Episode 14 – Reuven Lerner on launching your software development career

Get advice from Reuven and Arsalan about starting and growing your career as a software engineer as well as hiring new developers.
Reuven Lerner’s Bio:
Reuven created one of the first 100 Web sites in the world just after graduating from MIT’s computer science department. Today, Reuven spends most of his time training programmers at companies such as Apple, Autodesk, Cisco, EMC, HP, SANDisk, and VMWare in four open-source technologies: Python, PostgreSQL, Git, and Ruby. Reuven teaches in Israel, China, Europe, and North America, as well as online.
His monthly column in Linux Journal has appeared monthly since early 1996. His latest ebook, “Practice Makes Python,” is aimed at Python programmers who want to improve their fluency in the language.  Two new ebooks, about regular expressions and technical training, should be ready in the coming months.
Reuven curates DailyTechVideo.com (offering a new conference talk about programming each day), and is a permanent panelist on the Freelancers Show, a weekly podcast for independent consultants. He also edits MandarinWeekly.com, a weekly collection of links and resources for anyone learning Chinese.
Reuven has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT, and a PhD from the Learning Sciences program at Northwestern University, where he created and studied collaborative online learning communities as the developer of the Modeling Commons.
Reuven lives in Modi’in, Israel with his wife and three children.
Please say hi to Reuven on Twitter.
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Arsalan: A drip campaign is an email marketing campaign in the sense that you want to sell something to a group of people. It is like an email sequence that people will go through with the end goal of a sale once the sequence is complete. In your case, you’re probably selling them a membership into your larger mailing list, is that right?
Reuven: Right. Many people are familiar with an auto-responder where you sign up for an email list and you receive an email back. A “drip” campaign is sort of like a glorified longer term auto-responder. When you sign up for a drip campaign, you receive an email every day for “n” days until the drip campaign runs out. That is where an email course comes in. You can teach people things in these bite sized nuggets.
Reuven: My point is to get people onto my main email list so that they can then get information from me on a regular basis. If they hear from me on a regular basis, they will be more interested in buying my products. I also know that an overwhelming majority will not buy my products, and that’s okay. I want people to buy my products only if it is going to add value to them, but it is okay for me to talk to people in countries where they just can’t afford it, or students, or people who just simply want to interact and learn. I love that. I’m fine if I can make my living from the 10% to 20% of the people who buy my product and I’m happy with other people learning too.
Reuven: I’ve also started doing webinars every month and a half or so and that gets put on YouTube. All these things feed into my main list so that I can grow my following. This way when I want to sell something, I can even though I know that most people are not going to buy from me.
Arsalan: That’s a lot of information. First, you have to write the emails. You have to create a campaign. That means that you have to sign up for a service because you don’t want to be banned for spamming. Don’t use your own email account.
Reuven: I used to laugh at these companies that do email for you, but they provide a lot of value. You can do an amazing amount of stuff with automation using drip campaigns. You do have to sign up with them, which is right around $50 a month. You need a domain, the company, the material.

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