building your audience and going independent w/ josh comeau

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Josh, let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? Let's go from there. Yeah. My name is Josh. I'm a software developer. I've spent the last few years focusing mainly on teaching. So I have my own online courses. But for much longer than that, I've been blogging. I've been teaching at local coding boot camps. Mostly, I've just been, I discovered many years ago that I really enjoyed coding. In 2014, I think I got my first full-time role, even though I have been doing contract work in various things before that. And yeah, that's been the right I've been on ever since.

2020, I've been focusing on my own courses and blogging at JoshWucomo.com. I love it. And if people, so let's talk about your courses. I definitely want you to plug in a little bit. Where can people go? I'm gonna throw up a banner right now. Yeah, so the best place is JoshWucomo.com. There's a little courses navigation link that'll take you to either of my two courses. I have a course on CSS and a course on React. I love it. Is that right? Is that right? is that perfect. Awesome. Go check it out. Listen, I'm not technical. I'm at Josh at render. A lot of people like Josh.

Josh has a decent following. If you have a decent following, people like Josh are really Josh is a good product. So if you want to go level up and react and then CSS you said, right? Yeah. Also, if you want to go check out some react, some CSS and level up, go check out Josh. I again, like I said, I think it's a fantastic individual. So Josh, let's go ahead and dive into the conversation today. Just around like going out on your own, I know you're building courses, is you're not necessarily out here like freelancing and like hardcore like coding with clients but you're still building you're still doing your own thing.

Can you just get let's start super high level can you give just some words of encouragement or some thoughts for people who have maybe always worked full-time jobs but maybe has had some sort of like calling or some some just kind of like I should go like maybe I do something on my own can you just give some words of encouragement for those folks? Yeah, I mean, it was one of the best things I ever did. And by only real regret is that I didn't consider it sooner. It was one of those things that I had spent many, many years thinking of this as a thing I wanted to do.

I had in the back of my mind, I saw what West Boss fellow Canadian had done in his courses. And I just figured I had all the time in the world. I wound up hurting myself. I got a nerve injury in one arm and that spread to the other arm. And I spent like six months, seven months where I couldn't type or use a mouse. And that experience will really, yeah. I learned how to code using a microphone and an eye tracker. So I was still able to do some, yeah, that's a whole separate tangent, but it's interesting stuff. But the takeaway from that experience for me was the recognition that there isn't an infinite stretch of time that we have.

And that really, like, I realize I'm getting really dark for 10, 30. Yeah, yeah, we're down and we are six minutes in and just going for it this morning. Yeah, like I had this vision of everyone has a number floating above their heads. And it's the number of keystrokes left in their life. So every time you depress a key on a keyboard, that number goes down by one. It's like your bank balance and your bank account. It's like a currency. It's a resource that you should allocate strategically, right? Like if you're working a job that you're not super enthusiastic about, those keystrokes could be better spent doing something that you're really passionate about or that you've always wanted to try.

That's not an infinite pool. Like you should consider, and you know, like I also want to be very clear that I was very privileged. I was in a position where I had a couple of years of savings in the bank. So in my mind, the worst case scenario was that I gave myself a year. I did it. If it didn't work, I could probably, I'm glad that this was 2019, 2020. So times were a little bit better then, but I figured it would be pretty easy for me to get back into the workforce if I wanted. So it really didn't seem like the pro con trade offs were so in the favor of trying it, I figured it would be silly not to and once I had that realization, it's like, oh, yeah, of course This is obviously what I should be doing.

Yeah, that's what I'm doing ever since so talk about I mean I do feel like people Really don't know where to get started, right? They're like hey listen like I want to go on my own I want to build something I Think there's a lot of from a financial perspective and that's one thing really from a torque community I want to empower people I want to create these like PDFs of like how to get started financially taxes blah blah blah And I know it's going to be kind of its own thing. But like, like when you started, like, did you always know that you wanted to do a course or did the course come later and you did some freelancing kind of development on your own first?

Like, give me kind of that, that's side of things. Yeah, so like I mentioned, it had been in the back of my mind for quite a while. And I think the first like concrete step, although it wasn't really, it's hard to draw the line of like what is and is not intentional, but I started blogging in 2014. And initially it was mostly just a way for me to organize my thoughts. I was sick of having the feeling that I think a lot of developers can relate to, where you get stuck on a problem, you spend three hours wrestling with it, you solve it, you move along with your life, and then a month later you hit the same problem, but you don't remember how you solved it, and you have to go through the whole process again.

So initially it's like when I solved these problems, I would spend the 15 minutes and write up a little blog post. That way, next time I run into this, I can reference that. I love that. And I made it public and I started blogging on medium. And most of those medium posts to this day have like 200 views, like they were not popular. But it did sort of teach me how to blog. And I realized at some point down the line that this blog could be a really useful tool for whatever I wanted to do, right? In my mind, it was the courses were still like the main idea, but regardless, right?

Whatever the goal you have, a blog is a great way to build a reputation and that reputation can serve a lot of different goals. So when I had the whole nerve injury thing and I decided to go into this on my own it was the I didn't really I did one freelance job which was for Adios Manny at Google. He was building his own He had this library of JavaScript patterns and he wanted to build a website for them So I did a little bit of work on that although really like Lydia and Addy did like 99% of that So I don't want to take any credit for it But that was even that was mostly because I really like Addy and thought it would be a fun project I tried I said no to many many things because I really wanted to focus on the courses.

I Love that talk about I want to talk about blogging building in public. I know people are so tired of probably about hearing this Especially for me like building public Blah blah blah and I think people when they hear when when when when they hear people say build public I feel like they like think like mr. Beast Right Content like influencer content creator. I love what you said about how you were just blogging really for you. So when you had that problem, like Barrett said, I have no memory of this code. You can come back and like go to it. I mean, I think that's so fundamentally simple.

And I think is what I try to preach. I'm not asking you to create an email newsletter, a texting community, a live stream, any of this stuff. I'm just asking you to document. And so can you talk about just just the importance of just documenting your journey? Yeah. I mean, that's the reason I started was mainly for that purpose. But I quickly realized I had these posts on Medium that had 200 views, and I would get two comments from people like, oh, shoot, I had that same problem too. And this really helped. And it's amazing, right? It's so cool that the little bit of work that you do to document it has this profound impact.

And it really does, it seems to me, if your goal is to do anything in the realm of software development, it can only help you if like when you're applying to a job or when you're seeking out some sort of contract. If the person has seen one of your blog posts, you know, three years ago, it doesn't have to be recent doesn't have, they don't have to have like a, it didn't have to blow their mind. But if they remember that they've seen your name, it's like the reason that major companies will do all these like awareness marketing campaigns, right? Like they're not right. The Nike ad in the subway isn't trying to like preach the the value of the shoes, they're just trying to make you have that name and your head when you go to the shoe store.

So I think that there is so many benefits. And you're right, it doesn't have to be the influencer stuck, the toolkit that everyone has. I mean, for certain goals, that's the way you have, that's beneficial to do it that way. But just if you're a developer and you're just trying to build your reputation, of course, all of that is superfluous. It's just about creating a body of work that shows that you know what you're talking about and that you can sort of use as proof when people are considering working with you. Absolutely, I love that. And so this has popped in my head and I wanna ask you this because I think people, they wanna start out on their own.

And full transparency, when I left my last company before I landed at Torque, I was thinking about just going out of my own. I fielded a Texas have engineers that I really, really respect. I was like, hey, what are your thoughts on this? They actually, most of them thought it was a good idea. But I was like, should I go course? Should I go courses? Should I just like sit myself in a studio and record how to find a job in Taylor's playbook and all this stuff? Or I was like, or I could probably consult in terms of content creation, community building, all this stuff, kind of like what Tesser Creasels doing, kind of with her work.

What made you go coursework instead of like, like just straight up freelancing from like a development perspective? because I think some people deal with that. Like should I go course, should I go, you know, 10, I do that thing, you're like, should I start my own company? You know what I'm saying? I think there's a lot there that people need to kind of break through. Yeah, it's a great question. For me, it was mostly, it just seemed like the most obvious path for me with the skills that I had. I think like one of the things too, is I really like building stuff. And not only that, I really like building stuff where I'm the only stakeholder, like I get to decide what I'm doing.

I don't want to have to like present something to clients and get their reprogramming. I've done some of that. But that was really like, when I thought about like what is the role that I want for myself, like what do I want to spend my days doing? This just seemed like the nicest alternative because like in my case at least, I built my own course platform. My courses are really like built around the idea of interactivity and experimentation and practice. So there are videos like any other course, but Most of, I say like half of my time is spent just building interactive widgets and creating exercises, and it just is fun, right?

So I think that, of course, like, that's what I consider fun. That's not what everybody considers fun. So it's really about figuring out what exactly you, like, and I didn't really do this intentionally. So this is like, I'm sort of rewriting history here, but what I would suspect it would work well is to ask yourself, like, what parts of my job do I like? what parts of my job do I not like? I think a lot of developers feel like their time is getting into flow and building stuff is the most fun. And then like the meetings are the least fun. So that's like, you know, trying to optimize for a clear calendar is one way to like consider, you know, that sort of rules some things out.

But, you know, there's plenty of different, people have different things that they get energy from and enjoy. So yeah. I have a percent. Did you, when you, like, do you feel questions of people, before you wrote out your training course, like did you like message people and you're like, Hey, what are your thoughts on? Cause cause I think to some people are also too concerned about other people's opinions. Right? Like, like, you know, and I, but I do think there is a market resource that needs to occur. You know, if you want to do something, did you reach out to people or like, Hey, I want to do this, what are your thoughts or, or did you just like, did you just like, Hey, block out the haters?

I'm just, I'm just going to do me and see if it works. Yeah, this is, and this is, I should have mentioned, this is a good thing to hone in on. I had spent a few years teaching, so I worked for a local coding boot camp, I would do evenings and weekends, at the coding boot camp. And that did sort of help me realize that like, oh, this is a thing that I enjoy. And not only that, it built up the skill of knowing how to do this. And I think that there's like two separate things but they're sort of related. One is you wanna make sure that you understand, like for people that do wanna pursue courses, the creating the course is not step one.

That's like step seven, right? Step one is get experience teaching. Like you've learned how to teach. So good. So build an audience, right? Like the blog and I think the two necessary ingredients for me were creating the blog and then teaching in person or most of it was in person with COVID it moved online but you know, still like in real time. Sure. And that does like it helps you in so many ways teaching. In fact, just like as a general like forget creating courses, Teaching is a great way to level up as a developer, because you'll work with students who are just starting. And I'll ask you a question, and you'll open your mouth confidently and realize, oh, I don't know.

Like, one student asked me what the difference in JavaScript is between a statement and an expression. And this is like, you know, I've worked with statements and expressions for 15 years, and I couldn't put it into words, and this I had to actually figure, like, I have a broad intuition, right? It's like going into a room with your eyes closed and feeling around for the shape of things. And then like you can sort of see it, but if you turn the lights on, you'll have a much better, more clarity. But I wouldn't have known that that was a whole in my knowledge without those questions.

So fielding questions from aspiring developers is a great way to round out your own knowledge. But if you're creating courses, it has this other benefit of understanding where people are so you can meet them there. I think if the thing that I see a lot of people do is they know exactly what they need to teach. Like they have the curriculum in mind and they create that. And if they haven't done the work of building the audience, then only their friends will buy it because there's 100,000 courses out there. But if they haven't done the work of teaching, maybe they have an audience, they'll launch it, and students will hit the first exercise and be like, I don't know what this is.

And the whole course is premised on the assumption of knowing a few things. And people don't know that, then the entire course. So I think that that is, and then of course, another thing that I did is I created some of the content, I got a bunch of four students from the bootcamp to go through the content. I launched in sort of stages. Like I had this early test squad of people that I kind of knew at first and then I expanded that to people that had reached out asking specifically if they could help test and I had like 15, 20 people like that. So I added them, then I did an early access launch, which was sort of a beta launch where it was open to the public, but only for a week.

And people, I got, my courses now I've collected, actually hold on, I'll tell you, it's kind of fun. No, you're good. And then, then, Henri, yes, this is live, brother. good to see a van. Really, really good to see you. Yeah, I've collected 10,500 pieces of feedback about my courses. Holy smokes. Are you serious? I still have 1600 that I haven't gone through. So I've gone through 9000 pieces. So it's been a lot. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. That. All right. Do you, does it ever, do you ever, uh, I'm trying to figure out, Like, does it, do you like live for the feedback or does it kind of like bother you a little bit?

It depends. Definitely what first it was really useful and I was most appreciative of the people who were most critical because, you know, it was early enough then. Sir. But I could do something about it. What winds up happening, and the other thing too is, and this is what I recommend, and this is very niche advice, but what I do now is I wait a few months, I let it accumulate, like I have 1,500 on red pieces, then I sort it by lesson. So I can go through the seven pages of feedback for this one lesson. And if I don't see the same thing more than once, I usually ignore it.

Because a bunch of people have their own pet, you know, like this person doesn't understand this. But if it's only one person out of the 15,000 people that have taken the course now, it's probably not something that is tricky because sometimes there is, the one person is voicing the thing that 15 people thought too. But what I've come to realize is you do build an intuition for which pieces feedback point to a serious problem in which pieces of feedback are more just someone's personal idiosyncrasies and it doesn't work with the way their mind works but it's broadly because you're never gonna be able to like teach something to a hundred percent.

No, no, no, no at all. That's that man that is fascinating stuff. So let me ask you this man if you were to go back in time would you do anything different? That's a good question. Because when they talk about, yeah, can you talk about building medium? You know, I don't know if like you look back and you're like, man, I wish I went more often on Twitter at the time, or I wish I went more in on LinkedIn, or wish I went more in on X, like, I, or not, I mean, like XYZ, like, I'm kind of curious. Cause obviously you've built such a fall and you've, you, you have a name for yourself.

I'm always curious for the guys and gals who have built a name for themselves, but they were to go back and do something differently. I mean, so I don't have any, I mean, the one thing I briefly mentioned was I could have started like a couple of years sooner. Like I put it off longer than I probably should have. But at the same time, I built up like I got a lot of useful knowledge in the work that I did during those years. So even that my philosophy generally is if I'm happy with where I am and I am, it feels almost like, you know, like, you know, the genie comes out of the bottle and they give you three wishes, but you forget to bring your lawyer.

And so it goes totally backwards and like, you know, it's technically the way you wanted. Um, when I think about this, I think about like, there are things that maybe I could say if I could go back and change, I would, but who knows the consequences that would follow from that, I know, I would wind up in a situation that is less ideal than where I am now. And I'm pretty happy with how things are. So not really, which I realize isn't the most helpful. No, that's fine. Answer. But yeah, no, that's fine. Just like quickly, the thing I would say, because I recognize the point of the question is to try to come up with like, sharing things so that other people following the same path can avoid some of the mistakes.

But I think like the bit of advice I would give there is, I don't generally reconsider all of this. Like, I think it's actually value in just trying to look forward rather than back. So that's the way I generally do it. I love that. Yeah, no, absolutely that. People last next question for a second, I was like, honestly, no, like it's all worked out. I do have to say, I wish I would have started sooner. And that's what I encourage people. If you really feel the need to do something, everybody I've talked to that is pursuing exactly what they want to do, they wish they would have done it sooner.

And so let's just go with that. I love that. As we obviously last 10 minutes together, I do want to talk about, you know, obviously your courses, you see a lot of feedback. Is there anything that you could share that maybe developers are kind of still missing or that you're seeing in the market where people are still missing the market they could get better at? Yeah. Just from a technical perspective. So it's CSS is my answer. I think the CSS and the reason I created my first course CSS was I recognize from my own experience learning, but also from the developers I've worked with, so many of us, and it's kind of complicated, but so many of us focus exclusively on JavaScript because that is the thing employers value.

And there's truth in that. JavaScript skills are the number one thing that employers, at least in the front end, slash full-stack space, that's what they value. But I feel like if you can spend 20 extra hours on CSS, you can bring your CSS level from from like a three to a seven out of 10. It's like a massive improvement in a relatively small amount of time. And that's like a really helpful and celery skill whereas like those same 20 hours in JavaScript might take you from like an 8.1 to an 8.2 and like is that really moving the needle, right? So I think that there is, we've always focused so much on the highest priority thing that we think our employers are after, but there's secondary things that are still really important that we can really elevate in that same time.

So I think it's true for accessibility. Building design skills as a front end developer is super useful too. So there's a bunch of like ancillary things that I think don't get the attention. And like you need JavaScript too. But yeah, that's, I think the CSS. And that's why I created the first courses. I just saw how big of an impact I could have in a relatively small amount of time. That's awesome. I love that. Yeah, cause I'm always, you know, again, like I've been a traditional recruiter for so long. It was always JavaScript. It was angular, then it was a reactor, and it was no, just jobs for jobs, jobs, jobs.

And as somebody who's not super technical, not technical at all, I just am aware of everything. Like I'm always wondering like, where does CSS come into play? Right, for me, it's like, I feel like right now, like I'm definitely much more on the marketing side of things and like how things feel and look and stuff. And I feel like that's a lot of CSS. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but like, and I just the way the markets going, I feel like anybody can build something now, but it's like, how was it used? How does it look? How does it feel? And you correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that is CSS a little bit.

Yeah, well, so CSS is the visual language of the web. When I talk about building CSS skills, it's really more about implementation. So it's, you know, you have a design, it looks a certain way, it's meant to respond a certain way to different screen sizes. JavaScript is more about like implementation, like, or not like features and behavior. CSS is like the styling, but also the responsiveness. And that is like, I see Trey in the comments. Yeah, I was gonna say that. I used tailwind. The thing is, it's all CSS. Like tailwind, the browser only understands CSS. Tailwind compiles, it doesn't even compile, it's just classes.

And this is, and I also saw Barrett talk about how CSS is painful. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely true. The thing about CSS, and this is why I think a small amount of time can make such a big difference, is it's an extremely abstracted language. Like you write this little property, display flex, front-weight bolt, right? These little things. And these in massive machines behind the scenes pluck those values and assemble them in weird ways. There's all these concepts, and this is like, for myself, I had been writing building web applications for like 10 years. And like I mentioned earlier, like in the dark feeling around, I never took the time to learn it.

I just would experiment and see what works. And you get little snippets that you can copy paste, right? You figure, okay, these five properties together do this thing. But then, you know, the 30th time you do it, after 29 successful attempts, it doesn't make different. And you think, well, that's, you know, did I make a mistake? No, it's the same truck of CSS. But the thing is you're feeding these properties into this machine, and the machine's considering the entire context of everything else, and everything in CSS depends on everything else. And so there's these concepts like stacking contacts and containing blocks, things that you will never organically discover while writing CSS, but if you take the 20 minutes to learn what each of those things are, everything makes so much more sense.

Because I promise you, a lot of people think CSS is just random or unpredictable or rickety. It's not. It's any other software. The same inputs produce the same outputs 100% of the time. The problem is that the inputs are much broader. You write this little bit of code and a bunch of other stuff happens. So that's where it can get confusing. That's mine. I think it's such a valuable thing to spend some time learning. I love that. No, I love that a ton. I like this skill up and whatever helps the business needs the most. I love this from Jordan. I think there's a lot of what I call resume driven development, which is like, like, you know, what's hot, you know, you know, what's, you know, what's the hot and the, the zeitgeist of the tech world.

But listen, you know, and this is actually a conversation. We've had a torque a lot about building community. We're actually redoing our marketing site. We're talking about, because what really we want to do is torque is like, we really want to help people throughout their career, but we also know that some people don't want to do the latest and greatest. Some people just want to, I joke about Cobol a lot, because I recruited a ton of Cobol and mainframe stuff. There's still a lot of it. It powers a lot of enterprise clients. It's like, I do think, And again, Josh, I would love to hear your thoughts.

I think if you are starting out your journey and or wanting to pivot in your journey, I do think talking to people, doing some research and not always going out for the hottest thing will probably benefit you maybe even more. Yeah, I would say that it's always complicated. And it goes back a little bit to what I was saying about like everyone focuses on JavaScript, React is the most common front end framework, which means everybody focuses on React. And it's simultaneously true that there are more React jobs than Angular or Cobol or anything else. But there's also more developers. So there is some, if you had perfect access to all information, you could figure out the biggest opportunities, right?

Where they're the most demanding, the least supply. I don't know how to do that logic. I don't have that data. But what I would say is, I start my first software development job was as a Ruby developer on the back end. Yeah, yeah. It was fun. I enjoy that, but I found I wouldn't get so much more energy out of the front end tasks. And Ruby, you know, it's not a front end framework. So eventually I sort of, it's like, it's just, that's the way the pieces sort of felt. Like I wound up spending more of my time doing the thing that I liked, and that's where I wound up working.

So I think a lot of the time, it's, you know, it can be a valuable strategy to figure out where is the biggest opportunity. if you're like really disciplined and really able or just like really broadly interested in things. But I think for most of us, like just take the thing that you enjoy the most, you'll be really cool. You'll get a lot harder, you'll get a lot further with it. Yeah, within reason, right? Like if you're, I think that like a lot of us would rather just play the guitar all day. And like, well, that's a different story. Right, right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But within the scope of tech, I think that there is. Yeah. And again, I would say right now too, the trend I've seen is like companies like I think last two years with COVID, like companies were fine with generalists. Like if you touched a bunch of different technologies, like you were good with that, I think we're definitely back to being a specialist. And so I think if you can like drill down in one skill set and be known as like the CSS person or, you know, the whatever, right? I think that carries a little bit more weight right now. And in this market. I love this the amount of effort I've seen people taking and avoiding to clean CSS would have made them a CSS expert.

100% Steven as good as he is. Alright, I'm just wrap up here again. Thank you all for tuning in. Please go connect with Josh. Please go check out his course. I thought though, up his course here. So Josh, I do kind of this rapid fire. You were on like a thing a year ago, but we'll do it again. So first question I always asked if I told you tomorrow that you can't wake up and do what you do, you can't be in tech anymore, but I'll pay the same amount of money, if not more to pursue a hobby essentially, what would it be? Making music.

I have a grand piano behind me. So I'm not interested in this maybe. Oh, that's fantastic. I love that, man. All right. So then the next question, which kind of goes the first question is outside of that, what do you like to do outside of work? Yeah, I mean, that's I have been spending a lot more time recently making music, which is a lot of fun. That's really cool. The and I wish I had an example on me. I one of the things I spent most of my life doing was yoyoing. So I know and I find it's actually a really helpful skill for developers because it's just enough like it keeps your hands busy and it keeps your mind kind of busy If you're ever like stuck on a hard problem and like you know the trick of like going for a walk and you come back and all the time That the clarity could it's like a great tool for that I mean not the only tool for that but it's like a great way to get that same effect of taking yourself away from something Yeah, I love that.

Yeah, you're doing Um, uh, dude. I was a big y'all. We were back in the day, man. I loved that. That was fantastic The third question, anything you've read, watched, consumed lately in the tech ecosystem that you have enjoyed or you're keeping an eye on or you're actually implementing from a day-to-day coding perspectives or just any content recommendations, I guess you could say within the tech space? That's a good question. The person I find myself nodding along to the most is Danny Thompson. Like every time you post something on Blue Sky, he's like, oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. for many of you.

I think so too, man. He's great. He and I, he and I go back to COVID. He did a kind of a call for people. I guess you could say to do LinkedIn critiques and ask the lady who is DM's and ever since he's been a, he's been a dear friend. So yeah, love dating to death. I mean, just popped into our discord the other day too. Last question to be wrapped up here and again. Thank you all for tuning in today. I appreciate it. We appreciate it. You know, the show's called Guidance Councilor 2.0 for a reason. We had Guidance Councilor's in middle school, high school and college.

and adults we don't really necessarily have a guidance counselor to return to, ask for career advice, ask for help, general help, career stuff. What would, if you could go back in like, in time and give Josh some career advice, young Josh, what would you tell him? Yeah, and actually I'm gonna immediately contradict myself. The one thing Danny says that I don't agree with is he really puts a strong emphasis on in-person meetups, going to meetups, meeting people in person, going to new working events. And that's great advice for many people. I took that advice, it did not work at at all for me. I was in Toronto at the time getting started as a Ruby developer and so there was something called Rails Pubnights where developers would every one Wednesday every month, they'd go to a pub and they'd have beers and talk.

And I don't like beer, I don't like drinking. So I'd go to these things and I would sit and feel awkward and not talk to many people and leave just thinking that this was a colossal waste of time. And the imposter syndrome and one of my even younger people, this does not seem like the crowd that I can assimilate my way into. And that's just because that's not my jam. It's the way that I eventually found success was building stuff and showing that stuff online. So I think that there's a 1,001, like years ago I posted a tweet, which was like, if you work as a software developer and you don't have a CS degree, how do you get in?

And 500 people answered and it was 500 unique stories. And I tried my best to like categorize them. Right, right. Like, you know, what works for one person, it's, I think I said this a little bit earlier, like playing to your strengths. I think that like if you are really charismatic or just really extroverted, meetups are a great way to go and meet people. If you're shy and introverted like me, that's not really the best advice because you're gonna go and unless there is someone gregarious enough to pull you in, it's not compatible with exactly. So I think that there's so many different ways in, and that would be my advice is just focus on your strengths.

Like do the stuff that you like doing. I love that. Be sure to share it, but don't try to follow the standard advice. if you can kind of tell that Senator device won't work for you. Yeah, I love that. I mean, for me, like absolutely retweet there. You know, I, you know, if people know me kind of in like the conference community, like like, I don't stay out late. Like you have me from eight to eight. That's it. And I get tired. I kind of crash in the evenings. I'm a social sprinter is what they call it. And so, you know, and so I've learned that I can scale myself that over social media and lives like this.

I really crave one-on-one intentional time with people. And so this is one of my key ways to just hang out and catch up with folks in tech. But also too, I totally agree. You got the James Quicks of the world who stay out late and do the damn thing and shout out to him and anybody else who can do it, but I just can't. And so I've just learned to that. And I think the big thing is be present and be engaged. And I think however you can do that within a community setting, I think is fantastic. So Josh, I love that. I love that.

All right, y'all. Thank you. Thank you again, Josh. Stay on backstage. I can say bye to you. But again, y'all have a great one. Have a great weekend. I'm going to talk to Kent Dodds. I have Kent Dodds on Monday, but it's also Veterans Day. And I know a lot of people have off. So I'm going to talk to Kent. We may go live on Monday to pay on his schedule. He may reschedule. But Monday right now is Kent see Dodds coming on the show. But anyway, y'all have a great one. Well, may see you Monday. If not, we'll definitely see you next week. Y'all will go in.

Peace. Hey, y'all. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful. Because 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 T.S.

and on all social media handles, and I hope you have a fantastic day.