Hey, before we started the show, I'd like to give a shout out to one of our sponsors. Hack Bright Academy Hack Bright Academy is an all women coating boot camp in San Francisco. They were founded with the mission to provide women with the personalized path to a software engineering career. One of the most impressive things about the school is the tight knit community they've created. They truly believe in empowering each other and working to change the ratio of women in the tech industry. Hack Bright firmly believes that when you combine a community of like minded, ambitious women in a network of strong support, the possibilities are endless. Check out their programs at Hack Bright academy dot com. Ah,

lot of my path really starts this thing I've built in college, which was this limits based audio Web server like my my process. When I'm building something, sketch a bunch of stuff, it's very easy to do because that kind of like sketch with code like you can trying things out. You can erase things very easily in the way I've built things in the past that you don't really build these things with scaling and my necessarily. My name is John Buddha. I'm the co founder and the developer of transistor data fell. This

is code story. A podcast. Bring you interviews with tech visionaries who share in the critical moments of what it takes to change in industry and build and leave a team that has your back. I'm your host, Noel apart. And today, how John Buddha took its Web dev and audio experience and created the last podcasting host. You'll ever need all this and more on coat store building. On the early tech, he learned John Buddha became a ruby on rails champion, building his products, using all of the components of the language. Having created a Spotify like music platform way before Spotify existed, he gained large amounts of experience in what is required to host and process audio files while working at cards against humanity, he created his second podcast hosting solution in time to host a single and very popular podcast. This early solution would later become what is known today as transistor dot FM. Tell me, Tell me about transistor, that FM Tell me what it is.

So Transistor FM is a podcast hosting and analytics platform So if you wanted to start a podcast like the show, for instance, you need Thio. Ah, place to host your audio files. You need a place that generates an R s s feed for you with all the relevant information about your show on your episodes. We also need a place to track you know, your analytics and who's listening in a place that will help you distribute to all these other platforms, like ABBA podcasts and Spotify and all these other places. So that's that's what we have. It's a subscription software service that helps you publish your podcasts, helps you build a website for a podcast. We have embed herbal audio players that you get in bed on your existing website. If you don't want to use our Web sites. Yeah, which try to make it as easy as easy as possible that Oh, get your podcast out to the world once you've recorded it.

Cool. So tell me. Tell me how you got started building that product

I helped build Ah, podcasting platform that still exist today. For whatever reason, it didn't you know, it was just a a lot of things sort of fell apart to the point where I sort of just exited and I'm not like a part of it. I think it's been so at least once after that, like I was, you know, it was a little better about the situation, about how it ended. I think it sort of things ended in, like, 2015 for me. With that, I was always still really interested in podcasting. I was around a lot of podcasting. I was at the time working full time at Cargo gets married in Chicago,

and with it they built. It was more like a co working space office for cards and a bunch of other people in Chicago. And they built a couple different recording studios for podcasting because, you know, some of the some of the people involved in cards were really into podcasting and just wanted to help support the community and have the space with people comin record shows. So I was still around it, and people in the office were were using this product that I had help Bill, one of the projects that cards against humanity. Bales do these like big holiday stunts, is events on day one of like two years ago, they were gonna fund a year of a podcast called the Good News Podcast, which was like this daily podcast with good happy news in the morning for, like, five minutes every day. And and so, you know,

I was part of the technology team of cards. I was in a meeting, and they were you know, somebody was like, Well, we need, you know, we're going to this podcast. We need somewhere to host it. And we could use, you know, this product could I have helped work on. And I was like, How about I build one? I build a new one, and if it's done in time,

we can use that. And they kind of agreed to it like they were there, very supportive in people having projects outside of their job, which was super cool. And so I worked on it. I got it to a point where it could basically, you know, run a show. It would have a Narcisse feed in a website. Really? Basic analytics. I mean, it was like the bones of what transistor is now. There was no billing. There's no, you know,

nothing was hooked up to strike at that point, but it was, like, fully functional. Um, had to be ready by January 1st of 20 18 s. It was kind of like running, you know, running one podcast that got a lot of traffic. Actually, it's like 30,000 subscribers. Eso it. It launched. And it went really well, like there was no problems with the technology at all. You know,

obviously card has a big reach. So they're gonna email there, Their newsletter. They're gonna email all the people that purchased this holiday package toe, listen to the show, and immediately it had a ton of listeners. At that point, my cofounder, Justin Jackson, had gotten a hold of me way had met in 2014 at x o x o. We met there and sort of like, I don't hit it off like we just, you know, easy to talk to you And, like, kind of wanted way stayed in touch,

kind of wanted to, like, work on something at some point, we have no idea what this is stopped, you know, four years before anything happened but stayed in touch and Justin got ahold of me in early 2008 and said. You know, I really want to put my energy into something this year, and I know you're working on transistor, and I was just wondering if you wanted a partner and initially I was like, mad. I don't know. I kind of want to try this on my own because like, things kind of went badly with the first attempt at this spot casting stuff. But the more I thought about it, the more our talents and sort of like core skills like really overlaps and compliment each other.

Like I was developer and sort of Web designer, and he was more the marketing and product stuff, and I just I don't know how to market it, like, I'll tweet about it once and then be like, Well, that's good. I just marketed. So the more I thought about it, I was like, You know what? Like I might as well give this a shot with, Like with Justine is someone I would kind of look up to you for, you know, marketing and product stuff. And he has a big following and has done a lot of podcasts and kind of knows the market. Um, so we agreed Thio form a company legally and do you a 50 50 partnership, and it's kind of enough off to the races since early 8 4018

So what about what about your tech path? Tell me about your past to get to where you are now.

A lot of my path really starts. This thing I've built in college, which was this limits based audio like Web server that would run a network like you're in a dorm or in a house, and you could fill it with MP trees and stuff because obviously you get schooling. You have access to broadband Internet, and you're like, I'm gonna download all the MP three's and you could you could control like the audio playing out of a computer, which was hooked up to a stereo from your computer and, like build playlists and, like playlist up. But you couldn't give access to like other people in the dorm or in the house, and they control the audio coming out. He's coming out of stereo, so there was, like multiple iterations of that. I open source it. At one point,

it's, I think I ended up pulling into my get Hub has just like archive. I doubt it still runs, but it might sort of like iTunes for the Web will not like so after college. Let's see. Like the market was not great for jobs. I ended up starting my own company doing freelance Web design. It's mostly like just simple Web PHP Web sites, and I think, really early versions of WordPress and just found clients and kind of did the whole entrepreneurial thing from early on, like I just wouldn't I was living in Florida the time there really were not. The market was not great for finding a job, so I just sort of made my own kind of scrape by. Started a company with some friends doing Web design, who I grew up with a way had this guy contact us from California who found the this like, open source music player.

I was just talking about found it online, and I got a hold of us. It was like wanted to start this Web based like digital audio Marketplace is basically like, uh, kind of like it was It was it was an iTunes or I think the music, if you're familiar with that Basically, you just like purchase credits and you could download MP three's. And we had this. He had this idea to do this stuff because he was in the music industry. So we ended up building starting to build this project for him. Um, and that was called M tracks mtr a ks dot com. We ended up a couple of us ended up joining his company and like leaving this other company we built and moving to San Diego for a year, working with in building this thing ultimately wasn't successful. It's like, really,

really hard to make money on selling digital. Musically, the margins are so low you have tohave, you know, millions of customers to make any money. But it was a really, really fastening project, like it was. I think it was too early. I think for that, the cool thing about it was that it was our my friend Ben and I worked on this together, and it was the first project we built with the ruby on rails. So this was, I think, first in one point, our before I think we both really, really loved it, like we both I think we're getting sick of peach p at that point and just really loved what you know. 37 signals and and that whole team was doing with with the ruby

on rails and nice. So the rails is your go to for back in and front

end? Yeah, Yeah. I mean, I've recently recently kind of ah, dove into view Js. As you know, front and friend needs have grown and, you know, interactivity and stuff like that needs to be a little bit a little bit better than what you can ideally build with something like Jake weary or whatever. I never really got into reactor anything, but it sort of took a liking. The view?

Sure. You know, it's interesting that you say that you haven't really gotten into react, Are you of the mindset? You get a tool that is still fresh enough, and that works well. Um, are you the mindset? Like I don't really need to go learn something new, because I can just I know what works.

And I know it'll work Well, Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm definitely that mindset. Like I try as much as I can to avoid, like, the hot tool of the week because it changes too fast. And you just It's impossible to keep up to the point where e feel like you're not

gonna get anything done If you don't

just stick to what you know. I mean, they all Yeah. In the end, they all do the same thing. They render a Web page on the Internet. I know I've seen a lot of people sort of just just kind of, like get a little bit distracted by a new shiny technology. But before ever reason of you, I think I've used I've done a little bit of angular, never really got into react like view from what it looks to me is like a good combination of both of those has a great community behind it, just sort of. I read the documentation and, like, kind of made sense, headed up and running pretty quickly. Yeah, so I priced it with that for a while for the front. And

so you built the M V P, so to speak, and this might even be pre M v P. Tell me about that process. Taking it so pre M v p too, to what you might call in V. P s o that one show on it. And then you start pushing the agenda. Tell me about building that that product. How did that go? Well,

I sort of already knew the I kind of knew it needed to be done from previous experience, right? Like a podcast needs mostly needs an RCs feed, which these other service is air gonna read from. But Nelson is a place to host your audio files. In this case, it needed a website, so I knew I kind of need to build that

into it. I mean,

the process there was like like my my process. When I'm building something, a lot of times is sketch a bunch of stuff on paper and generator rails up like I know, I know. I kind of know in the back of my mind, like what sort of what the data miles look like At first, I take things pretty quickly, and I just

sort of almost like sketching

with code. I mean, Ruby on rails is really good with that look,

you can It's very easy to experiment.

It's very easy to Theo. It's kind of like sketch with code like you can try things out. You can

erase things very easily. You could make make mistakes, sketch with code. You know, people may hear that aren't developers and think you're using some sort of I d or with the wig dragon dropped kind of thing. But where you're talking about is using code to rapid prototype for lack of a better way to say it. But but almost with coach, you're riding in rails. Is your brush your canvas? You paint all that? Yeah,

Yeah. I mean, I would kind of liking it so that it is yet is a lot like rapid prototyping. And I think that's one of the one of the great things about rails, and they're certainly out there, frameworks that have come out afterwards. After that, you could do the same thing now, but yeah, it wasn't really It wasn't really a rigid process at all. It was just me, so I could kind of do whatever I wanted.

So how has that changed since Justin's joined the team? So how do you guys put together? Put your heads together and figure out OK, this is what's most important next to build.

We've been changing that a bit lately like we. You know, once we lot, we've officially launched in August of 2018 you know, we had a We had a decent road map. What we need Thio like there's obviously, you know, the basics of what a podcast platform needs to needs to do. But some of it is based on customer feedback, like we have, you know, customer chat, and we get a lot of feedback from customers saying, Hey, it's great if you did this. Or what about this? Some of it is just following the industry and seeing what's needed way.

Don't generally wanna listen to customers too much. I think it's easy to sort of hear something from a couple of customers and think it's a trend and to sort of jump into it without much planning. So we'd have you know, up until up until a few weeks ago, we had we just had this huge backlog of stuff that was a lot of just ideas we had or customer driven ideas that was just like we throw into this bucket that is like the backlog or the whatever you wanna call it, just a bunch of features that we may or may not ever get Thio. Recently, we feel sort of re thought that, um base camp, which used to be 37 signals, had this book come out called Shape Up, which is sort of a detail look into how they run their company and build their products and plan it out. They do things a little bit differently. They have a much bigger team and just two people, but they sort of have this idea that you can have these ideas. But you need thio take the time to shape them and,

like, really kind of fed them. And like, I bet they have this term like betting tables. They bet on these ideas. You're not planning anything. You're betting because it's like you don't know if it's gonna work or not. It's not really resonated with us, so we sort of rethought how we want to want to do things. And we're starting our first cycles like six weeks cycle of building a new feature that we have been shaping for lack of a better term. And that was that was definitely the result of a lot of customer feedback over a number of months of people saying Okay, we would really like to see this or Hey, have you thought about this? But it wasn't. It was a pretty big feature. And it wasn't something that you could just jump in Do start working on.

So we really had to sort of talk about it and, uh, sketch a few things out on paper and on a white board. And I think we have it to a point now where we can start working on it. But there's still a lot of, like, refinement. It's gonna happen while we're building it. It's not like we know exactly where building. It's like we still we know what the end goal we want to be, but we don't actually know exactly how we're gonna build it. It sounds like

the vetting process is a fair amount of hypothesizing of what you think the markets saying combined with what you guys see as the product makers, the market makers, so to speak. And, you know, maybe even running that against Cem Cem data are some more research overtime and letting it sort of vault allies in both your minds. That right?

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. I mean, I think at the end of this six weeks will have something that we're going to release, and we're still not gonna know it was Still won't know if it's gonna work and it might not be totally done, but it will be like we will probably cut certain things from this feature as we build it, but it'll get to a point where it's like, Well, this is This is like most of what we wanted. This is good enough to release into the world way have these certain people who will be able to use this even though it's 80% of what maybe other people wanted. And then you sort of Gatorade on that and you have another, you know, maybe the next weeks, six weeks, you work on something different. After that, you come back to this other feature and sort of add to it or find it after you've sort of done the planning and the shaping of the vetting off what you're

gonna add to it, You're going through the vetting process. E, get that part. But but set the vetting aside. What? What you're describing. Could it be a ready fire aim sort of scenario where you're gonna build it, put it out there and then refine it over time. Where is it? Not quite that extreme.

Uh, yeah, Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, I think at the end of the six weeks, like one that one of the things that base camp talks about is that you can still like you can still kill it. You could kill this whole feature within any time in six weeks, right? If you're not gonna make the deadline of six weeks, you basically have to shelve it. So it just means that, like, whatever you planned is too big for a six week sprint reiteration or whatever you wanna call it. So you know, our goal is t end this thing and the six week generation with something. We'll get something out.

We'll get feedback from people who are using it on dhe. We liberate on it, and we'll, you know, we'll we'll take all this feedback in and sort of absorb it. Think about it on dhe, talk about it and shape it again into something into a bunch of changes that way may make or we may not make like, it's kind of up to us to decide,

right? So that the US part this is interesting. So you're uniquely positioned having built something like transistor before from, ah, development standpoint. And you've been in this business for a while, and right now it's just you and Justin. So do you foresee bringing on more team members in the future? You guys just gonna try to sprint and make this happen on your own?

Uh, yeah, I think we D'oh, we I think we have to be cautious about it. We would like to you we've had we've had some discussions about it so earlier in the process. I would say this is past spring. Um, we really looked into the idea of getting investment money, but we're sort of were, like, really on the fence about it like we had. He'll contact us. We talked to a few a few places and I think neither of us really wanted to take money if we didn't have to write like I was so working a full time job. Justin Justin has his own thing going on the side. He has some other other projects. He runs that bringing money. It's like neither of us didn't necessarily needed the money toe live and we're I think we're pretty close to taking money.

But way ultimately said no. And I think it was a good decision to not give up part of the company. But we also really at that time didn't know what we do with the money. We weren't ready to hire. Anybody really want to spend money and marketing. But I think now we're getting the point now where we're both working on this full time. We're both. This is our primary source of income. I don't think we're ready to hire another full time person, but we have definitely talked about hiring somebody in customer support. I think that probably our first hire just kind of take some of that load off off us because we're doing, you know, we're doing everything, Really. It's like we're doing the coating, the design,

the business aspect, customer support, the marketing e. I think right now it's really beneficial to us to be really close to the customers and close to the customer support just to kind of get an idea of what people are having problems with. But there will be a point where It becomes a little bit too much for us to handle on a day to day basis, and I think that would be that would be our first Tiger, you know, which is It's scary, like I ever really I haven't been in a position. I think Nelson has either, like hiring someone else that you're now managing under your company. It's another. It's another like level and layer of stress. On top of all the things we're trying to do, you want to hire someone to alleviate the stress of customer support. But now you're managing that person,

which is a different type of stress. You sort of have to like, really, really way that. But yeah, there. Well, there will be a point. I mean, it'll be great to hire another engineer, too. Tell

me about a mistake that you made in building transistor and how you and Justin responded to it. Or you, if it was

pre Justin, there haven't been any massive catastrophic mistakes. But I would say, like we we made the decision, or I guess I did for the technology part of it to use to use a Web server that wasn't really like fully a production ready yet it was. So we do we do a lot with, like we host your own host a website for you through transistor, and you can point your own domain to transistor and use your custom to make. But we also wanted to provide free SSL certificates to people via Let's Encrypt and you can automate that stuff to some extent using, you know, like really production ready Web servers like Engine X and Apache. But it's kind of a pain like I don't really want to do a lot of like Dev ups and, like server work like I just like I have to because I'm the one running it. But so we have using the cervical Caddy C a D D y, which is has has since reached one point out there working on aversion to right now, but it basically handles automatic SSL certificate generation in renewal. You let's encrypt like every 90 days they knew and it was easy enough to get set up.

But there was one like Sunday or something like that, where it's all kind of crashed down and all, like our certificates. It's expired, but we didn't know so So like, our website didn't work Our dash. We're gonna work All the r s s feed stopped working, and it was like I was busy and Justin obviously couldn't fix it because he wasn't He wasn't in the weeds and that stuff. So, like that I'm like, racing to fix this stuff. I'm like, I don't know, Like what? I don't know what's wrong and like I owe, like,

emailing their support. But it's their small team, too. So, you know, it was maybe a little bit of the stake to depend on it that early. But I think a lot of good came of that. Like we learned a lot. Obviously we learned put up, you know, we set up some monitoring for SSL certificates. We ended up really getting ahold of the people that built Caddy and actually building a good relationship with them like that. The guy who wrote it emailed me directly. It was explaining exactly what went wrong and like how they're fixing like all their future plans for the next version. All this stuff, it was like actually really cool,

like, really kind of a good experience, and none of our customers a really mad. I mean, they were They were understanding. But I think Justin, I have more for like, just felt bad, like it's obviously on our shoulders to make sure this stuff is running all the time. But, you know, we've been through. We also record a podcast called Bill Your sass, which kind of we're tryingto talk about our journey from starting company through, building it and all the steaks and stuff we make. So we've been pretty open about it and try to really kind of talk about any huge mistakes or problems we have.

No, I definitely definitely doing a good job there. Thanks. But my question is, what does the future look like for the product from the tech side? Right now where you sit today, I know you're about to start in a six week cycle, that egg cycle that even beyond. Now what does it look like?

Well, I mean, I think it's a It's a good mix of building new features like improving accuracy and performance accuracy of, you know, things like analytics. If he's listening to your to your show and all that stuff is like from a technology standpoint, like podcasting is. It's still based on our SS. So it's it's still, I has its say, like antiquated Vatel. But like it's still it's built on, like ancient technology by modern standards on the technology side of things, sort of keeping our ear to the ground as to what's what's coming up with broadcasting that there. I think there's There are some things that might change in the nearest future with how broadcasting works like I don't know if we're ever gonna leave our assess entirely bleak. I think something's going to be built on top of our assess now, but really,

for us as a platform, I mean, as we grow and have more shows and have more downloads like it's, it's kind of a traffic. I mean, the biggest bottleneck is traffic and van with, So we just have to keep keep aware of what's going on with the shows. We have many talents. We have Hominy Hominy requests were getting do all of our different applications, making sure those are running efficiently, and I guess with rails and the way I've built things in the past, if you don't really build these things with scaling and my necessarily like it's a good problem to have problems with scale. I mean, you want to kind of be ahead of it.

What is coming for podcasting then? And how does that affect how you build your tech

podcasting? It still, at this point, is based on advertising, right like it's primarily Revenue is is driven by advertising. And in order to accurately sell ads you have seen even knowing how many people are listening, who's listening. That data is that data is still pretty ambiguous. To a certain extent. You don't really have that much information our people on who's listening. So there are. There's a number of projects, I think, some open source, some doubt that are being built around analytics, kind of capturing veteran analytics. And then there's also this idea of building like authentication and authorization layers.

On top of our assess, four things like listener supported podcast feeds and stuff like that. So I think it'll still be it'll still be our excess. But I think there's there's a handful of projects that really want to sort of, like build a layer on top of it to be all that you know, give access to two on RCs feed for people who have paid for it so they can pay the creators directly set of depending on ads. Hard to tell if any of that's gonna work out, like people have come to expect things to be free, you know, for better or worse, like podcasts are free. For the most part, we have some walled gardens right now, like Spotify has been doing some of their own content, which I think is market's unless you pay for Spotify. So that's sort of the future of it, I think is a lot of it is when I hate to say it because this is a code podcast, but like a lot of it is just like it's not necessarily code in this In this business, it's like you're sort of still predicting, like how how the podcast market is gonna go in which direction is gonna go in,

build something that's solid, that is flexible, that can react to the shifts. The market changes

exactly, So it's I mean, it's it's an exciting market to be in. It still is like it's it's It's a huge market so growing it's still it's still exciting, like there were still at a stage where, like, we can sort of define what's gonna be and not let some monolithic company take it over. Say, we're you know, we're just happy. D'oh! Happy to be a part of it and kind of wanna help, help push that platform forward. So

with transistor, you know, and with the increased in popularity of podcasts, right now comes the increase of podcasting tools. Right. So with transistor, how are you guys setting yourselves apart from the other hosting tools that are out there?

We have We've got actually a hard time to find until I think recently, like a lot of people have asked us that and you wanna you wanna have a good answer for it. But sometimes the answer is, Well, we're basically doing everything the other companies doing. But the more we thought about it, like our secret weapon really has been our customer support. Justin's on a really good job with this, you know, I can hop in when I can with some technical technical help with the customer support side of things. But, you know, Justin will really take the time out of his day to hop on a Skype call with a customer for our like walk them through and you know, sometimes it record it and send it to them or, like send it to me to watch. I think that has been kind of our secret weapon is just like, really being responsive with the customer support and really helpful.

And ah, lot of people are getting into podcasting who have listen to podcasts but are not necessarily like tech savvy like they know they want to start one. But it's still it's not necessarily a straightforward process. Like, you know, a lot of people don't you don't know what our assess feet is like, why you need tohave one or or that you're not necessarily uploading audio directly to apple like like people are like, How do I upload my audio apple? Well, I mean, you don't like white. Why would anyone think you you're not so you know, a lot of is just really explaining. Try Thio, trying to explain and just help people sort of navigate something that's that's really new and on from later

them You, you guys for C building more into the technology around the education of the process and maybe even were integrated

support. Yeah, yeah, we We have definite thought about it, and there's still a lot with a lot with the on boarding process. I guess you'd call it of, you know, you want to sign up. You want to start a podcast. After that, you really don't know what to do. I mean, even even up to and after, like adding your first episode, it's like, What do you do now? Way allow people to import.

There are sets. Feeds from other service is in the transistor. Like once you've imported your podcast. Like what? Now what do you do? Oh, and we have, You know, we have some help documents. We have some instructions. It's not really It's not really, like in their face, necessarily. So there's certainly quite a bit that could be done around that.

If you could go back to the beginning, what would you do differently

personally, like I may have? I left my full time job earlier. It was it was getting tough to work on two things at once. Transistor was mainly after hours and weekends on dhe. You know, I I loved working cuttings. Humanity loved the people there but, like, probably could have done with leaving a bit earlier.

Did that cause any strain? And you in Justin's relationship or in the delivery

of the product or anything like that? No, not not really. I mean, it wasn't internally. It was causing some conflict. There's obviously big, you know, big plans, things I want to do. And just like I don't wantto don't become unhealthy. And yeah, I don't I don't wanna work 24 hours a day for 18 hours a day or whatever. I still obviously value. And I value my health and stuff like that. So it was just there was more becoming an internal conflict about what I really wanted and how I kind of wanted to live my life. And Justin was.

Justin was supportive of it. He was, you know, I think he wanted me to You want me to leave? He was. But he's like, you know, leaving already. And it all worked out well in the end, but probably could have done with kind of work moving to a full time a little bit earlier. But it za scary thought like you're leaving a team that you know and like you're basically taking a huge pay cut. And in the US, anyway, like Justin's Canada been us anyway. Now you for the wake, worry about health insurance,

which is kind of a dumb thing, but it's It's such a huge thing that most people worry about when they want to leave their job or start their own. Start their own thing. Yeah, it took a while. It took a while to finally make the decision.

But what advice would you give someone just getting started out on something like building something like transistor or their own project?

Don't don't get discouraged. It's exciting to build something. I don't get discouraged if it doesn't take off right away. You know, make sure like if you're on the technology side of things, make sure you also take the time to build relationships outside of of Alec in the real world, with other people who are building things who are who are in different, different roles, I think one of the best things I ever did Waas as a developer go to design conferences. I was always really interested in in design. It wasn't necessarily it wasn't my degree. It wasn't like my main focus because Web elements interesting because it's Yeah, it was coding and its design. So you think can't really have one without the other. As a developer, you're always gonna be You're gonna be, like,

exposed to this stuff to design. And I'm like, I was interested in, like, why people were designing things the way they were. And the more I get into it, the more you learned code on your own. You can learn it from the Web. You can learn it on a course online. It's great to connect with other developers at conferences and stuff like that, but I don't know, I really like. I went to a number of design conferences and just really enjoyed talking and meeting with people who were just in a completely different skill set and kind of learning about about their process and sort of the differences, but also also the similarities. And I would say like as as a developer, like,

I was one of the only developers at a design conference, it's not a bad spot to be like designers. They wanna work with developers and developers should probably wanna work designers, and that's That's where you're gonna meet some of your you know, future business partners like I met Justin at a conference that was not at all about programming was about Internet culture and stuff like that. So try to try to branch out. I would say, uh, don't pigeonhole yourself into one industry like it's a big world and there's a lot of overlap.

Well, John, I really appreciate your time on the code story podcast today. Thank you for being on the show. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thank you. And this concludes another chapter of Coats. Story code story is a production of Touch Tap Loc, and it's hosted and produced by Noel Apart. Co produced and edited by George Machar Co. Special Things to Deanna Chapman and Stephanie Campisi For their promotional support. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Breaker or the podcasting app of your choice. Make sure to check us out at code story dot or follow us on Facebook, instagram,