Kate: All right. Hello everyone. I'm Kate, and with me is Leigh Halliday senior- Leigh Halliday: Hey everyone. Kate: ... Senior engineering manager at Wrapbook. Hey, Leigh, how is it going? Leigh Halliday: Good. Kate, how are you? Kate: I'm doing well. Yeah. So this is unusual because, usually I go through like this conversation where I'm like, oh, I know who you are because of Twitter, and I've seen all your stuff, but you and I have actually talked before about YouTube. So it's good to see you again. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. Nice to see you as well. And I've actually written articles for LogRocket too. Kate: That's right. And yes, you have made videos for LogRocket, you've written for LogRocket, so we are old friends. Leigh Halliday: For sure. Kate: So yeah, maybe you just tell our audience a little bit about yourself and what you're working on. Leigh Halliday: Sure. Name is Leigh like Kate just said, but I'm located just outside of Toronto, up north in Canada, where... I'm working remotely. I'm working from my home office, and I'm switching a little bit more into the engineering management side. I've been doing development for close to 20 years now. I would say I did about my first 10 years with PHP and building ops out with that. And then I would say the last 10, I've been focusing on Ruby on Rails for a full stock application, and maybe in the last five, really focusing the front end part of that into React. So I've been developing for a while, but I would say in the last five or six months since I switched to Wrapbook, I've been focusing on engineering management and building out and help manage, right now, two teams of engineers. Kate: Yeah. And you also have an awesome YouTube channel. Leigh Halliday: Thanks. Yeah. There's a funny story behind that. My wife is a lawyer, and she comes from legal background. And when she came to Canada from Columbia, she was trying to figure out, do I go back into law in Canada and become a lawyer in this new country as well? Or do I explore other careers such as software engineering? So she ended up doing a boot camp, and she was learning React, and I thought, Hey, I'm going to make her a little video trying to show how MobX works, the state management tool for React. So I recorded it really for her and just threw it up on YouTube as a way to share the link with her, and then I just forgot about it for months, and then I came back and I... People were subscribing to me, and people were starting to view this video. Leigh Halliday: And I was like, "Oh, shoot." I didn't do this on purpose, but maybe I should make more videos. I just started recording a few more, and then at some point the channel grew to the point where I started to make it a goal to produce one video a week. And that was over two years ago now. So I hit the hundred video plus mark, and yeah, it hasn't really had crazy startup unicorn growth. It's been a consistent growth over the last couple of years. So as long as I keep putting out videos, people seem to keep subscribing, which is awesome. Kate: That's awesome. That's great. Yeah. And you have over 22,000 subscribers, I think I saw this morning. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. It's been growing, I think especially at the start of the pandemic when a lot of people had more time for various reasons, maybe people were working from home more and they weren't doing the commute anymore, or just looking to upgrade their skills to maybe look for a new job. The channel started to grow around that time period, because I think I might've been around 10,000 at that point. It's been growing pretty well over the last year. I don't know where it will get to, but I guess the sky’s the limit. Kate: That's awesome. That's great. So I guess I'm curious, why specifically video wise or specifically YouTube? Because you also have some articles, but it seems you write less frequently and it's more videos. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. One of the reasons aside from the story about creating that first MobX video for my wife, at work, I actually didn't do a lot of front end development. When I started to learn React, I worked at a company called FlipGive, and we had a Ruby on Rails application that was predominantly a server rendered app. So our front end had, at the time it was jQuery and we started to transition pieces of individual pages to React, and over the course of a few years, basically the whole front end was React. But I normally worked on the backend side of that. So I was building out the GraphQL API to help support the front end developers doing their work along with our React native mobile app. Leigh Halliday: So I used a lot of the videos I made as a way to basically teach myself these skills that I wasn't necessarily doing day in day out at work. Because, yeah, I was just more comfortable with the backend working with databases and Ruby on Rails. And I wanted to be able to contribute to the work that the front end team was doing. So I would say that's why I focused more on this, and I just thought it was a nice format. Typically, what I do is, I'll think of something I want to learn, so I don't even necessarily know how to do that thing or maybe I've never even used that tool. And I play around with it a bit to learn the basics of how it works, and then I come up with a quick demo, some goal to work towards, like I'm going to build this demo to build a simple leaderboard for users or something like that. Leigh Halliday: So I build it out once, and then I basically delete the code and immediately afterwards I rerecord myself building the same thing for YouTube, then I just upload it. So it's still fresh in my mind and it allows me to live code, but I'm not having to spend six hours figuring this stuff out, like I can just code it through because it's fresh in my head. I still make mistakes all the time and I just leave them in, because that's part of it. Even though I had just literally built this thing, I still mess up, and name variables wrong and I have to stumble around, but, no, it's fun. Yeah. I like writing as well, but... They both take a lot of time. I would say doing a 20, 30 minute YouTube video probably takes at least four to six hours of work for that, and writing an article can sometimes take that or longer. Leigh Halliday: And most of the time is in the research ahead of time, and coming up with a good demo that I can show off, both for like writing and YouTube. It's all about understanding and then creating something, and once I've done that, the writing and the actual recording is the easy part, because at that point I'm just telling people what I just finished learning myself. Kate: Sure. Leigh Halliday: And that's generally the approach I take for that. Kate: Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. And so actually, as I mentioned, Leigh's done some videos for our YouTube channel, go check them out, but when we posted them, some comments were even like... Since it was on the LogRocket channel, I don't think... There was a couple you didn't have your face on them, so there was always only your voice, and in the comments, people were like, "Oh, Hey, that's Leigh Halliday, what's up? Love your videos, man." Leigh Halliday: That's funny. Kate: You definitely have a good following, and they can even recognize you just from your voice. Leigh Halliday: It's great like, I've seen people following me right from the beginning, and I've seen people message that they've gotten jobs possibly because of some of the concepts they've learned in the YouTube videos I do. So that's really rewarding, to see other people succeed from something that I was basically just doing to teach myself a technology. It's like a win-win. And I think that's a good approach in general for an engineer, share what you learn, and share as you're learning, like you don't have to be the creator of React just to be able to teach React. It can just be, "Hey, I'm learning something." And more often than not you're closer to the person that's learning than the absolute expert of that technology. So you can share the same roadblocks that you ran into that someone else might run into, beaus you literally just solved those problems yourself. Kate: Yeah, totally. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. I think it also helps out your career as an engineer to basically share your knowledge. There's not really, at least in my opinion, there's not a benefit to keeping it internal and just saving it for yourself, and like... Now, the more you share what you know, it actually goes back and helps you at the same time. Kate: Yeah. No doubt. Yeah. We just actually talked to James Quick on the podcast- Leigh Halliday: Yeah. Kate: ... And he was saying, a big part of his workflow is, he'll learn something, then he'll do it himself and then teach it. And he does that with every concept he comes across. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. I'm the exact same way. Yeah. Just share what you're learning and what you know, that's basically all there is to it. It doesn't need to be perfect. Yeah. Kate: So along those lines, I noticed, it seems like you had a very clear like... So we have MobX videos, Serverless videos, React hooks videos, and then it seems like in the last couple of months you've been experimenting with some different technologies, different concepts, I guess kind of... Where are you pulling those topics from? Leigh Halliday: Honestly, I'm just covering topics that interest me. The funny thing is, it doesn't always line up with the videos that are the most popular or that are... Yeah. Sometimes the hardest videos to make, perform the worst. But I've just basically been, if it's interesting to me, I'm going to learn about it and I'm going to record it, and hopefully other people will follow along if they find it interesting too. My best videos do are on maps, like Google Maps, Mapbox, but I can't just keep creating map videos for the rest of my life. So I have to like branch out, and... I'm trying to do more full stack development, because I love when a developer is a full stack developer, because that means they can take an app from initializing it to shaping it, and building out everything in between. Leigh Halliday: And you don't have to necessarily rely on, oh, there's going to be a backend team, that's going to build out my API or vice versa, or I just do the backend, I need somebody else to help me with the front end. It's really cool to have the ability to shaping out from start to finish. So instead of just focusing on React, I've been trying to tie it in more to things you might do on the backend, especially with Next.js, you don't need to learn a separate like Ruby on Rails for your backend. Next.js has the ability with these Serverless API functions to build out the pieces of a backend you need to be able to store a cash and Reddis, to store data in a Postgres database, to create your own GraphQL API that the front end can pull from. So I've been trying to do a little bit more of that intersection between the front end of the backend. Kate: Cool. Yeah. And you have an Next.js course actually, tell us a little about that. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. Basically the same theme I was just talking about where I wanted to produce a course that was more about building and shaping an app. So in this case, what we do is, we... It's basically like, if you're looking to buy a home and you're going to like realtor.com or.ca or whatever, and you're seeing a map of where all the homes are, it's like a really scaled down simple version of that. So it has a map that shows the homes on it. So we build out both the front end and the back end of this app. So on the front end we use React, using TypeScript, Next.js, Apollo for the GraphQL, part of it. Leigh Halliday: And then we also built out a backend, which is the GraphQL API from that perspective. And we use Prisma to connect to our database, which is a Postgres database. And we make sure that users are authenticated and then we deploy it to resell after. So we basically go from nothing to, Hey, here's an entire application where users can log in, upload a house, put that house on the map and have it display those details to users. Some things are simplified because it's hard to do everything in four hours of content or whatever, but it's pretty much what you would need to be able to shape an app yourself, start to finish. Kate: Very cool. Awesome. Do you ever get flagged for accessing all these map? APIs? Leigh Halliday: No, because... So one of the first videos in the course is, we basically go and we set up like actual accounts on those different map APIs. Kate: Okay. Leigh Halliday: So weirdly enough, we actually connect to both Google Maps and Mapbox in this video. Kate: Okay. Leigh Halliday: We do Mapbox for like the actual, visual map itself, but then we use further Google places API. So being able to start typing an address and it gives you all of the different options and... Basically what you're trying to do in that is to get a latitude and longitude that allows you to then place that location on the map. We use them together, but they're all with like legit accounts. But I was trying to find accounts that had free plans, so that as we're building out this full stock app, yes, you need to sign up for five or six different accounts to be able to do mapping, do authentication, deploy it to Vercel, host a database somewhere. I tried to find places that would have a free plan so that it wouldn't cost people extra money just to work on their skills. Kate: Yeah. That makes sense. Leigh Halliday: One of the coolest things is inspired Wes Bos, fellow Canadian up here is, I try to put a purchasing power parody plan out so that the course has one price, but depending where you come from, you can get discounts to hopefully make that price more affordable. Given your location, people have all sorts of different... Yeah. Developers get paid differently all over the world, so I wanted to try to make it as fair as possible for people. So yeah. There's a link on the website, but you can also just message me and I'm more than happy to help make it affordable for you. Kate: That's awesome. Wes Bos is actually coming on, we're going to record with him in two days at the time of this recording. Leigh Halliday: Oh, no way. Kate: Yeah. Leigh Halliday: I've taken many of his courses myself, so I highly recommend anyone, they're super high quality, he's hilarious, he's got a great podcast with Scott Tolinski. So yeah, Wes Bos gets my full approval. Kate: Awesome. Leigh Halliday: Plus he's from about an hour away. Kate: Oh cool. Leigh Halliday: So I better support local people. Kate: Totally. Yeah. Cool. Well, so I guess with video content, I know you have said that you have experimented topic-wise with what is interesting to you. You do also have quite the spread of like time, so you experiment with long form video, short form videos, I guess, is there a rhyme or reason to that as well? Leigh Halliday: No, I don't think there is. I try to keep them on the shorter side, meaning like 10 to 20 minutes sort of thing. A, because they're way easier for me to record, like if I'm going to be live coding 50 minutes of content, that's so stressful for me to keep in my head, like I have... I actually have a widescreen monitor behind my computer. And I have all these snippets of code that I'm trying to keep in my head. So as much as possible I'm typing and I'm just recreating it, but some of like config stuff, there's no way anyone can memorize that. I had to do a ton of Googling to figure that out for the first time, and to save it from being a six hour video, I had to just skip that part of me learning all of those things, otherwise nobody would watch anything, but... I guess it's all about the concept, like how big is the demo or how big is the concept that I'm trying to show. Leigh Halliday: And sometimes it's just like, here's a state management library, we're going to do a simple to-do list or something and we can get it done in 15 minutes. But if it's a longer demo where we're going to be storing data in a backend or we're going to be displaying it on a map, we have to build out all of these pages, that takes longer. But yeah, it's so hard to do, and it's not my full-time job. It's something I do sort of waking up at five in the morning before I actually have to work. So the more I over extend myself, it's sort of like the harder it is to stay consistent, because then I end up burning myself out and spending weekends coding. And then I just find myself like, I need more balance in my life, I need to do things other than working all day in tech, and then waking up at five to do recordings on YouTube, and then spend all Saturday learning a new topic. It just becomes too much. Kate: Totally . Leigh Halliday: So trying to find the balance for that is difficult. Kate: Yeah. For sure, yeah. Yeah. Another direction, I noticed on your YouTube channel you don't put your face on any of the thumbnails and we just had this conversation with Jessica Chan, but she's like, "I always put my face on the thumbnails, because whenever I don't then it's like noticeably gets fewer views." And there's a lot of- Leigh Halliday: Shoot. Kate: ... Face thumbnails on YouTube. Leigh Halliday: I've probably just meaning I'm bad at marketing myself, is I think what the honest answer is. Yeah. I have no reason why I haven't. I have a few that I have my face on there, but for the most part, that's... The marketing and graphics side of things, isn't something... Even the editing, I don't really enjoy that side of things. So I try to just do what will allow me to get it done quickly, because if it takes me six hours to research and record, if I had to do another six hours of editing, coming up with a YouTube covers and stuff like that, I just don't think I'd honestly do any... I wouldn't put any videos up, because it would just be too much. I pretty much do zero editing on my videos. Leigh Halliday: I do one take start to finish and just crop it a little bit. If I get stuck for two, three minutes, and it's not something useful to share, I may cut those two, three minutes of fumbling about, but for the most part, it's just one cut, start to finish, and then... It's like literally just live coding, and trying to describe what I'm doing as I'm typing. And then I quickly put together a YouTube cover that it's basically copy and paste the other one, change the text, like change a color and go. I should really focus more on marketing, because maybe that's one of the differences of channels that grow more quickly than others. Yeah. But that's definitely not my strength. So. Kate: I mean, is working for you, I was just curious. Leigh Halliday: No. It's good to know. Yeah. Because I haven't really done much research or anything. It's mostly just me figuring stuff out on my own. Maybe I should do that... You know what YouTube needs actually? They need AB testing for video cover images. So you could have, one is a face shot of like... It's always like you're scared of the code, like you're like, "ahh" that face. Kate: Yeah. Leigh Halliday: Or you're surprised, it's always like you're surprised at something. Kate: Yeah. Leigh Halliday: But then you could AB test that versus just texts, like what are you covering in the video, and then YouTube could just pick the one that's performing better. I don't know why they haven't done that. So maybe if they listen to this podcast they could. Kate: Yeah. Someone from YouTube is listening. We have some ideas for you. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. Kate: Yeah. That would be great. Leigh Halliday: I feel like that would be easy to do. Kate: Right. Yeah. I guess obviously you're experiment with a lot of different things and you have a next year's course, we actually just talked to Guillermo Rauch last week. Leigh Halliday: Oh, awesome. Kate: Very exciting. Yeah. Leigh Halliday: Guillermo Rauch is the best. Yeah. Kate: Yeah. It was great to have him on the podcast. I guess I'm curious, what technologies are you excited about? It's almost 2022, which is crazy. So I'm going to say, what technologies are you excited about in 2022? Leigh Halliday: I am still excited about Next.js. For me, like create React App, and even to some extent, Gatsby. I was always... I don't like being limited to the front end, and I know Gatsby has a Serverless functions, you can add it now. I come from that world of like a rails backend, which is like this one full stack framework that handles everything you need on the backend and the front end at the same time. I love that concept, and I love that in Next.js you can just throw on a couple end points to your React code on the front end without very little effort at all. Leigh Halliday: I'm also excited about though Blase, which is built on top of... It's not blaze it's Blitz, right? Blitz next.... Yeah. Sorry. Blitz. It's built on pop of Next.js, but they have added more of that integrated backend in for data support. So that excites me, because I love that stack becoming more full stack. RedwoodJS is really cool as well. It's created by one of the original GitHub creators, who also comes from a Ruby on Rails backend, because that's what GitHub is made in. And he's taking the approach as well where it's... It's actually a mono repo, where you have two applications inside of your one repo, one for the front end and one for the backend. And, but it's sort of... There's a nice seamless connection between the front end of the backend. Leigh Halliday: But it also means, if at some reason you need a different backend or a different front end of the future, you don't need to throw the whole thing away, you can just stick with the part of the application that you need going forward. It also, for me, works a little bit better if you're building out multiple applications like a Web app and a mobile app. Blitz is really cool, but it seems quite tied to the web front end. Whereas if you're building like a React Native app and a Web app, you sort of want them both to connect to a separate backend that can support both of those different applications. So I think Redwood fits really well with that idea of having multiple front ends connecting to a single backend, but they also make sort of... Leigh Halliday: Out of the box, they take care of routing, they take care of building a GraphQL API, they take care of all the annoying things you have to do on the front end anytime you're loading data, like check if it's in a loading state? Is it in an error state? Is it finished loading, but it found no items from the backend, and you have to handle, there's like five or six different states. It caused this unique concept called cells, I think it's called, where you just defined, what should you display when it's loading, when it's loaded but it loaded nothing, when it's loaded something, if it failed. So you just define all these little components and Redwood handles, which one to show based on what the loading state is in. So I'm really pumped about that as well. It seems like a really cool framework. Kate: Yeah. That's awesome. We had Brandon Bayer from Blitz.js on the podcast very early. We also had David Price for RedwoodJS in the podcast, super [crosstalk 00:28:21]. Leigh Halliday: Oh, no way. So you've talked to everyone already? Kate: Yeah. So we had... It was our first couple episodes were like very JAMstack heavy. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. Kate: That's who was interested in coming on so that it was, yeah, super excited about it. And we have episodes talking to them too. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. Like I... And I don't want it to sound like I'm down on one versus another. They both are really interesting and they both have pros and cons. The cool thing about Blitz is, if you're comfortable with Next.js, you feel right at home, because it's just built on top of Next.js. So as Next.js gets better and updates like Guillermo and the team at for cells doing, like they're putting out an incredible amount of innovation on that platform. You get all of those benefits as well, and you can just feel right at home in that environment. But Redwood took this completely different approach, where they're just going to tackle the problem from a different perspective. So they're both really interesting to me. Kate: Yeah. Definitely. And yeah, I'll include the links to those episodes [crosstalk 00:29:38]- Leigh Halliday: [crosstalk 00:29:38]. Kate: ... Notes as well. Leigh Halliday: Awesome. Kate: Cool. Okay. This is a, not related to tech question, but I was looking at your LinkedIn profile before this, and you've lived in two south American countries. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. Kate: You speak fluent Spanish, you've taught skateboarding, you have a coffee growing certificate from the Colombian government- Leigh Halliday: [crosstalk 00:30:10]. Kate: ... Which is very cool. And you enjoy brewing kombucha and camping, which I appreciate that as a LinkedIn bio. I guess I'm curious like- Leigh Halliday: So I've retired from kombucha brewing. Kate: Okay. Leigh Halliday: Because I had an unfortunate explosion in my kitchen. So the way kombucha works, I'll keep this short is, the bacteria eats the sugars, which gets converted into carbonation. Kate: Okay. Leigh Halliday: So I had this thing brewing in my cupboard in the kitchen, and then all of a sudden I heard this gunshot sound go off in the kitchen downstairs. So I come downstairs and there's just like tea everywhere. Like my entire kitchen is an explosion of tea and glass, and tea stains really easily and our floor was like... No, it was rough. I retired from kombucha brewing for now. Kate: Okay. Leigh Halliday: Maybe I'll take it up again in the future, but I got to stay safe and I can't wreck the kitchen anymore. I had to [inaudible 00:31:19] half of it. So- Kate: Have a shoot was there. Leigh Halliday: And the coffee thing, I was living in Columbia for a while while I was dating my wife, and they off.... The Colombian government offers these really cool free online education you can take. So I signed up for like the, how to be a coffee grower course. The tricky thing though was like, I do speak Spanish, but I have never done an entire course in Spanish, when I have to read, and write, and speak Spanish the whole way through. But it was cool, like do I remember anything 10 years later? I don't think so. But it was cool [inaudible 00:32:02] that time. Kate: Just to have it. Yeah. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. Kate: How long does it last? The certification? Leigh Halliday: I'm not sure. I haven't looked into it. Kate: Just curious. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. Coffee doesn't grow up here in Canada anyway. Kate: Yeah. All right. [inaudible 00:32:18]. Leigh Halliday: We [inaudible 00:32:18] pine trees and stuff like that. Kate: Yeah. It just stood out to me when I was looking at your LinkedIn stuff, I always... I was just talking to [Bidaggy 00:32:30] from GitHub last week. I interviewed him. Leigh Halliday: Cool. Kate: We ended up talking about pizza and Beyonce for a while. So I just always... Leigh Halliday: Pizza is my next a hobby that I want to get into. Kate: Okay. Leigh Halliday: I want to get a backyard pizza oven for my house, and figure out how to make high quality pizzas. But yeah, I got to wait a little bit for that. I'm in an apartment now, so first a house, then I can get the pizza oven. Kate: Yeah. And then you can do a YouTube channel for that. Leigh Halliday: That's true. I can expand. Kate: [inaudible 00:33:08]. Leigh Halliday: And I'll probably expand my weight as well. [inaudible 00:33:14] all those pizzas. Kate: Cool. Well, yeah, is there anything that you want our listeners to know about upcoming tutorials, courses? Leigh Halliday: Yeah. So if people are interested, you can check out my course, as I mentioned, we built a full stack Next.js application where your authentication, maps, GraphQL, Prisma, TypeScript, lots of cool concepts we go into and you don't need any sort of prior experience with those, I'll explain everything from scratch. And if you go to next.leighhalliday.com, I have a link to where you can buy it. And also where you can use the purchasing power parody to bring the price and make it more affordable for wherever you're at. And also right now, I'm working as an engineer manager at Wrapbook. Leigh Halliday: So I help manage two teams right now, and we... We're the full stack teams at the company. There's a couple other teams that focus more on the backend, but we touch everything. And we are hiring right now, we're looking to grow the engineering team by quite a bit. So if you're interested head on over to Wrapbook, that's a W-R-A-Pbook.com, and go to the career section and there's quite a few openings. So it'd be cool to get in touch and hear from some people that have heard this podcast. And that's a remote in Canada and US, so wherever you are in Canada and in US, it's fine. Kate: Awesome. Yeah. We'll include all those links in our show notes, so you can check those out and- Leigh Halliday: Awesome. Kate: Awesome, Leigh, thanks so much, it's always a pleasure, and- Leigh Halliday: Thank you Kate, nice chatting with you. Kate: ... We'll see you soon. I'm sure. Leigh Halliday: Yeah. For sure. Take care. Have a good day. Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to PodRocket. Find us @Podrocketpod on Twitter, or you could always email me even though that's not a popular option. It's brian@logrocket.