FusionAuth provides authentication, authorization, and user management for any application. Built for developers, it installs on any platform and integrates with any framework in minutes. And, every feature is exposed as an API giving you complete flexibility to handle any use case. A complete identity solution, use FusionAuth to build and manage registration & login, passwordless, SSO, MFA, SAML, OIDC, OAuth, JWT, social login and more. Learn more about FusionAuth at fusionauth.io. CORALINE: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code Episode 187. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke, and I'm here with fellow panelist, Jamey Hampton. JAMEY: Thanks, Coraline. And I would also like to introduce my other fellow panelist, Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Hello. And it is my pleasure to introduce this week's guest, Bryan Liles. Bryan is a software engineer with a diverse background, including networking, security, and operations. Speaker of diverse topics ranging from machine learning and simulation to software engineer development and growth to actual talks on the practice of writing software. Bryan is an all around good person with the ambition and ability to push the bar further. Bryan, welcome to the show. BRYAN: Thank you. And thank you for reading that. It's actually just an ode to make me feel better. So thank you, Jacob. JACOB: No, we love to do that. CORALINE: We will support you, Bryan. JACOB: Yeah. BRYAN: [Laughs] JACOB: We like to start the show with the same question that we always ask, which is, what is your superpower and how did you develop it? BRYAN: Before I say that, I think it's very fitting that this episode is 187, which is like the police code for murder. And I'm thinking about putting a murder about everybody's thoughts, about what Bryan thinks about and how he approached the industry. And with that being said, what's my superpower? And it's actually very simple. I didn't get stung or bit by a bug. No radioactive stuff, no cyborg stuff. My superpower is the ability to see the world as it is. Why is that my superpower or why is that even a great superpower? Well, because there's never any playing around when it comes to how I see the world. I take the world, the good and the bad, and I just navigate through it. And luckily, so far, over the past 40 some odd years that I've been on the Earth and the past 20 some odd years that I've been working in tech, I've always navigated in the right direction. More people need the superpower of being able to not sure [inaudible] the world. CORALINE: How does that manifest, Bryan? Can you give us some example? BRYAN: All right. Oh, wow. This is a great time to think about it. So, today is Wednesday of this week. So what has happened in the black people universe this week? Well, we had the gentleman who got killed in Minnesota, and then we had the other gentleman who had the police called on him in New York. And why do I bring this up? Because first and foremost, before I am a developer or anything like that, I'm just a black guy. And my ability to see the world for what it is, is that none of this is surprising. Does it hurt my feelings and make me want to cry sometimes? Yeah, of course. But none of it's surprising. And so what do I do? I don't sit down and give up and say, "Oh, you know." What I do is I realize that, hey, the world was not built for people who look like me. And knowing that, I actually adjust how I operate in the world. I am good at finding ways to succeed when those ways are not very obvious. It's kind of a thing because I think that I am literally the highest rated black engineer at VMware. And out of all the black people in the company, I might be the third highest out of a 30,000-person company. Little old Bryan Liles. How did I get there? Well, I realized that the world wasn't given to me. I had to work extra hard. So starting in elementary school, I worked harder. In high school, I worked harder. Give me an open book test. I will not take the open book test with my book open. I will take it close. And my goal is to beat everyone else out. And many times I did. Let's take those standardized tests that we had in high school. I took the SAT and the ACT. Scored perfect on one of them and almost perfect on the other. And why? Because the world told me I couldn't. And only because I could see the world for what it was that the world was not given to me, that I had to figure out how to work harder to get the things that I think that I deserve, like everyone else deserves. But I'm not afraid to work for it. So this sounds kind of cocky, but it's not. It's actually my coping mechanism. And the reason I look at the world this way is I realized the world is not made for me. And because it's not, I can't expect it to with seven other billion people or even more on this earth. So what do I need to do? I need to figure out how to do the best things that I can to affect the people around me in the best way possible without hurting anyone else. And Coraline, you've known me for a while. Years, actually. CORALINE: I have. Yeah. BRYAN: Yes. And even back in those times, I feel that me being able to see the world for what it is allows me to help others be the best people they can be. Well, that's actually the superpower that I wish that I had, that I could just make everyone around me better than they already are. CORALINE: Well, Bryan, I think you do do that and I think you're not giving yourself credit for it. I remember seeing you speak. And you're very direct. You're like, "Yeah, I'm that black guy in the Ruby community." And you are always so direct and so matter of fact, with your observations about the world. I couldn't help but see a glimpse of the world through your eyes. That's a gift that you gave. And I think that's a gift that you gave to a lot of people. So, don't underestimate the influence that you've already had. And you still have half your life yet left? BRYAN: That's right. That is definitely right. JAMEY: I want to second that, actually. You keynoted the first tech conference I ever went to. BRYAN: Oh, wow. JAMEY: [Laughs] BRYAN: And you all can't see this because of my beautiful skin shade. I would be blushing right now but I can't blush because my skin doesn't turn in colors. But this is wow. CORALINE: Bryan, this is why I was extra excited to have you on the show. You and I had not spoken in a while. Did you leave the conference circuit for a while or did you just leave the Ruby conference circuit for a while? BRYAN: Yeah, I went to different conference circuits. I decided that the Ruby world could not contain me. So, I have actually been doing, I still am out and speaking. The last big thing that I did is there was a conference called KubeCon. Have you all heard of KubeCon? I was the chair of that. KubeCon is a conference given by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It's literally the largest open source conference in the world. We did an event back in November. We had almost 12000 people in the open source conference. So, I keynoted there multiple times and I was one of the program chairs. I also program chaired for the Open Source Summit a few times. I've spoken on all the continents except for Antarctica. So, I've definitely been around and just trying to be the example that I want to see. One day, I might actually get back into the Ruby world again, if I ever feel comfortable being in public places ever again. CORALINE: I hear you. Are you doing any virtual conferences? I get invited to speak in a couple in June and I am like super nervous about that because I really get a lot of energy from the audience. And being disconnected from my audience feels like just talking at my computer. That's what I'm worried about. So, have you done any of those or are you just waiting it out? BRYAN: I did one panel, and I think I'm doing another one in the next couple of weeks. Actually, I think over the next month or so, I have two or three more. And I'm with you. I love speaking to people and I love seeing people's responses when I'm talking to them. So when you're doing this event and you're basically doing it to your computer. So I guess you could put people in front of you to look at while you're talking. It's not the same. And I think right now, since we're in the beginning of this whole Covid-19 era, people are just continuing on with what they have. And they think that, "Ah, we'll just get great speakers in their offices in front of their computers and we'll get good talks." The problem is, is that engagement is off. And I don't know about you, but I can't even watch a 30-minute YouTube video on my computer. I either fast forward it or download it and then watch it at 1.5 speed or just don't watch it. So, I am worried about that. But I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt to figure out where we need to be. CORALINE: What's the last talk you gave like? BRYAN: I spoke in January. There was a conference called DeliveryConf in Seattle. And what I did during that conference, I don't know if my slot was a keynote. I made it a keynote, gave a keynote-y topic where I was talking about rethinking CI and CD. And I decomposed those concepts in CI, Continuous Integration and then CD, Continuous Delivery, Deployment, whatever. But I took CI, continuous integration and continuous delivery, and I re-envisioned them and try to put it in a way that didn't make it seem opaque. CI is not Jenkins. CD is not Spinnaker or any other product. It's actually a practice and you should be optimizing what you get out of practice rather than the tool. I might have used this example, but I think about it as carpenters use hammers. They don't dictate how a hammer works. They might dictate the weight of a hammer, but they don't say, "This hammer, the head of it needs to be made of tungsten rather than whatever else." I don't even know hammerheads are made of. But they don't do that. So, that was my last talk. So now, it's -- what's today? Today is May 27th. It's been five months since I've given a conference talk. Having withdrawals. JACOB: Do you have any thoughts on, because you mentioned that this sort of state of virtual conferences thing is leaving something to be desired by everyone? Not that they're bad, just like that special element is not there. And I think something that is yet to be cracked that I would love to see figured out is how to bring that energy of unexpected collisions of people that happen in the best of circumstances, how to bring that into a virtual space. BRYAN: You know what? I am thinking about this. I don't know. I am notorious for going to a conference and going to my talk. And not because I don't think any of the other talks are good. It's just because if I got on an airplane and I flew across the country or across an ocean or two oceans, I don't want to sit down and look at content that I can go look at later. A lot of conferences I go to, they record them so I can go watch them at my house. I can sit on my couch or watch it on my iPad. The true value of a conference to me is meeting people I didn't know or strengthening the relationships with people I did know. And it's crazy. I'm not actually a partier. I don't drink. I just like to be around the people. And I could just think back about all the jobs. Like the current job I have right now is because I went to a conference and I challenged the creator of Kubernetes on an idea. I just basically told him he was wrong. And that stuck with him to the point that he offered me a job the next time he saw me. And I think those kind of relationships were going to be missing. And then also that Hallway Track is so big where just think about all the -- even in the Ruby community -- just think about all the tools that came by because of the Hallway Track. Or think about, let's go back years ago. Let's go back like 2008, where whenever I met Chris Wanstrath and PJ and that crew. Before, when they were just Err the Blog and I would see them out of events. And I forge relationships with them. They weren't super strong. We're not friends or anything, but if they see me, they'll be like, "Hey, Bryan." And I'd be like, "Hey," whoever. We know each other. And just being able to have those, that is missing right now. So what are we going to do? I don't know. I just think this idea of doing the Field of Dreams, you show video, people will come, think I will get old quick. So what could we do? Well, maybe we can have instead of having a whole day of conferences, maybe we have a month of conferences where we have events that happen through the month. Or maybe we do something like what Microsoft did with Build last week. A friend of mine, Scott Hanselman, Master Showman, and he did this whole thing from his office. His office is neat. I don't know if we compete on who has the coolest office, but his office is really cool. And my office is really cool, too. But he has more toys than I do. But the way that he used Microsoft products where he used teams to basically facilitate how people were talking to each other. And he made it very casual, like he was doing work. And we were just watching over his shoulder while he was working. I think that works. But this whole idea of just this talk, this speaker, this speaker, when it's not collaborative or engaging, is going to be another thing. And I think another problem that's going to happen is that and this is the controversial, the 187 Bryan murdering the industry type thing is most panels are low effort. We'll get people on panels and they do low effort stuff. Now, we're on a panel right now. This is a podcast. It's different. I think it's actually different. But a lot of time, panels are super low effort where people just go up there. They like them so they have to prepare. And they go up there and they give watered down answers. I think if we're going to want to do that, let's have that format and let's make it exciting and engaging. Realize that all my computer spinning right now, I have a Best Buy window, a code window, a calendar, talking to you all. I'm looking at my sound output. There's my Apple messages and a Slack, and then a picture that I was making earlier. And you are competing with that. And frankly, I think this conference is interesting because I'm in it. But if I was just watching it, I'd probably be off somewhere else trying to figure out why I'm looking at Best Buy. But that's what we need to figure out. And conference organizers are going to have to figure that out. So Microsoft did their thing. Like that section was good. The rest of it was, yeah, it was all right. But other big companies are going to have to figure that out and realize that just because people come doesn't mean they're engaged. And having these in-conference or these in-person things allowed us to get engagement that we couldn't touch. So, what are you going to do now? JACOB: I'd like to think about a lot, because I haven't gone to many conferences. And something I think about a lot is that a strong majority of people are somewhat in that camp that you just described. That they aren't as fully engaged as we expected or maybe they expected. That they're going to the panel, but maybe they didn't know anyone. So they didn't manage to connect with anyone or they were shy or something like that. I sometimes wonder of a conference of a thousand people, how many people were strongly engaged? How many people were wanting to and weren't able to? BRYAN: That's a good question. And the best part is I'm not a marketer. I really have no clue. But I am being negative on panels and what not. But let me say something else about conferences. Conferences aren't inclusive. I'm not talking about racially or gender. I'm talking of people who can't attend them, whether it be money or they just don't like the public or they just can't take any time off of work. I think that that is an underserved population. And as event organizers, we should be thinking -- well, I'm not one anymore -- but we should be thinking about how to bring those people into the fold. Some people just don't want to go to conferences, but they like the content. And why should they not be able to get at least some of that interaction? They're not going to get all of the interaction, but some of it. What can we do? What I'm saying is this area is ripe for someone to come in and say, "We're just doing this wrong. We can innovate on this better." And we've been in this whole lockdown situation for a couple of months now. So people are just becoming normal. I think what's going to happen is people are going to figure it out and we're going to see better structured defense. And I hope that this actually goes on longer because a lot of these conferences for big companies don't make money. They lose money. So if you're going to lose money, why don't we lose money reaching out to more people? JAMEY: Another thing I've been thinking about, as you're talking about this and particularly in that last part, is that we keep talking about people who are being forced to wear [inaudible] right now, but it's not really the same as normal or remote work. And we can't really treat it the same as in regular times. And I think that the same is true of these virtual conferences. We can make these plans for events and maybe even if we had a plan like in a normal time, would be engaging for people. It's hard to be engaged right now because everyone is under so much stress. I think that we're doing it now because it's kind of necessity to do it now or we'd have no events. But this isn't necessarily the best time for people to be innovative and creative and engaged with this kind of thing. BRYAN: That's true, and I agree with you. But on the other side, and this is like my adult hat on, people got to eat. And we are extremely privileged in this space where I work from home. My wife works from home. My oldest daughter is graduated. So she does whatever she does. My youngest daughter is still in school. We're making sure that she's getting her lessons. And this being home for me, not really a big deal. It's a little bit of a change. I can't go to the store or I can't go car racing or I can't do a few other things or hanging out with friends. That's kind of a pain in the butt. But overall, I think I spend less money now than I did before. But to other people where they don't have home offices. So, let's think about our coworkers who don't have home offices or they live in a city where they don't have a lot of space anyways. And you don't move to New York for an apartment. You move to New York to sleep from whenever you're not experiencing the city. And now you're working from home, and that's hard. I have an office. I literally have two desks in this office. I have a huge TV on the wall over here to my right. I have a closet full of all the tech stuff you could ever imagine. And when I get tired of this stuff, I move to the basement where I have my theater or I move to the living room where it's just a different room. We need to think that even in tech, that this is all possible. And even if you live in New York, at least if you work for one of these big companies, you're still working. Now, let's think about some of these other companies that they're not working. They're still in tech, but they're maybe consultants and people aren't taking on new projects right now. So what do they do? That kind of sucks. Hopefully you save money. That's the first thing about a consultant. Make your 40% margin and make sure you have a rainy day fund that is at least a year old. At least, it's taking at least a year. So I don't feel as bad for them. Where I do feel bad is for people like my brother, my younger brothers are twins. And the oldest one works in a restaurant at a hotel. They furloughed the whole staff. And he's on unemployment and he sits around the house. What's going to happen to him? And the reason I bring this up is thinking that we're just so well off, even though it kind of sucks for us to sit at home and we think in our mind, "Oh, well. It's us." When we get to the point where we're like, "Oh, are we going to eat this week? Are we going to be able to afford the electricity or our rent?" And this is the whole part about me being able to see the world for what it is. So yeah, it kind of sucks that we're sitting at home. And you know what? I think that a lot of us are probably suffering from a huge bout of depression that we haven't been able to figure out. Sometimes I'm working and because I never leave the house, my work day is all day and my workday is every day, all day until I decide that I had to actually pick up a video game and another hobby, so I would not work all the time. It does suck for us. What we need to do is we need to first identify that this is a problem for us and then we need to do another thing. We need to work slower or work less. I haven't taken any days off. I always tell my boss that I'm going to and I end up never doing it. But if you have that vacation, now's a good time to take it. Now, what are you going to do? Well, it's nice and [inaudible] in the country right now. Go outside. Go for a hike. If you can't walk, wheel yourself out front. Go smell that springtime air, and realize that the world is not made for you, unfortunately. So can we say it's ever going to get better? Well, we hope it's going to get better. But is it going to get better? I don't know. I look at the numbers every day just to see if we are getting better or not. Out west on Seattle, we are. New York, we are. In Maryland, it's kind of iffy. So that was like a really negative answer. But the summary is if you know life sucks, what are you going to do about it? You're going to go find a little piece of light that makes you happy. And then hopefully it makes it the part that sucks a little bit less. We’d like to take a break in the show to let you know that today’s show is sponsored by strongDM. Managing your remote team as they work from home? Managing a gazillion SSH keys, database passwords, and Kubernetes certs? Meet strongDM. Manage and audit access to servers, databases, and Kubernetes clusters, no matter where your employees are. With strongDM, easily extend your identity provider to manage infrastructure access. Automate onboarding, offboarding, and moving people within roles. Grant temporary access that automatically expires to on-call teams. Admins get full auditability into anything anyone does: when they connect, what queries they run, what commands are typed. It's full visibility into everything. For SSH, RDP, and Kubernetes, that means video replays. For databases, it's a single unified query log across all database management systems. strongDM is used by companies like Hearst, Peloton, Betterment, Greenhouse, and SoFi to manage access. It's more control and less hassle. strongDM. Manage and audit remote access to infrastructure. Start your free 14-day trial today at strongdm.com/SDT BRYAN: So, I have a question. This is called Code. We haven't talked about code yet. CORALINE: Greater Than Code. BRYAN: Ooh. CORALINE: Yeah. The whole point of Greater Than Code is the notion that we are more than our output. And the whole point of this podcast is getting to know the people behind the tech. Sometimes we talk about technical topics, but we're never like, "Oh my God, have you seen this new Ruby gem? It does blah, blah, blah." We don't do that. That's for other podcasts. BRYAN: I don't know. I was just curious. CORALINE: There are plenty of 35-year old white dudes with nothing better to do who are doing podcasts on all those topics. So, we don't need to crowd that field. JACOB: I am 36, Coraline. CORALINE: Oh, sorry. JAMEY: [Laughs] BRYAN: And you know what? I love the premise. I do like the premise. It's something that I like to say to people is that I'm always more than my code. Matter of fact, I'm to the point now, if I write code and someone says they don't like it or it doesn't work, I'm like, "So? You have two options here. You can fix it or you cannot use it. How about that?" And then I move forward because I realized, that day that I realized -- actually a long time ago -- that I am not my code, was a very, very illuminating day for myself. CORALINE: I only recently -- this is a show about you, but I'd like to share this brief sharing, get your thoughts on it, Bryan. As recently as two weeks ago, I was actually tracking how much time I spent consuming media versus how much time I was producing content outside of a work context. And I tracked that as a ratio. And I tried to keep my ratio at 1:3, but no worse than 1:2. And I had this realization that like, a friend of mine, she [inaudible] about reading a book. Why do you think that's a bad thing? Why do you have to punish yourself for reading a book by doing extra work? And I was like, "Holy shit" And I realized this whole meritocratic idea of who you are doesn't matter. What matters is what you produce. And I felt so angry at myself for allowing that meritocratic thinking to rule my life for so long and to influence how I saw myself in terms of productivity. And I got so angry that this idea [inaudible]. And I wasn't even aware of it until somebody asked me about reading a book. And that undermined my entire system of self-value and self-worth. So I'm drifting now. Even though I've been reading this meritocracy for like 10 years. This poisonous meritocratic idea was lodged in my head and it was awful. And I don't know what to do now. BRYAN: Meritocracy is interesting and I'm not a believer of the status quo. I'm not a believer in the ‘if you work harder, life would be better for you’. No, that doesn't work unless you're of a certain demographic. And I am not in the demographic. Even if I was, I think I still would, I don't know if I would do better in the world. But I think about the meritocracy all the time. And what I learned is that we can reject the meritocracy, but not really. We can do it in our head and we cannot be defined by the meritocracy because unfortunately, the way the world works is that the idea of the meritocracy moves us forward. The appearance of someone working harder and that is the reason for them moving ahead in life is an idea that we'd like to subscribe to. Even though this person's parents were millionaires, they went to the best college, they didn't have great grades. Their parents just paid for it straight out, which allowed them to go to -- they went to the best high schools, which allowed them to have access to go to the best colleges, which allowed them to have access to the best companies for internships, which allowed them to have the best access to jobs when they get out of college, which basically put them in the right place to have this trajectory to be in charge. Life is good and they think that that's the meritocracy. I realize that's a very true thing, that what we call the meritocracy is not really a meritocracy. It's really secret code for seeing people who look like me succeeding. And like I said, I see the world for what it is. I accept that. And that's fine. So what I tell people who look like me and people who don't, I tell them this. I'm not going to sugarcoat the world to you. If people come out and like Obama did the national high school graduation thing, and he said all what he's going to say, which sounds great. Bryan's version is different. Bryan's version says, "You know what? Chances are, you're not going to make everything you want in life. Life's going to be harder. You're not going to get all the chances. You're going to get passed over. People are going to treat you worse." So what do you do? And something counter to any advice that you give, people love to say that, "I like to be the dumbest person in the room." And I said, "That's the meritocracy talking right there." You realize maybe you think that you're going to suck in all this smartness just by osmosis because you're in the room with all these smart people. No, if you don't fit that category, be the smartest person in the room. But don't tell anybody about it because people don't like to hear that. So, your goal is not to be the dumbest person in the room. Your goal is to be the smartest person in the room. And not only be the smartest person in the room, but to also give your best ideas away to others and make them their ideas. So, you do something great or you have a great idea? Find someone else on your team. Tell them, "Hey, this is your idea now. Run with it." And let them know and just tell them in their ear, "Your success is my success." And do that over and over and over and over again. What I find is that by trying to actually be the success that you want to be and then giving away all these things that what you're doing is building a community around you of support because people realize that once you're giving your best away, they want to support you, because either they agree with what you're doing or their best comes from you. So, they don't want that to end. Or tell people that if he'd approach the world this way, even if you don't get all the things that you want, at least you made someone else's life better and can't put money on that one. That's a real win. I don't want to get super philosophical. But this is how I look at the deeper levels. This is how I think about things. And this is how I reason what I do. So, going out to conferences and actually being animated and giving people all these ideas is because I want other people to go out and say the things that I'm saying, not because I want to look smart. I want people to say what I say. I want people to feel what I feel. Years ago, so we go back 13 years ago, back to 2007 when I had the TATFT, test all the freaking time, I love that because people thought it was fun to say and put on their resumes and talk about it. But what I really did and I'll take credit for this, I got the Ruby community thinking about testing in a way that still goes today. I actually changed the way that Jim Weirich thought. And people still to this day, 13 years later, tell me that, "Hey, you changed the way that I look at code." That's the wins that you're looking for. Not that you were better than anybody, that you actually did this. And I'll end it with one thing. So, there's this concept of the 10X developer. This is how I look at myself as a 10X developer. Can I have impact on the world that is 10 times greater than what I could do by myself. And I don't know if I'm up at 10X, but I'm definitely some multiple above one. So I have been a net positive on the world list, I think I have. So if you can do that, I think that if you can't find that direct success, this is kind of success you should look for. JACOB: Speaking of meritocracy, I read something interesting and you all may notice that it's interesting to throw in there. So what I learned is that meritocracy was originally conceived as satire, like the word meritocracy. It was a sort of mash up between the words aristocracy and merit. Did you know this? CORALINE: I gave an entire talk dismantling meritocracy. That's one of the things I opened with. JACOB: Okay. Sorry. Well, feel free to roam with that. CORALINE: No, go for it. JACOB: So basically, the idea is like it was originally conceived as a way to sort of poke fun at the people who are claiming they got here on their own merits. It's like basically modern day aristocrats who have taken off their crowns and said that they got there on their own hard labor. And somehow the phrase has transformed into a legitimate argument for just about any kind of bad behavior that people want to use. CORALINE: It's the fucking libertarians. The libertarians have ruined everything about software development and open source. Freedom zero is libertarian. They're so transparent about it. It's those people who have fucked everything up for everybody else, more than a lot of other factors. And that makes me mad. If meritocracy were real, if you truly believe in meritocracy, you must be a white supremacist. Because all the people in charge are white dudes. So are they the best suited? Are they the most talented? Are they the smartest and the hardest workers? And that explains how they got to positions of power. Hell, no. It's white supremacy. BRYAN: Oh, my gosh. I'm going to tweet that later. Oh, I am so going to tweet that later. CORALINE: That riles me up. I'm sorry. BRYAN: No, it's fine. And you know what? I actually agree with you 100%. And you see the way that I look at the world. So, something that helps me also get to the world is I have it pinned as my Twitter quote, is this concept of me being an underrepresented person. And I say, "No, I'm not going to define myself as an underrepresented person." That's me, and it's a negative. What if I define you as an overrepresented person? And I'm here just because I'm supposed to be here. And you know what? It turns [inaudible] around. So I'm literally saying the same thing you're saying. I'm just using a different set of words. CORALINE: Yeah. BRYAN: But I actually love that way of thinking about it. If you really believe in a meritocracy, you believe in white supremacy because there is no way that all these white dudes are in charge, are the best and are best and brightest. Oh, gosh. That's a killer. That made my day. This actually made this whole session worth it. I got something really good out of this. Let me go write it down. [Laughs]. Here's another question. Do you ever talk about how people work? JACOB: On this podcast? BRYAN: Yeah, just in general. How do you make the donuts? JACOB: I think we do. I think there have been some interesting conversations. What are your thoughts about? BRYAN: So, I'm weirdo. No, I think I'm a weirdo. I believe in like the whole two monitor thing, but I only use one. I just put browsers that I don't -- it's like my scratchpad of things I don't want to look at. Go on to the other ones, so I don't have to minimize. And, you know what, Jamey, everyone is a weirdo. But I'm not talking about everyone. I don't want to call anyone else a weirdo so I can call myself a weirdo, and it's fine. But another thing I do is I write everything down and not because I don't have a good memory. Actually, I think I have an exceptional memory. But writing things down gives my brain the opportunity to consciously forget things. And I've gone to the point now if I don't write something down, it will not get done. So I am religious and I'm so religious that between my keyboard and myself is a tablet. I have an Apple pencil and iPad. I don't do much browsing on it. I actually just use it as a notebook that I can take everywhere. And I have years’ and years’ and years’ worth of notes in here where, because I read this book about AT&T and the AT&T labs. What was that called? Oh, gosh. Now, it's slipping my head. But the people who created Unix out in New Jersey and they had this concept, the engineers at the turn of the last century. So the turn of the 20th century, they would have engineers' notebooks and they would write down everything that happened to them in a day. And so, what I do is every day I create a new page and I write down all my thoughts and I write down funny things that I hear. And this helps me actually get all these things out of my head. And it's not a diary. It's not like, "Dear Diary. This is Margaret," or anything like that. It's more of if I get this out of my head, I no longer have to think about it. So it's a great way to actually go to the day. So this is what I'm getting to, is that we've run into these people that we think that are super smart. Like we run into people. I have a friend, Kelsey Hightower, who works at Google, super popular guy in the Kubernetes space, wrote a book, done a lot of talks and people just fall over his words. I think he's really smart. I have another friend. She's creating a company out in the West Coast right now. And she's very bright. People think she's very smart. And what people don't realize is that what you need to do when you're actually looking at people and you think this person is really smart. They might be really smart that one particular thing, that one particular time and you caught it, but all these other times, they use the bathroom. Sometimes they feel sick. A lot of times, they feel down and they're going through this whole thing with us right now. And the only thing they had was at the time where it can at the most, they performed. So all you need to do to be one of these people is perform or be ready to perform, which goes back to I see the world for what it is. And I really try to be prepared for everything or whatever I'm running into. And that's where my successes come from. Not because I was any smarter, or maybe I was compared to like conventional testing. Maybe I am smarter than a lot of other people, but that didn't get me. The hard work got me there. So I just want to share that. And also, I know that this is Greater Than Code, but there is a Michael Jordan documentary that I waited to the end to watch. And my wife was saying that, "Wow, he's really cocky." And I'm like, "No, I don't see that way at all." "Yeah, did he do these things that weren't always great?" "Yeah, he did." He did some things that you might not consider above board, but look at what his work ethic was. This guy said, "I'm going to win." And he did everything in his power to motivate him and the people around him to win. Maybe not everything was above board. I'm not here to judge, but I look at myself the same way. Given the opportunity, am I going to take it or expect it to come to me? I'm going to take it every single time and not expect it to come to me. And that's how I approach the world. So, it looks like I'm doing all these amazing things. It's not. It's because I bust my butt and I work a lot of hours to make this happen. CORALINE: Totally feel that. JAMEY: I really like that perspective. I'm thinking about it a little bit from the other direction, too, which is like you're talking about, looking at someone else and being like, "Are they cocky or are they confident?" And I think that if you turn that around and look at yourself, it can be like, "I want to celebrate my successes." And a lot of people have a really hard time celebrating their successes. And I think it's kind of about what you were saying about like this person, you caught them when they were saying something really smart or doing something really smart that they have expertise on. And I think that many of us have that kind of expertise and have moments like that. But because we see all of the other moments also, we feel like it waters it down. And I like the idea of saying like, "Yes, in that moment, I was the expert. I did a good job and I was really smart and I'm going to give myself credit for that." BRYAN: Yeah. And you know what, Jamey? What I like about it is that you're actually thinking about it. And that's the important piece. Your understanding that the world is not like it is just because. There's reasons. And actually sitting down and thinking to yourself, "This is why this is like this." Or, "Maybe this is why this is broken." And if you do that with yourself, then when you go into your workplace, you can start reasoning about why your work is like that. As people, we are super inconsistent. And realizing that, we're just not good where we think that even the worst of us, we think that we are so habit obsessed and things like that. No, we are inconsistent. It's human nature to be inconsistent. But being able to look at yourself constructively or critically helps whenever you go into another setting with other people, because then you can realize that, "Hey, this person is not at their best today. Maybe they had a bad night." And it's not because they're a bad person. Or they're having some other drama in their life that is affecting that. Or our department is not dysfunctional. It's actually just a communication gaps here, here, here and here. And if we fix that, maybe, we got a lot of good people who are really trying to make this work. And just being able to look at the world that way rather than, "Hey, the world sucks," or, "These people suck," and what are they doing? Let's understand that overall, many people actually, some people try to do good. Some people will try to take over the world and they will lie, cheat, and steal to get their way there. Look at our current government. But there are a lot of people out there who are trying to do good. Just the world is not giving them what they want. So what we need to understand is that people are not perfect and that everyone is just really trying to basically make it to tomorrow and then have a couple of nice things on the side. And I start doing that. And for the most part, it's helped me in a lot of cases. There's all these introspective stuff that I write down in my Dear iPad Diary about how I look at the world. And maybe I'll turn it into a book one day, but probably not because writing a book seems like it would be horrible. CORALINE: Writing books is hard. I'm trying to finish my first one right now. I've been working on it for three years. It's hard. BRYAN: Yeah. And I am succinct. When I write, I want people to read my whole sentence, so I write short ones. And that doesn't really translate into books. And I also have lots of books that I still need to read. So, I'm giving up on that one. I rather just play video games or something. CORALINE: Well, Bryan, I really appreciate the fact that you think about your impact, you think about the impact you have on other people. You watch out for them and you contribute to their success. And you still have time for video games. I would say that's a superpower. BRYAN: It is. It definitely is. So I want to say one last thing, and this will be short. Another thing is that sometimes we can't find power in ourselves. So we have to find power in something else. And one thing that I do is I am a hip hop person. I love the culture. Not even just like the music. It's the whole culture. It's the ideas that are in there. But one of the things that I do is people have their mantras that they repeat to themselves, all my mantras are hip hop verses or lines from hip hop songs. Jamey, you said something earlier that was a Jay-Z line. And Jay-Z says, "I'm not cocky, I'm confident." And it makes me think about it. Yeah, that's it. You can't call me cocky. I'm confident. And then he also has another line where he's trying to make hard things easy and impossible things possible. And I think about that, too. But then I go back to Biggie and I think about, "Well, sometimes you just can't get past it." And Biggie has things like What's Beef. And he has a whole bunch of songs talking about how he process the world and bad boys moved from silence to violence. And then I think about outcasts. I actually have an Outkast shirt. Not an Outkast shirt one. But I have one that I was going to wear. And I think about how they approach the world. He says that we're not country, we're southern. And think about that. It's not about, people have these impressions of who you are. They live in cities. They live in Atlanta. They weren't from the country. They're from the city. And I look at that for myself, that people have these impressions of who I am. And it's my goal. It is my job to show them who the person that I want to be. And then the final one is on Tribe Called Quest. And actually, that is a shirt. You all can't see it, but I'm wearing a Tribe Called Quest shirt today. And what I liked about Tribe Called Quest is that -- and this is not even a lyric. It's just the group. The group was like brothers. They did good things together. They broke up. They came back together. But they always realized they were better together. And we need to realize that we can't do all the things in our life alone. We are better with people, even though we can't always get along with them. We're always better with other people. And so, this is how I actually process life. It's always a hip hop song. But I just went to ones that people would know. But there's a song by Meek Mills called Dreams and Nightmares. And it starts off the beginning, and he's rapping real slow. He even said, like I did songs with Mariah. And then he gets tired of trying to explain himself to people. So he spends the whole half, the second half of the song yelling about all the amazing things that he has done with his life. And sometimes I think about that as well. I'm not saying you all need to do hip hop. I mean, I think more people should like the old stuff. Not this berating women and doing drug stuff that we have now. But find something that helps you channel and send in your light. And that's what I'm doing. And that's how I get to the world. And that's my last thing. CORALINE: Bryan, that was super powerful. I think we're all trying to figure out what to do with that. It sounds like a great way to end the podcast though. Seriously, that was super powerful. Bryan, it's been amazing to connect with you again. It's been a long time. I'm glad to see you are just as energized, motivated, and amazing as always. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and talking with us today. Learned a lot from you, as always. And just thanks. BRYAN: Well, thank you for inviting me. This was fun. JAMEY: Yeah, this is great. Thank you so much. JACOB: Thank you. CORALINE: If you appreciate conversations like the ones we have on Greater Than Code, I would encourage you to donate. Put your money where your mouth is. You can find us on Patreon at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Donate at any level and you get access to our Patreons only Slack community where we continue the conversation and talk to one another about the things that are important to us and find all the ways that we, as a community, are Greater Than Code. So, I would strongly encourage you to do that. And that keeps us being able to produce amazing content like you heard today. JAMEY: Additionally, right now, during the pandemic situation, we're opening up the Slack for if you can't donate, particularly if you're out of work and you want to join our community, reach out to one of the panelists or the Greater Than Code Twitter. And we're letting people in if they can't afford to donate, particularly because we're doing job postings and trying to help people with that.