Kate Trahan: Welcome to PodRocket. I'm Kate and this is bdougie, Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub. Brian Douglas: Hello, thank you for having me. Kate Trahan: How's it going? Brian Douglas: I'm doing fantastic. It's, well, for context, it's a Thursday and yeah, this sort of chugging along through some content today. Kate Trahan: Yeah, right for context, it is a Thursday. Awesome. So, yeah. If you could tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of, how you got to GitHub? I know it's probably a long, long story, so just kind of give us a couple bullets here. Brian Douglas: Yeah. I mean the high level bullets is a, so I do developer advocacy at GitHub and I've been here for three and a half years. And how I got to GitHub is because, I mean, how a lot of people use GitHub. I use GitHub. I was really interested in GitHub GraphQL API, handful of years ago and did a conference talk on it and was invited to speak to GitHub Universe on that same subject. And from doing that talk, I had some conversations. And then the long story short, I was invited to interview and eventually accept an offer at GitHub to be, at the time the first developer advocate kind of dawn the title. We've always had advocates to early engineers. All early employees always were advocating for GitHub, but for specifically the developer relations team, I got to join and get to see that team get started. Kate Trahan: Yeah, that's great. And I mean, it's really hard to think of developers who aren't familiar with what GitHub is. So, I mean, being a developer advocate at GitHub is certainly an achievement and a really exciting for sure. Brian Douglas: Yeah. Yeah. Honestly I loved the role. I hate to say this all the time, but the job is almost too easy because I don't have to constantly explain what GitHub is and how to you use it. I get to talk to users that already, maybe did a bootcamp, maybe you were in college and were part of a class that had you sign up for GitHub. So like that problem solved. So I get to show you cool ways to use GitHub and cool interactions and stuff like that. Kate Trahan: Yeah. That's awesome. And so you do a lot of other things. You're also the host of a lot of podcasts, specifically JAMstack Radio, and then also the GitHub, The ReadME project podcast. So I'm curious about those and maybe, can you tell me the inspiration for those? Brian Douglas: Yeah. And then the third podcast I do and I do too many, This Developing Story was my original podcast. I started when I learned how to code. So I was sort of talking about my story of how I learned, how to code back in 2013 and eventually turned that into an interview podcast where I interviewed other folks and I've taken that same sort of model, but instead I now focus on JAMstack companies and community members of JAMstack Radio. And that's what I do. I interviewed folks that are involved in the sort of JavaScript, ecosystem, front-end, web dev. And sometimes we get some Kubernetes and Docker folks or backend heavy folks on there as well. And then finally The ReadME podcast, which is a podcast for the highlight, folks doing really cool things on GitHub. So whether you have our project maintainer or you sort of went from zero to hero to now fully do an open source full time, those are the folks that we reach out to on this podcast. And so, reach out if you want to be on any of those. Kate Trahan: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. That's all, I was just listening to The ReadME project right before this, and it's really cool to hear about kind of where people like, where they were in their lives, to get to the project that we're working on. And I think it has a really interesting take on what people were thinking and doing to get to the technology that they made, as opposed to just talking about how the technology works. I think that's really cool. Brian Douglas: Yeah. Yeah. And what I learned from just interviewing all those folks, who some folks you've heard of like the creator of Vue, Evan You, everyone's stories pretty different. Even if you had a CS background, and got your master's, or maybe just got a regular CS degree, got at your job or internship, everyone's story continues to always diverge from different paths. There's no structured path, there's no sort of certification when it comes to web development or even just general engineering, which what, that's what makes the podcast so interesting. And one second, I'm unplugged this thing. Kate Trahan: That's all right. Totally. Yeah. So I guess, I mean, we could talk about podcasts a lot, so well, I won't ask too many more questions. I guess I'm kind of curious, kind of, what is your process as a host? How do you prep, I mean, for all these different podcasts, especially different stories like you were saying, what's kind of your process of getting prepared for each one of those interviews? Brian Douglas: Yeah. So, I mean, I do so many of them. So with the, This Developing Story, that one's low prep, it's more of DM friends or DM people I see on Twitter. And I, the prep is I only ask three questions the entire podcast. It's, who are you? What do you do? And how did you get here? And that's the This Developing Story thing. With JAMstack Radio, we actually have, we share a paper doc, which is Google. Google was like site Google. Dropbox is like similar to Notion. I'm pretty sure both companies don't want to be compared that way. They don't offer a lot with that. But basically I sent a quick doc and I've got a couple of questions. They've got a sort of released to be on the podcast because we do a lot of editing and that's actually produced by Heavybit, which is an accelerator in San Francisco. Brian Douglas: So a lot of the sort of prep work is all upfront. And then I sort of hand it off to editing and then it gets shipped either a month or a couple of weeks. And, but I tried to do very limited research on the projects and the companies that I talked to, mainly because I want to go on the same journey with the actual listener. Who's maybe never heard of like a, I don't know, a LogRocket, which all have not been on the podcast before, but maybe they haven't heard a LogRocket. So then we go through the conversation of as a new user, myself, going through asking questions and trying to figure out, how would I use this and what use cases and how can I get started quickly? And then finally The ReadME podcast, the secret sauce is that we have a production team. I get facts a bit easier. Brian Douglas: They're reaching out to guests. I do a lot of intros as well. Because I know a lot of folks in the industry reaching out to guests and then we do similar. We have a doc that we sort of propose questions that sometimes we share with the guests, sometimes we don't, but it's a similar sort of like figuring out learning the story. And what's interesting about that too, as well as like, we tend to go on paths that aren't expected. Because I think a lot of technical podcasts, they talk really deep in the details and we'll get technical on the podcast. But I also get to learn about background history and stories. And I mentioned Evan You, I didn't know that he, his first job at Google before even doing a Vue or anything like that was actually doing the Google Doodles. Brian Douglas: He was on the team to create those things. And which is like mind blowing. I'm sure he's probably mentioned it before, but I missed that part of the story, sort of seeing him, sort of glow up when it comes to Vue, but also learning that he didn't have a CS background. He had an art background, which is why he started doing the Google Doodles, which is why he started getting really deeper at the code and which why he felt like figured out a framework to get those stuff, get things shipped faster, which was Vue. So, that story is fascinating. And once you get to have all those pieces in one conversation, I know this is not answering your original question, but I'm just saying the prep work and everything like that. Brian Douglas: Usually when I go into the conversation, I'm thinking of like, what would be the aha moment? Or I think with Scott Hanselman told me this, he hosted the Hanselminutes podcasts and was like, what's the sort of driveway conversation? So if you're in a car, he listened to a podcast and then you get to the driveway of your house and you don't want to get out of the car because you want to finish the podcast. What would be the thing on the podcast to keep you in the car? Kate Trahan: That's it. I haven't heard that. That's a good tip as a podcast producer. I should know what that is. Brian Douglas: Yeah. Kate Trahan: Cool. Yeah. Evan You, I didn't know that either. That's a really cool story and we have reached out to him to come on this podcast. So Evan, if you're listening, you can follow up this story and we can talk more about it. Great. Okay. So you recently wrote a blog post kind of three areas to focus on as a developer in 2021. And you also had a video as well. And I really like one area there, which you coined to dev talks. So developer TikToks, which I haven't heard that term before and I love it. And it was kind of encouraging people to make more videos and just kind of be there in a digital space. Kate Trahan: I really appreciate that. I think that's really interesting. One, I love TikTok, I love watching TikToks. I also feel like, and this kind of speaks to my earlier point, a lot of these podcasts, we're kind of all talking to each other. And so I noticed you just had James Quick on, and then he just had just got Shannon who we just had. And so it just feels like there is a need for more people to talk about what they're working on. And it definitely is, I mean, there's such a great community of influencers and dev advocates already, but there's definitely room for more as what [crosstalk 00:09:48]. Brian Douglas: Right, for sure. Yeah. And it's the same thing, TikTok's great, follow me, bdougieyo in TikTok. But it's the same thing when it comes to conferences, you'd see at the JavaScript conferences, they get nation conferences, you see the same folks that end up showing up every year or every single conference. And it's the same thing when it comes to podcasting because not everybody wants to be on a podcast. So the folks who are on podcasts tend to get invited to other podcasts and the same thing on open source, the folks who are doing open source and get invited to do more open source. But with that being said, what I like about TikTok right now and what's happening is that it's a very much a younger demographic. And it's very true when it comes to even technical content. Brian Douglas: So the majority of the folks that are killing it on TikTok per se, are college students because they understand the audience, they understand the memes, they understand how to correlate that into funny jokes about Java or whatever, or classrooms settings and stuff like that. And those are the, I think the original folks who are doing well in TikTok when it comes to technical content. Now there are some advocates and other engineers who have now jumped in and are doing really awesome content, which I highly recommend find that blog posts, which maybe it's in the show notes and follow everybody I mentioned there, but what I like about is like, I'm now engaging a different audience and it's the audience that like, I think we're really focused on GitHub, which like, get up we don't have awareness problem. As I mentioned before, the job's kind of easy when it comes to getting people to sign up for GitHub, it's already a done deal, but where we do need help on is like getting people to use the next level of GitHub. Brian Douglas: So the amount of bootcamp students I've talked to who are like, yeah, I know GitHub, I have an account, but like, I don't know how to use issues. I didn't know you could open an issue or just any open source project, or I didn't know you can even contribute to any open source project. And there are some sort of rules of interactions with projects like, how to contribute is in a contributing in MD. That's something that maybe not everybody knows. So how do we educate the masses or maybe new developers on how to use GitHub in the next level way. Brian Douglas: And I find what I like about TikTok is that, that's the audience. These are all the newest developers coming through, graduating college, learning how to code. Maybe they navigated because one of their YouTube teachers or Egghead courses, they followed them. They found that they had the TikTok and then they're on TikTok and now they're finding other people in the virality. TikTok's algorithm is actually when you look at it, when you think about it, it's actually pretty basic. And it actually lends itself to actually like, you could be a nobody. Publish your first video, and get 10,000 views, and then a thousand followers within a week. And that's, what's kind of where everybody can be famous. That's, what's kind of driving why TikTok is so big, so fast. Kate Trahan: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I do like that. Your feed can be anybody, like you were saying, and you don't have to be famous to have a famous TikTok video, which I appreciate. Brian Douglas: Yeah. And I think there was an article, actually. I forgot who did this article? Maybe it was a BuzzFeed or somebody, but talking about the TikTok algorithm and how it could be problematic because it can start learning what you like. So if you watch a lot of sad TikToks, it will send you more sad TikToks, which could be a problem. But it's the same thing, the reason I didn't want to use TikTok for the longest time is because I thought it was all dance videos. Just teenagers, stay-at-home moms, all doing the shuffle. Then I got mad, I did the shuffling, like in college. I don't need to see now someone's mom doing the shuffle, but what's cool about the algorithm is that once you stop watching, once you swipe past the enough shuffle videos, they stopped showing you videos, which now all the content I get on TikTok is technical content. People talk to me about code and stuff like that. Because that's the stuff I like. And I get, very rarely do I ever get see any dance videos anymore, which is quite intriguing. Kate Trahan: Yeah. That's interesting. So it's actually pretty sensitive if you can like swipe through a couple and then it changes. Brian Douglas: Yep. Yeah. I'm actually, so I work on the side project called Open Sauced and I'm trying to rebuild the TikTok algorithm, but for open source projects. So rather than swiping through videos, you're swiping through projects that contribute to. It's a long process, I'm slowly building this live on Twitch, bdougieYO on Twitch. And we're actually talking through, actually tomorrow, we'll be chatting through a bunch of the contributors and myself. We'll be chatting through how they work the algorithm to make it. So we're starting to recommend projects to folks. Kate Trahan: That's awesome. That's great. And that was actually, that's a great segue to my next question, which is your project Open Sauced and we're actually, we just had Anthony Campolo on not too long ago. He was one of the first people to tweet about us and be like, hey, LogRocket has a podcast. So we're a big fans, but yeah, tell us about Open Sauced. Brian Douglas: Yeah. So it's funny because it's full circle because you talked about how you got to GitHub. The talk I gave at GitHub Universe was actually about the GraphQL API. In the project, I was talking about was Open Sauced. So in order to learn how to use the GraphQL API for GitHub, I built a project to rectus basically take notes on contributions I was making for projects. Because a lot of times, I think the limitation I have with open source is like, I want to get involved. I don't have time until the weekends. So what I do is I save a lot of issues. I store them in different docs or spreadsheets. I've done quite a bit different like forms of trying to save notes. And then I ended up this building Open Sauced so then I could the save issues that I can contribute to later, but not jump on them on a Tuesday where I know I can't get to until Friday. Brian Douglas: So I'm just going to put it there, see if anybody comments and then do some triaged work in silent, like in the background. And then once I've done enough work, then I'll comment on the issue and be like, hey, I did a little bit of triage, found out the errors here. Do you mind if I take this? They say, yes, I opened a PR and merchant by Sunday. So that's my pattern for contributing open source projects. And so I wanted to recreate that and something that I could share with other folks, which is now Open Sauced. And we've since pivoted from just, well, the feature of storing issues and repose it exists, but we went to now solve the problem of, and I say, we, because it's a team, a handful of us just random people in internet who've joined me in my discord to talk about this problem. But the focus is now we, if you don't know what, where to start, like how do we, we sort of feed you some stuff to start with. Kate Trahan: That's awesome. Yeah. And we had quite a few guests in the open source space to start out on this podcast, Blitz.js, RedwoodJS, and a big problem is, well, not problem, but there is always a need for more contributors. And I think everyone was kind of aware of that it might not be the easiest thing to contribute. So no, that's really awesome. And yeah, I guess kind of along those lines, I guess, how do you picture, I guess open source in general, maybe the future of open source, future of contributions, that sort of thing. Brian Douglas: Yeah. And I think it, so I have a vision, but my vision also is only is relevant for me and people like me. So, same thing with getting into engineering. It's, everybody's got a different path. Whether you need a degree, you don't need a degree, you go to bootcamp, it's all different. So open source is all different. And I think where the future is heading is that centralization into thoughts and ideas for how to manage contribution, how to manage the project. I think everybody's sort of centrally got the idea of do a poll quest. That's how you can get review. You can comment in line, whether you use GitHub or GitLab or whatever flavor of Git provider you're using or SPN, whatever, it doesn't matter. So we've solved those problems. Brian Douglas: People know how to communicate, but when it comes to, how do you get your project notice? How do you get your project to get contributions? How do you maintain those contributions and keep people interested? Those are all problems that are being solved right now in real time. And where I see a future is that now we'll have these sort of recipes. So if I get a project that sort of takes off, I just spend some time on my stream yesterday, looking at new open source projects. And there was one for recipes, it was a sort of fork and the deploy using Docker compose to a Heroku or something. And you have a recipe builder. So you can now store your recipes, source from other places. And it's like a community, which is kind of weird because you got to host your own stuff to make your recipes and stuff like that. But there's enough people who are interested in doing this, that they've done this, and it's a nice place to learn how to code and learn Python and Django. Brian Douglas: So with that being said, I see a lot of those projects, those projects now being sort of sanctioned as proper open source projects because it solves a problem and they've mostly been ignored, but it solves a problem, but it also has an opportunity to grow community around it. So I see a lot of the, what Discord is doing right now with open source and inviting open source projects to join Discords and get free Nitro or whatever they call it on Discord, that's changing access and privilege. And it makes it a lot more approachable for folks to be like, hey, I'm new here. I don't want to take any of your time. But if you have any need help, let me know where to go, like in start. And I think more and more maintainers are now taking in more folks. Because everybody's now, like you mentioned Blitz.js. Brian Douglas: I actually, we actually learned how to code the same way, we both went to the same program called block and years later, I'm working at GitHub. He's now has a large open source project. And I guess what I'm getting at is like the folks who are leading open source to feature of open source or new programmers. So as long as we can sort of educate everybody, who's learning today on TikTok, on Twitter, or whatever it is, educate them, this is how you can approach open source. Then I think the future open source would be a little more open. And I think there's some of the stuff, exciting stuff I can't talk about yet, but what things we're doing with diversity and open source as some projects and partnerships with HBCUs, like that's going to help sort of change the sort of culture, because the one thing I've always kind of rubbed me the wrong way, which when it comes open source is like everyone, it feels like there needs to be, there's a mantra. Whether it's the free software foundation, or the open source software foundation, or whatever foundation, that's cool. Brian Douglas: But if I'm just looking at TikTok and learning how to write JavaScript, I don't know any of that and I don't care if free software means a license and this and that, and that. If it comes to open source, what I care about is, can I use it and can I contribute? Can I be part of the community? And I think the, if I could summarize everything I just said, the future open source is basically no more gates, the removal of gatekeeping. So it doesn't matter where you come from. Everyone has a place to contribute into open source. Kate Trahan: Yeah. That's great. Yeah. I love that. I actually went to, I was a bootcamp grad, and I think even just, I mean, that's been five years ago now. Not even, probably four years ago. And I think even just from when I graduated that to now, I don't know if it's maybe because I'm more involved in the community around technology, but I think it's definitely a, it seems fewer gates, at least from my perspective. Brian Douglas: Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's pretty fascinating stuff because I felt like I kind of had, my story in the open source was kind of similar to most people. I learned GitHub to a bootcamp. I didn't know you could open up issues and random projects. So when I went to, when I found the project that solved a problem specifically that I wanted to solve by Monday, which I was just doing work on a project on the weekend, I ended up emailing the maintainer. I went on to GitHub found the profile of maintainer, emailed him and was like, hey, can you help me? I don't know anything about this, no JS business. And he responded. And today emailing maintainers, I think, is probably I wouldn't recommend it. But today at my recommendation is read the contributing MD, find out if they have a Discord, or Slack, or something similar. Find out if there's a place you can ask questions, if it's stack overflow because of the larger project, ask a stack overflow question, and then take that link and then post it to the Discord. Brian Douglas: The amount of people that just sort of post is like a question into a chat, expecting a response, it's pretty high. And I think if you have a link to an issue or a link to a stack overflow question, you get a better rate of return on your investment. But also the maintainer sees, oh, you're helping out the project by asking your question publicly, where then I can have the answer and then I can link to it in the future. And making easier, making things scale is one of the best things you can do too, if you want to be introduced in to open source or a project. Kate Trahan: Totally. Yeah. So with all of your content and you're writing blog posts, you're doing podcasts, you have a YouTube channel, I guess, one, I'm kind of curious, where do you know where to put what. I guess, video, Twitch, TikTok, YouTube, I guess, where do you know kind of where to put all your stuff? Brian Douglas: That's a good question. It's funny because I have a newsletter that I was going to be writing about that actually thought, because I didn't know, like TikTok I didn't know what to do with it. I had one meme video I did with my daughter, I've since made that private and then I switched to tech content, but then the tech content, what I noticed is like, if I'm just on there and say, hey, you ever heard of GitHub? Did you know, you can do this in GitHub? Here, point and click here. That content kind of doesn't do well very well on TikTok. Folks who that it does well, if you were to have a bigger following, you could sneak those in and people will be okay with it. But TikTok is more about culture and memes, and those are the things that are going to be more viral. Brian Douglas: So if you're asking a question, actually Shimmy who, she's on TikTok. And I first found her on TikTok because she was making a lot of jokes around the questions she gets asked at conferences. And she wear a Patagonia vest in some aviator glasses and pretend it's like she was a tech pro. And I thought it was hilarious because it's like, oh yeah, I've definitely, I know, I understand this culture. I understand the joke here. And whether it's for you or it isn't, I guess what I'm getting at is that she's making jokes about developer culture and community. And it's in a fun way on TikTok. And that's what kind of grows audience and a brand. I think MongoDB is doing a great job on that in TikTok and as well as Shopify, they both have TikTok accounts. Brian Douglas: But as far as YouTube, Twitter, what I've done is I've tried to essentially try to not basically create a different channels where I think things will work. So because conferences were shut down for shortly now, we got rid of conferences and now some in-person at this point. The very first conference I did in the pandemic, they asked, hey, can you create a video and then edit yourself and then give it to us and we'll upload it. And I'm like, oh wow, I don't even know where to start. How do I get the camera on my screen recorded at the same time? What do I use? So I learned all this stuff in a year, basically from that one conference that I did very awfully, I was like, okay, I need to learn how to edit video. How am I going to do that? Brian Douglas: I'm going to make YouTube videos every week. And then I'm going to learn how to edit while making these random YouTube videos. So to answer your question, I tend to do more culture and conversation on YouTube. For GitHubs YouTube, I tend to do a lot more technical tutorials and quick interviews like this interview, but I'll do it the PM and we'll do it in video format. So I think of podcasts, but video. That's what I kind of do a lot of on the GitHub YouTube channel. On Twitter, it's just a free for all. It's whatever, it's culture, it's content, it's links to newsletters. But I guess the answer, to clearly answer the question, I kind of have figured out the channels where technical content will go on YouTube and then fun stuff will go in TikTok. But for the most part it's always changing. Brian Douglas: Is that like, it's going to, if you ask me to get it three months a big, oh, you know what I figured out, this is the only type of content that's working on YouTube, which when I first started doing YouTube was only conference talk style videos, but in a YouTube form. And what I've found that gets the best engagement is hands down technical content. So if you do series based content of like, here are three videos of how to set up XYZ or two videos or one video, that's going to do the best. It gets the most click-through it gets most engagement. It gets the most follow through. And my internal pitch for us doing YouTube content was recipe content. So when I go make cookies, the first thing I do is I go to Google and I learned how to do the recipe. And what happens is I always go back to that same recipe because it worked. Brian Douglas: So when it comes to technical content, people go back to the same technical content over and over again. So what we see is the return viewers and users, they'll come back because they want to find out, two minutes in Brian said this, so I'm going to go back and watch that video and then get unstuck. So I guess that sort of answers the question, but again, if you asked me again at two months, will change. Kate Trahan: Yeah. Yeah. And you actually talked about that on JAMstack podcast, how a lot of developer advocates had to return to their YouTube channels and there was, and you used the term conference talk graveyard, which is great. And with COVID, it was like, okay, so now we have to revisit video content. And LogRockets certainly was not immune to that. Brian Douglas: Yeah. Which is it's crazy because it kind of like showed how much we lean on conferences. And when it came to developer relations, because I could go to a conference a month and my job is done. I'll have lots of engagement, if I get one keynote, like a quarter or even twice a year, then like, I pretty much, we're good to go. That keynote is going to be seen. People are there. We network, make community, have connections. So then it's now turned into now we're moving the conference graveyard, and now we're sort of cleaning up and weeding the garden. And actually now this had this sort of content garden now of people can sort of come and go, which is now intriguing. And I got some push back on Reddit when I posted this, on that developer relations Reddit, which was, I don't think conferences will be the same. Brian Douglas: I don't think we'll have as much investment as we did prior to the pandemic. Because now if you asked me to go sponsor your conference or someone else's conference, and they're like, hey, we can get your email in front of 20,000 of our Twitter followers. And I'm like, oh, that's cool. But GitHub has 2 million Twitter followers. So like, what are we really asking for here? That's not, you're not selling me on anything. And if the question's like, oh, we'll get it in front of our 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. Well, GitHub has 200,000. It's not a flex really, but it's more of like, okay, what are we doing here? I don't think GitHub, GitHub will sponsor conferences for good reason. Like we still are, but we're sponsoring less. And so now when it comes to conferences, what is the selling point? Brian Douglas: How, and this is for all you, your conference organizers, what happens to the video once the talk is done? How are you promoting an after the fact? Because if you say we're going to have a email campaign where to create blog posts, we're going to have you on the podcast after your conference talks, the people go watch the conference talk, and we're going to continue to point people to that and tell the next conference. Then you got the, I'm sold. Okay, cool. Sign us up for 10K, we'll be there. But a lot of conferences aren't doing that. A lot of conferences it's like, hey, we'll tweet you. And then GitHub can retweet that. And then GitHub gets better engagement in our Twitter account, then maybe these conference organizers. So with that being said, I think we have to now think about the difference and the different approaches. Kate Trahan: Sure. Yeah. And you're like, hey, now I really like to edit videos. No I'm just kidding... Brian Douglas: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing too, as well. It's like, we're partnering with Hacktoberfest. So all the content I'm doing for Hacktoberfest, it's going to live on GitHub's YouTube. Because we were ready, I joke, I say feeding two birds with one scone, we're doing that. We're going to get YouTube content on GitHub. We're going to teach people how to get involved in Hacktoberfest and then everybody wins. And there's no reason for us to, we are partnering and sponsoring and stuff like that. But there's no reason for us to shell out millions of dollars on these different engagements when GitHub could very easily do the same thing. But I think what the biggest thing about my team at GitHub and what we've done, we try to scale everything. So how can we scale these interactions, these engagements without feeling like it's a whole production just to get one thing shipped. Kate Trahan: Sure. Yeah, totally. Oh yeah. I completely agree. And then, okay, so kind of along these lines. So I was, when I was researching you, you have a lot of, your brand is kind of pizza oriented. And I think that's probably from Open Sauced, but I guess I think you've done a really good job, like with your personal brand. And that was that intentional or kind of tell me about that. Brian Douglas: Oh, thanks for noticing. No, it is intentional because like, even before we hit record on this podcast, you asked you to go by Brian, do you go by bdougie? And I usually default with bdougie, but I give people if they'll out. If they're like, ah, it feels uncomfortable to say, bdougie. Or sometimes if you have a different dialect or accent, dougie doesn't really roll off the tongue. So feel free to call me Brian. But I intentionally do that because Brian Douglas, if you Google Brian Douglas, you'll find me because I've done a good job of cornering the SEL market and juice for Brian Douglas. But if you Google bdougie, you find me pretty quickly because I am the one bdougie that's doing anything. Now there is bdougie on Twitter, so if this goes out on Twitter, please don't add bdougie, @bdougieyo instead. But the amount of people who follow him because of just what I do, it's actually pretty hilarious. Brian Douglas: I should actually interview him and see. He's a dad who plays X-Box. So, which is in his bio. So, but it's like a tongue in cheek we think we've had for years because people can @ mentioning them. But for the pizza thing and even different, I call myself a Beyonce advocate. That's something that I started doing as soon as I joined GitHub. And it was because the Brian Douglas thing, it's kind of forgettable to first names. So I always introduce myself as the Beyonce advocate because you're going to remember the guy who mentions Beyonce. The amount of times that people called me Beyonce or send me Beyonce songs in my DMs and stuff like that. And then tell me happy birthday for Beyonce a couple days ago. That's a thing that I just sorted started doing because when I gave that first conference talk in 2018, when I mentioned Beyonce for the first time I happened to be listening to a lot of Beyonce and I was, I never grew up, I didn't listen a lot to Beyonce growing up, or in college, or anything like that. Brian Douglas: And I found out that Beyonce is actually a pretty four-dimensional person. She has a lot of thought, and her writing, and the dancing, and her life. And once I started learning more about Beyonce, I was really fascinated. And the thing that I do, like I said, Beyonce advocate, because at GitHub, we've got 65 million users worldwide. Beyonce has a lot of listeners worldwide, like more than that. So with that known, Beyonce does a lot of good will for the community. She actually brings a lot of people up, she's from Houston. So like Lil Nas X is from there, she's not collaborate with her, but Megan Stallion who's also from Houston, she collaborated with her. She brings a lot of other people up like Chloe x Halle. Who's the little mermaid, Chloe, the new little mermaid. Brian Douglas: Basically what I'm getting at is like, I'm always looking to bring other people up. I'm okay to not have a hundred thousand Twitter followers. If I can bring up the next bdougie. So for my brand, I want to make sure that I'm a memorable, people know what I'm about and what I'm getting at, when you see a conference talk for me. I want to make sure that you're closing, my joke was actually close your laptops. If I get you to close your laptops, when I'm on stage then I know I'm doing something right. Now, you've got to keep your laptop open because everything's remote. But I guess the thing is like, if people, they connect with me because I make pizza jokes or my Discord channel, I send pictures of pizza in our pizza channel. People connect through that because maybe they'll listen to the same music as me, or maybe you don't have the same degree or background, but for the most part, everybody loves pizza. So we can all centralize on that. If you don't love pizza, I don't know if we could be friends. Kate Trahan: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I didn't know the Beyonce thing, but that's great. Yeah. And I love Beyonce. I love pizza. So I definitely noticed the brand in there and it worked on me. Brian Douglas: Yeah, it's something that I put a lot of thought into when I first started in developer advocate at my previous employer, Netlify, I was a big Kanye fan. Kanye just released an album and everybody's got like their own quorums with Kanye and whether they like them or they love him, he's gone through different iterations of his career. And what I realized early on, because I'm as gangster as it comes, when it comes to the suburbs, because that's where I grew up. But when it comes to hip hop music and even Kanye, it's mostly an act. And like, if you watch a lot of the Keeping Up with the Kardashians, you could see how normal he is in the background. And it's kind of similar to professional wrestling. So going back to the brand thing, they'd notice, you kind of have to have your gimmick, otherwise you're not going to get on the title card. You're not going to get up the ladder of being able to get promoted and being in all the commercials and having little action figures for you. Brian Douglas: So professional wrestling, I hate to spoil it for you, but it's not real, but it's the one reason why professional wrestlers like The Rock and John Cena could be great actors, it's because they're already acting. And at the same reason for hip hop artists, like Ice Cube and LL Cool J could be great actors it's because they're already acting. So when it comes to DevRel, I can act like a 100% Beyonce fan, which I'm going to pull back the curtain a bit. I don't actually listen to a ton of Beyonce. I'm not a huge fan, but I love her music and I will promote her as much as I can because I think she's what she's about is real. I also don't eat a lot of pizza. During the pandemic, I was eating pizza probably once a week because of I guess mental reasons. But yeah, I actually, I had have pizza last week and I didn't have, I actually had pizza the week before, but that's besides the point. Kate Trahan: Do you have a favorite pizza? Brian Douglas: I'm actually really, really vibing with Detroit-Style pizza. Now it's pizza that I know, as a kid Little Caesars before they went to $5 hot and ready, they used to make the Detroit-Style pizza, and I loved it and I never had it since. And then I was watching Jason Lingster stream. And for some reason he started diverging into pizza and talking about Detroit pizza. And I was like, wow, that was great. So there's a local shop in Oakland called Pie Guys. And they make Detroit-Style pizza, which if everybody's wondering, it's basically a focaccia style bread with oil bread basically, super thick, they put it into a square pan, and then they put the cheese on top. So then since it's a square pan, kind of like a brownie pan, or I don't know, I don't know your listeners are US-based or whatnot, but everybody Google brownies or Google square pizza, it gives you a crispy side cheese crust. And it's absolutely amazing. Kate Trahan: Awesome. Well, bdougie, is there anything you'd want to share with our listeners, have them to go check out? Brian Douglas: Yeah. I mean, for sharing purposes, I'd say like open source, I would definitely encourage you to try it out. If you haven't contribute to something, open an issue, report bugs, if you're using something. A lot of times people just like, they find the bug and they work around it, reporting that it's always the best thing to do for a maintainer. And then as far as things to promote, follow me on TikTok, bdougieyo. I swear. It's good stuff. It's usually funny if it's not funny it's because, well, it's because it's too inside. I share my TikToks to my wife and she says kind of like, I guess this is funny, but I don't get it because it's like super developer humor. So check it out. I promise you, you'll at least laugh at one of them. Kate Trahan: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us and yeah, we'll include all those in the show notes and yeah. Thanks, bdougie. We'll see you around. Brian Douglas: Yeah. See you. Brian: 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.