[00:00:05] SY: Welcome to the CodeNewbie Podcast where we talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I’m your host, Saron, and today, we’re talking about how to create successful mobile games with Bria Sullivan, CTO and Founder of Honey B Games.

[00:00:20] BS: I did not know that I could even call myself a gamer because I didn’t play games traditionally the way that other people said.

[00:00:29] SY: Bria talks about her diverse tech background, deciding to dive into game development after years in web development and how she still feels like a newbie when it comes to game development, even with the massive success she’s seen after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:00:53] SY: Thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:55] BS: Thank you so much for asking me to be on this with you. I’m so happy to talk to you.

[00:00:59] SY: I’m very, very excited that you’re here. I think this is going to be a fun conversation. So you have a very decorated resume of tech jobs. You’ve been to a lot of awesome places. You’re an intern at Microsoft and then a program manager at Microsoft. And then you were a software engineer at Google. Can you talk about where your love of tech and coding began?

[00:01:20] BS: My journey, I’m realizing in later career a little bit different. I just liked science and math, and I did not know what to do with my career as a teenager in high school. And when I had to apply to colleges, I chose my major at random.

[00:01:38] SY: Ha!

[00:01:38] BS: Yeah. I found a list of good paying majors and they all seemed to say engineering, like nuclear engineering, civil engineering, all those things, and I was like, “I wonder what an engineer is.” Like I had no idea. I’d never heard that name before.

[00:01:54] SY: Yes.

[00:01:55] BS: And it was during the 2008 recession. So like job security, financial security was very important to me. So I chose computer engineering at random, and I did not know any coding. I didn’t even know what programming was when I first joined college. And I ended up going to a very good engineering college in California. And they shared that making mobile apps was part of what you signed up for. That’s like something you can do with engineering.

[00:02:25] SY: Surprise! Yeah.

[00:02:27] BS: So I was like, “Oh, that’s what apps are. I had no idea.” And so from there, I had all these app ideas. I got my first Android smartphone. This is in 2010. And then I went to Borders during the bookstore closing.

[00:02:42] SY: Oh, Borders.

[00:02:43] BS: Yeah. And I’ve got an Android development book and taught myself how to make my first coding project.

[00:02:50] SY: Wow! And this was all in college?

[00:02:53] BS: So this was my first quarter/semester, in other places they call it. But yeah, my first section of college, that’s when I discovered, but I was already in the major, but it was just something that I feel like happened to me instead of me making that decision.

[00:03:09] SY: Well, it’s so interesting because you were in the major, but you still went out and kind of ended up self-teaching anyway.

[00:03:17] BS: Yeah.

[00:03:17] SY: I think it’s really interesting. You’re like, “I’m going to get a book and learn how to do this myself.”

[00:03:21] BS: Yeah. It was just because I was impatient and I just wanted to launch something and I did not know anything. And it seemed like everyone at my school knew so much. Our 101 class, everyone’s like, “Oh yeah.” Like, “This is that.” And I was like, “What does that mean? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

[00:03:42] SY: So you went to one of the most prestigious schools for tech and engineering in California, California Polytechnic State University. What was that experience like for you, especially being the person that didn’t have that coding background, where some of your peers, maybe most of your peers kind of did? What was that experience of being an engineering major like?

[00:04:02] BS: Well, I guess it was hard, but I think my high school experience was also hard. Growing up as the only black person in all of my classes, I was just treated differently and treated in a way to feel like people always assumed I was not smart. And then going to college, it wasn’t really that different. There were just a lot less women as well, but I am the type of person to when people tell me I can’t do something, I really, really want to do it. And especially if I’m treated one way, I really want to prove that I deserve to be there, or that’s the way that I processed that environment. And I guess that’s what made me really strive to catch up and then hopefully even get ahead of where people are going and just maybe trying to find even value outside of class, because a lot of people were kind of technically trained already. And so I wanted to find value where it’s like, “Okay, I’m making products for the real world or projects for the real world and not just things for my school.”

[00:05:08] SY: Tell me what happened after college? Where did your degree take you? Where did your coding journey go?

[00:05:15] BS: I always have the plan of owning my own company, starting a startup or something like that. When I was even in college, I would often drive up to Silicon Valley and just introduce myself to people at like 500 Startups or different conf. I literally just walked in the door and would just introduce myself and just make connections. That was where I was set on going. I was very set once I graduated, I'm going to start a company, but I was still kind of interviewing because I was interning and stuff. I was kind of interviewing just to see. And then during my senior year of college, my closest family member to me ended up getting diagnosed with cancer.

[00:05:55] SY: Oh, I'm so sorry.

[00:05:55] BS: And that was like the end of November. So it was in the middle of all of my interviews. I canceled all of my interviews, the rest of them that I had, and then unfortunately she ended up passing away three months later. And so I just was a mess and it was hard to even do classwork and everything, but I graduated and I did very, very, very fortunately have an offer from Microsoft already. So I kind of just did that.

[00:06:20] SY: Okay, that’s good.

[00:06:21] BS: But that was not my intention and it wasn’t really what I wanted to do, but I was kind of just going with it because that’s all I really had the capacity to do. And then after going to Microsoft, it was still a lot of turbulence in my personal life. So it did also affect my work life. And so I just was not having a good time, I guess, like that first year out of college and in work.

[00:06:45] SY: And is that when you got the program manager job or is that a different role at Microsoft?

[00:06:50] BS: Yeah, that was the program manager job at Microsoft. And it was like a culmination of things that just didn’t really work for me and then also for a lot of people at the time. There were a ton of changes happening at Microsoft and then my personal life was just wild. I try to be transparent about this. I was not doing well at work, like I really was not doing well at work. I’d done program management in like a product perspective before, but this was data science and it was not something that I felt successful at. So I ended up just not doing well. And basically, I didn’t get fired, but they were like, “Hey, I don’t know if this is going to work out.” And so I decided to go back into a software engineering role and interview at Google.

[00:07:36] SY: So now I want to talk to you about Honey B Games. So we’re moving from Microsoft and Google to game development, which sounds like another really interesting career shift. How did you get into that? How did you get into the gaming space?

[00:07:51] BS: Well, I make games for folks like me. I did not know that I could even call myself a gamer because I didn’t play games traditionally the way that other people said, but I was playing games on my phone a lot. And then in my youth, I used to play a lot of online flash games, but it wasn’t until a friend basically told me, he’s like, “Just because all these people might not call you a gamer, like you play games every day.” And then it also opened my eyes to see that there are plenty of people who do that. There are plenty of, especially women that play games on their phone, whether that’s like a Candy Crush or anything, all the way to Genshin Impact that might not call themselves a gamer. And then I realized, “Oh, I can make games for people like me.” But I didn’t really go into it thinking I would make money. It was honestly just a passion thing and me just being kind of done and needing a break from traditional tech and startups. I was heavy, like obviously working at Google, working on a lot of different products and then also doing a ton of work with helping people get into places like Google and then like the startup thing, VC thing. And it weighs on you a little bit. And I was like, “I just want to make a game that I want to exist.” I feel like I just started, I just did a tutorial and just kept going and then I’m here.

[00:09:18] SY: Wow! And when did that happen? When was the start of the game development journey for you?

[00:09:24] BS: Only two years ago, February, 2020 is when I first downloaded Unity on my computer and did my first tutorial. I was doing it actually as a way to prepare for interviews for a regular software engineering role because I was ready to maybe look for employment outside of Google just to try something else and maybe go to a startup or whatever, but I started. I was like, “This is really fun. I think I’m going to quit my job and do this for however long.”

[00:09:55] SY: Oh, interesting. So when you decided that it was fun and you really liked what you were learning, was the thinking, “Let me go start my own video game”? Or was the thinking, “Let me go get a job as a game developer”?

[00:10:10] BS: I chose for myself personally because it fits what was going on in my life at the time, I chose to start a video game company with no experience.

[00:10:19] SY: Wow! Wow!

[00:10:20] BS: Yeah.

[00:10:21] SY: That is so cool. Okay. So I have to ask, what gave you confidence? I’m going to assume it’s confidence. Maybe it wasn’t. But what gave you the confidence to kind of say, “I’m not going to get an internship,” which feels like a logical, next thing to do if you’re entering a field that you’re new to, “I’m not going to get an entry level job, I’m just going to like build my own thing”? Right. How did you get to that place emotionally in terms of your head space of saying, “I’m not going to try to get more official experience first, I’m not going to try to build a resume first, I’m just going to just start building a game for myself”?

[00:11:03] BS: Honestly, I just felt called too. I don’t know if that's weird to say.

[00:11:08] SY: Interesting.

[00:11:08] BS: But I knew that I was ready to just do my own thing. I think I had done enough healing and then I also needed to be closer to my family and I was already moving home and it just aligned. It aligned with everything that was going on in my life where I didn’t have many responsibilities other than showing up for family and stuff, but that’s what aligned, and I was just ready to bet on myself and just feel like I can do this. Especially after working in startups for so long as an advisor trying to pour into all of these different startup founders and try to give them confidence and try to help them and stuff. But my cup was just empty after doing that for so long. And I was like, “How do I fill my own cup so that I can eventually get back to being in service to other people? I can’t do it from an empty cup. How do I pour into myself?” And I just didn’t want to work for anyone. I had almost lost my mom. She’s okay now. And so I needed to spend as much time with her as I wanted to. It really just put into perspective, like, “Oh my gosh! Career chasing and all this stuff is not what’s most important to me. It’s my foundation.” And I just wanted to spend as much time as possible with my family.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:12:51] SY: So the game that ended up blowing up and really giving you a lot of success I believe was the Boba Story, right?

[00:12:59] BS: Yeah.

[00:13:00] SY: Was that the game that you started with when you decided to quit your job and say, “Look, I’m going to build my own thing”? Was that the game or did you start in a different place?

[00:13:09] BS: Oh, no, not at all. I’ve actually just been making a lot of games. A lot of them you just can’t see. I didn’t launch them and I made them with other people or whatever, but as a learning process and also something that I got as advice from veterans, like people who have been successful in that game is to basically just keep launching games, don’t spend too long on them. Don’t make your dream game as your first game because you’re learning. After launching the public beta of Boba Story, I was working on another game and also even thinking about what the game after that is going to be. And then Boba Story started to gain a lot of traction. So I’ve shifted my focus back to that game. But even Boba Story is not the game that I eventually want to make.

[00:13:57] SY: Interesting. So even where you are now is not necessarily the place you want to be?

[00:14:01] BS: I mean I think that it’ll at least get me to that next point. but I’m honestly still learning. But I’ve launched three games on my own and then I’ve made five or six more, something like that.

[00:14:15] SY: Wow! That’s pretty solid.

[00:14:17] BS: Yeah. This is something I took away from my startup journey though, is iterating fast and something that I learned early on from a mentor. One of the first games I made, he asked what my next steps were. And I was like, “Oh, I need to add like a hundred more levels before launching this.” And he was like, “Well, you already have 25.”

[00:14:39] SY: Oh, that’s a lot.

[00:14:40] BS: Well, it was not a complicated game. It was not a complicated game at all. Getting through the 25 would only take like maybe 10 minutes. Maybe.

[00:14:51] SY: Oh, okay. Got you. Got you.

[00:14:52] BS: Yeah, it was very, very small. And he was like, “Oh, add analytics and launch this now. If you don’t know someone’s going to get past level two, you don’t need to add a hundred more levels. You need to figure out why people aren’t getting through the first two and also get from that that maybe that’s not the game to invest in. So maybe you should start working on different games and more games. But it also takes many weeks to get analytics in. So that’s also time that you can be spending on new games.”

[00:15:26] SY: Okay. I want to dig into specifically Boba Story, which has had a ton of success. But before we get into that, I want to hear a little bit more about kind of the journey on the way to getting there. So when you said, “I’m going to leave my job, I’m going to do my own thing, I’m going to launch into this full time,” what was that learning process like for you? How did you learn game development? How did you continue to learn over the last couple of years?

[00:15:55] BS: I think I understood what my capabilities were, which was not much. From the beginning, I knew that I needed to learn the tool first. I needed to learn how to use Unity first.

[00:16:07] SY: Right. Right.

[00:16:07] BS: My specific process is, like I said, I played a lot of online games before. I get a lot of my inspiration from games from like the early 2000s. So I make games about Bubble Tea, Boba, whatever you want to call it. What’s the simplest way of making a game about that? So I thought about a couple of games that I liked. One of them was this sandwich stacker game where things fall from the top of the screen and you have to catch then. So I first just tried to find a tutorial that seemed really, really easy that had something falling from the top. And finding that, I feel that kind of gets me always to the next step, like figuring out what that little tiny thing could be and what is the easiest, easiest version of that and try to find a YouTube tutorial. Everything has just been iterations of YouTube thus far. You can break everything down into something that is small enough for that.

[00:17:10] SY: So what were some of the most challenging parts of game development for you, especially things that maybe you didn’t anticipate or didn’t feel as obvious as you were actually building out the idea and working on the product? What were some of the hardest parts?

[00:17:26] BS: It was quite shocking to me that game development is so object oriented. Especially because there’s been such a huge way away from object-oriented languages in traditional software engineering. I think people are very averse to like a Java or a C# or anything like that because people seem to really love functional languages. But games are extremely object oriented and you have to really think hard about which object owns what. That was kind of the biggest shock for me because say you have like a ball hitting the floor, do you have the reaction? In the ball or in the floor? Which one is firing?

[00:18:12] SY: Oh, interesting.

[00:18:13] BS: Because usually when it touches, it fires a method, but which ones? Do you fire the floors? Do you fire the balls or do you fire both? So say a bunch of dirt comes up when it bounces, does that come from the floor? You know what I mean? It’s not easy. That was probably one of the hardest things. But number two is just not knowing the names for things. I can come up with mechanics or whatever, but very, very often I don’t know the game developer language around a lot of things. That has probably been a little bit of a disadvantage because I don’t have that traditional background where they teach you all these terms.

[00:18:53] SY: Right.

[00:18:53] BS: But what has kind of supplemented that is the fact that I have cultivated community and really tried to put myself out there. I build in public so every time I build a game, I say everything that I’m doing on either Twitter or wherever. So I don’t really hide much. And because of that, I’ll meet other game developers and stuff and then I ended up being added to a Discord with other game developers. And sometimes if I am like, “Hey, y’all, this is something that I want to do, but I don’t know the name of it to even understand where to start.” And one of them was like, “I wanted to, when a character gives money that it kind of has an arch, but I did not know what that meant, like what to call that.” And then someone, a person that I didn’t know, helped me by understanding what I was asking for and then very simply just sent me a YouTube video being like, “Oh, that’s called jump. I know that doesn’t mean anything to you saying jump, but I’m just saying that.” It’s just the fact that a lot of my pitfalls have been supplemented by meeting other game developers online.

[00:20:07] SY: So let’s get into Boba Story, which is a mobile game. It’s had a lot of success. It currently has over I think a million users on iOS and Android. Is that right?

[00:20:17] BS: Uh-hmm.

[00:20:18] SY: How does it work? What does it look like? What is the object of the game? Tell us all about it.

[00:20:23] BS: Boba Story is a mobile game, at the core of it just making cute Boba drinks. That’s kind of the very core of it. Making cute drinks, decorating a cafe. It’s a business management simulation game. It’s inspired by a lot of different games and a lot of different art styles. There is a story, I’m still working on it. The game is still technically a beta. It has been doing well, which I’m very, very happy about. And it’s still not even close to being done yet. So I’m very happy that people are already liking it with a game that’s not done yet. I get a lot of inspiration from Studio Ghibli. There’s a free course on Khan Academy, K-H-A-N Academy, on storytelling by Pixar.

[00:21:11] SY: Oh, cool!

[00:21:11] BS: And after my game that I launched in February of 2021 and I was coming up with a new game, I did that storytelling class and I learned so much. And I feel like that got me to at least writing the lore of this game to at least inform the foundation pieces of it. And I think that class, oh my gosh. it’s so great. I feel like everyone should take it. It’s free. Doesn’t take too much time and it’s really, really fun. So back to Boba Story, that’s how I got to where it is. It’s mostly about decorating a cafe and doing that, but there is a larger story.

[00:21:54] SY: About what?

[00:21:54] BS: But what people are loving right now is just the amount of customization and I guess the cuteness of the lids and the Boba balls and people love to customize. At least in my target demographic, they really love to have that kind of artistic expression.

[00:22:10] SY: Were you surprised at the feedback that the game got and the level of attention and success that it’s gotten so far?

[00:22:19] BS: Yes. Yeah.

[00:22:22] SY: Tell me about that. What were you kind of expecting what happened and what happened instead?

[00:22:27] BS: I’m very happy with Boba Story. The fact that people are liking it without having all of these extra things, I’m really happy about, and a lot of the initial downloads are just from TikTok. And I think that that’s also what’s been helping me is that during the development process, I would often go on TikTok and say like, “Go on lives or something.” I would get a lot of ideas from my audience. They were telling me all the things that they really loved and they were just requesting a ton of frog and mushroom stuff.

[00:23:02] SY: Ha! Okay! Cool.

[00:23:04] BS: Yeah. And I felt like I was getting a lot of that engagement, but I’m hopeful for the future of what it could even turn into. But yes, I’m very surprised.

[00:23:17] SY: What do you think helped it get so popular? Did you do any advertising, any partnerships? Was there anything kind of you did on your end to kind of help it along? Or what do you think made it pop so well?

[00:23:30] BS: So I did not do any paid advertising. Everything is a hundred percent organic. So while I was building it, I did have a TikTok to at least raise awareness. And I think I started talking about it on TikTok, like June or July, launched it the last day of September/October 1st. By that time, I think I had like 14,000 pre-registration or pre-orders or whatever. So that definitely at least helped me see what was working, what’s not, because I do have live analytics. So I can at least look at what was working and what wasn’t. And so consistent updates and the feedback was good or that I could actually take action on. I did do that. So I feel like just doing that consistently at least got it to a place where people were liking it after they downloaded it. But the super surge started in February and I still to this day have no idea why. I still have no idea why.

[00:24:36] SY: Interesting. Yeah.

[00:24:36] BS: But I remember waking up on that Monday, because I hadn’t checked the stats all weekend and being like, “Oh my gosh, 50,000 people just downloaded it in this past weekend.” Because I was maybe getting like, on a good day, I could get almost a thousand downloads in a day, but then it was like 50,000 a week. Oh my God! And then at some point, it hit like almost 50,000 in a day, like new people.

[00:25:01] SY: Wow!

[00:25:01] BS: I don’t know why that happened, but it has at least helped me get to know that Boba Story is something to invest time and money in. And so I’m going to continue with it and I think I want to take it to completion and I wasn’t sure if I was going to do that before and now I am sure.

[00:25:28] SY: Coming up next, Bria talks about the different factors that contributed to the success of her big breakthrough game, Boba Story, after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:25:48] SY: So when I think about the attributes of a game, it feels like there’s a lot of things that kind of need to work for it to be successful. As you mentioned, it has to be visually appealing, whether that means it’s really cool and has really great effects or in your case, it’s really cute and kind of pleasant to look at. It has to have levels and progression. It has to have something of a challenge. You want it to kind be addictive, maybe not like addictive in an evil kind of way. There’s so many little things that kind of need to come together to make it successful. When you think about your game, what do you think drove that success? What do you think got people so interested? I imagine the fact that it’s Boba, it’s probably a part of it. I feel like Boba was really blown up and taken over in the last like five years, it feels like. But what do you attribute the game success to? What do you think really connected with people?

[00:26:42] BS: I think it was really getting to know my target user before I used to want to make games for people that liked Boba, but instead I feel like I had to learn this after a few iterations of other games that instead I need to make games for people that like mobile games, that like Boba, and getting to know those people. And even just interviewing them and asking them, “What do they do in their day? What other stuff do they like?” By doing that, I got to at least understand what other things motivate them and what makes them happy and incorporate that into the game. Like even in the characters, my audience is very diverse in their ethnic backgrounds and in their gender and they love other gender expressions being shown, getting to know the things that they love, like what people are crazy about frogs in this. And I feel like there are so many games about cats and that’s kind of been done. And so I tried to just move on from that and see where people are kind of pushing toward. But I think the biggest thing is just getting to know them and making sure that they’re reflected and the things that they like are reflected have been the most successful for me.

[00:28:02] SY: Interesting. I love that you did user research. Whenever you’re building a new thing, whether it’s a game or an app or even just a physical product, you should always be talking to users and getting to know your customer. And it’s really cool that that was a big part of your process. That’s really neat. What’s the long term goal for you? Are you hoping to be a gaming studio that keeps kind of making hits? Is the goal to someday transition into maybe a little bit more of a predictable income and be a game developer? How do you kind of balance what you know about starting companies and the risk involved with your passion for games in terms of planning your career?

[00:28:42] BS: What’s kind of been a guiding thing for me, every time I’ve made a decision out of like “greed” or wanting money, it has never worked out for me. I joined gaming with the expectation I would not make any money and just purely out of the joy and not getting emotionally tied to the outcome. I would like to create a game studio, not even because I’m extremely passionate about gaming or anything like that. What I’m more passionate about are people with tech skills being able to create a business outside of the startup or big tech world or whatever, without needing VC or anything like that. I’m more interested in learning and even being an example of someone that was not needing the things that they always tell you that you need. Whether that’s like to be in a big incubator or you need to raise a ton of money, it has to be a billion-dollar company. I'm hoping that I just want to have a sustainable company where hopefully I’ll make more than I did when I was working for a big company. And then I also am not bogged down by being part of a thing that’s making things that I don’t think are helping my community or even potentially hurting my community. I’m trying to do this as ethically as possible with the idea that hopefully in the future, other people will be interested in starting their own. And it doesn’t even have to be a game, but just something to sustain themselves that might solve a problem that their community is facing. And it doesn’t have to be this huge saving lives thing, but just a small need and maybe a couple million dollars a year, a small company. And that’s my motivation and that’s also kind of my goal with this. Have a small team, well paid people who really love what they do.

[00:30:47] SY: So you’ve written in the past that you still feel like a newbie as a game developer, which is interesting because I guess technically it’s only been two years. It’s not like you’ve a decade of experience. So that kind of makes sense. But on the other hand, the success of the game that you’re currently working on is a lot greater than most game developers with a lot more years of experience. Can you tell me about that feeling, that newbie feeling that you get and what that means to you?

[00:31:17] BS: I love feeling new to things.

[00:31:19] SY: Oh, okay. Wow! I’ve never heard anyone say that. Tell me more.

[00:31:23] BS: I think it’s because I love the feeling of growing and I feel like a lot of the time when people leave their job, it’s because they feel like they’re not growing. And that was definitely true for me or growing in a way that I want to. And getting into uncharted territory is like practicing courage and being brave. And I sometimes want to exercise that because you recognize other people that have that courage and it’s like, “Oh, what if it actually did work out? What if I operated from the space of what if it does work out?” And usually when you operate from that space, stuff does kind of work out. Yeah.

[00:32:03] SY: Interesting. I love this idea of practicing courage. I think it’s a really beautiful way to put it. You mentioned that sometimes you’re still scared. What are you afraid of?

[00:32:15] BS: I think I’m afraid of settling. I’m afraid of not dreaming. Before, I was afraid of actually going for it because I was like, “I think I’d be okay with this.” But I had someone in my life tell me that’s older than me and share the thing that she would share with her younger self is to dream bigger. And I’m like, “Okay, am I limiting my own potential?” So I think I’m scared of limiting my own potential sometimes because I have the tendency to do.

[00:32:48] SY: I think a lot of people can definitely relate to that. So if our listeners are thinking about possibly getting into game development, I’m wondering what advice do you have for them? What’s your biggest piece of feedback, guidance for people who might want to break into game development and make their own successful game one day?

[00:33:07] BS: I would say don’t make your dream game as your first game. Do the smallest version you can think of and launch it within three months, tops.

[00:33:17] SY: Oh, wow! Wow! Only three months? Oh my goodness. It seems like no time at all.

[00:33:22] BS: Then you better cut as many features as you can to launch and get it into people’s hands as soon as possible because you don’t really want to waste your time with that. And then also no one knows what they’re doing. No one actually does. So just have fun with it. It’s so fun. And if you’re not having fun, maybe don’t do it. Those are the three biggest things. And just to recognize that it’s not impossible.

[00:33:51] SY: Now at the end of every episode, we ask our guests to fill in the blanks of some very important questions. Bria, are you ready to fill in the blanks?

[00:33:58] BS: Yes.

[00:33:59] SY: Number one, worst advice I’ve ever received is?

[00:34:02] BS: To write a bad peer review.

[00:34:05] SY: Oh my goodness! Tell me about that.

[00:34:07] BS: Or at least don’t write a bad peer review without having a conversation first.

[00:34:11] SY: Okay.

[00:34:12] BS: Someone else told me to do that instead of just letting someone know because that is set in stone when it actually goes to their manager or anything like that. Nothing happened, but it’s just kind of weighed on my spirit since then. And I feel really bad for doing it.

[00:34:26] SY: Yeah. Okay. I totally get that. Number two, best advice I’ve ever received is?

[00:34:32] BS: To dream bigger.

[00:34:35] SY: Number three, my first coding project was about?

[00:34:38] BS: It was a saving money and spending habits Android app.

[00:34:43] SY: I love how responsible that is. That’s such a responsible first app to build, saving money. I love it. Number four, one thing I wish I knew when I first started to code is?

[00:34:57] BS: Using concepts for kids to help explain the basics. I think I would’ve gone on code.org or any of those kids’ explanation websites. I feel like they do a way better job and they make it way more fun.

[00:35:11] SY: I mean, just the whole category of explaining like I’m five, right? Whether it’s like the YouTube videos that do it, the Reddit posts that do it, like wherever you are writing to children, amazing content. Just amazing content. So yes, I wholeheartedly agree with that. Thank you again so much, Bria, for joining us.

[00:35:30] BS: Thank you. Thank you. This was really great. I wish you nothing, but the best.

[00:35:43] SY: This show is produced and mixed by Levi Sharpe. You can reach out to us on Twitter at CodeNewbies or send me an email, hello@codenewbie.org. For more info on the podcast, check out www.codenewbie.org/podcast. Thanks for listening. See you next week.