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Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s impending move to the mountains and what life will be like living there, how Justin is throwing off his mental chains, why you should take advice from successful people with a grain of salt, the importance of taking time off, working with the Web Audio API, the messy development process of the original iPhone, the General Magic documentary, how startups are responsible for most technology innovation, the history of Slack, Justin’s new podcast, and predictions for the new decade.
Hey guys, when you were discussing the details of transferring and concatenating audio files one of you said, “This will be boring for the audience, they’ll have to fast forward.”
Just want to let you know that I LOVE these parts. Your podcasts gets down in the dirt, in the nuts and bolts details. These might be my favorite parts of your show.
@Justin: the part with the dreams was fascinating. Your takeaway sounds like a good one. Trying to be a “rockstar” (in tech or literally) never seems to actually result in success on that metric and it seems to derail so many other things people care about.
@Jason: I’ve been commenting on these episodes for the last several but haven’t used the same email each time so the gravatar varies.
We met at Hack Reactor long ago. I was in the 2nd class (CJ was in the first) and you came to give a “choose your own adventure talk”, about either the kids’ computer classes you were teaching, the semi-elite soccer team you assembled, your messed up Google acquisition or building Uber’s early systems in Node. We were living and breathing JavaScript at the time so we all voted for a bit of each of the last two.
It was an interesting talk and IIRC, it had some relation to Jeremy Howard coming by and doing a very different but still interesting talk.
@Mark – Wow, that was a while ago – maybe 2012/3…? It’s cool that we have that connection and that you’ve stuck around this long. 😉 I haven’t spoken to CJ or Jeremy Howard in years! I should probably send them both emails.
I gave two talks like that at Hack Reactor, I believe. The first time I gave a “choose your own adventure talk” was at a Ruby meetup where I had actually prepared something, but at the last minute I was like f*ck it, who wants to hear some stories instead, and suprisingly it worked out really well. Plus, it was way more fun to do. Personally, I love to listen to stories and I remember the lessons from them much better than something like “Ten things to keep in mind when launching a webapp” or whatever.
By the way, how did Hack Reactor end up working out for you? It seemed to be a great launching pad for CJ, who wne from working part-time repairing iPhones to being a well-compensated web-developer at a first-tier SV tech company. Not too shabby!
@Jonathan Fly – Assuming you’re not in the minority, I have absolutely no problem getting into the weeds with this stuff. 😉 Thanks for the feedback.
+1 from me for steering into the weeds a bit.
I thought I heard mention that Justin would be able to talk about work, did that happen in this episode, or did I miss it? Also, you guys mentioned that Speak wouldn’t be a good match for what Jason wanted to to, but don’t think you covered progress on Speak. (FYI: skipped over the previous episode…plant to listen later this week)
The section on predictions was fun…I’m excited to see how 3d printing grows, bullish even, but it always seems to be something that’s just around the corner.
Thanks guys!
@Jason: It went well! I’d been in a semi-technical role at a startup in Beijing before and had a rough adjustment to the SF job market. By the time I finished, I had an offer from a small startup, a Japanese game company, a consultancy and Groupon, which I went with. I was in the pipeline at Google also but they were super slow. From there, the opportunities got better, but I’ve been pretty much incessantly drawn towards tiny new startups and my own entrepreneurial pursuits.
I went all-in at Hack Reactor and it was a fantastic learning opportunity. If they still existed as an independent entity, I’d recommend them to everyone willing to work hard to get into the industry!
@Mark – That’s really cool! I always thought the bootcamp model was an interestingl idea. It’s great to hear that it’s had such a positive impact on your career.