Hello and welcome to Teaching Python. This is Episode 137. My name is Sean Tibor. I'm a coder who teaches. My name is Kelly Shuster Paredes and I'm a teacher who coats. And this week we're joined by the one and only Kelsey Hightower. Kelsey, welcome to the show. We're really excited to have you here. You're happy to be here. It's funny we've been following Kelsey for at least I have on
Twitter for years. Kelly's been bingeing podcast episodes of his. We've been looking forward to this episode for a long time and looking forward to the conversation and talking about education and computer science and coding and a career and how that all fits together. Kelsey, we're excited to dive into it with you here in a few minutes. Yeah, fun fact. Python was like the first, maybe
relationship with the open source community. So that was like my first meetup was speaking into Python, small meetup in Atlanta, and also some of my first open source contributions were to the Python project. So it felt like my becoming in open source was all about Python. So it has a kind of special place in my career. That's Python people. That's what got me hooked. What is it? I came for the code. I stayed for the people community. It's the truth. So cool. Absolutely.
Before we dig in too deep, let's cover the wins of the week. I'm excited to share some this week. But Kelsey, I think we'll make you go first because you're our guest. There can be anything inside the classroom and front of your keyboard out in the great outdoors, whatever works for you. I learned how to do some electrical work. I needed to run in a brand new house. I wanted to run two new electrical circuits all the way from the garage with the electrical panel is all the way to
upstairs to the master bathroom. And I called a couple of electricians. They gave me some quotes. They told me it's going to take a couple of months. I was like, this can't be too hard. I got YouTube. And I pulled permits and I read all the codes and I ran all the wires and I put the breaker in at the end of last week. And everything works. My house isn't burned down and I'm ready to call the inspector to come approve. My cable runs to make sure everything was good. So that's a big win.
I did the thing. I was afraid of which was running an electrical line into it. And you have a heartbeat still. That's awesome. I do everything works. And yet I'm sure you had that moment the first time you flipped the breaker just to test it. That it's like what's going to happen. And it's both the most exciting and terrifying feeling in the world. You can't stop it. It's just like it's going to go.
And hopefully everything is still wired up correctly and it all worked out. That's funny. It's like a big congratulations. It's like a major philosophy. I do something different. Sean probably was he's Sean's going to be like, my what if I can wire his wife. Oh, I do. It's fun. Not me. I'll pass on that one. Many ways. You go for no, no, no, you go. Well, this week has been super busy. My one of the week was forcing myself to actually take
the week and off. And to the extent that I could, there were a couple things that came up. But I was able to push for that work life balance to be able to say, no, I know there are things I could do for work. I know I could be catching up or whatever that's. Instead, I'm going to take some time to just decompress, unplug, take some time for me, spend some time with my wife, just have a moment. And I came back on Monday. And of course, everything was a million miles an hour
right away. And I could have been more caught up. But I don't regret taking some time for me and for my own health for a second. Yes, you need to do that. He's hard to reach. He's been working way too hard. I never get to see him anymore. We never have our, our, I was going to say margaritas, but I couldn't think of anything. Our tacos. But that's cool. I'm, my win is really funny. And I'm going to say it's for today. And I'm going to get caught in it. But I work all summer.
I do all the background apps for our school and all the books and add some vendor calls today. I booked out like from one to three 30. But I did it at idle cove at the water park. So all these wonders are like, there's a lot of happy kids around you. I'm like, yes, sorry. Here's the water park. So it was, I found out that I work really well outdoors. And we've always known that I think when we had this been garden outside of our classroom. And I like to work
out there. But I think more and more people should be able to work from home or from a certain location. I got a lot accomplished in two hours. So definitely the children noise, the chaos going on is like a zen moment. So I think I'm going to try coding in that kind of environment next time. See if it works because that was like a huge win. It felt very accomplished. Lots of vendors hooked up. I think the question is with or without noise canceling headphones. I didn't have these things on,
you know. So I was like, you know, whatever. I'm getting it. We're getting into it. I'm going to make these connections to new apps and vendors. And hopefully it all works on Monday when I check them out. That was a huge win. Anyways, I digress. So go. All right. So Kelsey, let's just introduce you for a moment. You've been working at Google up until recently as a distinguished engineer, which is a pretty big deal. It is a reflection of all of your contributions and hard work.
But I think a lot of people know you more for your public interactions with the community. The conferences that you've spoken at podcast, a huge following on Twitter. And I've been following you for years because I found your posts to be thoughtful and insightful and provocative, right? You've provoked my thinking in terms of how I view a career in software engineering, a career that involves code and also how I engage with people around me. So thank you for that first of all.
You've expanded my horizons and my thought process over the years. And that's very much appreciated. So welcome. Thank you. Anything from your background or I guess how you got started. You mentioned your first contributions to the Python community. Let's explore a little bit of how you came to be Kelsey Haightower, the public persona, but who's Kelsey Haightower, the person who started and came to that place? When I look back, I think I got a bit lucky, not necessarily like I didn't go to
the college route. I always reluctant to call it the traditional route because I don't know a lot of computer scientists. So most people I know are self-taught lifelong learners. And so I didn't go to college route 1999. I went the A plus certification and let's see what happens. And so at that moment, the internet was exploding. The hottest career thing you could do, forget doctor, forget me and the lawyer. You want to be in tech by any means necessary. For someone coming out of high
school, deciding that college wasn't going to be for me, I'm working fast food jobs. And I used to say I never looked at on those jobs, but I never looked up either. And I've always thought that was going to be my path is the easiest thing to do, very little friction, and everything else is going to require way more effort. So I went to IT certification route. And not necessarily having the college identity or the first job and tech identity, you end up having to figure out who you
are. All right. And so I realized that I was willing to put in the work. I was willing to find my own confidence. We also didn't have social media or Instagram, really, that stuff. So I didn't have these illusions on what tech was supposed to be. I was still in the hard work error you put in the work. And then something comes back out. And so for the first five years of my career, it was exactly that. The more I put in, the more I saw come out. And so the whole HR job title
stuff really didn't shape my career. It was more about I can do this if only I would try. And so that's the early thing. And then there's this pivotal appointment part where I get to it's okay to be good at your job. You end up with a really great resume. But if you want more than that, then that's on you. And that's when I decided to go to a meetup. And it was a Python meetup. I
was writing Python at the time. A lot of the tools I was using at the time I written in Python. So I was like, Hey, what better way to go from consumer to someone who can create things than learn the language behind the tools. And so I went to this meetup and I'm sitting there at Georgia Tech University in Georgia. And I'm sitting there watching like these are all the smart people. Look at them being given the talks. And I'm sitting there in the audience and look, the talks were pretty good.
But I was like, I can do that. And so I asked the person's name was Brandon, Hey, can I can I come talk next month? He was like, Sure, what you want to talk about is I don't know. And so I was like, I got to be smart. And so I compared Haskell list comprehension to Python list comprehension. They were quite a bunch of study. And I wanted to just look smart. But in that preparation made me feel like you can learn the things you were missing. So all those computer sciences that were at
that meetup, I felt like they made room for me. And I felt like I didn't make a fool of myself. And that's huge. And I think, I guess Sean said, I've been binge watching a lot of your podcasts. I couldn't stop. There's just so many of them. And every time I hear you speak, I kept finding myself thinking, Oh my gosh, why isn't he speaking at schools? Why is this guy not in there? I can see you in the schools sharing your insights on open source innovation collaboration. All these skills
are things that you talk to adults. But Sean and I were saying, it's the same thing. The kids are people too. And I've been thinking like, you talk an open source about openness and collaboration. And it's so different. It's so different than what we do in the schools, right? We tell the kids
hydropapers. Don't share with each other. And I wanted to hear your talk and let everybody else hear your talk on our show about your thoughts on open source and how that collaboration and global thing is good and how maybe as teachers, we can start thinking of ways of bringing those skills down into the classroom. My wife has been an educator for 30 years. See, I knew it. Spanish teacher, high school teacher. And she looks fairly young for her age. And I remember high
school students proposing like, you can't propose to my wife. First of all, you're in high school. And stop it. I used to come and do the career days and kids deal with a lot, right? It's not just can they learn this stuff. It's like they got stuff at home. They got social pressures. Some need to be cool or try to fit in. Some of them are like, what do I got to figure out live in the next
two years? And so they have a lot on their mind. So it's hard for them to hear everything and also believe it, especially when you're talking to a group of students who don't know anyone that has those type of careers. So it's like hard to imagine something you've never seen before. You almost can't believe it. And so I learned through that was that kids, you have to talk to the whole child. You have to understand where they're coming from, their foundation. And it's not like
you have to dumb it down for them, but you have to bring it closer to their reality. What's the delta between where they are and where they want to be? Because a lot of kids feel like, oh, I'm not a straight-a student. I didn't take the AP classes. I get this over for me. It's like, well, not really because out there high school, this is a great reset that happens. Right. In the real world, they stop asking about grades once you get skills. Like, hey, I'd rather
have skills over what your grades were in elementary school. Like, we don't talk about those things. And so when it comes to education number one, I had to make sure I really understood how to respect formal education because it's very easy to say, I don't need that because you don't even know what that is. But at the same time, I understood that education doesn't stop in the classroom. And so for me, that open source community is like that continuing education where it's like,
there's going to be no grades. And so how do you learn without the structure? And for a lot of kids, it just doesn't make sense. So if I go get this exam, do I get a job? Not necessarily. Do I get a grade? Not necessarily. And I think about open source, there's no certification body. You're just going to go work with, in some cases, the best people at a particular set of technologies in the world. So you go from theory to application. And for a lot of kids, it feels
weird. It's like, you have to go break the ice. You have to go show up and not say, just teach me. It's like, no, you need to probably go and learn in the arena of saying, hey, I see you open this GitHub issue. I don't know if that's the right problem. But let me try to reproduce it. And from that reproducing step, you actually learn more than you probably learned the last year. And now you start to learn how to do human interaction. I think that's the key about education. It's like
when I was in school, it was a lot of remember this. You get a grade. And I learned how to gain that. I just learned enough to pass the test. And that was it. So I didn't feel like I was growing as a person. It felt like I got really good at memory. So when I'm talking to these kids, I'm like, I need you to grow as a person. And so your attitude is going to play a big role into how this plays out for you long term. So I think when I think I do, I've spoken at Stanford University before at the
height of all this distributed systems and containers and Kubernetes. And when I went to Stanford, they asked me to come speak to some PhD students about what they were studying. And I realized in that moment is that the theory is great, but their appetite for reality was so high. And so when I walked into that room, I didn't have to pretend to be a professor. I didn't have to create a lesson plan like their teachers that you would do. They were like, no, no, no, we want to know what is
like in the real world. How does this stuff actually play out? And that moment, I really realized that I knew enough theory to match the terms, but then give them something more. So we're all students and teachers forever. Yeah, 100%. So you're on, Sean's like deep thought is going to come up at something. The other thing that is coming through for me is the strong sense of doing, right?
Like that, especially once you leave that structure behind of a formalized education, whether it's in high school or eighth grade or college or wherever it is, you have to replace that structure with something that you create for yourself. You have to like to what you said, you have to discover what it means to be you. What makes you the person that is going to move forward? I resonated a lot with that. And I went through the full college experience under graduate,
graduate school, the whole thing. And I still had that moment, same as you. Okay, after that happened, who am I and what do I do next? Like hard work. Again, like you put the work in, you get the result out, you start connecting with other people, you learn from them, the learning never stops. Those are the things that I think are helpful also for students to see because they do crave that what's next. It's this big unknown for them about what life is going to be like whenever that
exit point is there from the structure of school. And I still struggle sometimes with how to actually tell them that it's going to be okay. It's going to be hard, but it's going to be okay because you will have to figure out what it means for you. And I can give you what my experience has been. But I can't tell you what your experience is going to feel like for you from the inside.
Have you seen any of that where there's particular experiences that you've shared or stories that you've told that seem to really connect with people that help them understand what it's really like once they make that transition? Yeah, I think the one thing I've learned over the years is that when you're like mentoring someone, like a real person, the job is to hold up a mirror and convince them to like what they see. Because I think their whole lives, they're being shaped and
molded into something. You're a senior, you're a PhD student, you're these things and you're going to apply to be this other thing. And hopefully they let you get it. But that whole time, the question remains, where do you learn to be you? And there's no exam for that. There's no AP course for that. There's nothing that says you're doing a good job being you. There's no rubric. And so I think a lot of people go on to be senior engineers and junior human beings, like ten years
into their career. And they're surprised about why they still struggle. And so I just had a kid, I'm calling the kid, graduated from Grandling State University. And he reached out to me and I take random DMs. I say, well, let's just jump on the chat because I know how important it is at this stage where you'd have someone to talk to. And they're like, kill some struggling. It feels like I'm applying to hundreds of jobs. I'm putting all these skills on the resume. And I don't know what to
do now. And I understood I was like, oh, all these kids are walking around with the exact same toolbox, the same color. Had the same words on it, right? Same tools in there. And they're all trying to get the same job, the twist of same wrench. And for then, they don't stand out in any unique way. So the company's just like, well, we'll choose which one of these robots we go into higher. Because you all try very hard to suppress who you are and try to impress us with who you think we
want you to be. So I can't tell who is who out of this mix. And so I told that person, who are you? And boy, did he pause? I don't know. I'm trying to be all these things that I was taught to be. And so I said, look, I know how you can find out. I want you to go to a meetup and you don't only consider the audience one time. But the next time you have to talk and you're going to talk in
30 days. Now, here's the thing. When you make those slides, I want you to write the talk and put the bullet points and then I want you to delete it all and try to get the talk without the slide deck. And only the things you can remember will be important. Because that's who you are. Now, I want you to realize what you're doing. It isn't matter to the best public speaker. I just want you to realize what do you care about? Because that's what you should talk about. And then you can
let people see you. Right? So when people can see you behind the podiums, I like that person. I think on social media, some people get to see me because I show it to them. And it can be dangerous because when you show people who you are and they don't like it, it's hard to get to a maturity point of saying, man, people don't like me. So the natural thing we try to do is make adjustments until they like me. But then are you still the same person? And so I've just asked people like
find your tribe, find your group, find your community. Those that might be accepting of who you are. If you'd like to play Magic the Gathering, there's a whole bunch of people in the world that like to play Magic the Gathering. Stick to that. And it's okay to be unique. One in nine billion is better than being a photocopy of two million other people. And I think that goes a long way. So I'm saying, get your skills. Pick any language. Learn that skill. Make sure you got your toolbox.
But it's okay to have a different color shirt on. It's okay to add a name tag to the mix. And it's an okay to let people know why you've chosen that language, what you plan to do with it. Let your imagination be married to that toolbox. It really resonates for me because I just went through dozens of resumes over like at the end of last week. And what I was really struggling with was that they all started to look very similar. A lot of it I think is an algorithm like we're looking
for keywords. And so people are putting those keywords on their resumes because it means they get a call back. But what I really want to know is what is it going to be like to work with this person? Not with this robot, but with this person. Because I'm convinced that you know, anybody who is willing to work hard and learn on the job and do their best to try to grow as a person in the role is going to be successful. It helps to have some basic skills. It helps to have some things
that you know that you can bring right from the beginning. But I really care more about the person that I'm going to be working with. This is my co-worker that I'm hiring. Even if they report to me, I'm going to be working with them. So I really feel that because what I really want to see is who's this person? What did they offer? What did they bring that we don't already have? Or maybe we do already have? We just need more of it because it's really awesome. And they bring some other
things too that are great. So I really hope that more people hear that, right? And understand that it's a little bit of a vulnerability. It's taking a risk. It's not the safe place to say, this is what I am. And here I'm going to leave all the other things that I'm not to the side. It means that I would be much more likely to go call that person to set up the interview to talk with them because
I have a better sense of who they are and what they can bring. And if they're not right for me, it means that there's probably some other hiring manager out there who they are the perfect fit for. Can I give people a specific example? Because this is the teaching channel. And I think people love examples. Like when you're writing code, it's one thing to see a function name, but it's really dope to see a function used in a larger context of a program. It just helps us understand how to use
it on my path to becoming a distinguished engineer. There's a very stringent set of review processes to get that promotion. And I think it took me about three or four promotions at Google to get to where I was. And I remember the first promotion, I followed the template. Like there's these templates on how you should format your activities versus your impact. So an activity would be coding, right? I
wrote a bunch of code. And some people's resumes are packed with a bunch of activities. I wrote this meaning lines of code. It's like great. And but the impact is the thing where you say, I wrote code to change the way people fly. With this program in place, we saved 30% of fuel and profits rose to match. Like, whoa, whoa, that is an amazing story. And it's more than an impact. And so I'm expressing
myself using the template like everyone else. And I remember there was a step to go to the principal engineer. I was like, you know what? This time, I'm going to not use the template. My colleagues like, what are you doing? Or if you committee is going to freak out when they see this. That's what I hope happens. And so I was describing my conversation like, Hey, you're probably reading this. I'm probably the 50th review in your batch. And one thing I want you to know is I carefully picked what I
worked on. I actually was working on things I care about most. And some of them actually match where a customer's care about most. So where you're about to read are my greatest achievements for the last two years. And I would describe a thing I worked on. Now this project, it's important. It's small. But it's important. Without this, customers can't sign those hundred million dollar deals. And so here's the list of companies that are using this thing to achieve things. There's some
links to some articles. But here's what I did to do it. I sidestep the tradition around over complicated, very impressive engineering project to doing the smallest thing possible. And it worked. And we got those results. And my thought was is that the person reading this would be like, who is this storyteller amongst us? I feel so connected to this person and their achievements that I got to at least put this one to the side. If nothing else. And it worked. And I got promoted.
And look, maybe my achievements were so good that didn't matter what template I used. But I found the courage to at least represent the whole person in the past. I think that's I think that's what got me hooked and binging on your podcast is like this ideas. Teaching philosophies and who we are as teachers. We all are hoping that our kids are going to inspire aspire to be a certain way. But as much as we hope and dream, we still always come back to this. Stay in the line. Got to check the
box. And I feel really bad for people that have to follow state standards. We're in a private school. So I get to make stuff off of my curriculum. And there's been a constant theme with a lot of, maybe it's just we're selecting these people, but it's constant theme with our guest. There's a divide between that typical computer science teacher. And I'm not going to leave every other curriculum out because I don't want to get anyone mad. But the curriculum or the computer
science teacher and like a real coding teacher. Sean and I we're in there. I have six 10-year-olds coding thousands of line of code in nine weeks because our philosophy is get in there. Tell me what's you. And it's not just like about all this stuff. Like what's your thought? I've already listened to some of your podcasts. I know you thought, well, I'm at Sean. Listen to it. But what's your thought between that whole computer science theory vocabulary and actually a person in tech and
that development and then in the road that you took? The truth is I needed it all actually. I think people forget like, for example, if I'm learning a new piece of technology and maybe I'm learning it so I can land that job. The job says you need to have two years of experience with Python. So we're just going to talk about day zero. So day one, I'm reaching for the book. I want the rigid. Let's get to the point. Hello world and then build me up from there. And so I want to
feel good that I can type out the syntax. I can make something happen. I want to see something move. And I probably don't want to get into the fuzzy stuff. I probably want to get straight to the point. Give me the skills that I need. But the one thing I've known is that if you really want to be good and stand out a little bit, what's the extra mile look like? So I'm the type of person that goes back and now I want to be a historian. Who invented Python and why? Guido Ren Rossim. Great.
All right. Who's this person? Why Python? What was what language was he writing before Python? Oh, Python's written in C. Also, maybe he did some C. And then all these people take influences from each other. Larry, wall and pearl and Python. Well, what the mailing list is talking about back then. And I just go read the whole mailing list about features and what to keep and what not to tabs versus spaces and dent base versus braces. And I'm now learning the philosophy of Python, the Python,
the whole style guide, the way you write idiomatic Python. And for me, I need that cultural part of why are we doing this? So I like to start with here's how to do it. Then I like to dive into why are we doing this? And then I like to go into the other side of this, which is when should we not do this? Right. When is Python not the right choice? Because that's when I feel the most confident. Right. I'm never confident when I only know enough to use it, but not enough not to use it.
Hey, Python is the wrong choice for this. And I think that's when people start to enter to that level of mastery of you're so good with this tool when it should not be used. So those are the phases that I like. So I think as a teacher, it's hard to beat all of those things. Sometimes it's like I got a, you know, when I'm on stage talking to 20,000 people, I can't give you the personal thing you've need. And so I try to go to this roller coaster mode. I'm going to show you this thing.
And maybe I use a story to lead into the thing. And then I want to take on a roller coaster right up and down so that I hit all of those points and give you enough to go and dive deeper yourself. So I think as a teacher, I think you, you have the biggest challenge date. Sometimes you want these kids for months, if not a whole semester or a year. And you have to service every one of these curiosity needs or assign them homework so they can do it themselves. I found that was the
most challenging and rewarding part, right? The fact that you could have so many different learners that were interested in so many different things and your challenges to reach all of them. And it's exhausting. But it's also really rewarding. Kelly, you remember that time that we had one student who came to me and said, Mr. Tyberam, I don't think I'm going to be good at this because I have learning differences. It's hard for me to read things and really get the information.
And I see if I think you could look at that differently. You could look at that as you actually probably will read everything more carefully and more thoroughly than the other students who think that they read well and they'll read through it quickly and not really absorb the information. So if you read something three times in this, you're going to know it really well and you're going to do well at it. But you have to be patient enough to give yourself the time to do that
and know that it's okay. And I remember she came to me at the end of the course and she said, you were right. She's like, I really feel like I know this way better than I expected to. And it was like that moment where I was like, oh my god, like I actually did something cool. This was good. And that challenge of finding that for each person, right? Like she took something
that she had viewed as a weakness and turned it into a strength. And I'm just glad that I took a moment to slow down enough to really listen to her and try to give her a different way of looking at that and it seemed to help. I guess if I did have a question for you all, there's this thing in sports where you can have the most talented player in the world, but they're not coachable. They don't fit well on the team. Actually, they are detriment to themselves because sometimes they
will meet their match. And that's where the coaching comes in. The second pair of eyes, someone that can identify their flaws and weak points. You know, how do you deal with the student who isn't coachable? That's like, look, I'm just here to just get a C on the test or I know everything already. There's nothing you can teach me. How do you deal with the unculturable? It's funny. The two sides of the spectrum, right? You have the kid that's like, I can't code.
I think I'm better equipped for that end because I was 40-something when I started doing Python. And I'm like, I get it. It's freaking hard. Sean was in this classroom. He would know how many times I would just like start banging on my teeth. It's hard. I get it. So those people, I tend to have a lot of empathy for because I was in the whole wisdom. We find a lot of ways for those people with different things. I think not to tut my own horn, but we do a lot of
different little things. And imagine we use hands-on, we have microbeads a little bit. We do a lot of drawing stuff. So those kids are fine. It's the kids on the other side of the spectrum. Like you said, it's those kids that are like, I know more than you. I'm like, you probably are. And in ninth grade, you'll be out coding me because I'm still teaching basics. I think it's the kids that when I push them, I said, you know what, you don't know, you don't know get help.
Or you don't know how many different libraries there are. Or you don't know how to pick this book up and read through it and try to find out the problems and write the code and check your mistakes. So a lot of the kids that come in with a really strong knowledge, they are very stubborn. So I try to stubborn their with them. And typically it's a long road, but it's that pure stubbornness of saying, show me something that it's different. I have this one. Can I just had who didn't want to
learn anything? It was chat GPTing, a lot of the homework assignments. And I was like, I don't care do something. So he started doing machine learning. And he's an eighth grader. It's like finding horse race. I was telling this story to Sean the last time, like horse race, spreadsheets. And it's like, I don't care. Go find, you know what? Why don't you go look at this for you as the playground, the TensorFlow playground. Like, check this out. He's like, what does this mean?
And I'm like, you know what? I've used it. Someone showed it to me. It went like this. I know it does this. You come teach me. I made him do a video on it and actually explained it really well. So I sometimes think that you won. You definitely have to find on the one spectrum how to get him hooked. It's like everyone, you have to find a hook. And on the other spectrum for the really, really strong coders challenge them because a lot of teachers are afraid to go above that teaching point
because it's too much work. You have to actually put in more work to teach the smarter kids. So that's fine. Anything add. Yeah. Well, I was just going to add that in both cases, it requires a lot of empathy and a lot of intuitiveness about what's driving that behavior. Right. So trying to look
behind what's obvious or what they're presenting to you into what could be driving that. So I love the approach of Kelly laid out for students who don't think they can give them something that's an on ramp, something that just gets them on the road and moving so that they can do the next thing and the next thing. And it doesn't matter whether they're moving at light speed or whether they're
just creeping along, but they're at least making progress. And once you have the making progress, then you can build on it for the for the students who think they know everything or think that you have nothing to teach them. Like I found out a little bit of it. I mean, I like I know the longer
that I keep working in tech, the less that there is that I really know, right. There is so much out there and I just have gotten really good at being a beginner at things and learning things from the start and understanding that if I turn over one piece of knowledge that uncovers three other things that I also should go learn or can go learn. And so being able to break through that barrier for those students that are the believe there's nothing more to be taught, right.
Is almost the same thing as what Kelly was talking about with the students who are hesitant to start. It's showing them that there are things out there that are hard that we could go learn or things that maybe are easy. We just haven't learned yet. But showing that there's a much bigger world than what they have learned so far seems to really help them understand that there's something to
this that there's more to the world than what I've learned so far. And sometimes that the empathy and the intuitiveness comes from realizing that sometimes they're just covering up a lot of insecurity. Maybe this is the one thing that they really are good at in school. And so you can't take that away from them, but you can show them that like they can have confidence in their abilities and learn new things and hopefully enjoy successes in other places too which will help them grow
into that more complete person that we all hope they get to. And I'm just the main one. I'm like perfection doesn't exist. You can always be better. I don't care if you're really naïve green. Sorry. One thing that I think in the tech career there's a point where I think you get the luxury of being able to learn without a deadline. And this is hard because in work if you're a sign of task that needs to be done by Friday, you're on this deadline and you know you have to get to
good enough and then it needs to go. And if you're missing those kind of deadlines it can get really tough for you. But this is why I think it's so important to diversify your skill set and have a few additional investments that don't have deadlines. So a clear example would be I'm at a job everything's in Python. But there's a new set of tools coming out and Ruby's all the rave. Now no one at the job is thinking about Ruby at this moment. So now I get to use it for myself.
And now when I go home I'm studying Ruby and I start off just like everyone else. I try to rewrite some of my Python programs into the Ruby language. But I also get to control my own pace. Right. What's missing? What's there pros and cons? Sometimes what we can learn from these new communities that we can then bring back to our existing ones. But I just think learning without deadlines it just feels very different. Right. It doesn't feel like I'm being forced to do this.
It doesn't feel like I'm running through this too fast. So I just hope everyone in their career gets that experience of being able to learn something without a deadline because it just feels way better than this force that comes with these artificial deadlines we crave for ourselves. 100% I know we're tied but I have to ask this stuff. Sorry Sean. Let me know if I run over.
No great. So I want a little switch gears just not really it's all connected. But I've been hearing a lot in their talks about your entrepreneurial mindset and I love this because we're always telling kids, oh yeah, to Prenorial. We're going into this entrepreneurial class and we're doing these I love and these stums and etc. etc. And there's been a lot of new young people that are
becoming entrepreneurs with this AI wave. But if we had to encourage students or help students or develop skills for students for an entrepreneurial mindset, what would be some suggestions from you? The fundamental to this is that when I say entrepreneurial these are the things that get you fired. So a lot of times we try to stay within the lines. Do what's been asked of you? Don't talk back,
don't love the wrong people the wrong way and ideally you play it safe. And the truth is there's risk in everything because the people who play it safe no one really knows who they are actually. And so when it's time to do these big layoffs, they just include you into this 10% number. Yeah, that person doesn't cause too much problems but they don't take too much risk and honestly if they were gone, we don't think anything bad would happen because we don't know really what they do
now. They just saw it and there's a lot of solid people in this world just to be honest because you're dealing with a global competition. There's millions of people who are solid. And so when you think about entrepreneurial, you're going to take a risk. Everything works as is but you're going to ruffle the feathers on purpose. So what does this actually mean? So look, you might say, hmm, I think we can improve this portion of code that no one else wants to touch. But think about being
an entrepreneur, you have to do calculator risk. This isn't cowboy territory. There has to be some profit from some of these decisions. So if I go touch this area code, what's the reward? What's the profit for doing so? It will get faster. Well, how much faster? Because if it's 1% faster, that's not worth starting a business around that. You got to think through this. But what if you can get a breakthrough that fundamentally changes the way things work? So when we introduce speed to
things, think about travel. Back in the day, it takes nine months to get overseas. You can't have three day vacations if it takes nine months to get there. So the minute we get air travel, where you can get somewhere in six hours, of course, you can stay three days and a whole industry blossoms from that fact. So when you're thinking entrepreneurly, you have to think about, hmm, no one asked me to go touch that area code. But I did the analysis. If that area of code were to
get 50% faster, so notice what you're doing. You have a business plan. You're able now to call your shot and say, Hey, I'm going to go off the beaten path. There's a risk here. I should be doing something else that everyone understands and approves of. But I'm going to go off field and look, as an entrepreneur, you may have to put in twice the amount of work the work you were asked to do. And this bet you're trying to make. But boy, typically, and not always, but when that bet pays off,
there's an outside payment because you took this risk to invest in this new venture. So that could be a start in the company. It could be looking at the things on the work, Pellet and say, you know what? Why are we afraid to bring machine learning into the app? I think I found a novel way to do this. So even if you're not the owner of the company, if you were thinking about how to increase profits, that means you got to understand how the company currently makes money, is your job valuable?
Would you pay you to do what you're doing? A lot of people wouldn't pay themselves because they're like, I'm literally doing nothing at my job. It's too easy. I wouldn't pay anyone like that. So like, when you hire an expert, like my toilet's clogged up, you call a plumber and you pay them because they're going to come in and be very efficient at what they do and you feel it's fair. I know a lot of people that know what they're doing every day at their job isn't worth what they're being paid.
That's why they just try to fly on the radar. Would you pay yourself? The answer is no. Then you need to start to recalibrate. So that's what my mindset was. What if I owned the place? How would I increase profits? How would I increase my value to make it where you want to pay me double what I'm making now? So there's something that has to happen there. I'm the product. How do I make that better? So that's what I mean by this entrepreneurial thing. You just got to take this lens at it and say,
do the risk assessment. Why is this ticket being assigned to me? Is there a more efficient use of my time? Is there a bigger payback for the business? If you add that to your software development skills, you will literally stand out from the crowd because I promise you the majority of the people you're
around do not think this way. They're playing it's safe. So take your calculated risks. That's what I think when I was talking to some of the students, they're going to go in there going to apply for college and they're going to show their AP scores and they all have 5.8s or whatever it is. But I tell the kids, put in your eighth grade code and get home and that sounds silly. Put it in. And then when you get in tenth grade, eleventh grade, and you look back at this code and you start
laughing, oh, this is crap code. Make it better. Show the train. Show the process of learning. But I think kids are afraid of looking bad where I think when you have that opportunity to look what I did, you look good in eighth grade. It looks bad in college. But if you don't do anything from eighth to twelfth grade, then that's not a good decision. So I think that's for us as educators, trying to get out of that way of telling the kids that they can't take those risks. Take that,
calculate it. I mean, it's very tough, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's very tough because you don't really have to. You just have to do what's in the curriculum. So it's like your own rails. For example, a lot of kids, I want to go to the absolute best college I can get into in a story. But if you had entrepreneurial minds, they're like, hmm, I'm going to go to college that costs half as much. Take the difference
and invest it. That's an entrepreneur way of thinking. Go to a college that doesn't have a great computer science program and make it great. Can you make the program great? What do you mean? I'm just going there to learn. But what if you can make it great? There are some athletes. There are the greatest athletes at their school. I'd never heard of Iowa until Caitlin Clark. And so even think about that, what impact can you make on the university? So maybe you go to one where you have a
bigger chance to make a bigger impact because you are coding on the side. You're really great at GitHub. And maybe you can bring that type of energy to your university's computer science program. So that's the way I'm encouraging kids to think it's like, of course, do the stuff that you need to graduate. But boy, don't miss out on those opportunities that may be right in front of you. 100%. Sean. I see. It's the art of what's possible. What could be done instead of what is? And I think that what
I've really appreciated, I've worked at very big companies. I've worked very small companies. The ones where I've been the happiest is where I've been able to say, I wonder if we can do this. And then have enough people saying, yes, that it works. And sometimes I have to wait to ask, you're going out and begging forgiveness instead of seeking permission. But at some point when you
show them what you're doing, how many times do you get told yes versus no? And that's the part that I think makes whether it's the school that you're at or the job that you're in, the family that you're in, the community that you're in better is how often are you saying, I wonder if we can do this? Or what would it be like if we got this instead? And having people say yes instead of no? And I think that's the part for teachers that's the tricky part is how often can you really say yes?
And it's probably more than you think. Can I switch gears one more time? So you're really good at explaining stuff in natural language. Another thing I picked up from your podcast, so explain Kubernetes to me. No, we don't have time. He's really good. He could do a quick little metaphor. There was a documentary about this whole Kubernetes thing. And
the way we described it, it's just another form of automation. Kubernetes is so powerful because 10 years prior to it being released, we figured out a bunch of ways of doing stuff, especially when it comes to cloud computing. And then 10 years later, we gave it into the name. And so we took all the things that companies figured out on their own and we pushed it all together into a single thing. And now anyone that was starting at that time, just download Kubernetes and you can ring your
apps in the cloud like a lot of people who figured out before. And that's the big thing around it because there's been this concept in computer science that the challenge of a distributed system
where things are beyond a motherboard or a memory bus. When you start putting things over a network and you want to have it function with a great usability, your job in that realm is to make a bunch of computers look like one computer and hide the complexities of failures and consensus and distributed algorithms to make it feel like people are literally just working with one global computer. And for a lot of people, Kubernetes is that computer's operating system. You install that,
you take a bunch of little machines and you make them look like one big machine. And that was really, really hard. Rice like the foundation of a lot of computer science to figure this out. But if you're not a computer scientist, you can install Kubernetes and be doing a lot of this stuff that people spent decades trying to learn. Thank you. Sean's got a very important phone call from a very important little girl at camp. I can see it. That's very good. I'm going to call you
back on this show. We're going to talk more. I do love Kubernetes. We run several different clusters. And when I first got it, when I like, is it took me a long time to really understand what was going on? Once I got it, it became like magic. It was like, wow, this is really, really cool. And what you can do with it to your point is extremely powerful. Without as much effort as you
would think once you understand how it works. Yeah. It has to be to have all of this stuff is that what makes open source so interesting as a teaching tool, even if you weren't around to learn it in real time, it tends to serialize itself into libraries and platforms that you just get to use. So yeah, if you start your career, 10 years from now, more than likely, you would just be able to import 10 years of knowledge as a library and be able to do all the things that people were trying
to discover back then. You're in this industry. Welcome. Very cool. Very cool. All right. Well, we'll wrap up here at this, I think, as good a place as any Kelsey. Thank you for joining us. It's been a awesome conversation. Just really enjoyed it. And I think my prediction was right pretty high density. Lots of good content and a short amount of time. And let's do it again sometime. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Kelly. Thank you. All right. All right. So for teaching Python, this is
a shock. This is Kelly signing off.