Code with Jason
Code with Jason
325 - Adam Burgess, Creator of Domain Tracker
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In this episode I talk with Adam Burgess about his unique journey from accounting to software engineering. We discuss his career transition, the coding bootcamp experience, launching his domain monitoring app, and the challenges of building and marketing a software product as a newcomer in the Rails community.
Links:
- The Domain Tracker
- Nonsense Monthly
Hey, it's Jason, host of the Code with Jason podcast. You're a developer. You like to listen to podcasts. You're listening to one right now. Maybe you like to read blogs and subscribe to email newsletters and stuff like that. Keep in touch. Um email newsletters are a really nice way to keep on top of what's going on in the programming world. Um, except they're actually not. I don't know about you, but the last thing that I want to do after a long day of staring at the screen is sit there and stare at the screen some more. That's why I started a different kind of newsletter. It's a snail mail programming newsletter. That's right. I send an actual envelope in the mail containing a paper newsletter that you can hold in your hands. You can read it on your living room couch, at your kitchen table, in your bed, or in someone else's bed. And when they say, What are you doing in my bed? You can say, I'm reading Jason's newsletter. What does it look like? You might wonder what you might find in this snail mail programming newsletter. You can read about all kinds of programming topics like object-oriented programming, testing, DevOps, AI. Most of it's pretty technology agnostic. You can also read about other non-programming topics like philosophy, evolutionary theory, business, marketing, economics, psychology, music, cooking, history, geology, language, culture, robotics, and farming. The name of the newsletter is Nonsense Monthly. Here's what some of my readers are saying about it. Helmut Kobler from Los Angeles says, thanks much for sending the newsletter. I got it about a week ago and read it on my sofa. It was a totally different experience than reading it on my computer or iPad. It felt more relaxed, more meaningful, something special and out of the ordinary. I'm sure that's what you were going for, so just wanted to let you know that you succeeded. Looking forward to more. Drew Bragg from Philadelphia says, Nonsense Monthly is the only newsletter I deliberately set aside time to read. I read a lot of great newsletters, but there's just something about receiving a piece of mail, physically opening it, and sitting down to read it on paper that is just so awesome. Feels like a lost luxury. Chris Sonnier from Dickinson, Texas says, just finished reading my first nonsense monthly snail mail newsletter and truly enjoyed it. Something about holding a physical piece of paper that just feels good. Thank you for this. Can't wait for the next one. Dear listener, if you would like to get letters in the mail from yours truly every month, you can go sign up at nonsense monthly dot com. That's nonsensemonthly.com. I'll say it one more time. Nonsense Monthly dot com. And now without further ado, here is today's episode. Hey today, I'm here with Adam Burgess. Adam, welcome.
SPEAKER_02Thanks, happy to be here.
SPEAKER_00Uh so we found each other on Reddit. Um, as I mentioned pre-show, I had put up a post some time ago on Reddit uh seeking founders and stuff like that of Rails Powered businesses. And then there was another post. It was like, hey, what are you working on? something like that, if I remember correctly. And you were one of the people who responded to that post. And I I actually responded to a number of the people who responded to that one and said, like, hey, want to come on the podcast and talk about what you're working on. So that's how we found each other. So um feel free to take this in any direction you want. Um who are you? What's your story? What are you working on?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so my background is a little unique, maybe compared to most people you have on this show. Um, I actually started my career as an accountant. I majored in accounting, um, went through passed the CPA exam, and then that's how I started my career in public accounting, working in taxes. And I did that for probably five or six years. Um in accounting's cool, you know, taxes is fine. Uh, but I hit a point where I was, you know, thinking longer term about my career. Did I really want to become a partner? These tax seasons were getting longer and longer, it seemed like each year. And I kind of started really thinking about other options. And this was during COVID when I think a lot of us just had a little bit more free time at home. And I've always been really fascinated by code and developing, but I never really kind of like plunged into it. And so I started, you know, doing little things, like free code camp projects, code academy. This was, you know, well before ChatGPT or anything like that. Well, not well before, but definitely before that was available, and just became so fascinated by it. I remember vividly just something as simple as loading up a site and going into the dev tools and being able to change HTML and seeing it reflected on the page. Um, a seemingly like small thing, but it was just like, whoa, this is really interesting. And so I was progressively doing more and more side projects with code, um, building little HTML files, nothing super fancy, but more and more of my free time, I was just coming back and doing it and during lunch breaks. Um, and it got to a point where it's like, you know what? If I'm enjoying doing this so much on my free time, why not look into doing this as a career? You know, I still have 30, 40 years left of my career. Why do I have to continue to do taxes because I was 18 and decided to major in accounting? Um would have been great to realize what I really enjoyed doing and not had to take the CPA exam or any of that, but that's another story. Um, so I talked to my wife and kind of a crazy discussion to say I, you know, I want to quit my job and pursue this. I was, you know, making a pretty good income and happy, perfectly content doing what I was doing. But it just felt like this itch kept getting stronger to pursue this new career field. And so we agreed that, you know, we didn't have kids at the time, which made it a little easier, but we agreed to to make the jump and and switch. So I put in my notice at my job. Um, I was living in Denver at the time when this happened, and I enrolled at a coding boot camp in Denver called Turing. Um, now boot camps, I there's a lot of hits and misses with those, as you may know, and other people have heard. I had a really good experience at mine. Um, I still keep in touch with a lot of my cohort mates from that. The networking opportunities that came from that have still proven to be really valuable. The education I got was great. It was a six to seventh month program. You really had two paths to pick from for that. You could either do the front end program or the back end. The back end was Ruby on Rails and the front end was, you know, React, um, JavaScript focused. The back end was fully occupied at the time, the program. So I ended up doing the front end and the React path. Um, went through, did the program, really enjoyed it. Again, this was before ChatGPT or anything was available. So you really were learning how to code, you know, from scratch without much assistance at all. So it was a pretty big grind for that time. Uh, to kind of come full circle when I graduated from that, I kept in touch with some of my bosses from the accounting firm I was working at in Taxes. And they said, hey, we actually have this department in our firm. It's called the Innovation Lab, and we build products for our accounting clients. We build, you know, third party, or not third party, we build software products for them. And you might be a good fit for this with your accounting background and your new, newly learned um coding education. And so I was fortunate to be able to return to the same firm I was doing taxes for, except as a software engineer in our innovation department. And so I've been with this department now for uh I think I'm just coming up on my five-year mark or my four-year mark in March. So I'm a senior software engineer here. Really has been an awesome experience. We have a really cool team. Uh, there's I think nine or ten devs on my team and a wide range of experience. Um, but yeah, we we build products targeted to our clients. Um, they don't have to be clients of ours, but we like building products that really fit a need for the typical clients that we have as an accounting firm. So banks, um, people in the construction industry. Um so, anyways, that's that's kind of my summary of how I got here. A little bit unique, but it's been uh it's been a pretty fun ride.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's really interesting. And you know, I've I've met uh uh transistors before from one career to from some different career to programming. Um and and I was curious how you got your first job, and that's pretty interesting how you kind of reconnected with some of your old bosses and and got in that way. Because now more than ever, it seems really hard for a newcomer to get their first programming job. Um if somebody came to me and they're like, hey, I need some advice on how to get my first programming job, I'm like, I I don't know. Uh I I don't know. Maybe at one time I would have some advice, but today I don't know. Like, I don't know if I would even recommend trying. Uh I I really don't know. I I don't want to say that I would recommend against it. I'm just saying, I don't know. It's a different world now.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it really is. And you know, the the boot camp I attended eventually shut down, they're no longer around, and I think a big part of that was the job placements just weren't happening. Uh when I graduated in what was it, early 22, things were still pretty good. Um, but it's been a pretty slow downward trend in terms of hiring since then.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, and side note, I I had the touring school guy, Jeff Casimir, on the show uh really back. Yeah, and we talked about all that, like the state of the economy and stuff like that, and he had some really like insightful, knowledgeable takes on what's going on, and he seemed like way more informed about it uh the the true causes of everything that's happening than literally anybody else I've talked to before or since. So, dear listener, if you're interested in that whole topic, that episode with Jeff Casmer, we really get into that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'll have to go back and listen to that. That's that's super interesting. Yeah, it it's a bummer kind of how it shaped out. Um I but I like I said, the networking opportunities are still there, still able to keep in touch with a lot of the alumni, and there's still new job postings that happen in our Slack channel, so it's I I really think the value has been there. And you know, we'll see what happens in the future.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, we'll see. Um I've said before, nobody knows what's gonna happen, and I think people don't even know what is happening right now. So much is changing so fast that it's impossible to keep an accurate read on what's going on.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, whenever I talk to alumni who were searching, um I would kind of keep in mind the more that you're going out of your comfort zone, it seemed that would have the biggest ROI in terms of job hunting. You know, sending out applications just blindly is probably a very, very small chance of hitting. But, you know, if you're attending meetups, if you're networking, if you are actually physically going to places, I like Ken Coleman's book. It's called The Proximity Principle. And it's are you putting yourself in the proximity of the people that you're trying to get in with? And I just think the more you go out of your comfort zone, I always go back to that. It seems like that has the biggest ROI because anyone can sit at home and fire off applications.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02But if you are getting somewhere in person and meeting people, much better chance of hitting, albeit it feels like it's still small these days.
SPEAKER_00Um, anybody can sit at home and fire off applications, and a bazillion people are doing exactly that. And my understanding is that job ads just get totally spammed um by not just uh legitimate applicants, but like people, you know, there's a job posting that's US only. You'll get like 500 applicants from India. It's like, okay, this is all just noise. And then I understand there's a lot of like AI applications where where people spruce up their resume with AI or whatever, and it's like, oh, this this candidate looks great, just like all the other candidates. How do we pick somebody out of these hundreds of candidates? We recently filled a position where I work, uh, we had two thousand applicants for that position. Good lord. Yeah. And so I don't I don't think the chances are great going that route. I had a um a a job search uh a period of job searching in late 2024, early 2025. Um and I I had very little luck. Um I I got the job that I have now at Cisco because I applied there, got rejected, you know, just like the automatic rejection type thing. Um and then I flew to San Francisco from Michigan and met with a friend of mine who works there, and he put in a referral for me, and then they fished my application out of the trash, and I got an interview and got the job. So it was exactly that, that thing that you mentioned, like visiting people in person that made it happen.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I haven't applied to anything that I didn't have a referral for in a while, um, because it just felt like it wasn't even worth the effort. Um and so that's that's kind of my baseline. If I have if I don't have a referral, I'm probably not even gonna apply. If I don't have some sort of contact to reach out to, I I just don't think it's even worth the five minutes to fill out the application. But you know, I people get lucky sometimes, so yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's so discouraging. It's like I've always viewed uh filling out a job application like buying a lottery ticket. It's like if it takes like 20 minutes to fill out the application and like the mental and emotional cost of it, because some of the questions are like tell us why you you're excited to work at this company. It's like, well, I don't fucking know. Like, who says I am? Uh you're just some like uh undistinguished company that looks just like everybody else from the outside. Like the truth is I'm not excited to work there because I I don't know anything about you. So like fuck your question. Um, but you have to fill that out anyway, and uh it really takes a toll. It's like, do I want to do this a hundred times when I believe that the chances are like one in ten thousand that I'll get any response back? Uh no, so it's just like the most discouraging thing in the world. So yeah, applying somewhere where you have a warm referral is so much better. Yeah, you have to. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay, so I'm I'm curious about this. You've you've worked here for a number of years, um, and you mentioned pre-show that you're ultimately interested in having your own thing. I'm curious to hear a bit about that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so as we mentioned in a pre-show, I know Chris Oliver pretty well, founder of Go Rails, uh, many other things, not just Go Rails, but he's the one that really I'll kind of come full circle with it, but starting with maybe how I got into Rails, which then made me really want to look into becoming a founder. I really I started poking around with different ideas, things I wanted to build. I my wife wanted a um a new list app for our phones that she could categorize things for. She was having a hard time categorizing list items in the basic notes app uh on your iPhone. So I was like, well, let's build it, you know, let's see what happens. And I kind of vibe coded my way through that using Swift. And it gave me a little bit of an itch, like, hey, it's other people are using this. Like it's mostly friends and family, you know, it didn't like go viral. It's not like a 3,000 people are using this, but I've got like 10 users, you know, on the and it deployed it to the app store. And it just really kind of got me excited to see other people using something that I built, albeit a super small basic list app, nothing groundbreaking at all. But my wife wanted to categorize things a certain way, and I was able to make that happen for, and we use it now. And so it got me just kind of like excited to make that happen more and more. Like, what other things could I build? And I think I see someone like Chris who has built this, you know, business and is self-sufficient and can kind of do things when he wants to do them, explore things he wants to explore. I I don't love having to just depend on an employer to set my future. I would love to carve my own path, um, but it's so difficult. Like it all sounds good and it it's great to think about, but the action behind that is extremely difficult. And of course it is, otherwise, we would all do it and we'd all be making a ton of money and be our own bosses. So I think for me it was just kind of building random side projects and starting on things and getting the excitement about that, really going and saying, man, it'd be awesome to have this be like my full-time job is building things that other people are using and being able to talk with them, getting feedback, push out improvements, um, and really work on things that I enjoy working on. Uh, my job's great, I love my job, but you know, it's not exactly the the most exciting kind of products that I would choose to do.
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, I'm I'm I'm going down the same path. Um I'm interested in doing my own thing, and I've been trying for an embarrassingly long time. Um I've been trying since 2008 to get my own thing going to support myself. And I've had some small successes, just nothing that has gotten to the income replacement level yet. Um the most successful thing I've done is books, ebooks. Um, and I got to the point where I don't even remember now, but maybe like uh ten or fifteen thousand dollars a year worth of revenue from the books, which is you know, you're never gonna support yourself off that. Uh, but it's as my grandpa used to say, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Um so so that was like kind of a small base hit, uh you might call it, or or even less than that. But it was something something more than nothing, you know. And you know, frankly, like making even a dollar off of your own products is more than than most people achieve who try to do that. Um, because honestly, like I think most people who have a desire to do something like that, they don't put in enough serious effort. And so they read the books and stuff like that, but they don't put in the work over a long enough period of time that it takes to make something happen.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, completely agree with that. And I try to focus on one thing at a time right now. Um, maybe going back to the the Reddit post that that you responded to, the the thing I've been working on lately or enhancing, I actually started from Chris's um one of his uh paths, I'm not sure exactly what he calls them, but he does these tutorials, and one of them was how to build a domain monitoring SaaS. And it was really cool because he gives you sort of the the bones of an application, maybe more than just the bones, but it cleared up a lot of the fuzziness that I had, you know, how to accept payments from people in a secure, safe way. Like, how do you correctly do that? How do you deploy a real Rails application doing it the right way using Camal. Um I had started several different Rails apps, but never actually taken them to that level. And so that tutorial really kind of opened the door for me. Like, okay, I have this process now on how to accept payments, how to deploy many other things that I'm not even mentioning, including in it, but it gave me a good blueprint to use going forward on different things to build. So it's a it's a domain monitoring SAS, and kind of the idea behind it is that you can track the expiration of various domains, um, see if they are registered, if they are, when do they expire, and then maybe an email notification to let you know a week before or the day before that, hey, this domain is going to expire. And so I followed his path, did the tutorial, finished that, but we've continued to enhance it from there and add on little features like uptime monitoring, SSL certificate checks, um kind of cleaned up the tailwind, the CSS behind it, made it a little more like built out because he gave he gives you the bones, but we don't go into all the weeds and details of making it like super pretty. So that's kind of been the thing that I've been enhancing and working on lately. And I've I've got 12 users, which for me is awesome. It's the first time that I've had a web app or a Rails app deployed that has actual users using it. There's probably a handful of bots in there, but uh I'm gonna pretend that they're all real users. Um so it's been super cool in reaching out to them. How do you get feedback? Like, how did you hear about this app? Um no subscribers yet. That's my goal. My wife and I made our kind of New Year's resolutions the other day, and one of mine was to make one sale from one of my products.
SPEAKER_00Subscribers meaning paying customers.
SPEAKER_02Yep, exactly. Yeah. So I have users that are registered, but I have a free tier. You get five free domains to add, and then after that, you have to subscribe. And so, no, no paid yet, but I'm gonna continue to chip away. I'm still consistently getting maybe, I don't know, a customer a week at this point or a really wow signed up user. So hopefully we can keep it, keep the momentum going. It's it's exciting though to see that for the first time. As a new builder, you probably have a wide range of people who have have million-dollar businesses. I'm on the very other end. I'm kind of just getting my feet wet and figuring out what this all looks like.
SPEAKER_00Um that is that's really interesting. Um, I don't know if you realize like what you have accomplished. Like that that is that is like really something. Uh to you build this thing, you got 12 users, you're getting you're continuing to get more users, it sounds like like that's a big deal. Like, again, most people who have a desire to do something like this never actually like even do anything. And then most of the people who do something, they never see any level of activity like that. You know, like most products I'm I'm a little bit guessing, but like most products that are put out there, just like nothing happens, like nobody uses them. So to even have 12 users, um, and how long have you been been working on this thing and how long has it been like out there?
SPEAKER_02It's been live since early January, so a couple months.
SPEAKER_00Couple months, and you already have 12 users. Yeah, that's a really big deal. So, where did these people come from? How did this happen?
SPEAKER_02I think some of them came from that Reddit post. The one guy who actually responded when because I email each person who signs up a very brief, you know, thanks for signing up. Curious how'd you hear about us? Thanks, Adam. You know, I keep it really short and succinct. And the one guy that did respond said he saw it on Reddit. Um, and so I don't know if it was from that exact post that you and I interacted on. Maybe it was, didn't really go into detail, but I try to on my Twitter or X now, if I'd make an update or do a feature enhancement, I try to post about it. So maybe somebody saw it there. I don't have like a big X following by any means, but um I do monitor Reddit Reddit posts periodically for domain expiration or domain monitoring. And if I feel like someone's actually looking for something that this could solve a pain point for, I'll respond and say, you know, I built this, check it out, let me know what you think. That's kind of been the marketing that I've used that I would believe that most of the user sign up came from. Um I haven't really done any sort of SEO fanciness in my app yet. I need to do that. Um it's probably not too difficult to do that nowadays with something like you know, Claude or Chat GBT just to see if there's any cleanup opportunities. But really Reddit has been it so far.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. Um so remind me like the name of it. How do I, if I want to pull up the website right now, where do I go?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's called thedomain tracker.com.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Okay. I've been here before, it autocompleted for me. Oh, cool. Um, okay, yeah, so you make it very easy to sign up. You just you're presented with a a a field right when you pull up the page. Uh you type in your domain name and it says start monitoring.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_00And I'm curious if I type in code with Jason.com and I click start monitoring, what happens? Oh, okay, it presents me with a sign-up form. Okay, very interesting. And you mentioned like you talk to these people. Um tell me about that. Like, have you formed relationships with some of these people and figured out like, hey, what's your deal? Why are you using this? All that.
SPEAKER_02That's the goal. I have not yet, like I said, only one guy responded to me to actually let me know how he heard about it. Um, and then I tried to, I think I followed up again and said, you know, keep me in the loop on any features that you would like to see. I'm always open to suggestions or ideas. But I'm learning that that's really the value is being able to talk to customers and figure out what they're using your site for, what is their need. Do they care more about monitoring domains that they own, or do they care more about finding domains that are expired? Uh, do they what what are the what's their actual pain point? What's the use case? Because there's really two different approaches you could have on my site. You have a bunch of domains you want to keep an eye on to make sure you don't miss them expiring, or you have domains you're looking for and you're trying to track them to see when they expire. And so if you're monitoring your own domains, you may care about the uptime monitoring that I have or the SSL check expiration that I have. But if you don't know that domain, you probably don't care much about those. So the goal is to build a deeper relationship with the customers. I just I haven't quite been able to get there yet.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, well, I think if you keep working at it, it'll happen. Um and I'm taking again, there's parallels for me with my product. Um I have one paying user, and he's somebody I've known for years. Um I used to do these uh weekly live coding sessions. Um and and this friend of mine, his name's Mike, um, he would come to some of those and he would like read my blog posts and email newsletter and stuff like that over the years. And so when I put this product out there and I emailed my email list, I was like, Hey, anybody want to use this thing? He was one of the people who raised his hand. So that was pretty cool. And then in a similar way to how you kept in touch with your old bosses and got your job. Um I keep in touch with some of my old bosses, and one of them said, Hey, I want to be a customer too. And that's been a longer onboarding process because it's a bigger business with a bigger team and all that stuff, and they have their own priorities. Uh they're not making it their top priority to switch over their CI from what they have now to mine. Uh so I have to wait until until it fits their timeline and stuff like that. Um but uh coming back to talking with people, that's huge to me. Because like people say, like, listen to your users and like, you know, listen to what they want and like build what they want, but I think it's a little bit more nuanced than that. Like you have to understand their life and who they are and what their job is that they need to do with your software, and then you be the designer to decide what needs to go into your software to solve their problems, not like literally build the features that they ask you to build.
SPEAKER_02Yep. Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense to me. And so, yeah, that's the ultimate goal is to continue to reach out best I can, and that's the hard part for me. The easy part almost seems, and I don't have a ton of experience, but the easy part almost is building the product and getting it out there. The hard part then is what happens now. How am I gonna let people to find out about this? How am I gonna collect feedback? How am I gonna you know figure out what needs to be tweaked or improved? And that's really getting in touch with the people that are using the app, and that's the million-dollar problem that I'm running into.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so you know, I I think of the sales and marketing side of it as at least half. Um, at least it's so how do you think you're gonna approach uh that side of it from here on out?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's it's super interesting. My goal is to just continue to be as present as I can via social media at a minimum with new ideas, new things that are happening. Continue to reach out to people as they sign up, and and maybe I haven't quite figured out what it looks like yet, but continue to reach out to to follow up on everybody who's signed up to say, how how are things going? What's what's working or not working for you so far? Maybe nobody responds, maybe one person does and gives me something that, hey, I actually haven't used it because this error happened and I haven't been able to get back in and I wouldn't have known if I didn't ask. So sales and marketing is definitely not my strong suit. And as someone who's just starting to build products, I need to figure out what that even looks like. Like, what does that mean? Uh, what what what works and what doesn't work for sales and marketing for this particular thing I've built. So it it's I'm trying to pick brains as much as I can from people who have been there and done it and succeeded. And so Chris continues to be a really valuable resource for me as someone who I can poke ideas at and just see what he thinks and just really listening to people who have been there and done that, because I think that's really hard.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I've always thought like if I want to do something, the way to do it is to find people who have already successfully done it and find out what they did and do what they did. Um, so I I think that's a really good approach. Um I I'm always very skeptical of advice just in general. Um but especially when I hear somebody give like business advice, I'm like, have you done this? Have you done this thing that you're giving out advice for? Because a lot of times the answer is no. And that advice is worse than nothing. It can lead you in a wrong direction and cause you to waste a lot of time, which sadly I've I've done myself. Yep.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, I I can share some of the things that have worked for me in certain areas, um, if you're curious. So I d I I think of there being kind of a menu of options, and I I I believe in uh playing to your strengths. So for me, okay, so selling my books and stuff like that. Um the the menu of options that I perceive for that kind of stuff is uh oh, sorry, selling books and selling like consulting services and stuff like that. Uh there's blogging, um, speaking at conferences, speaking at meetups, doing podcasts, both hosting my own podcast and going on other people's podcasts, uh, YouTube, email newsletter. And for me, I actually also send a uh there's an ad at the front of this podcast. Uh I send a snail mail programming newsletter every month, which is something very unique that nobody else does. Yeah. And so that's a very there's no noise to cut through there, because when you get my uh newsletter in the mail, it's not like you have two programming newsletters in the mail and you're like, which one am I gonna read? It's like, no, it's it's the only one.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So that's been great. And and it's something that's like fairly personal, and so I I it it's a way to maintain a close relationship with somebody over a long period of time, um in a fairly lightweight, easy way. Anyway, I see Yeah, I see that as kind of the menu of options. Oh, and I hosted my own conference, uh, and I'm co-chairing RubyConf 2026. I'm doing all these things with sales and marketing in mind. Um and so I I am inclined toward writing. That's just like part of my personality. I I it's harder for me to stop writing than it is to to make myself write something. Uh so so that like playing to my strengths, that is something that's easy for me to pick. Um speaking, I'm less good at. I I don't think I'm ever gonna be nearly as good of a speaker as I feel like I am with writing, but I do it anyway because I I care more about getting the results than like the pain and embarrassment of being a mediocre speaker and then getting out there and speaking anyway. Yeah. Um so I d I I do that, and there's certain things that I don't do. Like I'm trying to think of oh YouTube. Like I'm not gonna be the kind of person who uh sits in front of the camera and and talks for like 20 minutes or whatever. Like, there's nothing wrong with that at all. That's great. It's just I can't do that. Like, I couldn't sit there and talk for 20 minutes, it it wouldn't go well at all, it wouldn't be good to watch. So, like, I'm not gonna do that. I do like coding stuff on video. Um, that fits my personality. So for whatever that's worth, menu of options, play to my strengths, pick a couple things, that's how I look at it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I love that. I think that's all great. Um, yeah, I I just kind of going back to applying and going out of your comfort zone is kind of gonna be the best way that you can get action. I'm kind of viewing sales and marketing that way as well. And for me, doing really anything on social media is kind of out of my comfort zone. I'm not a great, not a great poster really, just not something that's been a strong suit of mine. I don't like really getting a ton of emails, so for me to go out and email people and ask questions is not super easy to do. Physically it's easy to do, but it's kind of like uh I don't love getting emails. Do I really want to ask somebody for feedback or questions? And so I think continuing to just get out of my comfort zone and try to make things happen, I'll end up seeing better results than just sitting behind a screen and hoping for the best.
SPEAKER_00What's your comfort level with like going to events and meeting people and maybe even speaking and stuff like that?
SPEAKER_02I haven't done any speaking at events, so uh maybe that tells you that's out of my comfort zone for sure. I it'd certainly be something I'd be open to. I just haven't done it. Going to events and meeting people, no problem. Not a big deal for me. Um it just that that that's not something that really scares me too much. So probably something I need to continue to do more though, of is going out to events and meeting people because admittedly it's not something I've done much of in terms of like the dev world. Um, so I I think it's a great a great thing to consider and think about.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Um have you been to any uh Ruby Rails conferences, that kind of thing? No, I haven't.
SPEAKER_02I my Rails journey is like super fresh. Uh I I started going, I started with Chris's first blog post tutorial, was the first one I did, and that was maybe a year ago. And so I'm very new to like the Rails world. And it really, I remember going through that tutorial. It's a classic blog post tutorial that you see. And I remember for the first time like creating a blog post and it saving to the database and then showing on the screen, and it happened so fast and so like there was no setup. I'm used to the React world where you have to add an API layer and then add a database layer, and it's two days of config and setup. And with Rails, it was like Rails new. We're creating blog posts within five minutes, and it just blew my mind. And I now, any project that I work on or I build, I start with Rails. I do it, I don't do anything else. Um, my work life is more of a Microsoft Angular.NET C sharp tech stack, but for personal side hobby projects, I'm all about Rails. It's all I use. Um and it's it just fascinated me how easy it was to get everything up and running and set up and be ready to go. I'm just I'm so used to the painful side of all these different services, hoping they can talk together and and work and this air here, and then I gotta fix that. Nope, it just all worked with Rails. It blew my mind.
SPEAKER_00That's great to hear. Um, you know, that's that's a story I've heard a lot of times, but it never gets old. It's it's great to hear uh the positive experience you had with it. Um and by the way, uh I would like to personally invite you to RubyConf in Las Vegas in July. Um because I'll be there, of course, since I'm coaching. Yeah, I expect that I'll be spread pretty thin during the conference, uh just running around from place to place, person to person. Um, but it'd be great to meet in person. Um, and if not that, some other event in the future.
SPEAKER_02No, I'd love that. I I'd love to immerse myself more in that world because I am kind of all in. It's it's just it's really fascinating to me. I like the movement. I I I just want to see that framework continue to thrive and and be a part of it. So yeah, awesome. Yeah, that sounds good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and uh part of why I ask is because there's there's a phenomenon that you might not be familiar with. I I didn't know about it until I started speaking at conferences, um, and and going to more conferences. But uh people often tend to form kind of a social group uh through conferences. Um and it's funny because there's some people I see at conferences, it's like we'll hang out in Portland, then Chicago, then Las Vegas, then um Boston, you know, just all over in these random places. And I will see those people more than I see my friends who I live a few miles away from, which is really ironic. Um but you know, it's it's kind of the same people showing up at all these conferences because they're the kind of people who go to conferences. And it's really valuable, really valuable. Um, and and that's kind of a pool of people you can draw on to be like, hey, do you want to try my thing? Or do you know do you know other people who might want to try my thing? Uh that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, I think that sounds really cool. That makes a lot of sense, and again, I I just I think it's such a cool community. I've had little bits and tastes of it from just different videos I've watched of like RailsConf and from last year in Amsterdam, um or wherever it was, I think it was Amsterdam. Um so yeah, that that's super cool. I look forward to that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Um okay, well, I hope that uh uh the domain tracker uh domain tracker, I hope that domain tracker uh takes off, and I hope you get your uh first paying customer soon. And when that happens, definitely tell me about it. I would love to hear about it and share your celebration. Um I'll I'll of course put the domain tracker in the show notes so that people can check it out if they wish. Anything else you want to share? People, uh, where should people go to find out what year you're up to and stuff like that?
SPEAKER_02Uh my ex-handle is a burge15. Um, I occasionally post stuff there about different things I'm working on. I'm building a little personal finance app right now that allows people to import their bank transactions via plaid and build a monthly income statement. Um, nothing really earth-shattering, but again, it's a pain point that I had. I kind of wanted to see where we landed at the end of the month in terms of income and expenses. And I wanted to figure out how to incorporate plaid into something because I have some other ideas with like accounting-specific apps that plaid would be useful for, and so I thought that'd be a good kind of first attempt at it. So post stuff about that. Um, but yeah, that's largely what I use as X. And I would just say also for anybody listening that maybe is considering a career change, it's not too late at all. I did it in my early 30s, and just because I majored in accounting doesn't mean I need to do that for the next 30, 40 years. Um and to those with kids as well, you know, I have a one-year-old and a three-year-old, and it's really difficult to find that time to work on these things. But just at night, in the morning, whatever it is, try to get an hour in if you can, especially with you know Claude or ChatGPT, the amount that you can get done in those shorts amount of times is just huge. So it's it's difficult though with little ones, but just try to make it happen. And you know, it's it's easier yet harder more than ever to make build things and make you know get them out there, but just try to get the hour in if you can. Try to do it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's great advice. You got to put in the time and effort.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But yep. Okay. Um, well, we will put that stuff in the show notes. And Adam, thanks so much for coming on the show.
SPEAKER_02Okay, thanks, Jason. Talk soon.