The Power of Networking and AI with Will Marple – Techstrong Unplugged EP19

Hey everybody, and welcome back to Techstrong Unplugged. I'm your host, Atan Solomon, and this is episode 19 of our series. In this episode, we're taking you to Vu Conf 2024 at vConf.

Our co-host, Cassandra Chen met up with Will Marple and they discussed the power of networking and ai. Will is a seasoned principal engineer at Black Airplane and he highlights the Pivotal role networking plays in launching and advancing a tech career. Without further ado, let's head over to vConf 2024.

Welcome Back to Text and Unplugged. My name is Cassandra Chin, and today we have Will Marble with us here today. Hi, uh, glad to be here.

Amp, it's an exciting conference. So, um, as I understand it, we're gonna talk a little bit about my background and then we're gonna speak a little bit about state of the state of the tech landscape and job market as it relates to people getting started in their careers. So I've been in, in the computer science industry in general for over 20 years.

Um, I've worked on both hardware and software side of things. Um, done everything from build and and manage complex server environments for both Windows and Unix environments, system administration, um, architected managed networks, um, to development work. So I have a, a broad range of experience in my career.

Um, currently I'm a, I'm a principal engineer at a company called Black Airplane. Uh, and I specialize in full stack web application development. Um, view is my favorite front end framework, and that's what brings me here today.

Um, uh, speaking on view and machine learning, which we could talk a little bit more about, um, in a few minutes. But to kind of talk about how I segued into full-time development from I, a mixture of IT work and development. Um, I recently moved from Florida to Georgia where I reside and, and work now for black airplane about six years ago.

Um, and the reason I'm bringing this up is because it's kind of a case in point for what I'm going to say in a few minutes, which is I think networking. You can't escape that. Networking is your strongest vector by far to getting started in the industry.

Like all of the things that we talk about in the realm of learning and building and refining your skillset is only part of the picture. You know, the, I think the biggest part of the picture to getting that job that you want regardless of where you are, uh, in your career, is going to likely come through your network. Because if you don't have the network, nobody knows how great of a person you are.

Nobody knows how good you are at what you do. Um, and nobody knows how great you are at learning new things, how flexible you are, whatever your, uh, your great shining qualities are without the network, nobody knows about it, and if no one knows about it, no one's hiring you for it. Um, so that's how I found my first job was networking.

It was literally, um, my wife's aunt introduced me to my current boss and the owner of the company that I work work for, which is really odd. It didn't happen at a tech conference or a meetup or anything like that. You say network, we really just, I mean, talk to more people.

When I say networking, I mean like, I, I feel like what I see you see happen often, um, is people stay in their comfort zones. They don't get outside of the box. So I, I have a, a friend and a person I follow that I respect a lot.

Taylor Dein, uh, he's, he's in the recruitment space in in tech and he, he said this thing like, which I, I agree with wholeheartedly, which is a lot of us go to the same tech meetups with the same people and we sit there with those same people and listen to slides where the person may or may not be know what they're talking about. We get indigestion from all the beer and pizza we ate and we go home and we didn't meet anyone new. We didn't establish any new connections.

So I, I, I don't know that it's not necess that it's necessarily even where you're going, whether it's meetups, conferences, you know, job fairs, whatever. Um, it's what you're doing when you go there. I see so many people in tech not want to get outside their comfort zones, just stay in that same clique that they've always been in, um, that kind of thing.

So I would say the biggest thing is be open, meet new people, introduce yourself. That's the only way that you're gonna expand that network if you're at a conference like this. Um, another thing Taylor said, your goal should be to connect on LinkedIn with every single person here.

And I know that that's uncomfortable, feels awkward and unattainable. You probably won't attain it, but if you don't have that lofty goal in your head, you're not gonna be aggressive in connecting on LinkedIn. Having those introductory conversations, introducing yourself and also being interested in what they're about and what they're into, um, and making those personal, those interpersonal relationships.

Personally, I usually go to Java conferences, so going through this view, JavaScript conference is really a different set of people. It really is like front end people. Um, they tend to be a little bit more gregarious because they are more on that creative artistic, they're closer to the creative and the artistic, uh, in that, uh, we are responsible for kind of bringing to life in code what creatives have created for us in Figma or whatever they've, you know, have designed in our designers.

So, um, so yeah, you, this personality set definitely does tend to be more gregarious. So it's, I mean, to your point, these kinds of, of meetups, you're gonna get a better response probably because every, a lot of the people here are used to like, they want to hang out, they want to meet new people, that kind of thing. So whereas in a, a Java conference or a do net conference or something like that, it might be a little bit more of a, an effort.

I mean, they're happy in they're community mobile. Yeah, for sure. And that's a great, that's a great point too.

Like my talk here today is about view and machine learning, but I don't come from a data science and machine learning background. And the spirit of the talk really is, is more about, you know, as an application developer, whether that be a JavaScript developer, a Java developer, or whatever it is, um, most of us that are building applications today, we don't get time in our day job to ex get exposure to AI machine learning technologies. But these techno, there's no escaping the fact that they are pervading our space at a rapid rate.

Um, and so the question becomes like, I, I think a lot of us are feeling the landscape changing and we feel that business requirements are going to increasingly come down the pipeline of we want AI features in our applications. Um, how do we do that? Uh, we have colleagues and other, uh, technologists in the landscape that are ramping up their efficiencies and workflows with AI technologies.

How do we keep up with those things? Um, and so really it's not about the highs and lows of like, oh, it's Devin this week, everybody's losing their job, or next week it's gonna be GPT-4 oh, and now everybody's excited. Again, we've gotta kind of level those planes and valleys out and have it strategy of how do we start to gain familiarity?

How do we learn how to build some AI features in our applications or workflows? Um, so anyway, yeah, I think How do you use AI yourself? Like do you use copilot to help code?

You know, I've AI's been something that I've been adopting and interested in for, you know, early on. I feel like, uh, it's a field of study that's been around, of course for decades, but recent advancements have kind of obviously created this current hype cycle in my workflows. I've tried copilot code, dium source, graph code, ai, um, cursor jet.

I'm a JetBrains guy, so I've tinkered around with their new AI assistant. So for my workflows, I'd say there are two big ones. Uh, one is I rarely use Google anymore.

Um, I use per perplexity AI and find P-H-I-N-D. Um, perplexity does a great job of When you say Google, do you mean web search or Gemini? Sorry.

Yeah, that's fair. Um, web search. So I do, to be fair, like I do still use Google Web search a little, um, but my go-to my knee jerk has become just go to perplexity.

'cause perplexity is kind of like the next iteration on that of it does the Google search for you and not just the Google search. It does a search across many different search engines, performs inference on those search engine result pages and what they link to and then returns an, an intelligent result to you. It's really good at certain tasks like, um, the, for instance, like I want an example of how to implement, like let's say I'm doing a Stripe payments integration.

I say, show me how to implement a payment intent using stripe elements with stripes API. And it's great at parsing through all the relevant documentation and distilling a very easy to understand code example of how to do exactly what you're asking, saves tons of time. Um, and on that note, find the, the place where find kind of fits in.

It's a competing, uh, service, but it's better at parsing docks. Like perplexity is a better, like general purpose for that kind of thing. Find is exceptional at parsing docks and giving you easy to understand examples instead of you having to like weed through the docs and find the thing that you're looking for.

Like you have a a nice handy link of where it, where like it referenced and then a nice description and example of how to do a thing. I think it can be really hard to find the right AI for the right purpose. It can be, but perplexity and find as like high level technologies in a workflow.

Just trying to kind of fill like, advance that mechanism of what I would do with a traditional search engine, I think is a great place to start to ideate. Like, I need to write a conference talk, here are my rough outline points. Like, help me flesh out some slide content.

You don't want like responsible use of ai, like you don't want to just slap it in your code editor or in your conference slides and call it a day. 'cause AI is not great at being you. There's still that human element, like you want to introduce you the spirit of what you want to say, your tone, your thoughts on the matter, but I find it's a fantastic jumping off point.

A lot of times it just triggers that creativity in my brain. When it takes a stab at something, I go, no, it's not really what I want, but now I know what I want and I'll go after it. Um, one interesting thing is in school systems right now, like college programs, they forbid the use of ai Mm-Hmm.

And compared to that workplaces or like, use it as much as possible Except for in the interview process, right? So because like I feel like I hear all the time about people in our space where I got turned down from a job 'cause I was, I was using copilot in my take home test or whatever, um, or it's some sort of proctored, um, code along thing where like you, they, they're, they're putting excessive effort in to make sure you don't quote unquote cheat. And yet everyone who's in a, in a role writing production code every day, they're all using this tooling.

So they're like, to your point in education and in, in the interview process, there's a big disconnect, um, between, between that and reality. Uh, because I think there's, unless you're in, uh, a field where privacy is a huge concern and you're, you can't just use most commonly available coding assistance, um, you should be like, why wouldn't you be, um, at bare minimum tools like copilot that try to finish your sentences, save you tons of time writing boilerplate for you. You're not necessarily going to accept every solution that's provided to you.

But there's a lot of cases where boilerplate plate becomes a thing of the past. Um, so yeah, a hundred percent agree. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

And I think we'll just, it's a slow boat to turn, you know, I, I think that some traditional constructs in our reality, like traditional education, you know, higher education institutions, um, like businesses that have been around for a long time that have tradi like what they would consider tried and true traditional interviewing, talent acquisition processes, um, that boat is gonna be slow to turn for them to realize like, oh, we've been doing it all wrong. We should let them practice. Like they're actually gonna play the game and show us what they can do.

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Um, do you have any more like pointers for people who wanna network and like try to get into the industry? I would say be like, consider your personal friendship world.

Like how did you establish those friendships? How did you meet those people? Um, what do the, your ongoing friendships and relationships look like?

Like take time to ponder and consider those mechanisms and then take that into your thought process. Like, I tend, people tend to think that professional relationships are wildly different than personal relationships and they're really not. Like even in our professional worlds, like we spend a lot of, we spend more time with the people that we work with.

For most of us that work 40 hour careers weekly, you know, uh, than we do with our families and our friends. And so how important are those relationships? They're just as important as our personal, you know, we are helping each other grow.

We're caring about what's going on in each other's personal lives. We're supporting each other's success when I, if, if we work together, I'm only helping myself if, if I put your best interests at heart, if I invest in you, um, if I, um, you know, if you work in tech for any period of time, you'll have the, that unfortunate experience of being in kind of a toxic culture where people are afraid to not know something because they're afraid of being viewed as as silly or, or what have you. And I think in our professional networking and professional relationship building, you're just looking to make business friends.

Really, it's not that hard, but I think we overcomplicate it. You know, you're just looking to have that one thing in common with something. If I were to meet you, for example, I would start to dig in, like, I noticed you had something that was like anime related on your phone.

Like if I were in anime, I'd say, Hey, are you in anime? You know, like, what do you like, what are your favorite films? You know, what are your favorite Characters?

So really next as people Mm-Hmm. Yeah, I'm looking to have that thing in common because the, the tech stuff, we're all looking for a break. I think from the tech stuff.

It like, it's nice to have that brief, that brief interruption from it and to talk about something. I'm like, I'm into guitar and music. Like if you realize that, you'd be like, oh man, I'm into guitar too.

Or your favorite bands, you know, that kind of thing. You're looking to have those kind of interactions. And then once that's established, then you can start to talk about like, how can I help you in your career?

How can you help me in my career? Where are you at? You know, who do I know that I really feel like I should introduce you to?

Um, I'm not gonna do that until you've established trust and credibility with me. And we're not gonna do that until we have something in common. I think you brought up some really good points about how we're all just people.

Yeah. I think we've talked about a lot of great things today, so thank you Will. Awesome.

Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.