Grab a whiskey and tuck in for the latest episode of The Dev Morning Show (At Night)! This episode features an interview with Taylor Poindexter, Software Engineering Manager at Spotify. In this episode, Cassidy and Zach sit down with Taylor to discuss Black Code Collective, being an empathetic manager, and Taylor’s favorite whiskey.
Grab a whiskey and tuck in for the latest episode of The Dev Morning Show (At Night)! This episode features an interview with Taylor Poindexter, Software Engineering Manager at Spotify.
In this episode, Cassidy and Zach sit down with Taylor to discuss Black Code Collective, being an empathetic manager, and Taylor’s favorite whiskey.
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Episode Timestamps:
(03:19): What Taylor’s day-to-day looks like
(06:40): What got Taylor into the industry
(10:53): Rapid Fire Questions
(18:50): Random Segment Generator
(25:44): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“I got into management because I knew what it was like to have a bad manager and I knew the impacts that that can have on you. I feel like I'm a pretty good people person and I'm very empathetic, and so I wanted to give that to other people.” – Taylor Poindexter
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Links:
The Dev Morning Show (At Night) YouTube Page
Cassidy William...: Hello, everyone and welcome to the Dev Morning Show (At Night). I am your host, Cassidy Williams and I am accompanied, once again, by my lovely cohost, Zach Plata. Hey, Zach.
Zach Plata: Hey, Cass. I heard you underwent some interesting events over the past week.
Cassidy William...: I did. I can see clearly now the rain is gone. I still have some haze, but it's very exciting to not have glasses anymore with LASIK.
Zach Plata: Wow.
Cassidy William...: Speaking of seeing clearly, I am so excited to see our latest guest, Taylor Poindexter. Welcome to the show. She is a software engineering manager at Spotify.
Taylor Poindext...: Thank you, Cassidy. I lead a team called Discovery. And basically what we do, is we focus on account management within Spotify on the advertising side. I know advertising is not sexy, but the way I make myself feel better about it at night, is we allow people to have the free version of Spotify. So the advertisement money comes in, people get free Spotify, world is good. But right now, we're working to make the advertising portion of the platform a lot more efficient and allow the advertisers to get on the platform more easily.
Cassidy William...: That's awesome. I was definitely a holdout for getting Spotify premium for a long time, so I'm very familiar with those ads. So thank you for the free music.
Taylor Poindext...: And really you're doing your part, so it's okay. You're helping contribute listening to the ads. Thank you, Cassidy.
Zach Plata: Yeah, they're pretty clever anyway.
Taylor Poindext...: Keeping me employed.
Cassidy William...: Actually, this is a blast to the past, I took a humor writing course way back in the day. And they said, "One of the assignments was to write a hyperbole statement that you wanted to just go to the extreme with." My example was Spotify ads, and it was a whole essay on how I'm going to defeat Spotify. "They will never make me pay for premium because I will just listen to those ads forever." And so, I'm feeling it right now.
Taylor Poindext...: But you caved, right, you brought the premium now?
Cassidy William...: It was a family plan. It wasn't my choice. My husband was just like, "Stop being dumb," and bought it.
Taylor Poindext...: Against your will, okay, all right.
Cassidy William...: Fine.
Zach Plata: I feel, for me, I'll do it for a while and then I'll be like, "No, I can live off free, the free plan."
Cassidy William...: Yeah, it's fine.
Zach Plata: And then I do it and then it's like, "Oh no, no, I don't like this."
Cassidy William...: Yeah, you're just like, "But I do want to listen to that one specific song."
Zach Plata: I know.
Cassidy William...: "And I don't want to just wait for the shuffle until you finally get it."
Taylor Poindext...: For me, that's YouTube because I'm always like, "Oh, I should probably pay for this because I'm sick and tired of the ads." But I'm just holding out, I'm just holding out.
Cassidy William...: I'm also a holdout for YouTube. I haven't let go of that yet.
Taylor Poindext...: Never.
Zach Plata: Speaking of ads, it's time for our lovely ad read. "The Dev Morning Show (At Night) is a sponsored podcast. I mean, 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 money, LaunchDarkly."
Cassidy William...: Taylor, could you tell us what your day-to-day looks like?
Taylor Poindext...: Yeah, honestly, so before this I was a software engineer. I would say the biggest shift is I used to come in, sit behind my computer, hammer out tickets. But now, my day is basically everyone else's. I'm not going to lie, I'm in a lot of meetings. Outside of that, I'm basically just interfacing with my team and trying to figure out exactly how I can make their lives easier and how I can remove blockers for them, in addition to obviously finding ways to make sure that our processes continue to become more efficient, and making sure that I'm investing in my engineers so they can continue to grow in the ways that they want to. That can look a lot of different ways, but my day... Oh, and right now, a lot of hiring. We're doing a lot of hiring.
Cassidy William...: Oh yeah, that.
Taylor Poindext...: So my day is typically a smorgasbord of those types of activities.
Cassidy William...: Do you ever miss the coding side of it or are you happy to be in the management track?
Taylor Poindext...: It's a catch-22 for me. So I got into management because I knew what it was like to have a bad manager. I knew the impacts that that can have on you. I feel like I'm a pretty good people person and I'm very empathetic and so I wanted to give that to other people. But I am not going to lie, there are some days where I just want to focus on one or two things and have my day be its own, but that's not really the case anymore. I do struggle with that at times. But overall, I'm very happy with the choice I made.
Cassidy William...: It's one of those things where it definitely is a balance. You do want to own more of your day. But the fact that you think of management that way and your day is not necessarily your own, you're unblocking your team and stuff, that tells me that you're an awesome manager. Because so many managers out there are just like, "I want to be in charge of people and tell them what to do." And so the fact that you are approaching it as being the resource for people that you wish that you had is really awesome and more managers should be like that.
Taylor Poindext...: Thank you. And I would say, if anybody out there does just want to control people, you shouldn't be in management.
Cassidy William...: It's true.
Taylor Poindext...: Take that training or leave.
Zach Plata: I love that take. So what tools do you use on a daily basis, whether it's the occasional time you do code with the terminal or editor, what are you using at work?
Taylor Poindext...: Yeah, honestly the sad part is the first thing that comes to mind is Jira, looking at a lot of tickets with my fellow PMs and whatnot, making sure things are going smoothly. But outside of that, since I do still try to stay active in the deaf community, I was even trying to do a little coding today, and it was kicking my little booty.
Cassidy William...: They always do those little tricks.
Taylor Poindext...: They always do trick stubs, but I typically just use VS code and [inaudible 00:05:59] if I want to just tinker on my computer a little bit. But then also, Spotify has something called Backstage that I dabble in a little bit as far as resources for the team and everything like that to keep things organized and have places for folks to go. But most of my tools are process related now.
Cassidy William...: Cool. Is Backstage an internally built tool?
Taylor Poindext...: Yeah. We actually sell it to other companies. So other companies use Backstage to organize their documents and share technical information as well, which I thought was pretty cool.
Cassidy William...: Huh, I had no idea. I'm going to look that up.
Zach Plata: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: So before management, before this, you mentioned, "That you were in software engineering." What got you into the industry in the first place?
Taylor Poindext...: So honestly, I was really probably like a lot of college students, very unsure about what they wanted to do. So for a certain time I thought I wanted to be a businesswoman, thought I wanted to be a doctor, teetering back-and-forth trying to find my path. But then a family friend actually told me... He was 10 years older than me, actually my older brother's friend. He was like, "Take a CS class." And my immediate response was like, "No, that's not for me, that's for the nerds. Nah, no it's not for me."
And he was like, "Just do it, just take the one class. If you don't like it, you can just quit it." I took the class, it kicked my booty. But I like the challenge of it and I like that feeling of finally getting it working and feeling like king of the kingdom.
Cassidy William...: That rush.
Taylor Poindext...: Yeah, that rush. So I decided to change majors in my third year and just make it happen.
Cassidy William...: That's awesome. So you ended up majoring in computer science?
Taylor Poindext...: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: That is awesome. And from there, did you go straight to Spotify or have you bounced to different companies?
Taylor Poindext...: So one thing that's interesting about me, each company I've stayed at for about four years. I just started at Spotify, but I originally started my career in a small consulting firm, out of the DC area. And then, I went to a startup because I wanted something different. I wanted to be able to focus on one product. And then from there, I decided to go to a bigger company with Spotify.
Zach Plata: Did you start in management at Spotify or were you also a manager at your previous employers?
Taylor Poindext...: So it's funny because with the consulting world... I don't know, have either of you ever done consulting?
Cassidy William...: I have. You wear a lot of hats.
Taylor Poindext...: All the hats, even hats I probably shouldn't be wearing, if I'm being quite honest. So even in my first job I got some management experience. And then when I went to the startup, by the time I was about to leave, I was a senior backend engineer and I was a team lead, which was awesome. But this is the first time I'm wearing the engineering manager hat full-time and being fully responsible for hiring and all that stuff like that.
Cassidy William...: Team lead to engineering management, I feel they have a very thin line between them, where there's definitely some shared duties there.
Taylor Poindext...: Yeah. Because even when I was tech lead, I did a lot of recruiting. But the difference there was that my VP of engineering had the final say, whereas now, I have the final say on who gets to be hired and whatnot, which is nice.
Cassidy William...: What has been the toughest part of hiring for you? Because I know for me, I just feel bad saying, "No," to people. If they are just so close in the interview, but not quite, it just aches my heart.
Taylor Poindext...: That is, I feel it makes sense because, obviously, you don't want to send somebody through a ton of interviews, but I feel you have such limited information to be able to make that decision with. And sometimes, I even just really like the person as a person. It was like, "Wow, I really enjoyed chatting with that person," but they're not a good fit for my team. Then, so one of the hard things is like you said, "Having to turn them down." But then too, I can find it really difficult to find the perfect fits for my team, not even on the technical side, but then people that are also empathetic and people that are willing to work well with others and such things. So finding that good fit can be difficult as well.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, it's so hard because you also don't want to say, "Oh, they check most of the boxes," and then you throw them in the deep end and then it was a poor choice. It's such a tough balance.
Taylor Poindext...: I, actually, literally just went through that. I had a candidate who wanted to be a backend engineer, but they had only done front end. And then so I was trying to convince my manager like, "No, I could just hire them. We'll teach them Java, it'll be good." And they were like, "You were throwing them in the deep end." They're expected to perform at this level and I had to realize that I'm actually doing them a disservice by doing that. So I had to say, "No."
Cassidy William...: Yeah, oh, that's so hard.
Taylor Poindext...: So hard.
Cassidy William...: That's so hard.
Taylor Poindext...: We do what we can.
Cassidy William...: Yeah.
Zach Plata: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: And it's a different side than people see. I think it's popular to look at the other side of the table on interviewing, on how difficult it is to be the interviewee, and it is. But being an interviewer and having to figure out how do we make sure that this person is the right fit for our team, the right ad for our team, and that you can set them up for success, is just as challenging.
Taylor Poindext...: Absolutely, I agree.
Cassidy William...: Okay, we are going to go into the rapid fire questions. We will be asking you questions rapidly and we'll see how fast we go. Okay, first one, we all have a domain name or 10 or project idea that we're squatting on. What are yours?
Taylor Poindext...: You know it's funny, is that, I don't know if this makes me less of a developer, but I don't have any. I've cleaned them all up in quarantine.
Cassidy William...: Good for you.
Zach Plata: Ooh.
Taylor Poindext...: I got that money back in my pocket.
Cassidy William...: That's so smart.
Zach Plata: There you go.
Cassidy William...: So smart.
Zach Plata: All right. What is the most recent thing you over optimized?
Taylor Poindext...: Ooh, that would probably be processes for my team. I felt like I started my first EM job, I wanted to do everything great. So I took a bunch of feedback and just tried to do too much. It's like iterate small or small iterations are better, instead of trying to do too much too fast.
Cassidy William...: Teaching someone an entire system or a team an entire system is not easy. Cuban's are tough.
Taylor Poindext...: I don't know if you've seen the meme where the guy, I think he's smoking a cigarette with a cup of coffee and he's at the board trying to explain it. I was like, that was me trying to explain it.
Cassidy William...: Oh, you were just trying to get a [inaudible 00:12:12]. "And then you'll go through this flywheel and then this workflow."
Taylor Poindext...: "Everything will be fixed." It's like, "Ah."
Cassidy William...: Okay, what is your golden rule for coding?
Taylor Poindext...: Ooh, don't gold plate. That's not well-put, but I feel in the beginning of my career I wanted to gold plate everything. But I feel done is better than perfect and then you can just again, iterate on it and continue to improve it. Big on those MVPs.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, the MVPs, it's so easy to want to be just like, "I will make this scale, so someday if it goes viral, I'll be able to be more scalable than Twitter," and your side project probably doesn't [inaudible 00:12:56].
Taylor Poindext...: You're doing too much.
Zach Plata: That's fair. What is your favorite, it depends, question?
Taylor Poindext...: Ooh, this isn't tech related, but when somebody asks me, "Which whisky is my favorite," it very much depends on my mood and what I'm feeling.
Zach Plata: Oh, a good one.
Cassidy William...: I have a lot of questions about this before we move on. So when you say, "Your mood," and stuff, is it just that it's a different flavor or it has a different effect? What goes into whiskys as someone who is ignorant of all things whisky?
Taylor Poindext...: No, it's fine. So flavors is one, but then also the bite and the smokiness are actually big things for me. There are some whiskys that I have in my collection that... But it's a good bite and so, it comes on a little stronger. You can feel the tingle down to your tummy, but it's almost like being wrapped in a warm blanket. Sometimes I just want that depending on my day. Other times, it's lighter and it's like, "Oh, more..." not digestible, but it's that smooth sailing. Sometimes I need that as well.
Cassidy William...: I want to pivot this to the whisky podcast and just ask all the questions about this, but we don't have time.
Taylor Poindext...: The next episode.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, next episode, it's just going to be completely different show. What is the oldest piece of tech that you still own?
Taylor Poindext...: Probably my black and white Game Boy.
Cassidy William...: Yes.
Taylor Poindext...: Or actually no, I think this was before the Sega Genesis. I have a Sega Genesis as well.
Cassidy William...: Dang, both of those are just pieces of gold. That's awesome.
Taylor Poindext...: And I have two young nephews, so unfortunately, I don't have them at my house. I have them at my mom's house because I want to one day introduce them to it so they can play it.
Cassidy William...: And be just like appreciate history.
Taylor Poindext...: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: Or let them start.
Taylor Poindext...: "What is this crap? It's so fuzzy."
Cassidy William...: It doesn't matter.
Taylor Poindext...: "Play it and be happy."
Zach Plata: It's going to be so nice. I feel I want to do that with a Tamagotchi, just give that to someone younger, a niece or a nephew and be like, "Here you go. Do with it what you will."
Cassidy William...: Keep it alive.
Zach Plata: "Keep it alive."
Taylor Poindext...: I feel like that could be great. I can't decide if they will love it or hate it.
Cassidy William...: Yeah. Although, I feel like Tamagotchi's have made a comeback. They make new ones now with backlit screens and colors. It's wild.
Zach Plata: They do?
Cassidy William...: Yeah.
Zach Plata: Oh, my gosh.
Cassidy William...: I saw them at Target the other day, when I was shopping for something else. I almost bought it. I resisted, but I'm so curious about them.
Zach Plata: All right, we'll have to get one.
Taylor Poindext...: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: Yeah.
Zach Plata: Okay, moving on. Have you ever written a cringey piece of code? And if so, do you care explaining it a bit?
Taylor Poindext...: Who amongst us has not? If anyone says, "They have not," they're lying and should not be trusted.
Cassidy William...: I'm lying.
Zach Plata: That's so true.
Taylor Poindext...: Probably the cringiest piece of software I've ever written was in that consulting job, again, my first job out of college. I thought that I wanted to pivot because at first I was a C#.NET developer and I was like, "Oh, I'd like to be a data engineer." Again, still trying to figure out my life. They put me on this project where I did have the opportunity to become a data engineer, but I was the only data engineer.
Cassidy William...: Oh, no.
Taylor Poindext...: They bought me a book and just said, "Read it and figure it out," until the more senior engineers get here. And they never came, at least for the first couple of months. So I had to write the first data pipeline and everything.
Cassidy William...: Oh, gosh.
Taylor Poindext...: It was just reading my little book, Googling where I could, and just a bunch of, if statements and just-
Zach Plata: Oh.
Taylor Poindext...: ... it was a little rough.
Cassidy William...: Is this machine learning?
Taylor Poindext...: Literally, it got the job done. But I can't remember how many days it took to run and it was not efficient at all. But we got the data over there eventually.
Cassidy William...: That's what matters.
Zach Plata: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: I feel like with consulting too, Zach has also done consulting, we've been there, sometimes the clients want things and you're just like, "You shouldn't want this," but you have to do it anyway. And so you just do the unholy things and you're just [inaudible 00:17:21].
Taylor Poindext...: Look away.
Zach Plata: Then it sold as the leading edge.
Taylor Poindext...: Right.
Cassidy William...: You're the expert at this.
Zach Plata: It's so great.
Taylor Poindext...: It's like, "I guess."
Cassidy William...: "Yeah, if you say so." What is your favorite programming pun?
Taylor Poindext...: How does it go, "When I wrote this, only God and I knew how it worked. And now, only God knows."
Cassidy William...: Yeah.
Zach Plata: Oh, that's good.
Cassidy William...: I had to do that today, actually. You know there's that meme of don't edit this code. And it had a comment of how many hours spent on this. I did the exact same thing in something today, only it was, "How many engineers have wasted their time trying to fix this?" It got up to seven today, which is not great and it's very relevant to that.
Taylor Poindext...: Dang it.
Cassidy William...: Ah, happens.
Taylor Poindext...: Yeah.
Zach Plata: And then last one, what is your most used emoji?
Taylor Poindext...: Probably between the purple heart... My friend said, "I'm very known for that," I do that a lot.
Cassidy William...: I do associate the purple heart with you. Yeah.
Taylor Poindext...: It's, I guess, another trademark. And then probably the crying emoji, but it's happy because me and my friends have great senses of humor and so we're always just laughing until we cry all day, every day.
Cassidy William...: That's the best type of crying and the best type of laughing.
Taylor Poindext...: [inaudible 00:18:47].
Cassidy William...: Good point. So I love that. Okay, our next segment is the random segment generator. There will be segments, they are random. What they will be, who knows. The first one is what you're proud of. What's something that you've shipped or created in your career, in your personal life, whatever, that you're very proud of?
Taylor Poindext...: The number one thing that I am proud of is Black Code Collective. So I started it and I didn't think that it was going to get as much traction as it did. It was, more so, myself having a bad couple of weeks and whatnot and feel I didn't have the community around me, and finding other people that had the same experience and created it. But hearing people say, "How much of an impact it's had on their careers and their lives and stuff like that, has really meant a lot to me." So I'm pretty proud of that.
Cassidy William...: That is so great having a community, especially when there isn't one because of obvious reasons in the tech industry, it's so important to have that. And so, I am proud that you are a community leader too, and I'm so glad that you've made that.
Taylor Poindext...: Thank You, Cassie.
Zach Plata: And moving on to the next random segment, merge conflict. So tell us about a merge conflict that you've dealt with in the past and how you overcame it. It could be code or people related.
Taylor Poindext...: Ooh, I didn't think about the people related example. How would that even work?
Cassidy William...: Sometimes they're even harder than the code ones.
Taylor Poindext...: Right.
Zach Plata: Yeah.
Taylor Poindext...: Right, Definitely with all the conflicts. And the funny thing is I'm trying to call a merge conflict tech-wise to mind. I can remember the moment where I was getting assistance from my team trying to figure it out, but I cannot remember what the issue was. I feel like that's true trauma. It was really-
Cassidy William...: You've blocked it out.
Taylor Poindext...: ... I've blocked it out. I remember my manager standing over my shoulder. It was like, "How did it get like this?" I was like, "I don't know. I don't know. I don't... Don't ask, just... " That was at my last job, but I honestly can't remember an example for that one. Now I'm trying to think people-wise. It's a merge conflict with people, I can't think of one, but I know there has to be one out there.
Cassidy William...: It might be one of those things where you blocked it out too. Honestly, stressful.
Taylor Poindext...: Honestly, it is part of my coping mechanism. My therapist says, "I'm a great suppressor," just like it never happened.
Cassidy William...: Just like, "For better or for worse." Well, that is fine with me because the next segment is the mild panic trivia game, trivia fun game. We have to quickly ask a question or rapidly compliment each other. Taylor, you're going to do me. I will do Zach. Zach, you will do Taylor. Ready, set, go.
Taylor Poindext...: Do I start?
Cassidy William...: Yes.
Taylor Poindext...: Okay. Cassidy, I love how you are unapologetically yourself. I love that you're quirky, funny and also give back to the community, but also are very welcoming.
Cassidy William...: Thank you. Wow, that made my day.
Taylor Poindext...: You're welcome.
Cassidy William...: I appreciate that so much. Zach, what's something that you're excited about in the next week or so?
Zach Plata: I am going to get a puppy. I've been deprived of a dog my whole life. Parents, if you're watching, that was directed towards you. But I am getting a puppy this Saturday, driving up to near Minneapolis and I'm so excited and nervous.
Cassidy William...: That's so exciting.
Zach Plata: Yes.
Cassidy William...: Oh, my gosh, also and nervous, you'll be fine.
Taylor Poindext...: Yeah.
Zach Plata: Probably.
Taylor Poindext...: Can I ask, what kind of dog?
Cassidy William...: You might be a little sleepy at first.
Zach Plata: It is an English Springer Spaniel.
Taylor Poindext...: Ooh, nice.
Cassidy William...: So cute. So that's the fluffy ears, right?
Zach Plata: Yeah, the fluffy, long ears kind of looks like a cocker spaniel, I guess. It's probably the more commonly known one, but I don't know too much about dogs. My partner chose the dog, so-
Cassidy William...: It's fine.
Zach Plata: ... I was like, "It's cool. It's cool."
Cassidy William...: And what will be the dog's name? Sorry, I know it's your turn.
Zach Plata: It's Rone or Rony for a name.
Cassidy William...: Rony, I like that.
Zach Plata: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: It's so cute.
Zach Plata: Maybe we'll see Rony on a future episode. We'll see.
Taylor Poindext...: Okay, Rony.
Zach Plata: Taylor, I love your collection in the background. Is that all whisky? I'm also very liquor illiterate.
Taylor Poindext...: It is indeed all whisky. I'm not going to lie, I keep telling myself, now that I'm willing to have friends over and we're not in quarantine, I need to get some non-whisky options in the house because I don't have any. I was hoarding a bottle of vodka and a bottle of gin that somebody brought over one time for if other people want it. But then I found out that gin goes bad. Vodka stays good for forever. So we have vodka somewhere in a closet in here, but not on these carts.
Zach Plata: It just looks so aesthetically pleasing.
Taylor Poindext...: Oh, thank you.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, that too.
Taylor Poindext...: Thank you. So my favorite on the cart... I have another bar out here, that you can't see right now. This house is full of whisky, that was my mom's biggest complaint when she helped me move. Because you don't think about... I have hundreds of box and they're so heavy. You have to pack them up. But favorite one on the cart or in the house?
Cassidy William...: In general, I'm curious. You mentioned, "It varies based on your mood."
Taylor Poindext...: I love the Old Elk Distillery, also love Japanese whisky, is pretty tasty. It's tasty, especially with Anika. I don't have it in here, but my brain just poofed. Oh man, what is the name of that dang whisky? I could see the bottle. Terrible, I am so... Actually, you know what, another bottle popped in my... My friend bought me this really nice bottle of King George IV which is exquisite. It's perfect.
Cassidy William...: Wow. I am writing all of these down so I can Google all of them. I am very ignorant when it comes to whiskey.
Taylor Poindext...: That's okay.
Cassidy William...: It seems like such a cool culture. I feel people who are into whiskey are really good at identifying the different notes in it and how it was made. I love learning about that kind of stuff. It's so interesting.
Taylor Poindext...: And for my birthday every year, I make my friends sit through a whiskey presentation and so they can get indoctrinated.
Zach Plata: Oh, I want to do this whiskey presentation.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, come on over.
Zach Plata: I feel I need that [inaudible 00:25:34].
Cassidy William...: I would like to watch this.
Taylor Poindext...: My birthday's in January, come to my house.
Cassidy William...: Perfect.
Zach Plata: Perfect. We'll have a beginner class.
Taylor Poindext...: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: Yeah. Oh, that is so fun. Okay, we are moving on to this final section of Cassidy's sage advice.
And my advice for you today is to be empathetic. I think a lot of times, especially in the tech world, it's very black and white where it's just, "This is the code. This is the logic. This is how we do X, Y, or Z," and that's not always the case, both in code and also just when you're working with different teams and different people. And as you're exploring your career and moving up in the world, choosing which track you want to be, figure out how you can be a good community member and a good manager, a good teammate to your teammates and fellow workers around you, whether they're in your company or out. Because you never know who you might help and it could really change the trajectory of your career. You never know. That being said, Zach, Taylor, thank you so much for being with us today. This was so fun.
Taylor Poindext...: Thank you for having me.
Zach Plata: Love this.
Taylor Poindext...: I honestly felt I was just chatting with old friends, so that's exactly the type of interview I want.
Cassidy William...: That's the best kind because then you don't realize time has flown by so fast.
Taylor Poindext...: I'll take it.
Cassidy William...: Yeah. Taylor, where can people find you on the internet? Anything you want to plug?
Taylor Poindext...: Twitterverse@engineering_bay is me on Twitter. I don't know how well that's going to age over the next couple of decades, but you can find me there. If you're into whiskey, check me out on Instagram @WomanWithWhiskey.
Cassidy William...: That is awesome.
Zach Plata: That's a great handle to catch.
Taylor Poindext...: Thank you.
Cassidy William...: Yeah. It feels like ripe for side projects too, and I started brainstorming, mustn't by the domains. No.
Taylor Poindext...: Actually, [inaudible 00:27:31] I should buy that domain because I want to create a site to suggest whiskey to people. Because folks often ask me favorites and stuff like that and I want a site just to do it.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, you could use a decision tree thing. All of those, if statements will come into play.
Zach Plata: There you go.
Cassidy William...: It all comes full circle.
Zach Plata: Data engineering.
Taylor Poindext...: Look at me go.
Cassidy William...: Look at you go. 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 @Cassidoo, C-A-S-S-I-D-O-O on most things. And I'm CTO over at Contenda.
Zach Plata: I'm Zach and I'm a [inaudible 00:28:24]. You can find me on Twitter @ZachPlata.
Cassidy William...: Thank you for tuning into the Dev Morning Show (At Night). Make sure you head over to our YouTube channel where you can like and subscribe. You can also listen to the audio version of this wherever you get your podcasts.