Bridging Education & Engineering Excellence (with Mark Techson)

Jan-Niklas Wortmann sits down with Mark Techson, a tech educator and engineer, to explore the intersection of education and technology. They discuss the importance of teaching methods that empower learners, the challenges of coding, and the evolving landscape of tech interviews. Mark shares insights on leadership in tech, the magic of modern development, and his journey with the Angular framework. The conversation also touches on personal passion projects, the impact of AI on the industry, and the importance of transparency and communication in tech.

takeaways

• Teaching should be in service of the learner.
• It's important to empower students to feel confident.
• Don't be afraid to explore solutions in coding.
• AI is a powerful tool that can enhance productivity.
• Understanding architecture and design patterns is crucial.
• Transparency in communication builds trust.
• The browser has evolved into a powerful tool for development.
• Passion projects can lead to unexpected opportunities.
• Leadership skills are essential in tech environments.
• Preparing for tech interviews requires discipline and practice.

Our fantastic Guest

Mark Techson 

Mark loves to teach and code.

He is an award winning university instructor and engineer with a passion for creating meaningful learning experiences. With over a decade of developing solutions across the tech stack, speaking at conferences and mentoring developers he is excited to continue to make an impact in tech. Lately, Mark has been spending time as a Developer Relations Engineer on the Angular Team.

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Links and Resources

Resource RFC (Part 1 and Part 2)
Jason Lengstorf and CodeTV

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Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:03 How do you maintain creativity?
• 3:41 One coding advice for your former self?
• 6:46 How to properly utilize AI?
• 12:29 Does knowing algorithms help you in your job?
• 16:18 What is an important soft skill for you?
• 21:48 What is something that feels like magic?
• 27:38 How to make Angular easier?
• 32:50 What is a meaningful project for you?
• 35:38 How do you stay up to date?
• 37:39 What's a passion project of yours?
• 46:35 What can I do if AI takes my job?
• 50:04 What is your fallback plan?

Transcript

1:00:00

Hey everyone, this is Jan-Niklas and welcome to the Weekly Dev's Brew. Today, I'm sitting down with Mark Thompson, a tech educator who's managed to do some made-ream about, but few achieve. Bridging the gap between teaching code and actually shipping it. From university lecture halls to the Angular team, Mark has spent over a decade showing us that the best engineers aren't just the one who build but the ones who can explain what they built the way they did. Grab your favorite morning beverage and get comfortable and let's explore what happens when passion for education meets technical excellence. This conversation might just change how you approach your next project or your entire career. Hey Mark, how's it going today? First off, that introduction though. That was so good. That was so good. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. Thank you. Good writing, good presentation. That was excellent. I'm feeling good. I'm just really impressed by you right now. I knew you were cool, but that was excellent. I appreciate that a lot. So, Mark, you've balanced being both an educator and an engineer throughout your career. What helps you maintain that creative spark in a way? Sure. So, one of the things I'd be completely honest that I feel is missing from most tech education is being in service of the learner. Meaning when I think about things, I'm never thinking about like, okay, for example, here's why I was super successful in university teaching. Because a lot of professors and instructors and lecturers were like,"I'm going to demonstrate just how smart I am." For me, it was like, I don't even care if you think I'm smart. Sometimes I would get students who would like, they couldn't believe that what I was saying was right, because I would break it down in such a way that anyone could understand it, and they wouldn't believe it. Then sometimes I'd have TAs come up and try to re-explain what I just said, because they're like, "No, it has to be more complex than this." But I would always think about what is the way that I can say this, so that you feel like you are the smartest person in the room after hearing it. That you feel super confident, you feel super empowered. So, for me, that's what's always made teaching so interesting and how to be creative, because I'm always thinking, okay, this is really hard to understand. There has to be a way for me to make it available to everybody. I love that. One thing that you said really resonates with me, because you see that a lot in tech presentation where people start. This is my talk title, and let me start by talking five minutes about myself, to show you how great I am. I get it, and to some extent that it's important to show you or to know your stuff, but this is not about you. This is at no point about you. This is always about the people in the audience. That's right. Here's what's really interesting about that. Because that's such an astounding and astute idea. It's not about you, it's about the people in the audience. Even if you're talking about yourself, it's technically still about the people in the audience. I gave a keynote for that conference in 2024, and it was a part of my personal health journey, and just what matters to me and how I use my core values. It was still me telling my story to inspire you as the learner or as a listener, to make the choices that I think will help you live a really meaningful and profound life. I think there are two very different ways how you can tackle those kind of things. It's either like, "Oh, look at me, how great I am," or,"Hey, I have some experience that is really relevant to what you are dealing with." Let me show you how I manage it. Maybe it helps you. I love that. Yes, 100%. So, Mark, if you could go back and give yourself one piece of coding advice, coding advice. Thinking back of your first days as a developer, like if I think back without beard and looking like a puppy, what would you tell yourself looking back? Yeah, so I've been working professionally for almost 20 years. I got my first job as an engineer in 2006. I started writing code when I was 15. Maybe a little bit younger than that, maybe 14. I got my first job in 2006, so it's 2025 now, so 20 years of time. I've learned a lot of things. And the thing that I would tell myself back then was probably like, "Don't be afraid because it's already broken." So, let's say that I'm trying to fix a bug or I'm trying to add a new feature. It already doesn't work. So, don't be afraid to explore the solution and to just try things. I feel like I spent a lot of time in my career with a little bit of analysis paralysis where I'm so afraid of making a mistake because I'm pre-thinking about,"Okay, what's the code review going to look like? What are they going to say about how good or bad my code is? I'm thinking about all these negative outcomes, but nothing even works right now. So, why am I so worked up about it? And if it doesn't work now, that's literally why you are hired, is to figure it out. If you can't figure it out, guess what you have? 18, you can get help. So, I think just getting rid of that fear and being able to just go forward, I think that's one of the main things I would say. And if I had to add one tiny little caveat on there, one extra thing I would say, explore solutions more thoroughly. I think that sometimes as engineers, especially in the young days, we see an API. We're like, "Okay, this one is going to work." But I think you could do a little bit more thinking and practice that. You have to practice this because you only get it through experience. But do a little bit more thinking about what options are available to me, what makes the most sense? Is this a short term versus a long term solution? You know what I mean? Just think more broadly and not so narrow into the, "I just got to get this bug fixed." Okay, think more broadly because then you'll come up with more robust solutions over time. I think, particularly, that skill is also getting more important now over the years with the embrace of AI. Let's be real, all coders are going to use AI in one way or another in the next couple of years. But I think where it's going to be the important distinguishment is like,"Okay, either you have those people that just use it and be like, accept, accept, accept, accept. This all looks great." Or the people that accept it, then reasonate with it, "Okay, what did just happen? Does it work? Does it do the things I want it to do? Why does it do it?" And this way, actively encourage a learning process. I think that's going to be a key differentiator between the... And I don't mean this in a negative way, but the average developer and the ones that are going to excel and utilize AI in a proper way. I think that the whole AI story is so interesting. And it's interesting because I think developers are in a couple of different buckets, maybe two or three buckets right now. I think there are people who are wholesale rejecting AI. They're like, "No, no AI for me. I'm just... It's not as smart as I am." So therefore, I don't even care about it. Then I think there are people who are just like, "AI is the best thing ever." Then I'm not even going to think about the code that I write or author anymore that I participate in. And then there's somebody where I think you should be in the middle, which is, what can AI do for me that is going to help me improve things? And so I think it's dangerous to be on the extremes of anything. I think people who say AI slop or AI is garbage. I think that's just short sighted. Because I think as an engineer, here's the thing where I love to use AI. If I already know what to do, that is my value add on a keyboard. I know what needs to be done. So here's what I know. I know that I'm building a distributed system. And I know that I need caching here and I know that I need load balancing. I know what to do. Then getting an AI assistant to help me smooth out that process means what? Less time just churning through things that... Is that the best use of my time? That's what I think about. It's like, how can I use AI to do the things that could help me to be more productive and then get more done, but not at the sake of like,"Okay, I'm just going to generate my entire app and then I'm just going to let AI do the whole thing." I don't think that's the full story. I think that we will have new systems involved. There's a whole lot to this story. And I think that AI is a powerful tool. I think it's a mistake to say that it is a fad. I think that is incorrect. But I do think there are some patterns maybe that are fads. We'll get past some of those things. But I think AI as a tool to help us make better products is here to stay. I like to compare it. So one of my professors in university forced us to use Notepad so that we basically just had like a basic text editor because all the fancy IDE features make it hard to actually learn stuff. And no one would approach this topic anymore like this. It's just an outdated way of thinking about things. And I think in a similar way, AI is going to be a tool we utilize to be more effective at what we do on a daily basis. 100%. And that's a really interesting thing because when I interviewed at Google, I had to use like a Google Doc to do my whiteboarding interview because I interviewed during COVID. So it was like a Google Docs, no IDE. Because you know what they cared about, I think. And this is me talking as the interview person, the person being interviewed, sorry, and not the interviewer. So I can't speak on Google's behalf. But I feel like they cared more about did I know what to do versus did I know every single syntactical line. It didn't really matter because guess what's going to be able to happen? I'm going to be able to stack overflow search. I'm going to be able to Google search. Now I'm going to be able to AI, pair programming with an AI. Like, hey, I'm trying to do this. What's a good way to do that? Because here's one, again, I keep going back to this idea. Me knowing what to do is what makes me special, what makes you special because you know what to do from all your experience. Okay, now I'm curious because I never worked for like a bang level company. How did you perceive the interview process at Google? I know some parts are probably going to be NDA related. But how is that? How did you prepare? Like, what would you recommend people that might want to... Oh, yeah. So if you want to get into like one of the faang companies or manga, another way they say it now, since Facebook is now meta. Oh, fine, right. Like, that's why I call you. So whatever you want, that's not my company. I think what's really interesting is how much tolerance do you have for just discipline? Right. And because that's what you really need is like discipline because you need to spend a lot of time prepping for the interview process. I probably spent three months, probably like one to two hours a night, like studying. Right. And then that was just the exercise and discipline, just because it's really easy to be like, yeah, you know, I don't want to spend that time. Okay, you don't have to, right? Because there are lots of jobs that don't require such a rigorous prep. But I like, you know, read cracking the coding interview. I use like algorithm apps to like challenge myself. I timed myself, right! Because that was one of the things that was a little harder for me is that like, I could always arrive at the right answer, but could I arrive at the right answer with enough time in the interview? Right. So that was just a thing that I really worked on was like, okay, I need to be able to solve my first version of the solution within like 10 minutes, right? Maybe 15 at the most, but like, I kind of have to be able to like get there. Give me the problem. I need to get my first solution. So I think if you want to do it, if you want to work at a company where they have those style of like, you know, programming challenges, I think the biggest thing you can do is one, learn about algorithms and data structures. Because what it always comes down to is being able to look at a problem and identify which algorithm or data structure makes this problem like easy breezy problem, right? Because there are like certain keywords, certain patterns you learn like, oh, this is a tree. If it's a tree, or I probably need recursion. You see what I'm saying? So like, boom, I got my data structure, got my algorithm. Now is just the idea of now that I know what my tools are, what do I need to use? Or like, how do I use those tools to actually solve the problem now? Okay, I have to ask this question because like looking from a perspective or like from a person that doesn't like to do things like that. Quite honest. Do you think it helps you now in the job you have? Yes. Or is this more like a stepping stone or like a barrier that you have to? No, I think that people who say, oh, you know, I, you know, I'm in day 3000 of my technical career, and I still don't need data structures and algorithms. And I would argue that maybe there's a place for them to be when you hit enough scale. So at Google, we're not talking about 1000 users concurrently. Now we're talking about millions of concurrent users on apps. That's a very different problem. Right? So like, so think about the same algorithm. So think about like, if you have to do 1000 database reads versus 10 million database reads per like minute, those those two things, you can get away with the for loop, you know what I'm saying? Or something like like regular loop structure at 1000. At 10 million, you got to start like partitioning and doing you can start doing all kinds of like things. So it makes a difference depending on the type of work that you do. Now, if you're working on an internal like SaaS app for your, you know, you work in an insurance company, it's an internal portal, of course, you're probably not going to run into the need of a like a red and black tree or something. Right? You don't really care about that. But here's the place where I thought it was super interesting. When I was preparing for my interview, I remember I had to like use one of the problems was like a scoreboard, right? Like like the leaderboard, you know, where people, you know, they give you like a dataset of scores, you got to like, you know, be able to put them on screen and do some sorting. But when I did it with the for loop, it would run out of time at scale. Then I had to like use I think I think it's like a binary search or something like that to like, sort of by they sort to sort it. You see, so it's like when you look at scale, that's when those algorithms and data structures make sense. And so it's okay if you work at a job where that just doesn't happen for you. And that's okay. Like, I think there are lots and lots of jobs where that doesn't matter as much. But I think when you start to work at bigger companies where they have, and even if it's not even the big company, if you work at a company that works at a large scale, that's where it really matters. Yeah. Yeah. I also noticed, so I did for some interviews, like you said that to to prep and to some extent, it's also fun. Like if you don't like the time pressure, like I have an interview, if you exclude those parts from the equation, right? But if you're just like, I mean, most of us engineer like solving problems. And that's like peak problem solving. It's like, okay, here's a problem, give me an easy solution. And then there are like different degrees, like you said, like, usually when I did it, like I found the easy solution within like a couple of minutes, and then you hit into like the test cases of like, okay, what happens if this function is executed a million times in a second, and those tests fail. And then you're like, well, maybe I should look at some algorithms for this. So I also to some extent enjoy that challenge, but I'm also like very triggered by challenges. So it's a, yeah, it can be fun. But I think you're right. We say, when it's not, you know, within the time pressure of like, I got to get this my interviews in two weeks or three weeks or whatever. And last thing I'll say about like prepping for a big tech interview, give yourself some time. Like if you're thinking about applying at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Netflix, or any of these like big companies, start prepping now, even if you're thinking about it started by doing a problem a day, right? Just like give yourself some time. I think me having three months to prepare helped, because I was like, okay, I'm not like trying to cram, I was like, just giving myself time to refresh a lot of the things that I had learned in university. No. Yeah, that totally makes sense. On that note, though, we talked a lot about like technical aspects of the interview. Do you think there's a non-technical skill in our industry, or like that is very important for our industry? Yeah, I think leadership is very important. And I think leadership, like, so there's this term from this book called 360 degree leader. And the 360 degree leader is someone who knows how to lead up, meaning like you can lead your leaders, lead down anybody that you're managing, or like in a team lead for you can lead them, but you can also lead laterally, like your peers and such, and have influence that way. I think just knowing how to lead in that way is super important. Because eventually, you need to have influence over people. So let's look. So let's consider this idea. You and I are on the same team, we're the same level, both software, senior software engineers, let's say that, right, I need you to do something, right? Like I need you to prioritize some work that I think is really important that I've heard from my, you know, person, my manager, like this really important, I need you to do it. How do I get you to do that? How do I communicate with you? How do I convince you, and then the people who are prioritizing your work to let you work on it, but then also get you to have buy in on that? Right? Like, I think that is such an underrated skill, because what ends up happening usually, when people don't necessarily align, they stonewall and then they have arguments in need because of conflict. But that's not helpful to anybody. So how do I avoid the conflict by communicating and leading? And the thing that I think is difficult with those kinds of situations, like, there's no particular framework for like working with people in that sense. Like, obviously, there are like schemes and stuff, but like, like, you will motivate me very differently than I would motivate you. And, and we're both like, grew up in a Western society, and those things, that's entirely different if you work with like, other cultures and stuff. So that's, yeah, that's just the thing that is always mind boggling to me when I talk to managers. And like, I had one manager that was like, super into like, psychology and stuff, and it was super interesting to see how he interacts completely different with different people. But it's a skill at the end of the day. And you need to know that the thing that I think that I think is the most important, and I would probably tell my younger self, I'm and people that know me know that too, I'm a big fan of transparency. So I think I look at you in a different light and then job interview if you straight away tell me I don't know the answer to this versus mingling your way around being like, okay, like, there are there is place for like sharing your thoughts about things. But there's also like, a way to say, I have no idea, but I would know how to find the answer to this. So and I did a lot of consulting before. So I think transparency is just so underrated. I interacted with so many consulting companies that were like, oh, yeah, no, we cannot share the progress status on that because we're behind the timeline. So they're like, bullshitting around with the client instead of just straight away saying, we're delayed. This is how much time we need is in the end better for everyone. So yes, it might be uncomfortable, but transparency, I've never regretted being transparent afterwards. So I have little known fact during my interview, I actually had to say that and I thought that it was over. Yeah, I thought it was over. I thought I blew it. I, I did a particular consultant, I did a lot of interviews. And the minute I noticed you don't know the answer, but don't tell me it's over for me, like, I will let you fail over this. Because I adjust the lack of trust that I have in you as a person of like being transparent. Yeah, I was really transparent. So you know what, I'm stuck. This problem is a good problem. And I know that with more time, unless it may be it's the pressure, and I was just very transparent, I was like, maybe it's the pressure of the situation, but I'm stuck. And I know that, you know, you've been trying to like, give me hints and push me in the right direction. But I just can't see the solution. And I'm just like, I'm at a brick wall. And I understand we're out of time. And I just said that I was completely honest. And I, you know, and I thought that I had like blown the Google interview, I was like, yeah, it's over. You know, I went outside, you know, because I was in my office, and I walked out, and I had tears in my eyes, because I had been studying for months, and this is the big day. And then I was like, Oh, I didn't perform, you know what I mean? Like, I couldn't get past this problem. And I think that honestly, was the benefit to me. Because then I talked about in my next, because I had to do five one hour interviews. And then in the next one, I talked about what I learned from that experience. Yeah, I was very honest. I was like, listen, here's what I learned, I learned what it's like to be in a like boxing match, or you know, like a fist fight match, where you get knocked down, right, then they expect you to get back up and keep fighting. But what's in the back of your mind the whole time is you don't want to get knocked down again. And so what does that create in your body creates all this anxiety, and all this like fear. And I was like, that's what I feel right now, because I did not get the right answer. So now that's all I said, but listen, I want to do my best. But I understand now why when somebody gets knocked down in the boxing match, why it's so hard to keep fighting, because you're so afraid of getting knocked down again, because you don't want that to happen. That's super interesting. And what a coincidence. Love that. So besides technical stuff, you've also worked across tech stacks for decades, like anger wasn't around 2005, as far as I know. So what is something in like modern developer development that still feels like magic to you? I have a couple ideas for myself, where I'm just like, okay, I'm just accepting the answer. I have no idea. Oh, sure. I think the browser is magic. Right? Right. Web browsers are amazing. Like, I remember I wrote my own web browser way back in 2002, as a college homework assignment, right? Like nothing, like, you know, like I'm a genius. But I was like, Oh, this is like, it was like basic, you know what I mean? Like I have my web browser, you could make the request, blah, blah, blah, we display the page, but I didn't have to work on the rendering engine. And I was like, man, the browser, so this little browser is pretty powerful. And then I can go online later, you know, use PHP, and I could like or Perl, and I could like make these scripts, and I could do these things. And now you can write code in the browser and compile in the browser, right? Like you can watch videos, do all this stuff. Every time I see the announcement from like the Chrome DevTools team, all these are the new fancy things we do. And I'm like, that's super cool. I have no idea how you would even tackle that. But that's pretty cool. Isn't that amazing? Like, think about this. A couple of years ago at Google IO, we talked about how Chrome and Adobe had I think they had worked together, something like that. There are some type of interaction with Adobe, but like they had a version of Photoshop that ran in the browser. And I was like, I remember when Photoshop could barely run on your PC, right? Because of how much resources it needs. And now we can have Photoshop, we can have image editing, video editing in the browser, like we're using a web platform to record together right now. Like think about how bananas that is, right? The browser is just amazing technology. I would have never envisioned that we'd be here 20 years ago. Yeah. And yeah, when I started my career, I worked at like a little rails shop and like everyone was like super anti JavaScript. And we're like, it's not secure. It's slow. The language is not great. And to be fair, Ruby is a pretty cool language. So comparatively, like JavaScript is not a great language. But so I kind of grow into the sentiment of like, okay, the browser is kind of like lacking and we're using a server to like accommodate for that. And by now every time I'm like, no, the browser is not right. That's right. My skill, my skill issue now. Yeah, I'm not saying that. I was there for me. When I can't do something like no, this is a skill issue. Like I need to work on it or something. It's so funny. That's funny. I feel like every time when I talk to Ryan about like signals or something, I'm like, I know all the words you're saying and like I can put them in the same sentence. What you're saying, can you put that in like small, a computer science is so interesting like that. So if we go beyond like this regular programming, right? Like, just like tight, you know, pecking keys, you know, with their fingers, it's like computer science is just such a fascinating field that we're still finding, you know, patterns and concepts and we're still like exploring and like creating new ideas. It's just so fascinating. So I went to, I have a bachelor's degree and a master's degree. So in university, for my master's degree, one of the things we just worked on was just like thinking, you know what I mean? And just like thinking about how things work. And I still have some of my graduate school books that I keep looking at every day. Like I'm going to revisit that book and I never will. Right. But they look nice on my shelf. And but I just remember taking a class about the principles of computer graphics and like at the lowest level, you know, what it takes to make a polygon and just all the ideas and patterns that just have come out of that space. Because somebody said, I want to be able to show 3D objects on the screen. Right. Like that was the idea. Somebody had that idea. So like now people like Ryan Carneado and then you got Alex Riccobard and Pablo Kay from Angler team. He said, okay, how do we expand signals beyond just like synchronous activity? Right. How do we go even further? And so now they're thinking about these things and, you know, and more patterns are emerging. It's just so fascinating. Like, you know, how computer science continues to live on. Like on that note, because you just published the resource RFC, we will put the link to that in the show notes as well. And a lot of the way that you differentiated between the API that you propose and the architectural impact that it has, because the API is pretty straightforward. People mostly will be like having like nois flavors of it, but like, we're pretty much accepted. But the architectural impact that's going to have on Angular application. And that's one of the things that I love because like, I've been with Angular for like, the last 10 years. So I basically did AngularJS, Angular 2, RC and all the went through all the phases. And the it's funny to see how when you joined, like it was a concrete effort to like making the framework approachable. So like, if I look at the Angular applications that I've wrote 2016 2017, they look completely different than the Angular applications that I would right now. And like, I'm pretty sure if we're talking about like, two, three, four years from now with like resources and other things that are in the pipeline, how different that is. So, a, I want to thank you for like making the framework more approachable for the broader audience, because it's so surprisingly has a weird sentiment to it. Working on like public presence. I know, you're doing great. But the other thing, how do you think? Okay, that's actually the thing that I'm interested in. Like, how do you approach something like that? So like looking at you joined the team, you had like, I assume, like, some kind of like, imposter similar, at least I would have joining a team of like, standard career, like known for their technical expertise. The framework has been around for years with fantastic folks working on that for years. And you're coming there and be like, I want to make this easier. How do you tackle this? Yeah, sure, sure. So at least the part that I spent the most time on over the last like five years has been like the learning journey, right? Like really doing that, doing lots of talks and just kind of dispelling, like rumors and myths and misinformation about Angular, you know, like people were like, Oh, you know, this out. Is it Angular two or is it Angular one? I'm just like, well, we're actually on Angular 15. So your argument isn't even making sense anymore. Just because it's like such outdated ideas about Angular. So the first thing was a lot of humility and a lot of let me understand how we got where we are and what people care about. So let me break it down a little bit more. How we got where we are. So a part of that would be asking questions like, Oh, you know, why do people say that it's so complex and asking team members asking community members say, okay, now understand about that. And then, okay, let me understand why we made those decisions. What were we trying to solve? So asking engineers, okay, what does this do? Because I don't think that this is wrong. So if you think of like zones, which is our way of like, being able to tell us something changed, that's people, you know, complain about it. But I started saying it in a different way. I was like, yo, think about this. We made a framework where if you change your data, your state of your application, it'll automatically update everything on the screen. Right? That's like magic. So another framework, you got to use like set state, or you got to do a render, you get none of that. We made it so that way, if you just change the state, we never explained it that way. Right? You see what I'm saying? Like, we never said, but again, you remember, I told you beginning, I'm thinking about how do you serve your learners, right? So I started thinking about how can you say it in a way that people would understand? I'm like, yeah, so we made it so that way you could just update your state and then everything, you know, magically re renders. But what we found out is that at scale, it didn't perform as well. And that language is much better than, oh, you know, it's a really bad architectural decision, or like Angular is needlessly complicated, look at the zones and change detection. Those are just artifacts of what we learned. You see what I'm saying? We just learned that it just wasn't good at scale. So anyway, so you got those those two points. And then the last part was slowly but surely gaining my own understanding of the complicated things, and then thinking about how to re communicate those things out. And then pushing back on the team like, all right, this does not feel good. You know, like, like this design decision, I don't think this is good for our for our users, I just don't. What else can we do? What else can happen? What are the options available to us? So doing a lot of that mix, over time is how you kind of get to where we are now where people are like, at least willing to acknowledge that we have improved, they're not necessarily all willing to acknowledge that we're good, which I think we're very good. But people are at least willing to acknowledge like, oh, yeah, Angular is better than it used to be. One thing that I think the Angular particular Excel said, and that leads back to my earlier point, I think you made great improvements in terms of transparency around what you're working on, what's on the roadmap. And that's one thing that I as a developer appreciate so much, because I know, okay, this is where the ship is heading. And I can mentally prepare for that. Like in the resource RFC, for instance, I saw someone saying, well, I implemented a resource myself, and now I have to like think about migrating it, which is fair and like kind of painful. But like you do everything to prepare for like this level of transparency that people don't have to reinvent that wheel if they don't want to. And that's things I mean, like in my position as advocate, I like look at all the frameworks and stuff that I miss sometimes at the other in the other ecosystems, like that level of transparency, what's going on and a lot of credit to our leadership on that, you know, of getting the RFCs there, continue to just like work more in public. One of the things that Jeremy, Jeremy Elborn and I do, which is our live stream, where we just talk, we just talk, we used to play video games. And then people complained all the time about how we should be working. And we are working, but we're also talking to you all. And so like now we like sometimes we're right coda, we're so off new API's, and we'll just talk about the rationale. I do agree that like that level of transparency, but a lot of that was decision by the leadership to be like, yeah, we're gonna do more RFCs, we're gonna publish our roadmap, we're gonna maintain the roadmap, we're gonna talk about it. Yeah. Yeah, I, I'm very glad that these leadership. Sure, pushes. Can you say? Have been done. That's, I think, really good for the framework. And I personally appreciate that a lot. So, okay, I mean, everyone, you're kind of like the public face of Angular right now. So you can you can just take it. Um, I know you're very humble. So but what is a project that is very meaningful to you that people may not know? Great one. You know, a project that's always going to have a big part of my heart is just people know about this. But I think the learning journey will always have a big part of my heart just because I just want people to be able to like have a good time learning. But I think that incremental hydration, defer, and just our server story, like I think people kind of have an idea about these things. But I think that is like, man, when I first saw defer internally, when we first started demoing it, I was like, there's no way like, why are we not on every street corner of the tech space, talking about this magical feature from the future where you could at the template level, lazy load things based on like customizable triggers. Like when you where else can you do that? Like people are like, Oh, we got islands. I'm like, you sure do have islands. But do you have an island that you can click a button that will dynamically load that component. And it's only like three lines of code. And you're not at the router, you're not at your like configuration. I'm like, that is like, like magic. And now that we have like incremental hydration, which I think more people should think about that you could partially hydrate your application like, wait, what? Like we don't have to do the full thing, we can just pick the parts that we care about. So when you think about those types of features, I'm just like, how are we just not like, only talking about this? You know what I mean? Like, why isn't everybody talking about this? But those are some features that I think are just really from the future. Yeah. And you did so well in the announcement of it with Jessica's talk at ngconf last year, was like the perfect demo sound like showcasing this, like concept that is particular for Angular developers, which are not used to like the server story before was like, so great in like the way it was visualized, the way it was presented. Like everyone was just like, and this totally makes sense. It was great. And I love that you're pushing that narrative now, a lot, because it is very, totally agree, totally agree, very innovative. And hopefully, what we'll see is the industry adopts these types of patterns and these new innovations, and everybody benefits, right? Like we aren't the creator of signals. Yeah. Right. And neither is Ryan Carniato, right? But like, he popularized it with solid. And it's a really good idea. And I think that one thing on the Angular team that I think we really benefit from is our humility around a good idea is a good idea, whether we created it or not. And I think that we have really good leadership on our team and our tech leads are just like, yeah, no, this is a good pattern. We should implement this. Like we didn't create hydration, but it's a good idea. Yeah. Right. So we should like leverage good ideas. How do you stay on track of those great ideas happening in the ecosystem? Is it just like it happens organically because you folks happen to talk to each other regularly? Or because I mean, I assume to some extent, you're like busy shipping at the end of the day, right? Like you have roadmaps and stuff you need to deliver to some extent, I'm pretty sure Google wants you to work on certain features, and those kind of things. So how do you make sure and integrate this level of like innovation? Sure. Well, one thing I love about this team and Angular team is probably the best team I've ever worked on. We are very curious just as a team, we're just very curious. And so sometimes the tech leads will be like, Hey, have you seen this really cool thing? Not like, Oh, have you seen this? We have to we have to rip it off ourselves. It's more like, Hey, look at what they're doing over here. Isn't this cool? And we just like, yeah, that is pretty rad. Like, Oh, that's really cool. For example, Jeremy Elbourn is a very public, like fan of selt. You know what I mean? And he's like, yeah, they just have some really great like ergonomics developer experience. And we all just stay curious and like see what people are doing. And it's like, then you take that idea. So we try to keep track by staying curious. Then we say, Okay, will this serve our users? Right? Not everything that's out there is for Angular developers or will benefit Angular developers. Yes. Right. So we have to be sure to look at what the needs are, what the priorities are, and then see like, does this solve a pain point for Angular users? And so like signals solve the signals is continuing to solve a major pain point of like just state and data management and Angular and eventually reactivity and fine grained reactivity is where we're headed toward, right? And you know, that's our like, right goalposts is like, Okay, how do you now only update a part of the or rerender a part of the screen where that piece of data updated but leave the other part alone? Right? Like that's our goalposts. Yeah. But signals helps us get really close to that idea. Yeah. So but like outside of the Angular space, is there a passion project? Oh, maybe even unrelated to tech. Oh, sure. Okay. So outside of the Angular space. Yeah, I have a lot of passion projects. I want to say this, and it's probably gonna come back to bite me someday. But I've always wanted to be a fitness influencer. I've always I mean, I wanted that long before I like joined Google. And, you know, so I used to do competitive natural bodybuilding. So like meaning like no performance enhancing like supplements, right? So everything had to be like natural. And so I used to do these competitions and stuff. And I used to have to sneak my camera into the gym because it was so taboo to like, put your camera Oh, my gosh, you know, the 2010s and to like, 2007, I think I did my last competition to 2013. So I now worked out, you know, whatever. But yeah, so I would like hide my camera on like the back of like one of the machines, just to get like a 10 second clip. And we had so much is like a different culture as well. Because really embarrassing to get caught filming filming yourself, where now the culture is like, I set up a tripod and I set up lights and I like standing in the gym. Back then it was like, you got a camera in here? What are you doing with that camera in here, bro? Like, why is your phone out? Well, your first off your phone would get like potato video. So it wouldn't even be like good video. So you have to have like a little camera. So like now I'm really like, I don't know, as a passion project of like filming my life health journey. Now that I'm older, I'm in my mid 40s now. And I'm just trying to think about like, Oh, who can I help? You know, are there any other guys in the mid 40s, even people in their mid 40s who could like benefit from like some of the things that I'm learning? Did you know just like your metabolism change or something with like going into the 40s? Because like, I mean, you put that out a while ago where you're like, like, think like, what would you think how old I am? And I always thought you're like, you're only 30. So yeah. Yeah, no, don't say don't get older. No, I want you to get older because that means you're still alive. But here's what you have to come to terms with, just as a person, okay, you guys come to terms with this as a person. When you cross, especially into your 40s, those extra cookies that you eat, they're going to show up right on that mid section, you know, around your face, your face starts getting fuller, your body starts getting fluffier, all the extra cookies, the extra french fries, and then other things just kind of happen, right? Like you are more susceptible to like long term effects of poor dieting. So like your blood pressure goes up, blood sugar goes up, they start getting to like scary territory, right? Where you're worried about like strokes and heart attacks and diabetes. So all these things are like super important to manage early on. And if I can go back and tell my 30 year old self something else, say, hey, listen, buddy, your resilience to your poor dieting, you know, like your junk food habits is going to change over time. And by the time you get into your 40s, it'll be much harder to like make those physical changes to get back to like, you know, like 10% body fat, for example, like it'd be much harder. And you have more things to do, right? Like now my job is more demanding, my family is more demanding, sleep is more demanding, you know what I mean? Like life changes. Very much. Yeah. And I personally noticed that I also feel much better when I eat clean for like a little bit. Like I love working out like I try to incorporate as much as possible. But eating clean doesn't take much more time if you plan for it. Whereas like working out, you need to allocate like an hour or something if you go to a gym, it might be even more with everything. But like eating healthy doesn't take necessarily more time as long as you know, if you plan it right. And that's for me, has always been the trick is like a meal plan of like, okay, this is what I'm going to eat. I already know what I'm going to eat. That really helps. You go ahead, go please. Sorry. Well, I just said like, I'm going to eat like a trash pan. Literally, like yesterday, I was like craving something, I didn't have food around. So I ate like ice cream. Whereas when I have food around, I'm like, okay, you should eat that first. That's right. That's right. No, I was gonna say is, and another passion project of mine, so like, like, like three areas of like hobbies are like fitness, you know, and like gym stuff, I play guitar. And then I like doing video stuff. Those are my like three big areas that I like my passion projects outside of like technical work. Do okay. Interesting question. So do you think that your passion project, do you try to incorporate them in your work? Like, I mean, video stuff, for instance, like certainly helps you as a developer advocate these days. But do you try to incorporate that? Or is that just happened to a good question? I get lots of practice with video with my video hobby because of my job. Right. So if I have to film, and just learning about cameras and stuff, that's really interesting. I try to incorporate music when I can, like back when I first hit the scene in the Angular space, I did this like musical talk, where I did like five raps. That was, that was so much work that editing was like, all the editing was horrible, just because it was like, I was writing new music, editing, and filming. And I remember the, the conference of organizers was like, we need your talk. We need the video of your talk. And I'm like, I promise you, if you just give me a couple more days, it'll be ready, it'll be so worth it. And when I finally delivered that, that was a lot of fun. But like, when I did that keynote last year, my last keynote, that conference, I played guitar on stage, as a way to just kind of like, continue to try to integrate the things that I care about in more spaces of my life, whenever I can. No. Yeah, I noticed, like, I, I try to separate them as much as possible. Like, I do enjoy like the video work, and that keeps me curious and learn about it. But I feel like when I, like the same way, I would not want to like, professionally just to use all this stuff, because I would easily get burned out on those things. And then like, out of the passion project would become a burden for me. So I'll, I'll try to separate work and those kind of things as much as possible. Which is just the thing that I noticed, because otherwise it would probably work 24 hours. Yeah, but I, you know, the thing about like, video and photography that I love the most, I'll tell you my thing, I like taking my camera places and taking pictures of strangers, and then sending them like this high quality photo, like right on the spot, right? So I'll like, transfer it to my phone, I'll like, air drop it and like, man, I just love. I want to tell you, you know, I think it's like, it is like this delight that you get to like, offer this gift to somebody. So because I usually people like, trying to take a selfie and they get their like, phone, and you know, it's gonna be a bad picture. Like, you know, the picture is gonna suck. And it's just like, man, okay, I have my like, nice camera, my like, you know, beautiful lens. I'm like, you know, can I take this picture for you and then just send it to you? And they're like, wait, what? I'm like, yeah, I'm just gonna send it to you. I don't, I'm not gonna post it on my Instagram. I just want the practice of taking pictures. I want to see if I can get you a nice, a nice photo. And I do that quite often. And it always is always special. And the moment for them is always special when they get this like, beautiful photo. And then they're like, man, I can't believe you did that for me. Thank you so much. You know, so it's a great moment. Yeah, I the pictures you made of my talk last year at ngconf. Oh, yeah, forget about that. Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah. And I can totally relate to that. Because like, I mean, you know, it this podcast is called the weekly dev's brew. So I have like, a coffee addiction, someone would say, so I just love making coffee for people. And most of them are like, I just drink a cup a day or like, I usually just grab on it like Starbucks or something. I don't care. But when you give them like a properly brewed coffee, and they're like, oh, yeah, okay, this is better, even if they don't like, can like fully figure out and like, why it's different and how it's better and like, why I like to spend so much time with it. But like the delight in their eyes when they're like, oh, yeah, okay, I see what you're saying. I wouldn't, I don't want to spend like all the time and learn this things, but I see what you're saying. It's it brings me Oh, that's exactly right. Make it someone a cup of coffee, like they can have their own coffee, but you get to like, you know, like live in it's like a moment of service. I'm saying that word service is like such a core you might, but it's like, like you're serving somebody like like you're using your gifts to serve somebody else. And then it like I use my passion for coffee or for a hot brewed drinks and like make you this like beautiful coffee. And you just get to have this like special moment. See, this is what I mean like this is like imagine taking that type of attitude toward like your work like, how can I be in service with the people around me and service of our customers to service of like, you know, the leadership like how can I create those experiences and I think it's something special that can come out of that. I have one last question for you. Because I had this conversation the other day with a friend of mine and we were talking about like, okay, is AI going to take our job? Yes, it doesn't really matter what the result of that is. But are you mentally preparing for the fact, okay, tech might not look the way it does right now in 10 years. Is there something that I can do in case my tech job might be in danger at some point? And what would that be? Good question. I think about this all the time about like how tech is going to change due to AI. Like as the models get better and better, like everybody's releasing great models. And now you can't really make a bad choice. Right? So now it's just like, all right, with with that being said, you know, what can you know, do I think my job is going away? I don't think my job is going away. I think tech jobs will change. But I think what will be interesting is your ability again, to like know architecture design patterns and everything like that. Like I think all that's still going to matter. And the reason I say that is because you know, when a design pattern goes back to what I said in the beginning of like, knowing what to do is going to be so important. Right? Versus like, writing a prompt, I mean, writing a prompt is super cool. But you got to know what needs to go in the prompt. Right? But you got to it's like you got to be able to like guide the conversation. So imagine you're you being able to be like, all right, I have this, this other person who can do anything that I want them to do, but I got to tell them what to do. Right? So that's what an AI coding assistant becomes at the end of the day, right? Like, it's a developer who could do anything you want them to do for the most part. But you have to know what needs to be done to get the right output. And so the same way we had to learn how to write, remember when Google searching was a skill? And we had to learn how to write good Google searches to find what you want. And now we've evolved the algorithm to be so good that we kind of know what you mean. But AI is at that era now where your prompting has to be good, but the prompt is only informed by your technical knowledge. You see, so it's not like, oh, the prompt is magic, you are still the magic, right? Like as an engineer, like all that work you've put in your necklace for the last, you know, 10 plus years at angular, when you ask, you know, project IDX, for example, to like generate a component or to make some code, you know what needs to go into that component. That way, you're not wasting time having to re prompt and re prompt and spending days re promptings like no, I know what I need, right? And then you can like get it to do it. And then you could fill in the gap. So I'm thinking about how do I work like that? I think also the thing that people are totally skipping beyond is what are the new design patterns of AI powered apps? What is the architect? What is the architecture? What is the deployment story? What you know what I mean? What is all of this? So, like having AI help you with your work is one story. But then having AI as a part of your work, like, okay, I'm building an app that has AI in it. Like, how do I do that? Like, what is the right, you know, pattern for that? How do I minimize cost? Like per token, like, how do I like, you know, make my embeddings really good? Like, there are so there's still so much to learn and so much to benefit from that it's just a new frontier, right, that we're going to be working on. We're not working on mainframes anymore, we're working at an even higher level of extraction. That's very true. But in case tech goes to shit, just hypothetically, I hope not because I built a career on this. But in case that happens, what is your fallback plan? I told you that already. I'm gonna be a fitness influencer. I'm just like, okay, I am you did. No, no, no, no, I'll just be silly. No, obviously, I didn't know but in reality, though, I really am thinking like, okay, for me, luckily, I'm a performer, right? Like I can perform on camera, perform on stage. And so I'll probably do something in performing area. I'll see where if there's still teach, I love to teach. So teaching could be something but I probably would like, yeah, but I don't know what the AI education will be in 10 years. Right? That may be something I'm curious to see that so. So that's something interesting to me. I also thought about this, I've been remodeling my home myself. So maybe I become a contractor, right or like a carpenter and just do that type of stuff. It's not going to be replaced by AI very likely, at least I don't see how and we're working as it is dangerous. I still have all my fingers. Yeah, a lot of fun. I just replaced the toilet, every place to sink, I remodeled my entire home gym down to like ripping up carpet laying down a new floor, doing baseboards painting, installing wall mounted equipment. I mean, like I did a lot of stuff. And so this just because I think of it like an engineer, like it's problems to solve, right? And you get these variables. So maybe become a carpenter. Or here's a dream. Maybe I'll just figure out like, I'll make a good lucky investment in something. Like maybe my YouTube channel, maybe you know, something just pays off and then I get a couple of million and then I'm just like, look, I'll go work at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods, right? Like, I'll just go be a cashier because I don't need the money. Yeah, I honestly like I would probably love to work in the coffee shop like, and just but like from a financial aspect, it just doesn't make sense. So you need the same thing as any, we need our media careers to blow up so that way we can have, you know, a few million and then we can go do jobs that we just want to do for fun. That don't you know me that that we don't care about the pay. I do have to say though, like working in tech is a thing that I carry on joy. So I already feel pretty lucky of like having a job that I like doing. And it happens also to be financially reliable and everything. So I'll totally agree with that. Totally agree. That's a really good grounding thing to remember. Yeah, I guess I love my job. I love my team. You know what I mean? Like, oh, here's another thing that I'll probably do. Maybe I was going to be an actor. I've been hosting that show, Leet Heat. That's so good. I like being on stage like, you know what I mean? Like we're on camera like on set like that was amazing. That was amazing experience. Shout out to Jason Lengstorf and CodeTV. Yeah, great team. Great product. I love what they're doing over there. So yeah, absolutely. I'll put the link in the show note as well. That's great. Check it out. Thank you so much for being on here. This was great. I very much enjoyed this and I always love talking to you. Feelings mutual. Thank you for having me. Anytime. Alright, and everyone out there have a good one. Bye.