building courses and reputation w/ josh comeau

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

All right, now from the run of my mouth, Josh, let's get the people they want. Let's get the people they want. People are like, just let Josh speak, stop running your damn mouth, Taylor. Give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? We'll go from there. Yeah, so my name is Josh. I'm a software developer and educator from Montreal up in Canada. Work for a handful of companies doing typical front end and full stack software development in 2020. I've stopped doing that. I should also mention I was teaching part time throughout some of that period for a little coding boot camp.

In 2020 with everything shut down and the world seeming the way that it was, I decided to, that was the perfect time to start my own business and I created my own courses. And that's what I do full time now is I do my own custom courses on my own custom course platform, appreciated Alex. And I also blog people may be familiar with my blog, JoshWucomo.com. I love it, I love it. All right, so much to dive into this morning. So again, so excited to have you. First off, let's talk about, we haven't really talked, I really haven't talked to anybody who has had a successful, the only guy that I've talked to on the pod is Kent, Ken C.

Dodds, but Kent had not rolled out Epic Web Dev yet when he came on the show. So like, you're the first kind of conversation about building a course, the things that go into it. The first thing I wanna do is I wanna brag, I want you to brag on yourself, Josh. So Josh was telling me behind the backstage, how long does it take to build out your courses again? A couple of years. a couple years of full-time work. Like yeah, I told Josh, I said, Josh, I'm gonna be honest, this is naive of me. I thought you would just create a course and you just like threw it up and Josh is like, hell, he didn't say that, but he was like, hell no problem, this is Brian.

Can you talk about like, if there are people that are watching this that wanna create a course or interested in creating a course, what are some things to be mindful of? Yeah, oh goodness, it's such a good question. The biggest thing that I see is that a lot of people think that creating the course is step one. And you can't do that. Certainly there's no one stopping you from creating a course, but the most heartbreaking thing that I see is people will spend, and it always takes way longer than you think. I thought my first course would take three months, and that was wildly optimistic.

You know, so you think it's not gonna take that long, you put your heart and soul into it, you work on it for months or years, you launch it to the 17 people that you know I'm linked in, maybe a couple of your buddies buy it, and that's it because like there's no real discoverability. Right. And so it's just a matter of don't find yourself in that situation. And the best way to not do that is to start by essentially showing people what your teaching style is. So for me that was my blog. I've been blogging goodness since 2016, 2015, something like that. First on medium and I created my own blog in like 2018-ish.

I've probably published over a hundred blog posts on that blog and many, many more on medium before that. And That was really useful because it gives people the opportunity to sample what your style is and see if they enjoy learning from you. And I think that was the most critical thing because when I launched the course, people already felt like they had some amount of understanding of what my teaching style would be, what they would get out of it. And the general thought process is that I hope people haven't. Maybe they don't. But if this is the amount of value, if you get a lot of value from the blog, just imagine how much value is in the course.

That's why it takes me so long to build these freaking courses because I really try and include a ton of value. They're usually pretty comprehensive, pretty big, pretty large in scope. My goal is to really have... Sorry, go ahead. No, how do you film them? What's your thought? Is it all screen record? You set up a DSLR and go through some stuff. I don't know, man. That's crazy. That's making my brain explode a little bit. Again, we don't have to go super granular. What are some steps that you kind of keep in mind as you're creating? Yeah. So one thing I should mention is I built my own course platform and that's probably a big chunk of why it takes so long, but it was important to me because I really wanted to have total control over the experience.

So you use like Gumroad or like anything like that? No. Yeah. And you know, there are off the shelf. Like Gumroad is a little bit even more generic. Like there are things like Teachable, Kijabi, like course platforms that are fully functional out of the box, but I wanted to have full control over it. The other thing that I think makes my courses a little bit different is that it's not really a video course. Like there are videos, but there's five content types. There's interactive articles like you'd find on my blog. There are videos, there are exercises which are small sort of self-contained challenges where you have a live editing environment and you can poke around with the thing that we're talking about.

There are mini-games which I think is the real thing that can't exist in like a typical off the shelf course platform and then there are workshops which are sort of like exercises but bigger. Typically those aren't through the course platform, you're going to work on your own machine or or something like Code Sandbox. And it's a chance to really practice the stuff that we've been covering in the modules. So that, like, all of those things together, I find is what makes an effective learning experience. Like, if it's all videos, then it's so easy for people to sort of sit back and just let it stream.

And it feels very productive. It's like, yeah, if it's all video, it's just it feels, it's enjoyable. It's easy, it's relaxing. But then you go from watching the videos to trying to use the skill and discover you don't even know where to start. But if it's like all hands on, all active, all like here's a bunch of exercises without any sort of context, it can be discouraging, it can be exhausting. So you really wanna find the balance of those two things. And I find like mixing the content types makes it easier to sustain attention for longer because it's hard to watch hours of video or do hours of practice.

But if I'm always throwing like a different style at you, then it makes it easier to stay engaged. You know, it's interesting because I feel like, I feel like a lot of people go just straight to video watching and for the courses. It's easy, relatively, right? I've done a bunch of videos. One thing I've become fascinated with, because I want to build out something myself, right? And that's more like long term down the road. I may hit you up just for advice down the road. But like, how do you pick the problem to train? Because like, for me, it's like, I get asked a bunch of the same questions.

Is that what you do? Do you kind of like, you know, after, when you're about to create a course, do you just sit there and be like, all right, what are the most commonly asked questions I get around the same topic then build off that? Yeah, I mean, so there's a couple things I wanna talk about. The first is like, how did I pick the topic to teach? Because, you know, I worked as a developer for a few years, there's quite a few things that I could do. And I made like a pro-con list of all the different things that I thought I could cover.

And my goal was really to optimize around impact. So I tried to find the thing that like, if I could spend 20, 30, 40 hours with a person one-on-one, like how much of a difference can I make in that time? And the first course that I made was on CSS because I knew so many developers that struggled with CSS. And it's the sort of thing, like, if you go to a boot camp, you have all of the weeks and weeks of JavaScript and like maybe an afternoon of CSS. And so often there's just like, we learn CSS as we go. And as a result, it's super shaky and the language feels really inconsistent.

So that was really why I chose CSS was that I thought in a small amount of time, I can really get you a ton of proficiency in that. More so than I could, if you've already spent hundreds of hours learning JavaScript, I think I can probably help quite a bit too, but not to the same extent. So that was sort of the rationale for my second course, React. It was more that there was still an element of that a lot of developers just struggled with React, but also it was just such an in-demand skill that I thought it would just be really helpful for people in their careers to have the bullet point on your resume that you have this proficiency.

When it comes to like, how do I figure out the curriculum? Okay, I decided the topic, how do I decide what I actually cover? Yeah. Because the route that I've chosen is to be really comprehensive, it's really just, and I start in like a notion doc where I just like, a lot of it is like going from course to fine, like going from just throwing a bunch of like messy brain-sorming ideas onto a thing and then trying to figure out how to structure it, like what are the modules going to be. But it really is like, what do I think the most important things to like, essentially just figuring out comprehensively what are the things that I've seen people struggle with that I think would be really beneficial to know and then try to find some way to weave it into a somewhat, like a linear structure that makes sense so that we can go from idea to idea that build on the stuff we've learned previously.

But it's tricky, it's difficult. Yeah, it's difficult. So Scott comes in here, a question for Josh, you have a great knack for finding all these hidden tips slash tricks with CSS, React, et cetera. How do you find these features and teach yourself how to use them. Is it by accent or by product of interest, et cetera? Yeah, I wish I had like, like here's the solution. Like, it's just an obvious thing. But it's really like a whole bunch of different things like for CSS specifically, a lot of how I learned was through experimentation where, and I think a lot of developers can probably relate to this.

For a long time with CSS, I would be running along, building the feature following the design and then something surprising happens. Like you use the snippet, you've used a dozen times before, but the box is in the wrong place, the layout is broken. My old strategy for this was to, you look on Stack Overflow, you try to find the problem, you throw almost random chunks at CSS at the problem, and the moment it does what you expected, you move on, right? You go on with your day. What I started doing was trying to settle into these problems, say, okay, I found the magic line of code that seems to work, but why does this work?

How do, let's make sense of this, because otherwise when I have the same problem in two months, I'm not gonna have any idea how I solved it this time. And in that process, right, in the process of like, okay, let me test my assumption here. So if I remove this line of CSS, does it break in the way that I expect? Let me like go into MDN and see if I can learn more about this property or even the CSS specifications are surprisingly accessible. And in that process, you learn a whole bunch of stuff that just like is really useful to know that you don't often see other places.

Sort of like anybody else, I've discovered some of the tips just on Twitter myself. So often I'm just sharing something that I've learned at some point in the past from someone else. So yeah, lots of different ways. But certainly it's something I say to students all the time. In my courses I'll often have exercises. And one of the things that is a little bit polarizing, my exercises aren't simply the opportunity to practice what I cover. Often like we'll cover 80% of a subject and the exercise will ask you to make that jump. And a lot of people find this kind of frustrating, I find it so effective.

Where was I going with this thought? Right. How do I learn different things? Yeah. Yeah. I was not saying I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was going somewhere there. It fell out of my brain briefly. And it's falling out of my brain again. Goodness. Right. The exercise is trying to figure out that last little bit. Right. In that process, you learn so much more than you do. If you're just sort of being given a problem. Like if I show you how to do something and then ask you to do it, you can get practice.

useful, but it's really that extra little bit. Like let me see if I can give you something that I haven't shown you how to do. Sure. It's just so much more effective. And that is a great way to learn different little tips and tricks because you may discover like one of the most challenging things is identifying your own blind spots. And this is actually when I first started teaching at a boot camp, this was one of my like ulterior motives because students have a knack of like asking you a simple question. Like one of the questions for people who don't JavaScript, what's the difference a statement and an expression.

And like, I open my mouth to start answering that question because I've been working with these things for so many years only to discover that I actually have no idea. Like, I've worked around this blind spot in my own understanding. Yeah, I'm interesting. And it's a great opportunity to like, you know, with the students sit and like, okay, let's figure this out. So it is, for anybody that really wants to like go from like intermediate to advanced in terms of understanding a subject, teaching is a great way to do that. I love that. I love that. All right. So a lot of things to cover.

I'm sure we can really just chop it up on your course real quick. Where's the best place to find your courses and whatnot before we move on to the next topic? Yeah. So Josh W. Como.com is my blog. There's a link to my two courses in the top bar. That's sort of my home hub, right? It's where I have my blog post, but it also has links. Josh, I'm going to put on the banner. Josh. Awesome. Thank you. You say Josh, como.com? Josh, W-como.com. That look right. Yep, that's it. Go check that out. Go check that out. Alright, next thing. So it kind of goes into kind of what we're talking about, right?

So we're building course creation. We're kind of really kind of not building in public per se but also putting a public thing out there, right? That obviously leads to a lot of building reputation and building brand online which then kind of leads into speakers, the speaking at conferences. I tweeted something this morning, not even knowing we were gonna talk about this, but everything you put out online is directly reflective of your own brand, your own reputation, right? Who do you wanna be done for? So can you talk about what building reputation online is done for you in your career? And again, like get braggy, right?

I want you to brag on yourself, because I want people to know like, I think people are so scared to take a jump, to start posting on LinkedIn, you know, and you know, people see, you know, guests I bring on about like building the famous courses or building these massive email newsletters. And I think people can get so heady that we all started somewhere. So can you talk about how to get started and then what happens when you start building that reputation? Yeah. Oh, it's, I have so many different things I could say here. I'm like, I'm all. I started. Yeah. Let's just go for the next hours on this.

Exactly. How long we got strapping folks? When I first started blogging, the main goal that I had wasn't necessarily to like build a reputation that I could then use to launch a course business. I was, you know, and it's complicated for in terms of like when I started because I initially started taking like 2007. So like quite a long time ago, but it wasn't 2014 that I actually like started looking for full-time work. I was doing contract work and just sort of experimentation going to school for other things. A lot of other like things in that period. And so when I was in 2014 getting started, I think I started blogging 2015 maybe.

My goal was really just to get a resource for myself. Like I think I published most of them, but often I wouldn't even publish them. Cause my goal was just to like see if I understand this thing and build a reference for myself because I had had the experience so many times of like you get stuck on a problem, you bang your head on it for a couple hours, you solve it, and then the same problem comes back two months ago. And you remember solving it. You're like great. Yeah, you don't remember what the solution was. So that was really like the main thing was I thought, this would be a good, like whenever I run into some weird thing and you Google something and you have some weird error message.

I forget the actual, there's some webcomic where it's like, there's no lonely or feeling than searching for an error message, only to find a single stack overflow question from six years ago with no answer. So like that's like when you run into those situations, that's like the perfect, oh, like you solve the problem, let's write a little blog post about it. So a lot of the my initial motivation was just to start my own, just to build my own skills. honestly your own repository basically like your own library right I love that and I found it super satisfying that I would build these things mostly for myself and other people would see them and you know it wasn't we're talking like 15 people might see it like it wasn't big numbers which was honestly kind of perfect because it takes a long time to build the skill of writing a good blog post and so you want to do that practice before you have a bunch of people criticizing it dude I this is a sidebar and so I've been doing my blog now for over a year and pretty much every day Monday through Friday.

And I like the app Time Hop where it pushes like old stuff to you, my first like nine months of logs were fucking terrible. Like literally they just started pop up. I was like, holy cow, they were so bad. And like no one really watched them. And like now like you gotta start somewhere. Like you gotta start somewhere. So. And that's it's such a good point. And it's exactly the same thing for me. Like I cannot look at my old blog post like there's just so many problems with them. Yeah, but that's the way it goes, right? That's the way it has to go because it takes time to build that skill and that's sort of the, there's no other way that it can work, right?

You need to start at the beginning without an audience building your own, and it helps if you have an additional, like it might be tricky if like your driving factor is to become well known and to like build, like it almost feels like if that's your reputation, it's gonna be so disc, or if that's your intention, It's gonna be so discouraging because it takes so much time to get to that point and so much effort, like so much effort without any sort of payback if that's your motivation. But if your motivation is just to build a reference for yourself or to get practice or to help you understand something, then you're getting the upside out of it through the entire process so there's no problem.

So you started blogging in 2015, you said? Let me actually check that. Let me go to media. I'm curious how many years does it take, right? Like when you start to see, for me, it's taken me three years. So really starting to see my career do things because of the things I'm putting out. Do you remember off the top of your head, how long it took to really, before it really started moving? Because I think people look at guys like you and somebody's epic content creators or even people out there with huge followers are like, oh, well they had it made from day one. And it's never the case.

No, the cause and effect is the opposite, right? And I've seen Wes Boss talk about this. Like people will say like, oh, it's easy for Wes Boss because he has a bajillion followers. And it's like, well, how do you think that happened? Like, it took many, many years. Right. Yeah, my first blog post was published on March 31, 2014. So earlier than I thought. And like nobody read any of these blog posts. Like I'm looking now, I probably had once a month for 2015, 2016, 2017. I think in 2017, so three years later, I had one post that made it to the front page of Hacker News.

So like a few thousand people saw that and it was mind blowing to me because up until then it was like a couple dozen, maybe like a really good post would get like 200. So it took many, many years and similar story on Twitter, like I started sharing tips on Twitter. And for a long time I had like 200 followers, like I went to a coding boot camp in 2014, so I had all my coding boot camp buddies on my list. And for a long time it was just us like friends all like each other. Go Josh. Yeah, so yeah, it definitely takes years. And that's why I say that like it can be really discouraging if you're not getting anything else out of it.

But if you can find a way to make it valuable, even if nobody else is reading it, then it's, it gives you you the motivation to keep going. And then once you start, like for myself, it was probably in like 2017, 2018 that I first started having the idea that it would be interesting to follow in the footsteps of a West Boss or a Ken C. Dots and do the solo course creator journey. But it wasn't until three or four years later that I actually did it. It was still laying the foundation, building my own blog was a big part of that, going from medium to having my own joshwukoma.com to think this.

I see right over here. And then once I had those pieces in place, I started building a newsletter, like I added a newsletter sign up, and all of those things, building the audience on Twitter, that made it so much, just like more easy for people to trust that the course that I was building would be of a certain quality because they had gotten to know my teaching style and I had so much practice as well. The other thing that I think if people are looking to become, to follow in those footsteps, and I've seen Wes Bostock about this too, teach in person at a local coding boot camp, because it's such a good way to help you, well, first of all, like, if you're going to teach the same thing that you taught in the coding group, it's a great way to discover what the beginner frustrations are.

Because for most of us, like, if we've been doing this for a lot of years, we forget just how complicated all of this stuff is and how much, you know, like, at that boot camp, someone would ask a question and I would answer it at way too high of a level. So my answer wouldn't make any sense to them. And then they would say like, okay, well, that's great. But what do you actually mean by that? And then you'd have to go down a level and down another level and just get to like the fundamentals, which is really hard to do if you haven't been there yourself in a few years.

So that's a really good way to get that experience of like just understanding where people are and how to meet them there. I love that. There's a good question here by Alex. Alex, what is Josh used for blog creation slash hosting? What are some good approaches to get started? Yeah. So can you, can you go quickly like what you started with sounds like medium and then talk about when you made that decision to go kind of full on hosting. Yeah, so I did start the medium 2014. Let me actually, I should be able to tell this too. Medium.com, there we go. Medium.com is medium.com is really the only place where you can kind of discover other articles, right?

These days, actually, I would probably suggest people start on dev.to dev.to. There you go. There you go. It's a similar sort of platform. I'm on there too. I'm on there too. And honestly, take this with a grain of salt because I haven't published myself on dev.2 very much. I tried it for a little while where I would cross post to it, but it just didn't seem to be like where I should be spending my energy. But I do think that's like, if I was starting new today, that's probably how I would start is just creating an account on dev.2 and start publishing there because there is a pretty big community there.

Medium, I feel like I very rarely see medium posts nowadays because they've sort of, with with all the paywalls and all the banners and all the stuff, it just become a less ideal reading experience. And I think they're, from what I've seen, they're trying to turn that chip around a little bit and maybe it'll come back. But I would say DevNet 2 is probably the best place to start. And I do think creating a blog isn't, like unless it can be a worthwhile exercise, like just as any other portfolio project, right? You may as well create a blog if you're just looking to get some experience practicing building stuff.

But the trouble, and I think we've all seen this, is the developer who creates a blog, publishes their first blog post, which is how I built this blog, and then never touches it again. Ever, ever. Because maybe you discover you don't like writing blog posts. And so you spend all this time building the, because you like coding, so you build the blog platform, but then it's a whole different activity to be writing blog posts, and a lot of people just don't like it. So I think that's like the first thing, is to see if you like doing this thing, because if you don't like doing this thing, and you know, if your goal is to build your reputation, whether it's for course graders, just for helping your own career, There's plenty of ways to do that.

You can start a YouTube channel, you can start a podcast. Like there's a bunch of stuff you could do. So it's worth trying them and finding something that you like. So maybe blogging will be something you really enjoy, maybe not. But yeah, so that's what I would say. It's just like see how you feel about the actual craft of writing. I was on medium from whatever I said before, May 2014, I think, to May 2018. And I can tell that because I have a blog post May 25th, 2018, my new explorable interactive blog where I was getting people from waveforms, or from, sorry, I'm reading something here, from medium to my own blog.

So yeah, I do think, and yeah, actually I should share that too. I had created a project called waveforms, which was sort of a blog post, but not really, it was an interactive explorable about how sound works. So I had this little sine wave that would change and text that would scroll on the side. And that was really what gave me the idea, because really I could have just kept publishing on medium. like you don't need to have your own blog. It is nice that you can control the UI, but that depending on whether you enjoy design or not, that can be a pull or con.

But really the thing that I wanted was the ability to embed just custom stuff. Like I want it to be able to have like a demonstration that shows how this thing works. And you can kind of do that with like code pen embeds. Like you can have a little iframe that you can drop an HTML CSS JS snippet in, but it's not the same, right? It's really cool if you can literally just like build whatever you would build in an application in your own blog. So I realize I've gone quite a bit. I love it. I love it. I love it. Speaking of courses, James Quakes just dropped in.

James, it's good to see you, buddy. It's really, really good to see you. And then let's see here. Rizelle, former guest of the show, also said Hashnode is nice too. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, F2O, I think I'm on Hashnode too. But yeah, absolutely. Talk about as we wrap up here in the next five minutes, Josh. And again, thank you again for coming. It's just been wonderful conversation and catching up with you. Talk about, man, talk about the importance of speaking. I know you mentioned about going to local meetups. I think that's incredibly important. Why people should consider speaking? Because listen, you can have a wonderful career.

There's a lot of, we all know there's a lot of people out there who don't do any of this stuff. And they're totally successful and make a lot of money. I'm not saying you have to do it, but why do you think it's good that you do this for your career? Yeah. Let me first, because I realized I only answered half of the previous question. The question was like, what tools do I use? Very quickly. Oh, yeah. And React. But I don't actually think it matters that much. Like, I chose the tools that I did in part because the tools that I already knew and I didn't wanna be burdened with learning a new thing.

The only little caveat I would say is find something like MDX. And if you don't know, it's markdown with the ability to embed dynamic content. like just make sure that the tools that you're choosing are like good for the kind of blogging you wanna do. But aside from that, you can use whatever you're already comfortable with, I think that's the best way to go. Conference speaking. Yeah. It's just being public, right? The whole social proof in your career. Why? Why should people really take serious that? It's really advantageous. It's funny actually. I started really getting a larger audience around the time that I started creating courses.

So I left my full-time job in mid 2020. And it seemed like, as of that point, like the moment I committed to doing my own thing, I got so many like really interesting, seeming offers, like people would say like, hey, we know of your work, we see the kinds of things that you're interested in. Here's like a role that is like beautifully crafted for you with all the sort of things that I've seen that you like. So you actually got like full-time offers from companies after you went out on your own? Yes. And a lot of, I think a lot of them were like contracts.

So it's not exclusively full-time, but it is just like, here's this company that I like with this really interesting sounding thing. One of them that I had to say us to you, because I just couldn't say no to it, was Adi Osmani, who works at Google, who's the author of many famous fabulous books, was creating an interactive JavaScript explainer. And wanted me to come help add some whimsy to it, which I could not craft a better opportunity for myself. And that's possible because I was sharing the things that I was interested in, right? It's such a nice little cheat code, where if you focus on the things that you really like and become a public person in that field, people will associate you with that thing.

And when they need some specialist for that area, they'll think of you. So that's like, just like it's so much, like it seems to me like such a better way to find the sorts of jobs that you really wanna do than like going through job listings, kind of hoping that the skill, that you know, the very specific thing that you like to do is part of that role, but you never really know. So that's like probably one benefit. Here's the age old question. And also James, listen, words are hard, man. Words are hard this morning. Do you have to be an expert in the field to post?

Absolutely not. No, of course not. I wasn't an expert when I started posting. You know, I do think like one of the things that is a useful thing to develop is a thicker skin because inevitably when you post something, people will discover problems with it. And that has happened to me over and over and over again. Especially, I don't know if I have. Devs, let me give their opinion. I've learned that quickly. I think I mentioned one of my blog posts in 2018, got on Hacker News and got a whole bunch of views. It was about performance in React and I had sort of, I don't remember the specifics, but I had shared like, here's something that's slow and here's something that's fast.

I didn't realize, but in my slow version, I still had logging and that logging was slowing everything down. So like the premise of that blog post was entirely wrong. Like when you, when you solve for that, the two are pretty much the same. So like it just like, it just happens, right? going to make mistakes, you're going to, and people are going to notice them. I don't know if anyone actually noticed that one. I think I caught it myself and very quietly made a little update to time, like just salvage it. Yeah, but that's just the way it goes. And so that's, I think people are afraid of that.

And the honest truth is that that will happen because, you know, we're all because we're humans, we're going to make mistakes. But there's still so much value that comes not just for you, but for the people who are, that are getting the information that you're sharing, like it's, it's just that's the way that it has to be. And I think there's, It does take a little bit of practice and time to get comfortable with that, but it's And I yeah, absolutely like you don't need to be an expert start sharing people people always they're like What if I have haters? I'm like I'm gonna be honest with you Let the haters fight it on the comments because like low key that helps that helps Boost your face.

I think the saying goes is like if you want engagement post something slightly wrong or something like that But yeah, I mean listen like you you have to embrace what I call healthy discourse Right. I mean listen people are gonna argue people listen. I have I have had posts that's gotten millions of views on TikTok and Instagram That have talked about LinkedIn and people have lost their damn minds Like you thought I posted some political I mean you thought this is something just political nonsense with how much people come at you And I was told post about LinkedIn people are gonna argue with you whatever you post But I but but you but to cause healthy conversation conversation, it for me is incredibly important.

Totally. And then you also learn a lot too, because I've learned a lot, right? I mean, I've, I, when I spoke, uh, me and Kelly Vaughn keynoteed Connect Tech last week, two weeks ago, somebody just a group, multiple people disagree with me in the keynote, we did like a Q&A style. And it was great. I learned a lot. Another wrong with it. Another wrong with it. Um, all right, Josh, as we wrap up here, three questions for you. All right. All right. First question. What brings you joy outside of work? Oh goodness. I do. I feel very strongly that having hobbies is really important. So I think piano, there's a piano behind me.

Talk about, yeah, by the way, shout out to Josh for having the most beautiful room I've ever had on the podcast. Like you win the award. I don't have a physical award, but if I did, I would send it to you. So talk about why hobbies are so important real fast. Yeah, I mean, there's so many things, right? One is it's just for balance, right? If like, you need things that give you joy in your life. Specifically for some hobbies, like I also yoyo, I have a yoyo sitting beside me on the desk, and I found that it is an incredibly useful tool for helping like the back of your mind solve problems.

So like, if I'm stuck on a problem, I'll pick this up and throw it around. And like magically, when I sit back down, solutions will have materialized in my brain and it's shocking how often that happens. So that's like, like there is like a work benefit to the hobbies, but there's also just like a life benefit, right? It's just nice to feel like you're progressing and things and I guess it's different for everybody. Like I feel like everyone in my family has always been like that. So I think I like just genetically have a previous position to meeting lots of hobbies, but I think everyone can benefit from it.

Can you do like fancy tricks on the yo-yo? Do you want to see a yo-yo trick? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you do one real quick for me? Yeah, sure. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Here we go. No one's ever seen Josh do a yo-yo trick. Here we go. And I don't know that I even like mostly I guess. What in the world? Holy smokes. And you can't really see the string. Yeah, yeah, I can see it. Great. How that's insane. Have you ever done competitions like locally? I did do like I think it's like 2003 or something. I have a medal. Oh, that's awesome.

Look at that. That's crazy. It is a fun hobby. That's awesome. I love that. I love that. Now, that was awesome. That was awesome. And how long have you been playing the piano for? It's tricky because it's another like 20 years, but with several many year gaps in that. Yeah, I'm like so, so at it, but I do find it very satisfying. I love it. Second thing, that was awesome. I've never had somebody do like show until, I need to do that more. We need to do more show and tell on the show. I forget what conference, I think it's React Miami that they're talking about having a Dev talent show.

Yes, yes. I'm just so excited about that. And I plan on being down there, so I'll see you there. Second thing is my question around tools, technologies, trends, frameworks, just anything maybe you're reading or tinkering with on the side that you wanted to maybe bring attention to. Yeah, I mean, I mentioned it a little bit earlier, but NDX, which is marked down with JSX, it's just a fantastic tool for any sort of educational product, whether it's a blog, technical documentation, anything like that. It just gets better and better. I do think like in the React ecosystem specifically, we're so spoiled for tools, like we have next JS, we have remixed, they're both just like fantastic ways to build full stack applications.

One of the things that that I'm hoping to spend some time on because I do feel like there's a bit of a gap right now is in like really good CSS tools that fully embrace a lot of the newer technologies. I've seen like Panda CSS is working on this. I think Kuna CSS is another one. I haven't really experimented with either of them and I'm excited to see like people exploring these ideas. It's something that I want to explore myself. But yeah, those are the things that I'm currently thinking about. I love that Jerome. It's good to see you buddy. Thank you, Jerome. Yes, the show.

Last question as we wrap up here and again, thank you all for hanging out with us. At 3 p.m. quick reminder, I'm going live on render atls page with Anthony Mayes and the job father Jermaine Murray to talk about conferences. So if you want to head over to render set an alarm 3 p.m. central today on renders page and going live with those two beautiful gentlemen. So last question, this show is called guidance counselor 2.0. For a reason, we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and kind of college, but now really as adults, when we need probably guidance counselors the most, we don't have anybody to turn to for just career advice.

What would be your biggest piece of career advice now to younger Josh? Yeah, it's a good question. So I mentioned that I started building my course business in 2020. That was prompted by a nerve injury that I got. I hurt my elbow. Ironically doing physiotherapy, like the physiotherapy exercise caused another injury, which is very frustrating. But I spent a few months, not really being able to type or use a mouse. And I have a blog post coding by voice about how I was able to still be productive with a microphone, actually the same microphone I have right over here, as well as an eye tracker.

So those two things together. The eye tracker serves as a mouse replacement. The microphone was for dictation. It was really cool, actually. And I got a few Google Josh coding by voice. You'll hopefully find my blog post. You can see exactly. I have a little demo of what that looks like. That's awesome. But so for these six, seven, eight months, I don't remember exactly how long. I was really thinking about like, like, and this is sort of morbid, I apologize for bringing the mood down a little bit, but I imagined everyone has like a number floating above their head, which is the number of keystrokes left in their life.

And every time you press a key on a keyboard, that number decreases by one. Whoa. Whoa. Phew. And so the way that I started thinking about it is that this keystrokes are a resource, right? And the same way that like you have a number in your bank balance, use that resource wisely, like figure out like every keystroke that you're doing, every line of code that you write should be intentional and should be serving a goal for yourself, whatever that goal is. In my case, I wanted to create courses. And so I left my job, I started building a business that I'm doing now. And it's been, I wish I had done it a couple of years earlier.

So, yeah. That's awesome. I love that. And Scott, shout out to you for throwing. Thanks for sharing. Oh, Scott is on his one suite. All right, awesome. Well, Josh, thank you again. I stay on real quick so I can say bye to you backstage. But everybody tune in. Thank you so much for hanging out. Go connect with Josh, send him a DM, tell him you saw him on the show, go buy his course, Support Josh again. I'm not a developer, but I love what Josh is doing. I've admired what Josh has done for a very long time just as an entrepreneur and putting himself out there.

So again, Josh, thank you again for coming on the show. Me and I appreciate it. And we'll see you all three PM on renders page. Y'all have a good one. Peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful. Cause you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finished an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it.

So thank you again, if you need to reach out to me at Tdaston on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.