Developer Excellence

00:00:00 well the name is the primagen uh I'm so happy to be here I cannot believe LEL has allowed me to have a microphone bold and risky strategies but I think it's going to pay off uh but but real talk I don't know what it is maybe it's the tap water maybe it's just the heat but PHP people are just the nicest people of any developer Community it's just true and I think lurel is even the nicer subset I don't know what it is but it's just so fantastic so thank you so much for letting me be here thank you for letting

00:00:31 me talk uh I'm extremely grateful for that and I do want to thank my beautiful wife she's not watching she's probably not going to watch this I don't really like it when she watches my stuff but thank you beautiful wife appreciate you uh the kids again I just do all of this because I have kids to do it for and I thank you and of course God for letting me have a second chance at life so all right so uh I'm going to tell a story it might sound a little bit like humble bragging so please you got to

00:01:02 walk with me for a second it's not meant to be that way but uh it's just how it's going to come out so when I joined Netflix in 2013 By the way Aaron got it wrong it was 10 years and then a half a year not 10 years and then five more years so uh I've been there I was in there December 2013 I was 27 years old and I got hired on as a senior software engineer now I've only been out of school at that point for about 3 years and uh I've only been employed for about a year and a half so I wasn't necessarily senior software engineering

00:01:34 material and not only that but the youngest person on my team was about 32 years old so Not only was I not a senior software engineer I was about 5 years younger than everybody there's 40 people on my team and I just felt massively like somehow I Bamboozled them to let me just come there and actually work on stuff but for whatever reason they let me come and I had the opportunity to kind of join at the beginning of a huge project it was about a 9mon project and we had to deliver an entirely new

00:02:01 experience on Netflix so since I was there a little bit later I didn't have the seniority they gave me the worst job which was to do a groovy back end is anyone familiar with groovy okay yeah yeah no one's clapping because it's not fun to be familiar with groovy groovy is an adult shaped toddler it is one of the worst languages of all time anyone with kids understands what that means it's horrible and so I actually had to do that I had to do it for nine months to build this back end in groovy and of course I took the

00:02:30 opport to just do it the best I knew nobody at the company I knew no connections I didn't know groovy I didn't know the tech stack I just went in there and thought okay I could do this I can actually figure this out and I can do a really good job and so I jumped in there and lo and behold it was successful we had like no production outages uh we invented what we called the slow clap at that point which means I rolled it out only to 1% of the customers in 2014 instead of all of them crowd strike did not learn from me 10

00:02:58 years ago you think they would have they did not um and my boss was really like happy about that cuz nobody wanted to work on the back end not a single UI engineer wanted it they all hated it so he said hey could you just rewrite how we do our data structure right now it's this way we've had this two-year bug we have to rewrite it no one wants to do it and so I was like oh yeah yeah I'll do that I'm I'm familiar with groovy now I can do this so I rewrote that and it went really really well so then they

00:03:24 asked me to help with falor so I did data fetching for Netflix and got to go on open source talks and do all that and that kept going really really well and then eventually because of those connections a man named guy Sereno said hey why don't you do this extra life event with me on Twitch so I did that and then I really liked doing twitch so then I kept streaming and I started making YouTube videos and then I accidentally ended up right here talking all this nonsense and I can attribute it all the way back to learning groovy

00:03:50 which is kind of a weird roundabout way to make it up here at a PHP conference you know it's like a very weird kind of Route uh I tell all of that that cuz I have to say it before I tell this story in 2007 uh I was just coming out of my wayward youth kind of Adventure if you will uh for those that don't know any part of my story um I had a teacher in high school handw write me a letter on nice thick printed paper nicely signed saying she was I was the worst student she's had in 30 years like real winning

00:04:24 kind of material at that point actually at the age of 18 my grandfather gave me the birthday present of informing me I was out of the the family will so you know like I I've done some things you know and I I I did recover and so 2007 I'm coming back and I took pre-cal for the first time ever I failed I took it again I failed I took it a third time and got a c c is not like that great I know C's earn degrees but it's really not like that impressive okay I'm not even getting what is that less than four

00:04:52 out of five things right so it's it was pretty bad but I still got through it and I remember just going that summer saying I don't I'm not sure if this is desperation or determination but I'm going to do calculus I'm going to figure this kind of thing out so I went to summer school and I spent two hours in class after two hours in class I spent two hours at the math learning center after doing that I spent six to8 hours doing just atome studying problems over and over again and I did this for five

00:05:20 weeks and in the first day at class I was convinced I was the worst student right I have no track record of being like achieving much and so after that six weeks forward I was objectively by all standards the best student and that moment in my life somehow changed something in me which was when something is super difficult say groovy a language you never worked on and a text act you never worked on being the youngest person out of everybody on your team like when all the odds are against you and you're not like gal smart right I

00:05:58 wasn't solving anything as a kid I wasn't like out there with the Geniuses that if I just had time and determination I can achieve anything and so many people I meet I cannot tell you how many individual messages including like a bunch of you walked up and told me about the messages you've sent me where you have the same feeling except for you don't have that hopeful end you don't know if you can uh bet on yourself I am telling you soorry I don't know I just get so passionate about this um really you can

00:06:38 bet on yourself you can you can actually I I don't actually cry I work out I don't know what's happening right now um but you can actually bet on yourself you can take the chance and I urge you take the chance you may not be betting on the same circumstances you may not know what's going to happen and I can't tell you if llms are going to take your future if the job Market's going to improve if there is a much better job out there on the horizon I can predict nothing of your future but I can say with certainty

00:07:16 betting that you can solve something you do not know will pay not just dividends that year or the next year but for decades and I also say that [Applause] and I and I say that because it's such an important topic because I feel like whatever reason I'm not sure if it was covid or llms coming onto the scene or whatever but I just feel this General kind of like malaise over people that things are just difficult and I don't think it has to be that way I mean by NE I mean by necessity we're all going to

00:07:52 die we all have an ending things will get hard but I don't know if that's right now and so I just have this intense desire to see people succeed but and this is a really important thing is your desire for Success cannot come at a cost and what I mean by that is that during the first year of my marriage and during the second year of my marriage it was the worst years of my marriage I've been married now for 13 years it's actually the best year of my marriage right now so surprisingly I really really like it yeah we can clap

00:08:22 for that that's a good one the thing was is that I came off that high of being able to solve something being able to know that I can build stuff that even though I struggled for two months to understand recursion and I thought I wasn't a very good program I knew if I applied myself I could figure it out I did figure it out I knew that I could do a startup so I programmed it with PHP 5.2 by the way good vintage it's a very good vintage really enjoyed it public class modifiers and so I just was really into it and I

00:08:53 knew I could build it but the problem was is I was doing it for like 80 90 100 hours a week I was so con convinced that I can accomplish any problem but I had no ability to Value what was valuable and so the two-edge to this is that always bet on yourself but don't bet against something that's good in value don't cut Corners it's not worth it trust me an extra 10 hours has never made a startup succeed or fail ever and so that's kind of my two things I just wanted to say because if you want to be

00:09:25 an excellent developer you have to be willing to go the distance but you also have to be willing to know what is valuable and they say that intelligence is the ability to solve hard problems but wisdom is knowing which problems to solve and so just know the problems don't be like me be smarter that's it that's all I had to say the name is isn't Aaron just a National Treasure a j I tried to go real [Applause] fast now well done hey well done yeah um so great to have you here at a PHP conference um here's my question for you

00:10:15 you talked to you talked a little bit about your four kids don't uh we were both just like working out backstage earlier it was C was crazy this guy can bench he can bench it's crazy um what you're you're out you're gone from Netflix you're doing so much what continues to drive you um there's I mean obviously there's like the easy things to say that I have beautiful wife kids like I have to provide for them I made the guaranteed to my wife that if she helps with the kids during their younger years her

00:10:58 ability as she gets to work or do whatever she wants for the remainder of her life with no pressure at making money like that's her goal and mine is that I have to at all times be the like last and final one and so that's just like a very obvious thing uh and second I enjoy these things it's very simple I I really like building I like discovering how things work there's something just just magical about seeing a problem from a perspective you've never seen before it just changes how you kind of perceive all the programming

00:11:28 but more so it's that it's the messages it's the people going are llms going to take my job is it actually worth coding I'm 25 am I too old to learn to code right like you hear that and I know it's like stupid when you've already been coding but if you haven't been coding and you've had such a rough go that you're starting to just even figure out your life in your 20s or your 30s it's like man that's just so good to be like trust me it's always worth it to bet on yourself and to to the person or people

00:11:59 that are listening that say um I want to I want to do what you do Beyond betting on themselves which I think is maybe the primary First Step Beyond that what do you say to the person that says I want to I want to do what that guy does but I am afraid so there's a lot of people that get into making content or trying to produce these things and try to put stuff out there and they get all the analytics and they look at all the things and they go oh well you know in the first 15 seconds I wasn't precisely

00:12:34 or maybe it's the music it's all this stuff and those yes they they they do help to analyze your metrics and do all that stuff but what people would much rather see is just you doing something you really love if you can just do that the thing is is there may not be an audience you might not be able to do anything with it but there also could be a huge number of people excited to see what you're doing and so I'd rather try to do the things I want to do the way I want to do them than trying to figure

00:13:02 out how to please just that one person and constantly like trying to strive after what I think everybody else wants because ultimately I'm going to get burnt out I'm going to get sad I'm going to feel dejected when things don't work out I'm not going to be like oh dang it nobody likes me instead it's just like this is what I like does anyone want to see what I like we all do y'all give it up for the primagen