Welcome to Community & Code, a podcast about the human beings behind the code and the commits that power the technology that we use every day. I'm here today with Will Klein, who's a developer relations engineer at a company called North. And Will, tell us about yourself. What do you do and what brings you to Community & Code today? Yeah, sure. I've been a developer for about eighteen years now. I've done everything from front end to full stack, worked on a lot of product. And a few years ago during the pandemic hit us, I decided to do a career change. I didn't think that was enough change for me just having to work from home. But I moved into developer relations. It was something that I'd always been curious about. I'll even say that I was something that kept me away from it was, I think, expecting that I would have to go to a lot of conferences and travel a lot, which I didn't want to do with family. But I was always drawn to the idea of connecting with developers. I was really into developer education. I was always doing workshops on the side and things like that. And I took the leap. And I've been doing that for the last few years. And now I'm at North. And when I joined, I asked developers, have you heard of what we do at North? And no one had heard of it. But a lot of developers are working with payments, which is the space we're in. So I saw that as a big challenge. I thought, why not go for it? So now I'm working in developer relations, working on developer experience. That's awesome. Yeah. I, uh, my first experience with developer relations as sort of a role, uh, was through going to events, um, and in particular and, and what drew me specifically to, to dev rel, uh, where I am right now, Pantheon was meeting the dev rel team in person at events. And like, I always felt like compared to like going to, to other sort of vendor booths, uh, at, at WordPress-specific events, that team always seemed to sort of just get me from my journey where I was as a developer at the time, more so than other teams. So when I was applying as an engineer at Pantheon, in the back of my mind, it's like, okay, I'll go in and I'll do WordPress things at Pantheon, and I wanted to get into producty stuff more anyway. But in the back of my mind, it's like, It feels like they know how to do DevRel right, and if given or when given the opportunity, that's kind of where I wanted to go. yeah, the opportunity came up and I'm here and I, like you, I've been doing this stuff for a lot longer than having the title, right? Like I was speaking at events, I was doing, there's a company called Pluralsight that does online developer training and I made a bunch of courses for them, sort of like LinkedIn learning, but don't say that because that's not competitive. I definitely relate to a lot of that stuff. Did you see DevRel in action before you chose that as a thing that you wanted to transition into? Yeah. Yeah. And I'll say my perspective was a bit skewed because most of my interaction with developer relations folks was at conferences or seeing videos they put up online. But a lot of going to conferences. I started going to conferences back in twenty eleven, twenty thirteen. And then I started going every year and I started going a few times a year. I found that conferences were. not only a place to learn, but a place to meet people and ask questions and learn things you wouldn't otherwise just get to find reading the docs or just watching videos. You get to have a back and forth with the engineers and the people that work on the teams, building the developer experience, building APIs, building libraries, writing those things. And so I got to meet a lot of great people in that way. And that was a really positive impression because those folks that would just take the time to really talk with you, sit with you, Some of my favorite stories that pop in my head is talking to an engineer at a company at a conference. Before I know it, I'm behind the table with them, looking at their code with them, talking through how they solve problems, talking through how I solve problems. Those types of very personal interactions where you're talking about the code and you're talking about other stuff too. It's not just even the code, but who we are as people and what we're up to. Those things really pulled me in and it showed me that there's a very social side to software. And I'll also add that another big interaction I had was meetups. And initially, I'm from Hartford, Connecticut. There were a couple of meetups. But there wasn't one for JavaScript, so I started that. Got to learn how to MC and do things like that. And then I moved to Denver, where there wasn't just one JavaScript meetup. There was five. So I got to meet a lot of people through the different communities there. So those types of interactions were always something that really infused me with energy and gave me excitement. I always think of conferences as a place I can recharge and get excited and kind of renew my energy. And that comes from the people I get to meet and the conversations I get to have. Yeah, and I'll say too, like, there's a skill involved, right? Like, not all developers are the best at, you know, writing and communication and speaking and that sort of thing. It can be learned, but there's also, like, I found for myself, like, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer, right? Like, I wrote a lot of fiction and I wrote a lot of essays and I, you know, and so I just sort of had those skills. So, like, I was writing blog posts and I was writing blog posts at previous agencies I worked at. That's an education in writing and talking and speaking and making videos and being in front of people is all part of the job. It's not a thing that all software engineers are super good at and some are particularly maybe not so good. at things at that you know because it's not a skill that that it's not a muscle that that they that they develop or need to develop um I I also spent part of my history um was in tech support um and that's relevant because um so one of the things I did when I was doing tech support is I was doing tech support for alberton's the grocery chain And in particular, I was doing tech support for like the Windows computers in stores, which are usually like the manager computers, but also we supported photo kiosks when they had photo kiosks in their stores. And the photo kiosk system, we had hired these developers, We had a couple in-house people that worked on maintenance and development. We had a team in like, I want to say maybe Poland. But when I was working on that team, we had a couple developers like literally in the next room. So a customer, and then usually the photo kiosks are in like the pharmacy or whatever. So we had a pharmacy come in, call in. or photo department call in, like, we have this problem with our kiosk, and I would take, I'd be like, okay, hold on a second, walk across the room, talk to the developers, describe what's happening. They would tell me in programmer speak, this is the problem, this is the database thing, this is what you need to do. I would then take that information and translate it into human English to the person on the phone, this is the thing that you need to do, I'm going to do a thing on this end, I'm going to, you know, log into your machine, whatever. And that's also a skill, like, David Price- Being the translation layer between like programmers speak into natural human English, so that people that don't have a tech background can understand like that's that's a thing that that is. David Price- One of like one of the reasons why I wanted to go to do dev rel is is because I just know that I'm good at that being that translation layer because I had a long time of sort of developing that skill. That's actually, so I had a similar experience in tech support. I was actually like a help desk IT admin at a small company for like three years. It's my part-time gig while I was trying to get into software. And a lot of that same experience, like people who are non-technical having technical challenges. And if I just told them the technical problem, you know, they wouldn't, it wouldn't land. They wouldn't understand it. And they wouldn't feel good about that. And I quickly learned that figuring out how to speak in their terms and how to translate it into what it really means, like what's the impact or what do we be working with here? What do I need to sort through? That was always really helpful. And- So you said something that I think I also believed at the time, which was that you were doing tech support as a way to get into tech. Did you come to the same realization that I did that there is no future in tech if you continue in tech support? Oh wow, I I'm not sure if I would say that it feels unfair to some people. I know some people that have stuck with it and are great at it, but for me that was definitely the case. It was always a bit of a stepping stone. I I wrote code as a kid and I decided to become a developer back in two thousand. I tried the college route, did that for a long time. Had to support myself, got into help desk stuff. But it was always the game, like the long game to become a software developer full time. And if I look back, I think it took me seven years from like starting college, trying to get a job, doing help desk till I got my first role. And even then it was like not a great role, but it was something. And then I had to build from there. I had the opposite experience. I made websites like on GeoCities and then off of GeoCities and I did it as a fun sort of side creative thing. And when I was in college, I had some friends who were like art majors and whatever, who were doing like commercial graphic design after graduation. And it was like sucking their creativity out, right? Like they had no creative energy after doing all this stuff for work anymore. And so after I graduated, and I went to a college where we could create our own major. So my major is silly. It's creative arts in the digital revolution, which doesn't, means a lot, but also doesn't mean a lot. And certainly not super applicable to many things, but... But when I graduated with that, I was like, okay, what I don't wanna do is do stuff with this thing that I can do, but I do it for fun. And I, cause I don't want it to ever feel like a job. And then at some point after doing tech support for a number of years and realizing that there's not a very good chance of me getting into like the programming side or the engineering side, or like, you know, getting super high in in the career ladder or whatever for what I was doing beyond like just a higher level of support that that OK, I'm going to I'm going to stop doing this and just go out on my own and freelance development and see how that works for a while. And eventually I gravitated toward, it was a project that I did with someone else who was a designer and I was doing more of the backend development and I realized, oh, I actually like doing this thing a lot. So, and that sort of set the path and that's kind of what led for me to be a developer and do, wordpress development stuff and then agency things and and and yeah but like I always approached it because I feel like I've always approached it with understanding and thinking about user experience at the forefront because of working several years getting those complaints from customers about stupid user interface things. I'm always thinking about how a user is going to break things or how even a developer is going to break things. What are the things... To the point where sometimes I over-engineer things a little bit. Because I'm just like, okay, what about this? And what about this? And what about this? I have this recurring experience with one of my doctors. Almost every time they prescribe me something, it goes to the wrong pharmacy. I quickly figured out that this is not a user error. They can't be making this mistake so consistently. There's got to be a problem with their UI. The application they're using has to be making this really hard, doesn't show them what they should be shown, things like that. Yeah. I remember, this is totally off topic, but there were two server teams when I worked at Albertsons. There's the Windows server team and there is the Unix server team. One of the things the Unix server team was responsible for was pharmacy stuff, because all of the pharmacy stuff was still built on Unix. it was a very old system and the majority of I mean the unix team didn't know unix sysadmin stuff there was a bunch of scripts that had been written for them and there was like a sort of ui that was built that was probably running like a really extended bash script or something um that like had like you know type one for this thing and type two for this thing and that was powering like every pharmacy in in the chain and it was uh kind of terrifying um to the point where like you know the unix team didn't actually know how to fix like system level unix problems they just knew how to run scripts um hopefully that's not still the case but like But I totally believe it when there are problems like, particularly pharmacy was like always a nightmare for a variety of different reasons. Like there's so many things that could go wrong. So yeah, that just reminded me of the interface that they were using at the time. This is probably like ten years ago or something. But going back to the idea of speaking, I know that you talked a little bit earlier about your experience organizing meetups and speaking at events and sort of getting over imposter syndrome and just anxiety of being in front of people. Talk about your experience and your process and what you've learned in being in front of people. Yeah. So you mentioned earlier that not a lot of developers or some developers aren't very good at communicating. And I think it's a really overlooked skill. And I go back about fifteen years. I was working on a small team at an agency. And I remember there was this meeting that was really important. It was a big project. I think our biggest project yet. It was really important that everybody showed up and had questions and voice, you know, contributed to the conversation to make sure that we dialed in our plan to execute on this project, to build things. And I remember being completely choked up and quiet. And there were real challenges I needed to speak to, things I learned from past projects that I needed to bring into this conversation. And I just completely failed to do that. And at that point, it was actually something being able to talk to people and to communicate was, I'd been working on it for about fourteen years at that point. And I tried to, you know, overcome it in different ways. But I knew in that moment, here I was working as a professional, as a developer and my anxiety my social anxiety was still so strong and significant that it was really hindering me at work and that wasn't fair to my team and it definitely wasn't fair to myself and I thought I I was still kind of young and I was thinking like what's my career going to look like if I don't take this on if I don't improve this and I decided then and there like I needed to go further and farther than I had before And of all the things I could do, I'd done a little bit of this before, but I thought and had terrible experiences. It was public speaking. It was speaking in front of groups of people where I'm the presenter, where I'm the one talking and everyone else is listening and everyone's looking at me. That was so hard for me at that point, even in a small group of people I'd known and worked with for a year. So I decided to really lean into that and I started to speak at meetups and that's that's where I started. And it was really hard and challenging the first few minutes as I got going and stressful throughout. But what I found was that as I got going, I really liked thinking about how do I communicate this? How do I I thought of it like a like a skill and exercise of like, here's the challenge of How do I tell everyone how this works and have them walk away as better developers, understanding these things that they're not familiar with before this conversation. And that like kind of tapped into the engineer part of my brain. And so I, I got sucked into that challenge. And after doing that maybe a few times, I said before there were enough meetups in town for job scripts. So I started my own. I started to emcee them and introduce other speakers and, of course, give more talks. And I just kept giving. And then when I moved to Denver, I spoke as much as I could any opportunity I had and there's a lot of me to do that at some point it flipped from I'm trying to overcome like social anxiety and fear of public speaking to I want to get better at this I really enjoy this this is a really good challenge and If I look back, it carried over into the person to person conversations that I had. I think it was three years into public speaking that I went to a conference and I was meeting people and ended up joining a company from somebody I met. And the conversations that we had at the conference were a big factor in me getting that role. And it just kept going from there. And at some point I started applying to conferences and going for that. And it's been a long time now that I've been doing this, but I think it was last fall for the first time I gave a talk where still a little tense in the chest. I was told that was adrenaline, but like mentally, I wasn't nervous. I wasn't anxious. I was excited. And I got to really focus on like, how do I deliver this talk in the best way I can? And I mean, it is completely... I I'm so happy when I talk about this or think about this because I went from a place where it was hard for me to talk to co-workers it was hard for me to go to a restaurant and order something or even like go to a cash register at the grocery store and I was afraid of that small talk that very harmless small talk that you have with a complete stranger that there was a time when that was completely frightening to me and made me really tense up and have anxiety And I wouldn't say that I am still happy to get on the phone or I always want to talk to people. There's plenty of times where I don't want to talk to anyone. I want to just work on stuff and keep to myself. But when the opportunity is there and it's something like a conference or something like a meetup or it's something like talking to another developer like you, it gets me like I get excited about that and it's not something I tense up about anymore. Yeah, I definitely... It's interesting how that sort of anxiety affects you in the body. You say that you feel it right here, and I do too. I was actually recording one of these last week, and... I don't know what was different because I don't feel like maybe it's just the moment or whatever, but I still sometimes feel that tightness right here when I'm presenting. I had an opposite experience. I did theater in high school and I did a lot of improv type stuff and monologues and theater competitions and stuff. I came into the world of speaking from mean I would have I would have characterized myself I probably like since covet especially but but even even before I kind of drifted more into like the introverted part of the the spectrum but I still kind of I kind of I would say I'm an ambivert like I'm kind of both um yeah I like that definitely like definitely you know um like in college and before I would have characterized myself as as very extroverted because I like just like being around people and being in front of people and whatever So it was not super like a big leap to be like, yeah, I think maybe I could apply to speak at a local conference. And then from there was invited to like, hey, do you want to do classes for this thing called this online developer training thing? Okay, I'll do that for a little bit. but even even in so like I still you know you get you get those sort of nervous jitters before uh before your you go up and and um and there's like a million thoughts running in your brain as as you as you're preparing as you're like as they're introducing your name you know like you're like you know why can't it just be over but when I'm I feel like when I'm when I'm finally up there um at least now uh these days when I'm presenting I feel like you know, I'm not talking, it's not me in front of an audience, it's just me in front of people, you know? And I'm really, like, I'm not, like, it's not about me, it's about, so much as it's about me presenting some, like, helping people with whatever, like, talking about the thing to just be just helpful, you know? And then on the flip side of that, like, If I go to big event after parties, if there's no one I know there that I can immediately latch on to, I'm definitely wallflowering and hanging out by the drinks or whatever or by the snacks and just waiting for somebody that I can like, oh, okay, this person will save me. Yeah, I also found that, I mean, when you give a talk, it's a really great social hack for not having to go make conversation. After you give a talk, everybody knows what you're interested in and they probably have questions. So you get to just go. My favorite thing to do is go sit down where nobody else is and just wait. And even before, even when I'm not speaking, you know, people will come over and just, you know, sit down next to me and just start talking or ask what I'm doing. But when you give a talk, that's just a massive social hack. And then they're already... They're already dialed into what you're all about as well. Yeah. My conference hack is during lunch going to eat with people I don't know. And part of that is the networking side. And part of that is overcoming that wallflower thing. I know that this is a thing that I do. So I'm going to put myself in a situation where I don't know anyone at the table, and I'm not just going to rely on the familiar faces that I know so that I can kind of push myself and overcome that sort of social anxiety. I had a conference, I think it was in twenty twenty one. It was my first conference after we'd all not been going to conferences for a couple of years. And I remember the first twenty four hours I didn't talk to anyone. I said hi to people like getting food or at the registration desk. But I was just completely like just almost I was completely quiet and I didn't know how to get out of my shell. I didn't think about it too much. I was just there. I was like, well, I'm here. I'm just going to get used to being around people again. um and thing that I ended up working was I mean I went to the talks and there was one speaker his name is homer gaines he gave a talk on accessibility which I really liked and I found him later on and I started talking about his talk and he he just like we just hit it off and we just started hanging out after that I went and sat down later on. He came over to hang out some more, brought more people over. And I think that's a really good strategy when you don't know anybody. And even for me, sometimes I I don't want to sit around a lot of strangers at a table. I'm not there yet. My energy's not there. I haven't acclimated. I just feel really quiet. But getting connected with like a speaker or somebody that you know works on something is just a really great way to tap into like, what am I interested in? What are they interested in? And then things start to flow from there a lot better. Yeah, it's also, I mean, I find the thing, part of the reason why I consider myself an ambivert, especially after learning more about the spectrum of extrovert to introvert, is that one of the, like, a lot of people talk about that as, like, where your energy comes from. Mm-hmm. that as an introvert, it's very draining to have lots of social interactions. And I definitely, at the end of an event, or even at the end of a night, after I've been interacting with people all day, it is legitimately exhausting. Especially if it's a multi-day event, you get home and I'm beat. And that's one of those things where it's not a thing... You don't think about... interacting with human beings as being uh like work for your body you know um but but it really can be um yeah what's what's your experience like with that it's it's what you described like I am absolutely drained of energy after a conference So I'm actually very thoughtful now. I'll try to give myself as much alone time before and after an event, even for meetups, right? I'll try not to have a bunch of calls that day. I might take the morning off or the afternoon off and just have some quiet time, do something by myself. and then the social event happens, I'm there, I find that sometimes my energy doesn't come to where I want it to be. I sometimes feel like I'm very much in myself. And I'll dial that in. I'll listen to myself. And with longer events, with conferences, I'm very strategic now about choosing one of the longer breaks. taking that time to go back to my hotel room or to go outside and go to a park or something like that maybe miss one of the one of the talks just because I need to prioritize that for myself because if I don't do that at some point it's I'm going to completely just zone out completely crash and not be able to like it's gonna be really hard for me so I prioritize making sure that I'm not overdoing it kind of pacing myself um and then definitely prioritizing sleep like before and after It's definitely hard because I love going out with people after the conference, having random adventures, not just the official after parties and things like that. And at some point, it's like, oh, I'm tired. It's like, all right, let's get back to bed. And then afterwards, I always take the day off afterwards if it's a conference. I can't go back to work right away. I need time to myself, time with my family. um so it's definitely a balance with that and I'm absolutely an introvert like it's it's exactly what you described you know where do you gain or lose energy and I I lose energy around people but I also gain it when we're talking about things that are interesting so that's that sort of balances it a little bit so it's it's tough if I'm feeling really quiet and I don't converse with anybody um because I'm not getting the energy back I'm sort of losing and just draining out of myself but um yeah Another thing that we talked about earlier that I'd like to just throw out is you were mentioning experience with burnout. That's something that is adjacent to social anxiety and that sort of thing. But I found myself... It was right around COVID and it was, I think it was right after COVID had started. And that happened to coincide with my father-in-law was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and we didn't know how serious it was yet. So we were like, okay, we're just gonna make sure that we stay close to home. And one thing about me that I've always done is like a thing that I use to recharge is using vacation time and time off. to get away and whatever and that's that's the way that and I knew going into it at least intellectually um that okay if I'm taking this away then there's going to be a very strong risk of burnout, going to burnout. And I told my manager that even. And then three months down the line, six months down the line, I'm like in the thick of it. And I've completely forgotten that I had told myself and my manager that I was going to burnout. And I was burning out. And when you're in it, when I was in it, I was no longer aware that that was a thing. I didn't realize that that was the thing that was going on until I was able to sort of step away a little bit. Talk about your experience with burnout and both sort of identifying and what tools you think there are for identifying and for maybe trying to work yourself out of it. Yeah. Burnout, I want to say, I think of it as a career killer. As people who are knowledge-based workers in a very creative field, and software is very creative, it's an art and a science, burnout can be very, very, it's the biggest obstacle, I think, that I've encountered in my career, where if I am burned out, I can't work at the same level. Sometimes I can't even work at all. What I'm doing, it feels absolutely impossible. And I remember my my first experience with burnout is going back to, I think, twenty eleven. I was I didn't know I was burned out, but my performance had completely fallen off. I went from writing lots of code, building new products by myself, to I don't know why I can't ship a feature. I didn't understand it. And I couldn't explain it. The president of the company's asked me, like, hey, what's going on? I didn't know. I really had no idea that I was burned out, what I was dealing with. And it ended up being something that I would experience again and again, every two or three years, kind of almost on a regular cadence. And then right before the pandemic in twenty nineteen, I took on way too many things. And this is one of the ways I think you can burn out. You just take on too many things and you don't recognize that you're stretching yourself thin. And you're not letting go. You're saying yes to everything, which is what I did. And I think I had something like five or six major kind of things happen over the course of three months. And some at the same time. And there was no rest. And by that point, I understood burnout. I knew how to recognize it. I knew that my energy was low, that doing things I used to be excited about was now hard. I wouldn't have the same energy for things I was really into. But I kept going anyway. not knowing how bad it could get. And I ended up after this, the pandemic happened in twenty twenty a year later. And that only made things worse with all the stress that came with that. I have a family. I was forced to work from home with small kids that weren't at school and all that stuff. And I ended up being burned out for three whole years. And it was that was really scary because what am I going to do my career? What am I going to do my life if my career is essentially dying? That's what it felt like. And I was very fortunate that I moved into developer relations. I made some changes. And that is something to do. I think if you're burning out, something does need to change. It's just a question of how much. Sometimes it's not as dramatic. It's like a role shift. Sometimes it's a change of what you're working on or what you're focused on. So one thing I tried, and I have tried this over the years, and it's definitely a thing that works, is I'll try to focus on things that if I have the autonomy and latitude to do so, I'll talk to my manager if I can as well. Can I work on things that I'm really into? I want to I'm really curious about kind of just tap into my passion and my curiosity more than, hey, you have to do these things and I might not be that excited about it. So sometimes being a little bit selfish about that, I think in the long run can be really good. And with a good manager, they're going to recognize, you know, that that sort of trade off with the team and what you're working on can be really beneficial. But even now, I'm thinking back to last week, I've gotten better at recognizing burnout in the sense that I know where my energy's at. I know that I'm not as productive as I normally am or I don't have the things I'm excited about. I'm not able to dive into them the same way. I feel like I... I describe it as riding the edge of burnout. So here's the challenge I have. I always want to do the best I can with whatever I'm doing. I'm a very like go on a hundred percent all the time type of person, which I know is not healthy or realistic. And I try to find, I try to be very strategic. Like right now I need to take the day off or I can sort of just show up eighty percent for like a Friday afternoon. But generally speaking, I want to be a hundred percent all the time. That sounds good, but it's hard to know where one hundred percent is. And something you brought up with your story is a very personal thing that was going on in your life. I think I overlooked for a long time, and I only learned this recently, that what's going on in your personal life plays into that professional side. And there are times when the professional side is just fine. In fact, things feel kind of easy. There's not a lot of demands where I really like the work. But if there's a lot of stress on the personal side, which just happens with life, That can factor in. And my one hundred percent is not where it was before that. So it's kind of a constant dynamic situation. I don't know what a hundred percent is at. I'm always trying to do my best. I'm always trying to show up the best I can. So what I've learned to do is just be really just patient with myself and reflect on how I feel as I'm doing the work. If I'm not feeling the best, I always ask why. Why am I not feeling the best? Maybe I didn't sleep last night. That's okay. maybe I've been doing a lot every single day and there's a lot going on in my personal life or maybe I'm just really I've just been doing it a while and I haven't taken a good break or having to work on stuff that I'm excited about so that's that's definitely the hardest thing about burnout for me is it's it's very dynamic and what burned me out you know three years ago might not be what hits me this time um so it's it's really paying attention to my energy to how engaged I am and you mentioned time off time off is a tactic like it's a tool but generally for me time off has not been the tool I remember there were times when I was burned out really stressed took time off when I got back to work That Monday morning felt like an absolute shock to my system because nothing else had changed. I was still working on the same project that I maybe wasn't excited about. So with nothing changing, that meant that I was just kind of being dipped back into, like I was a frog getting boiled slowly and I was just taken out of it and I'm back into the boiling water. This time I really feel it. So I always pay attention to that. But I always look for what needs to change? Like what's gonna change in the long term? Maybe I'm going at a pace where there's certain things happening in the next month and I really want to do them. I don't want to back off on them, but I'm going to make sure that in three weeks I'm going to take a week off or I'm going to change things up and work on something different. So there's a bit of thinking ahead there of what's going to change, what can change now or what needs to change in a week or a couple of weeks. And it's always different what that could be. yeah I I know that for me when I was in the thick of burning out I also like like you said like my performance I didn't really see it at the time but like that was the first time I ever got uh a performance improvement plan um from my from my manager um which like also like that didn't help I didn't help my my mental state um and I also like at the time I couldn't I couldn't articulate what was what was going on but and that that led me into like like imposter syndrome is a thing that I think everybody struggles with at different times and certainly like you know it's relevant to speaking as much as it's relevant to even just entering a new a new role at a new company but like at that point my imposter syndrome turned into what if I can't do this anymore? What if I can't be a developer anymore? What if the things, the demands that are evolving as the space changes, what if I just can't keep up? What if I can't cut it anymore? What does that mean for me? There's so much, I feel like too, particularly in our current culture where There's so much tied up in identity in what you do. And certainly at that point, so much of who I saw myself as a person was tied to the thing that I was doing. And maybe part of coming out of that and part of the recovery process is realizing that there is the thing that I do, and that is separate from who I am as a human being. And going back to COVID, too, one of the outlets that I had, even in the midst of burnout, was I got really deeply into Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing. And to the point where, like, I've been running a campaign for my kids before COVID. And then when we stopped meeting in person, I realized, oh, like, there's a part of me that, like, needs this outlet. Like, there needs this escape or needs something here. And I, like... Yeah, we started running a game just with me and my partner and our kids. And then we started, we moved our game online and I got deeper and deeper into it. And now I'm just like, you know, that's the thing. That's my identity outside of work. But like... Yeah, it's important to create those boundaries. There's an Instagram and probably TikTok guy. I never can remember his name. He's an Indian guy, and he does these sort of like... faux motivational videos, but the basic premise is essentially like, fuck your job, fuck your boss. I know what you're talking about. It's amazing. Yeah. But it's all about that separation between what you do in the eight hours a day that you are doing a thing for someone else and getting for money and whatever, that is not who you are. And I feel like sometimes I need to hear that. That's why I love his stuff so much, because you need those reminders to know you are not your job. and everybody out in like the rat race and the market and like everyone out there wants you to believe and certainly your employer wants you to believe that you are your job but but no you are a human being who happens to be performing a service for these people and they are paying you for it but at the end of the day I get to walk away and that ain't that ain't me that's not I can go and be a dungeon master or whatever you know Yeah, I'm reminded like back earlier in my career, I would get Stockholm syndrome at like a not great situation. And like, I would be just so bought in and tied to it and focused on it. And I love what you said about like, I actually can't, I have a hard time teasing out the Being a developer is such a part of my identity because I'm very mastery oriented. I love to learn things and get good at them. That is part of who I am. So one of the biggest ways I do that is through software development. But at the same time, knowing that that's not the only thing, knowing that I'm a father, I'm a teammate on my hockey team that I have, you know, friends and different friend groups and different things leaning into those things and knowing that my identity is spread out across all these different things is like, it definitely helps. And I always hate the line, like we're family at work. Right. And it's, I think we've all woken up to like how toxic that can be. It can sometimes be very well intentioned. I've learned that what you do have at work that can be very healthy as community is You can have friends at work. You can have a community at work. And an ideal workplace is just that. It's a really good community. And thinking of it that way is really helpful. Yeah, I had a boss that, well, CEO of the company, but boss, who said that he never hired people he didn't want to hang out with. And like, it sounds good, right? It sounds nice. And certainly when I worked there, we as a team, as like coworkers, were really tightly knit. But like you said, the flip side of that is like, feeling like you've let family or you've let these people down or you stay longer than maybe you need to or you take less money than maybe you deserve because you're part of this family or this friend group that it's, I mean, it's not really a friend group. I mean, you can have friends that come out of work and I have some of my best friends that came out of that team. But But it's also not it's yes, it's it's it's good to be able to make the distinction between like being like being friends or friendly with people that you work with because you are actually you like them as humans and being like friends or friendly with people because of this sort of forced community because of like proximity and you know and like and having like expectations like loyalty expectations related to that like again like yeah it took me a really long time to come to that to the conclusion or to to realize that the the idea that um your you don't owe your employer anything you know they they owe you like you're doing a service for them they're not providing a service like by giving you a job they're not providing a service to you you are providing a service to them. And that's a thing that I certainly didn't know or wouldn't have articulated. And it was always, as a teenager and first few things, you're begging to get a job, right? Or you're just desperate to have anything, right? But but it's it's an important sort of like mental shift to get to the headspace of like, no, I'm I'm providing a service to you. And and what goes along with that is being able to, like, value yourself and your. like the things that you bring to the table um that can help with like you know uh the whole like recruiting and interview process like if you know that like I'm giving you a service and these are the things I uniquely have that that I can offer you then it shifts the it shifts the scale in terms of like sort of who holds the power and like um and that's that's a really important and under discussed skill and and concept I think Yeah, I learned the hard way that being loyal to a company is not a good idea. It's very unhealthy. And anytime I did that, I think I was burned. I think loyalty can be earned, though. I've learned being loyal to a company might be wrong, but being loyal to people that have earned it, on the other side, that I do believe in. I've worked with colleagues and teammates and managers and leaders who I've learned they're showing up for me. They're showing loyalty to me, in fact. They're prioritizing me or the team. And that type of loyalty can definitely be earned. But even still, it can be hard. But I try to balance that loyalty with, what do I need as well? And I think I'm almost always kind of thinking about that a little bit of like, I'm really loyal to them. I really like what we're doing, but is this the right thing for me? It is. Okay, cool. Or maybe not. Maybe something needs to change and it's something I need to revisit and doesn't necessarily mean moving to a different team or a different company. if you're not paying attention to that then you know you can very much end down a path you didn't intend to be and you've been somewhere for three or more years and you're just not happy and you don't even know where you want to go next um so I try to think about that very proactively you mentioned something else about you know working with people you want to be friends with One thing I've loved about some of the teams I've been on is that I've made friends with people I wouldn't otherwise be friends with. And I remember there's a team I joined one time where I wasn't even interested in this. I wasn't that interested in this company. They were like number four on my list. and then I went to the interview and I remember going to lunch and they brought the whole team out and it was a very uh multi there were mobile engineers web engineers designer pm all that were at the lunch there's ten of us and I remember looking around the table and everybody seem very different. There's different ages, different genders, different backgrounds, different types of education, career changers, people who've been doing software since they were a kid, all of that. And everyone here is so unique. But I saw how they all talk to each other. And I saw like there was a lot of, you know, they were very comfortable with each other and they were talking like they were friends. And that was one of the best things I ever worked on looking back. And I could see it in the lunch and how everybody talked to each other. So I really like that about work. You know, I like the idea of finding people that are not like you. that don't communicate like you that disagree with you and that is absolutely that makes like work so much more interesting the end result of course is much better but that's that gives me an opportunity as a person to like learn so much more about other humans and other different experiences and I mean of course I get to do the thing but like selfishly I I enjoy that you know hanging out with different people that I otherwise wouldn't and work is a phenomenal way to facilitate that Yeah, I think that's a really important point of the value of building teams with people that you wouldn't otherwise necessarily think of yourself as hanging out with, right? Because I think there are so many social constructs built around like you you want to find people who think like you who have similar ideas and similar um backgrounds and whatever and you are drawn to those people um naturally and organically but it's it's even more valuable and particularly you know it's been proven from like a work you know performance standpoint that that teams with people with diverse backgrounds perform better because you have those those different influences and different backgrounds and different stories. And you can very easily, if you just hire people that think like you, fall into a pattern of just creating sort of a monoculture. If you're not consciously choosing people or finding people who are distinctly different from your perspective. I know as a, you know, I was organizing WordCamp Salt Lake City for a number of years, and one of the things that I was very conscious of was in tech spaces, you know, the status quo is a lot of male speakers, a lot of white male speakers, and I really wanted to be conscious to have a diverse speaker lineup. And what that meant was, okay, well, if I don't get the speaker applications that support that, I'm going to go out and talk to people that I know will represent these other voices. And a lot of them said yes. And that was all it meant. And that was the only thing I needed to do to have like, you know, a fifty-fifty split between male and female speakers, you know? Yeah. I had a very similar experience. Being intentional, yeah. When I organized the meetup, we had one speaker every month or maybe two sometimes. But we had our community. And it was a React Denver. And I got to do this for, I think, about seven years. And I looked at who was speaking. I mean, it was mostly white men at first. Most of the people signing up and volunteering were people that felt comfortable doing so and so forth. And I found that whenever somebody that was different, like say a woman or a person of color, came and spoke, I would see in the audience a reflection of the speaker. I would see people that were in the community but were not coming to our meetup show up for the first time and attend. So I also did outreach. I reached out to people that I would see just asking questions about writing tests with a certain library. And I would go out to them and say, hey, you're asking really good questions about this. Would you like to come give a talk about what you're learning? Things like that. And it was really hard to like I tried for like a fifty fifty ratio of like male to non male. I couldn't even get there. But like I saw those like it took effort. You said that that's the only thing you need to do. It's actually it's actually a lot of work. It's a lot of effort, but it's so impactful because so many different people came to the community. And that's not just beneficial to those few people to feel like they they're welcome or there's people like them at the meetup. But for everybody else already attending, now the community gets to grow and you get to meet different people and everybody benefits from that. So I still see this with some events where there's, you know, that seems to not come into play. I often look at the Usually there's like four to six speakers announced early, and that's gotten a lot better. But once in a while, I saw this last week, it was just all men, early announced speakers. And I've talked to people that affects who ends up applying to speak at this conference. It kind of skews things. and I've also seen the opposite I've seen um I'm actually wearing the shirt right now I'll just call them out wayway web um they're in spain and they do a couple different conferences j on the beach lambda conf is a functional conference coming up their cfp is open and then wayway web is like for ui and ux I remember seeing their lineup and I think it was five women and one man in the initial like early announced speakers and I was like that's very different that's the conference I want to go to I know right like they're they're just like really working on that and paying attention to that and I look back and um the previous year most of their speakers were female and it was the case again last november I I literally applied to their conference saying hey I actually hadn't spoken in a while at a conference but here's an old idea I have I just really think your event's great and I want to be a part of it. They reached out to me based on that, just knowing that I was bought into what they were doing and the type of community they were fostering. I ended up giving a talk and two workshops. It was the most I've ever spoken in a conference and it was a great experience, really great organizers. The community there was super welcoming. There's a lot that can be said for organizers that really pay attention to how their community is represented and how they welcome people. And it really shows up in the experience when you go there and you feel like you just I felt so comfortable there. I was in a different country. I didn't know the language. And there's a lot of people I didn't know. I think I didn't. The one person I think I was going to know. Oh, I knew one person that was there. But it was it was such a different community than what I was used to. And it was wonderful. yeah I we're getting close to time but I feel like um that reminds me of uh like sort of my best or favorite conference experiences is when when alter conf was a thing um and if you don't know alter conf is was um minority underrepresented uh diverse trans voices like basically like everyone that's not that doesn't fall into the white male tech stereotype, right? So like all, everything else. And there is, there is one of my favorite talks on a subject I never would have even imagined was how colonialism affects typography, like the font, like fonts and like the ISO, like standards and whatever, like, just like, just and and and some of them were very personal stories about like how like you know stuff that they had to do or not do or like you know um their experience just in work environment and it was just like going as a white male mask presenting person ally um just sitting and listening to these stories just was so deeply like it changed how I saw myself and the world around me. And it's unfortunate, speaking of burnout, that the organizers who were running it for many, many years burnt out on running the event and it no longer exists. But all those talks are online, which is great. But yeah, it's really, really vital to have spaces for just other stories that are not the typical stories in in in the tech space um yeah well I I mean I feel like we could we could go on for forever um but will uh thanks for being on the show where can people find you online what what do you do and do you have anything that you want to plug now yeah now's your space Thank you. Yeah, you can find all my socials on my website at willkline.co. And if you ever want to work with payments in the payments industry, I work at north.com. You can go to north.com and click on developers. And we're working to be the easiest payments company to work with. And it's a lot of fun learning about how to do things in that space. That's very interesting to me right now and excited to improve the developer experience there. Awesome. Well, thanks again for coming on and see you all next time. Thanks, Chris. See you.