Digging into the HackerRank Survey 2023

• Java
• Python
• SQL
• C++
• Javascript
• Bash
• C#
• Go
• Typescript
• R
• PHP
• C
• Swift
• Ruby

• To estimate employer demand for specific programming languages, we looked at HackerRank Work tests where a specific programming language was required, or where specific library questions were asked. Skill demand was estimated by the number of HackerRank Work tests using specific library questions.
• On the preference – or supply–side, we tracked submitted languages by candidates when they have multiple options available, as well as their proficiency in those languages. We also included HankerRank Community practice data to get a full spectrum of skill preferences.
• Notable these results are not survey results like the Stack Overflow survey
• Demand for most languages growing, but not equally
• Is there potential bias in the types of companies that use HackerRank? 
  • Companies that are more likely to use Java for example

• Problem Solving
• Machine Learning
• REST APIs
• React
• HTML/CSS/JS
• REST API shows sustained drama-free demand growth 😂
• Keep an eye on Go and TypeScript
  
  

• Tech hiring (and everything else) hit headwinds in 2022
• Overall, the tech industry continues to growing

• Art of Product Episode Episode 218
• Build Your SaaS
• Founder's Quest Podcast

• Twitter: @buildandlearn_
• Colin: @colinloretz
• CJ: @cjav_dev

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CJ: Welcome to Build and Learn. My name is CJ.

Colin: And I'm Colin, and today we are talking about the new HackerRank report for 2023.

CJ: Before we get into that, we wanted to just talk about, I mean, you and I both want to build eventually some sort of like side hustle income and it sounds like you heard a really inspiring episode of a podcast. I need to catch up on that that Art of Product episode. But yeah. So who was on it and what were they talking about?

Colin: Yeah, so this is Art of Product episode 218. It was Ben Orenstein talking to Adam Wathan of Tailwind and many, many other things, but you know, I think both of us have done this for a while. I used to listen to Founders Quest from HoneyBadger and I listened to Build Your SaaS and Art of Product where you know, Ben and and also Derrick and I think Derrick might come back to the show at some point, but you know, they've been building in the open and with Build Your SaaS, they were building Transistor in the open, which is what we use for podcast hosting and you know, they're doing really well and it's just kind of cool to listen back to it and. I've always had this desire to build something. And I think we talked about in the last few episodes ago about going to the Rails SaaS conference, which I didn't end up going to after all. But like, just being in that world, you know, you see other people building things on top of the tools that we use every day. And I actually think this will be a good segue into what we talk about later today, which is that the demand for these skills is not going away. There's only more people looking to do it. But in that episode, they really just get into like, what does it take to build like a developer education or developer content business whether that's through something like a course or you know, courses, books, YouTube and I think it probably won't surprise you or anyone listening that it takes a long time for that quote unquote, overnight success.

CJ: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that cuz, so Peter Levels it's like levels.Io, he's built a whole bunch of stuff. Famous for the remote. Okay. Or like the, the nomad list.

Colin: Mm-hmm.

CJ: Stuff. And recently he's been working on a bunch of like AI tools. So like the, I think the first one was interior ai. And now he has like all these, like you can upload images of your, of yourself, and then it'll build avatars for you in like all these different genres. And he made like insane revenue. Basically in like 72 hours of launching this. And a lot of people talk about how like, okay, you know, that's an overnight success. But then he posted today, he posted a screenshot of GitHub and his GitHub squares are just rock solid for like the entire year. And this is like his 10th year on his get up history. So it's like, okay. He's successful and all these people are kind of like, whatever, not yeah, they're, they're looking up to him and saying like, oh yeah, you're lucky or whatever. But the reality is that he, you know, created that luck by just taking so many swings and, you know, just going up to bat so many times.

Colin: Yeah, you, I mean, we talked about this in some other episodes too, but it's the reps that you're putting in, right? It's it like doing it once, like working on a project in a, in a weekend and then throwing it away is not gonna get you there. Adam Wathan was talking a lot about how, like when they dropped their Refactoring UI book, it was after years of creating very useful free tweets, right? Like, how to do this thing in CSS. Right. And it's similar to like what we talked about in the content creation episode where you've been putting out these like very specific little like, you know, nuggets of information on Ruby, like what does this command do? What does this, you know, how do you use this class method? Things like that. But it was like laying that groundwork and not expecting anything in return for a very long time. Just building that audience. And he wasn't necessarily building an audience just to like, be like, all right, it's time to settle to my audience. You know, he's doing it because he truly loves what he is working on. And he just like, this is exciting and I wanna share it with people. And then other people are like, oh, I didn't know that. You know, you could do that in css, or that making something look nice in HTML could be done. You know? So simply

CJ: Right. And I mean, if we need any sort of metrics around success, I think today or yesterday, tailwind crossed, bootstrap in terms of like N P M downloads. So it is like now like the number one CSS framework or whatever.

Colin: That's very interesting cuz we're gonna talk a lot about trends in languages and stuff today. But when I was trying to think back, there's a lot of we'll just say that right now, this is being recorded in November of 2022. There's a lot of tumultuous activity going on with Twitter right now, and I think back to the fact that like people were trying to ask like what innovations Twitter has done. And I think back to the early days of Twitter where people were. Again, throwing things out there to see what sticks and bootstrap came from Twitter. Like, which is awesome. And like for a long time every website looked like that. And now you're getting everyone kind of moving over to Tailwind and the kind of old guard is changing over into Tailwind, but like, I mean, if you've built something like Tailwind, you're gonna have a very loyal following that you can continue to build products for, which is great for Adam. And and I'm blanking on his partner's name. Steve Shoger. That's right.

CJ: Yeah, I like just, I'm rebuilding my personal site. It's like almost ready to go. And I'm using Tailwind and I'm realizing that I'm actually like learning CSS too through Tailwind because I, I mean, anytime you wanna tweak anything that doesn't fit directly, I, so I, I use a lot of, like, the components directly from Tailwind UI the like

Colin: Which is another product. Yeah. Another.

CJ: Well, honestly, like, before Tailwind UI came out, I was like, oh man, that's, I would probably never pay for Bootstrap, right.

Colin: Right.

CJ: Tailwind UI comes out, it's all these beautiful components that are pre-built for you that you just copy and paste. And it's a no-brainer for me who is like a person that doesn't want to think too much about design. But yeah, for this personal site, there was a few things that I wanted to customize and tweak, and there wasn't perfect components in there. And I was like, oh my God, in my accidentally like learning CSS right now. Like, okay, here's how you do, like, you know, nested grids and like, you know, sizing.

Colin: That's like the deep end of CSS too. I feel like how we used to learn and teach c s s and design was very different than today. Like most people start with tailwind and go backwards, unlearn c s s versus, you know, we both kind of grew up with c s s and. As it evolved and things like css, zengarden, and all these different sites where it was like the whole idea was that you should be able to replace the style sheet and completely change the page. Like that does not exist today with components and you know, style components and things like that. Everything's so tightly styled, but again, it allows you to drop that component in from Tailwind ui, which is great.

CJ: Mm.

Colin: I have paid for bootstrap themes over time. I guess they kind of came with components. It was always pretty painful to figure out where, you know, gonna start at this tag and take this until this tag and go copy and paste it and hope it looks fine in the other site. I think a lot of WordPress sites were built that way too. But yeah, I think, I think it's cool. I think you've dipped your toe in like personally creating a lot of content on YouTube and things like that, but I think it'll be cool to, for us to think about what kinds of products we can both, or not even products, but like courses or experiences that we can kind of build that, you know, might generate some side income or continue to develop ourselves as developers as well. Can you give us a quick overview of what Hacker Rank is and how companies use it?

CJ: Yeah. I think a good way to explain it might be that it is sort of like a filter. For candidates that want to work at a company. So as part of you know, the interview or candidate process, a company might have several different, like algorithmic or coding challenges where you have. You have to like write some code and submit your answer to a problem through the hacker rank interface. And then, you know how, like how fast the code runs and if you pass all the tests and like, did you meet all of their standards? They're looking for sort of you know, signal on all of those different things to see if you pass their rubric in order to move on. And Maybe an onsite or go on to more serious interviews where the company might make more investments. So it's kind of like a scalable way to filter people out. Another one is like leet code, where a bunch of people just, I mean it's, there's these websites where you can go and just do a bunch of algorithmic solve problems basically and submit your code to try to, you know, I dunno, reverse a linked list, for instance, or, you know find the bug in this c plus plus program.

Colin: Before we jump into, and I think the reason why we brought this up is that we saw that Ruby specifically was falling on their results, and so you had flagged us on Twitter and we said, let, let's talk about it a little bit more on the show. So before we get into that, I want to set their methodology. So basically we're gonna talk about like what they see as the top demand and the top preference for software languages. On the employer demand side, they're basically looking at hacker rank assessment tests, where specific languages were required or specific library questions. And then on the supply side, they basically ask people who are taking the tests, like what their proficiency and preferences. So like you might say like, yeah, this test is in Java, but I prefer to write it Python or go, or whatever that might. that's kind of just the methodology. They did some industry level trends as well which we can talk about. But they, so they were kind of looking at assessments on a whole. But like we mentioned before the demand for almost everything is growing. It's just not everything is growing at the same pace. So there's some interesting things we can dive into.

CJ: Yeah, I was also surprised too that like a lot. Employers did not require a specific language on the test. So only about one in five assessments required, like some specific language, which if you're at home and you're thinking, or you're walking your dog or you're driving your car, or whatever you're doing while you're listening to us and you're thinking like, oh, I I, I know Ruby really well and I know r and I know Swift, but I don't know Java or Python, I think. That should give you a little bit more confidence that like it, you don't actually need to know a specific programming language. Or at least, you know, 80% of employers might not require that, you know, a specific programming language to get hired. And in fact, I remember when I started my job at my vr, I did not know Python, and I was hired on as like a, you know, senior software engineer that was gonna write Python codes 24 7. So like, When I tweeted about this, someone said, oh, I've been doing PHP a ton and I've been learning Ruby on the side, but I am nervous about learning Ruby if it's gonna fall in, you know, if it's falling in preference or whatever. So yeah, all to say like, if you know one language or if you know a couple languages, you're gonna be in a good place. So.

Colin: Definitely. Yeah. So like, I guess to set the stage there the volume of the, what they saw the top five languages was Java, Python, sql, which I wouldn't really, I mean, it's a language, but. You use SQL in all of these languages? C plus plus and JavaScript. So, you know, JavaScript makes up type script, JavaScripts, all the React stuff that's happening, react native. So you get a little bit of mobile development in there. I don't see Kotlin on here, so I imagine Java and Kotlin might, might be under the same one. But I do see Swift. I don't see objective C Ruby's on here. I don't know what this graph represents cause it's the tiniest sliver, 77. Sum of monthly active tests was 77 in Ruby versus 20,000 in Java.

CJ: Yeah, like the, the other hot take, I mean, I think you mentioned this, but when we're thinking about these numbers, this is just about employers that are using this specific software hacker rank to filter out their candidates. And so, I, I remember that when you interview at Google, you are only allowed to interview in three languages, at least for like the full stack or backend or whatever roles you can do Java, Python or c plus plus. And I'm pretty sure that's it. For the front end role. Yeah, exactly. In the front end, the front end role is JavaScript, but like there's a chance that, you know, I don't know if Google's using this, but. You know, some massive company, Oracle or Salesforce or something is like, oh yeah, we're just going to, you know, we do, you know, 9,000 assessments every month and we let people pick between Java, Python, and c plus plus. And so that's why we see it skewed this way.

Colin: Yeah, this feels like a little bit of a bias, right? Because when I think about Ruby companies and Ruby culture in general, I think it hacker rank and leet code is kind of the antithesis of it. And that's not to say that we shouldn't be good at algorithmic things or computer sciencey type questions, but. It's just kind of counter to the the job descriptions I've seen the hiring processes that I've been a part of. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt. It's very similar to what we looked at with the Stack Overflow survey where there's a little bit of a confirmation bias where it's like people who go to Stack Overflow are looking for an answer. They're not necessarily going there as their homepage every day and then deciding like, what should I do here? It's not like a Twitter for developers. It's, it's like, I have a problem and I'm hoping someone can help me with that. What other highlights do we see coming out of.

CJ: Well, I think it's interesting to look at all of the go and type script gains. I think go, I mean like obviously go is super fun to write and it's picking up speed type script. Is a really popular front end language and I think a lot of companies and products are building more and more on the front end. And so I, you know, maybe five years ago you would have one front end engineer to every three backend engineers or something like that, right? And like now you need more front-end engineers or some in maybe potentially fewer backend engineers depending on what stack you're using. So I that, that's the type script gains seem like they make sense to me.

Colin: Yeah, go assessments grew by 300% type script by 392%. Granted, when I look at the sum of these numbers, it's like from 160 to 500. So we're still not even cracking a thousand. But you see companies like GitHub has moved largely from Ruby to go. They still have Ruby, I'm sure, but you end up with that. But again, I don't know that GitHub uses Hacker Rank, so they may not be represented in this either.

CJ: Right. Yep.

Colin: Swift and Ruby Assessments volume declined for 2022. Swift volume is only 80% of what it was, Ruby going down 66%. Again, the numbers are so small though that I don't know. You know, they, they note that developers have gradually shifted away from Ruby, and it's not just surprising to find it fading a bit more here. I don't know that like you, and you definitely cannot call swift dead like that is. The language that you would write an iOS app today. Like, I don't think someone's gonna pick up objective C if it's their first time you know, unless you used to write objective C for those things.

CJ: I don't know. I wonder if that the swift trend is potentially tied to React native and people like, oh yeah, if you can write type script and you can write react native code,

Colin: Right? Probably has more to do with it, right? Cuz if you are gonna build like a Kotlin app, a Swift app, and then a web app, you got a lot of code bases going on instead of that kind of mono repo mobile app.

CJ: Yeah. The other thing to keep in mind too is that like when we looked at the Stack Overflow survey, even though certain languages were like decreasing in popularity, their salaries were still very high or like increasing. And so in my mind I, I see this swift decline as like two things, like one, maybe fewer people are actually writing their iOS apps in their Mac apps in Swift and two, If you know Swift, then you could probably demand a really high salary because you're the one who's gonna be writing all this bridging code between like, you know, makos and React

Colin: you're supporting an existing Swift app, right? That they're like, oh, we need to go find somebody. I remember this when, oh man, flash was going away. And I was afl. I build myself as an Adobe Flex developer and. The amazing thing is I got so many projects because Flex kind of immediately fell out of favor with just JavaScript, right? Became the thing, and all of a sudden I was getting all these requests for people who had paid some company to build them a flex app, and they couldn't adopt it. And I, I think Salesforce was pushing Flex for a really long time, which is why I got into it and just Wow. Like it's. It's weird to think about that, but yeah, it's gonna be like Fortran developers and things like that, are in demand to support legacy systems. And mobile apps are in, by no means legacy systems yet, but if someone's not supporting it, then that's, that's a big one. You mentioned this with being able to, to test in three different languages, but the top skill that's in demand is problem solving. And I think we can all agree in all these surveys that it doesn't matter necessarily what language you're in. If you can problem solve, and like you said with your job at my vr, pick up Python as you go because you know kind of how to solve that.

CJ: Yeah, totally. And I, the other, the other interesting one was that machine learning is just crushing it, like, you know, problem solving. I think obviously everyone wants that even outside of software development, right? Like you're, you'll want people that are smart, that are on your team

Colin: Tech support PMs, any of those things.

CJ: Exactly. And so right on the tails of problem solving is machine learning in holy moly, this like last couple months we've been seeing just onslaught of machine learning apps and projects and things coming out that are so cool. All of the stuff that levels, like Peter Levels did. Super neat, but also like Jasper AI and or yeah, like the copy, copy ai, all of these different machine learning tools that help you author blog posts or create images or

Colin: GitHub co-pilot.

CJ: Yep. Github co-pilot and there's like ghost writer that's on Replit. All of these different machine learning tools are just like mind blowing.

Colin: Did you see the announcement the GitHub voice announcement,

CJ: No, I need to catch up on GitHub Universe.

Colin: Yeah. I don't know if it's gonna be a thing that actually gets released as much as like a research project, but being able to kind of dictate what you want to do and like vs. Code is like just doing it.

CJ: That's mind blowing. Yeah. if you haven't already seen to Emily Shea, she's a old friend of mine. She has a talk called Whale Quench where, so she had some like really bad rsi. Injuries and so she started like voice coding a long time ago. I'm like, I think like 2013, 2014 or something. And she has this talk that she gives about using, I think it's dragon. Dragon something, dragon dictate or whatever to write code. And it is so cool how they just use all these different words that represent letters or commands and then like are able to compose them in certain ways. It sounds like they're speaking a completely different, like alien language.

Colin: Wow. I'm sure it's similar to like a stenographer, like in a court, right? Where they're like typing super fast and they, they have all these shortcuts and

CJ: Yes, exactly. Exactly. So I can imagine that, you know, one day writing code becomes like that. You know, when you're live streaming and you're explaining all the stuff that you're doing, you're already saying it, and you have to type it and you have to think about the syntax and you have to think about like all these different things. If you could just say it, that would be, yeah, that would be pretty killer.

Colin: number three, top skill in demand is near and dear to both of our hearts here. Rest APIs, which. You just can't escape them these days.

CJ: Yeah. And I think even like REST API goes beyond just, or beyond APIs all the way into. A standard web application, like even when you're, you know, the browser is going to request the page and it's giving back H T M L and like what are the content types and what is the serialization and des sterilization, how do you hydrate and is this server side rendered or client Yeah, exactly. Like all of, yeah, exactly. Authentication and cookies and headers and all of that stuff is like part of, or it's like a super set of rest APIs. Right. And I think. You know, testing people on what they know about rest APIs makes a lot of sense to me because it's so fundamental to web

Colin: Yeah. What I, what I love about this is that they say that it shows sustained drama, free demand growth. And I think this is because it. Kind of devoid of the language battles and all these things that happened at the same time. Like I feel like GraphQL was trying to overtake rest APIs for a while and we've just been this back and forth on, you know, whether or not that's gonna be the new paradigm or not. Cause there's a lot of pros and cons to both. But I don't see GraphQL on this top skills and demand. You know, I know Shopify uses it. I know GitHub uses it.

CJ: I also read that as like drama free, meaning like boring, like Yeah, it's, it's like a nice way to say like, yes, this is just like the bread and butter boring stuff that everyone needs to know and kind of like table stakes

Colin: I think we all agree on that, which is crazy. That's like our, that's how we break bread now. It's like, hey, we're having a conversation about something we don't agree. Let's bring up rest APIs. And at the bottom, the, the fifth one is also I would imagine very drama free, which is HTML, CSS and Java Script. Just like plain vanilla. Everything's built that way. It's the bricks, the foundation. But between rest APIs and HTML and css, we get the, the slightly more drama filled skill, which is react. Which I think the drama more comes from just the, the number of libraries and angular and all these other different options that you can go down these days.

CJ: Yeah, it's like centralized and you know, does Versace own it or does you know, Facebook own it? Is it unowned? You know, there's all this like remix versus Next JS stuff going on in the React community. So, yeah. totally.

Colin: Yeah, I would say like we used to have that kind of drama in the rails in Ruby Land, but we haven't, I guess we we're, we're not afraid of drama in that world either, but, you know, it hasn't, hasn't been as much since like the MEB days or. You know, different forks of rails and ruby and all that kind of stuff. But so yeah, it looks like in general, like I would definitely take a look at these top five skills. And I think they also mentioned just that like people are really looking at adding data science to their skillset no matter what you do. I'm working on a project right now where I'm like, wishing I had more data science background because I'm trying to find. Interesting data sets. I have a giant data set how do I find out what's interesting?

CJ: Yeah, totally. Or you can, it's easier now to like come up with a question and be like I wonder how many, you know, voters in this state didn't vote this year because of their coffee preference change or whatever. Like you can there, I forget what website it is, but there's, there's another kind of machine learning site where you can just like give it your question and then it'll spit out the sequel that you need to run.

Colin: Nice.

CJ: But yeah, the data scientists that I've worked with at Stripe have just been like, mind-blowingly good at this stuff and some of the dashboards they make, I'm like, how in the, like, I, I thought that I was okay at sql, but holy moly, this is like, yeah, some really mind-blowing you know, insights that they can figure out. It's like knowing the question and then also being able to translate that question into like the code that you need to write and then being able to validate and verify, like, okay, yes, that answer does line up with the question.

Colin: Yeah, the thing that I'm gonna just throw out, this is for free for anyone who wants to build it cuz I don't even know where to start, is that I think about this a lot with rest APIs and integrations. Like, I don't know why we couldn't have a DALL-E for integrations at some point. Like if the docs and the spec is good enough and you know what the models are and you know it all. If I just want to integrate with a thing, why are we writing all this glue code all the time? Especially when like GitHub co. Like sometimes I'll write a test. Or rather, I'll write the code and then I'll write a comment in the spec and in rspec it almost always lately has like just written the test for me. Now I go back and I tear it down and read like think through what it's doing so that I'm not just blindly accepting it, but I'm like, yeah, that is exactly what I was trying to do. And I don't know if it's aware, if it's more aware because I just wrote the code for it. And obviously in this case I didn't write the test first because, But I would be curious if he goes the other way around, like, can I write the test first and then go into the class and see if it'll help me generate that? And it kind of depends on what you're building, but I think it would be really cool, like if, like with levels, like he's generating interiors for people based on their current interior. Like why can't we say like, I want Slack and Twitter to talk to each. Dolly, tell me what you think that should look like

CJ: Mm-hmm. Mm.

Colin: and just keep pressing generate until it gets to where we want it.

CJ: Totally. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think you're right. Like co-pilot seems to have gotten better over the last six months of using it. And now I'm definitely finding where like if I am writing an interface in one file and then I'm using the interface in another file, like it, it gets smarter about all the different things. So like one example was, I was saying like, Oh, I, on my video model, I have a view count and initially GitHub was auto completing to like video dot views, but as soon as I added view count to the other file, it like changed its auto completion suggestion to be view count instead of views. And it just, yeah, it, it's getting, it's getting smarter for sure, which is pretty

Colin: And we've always had like IntelliSense, but this is like a next level where it's like trying to think one more step further. Like, oh, I'm gonna map all these values for you. I'm like, oh, that was nice. I wouldn't have thought to do that.

CJ: Exactly. And a lot of that intelligence was powered by having a really strongly typed language. Right? Like if you're writing in C Sharp and you have in Intes sense, like

Colin: Yeah. You know what

CJ: Cause

Colin: you have.

CJ: Exactly. But like the fact that it can do it without types is kind of wild. So yeah.

Colin: So I think all these kind of lead up into what you were mentioning at the top of the show about tech layoffs and demand. They definitely saw this. I would say this probably was compiled before a lot of the layoffs happened, but. That tech hiring and pretty much everything else hit headwinds in 2022. The economy has slowed down. There are people talking about recession, however, they do see an overall trend of tech industry continuing to grow. I don't know if in their case that means. More assessments or more job descriptions or what that is. But you know, I know a lot of big companies are having q, you know, hiring phrases through q1. So in my mind, like it's the holiday season, definitely take a break, things like that coming up. But it's also a really good time to sharpen your tools, learn some new skills like. Go find some courses, watch some YouTube videos, check out CJ's channel, things like that. Because when those start to, I guess, thaw out and hiring freezes and, you know, I think being ready for those, if you're new to the industry or looking to make a career change I wouldn't necessarily go off of this list of programming languages, but I would look at the top skills. And maybe think about, you know, adding some machine learning or, you know, even just do a fun project on and see if you even like working with, you know, those kinds of models and things. Sentiment analysis is a good place to usually start on a project like that.

CJ: Mm. Yeah, it's interesting. The one of the things that they call out in the state of the industry in the report is a breakdown of the different types of candidates. And again, this could be skewing based on the companies that are on here or whatever, but it, it's like, oh. The assessments are incre, like the number of assessments are increasing for data scientists and decreasing a lot for full stack engineers. And I think that peer signal of just like, okay, data science is in, software engineers are out. I think it's much harder to pivot into a data science role from, you know, someone who's outside of tech than it is for a software engineer who's like relative or like somewhat interested in data to be like, okay, yeah. Like I'm, I'm now. Have learned a little bit more sequel and I know how to mess around with some of these hugging face model things. The hugging face transformers. That was like in the Stack Overflow survey. We were like, what is this? Yeah. I think the, also the, the Open AI API has gotten, I mean, it's, it's making it surprisingly easy to interact with these. Models. So like just hitting up G p T three through an API and saying like, do this thing, here's my prompt. And then getting back the data over an API is like kind of crazy because you can build a lot of these you know, tools that are writing copy for you or building blog posts or, you know, help me suggest a bunch of different titles for this video or whatever.

Colin: Facebook Research Division released like a video where they can actually, based on a prompt, they can generate video now. So,

CJ: That's super

Colin: and when I think about Peter levels, what he did with the interior, like you're talking about content like text, text is pretty cheap. Like the, I think they were tweeting about their server rendering bills for rendering out all of these interiors and like, I really want to go try it with my, my house, just to like, I'll have to see if he's got like a mid-century modern feature. It's like, I just want, you know, super minimal clean lines. Tell me what, and then next tell me what furniture to buy.

CJ: That's totally coming, right? Like, yeah. Yeah. It's, I don't know. Well, I, I wonder too, like all that, the Facebook's prowess, I wonder how impacted it's gonna be through all of these layoffs from Meta and the fact that like, I think they got dinged pretty hard for all of their investment that they put into the Metaverse. And so I think there was a lot of cool stuff that was coming out of that that could have been really, really interesting. And it's a bummer that that innovation. A little slow, maybe a little bit. I don't know. We'll

Colin: Yeah, I mean, he's not been shy about saying that he's not backing down from the metaverse, but the amount of money that they had been pouring into it was more, I don't know if it's more than all of the iPhones put together, but it. It's considerable. Like it's, it's on like Apollo mission level budget. Literally, like I actually think it was more than the whole Apollo program. Like I'll have to find these stats so I'm not completely making this up, but like the amount of money that they spent has been insane and they don't have a lot to show for it yet. But, you know, if you think that's where we're gonna go, like we're talking about talking to our computers, I still think that talking to a computer and things like AR are probably gonna. Before we get, you know, this kind of slightly dystopian like coding inside of a VR headset and like, you know, but at the same time you and I are separated by a whole country and being able to like put on two headsets and, you know, jump into even like what does a podcast studio look like in vr, right? And having all the stuff that we need and the mixers and all that stuff would be kind of interesting.

CJ: What? Yeah, I was super skeptical of this whole metaverse thing. I was like, it's not gonna, I don't see how this is gonna take hold as the gaming sort of, oh, you're gonna, you know, join with your friends and hang out with them and like, you're gonna sit at a table and visit or have, you know, like your Zoom call. But when I heard about the idea that this VR headset could sort of replace your computer monitor and like you could use that as a way to visualize everything. That really kind of blew my mind a little bit. Cause I was like, oh, now you just have like infinite space for what you want to see. And like then you can start having the input to your brain. Like the bandwidth of the input to your brain just goes up so much because now you can just start sucking in a, a bunch of different things. Like for instance, during this call, like while we're recording this, I'm command tabbing. I have two giant monitors up and I'm command tapping between the hacker rank survey, between our notes for the podcast and between the Zencaster recording studio and like being able to just kinda like look around and see all of that would be pretty, pretty cool.

Colin: Totally. And I, I think like what that would look like for programming, like even when we take the voice component of that and like, show me. Like you can just describe a data set like we were saying, and then just show me the summary of it. Or, or like, I want the item to describe it now, assign that to a variable and I'm gonna use that in my app. Right. Things like that. So I think we should definitely do an episode on the Metaverse. I think there's a lot of fun things to talk about there. Whether we, and I think we haven't touched it, but like there's some similar. With Metaverse and like Crypto and NFTs and Web three and all that kind of stuff, which we might need to find a guest for Web three. I don't know that I have not touched it for a lot of reasons, but I'm a little bit of a crypto skeptic on a lot of that stuff, but I think there's some interesting things to talk about with the future for sure.

CJ: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think all, all fun topics. They're all super fun topics and like whatever, you know, just to, I think I get excited about what the future holds and what the possibilities are and yeah. So I think it's gonna be an exciting decade ahead of us despite the current economic environment.

Colin: Absolutely. So well, thanks for listening to this episode of Build and Learn. As always, you can head over to buildandlearn.dev to check out all the links and resources in the show notes.

CJ: That's all for this episode, folks. We'll see you next time.