Hi, my name is Joseph. I have been job hunting for a couple of months now after finishing my coding Bootcamp, and I can't say it has been easy. There are many days where I don't feel motivated to program and flat out depressed at all the rejection letters I get. If you're in the same situation as me, keep trying! Find something that will motivate you to program.
Let's get into the reason for my title. Yesterday, I came across a podcast by FreeCodeCamp. They did an episode on Shawn Wang aka. SWYX. I've been in the ReactJs subreddit for a long time so I've seen him a lot while browsing the subreddit. He is a self-taught developer who made the transition from the world of finance to software development at the age of 30.
Here's the episode if you want to listen to it. Podcast: Leaving a $350K/year job to learn coding - Shawn Wang interview. Be warned that it's kind of long (2hours).
The main talking points that I got from the episode were, he encourages others to do "No Zero Days" and "Learn in Public".
No Zero Days
What do those mean? "No Zero Days", is what I think of as doing something that will bring you one step closer to the developer you dream to be. This could be something simple like writing down a todo list of all the features you want in your project you're currently working on. Do something every day and you will be surprised at what you can accomplish. Just have something to get the ball rolling, because once it starts rolling it will be hard to stop!
Learn in Public
"Learn in Public", is just as it sounds. Most of us, me included don't blog, don't tweet, don't answer/ask questions on StackOverflow, don't participate in Reddit discussions. Let's say for example that you blog about something that you have learned recently. Others may take notice and thank you for your valuable insight. Maybe, no one reads your post, that's fine! If no one reads your post you can have something to refer back to when you forget something. Who knows you may have a React problem and the React genius himself Dan Abramov might come by to give you some help. You might be asking yourself, "what if I'm wrong?". That's okay! Shawn talks about how if you put in the effort and try to output good content, even if your wrong people will chime in to correct you.
As the last point, if anything blog, create youtube videos, tweet, create a cheat sheet for yourself.
Thank you for reading! I'll be sure to practice Learn in Public when I can. Let me know in the comments if you've seen this episode or what are your thoughts on Learn in Public?
Top comments (2)
Nice post. I agree it's very important to get involved in some kind of community engagement and keep yourself active.
Agreed! It's nice to be in a supportive community where everyone helps each other.