Welcome to Bytes in Balance, the podcast where we navigate the wild world of software engineering together. I'm Dan and this is Damian. We have been juggling code, teams and sanity for over 35 years combined. From junior devs to principal engineers, we have worn every hat in the industry. In this podcast, we're sharing our journey, lessons learned and mentoring tricks to help you find your own balance.
It's not just about the tech. We dive into people, psychology, communication, and all the messy bits in between. Think of it as group therapy for the digital age. We bend to swap word stories and share what we think is solid advice. Sometimes we even bring guests to shake things up. This podcast is our way of tackling the stress, burnout, and growth pains that come with the job. It's as much a balancing act for us as it is for you. Grab a seat and let's navigate this madness together.
You'll find some interesting links in the episode description if you want to learn more about us or the topics we discuss. All right, let's get started. Hi, folks. Today's episode, we wanted to do something a little different. Demian, you've been calling this kind of our meta episode. For New Year's, I know a lot of people have set resolutions for the new year, I think.
I was joking earlier. I wanted to almost treat this like a mini retrospective. I want to talk a little bit about what are some of the things both in our podcast, but also in our personal and work lives. I think we want it. We're okay getting a little personal. What are the things that went well over the last year? What are some of the things that we're proud?
of that we're happy about. Let's take this opportunity and kind of celebrate those. Let's talk about what we want to do more of. What are some of the things that have worked well for us? Maybe there are some things that we want to do less of. Obviously, I don't want to focus on that entirely, but how does that sound? Does that sound good?
That sounds great. I actually was thinking, like, this was an interesting idea that just popped a couple of weeks ago. And I don't think this podcast episode is even going to have a number. because we have already some episodes recorded. So putting a number is going to screw up our numbering. So I think let's call this thing 2024 retrospective or something like that.
But yes, that's the idea is have this conversation outside the technical aspect, the software engineering aspect and discuss about these two guys that launched the podcast in 2024 and been doing a bunch of things and are planning a bunch of things in 2025. And let's see what happens. Yeah, sounds great. I'm excited. Do you want to start? What do you think about your 2024?
So I'll first focus on the podcast and then zoom out and talk about things in general. When we started this podcast, right, there were lots and lots of goals that we had and reasons for doing this. I wouldn't say there was one thing that I could. pick out this was why I did it. And now I'm successful at that. Right. But I think there's a lot of things that I'm proud of. I was nervous about how are we going to figure out the process of planning.
an episode is it going to be am i going to have to write like a whole script like previously when i would do public speaking and i know this isn't a great process but
I feel like I would write out like verbatim what I was going to say. And I'd practice that and practice that. And I would try not to read off of that in my speech or whatever. I would try to read off of bullet points, but that's often what I would... find myself doing and that takes a lot of time and you know that's usually taxing and i i imagined that's how the podcasting would go but you and i have figured out a process where i remember i used to want to have these pre
sessions where we would sit and plan out exactly what we were going to say and what order and stuff like that. We were doing this and then you said, hey, we should just be recording this and this could just be the freaking episode, man. And a light went off in my head and I was like, oh shit, we could do that. And we've gotten to this point where we can sketch out a rough outline just in text messages back and forth, or maybe we have something on Notion, but it's very rough.
And we can talk intelligently about it and use that to structure our discussion. And it has worked great. I think that's one thing I'm proud of. We've really gotten over the hump on that. I would say. Yeah, I agree. For me, it was interesting because it is a different media of what I'm used to. Like I have taught before, and then traditional lectures, you prepare your lecture and you go and you teach, etc.
And my approach has been pretty loose in the sense that I always joke that my PowerPoint slides are more designed for me than for my students. This is just my backbone and guide of what I'm going to talk, but I don't have any script prepared or whatever, right? And with the podcast, it went a little bit into that direction. It was that aha moment of realizing like, hey, this is just a conversation. We're just talking about things that...
We know, we feel, we believe, we know. Sometimes during the podcast, we may realize that we don't know well enough. It's just a conversation, ultimately. And I think that is what makes it incredibly enjoyable. it's like realizing that we can just sit down have a conversation outside of the podcast and then think hey this should be an episode of the podcast it's a great conversation for me though an important part of getting to that was seeing and experiencing the editing process once we
saw we're using the software where you see the words visually transcribed. You can edit it like text. And being able to go through that process. And now when I have, yeah, I can just sit down and have a conversation. But it was stressful to me to imagine someone listening to all of my ums and uh, and uh, you know, all of that. I know now.
that I can cut all of that out. And that's very easy. And it results in us sounding very concise and a lot smarter than we are in real life. And that takes the pressure off of it. This sounding feeling like this has to sound like a scripted speech.
which I know maybe I shouldn't have felt going into this. That was something that I got out of experiencing this whole thing. So even if we don't have any listeners right now, we're not looking at the metrics very carefully. I know we have a few, but I don't care. I'm happy. I'm really pleased that we've gotten to this point. where I've experienced the editing. I know how this process works. And yeah, I don't know. That's what I'm excited about.
Yeah, for me, it's adding to that, right? It's an interesting process. It's tough to get yourself in public and expose it in this way. And I am an introvert. People don't believe this, but I am, right? with my own imposter syndrome that creeps in from time to time. So this is a hard exercise for me in that sense.
And if you add to that the fact that I am doing this in English, which is my second language, and my listeners probably at this point have realized if they haven't, I don't know what they have been listening. For me, it was tough. It's like listening to myself and listening to my...
accent and whatever. It's tough. I used to joke with my wife that my name actually has an accent and a cute at the end. And I would joke that I was going to close the podcast saying, hey, this is Demian with an accent, right? And she was like, no way in hell. going to do that.
Not going too far. I had a conversation with a friend two weeks ago and he was saying I love the podcast The only thing that I don't like and I'm not gonna enter in details in case I don't fix this The only thing that I don't like is you say this word this way and in English you should pronounce that way and I'm like okay maybe I don't know if I will be able to fix that but anyhow that's gonna be the ongoing joke now from that
But yeah, a lot of things that you can fix with editing for sure. It has been an interesting experience in that sense. Yeah, that's an interesting thing you brought up. The long-winded ums and ahs, can you fix an editing? But you're right, the accent, you can't. For what it's worth, I don't have an issue with it. I think that's something you have to get used to in the tech industry. When I started doing interviews, it was hard for me to understand people that had a very...
different accent than mine yours is not even in the top 50th percentile of difficult ones to understand there are some people out there who are super smart and they're super well spoken but when it when it comes to either putting the words together in the right
grammar or saying the words in such a way that my native speaker ears can hear them. Yeah, it's a struggle. It gets better with practice. And it's something I just think you have to get used to for anyone. There's going to be people who talk exactly. like you're used to. And there's going to be people who talk very differently. And once you get over that hump, it's the same things you're communicating about. I remember this small story coming to Amazon first time.
My English was more or less okay. Still a lot of ways to go. And I remember getting into a meeting room the first time with my team. and listening the conversations and getting out of those meeting rooms, like understanding between the acronyms and the accents. Is this people speaking English? Like understanding 40% and thinking, oh my God, am I in the right place? And eventually it was fun because you start getting...
the hand of the accent of your teammates yes so I understand my teammates but then I go to a meeting with another team and it's wait what are they saying next level I remember in multiple occasions being almost like a translator my team mate would say an acronym the way he would say it and then the other people are like what and i'd be like he means a uh you know whatever this this this it's like whatever you're around these people all the time and
Yeah, yeah. Anyhow, it has also been a learning process. I remember reading a book called The Pragmatic Podcaster by Ilia Bisdeleff. Ilja is the co-founder and CEO of Metacast, a new podcast application. I have it here and I appreciated that book a lot. I need to remember to put the link in the show notes.
but it was a very useful book because it is like you have no idea where to start you want to do a podcast sure but where do you start you need recording equipment you need to record this thing you need to edit you need to know how to launch it you need to know how to structure this so i think
i'm really happy about the learning process i believe there is still a lot to learn in terms of audio and probably editing and a bunch of other things but i think we have learned a lot and that has been also great yeah and not just learned i think right
Now, earlier today, you sent an email to our new editor. We've not just learned how this process works, but we've started to automate it and put a process in place. We have a mechanism here for recording. We've done this for recording, planning out our episodes. But we definitely got backlogged, both you and I, on the actual editing process. We got through, what, six of them ourselves.
Three, so three for you, three for me, maybe, or maybe you did one extra one. I can't remember. Yeah, I don't remember, but yeah. But that was all we could do. And then we outsourced it, which makes a lot of sense. And that was hard. We had to think about how that's going to go. You've been reviewing the results. I'm really proud.
of us for getting to that point, because that's going to unblock us from being able to record more and more things. Something I've tried to realize in my work life and my personal life is how many times I get stuck on some project or some task on something that in retrospect seems really dumb or small but you know it's like
The editing process, I get stuck somewhere or it takes a long time and I don't want to get out of the zone. So I mentally block out, oh, it's going to take me four hours to do this. And when do I have four hours of free time? Never. It took me like a month to get around. to it. And yeah, I could beat myself up over that, or we could outsource it and move on and focus on the parts that aren't so taxing.
I am in the same page there, like I dreaded the editing process and I was like, the first one was like, I don't know, 16 hours, the first one that I did. And I was like, I hope this gets better.
I came to hate the editing software, which is unusual in me to hate a piece of software. It got better, but I definitely think that outsourcing is letting us focus on the... pieces that are important which is just dreaming the conversations and having the conversations and let us focus on that and forget about the hard editing pieces it's great
Despite that, we have still kept up with basically releasing episodes roughly when we said we would, right? We said, hey, we're going to aim for monthly-ish. And we launched six episodes total starting in August. That sounds like we about did that. Yeah, it's like a monthly episode, give or take. I think we have a period in which we spent six weeks without releasing. And then we released a couple of them very close. But yeah, that's more or less.
I think it has been a great growing process in that sense. So one of the things that I've been thinking about is, and maybe this is just me getting up in my own head, but I feel like I'm running out of these kind of easy, low hanging fruit ideas for the podcast, for the topics. I mean, we've gone through all the basic ones. I know there are.
probably a dozen more of these simple ones that we could do. Let's do one on testing or legacy code or whatever we did. But we've talked about having guests. We've talked about maybe diving deeper into some certain topics. I don't know. I feel like our episode content and outlines are going to get more complicated. How are you thinking about this? What are you thinking we're going to be doing differently in the coming year compared to what we've done so far?
Yeah, that's interesting. I think we're going to bring more guests. And we already had our first guest. We recorded with our first guest in December. And I'm hoping that the episode is going to come out somewhere around February. End of February, maybe. And I am in conversations with another potential guest that I hope to bring to record somewhere around February, too. And I think it's going to move into that direction.
I would like to have conversations with people that, for example, is talking about more seriously about work from home, remote versus in office and have this type of conversation, see how they think about both things and maybe talk with both sides. It's somebody that is advocating from work from home, somebody that is advocating from working from the office. We have talked about trying to find somebody in the AI.
So I think we are going to start having these interesting conversations with people.
Which it's going to be fun. We already did it once so that was our proof of concept We know it works and keep going from there and revisit a bunch of the topics that we have had with other folks in the industry this brings some of our connections another principal engineer or something like that and talk about how they think about changing culture for example and how they think different to us and stuff like that So I see a lot of potential in that aspect.
Yeah, I'm excited about the guest aspects for sure. I think maybe once we start putting together a rough calendar and I think maybe we've basically, it's been a while since we had our last brainstorming session. So we need to go refresh all those topic ideas and flesh some of those out.
We still have topics, right? It's like we have an interesting list of topics and episodes that are already recorded that are coming out soon. All right, then. Outside of the podcast, thinking retrospective in 2024.
What are your thoughts? What have you done? What do you think could have gone better? What do you think it went well? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I've been thinking about that a lot too. I've been doing mostly the coaching and mentoring on Mentor Cruise a little bit off of that as well. and the podcast.
And I've tried, I mean, I'm still interested. I haven't had any success with this, but I'm trying to go out and find some other part-time consulting gigs or something like that. I'm in an interesting point in my life where I don't want to work full-time. I don't want to have a nine to five. But I do want to be bringing in income. I do want to be...
keep staying engaged. And I want to be able to go back to a regular old nine to five job in four to five years and not have a big old employment gap. So I have lots of things that I'm thinking about and I've done well at some of them. Like one of the things that I'm really happy about.
is how the coaching and mentoring went for me. I keep close track of how many hours I spend on it. I have a timer app that I turn on and turn off when I'm sitting down to either meet with people or to write messages to people. people or work on people's resumes, do whatever offline stuff I'm doing.
And this lets me keep track of like how much money am I making per hour? Because obviously that's, I'm not getting paid per hour anymore, but I still want to know. And obviously I'm making like a small fraction of what I made at Amazon, which is okay for me. But I'm also happy about the fact that I feel like I've put in place mechanisms for myself and habits for myself of.
scaling up. Like at first, when I had three or four mentees at a time, I was like, oh my God, how am I going to stay organized and keep track of who needs what and who's working on what? And now I feel like I have a much better process in place where I can have a lot more people. that are that I'm working with at a time but I'm better at
not giving myself homework, but giving them homework. I'm better at staying on top of who's doing what and what people need and resources for people at various points in the coaching. And that's gone really well for me, I feel like. I still have more things to do, but I've balanced all of these different concerns.
and come up with a bunch of mechanisms that work for me so that's something that's gone well when i look at what's not gone so well i haven't been successful at finding any consulting work i did some in 2023 and 2022 and it honestly didn't go all that well i think i wasn't building my
properly. And it also wasn't really the right project for me, but this is something that's hard. I've been looking around for some kind of a part-time work and I don't want to just do like a race to the bottom and up work or something. And so this is something I'm not, I've not been successful at. what about you uh both in the podcast or outside of the podcast how has life been so for me it has been an exploring year 2024 i've explored a bunch of things uh some have gone
great, like the podcast, for example. Mentoring has gone great. I have enjoyed it.
a lot. Helping others is something that I enjoy and I have got some great mentees and it has been a great experience. I also learn a lot from my own mentees as much as I hope they benefit from it. I try to launch a series of youtube videos in spanish i have a youtube channel in spanish that has from when i was a professor it has 4 000 subscribers something like that that didn't really went well i realized that i put a lot of effort on that
but the process was extremely complex to release and releasing one video was extremely hard and it was not cost effective. So I paused it and it is on my list of things to potentially rethink. eventually. I did some consulting, same as you, it didn't work as I was expecting in the sense that I got offered some equity, but I really needed to get a little bit more cash instead of just equity.
to be able to devote the time that it needed. So that at least didn't go the way I wanted. It's something that I love doing up to date. I'm learning to fly airplanes. And it has been a long time dream of mine. And it has been amazing. It's this mix of stressful, fun, amazing. It's a mix of a bunch of things. But ultimately, all the fun. amazing, overcomes the stressful and the other aspects.
It has been hard, for sure. But anyhow, I got to the point in which I soloed in December, and I'm pushing towards my second solo, and it's this scary thing of getting on a plane with our instructor and saying, okay, I have to line this thing. But that has been awesome. I love it. And same as you, they think looking for consulting has not worked the way I wanted. I am in the same boat of
wanting to figure it out, a more stable cash flow, staying with the freedom that I have so far. So that has been, for me, 2024. What about 2025? What are your thoughts? Yeah, it was funny. As you talked about trying to get into the YouTube videos, I glanced over at the lighting equipment that's in the corner of my room. I tried to do the same thing. I was going to start small and I probably still will do this. I was going to just film like a little intro.
video for myself for my coaching and then if that worked out well I would continue on and maybe do some YouTube videos well that didn't work out well it was really hard and I just found I was really bad at the process of planning
script saying it in front of a camera it just took so much time for what was going to be like a three or four minute video so i hope to get into it but at the moment i'm trying not to feel too bad about scrapping it and focusing on other things as far as what i want to do more of I think honestly this applies to the podcast, but also outside of the podcast in general. Something that we haven't done recently a lot of, but works well, really well, is just some open-ended brainstorming.
I remember because we used to do it a lot early on. We were talking about the podcast and then we got out of the habit because in a way they were taking away from the recording sessions. We would find out that if we were doing a brainstorming session, just focused on some topic, we may as well.
just record it because all of the banter and the stuff that we would talk about, we would try to record it again and it wouldn't sound as natural if we tried to do that. However, you know, I think when we were kind of mind mapping out a bunch of different topics, or even you and I have bounced around ideas for different side projects or things that we would build together.
I'd love to do more of that with you. So both on the podcast, but also just in general, just more open-ended brainstorming of ideas, things to do, things to talk about in the podcast, but also projects to work on, goals to set for ourselves. So that's something. As far as the podcast goes, again, I talked about how we just figured out our routine of content creation and now the editing and publishing and stuff like that. I think we just need to settle into a groove of...
recording and bringing on guests and having a calendar for ourselves where we have guests coming up and rough timeframes and stuff like that. We just need to get into a groove of publishing because I think that I don't have any specific goals on who listens to us or how many or exactly what topics we hit. But I think it'll just be fun to continue to bounce ideas off of each other and record them and publish them. I agree.
I think 2025 for me goes in the same direction. I'm looking forward to brainstorm together and think of new ideas and stuff. I actually just had an idea about the YouTube video that you mentioned that I'll tell you after, but... It's definitely, for me, 2025 is keep pushing the podcast that I definitely enjoy. Keep brainstorming and keep exploring and finding different avenues to go and to do.
Keep mentoring and keep thinking of consulting or some other type of project. I don't know exactly. It's a very fuzzy idea or thing for now, but let's see how that goes. It's definitely something I'm looking forward to. Podcast wise. I think we are doing great. I think I agree with you about wanting to keep the monthly cadence and maybe even more now that we have an editor. I don't know it's something that we will see.
bringing guests. I think there are a lot of good things coming there for the podcast. All right, folks, I hope you enjoyed this episode. We thought a couple of weeks ago to record this and talk a little bit about the podcast, about ourselves. Who are we thinking? What have we done? And what are we planning to do? It's always nice.
I hope to have that insight on what we are doing. And if you have ideas for podcast episodes or if you have any comments, please, by all means, let us know in LinkedIn, Spotify. or even our website, bitesinbalance.com. We have a contact form. If you want to come to talk to the podcast about any topic, also, please let us know. We are open to that possibility. I can't promise we will say yes, but we are open to the possibility. And I hope you guys enjoy this episode.
And that's it for this episode of Bytes in Balance. We hope you enjoyed our deep dive into the world of software engineering. Thanks for tuning in. We would love to hear your thoughts, so don't hesitate to reach out. Connect with us on LinkedIn to continue the conversation or simply follow our updates.
You'll find the links in the episode description. We aim to release at least one episode a month, but with our busy lives, it might vary. Subscribe to stay updated and you might catch some surprise episodes when we're feeling extra chatty. If you are enjoying the show, please rate, review and share it. your friends and colleagues. It really helps us reach more people in the community. To learn more about the podcast, check out our website. The link is in the episode description.
And if you're looking for more personalized guidance, we're available for mentoring through Mentor Crews. And there's a link for that too. That's all for now. Until next time, keep coding, stay sane, and remember, even when it feels like a total shit show, you got this. Thanks again for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode.