Episode transcript

Ryan Burgess
Welcome to a brand new episode of the front end happier podcast. This is our first for 2024, which is kind of wild that we're already in 2024. I'm really excited for this episode, we have Mark Urbanski joining us from front end masters to talk with us about online learning. We've always been big fans of front end masters and feel it's one of the best options out there for learning anything you want to know about coding software engineering, jam myself, Brian hold, we've had the pleasure of being teachers there. We've been saying we wanted to get mark on here for a long time. Finally, we made it happen. It wasn't that Mark was avoiding us it was that we were just slow to schedule it. Mark, love to hear a brief introduction of who you are, what you do, and what your favorite Happy Hour beverages. Marc Grabanski Hey, I'm Marc Grabanski, CEO of Frontier masters and who I am, I'm just a random kid that grew up in a small town in Minnesota, and now happened to get connected online and learn a bunch of things from a lot of people. And that has echoed throughout my entire career. It's like, amazing that we're able to connect to these online communities and folks in their early days, and IRC and forums and stuff like that taught me web development and web design and you know, all things, building computers, etc. So, yeah, carrying that forward with Frontier masters. Pretty awesome. And then favorite Happy Hour beverage lately? Well, I pretty much mostly kicked alcohol for my life. But my wife said, I cannot kick wine, a glass of wine with her on a date night. So generally, whatever she's drinking, like a cab or something like that. We'll go for a glass of wine with her right on.

Ryan Burgess
Always a good choice too. Marc Grabanski But honestly, like, I have so many different snack drinks. Like right now I'm drinking, Poppy. It's like 25 calories, five grams of sugar, variety of energy drinks and Lacroix's and all sorts of stuff. My favorite one has been tea riot. I don't know if you've heard of tea, right? No, but I just ordered by the case. And it's like, pretty low sugar, good energy drink. And generally half the caffeine does it for me, and that's good.

Ryan Burgess
Right on? Yeah, like that. Yeah, happy hour. Beverages don't necessarily require alcohol too. So it's like, yes, these are. I'm a big fan of all the different sparkling waters and options out there as well. So before we dive in, we'll give introductions of the panelists. It's Jem and myself today. Jim,

Jem Young
you want to start Jim Young engineering manager at Netflix?

Ryan Burgess
And I'm Ryan Burgess, your host front end happy hour? Mark? How has online learning evolved over the years? You've been involved with it for a while? What are the trends currently? What's shaping the landscape? Marc Grabanski It's a big question. I've been involved in learning. First, really, the reason why I started focusing on this is because I realized, the reason why people gave me really great opportunities in the industry is because I was really good at disseminating information. Like if I learned something, I taught the team around me and they liked that people liked that, in general. And I feel like that's what elevated my career from really learning in the first place to becoming a senior engineer and beyond, was just educating in that process of like, tinkering around building stuff, learning something, and then sharing it. And obviously, the way that we share things online changes, you know, all the time, there's, there's different platforms, suddenly, some blogging platform is super popular, or some social media platform or whatever. Things change over time. So I mean, we started running workshops in 2011. And, you know, back then YouTube was just in its nascent phase, there was not really a lot of learning content out there and whatnot. So yeah, I mean, now, that is a big way that people learn is through YouTube. And it's primarily entertainment, or what would you call like edutainment, but I would say that that is the most recent trend, right? People just with working remote, more people working remote, they like to go into like things like Twitch, or YouTube or just various social media platforms, not necessarily to learn all the time. But if they get to learn something, and be entertained, it's, it's great. But like, there are obviously a lot of options to sit down and focus and really learn something deeply like for another masters that will, I think, always serve a purpose. And so I think you're, you're seeing a lot of, you know, developers kind of reach to social communities. And I mean, it's always been that way, right? I mean, back in the day, like it's said I was on IRC chat rooms, while also on forums, while also reading blog posts and stuff like that, that people are producing. So it's always, there's kind of a community aspect. People publishing on all various platforms, and then various forms of entertainment. And then there's the deep stuff, whether it's learning from a colleague or co worker, or, you know, something like front of masters where you're taking a focused, dedicated course. So I'm not sure if that answers your question, but I feel like it's a really big, broad question. And that's my best.

Ryan Burgess
Absolutely is a big broad question. But no, I think you've touched on many things there. I think like for me to like the touch on video was a big thing. When I think back to starting Oh, that was many years ago, YouTube didn't exist. And having like, there was forums that was absolutely really helpful IRC, like I totally remember all these things you mentioned. But I think video has really been a big advantage for learning online. Because you get to see that you visually get to see someone creating something, how they're interacting with their computer, like if it's teaching you like Photoshop, you actually see what they're clicking on and can follow along versus just like even podcasts, podcasts are great to learn from. But you lose that visual aspect for the most part. Like if you're just listening in the car or something like you're you're maybe being entertained, but you're not getting the depth because you don't see the visual aspects. So I think video for me is a big one that pushed it that much further, or

Jem Young
like you're taking marca edutainment. I don't think I've heard that one before. But did you make that up? Because if so I'll give you full credit. Marc Grabanski I don't think I made it up. I'm sure I heard it somewhere. But it is. Yeah. I don't know what frequency it's like.

Jem Young
That's a good phrase, you made up Mark edutainment recite using that. But I've seen that to kind of the writers of like personalities, when it comes to like the developer community, especially in JavaScript. And I don't know, I have mixed opinions about that, like the the idea of tech influencers and like, that sort of thing when it comes to learning. Some of them are really good. Some of them are really sharp, like incredible software engineers. And it's like, it's amazing to watch them to like see that live? It's not just like, oh, yeah, they put together a good demo, they'll just live code something. And it just shows like the depth of their quality. I think, frequent, frequent front of masters instructor private Jin, is really super talented. He'll just like pick up a language in a month and then start live coding it. Not many people in the world can do that. Then there's others. It's just like, it's nothing but heartaches and inflammatory. And yeah, maybe get some learning in there. But it's more that the attainment side than the edgy side, which I have mixed opinions to because I think I see newer people to the field being like, well, this person said, Said, x, and this is what I should do. And they said Taylan was bad. And so I'm gonna use this. And it's like, well, yeah, but their goal here isn't necessarily educate you, it's just like to get views and clicks. And that could be wrong. The real answer to anything is like it depends. And like, that's something you have to understand as a senior software engineer. So that's why I have mixed opinions about the edutainment and some of the trends I see there. Yeah, Marc Grabanski I think a lot of it comes from folks. Well, really, I mean, back to I think, back when I was 13, you know, in my basement, in a small town in Minnesota, where, you know, there's two people in the entire city that are interested in tech. And, you know, from that perspective, there aren't any mentors that I can go to and learn from right there. You know, people need someone to look up to and see, oh, how does this person do this thing? How do they? How do they do it? How do they think about it, and sometimes, you have to, I want to say, like, early in your career, you have to, you know, find a path to do something at all, right? And if somebody is showing you a path, and it works, then awesome. And you're, you know, it's part of growing up, in, in tech and in life and whatever is like choosing your mentors, it's like mentors that you had when you were younger. It's like, they served a purpose. And maybe you don't agree with them now, but at a time, they started a time you know, served a purpose and got you to the next stage. And so I think a lot of times it's like that need for a mentor someone to look up to someone to see how they do things and yeah, as you grow and mature you learn how you do things right you learn Oh, I like this I don't like this this works for me really well this doesn't work for me very well. And you know your mentors the people you will look up to the people you watch the people you learn from, you know, changes like front of masters I've heard just absolute, you know, amazing stories from people who you know, in a part particular part in their career, they needed those mentors and the front of masters teachers were their mentors. And so they went through, and they got to learn how Brian Holt does things. Now Jim Young does things and how, you know, all these different people we have on the platform do things. But you know, there are people like, you know, Kyle Simpson, who has very strong opinions on specific parts of the JavaScript language that you, you know, might not agree with, but you know, it still gives you an insight into that, or, you know, maybe you do like it, you know, or Mike north on TypeScript, or whatever, like the way he uses TypeScript. So I think like, having one blueprint to look to, and see like, Okay, this is how this, you know, clearly this person has gotten to a level of success that's further along than me, and I'm gonna see what their opinions are and follow them. I mean, I think we all go through, you know, learning from people over over time. And that changes over time to

Ryan Burgess
the well said, Mark, I like a lot of what you said there and actually made me maybe I felt similar to Jim, in some ways of the comments you're making Jim, of just like that influencer type thing, where it's like, it's just the world that we live in nowadays, too, for everything. But I liked the way Mark said it is that someone might resonate with you for this one day, or a year or six months, or whatever, and that you're like, kind of following that person and learning from them. And I think so some of those personalities is maybe a good thing to write, like, in the sense that you resonate with that person. And you're like, that's cool. I want to aspire to be that way. And I hadn't thought of it that way. I think there's some things that you said there, Mark, that made me feel a little more comfortable. That yeah, sometimes people are making the hot takes. But there's merit to some of the things they're maybe saying or that's their perspective, they're saying it. And yes, it all depends on the situation. But you may follow like, well, I resonate with that person, I follow that same kind of logic or thinking. And so that's actually kind of cool to think of it is that there are all these different personalities out there, that you may not be able to speak to a dedicated mentor in your small town. But you can look to online and go, Wow, I really liked this person, this gem young, like he has hot takes, and but he's really thoughtful on teaching too. And I've learned a lot of great things. I want to be like him. So I like that. I like what you said there. Marc Grabanski But I think, you know, the part that you're reacting to negatively, right is when somebody is in that really impressionable stage, and then they take somebody's opinions as complete gospel truth. They sort of like hero worship, and now all of a sudden, every single thing that person says is now their own. And they're arguing, not from their own perspective, but from what they think the person that they look up to, you know, says about X, Y, or Z, and you just can't even talk or argue with that person. Because now like they don't have any opinions of their own. They're just following blindly, you know, some sort of tech influencer, and I think that's the thing that y'all are reacting to negatively with this, right?

Ryan Burgess
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it's exactly that. I'm assuming Jim, that's kind of what you meant as

Jem Young
well. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I'll plus one, Ryan, Mark, one thing I've always respected about you over the years, we've known each other for years now. You're always very balanced. And you're, you don't like react quickly. Whereas I'm like, hot takes nothing but reactions, which is, I guess, good for a podcast, but not good for being a CEO of a company. So I appreciate that perspective. And, and you're right. I think some of it is just like, me getting older, and saying like, I don't agree with this style of learning. Because it's like, it's weird to me that like, this is how people learn. But your perspective, they're just like, yeah, people learn differently. And that's something we have to embrace rather than fight it. That's good advice. I'm going to take the heart who says you can't learn anything on a podcast?

Ryan Burgess
Apparently, I said that, and it was just proven wrong.

Jem Young
I think some of my reactions with when it comes to like the edutainment in the online learning space is that someone amass a large following. And then they start dumping on a particular person or technology, when that's not how we I've seen like, way too much of that. And that's not how we should be a software engineer. And so we should say, I don't agree with the solution. It's not the way I would have built it. But this person put a lot of time and hours and they built it for a reason. Just because I don't understand it or don't like, it doesn't mean it's wrong. But I see that getting pushed aside and more the this is bad technology and everybody who built his bad and everybody's using and stuff. And then it just becomes like tribalism for no reason at all. Like, at the end of the day, it's such a waste of time. And I'm really hoping we as the community can move past that and just say like, there's different types of software engineers, different types of software engineering. Use whatever technology you want, but be informed on like the trade offs you're making. And that's it rather than like this a superior to the other. But I think having that sort of balance is really hard. It doesn't. It doesn't sell well, like, no one's no one's gonna listen to like a well reasoned blog post or take because they're like, oh, yeah, there's nothing here for me. Marc Grabanski Yeah, I don't think that that's necessarily developer thing that's a maybe global, you know, social media thing where, you know, the way that a social media sells advertisement or whatever it gets the, you know, interactive interaction and interactivity that, that they're looking for the engagement, that's the word I'm looking for engagement they're looking for is through that type of content that evokes emotion. And so, you know, evoking emotion is the way that you get clicks and engagement, and then that leads to people having very strong feelings about things, for no apparent reason. And I think like, in the professional world, you know, that's, like, that's the difference, I think there's a line there between what you see on Twitter and what actually happens at companies, right, because Twitter, you know, you can interact with someone, and they're just bombastic and whatever, but then you meet them in person, and they're way more balanced, and what they say. And, you know, if you work with them, they're probably also way more balanced, and the types of decisions they make, like it could be, you know, they could be deep in the weeds in a project that's using some old, you know, class based React components, and they're still going to get in there deep in the weeds and fix things and build things and not complain, you know, even if they their preference, personal preferences, they want to use some, you know, wild new technology, right? So, at the end of the day, I think the real world is, you know, we all kind of live maybe different, you know, digital online lives and personal lives. And I think that's also something you have to look at, which is, Twitter isn't reality, social media isn't reality, like, you know, how your co your co workers and colleagues interact. And, you know, they're not doing that type of stuff, but it's just, it's just yeah, like you said that the influence or click play, get people talking. It's, you know, it's just part of, really society in general. And, you know, us being connected through these cool global communication tools, you know, than it is necessarily a symptom. You know, developers in general, I

Jem Young
think, how dare you, Mark, I am the same online as I am in person. It takes a lot of work to be consistent. But I'd like to think that's true. What about the because I've seen a few front end masters posts on Tik Tok, like short form video, not that I'm on Tik Tok. But what What's your stance on like learning? In that short form video? What am I concerns is software engineering, the only way to get good at it is to actually do it. And you can watch that 10,000 hours of videos, you're not going to be good at software engineering until you actually sit down and code. And like one of my concerns is people watching Tiktok. It's like, just do this thing and this thing. And they'll be like, well, I can't get it, I must be dumb. And they're not realizing this person has like years of experience. And this is why they can come up with a solution quickly. Is that? Is that like a real concern? Or is that overblown? On my part? Marc Grabanski Yeah. I mean, first of all, I don't think, well, if somebody thinks that they can learn software engineering on tick tock, I think that's, that's a problem for sure. I've never actually met somebody who thinks that, I think tick tock and, and Instagram and YouTube shorts and all of these, I mean, at the end of the day, people are just looking for a better way to waste their time in line or on the toilet, or in between things, right? Like, they're just, they're just scrolling through things. And like, you know, the fact that we post a couple of short form videos on there, it's not like we're trying to educate the world, you know, more, you know, fulfill our mission through, you know, these things, which our mission is to educate more people more deeply. Right. That's, that's the front of masters mission and something that we've done since the beginning in 2011. But yeah, the, I don't think that people think they're going to really learn something, they're just going to hear somebody's opinion, or like, waste some time. And honestly, if it's somewhat educational, I think that's better. And I don't think there is a lot of, you know, somewhat educational stuff out there. It's mostly just, you know, whatever. Like you said, the more of the clickbait stuff, and I don't know, so, my perspective isn't that people are actually doing real learning on those platforms, YouTube, for sure. And, you know, obviously, you've front of Masters is, you know, they're generally four, four to eight hour courses, depending on you know, that's a good amount to like, see how somebody in the real world does something, something Be very specific, like learning. Vietor, tailwind or, you know, in your case, systems administration with a full set course and stuff like that. But yeah, I don't think that anybody is thinking they're actually learning on these platforms. And if they are, I'd be surprised. I haven't met anyone. But I have actually found a couple of people who said that they learned up, that front of masters even exists on tick tock. And then they took our bootcamp, and then they got, you know, into the learning paths, and then they got a job. And I was like, you learned what, like, you learned? On, on, on what on tick tock? So yeah, I mean, that has happened. So I think, as far as like, just general impressions, just people are spending a lot of time a lot of free time on on these platforms, just scrolling through wasting time. And nobody's thinking that they're like, going to change their lives, they're just looking for a couple of minutes entertainment, and that ends up turning into hours. And, you know, that's another reason why we can talk about it more, but I actually don't have a phone anymore. So, you know, cuz it's just, yeah, just like, a couple of minutes turns into hours. And it's like, what did I actually do? So yeah, to your point, the only way to learn how to code is to code. It's, you know, time in the saddle building stuff. Mentors can help you kind of get unstuck at various points. And that's what courses are for. But at the end of the day, you've got to be building something. You've got to put time and building.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, you definitely need to put that time in and learn. But I do think that tick tock like, and I'm gonna even speak to some of the front end master, tick tock videos I've seen, it does, you hear some opinions in those short snippets, like where someone is maybe giving a bit of a hot take or thinking on how they solve a problem. And I think you can get some interesting perspectives from that. But then also, what it does is it provokes you to maybe go, oh, I kind of want to go learn more from Jim who's talking about, like, full stack, like, man, he's got some great thoughts on that. I'm gonna go and you know, I don't have time right now, because I am just like, flipping through Tiktok not really in that headspace. But I'm gonna go to sit down at my desk, and, you know, spend some time on front of the masters and watch that course. Like, I think that's what it does for us, it kind of starts that thinking. And so you may not, I'm not coding my full stack from that, you know, tick tock video, but in entices me a bit to maybe learn more. And so I think that's what it does. I think there is some merit to it. And yeah, I love hearing that even people found in front of masters because of tick tock, that's the world we live in. Jim, you need to get with the times be on tick tock,

Jem Young
I know, I don't have tick tock or Instagram, or YouTube channel, I really should get on some of these things, or

Ryan Burgess
you shouldn't because like Mark's point to of giving up the phone, it gets addictive. And so I think it is like people, you know, put time limits on and everything like you need to just, you know, be aware that it can eat your time, or maybe changing gears too. I'm curious, like, I think from all of us here, but like, what are the key advantages of like online learning from for students, but also the teachers? I think there's a lot of value there that we I'd love to hear your thoughts on that one more? Marc Grabanski Maybe I'll answer the question in reverse. I think it's been interesting. We started the front of masters podcast, we're on we I think we released the first seven episodes, but we recorded 13 There's stories about the instructors and how they got to where they are. And very common theme is that people teach to really understand the material better. And it's like they might know and use the material every day and their work. But to go and explain it and answer various, you know, off the question, cough questions and that kind of thing. It just, it's a way to organize your thoughts, really bring it together and learn something even deeper than you would if you, you know, just carried on with your job. So I think from teachers, that's a very common theme that I'm finding in the podcast is people people like to continue to teach, especially the people who are teaching for 510 years, all sorts of topics is that they're like, Yeah, I use the or I use tailwind, I'm gonna pull all this stuff together for it. And teachers, as if I'm going to teach my colleagues that are just joining the company or something like that, from the teachers perspective, they get a lot out of it. And then and obviously, there's a financial aspect to that and everything but I think I don't think you get great at teaching. You might be able to be good at teaching if you're teaching from financial motivation, but you're not going to be great. It's the same thing with coding. It's like you're gonna be good enough to get a good job. light at the end of the day, are you going to have like a long 1020 year career in coding, if you don't love it, it's going to be tough, right? It's going to be tough. There's going to be other people that also surpass you if you're not super excited about it, etc. So I think with with teaching, it's, it's to understand things better. It's to, you know, contribute. People definitely love hearing all the testimonials of you know, that learners get from taking their courses. So from a learner's perspective, it's, I think, the reason why I originally created front of Masters is because I was pretty upset with the state of college education, because college education, yes, you can learn the fundamentals and say, like, computer science, and they go and data structures and stuff like that. But when it comes to what is a company actually using, and how are they using it, there is this massive disconnect between school and actual practice. And so I think from my perspective, in the early days of front of masters, it was twofold. One was as frustrated by college, and the college system in general, and wanted education to be more practical, but also, historically, when you think about how people learned, if you want to make the best, most awesome Excalibur sword in the entire world, how are you going to do that? Well, you're gonna go find the best Excalibur sword Smith, in, you know, the land, and you're going to seek him out, and you're going to do everything you can to become, you know, his protege, and work with that master swordsman in a small group, maybe he has, or she, or whatever has five or six, you know, protegees that they're working with, to make these sorts, and they're gonna pass down all of the tips and tricks and etc. And like, that's how we've learned throughout history is a, somebody who's done it professionally at a very high level. And people were excited to learn from that practitioner that has done it at a high level. And so that's what I always set out to create is, yeah, if somebody wants to make something amazing, well go find the people that have made amazing software or whatever, it ends up being Excalibur swords, metaphorically speaking, and put them in front of other people that are excited about it in a small group. And then, you know, we layered in live streaming and Twitch and all these other things, right. But in general, the emphasis of it was, how do I learn something very specific, that I know this person has actually applied it in the real world. And it does all the things we talked about scales and is testable, and, you know, has actually served real customers out in the wild. So that's why we haven't taught Haskell on front of masters to joke against functional programmers. But anyways, functional programmers like to be made fun of so.

Ryan Burgess
I mean, I love that you touched on the historical like colleges and that approach, because I think it does do a good job of giving you a lot of those fundamentals. But it's completely missing the like, practicality of it, like how does this actually apply on a day to day job and like at scale, and all those things? And so that's what I've really been impressed with, with exactly what you've said for something like front end masters, is you're getting people who've dealt with these problems. They were like, oh, yeah, no, I ran into this, or, well, we had to, you know, leverage this technology differently because of XY and Z challenge of said company. And I think that, to me, is so powerful just to see that, and to the swordsmith thing I thought of like, tattooing for ever has always been apprentice based you learn from someone that you admire, you have a mentor, and you that you kind of just learn the tricks of the trade that way, there's not like a school to go to that. And you just learn those things like by doing and I think that's so well said. So, it makes so much sense of why you've created this community around that too. Yeah. And Marc Grabanski it's the whole thing of like, you know, choosing your mentors wisely, right? Because there are a million people that will be happy to teach you and take your money. But at the end of the day, like have they have they actually put this stuff into practice and put it into production and run across the edge cases? Because if you learn from, you know, I don't want to throw anybody out, you know, put anybody down or anything like that. But in general, you know, at least in the early days when I was looking at publishing a book, and there are certain publishers that they were just begging me to teach things that I had no real experience teaching and had I needed The money I would have taken it and scraped together some content off Google and put it into a book and shipped it and got the money. Right. And so there are, there are quite a lot of borderline Grifters out there trying to take people's money. And you know, and especially when you're earlier in your career, you can easily be taken advantage of, you know, pay money for something that's not living up to the promise, you know, that it says, And so that's, that's another philosophy is just like charge a, you know, a fair price and make it as accessible as we can. And, yeah, I mean, it's just, but focus on people who have actually put this stuff into practice, it might be only 20% of the API that have a particular tool that you really actually need. Instead of like learning, spending your time wasting learning 100% of the that tool, and really, it's not, you know, there's a lot of things that it does that are just edge cases that you're not going to run into in the actual real world. So

Ryan Burgess
no, that's well said. And I think like on the teacher side of it, too, it's like, I loved what you said, of like finding the right people to teach. It's like people are passionate about these areas, right? Like, you're going you're finding the right people who care about that said technology, or approach or whatever it may be. And like that, to me says a lot to right, like you're like this person loves to talk about this subject, let's get them to do that. I think that is so meaningful. And even speaking from getting to work with you all at front end masters, I thoroughly loved to come in and speaking there. And just being able to talk about something like engineering management that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, and care about, and being able to, like, have those like conversations with people in person, but then obviously online as well, is so powerful. I also think, as a teacher, you learn, like I got so many amazing questions, and hearing other people's perspectives that it was like, wow, this is really meaningful for me, too, as a learning opportunity.

Jem Young
I like what you said Mark, about like the like that apprenticeship model and how humans have learned since forever, and how that's rapidly changed in like, say the past 1520 years. It's really remarkable when you think about it, like the the learning curve of human intelligence, and like how we disseminate knowledge has changed, like, in our lifetimes. It's something I don't think we'll appreciate. So we look back and be like, Oh, wow, that was a turning point in human society, hopefully, for the better, but who's to say, but really, when I think about the advantage of online learning, it's, its accessibility. So no longer is that, hey, I want to learn how to be a great CEO. Mark, can you teach me how to be a great CEO and like, that's not super scalable, but like, that's how things were done. Whereas now you can teach a course and like, here's how to be a CEO, here's my credentials, etc. So knowledge is really accessible, which is super powerful. The downside of that and kind of what would you read touching on is, well, how do you know it's the right knowledge? So now you have or it's the right person to learn from because now you have like, this whole buffet of I learned about functional programming. Where should I learn who should I learn? How do I how do I actually determine like quality of of the teacher? Are they just someone that like is just reading other blog posts and like spewing metazoan knowledge? Do they have real world influence? And like that's where I think still some my my friction with the entertainers come around is people might use like, number of followers number of years as like a metric for like, oh, quality, versus that may not be the case, which again, I know, it feels like we're shilling for fronted masters for I swear we're not we just honestly think highly of it. That's why like for the Masters, because there is like a filter there in terms of the the instructor it when it comes to knowledge, have they actually built this thing? Do they know what they're talking about? Have they worked with other people who can verify that they know what they're talking about? That's why I like it. And that's kind of the the pros and cons of like, such accessible knowledge is, it's a lot to filter out. And if you get the wrong knowledge, you might be misinformed for years about something, it's like actively harming the way you think about coding or engineering. Marc Grabanski That's true. I mean, that that is the downside. I mean, at the end of the day, if you look at, you know, there's SEO, right. SEO has been this practice of just looking to see where the clicks are. And YouTube has a dashboard to where it's like, where are the clicks? What are people searching, and I'm gonna make a video on it, regardless if I have the experience or not, but I can make a hot, you know, intro and get the clickbait and get the, you know, get people watching past 30 seconds of the algorithm promotes my stuff. And yeah, that that can lend itself to Oh, wow, that person has a lot of views. And so maybe they're super credible, you know, and yeah, that that is the rub. Right? And I think that's part of why I feel so great about front of Masters is just it, you know it no matter where you go on the platform, it isn't clickbait It isn't, it's just real engineers, sharing what they know trying to be as helpful as possible, and not just going for maximum views and whatnot. And so honestly, I hope to expand on that right now we released a blog, a brand new blog, where, you know, Chris Boyer and others are writing, which is very, very cool. And, you know, we were about to release the front end handbook, 20, and 24, which will kind of cover the industry, in general, and we're trying to, you know, we have a quiz based format. And, you know, I think at the end of the day, like, experimenting with different ways people learn, and like putting it all onto one platform and knowing it, you know, it's all there for, you know, everything there is not to get clicks, it's to inform people as you know, and be as helpful as possible. And we do have free stuff. The, you know, I'm not just saying this from a pure monetary perspective, like, we have a front of masters bootcamp, that's two weeks of material free on the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So you can just type in front of masters boot camp is completely free. Intro to web dev is completely free. Getting a software engineer job is also a free by Jerome, who has gotten 300 Veterans Jobs. And so I think, you know, the stuff to get people into the industry, we're trying to make free. And, you know, also their stuff like the blog and whatnot. But yeah, in general, it's like we want every minute that people are spending on front of masters.com, or through our apps or whatever, just just to be that, what you're talking about, which is just engineers with experience sharing, and trying to be as helpful as possible.

Ryan Burgess
I mean, it's definitely come across as that. So that's awesome. You know, from an outside perspective, for sure, I think this is conversation like Jim and I were just having to is like, being in part of this industry, too. It's like, it feels good to be able to provide those insights and help others like, you know, we all have learned from someone, like we talked about mentors, we talked about, you know, various ways of maybe it was IRC, or it was a forum that we read, but we've gained a lot of this knowledge, and it's really great to be able to share that back. I feel very passionate about that. I mean, that's why we've done this podcast for so long. It was like, I mean, we're having these conversations, let's record them, if people get value out of that, that's great. And you know, it. I like that approach, where it's like, you're not doing it from like, Hey, I bet you we can make a ton of money if we create a podcast, you know, it's like that. Yeah, maybe? Or, yeah, you could probably get a lot of clicks on your YouTube video, if that's what your intent is. But I think just creating something that's good and gives value back to the community that just has merit in itself, it may take longer, because yes, we are fighting algorithms, unfortunately, that there is incentive to make things that are a little bit click Beatty, but just really thinking about it from the what's the purpose, it's to give back and to, you know, help others, I think is a great start to, you know, actually create really relevant, useful content. So Mark, you touched a little bit on a little bit there about some of the future thinking of online learning, or how you're even thinking about front end masters, maybe a little bit broader. I would love to hear both of your thoughts. What does the future of online learning look like? Like, what do you think the trends will continue change? AI is a big thing that's definitely coming into play, like, what do you all think is going to look like in the future for online learning? Marc Grabanski I think the future is a pretty broad question. Because you could say, long term I've heard you can just take a pill and suddenly, you know, a different language or something like that, like transferred through the bloodstream or whatever. You know, Elon has got a microchip that he can put in your brain and you can now talk to it or you know, the glasses thing with from Facebook, where you can talk to it or you know, chat, GBT, whatever, I think at the end of the day, there is a lot of value in having a, I like how prime calls it word calculator. Or it's like, you know, it's just, it's like, the entire world's knowledge kind of parroting it back to you. But it ends up being the most vanilla of it all. So you're not going to get the personalities like we've been talking about through the podcasts like how do we learn the best from a mentor or from somebody we look up to or whatever, seeing how they do things. It's not going to give you like very strong opinions, it's going to be like this, what is global all of global knowledge? And then what is the most plain generic version of that and give it back to and that can be helpful in circumstances right? We've We've all seen copilot, fill out a for loop or something, you know, and if you give more context to the code base may be able to be able to do more. So I think in general All AI is always going to hopefully accelerate us, it'll be a tool to continue to accelerate our work. And it will always, you know, be a part of it. Just like, you know, I think every evolution, we end up having tools that we just ended up being in our workflow. And they in enabled us to do more. And so I've seen with our courses, people using copilot people using, you know, chat JpT, for definitions of things to help them, like stuck things out. So they can then have some, you know, something that then lean their own experience to. So I think these tools end up being integrated into our daily lives in every part, you know, every, and they will continue to, what does that mean for learning in general? You know, I'm not sure I don't have a crystal ball. I think, at the end of the day, like I said, we've been talking about it, the entire podcast, we need people to, you know, learn from and see how they apply things in unique ways. And until, you know, at some point, we're all out of a job, and then, you know, we all have to go find something completely new. It's, you know, but it hasn't happened yet. Will it happen? I have no idea. So until then, that's my perspective is more of the same with with integrating some of these, you know, tools like co pilot into giving us the sketch of the framework of the, you know, the basics, all the vanilla, generic stuff, hopefully, automating stuff, so we can focus more on more interesting problems, I could

Jem Young
see the future of learning being one, you know, I hate to say the metaverse, because that's such a stupid term, but more the idea of, you know, virtual reality is becoming cheaper, like putting on glasses and sitting in actual classroom with people from around the world and learning like that becoming more effective mechanism for teaching people versus like, a, like a non interactive video, or blog posts or things like that. I could see us moving in that direction, especially we see it now with colleges becoming more online, there's colleges that are like almost entirely online. So I see that as like a potential next step into the, like shared learning trade group experience, because we do learn faster as a group, like that's just a fact. So like making, making things more immersive. The other one is, this is more of kind of a relic of how the Internet was developed. So like 55% of the internet is in English, which is interesting, because you know, the English speaking population in the world, it's not 55%. But it's just the way things have developed, I can see the future of online learning being more languages and more accessible languages. So more Spanish, more French, more Chinese, and us giving the tooling with AI and language translations, being able to have conversations with with peers who don't speak the same language. And us like collaborating as a community, I could see that actually, I predict that as the future of online learning, which is, more people from more countries will learn and we're going to start seeing really great software engineers coming to countries we didn't expect, because the London knowledge is accessible. And a lot of it's free or very, very cheap. But there's still that language barrier we need to overcome. And once we do that, I can see like a lot of the future is really bright for software engineers from around the world, not just Europe, and right now dominated by America. I don't know that's my optimistic take on on online learning the future. Marc Grabanski Well, I think with that, and multilingual, I think entertainment really leads the way there. And so what is Netflix doing? Like, is that gonna apply to Tech with you know, subtitles?

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, no, it's like it is the subtitles, kind of what Jim was saying to have, like the language aspect of it. Subtitles, but even dubbing like if you think about like dubbing has always been like, you talk to someone they're like, I hate Dubs, or they love it. You know, it's kind of one of those debates. But oftentimes what does mean is not great at it's like it's not matching the mouth movement correctly, things like that. It feels awkward. But the more that we have some of the AI being able to do things like that. It's like yeah, you know, I could be speaking in Mandarin right now I don't speak Mandarin. But like if AI is able to do that. And even if it isn't my voice, maybe it is because actually AI can do your voice very well. But could speaking that language, you could have online teachers that are speaking to a video but you're actually feeling like they're speaking your native language. And that, to me is really powerful. Like where you're actually able to manipulate that to make it feel like it is absolutely real. It's not making a fake person and putting them in front of the screen. It's literally just, you know, altering that. I see that it's where some of that tech could be really, really powerful. It just makes it more inclusive. We're accessible to someone who does speak a different language. So maybe front of masters will have some technology like that, where it's like taking all the teachers who have spoken and mostly in English and is able to flip that, I think that would be powerful. I think the pandemic has really opened us up to a lot of change in the whole teaching space in the sense that people are going online schools had to write. And so they had to figure that out, there was a huge forcing factor for that. So I think more and more of that is going to change in the way people are learning. So traditional schools may not have you been having to do that. They're just like, This is what works. So we do everyone's in person. That's just the way it goes. But I think the pandemic force that and I'm happy to see that it's like we need those things that challenge us a little bit more to how do we leverage technology, and make it easier for people more flexible? So I think that to me is going to maybe it's not a brand new trend, it's a trend that we're seeing. It's just, it's going to kind of keep accelerating that way, for Marc Grabanski sure. Maybe it's just, I've already kind of lived in the future for so long. But it's like, oh, yeah, more of it's going to look like having the live experience, which is, you know, one thing, but not everybody can be there live. And so the more people that participate in live content makes it more interesting to watch later. So you see, folks, like we brought him up several times in this podcast, prime engine, who's streaming on Twitch, or, you know, there are other content creators who are live and the fact that there are folks live and commenting on it makes it more interesting to watch later. And so, yeah, I think that, yeah, that live aspect. We weren't able to do that, you know, say 10 years ago. Now, live streaming is just a thing that's built into every platform. And so live streaming, I guess, more than anything, probably is, is a forcing function on the way we create content.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, no, I think it like it does, it helps it make it feel more real to like, it really does, even when you're teaching. So Marc Grabanski in January, we're talking about AR and the future of, you know, having glasses, and that being more immersive. From my perspective, it's interesting, during the pandemic, I got super into VR, I became the best pistol web player in the entire world, I got all the world records and defended them against a whole slew of professors, you know, up a very high level players that were going after all my records, and as soon as they got them, I got them back. I did it for a year. And so I was in VR, hours and hours a day, basically, through the entire, you know, 2021 20 era, and I was able to, you know, stream on Twitch and interact with people and got a decent following there and build a YouTube and all that kind of stuff. So I got got a sense of how like, even, you know, how we keep bringing them up with prime Majan came up as it's like, I got a sense of how all that stuff feels and looks and and like, how, how do we apply that to learning? It's something that I've always been super fascinated with. And part of why, like, threw myself so deep into VR is because it's like, yes, there's a glimmer there. But then, you know, at the end of the day, the headsets been sitting there for a long time. It's something's missing. It's like, I got as deep as you can possibly get into VR. But you know, is the quest three the thing? No, is the glasses the thing? We don't know, it's not there yet. So I can't, I can't say that it's not going to be a part of the future because I experienced glimmers of being in their competitive VR gaming to the highest level. And it was super, super fun. But at the end of the day, I'm not doing it now. I have no interest. I mean, sometimes I'll pull out beat saber, every occasional or whatever, or, you know, just kind of jump into it. But I don't think we're there yet for with AR or VR. But I definitely think long term. There's a future there on learning. And I want to be there when it happens. I just don't think it's there yet. Right? It's, it's purely just some games and some fun experiences. And that's it. But yeah, the next generation, I've seen how people get really deep into, there's like guerrilla tag and all these different games where that's what these kids are doing. Primarily, they're playing. They're not playing fortnight they're playing population one. So there's like a young generation that's really, really embedded in this stuff. And that's all they know. And that's all they do. And I think that that is going to really show itself in the next you know, 1020 years but as far as like, this year, are we all going to be in VR learning for each other. Nope. Nope. Well, I

Ryan Burgess
think this is probably a good time for us to jump into pics. In each episode of the front end happier podcast. We like to share things that we found interesting. Maybe it's relevant to the topic, maybe not. But yeah, we'd like to share things with all of you, Jim, you want to start us off?

Jem Young
Yeah, I've got two picks today. The first one is part of a Christmas gift I received which was a care package of snacks or one of my friends at Ohio. In it was this beef jerky. I'm a big beef jerky, or biltong fan. biltong it's delicious. If you've never had it, it's it's kind of the equivalent of South African beef jerky, but it's not beef jerky, it's much softer. Anyways, you see how much I get into it. But part of the package I received was something called beef Coast jerky. And it's delicious. I think their secret is they kind of dry it out in soy sauce which is like a nice salty but really like extra umami flavor. And I love it so much I ordered like two cases of it. So that's my pick beef Coast jerky. It's it's really really good. And my normally I have another pic like Silicon Valley silicone or something like that. However, I was so offended I had to make this an anti pic. And my auntie pic is the Netflix movie rebel moon, man, it, it just was not good. I really I came in like, my mind open, I'm very receptive. But it was pretty much exactly what I expected. It's like a movie made for trailers. Like it makes a really good trailer and really slow mo fight scenes and things like that. But the movie itself was not cohesive, the character development was poor. And they had like two hours, 15 minutes to do that. And by the end, I'm like, I couldn't name a single character, which is bad. I'm so disappointed by it had potential, it had a lot of potential. But the salad disappointed is I made it one of my picks for front end, happy hour. And just so you know, I don't feel for Netflix stuff all the time. This was not it was not good. So

Ryan Burgess
you're saving people from going and watching it, Jim is what you're saying.

Jem Young
Don't waste your time. I hate to say it like you're not there's there's more quality shows out there like the crown. There's just better content, especially as like, we're all parents, we don't have time to waste. So I that's the way I look at it. If me and my wife set aside time to watch a movie that's pretty hard to come by. So to waste two hours of my evening when I could have been doing literally anything else. That's what makes me extra offended. Those are my two. Well, one pick and my auntie pick love it.

Ryan Burgess
Mark, what kind of picks you up to share with our listeners? Marc Grabanski All right? Well, I'll just go with Jim, in starting with food. askin nosie is a chocolate tear that I think makes unbelievable chocolate, it's not something you'd order every day, it's definitely something you would gift to yourself or gift to a friend. But Aska knows he is incredible. I love their chocolate bars. But can't order them all the time. Like I said, they're expensive, and they're but they're very, very yummy. So that would be my food pick. And then my auntie pick would be the phone. So as I mentioned earlier in the episode, how I ended up happening is my daughter accidentally knocked my phone off in platform and basically, you know, just completely broke it. And it ended up being a blessing because it was just like, Alright, I'm gonna just try with life without a phone. And so, um, almost three weeks in, yeah, with no phone. And, you know, over time, you know, getting back into work, I've had to, you know, figure out things like two factor auth and how to move that into one password. And, you know, I wrote a post on my website on Mark ramsey.com. We can link to it in the show notes of the things that I've had to learn but essentially like I got a smartwatch with cellular connection, so I can do texting calls. And then I'm getting a really nice pocket camera. Currently, I have a DSLR. But like one that fits in my pocket to be able to take photos. And yeah, I can listen to podcasts and Spotify and everything on on my watch, and do all my fitness tracking everything. So essentially, I've moved everything. The only thing I can't do is social media, which is great. So I just do social media on my computer. And all of the apps kind of suck on desktop, which is great on on a Mac, like if I want to use Instagram, I can use Instagram from their web app, but it's it's a poor experience, which is great. It's like I can still get access to the content. But it's not that you know, it's not as convenient. So that's allowed me to have a much better relationship with you know, social media and just in general And, um, I don't feel like I'm missing anything at all. I actually feel like life is more convenient, convenient, and much more present. So yeah, I'm gonna see how long I can do this. Maybe I'll do it for a very, very long time. I'm not exactly sure how long I'll do it. But so far, three weeks, and it's awesome.

Ryan Burgess
That's amazing. Yeah, I think you and I are talking on Twitter. The one thing I was like the camera's my probably one thing that I'm like, I love having the phone with me at all times. Just for those photos that you feel like taking especially with your kids and things. But yeah, I love the idea of disconnecting more. I think that's amazing. And yeah, just hearing you speak to some of those things. I was like, oh, yeah, I could probably ditch my phone and leverage something other than the phone. So yeah, very inspiring. Thank you, Mark. I like that. I have two picks. I'll start with one that's kind of food related. It's not exactly but it's not a food but it's food related. Is glass straws. I got a gift of like, literally glass straws. I drink like a lot of you know iced lattes and usually use a straw. And who knew like other than I was worried that they would break so far, they're still holding up. But like drinking out of a glass straw is very satisfying. And I highly recommend it. I never thought I would say this, but it was great. I loved it. And then my other pick is an infrared sauna. I have a sunlighten Sauna at home. I love it. I've been using this for months now. And I've gotten to the habit where I do 20 to 30 minutes a day. It just feels awesome. Like I highly recommend if you can have a home sauna or get to a sauna at a gym, just doing that regular is pretty impressive. It just feels really good. Marc Grabanski Definitely second I got a dry sauna. So I don't have the infrared one. I've just got the dry one. It's like electric or whatever. But it heats up to about 170 and I've been doing it yeah 1520 minutes or so pretty much every day. And I'd say that the sleep is really what gets me it's like I sleep so well. Doing that, you know, say an hour before bed or whatever. And then I cap it off with a cold shower, get into my PJs and I'm just like I feel amazing. And I sleep incredible. Like so good.

Ryan Burgess
This sleep thing is the biggest one I noticed and then like even just like I feel good like I just feel really good. Like I don't know you sweat out a lot and it just feels good and yeah, that cold shower definitely haven't gotten to that level Mark maybe I should be it's minus still like I'm in that warm mode of like a have a nice warm shower but maybe I need to do the plunge and go out the cold shower. Marc Grabanski They say even if you finish off with like 30 seconds of cold. Okay, now it helps quite a bit. So I don't know, that's been my experience. It's like if you get yourself a little bit cold and then you just like you slide into the sheets underneath the covers and you're like a little bit chilly and you just like go in there and you're all warm under the covers and it's us. Great.

Ryan Burgess
I love it. Well thank you Mark so much for joining us you've had some really great insights to share. I know Jeff and I are fans of calling up front of masters but thank you for all that you do. Were huge fans of it and been very thankful to be a part of it. Where can people get in touch with you? Marc Grabanski Yeah, I'm I'm on Twitter and Instagram and all those things LinkedIn on one Mar see the number one ma RC or just Google Mark Urbanski, my websites or and links to socials and all that kind of stuff.

Ryan Burgess
Awesome. Well, thank you and thank you all for listening to our episode. You can follow us on really whatever you like to subscribe to podcasts on. We're on Twitter at @frontendhh. Any last words? Marc Grabanski Go build awesome stuff.

Ryan Burgess
That's some great words to end by last words