Adam Rackis, senior web engineer at Spotify, joins RedMonk’s Kate Holterhoff to discuss upskilling, frontend development, and conference travel. They chat about Adam’s service in the United States Air Force, his work experience in the software industry, and his thoughts about developer certifications. They also speak about the state of JavaScript frameworks, and the finer points of red-eye flights.
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Transcript
Kate
Hello and welcome to this Redmonk Conversation. My name is Kate Holterhoff, Senior Analyst at Redmonk and with me today is Adam Rackes, a Senior Web Engineer at Spotify. Adam, thanks so much for finding the time to chat with me today. All right, so I am super interested in your background, Adam. You served in the United States Air Force prior to working as a software developer in a civilian capacity. Would you talk to me about your history, your education and your service?
Adam Rackis
Thank you for having me.
Sure, so my education I went to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. I graduated with a computer science degree and a math minor. I served briefly in the Air Force. There was a sort of reduction in force happening when I was in, so I got out a few years early. I’m newly married, so that worked out well. Since that time I’ve worked as a professional software engineer ever since. I’ve worked in tons of industries, banking, energy, like natural gas. More recently I worked at Riot Games out in Santa Monica and that led ultimately to me working at Spotify currently.
Kate
I have been super interested in what the tech industry can learn from the US military about education. And let me just kind of explain what I mean here. So a lot of SaaS and cloud vendors offer these developer certification or badging programs. So I’m thinking of like AWS’s certification program, Salesforce Trailblazer, and Google Cloud Skills Boost. There’s a lot of smaller companies that also offer them, but usually there is no accreditation behind these certifications, which sort of sets them apart with more traditional venues for education such as universities. So unlike universities, there isn’t this board that checks to make sure that the skills that these programs promise are actually the ones that are being delivered. But in the military, which has this huge skilling program, both in -house and through partnerships, and as with your experience at the Air Force Academy, the military needs to verify these skills, that they’re effectively acquired by the service members and that they are up to the standards that they absolutely need to be as determined by the military, right? So I spoke with some former Navy officers who explained the procedures behind, for instance, the submarine dolphin’s badges, which require extensive hands -on training. You have to collect all these signatures from the stakeholders involved. And then there’s an oral board at the end. So I’m curious about your experience with education in the military, the good and the bad, and how you think it maps onto skilling and tech, or does it map on as the case may be.
Adam Rackis
Sure, so, the Air Force Academy is, as you know, for anyone listening, it’s a university just like West Point and so it’s accredited by the same organizations that accredit normal universities, which of course depends on whatever degree program you’re in. Accreditation bodies accredit the individual degree programs, not the university itself. So if you were a computer science major, I believe it’s the ACM that accredits that body. I could be wrong about that, but it’s some sort of computing organization that handles the accreditation for that department, for that degree program.
My military experience outside of that was limited. Like I said, I was in for a few years. I did go through tech school for my career field, which was communications officer. And you’re right, there are strict standards and the military keeps a tight leash to make sure that the training teaches what it actually should. And that is something that’s really lacking in tech. None of it, there’s no quality control. You could go to a boot camp or get some sort of certification and nobody knows how accurate they are. Back in the day I got a bunch of Microsoft certifications because I was a .NET developer in my early days and I got them because they were free because my company paid for them and so we all would collect them a bunch of them but it was just a running joke how useless they were and how dumb they were and we just did it just to boost our own credentials. It really is a shame. know Node worked on trying to get a serious accreditation training certification whatever you want to call it for some node training that was about four or five years ago I haven’t heard anything about it since so I’m guessing it didn’t stick or go anywhere but it’s really unfortunate I wish there was a legitimate sort of training certification you could get that was respected and quality controlled that somebody new to the industry could just do to sort of prove themselves but it doesn’t exist and right now it’s just, here kid, learn these skills and then try and land yourself a job and then if you know your stuff, you’ll succeed at the job. Otherwise, you’ll wash out. And it’s just kind of a terrible, terrible pipeline. We really should fix that, but I don’t know how it get fixed.
Kate
Yeah, it’s a complicated problem. I don’t know that anyone has it figured out. I think what’s interesting about the Microsoft certifications is that, they have this long tenure I’ve talked to a few folks who have taken them in a university setting as part of getting a CS degree. But in my experience, at least, I have one Microsoft certification, not as serious of a certification as yours, it sounds like. It was all based on multiple choice questions rather than hands-on experience. And I think that maybe that is sort of the difference between these military types of trainings, which are again sort of role -based and the types of things that we’re seeing come from these vendors. Was that your experience as well, where there was no hands-on component?
Adam Rackis
Yeah, like I said, was a running joke how sort of useless the certifications were. They were just multiple choice questions that you could just study from for a book. So they didn’t carry really any weight.
Kate
Okay. So obviously your going to the Air Force Academy, set you up just the same way that any university would, but when you were actually in the Air Force, did you get any training there that you think maybe could be extensible to improving some of these tech certifications?
Adam Rackis
I think it was sort of the opposite. I the second part of your question is no, I didn’t really get any military training that would apply to the tech certifications. My tech school was pretty basic just for a communications officer. It gave me really basic knowledge that just let me show up to work to start learning effectively. Nowhere near as impressive as what your Navy friends told you about. Things like that exist in the Air Force. I just wasn’t one of the people to go through some of those serious schools. But the Air Force Academy itself is what really gave me the best sort of training for life.
It’s just an insanely heavy workload at the academy. You’re taking a lot more credit hours than almost any civilian university, and you have a ton of military training on top of that. And so, I mean, to put it in perspective, when I graduated and I was a second lieutenant, I was also going to grad school at night, and I was also working 10 to 20 hours in a side hustle as a software developer and still doing lots of social things and that was ten times easier than what I went through at the Air Force Academy. So it’s one of those things you get through a military academy like West Point or Air Force or Annapolis and I mean you’re kind of you’re almost immune to burnout. You’re capable of grinding unbelievably hard and it really just sets you up wonderfully. I’m grateful for that experience.
Kate
That’s amazing. I didn’t realize that there was such a difference. I like that immune to burnout idea though. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about what you’re working on now at Spotify. So they’ve been doing some exciting work in the platform engineering space, but I tend to think of you as a front end guy. So what sort of projects do they have you working on?
Adam Rackis
I’ve been doing front-end and back-end. I’ve started doing some work on some Java services that we consume, so that’s been a lot of fun. I shipped a very small Swift thing about a year ago. That was just a very small little experiment for one of our mobile apps. I work on a sort of a mono repo that’s a really large application that musical artists use to check their analytics, check their profiles, just to do a lot of sort of behind-the-scenes things that artists will need to do. And I maintain some of the infrastructure for that, some of the front end features, I do some of the back end development as needed. It’s a lot of fun.
Kate
What’s been your experience with their engineering culture? It’s kind of legendary in terms of the innovative ways that they have organized internally. The way that they actually create software. What’s your experience been like on the inside?
Adam Rackis
It’s been wonderful. culture really is second to none. Very strong testing culture. I know that’s something that sort of the Twitter sphere is kind of down on testing, but at a scale like Spotify, having a very mature body of automated tests is very useful and it saved me a number of times. And so that really enables a lot of the cool DevOps things that you read about in books like Accelerate.
Once you have a strong set of tests set up, it makes it easier to do things like commit directly to master, trunk-based development, that sort of thing. Very strong engineering culture at Spotify. Wonderful, wonderful people to work with. It’s been a great experience for me.
Kate
How big is your team? Who are your direct contacts that you collaborate with?
Adam Rackis
About ten people, have our manager, we’ve got a designer, product person, a couple of back end engineers and couple of front end engineers, which is pretty typical.
Kate
Are you working remotely or do you go into an office?
Adam Rackis
I’m remote. live in Oklahoma City and I work out of the New York office.
Kate
Nice, I am also remote and I love it. The thought of going back to an office just makes me shudder.
So you have been in the software engineering rat race for a while now. And I’m curious what you’re seeing in the industry today. So what is exciting you? What do you think the future holds? And you don’t have to answer AI.
Adam Rackis
No, sorry, I don’t have anything to say about AI. So there’s two things that sort of are cool, very narrowly, like in web development. We went through this long period with single page applications where everything ran on your client and it just hit services to get data as needed. And there was a reason for that, and I won’t go into it, but it has been really great seeing frameworks mature beyond that, where you keep all the benefits of that client run application.
But you now have a functioning useful back -end to more effectively server render and seed that server ended rendered page with data. You see that with Next or even Next apps directory. Svelte Kit Tan Stack router is going to be coming out or Tan Stack Start is going to be coming out soon. Remix. Solid Start all those things sort of take the best features of a single page application and They make it better by giving you a useful back-end to fetch data before the page starts running on the client. That’s really improved a lot of things I think for web development performance. And the other big thing, the database space has really exploded. Companies like PlanetScale are just incredible. It’s so much better than it was a long time ago when I started. Right now PlanetScale is kind of expensive. I think they’re working on an affordable plan for hobbyists. I’m looking for that to come out in about six months, fingers crossed. But if you can afford it, it’s just an incredibly scaling database that has insanely good performance. It’s got HTTP drivers that have single digit latency, which is unbelievably impressive. Mostly MySQL compatible.
The workflow for making schema changes is incredible. They give you a branch, you just change your branch, and then you click a button and it creates basically a pull request. You click another button after you review what the schema changes will be, and it deploys it to your production branch. It’s just a really wonderful way to work. And I know everyone.
Kate
Yeah, I’ve been speaking to quite a few folks about their solutions for data and how that space really is moving quickly. In particular, I’ve been following Supabase and Firebase and some of these front end focused database solutions where they have a constellation of services attached to them like auth and, helps folks to get going a little bit more quickly. Maybe it’s going to be a little expensive, when you decide to scale.
But there’s these services that are making it extremely easy. You’ve spoken in the past about using Vercel as well. Are there other services that you’re really enjoying using right now?
Adam Rackis
I love Vercel’s hosting. They are incredible. Render as well. Render is another great service if you’re looking less for a serverless and more for a managed instance. They have a lot of impressive stuff.
So like if you can’t use Vercel’s edge functions and you don’t like the lambda cold starts, Render would be a really good place to look. And they have managed Postgres hosting as well. So that’s a really, and their pro plans are 20 bucks a month just like Vercel. They’re sort of flip sides at the same coin. If you want managed hosting, Vercel for the serverless and Render is sort of like a Heroku that’s good. That’s the way I like to think of it.
Kate
RIP Heroku free tier, speaking of hobbyist solutions. it’s interesting. I was looking at this schema that talked about the range of these types of platforms where you’ve got Fly, which has their own hardware, right? And is kind of challenging to use. And then you’ve got Vercel on the far end of that schema is like something that’s so easy to get up and running. So I do feel like the promise of Heroku has really been realized and now we have all these other services like DigitalOcean and CloudFlare as well. So there’s all these other less talked about, less trendy brands, but there’s this range of solutions that are going to fit pretty much any use case that you can come up with. And they can be as abstracted as you like. They can scale to the size that makes the most sense for whatever project it is that you’re working on. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And in terms of what you’re using at Spotify, does it tend to be a lot of serverless solutions or is there a big server room in the basement somewhere?
Adam Rackis
We use serverless for sure. I’m not going to talk too much about what kinds of stacks we use. I don’t know how much, if at all, we manage our own servers. I can’t speak to that either way.
Kate
That’s fine.
Yeah, just curious about what the stacks look like When I’ve spoken with some people at Chick-fil-A, some of the engineering team there, they spoke about the fact that they’re using Vercel for some of their smaller projects, which is, I think, pretty cool. And kind of talks a little bit about this sort of multi-cloud solutions that we’re seeing where it doesn’t necessarily just have to be these greenfield startups
Adam Rackis
Awesome.
Kate
So Adam, you do a lot of presenting at conferences and meetups, and I’ve heard several of your conference talks, and what strikes me about them is that you come across as this born educator. So you have this way of explaining technical subject matter that is approachable, funny, and really soup to nuts. So I spent a decade in academia, So
believe me when I say that this sort of presentation is difficult to master. And I just want to know what your secret is. Do you have a technique or heuristic approach to presenting challenging technical information?
Adam Rackis – @adamrackis (14:34)
I think the secret is you have to actually enjoy what you’re presenting and if you actually love it, it’s a lot easier to have an engaging presentation. I mean you have to understand it deeply.
that’s you have to have those details down if you’re going to have a good presentation that gets all the useful information across and then if you love it it’s going to be a lot easier to do that in an engaging sort of entertaining way so I think that’s you have to love what you do.
Kate (15:00)
Love what you do. Okay, yeah. So folks who are forced to the stage, you know, under duress, that’s not the way to get the audience enthused is what you’re telling me.
Adam Rackis – @adamrackis (15:08)
Yeah, I mean if you’re just doing it for the free conference ticket, it’s not going to come across as a good talk.
I don’t think so. If they are, then they’re not spending their time very well. Just buy the conference ticket because those talks take a long time to put together.
Kate (15:20)
They really do.
Do you have any advice for folks who are hoping to educate the folks in the audience? I’ve heard a few talks now that,
speak to the idea of how much information one can convey in a conference presentation. Like, should you keep it sort of fun so that everybody is having a good time and just really make it like, more of an entertainment form in order to keep them from just enjoying the hallway track? Or Do you think it’s really about communicating information?
Adam Rackis – @adamrackis (15:46)
You have to understand what your venue is. Like if you’re giving a conference talk, you’re not teaching a workshop. So you should not look at it as a 45 minute opportunity to
teach them a specific thing, you should use it as an opportunity to show them why this thing is good and useful and get them excited about it so that they can learn it on their own time. Because you’re not going to be able to teach them this thing off of your PowerPoint slides in a 30 to 40 minute talk. So just give them the high bits and show them what it does and why it does it and what problems it solves and do it in a way that’s going to get them excited and want to try it out on their own. I think that’s
the approach that’s going to bear fruit for you.
Kate
Sure. And you’ve never actually been involved in developer relations, correct?
Adam Rackis
No, I’ve never been to DevRel.
Kate (16:33)
That’s interesting. And so what draws you to doing these presentations then? I assume that you don’t get benefits in terms of your role. Why do you feel the need to do it?
Adam Rackis
It’s just a lot of fun. I just love doing it. I can’t say anything more than that. It’s just a lot of fun.
Kate (16:47)
That’s great. Yeah. And so at Render, did you do a workshop? Am I remembering that correctly?
Adam Rackis
Yep, I taught a workshop this year on TypeScript. Last year I did that as well and I gave a talk on the Vercel’s edge functions. I don’t know if that was one of the talks that you watched. Awesome.
Kate (17:02)
It is. That was the one that I watched. Yeah, and that’s where I was so impressed with your just demeanor and ability to make things clear. And I think as I recall, there were a lot of meme slides, which I do enjoy.
Adam Rackis
then two years before that, at Render 1 I did a talk on Svelte and web components. That was fun one too.
Kate (17:21)
I did not catch that one. I attended Render last year and then this year, but no, didn’t go that far back. And so you’ve been in the Render circle, this is Render ATL we’re speaking of now, since the beginning. How did you find out about it?
Adam Rackis
Yeah, I’ve spoken or taught at Render 1, 3, and 4. I was following Justin, the guy who does it for a while. Spotify was a sponsor for Render 1, and so I wound up speaking because of that. And I just kept getting asked back. So it’s been a lot of fun ever since.
Kate (17:58)
Yeah, it’s certainly on my list of favorite Atlanta -based conferences, although there’s quite a circuit here. I am based in Atlanta, so it’s very convenient for me
Adam Rackis
Nice. Can you go to Connect Tech, I assume?
Kate (18:10)
Absolutely. And Dev Nexus, so Vincent and Pratik’s two conferences, one in the spring, one in the fall. It actually overlaps this year with the supercomputing conference, which I’m very much looking forward to attending. So I’m going to be conference hopping that week. I know.
Adam Rackis
Cool, that’s awesome.
Kate (18:26)
it’s going to be a little over my head, but I’m excited. It all sounds very sci -fi. People who are a lot smarter than me, talking about things they are passionate about. And I’m hoping they’ve got a lot of hardware there. I’m looking forward to seeing some of these supercomputers.
My question to you as well then, as you are an expert in all things conference related, what sort of things do you look for when you’re trying to choose a conference to attend and present at?
Adam Rackis
so this is hard for me to answer. I’ve been in this industry for a while so I’m not looking for job.
and I’m reasonably experienced, so I’m more reasonably up to date on the happenings of this industry. So I’m more looking at these conferences on who I’m gonna get to see there and where I’m gonna be going. know, Render ATL’s in Atlanta.
React Miami is in Miami. If you’re noticing a trend, they tend to be kind of fun places to go. Next conf is in San Francisco.
Kate
Absolutely.
Adam Rackis
If you really want to see the most cutting edge developments on what’s happening in web development, I think React Rally is the one to go to. I saw a lot of impressive stuff coming out of that. So if that’s what you’re looking for, I think that’s the one. If I have the wrong conference, I’m sorry, but I’m almost sure that’s it. Kent Dodds has a brand new conference out in Salt Lake
City at like the most beautiful venue you’ve ever seen like very naturey and outdoors doors doorsey it’s gonna be a lot of great content there if you want to disconnect a little and connect with nature if I had the time I would love to check that out so depending on what you’re looking for there’s some things to check out I loved React Miami though my first time in Miami in a long time and it was too much fun it was a good time
Kate (20:02)
okay. Well, Adam, know, full disclosure, it sounds like you have a lot of fun at every conference you attend. So I am not surprised. So good recommendations there. And of course, anyone who is in Atlanta, I hope they reach out to me so we can go get coffee because yes, there are many things coming up here. KubeCon in 2025 is gonna be in Atlanta. yeah, are you a KubeCon person as well?
Adam Rackis
That’s the goal.
Really? Wow. No, but I know of it and that’s like a really, really, really impressive high-end conference. It’s like the Olympics. They bounce around every year.
Kate
yeah.
There is always one in Europe and one in the US. So they’re doing Salt Lake City this fall. But last year was in Paris. That was the EU one and I did attend that one. So, it was just awful. They had to really convince me to get on a plane and just…
Adam Rackis
is a…
that was pretty terrible.
Kate
go there and eat good food and drink wine and enjoy the beautiful cafe culture. Yeah, it was punishing.
Adam Rackis
I flew Air France to Charles de Gaulle on the way to Stockholm last year and I swear the food I ate on Air France in coach is better than what I get in first class on American Airlines here in the United States. So, yeah, they treat you right.
Kate
Wow. That’s something. Yeah. What’s funny, now that I am traveling more as part of my role at Redmonk, I spend a lot of time flying to the West Coast and increasingly to Europe. So for instance, one of the co -founders, James Govnernor he is based in London. So I’m learning more about my travel preferences. And what I’ve discovered as someone based in the East Coast is that I love a red eye to Europe, but a red eye from San Francisco to Atlanta is no good. It feels like four o ‘clock in the morning when the plane takes off, I’m just, I can’t sleep, I’m dead all the next day. It’d be better for me if I just spend the night and then wake up real early, because I’m gonna wake up at the crack of dawn anyways, and then get that, you the first flight out. And then I still, you know, arrive home early in the afternoon. And, I have learned my lesson the hard way. I made that mistake, several times and I’m gonna be trying very hard not to make it again.
Adam Rackis
I’ve done the red eye from LA back home a few times. It was an experience.
Kate
Ugh, ugh, I know, you can’t even enjoy the lounge
culture, right? I don’t want to drink anything, coffee or, you know, wine. I just want to die in their plushy chairs. So yes, but I’m learning my lesson. I’m becoming better at this. So, someday I’ll aspire to be an Adam Rackis and know how to travel to tech conferences like an expert. But right now I’m still learning.
So, any other thoughts about the state of software development right now? Anything else that you feel like we should cover?
Adam Rackis
If you’re listening to this and you’re just starting out, don’t lean on that chat GPT too heavy.
Make sure you try to figure it out before you ask it for help. And that’s not like for paying dues or because I had to go through it and so you should. It’s none of that nonsense. You gotta get these skills down yourself and get that muscle memory down. And if you are reaching for GPT every like five minutes, you get stuck on something, it’s gonna really impede your learning and you’re gonna pay a bad price for that down the road.
Kate
Are you gonna give us any juicy examples of seeing this happen?
Adam Rackis
Nope.
I see it, I mean I use ChatGPT for sure when I’m legit stuck on something or if I’m using something that’s not documented well I’ll see if it can help. The flip side is it’ll lie to you all the time and it’ll confidently lie to you and I have the expertise to see exactly where it’s lying to me and I have the expertise where I can still pull the useful bits out and I fear that that’s gonna be really hard for somebody just starting out.
So there’s danger there. Still use it. Do use it when you get stuck. Just use it with a lot of caution and with those sort of caveats and warnings in place.
Kate
sage advice from the man himself. Okay, we are about out of time, but before we go, how can folks hear more about you? What are your preferred social channels and are you planning to speak at any events, at the end of this year or in 2025?
Adam Rackis
Speaking is done for the year. If Next Conf happens in October, you can see me there. I won’t be speaking. I’m usually on Twitter. That’s the best place to see me. I’m on LinkedIn, but I don’t check it very often. And that’s it.
Kate
And let me just support the decision to follow Adam on Twitter. His tweets are very funny. I believe Corey Quinn would call it shitposting, usually, and I do enjoy the format. All right.
Adam Rackis
Love Corey Quinn. Good dude.
Kate
So I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you, Adam. Again, my name is Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you are watching us on YouTube, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.
Adam Rackis
Thanks.
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