In today's episode, we welcome back to the show Ali Spittel! Ali is a developer advocate at AWS Amplify. So, naturally in this episode, we discuss topics around what it means to be a developer advocate! Ali has a passion for making code accessible and fun, and you'll hear that in this episode.
In today's episode, we welcome back to the show Ali Spittel! Ali is a developer advocate at AWS Amplify. So, naturally in this episode, we discuss topics around what it means to be a developer advocate! Ali has a passion for making code accessible and fun, and you'll hear that in this episode.
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On the last episode of this show, we answered the question, what exactly is a developer advocate? In today's episode, we continue our interview with Allie Spittel, the senior developer advocate at AWS. AWS Amplify, specifically, Allie has been on Developer Tea before she has done so much in her career. You probably know her from Twitter. You might know her from dev.to, dev2. You may also know her from the podcast that she's a co-host of, the Ladybug Podcast. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Developer Tea. Let's jump into the second part of my interview with Allie Spittel. It's a hard industry. There's a reason why it's growing so fast, because it's hard, it's complex, there's a lot to learn, and there's a lot to do. And that's not changing anytime soon. Speaking of the industry and things that are difficult, I'm curious, and this is a question I haven't asked anybody else since the pandemic began, but I've started to talk about the pandemic on the show with some disclaimers that obviously I'm not a doctor or anything like that. And I don't have any epidemiology degree or anything, but I am curious. Since all of this, the pandemic experience has been something that's shared, what has been a really difficult moment? And then here's perhaps, not intuitively, what has been something that you've gained or something that has been good as a result of either being quarantined or some side effect of being a part of this collective experience of a pandemic? Oh, that's such a great question. Yeah. I actually got COVID in March of last year. So right when it came to the United States, I started in person at a new job or a new role at an old job the week that things started shutting down. And so in that three days that I was on campus, I caught COVID. And it was so early on that nobody really had any idea what was going on and everybody was freaking out about it. And it was just, I think the exact, the anxiety behind it was almost worse than the COVID itself because I just didn't know what to expect and didn't know if this was going to escalate, if I was going to end up in the hospital or if I was going to be fine. And I feel really lucky that it ended up to be okay. And that's just my experience. It's been definitely a challenge. So that was definitely the scariest part of it and probably the hardest for me. But something that I'm really excited about is how this has changed developer advocacy as a career. And I think that's a really cool thing to see. I think that's a really cool thing to see. I think that's a really cool thing to see. I think that's a really cool thing to see. I would go from one conference to the next one and would have so many speaking gigs back to back to back. And it was really overwhelming. I think that a lot of big speakers flipped between complete burnout and not wanting to speak at anything and taking on too much. And so I think, I mean, that's a very lucky and rare position. So I feel very lucky for that. But also it was unsustainable. I think in a lot of ways, the amount of in-person events that people were doing, the number of conferences that were coming out, the competition between them. And so I'm really excited that online events and the rise of asynchronous content that is being focused on due to the pandemic. I think that that's a pretty positive thing. I think that that's a pretty positive thing for our industry in a lot of ways, because people don't need to have the huge budget to travel across the world. They don't need to go to all these conferences. They have it available to them wherever they live. And I think before it really prioritized the people who live in big cities and now really anybody can partake in these communities. And I think there's a lot of really exciting things coming out of that. And I'm so excited to see people in person again, but I do think it's going to be on a little bit of a less intense scale than I expected. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. At least for me, it seems like it may be bringing bringing bringing bringing bringing Yeah, that was my next question is, do you think that we will, you know, of course we probably say, of course, I don't know, but, you know, theoretically we're not going to keep doing what we're doing right now everybody in quarantine and just kind of saying well I guess we're, you know, that phase of humanity is over where we no longer want to be around each other. I don't think that's going to happen. But I also, you know, it seems uncomfortable that we would go back to, you know, our pre COVID behaviors entirely, because there have been some kind of tangential benefits to us being forced there's this forcing function that puts us inside our homes and now suddenly we have these interesting. We're confronted with these interesting value proposition that we previously were not confronted with. So I'm curious. You know, how, how do you see us adapting over the next year or two years, five years, both in your specific world where okay we've got conferences now we're talking about maybe conferences are not going to be as much of a thing as maybe local meetups or, you know, maybe these virtual experiences or bringing like you said asynchronous content together and presenting it in new ways. Both in that regard and then also developer community and. Software engineering. More generally, do you see anything. Do you imagine anything happening in the next two to five years as you know as we readapt to whatever that new normal is. Yeah, so I've said this in the past I have this blog post about how much remote work doesn't really work for me. I personally work really well in a close knit team, and I really like interacting with people in person and. Working outside. Outside of my house. And so I have historically been not the biggest proponent of remote work. That being said, I'm actually really glad that there's been this acceleration in remote work that's happened. Because of the pandemic and for a lot of reasons, I think it's important for accessibility reasons that people who do better in a remote environment will more likely have that opportunity after this people with families people with disabilities that make it difficult for them to access. To get into an office or work in an office. People who live more. Rural I grew up like in the middle of absolute nowhere. And so the idea of being able to bring more people into the tech community because work is more decentralized. I think that's really exciting. I also think that it's exciting that most likely the. Jobs will move out of only being in San Francisco and New York City where so many jobs were. And hopefully that will. That will become a little bit less of. A hub, I guess. I think that there will be more like little hubs distributed across the country instead of you having to live in one of these cities. And I think that that's great for affordability. I think that's great for. People to be able to live where they want to live instead of being forced to live places for their jobs. So even though I'm not necessarily. The biggest remote work person. I do think that there are a lot of positives to this. Yeah, it's interesting. I think we fall on. So you don't seem extremely against it. And I'm not extremely for it, but I would probably be equally for it as you are against it. Potentially. So I'm like on the other side of the spectrum, but not extreme. And the benefit, you know, for me, remote work is. It makes the option of living. You know, for example, my family is here. Right. I have. It's taken many years for us all to kind of end up in the same geographic location. But it turns out that we're all within about 20 miles of each other. And that's a hugely valuable thing. If remote work was not possible, I would be confronted with the question. Do you leave your family for your job or not? Right. And that's a really hard question to answer. And everybody has different. Answers because everybody has different family lives. And but what's interesting about it is it means that there's this implicit selection for those. For those. Like you said, the bigger the bigger cities. Well, who is going to go to those bigger cities? Not people like me. Right. So so companies would not have people like me working for them. Very generally speaking, because it creates this selection. I won't call it a bias necessarily. But it's like a filter, I guess. A natural filter. You're not going to attract people who don't want to leave their families for their jobs. And in some ways, maybe that is what you want to attract. I don't know. It depends on who you are as a company, I suppose. But as a result of COVID potentially, but also just more generally. The kind of continued rise in remote work, I think, like you said, is making mobility. In all ways. In all of its forms or lack of mobility in all of its forms, rather less of a barrier. And I think that's important. Right. Maybe my reason is just a convenience reason. But for some people, it's not about being affordability or it's about some people stay around their families because they're caretakers for them. And they can't leave. They would be abandoning them and potentially the most important phase of their relationship. And I think that's a really hard question to solve. But as remote empowers that, I think you're spot on that this is a good thing, but shouldn't necessarily be the only thing. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm super pro the remote work movement. I think just personally working with other people a little bit more closely is more beneficial for me personally. But overall, I'm very pro the remote work movement. I think that's a really good thing. And I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. At least for me personally, I'm very pro the remote work movement and I've actually been kind of a digital nomad for the last couple of years while working remote. At least for me personally, I'm very pro the remote work movement and I've actually been kind of a digital nomad for the last couple of years while working remote. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I also believe that there is some possible positive empathy, at least short term positive empathy for people who are remote in companies that have mixed remote and non remote employees where, hey, you know what, now you understand what it feels like to be on, you know, a Zoom call and not be able to hear anybody. Right. Where previously, you know, if you had never had a remote job, certainly if you had never worked remote for an extended period, it may be hard to understand why it has unique challenges because you've never experienced those challenges. You've never not been able to hear somebody during the standoff. You know what I mean? Definitely. We'll get right back to our interview with Ali Spittel right after we talk about today's sponsor, Linode. Today, I want to talk to you about Linux virtual machines. 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Regardless of the location, you can choose the data center that is nearest to you. You also receive around the clock human support every day of the week, every week of the year with no tears, no handoffs, regardless of your plan size. You can choose shared and dedicated compute instances, or you can use your $100 in credit on S3 compatible object storage, managed Kubernetes and more. If it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode. Head over to linode.com slash developer tea. Click on the create free account button to get started. Thanks again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. Well, so this is, of course, this is a very interesting topic for a lot of people because it's a challenge to get through a collective, you know, pandemic. But I do want to continue down the road of, you know, where do you see? The the roles of engineers going. And this is unrelated to the pandemic, right? Because you work with a lot of engineers. You see a lot of the kind of higher level trends happening. I imagine, you know, what is changing about the industry that people need to be paying attention to? Oh, that's a really great question. I personally am excited about a lot of things coming out of the industry right now. I think the. One of the things that I'm most excited about and work at work on is low code solutions. I think that people think of like something like Squarespace or a form that you drag and drop or something like that. But I don't think that that's really necessarily the future. I just think that tools that make. You able to do more with less code are going to be the future. And I think that we've already had that in a lot of ways. Like the progression from writing everything. From scratch to having something like Ruby on Rails where you can generate certain things. I think that that was kind of a low code movement in a lot of ways. And then I think that we're going to go even further with that and making it so that you can have like code as a service and have. The ability to have some sort of general project that is scaffolded for you, but then you can extend it in any way with your own code. And I think that there's a lot of power to that because a code is expensive. Hiring developers is expensive. Maintaining code is expensive. Updating that code is expensive. Fixing security issues. That's a lot of work as well. And so. The less code that you can have in a lot of ways, the better and. But there's a lot of danger with that in there, it not being flexible. And so I'm really excited about these. Products that allow you to have something that you can extend completely with your own code. You can customize it yourself, but there's something there for you to start with. And I think that we've already really moved in that direction. And like, even if you work with something like next JS or Gatsby or any of these, you're probably starting with a starter. And that's not necessarily something that was true. At a different era in development. And so I think no, or low code gets a bad rap. But I think in a way that's already the way that the industry has moved. And so I think that that's just going to keep progressing. I agree. I have, I'm really interested in this discussion because I think there's something, there's a psychological effect happening here. And I want to hear your input on it. Yeah. So there's two things that come to mind as to why, you know, immediately in my developer, early developer brain, if I would have seen a low code. No code solution, especially the ones that I did see, like my mental model is dreamweaver, for example. Yeah. Or, you know, even the early Squarespace. This is in my head, the kinds of things that as a front end engineer, if somebody said, hey, oh, you don't have to learn code to be, you know, to make a website. And all of the kind of resistance things started firing because for a couple of reasons, I think there's three factors. And I'm curious about what your perspective is on these three things. The first one is probably just the idea that, hey, you know what, this is a threat to me. So we'll set that one aside because hopefully we can all say, well, if it's a threat, then it eventually will be a threat no matter what you do. So, you know, if you can't beat them, join them kind of thing. The second was, oh, wait a second. No, this is actually a quality thing, right? This. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. the third thing is trust. Maybe this thing looks fine. Maybe the code looks fine. But because I haven't kind of, you know, I haven't done it myself. And it's almost like having to trust somebody else to cook your food for you. You don't know what ingredients they're putting in there, right? You don't know what's behind the curtain. So how can I trust it? And I think that's particularly important for new products because I can trust AWS, but I don't know that I can trust the startup with a really critical function that I need to perform, right? I can trust Ruby on Rails because there's this big community, lots of tests, but I don't know that I can trust some, you know, off-brand framework that just popped up last week. Even, you know, even if it seems really cool, I'm afraid of it. So what do you think about each of those dimensions when it comes to the no-code movement? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I think to the first point that taking my job is like, developers are still going to be the people that are writing these tools, right? With each level of abstraction, the developers are just writing that higher level of abstraction than they were before. And I think we've seen that with things like WordPress and Squarespace, like there are still people behind the scenes writing the code that goes into that. So I don't think it's a threat to our job. And I think that actually it probably broadens our field a lot as well. Like the dawn of Ruby on Rails made it so that there was higher demand for developers. And I think that's a big thing. And I think that's a big thing. And I think that's a big thing. And I think that's a big thing. And I think that's a big thing. And I think that's a big thing. And I think that's a big thing. And I think that's a big thing. And there have been so many jobs with that. And so then the next piece is quality. And I think that that's something that's still being worked on for sure. But I think that we're moving in a good direction with that. Like tools like Webflow are really exciting to me because they write React code. And so you can extend that code yourself and make it so that this thing does exactly what you want to do. But visually, you can use it like a design tool. So I think that's really awesome. But quality is still definitely something that is being worked on. And then trust. I think with anything, you have to build up that trust with your user base and your audience and making it so that things aren't breaking. And I think code solutions are going to have to go through that. And low code solutions are going to have to go through that as well. So I've been working on the Amplify Admin UI as one of my main projects recently. And what this allows you to do is visually create a backend schema. So when you're creating a backend, you have to, or a database, you have to essentially decide what tables are going to be there, what fields, what data types they are. And this allows you to do that visually. And then the backend is generated for you. And then you can add authentication and change that down the road. And then all of that is there for you to extend with your own code. You can use the command line interface to work with it and all that too. And then you can add authentication and change that down the road. So really thinking about developers first. And I think that that's something that maybe has been lacking in previous low code or no code solutions is that the developers are kind of the second party to all of this. They're the people who may extend it someday, but aren't necessarily who is thought of first. But I think that there's a real power in the future where we're thinking of tools that make developers as fast as possible. And again, I think that's something that's going to be a big part of the future. And I think that's something that's going to be a big part of the future. I already see things like Ruby on Rails or Gatsby templates or any of these types of movements as already going in that direction, even though they are developer first. And I think that those are really great prototypes for what this may look like in the future. I agree. I agree. I present those because they're kind of the hard problems to solve. They're human problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some kind of these deep psychological issues. But you're right that we have these approaches that are basically we have abstractions that we are responsible for as engineers. And I think that it's important that we understand that the abstractions don't make it so that anybody at all can do these things. And it's not because... We want to lower that bar. We want more people to be able to do this stuff. That's the whole point, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The more complexity we can kill, the more likely we're able... But the interesting thing is what it means for software engineers is not that you're going to stop doing this. It's just that you're going to be able to do more with less. And that is a critical component of building efficient teams. It's a critical component of adding new value where there previously wasn't any. So I think that's kind of a... An entry-level point to make when these discussions are had that the no-code movement is not about replacing developers. It's not about saying, oh, we need to save some money so we're going to get the same fundamental thing done with less money. It's we want to do more, right? We can build more with the same resources. That's not to say that... Companies won't take advantage of that. But it's rather that that's not the whole point, right? We're going to be able to produce more value per dollar or per developer hour. Definitely, definitely. And I also want to call out the difference between the no-code movement and the low-code movement because I think that they are a little bit different. The no-code, from what I have seen, is mostly a community of people who are indie makers. People who are building solo... Co-founded startups who are trying to scale quickly, might not be technical themselves. There's a group called MakerPad who really focuses on this. I think it's a really cool community to watch. But they use tools like Airtable or Google Sheets or Squarespace to build products. And I think that that's a really, really cool movement as well. But I think the low-code movement, at least to me, is what I am most excited about because it's this kind of hybrid of we're making super developer-friendly products. But you don't have to write all the code yourself. It's kind of taking that convention over configuration to the next level. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that will help me increase my trust, right? It's kind of the idea that I don't want you to build the house for me. I want you to provide the materials for me. Give me the components and I will build the house. Don't give me the pre-built house, right? And I think knowing... Okay, this is how this component, kind of the inputs and outputs work. And we have to talk very generally about this stuff. But it gets very specific, right? It's, oh, I'm passing this X, Y, and Z. I can even go and look at this component and see how it works if I want to. But I don't have to do... But I don't want you doing everything. And also, I don't want to do everything. Let's share the load a little bit and abstract on top of these things. Definitely. And I think one of the best examples of this is authentication. Like, if you've ever done your own authentication system from scratch, it's a nightmare. Even working with things like Passport, which I think makes the process easier, I still think that the logic involved in that is really heavy. And getting a new developer able to build that authentication themselves is a really tough process. And it leaves all sorts of possibilities for security risks and all of that as well. And so, I think... I think that that's a place where you've already seen products like Cognito or Auth0 that you can set it up and plug in some components or a service on the back end. But you don't have to do very much yourself in order to get all this working. And it's going to be more secure because there's actually experts writing this for you instead of you rolling it yourself. And you're going to have something that is going to have a lot less bugs than writing it from scratch as well. Yeah. So, that's what I kind of think of when I think about it. I think of low-code as these services that you can use to scale faster. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Allie, thank you so much for joining me for this interview. I guess it'll be two parts by the time that we edit this together. I have one more question for you. I think we probably covered the two final questions in the last episode. But I have one more question for you. What do you now... What do you wish more people would ask you about? Oh, that's such a great question. And I think you got me with this last time too. I think it's how do we enable developers to be better and how do we enable them to enable their lives to be a little bit easier? And so I think this is really the conversation that we just had over the last few minutes and no matter what we call it. Um, that's kind of what we've been talking about is how do we make the next generation of development even better, making it so that products are more accessible, better, more performant, more, um, and easier to build. And so I think that's the conversation that I'm really excited about. Yeah. So if anybody encounters you, that's what they should... That's the kind of question that you would like to be asked and maybe that would spark a good conversation. Yeah, for sure. Awesome. Allie, thank you so much for joining me. And, uh, where can people go to learn more about what you're doing or learn more of your thoughts? Ooh, I'm aspiddle pretty much everywhere. Twitter's kind of feels like my hub of where I talk about all the other things that I'm doing, but my blog is welearncode.com and I have YouTube and Twitch and Clubhouse and all those things as well. Awesome. Thanks so much for joining. Thank you. Thank you. Another huge thank you to Allie Spittle for joining me on. Today's episode of Developer Tea. You can find her all over the internet, uh, at, at a Spittle. Thank you so much for listening to this show. The show wouldn't happen without you, of course, and our wonderful sponsors. Today's episode was sponsored by Linode. Head over to linode.com slash developer tea. That's at linode.com slash developer tea. Click on the create free account button and you can get a hundred dollars worth of free credit. Linode is just handing out a lot of money to Developer Tea listeners, and you can be one of those people. You can use that credit on virtually anything that Linode has to offer. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you want to join the Developer Tea discord community where we can discuss things like the things we talked about on this episode, head over to developertea.com slash discord. Until next time, enjoy your tea.