Trey Connell CTO of ePublishing

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(Joel Beasley at 00:01:04) It's high energy, pragmatic, and motivating. To book me, go to moderncto.io and use the chat in the bottom right-hand corner. Today, we are talking to Trey Connell, the CTO of ePublishing, and we discuss chasing a business model rather than chasing the money, overcoming failure, and creating remote culture where everyone feels a part of the family. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:33) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Oh, man. I'm so happy. We're getting ready. Right after this, I jump on a plane to go to RSA.

(Trey Connell at 00:01:50) Really? You seem like a busy man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:54) Oh, man. Yeah. I just don't stop from the time I wake up till the time I go to bed. I just go back to back to back.

(Trey Connell at 00:02:02) I understand. I have that same feeling sometimes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:05) I like it, though. So I can have it either way. You know, I kind of go with my body. Right? Like, if I'm feeling overworked, then I just slow it down. When I'm ambitious, I just turn it up, and then I just go through my seasons.

(Trey Connell at 00:02:19) Oh, yeah. I'll do the same thing. I'll get kind of in the zone, so to speak, and really start hitting it hard for several days at a time. And then I'm done. You know? Then I need a couple days, two or three days, and spend some time with the family, spend some time on other interests, and then reenergize.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:38) That's exactly what it is. Like, last weekend, normally, I'd write and do work on the weekends. But last weekend, I was like, nah. I need some giggles. I need to see my little daughter giggle and move about and have fun and spend some time with the family. So that was really nice.

(Trey Connell at 00:02:54) Oh, that's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:55) So what are you up to at ePublishing? What are you really excited about this week that you're working on?

(Trey Connell at 00:03:00) This week, we've got a couple of new clients that we've onboarded that we're right sort of in the middle of deploying them, implementing their websites, and deploying our platform for them. So that's always exciting, you know. New opportunities and new experiences and getting to learn more about their business models and how we can help and moving them through the process and ultimately coming together for a redesign and a rebirth of their website or sites.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:30) Yeah. That's one of my favorite parts about building technology is getting to learn about the other company's business model.

(Trey Connell at 00:03:36) Oh, yeah. I've learned so much over the years. I've forgotten more than I've learned, but most of our customers are small to midsize publishers that are pretty niche in what they do. And so it could be anything from automotive repair to agriculture to plumbing. You know, you just never know what you're going to get when that new customer comes in the door. So it does keep it interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:00) Yeah. So for people who don't know what the ePublishing thing is, can you give a high-level overview of that?

(Trey Connell at 00:04:05) Sure. Yeah. So, basically, we have what we call an enterprise publishing system, but, essentially, at its core is a content management system that we've built and sort of cultivated and grown over the past several years that's focused on primarily the B2B space. As I mentioned, small to midsize publishers, but we also have some large multi-title publishers as well. And so that's sort of the ePublishing side. And then, you know, we have that fun situation where our company name is the same as the product name right now. So it's always a little confusing trying to talk to folks about it. But we also have our other product, which is the Ellington CMS, that is on a completely different platform, completely different infrastructure and so forth, but it's geared more towards the newspapers than traditional magazine publishers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:00) So is it for the digital component of the magazine, or do you do both?

(Trey Connell at 00:05:04) Just the digital component right now. We do some integration with circulation systems that will handle those kinds of things, actually printing or getting assets to the printer, but we handle the website of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:19) And is it, like, where the printed version is just embedded in the web, or is the content native on the web?

(Trey Connell at 00:05:26) It's native on the web. We preach and sort of try to ascribe towards a web-first mentality, where they're using our tools to produce content, edit content, and ultimately prepare that for whatever channel they need to deliver it to, whether it be things like their newsletters that they're producing on a weekly or monthly basis, sometimes a daily basis, whether it be the traditional things like RSS or even podcasts, or then out to actual print, you know, for delivery to someone's home or business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:58) I thank you on behalf of all content readers because nothing's more frustrating than when I go to pull up content and it's buried inside, like, page 53 of this flippable PDF thing. That's the worst.

(Trey Connell at 00:06:12) Yeah. We do see those. We run into them every now and then. There are still the publishers out there using things like flipbooks and some are just putting up bare-bones PDF files, you know, for download and things like that. But now we try to move our customers away from that and think digital first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:30) So have you been around since the beginning here at ePublishing?

(Trey Connell at 00:06:34) I came on in 2000 as a developer. They had been around a few years before that in some form or fashion. We sort of evolved over the years, though. When I first came on, we actually weren't ePublishing. We were Chaffey Interactive, named after our CEO, Tom Chaffey. And we were more just sort of a digital agency slash boutique web shop back then. You know? So it was working on anything and everything, web development for hire. And so it was everything from the real estate industry to some stuff in sports, things of that nature. And then we had some magazine publishers sprinkled in there. We had, you know, we would do little virtual hosted websites, just anything and everything. You know, we might have a daily journal for the city of Chicago, but then we might also have the local lawyer's website on board as well. So we were all over the map to say the least.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:34) So you went agency turned product because what, did the ePublishing product just start to take off? You get a lot of that business?

(Trey Connell at 00:07:40) Yeah. We went through, I'll tell you, we sort of failed miserably around 2008 or so, and that sort of spurred our growth or metamorphosis, if you will, into a product or at least our version of a product-based company. And, you know, we are SaaS, but we were doing a lot in the real estate industry at the time. And so we all remember what happened around that time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:04) Yeah.

(Trey Connell at 00:08:06) And so, you know, having sort of a couple of well-heeled clients, really, you know, that was a hard lesson to learn. It was really nice when things were going great. But once that revenue went away, then we had to sort of reinvent ourselves or refocus. I mean, we were already working with media companies and publishers. But we really had to focus and stop going after sort of chasing the money so much as chasing a business model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:33) Yeah. When you look at your books, it'll say, hey, if you want to make this thing last 18, 20 years, you have to do this.

(Trey Connell at 00:08:42) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:43) It's not easy to scale an agency. That was one of the questions I was faced with a few years ago or constantly, actually, because I had a 14-person development agency. And the thing was scaling the agency is so difficult because you're always making new products, and then the people that you need are really high-quality people. And it's just the revenue of what people will pay for products at the beginning versus the quality of people you need, it just doesn't make sense. So you see the market shift, everybody boom and burst as small products. And then when the team takes off, it takes off. You know?

(Trey Connell at 00:09:19) That's right. And, you know, when we were, as I said, sort of chasing the money, it really wasn't about how we could grow. It was about growing the customer, which is great. And we still focus that way in many ways, but we couldn't scale any of it. You know, it was a lot of one-off development opportunities as it were, that, you know, once it was done, it was done, and then we moved on to the next. And so, you know, we had a hard time building relationships, long-lasting relationships, and ultimately revenue streams for us. And, as you say, I mean, when you try to staff against just being a web development shop, people are coming and going. You know, knowledge comes in the door and then it walks out the door. And it just became something that was not, you know, by any stretch of the imagination, repeatable. You know, we could not define a formula for success in that business, something that we could repeatedly depend on and know that we were going to put out a great quality product or just experience with the customer at every turn, you know, because everything was so vastly different. We were in constant learning mode, and so we couldn't become experts in what we were doing. We were just doing everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:26) Oh, man. And that's the worst.

(Trey Connell at 00:10:29) Nothing is worse than being the multitasking jack of all trades.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:33) Right? It's like all I hear is Tony Robbins in the back of my mind. Focus, focus, focus.

(Trey Connell at 00:10:36) Right. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:38) So what does your day-to-day look like now as a CTO of ePublishing?

(Trey Connell at 00:10:43) Day-to-day? Well, I still try to do as much coding as possible on the ePublishing side of the shop. I don't do anything on the Ellington side. Leave that up to the engineers that we have there, but I still try to contribute and do a fair amount of coding on the ePublishing side and everything there is Ruby on Rails. We switched to that several years ago away from Java and it's one of the best decisions that we had ever made. We really enjoyed that. But, so I like to, you know, keep my fingers in that pile a little bit. But mainly, it's, you know, I'd say everything from working with customers on an almost daily basis, sitting in meetings. And when they come to us with any kind of opportunities or challenges that they have and sort of trying to bridge that gap between business need and technology solution, trying to figure out what parts of our platform work the best for that given need, basically acting as a consultant to them, you know, with our own products and also trying to show them other partners that we might have or other things that we've seen in the industry that, you know, they might benefit from that either may or may not be integrated with our system or may or may not be in the future integrated with our system. But just really trying to help them with the best practices and ultimately look at ROI for what they're trying to do and helping them to decide if it's even worth doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:07) Nice. So how big is the team on the development team side at ePublishing?

(Trey Connell at 00:12:12) Development side, we're about, it's about half the company, so about 14, 15 people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:19) Oh, that's very cool. And then so 14, 15 Rails developers or some maybe some infrastructure people?

(Trey Connell at 00:12:26) Yeah. We've got DevOps guys and gals and, you know, we've got more of those people. And then on the Ellington side, it's actually built in Django and Python. So we have engineers over there that focus solely on that. We do have some crossover. We have a lot of our, as you can imagine, a lot of our staff, the area that's growing the most is front-end development. Everything is JavaScript nowadays. Right? So that's where we've sort of chosen to focus on that over the last couple, yeah, couple two or three years. And so that's where we've done the bulk of our hiring and growth is on the front end, quote unquote.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:00) So I'm curious. So, like, when you're writing code, are you jumping in and, like, just grabbing a story? Or, like, how do you jump in and out of writing code with your team and it not be an issue?

(Trey Connell at 00:13:14) Right. It can be an issue quickly. That's one of the things I learned is sort of, you know, in that progression from, or that path from, you know, pure developer to CTO is I can really cause a lot of problems if I get in the way. So I really have to sort of pick my battles or let my team pick my battles for me. So a lot of times, it's, you know, our teams coming to me and saying, look, you know, we're a little short on the sprint, or we've got this specialized thing over here that needs to be done, and we're having trouble resourcing it. Or on the other end of the spectrum, it's we know we have to get this done. We don't quite yet have a vision for it. You know, how are we going to architect this? And so I'll sort of walk in on the front side of that, you know, and help just enough. You know, we'll all learn together, figure out what we're doing and how we need to do it. Then I'll, you know, I affectionately call myself the bungee boss. So I'll bungee in. I'll help where I'm needed and where they need me, where they let me know they need me, and then I bungee back out and I get out of the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:21) So when this team is growing, obviously, it's grown. You've been there while it's grown. Have you, one of the big questions that I have been getting, I get, like, crazy amounts, I get hundreds of questions, Trey. Like...

(Trey Connell at 00:14:35) Yeah. I can imagine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:36) Because everybody here is, because it's international. Right? So from all different levels. And one of the things that, and it's weird because it's very much like looking at large datasets. The larger the data, the bigger the patterns emerge, and then they kind of move. So, like, one week, I'll be getting all these questions about this one topic, and, like, no one's connected. Like, everyone's in different parts of the world. But one thing that came up, like, real big in the past two weeks is hiring specialist versus generalist. Like, people are asking, do you ever bring in a consultant to do something very specialized or my team is growing? Should I get a bunch of people that just know this one thing or should I get a bunch of generalists and how do I balance?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:13) What thought? There's no wrong answer. Just like, what thoughts come from your experience on that topic? Because you know what you're doing.

(Trey Connell at 00:15:23) Yeah. I think it's, well, you know, that's important to remember too. I mean, I don't always know what I'm doing. In fact, most of the time I'm not. So I've been really lucky. I've been very blessed to have lucked upon some very good hires and, you know, establish some leaders in our company that really take, deserve, and need to take most, if not all, the credit for the things that we do. And they do a really good job of further evaluating talent and bringing folks on board. We are a completely virtual company, so every one of us works from home.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:57) Really?

(Trey Connell at 00:15:58) Yeah. So that comes with its own challenges, but we've done that since the beginning. So we're pretty adept at being able to interview. We're not imposing Google tests on anyone or anything like that, but we do have a measure of technical challenges and things that we issue. But we're really, really good at hiring generalists, I would say. We're just now sort of getting into a space, I believe, with data. And then on the other end, on just developing in general with all the, you know, I mentioned JavaScript, with all the frameworks that are out there now and trying to decide, you know, in that wild west of coding in this new era, who and what we need to bring in. So we have sort of gone from generalist and saying, "Okay, I need a front-end developer who has a portfolio or resume who looks like this, who knows these things and can show us their GitHub account," to "Okay, we now know what we want to do and how we're going to do it, and so now we can go focus in and hone in on the talent that we need." So that's helped us out quite a bit. It's just sort of, you know, planning our tech roadmap, so to speak, and the tools that we want to use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:10) You know what I've been thinking? I always get those messages from recruiters when you're in tech, right?

(Trey Connell at 00:17:16) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:17) And so I was thinking, you know, they never know. And then I'd say twice a year I'll just respond just because I need to stay in the loop of what their tactics are and be aware of it. So I'll respond and talk to one of them, have a nice conversation. But I found that you can always get to the person without a code review, which is always interesting to me. And then I was thinking about, you know, I just magically create tools on the fly sometimes in my head because that's what we do as creators. And I was thinking, you know, where's the tool that's scanning GitHub and then checking the quality of people's code and the language and the tools that they use, and then matching that back against the people's jobs? Because if I need somebody that knows Slim, right, and I see this guy who matches closely as Slim with some Code Climate style detection, right? Why don't I just get a list of a bunch of people who write really high-quality Slim?

(Trey Connell at 00:18:16) Yeah. That would actually be pretty amazing. I've never thought about coming at it from that direction, honestly, but it's a pretty decent idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:23) Yeah. It could even be private. So I could even go into GitHub and integrate it into my GitHub, right, sort of like a developer portfolio. But instead of it actually looking at the projects and everything, it's looking at the structure of the things I've committed, right? Not my team, it's only my commits. And then it's somehow giving some quality score, but then it just takes the results of that and puts it up into my company's database, and then it can search and match based on what people need. That way you can protect all your code privacy rights because the code never leaves the servers. It's not like I'm storing copies of it, right? And so you could probably do something really neat with that. And now it's like, "Alright, enough." Enough, everybody, you know, because here's the thing: if you want to game the system, you have to learn how to write good code, right? You'll actually have to go through and learn everything it's going to look for. And I'm like, that would be the best thing ever. It would make developers better, and it would give recruiters, like, it would stop wasting their time.

(Trey Connell at 00:19:25) Yeah. So I could go and learn all of the heuristics and decision making for RuboCop, for example, and then write really, really great code.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:33) Exactly. Yeah. You could just take, I mean, I don't know. I just thought that was a really cool idea because I'm like, look at these people. They're wasting their time having these long, hour-long conversations with these individuals, and then they don't even know the quality of their code.

(Trey Connell at 00:19:49) Yeah. And that's, you know, we do, I guess, probably take a pretty traditional approach when it comes to evaluating and finding talent. I mean, obviously we're looking for code samples. We're looking for things that we can find out about them online or that they're sending to us and so forth. And then it does come down to that sort of almighty interview or series of those. And a lot of what we found though is that it's not always the person who maybe, you know, in this example, Code Climate rated the best or whatever. It's who can work in our environment. It's who has also the communication skills and the sort of personal fit that, as you can imagine, our somewhat unique business and environment demand. So it definitely helps to see and know that they can write good code, at least we think they can. Of course, you never really know that until you get someone into your environment and into your code base and into your product, because they might have written amazing code with missile guidance systems, but that doesn't mean that they're going to put together a nice navigation for your next website or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:56) I guarantee you, if they do the first one, the second one's not going to happen. Missile guidance systems and navigation? That is so interesting. Yeah. I also noticed there's kind of, I was talking about this the other day, there's kind of like a split. There's very rigid, analytical programmers, and there's very creative programmers.

(Trey Connell at 00:21:14) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:15) Isn't that so interesting?

(Trey Connell at 00:21:16) I think that we tend towards the creative side, honestly. Yeah. You know, we have a lot of checks and balances in place to make sure that we're all doing the best job that we can, and we all have visibility to what each other is doing through all of our development life cycle in terms of our pull requests and code reviews. And then, of course, we do have those continuous integration and code coverage pieces in place to help us along the way as well and catch those things that a human being might not catch. But, you know, just being able to communicate with each other through a daily, not anything as formal as stand-up or what have you, but being able to be there for each other as code commits are being sent in, you know, formal and sometimes informal code reviews, and evaluating this pull request. I mean, you all get to know each other's code pretty quickly, which also means I know how I need to position a piece of code or a component because my team is going to work on it, and I know what the expectations are for that component and how it's going to fit in with the entire ecosystem that we're building. So just having each other all in the code base basically at all times and working together really helps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:25) It's like a team.

(Trey Connell at 00:22:27) Like a team. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:28) I know it sounds like I'm thinking this thought for the first time. Your team, your development, it's like a team. They have to, they're playing like, in my head when you're describing that, I'm seeing, I don't even watch or participate in sports. But, and that's not true. I played football and baseball all the way, but now I don't, right? But I just saw soccer players throwing the ball. You have to know what your teammates are going to do, and you have to anticipate the next move. And that's, I was listening to a Wayne Gretzky interview, and he goes, "I'm not really that great at anything except for being able to anticipate where the puck's going to go."

(Trey Connell at 00:23:03) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:04) He's like, you could talk about all the skills, all the drills. He's like, "No." He's like, "I just feel it. I just, I've seen, I just know the puck's going to go over there." And that's the thing I'm really great at.

(Trey Connell at 00:23:13) Yeah. I think because we do build that sort of camaraderie, and I know I probably make it sound like we have some of this meditative kumbaya team thing that we have going on. It's not quite that zen, but it is pretty cool to watch, especially from my role where I am not as involved just because that's just not my role. But sort of on the outside looking in sometimes, just watching the team operate like a well-oiled machine, that is the biggest satisfaction I could possibly have as a CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:43) Nothing's better than monitoring that Slack channel and watching them find and solve problems without you having to touch anything.

(Trey Connell at 00:23:50) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:50) It's like, yes, you go. It's like, we'll go back to sports. It's like watching a sports game. I'm like, "Oh no, Johnny's down. Oh, Mark saves the day. Andrea's got the support."

(Trey Connell at 00:24:00) Well, that's the thing with the sports metaphor. You always talk about, you know, players win games. Coaches don't win games.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:06) That is so true.

(Trey Connell at 00:24:08) That's sort of applicable here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:10) Yeah. But the coaches make great players.

(Trey Connell at 00:24:13) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:14) You know?

(Trey Connell at 00:24:15) We've got to get them all together. Everyone has to know the goals. Everyone has to know the game plan. And but once you get that in place, then it's just about the talent. And like I said, luckily, you know, we miss sometimes, but we've been very fortunate in bringing on great folks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:30) I'm not laughing at the great folks. I'm just, my mind's just going. I have a question for you about culture.

(Trey Connell at 00:24:39) You bet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:40) You have had this remote team always. Have you had the opportunity to work in an office with developers before where all the developers are in the office?

(Trey Connell at 00:24:50) A previous company I did, went into a cubicle every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:53) So how are you responsible for the culture? Or what do you think about the culture? Or what happens? One of the other questions we were getting is company culture when the teams are remote. Do you think about it? How do you deal with it? What sort of issues do you face? What do you think about?

(Trey Connell at 00:25:11) Yeah. You have to. I mean, on one hand, you don't have to deal with the sort of water cooler distractions, if you will. People can stay pretty heads down and get their work done, you know, when you're in a remote environment. On the other hand, it's absolutely critical. It's not just CTOs. I mean, obviously, CEOs, CIOs, COOs, doesn't really matter. Anyone in a leadership position, it's not just about cranking out the work, whatever that might be. It's also about being a cheerleader when you need to, making sure that you're putting things in place to reward people publicly and visibly across the company, especially when you're remote. Because if I have a conversation with someone and give them an attaboy or attagirl, then no one else necessarily knows about that unless we make it visible. So we try to do small things. We just sort of created some little programs and little things that we do from time to time. Just like we have, as corny as it sounds, we have a Rock Star of the Month program.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:12) Nice.

(Trey Connell at 00:26:14) And so everyone is encouraged to nominate their coworkers, their peers, people they work for or work with. Doesn't matter. Everyone is encouraged to nominate folks on a monthly basis. And then, you know, once that new month starts, I go back and review all of those nominations, and then we choose that Rock Star of the Month. Then they get a small financial reward and, more importantly, the recognition. You know, they get a special spot on our Wiki and in Podio where we have our sort of water cooler section of the company and things like that. So we try to do little things on that level to keep everyone sort of on the same page and engaged and a part of the, as you say, the team or the family as we like to say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:58) Nice. Yeah. We actually, in our proposals and all our paperwork, we call ourselves the Modern CTO family.

(Trey Connell at 00:27:03) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:04) Yeah. So have they ever nominated you?

(Trey Connell at 00:27:07) Yes. But I'm not eligible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:10) They're...

(Trey Connell at 00:27:12) I don't, I personally just don't believe that I should be eligible for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:18) Well, Trey, today you are the Modern CTO's Rock Star of the Month. You are fully eligible. I'm going to pretend that this whole thing was planned.

(Trey Connell at 00:27:29) Yes. I knew I could do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:30) You could do it. Oh my God.

(Trey Connell at 00:27:34) I want to thank the Academy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:35) Yes. Oh, wait. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Go. There's the speech. Oh, man. Yeah. We'll send you, you know what you won? Jackie, Trey wins a signed copy of the book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:49) There you go.

(Trey Connell at 00:27:51) Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:51) Sending it out to you. There you go.

(Trey Connell at 00:27:53) Hey. I'm already winning, man. I'm on here with you today. And speaking of the book, congratulations. I didn't want to let this get past without saying that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:00) Oh, damn. That's crazy.

(Trey Connell at 00:28:01) Actually, I read it. I did go and drop my five-star review for you. Yes. It's a great, great book. I read it through twice now, and it's sitting on my desk, and I plan on reading it again. As much as I've highlighted it and sort of, you know, skimmed and reskimmed and read, I know there's some nuggets in there that I've yet to sort of unearth. So I'll be reading it again. It was great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:22) Oh, man. It's so awesome. So thank you. The biggest thing I get from that book, other than people saying nice things, is I get this fierce anger.

(Trey Connell at 00:28:40) Really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:38) Of, it's not enough. Like, we need more.

(Trey Connell at 00:28:40) Oh, yeah. And I could say that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:41) Yeah. So I've never done a book before, right? I have no idea what I was doing. As far as the book, now, actually, I get it. Now I can put out a, it took me a year to get it figured out, right? But now that I got it figured out, I could drop a book in three months.

(Trey Connell at 00:29:00) Oh, that's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:00) Yeah. Because it's all about getting the connections, understanding the different pieces in the puzzle, and where you have to go for what, and how to get all your stuff together. So if you ever want to do a book, just ask me. I could bullet point it out. It'd be really easy.

(Trey Connell at 00:29:13) Oh, that'd be fantastic. I've been asked that question quite a lot. If I was going to try to do it, it seems like every now and then I get that question, you know, so when are you writing a book? What are you writing about? And as much as I love to write, just sort of on my own, you know, I haven't really contemplated going that far with it.

(Trey Connell at 00:29:28) But you definitely inspire me. That's, you know, I can see that you put a lot of work into that. And yeah, absolutely. We'll be looking forward to volume two if that ever comes out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:39) Yeah. So because of those people reaching out, apparently, when people buy books, everyone has a different idea in their head of what it should be. Right? Forget the description. Right? Forget that. Just assume that somebody just saw the cover and then they just know what's in it. So the two worlds are, the people that really like it are like they were just open and like, oh, Modern CTO. I'm a CTO. I'm modern. I'm going to just read it. And then it was, you know, more or less like experiences and lessons and things that I've learned. And then the other half of people believe that the book is to be a step-by-step guide. Right? So I was like, oh. So but that's good though because now that I put it out and I got that feedback, now I know that in the future, I can create two worlds of content, and I can separate them intentionally.

(Trey Connell at 00:30:30) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:30) Where I can set up one as, like, here's for example, there was a chapter about momentum and teams. Right?

(Trey Connell at 00:30:37) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:37) And so I could write the story about the momentum and teams and then provide a literal step-by-step guide that's separate from the story on how to actually carry it out.

(Trey Connell at 00:30:48) Yeah. I thought you did a great job of sort of merging the two. And I liked, you know, like I said, I liked it because it was a quick-ish read, which, you know, for people in our position, you know, any kind of leaders that are bouncing around all over the place. I enjoyed the fact that it wasn't, you know, 800 pages long.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:06) Exactly.

(Trey Connell at 00:31:06) You know, I felt like I was able to sit down in the morning and really, you know, glean some critical things from it that could keep with me the rest of the day and to come. So yeah, I tend to be more on the side of, you know, I think you put just enough of the sort of tactics in there and sort of people who are looking for that to benefit those readers. But I tend to be more on the creative and tell-a-story side where I can kind of learn from, you know, challenges and other successes that other people in my industry and in my role have had. And so I thought you had a nice mix of the two.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:44) Yeah. And so the two worlds, I dove deeper and started getting to know the different people that—it's funny. I've never put stuff out before, really, before this book or the podcast. So I had no idea what it's like working with putting stuff out into the world from the perspective of it's your own content versus an app and getting feedback from that. But when the anger can—when someone comes at you with the anger of something and then you just be nice to them, it instantly flips to like they love you.

(Trey Connell at 00:32:13) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:14) It blew my mind. I'll get people that write me these long things. Oh, this is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. I'm like, oh, man. I really appreciate that. This is very useful feedback because now I can do A, B, and C. And thank you so much for spending your time looking at it. And then they're like, oh, man. No problem. I was just having a bad day. Right?

(Trey Connell at 00:32:31) You hear that a lot. And you actually—I mean, you're absolutely right. You see it on social media a lot where the people who are handling social media very well are doing exactly that. You know, that's a—especially professionals who are having their work, you know, critiqued and sometimes just flat-out criticized. Anytime you see an example of someone who's going back and really truly appreciating the feedback, negative or not—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:53) Yeah.

(Trey Connell at 00:32:54) It usually turns the tide pretty quickly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:56) Right. Well, I need the feedback. I need every piece of feedback because—

(Trey Connell at 00:33:00) Oh, so you got to write a better book the next time. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:02) That is the only way you can do it. It's iterative like anything in life.

(Trey Connell at 00:33:06) Yep. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:08) I have, um, there is one course that people don't talk about or one thing people aren't talking about, but I have both experienced myself. And because you have a remote team, I'm going to mention it to you. And I get a lot of requests for it. But work-from-home depression is this topic that I'm getting people writing me about. Because if you're not intentionally structuring your day like, I have one CTO on, CTO of a large company, and they're remote. So I think they have 20, 20, 30 people on their team. They're remote and one of the questions was, you know, what's one of your biggest struggles as CTO? And it was working from home because without intentional—especially if you're single. Right? Without being able to structure your day intentionally to where you're going out and interacting with other people, you know, you can end up just completely isolated and disconnected from everybody very fast, very easily.

(Trey Connell at 00:34:04) That's very true. And we've seen that firsthand in the past, for sure. Yeah. It's not all sunshine and rainbows when it comes to working from home.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:11) Right.

(Trey Connell at 00:34:12) You do have to be on the lookout for that. You have to be engaged, you know, with your team and determine, you know, if someone is—you know, if you do see some drop-off, not just in productivity or amount of, you know, number of lines of code submitted, but just in interaction, you know, just in smiles.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:31) Right.

(Trey Connell at 00:34:31) Just in having fun, you know, whether it's, you know, this guy used to post a whole lot of memes to the Slack channel. You know, like, where did he go? Yeah. Kind of disappeared as of late. So you do have to be aware of that and make sure you communicate with each other and prop each other up when you can. And we'll try to—we don't do it as much as we used to, um, but we do try to get together for actual face-to-face, you know, team meetings from time to time. And they're usually very simple, but we try to do some of that. We haven't, to my knowledge anyway—I've not dealt too much on the depression side, or at least not that I've known, for anyone who's been—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:12) For the years. Everyone thinks of the extreme of depression, but depression just means to slow down. It's like you depress your pedal. You compress like, you know, like, it just means to slow down. Right? There's extreme depression. Right? But the act of getting slightly lethargic or, you know, just slightly disconnected, like, there's a huge spectrum of depression. Right?

(Trey Connell at 00:35:36) Yeah. And we urge everyone to, you know, we don't really keep—we're sort of, you know, we're in the Central time zone. It's where we kind of base our operations if you want to look at it that way. So we don't really keep a nine-to-five or eight-to-five or whatever. You know, people work and they get their job done. And so we encourage people to, you know, when you're done, you're done. If it's 3:00 and, you know, you're ready to go, then go. If you want to come in at, you know, work till six, but come in at ten, then that's fine too. And that can vary from day to day, week to week. It depends on, you know, if your kids have activities at school that you need to get to or you just need a break. You know? You've just been writing code, writing code for three or four days, and you just need to get out and go see a movie or something. So, you know, we've been very fortunate again that way that we have hired some folks that, you know, they don't take advantage of that. You know, they appreciate it. They nurture it. And, you know, it's just become, like you said, kind of part of our company culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:30) Nice. And that's one of the big things too with your support system, with the family, right, the people that you work with. When you have that culture versus think of more of a consultant-here-to-get-the-high-hourly-rate feel, you have different checks and balances involved. Right? There's just a different—it's just the culture. But one of the things that I would like to do, um, because I've gotten this and because you did like the book, is I want—I'm doing a whole guide system thing about the work-from-home depression, but what I want to do is I want to give it to you to sort of take a look at it and pass it around your team, have a look at it, and just get feedback.

(Trey Connell at 00:37:11) Absolutely. We'd be honored. We'd love to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:13) Yeah. Because I think by getting some feedback from some people that I like, um, because you will—you'll just tell me straight up. That's the thing. People that like me, they'll just be like, tell me exactly what they feel because that's what I want. Right? Because my goal is not to have something that Joel made that was great. My goal is to work with others to create something that's useful in this universe.

(Trey Connell at 00:37:36) That's amen, brother. We're all trying to do that whether we're doing it as technologists or just as people. That's the way we should be looking at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:43) Well, that's perfect way to wrap it up. Trey, if people want to find out more about you, what's the best way? Twitter, LinkedIn, email?

(Trey Connell at 00:37:49) Yeah. Twitter. LinkedIn is probably the best. I think you have those links. And so yeah. It's just at treyconnell, T-R-E-Y-C-O-N-N-E-L-L on Twitter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:01) I am so glad I—because you said your last name, because you would have been called—today we're talking to Trey Connell.

(Trey Connell at 00:38:08) Connell? Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:10) There's Ns though. There's two of them and they just demand so much attention being in the center and whatnot. So—

(Trey Connell at 00:38:16) It happens every time, I mean.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:18) So what's the accurate way to pronounce the name?

(Trey Connell at 00:38:21) It's Cannel. Trey Cannel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:23) Cannel. And that's American Indian?

(Trey Connell at 00:38:26) Yeah. Actually, ironically enough, I guess way, way, way back in the day, it was O'Connell. Go figure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:33) There you go. Dude, thank you so much for coming and hanging out with me and talking. It is exciting, man.

(Trey Connell at 00:38:42) Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:44) When I'm—I'm going to make an excuse when I'm nearby Arkansas to come out and see you and get a high five.

(Trey Connell at 00:38:50) Hey. Hit it up, man. That'll be great. Man hugs around.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:52) Man hugs around. Alright. The number one of the month. What are you—the rock star of the month.

(Trey Connell at 00:38:57) Rock star of the month.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:58) Alright. Talk to you soon. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this, get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.