8 Bits with B Dougie!
Follow B Dougie on Twitter: @bdougieYO
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Brandon Minnick 0:11
Wow,
Chloe Condon 0:13
that was a shorter version.
Brandon Minnick 0:16
Every week. I wish it was longer
Chloe Condon 0:18
extended. We have an extended version. Oh man. Wow, we will. We'll have it next week. Hi. Welcome back. I was like here just relaxing just like waiting for the the beat to go down here. Happy Wednesday, Brandon, how you doing?
Brandon Minnick 0:35
Oh, Happy Wednesday. It I'm doing great. It's been a really, really nice week, the doing a lot of coding. And officially a owner slash maintainer of the Xamarin Community Toolkit, which, if we have any Xamarin developers out there, it's a awesome open source library, also available on new get that has all those little niceties that you've probably been copy pasting from Xamarin app to Xamarin app in it so that you don't have to do that anymore. So anything from like, easily adding in a pop up to maybe you want to use an async command, or maybe you want to do little things like that, like adding behaviors. It's all in there. So it's it's been a lot of fun. But it's, as usual with me take it on probably more work than I had time for. But at the same time, we're at a pandemic, so I'm not going anywhere.
Chloe Condon 1:32
Take him on more work than you have time for this year in Developer Relations or something.
Brandon Minnick 1:41
Yeah, no, I really enjoyed we've been digging deep. Like, I'm kind of known as the the low level, guys. So like, I like looking at performance things. Like we've had weird things happening. We're like unit tests were failing, but not every time. So it's weird race conditions where like, certain things are happening on .NET Framework, .NET Core,Wwindows versus Mac. And so getting all these these things shored up before the next release, and kind of fixing up our CI pipeline so that we run all of our unit tests, and all of them pass. And then we know new code introduces bugs instead of Oh, yeah, that's the test that fails, you can ignore that test. So yeah, kind of get like a good foundation. But stay tuned, because we are going to be doing live community stand ups where maintainers there's, I think, five of us, maybe six, we already meet, but we'd like to do those in public, because it is an open source repo, we'd like to share our vision and our roadmap. That way, fellow developers can submit pull requests that kind of aligned to the theme we'll be focusing on and, oh, it's gonna be a lot of fun. But
Chloe Condon 2:57
yeah, I love that. So you've basically not only open source project, but you're open sourcing, like, the maintaining process, and like, letting it be in open discussion with the community as it should be. That should be a GitHub feature. So
Brandon Minnick 3:11
yeah. Oh, that'd be amazing. Oh, we should. Yeah, cuz, cuz i i'm really big on if it's open source, the discussion should happen in an open source manner as well. There's been a couple times where somebody will ping me on the side about an issue or a pull request, and it's like, nope, let's talk about this in the pull request. Let's talk about this in the issue, because otherwise, somebody else is gonna have the same question. Or they might have a similar concern. So let's keep it all in the open. But yeah, so I've been working way too much on that. But enjoying every minute. I love I love getting into this nitty gritty, low level code stuff, fixing obscure bugs. I'm weird like that.
Chloe Condon 3:59
We I kind of love this. No, I was just gonna say I love this. I can't wait to bring in our guests a little bit later. Because we're gonna have some really interesting chats about Developer Relations. Stay on, I just cannot wait. But I love that you I have. There's just so much of a change of landscape happening with everything happening online. I love that you can bring in the community now to like help with those decisions? Because I'm sure as an open source maintainer, there's probably questions you get all the time with official App of the show get trends, where it's like, Hey, why don't you have this feature? Why don't you add this, like, there's kind of a unique opportunity with everything online now to bring everybody into the discussion. So I love this.
Brandon Minnick 4:41
And as a maintainer, it also help kind of, I don't want to say we are turning away pull requests, because we're really not. But if, if we're focusing on something for the next sprint, then it can kind of help align the pull requests that the community might submit. So if we say, hey, this next one's focused on performance improvements, then you can kind of submit your performance improvements, prs, those will get prioritized. So you know, we'll approve those sooner than if you were to submit a new button control or something like that. So, yeah, I think it's good for everybody. And yeah, I love the idea of like, GitHub having some sort of platform like that just built in, because
Chloe Condon 5:23
you could like, go live on GitHub and be like, we're gonna have a discussion, like, you could subscribe to the project, and it'd be like, we're gonna have an open discussion about this. Oop, Brandenburg felt this.
I love that. That's so cool. Um, where can people check out info on that? If they want to join the party? Join the community.
Brandon Minnick 5:50
Yeah, so it is all open source. It is all on GitHub. It I would just google Xamarin community toolkit. And mean, you can find it under the Xamarin. org on GitHub. So it's probably github.com slash Xamarin slash community toolkit if I had to guess but toolkit Xamarin being it on Google, Google Google Shopping. I said that backwards thing it
Chloe Condon 6:18
asked Jeeves that on being Um, well, speaking of nostalgic, ask jeeves type things. You may notice Brandon that I'm wearing a Clippy shirt today. This is an eight bit looking to Clippy shirt, by the wonderful mark, who I know from Twitter and all the proceeds went to Girls Who Code so I of course, got in multiple colors. And I'm just I'm wrapping the Clippy shirt today because last week we were talking about kiuru, the right dolphin from the Clippy cinematic universe of office assistance. And I had a lot of folks tweeting me about kiuru after that episode, Brandon, and there is a very exciting thing. I am not a part of this, but I feel that I am like spiritually a part of this. There's this new thing called VS code pets. Have you heard of
this? Yes.
Okay, so y'all check it out. You can go on Twitter, do a little search. I've been tweet retweeted a bunch. But Mark and the gang have been making VS code paths, which is these animated little, almost like Tamagotchi, like pals that you can have in your VS code editor. And Clippy has joined the gang Clippy on a skateboard Clippy with the hat he kind of stole our logo idea with a bit but I'm so I feel Brandon that we had a very the timing here is fascinating. You know, we talk about purse or office assistants on the show. These VS code pads are the dolphin Yes. Alex trust says Oh, I love the dolphin Kira the dolphin. We are huge fans here. We forgot to make the merge for this episode. But okay, other than offices and things, what have I been doing this week? Last week, as in last Friday, I've been to I think I may have mentioned this on the show before I'm really cool five minute segment every Friday on the new learn TV show hello world, which is a daily show that's happening live on learn TV, at Microsoft learn TV thing, slow promotion. And it's been really great because I get five minutes to literally shout from the rooftops to everyone how awesome all the student things going on at Microsoft are. So we've talked a little bit on the show about Microsoft student ambassadors, I've talked a little bit about magic cup. And oh, my goodness, oh, my gosh, last week, we will share a link in the show notes that I will share with you, Brandon. But Aditya who is one of our Microsoft student ambassadors who participated in the Imagine Cup in India was one of the regional finalists, I believe, made this app called code share, oh, I'm gonna find the link to it here. But it's really incredible. A lot of folks don't have access to computers, where he's from, and a lot of classrooms only have one to two devices. So they built a app for the Imagine Cup where you can hand write code. So you can write out your function, take a picture of it, it will upload the code and run the code for you. It's really really incredible, really cool app. I just get so inspired this time of year because for folks that don't know, it's an agile cup season, which I work over in the academic area of Microsoft. And it's a really exciting time because folks from all over the world students get to compete in the amount of cup which is this competition we have yearly, where students can submit projects that are changing the world in education and the environment in so many different ways. And there's finalists, we're doing it all virtually this year, of course, but it's been really, really inspired I feel like Whitney Houston every time I work with either mshs or the Imagine Cup students because it's like, I meant I'm mentoring this year, I'm helping judge. I've been talking to a lot of these students. And I'm just like, I believe the children are future because these people, these students are going to be my boss's update there. So the smartest, coolest, they really give me hope for technology and a better tomorrow. So my heart has been very full all week, Brandon.
Brandon Minnick 10:30
That's amazing.
Chloe Condon 10:31
And I get to feel I feel like I get to kind of vicariously live through these days, because I was not an imagined cup participant, I was not a Microsoft student ambassador. So I'm just kind of what is it 21 Jump Street, never been kissed my way into the situation. I'm going undercover as a student and I get to kind of experience it. And so for any students out there, who are looking for really cool stuff to get involved in, highly recommend participating in Imagine Cup, checking out the Imagine Cup, they're going to be doing a lot of live streams in the finals and stuff. So exciting things happening in the student world. So I'm very happy but exhausted person because time zones are very interesting. Dealing with students all over the world. Lots of naps.
Brandon Minnick 11:20
Well, what do you say we've got all these amazing folks here tuned in watching this live. We've already got questions coming in from folks asking about the neon pizza slice. I think it's time we bring in our guests.
Chloe Condon 11:34
Oh, yes. Okay, so I'm so excited for our guest today. I think we're gonna have some really cool, great discussions about Developer Relations. The first time that I saw met this person, this is the before times, I believe I was at GitHub at an event and this person, they're gonna have to correct me when they come on here. But I believe the title that they had was Beyonce advocate, and I was like, I need to know who this person is, what they stand for, what kind of line of work they're in. So everyone, welcome to the show, sir. beads IV, Welcome to
B Dougie 12:18
Introduction.
Chloe Condon 12:19
Did I butcher that title?
B Dougie 12:22
The Beyonce of GitHub?
Chloe Condon 12:24
Was it Beyonce?
B Dougie 12:27
Yeah.
Chloe Condon 12:27
Okay. I
B Dougie 12:28
am very specifically to Beyonce advocate. I've claimed that title. And I'm owning that in that role here at GitHub. And that is a whole nother story behind that we're happy to I'm happy to go into it. But yeah, happy to also be here. But the question about the the pizza first?
Chloe Condon 12:42
Oh, yes. Go for it. So for folks who are listening to the podcast, there is the epic neon at Pizza sitting just ever so subtly behind be dug a shoulder here. Explain.
B Dougie 12:57
Excellent. Yeah, yeah. So I just recently passed three years here at GitHub, back about two weeks ago. And for my anniversary gift by my manager, my manager, Martin Woodward decided to send me a surprise gift for crossing that threshold. And he sent me this neon pizza sign. Had no idea was coming. But yeah, I think it actually came through Amazon. Because I did look, I was actually looking at this pizza side, from my own purchasing. So he sort of read my mind. But I run a project called Open Source dot pizza. And I tend to, I guess you'd call me a pizza head. I host a lot of pizza parties online. And that's just what I do.
Chloe Condon 13:40
I love it. I love that pizza. Like, people have things that are synonymous with their brand for me, Clippy for Brandon, what would you say? Or is it Paul hat? And the bow for me? Yeah. Xamarin. And then we've got pizza Lister. surbey, doggy.
B Dougie 14:01
Yeah, pizza is where it's at.
Chloe Condon 14:04
And what happens in these meetups in these pizza meetups? Is it this? Is it a discussion with a pizza? Or is it a discussion on something else? What what are these secret pizza conversation?
B Dougie 14:13
I have to kind of intro the project properly. And I do I see some some pizza heads in the chat too, as well. Anthony, kind of my actual description on GitHub is mild mannered beyond the advocate making open source accessible. So I should probably start using that and sharing that publicly. But a open source is a project that was sort of a passion project and build a couple years ago to only really just focus on having a sort of platform to manage my contributions to open source projects. Because I've always had the issue of like, I find the project and then I'll forget forget it. I also got to small kids. So Mike, my time is very limited. So I need to kind of get the best bang for my code, which I'm not sure if that's the right analogy, but if that falls in with the added hopefully you You're tracking into what I'm saying. But essentially, I only have a little bit of time to write code, I need to go to a list of some sort to be able to find all the projects, I was interested in all the issues I was interested in. And that's what open sourced is, it's a project built on top of the graph qL API for GitHub. And actually, I started building this before I joined GitHub funding story, I gave a talk at GitHub universe back in 2017. And that talk is what intrigued me and he started the interview at GitHub. So it's a project. It's a nice, cool dashboard that kind of works for me, and kind of works for a couple other 100 people. But it's definitely still work in progress. So please keep your expectations low and bring the pizza to you as well.
Chloe Condon 15:41
I'm sharing my screen right now, Brandon, if you want to show it, I just want to share my favorite parts of First of all, beautiful website here is this quote from gucci mane. If you don't got sawston, you lost. Love this. I am so excited to share this. And Brandon, this is a space that you're very passionate about, as well.
Brandon Minnick 16:03
I love pizza.
Chloe Condon 16:08
Pizza as well, we have had
Brandon Minnick 16:14
my wife gets upset with me. I mean, literally, we had pizza for dinner last night. But she knows if I'm in charge of dinner, we're doing pizza. If she's ever just yeah, go get whatever you want. I'm coming back with pizza. But yeah, also GitHub. I have an app called Git trends, gi T, tr, e n ds, you can check it out at Git trends calm. But also built on top of the GitHub graph qL API that helps you track your views, clones stars, based on the activity on your open source repos. Because all that data lives on GitHub, but it's kind of buried within the buried within the repo, you have to get it clicked out into it to figure out how many people viewed your GitHub repo. And I was finding that I would get a couple of dozen views a week on code that I hadn't touched and had no idea. So yeah, git trends will not only give you all the stats, so you can track your progress on stars and clones and all that fun stuff. But it also sends you a push notification if one of your repos is trending. So maybe your app is featured on a show or in a blog post. And now all of a sudden, you have this huge spike in people coming to clone your repo, it will get a little push notification saying this repo is trending. And you can obviously jump into it and make sure that that code is up to date.
Chloe Condon 17:37
Make sure you didn't leak your Twilio off code or something.
Brandon Minnick 17:41
Secrets.
B Dougie 17:43
Yeah, I like that app. And the thing is, I've actually heard of it. And I think I probably played around with it, but then completely forgot that you were connected to it. But yeah, it's very true. The insights tab on your repositories, you can find that information. But sometimes the informations not as accessible or known for folks. So definitely, if you have a repo, check out the insights tab. But also definitely check out kid trends because I love the idea of if you sort of hit the front page of Hacker News or something happened. I've actually it's I've had a couple days like that, where a random project this gets a couple stars and a bunch of questions. And I'm like, talking about I'm promoting myself.
Brandon Minnick 18:25
Yeah, Cassie, Apple also show you where the traffic's coming from, which is really helpful too. So you can see what referred that traffic to your income from YouTube or a blog post. You can kind of walk backwards, or is that the right word? Dig, dig into it. Figure out where this all started to.
Chloe Condon 18:44
I love it. Um, yeah, I need to like get on it. I'm the only person on the show doesn't have their own GitHub app, y'all. I'm gonna well. I'm an advocate for VS code. I'll do GitHub, Clippy pets. I'll just pivot over to that area.
B Dougie 19:00
Yeah, well, I mean, if you want to underhand pitch, I've been doing a lot of live streaming on Twitch. And I've been building this thing called the baby bot. And baby, it's been my sort of integration for my twitch chat into Well, it's actually hosted on GitHub Pages. So it's a really cool tool to sort of get your feet wet and doing twitch interactions. But I have the sort of the successor to that, which I call get Twitch. And we've been doing live streams on a regular basis. Actually, starting again, tomorrow is part three, where we're going to be integrating GitHub into Twitch. So that way every time people interact with your repo while you're live on the air, you get notification on that and hosted on GitHub Pages, by all means.
Chloe Condon 19:42
Wait, tell me more about this bay bot though go back. Fast.
B Dougie 19:48
Yes, it is a it's a thing I actually announced at satellite last year as a joke, and then I ended up this building it but I've always done I've been doing live streaming for about a year. I'm off and on for about about three years, but really focused in the last during this last year of 2020. And now we're currently 20 2001 dash two final txt. So with that being said, I learned a lot about streaming. But what I also learned is very hard to know how to write code to build integrations and API's with like YouTube and Twitch. It's all known information. But the docs are kind of dense. And because I relied
Chloe Condon 20:26
very heavily on folks like you folks like chef brands out there who's been really like, openly sharing how they've been doing this stuff, because I agree, like, it's not the easiest. When I touched OBS two years ago, I was like, No, I'm good. Like, I'll come back after some other people have figured it out.
B Dougie 20:46
Yeah, so the bay bot is basically it's, it is an index HTML file with some script tags. So like, I have no frameworks, like intentionally because I want anybody to be able to approach this with maybe without needing to know, you know, the history of all over react and JSX, JSX and virtual DOM, like, I just want you to be able to look at the index HTML, look at the job though, the couple JavaScript files that I have, and then kind of know what what's happening and then run with it. And that's what that's really what the baby is there. So support the beehive. All the pizza heads out there that would like to make interactions on their Twitch streams.
Chloe Condon 21:20
And what is your is your twitch handle be juggy? Oh,
B Dougie 21:24
yes.
Chloe Condon 21:27
I subscribed yesterday, but for anybody out there listening. Bits bump.
Brandon Minnick 21:36
Is, is there an actual pizza head? Because if so, I'm in like a big pizza shaped mask.
B Dougie 21:45
So we don't have the mask. But you know what I should probably get that made. So my older brother, he's a he's an artist. And he actually created a couple pizza heads for my my stream. So if you do come on stream, you can definitely have access to the pizza ads and chat, as well as our discord as well in the open sauce. Discord.
Chloe Condon 22:05
I'm a pretty big 90s Nickelodeon fan, if you couldn't tell from my bright orange chair. And I keep thinking of there was ear boy on all that. And his best friend was?
B Dougie 22:16
Yeah, right there with you. I'm pretty sure we're in the same generation. Yeah. At least a couple years apart. But yeah, I was a big Actually, I couldn't say I was really a big pizza head or pizza face fan. I was kind of weirded out by it. But I was a huge all that fan.
Chloe Condon 22:33
Oh, yeah. I mean, how else would a bunch of people our age have an obscure knowledge of ross perot?
B Dougie 22:43
So many memories. Yeah. Funny story, though. One of the producers from all that. My wife actually watched their kids later. So like, it was kind of surreal, cuz I asked him a lot of questions whenever I'd be over there. And we'd be like, Oh, yeah, so like Amanda Bynes, like, what's How's she doing? Cuz I'm really concerned.
Chloe Condon 23:02
I can tell you a lot about that. That's been my that's been my pandemic is going down rabbit holes of 90s. Nostalgia, pop culture, latest news. So well, I'll have you on my other show for that, Ryan, but I have a lot of
B Dougie 23:17
deep dive. Yeah. Actually, the introduction to get on this show. I think you had responded to my Cinderella Beyonce copy, I'd say brandy. About how relevant that that movie was for me. And also you also mentioned Whitney Houston. But yeah, all good stuff.
Chloe Condon 23:35
Yeah. I actually think the nice thing Kenan Thompson is a national treasure. I agree, Alex trust. I legitimately spent over an hour last week watching every single so y'all if you're not familiar, Kenan Thompson, international viewers here has had the same job his whole life like he was a child, like an SNL type show actor on all that and now he does that as an adult. And when I tell you I watched over an hour worth of footage of the what's up with that show from SNL, which is literally just a beautiful, it's what I aspire to do. Like truly was watching this as a masterclass of like, how do you get your dream job of being like, I want everybody to just celebrate me in a room and be very excited and dance around repeatedly, multiple times over the course of my life. Like, I think Kenan Thompson is one of the greatest entertainers of our time. I just re watched good burger. It still holds up. I love it.
Brandon Minnick 24:39
I love it was that Jason Sudeikis and the tracksuit just doing the running man. Oh, yeah, like everybody's playing music. He's just just doing the running man.
Chloe Condon 24:48
I actually think that a lot of my early interest in like technology and like wanting to play with like robots and cell phones and things of that nature came from those shows can From like the all that the kingdom and Kells like they always had some weird radio device or like I know we've talked on the show before Brandon about me watching Xenon and being like, Oh my gosh, video chat is the future and someday I'm going to be able to video chat with all my friends and now I'm just video chatting full time for my job. But did you have any kind of like, it sounds like we came up in that very similar era. Brian, what kind of was your tech influence to get into this world?
B Dougie 25:29
Yeah, I mean, I was definitely a nicolaitans kid for sure. I mean, I was like a big Doug funny fan. Because you know, I am I am dug in dug in as well. Right. So yeah, I related with with Doug funny, as well as Rocco's modern life. But as far as getting into tech, I always had, like, we had this computer in our compact, our apartment complex. And that was like sort of our gateway into the internet and computers. And some, like, magically some older kid, probably a high school at this point, showed us how to play Wolf and Stein on it. Oh, like we thought we were hackers because we could see right and Wolf and Stein. And yeah, I we spent way too much time playing Wolfenstein in the apartment complex clubhouse.
Chloe Condon 26:14
Wow. Brandon, have you played wolfen Stein?
Brandon Minnick 26:19
Ooh. So I missed the first one. But they literally later came out with the game called return to Castle Wolfenstein. And that's when I was introduced to the franchise and found out that it was like the Oji. Got it. I guess you'd call it the first person shooter. Right. Like, was it? Yeah, one of the one of the first Yeah.
B Dougie 26:36
I think it actually predated Doom for sure. But someone's gonna definitely.
Unknown Speaker 26:43
Well, guys.
Chloe Condon 26:47
That is so cool. And then from there that just kind of like that was the entry point then like, like, Oh, yeah, let's do games. Yeah, always.
B Dougie 26:55
I always had like the interest in computers I'd be ought to be quite frank by my I have a twin brother since birth. We are one month younger than the Olsen twins. Wow. That's like the those were always the twins. When we explained that were twins were identical. The Olsen twins are fraternal. Anyway, that's, I did a whole tweet thread about this. So definitely go back on my Twitter storm. But my twin brother is actually way more technical and handy. And it's funny because I work at a technical company and I do development and he he does other stuff like marketing. But what I'm getting at is we've always had a computer kind of close by. So like when he's mentioned, like Neopets. I didn't get quite into Neopets. But I got straight into geo city. So like we were making random websites with stuff spinning around. Yeah, stuff like that.
Chloe Condon 27:45
Angel fire,
B Dougie 27:47
all of that. Yeah, we're doing all that stuff. And yeah, from there, I think once I took a web design or web class in, in high school, and we had to build a website, which Yeah, on Dreamweaver, I'm just going to name a bunch of tools. Now high five, me if you if you if you don't, I'm talking about those in the back, tell me what's up. But what I'm getting at is we we had to build a Dreamweaver site. And because I already knew what I was doing, I built it in like two weeks. And it was like a workout site because I was into like working out. But I couldn't gain weight, I was actually really severely under underweight growing up. But what I'm getting at is I built this website on like all these workout tips, and I took my face and then photoshopped it on to a like, ripped person back before that was cool. And I made it pretty believable. So you had like my my head on like a muscular body. And then I had a bunch of workout tips. So like that was exactly what I did for the entire semester for that class. And then I had this floppy drive that I put the Super Nintendo emulator on it. And I brought that to class, and all the computers were networked. So then folks figured out that I was just playing Super Nintendo games the entire time. To the point where folks, everybody else, all the other students were all like asking me how I did that. And then they would all go into my network drive that had my name on it with my my website. That was awful. I really wish I still had a version of that somewhere so I can share everybody how great I was. I actually called it big Bob, big Papa B's get or something about something really silly like that. And it was basically this workout tips. But it got to the point by the end of the semester, we had the teacher playing with us Super Nintendo, cuz he eventually figured it out to everybody was just like not working. And so it's like, hey, how do I how can I play some games and like we would display network, like multiplayer Super Nintendo Super Nintendo games for the entire semester. So that's why I'm so good at what I do.
Chloe Condon 29:48
Is I love this origin story, like just taking over the school with the power of gaming, even getting the teacher to buy it and this is just the this should be a movie by.
Brandon Minnick 30:03
What's interesting is
B Dougie 30:04
starring Kenan Thompson though.
Chloe Condon 30:06
Yes, yes, yes.
Brandon Minnick 30:11
Yeah, what I found real interesting is a lot of folks, myself included their first introductions to computers, or, say, computer systems are through gaming. So whether that's computer games, video games on the console, and then if you're, like us, you're kind of your next question is, how does that work? Can I do it? And that's kind of how you get into it. So I love that the teacher embraced it, instead of saying, no video games are rotting your brain and they're a waste of time we're in school, we're here to learn. Instead, just feed that creativity. And then you can ask the kids, hey, how do you think that works? Or how do you think he jumped so high? Or what do you how would you do it? And then yeah, you can turn that into that learning experience. I love that I also am so jealous, you got to do this stuff in high school. Yeah, I didn't have anything like this in high school. I didn't write my first line of code till I got to college. And I felt so far behind. Everybody in class was able to do the Hello World, no problem. And I'm like, What static void Main, I don't understand what's going on here.
Chloe Condon 31:24
I was just thinking about in high school, I was in GarageBand, doing remixes of my friends doing sound clips. So they'd be like, I don't want to go to third very good. About while ago. I was way behind.
B Dougie 31:39
what's what's really intriguing about the your statement too, as well, because I felt like it's just so normal to sort of tinker with stuff that never actually took it seriously. So like, I didn't write any code in college. I didn't actually start writing code again, until after I graduated college. And it was sort of a, the iPhone was about to come out the Android phones were were about out at that point. And I was like, oh, Android phones, like I can learn how to write code. And that's where I sort of revisited this like years later. Because for whatever reason, like running scripts, or, you know, getting your, you know, land party or your servers up and running, I felt like it was it was kind of trivial. Like I was familiar with SourceForge, and all that stuff. But I didn't have anybody saying like, even my teacher, like he was cool with me just playing games in class. But he wasn't like, hey, do you want to do something a little more advanced? So unfortunately, like I didn't actually pursue it until years later, thanks to boot camps and iPhones and stuff like that.
Brandon Minnick 32:34
So but would you work out in college? or What did you major in in college?
B Dougie 32:38
What I worked on is trying to graduate. What I majored in was finance. And it really just came down to I did get scholarships, and had 100% of my school paid for. So I took the the safe route, which I thought was the safe route to get a finance degree, because I figured if you could, I'd have a lot of money growing up. So if I could learn how money works, then I could probably make some money. Turns out that didn't work in 2008 when I graduated, because no one was making money and the entire market crash. So I have I had eventually I had to pivot into taking a sales job in it. And that's where I sort of found my way back into coding because in it and then understanding that network equipment, and SSH into different servers, I was the guy this is actually pretty familiar. I kind of understand all this stuff. And then that sort of led to me building a website.
Chloe Condon 33:30
Wow. Yeah, I love that. That's such a I think the you're our first a person with a Did you say it was a finance degree?
B Dougie 33:39
Yes, finance degree,
Chloe Condon 33:40
finance degree to tech. I love that kind of wiggle noodle path. As we've said on the show before where like, we get a lot of students who are like, are myself included, where it's like, I didn't go to school for this specific thing. Can I do this thing? And I love the way that you found yourself here is so cool. We've all we've got so many people in the chat talking about my space and World of Warcraft. We've This is quite an episode of nostalgia for us. Yeah.
B Dougie 34:12
I honestly, MySpace is another like if you go to it's funny, because if you go to my GitHub profile, github.com slash be doggy. You'll see a MySpace page and back in the summer. Yeah, back in the summer, I was like, you know, we're shipping this new feature, because I got a kind of a head start on what this feature was, which was GitHub profile readmes. And it allowed us to basically add custom code to present your projects, present yourself as a developer. And we had the sort of internal challenge for get up employees before we launched it, to use this this feature and show us what you can do with it. So a bunch of employees did like really cool things of games. And we had one engineer who actually recreated Neopets in their profile page, where you could sort of feed it and it was actually backed by a Heroku run server as Well, and then like another employee built chess, we can actually play chess. So anybody can come to their profile and make a move, we need to
Chloe Condon 35:07
make a ski free one.
B Dougie 35:09
That would be amazing.
Brandon Minnick 35:10
Oh, yeah,
B Dougie 35:11
I think you could do that with some, like some of the some of the open source tools, you can really make that happen. But I ended up opting to make a MySpace page. And the way it's, it works. It's it's top eight. And it's powered by GitHub actions. So shout out to my employer who has cool tools and features he is but every time you open up an issue, you could add yourself to my top eight, and then and actually get added to the bottom list. So I have to actually bump you up, I should actually create a button to bump people up manually from the readme, if you want to bump yourself up to the top eight, because that was those are hard times back then trying to figure out who should be on the front page.
Chloe Condon 35:50
Yeah, I mean, it's I think about like the amount of stress in my life for maybe some folks who weren't around for the days in my space, deciding who was in your top. Well, it's I think it started as top eight and then it got very popular to have a top before limiting your friend group to that, like, hey, why did you take me off your topic? Are we okay? Or is everything cool?
Brandon Minnick 36:11
already enough drama in middle school and high school? top, top eight. Just Wow, we don't need that.
B Dougie 36:24
I apologize for bringing that back to GitHub.
Chloe Condon 36:29
That's so great. I love this new trend it maybe it's just been on my radar a little bit more because this is 100% my aesthetic. But I love this new trend of seeing a lot of nostalgia from the 90s. Like come into popular tech, like pop culture. I started to see this a couple years ago and have been doing a lot of like, Beanie Baby taxidermy. And like I'm about to take apart my Teddy Ruxpin live on stream and I just like cannot wait to do this because I've been curious what's going on inside there since I was very, very little. But I recently started reading some different books on how to hack tamagotchis. And so there's this whole era of folks that are in our age demographic, who are now going back and like taking apart these different projects and things and even last week, Brandon we had other Brian Brian Ben's show us their incredible vintage website that was quite a visual feast for the eyes of geo cities. Brilliant. I've been very obsessed with those dolls Blinky dolls with a Z. That's been my whole thing lately is bringing back the the age in the era of AOL Instant Messenger. But I that made me fall in love with tech.
B Dougie 37:44
I completely forgot about that. I definitely Stockholm did quite a few of those discrim target, because you can always just create a new email in a new account to get another 30 days of free AOL. Yeah. I'll tell my parents though.
Chloe Condon 37:58
I was getting mine from blockbuster. blockbuster had an endless supply of AOL online CD ROMs that are in a landfill right now. I'm sure.
Brandon Minnick 38:08
You've heard that. And I don't know if this is true or not, but it feels like it that the CEO at the time, His goal was to make enough of those CDs for one for every person on the planet. Which is probably why we're just in undulated with AOL CDs back in the 90s. did use them as silverware as frisbees. Yeah, spindles just sitting around everywhere.
Chloe Condon 38:32
I have a question in the chat that says okay, but what was your favorite AOL Instant Messenger away message? I so I love emo song lyrics like I had so many boys I was crushing on who would just be like all the like an afro Levine quote or something i just i i can visually see the little like Star you know wavy thing I'm it's all coming back to me now. Celine Dion.
Brandon Minnick 39:01
I don't even remember. Cuz I know I use him. But I do remember. And like, a lot of people would like literally put their status like I remember friends in college who put like their class schedule on there. And Arbor telling people like, Hey, I probably shouldn't share that kind of info. Like I'm gonna I'm not gonna be home at these times. So, you know, if the doors are unlocked, just come in. Like don't
B Dougie 39:27
do. Security was a big deal back then.
Chloe Condon 39:31
Great. Yeah, very different, different mindset we had back then I remember hanging out in a lot of Pokemon chat rooms back in the day. Ah, man,
Brandon Minnick 39:43
chat rooms. So the three of us were all in developer advocacy, technically all at Microsoft surbey duggie is at specifically GitHub. But you posted a video that I just watched this morning and I wanted to dive deep into it all about the future of Developer Relations developer advocacy. Do you want to kind of give us what's what was the video about? Give us the intro? Yeah, I'd love to dig deeper into that.
B Dougie 40:14
So the the, the title or the subtitle, subheading was like, everything I knew about Developer Relations was a lie. And it was actually a clickbait video. Because there was someone who responded to a tweet of the video and saying that Developer Relations has different channels, it has different principles. And it's actually has not been around a long time, I would actually preface that Developer Relations has been around for a long time. It's been around since apple and Guy Kawasaki in the 80s, where he would go to all the user groups, and relate with developers at the user groups and traveling. And it's part of like my early interactions with Deborah was going to meetups and engaging jamstack developers at netlify. Cuz that was my first dev job. And so the video is basically, I always, I didn't want to do dev REL like, that was never my goal. I always wanted to be senior engineer, Principal engineer, like I just wanted to write code. And I liked doing talks. And at my previous employer, they convinced me to say that eventually, the start giving more talks, and then eventually just take the job full time, because I'm doing a really good job at it, semis will continue. So eventually, they convinced me to, hey, we're not going to give you a pay cut to take this job. So might as well just do the job and still writes code. So that was one of the myths that I talked about in the video is like Developer Relations, you should be getting paid as an engineer or if not more. And I really, truly believe that because not only you're writing code, you should be able to ship features for whatever apps or ship your own features. Y'all have a Pitts website that I'm sure you all probably put together. For this. He didn't go pull an engineering team and ask them, Hey, we don't know how to do this, like you just figure it out. So like dev rel, you just have to figure a lot of stuff out. And the one thing that the video covers eventually, which, again, clickbait It was really just to get you this look at the conversation. It covers that I think that I personally think dev REL should probably start expanding practices. For so many years, we've had all these YouTube developers that are doing a great job and sharing content, doing tutorials, and screencasts. But they weren't based in San Francisco, they weren't based in New York, they didn't have access to all the big companies like Microsoft. So now there's a whole new change of like, Hey, we need a new skill set, because we can't travel, stand on stage and schmooze and have like really nice cocktails with the rest of the Devereaux folks, which I know it's more than just that. But on the surface, it looks like that. So what can we do to expand and silver engaged communities and I think what's really happening is things like this, like doing the podcast, during the live streams, doing the YouTube videos, the doing the edited tiktoks as well. Like I think those are all unique, unique platforms for you to engage your communities. And that was really the purpose of the video. And also, I wanted to point out to you, as well as like I did, I didn't really want to force everybody into doing Twitch and live streaming and having a nice pizza behind their head and a cool camera. Like the goal is really just do something, try it and try a new thing. Because that entire video I recorded I recorded while live streaming live coding. So what I did, because I was like, I need more time to make videos. I don't have enough time about two small kids. I'm already live streaming two days a week. Let me just go ahead and go fullscreen on the live stream. I always do this because someone asked me a question. They trigger me and then I answered a question in a long five minute monologue. So it was one of those I did a monologue, I edited it and then I uploaded the I uploaded to YouTube Three weeks later. So like it wasn't, it wasn't intentional to like do it right before the show. But it was intentional. It's like eventually I'll upload this and I ended up for that one live stream I got three YouTube videos. So that's one of three around the subject so we'll see how the rest of them do as far as clickbait go, but But what I'm getting at is that it was just me this trying things in this trying new things to see what works because I know what's not going to work is go travel to New York and speak on stage at a conference anytime soon. Like what's gonna work is do that same talk and then upload it to YouTube.
Chloe Condon 44:16
And it can get it can reach so many more folks than would have been in a in a smaller room. I'm sure that's so I love idea. I'm stealing this idea Brian. I'm like killing two birds with one stone here.
B Dougie 44:30
Like two birds with one stone. Yeah. Oh
Chloe Condon 44:32
my gosh, pm. I love it. I've not this is brilliant because it's so true. I think I've leaned more towards streaming because the time and the effort and the energy that goes into editing and producing and doing all of that is a lot of work so I'm gonna have to like use this tactic this multitasking thing.
B Dougie 44:53
Yeah, and like the one thing we were chatting about this off air but like no, we're doing this through stream yard. OBS is a powerful platform. stream yard is a powerful platform, you could actually go fullscreen have a monologue, and it's like, Okay, I'm going to clip that out, it's going to be a YouTube video, and then continue with the rest of the show the coding that whatever you read about the show off. And like, I think one thing that I found is like, most time when you're streaming like you have like the sort of five minute intro, because not a lot of people show up when he first started streaming. So I just started using those first five minutes for my monologue time. So if I know I need a YouTube video for the week, I'm just gonna monologue on something I thought of a tweet or something that sort of triggered me and like, triggered me in a good way. But like, hey, that's actually a good idea. I should actually answer this question. Or I get the question all the time. Like, how do I get my job at GitHub, I created the YouTube video, while live streaming. It wasn't as clean as the one I just shipped. But the other thing to point out is like, if you look at any of my videos six months ago, a year ago, they're pretty awful. And that's it. And I say that. I say that openly because it's learning in public. Like eventually, I learned how to do lighting. Eventually, I learned how to even use a camera. I didn't know anything about cameras before this year. And now I do because YouTube is a wealth of information.
Chloe Condon 46:11
Yeah, I think that, for all, at least for me, I've noticed the landscape changing so much. And that historically, I feel like we would come in and we'd have a very well rehearsed demo that would run perfectly, and we'd walk through each piece of it. And what I've actually really enjoyed about the the Panini, or the pandemic, I guess, I should say, is, I get to learn out in the open with a lot of different folks. And this goes both ways. I started tuning into Brandon and PJ stream on the weekend, where they were working with dotnet stuff which I had, and C sharp, which I had never worked with before. And it there's a very, it's a very different learning experience to watch two folks struggle through the Stack Overflow, the open source projects, the docs to actually figure out how to do something, versus watching a very succinct, edited down video of like, here's the five steps that you need to like get your website up and running on blah, blah, blah. So I've really enjoyed the not only just the realism of being able to learn with and learn from people in public, but also seeing how other people debug seeing how people run into walls. Because I can't I think a big part of me first starting out in this industry is wanting to throw my computer across the room because I thought I was stupid. Like I was like this is hard. And I think seeing that this is hard for very, very senior folks out there and seeing how other people problem solve. It has been a huge learning experience and a big, wonderful welcome. Change that for all. Yeah,
B Dougie 47:45
and the one thing that I do as well as part of the reason why I started streaming in the first place is I found as a developer advocate, I was traveling a lot. I wasn't writing enough code. And I wanted to find a place to like, actually just get code done, help do some demos that I'm probably going to share on stage eventually. So I started streaming as sort of like, this is the stake in the ground. This is why I want to like this is where I'm gonna write code every week. And like, this is an unmovable time. It's a code block, I won't change it. And then I also have accountability because people are showing up and like asking questions. And I spent two weeks ago I spent like, way too much time trying to figure out why Yes, lint in prettier was not working in my VS code. It's something that's like, trivial. It's something that I've had worked forever. But I don't know what broke. The chat kind of helped me fix it. Like we're just like googling together and trying to figure this out. Like, this is like, this is not what I want to write code. I want to write code today. But I'm fixing my editor. And we all learn together. We went through this process, they all got to see me struggle. And and then eventually I closed VS code and they opened up them. And that's how we got
Chloe Condon 48:52
Yeah, shout out to everyone who's ever joined me in a chat when I'm having to relearn regex for the 500th time in my life. It's made my life so much easier to live stream at this year. Yeah,
Brandon Minnick 49:03
well, I love the folks at chime in. Who do know the answer? Yeah. We clearly brought up the the show I do on Sundays with my buddy PJ. He's on Twitch as Benson around. And we were trying to figure out something because we're building his or he's building a website. So we're building it together. Neither of us are web developers. I'm a mobile developer. He's just now getting into learning to code. And we couldn't figure out there's a CSS problem because of course there is. And we literally had somebody in the comments, giving us the recommendation. And then finally, we just kind of asked like, hey, do you want to just join us real quick? Are you comfortable coming on to the stream? And literally, he's like, a couple minutes later, he's on on the stream with us. And he's like, Oh, yeah, there it is. Do this and then everything was working. It was incredible. And we would have spent And hours, if not days trying to figure it out.
Chloe Condon 50:03
It's like group pair programming. It's the absolute best and so scary, like I will say openly as a woman online was terrified start live code. But I found that to be a very brave and defiant act, because it's a very vulnerable I used to do musicals, y'all. I used to sing and tap dance on stage. And I find live coding more difficult, if not triple the amount difficult, because showing that you don't know all the answers that you have, like, have flaws. And I love Brandon, your stream of PG, because you have to completely we have a comment in the chat here that saying how I need to go back here. It was Sara, I believe saying even just knowing what terms to search for, and what links to trust when you're getting started in a new tech area is so tricky. And that's something that I've noticed with streaming with folks who are newer to tech is there's a huge, huge amount of value, showing kind of these things that are inherent knowledge for us that need to be shared out in the open.
B Dougie 51:09
Oh, yeah. And oh, sorry to say that. Apologies, Brandon, there's a comment from Anthony, about coding being a performance art. And I think the one thing that I reason why I did streaming is because I wanted to get better at live coding. Also, I wanted to get better at webinars like I was awful. Like I could speak on stage and talk through some slides. But when it was like silence, no one talking, and just listening to me and go to slides and like I have no idea if I'm doing good. No one's laughing at any of my jokes. And I can't even see chat. And then keynote takes up my entire screen so that this makes it even worse. keynote, what's happening? What are you doing? But what I'm getting out is a like, it is a performance art. Because if you learned how to fill in the blank space with like a story, or fill in the blank space with like, Oh, well, this is not working. But did you guys want to watch this YouTube video with me? And I just do that stuff. Because as I'm doing that I'm unblocking my brain, and then I can go back to the problem. And basically, it's a giant rubber roomful of rubber ducks. That's that's what streaming is.
Chloe Condon 52:10
You just blew my mind because I to get really nervous and dislike webinars, and I just released a new saying that that just doing streams is basically doing a webinar. I've tricked myself into enjoying this.
Yeah, silence is hard. Hey, cow, I agree.
Brandon Minnick 52:33
Oh, yeah. So yeah, right. We only have a couple minutes left. And I know. We chatted about some stuff in the pre show that I want to make sure we touch on everything. So we have a link to be duggie dot live here. Tell us a little about that.
B Dougie 52:50
Yeah. So bw live is that is my website, it's a website actually created a while live streaming as well. I did the whole I learned how to use figma and sketch a couple years ago, and never put it into practice. So I started learning how to use figma, again on air and created some templates. And then I properly got a designer to make it better. And then from there, I wrote some code. So it's a next JS site and hosted on presale. And it's just a way for me to learn some new skills and some new technology but also share what I'm working on on stream. It's also the other thing about it, it's I don't talk about this enough, but it's actually there's no back end for BDD live. It's a GitHub repo, that's the back end. So the way I do new posts is I open up a new issue on the GitHub repo. And then I mark it with a label called publish. And then it shows up on the site. So if I want to keep up to date with like, my portfolio and what I'm working on, I just have this really cool interaction. There's no database, it's a GitHub repo. And then I get to sort of slow down and be like, hey, by the way, that you know, I work at GitHub, flex.
Chloe Condon 53:54
Love it. Oh, my gosh, I love how that's all integrated together.
Brandon Minnick 53:58
And you can watch the videos of you making this website. On the website. Yeah. So if any of us like me, whose minds are just blown that you can make a website out of a GitHub repo and use issues to publish content to it.
Chloe Condon 54:15
You know, you have to now be live, Brandon, you have to do a live stream, live streaming going through Brian live stream, and making your own. It's gonna be a whole Inception thing. And then I'll do it from yours. It'll be a whole
Brandon Minnick 54:32
break the internet might break time in space, as we know it doing a live video about a live video about a live video, but it's worth
B Dougie 54:39
a shot. Yeah, it's where I mean, we're everywhere. We're gonna blow your mind. GitHub uses GitHub to build GitHub. So imagine pushing to GitHub and deploying from to GitHub from GitHub. And then see your GitHub changes live on GitHub after you deploy. Think about that.
Chloe Condon 54:54
All along.
Brandon Minnick 54:57
Yeah. graphy shut
B Dougie 54:57
up all the way down. C sharp
Brandon Minnick 55:00
Visual Studios written in Visual Studio.
Chloe Condon 55:03
Wow. Yeah, you heard it here first Mind blown in the comments. This is we're dropping exclusive content on the show.
B Dougie 55:13
Too many secrets I can actually hear the CIA tapping and
Chloe Condon 55:16
we got to wrap it up and people can follow you on Twitch and Twitter it's all the same handle correct be doggy Yo yo
B Dougie 55:26
yo and funny thing about the Yo is that the don't go to be doggy on Twitter. That's a mailman or father who plays games sometimes and sells insurance. definitely got to be Ducky yo cuz I want you to holla at be doggy yo instead of just be doggy
Chloe Condon 55:43
and I also feel like there needs to be some sort of collab between get trends and open sauce soon. I can like sense. I
B Dougie 55:52
think we're solving similar problems. Yeah.
Brandon Minnick 55:57
Cuz Yeah, we don't have a, there's no website for it. Because Oh, really? I'm just a mobile app developer. I barely know how to make a website. I
B Dougie 56:05
barely know how to make a mobile app. Oh, my gosh, upon
Chloe Condon 56:09
your Xamarin go to my GitHub. Oh, wow. Well, this has been such a great, great episode, y'all. I'm so excited that we've got to talk about so many different things from pizza to developer relations to Oh, my goodness, GitHub, all the things. What other you said that you're streaming something today or no, you mentioned,
B Dougie 56:35
I will be streaming. So we do this thing called Open Source Friday on GitHub, so Twitch, TV slash GitHub, and me and my colleague, Michelle, or miss manners on GitHub, as we go by GitHub handles everywhere. We're going to be pair programming on this GitHub interaction, which talks to GitHub and then shows up in your Twitch. It's hosted, it's actually leveraging WebSockets, and some really cool things like that. And also super simplistic in the sense of it's just JavaScript, and index HTML, we try to really abstract away all the framework stuff, and make it very focused on just learning the pieces of the code. And it's been a great experience. Because Michelle, she's not. She's not an engineer by trade, she can put a website up together and like do a WordPress stuff. But I've been teaching her all the basics of GitHub through the entire process. So if you want to see code spaces, if you want to see us leverage GitHub discussions and open up issues, and how we sort of approach merge conflicts, like that's all stuff we've been covering on these live streams. So again, at the twitch.tv slash GitHub, and yeah, I think that's kind of sums it up.
Chloe Condon 57:37
Amazing. Oh, my goodness, I
Brandon Minnick 57:39
can't I miss that. Brian.
B Dougie 57:41
Yes. So that will be 6pm. Eastern Standard. it, man, that's, it's an APEC friendly time, because Michelle is based in Melbourne. So it will be sorry, 6pm. Pacific, but 9pm. Eastern, and then do the rest of the map on your own.
Brandon Minnick 58:02
We love time zones.
B Dougie 58:05
Also, daylight savings time is now this this juncture of everybody else not following America. And switching the time zones is it's painful for a global team.
Brandon Minnick 58:16
I hear that because yeah, Europe changes their clocks at a different rate. And it's it's all sorts of confusing now. And yeah, I wish we would just everybody to just coordinated UTC, because who cares what your local time is or who cares with the sun in the sky at when the clock says 12pm? Let's just all standardize. But that's a that's a rant for a different time.
B Dougie 58:41
I've got a lot of stuff to rant about. I used to do timezone math for my one of my first developer jobs, and that was painful. Because twice a year, nothing worked.
Chloe Condon 58:50
The biggest thing I learned in 2020 was setting expectations with time zones for myself building my Animal Crossing as your power turnip timer. Because it's one thing to alert everybody at 5am in the morning that turnips are available on your island. But did you know that 5am is can be different days for other people like it's time zones timezone? That'll be next time we have you on? Be laggy we're going to have the whole time zone.
B Dougie 59:18
Happy to always come back.
Chloe Condon 59:22
Alright, y'all. Well, this has been another weekly episode of Brian madness, or second Brian of March. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Brian, and I'm gonna be watching your live stream later. I'm really excited to learn more about all these GitHub things. All right.
B Dougie 59:38
I look forward to having you in the chat.
Chloe Condon 59:41
All right, Brandon,
Chloe Condon 59:42
how do we close out the show we still have our closing out moment here.
Brandon Minnick 59:47
So thanks, everybody, for joining us. We'll see you back here next week. Till then, take care
