Interview with Jonathan Cutrell

Welcome to episode 15 of Inspect. My name is Achekahwe, and my guest this week is someone I've been looking forward to speaking with for a while now. He's a host of Developer Tea, a podcast about some of the less talked about skills required to be a good developer. He's also co-founder of the Spec Network of Podcast and CTO at Whiteboard.

It's my pleasure to welcome to the show Jonathan Control. Welcome to the show Jonathan. Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed the episodes that I've heard of Inspect and I've been trying to coordinate with you for a long time.

I'm really bad at email actually, of all the things that I do. Email is probably the last on my talent list. It's been a long time coming hasn't it? We've been throwing dates back and forth for quite a while now.

It's good to finally have you on. I wanted to have you on as a guest for quite a while. If you've ever listened to any of the previous episodes, you may have heard me mention a few times that Developer Tea was actually the first tech podcast that I subscribed to and it was kind of the inspiration for me to want to get into doing podcasting for myself as well. So exciting for me to hear because I really believe podcasting can be a huge, really just a good practice for developers quite honestly.

Taking these ideas that we work with every day and creating a podcast with those ideas, it's kind of an interesting translation process. Have you found that that's been kind of hard to explain? It's hard to verbalize some of the stuff that makes up our jobs. Yeah.

And one of the main reasons I wanted to start this in the first place was just to build up some sort of confidence for speaking about a topic at length and something like presenting at an event is something I always want to do or just to be able to present meetings that work and things like that. So I figured this would be a good place to start for me to just talk about a topic behind a microphone and just get comfortable with basically presenting really and the whole sort of interview process of throwing questions back and forth to people as well about a particular topic. And yeah, it's just good to have an opportunity to talk about, talk about development with other developers, people who I don't work with and spend time with any basis, who I've got very different ideas to myself and work in very different industries as well. So it's good to just get a good cross section of the industry as well.

Yeah, congratulations on doing more than what most people are able to do. I mean, putting out 15 episodes is in and of itself an accomplishment. So congrats. Oh, yeah, thank you.

Thank you. Still quite a few numbers away from the sort of episode count that you're on and releasing quite a few episodes every week, which is brilliant. But yeah, we can get into obviously your podcast and your process a little later on. Sure.

But if we could start just a little bit about who you are and what your background is because I'm sure most of the listeners of this show probably are familiar with your show as well and may have some information about you. But for those who don't, who is Jonathan control and where did you grow up or your experience? How to get to web development and what did you lead you up to where you are now? Yeah, absolutely.

So I grew up. I have one sibling and my parents and I, we all four of us moved quite a bit when I was younger and we moved around in the United States here. And so I was born in the western part of the country and lived there for a couple years. And then we moved to kind of the middle of the country, then we moved back to the same place we were in in the western part of the country.

And I stayed there until I was, oh, I guess I was around fifth grade. So somewhere around 10 or 11 years old. I remember how old I was. When we then decided to move to the southeastern part of the country.

So those three areas of the country are very different from each other. And in fact, my parents lived in England for a little while. So we've been all over the place. My sister was born in middle north, like the pretty much right in the middle north part of the United States and a state called North Dakota.

So we've been everywhere. So I had a lot of time in my personality. I'm, I don't know if you would know this from hearing me on a podcast. I think a lot of developers had the same kind of thing, but I'm an introvert by nature.

I get energy out of spending time alone. In fact, today I kind of took an off day from working and I went and just spent time totally on my own. And if you're an extrovert, that can be really exhausting. But for me, it's a recharge.

So I think being an introvert. Go ahead. I think that's quite common trait amongst developers as well. Yeah, I think so too.

I was listening to an episode of layout. I think it was like maybe two episodes ago. Layout is also on the spec network. And they were talking about being introverted and extrovert as well.

And they came up with this in conclusion that people in the design development industry are generally a little bit more introverted and like to be alone with their own thoughts. And not necessarily don't like being around other people, but don't really go out of their way to be the life as all of the party experts. Yeah. You know, and I think it's important to recognize, I have maybe a differing theory about introvert, introvert, introversion and extroversion than the average person might have.

I think they aren't really on the same scale necessarily. I don't think they're diametrically opposed from each other. And I also think it's kind of like saying, do you like coffee or tea? Right?

Because there's so many different varieties of coffee and so many different varieties of tea that to say that, you know, hey, I do like coffee, that's giving it a big lump sum kind of way of thinking about it. So being an introvert, there's so many different types of introversion. You know, I'm an introvert that likes to be active while I'm introverted. Some introverts like to be very calm and not, you know, not active.

So there's a lot of, you know, I can be with a very small group of people and recharge in that scenario. I think a lot of people take on and partially because the studies that have come out recently kind of create that diametric opposition. But I think there's a lot of people who would benefit from, you know, not trying to become deeply one or the other, but rather recognizing parts of the personality that might fall in both like I like coffee and tea, right? So you don't have to, you don't have to dive into that, you know, one side as your only personality trait and, you know, create this continuum where you have to fall in one spot of it.

There are times in ways of my life, you know, with developer tea, I'm talking to a very large number of people, right? And that's that would be an extrovert trait that I have. And so there's, you know, so it kind of depends on how you look at it. But I think we have a bias towards thinking in false, what is it?

False economy. It's the word for it. I've talked about false dichotomies on developer tea, but we have that bias thinking in false dichotomies because it simplifies things. And I can ask you, you know, are you an introvert or an extrovert and try to get a heuristic for what kind of person you are?

But you know, largely speaking, I display mostly introvert traits with the occasional extrovert trait. Yeah, that's really interesting. I suppose it means talking about cost is a step towards becoming more extrovert as well from a generally introvert background as well. Yeah, it's really interesting.

Well, I think developers share that introversion because it gives us time to kind of study, right? Like if I'm alone as an introvert, and that's not to say that extrovert is not study, but rather that my, the thing that I'm going to be professionally best at is going to be something where I feel okay, you know, being alone and isolated for hours on end. And that's, that is truly something that happens to developers regularly, you know, we have two or three or four hours worth of highly focused development time. And if you can't handle that well, then being a developer is going to, that might be difficult.

There are absolutely highly collaborative environments. But at some point, most likely if you're developing anything of any consequence, unless you're constantly pair programming, there's probably going to be a period of time where you are pretty much isolated. Yeah, definitely. And so you mentioned, just come back to sort of like where you grew up, it's like you mentioned quite a few areas around, around the US.

So where are you based right now then, specifically? So now I'm in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which is if you were to get in a car and drive North East or I'm sorry, Northwest from Atlanta is about an hour to an hour and a half on Northwest of Atlanta. Right. It's a beautiful place.

Yeah. What's it was like, I mean, what's the sort of texting like in the areas? So the texting is, it's growing. It's been growing for a few years now.

We just now, downtown Chattanooga, we just now got kind of this installation kind of institutionalized approval of something called the Innovation District. And Whiteboard is actually in that Innovation District. We were there before they called it that, but quite a few companies are kind of in that area. And there's not a lot of super well known startups necessarily.

We have a few logistics startups, a few tech based startups, a few client agencies like Whiteboard. But the texting has been growing for a long time. And in part, because we have a basically, and this is going to sound bad, but it's actually a really good thing. We have what amounts to state sponsored internet here.

And it's not sponsored in the way that I don't have to pay for it, but rather, it is it's like a utility. Right. So the power board in Chattanooga, they created a smart grid to essentially know when power went out, right? Because TBA, which if you know much about the history of the Southeastern United States, you probably know a lot about TBA, Tennessee Valley Authority was established in the early 1900s.

And basically, it's kind of like the people who brought power to the southeast for lack of a better explanation. And as a result of that, you know, we have a lot of innovative ways of thinking about managing power and power distribution. So one of the things that E.P.B. is the name of the company, by the way, E.P.B.

created this smart grid that basically is connected with fiber. And it reports back to a central location when power goes out, you know, on a certain street block. And if you go look it up, they have some case study or two. Basically, they've been able to decrease the amount of time that it takes.

Number one, to isolate where the problem is. And number two, to actually fix the problem, it's like 10 times faster with a smart grid, right? So that was like in the early, I think it was around 2010, maybe, or earlier. I actually wasn't living in Chattanooga when this happened.

But after that, they realized, hey, wait a second, we've got this fiber that's running all over the city. Like it's laying over, you know, most of Chattanooga. Why don't we use that fiber not only to communicate back, you know, when power goes out, but also just to carry the internet, right? So days started sending really fast internet.

And we were actually, I believe the first city in the United States to get a residential gigabit internet access. So at my house, I have a gigabit of my internet speed is a gigabit. So it's super fast, right? So this, this is enabled.

This is a draw for businesses. It has enabled a lot of people, you know, just because it's, it has kind of that marketing major draw to say, hey, you know, your, your internet bill is going to be very controlled. EPP is never going to sell your data, right? There's, there's all of these things that, hey, I work on the internet every single day.

This makes a big impact on my life and it makes a big impact on my work. So now we have 10 gigabit, that's actually available residential. I could get 10 gigabit internet connection in my house for like 200 bucks. It's crazy.

I mean, I've got a 15 megabit over here in my house. That, yeah, that's the base. I mean, the max it goes up to is about 200. Yeah.

Yeah. For around the same price that you're getting 10 gigabits. 200. And the truth is you can probably do most of what you need with that 15 megabits, at least for now, right?

Yeah, it's, it's enough for, you know, for browsing internet, for doing my work and streaming movies and time and music or whatever. I need to do this enough. Obviously, you know, more as always. It helps.

Yeah. Well, and, and as media becomes more and more, you know, higher and higher resolution and more people have access to that media, well, now your computer is going to relatively feel slower. Yeah. Sure.

All right. Cool. And so you work at an agency, whiteboard, you're the CTO of whiteboard, right? That's correct.

Have you been in a sort of development background for quite a while now or is this something you've sort of worked into more recently? No, I did not come from a development background. And then my family is working in computers. You know, when I was a young kid, my dad would assemble his own PCs.

And he did that mostly, you know, to be able to use word processing and that kind of stuff. You know, I remember a little bit of him, you know, running very simple commands on the command line to manage the disk and that kind of stuff, right? MS Dawes. But there wasn't a lot of that.

My dad is actually a pilot and he's a mechanic, but he never really got into software development. Sure. My mom is a teacher. And so neither of them really had a heavy tech background.

I started playing music when I was probably 10 years old, actually, I was playing earlier, but really taking it seriously and enjoying it deeply started playing guitar 10, 11, 12 years old around the time that I moved to the southeast, actually. Yeah. And so I played music throughout high school. I thought I was going to go into professional musicianship.

I wanted to go and basically be either I wanted to, you know, strike a big and go and play on the road and, you know, live that lifestyle or I wanted to be a studio musician. Either one was okay with me. So I went to school and I started learning about, I started my music degree program and pretty quickly realized, okay, this is, this is not quite what I want to do. And it was kind of a weird realization, right?

Because you spend a lot of your kind of passionate years as a teenager, when you're forming the way that you know, the first time you're really thinking about what am I going to do, you know, once I leave home is like at 13, right? And my answer to that was this thing. I wanted to go and be a musician. And so, you know, I was in bands growing up.

I was doing all that stuff. And I went to college and I started studying music and it turns out that wasn't what I wanted to do. And I realized that it wasn't because I didn't like music anymore. I didn't suddenly lose an appreciation or love for playing, you know, guitar, right?

Instead, what I realized was most of that degree program was about training you about the theory of music, not training you how to be successful as a musician. And I wanted to be successful as a musician. I wanted to spend my time learning how to record and distribute music. I wanted to spend my time becoming better in the studio.

So what I decided to do was stop that degree program, which was difficult, by the way, to do because it's, you know, again, it feels like, hey, am I throwing away my dream here? What's going on? But I stopped that degree program and instead I moved into actually started a journalism program, but then I switched to a communications with an emphasis in advertising. And so that's what I studied communications.

And that's what I got my undergrad degree in. Right. During the process of getting that communications degree, I wanted to find a way to connect with the world beyond where I was. And the most natural thing to me was the internet.

I wanted to take my, you know, kind of my portfolio as a person. I didn't really, by the way, I was terrible at figuring out marketing back then. But I kind of wanted to present myself as a professional musician slash designer sort of photographer at like a whole list of things. And I wanted the world to know about none of which apply today, by the way.

Yeah, don't come in playing music now. I do play music still. And I play mostly for myself. I play a little bit in a church that I attend here in the States.

And I've recorded a few times with my wife, my wife sings. And she's a very good singer. But I haven't really, you know, tried to push that to a mainstream audience. And I don't really plan, like I don't see, I don't really have a drive to do that anymore.

It's kind of a weird, and it's not because I lost a dream. It's, yeah, it's kind of older. Nothing, isn't it? Yeah, the music industry has kind of changed.

And I don't really see why I would do that if I get fulfillment out of just playing. Like truly what I wanted to do was just play. And I didn't realize that as a teenager, I thought I, you know, I thought I wanted to be famous. And I don't really, I don't really care about being famous.

Yeah, you've just got passion for actually playing. Yeah, so that's what I need to do for money. You can do something else for money and just keep that on the side. Why not?

Exactly. Yeah. And so that led me to developing websites. And when I started, I knew nothing.

I had no formal training. I had nobody who was teaching me, quite honestly, I was Googling in my apartment, Googling how to do certain things. I saw a site that I liked and tried to replicate some of the stuff they were doing, you know, didn't even know what it meant to plagiarize a website back then. I just liked it and wanted to figure out how they were doing what they were doing.

And just started deconstructing things and figuring out ways of making something my own. And I ended up running into, this is kind of, this is super old school, and anybody who learned web development back in the 2008, 2009, you will probably recognize this. But there was a blog or a couple of blogs actually called the Fuel Network. And the Fuel Network was run by Adele Charles, who I believe is now working at Bitly, or she was working at Bitly as a designer.

She was excellent. She had the biggest one was Fuel Fuel, your creativity. But I actually worked as the editor. Yeah, I remember Fuelie creativity.

I remember that site. Yeah, it was excellent site. Really good for designers that were wanting to work on their kind of perception and getting involved with the community. And it actually was a really cool thing because we had the opportunity to write content that, you know, it was one of the first blogs in that space.

So in any case, I ended up being the editor of Fuel, your interface, FYI. And I was totally underqualified. I can't believe that they actually trusted me with it. But it ended up being a really good thing because that's when I really caught my teeth on, you know, publishing schedules and talking about things in a way that people can grasp what you're saying.

And that was really, really important to even what I do today with developer tea. I started learning about that back then. So then moving forward, I ended up getting an internship as a front-end web developer. I thought that I wanted to be a designer still.

And I applied for an internship as a designer. And it turns out that when I was doing the front-end web development, I didn't realize that I was actually, you know, that was a more valuable skill set for me. I was better at that than I was a design. I had no idea because I didn't have any reference points.

I didn't even know what front-end developer meant. It was so early in that stage. And so I got that internship and that kicked my tail because I was presented with new problems. Like I had to build every front-end web developer.

You should have to build your own image carousel on web standards from 2011. It was difficult. Complete with text that was turned 90 degrees and all that stuff. That's the right of passage, isn't it?

Yeah, that's where that right of passage was so important because that's where I started realizing, hey, this is like some really interesting and complex problem solving and actually I love it. I really enjoy it. That's when it was all problem solving because it wasn't easy back then. It was very different.

Yeah, people had some good ideas on what they wanted to do, but the web just wouldn't let them. And there was all sorts of hacks to bring a design to life on the web. Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, it was very different. That was still when we were slicing PSDs and long before bootstrap.

Oh, yeah. Bootstrap was in thought of. And in fact, Twitter was barely a thing. I mean, we're talking about in terms of web years, this was kind of the early years still, especially in terms of like design web years, right?

My space was just out the door. I guess, well, I guess they've been a little bit longer than that. But people were starting to care about design on a popular level, right? But it was still very early.

So we still had very disparate web standards between browsers and video doing video work was impossible. It was very difficult. You know, the very first sites with full screen backgrounds and that kind of thing were just now coming out. So it was right after, you know, the fixed width, you know, the 960 grid, it was right after that was finally people started saying, okay, we don't have to do that anymore.

We can do more interesting stuff. That's when I kind of was dropped into that internship. And after that intern in really during that internship as well, but after that internship, I had good friends that went to the same undergrad colleges me, and they were starting a company. And, you know, it was really cool because we worked together on projects here and there we would, you know, we get paid and split up the money and then go our separate ways.

It was a lot of fun. Very interesting kind of period of my work life because, you know, it wasn't super structured. It's it was in every sense of the word freelance, right? And that those those two guys are Taylor and Eric and they ended up starting whiteboard.

And I actually went off to college, which is why I wasn't, you know, one of the founders of whiteboard, but I went off and did my master's degree. And effectively, after that, you know, came right back and started full time. And I take it there still, still the company and it's a oh yeah, yeah, and we work, you know, we still work very closely together every day. And you know, it's it's a challenge to work with your friends, but it is very fulfilling when you can make it work.

Okay, I had a fairly similar sort of start to what you mentioned as well. Again, like like yourself, when I was in my early teens around 1314, I was also really keen on becoming a musician as well, not so much musician. I was I was actually a DJ back then. And, you know, it started off as just something that was doing at home and then, you know, DJing up parties for friends and family and stuff like that.

And then as a golden, then I was like, DJing in clubs and very cool. Yeah, took it further and did that for quite a while. And when I went to university as well, before I went to university, my intention was always to study music as well. I studied music in high school, up until the end of high school.

But after that, when I went to university, I just for some reason, I just didn't go down that path. It kind of changed my mind to write the last minute. But I always wanted to do something quite creative. I was always interested in like music and drama and art and things like that.

And it just happened that I ended up on a computer science degree. It wasn't my first choice of path to take, but that's where I ended up and I didn't really enjoy it at that time. So while I was doing my degree in the sort of evenings and the weekends, I was always playing around with Photoshop and just doing sort of freelance design work for other people. And this was around the times that my space was in its prime, I suppose.

And yeah, you just spend a lot of time designing my space pages and putting together just small websites about music or about my favorite artists and things like that. And that's kind of where I started. So yeah, we took a fairly similar sort of root where musical roots and then ended up in design and yeah, sort of web industry. And yeah, I was just thinking about that because I also, I did a little bit of that Myspace hacking and I had, I guess I did have friends in high school that were interested in web development.

And it was that would have been my first introduction to it was seeing them make stuff and be a little bit interested in a way that wasn't really active. And you would exist it on kind of what the different pieces and parts were. But it wasn't until college that I found out that you couldn't use an ID twice on two HTML elements. I was that level of under educated until later.

Well, it was a lot harder to find the answer back then as well. It wasn't like stack of a flow wasn't really a thing. And there wasn't a million blogs about web development. You might have might have picked up a magazine, you might have a subscription to like computer arts or something.

And there was a few a few development sites and blogs, but yeah, there was a handful of them. And it was actually, you know, early early, early, high school, in fact, eighth grade, maybe before high school. And maybe even earlier, I remember I picked up a book in the library that was, you know, make your own website or write your right HTML or learn HTML. And I remember reading that and not really doing anything with it, but reading it and thinking, wow, I actually remember distinctly thinking that every page that I ever visited, somebody hand coded that page.

Yeah. I had no idea, you know, back then I had no idea about PHP or eventually I was like, wow, you can you can create templates and reuse them. That's awesome. So much that you learn that.

Yeah, I mean, maybe websites with those that occasionally I was in my way. Yeah, yeah. And you know, parody across them. Yeah, I can only imagine the people who first got, you know, Pearl on patchy being really excited about that.

Yeah, developers have it too easy these days. So now, now you're hosting developer tea, which is obviously development podcast. So what is it actually is, why do you just start podcast and you've been going for a roundabout two years now, is it? Yeah, so it's coming up on three years in January.

So it's around the corner for now to be three years. And you know, people ask me what inspired me to start it. And I want to answer that question. And I also want to answer the question, what inspires me to do it now?

Because it's the original inspiration is still there. But as it's gone forward, I've learned more and more. Well, we'll get into that in a second. The original inspiration for this really comes down to the fact that I was listening to podcasts originally before I started my own.

And the podcast I was listening to, you know, I love Shop Talk. I love listening. I mean, there's a variety of them. I'm not gonna list all of them.

But Shop Talk would be a really good one for a web audience. I imagine that you and probably others have been listening to Shop Talk, you know, the rapid fire episodes and all that stuff. You know, I can listen to those and really enjoy the content because it was highly relevant to me. And you know, connecting personality rather than just reading a blog, having the personalities and you know, that kind of warmth tied with something that was really specifically geared for me, right, as a web developer or as a software developer, really specifically speaks to some of the things that I think about and care about.

Yeah. The problem that I faced with all this podcast was the length of them. And because, you know, let's say I have five podcasts sitting in my playlist queue, whatever, that I'm subscribed to. Well, very often, five podcasts can take up eight hours of your day if you were to listen to them back to back.

And they would actually take a long time. And even with the 2x features on overcast and skipping the silences and all that stuff, the length of them was often prohibitive for me because I have like a two minute commute. That's another great thing about chatting about the way is it's not super congested. Yeah.

So to get to work, I'm like around the corner, right? So I found myself having to curate and kind of roll the dice on which one is going to be the best one to listen to. And I hated doing that because I really did enjoy all of them. Yeah.

You'd have to limit the number that you subscribe to when you, they're all coming out at quite a regular schedule. So you're going to be hit with this hour episode at least once a week. So yeah, you can very quickly build up. Right.

And I'm really bad at listening to them while I'm working. But when I found another inspiration that helps me get to where I ended up doing, helped me finally decide to do developer tea was actually a Ruby programmer named Avdi Grimm. Avdi creates Ruby Toppers. And Ruby Toppers, if you're not familiar with Ruby Toppers, basically what he does is he creates these five to eight minute videos usually.

And he's extremely focused and he shows one concept. And he does a lot of them. He has like 500 Toppers. So what I found myself doing is, you know, I was learning how to build better Rails applications.

If I'm, I found myself going and watching a Ruby Toppers video whenever I would take a coffee break, I go and grab a cup of coffee and I'd sit at my desk and I would watch Ruby Toppers. I was like, you know, this is kind of the format that I want this kind of media in. I want training in this format and I want podcasts in this format too. So I decided, you know, that was kind of brewing in my mind a little bit and I really had for a long time wanted to start a podcast.

When I was in my master's program, I'd even designed a logo for anybody feel free to take this. But it was called, and you know what, I think somebody actually has created a podcast called this now, but it was called Front to Back. And it was going to be about front and back in development. Yeah, I was a subscriber of Front to Back.

Two guys from the UK. Okay. Well, there you go. So I was going to create that podcast, but not that one.

But you know, I had an idea for a show called Front to Back. And I never went through with it partially because the plan to do it was, you know, to do a Kickstarter. And really, it was just way too much for me to actually get started. I could have done it, but it would have been a big investment.

And ultimately, I decided, well, it's too big of a risk. I don't have I don't have the time to risk that much on it. Before I started my podcast as well, I was throwing around some names on a spreadsheet with a friend of mine. And one of the ones that we wrote down was Back to Front.

It was only until, and I remember, we had a list of about five or six names, and I decided to put them all into iTunes and just see if anyone had them. And Front to Back came out, came up in the search and they're like, okay, I'm not going to call it Back to Front. It's going to be too similar. But yeah, they're both because it's really good as well.

That's awesome. You know, I had the idea of doing the Kickstarter from, if anybody's wondering why I even thought about doing a Kickstarter, you know, Roman Mars, the 99% invisible, somebody told me he had made like some crazy number of pledges on Kickstarter, like something like a million dollars running a Kickstarter for his podcast. And I thought, man, if he can do that, then, you know, why can't I? Who knows what this thing is?

But ultimately, that was the wrong, that was the wrong perspective for me to have number one. And number two, it was too much on the front end for me to get started. And I don't recommend anybody start at Kickstarter. I think it's, again, we'll get into that if we need to.

But yeah, so I started kicking the idea around and asking friends, Hey, what do you think of this? Developers, my wife asked her. I asked people who are not developers, but work in the industry. What do you think of this idea?

And I pretty much unanimously got, yeah, that sounds like a pretty good idea. I didn't get like rave reviews. You know, nobody was like, man, that's going to be really successful. Because, you know, people throw around ideas in this industry all the time, right?

And that's actually kind of a thing that I tell people now is nobody's going to believe in your ideas as much as you do, right? And just because somebody isn't super excited about it doesn't mean it's it's doomed or it's not going to be successful. It's one person, right? So take everybody's opinion with a grand assault.

But I continue doing research. I pop some names into iTunes just like you did. I was first going to do something related to coffee because that was my experience. I took a coffee break and I watched, you know, videos, training videos, whatever.

Of course, coffee is really saturated on iTunes. So I had to shift gears a little bit. And I came up with developer T and shot the name around to a few people and they kind of give it thumbs up. And so yeah, at that point, you know, we've already talked about my history as a musician.

I already had recording gear. I had the stuff set up while I had it in a closet, actually, but I could set it up pretty easily. And I could actually just sit in front of my can start recording. And that was truly one of the biggest factors for me, the biggest factors of success.

You know, I mentioned already that doing the Kickstarter was too much, right? There's too much before I got to the first listen, before I got to the first moment where an idea was was communicated to a listener. And so because of that, this is like the opposite approach, right? You come up with an idea and the fastest getting in front of the microphone as soon as possible was like kind of the key, the key differentiator.

I didn't even know it at the time, but getting in front of the microphone became really extremely important kind of step in that process. So I recorded a bunch of episodes and released them kind of expecting like, you know, kind of like a blog, right? Yeah, you don't write a blog post thinking, man, this is going to explode. Like that's nobody does that.

Yeah, you're lucky to get one or two reasons on blog posts, really. Yeah, yeah. But you know, I hit a few lucky strides, to be honest with you. And those lucky strides, you know, there's multiple ones along the way.

And you know, the rest, as I say, is history. So that's that was kind of the driving purpose is to fill this, you know, this format niche, but also to talk about things in a kind of a broader perspective, kind of way. You know, I want to discuss softer skills or I want to discuss, you know, how as a person, you should approach your work, not just how is the developer should you approach your work? I think it's good that you've chosen that format as well, because there are obviously a lot of tech web development podcasts out there.

And majority of them, including mine, to an extent, does focus more on technology and techniques and tips and tricks and things like that. And people don't really talk about, you know, what it takes to actually be in this industry and be a good developer and just be a good, be a good coworker and all those sorts of things. So yeah, really, I really love the format. And thank you very much.

It's taught me a lot as well, just to on persona and on attitude and just sort of giving me a bit more respect about a way to sort of respect my peers and respect other people's opinions and things like that as well, which I think is really inspiring. Yeah, that's that's the goal. You've explained why I still do it today. Is that exactly?

I've just had a quick look on iTunes at your list of episodes and it looks like you're well over three hundred now, aren't you? Oh, yeah, I'm around 440 or so. Okay, iTunes is really shiny 300. But I remember you did a you made a big deal of the 365th episode because of the day for a year.

Yeah, I remember listening to that one. So yeah, I have a 400 episodes. So how do you how do you fit into your schedule? I suppose 400 episodes at regular schedule.

Are you doing three a week? I am doing three a week. Yeah, at one point, I actually did four a week for like a month, but I actually got reviews that said that the quality was suffering. So I had to had to scale it back down a little bit.

So three episodes a week while being CTO of an agency and juggling your sort of home life. Yeah, I'm a new father as well. If you want to pile on there. Yeah, you know, this is a good question because I think a lot of people, well, let me back up and say that I've been extremely lucky.

There are a lot of things that go my way when it comes to these these episodes and making it out. I think there's some things that everyone can do that I do that I don't think are unique to me that anybody can really take advantage of. So I'm going to talk about some of those things now. Well, first of all, I do I should give a lot of credit to the team that I work with.

So, spec, you mentioned spec. Yeah. spec was started a few months into developer tea with the hosts of design details. And we had very similar audience sizes, we had very similar tones, you know, similar kind of approaches to what a podcast should be.

We had guests that come on, you know, their format's a little bit different. They're a little bit more polished than I am in some ways. They have two hosts rather than one. They don't really do monologue style episodes, etc.

But overall, we had a lot of overlap and we decided, hey, you know, we could really benefit from combining our efforts and doing some scale work together and that kind of thing. So we created spec, me, Brandon, Brian, created spec. And not too long after we started the company, Sarah, who is currently, she's actually full time with spec now. She's transitioning into a leadership role at spec.

She is a huge help in getting the stuff out the door. And so what that has allowed effectively, she edits all of the episodes. And she helps keep me on schedule. She actually does a lot of the sales work.

She's very, she's kind of a, you know, multi, a multi job genius at spec, basically. But that has really helped because what that means is the time that I spend working on developer tea can be 100% focused on production and creativity. And I use that word kind of tentatively because I don't mean like just thinking creatively. I mean, quite literally coming up with ideas for episodes.

Sure. So that's really the hurdle for me recording the episodes because they're short, it doesn't take a ton of time, which is another benefit of that format, right? Recording them doesn't take a lot of time. Coming up with the idea is the most taxing part of it.

And so allowing me to spend the time coming up with the idea, that's hugely important. So having that team, you know, if you're starting, let's say you're starting a podcast soon and you want to get to that same spot, then outsourcing would be the way to do that, right? If you don't have a team, then outsourcing some of the editing work is actually surprisingly not too expensive to do. And especially if you're looking to make this kind of a professional endeavor is probably worth it.

So I don't want to undersell that. But there are some other things that I do that I think can help pretty much anybody. So I'm going to kind of go through those. The first one is that I leave my setup ready to basically press record at any time.

So that means like I never take my mic down, my computer stays perpetually on. And my all of my recording gear is just ready to go, right? I have one spot that I do these episodes in unless I'm traveling to a conference or something, but typically, you know, nine times out of 10, I'm doing it right here, staying in front of this desk that I'm staring at right now. And as long as I have that stuff set up, then I know that the barrier to actually getting something started and recording, I just press two or three buttons and I'm going, right?

And it's kind of like that, you know, there's been some stuff that's been coming out recently about barrier to entry when it comes to working out. And the recommendation now is put on your gym clothes. And then if you still don't want to work out, then you don't have to, right? That first, that first whatever that first hurdle is, if you can make that first hurdle as small as possible or eliminate it entirely, right, then progress is going to be easier for you.

That's thing number one. Yeah. Thing number two that I do to keep this schedule up is I don't get so attached to an idea that I let it like I don't record an idea and not release it, right? Like I don't I don't waste time being so overly critical of this stuff that I'm recording or the ideas that I have that I let it like destroy an entire recording session.

I try to be as critical as possible on the front end, but ultimately, you know, I have over 400 episodes. If one of them is bad, that's okay. If I fail miserably on like five episodes in a row, that's actually not the end of the world, right? It's not horrible.

If I stop recording, if I lose my schedule, that is bad. Because once you throw that off, it's very difficult to come back from that. So the lesson to be learned there is take the idea as more valuable than you expect it to be. In other words, you can have an idea for an episode, you can have an idea for a product, you can have an idea for pretty much anything you want to make, and you're going to have self-doubts that ultimately could kill it entirely.

And that means that it never even has a chance to prove itself. Your idea is just it dies. You already fail when you do that, right? Instead, you know, especially when you're doing stuff like what publishing stuff like this, it's okay to have a few bad ones in there, right?

It's okay to release something that ultimately, if you could go back and erase it, you might, but not everybody's going to like everything you do. And that's it. That's okay. Yeah, of course.

I had a conversation with some friends of mine a few episodes ago now, where I firstly, I was struggling to think of a topic. It was I didn't have a guest on so I wanted to stick to a schedule, but I didn't really have a topic to talk about. And they encouraged me to basically, I had a few ideas and they basically encouraged me to do it no matter what. And I didn't have a bit of a sore throat that day as well.

So the recording didn't come out good. And I was I was very close to just scrapping it. And then I'll just redo it some other time, or I'll just skip this week. But yeah, my friends, they talked me into it and they said, no, you got to stick to your schedule no matter what, it doesn't really matter about the quality.

It doesn't matter about the topic, even if it's too many episodes, it's better than zero. And yeah, I was really glad that I pushed it out. I just I still do find it quite difficult to stick to the sort of schedule that you're on, obviously a couple of times a week. My episodes come out maybe once or fortnight.

But that's something that I'm trying to work on as well. But yeah, that's really good advice that you've given there. And it's interesting to know your process as well. I think it's really important how you've got your setup ready to go all the time.

Unfortunately, I don't really have space in the house to have a permanent setup. So after each recording, I do pack my microphone away and it goes into a box and it's put in the cupboard something. And then when I'm ready to record, I kind of need to wait till the house is quiet and down a bit. And then I do my recording in the lounge because I don't have a specific space where I can do it.

And I need to wait until the rest of the family is not in the lounge and they're on their own thing. It is a barrier and it doesn't stop you from keeping up that schedule and keeping up the flow. But yeah. Well, and for people who are in similar situations and for you, I would recommend a few things.

One, schedule time that you know is going to be successful. I always do record at the same time. I always record the exact same thing from around about eight, thirty to nine o'clock. Today we're recording a bit later because of time zones.

But that's fine. But generally when I'm doing an episode by myself where I've got to guess this in the UK as well, I'll try and schedule it in around eight, thirty nine o'clock because generally that's a good time when people are winding down for the evening and they've got so many time. Yeah, it's a it is a difficult thing. You know, space is important for audio production and having that barrier, you know, it absolutely is going to affect it.

So another thing though, that that may help and this is less related to, you know, the procedural side or the recording side is more related to the idea generation side. Because for me, that's really important. Putting out three episodes a week means I had to come up with something around 150, you know, valuable and unique ideas in a given year for episodes. And that's not going to be daunting.

But what I found is if I separate and batch that idea generation process away from producing an episode. So in other words, if I try to generate, I call it a blast file, which is kind of a weird title, I guess, but I have a file in my note taking application called developer T blast. And what I do in that file is I try to every time I touch it, I try to come up with five to 10 ideas for episodes. Now, the key here for anybody who is listening and want to generate ideas like this, the key is don't judge the ideas as you're going through them.

Right. So like, in other words, don't stop yourself from putting something down. And this is this is just a basic brainstorming technique. It's nothing new.

But employing it in this way, basically, it means that I have this treasure trove of like a massive list of things that I can pull from whenever I'm feeling like, oh, this is not my brain's not firing on all four cylinder all six cylinders today, you know, right? It's it's a I'm slow today. Well, I can go and look at this place where I've captured that brain storming. And do you try and create some sort of schedule at that point?

Or do you come back to that later and cherry pick the ones that you want to do in order you want to do them? I'm really bad about scheduling. That is one place where I'm horrible. A lot of times I have recorded an episode the day before it airs.

There's been plenty of times where I've been, you know, three or four weeks out in front. And it vacillates. I'm really quite bad at sticking to a specific schedule, partially because, you know, especially with having a son and a child in my house now, you know, it becomes a little bit more, uh, undeterminable, right? It's difficult to know exactly when I'm going to be free and exactly, you know, and as a CTO of a company, I have to remain relatively flexible on that.

And too, so, you know, the only real, uh, protected time that I could ever really have is super early in the morning. And for whatever reason, my brain is not ready to record a podcast at five AM. So, uh, and not to mention guests, right? So that's, that's another factor in all this.

So I'm really bad at scheduling what I'm actually okay at doing with this list. And what I found is, is kind of the valuable thing for me is when I have a spark that comes from that list, if I look at the list, I say, wow, I have like six ideas right now on that particular title, right? That's, that's basically what this list is, is a bunch of titles with maybe like a one sentence explanation of what that could be about. Um, you know, immediately, if I record it, I can get an episode done.

And that's, like that, having that has been the key to being able to stay on schedule for me. Uh, it's less about finding a specific time, even though I would benefit from that. I need to preach that message to myself, certainly. But I've been able to succeed by being able to translate a spark into a finished thing and doing it in, you know, a short period of time.

No, that's brilliant. And yeah, I think the fact that you obviously hand off the editing to another member of the team as well, just means that you can, you know, dump out your ideas on your microphone. Yes. And not worry about, you know, any retakes or any, you know, cutting out any, I mean, honoring and all that fun stuff of everything.

Um, yeah, I actually quite enjoyed the editing process. I do the editing myself. Um, so it is fun. It is fun.

I actually kind of miss it. Yeah, I do like doing it. And I do try and make it as polished as possible. Um, so I might, on an episode, which is you know, going on an hour, like, like we are today, I might spend about two, two and a half to three hours on doing the edit.

Um, so I wouldn't generally record on a particular day towards the end of the week, like, like, today, recording on Thursday, I'm going to record on Thursday or Friday, and then I spend maybe a couple of hours on like a Sunday evening doing the editing and then publish on Monday or Tuesday. Um, and yeah, I really enjoy it. But it is a time consuming process. And I, you know, I understand why you've got someone in your team to do that for you so that you can focus on the actual, the talking and the recording.

It's kind of an interesting thing. Uh, I haven't talked about this on, I don't think ever, on an interview, but the way that I record my monologue episodes, you might consider that editing as I go. Um, because I'm pretty quick with the recording software, like I'm proficient with it because I've been using it for so long, like much longer than I've been recording podcasts. So I can pretty quickly like jump back and read, like do a retake, right?

And it's, that's easy for me to do. Um, so it makes Sarah's job, you know, editing much faster. And you can't really do that with an interview style thing, right? So like, if I didn't word something correctly, I can stop it and cut that and redo it.

And she doesn't have to do a lot of that deep editing. It's more like, yeah, you know, she's making space for, uh, sponsors or she's, you know, she's organizing where the music goes or whatever it is, but it makes her job a little bit faster as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Definitely. Uh, with the two, with the interview type of episodes for me as well, most of the time is spent, uh, getting rid of like cross talk, um, just just, just adding a little bit of space between the conversations, or just to get a bit of room to breathe sometimes. Um, but yeah, like you said, but the monologue ones, it's, yeah, it is look like you do have the flexibility of stopping and starting.

Um, I find the monologues a little bit harder. Uh, I just find it, I just find it a bit difficult talking by myself about a topic. And so I find that those edits do take me longer because I do stop and start a lot more. So, um, yeah, like anything it took me a lot of practice to get to the place where I feel comfortable with that.

Yeah. Maybe in two, yeah, I've been going since March, so I'm sort of two and a half years behind you at the moment. It gets easier. Yeah, it has been getting easier.

Yeah. The first episode I remember I was never, I was a nervous record when I first started, but now I'm fine with it now. And I really enjoy it. Yeah.

I probably spent a full day on my first 10 in an episode, you know, like it's, it's taxing. Yeah. Yeah. My first one was a little teaser of what's to come and it just took forever.

Um, you know, the teaser took longer than the actual first episode. So, so when you, when you teamed up with Brian and, uh, Brynne for to join spec, did you already know them before? Hadn't always just like internet friends. Uh, this is actually a connection I made in Twitter with, uh, with Bryn.

Um, Bryn reached out. He's, he's very good at communicating with people he doesn't know, which makes him a great interviewer. Um, he reached out and basically, you know, we, we kind of talked for a little while before we decided to actually start a business. So it kind, we kind of knew each other, you know, we knew of each other and then, you know, but we didn't know each other before we started podcasting.

Uh, so it was entirely driven off of this. In fact, and this is the very strange, uh, facts about our history together. They started their podcast. If I remember correctly on the same exact day, I think on the same day that we started ours.

So you have competitions thought with? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Well, it's kind of weird because it's like a Venn diagram, you know, they have a lot of people who would never listen to developer T and I have a lot of people who would never really listen to design details. Uh, but we do have that overlap of like you who would listen to both. Yeah. Yeah.

I was a subscriber of both before spec started. And then all of a sudden, I noticed that you've both got this little logo on your, on your show up. What is that coming for? The same team.

Yeah. Uh, when you had the S and the circle, does that. Yeah. Yeah.

And yeah, I just, you know, I listed it as details now as well. And I like the format as well, they've got interviews with obviously the people in the design industry. Um, yeah, they're really good at what they do. Brilliant.

Um, how do you guys, uh, expand the network? How do you sort of decide which podcast you pull into the network? Uh, by and large, the, the, the people who have joined the network, uh, they have come from, um, mostly the valley, right? So I'm Brandon Brian.

They both live in San Francisco and I live out here in, uh, this kind of barren place of Tennessee, right? Uh, even though there are, uh, there's a lot of growth in tech and there's a lot of, there's actually quite a few podcasts that are popping up out of Chattanooga. It's not nearly the same as what's happening in California. Uh, so they have largely been responsible, uh, for making those connections and finding people who are doing really interesting stuff and bringing them into the spec network.

So um, you know, I haven't been extremely involved in each of those decisions, but really it comes down to, you know, are you making something that kind of fits the mission of what spec was intended in the beginning for? And, and are you making it to a quality level that is, you know, that we can see that it's going to do well for you and for us? Yeah, the spec network is brilliant. I mean, all the shows are really good on there.

I listen to the ones I listed the most that are probably, uh, design details of C2LT. Um, immutable, um, is a one that I listed a lot. Um, and I used to listen to one of the, um, I'll call it the name of it now. The one that, uh, San Service does, uh, his iOS one.

Oh, yeah. It was just while I was learning a bit of iOS development, but I've kind of put that onto a bit of a backburner now. Um, yeah, they're all really good. They've all got the same sort of quality and, uh, it's a brilliant network.

So if anyone who's listening hasn't subscribed to the spec network, you definitely need to have a look at all the podcasts on there as well. Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

And if you haven't subscribed to inspect yet, you can click subscribe in your podcast app right now. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Um, so what else are you working on right now? And what's the sort of future with, with spec and developer tea and go any plans that you, in the, in the, questions all around. Yeah. Um, so, uh, developer tea is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Uh, I, I see no reason to stop it. Um, and a lot of people, you know, they, they do these things for a run and, you know, we might play with the format. Uh, I've definitely considered going into video. I think it's a very important space that I'm not really, uh, haven't really pushed into at all.

Um, but I think there's a lot of opportunity for, uh, interesting engagement and, you know, slightly different types of content, like explaining, you know, difficult math concepts, for example, and that's not really something I can do super effectively in a podcast format, but I might be able to do that with video, right? Uh, it's also more, a more saturated format. So, you know, that's, that comes with its own challenges. Uh, I've certainly considered building course materials, uh, something that I really believe, uh, a significant portion of my future is going to be in teaching other people and, uh, what better way to start than creating online course material, right?

So that's, that's kind of in the back of my mind and on the horizon a little bit. Um, the network is going to continue in its current form for now and very likely will grow as new media, uh, opportunities are presented. So, you know, for example, uh, Apple is kind of moving podcast meta to support at a native level this concept of seasons. Um, and developer T has never had seasons, right?

Which we're always on. It's like the news or something, right? Um, because, you know, the season type podcasts are typically going to be story driven or, you know, but a lot of people are attaching to this concept of recording and releasing seasons and doing a little bit more work for episode, uh, high production value stuff, the NPR podcasts, obviously we're kind of the, I'm a forward front of that and have created a new type of podcast. So, you know, I'd love to see, and I don't know if this is going to happen in the near future, not I'd love to see that kind of thing, uh, on the spec network.

I think we have a big opportunity, uh, to, to create good media in that space too. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah.

Some of the stuff that you obviously MPR the production value on some of their products is amazing. Uh, you can obviously tell that they've got a lot of people, a lot of people working on them and they've got a good budget and they've got a lot of time and dedication. Very well resources. Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. It is a big publishing platform, isn't it? But yeah, there's, there's absolutely no reason why spec can get there. It's definitely got the talent and it's got the content and it's got the following as well, just by looking at the Slack channel, you can see how many people are interested in the content where Slack is kind of over capacity now, isn't it?

Yeah. Well, we've moved to, uh, to Spectrum now, of course, yeah, officially the community is on Spectrum and, uh, and that, that allows us to kind of open up a little bit more and invite different types of conversation as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Which brings me nicely onto, um, just before we sort of wrap up, is there anything that you'd like to, like to plug and, um, you know, where can people find out more about you and make sure? Yeah. I'd love to ask you a couple of questions as well. Um, before we close out, uh, these are, these are questions that I usually ask on developer TV, but I like to ask them as a guest too, because people want to hear about you.

Uh, hopefully, hopefully as much or more than they want to be about. Uh, first, the first question I like to ask is if you were not, you and I were to go and grab a cup of tea together, sit down and, you know, have an hour to talk, what do you wish I would talk to you about or ask you about? Um, okay. So I mentioned earlier that I kind of started off as a designer.

Uh, while I was, while I was at university, I was, uh, I didn't study design, but it was always like a passion of mine. And, um, when I first got into working in the industry, I was working as a designer for time for quite a few years, and then I was sort of transitioned into a developer over the past five or six years from the developer. And I think a lot of people who kind of know me now, they know me as a developer. Um, but, uh, yeah, it's always, uh, I always love talking about design as well.

And, uh, I love talking about composition and typography and, you know, color theory and the logo design and things like that. Um, and I like talking about the, the way that you can kind of bridge the gap between designers and developers, um, and how they can work together more efficiently and, um, sort of help each other in their roles and help produce like a, a, a more polished product in the end. Um, so yeah, if anyone does ever meet me and, um, you know, start talking about development, let's talk about design as well. And let's talk about the whole picture, not just, uh, go down one avenue.

Let's talk about the whole process of design development from end back end. Yeah. I like to, I like to get my fingers in a lot of the prices or, um, these experience and all that sort of thing as well. That's excellent because it truly is, you know, uh, actually just an episode of developer tea on the subject.

It is a, uh, a trait of great developers to zoom out and look at how what they do affects the larger whole, right? Uh, how does development affect, you know, how does the thing that I'm creating? But for example, and this is, this is why, right? If you are a software developer and you, uh, you want to optimize your software, ask the question, why?

Why do I want to optimize the software? Right. If you end up, if you ask the question, why a few times a lot of times the, the younger or, uh, developers who are, uh, limited in their perspective, they will end up at a, I'm not sure, or I'm, I don't know. I'm not sure why, but I know I'm supposed to, right?

I know it's the right thing. I feel somebody has told me before that to be a good developer, I need to have fast software. So that's why I'm doing it. But the truth is optimizing your software has a value, an underlying value that connects to the other parts of the system.

Whatever it is that you're building, that optimization should be with relation to the other things. I saw a tweet recently from somebody who works on the React core team, I believe. He was talking about, uh, a common, uh, complaint from developers or kind of this like best practice. He basically presented it as a myth that creating functions in your render call is going to you, uh, make your program slower.

And he created a, a test case for this and basically said it's imperceptible. Uh, how much slower it is. It's like, you can do, you can create a new function, uh, you can do like 5 million of them per second. So there's no perception level that you can have where that your user, users are going to have is going to defeat that and make the optimization worth your time.