Rachel Plotnick: Yeah, I’m still kind of working through that, but I think you’re right. Most public health studies have shown that there are a lot of problems with these drinks. I think some of them have tried to cut out sugar and things like that, and replaced it with other things… But the health implications are certainly concerning, and worrisome in many ways. And what’s fascinating is how these industries have embedded themselves so deeply in media, whether it’s promotions, or going to conventions, or in-game kind of features and things… So it’s almost like the drink has become media in and of itself, and it’s another thing to be consumed. They pull influencers in to promote them… So it’s a massive industry that I think hasn’t been studied quite enough, so I’m excited to kind of explore a little more and see where that goes.

Justin Garrison: Windows 7 launched July of 2009. Back in 2009, they were looking for influencers that they could have Windows 7 launch parties for. And so I was one of the inf–

Johnny Boursiquot: It’s just a hunch that I got. So one of the things that I do and have always done as a professional is I’m always looking at job postings. So while you have YouTube influencers saying “Hey, this framework is the best thing”, or whatever, and geeks get excited, nerds get excited about technologies, and programming languages and everything else… I’m like, okay, that’s one lens. The other lens is what are companies actually hiring for? What list of technologies do you see on those job descriptions? So I’m always sort of looking at those job descriptions. “Hey, what do SREs need to know these days? Hey, what does a full-stack developer need to know these days?” So I’m always keeping an eye out to see where the trend is going. Regardless of what the hype is doing, I’m looking at what people actually get paid for. So I started noticing the same job. I’d literally bookmark it. I’d take a screenshot of it. And I started noticing the same job, with almost the same description, maybe a word changed here and there, often from the same recruiter, other times from different recruiter, but the same job, again, with a word change here and there, asking for same exact thing… And I’m seeing the same thing come up over and over again, week after week, after week, after week, after week.

Before, I didn’t pay any attention, because we didn’t have – back in the heyday, everybody had a job, and you saw less of that. And basically, companies were just tripping over themselves to hire people. At the start of the pandemic, and everything else, when all the overhiring was happening, so to say… So you didn’t notice it as much. But now that so many people are on the job market, you’re seeing the influx of these job postings. And you’re like “Okay, how come there are so many job postings”, especially in places like LinkedIn, or Indeed, or Dice, whatever it is - so many job postings, and so many people are saying they can’t find jobs, going from three to six months before they find a job…Getting an interview is harder than it’s ever been… I’m like, something is not making sense here. What are all these job postings? And I started seeing the pattern repeating over and over and over again. Then I’m like “Something doesn’t add up here. Is somebody just training a model, or something? Do they just want people to just keep on sending their resumes into this void? What is going on here?”

So I have no evidence, no empirical evidence to say “Hey, this is what’s happening”, because I don’t know if anybody’s gonna sort of step up and say “Yup, we do that.” I don’t think it would be in their best interest. But, I mean, something smells odd. Something smells fishy here.

Johnny Boursiquot: Um, I think we have – I mean, it’s only September. There’s a whole Q4 remaining… And yes, nobody works in the last two weeks of the year. That’s fine. Even counting that, there’s a whole Q4. So I don’t think the hype – given what I’m seeing now, I don’t think… There’s at least one or two more model releases to come from notable companies in the sector. There’s at least another round of hype to go. There’s at least a few more, quote-unquote influencers on the socials that are going to make videos saying “Hey, we don’t need any more senior engineers.” There’s at least a few more rounds of that to come.

Adam Stacoviak: I noticed on your homepage for ergodox-ez.com, a couple of scrolls down, “Linus Tech Tips. Watch the full review.” How did this come about? You said you don’t work with influencers. Was this natural?

Simon Wijckmans: Yes. And so – I mean, if you use a third party script from a large, reputable company, that has big things going on, and they have a good security team, they know what to look for, they know what to protect, then of course the risks are way smaller.

The way that I tend to explain people how to assess risk about this is a little broader. It’s like, try to always assess when you add a third party script to your website whether that company is really technology at its core. I’ll give you an example. If there is a marketing influencer style firm out there, and their core business is introducing you to influencers that will go market your product, but they then ask you “Hey, add this script to your website so we can track conversions, so we can pay out commission”, well, the answer there is “Is technology really their core business?” Well, probably not. Then you can start asking questions… Okay, who built this script? What is your process to secure that script? You can dig quite deep into that. And then you’ll start quickly recognizing that, for some businesses, third party scripts are a way for them to operate, it’s not their core thing, and the risks of those are higher.

[18:00] The great thing is that a lot of these companies, they don’t make their scripts dynamic. So you can then self host these scripts, so you don’t actually have to add their thing. You can take it, put it on some type of a storage bucket yourself, and provide it to your website as a first party script. That reduces the risks, of course. So that’s one of those things to think about here.

I would say that there will always be risk on the web, but it’s important that we verify, and we just don’t blatantly trust stuff. And that’s where my company is trying to focus on. It’s “Okay, third party scripts exist. You need them.” And we live in a world where we want analysis of things, where we want analytics, where we want a chatbot, where we want social media, SEO, all that stuff. You need that, we trust that, we recognize that. And the best thing to do is keep an eye on it, so that if there are changes, that at least that’s not happening without you knowing, and that we can make sure that those changes are in line with what you would expect that script to do. That’s more the high-level approach that I would like to encourage here.

Adam Stacoviak: There’s several that, that at least I’ve discovered, not through pushing play on Spotify, or WebAmp, or Winamp, or some different version of listening to music. It’s been through a swipe, or a click, or something that, and it’s been the track to someone building something, or someone making cookies, or whatever it might be. So that’s kind of interesting, how music exposure has not come from pushing Play or an algorithm, or a playlist, it’s come through interest, and following of different creators, or influencers, or whatever you want to call those folks. It’s that cultural press, or swipe that happens, that the music comes with it. And I think the labels have now found the new Napster is a swipe away on social media. And it still is free. Like, you’re not paying necessarily for TikTok or Instagram. You’re there, and your data is the payment, so to speak.

Justin Garrison: I think the hard part is finding real people. Instagram is influencers, and Facebook is people that you knew in person, but they’re just showing one side of their lives…

Scott Chacon: Yeah, so we were doing all of these conferences, and I was speaking in lots of places - I still am - and we were sort of buying beers for everybody and finding this really valuable. So we kind of had a dumb idea, and we were like “Let’s just do our own conference about all of these things that we’re learning now”, like this Discord thing. How do you engage in an open source community, or source available community? How do you start a software company today? And there’s all of these tools that weren’t available at the beginning of GitHub days that I’m really interested in. There’s influencers, there’s YouTube, there’s Discord… There’s all of these tools of how to engage in the larger software development community, how to do it well, how to communicate effectively, how to communicate authentically… And so we’re bringing together a bunch of people to talk about developer experience, which I find very interesting. I feel like people don’t know very much about it, or don’t think about it enough.

This is one of the things that I think differentiates the Git CLI versus GitButler, is that we really, really care about the developer experience. We want to make sure “What is your workflow? What are you doing? How can we engage? How can we make this easier?” And so I’m trying to find all of these companies that do really great developer experiences, or have great sort of communication with developer communities, and try to learn from them. So we have some speakers from Sentry, from HashiCorp (it’s interesting), from GitHub, obviously… And we’re bringing everybody to Berlin, so it’s also a good excuse to come to Berlin.

Natalie Pistunovich: I’ve been trying to find an unpopular opinion, and I think it’s not necessarily unpopular, but it’s worth mentioning still… Prompt engineering is not something you should learn from YouTube influencers, and take one master prompt that always works… But actually, it’s good to compare that to how to write a good email. You can use some templates to generally understand how that works, but this has to be personalized. You cannot take “Here’s one email that I send, and it always works for all my use cases.” Same way when I see people ask questions about “But this is the master prompt. A person who is a prompt engineer told me to use this.” To my ears it’s like saying “Email engineer.” [laughter] It’s all about communication.

So to summarize this so that this can actually be tweetable, “Prompt engineering should be learned as a skill, and not as a set of templates to just follow.” Yeah, that will be it. Let’s see how unpopular that is. But until then, I want to say, Carlos, thank you so much for joining. This was a fun episode. I enjoyed talking about Go, and hearing more about GoReleaser… And all the cool things we have mentioned will be in the show notes. Thanks, Carlos, and thanks, everyone.

Adam Stacoviak: I mean, I don’t know how Jerod would answer it… But I think we’re happy doing what we do. And I don’t I think we’re on the long game. Like, when I talk to people, they’re like “Wow, you’re really thinking–” Like, I was just at a “mixer” for GitHub. It’s here in Austin; they were here for South by Southwest, and they invited me out to come hang out there for a couple hours while they were at the garage bar, and I was there… And I was talking to folks, and I was like “Hey, we should pod about that sometime.” They’re like “Well, I work at Apple and I can’t tell that story.” And I’m like “Well, we’ll be here whenever you’re ready. That sounds pretty cool, whenever you can share.” And they’re like “Wow, you have like this long game approach.” I’m like “Well, I’ve just been doing this for so long, and I have a pretty good confidence in like how we’ve been here, and what keeps us here”, both individually as passion, but also as a company… And I just have confidence that we’ll be here, at least in a few years, to maybe have that conversation.

So they were just surprised that I had this long game approach to things. And I think you kind of have to. And so our long game approach isn’t “OMG, there’s a competitor, or there’s a podcast that’s more popular than US, or there’s an influencer who’s more influential…” Jerod and I are not trying to be influencers or influential. We’re just literally trying to talk to people who share a passion like we do, get excited about where software’s going, and just have amazing conversations. And from a technical level, produce a really well-produced podcast it sounds like people want to listen to. We produced a beats album with Breakmaster Cylinder, we have music out there… What other job could Jerod and I do this kind of stuff at, on our own whim? We make the choices. We get to go into the nooks and crannies and hang out there, or zoom out and get bigger level. If we chose to follow the name that shall not be named kind of situation, like “Oh my gosh…!”, we would just be chasing them, and not going after what we feel is important, and what we think is more fun. As best as we can be, we are in control, while also being in a world of chaos, and total change every day. Right?

Johnny Boursiquot: Yeah, of course. Of course. First thing they tell you, like and subscribe. And hit that bell icon, so you don’t miss the next rant. [laughter] So yeah, if you are one such influencer – I’ll take it back. You don’t have to reevaluate your life choices, but I would ask you to not continue to propagandize AI. What you can do better is to help people level up, to help people meet the new challenge that this new innovation and technology is bringing… Because at the end of the day I think it’s a net positive. It’s transformative technology.

[01:11:58.10] I’m sure when farmers saw their industry being industrialized with machinery and everything else, I’m sure some had the same sort of gut reaction and knee-jerk reaction of trying to push back on that. So this is just another innovation cycle, and all we have to do is – well, it may not be simple or easy, but we have to level up as professionals, and meet the new stage that we’re playing on. So that’s my first unpop.

The second unpop hat - and it has nothing to do with tech, but rather it has to do with the fitness industry. So I’ve been on a fitness journey for a little while… And as with all things, whenever I don’t know much about things – I didn’t know much about fitness like a year ago, and I went to YouTube, and started googling things, and found fitness YouTube, and lots of influencers peddling lots of different things, and approaches, and “Do this exercise, don’t do that exercise”, blah, blah, blah… So there’s a lot of stuff out there, y’all, I’ll tell you this much. But one thing I’ve noticed, or rather my unpopular opinion is that if you are going into this world of fitness YouTube, avoid any influencer that is telling you “This is what you can do specifically for your abs.” Because there is no such thing has spot reduction of just one area of your body. That is not a thing. You can’t be walking around with a six-pack abs, with the rest of your body just all loosey-goosey. That’s not a thing.

Dylan Hildenbrand: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I did get contacted by some marketing people at Packt, now that I’m thinking back to it. I try to block it out, because marketing is really not my thing… But I did go and set up a website for the book, and I used all the techniques from the book to do that… And it was easy enough to do. I had someone who does it for a living. So setting up a website was really quick, really easy… And I did get asked to reach out to other influencers that I knew… I was a little not too keen on burning some of those bridges and saying “Hey, you have several thousand followers. Will you promote my book for me?” I didn’t really want to do that, so I refrained from asking influencers to do promotions for me. I did promote it on my blog, and social media, and stuff like that… But that’s about the extent of my marketing capabilities.

Adam Stacoviak: Right. Precisely. So I think if we were the true version of what people call influencers, then it would be icky. But because we’re not, we’re just normal human beings who just happen to have done something so long and so consistent, and I suppose over time so well that more and more people have joined our tribe… I read Seth Godin’s book way back in the day, and everything we’ve done has been a version of what he prescribed in that book around tribes. It’s such a good book. I love Seth Godin. He’s got such amazing writing. The Dip is amazing, Tribes is amazing… I think it’s called Tribes, if I can recall correctly. But it was around this, like “Hey, there’s a subset of people out there who find what I think is interesting, and overtime what I find interesting evolves, and I bring more and more things into that. Like [unintelligible 00:19:15.13] I love barbecue. I geeked out with a sponsor the other day… We were done with our conversation, we hung out for another 30 minutes, talked about Weber kettles, we talked about how we tweaked our stuff… And the conversation was totally over, but we were just there, now, talking about barbecue and our favorite recipes, and methods etc. And that was what it was. And that could have totally been a podcast, but it was just a conversation, which was cool.

Nadia Odunayo: Yeah. Pretty funny, because we launched a read-alongs feature at the end of last year, where you can read a book with up to 1,000 people… And it’s basically for people who don’t want to be in a regular book club, but they can opt in and you can choose a book. And I was running it from the StoryGraph account, but it was clear that Nadia was running it… And we had 1000 people join, and we all read Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and it was awesome. And at the end, I made a forum that was like “Share your feedback on this feature, given that it’s new.” And one person wrote something like “I feel like running one of these is not for me. It’s more for influencers, like Nadia” and I just remember laughing. I don’t see myself as an influencer… [laughs]

Joe Reis: It’s a good question. I was talking to some influencers yesterday, people who get paid to do sponsored posts, and I think their biggest question is “Okay, so at what point are we kind of automated [unintelligible 00:56:24.10] on what we do.” It’s an interesting one. I don’t know where this all goes… I mean, I’m quite excited about it in some ways. It reminds me of the – I think we’re all about the same age, I’m guessing, but we were all around when the web Information Superhighway came into existence…

Jerod Santo: Apparently very protective of their time as well. So they will say “Okay, it’s like 6pm. I need to meet up with friends. Goodbye. Yeah, I’ve done all my work.” Like, this is a generation that doesn’t do any more of that “Oh, well, we’ll put in the hours, we’ll just stay here for face time…” And also they just – I have some friends in Europe… Europe is a little bit slower-paced in a lot of companies… They’re complaining that they’re quitting, because they’re bored, and they don’t see advancement. In Silicon Valley, my friend is like “They’re amazing, because it’s a startup, it’s fast-moving.” They love it. They’re growing with it, and they’re growing really fast.

So I actually feel like yes, of course, there’s influencers, but I feel like that’s a very small subset. I hear very good things about this new generation who is entering the workforce, and I think it might give a run to the money for us people who’ve been there for a bit longer, which is, I think, a great thing.

sam boyer: I would say it’s more a subtweet becoming a real tweet on cryptocurrency writ-large. Financial influencers, [unintelligible 01:26:10.22] But yeah…

Jean Yang: Yeah, and I would say that it’s not even about the future not arriving yet… It’s that some tools are built for a reality that doesn’t exist, and may never exist. And so yeah, how I see it is there’s this notion that everything trickles down from a small set of companies that are doing best practices. And this set of companies tend to be very large, well capitalized, very profitable companies… The Fang, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google being the models of this is what needs to happen. But it’s not actually trickling down, and not because people are slow to adopt, or because they’re lazy, or they just don’t understand the good solutions… But if you think about it, Google has a set of constraints for their processing like no other company. How many companies actually need to process at the rate of Google in terms of data, in terms of requests, in terms of many other things? Most websites aren’t going to get that many hits in 10 years, what Google gets in a day. And also, there’s other things, like if you’re not set up that way, then it’s not that you don’t have the luxury of having 10 teams to work on, optimizing certain things, or developer productivity… You don’t have the need to do that. And so it’s kind of like – if luxury cars were really lightweight race cars, that were actually dangerous for most people to drive… You know, that’s not a luxury vehicle; that’s just something you don’t need.

So I think that a lot of the influencers talk about – they tell great stories, they tell stuff that would be great for engineers starting out… Any junior engineer learning about how Dropbox did their distributed systems - that’s great education for learning how to do distributed systems better. But most companies don’t have problems of that scale. They don’t need to solve them in the same way. And if they try anything similar, they’re just overbuilding.

[00:44:13.27] So there’s a “common wisdom” among a lot of investors that if you saw it at Facebook, or you saw it at LinkedIn, and you spin it out as a company, it’s going to be successful. I think it’s really worth questioning that, because most companies don’t have problems at that scale; they have problems at a different scale. And so if what you need – so I had a really big realization moment recently, when I was talking with one of my team members, and he had bought a motorcycle. And in my mind I’m like “Oh my God, a motorcycle. So dangerous. Why wouldn’t you get a car?” And he said “I live in Bangalore. You can’t get anywhere with a car, and everyone rides motorcycles. It’s totally different. It’s the only way to get from point A to point B.” And I think there’s a similar reaction sometimes in dev tools, when it’s like “Oh, my God, you haven’t set up this kind of cluster, or you haven’t set it up this way - what are you doing?” But at the level of requests that you actually need to serve to be profitable, and to hit your targets as a company, maybe you don’t need to be doing it that way. And actually doing it that way slows you down, and is impossible.

So I think that even calling these people blue collar workers – I think most developers are not Google. I think people have written a lot of things that have the exact title, “You are not Google, and that’s okay.” But I think we should stop having this idolization of a small set of companies that have problems that no one else actually has. People should stop feeling bad that they’re not solving those problems or having those problems. I think it’s also - side note - a little bit strange that in school we’re teaching people the cutting edge of algorithms… And I think one reason people get really drawn to this is they learn in algorithms class “This is what computer science is”, and then they’re like “Wow, Google is actually applying all of the things they learned in algorithms class to all their problems every day. We should be doing this, too.” But maybe actually there’s other skills that should be taught to you, in side note…

But yeah, software development is a variety of things. Most of it doesn’t look like what people learn in algorithms class, and that’s okay. That’s reality. And it’s not about catching up to the future; this is the present, and the future is going to be more of that. It’s not necessarily writing distributed systems and assembly code that can move at the speed of light.

Zach Lloyd: [46:02] But if you can get to a point where you have a really high NPS, like what we have, it just makes everything easier; it’s a really good indication of customer satisfaction. So that’s like a reason for me to believe “Oh, if we just made more people aware of it, people really dig it, we’ll get more users.” And so in the journey of a life of a startup, if you have a product people don’t like and they don’t retain, there’s just zero point in trying to grow it. I think we’re past the point of that. We have a product that people – at least not everyone, but some set of people really, really love. And so for us, to some extent, it’s more of a problem actually of awareness, marketing, can we build sort of like viral loops… Because for instance, most of our growth at work comes from people telling their friends about it, which is, again, where you want to be. We don’t really do paid marketing; we do like an occasional sponsorship, or work with influencers… There’s various things we’ve tried, but we’re not plowing money into Google, or Instagram ads, or something like that.

So for us, it’s how do we increase awareness, get more people to try it, and then how do we continue to make it so that when people try it, the likelihood of them sticking just goes up? So in very broad strokes, that’s how I think of it. We don’t have bulletin boards up of “Let’s crush Terminal”, or something like that… But yeah, we want people displacing the terminal, for sure.

Aiden Bai: Yeah, I have had the opportunity to talk with Theo and some React influencers, but not necessarily the React team. The React team has a very staunch position on this, and for valid reasons, right? If you work in the React model, and if you can create great React applications, and use well-written code, it’s going to be good, or good enough. Or more than good enough, actually. And with the advent of Server Components, a lot of these kind of performance problems can be changed based on the architecture. Basically, if you build good React applications, they’re gonna perform well. And that’s great. You know what? Totally valid. But React developers don’t write good React applications.

Kris Brandow: Yeah. I was like “That is very profound!” Yes, that makes complete sense to me. And I think a lot of people, especially influencers or creators, can sometimes forget that. And they can forget, “Oh, I might be telling other people how I use this, but there’s a whole lot of information behind why I use this in the way that I use it.” But yeah, that’s to say, Ian, I agree with you that taking notes by hand is far better than digital notes. Even though I do want to convert them to digital later so I can search them if I need to… But the initial notes by hand are pretty good.

Alright, so I think that’s it. Do either of you have any one last thing you want to say before we end the episode?

Kevin Ball: If you ask the influencers on Twitter what Agile is, they’ll say, “Well, you should never file a bug, because if you’re filing a bug, you’re not being agile enough. [laughter] Real agile software doesn’t ship bugs!”

Johann Gyger: Yeah, I mean, if you compare me to some ambassadors - they are working for the big tech companies, they are influencers, I would say… I’m not an influencer, and I don’t intend to be an influencer…

Zach Lloyd: Criticism… Hacker News is an environment where people say what they think, and a lot of people are not shy about doing that. So as a team, taking the feedback, trying to figure out what adjustments should we make, how should we respond to it - it was stressful, but good. Again, like I said, I would much rather have a lot of people interested than people not caring.

Hacker News - I would say really, really successful. Product Hunt - number one product of the day. I don’t know how typical it is for developer-facing tools to be the number one. Twitter - I think our video, our sizzle reel had 60,000 or 70,000 views, or something like that. We were retweeted by a lot of really prominent developer influencers and entrepreneurs… I think people really did care about it. So from that standpoint, the launch was amazing.

Adam Stacoviak: [43:57] Since you mentioned cars, there’s two people in particular that are pretty bullish on Rust. Obviously, you’ve mentioned that you don’t know enough about Rust deeply enough to know the concerns or lack thereof, if there aren’t any… But in particular Elon Musk is known to be bullish on Rust. And then a counterpoint is Jack Dorsey, who famously created Twitter, Square… You know, a forward-thinker on Web 3, which we’ll probably talk about to some degree, in terms of decentralization of the computer, and obviously, cryptocurrency. Those two people tend to be “thought leaders” or influencers or mega-serial-entrepreneurs that have widespread, almost cult-like followings, and therefore they’re –

Adam Stacoviak: Because I guess the future, the direction I see things heading is that you’ve got just a lot of - and I hate to use the word, but “influencers”, essentially, right? If social media is the square we all meet at, you’ve got people they’re congregating and you’ve got certain influencers who have massive appeal to a wide demographic. And it could be people who love squirrels; a very, super niche thing. And maybe they have an investment fund around their knowledge of squirrels. I don’t know. Is that a thing? Can people do that? Is that what you mean, kind of like, it gets ti that niche where if I’m aware of a very micro-chasm of the world - squirrels, ants, insects, like an entomology world, for example - I can pitch products in that space? Like a PetSmart, for example, or whatever it might be?

Jerod Santo: Yeah. Why Neovim, which was very popular as well. We’ll get to that one. So - awesome that you got influenced to adopt Vim. That makes us official influencers.