Gavin Doughtie, Senior Developer at Aon

Gavin Doughtie: There was no one, like, technology There were a lot of little things that would guide me towards creative aspects or technology things.

Pedro Pizzaro: Welcome, Gavin. Thanks for joining, John and I on the podcast today. You know, obviously, as as we know, you know, you're a senior dev at Aon, and we wanted to get some background on on your career, the lessons that you've learned, going from development to senior development and some management and leadership in there, and really touch on your background to see if it's if it's useful for the folks who are listening in. Definitely gonna be useful for John and I. But we'd love to learn a little bit more about your background quickly if you'd like to summarize it in your own words.

And, yeah, we can kick things off.

Gavin Doughtie: I was born yeah. So I, I grew up in Houston, Texas. My father was a professor at Rice University, and, unlike you might expect, he taught Elizabethan folk songs and ballads and English literature. But it was a very technical college, so I spent a lot of my, like, childhood time hanging out on a college campus, and a lot of my my peers were other faculty brats. And so there was a certain amount of cultural predestination towards reading things.

So I did a lot of that growing up, read a lot of science fiction. Because of science fiction, I like science fiction movies. Because of science fiction movies, I like Star Trek. Because Star Trek, I went to science fiction conventions. Because of that, I saw some Ray Harryhausen movies with stop motion monsters.

I got all excited about special effects and making movies. After that, I said, well, I'm gonna go to film school, and I'm gonna go to I'm gonna go to USC Film School, which was the one that, you know, George Lucas went to and now has funded heavily. And I applied. I applied you know, my backup schools were UCLA and NYU. So I got into, the film school at NYU, and I got into, UCLA as not just a regular undeclared undergraduate.

And USC Film School rejected me. And so I'm I'm, like, I am not staying in Houston, Texas a minute longer. I'm gonna go to UCLA. So I went there and started doing classes and meeting people and figuring out how to live in Los Angeles, and I kept applying to film school. And the second time I applied though, they also rejected me.

But I, you know, I, like, learned some stuff from that, and, and then worked on my application and applied. And then the third time I applied, they also rejected me, but the 4th the 4th time worked.

Pedro Pizzaro: Goodness.

Gavin Doughtie: So, so I started, at USC's film school as a junior in the early eighties, and I went there for a couple of years. And I worked on people's student films. But the, the thing that I think a lot of people miss out is you just do a lot of production, when you start out. You know? So you don't get too precious about it, and you try a lot of different things.

And you come in and show it to your peers, and they critique it. And you try to, like, clamp down on your own defensiveness long enough to take a lesson away from it and try to improve the work you do the next time, and we were all helping each other out. And then when you're working on someone else's film, instead of doing it all yourself and being totally in control, you have to learn how to give up control and and get something from someone else to allow them to contribute and allow them to learn how to contribute if their skills in one area or another are not as strong as yours. And that idea that it's not a you're not a one man band. You can always you can always help people do better work, become better at what they're doing, and also, become much better yourself than if you're in a room, you know, reading hacker news.

You know, you're gonna you're gonna be better if you have a chance to, in one way or another, work with other people. So, anyway, the the the short story is even at that time, I wanted to you know, I was writing screenplays all the time and writing feature length spec screenplays and stuff. And the the screenplay format for for people who haven't seen it is kind of a complicated technical format, and that's it's a pain in the butt to do it on a typewriter. And it's even more of a pain to go back and make revisions to things. And the film is it's much like software.

You you're continuously revising it until you actually get the product to the customer. So word processors, even at their primitive mid eighties form, were were really an important thing. Like, they were like, yeah. We totally want that. We want that right now.

I don't care if I have to shovel coal into the computer. It's still better than a typewriter. So I had, I had 3 roommates when I was in film school. 2 of them were film students, and the other one was a computer science student. And he said, well, if you wanna use word processing, you can go down to the computer lab, which was across the street from our dorm, and, and get an account on this this VAX computer.

And you get to use the cool word processor, like the really good text editor, e max. So I was there in film school writing screenplays with e max, and that was that was sort of how I got into using computers. Because they were so primitive, you had to develop maybe more computer skills than you would today. But I I was not there to develop computer skills. I was there to do word processing.

But when I got out of film school, as I was struggling along writing spec screenplays and directing, you know, no budget music videos for bands that did not have labels. You know, I was also temping a lot. And and this is this is how the how the how the road forked for me as I was working in a lot of offices, to, like, pay my rent. And, I was in there as a production word processor. You know, I basically sit down and type legal briefs, a lot of them, a lot a lot of law firms, but I've worked for all kinds of companies.

Typing's a boring thing to do. So, you know, what you do is you look for opportunities to automate stuff. And if you've got a technical mind and you're curious about stuff like, oh, I can automate this and I can automate that. And, you know, I could write a for loop, and it would do it a bunch of times. And so, eventually, what happened is I learned to program really writing a package of add on macros to write screenwriting to do screenwriting with.

So, you know, I WordPerfect at the time had a terrible but Turing complete programming environment, And I and a couple of other guys worked together to build screenwriting software, and we sold it. So it was an entrepreneurial venture in software back in the eighties and very early nineties. And that was sort of where I'd internalized a lot of things about programming. And then, you know, subsequently to that, I took a course in c and a course in Lisp and through UCLA Extension and just tried to backfill some of that information. But it was kind of a one thing led to another and in true, like, Los Angeles Hollywood style.

I had friends, and some of them needed some software, and I convinced them to do one thing or another that I didn't necessarily know very well at the time. But through the research I had been able to do, so this is probably the right solution for these guys. So I I did a lot of that. I did a lot of Macintosh relational database stuff, the an old 4 GL called 4th dimension, which again was a programming environment. So it was yet another programming language was proprietary to the tool.

It did have a compiler, and it did have the concept of pointers, so I got a lot of familiarity with that. And that that kinda takes us up to the the first software company that I worked for.

John Daniels: Your journey actually sounds very similar to my journey, and I have a question at the end of my story I'm gonna tell here for a second. So the question I'm gonna tell a story after the question. The question is, can you remember a time when you were a teenager or a child that really triggered your love for movies and film? Because it sounds like you you went to school for film and it took you 4 times to get in. And then you went on this journey, this broad journey of film and doing these projects and getting inter introduced to computers and all of that, which is a similar journey to me.

I I can specifically remember a snowboarding trip that I went on when I was about 15 years old, 16 years old. It was kind of a a snow camp, and this is the first time I'd ever seen a Mac computer. It was probably the first time I'd seen a real computer in general. I think I was using a Tandy 5000 way back in the day. And so we are at the snowboard camp, and this guy had a computer, and he was filming with a Handycam, and he would film all day all the snowboarding stuff, and then he would edit the video and show the video at night.

When all of us would gather after dinner, we'd see this video of everybody on the on the screen. And so that that memory specifically is what really pushed me into creativity, and I I went to school first for I did a little bit of film, and then I moved into graphic design and website design. So kind of a similar journey. I just kind of found a need and then did small projects for friends and grew from film to graphic design to mobile design, web design, all that kind of stuff. But is there a memory that you can recall that really kicked you off into this whole creativity realm, either when you were a kid or a teenager?

Is there that one memory in your brain that's always like, okay. That could have been the beginning stage for this entire journey?

Gavin Doughtie: You know, I would say it crept up. You know, it was more more one of those things where there's a little bit of interest and a little bit of gratification, and both of those things kind of snowballed over time. You know, so there was no, like, the light shines down on me kind of moment. There were certainly I mean, there's certainly films that I watched, that were like, oh, yeah. This is, you know, this is a really significant film.

This is going to change things. Like, as a science fiction nerd growing up in the seventies, like, I would go see all the science fiction movies when they came out, and they were they were pretty uniformly terrible except for the Andromeda strain. But I remember sitting in the movie theater on opening day watching Star Wars going, like, oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.

This is this is it. Right? And and to a to a somewhat lesser extent, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I thought was, like, cinematically more interesting, but not as not as kind of cultural and, filmmaking technology, paradigmatically different.

Pedro Pizzaro: Yeah.

Gavin Doughtie: So, so, like, you know, I could talk about the movie part. The technology part, you know, I think probably the reason I spent so much time in film and special effects and and that kind of stuff, was that computers, you know, for a man my age, computers at the time were not that interesting. They were a character mode. They were very hard to get a hold of. You know, I didn't didn't have one in my house.

Didn't have a color TV. Didn't have a VCR. Didn't have cable TV when I was growing up. Had to walk to school uphill both ways, etcetera, etcetera. But, right, it was just sort of normal at the at that time.

And so computers were extremely primitive, and I, you know, I did seek them out and got some time on them even as a teenager. But it it involved like, I bicycle to RadioShack, bought a book about basic programming, took it home, wrote a program on legal pads, bicycle back to RadioShack, and the the the clerk was, like, whatever. I don't know what he's doing. And I was, like, typing it into the computer so I could run it. You know, it didn't save it or anything.

It's just, like, 300 lines of basic and oh, look. It works. What's what's this? You know? And so I had I had those kinds of experiences.

And one of the things that I found, like, the snowballing effect was what I what I would call the gratification loop of programming, which is you can do a little something and understand a little something, and then you see it work. And in creative endeavors, it's never that clear cut. You know? If you've worked on something for a long time, you have an idea if you're moving it in the direction yet or not. But, but in programming, it's just obvious, like, you did it.

Right? So that kind of dopamine cycle, if you will, is a lot tighter. Now with digital production and especially now as you get into this AI and this generation stuff, I think people are gonna be having that dopamine cycle, with creative endeavors as well. So there's, you know, it's gonna all merge together eventually. Yeah.

But there was no there was no one, like, technology There were a lot of little things that would guide me towards creative aspects or technology things.

Pedro Pizzaro: It it sounds like it it really crept up on you and and it's all it sounded like in the beginning, it was more to solve an immediate need. Right? As you were working on different projects and you need to solve some immediate need that I need to send

Gavin Doughtie: you a screen play or pay my rent.

Pedro Pizzaro: Exactly. And and that just reminds me of, you know, there was there was a company that I was at before where the CTO always said that that lazy people make the best engineers and and developers, and I always thought that was really strange. But the more I listened to him say it, it was really about, like like you mentioned, you're trying to solve for these automation or these automate away these mundane tasks, and you wanna be able to do that so you could free more of your time to do something more interesting. And it's not to say the act of of developing the work is lazy. It's just that you wanna solve something that a computer could do.

And, you know, now coming into the age of AI and everything else, it's, you know, all these possibilities

Gavin Doughtie: will go

Pedro Pizzaro: into that.

Gavin Doughtie: Mark is, like, is it gonna be more more of that, or are we going into an entirely new and disruptive paradigm? And I the jury's still kinda out on that. Right. Could go either way. You kids are gonna have to figure it out.

John Daniels: Yeah. Do you find it

Gavin Doughtie: I'm hoping I'm hoping it'll time out, like, just around the time I hit retirement AI figures out longevity and, and UBI.

Pedro Pizzaro: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It's like at a certain point, you know, you get to computers had a limited capacity to solve a limited number of mechanical issues. They've obviously grown in technical ability to the point where it's Mhmm.

At some point what it can do most of what a human can do or 90% and, you know, there are What are you saying?

Gavin Doughtie: The 90% of what humans what humans have been able to contribute to the economy, particularly the industrial economy has been designed to be something that could eventually be replaced with a sufficiently capable machine. Right?

Pedro Pizzaro: Right.

Gavin Doughtie: You know? So the a lot of the activity and I I I it is in fact a concern when I'm programming now and I'm writing something that's like, well, this is complex, but it doesn't really doesn't really dig into any kind of uniquely human things that I'm bringing to this solution. So I'm I'm right now just chewing on, like, what can I do to, to offload that kind of work? You know, can I can I convince, a large language model to absorb a bunch of this complexity for me so that I can work more as a director? And and this is this is, like, the metaphor that that that I've been toying with a lot is, you know, you make a motion picture in what you're doing.

And and I'm not to say, like, I haven't done Hollywood for 30 plus years. Right? So I've been a software engineer this whole time. But, the process is you gather people together. Everyone has a bit of expertise or has deep expertise at at at one or more skills, and you are going to combine that expertise to produce some something that's, you know, greater than the sum of its parts.

And I think a lot of work that we have is going to feel more more like the role of a producer or director in a film, you know, where and I like and believe me, it pains me to leave out actors and writers and and and people like that who have a lot of skill that they're bringing to the table. But but I think what you're really looking at is expressing an intent to some instrumentality that will deliver you a a solution based on that intent. You know? So show me a picture of an astronaut riding a unicorn might be your intent. You wanna see that for some reason.

And then, just as you might have asked a human artist to produce that for you, now, you know, a an AI artist will produce that for you. Whether or not it's good or what you wanted, that I think that's the, the friction in the question that we have moving forward. I I have a lot of artist friends, and I would like to see them stay gainfully employed and bring all their many wonderful skills to, humanity still. So I don't, I don't I don't think there's a a quick solution to that. Yeah.

But I am digressing.

John Daniels: Yeah. Do you find so I think back when all of us were you know, Pedro and I are certainly a little a little more junior than yourselves, not too much. You're you're not that much older than us. But back when we were getting into technology, whether it be videos or software or computers, you know, the the learning curve, in my opinion, was a little bit easier because there was only so many technologies that we could learn and study, you know, so we could dive into a programming language. You know, when I started diving into Dreamweaver, there really wasn't too much out there on the market to learn, so I kinda just went with one platform.

So it was a little bit easier back then. In today's age, you know, there's AI. There's all these other other languages to do everything. There's 500 ways to do everything. So do you find that more exciting that there's so many ways to accomplish a task, or do you find it more daunting?

And and do you still kind of traditionally go back to some fallbacks that you you are more comfortable with?

Gavin Doughtie: So, you know, I I think this is a question that will always come up in in the life of any human being who's trying to be productive in in a world of economic value exchange these days. Right? It's been a long time since I felt like I had great depth in a piece of technology. You know? Like, I started as a web developer at Google in 2006, and I thought, like, okay.

I have more depth in this than most people, but I don't feel that way now, like, well over 15 years later. So it's, you know, the the the the technology, space will always grow.

John Daniels: Mhmm.

Gavin Doughtie: There is there's always a trade off between building out your production capacity and producing. Right? And some people get obsessed with production and ignore production capacity, and some people will go the other way. When I was word processing, I often would encounter a certain sort of person who would say, well, I'll just retype it. And I was like, you could copy paste it.

You could write a macro. You could write a mer mail merge program. You know, there are a lot of things you could do if you invested some time in understanding something that would pay off not only for this project. It might be a wash in terms of this one thing, but then it would pay off again and again and again moving forward. And I still have those conversations within my own head every day when I'm writing software.

Right? It's like, how much do I refactor this today? How per how how much production do I have to get done today to accomplish all the other goals that I'm trying to do? And how much, how much infrastructure should I be putting down for myself or learning about to increase my my capacity moving forward. It's continual juggling act and, sometimes in opposition to, this gratification loop.

Like, it is not gratifying to have a bug you can't figure out. That's just a pain in the butt. It's no fun to write unit tests. That is just a pain in the butt. But if you write the unit tests, you may not have to deal with the bug, and they'll pile up and give you more and more robust code and better understanding of the code that you've already written because you can refer to the tests.

And as my my colleagues will tell you, I am not the most meticulous of unit testers, particularly for user interface code, But I always find that it pays off. So that's the same thing with acquiring knowledge or studying things. It's like, it'll always pay off, but you have to balance it out with what you have to get done, like, right now. But I think most people on the side of production over increasing production capacity, especially especially people who are newer.

John Daniels: One of my next questions was going to be around the future because, obviously, we're in this these days where I mentioned there's kinda new technology every week. There's just something different, including AI. So how do you see you've already mentioned some of the things that you're building. You see them being used for the next 10 to 15 years. I guess, where do you see some stability in what you're what people are developing these days that'll be around for a long term in a long time also, long term long time?

But what are some things that you think are kind of at the end of their life cycle or things that are being developed that really have a a short shelf life? Is there anything in your head that you see both on the short term side of things and the long term side of things?

Gavin Doughtie: Do you

John Daniels: think do you think AI will, like I I personally think AI is gonna change the game. It'll it'll morph over time, but I think AI is gonna be around a long time as opposed to maybe something like NFTs, which kinda came and went quickly. So I'm just kinda curious if there's anything you've ever thought about along those lines.

Gavin Doughtie: Well, I mean, there have been a few times where I'm like, okay. This is this is an important thing. I'm really gonna have to dig in on this. And, some of it's philosophical. So the big technology choices that I've made where I've decided to spend time in a discretionary way and not at the behest of an employer has always been what is technology that is going to be portable.

And by that, I mean, knowledge and understanding that is not at that is not controlled by a single vendor, particularly, and that can be applied broadly. So JavaScript, I learned on my own time. You know? By day, I was programming in c plus plus. Machine learning and AI, I am still learning on my own time.

You know? And the prod the side projects that I'm doing around that are all on my own time. They're not they're not any learning how to do, you know, that web 2.0 style AJAX JavaScript stuff. That was all that was all stuff I thought, well, I need to know how to do this regardless of who's paying me. So you're you're looking for moments in the marketplace where it's like, like, people people are gonna want this.

People are gonna want more and more of it, and no vendor is going to capture all the value from it. You know, I I spent a chunk of time in the nineties as a, a Windows developer. So I was writing an application, couple several applications for the Windows platform. And I did not go home and screw around with Windows in the evenings because I, like you know, however you might feel about Windows technically, that was that was Microsoft's game. You were always gonna be playing in Microsoft's game if you were developing for Windows.

And I I think, you know, I have the same skittishness about building stuff that could only work with the OpenAI APIs. I think OpenAI is doing great work. You know? Windows became dominant by being the thing that people want, and I think AI is doing the same thing in collaboration with Microsoft to some extent. So I'm I'm skittish about that.

You know? I I had some interest in the the crypto space, particularly the, you know, executing code on on chain Mhmm. Because it had the promise of giving us a mechanism where the infrastructure wasn't owned or controlled by a particular entity. The reality is a lot fuzzier and not nearly as as idealistic as I would have wanted. But that was where, you know, the interest that I did have in it came from.

It's this idea that I can create value and I can distribute that value and I can I can get, remunerated for the effort that I put into creating that value in some way that is not, at the at the whim of some some other provider platform owner, or potential competitor? So that's why I've always been very big on web based technologies, even though I spent several years at Google writing, you know, iOS native apps. So that's that's sort of, you know, a roundabout way of saying, what do you what do you think you can take with you? You know? What will, there as OpenAI starts to, like, announce, hey.

Look. We've cut our price in half, and we've we've introduced retrieval augmented, generation. And, you know, what companies are basically were only doing that, plus not very much else that are now, like Mhmm. You know, their heads are exploding. Oh my god, you know, we're only 3 times cheaper than OpenAI used to be and, you know, now we don't have a competitive mode.

So there's a certain amount of figuring out what can you do. I mean, it's the same thing. You know? Go back to Hollywood. It's the same thing.

You know? What have you got? The only thing that you've got that's different from anything anybody else has is your unique intent and your unique perspective on the world and your take on a problem and your your skills at working towards a solution that embraces what's unique about you. And I think that, you know, if I were gonna give this as advice, you know, scratch your own itch and be really scared of proprietary platforms. And whether the platform is, you know, Google or Facebook or you know?

I I I don't see it as much as I used to, but there was a long time I would run into kids who were like, c sharp is the best. We're gonna, like, build this with c sharp. And it's, like, you know, however however good old programming language c sharp might be, it was entirely the play toy of people in Redmond. And you're you're locking yourself into a particular vendor and when you do that. So, you know, there's there's usually a platform and a platform a set of platform technologies.

And if it's a proprietary platform and they're starting to move you to proprietary technologies, you're like, well, how confident am I in this platform? How much do I believe? How much am I going to risk my career on the Atari ST or the 3 d o game console or, you know, the Amiga 2 1,000 or the Palm Pilot. You know, there are all these technologies that, you know, were opportunities for people. Like, I shipped this app on this platform, and the platform's getting uptake, and it's gonna be great.

But then if it loses a platform battle, then you're kind of stuck. Like, okay. I've gotta personally retool to either target a new platform, or you could make technology choices and, you know, choices about your own efforts that will lead you to knowledge, skill, and understanding that you can take with you to the next thing.

John Daniels: I think, Gavin, I I think we could probably continue this conversation for an hour. But, what I'd like to do is kind of allow you to wrap up with a little we know that I like to talk. We know that you like to talk. But I'd love to wrap all of this up. You've got a a very incredible and kind of experienced life of just different things that you've tried, different technologies you've seen.

You know, if you have one piece of advice or one thing that you love that you want to make sure everybody knows about, I mean, give us, like, a good as long as you want outro of kind of some of the some of the things that you've learned, advice you have for others, things that you you care about.

Gavin Doughtie: Oh, you mean you're, like, giving an old man permission to rant for just a minute? Okay.

John Daniels: Yeah. Go yeah. Go for it. Yeah.

Gavin Doughtie: So so if you're at the beginning of your software engineering career, I would still recommend that you learn how to type at least about 40 words a minute with some accuracy. There's plenty of ways to learn to do that. It's worth the effort because it will clear space in your head for things that are actually difficult problems if you don't have to worry about the mechanical stress of typing something. This is probably not gonna be advice that's gonna be worth anything in 20 years, but it's going to be advice that's useful for the next 5. So that's a little thing.

A little thing that I've been doing more recently that has been helpful is, this is such a cliche, regular exercise. I am I've been doing barbell stuff. Obviously, I'm not a giant person, but the thing that I didn't expect to get out of it, the the physical benefits are, of course, all the ones you hear about. The thing that I didn't expect to get out of it was the psychological training of stepping up and repeatedly doing something difficult that you didn't want to do in the moment in order to get a benefit further down the line. Right?

And just that mental exercise is incredibly valuable. If you're if you're getting it while you, you know, exercise your body, if you're like most Americans, you will be ahead of most Americans. So it's it's worth doing, and I say this as someone who despises my time in the gym. But that the mental thing was, like, the unusual thing, and it's something that I I would encourage, especially, programmers who are all interested in technology to explore and spend some time on, and it'll it'll pay off. The time the time will come back to you, many fold, especially over the the length of your life.

The other thing is get out and engage with people. Almost all the jobs that I've had had a component of knowing someone. And it's not to say that people hired me because they knew me, but they wanted to hire me because they knew me, if that makes any sense. Like, I had to be able to do the job and convince everyone and convince people who didn't know me I could do the job. But the personal connections, were always really important, And they were connections forged by oftentimes working with someone and demonstrating over a period of weeks or months or sometimes years that I could do a job, that I was good to work with, that I wasn't that I was trying to contribute towards the success of the project and to their success.

And that, you know, wouldn't say it ingratiated me, but it meant that they they knew it they knew what I was about, and they could trust me and that they would they would be my champion, you know, at the next place. It's like, oh, and, you know, combine that sometimes with the skills that that are necessary at that moment in technology history. I think that was that was a good a good combination for a lot of my career. You know, there are people I work with now that I worked with 20 years ago at the startup I left Picasa for. So they kept on with their careers and, you know, when I was looking for something new to do, they're like, well, you know, we're starting up this new technology group.

You could come come be the first hire, hire your own boss. So, you know all of those things. Life is long. Your relationships with other people are going to be valuable to you while you have them and then later on. You shouldn't have them for their later value.

You should have them to be present with other people now. You know, be collegial if if that's all you've got in common, and if you have other interests that you share, by all means, you know, talk about them. I I have a friend that I worked at at 5 different companies with in Los Angeles, including, including Google. So, we just you know, wherever one of us landed, we'd go like, you know, I think Mike's available or I think Gavin's available. And, you know, that that worked out well for both of us over time.

So, you know, keep up with people. They're they're important, And, you know, find ways to work on projects with people. If you're if you're early on, especially if you're not in a, you know, a big metropolis with a lot of technology going on, You know, open work on open source projects with people, take their take their poll request reviews seriously, Try to contribute to the project. What's in it for you is the process of contributing, not not a an immediate byproduct.

John Daniels: Yeah.

Gavin Doughtie: It's like, one of my my oldest son was like, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to, like, you know, help you out in your old age, dad, you know? And I'm like, you don't owe me anything. You know? The the the the good that I got out of the process of raising you was the process of raising you. You know?

Go have your own great life. And that's that's where I wanna end it. Go have your own great life. Like, technology is a a great thing to do. If you hate it, though, you should find something else to do.

Pedro Pizzaro: Yeah. Absolutely. So parting words of wisdom from Gavin. Work out your work out your body, work out your mind, and get out there, meet as many people as you can, form that community. And Yeah.

You know, I think that's what life's about. Alright. Is there anywhere that people can follow your work, or do you have a website or a blog or maybe just a social media?

Gavin Doughtie: Well, I have a cop website as they used to call it at gavin dotcom, which is a an a ill maintained WordPress blog. You can find me, I'm still a little more active on x than I that I'm comfortable with, but you can find me at Gavin Doughty on on Twitter. Twitter, Elon. And, and and basically, the way you spell my name is weird enough that I have no hopes of Internet privacy at this point in my life. So it's Yeah.

Gavin, g a v I n, like the governor of California, and Doughty is d o u g h t I e, like bread dough in a necktie.

John Daniels: Yeah. Well, yeah, I I also will second Pedro's, words there. I I definitely appreciate the advice that you gave at the end outside of technology. Pedro and I have been at the same you know, worked at 3 companies together. We Right.

Kind of are have that human to human relationship. Funnily enough, on a second topic, today is my 15th Twitterversary. So I've been on Twitter for 15 years today. But, yeah, I would definitely appreciate the the the technical and nontechnical advice you you gave today, Gavin. I think a lot of our viewers will appreciate both of those because getting out amongst humans, I think, is important as we start to enter this world of, VR headsets.

So we'll stay real out of the matrix while we do. But, but we appreciate the time today, and and, hopefully, people can give some feedback about what they've learned from your your story.