DevCongress Echo [EP2]: Stefan Froelich's journey so far.

Welcome to the DevCongress podcast. This is a podcast where we delve into the fascinating world of tech. Each week, we bring you thought-provoking conversations with leading voices in the industry and the community. From seasoned developers to aspiring coders, we've got something for everyone. Stay tuned for an insightful journey. Hello and good afternoon to everyone on here. This is Nathan speaking, DevCongress admin, DevCongress podcast host, DevCongress echo. And on here, I have Stefan Froelich. Stefan, did I get your name right? Yeah, Stefan Froelich. Oh, okay. Either one is fine. Stefan Froelich, right. That is not a Ghanaian name, I believe. No, it's German. German? I'm not German, so, yeah. Das ist Deutscher. Nein, I can speak to save my life. Okay. It's Lennon Deutsche. It's Deutsche or whatever, man. I don't even know what I'm saying. It's all just Duolingo stuff. I don't agree. It's all just Duolingo stuff, man. Anyways, man, it's good to have you on here, man. I'm a huge fan, by the way. I just want to start with that. I'm a huge fan of your work. I think you used to be at Petra, right? Used to be is a tricky word. Yes, I used to be full-time at Petra. Okay. But I've been consulting for them since. Awesome, awesome. But currently working on Achieve with them. Achieve is actually a special product for them. Awesome, awesome. It is a good product, by the way, a product that I also use, so I'm quite happy with what y'all guys are doing over there. Investing isn't easy in this Ghanaian landscape and making it reachable to the masses, it's a little bit more difficult than people might think. So, I mean, having discussed some regulations and all of that before the tech challenges itself, I think there's a massive milestone and y'all need to be celebrated for what you're doing for the masses. Okay. So, for the intro, let me introduce you, and then after that, you introduce yourself. All right, so I've been on your socials, I've been on your LinkedIn, I've been on your Exes. Not Exes, like female Exes, but Ex, a.k.a. Twitter. Yeah. The platform used to be known as Twitter. Yeah, yeah. So, I was on your LinkedIn, I was looking at... I used to be on LinkedIn a lot, and I think that of Adam and that of Boo Boo, they say when you're trying to reach something somewhere, you have to have people that you're looking up to, right? So I was like, yeah, some that want to be big like these guys, some that want to be in Deaf Congress doing things for people, some that want to... I was just like, some that want to be like these guys. So I was looking up your profile, looking up that of Adam, and where these people started from, and where they are now, where they're going. So I was on your Twitter, and I remember some time back, I used to follow you some time back. I still follow you now, though, but some time back, I used to follow you, and once in a while, you changed from Damn Tech Guy to this, you changed from that profile name to the other. I'm like, what's up with this guy? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was like, what's up with this guy, man? And then I remember one time, too, you posted this really nice shoe on your Twitter. I think it was this black worn-out shoe, I think it was the right side that you posted. And in the background, I think I could see a picture of your mom, and I think a picture of you or something like that. And I was like, damn, this guy's not, did not have it as good as I've been thinking it is. It looks like he's a asshole like me, right? So from that, I was like, nah, man, this guy's for real. If anyone's doing this thing right, if anyone's been learning it somewhere as huge as he is now, this is someone I must follow for real. But then on your Twitter back then, you were not posting a lot of tech stuff. It was like you come there to chill, so I was like, I was doing what I wanted to be doing as well. Can you tell us a little bit about that, like all the way from then, how your journey began? Yeah, basically that. Why don't you introduce yourself? Introduce yourself and tell us about that, too, because I'm really into that shoe story. I want to know how come a huge man like you is wearing that shoe. Yeah, later on. Okay, so as you said already, I'm half German, half Ghanaian. I was born and raised in Ghana. Lived all my life here. So if you ask me, I consider myself Ghanaian. I don't consider myself German at all in any way. I was born in 89. Schooled. I've lived in many places in Ghana, so moved around from the north, done some commerce here and there, and just basically moved around. So after senior high school, which I attended in Notre Dame, that's in Navongo, I decided that I didn't really care what I wanted to do in university because I just wanted a degree. So I said I wanted an easy course, and I chose agricultural tech. That was the biggest scum of my life. I got to school and I realized that I could have chosen a more difficult course to go to. But school-wise, I never really had much of a challenge. I have never been the first person in class, but I'm never the last either. Like you did in high school. Exactly. I tend not to study too much, but just make sure I pass my exams and get out. So I'm somewhat level 200, I think, like that. No, no, no. I'm level 200. Back then, we were doing online forums. So the way we used to... There were these mobile forums that you could set up. There was a site called mobile.web.ca, and you could go there and set up your own forum. So we had two prominent forums. One was GhanaWeb, and one was Ghana... Oh, I forgot what the other one was. But we had a beef online, right? Two forums. We managed to get a password of one guy, and then we cracked... We hacked their forums and deleted all their forum posts. Wow. Two communities beefing. Before this, I already had a lot of computers. I never owned ones. I had friends who did, so I learned how to use them. I never knew how to program. I had no clue what programming was. I just knew when I was younger that I wanted to build something like JetAudio, if you recall JetAudio. I don't think I know JetAudio. I'm probably too young to know that. Yeah, it's an old music player. It was one of the best back in the day. Was it like Winamp? It was like Winamp. Ah, okay. Winamp and JetAudio were around the same time. So, around this time, when we did this, one of my friends who I live with, who was in my forum, sent me a phishing link. It was a Facebook phishing link, right? Yeah. And I realized it after I'd submitted my password. So I managed to go restore my account, and then go to him and ask him, and then he said, hey, come and look at this. So he showed me a PHP script. And before this, I tried to learn programming. So the first thing I did was, I was trying to learn C, C++. And back then, you'd go to the cafe, save the webpages, copy them onto a drive, come home and try to work through. Any executables you needed, you would search for like three, four hours, download them, come home and then try to replicate. But it was kind of difficult. I got stuck somewhere around... I think what I got was reads. I got messed up. And this was C, right? This was C. And I moved on to learning these things, batch scripts. So that was the colleague I'm talking about, who I'm on the forum with. So we're creating these tiny batch scripts. We had this fun stuff where you would put a batch script and someone starts up, and any time it started, it would restart. Cool tricks like storing files inside of image metadata. So you could take a file, store it in an image metadata, and then others see the image, but you have a file in there. So we're doing all these cool small tricks, but not really programming, right? Yeah, no. So a colleague of mine introduced me to Python. I started out with Python. I went, went, went, went. I got to object-oriented, and then I got messed up again. I was not really grokking it. It was a little tricky. And then I didn't also know how to find packages. Okay. So in the examples of the tutorial, What year was this by then? What year was this? Level 200 would have been 09, 08? Oh, nice. I think I just written my B so you don't. Yeah. This was 2008. So we've, again, we're still learning these things, going through them. And I didn't want to find packages in Python because, okay, what if I want to do this? I didn't know that you could go look at packages or them or whatever. So I kind of abandoned Python at that point. Then this dude phished my account and then showed me PHP. All right. And then he showed me PHP. I said, well, let me look into PHP and see how PHP works. And PHP is what actually made it click for me because in PHP, the standard library contains almost anything you need to do. So you didn't have to worry about going to find extra packages to do things. Everything was in the language. And you could just search. Okay, if I want to do this, and then there's a function, almost a function for it in the standard library. So with PHP, I started, I was building apps and it was working out. My dad sent me a laptop in level 200. It was a small, medium Aquila. Remember these books? And I spent the rest of my three years programming, like almost every day learning, trying to figure things out. I think at some point I spent three, four months indoors without ever. Wow. For like four months. I really, I really love programming. So I was just into it. Came out of school, tried to find a job. Back then, programming jobs were not like, nobody was hiring. If you were a programmer, it was just for you. You couldn't even find people to build a community with. So all of my communities were online. Coding talk, it still exists. I went there and saw, recently I saw some posts that friends of mine had done, and I would try to catch up. It was fun. Came out of school, national service, I got accepted into Fidelity Bank. I luckily was asked what I wanted to do. And I said, I wanted to be in IT. All right. So I thought I was going to go learn programming or build programs. I went into IT and it was pure. Not even networking. I started off at a service desk. Okay. So started off at a service desk. And because it was pure IT where we did networking, all that stuff, I managed to learn all of these things on the job. I'm still not a network guy, but I can just sort of figure my way around. But I don't consider myself a network guy. Okay. Hold on to that for a bit. Before you jump into what you are doing, like for your first job, I think I remember you posted another thing on your Twitter. I went like way back though. What you posted was, I think was this, was it Cadbury Quiz Challenge something? And I think you were on TV with some squad. Zane Quiz. It was a Zane Quiz Challenge. Yeah, yeah. So this was, yeah, it was an inter-university challenge for universities from across West, no, from across Africa, actually no, West and Africa. I don't think South Africa was included, but the way it worked was they had this program where it was a fast-paced quiz, mainly trivia. And we applied with an exam, got selected, did training for some months, and then we went to, we came to Accra, Mabadi, and then we did like qualifications among the Ghanaian team. So four of us were picked, four universities were picked, and then we went on to Uganda. So in Uganda, two of us moved on. I think we moved on with Ligon, and then we got to the quarterfinals before we were kicked out. That was a really good experience. Awesome, awesome. So guys, as you can see, the damn tech guy is not dumb at all. He can screw you on any topic, literally. Yeah, let's go back to when you started working as an IT. What exactly were you doing then? Yeah, so help desk, initially just answer calls, go under people's desk, speak to them, make connections, people can boot up, set up things. And we used to use 10 clients back then, which was, you would have one CPU, and then multiple, we used to call them N, N computing. I've done a lot of that. N computing clients. Yes, thank you. N computing clients, and it was a heck. Yeah. People could not really, like always, every morning, you had to go help people set up. Yeah. Did that, a few programming things came up. There was one here and there. But it wasn't, the company itself was not really interested in internal development. So I realized that I was going to die. But around the same time, Android came out. So, I started learning Android. By then I was learning Java. So, I learned Android, I built myself a small program. And then I found a dude who, wanted us to partner to build something. So, I ended up building, my music app that I said I was going to. Yeah. We initially called it W-H-I-S-S-P-A. And then, we went on to, rebrand and redevelop, and do everything. And we called it Yuma Play. So, Yuma, in my language means, music. Okay. So, Y-U-M-A-P-L-A-Y. So, Yuma Play. We were way ahead of our time. It was music streaming. You had offline, offline downloads. You had, all of that stuff that now you have in Spotify. Well, of course, Spotify is way more advanced. Yeah. But, back then we, we were doing what these guys were not doing. So, we also came with Sigo. What? Deezer. Oh, Deezer. Yeah. Deezer. Yeah. So, we were before Deezer. But, there was never really any traction. One, we didn't know how to run a company. So, nobody was streaming music. Nobody. Like, nobody was streaming there. What we were even doing there was going on websites and downloading, like, compressed MP3 files, because that was the cheapest way to get music. So, eventually we pulled up, yeah, we submitted it to MCN Apps Challenge 1. I think Silver, if I'm not mistaken, won a second place prize in one of the categories. And then that was that. So, from there, the journey goes, it's quite winding. I left Fidelity to join IBM, but it wasn't like going to a different company. IBM was brought in as a, as the new IT support team for Fidelity. So, we were moved over to IBM, employed by IBM. I absolutely hated it. I learned very early in my life that I hated corporations. I hated big companies, and I could not work or thrive in such environments. So, I moved. And this is bringing us to the story of the shoe. So, at this point, I was about 23, 24, maybe, 25. And I was married with two kids. Okay. I looked at my career at Fidelity Bank, and I was like, this is not what I want to do. I, when we started out, let's say, I would say I was making already more money than the rest of my colleagues, but it was easily going to be out of pace. Because, Bank, you start out fresh, things look good. But in a couple of years, people who can't do their own thing are going to go way above it. So, I was like, nope, this is not what I want to do. I want to build programs. I want to do software engineering. So, I looked around, saw a job offer from Fidelity, applied for it, and then went for the interview and got it. I got in with a colleague who right now is doing his own thing. But the two of us started software engineering for Petra actually. So, we were the very first team to build anything. In order to go to Petra, I had to take a pay cut. Now, if you know anything about the way bank pay works, it's, the base pay is not too much, but then you get all of these allowances that make sure that you are constantly liquid. So, at the end of the year, every three months, you get a bonus. At the beginning of January, you get your clothing rent. Every three months, you get fuel. So, there's always some liquidity coming in somewhere to hold you and get you on right. But this was not the case at Petra. Petra was, I would say, a below average pay for me at that point, considering that I had a family. And I still took it, because as I said, I knew I wanted to program, and all I wanted to do was write code. So, I started that job. And, I, I, I'm not someone who really likes clothes. If anyone knows me, they'll tell you I dress like, I dress like a homeless person sometimes. So, I didn't really bother. My family needed a partner. I gave it to them. I had these shoes that I was wearing right from the beginning. And I wore them out. You wore the hell out of those shoes? The heck out of those shoes. I wore them to the point where there were holes in those shoes. Oh, man. And, you would walk from Fiesta Royal up to Petra, and your feet would be soaked. Which means that you'd go home with stinky feet every single day. It was, it was an experience. Let me, let me put it this way. It's not like you couldn't afford, but you just wasn't willing to code it like that. Well, at this point, everything needed to be stretched. So, as I said, I was earning less. I had three mouths to feed. I had to take care of all these other bills. So, it was more of me just not prioritizing my appearance in any way. After all, I was also sitting somewhere in some corner coding all the time. So, who cares? So, that's actually the story behind those shoes. Eventually, I think about six months after I joined Petra, I got a new job. I started to join a company that was going to do data engineering and data science for, guess what? Fidelity Bank. So, I went there. We went there. Full circle. Yeah. We did that for about three months. I realized I did not like data science. But after the data engineering, there's not really much to do anymore, but just three things. And I would have to do data science if I wanted to go. And I don't like data science. I have no interest in building dashboards for people. It's not interesting. It is mundane. And I do not want to do it. So, I read out to my employer then and told him, look, I don't enjoy this job. And if I don't enjoy it, and that's one thing that's very caring. If I do not enjoy the work I do, I leave. I have never made money the priority. Because what I found is, if you don't enjoy it, you don't do it well. And if you don't do it well, you're never going to get paid well. So, I left and I went back. Super trapped. It's like you literally read my mind on my next question, because I was going to say, what influenced your decision besides money? But you just went straight ahead and obliterated that one. Well, I guess your influence is in money. It's all about interest and what's keeping you going, like some sort of a drive. Yes. There's a Japanese philosophy known as Ikigai. Ikigai, let me try and summarize this if I don't budge it up. We have where your vocation, so what you do, if it intersects with what makes you earn money, what you do, you earn money from it. And then it has a benefit to society. That intersection, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but basically that intersection is considered Ikigai. It's not like a destination, but it's more a way of life where you try to make sure that you are always within that. So, if you love doing something and that thing has a beneficial impact on society and earns you money, it's considered a state of happiness. It's not like the happiness traditionally, but it gives you joy to go through life. And since I discovered it, I think that's what I've always been aiming for. So, as I said, I love programming. Absolutely do. The things I do impact people in positive ways, maybe sometimes negative, but generally positive and very patient. So, I think I'm sort of in that sweet spot. So, that was me. Came back to Petra. I came and built the members portal, which is like the online portal. And then I got a contract with Petra to build the core pension system. So, like you have a core banking system that manages all the banks, banking stuff. What I built was the care of patients, which would manage all the pension funds, everything that came in, everything that went out, benefits, all of that. That sounds huge. Sorry again? That is huge. Oh yeah, it was. That was an incredible project. We got that done in three months. Wow. Yeah, that was, and it was just two of us. If I recall, it was me and MS Brian. Another dude I sorely miss, like an incredible dude all around. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. He's in Germany now, if I recall correctly. But we did that. And then what did I do? I went to go do some work for some company. So, I left programming for about a year. I was not fully employed for a year. I was just doing this contract. It was a training contract. Did it. When I was done, I didn't work for a year. I just stopped working and just stayed in Tamale, got to adjust. And then I found a job with a company called Free. So, Trade Ghana was building commodities exchange. What we were doing then was we had warehouses, and then we had these affiliates. So, we built this entire network where we would go, we had people in the villages. And what would happen is the farmers would bring their commodities to us. We would grade them, weigh them, bag them, store them, and then issue them credits on our platform. So, you could go on there and buy maize. You could buy maize early in the season. And then maybe later when it was more expensive, it would rise and you would sell. So, you could literally trade commodities in Ghana using that. I'm not going to go into how that got started. Let's just say the government of Ghana. Yeah, I see that. Of course. The government of Ghana stuff. It was really incredible. We had a whole network in the villages. We were working with GN Bank, because GN Bank had presence everywhere. I did that for six months as well, and then I was like, you know what? I'm not really selling this big. It was, it was, what was the issue? Trade? Trade? I can't really remember what the issue was. I just knew that I didn't want to continue there. I see. I see. Okay, so, go on, go on. So, a quick trade, and then I came back to Accra. Before this, before this, I need to backtrack a little bit, because I just realized that I missed an important milestone. So, early on, I found out that there was an event, and this whole time, I was still trying to build a community, right? So, you were trying to build a community too? Not really build, but more find. Okay, find. Yeah, so, I found Google Developers, but it wasn't really a community. It was all Google, Google, I guess. Google stuff. So, I just, and then it was online. I was tired of the cookies. I wanted more interesting. And then, there was an event by Deaf Congress then. It was being organized at, there's a university somewhere around Serco. What's the name of that place? It's a community area, and they have an event there. So, I went there. Okay. And, there was an appeal for speakers. So, I applied to speak, and I was accepted. And I went, gave my talk, and that was it. Like, that was, that was like, basically, the beginning of my tech career proper, proper. Yeah. That's not what I meant. People, silence works. I mean, we were all young, trying to do something, trying to do, and these guys were building this community that they were having. And then, Kumoji was around, but he was more in the, on the slack, than interesting at that point. But, we connected all, and, I got, I was invited to apply for Andala. Oh. I applied the first time, the offer came in, I knew what the offers that other people had received was. Yeah. I looked at the offer, I was like, no, I'm not taking it. Again, money is not the motivator, but, I'm not going to take it. No, I mean, kind of peacefully. Take, so, I, I stopped. So, when I left trade, I was reached out to again by Andala. And this time, like, okay, you know what, we'll take it. This was like a year or so after. Hey, we'll take it or not. And I thought, okay, let's go. So, I joined Andala, and, the rest is history. I think, most of the rest of it, since then, you are aware of. Yeah. So, again, this is the part where y'all mentioned, y'all was like, well, I got to have this guy on next. Cause, y'all was really excited about what happened at that event. It was like, well, this guy, Stefan showed up. It was like, well, I've been looking for you guys all over, and finally I found you. So, at least I made a list of every single person that he mentioned, and I was like, I'm going to have these guys on one by one. They're going to tell us about how Deaf Congress has influenced them, how they got started. We want to know how these guys got here, because there's a lot of people trying to get somewhere who need some direction, and they wouldn't get to meet y'all one by one, but if they get to listen to the podcast, they'll definitely get to know what's up with Stefan, what's up with y'all, what's up with Boo Boo. So, I mean, that was great. That was a great starting point. And I'm so glad that you found Deaf Congress. I'm pretty sure Deaf Congress is happy to have you too. So am I. I'm absolutely grateful to it. And it's the one community that I can say that I love with my heart. Like, I don't know. The community is just... I don't think people realize this. Deaf Congress has no funding. Yeah, it has no funding. Everything Deaf Congress is run by Deaf Congress people. If you start up, you see food there, most likely some member of Deaf Congress will pay for it. If you see something, we book the... Yeah, sometimes we've had sponsorships, but majority of everything that has been done by Deaf Congress has been done by Deaf Congress people. Out of pocket. Out of pocket and out of the goodness of their hearts. And that is one reason why I keep pushing the community, because it is not about the self. It's about everyone else. Yeah. And there's been a lot of opportunities through Deaf Congress. If we're going to draw, I tend to call it the programming lineage. I consider Adam my father in a sense. So we're going to say his grandchildren and great-grandchildren is incredible. Because the number of people who have, I feel, have also helped maybe get where they are. And not... I want to say help get. It's just like Adam. Adam didn't teach me programming. He showed me an opportunity and it opened my path. And since then, the way has been open, right? So I feel like the same has been reciprocated for a lot more people, and the hierarchy keeps going, and they keep doing it. So it's more exponential growth now. One person teaches three, each of those three people teach three, and each of those three people teach three. So the lineage keeps going. Deaf Congress is an incredibly amazing community that I hope to remain a part of for a very long time. Wonderful, man. That's amazing. That's amazing. What would you say to your younger self if you're going to start again this whole journey? How would you do it different? What would you say to your younger self? I don't know if I would do it different. The reason being, this is the way I did it, and this is the way it works for me. I don't know if I would know any other way of doing it. Are there things I would change? Not really. Maybe because I feel like my specific pathway gave me certain things that other people do not have. For example, as I said, my networking background gave me a good idea. Infrastructure background gave me a good idea of how infrastructure works. The fact that I did help deaf staff gives me a good idea working in a company, even though, as I said, I do not want to work in a company, and a big company, again, also contributed to my trajectory and growth. So would I do it any way different? No, but are there more optimal ways of doing it? Maybe. I just think that everyone's career path is unique enough that I can't give guarantees. But the one thing that I would recommend that anyone do is to get involved in a community as soon as possible. It is no joke. A lot of hierarchy in the tech community happens by word of mouth. That is the main way to do it. Looking for someone, hey, do you know someone? That is how it's been, that's how it will always be. It's still a meritocracy, but it is not a direct meritocracy in the sense that just because you're good doesn't guarantee you're going to get anywhere. If you're good and nobody knows you, nobody knows you. If nobody knows you, it's going to be almost impossible to get recommended because there's a lot of inexperienced people in the field, and most people trying to hire are looking for folks with some level of experience already. So generally what they'll do is they'll go and ask someone they trust and say, hey, do you know anyone else that could help me do this or that? So getting involved in a community is critical, especially in the early stages of your career. You need that network. There are jobs that will come up you never know about. The majority of jobs that people employ for are not even posted anywhere. So join a community. However your pathway goes, let it go. But join your community. One thing too I would do is I would avoid the current trend of being a stack-based engineer. So if someone asks you, what do you do on a live dev, on a PHP dev, that is incredibly self-limiting. I don't know why we do it now, but it was never a thing back in my day. Of course, we had primary stacks. I coded PHP. But you were never just a front-end dev or a back-end dev. You were a full stack dev. You knew how to build. You knew how to build Sandbox. You knew how to deploy. You knew how to do everything. It might seem like a lot, but I would recommend that you try to be as all-rounded as possible. Don't just say I'm a... Especially the worst ones is, I'm a React developer. Your entire career is revolving around a library. A library. It's a single tool. It's like saying that I'm a hammer-capping type. Yeah. Only use a hammer. That's your job as a captain. You don't know how to use a saw. You don't know what to do. That's limiting yourself. Of course, it takes a long time to get fully rounded. I'm not going to lie. I've been doing this for 15 years, maybe, and I still don't know a lot. Now there's a whole new AI trend. I have not gotten on it. I don't know how to train. You don't even need to get on it, for real. I don't need it. Honestly, I don't care. I found my niche. My niche might be out of date soon, but my niche is what I like. It's a solid niche, man. You will find AI niches to occupy. One more thing that I will do is, I would recommend that if you want to really grow, just build. Don't worry. Just build. One thing I did early on was go online, find things, features on sites that I wanted to do. I rebuilt almost everything that I saw. Back then, Facebook was very, very simple. I re-implemented some version of Facebook. I re-implemented versions of any application. Just build as much as possible, because what happens is the more problems you solve, the more you understand how to solve the problems. The next time you are not learning how to solve the problem, you are just drawing upon previous experience, which is why you see someone as, oh, he's such a senior engineer. No, he just made the same mess-ups that you are about to do. He just solved a whole lot of problems. Yes, he just solved that problem that you were about to create for yourself last year, so he can see you creating a problem. It doesn't mean he's a god or he's just this superhuman person. That actually is why my name is the Dumb Timber. Not because I'm super smart or anything. I'm only able to figure out things because I have done them before. Even if I've not done them, I've done something similar enough to understand what the problems are. At the root of it, I'm still as stupid as any person on the planet, but it's just experience. The only way to gain experience is build. Whether it's commissioned, whether it's not, just build. You see a feature, learn how to build it. How was this done? How did they do it? Rebuild it. If you see a library, like for example, I've built at least two ORMs in my lifetime. I never use them in production, but I know how ORMs are built. I know how they work internally. I know what I'm doing whenever I call an ORM. I have some clue. That's what makes you a better rounded engineer, just understanding how the tools you use work. As usual, always use the tools that are well-established, well-supported, and have a lot of user base. There's a reason for that, rather than using your own tools. But when you are starting out, do not be afraid to reinvent. Reinvent as much as you can. It'll just make you a better experienced engineer than just constantly using other tools that people have built. That's for real, man, because I'm counting into year three of officially deciding to become a software engineer. Also starting from system administration, IT, help desk, and all of that. I really relate to what you're saying. The things I did during my time as a system administrator, network engineer, whatever, Windows server, all of that still plays in whatever I do now. I do understand infrastructures. People are talking about AWS. I'm like, man, I always probably go for onsite because I can manage that the most. Probably save myself some money, but AWS has its own benefits. I guess that is true. That is true for everything that you said. Building is definitely the way to go. The best way to go is definitely to build. Like you said, let's say a senior staff engineer who has solved more problems and seen more than you have seen. That is for real, man. I like that. I like the fact that you also have a systems background. So you understand what I'm saying? Yes, I do. See problems in a slightly different way from how most would see it. Like when you have to deploy something or anything, you already start looking at how are these components communicating over the network? How are these? You think of problems in a more different way. For real. Sometimes when people are thinking about solving a certain problem in software, you already know that there's no software problem. You can use something else. Yeah, for real. So I can definitely relate to that. All right. Let's get into, let's say, the future that I'm taking, lending and goods. How would you say that you stay updated and growing? Because, I mean, every single one of us is still growing, right? So how do you do that? I'm constantly learning, constantly reading, constantly using. So the learning never stops? Never stops. It never stops. It reminds me of when I chose Greek because I said I wanted to do something that was easy and never have to learn again. But now I find that I will be learning more than possibly doctors do because I'm constantly, if you agree with me, I'm constantly reading something. I'm having a very good conversation with you about reading. That's true. I do not read as much low-level design patterns and stuff like that anymore. I have actually gone in a very, I'll call it full circle kind of way in my engineering path. So when I started out in PHP, building applications was fast and easy. I have never reproduced the level of productivity I had in my early days as like ever. I've been thinking about it for a while now and I think I might have figured out why. When you start out, you don't have a lot of rules and limits. You build your applications, so they work. So the applications work, but that's when we end up doing spaghetti code. And when that happens, we go seeking, how do I actually do this better? Then we go find all these rules that teach us, do this, do this, separate this, clean code, do this. And you start applying them. They work. And you start applying them overly, consistently, everywhere. And one thing you start to realize is your productivity starts going back because doing it that way, even though it's the right way, can tend to slow you down. So one thing I've rediscovered in the last five years is after I returned to Rails, or I went to Rails, which is a return to dynamic programming because I moved to Java, Clojure, C Sharp, or everything. I've done lots of stuff. I've not done Go and Rust or none of the new ones, but I did almost everything back in my days. One thing I've found is you need to learn also how to break the rules. So you start off having no rules, then you learn the rules, you become overly rigid, and then you realize what Agile says about people, about processes. I'm just using Agile here, but you realize that the rules are beginning to constrict. Then you come back to that phase where you realize, okay, these are the rules. These are the ways to do it. But where do I break the rules? Knowing when to break the rules is very important. Let me use a very, a normal example that will hopefully make everyone understand. So if you look at functional programming, functional programming, pure functional programming states that you should not have any side effects. Your code should always be pure. You put in an input, it brings an output. But in the real life, what happens? You have side effects. You do something, it sends an email. You are not always going to send that same email, and it's not idempotent in a way that you can always ensure that if the email is gone, it's not gone. So what do you do? You have side effects. So you need to break that rule of purity in order to be able to achieve the goal of sending an email, right? And that is breaking the rules. In an ideal world, we would have a pure function that did input, output, and nothing else. But it doesn't work in real life, right? So you also need to apply that to programming at large, knowing that this is the right way to do it. But at this particular point, I want to break this. Single things are not encouraged, for example. But there are times when you cannot but have a single thing, right? So an example would be, maybe you have, and in this single thing, I don't mean fully global, but let me use, let's say, thread local global. So you have a request. Every request that comes in, it's a single request, so you have like one request going in. But throughout that request, you want to be able to access some state that is global to that request. Break the rule. Introduce a thread local that will be accessible throughout the state. Does it make your code a little bit more difficult? Maybe. But in the end, what do you do? It allows you to achieve your goal better and easier. Sometimes breaking the rule actually makes you build more maintainable code than adhering to the rule. So my current, as you said, what's the future for me? My goal right now has been going back to the basics. I'm trying to go back into a thing that I truly, I think I find the most pleasure in, which is building tools. You might have seen me post about something I'm working on called Plutonium. It's a starter kit based on Rails, and I've used it to build, like, three applications in the last month, and boy, boy, the productivity gains are insane. I need to clean this up, document it properly, and start having people use it if they want to. But the future for me now is going back to DevTools, providing tools for other engineers to go. I want to spend more time with my family, so I'm beginning to cut back on what I do. I'm looking forward more to more coming back, doing things like trainings, if I manage to get the time, building the toolings, just helping the developer community go. As I've said before, I have no interest in going outside the country. I have no interest in a yacht. I have no interest in Bugatti. I just want to wake up. Just to burn necessities. Today's 420, you know what I mean? Get my 420 going, enjoy some time with my kids, see a movie, have fun in normal life. I'm not looking so much. I'm a village boy. I grew up in the village, so I think I always trend back towards simplicity. That's where I'm heading. We'll see in the next couple of years. That's a good life right there, man. Life with family. I mean, that's a reality. That's what we do, what we do, man. That's what we do, what we do. All right, then. I guess we've come to the end of this interview, man. I've learned a lot, and you've even mentioned some terms that I'll probably have to go and sit down and research myself. Singletons and some other stuff like that. Oh, come on. Yeah, man, yeah, man. That's for real. So I guess that's what I was going to look up. I'm pretty sure that someone listening was like, wow, this guy mentioned singletons. I guess I was going to check that up and learn and see what else I can find out. All right, then. We're about to wrap this up. I was just wondering, what's something that, let's say, someone that knows you would be like, yeah, that's definitely a dumb tech guy. What makes you quirky? What makes you tick? What's one funny thing that we probably don't know about, something you want to share? I mean, something for the boys. Ooh, that's a difficult thing. I don't think I've put any thought into that. It's such a difficult question. No problem, man. No problem. All right, then. I guess it's a wrap. So thank you so much, man, for your time. I've learned a lot, and I'm so glad I'm in this position. I feel so privileged right now because not everyone gets to meet you and talk to you and ask all the questions you want to know. So I'm pretty sure I'll be asking questions for people that want to meet you or people who have seen your stage at a meet-up and they're like, man, I wish I could talk to that guy. I'm afraid he might point me at something. Okay, so on that front, let's just say I might look intimidating and have small, ugly face that I don't like. But that's not true. If you said hi to me at a meet-up or anything, I might be pleased. I might not have full focus. I mean, you're very open, actually. You're very, very open. Yes, I'm quite open. The worst thing might be I might be distracted or dealing with multiple things and not really focused. But whenever I have time, I'm quite open to talk to anyone. Yeah, genuinely. Reach out to me on Twitter. Wherever it is you see me, just say hi. I will talk to you. Awesome, awesome, man. Thank you very much, man. It's a wrap. We need to go back and enjoy our Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening, man. It's a pleasure. Thank you so much, man.