Hayden Baillio:

You're listening to the Everyday <Heroes/> podcast brought to you by HeroDevs. What's up, heroes? It's Hayden and Wendy and Wendy. And we're back for a brand new season of Everyday <Heroes/> after it was a huge hit back in April, Women's appreciation month of 2024, where Wendy did an amazing job interviewing, what was it, 10, 10 different women in tech.

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Wendy Hurst:

Sure, sure, sure.

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Hayden Baillio:

We're excited to bring it back and expand it to a lot of different open source maintainers and contributors that have walked the walk after talking the talk. They've done the work and so excited to tell their stories. Wendy, are you excited to be back in the booth and recording some podcasts again?

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Wendy Hurst:

I'm so excited. We've been talking about it all year.

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Hayden Baillio:

Oh, my gosh, we really have. When she says all year, she means 2024. We're super excited to bring this in 2025, and hopefully make it a staple of what we get to do on a weekly basis because I think we really love telling these stories with people. So this is the first episode of season one of Everyday <Heroes/>, and we have a very cool guest today. Wendy, all I got to say is 500 plus.

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Wendy Hurst:

What do you mean?

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Hayden Baillio:

That's how many open source projects our guest today maintains. And he's also been a member of TC 39 since 2014 and serves on the OpenJS foundation board and Cross Project Council. I probably didn't even need to mention those last parts because I'm sure that when people heard maintainer of 500 plus projects, there's probably maybe only one person that comes to mind for most people, and it's of course, none other than Jordan Harband. Jordan, thank you for being here today with us.

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Jordan Harband:

Hi. Thanks for having me.

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Hayden Baillio:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Now, Jordan, we're going to start off this season and these episodes now a little differently. We're going to start with the game right off the bat, and I'm going to let Wendy take it over. I'm super excited.

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Wendy Hurst:

Super simple game. It's a squirt association game. They play it in improv all the time. Giveaway just to get you to, like, talk and be comfortable hearing your voice. I'll say a word and you say the first thing that comes to mind. All right, Are you ready?

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Jordan Harband:

I'm ready. Bug fix.

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Wendy Hurst:

Cookie.

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Jordan Harband:

Peanut butter. Crash car. Ping Pong.

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Wendy Hurst:

Stack.

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Jordan Harband:

Overflow. Zombie brains.

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Wendy Hurst:

Fork.

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Jordan Harband:

Nice.

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Wendy Hurst:

Merge.

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Jordan Harband:

Rebase.

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Wendy Hurst:

No.

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Jordan Harband:

Undefined patch. Mind blanking. I don't know Patch Apply Sandbox Toys Shell Bash Toast Butter Rubber Road Snake Camel kernel Corn Frozen Elsa Unicorn Magic pipeline Problem. Yay. I don't do very well on the spot.

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Hayden Baillio:

Yeah, you did amazing.

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Jordan Harband:

Wow.

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Hayden Baillio:

I think that's good. I got warmed up and I wasn't even participating. So I think, yeah, like let's, let's get it going. We're here to talk about you today, Jordan, and your journey. And so super excited to discover that. And so I'm just going to start, I think at the beginning. Where'd you grow up, Jordan?

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Jordan Harband:

So I grew up the same place. I live actually in the San Francisco Bay area. I'm about 20 minutes south of San Francisco. I am very lucky to have grown up in like what many consider to be the birth of the modern Internet. Birthplace of the modern Internet. And you know, like in seventh grade, in the early 90s, my school had an ISDN line which was blazing fast at the time. So I had a lot of exposure to computers young and kind of was one of the computer guys that people would come to naturally to ask how to do something. I think I remember in eighth grade I taught all the teachers at my school how to use Excel.

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Jordan Harband:

I ran a class and like taught them because they weren't, I don't know I even know where the idea came from.

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Hayden Baillio:

But that was seventh grade.

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Jordan Harband:

Seventh or eighth. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. So I kind of always knew that computer stuff was one of the things I wanted to do. I couldn't decide between that and psychology as a major in the first year or two of college. And then eventually I dropped out to work on a startup with, with some friends full time out of the CEO's parents garage. It was a music startup. It never succeeded, but it also didn't fail.

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Jordan Harband:

So I guess by statistically we're better off than most startups. And eventually we ran out of money and I had to get a real job and I went and worked full time. The first company I worked at was called Bright Kite, which was a for competitor and I was still working on the startup on the side. And then I continued on through there, just moving from job to job as people tend to do in the tech world and as it relates to open source. I kind of accidentally found myself contributing to open source because at one of my jobs I needed to fix a bug and it was in a jQuery plugin and so I made a pull request to do it. And I think I had to ask a couple of my coworkers like to help me through the process, because I had used GitHub before, but usually to comment on issues and like look at other software projects and not usually to make contributions. So I've filed bugs, but I hadn't really fixed any before that. And so I did that first pull request and I really enjoyed kind of that ability to take ownership and solve my own problem.

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Jordan Harband:

And that just kind of grew over time. I eventually I found that if you are a helpful enough contributor to a project, maintainers will often ask you to be a maintainer as well. And a lot of them, at least in the earlier days of Node, a lot of those maintainers would just kind of hand over the keys to their project because they. They were working on other things and they were happy to have someone else take up the mantle, as it were. And so I became the maintainer of the ES5 shim, which was a. This was back when everyone was still using Internet Explorer 6 and the new version of the language had the map function on arrays. And you, if you wanted to be able to use that, you either had to write your own function or you could use a shim and it would install that method on arrays even in a browser that didn't have that method built in. So you could just write your code as if you were in a modern browser and not have to worry about as much of the different ways to support that you have to support older browsers.

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Jordan Harband:

So through that work, I also became a maintainer of the ES6 SHEM, and someone reached out to me who was on TC39, which is the JavaScript Specification Standards Committee. And I'd obviously been paying attention to it because I had. I had to try to like, learn how to implement these things properly if I was building them in the shim. And I basically got an invite to attend as an observer for one of the meetings. And almost immediately I was asked for my opinion on something and I was able to make a meaningful change in the standard. And that. That's a hell of a drug, right, to be able to actually make a change that will influence the entire world for, you know, a huge chunk of time.

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Hayden Baillio:

What was that change? Jordan? Yeah, what did you.

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Jordan Harband:

So this was in 2014, the biggest change to the language was ES6, which is the 2015 edition. So it was about to finish that. And there's a function called Object Assign. And the way it had previously been specified to work was that it would go through all the properties on your object and if one of them threw an exception, it would catch that and keep going. And it would keep catching exceptions and then when it was done, it would just throw the first one it found and both myself in the Shimmer and also the maintainer of Lodash, who had no affiliation with DC39 at the time. Him and I had spoke and agreed that this was sort of bizarre behavior. It was very slow to implement, it wasn't very valuable or useful to anyone. And it would be much simpler if we just threw the first exception that we found and stopped.

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Jordan Harband:

Right. And so the committee was convinced by that argument and they made that change. And as a result we avoided like Object Assign and Object Stop Spread, which uses the same semantics, the syntax. Those would have been ten or a hundred times slower forever if we hadn't made that change. And as a result, the language is better and it was easier for Lodash to make its assign function and for ES6 gym to make its object assign function and so on. So, like, that's. It's a small change, but it had an outsized impact over the last decade and probably the next few as well. And that's.

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Jordan Harband:

That's amazing, right? Like, it's not. It's not a contribution that only I could have made. It's not something I came up with on my own. So it's not special or unique to me. But nonetheless, it had to get done and it got done and I helped make that happen. And that's a really good feeling. So as soon as I had that, I went and scheduled a meeting with the CTO of Twitter, which was my employer at the time, and convinced them to join ECMA so that I could continue to represent various interests in the JavaScript standard. And I've continued that at all jobs since it's basically become a condition of hiring me, is that I have to be able to continue this work.

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Jordan Harband:

I love that because I'm going to do it anyway. So.

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Hayden Baillio:

I like that. I personally want to go back. Thank you for the amazing background. I want to go back to your first job in tech, like after the startup.

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Jordan Harband:

Okay.

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Hayden Baillio:

Because if you were at a startup, you were obviously doing everything right.

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Jordan Harband:

Yeah.

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Hayden Baillio:

Reliving off ramen or whatever you had to do to make it happen. But I want to go back to the first job you got hired for. What was that position? And like, where was it at?

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Jordan Harband:

I mentioned it was a company called brightkite, which was a Foursquare competitor. So this was the era when everyone was making check in services. Foursquare and Bright Kite came out, and then about a year later there were a few others Yelp eventually tried to make their. They made their check in service, which I think still works even though no one uses it. And my title was like front end engineer because I had no experience. They got me incredibly cheap because I didn't know what I was worth. And also I wasn't worth very much. All my experience in programming was basically at my own startup.

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Jordan Harband:

So there was not like I didn't have a lot of credibility essentially. But I guess I talked a good game and was able to get through the interview. And so yeah, it's my job was to maintain the website and it was a rails site using jQuery and Backbone. So I learned those things and I had never actually used Rails before that job. So I took like a crash course a week before the interview and they knew that that was the circumstance coming in. But like I wanted to make sure that they knew that I could learn it. So that was fun. And eventually they.

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Jordan Harband:

Because there were so many check in services, one of the founders of Brightkite made something called check.in which was a mobile website where you'd check into a place and it would push the check in to all the check in services at once. So sort of you. So you didn't have to like go to three or four different places. It was really fun actually at the time I think there were probably single digits of people in the world that had ever tried to write a HTML5 mobile web app using a manifest. It's like the feature that PWA's Progressive Web Apps replaced because it wasn't a very well designed feature. But like at the time there was virtually nobody that had built this stuff. So I was doing brand new like bleeding edge things and that was exciting. And you know, it made a website that looked good on a phone.

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Jordan Harband:

So I got to go show that to people walking around random things in San Francisco and it was fun.

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Hayden Baillio:

And what was that built on again? You said the technologies. What was it built on again?

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Jordan Harband:

Brightkite was built on rails as the backend and jQuery was, you know, backbone was they used for the front end. Check.in was using jQuery mobile and the backend. I never actually touched the backend for it, so I think it was written in something different. Brightkit had been acquired by a different company about a year before I started there. And that company, everything was being migrated to use that company's backend.

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Hayden Baillio:

Very cool. When do you got anything follow up with?

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Wendy Hurst:

I don't have anything to follow up about.

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Hayden Baillio:

Okay, so you had a couple of jobs Between Bright Kite and Twitter, what does that stretch of time look like before you had that moment in your life where you're like, who? That feels like a good drug when you get to help everybody? Yeah, what does that stretch of life look like? And yeah, sure.

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Jordan Harband:

So, Brightkite, I was only there for about 10 months and as I mentioned, right. I had virtually no experience, so they got me cheap. I also didn't have a college degree. I still don't. And so I felt lucky to take their very low offer because at the time it wasn't really clear that it was possible to succeed in the industry without a degree unless you were like Steve Jobs and made a startup and succeeded. Right. Which our own startup was not really making us bank. So when Bright Height ended up doing layoffs about 10 months after I joined, and me, along with most of the team was let go, and I found another job at a company called tripit, which is a wonderful travel organization tool that I still use.

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Jordan Harband:

While I was there, they got acquired by Concur, who later got acquired by SAP, and I think that's the current ownership. And I was there for about a year and a half. And that was a Symphony PHP stack using basic JavaScript and HTML on the front end. I think we had jQuery, but it wasn't like we didn't have like backbone or another framework. And so when I left there, I went to Twitter and I was at Twitter for about three years working on the campaign management dashboard for advertising. So basically anyone who did anything with ads or analytics on their tweets or scheduling tweets, that was all done through the ads interface, that was also a Rails app. And then when I left Twitter, I went to Airbnb, where I was on the web infrastructure team. And we were basically, our customers were all of the product engineers.

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Jordan Harband:

And over time our team sort of developed expertises and spun them off into other teams. So we ended up creating an accessibility team, a design system, like a design language team to build the components for the design system, a internationalization and localization team to deal with translations and things like that, and a handful of others. We built a server rendered react app in 2015 as part of that work. The way we were testing it was taking those components, dumping them into a string of HTML, running that through CheerIO, which is like jQuery for the server. And then just like making assertions about it, a new hire showed up, said, this is bullshit. And he came back after a weekend and had built what became Enzyme, which for many years was the Only way you could test react apps. So, you know, we were on the forefront of a lot of things. Pretty early in my time at Airbnb, another engineer who'd been there for years already said, hey, you're into open source stuff.

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Jordan Harband:

I've been running our open source stuff and I'm busy. Do you want to do it? And so I essentially ran Airbnb's open source department for efforts on the side of my regular job for the entire four years I was there. And after I left, I realized that the kind of work I really loved doing was standards and open source related. But at my previous jobs it had been a struggle to kind of overlap my actual job requirements with that kind of work. And so I decided instead of continuing to try and find a job where my real job is infrastructure or product work or something like that, and I fit in the standards and open source work, I wanted to find a job where that was my job, where that was what I was measured on and promoted based on and so on. And so I ended up working at Opendoor for about five months. And then they had Covid layoffs and then I went to Coinbase, where I was there for about two years until the Russian war destabilized the global economy and they had layoffs. My role at both of those companies was essentially building an open source programs office in bigger companies.

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Jordan Harband:

And OSPO is a thing they all have. My pitch was essentially you can wait four or five years and then you can hire an ospo director for 5 or 600k a year, who then has to spend years getting the company in order, or you can hire me for significantly less than that and I can get all the ducks in a row. So it's a very smooth transition when you eventually need it. And it's still, I think, the type of job that most companies should be hiring for, but nobody really is. But then after Coinbase, it was sort of a tough time for jobs that like, that's a tough sell anyway because it's not a job that really exists. And whenever you have to pitch sort of a role to be created for you, even if it's logical and sensible, it's a harder road. And on top of that, nobody, we wanted to do long term investment in anything because everyone was watching their purse strings when the economy was having trouble and people were worried about stuff and it was still in the middle of COVID So I ended up kind of contracting in a few places. I spent about six months at the Open Source Security foundation as their ecosystem security specialist.

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Jordan Harband:

Looking into like SBoMS and security practices in the foundation and so on. And then I spent about six months at the OpenJS foundation contracting for a similar role there, trying to kind of secure all of their projects and come up with standards for them all to follow. And then towards the end of that is when I started at EuroDevsk.

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Hayden Baillio:

I love that. I love that. The best one, I want to back up again because you said five months and then Covid layoffs. Right. Like I saw my stint during COVID was six weeks at a company before they laid off people. It was so brutal that I was like, come on, y'all, I can't even do anything with this. Right. Yeah, I did end up getting on with a company after that blackboard that ended up being a great time to be in.

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Hayden Baillio:

Remote learning was during COVID when everybody was virtual. Right. But I know, Wendy, you also have the COVID layoff story, right?

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Wendy Hurst:

I do. I don't know if it's as interesting.

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Hayden Baillio:

Well, it's not essential, but, you know, this is a conversation. We all have these Covid war stories, honestly, of life.

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Jordan Harband:

Everyone's story is interesting.

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Hayden Baillio:

Yeah. But I knew that your last. The last company that you were at. Right, Wendy, Before Herodevsky.

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Wendy Hurst:

Yeah. Before I went to Herodes, I worked at the. It was a credit repair law firm. I worked there for 14 years. I was super part time at the time just because I was kind of in between like what roles I was going to have. And things were going fine all the way till April. April 2020, I got laid off. A year and a half later, I joined herodevs.

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Hayden Baillio:

That sounds about right. For almost everybody during that time. It was a. It was a rough time. So we're back to. We did some freelance, we did some consulting. Now you've landed at herodevs. Right.

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Hayden Baillio:

Amazing. So we're at herodevs now, so I think it's a good time to take a quick break and talk to everybody at home about this very important company that's powering this podcast right now. Just give me 30 seconds. Everyday <Heroes/> is brought to you by Herodevs. Herodevs offers secure drop and replacements for your end of life opinion open source software. Through our never ending support product line, you get to stay compliant with the likes of SOC2 and HIPAA and FedRamp and all the other acronyms and regulatory bodies you can think of. All while also getting real vulnerability remediation. You don't have to choose between a new feature and security.

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Hayden Baillio:

And with over 800 clients, you can be Confident that your unsupported open source is in good hands. So if you need us, we're here. And if you don't, well, that probably means you've migrated to the newest version, so huzzah either way. Visit Herodevs.com to learn more. Now, back to your regular scheduled programming.

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Jordan Harband:

Peace.

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Hayden Baillio:

So, before we get into your time at Herobevs right now and what you've been doing recently, we got another game to put you through. Are you open to it?

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Jordan Harband:

Bring it on. Good.

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Hayden Baillio:

Take it away, Wendy.

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Wendy Hurst:

All right, we're going to play a game called Fork Star or Deprecate. It's a game Hayden and I made up. We're going to try to present you with a couple of tools, practices, or concepts in tech. Your mission is decide whether to fork it, improve it, star it, leave it the way it is, or deprecate it, which is retire it entirely. Are you ready?

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Jordan Harband:

I'm ready.

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Wendy Hurst:

Okay. Vue JS fork. Rust.

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Jordan Harband:

Fork pair.

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Wendy Hurst:

Programming.

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Jordan Harband:

Star.

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Wendy Hurst:

Tabs versus spaces.

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Jordan Harband:

I mean, DAR. Because tabs are better. I don't know how to GitHub fork.

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Wendy Hurst:

Okay. Dark mode.

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Jordan Harband:

Deprecate.

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Wendy Hurst:

Meme Driven development.

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Hayden Baillio:

Controversial. Just so I'm putting in controversial.

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Jordan Harband:

There are many people where the contrast in dark mode is far worse than light mode, Even though we are. We don't have the vocal majority. Nonetheless, light mode for the win.

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Hayden Baillio:

Touche.

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Wendy Hurst:

I see what you're saying. I've heard that before, too. All right, here we go. Meme Driven development.

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Jordan Harband:

Star.

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Wendy Hurst:

Okay. Rest APIs versus GraphQL.

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Jordan Harband:

Ooh, I'm going to just say Star. They still need to fight it out.

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Wendy Hurst:

Okay. A browser extension that plays a drum roll whenever you push to production.

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Jordan Harband:

Eh, Deprecate.

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Wendy Hurst:

A debugger that provides motivational quotes for each error.

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Jordan Harband:

Star. Let's see what those are. I love it.

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Hayden Baillio:

Those are good answers. Yeah, Controversial in dark mode, but I do get it. Accessibility is a thing that we really have to look at.

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Jordan Harband:

I mean, don't get me wrong. Like, when I'm on my phone in a dark place, I invert my screen as well. So it's like there are times when dark mode is nice.

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Hayden Baillio:

Oh, so you're a hypocrite. I'm just kidding.

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Jordan Harband:

But by default, I usually prefer the light mode.

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Hayden Baillio:

No, that's fair.

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Wendy Hurst:

Tell me a little bit more about what Meme Driven development is.

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Jordan Harband:

What I interpreted it to mean is a combination of building things because the thing is funny or communicating about the thing you're building using memes and sort of including whimsy in what you do. And I like all that stuff. I think that it's really easy to build a thing for the lulz and like essentially be a really shitty person by like, I've seen people build things just for personal attacks and stuff like that, and that's dumb. But like you can be hilarious around memes without punching down or even punching at all. I'm a fan of that.

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Wendy Hurst:

Okay, so you have maintained 534 things. Have you ever created a meme driven thing?

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Jordan Harband:

Sort of. I mean, it's not that funny. But there was a huge argument in TC39 that took an entire eight hour day in 2015 about NAN boxing. In other words, in Floating Point, IEEE 734 or whatever it is, there's like 32,000 different bit patterns that represent the concept of nan in JavaScript, there's just one nan, and so the language was designed so that you could only ever have one and so that all the bit patterns of them were indistinguishable, which is why NAN is the only value in JavaScript that doesn't equal itself. But with the introduction of typed arrays, you could put a NAN in and then read the bits out and see the different bit patterns for different nands. And so the debate in TC39 was like, should we force typed arrays to be a little slower in order to keep it to 1 nan instead of 32,000? And the end result was for performance. And because people didn't, browsers didn't want to make the change to do it, we kept it the way it was. And so I made a NPM package to get all the different nands so that like it uses typed arrays and a bunch of different math equations and comes up with like not 32,000, but with every, every nan that I could tell the difference between.

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Jordan Harband:

And the tests always fail on certain JavaScript engines because they. Some engines actually don't allow different nands and some do. And so I sort of built it with the intention of having the tests fail on the ones that do because I didn't like that outcome. I think that's probably the closest thing.

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Wendy Hurst:

I got as a former QA engineer. That just burns my TO.

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Hayden Baillio:

Fair. Well, that's fun. I love that. And good answers. Honestly, you did really well, especially for the first time that we've ever done the game. I think that was smash hit right there. Although I think a browser extension that plays a drum roll whenever. Maybe I'm a little sensitive because I made these.

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Jordan Harband:

There were two reasons I said no to that. One was I in General don't like browser extensions. They have superpowers, and they can, like, steal all your stuff. So, like, I try not to use them. And then number two is. I don't think a drum roll is what I would want. I would want something a little more meme heavy, but okay. I feel that General.

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Jordan Harband:

Like getting a sound effect when a deploy is done. That sounds great.

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Hayden Baillio:

Okay. Yeah, gotcha. All right, so we're in the middle.

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Wendy Hurst:

A randomized sound effect.

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Hayden Baillio:

Yeah, it's more like fork it and not deprecate. You just want to improve it. Okay.

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Jordan Harband:

Yeah, so you're right. Fork would have been a better answer for that.

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Hayden Baillio:

So I feel better. I feel better now.

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Jordan Harband:

So you can edit the video. Fork.

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Hayden Baillio:

So let's get back into Jordan's world, though. I want to stop before we get into Eurodazzo. And I know you're a family man, right? You have a couple children, right?

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Jordan Harband:

I have two kids, a cat and a dog.

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Hayden Baillio:

Two kids, cat and a dog.

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Wendy Hurst:

The cat and the dog are your two kids or separately?

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Jordan Harband:

No, they are the other two. I have four dependents in that regard.

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Hayden Baillio:

Four total mouths, just for clarity. Four total mouths to feed. That's awesome.

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Jordan Harband:

The one that's the most difficult changes hour to hour between all four, so.

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Hayden Baillio:

Yeah, classic. Are any of them following in your. In your footsteps of being into computers?

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Jordan Harband:

It's a little too early to tell. Kids are still in elementary school. I didn't do too much that would have foretold my computer path when I was their age. So it's. We'll see.

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Hayden Baillio:

I was talking about the cat. Dog, anyways.

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Jordan Harband:

Really? I mean, the cat certainly likes to. To hang out in here while I'm working.

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Hayden Baillio:

Yeah. Cat typed on the keyboard plenty of times. Right.

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Jordan Harband:

I had to train her to not stand on the keyboard because she kept, like, standing still, and the computer would eventually reboot, and I can't have that. Yeah, the dog, no interest. He just wants me to pet him and chase him around the yard.

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Hayden Baillio:

Just get a mouse that's, like, in the shape of a cucumber or something like that. I bet that would keep the cat off the desk.

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Wendy Hurst:

Right?

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Jordan Harband:

Those videos were.

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Hayden Baillio:

Y'all have seen those videos, right? Of cucumbers and.

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Jordan Harband:

Oh, yeah, the cats are terrified of them. Yeah.

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Hayden Baillio:

Oh, my gosh.

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Jordan Harband:

I actually got. I got those air dusters for the keyboard, and it didn't take very long before I don't even have to hit her with the air anymore. Just the sound of it. She knows she's doing something she's not supposed to do. It's great.

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Hayden Baillio:

Yeah, it's good training.

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Jordan Harband:

That's right. Gets her off the Christmas tree. It gets her out of a box.

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Wendy Hurst:

It's great.

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Hayden Baillio:

So you made your way to Hero devs at this point in life and so if you could, for everybody, what's their role at Hero does and what have you been doing for the past. I believe you've been here now for over a year, right?

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Jordan Harband:

Yeah, over a year, yeah. So my role, the way I describe it to people, is partnerships and strategy, but I actually don't have a very sharply defined role here which I kind of love. It really meshes with my ADD really well. I basically I started out writing kind of product memos, like research into specific open source projects that Herobevs was considering offering support for and trying to figure out how difficult it would be, what the resources we'd need to get it done would be, what the pricing maybe should be, things like that. But that has evolved over time as well and I'm doing less of that now and now I'm doing more kind of overall strategy and research into end of life events that are coming up. So like if there's some big open source projects that in 2025 are going end of life, like we want to be able to get ahead of that and support it in advance so that whoever needs it has that available. So, you know, things like that. It's very kind of serendipitous.

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Jordan Harband:

It's sort of. I do whatever it feels like the company needs, prioritized by whatever management thinks is more important, which I have of course have get to have an opinion on. But I basically am like, here's the 17 things I think I should do. And you're like, cool, do these three first.

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Hayden Baillio:

Yeah.

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Jordan Harband:

And I like it. It's very. Yeah.

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Hayden Baillio:

Startup.

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Jordan Harband:

Yeah. Different week to week. Yeah, exactly.

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Hayden Baillio:

It's fun. I know. I feel like Wendy often feels the same thing. She is the glue for the team over here as well as the. I mean this in all the loving way possible, but the Swiss army knife, like she's just, she's the person that just floats and handles all the, all the various things that come up.

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Jordan Harband:

And I find that every company I've ever been at has people that do those roles in various teams and every company dearly, desperately needs those roles, but almost none of them actually recognize and support and reward those roles. And I have in fact been described on feedback cycles at previous jobs as he's a sweeper, which is great, but that doesn't help our okrs like, in other words, people have said it's good that you're doing these things, that you're floating around and doing stuff, but we need you to do these specific things. And I really, really appreciate it. Herodevs that my value is recognized as being a sort of floater who can be on call to reorganize my tasks and triage them in different orders as needed, but that I like each thing I do has value, but my value is more aggregate and less about each thing. And I think it takes a special company to recognize that. Verodevs is one of the few I've worked at that does. It's great.

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Hayden Baillio:

Interesting.

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Wendy Hurst:

I completely agree. I used to work at that credit repair firm that I talked about. We can cut this part if it's just not that interesting. It's not really about me just adding like, context. Like, you're totally right that a lot of. A lot of companies, especially tech companies, sometimes forget how important those Swiss army knife people are. Where you're good at kind of a lot of different things. At my last company that I worked, the reason that I left it was because I was one of those floaters.

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Wendy Hurst:

I was in project management. I had a little bit of business analysis in there. I had a little bit of analyzing processes and things. Like, I kind of had my fingers in a lot of pies and they came to me with like an ultimatum, if you will. They were like, if you don't manage this one project, then we're gonna have to let you go. And I ended up not driving with that project at all. It just wasn't the right fit for me in the way that I liked to work and I moved over to the business side instead. But if I hadn't had that opportunity, I don't think I would have ever come to herodevs and really appreciated the difference.

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Hayden Baillio:

Yeah, well, I love hearing all the good things about Herodes, but I also think that this is a good time though, to potentially. Wendy, you and Jordan, y'all are both fairly deep into your careers at this point, right? Like we might have some junior devs or just developers getting into the space that's going to watch this like from your standpoint, Jordan, like, what's some bits of advice that you would give like a dev that kind of wants to see themselves eventually fit into the role that you're describing right now. One day that person that their ADHD gets satisfied, right, by just being able to work on a lot of different things.

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Jordan Harband:

I mean, I guess as if I'm talking to a younger version of myself. Right. I would say the most important things to learn aren't technical. They're personal and interpersonal. In other words, the personal stuff is like learning how to manage myself in terms of my emotions, my reaction to people. I feel like I think quickly, which means that I speak quickly. And some people love that and thrive on it, and some people, they just can't handle it. It's just not.

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Jordan Harband:

It's not their jam. And so learning how to recognize that in people and how to slow down my own speech and how to sort of adapt my manner and mannerisms to the people I'm speaking to, that's hugely valuable. Also, just learning tricks about how to manage time. Right. Like I set my clocks all random, different amounts of time wrong, usually ahead, so that I'm panicked and I get there and then, oh, I'm on time or I'm early. I showed up in an appointment yesterday and I was like, oh, I'm so sorry I'm late. I thought I was 10 minutes late. They're like, actually, your appointments in five minutes.

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Jordan Harband:

You're right on time. And I trick myself. Success, right? You don't have to necessarily do that exact thing, but it's like figuring out how to put up whatever guardrails you decide you need for yourself to do the things you need to get done is really valuable. And then the interpersonal stuff, it's that I think programmers specifically, but it's not unique to them, of course, really love right answers. They love there being a right answer. That's always why I like math. Right, right. Sure, there's 50 ways to get there, but there's a right answer and there's a lot of wrong answers.

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Jordan Harband:

And I like that. And if you're the kind of person who enjoys efficiency and correctness, it's going to be really easy to fall into the trap of thinking you know better than other people, of not listening to their opinions or telling them the solution without giving them the opportunity to come up with it themselves. And it's just a really easy trap to fall into. It's sort of the natural thing I do is I. I'm like, no, that way's dumb and this is the right way, and I can explain why, but can't you just do it the right way? And the cliche about this is like, how to load the dishwasher. A lot of people don't care how they load the dishwasher. And a lot of people are like, no, there is a right way and a wrong way to load the dishwasher. But the way you have that conversation with the person you live with is inevitably you're going to live with the opposite person.

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Jordan Harband:

The way you have that conversation is what's important. It's not actually important how the dishwasher is loaded. It's important that you're able to share what's important to you and why and that you're able to leave room for space and like, hey, if you put the glass that way, it's going to break. Sometimes you just have to let them break the glass and then they'll learn not to do that. Right. And that's as a parent, as a partner, as a coworker, like, that's a really hard lesson. That was a really hard lesson for me to learn. And I imagine that there's a lot of people out there that that's true for.

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Jordan Harband:

And so I would say if I had learned those types of lessons far earlier in my career, I think I would have advanced far, far farther, like much farther and much faster and ended up much more well regarded and liked than I am now. Right. And hopefully I'm well regarded and like now. But not by everybody, not by everybody I've interacted with. And I think that those stats would be way better if I had learned these lessons way earlier. So that's my advice is those things.

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Hayden Baillio:

I love it. Well, I mean, a lot of really honestly good tidbits in there. The soft skills, or as you said, like the interpersonal skills are extremely huge. And I oftentimes see that as the break between a senior engineer and like a software architect. It's like the ability to communicate at a level that's like. Because there can be a lot of very highly technical, very proficient people that never make their way past senior software engineer because they don't know how to communicate that the value to a client or to upper management or whatever that looks like. So I think that's really valuable. I also really liked one thing you said, kind of like your, your borderlines, like you set different clocks at different times to basically hack your mind.

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Jordan Harband:

Exactly.

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Hayden Baillio:

Whatever you need to do to hack. And I think the earlier that someone can figure that out about themselves and like what actually works to get them. Because you see this all the time. Like people are selling you a program or they're talking about something online and it's like they're giving you some framework to do something. Right. And oftentimes I was in the fitness industry forever and oftentimes it's like somebody's just like, this is A one size fits all program. It's like, well, no, actually nothing is a one size fits all program. You have to find out what works for you, and that is only through trial and error and figuring out what actually what is your motivation, like what gets you out of bed, all that stuff.

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Hayden Baillio:

So I really appreciate you saying that. I think it's really would be really beneficial for anybody to hear any stage of life because it can be very easily forgotten. So that's great. So we're coming up though, on time. I love that. This last bit talking about careers, talking about how people can get, I think farther, faster. Right. As you said.

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Hayden Baillio:

But before we end, we kind of got one more little fun thing to end on. It's a lightning round. Wendy's going to ask you a couple questions. Just rapid fire burn us the answers at it. Hopefully this will be the only thing I think that remains fairly consistent throughout our show here is asking the same rapid fire questions to people. So, Wendy, take it away.

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Wendy Hurst:

All right. I guess I'm the lightning round type game person.

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Hayden Baillio:

You're the game person now you're just the game person in general.

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Wendy Hurst:

I'm the game person. I can hold up like you're the.

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Hayden Baillio:

Game master of this podcast now.

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Wendy Hurst:

Yeah, lightning round. Here we go. Favorite open source tool, Git. Tell me why.

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Jordan Harband:

So there's an article that is like in the pinned tweet on my Twitter profile or something. It's called the Parable of git and it talks about how you might end up with a version control system like git. And it. I really loved that article because it really resonated with my experience of that as a version control system. And I have found that since I learned how to use git, I've often built systems and then halfway through realized, damn it, I'm just building git again. I'm just rebuilding it from scratch. And like that to me is a sign of an important. It doesn't mean git's the best implementation necessarily, but that's the sign of a really critical concept is if you keep finding yourself re implementing it and it keeps being appropriate for a lot of things.

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Jordan Harband:

Whatever opinion anyone might have about cryptocurrency, I think the blockchain concept similarly. Right. It's like there's some concepts that even if the implementations need a lot of work, that the concepts are definitely foundational. And I think git in particular is excellent for that.

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Wendy Hurst:

Okay, what book would you recommend to anyone watching or listening right now?

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Jordan Harband:

Ooh, I have to narrow down to one book. That's impossible.

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Wendy Hurst:

You only get one series.

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Hayden Baillio:

Book, whatever.

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Jordan Harband:

Well, if I get to say series, I'm going to say foundation by Isaac Asimov.

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Hayden Baillio:

Amazing. I'm glad you said that one. Yeah, incredible. Also, the show's not too bad either.

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Jordan Harband:

No, I like the show too, but the books are way better so far. Yeah, of course.

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Hayden Baillio:

Isaac Asimov is incredible. Before his time on so many things. Incredible author.

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Jordan Harband:

Absolutely.

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Wendy Hurst:

Okay, next question. Most underrated programming language.

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Jordan Harband:

I don't think I can say JavaScript anymore because it's. I think people generally recognize its quality more than they did 20 years ago. So I'm going to say AppleScript.

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Wendy Hurst:

Okay.

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Jordan Harband:

It's related to small talk and hypertalk and somewhat related to JavaScript. And it's the way you can automate things on your Mac and also in Adobe Photoshop, I think. And yeah, I like it.

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Wendy Hurst:

That's cool.

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Hayden Baillio:

Quick question, Jordan. Is everybody that's listening to this going to have to go Google AppleScript?

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Jordan Harband:

Probably. I mean, it's only on a Mac.

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Hayden Baillio:

Okay.

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Jordan Harband:

So if you're not using a Mac, you won't have it at all. And even most Mac users don't ever bother using it. But it's very powerful and very cool.

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Hayden Baillio:

I like that.

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Wendy Hurst:

All right, go to Sweet Snack.

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Jordan Harband:

Historically it'd be Reese's, but now it's Peanut butter Snickers.

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Wendy Hurst:

Okay, I haven't tried that one yet, but now I want to.

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Hayden Baillio:

Oh, it's amazing. But my issue with it is that they used to have creamy and crunchy peanut butter and now they just have crunchy. And sometimes I just like the creamy peanut butter. I haven't seen the creamy peanut butter in like a year now. So it's just crunchy peanut butter. But yeah, I agree, it's.

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Jordan Harband:

Yeah, I have never tried the creamy one. I just saw it in a search when I was trying to order some. The regular, the crunchy ones. But I would like to try it. I prefer creamy over crunchy as a spread, so.

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Hayden Baillio:

Me too. Wendy, are you creamy or crunchy? That's our rapid fire question to Wendy.

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Wendy Hurst:

Creamy or crunchy? Creamy.

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Hayden Baillio:

Okay, thank you. All right, everybody listening to this though, comment, Are you creamy or crunchy? Tag us on Twitter. Whatever.

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Jordan Harband:

And if you're allergic to peanuts, say for like almond butter or something. Yeah.

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Hayden Baillio:

If you're allergic to peanuts, don't comment at all. I think we got one more question.

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Jordan Harband:

Last question.

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Wendy Hurst:

Here we go. What is the funniest commit message you've ever seen?

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Jordan Harband:

That's a really good question because there's a lot that are just curse words or complaints. And those are sort of funny, but they're not like, they're not funniest. I don't think this was the commit message, but it was part of a commit. There was a commit on Babel forever ago that had a picture of Guy Fieri added to the repo. That one had some staying power. Yeah.

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Hayden Baillio:

Mayor of Flavortown, baby. Flavortown mayor.

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Jordan Harband:

Yeah. I've probably just not seen enough commit messages of other people to be sure, but I think that's it for me so far. Wow.

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Hayden Baillio:

Amazing. Amazing. Thanks, Jordan. This has been amazing today. I have, like, I think a final question and it's like if you had the ability to send a comment on git or GitHub to every maintainer out there, that was just one word. As a prolific maintainer, like, what would that be?

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Jordan Harband:

Just one word. Let's go with, I don't know. Kindness.

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Hayden Baillio:

Kindness. Every nook of the Internet needs a little bit more kindness. So I hope that. I hope it resonates with people if it gets out there. This has been amazing to have you on. This is the first episode of this new season of the first official season of Everyday <Heroes/>. Super happy to be able to explore a little bit more into your story, man.

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Jordan Harband:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

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Hayden Baillio:

Where can people find you online or find your work or, you know, npm or GitHub or whatever?

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Jordan Harband:

Yeah, I'm LJ H A R B on on most things. GitHub and Twitter and everything else on bluesky. I'm Jordan.Har.Band and yeah, you can find me on Slack or Discord or IRC or Matrix or whatever. Just reach out. My email's pretty easy to find too.

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Hayden Baillio:

And we'll link all those in the show notes in the description here, man. Anything else, Wendy?

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Wendy Hurst:

That's it. That was great.

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Hayden Baillio:

This was amazing.

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Wendy Hurst:

We should definitely play more lightning round games. Were three not enough?

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Hayden Baillio:

Well, you know what I love is that this is supposed to be a lightning round rapid fire questions and it's like, let's dig into that one and.

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Wendy Hurst:

Then we didn't rapid fire them.

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Jordan Harband:

It's easy to derail.

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Hayden Baillio:

Yeah, it is.

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Wendy Hurst:

You gave really interesting answers. So I'm going to rethink the names.

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Jordan Harband:

Well, thank you.

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Hayden Baillio:

This was really fun. Thanks for being on and thanks for everyone for listening or watching, wherever you're listening and watching. And yeah, share this with another developer in your world, in your ecosystem that might find it fun or interesting if you grabbed a tidbit. Like I said, comment tag us, tell us crunchy or creamy and looking forward to the next episode. Peace, heroes.

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Jordan Harband:

Thanks.