Learning in Public with Swyx Software Sessions

Swyx is a senior developer advocate at AWS, an instructor at Egghead, and the author of The Coding Career Playbook.

We discuss:

Getting help without having a big followingRemixing and summarizing what others createCreating FriendcatchersBetting on technologiesHis new book "The Coding Career Playbook"
Music by Crystal Cola: 12:30 AM / Orion

Related Links

@swyxPersonal SiteThe Coding Career Playbook1% ruleLindy EffectLearn in PublicThe Ultimate Hack for Learning in PublicThe Day I Became a Software EngineerDeveloper's Guide to Tech StrategyEvery Public Engineering Career LadderFriendcatchersReact Typescript CheatsheetSteve Yegge's Google Platforms RantDynamoDB BookEggheadFrontend MastersHow I Write Backends
Transcript

You can help edit this transcript on GitHub.

Jeremy: I did a computer science bachelor's.

Swyx: [00:00:45] Nice.

Jeremy: [00:00:46] It's interesting seeing how you learned because when I went through school, I wasn't super passionate I think particularly because when I was going through school a lot of it was, data structures and algorithms and stuff like that, and it was a little bit disconnected from when I first started where I was like I'm going to make games.

I'm going to make cool GUIs and like when I get to school, it's like there's none of that. It's really on me I should have been seeking that stuff out on my own. It wasn't until a few years later after I had started working where I really started, enjoying the process, enjoying learning about the technologies and building stuff. Looking at what you were doing I definitely should have been doing that when I was going through school

Swyx: [00:01:34] Well, I mean, you're still figuring out what you want when you're still in college, Yeah. I went to school for finance and I no longer do that (laughs). But, yeah, I don't, I mean, don't live life with too many regrets it's not worth it.

I fell into this way of learning because of other people. All I'm doing is trying to spread the message and there will be more beneficiaries of this than me. I'm definitely lacking a lot of things that you learned in college.

I'm trying to make up for it. I really want to take an OS course. I want someone to force me to do a basic operating systems course. And I don't know what a syscall is, and I don't know the details on memory allocation and all that, like, but on some level, it doesn't matter because it depends on what part of the stack you want to work in. But I just don't have the option available to me if I wanted to go further down the stack. I just don't.

I still personally do wish that I did a CS degree. I'm just saying I definitely did not catch up with what you already know just from my bullshit web dev stuff. But, it's enough to get a job, which is absurd. This is the only career where, it's high paid and you can get up there in like three months ish. Maybe you won't be amazing. You're not going to be Jeff Dean or something at Google. But you can get by decently and you get paid the same as a doctor or a lawyer. And that's ridiculous.

Jeremy: [00:03:01] I found that to be pretty pretty insane. Though I will say, when you were talking about you can get a job in just three months or whatever. But your background it's really not the three month boot camp right? You had a much longer tail in terms of all the things that you've learned at your previous jobs. You said you had used Haskell right? That's before you went to the bootcamp

Swyx: [00:03:27] Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely not speaking for myself in terms of the three month thing. But I have seen my fellow bootcamp people get good jobs. Obviously there's a failure rate as some people don't make it. But it doesn't happen for medicine or law.

Jeremy: [00:03:39] Yes. Instead, it's six years, eight years, and then like you've talked before, when people learn something, it's normal for them to share what they've learned.

Swyx: [00:03:48] Also we'll promote you for it if you do a great job. It's just f