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Audio digitally transcribed by Otter.ai

Introduction 0:01
Welcome to the #PirateBroadcast™, where we interview #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings. Where you can expand your connections, your community, #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. Let’s get this party started.

Russ Johns 0:20
And it's a beautiful day for a beautiful day, don't you think? Just checking in, just checking on if you're awake today. Hey, we have on the #PirateBroadcast™ today, Daniel and we're going to talk to Daniel today. He's been on lives. He's been sharing his story. He's been on LinkedIn. We have a mutual friend Gabe, who's always out there, you know, doing some great work and highlighting people and having conversations and even in Discord. I mean, the conversations are crazy over there. So I don't know if you're in clubhouse you're not Daniel, are you over there?

Daniel Hall 0:57
I am in clubhouse. Yeah. Don't get me started on clubhouse man.

Russ Johns 1:04
I was on Clubhouse a while ago, and I looked up, it was midnight, I'm going, what the heck am I doing? And it's just one of those things. It's it's very engaging, it's very, you know, addicting. And so I just wanted to talk today and highlight you because not only are you amazing adult and human and parent, and husband and, and all the good things that we need in the world. But you're also a great friend and somebody that I really relate to. And you also are a programmer.

Daniel Hall 1:42
I am.

Russ Johns 1:45
And you've probably been programming for a little bit, you know, here and there a moment or two.

Daniel Hall 1:51
Oh, yeah.

Russ Johns 1:53
So share a few stories about how you got into programming because everybody's origin story is a little different.

Daniel Hall 2:01
So most of your listeners probably know, I grew up in foster care and was traumatized before I came to the Halls, pretty abusive situation there. But one of the things my mom used to do is she used to go to a church function. And this is in Castleton, Vermont. She used to go to her church functions, she would drop me off at the college in Castleton, Vermont, and there, you could go in there, and they would let people from the community come in and use their computers. So I was eight years old, I went in and, you know, just had no clue what I was doing. But I figured it out. And so that was...by the time I was 10, my mom and dad got me a Commodore VIC 20. And I just, that was my escape. That was the way that I could cope with all my trauma is just camped out inside my bedroom and had this great big huge TV and, and geeked out most of the day, and when it was time for a meal I could out for a meal and go back up to my room and just keep on coding. And then from there it was, by the time I was 13, I was helping college graduates with COBOL and Pascal, I just figured out everything. And I've just I've had a great career since since then doing coding for multimillion dollar companies like Goodrich corporation for Vermont Yankee, which is a nuclear power plant in in Vermont. And, you know, Sprint Nextel. So I've had a great career of just developing enterprise grade software and picked up a few tech skills along the way. I know, you used to build PCs, I used to build PCs and slap those hard drives together and PCs together and try to build them but man just trying to figure that out now. It's changed so much since then.

Russ Johns 4:09
It's changed so much. So you mentioned Nextel and I used to remember when Nextel was like the two way talk radio.

Daniel Hall 4:19
Yeah, yeah.

Russ Johns 4:20
And they used when they first came out. They were actually built on the radio broadcast network that the truckers used. And it was a radio based device which was military grade hardware.

Daniel Hall 4:37
Interesting.

Russ Johns 4:39
And I was I issued these to outdoor advertising the the people work in the billboards, and I had one of those Nextel units dropped 80 feet, and it still worked.

Daniel Hall 4:50
Wow. Wow. Yeah. I don't dare try that with my iPhone.

Russ Johns 4:54
No, I think your iPhone would explode. But it's just amazing how parallel, you know, we could talk about different companies and different corporations. You know, I used to work in corporate and deliver services to, you know, large corporations, FedEx, Toyota, and people like that. And it's really amazing to me to think that the variety and the exposure of different environments that we've had, Daniel. And think about how many different companies you've actually worked with, or worked for behalf. And that broad experience kind of gives us a little different view on life. So any, any circumstances or any environments that really are unique that stand out to you that you really enjoyed?

Daniel Hall 5:49
Yeah, working in a nuclear power plant was was quite interesting, especially if you have to go down to what they called the drywall area got pretty hot. So sometimes you'd have to suit up and go down there and and then, when you get tested, going into the power plant, you would have to go in and they would do the radiation test or whatever. And I remember one time, I had a poppy seed, muffin. And I tested positive. It was like, Oh, it was the first time and they're like, what did you have for breakfast? I'm thinking to myself, why? I was like, a muffin. What kind of muffin? Poppy seed. And I guess that gives off some of the the signals that you have some type of radiation. So that was always interesting. developing software in a 13 week cycle meant that if you miss something in that 13 weeks, you have to wait another 13 weeks to deploy it, you couldn't just patch it. And so that was that was quite interesting. And then probably one of my most interesting projects was with Goodrich Corporation, we had to write back in the day of dotnet, and C sharp. When they first started out in 2001. I was developing software with a Boeing Airbus the ATA and Goodrich Corporation, we would calculate meantime between failure of all our Goodrich parts on the aircraft. So that meant that we had to get gathered data from Boeing gather data from Airbus, get information from the ATA, get all the pilots squawks of you know anything pertaining to that part. We have to mesh them together. And then we do calculations of you know the failure rates of our parts on their aircraft. So that was probably the most interesting software that I've built in my career. That was really cool. It was really cool to go to Boeing and see the 777 being made on the assembly line, you know, in Everett, Washington, and just a fantastic experience.

Russ Johns 8:09
I did a lot of wireless work for Boeing. Up there in the Everett plant.

Daniel Hall 8:14
Nice. So yeah, yeah. Did you see everybody riding their bikes around?

Russ Johns 8:18
Yeah. That's a huge plant.

Daniel Hall 8:21
It's like a mile something long.

Russ Johns 8:23
It's crazy. So I want to I want to give a shout out to some of the people that are in the room today. Glenda is joining us. Good morning. How are you? And you know this guy? Gabe.

Daniel Hall 8:36
Alright, man,

Russ Johns 8:37
Dude. Alright, you're here. Thank you so much for showing up.

Daniel Hall 8:40
Appreciate that brother.

Russ Johns 8:41
I just have to give a shout out Gabe cuz I, I love that you're just showing up. You're doing so much work out there. And sharing so many talented people and, you know, gifted opportunities out there. And I just wanted to share that. I admire your tenacity and your ability to go out there and create and work and continue to to expand your horizons. So hats off to you, Gabe. And I really, really love the fact and the conversations that you're having. So I don't always catch it. I know. The downside of being, you know, busy and active and everything is I don't get to catch as much as I want. So, Daniel, such a brilliant man. Glenda, you have a fan, Daniel.

Daniel Hall 9:32
Thank you, Glenda. Appreciate that.

Russ Johns 9:35
Glenda Thomas, yes, he is. Glenda. Nick is here in Canada. Good morning. Hey, Nick, I hope you're having a good work relationship with your shift work. And you're not staying awake all day and not getting enough rest. Jenny. Hey, Jenny. I got to give Jenny a shout out because she sent me a few things and I just want to thank you, I got some things in the mail. Nice follow up. actually got quite a few things in the mail. Jenny, you're awesome. Love you. Thank you so much for being here. Nick Gemmell. Good morning, Nick. Jenny Gold. Mike Baker's in the house. Mike, did you get the looks like you're in from Facebook? He was saying, and I don't know, Gabe, maybe you know this. People weren't getting their LinkedIn notifications anymore. So maybe they turned me off? I don't know. Then, Hey, hello, everyone. Daniel's story is so compelling. And I literally have cried hearing about his love and passion for love life and family. Absolutely, absolutely. But we're talking tech today with Daniel. So you know, I was on a project, what am I most one of my funniest experiences with software was developing the software that you know, you go on the bus and you see the advertisements on the side, you go to billboards, billboards up there. And then you go the kiosks in the airport and all those advertisements in there, the software that tracks how long those ads have been up, who's the advertiser? Who installed it, all of that stuff, was a project that I worked on in the late 90s. It was called KB world. And it developed into because we were in, I was in the out there advertising, radio, television outdoor. And so we developed a software to be able to track and because early in the back in the day, they used index cards, they just had the billboard on their index card. And then if it was in a certain status, they would turn it one way. And it was, it was analog, it was completely analog. And so when we digitize that, that's now the software that's all over the world. And a lot of it's probably the number one software that's used around the world for scheduling any kind of advertisement anywhere.

Daniel Hall 12:20
That's awesome

Russ Johns 12:21
A little backstory. That's not I wasn't a programmer, I was the the person that gathered the feedback from the user community and said, okay, here's how it needs to work the UI and everything else. So one of those people, but did a lot of traveling, toured around the countryside, you know, talking to people and doing gathered a lot of information around that.

Daniel Hall 12:49
And you're still talking to people, you're still traveling the world, but just virtual.

Russ Johns 12:55
Yeah. And the reason I bring that up, Daniel is is that through software, we just like the software, you know, Dan and Geige built for stream yard. There's so many opportunities have opened up in our world of software. And so many programming languages. Now you started, you said you started off with C sharp and COBOL. And, you know, what are you programming on these days now?

Daniel Hall 13:25
Oh, goodness, well, in the current day, it's a lot of Angular, html5, JavaScript, CSS3, that whole stack shifted from, I still, I'm still doing a lot of C sharp, a lot of dotnet core what they call dotnet core. And that is Microsoft's way of when you develop something, you develop it with one you can write, you can write software, like hello, world software, in Windows, and then you can take that same code, and you can deploy it across Windows, Mac, and Linux. So it's really cool. And I've really pushed the envelope with that and tested this across all platforms, with building API's connecting to the blockchain. Yes, Bitcoin is real.

Russ Johns 14:25
But did we find the password to my wallet?

Daniel Hall 14:32
But yeah, so a lot of that now. And then just you know, any tech that comes along that I like to try to figure out how it runs like clubhouse. I've done a couple of actually three posts on LinkedIn now, regarding clubhouses API and the security of it. So I love absolutely love it. When I'm not in the doghouse. I'm in the clubhouse. So you know it It's okay. I'm hardly ever on the doghouse. At least that's what I say.

Russ Johns 15:06
Yeah. Are you really in the doghouse?

Daniel Hall 15:09
Yeah, it means it means I have to do some self reflection and then try to figure out where I can improve on things.

Russ Johns 15:17
We can always improve. It's amazing. I just, you know, I have been teaching this for years, Daniel, and, and sharing with people that we are living in the most amazing time in history. Because when I started technology, just like you, you know, I actually would, there was a time where I had to write a script, for a modem, make the connections that I needed to connect. And, and it's really one of those things that people don't realize, if they were born with the iPad in their hand. They don't realize that, you know, not saying that it's, you know, the golden age or whatever it happens to be. However, we're looking at 100 years ago, 150 years ago, people were still riding horses, you know, so this, technology is accelerating. And we can just pick up a phone, and we can broadcast, you know, where 20-30 years ago, you still had to engineer a truck, satellite dish, and everything that goes along with it. And massive amounts of time to program, just a few bits of code to do minor things. And now we have stacks of you know, html5 has been some amazing progress in that. So

Daniel Hall 16:34
Yeah, I remember those days of modem scripts, and you had to you had to set the baud rate, you had to have it do the connection. The disconnect? Yeah, yeah, I remember those days.

Russ Johns 16:47
A lot of people. You mentioned clubhouse API's. And for those that aren't familiar with API's, you know, the interfaces between programs, you know, Zapier and different programs that allow connections between programs to take place. That's a huge opportunity for so many people nowadays. Yeah. To get information in and out of different programs. Can you talk a little bit and expand on that a little bit?

Daniel Hall 17:17
Sure. So if you take two different pieces of software, we won't even say what they are. They, they each have their own thing that they're doing their their own process that they're trying to or whatever problem that they're trying to solve. And one of them speaks one language, another one will speak another language. And what that API does is it developer will come in and say, Okay, if this, if this software is saying this, they translate it to saying this over here, and then that allows them to communicate together. So it gets a little bit more complicated than that. So if you take it a little bit further, say you have your inventory and a part number, and you have your part number over here and your part number over here. Well, they're not always the data is not always the same. So they have to meet in that API. And there has to be some translation there for it to go over into the other systems and vice versa, especially if you're synchronizing data back and forth. So at the very highest level, it's just making sure that data gets from point A and one system to point B in the other system. And that in the middle where that a where the API is, they all have to be able to talk to each other in the in the same language. So yeah, that in a nutshell, and I spent the last five years researching how tableau, these data analytics software packages like Tableau qlik, sense and Looker have been able to connect to these hundreds of API's. And I've actually been able to replicate that process, and build my own back end, where I can connect all these hundreds of different API's that are out there. And then I just have a nice front end that I've built. And now I'm able to do my own analytics.

Russ Johns 19:25
A number of years ago, I was using API's to build this platform. I don't know if it's a platform, it was basically a cobbled piece of a bunch of applications that were together to follow bleeds and the idea was is you know, you go to a conference, you know, and everybody drops their business card in a pot to get a gift or a you know, bag of whatever it happens to be. Well, what happens is all of these companies may not ever follow up with those individuals that drop their cards in there. So I built a platform called follow up leads. And what it would do is it would take pictures, you take pictures of the business card, it would translate that into CRM, you know, customer relationship management, it would copy all that information, converted into text and data. And then I would, I would take, and I would have created a small, this was long before Dubb was even a program. And I would do a little video, and then it would email out and said, hey, thanks for showing up here. And then it would put them in a drip campaign and saying, hey, I really appreciate you dropping by love to have you, if you want some more information, please click here. And then if they click there, they would go another campaign. And if they didn't, then I dropped them off. Because, you know, obviously, they don't want to receive the email. And it was really through a couple of API's talking to different programs that I was able to put this all together. So at the end of the day, it was just an icon on your phone, you open it up, take a picture. And then the next thing you know is it in your in your app. And they're on a program called bubble.io is codeless application, it was like that's about as far as I can go. It's all of these things. But these ideas. And the reason I bring it up is I want to make sure that everybody understands that. Programming allows the creativity, if you can imagine something, you could probably program something to have an impact on that. That idea and that adventure in your mind's eye.

Daniel Hall 21:50
I know, in my LinkedIn profile, I say that I'm a software visionary. And I don't really self proclaim that I just have been in situations where I would think of something. And about four or five years later it would be on the market. And um, like I, you know that you have to have the resources and everything in place to be able to solidify that. A good example of that was working with Nova Corp. And I was tasked with trying to find a way to track our documents in our SharePoint system back then. And this was 2012. And I was I got to thinking, you know, I can see the software lifecycle from cradle to grave and everything else in between. And why don't we put a QR code in a Word document or PDF file, and track the document to and they were like, Oh, no, no, no, nobody's ever done that. We're not gonna do that. It's too risky. And now you have DocuSign and everything, everybody doing that with QR codes. Now it's just like, man, so I tend to think of a lot of things outside of the box and not get too trapped into current tech. I love building new tech and and, you know if the resources are there, I like to push the envelope.

Russ Johns 23:16
I love that. I love that. I really enjoy these kind of conversations. I want to come back to some of the conversations. Patrick is in the room. Good morning. Tracie. Tracie is a wonderful producer that helps me produce these shows.

Daniel Hall 23:35
Hi Tracie.

Russ Johns 23:38
Sheri Lally, love you Sheri, how are you doing? I hope you're well. Martin. Sheri. Mike Baker says, always good to be here. Gabriel says loving the conversation. Russ Hedge from Oregon. Good morning pirates. Amber. Good morning. Amber. How are you doing? Russ says, amazing story. Gabriel says you should see the tech conversations in our discord channel as well.

Daniel Hall 24:13
Yeah, we talked about, you know, I know, this is probably a family show. But we talked about deep penetration and hacking. And that's all I'll say where when I was we're talking about clubhouse and the just exposing some of the API stuff and sometimes their minds go off in a few different tangents and I'll leave it.

Russ Johns 24:41
Nick Gemmell says you guys are talking Chinese. Oh, you know, I started in 2007. As a web developer, you know, it's just like, hey, I'm gonna learn this WordPress thing. Yeah. And WordPress has really changed. There's a Brizy has now taken WordPress to actually do a cloud based WordPress program. So you can take the code and transfer it to different sites. So you you update at one place on your code on your cloud. And then it updates the website. So you don't have to necessarily log in to everyone. It's pretty interesting model. I'm kind of fascinated to see how it goes.

Daniel Hall 25:22
Nice.

Russ Johns 25:23
Much love to these two remarkable pirates. There's more compassion in the States today than can be found in some huge corporations

Daniel Hall 25:30
Good morning, Wendy.

Russ Johns 25:32
Wendy, love ya, thank you so much, Wendy. And Nancy says, Hi, Gabriel.

Daniel Hall 25:41
Morning, Nancy.

Russ Johns 25:43
Morning, Nancy, how are you doing? It's early for Nancy. She's on the west coast. Mike Baker says I've been thinking of using clickfunnels. And it takes away from my personal touch and building relationship. You know, let's talk about that. Because a lot of programming is automation. You know, okay, let's take a let's take a lot of data and shift it, you know, pivot tables in Excel, and all of these things that you can do with data? And really, at its core, you know, code is poetry, right? Yeah. And if you can optimize some of these processes, I mean, can you give us some examples of automation, like that you mentioned? Absolutely, you know, multiple API's, like, you know, the data platforms that are out, yeah,

Daniel Hall 26:33
I'll give you a great example of automation. So a lot of people don't understand or don't realize that Microsoft actually changed and shifted in 2007, they shifted their footprint for Microsoft Office, all those files were all binary files. Now, if you 2007 and beyond the documents became text based files. Now, when you look at the documents, they're not, they don't look like they're text based. But if you take a look like a docx file, or an XLS x, which is Excel, they're actually zip files, you can rename them to two dot zip, and you can uncompress them. And once you'll get under the hood, is all XML text based files. So they've come in, that's how they're able to import and take those files into like a search engine. And the search engine will suck those in, it'll decompress them, because they're just zip files, decompressing, decompress them and strip out the text. And that's how they're able to, to automate and aggregate all this text based information from your document file from your office files, they take that one step further their text files, so if you wanted to automate generating a Word file, or an Excel file, they're text files. So if you know the algorithms to be able to render that text, and then compress them all together into a zip file, you can create a docx file or an XLS. x or Excel file. And, you know, automate that whole process. Of course, there's tools out there now, tooling vendors, that'll do that automatically for you. But that I think that's just a neat example of how automation has come forward, at least in the last 10 plus years.

Russ Johns 28:36
That is, that's a major transfer. Because, you know, coming back from Microsoft, especially with you know, I started in networking around dos 6.2 or 6.1. I remember when 6.11 came out, and it had, there's an ad in that you could actually use it to network. And that was a major accomplishment. That's when we converted over from mainframe, IBM System 36 to a client server technology.

Daniel Hall 29:17
LAN tastic. And Novell. Yeah. And there was another one I forget what it was started with a P. I don't know, history, history, LAN. Lantastic the big one and Novell.

Russ Johns 29:32
Yeah, yeah. And it was really an amazing time. I mean, I was just, and that's what kind of brought the nerd out into me because I had, you know, previously been a musician and I fell and broke my arm went through two years, he had came back as the safety director which got me into computers and typing, you know, safety documents and and, you know, all of this computer technology to develop safety programs and teach and train and you know, all this stuff. And then I thought, Well, hey, I can I can learn the computer. So then I got into computers and the rest they say is history. So, so funny to look back and talk to somebody that's, you know, kind of understands some of that technology and the way it's evolved over time. So,

Daniel Hall 30:26
So I think one of the funny stories I have of this kind of tech is actually when I was working at the nuclear power plant. There had somebody kept hearing this god awful beeping coming from their PC, and they were two technicians from the help desk that had already been there. You know, they stripped apart the computer. And it was still beeping, you know, I don't know if they unplugged it or not. But I ended up going up there. And, like, this is so odd, 2 guys couldn't figure this out, so I of course, I couldn't figure it out. And I'm plugged in the dang thing was still beeping. I'm like, okay, this is not happening. But they had left, there was a inside the drawer right above the computer was a pager.

Russ Johns 31:20
The batter was dead.

Daniel Hall 31:21
The battery, it was going on. It was like, did it it was like every minute or so. Technicians couldn't figure it out and I was like you guys didn't unplug it? Well, no.

Russ Johns 31:39
You know, it's the machine, right? Oh, man, Daniel, we could we could spend hours having conversations about adventures in tech. And we haven't even touched into AI, which is an entirely new platform and new, you know, Google just released their, what is it their E360, or something along those lines, I can't remember what the name of it is. But it's a new level of amazing tech that powers a lot of it's starting to power a lot of websites with our, you know, AI.

Daniel Hall 32:18
Yeah, D script is probably the most disturbing to me. Yeah, you can replicate your voice pretty well. And not only that, just by typing, you can type out, you know, an entire paragraph and it will read it back in your voice and it doesn't sound it takes a while it takes you about half an hour to train your voice, your train system. But then it's just like, Oh my gosh, you can do a whole book with your voice. If you want to do inflections intonation, the whole nine yards. It is wild.

Russ Johns 32:52
That is crazy. That is crazy. And I think the next 10 years are going to be very telling in in terms of what people do, how they respond, how they react to what's going on around them in the world. So we'll have you back on another #PirateBroadcast™. And we'll talk about that subject later. All right, Daniel, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much. There's so many people in the room. Yeah, Click Funnels or call to action buttons artificial intelligence. Wendy says I appreciate the amount of time effort it takes to master the Intel necessary to run my business. My nerds. Thank you, man. And Nancy was saying Sheri Lally, I was talking about the same thing. I need subtitles. I learned a lot. Gabriel says I learned a lot from Daniel Hall. Daniel is awesome. So there's just a lot of comments here. And I really appreciate everyone in the room. And I would love the fact that you if you could take a moment and just share this post out and, you know, share with the world. You know, somebody might want to resonate with this, somebody may want to learn a little bit more about what's going on in the communities around us. There's so many amazing people in the pirate community, Gabe's community, go follow Gabe, go like and comment on his stuff. And you know, all of the people that are in the room today have an amazing opportunity to make these connections. Start the conversations have a little kindness. Because Daniel, you know, #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. So enjoy the day my brother. So thank you so much. You got any big plans this week? Rest of the week? You gonna go off and spend time with kids?

Daniel Hall 34:45
Absolutely. That's probably the biggest plan.

Russ Johns 34:50
All right, everyone. All right. Take care during the day, and see you tomorrow.

Exit 34:58
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