Career Fitness, Hiring, and Interviewing in 2025 with Daniel Johnson

Dan (00:00) I can look back over a number of different people that I’ve hired. and I can immediately think of the first or the most important reason for why I hired them. It’s never, well, they did a really good job writing a recursive function, or they did a really good job with kind of.

designing YouTube in 45 minutes, right? That’s never the thing that I remember. It’s always something else. So why isn’t more of the interview process focused around those other things that actually matter?

Maxi Ferreira (00:20) Mm-hmm.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Frontend FM podcast. My name is Maxi Ferreira and my guest today is Daniel Johnson. Dan is an engineering leader who has been working in tech for the past 20 years. He currently works as a software engineer at Netflix. You can usually find him online writing about career fitness and navigating the changing landscape of software development. Daniel, it’s an honor to have you here. How are you?

Dan (00:55) I’m doing well. How are you? Thank you for having me.

Maxi Ferreira (00:57) I’m doing, I’m doing pretty well. I’m doing pretty well. I am looking forward to our chat today. We’re going to be talking about interviewing in 2025. We’re going to talk, we talking about hiring, which is a topic that I know it’s top of mind for a lot of people. So I’m really looking forward to, our discussion. But before we get to, into, into that, I would love to learn more about you. You’ve been working in tech for, for over 20 years. Can you give us an introduction of how you got started and what led you to.

your current role at Netflix.

Dan (01:28) Yeah, of course. I think my journey started like many that have listened to any podcast where I was in high school. You know, I went to school up in Vermont at a little tiny school where there wasn’t much to do at night other than homework. And I didn’t really enjoy doing homework. So I had a hobby of building websites. later on, you know, started off college as a pre-med, wanted to go into athletic training. I realized, you know, a year and a half or so in that it wasn’t for me.

I bounced around through a number of different majors, marketing, business, music even, and finally just dropped out and realized I had no idea what I was doing. Around that same time, I realized I was going to be a And so my profession at the time was teaching skiing and working in bike shops. And that didn’t seem like a very good way to support a family. And so I wondered, well, maybe people will pay me to build websites for them.

So went around through a lot of my parents, friends, businesses, just basically anybody who would talk to me about websites and whether it allowed me to build one for them or to make some changes. And so that’s really how I got started. There’s a lot of back then going to Barnes and Noble, buying books on programming, kind of book in one hand, computer in another, trying to learn what was there. And eventually got my first quote unquote real job at Staples at their corporate office.

And I’ll tell the story of that interview a little bit later, as I think it’s very different from how interviews are done today. But from Staples, that’s really where I learned how to actually program. I took a lot of their old ASP applications and ported them over to what at the time was kind of new, fancy PHP. And that really gave me a good education in looking through a large legacy code base and trying to figure out how it works to then be able to rewrite it in a different language.

From there, I went through a number of different web agency slash ad firm type companies. I always thought that I wanted to be a web developer and slash designer. But the more time I spent doing it, the more time I realized that programming came easier to me than design did. So eventually, I just switched over to really focusing on engineering. Eventually, I went back to school, got a degree.

Maxi Ferreira (03:38) Hehe.

Dan (03:40) But I think an interesting career event for me was in 2009, I started teaching programming and was not qualified for this, was not ready for it. Found the opportunity on Craigslist of all places and started teaching programming. Back then it was mostly JavaScript, Flash, some PHP. And really, I think that’s the thing that’s opened up lot of doors for me throughout my career.

which I can again talk more about later. So from there, I of followed, I guess, the traditional path from the engineering manager to tech lead to engineering manager, senior manager, director, and kind of went down that normal kind of, you IC to people management path. Was in management roles for seven or eight years and got to the point where I just really wasn’t enjoying it as much. And so the role prior to my current one,

I switched from an engineering manager back to an IC and just found that A, I hadn’t forgotten how to code, which was great, and B, I really enjoyed doing it. So when that role came to an end, I found my current role at Netflix as an IC, it was kind of early COVID times. So everything was remote. Interview was completely remote. Auto-boarding was remote. And I kind of joined as one of the first cohorts of people working for Netflix as engineers remotely.

Maxi Ferreira (04:53) Mm-hmm.

Right. Yeah. Now, thank you for sharing that. You’re making me think that one of the things that I’m more grateful for this career that we have is that we have this option of swinging back to being an IC after spend some time in management. think the fact that we have that flexibility and that opportunity is one of the great things about working in tech. So I’m glad that you’re in this role now, you’re finding that you enjoy it.

And yeah, when you mentioned something about your interview, we got your first job and we just probably a lot of, yeah, it’s very different to how things are right now. Like how things are right now, I imagine are very different to how they were three years ago, let alone 20 years ago. So can you talk about how, what do you see as someone who interviews a lot of people? How do you see the interviewing process has changed over the past 20 years?

Dan (05:58) Yeah, so that first job that mentioned at Staples, the interview process for that was similar to if you’re taking the written test for your driving license. So it was through a recruiting firm. So basically went to their office in person. They had a little back room with a couple computers and they basically sat down to do kind of like a code trivia test for an hour. And their determination of whether or not you were kind of worthy to interview with their companies was based on that test.

You don’t see that a lot today, but it was an interesting way to start off. And I’ve been thinking a lot about all the different types of interviews that I’ve, I guess, both done as a candidate as well as an interviewer over the last 20 years. And I actually did a post recently around kind of fun names that I’ve given them. So for instance, there’s the take-home time vortex. There’s the pair programming panic play, shark tank presentation, right?

There are all these different types of interviews that were present back then and largely are still present today. But I think some things are changing and some things aren’t. The things that are changing are obviously the technologies. What we were using in 2005 is very different from we’re using today. But I would say that the focus of interviews being placed too much on coding and kind of the technical aspects, that hasn’t changed at all.

So case in point, like I did a code trivia test in 2005 to see whether I could work for this company. It’s largely the same today, right? You go into an interview loop, whether it’s Big Tech, whether it’s a startup, whether it’s a consulting firm, and 80 to 90 % of that loop is gonna be technical, right? Whether it’s lead code, whether it’s system design, whether it’s some take home that you then doing a review on. It’s really all about the kind of coding technical skills. And that’s fine.

Right? But that’s really not typically what sets people apart. And I think that’s where things need to change. And I think we’ll start to change with kind of AI as a forcing function. Because now that AI is starting to write more and more of the code for us, I won’t get into the whole conversation of is AI going to take away programming jobs. But the reality is it does a pretty good job of writing basic code. And that’s the same basic code that you would write in an interview. Right? So it’s like,

Maxi Ferreira (07:52) Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Dan (08:09) Why are we spending so much of the time focused there when A, it’s not what engineers are doing, nor really has it ever been. And B, it’s not what makes people stand out. As an interviewer, I can look back over a number of different people that I’ve hired. and I can immediately think of the first or the most important reason for why I hired them. It’s never, well, they did a really good job writing a recursive function, or they did a really good job with kind of.

designing YouTube in 45 minutes, right? That’s never the thing that I remember. It’s always something else. So why isn’t more of the interview process focused around those other things that actually matter?

Maxi Ferreira (08:41) Mm-hmm.

Right. Right. And how do you think companies should adapt, keep in mind AI, right? But lead code no being this efficient. It’s never been like, it’s always been like controversial, like the decision to use lead code or not to do your interviews. But now with AI, like you said, it seems to be an even more questionable decision on terms of the effectiveness of how well that…

how good a candidate it’s translate with lead code. So what do you think are some more efficient or more effective alternatives to using lead code in an interview cycle?

Dan (09:18) Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t know that lead code is going to go away, right? At least not in the near future. I think eventually it will. But the concept of lead code, I think, is that when you’re a company and you post a job and you get hundreds, if not thousands of applications, how do you filter it down quickly? And usually with a relatively small group of people working on it.

And so you need tools, need processes to be able to do that. And so for better or worse, these kind of leacode style tech screens are a way to filter out people. ⁓ And so you basically, you’re trying to see, like do all these engineers meet the same technical bar, which is on one hand nice because there’s kind of uniformity there and that we’re all trying to strive at the same thing. We all know what it is. And so it’s kind of that there’s a sense of fairness there.

Maxi Ferreira (09:50) Mm-hmm.

Dan (10:06) But at the same time, when you leave one of those interviews, you’re like, okay, well, the unit tests pass. I wrote, you know, performant code. You just kind of check the box. You’re like, all right, but you don’t really know what actually makes them better than the 10 other people that did the same thing. And so I think the, like the answer for this is to still check for computer science fundamentals, like that those things are not going away. We still very much need to have engineers that know those things, but to get through the coding part as quick as you can.

to then focus on the actual understanding of it and not just the memorization of these kind of leak code style problems or using AI to help them actually do it during the interview, which is starting to be a thing. So when I’m doing a text reading, I try to get through the coding portion as fast as I can, unless it just goes really horribly, right? And then it’s a pretty easy answer. But most people do a pretty good job there.

And so it’s like, how quickly can we get through that to then focus the discussion more on, well, if we’re talking about some algorithm or some data structure, right? Like, how would you teach that to me as somebody who’s brand new? Or, you know, tell me about a time when you use something like that in an actual project. All like those sort of discussions tell me a lot more than just, you get the tests to go from red to green?

Maxi Ferreira (11:13) Mm-hmm.

Right. I definitely resonates with my, my own experience interviewing. One of the things we do during tech screens is we have a code reviews portion in which we, we do like a live code review with a candidate and they bring up comments about the code, what things could be improved. And those type of informal chats and conversations about the codes are always more revealing and more useful for me as an interviewer.

than how well they implemented a particular algorithm or data structure. yeah, definitely agree that going through that phase as quickly as possible and then focusing on something else is much more useful. We touched a little bit on AI both from the interviewer perspective or the company perspective and the person doing the interviews.

And it’s making things easier in one way and more challenging in other ways. How do you feel things have changed when it comes to AI recently? And how do you think both companies and people should adapt to using these tools more effectively?

Dan (12:21) Yeah, so I guess I’ll answer from two different perspectives. The first from a candidates perspective, right? So as somebody who’s looking for a job, yes, like you can use AI to very quickly tailor your resume to match a job description, which is important, right? You can use AI to help you prepare by saying, OK, I’m going to be doing a tech screen at Google, write out 20 different coding exercises that would help me prepare for that. It does a very good job of that. So there’s all sorts of ways you can use that to kind of optimize your

Maxi Ferreira (12:44) Mm-hmm.

Dan (12:49) your process for going to the application.

I don’t recommend using it as part of the interview, right? Which people do, and there’s a lot of kind of buzzer there right now around your platforms that allow you to do that. But at the same time, you’re being realistic, like people are going to use whatever advantage they can, right? And so I think that’s where it switches over to us as interviewers being aware of that and kind of just running with it, right? It’s similar to like 10 years ago, there’s this big, not big debate, there was a debate around, well,

If a candidate asks you to Google for something during the interview, should we allow that? And I think now it’s such you over to, well, if the candidate is using AI during the interview, should we allow that? ⁓ And I think that the correct answer to both of those things is yes. Because during the job, you can use whatever tools needed to get the job done. So why shouldn’t you be able to do that during the interview? But that does change the process from an interviewer’s perspective a bit.

Maxi Ferreira (13:25) Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Dan (13:43) from an interviewer’s perspective, the other thing I’ll say is that AI is really great to help you create interview questions, especially if you need to write the same question in like five different languages. So if you have really good question that your company is using for, Python, a kid comes in and is like, well, I’ve been working in PHP for the last 10 years. Can I do this in PHP? I can get the same answer generated by AI and PHP in like two seconds. It’s great.

That’s pretty nice.

But yeah, think the biggest thing is to just accept that candidates are going to use AI to some extent, either preparing or during the actual interview, and to just find ways to get to discussions that are harder for AI to answer. The AI, it’s good at writing code, it’s not good at telling your story. So the more you can get into their real understanding, their real usage of the things that you’re asking about, the less they can lean on AI to provide those answers.

Maxi Ferreira (14:19) Mm-hmm.

Right. how do you feel about take home projects during the interviews? Is that something you’re in favor of? Do you recommend people doing that?

Dan (14:46) Um, it depends. go back and forth on this. Um, I did a take almost for my in-view process for Netflix. And think that’s part of what helped me during the in-view process. I think I did a much better job on that than I did on the actual kind of in-person coding round. Um, so I think it can be beneficial at the same time, I think with the state of the industry right now with candidates applying to tens of not hundreds of jobs, right? You can’t be doing 20 or 30 take homes. Um, so.

I don’t know, like I said, this is something that I go back and forth on. think if you’re going to do it, don’t spend days or weeks working on it, right? Usually from a company’s perspective, the goal of a take-home is to start a conversation. It’s not to have a candidate show off every possible, you know, tech skill or piece of knowledge that they’ve had over, you know, their career. All right. So the general trend that I see is people spend way too much time trying to show off way too much during that take-home.

I just wanted to see you do something to then start a conversation with.

Maxi Ferreira (15:45) Right. Yeah. I think this is one of the areas that speaking of AI that has been also like impacted by AI, because the types of take home projects candidates can do right now, I think they should be adapted a little bit to something that AI cannot do like in a single prompt, you know, because you start, it’s a bad experience on both ends because it’s sometimes it’s

quite noticeable when you get a project to review that is all AI generated. So I think it’s something that at least we had to adapt to when it comes to the AI usage.

Dan (16:21) Yeah, I mean,

there’s definitely no way to stop candidates from using AI to generate the project, right? So like, if you’re going to give a take home, I think the key there is to not just review it, but to actually have a full obsession with the candidate to then go through it with them, right? And have them explain to you why they made certain decisions, you know, what are the pros and cons or the trade-offs? Because again, even if you generate with AI, you still have to be able to talk through it, still have to be able to rationalize why you chose something.

Maxi Ferreira (16:26) Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. Daniel, you talk about career fitness. I’ve seen some of your posts on LinkedIn where you talk about this. Can you define what career fitness is?

Dan (17:01) Yeah, there’s four different pillars of career fitness that I think about, right? And all of these go back to confidence and really feeling like you’re moving your career in the direction that you want to. And this is different from your current job. I think a lot of people mix those two things up, right? But those four pillars are goal clarity, network strength,

impact visibility and industry awareness. So if you were to go through those and kind of rate yourself one to 10 on, right, well, how much clarity do I have around my current career goal? How is my current network? Is the impact that I’m having invisible? Or could I make it visible if needed? And am I really aware of kind of my niche of the industry and what’s currently going on?

I think you kind of come up with almost like a score or a picture of where you’re currently at. And most people that I talk to, including myself, at various times, it’s not the highest. Because I think we get lost in our day-to-day jobs too often. And with everything going on in the current industry, there’s a very real chance that jobs come and go. A promotion opportunity comes when you’re not expecting it.

Um, you know, the industry just changes very quickly overnight and you weren’t expecting it. Right. And so I think a career fitness is all about kind of being prepared for those things and having confidence that if any of those things happen, you have a plan and you kind of are ready for that. Um, there’s a lot of career coaches and a lot of, you know, mentorship platforms out there. Right. And I’ve, I’ve worked for some of those and most people that come through there.

are scrambling last minute to try to prepare for something, whether it’s interviewing for a job, whether it’s getting ready for a promotion, whether it’s, you know, they’re just laid off and trying to figure out what to do next, or maybe even they want to switch from ICD manager or the opposite direction or they want to go to product, right? And they’re trying to figure it out very quickly. And that’s fine. Like, I mean, we’ve all been there, right? But the more ideal scenario is more similar to, you know, thinness, where if you’re

If you’re to do a marathon, you’re probably not going to decide the week before that you’re going to do it and try to train with it within a couple of days. You’re going to be building up that base level of fitness over months. Even after the marathon, you’ll probably maintain some level of fitness going forwards. And I think we should do a similar thing within careers.

Maxi Ferreira (19:16) I love that. Yeah, I love that that analogy. there any routines, any exercises that you recommend people doing as part of their to try to improve their their cardio fitness?

Dan (19:29) Yeah, so I, and again, I’m not perfect at this, but I try to spend 15 minutes a day thinking not about my current job or the meetings coming up or the coding projects that I have, but about where my act career was. And I kind of bounce back and forth between those four different pillars around, okay, well, networking. Who in my network haven’t I talked to recently? Are these all connections that even remember who I am? Those sorts of things. Or am I really confident in my current goal?

And are the things I’m doing in my day-to-day job incrementally moving me towards that? Am I aware of industry things that’s happening? Obviously, AI is happening. There are numerous other things. Am I keeping up with those that I’m not left behind? And it’s both simple things, just asking myself questions, as well as kind writing things out once in a while. But I do think there’s value in spending a little bit of time

daily or even weekly on, again, not just your current day-to-day job, but just the overall trajectory of like, are you trying to get to?

Maxi Ferreira (20:26) I imagine this can help a lot with also feeling of burning out or the people who feeling that their careers is stuck or that they are thinking about quitting tech and working on, I don’t know, woodworking or something else. If you can see that you have a score that you keep track of and you see, okay, maybe this is why I’m feeling, I’m not feeling great in my career because my score in terms of career fitness is so low. So I need to focus on developing.

And I love that the fact you have these four pillars, so you can probably pinpoint which area is the one that I’m struggling with the most.

Dan (21:03) Yeah, mean, burnout’s a very real thing. you know, I think I’ve been through various phases of that as well. So I’ve seen many others go through it. Um, and, know, I, I don’t know that. Curfitness is again, the one solution to that. There are many factors that go into it, but I think having a very clear goal or like, what are you trying to do? You know, what did you enjoy doing and where are you trying to get to? Right. If you can answer those questions clearly, then you look at your current work and realize that well,

None of these things actually match up. That’s a good way to end up burned out at some point. Because one of the ways to avoid burnout is to actually enjoy what you do and to be motivated, maybe not every day, but at least most days to do it.

Maxi Ferreira (21:37) Mm-hmm.

Dan (21:47) But yeah, think again, going back to these questions, going back to those four pillars and just making sure that you’re aligned with them most of the time makes sense. Again, like I mentioned earlier, my job before Netflix, it came to a very sudden and unexpected end, right? So like I’ve been there too where like you go in on a Friday and all of a sudden you don’t have a job. And so like everybody else, like I kind of scrambled very quickly.

Maxi Ferreira (21:55) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I love that.

Dan (22:11) And ever since then, I’ve kind of made it a goal to not end up in that position again. So I can’t control when jobs come and go, but I can control my own confidence level in knowing what to do when and if that happens.

Maxi Ferreira (22:26) Right. Yeah, absolutely.

We talked a little bit about the more technical or hard skill aspect of these technical interviews. We talked about lead code and sort of thing. In terms of soft skills, what are the things that you think people should focus on developing to do well in an interview today?

Dan (22:47) Yeah, I mean, think the biggest thing within the interview context is to just be able to tell a good story, right? Everybody gets asked the same question to start off with, tell me about yourself, right? And that really sets the tone for the rest of the interview. And that gives you a chance to kind of start telling your story as you want the interviewer to hear it. Yet I see a lot of people that just kind of repeat what’s in their resume, monotone, line by line.

And the interviewer kind of falls asleep for 10 minutes and wakes up back up again when it’s over. And so really having a very practiced story around like, what have you done? What do you want to do next? And really just like, who are you as an engineer or whatever your profession is? I think that’s the first thing. And storytelling is not specific to interviews, right? I think that benefits you in all aspects of your career.

Maxi Ferreira (23:22) Mm-hmm.

Dan (23:35) But I think the other thing that we’re seeing more more, partly due to AI, is really a focus on product thinking, which is kind of similar to systems thinking. But regardless of what type of interview you’re in, it never hurts to think about the problem from the perspective of who’s actually using it. So every system has users, whether it’s a human, whether it’s some other system, that there are always users of that system.

And a lot of people neglect to think about that aspect of it and kind of bring that up as they’re going through system design or whatever type of interview it actually is. But thinking about it as a project, thinking about users, thinking about success criteria, I don’t know that those are soft skills necessarily, but it’s different from just the actual boxes and arrows that you’re drawing out. And I think that’s something that has made a lot of candidates stand out.

Maxi Ferreira (24:09) Mm-hmm.

Dan (24:25) is the ability to just go beyond, OK, well, I’m going to have Kubernetes here. I’m going to have this sort of data store here. I’m going to have this thing here. But really think about it, big picture-wise, what are we building? And how do we optimize that for who’s actually going to use it?

Maxi Ferreira (24:36) Right. Yeah, no, absolutely. think that’s something that I recommend people, especially as they reach the senior level, is to focus in on developing their technical breadth. And even if their focus is still on one particular area, which could be like front end development, for example, to focus on developing these other adjacent areas, which could include some DevOps or backend development or product.

management like you described recently. I think like you said, it’s even more important with AI now and the sense that we might be seeing some of these roles becoming like more hybrid roles where you’re expected to not only do front-end development, but also a bit of product management. I don’t know if that’s a trend or not that will become a reality, but yeah, having awareness of these different adjacent areas.

to your particular area of expertise is always a good thing to see.

Dan (25:31) Yeah, the age-old debate of generalist versus specialist, I think, is interesting right now, which is also related to this concept of what is a full-stack engineer and should you be one of those. My sense is that, especially if you’re starting out or if you’re early in your career, trying to be a generalist and being good at a lot of different things is very difficult. And this is not new. This has always been how it is.

It’s better to be good, or really good at one thing, and be able to interview and really kind of show off your skills in that one area. Hopefully that matches up to the work that you actually be doing. Then to just kind of rattle off a bunch of buzzwords or try to kind of show that your knowledge will in a lot of different areas that maybe you aren’t knowledgeable in. And it’s interesting, right? Like now that we have AI, we’ve all these various co-pilots and things that are helping people write code, right? It’s like, does it make sense to try to…

specialize and say, all right, well, I’m to be really good at React, right? Or I’m going to be really good at Django and Python or something like that. Or should I try to be good enough at all of those things to be able to prompt the AI to actually do a good job with it? And so there’s an interesting tension there. And I don’t know that I have a single answer to it. But again, especially people that are starting off, I think it’s better to.

focus on one or two things and really try to be good at those and not just be overwhelmed by everything and try to learn everything.

Maxi Ferreira (26:55) Yeah, 100%, 100%. Daniel, before we wrap things up, were there any other topics that you were hoping to chat about today?

Dan (27:05) no, I mean, think one of the other kind of hiring trends that we’re seeing is. So again, back to when I first started off, right? Everything was in person, right? I had a lot of interviews where they like fly you out to California and you’d stay at a nice hotel and you’d, you know, go to the interview and you’d see the office. And it was like a whole experience almost, right? And now the interview process is very much kind of you, you know, have a phone call or a Google hangout, likely a whole series of them, right?

And it’s really tough to get a sense of kind of what that company would be like to work for. And I think there’s a shift now back to in-person interviewing because of the various AI help that candidates are having. And so I think it’s one of those things where I’m sort of torn on it. Like I love remote work. I would never want to go back to committing to the office, but I do miss interviewing in-person. I actually preferred that.

I’d much rather sit down and have a conversation with you kind of live at the office than kind of do it over hangouts. And so there’s a part of me that actually likes the idea of going back to in-person interviews, but I also understand that it’s just not feasible for a lot of people. And it’s also significantly more expensive for companies to get people to be there in person for interviews. But it’s a trend, right? I think it’s something we’re going to have to kind of watch over the next year or so with how much do companies push on

not only kind of in-person work and kind of private work, but actually if you got an interview, like you need to come to the office to do that too.

Maxi Ferreira (28:33) Mm-hmm.

Yeah, the human touch or the human aspect is more important now than ever. And I definitely see how if you can afford it, having the interview in person, will give you a much better perspective.

Before I let you go, Daniel, I want to do, I’d like to do picks with the audience for anything that you find interesting recently. This could be books, TV shows, movies, anything you want to highlight. Do you have any picks to share?

Dan (29:00) Yeah, so I listened to the podcast, I predicted this would happen. So I’ve got two of them. The first one kind of going back to the hiring topic, this one kind of from the perspective of a hiring manager or somebody doing interviewing. There’s a book from 2016 called The Ideal Team Player, which has really shaped how I think about interviewing and then hiring. The basic premise is you want to hire people who are humble, hungry and smart.

smart being people smarts, not kind of like the actual, you know, technical skills. And I think again, it’s a really interesting, unique way of thinking about it. So definitely recommend that book if you haven’t read it. I’m sure we can get a link, paste it somewhere for people. The second one, very much a different topic, but something I’ve been thinking about recently. So the weekend before last, I kind of accidentally ended up in a presentation by the founder of an organization called Charity Water.

Maxi Ferreira (29:37) for sure.

Dan (29:52) And they are basically trying to bring clean water to everybody on earth, which is a daunting task. But I’m thinking about it a lot lately in that, regardless of how much we dislike Leakode interviews or we don’t want to do system design, likely while you’re doing it, you’ve got clean water to drink, right? Which is kind of nice. So I’d encourage people if they haven’t thought much about water or kind of you learned about the various kind of issues going on there to check out SherryWater.org.

As again, I think it’s something that regardless of politics or beliefs or anything, we can likely all agree that having clean water is important.

Maxi Ferreira (30:30) Absolutely. Thank you. will definitely leave links to both of those in the show notes. I have two picks as well. have one book, which is an old book. It’s called Badass by Katie Sierra. I think the title is Making Users Awesome or something like that. But it’s a great book. I’ve been really enjoying it. I’m only on the first half. But if you are looking for a…

fun and easy to understand perspective on some product management and how, what your users are really looking for by using your product. It’s a very cool book. It’s an old book. think it’s maybe 15 years old at this point, but yeah, it’s very good. And my second pick is a TV show. I started watching The Last of Us Season 2 this past weekend, which is really good. I don’t know, Dan, if you’re into video games or The Last of Us or any of

HBO, any of that, it’s very good. Highly recommended.

Dan (31:22) Nice. All right.

I’ll check them out.

Maxi Ferreira (31:26) All right, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people find you online?

Dan (31:31) I’m mostly on LinkedIn. Again, I’m assuming we can post a link, but it’s just Daniel L. Johnson. Yeah, that’s really where I hang out when I’m not doing other things.

Maxi Ferreira (31:40) Awesome, awesome. Yes, we’ll leave all of that in the description. Thanks again so much for joining me then. Yeah, bye.

Dan (31:45) Thank you much. Bye.