S1 E19: There's always incremental improvements laying around (Kyle / @KyleShevlin)

So I work at a healthcare startup as part of a front end platform team. Specifically, I am building out essentially eternal tools and libraries to support. The other engineers that are building product for our company, our company helps people who have type two diabetes be able to honestly get off of their medications through a diet and through some other things that we help them do by connecting them with, uh, specialists and that kind of thing.

So I am helping people build product faster is kind of how I think. At the

Yeah. So what's the short version of your story, right? How did you get into intern or tools, uh, front end development, right? Is that where you started? Kind of give us a brief overview of what that journey looked.

I did my ADHD thing where I, you know, just dove in and I just kept doing it and, and then one day someone was like, You know, you can get a job doing this, right? Cause I had. Considered it as a career. It just wasn't something on my mind. And uh, they told me to go get a job and I did. It was lucky timing. Honestly, it was before like the proliferation of boot camps. It was a good time to enter the market, and I joined as a front end developer because that's largely what I could teach myself.

Html, CSS, and J Query, which is all I really knew. I didn't even, I can't even say I knew JavaScript. I knew J Query and just a little bit of it, so I joined. Like a design centric agency, like a, like an agency that built a lot of brand websites. And like my very first year, I just can't forget this, it was so formative, but I worked on like 80 different projects and most of it was like adding a little bit of UI or fixing some styling bug or something, or you know, it was stuff like that.

And I got really, really good at css. I've never understood the people who are like, Oh, I can't do CSS just because that's what I. So I actually have a little struggle having that, that empathy, because that's kind of what I started on and then built the other skills. And then how I've gotten to like being an internal tools platforming engineer. I think that has a lot to do with a couple things.

I'm an idealist by nature, so I want things to be right, and I want to do things right for the sake of doing them right. I'm very lawful good in that, that regard. Um, if you're a, you know, you're into d and d and you, you know, your character breakdowns that way. And I think the other thing is I'm also naturally like a systems thinker. I often joke that I'm a forest person, not a tree person.

Honestly, sometimes, depending on the detail, the individual tree, it's just really tedious and boring to me. I'll lose it. But like I. Almost immediately hear something and see the greater impact it'll have or can understand how it fits in the greater system. And so building tools that kind of do that, like build systems that help people do the right thing as, as silly as that sounds, that that really fits with who I am. And then I think the last thing. I like sharing things.

I've learned, uh, like I like teaching in some capacity, and that capacity has changed a lot throughout my career, but, Being an internal tooling dev, that's kind of my job. My job is to find patterns that are like, No, this isn't great, and here's why. You know, I, I know you are a busy dev, working the fast you can, but here's a better way. And then coming up with ways to make sure that.

They can't fall into bad habits, like, you know, whether it's as simple as an Slint rule or maybe I just, like, I don't give them the option to screw up in some way, maybe through types or something else. Uh, like, I'll give an example. I work mostly in React and React Native. Now, I think most people who work in React know that there's a style.

Available. Well, you know, I can make it type safe that you can't use style like the prop to override things, but that's not safe enough for me cuz I know some of you out there are gonna work around me and you're gonna put like a ts ignore and you're gonna write your own styles and I'm gonna let that happen. So I literally destructure it and use a Ts expect error. I don't assign it to the underlying component. You just can't do it.

I keep you from doing it at run time cuz I know you, I know how you work. And so, you know, sometimes it's about like gently guiding and other times it's about putting a really strong barricade and saying, No, you can't break my system. So sorry.

Like you like to have things working properly. Right. And that kind of leans towards the internal tools, but yeah, I guess what keeps you passionate about

It helps you realize like you could be doing other things that are much harder and, and frankly, I mean, I'm just really fortunate, Like I changed careers at a good time and I've seen how like for example, my finances have improved my life because of this career versus my friends who are still in ministry or struggling or something. So super lucky there, and it would just be, it wouldn't be realistic not to acknowledge that, so I have to acknowledge that.

The other thing, I think it just, it's always fit my brain. Even before coding, I had the wildest education journey. I started as an engineering major, like mechanical engineering. I have a double major in philosophy and mathematics because I had enough math credits that when I switch, Philosophy. I already had the major done. It was not a wise decision, by the way. It's just, it's just something a 19 year old me did without knowing any better. I didn't have any guidance in my life.

That's a story for another podcast and a therapist probably. So I've just always had a brain that could, you know, analyze things, break 'em down, maybe figure out how they work, or just kind of enjoyed that kind of puzzle. And coming up with solutions kind of thing. So that certainly helps. It's nice to have like problems to focus on, to work through, I think.

I think other things that keep me kind of passionate are, I love the idea that there's just always incremental improvement laying around. Like you can go learn. A new technique and you never know when it might be a useful addition to your repertoire.

I guess related to that is like how like learning a concept can maybe just transform the way you think and I've kind of always enjoyed transforming the way I think like you don't pursue degrees and philosophy and theology if you're not willing to hear an idea or a concept wrestle with it and come away. With different ideas and be a different person or something like that. And I, to some degree, I think that happens in coding. Like I, I'll give an example.

Many people who know me on Twitter know I have a course on state machines, and I've really enjoyed learning about them over the years, even though to this day I've still never gotten to use them in production at a company. Like I have a fullon course on 'em. I think they're great, but I've never gotten to use 'em. There's always some pushback somewhere. I think I might finally be at a place where we can, my managers like onboard another team is like, Oh yeah, we want to use those.

So might quite get there. But what I'm getting at is like, regardless of never being able to use like X State, it radically changed how I think about programming. You know, you go from these variables that represent infinite uh, data. To understanding that things actually mostly progress through a set of finite states. And when you start to see that, you actually start to see states that you didn't know were there.

I was explaining something to my wife the other day and I was like, You know, you might have something where like a light switch is on or off, for example, but there is something there in the time it takes you to move the switch. And I was specifically talking about animations. You would have a state of that transition. Right. And when you start to learn to think that way, I think it just changes the way you look at a lot of programming. And so, I don't know.

I feel like all those things kind of keep me interested in it. I, I kind of went everywhere, but that's what I always do. My apologies for my ADHD brain . Eddie: No, that's really interesting because I also feel. In some ways swing it back around to your philosophy degree, like that's kind of profound because people oftentimes feel unsettled when they are in a state of transition. Mm-hmm.

, and I kind of feel like identifying that you are actually in a definitive state and like, okay, if I'm in this state, what are the attributes of the state I should be in? Like, what should I be doing in this? Because normally they're like, Well, I'm not this thing yet, right? I'm not turned on yet. I'm not turned off yet. And I was like, Well, what properties belong to you in this state of transition? I feel like I don't know you. You hit something really deep there.

That's cool. Well, I guess I could kind of see that. I think I've, I think to kind of add to that, People often hear on my journey and they're like, How'd you end up here? And I think, I think people maybe don't recognize that there's really a ton of overlap, like of all these things, like learning to think like philosophy was mostly just learning to think analytically. And that's a skill that's used everywhere. I mean, that's why PhD stands for philosophy of that thing, right?

Whatever you happen to study. And so I guess I had, I'm, I'm sure I have, but I, I've never really thought of it as, Maybe we do all focus on our personal transitions and not our current states, or vice versa. That's a really interesting thing. I think we need another podcast for that one. . Eddie: Yeah, definitely. We'll, we'll book that one. Stay tuned to everyone. Um, . So kind of one of the main things we come around to on this podcast is talking about things that bring people joy.

And I've noticed that, you know, you kind of have this motto, right, That you enjoy leaving things better than you find them. And I just really love that. So I was curious if we could spend some time where you kind of talked to us around how you came around to this thought pattern and kind of how it intersects with your life and your job and, and that stuff. Sure. I don't think it was a conscious choice.

I think to some degree it's who I am, and I think it could be a bit, because I don't wanna say things are causational, but there's probably some high correlations with the fact that I'm neuro divergent and maybe there's some degree of rigid. I kind of look at myself sometimes as a, a relatively like black and white rigid kind of thing.

I, it's not that I don't understand nuance, it's like, but once I've made up my mind literally about something, until you really give me extremely compelling evidence, I'm like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stand here. And I think that applies to like what I mean by improving, while improving involves change, like the constant. I always want to improve, like the things I pursue and the things I do in my life, whether it's coding or like, probably the biggest endeavor I've done in my entire life is golf.

I took up golf in high school. I played lots of sports, but I took that one up in high school as well, and I played collegiately. I was an all American at the junior college level. I went on to play more and I thought about turning pro and. The truth is I didn't because I didn't have money, but looking back like that was probably a wise decision, even without having the money to try it. But even to this day, I still practice every single day. I have a net and a mat in my garage.

I have a putt green in my basement. I am. Probably better than I was in college at this point, and I do it because it's an impossible to perfect thing. It just really tickles something in my brain to constantly pursue this impossible to perfect. Thing. And it's, it's not just that, like when I was doing music, you can see on the video camera behind me, I have, I have music equipment behind me. You know, I was constantly trying to get better at that.

Whether it's be music production or songwriting or something, I just really enjoy. It's weird. The things don't necessarily like make me happy. But the recognition of improvement or just the feeling of improvement, that really speaks to me another way. Like video games, like I don't play video games that like make me happy. I play video games that I get better at. Like, as silly as it sounds like, uh, like Rocket League is probably the one I've played the most the last few years.

And why do I like it? Because the skill ceiling is unattainable. Like the ceiling just keeps getting moved up. Now I. Personal skills, ceiling. My thumbs are not amazing. They're like the least coordinated digits on my body, but I can see how I've progressed and how I get better and, and that. That triggers something for me, that pursuit of improvement. So it's weird. It's like that's a constant, I think all things should pursue improvement.

I look at the world and I'm like, Why wouldn't you try to get better? And it's why I get mad about all sorts of things is like, there are common sense actions you can take to do better or there are common sense actions you can take to be safer or, or something like that. Like, and. I just kind of look at that and that's a constant, like I just expect people should pursue the same thing as me, and that's, that's how I'm rigid, but I love the changing that comes from pursuing improvement.

I hope that makes

Like, you know, what their slide decks and their meetings and also like what revenue does that bring in?

Like that's how they're going to achieve success versus like, As an engineer, my, maybe my inclination is not to think of successes, how much dollars I've done, but, but you know, it could be, it could definitely be a metric, like, especially like if you're a backend engineer and you can like literally see like, you know, if I fix this, uh, this function here, this throughput here, whatever, I save the company X thousands of dollars. Great. It's a good metric for you.

But as a front end engineer, I think my metrics tend to be a little more difficult to touch to underst. I can't tell you how much more money, uh, more delightful experience gave without somebody else doing some kind of like analytics and, uh, economic breakdown, stuff like that. So I feel like there's that, that antagonism. And if you're a product engineer, you unfortunately have to balance it. You have to learn.

You want to be successful, you have to deliver product, and that should probably be your focus. But that's why I pursued work where my stakeholders aren't my product manager and the users directly, but my stakeholders are the other devs. Like do the other devs feel like it's easier to do their. Do the other devs feel like they're less likely to run into the problems they did in the past? Do the other devs feel like they're being successful?

By using the tools and the systems we create, that's a win-win for me. That means I get to sit here and I get to fixate on little details that actually really matter. Um, things like a system is all all about balancing. Enabling and disabling what power do I give you versus what powers do I restrict, you know, and, and really thinking through, like, I'm writing a blog post right now about how, you know, props on a component do that.

Like some props are expanders, like they expand the possibilities of what can happen, like children or, um, anything that can take an infinite state, like a string or a number like. That's going to expand what this thing can do, um, versus props that are restrictive. Like they only allow a certain set of, of things to happen. And both are good.

But you really have to think about when you're designing something to, for reuse to be reused by a lot of people, how do those things that power, that enabling, that disabling, how does that impact everyone that's going to use this? And so, I don't know, lucky for. That really fits the way I like to think anyway, finding work that fits that way works for me. Like the hardest part is convincing people like that. It's worth paying me for that stuff.

Cause you know, like when things are good, I think it, I think everyone's like, Oh yeah, let's, let's make it easier for everyone. But at the end of the day, You know, I think by the time this comes out, there's been plenty of companies with layoffs.

Uh, I've definitely talked to people on internal teams that are, that have concerns that proving that you have value and you add value can be a little more challenging when your work is foundational versus on the edge, like on where the user actually interacts with stuff. So, I don't know. It's a double edged sword. I.

Like right, like I've been trained to think through tradeoffs of quality versus shipping. Speed, quality and speed are constantly like balanced. Anytime I'm working on something and it's like you talk to the product manager and you're like, Oh. Well, you know, how important is it that it does this extra feature? Cause we could get it out faster if we cut that one feature. You know, like . Kyle: Yep. You do it all the time. You know, you cut scope, you cut scope, you cut scope.

I think one of the things that's really useful about this kind of job for the way my brain works is. I have a lot of autonomy to, as I'm going, like, I'm improving the system and I see something, it's not a big deal for me to make another ticket and go and just keep going. And, and as long as everything's building towards like the goal we have, that's fine. I, I'm also, you know, uh, I'm not the biggest stickler of like roadmaps and sprints and all that. I'm definitely a bit more of.

Just put things on a board and let's go. Like, let's not worry about points. They're all made up. They don't matter. You know, stuff like that. You, you don't want me as your agile, uh, coach or anything like that. This time. I will swear you can blur it out, but I'm letting you know, it's, um, have you ever seen J F d I just fucking do it so. Kind of a believer of that. Well, if you ever decide that you need to get a job as an agile something, let me know and we'll take down this episode.

. Kyle: All right. Yeah, yeah. No, no. I'll stand by this till I die. Sounds good. Well, hey, as we're wrapping up, I was just curious, like how does this kind of play in your personal life, right? Is there any way in which you kind of approach. This just in, Yeah. More, you know, where there's hobbies or how you go about your day or productivity or

I think there's also ways, like I just ask myself a lot, uh, not that I necessarily come up with good answers, but I ask myself things like, like, are there changes I can make that would improve my. That would maybe get me more time with friends, for example, or, uh, give me more opportunities to spend doing activities I enjoy. I'll give an example.

I don't do this every Thursday, but one of the things I was doing when I, uh, was pursuing work was made sure that I told them like, Hey, there's a group of guys. I play with golf every Sunday, but they also play Thursdays afternoons. How cool are you with. Splitting off in the afternoon, going and playing, and then coming back and work in the evening. And it, you know, if they balked at it, I balked at them. But the way I look at it, two things. I live in the Pacific Northwest.

Sunlight is a precious commodity. I gotta take advantage of it while it's there, but two. You know, time is a precious commodity. Like one of the ways you can be wealthy in this world is to have freedom with your time, and it's really hard to achieve. And so finding people that will be okay with that or allow you at least the flexibility to maybe control your time a little bit more can be really meaningful. And so for me that's, that's one of the ways, like I kind of apply all that to my.

Honestly a part of it is it it, and this kind of goes back to philosophy, theology, and all that is like, it's just really thinking about how time is finite. And I think there's potentially even more pressure on it due to things like. Anything from like, uh, climate change to all sorts of other potential issues and crises that might happen that affect things like economics and communities and all that. So part of me is like, I might as well do the things I enjoy now while I can.

Because I don't know if they're gonna be here in 30 years. I play with a bunch of old retirees, and I joke with them about that all the time. They're like, in their sixties and seventies, they play four or five times a week. And I know people have their qualms with golf and I, I get it. I really do actually get it. I, I think they'd be surprised that I, that I actually understand why they're upset with it.

But it's just a, it's just the most challenging activity that I've ever done in my life and enjoy. I enjoy it in a very different way than probably they think, But my point. It might not be there. When I'm at the age of retirement, we might not get to retirement. So I'm gonna try and enjoy it while I can and enjoy whatever else in my life that I can, while I can.

And allowing yourself, you know, um, to make the most important things happen today. Cuz like you said, you know, Yeah. Who knows what tomorrow

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