This episode features an interview with Suz Hinton, Senior Software Engineer at CrowdStrike, where she develops advanced threat hunting technologies. Suz has been in the industry for over 15 years holding positions at Microsoft, Stripe, and Kickstarter. She’s also an advocate for accessibility, privacy, security, and prioritizing the user experience. In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Suz discuss not being dogmatic, exploring outside the domain, and self-hosted web services.
This episode features an interview with Suz Hinton, Senior Software Engineer at CrowdStrike, where she develops advanced threat hunting technologies. Suz has been in the industry for over 15 years holding positions at Microsoft, Stripe, and Kickstarter. She’s also an advocate for accessibility, privacy, security, and prioritizing the user experience.
In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Suz discuss not being dogmatic, exploring outside the domain, and self-hosted web services.
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Episode Timestamps:
(03:34): What Suz is working on right now
(05:29): What Suz’s day-to-day looks like
(09:16): What tools Suz uses
(14:57): How Suz got into the industry
(20:00): Rapid Fire Questions
(34:19): Random Segment Generator
(47:07): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“Don't be dogmatic about something just because it's the only tool that you are really comfortable with and you don't want to explore another one, because then that makes you feel weird. [...] Just think about what is actually useful, what is something that is actually going to address my needs. And try to avoid the hype train, try to avoid that feeling of FoMo.” – Suz Hinton
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Links:
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Cassidy Williams: Hello everybody and welcome to The Dev Morning Show (At Night). I'm Cassidy Williams and I am excited to bring on our lovely co-host, as always, Zach Plata. Hey, Zach.
Zach Plata: Hey, Cass. All right. Are you going to start playing this Hogwarts legacy game that's just been going a craze?
Cassidy Williams: I don't have a place a PS five, a PlayStation five, and I don't have time because I'm hardcore playing breath of the wild right now.
Again, on on switch. I wanna get every cor oxide in the game and. I, who's got the time? No distractions. Yeah. , I'm very busy. Speaking of very busy, but very cool people. We have Suz Hinton on the show. Suz is a senior software engineer at Cloud Strike. Hey
Suz Hinton: Suz, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to catch up with you.
Yeah. So
Cassidy Williams: glad to have you. Are you playing any games now? I know you've got a whole like cross world move going and, and, uh, new jobs and all kinds of things going. Are you playing
Suz Hinton: anything? Mm-hmm. , I'm super behind on games. The newest one that I wanna play, which shows how behind I am is Stray. You know, the one where you're a cat.
Oh yeah, in the cyber punk world, so bad, . I know. So my, my work has like a games channel where you play one game a month, everyone plays it together. I just missed the boat on, on them playing stray as well, just cuz things were just a little busy at the time and it came out. So that's my next one. Um, when I finished my current semester at school, I'm gonna just play the crap out of that.
So
Cassidy Williams: that, that one looks really fun. I, I remember seeing so many. It was awesome. I remember seeing so many funny tweets where it was people saying like, okay, yes, like, There's cool combat and stuff, but really I just like being a cat .
Suz Hinton: That's just what it's about for me, a hundred percent. I am that person that's like, I don't really care about the main storyline.
I'm just gonna like, go and play around as the character, like I'm that person. Yeah, that's,
Cassidy Williams: that's pretty much what I'm doing with Breath of the Wild now, where I, I've played it before where I've like completed the game and now I'm like, I'm going to complete every part of the game, and I've been playing this latest run through.
For over a month now. And like if the, if these characters could talk, they'd probably be just like, she just doesn't care about the inquest. Like high rule is in danger and she does not care . But the COR seats, I've got those.
Suz Hinton: I feel the same way when I play animal crossing. Like Isabelle is really upset that my, I don't have a five star island and I'm like, you're ruining my vibe by asking me to do this right now.
But anyway, yeah. How many to seeds do you have custody?
Cassidy Williams: It's, uh, let's see, I have, I think I've almost at 200 core seeds. .
Suz Hinton: That's a lot. Actually. It's, I tapped outta the game before that. Yeah,
Cassidy Williams: it's, it's a lot of ox seeds. But here's the thing, I ha I only just unlocked the area with like the HITO village and stuff.
And so like, this has just been me going around like the central high rule thing and everything. Oh wow. And so, oh man, it's, I'm covering every inch of this map and it's, it's, I'm probably, I'm probably not gonna be done like this year, but it'll be so fun, .
Zach Plata: Dedication though.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, yeah. Anyway. Gosh, Suz, what are you working on right now?
Suz Hinton: I am currently studying a master's, actually, I'm just talking about outside of work. Um, I'm currently. working on a master's of, it's like a master of science in education. So it's like e-learning and education technology. It's like kind of, you know, the bleeding edge learning experience, design, that kind of stuff.
It's sort of the bleeding edge of education right now. And I think the pandemic has definitely shifted a lot of those, um, education masters in that direction. So I'm super excited to be taking this new program that the school just put out. Um, I do a lot of DIY stuff in my house right now, so just.
putting up custom shelving and that kind of stuff. Um, yeah, so that's what I'm doing outside work. It's definitely keeping me busy. Yeah. Oh,
Cassidy Williams: I'm sure. And I, I love that educational technology angle and everything. I, I feel like there's so much potential to make so many cool things for people to learn better, especially now that people are more open to remote and it, it's, It feels like early days, even though it's probably not, but there, there's just so much to do it.
It's
Suz Hinton: really cool. Oh yeah, I agree. I'm really excited about the research, like, you know, the capstone, the research project at the end, because you are kind of experimenting with. You know, trying to find, you know, the future of it. So I'm pretty excited to start that, for sure. Well,
Zach Plata: now it's time to hear from our lovely sponsors.
LaunchDarkly. The Dev Morning Show (At Night) is a sponsored podcast, means someone has to pay the bills around here we're sponsored by LaunchDarkly, and LaunchDarkly is the first scalable feature management platform. That means dev teams can innovate and get better software to customers faster. How by gradually releasing new software features and shipping code whenever they want.
Fast tracking their journeys to the cloud and building stronger relationships with business teams. Thanks for the
Cassidy Williams: money LaunchDarkly. Wow. Money. Thanks. So anyway, sis, what does your day-to-day look like? Well, between having a master's and all these DIY projects and, uh, and your day job.
Suz Hinton: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So I, I feel like this is gonna end up like one of those YouTube.
Video is, you know, a day in their life. Um, but I do actually start work quite early, so I'm gonna start off with that YouTube cliche. Um, I work for an American company, so CrowdStrike is based in America. Most of my colleagues are actually in America, and I have some in the UK too. So my hours tend to vary based on who I need to meet with, but most of the time I'll start at seven.
And then I finish at 3:00 PM which I think is kind of the, the perk of it. Right. Then you've
Cassidy Williams: got That's true. That's kind of nice to be done early in the afternoon.
Suz Hinton: Yeah. So, um, I really like that actually. And. That's kind of how I roll. So in the morning, you know, I just do the thing where I check my email and all that sort of stuff.
Check slack, leave emoji reactions everywhere, and then actually get on with my day . But I, I feel really lucky. So the team that I work on, which is the, it's got, uh, full on name. It's this, Strategic counter adversarial research team. It's actually an r and d lab, so we don't really have like a ton of meetings unless it's with the people you're directly kind of like, you know, working on the research project with.
So right now I have one standup meeting and it's on Tuesdays because it's Monday American time. So I have a really quiet Monday where I just code all day, which is amazing cause most of my colleagues are actually not, they're still enjoying their. And honestly I have one standup on Tuesdays and one optional meeting on Thursdays, and most of the time we just shoot the breeze, I guess.
Um, and it's great. This is like the dream, right? Like I was
Cassidy Williams: gonna say, that sounds so
Suz Hinton: chill. That's great. Yeah, , it's great. And so, you know, right now I'm working on a solo project, so that's why I'm not really, um, meeting with a lot of people very frequently, but. towards the, you know, towards the kind of middle of this year and the last couple of quarters, I'll be working on something that will be highly collaborative.
So I will definitely be in a lot of brain swimming meetings. I'll be getting a lot of feedback following up with users and things like that. Um, but for now I'm just doing a background project behind the scenes, which. It kind of integrity checks the output of something very important that we output, that the system uses, um, for a project that we're working on right now.
And so I just really have to do the behind the scenes work of, you know, calling all the correct APIs, pulling things down, integrity checking, make sure things are going right and sound the alarms if it's not. So it's kind of more like monitoring a DevOps work right now in infrastructure stuff. Um, but yeah.
the next project will be very much like more UI and like actual software driven that the threat hunters in our company actually use. So that's, that's gonna be really fun too. Yeah,
Cassidy Williams: those are such different ends of the stack. That's That's interesting. Do you like that? It's so
Suz Hinton: different. I really do. I think that's why I really jumped at this opportunity to work on a research team just because.
Um, it takes, like, it takes someone with, you know, who's sort of jack of all traits because you have to be comfortable jumping around. And I know that, um, the context switching isn't too bad because you'll work on a discreet project, then you'll move on to the next. So it's not like you are switching all the time.
But, um, I get to work on something different constantly, which I really, really like and I really like being able to put all of those skills that I've learned over my career, like into practice and into application, and really kind of feel. You know, all of that work I've put in over my career has paid off where I can just jump on anything.
So it's cool.
Zach Plata: What kind of tools do you use on a day-to-day basis? I know you mentioned Slack already, but are there any core other ones? ?
Suz Hinton: Yeah. I think Slack is just the mandatory thing these days, right? , right. But, um, I, I'm kind of boring. I, I really just use Vim to code with, uh, in I term two, and I just use the Dracula theme.
I don't really fiddle with my stuff outside of it. , it's, it really is. I love it. It's just, it's such a great color scheme. I've stuck with it for years and years now. Um, I use obsidian to take notes just because, like, I don't want to put stuff in the cloud or anything. I just want all the markdown files locally.
So I really, really, really like obsidian for work related tasks for sure. Um, and then I mostly am writing Go Lang these days. . Um, you know, I sort of, I moved outta front end a couple years ago and I kind of haven't really looked back and I think I'm gonna be working on a little bit of front end on the next project, but I mostly use Go Lang, so all the tool sets around that.
Um, we run our stuff on a Kubernetes cluster, so I tend to be just running a lot of that. Containers, images, um, all of that sort of stuff locally as well on my computer. So,
Cassidy Williams: so all the things that make your computer sound like a jet engine
Suz Hinton: sounds like , basically. Yeah. Yeah. And, and honestly like, you know, I don't mean to throw shade or anything, but.
Kubernetes is not great on M one laptops, and because I was the first on the team to have an M one laptop, it was kind of months of everyone pulling their hair out and us trying to figure out how to get it stably running. So that has not been the best experience. But once we got there, you know, I've been able to write codes since then.
So yeah, it's definitely like laptop Gober. Um, but less so on the, like, I, I just have a giant. , I have the 15 inch fully decked out, like that's my work laptop. They really pulled all this, all the stops out because they knew that, you know, I'm on a research team, so we also have to do stuff like run machine learning models and things like that.
Right. So we need like a pretty good deck. Yeah. And
Cassidy Williams: also I am a fellow obsidian user and I love it for taking notes. I just love local first stuff, uh, and like cloud things, syncing is optional and it just works if the internet's down. That's so
Suz Hinton: nice. I love it. I use it for capture the flag competitions as well.
Oh. Because it just helps me really stay organized because you tend to be just kind of a bit like, I don't know, frantic over the weekend, so you're trying to throw code samples in along with bullet points and notes and link to different pages and things, and it just makes it like so quick to do that.
Right. I know a lot of people use cherry tree for their CTF and their like bounty hunting, but I just really love using obsidian. Yeah, would you mind
Cassidy Williams: explaining, capture the flag tournaments for those out there who don't know what those are?
Suz Hinton: Yeah, totally. Um, it's really, really fun. So just for background, like I worked for a cybersecurity company and I did a cybersecurity degree, uh, over the pandemic just cuz I've always been interested in that stuff.
And, um, uh, a CTF or a Capture the Flag event is basically a competition. You need to, it's kind of like a hackathon, but from the actual like, you know, Hacka man perspective, actual sort of computer hacking. Yes. Um, that kind of cliche with the hoodie and all that. Um, so obviously it's not just men doing it, I just want to qualify that.
It's just that, that, that gif is so funny to me. But anyway, um, and so what you have to do, it depends on whether it's like. Defense, CTF or a offense? Ctf. But usually you have to kind of. Run some exploits and actually decode something or hack into a machine. And you find the flag. And the flag is usually just a small piece of text and the text usually follows like the same convention, you know, for a competition.
So it might just be like F L A G for flag and then a number. And then that's the proof that you've actually gotten past all the different barriers and you've actually hacked your way in. So you submit as many flags as you can in the competition. And then, You can do, um, you can win really cool stuff.
Like these challenge coins. We do the makeup brush thing. . Yeah. So, um, national Cyber League is like a, a collegiate competition and I did two of those. And if you end up in the top, whatever, Rank, uh, you get cool challenge coins. So yeah, so that's the ctf. They're really fun and you learn so much because you are forced to do stuff like, you know, I'm really bad at active directory exploits.
And so it forces you to like actually learn the things you've been putting off. So, ,
Cassidy Williams: yeah. Is That's awesome. That's where it's like blue team and red team, where red team is offensive and blue is exactly defensive, right? Mm-hmm. , I, I did some of those way back in the past and I remember learning so much and being just like, wow, every computer I've ever used is so vulnerable.
Suz Hinton: whenever. Yeah. I know is so true. It's just like windows. Just forget about it honestly. I just, yeah, a lot of, most expos tune for windows, uh, macros and Lennox less so, but you know, obviously there's still big issues with a lot of things and a lot of like vulnerabilities are up on the application level, right?
Like right at the top of the OSI stack. And so, you know, log four J for example, you know, just that's, that's cross platform, right? So yeah, it's just, it's actually scary. The more you learn about cybersecurity, the more you realize how fragile everything is for.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. Gosh. Well, we know that you build cool DIY things and you're studying Masters now and did security over the pandemic, what got you in the industry in the first place?
Suz Hinton: Mm-hmm. . So I have the most cliched story ever, so I for that. Um, let's go. When, when I was a kid, um, having a computer in your house was still kind of a luxury. Hmm. Um, and so we eventually got a computer in the house because my, uh, my uncle was getting rid of his old Commodore 64. Uh, yeah, so that's the cliche.
I started with the Commodore 64 and let, just, just to set the scene, Commodore 64 came out, I think like. Around when I was born in the eighties, but like this was like the early nineties at this point. So people already had like Windows 3.1 and stuff like that, . So you know, we got the actual hand we down that nobody wanted.
And my dad's like, we're getting a computer, and I'm like, I don't know what that means, but it sounds cool. And then he sits me down in front of it and it's just a prompt, right? You know, that really beautiful electric bluish, purple-ish prompt. And I'm like, how do I use it? And he just plunks down the manual, right?
And I was like nine, so I was already able to read and all that. So I just kind of taught myself just by, you know, poking registers and doing all of the basic. Programming language, you know, foundations. And that's how I started. And I was like, I love this. And I was just making arts with like poking registers and getting sprites to show up and I'd print it out and draw all over it.
And, and I was just having a lot of fun with it. And so, um, you know, that just naturally progressed to, you know, when I eventually got the internet, um, at home, I was like, oh, websites are really kind of easy to. , it's just HTML and notepad, right? And so, yeah, it just naturally progressed to there. And, um, I didn't actually go to college for computer science because my, my high school wasn't really super in tune with that stuff, and they didn't even know that my, my career, my, you know, school counselor was, didn't even know to suggest that to me.
So I just sort of, scrappily got my way into the industry just through, yeah. , what, what did you. Uh, I didn't major in anything. I went to what's called tafe, which is tertiary and further education in Australia. I guess the closest thing is community college. So it was sort of a technical school, um, of a major university.
And I did multimedia because that's showing my age, right? . So, you know, sound production, 3D modeling, um, video production, flash games. That's so cool though. Um, databases, right? And so, Two years. Um, I didn't learn a lot of programming cause I already kind of knew it, but I did learn how to do a lot of things Right.
Which, which came in way more useful in my career later on than I thought it was going to. So
Cassidy Williams: Well, and I feel like at that time and kind of in. Early, mid two thousands and stuff and, and getting into like early 2010s, knowing how to do the multimedia type things of like flash and video and stuff was almost necessary in addition to the coding, depending on what you were working on.
Suz Hinton: Yeah, that's what my first couple of jobs were actually were producing CD ROMs. Wow. You know, with Macromedia Director, this was before Adobe even bought Flash, you know, and, and I worked in advertising agency where I was literally making. Web banner ads for Ford dealerships like , you know, just, and the cars were zooming around with the price coming in, you know, and it was just like all of those really bad flash ads from back in the day that used to also destroy your laptop battery when you were, you know, scrolling through a website,
So, I mean, it was, it was actually, you know, because it was a technical school, they were. giving you the direct hands on teaching of skills that the industry needed at the time, you know? Mm-hmm. It was an incredibly agile school that, you know, I actually returned to teach there for a while, and I was able to say, screw this cold fusion.
This is going out of vogue now. I'm gonna rewrite the entire curriculum for to teach php. And they were like, yep, go for it. You know? Wow. And so, Such an amazingly dynamic school. And the teachers there were just so incredibly inspiring that I almost am glad that I didn't know about computer science degrees because I think that, um, going back to fill in that knowledge you can always do.
Um, but mm-hmm. , that was a magical experience for me for sure. And, and entering the field during those kind of wild times was also something that I'm so glad that I had.
Cassidy Williams: I. , man. Good times. I know . I know, right? It's just, I, I think about just like, remember when Transparent p and Gs came out with IE. Seven Game Changer?
Suz Hinton: And I'm like, I know, I know everything that came out. Yeah. Even just remember the, the Internet Explorer filters, the CSS filters, it was like, oh, and now, you know, obviously they're like way better and way more performant and cross black cross browser. But you know, when like all those CSS filters started coming in and all of us olds were like, Ooh.
I remember this. Yeah, I, I've done this before. , it's back. Yeah, it was .
Cassidy Williams: All right, it is now time for rapid fire questions. Ah,
we're gonna ask you things rapidly. Okay. So we all have a domain name or project idea that we're squatting on. What are your.
Suz Hinton: I, I really am that person that's a total criminal with this stuff. So I just picked a small selection . Um, first one? Yeah. First one is, uh, read me a read.me. And, uh, the idea was that if you have trouble sleeping and you're a nerd, , then you can, there'd be like a podcast where someone will just very soothingly read out the Read Me of like a popular open source.
I love that. Oh yeah. I think I saw someone on Twitter recently said that they wanna actually start doing it, or they wanted to do a Twitch stream where they'd read out the manual of something. And so I feel like, you know, someone might actually go and do this, but I thought it was such a good idea at the time and I was so happy to register that specific domain as well.
So, um, Yeah, I should really probably do something about that one. That's
Cassidy Williams: a good one. I like it.
Suz Hinton: That is the first step. And then I have . Yeah. The first step is the domain and then unfortunately all the dopamine rush just makes you feel like, well, I'm done now . I'm not gonna make the thing anymore. Right.
It's,
um, so I also have bite.academy. I am actually gonna do something with that. Ooh. . Yeah, I have a few Bite dot Blas actually, but bite.academy is my favorite one. Uh, I also have some day Lull , which I like, which I thought about just putting, you know, ideas on. Um, and then the last one is fragile.systems. So I used to host
Cassidy Williams: that could be cool for the security
Suz Hinton: stuff.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I used to host my. Demos on that when I was like presenting back when, you know, like in-person conferences? Yeah. The before. What a concept. Seriously . Um, so I used to put, put them all on that because it was just easier for me to kind of have a cool looking domain and stuff. And for some of the web USB demos, like you wanted to have a domain because that was kind of some of the, the really cool features of it.
Yeah. Um. That is actually now going to be transformed into, um, like a, a side business that I'll be starting soon. So fragile.systems is like my new business. Um, cool. But yeah, that's all kind of stealth right now, so once I finish my masters, that will be a thing. So, yeah. So they're, they're my favorites, but like I do embarrassingly just have a lot of them.
So it's a crime we, yeah,
Cassidy Williams: I understand. ,
Zach Plata: what is the most recent thing you over-optimize? .
Suz Hinton: So I used to do streams on Twitch and, oh,
really
Cassidy Williams: good streams,
Suz Hinton: by the way. Love the stream. Thank you for, I feel like you've taken the baton and you've actually done a way better job than me. Um, but when I was on Twitch, you know, it's a gaming streaming platform, and I'm sure you've run into this, Cassie, it just doesn't like, feel.
Like you make your own vibe on the stream, but twitch around it is just not the right vibe. At least I feel that way. Um, so I just, before I stopped streaming, ironically, I, I started working on my own streaming platform. That was just for me. It wasn't gonna be open source. Ooh. And what I ended up doing was I researched the crap out of.
Every single streaming, you know, like actual video streaming technology that I could use. Like everything from like stuff on Azure, aws, self-hosted, writing, my own, all of that stuff. And I had like this Excel spreadsheet with a massive matrix. And what I was over optimizing was how can I get sub-second streaming latency, like what Twitch has.
And so I eventually found one, but I, and like, you know, that respects user's privacy, that doesn't cost a fortune. You know, that, that also allows me to, um, also, uh, interleave a closed captioning stream. Right? And like all of those things, like you can't have all of them. I found out. So you just, I, you know, I had this giant matrix and then I picked one and I was just trying to get that website to be the fastest, most privacy.
Supporting accessible thing ever, and I just went so far down the rabbit hole, like I had a dedicated. Server of my own in a data center so that I could support, oh my word, the 300 connections at once. Because web RTC is just like really kind of like, it's juicy on your, on your resources. So, and I was doing like load testing and it was just so far over-engineered.
And of course because of that I just never shipped it .
Cassidy Williams: That's amazing though. Yeah. Video takes effort like, Every time I even like dip my toe in the video world, I'm like, GCs like, there's just so many things to learn
Suz Hinton: and yeah, I learned so much and the biggest regret I have is not blogging any of it.
Like I became like, you know, the streaming protocol expert, you know, like, because I was just like, what do I do with all of this? Nerdy stuff that I know now, you know, and I wish I, I'd put it in a blog post cause I've forgotten all of it.
Cassidy Williams: Somewhere. Somewhere in the ether of your brain. Mm-hmm. . I do think that Twitch has gotten better for live streaming, though.
Non-gaming things like they added a software and technology
Suz Hinton: tag. I remember this past year. Yeah. This was the end of my time. Mm-hmm. . Yeah.
Cassidy Williams: And, and every time I do stream, I, I can easily raid another software dev streamer at some point. Yeah.
Suz Hinton: That's really fun. The community is growing, which is nice. That is really nice.
I know that there's the live coders community and just a whole bunch of people. It started getting really good when I left, which is very silly of me to, to tap out. But, you know, I had specific reasons.
Cassidy Williams: What is your golden rule for coding or working in
Suz Hinton: general? Yeah. I, I'm having a hard time picking one because I'm that really passionate person that just has like a million feelings about it.
But I think the biggest one for me, which is a really good umbrella for it, is don't be dogmatic. , um, like, like just bring, or I guess bring critical thinking if we wanna like step back a little bit more. Like bring critical thinking into your day every single day. You know, don't be dogmatic about something just because it's the only tool that you are really comfortable with, you know, and you don't wanna explore another one because then that makes you feel weird.
Uh, don't. Don't jump on the hype train and just try and introduce something you read about on Hacker News like this morning. Um, you know, . Just things like that. Just like think about what is actually useful, what is something that you know is actually gonna address my needs now. And try to avoid the hype train, try to avoid that feeling of fomo.
It's like, oh, well, if I'm not playing with it, then I'm not like, you know, cool or something. It's just things are gonna come and go and you've really just gotta focus on, you know, the other side of it, which is like who you're building for and things like that. And so that pragmatism and, and, and not sort of, Not putting your identity into a single tool, you know, not being the React person, just because you have torn it to pieces and you know everything about it.
Just like be willing to just kind of wander outside and, and you know, like look at other things that might be a better fit.
Zach Plata: What is your favorite? It depends Question.
Suz Hinton: I think for me it's like, do, do I need Kubernetes
you know, which, which I've had my own version of that. And then after seeking the experts, indeed I did need Kubernetes, and I was like, oh, no. I've done something so wrong if I need this. Um, and so yeah, I, I really do think it depends, and I think that folds really nicely into the, the sort of previous thing, the critical thinking.
Like there are very specific, uh, applications for it and reasons why you would want to use it. And it don't just use it because it seems like it's the promise of DevOps where it does so much stuff for you, because it does come with a large amount of both confusion and also just like yam. maintenance, you know, so yeah, it really doesn't occur.
Yeah, it's, it really is. It's kind of like, well, it, it solves some of your problems, but it comes back to wacky with a stick later. So you've gotta be prepared for
Cassidy Williams: that. Yeah. What is the oldest piece of tech you still
Suz Hinton: own? Yeah, I, so I have a bunch of stuff still in storage cuz I moved recently, so I think I have like an original game boy in there and anari, but I actually think I have something older.
which is this little guy here. I'll do the, the makeup brush kind of technique. What, so this is a vacuum tube from the seventies. Um, I think this one was made for the French military, and this will make so much sense in a second , I promise. So I have two, I have two of these that I specifically ordered online.
I specifically wanted these muled of these mullard ones, which again, um, Were produced by the UK in the seventies for the French military, and you use them these days on tube rolling your headphone amps. Oh, oh. So a lot of headphone amps have vacuum tubes. Um, see in order to just like warm warmth, the sound, you know, bring some warmth to your audio.
And so I heard that the. Ones from the seventies are a great fit for my headphone amp. So I've been too rolling, you know, with ADD and stuff, so, yeah. Wow.
Cassidy Williams: Do you have like a very fancy audio setup, one of those audio file setups?
Suz Hinton: Not really. Um, , I sort of, I'm that person that is a little too pragmatic sometimes where I'm like, I don't want another hobby where I'm throwing money down the toilet, so I'm just gonna just do the amount that makes me sort of happy and then I'll just pull out really quickly.
Yeah, so I, I do have some stuff, right? Like I have the, I have a set of great OS headphones, which are just absolutely phenomenal and, you know, I have like a record player. And, you know, I have that really nice headphone amp and things like that, but like, I sort of just, I'm like, okay, I'm good now. You know?
So Cutting. Yeah. Every hobby I have to cut myself off because I'm like, well, you don't, you can't do all of them. So, you know, yeah.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. Someone should have told me that when I got into keyboards, but here we're .
Zach Plata: All right. Um, have you written a piece of cringey code? And if so, what was the last thing that you remember writing?
Suz Hinton: Mm, yeah. I, I do write a lot of cringey code. I think that, um, it's difficult to remember it all, but I think the worst, the, the most cringe code. Was age as a girl. It was much earlier in my career. This was before I, you know, went back and filled in all mysite knowledge. So, you know, I didn't know about all the data structures.
I didn't know about, um, you know, like, um, what's it called? Like, oh, notation and performance and stuff. So, you know, I was writing JavaScript for a retail website where, you know, you have like a color of something, a size of something. Like, uh, a different size, you know, whether it's a width or a length or whatever.
And so the customer can like, choose the exact thing that they want and if it, if we didn't have their thing in stock, right, we would try to sort of slice and dice all those different dimensions and try and find something super close to what they wanted, right? So like, maybe it's a different color, but it's the same length and width or whatever.
And the data just wasn't really in the ideal format for. Because it was a new feature we were trying to add to the site, and they're like, no, you just have to work with like, whatever. Jason already comes back to the page. So I, I kid you not, I don't know how I did this, but I did like 30 different for loops to like transform the data, like one step at a time.
I'm pretty sure that a bunch of them were nested. So we're looking at like, you. We're looking at like n squared end of the 10th. That's, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um, just at least n squared. Yeah. Like you said, probably worse. Um, and just, What was I doing? You know, and so I look back on that and I'm like, someone else found that later on.
And that person has black, like sort of like blacklisted me from every single other place of employment they've probably like worked at since we're like, we're not having that person. No, no, no, I'm just kidding. Um, but I would probably deserve that from what I actually wrote. So it's bad.
Cassidy Williams: It's always fun to look back at that old JavaScript.
You're like, oh, that's straight up crashing the browser. It's so bad. And just,
Suz Hinton: yeah, this was back when we had to support, you know, Explorer because a lot of the customers were actually from fr coming, coming over from there, you know, surfing the web at work and buying stuff. So they just still had ie.
Cassidy Williams: All right.
What's your favorite programming?
Suz Hinton: Pun . So I'm not really a pun person, so I, I really tried to work on this one, especially for you, Cassidy. So thank you. You know, let's say you're at work and someone's. Oh, we should start using GraphQL. Just they say it out nowhere and you can be like, all right, so like, don't go Jason Waterfalls.
Just stick to the swagger and the rest that you are used to. So, wow, ,
Cassidy Williams: that
Suz Hinton: was amazing. I admit that. I kind of, I saw the first line on Twitter, the don't go JSON waterfalls, and I thought it was so funny. So I added the, the, the rest of it. So,
Cassidy Williams: Beautiful. Oh, love that A plus. Love it. the best.
Suz Hinton: I can't come up with that stuff on the spot.
I'm just, I'm not that person. So he was,
Cassidy Williams: again, probably, probably a blessing. It's fine, .
Zach Plata: And lastly, what is your most used
Suz Hinton: emoji? Oh, definitely sweat, smile, without a doubt. Mm-hmm. It's like ultimate kinda. That's a classic thing, you know? It's like, please forgive. I'm very sheepish right now, but like, this is what I'm about to say.
Yeah, yeah. That's,
Cassidy Williams: that's, that's definitely going cuz you could be just like, huh, that's funny. But also the, like, you and then you couldn't say it about your own stuff. It's, it's versatile. It's
Suz Hinton: a great, it's classic, very versatile. It really is. It's, it's, I, it's the representation of, you know, in. Anime shows when they're sort of like rubbing the back of their neck.
Oh yeah. Just like, ah, it's like that. But that's how I actually feel when I'm using that emoji. So yeah, that's, that's
Cassidy Williams: spot on. Okay. It's time for the random segment generator. Ah,
we have random segments and we will find out what we're going to ask you. And our first segment is, Talk and ship. What's something that is , what's something that under that's underrated or overrated in the dev community in your opinion?
Suz Hinton: Mm again, I, I just, so many Twitter drafts that have deleted , uh, I just kind of thing.
Probably to safe space . I don't know. This is going out on the internet. Um, yeah. Uh, honestly, let's stick with like underrated. I think that, I think it's really underrated to. Explore outside the domain, you know really well. Mm-hmm. and just learn something totally different just for the sake of it, right?
Like it doesn't have to be a side hustle, it doesn't have to be relevant to your work. It's not a waste of time to just go and like, learn something cool or new just for the sake of it. And like, you know, it obviously usually unexpectedly ends up like useful anyway. If you really feel guilty about it. An example is I have always just had like a very foundational knowledge of networking, right?
Like I've, I've only learned enough to be able to get away with it, to be able to debug. Like I know what DNS is, I know what happens when you type www into the browser, right? And you know, I can. I can reason about stuff, but last year I went and got my network plus certification and that was just the most magical, you know, three or four weeks of my life where wow, there's, there's just so much out there about networking and it really did actually help me a lot more.
Like I could reason about a lot of things, even just like network latency and. actually understanding DNS on a really deep level and things like that has just like changed a lot about how I approach debugging in things. Um, and then when you find out about how the internet actually works, like bgp, which I know is like kind of more outdated, like, um, but BGP and autonomous.
Um, systems on the internet and how they all sync up their routing tables and everything. It's just like the coolest thing ever. And you can also just debug all of the stuff in your house. Like you can actually like set up your router properly and you can be more confident that it's been locked down securely and stuff, and it's just mm-hmm , it is just this unexpected thing.
And I just really feel that not enough people allow themselves to do that, or not enough people. How helpful it is to understand how computers work on a much lower level than even if you're just working on the application client side. It just helps so much. Yeah.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, I agree completely. And the, and and both on, both on like, you should be learning other things, but also just, yeah.
There, there's so many things to learn where mm-hmm. , it can only help you. If anything, it could just be like a fun thing that you explain to someone someday, but like mm-hmm. it, sometimes it ends up being really, really valuable. A another point in your life.
Zach Plata: All right, our next segment we've got is
Suz Hinton: Dev.
Zach Plata: Oops. Oh, this is my favorite. Um, so tell us a story about, you know, something that you've broke or something that happened around
Suz Hinton: that. I'm so sorry, Zach. I, I regret to inform you that I don't really have. An exciting story about it. So I'm that person.
Cassidy Williams: I was gonna say, you've never broken anything .
Suz Hinton: I have like, so I have like one tiny thing, but like, and I promise I'm not trying to make myself out to be this like amazing, perfect genius.
It's just I'm that person that everyone else on the team is screaming at me to ship it and I'm like, no, no, no, it's not ready. I just need to check this one last thing to see if like, you know, there's a regression or whatever. And I was always that person, always. It's different now cause I work in research, so like, you know, uh, it's a different context, so it's not as much about that.
But like I used to be that person that was like, no, no, no, I just have a bad feeling about this. And I'd go check it and I'd catch another bug. Um, and, and so I'm just so thorough to the point of like, just. Infuriating everybody that I don't break things very often, so I know that there's a balance there and I think I'm just too far on the other side, right?
Mm-hmm. . But like one thing that I broke ages ago, I was working at Kickstarter and I, we, we had just had this like way overcomplicated thing that we were trying to like pull off and there were these new event. Called transition events like css, transition events. Mm-hmm. . So you knew when the CSS transition animation had completed, and that was really important, like, so important to the UI thing we were doing to prevent, like, uh, to prevent like a glitch, like a, like a pop or a jump of the ui.
and I thought, uh, you know, it wasn't consistent across all browsers, so I just thought that I had, like, I'd, I'd done it all. I was listening to every event possible, you know, because it had all the prefixes at the time, like Ms. Dash and all that. Hmm. And I was like, it's good. And I obviously tested it to death, like what I said, and I shipped it, and then I went to JS Comp.
Um, and it broke while I was at JS com and someone else had to fix somewhere else, and I was like, that person that was like having kittens, you know, sitting in the audience on Slack going, oh my God, I'm so sorry. And like, David, if you're out there watching this, thank you for fixing that, because he was just so lovely about it.
You know, obviously he's like, you're not in the office, like, go watch the talks. Don't worry about. Simple fix, but it was because like there was this one prefix that I'd missed or something, you know? It was just something done like that so people couldn't actually back for a specific reward on the Kickstarter project pages.
That's Which is kind of bad. That's pretty bad. . Yeah. So if they, yeah, I know. So like I was kind of talking it down, like if they clicked, like back it now at. They could, but they couldn't select a reward directly from the patient. So there was a way around it, but like most people are just kind of perusing the rewards.
So yeah, it was not great. But no, that's, that's the only thing that I feel like was catastrophic enough to talk about .
Zach Plata: Those are always the most tedious ones where you forget like, ah, that one. Random browser prefix.
Suz Hinton: Tiny. Yeah. I was so proud of myself for working with the design and we just, it was like, it was like Chef's Kiss.
Beautiful. The way that we handled it all, and then I was like One case. All right. Gosh.
Cassidy Williams: All right. And our last segment is Launch Lightly Crash Darkly. What is your best advice for someone just starting out in the software development world today? ,
Suz Hinton: that's really a tough one, just cuz you know. , I feel that I'm not relatable in the slightest anymore.
I don't know if you both feel that. Like, because again, I got in during the flash games of days, you know? Mm-hmm. and I don't have a computer science degree, so it kind of, I just look like that, you know, very privileged person. But I would say, looking back on my career and what I wish I'd done at the beginning, um, was learning how computers actually work.
And I, I don't mean that in a gatekeeping way, I just mean. , if you copy paste something from Stack Overflow, code that extra step if you can, and find out why that fixes your problem. Or, you know, if, if something is wrong and you know someone's helping you out, don't just be like, oh, okay, cool. Thanks for spotting that.
Say, how did you debug that? Or how did you figure out that was wrong? Or like, why was this the fix? Or just, yeah, like if somebody says something, that doesn't make sense to you. Just stop, put, put stuff down and look it up. And I know that at the beginning you're just like, well, I have to do that about everything.
And I'm just so sick of Googling stuff, , but like learning how computers actually work. Deeper, you know, like deeper below the application le layer, which tends to be where you are, just like it's life changing. Mm-hmm. , it really is with your debugging skills, your instincts. Like when you look at other developers that are more experienced than you, and they just kind of seem to have that magical instinct where they just get something or they're just, they're, they're able to reason about something, even if it's completely new to them.
That's because they have some of that foundational knowledge and they can just make those extrap. From that, that knowledge so much faster, and so it is worth putting in that time early because you will start accelerating your learning if you just fill in some of that first. Yeah,
Cassidy Williams: I agree with that a ton.
And I do want to append, don't let understanding every single nuance stop you from building and learning. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Because there, there is that, that aspect of it, there's a balance because the, there, there is a balance, but it is so useful to have that foundational knowledge in general E even if it's just something you do in doses over time to understand this is why something works.
Zach Plata: and what are you excited about in the world of software development right now?
Suz Hinton: Yeah. Um, I tend to be someone who stays off the hype train, um, probably, and I tend to just, yeah, . Um, plus I, I just, yeah. Most of it's overhyped anyway. I'm not even gonna go into that today on, on the latest hype. Yeah. Knowing smile.
Um, I really am excited about something that. Cassidy and I were talking about earlier, like self-hosting and offline things and like making networks that aren't necessarily. You know, completely exposed to the internet. But let's say you have a friendship group that you trust with, you know, a dynamic IP and you can basically self host a bunch of stuff and just kind connect to each other's networks and things like that.
I think that that is really interesting because it's kind of taken privacy back. Um, there's a really good repo called Awesome Self-Hosted, and it's like that thing is like, it's a, it's a. Yeah, it's so cool. Um, and so setting up your own. Bunch of servers on your network and then kind of like connecting those to your friends and having more like a, a tiny little internet on the internet.
Um, that's when I'm excited about more people doing and just taking back control of their own software. Cuz I really do think that SAS has gone outta control, um, even though this is like really good intentions in it, right? Because, you know, it's, it's all in one place. You can access it everywhere. Someone is taking care of all the bugs for you.
You don't have to set stuff up manually. I mean, I get it. I get why SAS is. Actually really an incredible progression in the industry. But for people who are just not doing businessy things, I just think that there's just your, your, the trade-offs and the compromises you are making on behalf of these large companies that have all your data is just not fair.
And so I think that people creating their own networks, uh, is the answer to that.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, that's what I'm excited about. I'm so into that stuff right now where I know the awesome self-hosted, I've gone deep on that. That's
Suz Hinton: so good. I know. It's just like
Cassidy Williams: so interesting and, and I wanna, I wanna host everything and it feel, it feels like old school internet almost, because
Suz Hinton: Yeah.
So bbbs days. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of what it's a kickback to is the bbbs days where like if you were in the club, you know, you, you got access to someone's bbs. I want that because I just want a much smaller community these days and people that I've pre-vetted, like Twitter is just an absolute diabolical nightmare, but it's all I have right now.
And so, you know, I would rather just build my community and instead of just doing the extreme and just going back into the cave, right, so ,
Cassidy Williams: it's almost like being one of those, uh, one of those survivor people that, that have like a. Tunnel in their house that has all of those. Oh, the food and stuff. Yeah.
The preppers that, but digital is what
Suz Hinton: it feels like sometimes. Yes, a hundred percent. That is, that is literally, yeah. It's that. And I know that a lot of people have Discord service. Right. And they have their friends in there. Mm-hmm. . I think it's just more an extension of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I think that could be really cool.
But yeah, I do like the, the idea of like a digital prepper. I know someone who does digital prepping and he, his project for a while was being able to automatically sync the entire Wikipedia English version to a Raspberry Pi and then run it locally so that no matter what happens, he has, you know, all of that knowledge.
Cassidy Williams: Wow. That's,
Suz Hinton: that's a lot. . That was another person that kicks out us. Sot if you're out there. Yeah. Um, Tea. Sorry If Teague is out there. I've always been forever inspired by that. So
Cassidy Williams: what a project. Gosh. Yeah. Mm-hmm. . All right. It is now time for Cassidy's Sage advice,
and I'm Cassidy, and I'm here with Sage advice. And I'm gonna piggyback off of what Suz said earlier, and I think you should not be dogmatic. and explore new things as much as possible. There's so many really exciting things in the tech industry, in the world in general, but tech specific where you could learn a new language, a new framework, a new tool, a, a new anything, and you never know if it might be useful.
You don't have to approach it like. I could monetize this in a side project, you could just explore it because you never know what you might be able to use someday at work or just on something fun for yourself, and you can build a lot of very fun things that way. That being said, Suz, Zach, thank you so much for being on the show.
Suz Hinton: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me. I thank you for that, that sage lesson. I feel like you actually get me. Yeah. . . Got you,
Cassidy Williams: got you. That being said, Suz, where can people find you on the internet? Do you have anything you
Suz Hinton: wanna plug? . Yeah, I've pulled most of my stuff offline just cuz I want sort of a breakout of the public eye.
But I am sort of working on some stuff in the meantime, you know, if you want, if you're interested in learning when that stuff is gonna come out. Twitter for now while it lasts, um, is where I mostly am. Um, and so yeah, I'll be sure to get something up beyond that soon. Cool.
Cassidy Williams: We'll drop your handle. The noop cat or noop cat.
However, one might pronou. In the, in the show notes. And then also we gotta keep an eye out for fragile systems. Mm-hmm. ?
Suz Hinton: Yes. Yeah. Actually, I guess that is where you can watch out for more. Yeah. . Perfect.
Cassidy Williams: And once again, because making podcasts is expensive. This show is brought to you by LaunchDarkly LaunchDarkly, toggles Peaks of 20 trillion feature flags each day, and that number continues to grow, and you should use them.
You can head over to launchdarkly.com and learn about how. Thank you for making this show possible. LaunchDarkly, I've been Cassidy Williams. You can find me at cassidoo, c a s s i d o o on most things, and I'm CTO over at Contenda.
Zach Plata: And I'm Zach, and I'm a DevReal at Rive, and you can find me on Twitter at
Cassidy Williams: zachplata. Thank you for tuning into The Dev Morning Show (At Night).
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