Backend Banter

# Bill Kennedy Full

**Bill:** [00:00:00] You know how much it costs per CPU to run a Microsoft SQL server. there's thousands of dollars. Oh, no, no idea. You have no idea. Thousands like it was like the CPU level

microsoft was gonna get a bigger check from Miami Beach than we were. So I said to Ed, at that point, I was like, dude, we're never gonna survive in this game with the licensing costs

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**Lane:** Should I call you Bill or William?

**Bill:** Bill is good. That's my nickname, which honestly is crazy because I didn't know this was a problem until I started going to Europe. Like you grow up and everybody knows where I live. That bill is the nickname for William and then people started asking me questions about it and I suddenly realized that I had a problem.

Because I was using William in some places and Bill and the other, and nobody had any clue what was going on with my name.

**Lane:** So you've settled on [00:01:00] Bill.

**Bill:** Oh, I've always settled on. So here's the thing. For people who have nicknames, they'll appreciate what I'm gonna sell you. When you have a nickname like Bill, where your legal name is William, then your legal name is only used when you're in trouble. So you almost don't want to hear William because it just makes the hairs on the back of your neck go up because, this is either serious, you're in trouble, something legal. so I just don't like hearing William too often because it's usually doesn't, it's not a good situation.

**Lane:** All right, I'll, yeah, that makes sense. I'll stay away from William. I'm super excited to have you on, bill Kennedy, founder of Arden Labs. tell us a little bit about yourself.

**Bill:** Wow, man. I'm 53 years old. I could take a little bit of time. I've seen the. Have I really seen this? Have I really seen myself revolve around the sun 53 times? No. But no, I'm just a software developer, man. I'm not. I'm not any, anyone or anything [00:02:00] special. I've been writing code professionally since 1991.

Started with some C programming, moved to C Sharp, then moved to go. and I hope to retire with this language. I really. Not excited about learning another language. I've played with Rust a little bit . I got back cornered into playing with it because somebody at Arden decided to write a blog post and I had to review it and at that point I had to dig in.

and I think I could probably learn to love the language. But it's a completely different mindset in terms of design philosophies, guidelines, idioms, the, even the language designers had different things in mind with the pat, pattern matching and stuff. And so it's just foreign to me with how much I love goes philosophies.

But I think, if you told me like my life depended on learning rust, I feel like [00:03:00] I could do it. It'd be fine.

**Lane:** Yeah. Okay. No, that makes sense. I wanna pull on that thread more here in just a bit and chat about Rust and this natural comparison that everyone seems to make between Go and Rust. But I wanna give our listeners just a little bit more of a, Kind of grounding in who you are and what you've done.

Can you, so your, your handle everywhere is going go.net. Does that mean that at some point in the past you switched to go from a.net stack? Was that like a big changing point in your career?

**Bill:** So this is how ridiculous my handle is. Okay. I was basically, coding and C Sharp for 20 something years in the Microsoft stack and wasn't involved at any level. I didn't go to conferences, I wasn't involved in social media, nothing. So when I switched to go in 2013, I told my business partner I was gonna start writing blog [00:04:00] posts.

I was always an educator. But it was always local vocational school or company-wide. So I said, I'm gonna, I'm, and I did publish some C sharp stuff to be fair, but I said, I'm going heads down and I'm just gonna publish this stuff. So then somebody says, you gotta be on Twitter, right? This is like 2013, let's say.

So I'm asking people, is there a book on how to be on Twitter? Like I wanted a book. To teach me how to be on social media areas. Dude, I didn't even know what a hashtag was. I think first time I used a hashtag, somebody was like, bill, you're using it wrong. that's not how hashtags work. I'm like, I'm old.

I'm not that old at that point. I guess I'm, what is that? in my forties at this point, no experience. Okay, so my brain says, okay, you're not gonna put your personal life out there. Let's come up with a handle that kind of keeps your personal life away. So [00:05:00] I had a blog that, and I got a domain called Go and go.net.

I got the domain right. it was a hard thing to do, even at the time, to find a good domain for the blog. So I said, I'm going to learn. Go. So I found this domain, go and go down that, and I said, you know what? That's gonna be my handle on Twitter because, Me thinking, I'm a marketing genius, says, if my handle is like the name of the blog, then there's a connection and people can go to go and go.net, right?

and like this was like brilliant, right? This is me thinking I'm brilliant. So I don't know what happens like a few years in, I realize go and go.net is probably not the best. And I was able to get my own name still at the time. And I actually renamed my handle, I think to like Bill Kennedy or something.

I don't remember. Something personal at that point.

**Lane:** So did the.net have nothing to do with [00:06:00] like.net from

**Bill:** do don net had to do with the domain.

So and go.

**Lane:** misreading it this whole time. That's

**Bill:** there. Period. Net. Period net. Like I told you, it was bad. So I finally decide I'm gonna switch it out. And this is how like again, old school stuff here, I had just printed a thousand, 2000 business cards. I had literally just printed these cards, okay?

And on the card I had my go and go down net handle. So I switched out my handle name and somebody slip to me and says, bill, We just paid God knows what for business cards and now they're all useless cuz you changed your, and we're not buying you new ones. Ryan's my business partner. I'm like, fine, I'll put it back.

So I ended up going back all because of business cards, all

**Lane:** I forgot about business

**Bill:** yes, all because of business cards.

**Lane:** Oh, that's amazing.

**Bill:** it back [00:07:00] and at this point, For better or worse, that's what people know me as from a handle perspective. So now it's really too late to change it just because there's awareness there and you keep it.

**Lane:** that, that's how I knew you. I, that's so funny. I'm glad we clarified. I always assumed that at some point in the past there was some big switch in your tech stack from.net

**Bill:** there was. There was in 2013, but that's not where the name came from.

**Lane:** Yeah. Yeah. Okay. so tell me about what 2013 that go was what, two years old?

**Bill:** 1.2 I think was released, at least that's the first version I played with,

**Lane:** Yeah. Okay. So what made you excited about Go? How did you even hear about it way back then?

**Bill:** so I wasn't excited. in 2011, I started Arden Labs with my business partner. We were both C sharp Microsoft shop developers. We had a very similar background when we met in, like [00:08:00] 2009 or 10. So we decided at the end of 2010 to start a company doing consulting. Ed had already some good experience working with American Express and some other clients, and he found us a client and he said, bill, let's go do this.

let's, let's start this company. So we did, and we were riding in C Sharp and riding Windows services and all that good stuff. And then around 2013, beginning of 2013, Miami Beach, sitting in Miami Beach. Had this, proposal out there to build software. Okay? It was a big project, mobile app, browser, apps, the whole nine yards.

And we were like, let's see if we can win this. at least let's try. So these city level proposals you have to do are insane, dude, right? they're like, you have to have experience doing them. But one of the parts of it is, what is this gonna cost? [00:09:00] Not just in terms of my time, but in terms of hosting it and running it.

So when we did that exercise, we looked at each other and we realized that Microsoft was gonna make more money than we were on the project because of the licensing. This was before Azure, like the cloud, Azure Cloud maybe had just being mentioned, but at this point people are still running their own data centers.

So to be clear, you're using Microsoft's tech stack and is, and that's where the fees, that's how Microsoft's gonna make out like a bandit on

oh dude. You know how much it costs per CPU to run a Microsoft SQL server. there's thousands of dollars. Oh, no, no idea. You have no idea. Thousands like it was like the CPU level,

**Lane:** so you pay a license per CPU just to run the software

Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. on the SQL server you did, it was, pricing was really expensive. The thing about the cloud at the [00:10:00] time was the pricing changed and it be started to pretend it felt more affordable. Okay. But when it, when you calculated all the licensing costs, if you were gonna legitimately pay, which the city of Miami would have to, Yeah.

**Bill:** Microsoft was gonna get a bigger check from Miami Beach than we were. So I said to Ed, at that point, I was like, dude, we're never gonna survive in this game with the licensing costs. We gotta move to Linux now. Ed had already started moving and that Ed's always been ahead of me in the, in these situations.

So he's already been playing with Ruby. It's already been learning Linux. I just didn't wanna have to learn a whole nother operating system and everything. Again, I was, anytime I have to learn something that big, I get like depressed at first and then I got get through my depression and then I just go heads down.

It's every new thing, it's depression, fight through it, and then you feel better for it. Ed's we're gonna have to get off our windows. [00:11:00] So I start looking at different programming languages. Didn't like Ruby, didn't like Python. I always had a compiler in front of me. I didn't like any of that.

I looked at er Lang didn't feel right, and I just went back to Ed and I said, you know what? I'm gonna have to stay on the C sharp side and. Our back end is just gonna have to be windows and we'll have to figure it out. All the front end stuff could be in Ruby and all that. Go for it. You're gonna do that code anyway.

But I'm not writing C again, I'm telling you this, I'm not going back to writing C. and I don't find any affinity with any of these programming languages. So as a last ditch effort, ed says to me, why don't you look at this programming language called Go. I just, this just popped up on his radar screen and I was pushing back.

**Lane:** I'm like, dude, I'm done, man. I just, I'm,no. Bill, take a look at this programming lounge. So it was like over the weekend, fought to get it installed because it wasn't Microsoft, right? It's create a workspace, INow. It [00:12:00] was everything I was not used to. Yeah, and it was like different back then with, I didn't even really write in go 1.2, but like I remember PREMOs and everything.

**Bill:** Yeah, no, it's, it was, and the editor at the time was Light ide, which actually was not a bad editor. I think it's still around. if it wasn't for Light Ide, I may not even be talking to you right now. So somehow I got it all running in Light Ide and I started building small programs and learning it, and it.

It just felt right at that point. Once I got through that hump, I realized within a couple of hours that this was a programming language that I felt some affinity to. So at that point I had told Ed. Okay. I think we can do this with Go, and then I convinced one of my clients to let me start writing, go for the stuff we were building because they didn't care what it was built in.

They just wanted some stuff done. So I ended up porting some C sharp code that I had and to go [00:13:00] and then never looked back.

**Lane:** Wow. This is 2013. Go 1.2. Amazing. I had a similar, I had a, I guess I had a similar experience. I learned a lot of C sharp or not C sharp, uh, c plus plus in college and moving to go, for the compile speeds, the tool chain, no need for make files, like the simplicity was really what did it for me.

What was it that you enjoyed and again, I'm not even familiar with go 1.2, but what was it about the language that,made you look at it different than say, Ruby?

**Bill:** It felt like C and C sharp without all the object-oriented crap, if I can say that.

**Lane:** You can say

**Bill:** I just felt an affinity to it. I knew I could write code in this and maintain it and have mental models. And there was a lot that I learned, from the time two thir 2013 till now. and my skillset and my understanding of computers and computer science and everything went way up thanks to this language, right?

Things I wouldn't have learned, I [00:14:00] think staying in the C sharp ecosystem, but it just, it felt right. it felt like me. I was able to move forward with it.

**Lane:** Yeah. One of my favorite things about Go, especially from the education perspective is it feels like there's still a lot of abstractions in Go, right? The standard library does a lot of heavy lifting for us, but it just feels like the abstractions give you a lot of control, or at least a lot of ability to learn closer to what's going on under the hood.

And to give you an example of what I mean, I started building web servers with Jengo in Python, and I felt like I had no idea what was happening. Ever. Like I have to set up some Whis gateway and hook it up to an engine X proxy. I don't get why that has to happen. And then there's this framework and it's maybe doing some stuff with the database, but I don't have to write any sequel.

When I started writing my first couple services and go, the web really started to make sense to me.[00:15:00]

**Bill:** Yeah, Readability is about understanding the cost of that code you're writing and understanding kind of what it's doing right? You can look at it and have a mental model of how that's gonna behave and the cost of that. And simplicity is about hiding complexity. The problem that I see is people wanna focus on simplicity, make things simple, upfront, and what happens is you lose your readability and you can't do it in that order and go, the compiler, the runtime, the entire ecosystem is about this beautiful balance of readability and simplicity.

the hiding of complexity without hiding your ability to understand what's going on, that doesn't happen overnight. That takes a huge amount of experience and refactoring and knowledge which the Go Team had. So to me, I think that's what we're talking about here. with Go it, and the language shows you how to get there too, if you're interested in learning that.[00:16:00]

Yeah. No, a hundred percent. So tell me about the development of art and labs over this time. So in 2013, it was called Art and Labs back then. We actually, the name of the company was Arden Studios, and we still have that name. We think of that as the parent company. And the idea of studios was what was Microsoft's editor, visual Studio. So we thought, and my business partner didn't want a name that was, So obvious, which I always felt was a mistake, but Right.

He didn't want people to just absolutely know what we do. So he thought an Arden is an Irish word. that means platform. So it was like Arden Studios was this like studio that built these software platforms. cool. but I think over time there, there was this moment, I don't know what year it was, maybe it's 2015 or 16.

Where labs started becoming the big thing. Everybody was Labs, [00:17:00] labs. And I was at that point getting tired of people asking me,what does your company do? I wanted it to be obvious and Art and Studios made us look like we were more of an art sort of company, film company or

**Lane:** Oh, okay. Yeah.

**Bill:** when we were like, core engineering.

So I propose that we. Started doing business as Arden Labs to give us more of that tech edge, and that's what we ended up doing. I don't remember what year we switched using the lab's name. we started as Arden Studios. I think it was a cool name too.

**Lane:** And correct me if I'm wrong, the kind of the core business of Arden Labs over the years has primarily been, kind of building software for third party clients. So you don't necessarily maintain your own, software products that you sell, but you are building software for other companies.

Is that accurate?

**Bill:** Yeah, the primary revenue is consulting and staff, OG and [00:18:00] projects. for other companies. We dabble, we have dabbled in our own products. We're dabbling in one right now. building a product's really hard. It's just super hard. So we've invested time and money into products. nothing yet that I feel like has hit.

I'm hoping this new one, which I'm not gonna talk about right now, has some legs, but we do that. and then the training was, It feeds the consulting, right? They feed each other. and I don't know if Arden Labs would be as big without the training, and I'm not sure the training would be as big without the consulting.

it, it fits hand in hand. The problem with training, and why I, I think you don't see a lot of companies like mine was the pay cycle that you get paid, right? You go get to a training for a big company, let's say Intel, you ain't getting paid for 90 days if you're lucky. So

**Lane:** Just because of how they bill, how they

**Bill:** how it all gets billed and gets paid.

Oh yeah. [00:19:00] So if you wanna get into the training business, there's money there, but you better have six months of cash reserve to, to play that game. So what's cool is the consulting can bring money in every month, right? Which gives you time to wait to get paid on the training side, and if a consultant consultancy has decided to stop paying you for whatever reason, The accounting department had a glitch, then they got some training money coming in. we've been able to manage cash flow really nicely, having both sort of revenue streams. But if I had to guess, it's probably like 30 70. 70 on the consulting side.

**Lane:** Okay. Yeah, that sounds about right. in theory, backend, banter, viewers, they're learning backend development, right? Probably in Go and Python, and they're trying to figure out where they should take their career. And sometimes there's this choice that needs to be made. As you're a self-taught developer, you're trying to break into the industry of should I go work for a [00:20:00] product based company?

Should I go work for a consultancy? Should I freelance on my own? In fact, Daniel, one of, our graduates at boot dev ended up going to work for you at Arden, which is how I came to know you. do you have Could you like weigh those options? Like how would you look at that if you were, entering the industry?

I don't know if that's even possible to imagine at the moment, but.

**Bill:** it's a personality problem more than anything else. So when I started consulting, my business partner had already been doing it for I don't know how many years, and the first thing he said to me was, Don't get comfortable in. At that point you used to go to the client's office, right? It wasn't remote, so you don't get comfortable anywhere.

Be able to leave in 30 seconds or less. Just do you wanna put a picture on the desk they assigned to you? That's fine. But 30 seconds or less, you have to be able to leave. And the thing was that you can't feel [00:21:00] any sort of ownership in anything you're doing. Because you don't work there. You're being hired to solve some problem.

And as quickly as you got in, you can quickly be taken out. And it's not personal. It just is what it is. So 30 seconds or less, you have to be ready at all times. And the other thing is that in a lot of these sort of consulting engagements, it's chaos. I call chaos engineering. It's rare you're gonna walk into a situation where it's greenfield.

That takes time to get to those sort of clients. You're being called in cuz they've probably have tried everything else at this point and nothing else is working. And so I've met people who are not capable from a personality perspective to handle the hands off like. You don't own this. Stop acting like you do and being able to handle the chaos where the code isn't gonna [00:22:00] be perfect because it can't be perfect cuz the environment just doesn't allow it.

So your job is just to keep throwing band-aids and bubblegum and maybe clean it up a little bit as you can, but you go home at night and you don't care about it. So you can make a lot of money doing this. But if you're somebody who cares, really cares, it will drive you crazy because that caring is actually getting in your way.

And so I tell people to try it out because if you can deal with the chaos and deal with helping people where you can and when you can, and at the same time, deal with everything that's going around you. And there are people who love that. I've met people who love the chaos. In fact, the more messed up the code base is, the better.

They love

**Lane:** Is that how you are

**Bill:** No, actually I'm not. I am, I've learned. I had to learn how to be that [00:23:00] person. I wasn't, when I started my business partner helped a lot trying to teach me the right attitude.

**Lane:** the solve problems quickly and cheaply attitude versus having this immaculate engineering machine that

**Bill:** Get things done, make 'em stable, get things done, move on to the next thing. Don't worry about all those other little things you wanna worry about. what helped me balance that was the training because then I could build training products with what I wanted, how I wanted to engineer as opposed to how I had to engineer, in there.

I've met people who love that and it's brilliant. And then I've met people who just fail. Not because they're not good engineers, they just can't put themselves in the right mindset. They need to be in a product company. They need to have the sprint, they need to, and they excel in that environment and it's great.

So I think you have to be real honest with yourself and who you are and what you need. To maintain any sort of [00:24:00] mental wellness. Okay? And if you're not sure, then for try the consulting, see if you're thriving in this crazy world. If you're not, then the next choice is do you wanna do a startup or you want to go into a VMware because they're product companies, but they're completely different sort of product companies.

Two, one, it's gonna move very slow. You have job security for life, you'll have a good starting salary. It was very slow. You'll have a lot of time for personal stuff. you're probably not gonna be challenged a lot every day. and it's that sort of laid back maybe life. But if you wanna go into a startup, then you better expect that you're working all the time.

Even if you're not at work, it's in your head, right? Oh man, I forgot to do that. Oh, now I remember why that's not working. and probably taking the laptop out on a weekend, not because you have to, because you want to. and [00:25:00] you're being challenged and you're probably doing a lot more things than you normally would've done.

And there are people who thrive in that. There are people who don't. And as you get older, it changes. I'm at a point where, you know,I'm happy working 40 hours a week, but I don't wanna really work on the weekends and I don't want to do, I'm tired, right? Like I, I've done that. I slept on couches for three days in a row trying to build something that isn't running anymore.

**Lane:** So what about those three days I lost? I think the best advice is you just get, need to get a feel for not just your own personality, but like what the pros and cons of all these things are, and then just make a decision and try it.

I've always liked startups because, I just have to have something to do and think about constantly. I suffer from boredom. I cannot be bored. And so I've been at larger companies where kind of the project dries up for a week and you don't really have anything interesting to do and that drives me crazy.

**Bill:** but you can balance that. If you had product ideas, then it's huge. Because they're not challenging you. In fact, they're only giving you about 30 hours a week [00:26:00] and you supplement what you need. Building like I did with the training, building something else. So this is why I'm saying that everybody has to be super honest with themselves in what it is that they're they want, and then go after those.

I met, there was a time where it actually, it happens today. I don't see it as much cause I'm not traveling as much, but I would meet people all the time and they say, man, I should be learning Kubernetes. I should be learning Kubernetes. I should be learning Kubernetes, I should be learning mi, I should be learning ai.

I should be learning ml.

And when I hear the same person say that six or seven times over the course of two months, I will. And I've done this. I have finally stopped them. We're walking down the street and this is the seventh time they've said I should be learning this. And I stop 'em and I go, listen to me.

I don't want to hear this idea that you don't have time because you have time. Everybody has time. Everybody will make time for the [00:27:00] things they want to do. This is not an issue about time. It's an issue about attention and you obviously don't want to put your attention into this cuz if you did, you'd be doing it right. So stop beating yourself up because the next thing on Twitter was chat G P T and you didn't build an a p I to it. You didn't do it because you weren't interested in it, and it's okay that you're not interested in that. Let everybody else try to jump on the bullet train for the next three weeks and you just stay here and relax.

It's the same thing I'm seeing now with Blue Sky, right? Everybody wants a Blue Sky invitation, right? I'm just sitting back. I can wait until general availability. I'm busy enough on Twitter right now. I can wait like the idea of fomo. Can severely impact you, right? And severely impact your attentions And I fight it all the time, right?

I'm you fight cuz what do you do? You see all these people [00:28:00] that you look up to and they're jumping on the chat, G B T, they're jumping on blue sky, they're jumping on and you're like, man, I should be on there if they're on there, right? I'm not cool if I'm not doing this stuff right? And you gotta just fight it because.

First of all, it's a fad and it's gonna go away. And then second of all, if you really want to do it, you can do it, but you didn't, so why not?

**Lane:** we need mo motivational talks by Bill Kennedy. I hope your next conference talk is a motivational one. I, okay. the problem that you're describing this, I call it like shiny thing syndrome, where like you're unable to go deep on subtopic that you know you really care about because you keep jumping.

Back and forth, between different things. So for example, I work with a lot of people who are just starting to learn to code. Maybe they're in their first like one to three months of dabbling in this whole coding thing. And one common problem that I see is people quickly switching between languages, frameworks, and tech stacks.

[00:29:00] Like today go is interesting. Tomorrow it's node, oh, I heard about this new bun runtime. I need to install that and try it out. and my recommendation has always been like, you just need to focus. You need to focus the attention. Then just go do it. I don't know how else to say it other than you just need to go deeper on the thing that you set out to do.

Within a three month timeframe that you've been searching and surfing YouTube videos,the thing you need to learn to break into the industry probably hasn't changed

**Bill:** it takes 10,000 hours to be an expert in anything that you're doing, whether it's tech, sports, drinking, mountain Dew like you are. It takes 10,000 hours. So if you don't put 10,000 hours into something, which I think one time I calculated it out, maybe it's five years, depending on how much, how many hours a day you're working on it, then.

You're never gonna be [00:30:00] proficient enough to get any sort of, say, job or position or in sports, the opportunity to compete at that highest level. You're just not. So again, it comes down to what sort of problems do you want to solve? Start solving those problems. Try to leverage the tech that you've already started putting a, you've already put a hundred hours.

So let me give you this. My, my wife Ali, she just finished a bootcamp in Miami, okay. She spent basically two months hedged down learning JavaScript, Playworks, html, css. Okay.

**Lane:** Cool. Yeah.

**Bill:** Okay, so she put in whatever that is, right? already 300 hours, three maybe 500 hours, let's say, okay, you're 500 hours outta your 10,000 already in.

Now school is done right? And it's so easy now to turn around and say,[00:31:00] bill, I wanna learn. Go. I can teach. You go, but you're starting over. You're already 500 hours in. And it's not like there aren't a billion jobs out there in this tech. Once you get to 2000 hours, right? Once you get to 2000 hours, you're gonna get a job.

So do you want to take the 500 hours you've already invested and get halfway there being an expert and working? Or do you wanna start over again every two months? Because if you just keep starting over every two months, then you're not gonna be employable anywhere. Again, what is your goal? If you're retired and you don't care, then 500 hours is enough for anything you're doing cuz you got enough of a feel for it and you wanna do something else.

But if your job is to make money to have a job, then you gotta work towards the 5,000 hours to make yourself employable.

**Lane:** So [00:32:00] this is actually really interesting, topic cuz there's actually two, there's two separate things I heard you say and one of them I definitely agree with. The other one, I'm actually not so sure. If you spend 500 hours learning html, c s s travel script, and then you switch to say, a new programming language, but you're learning new concepts, I would argue that's just fine.

So for example, in my f in my four year CS degree, which I'm not, I started boot dev. I'm not necessarily the biggest fan of, CS degrees in general, but, there's all these concepts you need to learn, right? Things like. how the internet works, domain name system, databases, algorithms, data structures,all these higher level concepts.

And then you like, use and learn specific technologies to implement those concepts in the real world. And in my mind, it's really important to learn all of those concepts and keep making that like deep progress along that axis.

**Bill:** But that's, but you could have learned all of that while staying in [00:33:00] JavaScript and got to a thousand hours of JavaScript while still learning all those fundamental things

you gotta put in the, you gotta go towards those 5,000 hours. I don't know how many hours you're gonna need to get the job.

Let's say he is gonna be a, I just saw her do 500 and I think she could take an entry level job. I know if she does another 500, it's gonna look even better. And if she puts another 500 there gets, so every 500 gets you every two months, gets you closer. You need a problem to solve, which is what I try to tell people all the time. My service repo, which is what I used to train and teach, how to build services, it's technically a product. It's a web API for a garage sale, like it's a project. It's real. I build that thing like listings in production.

The fact that it's garage sale doesn't excite me, but the fact that I have to maintain users and products and crud and like these are standard things regardless of whatever you're gonna be doing. So you need the [00:34:00] project anyway.

**Lane:** I think that's great advice. Generally, I'm hu I'm big on project building, but what project should say someone who's learning go, wants to get a job as a go developer. What are the best. Like one or two kinds of projects that you can build or maybe the advice that you could follow to come up with that, th those like one or two ideas for what projects you should be building and go specifically.

**Bill:** This is what I would say, and I talked to my wife about this as well. She's in a place right now where, because there's so many people looking for work and the economy is falling apart and there's openings, but the 5,000 hour people are getting 'em right now because there's just too many of them. what do you do?

Do you know how many nonprofits there are right now that need software development? you're looking for something to problem, to solve. Go knock on a local nonprofit. [00:35:00] Yeah, and tell, ask them what technology problems do you have right now? Maybe you'll get lucky and they need some sort of website that could leverage some backend APIs.

Why not work on that? There's no stress. You ain't getting paid. There's no timetable.

**Lane:** Right.

**Bill:** have a problem that you have to solve. So you get to learn without any stress and you're helping the community out at the same time. And then on your resume, I'll show you how to make that look like you were working at a job because you technically were, even though you weren't getting paid.

But we don't put salaries on resumes, do we? So now under experience, you were working with 501c3 nonprofit. Blank building software. This wasn't school, it wasn't education. It was a job. It happened to be pro bono, but who cares? And so this is what I'm gonna say to you, okay? If you have that time and you're looking for a project, there are a ton of nonprofit organizations all over the place [00:36:00] that would love.

Your help and maybe part of that project isn't fun and fancy for you. Maybe there's a browser front end piece to it. then get your friend who loves front end to do that and let them learn how to work and get together as a team. And you do all the backend APIs and the database stuff and who, imagine if everybody did that, how much better the world would be.

**Lane:** I love that advice. If you're looking for a project, go find a nonprofit or an organization, someone who has a real world problem, go solve it with code, put it on your resume. Bill will teach you how to engineer your resume and and everything will work out. I love that. Thank you. I think that is a great thing to end on.

thanks so much for coming on. take a moment, plug your stuff.

**Bill:** You know me, man. I, my marketing department hates me because I'm not that person. I'm, look, I'm not. It's about making sure that everybody gets the educational materials that they need. This is all I care about [00:37:00] and I try to make sure that everything I'm doing, whether it's the Ultimate Go class that teaches the language or the ultimate service, which is teaching how to build services or whatever it is, it's real practical stuff that you can take back.

If you go on arden labs.com and you see any of our educational stuff, our video bundles and things, and it's too expensive for you, you are to send me an [email protected]. Send me an email. I will send you a scholarship form where you basically get to set your own price. Shit. And if you can't afford any of it, you say zero and I will give it to you.

you just need, and I don't, there's no policing that you are to be honest with yourself about what you can't afford. But I can only afford 20 bucks. Good. Here. All right. So if you see stuff on Arden Labs, if you see anything that I'm doing from an educational standpoint, you see a live class, you want access, don't worry about the price, just.

Reach out to me, we'll work it out. that's all I'm gonna say.

[00:38:00] Everybody has a different personality. Everybody's trying to teach the same things. So you can come and check my stuff out for free if I'm resonating with you, brilliant. If not, you tell me, bill. It's not. I've given money back. And then I'll send you over to Johnny. we're all friends. We love each other.

It's not about that. it's just about you getting the education that you think you need to be able to improve.

**Lane:** Fantastic. Thanks so much. I hope some people take you up on that. That's art. It's arden labs.com. Right,

**Bill:** Yeah. Ar d a n labs sergeant.com.

**Lane:** arden labs.com and [email protected] on Twitter. Thanks so much, bill.