Demetrious Robinson, Labs, and Learning Tech

Episode 155 · 41:47 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Well, I just demonstrated my proficiency at doing computers, which reminds me, I think, of something that would be fun to talk about. Instead of weather or food or whatever, Richard, what is your deal with upgrades? Do you upgrade everything computer, software, not computer-wise, but software-wise the minute it comes out? Or are you like, whoa, I got to put the brakes on this so I can figure out if it's good, how it works? Or are you just like instant upgrade guy? Yeah, first I thought we were going to think about food. Like, do I get the larger french fry or do I do the regular size? That's a different upgrade. I'm usually an upgrade right away person and feel instant wave of regret when things stop working. But I don't learn, so I do upgrade. How about you? I think I upgrade all the time, as soon as I can. Yeah, because, in fact, I wanted to upgrade to Catalina here on the desktop. But our, whatever, our fierce virus control policy thing wouldn't let me, which I, oh, it's called Sentinel-1. Is that a security risk if you tell people which Sentinel you use? We'll scrub it. Yeah. That sounds good. Yeah, they have this big, they have a big ad in Skipple where there's this, there's this archer and she has like some high-tech cyber bow, like, you know, some compound bow or whatever. And I guess the idea is it's going to shoot your updates like Catalina before they can get installed in your machine. But, yeah, I update stuff as soon as possible because I figure, you know, it must be good if they send an update. You think so? What about the browser? Because that's the one thing, like, I'll get that Chrome notification for about three weeks and won't click upgrade because I'm scared it's going to blow away all my windows. So that's the only thing I upgrade very slowly for some reason. No, no, I just upgrade all the things as soon as possible. Although, so, wait, you're telling me you're one of these, like, you keep a bunch of tabs open as a way to navigate life, persons? I mean, I'm not, you know, like our boss, Ian, who always has like about 400 tabs open. I only have at most like 10, but there's certain things I just, I'm not going to remember what I had open a week ago.

I just wait until I get to them. That makes sense. Okay. Well, speaking of opening tabs, do you want to introduce yourself, guest? Oh, yes. My name is Demetrius Robinson. I'm a software engineer. We have a little bit of news, as always, to talk about. Feel free to jump in or go over things we've left out. And then we'll come back for a more extensive introduction and for a little chat. But so, first up, I think there was KubeCon last week. Is that the right way to pronounce it? KubeCon? I'm glad you paused to stop there. I think it's KubeCon, or as our upcoming new boss is KubeCon. KubeCon. That's good. That's what Pat likes to say. That's like you cross the KubeCon. Yeah. And that's a big moment. Sounds legit. Yeah. And, you know, there was a lot of Caesars, and it's a lot of Augustuses, too. It's hard to separate them. I get mixed up. I was looking them up the other day, and I think the one that we all think of is Augustus, if I remember. The one that crossed the KubeCon. I'll have to go verify that. Anyways, we had a new version of the Pivotal Container Service shipping, PKS 1.6. It looks like, among other things, as one would sort of suspect, there's some integration with Tanzu Mission Control. Tanzu. Tanzu. We're going to have a whole podcast, how to pronounce things, which essentially, I haven't actually looked at a demo of it, but reading over the things and poking at it, you know, it essentially means you have the one pane of glass. I don't think people say moms anymore. But, you know, it gives you a single way of managing all your various Kubernetes things. But what else is in this version? Yeah, as you mentioned, it's that first integration with Mission Control, so being able to provision and manage clusters is great. There's a new management user interface for kind of day two stuff. But also, I think what's interesting is it supports Kubernetes 115, which if you kind of

follow industry-wise, it's been trickier getting the latest supported version kind of in your platform, even for public clouds. If you look at the default versions that most public cloud support, it's like 113 is the default. So it's interesting to watch how, you know, a survey came out last week. I saw the new stack reporting on it that most people are at least N minus two on the version of Kubernetes they're running. So it's hard to keep up. And so that's fair, but it also is going to be up to your platform provider to help you keep up. If your platform provider keeps encouraging you to use a two or three version, old version, guess what? That's what you're going to use. So 115, we're one of the only platforms that has that as a commercially supported offering. It's exciting. And, you know, there's enhancements to existing stuff in there as well, which is nice. And I guess people will, it'd be interesting. I remember, was that like the Datadog Kubernetes thing? I forget which survey it was that was going over the version people run. It'd be fun to see what version of PKS people run, how many far, I guess they wouldn't be ahead. They would only be back. That would be a good comparison. It would be. And then also, you know, I think there's some build services updates or there's a very long post, I think, in a good way, but posted kind of in the context of the KubeCon last week. Also about Kubernetes, but there's kind of an overview of what the, I don't know, the philosophy, if you will, of the build service was. And there's the usual thing that we've talked about in the Pivotal World for a while where it, because you separate out the operating system from building the container, it'll, of course, does that for you and manages that. But it does have a nice kind of way of, you know, having that pipeline wrapped around of the strategy of building container-based things, again, which is just, you know, use, whether it's the cloud-native build packs or other ways of like marking it up, basically saying, here's the code that I have and just build the container for me and also put it in a

registry, whatever way you might want to do it. But I think that blog post is a nice overview of here's why you would use the build service and kind of how it strategizes out building things for you. Yeah. And there's another milestone coming up soon, which is why we put that blog post out. But, you know, even more than building, which there are obviously a handful of ways you can build containers today. I think the value probably the most of the service is the update, which is now that you've got all these containers built, how do you patch all the different things that keep changing all the time from the OS to the app server to your code? And so having something that's constantly looking for kind of breaking change or changes anywhere in that container stack and then updating that container image seems like a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. It's hopefully you can get to the point in a good way where a patch and a release are the same sort of thing, you know, kind of stress level wise in that the stress level is low, essentially, not necessarily high. And then, you know, also, I think there's the PAS for Kubernetes is still like in beta or alpha or something, right? We just have an update of how we run what we used to call Pivotal Cloud Foundry and now Pivotal Platform on top of Kubernetes. Yeah, it was a good post as well against some other big milestones coming up, but bringing that experience, which everyone keeps seemingly trying to create on Kubernetes, right? That's a great foundation. But then how do you build these sort of application level deployment APIs on top of it? Everyone keeps trying to do that. We've already kind of had that with what we have with PAS. So bringing that to Kubernetes, bringing that proven experience, again, it seems like it's going to solve a big problem. We're getting pretty close to some major milestones there. Yeah, it would be nice. And there's, there's my, I think one of my favorite technical content innovations of the past two or three years, there's, there's animated GIFs that are like little demos. I think whoever, whoever came up with that idea, however long ago. That's a big win. Yeah. Yeah. Better, better than a little embedded video. I think also, I think maybe in that post, I am the featured tweet at the top, which was

a little shocking at first. I was like, who is that? Oh, that's me. That's you. Yeah. We had to throw a little nod at you. So I was, I was thinking, you know, it would be, it would be devilish fun to like change my, my Twitter avatar to something. Although I don't really know what you would change it to. That would be good or bad or interesting. It's, it's a, I wonder if that ever happens to people. Yeah. I think people do do that. So you just change your, your, your like screen name to something like, you know, PayPal me at, and like put your PayPal address in there. Just something. Oh, there you go. There you go. You've got to somehow troll us or, uh, right. So what's the, now, now last I checked, you work in, in, in marketing, Richard. What's, what's like the, what's like the deal with embedded tweets? Is it, is it like, is it just like cool or is there like some strategy for it? Like what, uh, I, I, what, why does that happen? Not that it shouldn't. I just like, I don't know. I'm, I, I, I went to college back in the late nineties. So they didn't cover that and I strunk in white, uh, how it fits in there. So what's, I don't know. What's like, why do we use them? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it shows that there's an active conversation and it's a proof point that isn't like, Hey, jump off the site and go read this long article. And so, so many people still do that, right? Like, Hey, to read more, look, click here. It's like, Oh, now I'm kicking you off the site and you might never come back, but here's like a succinct 280 character thing that kind of proves that point by someone else. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That, that makes sense. So it's a, it's a good quote. And like you're saying that's, there's, um, it's not just us like, you know, typing into a black hole. There's, there's, there's other people. Okay. That makes sense. I like that. All right. And then, uh, and then also there's a, uh, uh, there's a couple of other news items. There's a confluent has a, a, a, a new driver. I have to confess, I have not read this news. So why don't you tell us about it, Richard? Yeah, they did the update last week to a KSQL DB. So they have something called KSQL for kind of SQL queries on crossed event streams. And so this new version, which actually for them warranted an actual product name to KSQL

DB is actually a, an event database for kind of storing materialized views on the event stream and letting you do things like query that set of things. So, Hey, what's the state of this particular set of information, this customer record, this order, or again, you already had these sort of push queries that said, Hey, let me know when the longitude latitude of this Uber driver changes, send me that. So kind of a push based query. So interesting stuff. They just keep blurring the lines, I think in a good way, but frankly, I think for a lot of people, it's going to confuse for a little while. They're kind of changing the nature of what we think of as a database, which Kafka always did that since a, look, it's a write only or append only distributed event. So it feels like an inside out database where I'm not looking at columns and rows of like, here's the current state of things. I'm looking at the history of how I got to that thing. And so it's a powerful concept. It's just for people used to, here's my Postgres SQL server database. And it just tells me, you know, Coté's employee record versus here's the stream of everything since we hired him. That's just different. And so even this, where you have, again, this, this kind of different database concept, I think it's all great stuff. Like we're moving the conversation forward. It'll be interesting to see how people used to the current adopt and think about this new model. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, I think as, as I'm sure you've seen every time there's a new data base and not in the database sense, but data pool. Eventually you put SQL around it. Exactly. I, you know, and that reminds me, I don't know if I ever complained about this, but it was always shocking to me that like people don't use SQL against Excel. Like, I think there's some like little avenues to do it here and there, but it seems like, uh, I mean, it's already tables, right? It's pretty, like, it would be nice to just run SQL against Excel sometimes rather than, cause you know, the whole, I never figured out the way that the Excel programming model like thinks, like, it's very strange. Like if you, you know, when you make a pivot table and other things like that, the way that I don't know, the way all that stuff is, uh, it's strategy, so to speak is bizarre.

Yeah. I'm not a power user. I'm sure some of our listeners will say like, they know all the different tools and functions and ways to program a spreadsheet. I'm sure there's some admin out there who just can run laps around both of us. Oh yeah. I've never become a hardcore Excel geek. I've never totally unlocked the whole thing. Yeah. Well, you know, all you have to do is go get an MBA and, uh, work, work in corporate development for a while. And you'll be really good at, as they say, uh, arts and crafts doing, doing good spreadsheets. Yeah. I'm just PowerPoint now. Yeah. Like, see the first lesson one would be like, if you know what chart you want to make, here's how to enter the data, like make this the row and make this the column would be a fun, a fun lesson. And then finally, uh, Google cloud run is now, uh, has, uh, has general availability. It's, uh, it is basically their, their serverless environment. I, have you, have you like poked around at that? What, what, uh, yeah, a little bit. I mean, it's powered by K native, which, you know, isn't itself one Oh yet. So, I mean, good for, good for Google for shipping a one Oh service on a 0.9 foundation, which some people do, of course. Uh, but that's good, right? It's the first realization of K native as a commercial service. So it's kind of, you know, serverless, but containerized serverless. I don't know. For me, there's, it'll be interesting watching for the next year or so. Obviously more of, are we going to see, try to return to more simplified abstractions now that there's just seems to be so much complexity out there. Do things like this, do things like, obviously the things we keep doing with paths for Kates or these other, even PAAS like services out there. And, you know, just some of these things that are trying to hide some of the underlying complexity. Google cloud run tries to do that. You know, Microsoft's doing that with the Azure spring cloud that kind of hide plumbing guts and just help you focus on spring apps. I think we haven't hit the trough yet of over complexity. I think we're still, still rushing towards it, but I'm actually trying to look to see where do we start coming out of that and focus back on just kind of productivity versus necessarily all this extensibility we have right now. Yeah. What's, what's your sense of the, uh, the, the either maturity or the state of materialization

and the reality of like serverless and functional programming. I asked this kind of like, I don't know, two thirds jokingly on my other podcast last week. It's kind of saying, I haven't really heard a lot about serverless recently, but you know, maybe I just got my head in the wrong hole, but like, is that a, how's that whole serverless thing going? Is that working out? I mean, look, there's going to be a huge set of stuff at reinvent focused on it again. I'm sure there'll be more crazy announcement. I don't know if it's, it's crossed the chasm, if you will, yet. It still seems like Kubernetes potentially drowned it out temporarily because that's much more comfortable for most people is it's a computing environment. It takes a lot of stuff I already have. It's not forcing me to re-architect and adopt all these managed services and stateless stuff. But at the same time though, you're watching, I mean, today, this morning, actually, uh, pivotal, we updated the spring framework with functional programming and spring cloud stream. So again, we're kind of bringing those paradigms to other things, which may be where some of this stuff ends up versus just, I go to some function as a service environment. I decompose a perfectly fine working app into 40 functions and a message broker and call it a day. I don't know if that's where we're going or if instead it's going to continue to be this push to manage services, manage services that have functions as triggers to maybe connect systems together. But I don't think we're going to end up where we're all just turning everything into compute functions. And that's the end state. That doesn't seem like that's the future. Yeah. That's an interesting, uh, divide there that kind of, as you're saying, it could just be a programming model, not like a service. I mean, I'm, I think the same people have been saying the same lately. I've seen about AI and ML, like, am I going to have all these standalone machine learning AI services, or does it just get infused into more of my stuff where I'm not opting into AI? It just, it's there in my distributed system or it's there in my spreadsheet or it's there in my whatever. Maybe I don't really think about coding a ton of functions. I just think about building all these little hooks on my workday thing or Salesforce thing or whatever thing. Maybe we'll see. Put the emails on all the things. That's, that sounds great.

Well, well, guest, why don't you, uh, give yourself a, uh, a bit of a longer introduction? What do you, what do you do around here? Oh, well, uh, like I said, my name is Demetrius Robinson. Currently I'm a software engineer for Pivotal Lab. Uh, we do consulting work and, uh, using an agile methodology and that's about it about me right now. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for joining us for this chat. You're, uh, you're someone I met a little while ago and thought you had a cool story and inspiring story. So that'd be fun to, uh, pick your brain a little bit. So how old were you when you started programming? When's the first time you really started slinging code? Oh, the first time I started programming, I believe I was like 14 or 15. I actually started with visual basics, believe it or not, uh, for 2d game development. And like a couple, like a little while after that, I sort of like fell off, uh, programming and I took a break for a while. Yeah. So why did you like visual basic upfront? Like did it appeal to you in a certain way? I just, from a simplicity perspective, I mean, frankly, that's the first thing I really started even using intensely to JavaScript early, but then visual basic. Why, why did it appeal to you? Uh, man, honestly, the RPG community, like the online role playing game community, uh, there were so many games and like everyone was writing like, uh, RPG engines and visual basic and there was a lot of games coming out and there was a big community. So I felt like it was, it was a good place to learn and everyone was so supportive and helpful with each other. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, you started, so it's out, but you started coding because you like, you know, game development, like there was a reason, I guess, behind you. We're just tinkering. You actually were building something that was fun. I was in for games. Yeah. Awesome. So you mentioned you kind of took a break from programming for a decade or so. Can you tell us why?

Oh, yeah. So I started programming visual basic. I took a little break off and then in 2007, I was actually arrested and I spent a couple months in county jail. And then, uh, in early 2008, I was actually finished for 12 years in state prison. So that usually puts a crimp, I guess, on initially on programming goals there, but then something changed there. So you came across the, yeah, that kind of messes with your plans. So, but you came across the program you were telling me about with, I think it's called, it's called Last Mile. How did you come across that and how far in to your sentence did you, did you come across that? Oh, wow. Let's see. About, I want to say about nine years into my sentence, uh, like in prison, they do a lot of transfers, you know, you, uh, you're not really in control of where you live and actually my security level was getting lowered. I was going to a lower level. So they moved me to a new institution. And when you do that, you have these things called like orientation. So like when you start a new job, but in this case, you're not allowed to do anything until you see a committee. It usually takes like a week or two. So during my, my time to see committee, I'm sitting there and I'm waiting and I looked up and there was a poster for this program called the last mile. And when I read the poster, I did, I just couldn't believe it. The reason I couldn't believe it is because it says that it's how inmates how to code. Like, uh, they were using JavaScript to do web, uh, web development. And I was just like, wait a minute. They were teaching us how to code in prison. I was like, wait, prisoners, you know, I just couldn't believe it because they were doing something that I thought was, was pretty cool. Yeah. That's amazing. So you grabbed the flyer, you took the information or once you got through that orientation, you got, got into the program, right? Did you have to apply? Did you have to approve that you've coded before or they would take anybody who had interest in that?

Oh, actually there's a, there's like a weeding process for the last mile. Uh, there's a few requirements. Like at the time I mentioned that I dropped low, uh, dropped to a lower tertiary level. Uh, that typically means like I've been out of trouble for a while and with last mile, you have to not have been in any trouble within the last 12 months. Uh, you have to, they prefer like college experience. You don't need a college degree, just taking like a little classes to sort of get you in the hang of like the intensive work, you know, that you got to put in. And like, once you're in the program, like, well, you actually do have to interview, you do like problems, sit down with someone and interview with them if they accept you. You're in the program, but at the same time, like if you get in trouble while you're in the program at any time, like you're automatically kicked out. And so like, what, uh, is, is it like a daily or like what, what do you, what do you actually do in the class? Like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm I'm curious. And then also we'll have to return to role-playing games at some point that, that sounded, but, but, uh, yeah, what's, what, uh, what's, what, uh, what's, what are the classes like? Oh, so the last mile, they have a couple of tracks and the tracks are approximately like six months long. So in track one, you focus on, uh, sort of like fun and web development for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, uh, where we have a curriculum that you can work on. It's Monday through Friday. So you go to class, uh, after breakfast in the morning, they're typically in class for like the afternoon. And, uh, that's track one. When you get into track two, you sort of move to, uh, the back end and get into post, uh, post-pack development, uh, utilizing node JS, uh, like my SQL, uh, Python on the back end, uh, and things like that. And in addition to your coursework, there's actually like a mountain of information on

the computers because, uh, we are incarcerated in the last mile, uh, when we don't have access to the internet. So they just basically put a bunch of stuff on a server, like a local server. And then we utilize it from there. But in addition to the coursework, you can learn like all types of things. Like I was doing PHP and a few other things on my own that wasn't necessarily on our curriculum. And, and so like, what kind of apps did you work on? Oh, like, okay. Me, I worked on games. So, uh, I, I, me and myself, I did like, uh, Space Invaders clone and like other little games. I did like on runners because like back then, like with video basic, I found out that like you actually utilize a lot of a language if you build games because games are like encompassed so much that you pretty much dissipate all types of, well, all parts of a language when you do like, say a 3D game for instance. Oh, I see. I see. You mean, you mean all parts of a, like the programming language, flex all the language. Yeah, the programming language. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I, I never really like, uh, uh, programmed anything that was graphical and it always, and kind of to your point, like it, it always made actual, like creating pixels on the screen, a strange oddity for me, which, uh, was too bad, but I guess, I guess, you know, obviously doing a game programming, it's nice to have visual things, uh, moving around. Let me, uh, I want to back up. Cause you mentioned kind of just in passing there, you know, being offline for most of this, you're not just jumping on stack overflow. You're not just trolling Google to look for results. You're not just jumping in a group saying, Hey, I can't figure this out. So how do you think that impacted how you learned when you just had an offline data set and whatever was in there? I think you had mentioned to me that that's usually, you know, months or even a year or so kind of a, of a cache of stack overflow questions and answers, but how does not having that outlet change how you learn, whether how you have to learn from other people or trial and error. Can you tell us about that? Oh, yes. It definitely makes for interesting learning because we would have like states with choreos

and things, or maybe on stack overflow, we find because we're looking up answers and it maintains like a specific technology or specific, uh, in-game module. And we don't have it. Like when we do in-game as well, we had a local repository of node modules and we wouldn't be able to use it. So we have to basically like try things out until it works. And like figure, figure stuff out. So it was really interesting, uh, especially since like in the beginning of the last month program, like we didn't even have computers for our first month. Like we had to go over, uh, the HMS test books and like literally write all our code by hand for like a whole month until we got our computers. And then like, we were able to see whether the stuff that we've been writing actually makes sense, like, or how it looks. Whoa. You had your code stuff by hand? That's how did you have to like, uh, you know, indent it correctly and everything, even though you were doing it by hand? That must've been, uh, and then like, uh, we did a group project and we had to recreate this one fast food restaurant website. And then we all did it by hand, like, and then they gave every team a computer and then we input it. They're like, Oh no, don't change nothing. Put the HTML, the CSS, put it all out there and see if it looks like we thought it was going to look. And, uh, but that kind of discipline, it's gotta be, I mean, I don't know. I'm, I'm awful about a copy paste developing at this point because it's just like, Oh, it's quicker. Let me, I found this snippet. That's good enough. And it's, but you don't always learn, you know, I don't think it was deeply learned the syntax. You don't learn those things. So, I mean, has that changed me now that we're, we'll, we'll go back to kind of where, how you got to where you are right now. But has that even today, like, do you code any differently? You think because of that experience, have you found yourself kind of how you even pick up things now? Do you immediately go to the online source?

Do you find yourself doing trial and error first? How, how did, how did you think that that impacted how you do things today? Uh, I think it impacted, yeah, I think it definitely did impact how I do things today. Uh, believe it or not, like, I actually still do write down code sometimes. Like, I have a game of notebooks right here at my house and I just constantly write notes. Uh, maybe at work, I can't do that all the time, but I can directly come home and study stuff and write notes and things like that. But, uh, when I do run into problems, uh, it's interesting because I think that I have a certain way of Googling stuff. I get to just like find the answers. And I think it's because how you mentioned earlier, we did have a, in my program, we did have a offline repository of a stack overflow, but that only lasted, uh, June 2016. Uh, yeah, June, 2016 and I joined the program in like September for like, you find ways to like look up stuff and things like that. Wow. Yeah. And even as you said, the modules is interesting. If it's not part of your cached module pool for node, like you don't get to use that library that parses strings or talks to this sort of database that you just have, you have what you have, which sometimes constraints are freeing, at least in my, where I think it's sometimes you're more creative when you have to work within constraints. But at the same time, I'm sure there's times where you just wanted to solve the problem with the easy way and you couldn't use the easy way. Yes, definitely. I remember one time me and a friend in the last mile, we actually needed a node module and the node module, it wasn't even that big. Like it was literally like one, like 3000 line file. And then me and this guy like literally took like two days of class time because we were able to get a printout of the node module and we just like copied it. We just like had a hand type it in, like the 3000 lines of code, like, oh man. Wow. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about when you exited the program.

So you got out, your sentence was done, you're finished the last mile. Was that it? And did they kind of also steer you towards something else? I think you told me you got into a coding bootcamp. Can you tell us kind of what was the first things you were doing when you were finished? Oh yeah. So, uh, I actually finished my sentence, uh, October 26th lesson. So, uh, when I got out on October 30th, because I was like making phone calls and things on October 30th, I had an interview for a boot, uh, web development bootcamp called General Assembly. So, uh, I went there and I did an interview. Like I don't really have nothing because you know, I didn't have to post them out here. I'm four days out. What I did have though was three shots of my capstone project from last mile, because each, each chat, like you have to, like the chat culminates in like a final capstone project. So I just literally had printouts of the projects that I did inside and I took those to my, my interview. Oh, that's, that makes sense. That's, that's clever. That would, that would be fun to, uh, uh, show up with printouts at an interview. Yeah, but I mean, you can't have a GitHub repo, I'm sure. So it's not like I can't just point people to my source code. So that's the, the one creative way to show you, show your portfolio. So it's at least, it's good. You were able to do that at least. That's great. Yeah. I had to do something and it was good that one of my projects was actually, uh, since I knew I was getting out, my second capstone project, I actually did a, uh, like a web development portfolio and I just threw out types of projects in it. So like, they got pictures of that. And you, you said you were in the program for, remind me, a year or two. How long were you in the last mile before you were out? I was in the program from 2016 to like, like September, 2016 to September, 2018. Mind you, we had like, uh, you know, it is prison, things happen. So we had like a few months out there, a few weeks and so.

But for the most part, it was mostly continuous that whole time. I think you had told me that was something that, you know, it was a big part of your day too, right? I mean, it wasn't like 30 minutes a day. This was a big portion of your day and something you looked forward to. Oh yeah. It was definitely a big portion of our day. I can definitely say like, mostly everyone in the program, you know, like once you get in the program, it takes a little while, but by like that first week, that's how you're thinking about like, you're dreaming about code, like you're waking up at three in the morning, writing stuff down and like, it's just like real sad and like you wake up and they're like, Oh, no class today. Wow. And it was, I think you said this was three, four, five hours a day, wasn't it? So you probably have more coding training than I do after 20 years in this business. Oh, there's like a six hours a day. Six hours a day for a couple of years on their off. That's, that's amazing. Okay. So then you did the bootcamp, right? So you were in general assembly and then tell us kind of how in the world did you bump into the pivotal? Oh, wow. So, uh, I told us that is, I had my interview with a general assembly. Uh, it took about like seven days. Uh, I got a call back from them saying I was accepted program and they mentioned that I needed a Mac, a MacBook and actually didn't have a MacBook. But, uh, before I got out, my wife bought me a laptop, but it wasn't a MacBook and I couldn't really do like a lot of the code stuff on it. So I actually reached out to the last mile to see if they had, uh, any like MacBooks or anything like that. And they actually were, they were looking for someone to donate a laptop to me and they actually found this amazing woman. And when I went to go meet her to pick up the laptop, like she's like, well, yeah, just meet me in my office. It's right here in Santa Monica. So I went out there never having like ever heard a pivot or anything like that. I went in and she just drove me around the place and it was, it was amazing. It was actually my first tech company I ever stepped into, uh, just make a note of that. Oh, and then you came to the, you came to, uh, one of them with all the, uh, the free snacks.

Yeah. The Santa Monica, right? Yeah. Yeah. It'd be very nice. That's a, that's a good first experience. I mean, it's right by the beach. I mean, man. But yeah, so, uh, uh, I got it, I got it, I ended up getting a laptop from this woman at Pivotal. And then like, we went off to learn. She was talking to me about, uh, my experience in the last mile program. Uh, he moved, he, I heard that I was going to the boot camp and things like that. And the next thing I know, a couple of weeks later, uh, she emails me and she's like, Hey, send your resume to this guy. And I didn't even know what it was for. I just, I just sent, I just sent the resume out. I was like, okay. And how, how, how long ago was that? Uh, wow. So I actually met her in December of 2018. Uh, I sent my resume, I think in January of 2019. And then I had a, uh, interview with Pivotal for an intern position, which I, uh, passed the first one of the interviews, went to the second round and made my intern for the summer at Pivotal Labs in Santa Monica. All right. So it's been like a, like a, a year total since this. Yeah. And then, more or less. And then after your internship that we, we offered you your full-time, so you're a full-time engineer in Pivotal Labs, right? I did get an internship and, uh, at the end of it, I did get a full-time offer, which I readily accepted. Awesome. So, and you've, yeah, you've done some, some good projects so far and things like that. I mean, would you look back at all this? Have you kept in touch with any of your last mile kind of colleagues and, and kind of shared your progress with them? Uh, yes, uh, like, there's about, like, probably over 70 last mile alumni out on the street. I'm in contact with some of them. Um, and even people still locked up inside. Uh, I'm in contact with them, uh, as far as, like, shooting books and resources, any core

technologies I heard about. I'm like, hey, you know, try to get them to think about it because some are getting out. I'm sure it's inspiring. Yeah, there's some really good coders out there, you know? Yeah. They're like, oh, you got to have all you got there, you know? Just kind of see what I'm doing, see what's out here. Kind of get them ready for when they come up too, so. So, one of the, one of the things I, uh, I, I talk with people a lot, or I should say I talk with them, they, they, uh, they, they get all uppity about is like, we have all these, uh, existing programmers, uh, and we want to do, we want, it's, it's hard for us to basically train them in a new way of doing development or, uh, doing, doing whatever, doing releases more frequently or whatever the case may be. And, and like, what, what, what were like, like somewhat when, when you started working at Pivotal, like, uh, I imagine that it was slightly different than the, the programming you'd done two times before back in the RPG times and, uh, and, uh, at last mile, but like, how do you, I don't know, what, what, what, what can you like tell these people about like, uh, it's actually okay to, to, to retrain people to do programming? Like, like how did you kind of set up a curriculum for yourself to like, just like learn new methods of doing things as, as they came along? Oh, wow. Well, I don't know if my method is recommended, but yeah, uh, when I came in the Pivotal Labs, it was definitely, it was definitely an experience. Like I came in, you know, as an intern and as an intern, like you're just treated like, you know, regular self-engineered, just owning a project on a different page, you know, uh, I get on the project and we have, we like, luckily we didn't have Colin, like, we started and they're like, oh, Larry Collins, I was, I'm like studying all this stuff. And we get on, we had TypeScript, which I've done JavaScript, but I haven't done TypeScript before. And there was like a lot of generic and stuff that I just like, was like, whoa, what, what is that right there?

So like, like I took it up post, I was like, when I see something I don't understand, I wrote it down and I like literally went home at night and I just like studied until I understood it or at least understood enough of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you have to have some, uh, curiosity, I guess. And, and it seems like that's the thing I'm always thinking about, like, uh, making sure staff and our people are kind of keeping their skills updated is, uh, in general, it seems like people who are programmers, they were originally curious about programming and interested in learning new things. So it's almost like you've got to, uh, set up that environment where they're given the chance to chase down their curiosities and, uh, and kind of like you were describing, like dangle confusing mysteries in front of them, like, like what generics are so that they can go solve. But do you feel, I mean, it's great. I'm glad you brought up Coté, cause we saw that at SpringOne with the Home Depot talking about their program of just kind of offering coding bootcamps to employees and things like that. Did you notice Demetrius, even in the last mile program, people who are completely new to programming and found it intimidating, is there something that helps them get over that and said, yep, anybody with a, you know, sharp mind and curiosity can be great at programming. Did you experience, did you see people who were a little scared getting started and then really figured it out? Oh, yes. Like, uh, in last mile, the facility I was in, we definitely had people who were new to programming. We had people that were like, had been locked up for a long time that were actually new computers, so, like, they had, like, two-fold to learn, so, but, uh, yeah, it's just, like, they could, uh, they studied and just, like, kept going. Like, it didn't really get to them that it was taking a while. Some people pick up those, like, times and others, like, like, you're good at it, just keep going, you know? Absolutely. But it's a good, hopefully, you know, your story as well as, you know, other folks in that situation. It's cool that there's a lot of us who aren't traditional programmers, right? And again, I'm a political science major who pretends to be a developer now and a marketer.

So, everyone comes from different backgrounds for this stuff, and I think it's pretty cool that you don't have to have been building operating systems from age four to get into programming. Like, a lot of people can do this for fun, for whatever, and even if it's a little scary, you're, you're showing that, hey, people even in, in kind of constrained environments with offline access and certain things can, can be super successful with it. So, I mean, that's, I don't know, that's really inspiring to me. Oh, yeah, it is, it really is. So, so, as promised, back to the role-playing games that you mentioned earlier. Yeah, let's get back to the good stuff. So, so, after all this time, do you still program role-playing game things? Is that, is that something that you, you play around with still? Oh, when I got out, I did. For like a while, I'm about to actually get back into it. I did actually take a little break to go over a couple new languages. So, I'm about to get back into it and use the stuff I've learned. And, and so like, like what, what kind of, what, what kind of games are you planning on making? Like, are you going to, do you program them or do you play like a tabletop ones or like, what are, what are the games? Oh, actually, just like, I like programming 2D, oh, things like old school Zelda, you know, like top-down RPG. Oh, yeah, yeah. I never really got into a 3D game, but that's because I can't use graphics programs to save my life. Right. Well, yeah, yeah, that's, that sounds like it's fun. Well, we'll have to, you'll have to send over once you get, you get some programmed up. I'll have to check them out. That, that'll be fun. I'll definitely send you a link. You know, after you've learned, you know, about whatever generics are and how to, how to program things better, I'm sure the gameplay is going to be phenomenal after that. You're not constrained to just visual basic. The world, the world, the world will be your tops down oyster. Everything will look great.

Well, well, thanks. Thanks for being on. I, it was, it was, it was good, good talking with you. And also now I have some games to look forward to. Do you have a, if people wanted to like, do you have like a, a Twitter account or anything like that, that people could check up on if they're interested in more? Oh, Twitter account. No, actually I don't. They'll just have to search you on the internet for GitHub or other spots to, to follow you online. I'm on LinkedIn, Demetrius Robinson. That's D-E-M-E-T-R-I-O-U-S. You can find me there and my contact information. Awesome. That's the, that's the common denominator. Most everyone always has. That's right. There's always that. All right. Well, well, great. Well, thanks again. And as always, this has been Pivotal Conversations. If you want to get this episode and all the other ones, you want to download them directly. You can go to soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations. And also usually every Thursday when we have an episode, or I should say Thursdays when we have an episode, you can find it at pivotal.io slash podcast. And with that, we'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye.

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