Champagne ideas and caviar dreams

Published October 15, 2017

Writing great code isn’t always the only part of our jobs. In order to impact changes on our teams or the business, we need to be able to persuade others to buy into your ideas. This could be in the form of migrating to a new technology, process or even adding a new feature to a product. In this episode, we are joined by Shirley Wu to help us discuss how we can best sell our ideas and make an impact on our teams or clients.

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Ryan Burgess
Welcome to a brand new episode of Front End happier. This is episode 44. And we are joined by Shirley Wu, who has joined us to help us discuss how to sell an idea that will impact changes on your team or the business. We are fortunate enough to have Shirley back again, she joined us on episode 38 to discuss data visualization, and is just couldn't get enough in his back again. Surely Can you give a brief introduction of who you are, what you do and what your favorite Happy Hour beverages,

Shirley Wu
Chris, thank you so much for having me back. Hi, I'm Shirley. I'm back again, because I was promised scotch. And I wasn't given Scotch last time, so that I was promised scotch. And there's no scotch, so I just need to come back a third time.

Ryan Burgess
I feel like we just agreed to keep that trend going. Like you're just never going to get that scotch.

Shirley Wu
Keep coming back. I was actually really excited. I think I was doing live stream earlier today. And I was like, Okay, I'm gonna go to friend happy hour where we drink and we talk and I think there's gonna be

Ryan Burgess
really, really good scotch like, it has to be like the best bottles only?

Shirley Wu
We can figure that out. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. My name is Shirley. I'm a freelancer. I do software engineering and data visualization. I'm, I'm actually I don't think I'm fully qualified to talk about selling ideas.

Ryan Burgess
Come on. Everyone is selling yourself right now.

Shirley Wu
Yes, so as a freelancer, I have to talk and work with a lot of clients. And so I am semi qualified to talk about this topic. And my favorite Happy Hour beverage is some form of whiskey. But after that, some form of stouts or porters are great, also. Thank you.

Ryan Burgess
Right on. All right. Let's also go around the table and give brief introduction of today's panelists. Brian, want to kick it off?

Brian Holt
Yeah, my name is Brian Holden. I'm also disappointed that there's no Scotch brought.

Stacy London
I'm Stacy London. I'm a front end engineer at Atlassian.

Augustus Yuan
I'm, I guess, this year in front end engineer at Evernote.

Ryan Burgess
And I'm Ryan Burgess. I'm a software engineering manager at Netflix. And each episode of the front end happier podcasts. We like to choose a keyword that if it's mentioned at all, in the episode, we will all take a drink. What did we decide today's keyword is convince convince? So if any of us say the word convinced we will all take a drink. All right? Well, let's start off. And I'm interested to know what types of things you've found useful for having to persuade others in your career Scotch scotch. We get surely we pulled that rug out from under.

Brian Holt
That's actually funny. When I when I started one of my jobs, I wanted to get a different sort of server launched. And what one of the engineers Tony's like, Look, if you take a bottle of scotch down to this SRE, knock three times, say the password, then you can get it out. It's true. I showed up with a bottle of scotch, and we were able to get the server. That's actually true.

Stacy London
This has happened I didn't do this. But they had a like a job a while back, it was the same same deal. Some of the infrastructure team, like if he needed something, a server stood up faster. And they had like a queue of tickets that they were working off of like, someone's like, yeah, you just go back there with a bottle of scotch and like, get your ticket to get out of the queue. And I was like, This isn't fair. It's not fair.

Ryan Burgess
And does it come down at that point of like, who has the best Scotch bottle? Yeah, might have to happen. So I guess a good thing is have alcohol on hand. Bribery, bribery. Yeah, that that's true. I've also found useful like sometimes it literally just writing out pros and cons of why we want to do something like if it's adopting new technology, or whatever it may be is like just actually putting the pros and cons together, why we'd want to do that and getting others to weigh in. That's sometimes effective. Sometimes it's a pain because you it just takes longer and everyone has an opinion. So it's really hard to get a consensus. I don't think you're ever going to get a consensus. Maybe

Brian Holt
I've I've now convinced two companies to switch to prettier. Relatively. So if you're not familiar with prettier, I'm obviously a huge, huge fan of it. I think it's an amazing piece of technology. It's a form matter for JavaScript. So you just kind of write your code, you don't have to worry about indentations or anything like that. It just kind of does all that for you. And I'm a huge fan of it for a bunch of reasons but namely that I don't have to think about styles at all anymore. It's just taken care of, for me, well, if you ever want to get into the most pointless argument in the world, just bring up tabs and spaces and like people formatting their code that everyone has an opinion and they all suck, right? Like universally, like I have acknowledged that everyone's opinion, including my own sucks. And so that's why I like prettier is it just removes the conversation like it's just no like, no it doesn't come up on PRs anymore like none of this is comes up because it's just not a possibility anymore. You could

Augustus Yuan
say you don't have to convince.

Brian Holt
So when you when you try and come in and tell people that like I'm taking away all of your formatting options, people kind of revolt. And this is, again happened to be both at Netflix and at LinkedIn. And so the way that I found to convince people cheers is not necessarily to tell them that like I'm taking all their options, like that's not a very persuading argument, rather, is to go in and just say, like, sit down in this conference room, and I'm going to show you why you want this right. And I will like walk them through the steps of like, pasting code in and then saving, and it just shows up out of formatted. I walk them through, like, hey, like, look at all these comments in your prs. Not all of these go away so that you don't have to fix something, I don't have to make them, right. I'm just like, show them the immediate benefits of doing it rather than trying to, you know, convince them cheers. Cheers.

Ryan Burgess
You chose a really bad word.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, actually, to kind of go with that. Forever. No, we're in this. Same actually. So we also move to prettier but same medium of that's been helpful. But for a different topic, we moved off of Google Web Toolkit to react or we're slowly moving off of it. And the way we did it was really, we just like, we like actually did it and then showed that it, it really makes a huge difference to just be able to show someone like what it is. And I think another part of it is you it shows you put in like the effort to like be like, hey, like, I sincerely believe this is gonna like make your lives a whole lot better. And you like, put in that effort. I think it like really shows like a good impression on them.

Shirley Wu
Yeah, so seems like numbers and benchmarks and like how much more improvement, how much more improved, like their lives are. So I remember something similar, I pass full time job, which was that we were trying to figure out how to move where to move from from backbone. So this was like 2014. Actually, this is what I would go from backbone. And we were trying to figure out because at that time, react was still, like semi young. It was like about a year old, I think. And so we were like, should it be react? Should it be Angular? Should it be? I think we also looked at like meter and all of these others. And so we like wrote out our protocol list and really got everybody like all the front end engineers into a room we like talked through it all. And it's kind of like you said, there was like gridlock because we're like, oh, there's like pros and cons in all of them. And we don't know, like, which kind of went on for a few weeks until, like, we were just like, at that time, I think the part of the application that had the most kind of like spaghetti event kind of thing. But the backbone was the part with a visualization tool. And I was like, You know what, I'm after these like weeks of discussion, I think like I'm, I'm kind of leaning towards react and like I think they might like because I think flux had come out around them. And I was like, I think react and flux might actually really help solve this very specific backbone, spaghetti event. thing that's happening that's giving us all these bugs. And so I'm just going to like, you know, prototype and convert a part of our code over from Batman to react. And then once I got that going, I don't know if it was just that people were like, Oh, this is so much better. But I think it's just that momentum of like getting that codebase set up and like kind of starting that motion. And people were like, well, it's too late to go back.

Ryan Burgess
But also, you're able to prove it to you that hey, this works. This solves our problem. And you can also evaluate how long it took you Right? Like it's like, was this easy? Was this difficult? Is this a viable option? Yeah, sometimes just doing it is really that's very useful.

Shirley Wu
Yeah. So I think I came back in like a week or two, maybe two weeks and was like, Hey, here's like, you know, the core part of the problem we had, and this is how I solved it. And I actually quite like it because XYZ and then that's how we move to react.

Ryan Burgess
Very nice. I know we have Ryan anklam To thank at Netflix for moving us to react. I think he just shoved it in. Pretty sure he decided like a feature. He was like I'm using React and just did it. And then like people were like, Oh, I think there was a bit of a revolt at first, but then people started to be like, Okay, this actually makes a lot of sense. I don't know if that's the best idea of just shoving it in, but it did work. So that could be another option to

Shirley Wu
the whole like ask for forgiveness. Yeah, like that. Yeah.

Augustus Yuan
Oops. Yes. There's a new framework,

Stacy London
like the asking for forgiveness thing. Reminds me of For how, like I've attempted to do responsive design at multiple places where, like, that's been a conversation I've had at multiple companies, like, Hey, we should probably make the site responsive. So just like works on some smaller devices, and it's nice and having to do a lot of convincing a lot of like, why this is something, you know, people are like, Oh, it's gonna take like, 12 times longer, you're like, well, not necessarily and trying to show using, not necessarily my opinion, but I would like, you know, essentially just be like, I'm going to copy and paste Brad Frost's presentation about responsive design and be like, Brad FOSS says this, he's an industry leader, like, we should probably do this and use those techniques to like, convince them of that. But some of the cheers, cheers. Even to this day, like even in 2017, that's still something that I'm trying to, like, sell to, is responsive design responsive. And I'm like, Oh, my gosh, it was introduced so long ago, like, why are we still having that realization? But

Ryan Burgess
yeah, I mean, I remember the first time selling it to, and it was at an agency that I was at, and like, we were actually getting hired to build mobile sites. And like those mobile like, dot ends, that, you know, whatever, like the actual mobile specific sites. And I guess they were a little bit WebAPI at the time, like they're pretty heavy JavaScript. But still, same point, we were thinking that director at the time, him and I actually just built a prototype to try and sell up like, this is what we should be presenting to clients is responsive design. Let's not make two separate websites, a desktop and a mobile website is like we can build this to scale. And even that I remember, it was a huge battle of This was an amazing demo. And they're like, Yeah, but why would we sell them on one and said, Well, we could sell them on building two sides. And it did take some buy in. But eventually, it was something that we got. And I think having that demo was really, really useful. I think we've heard a couple things of migrating to code bases are adopting new technologies. Are there other things? What are some things that you actually have had to persuade others on teams or in the companies that you work on,

Stacy London
I had to do a lot with like trying to sell like single page application architectures, to companies that were, you know, had very heavily invested in a certain other, like, traditional stack of stuff. And in for that some of the big companies that I worked for, something that I learned over time, this was like a maturity thing. Like originally, I was just like, why are they listening to me, just trust me, like a note saying, and then realizing, like, oh, but they also really trusted Gartner research. And they also really trust these, like, research companies that publish these, you know, papers, and, and I was like, oh, so if I maybe start referencing that stuff, maybe my voice will be heard. Better, and it did. So it was like this, leveraging the community and leveraging resources, and not just being like, trust me, I know what I'm saying. It's kind of like others also are saying the same thing. And, like providing that, that evidence.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, presenting more than just your own opinion, is actually backing that up with something else. Yeah, like that can do it?

Augustus Yuan
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's been three years. But speaking for, like younger audiences, those who are probably going through career fairs right now, definitely a lot of persuasion and selling of yourself. And like, it really helps to, like do a lot of research. And like, I remember, like, when I was going to career fairs, like, had to do like tons of research and find ways to, like, persuade them essentially, convince them. Sorry, I had to drink just thinking about it. But yeah, but it does take a lot of effort to like be able to, like convince people I thought it was persuade for a second, but persuade people that you have the skills that they're looking for in the jobs that they're you know, tailoring for like internships or like new hires, straight from college, like, it really pays off to like do the research upfront to see like, what skills that they're looking for and telling yourself to say, hey, I have skills

Ryan Burgess
that's really good too, is also shows that you care about the company's going to as well it's not just like, just give me a job. That's all I care about. So your office for

Brian Holt
me? Yes. Do you know who I

Ryan Burgess
did that work in your right out of school?

Shirley Wu
Yep. Actually, that's a really great point that I really didn't think of, which is, um, so kind of going off of that, I think, showing that you care, but I remember when I was like, going through the career fairs and stuff, I was in a little bit of a weird situation that like I was a business major and I had kind of switched to computer science in my last year in my senior year. So I couldn't even do the convincing the persuasion etc on just cheers to that right. And, and it wasn't even about like caring about, about the company and doing research about that anymore. And it was a lot about at the end of the day, when I got the offers for those, those like software positions, it was about my passion, and like how excited I was to do software and like kind of having that story of know where I was which was I thought I was gonna do investment banking and realizing that that wasn't for me, and then switching over to computer science and like, how much more I love that, and that kind of story. And then people really, really appreciated that. And I think that's probably something similar. I mean, I'm not saying this is gonna work. But like, I think from what you were saying, I think the having the like, this is how it was before. And this is why I'm really excited to go forward with this, this new thing or this direction. And so that excitement and passion I think really worked out for me,

Ryan Burgess
you stand out more to like all remember that versus like someone who's just like, I went and did software engineering, you're like, okay, cool. But tell your story of how you got there. And because you haven't worked yet. So it's like, that's difficult to do. It's just for someone to like, invest in you, because that's what they're doing. They're investing that. Yeah, I think she's got what it takes. And I think you probably stood out that way, a lot better having a bit of a story like that.

Shirley Wu
And that wasn't even trying to be like, you know, using that to my advantage or anything. It was just like, yeah, that was and I wasn't because some people are like, Oh, maybe you shouldn't highlight the fact that you only have like, you know, two semesters of coursework. And I'm like, no, like, this is something that I really, really care about. And I'm really excited. I really want to get into this field. And I think that

Stacy London
yeah, yeah, maybe since this is a shift from like, personal promotion, but back to kind of like a suffer argument about like, if we should do X or X or Y. I had this very recently, where we were having this discussion about how to approach building out this API. And they're like, Stacy, what are your like? What are your strong opinions about this? And I was like, Well, I shifted it cuz I was like, it's not really me. It's not about me, I was like, I, the argument that I'm making is for the the user experience, how fast this page is gonna load how it'll affect the user. Like how how this will help the person using our thing and having empathy towards that. That's the argument I make. It's not me like, I'm not, it's not about me. And I think shifting the argument when you're talking about those things, that way. It's it's it builds up to the across the team, like I think it makes things less about, you know, egos in the room, as opposed to like doing the right thing.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, you shifted from being like, No, it's not just my opinion, or this is what I'm like, looking out for is like, what's the best product? Or what's the best thing we can build for our user? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like that. And building empathy. Yeah.

Augustus Yuan
Great, like, freeze, like having like people, like do it from another perspective, essentially, because it's so easy to be like, Oh, this is just what they want. But it's like, well, what are they doing it for? Yeah. And that like really changed? Yeah. And

Ryan Burgess
I think another thing is also just sharing, like the trade offs, because I think that even if you're talking to like a new framework, which we always talk about, hey, if you're on Ember, and you want to move to react, like, how do you convince the who does that? Yeah. But there's trade offs for it is like, that's gonna be a costly trade, it's gonna take time, but maybe you're faster because of it, maybe it is a better user experience, it's more performance, there could be a lot of reasons why you would it's like, but there's also reasons not to do it. And I think it's also being aware and sharing those reasons up front. And just kind of outline outlining that a lot more upfront,

Shirley Wu
I think that's a really good point. I remember when I was at a full time job, a lot of my, um, so the people that I needed to convince were usually product managers. This damn product,

Augustus Yuan
I thought for a second, are we choosing to product?

Shirley Wu
Like, why are you drinking, and I think that's a really good point. Because to them, it was a matter of customer needs for us and our time as resources, and then balancing the decision between having us as resources being dedicated to our customer needs or wants, versus basically sometimes when, because some of the things that you're talking about are more kind of technical, like technological. And so it's not about so it's kind of opposite of what Stephanie was saying, it's not as much about customer stories or needs, but like kind of about, like, you know, if it was switching frameworks, or I think there's actually a very specific memory that I have, which was one time, we wanted to have a oh my god, an engineering story. I like don't even remember these phrases anymore about Sprint's, but I think it was an engineering story, we wanted to do an engineering story, because it was our, I think, like layout algorithm was taking really massive amounts of time to calculate. And so my teammate at that time, had gone in to talk to the product managers, and they will and the product manager was like, Okay, well, tell me why we should, you know, do like we should commit your time into this engineering story about improving the layout algorithm. And she had gone in and was saying, I think, I think she was she came from I'm not more of a technical background. So she was talking about how interesting the algorithm would be, and how, how, yeah, how interesting and fun it'd be to implement. And that was like, oh, and on top of that, and and that comes back to what you were saying about, kind of selling it from the users perspective about and then I remember adding in that it would also really speed up performance. And like this layout, algorithm change will speed up performance and with overall be a great user experience. And that was the kind of thing that like, as soon as we said that the product manager was like, Okay, done, let's do it. And so I think that's also a understanding the priority of the person that I'm trying to persuade, or the group that I'm trying to persuade, and like, their priorities, and like, what they're basically trying to balance, because at the end of the day, I think the selling these kinds of things are a form of negotiation. And with negotiation, I think I dropped out after two weeks from that class. But in my negotiations class, I was taught to first understand the priorities and motivations of the person I'm talking to, and then use that to my advantage to convince them out.

Ryan Burgess
It's a good way to end it, though, I like that that's a very good point is that you're leveraging what they want, and just using that to your advantage. So if they care about the user experience, which most product managers do, or if they want to move some metrics, you're like, This is how it could improve the performance. Yeah, like that.

Brian Holt
I think something definitely keep in mind when you when you are trying to persuade someone to to do something your way. The waterfall method never works, right? It's it's, you can never go into a new company and say, this is all shit. We're gonna spend two and a half years we writing this in another language. we've all tried it, and it doesn't work. And everyone's gonna look at you and roll your eyes, like, yeah, like that never works. Like it never works to convince people to like, rewrite, you know, whole technology stacks or whole products or anything like that. The term rewrite should just be thrown out of your vocabulary and less than a very, very extreme circumstances, right? You're going to be much more successful and, you know, agile sprint based, more towards piecemeal migrations, right? And it's even better if you don't tell people to migration, you need to avoid that word, it's a dirty word for so many of you. And what you do is you say is like, yeah, like, we're gonna add this new feature. And in the process, we're just gonna, like, modify the existing code to use this not piece of shit framework and use this new one.

Augustus Yuan
That sounds so much better.

Shirley Wu
I used to do that were. So I was at fault for really liking to refactor code is because I just really hate after a while, there's just so much baggage to a codebase. Right when there's like so many people working on it. And so, I was as really bad at this, but I like would, you know, refactor small pieces of the codebase. And at first, I would tell people that like, Hey, I'm going to refactor, like, I would tell the PMs and the overall scrum team and be like, Oh, I'm gonna refactor blah, blah, blah. And after a while, I started to only tell my teammates and then just exactly like you said, I'd be like, on top of a feature I just secretly refactor. I mean, the important thing is that my teammates knew what I was doing what I was about to do, and that they agreed with it. And I think that's also another reason another lesson I learned, which was that I need to get buy in from my teammates for what I'm doing. And that's really really important.

Ryan Burgess
That is super Yeah, yeah.

Augustus Yuan
Unless you're writing ankle.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah. I'm sure he I don't

Brian Holt
know. No, like I think there's a time and a place for so I just launched and shit. I just say like this happened. Like get with the program here. Like it make sure it's not gonna get you fired. But like there's a time and a place. There's a

Ryan Burgess
time and a place I think we're It is sometimes someone has to make a call and go for it. And I know actually, when I was at Evernote, the team I was on they weren't using a CSS preprocessor at that time, that was like something that it was hard not to there was just so this, the CSS was craziness that dealing with it. And I remember being in conversations where it was like, Oh, well, maybe eventually we'll do it or which one should be used less or Sass, and I just finally one day was just like, fuck it and just like did it and you know, implemented a bunch of it in SAS. It was like a few new features. And I started to just pull some of the old legacy code base, just get us to where it should be. It was like, the legacy stuff I didn't care about as much I could just like throw it in a SASS file and it would it would transpiled and we're good. But it was one of those times where I felt like yeah, this conversation has gone on and on and on and on. And it's someone's just got to plate the bullet and just do it so I think one like evening, I just sat there and like moved everything.

Stacy London
Yeah, I just put the style winter stuff in like Yeah, and it didn't have to convince people I guess there wasn't like an argument against that. Yeah. But I was like, I just, I'm just doing it. Here's the PR, like. So that one, I guess is not the point of this podcast. I didn't actually have to talk to people and be like,

Augustus Yuan
No, I totally agree. There is like a time and place where you should like, talk to your team and get buy in versus just like the conversation. Clearly, it's never going to get done. So right, just do it. And then that conversation becomes so much easier. It's like, hey, it's done. It's like a yes or no kind of thing. Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
exactly. And that's exactly what happened. And actually, the engineers on the team, were all happy with it. But it was more just getting buy in from the director for some reason he needed to buy in, and it didn't really make sense. So it was just like, Oh, screw it. Now. It's done. It's ready to go.

Brian Holt
Yeah, one. And I think Stacy brought up a salient point that just open up er, and say, like, look, this is ready to go just click Merge. And we're done. Right? It's

Ryan Burgess
how you got how you got that in at Netflix. Yeah.

Augustus Yuan
Actually, like, whenever we're moved to prettier, that's literally what happened. Someone just did it. And they're like, because we were always like, oh, what configs we want to use, I was, honestly was just like, what, what are we arguing here too? Yeah, exactly. Well, and that's the other thing, like once the PR was I was like, Okay, well, now we just we know what to tweak. Yeah. And it's just like, change this config. It's like, big deal. It's like, Yeah, nobody cares.

Ryan Burgess
The conversation after the exactly, I think, yeah,

Stacy London
a good technique for that to to be like, here's the PR, hey, if we find that this isn't working for us, we can over time, adjust it. And we don't all have to have this like massive discussion about every config possible for it up front. And you can throw out the word agile, let's be iterative kinds of things, like we can justice over time, it's all gonna be okay, calm down.

Ryan Burgess
Have there been times in the past where you've like really messed up and would have changed how you tried to convince others cheers.

Brian Holt
Think we kind of talked a bit about it just kind of in multiple places, but I would be sometimes more selective and the information that I would share with different people, just like you don't need to go to the, you know, the director of product and get into nitty gritty technical details, because then they're gonna get overwhelmed and say, This sounds like a lot of work No, right. Rather, you can get buy in from your team, like was mentioned. And then just go to the product and say, like, we're building an extra bit of padding into the sprint to make sure that we have high code quality, high, quote, quality is rewriting everything really quickly.

Shirley Wu
So I'm gonna add in a little bit about freelancing because I knew I knew you had previously asked about what was the question about freelancing,

Ryan Burgess
you sometimes have to persuade a client to either make changes? Or maybe it's just even getting them to go with you, right? Like your your, get them to hire you?

Shirley Wu
Yeah, so I think I was mentioning this to Ryan earlier. But I'm, I'm an extremely fortunate position that most, if not all, of my clients come to me because of my portfolio. And so they come to me because they have a specific case, specific use case that they want to build out. And they come to me because they like my style, or what I've done, and they want something similar. So in that sense, in the overall scheme of things, I usually don't have to sell a client on a project, I think the only thing was the only time that was different was I did something for Google, and they wanted me to do something with their search data. And then in that case, I had to come up with a proposal and I think I came up with like, four. So I did that with Nadi who I do a project called Data sketches with and she and I came up with, I think, four or five different proposals, ideas about what to do with the search data, and then they picked one. So in that sense, I'm not as I don't think I'm as experienced when it comes to like pitching and selling a whole project. But after you know, selling that, and getting the contract written and getting started, there are the tiny little details or the like that iterative feedback of you know, sometimes getting, getting feature requests or being asked to do something that Because oftentimes, the clients I get aren't necessarily technical. And so then that's why they're coming to me for my skill set. And in that, in that time, it's actually easier to solve them on a change a technical change, if they asked me for, you know, something that they think is going to be really, really easy. And I say, hey, like, it seems like a trivial amount of work, but it actually takes XYZ and I kind of list out the steps and might take and like how much longer it might take and a lot of times with clients because sometimes I'm I think our so I'm billed hourly and sometimes I'm billed on the project, but especially if I'm billed on the hour, like a lot of times they'll be like oh in that case that like that's okay, I don't want you to spend your time on that. So a lot of times it's kind of like with contracts, especially because I do a lot of short term contracts. It's kind of like either if it's hourly or If it's by the project and neither have a deadline, I say, hey, I can do that for you. But is that your priority? Because if it's not, then I should actually be doing this other thing that is actually your priority. So I think that's, that's a lot of it. And I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier about understanding the priorities and motivations of the other side. And so in that case, it's kind of really trying to understand what's the most important things for them out of this project. And then, going off of that,

Ryan Burgess
I also really like the way back from the start there, you said about your portfolio, I think that's really, really useful is like, you've literally have this portfolio of work of this is my style, this is what I do. And and in a way you're selling yourself, just by having that work of portfolio, it kind of reminds me of when I look for tattoo artists, I'm going to them for their work they do. They don't really have to sell me on it. It's like I've seen their work, it's great. I want them to do that work and not style. And so that's kind of goes the same thing with like, your work is someone's like, Charlie does this really well, this is what we want, let's go to her. And so I think that's really cool. I think that is a great way of selling yourself. Yours is a perfect example where the portfolio site does a really good job.

Shirley Wu
Thank you so much. And yeah, for me portfolio is just like an aggregation of all the things I've done, because I've like, random things over the internet of like projects, you know, in different domains. And, and I have my GitHub and I have talks I've done and like workshops I've given, so it's kind of just an aggregation of everything. But it's, it's funny to talk about that portfolio, because I actually want to say, if anybody's looked at my portfolio, it's actually very like pink and blue and pastel Li and like, really, really feminine and kind of really girly. And I'm, like, really happy with it. And I really like it. But actually, before I launched it, I was really scared because I was like, Maybe I won't get any clients because it's so girly. And people might be like, Oh, she's not professional. But I was like, You know what, I'm really happy with how it looks I'm and, and so I kind of launched it, like on a leap of faith. And I remember there was one client that said, hey, if we found your portfolio, we liked it, because of the color palette and color palette and style and everything. And that was a moment when I realized, like how happy and one that made me super happy. But too, it's kind of like what you're saying about my style that it actually eliminated. Like, it means that I don't have to work with the people that don't like myself that don't rise, or bluer, because that's pretty much an expression of who I am. And if they don't like that, then they won't contact me. And they don't have to deal with that. As would

Ryan Burgess
you want to do something that's not like your style, you're getting pushed in this direction that you're like, I don't really want to do that. So you're you're making it clear. And that that's great. That's cool.

Brian Holt
Yeah. One thing I wanted to bring up with, like regards to the portfolio, you can kind of take that same line of thinking and apply it like internally to a company like so if you join a company, and then immediately say, like, I want to come in and rewrite everything they're gonna tell you like you just got here, hold your horses. And like, it's super tempting to do, especially if you come in and you see that, you know, everything's on fire, you want to say I want to put out the fire, right? But sometimes you just need to, like, get some cred first, like, get some products underneath you and then realize, and then also get to work with the code base and really find out what's right and what's wrong with it. So sometimes it's better to temper your expectations going into something and wait before you actually try and sell them on whatever big plans that you have.

Ryan Burgess
I like that too. And I think it's also talking with your teammates, I think of that perfect example is like when you join and also understanding what are some of the things that they've been wanting to do it, maybe they all wanted prettier already. And they already wanted to move to all these things. But you can also understand why they haven't and not could help rather than just being that guy who comes in and it's just like, we got to change everything you got to rewrite, this is terrible. What are you guys doing? Like why? And there's there's probably a lot of valid reasons why they haven't yet. Maybe they actually do want to, but they just haven't had the time or someone hasn't championed it. Maybe you can be that champion, but it's really understanding why Yeah, be the

Stacy London
observer when you first start somewhere new, like, be the observer. Talk to people find out the history, get to know like the product managers get to know the devs like figure out like why things are the way they are and then and then maybe someone's just defeated. They've tried too many times to push something through and it didn't work, then you can be like, what did you try? Figure that out? And then be like maybe there's this other angle that you've got that you can you can help try and continue to push it through and be be the advocate.

Ryan Burgess
What happens if you've tried many, many things at a company or with a client? At what point do you stay at the company or go like what do you what does that barrier like what makes you think about that?

Stacy London
Oh I could I guess I could speak to that because that was basically the reason And then I had left a company several companies ago because I had tried to push for doing like more of a modern web development stack more like modern platform bring in more focused developers. So not just like a full stack developer, but But start having roles built out for front end, to try and change the whole landscape of how they did development. And that was so hard, because it's a very big company. And you can try very hard but you know, you're just like, one tiny piece. So as much as I tried and tried to convince like, it just wasn't happening, and like, how many years do you stay at a place where you feel like, you could be doing good work. But if you can't, at that point, I was like, I'm not important enough at this company to convince a shift in the entire way this company does something,

Ryan Burgess
especially if you feel really strongly about it. Yeah, shut about it. There's probably some other company or team that is doing that work. And so even to Shirley's point of if they wanted her to do some very corporate cold colors, and not these, like warm pastel colors, like that might be enough for her. But again, it's not really my thing. And knowing that is actually really good is like, what do you want to do? And that might be driving up like, I've tried, I've tried to get us on the right track, or in your opinion, that's the right track. It probably was in that case. But yeah, it's like, don't don't stick around too long. I think at that point, I don't know what the magic number is, though.

Stacy London
Yeah, I don't either. And I think it's just more about your happiness, too. Like, if you tried multiple techniques, and it's not really working, then. And maybe at that point, like, it's your happiness, you're spending 50 4050 hours a week doing this thing, like, you should probably be happy. And there's a lot of companies out there that probably will be doing the thing you're advocating for, you just have to find them.

Shirley Wu
I actually sue on the one on the part about when do you decide to leave. And there is a really, really great piece of advice that I got. And it was it was basically when I was deciding whether or not to leave my old job. And the piece of advice was, always make sure that you're not running away from something that the reason that you're leaving is not that you're running away from something, but rather that you're running to something. And I thought that was such a great piece of advice. Because like, Sure, there's a lot of things, a lot of times, there's probably something about your job that really really sucks. Like, overall, it's probably a really great job. There's like that little minute thing that like, you know, takes you off. But like, as soon as I heard that about, like, you know, stick it through, if, like, Yeah, stick it through, until you find that something that makes you so excited that you need to leave and go to that next thing. And yeah, that's like something that I've been keeping with me. It's such a great piece of advice.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, cuz even in that point, you might not like something about the job, but make sure that you're not going to the next job that has the exact same No, yeah, that does happen. So yeah, it's like, you're so unhappy. You're like, I just need to change, and then you end up really not changing, you're just going to another place that has similar problems. Yeah. What advice would you share with others to or who are looking to convince their team to make a change to here?

Augustus Yuan
Just do it now. Honestly, I think, lots of like good things. But I do want to, like, bring up like two points that Brian and Stacy said, which include like, you know, especially well, I guess, if you're coming in, like be an observer for a bit, you know, really understand what the core problem is. But assuming you've been on the team for a long time, like really like, it helps to show that you put in effort, but then also, like have a plan. Because actually, I didn't get a chance to say but what hasn't worked in the past one time was, I think, a developer, a developer on one of our teams who wanted to do something. And he actually did make a PR, it was all kind of signed off. But then there are all these open questions of how we go about like, oh, like, you want, like, how do we get this localized? Blah, blah, blah, like really, like kind of have those things kind of thought out? And makes like that discussion a lot easier? Because if you have like all these open questions, like, it's really hard to get like people to buy in and stuff. You can't just like do it. Yeah, show

Ryan Burgess
that you've thought thought through all those angles? And like, like exactly what I was saying at the trade, think through, like, oh, yeah, when you have that PR you could put all that information in there and show that you're that this is a thoughtful thing. I'm not just shoving this in.

Shirley Wu
And I guess also going off of that, be ready to own it, right? Like once that PR goes in, and people are gonna start coming to you being like, well, blah, blah, blah, doesn't didn't work out for me like what like, or, you know, I think he said something earlier that reminded me of like, every single time Facebook changes their layouts and people just kind of revolt and then they start getting used to it. But like something but when the people are rebelling, you just have to be the owner that is kind of like addressing all of the questions and all of the anger and kind of championing it. forward, it's kind of hard, but it's a lot of work. But if it's something that you really believe in, then I think it's quite worth it.

Brian Holt
I'd say pick your battles. Some of them are not worth fighting and don't find all of them at once. That's so true. Yeah, like, don't be, don't get in a land war with Russia. And then that sort of thing, right? Yeah, like, if you have a bunch of things you want to change, pick the most important one. And or pick this the easiest win, right? Those are kind of the two things I usually optimize for, like, what can I win quickly, or what's going to be the biggest win, and then everything else can kind of just come later,

Stacy London
be via communicator to like, if you're going to make a change, and maybe like a significant architectural shift and something, explain it to the team. And then just like, constantly communicate about it, like, Hey, I'm leaving for a week on vacation. This is the current state of where this is at. This is how you need to run a command to do the build process. It's like if it's in flux, or something like you're changing how people are going to work with this library, or work with this set of things like, just make sure you're constantly communicating that out and be like, I know this doesn't work right now. I'm, it's in progress, I will get it working by the end of next week. In the meantime, this is how you do something to do what you need to do, especially if you're in like distributed teams where like everybody needs to torque on this library. If you're making big changes to it, you have to make sure you're really communicating that well. I think that's, I think that's something that is missing from a lot of deep, deep engineer types for like.

Brian Holt
So when I when I launched prettier here, whenever it fails, the build process, it actually says, You didn't pass prettier. Here's a wiki link that shows you what you didn't do. And the first week I had one of the backend engineers that had no idea even worked on our code base, say like, thank you for putting that there. Because I didn't have to talk to him. I just went read the docs. And I was done. Yeah.

Ryan Burgess
Your name there even. But while you would have just probably sent him that same link, he doesn't have to get blame. It's literally just here. This is the information. I really like that. I'll echo all the points that everyone's made. I think those are really helpful. And I think another thing just sometimes some you have to be bold and champion something I think Brian kind of said that a little bit. But sometimes you just have to put yourself out there and really be bold and make a change. Don't wait for someone else to do it. Cool. As we wrap up the episode each episode, we like to share pics of things that we have found interesting and like to share, go around the table and share pics for this episode. Charlie, what do you have for us? Hey, Sue,

Shirley Wu
I was seeing about this earlier. And the first one I have is kind of like self congratulatory, but we had d3 unconference earlier or last weekend, I think and it was, it was really fun, really exhausting, but also really fun. And I think a lot of people seem to have had a good time, or I guess only the people that had a good time told me that. But um, I just want this community to kind of be aware that there is such a thing as d3 unconference where we get together annually every single year in San Francisco for two days. And we talk about all the things to do with d3. And in the wider spectrum about data visualization and how it does with like other frameworks or how it does in like neural nets, or a lot of whatever the community wants to talk about, we talked about, and it was a really great time. So that's my first pick. And the second one is, um, I just finished the Stormlight Archive, like a few weeks back and the third one which is oath Bringer is coming out and sometime in November, and I'm just really excited to go to the book signing by Brandon Sanderson. So that's my second fig.

Ryan Burgess
Great, Brian, where do you have

Brian Holt
two picks, one of them is size limit. It came out this week from evil Martians. It's a NPM package. I love built processes, as we've probably well established previously. So what size limit does is it actually tells you what the size of your like your projects going to be? Geez, it and it just kind of like you can put like budgets on there and things like that. It's a really cool piece of technology. Super excited about that. It's from the same team that did post CSS as well. Nice. And then my second, it's from Emily Haines and a soft skeleton. Emily Haines is the lead singer of metric. So this is her more solo album, and the latest albums called choir of the mind. And I'm listening to it all the time. So you should definitely check it out.

Stacy London
Metrics are good. Yeah, one of

Brian Holt
my favorites.

Ryan Burgess
Nice. Stacy, what do you have

Stacy London
to fix? Always a music pick. So music is oceans by valus Alps. It's just such a like, happy summary track like I went. A friend of mine was visiting me last weekend and we like drove up to dinner. Do a wine tour and wine country and we drove back I think we listen that song on repeat the whole way back California hills and like it was just very picturesque and it's a great song. My second pick is an artist that goes by the name people. His name is Mike Winckelmann. He's actually from my home state, Wisconsin is from Appleton. He posts something almost nearly like every day, his Instagram feed is, is phenomenal, very inspiring someone who's just like really working to get better at their craft by just doing something every day. So I really appreciate that. So the link will be in the in the notes. Nice.

Ryan Burgess
Gases. What

Augustus Yuan
do you have? Yeah, I have two pics. One is images dot guide. This is like a website that Addy Osmani recently, like, opened up. It's like a free ebook on essential image optimization. Yeah, I thought I haven't read the full thing but it looks pretty, pretty good. And I'd like the domain images stock guide Wow. So that's my first page. And then the second pic is leet code.com/articles Not just lead code.com I don't know how or actually you can just navigate from the nav bar but I really suck at Tech interviews and like, there's like lico coms articles like have very in depth. Like there's the problem, but then they give you like all these different solutions, and they go very in depth of how to think about going about the problems. I like really struggle with tech interviews. So I thought like reading like the solutions that they have is like super, super helpful. Like, they'll tell you like tricks or like oh, this is like a trick you can use for like string problems and stuff. So like someone like me who really sucks at these. I think it's like really helpful

Stacy London
or someone like everybody. Yeah.

Ryan Burgess
You're not the only one. That's fair everyday.

Brian Holt
Yeah. All right,

Ryan Burgess
I have two picks. My first one is a music pick. It's old, but I found myself listening to a recently a while I was doing some coding was the social network soundtrack, which was done by Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. Such an amazing album, like I kind of forgot how good it was and just found myself that one was on repeat for a while really good, so definitely something to add to your playlist. And my second pick is a Netflix Original called American vandal. It is hilarious. If you've watched anything like making a murder the keepers or listen to the podcast cereal. It's basically a satire to all those. So I don't want to say too much about it. But like the watch

Stacy London
the ball I'm sold if it's like making a murderer.

Ryan Burgess
It's about a high school kid who draws penises or spray paints penises on a bunch of cars, faculty members cars, and yet they go into the hole like, did he do it? It's hilarious. So I highly recommend it. I'm not done the full series yet. But I'm about halfway through and I think it's hilarious. So definitely check that one out American vandal. Before we end the episode. I want to thank Shirley for joining us. It was a pleasure having you on here. As always. Second time on here. You so

Shirley Wu
much for having me. I'll be looking forward to the scotch and the third time.

Ryan Burgess
We definitely order some scotch. Where can people get in touch with you?

Shirley Wu
Oh, yeah. So my portfolio website is xyw.com. Same exact thing for my Twitter. I am now in live coding on Twitch. Archiving everything on YouTube. GitHub, same basically everywhere, same handle.

Ryan Burgess
Great. And I think the last time you were on it was you were just about to do twitch. Like I think like that was one of the first ones.

Shirley Wu
Yeah, I think I had just set everything up. And I was just about to Yeah, I think I was just I was still thinking about it. Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Burgess
Well, I'm glad that you've got some out there.

Shirley Wu
It's been great.

Augustus Yuan
I've watched some there. It's actually really cool to like when you like have a problem, and you do theory. It's pretty cool.

Shirley Wu
Thank you. And I think they're really, really great. Cool thing is that like people actually helped me debug. And it's so much faster because like there's obviously like, I'm like pretty confident and like d3 and SVG and all of that. But like, the other day, like there was something with promises. And I'm like really bad with promises. And like and share helped me debug through that. So people helped me debug people teach me about Yes, 2016 and it's been a really amazing, great time shares. awesome

Brian Holt
to see I

Ryan Burgess
think share also taught you the difference of Latin con. I saw that tweet. Grace. She lives in St. Louis, I believe. Okay, yeah.

Brian Holt
We have budget. We'll have to fly her out here. Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
we need her on an episode. That's for sure. When we were if you ever go to St. Louis. Yeah, we need a conference in St. Louis. Yeah, Strange Loop isn't doing loose. All right. That's a good one. Let's go to

Stacy London
the States.

Ryan Burgess
Need a Budget somebody to sponsor us to talk about Yeah

Brian Holt
pretty sure Jem would just like rip us all apart. Oh man, Jem, on the side of the road.

Ryan Burgess
All right. Thank you all for listening today's episode we'd love to hear more about stories that you've had to do with convincing people cheer. Tweet at us at front end ah, any last words

Stacy London
convince