Leaving your legacy is all about putting in hard work and paving the way for others who come after you. As a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, this is something that Shaundai Person strives for every day. In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Shaundai discuss leaving a legacy, Netflix’s culture code, and navigating the dev world without a blueprint.
Leaving your legacy is all about putting in hard work and paving the way for others who come after you. As a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, this is something that Shaundai Person strives for every day.
In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Shaundai discuss leaving a legacy, Netflix’s culture code, and navigating the dev world without a blueprint.
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Episode Timestamps:
(01:53): What Shaundai is working on at Netflix
(13:15): What Shaundai’s day-to-day looks like
(20:06): Why Shaundai got into the industry
(27:02): Rapid Fire Questions
(35:23): Random Segment Generator
(41:21): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“Every day I'm going in and starting a new side project, something that's new and interesting and useful to me. And I'm getting to take part in these really big decisions and pave the way for the productivity engineers who come after me. So I'm kind of like a legend in a sense.” – Shaundai Person
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Links:
Shaundai’s TypeScript for JavaScript Course
The Dev Morning Show (At Night) YouTube Page
Cassidy William...: Hello everybody, and welcome to the Dev Morning Show At Night. My name is Cassidy Williams, and I am here with my lovely co-host, Zach Plata. Hey Zach.
Zach Plata: Hey Cassidy. I hear you got some fun facts today.
Cassidy William...: I always have fun facts, and I've been particularly into moose. And I'm going to tell you about them. Did you know that their antlers can weigh up to 35 pounds?
Zach Plata: No.
Cassidy William...: Those are heavy. And they shed them every year. And laughing here with us is Shaundai Person. Shaundai is a senior software engineer at Netflix on the productivity engineering team. Shaundai, hello. Thank you for being with us today.
Shaundai Person: Thank you for having me. You forgot to mention that I'm also a budding moose enthusiast, so I would like to add that to my title.
Cassidy William...: Welcome to the club. I am fascinated by these gigantic creatures because they can weigh up to 1800 pounds.
Shaundai Person: Insane.
Zach Plata: That is significant.
Cassidy William...: Enormous. And yet they're fast. Can you imagine, 35 miles per hour running at you, 1800 pounds? They're a truck, they're a semi truck.
Shaundai Person: Exactly. Yeah. And I've heard about people who have hit moose on the highway and the moose, like yeah [inaudible 00:01:28].
Cassidy William...: Yeah. It is the car that will be beat up, not the animal.
Shaundai Person: Right. Right.
Cassidy William...: It's amazing. I'm glad that they're relatively peaceful in general because I think we'd all be in danger at that point.
Zach Plata: Well now I'm just scared, but that's fine.
Cassidy William...: Anyway, thanks for that kickoff, Zach.
Zach Plata: You're welcome.
Cassidy William...: But Shaundai, back to you. What are you working on right now, in work, outside of work? You're doing all kinds of cool things from what it seems like on the internet.
Shaundai Person: Yeah, so I'm busy always. The things that I'm doing inside of work, so I'm on the productivity team at Netflix and so what our role is, is to make other engineers as productive as possible. And I started as the first UI member of my current team. Now I have someone else on my team who is there to help out. But the projects that we're working on are, the best way to explain it is kind of like if you think about Dependabot with GitHub, so Dependabot, if you're not familiar, is something that will help you to identify vulnerabilities, security issues inside of a repo inside of GitHub. And we are building, or we have built a system that allows people to surface different security issues, vulnerabilities or you need to update your library to this latest version. But there being no UI person, it wasn't sexy.
And not that security has much potential for being sexy, but I think it wasn't living up to it's potential to be as good as it could be. And it was doing the job that it needed to do functionally, but to be able to notify people of issues and not overwhelm them with too many issues, but also make sure that we got the right issues to the right person. That's kind of what I'm working on on a day to day basis is just making it more attractive and beautiful. So those are the things that are keeping me busy at work. And then outside of work, I'm actually working on a course on TypeScript and migrating TypeScript, migrating your JavaScript libraries to TypeScript as an enterprise developer, programmer, engineer, whatever you call yourself. And so I'm working in tandem with the folks from Egghead and working on that course.
It's coming along. I'm learning a lot. And where I got the interest for it was at the last company that I was at, Salesloft, I was part of a migration of our code base from old Angular, Angular one, to react in TypeScript. And so I learned a lot in the process, but I was like, one, I need something to reference for myself so that I can make it easier when I need to go back and remember all the crazy clunky things that happened. But also I don't want anybody else to have to deal with things in the way that I had to deal with them.
Cassidy William...: I feel like you learn the best by teaching because you're not only telling people who are learning from the ground up, but you're just like, "I know I will forget this in the future," and you're leaving notes for yourself
Shaundai Person: A hundred percent. And I can't tell you how many times I'll reference things or I'll see people tweet like, "Oh, I was looking up what's the best way to do something," and then their own blog article came up from years ago.
Cassidy William...: Your own stack overflow answer or something.
Shaundai Person: Yep, a hundred percent.
Cassidy William...: Also I'm wearing my TypeScript socks today and I'm trying to lift my leg to show you, but I'm not flexible.
Shaundai Person: I love TypeScript. I love that you have TypeScript socks.
Cassidy William...: Yes. Very exciting. Oh, that was the workout for the day. Gosh. Well the productivity engineering team sounds really interesting too because especially working on the UI side of it, it's not even just about it being attractive. It's more readable when things look good. And it's kind of like that form follows function, function follows form type of thing. If it's easy to look at and easy to parse, understand, and it actually looks like a professional piece of software instead of just a bunch of rectangles next to each other, the information is better conveyed. And so that's a really, really cool concept for a team.
Shaundai Person: Yeah. So this is the first time I've ever heard of a productivity team. And I'm like, okay, well maybe it's just because Netflix is so huge that we need engineers to support other engineers. But as I go out and I just talk about, "Oh, this is what I'm doing," people are like, "Oh, so you probably do what this person does at my company." And I'm like, "Oh, I didn't realize that was a thing," and I'm finding out more. I was actually talking with someone about putting together a group of people who want to connect with people outside of their own companies and want to have a Discord or something. So if you're interested and interested in starting something like that, I would love to jump on that bandwagon.
Cassidy William...: I would love for that to exist because I think it's something that a lot of companies have, but they don't know how to describe it. At my company, I think they were debating should we call it core experience, core engineering? But that's not fully what it is, but kind of. But anyway, I think that something like this could be particularly valuable because so many companies have a person doing something like this or it's kind of a design system, but more engineering. It's hard to describe. And so the fact that it's titled and you have such clear goals, I feel like this is a conference talk waiting to happen.
Shaundai Person: Good point. And so there's something that I forgot. So I know that my manager, who is Ryan Burgess, he used to do a lot more conference talks, but he does a lot of speaking, he's spoken about this. I've also, there's a company called Gradle, and they have hosted different talks about productivity, engineering. Gradle is a tool that we use here at Netflix, but they also are big in just branding and helping other people to better develop their productivity orgs. And so I can send you a link, but they do have people talking from Uber, Airbnb, and different companies all about their productivity org. So if you're interested in finding out more, definitely click that link. So yeah, I know that I also described my role is not that sexy. And in fact, when I was interviewing at Netflix, my director described us as the colonoscopy org.
So basically it's like you go in, you navigate around the crap, and you have to make sense of it and then kind of diagnose people with it. But what I love about my job is that because a lot of other companies don't have a productivity org, there isn't necessarily a blueprint everywhere that you go. So a lot of the work that I'm doing, it's uncharted territory and things that I've never done before. So I'm getting to have input on this is what this should look like, and also get the feedback right from the other engineers, my customers, who work within the same org that I work in. So it's a lot of experimentation, it's a lot of fun. It's like every day I'm going in and starting a new side project, something that's new and interesting and useful to me. And I'm getting to take part in these really big decisions and pave the way for the productivity engineers who come after me. So I'm kind of a legend in a sense.
Cassidy William...: Of course. I love that though. It feels like it's a team that has a lot of flexibility and because your customers are your coworkers, you get so much feedback quickly and flexibility in general it seems like.
Shaundai Person: Definitely, definitely. And that's one thing I can attribute to Netflix as a culture. From day one, I was trusted to be a smart and capable human.
Cassidy William...: What a concept.
Shaundai Person: Right. So when I first started, I was kind of like, where are the people who are supposed to be breathing down my neck? We don't even have a QA team for my team. We don't even have a QA. And so I'm just trusted to release things into the wild and have them be functional and bug free. So on the one hand, it's scary, but also it helps you to turn into this very responsible person who cares about what happens when you throw that code over the fence. So yeah, it's like nothing I've ever experienced, but it's awesome. Every day is just a new, fun, exciting challenge.
Zach Plata: That's so cool because yeah, I imagine Netflix is just this huge monolith of a company. And it's a lot harder to do a lot of those things and experiment on your own time. So really cool to hear that.
Shaundai Person: And that's what I thought too. So we have a culture doc that is out there floating in the world. If you look up like Netflix culture, there's a doc that explains what our culture's like. You don't really understand it until you're in it. I can't even say I fully understand it. It's a lot of freedom, but they say with that freedom comes responsibility. And so I feel like the best analogy that I can use is just, it's a village of people who are just doing whatever they think is best for the company and the organization. And you're just trusted to make the best decisions on behalf of the company, on behalf of the people that you're working with. And people really take that seriously. And it works. Somehow it works.
Cassidy William...: It takes a village to raise a product.
Shaundai Person: Exactly. I love that.
Zach Plata: So good. All right, now I'm going to transition awkwardly into an 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...: Shaundai, we did learn a lot about high level what you do. But what, more granularly, does your day to day look like?
Shaundai Person: That's a really good question. So I wake up in the morning, I have breakfast. No, I'm just joking.
Cassidy William...: Sometimes.
Shaundai Person: Mainly I try and do as much code as I can on a day to day basis. But a lot of my day is with meetings, so most of my time, and obviously it depends on the day, but if it's a not meeting heavy day, a lot of my time will be just actually in the code developing the tools that I talked about, is putting the UI to different systems that we've built to make the engineers more productive. And that's my favorite part of it is I'm still very in love with the coding aspect of it. So even in my spare time, I would love to just be spending as much time as I could in the code. Another big part of engineering as a whole is just making sure that you're on the same page as your team members. And so that takes the form of meetings a lot of times.
Our culture is also to try and do things as asynchronously as possible, so we'll be communicating via Slack and then we'll also write docs. Netflix is big on docs. So we have a Google doc for everything. Any decision that you have made, thinking about, you'll write a doc about it, you'll circulate that doc and then instantly ants, all other engineers and managers will start commenting on it, asking you questions. They call it farming for descent. But the goal is ... So one big thing, just kind of taking a step back, is one of the big parts of an engineer is to get that constant feedback from your customers and not just be making products and iterating on products in a way that you think is just, this is a cool way to do things or this is a feature that I would love to implement, something that's fun for me to build, or something that I think I would use if I were a user.
You need to actually have those conversations with your customers. And luckily we have our customers, the other engineers within our org, so we can just circulate those docs within them. And so part of farming for dissent is making sure that you're not working in a silo and just making decisions based on what your own personal interests or experiences tell you is the right thing to do. You're actually understanding what your customers, what the other people in your org want, need, will use, and getting other ideas. And so in order to help you to build out the best product, people will instantly, like I said, like ants, will come in and comment on your doc, ask you questions, and poke apart the things that you've put together so that you build a fully thought out product.
Cassidy William...: I feel like that culture of documentation is something that's ... When you are in a company that has that, it's prominent. And you get so good at writing by the end of your tenure there where you are constantly just improving and you think about those holes ahead of time. I did a brief stint at Amazon and that was another one of those where you write a doc for literally everything. And I know how intense that can get, but again, you come out such a good writer.
Shaundai Person: So true. And part of it is, it's like a pain too, because I'm like, I should be coding right now. I should be spending all day writing up this doc. But it makes you a better writer, makes you a better developer because you have this well thought out product. And it also, as a professional branding experience, it helps you to leave a trail of the things that you've done and the way that you've contributed to it.
Cassidy William...: Yes.
Shaundai Person: So now if I'm up for a promotion or something, I can just go through all the docs that I put together and I'm like, "Hey, listen, I was the informed captain of this team," or, "I was the leader of this project," or, "I had input on the way that this went and I made sure that we didn't fail because I made a comment on a doc that if I hadn't raised this flag, we could have released something into the world that would've cost us millions and made us no money," or something like that.
Cassidy William...: Yeah.
Shaundai Person: It's important
Zach Plata: For sure. So regarding when you do get time to code and stuff, what kind of tools are you using on a daily basis? Like terminal editor of choice?
Shaundai Person: Good question. I use, for my terminal, well, so for my editor I use VS Code. And then I just use the terminal that comes along with that. I do have iTerm, but I don't use it that much. I'll use it for weird purposes like if I'm trying to do two things at the same time. But for the most part I just use that VS Code terminal. My stack is JavaScript, TypeScript, React, GraphQL. I'm very heavily in the front end, but I am making it a goal to learn some Java this year because that's what part of my team uses. So I'll be taking Angie Jones's course on Java at some point when I'm free time.
Cassidy William...: [inaudible 00:18:50].
Shaundai Person: She's amazing.
Cassidy William...: Honestly, I really like Java and front end developers might be going like, "Why?" But it's such a solid language that's just been around so long that they've just made really good steady improvements over the years. And also it was one of the first intense languages I ever learned. So if I ever have to do an algorithms interview, I think of it in Java first. But it's a solid language. If you build it in Java, it's not going to go away anytime soon.
Shaundai Person: Agreed. I think all of the bigger companies and older companies are all using Java. I've just avoided it because it sounds scary. And I'm self taught so JavaScript to me is the cool, sexy thing. So I was like, I don't know. I don't want to do anything else. I don't want to do static typing. Even TypeScript for me was just kind of like, "No, I like dynamically just being able to do whatever I feel like."
Cassidy William...: Just do whatever you want. Who cares if a string's a number?
Shaundai Person: That's it. [inaudible 00:19:56]. Who cares?
Cassidy William...: Going from TypeScript to Java though will be much easier than JavaScript to Java. So at least you have that going for you.
Shaundai Person: That's what I've heard.
Cassidy William...: So you said you were self-taught. What got you into the industry?
Shaundai Person: So you want a story?
Cassidy William...: I would love a story.
Shaundai Person: Okay, cool. So I switched careers. I was in sales for 12 years.
Cassidy William...: Wow.
Shaundai Person: Yeah, the reason I got into sales was, undergrad, my major was entrepreneurship. And when you're going to look for jobs with an entrepreneurship degree, literally the only thing that you can get is yeah, CutCo sales, like weird jobs on Indeed. So I remember one of my entrepreneurship professors, so he had never worked for anybody in his life. And he was just an adjunct professor as his way of giving back. And he told me that the best way to understand what it took to be an entrepreneur was to do a commission only sales job. And my first job ended up being a commission only sales job. I was selling at trade shows, state fairs, a hundred percent travel, just going back and forth selling.
Cassidy William...: Wow.
Shaundai Person: Yeah. Anything that you would see on QVC. But the main thing that I was selling was this nail polish design pen. So if you think about those people that you see in the mall where they come up to you and they're just like, "Oh, I have this flat iron, let me straighten your hair." That was me. I'm in a trade show, just like, "Come on, get a free nail design ladies, come on over."
Cassidy William...: Wow.
Shaundai Person: Yeah, that opened my way into sales. I ended up moving into tech sales. So tech to me, I really didn't want to touch tech. And I had this view of tech and engineering. If you saw Jurassic Park, the original one, Dennis Nedry, he's the engineer who basically is the reason why the dinosaurs got free, killed everybody.
Cassidy William...: Messed up.
Shaundai Person: Yeah, big time. So him, the sedentary man, socially awkward, just sits at the computer drinks sodas and things. That was my view of what engineers were, was just very, it wasn't the type of person that I thought I was. I was so cool in my head, I was the coolest. I'm too cool to be tech. Ew. And so I wanted to stay away from it as far as I could. My cousin's now husband was at a tech company and he was like, "You're passionate about sales, you're amazing. Let me get you in the door at this company called MathWorks, which makes a-
Cassidy William...: Oh yeah.
Shaundai Person: You know what? Programming language for engineers. And so my customers ended up being first, my customers were tech companies, Apple, Google. Then I switched over to government and then the companies that I was working for was NASA, so literal rocket scientists is who I'm selling to.
Cassidy William...: Wow.
Shaundai Person: Yeah, and I found that I was less, even though I was great at sales, I was way more interested in the things that they were doing with the software than what I could sell them. So you would have engineers who were responsible for making programs that could visually recognize how big oranges were growing in farms and could tell you what combination of different chemicals to put in the soil so that they would grow the biggest. Or people who were getting us to Mars. So I was like, "Man, I just want to have these conversations all day." And that started my wheels turning. But of course all of those engineers had advanced physics degrees and stuff. So I'm like, "Well I'm not going back to school and I'm not going to school for that, so forget that." And so I just kind of dropped the idea out of my head. When I was on maternity leave though, I decided that I wanted to ... Well actually, sorry, this was right before I was on maternity leave. I had a business and I ended up leaving that bus ...
I pursued my passions for entrepreneurship, left the workforce, started this business. And then I went back into the workforce, back to MathWorks when I got pregnant because I needed health insurance. But the one thing that I felt was missing from the business when I had it was a tech presence. And I used Shopify to collect sales and things, but I wanted to build an app and I had all these different ideas. And I was like, "Man, it would be cool if I could learn to code just kind of as a hobby to do it." So I started out just tinkering with building websites. And I was like, "I'll build a website for my son's daycare and then I'll build a website for this really good brownie company that's down the street."
And I found that I loved it so much. I gave it myself a half an hour a day to just tinker with it. And I would be up until four in the morning some days. And I'm already a tired parent. But I was like, "Man, this is so interesting." And the main reason I didn't want to leave sales was because I felt like it was risky to leave something that I was so good at, was already making money, and I was a parent. Long story long, I decided that engineers could make money. It's possible to make money as an engineer, which I had no idea it was. So I ended up teaching myself in the effort to switch careers. And so finally in November 2020, I moved from sales at my company into engineering at the company that I was at. And here I am today at Netflix.
Cassidy William...: Wow.
Shaundai Person: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: I didn't realize that you only started in the pandemic full time. And you're a senior software engineer at Netflix.
Shaundai Person: I know, honestly, a year and a half, I could not have written ... And I'm so happy, but I could not have imagined that this would be where I'm at a year ago.
Cassidy William...: That's legitimately incredible. And it's a testament to your skills too. That's so, so cool. Every part of that story.
Shaundai Person: Thanks.
Zach Plata: I hope you got free brownies from that website you built for that brownie shop.
Shaundai Person: I never finished it. And I think I lost the code, but when I tell you that was probably the worst code that anybody's ever written in life. It was a div for everything. It was just like div, div, div, every letter. I remember trying to change the color, say the B and the R and brownies were two different colors. The B would be one div and the R would be one div. It was just awful. But I learned a lot.
Zach Plata: Good to go through that.
Cassidy William...: That is so awesome. Okay, we are moving to rapid fire questions now. We are going to rapidly ask you questions. And hopefully we don't catch on fire. First of all, we've all got domain names. Are you squatting on any?
Shaundai Person: I am.
Cassidy William...: Which ones?
Shaundai Person: It's so sad. I'm squatting on Shaundai.com. Shaundaiperson.com.
Cassidy William...: Those are good ones. Those are good ones.
Zach Plata: That's important.
Cassidy William...: I've heard significantly worse. Those ones are actually practical.
Shaundai Person: I'm not collecting anything really bad. I've had ideas, but I'm so practical in life that I won't buy it unless I know I'm going to use it someday.
Zach Plata: What is the most recent thing you over optimized?
Shaundai Person: My life. I would say anything. Outside of code though, I do over optimize with code. But in general, I'm big on lists. And just lists of things that I need to do for the day, but also my goals. And I realized the other day I have one app for long term goals and then I have that broken down into sub long term goals. And then between a year and five years, and then five to 10 years. And then I also have another list and another app that does similar things. And then I have one that breaks it down from day to day, these are the things that I need to do to get to those long term goals. So I'll get there.
Cassidy William...: I love it.
Shaundai Person: I have a lot of guidance right now, a lot of lists.
Cassidy William...: That's great. And I want to go deep into these lists, but we can't because we need to rapid fire.
Shaundai Person: Rapid.
Cassidy William...: What is your golden rule for coding?
Shaundai Person: Composability. Make things as composable as possible. If you're not familiar with what composability is, it's breaking things out into their smallest functional parts. And I saw a really good talk by Rich Hickey called Simple Made Easy. Just Google it. He talks about the difference between a Lego castle and a knitted castle. So yeah, if you think about-
Cassidy William...: I love that example.
Shaundai Person: It's so smart. And so if you think about, okay, code, spaghetti code, it's really intertwined together kind of like a knitted castle. And if you ever needed to change one part of the castle, turn a triangle window into a square window, you would have to unravel, If it's a knitted castle, unravel so much in order to get that one small change to happen. If you have a Lego castle, you just kind of break apart these smaller functional parts to make a much easier transition into something functional. And so you want to think of your code as that Lego castle. Build Legos, don't knit when it comes to code.
Zach Plata: Love that example.
Shaundai Person: Thanks.
Zach Plata: All right. What's your favorite it depends question?
Shaundai Person: Oh, when people ask what programming language to use or what to start with. For example, a question I get a lot is, do I need to know all of JavaScript? Or do I need to be a JavaScript master in order to learn React? It really depends on you, who you are, and what your goals are. I know that I did it because I like to know everything before I move on to the next thing or I need the fundamentals in order to move on to the next step. You may not be like that. There's a lot of people who have had really successful careers just starting with a framework and then going back and learning the fundamentals as they go. So depends on you.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, I actually, I spoke with an engineer somewhat recently where they only used React for years. Something like four or five years. So much so that they never really did vanilla JavaScript or anything and didn't actually know how a for-Loop worked because they never had to do it because they just never did it in React. And I was shocked, but at the same time I was like, it makes sense if you can get away with not using it.
Shaundai Person: I learned a for loop, but I never go back and use them now. So I can see how reasonably that would happen.
Cassidy William...: What is the oldest piece of tech that you still own?
Shaundai Person: I still have my computer from college, my laptop. And so this is undergrad, I graduated in 2008, so this is probably this big when it's closed, an IBM computer. So heavy. I haven't turned it on. I don't even know. Maybe I should open it, but I know it's in this closet back here.
Cassidy William...: You can try plugging it in, see what happens.
Shaundai Person: Yeah, see what happens.
Zach Plata: All right. Now we kind of talked about this one, but what's the latest piece of cringy code that you wrote?
Shaundai Person: Oh, okay. You know what? I'll tell you a story from last night. And like any mature adult, I'm going to take the blame and I'm going to give it to somebody else. So this is my son's fault because I was tired.
Cassidy William...: Blame the child.
Shaundai Person: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: [inaudible 00:32:28]. Defend themselves.
Shaundai Person: Exactly. He's four, he'll get over it. So yeah, he was asking me questions all at the same time. But I was trying to finally do something with my Shaundai.com website. And what it's going to be is the header is Shaundai Person, and then right behind that is some angle brackets as just a cool designy thing. Z index, yesterday was just messing me up. And I had to go back and look at how to do a Z index thing. There's the whole position, absolute or position relative.
Cassidy William...: And you can't do position fixed sometimes.
Shaundai Person: Oh my gosh. It was just all these little nuances. And so I'm going through back and forth through different blog articles and everything. And for some reason the angle brackets would not get behind my name. And so I posted it on Twitter and I was like, "Z index is kicking my behind." And then somebody posted a blog article, could it be this? And as I'm going through the blog article, I realized that I just had a higher Z index for the thing that I wanted to be in the front or sorry, in the back.
Cassidy William...: No.
Shaundai Person: Yeah. And so I changed it and it worked. And I was like, "Oh my God." So I deleted the tweet because I'm like, "Girl, you're a senior engineer at Netflix."
Cassidy William...: And it was a number.
Shaundai Person: It was just a number. I was like, "Yeah, Twitter's going to have a field day with this," so I took that post right down.
Cassidy William...: Good thing no one will ever know that story.
Shaundai Person: Right. Yeah, it's our little secret now.
Cassidy William...: Oh gosh. Anyway, what is your favorite programming pun?
Shaundai Person: Oh, that's a good question. Okay, so I actually just saw this joke. I'm stealing a joke from Emily Freeman. Her handle is editing Emily. Yeah, her dad, she'll post her dad's jokes every once in a while. And it was like a couple weeks ago, he was saying that he needs to put all his dad jokes in a database. And I was like, ha ha. That's so
Cassidy William...: [inaudible 00:34:37].
Shaundai Person: That's so funny to me.
Cassidy William...: Pretty good.
Zach Plata: All right, last one. What is your most used emoji?
Shaundai Person: I think it's called woozy face. But it's like the mouth.
Cassidy William...: [inaudible 00:34:53].
Shaundai Person: Yes. That's exactly it. But it's like if I'm talking about anything, cringy code or anything, that's the face that I'm imagining in my head. I use that a lot. I use the champagne cheers a lot.
Cassidy William...: Oh, that's a good one.
Shaundai Person: And I also use the little sparkles. I think it's just called sparkles. But it's my quotation, it's my emphasis.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, decorating around text.
Shaundai Person: Yeah, everything. Everything.
Cassidy William...: I love that one.
Shaundai Person: Yep.
Cassidy William...: It is time now for the random segment generator. You will randomly get a segment and go with it. And this next one is dev oops. What's the story of something that you broke?
Shaundai Person: Broke? I want to use that same story from the Z index. Honestly, I haven't taken down production, so knock on wood, I haven't.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, I was going to say knock on every piece of what you want.
Shaundai Person: Yeah. Metal, plastic. No, I haven't. I got pretty close at my last company, but luckily we have QAs. And what I was trying to do was I was trying to implement a filter. And we had never done a numerical filter. So people could put in custom numbers, like this account makes between this much and this much revenue for a search. And instead of, we were using React to router, which can be tricky, but we're using the perams, the URL perams as a single source of truth. And so the first step for the system is to put, okay, the filter is between this amount and this amount. And then the search will read the programs and then implement this filter. If somebody updated the filter, instead of replacing the old search, I would just append it at the end. So that would just like-
Cassidy William...: Oh, [inaudible 00:36:56].
Shaundai Person: The search results come up with nothing. Yeah. So luckily QA caught it. I was just like, "Oh, well, if I refresh the page and update the filter, no issue." But they were like, "Oh, well we can break it by just changing the filter. If I filter on something else, we can break it." So yeah, good to have a QA. As much of a pain as they can be, they're helpful.
Cassidy William...: So useful, for better or for worse.
Zach Plata: Awesome. All right, onto our next random segment. It's dev opposites. So we'll just ask you a few questions about the opposite of your dev life. So to start off with, what do you do outside of your day job?
Shaundai Person: Yeah, so I have a son and I spend most of my time with him. I'm teaching him how to read right now. So yeah, it's awesome. And he's four and a half, but he doesn't like to write. I'm a bookworm, so that's my other thing is I love to read. I love to listen to audio books. And he's just really interested in phonics and understanding how to read and spell. And so we just sit down and read books together, practice different words. And yeah, we're both in heaven, so it's great.
Cassidy William...: That's so cute.
Shaundai Person: Wonderful, yeah.
Cassidy William...: If you weren't in this industry, what would you be doing? Do you think you'd still be in sales?
Shaundai Person: No. Well, I would because I need to pay the bills. And so yes, if money weren't an option, what would I do?
Cassidy William...: Read all day?
Shaundai Person: Yeah, I would read all day. I would travel. I love to travel. The pandemic has stopped a lot of that. But if I could find a job where I was just reading books and maybe posting them on Instagram. I don't know how I would monetize that, but if I could just read books and go different places, that would be awesome.
Cassidy William...: I love that. Okay, our last segment is the mild panic trivia game. So we each have 10 seconds to ask a question or rapidly compliment each other. So I am going to go to Shaundai, Shaundai will go to Zach, and Zach will go to me.
Shaundai Person: Cool.
Cassidy William...: Are you ready?
Shaundai Person: Cool.
Cassidy William...: Shaundai, I think your personality is great. And whenever you give a conference talk, I'm always laughing because you do such a good job at it and I genuinely appreciate all the content you've put out there.
Shaundai Person: Oh, that's awesome. I love that. Thank you. Okay, sorry, next. Zach, what should I make for dinner?
Zach Plata: Mac and cheese. I hope you're not lactose intolerant.
Shaundai Person: Not at all.
Zach Plata: I just saw [inaudible 00:39:56] company. It's National Mac and Cheese Day, so [inaudible 00:40:00].
Cassidy William...: I didn't know that.
Shaundai Person: Neither did I. Little fact, mostly mac. I love it. Even if I was lactose and intolerant, I'd still eat cheese.
Cassidy William...: I feel like everybody who is lactose just eats cheese anyway and then they're just like, "Oops."
Shaundai Person: Just deal with it, yeah.
Zach Plata: Cassidy, I love that you always have the fun facts. And no conversation is ever boring because I learn something new every day.
Cassidy William...: Thank you. Moose Pregnancy periods are 243 days.
Shaundai Person: What?
Zach Plata: There you go.
Shaundai Person: Got to make those 1800 pound babies.
Cassidy William...: I know, they're enormous. And they come out knowing how to swim. They just-
Shaundai Person: How do people know this? Did they-
Cassidy William...: Scientists ... I want to just ask a scientist so many questions about moose because they can outrun a human after five days.
Shaundai Person: Wow.
Cassidy William...: We are inferior beings.
Zach Plata: Everyone is concerned about these new space photos from the new satellite. And the Cassidy is here just like-
Cassidy William...: Look at what's here, people. Moose.
Zach Plata: This is it.
Shaundai Person: Right in front of your face, man.
Cassidy William...: Okay. Anyway, it is time for the advice section. And Cassidy's sage advice brought to you by Cassidy. Hello everybody. Hello you out there? My advice to you is to experiment and figure out what interests you. Because a lot of times we go through life either looking at stereotypes like we see in movies or TV like Jurassic Park, or we just listen to what the loud voices say on Twitter and everything. But until you experiment for yourself and see what you like, whether it's for a hobby or for a new side gig or anything, you never know what might be the thing that interests you and is that thing that you want to pursue. So experiment a lot, and try to find that thing that drives your ambition, and draw the line between what you think it is and what the world says it should be. That being said, Zach and Shaundai, thank you so much for being here today.
Shaundai Person: Thank you for having me.
Zach Plata: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: It was so fun. Shaundai, where can people find you and do you have any plugs for us?
Shaundai Person: Absolutely. So you can find me on Twitter or anywhere really just using my first name. Like I said, I'm a legend. So if you just look up Shaundai, S-H-A-U-N-D-A-I, that's my handle at Twitter, Polywork, Instagram. Also, I'll plug my TS for JS course. It's not released yet, but you can sign up for updates. Just put your email in the form, pretty easy. And you can get updates to free content and updates on when the course is going to come out.
Cassidy William...: Awesome. TS for JS?
Shaundai Person: Oh yes, good question. Tsforjs.com. T-S-F-O-R-J-S.com.
Cassidy William...: Awesome. 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, Launch Darkly.
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: I'm Zach, and I'm a dev at Arrive and you can find me on Twitter at Zach Plata.
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.