Lily Chen’s past experiences as a professional gamer and monk have given her powerful insight into running a successful and empathetic company. As the founder of Contenda, Lilly is ensuring her employees feel seen and valued. In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Lilly discuss communicating your feelings, why being on call is overrated, and the great Millsberry computer game.
Lily Chen’s past experiences as a professional gamer and monk have given her powerful insight into running a successful and empathetic company. As the founder of Contenda, Lilly is ensuring her employees feel seen and valued.
In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Lilly discuss communicating your feelings, why being on call is overrated, and the great Millsberry computer game.
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Episode Timestamps:
(02:40): What Contenda does
(05:06): What Lilly’s day-to-day looks like
(13:50): Rapid Fire Questions
(19:11): Random Segment Generator
(19:36) What Lilly thinks is overrated/underrated in the dev community
(28:13): How Lilly became a monk at 15
(33:09): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“Sometimes we lose track of why am I actually doing this work? Does this help me get closer to my business problem? Does this help my customer? Does this help something? And thinking that instead of necessarily just the coding thing in front of you can go a long way.” – Lilly Chen
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Links:
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 accompanied by my lovely co-host Zach Plata. Hey Zach.
Zach Plata: Hey Cassidy. How's it going?
Cassidy William...: I'm good. I just had a really good cookie. And I'm in a good mood.
Zach Plata: I need that.
Cassidy William...: You know what puts me in a good mood? Really cool guests. We have a really cool guest today and that's Lilly Chen. Hi Lilly.
Lilly Chen: That's a tough act to follow. I saw that cookie.
Cassidy William...: It was a really good cookie. Lilly is the founder of Contenda. Lilly, could you talk about Contenda and what it is and the whole deal with why it's cool? Because, I think it's cool.
Lilly Chen: I think you're legally obligated to think it's cool.
Cassidy William...: That's true.
Lilly Chen: Contenda, helps companies scale their technical content marketing. We make derivative content from your original content, super easy, super fast, super great.
Cassidy William...: Derivative, that sounds a lot like math. Could you please explain more?
Lilly Chen: It's all the math about the math. Basically, you have an original piece of content. You speak at a conference, you spent days prepping for that conference talk and then you share that recording link and it goes into the internet. What if instead you put it onto Contenda? Contenda, makes blogs from it and makes a Twitter store with clips, all automatically. That's derivative content.
Zach Plata: That's cool.
Cassidy William...: So useful.
Zach Plata: At first, I was like, in my head, "The math isn't mathing." And then when you went into it, I was like, "Oh wow."
Cassidy William...: It was just like, "Wait a minute, roll back."
Lilly Chen: That calculus woman doing the meme.
Cassidy William...: That's something that, I think Zach and I in particular, because we both do a lot of Dev advocacy work, it's the kind of thing where we have to make lots of content and make sure it's evergreen and post it in all kinds of different formats and ways. And so, the fact that you could make it once and then recreate multiple forms of content from that one piece, is exciting.
Zach Plata: It saves so much time.
Cassidy William...: I know.
Lilly Chen: And you get to focus on the stuff you care about, like this podcast being here with you guys, I get to think about that instead of re-watching my old stuff and writing down notes and turning it into a blog. That's the slog.
Cassidy William...: Wow. Blogs are a slog. I am living all of this right now. Could you talk a little bit about how? You don't have to go too deep into the weeds of all the technology and stuff, but you take a video, a talk, it turns into a blog post. It's not a transcript. It's something new. You get a Twitter thread out of it. You get clips out of it. How? What do you do?
Lilly Chen: There's so much, but let's do that specific example. We focus on technical content. The reason why, is because we actually train models specifically to all the technical content marketing stuff that's out there. We pick up those words more. The other thing that we're working at right now, is something called content CI. Basically we write unit tests to make sure that the derivative content piece is accurate to the original. That's one of the tricky parts, when you try to get someone to help you. If you were to tell somebody else, "Hey, I spoke at this conference, could you turn this into a blog for me?" Well, depending on their background, when they watch it over, they might not get all the right things. They might miss a couple details or they might just try to Google something and maybe it's not completely accurate. One thing that I'm working on right now, is writing unit tests to actually compare the topic accuracy from the derivative piece to the original. Lots of topic modeling, lots of statistics.
Cassidy William...: That's so much. And especially code samples, I imagine those are very difficult to make sure that those are correct, if you're going to put something described in a talk into a blog post?
Lilly Chen: Yes. We actually pull those usually using OCR. So that, means on computer vision front. If you put it up on your presentation, nice, nice, easy pull.
Cassidy William...: Guess what? It's time for advertisements.
Zach Plata: The Dev Morning Show (At Night) is a sponsored podcast. Means someone has to pay the bills around here. We're sponsored by LaunchDarkly. And LaunchDarkly is the first scalable feature management platform. That means dev teams can innovate and get better software to customers faster. How? By gradually releasing new software features and shipping code whenever they want, fast tracking their journeys to the cloud and building stronger relationships with business teams. Thanks for the money LaunchDarkly.
Cassidy William...: So what does your day to day look like? Could you tell us more about Contenda, we know you founded it. How many people are on your team? Do you regularly do very business heavy things or are you more on the technical side? What does your day look like?
Lilly Chen: Well, so I have investors. These are venture capitalists and I meet up with them pretty regularly. And at my last meeting, I told him I was coding this thing, training this new topic models, really excited to see the output. And he was like, "You're doing what?" And I said, "Oh, I'm coding, because I'm an engineer." And he goes, "Stop that." And he smacked my hand off the keyboard, he was like, "Stop doing that. You got to do sales. You got to do product management. You got to hire." And we go through that conversation probably every couple months. So my day to day is a lot of doing one-on-ones with my engineering team. It is writing product docs, little tippy taps, and then sales calls, emails, always in a meeting.
Cassidy William...: I see that a lot with technical founders where they're basically told to stop being technical and run the business side of things. Do you ever see yourself bringing on someone to do the business side, so you can lean into the technical or do you like doing the business side? This might be personal, but I'm very curious about how that battle in your brain goes.
Lilly Chen: I have been asked that before, so don't worry I'm well prepared. I think one thing that's hard for me to reconcile, is I feel like I became a software engineer relatively recently and I discovered this whole world of fun. And then I just started getting into it and then people were like, "No play times over now, you got to do business things." And so, there is that part of me that misses it all the time. On the other hand, I think it's pretty advantageous, because I can communicate with my team about specifically when they say something's a blocker where they can't do it, we're actually able to have an intelligent conversation about, "What do you mean by we can't do it?" Is it, we don't have the bandwidth to do it right now. Is it not possible because of some dependency, that's a conversation that I can actually have with my team, which I value.
Zach Plata: So I guess when you do get to find that time to dig deep into the coding stuff on a day to day, what's your favorite terminal and editor to use?
Lilly Chen: I use VS Code and it's largely because the habit I picked up from the Zuckerbucks. So I used to work at Facebook and they have really great VS Code set up. I used to think that was just VS Code and then when I left Facebook and I installed VS Code on my own personal devices, I was like, "This is not the same. They did things to it." They did a lot of things to it. On the other hand, you can still install VS Code pets, you can get a little cat or a dog that hangs out right above the terminal. It's cute. And you can pet him.
Cassidy William...: It sounds like a Tamagotchi, but in your editor.
Lilly Chen: And he goes asleep, if you go idle, your pet will just go take a nap.
Zach Plata: I'm going to need that.
Cassidy William...: I'm glad that you learned such hard hitting stuff at Facebook as an engineer.
Lilly Chen: Yeah. VS Code pets is blocked at Facebook, but it's free in the real world, baby.
Cassidy William...: Oh, there you go. So what got you into the industry then, before the Zuckerbucks and everything before that?
Lilly Chen: Oh man, I wanted to be a PhD, like professor economics. I wanted to teach. I still think that's obviously something that resonates with me on my team right now. But originally I majored in math and econ and undergrad. And I wanted to be a professor. I guess if we're going to talk about business things, the funnel here is, first, you have to be brand aware. What is tech? And I became aware of what tech was when my college took me on a tour to Silicon Valley. And it was just a magical door. I went to Airbnb's office. If you've never been to Airbnb's office. [inaudible 00:09:00], have you been?
Cassidy William...: I've seen so many pictures. I haven't been, but [inaudible 00:09:04]
Lilly Chen: [inaudible 00:09:04] you've seen the picture.
Cassidy William...: It looks like the fanciest office in the world.
Lilly Chen: You should definitely check it out. It really is a mini Disney World. You know how in Disney World, they rebuild all things from different countries. That's basically what Airbnb's SF office looks like.
Zach Plata: Oh, that's cool.
Lilly Chen: There was a yurt, a yurt indoors with the whole two stories.
Cassidy William...: Of course it is.
Lilly Chen: [inaudible 00:09:27] top type thing. Yeah. A yurt indoors, it was nuts. But that's the first time I really saw something like that. I didn't realize that adulthood could have yurts indoors amongst other things. And there was bagel days. There were bagel days and kombucha on tap. I've never seen that before. But basically going to Silicon Valley, seeing all of these things, which is the first time I was like, "Wow, these people must be so smart. So talented and clearly better than me, because I don't know about this thing." Because, I don't know about this thing and I don't know how to do this thing. So these people must just be somehow inherently better than me. So that's, stage zero, brand awareness. Then stage one, is getting to the value proposition. Feeling like you, as the person can actually have that thing that everyone else has. And fun fact Cassidy, this is where you come in. I don't know if you know that.
Cassidy William...: I don't know if I do know that. Hello?
Lilly Chen: Yeah. These are facts. We are learning together. So when I came home from that trip, you put out a TikTok on Twitter of, it was the song High School Musical where it was like, "No, no, no stick to the status quote." [inaudible 00:10:43].
Cassidy William...: That was the Thanksgiving one I think, back in the day.
Lilly Chen: Yes, it was fixing things for your relatives. When you go home for the holidays and your friends and family are like, "My printer doesn't work. My WiFi's slow. Can you fix it for me? Can you install this mobile app onto my mobile phone?" All of those things. At the time I was working in a ITS help department. So I was doing lots of those things for people. And I saw that TikTok, it made me laugh. And I was like, "This is great." And I clicked on your profile. And I was like, "Whoa. She's like one of those Silicon Valley people." [inaudible 00:11:17]
Cassidy William...: I have a yurt indoors.
Lilly Chen: She might have a yurt, she might own a yurt. She could have bagels, kombucha on tap all these things. And I was just like [inaudible 00:11:29]. You did not, but I didn't know that. I didn't know that [inaudible 00:11:34].
Cassidy William...: [inaudible 00:11:36]
Lilly Chen: The web lies grows. But I mean, I ended up following you after I saw that, because I was like, "Oh, she's kind of funny. And she seems relatable." I was just kidding. I was going to say I was wrong. I'm not wrong.
Cassidy William...: Absolutely wrong.
Lilly Chen: I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. But that was, I think it was around the holidays year. And then for the next couple months, I just sort of liked, retweeted stuff that you were posting. Eventually, I think I got onto one of your Twitch streams and you were sharing beginner friendly guides. You have this Discord community, by the way, this is not a plug for Cassidy. I'm sorry. It's not on the script.
Cassidy William...: [inaudible 00:12:13] I didn't expect this. I didn't just bring [inaudible 00:12:15] on to be just like talk me up.
Lilly Chen: It didn't happen this way, but this is just the truth. So we're going for it. But Cassidy has this amazing developer community called RWC and everyone in there is just very welcoming and friendly. And I remember telling people, "I've never coded before. I saw some stuff in California. And I'd like to live that life if anybody has any suggestions." [inaudible 00:12:42] indoors. If, anybody knows how you can reach me at this number. But from there, I got some advice, got some resources, met some really helpful people. And I learned how to code by doing tutorials on the internet. The Internet's a magical place. Started doing that and then after college, I got my first software engineering job in Boston, then worked at a gaming AI startup in New York and then ended up at the Zuckerbucks in guess what, Silicon Valley.
Cassidy William...: You got your yurt.
Lilly Chen: I did, turns out yurts are really expensive.
Cassidy William...: They are it's wild.
Lilly Chen: They're really expensive.
Zach Plata: That's amazing.
Lilly Chen: [inaudible 00:13:24] I got there.
Cassidy William...: What a journey. I am blushing deeply that I was mentioned so much in this story, but it's also so cool that you kind of saw a goal and was just like, I'm using the yurt as a metaphor, but it's real. You were just like, I'm going for the yurt and you found your way there. And now you're the founder of a VC backed startup. That's amazing
Lilly Chen: Go yurt. Go gurt. All correct.
Cassidy William...: Anyway, let's go into rapid fire questions. So we're going to just ask you a bunch of questions rapidly, back and forth. Are you ready?
Lilly Chen: I think.
Cassidy William...: Cool. We all have a domain name or 10 that we're squatting on. What are yours?
Lilly Chen: Various deez nuts jokes, variations on my company name. Yeah.
Cassidy William...: It's good to keep [inaudible 00:14:23].
Lilly Chen: That's why I'm squatting on them.
Zach Plata: You never know.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, you never know.
Zach Plata: All right. Next question. What is the most recent thing you over optimized?
Lilly Chen: The amount of salad that can fit in a 16 ounce mason jar.
Cassidy William...: Please explain.
Lilly Chen: I bought a 24 pack of 16 ounce of mason jars from Amazon with the goal of eating healthy and I tried to fit all the protein and nutrition that I need in this 16 ounce jar with the dressing, so that it doesn't get the lettuce too wet. Because, I want to pre-make it on Sundays, but I don't want all my lettuce and stuff to get soggy. So I got to figure out the layering, I'm optimal right here.
Cassidy William...: Wow. That actually is incredibly really over optimized. That's really interesting.
Zach Plata: If you have photos, I'd like to see these.
Cassidy William...: Let's see these jars. What is your golden rule for coding?
Lilly Chen: Solve business problems, not coding problems.
Cassidy William...: Ooh, I like that. Please go deeper.
Lilly Chen: I think oftentimes as engineers, we get really deep into a bug or into this kind of thing that we're solving and we're really focused hard on trying to get that error message to go away. Sometimes we lose track of what am I actually doing this for? Does this help me get closer to my business problem? Does this help my customer? Does this help something and thinking that instead of necessarily just the coding thing in front of you, can go a long way.
Zach Plata: What is your favorite, it depends question?
Lilly Chen: People always ask me, "What's the best way to start a company?" They mean like a venture backed startup, but that's a very, very broad question. Oh
Cassidy William...: Oh, I bet. That could go in many directions depending on industry and problems you're solving and all that.
Lilly Chen: And what your priorities are, like do you have financial needs that you need to be meeting? Are you still in college? Do you live with your parents? Can somebody support you? Those are all personal questions.
Cassidy William...: Yeah. For sure. What is the oldest piece of tech that you still own?
Lilly Chen: Nintendogs. The 3DS game. Not the actual device anymore, but the game.
Cassidy William...: Where you can pet your dog and [inaudible 00:16:44].
Lilly Chen: Yeah, do you see where my VS Code pet obsession comes from now?
Cassidy William...: It makes sense. It's all from Nintendogs.
Zach Plata: Have you ever written a piece of cringey code? And if so, could you explain a little bit?
Lilly Chen: Yeah, because I don't have as much time to code anymore, I do find myself doing more hacky things than usual. I do recall one time my serverless function kept timing out and I could not figure out why, I didn't have the time to figure out why. So I just made it sleep. Just like sleep five. And then I was like, try again. Can you just try that a couple times? Just go to sleep and try again. It's fine.
Cassidy William...: If it works, it might be one of those things where someone might grip their heart, "You did what?" But if it gets the job done.
Lilly Chen: In the comments, do not delete the sleep function. The sleep function is super important.
Zach Plata: I bet we'd all be surprised about all these kind of asynchronous processes, like how much we'd find this kind of practice of sleep ten seconds. [inaudible 00:17:49]. We'll just throw up a pretty loader and it'll be fine.
Cassidy William...: For sure. I bet that is significantly more prevalent than we all care to think about. Gosh.
Zach Plata: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: Okay. Anyway, what is your favorite programming pun?
Lilly Chen: I thought about this for a really long time and I made one up myself.
Zach Plata: Okay.
Lilly Chen: Programmer, I hardly even know her.
Cassidy William...: It was good.
Lilly Chen: Yay. Thank you. I won't quit my day job.
Cassidy William...: No you could, that's fine. No don't, your company seems neat.
Zach Plata: All right. Last one. What's your most used emoji?
Lilly Chen: Officially in the Unicode excepted standards. It is upside down smiley face. When people say, "What is the sleep function?" Upside down smiley face. My favorite unofficial is mild panic. Our Discord server has it as an emoji. And so, whenever if someone says, "What's the sleep function?" Mild panic.
Cassidy William...: Perfect. We'll get that one in Unicode someday, maybe. They rejected [inaudible 00:19:08]. We'll try again. Okay. Next we have the random segment generator. We have a bunch of random segments and we'll just see what they come up with. And then we'll go to whatever is asked. So the first segment is, talk and ship. We're going to ship slash sip some tea. What's something that is underrated or overrated in the dev community, in your opinion?
Lilly Chen: Overrated definitely is on call. I know people are obsessed with this 99 and how many 9 you got. But I really think that most product services probably don't need that uptime. And it's a lot of stress, if you've ever been on call, if you've ever been paged dead of the night and they're like [inaudible 00:20:05] zero, [inaudible 00:20:06] stuff is really freaky. I think it's a little overrated.
Cassidy William...: It makes sense. You want things to be up, but sometimes you also want your teams to be healthy. So I totally get it. Definitely, it's tough, because there're some things where you're just like, this has to be up because you want it to be up for anybody. But I get
Lilly Chen: I mean if lives are on the line, right? Yeah.
Cassidy William...: Right. Oh for sure.
Lilly Chen: [inaudible 00:20:35] hundred percent. We got to do that.
Cassidy William...: If health and safety and that kind of thing are relying on it. Yes, that's incredibly important. If it's kind of a silly thing...
Lilly Chen: Maybe you can wait, maybe you can wait till business hours, then they'll get to it.
Cassidy William...: This is also a good case for just remote work in general, where if you have people across many time zones, then people can keep an eye on it when they're awake and working rather than just at that particular middle of the night time where they might not be working.
Lilly Chen: Big fan of remote work right here. As a compliment to the overrated thing. I think something really underrated for engineers anyway, is emotional handling. So as a joke, but kind of not as a joke, for a while for my one on ones, I was bringing a feelings wheel. If you don't know what a feelings wheel is, it's like the color wheel, but instead it has feelings on it. So it starts off with good, bad, because when you ask somebody, "How are you doing?" They say good or bad. So they divide good and bad and different things. Good, then divides into feelings of happiness, feelings of accomplishment, and then happiness can be divided further and all those feelings get secondary feelings and get very descriptive. Super underrated, but it goes a long way for both the business and the culture, if you can communicate how you're feeling.
Absolutely. So when someone says, "I had a bad week." If they say that, and I'll usually say, "Could you elaborate? What can I do to be helpful?" If they can't say anything more than that, it's really hard for me to do anything. But if you can say something like, "I felt really frustrated this week, because the assignment that I was working on seemed like it was out of reach for me. And it made me feel like I had feelings of a hopelessness. I couldn't get it done. And that made me really frustrated. Then I felt like maybe some people weren't prioritizing what I was working on. It made me feel like these things." When you give me that type of information, just as a manager, it's just information for me to help you. Because, then I'm like, "Oh, okay. So did you think that it was outside of your actual abilities or did you just not have enough support in getting that done?" And whichever just way that goes, it doesn't actually matter, it just means that I have the information to help you.
Cassidy William...: That also shows that you're a good manager, the fact that you care about that kind of stuff. Because, lots of people don't.
Lilly Chen: [inaudible 00:23:20] wheel out.
Cassidy William...: Yeah.
Zach Plata: There's a lot of managers these days that are just kind of using that one on one time to really just be like, "Okay, how close are we to this feature?" Or just work related things, but never really take the time to get into the, "How are you doing?" Kind of side of things.
Lilly Chen: Bring the feelings wheel with you.
Zach Plata: Definitely need a feelings wheel.
Cassidy William...: It does sound cheesy, but I think that's a really great thing. One of the best managers I ever had, she always said that she felt like Mr. Rogers sometimes where she was trying to prod for feelings, but she would bring in question cards that she got, where it was just like, "What's something that made you really proud this week?" And there were totally just prompt questions, but it was really great having those, because it kind of established more of a human relationship rather than just a, you are my boss and I need to deliver code to you type of relationship. I think that's really important just for psychological safety and being able to communicate better when things do get tough at work.
Zach Plata: All right. Moving on to our next random segment. It's dev opposites. So we'll talk a bit about the opposite side of your dev life or founder life, I suppose.
Lilly Chen: What life?
Zach Plata: Well, outside of all the day to day things of being a founder, what do you do outside of that for fun?
Lilly Chen: I joke about it, but I actually do have a lot of things that I do outside of my job. I don't seem to have a normal weekend. So I find that it's really important throughout my day to find things that make me feel like a human, just like how I encourage anyone on my team to take a break when they need it. I recognize that I also need to do the same, if I want to show up the way that I want to show up. So I think today one of my engineers and I, are actually going to a beginner swing dancing class. We're going to go learn the hustle. But I normally take dance classes three times a week. So I do that pretty consistently. And then this past winter, I learned how to snowboard for the first time.
Cassidy William...: That's so cool. No injuries, right?
Lilly Chen: Wow. You had to go there? I broke three ribs.
Cassidy William...: What other hobbies do you have outside of just what you do on outside of the day to day? Do you have any?
Lilly Chen: I'm actually a really big fan of Dota. It's a video game. I don't know if anyone here has heard of it. It's sort of a niche game these days. Dota 2, is the name.
Zach Plata: All right. Next question. So are you a karaoke fan and what's your go-to song?
Lilly Chen: Oh my goodness, I do love karaoke. But fun fact, my cousin and I, he does a really great Fetty Wap impression.
Zach Plata: Oh.
Lilly Chen: So I'm a big fan of any of those songs where I get to show him off in his Fetty Wap impression and I just do the backup vocals.
Cassidy William...: That's the perfect support. So if you weren't in this industry, what would you be doing? Would you be an econ professor or do you think you'd be doing something else?
Lilly Chen: If you ask me before I got into tech, a hundred percent, I would've loved to be a professor. I still think a part of me just really enjoys teaching. I enjoy teaching more than the research piece. So these days I'm not quite sure, because what I hear about, well now that I'm a little older, I learned that professor's actually, they got a lot going on and a lot of it's not teaching and I'm like, "Oh maybe I don't want that." There is a part of me that would actually love to play at the international for Dota.
Cassidy William...: Go pro.
Lilly Chen: So for context, when I was 15, I did briefly play professionally. So when I was 15, I was playing in this amateur league and I had ranked number seven on the ladder for North America.
Cassidy William...: Dang.
Zach Plata: Whoa.
Lilly Chen: And a group of friends and I, had actually gotten together and we took down a pro team and this qualifier to be in a LAN tournament. So there was a brief period of time when I thought maybe then when I was 15 overall kind of grateful that I didn't do it, ended up actually becoming a monk instead of being a professional gamer.
Cassidy William...: I would love to [inaudible 00:27:55], professional gamer to monk, to start-up founder. That's quite the pipeline. With a few little things in between.
Lilly Chen: Yes. We could go so many places here.
Cassidy William...: I feel like that's an extreme opposite from professional gamer to monk. Was it something where you were just burnt out from gaming and you were just like, "I'm done, lets shut out everything." It's hard to process that.
Lilly Chen: That's fair. So the piece of context that would be helpful, is during that time I actually became deathly ill. Not kind of deathly ill, pretty deathly ill. I was in and out of the hospital a lot. They realized later on I actually had an autoimmune disorder, but at the time the symptoms were just like, I had a hundred plus degree fever for months.
Cassidy William...: Oh my gosh.
Lilly Chen: And I had no appetite. You know when the worst feeling of the flu, just that for months. And that's what it looked like. And I went to the hospital, they ran tests and they were like, "You seem like you should be a healthy 15, 16 year old." And then my mom basically was just, doctors aren't helping, so we're going to turn to Buddha and we are going to China and we are going to go be monks and that will fix it. The worst part is it kind of did.
You hate it when your mom's right. But that really hit the ego. It's not the religion piece that I think helped when I think back on it, but just like a lifestyle change. So I dropped out of high school. I was living in a monastery in the mountains, the weather's beautiful. We were growing all of our own food. I was on a pretty strict schedule. So we were waking up around 3 or 4:00 AM. We were meditating several hours a day. We prepared all of our own food. So everyone took turns being accountable to the community. So you had to help farm the stuff, you had to help prepare, clean up, just basically support the monastery. So that, kind of lifestyle, you live that for a little while and you kind of clear some of the [inaudible 00:30:27]
Cassidy William...: I was going to say that's sounds incredibly healthy, honestly.
Lilly Chen: It's good.
Cassidy William...: Good for the soul.
Lilly Chen: Good for the soul. Good for inflammation. And it kind of worked. The autoimmune disorder actually went into remission. And then when I got back to the states, I was actually able to get it diagnosed. Because, I finally got off all the meds. It was one of those things where when you take medicine for something, you know how those meds cause side effects and then you can fall down a rabbit hole really fast. And when I got clear of the meds, they were actually able to see the symptoms for what they were and able to give me a diagnosis.
Cassidy William...: Gotcha. Wow.
Zach Plata: Wow.
Cassidy William...: What a life you've had.
Zach Plata: How long was this? This period that you were a monk?
Lilly Chen: Two years. So I went to college when I was 19. I was two years older than everybody else. So about year or two.
Cassidy William...: Wow.
Zach Plata: Amazing.
Cassidy William...: Well, I guess it's time for the next segment.
Zach Plata: Truly.
Cassidy William...: Random segment generator. What is it going to be? And it's 404s and heartbreak. What's something that was on the internet that is no longer on the internet that leads to a page not found?
Lilly Chen: I don't know if you guys remember this, it feels like a fever dream. It was an advertisement for a cereal company and it was a whole game. I think it was called Millsberry.
Cassidy William...: Yes. You just unlocked something in my brain.
Lilly Chen: Right?
Cassidy William...: Was that a General Mills thing?
Lilly Chen: I think it was General Mills. It was an advertisement for a cereal company. And you could cash in these points for [inaudible 00:32:16]. It was like a Sims online situation.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, it was like a role playing game, but for cereal.
Lilly Chen: It was, yeah.
Cassidy William...: I totally remember what you're talking about.
Lilly Chen: If I had to rank those types of games, it goes the Millsberry games, Webkinz, then the classic Neopets and then everything that was on Disney.
Cassidy William...: Did you ever do Neopets, Gaia Online?
Lilly Chen: All of those. And then when you're on and all of a sudden your parents try to make a phone call and it goes [inaudible 00:32:49]. And they're like, "You have to get off the internet. I'm trying to make a phone call."
Cassidy William...: Oh gosh. Okay. Now, we're moving into the advice section. We have had such a fun conversation today and I think the biggest takeaway here is to find your yurt. What is the direction you want to go in? What is the indoor yurt that is like, I want to get to that point, because sometimes when you have that kind of goal in mind, you can kind of figure out, "Okay, what do I like to do? What do I not like to do? And where do I want to go to get to my indoor yurt." To get to that thing where it's drives you a little bit. And I think the goal posts can move, totally a thing, but having some element of goals and just people to look to, are really, really helpful as you figure out the direction you want to go in life.
Zach Plata: I definitely want to look up yurts now.
Cassidy William...: It's time to buy a yurt. But anyway, Zach, Lilly, thank you so much for being here today. It's been so fun. Lilly, where can people find you on the internet?
Lilly Chen: On the internet. Okay. So my Twitter handle is a throwback to when I wanted to be an economics PhD. So it's @LillyDoingEcon and I've been told that people thought that said Lilly Doge Coin. It's @LillyDoingEcon. Thank you.
Cassidy William...: That's quite the difference. And do you have any plugs you'd like to share with us?
Lilly Chen: Oh yes. My team is hiring for an NLP engineer. So if you're NLP at any point, please come find me.
Cassidy William...: Great. And once again, because making podcasts is expensive. This show is brought to you by LaunchDarkly. LaunchedDarkly 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 dev at Rive. And 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.