Michele: You can save up to 80% of your hosting costs by
switching to Flight control.
Flight control is a new deployment platform by the creator of blitz .JS
that solves the age old Heroku versus AWS trade-off by bringing the Heroku style
developer experience natively to AWS.
The beauty of Flight control is that it doesn't require any AWS skills, but
since it deploys to your AWS account, you have the ability to inspect and
tweak anything should the need arise.
Flight control works with any language or framework.
It supports servers, static sites and database.
Sign up at Flightcontrol.dev and use the code Software Social to get
20% off your first three months.
Colleen: Welcome back to Software Social, Colleen here.
I am super excited to bring you a special guest today.
Nate Berko pec, who is the leading rails performance expert.
He has his own consultancy.
He has written a book.
He has a workshop.
He's pretty much done all the things.
Nate, thank you so much for coming on today.
Nate: Thanks, Colleen.
Yeah, a special guests, like, cause I had a, like an upgrade
from the normal guest category.
Is this like, Oh, that's really, really nice.
Colleen: So Nate, I actually didn't ask you on, because I wanted to hear
all about your rails experience.
I knew who you were because I'm a rails developer.
but
Nate: tricked.
This is a setup.
Colleen: It's totally a set up.
Nate: Gotcha.
Journalism here, huh?
Hmm.
Colleen: While I was, you know, internet stalking you.
It's not weird at all.
I came across your talk alone across America.
Nate: Ah, yeah.
Yeah.
Colleen: I loved it.
Nate: No.
Thank you.
Yeah, that was a, what does that format called?
PechaKucha um, you heard of that?
Colleen: not until I found your talk and I was going to lead with that's, what
it was called, but I can't pronounce it.
So
Nate: Yeah.
You know, actually I don't even know like where that comes from.
It was started like this Japanese architectural firm and like Japanese
people really love coming up with words that are on amount of Pia.
So I think that's where that name comes from.
It's probably trying to imitate some kind of sound, but I
don't know what that would be.
Anyway, the format is people give talks and they're 20
slides, 20 seconds per slide.
Auto advance.
Colleen: Oh, wow.
Nate: uh, That's like what, six and six minutes and 40
seconds or something like that.
So that was the format of that particular talk which is fun.
Actually, I really like the auto advancing slides idea and it's
actually something that I've done in conference talks since without saying
anything or telling anybody, but mostly have my conference talks since
then have been like a 32nd auto slide
Colleen: Really?
That seems like a terrible idea.
Nate: It really keeps you moving, and it really keeps you on track.
Yeah.
I like it actually.
I also like just not having stuff in my hands when I'm talking,
like when I'm giving a talk, but anyway, I got off track.
That's the format.
Colleen: Okay.
So for the listeners, it's a short talk.
You should look it up.
It's linked from his website, but essentially the story is that when
you were 19, you were on shark tank, and you failed miserably.
Nate: Sure.
Colleen: I don't want to over exaggerate, but, and so then you bought a motorcycle
and motorcycle across the country.
Nate: Yeah.
And two times since.
But yeah, that first trip was the big one from Tennessee to Washington.
And it's was on this thing called the Transamerica trail, which is this informal
kind of put together route by the guy.
And he sells, you know, he based sells the route online.
The route is almost a hundred percent as much as can be gravel and dirt roads.
So that's the concept is to ride dirt from Tennessee to Washington.
Colleen: So you were what?
20.
So this is where you in college then where you out of college.
Nate: No, I was definitely out of college.
I think I was probably 22.
Colleen: Okay.
Nate: The gap there is I buy a motorcycle after shark tank and then I blow it
up and then two or three years pass.
And then I go on this ride on a different motorcycle.
Colleen: Oh, okay.
Got it.
Okay.
Nate: You kind of leave some of these details out in a six
minute 42nd talk, you know?
Colleen: Sure.
You don't have a lot of time to, you know, auto advancing slides at all.
You got to stay on top of it.
So What struck me about this talk was the focus on identity.
You started saying you were always someone who wanted to be entrepreneurial
and kind of that failure at shark tank kind of changed your identity.
Then you got the motorcycle.
So you had this new identity.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Because I feel like that is so applicable to like literally everyone.
Nate: Well, this is kind of the lens I had started viewing that experience
through after I read I actually don't know the title of the book growth mindset.
I think it's just the name of the book by Carol Dweck.
The idea is that some people have this, a fixed mindset and other
people have growth mindsets.
Fixed mindsets are concentrated on identity on I am this, I am that.
And we'll reject experiences which do not fit that identity.
So if you have a fixed mindset, and you think you're an entrepreneur, someone
tells you, you're not in a way that's very difficult to deny, that becomes something
that is difficult to integrate into this identity that you've created, right?
Because you are an entrepreneur.
That the example she gives us the smart kit, the high achievers.
Uh, You know, they go through school and they're always told, oh, you're
so smart by their parents or by, you know, the school system or whatever.
And then they meet a challenge that they finally can't beat.
Right.
You know, they got a 1200 on their sat or something.
Right.
And, that experience is not possible to integrate in a fixed mindset.
You can't deal with that, right?
Like you're a smart kid.
So like you can't get 12 hundreds on SATs and then that kind of can drive
you in a lot of different, bad, direct.
The drive you to cheat or to do something bad like that, like to give up.
That's a big kind of thing that I did a lot when I had a fixed mindset was
I would not attempt experiences that I thought I would fail at because I didn't
want to have an experience for that, but challenge that identity, right.
So I think a lot of my experience since then has been to try to push myself more
into a growth mindset, which orients your identity, if anything, around process.
So not being someone who is smart, but someone who is a hard worker, cause you
always, you control the process, right?
I could control being somebody who doesn't give up or you know, works as hard as
they can gives their best all the time.
Right.
That's something that's under my control.
So.
I can kind of safely attach to that in a way that you can't to a fixed mindset.
So Yeah.
I mean, with the motorcycle, like it was something that I didn't
really know if I could do or not.
I didn't really know if I would go all the way to Washington.
Like, as I said in the top, I probably had like a couple thousand miles
of motorcycle experience before I took off on a 10,000 mile trip.
Completely alone and unsupported.
Colleen: It seems like a great plan by the
Nate: yeah, Yeah.
I mean, I knew there wasn't any real danger.
Like the worst thing that could possibly happen would be like, I leave
it the bicycle, the motorcycle and the ditch, and like take a plate home.
That was probably the like, or get injured just somehow, like, those are the
worst things that could possibly happen.
So, that's actually not that bad, like as far as a floor there.
So like that I think was a kind of a first step that I was taking
towards orienting my mindset to.
Colleen: So, okay, so this is I've elementary school aged kids,
and this is the thing they're trying to teach us to teach them.
Right.
So when they color a picture now, instead of saying your picture so beautiful,
you're supposed to say stuff like I can see you used a lot of different colors,
or I can see you really took time on that.
Do you think it works?
Nate: I don't know.
I don't know my kids only a three months old, so we'll have to catch up
in like 10 years and like, we'll see.
We'll see like what happened and what didn't happen.
Colleen: But I feel like, so I've heard so much about growth mindset, right?
I've read atomic habits.
I haven't read that book.
You recommended I'm going to.
I think a lot of people who are really good in school, and I think
for people like us who are starting businesses being good at school does
not correlate with being good at business necessarily is my opinion.
So I feel like this concept of growth mindset, like you hear a lot about it,
but it's really hard to, believe it.
Nate: Hm.
Well, I think that business is very much not like school because
there's nobody laying the track in front of your locomotive, right?
There's nobody there.
Okay.
Now you just have to do this.
And then as long as you get a 99% on this test, you'll succeed.
right.
Just keep, keep laying that track in front of a kid.
And that's how they get from kindergarten to grade 12.
Right.
It's like just hitting the track that's laid for them, but like, there's
nothing like that for anybody, you know, that's starting their own business.
There's some people that could tell you, like, hey, this thing worked for me,
like I don't know, might work for you.
But you know, even if you followed all that advice, it wouldn't work.
Everybody has their own specific situation that like no one can
lay down that track for you.
It does not exist.
So yeah, I think being able to teach someone or to have a mindset that
allows you to safely explore in that way, like to be able to, you can
stick to, if there was gonna lay on the track for you, you're going to
have to try stuff it doesn't work.
Right.
And that was something I was really bad at was trying things that might
not work or having things not work out and then having to integrate that
into, okay, well, what am I going to do better next time or whatever?
Like, I couldn't have that experience.
The only experience I wanted to have was success, because that was what I thought
I was with someone that had success.
Colleen: Right.
So did you have any of those as you were kind of transitioning into this
growth mindset and trying new things, did you have any like public failures.
Nate: I mean, the shark tank was definitely the one that stuck
with me the hardest for sure.
Colleen: Yeah, that's pretty public.
Nate: Yeah, it is.
I don't know.
I mean, I think that's probably the big one.
I can't think of something else off the top of my head.
I'm sure there is.
Colleen: So, okay, so you did shark tank, you did personal growth motorcycling,
and slowly over time, you establish yourself as an expert, as a rails expert,
and specifically a performance expert.
Talk about the decisions to start a consultancy.
Is it just you, or is it you and other people?
Nate: It's always been just me.
Yeah.
Colleen: So talk about some of those decisions on those path
versus building, you know, another monitoring app or something like that.
Like the choices you made when you decided to go independent in that way.
Nate: Well, I had worked at a couple of different startups,
like right out of college.
And, basically I got a little bit burned out on that in terms of, like, I
realized that working for someone else in Like an employee at a star or very
early, very, very early stage, like, you know, five to 10 employees kind of
startups, just wasn't something that lined up with like what I wanted to do.
I didn't want to work 60, 80 hours a week.
I didn't want to, you know, work for half market rate, you know, to maybe get
a lottery ticket to a billion dollars.
I was like, oh, it doesn't really make sense to me.
Colleen: Right,
Nate: I got out of that and then, I don't know, I just sort of fell into
contracting initially, cause it was like, well, I gotta do something to, you
know, pay the bills and fill up the time.
And I knew a lot of people in New York from the startup seat.
So like I just was okay, Hey Nate, come and help us with this.
Help us that.
I kind of did like hot, you might call it like hot, a hot seat consulting,
like just try and warm body.
That's what I was thinking of warm body consulting for about a year.
Just like, you know, filling in on rails projects, wherever I could.
And then I just started writing.
I just started writing about performance.
Actually, no, I think even before that it was probably,
this was around the same time.
This was like the summer of 2015.
Mike Dalessio who now works at Shopify was running Gotham Ruby conference
at the time Go Ruco, and he called me like a week before Go Ruco, and
Mike and I had known each other from the New York City Ruby meetup group.
And he was like one of our talks canceled.
Can you fill it?
So like seven to 10 days?
I don't remember what it was before Conf.
Was like put together a 15 minute talk and I was like, all right, I'll do it because
I'd never done a conference stock before.
So.
I was like, oh my God, this is my big shot.
Gotham Ruby conferences, a single track conf.
So it's like 600 people in the main room watching your talk.
Right.
Colleen: Everyone is coming to your talk.
Nice.
Nate: don't really remember like how I was on this track at the
time, but I running on this hot take of turbo links is actually good.
And that was an extremely hot take in 2016.
Nobody believed that turbo links was a good idea.
You know, everyone was like, DHH, push this into rails.
It's BS.
It doesn't work because Ember was really hot at the time.
And everyone's like use Ember.
Embers cool.
Don't use turbo links, whatever.
And I was like, actually I think turbo links is pretty cool.
So I built this to do app in turbo links.
And I just wanted to show like, hey, if the server response time is good
Uh, turbo links app can work almost as fast as a like a service, client
side, Ember powered app or whatever.
And the commerce talk was about that.
It was about sort of like the performance limits of turbo links.
How can you make it as fast as possible?
And then I turned into a blog post and that blog post DHH retweeted cause he was
clearly looking for some like hot takes to amplify our turbo links to that point.
Right.
Cause everyone was just like down turbo links at the time.
So I'm sure that.
It was the right take for the right re Twitter.
And then at that, that really blew up.
So I had tons of people reading that post.
And then I just sort of fell into a rhythm of like, okay, every two weeks I'll
start writing about performance stuff.
And it was partly just what I was interested in at the time.
And then I realized what a huge uptake it was getting.
And I was like, okay, this is really hitting a nerve.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nate: was is that there's so much anxiety, more at the time.
This is almost hard to remember now, but at the time there was a ton of
anxiety around Ruby on Rails performance.
It was like, oh my God, it rails doesn't scale.
And I will have to rewrite my application in Scala and whatever cause like
Git Hub and Shopify, we're not that big in 2016, like they were just not
the behemoths that they are today.
And Rails sort of hadn't recovered from losing Twitter to Scala in
2010 or whenever that happened.
And so there was like this big, like anxiety.
I could feel in the community about like, oh my God, it's not fast enough.
I got to start writing some other hot language or framework.
And I didn't like that.
I was like, I don't think this is true.
And I like writing Ruby.
So like, I'm going to figure out how to make this work.
I always hated the mindset of like, I have to switch.
I have to switch frameworks or languages that I'm writing because the market
says I have to, or it's not fast enough.
I didn't like that mindset.
So I was like, okay, I'm going to set out to prove this wrong.
And, I just kept writing about that.
I kept writing about web performance and I realized like,
this is like a really good market.
I really liked performance.
I really liked writing and talking about it because it's so, it's so definite it's
so like, it either is faster it isn't.
It's very quantitative in that way.
And I really loved like, take this thing from three seconds and make
it 300 milliseconds, you know?
Um, So it was a combination of right place, right time, right person, which
is, you know, as any success story sounds in 2020 hindsight, you know.
Colleen: Yep.
Always.
Right.
So you started writing and then you had a lot of success writing and
then two people just started reaching out and like, hey, can you fix this?
Nate: Yeah, pretty much.
I should go back sometime and like, look through all my old client
reports and like figure out who the first person was in the last
Colleen: That would be
fun.
Nate: first one I did, but Yeah.
I started just really getting a lot of cold reach outs, and I when
I was putting together all these blogs and stuff, I was like, okay
I think this is a good opportunity to create kind of product revenue.
So I'll make a course.
I'll make a book.
And that became the complete guide to rails performance, which
released like nine months after that conference talk that I gave.
So it was a nine month period of a lot, a lot of, a lot of writing.
Colleen: Yeah.
What year was that?
How long ago was that?
Nate: So I think that was the summer of 2015 that I did the conference talk.
So the complete guide that rails performance came out in March of 2016.
So almost six years.
Colleen: And then, so then you followed that on with workshop.
Nate: Yeah.
I remember the first one of that.
I remember the first workshop I ever gave was at Getty Images.
So I remember Getty Images, found me and were like, can you come to
Madison, Wisconsin and give a workshop?
And I was like, hell yeah.
Business travel.
And like, this is like cool executive stuff now.
So yeah, it's my glorious Madison, Wisconsin set up, and I remember,
like in retrospect I had no idea what I was dealing with that workshop.
It was just like, I dunno, it must've been awful to take, but
yeah, that was the very first one.
That must've been the summer of 2016 or something like that.
And that workshop basically kind of just kept changing
and being revised and edited.
And yeah.
Now I've probably given that workshop live to hundreds of people
now, now asynchronously, cause I sell it online to hundreds.
Colleen: So have you resumed traveling yet?
Post
Nate: haven't yet.
I haven't yet.
My first trip will be to Sin City Ruby in a month.
Colleen: Oh, I'll be there.
I'll See I'll see.
you there.
So I think a lot of our listeners are trying to break
free from the nine to five.
And a lot of people like that story you just described sounds you make
it sound like it was really easy.
You're like, I just did this thing and then people are calling me.
Wasn't really easy.
Nate: Well, I think my memory of that time was like, I didn't
really bill for nine months.
I didn't have like
a lot of billable work While I
Colleen: while you were
Nate: Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't really remember having a lot of like hourly at that time, because
I remember like my last client cut me off and like their startup blew up
and like he didn't pay the last check.
It was like kind of a bad breakup and.
Colleen: That sounds like it.
Yeah,
Nate: And I think after that summer, it was like, after, as I was writing, I don't
remember how many other clients in there.
So I don't know how much billable I was doing at that time.
And like writing is a lot, a lot of work, and probably nine months to
write 130,000 words in retrospect is pretty quick for non-fiction.
So I don't even know if I could have done too much more, but yeah.
So I guess, you know, I think there's a little bit of luck in the thing that I
wanted to write about was the thing that the community desperately want it to hear.
Right?
That didn't have to be true.
So the fact that that was the way it worked out was important.
But I think also, like, I think a lot of it is listening, like paying attention
to what the community cares about.
What are the things that people are, you know, writing a blog posts about
that sound like they don't have an answer to, you know, like what are
the things that continue to hit the top of the Ruby subreddit or whatever?
What are the things that people seem to be struggling with, but
don't have a clear answer for it.
I knew that performance was one of those things.
So it was part for tourists that was something that I wanted to do.
But I do think that, especially as I was writing continuously every couple
of weeks and posting stuff like that was probably deliberate of honing a
message of, okay, what are the things that people want to hear from me?
And how do I provide that?
One of the things that I've always pushed has been front end performance, or you
might call it full stack performance, like trying to analyze the performance of
a rails application from the perspective of the browser, not from the perspective
of the rails application itself.
So the reason I do that is because human beings don't just like
read raw HTML from a rails app.
The browser has to like turn it into a webpage.
But I've definitely realized people don't want to read that despite the
fact that I think it's actually the most important part of performance.
I've learned in my message to sort of like lead with these goodies of like,
Hey, try this one weird setting and you'll make your rails at 10% faster.
And then like feed them the vegetables, if like, okay, but you
actually need to fix your front end performance this way or whatever.
Right.
There's a lot that you learned from writing and publishing on a regular
schedule because you'll see like what blows up and what doesn't.
Colleen: Yeah.
Right.
So it sounds like really the process of writing helped you start to engage
with the community and it helped you start to kind of open that loop with
people to see what people wanted, which I'm sure you don't want to use the
term marketing, but it is marketing
Nate: oh, no, it is a
Colleen: Yeah, where you can be more specific.
So is that you're doing the workshops.
You have the book.
Is that what you're still doing now?
Nate: No.
So our, our first child was born in November.
Um,
Colleen: That's super exciting.
Nate: And after I've come back from parental leave here now in February,
I am on more or less, a hundred percent time contract with Gusto.
So, Gusto is my more or less full-time client nowadays.
So working on making their payroll experience faster for their customers.
Colleen: So tell us about that decision.
Nate: Huh.
Well basically last year, I mean, I was, the kid was coming and I was just
thinking like, I love contracting.
It's great.
But, I would like to have more stability in my income.
I'd like to have like a little bit more stability of you know, money coming in.
So the other thing is like, especially after doing this for six years now, is
that I think my, like, this may sound surprising, but some of my technical
skills have just not grown anymore.
Basically, 95% of the time when I get brought in on a contract,
I am like the most experienced rails developer in the slack chat.
And that's partly, I think because of my clientele and partly just the
atmosphere of being brought in on a short term contract is like, we're
paying this guy a lot of money to solve problems in a really short time.
So everybody like pay attention to this person.
And it's not really an atmosphere for me to learn.
Right.
Colleen: Right.
Nate: So I think in the last couple of years, I'd felt like my
technical skills had not really grown as quickly as they used to.
So having a long-term job or contract, I thought it would be a good opportunity
for me to really like dig my teeth into a problem long-term, and to do
it with a larger group of people that were as experienced as, as I was you
know, like at a company where there's 20 employees, just like, by whatever
law of large numbers, there's like one person at my experience level.
Right, but at Gusto, there's 500 engineers.
So there's like 20 people, and have those people have like
more experience than I do.
right.
So.
Colleen: Right.
Nate: That opportunity to really work closely with people who have tons of
experience and different experience than me was something I was looking
for and also to have, you know, time horizons of like a year to work on
a problem and really dig into it.
Maybe build new tools, like really almost push the boundary of the
profession in a way that I can't do on like one week, two week kind of contract.
So I was looking at those, you know, kind of interviewed a lot of places,
both for normal jobs and other stuff.
And Gusto came back to me with saying like, hey, we'll bring you
on as a consultant, but you can, you know, do 40 hours a week.
And I was like, that's perfect.
So that was the setup we ended up with.
Colleen: Okay.
So I have a somewhat unrelated question, but when you go on job
interviews, do you still have to do the normal interview process or you
just kind of like get in the back door?
Nate: Depends on the, depends on the place.
I had places where my first conversation was it the CTO and I had places
where I went through a normal interview funnel of like four rounds.
You know, people I'd doing coding challenges with
people I'd never met before.
That kind of thing.
So I did all of that.
Depends.
It's dependent on the place.
Colleen: Okay.
Yeah.
That's such an interesting thing, because I think, as an independent developer,
people just give you jobs, like based on your public persona or what you've
written, especially you I'm sure.
I mean, it happens to me.
So I was just wondering like what that actually looks like when you're like,
I want to do this for at least a year.
That's interesting.
Nate: Yeah.
I think it's interesting.
I think, the more the company in question, like understood my specialty
and like my sort of what I can do and bring to the table, the more I was
like off of the normal interview track.
And the more that it was like, people kind of thought, oh, this is Nate, and he's a
really famous Ruby developer, whatever.
Then I sort of would just get shunted into a normal interview path.
My skillset particularly is really weird.
It's very specific, right?
If I was just like a normal working in, so at Gusto, right.
We have lots of different areas where people work, but if I was on
a different team, let's say doing, we have somebody at a Gusto right now
is doing a lot of work with PAC work.
So we're trying to modularize all our Ruby code or whatever.
If I was on that team, I would not be nearly as useful, not even close.
Right.
I'm sure I'd be a competent senior staff developer.
Right.
But like, that's not even close to the kind of value that I
provide doing specifically what I do with the rails performance.
Right.
Then when I'm doing the thing that I'm good at and like that I am have
specialized in, you know, that's where.
Colleen: Yeah.
That makes sense.
That absolutely makes sense.
So how are you adjusting to life with a newborn and a new job?
It's a lot.
Nate: Yeah, well, luckily or our newborn is a little angel,
and she can do no wrong.
So, you know well, I think we got lucky with her.
She's just a really good sleeper.
So I have not been as sleep deprived as I expected.
Colleen: That's unusual.
Nate: Yeah.
I know.
I know we got lucky.
So, you know, everything else, like we can handle, right?
If I get sleep, it's like, okay, everything else, we can figure it out.
But, the sleep uh, we figured it out now.
I think we we've pretty much got that down.
So that's, that was the hardest part of that adjustment and work.
Yeah.
I think, the biggest adjustment for me at Gusto has been
like, it's a big app, right?
It's a huge app.
Tons of people it's like 10 years old.
So like some of the lines of like, when you see the blame, it's the
CTO wrote this 10 years ago.
That kind of place, you know what I mean?
Colleen: Yeah.
Yeah.
Nate: it's very easy to get bogged down in that kind of environment.
So like really go off on tangents or everything turns into this massive
eight degree yak shave of, you know, something that you thought that was going
to take five minutes, it takes 10 hours.
I've got so many right now where it's like I'm shipping rack mini profiler
in production, and one test out of the fricking 20,000 that at Gusto fails when
I, when I add this one, like basically three lines of code and now I gotta go
figure out what's going on with that.
It's like this completely random part of the app.
It doesn't even make sense.
Why is this thing blowing up?
Right.
So any change at that scale of application potentially can break 0.001% of the app.
So it's hard to stay focused in that kind of environment.
It's hard not to like, just go off and dig to the bottom of every hole to, to,
to, to completely try to understand or fix every single problem in its entirety
before you move on to the next thing.
But that's not really my job there.
My job is to fix particular, make particular pages faster.
So you know, kind of keeping on that, track has been an interesting.
Colleen: Yeah.
Do you think, so this you're doing this for a year.
Is that how long you committed?
Nate: I mean, that's how long the contract is.
We'll see if they need me for another year.
Colleen: So you'll just decide, you don't know what you want to do next.
If you want to stay, if you want to go, it's too soon to say.
Nate: Yeah, yeah.
Too soon to say.
Too soon to know if I would.
Yeah.
I mean, I just got started.
We're recording this like three, this is like the middle of my third week.
So
Colleen: Oh, okay.
You're got it.
You
Nate: Because with performance work, for sure.
Right.
I do think unless the company, which it could continues to grow
basically at a pace where they create problems faster than I fix them.
Right.
But like performance work definitely does have a marginal,
marginally decreasing value.
Right.
If I really set out and achieve all the things I wanted to achieve
in this first year at Gusto.
It could totally be possible that it's like, Hey, like all the really valuable
performance problems here are solved.
Like, thanks.
And that would be fine with me.
I'd be totally fine with that.
But maybe the company continues to grow and like, then the
frontier is just pushed.
It's like, okay, well now we've got this other stuff broken or, oh, now we
need this to work for people companies that have 10,000 employees like,
okay, well that's a whole new world.
right.
So it would kind of depend at them on the moment, you know how much I was
able to accomplish and how much the business, the situation needed me.
Colleen: Yeah.
Are you still doing workshops while you're working full time?
Nate: am.
Colleen: Cool.
So.
Nate: Yup.
Colleen: You've just had quite the interesting career trajectory with the
you know, kind of everything you've done.
Are there any things you would have done different?
Nate: Hm.
I don't know.
I don't think so.
One thing that I think worked out really well for me was I started off with a two
or three, like in-person traditional jobs.
I was a developer or whatever, had a small team, but like, it was still just a job.
And only after that was when I started consulting.
And I think some people try to skip that step, right?
They want to get out of maybe cause, the first job is always the hardest,
like, you know, with somebody who maybe came out of a bootcamp or something and
like they try and get that first job.
That is 100% the hardest one.
And they maybe look at like, oh, I could just go on E-Lance or whatever
and you know, start doing jobs on there.
But.
I am glad I didn't go that way because I think you can get stuck in a hole of
working for kind of these low value clients, not learning that much, cause
you're on your own most of the time.
I was really glad that I kind of only launched into freelancing after
I had this like extensive personal network and at least a little bit
of programming experience and resume.
So I'm glad I did that, that way.
I'm very happy.
I've written as much as I have.
I think my writing has been a major factor as to why I've ended up where I
have, maybe I would have written more.
You could always write more.
I could always have written more blog posts and written
more frequently or regularly.
There is no marginally decreasing returns on writing, for sure.
I think.
I could always have produced more content.
And, and that would have been great.
So I don't know.
Those are the things that come to mind, but I don't think I have something
that like, I would have changed.
Colleen: Yeah, I was listening to the founder of balsamic was on indie hackers
a while back, but he talked about that in terms of even starting a SAS,
cause he worked at Adobe for like six years before he started his business.
I keep hearing that and I think that's really good advice to give to people.
However you learn, go get a job.
If you can first to help you get on the path of freedom, the path of
freedom, I'm going to start calling it.
That
Nate: it's
a path of freedom.
Yeah.
I wasn't even that long for me, it was like two years, I think,
maybe the beginning of my career.
And also I think to some extent, like, because it was in New York City and I
was going to meet ups every week and making like, I didn't realize at the time
wasn't network, but it was, you know.
That was how I, that was how I met Mike, who gave me the conference
talk, which then led to the blog post.
Right?
Colleen: I love that, by the way, I
Nate: know, like, Yeah, I think that is, that is helpful.
I think it's definitely more difficult, not impossible, but definitely more
difficult to start from a place of a hundred percent remote from the start.
Colleen: Yeah, well, Nate, I think that is a good place to wrap up.
Thank you so much for coming on software social today.
If people want to find out more about you, where can they go?
Nate: Yeah, speed.
shop.co is my website for my performance consulting and everything
that I do is linked from there.
Colleen: Awesome.
Thanks.
Nate: Alright, thanks.