Kate: Hello everyone. Welcome to PodRocket. I'm Kate, the producer of PodRocket, and with me, Jason Lengstorf. Hello Jason, how are you doing? Jason Lengstorf: Hey, thanks for having me. Kate: Thanks for coming on. Why don't you tell the audience a little about yourself and what you're currently working on? Jason Lengstorf: Sure. So I am the VP of Developer Experience at Netlify, I'm also the host of Learn with Jason, which is a livestream show where I pair program with people in the community to learn something new in 90 minutes, a couple times a week. I have been doing this for a long time prior to being in the educational roles that I'm in now. I worked as a frontend dev. I ran a frontend agency for a long time, moved into contract work, ended up over at IBM where I did a lot of frontend architecture work and then I realized that I really liked teaching people how to do stuff and socializing concepts and trying to help people make better architecture decisions, which is how I ended up at Netlify. Kate: Very cool. Awesome. Yeah we've had Cassidy Williams on, we've had Ben Hong on. I've worked with Kenny and he- Jason Lengstorf: Oh nice. Kate: ... hasn't been on the podcast, but he wrote for us back in the day and it's only a matter of time before he's on here. Jason Lengstorf: Absolutely. Kate: Very familiar with the Netlify team. Yeah. So I guess to start, can you maybe talk a little bit how your role is different as a VP of Developer Experience from an individual contributor, what that progression is and what are the differences there? Jason Lengstorf: So I think the thing that I've noticed is that, the transition into any management role or leadership role is that you largely end up doing context sharing work. So what I was doing as an individual contributor is I would write a lot of the content, build a lot of the demos, do workshops and things like that. As I've moved into this VP role, I can do very little of that. So, I'm now on probably 10% of the number of events that I was doing, podcast things like that. I am speaking at three events total in 2022. Most of what I do now instead is I'm trying to clear a path for the people on my team to go and do that work. Jason Lengstorf: So I'm making introductions to get people writing content. I'm suggesting people as speakers and trying to work on strategy and scope and the more admin long term vision stuff, so that we can have a bunch of targets to shoot for, and then set the team loose to go and try to hit those targets. So it's much more about gathering and sharing context than it is about doing the actual work, it's an odd adjustment to make I think, especially if you're used to being an IC, when you make the role change into management, it can feel like you're always trying to do real work, which it feels odd. Jason Lengstorf: To be in that situation where, well I used to build things and now I have meetings. And what I'm realizing is that my job is to have meetings so that the ICs don't have to. I can go gather the context. I can go gather the requirements. I can make sure that things are written down in a way that people can look at asynchronously and not have to have meetings to understand so that they can go and do work and be confident that the work they're doing is the right work. I'm still adjusting to that because it is hard for me to not actually do the thing, to just plan it and then be like, "Okay, you got I'll see you later." That part feels a little bit strange. Jason Lengstorf: But it's very rewarding, but also a very different role from what I was doing before. Kate: Sure. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So Netlify, I think... We actually just had Chantastic on the podcast. Jason Lengstorf: Oh, nice. Kate: We were talking about corporate communities and we were saying how Netlify seems to be one of the few that is doing it really well, and it's a community that doesn't necessarily feel a corporate community and I don't mean to put that title on you if that's what you want to avoid but, I guess I'm curious, how do you make it feel organic still and how do you plan a strategy around a community? Jason Lengstorf: Well, I think there are few things in there. So the first thing is, get the right team. The core of a good community is people that you want to spend time with and people that you are interested in getting to know. So, if you surround yourself with great people who are just fun to hang out with and who are doing interesting things and building stuff that you find exciting, that like attracts like. If you've ever seen Charlie Gerard and the projects that she builds you're not coming over because you're like, "Oh, I like Netlify so let's see what Charlie's doing." You're like, "What is Charlie going to come up with next? She's out there building something she's controlling computers with her mind, she's doing motion controls for street fighter." Jason Lengstorf: It is off the wall how just inventive she is. And when you see Cassidy or Phil or Tara out there being really funny and inventive and just making this goofy stuff that makes them laugh, and they're trying to make other people laugh. And it just the whole team Kenny and Ben, and they're all amazing, amazing creators. And they all do great work. So that's at the core of it. Each of them is somebody that independent of where they work or what they work on, you're just interested in seeing what they're going to do next. I think that forms a great community because you see that in creative communities all the time, that's at the core of Dribble, it's at the core of GitHub. Jason Lengstorf: It's people sharing their work and being excited together about things that they can create. So, at the root of it all there's that. Then I think beyond that is you can't strategize around a community in terms of saying, we are going to get the community to do this. I think the strategy is, how do we make the community healthy? Because, what makes the Netlify community healthy is that it's not the Netlify community. It's a broader ... this is a group of people who are building for the web, some of them use Netlify to do so. It's largely more ... we are trying to give people more tools to build better stuff, and trying not to be possessive about it. Jason Lengstorf: I think if we were out there saying, "Well you can't talk about AWS, you can't talk about Vercel." Our community would close down in a hurry if we were sliding into somebody's DMs and being like, "Oh, you're promoting our competitors. That makes us really uncomfortable." People would stop working with us, that's a really uncomfortable way to be to get that weird backend shade, just because you're trying another tool. So instead we encourage you go out, try everything, try all the stuff that's out there. Just build cool stuff, and our hope is that we're building the tools that make that the most enjoyable and effective and performant experience so that you will use us at least some of the time. Jason Lengstorf: I think that that's a key thing is recognizing this isn't a zero sum game. It's not like if one company succeeds then Netlify fails, multiple companies can succeed in a space. And that's a good thing. That means that you've got a healthy ecosystem. If there's only one player in the space, that one player now holds all of the marbles, and if they stop working on the tool, if they pivot and change what they're building, the whole community's done, and we've seen that happen where a tool shuts down and it's just over. I feel like that's not a fun place to be, it's not a thing you want to see happen. Jason Lengstorf: I think Tumblr is a good example of where at one point there was this huge community completely centered around Tumblr, and when it closed down, it was like, cool. So where do all these people go? They built all these bonds and they had to scramble to find ways to build that community in another way. So I'm a big fan of resilient communities and resilience means letting the community be a community and supporting not trying to control it or divert its attention or force it to be a certain way. You just want to let people be excited about things and give them more things that will help them build more things to be excited about. Kate: Totally. Yeah. In developer experience, how important is building a personal brand outside of ... So I Learn with Jason for example, how important is it to have other stuff you're working on and another brand inside of the Netlify team or whatever company? Jason Lengstorf: So, I'm going to caveat everything that's about to come out of my mouth with, this is how it worked for me and the people I know. So this is going to be just covered with survivorship bias, right? So, that being said, what I have noticed is that you can get into DevRel and be really good at it and run a developer experience role with no online presence. You don't even need a Twitter account. You can be extremely effective as a creator behind the scenes and just be somebody who is so good at empowering the community that no one even needs to know you exist. You just are this powerhouse. Jason Lengstorf: Having a personal brand, certainly makes it easier to get a job. It is so much easier to get the intro to get the interview if you're coming with this personal brand that is basically a walking resume. If you look at my Twitter account, you can see the work that I've been doing in public and you can see the impact that I've had. If you like the stuff that I do and it seems a good match, then hey, I'm a pretty good fit for your company, right? There's no reason to believe that I would materially change who I am if I join another company. So, that makes it much easier ... I'm interviewing in public all the time. Jason Lengstorf: There is an incentive to that. I think the other thing too is that, especially in DevRel and dev experience, what we're looking for is somebody who is consistent. I have found that the people who make the biggest impacts, aren't the people who disappear for five years and then have a huge launch and then disappear for five years again, that's great in music. It's one of the things that makes art fun is that somebody will drop off the map and then they resurface with something really exciting. That can be exciting in tech but, I don't know. I find that what I really love are the consistent creators, who's going to do a little bit every day and just always incrementally move the community forward and be thinking about how can I make this all 1% better today? Jason Lengstorf: I think that with a public image, that is one way to do that. You can be a constant presence in the community that is always trying to make it a little bit better, and that is one way of being consistent. You can also be a regular blogger. You can make reg regular video streams, either live or recorded, publish something prerecorded to YouTube. Brian Douglas is killer at that. He makes really funny videos. He's very consistent with it. So you see those go up all the time. You've got people like Salma Alam-Naylor at Contentful is doing amazing work of streaming how to build things. Jason Lengstorf: She's super consistent with that. So when you see these creators, no matter what their medium is, whether they've got a huge Twitter following or not, they have found a place where they can be consistently helpful and beneficial to the community. So, to me that's a strong signal to me that this is the right person to bring into a DevRel org is this is somebody who's doing it because it's important to them and they're good at being consistent, they're even keel about it. They don't go with high energy for a while and then disappear for a few months and then come back with high energy again. Jason Lengstorf: We want somebody who's always just doing that gentle push, doing it in public is part of the job. So, it's a public resume to build the side thing. But, I think it's very, very, very important to emphasize that you do not need to be Twitter famous to be a DevRel. It is absolutely not a requirement. And even if you are very good at your job, you don't need to become Twitter famous. You don't need to have side projects. You don't need to do any side gigs or side hustles. That's not a requirement for being successful in this role. A lot of times it can be a distraction because one of the things that's hardest in DevRel, if you start taking the side gigs is not burning out. Jason Lengstorf: Everybody wants you on this podcast, that event, this place wants you to write an article. Well, it's always you get a lot of asks for your time and it's really, really fun to do all ... I love being on podcast, but if I was on a podcast every day in addition to doing my job, you can bet I would burn out. So there's a lot of ... having that public persona is good but the flip side is that it will burn you out if you're not careful. And that's also not a good thing. As someone who has burned out and burned down my whole career and ran away for a couple years to not do anything strenuous, that's not a path that I wish on anybody. Jason Lengstorf: You want to be in a position to sustainably continue to advance, and every thing that you're trying to do simultaneously is another burden. Whether it's a burden you enjoy or not is immaterial. It's a thing that you have agreed to do. So that can get really challenging and it can be a cause of burnout. So, that's a very whiny answer to that question. Kate: No, that's right. Yeah. There was a couple ... so first you mentioned putting something out there, being consistent. Your recent blog post, I was just reading it before this episode, you talk about how ... when you see a really awesome piece of content and you're like, "Oh man, I'm worried mine isn't cool enough to put out." But, in your blog post you talk about this awesome piece of content didn't just pop out of nowhere. It's a result of a lot of iterations and being consistent, putting stuff out there, trying things that I am so familiar with that feeling, being on the content team at LogRocket. Kate: So I think it's a really good piece of advice. I think you even mentioned when you're doing live streams, how little things like setting up your camera so that your notes are eye level, so it doesn't look you're looking away. Little things like that, where you maybe don't think about that when you're planning all this stuff and you can only learn it when you do it, PodRocket, we were five episodes a month and now we're at 10. The bandwidth that we had was barely five. I'm going to say we maybe even just did four in the first month, to now being able to ... all of our learnings were able to now double our production. Jason Lengstorf: Right. Kate: But yeah. My point was, tell me more about your experience with content and iterating and that sort of stuff? Jason Lengstorf: Yeah. So, one of the best pieces of advice that I got had nothing to do with tech, and it was a friend of mine who has this pattern of going all in on something and then feeling like it's not working and then burning the whole house down and starting over. So been this constant process of, "Okay, I'm going to do this and it's going to be different this time. It's going to be perfect and nothing is going to go wrong." He's been a friend of mine since ... oh, I don't know we were 10 years old or so, so we've been through a lot together and he has spent the last five years or so trying to address this tendency he has to anything that feels frustrating, he has to fight this urge to start over. Jason Lengstorf: What he's been doing is actually studying a lot of mindfulness and meditation. And that's never really been a thing for me. I'm not a big meditator. I don't have anything against it. It's just not something that has been ... I've tried it and I don't know, it didn't feel right. But, what he's been finding is a lot of stuff about just experiencing feelings versus letting feelings control you, and one of these feelings is like this perfectionism. This feeling that it's not good enough and therefore cannot exist. He brought this idea to me that life is not a project. Jason Lengstorf: None of these things are projects. They're all processes and everything is born out of continual effort. So that means that you can't expect that ... if I'm going to go try to juggle or walk a tight rope, I'm not going to get it right the first time, I'm going to drop the balls, I'm going to have to pick them up again and try again, have somebody who's better at it, show me what I'm doing wrong and teach me techniques. That's equally true with any knowledge work. If you're trying to write good content, you're not just going to write a perfect article the first time you try. Jason Lengstorf: You're not going to write the perfect tutorial the first time you put pen to paper, you're going to make mistakes. You're going to leave things out. You're going to skip context, you're going to completely forget a step. You're going to do something that people are going to be like, "Well, this isn't the best tutorial I've ever read." But, it's better than no tutorial. The next tutorial you write, you're going to have that piece of feedback. Like, "Oh, I'm not going to forget that step this time. Oh, I'm going to remember to include this context." Jason Lengstorf: Each of those reps, each of those things is an iteration of the process. It always feels like it's a gain of a millimeter, a gain of an inch. But, it takes a long time to build that skillset. So, gaining those inches is really important and being consistent and embracing the fact that you're going to get a little bit better each time you do it, is how you become somebody that everybody looks at and says, "I can't believe they can do that." People might look at my stream and think, "Wow, it's so well produced. It's so polished. It does all this stuff." That's because I've done 250 of them. Jason Lengstorf: I've made 250 episodes of Learn with Jason and the first one was me in a Zoom call and a quick time screen recording. That was the whole episode. So as I went, I was like, "Oh, this could be better. That could be better. What if I did sound effects? What if I use this tool?" And it's slowly evolved into this thing that it is now, and I have a whole bunch of things that I want to make better and give me another 250 episodes and maybe we'll get there. Kate: Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's so true. Yeah. I saw 250 which is crazy. So this is probably like the 75th episode of PodRocket, but we've learned so much just from ... I told this on a previous podcast, I just Googled like how to record audio remotely. That's where we started, which is how to record stuff. I think content in general is a living, breathing thing. There is that desire to just delete stuff that's old, but you do have to go back and say, how can we improve this? I totally get the urge to if like it's not totally perfect. So let's just restart this whole thing. But yeah, you can't eliminate those learnings for sure. Jason Lengstorf: I think that's a big urge for people is always well now knowing what I know, I'll get it right this time. Kate: Right. Jason Lengstorf: This is everything. We're doing this right now with the ... We got a house and there are things we don't about it. So we're like, "Well, should we move? The next house would be better." Right. We can make it better the next time. It's like, no, everything is always going to be less than perfect. And that's going to be where you live, who your friends are, what choices you make with your professional or personal life, everything is going to have its ups and downs and it's good sides and it's bad sides. I think it's easy to be optimistic and the whole grass is greener thing where you say, "Well, if I make a different choice, all of the downsides of this choice go away and there will be no more new downsides." That's not just how this is going to work. Kate: Totally. Another thing you mentioned was, in developer experience, it's easy to burn out and it's easy to work on a lot of things. Then it's from there it's easy to burn out. I was watching a talk of yours I think from ... It was 2018 about work life balance and how you were working 70 hour, 80 hour weeks. I'm curious, your thoughts, how they've shifted from ... with COVID, where there was a solid year and a half where all of us and companies, people had to really address not burning out because all we could do was work. I'm curious your thoughts there. Jason Lengstorf: Yeah. So the big thing that I ran into is that for a long time, I would equate my level of busyness with my worth as a person. I felt like having lots of side projects, having lots of clients being overloaded was a sign that I was valuable. That made it really, really easy for me to say yes to everything. Because when somebody would say, "Hey, do you want to do this? I would say, "My value's going to go up. I'm going to say yes." What I learned, I got some really good advice from a friend of mine, Dr. John Berardi he had started a company and he was in the same general boat, totally different industry. Jason Lengstorf: But, he was getting asked, "Hey, can you write the forward for my book? Can you speak as a keynote at this event? Can you fly over here to be on this board?" Whatever. And he said, "What I've realized as I've grown in my career is that my value is not increased by doing more things, my value is increased by doing more important things with more intention." So at the beginning of his career, he could get to do more important things by saying yes to everything. That's how you gain a network. That's how you get your foot in the door. That's how you gain the experience that allows you to determine I want to do this work, but not that work. Jason Lengstorf: So earlier in your career, you say yes to everything. Then as you start to advance, you hit another stage in your career where now, there's a point where things that you're getting asked to do don't actually help you, they get in the way of things that you want to do. So you have to intentionally say no to some things, because you want to be able to do the things that do help you, that do provide value. Then, as you really start to establish this is what's important to me, this is ... call it your life's work, call it your mission, call it your core of focus, whatever, you have a lot of big work that you're trying to do, that is the thing that you're focused on. Jason Lengstorf: That means now you have say no to most things, because a sufficiently advanced or ambitious goal, is going to take 40 hours a week. And that means that you can't go speak at this event. You can't take on a side project that's really fun and really exciting. You have to start choosing what you're optimizing for and is your goal to do more things but less of each of those things, or is your goal to do one thing that's really big and impactful? And what you're optimizing for is absolutely a personal choice. But I think we have to acknowledge that as we advance in our career and grow our networks and build our resumes, we're going to have access to do more things than we have hours in the day to actually accomplish. Jason Lengstorf: So it's really important to actually take inventory of the stuff that we are doing and make sure that what do I actually want to accomplish? This is an exercise that I don't think people do. Sit down and write out ... Sarah [inaudible 00:26:26] has an exercise that I love where she makes a matrix. And she says, "What are my core values?" So she picks four things that are the big thing she's trying to accomplish. Then she takes everything that she's working on and she's just like, "Does the thing that I'm doing hit any of these?" Jason Lengstorf: Does it fall into any of these quadrants? And it should ideally fall into more than one of them, right? You should see each project in two or three spaces if not all four. If it doesn't fall in any of the quadrants, why are you doing it? What value does it bring, and a lot of times the value is, "Well, I committed to it and I don't want to let somebody down." And it's you don't want to do it. You don't enjoy doing but you told somebody you would, so you're going to follow through. One way that she described burnout that I really like is burnout is not working too many hours, burnout is spending too much of your energy on things that don't align with your core goals. Jason Lengstorf: So if you work on things that are out of alignment with what you're actually trying to accomplish, that's a grind. And it starts to feel like you're having all your energy sapped away. So as you find yourself in a position in your career where you have more opportunities than you have hours in the day, start doing this exercise of really thinking through what am I trying to accomplish? What have I actually committed to? Where does my time go in the day? And write down everything. I wrote emails, I got on this phone call. I did this thing. Write all that stuff down and look at it and say, "Okay, what purpose was each of these things in service of?" Jason Lengstorf: Because if I'm writing an email to move forward my big project, great. If I'm writing an email because somebody that I don't know has asked me for advice without Googling for any of my articles to see if I've to answer that question somewhere, I'm not helping anything. I'm basically saving somebody from having to Google something at the expense of a lot of time. So it's starting to be really pragmatic and a little bit cold hearted about which is hard to do because we love building community, we want to help everybody, we want to make everything better. But saying no is the thing that lets you actually make a big impact as opposed to making a little bit of impact in a lot of places until you burn out and then disappear. Kate: Yeah. That makes sense. So along those lines, how much time do you dedicate with Learn with Jason versus your day job I guess? How do you have enough time in the day? Jason Lengstorf: So I was very fortunate that I ... Learn with Jason is something that I designed to be valuable to companies. As a result, I was able to build it into my employment. So I have Learn with Jason as part of what I do for my job. That's really the only way I'm able to keep doing it. Because if I had to do it on the side it would be done. So, I negotiated that in as part of my previous role when I was an individual contributor. Then when we talked about moving me to the VP role, it was, this was a big point of discussion is like, "Hey, I'm not ready to let this go, so how do we work this into the role?" Jason Lengstorf: Fortunately Netlify is very aware of the importance of community, and they're aware that the work that I'm doing on Learn with Jason feeds that, so it wasn't really a negotiation. It was like, "Okay, cool. Let's make it work." Again that's one of the reasons I work here is, Netlify's focus is like that. It's not like, "Well, what do you do for us? What do you do for us specifically? How are you putting dollars in our pocket?" It's very much like how do we make this community stronger? Because the rising tide lifts all ships. I would say the average week I work 40 hours. I'm pretty intentional about not exceeding 40 hours. Jason Lengstorf: I think we occasionally have a big launch coming up or something goes wrong that I wasn't expecting. And maybe I'll get up toward 45, but then I'll like to take the next Friday off because I want it to balance out, right? Having burned out, I am very intentional with ... My team takes a lot of time off. The people on my team have taken around four weeks of vacation this year and that's very encouraged. We have minimums ... we will measure our managers on whether or not their direct reports are taking their PTO, because we know if you are overworking, if you're consistently putting 60 hours a week in, you're not going to do that for very long. Jason Lengstorf: You might give us six great productive months and then you're going to get burned out and then you're going to be still working 60 hours but your productivity's going to go down, and then you're going to be frustrated by that. So you're going to try to put in more hours and burn out faster and then you're going to quit and it's all going to feel terrible for everybody. So it's easier for us. It's better for the people working at Netlify. It's better for us as the leadership at Netlify to ... Even if somebody's really excited and they want to work all the way through the weekend they'd be like, "Hey, go outside. This will be here on Monday. We want you to be here for a long time. So don't let this be something that eats your whole life. You want to be a whole person outside of this company." Jason Lengstorf: When we get that right, we have people who stay with us for a long time. And when we get it wrong, we've seen people burn out and, my hope is that we lead by example at the leadership level and really help put the right incentives in place for managers so that it becomes a cultural thing where you should be working a normal amount of time. I think there's even an argument to be made that 40 hours is maybe too many in a given week. There's some research that shows that it maybe should be less. So I don't think anybody should go over 40, personally. I'm pretty in favor of hard capping that. Kate: Yeah. That's awesome. So along those lines, right now it seems everyone's hiring engineers, do you have advice for building an engineering team, hiring engineers, growing an engineering team? I guess, except outside of capping at 40 hours, is there other thoughts you have there? Jason Lengstorf: Yeah, I think as you're trying to build out an engineering team, the trick that I'm seeing is that a lot of companies are struggling to recruit and retain engineers. I think that there are a couple things that go particularly poorly. One of them is that once somebody's hired, it can be easy to just assume that they're going to stay. We have seen over and over again 18 months, two years, people are going to start looking again. People hit two years, they get 50% vested in their options they're like, what are you going to do to keep me here? And a lot of times the company says, "Well, nothing, you got a job." Jason Lengstorf: And they go, "Okay, cool. I'm going to go get a different job." So, as companies, I think we need to get better at recognizing that it is significantly cheaper and more beneficial to retain the employees we have by providing the right incentives by giving people really competitive raises, by monitoring what the rest of the industry looks like and making sure that if everybody's getting offered 30% more than they're making right now to go work at another competitor company, "Hey, maybe we need to give everybody a 30% raise." Does that look terrifying on paper? Sure. But how much does it cost to lose those people and then hire their replacements at 30% more because that's what the market says. Jason Lengstorf: Then spend all the time training and getting them onboarded, right? It's more expensive to do that. So, there's some math that I think is easy to ignore because the spreadsheet feels static when you look at a spreadsheet like that, but it's not. People are always saying, "Hey, am I getting treated fairly? Am I getting what I deserve out of this company?" And there's a lot of arguments that maybe we're in a bit of a bubble in terms of really, really high dev salaries and who knows, maybe that's true, but what is true doesn't affect what's going to change the way things happen, and the way things happen right now is that if you don't pay somebody competitively, somebody else absolutely will. Jason Lengstorf: And they will give somebody a giant raise to steal them away from your company. So it's maybe less about what's factually correct more about what's going to happen. I think the other thing too when you're talking about engineers is ... not just engineers but companies in general, we're remote now. Companies are remote, there's a large contingent of companies that are probably never going back to the office, Netlify canceled its lease. It doesn't have an office anymore, and has no intention of getting one we're at the leadership level, we're talking about how do we create little hubs where people can hang out if they want, but there won't be an office. Jason Lengstorf: That's a new landscape because, how do you create a company culture that feels real when you don't ever see your whole company together outside of an annual all-hands and maybe some team meetings and stuff like that? Video meetings don't feel naturally casual. The thing that we're missing from offices, is, you used to go out to lunch with people, you would walk down the hall with them, somebody would be having a barbecue and because you were all working in the same office, you would get invited to that. These are all things that have just completely evaporated in the pandemic times. Jason Lengstorf: Not least of which because people don't go places or at least haven't been going places until very recently. So, how are companies going to create that community? I think one of the ways that I've been saying this recently and I don't know if I'm the first one to say, I imagine I'm not, is work is not a family, work is a community. So you can't say, hey we're a family here, right? Because that's weird. It's emotionally manipulative, it's not how companies work. But work is a community. I am choosing to be a part of this group, and I want this group to be a group that I'm excited to be a part of. That means that you have to build that community and community building takes effort. Jason Lengstorf: It's especially hard to put that effort in when you don't have the incidental stuff like lunches and hallways that causes some of that community building to happen incidentally. So, what are we doing as companies to actually create the foundation of trust and connection that teams need to have? Do we have private team Slack channels where they can make jokes and vent a little bit and not have the whole company weighing in on a decision? Can we create space and meetings that's not scheduled fun time because that's the worst, but can you create a meeting structure where it's okay to banter and waste "10 minutes in the meeting to talk about your weekend and make silly jokes and talk about a movie that you all liked." Jason Lengstorf: And just do the stuff that makes people into a team and not a loose collection of colleagues. So I think these are going to be really, really important. I feel like the formula is simple, right? Pay people fairly, treat them well, make the job a place that gives them energy instead of drains their energy. All of that assumes that you're working on a product that somebody can care about. You should be proud of the thing you're building and if all of those things are true, you're going to keep the people there. But it's really easy to let each of those things slip individually. Jason Lengstorf: So, it's going to be a constant effort and I think it's going to be even more so a constant effort in a post all remote world, because it doesn't happen incidentally anymore you can't rely on teams to just hang out into feeling connected. You have to build that connection. Kate: Right. Yeah. I like that idea of setting time aside, during working hours maybe. Because I know we did a lot of virtual happy hours, the last few years we've done quite a few and it just feels different because it's like, then you have to sign on and then it's like, you lose that train of thought by the end of the day like, "Oh I want to tell someone about this movie I saw." It comes up like when you're talking to people organically. So I that idea. I know I was like, when we were all working fully remote, it was ... I was like word vomit I guess I'm super extroverted. Kate: I would say I'm the most extroverted on my team. So I feel like sometimes it was like, I would just be talking and ... yeah, I just had to go somewhere. So yeah. So what would you like to plug or would you like to point our listeners to anything or a channel or? Jason Lengstorf: Yeah, I spend entirely too much time on Twitter so you can find me on there. I'm at @jlengstorf. I also have a whole bunch of content about learning things for the web at learnwithjason.dev. And if you want to ask me Netlify questions, feel free to hit me up on Twitter. That's easy. I hang out in a discord called the Party Corgi discord. It's at partycorgi.com and that'll give you a link to join. There's a good WebDev community in there that goes beyond just tech. It's a bunch of goofballs being weirdos together. It's very fun. We play video games, we talk about food and crochet and music and whatever else. Jason Lengstorf: So, hang out with me there. Then yeah, just check out this Jamstack community. Go poke around with some of the tools and toys that you can build. There's a ton of stuff on explorers.netlify.com. If you want to see some of the things you can build, lots and lots of links to follow from there to just get deeper in and try this stuff out because it's really exciting, it's a really fun time to be a front end dev and I would be very happy to build some fun stuff with you. Kate: Awesome. Well Jason, thanks so much for coming on. We appreciate it and we'll see you around. Jason Lengstorf: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Brian: Thanks for listening to PodRocket. Find us at PodRocketpod on Twitter, or you could always email me even though that's not a popular option. It's brian@logrocket.