Welcome to day four of season one finale week. It's episode 43 of the web joy podcast. I'm your host Eddie. And in this podcast, we interview guests about their origin story. And what makes them excited and joyful to be part of the tech community. I hope you enjoy today's episode. A huge fan of spending as little time as possible typing with my chin. Welcome to another episode of Web Joy. I'm excited to have Mike here talking today. Mike, say hi to all of our listeners.
Hello everyone. Hello, Eddie. Good to be on the podcast. Well,
we're, we're happy to have you. So for those who might not know who you are, go ahead and just give us short intro, right? Who you are, what you do, the general
details. So I am Mike. I am the c t o and co-founder of a small startup in based out of Virginia called Motiva. And we are pretty niche. We do, we're a mental health startup and we connect pre-licensed therapists to supervisors. Uh, it's an important part of their, their licensure journey. And so we are essentially a marketplace that connects those two populations together. Just a tech company that does that. So that's what I do for work right now.
How did you get into all of this? Seems like you've, you're a, a fun, exciting part in the journey. That sounds really cool to be part of a mental health startup and everything. So how did you get interested in technology? What journey did that take you on? Um, how did you kind of end up where you are today?
I, uh, have been doing this about 11 years, so I'm self-taught, started teaching myself back in 2009. And I learned back then I was like in on the med school track, very similar to Cat who, who you had on recently. And I was doing clinical research, uh, and I had done my whole pre-med thing and was getting ready to go to med school and then I decided I hated it, , I didn't wanna do any of that. And tried biotech for research for a little while.
Uh, and then decided to like basically pivot, uh, entirely and. I started learning programming on my own back. Then there's like just books. I bought a bunch of books and studied and just tried to figure it out on my own.
Built a couple of small toy apps and then eventually landed a job at a small startup and kind of worked my way up to bigger startups and then, Wound up in Silicon Valley at some larger companies that you've, uh, probably heard of, like Yahoo, Google, Airbnb, and then coming back down for a landing, so to speak, in startup land.
So yeah, that's kinda the arc of my, my journey is kind of getting going to bigger, bigger companies and then, uh, and then smaller, uh, just, we're a 21 person company right now. What was it
that kind of drew you back to startup and smaller companies and stuff? Once you kind of got up to the larger companies, what was it that kind of tugged you back Welcome to day four of season one finale week. It's episode 43 of the web joy podcast. I'm your host Eddie. And in this podcast, we interview guests about their origin story. And what makes them excited and joyful to be part of the tech community. I hope you enjoy today's episode.
A huge fan of spending as little time as possible typing with my chin. down?
I knew pretty early on in my big tech journey that I was gonna be back in startups. Uh, eventually. I just find the feeling of like creativity and ownership to just be so much stronger in startups and like kind of like the impact that you can have on, on pe. Like I just feel a lot more connected to my work when I'm in a smaller company. Just being able to own like a feature from end-to-end, like talking to the customer who I've impacted, or sometimes like a lot of the.
At a company, the small, my customers are the employees, and I, I have a relationship with them. I get to see, you know, how my work has impacted their lives and how much it better it's made their jobs. I really like that feeling. I just, I didn't get that for many, many years when I was at these bigger company. I mean, I think like you reach people on a broader scale, but the trade off is, you know, everyone's just kind of a metric. They're a number and you're trying.
You know, make those numbers go up, uh, or like whatever direction that you're trying to get them to go in, but you don't see the impact that the technology actually has on like an individual person's life. So I really like kind of feeling that in, in startup land.
Yeah, no, that, that makes complete sense at Glass Storm, not even in that, that big of a company. Right. But definitely like closer to Silicone Valley sizes than all the startups and small like design agencies I've worked for in the past. And definitely already kind of feeling that like at not even as big a c as some companies get, it's like, okay. Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts here. And like you said, it's much more, you're kind of zoomed out from everything. Right. And it.
As you zoom out from a photo, all those individual pixels, like they blend together into a tapestry, but you're no longer looking at pixels, right? You're looking at mm-hmm. the pattern and the image that comes out of it, but it's like, well, If those pixels are people like that. Yeah, that's a huge, that's a huge thing to zoom out of, right? And like something that you kind of have to remind yourself like, oh no, these aren't just pixels. These aren't just numbers.
Like these are people, and I can definitely see how it would be refreshing to step back out of that and into where you can actually see who you're impacting. So I love that.
Nothing against people who kind of prefer having like, oh, I. You know, I wanna work on this product that like, you know, 10 million people use. You know, I think there's, oh yeah, there's something magical about that too, that you can do that in technology and you can like push it. Like probably you can't push a change like in the same day that impacts like 10 million people probably need to go through like a lot of review to do that. But, uh, nothing against that and does it for some people.
And, but for me it's like, that wasn't really it for me. Yeah.
Well, and I love that about tech, right? Like it literally spans so much that you can have people who are really passionate about, I'm gonna build this niche thing for five people, right? And then you have. People who are gonna work for a company and build something. And like you said, once it gets deployed and goes through all the systems, like it hits millions of people, maybe billions of people.
And um, that's just cool that you can have the same skills and you can choose which of those areas you want to be in. Right. And find the sweet spot for what works for you. Yep. Totally. As every episode in this podcast, we kind of just say, Hey, what brings you joy? Right. What have you been up to lately that just kind of stuck out to you and gets you excited?
My journey has been like primarily front end. I probably, you know, became a front end engineer, like I became what I would call a front end engineer around my, my second or third year into, into my, you know, career. And I, I'm like really struck by how much front end engineers care about the developer experience. And this is something that I still feel like, you know, front engineers get right More than other languages that I've used in the past.
It's not that like backend engineers don't care at all about dev experience, but I feel like frontend engineers take it to like another level. And I think there's a trade off here. So I just want to caveat this, that like, It's really complicated to set up a lot of these like tool chains on front end engineering. People complain all the time about like, oh, what's mpm? What's brew? All these different like package managers that you need to like know.
And so there's like a pretty big barrier to entry to like getting into like these like tool chains. A lot of people say, I used to just be able to like, Throw some H T M L in a file and like some JavaScript in a file and then some CSS in a file. And like, I didn't have any like these build systems, but these build systems add like a ton of value to my life, , and I understand why they exist.
So like my thing is just around developer productivity, I am like really a, a huge fan of just spending as little time as possible typing, like just trying to like type manually enter keystrokes in kind of like shortening the feedback loop between. Writing code and seeing it in your browser, automating a lot of like the things that are just really annoying about web development. I found that like so many of these things have improved so much over the course of the past decade.
And just to give you a couple examples of this. I remember back in like 2013 or 2014, I started using this technology called Browser Sync. And back then browser Sync was like this revolutionary thing where I would just have two monitors and I would like edit code on one of the monitors and it would just update in my other monitor in the browser. Like I could just edit some CSS and it would just get injected into the browser. And nowadays it's like so boring, right?
Like create, if you like spin up, create. It's like you get that out of the box, but back then it was like I had to, I used to have to just like write my code and then go into my browser and hit the refresh button and maybe it takes like five, 10 seconds, like, you know, that's really slow. But like, maybe it takes a couple seconds to refresh, but that's enough time for me to like lose my train of thought.
And forget what I'm doing and just the kind of, just these like tight, these tighter feedback loops have really just improved my productivity over the years. Another example is just like prettier. There's this, uh, lint tool called Prettier that just formats your code, and I used to used to have to do that manually. It's just like it used to be such a pain in the butt. There's just so many things now that just, I don't even think about.
I remember, like I had code reviews at Google where all we would do is just like knit syntax. Like, just like, oh, you forgot a space here. You, uh, you should have broken the line here. And I just, I don't spend any time doing any of that stupid stuff now because I have a computer that does it for me. So just, I've seen just the evolution of these tools and I take, you take them for granted now because so many.
Spoiler plates and stuff come with them, but man, I I, I was around when they weren't there, they didn't exist, and it was so much more of a chore to do web development back then. Yeah,
no, I, I totally get that. I love a lot of those tools as well. And I actually, the last company I worked at was using really old codebase. It was not easy to work with because it had been j s. and then they, like, they weren't able to move to a complete S p a, so they were like mid transition from J S P to Angular s p a. And so essentially it was in this place where rather than actually loading up the whole thing, like you would load up a G S P page and some of those pages would activate.
An Angular app inside the page. But if you navigated, you were doing a full page refresh, right? And then you'd get angular and maybe there were some different things you could do while on that page that wouldn't cause a page refresh. But the build thing was crazy cuz we were still having to bundle it back up into being injected in these different J S P pages. So we did not have a lot of that tooling when I started there. Yeah. And thankfully we.
We made a lot of progress in the years I was there and so when I was leaving we finally were able to start using Prettier and we were doing, we got up to Angular 11 and it was actually exporting like a true s p a, aside from like a couple pages that were still, so we were able to actually do like live refreshing stuff. Yeah. Then now being at Glass, You know, using much more modern tooling starting to migrate into next, which obviously does all the things like Yeah, really nicely.
So a lot of those tools have been out for a little while, but in certain companies, like you still don't have access to that. And then when you suddenly do, you're like, oh, this is amazing.
I started with Java and uh, I did JSPs for a little bit. Um, I'm not even like comparing to JSPs , uh, I'm comparing to like, yeah, just, uh, I was using PHP at the time, which is we weren't at enterprise at, at my first company. Yeah. Jsp, like, I can't, I can't imagine like trying to combine those two things. I'm glad you, I'm glad you got outta that. It was painful. . Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and I, I think, you know, you mentioned next Js. I think like s Spas are no longer cool.
Which I get like, I think like that's, I understand like, you know, I think it's a flawed paradigm for a lot of different use cases, like an Sspa blog Makes no sense in many ways. Yeah. But I still think that like, you know, the developer tooling around React is so amazing that like, I, it, it's like very painful for me to not have it, even when I'm trying to like develop like a multi-pay app. Yeah. Just like, you know, tools like Next JS and Remix are, are out.
Which is, you know, like I get that like we've kind of come from full circle on like we used to do multi-page apps and then we did single page apps and now we're like coming back to multi-page apps. But now I get to keep all the tooling that I used to like, kind of bring me joy when I was, you know, doing development. And I can still move super quickly in the developer experience and I get, you know, like performance.
But you know, the trade off, like I said at the beginning is, A very overcomplicated build chain that like, you know, I, I totally get that. There's like downsides to it, but for someone who's like seasoned as like really comfortable with these like tool chains, I love it. I can't get
enough of it. Yeah, totally. I think one benefit to next and remix and stuff is I do feel like in some ways, The big barrier to entry is having to figure out how all these things work together, and I do feel like if someone spins up next or remix, it's so much easier now to just dive in and have all this stuff for free rather than having to like learn 10 different tools that all need to work together. And I, I totally agree.
Like I started using P H P back in 2005 or something, and having P H P versus remix with React, like that's just a
dream. Totally. I think this was like a big problem too when I was learning React back before we had these like kind of frameworks to kind of like tie a bunch of different concepts together. Had to cobble together my own router had to cobble together my own form library and with remix, you just get everything out of the box. Some people don't like that. Some people are like, oh, I want to use form or my own form library, and I'm like, who cares? I don't care. Like I just, I wanna be productive.
I wanna work on like the business logic. Yeah. There's so many frameworks that like kind of make these decisions for me. That I can make these decisions. I don't want to, like, I just, I, I think it's like a waste of time. And so I get these frameworks that like, have put a lot of thought into it, have a lot of people like kind of battle testing it for me and god bless, uh, open source contributors. I've just, everyone gets a benefit so much from it these
days. Yeah, absolutely. Without open source contributors, like we'd be in such a. A worse place. I mean, definitely all this stuff coming together just is, is nice. And like you said, I think I never really got into Ruby and thus never got into Ruby on Rails. But one thing I always liked and appreciated about Ruby on Rails was how it was opinionated and you could just sit down and spin it up and it just, the whole cyst ecosystem was made to work together.
And I. Next and remix and Right, like we're kind of starting to get that Yes. Where we get some opinionated frameworks that do everything for us and it's like, yes, you can kind of decouple this stuff, right? Someone wants to spin up, react, and they just wanna cobble together 10 different things. That's great. Like you do you, but. If someone just wants to spin up a project. I was doing a hackathon back in May and I was like, well, when am I going?
You know, used to do this hackathon, it was an internal Glassdoor hackathon and I was like, oh, let me just spin up remix. I've been wanting to do something with remix and like it was so easy to spin up and like start building this thing in remix and like, I'd never used remix before, but in this like three day hackathon I was. Able to spin it up and make like a huge amount of progress for never using it before. So that was
super fun. I totally agree with the, the Ruby on Rails discussion too. I used Ruby on Rails for a while and even though mostly a front end engineer, I still used Ruby whenever I was like starting a side thing because it's so easy. It was just so, like Rails and eight mm-hmm. and you're, you're off and running. And you don't have to side on like a directory structure. You don't need to decide on anything.
You just follow the convention and you are just writing business logic and so much of the stupid stuff is extracted away. Like I felt like for the longest time, that just wasn't true, that that wasn't possible. In the front end ecosystem. It was like, just pick all the dependencies and make sure they work well together too.
You know, like I remember the thing that almost made me abandon React was I was like using a, I was trying to like integrate like Redux and Redux form into React and then like I was running into problems with Redux form saying, oh, if you want to. There's a critical bug in React. You have to upgrade to this version of this like release candidate and react to fix it.
And so it's not even just like picking the dependencies, it's also making sure that you are on the right version of dependencies, such as they Oh, that they all work together. Where the remix is just like they've already done that. They've already like tested it and make sure it all works. Yeah, like that. It's not that a hundred thousand different, like front end engineers need to figure that all. It's just the core team needs to figure it out and then everyone else gets the benefit from it.
No, that's awesome. Yeah, we ran into a lot of that at my last company, like when we, we got stuck at Angular four, I believe, because Angular five used Webpac five, I believe. Oh no, nevermind. They used the Angular C L I, which we had chosen not to use, but then we waited long enough. Angular 10 came out I think, and that used Webpac five. So then it's like we had to like figure out, okay, we have to be able to transition over and we have to be able to support Webpac five.
So then we're like, do our dependencies support Webpac five and like there was all this math to make sure that we could go from Webpac four to Webpac five. Yeah, it's a lot of drama. So, yeah, I, I like other people making those choices for us. . Mike: Yeah. I think anyone who hasn't like, gone through version upgrade or like, been not been, been able to upgrade to some version of a library, because some other version of a library that you also depend on doesn't support that version.
Just do that a couple times and you'll like really support frameworks that cobble everything together. . Yeah, exactly. Well, every episode we always kind of say, Hey, like is there anything you've been working on? Anything that you wanna share with the listeners that they might find helpful or wanna check out? So I just wanted to ask if there was anything you were working on that you wanted to.
Not so much right now, Eddie, but I do want to get back into writing. I'm actually like, this is my first, uh, public commitment to to putting out a series. I wanna, I wanna write a series called What New Web Developers Should Know About X. So I'm, I'm gonna be covering topics like, kind of like the 2 0 1 version of topics. What new web developers need to know about like form validation or security.
Or http or like thinking through all these like different topics that like, you know, you're probably not gonna get at a bootcamp. But, uh, I wanna start kind of thinking about those and like kind of teaching those topics. So I will be writing at my website, uh, Mike chen.io. And so I will probably be trying to put out a newsletter or something like that, uh, in the near future. Yeah. I'm saying this right now. I haven't started d doing it.
I'm saying this right now on this podcast because, uh, so I'll be embarrassed if I don't do
it. I love that accountability by putting it on the public. Yes, for sure. Nice. All right. Well then if you're listening to this, and you heard this either, Mike got it out there and so I didn't cut it out or B Mike still didn't get it out there, but I wanted him be embarrassed and accountable anyway, so you should check the show notes and see if there's any links to that stuff and see if he actually completed it. Sounds good. Well Mike, thank you for joining us today.
It's been a pleasure just chatting, getting to know you and your journey. Hearing and chatting about some developer productivity stuff. Really a good thing to take joy in . Mike: Agreed. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Eddie. Absolutely. Thank you for joining us for episode 43. A huge fan of spending as little time as possible typing with my Jen. You can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as a link to Mike's website and social media accounts.
All in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode. Come on help. Some others discover it as well. Give us a shout out on your favorite social media platform. Doesn't matter to us. And tag a friend or coworker that you think would enjoy it. Don't forget to follow us wherever you hanging out online or subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date. Thank you for joining us for season one. If you have three minutes, please take our short listener survey.
You can find the link right in the show notes. It'll be invaluable while we plan out season two. Thank you for listening and have a great day.