He imagined he could make the web shinier, so now he does.

Join us as we talk with Kristian Hamilton about his passion for helping adults and children learn to code. We explore his hypothesis, "There's no better escape from poverty than education," and how that inspired him to become a volunteer coach and organizer at CodeBar.

Kristian Hamilton (LinkedIn) is a Senior Front End developer keeping Signavio running at SAP, a global software company.

Listen as we talk about mentoring as motivation, being black in very white spaces, intersecting art and code, and eating delicious British food.

This episode is packed with insights about:

• (00:00:22) Starting in East London
• (00:02:50) One-line word processors
• (00:07:41) Copying code from magazines
• (00:14:08) Teaching kids to build games in Scratch
• (00:17:21) Rolling the dice at Codebar
• (00:24:02) Creating the workshop vibe
• (00:28:37) Breaking it down like Feynman
• (00:30:34) Making things shiny
• (00:40:57) Berlin <3 Code + Art
• (00:43:14) Hum of not belonging
• (00:48:10) More black people in tech
• (00:49:52) Websites on the brain
• (00:56:15) Flash pages were cool, but...
• (01:00:01) British food is delicious

Mentions:

• CodeBar - International non-profit that enables minority group members to learn programming in a safe and collaborative environment.
• Scratch - Scratch is the world's largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface.
• Feynman Technique - A study method for students to learn through the act of teaching.
• Creative Code - Part casual hang out, part show-and-tell, the Creative Code Stammtisch is a free event for artists, coders, and anyone interested in using code for self-expression.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or your favorite platform.

Zeke Arany-Lucas is a principal engineer, consultant, and coach living and working in Berlin since 2014. He was previously a leader at Amazon and Microsoft, where he started his career building Internet Explorer. You can also follow him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Mastodon, and Instagram.

Artwork by Emre Aydogan & Laura Diezler — ©️2022 Zeke Arany-Lucas

Read the transcripts

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Hello and welcome to The Introspective Developer. My name is Zeke Arany-Lucas, and we are exploring how software developers build unconventional careers without a computer science degree. Let's find out what drives them and how they think. I am convinced that building the best software engineering teams requires diversity and inclusion by hiring more devs from outside the traditional university pipelines.

Join us today as we talk with Kristian Hamilton about his passion for helping adults and children learn to code. We explore his hypothesis, “there's no better escape from poverty than education,” and how that motivated him to become a volunteer coach and organizer at CodeBar.

Plus we'll hear about being black in very white spaces, intersecting art and code, cooking delicious British food, and having a soft spot for Flash websites.

All right. Hi Kristian. Welcome to the show.

Kristian Hamilton: Hello.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: How are you doing today,

Kristian Hamilton: I am good. Uh, yeah,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: You're, you're, you're British, right?

Kristian Hamilton: Yep Yep, I can prove that. Cause I've got a cup of tea next to me and some biscuits in front of me as well.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Biscuits and tea is about as, as British as it gets.

[00:01:08] Starting in East London

Zeke Arany-Lucas: So, uh, tell me about a little bit about, uh, growing up in the UK

Kristian Hamilton: Mm. So I'm from East London. Um, I also, I currently live in Berlin. Just to give you context, I always introduce myself. Say I'm from East London, and then some people laugh, be like, why would you specify what part of London you're from? But because London's so big when you're from London, it's very important to specify where in London you're from

Um, yeah. I grew up north of the river, uh, in a very ethnically diverse area. Um, a place called Newham, one of the most ethnically diverse places in the UK. Also one of the poorest places in the UK. Um, but yeah, I really enjoyed my childhood. It was fun, not to Yeah, but adult life is so much better, um, than childhood. I,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: What, what's, what's a highlight from your childhood?

Kristian Hamilton: I really enjoyed extracurricular activities. I did a lot of them when I was younger. Um, and I also enjoyed school as well. It was just doing stuff, making stuff, going places, riding the train. That was a very fond memory of mine growing up.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: know, you know what's really impressed me since I moved to Berlin is how many kids use the train on their own.

Kristian Hamilton: But then I think it's something quite unique to large cities. So as soon as you start moving out of London and transport, um, system isn't as, um, good, you'll often find that parents, it goes into the American mindset where parents have to drop their children off absolutely everywhere. And for me, that's alien.

From a young age, you become kind of independent. Um, and more so in recent years, they've given children in London free transport. So it means that when I was younger it was very cheap, but now children can absolutely go anywhere they want in London, which pretty much opens the city and the like, the potential in your childhood.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: I, I think it's brilliant. I mean, it's one of the reasons I chose Berlin is because I knew it had a good transit system, but when I got here I was like, oh my God, it's, it's even better than I had imagined.

Kristian Hamilton: I love the culture in Berlin. It's one of the reasons I love living here. The access to outsideness, the nature, the wide pavements. I, I call them pavements, of course, but yeah, just the eating on the street is a weird thing for a British person to see. But I happily enjoy it.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah, me too. Me too. Berlin is beautiful.

[00:03:37] One-line word processors

Zeke Arany-Lucas: So you, you, you grew up in a poor neighborhood. Did you grow up, uh, around computers at all?

Kristian Hamilton: Jein as the Germans would say. Both yes and no. So my mother trained to be a secretary, so back in the days when offices used to have large, I think they were called like typing pools, where you'd have large amounts of people typing. Letters because emails didn't exist. My mother trained to do that, so she had lots of typewriters in the house and electric typewriters.

And it's, these are like the machines that kind of predate computers. So there was always like, kind of technology in the house in the sense that there were these electric typewriters, which would kind of like, there were very simple word processes. They were like, do matrix machines that would have just one line and then you could like program a line before you'd type it, but then you could also do interesting characters.

They were like, they just predate word processing on an actual computer. So I grew up with those in the house, which is very unusual. So I used to play with those. I used to do my homework for school and type it up on a, like an electric typewriter which was cool. You could, I think the most you could probably do is maybe a paragraph if you were lucky, but most of the time you just program a line.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: So you, you'd edit one line and then when the line is correct, then you commit it. Is that basically what you do and when you commit it, it would save the paper?

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah. , I'm gonna show my age aren't I Yeah. And you print one line. But yeah, those were in the house when I younger, but then I think I got donated some computers throughout my life, my childhood. I was often donated computers from like a friend of the family,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Hmm.

Kristian Hamilton: who I think I later bumped into in my adult life.

And he was sitting there on a, on a fancy MacBook at the time. And I went over and I was like, I wanted to say thank you for giving me a computer when I was a child. You gave me a Macintosh. And then he was like I'm now a software engineer. He was like, ah, not the first person who's told me this. So this person, I think it's like an Apple fanboy that kept on buying computers and kept on giving them away to people when he wanted to get the new one.

And I so happened to have a bunch of Macintoshes when I was younger that he gave to me. But yeah, he didn't seem very surprised I was a software engineer

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah. What was he a, what? What did he do for a living?

Kristian Hamilton: I have no idea. just absolutely an older gentleman turned up at my house, dropped off a computer, never really saw him again until years later

when

Zeke Arany-Lucas: mysterious benefactor.

Kristian Hamilton: yeah.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: I

Kristian Hamilton: I always kind of had access to computers. I would, in my area there was like internet cafes that were very popular and I'd hang out in internet cafes as well as a child, 50 p for an hour. Which yeah, I was, I would've been about 13 years old by that point. I would've been bothering my mom to have some money so I can go to an internet cafe and use the internet.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: That's quite affordable.

When I was a kid and my access to computers was mostly computer games, and that was 25 cents for, you know, a single round on a video game, you know, and like in a seven 11 or grocery store or something like that. And that's, that's not an hour, that's for sure.

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah, that's definitely a lot cheaper than like an arcade machine. Arcade machines were always, for me, prohibitively expensive. Like, because I wasn't, if you're not very good at computer games, you're not gonna spend very long on that machine. Yes, I've always had computers nearby, but how much time I would spend on them would vary drastically until I was able to purchase my first computer when I was like 16 years

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Oh, oh, wow. 16 though. So when you purchased a computer, did you already kind of have an idea that you wanted to do computery stuff?

Kristian Hamilton: kind of. So did the internet cafe I spoke to you about. I used to hang out in there a lot. The guy had a website and he showed me, like, he made like a Flash game. And I was like, oh my gosh, what is that? And he was telling me how to make websites, how to use ftp. He was like, Hey, just dragged the files into the folder.

And he was the person who built that computer for me at 16. So he was like, give me 300 pounds. I'm gonna go to the computer fair, buy the parts, assemble it for you. And yeah, you can have a computer for 300 pounds. And I think I used probably the old monitor from the Macintosh and I was so excited. I think it was, it might, I'm not sure if it was Windows 95 or Windows 98, but I just remember coming up on the screen just being like, oh my, it's gonna be good.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: it's.

Kristian Hamilton: I think it, it's when this fight. Yeah. I was very excited I think. Yeah. I was like, oh

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Cool.

Kristian Hamilton: yeah.

[00:08:27] Copying code from magazines

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah. So tell me a little about when you started coding then.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: How did that happen? You talked about, so you said the guy built a Flash game in front of you and a website.

Kristian Hamilton: He didn't built it in front of me, he just showed me the results. He was like, look what I've made. And I was just like a kid in the, in the internet cafe. And I was like, wow, that's impressive. How did you do that? And he was like, it's this thing called Flash. And I was like, tell me more. So I, I grew up in a time . Where if you wanted to learn coding, for me the most accessible thing was magazines in shops.

So I would go, I'd spend a lot of time in shops looking at magazines because it was like, yeah. And then there was often magazines about making websites. So there were, one of my first was called, I think, called dot Net Magazine in the UK. And you'd have like snippets of code that you would, you could use. It would be CSS or JavaScript or HTML.

To make something like little tutorials inside the magazine, I'd buy that and I'd try it out. And this, I was using Dreamweaver at the time, and yeah, just copy and pasting code from magazines to see if it would work. But I think this is also because I think when I first, I didn't have the internet as well, so this was the, I was having to learn without the infinite amount of knowledge on the internet.

But it was also a different time back then

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah. What, what, what year are you talking about here?

Kristian Hamilton: gosh, so I finished school 2007, so we would be talking about 2004 Yeah.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Interesting. , okay, so you got into coding somewhere around 2004 for magazines, which is an interesting thing. I mean, that's, that's how it was like in the eighties too. You know, read about people, you know, back from that time, the, you know, like you're typing in by hand. And then and then you went to school.

What did you go to school for?

Kristian Hamilton: So, well, I had compulsory education until I was 16 in the UK. Then I get to choose my subjects and I did four A levels. So I did fine art, graphic design and politics and physics. Which is the choices I had. There was no option of, I think there was a subject, IT ah, this brings me up. So I used to hate IT at school because I used to, I was good at it, but I used to be frustrated that I felt better than the teachers.

I was probably a little arrogant child as well at the same time.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: But it might have been well deserved,

Kristian Hamilton: yeah. But in IT, at school at that time was writing letters was a big topic. It was so word processing. I dunno how Microsoft got their foot in the door in terms of the English education system, but like, it was like making PowerPoints. Making Excel spreadsheets. I did calculations. And for me, I found that infuriating. I was like, I can do this stuff. There's, but then I kind of thought there was more to doing. Well, there was more to be done on computers, so I kind of refused to do it at schooling. And especially at a level. But then it was also the skill set, the skill set wasn't there in schools to be able to teach children how to code.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Hmm.

Kristian Hamilton: so at school, yeah, so I did physics, which I loved. Wasn't very good at politics. I loved but I excelled at art and graphic design. Those are my two favorite subjects, are my strongest subjects at school.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: those have some overlap with building stuff with software.

Kristian Hamilton: Most definitely, most definitely.

After, after my A levels, I would've turned 18 and decided to go to university. And there I studied graphic design on web design. So,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: huh?

Kristian Hamilton: So I did that for three years and I did that at Cambridge School of Arts, which was part of, it's the other university in Cambridge. So it's not Cambridge, Cambridge, but at the time it was called Anglo University.

But it's gone through a few name changes. I don't think I know the name of the university right now, but, um, it was a cool place. So I, I had an intersect between, I, I was looking for the icep between, um, coding and art, so I think I got lots of prospectuses. So it's like a booklet you'd get from a university that would tell you what would happen during the university course and I'd get 'em from all over the country.

And I kind of just looked through them trying to find what course would allow me to draw and make websites at the same time.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: What kind of material were they recommending you learn to build websites?

Kristian Hamilton: So I didn't actually in, I didn't get introduced to a teacher who could tell me how to make a website till about 2007, um, maybe 2008. And that's about the time the iPhone had just come out. But I was already tinkering of stuff, so I was mainly tinkering, but hadn't really spoken to someone, um, more advanced than me, if that makes, that's a horrible thing to say.

Um, but I think this can easily happen, like when you are, before the internet, you had a curiosity about making websites, but then you weren't sure who to talk to about making websites. You kind of were just doing your own thing in kind of isolation. And I think also, cause you had the internet at home, it was very hard to Yeah.

It was 50 p for an hour, so it was, yeah, until I was 16 and. Even though I wasn't very okay with forums, so I wouldn't necessarily talk to strangers on the internet about stuff. Um, what was I doing on the internet at 16? I nonsense. Probably. Um, yeah. So wait, that's the question. So, no, I've forgotten the question.

Oh, this is gonna be a common occurrence, isn't it?

Zeke Arany-Lucas: No, no, it's all right. Um, I was just wanting to know, at what point did you actually start learning software? Right. So like, there's like schools, I mean, cuz one of the things that has come up again repeatedly over my entire career, but even before it was, schools are just behind.

Kristian Hamilton: Mm-hmm.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: just takes, it just takes a long time to advance curriculum and to hire teachers that are all at the standards of the curriculum.

So, you know, like schools can't say, Hey, we're gonna teach the most advanced thing when they don't have any to teach it.

Kristian Hamilton: Mm-hmm.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Right. And how do you get people to teach it? Usually it's the people who have left the, the avante gard and they're ready to take their skills and, yeah.

[00:14:55] Teaching kids to code in Scratch

Kristian Hamilton: So I, I think I told you about this before. I used to teach in schools. I used to teach nine and 10 year olds how to code in Scratch. Uh, it, yeah. So Scratch was a software developed by MIT um, and I think it's kind of open source as well. And, um, yeah, so I, so I had a frustration that when I was at school there was no one teaching me how to code.

Um, so when I, later on in my career, so we're probably talking. About 2014. So I, I took a job and I asked my employer at the time, I would take this job if I'm allowed to go out once a week and teach school kids in a school how to teach. So I think once a week on Wednesdays, I would leave my desk early, go to a local primary school, and I'd have a class for about 20 children who are like eight or 10 years old.

And it was through an initiative called Code Club in the UK and it was trying to get tech professionals into schools to teach children how to code. And I did that for maybe two years and really enjoyed it. It was really, it was, I was trying to find myself at that age tinkering around on computers.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: That's a, a real kind of passion, mentorship kind of alignment, right? Where you're saying, I want to mentor my, my younger self.

Kristian Hamilton: Mm.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: You know, I think that's fascinating.

How well did it work? Did the program

Kristian Hamilton: well. It was, so it, this school offered, um, the school offered after school classes. There was dance class, there was, I think there was a science class next door to me, but we were just a coding club and I think it was the most popular club at the school. So it had the most request for children that wants to participate.

All we would do is make games in Scratch. So each week we would have tutorials, and by the end of the class, we'd hopefully have like a working game. Some kids would have a wedding game, some wouldn't. We'd come back next week and we'd try and finish off the previous game. They would play each other's games.

They would encourage to customize the games. So Code Club would provide learning resources where, um, it would make a simple game, let's say for example, pong, but then you would encourage the children. Customize it themselves. So rather than paddles, there'll be like two cupcakes going up and down, and there'll be bouncing a football between them, for example.

But then it would encourage 'em to be creative and, um, yeah, it went very well indeed. I had my favorites in the class. Um, there were some kids that would make incredibly advanced games.

Because the class was coming from often a creative approach. They would have to work backwards, they would have to abstract. So one child says to me, I wanna make quidditch as a game. So quidditch, the game from Harry Potter in itself is very complicated. I think it's the, it probably doesn't even make sense in the actual real world, even though I know there are people that play it as adults in leagues.

But I mean, it's, it, it's way more complicated than trying to make a football game. And, um, you're trying to talk to a, a nine year old about how would you break this down into a problem of what needs to be going on at the same time? Um, But yeah, the children enjoyed it. Um, so at the, actually they enjoyed it so much.

So at the end of each year, the plan was to kick the kids out and take a new bunch of kids. But I was like, I can't say goodbye to these kids because they have nowhere else to code. So the class just grew in size instead. So, uh,

[00:18:07] Rolling the dice at Codebar

Zeke Arany-Lucas: That's fun. That's fun. Does this, is this kind of, uh, leading into how you ended up doing CodeBar then?

Kristian Hamilton: So I think I might have been doing them simultaneously at the same time. So, so just to explain it, CodeBar is something that I do in Berlin. It, we offer workshops once every two weeks. Um, for people that wanna learn to code, they can just drop in and learn how to code. But I was doing this in London as well at the same time, but I wasn't the organizer, I was just coaching.

So for me, I would do my class on Wednesday with the children. Then I think it was Monday evenings, I would do, um, CodeBar completely separate. Simultaneously,

I, I need, I've got a confession to make. I was, uh, I used to frequent the meetups a lot in London. This is how I learn. So I'm not very good at reading coding books.

I'm looking at my bookshelf right now and there's coding books that I have not read. Um, but what I love doing is spending time with people who are coding and who like code. So I love going to meetups and being around people that wanna talk about stuff they've done. I love listening to people talk about what they've made and if I can help someone debug something or I'm also very open to do that as well.

So, when I lived in London, I could definitely easily go to like three or four meetups in a week, which is crazy business. Um, some probably would question if I was there for the food or if I was there for the knowledge. But, um, I used to re, I used to enjoy it. CodeBar was just enough a meet up for me. Um, teaching kids was something I could do, but then teaching the kids, I could actually go to a meet up afterwards because I would, if I, after school club is probably three 30 till four 30.

Um, workers don't get out till six. So there's still time.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: It's, I mean, it's a real pattern of pedagogy there, right? Where you're, you know, like learning from others, but also teaching others, sharing what you know.

Mentor is often like, kind of on a journey and kind of ahead of some people and behind some other people on that journey. And they, you know, are often being, being taken further in the journey because they're connected to people above them, but they're also taking people along with them. And it sounds like you play that role almost, almost as a habit.

Kristian Hamilton: I can definitely agree with that.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: What's, what's the, what's the, the incentive for you? What's the core motivative motivator?

Kristian Hamilton: Um, so for me it's, so when I'm working in my professional work, I'm always, I'm, I'm, I'm happy in my professional work, but I always feel annoyed at myself cause I've always put myself in a position of being uncomfortable, if that makes sense. So for me, a good place to be in terms of working is somewhere where I'm being technically challenged, but that I find that incredibly frustrating at the same time.

So it's very nice. To, I dunno, I assume, I assume everyone else is having that problem as well. Like I want to be around people who are in that space where they are challenging themselves. So be that a nine year old child or someone switching careers as an adult later in life. I think being around people who are like treading water and helping them for me, is a great incentive to be around a person, in general.

So I think it's, yeah, it's a, that's a, that's a valid answer. I'll go with that.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: I, it makes sense to me. Um, it makes sense to me because, you know, um, you know, I'm also attracted to people who are invested in reinvention. I'll just say that, like where it's like that there's a sense of growth and so that means not it's. Then it's like more, it is more about the journey, right? Like you wanna surround yourself with people who care about their own growth and development and are curious about things.

And that might be it almost in a nutshell for me, it's like being around people who are curious, although you want them to be close. And for me at least, I want them to be close enough in what they're curious about, that I can have really, uh, compelling conversations. I'll just say, you know.

I struggled a little bit at CodeBar, um, to connect with the students. Um, but I felt like what happened for me when I did CodeBar was that they, they, they were coming in and they just wanted some answers. And, and the things that I kind of think are, are more important about being in software or technology didn't and kind of come up.

They would just be like, can you, can you fix my React app? And I'm like, and I'm like, um, well I don't really know how React apps works, but I can kind of walk through, you know, how code works.

Kristian Hamilton: Mm-hmm.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: And I, I was like, yeah, that was a little truck tricky because I, I felt like they just kind of wanted a surgical strike.

And what I was hoping for was a little bit deeper, deeper discussion.

Kristian Hamilton: it's, it's, it's the roll of the CodeBar dice. Um, so unfortunately students that come to CodeBar are a mixed bag. So I've had CodeBar sessions where someone's like, I've got a job interview tomorrow. I'm scared about the interview questions. Um, can you talk to me about what, this is my first ever front end developer.

What happens And those are always interesting conversations. Cause I feel like every coach wants to pipe in about their experience in interviews.

Um, you'll have some students that come and they just want to help, help with their cvs. Like, can you read my cv? Cause if, I don't know if any software engineers, I'm trying to enter into the field of software engineering, what does a software engineer C really look like? And we can sit there and go through it with them and highlight issues.

Um, and at the other end of the spectrum, there are people who are like, I'm using this framework on and I'm using this library with this framework and it's not working the way I want it to work. Can you help me? And. The approach with code buyers, we shouldn't often we'll be trying to help, like you want 'em to, maybe you kind of mentioned it, you want 'em to be at their own kind of level of understanding so you can just nudge them along.

So we're not supposed to give them answers or fix code for them. We, one of the main things I spend a lot of time doing is helping show someone how to bug something. Um, or like to debug something insanely without going crazy with co to logs or just let's try and break down the problem and talk to them and, and almost massage them to the solution.

[00:24:48] Creating the workshop vibe

Kristian Hamilton: then some, but then it can often be, yeah, it's, I think while we were online, there was a, it lost the sense of community. The, the it, the informal conversations that happened at CodeBar didn't happen as much when we were online. There was lots of people who were trying to get code fixed. Um, but then

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Can you fix my app?

Kristian Hamilton: Yes.

Which is, which is, which is unfortunate because one of the great things I loved about CodeBar was the informal conversations that we had. So CodeBar starts at six 30, but we don't start coding until seven. There's intentionally half an hour before we actually start coding so that people can talk to each other, understand where people are in their journey, uh, which can inform the help we then give them in the two hour workshop.

But, um, when we switched to online, um, yeah, it, it wasn't unusual for a coach to appear just before seven, a student to appear just before seven. And the student's just like, my app's broken. I've been working on this all day and my app's broken. And they, and they've, they're so, um, they get caught up in what's gone wrong because they've just, the context which is too quick in comparison to CodeBar where you have to travel to a CodeBar, enter into a room, um, talk to people about what's going on, and it sets you up better for helping someone.

Holistically, hopefully I'll use the word correctly, then simply dump in spaghetti code or the developer's lap and saying, can you fix it?

Zeke Arany-Lucas: That, that really resonates with me. Especially cause like several of the interviews I did before were with women who did, um, the Rails Girls or Summer of Code and every one of them said, it's like coming into the room, like just the walking into the room changes the way they think about computers and software and stuff like that.

They were just like mind blown, you know, ready to get busy. Because like the energy in the room was hot and you just don't get that when, like you said, when you're switching between Zoom calls,

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah. And especially if your job info involves Zoom calls as well during the day. Like you spent the whole day on Zoom calls and then you stop your day to go join another Zoom call to do some more, do some coding.

Um, yeah, there's something nice about entering the, the is, it's almost almost religious know how, in the same way you'd end, you might not be a religious person, but you enter a church and it's like, wow,

And it's the same when you enter into a tech company. I think that architects intentionally do that when they design a tech space. Like you, you come into a reception, you, you might see the neo light with a funky logo or like a, a catch trace. Um, but. But then you see people who are like you, like in the room with people with the same height as you.

You can't catch that on a Zoom call you. Um, you see people that look from the same ethnicity as you. Like. One of the things we had recently at CodeBar, I think we, we had maybe six pairings and I think three of them were happening in Spanish. And like, that's something that I can't predict. Um, it's, it's very hard to predict online what, so we can talk about people's native languages, but then you find out that there are a group of people who, whose mother tongue is all Spanish and then they, let's just program in Spanish for these people.

Um, but that's the difference between an online CodeBar and an in person CodeBar workshop.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah, I, I talk about diversity there. That was one of the things that attracted me to CodeBar originally, right, was just that their, their focus is on, excuse me. Their focus is on getting underrepresented people in tech into, you know, to actually get bump up to the level where they can get a job, right?

Like, it's not just like, oh, learn to code in your spare time. It's like kinda, you know, start your career. Um, especially the, the lane changers. It's, you know, like people who are switching careers.

Kristian Hamilton: Also, I want to give, um, space for the people who just are doing it for fun as well. I don't want people to be at CodeBar just to be like, I wanna switch job. There's also a space. So we used to have one student that would just make stuff for fun. So would just make a website to solve a problem just because it's fun.

Um, so I wanna make, so CodeBar for me is also a space for that. I think we had one lady that. And she wants to know how the internet worked. And that was a CodeBar session explaining where do, where do images live on the internet? How do we get the images? And it's presented to someone without starting to talk, talk about TCP handshakes.

[00:29:23] Breaking it down like Feynman

Kristian Hamilton: You wanna be able to, like, I think for some, if you approach the internet, it's completely alien and abstract concept. So trying to break this down to someone is, I take great pleasure in doing that.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah, and that's a very particular skill actually to, to take things which are basic, basically infinitely complex, and reduce them to concepts that are useful to a non-expert.

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah, I, I think it's a very important skill, especially in my professional career as well. It's something that I feel like I've interacted with lots of people that do not have that skill where you are talking to an audience and you've neglected, the audience. Because we are not all senior engineers in the room. There's juniors in the room, there's people on internships in the room, and there's people from marketing in the room.

And you, I suppose it's hard when you deal with complexity and you need to convey that to other people, but I think it's an incredibly important skill to be able to communicate. And I think that's the most why trainer I go to CodeBar if for selfish means being at CodeBar helps me communicate what I do better to people who don't know what I do.

Or, yeah, it's, yeah, it's one of the things that helps me teach often is like, if someone doesn't understand something, it's my fault for not explaining it well enough, not the person for not understanding it. It's a thing I constantly repeat to myself. So I have, it's like I, I'll explain the concept to someone and I'm, I have to check their under.

It's very important that I check their understanding and even, and even be as rude to say, can you explain it back to me? If you were to teach to someone else, how would you explain it? Which is, it puts someone in the spot. It's a bit uncomfortable, but it's, I really wanna make sure when I'm explaining something to someone, that they understand what's going on.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah. That's powerful. That's really powerful.

[00:31:20] Making things shiny

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Um, I, I realize we haven't talked about it. What are you doing right now?

Kristian Hamilton: Good question. Um, so I work for a large German software company called SAP. I'm a senior front end developer. I work on a very complex bit of code and it's just a React app.

I spend a lot of time here just fixing bugs, update dependencies, um, improving stuff, making things shiny. Um, yeah.

One, that's a catch phrase that I loved: making things shiny. When anyone asks me what I do for a living, I like, I make websites shiny. It's one of the reasons I got into web development. I, oh, yeah, that's something I should mention.

When I, when I was interacting with the web in like the early two thousands, I was like, this is hideous. Um, and I always felt like I could make it look better. And, and that's something that I still strive to, to this day, is making websites look better, um, and behave better. I think functionality is very important to me.

So, uh, if you, I will, you'll see me on poor quests getting angry about accessibility. I think last week I complained about validate. I was like, does anyone care about that anymore? ? I was like,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Uh, yeah. Although that one I, I find. Is is little tricky. You know, I was around in the time when XHTML was supposed to take over because, and the one of the assertion was it's because it's provably correct. But XHTML makes everybody miserable cuz it's like super quiggly. But doesn't add, the quis don't actually give you better behavior cuz there's no compiler.

I mean, like the, the syntactic sugar, the syntactic enforcement is not as valuable as the, the syntac flexibility of classic HTML.

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah. So yes. I also come from an age where I used to write HTML for my job, and I would copy and paste it into HTML validators. So this is before linting, in my editor. I would actually have to copy and paste my HTML, stick it into a validator to see if my HTML is valid.

But then that was only because one of the worst things I have is when you find the bug, because there, because the browser can't interpret what's going on. Or, or because the browser that's being used hasn't made the allowances because what you're doing is wrong. If that makes sense. So

I'm sure we're all aware that browsers put in a lot of work to help render bad HTML, bad css, bad JavaScript. But then if you, if you do something too crazy in the code , the browser's gonna not know how to handle what's going on.

And some browsers might, some browsers put in extra effort to make sure, um, it understands what people are trying to do. And then if something, and if someone codes something, it, yeah, it, my point is it, it felt like a very weird thing to complain about, that another engineer in the team was adding some invalid HTML to the code base.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Well, it, it's important in, I think, in any language or framework to understand the subset of behaviors that are important, right? Like, this is like design language stuff. Like you say, Hey, our apps look like this, behave like this, do this sort of thing. Don't, don't just start throwing. You know, random behaviors into the system because even if it's, even if it's technically correct, it's not good for our users, it's not good for our developers.

Um, I don't know, when you were talking about the browser stuff, I was just remembering the early days of the browsers and how basically it was a trade off between adding things that other browsers don't support on purpose. Just, you know, trying to get them as quickly as possible in front of users and to just somehow get a website to use them.

And then second was catching up with the features that the other browser had built, and to do it in a way where the behavior was as close as possible not to expect, which didn't really exist, but to whatever the most important websites were rendered as. Right.

Yeah. Because some big website used something that as a feature that shouldn't behave that way. And then the browsers all copy to make sure it continues to behave that way.

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah. I, I, I love those quotes of the browsers. It, they're not so much any Oh, you don't find, I don't stumble upon those too much anymore. I used to find those incredibly interesting that like, um, and they, they can often come up at CodeBars. So sometimes I think it's almost very similar to like language learning.

Like when, so. Say my, my mother, sorry. Gosh, my first language or my mother tongue is English. So when people try to learn English, there's lots of exceptions to the rules, and it's just like, why is it that way? Oh, it just is. But often with coding, there's probably a reason why something is the way it is because some big website decided to do something and everyone just had to copy so they didn't break that website.

Um, or that specific library, and, and you have to be very careful at a CodeBar session not to interact with a, um, a learner who's just stepped into the world of h and CSS and go down a rabbit hole of, of tech companies that don't exist anymore, than choices that were made there.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Oh yeah. Shenanigans. Basically here be shenanigans.

Kristian Hamilton: I like that phrase,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Uh, that, that really, that hits home. Just having worked on browsers that really hits home because, you know, you're always trying to figure out like, do we do what's right for the code? Do we do what's right for the user? Do we do what's right for the kind of the spec? Or do we just, you know, make this, this website continue to work with all of its terrible bad assumptions.

Kristian Hamilton: It's part of the fun.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah.

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah. So I, I don't do much of that at work at the moment, but, um, , yeah, I, yeah, I, I really enjoy my job at the moment, so I don't, I don't know why I've enjoy, I enjoy updating dependencies and maintaining code, but I suppose I'm in the right place for it.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Will you 90% of, of the kind of lifestyle life cycle of a, of a, project is maintenance. Like if you just think about the amount of work that goes in, there's, in the very beginning, there's the time where there's no maintenance cost because nobody uses your product.

Kristian Hamilton: Mm-hmm.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: But realistically, if it's successful, you'll spend much more time maintaining things and hey, maintaining dependencies.

It's, uh, a particular nightmare of front end development. I feel like these days that, you know, like it really requires somebody who cares in order to do a good job there

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah, I definitely will bang my head on the table a few times a week. When I get like a break in change, um, on a library that I'm using. But, um, Yeah, I think it, so I, I think I, I age from a time in web development where we didn't update dependencies and that, that also used to frustrate me. The idea is that we would have security holes in our application purely because we're using old libraries, or simply we just weren't able to use new features.

That was also frustrating how, um, I, it's something that scares me about web development is just being left behind. I think it's a constant thing when you work in tech about being left behind and something that gives me a, like, a sense of, um, I can do cool stuff, is that all my dependencies are up to date and I don't need to be, um,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Mm

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah, stuck in the past, if that makes sense.

It's, yeah, it gives me a sense of security knowing that everything's up to date, because I, I must confess, I'm not okay with security in regards to funding applications, and I No wait, so, It. I, for me, security feels scary because it's there.

It's, it's, I feel like it's a skill set in its own to be up to date with security exploits and applications and people get paid for good money to attempt to exploit, um, applications. But yeah, so this, uh, it's what I do.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: All right. That was, that's what you're doing. Um, and what are you looking for next , I mean, we've heard a lot about your investment and mentorship and, you know, coaching and CodeBar and, um, now we, you know, learn about, you know, what you're doing technically, you know, how does this feed into your future?

Kristian Hamilton: um, I want to, I want to continue doing mentoring. I, I really, it brings me joy to help people enter into tech support people who are already in tech. Um, I would also, I've never, I want to spend more time with juniors in the workplace. So for me, I, so one of the reasons why I did CodeBar is why I, I neglect to mention that I've, I've often worked in environments where you've, where the company will only hire seniors, by default.

I've always worked in companies where there's always been lots of seniors, but there's never been lots of juniors where you can mentor someone. So it's code by and large do that outside of the workplace. So it means that if you are looking to grow your skills as a coach or as a mentor or as a senior developer, code by gives you that opportunity to work with people.

But then I think I would just like to do that more in my professional capacity as well. If it's something that I do outside of work for fun, it stands the reason that I should probably try and do it inside my actual day job as well. Um, but I'd like to do more of that in the future in my day job with, to work alongside juniors.

Um, something that I've expressed to my manager already. And I probably would still do more teaching outside of work, but more fun stuff. I wanna do more stuff with animation. It's one of my main passions. Um, and SVG mucking about with. Yeah.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Making things shiny.

[00:41:43] Berlin <3 Code + Art

Kristian Hamilton: yeah. Making things shiny. I would, yeah. One of the things always interests me is the intersect between art and code.

So yeah, I'd like to do a bit more of that in my free time, in my future. And

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Berlin's a good place for that. I think there's a lot of intersections between, The techno side and the artistic side here in Berlin.

Kristian Hamilton: Definitely there's a really good workshop. I think it's, uh, Creative Coders, I think it's called in Berlin. We used to meet once a month. Uh, when you used to meet physically, it was, it was a , a bunch of interesting people.

So you, you'd have people there trying to make music with ai, which, um, Sounds rude with me to say always sounded terrible, but I'm sure they'll get there eventually.

There was lots of people with physical devices, which was always really cool to see lots of people just mucking up about with, um, oh, what are they called? Um, ah, shaders. That's it. Shades is something I've never got into. Um, I used to spend most of my time doing some like processing and P five, which was lots of, um, uh, kind of like animation and just rendering complex like patterns. But we are through code.

Yeah. There's lots of meetups and be for that kind of stuff. Bit of people hang out and show what they're making.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: And there are companies here like Native Instruments and Ableton,

You know, obviously, you know, like they were created to serve the purpose of, you know, basically creating the Berghain culture. You know, like the techno music scene in Berlin isn't just the DJs, it's the technology that powers the DJ's, producers and creators.

Yeah. I mean, and I think that's, it does, it is pervasive. There's lots of, lots of venues to also share anything you do this way. I mean, when I was before the pandemic, I would try and go to art exhibits and there's always something kind of, you know, tech related that's often pretty wonky, but sometimes very cool.

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah. We used to get some of those people coming to CodeBar as well, so people who were making installations and they needed help with like coding for like an installation or something. Every now and again, someone would turn up and be like, how do I do this?

[00:44:00] Hum of not belonging

Zeke Arany-Lucas: I wanted to kind of hit something, um, what's it like being black, in tech?

And I ask that. I ask that because, um, to be honest, I've worked with very, very, very few black developers and it's, it's like, I mean, in terms of underrepresented and especially the United States, it's probably the least represented, um, minority in tech,

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah, I think there's lots of statistics to back that up. I think when I used to work at like a large tech company, they used to release their, um, statistics and black people always , embarrassingly low numbers of them. Um, and what, yeah, every company that releases their data we're. Not very present. So the question was, I was wondering what that sentence was gonna end or where the question was gonna end.

What is it like to be black in tech? Um, in tech? Yeah. I've been in lots of spaces where I am the only black person in the room. So, um, I think I mentioned, yeah, when I, when I went to that tech talk where someone introduced Prettier, so I, I forget the name of the person who made Prettier.

They're like, oh, I've been working on this thing. It's gonna, I think, uh, it'll be popular. . And I was in the room. There's, I think there was only one other black engineer in the room who came over to me and spoke to me, uh, is,

And in Berlin that I moved from London to Berlin. I think, I'm not to say if it's got worse, but I think there's, I've never seen them at meetups, so I, I used to go to a lot of meetups, but maybe I, I wouldn't be able to say if meet meetups are representative of the black community in tech, but the, very rarely would I bump into someone in Berlin who was black and in tech, but I do know they do exist because I often meet them outside of tech events. So yeah, that's unique burden.

So what's it like being black in tech? Um, yeah, that, I think for me personally, I've often felt an under a background hum of like not belonging.

Um, because I went to a very black school where growing up so, or a very ethnically diverse school and I think I spent a large amount of my adult career in very white spaces. Um, and there's, there's a, a background harm of being uncomfortable or not belonging, but often the work can distract you and getting results will distract you and, and you'll feel comfortable when people are happy with what you do, as well.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Hmm.

Kristian Hamilton: So I, I'm not too sure if I'm a good detector of tolerance and acceptance. Um, whether I'm, like, I would probably do things in the workplace that are unconventional, that are just part of my, or I wanna say like ethnic heritage or like, would I be, but then I, from a young age, I've always hung out with intelligent people and I've, I don't know, I've, I kind of enjoy in like intelligence being like the barometer for acceptance.

So like I kind of get that in the tech space that if you can, if you can solve problems, if you can, back it up with what you do, then they're incredibly tolerant of you. Um, in regards to acceptance. Um, yeah. I don't, I, I'm asking first I don't feel I've ever been, I, I've had very good friendships in the workplace.

I have colleagues that I, I will spend lots of time with. I will attend weddings and they feel almost like family. But yeah, I, I would struggle to try and find acceptance in the workplace, but maybe it's because I, by a default know that I'm a bit odd in the first place, so I wouldn't expect anyone to be on my wavelength

Um,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: I like you so much.

Kristian Hamilton: yeah, I'm, yeah.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: I mean, I was like, as a kid, I was always like, you're the weird kid. You're the weird kid. So when you talk about tolerance and acceptance, it really was like acceptance was not a priority because it just wasn't available. Like social acceptance at school and stuff.

Kristian Hamilton: I, um, I wanted to talk more about being black and in tech, but I dunno through what prism to ask any questions. Um,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: well, I'm just, just totally ignorant. I'll just be honest. Like I just have no context for, yeah, how it might feel or what it would be, you know, what would be different or something like that. That's why I was just kind of curious. I'm actually quite curious, but always feeling like I need to be sensitive.

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah. I, I, I can appreciate that.

[00:48:56] More black people in tech

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Here's a question, a straight question. Would you recommend it? Would you say, Hey, um, black people come join the tech community? Not just because I'm lonely, but because it's a great place to be.

Kristian Hamilton: I, I want an excuse to play more hip hop at the Christmas party. No. Um, so.

Of course I would recommend it. So I grew, I grew up in a poor area. I also grew up in a relatively poor household as well. And I, it blows my mind how like, I think my first paycheck, I started, uh, out earning my mother. And there for me, there's no better escape for me, at least to poverty than education.

But then that was the way I thought as a child. I'm sure there's many other ways to escape poverty,

but for

Zeke Arany-Lucas: The, it's straight up the best way. I mean, it just turns out it's the best way.

Kristian Hamilton: So for, so I have a younger cousin who I kind of took to the of, to like the corporate office and they're like, look to one like, this is boring. I can remember the first time I went into, into like a tech office, I thought it was amazing. I mean, I saw a graphic designer who had like a monitor that was like 90 degrees, like vertical.

I like, I'd never seen anything like that. I was like, that's amazing. But then, yeah, I took my cousin who was probably like 16 at the. Or maybe 14. Probably 14. Showed them my core offices in London. They're like, this looks boring. And I was like, oh my gosh.

I would, I wish there were more black people in tech. I would highly recommend it as a career.

I, I'd recommend it to, to most people, but, and at the same time, I wouldn't. Right. Why only do it if you want to do it? And I kind of feel like if someone wants to do it, I'm happy to help them do it. But,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Hmm.

[00:50:39] Websites on the brain

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah, I, I've, I've enjoyed my career. It's allowed me to do some amazing things, go amazing places, meet amazing people.

I think I was mesmerized by websites when I first saw them as a child. And I was like, from a very young age, I was like, I just wanna make websites.

I didn't know how. I was like, I just wanna make websites. So I remember being asked by a teacher at school, and I probably would've been about 16, 17, what are you gonna do when you're older? I was like, I wanna make websites. And I've kind of had that in the back of my head the whole time. And this is where I've ended up.

So I've had, I mentioned earlier that I did like email marketing, so that was my first someone, the first time someone allowed me to write code was writing h emails, which was, um, something that I enjoyed at the time. It was very interesting. But I, I knew that I wanted to make websites and I just went down that path and kept on.

Yeah.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: It's so handy when you know that you want something, right? You say, I always knew I wanted to build websites. You know, like,

Kristian Hamilton: genius. Absolutely genius.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Cause it gives you automatic, like, uh, when you're wondering what am I gonna do next? Like, well, does it lead towards building websites?

Kristian Hamilton: If it doesn't, I'm not doing that.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Cause HTML email, you could say, well, that totally leads towards building websites.

Kristian Hamilton: yeah. But then at the same time, yeah, my cousin doesn't have that luxury of having a strong compass pointing in the direction of what they would like to do. They have one right now. I have little faith that will stick around. Um, but that's me being rude about my cousin. Um, there'll be a different thing next month, uh, , but thankfully, um, she's at an age where she can make that one of the joys of being.

It's the, the benefit of being young is that you have so much potential to do,

but I no negating age at any age. You can do cool stuff. Um,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: It's, it's nice when you have the flexibility to flail.

Kristian Hamilton: and no bills to pay

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah, exactly. You're allowed to say, ah, I'm just gonna, you know, go left and right like this. It's actually where I am right now. So I'm kind of at the stage and I'm taking the time to be like, I'll just explore whatever takes my fancy, because I have myself, you know, I have a security right now that I can do that.

Kristian Hamilton: So there are other things I wanted to do, of course, during the course of my life, it wasn't just websites. So from a, I, I'm, I was always, so, like I said earlier, I went to art school, so there was a desire for me to become a fine paint, a fine artist or like painting with oil paints.

Um, yeah, no, but I've decided that oil paints not for me. They, um, I'll stick to acrylic. I still paint in my spare time. I still draw in my spare time, my life joy in portraits.

Um, but I think it was. When I was younger, I wanted to be an illustrator or an animator perhaps. And for me, that felt crazy. That felt like a, animations are only made in America. We don't make them here in the UK, which is not true at all.

Um, but the idea of being able to access the world of animation just felt incredibly alien. But there, there's something, what I love about my profession, about the internet, about when we have a CodeBar workshop, for example, all I say to you, all you need is a laptop. And even if you don't have a laptop, don't worry, we can give you a laptop and we can learn how to code.

There's something so accessible about writing code and making websites in comparison to my other dreams.

I should tell you another story. So I, I made my first website, that was probably about 15. Um, 16 probably. I don't know why they let me have buy a domain address at that time. I dunno how I, I probably used my mom's credit card to buy a domain address. Uh oh. Did I already, I think I might have already had my own debit card to be able to make a, yeah, but I bought a domain name when I was like 15, 16, so I used to rap, um, I used to rap and I wanted, and I used to draw pictures, so I think first came drawing pictures.

So I used to walk around school with a folder, which had cartoons in, but I would lose the folder during the course of the school day. So people would take the folder from me with my cartoons in. So, um, eventually I started scanning my cartoons and put them on the website. So I had a website that had my cartoons on and I had a website that I would put my little rap songs on that I used to make.

And we used to make videos. This was, this predates YouTube. Maybe YouTube existed, but I didn't know YouTube existed. So I was just putting my real player and my quick time files and my Windows media player file. You had to choose which one you wanted before streaming was even a thing. I was put in my videos online that I'd made with my friends that were like funny videos.

Um, and for me, uh, yeah, so for me it was just a means to an end. Making websites was a means to an end. And I think at being in like 15, 6 16 saying that I wanna make websites with music. Like I can make websites. I like making them, someone must be out there doing this kind of stuff. But then it, it leads to what I said earlier about my choices in terms of university.

I didn't understand that there was this, there's, there's this, there's this like conveyor belt of I do computer science and now go do work at a software company. I didn't really understand, but then it was also a different time for the web as well. I kind of feel like the web was often made by people who hadn't studied or it was made by, I, I don't even think, even if you studied computer science at the time, I think the natural outcome wasn't that you would go on to make, um, The Internet.

I kind of feel like you could probably study computer science in the nineties or the early two thousands and you would, you would barely touch web technologies. You would spend your time doing other stuff. But I don't, I'm the wrong person to ask cause I didn't study it. But when I was looking at prospects, the internet wasn't a very big thing.

I knew I wanted to do stuff with the internet, but I couldn't see it in the university prospects that I was seeing that I think I just, if there was a course called Make Websites, I would've signed me up for that course. What there was , there wasn't one.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: I don't even know if there are now. I'd be curious. I.

Kristian Hamilton: So one of the things that, at least in terms I can talk about the uni, the university system in the UK, it's very hard. First off, it's a financial risk to set up a course because the course has to make money, it has to get students, um, the syllabus has to be. A long time before a student can even actually take it.

[00:57:01] Flash pages were cool, but...

Kristian Hamilton: And it has to be approved by the examination board. So it means that wherever you like the modules that you you put in there, you potentially could not be relevant in two years time in the first student or when the perspectives start going out for students to sign up to that course. But I think there was lots of like mixed media courses that I was curious about because I was making Flash games, not Flash game, but like, definitely not games.

Cause that requires too much logic. It was mainly like weird things on Flash. This was in the, the age of an incident where there was lots of like Flash animations. You'd go to a website and there'd be like, um, short videos that you could watch.

So I entered a career when Flash was kind of dying out. So the iPhone came out in 2007 and didn't come with Flash. I joined my first job 2010.

So when I first started I started off in like kind of eCommerce. So there was lots of eCommerce companies that wanted to create unique web experiences. So they were often hiring people like me who were trying to push css. So that's what I was doing early on in my career was can you replicate Flash, but using HTL in css?

And that's where a lot of, I learned so much during that time. That was a really fun time for the web. Created unconventional UIs, which to today would probably be very annoying. , lots of circles. Um, I think the web's a lot more standardized now than it was back then. Um,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: It's due for a shakeup. It's due for a shakeup.

Kristian Hamilton: I'm, I'm looking forward to that shake up when more buttons are shaped by triangles.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: But I know what you're talking about. There was this time where like, you know, first of all, Flash didn't have any notion of idiomatic Flash, right? So like all the Flash websites were like, whatever the fuck.

Then on top of that, when they were trying to say, well, we build similar things in the web than the designers were used to Flash. They were like, well, let me just put whatever I want, wherever I want it.

And so that would be like, can we do that in HTML? And the Flash killers, like the idea of the Flash killers were really like, how, what? What is the threshold where idiomatic HTML completely eliminates the, you know, the need to have Flash, right? And, and I don't know, you probably know better than I do at what point, like it became clear that you could do anything in HTML better than you could do it in Flash.

Kristian Hamilton: So I, I kind of felt by the time I started working, or by the time about 2010, 2011, we, I think we could see that you didn't need Flash anymore.

But then I think it was hard, it was Flash did a lot of heavy lifting for engineers to be able to make experiences, which I, yeah. Which I think is one of the reasons why it's led to a more boring internet, if that makes sense. Because it's a lot harder than dragging around stuff in Flash.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: I, I have a suspicion that the boring part doesn't come from that. It comes from the, you know, like people understanding where the incentives are about how to make money.

Kristian Hamilton: Ah, I did. Cause there were a lot of websites that didn't make money. Lots of the marketing stuff, like the landing pages that I made, there was no incentive for people to buy products.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah.

Kristian Hamilton: give them an experience.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: So now everybody, when they're talking about building webpages, right, are all talking Yeah. They're all talking about conversion. Exactly. They're, that is the number one thing. And then here are the techniques for getting conversion. And so that's not really the space where they're like,

Kristian Hamilton: triangle buttons,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: let's, let's, let's try, you know, different color schemes.

It's like everybody tends to trend towards, you know, fast converting color schemes.

Kristian Hamilton: Have you, have you covered all the questions you wanted to ask me?

[01:00:48] British food is delicious

Zeke Arany-Lucas: One of the things I'm always curious about is what is food that people really love and recommend?

Kristian Hamilton: Are you talking, are you talking about human beings in general or are you talking about me? My personal opinion

Zeke Arany-Lucas: you in particular. So I'm

Kristian Hamilton: Oh, sorry.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: I'm talking about food in general is fascinating to me and I love food, but also you in particular,

Kristian Hamilton: I, I thought you were asking as if like, you're an alien coming to Earth. I was like, am I supposed to speak on behalf of humanity? If that's the case, if that's the case, I think pizza's a good place to start. I kind of feel like lots of people like pizza.

So I, um, as, as much as people like to complain about British food, I really like British food. Um, I live in Germany now and I miss lots of food from the UK. And, uh, , my partner doesn't like raisins, so that that kills out a lot of British food pretty early on. Um, I

Zeke Arany-Lucas: partner on this one.

Kristian Hamilton: I love, so, um, so, okay, Joe, I really wanna do so, so I really wanna invite people over for a British dinner.

Uh, we're gonna, yeah. So what would we have? Bread and butter pudding is for me is amazing. Um,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: I've never even heard of that. I.

Kristian Hamilton: yeah, so it's like white bread, sandwich bread, but with like cream and raisins and lots of sugar and it's delicious. Um, that's what we're having for dessert, but also sticky toffy pudding. I've made German sticky toffy pudding.

They love sticky toffy pudding that always goes down well, um, which is like a cake sweetened by dates. Um, served by a cu ice cream. Um, also Sunday roasts in the UK. Um, the Germans that I've met, they love Yorkshire Putins. Um, see you looking at your face. Have you heard the Yorkshire

Zeke Arany-Lucas: No, I don't know what it is. That's the, my face is, I, I don't know what that is. The white bread dessert, I'm, I'm, uh, highly skeptical of, but , I would still try it.

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah. Um,

Zeke Arany-Lucas: What's a Yorkshire pudding? I've heard of it.

Kristian Hamilton: so it's the, it's the same mixture as a pancake if you're trying to make a pancake, but you would probably use a muffin tin, put oil in the bottom of the muffin tin, you put the batter for a pancake, and it kind of like morphs into kind of like a cup shape and you can use it to dip into your gravy.

Um, I don't, it weird, but it's delicious.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: I, so that reminds me of, what did they call them? We called them pancakes, but they were pancakes. I can't remember. There's another name for my kids. I used to make them in a frying pan, basically pancake, but it was like a cake in a, in a pan. So it wasn't flat.

Kristian Hamilton: So would it wise up at the size?

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah, it, it was a, I mean, it really turned into like a cake kind of thing in there, in the, I put it in the oven. So it was like, instead of cooking it on the tabletop, put a, a cast iron pan in the oven with, it's pretty close to pancake. Better. It was a little bit different. I think it had more baking soda so that it would rise.

Kristian Hamilton: I think we're making, I think we're operating on similar terms then in

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah. And if that's the same, then those are really good.

Kristian Hamilton: yes. I really like Yorkshire Putins, I really like Sunday Roast. Um, we have something weird called Coronation Chicken. Oh, I love Coronation chicken. But you'd have to like raisins. So it's like raisin's, chicken curry powder in a sandwich.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Oh man.

Kristian Hamilton: just because you laughed, you're have

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Well, I'll, I'll of course, like I said, one of those things when people say, this is great food, I always try it, even if it makes no sense to me. I think I always traumatized by carrots, I mean, sorry, not carrots as well is carrots, but it's, my mom made a raisin carrot salad as a kid and, and raisin carrots and pineapple actually.

And the juiciness of the, um, of the pineapple would get into the raisins and the raisins would always swell up and man, did I hate those, those damn raisins, like carrots in the pineapple together are a great mix. The raisins, they're just like little, you know, pules of torture that are embedded in there.

You couldn't get around them. It was really hard to evade them. Shredded carrots. Shredded carrots. So it's like hard to separate the raisins out.

Kristian Hamilton: That sounds so seventies. That sounds ridiculous.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Well, you know, I was born in the seventies, so it's, uh,

Kristian Hamilton: I love seeing like seventies cookbooks with those crazy pictures. There's always like glacier cherries, on the pictures. There was something happening in the seventies. They were experimenting with lots of like tin pineapple and glacier cherries.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Well, my mom, you know, I was raised vegetarian and my mom was doing all this experimental vegetarian organic food, which was not available anywhere. Right. So she had to kind of source her own ingredients and kind of look for other recipes, and it still had to. Cheap cuz we weren't rich and it had to be available somehow. You know, you still had to get it.

So a lot of the things we ate other people cover and be like, I don't recognize your food

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah, but I, I also, I also love Caribbean food, so my family is Jamaican, so, um, that's something that I don't eat a lot in Berlin. A lot of it takes a long time to cook as well. That can be a disadvantage. Um, so yeah, so I love Jamaican. So occasionally if I'm, if I like a person, I'll make, um, Caribbean food.

So like jerk chicken, rice and peas, plantain. Yeah. But then it's really hard to source the ingredients here in Germany. So it's something that I eat more. In the UK it's easy to replicate German food. No, sorry. It's easy to replicate British food, purely because British food is very similar. We use the same stuff as in Germany, the, the ingredients don't differ that much.

Um, yeah. But Caribbean food's a lot harder.

[01:06:45] Signing off

Zeke Arany-Lucas: Yeah. Okay. Well, um, it's been really great, you know, talking to you Kristian. Uh, I, I've learned a whole bunch. Anything you wanna say to our listeners before, uh, before we sign off?

Kristian Hamilton: Yeah, think about going to a CodeBar. They're a nice space. We haven't got any planned at the moment in Berlin, but I'd like to organize one soon. We're actually looking for hosts who can physically host us. Um, I think we've got a few in the pipeline, but I think it just requires me to do some admin work to get another CodeBar in Berlin.

But we're operating all around the world, so we've got a few in Africa that are starting lots in the UK, pretty much every UK city. Um, a few in America, they're popping up all over the world. CodeBar is a great space to, as a student, to learn how to code, uh, get some extra help. And they're a great place if you are already in the tech industry and you wanna expand your coaching abilities and your, um, yeah, your ability to explain things, um, that's what's going on in my world.

Uh, and that's, yeah, that's the last thing for me.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: That's great. That's great. I don't, I wanna double down on that last comment that I think when people feel stuck in their careers, one of the places that they can really help boost their career is to try and share what they already know.

Kristian Hamilton: Hmm, definitely.

Zeke Arany-Lucas: I think that's a great thing. All right. Thank you so much.