Hey, hey everyone, hanging out with one of the coolest guests I've ever had on the 99
Dev Problems show.
Kevin, I would love for you to introduce yourself.
Yeah, totally.
So well, thank you so much, Thisa, for having me.
It's always a pleasure to talk about development and technology in general.
And I enjoy learning from you.
I'm actually one of your fans in terms of these live streams you have been doing.
I've been watching all of them.
So thank you for making this happen and having such amazing people in this show.
So the first thing is I'm Kevin Blanco.
I am based in San Jose, Costa Rica.
That's what I was born.
And I am a 15 years tech engineer who loved doing technology and then transitioned to
a developer relations advocate job almost two years ago full time.
But I've been doing technology and community work alongside in parallel all my life.
Because I have to admit that the community was a big part of my success in my early
career.
And one thing I said at the beginning when I started to go to certain meetups and events
and getting so much support from the community, I said, I'm going to get back to these people
because I've been learning so much from them and they're doing it for free.
There's no way this can be that easy for them.
And for me, it's no way that I can get all of this knowledge for free.
I have to get back.
So every time that I had the capability to go back to the community, whatever that community
is and retrieve it with giving my own time for free and giving my own knowledge for free,
I do it.
So that's who I am.
And there's also a huge parallel career in my life, which is film.
Ever since I was a kid, I loved to watch films and I always said that I wanted to do some
films my own.
So when I was settled in my tech career, had my good job and my good salary, I started
to learn at film school.
I graduated from film school.
And now all of a sudden, I find myself creating films for educating developers and working
as a full-time real advocate.
So I'm just in the best time of my life, I can say.
I'm doing the things that I love working with developers, doing technology, but also doing
films and doing videos every day.
So I just feel that I'm getting paid to be happy and that's amazing.
I love so much of what you said.
Gosh, I want to reply to so many different aspects.
First off, thank you for the incredibly kind words.
Fair enough, agree, your video editing skills are top notch.
You've actually got to support some of my clients, which has been amazing.
I would love to tap into some of the like AI video stuff, but let's save that for a
different live stream.
Maybe we can do something fun and talk about that.
Because someone posted a video on LinkedIn where it was a cat making food and it was all
like AI created and it was adorable and sure there was little points that you could nitpick,
but at the end of the day, it's a cat making food.
pure entertainment. So I'm really intrigued to kind of hear what you think about film and AI.
But the biggest thing that I wanted to tap into what you said was the community. I have had the
same thing happen for me. I was self taught or taught myself how to code many years ago.
And just really felt that the community around me and the people that supported me and sort of
gave me the different opportunities and then helped me grow really was what forged that career.
And I didn't have free code camp. I didn't have these really awesome curriculums that are around
now. Like it sounds like you and I have been in tech for around the same amount of time. So you
know what I'm talking about. We had W3 schools, right? Like that's it. That was what we had in
books that you could get from the library or buy, you know. And so, yeah, it was hard. And so I
invested heavily in teaching women to code because of that. I was like, I don't want people to have
to go through the same gruesome process I went to. And then that just flourished my career beyond
belief. And so I love that you said that. And I think that just wanted to really double tap into
that because I think it is something that developers should really take to heart and that
if you are looking for work or if you have found yourself looking for work in the past,
if you never want to look for work again, give back because the work will come to you.
Exactly. That's true. I mean, just to give a sense of where I come from. I come from a very
poor and humble family, like to be honest, my father is a plumber. He had no formal education
at all. My mother was just a mother. She was just dedicated to me and my brothers. And they always
told me, I saw that from my father, you have to work your ass off. Like there's no way you can
achieve something in your life, you don't work your ass off. But my father had something that my
mother, sorry, my mother had something that my father didn't have, which is it's my mother had a
strong belief in that you can be whatever you want in the future. My father, unfortunately,
he worked really hard, but he never trust himself. But my mother had a huge trust on the things you
can achieve. So I think I got the best from both worlds. Like even when I was a kid, I remember
that after school, I have to go back with my father and go work with his clients. He was also an
entrepreneur, let's say. And I remember working with my father after school and I see him working
weekends. No matter the time he got a call from a client, we have an issue with our prompts. He was
putting his work, his clothes and going to work. And he told me or my brother, let's do this job.
So I understand the importance of hard work, but also understand from again, my mother, like you
can be whatever you want. So I remember that in school, I never had access to a computer in my
house. We never had a computer. And like to give context, I'm in Central America. I'm kind of far
away from the big cities and everything. I was close to like more to the farm life that to the
city. And so when I go to high school, that's the first time I touch a computer. And for me, it was
like, mind blowing, like, what the heck is this thing? It's so amazing. And I remember that the
first thing I had the chance to play with was a piece of software that I don't think they never
used that in the United States, or maybe they did, but it was called micro mundo, something like
micro world. And what it means is we had this little horse that you could program the horse to work,
to walk five steps and then walk five steps up and then walk five steps left. So that was like my
first programming experience where I had the chance to move the horse in a direction that I
wanted. And so I was mind blown. But and I said, like, I want to work with computers. That's all
that I said, I don't know how I didn't know what was programming or our Cisco or whatever, all of
the different branches that you can work technology, all I said is I want to work with computers.
Yeah. So here in Costa Rica, there's something called, so we have a good education system here,
a good public education systems. And there's something called technical high schools and a
technical high school is, it's a combination of a standard high school plus a technical
education. So at the end, you ended up with your standard education diploma. And also an engine in
the standard engineering is a bachelor degree level of a certain career that you have. Wow.
Wow. Really good. It's all day, like you have to be from eight a.m. to seven p.m. It's really strong.
And they don't choose anyone, you have to take a test and they will only allow people
with certain skills to access this education level. So I had the chance to achieve it.
It was the public education system. So my parents did have the money, but they said,
if you achieve that, that's going to be your diploma that you can go out and search for your
first job and then finish up your engineering career with your own salary, because we don't have
money to pay for university or anything like that. So thankfully, I got it. Thankfully, I finished
all of that. And at the end of that, those three years of studying in parallel with the standard
high education diploma, I was able to learn everything about computer science, programming,
Cisco. I had a bunch of, like it was, it is amazing. Now when I go back and I see everything
that they teach me at that time, I was like, that was amazing. So long story. I go out to the market
and I get my first job. Thankfully, it was a very small agency. Like it was actually three friends
who founded their own agency and they were doing just websites at that moment. We're talking about
Flash. We're talking about jQuery, Glowwishing, Spaghetti Code. I remember I wrote a lot of
Spaghetti Code in jQuery. And that's the same on my GitHub repo. I have to go back and maybe
delete that, but that's part of it. Now you have to leave it. I have the same in my GitHub background
too. Yeah. And so I was their first hire. They were a small agency. They had their first customers.
They were doing good and they said, we want to hire someone, but we cannot pay an actual
engineer to come to this shop because we don't have that amount of money. So I applied. They
paid me like the minimal wage, but it was great because I learned all of the ins and outs of
what it means to work on a company. And I appreciate that opportunity so bad because it wasn't my first
job as just a person who was writing code on a large enterprise. I was somebody who was actually
part of the client coming in the office, understanding their needs. I saw those guys taking notes on how
to understand their requirements. I saw how they, an SOP is wrote, an SOD, a scope of work is wrote
or is written. And that was so much learning for me because I was not only part of writing the code
for these websites. I was also part of the whole process on how is the designer taking all of that
and building the user experience, their first diagrams, et cetera. I was so much blessed about
that opportunity. And I remember that when I was interviewing for them, they told me, you know,
if we hired you, we would like you to be part of the community because it turns out that we used
Drupal for all of our websites. I didn't even know that. I love that. Yeah. I mean, I have so much,
like I really, I always tell this to my friends and everything, like I have so much value for my
first boss because he taught me what the community was. And so he said, since we do a lot of Drupal,
we like to get back to the community. If we hired you, will you be open to go to the meetups and
start learning and at some point give back to the community? Obviously, I said yes because I needed
the job, but I didn't even know what the community was. I never went to a meetup. I never went to
any type of event like that. And so I said yes. And when they hired me, that person teach me
everything about Drupal. I only knew like HTML, PHP and everything. And I remember he said, like,
if you want to, you're not obligated. Like we work from Monday to Friday, but I always come to the
office on Saturday because like I'm the owner. We have to keep working. We have to make this happen.
So if you want to come in on Saturday, we're not going to pay you, but I'm going to teach you even
more about Drupal. So I said yes to community. Obviously, I was hungry for learning. And that's
one of the things about when you're a junior, I mean, I think at every level you have to be
hungry for learning even more. It doesn't matter what your level is. And so I said yes. He taught
me everything I knew about Drupal at that moment. And then we started to go to the Drupal meetups.
It was called Drupal. And I remember my first presentation. I remember my first. It was so bad.
I was so nervous. I couldn't go through the topics that I had. But that's how you grow. If you don't
fail, you don't grow. You don't do shitty work at the beginning. You're not going to do great work
at the end. Like when I go back and see my first videos, I cringe about it. They're so bad. I would
like to delete them, but I keep them in YouTube so I can see my progress because I learned so much
about communicating, about technology, about everything that I have learned so far. And it's
good to see where you go. But anyway, that's how I entered the tech area. That's how I got my first
job. And then after working for about two years with them and learning a lot about technology
in Drupal, I got my second job working directly with a United States company. It was a company
located in Texas. And I remember my interview because the person who interviewed me, he loved my
profile. But he wanted to see how good I was speaking in English because everything was in
English, obviously. And I remember I couldn't understand a single thing that he said. He had such
a hard and complicated Texas classic. The southern draw. Yeah. Hey, that's fine buddy. I was thinking,
yeah, maybe I couldn't understand a single thing that he said. And I said, like, can you send that
over chat or something like that? I don't know how, but he hired me. He liked my profile. And I had
to really pay attention to what he said. I remember that every meeting that I was with him,
I had to close my eyes and put my headphones, noise canceling and try to at least understand
a little bit of what he said. And just ask for a follow up email. But that was good because I
trained my ear when it comes to English with him. And again, I take every challenge that I have in
life as an opportunity to grow. And everything that I had as a challenge, I get so excited because
it means that I'm going to learn something new. I never take challenge as something that scares
me or as a pushback. I always take it as this means that I'm going to learn something new. And I
take challenge like, oh man, I love it. I'm going to do it. So yeah, I don't know how much can we
continue to delve into that area. But that was how I started in tech. Oh my gosh, I love that story
so much. Okay, so have you been to a Drupalcon? Oh yeah, I speak at Drupalcon New Orleans 2016.
We like, I bet we just missed each other in my investment in the Drupal space because it started
around 2017. Previous to that, I was in Jumla in WordPress. So Jumla is like where I cut my teeth
similar to you on Drupal. Love Drupal. I love the Drupal community. They are honestly,
oh, I don't know if I can say this with everyone who can publicly hear me, but I think they might be
my favorite developer community of all time, honestly. They're just the open source vibe that
is in that community is just so real and so, I don't even, I can't even explain it. You get it.
It's true. Like what I was saying at the beginning, remember, I went to my first Drupal meetup,
this one that I'm telling you, and I asked a guy who did this presentation on a topic called AHA.
So AHA was something to use Ajax in Drupal so you could update the page without refreshing the page.
And I couldn't understand a thing about the AHA API in Drupal. So I get close to this guy and I
said, can you explain a little bit further? And he said, yeah, sure, let's go outside. Let's take
the computer and I'll explain to you. We spent like two hours and I learned a lot about, you know,
AHA at that moment. And I remember that the end I asked him like, hey, what do you do? And he said,
oh, I'm the owner of this company and you probably don't know the name, but it is a company was very
well-established in Costa Rica. And he was the actual CTO. And one of the founders of that company,
I was like, so you're telling me that you are the founder and CTO of this company. You come to this
meetup and you took two hours to explain to a junior guy who's just starting his career without no
constraints at all. Like you're not billing me or asking me about anything. And he said, yes,
that's the power of the Drupal community. So I've always had the Drupal community in my heart and
that's why I always try to get back so much to them. But at the end, that's the power of the
communities and the open source communities. I think in general, open source communities are
like that. I'm not saying anything about closed source, like companies of software, but in general
terms, open sources is that way. Yep. I would agree not to bring up any major drama, but WordPress
isn't that way. But we're just going to walk away from that conversation because that's a loaded
conversation. It is packed. Yeah. It is, it is. Okay, so moving on from that, lots of good, there's
a lot, there's lots of good chat. So Arvin thinks that we need to build a front end application using
jQuery in the live stream. I think that's a glorious idea. This is where my dev chops can shine
again, right? Bring back jQuery. But no, it would actually be kind of fun, honestly, to like retro
build a site in a live stream with someone like, I think the older techniques and honestly, like,
I don't know what I think is really interesting. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and we
can kind of dive into like how you're, how you do some of your work and some of the challenges
you face because you're doing some really cool stuff today. It's like, I think it's really
interesting that everybody runs for like cloud and Kubernetes. It's like, it's just the way, and I'm
like, but this wasn't the way years ago, I've built like really, really high-scaled websites without
Kubernetes, without this infrastructure. Like, why can we not start to build on an infrastructure
that makes sense, you know, and not that I'm not saying it's not the right decision, but that's a
whole loaded conversation. But I feel like you definitely have a lot of similar opinions, but
I would love to hear sort of, if you want to shed light on that opinion, but also just the things
that you're working on in your day-to-day today, as you've shifted away from the beautiful world of,
you know, Drupal day-to-day and writing jQuery.
Yeah, totally. So at some point in my career, I moved a lot away from writing code to more
like cloud architecture, and I started to do a lot of Kubernetes and, you know, dev operations,
SRA scaling. And then at some point, I moved away from that, and I moved to a technical
director position. So actually, before joining AppSmith as a dev rel advocate, I was working on a
digital agency. I spent four years there working as their technical director, and I was managing
software developers. I was managing customers. I was making sure that all of these products and
software that we were writing were actually doing great. We're under DS code. We're running
correctly. So I got the chance to understand how things works very early in my career. And I think
that was my blessing. I wasn't just focused on what little portion of writing this code. I understood
the bigger scope, like, how is this going to run? Where is it going to run? How much money is going
to spend? So I think I saw a post from you. I think it was from you about Ruby on Rails, and I
worked with Ruby on Rails at some point in my life. I loved it. But it was so goddamn expensive to
run it. And I think that was one of the problems with Ruby on Rails. We spent so much money. I'm
talking about a startup that I worked with. They were running on Ruby on Rails. And I remember
we had to migrate from Ruby on Rails because just the amount of money we were spending on executing
that software, hosting it, it was amazing. We had so much great developers. It wasn't that we
wrote bad code. It was a chose run in Ruby on Rails. It was expensive. But anyway, I'm sorry
for going back to your question. When I started working as a cloud architect, I remember that I
enjoyed doing all of these complicated diagrams and complicated topography. Because I thought that
when you get over complicated things, you're going to be like, you're very professional. You have
all of these clusters. You have this API get way. And how do you route things? And you have a bunch
of balancers. And you think that when you are over engineering things, it's because you're a better
engineer. And I remember one of the leaders that I had at some point, he told me, you probably have
heard about the keep it simple principle. And you're not keeping it simple. Let's go back and see
if we actually need microservices. And I remember we changed one of the architects that I proposed
to something very simple. It was just a single Google Cloud run serverless application. And it
was for an event. One of our customers had to run an event with millions of people joining the event
from one moment to another. They were a makeup company. And I remember that everything run
perfectly on that Cloud run instance. It could be a Lambda in AWS. It doesn't matter what the
provider is. It was just a Cloud function managing all of those requests. And it scaled up correctly.
And so I'm not saying that you shouldn't try to focus on the best solution for your problem. But
sometimes we're over engineering things. Because unfortunately, and I'm going to put myself in
that position, at some point, I had a high ego. And when we are developers, we have high egos. And
I can say that a lot of people I work with, they have high egos. And you think that coming in with
the biggest solution or with the largest amount of frameworks to your project, and now you have a
node modules folder that takes two gigabytes, that's going to be the best because you are like the
best developers because you know all of these frameworks. Keep it simple. Keep it simple,
stupid. Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is by the simplest solution that you can find.
And we have always heard about Steve Jobs who said that, oh, I think it was Bill Gates. I don't
remember. He said, I will hire a lazy developer to do the job because he will find the easiest way
to achieve it. And that's true. So I think that I will say, yes, keep it simple, stupid because
you know what? Customers don't care about your cloud architecture diagrams. Customers, they
don't care about your framework. What they care is that when you deploy that website or that platform,
it has to work. It has to achieve their goals. Normally, customers, they don't care about that.
So that's when, again, going back to my first experience in the job market, I had the chance
to be in this very small agency where I had the chance to be in customers' meetings. I understood
that very early in my career. I never heard them say, are you going to manage like five servers
with a cloud balancer? And what type of balancer are you going to use? Are you going to use
Route 53 to manage it? They don't care about that. They just care like, can you give me the best
piece of software you can to solve my problems with the least amount of money you can spend?
That's what I care. And when I understood that, I understood something that we take for granted
when we are developers and it's called value. Normally, I don't hear developers talking about
value. That's higher leadership conversations that you, when you hear about what value proposition
is. And again, I understood that very early in my career because every time that I have to
build a proposal for a project, whatever that was, I understand like, is this bringing value to my
customer? Or is this just me satisfying my ego and building the biggest cloud infrastructure that I
can? And that's always something that brings me back to earth. Are you actually bringing value?
And that's something that helped me in my career. Like I have been able to grow in my career,
always going to the next ladder on the, to the next step in the ladder because I've always
thought about value proposition. And I didn't focus just in the technology piece. So I think
that's very important when it comes to building software, like just go back to the basics,
or feel intimidated by all our coworkers building incredible dev operations, pipelines,
and automations. And dude, if you're solving the customer's problem by bringing value and not
spending too much money, you're doing the job. You're a good asset. I fully agree. And to even
take it back to like, so when you were talking about your first role, and you were in that agency,
you, you know, you spoke to the fact that you talked to clients and you did some of these other
things. And you looked at SOWs. And I think that that was also my experience as well. And one of
like my first sort of agency type of a roles where I was building multiple projects, I was also tasked
with that as well. And I think that it's honestly a beautiful blessing. And I think that some
developers tend to shy away from those client conversations, those hard business conversations,
because they're like, meh, don't care. Tell me what I need to code. Tell me what I need to program.
But I think at the end of the day, and if anyone has listened to any of my interviews, I swear,
I'm not plugging this in there, but it has happened with every interview, I think almost
everyone, where we've talked about how important it is as a developer to understand the business
value of what they're doing. Because when you understand that, like Kevin gave us all these
great examples, but it's like when you understand that, then you can go into that technological
solution with the right resources, with the kiss methodology that you said, right? Keep it simple,
stupid. But also, I've been able to go into some of those conversations and talk to a client and
then they are explaining something super complicated, super crazy. And I'm like, but why? Tell me why
you want this? What is the root functionality that you need? What do you need at the end results?
Right? What's the, what's the thing you need for your customers or your clients at your end result?
And I've been able to rule out unnecessary infrastructure, unnecessary features, unnecessary
building to be able to simplify and not only save money for the client, but also save us time on the
agency side, right? How can we be more efficient? How can we still deliver something amazing for
this client while doing that in a way that is keep it simple, stupid? Exactly. And so I think
that a lot of people will go back and say, oh, so you're saying microservices are bad? No, I'm
saying that people overused microservices and hard containerized architecture. It's just because
and maybe that's even a bad fame to that particular type of infrastructure topology.
But all I'm saying is you can go into YouTube and find a lot of videos of companies who drove away
from microservices. Not because microservices were bad, but it's because they just didn't need it.
It wasn't what they needed for their solution. They maybe just needed any standalone, monolithic
applications. And that's fine. Like if you feel bad about using a monolithic, like, oh my god,
this is so old. Go back to check. It's an ego check. Like if it's solving the problem,
and it's code that is well written, it's well, it's correctly deployed, it's under all of the
correctly parameters of security and et cetera, like feel good about yourself. You're solving the
problem with the best way. And if microservices is the best solution for it, then go ahead.
But you have to just, you have to really understand the requirements to make sure that you need that.
Just don't go with that path. Yep, you should. Yeah, I fully agree. Okay, so we've talked about
a lot of really cool things. We're sort of getting near the end of time, but I would love to hear
what does a day to day look like for you? I know you do. You've got your full-time work. You do a
little bit of some side stuff here and there. What does that look like for you? What are you working
on on a day to day basis? So my day to day is beautiful, as I said at the beginning. I love that.
So I work at AppSmith. AppSmith is a local platform. It's completely open source under the,
I will say, the most open license, which is Apache 2.0. And AppSmith, it's a low-code
platform focused on enterprise internal tools. That's their niche. It doesn't mean that you
cannot build a public website, but that's what they do. So my goal is mainly three important
goals. The first one is developer advocacy and video production. So I'm in charge of the video
production and making sure that we're creating content tailored for the developer journey,
basically, from awareness all the way to getting our developers to actually be advocates of our
product. I'm not alone in this team. I have my good friend Joseph, and he's very focused on the,
let's say, second portion of the developer journey, which is growth. And I'm more focused on the first
one, which is awareness and evaluation. You're more on that content, sort of like telling that story.
Exactly. So why is beautiful for me is because I'm able to use all of the storytelling techniques
that I learned in film school to generate awareness, to maintain tension, to build stories that
generate empathy with people. And I bring that into DevRel, and I blend that when I'm creating all
of these awareness videos. So the whole thing is I'm trying to generate empathy with our ideal
customer profile and make them understand that I understand their problems, that I understand
what they're facing, and that maybe have a solution for them. A lot of people say that
DevRel is not sales. A lot of people say that DevRel is not support. A lot of people say that
DevRel is not a product, but we are all of that. I have at some point, we're the head of somebody
who's trying to sell something. I have to wear sometimes the hat of somebody who is doing customer
support and maybe join a customer of, I've joined customer calls in AppsMe with somebody who's trying
to deploy AppsMe to their Google Cloud infrastructure. And since I'm a Google Cloud certified engineer,
I do that. And that doesn't mean that I'm not a DevRel person. That sometimes you have to wear
all of those hats. I also participate on the go-to-market strategy. I work very closely with
their marketing team to define all of these strategies for our launch events, about all
of the upcoming features that we're launching, also on focus on developer programs. So right now,
we're working on a developer program to make our developer advocates more officially heroes.
Probably a lot of companies use the hero's names anyways. But at the end, it's just making it more
official because I want them to be able to create their own events in their own cities.
AppsMe has a global community and I'm not able to go to Middle Asia and Japan. I wish
to create events, but they can. We have advocates in all of these cities. We have people in Abu Dhabi,
we have people in Africa, we have people in Australia loving AppsMe. And I want them to
run their own events and we want to support them to run their own events in their own cities. So
that's one of the things that I'm also working on for next year. And the other thing is partnerships.
So since AppsMe is a, let's say, front and focus platform because you can connect to any data source,
I go out and search for all of the different data sources that our customers are using and that we
support. And I tell them, for example, last year, MongoDB, hey, we have a lot of customers who use
MongoDB, we support MongoDB, let's do a joint collaboration together. That means maybe official
documentations in both websites about integrating each another. That means maybe a joint live stream
where we showcase how to make maybe a rack solution using AppsMe in MongoDB, just an example of there.
And so on and so forth. I'm just trying to build valuable and a strength
joint collaborations and partnerships with all of those companies that we support integrations with
and allow our developers to have more formal integration documentations with all of these
different vendors that they're trying to use. So that's how my day-to-day looks like. A lot of
creativeness, writing scripts, shooting in different locations, editing, color grading,
talking to people, doing community support, being on this court sometimes. It's all over the place,
but I love it. That's basically what my day-to-day looks like and building a lot of demos. I build
maybe two demos per week to showcase the different AppsMe capabilities.
Wow. So for someone who's spent a great deal of time in DevRel myself as well,
you're killing it. You're taking all the growth tactics, although you don't necessarily focus
on growth, but I call it all growth of really elevating those happy users. Honestly, that's
the money. That's where you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck. That's where you're
going to get the biggest impact is when you can empower and elevate those users that love your
products because they're going to speak far better about your product than you can because they're
going to talk about how they're using it in their day-to-day, what problems they're solving, and
that's going to convince someone like you or I as developers ourselves to be like, wait, what are
you using? How did you build that? You did what in that little of time? So that's amazing. And
then partnerships, that's the other really, really impactful thing when you can
get some of these bigger brands to partner with you, like you said, integrated into the docs,
the co-marketing opportunities. Maybe you sponsor a booth together at a conference,
right? And you really double dip into something beautiful. Wow, that's awesome. I wanted to call
that out just so other folks listening, if you're interested in DevRel or interested in what Kevin
does in his day-to-day, I think he's doing some really, really awesome stuff that is likely driving
some major impact over at AppSmith. And I'm sure they love it. Yeah. And coming back to,
from that community sharing experience, I do the same with DevRel. Like I have my personal
video channel on YouTube where I go out and explain everything I know about storytelling for DevRel.
Next month, sorry, next Monday, I'm starting a monthly newsletter called DevRel, which is me
just going over everything that I've done during that week. I'm going to explain very raw, like
this is how I write my scripts. I'm going to showcase the video of the week, which is a video
that inspired me to do the work that I'm doing. I'm going to share the resource of the week,
which is maybe some piece of tool that I use. So for example, maybe this life, you know,
changing camera switcher that I use here and there to do in my live streams. I'm going to showcase
how I use that and how can you use it for your day-to-day. So next Monday is a weekly newsletter.
I'm going to put a lot of effort on that. So if you want to just, it's going to be on LinkedIn or
my website, Kevin Blanco.dev. And yeah, it's just the spirit of sharing. I've learned that you,
when you teach, you learn double than when you just learn yourself. And it's beautiful.
Teaching is beautiful because people might say, well, you're explaining your values,
so aren't you afraid of people like maybe taking your job or your opportunities? And I'm not now,
because when I explain what I know, and I get more people to be involved in what I'm doing,
it means that we have more value and more resources as a team. I don't see other DevRels as
competitors. I see DevRel as a community and I've met so many great people, so many great people
in these two years that I've been a full-time DevRel, that I'm just in love with the DevRel
community as I was with the Drupal community. It's beautiful, it's supportive. I had the chance
to go to DevRelCon in July in New York. Beautiful. I enjoyed it so much. I learned so much from
many people and they're just so open again to share their knowledge and see. They're very raw
about their learnings on their own companies about this is how we're failing, this is how we're
winning. So open to see all of these DevRel teams talking about their strategies in their own
companies and how they are killing it or how they are failing it bad so we don't fail the same way
others. That's beautiful. That to me is just so much value. But yeah, anyway, long story short,
that's what I do. And next year, I mean, this year it's going to be more traveling probably,
to more events, more physical events, which I also love. So I'm already looking at the
HKDL. It's very busy traveling, but again, that's opportunity for me to create more video content,
to talk to people, to get their stories because at the end, the story is what drives people
emotions. And that's probably sometimes what can take the decision from using our product or not.
And it's not because they saw a feature they love, it's because they saw other people's stories
that they felt empathy with and say, oh my God, I'm facing the same problem that this company had,
and maybe they can help me solving it. And I believe that storytelling is probably the key
and the strongest value when it comes to talking to people, not just for dev rel or for video.
Like if you're in a meeting and you understand how to drive a story, telling in that meeting,
you're going to have a better communication skill and more chances to maybe close a deal with that
particular client or customer. So it's a very valuable skill set to have in your umbrella,
you know, storytelling. So yeah, that's what I'm sharing every week, basically.
Oh my gosh, I love that. Well, I will definitely be subscribing and I recommend that others do the
same. I'll make sure I put the links in the show notes for anyone who is either listening now and
can't write that down or comes back to the actual podcast version of it because that sounds super
great. This isn't so like such a good conversation. Okay, so there's one question I like to ask at
the end because we all work through problems in different ways. And I think the biggest thing,
the whole focus of the show is talking through sort of challenges and removing that imposter
syndrome of developers at every level and in every role and just making things more approachable.
Right. So in your day to day, if you are either stuck technically or you're stuck with a strategic
decision or stuck with trying to figure out how to solve a pain pointer problem, what do you go
to and how do you work through getting unstuck? Yeah, that's a great question. So now we live in
the AI modern days when you can ask chat to chat with you. We didn't have that back then, right?
That's what you said. And that's so true. We have to go back to books or just cross our fingers that
somebody had the same problems on Stack Overflow and try a response from four years ago and see
if it still fits it. But now we have all these AI tools in our tool chain, which is great. But I
will say that the first thing is, yeah, try to use all of these tools at your disposal to solve
your problems. The other thing is ask for help. Myself, I am a very, it might sound weird because
I go to conference and I speak to hundreds and thousands of people. I am an introvert. I don't
enjoy that much, a lot of huge groups, but you know, I love teaching people. So it's kind of weird
that I'm an introvert, but I enjoy teaching people and talking to people. But anyway,
I'm an introvert. And so in my day-to-day job, I used to really spend a lot of time trying to
solve something without asking for help. And that's bad because you end up at the end asking people
because you couldn't solve it. And they're going to say, like, why do you spend so much time not
asking for help? And that happened to me a couple of times. And so one of the frameworks that I got
from one of the leaders or bosses that I've had in my life said, come to me and ask me a question
when you already tried two things that didn't work. So you're going to come to me like say,
hey, this is not working. I tried this, didn't work. I tried all of this other thing and didn't
work. So he already has a couple of things that I tried and didn't work. So we can go in another
direction. But don't just ask for help like this doesn't work. And what have you tried? I haven't
tried anything yet. No, give it a couple of chats and it still doesn't work. Now is your moment to
go out and ask for help because that's, you know, that at the end is teamwork. And now in my day-to-day,
when I feel stuck and when I feel overwhelmed, coming from a technical career, when writing code
is a procedural type of work, coming to a creative position, it has been completely mind blowing.
Because there's multiple ways to tell a story. There's multiple ways to create a video and none
of that is bad. None of them are bad. Like when you write a piece of code, like you get requirements
like this is how it should work. And if it doesn't work that way, then it's bad. It's wrong. So what
I'm saying is that writing code or building software is more procedural and it's more analytical than
creative. And so what happened to me when I'm feeling stuck from a creative standpoint is
I heard this from Brian Cranston, probably have heard him. He was in Breaking Bad. He was the
main character in Breaking Bad. He's a great actor. He has done multiple amazing shows. And one of the
advice he had is forget about your career. Forget about what you do. I mean, whatever you do in your
career is cumulative. Go travel, talk to people, walk on a different street every day, watch a
different movie, go to an art gallery, listen to different music, develop your taste and judgment.
Because whenever you are put in front of an opportunity, your personality that you nurtured
has something to bounce off because you are unique. And to me, that was beautiful because
in the AI days where anyone can just ask AI to write code, what is going to be more valuable in
the future for us as engineers and developers? If AI can write code, it's going to be your
personality. It's going to be your ability and your own taste. And that's going to bring value.
So to me, that was a beautiful advice from Brian Cranston. The other one he said he has four steps
for creativity. And he always goes through those four steps whenever he's going to act or he's going
to do a performing. And he said, the first thing is relaxation. Nothing good is going to come if
you're stressful. Try to relax, whether it's meditating, praying, whatever you do, that's fine.
Doesn't matter the medium. Stay relaxed. After relaxation, concentration. Try to focus
on whatever that is that you're trying to build. And from there, it's going to come imagination
and inspiration. But the first two steps is really important. Relaxation and concentration.
And the other advice that I got that I remember was really good for me. It was from William Defoe.
He's another good actor. He has been in multiple movies. And he's a great actor and I love him.
And he said, try to fail next time. The next video, the next painting, the next piece of
thing you do, try to fail really bad rather than striving for perfection. You've got to find ways
to not worry and be free and just do. And I take that very seriously because every video that I do,
the next video that I do, I try to fail really bad. I'm going to do another character. I've been
doing characters for my videos. Today, I'm going to play a role of a front-end developer in an
agency who pushed back local platform because we are men's. We write code. We don't use no code.
And that's the character I developed for that video. And for the next video, I develop another
character. I try to fail really bad. And I found that whenever I try to fail, it's where the most
creative and what people enjoy the most when it comes to videos. And that's why I wear the glasses
because the glasses for me is like, whenever I put the glasses, I'm not Kevin anymore. I'm somebody
else. I'm another character. And I can be free. And I cannot have the tides of I'm Kevin, the
developer who writes code and he's an engineer. No, when I put this, I'm at the creative guy who
can play any character and try to fail and never fails because whatever I do is something different
and so unique that has its own nature. And it's so pure that cannot be destroyed because it's very
unique. It's a blend of everything that I have in my life, all of the places that I've been, all of
the movies that I've seen, it's very unique. And when I tell people that, they feel inspired because
we're still developers who have the sponsor syndrome. You are unique. Nobody has the same
experience, the same life choices you have taken, and everything you know, you are unique. Nobody
has that beautiful blend. Now, go out and find what that uniqueness and that blend of experiences
and things you have lived and use that to continue your career ladder. Don't think that that's going
to be your bad thing. It's actually your good thing, whatever you sometimes feel the most ashamed.
It's actually what makes you unique and it's going to help you to be different in a world
where everyone is normal. Why be normal when you can be unique? That's also one of my slogans. But
anyway, I hope I inspire some people with all of the rambling that I've said.
That was so good. Why be normal when you can be weird? That's my theory.
I like to be weird. I love what you said. We hosted a panel on Monday about writing production
level code, leveraging AI. And David, who is one of the speakers that was in there,
he spoke really strongly about being more creative, being close to your hobbies,
being close to music, being close to creativity, and how that's going to set you apart. And then
you come in here and say the same exact thing. So I think really good sentiment here. And I
think it makes a lot of sense too. And I know that you yourself have seen the opportunities due to
who you are and your uniqueness. I have seen opportunities due to who I am and my uniqueness.
And so I think that is just beautiful advice for anyone that, you know, AI might try to take
some of our jobs and take some of the really annoying tasks off of our plate, actually,
but they can't take who we are, right? And I think that that's what's going to shine bright.
Kevin, this has been such an amazing conversation. You are so cool. I already knew that, but you are
just really awesome. And I'm glad that I got to chat with you and the rest of the world got to
hear how awesome you are too, although they get to see it in all of your awesome videos too. So
where can folks find you? They can find me on LinkedIn, Kevin Blanco. They can find me on
my website, KevinBlanco.dev on YouTube, Kevin Blanco as well. You can find, if you don't find me,
just put Kevin Blanco. There's going to be a bunch of videos about me wearing sunglasses and
doing weird stuff. And yeah, I'm on Twitter. I'm everywhere. Just find me any place, shoot me a
message. And that's another thing. Every time I get a message from somebody asking for help,
I take it seriously. I go all the way and help you. So if you need help with whatever you're
trying to do, don't hesitate. Ask me for help and I'll help you for sure. And I don't care about
the money. The money is never the result. The money is just a medium. The result is doing what
you love. So yeah, thank you so much, Tisa, for having me. I've been enjoying these shows. I've
been seeing all of them. And honestly, you're having great people here and they all have great
thoughts. So thank you so much for doing this because we all learn a lot from this.
Tisa, thank you for that. Well, on that note, I'm going to go cry because this has been so sweet
and so kind and so great. No, not really, but this has been awesome. Thank you for joining the show.
I really appreciate it. I hope that everyone has a fabulous rest of their day. Kevin has been a
really great supporter of my business and our work. And so definitely the really annoying ticker that's
going across the live stream, join hub.builtfor.dev. I really strongly recommend that you do go and
join the platform because he is in there doing awesome stuff alongside of some really other
great developers as well. So you can hang out with him there. Join us now. I love it.
Please. Join us now. All right. Bye, friends. Take care, everyone. Have a great one.