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and update. In today's episode, we will talk a lot about next JS, and we will also talk about some career advice for people wanting to start or already starting but getting the hangout software development later in their careers. My name is Lucas Paganinia. I'm your host in the podcast. Joining today's episode is also the hosts Chris.
Ruin, Hello everybody, Peter Orsan.
Hi Eboom, and our very special guest that I just spent the last ten minutes figuring out how to correctly pronunciate his full name, Paul rat Slovsky. He is a software engineer at Strappie and he is also a content creator. He creates content for people that are trying to switch into other careers through have development later in life. And he is also a co host at the not Dule podcast and he's also done a course on XJS. So, Paul, thank you so much for being here with us.
No, thank you for having me.
I'm super excited to chat about all the cool things that we have planted today. So thank you very much for having me.
Awesome. Awesome. So before we get started, let's.
Just go through some quick definitions. So I said that you're working at and that is relevant to the course that you publish on XGS because it was also published in the YouTube's channel of Strappy, which, by the way, that's a huge note for everyone listening to this. You can just go to YouTube and watch the course like
it's all there. And I think we could start by defining what is strappy and also what is the value proposition the premise of your course on XGS, because there's already so much content out there about XGS, so why.
Should people go through the course that you did?
Yeah, No, definitely. So Strappy is a headless CMS. It's all javscript based, which is awesome. So if you're doing front end with next, which is also jovscript, makes things easier, you stay in one language, and the biggest thing for Strappy is if you're going to have a lot of content and you need non technical people to manage it, Strappy allows you to do that out of the box. There's other features as well, but mainly for content management
for non developers. But you as a developer, you do have access to that data via the API, so you could do full CRAWD functionality, create authorization, authentication, you could. And because it's strapp is highly customizable, like if you need to add new features too, Strappy you could actually create your own plug in. And what's awesome because it's all based on no JS. If you need add additional like controller services, middleware, some functions, you're able to do that,
but you don't need to. You could actually get started right out of the box. It takes two minutes to set up, and you have a working API where a non developer could manage data. And what I like about that as a developer, Like I've used to work on like smaller websites when it's starting out where a lot of stuff is hardcoded, and then you'll get a call like hey, can you go and change this data in
my website for me? I'm like, I don't want to do this as a developer, It's like, I mean, I don't mind it, but like and so to me, this idea of having a place for non technically users to manage their own content themselves and for me as a developer not have to worry, that's amazing. And the biggest thing for me is I switch careers into development late in life and I always like thought of software engineering is you have a business that has a problem or
they want to create a product. And so to me, I always thought about what is the fastest way to get to the product, Like I don't want to spend months or years in development.
I'm not saying there's anything.
Wrong, but I always thought of like how could I help this business to solve the problem. And so for me, like leveraging next CS, leveraging aheadless cms, like strappy, I feel like you say ten thousand hours of development and it's like an easy way to get started. So like when I first got my first dev job, I work at a company where I learned a lot of things that.
Are not to do.
And what I saw a company that tried to do everything in house, you know, their own back end, their own like design system, then, and the team was only like five people, and they spend years of bild this product and they never delivered it to clients, and I was actually wondering, like, how does this company even like generating income? And so to me, I really like things that help you build things quickly to get them out to the clients as fast as possible.
Gotcha makes sense? Makes sense?
So this seems like a very unique CMS because when I think of CMS, I just think of something where I can host blog posts and update the content from there. But that sounds way more flexible and honestly just modern. I was going through the website as well, and just by you saying that it's fully customizable and done in node, that just made it sound very interesting. So I would definitely check it out on any project that is requiring
a CMS. There are some very interesting products that were arising around the CMS space a few months ago, and currently it feels like maybe it's just my set out and the bubble that I am in, but I haven't received any hot topics about just companies launching UCMs.
Is and stuff like that.
But I remember that a few months ago there were a lot of interesting cms is popping up I also thought it was really interesting that strappi has not just a rest API but also a graph q il a p I, so that definitely makes it very interesting for people that are looking to work with those two different API data formats.
So yeah, pretty cool, Pretty cool.
Now specifically about next JS, is it what's the connection between strappy and next JS or is there not? Is just like Strappy is a headless CMS and you could be using anything and you just happened to want to create content about next.
So very good, like interesting and good question by the way, So all that I so next I I'll be honest with you. I didn't use next gs like up to twelve. I tried a few times. I was like, you know what, there's like other things that I just you know, use that are nice to me. But when I saw the differences they made, like next thirteen, Next fourteen and where
next GS was going to me, that was amazing. Like from you know, the introduction of like reaction or component, like you know, the new app router, like you could create route handlers or you could create actions like to me, that just opened up this whole way of building things quickly.
And that's the part that I like and you know, when I was thinking of like a course to build, and after exploring next GS, and it started from the standpoint like I kind of like it, and now I'm like, god, damn it, they got me, and it's like really really good. And so for me, it's again, how could I build something quickly with the tools that are available and through their app router like you know, folder allows you to easily you know, structure your routes. You could do nested
routing like like easy. The fact that now you could use reacts over components to load your data specifically to that component and then wherever you move that component, because that data loading is inside that component, it's still going to work. And to me, there's a lot less things that I had to think about it. And to be honest, when I was starting out, like as a newer developer exploring all the like thirteen to fourteen features, I was like, oh,
this is stupid, Like I don't understand it. But once you understand like the tools that they give you, you realize that they really thought, like you know, we're sell team and XGS, like they really thought about, you know, what they want to accomplish and where they're going and I find myself like really enjoying the developer experience process. And also they're growing in popularity. That means that I mean,
they're huge. That means that other people enjoy working on xts and you know, and so I was like, you know what, this is something that I want to learn more about because I'm not an expert. I think this will be a good opportunity to do something that other people are really enjoying.
And I want to.
See like what a cool like way that we could come buying it with a headless CMS. And what's interesting Like a lot of times when people think about had less MS, they think of like it's a blog post or I'm managing content, which is perfectly fine. But the path that I took for this particular project, we used to you know, strappy to power like an app because it's.
Not just like a blog platform.
So the functionality that you have, you have your landing page, of course you could go and see, but once you likeg in, you have the ability to generate summaries of YouTube videos. So you put a link of a YouTube video you hit generated, it's going to generate your summary, and you have like basic authentication. So if you're authenticate into account, you're only going to see your videos.
You're not going to see somebody else's video.
So we implemented, you know, the full crowd functionality, including like you know, uploading.
Images and files and stuff like that.
And so to me, I kind of did like if someone were to build an app, like what features do they need? And I was like, you know, really happy that you know, strappy, like it allows you to do that, it doesn't get into your way and one of the things that like, so I love next year ass.
I'd like other frameworks as well.
Like I basically like anything that my you know, customer or boss will tell me to use, I'll use it.
So that's like how I judge things.
But with next ye asks, what I saw a lot of people do is that they're like, you know, we need to start a project, Let's use Drizzle or Prisma, let's manage our own database, let's do all this stuff.
And I'm like, I know it's great and it's cool and I love it, but what if one day, like you need to show push that content somewhere else, maybe on iPhone, maybe maybe your refrigerator has a screen and he needs to showcase some content, and so I realized, like building everything and it's not a bad approach, but building everything just in next she ass as like your full stack framework.
You can do it. It's amazing. But what I like is I like.
Decoupling my content delivery platform from the front end. And so when I work with next year jass and I just recently realized there's a term for it.
It's called like back then for your front end.
Basically, even though you next year as is your full that framework, you're still using it as a way to present your data, but you're like API lived somewhere else in that case, like Strappy, And for me, I love the flexibility that now I could have my next chess project that's consuming my Strappy data. But if I want to have another source, like an iPhone that has a different app but similar to the content that we need, we could hit that same Strappy airdpoint with that mobile app.
Or if again I want to.
Push content like a very ludicrous example refrigerator, you can do it. And so I've working on Strappy. I've seen so many use different use cases that people are using with Strappie outside of like a standard blog like it blew my mind and so I wanted to create something that kind of goes slightly beyond that.
Okay, okay, that makes a ton of sense.
And yeah, I think that we as developers we jump too quickly to something that we're going to have food control on. Honestly, it actually makes sense in many cases if you're like actually building a web application, but not always, you know, and you also have to consider how much time you're going to add because you want to manage the database completely yourself, right, So you could still just start with Strappy or something similar and then you can
switch later when you actually need it. By the way, how does that look like? What if someone wants to start with Strappy, for example, and then later on they're getting enough traffic that they actually want to have more control over their back end and make sure that it scales the way that they wanted to scale. How would a migration of data out of Strappy look like?
Yeah, I mean that's a great question. I'll answer it in two parts.
The first part, you have most of our clients they're like and I can't mention them, but they're like enterprise level our clients that are getting a lot of like, you know, hits, and it scales well. Because the cool part about Strappy you could self host it, so it's literally up to your DevOps team how they decide to manage that process, which makes it awesome.
We do also have a class solution.
But in terms of the migration process, if you know, there's many ways of doing it. You could export your data into like a format that makes sense for you, like because it's an API driven thing. Like some people, if let's say you're not well versed in you know, database backup and that whole like managing scal database and stuff like that, where you could actually just do a data migration from you know, like if use postcress, you could take that postgress and migrat it to wherever you
need to. Or if you're not well versed in that part of things, because we have an API that you could hit, you could literally just write a script that will hit the API of Strappy, pull that data from there, and then you migrate it to whatever platform that you want.
Like we do things like that.
In the opposite way, if someone like for instance, want to migrate from wore press, they'll structure, they'll take their data, they clean it up, and then they'll just iterate through the data and they'll just make an API call into Strappy and Strappy will just load that data.
So there's many ways of doing it.
Another thing I was going to say, a lot of times when I talk about Strappy, people think like it's strappy or nothing. And so a lot of use cases that I've seen is Strappy is just like one service that their application uses. And that's like kind of one thing I did on a very small scale, like for the next ys project, although like I'm using Strappy to
handle certain things. We do have a small like AI portion of it where we use open Ai and a library called length chain, which is awesome that they have a typescoop version because a lot of the Python things are I mean, a lot of like Ai stuff is done with Python, which is another language to learn for folks.
So it was kind of cool.
And so what I did is like I'm like, here's a piece that Strappy handles, and here's a piece that next JS handles would length chain, And what I like about it is could be a piece of a big puzzle. And there's like public companies like post hoc that use Strappy. They have a whole website and their content just because they had the system that they had before. All their content is in GIT and they're like, we're not going to move it to a different like thing.
Because we're fine with Git. We like it.
And so they use Strappy just to manage the users and their profiles. And so it doesn't have to be like you have to do everything. It could be like a piece of the puzzle in your application. And what I tell people, like, you know, not every solution is right for you, and not every solution is perfect, and you just have to find like do your due diligence, research what's out there and figure out what is the
best solution for your client. And that's kind of to me, like, even though I will look at Strappy, I don't think Strappy is the right fit for everybody. But that's for you to decide based on your customers needs.
Thanks.
Yeah, that that's a very balanced response and any and it makes a ton of sense. Interesting to know that its scales so well, yeah, that's it's pretty interesting, all right.
So, well, there's there's still a lot of subjects for us to cover.
We didn't even went into some of your career advice for people wanting to switch to software development under after thirties, right, but before that, I just want to make sure Chris Bitter, do you guys have any questions thus far?
Okay, yeah I do have one.
So I apportunally stuppy for very long term and it's actually pretty awesome. But I think I would multiple needs once before when I worked on it. Yeah, so, but then I wanted to ask, so maybe you could talk more about this traffic clouds from future. I did just provided the cloud future prostraffic does for lectful use us dot. Maybe you don't want, so how do you deploy me
to your cloud? But must speak like I know that you can't stay, you can't say stop you, but yeah for people that have know really technical just to hand to someone who can't. So maybe you could stop stop deep on that, right, maybe to just speak on how topic cloud works.
Yeah, yeah, that's an amazing question because again, like I'm definitely not going to be a DevOps person and if I have to struggle with that stuff, like, to me, they're just time that I could be using somewhere else. And because like Trapp your self host it, you know a lot of people like oh perfect, I want to
do all the school stuff. I want to spin up like that doctor, or I want to use s Cooper Days, or I want to use I want to do it like and I'm like, I just don't want to hear you talk about this stuff because to me, that stuff that is hard for me, and I just don't want to worry about it because I just want to work on creating the business solution for the product that the
business wants. And so now we recently started Trappy Cloud, and to be honest, you did get I had some flack about it because you know, you look at platforms like Heroku before they took away their free tier, and you look at other you know services, they all start with a free tier. And that's Strappy. We are, you know, an open source company, and we give so much. Our Strappy Community edition is absolutely free. You could do whatever you want. We have like when people buy the enterprise license,
they're literally just paying for the support. So we don't like as a company, we want to be profitable, so we made the decision we're.
Going to start with Strappy.
The higher tier, focusing more on our enterprise users or like agencies who could afford. So our initial pricing was ninety nine dollars a month but even with that, like when you take a look at what it does, you get database, you get email, you get CDN, you get file storage. Everything is deployed in one quick step, very easy to manage. And for me, like we was, I thought about it. If I'm a DevOps person, like the
more work I have, the better. But as someone who's looking to build a product, they're like, I just want to get a solution that I could pay. So for our developer who's building everything themselves, they're like, I don't want to pay ninety nine bucks. Why would I, Like, I just build it myself.
Perfect. That's great.
For a business owner who's like, I don't know, I just want to have this thing done, they're like ninety nine dollars a month, that's nothing.
And I kind of found it very interesting.
How like, depending who you talk about, it's either highly overpriced or highly undervalued. But with that being said, with all the things that we're doing, because you know, strapping cloud is the easiest way to deploy you know, your strappy application, similar to like versail for next it's the best way to do it.
And so we're started at the higher price range.
Now.
A couple of.
Months ago we introduced our depth plan, which is a twenty nine dollars a month as we continue to make progress with the cloud, and our next iteration is we do want to have that free you know, hobby plan that developers could just use for our cloud. But we just took that top down approach by just try to make some income first so we could continue to develop
these services. And so our goal is to have free I tea of Trappic Cloud, and to me, it is the best way to the and the easiest way to deploy strappy uh without worrying and having to do things like yourself.
So that's also actually, I think actually a very good idea for people who don't want to get the devil stuff like you just want to avoid that. Yeah, so I think she really actually agrees, and I think it's of our probagy as you said, because you know, it depends on the individual. If you did this and you have an experience with that, you'll be like, oh, yeah, well will I pay this to just deplore my stuff to myself?
Like why why would I do all this?
Right? So, yeah, that's pretty awesome.
Yeah. I also had a question I think you mentioned, if I'm correct me if I'm wrong, you had you have some experience with Remix as well.
Correct, Yeah, I actually like I love REMA like I'm not gonna deny it. A lot of people say, I'm like you like a framework fanboy, I'm like, I love Astra, I love Remix, I love next Yass, I love all the things that allow me to build cool things like.
I'm not like one, like I'm not on Team A or Team B. And for me, like.
Remix was an interesting point because when they came out, they led with features that made development like super awesome the unfortunate part, and Remix is going to catch up for.
Sure, I'm not even worried about it.
So I'm like, I'm like glad like that they were picked up by Shopify, but access to React server components, you know, the only way you were able to do it was through Next, you know, so if you wanted to get all those latest features, you know, that's kind of where you had to go.
And you know everybody's catching up and what have you.
But Remix to me, like, if I had to describe next Gass and Remix and I know I'm going to get some flag for it next years hides a lot of implementation stuff and makes it easy for you to build things. Remix it doesn't hide as much and you are forced to explore like native web APIs. And so when I say this and again, I'm gonna get flack, Like, when you do next Yas, you're going to become a really good next ys developer.
When you do Remix, you're going to just.
Become better at web in general, just because you have to rely on using more of the native like web APIs, It's not hidden from you like you know, and you like, if you need something, you kind of have to like find it yourself and learn about it. And I like that part about it. And the other part I liked about that next ye As is like pretty good with this now. But in Remix one of the reasons why I loved it is it's simplified.
And I know this is the stream about next years, so I'm sorry.
But the Remix, the part that I loved about it is their concept of loaders and actions And basically, if you need to get data from anywhere, you use a loader. If you need want to you know, mutate data, you use an action and it just sits the top of your file. And to me, that kind of compartmentalized behavior
of my app and a way that made sense. So it's like very easy and one magical thing they do, and I have no idea how they do it prior to Like let's say you're using just like React and next, yes they have that revalidate like functionality you call, but prior like in React, if you have like many items, like let's say you have a NAV on the left, you have a nav.
On top, there's an avatar image.
You're also using it somewhere else, and you have to manage that state somewhere, so if you change it in one place, it'll get changed in that like like if you change in the side nap bar, it should propagate throughout your whole app. And a lot of times like you either had to use contacts or people used to use reducts like to manage that.
In Remix, that just was handled auto magically.
So if your data changes, it would reload that data everywhere there that's needed, and you don't have to think about state that way like the old traditional way, So you know your source of truth, what's your database, like if the data changes, it will just automatically update your UI. And I thought it was wonderful, and then next YS thirteam came out and fourteen came out and they kind
of went the similar path. And now in NEXTGS, like you know, at least in fourteen, if you want to revalidate certain route because data change somewhere else, you just hit that revalidate function and you tell what route, or you could even do it by tag and it will revalidate that data. And so for me, that's kind of like the thing that I like Remix, and to be honest, like for me, like I don't I'm not like a framework fanboy.
So I have my personal website that.
I'm working on, nothing to talk about, but it's using Remix just because I want to use Remix, like a lot of the you know, the course that I made for next GS I wanted, Like I think that's awesome. And then if I want to write HTML and vanilla like JavaScript with CSS, I'll just use Astro because it's just like a nicer way to start a project. And so for me, like I think you have to understand what you're trying to accomplish at your work and then you have to pick the twol accordingly.
I not like I haven't been in this industry forever.
But I have like friends who've been here for a while, and one of the like folks that have been around for a bit. This is like the thing that I hear from them when they talk to like an excited developer like mid level or like you know, junior. They always start leading with a framework, Oh, we should build this product with this, we should do this, And then my friends who's been here for a while, he's like, but what are you actually trying to accomplish?
Like what is the end goal? Like you work backwards.
You first realize like what you're trying to do, and then you you don't make your solution fit the framework. You have the solution that you think of, and then you have to do your due diligence to figure out like what is the best choice, And like this is where allowed us. Sometimes people like give you know, ward Press a hard time or squarespace. I'm like, sometimes that's the best solution and you just have to be okay
with it. That's kind of like where I stand. But I recommend folks like try a remix, although if you're on Twitter, you realize that there is not going to be remix three they're basically going to put all that functionality into React out a seven. So if you when that comes out, So when you start React act with VAT, and you could right now because React out of seven
is not out, you could select the remix option. But I guess what the Remix team is going to do because they realize Remix is very similar to React with out as like six, and they're like, we're writing code in two different places.
So I guess.
Moving forward until you know whatever, nobody knows what the future is, all the functionality that Remix has will be in React out or seven. So if you want to take advantage of all those school things that I mentioned, when React out of seven comes out, you just have a React VAT project and you just install React out of seven and you'll have all those features.
And I kind of like that approach because again.
It's you're doing things in a thing that it's more for a there for you. So like if you need next for something else, you use next. Sometimes you like next like a full steck frame that comes with certain things that some developers that will be like, you know, I don't need all those things, and so just you'll be able to start with react with EAT and then add the features that you need. And if you want
the similarities what remix has to offer. Now that's what reacts for out of seven is going to have.
Okay, well, okay, that was that was an awesome answer.
Yeah.
The reason I ask is because so I'm I'm yet from another framework. I typically use Gatsby, but I you know, I kept hearing about more and more about next JS, and so I'm starting a new SaaS project, and I said, yeah, okay, I take a look at this next JS thing. But then just a few days ago or sometime this week, someone made a post about how next JS, especially like the newest version, is super confusing, and so then I got I was nervous. I was like, okay, should I
just do do remix or whatever. But but I guess even within next JS, you have you have opinionated people. A lot of people say they love the earlier versions. They said, yeah, I could build stuff super quick, and now they're they're doing a lot of like opinionated decisions. And but yeah, it's it's people who I guess enjoy opinionated systems versus versus non opinionated systems.
But in your.
Opinion, you seem to really enjoy the steps they've made in the past versions, in the most recent versions in Next.
Yeah, the change that they made I enjoy.
But one thing that I'm going to come back is I do want to add this as a caveat it. Like to what you said, it's like very opinionated framework, and I think if you're okay with that, next, yes is perfect for you.
So like if.
And I can't, I like, for me, like, there's a reason why my personal side is built with remix is because I don't want to be opinionated. I just want to explore different things in my project and I want to have access to certain things. And there's a reason why, like for you know, course, or let's say like a project you're going to work with other teammates, if you have developers who are familiar with next and that's all
your team, it's like that makes sense. And so again I come back to that point of like you have to do your due diligence. But yeah, like I'd love actually ass but I do it in the context of, like, you know, with a specific goal in mind, Like, so I wouldn't just say use an actually as for.
Everything awesome Okay, now let's get a bit onto your career advice. We're already at thirty minutes of the podcast, so I'll try not to take too much time. But you have very in depth content, so we can we can also just take it from an introductory kind of point of view, and then if people want to know more about it, they can just go look for your
more in depth content. Right, But in general, what do you see are the main pain points and also the main ways to deal with those pain points for people wanting to switch careers to teck later.
Well, it's like such a big good topic for me. I think depending where you are, you're going to have a different pain point. But I'm going to talk from the standpoint of new people trying to go into the industry and this you know content on Twitter YouTube which is like Devin's going to take your job.
AI's taking over everything. The world is over.
There's no need for engineers, you know, like you don't need to be a software engineer, Like you can't get a job, and it just scares people away.
And a lot of times people say, well who listens to that?
And I'll tell you a story when I was like learning to call this something I shared like before the podcast I started, I used to teach personally introducer and mixed martial arts, and due to industry, was like, I need to find a better career choice.
And I always like coding.
I always like tinkering because like my business website wasn't more press And then I was like, oh, let me, I gotta tweak two things so that let me learning a little bit of PHP.
And then I was like, oh, I love this stuff. This is school.
And then at like age thirty, I was like, let me try to kind of explore this learning to code a little bit more. And I went on stack overflow and I asked questions, is it too late for me to learn to code at thirty and being naive thirty year old like believing what people say? Like I had some positive comments, but the ones that stood out for me were the negatives.
Basically told me like, you know, like.
You're never going to happen, you know, like forget it, You're told whatever, never, like just and that actually I actually believed it, and it discouraged me from jumping into the journey of learning to code until I was like thirty five, and then I had to work so hard because actually.
Learning to code is not as easy.
Don't believe the hype that in thirty days you're gonna get a big job. It took me like three and a half years from starting to learn to code too, like landing my first Junior Developments job as a reactive eloper, and I was required to start learning c sharp because their API was in asp dot net.
So it's like a long journey.
But what upset me, and that part of it was on me because I believed somebody else is that it was what they said that it's too late. It was true, and so I spent four or five years not doing anything about like the dream that I had, and I was like so frustrated. And so now when people you know, talk about AI taking jobs, it's like, if you want to be a developer, this is something you want to do, I would say, just do it, you know, and go for it. Don't listen to the hype, do the work.
And I'll just tell this anecdotal story. I started a community a long time ago on Slack just to share my progress, and I had other people basically doing similar things as I was. And we had a guy who kept asking questions like hey, I'm trying to build this thing, and can you show me your code? And he's like, oh, I didn't start yet. And then I had this girl, Katya.
She started like building projects. She was a paralegal at the time, and two years and a half into it, she sends me a message out of the blue.
She's like, I got my job. I'm like, wow, that's like super awesome.
And so the difference is like someone who just listened to came up with excuses versus someone who like, I'm just going to do the work that it takes and however long it takes, that's what it takes. And she got hired. And so my first advice is, you know, just go for it.
I also think that people underestimate how or overestimate. I think I got confused at myself if it's on whatever. So companies have a really tough time trying to find good talent.
That's what I was going to get into. And I think people have this weird.
Image in their minds that, oh, because there were so many layouts on Google and matt Tie and Amazon, the market is flooded with those seniors and there's no room for juniors and playings.
There is room. There's a lot of room.
Companies are still hiring, and the companies that are hiring are having a very hard time finding the right talent. It is still hard for companies to find the right talent, and that already tells you that there is space for it, and there is.
There is a need for it.
Maybe for juniors it's more complex because the situation that I'm that I'm painting here is more towards more senior and playing levels, which can be scary for someone that is just starting out. I get that, and honestly, I think you have more knowledge about this marketplace than me, Paul. It's been a very long time since I don't have contact with how hard it is to get a job as a junior developer, especially late in their careers, because we know that there's a lot of pre judgment from
hiring managers and tech companies. So all of that is a reality and although this should not happen, we need to face the reality as it is and deal with the deal with the problems. So I think you can speak more about that, but I would say there is definitely room for talent. It's just that software development has a steep learning curve that's it. It doesn't matter which level you're talking about. You can even for an entry level,
there is a steep learning curve. It's not something that you learn on a weekend and you start being productive on it. It takes a lot of time. So if you want to get into software development, you've got to be willing to go through that. There's just no way to work around it.
You just gotta go through it.
Yeah, and one thing I want to add to it, it is very difficult. And when you're switching careers, like regardless of what you did in the pass, like instance, I did president jiu jitsu, Like if you don't have like a social presence, so you do on a network, when you send your resume blindly, like number one, it might not pass through all the keywoard readers just because you might not have all the requirements necessary. And number two, like nobody knows who you are and so there's no
like it's very hard to sell yourself. So if you're serious about switching careers, you need to start doing things publicly. That's why they're building public is a thing. It's like you need to share what you're learning, write blog posts and don't like when you write block posts.
It's not like let me tell the world like how awesome I am.
I literally create content to reiterate to my brain what I've learned, because by teaching it, I reinforce it. And sometimes I catch myself with so many mistakes. And I made a video long time ago which I thought was very funny because I think people missed the point.
But it's maybe I missed the point.
But it's called the React versus JavaScript and it's got a lot of like almost like forty thousand views on my YouTube channel, a lot of positives, but then there's like negative comments like, bro, you don't know JS.
What are you talking about? This is like the this broke my brain.
And basically what I did in that example instead of like writing you know, HMLCSS and JavaScript and using JavaScript appropriately in your HML or like targeting your HML elements, I actually wrote everything with JavaScript and my JavaScript created like the HTML similar to what like JA sexist.
But they're like people like why would you do that? And I was like, exactly, why would I do that?
Like I wouldn't, but I did it because I wanted to learn how this is done. And so for me, like I didn't care about the critique. So basically, what I want to say, you need to do things publicly so people know that you're on the path of becoming developer. So when I was starting out, I used to tell everybody, Hey, this is what I'm doing. I started a YouTube channel to share the things that I'm learning. I started like
posting more and more. Now I post even more, like blogs and stuff like that content out there because when people search your name, like if you search Paul Breslovsky, you're going to find, like, you're not going to be confused that I'm like a developer. Like you'll find a talk that I did. You're going to find, you know, a bunch of other stuff I did. If you go to my GitHub, it's pretty active. Even though a lot of these projects are trashed. I'm not gonna lie to
you because that's how you learn. You build a lot of throwaway projects. You need to get out there. And so to summarize this, start your learning journey. Start hanging out with developers. And this is going to sound like
it's a lot. Go to meetups, go to discord talk to other people, and meetups is the best way because you're meeting people like in person, you build relationships, and there's many times so went to meetups where like you literally I hear other people talk and I actually talked about this where it's like, hey, you know, my company is hiring. You know, like are you interested? And so it's a good way to build connections. And the reason
why this is important. I have a friend she switched careers recently and she applied to seven hundred resumes like she sent out. She got five callbacks one job offer, which is insane because sending out called resumes is insane. I'm gonna tell you this because this is the truth. I don't want people to be like, you know, miscontruded. I've never sent many resumes because when I used to have my own business, I was all about like word of mouth, referral and sales.
That's how I got clients to my jiu jitsu school.
And so I approached getting hired the same way where I had friends or developers. I'm like, hey, this is your company hiring. Oh they're not like can you look at my resume? Does it make sense? And what should I do to or what tech should I improve on to have like getting like better chance of getting hired and like, I have those conversations and my friend was like, well, first of all, you need to move to Texas because if you want more opportunity, Austin is the place to be.
This is per pre covid. Second, he's like, you try to learn way to meet things like you need to focus on react and that's what I did, and so like you kind of need to have developers around you that you could talk to. You have to live the life basically even before you get into the field. And what ended up happening through those conversations and through having these networks. All my jobs have been my resume with
a referral. It's never been just my resume alone. So I could quickly go through my history just to hit this point home and this will be the last thing we could talk about it.
So I used to teach Brasidian jiu jitsu. Before that I had no developer jobs.
I was learning how to build like custom PHP and warp press sites. And in my ju jitsu class, there was a lady who saw me like working at my warp Press site and she's like, oh, is this what you do? She's like I'm like, yeah, this is what I'm learning this is something I want to try getting into. And she's like, oh, I worked for this marketing agency. We'd love to, like, if you want to get an internship, we could do that. So because I knew her, she kind of saw what I was doing. It led to
an intership. That intership basically led into a contract role and I worked there for a while.
My next company.
Was this company called Versus Sweet where they made medical projects.
How did I get that job? It wasn't blindly sending my resume.
It's by having a friend of mine whose wife worked there, and I kind of asked said, hey, if you don't mind, can you pass my resume and give me a referral?
And she's like, yeah, I'll do it.
And so every job I had the red hack research job, it's some guy I met in jiu jitsu who needed a reactive heloper. This is actually a funny story. So I met this guy referrals from friends. That's basically the main takeaway and connections. But I just want to put the power of referrals and not giving up this. I promise this is the last story I tell. So I do jiu jitsu. I have a friend in a classroom this. He owns his own company, very smart guy, and he
knows they do warpress stuff. And he's like, Paul, like, I know you do warp press stuff, but I don't need a warpress developer. But I just want to ask, just in case, do you know somebody who does react? Because this is back then when reactor was like super hot. I was like, yeah, I have a friend Jeff. He's an amazing reactive heloper. So I connected David and Jeff together, and David and Jeff worked on this huge project for like four years, and then one day Jeff calls me out of the blue.
He's like, hey, remember your friend David.
I'm like, yeah, yah, yeah, they're hiring more React developers and he's like, I was going to refer you to the company because you've been learning React for the past four years. And so I actually ended up getting a job working at the Red Hawk Research And the way I got there is I recommended a friend to my friend first because I was underqualified, and then over time my friends like, hey, you not know what you're doing,
let me recomd. So the power of social networking is really good, and I think where a lot of people get frustrated. I know I keep saying the last thing, but this promise. Last thing is that when they try to get a job by blindly sending resumes where they're not realizing you competing with internal referrals. So I've heard people that got laid off where they got referred to a different team on the same company internally. I also had friends who got laid off because they have other
friends for developers, they ask them for referrals. And so if you're just sending resumes only, you're never going to beat the pot of folks being by friends. And that's an unfortunate truth, but I think that's something that at least if you're trying to break into the industry, you need to network more than sending out resumes blindly, because that would be like my number one takeaway. You got a network, You got to get out in the community for sure, you got to be part of the club.
That's a good point.
What would you I know that we're already a bit over, but I think that's a really interesting point. What would you say to someone that simply doesn't have the privilege of being able to relocate to a city that has more opportunities like there are a lot of people out there that aren't even in the US, and even some there are in the US, they might not be able to relocate to a bigger metropoli. Do you have any practical tips for those people in terms of how they
can network. Maybe they even don't want to move, they want a remote job. What would you What do you think about that? Because I also think that because everyone wants a remote job, that also exposes an opportunity for those that are willing to get in person jobs and frankly for those that are just starting out on their careers, that might be a great opportunity, right, It's a great timing if you're willing to do that.
So how do you see this? Oh?
Yeah, So, I mean I moved to Austin, Texas because this was pre pandemic, and I think after pandemic things change that actually made things different in terms of getting a remote job. So the reason I moved to Austin initially is because the concept of remote work was like nobody was thinking. It was like a privilege that like mid or senior developers had because they worked for certain companies,
And that's the privilege you had. But after the pandemic, it was actually the norm to work remotely, and so I think with that it did change the world to where finding remote opportunities is.
More bonding than when I was looking for jobs.
But it's still very difficult and all the things that I mentioned about networking applies. But the one thing that I would say a lot of times when people applying for remote positions, like and when I use the example of this girl friend that I have who sends seven hundred resumes, like you are, you have to put a
massive volume when searching for jobs. There's just no way around it or referrals like because sometimes what happens you think you did a lot of enough work in terms of like looking for a job, and then you're like, no one's returning my call. Soone's like like getting back to me, and you give up. No, no, you just got to keep doing until people get back to you. Like it's just the process that you do until you
get the job. That's what people have to understand. But with that being said, yeah, there's definitely more opportunities now when looking for remote though, like I like, I feel like it is very competitive and sometimes if you're not able to find a remote job, like finding a you know, brick and mortar job that's you know, that might be
like your thing to do. One caveat to that I was going to say, is that a lot of times when people I applied, they apply to all the companies that like all the other people apply to, and they think of like, you know, big corporations, you know, like IBM, Microsoft, like big companies, and it is very competitive because a lot of times they're trying to find like the top talent.
I took the opposite route when I was first trying to get a job.
I was literally applying to software companies that nobody knows exists, Like nobody knew what re like what's a red hock research? Nobody knows, but that they need a developer versus Weet, the worst company I've ever worked for, they need a developer, you know what I mean. It's like, so there's a lot of like small companies that building software that might have like a ten person team who need a developer, and you know they will hire you.
But if you're not applying to those companies, you'll never know.
Like so for me, like I don't want to play where all the big boys play, Like I'm not gonna apply to Facebook. I'm gonna apply to places, especially when you're starting out where the big the big players are not competing, you know what I mean? Uh? And and some people like for some reason find that be like a taboo thing, and for me, it's like, like there's
a supermarket store in Texas called HIB. I would have never thought of applying there as a developer, but they actually are very well known for their like software engineering team, and then Austin they have like this tech hoop building just for developers. And I would have never guessed that HIB, a grocery store company, needs developers. And that's what people need to do. They need to find don't go where
everybody else goes. Just because like the company is small, doesn't mean that they're not going to pay you like a good salary to work as a developer.
So apply everywhere, especially when you're starting out.
Makes a ton of sense. Great advice, man. Okay, so we are at almost an hour. I think we can start wrapping up.
And let's just.
Do some some quick promos. Chris, why don't Why don't you start?
I have a totally dev unrelated promo. Tomorrow is the quarterfinals for the Euro in the first game, which is I guess noon Eastern time, Germany versus Spain. Even if you don't like soccer or whatever football if you call it, I would check out this game. I think it's for me. It's the final, but yeah, soccer fever has me captured here.
What are the other teams that they're because this is the quarterfinal, right, So there there's also another pair of countries that is going to play against this winner.
So there's Yeah, there's France and Portugal I think it's the other game. Then you've got England, Switzerland and yeah, and the Netherlands Turkey which sadly beat Austria. That's sad.
Yeah, No, but Germany and Spain. That's that's gonna be strong. Yeah yeah, Okay, high hopes, I hopes I will.
I will watch that.
What about you, Peter? Yeah, funny enough. I would say I'm with Christian this one as well. I'm kind of looking forward to the game as well too. I sink that's probably my open one as well. Yes, we are also a game, and I really want to I think that's defined out as you said, that's probably defined what all wings is like.
Yeah, okay, all right, I like when those things happen, and then it's like a completely annexed.
Back to the winner at the end.
You know, you're like you're thinking that, oh, it's going to be either Germany and Spain, and then after that everything's already in position for them to and then like Portugal wins everything.
I don't know.
I remember in the last World Cup Brazil was playing against a country which I don't know how to say that in English, but in Portuguese it was Comado wins and they weren't known to be very strong in soccer, but they won that game.
It was right in the in the first group. Uh, and it.
Didn't disqualify Brazil because the Brazil still won other games, so they were fine. But it caught everyone by surprise. It was like holy shit, like what if what if that wasn't like the first group game, you know, we would have been disqualified. So yeah, it's soccer has I think all sports have that luck playing around, and it always makes you want to watch the game because you never really know it's what's gonna happen.
Yeah, what about you, Paul.
I mean, since we've been talking about strappy, I would just say, if you need a headless MS solution. I check out Strappy dot day website and go from there and I'm at Strappy so Monday through Friday on their discord channel. We have open office hours at twelve thirty PMCSD. So if you want to hear me chat about nonsense, definitely stop on by. Otherwise, you know, I want to say, you know, huge thank you to all for having me here.
Awesome, thank you for taking the time. On my end, I'm just going to pick the two companies that produce the show. So we have top and Devs that produces a lot of other podcasts as well other tax subjects. So if you're interested in checking out maybe Angular or just regular web development with JavaScript, there are shows specifically for that. And also if you are a company or just you know someone that wants to build a project
or wants to extend their team. Maybe you work in a company that is looking to extend their staff and they're having trouble hiring good talent, then definitely check out on void is un void dot com. They are basically they offer the same They solve the same problems that are regular software development agency would solve, but they solve it in a way that is much more client friendly.
So instead of the clients paying by the hour and then tasks taking longer than expected and the client having to pay for that, they only charge after the tasks are delivered and approved, so that gives ability on cost and quality.
To the clients.
So if you know someone that needs that, definitely check out the website and reach out and they probably have something that is going to solve your situation. So yeah, that's going to be it for me. Thanks everyone, and Paul, it was a pleasure to meet you. Please reach out if you ever want to come to the show again.
And yeah, many thank you for your time.
No, thank you, Lucas.
And I was pleasured meeting you at Chris and Peter And yeah, I mean, I think you don't know what you did by extending that invite. I think I'll take you up on it, probably more often than you would like.
I'm just kidding because as you could tell, I love to talk too much. Probably, but that's what it was. It was fun. It was a lot of fun. Thank you.
No Wor is definitely taking me up on it all right. Thank you for stacking up until the end of the show, and I see you in the next one
Okay,