Say Yes! with Harry Guthrie

Matt: 0:00

Hello, and welcome to the Router, the official podcast of the UQ computing society, where we explore the human side of tech. I'm your host, Matt. And today I'm joined by Harry Guthrie, also known as@guthers on Slack. He's a recent UQCS alumni, studied software engineering and has a wealth of experiences to share from traveling in Illinois, to China, to co-founding a software company Autop and everything in between. Tune in to hear about how saying yes to opportunities can lead you to exciting and unexpected places. All right. Hello, Harry. And welcome to the Router. How are you today?

Harry: 0:42

I'm well, thanks. How are you?

Matt: 0:44

I'm great. Um, before I start, I just wanted to get a quick intro from you about yourself, uh, what you do. Um, and what was uni like, I guess?

Harry: 0:57

Yeah, so, uh, my name is Harry Guthrie. Uh, I graduated at the end of 2020, so I've been graduated for five months now, I suppose. Um, I am a co-founder at Autop. I run the tech side of the business, um, and, uh, university was just sort of a series of, um, experiences. Uh, I just sort of said yes to lots of stuff. And that led me to lots of weird and interesting places. Um, I'm not what one would consider studious, um, but I still managed to go and do lots of really cool extracurricular stuff without having remarkably. Okay, great. Um, but yeah, so that's sort of, I suppose the TLDR of me!

Matt: 1:41

Very nice. Um, I guess that's a good philosophy in life, right? Say yes to everything.

Harry: 1:44

Yeah, exactly.

Matt: 1:46

Um, so I guess let's talk about uni, uh, to begin with a lot of our listeners, uh, current university students, uh, or have just graduated university. Um, were there any experiences that kind of stand out, uh, during your time at university? Um, I've had that you've participated in a research project overseas. Can you tell us about that?

Harry: 2:11

Yeah, so I went over to the States, um, as part of a, um, research group. Um, it was a joint research group between UQ, Monash and, uh, university of Illinois, uh, more specifically the researching the research group there. Um, and yeah, so I just, I mean, I was over there for a month, pretty much on the.no two months on the dot actually. Yeah, a while ago. Uh, um, yeah. And so we were simulating bee vision while we're over there and, um, that just sort of, yeah, I just sort of took a chance at uni and that sort of panned out and, um, I mean, what would you like to know?

Matt: 2:52

Uh, I, I guess we don't want to know kind of like, how did you find that? How did you, how did you get that? Like how did you end up being able to go to America for two months?

: 3:02

Yeah, so, yeah, so I mean, back to that sort of saying yes to most things, I sort of look at a lot of stuff like, Oh, you know, I might as well try it and see how it goes. And so what happened was I was in COSC3500, I believe it is the high performance computing course. Um, and during one of the sessions at the end of the session, or maybe the start, uh, Dr. David Abramson came in and just gave a talk about, um, a seminar series that was being run between the UQ research computing center and, uh, NCSA in the States, um, which is the national center for super computing applications. Um, and it was just like, Hey, if you're interested, come along. And he mentioned that there was the possibility of potentially doing some international research. He sorta thing, it was very noncommittal. Um, it was like a, Hey, that might be a thing that might happen. Um, but I thought, look, you know, he, David gave a bit of, um, a brief on different like seminar topics. And I thought some of them were pretty interesting. And so I went along to this seminar series that I think it was seven or eight seminars long. Uh, they provided us with food and drink, um, you know, like little nibbles beforehand. So, you know, poor uni student know, of course I'm going to go,

Matt: 4:16

Take all the food you can get right?

Harry: 4:18

Exactly. I'm like, Oh, I'm just getting a free feed. But, um, you know, they, they, they know their audience, you know, you get uni, you didn't say with the promise of free food, and then, you know, you're like, Oh, I'm actually interested by these topics. Um, a methodology, I think UQCS implement well. Um, but, uh, yeah, and so the topics were really cool. Um, you know, they were talking about, uh, the dark energy survey and like, you know, information coming in from these telescopes that is like on a massive scale and, you know, the sort of technical challenges behind transmitting computing and storing the results and all that sort of stuff from live. You know, you have like a 12 hour window where you might need to readjust your, your telescope very quickly to like pinpoint on a particular location in, you know, across, you know, um, thousands of gigabytes of data, but you need to be able to readjust within a few seconds, right? Like we're talking ridiculous scales. Uh, and that was just really cool because, you know, um, just some of the numbers that throw around and just sort of awe-inspiring amounts of computation. And I just, yeah, I thought that was really cool. And, you know, um, the work that NCSA was doing at the time, it was really cool and they did had a lot of different projects. Um, another one was about like in Cyprus doing augmented reality, uh, to show renditions of like old buildings. Um, and you know, like, so you'd walk around Cyprus holding up your phone and looking through your screen tablet with this sort of augmented reality scape around you, that takes the buildings that you're sitting next to you, but either refurbishes them all. Well, you know, I think one of the ones is they were, they put in the walls that were formally around, um, the city and, you know, just stuff like that. That's like, it's just really cool. It's, you know, non-business applied problem solving and it's, it was just really cool because it's, you know, as programmers, a lot of the time you end up in enterprisey sort of stuff. And I mean, I have to, but it was something that, you know, I thought if I had the opportunity to explore it, because at the time I was considering, you know, was research where I wanted to go. Um, as everybody, I think at some point things, even, even those of us without good grades, um, you know, we still consider it. Um, yeah. And so that was sort of the intro to that saying yes.

Matt: 6:38

Saying yes to one seminar series and you're suddenly on your way to, um, United States.

Harry: 6:43

Yeah.

Matt: 6:44

Were there any other opportunities that you kind of, anything that comes to mind from your uni days?

Harry: 6:51

I mean, there's the trip you and I went on. Uh, yeah. Uh, this is what I was going to, um, segue into. Yeah. You teach yourself up perfectly if you, if you would like to segue in,

Matt: 7:04

Well, yeah. So Dalian trip, what do you reckon to that? Can you tell us, I guess, do those, Oh, maybe I should intro that. Um, so to those who are unaware, um, every year, or at least up until, um, 2019, uh, UQ sent about 30 or so, uh, students, uh, over to China as part of a, uh, startup and entrepreneurship program for, uh, for developers and, uh, people who, you know, wanted to try out, uh, IT, or software engineering or something, and like in a bit of a like startup context. Um, so yeah, just jetted off to China for a month. Yeah. It was pretty fun. Uh, anything that stood out for you?

Harry: 7:48

Yeah. Oh look, it was, it was just sort of completely different to everything I'd already done. Um, I wasn't a lot involved with a lot of like the entrepreneurial side of the undergraduate thing. Um, and it was just, yeah, it was just really interesting because we, um, we were thrown very, very headfirst into like this experience and I don't think any of us knew what was coming for us, you know? Um, like I was probably one of the older people on that trip. Um, I think I was maybe second eldest and probably one of the most, I was fortunate. I I've, I worked in industry before I worked in industry before I even started uni only by a little bit. Like, I wasn't, you know, this isn't my second wind or anything. Um, I just got fortunately getting a job out of high school. Um, and so I had a bit more experience, um, but like the, the trick wasn't around, Oh, what can you build and how quick it was, Hey, we got two weeks to build something. And then the next weeks we'll like the business and the marketing of it and all that sort of stuff. Um, which is just really cool. It was completely different. Um, you know, and I think like they, they also did a lot of like lessons on like Chinese culture and like linguistics And, you know, like which was pretty cool. Um, you know, you, you, I didn't really, hadn't had, hadn't had much opportunity to do stuff like that beforehand. Um, so it was like a lot of fun. Um, yeah, like, I mean, a lot of drinking, um, every day we, you know, would, uh, go drink some, uh, from like one of the bars nearby and smoke shisha it was great time.

Matt: 9:37

Yeah. I highly recommend it. Um, I guess with these kinds of things, uh, it's a bit hard to say we recommend going on trips. Cause I think about every single person wants to leave Australia at the moment. Um, but, uh, I guess, I guess you'd say something like if you're given the opportunity, even,

Harry: 9:57

Even within Australia, I think like I only cottoned onto this really late in my university sort of tenure, um, which was longer than it should have been. Um, um, just go to things like there's a lot of opportunity. UQ invest a lot of time and money, um, into, you know, trying to promote students to get out and get involved in stuff. And like, you know, I I've, I've, I've talked to Nimrod from the UQ ventures and he's a really cool dude to talk to really lovely. Um, and you know, he's talking about like what UQ Ventures is just trying to do, you know, like by itself, um, you know, if you're more business inclined and I, you know, I didn't know that well, I'd heard of it, but I didn't really care while I was at uni. And I think that's probably one of the biggest mistakes I've made at uni was not actually getting more involved with like opportunities. Like, so not necessarily societies, sorry, Matt. Um, but like things offered by the university through it's like research groups and all that sort of stuff, just because there are opportunities there, if you go look for them. Um, and just when you see something presented itself, just going, yeah, let's do it.

Matt: 11:09

Yup. Sounds good. Just go for it.

Harry: 11:11

Yeah. I mean, I was also UQCS committee, um, I think 2017 now, which is terrifyingly long ago. It was around there. I can't remember the exact year. Um,

Matt: 11:24

Might've been 2018. Cause I remember seeing you in 2018.

Harry: 11:28

Yeah, I think my, I think it might've been 2018. Um, yeah. And look, that was a experience. Um, uh, we out, my tenure as committee member was interesting. Um, we had a transition of power midway through our run because, um, Taylor Manderson had decided she no longer wanted to be president, which was fair enough. Um, because she'd been at for a while. Um, so yeah, it was an interesting transition. Um, Cameron took over from her and you know, it, he, he worked his ass off for it, but it was very interesting because, you know, you sort of started with a foot down and all that sort of stuff. Um, um, although I think I might be misremembering. I think Cameron might have always been present, but Taylor was a committee member aimed with helping Cameron and then she dropped out of the committee general. I, I might be misremembering that slightly, but yeah, it was an interesting time, but you learn a lot really quick, you know,

Matt: 12:27

Societies are like kind of a bit of a roller coaster.

Harry: 12:30

Yeah. They're an organism. Yeah. That little thing it's sort of like the university group from hell, because, you know, you're all university students. You're gonna have times where you're busy as, but like UQCS is one of the biggest societies, if not the biggest, like, I mean, you know, if you discount EUS, I think maybe like we're probably one of the biggest, like definitely have the most active members going to shit constantly, you know, and we have the largest like social media presence, like with Slack, you know, maybe not social media, but you know, a way that if it's something that constantly needs to be moderated to some degree, 24 seven, I think at the time we would have, you know, somebody messaging the committee twice a week, different stuff

Matt: 13:15

And, you know, just random like things like that.

Harry: 13:18

And you know, the code of conduct, I think came out in our year, like that wasn't a thing. Or if i t, you know, like we created a lot of stuff that was very imperfect and has definitely been improved upon since, but like, it was

Matt: 13:35

A lot of varied work, right? Yeah.

Harry: 13:38

There's always something different and new to be done. And like, you know, um, there's a, yeah, it's a great opportunity to kind of learn about a lot of different and, you know, particularly being required to do lots of different stuff, you know, you'll have people who aren't public speakers who would be getting up and having to talk to crowds of 200 people because they're like, Hey, we need to run some logistics for hackathon tonight and I know what they are. So I'm going to be the one to say them, even though I don't particularly want to speak to a crowd like this big, um, which is awesome, you know, like you get pushed out of your comfort zone and you learn that you're okay. You know, being uncomfortable.

Matt: 14:15

Yeah. There's definitely been times I've had to, um, step out of my comfort zone as well, um, as a committee member. And I think it's a really good experience to just let you know, force yourself to it.

Harry: 14:27

Yeah. Would you like to share any particular instances with our listeners?

Matt: 14:32

Well, you mentioned something about, uh, having to get up in front of many, many people to make an announcement when you are not comfortable public speaking. Uh, that is a very common occurrence for me. Um, but you know what, that's what it's all about. And, um, I guess, yeah, even, even for me, those experiences have dramatically changed the way I, um, you know, deal with public speaking and things like that. Yeah.

Harry: 14:55

Um, you know, you said, yes. I mean, like, this is sort of like the, Hey, everybody go watch the, um, the yes, man, a movie now. Um, but you know, like it's, it's, it's an interesting way of looking at things like I'll try most things once, obviously there's things I won't do because they're unsafe or, um, I think are actually clearly wrong, obviously there's no way, you know, it's not like a blanket rule, but you know, if you can't think of a good objection, other than all that makes me feel a bit uncomfortable from a, like out of my comfort zone perspective, that's not a good enough reason. You know, like obviously there's a lot of caveats to that around safety and all that sort of stuff that I'm just going to brush past. Um, you know, but as long as you

Matt: 15:40

Can mentally manage it, and if it's something that you feel comfortable, you know, or maybe it might make you feel a little bit uncomfortable, but you know, something that yeah. It fit into your life.

Harry: 15:49

It's acknowledging that there's things that are going to make you uncomfortable, that it can help you grow as a person. I think there's a lot of value in doing that. And I mean, that's sort of how I've ended up in my current position. It's just, there's a series of saying yes and now I co-run a company.

Matt: 16:03

Yeah. Autop. Tell us about that. So you've gone from, you know, uni and, uh, I hope I'm pronouncing Autop correctly. Wonderful.

Harry: 16:12

Cool. Okay. So many people say auto-P, uh, and, um, so yeah, what happened was, and this is another UQCS story, um, uh, February last year, uh, a person with a Slack handle, Brad VK put a message up on projects. So one of the channels going, Hey, I'm looking for tutoring more or less. And I, I messaged them and I went, Hey, I'm interested. And, you know, I met this guy at uni, um, and you know, we, we had, uh, a tutoring session and, um, he later told me that that was my unofficial interview. Um, yeah. Um, so you know, like the classic story of, Hey, do you want to be my co-founder, um, listen up business kids. This is how you do it. So Brad is a very, very, very smart, uh, he has no, he had no technical background and had made like this sort of, Zapier no code solution. That was almost a person proof of concept. And that was sort of what I was helping fit a bit. And he went, okay, I'm going to need to learn how to write Python to add to that. Uh, Brad now knows how to write code in both Python and flutter and like, you know, connect like a flask API up to a like flutter front-end to like load API requests onto a mobile or a website. Like Brad has learned a remarkable amount, very quick. So business students learn and, you know, caught us into going to tutor tutoring sessions where we, you know, agree to help out. And I did a lot of, um, consultancy all throughout and like doing a lot of different sorts of projects, like, um, so it went from, Hey, I'll true to you to, Hey, I'll do some consultancy work for you, um, where I'll help build this pro product and project. And eventually he went, Hey, what if I gave you equity? And you charged less? Yeah. Okay, cool. Because I, you know, I, I thought the project was really cool and what, what it is around is we want people to be able to tell the full story that business. So you have sales and everybody knows how to track this sales and that tells you how much money's coming in. But when you're trying to train teams and you're trying to like produce good teams that focus on the right things in a lot of businesses, you have KPIs. So, um, key performance indicator. I shouldn't forget that that's one of the things to my business, but I mean, I always call it KPI

Matt: 18:36

Uh, no one remembers the abbreviations anyway. It's just you know KPI. Yeah.

Harry: 18:40

And so, you know, the KPIs tell a much more full story of how business runs. And so what we sort of did was how do we create like a sort of reporting platform that provides feedback and does all this sort of stuff. And, um, you know, that's just kept evolving and evolving and evolving. And like, I mean, we've got some really cool stuff coming out soon with like leaderboards and stuff inside teams, so that, you know, you get like gamification going and all that sort of stuff. And, you know, it's just been this constantly interesting roller coaster of what, how can we provide more value and, um, you know, integrate with other providers. So like, you know, we loaded sales dynamically and, you know, it's this massively interesting roller coaster of, Oh, is, you know, do we have money this week? Maybe? Um, you know,

Matt: 19:24

That's what starting business is all about, right. Yeah.

Harry: 19:27

Okay. And you have, if you're a startup and you have way too much money within the first few months, you've done it wrong somehow. Um, uh, but yeah, like it's been a very interesting rollercoaster, but it just started by, I was like, Oh yeah. Tutoring this kid that seems, looks like something I can do, I've got a bit of spare time. Um, and that turned into, Oh, I, you know, just thinking about things from another perspective, right. You know, I could have just tutored him and said, okay, good luck have fun. I'm like, Oh, but what are you actually doing? Oh, okay. Why do you need to learn this? Okay. You need it for this application. Cause I mean, I always found that I learned best when I had a particular thing to learn from. Right. Um, and I went, okay, why are you trying to learn code? Is there like, w let's okay, let's start to build the components of this, you know, uh, tool and, you know, have it do what you need it to do. Uh, and so yeah, now I, yeah, I have, like, I have a co-founder who has like some interesting amounts of architecture in the work in weird and wonderful ways, um, and fail often and wonderfully. Um, it's nothing crashes the system. That's the only important thing, you know, an API requests can fail without hitting the fan

Matt: 20:37

Silent or light failure.

Harry: 20:41

I found AWS serverless actually makes life remarkably easy. So it effectively spins up a Lambda instance to take care of the API requests as it's received. I see. And it's really cool. Um, and like, I mean, I'm, I'm not a dev ops engineer by like, I don't have any formal training. I've just sort of had to learn stuff because you know, you ever want to host a website yourself. You're like, okay, what do I actually need to do here? Oh, cool. I can spin up an EC2 instance that serves that. Okay, cool. How do I plug my EC2 instances to the outside world? And, you know, you run into all these weird sort of problems as you, as you do it. And, you know, um, so I've sort of cobbled stuff together. I'm not necessarily saying that's the best solution, but, um, yeah, like, so like doing a Flask API with several, this turned out to be really, really good. Um, you know, like we can handle thousands of requests a day and it's fine. You know, most requests are resolved in 0.1 of the second, um, you know, including making a database call and all that. So it's pretty cool. Um, surprisingly it works surprisingly well. Um, yeah,

Matt: 21:51

I guess if you have anyone who's here who wants to start up, uh, start a startup, uh, you heard him here first. AWS serverless. Yeah,

Harry: 21:59

Now, now somebody's going to do that and they're going to go, why isn't this working? And I'm going to go, I dunno, not my problem!

Matt: 22:05

And know they know who to go to for tech support now!

Harry: 22:08

I'd be happy to answer people's questions. If they messaged me on Slack, my handle is@guthers. Like if people are interested in like, like again, it's all my opinion, take it at your own risk. Um, but you know, like more than happy to like, go, like what architecture would I suggest? Like, I mean, you know, one of the most interesting things is tech languages like that you're writing it in and this is going to upset a lot of people. Cause it's disproved with everybody. It's irrelevant. What you pick it within, within reason, obviously like, unless you have like a very specific application and there's like some very clear like advantages, but most of the time it's just language fanatics and like holywars. Yeah. But like, if you like a language that's a fairly valid reason to pick it. Like, unless there's like an architectural problem there. And like, you know, we pick Python because it's the easiest thing for a non- coder to pick up. Right. You know? Um, and you know, so now, and now Brad's learnt Flutter out of that, which in my opinion, Flutter is really good. Like it is, I've used like Cordova and stuff to do like app stuff before. And that was like horrible. Um, you know, it's a breath of fresh air. Yeah. And, you know, Flutter Web isn't really meant to be used in production, but we do, um, I sorta just stay slow, but talk to you about it and go, no, you shouldn't use that in production. I'm like, yeah, you look, you're probably not wrong. There's a lot of issues with it still, but it means we have two languages in our stack, you know, SQL and that's incredibly valuable. And, you know, you can share code between your app and your website. And that's like also very important.

Matt: 23:53

No. Yeah. The whole, the whole like mono code based thing, like it was like a react native and there's kinds of like approaches. It's kind of like the other way. Right. You know, going from native to web, um, which is kind of cool. And I've, yeah. I had a lot of hype around flutter and, you know, um, there's plenty of people in the Slack as well, who would just even, um, you know, plenty of fanatics.

Harry: 24:16

Yeah. But honestly, I think flutter, there's some like getting your head around stateless and not stateless. Widgets is like probably one of the first learning curves. Once you get around that you can build so much really easily. Like, I, I, to be fair, I have a couple of like clauses that I use all the time that's like around, um, don't load this page until this API request has been made in resolved correctly. Don't do it. Just don't do it, you know? Um, and like having those sort of loading utils like those you make, you know, you make your abstract class does it. You've good. Um, you know, that's probably like the only bit that you actually have to engineer yourself, like to really make stuff up. But if it's like a fairly static website or app, you can build shit pretty quick. Um, and yeah, I'm sorry if anybody, under 18 listening to this podcast, but um, yeah, I mean, yeah, just giving shit a go, you know, it's, it's, it's easier said than done. Uh, and you ended up in some weird places, you know, um, doing contracting where you have like clients, like I need this thing by the end of the week and you're like, yeah, but I have an assignment then, so I'm not going to have it done by the end of the way you end up in some weird positions, but you know, it's experience. And you know, every, everybody who graduates uni has different levels of experience in grades. My grades were never good. I was better at building projects and doing stuff. Um, you know, and that's how I've always sold myself. And, you know, that's, you know, you can choose to be very academically inclined and that's a choice you make. And that means you get good results. But if you're not as academically focused yeah. There's, there's other avenues, you know, I'm saying this as somebody who did not get good grades and I did not get like an honors class one or two, I got a 3A, like I'll tell people that I don't care. You know? Cause that doesn't matter to me. I have five years of industry experience, you know, and even if you don't have five-year, that's like start as soon as you can build projects, find people, people need done. You know, I've done projects for research groups at UQ outside of that other thing I talked about, like just, you know, Hey, you need a solution develop. Cool. Let's just do it. You know, it's just saying yes and all well within reason obviously, but you know, get exploring possibilities wherever possible. Um, yeah. It's, it's, I, I definitely say it's well worth it.

Matt: 26:41

Maybe I should call this this, uh, episode say yes. Say yes with Harry Guthrie.

Harry: 26:47

Uh, Say Yes, comma don't blink, um, for any of my Whovian fans. Um,

Matt: 26:53

Um, well I guess is there any, um, any final, final things you wanted to say besides, uh, you know, to try and try everything out, any advice for those who want to start their own? Uh, well I guess this is a bit of a different situation. Cause you kind of, you, you joined as a number two, right. You know? Yeah. But, um,

Harry: 27:13

Yeah, look, it's, it's a hundred percent, you know, if you want to do more things and build more projects, there's nothing stopping you. Software is wonderfully amazing. You know, you have people in first and second go, I don't know where to start. It's like, fantastic. That means you built nothing, which means everything's left to build, you know, you're not overbuilding crud for websites yet. You know, you haven't had to do that yet. You haven't learned why that's such a terrible thing. Like PDF generation is a whole host of misery that you haven't learned about. You know, mapping is terribly complicated and time consuming. You know, you haven't learned why things are bad and why people charge once for them yet, because I haven't found a map, um, a PDF solution that doesn't really suck. Um, you know, and you know, you'll have LaTeX and that might be a way to do it if you, you know, but like, are you going to be able to deploy LaTeX onto like a windows machine that your client's running because you've decided to go for a desktop application, right? Because you don't want to have to host stuff, you know, you end up in weird positions all the time because of how you've chosen to go about stuff, you know? Um, and you know, like I would suggest that, Hey, the everybody's first websites or resume website, right. You know, you put up a website, pick a stack, you know, you can probably even do it for free. I mean, obviously you can do it through, um, GitHub pages for free. Um, you can also use, uh Google's Oh no, no. Google's Firebase. Oh yes. Firebase, yeah, that deploys Flutter code ridiculously easily. Um, that's how I host my websites for work, uh, for free, um, you know, like that works perfectly fine. Obviously if you're connecting it to more things and you need backend, if you have different problems to worry about, but you know, like there's nothing stopping you from spinning up a Firebase instance with like a flutter page that has just a counter that you click on, you know? Cool. You've learned how to deploy that. You now have that page up there, you know how to create a new Flutter project. And that's not that now, you know, like that's the, that's it, it's cool. You know? And it's like, okay, what do I do with it now? It's like, okay, I need a, a thing that I, um, you know, note taking apps are fairly constant, but that made you have to worry about state management, which is a second problem, you know? Okay, that's good to learn, right? Yeah. You know, if you want persistent state versus current state or whatever, you know, and th those are things that you don't know about until you get there and you go, Oh, why does this matter? How, how come when I refresh my page? I've I've redeployed. And it says, it's deployed. And I hit F5 on Chrome. Why hasn't my page change? Because Chrome is remembering your shit. And that sucks. You know, you need to change your page on Chrome. You don't know about that problem until you've run into it, you know, but if a client messages you going, Oh, this hasn't updated, then you're like, it definitely has. You need to understand why they're saying that, you know, the, and you don't know about these problems until you're there. And that's the really cool things. And that's what separates people who have experience with people who don't, you just don't know about these problems that actually affect real life applications until you're there. And the only way you do it is, and find that out is by doing it, like there's no course on, Hey, PDF generation is going to suck. Hey, you know, like nobody tells you

Matt: 30:39

PDF 1001. Yeah. I mean, yeah. So give everything a go, I guess.

Harry: 30:47

And you know, if you're especially first years, you know, you go, Oh, I don't know enough yet. Fantastic. Good, good. Yeah. Google. It you'll find out. And if it doesn't work the first hundred times, like your sh your website looks like garbage, it doesn't matter. You've got a website out there, you know, Oh, I spent, I spent a week figuring out how to actually deploy from five days. Cool. Now, you know how deployments work? You've learned something that is a marketable skill. It's something you could say to a recruiter, or w I, I taught myself how to deploy sites. That's much, and this might ruffle some feathers, but that's much more interesting than I got straight seven first semester, because I found most employers in my experience. And maybe this is based off and how I try to sell myself in an interview care more about your experience as opposed to your grades. And yes, grades do matter. Occasionally you have employees who cut you out. I've been cut out from jobs because of it, you know, that maybe those aren't the jobs you want. Um, you know, because typically people who are only looking at grades, uh, the people who are going to be your direct manager, most of the time, they're not the software people, they're the business. People who think that's what's most important, or that that's the metric by which they, they can most easily yardstick you on. Um, I think I'm pontificated for long enough.

Matt: 32:14

Nice. All right. Thanks so much for, um, sharing experiences. Um, you know, so it sounds like a pretty interesting journey. Um, and yeah, if people want to, you know, have a chat to you, uh, where should they contact you? Slack? Yeah.

Harry: 32:27

Just message me on Slack. That'd be the easiest. Right. Um, yeah. And I mean, if you're a company that needs a business analytics solution, I'll have my shameless shill ready. Uh,

Matt: 32:37

I will check the link in the description as well.

Harry: 32:42

All right. Thanks so much. Thanks for that.

Matt: 32:45

All right. That's all for today. Thanks so much for listening. Uh, as usual, our next episode will be out in a fortnight around midday on Sundays, uh, until then come join us on our Slack community at slack.uqcs.org. My name is Matthew Low and this podcast was created by the UQ computing society with gracious support from our industry sponsors.