w/james quick, javascript developer & dev advocate

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

I now have my dear friend. I'm gonna call him a dear friend even though we just met. It's like speed dating, like having these things are like speed dating, but James, thanks for joining me and I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. That's actually been one of my hacks during COVID as I started a joint livestream bringing on, yes, on Fridays. And it's just an easy way to reach out to random strangers that you think are doing cool stuff. And let's be friends. Yeah, it works out. Yeah, so I mean, again, so for those of you who are tuning in, add us, comment us, Let's know where you're tuning in from Chase.

Good morning. It's good to see you man again. Yeah. And so I, for those of you who are starting to tune in, I do eat my own dog food, as they say. I, I DM strangers, James, what they stranger, IBM, James. I said, Hey, James, I appreciate you. You should come on. And he goes, okay. So here we are. Tiffany, what's going on? Key short, good morning. Casey, it's only Wednesday. You've had two guests. Yes, it's been busy, Casey, it's been busy. John, good morning, Kayla's good morning. Herbert, I appreciate it, man, I appreciate it. Jason, what's going on? It's good to see you again.

Y'all at us, comments, no lurkers this morning. I do want to go ahead and dive in. Y'all keep commenting, but I want to give obviously, kind of the pleasantries out of the way. I want to first give a shout out to made South Meals sponsorship of the show. If you are in there, only in Nashville, So James, sorry, you cannot get a part of made South meals. But if you struggle with meal prep, just like I do grocery shopping, it takes me three hours to go to the grocery store to the point where my wife hates it. So she just grocery shops for me now us.

So if you struggle with that and you're in the Nashville area, my boy, Alex Blue made South meals, check him out. He's in Murphy'sboro. He's open every day to pick up meals, but then also you can order for the week. So tell Alex I sent you again, thank you made South meals for the sponsorship. Also shout out Brandon Arvey, Brandon 78, who's the kind of the brains behind all my content. If you are wanting to start content, we're gonna talk about this today with James, but if you wanna start content on a low budget, hit up my buddy, Brandon Arvey, and Brandon 78. A few more shout outs with some people coming in and I'll finally stop running my mouth.

Marco, what's going on? Good morning, good, you found us from Twitter. I love it, Oscar, what's going on? Jason goes, I like James YouTube. James the Man. That's why I have him. And just going on, oh, hey James, I'm just, okay. It's me. Caleb, what's going on, man? Philip, hello, finally with someone with better hair than Taylor. All righty, there you go. Brandon, what's going on, man? All right, sweet. So James, tell me who you are, what you do, and then we'll go from there. Yeah, I say I've been going through some rebranding stuff and redesign stuff personally for a while. But I've got a new tagline, which I teach developers through content, which hits on three of the most important things about me.

I've gone by another tagline line of developer speaker teacher for a while. So I teach developers that hits I teach developers development code, programming, all that stuff, and then content. So I've been like more generically a content creator, I think, for the last couple of years on YouTube live streams on Twitch Started on TikTok, which has been fun. It kind of just quirky weird videos. Yeah, that one's been fun. And then Day job actually we talked about this a little bit before we started. We'll probably talk a little bit more But I am now the developer marketing media manager at Auth0. So I get to work a lot with our our developer media.

So our YouTube channel, technical content, working with content creators in the community and helping us explore other platforms, getting into Twitter spaces and maybe TikTok as well. Also, can I do one huge shout out for myself? Yeah, dude. I mean, this is your show this morning, man. I'm just here to facilitate. But I think this will be like entertaining for everyone. Everyone go and check out the Auth0 YouTube channel, a UTH0. Here, hold on. Hold on, how do you spell it? I'm gonna create a banner right now. What is it? AUTA. A-U-T-H-0. Okay. And the reason I send you there is- Like my home. So it'll be YouTube.com slash all zero.

Okay. I can grab, I'll grab you a link and put it in the chat or put it in the private one for you as well. Ad banner, here we go. Is it that? Let me see. Yes, it should be. Somebody give that a try. Yeah, someone gave it a try, but I'd love you. And let us know, yeah. So here's a fun fact about me. In my personal time, I rap. I make rap music. A lot of it's super like- I'm sorry, what? I didn't talk about this topic. Yeah, no, it didn't. But a lot of it's super personal and it's kind of like my diary type thing.

So it's like emotionally, that's how I deal with stuff a lot. But it's been a few months ago, I wrote an all zero rap and then we had a video editor edit it. So the video is dropping on the all zero YouTube channel in two and a half hours. So it's at 12 p.m. Central. So go and check out the YASE or YouTube channel and check out the YASE or RAP, which is dropping in a couple hours. I will pin that out for sure. Obviously a few more comments coming in, Marco, what's going on, Matt, what's going on. James is a B, subscribing ASAP. YASE is one of the most useful pieces of tech in all development.

I love it. Casey goes, it works. Okay, thank you, Casey, we appreciate it. We appreciate it. So James, so give a rundown of your journey real quick with talk to me about kind of moving into, I guess your current role, some decisions, right? And let's kind of dive into, so what we're gonna talk about today for the individuals who are watching, we're talking about career development, where to go, what else is out there. So James, talk about your journey, how your thought process was to go this way, and then maybe some advice for other developers out there. Yeah, talking about a very broad question. Yeah, no, I get it.

So I oddly enough with no career trajectory, with no ambition, no specific goals, no plan, got into Microsoft as a technical evangelist coming out of college. And the way that worked is actually, so you're probably familiar with the Cheerion company in Asheville, I applied for them, I got asked basic computer science questions, and after a four year degree at a top university in the world, couldn't answer any of them. Like I just, I got good grades in college. It's not that I was slacking off. I just didn't appreciate what I was doing and I treated it like a memorization test. So I wasn't actually learning how to program.

I was just trying to pass tests and get good grades, which I did, but I didn't walk out of there within college honestly that I should have. So I applied for Java to Shareon, which they told me no. I applied for a software developer role at Microsoft. They said no, but they liked me. So they said, hey, how about this technical account manager role? Applied for that, I've actually flew out to DC for interviews, got told no. And as a compensation for that, they sent us back the group of us who got told no back to the hotel on a limousine. Really odd, kind of awkward.

Yeah, really awkward situation. They still liked me though. Yeah. Congrats. You didn't get the job, but you get to ride a limo for one of the first times in your life. Cool. So they still liked me enough. And they brought up this technical evangelist role, which is the most ridiculous title, especially at that point that anyone had ever heard of. And oddly enough, my Spanish was something that really helped me because they were looking to fill a slot in Miami, and they noticed that I had a double major in computer science in Spanish. So I started at Microsoft as a technical evangelist. So at the age of 22 with like not very good technical experience, not having learned a ton in college honestly, I was giving talks and presentations and workshops to rooms full of people of different age groups, groups, but at times to people who had been doing development longer than I have.

Yeah. Or sorry, longer than I had been alive, not longer than I had, longer than I had. Just longer than I've been alive, period. Yeah, total. So I did that and I started to find like my kind of my comfort zone. I enjoyed speaking. I enjoyed working with people. I enjoyed teaching. I was in classrooms and startups and all kinds of things, which is really neat. Fast forward a little bit. I transitioned. My wife and I moved back to Memphis, transitioned to FedEx, which is the headquarters here. software development, which I really needed. Like I needed that like everyday right code type scenario to kind of build my technical skills.

But then I realized I missed. I missed being at conferences. I missed being more actively engaged in the community. I missed doing YouTube videos. And so I started doing that stuff on my own, paying my way to go to conferences at times, doing videos more consistently. And decided I wanted to apply for developer advocate role that then became all zero. And at the time we talked about this before, I could literally just point to here's a hundred videos that I've created, here's 50 paid blog posts that I did. Here's all the content that I've done, the conferences that I've spoken at. And I think that kind of stuff at that point really spoke for itself.

And so I started with Auth0 early 2020 just before COVID and I've been working there ever since. That's awesome, man. So let's, what's the first advice to developers, right? because again, everybody who's tuning in right now are newer in their career, maybe mid-kind of in their career. What's just some advice from a career perspective you would have that you wish you would have known or that you want to share today for people either getting into the industry or currently in it? Yeah, probably two things. One is looking back on my experience of getting a grades and really not understanding the things that I should have.

Try to make programming personal in some way. Like try to build something yourself. That's the best way to learn in general when you kind of throw off the, here's the homework requirements. When you get into this open world of just building something yourself or being asked questions yourself, it's totally different. And so like the, like I could confidently answer the programming questions that I couldn't answer before, but it's because I've now learned those things just by doing. That's to me the best thing. So I would say make it personal, make it something you enjoy, try to appreciate programming for what it is. It's the biggest enabler there is.

You can literally build anything. And that was a big transition for me of embracing, going from a consumer of technology and things to now a producer. Now I look at something and I'm like, oh, I wonder how they built that, or I could build that, or I could do it better, or I could build my own startup, or I could create content, all that kind of stuff. The other thing, and this is general career, but especially in programming is having program experience doesn't mean the only role that you're able to do a software development. You can do lots of different things, including what I'm doing now.

This is a totally, like no one is talking about DevRel coming out of college. Most people aren't. Most people aren't talking about DevRel coming out of a boot camp, but this is a way for you, especially if you have interests or skills that are outside of programming that are public speaking, your content creation are always or I just read always because you flash the thing. Sorry. Yeah. I'm trying to keep it all straight. Yeah. There's just, there's more to it than just software development. So ask questions, reach out to people, send those DMs that you talked about, learn about what other kind of opportunities there are and then see if like maybe you want to write code eight hours a day, which is fantastic.

Maybe you don't. Maybe you want something a little bit different, but you'll never know what opportunities are out there. If you don't do some research and reach out and ask. So you said something that I want to dig into, right? And again, for everybody's watches, this is not scripted. Like I never scripted. We didn't have any notes at all. We talked about it. Yeah, no, no. Honestly, I just met James literally 30 minutes ago. So James, you said something about asking, right? Learning. Talk to me about the importance of networking. Because that's kind of my entire like mantra is networking, slide it into DMs, right?

Like do the thing, meet the people. What are your thoughts on networking? How important is it? Give me some James' thoughts on networking. Yeah, I'll tell you what networking isn't first. Networking is not what people stereotypically think of which is you walk up to someone, hi, I'm James, I do this. Like the just like you're right to the point, just I wanna figure out what we can do together type of thing. It's not what it is. like genuinely investing in people and relationships and community. And that can lead to a million different things. And you can help that person. They can help you, but it doesn't start from, I need to meet as many people as I can.

It starts from being genuine. Like I need to be in the community. I want to surround myself with people. I want to invest in these people. And there's, there's a lot that you can do. I think a lot of it first and foremost is being in the community. community, keep me in a lot of things. It could be a lot. It could be Twitter. It could be in person at meetups and conferences and all that kind of stuff. But it is, I had this in college actually a lot in that relationship management is the key to success. And I think that's absolutely true. And one of the things I didn't mention when I was applying for all zero is I had two or three people that referred me.

So by the time I applied and the hiring manager had two or three people that that she could ask to, hey, what do you know about James? And they had good things to say, which obviously helps. And for me in my career, because I've worked with so many different people and so many different communities, if I'm looking for a different role, no offense to you, I don't need a recruiter. I am my own recruiter. Like I've got my own network and I'll say, like, hey, what do you, how do you like working at the company that you're at? Friend of mine, person I've known for years, and they'll give me real insights and then they would have vouch for me if I go to apply for a job.

So that like, I have such, I feel like such high trajectory now in my career, such control over my career, because I've built such genuine relationships with people where if I actually did need something or asked for a favor, I feel like that would be something that people would be happy to reciprocate because I've done that stuff for other people throughout the entirety of my career as well. I love that, I love that. So I wanna catch up on some comments here. Obviously I've been flashing up a lot. They go, Josue goes, would love to hear James rap, am I the only one? Definitely not the only one.

Two hours, whatever. Yes, I would love to hear James rap. Y'all, two hours, it's going on Auth0, YouTube. Check it out. William Johnson, what's going on, boys? Good to see you. So let's dive in, because we've been kind of like playing, we've been kind of just stepping around it, content creation. I want to just dive in, because we need to address the elephant in the room. And, well, actually we got a question from Alicia. So Alicia is my dear friend here, national director of engineering at a company in town. So before we dive into content creation, because also we have another question about it too.

James, what's the one non-coding based skill technology to learn? I think we uncovered it just now, but obviously if you wanna answer this question. Networking part is huge for so many different ways, But I think a thing behind networking is being comfortable speaking. And I don't mean speaking at a conference, although that's obviously a way to get notoriety. But if you think about how a developer goes from a regular title developer to a senior principal or whatever, a lot of it comes from much more than just programming skills. It's your ability to teach. And most importantly, it's your ability to communicate. Like, the higher upset companies need developers that are experienced enough and are articulate enough that they can trust to translate these technical concepts to things that other people can understand.

Not that other people that aren't technical aren't capable of doing that. That's just not their language. That's not the stuff that they do every day. So I think like communication is so key. The communication plays into networking, right? Like you can't network if you can't talk to people. And it's huge. But for me and my career at FedEx, I did a double promotion, which almost never happens. I became an architect, which is something that I was probably, I don't know this for sure, but probably the youngest architect's title at the entire company at the time. And that came from me, one, speaking out for stuff that I believed in, one, calling us out when we didn't do things that we should have, and then also communicating with my manager of what I wanted in my career.

And that's also been a big factor of what I'm doing now at all, zero, which is they basically carved out new role for me based on what I told them I was really interested in. That's amazing. Also, Sean, I'll zero for being very good with ideas and fostering that, with fostering that culture. Um, that's fantastic. Um, William Johnson goes relationships have been critical to my career. Um, so I'm going to scroll up here real quick. Casey goes, James, as someone who has been getting the content creation, how did you handle doing workshops and talks, knowing that you were really green? How did you make sure that you were teaching authoritatively, that's a big word on this Wednesday, Casey, and responsibly.

This is also a fantastic question. James, take it away. Yeah. Here's the simplest thing that comes with that. To speak to a room full of anyone about some topic, you don't have to know more than they do. You just have to know more about the one thing that you're talking about than they do. You also don't have to be an expert on that thing depending on your audience. Now, if you're speaking on a topic where the room is experts, then you damn well better know expert level stuff because you're going to get those questions. But you just have to know more than your audience. And for me, what that became was I was teaching mobile app development to developers who had never done mobile app development.

They had been writing .NET. They've been writing code for 20 plus years. They'd never done that specific thing. And so I was able to bring that to the table and say, like, all right, you've never done this. So I can introduce you to it. I can answer these questions. I'm not gonna be able to answer the deeper questions that I just don't have experience with. So I think you can find your topic in your audience and make sure that those things merge well so that you can be more comfortable at something hopefully that you're excited about and something that you're knowledgeable enough about. And then the audience has that thing to learn.

Right, I love that. Real quick, going back, Alicia said, sorry. Alicia, be more, be better with communication. He meant tech related. James, what are you seeing right now that people should know or that are missing the mark. Let's just say early on in their career. I don't know, it's a pretty broad one. Two things come to mind. One, I like the idea of people having full-stack experience. Regardless of whether or not you wanna be on the front end or the back end or databases or whatever, I think it's good to have a solid understanding of how they all fit together. I think that's important because the conversations you have on either side are now influenced by your knowledge of how they all fit together.

Right. The other thing that I had in mind that I'm blanking on now, oh, a lot of people come out of boot camps. Um, and they don't have any data structures and algorithms experience. Now here is, here's the thing. We probably all agree technical interviews are not best by forcing someone to whiteboard and solve something right code line. You see my tweet. Did you see my tweet from yesterday? I maybe, but I think I've seen blue up. There's like 300 comments and it's literally about trying to figure out a better way to evaluate talent than take home tests and or whiteboarding. So. But the caveat to that is if you're a realist, that's the kind of thing that if you want to get that job, that may be something that you have to go through.

Yeah. So like the data structures and algorithms for those types of things, specifically like the Google interviews, which I've done, I got turned down twice after doing an in person all day, both times. There we go. But having that experience now opens up more opportunities and aside from it being like you put in this pressurized environment of having to do it live, it's still really useful for how you solve problems. It's not the game changer of whether or not you should get a job in my mind, probably in your mind, but it is something that can help facilitate you getting the job and then coming up with better solutions as you start to write code.

So it's something that I recommend, especially with bootcamp students, that they spend some time after to just get some practice and get some awareness of what's out there and what data structures and algorithms means. I love that. All right, content creation. What is it? How can people get started? What should people be mindful of? What should people do it? I mean, let's just give a quick overview. See where that goes. Why should people do it? There's infinite opportunities in your career that come from content creation. I recommended everyone of my bootcamp students, write blog articles, create videos, all the things, because that's just a testimony to your skills.

And again, your ability to communicate whether written or verbal or video. That level of comfortness is something that as you look for leaders on a technical aspect, that ability to communicate is actually really, really important. So tons of different career opportunities, not to mention they reach out to you more than you reach out to them because your stuff is out there for people to see. As far as how to get started, the biggest piece of advice is just write that first article, do that first video, let it be shitty and make the next one better. Like don't wait too long to try to make the first one perfect because it's not gonna be.

Don't invest a ton of money upfront because you don't need it yet. Like just start with what you have or something cheap. Do the thing, see what people say, see how you feel about it, and then continue to do better next time. Like if you look at my first YouTube video from eight years ago or however long it is, it's drastically different than the video content that I put out now. but the thing is I've been doing it now for eight years and I have a million different things that I've learned and applied. So just get started, it's never been more accessible. You can record a YouTube video on your phone if you want to.

You can write articles on a hash node to set up an account there and have a blog ready to go for free. You could build out your own blog if you're a developer and you're interested in that and want that experience. There's infinite opportunities to get started. Take one, do it, see what you think, make it better next time, and then maybe pivot to a different form of content if you enjoy something else better. I enjoy video. I don't write as much because I just enjoy doing videos more. Yeah, absolutely. Casey, if you're digging into video and you're open to video editing, shoot me DM.

I'm looking for more people. So James, talk to me. But let's give some practical things, right? Right? You just went over what you should do from a content creation perspective. What is it done for your career? Like, give me some examples of like, Cause you said people reach out to you, but like, talk about what it's done for James quick. And then also real quick, Jason come and do. So it's as simple as a blog. Yes, it's doing that, but like every day. Yeah. Or just like to take a little bit of the pressure off to start like once a month, once a week, like give yourself a consistency goal to get into the situation.

All my hands like every day. Every day. There's a, there's definitely a balance, but the consistency I think is key. So things that have worked out for me because of content, one, I talked about like by the time I applied for R0, I had people to advocate for me based on content that I created. And then I could just, on my resume, I can say I've got now, I'm approaching 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. I've taught tens of thousands of students online, and I've taught 100 or 300 different students in bootcamp scenarios as well. Those are, that's irrefutable. Like if you have a resume and you say, I'm a really hard worker and I blah, blah, blah, blah, it's all just work.

Like it literally doesn't mean anything. But if you have something tangible to show to say this is what I've done, I don't need to tell you that I can communicate. Go watch a video and you can see that. It's pretty obvious. So career opportunities in that sense, all zero was huge. I make side income. Like this is huge for me. Is I get paid well to do my job at all zero? I also then get to create YouTube videos and courses and do sponsored videos on YouTube things outside of regular work stuff that I know and I love and I enjoy it, but I also get to make money from it.

A specific example, I think like my next YouTube ads check is going to be like two grand. Pretty sweet considering like I just do videos that I enjoy doing. I'm out of here on James's level. James man. Hey, it's nice. Also for the people who are watching, I just found out James and I are giving it the same conference at KCDC. I'm going to like awesome hostess, James. I'm going to follow James around the whole time and trying to like learn all the things. That's going to be a fun one first. It'll be my first conference post-COVID. Yeah. Yeah. So if you comments come through, so Brian, Brian goes, when you learn something right, I've used my own blog post to remember how certain things work.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, Umar goes, but do you write scripts for your videos, James? I'd like to see your manuscripts to get the gems that get lost on the editing room floor. I don't write scripts at all. I have like bullet point notes. This is actually how I approach speaking to you. Like if you write an entire script and you only read it based on that script, you lose the ability to adapt a little bit because you're only used to reading it one way, especially when you give a talk. So for me, I have bullet points and if I rehearse a talk multiple times, it's slightly different every time with the same general content, but it gives me that ability to adapt.

It's a lot less formal even than that. for me for YouTube videos. I don't script, I have bullet points, but one of the things I do wanna do better at to help other people do YouTube videos specifically for our zero is help giving them an outline so that it takes like I've done a million videos at this point, but other people haven't. So how can I translate a little bit of the things that I take for granted to help other people? So I wanna do more of that kind of scripting outline type stuff for other people to make it easier for them to create content.

I love that so much, I love that so much. James, how's it going to wrap up here? Because we all have jobs. James is going to go produce more content, and so am I. What is a nugget you want to leave with individuals, whether it's content creation, whether it's job search, whatever, any last closing remarks from James? Big thing for me that we talked a little bit about before we started, if you, whatever you're doing in your career, if you find yourself complaining about that thing or having negative thoughts about that thing or you realize that you're just not doing, you're just not enjoying the stuff you're doing on a consistent basis.

It's time to do something else and do something else might mean a different manager, might mean a different team, it might be a different company, it might be a different career, but it's time to make one of those changes. Now I do want to address like it doesn't mean that you can just all of a sudden go and get a different job and you're way happier and you make a lot more money. That's not how it works. What I mean is like you have to be honest with yourself and look at every day. you come home happy, are you happy at work, are you enjoying the stuff you're doing, or are you not?

And if you're not, what can you start to do to kind of move the needle ever so slightly? So if you wanted to make a career change, for example, what extracurricular activities could you do? If you're a developer, you want to be a developer advocate, you can start creating content, you can start going to meetups, you can start applying a conferences. It's not going to happen overnight, but if you find yourself doing things that you, honestly, for For me, if I don't love it every day, that's not the kind of thing that I want to try to shift, right? I want to change that needle a little bit every day.

So that's a big kind of light for me, golden light. I don't know what the thing is, but that's the kind of thing that I follow for me is I should be basically chasing happiness, whatever that means, and that can change every day, every week, every year, but I should be chasing and pursuing happiness every day. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Wow. Everyone, thank you for tuning in to God's Captain America. and she's going out this morning. It's been a good one. James, thank you so much, my friend. I definitely want to stay in touch and watch your journey through Oxhero because it's very similar to what I'm going through.

Y'all, thank you again. Y'all go connect with James on Twitter. James, what's your Twitter account? James Q Quick. James Q Quick, add him on Twitter. And connect them on LinkedIn. Y'all shoot me a text. If you want to be a part of my texting community, one text message to your friend today on how to level up your job search, 615-235-5650, James, you need to get on this by the way, because it's really cool. And y'all have a great, great Wednesday, great hump day, and we'll see you all tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah.