[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 Linux with Courtney Wilburn, Engineering Manager at Elastic.

[00:00:17] CW: Regardless of whether your coding journey is hobby-oriented or you’re just purely scratching some kind of intellectual itch, you can definitely choose your own adventure with Linux.

[00:00:27] SY: In this episode, Courtney talks about Linux distributions, the pros and cons of using Linux, and whether Linux is something people should add to their list of things to learn after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:00:49] SY: Thanks so much for being here.

[00:00:51] CW: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure.

[00:00:52] SY: So before we talk about all things Linux, tell us about how you got into coding.

[00:00:57] CW: I’ve been coding in some way, shape or form for a really, really long time. I first started when my mom brought home a computer. She is a chemist and brought a computer home, to do work, and I immediately wanted to mess with it, see what was involved. And then we got a personal computer at home and there was this little book, Teach Yourself Basic. And then later on, I had opportunities to do it in middle school and high school, but it was mostly through basic that I first started learning how to code. And then I’m a huge Prince fan and I wanted to be able to trade show bootlegs for different Prince shows. Even though I was a kid and there were all these people that were adults trading tapes, trading show bootlegs, I wanted to be able to sign in, give them these forums, talk about prints, talk about music and trade show bootlegs. So that was one of the ways that I first started getting super involved with bulletin boards and coding for bulletin boards to different platforms that those things are hosted on. And that kind of got me deeper into just doing things as a hobby. I didn’t do anything with it in college and then decided to make a career out of it at a certain point.

[00:02:10] SY: Why didn’t you study it in college?

[00:02:11] CW: I ended up taking some courses in college, but I didn’t major in it. So I didn’t major in computer science. I majored in physical anthropology.

[00:02:19] SY: Oh, interesting! Why that?

[00:02:20] CW: Yeah.

[00:02:21] SY: That’s very different.

[00:02:22] CW: Yeah. It’s very different.

[00:02:23] SY: I don’t think I’ve heard of that one. Yeah.

[00:02:26] CW: I think this now gets called biological anthropology, but at the time I majored in, it was physical anthropology. So cultural anthropology studies cultures, past and present, and they do sort of ethnographic research and things of that nature. Physical anthropology studies the origins of humanity. So a lot of it is analysis of skeletal remains or people focusing on different parts of the human body that have evolved over time, like the lack of use for wisdom teeth or when people began to walk up right, things of that nature. So that’s what I studied.

[00:03:01] SY: Interesting.

[00:03:02] CW: I liked that it was like scientific and there was a lot in the field to discover. So I think that’s what excited me about it.

[00:03:08] SY: So how did you break into or I guess re-introduce yourself maybe to coding once you graduated and got that first coding job? How did you land that one?

[00:03:17] CW: I sort of ease my way into doing coding work. I was temping at a law firm and they had switched over to this very huge database system and they needed help in organizing the database system. They didn’t know how to manage all these SQL queries that they needed to sort of pull data. They didn’t have any larger sort of business intelligence system or anything of that nature to manage, like all of the legal files that were going into this huge database with cases and all these other sorts of things. I knew SQL at the time. I figured, “Oh, let me just start managing the database. Let me be a DBA.

[00:03:55] SY: Nice! Interesting.

[00:03:57] CW: And at the time I was teaching myself other things that I’d always had, like small bits of managing data, be a component of jobs that I had, but it wasn’t like a full-time commitment. It was like, “Oh, you’re managing this system or you’re building a website for this thing or you’re maintaining a website for this thing,” but it was never like a primary part of my job until I was fully a DBA at this law firm. And then I was like, “I think I like this. Let me freshen up some of my dormant coding skills and then dig into doing this as a career.” And it was after that, I got vaulted into leadership at a certain point in my early 20s.

[00:04:37] SY: Oh, good for you.

[00:04:37] CW: And then I was like, “I don’t want to do this.” I realized quickly that I was like so bad at it. And so then I pulled back and ended up going back to being an individual contributor and I worked in academia. I worked in healthcare, doing coding for research projects and healthcare research, helping build out large systems that dealt with healthcare, either clinical research or other types of research. And that was so fun for me. And then I went to the agency world and I started working at companies after that.

[00:05:08] SY: And you are currently at Elastic. What is Elastic? What do you all do?

[00:05:12] CW: So I think a lot of people are probably familiar with Elastic’s largest offering, which is Elasticsearch. So it’s essentially an embedded search inside of someone’s site. I think the most common way that people interface with Elasticsearch is probably the search bar in a lot of commercial websites. So a lot of ecommerce websites will use Elasticsearch for searching their site for a product. And that’s probably the most common way that most people are interacting with Elasticsearch, but it’s a lot more powerful than that. We have a large suite of tools. I specifically work in the cloud division. Our cloud product is probably the way that more people, if they’re going to be using Elasticsearch, that they come into contact with Elasticsearch is through our cloud product. So it’s available on all the common cloud providers, the most kind of cloud providers, people will use Elasticsearch or Logstash, which is another thing. And I think a lot of people talk about the ELK Stack, which is Kibana, which is the UI. Elasticsearch is the database essentially, and Logstash is for logging. So I think that’s probably the most common way that people are like interface with the product.

[00:06:22] SY: Yeah. Elasticsearch is definitely the thing that I’m most familiar with and I think a lot of people have probably used it and interacted with it and probably just didn’t know that there’s a company behind that.

[00:06:32] CW: Yeah. Yeah. No. Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:06:35] SY: Yeah. Yeah. Very cool.

[00:06:35] CW: I think a lot of people are familiar with it as a plugin, or if they’re doing something like WordPress development. It’s probably one of the more widely used and widely available WordPress plugins, something like that.

[00:06:46] SY: So you are an avid Linux user. Give us a brief overview of just what it is.

[00:06:52] CW: I mean, it’s an operating system. It was invented by Linus Torvalds, basically wanted to make something that was a little bit more usable than Unix. So it is probably I’m guessing the most widely used operating system at this point and it has a lot of different… like people who have flavors, distributions that have emerged since its birth and it is the way that people are interfaced with computers.

[00:07:20] SY: So you mentioned Unix. What’s the connection between Linux and Unix?

[00:07:24] CW: It’s similar. Linux is based off of Unix, if my memory serves me correctly.

[00:07:29] SY: So what was the first time that you encountered Linux and started to use it?

[00:07:33] CW: I first encountered Unix by itself, not Linux. In high school, I was at a program for kids that like to do science and math and computer things. The first time I encountered Unix and Linux essentially first used a Silicon Graphics Unix workstation to do gene sequencing.

[00:07:54] SY: Oh, cool!

[00:07:54] CW: I was helping a pathology lab that was doing right after Polymerase Chain Reaction, PCR, became more widely available and used in labs. It’s sort of busted the door open for rapid gene sequencing and to make scientific discoveries. So one of the things that I was tasked with doing was being able to output after some of these genes were analyzed, they needed to compute out all the amino acid genes for these really long gene sequences. And they didn’t really have anyone on staff that was like working in the lab that was like sort of…

[00:08:29] SY: Figure that out.

[00:08:30] CW: Yeah, to figure that stuff out. So the scientist that ran the lab just handed me a big book called “I Hate Unix”.

[00:08:37] SY: Oh, no!

[00:08:39] CW: Dropped it in my lap, guided me over to this Silicon Graphics Unix workstation and said, “This is going to be your thing, your project. You’ve got to figure out how to do this. You’ve got to figure out how to navigate this computer and help us so that we can map out all of these long amino acid chains. We think we’ve discovered a gene, but we aren’t a hundred percent sure. We need to figure this out.” I turned the computer on and there was just a blinking cursor and I was immediately intimidated. I was like, “How do I get in this? This doesn’t have what I now know as a gooey. This doesn’t have the interface that I’m used to interacting with to interact with the computer. How do I figure out what’s in here and what I need to do?” And then as an addendum to that program, they also needed folks who, and I don’t know why they use children for this now that I think about it, but they had high school students like myself at the time who were writing Perl scripts for online courses. At the time, people would go into these computer terminals and take their exams online, like in the grading system of these little thin clients and grading system would be right there so they’d have a test and they were having high school students write these things out. And so I first used I'm guessing it was Gen 2 at the time, this was late ’90s, desktop to code in Perl. I was just using a terminal at that point and writing these scripts so that people could take these interactive multiple-choice tests. And that was probably my first time using Linux.

[00:10:15] SY: So these days, we have a couple big choices for operating systems. We have Linux. We have obviously macOS, which is based on Unix. We have Windows Operating System, and those are kind of the big three. Back then, when you first encountered I guess it was Unix first, were all three choices still available or was that kind of the operating system to use?

[00:10:40] CW: I mean, all three choices were available, but not to the general public. So at the time, Linux and Unix were considered more of like scientific research based operating systems. They weren’t really super widely available for some random person. Certainly if you knew what you were looking for, you could probably find, burn an ISO to a CD-ROM and install an operating system, but it wasn’t something that was commonly done.

[00:11:11] SY: Why was that the operating system for science and academia? What made it such a good fit for that?

[00:11:18] CW: Its genesis was research-based. I think it was snappy. There were a lot of things dealing with computation you didn’t necessarily need a UI for, or if you needed a UI, it could be a very light UI. It had all of the basic tools to do computations. You didn’t really need a lot of the features that even that you’re seeing now on Linux distros that are built for home use, you didn’t need a lot of that.

[00:11:48] SY: Tell us about what it was like back then to work on those operating systems versus what it might be like today for someone getting started on Linux.

[00:11:58] CW: I think back then, I mean, there wasn’t really a concept of containerization or virtualization as much. I mean, these were not sort of common concepts. I think you could get what was called a live CD in the early aughts or the ’90s you could have it sent to you or you could build one from an ISO and then try out a Linux distro whatever your home computer is. If it was a Windows computer, if it was a Mac, you could pop that in and try it out. If you were using something that had a gooey, you certainly felt like there was a difference in how it worked. It felt like something different. You had to understand the concept of package managers, which is something that a casual home user of a computer would not, you don’t really have to care about. There were a lot more things that in the beginning, if you’re using a Linux distro that you have to care about, that you have to understand in order to make it make sense, you can’t just get up and go. I think now because the point of computers for a lot of people, because of their ubiquity is just to get on the internet, back then that wasn’t the point of having a computer. Your relationship to a computer was a little bit different. If you had a home computer, you thought of it more of like an appliance. It was like akin to a refrigerator or something like that. You kept it for a long period of time. Hardware was really expensive. I mean, it’s expensive again for other reasons, but the hardware was expensive. So if you went into a particular operating system, you wanted something that you could patch yourself. It takes a lot more personal maintenance if you were digging into doing Linux. Obviously now there were distros that take a lot of that guesswork out, but to get to the point where you can do things casually with Linux, it takes a lot longer than a lot of the other operating systems where things are sort of named semantically or check your email, it says mail or something of that nature. It wasn’t really like that. You had to figure out how to do everything.

[00:13:55] SY: You mentioned earlier that there are different as you put them flavors of Linux, also known as distributions, also known as just distros for short, what are the differences between them? And frankly, why do we need different flavors? Why not just have the one operating system and have everyone use that?

[00:14:15] CW: I mean, there are different flavors because they serve different purposes. I mean, some are better suited for computers with all their hardware. So they are written in a way that can accommodate a variety of different types of hardware that the operating system is going to be installed on. Other times people are looking for the ability to maybe customize their user interface a little bit more. Sometimes people, they have a specific purpose for what they’re using their operating system for and that particular flavor or distro comes bundled in with some of the things that they would need right off the bat. But I mean, I try to think of it as like a shoe store. Shoes have different purposes. They come in different sizes and shapes. Obviously, it would be easier if everyone just wore a simple pair of multi-functional shoes, but there are going to be times when you need a work boot versus a high heel. And even with high heels, there are people that are going to have their opinions on how they want their high heels to be. So you’re going to have someone getting a Louis Vuitton versus a Manolo Blahnik. They’re going to look different. And much like that, people come up with different ways of packaging software, it will come up and distributing that and enabling people to install it. People are writing different kernels, different underlying bits of architecture in the operating system. So people have different opinions about how it should be structured and they’ve built their distro based on those. They’ll use those thoughts.

[00:15:46] SY: Yeah. That makes sense.

[00:15:46] CW: And that’s how you get all those different distros.

[00:15:48] SY: So what is your favorite? What do you use?

[00:15:51] CW: On a regular basis, I mean, I’m mostly coming into contact with something via a container right now is how I’m mostly using. For home computers, I use Macs. So that’s based off of BSD Unix long, long ago. But if I was just going to put an OS on an old computer and I wanted something that I knew was likely going to work, it would probably be Lubuntu or Linux Mint, it would probably be a choice between one of those two.

[00:16:18] SY: Okay.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:16:37] SY: So I want to talk about two use cases. There’s kind of maybe the average consumer, the person who mostly uses their computer for the internet, maybe some Zoom calls and a couple of applications, but kind of your average consumer not doing any heavy research or math and number crunching. And then there are developers, right? People who are a little bit more hands-on with their machines and their computers. So if you are an average consumer, not a developer, is there a reason or a benefit to using Linux over things that I think are maybe a little easier to use, a little bit more user-friendly like Mac or Windows? Is there a benefit or a use case for Linux that makes sense for that demographic?

[00:17:19] CW: I would say if that person is like the casual user has a computer that they intend to hang onto for a long period of time because of the cost of buying a new computer, I would say that would probably be the most common use case. It’s not terribly difficult for there to be a Linux distro that has the capability. If they’re just getting on the internet, all they need to do is the internet and Zoom, you could do that from whatever the latest stable Ubuntu flavor is and be totally fine. I mean, a lot of people use Chromebooks and Chrome OS, if my memory serves me correctly is a Linux flavor. So if all you’re doing is surfing the internet, maybe looking at an attachment or two, there’s absolutely a use case for that. I think going into when I first learned about Linux and things being free and available, it was certainly my hope that this was going to democratize the ability for people to be able to hang on to maybe aging hardware and still be able to do the things that other people are doing with the internet, whether that’s watching a movie or emailing people or staying in touch with people via video, what have you, I was really hopeful for a long period of time that there would be more distros that would be available to people so that they can participate in interactions that are increasingly have gone digital rather than in in-person and just be a part of the exchange of information.

[00:18:48] SY: And what about developers? One of the first questions that we get from people at the very beginning of their journey is, “What computer should I get? What operating system? What toolset should I have ready to start this coding journey? So again, picking from Mac, Windows, Linux, is there a reason, is there an advantage to picking Linux or would you recommend people kind of pick something different?

[00:19:10] CW: I mean I guess it depends on what they’re looking to do. If they really want to get in the weeds and learn how to set up their computer to their exact specifications and really want to get in the weeds, so to speak, I think Linux is a fine choice. A lot of the information that’s out there if someone is getting started by themselves, doing self-starter, doing online courses or something of that nature, it’s pretty easy to find resources for someone to learn how to do something with the installing, what they need to install. It’s easy to do that on a Linux OS. And I think sometimes, especially if someone is pivoting in their career, if they don’t have a Mac, I think the barrier of entry to buying a Mac, the cost, it can be cost prohibitive. Dropping $4,000 on a computer is not something that like everyone can do. And if they have a Windows computer, a lot of the online tutorials to me seem infinitely more complicated than the tutorials for installing a suite of programs or even just getting set up on a Linux machine.

[00:20:16] SY: What are some of the things that Linux is really great at as an operating system? Where does it really shine?

[00:20:22] CW: I would say speed. If you’re looking to do something quickly, like for developer tools, once you get an understanding of what package manager you’re using, you can typically just throw in a couple of commands for like developer tools, say like, like YUM Install, if you’re using Red Hat, it’ll automatically install sort of almost everything you would need to sort of, if you’re really wanting to do some web development specifically, you would have a lot of what you needed installed right off the bat, and that’s pretty cool.

[00:20:55] SY: Anything else?

[00:20:56] CW: The licensure cost is pretty low and the fact that you can get distros available for aging hardware and install it without too much trouble. So if someone’s getting started and the only spare computer they’ve got is maybe not quite fresh, maybe the laptop seen better days, you can get started and install what you need in terms of text editor, installing some of the basic tools for developing, an IDE, a text editor, all these things are pretty widely available and easy to find. You don’t necessarily have to pay licensure for that. So if you are pivoting or you’re a hobbyist, you want to figure out if this is something that you want to do. The barrier to entry to me seems a lot more.

[00:21:43] SY: What about when it comes to security? Is Linux particularly good at that?

[00:21:46] CW: I mean I don’t think any operating system in particular is impervious to being compromised. I think it’s more security through obfuscation, like someone who’s seeking to compromise a set of systems is going to go where people are. So if you’re talking about personal safety, it’s security throughout obfuscation. No one’s going to be out there looking for Linux users to try to compromise their personal computer. But when you’re talking about people who are looking to compromise large systems, obviously they know that the computers that are running ecommerce, banking systems, et cetera are more than likely not going to be Windows computers. They’re more than likely not going to be Macs either. They go where the fun is so to speak. And so I don’t think there’s necessarily a security advantage. I think it just depends on the context really.

[00:22:39] SY: Yeah. One of the other feelings I’ve always had about Linux is that it feels more customizable than the other operating systems. I don’t know if that’s the right way to describe it, but kind of feels like you have more control. I think the downside of that is you have so much control, sometimes you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you know what you're doing, you have a lot of flexibility to really create exactly the environment and exactly the operating system that you want to. Is that true? Is that how you think about it?

[00:23:10] CW: Yeah, you can make of it what you want. Right? Even if you’re using Ubuntu, you can pick which UI type you’d like. You can customize all of that. You can go as deep as you would like to go or not go as deep if you don’t want to. And it is very customizable. Like you said, there can be like a paradox of choice, right? You’re presented with so many options you either are paralyzed by the number of choices that you have or you get yourself into a sticky situation because you’re like, “Oh, wait, I didn’t mean to do that. Why am I choosing file systems? What is this?”

[00:23:48] SY: “Why am I doing this?”

[00:23:49] CW: Yeah. “Why am I doing this? Well, I don’t know if this is better. Is this better?”

[00:23:53] SY: Yeah. Yeah. So what do you recommend for people who are just getting started with coding? Is Linux something that they should kind of add to their list of things to learn? Is it kind of an optional nice to have? Where do you see it in the curriculum of people learning to code?

[00:24:09] CW: I would say yes at this point, because if the purpose of your coding journey, regardless of whether your coding journey is hobby-oriented or you’re just purely scratching some kind of intellectual itch, you can definitely choose your own adventure with Linux. If your journey is because you want to shift gears in your career, you would like to work in tech, most of the stack that people are going to be using is going to involve a flavor of Linux, like for the most part. If some product, whether it’s oriented toward the internet or you’re purely doing systems work, you’re going to likely encounter Linux and it would make sense to get an understanding of basics, how it works, how to find something. A lot of the basic commands crossed at Linux distros are the same or they’re very similar. Package managers differ across distros, but knowing the basics and knowing how to get around is essential I think at this point, if you want to get deeper into the coding journey and especially if you want to do something in your career.

[00:25:18] SY: Coming up next, Courtney talks about the general perception that Linux is something that is intimidating and not user-friendly and whether that is valid after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:25:39] SY: I feel like there’s this common perception that Linux is really scary and intimidating and not very user-friendly. Is there truth to that?

[00:25:48] CW: I mean I guess it depends on how you’re encountering it. I mean I think if you’re going into it the way that I first did when I saw a Unix workstation and turned it on, there was just a blinking cursor, absolutely.

[00:26:01] SY: That sounds amazing.

[00:26:02] CW: Yeah.

[00:26:03] SY: Yeah.

[00:26:03] CW: Because you don’t know where to start. But if you’re talking about someone using a computer with a gooey, with a user interface, especially with the way that a lot of the user interfaces are designed, if you have any baseline experience with any operating system, you can figure out what you want to do, like relatively easy. You can figure out like, “Okay, there’s a browser on here. There’s a text editor on here. There’s maybe something to manage documents if I’m choosing to write documents in some kind of format.” You can figure out what you want to do pretty easily. I feel like Linux has a tight association with research, with universities, with science, kind of makes it intimidating, but I think the barrier to entry is mostly perception at this point.

[00:26:45] SY: What is the Linux community like? What’s been your experience kind of hanging out with people who enjoy Linux as much as you do?

[00:26:54] CW: I mean, it’s a lot like a lot of other open source communities. You get the people that have lots of opinions about how things should be done and how things should look. They have strong preferences about perhaps what distro they’re using, what gooey they prefer to use on that distro, et cetera. You get a lot of strong opinions, but still a welcoming sort of vibrant community and that I think a lot of people want to help expand knowledge of it generally, at least in my experience.

[00:27:28] SY: What do you think we can do to make Linux more accessible to folks out there? You mentioned that a lot of the intimidation is more perception than reality. Do you think it’s a marketing campaign that we kind of need to tell people like, “Hey, it’s maybe not so difficult”? Or are there other things we can do to kind of lower that barrier to entry?

[00:27:48] CW: I think, I mean, this may be a bit of a stretch in terms of a metaphor, but I think one thing that people can do is sort of understand that in some way, shape or form they’re probably already using Linux.

[00:27:59] SY: Yeah, that’s a good point.

[00:27:59] CW: And understand that it’s not very scary, just in the way that people have brought about other types of understanding, be it like social awareness of different issues. You can say that someone who’s not like me lives next door or something like that, but you can also say with regards to Linux, you can say, “Oh, all of these things that I use actually have a Linux operating system.” If someone has say a smart fridge or they’re using a tablet of some kind, it likely is running some distro, some embedded operating system. If they’re on a plane, I remember I was flying to Germany at the end of 2019 and the in-flight programming on the little televisions got messed up and it got stuck in a boot loop and I noticed that it was running a Linux distro. So all these things that people are using, smartwatches, smartphones, likely running some Linux distro, tailored to the thing that they have and letting people know that if like sound scary, you’re using your refrigerator every day, you’re using your mobile device every day, your smartphone, it’s got Linux on it. Perhaps it’s not as scary as you think.

[00:29:10] SY: What are some tangible things that people who are curious about Linux who maybe want to see if they can get started, learn about it, what are some things they can do to take their first step into that world?

[00:29:21] CW: I think one of the first things that people can do if they hear something about it is to do a little bit of research and then more than likely, because it’s the most popular people will hear about Ubuntu, find a flash drive, pop it in, get an ISO, put it on your computer, browse around, see what it looks like, read up on what’s involved, understand maybe what a package manager is and what it means to install software in that way. Maybe understand that the Mac that so many people enjoy is a distant cousin.

[00:29:52] SY: Yeah. That’s right, they’re related. That’s right.

[00:29:55] CW: Yeah. You can find what you need. There’s plenty of online courses and tutorials that will run through the basics of learning.

[00:30:08] SY: Now at the end of every episode, we ask our guests to fill in the blanks with some very important questions. Courtney, are you ready to fill in the blanks?

[00:30:14] CW: Sure.

[00:30:16] SY: Number one, worst advice I’ve ever received is?

[00:30:19] CW: Not negotiate salary. So not do a salary appreciation. That’s some of the worst advice I’ve ever received.

[00:30:26] SY: Yeah, that is good worst advice. Number two, best advice I’ve ever received is?

[00:30:32] CW: To find a community. And for me, initially, it was in the context of, I am queer, and so it was in that context. But when I think about sort of my coding journey and pivoting away from thoughts of all these different things that I wanted to do to going into coding full-time, it was finding a community of people that were supportive, whether that’s people who are also in a similar boat to you or it’s people who just want to be supportive of you. Find that community. And there are lots of online communities and things now of people who are maybe underrepresented or who are pivoting in their careers or who are new. Be in community with those people and share resources and build each other up and encourage each other. So that was definitely the best advice that I received for sure.

[00:31:20] SY: Love that. Love that. Number three, my first coding project was about?

[00:31:25] CW: So long ago. I’m guessing it was likely a primitive basic and it was like a Hello World in basic. It was probably the first thing that I did. The first time I did something in HTML was probably the most gratifying. I think I first started coding in HTML in maybe 1994 or ’95 and seeing the first webpage I made and I was using Netscape, that was pretty exciting.

[00:31:50] SY: Yeah. When you just see it come to life, it’s still an amazing feeling to me.

[00:31:55] CW: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[00:31:56] SY: Number four, one thing I wish I knew when I first started to code is?

[00:32:00] CW: That you’re going to be new to something forever.

[00:32:03] SY: Tell me more about that. Yeah.

[00:32:04] CW: Some concept is going to be new to you forever. I mean, there’s always more to learn. You’re not going to have all the answers and research is being a part of that and then being wrong sometimes or messing up is also a part of that. Something’s going to be new and you’re going to encounter something new. So be open to that new experience.

[00:32:26] SY: Thank you again so much, Courtney, for joining us.

[00:32:28] CW: Oh, thanks for having me.

[00:32:36] 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. Join us for our weekly Twitter chats. We’ve got our Wednesday chats at 9 P.M. Eastern Time and our weekly coding check-in every Sunday at 2 P.M. Eastern Time. For more info on the podcast, check out www.codenewbie.org/podcast.