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Ryan Burgess
Awesome. Welcome to a new episode of the front end happy hour. I'm excited for another panelist interview. We've done a few of these already throughout the year. Did myself gem Stacey Mars? Surely already now in this episode, I will be interviewing Brian Holt to learn more about his background. Brian, thanks for agreeing to do the interview. It's been a while having you on. So I'm excited. I know our listeners have been waiting for an interview with you too. So this will be fun.

Brian Holt
I'm excited. I know you can't fit me in Jem on the same podcast. And

Ryan Burgess
that makes sense. And what why is that? You know, I'm

Brian Holt
just too big of a deal for Jem these days.

Ryan Burgess
Love it. Yes. And I hope he listens to this too. And it will just be a great trolling moment. It's great.

Brian Holt
That's what I'm going for. This is just an hour long troll of Jeff,

Ryan Burgess
can I like this? I feel like we can slide that in here and there. It'll be fun. So I mean, let's start off with some easy stuff. Brian, where did you grow up?

Brian Holt
I was born and raised in Helena, Montana. I grew up there for 10 years. And then the next I don't know, 15 or so I spent in Salt Lake City, Utah. So Mountain West, not too far apart from each other. But yeah, those are the two places

Ryan Burgess
what made you and your family moved from Montana to Utah?

Brian Holt
Well, my dad worked for the company. I've been moved IBM, right. So IBM is infamous for moving their people all over the country. And so my, my parents actually moved a lot before they moved to Montana. And then they managed to kind of plant some roots. But eventually IBM closed off their Montana offices. So we were actually supposed to move to Atlanta, oddly enough, and then my dad last moment, was able to talk some sort of deals that he was able to move to Salt Lake City instead. My dad is very much a mountain west person, you know, he will never get my father blessed again. So yeah, it was for IBM. My dad did technical sales for IBM. So if you've ever heard of IBM DB to which people still use, that's what my dad used to sell back in like the 80s and 90s.

Ryan Burgess
That's really cool. So I'd never heard the acronym for IBM like that. Obviously, the joking one and vote moving. I had no idea. So that's something I learned today.

Brian Holt
Yep. Yep. No, it's if you talk to like anyone who worked at IBM, back then it's a different company now. or kids or people like that. They will they will definitely get to the I've been moved. So

Ryan Burgess
funny. Well, that's cool. Immediately, you got to stay at least in the mountain range area, which is awesome. And I mean, Salt Lake City is beautiful. So what kind of things did you do growing up?

Brian Holt
Well, I mean, growing up in the snow laden lands of the Rockies, you just kind of have to ski. So I definitely grew up skiing quite a bit. I just, my dad's a very outdoorsy kind of person. So we had horses, I grew up riding horses, despite the fact that I'm very allergic to that. So I was always hopped up on Benadryl. So I was like, half asleep, every time I was on a demo. That was certainly part of it. I played a lot of soccer going up. And then I just I loved video games, I played a lot of video games growing up, that's kind of a nice thing is like, I mean, I'm holding my I'm like 34 I'm 34. So like, when I was born, like the NES and the Atari 2600. And all those things were out. And so I kind of grew up in like a tech heavy household because of my dad working in IBM. So we always had new computers, we got a Pentium the first week they came out, I had a 386 in my bedroom that I was able to like hack on. So I learned to code fairly early as well. My eldest brother wouldn't let me play video games until I had done a bit of coding, which was a pain in the ass. I hated him for it. But it got me here. So both I love you and fuck you then

Ryan Burgess
what what was the reasoning that he would make you code like why?

Brian Holt
He just he was a engineering student at the time. And he thought that learning to code first of all, I think he wanted to like make gains, then we did, we made a couple of like little tiny dumb games together. So he thought that that would be a venue for that. And then he thought it would just be useful for me to know how to do. And then it was turned out it was because I went into my programming classes in high school, and I just aced all of them. Because I'd been doing all the Hello World stuff for you.

Ryan Burgess
That's really cool. I mean, it's funny, too, that he like was making you do that. And you probably were like, yeah, why? Like,

Brian Holt
I remember, on my birthday, he bought me the Legend of Zelda Windwaker. But so I opened it. He's like, cool. Now we're gonna code for two hours before you can play this. And I was like, I can't I don't want to and he's like, doesn't matter. It's like, I won't let you play it. It's my GameCube until you've finished reading this, like, I think I was reading like a little quiz app or something like that. Yeah, no, I mean, obviously I benefited from it now but at the time Brian was not very

Ryan Burgess
know. I mean, that seems cruel. to say, here's this amazing game that you were excited to play. Guess what? You just have to think about it and go do this other task that you don't want to do that was been obviously thankful for now, but yeah, the time probably not so much so

Brian Holt
that you can issue a rebuttal after this. So we can blame this on Ben.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, I like it. And somehow it will blame Jem for something later. Gaming. Like what what kind of games? Are you playing? Like on you know, NES and probably Super Nintendo? I've been thinking and then eventually 64 Then the GameCube Yeah, what what kind of games are you playing?

Brian Holt
Um, I mean, I have some vague memories of playing like, Pitfall on Atari 2600 Or playing? I don't know, like Mario and Duck Hunt and stuff like that. And yes, but like, my first like, more, you know, more concrete memories, as I remember opening the Super Nintendo on Christmas. That actually my brother's got it not B. And then I got, like, Donkey Kong Country, and Final Fantasy Three in some of those games. And that's, those are the games I really remember playing a lot of and then I played a lot of computer gaming at the time, I played a lot of like Starcraft, um, and then eventually like Warcraft three, and at one here's a fun weird fact. At one point, I was World ranked in a mod of Quake three called weapons factory, which is like if you ever play Team Fortress, that's Team Fortress and weapons factory really competing. Mods and then Team Fortress one out, but there was another one called weapons faction. So anyway, I was I was a world ranked weapons factory at one point. And I was like, I don't know, 13 or something like that. That's wild.

Ryan Burgess
And it's I mean, if you think about that, now, you probably would have been like a twitch star at that point. Because people are like, I want to watch this guy play

Brian Holt
this little shit. Just get on there and own like grown ass men playing. Yeah, that was that was me at the

Ryan Burgess
time. That's really cool. I love that did not know that. So that's a really cool, like fact, your brother was probably the one who introduced you into programming. Like, that's kind of what kicked it off. Yeah.

Brian Holt
He's had me started writing C++. That was the first thing I started writing. Because I think that's what he was writing in his college classes. And then I got into high school after spending probably two years writing C++ and I had to read Visual Basic six, because that was the only class they offered at my high school. So I wrote a, I wrote a decent amount of VB six. And then further into high school, I took one Java class. And then I had like another class that was just like, general programming from a local community college. So I went through a bunch of languages and that one, that's where I learned scheme. It's where I learned some PHP not very much. Actually, it's not even true. There wasn't PHP was a different scripting language anyway. Scheme might have been Lua, actually. And then more VB six. So yeah, up until high school, it was C++ and Visual Basic and Java. And then probably by the time I got to college, it was mostly just Java. And that's what I took in college because that's what my university offered was was all Java classes. And I ended up teaching the first two levels of Java programming at my university. I had this professor that really didn't like to teach, he was there for research. And so I got hired as a teaching assistant and I walked in the first day, he's like, Yeah, I will. He's like, I, you are doing your job if I have to do nothing for my students, so just take everything. So I, he gave me like, all the assignments and stuff, but I had to teach the class, I had to grade the assignments, I had to help them with their labs, and totally not what I was expected was, I really enjoyed it. I, at that point, I thought I was going to be a university professor. But yeah, that was that was all in Java. And it was just kind of by accidental happenstance that I ended up in web programming. Yeah, I was totally unplanned for.

Ryan Burgess
That's kind of cool to like, the teaching aspect. Like I didn't know that that's like, you know, probably your early instances of teaching because you're a strong teacher, like I've seen you teach many courses over the years front end masters courses, like they're solid, like, and you're a really great teacher. And so it's probably because of that moment being like, sink or swim, Brian, you're teaching the class that now you have, you know, been able to leverage those skills.

Brian Holt
Yeah, appreciate appreciate that. Thank you. It was certainly where I like realized that like, this is something I legitimately enjoy doing. I enjoy taking concepts that I understand and breaking them down into pieces that you that a different person wouldn't understand. But they could put those pieces back together and come to the same understanding that that I have. That is a really rewarding cycle for me. And I mentioned this a lot before if I if universe To do teaching and development and product management all paid the same, I would be a teacher, but it's just not right. I would make a 10th the amount of money that I make and work probably 10 times harder.

Ryan Burgess
I think you pretty much summarize that exactly. When you were in high school is Did you know like, I'm going to be in programming like that, because it kind of sounds like you were looking for courses with like VB six and like looking at different things. We did you know that like, Alright, I'm gonna go to high school and then go for schooling after on programming.

Brian Holt
I thought I'd always be around tech. But I didn't think I was going to come out and like be a programmer, that wasn't actually really ever my intention in high school and even into college. My actually my degree. I dropped out of college, right. But my, the, what I was enrolled in was bioinformatics. So I had a lot of biology classes, it was actually primarily a biology degree with basically a minor in Computer Science. More into how I got my first developer job. I was working in a biology lab at my university. And I was just like a skirt in the lab, right. So I did basically all of like the pipetting, and stuff like that. So like now we talked about PCR reactions all the time, right? Because of COVID. I ran PCR reactions for like three years. Wild, it's weird, right? It's weird how that worked out. So I very intimately aware of how those work, right? You basically just pipette a bunch of reagents into a gel and then you run it through like this like electro for Rhesus. machine and it separates the DNA strands and bands. And then you can compare that versus like known. Other samples, right? That's how they can tell if it's you have COVID or not, right? Like does your DNA of your virus lineup with what we've known COVID looks like before. So yeah, I was doing that. But I was doing it for like the tree of life research, we were researching decapods, which is like crabs, and shrimps, and hermit crabs, and lobsters and things like that, we were kind of trying to figure out how those things fit into the tree of life. Because it's kind of messy. It's like you would think that like, there's very clearly lobsters and it's very clearly shrimps and crabs, and I was working specifically on crabs. And it's not true. Like there's actually a lot of myths around decapods. Right. I don't know if you've ever heard the term the cancer, suffocation of animals, which is basically that all animals if you let them evolve long enough start to look like craps. But yeah, I had no idea. It's weird, right?

Ryan Burgess
Oh, man, that is so weird, like such a random thing to look like to it's, it's

Brian Holt
an example of convergent evolution where like, crabs are just really good at existing right there, their form works very well. Given the evolutionary pressures of Earth, basically, due to that, everything that you say looks that looks like a crab, there's a decent chance that they're very unrelated from each other, right? Like, to the samples I was looking at, were as different as like, seals and giraffes, right. So like, they were very, like, pretty, I mean, they're mammals, right, but they're pretty far apart on the tree of life. And same thing with crafting. Anyway, so that was interesting. I ended up actually publishing a paper on it. While I was still in college, I thought I was going to go into that. And then a very long story short, basically, I had a opportunity to write for another paper for Nature magazine, which is like, you know, the pinnacle. And my postdoc that I was working underneath basically said, like, I'm not, that's awesome, I'm not putting your name on the paper, I'm gonna put my name on the paper. And I went to my professor, my professor basically said, that sucks that your postdoc said that, however, she has to do that, or she will never get a job, right? So basically, what's happening is she's gonna steal a bunch of your work. And then what's gonna happen is you're gonna get to her position, and you're gonna have to steal other people's work. And that's just how this like circle works. Right? And that sounded awful to me. So, I took a different part of what I was doing in that lab, which was I was preparing samples to enter into the BYU supercomputer, which is like this computer that they used to like, run these like, you know, advanced computations at the time, you couldn't run just on a desktops, but they had the samples that we put in like a particular format. And it was basically just not data normalization for DNA samples is essentially what I was doing. And I was reading that all in bio Perl, which is a flavor of Perl. I realized that I could take those skills. And I could immediately just leave that laboratory without an undergrad or anything like that, and I could make more money than my postdoc was making. And she was 10 years into her journey to try and become a professor which she did. By the way, and while I'm still a little bit over that trend like that interaction, I understand why she did what she did. So I'm not actually not that mad at her either. So that's kind of I did, I was I was planning on just taking some time off getting like my first job getting some, like financial feet underneath me. And then finishing my school at the University of Utah, I transferred down there. But I ended up getting a job at the NBC affiliate for Salt Lake City, if you've talked to him from Salt Lake, they all know what KSL is, which is basically it's the NBC affiliate, but it's also people don't use cars.com, and Salt Lake, they use KSL. They don't use Craigslist, they use case Hell, they don't use Zillow, they use Castle like everything is all those kind of classify things ended up on KSL. And that's what I worked on, I worked on like the cars portion of it. And I mean, my rent was 250 bucks, my parents, were paying for my insurance. So basically, my only expense is 250 bucks a year, and I was making 45k, or something like that. So like, like a fucking King. Like, because I could just do whatever I want I, I suddenly had real adult money, and I had no idea what to do with it. Which was great. So I kind of just effectively dropped out of college, because at that point, I was like, I can go back and finish my degree, but it's gonna take me forever, I'm probably going to leave my job. And I'm way better off of my career if I just stick this out and follow this through. So that's kind of how I ended up dropping out of college,

Ryan Burgess
as well. Any regrets on that one?

Brian Holt
Regrets a complicated word there. I always wanted to get a degree. And I still don't have one. Which I'm sure we'll talk about this later, but actually just started my Master's of Business at Seattle University. So I'm actually apps now finally fulfilling that goal of mine. But objectively, it was the correct career path for me at the time, it would have been done to do literally anything else. So I'm sad that I didn't get my degree. But I don't regret the decision. The decision was the right one.

Ryan Burgess
That's awesome. No, I think that's it's always cool. Because people ever you can take all these different paths. And I think that's awesome to hear. Like, yeah, it wasn't right for me at the time. But yeah, like we, you know, like you said, we'll talk about the master's degree. But that is something that you're like, now I'm going back, which is really cool. That's

Brian Holt
I mean, a piece of advice that I try and give everyone is like, I'm going to come with and tell you my story of what worked for me. But there's a trillion variables going into this that you're not seeing right, you're getting a very surface level take on what my what my pathway is. So you shouldn't try and replicate how I did it, you shouldn't try to replicate how someone else did it. Like you can talk about someone like more like Mars, right, that has like a very methodical and direct path into tech. And her path is amazing. And she deserves to be where she is because of the path that she took. But mine's much messier and weirder. And both of those paths made sense to us at the time. And so I guess my point I'm trying to make here is you got to find your own path. Because my path, if I, if I had been very set on following the same path as Mars, I wouldn't be where I am today. But I think Mars is where she is today, because of the path that she chose.

Ryan Burgess
I like that, too, is like yeah, it's kind of like things happen for a reason type thing. Like I'm, you know, it's like, it's is what it is. And all those factors, like you said, it's like, from afar, it looks like you just chose this path. And it makes sense. But it's like, yeah, there's a lot of factors that go into it. So that's, that's a cool thing to hear. So you had the first job working at car classifieds, essentially. And what what was the next job after that

Brian Holt
self like two years that treated me really well, like I learned a bunch of stuff there that like, was like, would be considered like, remedial. Now. I came into the industry, like this weird moment where it was, there was like a shortage of junior engineers, like the colleges weren't producing enough. So it was really easy to get a junior developer job. And I hesitate saying that, because it's probably gonna be discouraging for a bunch of people because it's really hard to get a junior developer job now. I didn't really have too hard of a time. I kind of started taking a step backwards actually had an internship for us actually worked for multilevel marketing company in Salt Lake City first as an intern. And I seriously walked into this interview, they handed me a printed out piece of paper of PHP as like, what do you think this does? And I fucking guessed, I had no idea what it did. I was like, this looks like authentication code, because I saw like login and password and stuff like that. It happened to be correct, right. And so I ended up getting an internship based on that and that like that really was my gateway into tech into web development. Because like I said, I hadn't seen PHP at that point. And the job I was interviewing for was computer programming intern. I had no idea was for web or scripting or anything like that, I just assumed I'd be doing Java, right. And that's how I learned. PHP. I literally showed up for my internship, and panicked and learned PHP as fast. I literally went, I left my first day my internship, I drove to Barnes and Noble. I bought a PHP, my SQL and CSS book. From SitePoint. I still have a summer my shells because I like it was literally like my first foray into any web programming. And I read it in like two days, like sci fi, I just panicked and did everything I could. It was one of those thick books too, right? No, it was like, like, yeah, five or 600 pages. That I mean, that's been kind of a theme of my career, as well, as I throw myself into situations that I have no idea what I'm doing. And then I just sink or swim and so far have barely managed to continue swimming.

Ryan Burgess
That's awesome. I mean, the sink or swim mentality works too, sometimes, like, where you're just like, You got to learn it, right? It's a forcing factor.

Brian Holt
I mean, I'm not gonna suggest people throw that like, potentially put themselves in those. But I mean, like, one of my big mantras is successes, opportunity meets preparation. So I've been extremely fortunate in the opportunity side, there's something you can do to try and put yourself in interesting opportunities. But some of it's just allocated by who you are, and what you look like, I'm a white guy. So I get more opportunities, just throw my way. And, like, we like to take a lot of credit for these because we're like, Well, I was prepared, right, that's the part that we get to own is like, if I get if I'm ready to seize upon these opportunities that I'm going to, you know, I deserve credit for that, what you do, no one should be able to take that away from you. But you need to also recognize that not everyone gets opportunities like you do. And so that's, that's the part where I'm incredibly fortunate is like I was a dipshit. At that time, I like to objectively I was just not a responsible, good, well adjusted human being at that point. But I had some repeated opportunities for me, like at some that I messed up, and some that I didn't take and things like that, but I eventually got the right ones. And I took them and I, you know, it's easy for me to look back and like, look at all the cool things, I did all the things I deserve, because I did all those things. But it's also kind of on me to reflect on like, I had a lot of help, I had a lot of luck, I was in the right place, I was the right skin tone, I was the right gender, like all those things, those pieces kind of just fell into place. And so it's you got to kind of take stock of all of that.

Ryan Burgess
That's good to reflect on too. And I like to like I mean, you were young at the time, too. And so like, yeah, you're you're maturing as an adult and like you're you're not aware of all these types of things. But taking those chances, and you did dive in and worked hard, even the fact that you read that big textbook, just to be like, Oh my god, I have to know PHP on the job like that. That's That's hard work. It's not easy to read those big tech books either. Yep,

Brian Holt
for sure. But I was also really fortunate that I had it. It's actually ironically, Nikki, my wife's best friend gave me this opportunity. Nikki and I were even dating Nikki and I barely knew each other at the time. But she's like, Hey, I worked for this company did you should come apply for this internship or recommend you and that's actually what really, I think pushed me over the edge versus the other five candidates. That

Ryan Burgess
was That's awesome. I mean, it says a lot too is like I think about that always, like often trying to like, you know, bring someone in or you know, just, hey, you're wanting to apply and I know you it's like a job. It's like, hey, if I can get you in a little bit further that it goes a long way. It really does especially like being on the hiring side is like you have to talk to a lot of people and so if someone hands you a resume or you know, puts that leg up, it goes a long way.

Brian Holt
So that was my internship that was at Nu Skin, which is a well known MLM company. I'm not a huge fan of MLM, so not definitely endorsement of them. That I was at kessa. And then I was at Castle for about two years. And then my brother, my older brother, not the coding brother and my other brother Chris. He had a tenant move into one of his apartments that he owned. That was a an executive at a company called needle. And so he told me, okay, you should talk to this guy. And so I ended up talking to him and then he convinced me to join this new startup newish I think it sort of had been around for like a year or two at that point. Needle. And so I went in and I interviewed at this company, and you know, had like a really good time was like a real like, it had like a startup vibe. Like even though we were still in Salt Lake City, they had like, ping pong tables and like, you know, it was an industrial warehouse. Like it was as much of a Silicon Valley type startup that Utah could support at the time. Lovely people and all that kind of stuff. But my my interview for that this is another one of those just dumbass Thinkorswim Brian getting weird opportunities kind of moments. So I went into this interview and interview with some love The people some of them I do not know, listen his podcast. So hi Travis and interviewed and I they ended up asking me a lot of CSS and JavaScript questions. I was very distinctly a back end developer at this point, I'd worked primarily in PHP and like MySQL and Mongo stuff. That was really it. I only touched the front end, when I had to. I was working with Jen, Luca, which I imagine many of our podcast listeners know at the time. And she was doing all the front end stuff when I was at KSL. Much better than I would have done. So I left QSL. And I was expecting my title, when the I passed the interview at needle, and I was expecting my title to be Junior back end developer. When I got there. I was expecting write Python, and work on that stuff. And I got there and my business cards that they have pre printed for me on my desk, said senior front end developer. And so that's awesome. I had another panic mode is like, I don't know JavaScript that well, right. And so I pulled the same thing, I think, like I bought a course or something like that. But I'd like I'd really quickly spun up on JavaScript. I'm trying to remember what they were on. There. I think it was just like a jQuery mess that was inter intertwined with Django. And so spin up on that fairly quickly did a lot of reading on CSS. It's where I learned CSS really well. And then there's this new hotness in the market that was called Angular JS. And so we decided to move a lot of our stuff to this, I wrote a lot of Angular JS was that needle, I was only there for six months. I actually quite liked working there. But yeah, that's, that's where I attended my first conference. That's where I gave my first conference talk. Because I had attended a. So it was it was the first one at my conference, I had attended a couple of other conferences, but I went to fluent for the first time, which was like a really big Oh, wow.

Ryan Burgess
That's a huge, huge conference,

Brian Holt
rip, like, that's really where I got my big start into speaking. As I showed up to fluent, it's gotta be like, 2013, or something like that. 2012 2013. And I gave a five minute lightning talks, I'd applied to give a talk, they turned all those down, but they accepted me to give one of the little lightning talks, Ignite Talks, if you remember that format. Yep. It's a five minute talk where the slides auto advance, right. And it's so you have to get your timing down really well, because you don't get to use your clicker, you have five minutes, and then you are done. Turns out that is objectively the worst way to start speaking your speaking career. The shorter the talk, the harder it is 100%. Like, if you're gonna give your first talk, give a 2030 minute talk. Because you, you can be you'll be surprised, but when you're on stage, you can ramble, right? And like, you can kind of explore and you don't have to have everything down perfect. Your timings will have to be super, like well thought out. When you're on stage for five minutes, you have to be super on the mark, or you're going to fuck up your talk, right? So anyway, I gave a five minute talk on yelman, which was a brand new technology at the time. And right before I got on the stage, one of the other speakers was point I was like, Oh, hey, I know that guy. He maintains the Owlman, and I was like, Why did you tell me that? So I got also got really nervous. So actually, you can it's on online, you can search for like Brian Holt, Ignite fluent. And the video will come up and you can see me shaking. Like I was like, if you look closely, I wasn't shaking that bad. But like I was, I was terrified.

Ryan Burgess
I mean, it was your first talk fluent is a huge conference. I actually think that was my first time attending fluent was like around the 2013 time. So I may have been there. I don't remember if I saw that lightning talk, Brian. But yeah, I mean, your first talk in general is nerve racking, but like, fluent was a pretty high bar. And then yeah, you have Yeoman creator there. Cool. Thanks. Awesome. I got

Brian Holt
off stage and I thought because I was so just amped I was like, I thought I had done terribly. Like I thought I was like, Okay, maybe this isn't for me. And I was literally just walking offstage thinking is like, I don't think I want to do this again. This was so hard. And Peter Cooper and Simon Simon St. Laurent, who are the two people that ran the conference at the time came up to me he's like, that was a great talk. You should give a full talk next year like do let us know next year we'll get you on to speak next time and that I and I've told this to Simon and Peter before is like I credit them quite a bit with like me not ending my public speaking career right there.

Ryan Burgess
That's awesome. Sometimes it all it takes is that little bit of encouragement and like recognizing that like, Yeah, you did. You did good.

Brian Holt
I mean, it was it was huge. It was everything. So I mean Like that's another thing is like, recognize when you're in positions where, where you can give a little bit of encouragement and how far that goes. Because I'm sure to Simon and Peter that like that was probably just a throwaway comment like, Simon when I brought it up to him did not remember it. But I mean, obviously, I'm talking about this probably a decade later. So it may have meant the world to me, right? Yeah. So anyway, that was fluent. I was at needle. And then I used to hang out on Reddit at the time. And they had posted a job description for Reddit in the Salt Lake City subreddit. And no other way around. They had posted a job for Reddit, in the JavaScript subreddit, this, this job is located in Salt Lake City, you must be located in Salt Lake City. And I was I had no intention of applying for the job. I hadn't even invested in needle yet. So I was really not interested in moving companies at that point. But I was just in the comments, like people were saying Salt Lake City sucks. I was like, No, you suck, because it was the internet that was an adult. And so eventually, I got a message like a DM on Reddit saying like, Hey, you're a JavaScript developer, you're in Salt Lake City. Would you like to come work for us? So when interviewed, and I was just telling us, like, like, I have a lot of hesitancies My wife has a lot of hesitancies about you know, leaving this company, even though like, right, it's really cool. So he's like, just come down to our office meet us. And there's only five people in the Salt Lake City's office at that time. And they were in this like really shitty building like objectively tests, I was going from this like, really cool startup kind of company to this like, dungeon with no windows, like, they had five desks that were crammed in this little space. And they had told us like, bring Nikki will convince her as well. So Nikki came to my job interview with me. And the, the head of the Salt Lake City office just took me in the back room was like, just tell me what you want. And I was like, Well, I was like, I want you know, 110k which was I think was making 75 that needle. And you know, I want to you know, have a good work life balance. And he's like, done, like, I can do that for you right now. Like, here we go. And I was like,

Ryan Burgess
Oh, that's amazing.

Brian Holt
So he this is still a sore point for Nikki he walks out of this like me just talking one on one. It's like, here's Brian, the newest Reddit employee and Nikki's like, What the fuck did you do? Like what? Why would you leave this other awesome company? Like what beautiful offices to this Dungey dungeon has like you were making a massive mistake. And she was pretty mad. I mean, and to this day. It's pretty fun. We can talk about how this happened again, when I applied to Netflix. But like I'm very cautious to not like always check in with Nikki with these, you know, big life decisions, even if they're very obvious. Obviously, this was a very obvious yes. Like they were paying me significantly more and was read it right. Still gotta ask your wife, right?

Ryan Burgess
Oh, it's always good to check. Like check in with someone who knows you really well. And like maybe you jump at chances too soon, or all those things and like she can kind of, you know, play the other the other side of the coin to just try and like help you really make the right decision.

Brian Holt
So yeah, that's how I ended up at Reddit. I was director of engineering on like experiments, basically. But I was director of myself where they actually had no reports the entire I was there despite the fact that was in managing ladder there. If you consider Reddit having any letters. Read it was like I was employee number 29 or 30, something like that. So I was really early at Reddit. So it was still, you know, the Wild West when it comes to that kind of stuff. But that's really like where my speaking career took off. I spoke. So I did speak of the fluent the next year, I gave a 90 minute workshop on we built the same app in Angular, Ember and backbone. And that was my 90 minute workshop was way too much content, but it was my first workshop ever. But that's where I ended up in the Speaker's lounge. There's where I met Mark Urbanski, who is the CEO of front end masters he's like I saw your workshop, it's great. You want to come teach online? Is like I run this thing called front of masters since I had actually heard of it at that point, because I saw that there like Mieszko honoree, and I think John Resig, and like, there's a bunch of might have been not John Resig. But there's other jQuery core maintainers that had done workshops on this. And so they had some really famous people's like, well, I'd like to be in the company of very famous people in the JavaScript world as well. So yeah, sure, no, whatever, I'll come do it. And that's really what got me started with my masters, which I'm literally I'm going to finish this podcast. I'm gonna go back to preparing my next for front of masters. So obviously that's been a very fruitful relationship with Martin. You know, Mark is still one of my best friends like the the I literally see those guys all the time like so I made lifelong friends from that as well. So yeah, that was read it read it but actually ended up moving me to San Francisco because they closed all the remote offices. And I was there for 92 days and the San Francisco office had to be there for 90 days to not pay back my moving bonus.

Ryan Burgess
I was like, why is that so specific? Brian Barrett, this is That's funny.

Brian Holt
That's that's why it was very intentional as why I remember that specifically. And that's when I got a call from Netflix. And it was, I'm pretty sure the person I ended up that ended up offering me the job was a was your boss Christina Mont right here for a very short amount of time, it was my boss as well. And he's like, Hey, here's your salary. And like, you know, Netflix, it plays stupid salaries. That's that's kind of their calling card. He's like, do you want it? And it's like, I'm pretty sure I wanted but I like I've done this before. I'm not saying yes to a job without talking to my wife. And apparently I was like the only person because I gotta I heard this from recruiting. I was like, you're like one of the very few people that didn't actually end up saying yes, on the phone on that first call with the offers, like because they don't want you to go compare offers, right? That's a very common thing in Silicon Valley. Right. So yeah, I was like, I was like, I can't say yes, this because I have to talk to my wife because I've done this to her before, and she'll be so pissed if I do this to her again. And bless Chris. I think he's like, okay, that's fine. But can you let me know, by the end of the day, it's like, I can totally let you know, at the end of the day. So it's funny how that almost happened twice to me. And I I am an idiot, but I learned

Ryan Burgess
you learned from your, you know, gotta pull Nikki in a bit sooner this time.

Brian Holt
Nikki decided like, yeah, of course, you're gonna do that. The only thing that I mean, you understand that commute is awful though, going from San Francisco to Los Gatos every day. I don't miss that. I mean, I was I was in over an hour each way. Especially when I moved into Noah Valley. That's just not great. But I enjoyed work. I worked for you at Netflix. We worked on some cool stuff. A lot of the signup experience for fun TV. I shipped C code at Netflix. That was That was interesting. I have not done that. Since that. I do not intend to do it again. But yeah, that was good.

Ryan Burgess
I feel you join my team with me not being there yet. Because I was supposed to start the same day you were. But my visa took an extra week or something to come through. There's some some reason I remember something to do with my visa. And so I remember coming like and meeting you like that first day, my first day, which would have been like, week two for you. I'll never forget to yours. Like you. You need to go get lunch soon, Ryan like, because I remember all the lunches, we'd have those box lunches, and they would just go really, really fast. Like, you're probably not going to eat at 10 3011 o'clock. But you grab your lunch now, so that you have it. And I remember that

Brian Holt
still sticks out is like how to procure food. I am actually very good at that kind of advice. It was

Ryan Burgess
it was like one of the first things you said to me. It's like, oh, here's my manager, I should help him out. And that was like what you said, I'll never forget that.

Brian Holt
Yep, that was for a good time. I mean, we had a great time. And Netflix. Obviously. I'm still lifelong friends with you and with Jem. And, and Ryan and yeah. And Mars. Right. So yes, I'm really good friends there. Yeah. So I guess I'll just finish up my resume. Right. So I ended up at

Ryan Burgess
you have a great resume. And so yeah, you're right. Netflix for a few years. And then yeah, moved on to LinkedIn. LinkedIn at that point. Yeah.

Brian Holt
So I went to LinkedIn. That was nice because like instead of having to go down to Los Gatos I could bike ride into LinkedIn so um, fun fact is actually Derek showers the company my job and I imagine how many people on this podcast remember our friend Derek which by the way, you should definitely interview Derek as well. I'm sure he would have a very interesting take

Ryan Burgess
Derek's on my list to talk to you. And he definitely has an interesting background and like, yeah, it's it'd be great talking with him on that.

Brian Holt
So I was at LinkedIn for and for about six months, I worked in the San Francisco office, which was very intentional. I was on Derek's team, it was great to work with Derek. Derek was doing iOS stuff. I was doing web stuff. But there was just a bunch of factors that made me not happy there. One, I didn't like my manager. And I'm sure he'll never listen his podcast and if he does, I don't care because he and I, he legitimately in one of our one on ones he's like, I don't like you. And it's like, that's the nice thing to tell your employee.

Ryan Burgess
Great. Great way to start a conversation with your direct report.

Brian Holt
So that was the primary thing. I was working on stuff that I was not super excited about. I was actually shipping more Java code than I ever did JavaScript at. And so that was a pretty short tenure. I was going to transfer to another team at LinkedIn, which I was kind of sad about. So it moved me out of the San Francisco office down back to Mountain View. So I was back in that same boat again. View or anyway, wherever

Ryan Burgess
that I think, Sunnyvale or Mountain View I can never remember Sunnyvale.

Brian Holt
Yeah. Doesn't matter. It's all you know, the peninsula to me, it's it's a commute

Ryan Burgess
that you you're given up that nice bike ride. Exactly.

Brian Holt
And that is when another podcast favorites, Sara Dresner reached out to me and said like, Hey, I'm at Microsoft, we're doing developer relations. Are you interested in doing Developer Relations, and it's because LinkedIn and Microsoft it was going to be technically be an intercompany transfer, which means I didn't have to, like reset my like stock. Or I didn't have to pay back my signing bonus, which they gave me a pretty good signing bonus. All super positive things. You only stipulation is you have to move to Seattle, which having grown up in Helena, Montana, like I went to Seattle quite a bit as a kid. So it was actually I really, really liked Seattle. So that was actually a positive thing for me. And I actually had been trying to buy a house in San Francisco at the time, we've just to no avail, because it's an insane market, right. Yeah, I actually tried to buy a house really close to where your old house was right. And Bernal, right. And I think I offered like, the listing was like 800 I think we offered like a 30. And I think it for for like 1.2 million in cash or something like that. Like it was just stupid.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, it's like you're throwing you're throwing money over top of asking. buying houses in San Francisco is like a complete weird thing.

Brian Holt
It's I think it's gotten slightly better. It was even worse back then.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, when you were looking that was like, probably at its worst, like, like demand was just like you had to go right then in there, give money and be prepared to pay over asking. I think it has gotten a little better. But it's still has stories of that, too.

Brian Holt
So yeah, that's I applied to Microsoft. It was a pretty slam dunk interview, I got an interview with you know, awesome people, some of them that which I already knew, ended up working for John Papa, which again, many of you probably know, as well. My manager from LinkedIn actually tried to block my transfers, because he was a jerk. I don't I still don't really understand. I just got a message. He's like, Hey, your manager is trying to like not sign off and this and bless the recruiter for Microsoft. Well, I told my distaste for my managers, he's like, Don't worry, we'll just work around him. He doesn't he has no say in this. So that's, that's how I ended up in Seattle, which is where I still live to this day. I worked at Microsoft for three and a half years, a total of four years. If you count my six months at LinkedIn, half that time was as in developer relations with Sarah. That was like 2018. I took 97 flights in 2018. I spent like 130 days and hotels. Well, I still have diamond on Delta to this day from flying so much in 2018. It was crazy. So one of the flight attendants told me is like if I had just kept doing that for like another couple of weeks, I would have gotten delta 360, which means that you were in the top half percent of fliers in a market, which for while Seattle is a very active market. So that would have been pretty nuts. I think I went to like 30 countries that year, I spoke at like, probably 40 conferences, shipped a bunch of blog posts. So that was like the peak of developer relations silliness in my opinion. Microsoft had basically come back roaring with like, we're gonna restart a dev rel program and we're gonna get all the most famous Twitter famous people and all the smartest people and then ended up hiring like a lot of objectively fantastic people. Some of my favorite people to this day, like Sarah, like Ashley McNamara like Christina Warren, like Jesse Frizelle God they just killed sorry to the

Ryan Burgess
there that tie remember that time there's so many amazing people together like under that one team even

Brian Holt
Yeah, I mean, it was it was a who's who of Developer Relations at the time. And like, you can bet that if your favorite DevRel person didn't work that that we probably talked to them right. So we were we were doing everything we could and it was a fun time because we didn't really have too many rules, right? We were able to just kind of speak at any conference do anything like I spoke at like Ruby Conf Kenya, for example. Right? but actually ended up being one of my most fruitful endeavors because I got to meet with a bunch of local startups, help them with a bunch of stuff, connect them to like resources and stuff like that. And also just found out that the the African tech scene is out of this world, like they are just fucking killing it. And I don't know what I expected, which is to say that, like, I probably had some preconceived notions, which were certainly incorrect, which is not great on my part. But I went in there, I was just blown away by the stuff that they were doing like they're, they're performing at such a high level with such comparatively little resourcing that, I don't know, if you want to fund some startups and for you know, less money and get a lot of bang for your buck, I would say go look at like, Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ghana, there's some fucking phenomenal developers in that in that area. Anyway, but not. So that was great, because we have a lot of freedom to kind of do whatever we want, and secret of our impact that we wanted. And so when you give someone like, like Sarah Dresner, just basically like, here's a ton of budget, here's a ton of space, go do cool stuff, right? Someone like Sarah, someone like some on a cotton, they're gonna go, and they're just going to exceed all of your expectations, right? That people like that thrive in those kinds of environments where they can just do great work and not have someone breathing over their shoulder. The unfortunate super downside of that is that if you tell everyone that there's a, there's a different class of person is going to take super advantage of that, right. And they're just going to fly on fancy airplanes to fancy hotel rooms and do nothing and take advantage that until someone tells them to stop. And so that was kind of our problem, Microsoft, and I'm not going to point fingers anyone. And honestly, I don't really know, the only thing I can say is that our budget was out of control. And not a lot of oversight. And there was certainly some teams not performing as well as other teams, but some people that were not performing as well as others. So they kind of cracked down on it pretty quickly. And that really happened probably would be the end of 2018, I think. Something like that, maybe a bit after anyway, sometime in that timeframe, maybe like mid 2019. And I kind of saw the writing on the wall. And I was also very sick of getting on flights. There was a time that I was getting off a plane from Singapore or India or something like that, and I got a notification was leaving the airport like, Hey, here's what you need to plan for, for your trip to Europe in a couple of days. And when I saw that notification, normally I'd be over the moon because I love both south, south southeast Asia, and I love Europe. But the idea of getting off a plane and then getting on another plane, right? That was so important to me at that moment, I was like I have to stop doing this. So that's when I saw a position posted by Amanda Silver, who is the corporate vice president now of the developer division at Microsoft. So I like a kind of an adjacent sister team. There's Dev Rel and Deb div, right. And there's they sit pretty close to each other and Microsoft to be a Program Manager for JavaScript developers and work on VS code. And so all my favorite things required way less trouble working with people that I liked. I followed and respected Amanda forever. And so I applied for it. Got it. And that's that's kind of how I accidentally became a pm and like, just continuing the trend of Brian accidentally changing jobs, right. And so I was a pm, I worked a little bit on VS code. And I worked a lot on JavaScript experience on Azure. That's kind of where I got more and more cut into the the developer, the DevOps, the infrastructure, kind of world of cloud computing. Still something I really enjoyed to this day. And just really, really enjoyed that. So my job was basically one meeting a month I would have with Scott Guthrie, which is like he's a, you know, one of the more important people in the senior leadership team at Microsoft, and I would brief him, what is it like to be a JavaScript developer on Azure, which, to this day is still not great at the time was much worse. Basically, if you're a JavaScript developer, you you would not choose Azure ever. Probably still would be pretty hard up, but it's a lot better than it used to be. They made a lot of inroads there. So basically, I would go to teams, like you're doing this, this is hard for JavaScript developers let's fix it and then tell Scott about it. And most teams are like hey, yeah, please help us fix this thing so that we can go tell Scott about our victory as opposed to there was one team in particular said like, you know, we don't care right like we think we're right and you can go tell Scott that we suck but we think you suck so that's fine. So it was stuff like that was a very confrontational job like I was my job was basically to pm other PMS, which was It's like herding cats. Like if you think pm engineers is hard. It's not actually engineers are very reasonable people to work with it's pm and other PMS. PMS are the least reasonable people on this, like food chain here. So I enjoyed that job it was, but it was pretty stressful because those meetings can end up being pretty confrontational. But honestly, I still really liked it was cool to kind of see things that I was doing enact massive change on like the entire direction of a trillion dollar company, which is,

Ryan Burgess
yeah, and something that Microsoft was betting big on to Right. Like, I mean, Azure, they were really going deep on it. Yeah,

Brian Holt
definitely. So they still do that. That program still exists. It's going well, as far as I can tell, really enjoyed my time Microsoft was not intending on leaving. But another one of like my legendary colleagues that I worked with, and Microsoft, Deborah was Suze Hinton, which I imagine many of you know of her. She's a new cat on Twitter. She had left Microsoft to go to stripe, which I was really excited for her for. And then she reached out to me, she's like, Hey, you should, there is a pm of developer experience open at stripe. And I was like, that sounds really interesting. So I wasn't intending to take it. But I did talk to the manager and the engineering manager. And the thing that my manager said that really stuck out to me was like, Do you want to be the pm of developer experience at the company that is specifically known for the best developer experience? And that's like that is hard to pass up.

Ryan Burgess
So yeah, switch now. Now you were at stripe.

Brian Holt
Yeah. So now I've been in Australia for about a year working on I work on the VS code extension, I worked on the CLI I worked on the server side SDK is the React Native SDK. The developer dashboard. So I own a lot of stuff, because stripe is a has a massive footprint, with not a ton of people. I mean, honestly, the thing that stripe reminds me of Netflix when I was there, right? That's like, a lot of really smart people working on these, like really high impact projects. But like, it's kind of a, it's less people than you think working on those things. Right?

Ryan Burgess
Like, actually, quite a few people from Netflix have gone there too. Because like, I know, there's a few that you've worked with over the year and like, yeah, there's quite a few people have gone there. And I remember you even telling me that you're like, Ryan, it's kind of like what Netflix was when you and I first started and that was really appealing.

Brian Holt
So that's

Ryan Burgess
that's good. I mean, I'm happy to hear you're like enjoying it there too. That's a big thing.

Brian Holt
It's a it's been a good time and like it weathered COVID Really well. People still had to use money, right? So it's been it's been fun. I have no intentions of moving anywhere at the moment. But ya know, I'm enjoying stripe. Yeah. And that that is my got a complete resume. How long did it take me? It only took me like 15 minutes talk my resume. It's fine.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, that's not too bad. I mean, hearing that you're happy at stripe, I think is great. I'm curious too, is like, what, what keeps you excited about tech.

Brian Holt
I really did love being an engineer. And like, honestly, I could go back to tomorrow to being an engineer and be super stoked about it. And there's one point I was actually interviewing for an engineering job. Thinking that I'd go back to it that was as well as at Microsoft. But I've just found a lot of joy and building tools that let people build the things that they want to envision, right. So that kind of being that force amplifier, right? So that if I can make your job easier, then you can make cool stuff. And then, like, kind of working on that problem in the middle of how do I help developers work faster and be happier about it because I end up solving my own problems, right? Because I'm, you know, still an engineer myself, I still write a decent amount of code. That cycle of identifying a problem talking to customers coming up with a solution and then measuring the results. Like that cycle is really rewarding to me. So that's, that's the thing that keeps me going and gets me excited about working on stuff.

Ryan Burgess
That's awesome. Maybe before we end I'd be curious if you weren't in tech, Brian, what would you do like something completely different? What would it be?

Brian Holt
The obvious one there would be teacher on T I mean, teach anything, right? Like I could. I used to teach Italian to inmates, right? So I like I just enjoy teaching in general. I have brewed beer like I used to brew a lot of beer was special when I was in San Francisco and then I I've helped a friend brew like large scale. That was pretty fun, but it's fun for like, you plan the recipes. You plan these things and then you see if you turn out that part is really rewarding. But 99% of everything else is just cleaning things indefinitely because everything has to be sparkling clean or else you'd ruin the beer right? So that would be another thought. But probably not Sonia will stick with teacher.

Ryan Burgess
I like that. And I forgot about the Italian to that you know Italian very well yeah, I lived in Italy for two years. Yeah, yeah, so that's very cool too. That would be a fun yeah, just even teaching a language other than coding language that actual speaking language

Brian Holt
he acquisition of language, whether it's programming or spoken for, at least for me, I found we're similar processes. We have to learn syntax and organization and things like that.

Ryan Burgess
Well, Brian, it was amazing having you like back on an episode. It's been a while and thanks so much for letting me interview you. I enjoyed just hearing more depth on the back your story. I know some of the things but definitely learned a lot. Any last words you want to share with the listeners?

Brian Holt
Well, someday we'll have to have a vote if it's me or Jen that stays on the podcast. And I think you know how to cast your vote. Hold for President. That's all