This episode features an interview with Brian Rinaldi, Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly. With over 20 years of developer experience under his belt, Brian has worked with front-end and back-end technologies focusing on the web. He also serves as the editor for the JAMstacked and Mobile Dev Weekly newsletters, co-author of The Jamstack Book, and is on the board of directors for Orlando Developers. In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Brian dive into perfectionism, delivery of code versus quality of code, and learning how to adapt.
This episode features an interview with Brian Rinaldi, Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly. With over 20 years of developer experience under his belt, Brian has worked with front-end and back-end technologies focusing on the web. He also serves as the editor for the JAMstacked and Mobile Dev Weekly newsletters, co-author of The Jamstack Book, and is on the board of directors for Orlando Developers.
In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Brian dive into perfectionism, delivery of code versus quality of code, and learning how to adapt.
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Episode Timestamps:
(02:06): What Brian is working on at LaunchDarkly
(04:28): What Brian’s day-to-day looks like
(08:57): Rapid Fire Questions
(20:45): Random Segment Generator
(37:28): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“I loved to learn and I was so into learning new stuff and new frameworks. There was always a slightly more perfect way to do something. [...] I was overly focused on the quality of my code and under focused on delivering the code.” – Brian Rinaldi
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Links:
The Dev Morning Show (At Night) YouTube Page
Cassidy Williams: Hello everybody and welcome to the Dev Morning Show (At Night). My name is Cassidy Williams and I am accompanied by my wonderful, delightful co-host, Zach Plata. Hay. Zach.
Zach Plata: Hey Cass. An extra adjective that time.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, I know some things up . There's so many things.
Zach Plata: What are you up to this weekend?.
Cassidy Williams: Well, I am in Philadelphia as you can see by the Liberty Bell and Cheese steak words behind me
And so I'm gonna see some family gonna eat lots of food. It, it should be good. Well, without further ado, we have our next guest on the show and oh my goodness, what a cool company He's a part of Brian Rinaldi. He's a developer experience engineer at LaunchDarkly Darkly Brian, welcome.
Brian Rinaldi: Thanks for having me.
Cassidy Williams: So glad to have you for a little bit of context, everybody.
When we were first starting the show, Brian was our test subject as we tested out our questions to see if anybody would actually wanna answer them. .
Brian Rinaldi: It was fun. I enjoyed it. Yeah,
Cassidy Williams: yeah. Now we have the real thing, and so this is gonna be a 100% flawless episode.
Brian Rinaldi: Absolutely flawless. I just trying to remember my answers from,
Cassidy Williams: Oh yeah, just copy yourself,
It's the best kind. Although copying yourself is really humbling when like, , you look for an old stack overflow answer or something, and it's your own, and you're just like, Dang it, .
Brian Rinaldi: Yeah. Now what I need is, you know, how you get, you can create this AI artwork and stuff like that now. Right? Yeah. I was telling, I was having a conversation earlier, I'm like, wouldn't it be awesome like you're having AI like me in the meeting kind of thing.
It could predict what, um, what I normally would say, , things like that. Mm-hmm. . Mm. I'll just. So the I, This is AI me by the way, just this program. Cool.
Cassidy Williams: Perfect. Just so you know, Brian is an AI confer. . Great. . Well, besides being in ai, what are you working on right now, Brian?
Brian Rinaldi: Uh oh. I am working on, oh God, number of different projects.
The big one is, well, you've, I dunno if you've heard of this conference called Reinvent, Um,
Cassidy Williams: Oh yeah, that's
Brian Rinaldi: a big one. . So, yeah, we have a big presence there, and we have this, there's this thing called the A Jam, which is like, kind of like a hackathon, but a little bit different format. We have to finish, like accomplish a bunch of tasks as a team and stuff like that.
Um mm-hmm. and we have one that we've rebuilding. So I, I built that one out and it's, it's not, it sounds like it should be easy, but it, it's really not. Um, cuz they have a whole system to build it into that you have to kind of fit in into the jam. Oh yeah. It's a custom built system to run these jams that you have to kind.
Yeah. So it's been a fun project, but it's a.
Cassidy Williams: Interesting. So it's like a very custom hackathon of sorts.
Brian Rinaldi: Yeah, it's kind of like that. So yeah, you basically, you have to create different tasks and then they have to go into, you know, creates, like, it spins up a whole like, um, account for them on AWS and everything that they have to go into and try and complete the task in there.
we, I have to build like a validation function that goes out and checks whether you completed the task by running your function and seeing the output or checking tb. I see. And seeing that things were inserted and things like that. So, yep. Gotcha. It's fun. Well, that's cool. It is kind of cool. It's a lot.
It's, It's frustrating but also cool.
Cassidy Williams: It's work, but it's cool. .
Zach Plata: Well, speaking of building cool systems, it is time for our ad read by a company that makes. Awesome systems. 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.
Thanks for the money LaunchDarkly Darkly.
Cassidy Williams: So Brian, what does your day to day
Brian Rinaldi: look like? Uh, you know, I, my day to day is a lot of like writing. I write a lot of dumb demos, a lot of blog posts, a lot of videos and conference sessions and
Cassidy Williams: a newsletter. You run the JamStack Newsletter
Brian Rinaldi: I do run them. James, yes. But, um, I run. Yeah, I also run like a local meetup.
I run online meetups. Um, yeah. So, but most, most of the time I'm working on like, writing something. Like, that's kind of the core of my job is like I'm either writing a blog post or I'm writing documentation or like, you know, some kind of guide or things like that. That's kind of where my, that's my favorite thing to do, honestly.
And what kind of
Zach Plata: tools are you using on a day to day, whether you're like writing your, your blogs or, uh, for code
Brian Rinaldi: or whatever. Uh, you know, most of my work is front end focused, so like, you know, well front end and like serverless stuff. So I spend, if I'm coding, it's mostly in vias code. Um, I spend almost all my time doing stuff in Vias code.
Uh, you know, I don't other, outside of that, I mean, I mean, it's kind of the usual stuff like GitHub and, and, uh, you know, I use, uh, Tyra. For like lots of markdown stuff, which is like my favorite little markdown editor. Interesting.
Cassidy Williams: Oh yeah, I, I'm team obsidian, but Typo is definitely one that I thought about for a markdown editor for myself.
Brian Rinaldi: Yeah, I, I've been using it cuz it was free for years while they were in beta. It was, put it in a long time and I got really used to it and I really liked, It's so tried ob sit in. What, what made you choose that over.
Cassidy Williams: So what I like about it is the tagging and linking and the plugin system because I, I switched over to obsidian from Bear and Bear is Mac only.
And that was the main reason why I left cuz I have a PC as well. And with obsidian. You can back link and kind of create a wiki for yourself in addition to tagging your notes like with hashtags. But then they also have a plugin system where like for example, one of 'em lets you query your notes as if it's like a database of notes and it has like a graph view of how all of your notes are connected and stuff, and.
I could turn this entire podcast into an obsidian podcast. But anyway, between the, the basic linking and then the very powerful plugins, it does what I want it to do. .
Brian Rinaldi: That's cool. I definitely have to check that out cuz, I mean, I think it's just one of those things, I haven't found a reason to, to do something other than typo.
Even when they charged it was like nominal. It's like, okay, I, I'll cover that. Right. We make good. So fair. Um, but yeah. Yeah, I, you know, that's, those are kind of my tools. It's not that complicated to do my job in some, some respect.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I, I think in general, like when you, when you have the basic tools, that means that they can just kind of get out of your way so you can do the work that you enjoy and stuff.
And, and that's really what matters about them in the end.
Brian Rinaldi: Exactly. Exactly. You know? Yeah. And. Thankfully we got, I've been doing this a long time and it's, it's nice to have like great tools like, like VS. Code I love vs code and it's like, you know, but I used to pay for managers. I mean, like I, back when I got started it was like, you know, I had to pay like.
Um, you know, I remember trying to buy the dream weaver because I, I really wanted, when I was learning and it was like 600 bucks and you're talking like, this is in like 1997. It's like, Yeah,
Cassidy Williams: yeah, yeah. Adobe stuff in general. Uh uh, well, , I, I don't mind paying for software. Kind of like what you said with typo.
Like if it's good software, it's good software and, and I'll use it. But when it's so expensive that, and you're not sure if you'll like it and it's a barrier to entry, like the cost is a barrier to entry, that's when I'm not as much of a fan.
Brian Rinaldi: Exactly. Yeah. It was, it was hard to get started. You had to like have, have a budget for the software, you know, cuz it was not cheap back then.
Now it's like, eh. I just, you know, download vs code and I start coding JavaScript. I'm good. Go. Everything's free. Yeah.
Zach Plata: I remember like doing stuff on sublime text and I mean, if I'd use it for so long, I probably would've paid for it, but I was so annoyed by the whole popup thing that came up every so often when I was into it and I was like, Oh gosh, kind of my workflow.
Cassidy Williams: Come on. Breaking your focus, your flow. I know. All right. It is time for rapid fire questions.
We are going to ask you questions rapidly, and the first one is we all are squatting on domain names and project ideas. What are some of yours? So
Brian Rinaldi: I've, I've been good about unloading all the squatted, the domain I'd squatted for a long time. But I have one that I've. for reasons that I can't entirely explain.
It's whole enchilada whole enchilada.com. Um, yeah.
Cassidy Williams: So I feel like that's a good one to keep.
Brian Rinaldi: Yeah. . Yeah. Apparently it's worth something too. Like I could sell it for, you know, so I'm like, maybe I should sell it. I don't know. Um, but yeah, the original idea was, um, I've run a lot of events. And I was gonna run an event that was basically like, gonna be about different things, but it would be the whole enchilada, like of JavaScript or the whole enchilada of, Oh, you know, and, and, uh, I never got around.
I did have a logo and everything, but I never got around to actually launching the events under that name. Um, but I keep keeping it thinking I'm gonna come up with something that. Kind of pull back that logo and, and use it for I I see you're, you're already, you have ideas.
Cassidy Williams: I'm like, I'm like noodling on this.
Cuz anything could be the whole enchilada. It could even be a framework if you wanted to make a framework that does everything. It's the whole enchilada.
Brian Rinaldi: Oh. . Yeah, I know it sounds a little above my skill grade though. ,
Zach Plata: But you have the bases. .
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, you have the domain
Zach Plata: name and that's what I
Brian Rinaldi: have the domain name.
All that matters. And a logo. The rest is like, Yeah, details. .
Zach Plata: All right. What is the most recent thing you over optimized? Yeah,
Brian Rinaldi: so I was thinking about that question since you all send it to me before and I'm like over optimizing is probably. Nowadays, Like not, It's not even like something I, a problem I have.
I really, um, yeah. I don't, I don't even think I've over optimized anything in a long time now. Go back a while Wow. In my career. Mm-hmm. , and yes, this was a huge problem of mine. Um, you know, to where I, I didn't get projects done on time because they had to be, perfectly. Um, and you know, I was a total perfectionist and I think I've kind of gone the other way where I'm like, I'm just, I just wanna get this done.
I don't, I don't tend to over optimize things much. Um, Maybe it's cuz I just
Cassidy Williams: build demos. That's, It's probably a sign of wisdom. .
Brian Rinaldi: Is it really ? Let's just pretend it is. I'll take that as a,
Cassidy Williams: It is so wise. Wow. Brian,
Brian Rinaldi: go you
Cassidy Williams: What is your golden rule then? For coding or working in general?
Brian Rinaldi: So, yeah, um, I think my golden rule would be that, I mean, it's not an original thought, but like, basically. that everything you write today, tomorrow you look back on and pretty much be like, Ugh, God. I can't believe back to Word that. And I, I say that because as I mentioned, I, I, this was a problem for me early on, like.
I was, I loved to learn and I was so into like learning new stuff and new frameworks and, and so there was always a slightly more perfect way to do something. And in my mind anyway, there was no real perfect way to do it. But like, I'm like, Oh yeah, if I just did this, this would just be such better code.
Like I was overly focused on the quality of my code and. And probably under focused on delivering the code . Um, yeah. And so, yeah, so, and what I learned was like I, I kept releasing things that like, I'm like, this code is like, it's ideal. It's, it's so good. And then the one I look back a month later, I'm like, Yeah, I really should have done that differently and I've already learned something that we're, Yeah.
So, you know, um, you know, which is kind of, I think led me to a place where like I'm, I feel much better. Did I could deliver actual projects on time. Now this is quite the accomplishment.
Yeah,
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. Yeah. That's important. . Yeah. It's
Zach Plata: good to have that good balance
Brian Rinaldi: there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I, I, Over over, uh,
Cassidy Williams: corrected.
Over corrected. You got swing it pendulum them
Brian Rinaldi: a few times. .
Zach Plata: Fair. Fair. Um, okay, so what is your favorite? It depends. Question. .
Brian Rinaldi: Yeah. I don't know that I have one. I thought about it and I'm like, I don't know what everything is. It depends, isn't it? I don't know. That's true. Pretty much
Cassidy Williams: everything. Yeah. So again, a true sign of wisdom.
It depends what my answer is.
Brian Rinaldi: Yes. There you go. That's, That would be the witty response though. Let's edit that back and throw that in my mouth. . Great.
Cassidy Williams: Perfect. Editors, You know what to do. . .
Brian Rinaldi: That's just Cassidy's voice on Brian's mouth saying it. . Yeah. Deep picture.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. Perfect. What's the oldest piece of tech that you still own?
Brian Rinaldi: Oldest piece of tech that I still own. Um, well it's not related to coding, but I still. My, we sitting around somewhere. That's
Cassidy Williams: pretty great. Yes. The the we holds up.
Brian Rinaldi: It does, right? Yeah. Like it, like, I, like we got the, the bowling, whatever, sports for the switch. Heck yes. It's like, hmm. We, Sports was better. I
Cassidy Williams: agree.
I agree. I, my grandparents got we sports like in, in the retirement area that they live in. And it's very funny cuz my grandparents are very good at bowling but not at we bowling and they were, they like called us very angrily and were like, We need you to get us a we so that we can practice and beat our neighbors.
We're like, Oh, it's very competitive amongst all of these old people to be very good at We Ball.
Brian Rinaldi: Yeah. You know, weed bowling is a, is a particular skill. It's like, has nothing to do with actual bowl at all. Not at all. . It's, yeah. I mean, I used to sit there on my, on my, uh, on my couch. Like basketball, doing basketball.
I'm just in there. Mm-hmm. .
Cassidy Williams: Huh? Yeah, we tennis. Yeah. So
Brian Rinaldi: good . Yeah. I, I, you know, they remember where we said this was like a workout and then that, like once we got used to, it's like, no, no, no. Just sitting on my, I'm just like, I made my wrist get
Cassidy Williams: a workout wrist a certain way. .
Zach Plata: I need some exercise. Yeah. Um, what was the last piece of cringy
Brian Rinaldi: code you?
I think you could tell by my prior answers that pretty much every piece of code that I write is for ESY .
Zach Plata: So what was yesterday? ?
Brian Rinaldi: No, uh, that Dynamo DB thing. , Yeah. Um, I've wrote this presentation. It's all about future flags of course, cuz you know, I'm working Launch Dark play. So, anyway. And I was like, You know what I'm gonna do?
That would be really cool. Cause it's really hard to show off feature flags as I'm going to actually make the presentation built with feature flags. Right? Oh yeah. So you think, Okay, well, that, that should be easy. Like, like reveal js or whatever, solve JavaScript. Right? Super easy. Except it turns out that feature flags and presentation frameworks are like kind of a weird mix.
It's not really like I, and it's not like a problem. Launch dark we should solve. Cuz it's like, who should be really be doing this outside of me? Right. Um, and, and uh, you know, I understand that like reveal js wasn't really built for me to be like, feature flagging and Chan, but yeah, the two didn't mix very well.
So like people came up to me afterwards and they're like, Oh, can I have the. The slides like the GitHub for the slides and I'm like, I'll share it with you. But please understand that everything in there is a hundred percent not what I'd recommend that you do. . It's like a total hack to make a presentation work with feature flags.
Cassidy Williams: I could see it being kind of like a fun way to improvise a talk where you're just like, it could be any one of these different directions that we go in and like a choose your own adventure almost. But you have no. Oh, that's, But I could also see that being, I did, Oh, well stop. But I could see that also being chaotic to try to make that work together.
Brian Rinaldi: Yeah. So like mine was more like, there was a couple things. First all I started off with, like, it looks like the, the, it has the wrong title. And it has like one layout, like the color scheme is all messed up. And, and I'm like, Oh yeah, let me go and like, let me fix that and let me fix that. And I'm just flipping flags and getting it right.
And the other, the rest of it is really just like that the demos are in line, so like I can actually click a button in the presentation and it flips flags and uh, changes things and things like that. Which I think is, it's makes it fun cuz it's like, I was like, well how do I interac, you know, it's like a dry topic, right?
Like I, it could, could be. Boring, but made it a little more fun, I hope. I don't know. That's my opinion, but maybe the attendees thought differently. ,
Cassidy Williams: Well, hey, if they ask for your slides after, chances aren't Well, well, yeah,
Brian Rinaldi: yeah, yeah. Now they're, now we're, we're gonna get like, support questions of like, they copied this code from this slide deck, and you're just like, Oh, what have I done?
Cassidy Williams: Yes. What is your favorite programming joke or pun?
Brian Rinaldi: Oh. . Geez. That's another one that I don't know that I have. But you, I, I, I just like you are a, a fountain of them. I, Come on, give me
Cassidy Williams: one. I, I, I do, I do enjoy a good programming joke because I am a professional. That was terrible. awesome. I just pulled that out of my butt.
Yeah,
Brian Rinaldi: I'm sorry I put you on the spot. That is totally my fault. It's cause I'm, It's okay. I'm unprepared for that one cuz I'm like hmm. I don't know everything I do. Like my kids say, everything I do is like a dad joke. So I'm like, you know, programming
Cassidy Williams: dad jokes. I'm not a dad, but I am a faux pa and I think that dad jokes.
Brian Rinaldi: Nice. All right. Yeah. You saved yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Very good recovery from that last one. Yeah.
Zach Plata: Well, what is your most used emoji?
Brian Rinaldi: Oh, my most used emoji would probably be, uh, it's either, it's a kind of a tie between the raised eyebrow, uh Oh. Yeah. And, and the. I, I often use the, what is it? The kind of expression list, like, you know, Oh yeah.
The,
Cassidy Williams: yeah. Straight face one. Mm-hmm. .
Brian Rinaldi: Yeah. Mm-hmm. .
Zach Plata: That's a good one. That's,
Cassidy Williams: yeah, that's a good one when I'm upset. .
Brian Rinaldi: Yeah. I also think like, you know, rather than, I may not have many jokes, but I, like, I think those emojis blend your, blend themselves to somebody whose humor leans sarcastic to
Cassidy Williams: so, mm. Yeah. Yeah.
It's, it's, it's solid dry humor stuff. .
Brian Rinaldi: Exactly. That's, that's, yeah, that's me. That's why I don't have any jokes, cuz that's not my, it's not my humor, not a joke telling. Keep it dry. . Yeah. I would've been, I would made it in British humor maybe if I were
Cassidy Williams: born there. Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. , they, they know what they're.
Yeah. All right. It is time for the random segment generator.
Brian Rinaldi: Oh,
Cassidy Williams: okay. We have a bunch of random segments for you, and the first one is dev opposites. What do you do outside of your day job? What are your hobbies?
Brian Rinaldi: Uh, I am a big game. , Um, Ooh. Yeah. I love the games. Quite a few. Um, lately I've been putting, like in the more solo kind of games, I've been putting a lot of time into a game called Horizon Forbidden West because
Cassidy Williams: Nice.
I've been wanting to try that one.
Brian Rinaldi: It is. I mean, I love the first one. It was one of my favorite games ever. Um, and this one is, it's is excellent. The problem is I am a completist. I don't know if you like, if that's a real term. Oh no. But yeah, so like I'm the type of person who has to finish every side quest, every single side quest before I, like, I only get back to the main story when the, when it's like unblocked from moving forward with, with side quest, because I need to do complete something in the main story.
I am like hundreds of hours in, and I'm probably only like three quarters of the way through the story, but I have every side quest done. Every single one, there's like no, Well, okay, there's that game. That game. There's so many side quests. So like there's some that I don't really like that I'm like, I'm not gonna do that.
But outside of that, I mean all the main side quests are done. Um, yeah. So that destiny put a lot of time in destiny too. Um, Nice. In Apex Legends and now that it's just got re-released Overwatch, I came back to Overwatch. I always
Cassidy Williams: loved Overwatch. Yeah, I saw that new version and all the people posting screenshots like Overwatch is dead.
And then it was back with the new version.
Brian Rinaldi: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Cuz they took it offline, the old one offline and then had like a, a completely abysmal launch to the new one that it still has problems. Yeah. So it's not going well. And, and the weirdest part is not to get sidetracked on the topic, but it's okay.
It's side, it doesn't sound like either of your Overwatch players, but it's literally the same game. Like they call it Overwatch tv. Huh? But it's like, uh, you slightly tweak the game modes and you added a couple characters, like what's two about it? I don't get it. Like, I still love it. It's still fun, but like, Yeah,
Cassidy Williams: I tried it a couple times, like it was entertaining.
I, I play Fortnite because I like dancing. Um, but yeah, like, uh, it didn't, That's surprising that it's not
Brian Rinaldi: that different. No. Yeah, it's really not different, like almost at all marketing
Zach Plata: fluff, just putting some point.
Brian Rinaldi: Oh . And it took, and it's weird cuz it was like years of development to go. And, and then you have this big problematic launch and you're like, You're launching the same game you've been running for like six years.
I don't get it. Like it really didn't change, but that's really odd. Huh? I'm sure there's lots going on under the scenes that I don't understand, but still
Cassidy Williams: Sure. Yeah. As a user, Yeah. ,
Brian Rinaldi: I played Fortnight for a little bit, but I stink it it, so I can't do third person shooters. Like it's just,
Cassidy Williams: just, Hmm. I kind, I kind of like the third person perspective.
It, it, I don't know. I like that in like the Zelda games. I, I, I've, in general, I, I like being able to kind of see everything around.
Zach Plata: It's fun. I like how Fortnite has just become so extensible with like, all these different, you can have concerts and now there's a Star Wars theme or whatever, and it's like, okay, you'll draw me back in
Brian Rinaldi: every often it's, it's like the meta.
But better. Oh, yeah. Because it's actually fun. Yeah. And you have legs to, by default, like you don't have to like fake
Cassidy Williams: legs. Legs. What a concept. I also think just in general, it, it's a marketing machine and they give the people what they want. Yeah. And so like, people who are really into anime, they had so much dragon ball last season.
People were into Star Wars, Done Indiana Jones. Done. Like, they're, they're just, they, they pull in the all of the fandoms and it works really well.
Brian Rinaldi: Yeah. Yeah. They are good about that. It's, it's, yeah, I, you know, I liked it. I just was not very good at it. Yeah. So kind of
Cassidy Williams: mm-hmm. building is
Brian Rinaldi: hard. Yeah. Oh yeah.
Building. I was terrible. I
Zach Plata: run away ,
Cassidy Williams: hide in a bush.
Zach Plata: Okay. Well, if you weren't in this industry, uh, what would you be doing?
Brian Rinaldi: Let's see. Uh, I mean, honestly, I studied. And I wanted to be a, a college professor in history. Um, and I was even getting my master's in history and then just that like fell into this industry.
Yeah. Um, wow. You know, well, my history skills just really easily, you know, pivoted to programming. It's, But anyway, um, I'm, I'm kidding. Of course, right? Uh, there's a dry humor. I was like,
Yeah. So, uh, so yeah. Um, Maybe that I kind of think like, but given all the years looking back, I probably, I would've been an economist. I love, I love studying, like reading about that stuff and yeah, it's really fascinating to me. And I don't know, I think I wish I had studied it more now I'm kind of like an amateur.
I just read people who are experts and, and then form, uh, opinions.
Cassidy Williams: I mean, at least that way it can be more of like a fun thing that you learn about rather than like, I've dependent on my career Yeah. To do this thing. And you, you never know. Yeah.
Brian Rinaldi: It's true. You know, As soon as it becomes your career, then it's like, yeah, I wish I had done something else.
Even. So.
Zach Plata: All right, moving on to the next segment is what are you proud of? So what is something that you created or shipped recently that, um, you wanna
Brian Rinaldi: talk. So, I mean, it's not something I ship recently as in like new, I've been doing it for a long time, but, um, I run a site called cfe.dev that I've been running for the crazy part's, like now been over five years.
Um, it's all virtual events. Gosh. Time flies. I know, right? So it's, yeah, Cassie's been a speaker. Um, but it's all like virtual events. Um, And, but yeah, it's been five years. I mean, to think. It five years ago, five plus years ago, people were like, We have virtual events. Like, who wants that? Nobody wants that.
Even I was like that to be quite honest. I, I kind of fell into it. It's funny. I was like, Yeah, I don't know if virtual events are good, but it's like, I can get this going and, and see how I like it and then like now five years little did you know? Yeah, exactly. So like, we have two speakers at least, uh, a month.
Uh, so it's like every other week I host somebody. Um, We recently started like adding some additional programming in there too, but like, um, yeah, and I. Great speakers and it, but it's, it takes up, honestly so much of like my, my weekends, like I set aside, Sunday is the day to sit there and like work on this because it's always like, okay, find new speakers, working on sponsors cuz all of it costs money, you know, getting.
And, you know, updating the site and fixing issues and adding new events and I mean, it's like mm-hmm. newsletters and blah, blah, blah. I, I don't say that I do a great job of it, but I do enough, um, to kind of keep everything
Cassidy Williams: going. Honestly, the consistency part is the hardest part of anything. Like whether or not you do a good job consistency for five years is.
That's been amazing. That's awesome. Thanks. All right. It is our last segment and it is Launch Lightly Crash Darkly. What a fun name. .
Brian Rinaldi: What advice do you have? Where did that come
Cassidy Williams: from? I don't, I, I have no idea. You
What advice do you have for someone just getting into the development world?
Brian Rinaldi: Uh, you know, I, I'd say, A couple of things. Number one, um, don't jump right into like frameworks and tools and stuff like that. I feel like, like I, I meet so many people, particularly in web development, like now it feels like, like they know how to do things in a React, but like take a reactive way and it's like, how do you do this without React?
It's like, uh, wait. You can do that without React , um, you know, I'm, you know, I'm a, I'm an, you know, old, you know, kind. Crabby old guy, but you know, I get, I'm like, Yeah, you're so crabby. Yes, I am super crabby. You can tell not on podcasts, but as soon as I'm off, like, as this, soon as this camera goes off, I really the
Zach Plata: front, because Overwatch too just didn't, didn't fill that need.
Brian Rinaldi: Ruined everything. . But, but yeah, so, you know, so. I was a reluctant person on some of these tools and like, I, you know, I was like, Okay, fine, I'll use reactive. I have to. Um, but I, but I do feel like it, it, part of it is that I've been around long enough to know like, things change and actually sometimes they change way faster than you anticipate they're gonna change.
Um, you know, I, as a, as a kind of old school example, I was literally working in Adobe. On Flash and Action Script and like that was my thing that I was, and like that all ended overnight. I mean, it was, I, you know, There was a Steve Jobs letter and we thought things were going, but we thought things had kind of stabilized and all of a sudden I get one day it's like, Yeah, you're not doing Action Script and flash anymore.
You're doing all JavaScript and, and HTML and CSS and stuff like that. Um, and it's like, you know, I, the, I already knew a lot of that stuff, but the point is, is like I had to switch gears very quickly, you know? Um, and, and a lot of the tools I can, I can list you all kinds of tools I use. You know, at the time seemed like, well that's never gonna go away, and then it goes away.
Um, and you have to kind of, you have some skills to fall back on, I guess. And it may seem like, like some of these tools like React are not gonna ever go anywhere. And then, you know, you look back in five years and you're like, Oh yeah, I guess I totally disappeared and I had to really pivot and I never really thought about it, but at the time it.
It seemed inevitable that this was gonna be the way it is eternally. It just doesn't, doesn't work out that way.
Zach Plata: If you could undo one thing in your career, what would it be? Or, or change?
Brian Rinaldi: Did I mention that whole flash thing? . ? No. Oh, that . I kid, I, I mean, honestly, I wouldn't be here where I am today if it wasn't for flash.
So I'm totally cool and Right. Even cold fusioned and all that stuff. Um, if I had to undo one thing in my career, Hmm. It would be my first public speaking. I felt like it went just really poorly, and I'm surprised I managed to keep, you know, to get invited back. I, you know, I just, I, I made a number of dumb mistakes.
Uh, mistake number one, staying out too late, drinking the night before. Oh, no. Yes. That was bad. That would do it. Yeah, that was, that was mistake number one. Mistake number two. I like, that didn't help the fact that I was like super, super nervous and like, Just like, you know when you get nervous and you start talk, like, I naturally will talk fast when I speak and I have to focus on like slowing down.
But I was like hyper nervous and I was just, I spoke way too fast so my session was short. I had screw ups on my slides that I somehow missed until I got there. Cuz I just really guess didn't rehearse enough. I, I dunno, it was like, uh, you know, I dunno if it was a comedy of errors. Tragedy, but there was something, um, that I don't wanna have to
Cassidy Williams: repeat.
Well, and last but not least, Bryan, what is one thing that you're really excited about in the web development, software development industry right now?
Brian Rinaldi: So, I'd say there's couple things. Uh, they're not, they're both kind of related. Um, one is I'm really excited about edge functions and like edge computing stuff.
Mm-hmm. , um, I. I think it's just one of these things that like, it's one of those tools that you're like, Okay, I can see a couple quick, easy wins with that. And then the more you dig into, you're like, Oh, but I could do that and I could do that too. And I like just the way, um, You know, it kind of, the edge functions sit there in an interceptive request and the response, right?
And then, and I can manipulate those pieces and do all kinds of things. Like I started messing with flags on the edge, which was of course, something that I was doing for work, which, you know, I could suddenly start shifting what you see based on a flip of feature flag. And I could even take a static con content and I'm modifying that content and, you know, making, making, uh, it really dynamic or doing all kinds of, Redirecting based on different parameters or, I mean, it's just, it's, it's one of those things that I think we're only really starting to see what the possibilities of doing things there are, because it's not like, Oh, hey, this is just a serverless function running on the edge.
This is, It functions very differently. It's not end, it's, it's like before it ever hits the end point or coming back from the end point kind of thing. So it really alters the way you can think about architecting things. So I love. Yeah. And not unrelated, Sorry, go ahead.
Cassidy Williams: Oh, no, I, I just, I agree with you.
It's something that I feel like, first of all, there's so much opportunity for education with them because it's so new that people. Don't fully understand them. Mm-hmm. , I do understand them, but half the time I'm just like, But do I? And, and so I think there's a lot of opportunity there, not only to understand it more, but then once more people do understand it, the things that they'll build I think will be really
Brian Rinaldi: cool.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's very early days, so like all the, all the platforms are quite different. Mm-hmm. and, and one of the things. That was complicated that they're already starting to solve this problem is like data at the edge because it's like, well, yeah, I can move all this logic to the edge, but then my data still sits in some server halfway across the globe.
Um, and uh, and so it's like you have that latency involved and things like that. So like already starting to find like edge enabled. Databases or, or kind of, or data stores and all kinds of things like that, that starts to solve that problem. And it's like, and then the more you, you solve these problems, the more possibilities it opens up to like really take advantage of it.
So, yeah. Super excited about that. Um, yeah, and, and not, not completely unrelated, but like there's a lot of new set of tools, like, like your Astro or your remix or even SELT is not so, so new anymore, but it's still, you know, doing lots of different things that I, um, I think also take advantage of, of the edge, well, number one, and, and number two, kind of really getting back to the basics of, of, of building things.
Like I don't have to know like an as. I don't have to know the as way of building things. It's. Like mostly just JavaScript, right? Uh, felt is very similar, right? Like I feel like I'm writing JavaScript. Again, it's not like, well I know how to do this in JavaScript, but how do I do it? And react is always something like that end up kind of fighting against like, whereas like with this, it's like, okay, I know how to do it in JavaScript so I know how to do it, right?
Like end of story, right? It's just like, it feels very native. It does, It does. And I love that. Um, so I'm excited about those tools and, and even the way that they take advantage of like edge framework, edge functions and things like that to really, you know, build, build really fast, really cool sites.
Cassidy Williams: All right everybody, It's that time of the show.
Get your sage out. It's time for some sage advice.
When you are learning to code or learning something new, don't forget the basics. Kind of like what Brian had gone through with his career with having to pivot everything and, and having to. change full languages, frameworks and concepts that he was building with. A lot of times when you're building, there might be something that changes entirely, whether it's a new version, a new technology, a deprecation, something you're gonna have to adjust.
So don't stick to your guns too much when you're learning. Understand the basic fundamentals of what you need to know so that when it's time to transit, You can handle it with as much grace as possible. That being said, Brian, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. Thanks
Brian Rinaldi: for having me.
This was a lot of fun and that was very sage advice. Oh, thank
Cassidy Williams: you. So sage,
Zach Plata: lots of sage. . Yeah, .
Cassidy Williams: Brian, where can people find you on the internet? Do you have anything to plug?
Brian Rinaldi: Uh, yeah, so I'm remote synth. Um, that's our, uh, with S Y N T H. Um, basically every platform. You, you know that I'm on anyway. Uh, so yeah, you can find me there on Twitter on everything else if you want to play me on, on the, even on Xbox or PlayStation.
I'm that, I'm the MO and Thunder too. So, uh, yeah, so that, and I'd say other than plug, I already plugged cfe.dev, which is, you know, kind of my passion. So, uh, yeah, those two. And LaunchDarkly. But you did that for me, so Oh
Cassidy Williams: yeah. Don't worry. We'll hear from them again. . . 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. clay.com and learn about how Thank you for making this show possible. LaunchDarkly. I've been Cassidy Williams.
You can find me at Caou, C A S S I D O O on most things. And I'm CTO over at contend.
Zach Plata: And I'm Zach, and I'm a Deval at Arrive. And you can find me on Twitter at
Cassidy Williams: Zach plot. 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.
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