speaker-0 (00:07.832)
Welcome back to Adventures in DevOps, podcast host, repeat founder, technical advisor, conference speaker, and started out as a Microsoft intern, proves that Microsoft even has its good parts. It's by no stretch of the imagination to call her tech celebrity, senior director of developer advocacy, Cassidy Williams. Welcome to the show.

speaker-1 (00:28.034)
Hello, wow, thank you for the intro. Thank you for having me.

speaker-0 (00:31.31)
You know, I almost didn't say like you apparently were on a documentary as well as the starring member.

speaker-1 (00:37.454)
I forget about that so often because that was so many years ago. I was just like the clown of that documentary, feel like. But was good times back in the day.

speaker-0 (00:48.27)
Well, I think part of the problem is if LinkedIn experiences are a proxy for success, then you have achieved quite a lot there. And it makes me question what we should even talk about first.

speaker-1 (00:58.222)
I don't even know. What would you like to talk about first? I could talk about most things.

speaker-0 (01:02.508)
Well, you know, last week we did a breakdown of CI, CD systems and their challenges and found that they all suffer one way or another. And given your current work is at GitHub, I can only imagine the sorts of constructive feedback you must be getting from your community about the recent outages.

speaker-1 (01:19.218)
yes. yes. And this is where I'll like put on my work hat and be like, performance is a priority at GitHub. We are making sure that it is number one in everything that we ship. But yeah, no, it's been pretty tough. It's one of those things where my work in particular is very much focused on the open source community making maintainers and individual developers happy with all the features that we ship. And it's been exciting to get those shipped.

But as the company is growing so tremendously in terms of just usage, it's wild to be like, we want to ship this for maintainers. But also in 2025, we crossed like the 1 billion commit mark, which is amazing. Like 2025, we had a billion commits on the platform. Now we're hitting like 275 million a week, which is absurd numbers. And that scale is so...

astronomical that all of the tech debt that we've seen in the past that normally would be like, okay, we're going to fix it incrementally, these things here and there. Now it's just really showing its age. And so that's something where we have to navigate that while also shipping releases and hope that the releases can shine at least a little bit when folks are angry about availability.

speaker-0 (02:41.034)
See, I think a lot of people are unfair in this regard. And it's one thing to have a root cause analysis or a public release on problems that happen, saying like, oops, we had some engineer that changed the policy and that got deployed and deleted a whole S3 bucket from everyone's AWS account. It's another thing when I think officially the public story is the lack of capacity and dealing with how to deal with those sorts of challenges that you get when you have to scale significantly.

And I feel like it comes at a time when there's a lot more, for better or worse, code and pull requests being entered into every source of record that exists.

speaker-1 (03:18.478)
The usage is, the numbers that I cannot say are so astronomical that it's hard for me even to comprehend. And it's cool because that means that everything we work on has that kind of impact for a lot of people, people who haven't been devs before, people who are using agents to run like fleets of different things to commit and make pull requests and stuff and all that jazz. But yeah, it's a lot.

And it's something where it's really nice for me to be able to go speak at conferences and be in person with developers where they're less angry in person than they are on the internet. And so I can kind of hear more reasonable level concerns and feature requests and stuff and navigate through those. Whereas if I were to go to the average Twitter feed or something, there will be people rage baiting for clicks and it's much harder to navigate.

speaker-0 (04:15.726)
I want to ask you about that because I feel like you've put yourself in a not such a great position when your customers are super technical and you've chosen to be almost a liaison for those technical users who historically have their own personal, I want to say vendettas, but maybe philosophies is the more appropriate term when it comes to how systems should work. And I feel like this may be, I mean, you've been in the developer advocacy or bridging that gap for a long time, feel like, but...

Now you're like in one of the most technical systems out there, which is not like first class production. Like we're not talking about cloud providers specifically, but I think everyone knows when there's something happening with their build system in some regard. Has that transitioned into the space in GitHub? Have you seen like a specific kind of, I don't know, eye-opening experience or new sort of challenges to actually communicate with the users?

speaker-1 (05:09.742)
I think the main thing that I've been trying to communicate to people is like, if it were easy, it would be done already for so many of the things that they want. I even went in literally day one when I joined GitHub. I went in and made a pull request on something where I was just like, I've been wanting this for so long. Shipped it, broke production, had to roll it back really quick. And it wasn't even that big of a change. It was just like a small CSS fix. But I just

I wanted it. And after breaking production, figuring out what I did wrong, all that, it was day one. Luckily, people were forgiving. That was like the first mini lesson in something much bigger in that there's so many things that seem like it's easy to do, but there's a lot of historical context why things have been done certain ways that you have to bridge certain gaps where people will come in saying like,

Well, this feature is in pull requests, but it's not in issues. But they look the same. Why can't it just be in both? When historically, yes, a lot of the back end of both of them are the same, but two separate front end teams worked on both of those and they have completely different state management systems and UI libraries that they used for some reason because history and they're slowly building that bridge between them. So that way there can be more feature parity between the two.

categories of things. And that's just an example. But yeah, I think that's really the main thing where there's a lot of history. This is a platform that has been serving developers for so many years that changes have to be incremental and small. And one of the teams that is really growing a lot internally, they started just by calling themselves the Tiny Winds team. Or it was a few people saying, what if we just went through the maintainer feature request backlog?

And anything that takes like less than two weeks to ship, let's just ship it. And that started to make such a big difference for so many maintainers where it was little things here and there. Like one of them that was shipped recently was sorting notifications between oldest and newest, instead of from newest to oldest. Small thing, but big thing, depending on who is asking for it. That team is truly just taking all of those. And it's been making such...

speaker-1 (07:31.622)
strides in small things on the platform that ends up being much bigger overall and impacting so many people overall that like we're trying to build that love with developers from that angle while everything else is just trying to keep everything afloat while the platform is truly just being hammered. And honestly, I think that the platform is doing as well as it could.

Given that absolutely astronomical, once again, growth that we're seeing, I challenge so many developers to try to solve some of the problems that our teams are solving, but it's a lot. It's a lot.

speaker-0 (08:10.83)
I think that is worth repeating realistically. There's this question of, as a user of any service, you're complaining about it in some regard. And my question is, do you want that thing to go away? And for someone else to have to deal with that? I was like, no, no, I want it to stay. It's like, well, great, then maybe you should be happy about it.

speaker-1 (08:31.566)
To just be a little bit nicer to the humans. Like I understand communicating frustration and we hear the frustrations for sure. We hear them personally as individuals all the time. But at the same time when people are bashing, they kind of feel like they're bashing this faceless organization when there's so many humans being like, I'm working the best that I can on this specific thing. And there could be a lot more empathy in socials.

speaker-0 (09:01.452)
Honestly, we've had quite a few GitHub members. Obviously, they weren't always GitHub people in their whole lives on this podcast and one day before when I've met quite a few. And they always seem like great people. I mean, we're only like 10 minutes in here. So I don't know you that well yet. This whole thing could just still turn around.

speaker-1 (09:20.142)
That could be a real jerk.

speaker-0 (09:22.446)
No, and I don't want to make this whole episode, you know, it's not all about the struggles you have to deal with, but one of the things that did come up for me earlier on in my career is I was forced to be also that sort of point person, except my customers were less technical. I was working in the healthcare space and I had to explain to them why the system couldn't do what they want. And often while I'm sitting there trying to like rehearse what my retort is for why this incredibly critical piece of functionality

Needs to be three pixels over on the screen and can't be moved I just feel like a total clown like I know it's better for them and after doing that for almost a year I'm just like that's it no more like I Lying doesn't make sense. I'm just gonna be honest with them like I have no idea why this is so can't do exactly that you want it's the right thing it's the right thing from my perspective and I just know that's right here's are way less forgiving that healthcare IT admin

speaker-1 (10:18.454)
Because they're just like, but I could do it. And I'm like, sure. Yes. Great. There's a lot at play. Nothing is ever simple. yeah, it's been an interesting challenge. We definitely kind of rotate on the team who's the punching bag of the day, depending on which thing went viral or something. But it's not all bad. The fact that people approach us so regularly being like, I got a job because of this or

my project exploded because of this or I'm able to change the trajectory of my career because of this, that stuff keeps us going. And it's been really, really exciting to see people be thrilled with different releases and with different things that they're able to be enabled to do because of our work. And so that fully makes it worth it, where there's highs and lows. Sometimes the internet is more angry than other times, but it's not all bad.

speaker-0 (11:15.15)
So one thing I did notice is recently on the GitHub blog of which I assume there's just thousands and thousands of articles in there. I did stumble across something that you wrote which was almost like a throwaway blog post on typed languages. And I say throwaway because it was a little bit like from Ma's last theorem. If you're familiar, it's like this in one of his notebooks in the margin, it said like A to the X plus B to the X equals C to the X.

there are no values greater than two that it is valid for. And it's like, it took us like, I think almost a hundred years to actually prove that the only answers are like Pythagorean theorem, where it's a square value or one. And when I was coming across your article on type languages, it did feel like this secret genius that was written in the margin of a notebook somewhere that only seems obvious after you like actually have accumulated lots of significant experience on the subject matter. And I think there's a lot of maybe interesting things to be said about.

like where type languages are going and whether or not we're accelerating towards that or whether or not there's a whole branch of computer science or programming that is left untouched that we're going to get into.

speaker-1 (12:23.286)
Yeah, I feel like I love that you brought up this blog post because it was kind of one that I wrote and I was like, that was quiet because it was over the holidays and so fun. Yeah, so for those who didn't read said blog post, we could link it in the show notes.

speaker-0 (12:38.604)
Yeah, for sure. All links will be in the description. So someone will see it for sure.

speaker-1 (12:42.478)
Very long story short, looking at the data, typed languages are on the rise and in a significant way, like by a fairly large margin. And I feel like the main reason behind that is because so much code is being written by non-humans now, we need more languages and tools that have guardrails already built in. And types are a very simple guardrail that you can have where me personally as a human,

I prefer JavaScript. just want like sometimes the code to get out of my way so I can make something. But I understand the value of types because then linting is a little bit stronger. You get some more explicit error messages and stuff. And you need that when you don't necessarily know what code is being shipped line by line. And I think that's a very high level summary of what that post is about.

speaker-0 (13:36.258)
Yeah, for sure. And I think the interesting thing here is I'm with you. When I discovered JavaScript, was just a little bit after the jQuery period. So I didn't have to go through that horrific existence. started.

speaker-1 (13:47.863)
I kind of miss jQuery. Things are so simple.

speaker-0 (13:52.086)
I don't think there's ever a time where I'm like, I'm so glad this existed, but I was not like a UI developer in any regard. I liked my C++, anything programming on physical hardware. was hardware descripting language. Like I would program FPGAs for CPUs, et cetera. Yeah. So the interesting thing is that I think I totally agree with you that because we're entering a world where more software is written, whether or not more software is kept,

or more software products are created? I think it's a separate question, but definitely for sure more software is being written for better or for worse. And there is a reliability problem, not with what's actually being produced, but the code quality or safety that's baked into it. And while I much preferred JavaScript early on in my life, in the last 10 years, I started an experiment where I went through and found every single bug that...

I caused to enter production and found like a majority of them would have been solved with, well, not just type languages, but type languages that had certain extra guardrails in place. And that sort of like completely eliminated whatever preference I had for any sort of scripting language that didn't make types a required aspect.

speaker-1 (14:53.964)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (15:03.554)
Right. It's interesting how that has also changed my tune, where so many of my projects that I've made for myself just side projects in the past. It's me saying like, get out of my way. I just want to make this app exist. Yay. And because it's just me working on it, I know how to test my own code. It'll be fine. And now that, yeah, I'm starting to use AI more. playing with agents more and things like that. I'm realizing, mm.

It would be nice to have some of these errors handled when I don't know all of the ins and outs of things. yeah, I'm realizing now like, wow, types actually are good, aren't they? They aren't just annoying, which is a joke for everybody listening. That is called humor. But yeah, it's been interesting to see that shift where like my opinions in different regards have been changed because

we need to be able to be flexible with the times. Things are changing constantly. cannot be loyal to a language or to a tool.

speaker-0 (16:06.542)
I think that's what's known as personal growth.

speaker-1 (16:09.614)
Yes. Gross.

speaker-0 (16:12.942)
You know when Russ came out I was not like the biggest fan like I mean the complexity wasn't was just something that would stop me personally but over time I definitely learned to lean on it more because there's just like a whole class of problems that goes away and The current idea that I have floating around in my head is this one of formal verification. I don't know if this is Terminology you've you've run into before

speaker-1 (16:35.566)
I, maybe, but I'd like you to continue. Why don't you tell me what you think it means?

speaker-0 (16:41.166)
If you insist. So the idea is that we can't be sure whether the semantics of the language or the function that we're writing is absolutely correct and types help us do that. Right. But at some point, if everything becomes typed that we have, there's still a class of bugs that we can run into. And one of them is simple. Like I write a function, how can I be sure without writing every unit test possible that the results of the function are actually accurate?

And a good example is like if you have a difference function like a minus b where a is greater than b, you should be able to conclude that for all values of a greater than b, the result is always positive. And if you can't imagine there being a set of unit tests, you can write to prove that. The challenge is that realistically, you want a language that you can actually validate that the difference in this case could always be positive.

Some function, no matter what the inputs are, actually work. And this is what formal verification actually does. It allows you to write guarantees about it. And in the world of LLMs, I think the current thought is we'll shift everything to type languages because more software is being written and we can have guarantees about it. But over time, I think we're going to realize there's going to be another optimization on top of that, which is how do we make sure that the output is actually semantically accurate?

speaker-1 (17:56.962)
wonder if we will eventually see a shift to functional languages as a result.

speaker-0 (18:02.702)
I want to say, so it was interesting because I think it was a couple episodes ago, we were actually talking about, we had one of the foremost Haskellers on and he was talking about writing the library for Othel and some other fancy frameworks. And basically there is this aspect where you can get quite into the complexity of how you define your types. Basically, you can have a language that has so complicated or complex

type semantics that you can write like the length of the string must be between 10 characters and 12 characters. And this is great because you can make a whole bunch of assumptions about the amount of data that you can save in a particular database column if it's limited. But on the flip side, it becomes incredibly challenging to actually reason about in practice what you're looking at. And I think anyone that's written any sort of TypeScript can sort of see from their experience, like you look at the types in TypeScript and you're like, I have no idea.

what invariant this actually captures because I have no idea what this actually is saying.

speaker-1 (19:01.568)
Yeah, yeah, it's a different kind of set of problems. I've been thinking about like, kind of what you're saying, but not with this naming in terms of like, if so much software is going to be written by machines and read by humans less and less, possibly, probably, who knows where we'll be in five years, let's circle back then, is a more like...

machine-y level language where it's either super low level or super, super functional where like we look at it, we're like, what does this even mean? But a machine is like, perfect. It's just math. where will that balance be? I don't know the answer to that question.

speaker-0 (19:48.664)
So do you feel yourself reaching for a particular language right now and do you think that your choice or preference is going to change as the years go on?

speaker-1 (19:57.932)
What's interesting is no, not at all. Like there have been a couple things that I've experimented with now that I haven't experimented with before. Like I've written Rust for fun pre-AI. I've written various Python scripts and JavaScript scripts and all of the different things. But recently, for example, I was just like, you know, I've never made a Go CLI and I'd like to play with these libraries, but I don't know Go.

But the machines do. And so I just kind of told some, I was using the GitHub Copilot CLI, hashtag shill, said I want to use this CLI, or I want to use these libraries in the CLI to make this CLI tool. And it made something that worked. And I admit, I was looking at the code, was like, I generally know how this works. Could I write this from scratch? Maybe if I had a lot of docs and experience.

Does that matter? It's a very existential question.

speaker-0 (21:01.134)
Do you feel like having written that, that you actually created it or that it was just something that you then owned?

speaker-1 (21:09.632)
You know that meme where it's someone on the internet saying like, look what I made. And then like they give the object to someone and the person holding the object is like, I made this. Like that meme comic. I feel like there's an element of that with AI tools where people are just like, look what I made. I'm like, but did you? But also kind of. I feel like with some of the tools that I've worked on, note how I'm saying worked on rather than made.

Some of the tools that I've worked on, I say that I did make it because I put in so much significant effort in addition to the AI helping me along. Some tools, one that I'm editing right now is like an electron app that I started, think literally in 2016. So about 10 years ago was when I first started this app and I handcrafted every line of code. And there's been a handful of issues in my repo that I haven't touched because it's painful. And literally yesterday I was like, what if I just

what if I just let go of control a little bit and let the AI do some of it? It wasn't perfect. I still had to tweak it. And I did sit there thinking like, did I make this feature or did I just let a bot do it? But also at the same time, I did refine it. It's a very weird balance. And once again, this is where like a lot of people might say, but doesn't matter. And that's a good question. I don't know if it does matter. feel like we're...

collectively as an industry having a bit of an identity crisis in that regard.

speaker-0 (22:37.806)
I mean, I think you're definitely onto something there in that regard. So one of the things is that we still have opinions about the technology that we can create like individually with our own brains and that technology that we make or someone else makes independently using the tools that we think they, how they work and have assumptions about what actually comes out there. So when I'm using an LLM, maybe I have assumptions about what it can make. And I think right now fundamentally those things are still different enough to the point where I feel like I can

have those opinions, but at some point, I think that's gonna shift. So much so that I will say, I'm gonna go on a limb here, that in a couple years, we are going to get artisanal software engineering.

speaker-1 (23:18.638)
Yeah, handcrafted websites made just for you. Yeah, I feel like I'm seeing some of that right now, honestly. it's a really interesting thing, phenomenon, I guess you could say, where I have a big list of side projects on my computer where I pull from it sometimes where I'm I'm interested in making something. there's some of them that I really care about existing, and I have not started touching them yet because I'm like, I

I want to make it myself. It's my project. But also, if I just use these AI tools, it would be alive right now and I could actually be using the project. And it's a really weird thing where I want to make it, but also maybe I should just use the tools so that way I can make it exist. And some of the projects I have made exist, some of them still feel precious to me where I'm squatting on the domain name and I should just ship it. And it's been interesting to talking to people who aren't.

technical or don't have a technical background and how they're just starting to ship things a lot. Where we're seeing that a ton internally, but even just a neighbor of mine, I'm going to just tell this story of her. I introduced her to agents in general. She had used ChatGPT a little bit before, but that was kind of the extent of her usage. She does not work in tech. She is very artistic, fully, fully separate from our industry. And I introduced her to

Zo Computer, which is kind of like a hosted open clause sort of thing. It's this online computer, agented computer thing. She got so into it so quickly and was like, I can make an app for this, for this, for this. it was amazing to see her ship. But then at the same time, she would ask me for feedback on her apps. And I'd be like, it's amazing that you got this far. It is, it does exist. But there's so many holes, but it does exist.

But at the same time, she asked me for like specific details and I was like, okay, I can see that your password is admin123 by just inspecting the console. You got to have these guardrails in place. She was talking to me about like bun runtime, which is wild for someone who knows nothing about tech, but at the same time, she doesn't know what an array is. Like, it's crazy to see all of this usage of tools and people shipping from all these different backgrounds where I feel like...

speaker-1 (25:42.912)
A lot of engineers are accelerated and shipping so many different things and able to push stuff. A lot of them are paralyzed, kind of like me in a lot of my own projects where it's like, can do so many things. I want to do some things. I'm nervous about doing other things, all of that. And then there's some people where they're just taking it and going and being super creative with it. yeah, it's wild to see just the differences of everything. And I feel like we're going to...

look back on this time right now and be like, man, you knew nothing. And in a few years, our roles are going to be looking incredibly different.

speaker-0 (26:19.722)
I don't know if that's optimism or pessimism.

speaker-1 (26:22.638)
That's little bit of both. feel like I'm like both nervous and excited. I like coding, but also I like building and I feel like those are sometimes the same and sometimes different.

speaker-0 (26:33.72)
More so now. And I feel like you're also in a particular role where you're connecting over the collaboration, over a communication mechanism with other humans. Is that role, like, you fearful for that role that I assume you enjoy doing going away in the near future because you're, like, the people who are building aren't going to necessarily be technical or have a clear understanding of technical aspects, which you're the expert or working for a company where...

you need to communicate along that sort of product architecture or tool set.

speaker-1 (27:07.114)
In a weird way, and I don't mean to be like, my job's amazing, but in a weird way, I feel like more communication heavy roles are going to be more valuable than ever. Because now if anybody can quote unquote code and ship things, first of all, I feel like mentorship is more important than ever in general, because if everybody is hiring senior engineers and people who can use AI and stuff, who will the future senior engineers of tomorrow be?

And we need to be able to kind of lift people up, but then also learn via teaching on the technical side. But at the same time, these junior folks entering the industry are going to be moving faster than ever and learning faster than ever. So that level of communication from like a purely engineering perspective is important. The growth that I've seen for developer advocacy and like technical marketing and that type of external communication.

It has been growing tremendously from my perspective, just from what I've seen around hiring boards and forums and Discord groups and just trends that I've seen, where I feel like a few years ago when all of the massive layoffs were happening and stuff, a lot of people were leaving those kinds of roles and leaning just into the engineering side and doing some career pivots. And now I feel like the pendulum is swinging in the other direction where now that

quote unquote, everyone can code, we need people who can communicate both to humans and to the agents of the world and be able to communicate concepts and teach concepts more than ever. And the LinkedIn inboxes for everyone I know in this type of role are on fire right now because the AI companies are realizing it too, where you can't necessarily use AI for all of your...

communication marketing and communication teaching and education and all of that. You need a person to be able to explain to other people how to use these tools.

speaker-0 (29:10.402)
Well, that's like directly opposite of the marketing documentation on all of the AI tools out there that suggest I can just fire my whole team, technical or not, and replace it with agents.

speaker-1 (29:21.164)
Yeah, everyone thinks that other roles don't matter anymore. But that's not true. I feel like it's now we can abstract away some of the boring stuff and repetitive stuff and do more of our specialized skills. That's what it feels like.

speaker-0 (29:37.134)
I like your framing. It's something that almost, I think it was over 20 years ago now, where one of my professors had said that the industry and corporations, especially enterprises, want engineers who can do at least one other thing. And I didn't really understand what that meant at the time. And it's sort of something that has stuck with me even after so long. I don't have that good of a memory, I guess. And it does, feel like, come to light more. Like, who am I outside of being able to be a

technologist in any way, you know, where are my skills? I do think I got a little bit of advantage given my non-historical path, like I didn't major in computer science, I didn't start out as a software developer or build websites, so I feel like I avoided some of the canonical, I'll say failure modes, where you spend your whole life coding in some regard, maybe backends, dealing with support or tickets, not even support tickets, and now you may be questioning what you're doing.

speaker-1 (30:31.434)
Yeah, it's very interesting to see that in general. Like all of the best engineers that I know and people who are not even just engineers, but technical in some way using AI tools, grand majority of them don't have a traditional computer science background. Like I do have a traditional background and I feel like I'm in the minority these days with all of the people who are really accelerating their work. And that's been interesting to see and very cool, honestly. And I feel like that is

an important thing and feels like a move in the right direction. I feel like people should do more things. And my very, very, very, very idealist take is if we're more productive than ever, should we have four-day work weeks? We should be working less days, right? Because we're shipping more. But I know that that is not one that the capitalist machine would like to hear.

speaker-0 (31:27.348)
You're opening the can of worms there. is this book, I think it's a four hour work week.

speaker-1 (31:34.311)
I will say.

speaker-0 (31:35.99)
Yeah. So not a new concept, realistically. And it doesn't matter what the research says. So there is a dedicated episode that we made, I think, at the beginning of the year called, what is productivity even? Because I feel like every time someone brings up term productivity, they're hard pressed to actually identify, like, what is that thing that's happening? And I don't want to spoil the episode, what we chatted about there, but it definitely felt very subjective as far as determining what that thing is.

What I do want to ask you about is maybe to just change the topic a little bit. you did mention basically the role potentially changing as it's going forward and something that is in huge need. so my question will be, if you see the role changing and that it's in a huge need, are there things that you're already doing to prepare for the future and how you see the role evolving?

speaker-1 (32:26.058)
I feel like the biggest skill anyone can have right now is flexibility. like, don't be too attached to all the things because everything is changing. Just everything's changing so much. I feel like every talk I've given recently is like, hey, so things are changing. Are you okay? And having that flexibility and willingness to learn things, I feel like we used to say that was a big thing in tech and we got comfortable and now it's more true than ever.

And yeah, in general, I feel like we just need to be willing to learn and be flexible with the way the waves go. And like you said earlier, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of like, make our to snow websites here. We do not use these tools. I think that's okay. And I don't think necessarily people will be left behind if they don't use certain tools. But at the same time, you shouldn't be completely, fully AI-pilled or like an AI skeptic.

or anything like that for anything because we don't know what the future is going to look like. I think we have power in shaping it, but being super strongly in one way or another could only be detrimental when everything is changing so much and we don't have a lot of control over what the future will be.

speaker-0 (33:42.36)
Do you feel like there's a particular area that you're focused on personally, like as far as like areas where, you know, you're currently weak and you see that given the overall topology of the industry changing over time that you want to adjust yourself to, I don't know, meet it where you expect it to be going.

speaker-1 (34:00.482)
That's a good question. think honestly right now, what I've been personally dealing with is seeing how I'm frustrated that rage sells in terms of how products are shipped and gone viral and so many things. everybody posts rage bait and makes enemies and gets loud and then they raise tons of money or they get tons of views or anything like that.

Personally for me, I'm trying to figure out how do I work against that current and still learn and still be able to make things that are interesting for people both at work at GitHub but also on my personal projects and stuff and be less mean, guess. It's kind of a wishy-washy answer to that, but it's something that I'm really struggling with seeing. Every single person that...

Once again, we're listening to constantly, we're listening on socials and we're looking at how things are getting shaped. It's literally all just people being upset at something. Too much AI or too little AI. Good AI, not good enough AI. Like, this model is dead, this one's the best one now. There's so much of those upset definitive statements.

like software engineering is dead, software engineering is alive, but marketing is dead, things like that where I'm like, it's not any of these things. Is there any way to make the non-black and white, the gray, peek through and be a little colorful and fun? I'm genuinely hopeful that in these new eras, we're going to see more personal tools and more like artistic things coming out of it as a result because

humans who were once stopped by not being able to do certain things because of technical ability or because of like certain reach, they suddenly have the freedom of making what they want in an artistic way. And I use artistic to be like in a creative human expressive way. I want to see more of that because people are unburdened by the way things have already been. And I don't know how

speaker-1 (36:14.912)
I'm going to turn that into what I'm learning and in my career, but that's what I'm struggling with and thinking about a whole lot right now.

speaker-0 (36:22.702)
So I do think that there is this challenge of at least the question I've been asking myself is am I part of an industry where a majority of my colleagues or Network, etc. People who are in the same area of tech as I am are all online Or is it just a small part of it? And I'm just seeing those people who scream on rooftops and of course they pick the most click-baity thing to to say or trigger to get views

And I worry that it's the former and I'm seeing the entire industry and I'm not happy with that. And it's not really the latter, which would be sort of both the cynical perspective where you only listening to those people who should not be listened to because there's nothing else to be there. But I guess I'm optimistic in that way that there is a secret part of humanity that our software engineers, they have no desire to be on LinkedIn or blue sky or wherever people go today. Maybe they'll show up on hacker news one time.

if some random company they happen to like mention. But I don't know. It's like there are so many people using chat bots today, LLMs in some regard, that I fear that a majority of our tech industry is also online in some regard. And there's no secret rock out there in the forest that you can uncover. There's engineers doing an amazing thing there. Hasn't that been totally abused?

speaker-1 (37:44.746)
Yeah, that's so real. feel like because I have to post so much online on the various networks for work, at least half of the replies are always bots. And I can just, you can smell it a mile away. And I do have like a nice Discord community of people where I'm like, look, the humans are here and it's great. And that's honestly...

Those kinds of group chats, whether it's a Discord group or a Signal group or various group chats where I have some humans that I know know how to code. I love being able to talk to them about projects and different things. And it's something that I feel like I have been limited now, just given the state of social media and how I can talk about it online where, for example, one of my projects, I was deciding if I wanted to sync data using SQLite or JSON.

A simple thing, there's pros and cons to both depending on how the app will ultimately be used. And unfortunately, using AI, they're just like, you're absolutely right. This is a tough decision. And it just doesn't actually give me opinions. And I was like, I need some engineers who have seen things to just tell me stuff and not use a chat bot to be like, wow, what a quandary. And so that is where I posted the Discord chats and in the Signal chats and stuff and be like, I want you to roast this concept. Tell me what you think.

Some people had really strong opinions in both ways, but being able to see that with that experience was so nice and is so refreshing. And I feel like we need more of that. But people are doing the things for the clicks. so I feel like we're losing a lot of that vulnerability.

speaker-0 (39:25.292)
Yeah, for sure. Genuineness. There is some genius in what you've shared there. I remember early on in one of my previous companies that I had worked at, an engineer had told me that she paid a used car salesman to go to a new lot for a competitor to negotiate buying her car for her. And I'm like, genius, honestly. And I think the same thing applies to the LLMs where you just get...

they'll allow the first one to give you the plan and then you bring it to another one and be like, hey, this other LLM said this is the best thing ever. Tell me why it's atrocious. And the stats are back on that. Actually, it's pretty effective if you, instead of saying that I did this thing, why is it so great? No leading questions. I didn't do this thing. I think it's terrible. Do you agree? Is a great way for it to expose all the problems there. I will say that there is a little bit of an issue where, especially when it comes to reasoning, that there's like this

It can come up with like 10 ideas about how to solve a different problem a particular way and it'll be missing the real like the one that I believe is the objectively correct answer number 11 and only if you go back to your desk and bang your head against the keyboard for a while. I guess not in your case because you have probably have like really heavy keyboard keys and that would probably be damaging.

speaker-1 (40:43.276)
But still.

speaker-0 (40:45.518)
You actually can get out a real answer. Yeah, for sure.

speaker-1 (40:49.164)
Yeah, okay, so really quick shill hat. Something that I am actually excited that GitHub released recently is they have a rubber duck feature now that's built into the CLI. So when you do make plans, it automatically consults another model to be like, hey, vet this plan to make sure it's good and there aren't holes. And I used it yesterday and it was fun. Taking the shill hat off, yeah. like you said, it's cool to consult the different tools on this and I feel like that's

was they're so agreeable and it's a nice thing. But I kind of want a grumpy engineer who's seen something to vet certain plans for me. And I feel like that's something we kind of have lost with Stack Overflow kind of going away more and more and why it's nice to have these chats where I just want to see these kinds of debates because we learn so much from failure.

and things going poorly and things you've had to debug for hours and hours and you're like, was a one line change after all of that. Those sorts of things you learn so much from and we just aren't having the same levels of failures and debugging sessions as we once did. And so we're less haggard.

speaker-0 (42:02.824)
Sorry, I'm laughing because I know you have a special place in your heart for the Stack Overflow community. You chaired the authoring of the podcast and got it started originally, But no one, I don't think anyone in quite a long time has said, how great Stack Overflow is.

speaker-1 (42:09.061)
yeah, good time.

speaker-1 (42:14.766)
Yeah, in their newsletter,

speaker-1 (42:21.26)
I know, I know. That's the thing. I don't think I would have said I liked it when people were mean to me on Stack Overflow until recently because I just, need something to roast my projects. And you can like train some kind of custom LLM fine tune or something and say like, hey, everything I do roast me, it's not the same. It's not. And I feel like those kinds of perspectives that

speaker-0 (42:29.4)
But I missed

speaker-1 (42:51.148)
They come from community and they come from experience. And finding that community is particularly hard right now. And when you do have it, hold onto it tight. again, I love my Discord server. I love my group chats for that kind of experience. And I hope those types of communities can continue to exist as we all move towards this future.

speaker-0 (43:12.46)
I mean, you've given me some optimism because I think one of my personal failure modes has been I just like tearing things apart and so much so that when I come up with an idea to do a project, I'm like, but there's an open source version already and it's already there on the internet. Like I can just use that. I have no justification to do this myself. And I take that same optimism and I bring it to other people's projects too. But you you saying I missed this. I missed when tearing apart my stuff. Why the idea is so bad. You know, maybe there is a whole in this future world where

The artisanal software engineer review comes into play. We hand pull requests review all of your code that you write. There's no bots involved here.

speaker-1 (43:53.198)
I honestly like that. Who knows if I should be saying that as a GitHub employee right now. like, I think there's so much value in the human experience there and it'll be interesting once again to see where our roles go. One of the things that I genuinely really like doing is like untangling legacy code. It's so fun.

I love going into some kind of hairy 3000 line file and be like, why is it like this? I'm going to make it perfect. It's like untangling headphones or earbuds or a pile of shoelaces or something.

speaker-0 (44:32.568)
I know what you're talking about. just, fear that there's just like very small part of audience, human population that understands like, yes, there's a knot here. I get to untangle. can't wait to.

speaker-1 (44:44.782)
It's like solving a puzzle like a sicko. it's really fun. Something that I've honestly been doing is having AI make some feature on an app, and then I just rip it to shreds, and I treat it like legacy code and fix it up and clean it up myself. Some models, I have to do that more or less. Certain features, I do it. But that's honestly how I've been kind of enjoying certain side projects where I make the feature exist, and then I make it better myself.

speaker-0 (45:11.598)
That just sounds horrifyingly bad. Like I just can't imagine what to review a-a-a-a-

speaker-1 (45:16.622)
I know. Yeah, believe me, it's like not always a great experience, like that was something I did yesterday where this feature that I've been wanting in a side project, I was like, fine, we'll have an AI model do it. I hated it. The code was not what I wanted. But because the code existed, I was like, I can make it exactly what I want because it almost gave me clarity from a rubber duck type perspective being like, it makes sense why it was implemented this way, but it should be implemented this way. And I was able to like...

use my opinions to edit it more. So I don't know, maybe I just craved a thought exercise, but it'll be interesting once again to see, is this always how we're going to be shipping things? Probably not. don't know.

speaker-0 (46:01.582)
I mean, I almost fear for you because you're like, spend a lot of time online with AI-generated bots, with AI-generated comments for my messages. I get to work and I have these angry developers complaining about the platform that I'm helping to make a success. You know what? I just crave.

speaker-1 (46:20.366)
I breaking something. Yeah, no, believe me. I feel like I'm not super AI-pilled. I still consider myself somewhat of a skeptic. And I'm at this point where like I just smell it a mile away. Every single time I hear someone reading a script, I'm just like, I know this is an AI-generated script. Within seconds, I can see it in blog posts, I can see it in comments, I can see it in code. It's just what I see now.

And it's so nice to see human writing and stuff and human code and fixing things with human changes that, I don't know, I feel like I'm trying to add that more and more wherever I can. Like I refuse to use AI on my own personal blog. I refuse to use AI to write social media posts for me. And at the same time, I see people using it and I understand why they use it.

And I want to figure out how do I get them to a place where they don't have it right for them, but they might have it edit for them or something. There's balances everywhere that we're trying to meet.

speaker-0 (47:23.406)
I feel like this is you trying to teach someone how to be enlightened and you can't drag, like they have to want to get there and see their own path for them. It's just, so we had a vibe coding episode of this podcast a bunch of months ago. And the reason I bring it up is because the guest referenced a post about that AI art has no soul. And I think this is true for a lot of those things why at least,

you can reference, like identify immediately. can usually identify what's going on. And the thing that stabs me a lot is some of the things that I noticed that it does, like I do intentionally. Like the thing about dashes broke me because right with dashes, I love dashes. dashes are so great. And now I'm just like, what? People are going to mistake my work for LLM generated garbage because I use this prose like naturally. I have a shortcut key on my keyboard for dash. I know. Yeah.

speaker-1 (48:03.176)
That one

speaker-0 (48:20.302)
But now I'm like second-guessing, like, do I have to take it out of my writing? Because people will start to assume that it's also generated that way. It's so different, though, and I don't know what it is, like, why I can recognize it in what I'm reading. I mean, the joke out there right now is like, the person who filed the support ticket thanked me. That's the clincher. Like, a human would never be that nice.

speaker-1 (48:45.838)
I did see something gross, just like people think they're AI bots more than support agents, which was so sad. yeah, no, I feel like I've been trying to, it's been a good exercise in me like practicing my voice on the internet more where I'm not gonna care if I use an emdash or anything. I'm just gonna write.

And I have like an AI manifesto on my website where I say like, I'm not going to use AI for my writing. I very much strongly think if you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it. And so I want to make something that's like worth reading. honestly, yeah, something about AI writing is so sterile, I guess. Like, like whenever I read it, it's, it's almost unreadable because I'm like, I know this is correct. The words are in the correct order, but it's so hard to read because there's no like depth to it.

And yeah.

speaker-0 (49:40.654)
I know what it is. You're picking up on the uncanny valley of that writing. You see that there's no soul there and it's deeply disturbing. And I think for a lot of people, they just don't see it. They don't necessarily understand or don't perceive it. They don't observe it in that way. So it may not actually bother them as much. I guess I'll go on record in saying this.

just recently wrote a couple of blog posts where I now can distinguish between having an LLM help you write and it doing the writing for you. I think there are things that like I really wanted to get written like a long time, like those tickets in your backlog or that tech debt you want to take care of and I wouldn't have done it. And because of the scope creep that LLMs keep throwing into everything that I do, every, you here's some extra features. Here's something like writing command line prompt. Here's five input parameters that you can optionally add in. I'm like, hadn't.

This is a one-time script. I don't need any of those.

speaker-1 (50:35.31)
Stop that. Don't make a wizard.

speaker-0 (50:38.926)
Here's a whole UI that I know you didn't want that but you know it's now there's a file called UI.

speaker-1 (50:45.174)
A little Unicode loading animation and everything.

speaker-0 (50:48.574)
yeah, for sure. I think the same thing applies to the writing though. It is really helpful to have it build out all the scaffolding, not the outline, it's terrible at that, not the paragraphs, it's terrible at that. But if you tell it to write a bunch of things, then I can go back through and be like, you know what, I do want to say something here, but what it wrote is so atrocious, I need to rewrite the whole thing. And so going back through and rewriting an article that I didn't just find on the internet that's the appropriate length is really motivating for me.

Again, it's the, found this knot or puzzle that I have to uns- like fix in some way and I know that's not everyone's particular preference.

speaker-1 (51:23.34)
Yeah, no, there was a point where my team started taking on certain newsletters that GitHub puts out and my team writes those newsletters. And we had to tell the folks who are assigning us these newsletters, hey, don't write it with AI for us to edit. That is actually harder. If you just give us the headlines that you want us to hit, we can write it. It will read better. It will make more sense. so now if we ever use AI for any sort of writing at work,

all we do is get like, these are the bullet points we want to hit, then that's it. And we fill it out that way. yeah, I feel like I'm constantly fighting with myself on what it's useful for, what it's not useful for, what we should use it for, and what we shouldn't. really, I just want humans to do well at being humans and use their brains. Because if the internet goes out one day, what will you be able to do?

speaker-0 (52:18.638)
Well, I think there was something that I was dealing with recently, which is I sort of want LLMs to go away because of the environmental impact or data issues or whatever. I keep thinking to myself, but will it really? I don't think so. And so maybe it is really more of a bet of, since it's going to be, even if it never gets better, we're just at this level, it still means that things are fundamentally different than they were before. And I don't think there's any way of getting away from that.

speaker-1 (52:45.56)
I think there are waves of tech trends, a very significant one, for example, that like grew and then fell with crypto a few years ago, where I think we're deep in an AI wave and it's less like it's going to come and then go away. It's more going to be like everyone is using it and then the tools that are good will probably rise to the top and the ones that end up not actually being useful because they just threw AI at you will probably go away. And so I feel like

Hopefully, we'll get to a point where like right now everyone's like, get on the AI train or you're going to be left behind. Like I'm sure there's elements of that, but I think there's no such thing as getting left behind in this regard. There might be money to be made, but we're going to see the tools that end up being good productivity tools, however you define productivity. Those ones will rise to the top, be useful for us, and the ones that end up being superfluous extra.

unnecessary will go away. And hopefully by then things will even out a little bit. But right now everyone's just like, I got to use these tokens because they're for free now and they're going to be more expensive later. we're just seeing that everywhere right now.

speaker-0 (53:59.662)
Okay, my spicy take is that I think that the companies that create LLMs are taking a page from the book of all those social media platforms that have corrupted the teenagers for generations and are using those same strategies to convince or trap software engineers in vicious loops of continual usage and basically abusive relationships. And it's incredibly hard to get out of one of those.

speaker-1 (54:26.446)
Yes, I am aware of who I work for, but I think that's a very real thing where like a few years ago, people would be enraged being just like, have to spend $20 a month to use AI. And now they're just like, I will spend $1,000 a month if it means that I will get as many tokens as I want. Like that type of attitude shift, it's like an addiction.

fascinating to see and I think that that's by design and once again kind of above our pay grade to stop it. And so, yeah, it's a very weird thing where I do see usage gains and I do see productivity gains where some of the domain names that I've had sitting for years, I actually have shipped the projects. Like that is an actual value to me that I'm excited about. And then at the same time, I'm nervous for like AI psychosis brain.

speaker-0 (55:23.874)
Hmm. It's a cybernetic rot, like brain rot. Like you use AI and it's coming. mean, Microsoft backed the paper at Carnegie Mellon that suggested using LLMs removes your usage of critical thinking. you, it's gone. Like you just don't use it. And it, hate when people say the brain is like a muscle that has to be trained.

But they use that analogy in the paper and I mean in some regard it's probably true like if you don't continually think about this we know that patients with with any sort of dementia that do like word puzzles or like strategic thinking games are much better at Keeping their their wits about them rather than ones that watch non interactive content I don't know

speaker-1 (56:14.199)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (56:15.15)
Okay, so maybe it's a good moment to move on to picks. So Cassidy, what did you bring for us today?

speaker-1 (56:22.07)
My pick is the note-taking app Obsidian, where if you haven't used Obsidian before, if you look at it, it's like, this is your second brain with infinite plugins. It is a glorified markdown editor, but it has plugins. And I think the open source plugin ecosystem is where its superpower is, where I honestly, I could, to some circles, be considered an Obsidian power user, and to others be like a total noob, because I really do just use it.

as a markdown editor for my blog posts and for taking notes on projects and stuff. But the fact that you can backlink your notes and tag between them is where it's really, really powerful. I've been able to like make wikis for myself on my projects, on my ideas, on any talks that I listen to or things that I see. And I love that it's such an open ecosystem. I have like a theme that I made for it. There's so many different plugins that you can use for

formatting markdown or turning it into a Kanban board or really just a whole personal dashboard, but I'm a big fan.

speaker-0 (57:27.234)
I think the Zettelkasten aspect of it to do the deep linking is where it really shined initially.

speaker-1 (57:33.166)
Yeah, I think it can be very intimidating at first because of all of its capabilities, but that's where I say to anybody who first opens it, start with just like writing stuff and get into that habit and slowly build up workflows that make it make sense for you.

speaker-0 (57:48.11)
You know, I started with it early on and I was a huge obsidian user. I didn't go down the whole plugin route though. And I've been going, like making my way back to VS Code as my note-taking application.

speaker-1 (58:01.096)
And honestly, there's so many similarities. Just, it makes sense.

speaker-0 (58:07.032)
but it's the marketplace.

speaker-1 (58:09.152)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, now they have a CLI. I haven't actually played with it yet, but I'm like, that does unlock so many things to be able to use Obsidian in a headless way. But I'm going to stick with it as just like a quick place for me to take notes. And we'll leave it there.

speaker-0 (58:25.55)
How do you do the syncing between your, I assume, laptop or desktop and like your phone if you're on the go?

speaker-1 (58:31.118)
So they have like a sync platform that I pay for, but as a backup, I keep my vault in Dropbox. And so I have both of those and I occasionally make a copy in Dropbox in case I lose it.

speaker-0 (58:43.25)
No, but like you ever like you're out somewhere and you just have your phone and you want to take a note? How do get those notes into your obsidian vault? I see.

speaker-1 (58:50.379)
I just used the Obsidian mobile app. Yeah. If it is really, really quick and I don't feel like using it, I'll text myself, but that's rare.

speaker-0 (59:00.398)
No, I think it's fair. know, after I've done a lot of the editors tried a bunch of different things and I feel like when I'm outside of a coding experience, it is for some reason obsidian. And I don't know if that's just some I'm on Linux and maybe there's some magical set of solutions on Mac OS because everyone's like, yeah, I just install whatever I think bear is the one people use for writing.

speaker-1 (59:20.686)
I used to use bare, but I switched so much between a PC and a Mac and any given day because I stream from my PC. I use my Mac for some things and other things. But yeah, I needed something more neutral that could work across platforms.

speaker-0 (59:34.574)
No, got it. No, it's a good pick. That's a good pick. And no one's done it before. So you got the unique holder of Obsidian. We did have one guest that went back through and was like, oh yeah, and you're like 300 episodes. No one picked this. like, I don't even think there's a canonical list of where, what the pick's worth. don't know.

speaker-1 (59:52.718)
where an agent can go through and find all the pics and make a list.

speaker-0 (59:57.45)
Yeah, an agent is coming to make a tool to crawl the blog and the website and have a page dedicated to it. But no one asked for that. That's in the backlog.

speaker-1 (01:00:11.294)
That's something where I also want to do some kind of thing like that for my newsletter, because my newsletter has been going for nine years now. And I want to just make some kind of visualization on the emojis that I've had in the subject line. Nobody cares, but I do. And so that's a project in the backlog for another time.

speaker-0 (01:00:30.754)
Do things for yourself. That's the most important modus

speaker-0 (01:00:38.382)
Yeah, so what did I bring? I struggled today. I'm running out of things to pick, honestly. I think it's almost going on three years of just hosting the podcast myself. That's a lot of to At that point, I have to have something every single week that's like 150 picks already. So I've started this new thing where I have to have an idea about something that I could do a pick on, then find that thing in the universe so that I could actually pick it.

A guest, I think last year actually suggested this. It's a book called The Light Eaters. It dives into the scientific understanding of how sentient plants are. How sentient are they? Yeah, the light eaters. Yeah. Like they eat light, photosynthesis.

speaker-1 (01:01:16.213)
Light eaters. Got it.

speaker-1 (01:01:21.934)
I at first thought it was like people who just don't eat that much

speaker-0 (01:01:27.982)
The author like details her almost philosophical journey to like full plant understanding and there's like some interesting things and I keep a list of every time someone tells me like, I'm a vegetarian because I don't like eating animals and I'm like, well, you can be a vegetarian for lots of reasons though. The one to not like eating sentient beings is not really a good argument because, you know, I feel like you're putting plants into disservice realistically. There's like a couple of really good research papers.

that on my list that suggest like plants that are from the same species who have similar genealogy will try to avoid stealing each other's sunlight. Wow. And I just find like, how do you justify that plants aren't intelligent? I mean, at this point you can't. If you read the book, you'll be convinced too.

speaker-1 (01:02:17.354)
Yeah, okay. I'll look that one up. That sounds cool.

speaker-0 (01:02:19.982)
I don't know if it's like a personal vendetta just to argue against people when they say things, but I mean I appreciate a lot of things, but

speaker-1 (01:02:27.362)
Bike-driven developments fun.

speaker-0 (01:02:29.166)
I mean it used to be a thing like this can't be done and then you'd be like I'm gonna do it and

speaker-1 (01:02:36.334)
I played sousaphone and marching band purely because my band director said that I couldn't. You're too Literally that. Yeah. I had a bruise on my shoulder for a year, but I played it. So there you go.

speaker-0 (01:02:43.342)
can't carry it, it's too heavy.

speaker-0 (01:02:50.978)
So yeah, so that's the one that's like the marching band version of 2-BUTT, right?

speaker-1 (01:02:55.69)
Yeah, yeah, it's like the big circle around your body and stuff. My sister and I both ended up playing it. It was a blast, literally, but it was also incredibly heavy. But we had to them wrong.

speaker-0 (01:03:05.292)
I never understood how anyone in marching band played one of those honestly. I was a trumpet player and that was much easier to carry around for nine and a half minutes than it was to have a whole harness holding up your instrument so that it didn't fall over.

speaker-1 (01:03:18.572)
I started as trumpet and then I kind of just progressed to larger and larger horns where I went from like trumpet to mellophone to baritone to sousaphone.

speaker-0 (01:03:27.566)
Do you still play?

speaker-1 (01:03:28.896)
Yeah, I granted I have two toddlers now, so I don't have as much time to these days. before I had them, my husband and I, were in the Seattle Video Game Orchestra together. And so he was on violin and I was on trumpet and that. we would play like Zelda and Skyrim music around the city. It was really fun.

speaker-0 (01:03:45.806)
I don't think that's on your LinkedIn profile.

speaker-1 (01:03:47.958)
It's not. But it was a good time. I miss it and I'm looking forward to teaching my kids how to play these instruments eventually. No, not LLMs. No, this is artistry.

speaker-0 (01:03:56.118)
I know.

speaker-0 (01:04:01.146)
I think if LLMs completely take over our profession and there are no software engineers left, least you'll still have something to fall back to.

speaker-1 (01:04:07.358)
Exactly. There we go. Okay. Yeah, I'll take that angle.

speaker-0 (01:04:11.534)
Well, thank you, Cassidy, for this episode of Adventures in DevOps. I've totally enjoyed having you on.

speaker-1 (01:04:17.378)
Thank you so much for having me. It was a fun time.

speaker-0 (01:04:19.63)
It's been great. Thanks all listeners for coming and tuning into this episode and hopefully we'll see you all back again next week.