In today's episode, I interview Dain Miller, creator of Start Here FM. This interview is completely packed, so make sure you subscribe if you don't want to miss the next part! Today's episode is sponsored by Pusher. Build awesome realtime features faster with Pusher. Focus on the application, not the infrastructure! Get started today at https://spec.fm/pusher
In today's episode, I interview Dain Miller, creator of Start Here FM. This interview is completely packed, so make sure you subscribe if you don't want to miss the next part!
Today's episode is sponsored by Pusher. Build awesome realtime features faster with Pusher. Focus on the application, not the infrastructure! Get started today at spec.fm/pusher
How would you parse a million podcast feeds? My guest today, Dane Miller, has done exactly that. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. You're listening to Developer Tea, and I'm very excited to interview Dane. Dane is the Director of Tech at Stitcher and Midroll. You may be listening to today's episode on Stitcher, and Dane is working at Stitcher with tons of podcast feeds. We're going to talk a little bit about that. He also is the host of Start Here FM, a podcast for beginner developers. Formerly, he worked on tech innovation at the White House. We're going to talk about a lot of this stuff in today's episode. I'm really excited to have Dane Miller on the podcast. Testing. Okay, cool. Recording my end. So, sure. I was just going to ask, though. So, you're a Director of Tech over at Whiteboard? I am. Yeah, that is the official title. You're the only other Director of Tech that I know. Everybody else seems to be just, you know, a Director of Engineering. And I'm always, like, trying to look up online, what is the difference? Like, is there even a difference? And it's absolutely, it seems that it's just a random word. It's unclear. Yeah, it's unclear. You know, I like to think that we're going to include this in the podcast. We didn't have the official. Sure. So, welcome. So, that's fine. I like to think that the title Director of Technology implies that, you know, it's more than engineering, right? So, like, part of my job is looking into the future, or at least trying to, attempting to look into the future and predict what's coming next. And it may be that engineering is not the next wave for us, right? It could be that we're going to, we need to adapt to a different thing. Yeah. And understand. Understanding tech is really my job. It's not just understanding code, but also understanding how that code affects culture and how it affects the people around me and how developers engage with that. And I think that's very well said, and I've never heard anybody say it that well. But I think also, Director of Engineering is such a, you're backing yourself into a corner already. Because what if one day a solution is a third-party piece of software that you need to leverage? Well, if you, you know, if you really are. If you're over-engineering everything, that's never ideal. But Director of Tech, yeah, we have that ability to kind of step back from the business and look forward and say, okay, you know, I'm going to acquire this third-party software, right? Yeah. That we don't have to build, necessarily. Right. And that's kind of why, you know, these titles, this is actually something I've been thinking about quite a bit, so I'm glad you brought it up. But titles are going to become kind of elusive as we move into the future anyway. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The people that are closest to you, and particularly the ones that you think are, you know, don't be mean about it, but the ones that you kind of respect and are a little bit smarter than the average Apple, if you ask them what they want to do in 20 years, very few are going to give you a job title. Yeah. Most are probably going to give you a softer answer about who they would like to be in 20 years because job titles are shifting so rapidly. So, you know, soft. developer is going to look very different even in two years from now than it does today. Do you think everybody's going to be a consultant? Because what you're referring to, it seems like is this broadening of interest, right? Like people want to do so many different things. So it seems like this consult, this rise of the consultant is going to continue the independent consultant, right? Even more so than freelancer. Freelancer was a popular term back in the day, not so much anymore, right? If you want to be credible. I think that that's a really good insight. I do think that, you know, if you compare the shape of the movement from, let's say the 1970s to now, in the 1970s, if you said you were a computer programmer, that meant maybe one or two things, right? Like you're very unlikely to be way outside of this relatively narrow group of people who are writing assembly code or doing punch card code, right? Very unlikely that you're going to be doing something wildly different from that. But today, if you say you are a computer programmer, you could be writing in one of thousands of languages, or you could be doing something totally different that people, you could even be designing your own language. And then on the far flip side, you could be doing database query, big data, you know, what is the name of it? Big SQL or whatever. Right. On the total opposite end of the spectrum or metaprogramming, or maybe you're teaching people about programming theory and you consider yourself a computer programmer. These are all wildly different from each other. And it's partially because, you know, that job title is no longer, it's too large to really narrow down what a person does. And I do think that we're going to see the same type of thing happen to that wide term of consultant, right? Right. We have consulting in all different areas, obviously, but we may have something very specific in technology consulting that can't really be captured just by the word consultant. And while things are broadening, I 100% agree, while things are broadening, interests are broadening, and all the education that we have access to, or education material, I guess, that we have access to is broadening. The need for specialists is increasing in some ways. It's broadening and deepening. It's very strange. Yeah, exactly. And I totally am on board with you, that job title aspect. I'm curious, like when people ask you, what do you do? For me, as a director of technology, sort of director level at a company for more than three or four years, I still say programmer, or some weeks I'll say manager, you know, if I'm feeling particularly good about my job at the time. But it's funny, I don't like necessarily say what my job title is. And I've, you know, I've been doing a lot of research on that. Do you do that as well? Yeah, I would say 90% of the time, I will answer with, because most of the time, they're not looking to have a deep discussion when they ask me what I do. And so I'll tell them, well, usually I write code, and I help other people write code, right? And that's, that's like a simplified way of saying, you know, I, I do write code, but I also oversee other people who write code. But the reality of what I do is significantly different than that, right? Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. a different thing that they really want to be known for. I want to be known for teaching. And that's that, again, that is quite a broad thing, but I do kind of a teacher at heart. And so if I go a day or if I go a week, or especially if I go a year without teaching, then something's wrong, right? Part of the reason I started developer tea. So when somebody really wants to have this discussion, like you are asking me right now, that's where I start going with my discussion. Yeah, I'm the same way. I have such a passion for teaching as well. That's why I started my thing. I'm curious though, like when we're talking about your job title, there are so many different aspects that it encompasses and we can transition to questions that you want to ask in a minute, but I'm just curious, like, what is it that you find the most challenging being a director of technology and engineering? Is it dealing with stakeholders or is it looking into the future and making strategic technology decisions? Or, is it just the day-to-day? What aspect is super challenging? I would say people. And that, again, a very broad answer to a very specific question, but the hardest thing that I deal with is managing the misconceptions or the natural biases that people have, both on my team and in the client world, as well as users, broad user spectrum. Dealing with the dissonance between the way I'm thinking and the way someone else is thinking, or the dissonance between the way I think something should be and the way that the client is requesting for it to be, that really is kind of the big problem, right? It's never going to be actually solved. It's only going to be dealt with. And we had a guest come to Whiteboard recently and do a kind of a guest talk about that. And I think that's a really good question. Speaking session with our team. And he mentioned this quote. I don't know if it's his quote or not, but he said, there's no future without conflict. And I thought that was so profound and so true. Really, the personal conflict, and it's not just interpersonal like me to you, it's conflict in large, right? Conflict between the way I think something should be and the way a large number of other people are. And I think that's a really good question. It's conflict between the way I think something should be and the way a large number of other people think it should be and conflict between my team members. And managing that is far harder than deciding what new language to learn. Yeah, for sure. Today's episode is sponsored by Pusher. If you don't have live features in your application, meaning real time, things that are happening where the user is interacting with something like push notifications or a chat message, you can use Pusher to do that. And if you don't have that in your application, then you probably are missing out on a lot of value that you can provide to your users. Pusher makes this easy, incredibly simple. No matter what language you're using, Pusher's hosted API makes it simple to add these real time features to your web and your mobile applications in just minutes. And you can scale it up massively. Pusher has this simple methodology of working on top of websites, and you can scale it up massively. And you can scale it up massively. to send messages between your client and your server. What this means is insanely fast and responsive applications for your users. Of course, Pusher is built to grow, you can start with a free plan today. But you can scale up to a massively large plan if you'd like. For example, other companies that are using Pusher, GitHub, intercom, MailChimp, and the New York Times, they all use Pusher to build their real time features. So if you're a user, you can scale up to a massively large Go check it out spec.fm slash pusher to find out more and sign up for the free plan. That's spec.fm slash pusher. What would you say your biggest challenge is? Both? Maybe we ask or answer this question twofold. What is the biggest technical challenge that you're facing as of late? And then what is the biggest challenge overall for you? Well, I think overall, I'll start there. You know, what you mentioned about conflict, that's huge. To me, and that's something I'm passionate about, because dealing with so many different stakeholders, you as a director of technology, you kind of sit at the intersection of a bunch of teams, that's kind of your job is to sit on that intersection correctly. And that means, you know, communication and everything else. But in the book, Creativity Inc, by the Pixar guys, they actually talk about one of their favorite days at work is uncovering deep conflict in the team. Fantastic. And I love that idea. Like the most creativity in the world comes from like this deep conflict. I don't know if that's true, but that's what the book said. And I thought that just resonated with me so much. And at work, I see that all the time. You know, it's always the best technology decisions are hashed out over a whiteboard, you know, with some conflict. It's just always the way it is. You know, the best one-on-ones are where I'm being super blunt, you know, and I've gotten to this point in my career where everything I say now, most of the time, it's a little bit conflict. It's a little bit too blunt. And I find that to be just so powerful for the team. And the important thing there to note is that you're not shying away from conflict, which actually creates unhealthy scenarios, right? When you shy away from conflict, it doesn't remove the conflict. The interesting part of this to me, I'm also reading Creativity Inc, by the way, is a fantastic book. I've got it sitting on my shelf and it's actually the CEO at Whiteboard actually bought everybody a copy at Whiteboard because it's so transformative in the way he was thinking at the time. But another book that I'm reading, and I've already mentioned it on the podcast, and I'm kind of a super fan at this point, but Thinking Fast and Slow. And they talk about this cognitive dissonance between your system one and system two thinking, et cetera, et cetera, right? And so it's the ability to reason through, you know, I'm going to ignore this conflict in my thinking brain, right? I'm going to actively suppress on purpose. I'm going to actively suppress this conflict. But your intuition or your fast thinking brain, as they talk about in the book, still knows that it's there and you still feel the looks around the room, right? You still feel that dissonance and it doesn't really go away. And in fact, it can become worse and it becomes ingrained into your brain in a lot of ways. That's a fantastic insight. But that's a great... That's a great thing to cue off of too. And I love being in person. I work remotely. I've worked remotely for the past four or five years now. And I love being in person because I can cue off that feeling of awkwardness when I'm being too blunt and stuff like that. Because I find that that's a huge challenge is, you know, I like to lead by inspiration, not by fear. So for me, like being blunt is inspiring to people because in a corporate environment, it's typically the opposite. So if, you know, when you can inspire people in that way, but then you have to walk the line of like, am I being too forward? You know, am I saying a little bit too much? Because you want to lead people. You don't want to slam them into a wall, you know, just with information. That's not leading them. You want to kind of lead, you know, you don't necessarily want to hold their hand, but you want to parcel out information that helps them over time. So it's not overwhelming, right? So that they can kind of take it and take action on it and then continue and take action on the next piece. Yeah, that's a really good. You know, a sign of a healthy or, well, let's say a sign of an unhealthy culture is when somebody tries to hide bad information, right? Bad news. That's a good point. And one of the things that I, one of my early days at Whiteboard, I was personally in a client meeting where I was fired. And, you know, this client, I have a perfectly fine relationship with them at this point. And, you know, all is good. And we no longer work together, but one of the most compelling moments of my career up until now was that day, because the very first thing that I, like my gut instinct was to call my boss and let him know. And this is a sign of a healthy culture, right? Because if you are afraid to tell your boss something, then you're afraid of some kind of negative punishment of your situation, right? And this isn't to say that you won't ever have that consequence. Are unhealthy, right? That's not the point, but instead that you view your boss as someone who is on your side, right? Or if you don't want to use the word boss, you view your coworkers as people who are on your side and you share that vulnerability, you share that loss with them, perhaps just as much as you share a win with them. Yeah, totally. That's a fascinating aspect. And that is the ultimate sign of a healthy culture is I feel free to talk to my boss. Almost like a friend, but you know, not to, you know, perhaps get too friendly across that line as well. I'm curious for you, have you done a lot of stuff where your company has like satellite offices and you have to kind of interface with teams and a bunch of different satellite offices? Is that how whiteboard is set up? It's a good question. We actually have one main office and then we have a couple of remote workers. The interesting thing is that our remote workers, actually, we have two remote workers at the moment. We're still a relatively small firm. We have about 25 people at the moment, but those two people started out in full time on site. So we don't really have a lot of remote work. We do a lot of work. In fact, I would say the vast majority of our work is done for remote clients rather than local clients. Interesting. So in a way- You have a lot of- Yeah. Experience with that in a way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In a way it's, if you view them as a collaborator, which we do, then that kind of has that feel, right? And it is extreme. So to your point, it is extremely difficult to maintain the same level of clarity and relational intuition with people who are distant, physically distant from you, right? Yeah. I was just going to, you know, just to, to circle back around to your original question, what are some difficulties? The satellite office thing is huge. I mean, we, and that's why I was so curious to hear your answer. We grew, I, you know, I started with mineral. We were like 14 people. Now we're, you know, 150 or something like that. We're purchased by a company that's much bigger. So as you go through those transitions from one office to the other, it's funny how you watch complexity get exponentially harder to deal with, you know, human to human interaction specifically. And I think that's what you were talking about. Like people, people are the hardest. I totally agree. Like the technology from one satellite office to another is the easiest thing to set up the motivation for an individual in that satellite office to communicate, to over communicate to the others. That's way harder. Like how do you even do that? And I've found that to be that, you know, that's pretty challenging. So I have a question about a theory. I'm going to present this theory to you and you tell me if it, if it hits your ears, right. As someone who is dealing with this problem that you're talking, about, um, recently our, our CEO, he went to a conference and Andy Crouch was at this conference. I don't know if you're familiar. Uh, Andy's a cultural, cultural thinker writer. And, uh, Andy mentioned this idea of bandwidth of information. So, uh, if we were to quantify the information that we take in, in our natural environment, say in a face-to-face conversation, it's going to be a massive amount of information, right? We have a lot of visual cues. We have, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, true 3d, uh, to the highest, um, uh, degree of quality, right. Um, something that's incredibly hard to replicate. In fact, perhaps impossible or close to impossible to replicate perfectly in a digital space. And so the idea of, uh, communicating through 140 characters or, uh, through a low quality audio stream, like you and I are doing right now, um, that idea is effectively compressing that communication stream. And so what you could be receiving through, like you were saying earlier, the face-to-face cues and the intuition that you can build, um, just being in the same room with someone that's, that is significantly harder quite simply because the number or the amount of information that you're, that you're getting is massively compressed. Um, most, most when it is text only, right. And then, uh, progressively better as we can see people's faces and see, um, their, their expressions and hear the tonality in their voice, but significantly different from sitting in a room still. Yeah. And that's what's when the days where I feel super unmotivated about being a manager at a tech company, I think of reading Richard Dawkins in the selfish gene. He reminds us about these amazing facts. Like our brain was built for thousands and thousands of years ago. Yeah. And you were talking about the reason it is so hard is because it's so new and it, we're literally on the forefront and the days when I feel super unmotivated, I remember that and I'm like, okay, it is hard. That's straight. It's straight up hard. And you know, I step up to the plate because we're, we're still kind of exploring and figuring all this out. And it's cool for people like you and I to be given the privilege, you know, to, to be able to do that and not taking that for granted is awesome. Yeah. A hundred percent. You know, something you said actually reminded me, so we have these kind of primitive brains, right. That are, that are primed for something entirely different from what we do regularly and in our bodies can't really even cope. We're, we're doing pretty bad at the coping side of this. We're trying our best and we're getting better at it. Right. And that's, at least that's the hopeful, the hopeful perspective of this situation. Eventually our brains will catch up, but that's, that's, you know, in terms of scientific proof, at least it seems like it's a pretty, far way away, well beyond our lifetime. So it's unlikely that we're going to evolve fast enough to really understand how to do this perfectly or, or, or significantly better. I'm interested to know, this is kind of, this is, this is related. So it's going to seem like a jump, but have you ever taken the, the Enneagram test? It's a personality quiz. No, I have not. I love personality tests and figuring out what type of person I am, but I've never heard of this one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This one is, is a very good one. I haven't taken like the official one with the book. I've taken the, the, the online free version, which is still surprisingly insightful, I thought. But I read some of the stuff about my personality and my personality for anybody who's wondering, I am a five on the Enneagram, which effectively means that I am, I'm kind of in my head a lot and I'm kind of withdrawn and really appreciate academic pursuit and that kind of stuff. One of the things that the Enneagram test does is it does a lot of research on the, on the, on the, on the, on the Enneagram. And one of the things that the Enneagram talks about is connecting with your growing, the growth version of yourself. So in other words, what are your, what are you doing when you are progressing and what are you doing with, when you are digressing? And when I am progressing, I'm rejecting some of my natural desires to, to, to live in my head. And instead I, I do something that is more like a full body. Right. So something as simple as full body exercise can massively affect the way my brain is working for the next 24 hours. And I've seen this, you know, anecdotally of course, but I've seen this at play in my own life and it's, it's pretty amazing actually. But like how many years, just like me, probably as a technologist, like it took me so many years to get that through my thick skull that you need to do full body exercises. Like I finally got it a couple of years ago or whatever. And especially, recently, you know, the stress that comes from being in your head all the time, it's just, you know, it can be totally dampening on creativity and everything. So I've, I've had to get that lesson quite a few times. We, we trust ourselves too much. You know, I was, I actually recently bought tickets to go skydiving and, and I'm really excited about it. So this is, this is kind of an interesting, interesting statistic. Um, uh, exercise for you. If I were to tell you, um, that you have a choice, you can either go skydiving, drive in a car, uh, or, or go swimming, which of those is, is the most dangerous thing you can do. Uh, what would, what would the intuitive response be for most people? And I'm already kind of giving it away by, by framing it this way. Most people would say that, that the intuitive response, uh, or that immediately their, their thought of that would be, oh, of course skydiving, right? Because our brains are substituting the, the out of control nature, or at least the seemingly out of control nature of skydiving. They're using that as some malformed heuristic for safety. Statistically speaking, you're 26 more times likely to die in a car wreck than you are, uh, to, to die skydiving. And it's, it's amazing to, to think about it that way because we think we're more in, when we are in control, things are safer, right? Like I like to think that as long as I am the one who is authoring my car, um, that I can control my risk and statistically it's overwhelmingly the opposite. Yeah. What an incredible insight. I mean, the, that insight on just for pushing your comfort zone, I think in and of itself is insight enough. There's this great book that I love called mindset, the new psychology of success. And it talks all about this, like growth mindset versus fixed mindset that I found really useful, which is basically this idea that anytime you're in a situation, most people that succeed, they tend to be in all the same situations that the people that fail are. Everybody's kind of given the same opportunity. And I know that's not politically correct and it's not actually true, but typically throughout your life, you'll get about the same opportunities as everybody else. The P in the book, they go on to say like the people that succeed when they fail, they just take that next step that pushes their comfort zone. Yeah. And that's how you get into your career. You know, that's how you got at this level in your career. Whereas a bunch of other people perhaps aren't at that level that, that you even started with. And it's because of your ability to constantly push that boundary. And I think we so often take that, take that for granted, you know, or we think about it and we know it, but we don't take action on it. You know, I know a lot of people that say they know that, but they aren't doing the actions that sort of reflect that knowledge. That wraps up the first part of my interview with David. I'm so excited to be here with David. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here with you. I'm so excited. I got to talk with Dane. This interview is a three-part interview. Please come back and check it out. Check out the second part of the interview with Dane Miller. You can always subscribe in whatever podcasting app if you don't want to miss out on future episodes of Developer Tea, including the remainder of this interview. Highly encourage you to do that. And also I challenge you to share this with one person that you believe will be challenged by the conversation that Dane and I are having. And I also challenge you to start a conversation. Start your own conversations around this content. That is the reason I'm creating this show three times a week. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you again to today's incredible sponsor, Pusher. If you aren't building real-time features in your application, you may be leaving huge opportunities on the table to create insane amounts of value for your users. Go and check out what Pusher has to offer. They are making real-time features, and they are ideal for you as a developer. You can focus on the application. Thank you again to Pusher for sponsoring. Go to spec.fm slash pusher to learn more and sign up for a free account. Thank you again for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Again, the challenge today is to subscribe in whatever podcasting app you use, and then start a conversation about today's episode with someone you know, someone who will listen to it with you, and someone who will have a critical conversation. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode, and until next time, enjoy your tea.