Code and the Coding Coders who Code it
We talk about Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and everything in between. From tiny tips to bigger challenges we take on 3 questions a show; What are you working on? What's blocking you? What's something cool you want to share?
Code and the Coding Coders who Code it
Episode 56 - Aji Slater
The journey from circus performer to respected software developer isn't a common career path, but Aji Slater navigates it with the same thoughtful precision he applies to code. As a former Ringling Brothers clown who now leads development teams at ThoughtBot, Aji brings a refreshingly unique perspective to technical challenges and community contribution.
Diving into his current work with a 12-13 year old Rails codebase, Aji shares his struggles with an Angular frontend implemented in non-standard ways. Despite his graphic design background and comfort with frontend development, the architectural decisions in this Angular implementation present significant challenges. His approach to overcoming these obstacles reveals a thoughtful balance between leveraging AI tools for understanding code while preserving the creative problem-solving aspects that make development enjoyable.
The conversation shifts to Aji's crowning achievement—his "Keynote of Keynotes" presentation at RailsConf that earned him the title of "RailsConf World Champion" from Aaron Patterson. This monumental project required watching 94 hours of past keynotes, tracking down information about 16 presentations that weren't recorded, and synthesizing two decades of Rails community wisdom. Through this archaeological deep-dive, Aji uncovered a powerful throughline in Rails history: the focus on shared solutions that make developers "stronger together than if we were working alone."
Aji's reflections on public speaking reveal surprising insights about performance anxiety. Despite having performed for crowds of 24,000 during his circus days, he still experiences nervousness before technical presentations—though of a different quality than most speakers face. His upcoming move to Scotland adds another fascinating dimension to his story, as he discovers the limitations of UK-focused resources that often neglect Scottish cultural specifics.
Whether discussing his frustrations with Keynote (the presentation software), sharing his thoughts on ADHD in technical work, or explaining why he named his dog after Jim Henson, Aji demonstrates the warmth, humor, and thoughtful perspective that have made him a beloved figure in the Ruby community. His story reminds us that the most interesting developers often bring their whole, multifaceted selves to their work.
Connect with Aji on Bluesky at doodlingdev and watch for his upcoming short technical talks on YouTube!
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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Code and the Coding Coders who Code it. I'm your host, drew Bragg, and I'm joined today by the RailsConf World Champion as proclaimed by Aaron Patterson Aji Slater Aji. For anyone who is not familiar with you, would you please do a brief introduction for the listeners?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Hi everybody. My name is Aji and I am a former Circus Clown, current Rails and Ruby developer. I work with ThoughtBot as a development team lead and, yeah, happy to be here, awesome.
Speaker 1:So the way that this works is I'm going to ask Aji three questions. I'm going to ask what are they working on? What kind of blockers do they have? If they don't have a current blocker, what's a recent blocker they had and how do they go about solving it? And then the last question, my favorite what is something cool, new or interesting that you've recently learned or discovered? It doesn't have to be coding related, but this is code and the coding coders who code it, so it totally can be. So, adi, what are you working on?
Speaker 2:Well, my current client project at Thoughtbox for consultancy is working with a very old Rails code base Been around for, I think, 12 to 13 years, and so it's got all of that that comes along with that, and the front end is Angular, which I have never worked with before before this client I have never worked with before before this client, and so that's been kind of an interesting journey to see how much I can possibly avoid working in the Angular codebase, which is not very much, because I kind of trend towards the front end in my personal proclivities. So that's been an experience.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask if avoiding the Angular part was because of Angular or because it was the front end, which sometimes back end folks are like I don't do that front end stuff, so with it being like a 12, 13 year old Rails app, that's Rails 4, 3?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know where it started. That feels about right.
Speaker 1:Three maybe have they kept up on their upgrades or are you still working with a slightly older version of Rails?
Speaker 2:A slightly older version of Angular, but the Rails is all up to date. Nice.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you do lean towards the front end-ish, or you enjoy it. You don't shy away from it.
Speaker 2:Right, I don't shy away from it. I started in school with graphic design and things like that, so visual art and that kind of layer has always been interesting to me. So, yeah, I haven't shied away from it. And after going to a Ruby boot camp, we did our final project, my team in JavaScript having not really touched JavaScript all that much, so I feel like it's not my native language, but pretty close to it because I got into it pretty heavily at the beginning.
Speaker 1:But you are kind of avoiding the front end because of Angular on this project. Because of Angular, I also have not had the privilege pleasure of working with Angular, so what's driving you batty on the Angular front?
Speaker 2:I think there's two different things in this particular code base.
Speaker 2:One is just sort of Angular takes a lot of different decisions and a lot of different approaches to solving problems than I'm either used to or would kind of choose to do myself.
Speaker 2:I feel like it probably suits really well people that have come from maybe NET or Java different things like this. There's a lot of kind of decisions and architectural quirks that feel vaguely like that, even though I haven't worked in either of those languages or frameworks either. So that's all supposition on my part. So there's that where how to solve a problem is just a completely different approach and style that I'm used to. And then the second is that this particular code base has a configuration or fleet of libraries that work together in a way that is very not the standard way that Angular is done, and so finding resources to know how these things work together on the internet is not super easy, because it's kind of an uncommon stack in a way, and so it's been pretty challenging not only having to reverse engineer a thought process that is pretty far away from mine, but also to have to navigate the differences between the resources that are available out there.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So is this also kind of a situation where, because it's not best practices, standard, common way of doing things, that AI isn't really helping to answer some of the questions? Or do you not generally use AI in work at ThoughtBot?
Speaker 2:I think it's a little bit different for everybody the level to which they use these kind of tools. I have been using Claude and a little bit of Copilot, I think pretty usefully. It hasn't been able to generate code in a way that it might for some other things Like, hey, give me this, I need this solution, give me a first draft of that. But it has been very good at explaining what is going on here. How do these things fit together? And I can at the very least get a more specific to the project answer than a documentation page would. So that's actually been pretty helpful. Framework through chatting with an LLM, as opposed to doing the kind of foundational work with the framework, building up my understanding and then working with it kind of approach that I would have before things like Clot and GPT.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so how is that experiment going? Is it something that you're potentially going to keep using as you go forward, or maybe tweak it more?
Speaker 2:I think, tweaking it probably. There have been a lot of times when I've gotten caught in that LLM loop of here's the solution oh, that didn't quite work. And three more steps later it suggests the solution it did in the first place and it's like okay, well, we've gone nowhere. So I think there'll be a little bit of a hybrid of more of that kind of upfront learning on my part, so that I will know better when we're kind of going astray a little bit interesting.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, I don't really have to do that kind of hey, help me understand this bit of code because I'm working in the same code base. But yeah, the AI does seem like it would be fairly useful for understanding code you're seeing for the first time, with the caveat of because it can hallucinate so badly at times. Knowing when to call its bluff is probably a really good bit of knowledge to have.
Speaker 2:Do you find that you do use that pretty often in your work, though?
Speaker 1:I've had mixed results with AI. I don't know if it's my poor breaking a problem down small enough for the LLM to understand and give me good feedback, or if they're just not there. It's interesting that you brought it up, because we were having this conversation at Podia the other day at our weekly dev team meeting and we were talking about AI. The topic essentially was what do we want AI to do for us and what don't we want it to do for us? And I actually don't want AI to write code for me.
Speaker 1:I like writing code. I like solving code. I like solving problems. I like the whole process of it, from the creative bits to some of the frustrating bits. It's enjoyable. It's part of the reason why I love my job. So I don't want AI to take that. I just want it to kind of be a slightly more responsive rubber duck when I'm working through something, and I don't think that that's actually how a lot of people feel. I feel like, especially with like how much you hear people talk about vibe coding and stuff like people do want to just be able to say build me X and it gives you the code to do whatever you wanted it to do, and I don't want that. So I'm wondering if maybe the problem is that it's not designed to do the kind of thing I want it to do, or I'm just bad at prompting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that really hits on the way that I kind of feel about it. I was using cloud code for the first time to just be completely removed from the code and just tell it what I wanted to have happen. I hadn't gone that far into it until picking up that particular tool and it sort of crystallized my feelings. I had this kind of ick feeling about all of the like, LLM-assisted coding and everything, and I couldn't tell why. Like, am I just a Luddite? Do I just fear change at this point? Anything like that? And I realized as I was doing it it was working fairly well. I think I just don't like it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I enjoy coding the way that I code. I, like you were saying, enjoy problem solving. This is a fun and satisfying work for me and if it's going to completely go in that direction which probably won't if I can't find the joy in that approach, then I just don't want to do this anymore. So we'll see how it goes. I'm sure there's another way to get that same kind of enjoyment if the industry or whatever our jobs end up being that, but I haven't found it yet.
Speaker 1:Whatever, our jobs end up being that, but I haven't found it yet. Yeah, I think at minimum, we're definitely a few years away from our jobs being really at risk Some of the funny but horrific stories of people shipping really insecure code or not being able to. Yeah, it's amazing what AI can do. It is truly incredible, but it's also not as coming for your job as some people would have you think. Yet Hopefully, that's so far in the future. We don't have to worry about it, but definitely not yet.
Speaker 1:So the one thing that you're not working on, but I do feel like we sort of have to talk about, since Aaron Patterson crowned you as the RailsConf world champion after your amazing keynote is your amazing keynote. So for anyone of you listening who doesn't know, because I haven't shut up about it, I was on the programming committee for this last RailsConf and when we were going through the submissions, the CFPs Ajis came up as a regular talk but still entitled the keynote of keynotes, and it wasn't because of the title, it was because of the content that we all kind of went oh, this needs to be a keynote. I know that you talked a little bit about it on the bike shed with Joel Quinville. You said it jokingly. Yeah, I just tried to use the word keynote as many times to get, but really in your head were you thinking maybe they'll bump this into a keynote? I?
Speaker 2:was hoping for that, especially because the scope of the thing was to watch all of the keynotes and try and give a little takeaway from every RailsConf keynote ever. I was thinking I can't do that in half an hour, that's not going to work.
Speaker 1:It was an easy pick for us to say this should become a keynote, but what doesn't sound like it was very easy was the talk creating it. Watching every keynote from every RailsConf for the past 20 years multiple keynotes because we didn't always have the hack day as the middle day, so you'd have two additional keynotes. There's so many aspects of that that sound challenging and interesting, but the one that my brain won't let go of is like for recent Rails comps it's pretty easy to find the videos. Comfreaks does an amazing job, but for older ones I imagine that took some detective work. What was that like? Finding the older, maybe before ComFreaks or just older videos?
Speaker 2:It was actually even a little bit more difficult than I kind of expected. I looked on YouTube to see where the gaps might be before writing up the proposal and then, once I knew that I had to dig in and do this, I started digging around. There was a lot of the Wayback Machine and Internet Archive going on old RailsConforg schedules and different things like this, because RailsConforg just gets written over every conference so it doesn't even exist. There's no archive page even on RailsConforg. So it was very much that idea of nobody in 2008 thought anyone in 2025 was going to care what they were talking about. So just nobody recorded, even who was there a lot of the time without doing a little detective work. But yeah, those videos they basically don't exist. I think there were 16 that there just is no video.
Speaker 2:I reached out to the speakers, to people involved in early RailsConf, all of these sort of things. Nobody just kept those around. They might not even have been recorded at all. There were one or two years that because O'Reilly used to be involved with RailsConf and so for a little while there some were on O'Reilly's servers and their sites. Those are all gone now and nobody kind of grabbed them before they were gone. So for those missing keynotes, my material came from blog posts of people who were there and kind of like writing their thoughts and their takeaways. And luckily there was enough in the community that wanted to talk about their experiences at RailsConf that I could reconstruct enough of the sort of main ideas A few of the speakers remembered enough and they sent bullet points of what they remembered they wanted their key points to come away with, but nobody even had their slides still. It's all just kind of gone.
Speaker 1:Especially nowadays. You just think if you give a conference talk, it goes up on YouTube and that's it. It's there forever. At the time, I doubt anybody was from the oldest one, or did you have, like I want to do like Aaron's given what did you say? 16?, 15 notes, 16. Okay, did you watch all Aaron Patterson at once or did you go chronologically, I guess, is the question I'm trying to ask.
Speaker 2:I thought about that for a while before starting to watch them. Did I want to go chronologically? Did I want to find themes? Did I want to go chronologically? Did I want to find themes? Did I want to go with all through one person and kind of see their arc more back to back?
Speaker 2:But I think, as is my opinion with rewatching an old TV show or series of movies or something, release order is the proper order to watch them in, because they're going to be in conversation with each other in a way that you're not going to get if you watch in timeline chronologically with the MCU or something like that. So I wanted to kind of reconstruct the context of the conversations going on at those conferences and at the time by watching them as close to in order as I could get, as far as like within one conference. But yeah, it was really interesting to see sometimes when there was an idea that you could tell caught on from one keynote and then got mentioned and talked about in the next one, and seeing where people definitely rewrote that little section because they wanted to respond to something someone had said a day or two before and things like that. So I went with chronologically and I think it was the right choice after I had gone through a few years worth.
Speaker 1:And you've also seen a lot of keynotes yourself because you've been in the community a while. Right when was your first? Railsconf? 2016. Okay, so, of the keynotes that you watched prior to that year, do you have a favorite or one that sticks out to you?
Speaker 2:It's tough because, like a favorite ice cream or favorite movie or something depending on like how I'm feeling or what I'm thinking about that answer changes, but I think one that had me thinking about it the most since I've watched it was Gary Vanderberg's I think it's 2011 talk that, as far as I'm concerned, settled the question of are developers engineers or not, which I know is not as hotly debated a topic anymore.
Speaker 2:I know is not as hotly debated a topic anymore, but it was for a few years after I started my career in 2015. And it's shocking because, as far as I'm concerned, it was settled in 2011 because that talk was just really brilliant. It broke down the comparison between more quote-unquote traditional engineering roles like civil engineering and chemical engineering and things like that, and why those are seen as engineering and what is similar to our work and also how is the mindset of engineering carried forward into development and actually set us back a lot and like what needs to be broken down and kind of took another 40, 50 years with xp and all of these other things to really break apart the kind of using the wrong metaphor of engineering and yet at the, I still think it probably decided that yeah, we're engineers. Engineers is a bigger concept than maybe we're stuffing it into Interesting.
Speaker 1:Would you consider that a technical talk? Obviously it's a keynote. So when I say talk, I'm referring to keynotes just as a blanket. But when you think of a technical versus a non-technical talk, would that be considered to you a technical talk?
Speaker 2:It's borderline. When you first were asking that question I thought like, yeah, absolutely. But then I thought it's more about meta, about the work, but it's not completely removed, in that it's like human first and then gets into the work. It's like process first and then it gets into the work. So, yeah, yes, but there wasn't any code on screen, that kind of thing. The thing that I kind of think about technical talks is that as soon as whatever they're talking about is out of date, then that talk is kind of out of date for a certain amount, and that's sort of the thing that is the maybe defining quality or, nebulously, the kind of energy of like, well, this is a technical talk versus a non-technical talk. Is it going to stay with us and be higher concept or kind of broader, or is it about a technique, technical?
Speaker 1:idea, technique, technical idea, armed with that description of technical versus non-technical from your now very complete experience, probably the most complete of anybody in the community, are keynotes, mostly technical or non-technical.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think they're mostly non-technical because people try to hit a broader idea, for better or for worse. Sometimes I think that's detrimental because people try to speak too broadly and don't really say very much at all. But certainly at the beginning of RailsConf there was tradition of kind of introducing the newest parts of Rails and like what are the kind of technical concepts that are driving forward this last year and maybe the next year coming up of Rails development? That we kind of moved away from, as I think a little bit the framework got more stable. There wasn't as many groundbreaking things to talk about each year, and then we also expanded the horizons of who we had come to speak with us. There were people that weren't just Rails developers. There were people that weren't developers at all and we learned what we could from other disciplines and other points of view and those just kind of by their very nature had to be less technical because even if they were technical people, their technical content was not going to be related to Rails keynotes.
Speaker 1:Is there a trend in keynoting similar to that where we've gotten away from the hey, this is what's new in Rails technical keynote and we've brought in more people who might not be talking directly about Rails? Is there any trend similar to that that you've seen in keynotes that you hope keeps going at RubyConf or any conference that does utilize keynotes that you hope they take that away of?
Speaker 2:like hey, it took RailsConf a while to get there, but I really like this style maybe of conferences in general, because the majority of conferences I've attended have been Ruby Central conferences and so they have shared a similar arc in kind of their learnings and the way that they present topics. So I'm not as aware of non-Ruby or Rails conferences what they sort of look like. But as far as RubyConf or what would I hope to see when I do go to a conference that's not a Ruby or Rails focused one is, I would hope, is that continuation or that same idea of using the keynote as horizons, broadening opportunity, getting someone that isn't part of the whatever community or maybe isn't going to talk about something very specific and kind of that energy of the keynote. It's a little bit of a catch-22 in that you don't want to set out to say something lofty, otherwise you're probably just going to lose the thread and wander all over and not really have a coherent presentation.
Speaker 2:And wander all over and not really have a coherent presentation but at the same time wanting it to not be so in the weeds, really, because that feels like the quality that a normal session would have right, like you're there to get in the weeds about something that maybe like a blog post, is not the right way to release this information or to talk about this thing and the keynote isn't going to land with as many people, if it's really specific, so that maybe a third of the conference would want to go see that session.
Speaker 2:Right, you want to do something that's going to be more applicable to the wider group? Yeah, so I think, kind of following that trend of like having a broader or more wide-reaching topic, but still a specific topic, rather than just come in here and do a end-all, be-all TED Talk style thing that trips people up, makes them kind of lose touch of why they might have been invited or elevated or whatever, to give a keynote talk, because it's probably because you're already saying or thinking about something interesting that more people are going to want to hear about.
Speaker 1:So you kind of mentioned it in that segment and I know you talked a bit about it on the bike shed. I keep referencing that episode, so sorry listeners, if you haven't listened to it yet, just hit pause, go listen to that episode, come back, we might cover some of the same stuff. But you talk a little bit, or a fair amount, about not trying to make the keynote this impactful thing, not setting out to be like I'm going to say this really powerful thing in my keynote because I have this fancy stage and this fancy slot, because if you do that you may end up not saying anything important, etc. How did you manage that own thought that I need this keynote to be good? I want to say something meaningful, not just talk about every keynote that's ever happened. But also, I can't set out to blow everyone's minds because of every point you already made. How did you manage that?
Speaker 2:It was a theme that I had to keep front of mind every time that I started to, outside of the content, come up with an idea of something I wanted to say. So, from my own thoughts or from my own experience, or again thinking about the opportunity of having that moment on stage, I had to specifically tell myself it's like no, that didn't come from the project, it didn't come from the content, so put that aside. If it ends up being useful because it comes out of the content, I can pick it up again, but I really had to concentrate on what is the story coming out of the group of these talks? What are the themes? Are there things that Trying to notice things that people were bringing up again and again across the years, and trying to find the ways that I was affected or the things that I was thinking about because of watching the keynotes, rather than sort of a meta thing or something that I was bringing from outside? And eventually I got to the point where it's like okay, I've been purposefully not thinking about anything. What is the point of my talk?
Speaker 2:And I started to think about that until I had watched Yudikatz's 2014 keynote, where he said something about Rails and convention over configuration, being kind of this culmination of shared solutions that can make us all stronger together and make us all more powerful together than if we were working alone. And kind of refuting some detractors that were saying that shared solutions are just leaky abstractions. And he said that we needed to focus on the things that bring us together instead of focusing on the things that drive us apart. And when he said that I paused it. I went back, I watched that line a couple of times, I made sure that I had it down verbatim because all of a sudden it had kind of crystallized this idea of Ruby on Rails for me, of RailsConf, of what so many people had been and then would later talk about, in this kind of chronological escapade of keynotes that kept coming up.
Speaker 2:That people would be saying something about a technical topic, but it would be about these shared solutions, it would be about coming together, it would be about working stronger together and all of these different things that were both in technical content and in non-technical content, and it just seemed like that was the theme, that was the history, the point of Rails and RailsConf and it just really struck me at that moment. I was like, well, there you go. That's the through line. That's what I am going to kind of put my own opinion to. At the end of it, what was the point of all this is to rediscover this idea that was just sort of latent and I felt was already there, but I just never had words or never had a thought to elevate like that. And so, yeah, it was that 2014 talk that just struck me and I knew that's where it was going to be.
Speaker 1:That's such an interesting challenge to be able to go into watching all of these keynotes and try to not inject your own thoughts or feelings into them and just take them as they are so that you can present them to others who also weren't there, without bringing your own. Here are my thoughts on this person's keynote. It was not the goal. The goal was this person talked about this and these impactful things, but still make it your keynote yeah, it was concerted effort.
Speaker 2:It was a concerted effort and it was also at some level I knew going to be impossible, because just by choosing what I thought their takeaway was, I was imposing my own editorial voice on it, and the only way to not do that would be to just hit, play and watch all the keynotes together. So it was a little bit of like I'm going to do the best I can while knowing that it's completely impossible to do 100%.
Speaker 1:But the effort is there, which is not always the case. If someone's telling you, trying to tell you even facts without injecting their own opinion, the effort is appreciated. I want to talk so much more about this keynote because it was full disclosure. Aji spoiled the ending for me, asking for some practice and I knew it was coming and it still got me. I think it got most people and you got a very well-deserved standing ovation afterwards. And if anybody listening to this has not seen the videos are now out, you need to see the keynote. It is a lot of work and it is a ton of effort, as you just explained, but should be clear to anybody, and especially after watching it. Oh, knowing the amount of work it took, knowing some of the work it took that you weren't expecting, knowing everything, would you do it again, all over again, from scratch?
Speaker 2:there were definitely times while I was working on it that I was like why did I do this to myself? This is awful. My talk writing technique is unsustainable in the first place, the way that it just sort of takes over my life. But this was another 94 hours of watching video on top of needing to come up with an hour's worth of material. It was a lot, but I would. I love how it came out. I love how it landed with people. I love the way that people have connected with me since then. The sense of being pulled further into the community that I had that day after giving that talk was just incredible.
Speaker 2:I was saying the other day that I had a different kind of anxiety before giving the talk. It wasn't the usual like are people going to like it? Am I going to mess up? That kind of presenting something live anxiety. It was more an excitement. I came down to the conference area from my hotel room and I was thinking that I know it's good, I just can't wait to share it with people, and it was a different kind of excitement and nervousness than I'd ever had before. So yeah, I would absolutely do it. I think I have been maybe a little annoying in conversations over the last few months being like. You know. There was a keynote where they said I'll take that too. I'll be that person again, and I will be that person for months, if not years still, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:Well, you do have a very unique knowledge set now and, yeah, I mean, you earned it right. That's a lot of hours of video watching, that's a lot of hours of collecting your thoughts, and you did all of the illustrations right, I did yeah. Yeah, there was a lot of really good illustrations in it too. So it is funny because, for anybody who doesn't know, I did a keynote not a RailsConf keynote, it was a RubyConf keynote, barely and it was your partner's fault, it was Mina's fault. At least she was the one that talked me into doing it.
Speaker 2:Oh, she fully takes credit for that, by the way. Yeah, it's cool.
Speaker 1:So, because I keep saying it's Mina's fault, and my keynote by your definition of a good keynote, was a terrible keynote. There was no point to it. It was me going up on stage and making the creator of this language. I love laugh and just feeling good about doing that kind of nonsensical. That was a lot of work, I felt like, and then hearing the lot of work you put in, that is a different level. I don't know if I even have that capability to put in that many hours into something and then put in that much time and effort into making very impressive. This is where Andrew Mason would tell me to shut up because I'm fanboying, but he would use more harsh language.
Speaker 2:I think first of all you shouldn't sell your own keynote short, that playfulness and enjoying and fun is somehow not a worthy theme and cause, especially amongst Rubyists.
Speaker 1:I think it's a great talk, or at least it's got to be, because people keep asking me to do it. It just felt weird to do it as a keynote. It felt really weird to do it in front of everybody. It wasn't a hey, go to that talk or the game show or this other talk, it was hey, if you're coming to the conference, you're going to sit here and watch this game show Felt surreal.
Speaker 2:I don't know how this will change your opinion of everything, but it was not the first Ruby game show to happen as a keynote at RubyConf.
Speaker 1:No, I sort of found this out from trying to prepare myself for your talk of like seeing what some of the keynotes were and what some of the topics you were going to cover are, and also a little bit of my own, like, hey, people have done game shows in the past. What did they do? How did this land Stuff like that? So, yeah, it just felt weird for me to be doing it, I guess.
Speaker 2:This is a bit of a tangent, but it's kind of related there, because I feel like you've talked about this in conjunction with that whole idea of you making fun of this language and the creator is sitting right there in front of you watching you do that. Is it true that you named your dog?
Speaker 1:Mats. Yes, Matsumoto is actually what we call him. We call him Mats for short. He's adorable. He wore a red tuxedo at our wedding because of course he did, and we had gotten a girl dog instead. It would have been Ruby. I absolutely love Ruby For so many reasons. Ruby changed my life. To have the opportunity to name something I deeply care about after something else I deeply care about, that's what I was going to do.
Speaker 2:I have kind of a similar experience that Amina and I's first dog together. We named Henson after Jim Henson, who is an incredible influence, and Jim Henson's work across the Muppets and everything else that he did and his philosophy on life has been so impactful to me and so we named our little Muppets. And everything else that he did and his philosophy on life has been so impactful to me and so we named our little Muppet Henson. And much the same as you telling Matt's that fact of you having a named your dog after him. I was lucky enough once to run into Heather Henson at the Orlando fringeinge and she saw on the poster for my show. She was like, oh, is that your dog? Yeah, I was like yeah, it is. And she said what's his name? I was like Henson, he's named after your dad.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, when you told that story about your pup and matt's being in the audience, I know how that feels you did bring up something that I want to at least touch on how do you go from circus performer, circus entertainer, circus clown to a rubius, to a developer or engineer, if you so choose?
Speaker 2:so, yeah, I ran away to join the circus. I went to circus school in san francisco.
Speaker 2:There's a school there's a circus school. Yeah, it's the san francisco school of circus arts, or the circus center as it's known. They have a clown program called the Clown Conservatory that I did two years at and I got a degree in experimental theater with them. And, yeah, now I work in tech. Yeah, I changed careers because it didn't work out in comedy for me for a myriad of reasons, one of which was the undiagnosed adhd that I didn't really find out about until some pandemic induced self-reflection that led me to spread my interests and things too thin to ever get to like a circus level of skill in a lot of different things.
Speaker 2:I tried to make that what I did, that. I was a collector of useless skills. I even had still out there this digital YouTube channel where I tried to learn a useless skill every week for a year and like make a video about it. That was unsustainable as well, but it didn't really work out. It landed really well with people that it landed with, but not enough to sustain a career.
Speaker 2:We left the Bay Area. Mina and I met on tour in the circus with Ringling Brothers, by the way and then. So we lived in San Francisco again after that and we left because we couldn't afford it because you can't live in the Bay Area unless you're in tech. And then you still kind of can't live in the Bay Area. We moved to Chicago and the idea of just having to work the network from the ground up it wasn't interesting, it wasn't going to be like satisfying or fulfilling. And so I started looking around and I found Dev Bootcamp satisfying or fulfilling. And so I started looking around and I found Dev Bootcamp and I'd always been kind of tinkering more with my website and other performers' websites while being a performer, so I thought, hey, maybe this is something that I could do. And then I found Ruby and Rails instead of just HTML and CSS, and it's like, oh, this is how the internet happens, and just kind of stuck.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. It's so funny because I'm pretty sure you're the first person I've met that can be like I was a circus clown and now I'm in tech, but at the same time your story is so familiar. So many people in this industry of like I used to do this and then just took this fun little hobby or interest I had and turned it into this amazing career. It's interesting to hear that you toured with Ringling Brothers Circus, which is, I imagine, a big deal. I mean, it's a pretty well-known circus. I imagine they don't just take anybody. And then to hear you also say there's an anxiety when you give a talk, when you get up on stage, you still have an anxiety of being in front of people after you were a clown more maybe about like I want it to be received well and these different things.
Speaker 2:So there is definitely a cheat code or something that I can think like, as big as this audience gets, it's never going to be the 24,000 people at Boston's TD Garden that I performed for, or something like that. So whenever people ask how to get better at speaking and they get to the point where it's like okay, but I'm afraid of public speaking, I'm like I wish I could help you, but it's not a shared experience. I can help you with all the like technique parts of it and please, if there's anybody that wants to get into speaking, reach out to me. I'm very happy to help. I'm just not going to be able to help with that part. A lot of it is just you'd kind of just have to do it, but I'm not going to be able to tap into the same kind of emotions in the same way that somebody else who has a similar experience will be able to kind of help and share those kind of trials and tribulations.
Speaker 1:Dang, because I was hoping you were going to tell me because I still I've done the game show more times than I can count with shoes on, I think, at this point, and I still get nervous every time I go up on stage like it's the first time and I was kind of hoping you'd be like well, here's how you get over that. But I guess not.
Speaker 2:The only thing that I think that has helped me when I've needed it, and I think has helped other folks, is to remember that everybody there wants you to succeed. Nobody is looking for you to fail. They paid money to be there. They want this to be good, as wants you to succeed. Nobody is looking for you to fail. They paid money to be there. They want this to be good, as much as it might feel like it at times. Nobody is rooting for your failure. That's all I got there.
Speaker 1:So the next question I would normally ask is what kind of blockers do you have? If you don't have a current blocker, what is a recent blocker you had? And it can be about the Angular project that you currently have. It can be about you kind of touched on blocker-esque things with the keynote. But if there's like something specific where you're like actually, yeah, I hung up on this thing, what's a blocker in the life of Aji?
Speaker 2:To kind of keep going on the speaking train. It is the application keynote, because, like I said, I went to school for art and I studied animation and I have a lot of opinions about how things should look visually and I want that to show up in my slides and presentations. And Keynote doesn't want to do all of the things I want to happen, and so the number of hoops that I have to jump through trying to make something look remotely the way that I want, or the hacks that I have to come up with to make this program bend to my will, is ridiculous, and just the sheer number of clicks to do something sometimes, and the fact that it's an apple made application and the apple scripting support is terrible. I could take away a couple of those clicks. I know how to program, even though that's barely a programming language.
Speaker 2:That is always my biggest blocker and somehow I will put myself through the hell of all of those hoops because I am opinionated about how I want this thing to look and I think it is worth it, and I have a lot of opinions about how animation can help people understand a concept, and so the more angles I can take to help someone understand a concept, I'm going to take them and so I put in all of this extra work. But I really wish there was a better presentation software, because I've tried a bunch of the other ones and they are still not as powerful as Keynote and Keynote is still incredibly limited. Powerful as Keynote and Keynote is still incredibly limited, so I don't know what it is. I'm going to have to start using After Effects or Final Cut or something to make these presentations.
Speaker 1:Go full-blown Hollywood movie style. Instead of slides, we're going to hit. Play on this movie now.
Speaker 2:That's my biggest blocker to getting one of these things done. That's my struggle. Keynote is my struggle.
Speaker 1:I keep telling myself I'm going to learn Keynote one day so that I stop with my crappy markdown converted slides. But I'm like, but they work, they do the job. And Keynote seems, feels, daunting. Take it from someone who's opened the application like three times and been lost within like 10 minutes. I know that in order to get the slides better, I'm going to need to learn it. My God, it seems so daunting. I would rather just deal with crappy slides.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think for the majority of slides and talks and presentations, too much bells and whistles can really detract. There's like a bell curve, inverted bell curve. There's a gulf in the middle where too much stuff is just going to make it worse. So it's either you need to keep it simple and stick to your message or kill yourself animating 800 slides in a half hour presentation or something.
Speaker 1:No, I'll keep it simple. I appreciate you enabling me and my laziness with my slides. The last question is what is something cool, new or interesting that you want to share? Could be you built. It could be you read, it could be anything. The floor is yours.
Speaker 2:I'm looking around my crazy workshop right now to try and figure out the things that I've been learning lately, because I do a lot of different hobbies and projects and I'm always trying to learn something new. But I think right now my big project is I'm moving to Scotland at the beginning of November. Project is I'm moving to Scotland at the beginning of November, and so a lot of what I've learned about is the kind of differences between the United States and the UK as far as logistical things about like language differences and all these different things. But what I've kind of learned the most is that so much about living in the United Kingdom is about England and I'm going to be moving to Scotland and I know that those are two different countries with different cultures, and so I have learned that there is not as much to be learned about my coming up new home as I sort of expected there to be with all of the information there is about living in the UK.
Speaker 2:It's so much about England and I know that there is going to be a sort of cliff where that stops working, and so I've gotten to the point where I've learned what the unknowns are, which I think is an important step in learning anything. Right, because you can start learning and you're like, oh, I got this. But then you get to a point where you've actually learned enough, where you know that you don't know anything yet. And I've gotten to that point. And that's a frustrating point, but it's also an exciting point, because that's where you actually kind of stretch and grow and you get the most out of it. And so I'm there and I'm like ready to go into that next step, but it has to kind of wait until November and then we'll see how it goes.
Speaker 1:I'm moving to which I like to camp and do a little dabble in backpacking and I do a ton of research before I go anywhere. I can't imagine moving somewhere like your life moving, not visiting, moving and not being able to find information.
Speaker 2:There's enough stuff about the things that you would need to know to make the move stick, like laws and all of that. I just think that there's a little bit of there's going to be more culture shock than I sort of expect because you think, moving to a different country, well, they speak the same language. There's enough of kind of like root culture similarities and I know a lot about the differences. I've been an anglophile all of my life and all of these different things. But I just know watching these that it's like, yeah, that's not how I've felt in Scotland so far, so something's not matching up here and, yeah, just kind of learning that vague feeling that I can't put my hand on exactly why just yet. But I know that this isn't the whole picture and it's exciting, it's daunting, it's all of the good things about taking on a new sort of challenge and a new journey.
Speaker 1:Not that there's anything wrong with Scotland. I'm not asking the why it's like. Why in the world would you choose Scotland? I just mean there's a lot of places that you could move in the world. What drew you to scotland, edinburgh's?
Speaker 2:just the most gorgeous city. So that's part of it for sure. Like I said, I've been an anglophile my whole life. My paternal grandmother was born in england and so just kind of an interest and closeness to United Kingdom-y-ness has been kind of near to my life in a lot of different ways. Grew up watching British sitcoms and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:Mina, my wife, really needs elevation in scenery and we don't really get that in Chicago in scenery and we don't really get that in chicago but you do get that in a little bit in edinburgh and definitely in the highlands. The landscape is just beautiful, the kind of closeness from the city to nature. A lot of like little reasons that kind of add up and aggregate. There's kind of feeling of closeness to like magic and myth a little bit, in that it feels like that's where the fairies live. And even though I've tried to explain to Mina that fairies are not actually very kind to humans please do not go talk to the fairies, bad things will happen she's still very excited about meeting fairies so you know your fairy myth.
Speaker 1:Not many people know that that fairies are, for lack of a better term, their decks.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, but yeah, just like lots of little things the kind of quality of homeness is the only way I can describe it that I felt living in san francisco. I felt walking around in Edinburgh and maybe it's a little bit the sidewalks sometimes turn into stairs. There's a quality in both of those places. The weather is a little bit the same. It's kind of like temperate but a little coldish. A lot of little things that sort of add up to make it seem kind of like a dream or a fantasy and it's like, yeah, but we're going to go make it real.
Speaker 1:It's such a cool way of describing it. I'm not just moving, I'm going on this like semi-permanent adventure. That's awesome. Is there anything else that you want to talk about before we wrap this?
Speaker 2:up. I don't know if this is for the podcast or what, but you mentioned when you were talking at the podcast panel at RailsConf that there was an episode of Code in the Code Encoders, that Code it. That kind of stands out and means a lot to you where you talked with your guest about ADHD and tech and that whole thing, and I would like the recommendation of which episode that was, so that I can go back and listen to it.
Speaker 1:Sure, so definitely episode one, pretty much any episode that I have Andrew Mason on. We talk a little bit about it in episode one because he's my first guest. He kind of hijacked my ADHD a little bit to make sure that the episodes happened. I said this at the podcast panel, but I was struggling to get that first episode recorded and I was just texting with him and we have very similar ADHDs His is a little worse than mine, but very similar. He just knew like, okay, we'll just do it now While we're talking about it, what's going on?
Speaker 1:But the episode that we did a lot of ADHD talking about is episode 18, which is from March 7th of 2023, which is crazy to say out loud. So we do a bunch of ADHD chatting in both of those episodes. If I'm remembering correctly, 18 is the one where we had a full segment on working with our ADHDs and making sure not being afraid to, which was always something for me. I was very afraid to be like well, I have ADHD, but how important it is when you're working with others, especially in a world like this.
Speaker 1:I have ADHD can help other people just understand our workflows, understand why it's 2 in the morning and we just ripped out a ton of PRs and you didn't get anything done for the past three days and now it's 2 in the morning on a Thursday. What's going on? Stuff like that where it can still be hard to talk about a little to a degree. But I think, especially getting to interact with so many other devs and successful devs and very intelligent people that are like, yeah, I also have ADHD and here are the types of struggles I have and I'm like I have those too. This is not nearly as bad or as damning as it was in my head when it was first revealed to me that I had it from my doctor. So good episodes to listen to.
Speaker 2:Good call out yeah it's that shared experience and everything that I'm looking for, so I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:Hopefully those episodes give it to you and the next time you come on the show we can talk about nothing but ADHD, because I do think there's a lot that I wish I knew when I was first diagnosed and especially when I first got into this industry after being diagnosed which happened a few years before I got into this industry so I'm always down to talk about it and give other people a resource, a place to like learn about themselves in a way. You just haven't figured this out yet. It took us a while too, but we'll tell you all about it. So anybody who wants to follow you or learn more about you on the internet, where can they find you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm mostly these days on blueskydoodlingdev, I think, because I finally linked my domain to my account there, so you can find me there and I'm going to say this out loud, so that I have to do it. I'm going to start putting short, essentially like little talks on a YouTube channel. So if you want to hear what I'm thinking about as far as, like, ruby and object-oriented code and stuff, it'll be on YouTube Doodling Dev.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I'll put those in the show notes so everyone can easily find it. What do they say on YouTube?
Speaker 1:Smash the like and subscribe button Gotta use the right word Otherwise it doesn't work, and I just see Aaron Patterson in my head every time. I say that out loud. Well, thank you so much for coming on, aji, for talking about the keynote, for the keynote Again. Listeners, if you've gotten this far and you haven't hit pause to go watch the video as soon as this episode is over. Go watch it. It's incredible. We'll definitely have you on again, because this was a blast. Listeners, I will see you in the next one. Bye.
