Career Development with Topher Martini

Welcome to Syntax.

Today, we have Topher Martini on the show, a former engineering program manager at Apple. Topher started at Apple all the way back in 2001 Wow. As a tester working on the Mac, iPad, iPhone, iPad, all the stuff. Right? All the I stuff. Topher's career has taken npm to wild places in 23 Yarn, like spatial computing, self driving cars, light field cameras, and, even the original iPhone.

So, we've been wanting to have Topher on the show for a long time. And now that he's on sabbatical, it seemed like the perfect time. So welcome to Syntax, Topher.

Thank you very much. So excited to be here, and, nice to make the connection with you, Wes, as well. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I, I know we're talking about

career stuff here, but am I am I allowed to ask what working on the 1st iPhone was like? Can we can I go off plan already?

Sure. Sure. I mean, enjoy the ride. You know, it's interesting. I think we're a broad strokes pain. Like, working at a company like Apple JS, you know, for a lot of people, it's kind of that hallmark in their career, the benchmark that they aspire to. And having, you know, worked at Apple for over 15 years, you know, it's a truly unique experience. And I think, you know, more so than the products, it's really the teams that have shined.

And so working on amazing products like iPhone, you know, granted I had a very small role and, you know, as a tester in a very large product ecosystem, but, you know, the ability to work with amazing teams is really kind of the differentiator in seeing how amazing products are built. You know, it's interesting, in retrospect, you know, it was so exciting to deliver a product like that. But many years later, you think about, like, man, am I addicted to the phone in my pocket? You know, it's almost not like a buyer's remorse or developer's remorse. But, like, when you have the longevity in your career to look back on certain things, like, did that move the needle for everybody? For me, kind of in the later stages of my career, one of the areas I've been really excited about is helping people navigate, you know, the kind of iceberg field that can be career development.

So having worked on amazing technologies and different products and everything, it's been a really great capstone.

But beneath it all is really, I can look back and say, that was a truly amazing team that did that work. Or more recently working on VisionPRO and RealityKit,

Amazing, exceptional teams. And it's always hard to say goodbye when it's time for you to move on, but those are some of the things you navigate to do the right thing for you in your own career cycle. It's funny that you mentioned VisionPRO. When we first met, you were not able to tell me what you did at Apple. And I I Yep. I was telling my wife. I'm like, I bet it's a headset. And at one point, I I I think Topher showed up in the, what's now the Syntax Discord, and people were talking about VR headsets. And he was asking people what they thought about the the Sony headset or one of the headsets, the Quest that just came out. And I was like, oh, yeah. It's definitely the headset. He's coming in here, asking about headsets.

So it's really cool to to be able to chat with you across the release of that product because it was like, went from being something that you couldn't even mention, you couldn't even TypeScript, to something that's real and out there, something that I own and and really enjoy. But, like, that's a huge project in general. And, I mean, when you started Apple, 2001, that was the year the 1st iPad was released.

That was. Yeah. Yeah. What was it like being at Apple for the iPad release? Was there, like because I know it wasn't till, like, 3rd one that it really caught on.

Yeah. You know, iPod was a truly unique product at the time. You know, Apple was a computer company. You know, my role was working on storage technologies and underlying NAND storage that was inside and hard drive for the 1st Node. But so very small role again. But looking back on how, you know, that was a pivotal moment for the company of it was Apple Computer Incorporated, no consumer electronics. And so looking at, you know, the whole industry shifted too. You had your Rios, you know, Zune came out a little bit later that everybody likes to poke out a little bit, but having a great technology does not make a great product. And the ones that resonate over time, you know, are just fundamentally different. It's interesting Wes, kind of later, I have people who weren't even alive when the Ipod was out in 2001 that I worked with. And it's like, oh, welcome, intern. And, you know, it's,

so it's always interesting to see kind of, you know, the complexion of how things change as well. Yeah. Totally. I mean, I was in high school when it came out. So for me, I remember the 1st time I saw 1, and the thing I thought was cool about it beyond just having, like, a a little hard drive in there was, like, some kid in my class was playing Breakout on it, like a little the little Breakout game. And I was like, this thing caught Breakout? Oh, man.

Like, it was so Unnovelable.

Yeah. Totally.

It's true, though. Like, that was so long ago. I saw somebody the other day that had kids, and their name was Aiden. And I was like, there's Aiden's that have kids already? You know? Like, wild. Yeah. It's people are growing up.

Yeah. So you arrived at Apple, like, really early on in your career. Right? How did that transpire? Like, how does that even happen?

Yeah. So I actually was transferring colleges. I grew up in California, Bay Area native, and had actually gone to University of Denver for my freshman year of college and effectively dropped out and found, you know, CSU Monterey Bay. And the goal was, I'm gonna finish school, and I'm gonna get a job. And, you know, luckily, through a worldwide developer conference, I landed an internship at Apple in 2001.

And at the conference, you know, basically Scott an on the on the spot job offer, which was really exciting and kind of, you know, wildest dreams. Like, never could have forecasted that that could have happened. Wes year an intern, you're obviously a little person on the totem pole. And, you know, I was just hungry for it all, working late nights, you know, all the things that you're really fueled by in the flow, all those different areas. You know, working with a great team and on the product, it was an awesome ride. You know, ended up graduating early and was extended a full time offer. You know, it's interesting to see too of Apple in 2001 and tech in 2001 was a very existential moment. People didn't know if big companies were gonna be around, and several of them are not. And so, you know, it's interesting when looking at kind of your role within the company, but also, you know, is the ship I'm sailing on gonna make it to shore, or is it gonna you know, how how is that gonna fare? Yeah. I I guess in 2001, you know, like, we said pre iPad, pre iPhone. I mean, Apple was certainly not the company. Granted, I had a an Imac

g 4 in 2004 Wes my first I guess I had an iPad for or an iPad first, but I think those are, like, my first real forays into to using Apple full time as a a professional even at that ESLint, the high school student. But so it it definitely was a different probably a different landscape, but, like, you have that opportunity to to talk with Apple. You are currently in school. How does somebody land

something like that? Like, is there anything that you did to make yourself stand out in a special way, or did you have just the the creds that they couldn't deny? The landscape then and the landscape now is very different. But back then, it was really kind of the hunger and the desire to learn. There were a lot of different storage technologies at the time, and that was kind of the team I ended up working on was storage technologies. So, you know, the fact that I knew DVD authoring, which was incredibly rare at the time, and the foothold into, you know, hey, why does an intern know about, like, you know, DVD mastering technology? It was, so, full disclosure, I mean, you know, I was a college kid. Piracy was a non zero part of that. So Yeah.

Yeah.

And so and that grows. And I think, you know, not having a preconceived notion of what an internship should be, if anything, I felt like completely underqualified Wes, you know, I knew maybe Bash and Pearl at the time, but, you know, week 1, here's someone learning objective c and developing like, you feel just completely outclassed from day 1. And that's that defeatist kind of mentality can really jump in quick when you're early in your career and especially as an intern. So, you know, moving away from that and how to, like, you know, how do you make value for the team? Like, there's no shortage of problems to solve at any, you know, sizable company. And so that was kind of the accelerating factor of Wes is it we're spending a lot of our time. And there was kind of the 1st hockey stick moment in my career Wes, you know, we spent an insane amount of time just getting systems ready to test every day. You Node? So if you imagine a lab of a 100 different computers, new builds every night, how do you get them up and running? Transitioning from testing to software automation Wes, I did it because I didn't wanna have to install new software on a 100 different computers every day. It kinda got tedious in mind numbing. And so how do you look at, you know, what is it about your workflow that improves it for you but also improves it for the team? Yeah. And and it's funny about the piracy thing. I would say a definitely a portion of our audience has turned back their clocks on a Windows computer to get Adobe installed at some point in their lives. So we are, we're familiar with that. So as you're working at Apple, you're interning. You get extended a full time job. And as that kind of is happening, man, Apple's, like, really blowing up in a lot of consumer ways like we mentioned. What did that do, I guess, for your career? And, like, as that's happening, like, how did Apple change to work at in that same time? The company got very big, you know, with Apple Retail, especially, but also with, you know, just the size of the company and the different products everybody's working on. It was a really exciting time. You know, there's the old thing of Dunbar's number. It's the 150 people that you can have a meaningful social relationship with. You know, when you grow like wildfire, you kinda lose that Dunbar's number effect. And so, like, there are whole teams that you might not even know who they are. So it was kind of things got big really quickly.

And being on the younger side, you know, change can be exciting, but change can be scary as well. That's also when I decided to transition roles. And, you know, unfortunately, ultimately when Steve passed away in end of 2011, that's when I decided to make my 1st big career pivot as well.

And, you know, there's a time when you can stay at an opportunity long enough to enjoy the opportunities that come up and the new experiences.

And then there's times when you can stay a little bit too long. You know, it had been building that starting when I was 19 years old, working on this amazing team for over a decade. It was 10 years too much. And so that was when I made my first jump to a startup company. You worked at Apple for 10 years before Steve Jobs passed away. That is Yeah. Wild to me. Yeah. Did you ever get to meet him? Do you have any stories? Yeah. There, so, every year, they they intended to do kind of an intern presentation where the different executives across the company would Scott. And, you know, Steve and, hire executives with their calendars. You never know. Node know, I was fortunate for 2 of the years I interned that he did give a presentation. And, you know, it's kind of a q and a format, a little bit like this, but, you know, him sharing his life experience at the time. You know, some of those moments are private, not really public, but learned a lot. And I think the biggest thing was following your passions.

Of you know, he had rejoined Apple. He in late nineties, he had helped redirect the company. Like, hearing someone share, like, what it means to be committed to an idea and really passionate to drive it forward was Mhmm. Really exceptional.

So one of the things we're really wanting to dive into in this episode is some of your lessons in in career development and and just around personal professional development. You know, you definitely had a lot of time as program manager, technical lead manager, those types of things. You had a lot of managerial experience overall in all of your adventures, I'd say. For employees out there who wanna be better,

what were the best employees to work with, the best employees to be managed, the best employees that you would end up saying at the end of the day, yeah, this person, I will vouch for them. At a base level, I think treating everybody like a peer was a really big kinda catalyst, not only for my career cycle, but, like, in the teams I've worked with as well. You Node, yes, you have a manager. Yes, there JS a hierarchy within an organization. But, you know, the people I've really enjoyed working with and the feedback of people who've joined to work with me are, you know, where we truly treated ourselves as peers and we have different skill sets, and how do we really complement each other Wes? And I think when looking in more of an employee manager relationship, it's people who are open to communication in the sense of you could be really worried or concerned about something as an employee, and your manager should be your biggest advocate, not your biggest adversary. And so I think, you know, early in my career, own career cycle, I would see my manager as the person limiting me from the next step or what I wanted to do. And there Wes something that really pivoted later on, where it was, you know, how to have a better communication cycle to be very direct about what it is I'd like to do. And when there's a gap, how to help close that. I'm curious. Do you have any examples specifically of that, where you were managing

a developer, and they came up to you and said, hey. X, y, and z needs to happen. I'm just trying to see. Like like, what does that actually look like? Somebody somebody's in their job right now, and they're saying, I wish I could do something else. How does that look?

Yeah. You know, at at Bos level, it's kind of under if it's driven by unhappiness or dissatisfaction, it's really at the core of that first. I think there's this kind of the the fork in the road of someone who's super motivated, wants to, you know, do this big transition or acceleration.

On the other side, there's people who are like, I'm dissatisfied. You know, burnout's kicked in, some element of fad, and it's really helping them navigate that part. At the root of it, for a lot of people, it's like you have your core values.

And your actions can either compliment your core values or deviate from it. So people who come in that situation of, like, I'm super burnt out. We worked on this project. It didn't turn out all the different negative, you know, self talk and team talk that can happen, but it's, I need to make a big change. And coming from someone who's currently on a sabbatical, I always advocate for the appropriate big change.

And oftentimes, instead of a big change, like your job role or your team, it's probably some small daily action that can help get things back on course.

So for more of, like, the tactical example, Wes, it's usually people come very frustrated.

They want a big change to happen. But in reality, it's they didn't get to that point, like, overnight. And so it's how do you help correct that day by day? It could be how you communicate with them in status and stand ups, you know, Node scrum. It could be the work that they're assigned to do and the agency they're given in how to deliver it. A lot of people, it's they feel like they Yarn being controlled or compelled into doing something. And so how do you give them the control in the agency to deliver their best work? Yeah. I've always heard that. Like, people don't quit jobs. They they quit managers because, like, you often see people go nuclear

and just quit something. And it's like, well, I bet they were super frustrated, and either they didn't try or they were not able to to get around what was really bugging them about their job.

Yeah.

ESLint interesting when looking at kinda corporate and Scott ups Wes I found like there's the rocket metaphor of, you know, there's a personality that loves to be launching the rocket into space.

Wes people, you and your best friends, doing a startup company, doing a new project within a larger company, accelerated growth, not caring about the collateral damage or casualties along the way, you're just invigorated by the momentum.

And then kind of something happens. In a startup, it's typically around like a series a or first product launch or something like that, where you accelerate, but your agency reduces.

And your role might shift a little bit, a lot more people join in. So, you know, you have to have real HR, not just your buddy, you know, kind of a thing. And then the last part is you've made it into orbit. You know, you're in space, you're in maintenance Node, but the innovation, the energy is not as high, but, you know, the effort isn't as high as well. And I found that when people really struggle, it's usually they're in one mode, but they desire to be in a different mode. If you're in maintenance mode, you wanna be in bootstrapping mode. If you're in bootstrapping mode, you want some sanity in your life, so you want the next acceleration phase. I find that those kind of step functions tend to be where people gravitate towards.

And then you wanna move somebody out of one of those modes that you said it's, like like, small steps, does it what is that? Do you give them different work? You Mhmm. You move them to a different team? I guess ESLint it probably depends.

Yeah. I mean, a big believer in, like, the inter compass. If someone can articulate to others what it is they want, they're more likely to achieve it. And I find that, you know, the first stages is people who can't put the words around it so that they can make sure their manager's aware. They can socialize to people on other teams of like, hey, I wanna make a big jump. You know, I went from QA testing to evangelism and product marketing to program management. You Node, you don't get there alone. And so I think it's really how you identify, like, what it is you want and then who's the cohort and the right people to put around you to achieve it. Yeah. That tracks so much. I I, you know, I think a lot of times people do get hung up by simply just not knowing

what they want. And sometimes you're you're so clouded by either burnout or just energy in general that, like, you you can't even take a second to step back and even know what you want, which can just further complicate things. You mentioned earlier on that evolving communication style was a big point in which people, like, really develop their ability to be a good employee somewhere. Do you have any communication tips overall for communicating

better, but also, like, what what does that even mean? Yeah. I think one area is trying to be as succinct as possible. Very early in my career, when I was working on these automation projects, our team got absorbed by whole new leadership.

And I remember having a 1 on 1 with the new leader and feeling very excited about, like, all the growth and opportunity. And, you know, she sat me down and was like, you're awesome.

You're kind of like a $20 I found in the wash. I know you're good, but I don't know what to do with you.

And then our 2nd piece of advice Wes, you need a copy editor of the what you are sharing with me is great, I cannot understand it. And so the point about communication, you know, I think in the course of my career after, it was how to be able to recap more succinctly to the point of, in meetings even more recently, you know, a huge discussion will happen, and at the end I'll just recap the top 3 or 5 points, and everybody's typically on the same page.

Most of the conflict that develops, I find, JS basically a difference of perspective.

When you recap it back, 2 people aren't communicating the same thing. Yeah. That that tracks. That's it. How do you feel about meetings overall as, like, a means of communication?

Oh, super conflicted.

I became a remote employee in 2018, pre pandemic, when we had moved from California to Colorado.

And for my personality and and lifestyle, like, remote is absolutely where I thrive the most. And I think we've learned a lot in both the cadence and content of meetings in pandemic. Node, post pandemic or whatever we wanna call this current phase, but they're kinda redirect a little bit of, like, there's an old military phrase, so planning is essential, but plans are useless.

And I think meetings are about plans more than they're about planning.

That's really cool. I haven't thought about that. Yeah. Do you think that like, do you think we have too many meetings as a I guess, I don't know about Apple. But, like, just in general, do you think there's too many meetings when you talk to people from other other, companies?

Looking at the slice of the tech industry, absolutely. And I think it it's omnipresent in almost every industry right now of a knowledge worker.

If you associate a dollar cost to both the time and attendees of a meeting, Node let's just say even $10, something totally unrealistic, and you start to, you know, put the metric into work of how much dollars is this consuming even at that nominal $10 rate. And you'll begin to realize for the amount of effort, money in this case, that we're using, we're getting very little value out of it. And so I think, you know, by making meetings more focused, reducing the attendees to the stakeholders, you know, I think there's a lot of meeting etiquette that gets brushed under because people want the perception of feeling busy or perception of feeling important. What do you think about, like, things like agile, those types of strategies? Yeah. I think, you know, the scrum, kanban, you know, hybrid models and everything, I think as a guiding light, they're exceptional.

As a, you know, dogma and a practice, I think they can fall apart, you know, pretty quick in different areas. It depends on the needs of your team. You know, there's no one prescription for a process.

And so I think if you can if all the members of a team can speak to, hey. We do scrum because of, you know, reasons. Mhmm. We do kanban because reasons.

As long as those reasons are the same, I think it's the right process for you and your team.

Yeah. That's interesting.

We'd asked earlier what the best employees to work with and to have work under you Yarn like, what about, like, the worst employees? Like, the employees that you wouldn't vouch for, what did they do wrong?

Yeah. It's it's always hard, you know, never to name names, but it's, you know, personality traits of obstructionism, people who are just mad and and can't like, defeatists.

They're negative to the point that it drags others down. There's the old HR ism of pnpm arithmetic order of operation, PEMDAS, parentheses, exponent, etcetera, etcetera.

And when you get into Node members, there Yarn subtraction and division, that either they subtract, they take away from their output to the team, or division, they take others down with them. You know, those are really the negative side. And when you talk about a manager, it's how do you transition employee from addition to multiplication, not just the effort that they can do, but that they can then multiply around them.

And then leadership is kind of that parenthetical JS an exponent. How can you group the right people together and then, you know, pour gasoline on the fire? Do you think those people know that they are being that type of person? Like, like, how do you let somebody know

that they're a subtractor?

Yep. This is part of good one on ones, which I think is really hard Wes so many people in management, you know, don't desire they were kind of that team captain, and now they were ascended to the coach, but they really wanna play the game still. Mhmm. Yeah. I think those are kind of the friction point for a lot of good one on ones. In any one on one, it should really be bidirectional. Once again, a meeting appears.

But how to give constructive feedback is really, you know, the the core of that answer. So, you know, hey, Wes, you know, I have some things to share with you. Are you in a good place? You know, always a check-in first. Because the last thing you wanna do is deliver bad news when they're in a negative place. It also sets the stage for, hey, if you're not in a good place right now, let's work together so you can be on the same level playing field. And then, you know, recapping back, you know, using their words. Like, I wanna share some things, but you tell me more honestly. Like, what are you seeing in the workplace? What do you think of your performance? And then that way, you can have more of a bidirectional conversation.

You never wanna just be the dump truck and unload the negativity on someone, have them go process that usually they're not capable of in the time.

I wanted to ask about hiring as well because I I presume you've probably hired your fair share of of developers in your day. My first question is, are you a genius? You Node? Like, what does it take to to get hired at Apple? And I I think the answer is you might be a genius, but often I see people who get jobs at this large company goes, oh, wow.

That's a sweet gig. I'm impressed that they got that. I'm always wondering, like, man, what what was it that the manager at Apple saw to hire this person?

Yeah. You Node, moving away from Apple Warp, like, the tech industry in Scott ups too, so I think it's universally applicable, is, like, you wanna find good teammates. There was that old movie, The Internship, about who warp the 2 act but Oh, Owen Wilson, maybe.

Yeah.

You know, I think there Wes the the paraphrasing the infamous Google test of, like, if you're stuck at the hotel bar, like, who or the airport bar, who would you wanna have a drink with? I think there's some amount of, you want someone that has some level of domain expertise or at least acknowledges the domain expertise they need to grow into.

So they're coachable and they kind of understand where they are on the talent spectrum.

And that they're a net positive to the team. You know? The water boy metaphor of, like, this person might not be the best on the field contributor, but he helps raise the whole team to play at their best.

Yeah. Yeah. That really tracks. When we were hiring positions for Syntax, that's definitely something that you just think about the whole time JS how well will this person fit in with what we're trying to do, both as a a personal teammate? You're gonna feel comfortable giving them feedback, receiving feedback from them. Like, all those things, I think, mattered so much more than people give it credit for because especially developers are so like, I'm

smartest at React. I killed my technical interview. Why didn't they give me the job? And it's not always about that. It's a lot more about the like, the the personality as well, you know, be able to to suss that out. Is there is there any questions that you would ask them in these interviews that would either throw up red flags or or maybe show you through few green flags?

Yeah. You know, 1 question I always typically, when I'm in the interview process, I'm more of, like, the the sociology, the team side of things, not like the technical domain expert for a field. Yeah. Yeah. And so I usually give the hard redirect questions of one of my favorites is, in your own words, what's your definition of work, life balance?

Ah, and what what what have you heard from that as as answers?

I mean, mostly deer in the headlights of it's people who want a pre canned sounds good. Like, because it's all about, you know, the the authentic self you want to portray rather than the authentic self you feel inside.

And so I think a lot of people give, I do time boundaries. I, you know, carve out this. Or it's a very like, something they've heard in, like, a TED Talk before. Mhmm. Yeah. Can I give my answer, and you tell me what you think? Please.

Alright. So my my thought of work, life balance is that I finish off my day job, and I am still excited to do other things in my life. I want to dabble in hardware technology. I wanna go to the gym. I wanna spend time with my family.

And if I'm doing well in my day job, I feel like I'll have good energy for that in my off time.

Mhmm. Do I get hired?

Yeah. I mean, follow-up question follow-up question of Yeah. Is that the first time, like, you've really thought about it, whether on the moment or, like you Deno? A lot of the words were I never thought about that before. Mhmm. But as soon as you said that, I thought, like, like, what what is it to me? Like, obviously, I have nothing at stake here. I'm not trying to get a job, so maybe that has some some flow into it. But, like, I I do think about, I guess, I do think about, like, what does work, life balance mean? Yeah. Yeah. If you think about, like, a funnel, you know, for the top of the funnel, the first response, awesome. All the core elements were there. Then I think as you said with something, especially something that's important like work, life balance, you distill it down, and eventually, you get to the elevator pitch that both sounds authentic but also represents what you wanna share. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application,

you'll want to check out Sentry at century.ioforward/ syntax.

You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up, and you might not even know it. So head on over to century.i0forward/ syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time, and it totally rules. Alright.

I think that authenticity is is super important. You know, we we've talked a little bit about, like, passion in your career. I know for some folks, it's they don't know what they want, but maybe they're like, what am I passionate about? Is my passion even important to getting a job? So how do you how do you feel about that relationship between being passionate about something and making it your career?

Yeah. The the balance of aspiration and attainability.

The idea of something versus what would that really feel like. And I'm gonna mispronounce it, but there's a Japanese phrase of Ikigai or Ikigai. It's I k I g a I. And it's kind of 4 Venn diagrams of what you're good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what pays you. And kind of the life philosophy behind it, as I understand it, is Node central point of that, the balancing point, is kind of ikigai. And so oftentimes if you're struggling with something, you're like, Oh, I wanna be earning more. But it's like, does the world need you to earn more? Node a way to do checks and balances. And the other side effect of that is people think it's one thing. Like, there is a perfect job out there that is ikigai.

And Wes here, coming earlier, it's really the sum of many parts. Like, I wanna be motivated and go work out. I wanna spend time with my family. I wanna be motivated to this career path. And so when you look at it as kind of a balancing point, it's, are you putting the chess pieces in the right quadrant? There are times work might be super exciting, and it's that hard conversation with family of, hey, I need to spend more time at work. I won't be around for these things. Like but that's the balancing point JS that it's never a static ESLint. It's something that's always fluid and evolving.

Yeah. By the way, you were pronouncing it correctly, Ikigai. Definitely correct. So That's beautiful. I'm I'm already working on a meme

for, Ikigai where it says JavaScript in the middle.

What you love, what the world needs, what you're good at, what you could be paid for. Oh my gosh. Yeah. That is very on brand for you guys. Yeah. And what's your point earlier too about, like, you know, the top of the funnel? I think a lot of the same elements you shared are actually very similar to my own. And so as you talk about these things with a lot of people, you kinda refine it down. And by way of example, you know, the place I've come to on work, life balance is to identify and honor your personal and professional values.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I love the way you think about these things, Dofer. It's always one of the my favorite parts about talking to you is that you always say I don't know if it's just, like, metaphors or what. You always seem to have a a great way to, like, put things into perspective. I think your your career has evolved in such an interesting way. I'm curious. Like so we have a lot of people who listen to this show that are are trying to break in or they're in a job and they they don't know what to do. I Wes, I I wanna get into a little bit of, like, for these people, what is out there to take them to the next level, to get them a job, to get them that promotion or if they even want a promotion? What types of tips do you have for people to actually grow within their their career path?

Part 1 is always being clear on what the goal is. When you're first starting out, that goal is wildly different than you've been, 10, 15, Wes, or veteran at something and are looking to accelerate.

So I think being, once again, able to articulate what the goal is. I think there's a little bit of the apprehension when you're first starting out of the, here's all the barriers in my way. And I think what's beautiful about software, especially web development, is there are none.

You can go spin up, you know, any project you want, go contribute to an open source project that already exists. Like, there's ways to just start.

And to that point about kind of aspiration and attainability, so many people starting out like the idea of something, especially in the tech industry. Compensation tends to be a driver for a lot of people of, I see my friend who started making these apps and, you know, overnight millionaire, all the different anecdotal stories. But then the question is, like, is that right for me? Like, is this the type of work I think I'd enjoy? And it's easy to analyze it from the sidelines,

but it is actually easy just to jump in and do it. Yeah. You know what? I I think about that a lot where we I know, Wes, you probably have this too. But being a a developer educator in this space, I have a massive amount of either friends or people I've known, old coworkers, or even family that you're like, I'm thinking about getting into tech. Like, what do you recommend? What do I do? And, like, 99% of those people, they actually try it. They give a a code Wes, a challenge, and then it's like, alright. I'm out.

But the 11% of those people that can take it and and turn it into something, like, really, really do.

Yeah. So, like, I mean, kinda what you're talking about is the development life cycle a little bit of, you know, people who can take something from the idea to a shipped product and to iterate continuously for it. And think your Sanity tracker JS an awesome example of this, of, like, build something you'd wanna use when you're first starting out. Because even if your customer base is 1 for the life cycle of the product, you've achieved success.

And I think many people think they need to do such a big project to start or something that would be impressive if they're applying to another company. But, like, if you build something you would actually use, like, that's where, you know, really things start to move.

Yeah. You have something to show for it. You have something to to hang your hat on. You're currently on a a sabbatical.

What does that actually mean or entail? And, like, why might somebody take a sabbatical?

Yeah. I jokingly say preemptive burnout of, like, there's times to get back to the part about, like, your values and kind of realizing there's certain actions you've taken that have deviated from your values. You know, Node was in this most recent Node, had a really long commute between Denver and Boulder, Colorado, which is about an hour there and about 90 minutes Node. And just it it wasn't working out over time. And so for me, taking a sabbatical JS, you know, reconnecting with the personal identity of my family, my partner, you know, really taking a break to understand, you know, we have this amount of time. Node key aspect of taking a sabbatical is just financial viability, making sure there's some coins in the piggy bank. So when you take the hammer to it, you're not stressed about, you know, if I'm not professionally employed at this time, like how can I make the best of it, while not feeling that stress upon you? But I always encourage people whether it's at some point in your career, you know, at every point you can take a step back, you learn so much about yourself.

It's so easy to put something on the backlog and say, oh, Wes, there's, you know, chores and maintenance around the house or personal development work. I'm a huge advocate for therapy to understand more of, like, what you think and what you feel, but there's so much you can suppress when you're in the grindstone of a big project.

And so for me, taking a sabbatical, this is kinda my 2nd major sabbatical in my career, is really about self discovery. And every time I've come out of something, it's been to something fundamentally different. Yeah. That that is like, Wes were saying, like, sometimes you don't know what you want because you're too there's too many factors weighing down on you. There's too much weighing in to take a step back and be able to do that. That's gotta be pretty amazing. I know, you know, one of the things you're doing is working a lot with your kids right now. Mhmm. I I have wonder about your thoughts on, like, teaching technical things to kids or just in general. Like, what kind of tech does somebody who worked at Apple basically, you know, not in your entire career, but a a chunk of your career. What does somebody who who does that, do to teach their kids with tech?

Yeah. You know, I mean, it's such an amazing time to be alive, and especially as a parent now of, like, as a child of the eighties, like, oh, man. I wish we had this instead of, you know, speak and spell or, you know, all the different, like, flight years ahead of, like, what is available in the STEM and STEAM curriculum at most schools these days. And, you know, it's been interesting to see taking a step back of, once again, to the technologies or products I've developed that maybe not super thrilled about, like, the impact they've had on kids or, you know, having worked on Ipads. Like, you know, now to see my kid glued to him is like, oh, better take that away and enable screen time real quick. But, you know, so I always look JS technology for good. And as someone who grew up with learning differences and different challenges along the way, like, I can see the huge benefit of technology to help people, you know, break through different barriers they wouldn't be able to otherwise. So how to apply that towards not just kids, but adults as Wes? I think so many people you know, the job market is not pretty right now in the tech industry.

And people are looking to either change careers or transition in roles and feeling a little bit stuck. And I think there's no shortage of, you know, learning opportunities out there. It's just like, how do you get to step 1? And so back to your question about, like, for kids, it's giving them, like, a step 1 and a step 2, but giving them the environment that they can find step 3 and beyond.

That's really interesting. Landon and I, my son, for the people who are we're building a video game right Node. So we're we're both in Godot. And it is funny to try to teach a 7 year old how to work with an application building thing like a dough. He's just like, why don't we have him do this now? The character do this. I'm like, well, we have to program that first. Let's figure out how to do that. Let's get into it. And then, like, just to see his brain work to be like, oh, things don't just exist out of nowhere. We have to create them. We have to program them. We have to understand how this thing works. I think it's really been even though he's not coding, I think it's been changing for him in terms of how he sees things happen. I know at one point you had worked on self driving cars. This is an off the board Wes, but I'm curious about what your vibe is on the self driving cars.

Yeah. So all the time. Worked at an amazing startup company called Aurora, which kind of did self driving vehicles to begin and pivoted to autonomous trucks. And so I kinda distinguished between trucking versus, like, ride sharing.

And, you know, I think it will take a long time for ride sharing, both from a regulatory and, like, a cultural perspective to be, like, everybody's comfortable. Like, San Francisco had that honking incident with Waymo recently. Yeah. Yeah. There'll always be a headline.

But, you know, as someone who also was in a very traumatic car accident as a young kid, human drivers are not safe. We have this perception of, you know, what safety is. And I think that was a unique Yarn, both in my career and just technology development, to look at how can we build tools to make things safe again. And so trucking, I think, will be more widespread earlier. But, you know, if you go to San Francisco or Chandler, Arizona, like, there's places you can go now and ride in a self driving vehicle. And it's uncanny the first time you do it. And then it's very uneventful because it's just like you have a virtual chauffeur that drops you off. So it's kind of a weird, exciting than anticlimactic experience to be a rider. I think about this all the time. I wanna I want them to make the car out of the black box box of the airplane and then just put my kid inside of it and then have that take him everywhere. So that way, he never has to be a 16 year old driver. That's my my goal in life. You know, the safety and redundancy systems and how you I mean, it's it comes a lot from aviation and rocket science of, like, you're not just building a web app and shipping it over to an SRE team to go deploy it. Like, this is a very end to end system, and you have to think about safety as the paramount goal for everybody.

Yeah. Wow. What did you specifically do when you worked on the self

2015 when Node neural networks, DNNs, were all the new rage, and training data was a huge segment of the industry. And so my role was program management and corporate development to build large, high quality datasets.

You know, when transitioning to Aurora, I had a larger, you know, role there that really enjoyed. But if you think about it, you're educating a neural network, a machine learning system from the ground up so that you have to teach it both, you know, true positives, false positives, false negatives, you know, all the different taxonomy, the different objects you need to identify.

Failure is really bad in those cases. And so if you look at a small detector on your phone doing object detection, it's worlds apart from, you know, a vehicle doing it at such high speed and low latency.

That's fascinating, that whole area. Sorry. Go ahead, Scott. No. I was gonna say is working on a team like that where where safety is so paramount, is that stressful to the team to work on, knowing that that there's such high stakes?

It can be. But as mentioned, like, a lot of, like, the safety critical work of, like, aviation and other industries, you know, there's we're building on existing foundations of how do you make sure in a regulated, you know, highly controlled safety environment, you know, that foundation makes you feel really affirmed that, like, I'm not gonna put in a wrong semicolon, and that's gonna land on a vehicle. Like, the the number of steps between an individual commit and on a vehicle are, you know, almost infinite. But that's what the whole process of a safety framework is about, is because you can think about it that JS an engineer, if I'm concerned that, you know, if I do this, a catastrophic event might happen, that can induce bias in the actual work I'm doing. I could be overprotective of things, which in turn could make things have run worse.

So there's a lot of making sure that you have a safety framework that supports doing the right thing.

Yeah. So, I mean, you've been involved obviously now in machine learning for a while. I know that you use LLMs, you know, personally. What do you think that looks like for somebody who's looking to get into tech? I know there's so much negativity about AI taking our jobs. Do you feel like that really evolves the career path going forward?

You know, it's definitely made an impact how measured that impact will be. I think we're, you know, writing that page as a history today of there's an old phrase of if technology can make your job easier, it can also make it irrelevant.

And while that's been a joke, I think now we're kind of seeing that Wes, you know, sections of industry, a paralegal, you know, an accountant, you know, things that are highly professional and credentialed, you know, professions can be done by certain LLMs.

I think, you know, the trust factor is still something we're acculturating to of Wes I'm getting an answer from insert favorite LLM here, like, I want to plan a trip for me and a family Wes, you know, all the different criteria.

It's amazing for things like that. But we still have the rationalization effect or hallucination effect, as some people like to call it, that JS this answer real, or is it fabricated based on a limited understanding?

Yeah. How how much longer do you think that's going to? I know you're you're not a soothsayer here, but, like, when do you think that barrier ends up disappearing?

I you know, candidly, in certain areas, we're there. I think, you know, people look at the capability of crossing the finish line in one area versus everything's across the finish line. Do I want an Npm to operate on me as a surgeon? Nope.

Do I warp it to make a much better recommendation than anything I've ever had before? Absolutely.

Yeah. I get that. I I know there's certainly a lot of things that I do use it for that I do. The trust sometimes isn't a 100%, but I think that's one good part about being a developer, especially if you're using it for coding, is that your abilities are there to validate that that trust or or to, you know, filter out what could be something detrimental that you're adding to your code base. I know coding seems like a ripe thing to be encompassed by AI. What do you think developers should should do to make themselves stand out or even be relevant?

I think it's interesting maintainability comes up in a very big way of just because an LLM or a copilot, I am insert name of product here, can, like, generate something for you, does that mean it's the ideal solution to deploy? And much like having the intern refactor the piece that's been in production for 20 years, there's certain things you don't touch because, you know, of the mission criticality to whatever your product is. And so I I think for day to day kind of work, I think our inspiration of how to move forward with a problem in engineering, like, excellent for brainstorming. I think when it comes to not just implementation, but deployment into a production environment, oftentimes, I think people rewrite a whole bunch that they'll have, you know, their LLM, you know, generate something for them and then refactor it. And then it's that, you know, opportunity cost of if you'd just written it yourself, would have taken less time. So Yeah. Yeah. I think that gap is what people are focused on right now. Interesting. Yeah. Totally.

Or from a different lens, you know, people who are into no code of I think there's a lot of interesting application to extend, you know, no code IDs and frameworks to, you know, actually have functional code that they can better understand and make cool products. You know, you might have an idea, but not the capability to go implement. And I think the amount of ideas that can be accelerated through that is phenomenal.

Yeah. The amount of people that is no code JS a gateway drug to actual code is is amazing. Right? Like Mhmm. I don't blame people for doing that type of thing. Like, even an Excel spreadsheet is no code. Right? But at a certain point, you realize, this is so complex and fragile.

I think I wanna learn a little bit of code Node, and I have the whole mindset for it now that I've been working on this.

Yeah. I started with no code stuff. I mean, Dreamweaver or there's some Adobe software where you dragged everything onto a grid with no code to an ESLint. And, again, it is a gateway. Yeah. I know. Totally. Right? Scott, Topher, to sum up kind of what we're talking about on career development, do you have any, like, final statements here on on career development stuff that could wrap this up in summation?

Yeah. Especially for those who are just starting out or looking to make a transition into into tech, into a new field within tech, is at times, you can be your own biggest enemy. And it's so much easier to start than, you know, oftentimes Wes make it up to be in our head. So when looking at starting a side project, learning a new skill, doing something that once again is for you as the primary customer. I think these are all great ways to better discover and explore what it is you wanna do.

And naturally over time, I think those will connect the dots to the right team and the right products.

Nice. Are you familiar with Kaizen, Topher?

Not so much, buddy. So to yeah.

We're about to drop our 2nd Japanese business philosophy on this podcast.

Kaizen is a Japanese term for, continual small improvement. There's a a book. I think it's called, like, Node Small Step Kaizen or something.

Definitely worth your time because it resonates a lot with what you're saying. Paul Cobblestone of Supabase told me about it. And, man, it definitely fits in with a lot of what you're saying about this. It is easier to start 1 small step here and there, and and you can make a a big difference. You worked on light field cameras. This is off the wall question. What what is a light field camera?

A light field camera is capturing an image from multiple centers of perspective.

So Stanford University had developed an array camera, so a big wall of cameras effectively.

And when you look at capturing an image of that scale, you can actually shift, you know, and you create a three-dimensional image. So this JS long before, and this is very early computational photography.

But, like, you know, you could put this wall next to bushes and see through them. Like, there's amazing things that you could do. Yeah. And so the company, Lytro, was founded to miniaturize that technology into a single camera. It was a consumer camera to start, but it allowed you to take 1 picture that you could refocus after the fact. Everything was three d.

Node was in, like, 2012, 2013, so three d TVs were all the buzz. And I think, you know, that's an example of an amazing technology and a great team, but the product didn't really fit within the environment at the time. And so as a lifelong passionate photographer, it really resonated for me to have, like, a technology and a camera company, but, you know, a lot of good life lessons

of, from a Scott up company, how they, you know, rose and ultimately fell as well. I remember this product seeing this photo. When you had said Lytro before, I didn't put it together, but I do remember when this came out. That was like it was kind of like black magic to to see that JS, like,

field of view. Yeah. There was that yeah. The focus come in and out. Yeah. That's pretty wild. I want that for just my cameras right here. You know? If if, like, if I go over here or if you wanna pan in to the side, you know, wouldn't it be nice just to

One of the synthetic depth of field was actually one of the big effects that, you know, you Vercel always shooting at effectively f two, so very shallow depth of field. And you can synthetically increase the depth of field using real pixels data. So phenomenal technology. I think selling a 3rd camera to photographers where their 1st camera JS like an SLR, their 2nd camera JS a a smartphone.

You know, there's not enough room in the camera bag for for kind of a 3rd camera in a lot of cases. Yeah. And now the iPhone with the cinema recording,

I mean, you can change the the focus point at any given point in it. Yeah. Is that being do you know if that's being done by recording, like, just multiple

streams at once? Yeah. A lot of it is just by stereoscopy, having 2 cameras with overlapping fields of view. And then, you Node, so effectively spatial video works in a lot of areas too with a LIDAR sensor where you can get depth information. Node of the big features of VisionOS too, as a Wes a fellow VisionOS owner, is, you know, photos can actually take photos you've taken traditionally, 2 d images, and use computational photography to make them spatial photos.

I don't know if you've had a chance to do it yet on the developer betas, but it's amazing. Like, it especially as a parent, like, it you do relive the moment that you wouldn't otherwise.

I I know people you know, if people haven't used it, they wouldn't Node. But the the spatial media is such a killer feature of the the VisionPRO overall for me. Like, turning photos spatially is like an emotional experience. Or, like, I recorded my son singing in his 1st grade class, and I recorded that as a spatial video. And then I could do that before I even had the VisionPRO. And then I watched it back on the VisionPRO, and it was just like, man, it is such a cool experience to really feel like you're not like you're there, but you're you're experiencing something that's real rather than just a like a video of it. Man, it's just such cool stuff. Can I ask you real quick about the stuff that's in your background? So if you're not watching the video right now, there's

a bunch of cube squares that has some Minecraft stuff on it and a bunch of

stuff. Yeah. Over here, just so my son, Bear, actually, and Scott Sunlanded are kinda really good friends from kindergarten and 1st grade. So that's kind of one of the small world connections here. But my son JS all the things Minecraft.

And, these are little Pixu, Daifu, LED boards. And the moment he saw that it could be Minecraft, it was all the things Minecraft.

So Yeah. Yeah. Landon is ESLint Minecraft right Node. But the funniest thing about Landon is he just makes up so much stuff about it. Like, he'll tell he'll be like, dad, did you know that I could kill the the unicorn on this planet in Minecraft? I'm like, I don't think that's a thing. I don't even know where you're coming up with that.

My my kids are getting into it recently as well. I'm learning all about Obsidian

and all these and and they ask me Wes. Like like, I know everything about it, and it's hilarious. We have to go look it up. Especially from a parent perspective too. It's funny. You know, Landon and Bear think they're in the same world, but they're both playing locally on their own device. But I was like, I left this thing for you in the loot box. Did you see it? And it was like Yeah. I don't have the heart to tell. I'm like, guys, that's not possible, but it's adorable. Landon and I had a world that we were doing together, and I branched his off just because I didn't you know, he was playing creative and whatever. He's like, dad, I did this to your house. I blew up your I'm like, you didn't blow up my house. I'm sorry, but I yeah. Same deal. Just the same deal. I haven't told him, but I I think we do we do have to get a a an actual server going at at some point because that would be a lot of fun. Actually, I have 1 more question about Apple stuff before we go. What what was something just just because we got you on here, what was something wild that happened while you were working at Apple that you could share? Just a wild experience for you.

I think, you know, going back to the theme of, like, starting something, making it real, and, like, seeing people use it, when Apple Retail first started, which is around the same time I joined the company, like, the ability to work on something so hard and then go walk into a random shopping mall and see people, like, using it for the first time is, like, one of the coolest things ever. And, for me, kind of in private working on VisionPRO for so long, like, to really, yeah, demo it to people or have them go into an Apple store JS, like, that weird, like, Christmas morning effect of, like, it brings me a lot of internal motivation and joy to see something I've put so much energy into and so a large numbers of teams and people and to have it, you know, have that moment. A lot of products are judged over time, iPhone being a good example of that. But, like, you know, it's to really enjoy that moment of when people experience something and go, wow. This is just cool. So

Yeah. I I do feel like that is a thing with VisionPRO, especially that, like, when people really get to use it or experience it for its strengths and and the reality of it, they they really see how incredible it is. So, yeah, it it's a really cool product, I think, for me personally in that regard. Using it on the airplane was, like, the biggest thing in the world for me to be able to code with a giant screen on the beach, in the airplane.

And I had RoboCop over here, which RoboCop, incredibly violent movie. I can watch it on the airplane and not have to worry about little kids seeing 1,000 squibs go off in a a boardroom shootout scene. So it's like for me, that was just such a cool moment to be like, ah, this is, like, this is really transformative in a lot of ways. And I'm I'm excited for more people to experience that. So now since we we're wrapping up here, this is the part of the show we're getting ESLint, sick picks and shameless plugs. Topher, did you come with sick picks and shameless plugs?

I did. So 2 days ago, I took the leap on getting a 3 d printer.

You did.

Oh, nice.

And I had 1, like, in 2010, the MakerBot Thing o Matic, I think it was called, but, you know, early, early stuff. And, oh, man. I mean, it is nonstop, you know, fidget toys and everything. Like, I had to turn it off so the audio didn't bleed in here for the call, but, you know, this printer has been running nonstop for 24 hours or 48 hours, and it's been super fun to learn something new. Which one did you get? You got the Bambu Labs Wes. I can send a link for the show notes.

But there's an automated material system that can do, you know, multicolor printing. And, you know, Node a bit apprehensive. One, they're not cheap, but it's, you know, diving into something new. But just once again, that thrill of kinda doing something new and and yeah. It's been fun. And the kids absolutely love it. It's, you know, Santa's workshop at home.

Man. That's cool. This is gonna be a thing now. Topher and I were talking about this this weekend or or I guess it was last weekend maybe even. Mhmm. Man, it's it's exciting to hear that you you went with it. This, I bet Landon will be stoked to check it out. He has such lofty ideas. We were gonna get him this, like, cheapo 3 d printing pen for Christmas that just, like, the earring is, like, dragging. And he thinks, like, oh, I I'm gonna be able to make all my toys with this. And we're like,

I Scott set expectations, man. It's it's not going to do that for you, but maybe a real three d printer. Yeah. Yeah. It was funny. It was actually a web app that kinda tipped the scales. Like, this has been in a family. Like, there's always, like, you know, the, hey, dad wants to get the 3 d printer. Oh, that's nice. And it was bento3d.design is a really cool and kind of reactive web app that allows you to create an interactive Bento box. So one of the big challenges I always have is, like, camera batteries or insert name of random thing here. And you can make the completely unique custom Bento Bos and just download the STL file to the printer.

Wow. And, you know, in our kitchen, we have, like, you know, whatever off the shelf cutlery organizer. And I went to my partner. I'm like, we could just make our own that instead of the one we've been struggling with for 10 Yarn, and that was the pitch. Like, that's what sold it. We're getting a 3 d printer today.

It actually fits the drawer. Yeah. Totally. Exactly.

Yeah.

It's really cool. I've been watching this for a while, and I've I've been on the cusp of getting a 3 d printer for probably 15 years now. That's so amazing. Node of the ones where if you're trying to visualize what this is, it's like a CSS grid where you can infinitely add rows and columns and split things up, and it will just figure it out. So if you do have a drawer that you wanna perfectly

section off, that's what it is. And Wow. I wanna do it. Who wants to go to the web app? JS this web app really solves the precision problem. Like, you can go download, you know, Blender, any app you wanna go do, but, like, by the time you actually print it, it's not millimeter accurate. And the above and beyond the design of this website, it's the fact that everything's millimeter accurate JS really cool. This thing rules. This is a really cool web app. Japanese developer,

Shuntaro Naka. I'm not even gonna try, but, man, Japanese Yarn taking over this episode today.

Wow. Yes. Wow. Cool.

This is sick, Topher.

Yeah. Stoked to see what you guys end up making with that thing. What about shameless plugs? Is there anything you would like to plug?

Yeah. So speaking of doing new things, I've been attempting to start a YouTube channel for probably a decade. And so I have youtube.com/toframartini with 0 videos and 1 follower 1 subscriber. So in, like, weeks ahead, I really wanna continue conversations like these and, you know, share more of what I've been able to learn through my career trajectory to help others. So, that's one place I hope to do it.

Yeah. And and give Topher a follow-up because and he's one of the the wisest people I get to talk to on a regular basis. So I I sincerely appreciate you getting to come on the the show, Topher, and, like, share some of that with our audience. Because I know when we chat all the time, it always feels like it feels like I'm picking something up left and right. So, thank you so much for coming on the show today and getting to share that with the audience. So, yeah, go follow TOFA on YouTube. We'll have the links for all the stuff in the show. And, Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on today.

Really appreciate it. Thank you for the conversation.

Of course. Anytime,