Insights from App Development to Content Creation with Lucas Montano

Hi everyone, my name is Patrick. A cue for today's episode. I have my friend Lucas Montana over. He's a senior Android developer over at Disney and we talk about a lot of stuff. How Android development is different from back end development, how his love from content creation originated, and how he finds new ideas like figuring out how Mr. Beast is going to do his famous tweet giveaways even though the AP is on Twitter. Sucks. Enjoy What?

What do you do at Disney exactly? I'm a Android engineer. Android. Yeah. And I looked up on LinkedIn what you did previously and it's always been kind of mobile development, no? Well, my background is from as a back end, so I I yeah. So I started with VB6. That was my first programming language and then PHP and then Java. Then I bought my first Android phone like in 2009, 2010 and then I switched to. To mobile, yeah. Back then, yeah, everything was

app development. No. People were like, this is the next big thing, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like people wanted to put their websites inside an app. Basically. In the beginning it was like that, right? So there was no market in Brazil in 2009, and I was learning to how to code in Android in Java. So there wasn't, no, there was no one hiring an Android engineer, right. So I had to create my company like consultancy to create apps

for other companies. But most of people, most of companies and clients, they wanted to put their website inside an app. So in the beginning it was like that. There was no like app, Let's build the app. It's like, let's build what we have on the web in an app. Yeah, yeah. Was that the most of the client requests that came to you? Yeah, yeah, right. And why'd you stop with your because you said you built a company around this, I think very early on when apps were kind of prevalent.

So you were even, let's say, on top of the game or ahead of the game on that front. Why did you stop when it came to kind of your own company and your own business? I failed a lot, I think, yeah. So it was not not one company. I think I started like three companies and all of them failed. Yeah, Yeah. So this first one, yeah, we, we didn't succeed to get more good clients because that's a thing, right? You need to get good clients. So yeah, we we got I think

shitty clients in the beginning. So it was very hard to, you know, to to to make plans or to hire more people. So we grew like to five to six engineers working with with me and my partner and yeah, but then things got like a one client didn't pay, you know so you have a cash flow problem, you need to go back to the market start working again. So that's what happened. That's rough. Yeah. So in 2000 I think we, we founded the company in 2011 thousand, yeah.

And then 2013 that's the third thing I think. Yeah. I I had to go back to the market, Yeah. Was that the period from 2011 to 2013? Did you start multiple companies that in that period? Multiple apps, yeah, but below this umbrella company, yeah. And then you continue with app development from that point on. You didn't go back-to-back end.

Why? Why didn't you go back-to-back end like? Because I feel like app development was very much booming in exactly that period. Why It was like this is the future, basically everything was going to mobile and I feel like nowadays if I'm in public transport, everyone is on is on their mobile phone. So it's still very prevalent. Yet back in engineering and like the web never went away. I feel like they're kind of, yeah, either combining or it gets easier to go hand in hand

in that way. Yeah, I don't know why it didn't go back, but I like the experience. I I like the feeling of having created an app and then you see someone using in their phone, you know, just like maybe like the front end side, the client, the client limitation. Yeah, I can see that they can do it. But on my personal projects, like for the YouTube channel, for instance, when I'm starting a project, a lot of times I go back end. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, because your main. Are you mainly using Kotlin nowadays or are you still doing Java? I do Kotlin now, Yeah, right. Yeah, as an under right engineer I do Kotlin. Yeah, and it is that. I mean, can you do Kotlin for iOS as well nowadays? Yeah, you can. You have Kotlin with platform can be. Yeah, yeah. Every name I think was KMM, but now it's KMP. OK. Yeah, I've heard of KMM. I didn't know about the name change, but do you do? You're still focused on Android, right?

Yeah. Do you think platforms are moving to a point where everyone's just gonna use whatever language, whether that's React Native or Kotlin, in that way and then develop for both iOS and Android? Yeah, that's a good question. I think as long as we have Apple being Apple, we are gonna always have two natives. Platform 2, native platform, Android using Kotlin, iOS using Swift. Yeah, because Apple is like a

closed system. So yeah, they they push back a lot of things now in Europe not that much, right. I mean until now every browser in the app browser in iOS was the same was yeah, behind the scenes was Safari. So if you download Chrome, Chrome or Firefox on your iOS, it is basically Webkit from from from Apple. Right. Really. Yeah. I didn't know that. So the engine is the same as Safari.

So that's why like if you do web progress like you can have that, you cannot have all the features that you would get in underwrite for instance. OK, yeah, but now in Europe they need to comply some rules, right? They can't do that anymore. Now yeah, now like Google will be able to fully implement Chrome, so this is changing. I never knew about that, actually.

I've never, I shouldn't say never. Like, I've dabbled a bit with mobile development, a bit from the React Native side, and I built kind of the back end, let's say, for a later project, which was an IT project where we had a lot of data and then we fed it to a React Native app in

that way. So I did stuff with notifications and I was really happy to see that people already thought of, OK, how do I send a push notification to someone and it pops up and stuff like that, But what would you say? It's like a big difference when it comes to mobile development, for example, traditional web development or back end development that way. I think the biggest difference is that when you release something, it is released,

right? Like it is there in the user's cell phone and you don't have any guarantee that the user will upgrade or it will update your app, you know? So if you ship a bug, you need to think like, OK, how can I fix this? Yeah, because the user might not want to update the app, right? So it can still be in a version like 10 versions I go. So from the beginning when you are creating an app, you need to think like, OK, how can we enforce the user to update? So your app need to have some

kind of local logic to do that. Yeah, you need to also have of course like versions on your APIs and config config files so you can enable disable features on the flight in case the user are using a feature that you don't want no longer support or something like that. Yeah, you do those. So those are dynamic configs. Then you don't ship them with the app code. You ship the configs with the app code, yeah, you can do like you can push code with rect

native for instance. Yeah but yeah on native we used to native, I mean like coddling Java for Android we used to we shipped the app with config like if else in the code. So it will enable and disable based on the small feature flag or. Yeah, I thought those would be kind of dynamic because otherwise you have the same challenge, right? If someone, let's say if you enable a feature due to a feature flag, someone would still need to update if it shipped with the bundle or

wouldn't they? What do you mean? So let's say I have a new version and in that version my feature is disabled. OK, I thought if you have a dynamic config, you can just toggle let's say the feature on and people don't have to update their. Yeah, that's what happens. OK, in that way, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So you can do like even you can roll out the feature gradually for 1% of the users. 5 percent, 10%, yeah, you can do experiments, yeah. That's nice.

Do you do a lot of experiments on the app side? Yeah. Cuz I have experience when it comes to like AB testing on the web, is that easy to do on mobile as well? Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah. So both rollouts as well as AB testing is all in there. Yeah. Yeah. And do you use those Disney? I don't know how much you can talk about Disney specifically, but do they use that a lot? I think I cannot talk that much, but yeah, they do. Cuz yeah, you do that a lot. Yeah, that makes sense.

And a lot of like, I like that a lot of decision making nowadays used to be OK market driven design. We try and make a lot of assumptions and we test those with the users and then we do features and now you have this trend of OK, we do all of that sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less. And then we actually see with AB testing and experiments what actually hits.

Because I feel like especially with mobile and also on web, the more features you build, First of all, your codebase gets very complex and second of all, your velocity goes down because of that complexity. And if the features don't get used, they're just there and there might be either in the way, especially from a code perspective, but from a user perspective as well. So it would be best if we

removed them. But I feel like sometimes, especially from the development side, we're just adding stuff, yeah, adding and adding and adding until we say OK, it's too slow or it's rubbish or code is outdated and we do it again. That's like the cycle. It's crazy sometimes.

Like I feel like we we are always creating new frameworks, new libraries to to use to have to be faster in deliver more features and then you wanna buy a flight ticket and the apps, the app keeps like restarting your whole search. You know what I mean? Like you wanna you go to the flow to buy a ticket, a flight ticket and then something fails and they don't need to restart everything again. That is the most basic feature on app.

Buy a ticket? Yeah. So I feel like the, yeah, I don't know. I have the feeling that the websites or apps, they are not getting faster, you know? Yeah, I don't know if that's due to more features or do they need to let me take a step back sometimes on web and I don't know how this is on the app side, but if we for example select a database or if we select certain solutions, people like to compare speed right?

Because better is faster or faster is better when it comes to kind of user experience and maybe even conversion. But at some point I'm like, OK, how much faster do we actually need it to be? Because when I'm talking about a web page, I've built a web shop and that was like statically rendered, a lot of it, very minimal JavaScript and that was like super fast and I don't think we could get it faster, but I didn't know if that was gonna make a big difference.

Is that for the app side? The speed really matter in that way as well? Like, even those tiny, tiny differences. Yeah, that's a good question because I think that's the one of the most interesting thing about working with apps, mobile apps, because you you have millions of different devices and you need to support all of them like a big company as Disney, we need to support all

kinds of TV's, TV box, Android or Fire stake from Amazon, so a lot of different partners. So it's not about always like your app need to be fast, but your app need to run certain devices that have low memory, so you need to care more about resource. Yeah, yeah. How much of A hassle is that when it comes to actually developing? Yeah, you need to the first thing. Like if you wanna become like a senior mobile engineer, you need to be good at profiling that.

OK. App inspection and just like figure it out why your app's consuming that much memory or in which thread it is running. Yeah, yeah. Which is scheduler and so on. I didn't know about that actually. That, that is, it makes sense when you lay it out like that. Like there's just, I mean, hardware has improved, but people still have old hardware, especially when it comes to TV's.

TV's nowadays are cheap. Yeah, but people don't buy cheap TV's if they already have ATV, especially if they bought it for a hefty price, let's say years ago. And then you have older hardware that runs on that. Yeah, would you say like great mobile engineers also like think about low level stuff like that? Yeah, they have to now. I think so, yeah. So it doesn't matter if you coding React Native, Flutter or Kotlin or Swift like. You need to care about the resource that the app is

consuming, you know. Yeah, I wonder how I'm thinking

about, let's say I come from operations and in that way we usually when there was new software, I had to test it and back then I was working in retail. So I actually had a physical test set up when it comes to like registers and stuff like that, which I would patch the software on and then I would see if I could scan everything.

And that would be like a more manual test when it comes to mobile and especially when you talk about the suite and the range of let's say TV's, Android phones, different versions and what you need to support. How do you test all of that when it comes to actually putting stuff to production? Yeah. So it's very hard to get all the device. Yeah. So if you are like a freelancer, you won't have all the device like if you work at Disney, Disney will have a lot of device

for you to test. But nowadays you can use also a device in the cloud. So there are companies that provide that you can run your tests in all kinds of device in the. Cloud. So that's nice. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It makes sense that they would kind of solve that solution in that way. Yeah, even Google in the Play store they have with Firebase. You can also run tests in the cloud and you can see yeah very nice and you can do roll out in small percentage.

Roll out your app to 1% of the user base and check the logs. Yeah. And do like a bubble roll out in that way. Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. I do like the trend that. I mean, I don't know how it is on Android cuz I have an iPhone that my iPhone basically updates either stuff on the background or really says, OK, now you have to update. So then from a software side, we still built in the same check that you said when it comes to OK, at some point we need to

force people to update. So it's in the software as well. But at least from the App Store side, automatic updates just roll out most of the time. Is that on Android as well? Yeah, you can do that. Yeah, that's good, right? Yeah, that makes it from a developer standpoint. I think that's really nice to have. Yeah, but there is a funny thing like that. I am an iOS user as well, but I'm an underage engineer for more than a decade now. But I use an iOS as well.

Yeah, why is that? You don't want the. I don't know, but I have it tattooed in my arm as well. Really. Yeah, just like a funny joke. It's the first Apple computer running an Android. Side of it. That's funny, man. That's cool. I was wondering because you laid

out kind of this step in entrepreneurship that you've made when it comes to kind of creating your own company. I'm sure you made a lot of apps and you do a lot of like hobby projects as well. But are you still thinking about starting your own company down the line and doing that again? Or what are you thinking when it comes to entrepreneurship? Well, I think Content is the new app, right? So in 2010 I launched my first app like what's the? It was called Financial Specifies.

It's basically like a personal finance management app. Yeah. And that went great. So because back then people, they wanted to download the apps. So like in two years the app reached $1,000,000 and I was able to get some revenue from it and have like, yeah, different source of revenue. That's my first rule in life. Like you need to have more than one source of revenue and I always did that inside project into inside projects like apps. But nowadays like people don't

download app that much. Like if you are not having dinner with a friend, you're not gonna say like, hey man, look, this new app I download, no one, no one did that anymore. Not anymore. It used to be like that. It. Used to be like that. Now people say like, wow, look, this new look. How how funny is this 10 second video that I've have on Instagram? Yeah, or this new AI stuff. So yeah, that's the new app. Yeah. AI and content. Yeah, and I know you're playing

around with that as well. Yeah, yeah. So I think now my side projects are around content and I'm playing with AI, but not that much. Not that much, not. Yet I wanna see what happens. Like when Open AI, they now have GPTS, right? So they create the GPTS store. You can explore new GPTS. So I launch two GPTS just to see what happens. But no, people are not downloading that much or not. They are not using that much, yeah. It's not like the early days of the App Store.

No, Yeah, it's not. Yeah, that makes sense.

I like how you put it because I did use to like especially I was younger. As a teenager I used to download apps, many games, but also to see like OK what is out there nowadays. No, I don't download stuff anymore. Somehow sometimes there's one app that all of a sudden all my friends then use, then I'm like how how did this slip in? Like 1 is for example, it came from the UK split wise where we went as a as a group on a vacation and then people just pay.

You put it in the app and then at the end it breaks down the split. But I don't know how that got established. Let's say. It's really hard, I feel like as an app nowadays to get that popularity in. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to to get traffic to the app. It's not that much organic anymore. Like as a YouTube I can launch an app and then I can maybe try to drive audience to the to the load the app.

But if you don't have an audience then it's very hard to to launch an app and get like $1,000,000 just because people like and are sharing with their friends. It's very hard to do that. Yeah, yeah, like that. You said that it it does go hand in hand with the content side of things. I do see a lot of let's say content creators start creating and and expanding their revenue stream, but also just their platform and their influence in

that way. Because if you have a a community that's built around the content that you create and you create more content in a different way like videos is not just a a silver bullet. For example, I know a a person I had on the podcast he's creating like this learning platform. Where it's similar to league code but more for data science. And he's really working hard on that platform.

And because he has an audience, he thinks this might be a great fit for them to keep learning next to kind of the video content that he creates. Yeah, yeah. That's cool. So similarly, an app could work in that way as well. But nowadays, yeah, I've always thought it would be a cool idea to create apps or maybe even like plug insurance. Browser Plug insurance are kind

of in the same avenue. I feel like I read these stories on Twitter where people say I make so much money with browser plug insurance and apps, and I'm like, is that still a thing? But I'm happy you see it differently as well, that, yeah, it's kind of not the main thing anymore. You have to have stuff around it. Yeah, definitely, Yeah. What type of videos do you like?

Content creation wise creating. Mostly about stuff that I'm thinking, yeah. So sometimes I see a tweet and I just like, OK, I think differently or I don't agree with this and maybe I would mention that to a friend. What I do is hit record and I mention to my audience. That's basically it. Do you have an example of a thing that you found on Twitter that was interesting where you wanted to talk about it? Yeah, Most recently I saw the

Mr. Beast's tweet. You know, Mr. Beast, that Mister Beast upload his first video, I think to X. Yeah. And it reached like millions of people. And then I think it was one week ago, he said like, OK, I will share my revenue from this video to 10 people. So. You can retweet. If you repost my tweet, you are in the game. I will randomly choose ten of you. And I look at that tweet and I I think like, OK, that's good, right? I think I I'm gonna repost. They're not.

No. My friends will see that. I wanna I want money from reposting a tweet. So maybe I will not. But then I start looking like, but this is very interesting. I will repost. Then I saw like, OK, there are there are like 4 million people that repost this tweet. Yeah. And I start to think like, OK, how Mr. Beast will select and people from 4 million people. So that was that hooked me like OK, let's try to figure out how we can technically build a

script that will do this. Then I start creating content around that. So I start a project to implement how we can use a Twitter API to fetch this 4 million retweets and then select ten of them. Well, yeah. So then, yeah, that was one of the most recently thing that I found onto it. That's a really cool use case. Yeah, because the Twitter API has API rate limit. So the first thing is like you

have 3 tiers of API. Like as a developer you can buy like you can use the API for free but you don't have access to the retweeted by API. Or you can pay $100 monthly OK to use this API, but you have API rate limits of five requests per 15 minutes. Oh, no way. Yeah, that's never going to work. No, it will take me 77. Yeah, almost like 80 days to run the script without considering errors or you know, Internet

issues. And then you have the Pro tier that you would need to pay 5000 per month to Twitter to X. It jumps up like that. Yeah. Wow. To have 5075 requests for 15 minutes. It's not even that much. No. And that means that if Mr. Beast would pay the maximum tier to do this, it would take him five days. Yeah, but he promised to select them people in 72 hours. So I was like wondering how how he's doing? Does Elon Musk send? Open the gates. Open the like database or send a

file with everyone. So that was like what got me interested to create this content. So I will upload the video this video next week. So there is also that you can do enterprise tier but you need to filling up a form and you need to be already spending 42,000 monthly with with Twitter. I didn't know the numbers got up that high. That is insane. Yeah. And probably has something with the rest of the enterprise tier. Maybe, yeah. Or maybe a different way of doing.

Like maybe he's actually using the search API and choosing based on time stamp. I don't know. Here, yeah. Interesting.

I like that your use case. Some of the content creators I see are like, OK, let's use this programming language and then we make a calculator or we make something simple and they all have the same type of projects, like a widget or a smaller app that does something. But you're actually like, man, the inspiration for your solution. When you laid it out like that, I was like, that is very interesting cuz I have no clue how you would do that.

And then you get those, let's say, functional constraints. Your API sucks, basically, Or you have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars. How do you do that? It's fun stuff, and the trick part is that the API the the pages they are tokenize it. So you cannot like from OK if you have 100 because each page of the API will return 100 people, 100 registers per page. So you could basically have you know that you have 37,000 pages or 40,000 pages for 4 million

retweets. So you could basically random randomly choose 10 pages, right? And then you just do 10 fetch and API and it's OK. But the the pages are tokenized, so you cannot fetch like give me the the second page, give me the page #30. Yeah, because you need the next token. You need the next token, so you need to actually fetch all the pages. One by one linearly. One by one and you cannot, yeah, you cannot do parallel, no. No, no, I was thinking I was, I

like thinking solutions also. So I was thinking maybe you can do it parallel, but I'm assuming if there's a rate limit it's based on the key. Exactly. And I don't know if you can do multiple keys, but then the page token that's like a you can't do much then you have to do it linearly. Yeah. OK, so did you end up solving this or this is like that? Yeah, I solved it. I solved the fetching the the 40,000 pages so the script is still running, yeah.

It's running. I need to wait about 77 almost 80 days, but what I did to just demonstrate to the video, I create a mock server and I set up a proxy a prox. Using Charles Prox. So basically my script is fetching, it's trying to fetch the data from tweet but my proxy will redirect that to my mock server and my mock server is generating fake pages. So just to demonstrate if the script is working or not. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Otherwise it's it's within days you will either know if it's right or wrong and then if it's wrong, that investment in days you're not gonna get back. That's funny, man.

Do you like to come up with ideas like that? It takes a certain way of thinking and to see an opportunity there. I don't think everyone could do that. I wouldn't have thought of that. I didn't see the tweet, but I never wondered like, OK, how can you do this? But you do. Do ideas just pop up like that? Or do you keep a log of ideas that you wanna execute on? Yeah, I keep a log of ideas, but yeah, usually they come. Yeah, like that. Yeah. Nice.

How big is your log of ideas? Like how many are we talking about that are in there, you'd say? Well, so I think one year ago I switched from talking about random subject to react to content. So my main content's like me reacting to an article. OK. All right. So that's the way we can have consistency. So we, we post videos on Monday, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, three days a week. So we have a format.

OK. So I will be reacting to articles three days a week, but sometimes there are like this tweet from Mr. Biz then. OK, it's interesting. Let's let's put it in the pipeline too to deliver the content. Yeah, that makes sense. So so I have a road map of articles that I want to react but I have this small projects that comes. And when it comes to, let's say, the excitement, I can give you an example of the podcast. This is my favorite part. These are the conversations, is what I like.

I don't like doing the planning. I don't like doing the finding of people, but I do that because I really enjoy this part. I even like the editing part, but at some point it gets mundane and it's like time heavy and the release part is like more so the fun part. Then that's when you see it go live, let's say. What about the video content

creation part? Do you like the most? Do you actually like the research and review articles? Do you like the shooting with the camera? I like when I need to develop a project. Yeah. Because also like one of the things that I figure out early in in my YouTube channel was that my content need to be, first of all, it needs to entertain, but it needs, it needs to be a entertainment that doesn't generate guilty in the audience. You know, it can be that kind of video like that.

You watch the video, it's very entertaining. But then you're like, oh, why I'm watching this. It's just for entertainment. Like popcorn content? Yeah, yeah, like the the audience needs to for me. Like they need to finish the video with the feeling that they learned something. And I think that when I found something like this Mr. Beast tweet, this is the best for these two pillars. Yeah, because it's entertainment, but you also will learn something.

Yeah, Yeah. So that's what you like finding those opportunities. Yeah, that makes sense. That also makes sense with kind of your Android history, let's say, because one of the things you said when it comes to why you like Android development versus back end development is making that difference for the end user in that way and it shows in your content then as well. I think so. I think it's genius because everyone knows Mr. Beast, that example.

I love it. I'm going to check out the video

because I'm also interested. Yeah, Do you, when it comes to, let's say, the technical side, do you experiment with different languages? Do you like the technical stuff as well? Because it feels like you're very much solution driven. You like solving problems rather than figuring out or playing around with the technical stuff. Yeah, so I think it has been like a three months ago I was

like I need to learn REST. I think it's quite interesting programming language, because I come from Java, so I hate garbage collector. Yeah, but I also did some C, so I hate my lock and having to unlock memory myself and think about it all yourself. Yeah, yeah. So Rust is just in the middle. So, OK, I need to learn Rust, but I need a motive to learn Rust. I don't like to go like, let's go to the Rust documentation and let's do the hello world. Well, let's see an article about

how to build the. I don't know. Calculator I calculate. I don't like to learn like that. Yeah, I like to learn in a project. So for this Mr. Beast project, I thought, OK, let's learn Rust while I'm doing this. So, so yeah, nice. That's how I learn new things. But it's not because of the tech, not because of Rust itself, but it needs to be combined with a project. Yeah, You find an opportunity, a problem to solve and then use it as a learning opportunity as well. Yeah, I think that's.

I see more and more like even my colleagues do that, like Rafael that's listening, he also does that. Hernani's another colleague, he does that a lot as well where they first of all, they find a problem where they want to learn something and they either create content through kind of that learning and they talk about that or they create videos similar to what you do when it comes to solving a problem like

that. And I think that's really smart because you in parallel, you do a lot of things at the same time. And I think it amplifies your learning journey because you're not. I mean, if you're starting out with Rust, especially, Rust has like this huge learning curve. It's ridiculous. If you create content on that and someone that has, let's say, a few years of experience sees that they can also give you

feedback. It's like you're not learning by yourself then because people, people can help you in that way. If you're open to that because it can also be confronting, yeah, have you gotten any feedback when it comes to your code or the solutions in that way from the audience as well? How interactive is that? Well for this challenge I chose to do live, so it was like 5 private lives for my members

from YouTube membership program. So I did with the audience help me in the chat also using chat DPD or that's nice, just like regular how how I like what I like. Like I don't like to to resolve the problem before going live. When I'm doing live code with my audience I like to to just make mistakes because I want I want them to see how it is actually to learn a new language, you know. So I just go like open chest like OK, yeah, I actually don't

know how to do that in REST. Let's search together. Then I go to Google because then the audience can learn how to also figure out how to solve a problem that you don't know how to solve. Which is the most important skill? Exactly. Yeah, that's really nice. And it doesn't. You don't get nervous doing that because I can see from my side, if I were to do that, you need to have an ego, which is very low, let's say you barely have to have. You don't have to have an ego to do that.

If your ego is high, you're never gonna do that. You're gonna be that person that prepares. And he's like, OK, I know how to do that. And then I'm gonna show them how to do that. Yeah, I think I learned how to solve problems because I start coding with 12. So for me it was. I don't know. Writing code was always a thing that I did, yeah. And you taught yourself at a young age, Yeah, just playing around, you would say. Just playing around, I started using Access for Microsoft.

Yeah, then inside Access you can actually create use Visual Basic, VB Six. Yeah, so that's where I started. Nice. Yeah. But The thing is that, so basically what I like, I learned that I I will always find the answer if you know what is the problem or what is the question. Yeah. So yeah, I think that's why I'm comfortable doing that.

Yeah, yeah. Would you say nowadays, let's say for people listening or people even in your audience that haven't done anything with programming, would you say now you can still teach yourself and let's say up to a point where you can be productive and solve problems that you see, just like the one you mentioned? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think that's the best way of learning. Yeah, yeah. And nowadays you'll have AI to

help you. You'll have people online, in a Discord server, or Reddit or Twitter. You can ask questions or even in the comment section of YouTube. Yeah, there's multiple communities nowadays. I fully agree with you there. Yeah. How much have you played around with kind of using AI to develop software? I'm using more, but I don't like copilots. Yeah, I don't like the feeling of suggestions. Code suggestions come coming to

me without without me asking. I'm not asking for a suggestion, but I'm typing and then GitHub Copilot is out of trying to figure out what I want, so I don't know. I feel like I'm not driving the car, you know? Yeah. OK. So the copilot aspect is you're kind of the copilot? Yeah I think it breaks my flow. OK because when I'm coding I have hyper focus on code. So when I'm coding the world can be falling apart. I will like be focused on my

code. Yeah, and I think Co pilots, they they make me lose the focus. Yeah, I can see that. I haven't played around with Copilot, let's say integrated in the IDE. I do the, what you said, the conscious going out of it, asking a question, then using that as an input. And it's mostly because from the client side I can't use that.

But also from an interest perspective, I haven't really played around with it, cuz I think what I do now solves kind of my needs when I think I need a problem and it might be making me less productive. But I still see this as kind of a mental challenge where I want to figure out something. It's also from a fulfillment perspective. It's nice to do it, but I use it just like I use Google, except I've started using that more than Google even.

Same here, yeah. Yeah. I don't use Google anymore or Stack Overflow. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I sometimes do, but then I'm like, maybe if I go through multiple articles and I still can't figure it out, I'm like, why am I doing this? Yeah. I like that a lot. But that's easier when you have experience like I I think when you are starting, the problem maybe is to delegate to the AI your Rd. road map to study or you know, yeah, so because yeah, the AI can be not lying but can making stuff up.

Yeah, the hallucinations. Yeah, those are funny. So if you don't have experience, you won't be able to cut this, yeah? Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.

One of the final thoughts I had was we were talking about content creation and we were talking about your schedule and you said we a lot. Are you doing this by yourself or what is kind of the team? What does it look like? The team, it's me and my wife, Sarah. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. How is it working with your wife? Cuz I know she's listening. I know you can't say too many bad things. No, I. Don't have anything. To say it's been good. Yeah, awesome. It's amazing actually.

Yeah, because for instance when I have an idea and it just, it just feels good to have someone to share the ideas and also to get it's you get like a quick feedback. So because Sarah, she does the editing, but she does more like she does the whole. She's back to the CEO of Lucas Moncton. Incorporate because she handles the partners and all this kind of stuff. Yeah. But also she gives me feedback about the content or about. So it's like social media training or something like that. Yeah.

So that's good because then for instance, sometimes I will post something or I tweet something and then she can see things that I'm not seeing. Yeah. So that's really good. And we are always In Sync, OK, because we are daily talking about content or. Yeah, that's fun. Yeah. I started a YouTube channel with my partner as well and her sister, so it was kind of the three of us.

And it was more so in the fitness space where I would do the production and the editing and stuff like that and they would do the videos, great fitness videos. And it was fun And when we were In Sync it was a lot of fun because in our personal time we could brainstorm and this was really something we were building up.

But when it was not like when we would butt heads or have let's say conflicting opinions where we were not In Sync, sometimes it would bleed into our regular life, the the non work life or the non YouTube life. And that was that was pretty challenging at some point. Yeah, it is challenging, yeah. But we are doing that I think for two or three years now together. Yeah. So I think we learn how to, you know, let's stop talking about

the YouTube channel. Yeah. So I think now we can switch back to, OK, let's just be us not be like YouTube partners. Exactly. Yeah, I like that a lot. Have you ever thought about

expanding the team? Cuz I'm gonna show you. Actually, I think when this episode comes out, the episode that I'm talking about already came out. I talk to Arjun and he does Arjun codes on YouTube a lot of Python content creation. And he's recently also released a lot of Rust videos and he wants to expand. And when he talked about his YouTube team, every time he wanted to do something new, he was thinking about what he needs to do when it comes to editing or creating content or creating

courses. And he would bring something on, bring someone on on his team to help him with that aspect. And then he could do something new. And his team is now a lot of people like, it surprised me that from a YouTube perspective, I always thought about, OK, you have a person that's on camera that does the content creation,

maybe an editor. But he has people that help him with social media, people that help him with courses that he creates, people that help him with business automation, where he has scripts running on his YouTube channel, on his comment sections for people that give suggestions. And then that goes into like a whole notion thing where he just has ideas from the audience, let's say, and people think about those types of automations. That surprised me. Like it was very cool to hear

about that. Yeah, we actually have a new member now, so it's me, Sarah and Tony. OK, We call the Tony. Yeah, so Tony is AI. Actually, it started as a joke in a video that I made, Like Tony was one of the characters that were like the junior developer in a video. And then when when Open AI released the GPTS, they also brought like action actions. So now you can basically create your API.

So I created a Google cloud function and you can use swagger API scheme to tell GPT how to communicate with your API. OK so for the suggestions what I did is like now you can go to the Tony on GPT and you can say like I want to send a suggestion to Lucas and then he was reply OK what is our suggestion then you can just send tell the GPT the suggestion yeah and GPT will get this and create a payload based on my swagger scheme and it will send to my Google clown function.

Perfect. Yeah. And that then processes it and stores. It stores it, and then I have a private GPT that I can ask, OK, what are the suggestions that people send me this week? Yeah, then he will use the same Swaggy scheme to hit the Firestore Firebase real time database and from Firebase, Yeah, and it will just tell me, OK, these are the suggestions. So I think we can automate more. So before bringing more people, I think first we can work automating stuff.

Yeah, that's cool. Like you have AI team members. Yeah, and the YouTube channel is like a platform for projects.

So for instance, I work together with a company called Olympus to create a memo flash card app so people could learn, can learn like topics like agile or JavaScript using flash cards. Nice. Yeah. So we did that project with this company. We did open source and we brought partners to sponsor the project. So I create content. The company developed the app, We released the app together. I brought audience to the app and sponsors paid for it, right? Exactly. And the audience learns.

Exactly, Yeah. And also now, Sarah, me and NATO Marine, it's our partner. We found a new company in Brazil called App Academy. So yeah, we have more partners, but then it's not on the YouTube channel. Then we create a new entity and then we start this project. Really nice. Yeah, that's cool. I like the part of automating whatever, let's say teamwork you would need. And I think he's doing that as well. And I think he's really smart to kind of simplify the workload that you have.

Cuz if you have two people, and I get it, if you have, let's say, this core team, it's hard to expand with more people, It might disrupt the dynamic, but automating processes to make kind of your lives easier, that makes a lot of sense in that way, yeah. For all the solutions that

you're building, are those open source available to the public as well, or most of them, let's say? The Memo app is open source. Yeah, yeah. But I think that's the only project, Big project. Yeah. So I was wondering for the, let's say the Mr. Beast example where you were playing around with the rest, why didn't you open source that or that type of stuff? I will, yeah, yeah. But it's just like I think it's like 4040 lines of code.

Yeah, so it's barely anything. Yeah, OK, I can, I can yeah I can create a git repository for that, yeah. But the the entire content it was like around 5 lines, 5 lines, 5 lives and seven hours of content me coding but this is private only for members. And that way, Yeah. OK. So then open sourcing that would kind of be counter. Yeah, kind of, Yeah, I get that.

Cool, man. Do you do members here? No, I don't. I saw like I get this monthly update from YouTube and they said you can now give your subscribers free memberships when they first subscribe or you can just gift them. And I've thought about what I would do membership wise, but I don't have any inspiration yet. Yeah, for me, doing this already takes a lot of effort and I wanna keep doing it weekly. I'm having a blast with it, but I do like giving something nice for audiences that wanna give

something back as well. In that way I like it. Yeah, and sometimes people want to contribute. To life. Yeah, I've seen that as well. Yeah. Maybe I'll pick your brain. Maybe you have some suggestions. Yeah, but we'll do that after.

This has been a lot of fun. Man. I've had a blast chatting with you. Is this kind of what you expected coming into it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I'm. I'm a bit more nervous that I was imagined, but it was great to talk to you. Good, happy. Then I'm going to round it off here. Thank you so much for watching, everyone. I'm going to put all Lucas socials in the description below, check them out, let them know you came from our episode. And with that being said, thank you for listening.

We'll see you on the next one. Beyond coding.