JR Hayward - VP of Software at TopDown Systems

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(Joel Beasley at 00:00:24) Now get excited because today we are talking to JR Hayward, the VP of Software Development at TopDown Systems, and we discuss how a feature isn't done until it's shippable, tapping the next generation to drive innovation, and the importance of asking the question, "How could I be wrong?" All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. So you're at TopDown Systems?

(JR Hayward at 00:01:02) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:02) What do they do?

(JR Hayward at 00:01:05) TopDown Systems does customer communication management, which is kind of a changing definition right now and changing so much, in fact, that Gartner and Forrester, Madison, a bunch of people who report on that industry are no longer going to report on CCM as just CCM. And I think we're one of the reasons why. Now they're going to just start talking about customer experience, which CCM is a small part of. And when I say I think we're one of the reasons why is when we started to develop this new product of ours called InTouch—yes, my question is going to dive right into it—but the new product called InTouch, which reaches out beyond what used to be customer communications management. Is that CCM?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:51) CCM?

(JR Hayward at 00:01:51) CCM used to just be basically large batch jobs sending out bills, sending out explanation of benefits for insurance companies, sending out letters, or even sending off letters from a CRM system. There's an actual rep involved in stopping the person on the phone and fills out a letter. And it's gone way beyond that now. It's gone into SMS messages, YouTube, Facebook, all kinds of different channels to reach customers. And it becomes a big part of making sure that a customer—they call it customer journey. I'm sure you've heard all this before—customer journey is a smooth one. And we would like to see it get to the point where you're on the phone with a rep on your way into the office. You get to the office, and now you're in a chat session, a video session with that same rep, and you're having interactive dialogue with them, and they're writing you something at the same time. And, "All right, can you send me a recording of this? Can you send me a confirmation?" And it goes right to your text or your email or wherever you want to receive it. We'd like to see it get that smooth that you could literally go from phone to desktop to tablet to paper seamlessly without ever knowing that it happened to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:03) That's the problem you're solving right now? That's awesome.

(JR Hayward at 00:03:05) That's—we're taking the first steps towards solving that problem along with a lot of other people. No one's going to solve this by themselves. Otherwise, they would have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:12) Right. It's going to be an iterative approach that's going to, you know, small improvements here and there over time.

(JR Hayward at 00:03:17) Right. And, you know, not everyone can be an absolute expert. For example, Alexa. I'm playing around with Alexa now because of my home remodel, really.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:26) Yeah.

(JR Hayward at 00:03:26) But I'm playing around with it, and we know that we want to be involved with that type of technology. And that's really easy to do because everyone has done something—Google's done something for us, Amazon's done something for us, and Apple's done something for us. All I need to do is talk to those things. So that's an example of we're not going to develop a voice response application that, you know, natural language understands. When I said, you know, "Alexa, turn on the lights," we're going to interface with that in such a way that we could have—one example, an insurance company of ours sends out, you know—"Give Alexa your morning report," or "Siri, your morning report," and it says, "You have three emails from your boss and you have an email from Blue Cross saying there's an explanation of benefits." "Well, show me the explanation of benefits," and it pops up on their screen, on their tablet, or wherever they need to see it. And then they can say, "Wait a minute, this is wrong," and immediately start a chat session with someone and say, "This is wrong. This should have been paid. I already have my deductible covered," stuff like that. That's where we want to get to. And again, we're not going to invent all those technologies. We need other people to work with those to develop those technologies.

(JR Hayward at 00:04:32) And what I love about the world today with technology is the API concept. Everything has an easy to get to API, a webhook, a something to tie in. I'll take it back to the more mundane. I started looking at it because my TV does not have an Alexa interface. So, "Well, I'll write one." So I started looking into that, and I want to tie it into my DIRECTV box, and I want to tie it into my light system so that the lights change when I turn on the TV and they can do all that from one place. So I start looking at that, and you see this. This is just like the APIs we build. It's that simple to use and that simple to do. And I love that. I mean, that is taking—that's a promise of technology that I've seen my entire career—that one day you won't need a programmer to write a program.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:19) Oh, yeah.

(JR Hayward at 00:05:19) And we're getting there. And I love it. It's just—I mean, like, put me out of a job, but it's pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:25) Right. We had David Isbitski. He's the head of evangelism for Alexa. But, yeah, the promise of being able to connect things is just beautiful. And going towards the point where we don't have developers, I mean, I think us at our—the experience we have building systems, it puts us in an awesome position for us to be relevant when there's less programmers, because we're designing systems that build systems.

(JR Hayward at 00:05:52) Well, it's the—I mean, everyone complains about things being made in China, like the iPhone's made in China. But I remember reading an interview with the guy who at the time was the head of technology—I can't remember his exact title—for China. And he said, "That iPhone sells for $800. We get $4 of that. We are on the wrong side of this equation." And there's a lot of truth in that because the real strength in all of this is creativity. It's not technology. Because, you know, you can call them factories, but there's colleges in India that are turning out people who can write code—300,000 of them a year. So there's lots of them around. But the guy who comes up with the idea or can put those all together and make it something really useful and really cool, that's where the value is now. Unfortunately, there's few of those people. That causes some employment problems until, you know, everything else catches up. That's the normal cycle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:52) So how did you get involved with TopDown Systems?

(JR Hayward at 00:06:55) Well, a guy who I used to work with when I first started my career—we worked for a company called Datacrown, which was a Canadian-based insurer, and they had huge data centers. And my sister was working for him, and I was just starting, you know, I was just working every job at the time because I was just hungry. And I got a job as a remote job entry operator there. And two years later, I was an assembly programmer for them and working on special projects. So he knew me from that, and he was having a problem. He called my sister and said, "Where the hell is JR?" And I think I was in Latin America at the time, and so that's how we got back in touch.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:38) Nice. So assembly, like memory systems?

(JR Hayward at 00:07:41) Yeah. This is—I'm dating myself. But, yeah, this is IBM mainframe type systems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:45) You know, there—it was interesting. I was reading this article about the rise of hackers and security experts from other countries. And one of the things, the benefit that they had is they would get our tech, our old technology, essentially—the scraps of technology because of how cheap it was—on a huge delay. So they were learning these fundamental principles. They were learning assembly, like, ten, twelve years ago as the thing that was the new hot technology, which we have moved so far from that. They were using that old technology in order to attack our newer systems because we've since kind of moved on. Because we don't have a lot of assembly experts. We don't have a lot of low-level experts anymore going so far up the stack, and they're learning and excited about the bottom of the stack. And they're like, "Whoa, you guys have all these gaps," and they're just wide open, but no one even really is aware of them here.

(JR Hayward at 00:08:40) That's really interesting. Because I remember Mike Fitzgerald, the guy who I said knew me from way back when and brought me into TopDown. I remember him—he didn't remember this, but I remember him telling me a long time ago—that when he retires, he's just going to put up a sign in front of his house that says, "I read assembler dumps, $2,000 a line." Because he figured he'd be the only one left to know how to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:58) Yeah. And it's funny too because before I had this conversation about five or seven years ago, ORM started to get really popular. I was introduced to them with Rails and some other larger platforms. And when I saw them, I was like, "Oh man, when everyone starts using these ORM systems, no one's going to know how to write SQL anymore." And then I'm going to have a huge bit just like your assembly dump reader. I'm going to be like, "I can write SQL. I know what to do." And you get the high schoolers look at you like, you know?

(JR Hayward at 00:09:32) Actually, this is actually interesting because I think the trend's kind of going back the other way. Because one of the things that's happening in universities right now is you can get a degree in Java programming, which to me is just silly. I don't want an expert Java programmer. I want an expert programmer. And I'd rather they taught them assembly, that they knew how a disk worked, that they knew how databases worked, and they knew all the algorithms. I'd rather that, because anyone could teach them Java if they know that. You don't even have to teach them. Give them a book. They'll know Java overnight if they know that. It's just, you know, "I know I want to do this. There must be a way to do it. How do I do it? And is there a library that makes it easier?" That's what becomes your question at this time.

(JR Hayward at 00:10:12) And I've been doing a lot—I do a lot of volunteering in the local school system because I have kids in there. And I was working with a few of the teachers there to push STEM and STEAM programs. And I started pushing the STEAM because I have a daughter who's really good at art, but has no interest in technology, and I'm trying to—

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:27) What's STEAM? This is new for me. I'm just hearing that.

(JR Hayward at 00:10:29) Oh, STEM is science, technology, engineering, and math. STEAM adds art.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:35) Oh, very cool.

(JR Hayward at 00:10:36) So the idea is, "Okay, you want to be a creative person. You want to make movies? Do you know how green screen works? You've got to do those special effects. You've got to talk to the guy who knows how to do those special effects." So there's a side—there's a side of art that you have to—and that's what I'm trying to explain to my daughter because she has no interest. I mean, she does really well in math because we insist on it and all that. But she has no interest in science and she has no interest in math. She's just doing it because she can. And I'm trying to explain to her, it's like, "Very soon, the only people who are going to have really good jobs in this country are really creative people, of which you're one, who know engineering as well." Because that's where the world is going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) So she really likes art, you said?

(JR Hayward at 00:11:17) She loves art. She loves art.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:18) So that and she'll love science. Same thing.

(JR Hayward at 00:11:20) I keep trying to—she'll know that one day. She's 16, so she knows everything besides that. I mean, that's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:27) Yeah. When I hit that intersection in my mid-twenties—I'm in my early thirties now—but when I hit that intersection of science is art and it all just kind of clicked—a lot of thanks to the Neil deGrasse Tysons and, you know, a bunch of people who explained things simply—when it all kind of clicked and I got that perception of how large life actually is on, you know, a calendar of the universe, at that point, life started to make a whole lot more sense to me, and art and science blended. But, yeah, you use one to fuel the other and they go back and forth.

(JR Hayward at 00:12:02) Plus, yeah, that's a way to communicate with—you know, I did a real fast weekend thing for a friend who has a scientist working for her and they couldn't get some software working. So I went in one weekend. And so I'm talking to these scientists. Now I have no idea—these guys are PhDs in physical chemistry and stuff like that. And they're way over my head talking about, you know, time-of-flight spectrography. But, you know, between three of us, we got the whole thing working in a weekend. And I did it as a favor to start a company, so I did it as a favor for a friend. And it required the three of us to kind of be able to translate between each other's expertise. And artists have the same issue right now. You're not going to turn out a movie today without technology and technologists involved. You're just not going to do it. And you can make a much better movie because at a much cheaper—this is actually interesting because it kind of explains what's going on in the world now in my mind is that you can have a movie set in Rome and never leave your basement. That's how good the technology is getting. Never leave your basement. And when we have movies set on—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:13) Available to me in—exactly. Exactly. Like, I have a whole setup here where we have a green screen, and we have a 4K camera. We have boom mics. I literally have better technology than existed twenty years ago in the best studio in the world for under $3,000 or $4,000 and available to me with one click Amazon within two and a half days.

(JR Hayward at 00:13:32) And all this is literally free. I mean, not literally—virtually free. I mean—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:37) It is free. That would have been a million dollars back then, and it wouldn't have been one one-hundredth of what it is today.

(JR Hayward at 00:13:42) And it's the problem that IBM has right now. IBM has this huge—everyone, all the big companies have these huge, huge systems lying around that they have to somehow write off or get money out of. And I can sit in my basement and compete with them and have—I can have more processing power than IBM owns, well, maybe not IBM, but than a lot of large companies own, at my fingertips, literally for one year free from Amazon or Azure or whoever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:07) I was speaking with Puget Systems. They make these custom computers, and the founder of the company, his name is John. And we were talking about how AMD is making a comeback against Intel because they're kind of capping out at their chip processing speeds, and AMD was always kind of the lower cheaper provider. But they did some innovation, got some better people, and Intel stopped progressing as fast as they could because you can only get so small. Right? And so now AMD is catching up and becoming a player in the game after being off the map for, like, eighteen years. And so I was like, "Oh, this is really interesting." Because they ran into a physical requirement. And now—you know what's running through my head right now as I'm talking about this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:53) When you were saying earlier that people don't understand how computers work, I'm like, so many people don't understand what you were saying about the hard drives, like how they actually work, the fact that they're magnetic fields and how data reads and writes to them. I was having that conversation about two weeks ago when we were out at the RSA Conference, and when you sit so high up in the software stack, everything feels so clear because you see the text. And then when you start looking at how security works and how memory gets stored and how hard drives actually put memory into a system and store it and retrieve it back out, it's really, really cool.

(JR Hayward at 00:15:28) So I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:29) My mind just went off on that.

(JR Hayward at 00:15:30) Yeah. Well, those things, the reason those things I think are important is that programmers have, in general—I think, including, although I don't really, I'm not really a programmer anymore, although I still program. I'll program my lights.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:44) That's all of us, right?

(JR Hayward at 00:15:46) Yeah, exactly. But I think they've gotten, not lazy, sloppy, because memory and disk and speed has just gotten cheaper and cheaper. So if I write this in a slow way tomorrow, it's going to be fixed by someone who comes out with a faster chip, or there's going to be more memory available, or I'll use up all the disk space because I'll make a bigger disk tomorrow.

(JR Hayward at 00:16:05) But when you start getting into large systems, and now we're going back to the mainframe days in my opinion, because that's what the internet is, the cloud providers. It's just a mainframe system. It's just a time-sharing system. And now you have huge workloads. I mean, you look at Facebook's workload, you look at what Amazon's running for everyone out there, or OVH, whatever the name is in France. I mean, they're running huge amounts of data and processing through their systems. And I literally had this conversation with one of our developers in something where he wanted to do something one way, and I'm saying, yeah, but that's going to be a little slower. And he said, well, I mean, it might be ten milliseconds slower. We're talking about doing 10 million of these in an hour. What's 10 million times ten milliseconds? Because that's how much you're slowing me down. Yeah. So ten milliseconds is a lot of time to me. To him, it's not, because he's young. Ten milliseconds is like, that's a lot of time? Not when you multiply it by 10 million.

(JR Hayward at 00:16:57) When you start getting into the largest systems, there's fewer and fewer people who think this way. And I think, and this is where I was alluding to with the STEAM and STEM programs before, I think you're going to see a switch back to people who understand the hardware. Because the example I'll give you is a friend of ours asked me what she should get her son because he's really into technology. I think he was at the time maybe in second grade. So I said, get him an Arduino or a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:26) That's what I was thinking you were going to say. I was like, get a Raspberry Pi kit, right? One of those, right.

(JR Hayward at 00:17:30) So I said, all right, Edison, one of those. And I don't remember. I think she got the Edison, but I'm not sure. Probably because she recognized the Intel. But she got it for him. Well, about two years later, maybe in fourth grade, I went in and did a career day. And this is the popularity of this stuff now. They had to move me from a classroom into their auditorium because there were so many kids who signed up. And one of my daughters was not one of them when I did it for my daughter's class. She was the one who likes art.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:01) Snuck out to art. She was painting something.

(JR Hayward at 00:18:04) Exactly. She was looking at, oh, some author came in or something, and she likes to write. But in any case, that kid was there along with these other kids, and these guys understand hardware. They know how, you raise a signal here, and I capture it here, and I get the interrupt here. And this kid's asking me Python questions to the level of, like, man, if it was legal, I'd hire you. Right? I mean, they know this stuff, and they were at the time maybe ten years old, and they're writing games. They're doing, what's that, the name escapes, the big game that every kid was into, probably still—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:37) Oh, Minecraft?

(JR Hayward at 00:18:39) Yeah. Minecraft. Yeah. And my daughters were using that too, but they were writing components for that and putting all these apps out there. And they're using their Arduinos to do this and to do that, and they're writing some really low-level code. They're controlling machines. They're getting signals from machines, and they're making them useful to do other tasks. And I was heartened to see that because that means that that level of understanding of the world of computing is coming back. Because I think it's important to know that. Because when you're looking for that ten milliseconds, you can say, you know what, it's because of this disk here. Can we swap that one out? I mean, you literally sometimes have to get to that point where you're tuning a system. I mean, that's what Google had to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:18) Yeah. They had to reinvent hardware. Yeah.

(JR Hayward at 00:19:18) Google and Facebook had to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:21) That's exactly, that's the innovation, right? And those are the people that are rare in the workforce right now.

(JR Hayward at 00:19:28) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:29) Exactly. If I mention, like, understanding an interrupt to a software developer, they're like, what?

(JR Hayward at 00:19:36) That's why my boss wants me to go to a meeting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:39) Yeah. It's like, we should, you know what we should do? We should do a series, like a short series of videos. You were talking earlier about, you know, I call them relational analogies, although I know that's somewhat redundant. But there's a guy, Richard Feynman or Feynman. He's known in physics for the Feynman technique. And—

(JR Hayward at 00:19:56) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:56) He's known in physics for just taking extraordinarily complicated concepts in physics and boiling them down to where a child could understand them, and that the true measure of someone's legitimate ability to understand something in its entirety is their ability to explain it to a child. Right? You understand stuff so you can explain it to a child using apples and pears analogies.

(JR Hayward at 00:20:20) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:20) And that's what you were talking about when you were working with those individuals. You were all trying to sync up your analogy, like, hey, what do we know in common so we can figure out how to make this work? I think we should do a series of videos, like two or three videos, taking hardware and putting it in terms for the software developers.

(JR Hayward at 00:20:36) Yeah. I mean, I actually did that as part of the presentation I gave for that career day. I started out with a picture of the first computer, which filled the, the UNIVAC—not really the first one, but the UNIVAC—and it filled the room.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:51) Yeah. The one you could walk inside of and you'd have to change the—

(JR Hayward at 00:20:52) Right. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:53) Vacuum tubes.

(JR Hayward at 00:20:55) Back when you could drop an address on your foot. So I showed him a picture of that, which was before my time, but I showed him a picture of that and said, what's there right now is one-tenth of what you have in your pocket right now on your phone. That's how much room it used to take. And I took him through a series of it, and this gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Then I explained to them how a magnetic disk works with the magnetic fields and how it moves the particles of metal around. And took that right up to SSD and memory and how they call it core, and this is why they call it core. And I took them through those basics, and they were able, I think, for the most part, to grasp the concept because in reality, those are pretty simple concepts. And the younger you are, the easier simple concepts are to understand, I think, because you don't have all these things blocking—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:47) We get really good at making things complicated as we get older.

(JR Hayward at 00:21:50) I mean, there's a classic example. This is a whole test they actually have on this, but the one I always remember is they draw nine boxes inside of a square, and you have to get from this box to this box down in this corner and only cross two lines. And ninety-nine percent of adults can't do it because they're trying to figure out how to do it inside the box. Yeah. Kids just go like this, outside and back in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:12) Yeah. I was going to fold the paper over itself like it was one plane crossing over another. Put the thing right through it. They're like, there's some physics for you. Oh, just crossing dimensions. That's normal.

(JR Hayward at 00:22:25) For a kid, that's like, there's no bound of a box to them yet. We teach them that boundary, that there's a box here. You can't go over that line. Oh, okay, color inside the lines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:34) Yeah. And then our eyes get trained, our brain gets trained to work within the box—

(JR Hayward at 00:22:38) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:38) Instead of figuring out how to just get to the core solution. So how large is the current, you're awesome, by the way. I'm super enjoying this. How large is your development team currently?

(JR Hayward at 00:22:50) We run between seven and ten people, including designers and everyone else who's involved in the process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:58) Are you mostly local or remote?

(JR Hayward at 00:23:00) We do some, well, everyone's kind of spread out. We have people in Florida. We have people out in California. I'm in Pennsylvania. The main office is in Rockville. And we have some developers over in Poland as well, a great team there called SoftwareMill that works with us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:16) And then you have a modern deployment stack. You guys are writing tests. Obviously, you write tests. I mean, people who have been programming for a long time, they do the testing.

(JR Hayward at 00:23:27) Right. We do. I don't personally. But yeah, we do the whole, you know, write the test first, write the code, run the tests to make sure the code works. We go through the entire modern SDLC process. We run an agile shop, so we have a sprint, which I love. I love—

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:47) You guys do the morning stand-ups?

(JR Hayward at 00:23:48) We do. And for some of it, we at first, we tried to automate that with something called Tatsu.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:55) Oh, I haven't heard of that.

(JR Hayward at 00:23:56) Oh, it's a really nice little thing. It ties into Slack. I'm sure you've heard of Slack.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:59) Oh, yeah. Well, I've muted my Slack so we don't hear from Slack in the call.

(JR Hayward at 00:24:03) Right. So Tatsu integrates with Slack, and it does your morning stand-up by sending messages to Slack, and each person has to answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:12) Oh, that's awesome.

(JR Hayward at 00:24:13) It is. But it took away some of the interaction that we needed between people. So I kept Tatsu because I like to wake up in the morning, or, you know, whatever. I like to go to Slack in the morning to see what, where, what's my day going to be like, and what happened last night. We have people working in different time zones. And also, with Tatsu, I can go to one place and see what everyone was working on, and I do that. Then we have a morning meeting also. And I have a much better understanding of what's going to be said in that morning meeting because I see what they were working on already and what problems they were having. So we still do the morning meeting. It goes very quickly, probably because they have it clear in their minds. They did the Tatsu.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:51) That's the idea.

(JR Hayward at 00:24:52) Right. But it will then say, okay, is there anything else we have to talk about? Should we, because we scheduled the meeting, so there's time afterwards that two people have to have a conversation, or we'll have to have a conversation if someone's having a problem and they can't figure it out. Well, let's figure it out now. We have the time set aside now to figure this problem out, unless it requires a larger group or a larger meeting. But that's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:11) Now Tatsu, they need the Alexa integration.

(JR Hayward at 00:25:15) Yes, they do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:16) Yeah. While you're showering, give me my morning report, right? Then Tatsu starts reading your—

(JR Hayward at 00:25:21) I bet, because Slack has a great API, I bet you I could write that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:25) Yeah. No, they, yeah.

(JR Hayward at 00:25:26) But you can do that in a day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:28) So what are you really excited about now that you have an upcoming project or a project that's fixing to hit production? What are you excited about at TopDown Systems?

(JR Hayward at 00:25:38) InTouch. InTouch, I think, is, we're being called by the analysts that we have the future roadmap, that we own that. We've developed that. And it's true. Because basically, we did InTouch as greenfield. We did not take what we had and change it to a microservices architecture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:03) And that's really smart because a lot of the company, because TopDown has been around for a long time.

(JR Hayward at 00:26:07) Thirty years. Thirty-five years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:08) Yeah. Wow. Thirty, I was going to say twenty. So thirty-five years. And they're resourceful and modern enough to realize that, hey, we need to just do something greenfield. Not try to fix something because it's been around for a long time. Earlier, what you were saying, how larger companies are trying to justify old stuff, right?

(JR Hayward at 00:26:26) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:27) Appreciation of their assets. You guys are saying, like, let's just do it right and build it.

(JR Hayward at 00:26:32) Right. So we built a microservices architecture, which when we decided to do that, I don't even think they called it microservices at the time. Docker was just in its infancy when we first were doing the, how should we do this. I was playing around with Vagrant files and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:49) Yeah.

(JR Hayward at 00:26:49) And started playing around with Docker. I said, well, this would be probably a really good way to do this. And we were even thinking on-premises. I mean, we weren't even thinking cloud at the time. That kind of got introduced by marketing that this seems to be the upcoming thing. I mean, cloud existed, but the idea of doing our stuff as cloud at the time, because of security concerns, everything else, was just, you know, no one's going to do that. But we decided, like, you know what? Let's go with the latest technology even if it's not quite ready yet because it will be by the time we are. We got lucky we picked Docker, and that was the right one to pick at the time. I know a lot of people are saying that Docker is going to die because of, there's another one after that. We started, there's another one after, starts with a K. Don't remember that. But there's another competing thing with it that, which is really nice, but I thought was overcomplicated for our needs. And so doing the greenfield project, we have microservices. We have APIs there. We have the ability to create any API. We tie into Slack with our application. So the ability to do a greenfield project and have the ability to say yes to any idea until it's proven wrong. Because we also switched over to agile at the time. Yeah. And the attitude of agile is fail quick.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:02) Yeah. So someone comes in, you know, it would be really cool if, and it's like, yes. Go ahead. You know, if it's not going to cost a lot of money, go ahead. But if it doesn't work in two weeks, it's gone.

(JR Hayward at 00:28:10) Right. You know, if you can't prove it in two weeks, it's gone. That's an exaggeration, but they're almost—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:15) I asked people what they're doing before agile, like, what methodology. And so now I call anything before agile this new methodology I made up called chaos.

(JR Hayward at 00:28:24) The agile process is, I think, how it really worked. We just pretend that it didn't. Yeah. We just said, you know, developer gives you a time frame and double it by two. Yeah.

(JR Hayward at 00:28:33) Because then you'll still be late. I think the developers always kind of worked in that agile mode. They talk to each other a lot. They check in with each other all the time. They just freeze up when management comes by and says, "When is this going to be done? Well, when is done?" And when management... yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:52) I was being interviewed by some younger developers, and they were, I don't know, probably about twelve years younger than me. And they were asking me, like, "Well, when did you learn about agile?" or, you know, "How did you come about understanding your product management?" And I said, "Well, so I've been writing code for, you know, seventeen years now, and I started writing code. And then it was very difficult to get stuff done, so I created a series of organizational tools for myself and ways to hold myself accountable on lists and spreadsheets. And then I started working with other developers, and then we figured out a method, like, a method to work together."

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:36) And then about seven years ago, people started calling it Agile.

(JR Hayward at 00:29:39) Right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:40) But you learn through trial and error of projects, and it was really interesting. There are... yeah. To them, the only thing that exists is Agile because when they came into the market, that's what was there.

(JR Hayward at 00:29:52) Exactly. One of the issues that we had in getting people to adopt Agile, and this is actually a funny story on this, is getting people to adapt to Agile. There's two things. One, not estimating with time—estimate with points. Because over the long range, you'll come up with an accurate timeline from it. And the other one was that, actually, that's three, I guess. Another one is that they want credit for their points. "Well, it didn't get through QA, so you don't get... you know, it's not done." "Well, I did all this work. I'm not getting credit for it." Well, that's not what this is about. Yeah.

(JR Hayward at 00:30:32) But, you know, you don't accumulate those points and you get a trip to Disney. We're just using... we're just doing...

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:38) Miles.

(JR Hayward at 00:30:39) But they act like it's, you know, they get a trip to Disney if they win all these points. So, and the meetings, the daily meetings. And I remember when I first was reading about agile and looking into it, there was a... everyone asked that question, like, "How do you get anything done with all these meetings?" And the answer was, "We don't know whether it works. We don't know whether it works."

(JR Hayward at 00:31:01) Yeah. It was just a good enough answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:03) You know, I was talking with a CTO last week, and this quote stuck in my head. He said he tells his team that, "You're not paid... like, programmers aren't paid to write code. They're paid to ship code."

(JR Hayward at 00:31:15) Like...

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:16) And for some reason, it was the first time I've ever heard that, and it just, like, stuck with me every single day for the past couple weeks now. I was like, "Wow, that's such a great way to look at it." Because the most recurring conversation I have with upcoming technologists or CTOs that are just getting their first time in teams is managing their deadlines and not hitting deadlines. And I'm like, "Well, your ability to define done does not match your C-level counterpart's version of done. Done means within the customer's hand."

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:44) Someone's...

(JR Hayward at 00:31:44) Paying me. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:45) Yeah. Not like, "It's time to write data migrations. Like, it's technically working in development. There's still some more testing, but, like, it's on the screen." That's not done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:51) Done's in production running in your customer's hand. Right.

(JR Hayward at 00:31:54) "It works on my machine" is not an answer to "Is it done?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:56) Yeah. That is right. So, you know, the other thing that really intrigued me about TopDown Systems is we had originally reached out and talked with the marketing person there. His name is John. Correct?

(JR Hayward at 00:32:08) Yes. John Zimmer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:09) Okay. John Zimmer. So we originally reached out and was talking with John and jumped on a call with him. We ended up getting in this conversation about, like, Kubernetes and APIs and stuff, and I'm like...

(JR Hayward at 00:32:17) That's the one I was trying to think of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:19) Yeah. I'm like, I'm sitting here talking to their marketing person, and they are throwing down the technical knowledge of, like, a VP of Engineering. I was really excited.

(JR Hayward at 00:32:30) Yeah. It's... John was a really good acquisition for us because he has that technical background and he has the marketing side, and he's very easy for me to talk to because I don't have to... very rarely do I have to translate what I'm talking about. He more often has to translate what he's talking about to me from the marketing side. And I think that one of the talents that a good developer or good technologist needs is the understanding that you said: it has to be shippable. There's a reason why you're writing this, and that's, you know, so the company makes money or that you cure cancer or whatever your reason is for doing it. Until you're curing cancer, you're useless. If you're not getting to that step, if you're not shipping product, if someone's not using it, why did you write it? And working with John, I can say "microservices" to John, and if he doesn't know what I'm talking about, he will the next day. Yeah. He'll go out and he'll learn it. And he'll probably be doing better than I do at that point. So, you know, having that kind of a team is really useful, and that's one of the beauties of TopDown. I always tell people there's only two people at TopDown: those who have been here for a few months and those who have been here for twenty years. Those are the two people in twenty years with this gradation. But most people there have been there... I don't know what our average is. I bet your average is somewhere around fifteen years. People come in, their first job even, and generally, the only ones who leave are the ones who aren't going to make it. They just can't work in the environment, constantly changing environment. They're people who should work in large companies, basically, where they...

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:16) Move slow. Right.

(JR Hayward at 00:34:18) Yeah. I mean, I remember being amazed walking into a shop, and I'm talking to someone, and we're trying to solve a problem. And we're installing our old product there. And I said, "Well, can you just do this query against the database?" And their answer was, "No. I have to get a ticket into a DBA." To query a database? Yeah. A DBA has to do that. And every job is so tightly defined that I don't know how anyone gets their job done. And at TopDown, if you're a developer, and actually, if you're customer support, if you can't write a SQL statement and run it, you're not going to make it. And you can't say, "Well, I'm a customer service rep." Yeah. And part of what you do is write SQL.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:01) Yeah. And that's the thing. I mean, to be an efficient business, if that's the way your business is set up, then that's the requirements for the job.

(JR Hayward at 00:35:07) Right. And, you know, you have to be good at almost everything. You don't have to be... I don't expect them to go out and develop an entire application in every aspect or even design one. But the parts of it that you need to debug a problem that a customer's having or to figure it out, you need to know that. And if all you are is good at talking on the phone, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:27) It's not good enough.

(JR Hayward at 00:35:27) Yeah. Not helping us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:29) Yeah. Because, and the thing is, because there's enough people that can. Like, and it's teachable, and there's enough people that are hungry. And when it comes down to it, we, as humans, we have the capacity to learn. And as cool as it is and as much as we know about the technology, you can learn the basics in a day or two in order to... I could take anyone that can read and write and speak, you know, that's eight to ten, twelve years old that has a desire to learn. That's the most important thing, that has a desire to learn. And I could teach them how to write a basic, you know, select all, return them back to me. Now only grab the name. I mean, now grab the name and the email. Now only get the first ten records. Like, you can do that with a basic person in an afternoon.

(JR Hayward at 00:36:10) Well, afternoon might be stretching it, but, yeah, you can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:12) Maybe. So that's me oversimplifying it because...

(JR Hayward at 00:36:16) But no, but you're right. That's exactly... and that's what TopDown... if you ask any of our customers, one thing they'll rave about is our support. Because one thing, we're constantly available, we'll answer any question. We spend a lot of time debugging other people's problems. It's like, yeah, their database isn't working, and we're figuring out what's wrong with their database. Citrix isn't working. We're trying to figure out what's going on with Citrix and, you know, "Can't you get Citrix in on this call?" Well, but you know...

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:38) Oh, yeah. Let's call Citrix.

(JR Hayward at 00:36:39) Yeah. "But you guys answered the phone." So, uh, but also all those little, you know, database, Citrix, all these little issues, network stuff, our customer service people can do that, or the most mundane, "Click the button in the upper left hand corner on the screen and that will pop up this. Oh, okay. Two." They're done. And we need that. And I think that's what makes us so good at customer support is that everyone in our company does as much as possible of everything. And if a customer has a problem, anyone from the owners right on down to whoever's sweeping the floor is going to work on solving that problem till it's done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:16) So... That's what I really like. I like that your standards and your requirements are high because they are that way. This allows you to bring that level of service to your customers.

(JR Hayward at 00:37:29) And I can tell you that InTouch, which we've, you know, we've announced and released, is a SaaS product. Mhmm. And we brought in a lot of consultants to tell us how that changes what we do because the assumption is you can't... you can't have someone like, "Alright. Now let's reboot the machine." You can't do that anymore. Now you have to reboot the container. So, you know, using the technologies, and this is one of the things I love about containerized microservices, is that if I have a customer who I need to isolate, I just spin up a container, route the APIs to that one that come from their address, and I'm debugging in a lone environment there, and I'm not affecting anyone else. That's one of the wonders of that technology. But you're dealing with everyone working on one system. So we brought in consultants to tell us... the assumption was we don't know. The assumption we started with when we went to the cloud and SaaS and microservice and all that other stuff is that all the reading that we did, and John and I did a lot of reading, was that we still didn't know because we didn't know what we did not know.

(JR Hayward at 00:38:31) So we brought in...

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:31) That's the most important thing to know, though.

(JR Hayward at 00:38:33) Exactly. Exactly. So we brought in these people to tell us what we didn't know, and that was a huge help. And we've done that in a lot of areas like the GUI design. We brought in people who do GUI design to do that rather than... we used to do it ourselves. "Why are we doing that? No one in this room is good at that. Yeah. We were good at that. That's what we do for a living, and no one here is doing that for a living. Let's bring in someone who knows how to do that." So we brought in this firm who did the GUI design for us. Now it's a back and forth every day with them as you tweak things and explain to them how this is supposed to work. Yeah. But we're not doing the GUI design. We have professionals doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:06) But what you're doing is exactly what TopDown Systems did when they brought you on. They leveraged decades of experience, and they traded that for time. So, like, you could take someone that didn't know and let them get the decade of experience with you, or you can just buy it like what you did. Now when you need to understand Kubernetes or Dockers or something, like, "Well, we could sit here and read all day, every single book, or we could just have someone come in, sync up with them from an analogy standpoint, have them explain to us exactly how it works and understand it in a couple days with an expert," just like you did with the UI. Yeah. "We could have some designers and figure out our workflow with the UI, or you just go to a UI company." You're basically API-ing with other businesses.

(JR Hayward at 00:39:48) Right. Exactly. It's interesting you said the decades of experience, because one thing that I like to do, and we do a lot of it at TopDown, is you look for really smart younger people as well. A lot of the innovation that came about in TopDown with InTouch and our procedures... Slack, for example. Slack is a perfect example. It was a kid right out of college who came to work for us, and he found Slack, and he said, "Oh, we should be using this." And I had gotten into the mode at that point of saying yes to anything. "We'll try it. Sure. Why would I say no to that?" I mean, it's something I learned when I was raising my kids, when I first started having kids. It was just like, you know, they come to you and say, "Hey, can I go run around the backyard naked?" I'm like, "Before I say no, make sure I have a reason to say no. Why am I going to say no to this request?" "Can I... What happens if I jump off the stool?" "Don't jump off the stool" is not an answer. The answer is, "It's thirty feet high and you're going to hit the ground and you're going to break every bone in your body," or "Try it. You're only three feet on the ground. See what happens."

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:54) Let's try it with a piece of fruit first.

(JR Hayward at 00:40:56) Yeah. Exactly. Drop a... I'm not sure if it's... Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:00) What you're doing is you're teaching them to think critically and try things. You're teaching them the scientific life. And when you say no, you agree.

(JR Hayward at 00:41:07) Need a reason.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:08) Yeah. You need a reason, and you need to teach people also to, like, think critically. Like...

(JR Hayward at 00:41:16) Right. And, you know, the fact that I'm tired is not a reason to say no, or the fact that we've never done it that way is not a reason to say no, or, you know, "How much does it cost?" is sometimes a reason to say no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:26) Yeah. Sometimes a reason to say no. Yes. But, uh, but, you know, nothing's coming because, you know...

(JR Hayward at 00:41:31) So a mix of the decades of experience with people who have no experience. I mean, it's the old Rockefeller story of he got really angry and he said, you know, "You know what? Get rid of these engineers. Get someone out of college in here because I want someone who doesn't know this can't be done because I want it done. Done."

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:49) Yeah. That's good. I love that. Yeah. Give me the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed that'll just attack the problem from every angle.

(JR Hayward at 00:41:56) Right. They're too stupid to know you can't do this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:58) Yeah. Exactly. And that's brilliant. Right? And that's why... that's one of the things that I've done. You know, so coming up, I was... you know, my dad was an engineer and he taught me. Right? And then I got to see...

(JR Hayward at 00:42:12) What kind of engineer was he?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:13) Embedded systems engineer.

(JR Hayward at 00:42:15) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:16) Yeah. So growing up, my childhood is the smell of, like, fake electronics. It's not her.

(JR Hayward at 00:42:21) There's no smells.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:23) Yeah. I remember he was telling me one day he came home. I'm probably, like, 13, so this is, you know, 17 years ago. And I'm sitting there, and he's talking about how he's working with another engineer, and they're kind of, like, executives at this company at the higher level. And the one's telling him that it's just not possible to the partners, to the nontechnical people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:44) And my dad's like, pointing at the manual saying the API call's right here. Like, the chip supports it. We can just do it. It was like some buffer thing that they needed to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:52) And it was just unbelievable that that happened, but the guy's mind was so closed minded because he had used all these other chips that didn't have the feature. He wouldn't even look at it. He wouldn't even acknowledge the API documentation that can't work. And so there was something about that story that when I got older and as I'm right in that change right now where not everything is possible. I'm not like, oh, yeah, everything's possible. But I get that weird gut feeling that, like, oh, no, it's not because. And I realized that, like, alright, well, that's just my feeling of experience. Now, like, that's my signal now to say, how could I be wrong?

(JR Hayward at 00:43:32) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:32) Like, what could make this possible?

(JR Hayward at 00:43:34) That's one of the best questions you can ask.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:36) Yep. How could I be wrong? And then, if I'm not feeling it, where's that bright-eyed and bushy-tailed person? Where's that optimist that's going to tell me all the ways it could work and then surround myself with those people?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:47) So for me, it's been more about not, like, trying to prevent it from happening, but being aware of it happening and putting a system in place that allows me to overcome the negatives of that.

(JR Hayward at 00:43:57) Yeah. That's actually a really good insight. That ability to say, okay, I can't figure this out. There's someone out there who can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:08) Yeah. It's my interrupt line.

(JR Hayward at 00:44:09) It's a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:09) It's my little webhook. Right? Boom. Oh, there's a problem here.

(JR Hayward at 00:44:13) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:13) I'm feeling this resistance, you know.

(JR Hayward at 00:44:15) There's an API for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:17) We've got a system for that.

(JR Hayward at 00:44:19) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:19) Oh, anything else that we didn't cover about TopDown Systems? I mean, wow. I love it. What exactly does InTouch—I know we talked in the beginning. You said a little bit about the ultimate goal of InTouch, where you were going with the TopDown System about the seamless communication. Maybe just a little wrap up on where exactly it's at today.

(JR Hayward at 00:44:43) Today, it's available. We're selling it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:45) Okay.

(JR Hayward at 00:44:46) And it has the ability to create in a designer—and this is a big ability. It has the ability to—I'm trying to think in marketing terms here, but the ability for if you wanted to go in and create a communication across all these channels that I talked about. It's one place to go. You can develop all your content, all your formats, and then you can look at what's it gonna look like on a phone? What's it gonna look like as a text message? What's it going to look like in print? What's it going to look like on a web page? What's it gonna look like on a tablet? What's it gonna look like in horizontal on a tablet?

(JR Hayward at 00:45:19) All in one place. And you can have 20 different developers—or not developers, because I take that back. The product is not meant for IT. The product is meant for business users to be able to do all these things. Or someone who has absolutely no IT experience at all should be able to walk in there and do this. They might need some upfront help from the developer to hook up data hooks or something like that, but outside of that, no developers are supposed to be involved in this. Anyone should be able—not you, because you're technical. A nontechnical user should be able to walk into InTouch and create an entire communication package across all channels using shared content, shared logo, shared images, shared everything, and directing them to the channel that they are appropriate to. So as an example, I want to—this person may call in and say they didn't get the email or they want it in writing. They call and I need that in writing. Click. The printed copy goes out in the mail to them. Or you say, okay, I'm gonna create the PDF over here, and I'm going to SMS a link to that PDF to them, so they go to my portal and pick it up. So all that is now possible within that, all based on rules that anyone can write. The rules do not require a programmer.

(JR Hayward at 00:46:33) There's no programming language to our rules. What we did is we took our 35 years of experience and said, what is everybody doing with communications? We know what that is. Why are we going to make them write a rule for that? Let's build it into the product. We know that based upon state, they're gonna bring in a piece of content because of some legal requirement. Why are we gonna make them write a rule for that? Let's build it into the product. Content, whenever you see this, it goes. All those things are built into that product.

(JR Hayward at 00:47:00) It should streamline the process, make it much faster to put together a package like that. And through APIs, tie it into other mediums, other systems. You need to tie it into your portal? Tie it into your portal. You wanna tie it into Slack? We'll tie it into Slack. You wanna tie it into Alexa? We'll tie it into Alexa. I keep using that because that's the thing I just bought. It's a single point within now. But before that, it was the iPhone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:24) You just kinda blew my mind a little bit. I didn't realize that that's what it—that's really cool, man. Have you—

(JR Hayward at 00:47:29) Have you not seen a demo of the product?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:30) No. I've not seen it.

(JR Hayward at 00:47:31) Oh, you should request a demo from John.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:35) But I've worked with some large companies in the medical field and then in private—like, Boarshead is a cool company. And the reason why they're running through my head right now is because when I did a project with Boarshead, I got to work with their graphics teams. And the way that the request life cycle was, if they wanted to get, like, a header for or a letter out, it was quite ridiculous. It touched a lot of resources. Right? And so it kinda reminded me when you were describing it, it's like you kinda have an asset management server kinda component because, like, you had all the graphics there. Right?

(JR Hayward at 00:48:07) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:08) But those are—just they get sold as just asset management, and only the designers really touch them. And then they get request for information, and then they pull it out or whatever. But it sounds like you brought templated content with an asset management server, but also able to API and integrate into all these platforms. Consistency across your messaging. That sounds like there's a consistency part, which is really cool because—

(JR Hayward at 00:48:33) We even have that issue here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:34) We'll have, like, a message we're getting out, but it looks different. It comes in, like, 12 different forms, and there's, like, lots of ways to get to it, and it's kinda like, why can't I just look at how this messaging looks like on all the different platforms, how it could possibly get out?

(JR Hayward at 00:48:46) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:47) I'm going to do a demo of it.

(JR Hayward at 00:48:48) That also—the fact that you're talking about the image assets that are done by designers. Your designer can do that, then bring it into InTouch and set it up there for you, and then someone else is going to use that asset.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:59) Yeah.

(JR Hayward at 00:49:01) And so you take all—

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:01) The fun out of hunting it down from Dropbox.

(JR Hayward at 00:49:03) Exactly. Although we integrate with Dropbox. So, yeah. So it's a—it's just a centralized place to manage communication.

(JR Hayward at 00:49:17) For a complete customer journey, we know we don't stand alone. We know you have to have other products to work with us, which is why we did the APIs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:25) So who's your core customer?

(JR Hayward at 00:49:28) You'd have to ask John that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:29) I'd have to ask John that?

(JR Hayward at 00:49:30) I think you—

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:30) You said you guys had a lot of cool, like, banking customers. Do you have a lot of—

(JR Hayward at 00:49:33) We have a lot of insurance and financial companies. There's a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:37) A lot of regulation. There's a lot of letters that go out there.

(JR Hayward at 00:49:39) Yeah. And we have, like, people who do publishing as well. I don't—the only time I pay attention to that is when it comes through marketing to me as a request for a feature.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:49) Yeah. To understand the why.

(JR Hayward at 00:49:51) Like, yeah. But that's—I mean, they deal with the customers who are dealing with the stuff, and that changes my priority. We have a customer who needs this to work. Well, that's on the road map, you know, for two months from now. We'll move it up to now.

(JR Hayward at 00:50:07) Yeah. That's where I interact with that. And where I usually find out where that's coming from so I can make sure I understand the use case. But how many—to be honest with you, I know we have a bunch of customers. I don't know how many.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:18) It's cool. I was just—yeah. I did have in my notes that you guys, like, had a lot of stuff in the financial world too.

(JR Hayward at 00:50:24) Yeah. Insurance and finance are probably the big one. We also have some utilities I know because I've dealt with them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:31) Let me know when you see a utility company using Slack. Just personally. Just send me a message.

(JR Hayward at 00:50:35) Using Slack?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:37) Yeah. Just because, like—

(JR Hayward at 00:50:37) Oh, that's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:37) It seems like such an unmodern place to use Slack, but then I could see, like, eventually some utility company is going to embrace it.

(JR Hayward at 00:50:47) Actually, talking to friends, and for some reason, all my friends seem to be either engineers or salesmen. That's true. Yeah. Which is a weird mix. Very few of them—like, when I mentioned Slack, very few of them know what I'm talking about. And these are people who I thought would. The, you know, the engineers, the technologist types. And there are all different kinds of engineers, you know, plastics engineers, stuff like that, electrical engineers. And I would've thought when I mentioned Slack, they knew what I was talking about because I've been so embedded with them for so long. But I think it's one of those things—if I know it, then everyone must know it. And, you know, which is why you mistaken.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:16) Your whole day—yeah. That'll get you. Like, we spend your whole day in it, and then everyone you talk to is—like, it becomes just a word in your vocabulary. Oh, yeah. Slack it. You know, like Slack it over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:26) I'll—

(JR Hayward at 00:51:26) Slack that to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:27) What? Yeah. I'll Slack that to you.

(JR Hayward at 00:51:29) You're gonna slap me what? No, no, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:32) No. It's cool. Although, sometimes it does feel like I get slapped by the notifications. Like, du du du du. I'm like, okay, okay, okay. I'm here. I'm awake. So it was excellent hanging out with you today. So if people wanna find out more about you, they can—LinkedIn, Twitter, where do you—

(JR Hayward at 00:51:49) LinkedIn, Twitter, those are good enough places. I'll be honest, I don't spend enough time on those things. I'm more of a voyeur. I watch what other people are saying more than I say things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:57) They can Alexa message to you. You have an API for that?

(JR Hayward at 00:52:01) They can send it to me on Alexa. The—probably the best place to find out everything about TopDown in general is from the TopDown website and talking to John. I mean, he has a lot of—

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:12) You have a profile on the TopDown website. Right?

(JR Hayward at 00:52:14) There's a little—I believe I do. I haven't looked at my profile in a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:18) People are gonna like you. I already know this because I like you. Like, so when I like the guest, like, a lot, I'm like, oh, man. I'm gonna get so many emails about this JR guy.

(JR Hayward at 00:52:25) Go to LinkedIn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:28) Go to LinkedIn. Alright. Well, funnel people to LinkedIn or your paragraph blurb on the TopDown website.

(JR Hayward at 00:52:34) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:35) Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. My kid was fun. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]. If you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.