8 Bits
8 Bits
8 Bits with PJ Metz (again!)
PJ is a High School English Teacher learning to code!
Watch the Video Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no36D8isG4A&t=2353s
Follow PJ on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MetzinAround
Follow Chloe on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChloeCondon
Follow Brandon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheCodeTraveler
Hello, hello.
Brandon Minnick:We're back.
Chloe Condon:Your favorite team of 1pm PST, Wednesday show people. I'm calling on them. And I'm here as always with
Brandon Minnick:Brandon Minnick. Great to see again, Chloe,
Chloe Condon:good to see you be dog, my new nickname for you that I just started calling you out of nowhere. I haven't seen him since we had a little week off for Ignite.
Brandon Minnick:Ah, so good. I mean, I missed you last week. But we had been doing this weekly show for Well, since May. So what is that six months? Almost half a year, every week. And yeah, last week was the Microsoft conference ignite, which had some really cool announcements. We'll chat about a minute. But yeah, we decided why not take the week off, let the focus stay on the fun, new cool things with Ignite. And then we'll come back the following week today to come say hi to everybody again.
Chloe Condon:Hello, hello. We will introduce our guests quite yet. But we have our first returning guest today. I'm pretty, pretty excited. Did you do anything at Ignite, Brandon?
Brandon Minnick:Oh, so maybe? Yeah, I did some pre recorded videos. And I shipped them into the Ignite team. And they said, we'll take it from here. So I have a video of me might have played at Ignite, but I personally didn't see it. Although ignite is following the trend of the recent Microsoft Virtual conferences that lasts a couple days and go 24 hours a day. So there's a chance I could have been sleeping and folks in Australia saw my smiling face.
Chloe Condon:Yes, I did the same thing that I had some great chats with some of my co workers actually. So I chatted with Jim Bennett, who does IoT things on the Academic Team with oh my gosh, I hope I will find the link for the video. I believe that the videos from ignite are either going to be posted or have already been posted. We'll get those links for you. But Jim did this amazing demo. I think we were only chatting for 10 or 15 minutes. It's a very short video. But he manages in one video to show a Iot demonstration using little Lego stormtroopers and determining if it's built correctly or not. I know. Uses IoT Hub I loved loved loved chatting with him about it, Jasmine as well. Amazing bots. Jasmine is incredible. One of my Animal Crossing friends at the Animal Crossing. And yeah, it was just a really fun event. I also talked with Megan. So I got to do a lot of different pre recorded interviews same situation where I got random messages and tweets from people saying great job of build. And I said oh are sorry, Ignite. Bad. But I was like, Oh, I guess it must have aired. But you know, it didn't happen to me this time, Brandon, which is happening a lot more often, as I'm sure if anybody here has ever spoken at a conference or even done a play or a musical. I don't know about y'all. But whenever someone takes a picture of me on stage is the most unflattering photo like I'm looking for something and I was surprised I didn't get any screenshots of people. So hopefully, hopefully my hair, my glasses, they're looking good. It wasn't making any crazy faces. I'm sure it was. It was ignite, ignite, ignite build, I have to keep them straight in my head.
Brandon Minnick:I get them confused because we have a Microsoft as build, inspire. And ignite are the three major yearly conferences. And yeah, I mean, big conferences, big announcements, it's easy to get the name swapped around, but I actually have you ever been to ignite in person.
Chloe Condon:I did ignite the tour. I did get to go to ignite in Florida. But actually this kind of a good segue for our guests because I had a lot of FOMO about blast and person ignite because it was in Orlando and I believe they took over Universal Studios for like, the evening or something. So I was hearing I was living vicariously through many other people, people in the chat if you went to this ignite, tell me what I missed out on because we're gonna be talking about theme parks Today on our episode, but I hear that ignite is really cool. Have you been to one before?
Brandon Minnick:Only only the tour as well. I joined the Ignite tour when we took it to Seoul, South Korea, and that was earlier this year in January just before the pandemic hit. We all stopped traveling and stayed at home. But now I've only been to build of the three big Microsoft official conferences. But maybe someday I can.
Chloe Condon:It's like build 2.0 but I really enjoyed the tour and I had the pleasure of going to Milan and Prague on Microsoft Ignite the tour which is basically like ignite on the road it's like you see wicked on Broadway, you see wicked. That's how I felt. It was really fun. I got to meet a bunch of Microsoft users overseas and and talk all about Azure and and oh, my goodness, I got to speak at one of my favorite meetups, shout out to Prague. One of my favorite new cities I've been to, if you are a woman in tech in Prague, may I recommend the best named group in Meetup group in the world chiquitos. It's a check programming group for women in tech. Check it out. They've been really really great things. And myself and Frank Boucher and a couple other cloud advocates Scott's got to talk to chiquitos. So I'm a big fan of ignite the tour. Although sad that I guess everybody kinda got to go to the same ignite this year, which is nice. Everyone gets the same extent from home.
Brandon Minnick:That's true. So I guess the answer my own question. Yes, we all have been to ignite, because we were all there this year. Yes.
Chloe Condon:I did register and I was there.
Brandon Minnick:And maybe, maybe I was even in it. Who knows? If everybody saw me, let me know.
Chloe Condon:All right, well, should we bring in our guests because I'm sure we need all the time that we can to talk about the very, very, very important topics that we have on the docket today, which include everything from theme parks, Shania Twain, I don't even know where to begin.
Brandon Minnick:So many good things.
Chloe Condon:Without further ado, please welcome to the show. PJ Mads Oh, a prop ej. They're
Pj Metz:doing a bit of learning about what I assume is JavaScripts. Dad, because I don't know.
Chloe Condon:Wow, I think it's a coffee back. Welcome page. Jay.
Pj Metz:Thank you so much for having me, guys. I'm so excited to
Chloe Condon:hear PJ Of course, first return guest on the show. So exciting. And I can't think of anyone better to be our return guest such a talked about episode by me. So many things have happened since then. But first, I'm gonna bring up a little icebreaker real quick. Something was happened recently that has been in the news. And we've all been talking about highly debated. And I think we need to talk about what's on everyone's mind, which is that Farmville is leaving Facebook.
Pj Metz:Absolutely. The biggest thing in news right now, you can't go anywhere on the internet without people talking about Farmville leaving. I mean, what will our middle age on Send us on Facebook now?
Chloe Condon:I think so I actually I bring this up, because we are always bringing up these fun tech things that are happening in the news. And I read this I got a push notification on my on my google news alerts. Um,
Brandon Minnick:fun, notification. Very important news,
Chloe Condon:very important. I'm not sure if I've shared this on the show before. So first, we should say PJ a little bit of background on you, before we get too far into things is that you are learning how to code and you are a high school teacher. So you give us a little background. I know we we obviously know how you got here. But like, tell us how you started on this little journey?
Pj Metz:Well, as a high school teacher, that basically means I spend a lot of time doing a lot of work, and I don't get a lot of money for it. So I was in a happy hour with a bunch of friends. That includes Brandon and another friend of ours, who is also a software engineer and works with computers and such, was talking about how his company was underpaying him and I was like, that's really unfortunate. It doesn't feel good. And that's something that can happen very easily to a lot of people in tech, you just sort of know what the going rate is. And you're like, I feel like I'm not getting what I'm worth. And when he said the amount that he was not getting. I realized that was my yearly salary. And I was like, Man, I wish I made money. And Brandon was like, you know, PJ, you can always switch jobs. And then he like, took me aside and like whispered in my ear, he's like, yeah, you could probably code like, like, if I can do it, you can do it. I was like, Oh, well, sure. And like it was a happy hour. So I was feeling happy. And these are all friends that I just I love immensely. And when Brandon said that, something just kind of clicked in my brain that that forced me to try it. It's like just give it a shot. It's It was like May, the pandemic wasn't going anywhere. School was basically done for me. I had another month left of online teaching and I was like, Yeah, let's do it. So he sent me some C sharp 101 videos from Microsoft. And I learned a little bit from scratch. hanselman and I started watching those. And then I signed up for Code Academy. And then I was like, you know, what people really need to see is a 35 year old man doing badly at coding. So I signed up for a twitch account and I stream once in a while on there, and I'm slowly learning C sharp. I created a website in ASP dotnet. It's your new favorite poem. Why and FP dotnet. And really, I'm, I'm so very early in this in this journey. I mean, I'm still a high school teacher, like I just work today, and I'm giving a test on Sir Arthur Legend's tomorrow. Oh, that's great, sir. Go wait in the green night. It's a classic.
Chloe Condon:The original graduate soundtrack of Camelot, you know,
Pj Metz:that's exactly what the school hopes I'm going to do. It's like, instead of teaching the book, I'm like, well get ready. We're just gonna listen to a musical guys.
Chloe Condon:Well, and of course, I met PJ, through Brandon, because I myself am a non traditional background engineer, as well. And PJ and I clearly have bonded over our non traditional paths, and also our very quirky sense of humor, a little bit more on that later with a project that we're going to share with you in a little bit here. But to continue my story, so to recap, Farmville, no one looked into this myself, turns out that Facebook is no longer going to be supporting flashplayer. That is why they are leaving, they will still have an app Farmville is not going away. Don't worry, don't worry. But I wanted to bring this up because PJ, this reminds me of my one of the many, many, many jobs that I had before I was working in the tech space. I guess I was technically working in tech, I was working in gaming, just not in a technical role. My very first job out of college was working for kixeye, which was a competitor to Zynga. Back in like the peak of Silicon Valley. This is like 2012, two ish 2013. One of the longest jobs that I've ever had in my life, and I worked in VIP customer support on this game. And what does that mean? In a game at
Brandon Minnick:the red carpet?
Chloe Condon:It means that you provide VIP support to what they call in the industry. This is an industry term for people who spend large amounts of money on a game. What else? Yes, I was in charge of VIP whales. Such a weird thing to say, whale Wrangler. And I support tickets all the dingdong day. And it was a really interesting experience in my life. And I actually talk about it a lot in engineering interviews, because it gave me a lot of empathy for customer support agents, because having worked on a game where sorry, kixeye, there were a lot of bugs. And you know, we get a lot of angry people being like, Where's my goal, they spent 20 on this because they're spending the equivalent of like a car on, you know, a speck on the internet. But that's a whole other conversation for another day. But I have empathy as a developer to understand like, hey, of course customers want the solution fixed in a timely manner. It's important to get those issues escalated quickly to the development team. So back in the day, if you'd met me PJ, I was answering with a lot of templates to customer support emails saying here's some free gold in math.
Pj Metz:Very sorry for the inconvenience, that your crops did not produce as much as you thought they would please have 2000 gold on us and seven
Chloe Condon:and it's actually it's a little bit but it's that time of year right? It's spooky Halloween time and usually in games when there's updates they'll be like a Halloween update.
Pj Metz:Absolutely. It's all out of the ground now.
Chloe Condon:Well, I'm literally counting the hours down for my Animal Crossing pumpkins basically please start on October 1 but
Pj Metz:do they do pumpkins instead of turnips on Animal Crossing for Halloween?
Chloe Condon:Well, I don't know yeah, cuz I don't time travel I don't cheat in the game like some people
Pj Metz:morality in Animal Crossing TV show
Chloe Condon:but I play in real time and but yeah, apparently this update that I just downloaded the other day I read this article that says that all the pumpkins all the like spooky Halloween decor but costumes are coming out like
Pj Metz:everyone's a bad.
Unknown:Very exciting.
Pj Metz:There's a murder mystery on Starfall Island.
Chloe Condon:My Island is called baller. But you gotta come visit sometime for sure.
Pj Metz:Switching I'll do it.
Chloe Condon:Alright, so this is gonna be formatted episode. This time y'all pretty exciting stuff. It's gonna be a little more, more chill, more free flowing. You know, got our hat on. We got the Hawaiian shirt on. It's a very chill Episode. Let me know you PJ and we walked away from your last episode. And we were like, you know what? We need to talk more about theme parks. We need to catch up with you. I'm less than going on because I know you and I have been working on some stuff which we'll share a little
Pj Metz:secret for 20 minutes from now.
Chloe Condon:Yes. I'll get into that. But let's start with the most important map data in your life here at PJ, which is you went to Universal? How was
Pj Metz:this nothing more important than visiting a theme park during a pandemic?
Chloe Condon:I missed them so much. And we mentioned them on every episode.
Pj Metz:We might as well get out of the way and not accidentally stumble into it later on. Right? Yeah. So universal has a deal right now, where up to today. So Florida residents, today's your last chance. If you buy a one day admission to the two parks, you get the rest of the year for free. And as soon as they came out with it, I was like, Ah, that's very tempting. And then I was like, wait, there's a pandemic and I had to wait and think about it. Then they announced that they were going to have to have the haunted houses that they do for an event here called Halloween Horror Nights. The event itself was canceled. But they had already been building the sets for these gigantic haunted mazes that you can walk through. And I go to this event every year. The only year I missed it is because I lived in Korea. And I found a way to actually go to the one in Japan The next year, I was in Korea anyway. But they announced that they were going to be two houses available during the daytime. And all of a sudden, I had to really, really think about this. This ticket. So I decided it was okay. I was doing a lot of research. I was looking up their safety policies. I felt comfortable with it. It was busy while I was there, but people still keep their distance. And there was only one time when I was in line for a ride where I turned around I said, Oh, could you please step back a little bit. Thank you. And they did the whole rest of time and they were like Sir, my teenage years. So I was like, oh man, they're gonna make fun of me. And like I get enough of that at my job. They didn't they were like, Oh, yeah, and then they would like make fun of each other when they went to close. But it was it was good. Like I felt safe and I felt like universe was doing a good job. I did see your best friend Chloe the swamp monster holding a shrimp salad on top of the universal Monster Cafe. He said please tell Chloe I miss her. Listen, I haven't seen her since she was here in Orlando for the Ignite tour. Yeah,
Chloe Condon:I'm eating a low carb diet and I missed that so for those who don't know there is a universal is divided into kind of different sections muscle much like a Disney World or land. And there is a food area that's monster themed so they own all the enterprises for you know Frankenstein, and Dracula and all these things. And is it Creature from the Black Lagoon?
Pj Metz:Some people call him Oh, there's like a nickname for him?
Unknown:Was he in the shape of
Pj Metz:a very attractive fisherman?
Chloe Condon:It's kind of like a mummy looking fisherman and all of these monsters You know, they're holding hamburgers and fries but it's the funniest thing the swamp monster is holding a shrimp Bluey salad. And it's the best and it turns it rotates so PJ was kind enough to send me a picture of my dear friend hanging out in the park. Well that is so cool. It was so were you scared Halloween was coming up Was it a scary
Pj Metz:so the houses are actually really good. They're pretty scary. One of them is called Revenge of the tooth fairy. And these are both what would be called original houses they do a mix of intellectual property houses which is where they take like popular horror movies and things people know like they did the Walking Dead three years ago there was a walking dead house and that's an IP but they also have original houses that are come up with with a site come up by their creative team and one is Revenge of the tooth fairy a little boy in like 19th century England refuses to give the tooth fairy his tooth and the tooth fairy goes bananas and brings great harm upon everyone in the family. And there are these little like Tooth Fairy monsters running around
Chloe Condon:in the Rocky universe because wasn't the rock the tooth fairy at one?
Pj Metz:Yes. And I believe this is actually the the alternate version of that. It's like Rick and Morty. There's several universes and in one it's the rock and he's got like a daughter to impress and in another their murderous emps in 19th century sailor boy outfits.
Chloe Condon:Did they give you money? I think because I feel like no
Pj Metz:which is terrible. You gotta lose a tooth first.
Brandon Minnick:on your pillow.
Pj Metz:The mouth bones are their money essentially.
Unknown:Yes. Yes,
Brandon Minnick:yes. Yes. Makes sense why there'd be so angry if you didn't give them the right
Pj Metz:you're basically not paying them that's you can't you can't stiff a contractor like that
Brandon Minnick:we all know that the tooth fairy is basically just the mob is that
Pj Metz:very tiny angry Goblin mob
Chloe Condon:I have a fun little Halloween tacky anecdote which is so I love animatronics. We've talked about this before. One of my favorite pieces of technologies is robots and animatronics. And I'm sure everyone if you haven't already google it or bring it bring it right now that was test well foot skeleton for sale at Home Depot that everybody has been posting memes and tweeting about and it's truly it's 12 feet tall, very menacing. I want one so badly to put my inside of my home like a Christmas tree. Not even a patio since I don't have one. But it's they're sold out everywhere and people are reselling them for 1000s of dollars. It's a super super hot item. But y'all I have an exciting exciting announcement. a dear friend of mine, Ryan Drummond, the voice of Sonic the Hedgehog, which we'll get to Xbox in a second here has voiced some of the Halloween voices of the animatronics at Home Depot and target and I'm making a trip there later to buy one myself. So I'm very excited to be only one degree of separation from a spooky Halloween animatronic.
Pj Metz:I love those devices. We have a phone that if you walk by it, it rings and when you pick it up, it says terribly frightening stuff like, spooky. But like
Chloe Condon:flossing, it's like a glasses. And I was like, Ah, no. It's so good. It's so bad.
Pj Metz:It makes me make this face where I'm like, huh?
Chloe Condon:Put up Halloween decor for Halloween. I'm looking for my son here.
Unknown:Oh, yeah,
Chloe Condon:I have a skeleton that I always put out every year.
Pj Metz:Brandon, you better decorate for Halloween or something?
Brandon Minnick:It's a good question. Because we've been living in an apartment for the last five years and we never got trick or treaters. So we never felt that inspiration to do anything. But yeah, we just moved. So we're in a we're in a house. Now we're in a neighborhood. And I know my wife really wants to go out for trick or treaters. And she's the kind of person that has always wanted to give away the king size candy bars. Yeah. And we have to figure out how to do that this year and still be socially distant. But yeah, I have a feeling we're gonna be putting up decorations because the neighbors are already putting up their decorations. And we don't want we don't want your recruiters to pass our house by. So we got to let them know it then.
Pj Metz:Get good 1000 but I know you just bought a house in Napa blah. Invest in a 12 foot skeleton.
Brandon Minnick:Did it Yeah, financing. Credit second mortgage.
Chloe Condon:As you were saying that Brandon I was writing down a note because that's actually a really great idea for an IoT project with social distancing, figuring out a way to give candy to people in a safe way. Interesting. Stay tuned.
Pj Metz:tape on the sidewalk that's like eight feet away from your house. And they'll notice Yeah, it'll be really scary cuz you'll get COVID so stay back.
Chloe Condon:Um, which So speaking of so I did a weird segue there from from my panel for the voice of Sonic but did you all see the pictures of the new Xbox is so tiny, so small
Pj Metz:that it doesn't have disk drive? Right?
Chloe Condon:It's well most of the pictures I saw were being you know that meme of SpongeBob and Patrick where they're all like with their mouths open they did that with the Xbox so people have been putting like little eyes on it and it's been fun to see people did the say anything mean where instead of Xbox so
Pj Metz:this is a PlayStation house unfortunate. Yeah, I know. I'm the bad. Our first and last repeat.
Chloe Condon:Do you play a lot of Xbox branded?
Brandon Minnick:I used to I used to back in the day by so what's funny is I never owned an Xbox but we used to. I used to have friends over when I was in high school and they would bring their xboxes because I was the computer guy and I knew how to hook them up for actually, you could do I mean the classic LAN parties but back before Xbox Live was even a thing. There was actually ways that you could hook it up to your computer with the spirit You cannot card and get on the internet and play against people. So because I was wanting to know how to do that, my friends would always bring over their xboxes we played together. And my friend Glen just ended up leaving his Xbox at my place. And so I kinda used to have an Xbox. And then he took it back a couple years later, which, rightfully so,
Unknown:but there's
Brandon Minnick:no in our household, we have all retro games we have and 64 we have Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.
Chloe Condon:Let's go around and name our favorite like, weird, obscure game that we either had or have. Does anybody? I can I can start to give you an example. Yeah. Okay. So I still have I'm a Nintendo girl from the beginning. That's how I learned. I'd still play my switch every morning and get those Animal Crossing ATM points every day. But I have my original Super NES and I have Pinocchio's daring adventure. One of the strangest games I still never beat it. actually pretty difficult game. And I also have Oh, Brittany's dance groups are Brittany's dance studio, something on PS two, which I my boyfriend keeps saying you don't play your PS to get rid of it. I'm like, I need it. What if I need to play Brittany's dance groups and it's Britney Spears? And technically you're supposed to play it on like, you know, the DVR had. But um, if you play it on your your controller, it's more like Parappa the Rapper or something? Also? Yeah. But you are one of her backup dancers and you're auditioning for her tour. So your avatar is like, either like a dancing like, you know, very strong guy lifting people up or you're just like a beautiful, lyrical ballet dancer. And one of my favorite games. How about y'all any weird scare games from childhood or adulthood?
Brandon Minnick:You know, I was just thinking about this. And there's a game that I don't think gets enough credit. And it's on the 64 called Diddy Kong Racing. Yeah, I like that. racing games, right. And I just got the itch the other day to pop it back in the N 64. And start over again, because it's such a it's such a massive game. I was watching. There's a YouTube video.
Chloe Condon:Leave it? Is it kind of like Mario Kart? Or is it different?
Brandon Minnick:Similar Yeah. But it's Mario Kart where you're also in a world. So when you're done with the race, you can explore this world, there's, I guess, there's different worlds inside this world. So you have to kind of beat the boss on each of these and work your way up. And then once you do beat that world, you get in a spaceship that blast off into space. And then once you do that, you can start playing the game all over again. But everything's in reverse, so that it's just a massive amount of content. And yeah, I have nothing better to do during quarantine. So why not spend another 30 hours playing it?
Chloe Condon:I just started Super Mario this morning so
Pj Metz:I can beat Diddy Kong Racing, please. Thank you. As I work through it, um, so I have like a long history of video games. Um, when you said you need a DDR dance pad. I had a flashback to freshman year of college when I almost joined the DDR club at University of Florida.
Unknown:State also
Pj Metz:there would be weeks where I got close to not having enough quarters to do laundry because I spent it all on the arcade machine at the student center. I used I was the kid who like brought like a water bottle and a towel. And like I would like train just picked the same song three times and like train at it. And one time I was there with my drumline friends and we were walking by the students. I was like, Guys, hold on, I gotta go do something. And I went in and I played and they sat and watched me. And in my 17 year old, I'm a freshman in college. And I was like, they'll probably think I'm really cool. And when I finished the song I turned them looked and they were like
Brandon Minnick:what are you doing? Like?
Pj Metz:I still play DDR, but the obscure game cuz that's not an obscure game. The obscure game is Marble Madness for the regular Nintendo
Chloe Condon:Marble Madness. What
Pj Metz:is it is it is in 3d. And it's not a regular Nintendo and it's like you have to really get used you move like a marble or bowling ball type thing down a track and the goal is to get to the finish line. And my mom was obsessed with the game. She
Chloe Condon:hears this game like Howard, what are the graphics like?
Pj Metz:It's like like 88 and it is like it's like Got that that depth is really interesting because like Sega was the one that had like, 3d and it was like this depth and they have 16 bits, and it was aggressive. And for to do it on the NES. I just now that I know like a tiny bit about coding, I think about that. And I'm like, blown away how they were able to do that with like, you know, a graphics chip that's got like, like seven bytes of space on it.
Chloe Condon:That's what like, has completely blown my mind about programming now that like, I'm further into my career, and I understand what goes into building a game and designing a product like that. My boyfriend plays a lot of open world games, and I sometimes just watch him and I'm like, Oh, my gosh, like the amount of detail and time and energy that is put into just making this I think I took that for granted as a very simple thing before I learned how to program so I have such an appreciation. Shout out to all the game devs out there truly, like you are doing magic, you're doing literal magic. It's pretty incredible. And also shout out to all the cool, amazing VR stuff. Specifically, all the stuff that Miguel April vogon code is doing some really cool gaming stuff happening. There, y'all.
Pj Metz:I like that you were like, it's like, I don't seem so complicated and crazy. And I think about the project that we worked on. And I'm like, that was much less complicated. But it's so cool. Still.
Unknown:Speaking of which,
Pj Metz:I made a segue.
Unknown:Let's go girls.
Chloe Condon:We can't afford to play anymore. ej and I have been working on a project y'all. I won't even call it a project. I'll call it a
Unknown:calling. It's a calling a personal
Chloe Condon:calling. Do you want to explain the origins of this project? And I'll I'll put a link here for it to share it with y'all.
Pj Metz:So I'm on the internet one day as I'm want to do. And I see a tweet that someone has retweeted and it says if I were Shania Twain on Twitter, every day, I would wake up and tweet, let's go. Let's go girls. And immediately I was like, man, that'd be cool. She actually did that. And then I was like, isn't there like a way that like, you can automatically do stuff on Twitter. I know. They're called bots. And normally when you say Twitter bots, it's followed by Russian propaganda. But this is a Twitter bot for good. And so I immediately messaged Chloe, I was like, Chloe, can you make a bot on Twitter? And she was like, I think I could. And then I said my idea and she goes, we're doing it. We're meeting this Friday. We're gonna build a bot together and I was like, oh, together I don't and she said, Nope, you're in it now, and I was unable to escape Chloe's grasp when she got a project that she wanted to know we created a bot that tweets let's go girls every day at noon Eastern one eastern standard time like
Chloe Condon:11 nine 9am PST.
Unknown:So Monday noon Eastern.
Chloe Condon:And well Brandon first let us ask you what is your familiarity with Shania Twain?
Brandon Minnick:Um, please note that
Chloe Condon:she is reading in obviously is Canadian, a feminist icon created anthems for a generation iconic for those of you watching at home or like who's shanaya Twain? She's saying such hits as man of a like a woman. And
Pj Metz:still the one
Chloe Condon:do the was still don't want. So lots of very feel good. Oh, that don't impress me much, which is going to be a v2 feature on the crunch. And I bought Oh, yes, this week peek into our promises for our development process. But we've gotten so much positive feedback on this bot. It truly was something that we built as like kind of a joke for ourselves, to learn to teach PJ how to use, how to build bots. We're starting with logic apps, and then we're, as we progress, making it more difficult. And we will be coming out with a blog post for that soon. But you can get started@aka.ms slash let's go girls, if you want to get started and get a little familiar with the technology we're using behind that, but it was actually really easy, right PJ?
Unknown:I mean, honestly,
Chloe Condon:not an ad for Microsoft, but also not for Microsoft.
Pj Metz:literally anyone could have done it. And I'm glad we did it first. But yeah, Chloe was like we'll use logic apps. Is that correct? Right. Logic Apps. Yeah, we'll use logic apps to do it. And I was like, Oh, so I kind of like get ready to dust off my typing fingers and then Chloe was like, sorry. Click this and click this. And did you create the Twitter account, send me the login info and look at tweets itself. And I was like, Oh, it was 30 minutes. And then I
Unknown:was like,
Brandon Minnick:let's go
Chloe Condon:to our favorite part of making this, which is not technical at all, which people can see is the cover photo.
Pj Metz:So we finally get logged in. And before you send a single tweet on your twit, your new Twitter account, on the bottom it says, basically, we're so excited, you're on Twitter, let's get ready. And then there's a blue button that you use to get started. It says, Let's go and I was like, oh snap. And so I screenshotted it and did my best MSP comma girls afterward. And it's like Twitter knew they knew.
Chloe Condon:We've gotten so many people messaging us dm, you know, saying things like, you know, 2020 has been really hard. But this bot has given me so much joy, thank you for this, I needed this reminder, people really need to be reminded that they need to go girls. So it was super fun to make very easy to make. Brandon, have you ever played with Logic Apps before? There's just so easy to automate things with?
Brandon Minnick:Yeah, and I did I do a Twitter bot. But I did something similar, right? Well, so we should probably back up. What is Azure Logic App. So anybody ever listened along at home who hasn't heard of Azure Logic Apps, it's a, essentially a way to build an app that runs in the cloud, that doesn't require you to write any code. So if you think of the same way, you can build structures out of Legos by using these building blocks to kind of piece them together. And next thing you know, you have a house built out of Legos, and you didn't have to know how to write blueprints or lay drywall, you could just build a house out of Legos. Well, I guess it'd be a really big house. But yeah, but you got to similar, you don't have to write any code, they have all these little modules that you essentially pieced together. And so the what I did was to basically watch Twitter for anything about my get trends app. So if this this, I guess it's a bot, but it doesn't tweet anything. It just monitors if there's anything anybody mentioned, get tritons, which is the name of my app on the iOS and Android app stores. Download it today. It will. This, this bot will send me an email. So essentially gives me a heads up that somebody's tweeting about my get trends up. And lets me know. But yeah, I had that up and running in no joke. Five minutes, it was just dragged in the Twitter connection, logged in via logic apps to my Twitter account, and then dragged in the, in this case, the Microsoft Office 365 connection, and logged into that account, and just hold it, send me an email anytime you see a link to get trends on Twitter, and include that link in the email done. And what's what's really funny is when I first heard about logic apps, I was like, Ah, that's cool. But I already know how to code I don't like, I can write the code myself,
Chloe Condon:I have the time. Simple thing from scratch. I mean, that's what's so cool about it is, you know, obviously I told PJ when we started this out, I was like, we're gonna extract everything and just build this in the simplest way and, and make it harder and harder as we go. And I was thinking, because we did this in like, I want to say under 10 minutes, probably
Pj Metz:snapping a switch. And it was
Chloe Condon:like had we had to set up authentication. Because if you're doing something with the Twitter app, we had to get our you know, Twitter developer account, it would have really been a long difficult project to start from scratch. So it's a really, really cool, it's way too if you're thinking of power. So Power Apps and logic apps are a little bit different. I would say Power Apps are a little bit more to enable maybe folks on the administrative side of things. But with logic apps, what's really cool is, you know, let's say you're a developer and someone from your marketing team says like, Hey, we want to track it's just like Brandon said, this hashtag like, can you build this bot from scratch and build it in Logic Apps and like, you know, under six minutes
Brandon Minnick:easiest. Take the rest of the week off and just tell your manager you're still working hard. They'll be super impressed.
Chloe Condon:Work of my life shanaya bot took the least amount of time to make wild.
Pj Metz:I believe this bot actually has more followers than I do now. Actually,
Chloe Condon:it has the power to heal.
Pj Metz:It's it's got the feelings that you need to get through the day and it's it's three simple words that we all need to hear sometimes and and that's let's go girls, you know,
Chloe Condon:and we will be adding some features Stan specifically Letting the bot be able to give its opinions on if it can impress it match, buddy? Well, great question. The bot is currently a Twitter bot and it's on an Azure timer. So it's going off at the same time every day. But thank you for that feedback, we'll consider tweeting for different time zones, because everyone know, when it's time to go, girl,
Pj Metz:it's always time to go,
Chloe Condon:Oh, it's time to go. And PJ, gonna be speaking at an event.
Unknown:Yeah, so
Pj Metz:it's kind of crazy. These opportunities that I've been given, and it's, it's such an awesome, just like blessing to have this. So yeah, there's a Microsoft conference coming up on October 14, in fifth
Chloe Condon:is this year first conference,
Pj Metz:the first conference, the last conference I went to was in Boston, and it was for education. And it was March and I was like, oh, it'll be warming up. And that's a lie. Boston is freezing in March, it was for a Florida boy who likes to wear Hawaiian shirts. It did not work out well for me and my poor. But this is a conference called start
Unknown:dev change and excited for this one
Pj Metz:try really, it is very much about people who are looking to switch into tech and people who are sort of unsure where to start. And it's two days, the first day is a whole slate full of speakers. amazing speakers vogon code, you mentioned earlier will be speak I think I'm on a panel,
Chloe Condon:it was on our show, our favorite breadmaking developer will be on a panel.
Pj Metz:Danny Thompson is going to be on a panel as well. Um, there's all these names. And it's funny because I was looking through like the speaker list, and I saw like Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, like senior developer, senior developer and all these people. And then it was like, PJ Metz, English teacher, and I was like,
Chloe Condon:Oh, that's a mistake. It should say co creator of the shanaya bot,
Pj Metz:I'll need to update it. I think I need to ask them to update that.
Unknown:Immediately.
Pj Metz:creator, it means that I sat there and he was like so we do this and I was like, Yes, we do correct.
Chloe Condon:During pair programming is just as valuable
Pj Metz:I am the rubber duck in this situation. I'm so I'll be speaking out I'm giving a speech called confusion is the sweat of learning all about how important it is while learning something new to actually allow yourself and understand that it's okay and actually preferable that at some point, you're confused. So it's it's a small stage. All honestly, never, never get out of confusion actually just constantly wander around like a, like a just the ingenue just not knowing what's going on a little worried and tense. No, but um, yeah, when you learn new things, we have this expectation. In the world, it seems that if you get confused, that's bad, or it means you're dumb, or it means you're never going to get it. when in actuality, confusion is your brain, working harder to make connections that you need to understand something. So confusion is the first step towards understanding something. So the whole speech is about how important it is to persevere and how important it is to understand that when you're confused, you're doing the right thing. And you're on the right path. And it just takes a little time to move from confusion to a deeper understanding of whatever it is you're working on. Whether it's an app, whether it's learning to play a musical instrument, my sister randomly actually decided she's going to learn to play violin. And she sends me videos, sometimes she's like, I don't know how to do this. And I'm like, just keep going like that. I don't know. And do it till you do know. So often, that moment, the moment between confusion and understanding, we, we don't celebrate that moment, we simply think, finally, I'm done being confused. But that moment that spark, I mean, it's literally neurons making a connection in your brain, there's a literal spark that happens when you understand something. So the light bulb metaphor, it's not a metaphor, you're lighting your brain up when you finally understand it, and that that needs to be celebrated. That just
Chloe Condon:wanted to share this image PJ because I saw this the other day and I thought of your talk. And it says what growth really looks like I think I saw April post this on Instagram, and I felt this deeply. I even look back. So like the term growth mindset, which Satya talks about a lot in his book and we talked a lot about here at Microsoft is very new concept to me in engineering. And it's been really interesting for me to be bad at something because I did musical theater my whole life, but it was something that I felt that I had perfected. But then I think back and I'm like, hmm, if I had stuck with valet a little bit more, maybe I wouldn't be such terrible. I just was humiliated in Valley all the time. But I love this chart. It also reminds me of that one. That's like the iceberg of success where people don't see like the highs and lows. But oh my goodness, I've been in those engineering down ticks where I want to throw my device across the room. So
Pj Metz:I love that, that that chart, because the point where it feels like you're at your lowest is still higher than where you started. That's true. But it's that drop throws people off and they're like, I'm never getting back up there. You were already there. Once you're gonna get back there. That's true for for learning. That's true for mental health. That's true for for every facet of our lives understand that growth is not linear.
Brandon Minnick:Absolutely. And that's, that's something that I wish. And I'm curious what your take on this pjp being a high school teacher is that I wish this was taught better in schools, because when I was growing up, yeah, like when I was growing up, getting anything less than an A was bad. And so failing a class was terrible. That's the worst thing you can do. And it wasn't until I, since graduated, kind of joined the useful, say the real world. And that's where you learn that failure is a good thing. Because failure means you are learning you're making progress, just because you didn't get it perfect. The first time doesn't matter. But what I found myself before then I was scared to try new things because I didn't want to fail. And I think a lot of that, I point back or look back at my experiences in education growing up and just being taught that failure is bad. And so I'm curious, what what is that like in in high schools today? Is anything changing? Or is are we still kind of forcing that perfection from the students?
Pj Metz:There's still I think it's a cultural idea for a lot of people the idea that failure is something to be avoided. But I do believe there's change happening. One of the things we instituted this year at the school I teach at is a social emotional learning time, once a week, and students watch a video about some social emotional learning aspect. This most recently was actually a very heavy topic, but it was handled so gracefully. We talked about suicide awareness, the previous week was growth mindset. And it was about the importance of understanding that it's not about whether you succeed or fail, it's about whether you improve, and improving happens over time. So expecting yourself to be amazing and spectacular, the very first time is not feasible. It's ironic, one of the places that I see the I have to be the best mindset the most is going to be in the advanced classes in the Honors and AP courses. I have a student who very worried came to me and said, Mr. Mets, my grade dropped by two percentage points. I was like, well, all we had done was kind of like, kind of like homework questions like, Who's this character? What are they doing? What's their motivation? which is essentially for completion, like, so yeah, you had 100 in the class, and then I put a test in. So your grade went down to a 98. She was like, Yeah, what can I do better? And I was like, oh, kiddo. You did? Great. You got a couple questions wrong. I was like, you're really gonna hate the first essay I give you because I'm not going to be nice on that one. Um, but I stress and I and I tell students all the time, at least in my class, and a lot of the teachers at my school did the same thing, the importance of like, that didn't work. Let's find something that does. And keeping that line of communication open. So students know when something does go wrong, or go unexpected. They can come to us and say, Well, this went wrong, what can I do? And then we say, Ah, so here's your here's your learning opportunity. And even at the the AP Summer Institute, I went to the summer to every year AP teachers go to a summer institute where they review. Yeah, they review how to set up the class and how to make sure it's an AP class. They talked about giving students chances to redo things, because it's not about getting it right the first time. It's about being able to do it. Yeah. And if you're able to do it, by the end, it doesn't matter how long it took to get there.
Brandon Minnick:He's so willing to do anything. Yeah. As I said, I'm a mobile app developer. I've been making iOS and Android apps for years. And I just started dipping my toe into web and I made my first website last year welcome. Thanks to PJ's help, but uh, And I'm struggling. And it's tough. And little things that seem like it should be simple like I want this is an internal website just for Microsoft employees. So having that Azure Active Directory login to make sure you you are validated or authenticated as a Microsoft employee before he can come in and join the site. And these things that, like we're talking about earlier, we see these all the time all the time in our day to day life. And you're like, Oh, yeah, of course, that every, every website does that, that should be so easy. And I am still struggling with just little things like this. And it's, it's frustrating, but I know I'm learning. And that's, that's kind of my motivation for keeping on going. Because I could stop it where it is, it's good enough. It'll work for what it needs to do. But I know I can figure this out. And yes, I've failed probably five times this week, and my attempts so far. But instead of looking at that as failure, I'd now see that as growth, and I've learned things along the way. It's just those things weren't my final goal. So I'm still learning and growing. But I'm confident I can get there. And yeah, I love that PJ cuz that that analogy plays so well into my day job as a senior developer.
Chloe Condon:Absolutely. we all win, we all start we're all Terrible.
Pj Metz:Terrible for a long time. And a lot of things go
Chloe Condon:back to the the dancing metaphor, full disclosure, y'all. I'm a terrible dancer, I was a luckily a very good singer and actress. So I was able to make my career in musical theater off that. But I did a production of hairspray, where I was just thrown into the trenches, I had to learn a bunch of dance, I'm usually not really good dancer, but I was given this opportunity to like, show off my dance skills, and to really work hard at it. And all of a sudden, I was like, Oh my gosh, like, they put me in the front. Maybe I know what I'm doing. And I feel that way a lot with coding as well. Because I'm the same way with a programming language. I'll be like, I, I need to not do this. Like nobody needs to see me programming. See right now. And then I'll like, start playing a little bit more with it. I'll be like, actually, you know what, this is a little similar. Okay, um, bingum. So I think it can be I always advise folks, especially a lot of actresses that I know, now we're learning how to program. I'm like, if you get discouraged at the beginning, like don't let that deter you. Because like, this stuff is really hard. But like, it takes time for it to marinate, and to fully like, there will be that moment where it clicks. But then you'll also want to click out of the browser tab.
Brandon Minnick:Yeah. I'm done with this. And anybody, and anybody that says it's easy, or you just have to do this, yeah. Don't let them discourage you. Because the truth is, it's not easy. But when they say it's easy, what they really mean is, I've done this before, and I've already made those mistakes, and I can show you how to do it. And that's something I'm trying to remove from my vernacular is avoiding like, Oh, yeah, it's easy. You just go blah, blah, blah. Because whenever I hear somebody say that, what I don't know how to do it, it is it's like instinct, cringe. I'm like, it's not easy. I wouldn't be asking for help if you've done it before,
Chloe Condon:inverse of that to like, make myself feel better. Like when I am in a room and I feel a lot of imposter syndrome. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, these people know way more than me, I think, well, none of them could sing the entire score of Legally Blonde the musical on demand right now do every single part in on key
Pj Metz:part two of this show, which is Legally Blonde.
Chloe Condon:a benefit for girl to code coming soon, I just get it. Great. But speaking of passions, and specific things that we have interest in real quick in the couple minutes, PJ will do plugs but you have a cool poetry website because you were your poetry friend, and you tell us what to do.
Pj Metz:So poetry is my jam. I still write once in a while I actually went to a zoom poetry workshop with one of my favorite poets Shay Alexi. They are a poet out of Georgia, they write a lot of feminine centered poetry. One of their best is a poem called an ode to femme friendship the night which is, and you can read that poem on my website y and FP dotnet. And what why NFC dotnet is is something that when I first started coding, Brandon said, so people learn best when they have a project to work on and not just doing whatever the coding program or the teacher tells them to do. So what do you want to build? And my thought was, no one reads poetry except a bunch of poets. When I do open mics, it's the same 14 of us hanging out. And there's a lot of amazing modern poets out there. I'm talking like this year right now. People who are writing stuff that will just knock your socks off and I thought we We should be talking about these people, we should be talking about poets that resonate and are making modern pieces that are valid and interesting and that you're not going to read in your literature class. Because you know, you're an adult, you don't have a literature class anymore. But everyone knows Emily Dickinson. Everyone knows Walt Whitman. But I wanted to highlight people that everyone should read experience. So I created a website. And it started out with hard coded HTML with links to, to the poets and the poems. And then I turned it into a list using link. And then two days later, Brandon was like, let's make a database. And now there's a database that Brandon helped me to create for this website. So this has been like an evolution of my skills. And if you go, there's a random chance we did was like, we like finally gotten the database there. And we had everything encoded. And then we shipped it and like, we went to load it. And it was like, error. And Brandon was like, it's been four hours. We're just gonna revert to the old version, bring up your GitHub. And then the next week, we spent four hours making the database work. And at the end, I pulled it up. And I saw my website. I was like, we did it. Thank you, Brandon. And then I was like, it looks the same. Nothing's changed.
Brandon Minnick:spent eight hours. And it's exactly the same. It's like it was a database, but
Pj Metz:it is, you can see it on my GitHub messing around. You can see the website why NFP dotnet. I have another website that I pushed. I published it last night, and it's in CSS. Hell, it's terrible. with CSS Guys, if anyone wants to
Chloe Condon:tune in to do it for me, maybe. So tell us about your twitch stream where you online?
Pj Metz:Yeah, TV, backslash spins around. I'm finally coming back this week. I have been grading harder than I've ever graded in my entire life. And that's actually no small feat. For me, I'm usually very distracted when grading. I'll put it off and put it off. But I've actually been doing a good job. So I'd like to pat on the back for me and my my difficulty concentrating. But finally get back on this week, I'm going to try and actually make the website look presentable. And it is a website where you can get like, my resume and like, when I do presentations, the presentation itself will be available there and it's got links to all my social media and stuff. I don't even have a name for it yet. Right now. It's like conference resources.as, your website's dotnet or something? Close right off the time
Chloe Condon:taken.
Pj Metz:PJ's portfolio
Brandon Minnick:and this is this one open source to
Pj Metz:this one. Currently, I don't have it up on GitHub, but I anticipate I'll be putting it up soon.
Chloe Condon:What Days Are you streaming? Usually it's weekends, right?
Pj Metz:Yeah, Sundays at 11 o'clock is when I try and stream and I'm on there for anywhere between an hour to two I did it three hours one time. That was a good sexual.
Brandon Minnick:I love 11am. Eastern Time.
Pj Metz:Eastern Standard Time. That's correct.
Chloe Condon:All right. Well, we are at the final minute here. Thank you so much for joining us.
Pj Metz:This is you guys are the best
Chloe Condon:such a pleasure as always thank you for coming back and joining us and I think I have the the perfect way to segue us out if you don't mind.
Unknown:Let's go girls. Bye