So you guys don't want to bring up any of your dodge coins or any other things that you're starting up with?
Still in the bottom there.
How about next month?
Let's check next month.
We'll release a bit of episode.
Let's do the ICO.
Do the sprint.
Yeah. Hello, hello, hello.
Welcome to episode 12 of the Metacast podcast.
This is the podcast about podcasting.
And today we have Rona Knahtani and Guanyang from the software Misedventures podcast.
In their podcast, Rona Knahtani and Guanyang bring in experienced folks from the tech world.
And they discuss stories from their companies, problems, Misedventures that they have had, as well as their career progression and topics like that.
It's been one of my favorite podcasts over the last few years.
We didn't pay you to say that.
So just wanted to clarify to the audience.
I wish I was paid.
I mean, if you want to pay, I'll talk more about you.
It's too late. You already said it.
And with me here, we have Ilja.
Hey, everyone. I'm a co-host of the Metacast podcast.
Nice to, well, I guess nice to have everybody here, guys.
Because I can say nice to see you.
But yeah, welcome, guys, to our show.
It's really a big honor to host you here.
I discovered actually your podcast through Arnab.
Because he's like, listen to these guys.
They have really cool vibe, the jokes and all.
And you also have some amazing guests.
Some of those guests actually either heard their name, heard them talk, or even talked to them myself.
So yeah, it's really great to have you here and learn from you from your misadventures.
We could have called our podcast the podcast to misadventures.
And we could ask people about what went wrong with our podcast.
Hey, that would be a good name.
I like your name.
I like Meta too.
Except we have to say on record that we're not affiliated with Meta.
Did I come from anything like someone complaining?
No, I would just joke around.
I mean, if we get to a point where somebody's complaining about it, that would be nice, I think.
That's a good problem to have.
Yeah. All right.
Do you folks want to start with a quick intro of yourselves?
Hey guys, my name is Guwang.
I started my career in data engineering and then started slowly to go up the stack.
So more into ML. And I met Ronek, actually at one of the book camps I did for data engineering.
And then if in fact since these days, I'm doing a little bit consulting and then trying to work on my own like small internet business ideas.
Yeah, folks, Ronek here and thanks for having us guys.
I love the t-shirts that you have.
We should probably do something like that.
We just got them.
Yeah. Nice. So similar to Guwang, I'm an electric engineer by trade, but somehow got into software engineering.
I always believed that at least during my undergrad days that I couldn't write code and I wasn't cut out for this field.
Somehow I ended up here.
Guwang mentioned both of us met at inside data engineering program.
Guwang not a boot camp.
We spent some time there and that's where my love for infrastructure kind of grew.
And I worked at inside for a couple of years and then joined LinkedIn.
And over the last five years, I've been working on computer infrastructure there.
And these days leading our Kubernetes initiative.
So our map is also a civil engineer.
It seems like I'm the only one with actually computer engineering training.
But I am the only one who doesn't work in the engineering.
Yeah. I'm a civil engineer by education, but I got tired of building bridges about three years into the four year course.
I was like, okay, I'd like software more.
Are you still a real engineer?
Yes. I think that was the job at me because I did operations research, which was called industrial.
You can't see the air quotes, but industrial engineering, which the undergrad called it imaginary engineering can't really fault them.
So just a bit of, I think, backstory back when we started the podcast or we were brainstorming, starting the podcast in October.
Ilya and I were like, okay, we're going to get at least 10, 12 episodes scheduled in.
So let's figure out who we want to invite.
And I think Ilya, you got like four or five people that you were listening to all the time.
And I got four or five podcasters that I was listening to all the time.
And we sent out invites to or like reached out through Twitter and email and all that.
Whatever we could find. And this is back in October.
So I first got a straight rejection.
The first one.
The second, the other two people didn't reply.
Actually, the other three people didn't reply.
And Ilya kept getting like, yes, I'm interested.
Yes, I'm interested.
And then eventually, I think in February, Ronna replied to it saying, hey, sorry, we didn't see that email.
We love to come on.
And I was like, yes, finally.
Glad to be your first win.
And sorry about the delayed response.
We need to improve on that alertly.
At least me, particularly.
They're all good, all good.
We'll get into all that.
So do you want to talk a little bit about what the software, misadventures podcast is?
Why did you decide to do the podcast together?
Let's start with that.
This was, I think, somewhere of 2020 where everyone was starting a podcast.
And all of us had a little too much time at our hands.
And actually, I've been a podcast listener for eight years at this point.
I think I first started listening to podcasts in about 2015.
And I still love podcasts in general.
And I was thinking about a podcast where we talk about technology.
But if you're more in depth, then what I was getting at some of the other forums.
So I reached out to going out at the time Austin as well.
Three of us actually started the podcast together.
And when we started discussing what the podcast should be about, at least the initial theme was, let's talk about misadventures.
Because there is a lot that we learn when things don't go as planned.
And that doesn't get talked about very often.
And while this was the topic, the main motivations where there are enough people who are much smarter than us have had different experiences than us.
And in some cases, just have a lot more tenure.
And we want to learn from them.
One of the best avenues I've found to learn from people is through listening to podcasts.
But at the same time, we wanted to be in a position where we could ask these questions.
And we should more specific to our own interests instead of questions someone else was asking.
So it became kind of an excuse to get really cool people to talk to us.
And people have an extremely kind to say yes and spend some time with us.
One of the other reasons was we wanted to get better at asking questions.
This is something that I've admired a lot in many podcasts that I listened to.
I'll just throw out one name like Tim Ferris.
He's the one I've listened to the longest and the quality of questions he asks or I think Shane Parrish from the knowledge project.
And there are a few others and I love when these guys go deep into a specific topic or are able to pull insights out from the guest because I don't think it's easy to give the guest enough room to express what they're thinking at the same time navigate the conversation.
I've loved this art of asking good questions and it's something that we wanted to get better at.
And the third thing was as we're having these conversations, we wanted to make sure that others could learn from what you were talking about.
We want to be the dumb people in the room who can ask stupid questions and say, hey, this doesn't make sense.
Please tell us more. I think many people feel that way.
I mean, I'm not sure about you guys, but I've always felt weird raising my hand saying, hey, by the way, I got a question and this question is pretty dumb and I don't want to ask that in front of 100 people.
But in this forum, we just wanted to be comfortable doing that.
And as we were asking these questions, we want to make sure the conversations you're having were accessible to others too.
Initially, it was more like, hey, let's just start a podcast and I was thinking of starting it myself.
And I was like, ah, starting it with others would be a lot more fun.
Like you guys are doing it together and I love working with other people in general.
And going in Austin and I, we've known each other for, well, at this point, seven years, eight years.
Austin's dead, he left us. So maybe two or five, six years.
I reached out to these guys. I just pinged them.
I was like, hey, guys, thinking about this idea, what do you think? Somehow I have no idea why both of them were very excited about doing this.
So that's how we got started. I'm curious, what was it like for you to get your first guest?
Nobody knows you, right? Nobody knows about your podcast.
Podcast doesn't even exist, right? What was the process of getting the first guest or maybe the first three guests?
When we decided to start the podcast, we actually didn't even have a name.
We just knew what we wanted to talk about at the time and the kind of guests we wanted to bring on.
We started indexing on the people that we had been following in tech for a while and wanted to reach out to them.
And obviously all the things that you said, the podcast did not exist.
We didn't have a name, no website, but we decided to reach out anyway.
So we reached out to three or four people just describing what we wanted to do.
And if they would be interested in talking to us, I was in Boston at the time on vacation.
And we were going from the airport to our Airbnb.
And I got a response back from Kelsey Hightower.
Wow. And I'm sitting in that car right next to my wife and like, holy crap.
He's responded and he's saying, yes, now we got to figure it out.
We scheduled it, I think six weeks after we got this funds in those six weeks figured out what the name should be, what the website should look like, what the logo should be.
And that kind of acted as a motivator for us to get things done on time.
There were some nose as well, like we reached out to some people who said no. At the same time, people have been very kind enough to respond not as delayed as we respond it to you.
So sorry guys, that's how we got it first guest.
Not everybody who listens to us is from the software world.
So Kelsey Hightower is a big deal.
Let me just put it this way.
One of the many things I like about working with Ronik is the lack of shame.
Did you reach out via Twitter or via email?
I think it was Twitter, right?
I think I reached out via email.
It took a little bit of searching to get to his email, but yeah, I reached out to his email.
Twitter too much traffic.
Yeah. That's it, because that was a huge fan of Kelsey Hightower for the longest time.
All of us, all of us.
We're right, exactly.
So then first I think when Ronik was like, you know, I'm gonna do that.
I was like, yeah, right. That's gonna happen.
Maybe let's wait until 10 episodes.
He was like, ah, you know, let's just try it now. Very good idea.
It was a great episode because we were very new, right?
We were just, hey, we don't know what the hell we're doing.
But it really just started talking about really interesting stuff.
And we just had to chime in.
It was a really nice.
I think it also set up your style of the podcast where you go deep into technical topics in that first episode.
I think you went to do lots of Kubernetes problems and things like that.
But also talked about talking in front of a conference in front of a lot of people, stuff like that.
It was really good.
And I think that said the tone for your podcast quite a bit too.
Yeah, for sure.
I wanted to ask a question about that.
I listened to that episode actually this morning.
So I have very fresh memories of that.
There he talks quite a bit about how the big company wants you to be in that square box that HR wants to put you in with your skills and your capabilities, which is not always representative what people want to do or what people are capable of doing.
And then he also talks about mentoring and how he really deeply loves and cares about people that he mentors, which was absolutely fascinating.
But then in between these two topics, he talks about schedulers and it's CD and all that stuff.
So my question is obviously people who listen to your podcast, I suppose most of them are in the engineering field.
But I would say maybe not everybody is interested in Kubernetes.
So if somebody does mobile development, Kubernetes to them is not as interesting, right?
So I'm curious how you are thinking about over the course of your podcast, how to balance those topics that are just universally appealing.
You talk about career.
Anybody can take advice from Kelsey on mentorship.
But Kubernetes stuff is very specific.
So some people would just be not interested.
So how do you think about that if you thought about it at all?
I think that's a great question.
And exactly to your point, I think it's a spectrum.
So on one end, you have podcasts like software engineering daily where at least how I used to listen to it is just look at the topic.
If it's not interesting or I don't find it relevant, I'm going to skip.
On the other hand, do you have, I think Tim Ferris is example, right?
We're just so generic such that you can read just doesn't even matter where you're working on.
There's always something that you can learn from.
I think to your point balancing that is super hard and it's a work in progress.
We're still reviewing trying to figure out who are the people that we want our listeners to be and then to kind of tailor towards that.
What we've been using is proxy of like using ourselves.
If it's something that we find super interesting, then we're going to have them on.
I think in terms of delving into the more technical stuff as engineers or as people in tech like product managers or something.
Usually even when you're on a hacker news just browsing, it could be something that's not exactly relevant to what you're doing, but if it's told or described in a way, right?
It's so interesting.
The point of the story is that I think it can be quite detailed but still be engaging.
So a lot of that depends on the delivery, but I do think that part of what we've been trying to narrow down is to find that framework.
I think on one hand you have too much detail on the other hand, you have these things are too generic.
But in the middle, it's sort of like these kind of frameworks that you can apply such that you can use that for other things as well.
Before recording the episodes, did you have a plan that we want to go into these areas for this guest or do you just figure it out on the field of the episode while recording what you want to venture into?
Every time we talked to a guest, we had an idea of what we wanted to dive into. In fact, when it comes to just choosing topics as going said, one aspect is we don't make money from the podcast.
That's not the intention. We want to continue doing it because we like it.
And that's why our interests take the top priority.
In some cases, some episodes are not enjoyed by everyone.
But as long as every episode has some people who really love it, that's good enough. And as long as we are having fun, I think that's good enough.
At least for us right now. So in that case, like when we reach out to people, we reach out to them with a specific focus in mind that I could hit this person super interesting for various reasons.
These are topics you would love to get into. So we have a high level idea of what you want to talk about.
If you took Kelsey Hatt, however, as an example, we knew we wanted to talk about career. We knew we wanted to talk about how he mentors people because he is mentoring people on Twitter.
Trains he doesn't know and he's awesome, by the way. And we also wanted to talk about Kubernetes because he played an huge role in making Kubernetes successful as it is today.
We start with that outline and that's how we go.
And then you can go talk about it's CD and stuff.
Yeah. Our poetry.
Our poetry, yes.
Yeah. Again, we don't keep a rigid structure when it comes to talking to a guest.
Just like here are the topics you're interested in, but something we learned through some episodes. So you don't care about going through each and every question that we thought about before.
And we also don't care about the ordering as we did at least in the first episode.
I was like, let me just go through with this thing and finish it on time and not make a fool of myself.
That was the goal, but at this point, we can just navigate it.
Yeah, that both sailed, making the fool of ourselves.
It feels very similar to ours because we kind of do some research and right now we have three pages of things to talk about, but we don't know how much of that will get into.
But it depends on the feel of the recording like right now, we'll venture into some of these and go deeper, maybe in some areas.
I think the one important thing for podcasters is to have enough things written up beforehand to be able to venture because some topics you bring up and abruptly ends or yeah, I did that find done.
Let's move on right. So you've got to have like enough research done. So you have lots of things to talk about in that.
So while talking about that, you did have three people in the podcast in the beginning and we were wondering how because with Ilya and me, we are always stepping on each other's toes sometimes in the podcast or sometimes somebody's forgetting to introduce the other person and things like that.
I wonder what that happened. So how about the past if I go in on.
An intentionally. Yeah, with three people that's going to be even more right, especially with a guest. You always had one guest at max, but let's say you have two people coming in. How did you manage all that?
I like it. I thought you were going to ask why do the other person leave. But okay, I see we're taking the nicer route. Actually, often the other guys my best friend. So we're all very good terms.
I think y'all's relationship is a bit similar. Right. So like I'm usually for comic relief and Ronnick asked the serious good very thoughtful questions and I just make my dog jokes to keep things light. It works out really well.
Is that what you're talking about in terms of the conversation itself? We're talking about prep and I'll do W up the work and stuff in the conversation itself. I was wondering like if you have specific things that you yourself are interested like Wang. Let's say I want to talk about this or Ronnick.
You say I want to talk about this or do you just write everything up and get the feel for the podcast and just go. So I really like working with Ronnick because have similar interests general interest, but at the specific stuff. I think it's pretty different.
He's background is longer infrastructures more lower in the stack versus my is higher. So ML application and really interested in the hacking things like that.
So I think that makes it a very natural split in terms of when we do ask someone who has experiences in different buckets. So that categorization becomes very obvious to us.
Yeah, one thing which I would add to that is if you can example of an episode for instance when we're prepping we usually write down topics at one point we would write down the exact questions to not that we would read it out but it helps us formulate our thought in the head before the conversation itself.
So what we use it is we would split out sections and one would be a lead by other person would assist. So in that case what happens is it's the responsibility of one person to drive that section forward.
And the other person can ask follow up questions if needed for example so that allowed us to not step on each other's toes start us one thing that we tried.
We have tried a different version of that sense where there are no sections split up that way but there are high level idea split up that way.
So it's still like okay this topic is something that going would cover this topic is something that I would cover, but there is no sequence at that point.
So what happens is when we are talking about it and when the other person feels this is a good time to introduce the subject that person would jump in take the conversation there.
But then one person is still responsible to make sure we go through the conversation bring it to a close don't go off on tangents way too much think of it this way one person's responsibilities to make sure you start at the source reset destination.
The second person can take you on detours and whatnot but it's that first person's responsibility to make sure you move forward.
We have a name for this we've been trying to do checklist since episode one but we failed to do that until episode 10 I think because we just get to excited and then we would go on all sorts of tangents once we call it an episode an entire episode we didn't talk about podcasting at all because we just got so excited about sci-fi must be a fun episode.
So yeah we had to read this is a bonus episode and I think there was one episode where the guest did not say their names all true.
So yeah we introduced a concept of check police check as in check Republic but it's also as in checklist so they are now is responsible for making sure that you stay on track.
Let's move on to the next topic.
Very good.
So I've been listening to your podcast as soon as they come in yours the indie hacker and Scott Hanselman's that podcast those are three like as soon as an episode drops I listen to it.
This is the ones that told you no right.
I love the indie hackers podcast I think it's amazing.
It's an honor to be named next to indie hackers and Scott Hanselman's broadcast so thank you means a lot right. Yeah we have our own favorite episodes and moments from your podcast we're not talk about that but before we get there I want to hear what are your favorite episodes what we're like some of those surprising or memorable moments that you have.
For me it's very obvious Michael Lynch he was also on the hackers do this fucking amazing he's just such a awesome guy like I want to be his friend he's very transparent right sorry so for context he could Google I think maybe five six years ago so he was there for like a couple years and then he left to into hacking.
And I love how he thought about it because he said a budget being like I'm going to try to do this for three or five years and then if I can make it happen and come back and do something else.
So then he just post these monthly retrospectives what did I do this month or project them working on super transparent and just reading through it is like taking you on like a journey of all the things all the ups and downs because for the first two years he made negative profit negative money for the third year the business really started to take off and it was a very surprising enterprise that came out of that as well so I think the subject the guy just amazing and I think he had pretty funny stories at the end.
It's not surprising that was my most favorite episode to in fact I heard that episode and then I found more about Michael he was also on the India hacker podcast at a different time so I went and listened to that episode so last year back story I was working as a principal engineering AWS but I had this each kind of going on like I'm in too many meetings and I'm not doing enough I love building things and I was not building enough anymore.
So that was already going on but your episode and I think there was one from India hacker as well the Daniel was solo episode he was a engineering AWS maybe in 2019 or something those two episodes inspired me that what am I waiting for right so I immediately went on a leave of absence in June last year took three months height around and figured okay I'm just going to take the lead and I left my job and then I think I actually seriously started working on stuff.
In January but it's been amazing so far so thanks for that bit of inspiration that was my top episode to that's a cool that is pretty awesome by the way I take courage to do that it's not easy courage and finances to I think of course.
You know I think that I really like the quote from the simnical as the lab he is a philosopher and a trader hero blacks one and anti fragile and a few other books I think he said something like that the worst addictive thing in the world is the monthly paycheck or something like that it basically makes you hooked onto that salary that you get every month and you become complacent and stop taking risks and actually start doing things to avoid taking risks that's where complacency is bread.
Okay so now you have had enough time to think over I think sure so in general answering questions about what's your favorite X it's always very hard for me people to ask questions about what's your favorite food what's your favorite place in what not and I always struggle with that question because it's hard to pick one.
So before you get to that what's your favorite food place.
How much time do we got here.
I mean I love food by the way and I can go on talk about food I don't think your audience would be interested in listening to all all my weird food habits but in terms of episodes again all of our episodes were very different we learned something different from each one of them.
The ones that just come to memory right now Kelsey's episodes and start was actually the second one we recorded the first one we released the reason we recorded the second was we recorded one way it's Ryan and
I was a little bit worried about who was my colleague at length and I felt a lot more safer was recording it with him our first time and making all the mistakes but he was super kind of this time.
So Kelsey's episode we were essentially star struck and wanted to just get it going but came out to be a really good episode much better than what we thought.
The other one was with David Hengke of been at Lincoln for about five plus years at this point and David Hengke was at length and he was the SVP of engineering at some point where he led the reliability engineering org.
And he has tons of stories about LinkedIn from the days past at least before my time and he is an amazing storyteller I've someone is to know how to tell a story about tech I think he's one of the really good ones.
There are a couple of the episodes which was very hard to expect what it would turn out to be but we were super interested in the topic one was with Ashwin Kumar he's a close friend with Gwang and we talked to him about hackathons and pitching toilet ideas which was very different from everything else we did but the conversation was super fun.
The last one that comes to mind is the one we have with Kailash Nath he is the CTO of zero zero the is the stock trading company back in India.
His episode took a very different turn than what we thought we talked about absurdism or being an absurdist we talked about philosophy for 20 minutes we talked about how they run zero as a company with like 30 plus engineers running the largest stock broker in India and
the world by volume that was a very fine episode to by the way we just lost Gwang he there got tired of talking to us or maybe some internal trouble because his picture was getting pixelated before to it says internet I'm just going to pay him this is usual with
this happen while recording more than once more than once yes I don't know if he minds but I'll share it anyway so he's been traveling around the world he did this three four years back where he took 12 months off traveled around the world and liked it so much came back
worked as a machine learning engineer and decided to do it again and I think right now he's in Mexico yeah he's in Mexico City right now and when he's traveling he's living in Airbnb's or hotels
so at many times either the internet is party or there is some construction going on and otherwise some neighbor is screaming somewhere and making loud cooking noises or whatnot so we've did pretty much all of those at some point he was talking to us just before we started recording about that it's fun yeah
it's interesting you mentioned this starstruck when you interviewed Kelsey high tower I remember first time talking to him because we were part of the same org at Google working to Bernadier's and I was in a group picking with him
and he was saying some good ideas and I just think him on our internal chat I'm like Kelsey like can we talk and he's like yeah sure how about today at 4 p.m. or something and I'm like oh my god Kelsey right now is talking to me and for the first few minutes I'm like oh my god what if I ask dumb questions and stuff like this but he was just so so nice to me and I guess to everybody who he talks to
we had a bit of that experience I think our very first guest on our show was Brian McCollum who is the host of the Internet History podcast which was the podcast that hooked me on the listening to podcasts in the first place
I listened to maybe hundreds of his episodes and I love it so much he's like a dead speaker and he was the first person to say yes and you were like oh my god the interesting thing he said in the episode though is we ask him why he did he agree to talk to us we are nobody in a podcasting space and he just said that I know what it's like to get started I just said yes
because if nobody says yes how are you going to get started so I just want it to be nice to you and it came out great episode and all I'm not surprised to hear that people actually said yes to you
because you guys send the right energy and people react to that. Oh yeah it's incredible. It's been wonderful in how people are willing to help once you're ready to open up and ask how easy it is to get people to help you out it's been amazing.
For sure people are super nice. I do think even the code email that you guys send to us I assume you just similar area right for the other guy I think it was a great email. Oh yes.
You talked about with the why it just felt very personalized right because we get also spam emails I was surprised by how many people reach out either to place someone on your podcast or business stuff.
So it's really refreshing to read a nice email from someone who's also in the trenches. There's actually a subreddit and service right now I think called podcast guest exchange or something like that where you can put in like I am the host of this podcast and you invite me to other podcasts and what you're going to charge and all that we were like okay we're not doing all that we let's just send out personal notes about why we listen to their podcast and all that yeah.
I think it was by a guy who has a YouTube channel in Belarus and he was talking about how he never takes money for people kind of being on the show because he did it once and it was his weird guy it was a final discussion up until the point where he started to promote his stuff which ended up being some kind of scam and I think he eventually had to take down the episode and people like bitching to him why you didn't read this guy like he took all over my money.
So yeah. That's rough. That's rough. He was like oh, it never did again. So we always reach out to people who we know. So you guys don't want to bring up any of your doge coins or any other things that you're starting up right.
Still in development. Okay. How about next month? Let's try next month. We're really the worst episode.
I see you. I was driving today when I was looking at your logo which has always this line and triangle or thing. It's a mountain with the eye.
Oh no, you thought he was. Oh no, you think it's about to. Oh no. No, no, no, my first thought when I saw it was that this is a regular expression.
A regular expression. Okay. Okay. Wait, wait, why regular. It's like M or S inside that. So I don't have over things that you know.
Hey, who was the fabulous artist which we paid good money to commission this piece of art. It was our dear friend Austin.
We're thinking about how should we represent Miss adventures and because it's about tech, we introduced the curly braces and Austin works on the monitoring infrastructure team at LinkedIn and has been on that team for a couple of years now.
And he's like, how would a graph that has a blip because you know, like that's when things are not going as expected. So let's just put a blip there with an eye and like, yeah, works.
I like it. It's a very catchy logo actually. You're very kind. You're not. You're very kind. Too late to say too late to your dissent. He looks like a mountain or regular expression.
For me that blip is you know, like you watch a movie when somebody is dying on the hospital bed. Oh yeah. And they have this flat line and then they get can't reanimate it and you get the blip there.
That was my first association when I saw that. I think someone else told us this. I forget it was it Catherine Boston's wife or I shan't use my wife either of them told us it.
This might be misinterpreted with someone's heartbeat and someone the hospital for example. Yeah. And we were like, it's okay.
In a way that's what it is. Right. It's a critical thing in your software world that that kind of a blip is a problem open to interpretation.
Guang. Well, you were absent from this conversation. We talked a bit about you and your travels.
I like to study when now the buildings that I just didn't want to know you can't make this up. That's crazy. I was just talking about your travels.
And just this morning I actually read news about Amazon forcing everybody back into the office and how there was a huge backlash because people bought houses, moved their kids or whatever because they expected this to last.
Well, the company's made policies right that you could work in definitely from anywhere. I mean, I moved to Florida for one from Seattle, even though most of my team is in Seattle in California.
That's just curious. What do you guys just take on the remote work and how that you'll liberate it you or on the contrary, as the media feel worse like that work from home topic.
I think is what I want to talk about a little bit. That's actually one of my goals this year is to figure out where longer terms to the five years where do I want to be based off of.
I think exactly what you're alluding to right you have so much possibility. And for me, before I think I thought always the proximity to people like to friends to family is too important.
But then COVID made me realize like, oh shit, like you have to be very be very intentional about it. Honestly, the past cast is also the next way to catch up with Ronek as well, just like maintaining that friendship.
Obviously, it's better still to have friends and stuff in real life also be difficult if you have a girlfriend, right.
But I do think that there's a lot of possibilities for me. I realize my priorities are the food has to be really good. Hopefully a lot of Asian options, which makes a lot of places in Latin America difficult. And I really got into dancing, but chat, so type of a Latin dance, which then makes Asia kind of difficult because I don't think that's not popular in Asia.
And then also the third is like somewhere cheap, right. Cause I want to kind of work on like different small internet business ideas. So then I want to reduce my burn as I'm trying to figure out because I know that it's going to.
Thanks to Michael which kind of showing the way of like it's going to be pretty painful. I think the first two years, especially if you're not going to the VC route right that kind of ruse like US.
So for me right now, I think the top two choices, so Mexico City, I think has been great. There's also a lot of expats. So it's also easier to make friends with more similar experiences.
And then I'm thinking about going to checking out fall along for in Malaysia. Cause I think it's also very big city is very diverse. They speak English very well as well as Chinese, which I speak. And then the food is really good.
And then you're not planning to go to Portugal. I think people in the India hacker community would know what I'm talking about. But yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, you got super popular. And then now there's a backlash right because they got rid of the digital nomad of visa and things. The other thing that I thought was important to me is to be able to at least sort of speak the local language.
So then Spanish for me was like something I'm trying to learn, but then Portuguese me just like only if you go to Brazil, the accent is so different that's so I just don't know how I spent all that effort trying to pick up Portuguese. So for me, I think that was the reason.
Have you guys thought about going to different places other than Canada in the state?
Class summer, but we did want to go back to Russia in a couple of years, but after the Holy Crane situation, it's like off the table. Basically last year, we've been re-adjusting our expectations and just figuring out that you can't predict what's going to happen tomorrow.
So it's best to enjoy today.
Playing for the future became not a thing anymore. We moved from Seattle to Vancouver about four years ago now. So I have a daughter, she's 11 and a dog is actually right behind me. So she made lots of good friends and also it's not going to be easy to like just approve.
Well, we did it already once to her and we don't want to do that again, but we do like to go to new places like you. I love Mexico. I've picking up Spanish quite a lot too. And I think it would be nice to be able to spend the dry season there or somewhere else traveling around the world, but that's still at least 10 years down the line.
For now, last year we spent a month in Banff. My wife was working from there. I was basically hiking with my dog and my daughter the whole time was fabulous.
Sounds incredible. You know, pamphlets on my list.
There's good climbing there as well, right? Do you climb a chain?
I don't climb much, not like technical ones, but the hardest ones I did were rope climbing where there's already somebody has laid out a rope or letters are there.
It was beautiful. My definition of hard hikes became different after that.
And Ronik, you've been doing remote work since you got to Canada, right? How has that been like?
Yeah, it's partly remote work or work from home that actually made it much easier for me to move to Canada while still continuing with my team before COVID.
There was no company wide remote work policy. It was more of a case by case thing. And there were some people who worked remotely, but that that was done as an exception more than a norm.
And we had already decided before COVID that we would move to Canada at some point.
And I didn't know at the time whether I would be able to continue with LinkedIn or not in the current job, but with COVID again worked from remote policy became an easy thing that transfer was pretty straightforward.
And because we had been working from home anyway, like even in the barrier, moving here was mostly adjusting to the time difference, nothing other than that.
But on the whole work from home thing, I like hybrid instead of one or the other. Honestly, there are days when I love just being at home and being able to focus.
So either I have a lot of back to back meetings or if there are, I need a lot of focus time, I love being at home.
But then there are times when you're not physically in the same room with people, let's say you want to brainstorm something or discuss something and you're missing that whiteboard.
I mean, I've tried, I don't know how many different apps to whiteboard over a Zoom call their teams call. It's not the same.
And the biggest difference I found over the last couple years was when you go back after a long weekend or a break, you go back to a call and you're right to business.
And the biggest difference when you're at work was you go to your seat and people just talk about how is your weekend, what do you do there?
So LinkedIn has an office in Toronto, so I go here as well, even though there are not many engineers here or no one from my team.
That interaction, which is more informal and not a bar just work. I don't see that organic over a call.
So I definitely miss meeting people in person a little more, but I think that's preference more than anything else.
So do you travel to the Bay Area once in a while? I worried if I had my visa.
My work visa was cancelled after I moved to Canada and my visitor visa, I've applied for it except there are no appointments available.
Oh, yeah, I know that story. Yeah, exactly. So my appointment is like next year in January. Jesus. Yeah, that's ridiculous.
I also just applied for a B1 visa and I got next year April, but I kept looking. If you keep looking, there are spots opening up.
So I actually got it this April. Oh, wow, we didn't like a week or so. Yeah, okay, keep looking. I should do that. Thanks for the tip.
Yeah, talking about moving to Canada, I think my story was very similar actually. We wanted to move to Canada and at that time.
So Ilya and I have been peers working together. I think for a year or two, you are my manager too, right? So when we decided that we want to move to Canada, you are my manager.
I don't know if you remember or not. And this is before COVID.
And these policies were not there, right? You can't just go to a different country and report to a manager from a different country because of tax and financial things and all that.
But somehow Ilya was able to convince people to let me do that. And so that's how I moved. That was awesome. Yeah.
Does a lesson in like anything is possible as long as you know the right people. Oh, yes. Can tell a story.
Yeah, Ron, you're a senior staff engineer at LinkedIn and you've been working at like big companies LinkedIn for a while now. How do you enjoy that part flipping that on Guang? I think you're starting to explore the indie hacker and you prefer working and startups and small companies.
I want to hear from both of you. What do you like? What do you not like? I first worked at inside which was a startup. I was I think 18th or 19th employee of the company. And I was pleasantly surprised how much trust they put in me would not done anything before from a professional side would except for going to school and doing side projects.
It's like, hey, by the way, do you want to run this program for us? I'm like, well, you trust me to do this. Okay. So the amount of things that I learned over two years at inside was in terms of density of learning. I have not experienced that anywhere else.
And it wasn't just technical stuff. It was everything else. Learning how to communicate to people at all different levels. How can you go from deep technical issues to abstract it out at the high level and talk about strategy.
How can you talk about business development, talk about leaders, other companies about sales, for instance, because we were still trying to sell a product.
Being able to do that at a startup was amazing for me. Just getting their autonomy. I knew that I enjoyed autonomy and I don't like being micromanaged. If I need to do something, give me a task and trust me that I can do that.
And you can always check in to see if it's on track. And from there, I reached a point where it felt like I wasn't growing as much or learning as much.
So I decided to make that move. I explored a few options and land at LinkedIn. At LinkedIn, it was very different as compared to a startup.
As you said, it's a big company. So things are a lot more structured. You're not working on very white things like I'm not going to do sales for LinkedIn ever.
I'm not going to talk about business ever. And I would do that as startup that allowed me to go much deeper into the infrastructure layer.
At the same time, all the learnings I got from working at a startup helped me in many other areas at LinkedIn.
If I'm pitching an idea, for example, how do you go about even thinking about it? Like, why should you do this?
So thinking about business metrics, thinking about how it's effective to the company, that all came very organically instead of just talking about engineering pipelines.
I've been there a while, as you said. I hit a point every year where I think about am I learning? Am I growing? Am I having fun?
And if these things are not true, then what's the point?
And so far, I've had the opportunity to work on different things that LinkedIn and all of those things have kept me very engaged.
These three things still continue to be true. One thing which I'll also say is that LinkedIn has a company cares a lot about people.
And it shows up in culture as well. It challenges you in various ways at the same time.
It recognizes when you need to set your own pace, when times are difficult. And people in general are pretty awesome.
And I think that makes all of this worthwhile.
Nice. Guang, you want to give us your take on this?
Not nearly as smooth as how I run it.
Have you guys heard of the thing? Like for your career, three things that are important.
And then you figure out your own priorities.
Like purpose, craftsmanship or mastery and then autonomy.
I haven't thought about it this until maybe like two or three years ago. And then it makes sense. Like for me, autonomy, I think is the most important thing.
So then I've only worked at startups. The first one was like employee three. The second one, there's only 60 people, 70 people.
And the last wave, three people, I think every like the fact that you can explore like different roles.
What Ron was saying. I think it's kind of funny. Before I was a while, they trust you to do this super important task without any experience.
And then you kind of realize it's not that they trust you, but they don't really have a choice.
That's nobody else. You know what an option.
So I think it's something to keep in mind, but I do think that it really does give you a lot of opportunities.
The thing is that you have to be very intentional about it. It's very like you don't want to just cruise.
You make far less money and I'll write there's far less certainty in terms of the future as well as you want to get a new role.
So for the last two jobs, I think going into it, I got one with discipline about like, hey, this is what I envision where the company is going to be and where I'm going to be in one year.
And then in one year, let's revisit.
What I have is, you know, you're like 80% off when you're expecting.
And then it's kind of like, okay, shit, clear is something's not working out. Maybe it's time to go on.
I think that's a great framework, yeah, especially in a startup because the startup is moving so fast.
I think for you to set up your own expectation of what you will be doing and what the startup would be doing in a year or two year horizon.
I love that. Yeah. Maybe we should start moving towards the actual podcasting logistics and mechanisms and all those kind of things.
Yeah, let's actually go back to the topic that we brought up before we start recording.
So what microphones and gear do you guys use?
I use the shoe SM 58. This also came from a recommendation.
I think I was listening to Tim Ferris show and I looked at what gear he uses and he was like, this thing you can throw on the floor and it will be fine.
I was like, I'm going to go for that.
Have you thrown it?
Not that I threw my microphone on the floor.
There are way too many options. I didn't have to think about which one to pick from.
I tried this one and the other one I tried was audio technica.
Forget the exact model.
It's about $100 USD. The nice thing it has is that it plugs into a USB.
What I found was that that mic was a little too sensitive for my taste.
So I tested out this one and the other one.
This one I felt the audio quality I like that it will better than the other one.
So I just went with it and hindsight should have gone with something that gives you a USB plug.
So you don't need to go around with this focus right interface with an X- So you've got the focus right solo.
Yes, I've got the focus right solo.
And just for the record I got the focus right to mine is I think it's two I-2.
It's basically the same as yours but it has two ports instead of one.
Yeah, because I was playing the guitar and I can plug the guitar into the second port.
Oh, that's pretty sweet.
Yeah. but this one has a USB connection too, but it can also be plugged into XLR.
In the respect, I should have just bought an SM7B.
SM7B is nice.
I didn't use it, but I think Joe Roganizes that one, Lex Frieden, Renus is that one.
Kelsey Hitever had that one as well.
Oh my gosh, Kelsey Hitever said, I was so good at the camera, like the webcam, was ultra HD, and then it just looks like, whoa, so cool.
Do you have video from that episode?
Funny story, we were actually using Squatcast at the time.
We moved away from Squatcast to Riverside because on Squatcast, we lost our recording a couple of times.
So for example, if someone's internet connection got lost, that person would drop off, and the recording would stop if any guest drops off, and that was annoying because at times we wouldn't notice, like if a guest is talking, recording stops, well, you lost the part that they said,
and it's weird to go back and ask them to, hey, can you do that again?
Like if they had in the flow, it's not natural.
When was that?
This was, I think late December 2020, and the first tough of 2021.
This is when it was, and I'm sure they've improved their reliability quite a bit, but it wasn't fun back then.
To be fair, to Squatcast, I think part of it was also armistic where they put the recording button, or like the indicator, I think it was at the bottom, and then it wasn't very obvious, versus now it's like very highly distributed.
So part of it was our fault.
Basically when someone dropped off, like so we stopped, but then we didn't really click the thing.
But to Ronis Point though, like now it's doing what he's supposed to do, right, which is recording throughout.
Doesn't matter when some drops are not.
We just to come back to your question, what Kelsey's episode in the video?
So that happened in that episode.
We didn't have the recording on Squatcast, but about like 20 minutes.
And the nice thing was that we were recording locally, and he was also recording locally.
So we got all the tracks and mixed it up.
Wait, so you were recording locally separate from Squatcast?
Oh, interesting.
That's what the series do.
It's like one is none, two is one.
We always, well, not always, but many times we had off-onic running on the background and not off-onic, sorry, our Dacity.
Running in the background and yeah, we would all have local recording.
It was something I never saw that was, but then Ronis was like, oh, you know, just in case we should ask the guest to, you know, do that, I was like, oh man, I sound like such a hassle, but then second episode.
Of course he happens.
So thanks, Ronis.
For the record, our episode number eight is with Squatcast founders.
So it actually came out this week, the big one we were recording this episode.
So it came out in, I think February 28th of March 1st.
Well, it's good we're saying there's a free record with them.
Yeah. No, I've been using Squatcast for pretty much every single episode except one.
And also I've been using for my other podcast.
The issues you have experienced, I can't tell it don't exist anymore, but we have not experienced them.
In the episode they did talk about some of those early challenges.
And I think during COVID their usage kind of skyrocketed, right?
And they found a lot of problems.
So I think they've learned from that and fixed a lot of things.
Yeah, I feel like we're defending Squatcast, but yeah.
We love Squatcast.
Are you getting that sweet, sweet Squatcast sponsorship money?
They don't pay us, too.
So good.
So what microphone do you use?
I just have this very hilariously tiny Samsung goal.
So S-A-M-S-O-N-G-O.
Oh, it doesn't have any model number.
It's the smartness I have.
I can tell unlike your fancy microphones.
I just Google with the smallest form factor because I travel kind of bit.
I think blue Yeti has like a snowball or something that's quite small, but this thing comparing to that is like hilariously small.
So when you hear this episode, it sounds like asked them, maybe this is a bad choice.
But I think it sounds great.
And I think for traveling, it's a really good choice.
We pay to sound engineer to produce our podcasts.
So I think you'll be surprised how nice you will sound.
Sometimes I get surprised is like, how great is this?
Well, we would request that contact from you, by the way.
Yeah. Keep it the share.
How did you guys find the audio engineer?
Do you have to like interview and stuff for it?
Or is it a previous contact?
I worked with him on my Russian podcast.
Basically, what got me into podcasting?
So somebody invited me to a podcast in Russian in 2020.
So I went there, I talked to the guy.
I'm like, okay, it's actually a great thing.
I want to do a podcast too.
I asked him, like, who he used as a sound engineer.
So it's all nepotism.
So like, I'm not even writing all that.
That's excellent.
Nice. But I'm happy to do the intro.
What's your other podcast about?
One podcast, which is kind of dormant.
It's about technology, more career in technology.
So I invited people who work in different companies, like Amazon, Google, whatever, and we'll talk about their experience.
And then the other one that has started in January is here.
But I already have 29 episodes.
I would just turn on my microphone, like every now and then in the evening.
And just talk for 10, 15, 20 minutes.
And then I published it without even listening back to it.
It's also in Russian.
But sometimes I will talk about career.
Sometimes I will talk about something that happened to me.
Like, cops stopped me or something.
Basic stuff, you know?
I was in this particular retreat in Peru and I was talking about that, which got quite good reception because I was pretty transparent.
I call it the audio blog.
So it's like a journal.
And it resonates with some people because it's across different topics, yeah.
It's surprising just how easy it is to publish podcasts these days.
I give this one a sub-stack.
Like Arnab was saying, I know the sound stuff.
So I have this kind of setup where I can actually go turn on the mic, record, render the file, and just publish it.
So it's actually post-produced.
I just don't have to do it every single time because I have this template.
So I'm curious actually, how do you post-produce your episodes and also where do you host the podcast?
Blood and sweat is what it takes.
We post-produce our episodes ourselves, we use our acetate.
Everything is a monotract.
We combine it together, clean it out.
Again, both of us edit the process might be different for both of us.
Mine's easier.
Prozago's like, listen to the entire episode, find out the things that are definitely not good and I need to clean it up.
We rarely cut things out, but what we clean up is like, uh, um, so our background noise at times sort of like the mic volume is too low for someone.
After all of this is done, add the intro outro, and then we usually run it through off-onic.
If you haven't tried that, I mean, you have a sound engineer, so you're good.
But otherwise any audio, like it doesn't matter how much we equalize it on our Dacity, sanding it through off-onic just brings it to another level.
Oh, that's what it looks like.
And we host it on Lipson.
How long does it take you to produce one episode?
Two, damn long.
Yeah. Two long.
This is the story of every podcast that I've been doing.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, everywhere I think.
I would say anywhere between four to six hours, like from editing to publishing for, like, how long?
Like one half hours, one hour of content.
Yeah. Actually, 90 minutes.
Yeah, one thing I'm trying now is actually just this morning I was talking to my wife's sister, who is currently a student, she's studying English language back in Russia.
What we're trying to do is I showed her how to use the script.
So she could remove all of those arms and ooms and repeated words, all these basic stuff, basically first pass of the content on.
And then after that, we would send it to the sound engineer.
His job would be primarily to just make sure that equalizer's all good, like breaths are removed, all the technical stuff.
So she would be more like doing the content and he would be doing the technical audio bits.
Let's see how that works.
That's really fun.
Keep us posted.
Yeah. Yeah. Nepotism again.
Also, what we do is one episode we have guests like you and then the next episode we call that a metasod because we're very metta over here.
We're not affiliated with Metta again.
We talk about these kind of things that came up in the episode.
So yeah, next week our listeners will listen to more about this story, I think.
Yeah, we'll talk about you next week.
Yeah. Great things, I'm sure.
How annoying were these guys?
Yeah, but we were always very positive about all of our guests because we want people to come to us, right?
So you can't stress our guests.
Yeah, but also we are not the kind of people.
Okay, so just before we close, if you can share how many listeners do you get, do you do anything to market the podcast?
We don't do anything special to market the podcast, except for post it on Twitter and LinkedIn.
And any listeners that we've gotten have mostly been like, through people we know are people who discovered the podcast themselves.
In terms of numbers, the numbers I remember right now is like, we have about 20,000 total downloads.
We get the maximum downloads we've had as 3 1 1 1 1 1 episode.
I think we have 18 episodes now.
That number might be a cloth.
On average, it comes down to about a thousand downloads per episode.
Cool. Nice. Those are great stats.
We are at time.
So just quickly, where can people find you?
What's your favorite podcast before you say bye-bye?
People can find me on LinkedIn, Ronnick and Nathaniel, Twitter, same, Ronnick, Nathaniel.
I have my website, Ronnick, Nathaniel.com and that will point you to every other link, as well as the podcast software, MrDrincer.com.
Favorite podcast?
I love many of them, but if I had to pick one, I would say the Tim Ferry show.
Very cool.
I'm like looking at LinkedIn here, though, right now.
Sorry.
But it's for the podcast.
Andy Hackers, pretty easy choice on Alan.
I love their format now, but anyways, and then my LinkedIn is a GY-ANG, eight, too many Chinese people with the same names.
Yeah, it's a problem.
All right.
I got to drop a folks word.
Thank you so much for having us.
This was a blast.
Yeah, thanks so much for having us.
It was awesome.
Thanks for coming here.
All right.
Thank you for listening.
And please send us a note if you have any questions.
Or if you enjoyed the podcast, if you listened up to this point, set this a note.
I want to see, actually, who is listening?
Because all we see right now is just raw numbers.
We really want to meet our audience.
All our listeners really want to understand who the people behind the numbers.
And also, if you haven't already, give us a faster review.
Whatever you listen to the podcast.
And see you next week.
Post-scriptum.
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Eight is at newsletter.metacastpodcast.com.
It's also linked in the show notes.
Please subscribe if you haven't already.
If you're a podcaster, I think you'll find a lot of valuable info there.
Because every time we have an episode coming out, we summarize all of the takeaways and links and all the useful things that guests said.
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Oh, Google doesn't listen.
Yeah. All right.
Bye for now.
Yeah.