Hi! This is the Daily Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps.
Now, today I want to talk about software developers and mere mortals
okay so today I want to talk about sorry what was that
Oh what what this shirt what this whole thing this whole shirt come on right
actually the attitude yo I just got this yesterday sandy one of our designers has
been putting out designs so quickly that we started to do t-shirt design so we
got a bunch of designs on threads this calm which we're testing out and we also
got a few app related ones on Spreadshirt which we're going to put on
our website eventually and this is the newest one and so far we've sold one of
them and I'm wearing it so anyway yeah I think I think it's really cool and wait
today I want to talk about software development or software developers in
general you know I get yeah sometimes I talk about software development like
it's not that important like so I think and the reason is that is that I myself
as a software developer you know I I think I do like a lot of guys out there
do a lot of you know developers out there where we code an app but we think
that the code and the product itself is enough and then you put something out on
the app market and it's not enough so there's a whole new set of skills that
we have to learn in terms of you know keyword marketing you know advertising
design how do we get things out there how do we do the social media promotion
and all that kind of stuff but you know I think software development is hugely
important in fact I love doing the coding side of things it's almost like I
have to force myself not to code you know I get it calls a lot from clients
and/or prospects I guess and they'll say like yeah they'll tell me their idea
whatever they'll say but the problem is I don't know how to code and I said well
it's not really a problem that's that's a choice right anybody can learn to code
right it's not it's not like superhuman thing but you know
I do joke I do joke a lot sometimes I'll say I'll say here like I talked about
software developers and there are two types of people there's software
developers and there's mere mortals right so how did you when I was working
in the like when I worked contracts and stuff you know talking to my developer
friends we would you know when I refer to somebody who doesn't know what but
the code is I'll say well you know they're just they're just a mere mortal
so they don't you know you're like you talk about something that's technically
too advanced or somebody they'll say well so-and-so is having trouble doing
this Oh we'll just tell them to FTP on to the server and all the size of what
you know they're mere mortal they don't know how you know how that part works
and it's you know which is really condescending and very snobby but you
know gets Vega but I'm guilty I did I did say you did say that sometimes right
is I think that being able to code makes life well it can make life a lot easier
right so and I'm not saying that you do it so
when somebody says hey or do you think I should learn to code my answer is always
yeah yeah I think you should she least learned a little bit right it's on you
have this book so your books upon books you know everywhere everything you need
to learn how to do code wise there's a book or a wiki or a or a blog or
something like that your people like the the mere mortals the mere mortals think
that you know the coding languages are not for them they think it's too
complicated I could never learn that and I think the same thing about playing the
guitar right I don't I see somebody playing the guitar and I
think god I can never learn to do that although I'm sure yeah they would say to
just pick it up and start strumming and you know get a book or take a course and
get a tutor or whatever right so it's um you know and it's I wanted to tell you
guys a story about um you know it was this was years ago I was working in an
investment bank and and you know we we work in a development team so we'd like
it was a bunch of like a cluster of a gym desks together if I go on this one
floor and you know we would work on projects so we would go down to the
different departments to meet with the stakeholders or whatever project we
happen to be working on right every so often they get called because of some
support issue so you know one day I get somebody comes at me and because I
wasn't anything at the time they say Eric can
you go down to talk to such-and-such and you know this department they've got
this Excel macro that just stopped working for no reason right can you go
down and investigate it okay so so I thought yeah sure and I went down and
met with the person who uses this Excel macro report thing right and they didn't
investigate it that much because you know they're mere mortals I can't help
myself so some you know they didn't know
anything about ODBC connections or or macros or where the macro code was or
anything like that so you they would just run through the steps um they would
do the same thing every day so when I went down there I said can you show me
how this works what it is you do in a place they show me the process when they
would use the run this report it would took them like three or four hours each
day it was like this big report it was really important right so and what would
happen is it would get like a like a spreadsheet would just show up on a
drive one day like a an Excel spreadsheet right it was probably FTP
there but they didn't know that so uh so we show up on this drive every day and
they would go and open up the spreadsheet the XLS file and they would
copy out all the contents I think of the second sheet and it would paste it into
this other worksheet workbook that was created them for them by a developer
right and it would paste it into the first sheet they would click a button
and run a macro and it would do all these calculations and put it everything
into another sheet and then they would go through without doing anything in
between they click another button it would do another calculation and paste
it into a third sheet and then they would click the final button I would do
a bunch more calculations clear the sheet and send the results to the
printer it was sent as a result of the printer and then clear the sheet the
next step was the guy would get up walk over to the printer take this the you
know I were five or six sheets of paper with awful hangs on at the grid and you
would go in and he would open up another workbook and it would key all these
values in right and the first thing I thought was I don't understand why you
do that why do you why do you go to the printer why don't you just copy and
paste it from this sheet over to that sheet right you know the whole thing
could be automated but boy you have that step I couldn't understand he said well
that's just that's just the way it works that's why it was developed that's the
you know well it goes sheet and you can't copy from there
because it's no longer there when the macro finishes and I looked at the code
and sure enough that's what it was doing by it was it was doing the calculation
and it was setting it to the printer and then it was clearing the sheet and I
couldn't figure out why I would do that the only the only two reasons I could
think of is one it was some sort of practical joke like the guy thought you
know these guys are such jerks I'm just going to do this in whatever the
developer or number two they told them exactly what they wanted and he said all
right what that's what you want I gave it to them right so it was really
strange this whole process so so I investigated the issue and it was it was
easy and basically it was there was another map drive that something gets
saved - that was no longer Maps all I had to do was map the drive and bam
everything worked again easy right but then I went back to to my section the
developers and I was discussing that with them and I said do you realize that
whole process I mean with just a little bit of code I mean we could spend half a
day or a day on that and we can move it from a three or four hour task to a
twenty second task right there were no manual steps in between except for you
know manually keying stuff in you know I mean everything could have been Metis
they didn't have to open it up and copy it in they could have just if they knew
where that drive look is what's everything could have been automated
they already had macros in place it was just bringing all those together and I
said we could just you know we can remove you know three or four hours of
this guy's time and one of the developers said to me is it Erica I
don't think you should probably tell them the senior manager or whatever of
that department because it would be a huge time saving right and as a
developer that's the coolest thing if you can find way to trim up trip time or
make a process more efficient then you're just leaders like a superstar
right so that's some friend of mine said don't do that this is
this guy's job it was I mean it's kind of seems silly now because everything is
automated and everybody's losing their jobs because of some sort of automation
but back then it was like he told me that and I was like okay I actually felt
kind of bad it sounds pretty young too at the time and I see suddenly and this
is this guy's job and I said well surely they'll get him do something else is I
don't think they would I mean there's redundancies everywhere don't you know
don't do this to this guy so as much as I'm ashamed of it I did not do anything
about that but I see instances like this all the
time where you see processes or things that are done that could be automated
like we taught to make things all the time you if we do something too many
times a day then we think how cool you know what API is could we link into you
know what kind of stuff can we do you know how could we use all the tools at
our disposal you know we have so much more tools that we did not back then you
know because we have you know Internet API we have a lot more internet API is
that we used to have we have you know Google Docs Google sheets Google script
all this kind of stuff and just learning how to do a little bit of code it can
make your life a lot easier I mean I see a lot of people with their jobs are like
I copied something from this screen and I pasted it over this grade from this
field into that field of this field into that field this field in that field I
see this kind of stuff all the time and it's remarkable that that kind of stuff
happens where if they knew how to write like a little bit of JavaScript maybe a
little bit of shell script they could think and automate a lot of that kind of
stuff so anyway I think coding is really cool but I think it's like you know in
if you're hiring developers like to do your app I think if you wanted a code to
do your app I think that's fine but it's going to take a long time but you know
if you do learn a little bit of code then it will help you in the future
anyway long story I'm sorry used to say hey I love being a software developer
you know I think it's exciting I'm you know I love the new stuff that comes out
right when if ever it seems like I'm putting down software developer that's
not the case I love Cody I love just getting stuck in
there sometimes and the danger is that sometimes I get get stuck in some code
for days and then completely ignore everything else business-wise so I try
to you know try to limit myself sometimes I tend to just
slam my fingers into a drawer so yeah I can't code anymore and it forced me to
delegate things so anyway that's it for today this one goes out to all you
software developers out there that's it for today I will talk to you guys next
week