Egghead.io Developer Chats

Khalal's first language was Java, he learned his it in school. He didn't like coding in school because all they did was learn algorithms and data structures. How many people have completely turned away from this amazing career where you get to build cool things like dad jokes in text messages simply because classes get structured around data structures, algorithms, and Java?New coders should take a step back before jumping straight to a Bootcamp. Take time to learn on your own to make sure this is what you want to do or what you want to invest in. You'll still be doing a lot of self-lead learning anyway when attending a Bootcamp.Try to find people who went to the Bootcamp. Don't look on websites like Course Report where almost every Bootcamp is five stars. Get on LinkedIn and find developers who graduated the Bootcamp and talk to them, you'll get honest insights.ISAs are the only option for most people to attend Bootcamps. You have to be coming from a place of privilege to pay the 18-20 thousand dollars upfro

Making technical decisions for your business when you don't have experience as a developer is difficult. It's scary to make decisions that you don't know the consequences of.Tracy got into development when at one point she had the freetime to take an HTML, CSS, JavaScript course online. Becoming a developer taught Tracy the importance of grouping her meetings so she could have uninterrupted blocks of time to get work done. Before, she didn't realize the impact that breaking people's flow had.A lot of people are trying to become developers. One of the more common routes now is attending a bootcamp. But be careful, not all bootcamps are equal. Graduates from some bootcamps struggle a lot harder in the hiring process than others. Make sure that you do your research and talk to people who graduated from the program.Transcript"Out With The 10x Developer And In With The 10x Mentor With Tracy Lee" TranscriptQuotes"I feel like if you're not technical, it's almost like you're scared to make the decision"". . . I group

To executives, new features mean more money, but even if you had terrific features, they wouldn't be worth a thing if they only worked half the time. Reliability isn't something you want to put off until later after the project has grown, it will save you a lot of time and money if you factor it in from day one. Everyone has adapted to a speedy internet these days. Users leave if the site is taking more than even a few seconds to load. It's easy to get overly focused on features while losing the context of the overall application. The first and foremost solid you can do future you is to keep things as simple as possible. Never get overly complicated, that's where you run into scaling troubles. Complexity also causes significant headaches when bringing other people on. In addition to keeping complexity low, make sure documentation gets written and that it's kept up to date. A solution that Molly's company has put in place to keep the docs fresh is to give every document an expiration date three months out from

How many of us still almost exclusively use console.log() when trying to debug something? It's okay, plenty of us do it that way, but you could be saving yourself a lot of pain and suffering by using the debugger and stepping through the execution. There are several advantages to using a debugger, you get a tighter feedback loop, a lot more information, and it allows you to go into places you wouldn't have even thought about. Now debugging can take you far, but there are times when we need another human to help us. Asking questions is anxiety-inducing, "what if this is something I should already know?" "am I being annoying?" "am I interrupting them from doing something important?" The key is to remember that there is no such thing as a dumb question, but there are questions that haven't been thoroughly vetted. Stack overflow has an excellent wiki on asking good questions. Learn how to form good questions, and everything will end up being okay! Justin is doing good work in bringin

Everything is a system, and every system is a box in another larger system. It's up to managers to think in systems to make choices and understand their consequences. The manager has an obligation to their team. The decisions of managers make a tremendous impact on folk's lives.But managers are only human."When we go into school there's kind of this sense that authorities are these all-knowing kind of perfect figures that are responsible for everything." The reality is that managers are humans that are dealing with their circumstances. It's easy to put all of the responsibility on them, but they need to be seen as people.People fail. Managers aren't the only people burdened with responsibility. There's the "10x Engineer" or "The Hero Programmer," that end up with severe burnout.Managing is an ethical and moral profession. Managers have to make ethical decisions in regards to deciding who gets promoted, fired, given a raise. How do we get justice and results? That's what makes management an elegant puzzle.Tran

Marisa Morby is a professional product manager. A common question she gets is "what's the difference between a product manager and a project manager?" There's a lot of overlap, but the difference is a product manager has to understand what needs to get done and why and be able to communicate that, and the project manager makes sure that everything stays on the rails and results in a cohesive product.Many teams put significant of focus on user outcomes. A user outcome is the ultimate goal of the user. It's what they need to happen. If we don't know what the user needs to happen, we'll end up focusing on the wrong thing.To figure out what a user wants user research needs to get conducted. No, you don't have to break out the lab coat. Research doesn't have to be so rigid. Just have conversations with your users and try to gain an understanding of their wants, needs, and frustrations. Make sure that you don't make assumptions about your user's needs. Ask questions that might seem painfully obvious to youMarisa al

When you are a consultant, you can't just learn a framework and then choose a place to work that uses it. Your clients will have their own needs and constraints that you're going to have to adapt to serve your client well.The constant learning can feel like a freefall. Constantly feeling dumb is panic-inducing. There's this trough of despair in software, where you swing between feeling like a genius and then going right back to despair.We can't just learn, but we have to learn well. It's critical to retain what you learned. Keep a developer journal, start a blog for yourself, discuss what you learned in a study group, etc. The less you have to relearn things, the less time you'll be spending in the trough of despair.The dreaded technical interview tends to have the problem of not testing you on anything that you should be learning. You have to spend your time cramming and hoping that the interviewer gives you problems that are still fresh in your mind. A one size fits all solution doesn't work and doesn't end

There are a few options for those trying to start a career in web development, teach yourself, join a bootcamp, or go to college. Veni chose the college route, she got a master's degree in computer science, which is awesome, but it didn't fully prepare her for web development. Computer science is primarily theory and it doesn't really prepare you for the engineering side of the job. There are only so many research positions where you'll get to applying your degree directly, the vast majority of us are facilitating commerce.When Veni was earning her degree the competition between her peers was fierce, but in order to grow she had to let go of that competition mentality. It becomes a puzzle for you to solve instead a competition between others. Having this kind of growth mindset is key to unlocking your learning potential.You hear about JavaScript fatigue everywhere and all the time. It's exhausting to try to keep up with the Joneses. Let go of the competition and do this for yourself. Each new technology is an

You don't have to be passionate about code to have a successful career as a developer. Pariss Athena talks about how it isn't the code itself that motivates her to get better at understanding it. It's what being good at code provides that drives her.The financial freedom code gives Athena enables her to give more to the people and communities that are important to her. Success to her is freedom and helping others find success too. She is working on the Black Tech Pipeline, a platform to bring resources and exposure to the black tech community.What can those of us who are already established in this industry do to help underrepresented people? Athena says speak up, reach out to the community with opportunities for jobs, speaking engagements, podcasts, etc. Diversity doesn't just happen by default. Systemically we don't have a society that enables that. We have to be active and be a part of the team to make it happen.Transcript"Gaining Freedom and Helping Others Find Success - with Pariss Athena" TranscriptReso

Vue has a reputation of being the most beginner-friendly framework, but that didn't just happen by accident. The Vue CLI is an excellent example. New developers often struggle with using the terminal and remembering all the commands. The Vue CLI provides a visual interface for the developer to generate a project. By making it easier for newcomers to make Vue projects, they've reduced the barriers to entry. Beginner-friendly doesn't mean basic. Many large-scale projects use Vue.Another example of something that fosters beginners and benefits established developers is how friendly, and inclusive the Vue community is. Natalia Tepluhina talks about gender mismatch in JavaScript and how the Vue Vixens are making efforts to make the gender ratio evener.The Vue Vixens are using free and accessible education as the primary means of getting more women into tech. Natalia Tepluhina goes on to share her two main ideas when it comes to designing a good workshop. Stay accessible to people of all skill levels; don't assume

J.C. Hiatt put together the conference MagnoliaJS in the town of Jackson, Missouri to help his community and combat the growing problem of brain drain in his state.MagnoliaJS is not only for his community, but it was put together with the help of it too. J.C. put it together, publically by using Github issues, blogging, and posting about it on Twitter. The community responds well when you are genuine and trying to do something good, and bringing them in and giving them a sense of ownership is what J.C. attributes as the single most significant contributor to the conference's success.If you have the opportunity to do something like this for your city, go for it. Bring in as many people as possible, contact your city officials, plan it publically. Technology can have a significant positive impact on a community!Transcript"Organizing a Conference to Combat Brain Drain in His Hometown - with J.C. Hiatt" TranscriptResourcesTwitter - Shawn WangJ.C. HiattWebsiteTwitterJohn LindquistTwitteregghead.ioGithubWebsite

What do we do when all of our needs are met when we are making seventy-five thousand plus a year, working for a company with some prestige, have a home, and don't have to worry about food. Jason Lengstorf wrestled with this after the company he was contracting with didn't have anything for him to do, but kept him around. New goals have to be set, and growth still has to happen.Jason discovered that what he wanted was to help other people grow in their personal and professional lives. To help other people you have to have a set of skills beyond your technical skills, typically these skills would be called "soft skills," but they are often just as important as technical skills, Jason prefers to call these skills "meta" or "catalytic" skills. These are the skills used in planning, bringing people together, decision making, all of these being essential in our careers.You don't just use these kinds of skills in a software project; they are also the tools that are used to build communities of people. Jason explains

Teaching provides a learner with more information, but the information isn't the only thing that is required to teach effectively. Doing is almost just as essential as the information itself for the learner to solidify what was taught. Creating an effective learning path is challenging, and we tend to start from what we know and take it from there. Janelle challenges the tendency to start from our knowledge, and instead, we should start from where we want our learners to end up being and work backward from there, this is called Backward Design.Backward design doesn't just apply to education, it applies directly to software development. As developers, it's essential that we get out of our head and start with the user.How do you start teaching if you have no one to teach? Janelle says there are three critical components to building your audience, having an email list, providing valuable content, and consistency. If you stay genuine and provide value you'll filter out anyone who doesn't resonate with you and wha

Jen Looper, developer advocate and the founder of Vue Vixens, didn't study software development in college, she has a Ph.D. in French Literature. Her degree might seem unrelated, but it strengthened her ability to explain complex ideas as well as her overall communication abilities, skills that are essential for her role as a developer advocate. These skills also come into play in her work building the Vue Vixens community, which now has over 20+ chapters all over the world!The workshop has been a powerful tool for growing the Vue Vixens. Jen explains how the shared experience of learning, eating, and hanging out together can build a lot of lasting connections. Vue Vixens has also branched out from workshops into also hosting meetups, the structure of which is determined by the local chapter leader to suit the needs of their particular location. But what makes a great workshop? Minimal installation, maximum output. Codesandbox and Nativescript playground have massively cut down on the initial setup times for

There's a kind of "black box" mystery that surrounds illustrators and programmers, to someone who isn't one their skills seem like a form of magic, but to someone who is these skills are just the tools that they've been learning to use through time and hard work. Maggie is the course logo illustrator at egghead.io, and she has the challenge of turning the concepts being taught in the course into something more visually concrete. The challenge isn't necessarily the drawing, but the research that is needed to understand a topic to the point of being able to create an accurate metaphor that people who don't know what is being taught can grasp. Maggie discusses her process in research and creative thinking to get to that point.The beginner's mindset is critical to Maggie for creating these illustrations. When someone becomes an expert in something, they tend to overlook things that have become muscle memory to them that make beginners struggle. You don't have to be an expert to teach something to someone! The pro

JavaScript fatigue is a topic that has been trending for a while now. It's easy to get overwhelmed with the constant influx of new technology, but it's also thrilling to learn the latest cool new thing! Stacey Mulcahy discusses how she embraces this deluge of technology by being a generalist, allowing her to make connections with more people than she would have if she specialized in one thing.Stacy is a Maker, a kind of tech-based DIYer and inventor. Creativity is, of course, important for the DIY hacker, but it's essential for everyone else too. Creativity is creative problem solving, and it's something that you can train. If you aren't "working your creativity muscle," your creative skills are going to degrade. Try to push the envelope and find outlets where you can apply your creative skills!Like a lot of people in the tech world, Joel has a box of Arduino stuff that is gathering dust somewhere. How do you get past that initial "hello world" LED blink project? Stacey recommends to immerse yourself, see wha

Web development is a fantastic field where people, for little to no money, can self-teach everything you need to make a career, and it's amazing, right? That doesn't mean that there isn't a time cost though, it isn't easy, but the internet has an overwhelming amount of information that you can use to teach yourself. Authors who write this free content are the life-blood of the internet and provide an invaluable service to countless people.However, in the sea of information, it's easy for your content never to get noticed. You wrote that blog-post that killer blog-post on medium, but no-one seemed to have seen it. Where you write your content is important, there are communities like the amazing dev.to that reach a specific audience and are more focused towards engagement, but the reason why you create your content is also important. People can smell inauthenticity if you are writing your content for the sole purpose of brand-building and getting views people are going to notice. Create content that you love an

Marcy Sutton is the Head of Learning at GatsbyJS, but what does that mean? One of Gatsby's core focuses is the community, and a part of that is making the experience with Gatsby as friendly as possible. A large part of making Gatsby friendly is having excellent documentation, so that learning and debugging experiences would be smooth. So the learning experience is smooth but what is Gatsby's potential on the web? Marcy talks about how Gatsby has the potential to make a huge impact. Currently WordPress is powering about a third of the web, that's huge, but it has its issues. WordPress is centered around the authoring experience but the front-end experience is not good. Gatsby is looking more towards the future, it doesn't use a database, it can build out static HTML, it's accessible, and it's also democratizing the experience with a themes ecosystem. This brings up the point that JavaScript is eating the web and it's making it more difficult for folks who've had a different intro to webdev. This is a real chal

Sara Vieira, developer advocate and professional maker of dumb shit, talks through why she does her weird experiments on the internet. Sometimes it is out of need, but honestly a lot of the time it is a random thing that she thinks of or something that someone says that brings up the idea, and she just has to make it. A lot of it is out of boredom, and also procrastination from other projects that she just doesn't want to do. Sara calls herself a lazy developer, but that doesn't mean she isn't working. She finds simpler solutions that involve less coding and also avoids things that aren't necessarily interesting or fun for her to do, like CSS or writing her talk for a conference... A part of being a lazy developer is using the right tool for the job. GraphQL and Redux have an almost cult-like following, but for small apps, their solutions for state management and fetching data are complete overkill.Netlify and Zeit's Now are great for deploying your projects, they allow you to get your unique dumb-shit out th

Today we are joined by Ali Spittel, a Software Engineer and Developer Advocate at dev.to, who speaks with us about:The skills she gained from a developer teaching jobHow she kept up on her coding skills without writting production code by doing daily code challengesWhy she began to blog and how she made a habit out of itBlogging on a platform vs having your own websiteUsing visual feedback to teach beginners to codeInvolving herself in the local developer communityTranscript"Developing Yourself While Teaching Others - with Ali Spittel" TranscriptResources:dev.toAli Spittel:TwitterAli on dev.toalispit.telJoel HooksTwitterWebsite