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In this episode, Frank and Andy interview Stephen Leonard, Andy's son, about his upcoming first SQL Saturday Talk, digital natives, engineering and STEM, and old movies like "Aliens" and "the Matrix."AI Generated Transcript (experimental)Hello and welcome to data driven,the podcast where we explore the emerging field of datascience.We bring the best minds in data,software, engineering, machine learning and artificial intelligence.Now hear your hosts Frank Lavigna and Andy Leonard.Hello and welcome back to data driven,the podcast or we explore the emergent fields of datascience machine learning an artificial intelligence.If you like to think of data as the newoil then you can consider us.Car Talk 'cause we focus on where the rubber meetsthe virtual road and with me on this epic journeyroad trip down information superhighway.Although I think we have to be sequestered because ofthe pandemic is Andy Leonard,how's it going? Andy, hey it's going well Frank,how are you doing, brother?You know I'm doing OK,I'm doing OK, we're in lockdown.I'm in. My wife is actually on an important workmeeting and I have the kids.In the room with me so you might hear ina frequent interjection,but I understand that Speaking of kids,yeah, we have a very unique guest.We do, we do have Steven Ray.My older son is joining us for the first partof this an we want to talk to him becauseat least in this it is first part because heis about to deliver his very first sequel Saturday presentation.Yes Sir, very cool. So I know a little bitabout the back story to this so.Steven, why don't you, uh,kind of do an intro to yourself.You're just. Quick bio I know and he probably knowseverything about you,but most of the rest of his home.Well, I'm for the uninitiated.I'm Steven. I'm Andy's son and or as I normallyrefer to him.Dad, I do stuff with small AI and neural Nets.I also work with Raspberry pis specifically.Sorry iot devices, specifically Raspberry pie.Zan, Jetson, Nanos working a little bit less with thelatter.Recently I've been doing more work with the pies.And, uh, pretty soon on the 25th I will bepresenting my first sequel Saturday class and I guess Ijust got lucky enough to do it on the firstseveral virtual SQL Saturday. Call it whatever you want,lock or unlucky based on the world events.I'll be teaching class on how to install SQL Serveron a Raspberry Pi 3B and I'm working on asolution for the four as well.Very call and it's my understanding that you actually you'reactually studying.Was it telerobotic? Not telerobotics but.Was it? Does a really cold like $10 word forit that Angie,Oh, Mecatronics Mecatronics That's it?Yes, Sir. Cartoon yes it does.I'm uh, it's It's, uh,it's really just all the I believe there are like12 or 13 official realms of engineering,or at least the ones that they teach in college.And it's sort of all of those mixed into onelike hyper focused,really hard class and I really just chose it becausewhen I walk into the when I walk into aroom,if someone has a question,I just want to be able to answer it.I want to be sort of the most helpful Ican be and I figure if I'm well enough versedin.As much engineering as much as much of the realmsof engineering as I can be,I figure I can be pretty helpful.That's pretty, that's the plan.A chip off the old block there Andy.Well, he, uh, you know his.I'll say Frank, he's probably better at it than mebecause his mom has a lot of background training inmultitasking type tasks.She was 911 dispatcher for awhile and to graduate fromthat course.They they literally play five or six conversations at thesame time.And she had to write down and track all ofthe conversations and respond accordingly.So it makes for a good project manager,which is awesome because I have exactly zero of thoseskills,so he has. He has more of that than Ido,but I think he definitely gets his ADHD for me,which this is Frank. We've talked about this about weaponizingthings that maybe hindrances in some fields an you knowthat I hear some of that in Stevie's plans herebecause rather than just go after one discipline.You know, just pick up a discipline of engineering,mechanical or electronics. You know he likes the idea ofkind of popping between disciplines and.You know, I, I think that so he's kind ofleveraging the ADHD there.Yeah, I, I mean I.I think that if you can,it's one thing to kind of play to your strengthsand quote Unquote fix your flaws.But I think there's a whole new level of selfimprovement that I've kind of discovered over the last fouryears or so.Is weaponizing your flaws. Yeah,you know what we talked about this with anti fragileright?Antifragility and not seem to loves books on that.you and I are both huge fans and I'm stillworking on getting him to come on the show.Frank I don't know. I don't know if we're goingto be able to pull that or not,but I have two goals here.Is you're well aware one is to make contact withhim and two is to not get blocked on Twitter?Yes, so he's although if you're for the listener,if you're not familiar with the lab he's been,he's been on fire lately with Twitter,as well as his one of his big sticks isrisk prediction and risk modeling and risk management.Although he would call it something else,and he would probably smack me across the face forcalling it risk management.But honestly, it would be an honor.Do snack Crossface by to lab in my agree.Agree yeah, but he's on fire both on Twitter and.He's making crazy money on this on the fund thathe manage is.Oh wow, OK, I didn't realize he still managed tofind.I didn't know either, but somebody reported that he madeeither 360%.A three 3600% or 36 times I don't know whateverit is,but he's in March. He made a ridiculous amount ofmoney,partly because I think he predicted a lot of thelong tail effects of the Cove in pandemic.Wow, yeah, if you look at him on Twitter lately,don't get blocked for him though.Please yeah, I'll try not true.I can live without kind of that pseudoscience biohacker knowledgefrom his Twitter feed,but I don't think I could live without to labswisdom.Yes, I'm here. Which again we will share that storyin full detail.Later, you're laughing. I am laughing now.We were going through that phase of.A kind of anger denial and all that.Now we're kind of laughing at it were accepting.That's where we have accepted it.An yeah, so we've gotten over it.But yes, we need your child.We have. We have ignored him and we want totalk about his product now.You gave him advice that he should Chinese.He combines the more likely his proposal to speak wouldbe accepted.Yeah, and you know this Frank from our relationship andI've been doing this for.Along time when I get,you know, once I got to to be able tospeak,I started reaching out trying to help others do it.'cause it was such a rush and I had.I had a couple of of men tease,I guess actually present at the pass summit 2019 inSeattle back in November and you know,that's just a huge, huge,great failing and you see the kind of picked upon that as well.You heard it when he was talking about his motivation,part of it as he wants to be able tohelp just as much as possible.But yeah, it came to me.I don't know ten months a year ago he saiddad,I want to. I want to do a presentation.He's been traveling with me to events over half hislife and.He said, You know, the very first thing I toldhim is,I think that's awesome. You'll do a good job,but here's what we're not going to do where we'renot going to get you picked because you're my son,but I'll do the same thing for you.I do for everyone else,and I did. That was my next piece of advice.Was my first real piece of advice.Was picked something shiny, and by Shawnee I mean youknow something new.A little edgy an he picked 2.Uh, an when he first told me about it inside,I was thinking that's a pretty big bite,but I didn't share that until just now with him,but he jumped right in on it.Franken, I would estimate in the first couple weeks.He probably put 100 hours on this.After that. You know he's probably been averaging 50 orso hours per month or so and I would sayhe's got a good solid 400 hours into it beforehe got it to work.And that was a couple months ago.He actually got it to where he got SQL Serverrunning on one of our π three is.So yeah, that was that was a very,very interesting way that happened to.I solved it while hanging out I.It honestly looked like I was building a weapon ina college that was that was really where it happenedis I was setting in the lobby of the college.My mother works at. And you know the HD MIcable was too short sided hanging out of the portand everything.But you know I just kind of threw my handsup and laid back and the desk lady kind oflooks over me like are you OK?It was it was. It was a very interesting time,but when I finally got it was just like everythingthat I had been waiting for.Just kind of crashed down on me.All the money we'd spent on replacing the walls.I was hitting my head into,it was just it was.It was worthwhile. We've been there,Stevie. I mean, Frank and I both done that anI've shared this story.In fact, this is completely unrehearsedI I've I've shared with people on a bunch ofdifferent times.When I talk in class is about this.You know I will. Failure is normal and my demofor that is I will walk down stairs on abreak and you and your siblings are homeschooled here andI'll say guess what my code just did and whatis it that you reply in Unison user?Exactly what you told it to exactly what I toldyou right?Not not what I wanted but exactly what I toldit to.Yes. But you experienced that.Go ahead, go ahead now.You've experienced that, and what I shared with you aswe were going through,and I do this with everybody that you know,I have a opportunity and it's truly an opportunity.It's an honor to mentor anyone when I have thatopportunity to share with them.Listen failure. You gotta look at failure as the lateststep on the path to success.And really, what you'll see is when you succeed,the number of times that you failed will actually kindof set the bar.How good it's going to feel.When you succeed. Was alright,so yeah, no you were totally correct.It was. It was the you kind of get toa point where I explain this to it to mybest friend who was,you know he works. He helps me work with thisas well.And I explained it to him and the way Ikind of explained it was I reached a point wherejumping off a Cliff was preferable to continuing to workon this. And, uh, you know,I just kept pushing through it.And finally, once you get to the end,it's just everything sort of it.Just kind of collapses on you,really. It's like being in a building and it's just,it just feels so good,just all the all the weeks of hitting your headagainst a wall and being angry and not figuring outnot being able to figure out why it's giving youthis error and that error.And why is this breaking and why I can't getDocker installed after I've installed it 3 times before onthe same kernel?You know, it's just. It's all these things over andover and over again.Just finally hit you and you just go.Yes, it's completely foreign to both Frankie.Now we write code and it just works the firsttime,every time, right? Frank, Oh yeah.No, it's true. He's never come downstairs.I've never heard dead come downstairs and go Dang mycode didn't work today.It's always just man that was perfect.There's actually a cartoon where it shows the same skepticallook of a person in front of a computer.And it says my code didn't work and I don'tknow why that was the first captain.The second one is my code worked the first timeand I don't know why.It again, if your code works the first time,then either you forgotten something it didn't work and it'sjust not telling you,or you need to stab yourself with a fork andwake up,right, right? Or you kind of like something is bad,so going something even worse is going to happen.And what I anticipated, right?Which I think a lot of folks,I think you know. I learned this when I wasdoing a couple of years ago.This is back in the Windows 8 days when Iwas in evangelism.Uh, I spoke to a bunch of high school kidsand I kind of did this summer course on writingapps and stuff like that.And like I thought, I bombed it the first day.Like really bad, because it just kept compiler,kept happening problems and there were some driver issues andI worked through it an I talked to kind oflike the coordinator with the local high school and hegoes no. That was awesome because a lot of thesekids,they see how programming is represented on TV and it's.Everything works the first time and I'm like looked athim like we both kind of set in Unison.Nothing ever works the first time,and if it does, I'm very,very suspicious. Very sets to write a lot of folks.They think that they get there,they get their hands kind of dirty with code orstem an the first time.If it doesn't work, they think it's them.But no. I mean that's frustration is on Fortunately orunfortunately a large part of engineering.Right, and that's that's the that's the issue I runinto when when I tell people that I run intoor people that I know that I work with computersand you know, they tell me stuff like Oh wellthat's I'm not smart enough to that.Or that's too hard. I could never figure that out.And then there's two kind of groups and that's thefirst group is well,you're so smart an my answer is no,I just spent a lot of time in it andthe other the other group that I run into isthat like are the people who have seen.What's the movie called? The oceans,movies and there like in.They asked me how nice you know how it feelswhen you finally hack the mainframe and get through theFirewall.And it's really just like the reality that you runinto when you start getting into doing programming and engineeringof any sorts really,is that? It's nothing like what it's portrayed in themovie.In the movies, in the general consensus of how itworks is nowhere near how it actually works.Right, right? I mean it it to everybody,it almost seems. It's almost it's almost synonymous to rocketscience.I've seen to the at least of the general publicthat I've talked to is they think it's some sortof thing that you have to go to college andget a degree for, when in reality you can learnit in your Mother's basement in six months.Now that's true. Patience is under rated,I think in our society and this and a lotof the folks that what differentiates kind of someone who.Is good at, this is just the patience.The tenacity. I mean you've demonstrated this.I think you've internalised it now,right? But you know a lot of folks,I think in result of this pandemic are going tostart pondering new careers as they should,right? You know, just. It makes a lot of sense,and I think a lot of folks have to realizethat.Programming is frustration.Yeah, it's it's definitely. It's definitely not a career that.4. Uh, what's the word I'm looking for?Not short minded, but sort of short sighted people wholook for instant gratification,right? Although I would say that.As someone who, as someone who has been,I've never been formally diagnosed with ADHD.But you know, people close to me have said I'mhigh functioning ADHD.Uh, which is? You know I'm not going to arguewith that,but there's a lot of folks who were quote aquote on the spectrum or on a spectrum of some…
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