Transcript for:
Interview Insights with Hiroko Nishimura

that neurologist was trying to kind of be like hey you know you're never going to work you're never going to be independent and you're probably going to be living with your parents for the rest of your life and you're probably never going to have a full-time job so you kind of have to like come to terms with that and we have to figure out what you're going to do [Music] welcome back to the freeo camp podcast I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org each week we're bring you Insight with developers Founders and ambitious people getting into Tech this week we're talking with hiroko nishimura she's a special ed teacher turned system administrator turned technical instructor hoko grew up in Japan moved to the US and in her early 20s she was diagnosed with a vascular tumor in her brain after life-saving surgery she had to work to regain the ability to walk and talk and she still lives with disabilities to this day despite this hoko has gone on to author technical books become an AWS hero and create the popular AWS newbies Community more than 500,000 people have taken hoko's LinkedIn learning course hoko welcome to the Freo Camp podcast thanks for having me today yeah I am so jazzed to talk with you and learn more about you I have known of you for many years uh because so many people use your learning resources to prepare for AWS certifications yeah I mean when I first got back in to like hey this coding thing like free Cod Camp was the first thing that I learned about so this is kind of like Synergy moment here going on yeah awesome well uh yeah we're we're thrilled that You' found free Co Camp useful over the years as youve continue to expand your skill and then figure out how to synthesize those skills you're learning and teach them to other people uh because you do have a teaching background and we'll delve into that but I like to take it all the way back just so our listeners can have full context in your life's journey and who you are as a person maybe you can start off with just talking about your childhood I understand you you spent the first seven years of your life living in Japan yeah so I was born in Kyoto Japan um it's a pretty popular destination these days uh with the economy the way it is um and I moved to the US to the east coast when I was seven because of my dad's job and we were supposed to go back after 5 years years or so but then clearly it didn't happen and we've been here for the past almost 30 years so um I started my education here in the United States as a first grader and I've been here ever since yeah Kyo is an amazing City by the way if anybody wants to travel there I I was just there a few months ago um visiting like a lot of the different temples and visiting nearby city of Nara which was like the old capital with the adorable little deer that come over eat crackers out of your hands yeah uh and and B to you they're very uh polite um and well unless you have a cracker in their hand that they really want but it's not dangerous headbutt you yeah yeah it's the most gentle of headbutts usually uh but my kids had a great time uh interacting with them and what you said about the the with the economy the way it is uh current currently the Japanese uh currency is very weak against the US dollar MH and it's weak against a lot of currencies so it's a good time to travel to Japan because you're getting like a you know 30% discount on everything you buy basically yeah it's it's pretty bad it's pretty bad right now yeah it's it's bad if you're getting paid in Japanese Yen but if you're getting paid in US Dollars and you're going to Japan it's it's amazing so but yes uh we'll we'll see what they do I know they're taking like interventionary steps to try to like get the the currency to become a little bit stronger against the US dollar and the euro but this is not an economics podcast nor is it a tourism podcast so we will uh get back to your childhood okay so you're you're here in a new country uh you are you said you you came over and it was first grade was that when you started yeah yeah so you're like a seven-year-old kid and you're in a completely different culture did you know any English before you arrived I didn't even know the alphabet so it was and I think I thinking back I don't even know if I really understood this concept of like a foreign country like I knew I was going to America you know and it's like a different place I'm moving but I think this as a seven-year-old and have having never traveled outside the country before I think it was just this like huge shock to my system that you're in this place where you don't understand a single word that anyone's saying and I did start school the next day that we moved here for some odd reason um I was like apparently really excited and then I went to school for a week and then I just couldn't go for the next month I just couldn't get up from bed for the next month wow so I think my brain just like shut down going like okay what is this I don't understand what's happening here so it was like a literal culture shock I how you describe culture shock yeah I think my brain just didn't know how to process what was happening I think if I were younger because you don't really understand too much of the world anyways and a lot of languag is like foreign even in your native language it might have been not as much of a shock and if I were older I would have understood the concept of you know moving into a foreign country sorry this is my cat yeah for anybody watching the video uh Edition on YouTube I I listen to the audio version I think most people listen to the audio version but uh yes Yoko does have an adorable giant cat that just walked in front of the camera what's your cat's name uh so his name is T and I have another one named Mia who's chilling on the side um but he's kind of mad because I took his chair that I haven't been in for the past year cuz I haven't been in my office in a very long time um so he's kind of upset right now which is why he's walking back and forth because he knows there's a camera going on here yeah so he's trying is a it's a protest yeah it's a protest he protests a lot well tell Tom give t a big love Pat Uh from all of the people of the Freo Camp Community uh so okay so it takes you a month a full month to recover after that first week uh but you do eventually go back to school um like how did you do you remember how you went about learning something as daunting and you know I learning English is hard and you had to learn it pretty quickly was like did they have like a Japanese like teacher who would who would kind of like help you or did you just get thrown completely in so back then at least in my school district ESL was very new so I think we shared one teacher across maybe you know multiple schools if not the whole entire County so I think my ESL class it was called Esau back then like esol was like 30 minutes English is a second language sorry to interrupt it was like English is a second official language is what it was used to be called I think now there's like one more PC so it's like English language learner elll or something like that yeah um but back then they now I think they have like it's a pretty like created there's a curriculum for it but back then it was like hey here's a flash card of an apple say apple apple apple apple you know and then you're just like haaha with other kids who also don't happen to speak English and then they're like okay go back um so I honestly don't know how I managed to learn English with like 30 minutes a day 30 minutes a week of like English education um otherwise I was the first Japanese student ever in that 40-year history of that elementary school and so I was like this like guest and everyone's like oh my gosh there's a Japanese kid look at her hair it's that like bull cut like oh my gosh and I think there wasn't even that many Asian kids in the school either so they're all like oh my god look there's an Asian kid it's a Japanese girl um but somehow I managed to learn English pretty quickly and I think I was streamlined into the main curriculum within a year um but my mom always says especially after I've had kids that my language skills were like two years ahead of my age like developmental milestone wise which is probably why I was able to learn English really quickly and I also had a really good foundation in Japanese and bilingual is like something I'm pretty interested in right now because I just recently had two kids and I would love for them to be able to speak Japanese so that they can talk to their grandparents but I'm like they don't even speak one language right now I don't even understand how this like two language thing goes so I've been thinking a lot about it I've been like learning about it and my method is apparently what they say is like you get one language squared away and then you add to that um which was the way that I learned English and because my language skills in Japanese were pretty good already they were able I was able to map English onto Japanese and learn pretty quickly um so I think after a year I was like just mainstream into the classroom um I was always mainstreamed in but I they didn't expect me to be able to do anything or understand anything and then by third or fourth grade I was like in the above grade level classes oh wow so it didn't take me very long to learn English and then learn with English but I think then the problem became my Japanese because we were intending on going back to Japan after like five years and when I did I had to be at the grade level that I'm going back as not as a seven-year-old so my mom worked really hard to keep my Japanese side up to um and I think that's probably the harder part of it is maintaining your mother tongue when you're 247 in an English Community with no Japanese people so yeah well tell me about your kids you mentioned you've got you've got two kids now I have two kids so um one is about to turn two and one is four months old wow so you're like very recently out of you know postpartum like uh both your kids are super young yeah that's wild like so uh did you were you able to take any time off uh from your your arduous schedule of like writing books and and creating courses and things like that um yes so I'm self-employed so most of my work is like project product based which was really convenient for this because I finished my book um I have a book called AWS for non Engineers I finished that one month I finished the manuscript one month before my first child was born and then I was like stop contacting me I'm done like I about to birth this thing at any moment now and of course they still keep on contacting me because they're like what about this edit what about this edit like I don't care if you replace half of it with Pokemon at this point I don't care anymore but and then before my second child was born I redid the whole um LinkedIn learning I have a four course series on LinkedIn learning called introduction jws for non- engineer years but i r redid that whole thing before I hit my third trimester um so I should be good to go for maybe another year or two or until AWS decides to um update the whole entire exam again yeah so uh that's great that you're able that you have that flexibility that because you're uh essentially like an an entrepreneur uh a free agent however you want to describe being able to work at on a project by project basis and then also have that balance of being able to spend lots of time with your kids we're going to delve into that so much but uh first of all congratulations on the birth of your second child and uh thank you yeah uh just to just to close out the language learning topic uh my kids my wife is uh she she grew up in China and we went to grad school together in China and so she also had to learn English as a second language and then moved here and worked in eng English uh as an adult and so we're also very actively involved in trying to make sure our kids learn their mother tongue uhhuh both I guess both English and they have to learn Cantonese and Mandarin because wife Cantonese and Mandarin is like the official language uh of like all the formal stuff and and the Chinese government's kind of trying to eradicate cantones by like marginalizing it so there are very few learning resources uh for K so so we're we're doing the same thing but uh yeah like like I'm right there with you to an extent like in that we're we're trying to figure out the how to balance the two we did this thing where we sent my daughter to a kindergarten completely in Chinese she was the only oh non like uh I mean she Chinese but she was the only non-chinese speaker at this school um and it was like what happened to you she she just got kind of culture shock and she got she shut down and we're like oh this didn't uh she she ended up going for two whole months but it was just you know it was a lot take in all at once and I do worry that we we pushed her too fast and now she um is not as enthusiastic about learning Chinese as my son is uh CU he didn't have that negative experience so yeah it's a very careful balance and it probably depends child to child but yeah yeah it's so up to the child that there's no like right way to do it that works for every child even within siblings and I just like my my husband's um second generation Taiwanese American so my mother-in-law wanted to try um teaching him Chinese too um that didn't go very well he knows how to say owl and Grandpa and Grandma um I don't know why owl owl and elephant um but we're like okay you know what we have to like get at least one language in first and then Japanese pretty close second and then Mandarin if we're lucky we might be able to slide a couple words in there I mean it's it's just a massive Corpus of learning layered on top of everything else a kid would have to learn if they were just going through you know K through 12 uh yeah but I I mean I meet Kids all the Time who are adults now and like have grown up and like are natively able to speak you know more than one language and so I definitely think it's worth the effort uh and I meet a lot for your brain too yeah absolutely like it it reduces uh the likelihood of dementia and Alzheimer's and like a lot of uh because there's like proven benefits to uh bilingualism or multi multilingualism I guess in the case of uh your kids will hopefully eventually learn Mandarin as well it's very useful language uh say this having spent 20 plus years trying to learn Mandarin uh it's super duper hard uh yeah but it it is also like I've learned some Japanese here I'm not going to go off on too much with Tangent but I picked this this cap up in aaka when I was there it's got like this cool imprint right uh yeah I I started I'll I'll give you a very very high level like 30 second so I I studied Japanese in University and I went to Japan for a few months wow did like immersive learning and then uh after that I moved to China for like six years and learned Mandarin and Cantonese and then I came back to the US and worked as a School director worked as a software engineer doing all this stuff that had no like I didn't really use those at all so I had to like pick those up and dust those off uh but over the Summers I've been going to Asia and just speaking Japanese for 12 hours long or speaking Mandarin all day long and like trying to like rebuild those faculties and I absolutely want my kids to be able to do that stuff uh so it's like one of our big things like my wife um my wife is like they have to learn piano and they have to learn Chinese really well so but anyway like I I think it's great that you're being so proactive about teaching your kids and uh it's it's inspiring for me cuz I absolutely want my kids to learn those things and if anybody's listening and they're a parent and they're like maybe I should teach my kids Spanish or you know get like yes absolutely I do think that there's a lot of benefit to learning as a kid and not just learning as a as a grown-up because I didn't start learning Japanese until I was like 18 1920 and as a result it was probably a lot harder for me to like you know get like intonations and you know vocab and everything anyway this is not like a parenting podcast this is not not langage learning podcast not a parenting podcast this is not a Japan travel podcast yeah but those things are very near and dear to my heart so I I appreciate the audience for humoring me and I appreciate you roko for uh humoring me as I talk about those things so let's dive into uh your early experiences as you know a Japanese American uh teenager using technology because I understand that you were very quick to adopt technology as a kid and uh and you grew up kind of like during the first internet wave when people started getting like a CDs in the mail and like bbs's and all that stuff yeah can you talk about that era yeah so I'm the dialog Generation Um though in hindsight it only lasted a couple years but I started um I first connected to the internet I think in middle school I'm sure I connected to it in school and Elementary school and stuff like that but um I we first got a laptop that connected to the internet when I was I think in sixth grade and it was black and white but um was like what is this you know and of course the first thing I do is go find a Sailor Moon website you know whatever but um so my dive into the internet was um trying to find fellow teenagers pre-teens who were interested in anime because unlike now for children who don't know it was not cool to like anime and mangas back then and you know you have to wait months if not years to get access to like mangas or um videos movies you know and the only thing that was airing was Cartoon Network and Dragon Ball Z and so um we we wanted to talk to people but it wasn't that easy to find like kids in school to talk to so I ended up finding people to talk to on the internet which back then they to every parent told you not to do that because someone living in someone's basement and it's not okay um but that's actually how I got into coding which I didn't even know was like really coding at the time um we had this like community of girls young girls who were really into onent and really into like um creating fan sites so we would learn HTML and CSS from like Lisa explains it all.com which is apparently still active and um steal from each other's code when a new cool like effect came up and we just created these fan sites and U we had blogs and we were like sharing our love for a certain character or another and um I had no idea that this was like a career that people had so I actually quit this whole entire fandom thing in After High School because I was like okay I need to get a real job after college um and so I even though I was coding quote unquote quoting um very early this is like 20 early 2000s um because I graduated high school in like 2008 so I started in like 2002 or 2001 or something like that yeah and um no one had I guess growing up maybe as a woman as an immigrant my parents were always like get a job that you can always have a job in so my mom was like a stay-at home mom and she was really adamant that my sister and I get into a career that if you took off to raise kids that you have a job that you can get back to so she's like you know you're pretty good with kids um you should be a teacher because you're not good at anything else and I'm like okay rude said that but at least you're not trying to make me become a doctor you know whatever so thanks for your vote of confidence there um so ever since I was young she was like you should be a teacher you should become a teacher because if you're a teacher there's always a need for teachers especially good teachers just become a good teacher you can't do anything else and I was like okay Mom whatever and so you know I need to get a real job so I was like okay I'm going to become a teacher um I'm going to quit these Hobbies I don't have time for this and and so growing up you know I was coding I was in all the AP classes and um in science math you know whatever but it never crossed my mind that I could potentially like get into Tech or you know the stem field because I grew up being told hey you can't really do anything and you're really bad at math so um you should teach because you're good at teaching children and so I went into the education field and I enrolled in college to become a special ed teacher and so I got my bachelor's and MERS and special ed and in that time you know I stopped coding I was like oh this is this is a hobby to me it was like you know watching anime was the same level even though like looking back I was like wait if I had continued there and gone through with this I would have like 20 years of experience before I was 30 you know it was like mind-blowing thing that I realized too late but um so and within while I was finishing up my undergraduate um I was diagnosed with a vascular tumor in my brain after having a seizure and that just kind of like threw everything up for a loop because now it wasn't like hey you can't do anything so become a teacher it was like Hey you may not be alive tomorrow because you might have a stroke and so for I kept on going to college and taking classes but I like pulled back on the courses that I was taking and um I was waiting for my brain surgery which was like half a year after my diagnosis and um I mean it all went great it was like I think it went as well as it could possibly go and they took out the vascular tumors and it hasn't grown back since then but um what we didn't really anticipate was that even if everything went great you're left with u brain injury and you have to like this is like a new life it's not you don't go back to being who you were before the brain surgery you just have to like start your life as like heroo 2.0 and looking back on it it's like obvious duh you like went in and like scrambled up your brain but at that point like my parents and I had no idea that that's how it we kind of assumed if it went well I was fixed and I go back to how I was beforehand so I had like um a lot of memory issues I had Aphasia which is like a language disorder where what you're thinking can't like you can't articulate it properly it's very hard to get like words out language out and um like you said in the intro like I have to re learn how to sit stand walk like use a spoon you know I had a tremor in my hand for a while and just like we thought you know when those things were over after a couple months I'm back to normal and I was definitely not back to normal and I still have like memory issues I still have like executive function issues and like anxiety issues and stuff like that and it took us a while to like be like okay this is just what we have to live with for the rest of my life and after half a year or so um when we're like wait this is not a temporary thing this is like permanent um they were trying to like the neurologist was trying to kind of be like hey you know you're never going to work you're never going to be independent and you're probably going to be living with your parents for the rest of your life and you're probably never going to have a full-time job so you kind of have to like come to terms with that and we have to figure out what you're going to do so I did end up um getting my Bachelor's and Master's in special ucation but I was kind of like okay now what do I do because special education is very notorious for being ex extremely difficult job both physically and mentally and given that I had all these like disabilities and chronic fatigue I was like maybe this isn't the most like Optimal career choice for me now and so I was like okay what can I do I'm like I think I need a desk job um and so I was like what's something I'm really interested in which giving my like recent experience with becoming disabled and all these things I took for granted like I was the kind of kid that if there's an exam or if there's a paper duw next day I stay up until midnight study for it or do it and then I'll probably get an A and I thought that was normal and that wasn't normal and my new normal was like I can't remember like what I decided I was going to do like an hour go so I have to like write everything down I have to like have calendar reminders for everything you know and I was like okay well what do I want to do and I was like you know I want to do like advocacy work and given that I was being told at that point I can't drive I can't get a job I can't be independent I kind of had this like feeling that at the point where I graduated from grad school I was like you know what I have to like try something now or I'm going to get way too comfortable in the situation that my parents will allow me to live in because they're like they they think you know I can't be independent and they're going to have to take care of me so they're fine with me moving back and getting a part-time job and my mom would like even drive me everywhere cuz it's like her baby needs help you know so I was like you know what if I don't do something at this moment and try it I'm going to regret it for the rest of my life and even if it doesn't work out and I have to come back home because it didn't work out at least I tried it so I don't have to feel like oh what if I just did something at that point so I just um actually kind of like packed my bags and moved to New York um I had secure like a like a sublet online and um I had secure like a part-time babysitting gig um online and then I was like okay I'm moving next month after I graduate to New York have I ever been to New York uh maybe like twice in my life but I was like I I something like told me I had to like act now and I'm a very very very cautious high anxiety person so I have no idea how I decided this was okay especially because I've like literally never ridden public transit before um but I hopped on like a $15 Greyhound and I had like $6,000 saved up from like the bank account my parents helped me open when I was um with all my like summer jobs and like little monies that I would get I would like put it in there and then I was like you know what I'm rich I have $6,000 in here um turns out doesn't take you very far in New York City that's like a month month or two of like living expenses in New York City oh yeah I mean I also had no concept of money so I didn't realize how expensive fruit was until I moved out of my parents house it was it was a whole culture shop I mean New York is a culture shock but the fact that I couldn't buy fruits anymore and cabbage was actually really really expensive was like a huge culture shock um yeah so that's how I ended up in New York is like I decided one day to H on a bus with my pillow and a backpack in a suitcase and I got a supplet and I'm like all right I'm a New Yorker now like let's go wow um and there's this concept in um the disability at uh ecosystem where I think it's it's like called like um oh God I can't remember what it's called anymore but it's like basically a lot of disabilities are environmental in that if you take away society's like limitations um people's like disability a lot of it can be like accommodated for so in my case because I couldn't drive I was like you know what let's just remove the me to drive if I'm in the city I'm like everyone else like everyone take the subway everyone takes the bus everyone walks I can walk I can take the subway so that allowed me to work because that was one of the biggest hurdles to me working in the suburbs is that I couldn't drive right and so I removed that and um so I was able to like look for jobs without having to disclose that I have these like neurological disabilities and chronic fatigue and stuff like that but um turns out uh no one really wants a 20-some year old with um no job experience no connections and over qualify with a master's degree wanting an entry-level job in a field that's not that field and so for half a year I was like resume after resume I think I put in like 600 resumés and I only got like one interview and my sublet was about to expire so I was like okay either I get a job within the next month or I have to go back home and I'm like you know what I tried pretty hard yeah it's okay um and then I actually landed a an interview with um a recruiting firm so I didn't realize like recruiting firms um I thought they were out to get your monies so I didn't like take take any of their like um interviews and stuff but then I realized at that point that they actually take money from the corporation not interviewee um and they actually like helped fix your resume would coach you for the interviews I was like wait a second what was I doing for the past six months guess this is like what getting an Asian is you know for like so some of some of those 600 job applications might have actually worked out had you g through if I to talking with recruiters yeah less learned and learn recruiters are kind of your friend like yes you do need to watch out for like the dodgy ones but in general like they they paid if you get paid yeah J yeah yeah and you know they were like talk of like oh they take a portion of your paycheck for like 6 months or whatever no like the ones that I work with they don't take anything from me they want me to get the job and the more I get paid the more they'll get paid so they're like helping you negotiate and stuff too so I actually um ran into Japanese recruiting firms in New York City like who knew these existed in the United States but basically they they try to like um put Japanese speakers into Japanese companies that have offices in New York City and um I went in to interview as a recruiter cuz I that point I was like I don't care I just need a job and they're like oh we actually just filled that job but we heard you can speak English and Japanese and they're like would you be willing to work in it and I was like what is it and they're like don't worry like we can teach you it skills great response but we can't teach you language skills so we want to buy your language skills and we don't care if you don't have any it skills can teach you that and I was like you know what I don't have a job uh $14 an hour sounds great when you're making $ Zer an hour let's do this and that's how I ended up in it is because I speak Japanese and they really really needed a Japanese English bilingual help desk engineer awesome and they were willing to uh buy that for $14 an hour so even though you didn't ultimately move back to Japan I I think you mentioned earlier your family was like preparing you for the eventual move back to Japan cuz you uh the US was only supposed to be like a 5year tour right uh all that preparation and all that time and energy you put into maintaining your Japanese and continuing to expand it did ultimately serve you really well in New York City it was really shocking because um I grew up in Maryland but where I grew up there's like no Japanese people so I didn't even understand that my level of bilingualism is actually pretty high because the only people I spoke with were my parents and my sister and it was kind of shocking to realize that in this like New York City has so many resources they even have like elementary schools you know preschools like playd dates like bookstores you know food like everything you can even order in Japanese at a ramen restaurant you know so I didn't realize like the um there actually aren't as many fully bilingual Japanese English speakers in New York as I had assumed and they were like your level of bilingualism is actually really really high and we really want that for our client would you be willing to interview and um it got to the point where like the people I the Japanese people I spoke to thought I just speak Japanese and the people I speak to in English just thought I only speak English because they thought I was a native speaker in one language or the other and um that was like a really interesting experience and I think I never would have fully appreciated what my mother managed to do for us if I hadn't moved to New York and realized that um she had actually somehow gotten the seven-year-old to like almost a professional level Japanese and you know she doesn't use the internet until 5 10 years ago when she discovered Gmail so do you think that uh all the time you spent like reading manga and watching anime and stuff like did help kind of build out your vocabulary and your usage of Japanese I don't know about the vocabulary but I definitely think um what the the people that I know of who are fully bilingual they're all like oh I really wanted to play video games and my parents refused to buy me video game if it's not in Japanese yeah or they're really interested in this anime but then realize like there's a whole community in Japan that they could talk to online so they learned Japanese like these are like Japanese American Kids yeah and so the joke around that with us is like just make sure your kids are an otaku they're really into anime or Manga or video games and you're set because they're intrinsically motivated to learn the language and use it whereas if you force them to do it they're not going to be interested so I think for me that really contributed um especially in the reading and writing because if you just speak to your parents you don't need to be able to read and write but to be able to talk to people on the internet you have to be able to read read and write yeah so and reading and writing isn't as big of a deal with like Roman character languages with with Japanese you need to know like at least three or 4 thousand Chinese characters uh you know in order to be able to like work in Japanese like Chinese characters character has like so many different ways of being read depending on the context yeah that I don't know how like people learn Japanese it's just like it's not easy speaking from personal experience the the Oni and the the Kun Yumi and all these other but then there's like three of each and then like don't get me started on uh the character for like life life like there there are like I don't know like 16 different ways of read it uh gosh meanings different meanings yeah yeah yeah I'm not gonna vent about the uh difficulty this is not a Japanese podcast yeah I mean in Chinese you have to learn I don't know 10,000 characters 15,000 characters like four times reading it right usually yes yeah yeah yeah so so it does make it a little simpler in that regard yeah um so this is great you're working in it uh you're using your Japanese language skills uh and you're getting paid $14 an hour which in the most expensive city in the United States is probably you know Ramen food Ramen money or uh you know enough enough money to buy like a Loa of bread for lunch like how was it hard to survive on $14 an hour um yes so like I I said earlier I really didn't have a concept of money and um from $ Z an hour $14 an hour sounded great until I got the paycheck and realized like actually um they take like 30 40% off right there and then I think my paycheck was like a th000 a month or something 1,500 a month or something like that and so that was like pretty shocking um so I actually kept tutoring and did some like babysitting and stuff like that um and tutoring was pretty good monies back then um and I've learned that this whole like being able to speak Japanese is actually a huge asset so I was tutoring um Japanese expat kids for their like American schools because the parents didn't understand English didn't understand the school system they didn't understand homework what the teachers were saying so I would like help them write their letters back to the teachers when they sent stuff over and stuff like that and I was working kind of as like a bridge between the American school system and the parents but also helping the kids like do their homework and study for tests and stuff like that so I was able to get pretty good hourly rate with that but it just kind of meant that you know there's really no like social life well first of all I couldn't afford a social life I just need to pay rent um so I guess it didn't matter as much but um I I basically worked 9 to5 and then a couple nights a week I would be tutoring kids and then on the weekends I'm might be babysitting kids yeah um yeah shout out toing did what you did yeah because tutoring like I tutored a lot when I and helped you know make hands meet when I was in uh University as well and uh yeah it's a great way like there's always some relatively wealthy parent who wants to find a safe reliable person who could show up who has the domain expertise who has any sort of teaching ability I mean the fact that you actually had a master's degree in teaching probably a huge upsell uh when you talking to these expats uh but yeah yeah like tutoring is a great way to kind of make money informally and uh if anybody's looking to uh I guess build upon their current income or if they're looking for a way to just survive while they're learning the code or while they're learning how to use uh you know how to CIS admin and stuff tutoring sorry that that ends my endorsement of tutoring as a uh as a side gig but I do think it's uh you know perhaps underexplored by folks out there yeah so uh so you're working on it you're being uh probably underpaid like like did you realize that you were being underpaid by this company um I think it took me a while because I didn't even know what a normal wage was in New York I just knew that I couldn't pay rent well my rent was really cheap it was like 750 a month or something that's um and I was in like a a bedroom in like an apartment with three other people and there was someone living in half of a living room um with one bathroom and the windows didn't close it was like the polar vortex and every morning every afternoon I was like okay guys if I don't come in tomorrow please call the police because I might have frozen to death it's like 4 degrees outside and it's snowing um so looking back it was probably a legal housing been going on and I was like uh how do we keep War and people were like oh open the oven and turn it on overnight and I was like that's how we die um so being that I could only afford that why the windows close were they just like broken or something or they're just broken yeah and then the ceiling kind of came down too what um so you were paying 750 to live in like kind of a kind of like a almost like a officialized squatting yeah I think these um landlords looking back you know cuz I didn't know anything I was like this come from a middle class Suburban life like I didn't even understand what was going on I was like I just need a place to live but I think they targeted like immigrants who may or may not be there legally so and they don't speak English so they could just provide these like very poor living conditions and know they're not going to complain and they'll pay their rent because they don't want to get kicked out so they didn't care how many people there were in there they didn't care if it's broken and and I would go complain and they'll be like no one's ever complained before and I'm like cuz they don't speak English like I speak English and American citizen and I have my rights here and this is not okay and they try to convince me they they would turn off the heat at 5 o'clock every afternoon this the polar board text right and I was like off day they turn it on off during the daytime not the night so during the day they live they work in the office downstairs so they want heat during the day so they turn it off at 5:00 they leave and I was like this is not okay like we need heat and they're like oh you know heaters are you know you work in it heaters are like machines so you can't just have a computer on 24/7 you have to turn it off or it'll break and I was like that's not how heaters work but they're like no no that's how heaters work like if you don't turn it off every night it'll break because you can't have it on 247 computers break too and it just like Clos the door that is freaking that is dark I mean this is like uh it's like like uh Scrooge from uh what I mean this is like like the most mellian landlord trying to manipulate you g like you gosh yeah and they're like oh it's okay I'm like no it's not okay fix the freaking Windows what the heck like that's that's crazy it doesn't sound like it'd be that expensive I mean maybe a few thousand dollars to go fix the windows and then like a lot of the problems were solve with the place but anyway but why fix it if we live in there and they don't have to fix it right so and they can even turn off the heat at 5:00 every day um yeah looking back I have no idea how I managed to like live through that phase I thought it was okay like I didn't think it was like as horrible as what I now know as a more socialized adult human being yeah but um I really don't think i' would have been able to do my New York Life if I weren't right out of college and had no idea what the real world was so I just accepted everything as like okay this is this just must be what happens when you only make $14 an hour this is just what you have to live with um yeah well I'm glad after a while yeah after a while I was like U maybe I should bake a little more so they did upgrade me to 37k a year after three months yeah that's a big upgrade and I was like all right I'm set and I got the paycheck again I was like I am definitely not all set because surpris when your wage goes up so does your taxes yeah um yeah so I was like I was there for I think like eight or nine months and I was I learned I mean I was I started from zero absolute zero I didn't even know what a server was and I was doing all the tier one help desk related things you know fixing your printer fixing your computer won't turn on you know it's not connected to the internet stuff like that my um Outlook isn't working like have you try to turn the computer you know back off and then on and then yeah so I did all that stuff for like nine months and people thought I was like hilarious because they thought it was so funny that I speak English and Japanese and then you know I'm like this young person and they it's like mostly old people and they're like they don't know what to do with me and um because I look in my name is Japanese I look Japanese but then I don't act like a Japanese person because I been raised in America so just like really confused and they think it's like so funny um but and I was like I'm learning a lot but because it's such like a tiered um environment where there's like tier one tier two tier three server admin like everything everyone has a job like a very specific job I couldn't even like click a button that I needed to to do my job if that wasn't part of my like wow allotment and they're not willing to give me that permission because then I will take someone else's job and I was like okay I feel like um I've learned everything there to learn here um and also I need to get paid a little bit more so I can like move or something because um I'm not willing to do another winter like this and around the time where I'm like maybe I'm getting underpaid maybe question mark um I recruit a recruiter reached out on LinkedIn going like hey like are you interested in um switching jobs there's like a I think the title was it support analyst but it was basically more like um proac proactive maintenance as opposed to like help desk so we do do help desk stuff but it's more like making s of servers are working the networks are up the backups being taken stuff like that and so to me it was like okay I did the help that stuff now it's like proactive meance is like a little higher up on the echelon where I get to kind of see like how ecosystem overall kind of functions so I was like okay I'll um I'll do it like we'll take an interview and I managed to get the job and I got 50k and I was like I'm set i'm set for life great I know I mean I was like dude this is almost what I would have earned as a first year teacher teaching special ed with a master's degree it's great um but then you know surprise it's still not enough but I've since learned nothing is ever enough so you just have to be happy with what you have but um so there I stayed there for about a year learning like you know how to deal with like small business clients because this was like um SNB it was more the medium businesses clients that we visited or we were managing remotely whereas the other company I was like fully in the client office and I was basically their it person and so I got to that's where I kind of started touching um SAS software service yeah yeah before that everything was on site and this was I was like wait this is like this is pretty cool you can like do things on the internet this is like really cool it's like Facebook and that's that's the level of it comprehension I had working in these companies and I was like Wow wait there's like you can do things online like this is pretty cool I'm pretty good at online I've lived online since the early 2000s and um I stayed there for a year turned out to become kind of like a toxic environment and I was like I need to kind of get out for my mental health but I also need a job and around then um I was able to be hired in as a it support engineer or it like it's back to like help us but it wasn't a startup mhm so it was like a completely new environment because they just finished a merger like a year earlier so everything was like and they're just trying to get the infrastructure up and everything is sass everything is on the cloud and um they just needed people to do stuff and get things done so unlike the first company if I can do it and I'm willing to do it they're like do it do it do it do it do it they'll just throw anything to me if I'm able to do it and I'm willing to do it and then that meant that they get to focus the higher ups can focus on stuff that they want to focus on to like help make sure the it infrastructure is secured and like comprehensive and so I like learned so much and such little taught because of the pace that we were growing at mhm and um we definitely didn't have enough people in it for this like couple hundred people environment so like everyone basically just had to do whatever it takes to get the things done and um because everything was on the cloud and we were using SAS products and whatnot I was like wait I'm like doing my job but it's kind of like I'm on Facebook and I'm like I know how to do these things I've made websites before you know it's kind of like that's that's so interesting so so I mean earlier you mentioned like if I just stuck with like learning about the web and you know building things with HTML and CSS and everything then I would have 20 years experience by now it's it's so interesting that you're kind of rediscovering oh this is actually a thing you know there are like web services right yeah there's the cloud yeah it actually yeah sorry but like it actually took me like a year or two into this job when I made a friend with someone who was working um as a developer at that company and because I'm in it I like I have the opportunity to talk to like everyone from like every domain and kind of like peek at what they do and they'll tell me what they're doing and stuff and I was like and they were like creating a product and I was like wait is that HTML and he's like yeah and I was like wait people still use HTML and he's like yeah and I was like but I thought you guys Ed like some really complicated like programming Lang anguage to make these things look pretty he's like no this is CSS and I was just like what and so it took me until like yeah like 2018 to realize like what I was doing in middle school was a job that paid you six figures I mean obviously you have to be like a lot better than I was as a 12-year-old but like yeah like I I absolutely had no idea that yeah the syntax is a little different it's been upgraded over the years but like what I was learning and I thought was really fun and engaging in middle school was a literal career and that job in Tech that everyone was talking about and that was like a mindblowing moment that's when I started poking back um in start like the 100 days 100 days of code yeah the hashtag challenge yeah yeah the hashtag back when it wasn't overrun by like impression zombies was actually really helpful people were like so nice it's so good yes so Twitter um obviously under uh the current leadership has has not been the best place to get things done there's like uh but thankfully uh free C Camp has a Discord server and you can go there and you can you can just share your updates on 100 days of code there uh so there are a lot of people that are um pretty active uh I've interviewed the gentleman who kind of started uh 100 days of code like that #i think existed but he he popularized it uh through his Challenge and got thousands of people doing it including yourself uh and many other people in the free Cod Camp community so yeah it's still going strong and if you want to listen to that podcast just search 100 days of code or you can read my history of the 100 days of code challenge if you just Google history of 100 days of code uh I will be putting links I I'll put a link to that in the show notes and in the uh YouTube video description and I'll also be linking to many of the things that hoko mentions here as well but yes yeah yeah that's yeah that's around when I also discover free cold camp and I was like doing a little bit and I was like oh this is too hard so I actually didn't get very far in but um it was just kind of like it was it was very like strange realization that um my sister is actually a developer she's three and a half years younger but so to her it was a career that people suggested but she had never code us like she she wasn't a computer person until she decided to become a CS major in college she was a math major and then she added on the Cs major um but I had been coding since middle school but no one had floated this idea to me that this is a career and a job so I'm wondering if something changed in those couple years between when I was applying for colleges and when she applied for college but I always think it's like really interesting how different my life would have been if I had realized back then that um what I thought was really fun and was my like biggest Hobby in Middle School became my career yeah um but you know that's here neither here nor there but um yeah so that's how I got back kind of into this like um world of like interacting with people online to talk about tech and code and share what I'm learning and um one of the things I was doing ever since I started my career in it was making like um how to articles for myself yeah when I learn how to do something for my job um because I have such bad memory for my brain surgery the only way to compensate for that was like meticulously like writing down everything so that I tomorrow who would have 100% forgotten what I learned today can like just read it and replicate what I've done and couple years on turns out that's like actually a pretty coveted skill and it because you want as little tickets as possible and the way of creating less tickets is making very very comprehensive and easy to understand how to articles and we were just um implementing that in zendesk at my um startup company that I was working at and my manager was like Hey here you're always writing um these like how- to articles and sometimes you share this with me when I'm asking about something like do you want to like start creating the um support articles for Zen desk because we just bought this new like subscription model or something that allows us to do this and if we fill out the knowledge base when they're writing a ticket It'll like recommend an article and if you click on it and then it solves your problem you like click this has helped me and then that's one list ticket we have to deal with and I was like yeah sure that sounds great like less less that I have to deal with and I could focus on more of like the real problems instead of like oh yeah copy and paste the same answer over and over again for this thing that's just like click the other button or something like that um so that's how I got into unknowingly gotten into um technical writing MH is creating all these like how-to articles and problem solving articles and stuff like that which I had been doing for myself for a couple years by that point and so learning in public that's that's a term you used before in uh some of your past writing and can you describe learning in public and and like how it is been so instrumental in your career it sounds like like you went from just writing things for your own reference so you could prepare for different certification exams and things like that to other people using those resources to ultimately writing the book on the topic as a result like like uh yeah but but what what is learning in public and what how would you kind of describe that approach um yeah yeah so learning in public uh for me is when I learn something I'm like Googling a lot I'm trying to like ask people questions you know if I'm really stuck I'll like ask Twitter's 100 days of code or some community that I had back then to help me kind of like figure it out and ultimately I'll figure it out but I had gone through so many steps and so many people and so much time and I'm like like you know what if what I wanted didn't show up on Google that kind of means like hey maybe I there's something for me to be like hey this is what I've done this might help you too and so I think one of the biggest reasons why I was able to start this like um learning in public thing really like early and robustly is because I knew I didn't know anything and I didn't have anyone to impress because everyone hired me knowing I don't know anything and so I was like oh look I learned this I learned this I didn't have to pretend that I already knew this thing and so I started I'm like oh figure out how to do a Blog you know and then again in the 21st century and then I started writing these articles um when I learned something and even if it's something on the job that I learn if it's like applicable to the public then I would like start publishing like similar things online being like hey this is what I learned learn today and people and then I would like it'll post on Twitter or something people are like oh I was looking for that you know it's like I was trying to figure that out you helped me and I was like wait like something I as someone like with a complex of not knowing anything can help people not because I know more than them but because I'm just two days ahead of them and that was like a huge aha moment for me that just being two days one or two days ahead of someone else can help that person like figure something out took me two extra days to figure out and um that was like I think that was like a pivotal moment in my like publishing and learning online kind of thing learning in public and I was trying to figure out how to like level up in my career and I wasn't sure even what kind of careers existed in it above this like tier one tier 2 help desk like support and at that time um I mean WS was always big but that's when I learned about AWS was like around 2018 because we were implementing it at our work and I was like I have absolutely no idea what this is but my friend says like when he got these certifications it like really leveled up his career so let me like check it out and I checked it out I had absolutely no idea what was going on but I told my manager I was like you know what I think I'm going to get this like Solutions architect associate certification and he was like okay okay hero um let's start with this new certification that came out that's called like the cloud practitioner yeah because um we want to start with a win for you and I was like thanks for your vote of confidence but you know what if you're going to give me credit for it whatever you know like sure yeah so basically he was like you're GNA fail the solutions architect and you're going to get dejected so let's start with the cloud practitioner exam for us oh man you're like your life like uh your mom's telling you like you're only good at teaching don't bother with other stuff the doctor's telling you oh you're never going to work and now your boss is telling you oh you can't pass the the uh you know Solutions architect you got to start with the the uh certified founder cic yeah which I mean every person that said these things to me like mean it not in a mean way but they just want me to like not fail I guess um and I could taken it or left it right and I decide to take it and I was like you know what if you're going to give me credit for passing the certification exam I'll do it and um and I was like it's a foundational exam it's for people who have no experience and Tech and the cloud this I this great I can do this and I'm like learning about it and I'm like I have absolutely no idea what's going on right now and it took me a couple years to figure out why it was so hard um because a lot of people back then were also like saying like oh my gosh I don't understand any of this but this is supposed to be a foundational exam and I think because it was so new I think it's only been out for a couple months at that point what a lot of um platforms the teaching platforms and like um blogs and stuff were doing was taking the solutions architect associate exam content and just um peac mealing it together to create the cloud practitioner exam so they're like oh ec2 ec2 is on there so they will take the solutions architect associate content and be like okay interesting and and oh S3 take the solutions architect associate put it S3 but the F fundamental difference between the cloud practitioner exam and solutions architect is Solutions architect exam is for people who work in the cloud and work in it and at least have like Legacy infrastructure knowledge even if they don't have a cloud knowledge right and a lot of them were being toally as like oh you can have zero um Cloud knowledge we're explaining it to you like you're five stuff like that and I was like clearly I'm not even a 5-year-old because I have absolutely no idea what's going on but the cloud practitioner exam is marketed for people who actually have zero foundational knowledge and that was the Gap that I was experiencing and I thought with a couple years of it experience like I could like I I was already at that like I could take a Solutions architect associate exam if I studied for it but because I didn't have like the um Legacy it infrastructure background it was still like gibberish to me and there's so many terminologies so many New Concept that I've never seen before in my life and I was like getting really dejected going like wait I thought this is like the chill way to go like this was like supposed to be an easy win for me but this is clearly not working out and I had um kind of put myself into a hole because I was like I'm going to take this exam and I registered for it and I only had like two weeks left for the exam date and I still had had no idea what even like ec2 was cuz it's just like so so much information coming at me that I didn't know what was important and what wasn't important and stuff for the solutions architect associate exam there's too much information um and it's too complicated for someone with like literally starting from zero to understand and there's a lot of stuff that's wasn't important like yeah yeah it's important if you're going to be a Solutions architect but not important if you're just trying to figure out what the heck an ec2 is like all the instance types and the what the probability of it going down and stuff are and I think like there's like the paralysis when there's way too much information coming at you and you don't know what you need to learn to pass this exam and so I was like okay how do I learn best and I'm like I learn best by like regurgitating what I've learned into my own words and teaching someone else especially with my like education background and I was like you know what I'm gonna create a study blog and I'm going to pretend I'm like teaching someone on the other side of the screen what I've learned and I'm going to synthesize all these resources and look at the um the study the official study guide and see what exactly I actually need and what I don't need and I'm only going to write what I need to pass the certification exam and that's how um AWS newbies got started and so I just bought the domain I spun it up on ec2 the WordPress instance um and I was like look I'm a pro now I've spun this virtual machine up took me a while to figure out how to turn it off but you know whatever yeah if it works it works right it worked right yeah I don't know what I did but it worked and you know I was like that's good enough for me I even wrote a um how to article on that and people are like that's wrong and I was like you know what it worked okay whatever but um so did you incorporate any of their feedback at that point I was like so beyond that I was like h i don't I can't even log back in I don't know like um but the well people were talking about it like years after because that's when they like found yeah because people will constantly find your old article and like I have this all the time because I've written like 500 plus tutorials about different things that I've learned over the years uh because like you I I also learn best by taking what I've just learned synthesizing it and Publishing it I love learning in public and uh yeah that's how I learned so um so yeah I can like this is one of the things if you learn in public and you're constantly creating these artifacts that you're learning you're going to constantly be receiving you know Twitter DMS or like people on Reddit at mentioning you hey what's wrong with your tutorial like it's broken come and fix it and you're like I can't even remember doesn't work yeah yeah yeah you'll get a bunch of like blog spam like like people that are trying to get back links like oh I noticed this link is broken well here's a perfectly great article you could link to I get so many of those email we won't pay you any money but we want you to put in there yeah we just the SEO juice from you uh yeah we we just did a favor we fixed a broken link and then I go and I read the article and I'm like oh I'm just going to delete that paragraph so I'm not going to link to this person that asked me yeah because then I'd be incentivizing and then they'd write me back next week with like 10 other links that they found that were broken and yeah um anyway sorry like that I'm suffering from success I've got too many popular blog articles that people are constantly trying to uh insert their P of Google first page of Google I don't know what to do with myself I don't have that many articles on first page of Google but um well back then I actually did because um the study blog that I created turns out it was like filling this Niche that I only understood like years later that that zero to one part MH that people weren't addressing at that point and I can only do 0 to one but apparently I do that 0 to one really well because I don't understand and and for me to understand it has to be pretty darn fundamental yeah so um I was basically creating what I wanted out of the internets if I could have just Googled and found the kind of blog that I was looking for I would never have started this whole journey but I couldn't find it so I created like every service you know introduction like very very fundamental introduction on what you needed to know to pass the exam on like every service that they talked about like know the pillars like all these things yeah and um I even came up with like some silly like um like sip for like the um the pillars and stuff like that I know that's the um that's like the SAS and like pass and like stuff like that infrastructure is the service yeah now it's like all changed so now you can't even like use that anymore but the amount of people that have mention this like really silly like bunch of letters to help them memorize it has been like shocking to me that like you created your own learn F yeah and then people are actually using it to pass the certification exams and I was like this is mindblowing yeah um and it like haha it doesn't work anymore and I'm like I know um well so I want to back up and and talk a little bit about like your key Advantage here not only do you have a ton of like theoretical knowledge about teaching from getting master's degree in special education uh which is you know arguably one of the hardest forms of teaching uh bo KS who runs the freeo camp YouTube channel worked as a specialed teacher for like five or six years before he got into software development um and you know I I have lots of friends who do special ed teaching and it's it's extremely difficult uh because you have no idea like like every learner is coming to you from a different perspective and it's even more very and uh filled with just like unknown unknowns and stuff than normal teaching is but one of the big advantages uh because I've listened to a lot of interviews with you and in one of the interviews you talked about how like oh I'm not the most qualified person to write a book about AWS like why would you want me when you've got like these you know architects who have like Decades of experience built like massive infrastructure on top of aw like why not get somebody from to right about AWS why would you want me but the fact that you approach it with like relative beginner mindset is a massive advantage and people can relate to what you're saying much more than they can relate to some CTO with with you know 10 years of experience building on the cloud yeah The Beginner's mind I think is like the biggest asset that I had which I would never have figured out until I like enter this space because um until then I was like not knowing is a bad thing like I need to learn as much as possible and I need to become you know like a stereotypical sadman or something like that and like and then when I entered this like learning in public space I realized like the fact that I don't know and then I will know and then I can backtrack and teach someone to get from where I was to where I am now is like a huge asset because there's a lot of people who are teaching like really comprehensive courses for people who have like foundational knowledge but getting from zero to like that foundational knowledge is actually really really difficult and I feel like I can like release everyone to the world once they get that foundational knowledge and they'll be able to take advantage of the really high quality resources out there but back when I started there was actually very little like zero to one content and special education it's all about accommodations and modifications to meet that specific student's needs and not necessarily like making the content easier or like whatever but you you try to get to the core of what is it that you need to teach this student to do and then how do you get rid of all this stuff that's not completely necessary for them to acquire this core skill but they will acquire it in a way that fits them the best and I feel like it help desk really like require that of me because you don't know where they're asking this question from and what level of technical skills they have and working a couple years and help desk has helped me like further be like okay this is how you need to explain things these are the words that you need to use not these real word not these like technical jargon but like these words and even while I was working in like startups and stuff um my co-workers would be like it's really actually really nice um talking to you when you come to troubleshoot because you actually explain things to me in ways that I understand without all the technical jargon so I actually know what the problem is so next time I can fix it myself and I think like the special ed background really fueled into that and then my experience actually working with people as a help desk person really helped like get me to the next level where I'm explaining it to like the general worldwide web the zero to1 concept yeah and I was fully intending on taking the solutions architect associate exam after I passed this clf but I've been stuck here for the past seven years because there's just like so much need uh from this zero to one and once I published that blog and then I passed the exam I studied my own blog and passed this I'm like okay this works um and then I got an email from LinkedIn learning going like hey do you want to make link learning courses about this content like that was literally like maybe a one or two months after I published the website and that's when I was like I think you're talking to the wrong person this is literally the wrong person yeah like the reason why I made that blog is because I have absolutely no idea what's going on but um that's when the content manager was like well we have a lot of really really distinguished and um very decorated instructors who have Decades of experience but um when you are so far into the depths and you know so much sometimes it's hard to relate to the people who are starting with zero and she's like you have the ability to bridge that Gap in because you're a beginner yourself but you've also been able to acquire a certain level of knowledge you're able to bridge that Gap that's missing in our platform right now because we have so many really like deep stuff but we need the beginner content and we really think that's like an important next step when we're getting all these people that don't work in it or don't have a engineering background coming into cloud and everyone has to be able to kind of work with the cloud now even if you're not in engineering you know you could be in finance you could be in legal like you still have to understand the core concept and she was like I think you'll really be able to make a difference there and that's how I kind of got into the technical instruction kind of like fell into that bucket yeah so you you've kind of stayed more focused on the foundational level rather than continuing to climb the skill tree and like like hey I've got a certification Prep course for every single Cloud certification like my friend Andre Brown like he is like he was a CTO and he's got like tons of knowledge and and so he has uh courses on like every certification preparation but but they're not as you know robust and like focused on like like single-minded I guess as what you have with your LinkedIn learning courses so I think it's really cool that you've chosen this very specific Niche and you've continued to interact with people in the community and like keep this like super duper up to dat uh as you hear back from uh people in the the community can you talk about uh the cloud newbies uh community and or the WS newbies community and like the people you interact with that are going through your LinkedIn learning course or like how do you mainly interact with Learners so I don't do too much like one-on-one interactions people do message me um all the time on LinkedIn and Twitter and stuff um they might have like questions about like potential careers or um you know what resources I recommend after watching my courses and I would like send them links to like you know it could be Andrew Brown's courses on free C Camp or it could be like I created like free study guides for the new updated Cloud practitioner certification exam and I would like s these things um but I used to try to have like a Discord community and stuff like that it's still like alive but I found Discord to be like pretty hard to manage for myself so I'm debating whether to like move the platform entirely and start start over or just be like okay maybe huge Community Management is not for me maybe I'm more of like an output and when people reach out I'll do my best to help you kind of situation um especially because after I started teaching on LinkedIn learning I quit my corporate job and decid to focus full-time on technical writing and Technical instruction and stuff like that and now as we mentioned earlier like I have two kids and so yeah I can't go to like the summits I can't go to a reinvent you know I can't like move freely physically and also like my time even online is like fairly limited yeah and yeah so that's been kind of like a huge like turning point for me I'm really like glad I fell into this um online teaching space because the way I get paid it's like monthly royalty income so I don't actively have to work to keep keep on getting the paycheck I just have to be really focused and like really like do the job for the couple months that it takes for me to get the job done and I from the brain injury and seems like I was born with it but I have like pretty severe executive function disorder but the flip side of that is I'm not really good at the 9 to5 everyday grind kind of thing but when I am like focused I like spit things out so quickly that it like horrifies people and so um what might take like I guess quote unquote neurotypical normal person like a year to create if I am given the opportunity to just kind of sink deep I could create within a couple months and so LinkedIn learning has been really like flexible with me on like the time Horizon um literally um I was supposed to do the updates for the clf course the cloud practitioner exam course um starting this January cuz I was like oh my kid will be a year and a half my older one will be a year and a half so I I'll put him into daycare and we'll do that and then I found out I'm pregnant last summer and I was like uh LinkedIn um we have a problem here um if we start in November I'm going to have a baby and this is just never going to happen ever again because I'm never coming back I'm GNA never going to come back to the surface so we have to do this before I hit my third trim wow so you decided to do it before that's so you're because a lot of people I think would be like well let's just push it back and I'm someday maybe I will be able to come back and finish this but no you're just like clear I had to do it clear my plate because um they updated the certification exam so much in September that I'm not okay with like leaving something out there that I've created that doesn't serve what I want to serve like the audience and I felt like it's not fair to people who are taking my courses to have these like outdated courses um and so I was like I I want to do this I really want to do this and they like were like would you like a co-author or something so that you know it's less that you have to do and I was like no I want to control everything on this you cannot do anything um so I was like no I'm GNA write this and I'm going to record this but then I can't go to record it on site so they have to send me a kit to record at home and then I have a screaming toddler in the background and I actually had to pull him out of daycare because he was getting us so sick and I was like pregnant so my system is getting everybody sick yeah yeah so um I knew it was bad but I didn't realize like you get sick and then you get secondary infections and I actually got hospitalized I had noro that he gave me and then I got hospitalized because I'm noro and I was getting really dehydrated but I'm to like second trimester pregnant and so I went to eat ER and then I got sepsis at the hospital damn but they can't give me any drugs because I'm pregnant and I was like so you just want me to die like whatever but like these kinds of things just kept on happen I would get like strap I would get like all these like infections and I had like six weeks of non-stop coughing and um I realized like my voice is actually pretty important as a technical instructor and around then Andrew was like oh yeah I lost my voice I'm getting um AWS like to like speak for me and I was like oh that's a great idea and I was like Hey LinkedIn learning can I have someone can I have the computer talk for me they're like no so um I had to get my voice back um so but I was like I need to finish I have a strong deadline like I did with my book I need to finish this before the baby's born because once the baby's born I'm not getting anything done and so um I actually did finish it and that's how out now the updated version's out now and so I feel better about people taking these courses because I I'm like I I guess I have like a lot of pride in the quality of work that I put out and if it's not up to par I don't want it floating it like really stresses me out yeah um so I'm really glad we were able to like update it and Linkedin learning has been really flexible with me on that um so you got a compulsion for Quality like it just do not tolerate it being out of date and it sounds like even with everything going on you still figured out a way to make it happen yeah I did contemplate leaving the screaming baby sounds on the recordings but um yeah but uh I I managed to cut them out um Andrew Brown has a degenerative uh voice uh issue like it's like permanent like regressive uh I think or Progressive I'm not sure exactly how to say it I'm sorry I'm not a doctor but but basically like his voice will gradually like become weaker and weaker over time so he's been really experimenting with voice synthesis um but uh yeah absolutely that technology May soon be ready for prime time uh so that might come in handy in the future when you've got like a crying baby and you still need to get like a transcript recorded uh yeah this is so impressive to me your commitment to Quality your commitment to helping people learn these people who've entrusted you with like oh yeah using hoko's course it's really helpful and then they sit down and they actually pass the exam and they actually understand the concepts they didn't just cram for the exam because you've spent so much time and energy really laying things out and explaining things uh and so I just want to uh applaud you for taking your your craftsmanship so seriously yeah I think um if I didn't get so much positive feedback from people who have taken it it wouldn't like have impacted me so much but one of the things that has like really impacted me I've like spoken to a couple people and some people who taken my courses in past have like in like um invited me on their podcast and stuff like that and one thing that really stood out was um one lady was like um I realized after taking your courses and passing the exam until then she was like I thought that it just wasn't for me and it's like too hard and it's too technical it's just not for me but she's like I real realiz it's just the way that I was getting the information that wasn't for me and if I got the information in a way that was digestible for me then I can understand it and that just like really like was like wow moment to me that I can have that kind of impact on someone with you know a couple months of work even if there's a screaming baby in the background and that's kind of like those kinds of feedback people have told me they became a Solutions architect after taking my courses from an ALS um ASL interpreter and stuff like that and works at Amazon and stuff like that and I'm just like that's just like mindblowing to me that um I could do something like this and I don't hate doing it like I actually think it's like pretty fun and so I'm like well if I with couple months of work can have this kind of impact for over half a million people now I'm like you know what this is this is pretty pretty nice and you know you get paid and I get to have a pretty flexible work life balance yeah um especially with all my disabilities and like chronic illnesses and stuff and like energy ups and downs yeah um it's worked out pretty nicely for us well I want to fire off a few rapid fire questions uh because I want to be mindful of your time I know you've got two two kids to get back to and you've got a lot of other work going on uh you talked about how it's been great to be able to do what you love helping people and that it's pretty enjoyable creating the these courses um one of the things that you've mentioned is that your husband has a pretty stable you know kind of like regular income and that your income is more variable because you're getting royalties and you know from books courses things like that uh but it sounds like you you two have kind of like really made like a good uh I guess Financial setup I don't know how to say it but basically like where you're keeping the lights on uh with your variable income that can go really high when you publish a new course or a book or something and then can go back to like some sort of Baseline uh maybe you can talk about how how you've made that work because I know there are probably a lot of uh couples out there that are thinking about like oh you know I was in this situation uh I was working as a software engineer and I wanted to leave my job and focus full-time on developing free code Camp uh and developing projects that would ultimately lead to free Cod camp and my wife had a a full-time job working in accounting so she was able to uh support that and we had importantly in the US we had health insurance through her job uh maybe you can talk just a little bit about how you and your spouse approached this yeah so health insurance was actually the most important thing for me because of all my all my like disabilities and medical conditions and at that point I had lumid arthritis so my like even with insurance the doctor's visits were like running me at least $800 per visit and so I was like I feel like this teaching online thing is going somewhere but at that point you know I was only making like a couple hundred dollars a month from it but I was like you know zero to something is the most the hardest part after this it's like scaling and people knowing my name and wanting me to work as a technical writer or like a consultant for them I was like I feel like this is going somewhere but I need health insurance and um we also probably need like a stable income so my husband has a stable income he has a stable job and so we've been able to make it work that way where we created a lifestyle where we are only reliant on his income to run our you know expenses like everything comes out of his paycheck and my paycheck can go anywhere from zero to like on a crazy month like 24K or something but it's never like stable enough that I feel comfortable like putting a mortgage on it or something because at any moment because I don't own the platform they can just pull my courses and from next month on my income can become zero that's like the I think the hardest part for me is like you really don't know and like AWS updates the certification exam or heck they might even pull the certification exam entirely then it's like goes to zero so living on one income has been a pretty important part of how we've like managed our finances and um so everything like when we got married it's like okay it's our money um no matter who brought it in but we kind of separated in that his money is the family money and my money or my income we kind of save or invest so that um if we need to buy a house or we want to take a huge trip or something like that it's there as like a good bonus money and thankfully like the bonus money has been pretty good for the past couple of years so I've um felt okay you know having children in this crazy daycare environment I did not know how expensive daycares were until we started looking and it's just like astronomical there's like an extra zero behind everything I had no idea um and now we have two yeah so I think like um it's just been really really instrumental that we've always been talking about money since even like before we started dating and once we got married we were like we're very like um everything is there's no hiding money stuff we are very open about money we have like a shared account on like um simplify quick and simplify now that mint is gone of like everything um so that we can like manage our finances and invest in and like plan for a kids future and stuff like that together yeah and I think without that kind of like um transparency it would have been really hard for me to have trust in our system to quit that full-time job because that Baseline income is like so important to me that we maintain month to month no matter how bad business is you still get paid a paycheck until the company like goes kapoot I feel like everything just went out the window with Co but before before Co is when I left my corporate job so the world was a little more stable back then I don't know if I would have made the same decision when covid if I were leaving my job during covid but um preo world I felt like we had a pretty stable thing going on and we're fully transparent with our finances which has helped make this work that sounds like health insurance that sounds like a really great team effort uh and I applaud you all for you know being so thoughtful and deliberate about that like a lot of people it takes restraint to say no this is this income this windfall could go away right like uh platform risk what you said you know uh free Coke camp for example uh we're we're trying to gradually diversify our Chari source of Revenue and get more people to support us directly because uh it's harder to get grants right now with you know lots of tech companies will not give you a grant to develop courses focused around their technology we we've gotten some grants from like you know Google and uh Microsoft and some of the these other big tech companies we've gotten quite a few from like mongodb for example and we love creating courses that incorporate those tools and we're very transparent about like this course is made possible by a grant from you know New Relic or whomever we're working with and covering open source Technologies and stuff but the reality is that is a windfall and we can't just count on that being there we can't rely on it yeah yeah you can't rely on income from YouTube you can't rely on income from you know Google AdSense or you can't even rely on Google to send traffic uh to you like I wrote this comprehensive history of uh the 100 days of code uh which I and I have a comprehensive interview with Andrew uh Callaway and I've hung out with him in person in Toronto and done all these things and like yet my article is not the top ranking article on the history of 100 days of code it's some software.com that you know heavily links to my article but it probably written by an llm or something right so yeah it's it's like you can't take for granted any of the hard work you're doing is going to stand the test of time and is going to continue to like deliver any sort of value for you so you know obviously like I'm I'm kind of planning for like an entire charity uh and and we're trying to save as much as we can for unknown uh things that could happen but uh you know with your family you've got two young kids that depend on you you've got yourselves uh you've got to reliably be able to make you know mortgage payments and all these things and yeah there's like just so the world is just a wash in risk and the more planning you can do the more conservative you can be in making you know purchases or committing to you know um anything like it sounds like you've really learned to be economical over the years surviving in New York City on a very well it helps when you only made $14 an hour you know but I think I'm like too much on the anxious side I think I think too much about money so we're trying to um get me less anxious I'm um been watching like R safy sa safy R he had a a Netflix show but I the book I will teach you to be rich but he has like a YouTube channel now that I periodically watch and he's like you know you have to use your money you have to spend it for like yourself like to make you happy and that shouldn't come with guilt and I feel like as like a first generation immigrant and not knowing how the US system and worked and having to learn everything from scratch like retirements and stuff like that like I had to teach my dad about 401ks when he's like almost 60 right and it's I'm like these are the things like generational knowledge generational wealth but I feel like even more important in generational wealth is like the generational knowledge you have as an American that gets passed on from your parents that I didn't have and that just really like made me like really really anxious about our future and stuff like especially now we have kids kids but now I'm like okay you know what we're pretty stable we have careers like I need to be able to enjoy what we have and especially since covid happened I was like wait everything we thought we can just push off to later to enjoy it might not even exist in five years you know like all we took for granted would always be that's why we never had a honeymoon because we're like oh we can go on a honeymoon when we have money whenever when we're stable and then Co happened and then like we haven't gone anywhere in the past 5 years except like Seattle last year and so we're trying to like balance being financially responsible and knowing my income could stop at any moment I would have to go get a job or something but then you know child care I don't even know if I can get a job that pays enough to pay me more than what I would pay in two two day carees so um it's been like a transition going from the $14 an hour in New York City's will do anything for cheap rent to like okay now we have to like raise these children and um pay for everything associated with it but also make sure we're like enjoying our life not leaving it off to when we're 75 and retired yeah there's definitely aention there like uh and for many many years like I was just obsessed with saving like I would save like nearly half of my income which as a teacher was not a lot of money and as a software engineer was a little bit more but um yeah I I totally hear what you're saying like you know we've got these kids and we want them to have a childhood and so we want to be able to take them over to spend the summer with their grandparents uh in China and get Chinese you know exposure to Chinese culture Chinese history Chinese language yeah there there's definitely a tension there you have to spend money to do these things uh so yeah I applaud you for being so deliberate and thinking about these things and grappling with them because a lot of people just they don't plan right few people plan to fail most people fail the plan and it sounds like you're being proactive about that uh yeah it sounds like you've got a really healthy relationship uh with your husband as well the fact that you can talk so candid about these and have this level of transparency uh because I know so many couples who like one of them gets interested in gambling or something like that or making very dubious you know stock investment decisions and things like that next thing you know like the entire family is kind of like on the hook for bad decisions that one person made or something like I mean I think we should buy more Amazon and Target stock from the amount of money I'm spending every month on them on the kids but um other than that I'm sure he thinks it's like ridiculous how many diapers I buy but and I'm like oh this toy oh this toy oh this book and then you're like looking at the bills going like what happened I just bought a couple toys but the good news is those toys can be passed down uh or even keep you know donate like we we donated almost all the toys that we Acquired and we got a lot of toys secondhand from family and friends and stuff like that and so there's kind of like this informal toy you know exting economy yeah yeah yeah yeah so that is a great news and and like it it feels very different when you're buying something like like I went and spent like six bucks on a fancy you know drink at the at the coffee shop and I just drank it and like that's that you know there there goes that six bucks uh whereas you're getting a toy that your kids's going to potentially have like lifelong memories about playing with and and it's going to potentially help improve their motor skills or something like that right like a total different justification process when you have kids and you're spending money on your kids uh yeah I want to talk to you a little bit about platform risk you mentioned it uh and I talked about the platform risk that our charity faces uh drawing a lot of money from these grants and from uh YouTube ad revenue and things like that uh but where would you recommend if somebody were to go and publish courses in 2024 let's say hypothetically somebody's like I'm really interested in cobal for example uh very old programming language but still very widely used with you know government offices and there are a lot of companies that work with it or they have this very specific Niche uh this tool that they are very excited about and I've talked to so many people over the years who've found a niche like you've found a niche in Preparing People for the entry level uh AWS certifications how would you go about it if you were starting from scratch like somebody had has this Niche they're interested in potentially learning in public and maybe eventually doing what you've done uh in their particular Niche like could you give us like a very brief uh what you've learned looking back what you would do now based on what you've learned yeah so I talked about this a little bit in my blog um I write about um how to become and what entails what it tells to be a LinkedIn learning instructor but so in my case there it's like a really like loaded question for yourself that you really have to like think about and way the pros and cons because even if you uploaded YouTube you do own that YouTube channel and stuff but YouTube can change the algorithm at any time so yeah you own it a little more than you would if you put it up on LinkedIn learning but the risks are pretty similar um and one of the biggest things that I think LinkedIn learning has provided for me is the platform and the reach and if you have like millions of followers already I think You' probably be better off um publishing your courses on um you know it's it kajabi there's like a lot of platforms where you can host video courses and you basically retain most of the most if not all of the revenue that you generate and you would sell your courses for you know like $300 $500 um what LinkedIn learning has provided for me is they have a subscription service if you have link LinkedIn premium you get free access to LinkedIn learning and um you can also buy a subscription to LinkedIn learning for you know maybe like 30 bucks a month or 35 bucks a month or something like that and you get access a whole platform and that kind of um reach I personally can't have and I can't spend enough marketing dollars to get that kind of reach where they literally have all of LinkedIn and and the fact that I can even like not have a full-time job is because of that huge reach even though because you're getting paid in royalties they get to keep like a pretty big portion of the revenue that you generate um so for me it's kind of like I guess there this it's a huge platform risk because they can always just get rid of my courses um but being a LinkedIn learning instructor has come with a um prestige because it's kind of mostly like an invitation based system it's I think it has like a different um field in a Udi instructor where you can upload UD anybody can publish right like anyone can upload yeah and there are amazing courses on there but people feel like they have to be like really cognizant and have it be really recommended to them to be like okay this is a good course it's worth investing whereas LinkedIn learning it's like invitation based and they work with you to create in public to course they all kind of have like a uniform look to it and uniform quality to it um so I think just the fact that I have LinkedIn learning instructor on my resume has really helped me as like um a content creator um get that like Prestige where I had none because I'm like literally a professional beginner yeah and I don't have like a background in it or whatever in computer engineering degrees and I think without it I would never have become like an AWS hero and I would never have had the impact that I have um because I just don't have that kind of reach and I felt that when I published like ebooks and stuff myself yeah it'll get maybe a 100 200 300 people buying it but I can't offer things for such low cost to this many people and if I offer things at so such low cost I don't make any money so then I can't do this as a full-time job and I think being on that big plat platform has really helped me um balance those like number of people taking it versus how much I'm able to offer it for cuz you know like as you were saying you have to get grants you have to get donations to make it like worthwhile for people to be able to create these content because they also have to feed their family too it's like we we I think the internet likes to think of us as like this like forever giving and we don't have our own personal needs but like I have kids I have a family I need to eat and pay my lights you know I can't work for free as much as I would love to work for free and get paid in clout as they used to say yeah paid in uh what was it there was like a famous uh exposure like the guy gets oh here it is this is exposure oh okay awesome yeah put that exposure they take that exposure and they go to the sandwich stand they're like hey can I get a sandwich can iay an exposure yeah no unfortunately you cannot yeah in my early 20s I think I still felt mid 20s late 20s like I still felt that like oh you know I can do all this work for free I can run AWS newbies for free I can continue creating content for free but I feel like once I hit my 30s I'm like wait I have to get paid for what I do because it's just not sustainable and I'm burning myself out keeping a full-time job to feel my like passion and content creation and I'm like the easiest way is to get paid for what I'm good at instead of having to suffer through a full-time job that I'm not really engaged in so um yeah yeah so you've definitely painted like a a a pretty uh detailed picture of like for people who are considering leaving full-time work for mothers who are considering doing this as a way to spend a lot of time with their kids uh while also having like flexible like actualizing work because childcare is exorbitantly expensive in this country and hopefully that's something that we change in the near future but for now it's ridiculous and uh yeah it like really constrains what you can do as a family like like you know at least during that period before your kids are old enough to go to school I think once they can go to school that does dramatically reduce costs uh we we never had to provide like we didn't even have a babysit or anything we just like stayed with our kids all day and because I have the luxury of working remotely I just hung out on the couch and like watch them roll around on the floor and be silly little munchkins right uh and and again like I I can definitely see the appeal and I I I imagine a lot of people would like to do what you have done what what I have done essentially working remotely or or working asynchronously where you can do it on a project basis so I I think a lot of people are going to walk away from this conversation with a lot more insight into what that looks like and how it can be practically possible but it's not a walk in the park it's not like you know you just get your giant check from LinkedIn learning every month and every everything's gravy and you never have to worry about anything again for the rest of your life no life goes on and you know Revenue sources dry up and you have to adapt and um so I really appreciate what you what you just said about like you know LinkedIn learning is a great way to get distribution there's the saying that firsttime Founders focus on uh focus on product uh or focus on technology like the implementation details second time Founders focus on distribution how are they going to actually get things in front of potential customers and it sounds like LinkedIn learning has been a huge way to do that uh congratulations again on becoming an AWS hero which is uh a distinction that very few people have that AWS only Awards to like the you know the most skilled uh and capable teachers uh of using AWS and I don't know there probably thousands of people out there that make their their uh living off uh teaching and Consulting around using AWS and other Cloud platforms uh but you're one of very few AWS Heroes so yeah it's just um it's kind of like I was like wait are you sure you can give this distinction to me there's only like 20 20 30 of us in the world and I'm like I can log into AWS like but um apparently uh as a community hero what's important is like the impact you've had on the community and I have a lot of like um I guess imposter syndrome especially not coming from an engineering background but one thing that's like always helped me is like numbers don't lie and the number of people who message me and the number of people who are taking my courses and my courses all having like 4.8 or 4.9 ratings after thousands of thousands of people reviewing them and I'm just like you know what maybe I can do this and it's it kind of sucks that um it takes like over half a million people to like tell me that I'm good at what I do but um I guess it doesn't help that I was raised being told I can't do anything but um yeah it's like I'm like trying to like work through it and it's another big thing that I'm working with with my kids and we're trying to like break like I guess generational trauma but um I'm like I want you to find things that you're good at I wouldn't say like pursue your passions because I feel like we were raised well the not super Asian parts of us were raised Millennials were raised being told you know do what you love and then that hasn't worked out for a lot of us um I would definitely not make it as a professional video game player yeah yeah yeah um it hasn't worked out for a lot of us but I've also like I want you to be able to find something you're passionate about and at least make that into a big part of your life it might not be what pays the bills you do need to pay your bills somehow but you need to find something you're good at and then I'm willing to like invest money and time and resources to like help you build that out so that maybe you wouldn't end up finding out near 30 that um something that you loved as a middle schooler was a career that could have like actually been a very stable career but all in all I think I took a lot of weird like loops and I've had a lot of Step backs and a lot of career changes but they've all like ended up piling on top of each other and without like even the brain surgery and like apparently I I learned when I was pregnant with my first son that I had a stroke when I was probably in like high school or college I didn't even know um my medical records They just casually was like there was a stroke and I'm like would have nice if he told me at some point before I turned like 32 but um I think like even every little thing that I experienced and had to overcome it ended up like contributing to me being able to explain things really well to beginners um so it's just like been really interesting how um that has folded out every time I thought I'm like I failed it's done like I've just wasted five years of my life eight years of my life and then turns out like every portion of it was really important to Landing here and doing what I do now so yeah yeah well we're so thrilled to have you in the community uh to have you uh still powering through given all the obstacles life and fate is thrown in your way uh and I mean you have really been like a textbook example of taking the lemons life is given you and turning them into lemonade it's really really firing me up like uh just thinking about uh the progress you're making ever since I read that article about uh you know your recovery from uh brain surgery where they like as you said scrambled your left it's like that's a crazy my brain or something yeah and people are like function pretty well for someone missing like a portion of your brain I'm like yeah I think so too I'm doing pretty good for uh Missing like this much of my brain over here yeah yeah I mean that's a attribute to the plasticity I guess of the human brain and the flexibility of and I think the bilingualism they said helped because I have so many I guess I have more parts of the brain I use and I'm also left-handed but I write with my right and they think like that also really helped with like I'm using different parts of the brain than normal people so the impact of that area was able to get like mitigated a little bit maybe that they think that might be why I recovered a lot more than they expected me to recover so you were like the most prepared person ever for uh brain surgery yeah and I'm left-handed and that was controlled by my right side so the fact it was on the left side you know I didn't use that part as much I don't know yeah yeah well I mean I mean like obviously like everything you've dealt with that you've written about about like and again I encourage everybody to read uh your post uh from a while back where you looking back on the anniversary of uh the surgery and like everything has transpired since then and if with your permission I love to use the picture of you called it your staple Tiara I think yeah yeah everyone thought I was married like I got married they thought it was my wedding photo really because it's like it's but if you look closely it's just hundreds of Staples yeah it's like 75 Staples I didn't know that's how they you can still kind of see like this is like this was from like here to here like a linear scar yeah all across my head but it was all staed with silver Staples and um I was like and all white cuz I'm in the hospital so when I uploaded that picture on Facebook everyone thought I got married and they're like congratulations and I'm like no no actually no um so that was like really funny W and then it was like really interesting cuz the way they take it out is they literally have a huge staple remover like the regular staple remover but it's just huge and they just like pull it out one by one and I was like is this really the 21st century like you're literally pulling 75 Staples from my head with no anesthesia like yeah a lot of interesting experiences yeah well so if if you're listening just to the audio version I will have a picture of the staple Tiara uh so they just like they they cut it open and they peeled your scalp back and then they bored into your skull front yeah front Okay yeah and then they just put it back and actually um my skull is stapled in my back with um Titanium Clips mhm so I actually have like titanium Clips like here and here or something that's holding my skull together on my forehead and I like they remove part of your skull to per take the um the skull out do stuff and then put it back and then they like basically clip it back together um so you can actually feel it if we ever meet you can touch it okay well that'll be weird yeah some people really want to touch it and other people are like oh oh no no that's not that's not okay no so I mean depends on what kind of person you are no it's remarkable that they can do these kinds of things but like you said it's still kind of bar aric like ripping Staples out of your head but I mean that's that's a that's attribute to the pragmatism of medicine that like Staples of all things is how they fig you can't tell you know it's crazy you can't tell like unless I pointed it out like you can't tell that I have a scar from like here to here so it's pretty amazing what medicine can do and now if I had the same condition they might not even have to cut me open they might be able to like go through one of my large veins and like fix it that way so wow that's wild just going through a vein with like a like an endoscopic tube thing and then going in and yeah they would like coil put a coil in and for me like that was like not an option so they decided to do open surgery but you could also do like radiation and they would just radiate that specific area and shrink the blood vessels and stuff like that there's like a lot of there's a lot of risk with all those different things though I'm just really grateful that everything worked out and you've been able to I mean it's remarkable like talking to you I would never have an idea that you at one point had trouble speaking that you had aasia yeah uh it's just remarkable what you've accomplished in terms of your recovery uh that that even I as an lay person can observe here so um I just want to thank you again Heroku for being so open about your journey uh from you know a person who had to get their skull partially removed and have this you know extremely invasive procedure done to recovering to learning it to moving to the big city New York City few people have the audacity to do such a thing certainly not when they're recovering from you know everything that you were recovering from and then working in it and then climbing the ranks and discovering cloud computing and going on to teach 500,000 people probably a whole lot more than that uh how to earn the uh how to earn aw certifications and giving them the confidence and the clarity to be able to do so it's just a remarkable thing that you've accomplished here and uh it's very inspiring and I really appreciate you taking two hours of your life to sit down with me and relay all this to me and to the good people listening to this conversation um thank you so much yeah thank you so much for having me this like like I told my husband I having an interview with free cam and he's like what so he's an engineer too so it's like it's like oh that's pretty cool so yeah yeah well please thank him for his kind words and uh for everything he's doing to uh help you be able to teach uh you know there's a saying like behind every great man there's a there's a woman and I guess in this case behind the great woman is a man who's also helping provide the stable income so that you can continue to do this yeah the roles have switched no not really but awesome well thank you so much for having me absolutely and everybody uh tuning in until next week happy coding