So, I just got back from holiday. I was

in vacation in Cairns, which is in the

north of Australia.

I was enjoying myself.

Um going snorkeling, seeing the coral

reef.

Uh

I saw some turtles and other wildlife.

I went on I went on a helicopter ride.

And a bunch of other cool stuff. So,

I couldn't get back to everyone, but I'm

here now and uh

And also,

there were so many comments that it was

kind of overwhelming. And so, I'm trying

to respond.

There have been 1 million views on my

last video

titled I was laid off by Atlassian,

where I went into

a little bit of detail about what I

built.

And basically did a recap.

And drew up some pretty basic diagrams

to explain things as I went along.

And then I went into a few of the more

interpersonal

sorts of lessons that I

that I learned. Really just the ones

that came to mind.

A million views is a lot.

And I obviously wasn't expecting that

kind of

exposure.

You can see that my previous videos,

they had less than 100 each.

And so, this response has been

interesting,

to say the least.

This video is going to try to address

the majority of the feedback and the

comments.

But I wanted to say one thing first,

just to make sure it's very, very clear.

I worked at Atlassian for 8 years

and I did that because I enjoyed working

there.

I was sad to be laid off,

but I am not angry at Atlassian for

laying me off. They made a business

decision.

I don't know the criteria behind that

business decision.

And it doesn't It's none of my business

what they do. I don't have

an entitlement to continue working there

for as long as I

want. You know, it's their money at the

end of the day.

And Atlassian didn't throw me out into

the cold to fend for myself.

They gave me

a substantial payout along with everyone

else who was laid off,

which gave those people time to

think about what they want to do next

and and gave them a lot of breathing

room to do so,

including me.

And you'll notice that

I made this video 2 months after I was

laid off.

I haven't been working this whole time

and I don't have to work

for

many more months if I don't want to.

So, I hope that that's clear that there

is

no anger

or vengeance

or anything else like that

uh

in the video that I made.

I don't have any kind of negative

feelings towards Atlassian.

I'm still keeping in touch with my

teammates.

I I really have nothing bad to say about

Atlassian.

Anyhow,

moving on, let's talk about

the comments on that video.

I tried to sort of group things into

categories,

but they may not be as granular as

people may like.

So, I'm probably going to try to just

pick out the very specific comments and

respond to them directly.

Um I may potentially make uh short-form

content to respond to some of them if I

think that the answer is interesting to

many people.

But, let's sort of start from the top

in a in a way.

>> [snorts]

>> For some people, it was unclear what my

level of education

and seniority was, what title I had, and

how much I was getting paid, and all

this kind of stuff.

Uh I have never been to university. In

fact, I didn't really finish high

school. I stopped after the 10th grade,

>> [snorts]

>> and I started working.

I started my tech career in help desk,

and I at some point taught myself how to

program in

PowerShell. Uh actually, I started with

Windows and PowerShell.

I then moved on to Python.

During the time that I was building up

the skills in my tech career, I had no

mentor myself. I had no one was teaching

me.

Uh I used books and videos

uh of other talks

uh as well as exercises and courses and

sites, wherever I could,

to learn what was relevant to me at the

time, and just to increase my skill in

general.

When I joined Atlassian, I was uh

systems engineer,

and after I delivered the

edge load balancing

project that I spoke about,

I was promoted to a senior systems

engineer.

So, I did not start as a junior or a

graduate. So, hopefully that answers um

a little bit about my title, my

experience,

the fact that I I've not been to uni. I

had very little schooling.

And I I mostly taught myself. So,

hopefully that's clear.

If you got any other questions about

that, just let me know.

The second thing is

I've noticed

uh people asking if I violated an NDA, a

non-disclosure agreement,

or if I am at risk of being sued, or

anything like that. I've noticed it on

social media broadly, but and and also

in the comments.

The detail

and the content that I shared is

something that

a typical

speaker would share at any tech

conference.

There's actually blogs posted

on the Atlassian website that have more

detail than what I shared in my video.

And in fact, me and my colleague who

wrote such blogs and published them.

Planned to talk about the stack in even

more detail than what I shared at the

Envoy conference that was just recently

in Japan, which we both unfortunately

did not get to go to

because we didn't really have the time

to write up a talk,

especially since uh my employment ended.

So, for people that are more

experienced, it's very clear that I

haven't broken any kind of

NDA and that I haven't shared real

confidential information because there's

There's not enough detail in what I

described for it to reveal anything

confidential.

So, hopefully that is clear.

Uh some people gave me

tips about my microphone placement.

Uh as you can see, I have changed the

direction of my mic so that the top of

the microphone is now facing me.

Hopefully, this is delivering a nicer

clarity to you.

So, thanks for the tip.

A decent number of comments said that

the video that I

made

gave

educational content that was perhaps

better than university courses or

paid boot camps or something like that.

I don't know. I've never been on any of

those courses, so I don't know exactly

how valuable

the educational material is in those.

I'm not sure if I would

be able to take my last video and

meaningfully

apply it to a real business problem.

It was really just a recap in my view,

but I could be wrong.

Uh either way, I'm glad that it was

interesting and valuable. This is

actually really surprising to me

and very validating because I thought

maybe most people would find it quite

boring

unless they were specifically in

I guess the niche that I thought I was

in.

A lot of you said that you appreciated

the

breakdown of um Envoy and Sovereign into

the diagrams that I shared. I'm super

glad that uh that you liked that and

that just encourages me to make more.

Um so I'm going to think and plan about

exactly what kind of educational content

I'm going to create

in future.

Some of you said you were interested in

seeing me build something from scratch.

I'm definitely going to do that.

Uh, the plan that I have for that

actually is that I'm going to build a

control plane from scratch.

Mainly so you can see how easy it

actually is. So, I'm going to build a

control plane in three ways.

First, in Python.

Uh,

in a very basic way

that just is going to do a uh fetch

and a response.

Then I'm going to use uh some other

languages and stacks to show you how

advanced it can get if you're

you know, operating at a higher scale

where certain efficiency

is more meaningful.

Uh, a lot of people that are more on the

junior or student side appreciated the

video and they said that I would make a

good mentor and I really appreciate

that.

Um, I'm going to try to

sort of asynchronously mentor

all of you

uh

with future content if I can.

There was some very, very valid

critiques

on the complexity

of the solution that I described.

Some of you questioned whether

microservices are a good choice.

Some of you questioned whether you need

to have

uh you know, a a broker and a control

plane and ASGs and EC2 servers and why

not just use Kubernetes and why not do

this?

Yeah, completely valid.

I would say this in response.

The stuff that I recapped was close to a

decade ago. If I had to build it today,

I would build it differently.

Maybe it would be on Kubernetes. I'm not

sure. I would have to do experiments to

figure out what is the best approach

given that it would have to integrate

with a whole bunch of other things that

are

pre-existing.

When we're talking about building stuff

from scratch, if you if you could just

build your company from scratch and give

it the best architecture ever,

then maybe

maybe it would be super easy just spin

up Claude

and 58 it

10 billion agents and

just build the most

perfect architecture ever. I actually

don't think there is a perfect

architecture. I think at all times you

are making trade-offs, whether you're

aware of them or not. I think it's

better if you are aware of the

trade-offs you are making cuz otherwise

you have no idea what's going on and in

future you will run into problems that

you did not anticipate.

I can talk about how I would build it

today.

It would be different. It would be very

different. I can talk you I can talk

about some of the things

that were painful which I didn't include

in that video.

And there was pain and struggle and

problems.

And

uh

those were a direct consequence of the

architecture that we chose. So, I can

talk about those things.

And I may do that in future.

But yeah, I just wanted to say that the

criticisms

that

ended up in the comments, a lot of them

very fair, very valid.

Absolutely no problem with that.

Some of you said that I reversed the

interview process by basically putting

out

you know,

pre-answering interview questions in a

video.

Yeah, this was all calculated, guys.

Like I I planned for it to go viral so

that everyone knows exactly what I've

built

8 years ago so that they can hire me.

Exactly. It's just I'm playing 4D chess

over here.

Some of you shared that watching the

video made you feel

deep impostor syndrome and that you

weren't at my level.

Um

To that, I would say

you're at a different stage of the

journey. There are people that I look at

who are younger than me that I think are

just

so much more intelligent, more

conscientious.

And so I feel the same way.

Uh I don't know. I don't think there's

really

I don't think there's a point to really

getting

uh

to feeling negative

as a result of comparing yourself to

someone else because

there's so much work to be done

that we

we need people. And if you're halfway

com- competent

then

I I don't see why you wouldn't be

welcome.

Like as long as you aren't making things

worse

than they were before. If you're making

things better, then I don't see why you

should care the about the delta between

you and someone else that you perceive

as being way smarter than you.

I I think it could just be that they

they've spent more time.

Um I don't think it's impossible for you

to learn the same things as them. So,

just try to stay positive and maybe look

at the

what you can do in order to get closer

and use them as inspiration, not as a

way of feeling defeated. A lot of you

commented on

my

prints that I framed. Thank you for

those comments.

It brings me joy.

Uh,

I like to joke that when I show up

on the uh

severity one incident call and they see

the picture in the back that every

everyone calms down because, you know,

this is fine.

But, uh yeah. Sorry, that was lame.

Um, also in terms of just YouTube in

general,

uh

uh some of you said you wanted to do

like super chats or whatever it was, uh

super donations. I'm not sure exactly

how that stuff works.

Uh, because I've only been posting on

YouTube for maybe a month.

Um, so

because of the views that came in

and subscribes and everything,

um I I have become eligible to be a

YouTube partner. So, I've applied for

that now and apparently it's in review

and it's going to take some weeks, maybe

a month or whatever.

So, um

that's where that's at. I think you

won't be able to

become a member or do any donation type

things until that point.

So, yeah.

So, anyway, that I think that covers a

lot of the feedback that I got in the

video. Um, if there's anything else

that's unclear,

uh I will be going through every single

comment on the last video and responding

wherever possible, unless it's something

generic, then I I might just like it and

move on.

And then I'm going to get to work on the

follow-up videos. I've got a few videos

planned,

but I have to

go do the work and create them. So,

thanks for your patience while I get

those up and running.

See you next time.