Chris Busbey - CTO at Connamara Systems

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:02) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Dude, how are you doing today? You excited?

(Chris Richardson at 00:00:16) Yeah, it's my first podcast, so happy to get started with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) This is it. We're recording right now.

(Chris Richardson at 00:00:24) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:24) Like, we just roll. This will be your favorite pie. Like, I love doing this podcast, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) So it's pretty much all downhill from here. Okay, no. I guess, like, to be candid, one of the things that I did—the podcast for over a year before I'd been on anyone else's podcast. And one thing that they did when I started going and I did, like, ten podcasts in one month, like, other podcasts that weren't mine, and they all did this, like, long intro when they read my bio before the podcast started. And I was like, and then they asked me some big, deep question. That'd be like me reading, like, your list of life accomplishments and then be like, "How do you do it, Chris?" It was, like, way too heavy. So I realized, oh, I didn't even know, like, how to do a podcast. I just wanted to talk to people.

(Chris Richardson at 00:01:19) Yeah. So we're not gonna do that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) No. Okay. No, sir. Alright. Nope.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:25) We do have a new addition to the office, though. We built, like, a little set, and we started, like, flying people down sometimes to do them in person. So that's something new we're doing for the year.

(Chris Richardson at 00:01:35) I am in very cold Chicago, and I was not given the opportunity to fly down to Florida. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:42) Dude, you shut up.

(Chris Richardson at 00:01:43) Second appearance. Second appearance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:45) Second appearance. Yeah. So what is it exactly that you do, like, on a day-to-day basis?

(Chris Richardson at 00:01:53) There's no typical day. So tell you a little bit of background of Connamara. So Connamara, we're a consulting firm in the engineering space for capital markets. So Connamara itself doesn't have a very large technology footprint because we're consultants. We're basically guns for hire. So every day is kind of driven by whatever our current customer load is and kind of what they're looking to build. And yeah, so today I've been writing a lot of Go code and debugging a lot of Go code. But yesterday, I was doing something completely different. So as a CTO, I end up having to write a lot of code, but a lot of meetings in there too. Maybe that's what makes me a CTO is all the meetings that get laid on to my regular engineering duties.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:48) I love that people always will say, like, what's the quickest way to become a CTO? And I'll say, quit your job and start a company, and you can be one tomorrow.

(Chris Richardson at 00:02:57) Yeah. Right. Yeah. Print the business cards. And then I think for myself, you know, I've been here at Connamara since 2005, which is a long time for a technology gig. So I mean, I've stepped into the CTO role, but it's kind of a role by circumstance. I think that kind of starting as a regular engineer, writing software, and kind of understanding a little bit about the business from a higher-level perspective, you'll eventually figure it out, and you'll be able to take on those responsibilities whether you're ready for them or not. You'll figure it out real quick.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:38) So do you get to meet with customers?

(Chris Richardson at 00:03:41) Yes. Yeah. And then that's probably a unique thing that our engineers have to do. In fact, when we hire, we look for highly talented engineers, but we're also looking for engineers that are interested and motivated to talk to the customer, figure out what their requirements are, and help them accomplish whatever business goals they have. So that was something that I definitely had to figure out. And I think that having done—you know, before Connamara, I worked at a very large company, and I was a Java Developer II, I think. And so all you're doing is, you know, writing Java code and passing your tests. And I wanted to be more involved in the regular product development life cycle, and I was looking for opportunities to do that. And consulting, you get thrown right in there. So that gave me the opportunity to kind of scratch that itch in terms of figuring out, you know, how do you write software? How do you accomplish business goals with software and get above just a regular editor from time to time?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:50) So do you guys, like, actually make exchanges? Like, what—I know you do a lot of stuff in the financial services, but it seems kind of weird. Like, isn't there just, like, a handful of exchanges? Like, how do you make exchanges?

(Chris Richardson at 00:05:01) There's a lot of exchanges. So we're not just in the exchange space. When I say capital markets, it's kind of a slice of what's commonly called the fintech space, but we're not necessarily, like, in the payments business. Our clients could be, like, a couple of traders that have an idea, and they need us to implement an automated solution for them, like an algo. Or it could be a startup exchange who has a trade that they want to be able to make or make on behalf of an industry, and they need to be able to build an exchange from scratch to much larger institutional investment firms, where they might have an internal matching solution or they'll want to integrate with one of the, you know, the main exchanges that are out there. But yeah, man, we're building all the technology that allows you from, you know, click to trade to reporting that trade. We do projects all along that stream of work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:07) And you've been there for, like, what, over ten years now? So you must like it.

(Chris Richardson at 00:06:11) Yeah. Yeah. I do. And I think part of it is I get bored very quickly. So it's nice to be able to have this cadence where a long project for us is maybe a couple years, and that's a long project. Our typical engagement is much less than that. You know, six to nine months is a good-sized project for us. So we are in that capital market space, but there's so many different pieces to that that I'm able to see a lot of variety. And I think that's what's kept me around. That, coupled with, you know, just working for a small firm, really enjoying working with the management team and the developers that we have, that's just kind of kept me, you know, interested and really comfortable in the space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:57) You guys use Slack?

(Chris Richardson at 00:06:59) We do. Yeah. Yeah. I turned it off because I knew it'd be dinging me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:04) Yes. Yes. So actually I was talking about this this morning. I went, like—because we do the show, I have to put my phone in Do Not Disturb all the time. Right? And so then I started to, like, learn about how Do Not Disturb works, and then I ended up putting my computer—you can, like, do this hack where you do it from, like, 12:01 a.m. to, like, twelve—it's basically you set it in a 24-hour loop, so, like, Do Not Disturb is always happening on your desktop.

(Chris Richardson at 00:07:27) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:27) And so I've done that for, like, a year. But then over the past couple weeks, I couldn't figure out, like, why I was still getting notifications in Do Not Disturb, because apparently they'll still come up. It just won't light your phone up. Like, it won't disturb you in the sense that it, like, lights your phone up. The notifications will still be there, like, if you press on it. You know? It'll, like, still be all stacked up, which is, like, equally as stressful. Right? Because you put your phone and you're not disturbed when you're trying to do something else, and you need to check the time, and then you see, like, eight things happen.

(Chris Richardson at 00:07:56) Yeah. What did I miss? There must be something really bad. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:00) Yes. So then I was like, alright. So after I emailed Tim Cook and realized that I just didn't understand how it worked, which was humbling—I'm always doing that type of stuff. Then I went to go into my notification settings, and I was like, you know what? Let's just see what happens if I turn off all notifications. So I've turned off all notifications except calendar and text. And so because, like, I got—I have two kids and a wife. Like, I need my text to, like, notify me. And I need calendars, for, like, I don't miss my meetings, like this amazing podcast. Right? But I wonder, like, I feel so much more free, and it's only been, like, half a day.

(Chris Richardson at 00:08:41) That's a life hack.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:42) It's gonna be like—

(Chris Richardson at 00:08:43) That's a life hack right here. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:45) Yeah. Because when you go into the Slack, everything's there.

(Chris Richardson at 00:08:49) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:49) And what I was noticing is that, you know, I look at the Slack messages, I think about how I'm going to respond, but then, like, my brain's really fast. Right? You can look at it and think about what the response is. It's like a just a reactionary behavior. Involuntary behavior. And then you have to wait till later to respond. So you're, like, doing the work twice. And I was like, yeah, I pick up my phone 150 times a day anyways. Like, I'm not gonna miss the stuff. So I'm just—I don't know. What do you think of that?

(Chris Richardson at 00:09:18) You know, we've had Slack for a long, long time. We had Campfire. Did you ever use Campfire?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:25) Oh, yeah. DHH and yeah.

(Chris Richardson at 00:09:26) So Campfire was great because it could play sounds. I mean, that's really—that's what we're looking for. It was just goofing off as a team is what we could do with these things. And Slack was—or Campfire was great because you could do sound. Slack, they got rid of the sounds, which is probably the smart thing to do. And we're at a point now where I have a ton of channels because I'm involved in different projects and things. But we're so deep into this post-DevOps world. So it's not just us, it's all of our bots that are talking to us. And, you know, actually, before this, we're kind of looking at a GitHub outage right now. And so we're getting all of our notifications late, but it's basically hammering all of our channels. And so we're trying to figure out, how do we deal with this world we live in where we have all these bots, they're telling us, hey, there's a pull request you need to look at, or, hey, this build's broken, or, hey, your dependencies are out of date. How do you manage that? You need to capture that stream elsewhere than when you're trying to solve a difficult problem, you know, with the team that's across the country or across the world. You don't want a bot interjecting and saying, hey, build's broken, when you're trying to have a conversation. So I wish there was a playbook for how to properly use Slack. Maybe someone has a book out for that, but that's something we've been kind of figuring out, because just like what you're saying with notifications, I mean, it's useful, but it's to a point where we're saturated with all of our various forms.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:52) They, like, infect every part of our lives.

(Chris Richardson at 00:10:56) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:56) Because there's, like—I guess because we're trying to, like, work this thought out right now live. Like, I guess we have to ask ourselves a question of, does this style of notification deserve to interrupt my stream of consciousness? Does it deserve my attention in real time? Like, we'll have to start subsegmenting our attention span versus, like, can it interrupt me? Or, like, is it worth it? Like, we'll have to decide that because we need them to stack up. We need the bots to stack up their list and their queue so that when we're ready to go in there and work on that, we can see everything that we need to know, but we shouldn't let it control us. We should take control, and we should control the technology.

(Chris Richardson at 00:11:45) Yeah. So some of the things that we've done is, like, let's say that I'm working on a project. I'll create a channel for the project. And then once it's, you know, we have alerts and things, I'll create a project-dash-alerts channel. And that's where a bot's gonna throw us all kinds of, hey, there's an error that's being logged or something. And then because we're working not with just engineers, we're also working with project stakeholders. So maybe it's my boss, Jim, who's the CEO, he wants to know what's going on with the project. If he jumps into a channel that's full of GitHub alerts, like, it's just overwhelming. So we have a dedicated channel that's for, you know, project-dash-dev, and that's where all of our GitHub alerts are. And that's usually where I'm haunting because I want to see activity in GitHub. But I still have the other channel where I can talk to the project manager or the business analyst and kind of have a quiet place. But I think what Slack needs to figure out is that I'm on all of those channels. And on my left, I've got my little bar of all my channels, and it's—I'm still seeing that there's some activity going on even though it probably doesn't require my attention, but it's still—it's distracting me away from what I probably really need to be working on. So I don't think the problem's going away. I think it's just gonna get worse.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:58) Exactly. I think it's just gonna fall on us to figure out how to control our focus because it's like the frog in boiling water. I was thinking—I was when I disabled these notifications this morning, I was having breakfast. I was telling my wife, and I said, I wonder what life's gonna be like. And I'm like, shit. I'm 32 years old. I was like, I lived for 27, 25 years without any of this stuff.

(Chris Richardson at 00:13:23) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:23) Like, it'll just be like it was before, where I decide that, okay, I'm going to go—like, I was even thinking about Xbox when I was, you know, 15. Like, people would send me messages. And when I chose to do Xbox, when I chose to go online to play, I had my—I focused on my online world. I had my messages, invites, people wanting to play games. And I just dealt with it in that mindset. But what's happening now is, like, there's no peace. Like, there's no peace. There's no, like, here's my window of time where I will not be interrupted. And I think the argument for that is, like, every great thing that we've gotten up into this point has had the benefit of uninterrupted deep work. Like, that's how we got the technology. Like, we couldn't have ever got here without that uninterrupted deep work.

(Chris Richardson at 00:14:17) Yeah. Yeah. But we're in a world now where, you know, we're writing software that's typically a hosted service. And one of our offerings at Connamara is an operations and support package. And that segment of our business is something that I'm involved in, but isn't necessarily my direct responsibility. But we have folks that are on call, and they need to know when services are going down. And I will say over the past ten years, I've seen monitoring systems be highly effective to be able to let us know within, you know, a second or so, hey, this thing isn't behaving properly. And because we have those tools that are willing to alert us that quickly, there's an expectation that someone's listening on the other end of that. So the best vacation that I ever had in my honeymoon is when I didn't have my phone on. And it's like, that was a free thing, but I was telling everyone, oh, I had this great vacation. You guys gotta try it. I just had to get rid of my phone. And it's a weird thing to think about, but that's kind of where we're at right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:21) Yeah. It's also weird because we have a biological incentive. Like, I was listening, like, Simon Sinek. I have one of his books up here somewhere. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:29) Getting good at pointing without looking.

(Chris Richardson at 00:15:31) It's good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:31) Leaders Eat Last. Right? That was pretty on point. It's like that's cool. Got unicorn ampersand because I like that with Ruby, and I like blocks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:41) And then, yeah. So you could be a weatherman.

(Chris Richardson at 00:15:44) That's perfect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:44) I could be a weatherman. Yes. And over here, we have product development. I don't even know what I was saying anymore. But, oh, we got the biological synaptic feedback. Like, we get that hit of dopamine when we get those notifications, assignments of, like, the bing, the buzz, the zip, the pop, or whatever.

(Chris Richardson at 00:16:05) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:06) And so, like, we can know that it's not good for us, and we could still do it.

(Chris Richardson at 00:16:11) Yeah. Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:12) Like brownies.

(Chris Richardson at 00:16:14) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:14) Right?

(Chris Richardson at 00:16:15) Yeah. Yeah. Or social media in general, and 2020, here we are. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:22) Yeah. Yeah. What's your media diet look like?

(Chris Richardson at 00:16:25) It's pretty trimmed. My lovely wife is fielding family Facebook responsibilities for us. So I removed myself from Facebook a few years ago, but we have an obligation to be available on Facebook to know what's going on with our family and friends. So she's playing my proxy for me, which is great. I was on Twitter for a while, and I've kind of scaled back on that. And I have LinkedIn for professional reasons, but it's pretty well trimmed. I try to keep up to date with various blogs that I haunt. Like Hacker News is a really good resource for me to figure out what's going on. And, unfortunately, my way of consuming Hacker News is to have a Slack channel where I'm piping in Hacker News. So maybe that's not the right way to do it, but it's a great feed.

(Chris Richardson at 00:17:19) So that's kind of where I've been at. But, yeah, there was a time where I was fully into, you know, Twitter and then just Twitter and Facebook at the same time, and it's just it's too much. A little overwhelming. Needed to take that break, and I miss the days when Google had their reader because that was more my flow, but that's not a thing anymore. So, but there's plenty of RSS readers out there that are pretty good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:45) Yeah. They turn off a lot of products. Like, there was actually a website that started tracking them, like, all the products sunset. It's like hundreds.

(Chris Richardson at 00:18:08) Yeah. Yeah. Actually, and that affects us. They have a really great service for jobs, Google Hire. And we discovered it maybe six months ago, and it was super useful. We were scheduling interviews. We were giving feedback, and they're sunsetting it. So we love Google. We use the Google domain stuff, but this has happened a few times now where there's a really awesome service and they're getting rid of it. So you've got to build your own. That's the solution. That's why we're engineers. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:30) Right. Just build it yourselves. And usually, they're doing that because they couldn't get it profitable, which usually means there's someone else in the market who's also doing a pretty good job at it too.

(Chris Richardson at 00:18:40) Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, for us, we would gladly pay. You know, it happened to be I think it was maybe free because we had the Google domain, but, you know, it was such a great thing. We would gladly if they monetized it in a second, but they have bigger fish to fry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:55) I bet you it's something stupid too. I bet you it's, like, some team estimated it would take X millions of dollars, and they were off by something, and it just got cut by someone somewhere because they just saw, oh, we didn't achieve this metric and this. I mean, when you're that big, like, you're not. That's why the best products end up coming from these founders that, like, they build something, they're in love with it, and they don't quit no matter how hard it gets. And then you end up with, like, Tesla. Right?

(Chris Richardson at 00:19:27) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:28) I've got a good one for you. So one of the things we do a lot is we ask this Elon Musk Tesla question at the end of the episodes. Right? So much so, like, when I forget to ask it, I'll get people that reach out to me on LinkedIn, and they're like, don't give up on the Musk question, or you forgot to ask it on this episode. I'm like, I don't know. Just sometimes it's not standard. I try to just have a conversation, and I like that question. Yeah. But we just booked the CTO of Ford, like, coming on the show. And I was like, I don't know if that'd be so rude if I asked him the Tesla question.

(Chris Richardson at 00:19:57) You know, he's getting asked it every day, though. I think it's fine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:01) Is he? Is he? You think it's okay?

(Chris Richardson at 00:20:03) Absolutely. I mean, shouldn't they be asked? They should be asked.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:06) I guess. I don't know. It's like bringing someone over. I guess if I did bring someone over to my house and I was like, hey. It would be normal to talk about other people in the market. Right?

(Chris Richardson at 00:20:17) Yeah. I mean, we're this capitalist age. If you are an executive at Ford, shouldn't you be challenged? You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:25) That's true. It's just that I'll be like, alright, I have a question. Hypothetically, the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk.

(Chris Richardson at 00:20:33) Oh, is he Tesla too? I didn't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:36) Tesla? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Batteries? Yeah. Alright.

(Chris Richardson at 00:20:41) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:43) I always want to, like, you know, you want to make people feel comfortable. You want to, like, you know, have good conversation.

(Chris Richardson at 00:20:48) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:48) So, yeah. I'll get them to smoke some weed. Be like the CEO of Tesla did it?

(Chris Richardson at 00:20:56) Yeah. It's that kind of podcast. We're all doing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:59) But we're in Florida, so I would have to be in California for that one to be okay.

(Chris Richardson at 00:21:04) Oh, we're in Illinois. So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:07) What is it like there? Is weed legal there?

(Chris Richardson at 00:21:09) It is. We're, let's see. So it is February 25th, and it became legal on the first of the year. And it wasn't, and I think all the states. I used to live in Washington. I lived before that, I lived in Oregon during their rollouts, and it there's a shortage. So it's interesting if you read about it, like, it helps the black markets, you know, this type of thing. Because more people are interested in it, but they can't find it, so they go back to the black markets. So I don't know. Talk to me in a year. We'll see what happens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:44) Yeah. I just watched a movie this weekend with, like, Matthew McConaughey. Yeah. It was, like, it's, like, a new one out right now, and it was quite possibly the most interesting director directing of a movie. Like, the format of it, like, the layout, I don't want to spoil it for anyone. I don't even remember what it's called. Maybe Jake could look it up and chime in, but it was just out this weekend with Matthew McConaughey. But he, one of the premises is that he is this kingpin of a black market, like, marijuana thing in UK. Super interesting. The way that the video, the movie cut and, like, the way that the whole storyline was. And I told Alex, our videographer, I was like, dude, you have to see it from, like, a director perspective. I haven't seen something, like, totally unique in a long time.

(Chris Richardson at 00:22:33) You don't remember the name of it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:34) I think, well, Jake's going to check it out and chime in. But I think that even if you don't really like the preview, like, go watch the movie because it's so interesting how it's laid out.

(Chris Richardson at 00:22:46) Yeah. Well, in a couple years, because right now I have an eight-month-old and a five-year-old, I will be able to see it. Will it be on HBO or something? I'll be able to watch it. But I haven't seen a movie in a theater in a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:04) There he is. The Gentleman. The Gentleman.

(Chris Richardson at 00:23:06) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:07) Yes. So you have an, wait, hold on a second. You have an eight-month-old and a what?

(Chris Richardson at 00:23:12) A five-year-old.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:14) Oh, I thought you said a five-month-old. I was like, this is like you got two wives.

(Chris Richardson at 00:23:22) No. No. I'm not sure this is much better. I mean, a five-year-old and an eight-month-old. I have a toddler.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:28) I have a three, two and a half-year-old, almost three, and then Lachlan's birthday is actually today. Oh, wow. So he's one year old. So almost three and a one-year-old. So I get it.

(Chris Richardson at 00:23:41) Yeah. Yeah. I get a lot of parenting advice. Babysitters? Yeah. And, you know, one of the reasons why we're in Illinois is my family is around. So that helps to have that support system. But I get a lot of parenting advice for our youngest, and it's like, dude, I've done this already. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you tell me. It's all, yeah. It's tough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:03) What advice, or, like, what's on your mind as far as, like, let's say, like, professionals having kids and, like, we have to work a lot? Like, what are your thoughts on that? Like, how do you deal with it?

(Chris Richardson at 00:24:15) You know, I've noticed it in myself, and I've noticed it in my friends who have had kids. There's something about that extra responsibility. You have to figure out a way to mellow yourself out and to deal with that stress. And that's something that's difficult for a lot of us just in the workplace in general. So just something that I picked up on is kind of like figuring out how to deal with my stress levels at home, which has actually helped me in the office in dealing with the, you know, the stresses that come with my professional career. It doesn't necessarily make it easier having two sources of stress, but there's something about getting thrown into that situation. You have to figure it out, and something about that life skill can really apply elsewhere. So what's worked for you, man? It's slowing down. Definitely slowing down.

(Chris Richardson at 00:25:09) And just that patience is so critical. I mean, my kids are sharp. I mean, they're awesome. But it still takes a little time to figure some stuff out, and it kind of feels like we're both testing each other. You know? Like, how a caged animal kind of checks out the bars and stuff. That's basically how it is. So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:32) We see her testing us, like, when she'll cry because she wants something. And in my mind, I'm just like, oh, we're going to do this for 20 minutes. Oh, yeah. It's like, of course, I win. Right. Of course, I win. Right. Right? Right. Unless you can't just say that.

(Chris Richardson at 00:25:47) You can't just say that. Although I've said that. I've said, you know, this is not going to work, but it just doesn't. You have to figure out a different way to do it, and you have to think, okay. That would work for me, a purely logical human. But this is a five-year-old I'm dealing with. What's going to work best for them? And so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:04) I know. What are they into at five?

(Chris Richardson at 00:26:06) Well, my daughter is super into unicorns.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:10) And there we go. Right there.

(Chris Richardson at 00:26:12) Oh. There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:13) Yeah. Purple unicorn. Yeah.

(Chris Richardson at 00:26:15) And princesses, and we don't know how that happened. We have no idea. Like, we didn't, we don't push, you know, the whole Disney princess thing, but somehow they just, they're their own person, and it's really interesting to see that kind of develop.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:28) Isn't that amazing how, like, you think, like, before you have kids, like, oh, those parents shape them. And then when you have kids, like, oh my God. This human's, like, preprogrammed with, like, this whole personality that there's no way they could have learned that anywhere. Like, they definitely didn't learn that watching anything. Like, they just have that inside of them. It's like their soul. You know?

(Chris Richardson at 00:26:48) Yeah. There's some nature versus nurture there at work. But, yeah, I don't, it's great. I mean, I'm looking forward to seeing my, so my oldest, Linnea, she's five, and our son Cooper, he's eight months. And I'm just so just jazzed to, like, see him grow up and, you know, hang out with them and just kind of figure out how they see the world. Yeah. I don't know. I like it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:14) I recommend. Got the same. I recommend them too. I mean, they're difficult and amazing, but there's a net positive. Right?

(Chris Richardson at 00:27:20) Yeah. Totally. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:22) Yeah. I had the girl first and then the boy. I was actually, like, thinking last night, and I make notes sometimes. I do some, like, reflection stuff. And I was like, I was thinking, like, what do I want to learn so that I can then teach them? Because he's only, he just turned one. And Right. And so I was like, alright. Well, I'll learn maybe some, like, archery. Maybe, like, I've never been hunting. I'm, like, super nerd engineer introverted for, like, 99% of my life until this podcast. I was like, maybe I'll go outside. Maybe I'll go outside and, like, learn how to shoot a bow. And then I found that there's, like, bow shooting classes, like, in my town for, like, $20. I was like, alright. Maybe if I go learn how to shoot a bow, I could, like, take him on a camping trip and, like, teach him how to shoot a bow, and that could be kind of, like, a good experience. You know?

(Chris Richardson at 00:28:13) Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You just, you've got to figure out if they're going to like it or not. Like, I've tried, we tried to get her out to, you know, go camping or snowboarding. I really wanted to take her out snowboarding, and we're just not there yet. And you don't want to push it on them because then they're going to hate it, especially if it's something that's difficult. You've got to figure out, you know, how do we do this in a way that they enjoy the actual, the journey of figuring this out, you know, and then not thinking, oh, you know, we watched this cool video on archery or something. You should be able to do that right away. No. It takes a lot of practice, and you've got to, you know, be okay with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:52) Yeah. Discipline is definitely like, I was trying to, and I'm sure you've thought about this too. But, like, as a parent, I've been trying to think, like, you know, what heuristic or what methodology, like, should I raise my kids under? Right. And, like, what, you know, what principles? And the one that I came up with that I like the most is, I don't care what you do as long as you do it well. Like, because achieving mastery of one thing lets you understand how much work it is to achieve mastery of something.

(Chris Richardson at 00:29:27) Right. Yeah. And I think that heuristic really instills the value of hard work. Right? To be able to say, look, whatever you want to do, that's great. Just strive to be the best you can at it. You know? Don't give up. Keep working on it. So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:43) Yeah. Because you've been programming a long time. Right?

(Chris Richardson at 00:29:45) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:46) So you and I both know, like, once you get to the top, you realize that, like, it's just the experts arguing about best practices.

(Chris Richardson at 00:29:53) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:53) And to make that journey takes you almost a decade. Like, you can't get that on day one. Like, someone can tell you it, and you can know the words to say, but you don't have the feeling and the experience of knowing what it's actually like until you do it.

(Chris Richardson at 00:30:06) Yeah. Actually, I was just thinking about this because I was asked to clear a LaCroix box from my window over here, and I've got some books that are over here. Well, you don't see the books that—like, those are great books, and they're basically, like, high level, you know, how to write pragmatic software, you know? Basically, like, high level stuff, how do you work in teams, things like that.

(Chris Richardson at 00:30:30) My monitor is resting on all of these books that at one point I've read that are, like, low level, you know, JUnit or Hibernate and stuff that I don't—I don't want to say it was a waste of money, but at that time, I wasted so much time going so deep into that one thing that I wasn't able to look above, and there's more valuable things that I was kind of missing out on. So that took a while for me to figure out. Like, getting, sticking your head up from, like, examining a library, what you can do with it to kind of understand, okay, how does that fit in the whole ecosystem? What can I learn from this library that this other library does differently? So going a little bit too deep maybe. I wish I would have learned that sooner.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:15) But, like, not so shallow that you're hopping, like, entire languages and never, like, learning how one language fully works, though.

(Chris Richardson at 00:31:23) Right. Exactly. And, you know, I'm at a point—I'm sure you're at a point too—where you don't necessarily, you can see the commonalities between languages. And once you get the gist of what this one does or how it, how this database works, there's some questions that you can answer. Like, okay. Well, I know that, like, Mongo does it like this. This new database, how does it handle that? And you're asking more intelligent questions that get you to that answer faster than if you were just, you know, starting out in a vacuum.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:55) And then there's, like, the humbling of there will always be a new technology. There will always be something new and you don't know, and there's no way you as one individual can consume it. And, hopefully, by that time, you've gotten to the point where you're, like, leading the team and you can bring people together to create something greater than the sum of you. Right?

(Chris Richardson at 00:32:13) Totally. Yeah. And in consulting, so what we do, the next project we get, we don't know who it's coming from. We don't know necessarily what it's going to be. A lot of our constraints that we have in terms of designing a system are, what is the staff going to look like that's going to be taking this technology on once we're gone? Or how is this going to integrate with their existing solutions? So it totally depends on who the client is, but in the past year, I've written a few Rails projects and, you know, Go projects, .NET products. And kind of having that agility is really necessary in our particular industry. So that's one of the things that we look for when we hire engineers too is we need basically generalists that are really good at having that breadth of knowledge. But when needed to, they can go deep and figure out, you know, for that particular technology that we're working on for that project. Let's figure out everything we can about it so we can address, you know, whatever the thing is we're trying to debug or whatever else. But that's something that takes time. At scale, that takes a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:22) So, like, so last week, I got into this, like, rant with this CTO that was doing, like, a lot of mergers and acquisitions. Right? And he had a pretty strong, like, finance background that he had developed from having to do these different mergers and acquisitions, and we were talking about that. And then I started thinking, like, I know all these different CTOs, all these levels, and I wanted to know now, like, how much P&L responsibilities are you exposed to at your level?

(Chris Richardson at 00:33:57) A lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:59) Okay.

(Chris Richardson at 00:33:59) A lot. A lot of my days are spent working on proposals, working on estimates, and kind of understanding what the budget is, what our customer's budget is. One of the things that I'm really excited about with what Connamara is doing now is we are traditionally a consulting firm. We're not a products company, or at least we have not been traditionally, but we keep solving the same problems over and over again. So we're starting to do is develop our own off-the-shelf kind of platform to be able to allow the next customer to build their exchange faster because we have some parts that we want to be able to reuse for that next customer. So we started to have to think more like how our customers have been thinking. Thinking about this product that I'm going to be building, this platform, how much time and money do we want to spend this year to implement this feature? What do we think we're going to get out of it? Whose problem are we solving? How much more business are we going to be getting? So I get exposed to a lot of that. And I think part of that is just because having been here for a long time and just being comfortable with the executive team, because of what we do, the engineering voice is important in all of that. And so I get involved in a lot of that discussion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:18) So is that what QuickFIX is, like, the precursor to, or is that something else?

(Chris Richardson at 00:35:22) So QuickFIX is an open source library, and there's actually a lot of flavors of it. So the original one was written by Oren Miller, and it was C++, and that's something that Jim, our CEO, helped with. He actually wrote the acceptance tests for QuickFIX. But QuickFIX is basically just a library, an open source library for facilitating what's known as a FIX protocol, which is a financial language for, like, sending data about sending orders or trades or market data. Before Oren wrote QuickFIX, there was no open source library for that. So when he did that, which is fantastic, he did a great job, and people were using a lot of wrappers around that for whatever language they needed to. And from that spawned QuickFIX/J, which is a Java version, and we wrote QuickFIX/n, which is .NET version, and then recently, QuickFIX-Go, which is a Go implementation of that. But it's just an open source library for FIX protocol. A lot of the projects that we've done in the past, we've been able to leverage open source technologies to build software much more cost effectively than if we were licensing everything. So where we can, we like to give back and look towards open sourcing what we can to give back to the community.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:47) And you did that at Microsoft too. Right?

(Chris Richardson at 00:36:49) A little bit. Yeah. So I was at Microsoft for about four months. Not very long.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:58) It counts. It counts for the resume, man. It counts.

(Chris Richardson at 00:37:00) It counts. It counts. I had a blue badge. I was a blue badger. But, yeah, this was—it doesn't exist anymore, but there's a division at Microsoft called MS Open Tech, and they were really interested in open source technologies and kind of being evangelists for what Microsoft could do for open source software and where Microsoft fit into that. And so I was a program manager for, like, four months, mostly involved in the IoT space and trying to show how you can use Azure for these IoT devices to use the cloud software. And then also, I believe they're doing some work at the device level to install Windows 10 or something. But what was encouraging is that Microsoft was fully on their way to already, you know, being open source first in house, you know, be more comfortable in that space. So that division closed shortly after I left, but that was something that I was really passionate about. I don't know if I would have gone to Microsoft if it wasn't for that particular program that I was involved in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:07) Yeah. The IoT stuff's, like, really exploding nowadays.

(Chris Richardson at 00:38:10) Yeah. And this was back, let's see, it was about six or seven years ago where it was really starting. I mean, it's still in many ways like the Wild West. And we were debating about different messaging systems and, you know, IBM MQ or all kinds of different methodologies for things. And I don't know how much closer we are to that. I think now there's a lot of security stuff that's coming up, you know, all of the concerns about the Ring doorbell and everything. It's good discussions to have, and I wish that would have happened sooner.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:39) What do you mean Ring doorbell?

(Chris Richardson at 00:38:40) You know, just the privacy things. You've got all these devices that are monitoring here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:48) What are you talking about? Privacy?

(Chris Richardson at 00:38:51) Yeah. Yeah. Well, some of us, we live more concerned than others, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:56) I have recording devices in every room I'm in. Do you? Well, I mean, I've got Alexas all through the house. You know?

(Chris Richardson at 00:39:04) Oh, do you? Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:05) And we have a studio, so there's a video studio in the other room. We make these, we make, like, management programs for technologists. Pretty cool.

(Chris Richardson at 00:39:15) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:16) Like, if you want to manage your team better, usually, people like you will buy them for, like, your managers. Right?

(Chris Richardson at 00:39:22) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:22) But so we have a video studio. We do that. And we've got about eight people here outside—get my hand up there—outside that door. Yeah. Yeah. But what I want to know—what the Ring—got off topic. I want to know what the Ring, what's the discussion around the Ring? Because I know I have one, and I know that I can, like, see my neighbors because there's, like, bobcats in my neighborhood and stuff all the time, like, and they're ruining gutters, trying to eat the rabbits that are hiding in the gutters, and there's video of them.

(Chris Richardson at 00:39:46) Really? Yeah. I would watch that. That sounds good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:50) Yeah. So it's, but it's weird to me because, like, there's an app, and my wife, my wife brought it up to me, and I was just, like, you know, I'm pretty chill with the automation because it's like a ball that we know is happening, but, like, what am I going to—like, I can't stop it. I'm assuming you'd have to be in, like, law or legislature to just try to do something. But, anyways, in ten years, we're gonna be there anyways. Right?

(Chris Richardson at 00:40:12) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:14) But she had this app, and she came up to me, and she's like, oh, check it out. You know, you know those noises you heard? She's like, oh, look. The neighbors got them on a bobcat. But I was like, oh, how'd you get access to this? She's like, oh, it's just an app. And she goes, if you own a Ring doorbell, it's just going to show you all your neighbors near you.

(Chris Richardson at 00:40:28) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:28) I was like, what? I was like, there's no—like, I want to see Jen's, you know, neighbor—my neighbor Jen. I want to see her camera. Like, we have to exchange—no. No. It was just open. Like, you can just go around and see everyone in my neighborhood's doorbell cam.

(Chris Richardson at 00:40:42) Yeah. Yeah. That's part of it. Kind of bringing the surveillance state into our neighborhoods. Our neighborhood is very funny because there's a big—I mean, it's not super funny, but there's a big concern about coyotes. Coyotes are just all over Chicago and the Chicagoland area, and so there's always an alert. Hey. I was walking my dog, and there's a coyote. Every single night, there's an alert about a coyote.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:05) Are there attacks? Do you guys have coyote attacks?

(Chris Richardson at 00:41:08) I don't think so. I think they're afraid of us. But yeah. And it certainly, our—so we have a Ring doorbell, and we have a fairly busy street. And, you know, whenever there's motion in our motion zones, that information is going up somewhere. And it's, you know, my neighbors who never agreed to be on camera and have their Internet, you know, their identity on the internet and showing their faces and things. All it's going to take is someone to scan some faces and that's a lot of data out there. So I don't know. I'm not a super paranoid guy, but...

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:45) You know, if you want to be paranoid, you know what I think is going to get it the worst? The delivery guys.

(Chris Richardson at 00:41:51) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:52) Right? Because their faces are going to be the most, like, recognized, so they're going to have the most opportunity. They're going to be in the database longest and have the most opportunity for error. I want to see the graph of, like, crimes committed or, like, identified through facial recognition mapped to, like, what their profession is. Because the more you're on camera, the more likely, right?

(Chris Richardson at 00:42:12) Yeah. There's got to be some correlation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:13) No. I agree. And I feel bad because postal workers, that's a stressful job as it is. And now they're going up to housing, like, oh, god. I've got to be on a camera for this now. I'm just trying to deliver this mail, and they've got to be like, their face is right up to the doorbell.

(Chris Richardson at 00:42:25) No. Yeah. Yeah. But still, I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:35) Oh, man. This is great. So, like, what does your team look like? Like, how many do you have direct reports? Like, what do they look like?

(Chris Richardson at 00:42:43) So my direct report—I do have direct reports, technically, but they're my peers. I mean, I've been working with the same guys for, you know, a lot of them have been here for just as long as I have. But having said that, I mean, we've hired guys recently in the past three or four years, and, you know, technically, they are my direct reports. But when they're on a project, we like to put people together so there's at least teams of two or three, but they are interacting directly with the customer. So they have a lot of responsibilities and that's, you know, kind of who we like to hire is people who enjoy that responsibility. So in terms of me managing them, it's more what can I do for them? How can I provide mentorship abilities or what is it that they need to succeed, not at the current position necessarily, but, you know, beyond? Because we get people that are pretty young, and we know this isn't their first and only job. They're probably going to continue here and use this as a springboard or something else, and we're okay with that. That's great. That's fantastic that we have the least skilled people that want to come here and learn and get familiar with capital market space while learning a ton of, like, interesting technology and figuring out exactly what they want to do. So it's weird because I don't, I've had good managers. Actually, my boss, Jim, is just fantastic. I mean, he's really helped me kind of figure out what I want to do with my career, and that's how I want to help out our guys. They don't need, you know, someone to parent them and, you know, make sure that they're doing whatever they need to do. I trust them. That's why they're here. So it's whatever I can do to help them succeed, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:31) No. I mean, I love hearing that. We were just talking about this yesterday. So we started the podcast, and then a leadership company came out of it. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:39) Because people were saying, oh, you know, we hear these leaders. How do we get our leaders to do those types of things? And we're like, alright, well, Great Leadership Challenges. And so we're about two years into it now, and we were having a meeting the other day, and we're saying, alright, let's look at our best customers. Like, who are our best customers and what commonalities do they have between them? Right? It's like a startup, right? Because we want more of those types of people because they're having success with the product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:00) And what we've learned, like, the short of it is their company culture is everything. Like, the companies that have the culture that they care and they want to improve, they do well with our product. And we can't take people that don't want to improve and give them a product that makes them better. They just don't, it's like they won't do anything with it, and they won't have success with it. But it's important, though, because here's why.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:31) Like, they will go around, right, and say it doesn't work. Like, the purchaser, right? Like, they could purchase it, and then their people don't use it, and then they could go around and be like, oh, you know, it doesn't work. We haven't had this. We were just talking about this the other day. It's like, you want customers, and you want to be really good at identifying them because everyone talks no matter what. And so you want them going around saying this is the best system in the world. We love it. We recommend it. And then we want more of those types of customers. So we've finally gotten to the point where we can tell in our sales process when we don't want a customer. Yeah. And that's okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:07) Yeah. And we can say no to a customer or just discourage them from buying it.

(Chris Richardson at 00:46:12) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're in the same space. I don't know that, no, I'll say I think we've always been in the space where we can recognize upfront like you're saying. Is this risky? Is this a relationship we want to be in? And business is good enough where we can say that. And we know that we're going to turn this one away because it doesn't feel like the right thing. We're going to open ourselves up so that we have the availability when the next good customer comes our way who understands what this work relationship will be like. So it's tough to say no sometimes, but you're right. I mean, you have to kind of know when to walk away from stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:50) Oh, don't get me wrong, it's a total optimization thing. Like, it's after you get your base cost met, right? Like, you definitely have to take everybody at the beginning, and you have to go through that learning process. And then it's not always a straight shot up. Like, you can be doing well, and then it just, you, and then sometimes you're like, well, we really need the money, so we'll take this customer and then try to figure out how to get them as much success as possible, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:17) But yeah, it's, that's what makes it fun, right? If it was just a straight ride to the top, like if you could just flip a switch and just start having immediate success indefinitely, like, there would be people who would not flip the switch because they would just be bored.

(Chris Richardson at 00:47:31) Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And again, I mean, I think that's one of the fun things about the job is to not be bored, right? That's just the fun thing about doing engineering and software is there's so many opportunities to improve and to learn new things that we didn't sign up to be bored. It's not what we do. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:53) So as we start to wrap up, what's the rest of your day look like?

(Chris Richardson at 00:47:57) Well, I've got a, we do weekly iterations. So in about nine minutes here, I'm going to jump, and we're going to do feature estimations for a next iteration for our exchange platform. So we're kind of rolling out some new functionality that we want to estimate because we basically keep track of our team velocity to figure out how much work can get done every week with the given team that we have. So it'll be probably a long meeting going into features, really challenging each other, and making sure we understand exactly what's being asked of us to develop, you know, fun agile stuff. So unfortunately today is a long meeting, but then hopefully, once that's wrapped up, we'll know exactly what we need to do, and I'm going to probably play more of a Batman role and help where we need help to kind of improve our process. I like to give the feature functionality to the engineers who are most involved in it, and I'm just trying to assist them where I can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:53) So you start the meeting, sort of set the tone, and then just let them do their thing?

(Chris Richardson at 00:48:57) Exactly. Yeah. Again, we're all adults.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:00) Yeah. Yeah. Well, the important thing is that, you know, we have standards. Like, we set ourselves in an environment where we know that that's the most productive way to work, and so we adjust our environment to have a bunch of adults. And that, like, people want to come in, do good work, complete things, get things done, move the world forward. And then, you know, the biggest thing when people are asking me, oh, my team's like this or that or whatever, I was like, you're just in the wrong place. Like, if you're not that type of person and everyone else is, then just go find groups of people that are like you, that want to get good work done and not have issues.

(Chris Richardson at 00:49:40) We're a small company. I mean, there's eight engineers. That's including myself. And we have a lot of contractors that we work with as well. But one of the things that Jim has been doing, which I didn't get at the beginning, but now I totally get, is we have to just start thinking like a big company. How would we franchise this if we wanted to franchise it? And that gets back to figuring out what is our culture. What are the operations? What are the policies and procedures? For what does this meeting mean? And once we get that kind of written out somewhere, people can read it once and say, oh, I get it. I know why we're doing this. I got it from here. I know exactly what I need to accomplish today. And that's been something that we've been doing the past year, year and a half, and I think it's been to our benefit. Certainly, just, you know, codifying what it is we do here every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:28) Well, I want to make sure you're not late to that meeting, but, Chris, man, we did it. We made a podcast. How was it? First podcast. How was it?

(Chris Richardson at 00:50:34) It was great. It was great. 10 out of 10.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:36) Like, hang out. 10 out of 10. We just like hanging out, talking, right?

(Chris Richardson at 00:50:39) Feel like we figured out all the things today. It's good stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:42) We did. We took care of the world today.

(Chris Richardson at 00:50:46) You're welcome, world. You're welcome, world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:50) No more hello. Now it's you're welcome, world. That's right. I love the pizza there. Next time I'm in and around the area, are you in the city of Chicago? Are you right outside?

(Chris Richardson at 00:50:58) I'm right outside, but right outside. I'm practically in the city. So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:03) Okay. Cool. Yep. So, yeah, I was actually there like five times last year. So.

(Chris Richardson at 00:51:07) Nice. Yeah. Come on out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:08) Next time I'm there, we'll have some pizza.

(Chris Richardson at 00:51:10) Don't come right now. Wait a few months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:12) No. No. No. Yeah. I'm from Florida. I'm in Florida, and I'm wearing my Columbia jacket.

(Chris Richardson at 00:51:16) Yeah. You're going to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:17) It's like 70 degrees. Alright, my friend. Next time I'm out there, I'll let you know. Maybe we'll grab some food or something.

(Chris Richardson at 00:51:25) Cool. Sounds good, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:26) Alright. Have a great day, buddy.

(Chris Richardson at 00:51:28) You too. Bye-bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:29) See you. Bye.