesings. Yeah, it was
a matrix of stuff that you needed to know. It was impossible. What
CSS framework should I use? Uh, Tailwind whatever, Bootstrap again. Yeah,
So it was crazy. It is it's still crazy, and I think
we we are going to I hope we're going to see a more focused effort
on things that actually work, instead of trying trying to discuss a new re
implementation, a news velt, a new react again and again again, instead
of of getting stuff done and in the in the idea of getting stuff done
again again, we go back to the roots of the agile movement. The
agile movement itself kind of died ten years ago because of because of that that
situation. So in terms of discussing things that doesn't add value, people are
discussing, uh, they were, they were they were thinking that efficiency was
having a report where I estimated ten points whatever and I delivered ten point.
Wow, we're efficient. But that's not efficiency. Efficiency is actual value,
not not trying to fit useless metrics into a report and calling that efficiency.
So I think all of those things are coming into into a discussion. And
again because we get we need to get rid of all of that and start
getting things done, which ironically is the first thirty seven Signals book, getting
getting real to get things done properly. And uh, maybe we're going back
to that. And if we are Ruby and rails, is uh in the
best position to be again the one that starts to deliver value faster with more
quality. We've maintainability in mind because we had all those agile principles imbuilding to
the web framework. We never opted out of testing, for example, because
oh, no one needs to test, because we have an army of people
that can do manual testing. So many companies were doing that. They were
calling that QA. They had like one hundred people just to start clicking things
because they the developers were too important to waste time doing unit tests or automated
test. So yeah, that's the thing that actually happened. I saw companies
that were there were mandating no testing code because we have a QA department company
that's responsible for that, and developers are are in short supply. We don't
want them doing testing stuff. We need them coding new features, new features,
whatever they are, and turn code as fast as possible. And that
was the mindset a couple of years ago. And I think now we're going
to go back to developers that can deliver features that work with minimal bugs,
with test coverage, with proper designs in mind, with proper principles in mind.
So all of that becomes the new the new priority. And when we
say that the bubble crash that we are now coming to recession layoff stuff like
that, it feels doom and gloomy. Uh, But actually that's an opportunity
because anyone that can leverage that position out of uh uh create creating companies or
creating tools or creating whatever that adds value, that brings back productivity, efficiency,
profits, stuff like that, they're gonna be better positioned to uh serve
the next wave, whatever that is, because that there's gonna be a next
wave. I don't know if it's AI, if it's whatever, but if
you have that mindset instead of the let's waste time with whatever, you're gonna
be better positioned to conquer that new wave whatever that is, right, So
I'm just gonna make it really simple. Then are you telling the Ruby people
to just hang in there or are you Are there other concrete steps that they
can take to position themselves for what's coming. Yeah, I think the Ruby
community, the original mindset of the Ruby community shifted because of that period of
time that people are not paying attention to quality anymore to efficiency. So it
was not Ruby and Rails was not a great framework in that scenario because oh,
I can do micro services and Go, I can rewrite stuff in Rust,
I can rewrite my front ten ten times, in tend to web frameworks
and all of these things so many times, so many times. So I
think most true rails developers were disheartened to not be able to participate in that
bigger discussion because'bion rails was not sexy enough because it was too efficient,
It was too easy, it was not flashy enough. It was not wasting
time, So we needed to waste more time to be flashy, and I
waste more resources. Why be efficient if we have money to spare, but
now that we don't, I think the message is all of the principles that
rails are built upon built over. I think those are now the new priorities,
and I think one can be more motivated to learn more about how rails
work, how the ecosystem worked, how we did things back in two thousand
and eight when we launched stuff that was influential like GitHub for example, every
every CI platform that we know was basically made with Ruby and rails. So
we built all the proper tools that people dismissed for ten years, and now
they're there again important. So I think anyone that's beginning in the rugby community
should learn the proper values, what quality is, what proper coding is,
uh and not, and not try to jump into whatever new high comes up
just because it's new. But Ruby and rails now is not the new kid
on the block, but I think it still holds as one of the bastions
of the best practices that I hope are going to start to be more valid
in companies. Again makes sense, So I'm hearing the you think that Ruby
and Ruby on rails is a good longer term bet so, Yeah, So
where are things going to go from here, right, I mean, if
I'm betting on Ruby on rails, I know some people have to go find
work now, and they maybe not be able to find the rails jobs,
right because some of them went away. So should they be picking up things
like AI or yeah? And that's that's another question that I hear often.
What should I start learning or what books should I read or what courses should
I do? Because it's urgent, I don't have time to waste and I
need a new gig right now? What should I do? And that's that's
the Unfortunately, if I had that answer, I would be selling it for
a million dollars because no one has it, right, Let me try to
share what I think about it. Of course, this is really just my
opinion, and there is no proper way. I think most people they they
they are so insecure in feeling that they are not able to decide that that
they try to hear someone like me, someone like you, all the other
influencers asking them for that kind of answer, and there is no answer.
None of us can give an answer to everybody because each person's conditioner is a
situation is going to be very very different. Maybe you are a father that
has to provide for your family three kids. Maybe you're someone that is not
married, you live with your parents, your freelancer whatever, Maybe you have
I don't know, loans to pay, and you have a one hundred thousands
of different situations and there is no one answer that's gonna be good for everybody.
So in terms of principles, yes, you should start learning. If
you don't know already, something that's very practical, something that can be used
in a couple months, you're gonna be productive in something. There's a big
list of stuff that you should probably know, web frameworks, devop tools,
all of the traditional things that most online courses already have. You should start
learning some of that. It's gonna take you, I don't know, six
months, maybe a year. It feels like a long time, but that's
not a long time. It's a very very short window. And try to
find your next gig, your next job, whatever that is. If you
are able to jump into a new job, then you use that time to
not only get better at that those specific tasks, but also trying to experiment
with new stuff that are not gonna be used in your current job. So
be it AI, be it content generation, be it social network stuff,
I don't know, something that feels like a hobby, but you actually have
to study a little bit more. And again there's no course on that.
Maybe you like cryptocurrencies, maybe you like the new crop of AI tools,
I don't know. You can start reading books. There's no one single book,
there's no one single course that's gonna teach you all you need to know.
So you're gonna have to do experimentation. And this is the part that
I think most people are afraid of. When I say experimentation, it's exactly
as the word implies. You have to learn by trial and error. You're
not gonna be able to target a specific learning program that is gonna be one
hundred percent correct, and you're not gonna waste any time that's not gonna happen.
Actually, most of the learning is gonna come from stuff that you do
wrong instead of stuff that you think is right. I think the learning process
is more productive when you're not afraid to make mistakes, because the mistakes are
the stuff that make you actually mature and grow. If you're not making mistakes,
you're not actually learning anything. It's impossible to just learn by reading a
book and not actually trying to do something. You have to accept that you're
gonna make mistakes. It's gonna feel like you're wasting time, and that's part
of the learning process and you have to accept that. The sooner one accepts
that, I think the faster they're gonna learn new stuff. Cool. You
you talked little bit about if you're new to Ruby, you need to learn
these ideas and principles that were in vogue and important to learn ten years ago.
Can can you kind of? And you've you've talked about some of those
as we've gone along, But what are those ideas that get you from you
know, bike chadding to being a contributor that actually brings real value. Sure,
So, I think one of the first mistakes that beginners do is they
think of languages or web frameworks or tools like sports teams, so they cheer
for that team. They feel like they have to be loyal to that team.
Some people actually tattoo the languages or frameworks whatever permanently because they feel like
they own something, They owe something to those technologies. But technologists, at
the end of the day, they're just simple tools. They are not different
from hammers or screwdrivers. You never you're not gonna I don't think someone's gonna
tattoo a hammer just because it's your job to use a hammer. Yeah,
that would be silly. And it is silly to be loyal to a language.
Even though I love Ruby, love Ruby on rails, I'm not loyal
to it in terms of I'm gonna all my decisions are gonna be live or
die by Ruby. So it's not gonna be that. Languages to technologies are
every Every technology is a tool. It doesn't matter. For example, if
I like or dislike I don't know cryptocurrencies. Let's say, so that's something
that's controversial. I don't need to like bitcoin to actually learn the algorithms behind
it. There's a lot of interesting stuff that many people don't even realize.
For example, in terms of Byzantine consensus, that's the same algorithm that we
use for distributed systems to actually have coherence in their communications. So you have
to have some kind of consensus, and bitcoin is one. Maybe if you
like that that theme, you should use that to learn the underlying technologies behind
it. The blockchain, it's basically learning to use hashing. If you don't
know hashing, you don't know cryptography, you need to know something like that.
If you don't know hashing, you don't know what it means if a
data is corrupt or not, you don't know how to index it. You
don't know how to find that data in a bigger data set. So you
have to learn the basics. And if you can use something that a theme
that you like to use and use it to learn the underlying technology, the
better because it's more practical than actually opening a cryptography book, going to the
hashing chapter and trying to memorize what hashing means without a practical usage for that.
So I think you should you should start at something practical and trying to
go deep in the UH in the underlying foundations that make that thing work.
Once you understand what makes the work, you can apply it to other stuff.
Then comes the creative part, the experimental part. Could I use this
technology to this other thing? And then then you start to see uh.
For example, the AI stuff GPUs were made for graphical stuff that it was
made for. CGI was made for games. Someone allow during during the evolution
of GPU's pot Oh, maybe I can use that to process large data sets
and do something with that. Because images are basically matrices of data. Uh
in artificial intelligence deals with matrices of data. Maybe I can use the same
hardware and boom. Then you now have the Nvidia the Nvidia market going up
like crazy nowadays. So, but you never know. Someone had to try
that ten years ago to figure it out and make that work. No one
knew it could work. It was an experimental work. Not everybody can do
that kind of experimentation. But it's not as rocket sciencey as most people think.
It's basically someone with a terminal open doing random code and some of that
actually worked because he didn't know it wouldn't work, he just tried it.
Most things actually work like that. It's not many people think that advanced stuff
like AI, for example, it's probably one hundred web coded people in a
war room focusing on trying to solve that problem. That's not how how innovation
works. We don't. We don't actually do that. It's mostly people that
that do not accept limits trying to push limits. I think that's h and
everybody has to start somewhere and your own limitations in your own learning process and
the prejudices of oh I can't do that. I don't think it's a good
value for my time. It's going to be a waste of my time.
I'm not going to be able to achieve that. And every time you start
thinking about that, you're not pushing your limits. You're not practicing practicing pushing
that limit, and that's how you become obsolete fast instead of actually learning the
learning process. And that's another thing that I've been explaining in my channel,
because it's not obvious, is that people think the learning is receiving a list,
a checklist of stuff and reading through that stuff step by step, and
that is learning, and that is far from learning. Learning is problem is
learning how to solve problems. Learning how to learn is to actually problem solving.
If you don't know how how to tackle a problem that you never saw
before, that was not documented anywhere, how do you tackle a problem that
you never solved before. It's not opening a book, it's not going step
by step for some tutorial. You have to analyze that problem, you have
to see the boundaries, you have to experiment to hypotheses to see if it
works or not, and go gradually, step by step. Eventually you solve
that problem. And that's learning. Awesome. So we're kind of getting towards
the end of our time. But going back to the YouTube channel, so
did you just start putting content out and then people kind of found you or
did you promote it in some way? And how many people did you have
following along when you finally stopped making the content. Yeah, so I was
very late in the YouTube game. So there were already many software development focused
channels or technology focused channels, so I was trying to figure out something that
was different from most of them. So I was not going to do product
reviews. I was not going to do easy tutorials because many channels were actually
basically going to the website getting started tutorial and making a ten minute video with
the step by step stuff. Then that's that's not valuable, that's not interesting
because anyone can google the original source and just go there. So I wanted
to do a more in depth analysis of the computer science and stuff, and
I didn't know exactly how to do that. But I hadn't in my mind
that if I could reach I don't know, ten thousand subscribers in one year,
that would be my all time goal. Because I didn't I didn't know
it was. I was starting from zero. I was able to reach the
one hundred thousand in the first two years, so the silver plate came very
early, actually, and the I didn't I didn't try to follow anything that
most people would say. So I was asking people and they would say,
oh, do short videos, do easy to digest video with step by step
stuff, all of those best practices that most people would repeat. Five years
ago, I was hearing that and disagreeing and saying, I don't like that
format. I don't like easy to digest videos. I actually want. I
actually want one video that tells me everything that is to know about that subject.
So I don't want to see a playlist with parts one through ten and
have to see introductions five minute long introductions and advertising or whatever. I just
want something that's very no nonsense, not waste my time, very dense.
And that's what I did. And by doing that, I didn't know that
many people actually wanted something like that. So five years ago, I say,
I'm going to do a one hour video with no interruptions, edited out
in a way that feels like I'm not even briefing. People say that most
people on YouTube, they say that they play videos to x speed. My
videos they say they playing in half the speed because otherwise they can't they can
what I'm saying. And the whole, the whole, whole idea was to
be the most comprehensive kinds of videos about a certain subject. And I have
all the scripts are all my blog that can on rails dot com blog.
It has the video and the transcript if someone wants to read it through,
especially if there's code, I think it's better. So I was. I
wasn't making it for for sponsorship or for the clicks, and even then I
was able. Now five years later, I had in my mind that I
wanted to end the the my run in around five years. I didn't want
to do a ten year career out of YouTube, especially because it was not
my my prime. It's not my primary means of I don't get any money
from that, So it was not for the money. It was primarily to
dump my brain into video format, uh and have like, how would I
explain all my knowledge and experience about databases, or about how to optimize code,
or how much low level coding works, or how cryptography works. And
I did one single video and most two videos for all of those subjects.
And I think there's a point because my career is finite that I would reach
some corpus. That makes me satisfied about it. So five years later,
my channel now has four hundred twenty thousand subscribers, which I think it was
good, but better than that. There are many channels even here in Brazil
that has six hundred thousand, maybe a million. But what is most important
is the number of views in the videos themselves. It doesn't matter if you
have a million subscribers, but each of your videos has just like five thousand
views or ten thousand views. So my videos were I was keeping the fifty
thousand to one hundred thousand views per video as well, which I think is
a good ratio for the number of subscribers, so I know that people were
actually watching it and not just not just browsing through. So I think I
started with short ish videos fifteen to twenty minutes. It's not short at all.
I think when people say short, I think they think ten minutes or
less. For me, short was twenty to thirty minutes, and then my
normal videos would be an hour, and my longer videos would be an hour
and a half to two hours. Sometimes Oh wow, crazy, Well,
we're kind of at the end of our time. But if people want to
connect with you or see what you're doing these days, where do they find
you? So there's my blog akiton rails dot com. I'm still gonna post
there even though my channel is exposed for the time being. Maybe I can
I come back and do more videos, but I think the goal of having
a video a video collection of my knowledge and experience in computer size, I
think it's largely complete. Uh. Then I'm mostly on ex Twitter, So
a kid on rails on Twitter, a kid on rails on Instagram, a
kid on rails on LinkedIn, so I'm usually posting new stuff. I'm currently
discussing about the new AI stuff for Exampeople keep asking me, oh, is
AI going to replace my job? And I have to explain to them what
AI actually is and whatnot, and that that keeps the keeps me occupied for
for for some time. Awesome. All right, Well, I'm gonna go
ahead and roll us into the picks. You've been on the show before,
so you know the drill there. I'm gonna start us off with picks.
The first thing that I'm gonna pick is a card game, so I would
start with the board game. So do a card game this time it's called
for sale. It came out in nineteen and ninety seven. It's a fast
game board game. Geek says it takes thirty minutes. It doesn't take thirty
minutes to play. The game might take you thirty minutes the first time while
you figure it out, and even then, I doubt it has a board
game weight of one point two five out of five. So you know,
really really simple game. And essentially what you do is you start out with
a certain amount of money and you bid on different houses, right, So
you have the lowest level house, which is level one, and that's a
cardboard box in an alley, right, and then it goes all the way
up to thirty and thirty is a space station right as a house. So
you know, pretty broad range there, right, And so you're buying these
houses. And then what you do is in the next round the payments the
checks come out, right, and so you pull out the number of checks
per you know, number of players, and then you blind bid your house,
so you know, if the highest is fifteen thousand, right, So
if fifteen thousand comes out, you're probably dropping your thirty if you have the
thirty, right, and you know, and then you're going to try and
figure out Okay, well, you know he has the thirty and she has
the twenty nine. I have the twenty eight. So if I put the
twenty eight down to try and get the fifteen thousand, because the next one's
a five thousand, and then bottom one was a two thousand, I you
know, I'm probably gonna wind up with the five thousand or two thousand,
So instead of using my really high one, maybe I'll drop seventeen and see
if I get the five thousand, right, because you get them in order
of your value of your house. So anyway, fun game. Whoever has
the most beneath the end wins. I mean, that's that's the whole game.
The artwork's fun. Yeah, I really have enjoyed that. So and
it's a quickie one that I've played with my buddies a bunch. I played
it for the first time at salt Con, which is local boarding game conference.
So anyway, fun stuff there. I'm just trying to think through what
else I've been Things have been nuts, because I would I'm involved politically here
in Utah and been pretty involved in the whole process of getting people nominated and
stuff like that. So yeah, anyway, I encourage people to get involved
in the political process. You know, I'm not going to cast any judgment
on either. You know, if you believe one way, go get involved.
Right if you believe different for me, go get involved. It's just
anyway. It's it's really fascinating way of getting into that. One thing that
I have been used to reach out to delegates in the process here in Utah
is a sass called clicks end, And I mean it's real simple, but
you just import the phone numbers and then you can send the messages. So
I sent out a message this morning encouraging people to come out for the school
board debate tomorrow. But incidentally, I'm also the moderator for so anyway,
just just fun stuff like that that the party's putting on because I'm a party
officer and so yeah, so I guess that's the other big thing that I'm
into right now. How about you, Fabia, what do you have?
What do you want to pick? It can be any subject, anything,
yep. Okay, So, as I said, I think nowadays, what
has been fascinating me the most is the reaction. Apart from the all the
political stuff I tried to see what people are doing. But I'm not as
active because especially here in Brazil, was very very polarized, and whatever you
say, people are just going to try to their way. And that's that's
why I didn't mention any parties or any movements part because it's not really relevant
to what we're talking about here. Yeah, and again, as always,
I try to be as welcome as possible to people to from any side.
Usually I'm trying to discuss technology and stuff like that through the social networks because
I think it's first, it is easier because it's technical. I think we
can we can have fun discussions and use the full one. Especially as we
were discussing, people are trying to figure out what's the best to what's not.
And in terms of my picks, I've been, I've been. People
have been very insecure. They dread the current, the next generation of AI
stuff. Some some people really think they're the devil, They're going to replace
my job, whatever. But what I try to say to people is instead
of being afraid, are trying to give up your career because you think you're
going to be replaced, try to I think, instead of waiting for the
tool to dominate you, I think you should prefer to dominate the tool,
So I think you should learn as much as possible on how can you make
your life easier using tools like that. So my picks would be tools such
as the GitHub co pilot. If you're a programmer, it's actually really useful.
It's an autocomplete on steroids, so you don't want to be expecting the
AI to do the entire code for you. It's not going to happen,
but for the boring parts, or let's refactor this big as CSS file that's
so boring to do. So that's the kind of stuff that maybe is just
the copilot thing and can be very very useful and actually save you a lot
of time, especially for example, if testing testing people. One of the
justifications for people not to do testing because it's boring. Oh it's boring code,
it's not fun to do. And the copilot thing is very very good
to understand your code and suggest unit tests for your code as well. So
I think for programmers they should try that and the chattpt Claude Gemini things that
are already available online. Again, it's not supposed to be a replacement for
anyone, but it's actually a very good too to summarize stuff. So let's
say you are overwhelmed without knowing where to start. Learning will be on rails,
for example, because there's so many different topics that you want. So
there's active storage, that's active channel, What how do I manage database?
What a migration is? So there's lots of documentation that you can try.
You may find that overwhelming, and you will find that tools like ch GPT
can help give you an overview and explain certain topics in an easier way that
you can digest faster, and that can actually speed you up in the learning
process. So I think those new crop of tools can be kind of like
your personal assistance in helping you in where you're overwhelmed or where you find it
boring, to help you get that productivity back and learn faster. Awesome,
all right, well thanks for coming, Fabio. Yeah, thank you,
and I hope we can talk again soon. Yeah. Absolutely, all right,
folks, We're going to wrap it here and until next time, max out