Embracing #100DaysOfCode: A Deep Dive with Chris Williams

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All right, you're watching another episode of the CTO Advisor podcast. You know, Chris, have you ever been on the podcast? We did a recording in Vegas, I want to say in the before times. I can't remember what we were talking about, but I vividly remember having a conversation with you after we did the recording where I asked you, Keith, can you explain what Kubernetes is to me? And you spent 15 minutes breaking it down for me and explaining it very well, because at the time it was new to my brain, and I don't remember what the talk was, but I remember you giving me the first explanation of Kubernetes that I actually absorbed.

So that was a while ago. That was a while ago, because I don't think anyone, you know, I think we wrote an ebook on Kubernetes in the before times. It was even before Kubernetes was really a thing, and I was a Kubernetes proponent at the time. And then, you know, things, you know, ebb and flow. I was not a fan of Kubernetes for a long time, at least not the way that it was being promoted. And now it would be safe to say you easily can outpace me in any Kubernetes conversation.

You're now the DevRel, Chris Williams, you're the DevRel manager at HashiCorp. We're not going to talk IBM Hashi, surprisingly, and you are a well-known cloud therapist. And the reason why I wanted to jump on and do a quick podcast for you, what people may or may not know about you and your role at HashiCorp, you love sharing information. You love educating the practitioner community, whether it's developer, infrastructure professionals. You love doing the work. Even before all of this, you volunteered for vBrownBag for years.

So you're a big man, a big part of the community. And every year I see this, I see this hashtag, 100 days of cold, and I think to myself, you know, so, you know, I've seen Michael Kay do it from over from Veeam. I've now seen you on your timeline and, you know, I'm like, what the heck is this thing? You caught my attention because you had an emulation of Space Invaders. I'm like, OK, this is worth having someone on the podcast.

So what is this 100 days of cold thing and how do I get my emulation of Space Invaders going? OK, so the 100 days of cold thing is a public promise. Basically, you are declaring to the world that I am going to do one hour of coding a day at whatever level it is that you are comfortable and capable of doing that. For me, it was beginner level. And then so I actually started doing the 100 days of code three years ago in the pre times.

And I got up to about day 49 and I was using the Angela U course on Udemy to to go through it. There's there's a so there's several different 100 days official 100 days of code folks that have like learning material out there. Michael Kennedy has has two different 100 days of code ones, one for web developers and one for Python. They're both Python based, but there's there's one for like beginners and there's one for more web centric. Angela, you has one Bob Builder boss over at Pi Bites has another has another 100 days of code.

I think they were the ones that originally did it. But don't quote me on that. I'm not 100 percent positive. But the concept is you are dedicating yours to your to yourself by publicly acknowledging and saying that you're going to do 100 days of code. I'm going to study for 100 days, one hour a day of the thing that you want to learn. For me, that's, you know, what I like doing this in public. As you said, I like sharing my knowledge as I'm learning things.

I get excited about it. So I want to share it with everybody. So I figured this was a perfect way to level myself up as the DevRel manager, because my my level of knowledge has been everything except development. Like, you know, I started off my career building gaming rigs back in the day and then I was building servers and then I was networking servers and then I was building data centers and I was migrating data centers. Then VMware came along and we were virtualizing data centers and the cloud came along and then we moved all those virtual systems to the cloud.

But I never really like built code. I was scripting and I was doing stuff like that, but I wasn't good at the actual application development piece of it and all of the foundational things that that entailed, like Git and Actions and CICD pipelines and all those things. So I figured this 100 days of code would be a really good time for me to not only beef up my development chops, but also get into version controlling, branching, packaging, learning all of the things that are auxiliary, not adjacent to the process, but still very, very important for developers so that I can relate to them as a developer relations person.

So I guess it would be it would make sense to know something about development. If you're a development relations manager, I say that tongue in cheek because we had this debate in within the community. Do you need to be a developer to be a developer relations manager? And I have my lay terms with it, but you've been at this job for a little bit over a year and a half now. I think you took the job at Hatchy. So tell me what has this helped you in your job?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, so when I came on, my edict was to help folks like myself, folks that came from the ops side of things to learn how to get into the DevOps side of things. What are the things that an operations person or a systems administrator or a systems architect that is not a developer, what are the things that they need to learn in 2023 and 2024 and beyond so that they can better communicate with the development teams, work better with get, you know, grok the tools to become a good DevOps person?

And, you know, what are the 100, 200 and 300 level things that are fundamental that they might not know? They have great technical acumen, but there's pieces that might be, you know, there's the field of tech is so wide and so broad that not everybody can't know everything, no matter how much companies want us to, you know, jam everything into one person's head. So this is kind of like a reset for myself. I mean, I was an enterprise architect for a decade.

And so I have a broad swath of knowledge, but there's still fundamental building blocks that because I wasn't a developer, those, you know, I need to get those in my head. So this is a perfect opportunity to not only put those into my head, but to write about them, create a series on. So recently on Free Code Camp, I put out the Terraform Certification Study Guide to help people learn Terraform. And then I did the GitHub Foundation Certification Study Guide to help people get that.

So as I'm creating these foundational building blocks for myself, I'm writing about them, I'm creating videos about them and helping other folks do the exact same thing. So I think I get the gist of 100 Days of Code. Like I said, I've seen the hashtag over the past few years. And this is not your first time attempting 100 Days of Code. Right. Nor my last. And it is an ongoing thing. I'm now thinking 100 Days of AI or something or along.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. But this has me asking the question, how has AI and chat GTP and all the code assistance, how have that? How has that changed? 100 Days of Code for you over the past couple of attempts. So the first time that I did it was was pre-AI, and that was interesting insofar as. OK, so so now that I have GitHub Copilot and I've got Code Whisperer attached to my IDE and I have all of these things in there making recommendations for me, I actually have to turn them off because in 100 Days of Code, it's not the it's not.

Learning a programming language is just like learning a regular language like Spanish or Japanese or English or whatever like that. It's not studying eight hours on Saturday and then not using it any other time of the week. It's the consistent, repetitive practice that gets it to soak into your brain. If you have a an AI agent pre filling out all of your stuff and you're not typing it yourself, you're doing yourself a disservice because you're not you're not getting that muscle memory of learning the code yourself.

You're just you're just tabbing through the appropriate recommendations and going, yeah, that's close enough. And I'll just tweak that. So I turn it off for that. But what I do use it for is I use it as kind of like a tutor, like I'll paste into. So I actually on chat GPT, I created a DevOps mentor for myself. I uploaded a bunch of PDFs that I had purchased and everything. And so now I ask it questions about how to do the things I'm like, write me.

Here's a piece of code. Explain it to me, you know, in in your own in your own words. Explain to me like I'm, you know, like explain to me like I'm five. And and then I'll say and now and if I put if I write a piece of code, I'll put it in there and I'll say, write me some tests for this function. And so it'll so if I'm going into testing, it then writes the test for me. So it's it's useful, but not useful in the exact same way that a true developer would use it for.

Yeah. So a true developer will use it to do. Well, anyone who writes code is a true developer. So a professional developer, someone who's done it, you know, they've done it for years and they're beyond the point that either of us are at. I tried taking a course in coding a couple of years ago because I have a very similar background to you. And I discovered that my previous knowledge of coding was actually a detriment to learning how to code today, because compute and languages have advanced so far that all of my logic, the logic works.

But the methods that I would have used to get to the solution no longer work. So it's important to have these fundamentals. So last question, because for some reason. So Chris is a professional content creator and he put 15 minutes on for this podcast. Oh, I'm like, oh, that's a pretty good challenge. And he said, oh, there was a meeting before the meeting. I'm like, oh, come on, Chris. We don't do meetings before. We're going to do it live.

No, this is off the cuff. The hundred days of cold seems extremely intimidating. Like for someone who's not that level of discipline. And you talked about, you know, getting to day forty nine. How should somebody look at a hundred days of cold as a tool to learn how to. Leverage it in the exact same way that you would leverage the desire to learn how to do Spanish. If you don't, if you're not a native Spanish speaker and you want to learn how to speak Spanish, you get on Duolingo and you spend 15 minutes, 20 minutes a day.

Learning, you know, words in Spanish, 100 days of code is the exact same process. I say, you know, dedicate an hour to it, but you don't have to do an hour. You can do you can do a half an hour. I'm really enjoying it. So I tend to actually do a little bit more than an hour. But but that's. It's a. It's by declaring it in public. You're basically kind of like holding yourself accountable if you don't happen to have the same amount of.

Discipline that you that you think you need. You know, you don't need a lot of discipline, but you need some discipline. I'm I'm both highly motivated and highly disciplined. So I can so I can do it. People that have high motivation, but low discipline. You know, they need a little bit more of a push. So by by doing it out in public and having your friends cheer you on, you know, getting the endorphins from the likes and the way to go, Chris.

And I just checked out your repo and that that's really fun is is is a high motivating factor. Yeah, I did a hundred days of five K at running five K every day. I remember that. Yeah. A couple of years ago. And I got to tell you, if I didn't do it in public, I would not have finished. Right. Exactly. It was the people checking in every day and saying, Keith, how's it going? It's inspiring. Keep going.

I'm so proud of you. You know, I'm proud of all the people doing the hundred days of coal. I look at that and I'm like and I mean, I've got I got to be honest, I'm intimidated by it. I'm like, oh, my God, that is just that is a that is a commitment. But I love that you folks, everyone that does it, does it out of public. Sometimes they'll have a plan. Sometimes they'll, you know, won't have a plan.

It's just playing it by ear. D. and doing something I used to when I was a kid. I'd always start out a application line 10, T. T equals something T was. So what was some reason my favorite variable in the world? And then it would just the ideas would just go from there. I don't know what I would I don't know what that counter would become, but it was the start. Chris, for those who want to find out more about your cloud therapy and your thoughts on the acquisition of HashiCorp by IBM.

You're not going to put that. But where can they learn more about you? So I just figured this out recently. My my online handle is Mistwire, M-I-S-T-W-I-R-E. And if you Google Mistwire, I'm like the first five pages of hits. So my my Web site, my LinkedIn, my my Twitter account, my threads account, everything. If you if you can. And my blog. So if you want to find me, Google Mistwire. Pretty cool. And if you want to learn more about the CTO advisor, you can find us on the Web.

The CTO advisor dot com. Now a Futurum Group company. And you can find out more about Futurum Group by going to the Futurum Group Web site, Futurum Group dot com. You can also find me. I am not. Well, you if you Google CTO advisor, I'm probably not the only CTO advisor you'll find. That'd be pretty bold of me to make that claim. But at CTO advisor on Twitter's and most of the platforms, talk to your next CTO advisor podcast.

Thanks a lot, Chris. You are the first five first five hits at least on CTO advisor. So nice. It's good. So when I do my vanity search, you know, of course I'm going to come up because Google knows. Right. Right. Right. It's nice to know that when somebody else does a search for CTO advisor, I've made an impact. Thanks, Chris. Congrats, Keith. Thank you. Thanks for having me.