We Need To Bring "Gatekeeping" Back To Web Development

Ready to bridge the developer skill gap and set yourself up for success in the tech industry? Join me and my guest, Derek Wood, better known as Sheriff Derek, as we dissect the growing disparity between what employers expect and the current skill levels of many budding developers. We dive into why foundational skills are critical and how bootcamps sometimes fall short in preparing students for real-world challenges.

Curious about the role of gatekeeping in tech and how it affects newcomers? We explore the evolving concept and its impact on aspiring developers. Sheriff Derek shares candid advice on avoiding the common pitfalls of coding bootcamps and stresses the importance of strategic self-branding. By focusing on developing core proficiencies and understanding industry expectations, you'll be better equipped to navigate your tech career without falling into financial strain or feeling unprepared.

But it’s not all about the grind—discover how to find joy in your programming journey and build meaningful, impactful projects. Sheriff Derek and I discuss the importance of celebrating small wins, integrating creativity into your work, and engaging with the tech community. Learn practical tips for continuous learning, networking, and creating projects that showcase your problem-solving skills. Whether you’re new or junior in the field, this episode is packed with actionable advice aimed at helping you thrive and find fulfillment in your tech career.

Sheriff Derek (guest):
Website - https://perpetual.education

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Transcript

Don Hansen: 0:13

Welcome back to another WebDev podcast episode where we help aspiring developers get jobs and junior developers grow. I brought Derek back on. We actually did an episode with him called there's a Massive Skill Gap Among New Developers, and people either loved or hated it. That video took off a little bit and so we figured we'd do a follow-up. We have some things to say. We read all of the comments. Derek was very active in the comments and, yeah, this is creating some interesting conversation, so we're going to dive back into it today. I'll go ahead and link that video in the description. You should definitely watch it before you watch this one to get some context. But we're just going to continue on the conversation, address some of the comments and, yeah, dive into it. So we'll go ahead and just start with a quick intro. Derek, who are you and why should they care what you have to say?

Derek Wood: 1:01

Aha, my name is Derek Wood. I'm Sheriff Derek on the internet. That's my web name. I started doing web development in around 2011,. Seriously, and I've worked freelancing and small dev shops, bigger dev shops, contracting at agencies, worked at some big agencies, little agencies.

Don Hansen: 1:20

I've done some web development for different sass products and I do, uh like senior ux stuff now but, uh, you know, mostly a kind of front up what I think were a couple of important points of the video.

Don Hansen: 1:49

I had kind of made this assessment that employers expectations have gone up, and I think most people can get behind that, and I think the controversial part was I had made the assessment that most aspiring developers' expectations have gone down into like or I guess, like what they expect that they need to learn in order to actually stand out in the market for employers to want to hire them, to want to pay them money, and I feel like we've got a new generation of developers, that there's just a huge mismatch of expectations between the employers what they think they need to learn, and I think a root thing that I mentioned was there are a lot of people that just do not have a solid foundation.

Don Hansen: 2:33

They're kind of just learning the bare minimum possible to hopefully get this unicorn of a job, and there are so many steps in between where they are just skipping over and they think it's going to help them, they think they're moving fast and so um, we, uh, we. We got a lot of interesting comments, um, but I'm curious, cause I want to go over a couple of comments, but I'm kind of curious what, what you had gathered from all of the comments that we got in response to kind of like just trying to encourage developers to like get a more solid foundation, like actually care about this industry.

Derek Wood: 3:13

Yeah, overall, I mean because I read them all and there was a lot of them actually I read them all and responded to everyone because this is, I do want to encourage and foster an active conversation, and I know that that's what you're doing, and so I kind of don't want to leave any stone unturned as far as where we could have a conversation as as opposed to these kind of passive attacks and things like that. So the general feeling I got was that a lot of people felt pretty positive about it. Actually, I mean, they're like, well, somebody's kind of got to say it and I think that in some ways, whether it's your boss telling you you need to step it up or something, sometimes just getting that out on the table is actually better than worrying and so kind of knowing that stuff. I think people, people who are honest with themselves, appreciate. But then there's just some other camps. There were some camps of people who I feel like maybe pick and chose some things that were said out of context and just kind of wanted to attack that. I think there's another camp of people who have probably been working really hard, maybe not working smart, and don't want to hear that and uh, and so they're. They're willing to kind of try to push down whatever somebody's saying, um, but I don't know, and you know they're in there. There's just a couple of like little things. Uh, you know just personal things like who, who's this guy cares, that sort of stuff, and I think. But there were.

Derek Wood: 4:42

I think one of the other main ones was what people were. Some people kind of said like well, this is sort of like gatekeeping, maybe we shouldn't, you know, or some alluding to you're kind of creating this false narrative that we need to know these foundations, kind of to suit your own needs or something like that, like you know, and and then. And then there was another camp. That's just kind of the general bootcamps, like selling shovels in a gold rush type of attitude. But I mean, I think our conversation even though I was a little all over the place what is the core ideas that we were talking about are pretty clear. There's a mismatch between what people think they need to do and what you need to be able to do to the job. Like completing some courses isn't the same as being able to sit down with a client or your boss or the designer and make what they need. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of.

Don Hansen: 5:37

I tried to go in and make some clear need. Yeah.

Derek Wood: 5:38

I mean, that's kind of. I tried to go in and make some clear points about it, but I don't know it all just kind of glossed over eventually. I think, people remember it better.

Don Hansen: 5:50

You were pretty engaged and, by the way, we loved your comments. This was awesome. I loved going through all of these and I did read every single one, no matter whether you loved the episode or of these, and I did read every single one, no matter whether you loved the episode or hated it. But I think there was kind of a sentiment of or I guess what I gathered was there was kind of an accusation of gatekeeping. I want to be very clear influencers and content creators and other software engineers that are posting on social media platforms, that are posting on social media platforms we need to gatekeep harder Because for some reason, you do not have like the proper line in the sand of like what you need to aim for in order to start actually being marketable. There's like bad information going out to you for some of you to like skip right over the foundations, jump right into abstractions and think like you're going to be hireable and those skills are going to transfer over into different problems, different frameworks, different libraries. It doesn't work like that, and so I like maybe this is controversial, but I think not hiring managers.

Don Hansen: 6:49

Hiring managers are the real gatekeepers. I think people like us need to actually strive to gatekeep to bring people's standards up so they're well aware, because we're not preventing you from getting a job. We're just not. We're literally mirroring the expectations of employers so you can actually hold yourself to a higher standard and stand out. Because when people hear these high expectations and like, oh, I'm going to have to spend another three, four months diving back into the fundamentals, like when you hear that if you hear gatekeeping, you're just on a path to giving up, you're going to burn out because you're going to apply for all these jobs, probably going to spam your resume out and then just burn out and quit the industry. The reality is the expectations are just higher. You're either going to meet them or you're going to drop out.

Don Hansen: 7:42

Like that's my personal opinion and so like these accusations, like I've seen this with other developers that are influencers as well and they get these accusations of, oh, they're just gatekeeping in the industry. Like they just have these high standards to become a software engineer and they just don't want to let anyone in. No, they're, they're literally just mirroring what they know and who they know gets hired at their company. They're just basically saying exactly like the exact outline of what you need to do, what you need to know in order to get hired. So I think there's um some people kind of just scared when they hear some of these higher expectations because it's very different than what they expected. But I think that's where a lot of these like accusations of gatekeeping come in. It's like I don't think they're prepared to hear what we're saying.

Derek Wood: 8:32

Yeah, and I think that gatekeeping the term is pretty weird. I think people just like get a hold of these things, like whether it's gaslighting or gatekeeping the term is pretty weird. I think people just get a hold of these things, whether it's gaslighting or gatekeeping, and it creates its own cultural meaning. I remember a while back this is many, many years ago but I think some of us were using gatekeeping, like you're saying. I personally would rather teach and help people get into the industry who are going to go out there and make awesome stuff and who care about accessibility and who care about products and are going to at their own company, try and make everything good, make sure everybody's being moral and people are doing the right things. I want to help those people get into the community and people are doing the right things. You know, I want to help those people get into the community and at some point this gatekeeping idea was a positive thing.

Derek Wood: 9:24

And then I remember a few years back it kind of flipped and I was listening to a podcast with Mike Montero and a few people and then I think it's just culturally shifted during the politics of the last four years or so to being or so and to being something that's like definitely like we're not going to let you work here because you don't look like us or you didn't get this degree so you're not allowed in, whether, regardless of how much time you spent in open source software and how prolific you are and how amazing you'd be for our company. So I think this kind of gatekeeping idea is definitely has nothing to do with you and me. I mean, if anything we're saying like come learn about design, come learn about programming. It was hard for us to get in there and we want to share everything we've learned to help you. So I mean that's just kind of just totally off base with what that is.

Don Hansen: 10:17

Yeah, oh, sorry, were you still going? Okay, um, no, I think that's a really good way to look at it. Um, cause, like a lot of us, we, we want to see people succeed. It's incredibly sad, like when I would do just one-on-ones, um, like, I still do one-on-ones all the time and um, but I did a lot more of them in previous years and I I feel like it was just so sad to people or see people like dump a ton of money into a coding bootcamp without doing proper research, they graduate, they're six months in. Then they finally reach out to me with their last bit of money and you know, like they have kids in the background, they have other responsibilities, like it's kind of clear that you know they're not in this. Like they're not very financially well off and they're like, oh, I just need to get a job, like next month. And I look at their portfolio, I look at their resume and they're you know, she's probably six months off, eight months off, at least bare minimum.

Don Hansen: 11:16

And it's really hard to have these conversations with people like this that are just they're at the end of their runway and they're at the end of their steam, they have no motivation left, and it's so sad to continue having these conversations, so it's like.

Don Hansen: 11:30

This is why I'm so candid, this is why, like, quite frankly, I purposefully come off like a dick in certain statements that I say because, like, I want it to, like, I want you to remember it and I want you to remember it now.

Don Hansen: 11:43

Don't wait, don't just brush off my feedback. Like I'm telling you please, like, dive into the foundations, care about this stuff and do all of these strategies that you can actually do. That take a lot of time to make you stand out and build yourself, branding and build your network. A lot of time to make you stand out and build yourself, branding and build your network, but do it now. Because so many people listen to this type of message when they're at their uh rope's end and they, they don't have options at that point and like, because there are so many people, like you said, that we want to see, get into the industry, but, um, they, they just listen to the wrong advice for so long and then they have extremely few options at the end. We want them to hear this now and we want them to come to the industry and especially the people that actually care about this industry.

Derek Wood: 12:30

Yeah, I think it's just the emotional energy sometimes when people forecast and they say, well, I heard it's gonna take six months. I'm basically doling out all of my energy, heard it's going to take six months. I'm basically doling out all of my energy and at the end of that six months there's not any more. And so when they get told, hey, sorry, you went to this UX bootcamp and you came out with these like two fake UX projects and you don't really know how to do the job and you're competing against people who have years and years of experience of actually designing things, because there's boot camps for other things besides coding. Right, it's the same, um, in any kind of industry really. But people will just see it as oh, you're self-serving, you're trying to sell a course, you're trying to sell this, you're trying to sell that. I mean you people can think about it that way. But also people design things to be better or because that they want to try to do something to be better. Right, certain colleges are trying to be the best college they can be. Are they like scumbags? Like selling snake oil? I mean, they're just like. So for me, if I meet somebody, I'm like if you start with the fundamentals. I mean you're not like it's not a disaster, it's not over, if you went through some other bootcamps and stuff, but it will create weird mental models it will be harder to undo. Emotionally You'll feel like you're further along than you are. You won't recognize the gaps because even when I started I mean I think we've talked about this before but I, I like, didn't know a lot of things and they were completely mysterious to me. And that's just kind of how it is. And if you're not stepped up through those a little bit, you don't get to have those aha moments. You don't get to have that. Oh wow, I can make a little tiny mini program that I can use over and over again wherever I want.

Derek Wood: 14:15

I have confidence in understanding the usefulness and the utility of a function, as opposed to what I did when I first started out was memorize something, something dot, click, sorry, something. Something dot, click, jquery thing. I could change a class. Didn't know what the dot was, didn't know that I was adding an event listener. Didn't know there was a callback. Didn't know what the dot was. Didn't know that I was adding an event listener. Didn't know there was a callback. Didn't know what a function was, didn't know what the DOM was. I just memorized that thing and I went on fine with it.

Derek Wood: 14:46

And so when I see people go through these and I hate to just always be calling out React, I don't think it's like React's fault, but these bootcamps that see, okay, react is in high demand, so we should teach React. That's the quickest way to get into the job. Maybe that was the best idea at the time and maybe there was that demand. But when you're in there you start to just memorize patterns, visual patterns like the shapes of the things you're typing, and it's just really obvious as.

Derek Wood: 15:14

I'm sure you know from doing the one-on-ones, because you get in there and you're like all right, let's build this little thing. And it's just amazing how blank some of the people can be. Or where do I start? They're going back to well, how did I do it before? Could I look at my old one? So they're not really owning and getting the confidence in how to do that. They probably didn't have enough repetition. They probably didn't have enough kind of targeted exercises to prove the point.

Derek Wood: 15:44

You know why would I need something asynchronous? Do I just write a weight for everything, just the buildup? And so yeah, I think it's not like, oh, you need to learn. The people will immediately say why do I need to learn the fundamentals? What do I also have to learn binary? Do I also have to learn assembly code? When's it going to end? And I think there's something to be said for that. If you can get the job done and your job is writing no code, low code type of connections, great, good for you.

Derek Wood: 16:18

But we're talking mostly about people who want to get their foot in the door in web development and in some form of crossover into software engineering, whether that be back end, maybe less connected to the front end. So maybe they don't think of themselves as web designers, but somewhere in that mesh of our context that we're talking about, you know, aspiring developers, junior developers. They want to get in there and they want to start building websites and adding features to applications and learning how to do things, probably like, in some cases, writing tests, in some cases auditing CSS files and updating systems, helping write documentation, like there's a whole bunch of different roles on these teams and people need to just understand that, whatever it is, they need to be able to do those things. So if I was hiring somebody, I would need them to be at least teachable in a way where I could trust them to kind of show them the ropes of HTML and CSS and know that they could go complete the projects, or that they knew enough about Django or Rails or React or whatever we were using that they could build out features and understand the code base loosely. I mean I can teach people what to do on the job, code-based loosely. I mean I can teach people what to do on the job, but if they're just kind of like I only know how to make this fake dating website I made at my bootcamp and the only thing I remember is when we set up the auth for some reason. That was really exciting.

Derek Wood: 17:51

So where's Passportjs? Can I install Passport? And they're like no, you need to have a problem solving ability for me to say, hey, I don't have time to do this. I want there to be a calendar so that our users can see the dates. Right now it's just in a list. Here's a mock-up. I'm going to have the designer go figure it out.

Derek Wood: 18:14

But like can you get the code in place so that we can move this forward in an agile way? Make sure that it works on all screen sizes, and then we'll tune it up as we go and kind of test with the users. If somebody can't be on the team and help me with that in a junior capacity, I can't afford to pay them, and I don't think any other companies can too. Maybe the bigger the company is, there's probably a little more wiggle room, like they're just like we need six developers in here because we know we got stuff, we got a lot of tickets. But even then you're going to have to get onboarded, you're going to have to understand the code base, you're going to have to take responsibility for things and you're going to have to know a certain amount of stuff, even though you are new, and I don't think that in some of the comments people were acting like we're asking too much for an entry-level developer, but maybe that's inflated.

Derek Wood: 19:06

In the way we're talking about it. I feel like I'm asking for so little, like really little, but it's just the nuance of what that little is. I don't really care if you know how to like nest 30 levels of slots or some weird thing in your special UI framework. Can I count on you to look at our code syntax and our code rules and our code quality and match that and add features and be able to talk to me and get on camera and when necessary and pair through something, and that you are able to make your commits, make your PRs be part of a team, take responsibility for getting those PRs to actually go through, not just make your tickets and then move on and just do all these little tiny things that float around Like are you going to take responsibility for moving this app forward and making things users actually care about? That's where the money comes from and you know we can make it a team sport. It doesn't have to be all about the money, but I need somebody who recognizes that, not someone who is very loosely said I don't know.

Derek Wood: 20:13

I was in a disaster. I thought I could get coding and coding would be the solution. And then I did a six month thing and now I'm at the end and like why aren't I getting what I want? And those are the nice people. Then there's the people who are like I got screwed. They told me I was going to get this and now I didn't and I'm never going to code again. But I'm going to sit around and be angry about it all day and yell at everyone.

Derek Wood: 20:34

Like you know, there's a huge spectrum, but at the end of the day, I don't know how we're missing this obvious stuff. You need to know how HTML works. Yes, we're going to be writing React, maybe, but you're still writing divs in there. You're still writing headings in there, you're still looping over some stuff. You might even need to know HTML more because of that, and there are abstractions and Vue makes it even easier. But if you're not learning how HTML works and how CSS works, how are you then going to optimize everything else going forward? I don't know. Is it really that much to ask for someone to learn HTML, like, on one hand, html, by the way. On one hand, everyone on the internet is just like HTML is easy, you can learn it in a day. There's a tag and a tag, get over it. And then, on the other hand, they're like why should we have to learn it? That's asking too much. Pick a side man. How about right in the middle? How about right down the middle? Logic Websites are made of HTML.

Don Hansen: 21:38

You should know how to use it like pretty well if you want a job there. There's so much I agree with there. I'm probably going to pick just a couple of points. But that was awesome.

Don Hansen: 21:43

Um, you, you had mentioned this idea that people kind of they remember patterns, um, and even like they kind of just will type this um same thing, and then they might even, uh, just have kind of their text editor auto fill the rest, and they do that every single time, and then when that's stripped from them they're lost, like oh wait, what do I type? And then it significantly slows them down, or they kind of just will, um, they'll even just start maybe with copying and pasting, like old functions that they use, that they think they can reuse, but they don't really know the fundamentals well enough of like what makes that function to type it from scratch or write it in a different type of implementation, because maybe that function doesn't work exactly like we need it to in this application, and so even changing the implementation of like just what's happening in that function doesn't work exactly like we need it to in this application, and so even changing the implementation of just what's happening in that function, it just makes them kind of go blank. They're like what do I do, what do I look up? Or like I don't even know how to like overcome this. And then you start becoming dependent on, like chat, gpt, or you just just keep copying and pasting all of your old code that you probably copied and pasted from stack overflow. It's like I feel like, um, a lot of people just need to be uh, they need to struggle, they need to hurt, they need to feel some sort of like mental turmoil of like I don't know what to do. Cool, this is an awesome opportunity. Figure it out Like. This is like.

Don Hansen: 23:22

Every time you hit bugs, every time you get stuck, and you actually, instead of like just getting mad at it, just like cause there are a lot of people where they'll just blank and then they'll, instead of like actually thinking through it, they're just sitting there for 10, 20, 30 minutes, sometimes more, thinking like I can't believe, I don't know this. Why don't I know this? I need to remember this and like where's that thought pattern going? Like, you need to write this stuff. You need to struggle and instead of copying, pasting and like just remembering patterns, you need to actually struggle to grow and learn from this. You're going to look up proper documentation. You know a couple dozen times and it gets you remember it more and more and more and more and more the more you use it and the more you look it up and the more you write it.

Don Hansen: 24:05

And I think a lot of people, quite frankly, they're just their mental state isn't great Just when they encounter a problem. That just actually is a big plateau for them. I've even noticed with mentoring people a lot of people are just stuck in this like weird spiral of this repetitive thinking that they're just thinking they're becoming more anxious, like I don't know what to do, and then it just becomes more frustrating and frustrating. But that's that's solved by solving small problems. When you're learning fundamentals, you're solving small problems. You're at the initial foundation, the building blocks, where you are able to grasp those and get those wins under your belt and do them over and over and over again. You just build a little bit of confidence and then you take more building blocks and you combine them and then you learn those concepts.

Don Hansen: 24:58

But I think a lot of people like, as soon as they hit that, like roadblock immediately, it's like you know what. I'm just going to copy and paste this or I'm going to copy and paste this, or I'm going to allow my text editor to fill in the rest. Or, like you know what, this isn't even that important HTML, you know, like you can learn it in a day. Like, do I really need to remember it? Do I really need to care about, like semantic HTML, like who actually cares about that? And like a lot of people will skip over stuff. And I think it's. I think partly it's because maybe they have this weird perspective that they don't need to learn this stuff, but I think a lot of it is.

Don Hansen: 25:37

It it's a little bit difficult, it's going to take time, and then they find an excuse not to learn it. Like they combine all of that and it's like, oh, you know what, I want to jump out of the javascript. I want to be, uh, job ready and I want to. I want to jump into, react as quickly as possible. I'm taking way too much time with this hml stuff and like I just you know, like I don't want to waste time, I want to be efficient with my time, and what ends up happening is like you are extremely inefficient with a time, with your time, because then you come on to a video like there's a massive skill gap among developers, and you hear that message and you think, oh, you know what, like I, I can't learn all the stuff that you're trying to say that I should learn. This is ridiculous. It's it's going to take forever and, like I, just it's too much. You're expecting too much, and companies just need to give junior developers a chance and train them and they just they need to understand that I just don't have all the time in the world to learn this stuff.

Don Hansen: 26:29

Well, the problem is that you just spent all this time learning abstractions. You didn't really spend a lot of time learning what you needed to learn, and that's kind of a tough pill to swallow. But you're going to have to go back. You're going to have to go back to those foundations. So this is why it's a huge recommendation Learn these foundations first. Spend most of your time in these foundations. Stop trying to pick up Tailwind. Stop trying to pick up these abstractions. Learn these foundations. Stop trying to pick up tailwind. Stop trying to pick up these abstractions. Learn these foundations first. They will transfer over. It is much easier to ramp you up when you have solid foundations.

Don Hansen: 27:05

Um, so I think a lot of people have this perception of you know, when, uh, people like youtubers and stuff will give this like kind of uh, hard-ass response like listen, you got to dive deep, you really have to have some depth, you have to have a solid foundation, these fundamentals they hear oh well, I got to learn these abstractions and all this foundation and keep digging deeper. It's like no, I think part of what we're saying is like you kind of just skipped over some of the important stuff and you spent too much energy here when it should have been here. That's what we're saying. So it feels like, oh, now you got to learn all this stuff. Well, quite frankly, a lot of you do, because you skipped over all the important stuff and that's. I think that's just a tough pill to swallow what could?

Derek Wood: 27:46

it could also have to do with the terminology, like maybe just the word fundamentals is triggering or something, because in a way you could think about the fundamentals as I mean, all of these languages are mostly the same. You know, they're C-based kind of languages and they have. I mean, I probably know 5% of what JavaScript has to offer, and that's more than a lot of people. They're huge languages. A lot of times what we're learning is the abstraction of the browser API, like click events, the window. These aren't JavaScript. These are implementations that the browser has decided that use JavaScript. So under the hood, yeah, there are fundamentals like can you write for loops? Can you see some benefits to these different patterns? Wow, loops do in or whatever for in for, of whether you know these bunch of new ones that are cool or newer. And then I don't know logic. I mean these are foundational things in all programming. Luckily, we don't have to actually decide where we're going to store things in memory and for how long and allocate all those details. You know, sometimes people that come from learning C first or Java pick up things more quickly because they did have to go kind of the uglier, unfortunately, but it's nice because then they do learn how to allocate memory and how to do different things. And then when you come into JavaScript land which a lot of people want to just start there because they heard it was the spot to start then they dive right into that and then they're like basically all the courses should say JavaScript for people who already know how to write programs. But they know, they just say JavaScript. So they're like here's a variable, here's a loop, here's a this. That's for someone who already knows how to program. They're not going to teach you how to program. I was just talking to some people on Reddit today. They're like why doesn't JavaScript, the definitive guide, teach you how to program? Well, it doesn't really. It's just, it's like a documentation, almost book.

Derek Wood: 29:47

You have to learn to program with any one of these languages separately. That's a separate mindset and I think that's what people are skipping. They are learning to do implementation, which is sort of a repeatable task. You know, set up things, make a component, put a component places, and a lot of people yelling are like well, I don't need to do anything else to do my job. Okay, if that's you, great, go for it. Use the UI frameworks, piece things together, connect, strike, that's good, go for it. Use the UI frameworks, piece things together. Connect Stripe that's good, go for it.

Derek Wood: 30:16

But if you're out there trying to learn a more general thing that you can start applying to different languages, that might spin off into something you don't know about. Like we've mentioned, I have Arduino type things over here. You can make embedded, you can do embedded stuff. You can do backend stuff, you can do frontend stuff. So, knowing the fundamentals, I guess I would say is you don't need to know everything the language can do, but you need to gather a certain amount of confidence where you re-envision how this works. It's not a timeline where you do stuff and get a job necessarily. It's not that you can master anything, that's impossible. It's not that you're going to be good enough for your own kind of insecurities. It's not that you're going to match what is the industry expects, that we hardly even know what that is.

Derek Wood: 31:06

Everywhere I've ever worked had like an incredible range of skill and most people are just embarrassed to talk to each other about what they really know, depending on their salary. But can you look at something and say you know, I want to like? I had this experience. There were these drummers next to my music rehearsal studio and I never knew when I could go in there because they were really loud drummers. So I was like, can I make a thing that will listen to the drums and it will mark on a list what times of day these drums are happening? Maybe I can figure out that on Tuesday afternoons no one's there, and it would be fun just to learn how to do something with the Raspberry Pi or Arduino or something, and I have a computer in there anyway. And so how do you do that, though, like you don't just go to a tutorial.

Derek Wood: 31:57

The fundamentals are we can store moments, like little pieces of data, a time, whether there was a sound or not. We can put that set of little objects or dictionaries or whatever your language calls them, in a list. We can loop through the list or iterate over the list and print out some kind of things, like there was a big, loud noise or not, and I mean this would have sounded incredibly impossible to me. I would have thought I've had to go to school to be some kind of amazing technical engineer or something 15 years ago. But if you think about it, those are so simple. But it's understanding how simple they are and how you're in charge of those little tiny baby talk type of things to the computer.

Derek Wood: 32:46

And then it's your job to decide if a loop's going to help you. It's your job to decide what data structure. Should it be JSON? Should it be HTML? Should it be SVG? Should it be SVG? Should it be an array? Should it be an object? Should it be an associative array? Whatever it needs to be? And if you don't let that click enough that you're in charge and you get to decide how these things work and the people who made those frameworks had to think how those things work and then use them to build these frameworks you're never going to have the same amount of confidence as somebody who does. And so it's not that you can't do the job and it's not that you can't kind of retroactively learn on the job, but it's a lot harder because you're going to build these different conceptual models, mental models, and you're going to always be thinking, convergent thinking In UX world.

Derek Wood: 33:38

You have these I don't know these silly like double diamonds, but you have the time period where you're like let's think of all the ideas. We can. No bad ideas. Think of every single terrible idea, every good idea. Just let yourself be free and it like comes out like a big diamond, you know. Then you go into convergent thinking time period and you decide all right, which one of these are going to be good. Let's filter them down, let's try them out with users, okay.

Derek Wood: 34:04

Then you go back into the divergent thinking and these two mindsets. When people just put them on top of each other, it's like designing in the browser with HTML. You just start nudging things. You can't get out of your own kind of. I mean, I like designing in the browser but you don't scope down, you can't make big decisions, you can't get out of your head in a way.

Derek Wood: 34:26

So I think with programming you need to let yourself be like I'm going to write this function new, I'm not going to go find my other function, it's not about finishing it. Maybe I'll write the function a little better this time, maybe I'll learn something different about the function this time. And you're robbing yourself of that freedom and that divergent thinking time period where you are getting that repetition of saying, oh wow, I learned about map. Maybe I could use map this time. Or maybe I could use a spread operator. That would be cool.

Derek Wood: 34:55

Or I've been hearing about this immutability thing. What's? What's the difference? So if you're not rewriting your code and rethinking it, you're not going to be growing, and that's. And if you're not going to let yourself be in that space to like, relax, enjoy it, it's fun, it's like a computer game. If it's always about completing things and getting to the end, you're always going to be stressed out. No matter what job you are in, the problems will get bigger and bigger and you will be in the same mindset where you're always in the convergent thinking mindset. You're never going to learn and it's going to be frustrating forever.

Don Hansen: 35:34

I mean that's what I worry about that I, I agree with all of that and that that last point's really interesting, and I'm wondering if that's part of what's contributing to a lot of frustration, is maybe it is just because, maybe maybe it's not people that are, just because I, I think about, like, when I read all of the comments, I think about why is this person so mad? Um, uh, did I say something wrong? Um, are they misinterpreting it? Um, okay, but now they're mad at other people. Now they're just shitting on other people in the comments. So why are they shitting on other people? And what, basically, what responses do they hate?

Don Hansen: 36:17

Um, and I kind of just wonder, like, why people choose to be miserable for so long, and every single response that they have is just it's disingenuous, it's uh, they're obviously miserable, um, and they, they don't really engage in the programming world in a constructive way, they don't lift other people up, they just try to bring other people down. It's kind of just like a misery loves company situation and I wonder why and I think it, I think you kind of summed it up very well at the end it's just like when you are constantly like, when you approach the programming world, when you approach the software engineering world to just finish things, to complete things and be done with it Right and I hit that finish line. That doesn't help. You stand out and you're never going to hit that finish line and you do a lot of the wrong things and you don't take time to explore and allow yourself to be creative and enjoy programming and eventually, like you just, I think, just build up a lot of misery and hate for yourself that you spend all this time or you're not able to achieve it and, like you, have all the wrong metrics for yourself to assess if you're even growing, and it's like a lot of people just lock into well, you know, I won this, I've succeeded. If I got that job, it's a long ways away.

Don Hansen: 37:37

You need other dopamine hits. You need other milestones to be proud of and to build your confidence and, like I said, when you're just focused on finishing and getting to that stage, you're ignoring all the other ups and downs and things that you can celebrate along the way, and no one can go from a to z trying to become a software engineer and stick with it for that long, um, without having these like intermediate, like celebration of wins and and just creativity, even because like it's so freaking, boring, like when I I'll be honest, like the one thing I love about entrepreneurship a lot more and building my own apps and, you know, working for some other company is because I like building up my own stuff, building up my own dream, like the idea I know most people want this. Like most people want this because I did a poll a long time ago and I could do another poll, but a lot of people love the idea of financial freedom. Like a lot of people, I get want to have that financial freedom, to not feel the burden of kind of a lack of money and inability to support their family and, like I didn't have a lot of money growing up, I truly understand the weight on your shoulders that that feels, and so I get that people want this kind of financial freedom and not be dependent on like a company and hopefully they won't lay me off or anything like that.

Don Hansen: 39:13

But even if you have that mindset, that mindset is like as an entrepreneur, you have to be creative, you have to enjoy the process, because that finish line, like even for like I'll just use my example as like a YouTuber, if I based my happiness and my success off of the views that I got on each video like I would burn, would, I would burn out, I would quit, I wouldn't even continue trying. Like it is such a self-defeating thing to see a video that I spent so much time on and I thought it was going to help people get like less than a thousand views. That is, um, and I felt that it it, it sucks, and so I think part of it is just like understanding, like, first of all, not having this like long-term goal of like you know what, I'm just going to go on this efficient path and getting this job, but what are all the cool things that I can build? What are all the cool wins that I can feel? What are all the and get those dopamine hits? Like, what are all the milestones that I can formulate within this entire path to make me want to continue? Because I don't do this.

Don Hansen: 40:20

Whether you're gaining, trying to gain financial freedom and eventually, like build your own SaaS product or your app, or whether you're trying to work for a company, like there needs to be this creative process and you need to stop and enjoy the process, or you, I guarantee you that you are going to be like, you're going to stand an extremely small chance at actually feeling successful at whatever you're trying to achieve it. Just you have to enjoy that process and I think people need to figure out how to do that.

Derek Wood: 40:52

Yeah, a lot of people will say work is work and you know that's fine. I'm sure you can go play rugby or cricket or football after school or you know, after you do this and I've heard some of the best programmers don't. They don't want to talk about programming. Sometimes I'll be at a barbecue and someone would say, hey, this so-and-so programs, and they're like they don't want to talk about it. So some people can compartmentalize that. But I think it's pretty fair to say if you're deciding to go into this career and you're new and you're learning, at least during this part, you should be excited, you should be interested, you should be problem solving. How is this going to fit into my life? How does my backstory fit into this? Why am I a good? Why am I in like, into problem solving? How? How does this medium work with me? How can? What companies? Do I want to help? Do I want to do freelancing? Do I want to work for a company? Do I want to do both? Cause you know you could make a lot of money on a Saturday if you're using your time properly. Could I, during this two years, while I'm working for someone, build my own app? There's nothing stopping you from doing it. I know it's a big leap from just learning. I mean, I still have trouble getting my apps through the finish line and I've been doing this for a long time, so I'm not saying that that's easy, but it shouldn't be off the table and you can get together with a couple of people. Also, you learn a lot from making the app. It doesn't mean it has to be a successful app. You make it, put it on your resume. You have that story to tell. You learn a lot from it and I think people need to just be more creative with how they're thinking about this. Like what is, imagine what a really great candidate looks like. Imagine what a really great candidate looks like. Like someone I'm working with right now is moving from being a teacher in schools. They have a background in language. They've gone around the world teaching different languages, so they're interested in kind of teachings or ed tech type of things. They're interested in languages they're interested in. They're enjoying CSS and HTML and interfaces and using Vue and having like cool, like you could type in stuff and stuff happens. And how do you do that? Like if you want to go work at Duolingo? What is Duolingo about? Well, it's got like a funny owl. It's got some little animations, it's got some like gamification. They're going to be interested in people who know many languages interested in people who know many languages. They're going to be interested in people who have fun kind of whimsical animations, or who are interested in the same things that they're doing.

Derek Wood: 43:23

So whether that's making a bunch of code pens, practicing little animations, even using the little Duo owl or something, or one of the things, I suggested that he read this book, and this book is the code book. But in the book it talks about all these different ciphers throughout history and all these different ways of obfuscating messages. But that would be fun, because then you're talking about language. So why not make a series of articles where you read the book but then you also have a companion set of code for each of them to say, oh, this is how you could build that cipher from that one war in Scotland or whatever I mean. So I'm not saying everyone is this creative, but I think people should try to push themselves a little more in that direction than the corporations. Owe me a job. I put in my time. I mean, it's your life, I don't make the rules, and so I don't see what railing against the machine in this case is going to do for you, and I think that on the other hand, it's not so black and white. It's not like a zero-sum game here.

Derek Wood: 44:27

If you learn how to write HTML and CSS, you can get a job doing that somewhere. It might not be the software engineering role you wanted to start with, but there's lots of little companies that do that. I see ads for it all the time. I know people who get jobs doing it all the time. I just saw one on the Discord, somebody asking for somebody who was doing just that role at a cool company.

Derek Wood: 44:48

The problem is when you learn 15% of seven things. The problem is when you learn 15% of seven things. This isn't the right field for that. Maybe later, if you learn 15% of 3JS, 15% of WebGL and 15% of AR, you might be able to use that in your agency to do some stuff. But if you're learning your foundation, you need to know the three or four different languages and how they work together, how to make a little mini server, how to make a little client app, how to see the pros and cons of both, and then you can kind of start to specialize, like I got a job recently on the side just for fun, where they wanted somebody who just knew a lot about SVGs and was interested in accessibility, so I don't know 10,. I actually recorded it. But within the hour I had the job and uh, and I just made them some code pens to kind of prove that I understood what they were looking for and they didn't know anything about me or my background. So there's lots of uh jobs in different situations out there.

Derek Wood: 45:52

But you have to be willing to be yourself and find yourself and find your connection to what you're interested in here. And it could be something as weird as, like, I just love page transitions. So I'm going to like learn everything I can about how to make like the homepage, go and then come into the next page. You could do nothing else. You could just make a hundred page transitions or something you know and just talk about it with the people.

Derek Wood: 46:18

Go in the Discord for the animation. Go and find your little groups, like you were talking about the other day in your other video. Like meetups. Start meeting people who like programming. Now Don't wait until you're done with your boot camp and then just show up and get everybody's LinkedIn thinking that's all of a sudden going to just like, get you a job, go there and ask people what are you working on? Here's what I'm working on and you build up friendships. You're like, oh, this guy's really good at animation, or this guy's a nerd. I'm going to definitely call him when I need somebody to, like, clean up our databases, like whatever it is, you'll you'll become your own person if you let yourself be.

Derek Wood: 46:54

But if your goal is, I mean, finishing the course doesn't mean anything. It's just time. Time went by.

Don Hansen: 47:09

Yeah, I don't think I have anything to add to that. I love that mindset. Well, I guess the part that I love the most is this idea of like figuring out what you want to focus on. For example, I, you know, I've been mentoring Zinka. We've been doing the dual stream. You've you've checked that out and you know one thing she loves is animations. It's fascinating for her and she should dive into it further, Right, and she could become that developer that, like companies wants and even if it's like on a consulting basis, part time or full time, like there are websites that have a lot of animations and there are not a lot of front end developers, especially that are newer, that really have built amazing animations in their personal projects, right, this is something like, if it really interests you, man that creates such a perfect alignment with companies like that. But, yeah, I, I love that.

Don Hansen: 48:12

I want to take an extra like 15 minutes and we're going to go over a little bit, but you had written down some stuff that you I thought was interesting. You had written down some points, points, and you mentioned even that, like you saw the video about you know, I think my video of, like cold applications are dead for developers or something like that. But I did think you brought up some interesting points before the episode, so let's dive into that. What do you have for us?

Derek Wood: 48:39

I guess I did have one just general point, that which I wanted to mention because I think that new people just in this area who are like want to get into tech. It's so blurry what is it? What do people do at these tech companies? I mean, most of us don't actually work at Facebook or Meta, and some of the people there you'd think they were rocket scientists or something, but they're the whole team tuning up the newsletter. Like the newsletter signup has a whole product design team devoted to it, and so sometimes the people there aren't even doing that much complicated things and they might be junior in their abilities as well.

Derek Wood: 49:18

So there's that. There's agency work, there's embedded systems, there's all sorts of interesting, strange jobs you wouldn't expect where you suddenly get a job and you're writing in this strange language you've never heard of and just making slides because they just happen to have this old system that they have. So I've just seen people get into all sorts of jobs and I think it's important to think about the context and what your show is about, because I think some of those comments were like, hey, you're stopping us from being software engineers or you're keeping this or that.

Derek Wood: 49:51

But I think we're talking about our specific background, our connection to web development, software engineering, as it relates to the things that we've done, and that doesn't encompass everything in the whole world. And people need to remember what your channel is about and that we are assuming that context, like we're assuming we're talking to your viewers and the people who are interested in this topic. So if somebody out there is saying, well, that's not fair because of this we're not talking to you or I'm not, I'll speak for myself. And so I think that to connect to that is just like goals, like are people clear on their goals and is their goal to get a job? And if their goal is to get a job, what do they? What is the goal, what do they need to do to get the job? Like they're letting their goal be too blurry. Anyway, I just want to. I wrote that down. I just want to. I wrote that down, I just want to say it.

Derek Wood: 50:43

But as far as cold applications go and what you're talking about, I just wanted to kind of touch on some of the things you mentioned. You were talking about like coursework versus building things kind of on your own. And I was kind of interested in in what you meant by that as far as, like bootcamp kind of follow along kind of bootcamp one, like a lot of bootcamps have the same one, like you build this camping app or you know, if you do a UX, everyone comes out with kind of similar, the same product, versus when you have to sit down and figure out something on your own for your first time. Is that what you meant by that?

Don Hansen: 51:18

I'm wondering what the exact statement was. Was it, um, when I mentioned like a lot of um, like, if all you have is like boot camp projects, it's going to be like very low value to employers. What was the exact statement?

Derek Wood: 51:32

Yeah, I, my notes aren't very good, Probably around that, but you know so yeah, yeah, essentially like.

Don Hansen: 51:41

When I bring this topic up, I talk about like. Actually, let me ask you this Was it in terms of, like, using projects to learn, or was it in terms of like projects that stand out to employers? Does that ring a bell? Not sure. Ok, that's OK, I'll dive into this because I think this is important. But yeah, obviously like and we've touched on this building projects is really going to reinforce a lot of the concepts and if you're just diving into courses, you're not learning and reinforcing as much as you think you are. And I think courses are a part of the process and I think they can be abused and you can end up in tutorial hell right there. But they can give you that initial starter and then you need to do other stuff to be able to reinforce the concepts that you're learning.

Don Hansen: 52:26

But what I see a lot is a lot of people will kind of just build these cookie cutter projects. There's no meaning behind them, like they just are building a project that is probably going to reinforce what they're learning, which is good. Those are actually good projects, but those aren't valuable projects. They don't tell employers what kind of problems you like solving, what skills you've like, how you've used the skills that you've learned to solve problems that the business is going to care about. And you know, like, based on the projects that you build um, especially when it's kind of like even a basic form of a project that the company that you're applying to like they solve similar problems, their application is just more complicated they can get a good idea of, like, what skills you're actually reinforcing by solving these specific problems. Especially when you have software engineers that look at your projects that have a lot of years in the industry, they can kind of like understand, okay, what fundamentals made up this implementation based on this project that, uh, that is solving this specific problem. And so a lot of people and I think majority of people just have these cookie cutter projects that they're not really solving real problems. They're just, you know, it's a, it's a cat gallery website, it's just kind of like a basic hobby website. Those are good for reinforcing some fundamentals, but you know you got to look at yourself as a professional, like what are you building that is going to be representative of what you can do with a company and in to even simplify it, because I think a lot of people will put these like company projects on this giant pedestal and they're so impossible to build and you could never dream of building it, and that's not always true. But what is true is that good software engineers that are able to ramp up with that code base, that are able to build meaningful features, push it out to users, make the company money. As a software engineer, you just become a really good problem solver, if you're not one already.

Don Hansen: 54:27

Like you have to identify the user needs. You have to identify like, because you're always going to have variations and implementations. You have to understand like hey, you know like, we're probably going to implement these other features that are going to reuse some of this functionality. So now I need to think about how I, now that I understand the user's needs and the product needs, I need to think about how I can create this reusable code to accommodate that. And now I can think about the initial structure of the application that allows for scalability of creating all these reusable components and me not to get lost and other developers not to get lost in what I'm building. It's not just a bunch of spaghetti code, and so I think a lot of people need to think about these projects in like a more, in a similar sense, but at a basic level, where, like, you are building a real app that people can use, it doesn't mean and I've seen these comments like, oh, it's way harder to get an active user base that actually isn't than getting a dev job. It's way easier to get, like, five users using your app than getting a dev job. I don't even know why people are making comments like that.

Don Hansen: 55:34

But you can build things that are useful to people, right, like talk to your friends, talk to your network, like, hey, you know what would be cool to build? Think about your old industry. Like what? Um? You've all used crappy software in your old industry. We all have right. Like what could you build differently? What? How could you? What if you could build like a? Maybe you just had this gigantic software and you needed this tiny little feature. Build that feature, right, and that's easy. You could build that feature and that feature could be helpful to people.

Don Hansen: 56:04

A lot of companies, entire companies, are founded off of these really small solutions that then grow based on user feedback, because you got a few people and they're like it'd be cool if it did this. You know, this is kind of my problem, um, and I don't think you need to go into this like because I've gone into extensively into like long u UX courses to go through this entire process, to flesh out all this stuff, and I'm not great with it, but it's interesting and there's depth to it. You don't need to be a great designer, you don't need to like be amazing at UX and just identify all of your users perfectly, like a professional UX or designer would. But you do need to think about like you need to talk to people, like push it out to your network, get their feedback and that's enough to start flushing out some additional features that your app can turn into. And then you know if you are building something for, kind of, your fitness journey, or you're building something for, like, you're trying to learn music or like was a one person I talked to. They're like I can't keep track of all my notes as a developer and I'm like there's so much useful context I don't know how to keep track of all of it and bring it up at the right time when I need it and create searchability and focus on that. And it's like man, everything you're describing sounds like a really cool app that would help you out and that would help so many aspiring developers out.

Don Hansen: 57:25

You have to start thinking about when you encounter these problems. It would be cool to do this. This is frustrating. Like, use these as opportunities to build stuff in your way that you know solves the problem. Put it in front of a few people, get features. And now this personal project that you care about in this industry, you can start flushing out features and it starts blowing up and blowing up and blowing up and it's a meaningful and you're building a real. You're using your skills to build or provide real value to people that employers care about. And then you apply to companies where, like, it's a similar product. Like you apply to the fitness industry, depositions in the fitness industry, you apply in the music industry and those are tailored projects that truly do make you stand out.

Don Hansen: 58:12

I think a lot of people don't want to do this because they think that they're and I'll kind of just end with this but I think a lot of people don't want to do this because they think, well, if it's too niche, keep in mind, like a lot of what you build up. And a lot of people don't want to do this because they think, well, if it's too niche, keep in mind, like, a lot of what you build up in a lot of these apps can be transferable into other industries and into other code bases and stuff like that. But it shows what you're interested in and that makes you unique, that makes you stand out. So, even if you're kind of building this niche app that eventually blows up into this thing like what it blows up to can be incredibly impressive Cause then you, even if you're not applying to the music industry and you also applying to other industries which you should like you are now having to face like, okay, my, you're having to face problems that real developers face.

Don Hansen: 58:53

Now my code base is starting to get a little bit messy. What do I do about that? Now I'm starting to like, repeat my code. I shouldn't be repeating my code, right? So, like, what do I do about that? What kind of reusable things that can I create? And it's that niche thing that builds and builds and builds that can start getting you to focus a little bit on architecture, can get you to focus a little bit on efficiency. Like, maybe your app just has, you know, 1000 different results. Do we display that on a single page? I don't want to do that. That's probably not a good user experience. So what do we do? How do we fix that?

Don Hansen: 59:28

Like, I think you need to just focus on an app that you enjoy building, that solves a real problem. You put in front of people, you go through the agile process of getting that feedback, iterating, pushing out, and you have to write down requirements or you're going to get lost. It's going to because you're you're going to have like a a never ending goalpost. So you want requirements. This feature is done. When this, these requirements are met. Like, this is all professional stuff, this is all stuff professional developers deal with. This is all transferable. This all looks good. But when you kind of just keep building these cookie cutter projects and going from project to project to project, you're you're not really diving into the complexity and you're not learning and growing in ways that you truly can, even as a new developer. And maybe it's because it's intimidating, I don't know, but like, I think people need to dig a little bit deeper into a real problem and I've just seen so many cool projects flushed out that are impressive to employers.

Derek Wood: 1:00:23

Yeah, I think I agree with you on all that stuff for sure. But I made a note just to also voice what I feel like a lot of people are feeling. It's like is that too much? Are we forgetting what it was? For the first six months we were doing this.

Derek Wood: 1:00:48

But I think you're right and I work with some people who are just getting right into business making practical things, even at simple levels, even if it's just like well, if I'm going to learn about looping over these little components, I'm going to make the component something I'm interested in. So, even at all levels, you can start to align this to things you're interested in. It doesn't always have to be a full CRUD app. It could be a small feature. It could just be a fake prototype little feature, just with some vanilla JavaScript just showing how this interaction would work. It could be an article researching the problem. Maybe you just hate this one part of Trellollo and you don't want to call them out and like do one of those quick redesigns which are kind of rude in some ways. But maybe you want to explore a new drag and drop idea and you don't know how to do it. But maybe you could just draw it out on paper and talk about it. So I think you're totally right, but that I'm just adding in that there is a range and that people can do that.

Derek Wood: 1:01:43

Because if you go over here and you read JavaScript, patterns, javascript, this JavaScript that if you come in here and you start and you try to read this crazy thick Node patterns book, you're not going to learn the patterns, you're not going to know what to do with them. But, like what you're saying, if you're like okay, now I have this list of things, now I need a detail page. Now I have this card that I used multiple places. Maybe that should be its own file, maybe that should be its own partial and its basics, if you take on more than you can chew, you will learn patterns. They will start emerging, because those things it's just hard. I don't know how to quantify them, but they're at least 10 times better, or hundreds possibly. Like we don't know how our own, our own brains are like LLMs, right, they don't know how they work. We don't know how ours work. But if when you, when I finally went back to learn this stuff and I was like all right, just go from the scratch, stop trying to skip ahead, which is really hard. I learned just exponentially more that I can't even explain how the connections were all made.

Derek Wood: 1:02:51

But when you go through that process of building something and seeing those patterns, it's totally different than if you go through and you make a Netflix clone of the homepage of Netflix. It is good for reinforcing, like some architecture, but that architecture is, I mean, that's not even the hard part. I mean it's deciding things, being comfortable in making decisions and I mean even now, I went through a Vue course recently that was like Vue, typescript, prisma forget the guy's name. I went through it. I don't remember anything of it. I didn't learn anything about TypeScript. I didn't learn anything about Vue and I mean I know a lot. I've been using Vue for a long, long time. I totally understand like all the, but I don't know.

Derek Wood: 1:03:36

I just going through that process, if you're not making decisions and if the course isn't made to say here's an interesting way to use a pattern, here's like 10 different things you could try, you think up something and you use it, you're not going to remember it, you're not going to make the connections, you're just going to get through it again and it's just going to keep happening. And I know from personal experience I'm trying to do it. Like I've said before, I did the Rails tutorial. The Rails tutorial came away feeling like I couldn't add a feature, didn't know what to do. Maybe I didn't put my enough, maybe I didn't go all in, but, for whatever it is, I just left it there. But when I went in to build something with like dead simple PHP and the idea that I'm just going to sit here until I get this thing working, I learned 20 to 100 times more than I, than I learned in those like 20 hours of watching. This really smart guy explained it to me and that still happens to me now, this far in like my you know career.

Derek Wood: 1:04:32

So if you're in your first six months, your first year, it's just just bite the bullet, get through the hard part now, because every little hard thing you get through will make the next part easier. It's still going to be difficult. It's still going to be difficult. It's still going to always. You always want to push yourself 110%, but those things add up so quickly and then in retro, like it'll just start to make sense, things will start to make sense, you'll see. You'll see.

Derek Wood: 1:04:55

Oh, wow, I could use this here. Oh, I need to. I need to show a bunch of things on the screen, oh, okay, well, maybe I need to store a bunch of things in a list and then I need to go look at each item in the list and render it to the screen Like it's not okay. How do I do render to screen? Where's the tutorial? Or you'll start to see all of these things as little tools and you know.

Derek Wood: 1:05:17

And just to add to that spectrum there, like I think a lot of people just get freaked out when people Because a lot of people parrot other people. They don't necessarily know what they're talking about, but they'll say, just go do a bunch of open source. Or they'll say, just do an app and get tons of users and I know you're genuine, but other people are not. They're just saying it because they think maybe they agree and they want to just keep repeating it. But I could see why people are going to be a little bit shocked from that. You can do open source. Just make your own little CSS library, have your friend work on it with you, get a couple people, practice open it doesn't? You don't have to go straight and dive into the metal of React or something and try to get some PRs in there for the sake of it. You can work on smaller things and it doesn't matter if it's a famous thing, it just matters that it's something that you got to spend time with, you got to collaborate, you got to practice so you can do open source and you can do things with real users that are small. So anyway, I just wanted to like help people understand that, because they may not see that we don't. We're not creating this unattainable thing and everybody's different.

Derek Wood: 1:06:33

Some people's idea of a big project or getting users is a series of code pens that have like a funny little quiz, you know that, one with the bear where he like click, where you click the button and the bear pops up and is like and like, clicks the button back, like stuff like that. Stuff like that is just you know, gets passed all around the web and stuff. You can get real users almost like that. There's tons of people on CodePen who just made these kinds of crazy things. I forget her name right now, but the woman who made the like Huggy Panda laser code pen Go look it up if you haven't seen it, but you know I remember first seeing her work on code pen and just being like wow, she's wild, she makes a lot of weird things. Well, she's like a celebrity now. She's like the darling of the industry, for you know Vue and SVG and animation she works at all these big companies and she's super fun and she loves tacos. So animation she works at all these big companies and she's super fun and she loves tacos. So there's lots of ways to do this. And if what you're hearing from us is, oh, they're asking me to do this unattainable, super hard thing, I can't do it, I give up. You're not seeing what we're doing here. We're trying to give you like a spectrum of options and you got to find where you're going to fit in here. It might be helping someone else with their project.

Derek Wood: 1:07:42

A lot of people I've met and have long relationships now were just people who are nice on Discord. They were always helping some other people around. I tried to help them out. Where I could. I get them jobs. There's lots of ways to make friends and be a part of these things and the meetups and the hackathons.

Derek Wood: 1:08:01

And how are you using your time? That was my other note. I guess is just being effective with your time. How are you using it. You could spend a thousand hours and have a bunch of confusions, be frustrated, probably worse off than you started. Or you could spend a thousand hours making a website, then making a little bit more complicated of a website, then making a little bit more complicated of a website. How many websites you got now? Three. That's how I got my first job. But if you just go through a bunch of courses and make a bunch of dead in the water React apps that are just like a graveyard of things you don't remember, that's not going to work. So you just have to take some baby steps and just be a little more honest with yourself. Then it's like this LinkedIn. You're talking about curating the feed in the LinkedIn and stuff. It shouldn't be if it's that hard to tell people about what you're doing.

Don Hansen: 1:08:56

You must not be doing anything.

Derek Wood: 1:08:58

You know, if you're not seeing blog posts that are interesting to you, if you're not seeing podcasts like this that you're interested in, that you want to share, maybe you're not thinking about anything. But you know why not just say, hey, cool, I made my first website. I made my second website. Hey, I made this cool slider that changes the colors. Hey, I'm interested in this cool theme maker. Like you, I don't like LinkedIn. I mean, I don't like Microsoft. I don't like the idea that they're like monetizing education and then they're also the gatekeepers for your certificates and that they're also taking money for when you get hired. Like, I don't like it. I don't like anything about LinkedIn. But I also think it's not a lot to ask to just start pumping things onto LinkedIn once a week that you're interested in, to tell people that you're doing stuff. Because I've heard time and time again on Reddit and all these places. You know I started my journey. I just started sharing what I was doing and someone reached out and said man, I've been watching all this stuff and that you've been doing, and since the beginning, and that's so inspiring and I gave you a job. You know these are people without backgrounds in tech. People stay at home, moms, stuff like that, you know and there.

Derek Wood: 1:10:05

But if you don't make things and you have nothing to show and you're complaining in all these forums saying shouldn't have to do this, shouldn't have to do that, and I say, well, hey, let me see your portfolio. And you don't have one, you don't have anything to show for your work, you don't have any proof, you don't have any articles. You, there's nothing. You haven't done anything.

Derek Wood: 1:10:21

I don't know why don't you have like one little tiny open source little project, do you? Don't have anything you ever want to reuse? That's weird. I mean I have one that's just like consolerender, so that in CodePen I can render the console to the browser instead, so that when I embed the CodePen it doesn't give you an option to see the console to the browser instead, so that when I embed the CodePen it doesn't give you an option to see the console. So I made my own console on the right side. It's like this long, good-ass chat GPT to do it for you, and then you can't do it. But you know, it's like this long, it's a little tiny, tiny thing. You could have a little open source thing like that. There's just so many options and so that doesn't mean you have to do all the options, it doesn't mean that it's unattainable. Just pick a few, start somewhere, start small, do some things and they will grow naturally.

Don Hansen: 1:11:17

Yeah, it's a really good point. I'm glad you've really called that out, because it's a tricky thing. As a content creator, I've said everything. Throughout all of my videos. I've said everything people need to know, but in a single video there's a lot of missing context, right, and I think that is an important thing to identify.

Don Hansen: 1:11:37

Even when I talk about, hey, build something that's useful, right, that alone could sound intimidating, especially when you've never built something that someone uses. But you are capable of it and I think you need to build a bunch of small things and try things out, and I think that's going to build confidence in your capabilities to build something useful. Start small, and I think that's important. Start with whatever interests you, but build. Most importantly, don't just go through a book trying to learn this stuff, because I think a lot of people over focus on the number of projects on their portfolio, when a single really impressive project that is built over the course of a year as you're learning all this stuff, can also be impressive. But you know, like even one of my apps was like Twitch analytics when I was trying to become a developer. I used it as a portfolio project and all I did was hook in. I just made a ping to the Twitch API and I provided analytics in a way that they didn't. I just had kind of like an object of data and I'm like you know what I could do certain calculations on these two pieces of data to provide something. Twitch isn't that's. It was a really simple app. I think what I tracked was how long someone would stay in your stream, because I was able to see when viewers joined and left. That's a statistic back in the day that Twitch didn't have and, honestly, it took me a week to build that out and I could have kept building on that and I actually abandoned the project which, looking back, I shouldn't have. It was a really fun, cool project.

Don Hansen: 1:13:09

But I think a lot of these things you know, like maybe when you hear people like me say, like, build something that's useful and put it out in front of people, like it isn't, I think you need to just try it. I think you need to put yourself out there first of all. Like you said, like write an article about like, or give your opinion and and share what you've been learning or what, what's exciting or your opinion on a certain thing. Like start small. Like build a small little tool that um build reusable code that you're going to then use into your other projects, right. But I think the key thing is, like you are fully capable of building useful stuff as a new developer. But you know, to your point, maybe you're not going to realize that until you build a bunch of small stuff, gain that confidence, and that's kind of the missing piece. But I think that was kind of a fair call out.

Derek Wood: 1:14:06

Yeah, I mean I'm not giving you, not saying you're saying you're right, but just to help people, like you said I think that's a good point Like they're not getting the context of all the other things you've said or that you know I've said it like it's a big picture, right?

Don Hansen: 1:14:20

Yeah, I like that.

Derek Wood: 1:14:22

Yeah, I mean you gotta find something you're interested in, you too, yeah just like this whole industry is going to change over time and stuff like the code's going to change the thing. A lot of the tasks that people are doing, like rewriting, like express apis and stuff, those things might not be there later. So try to lean over into your own little product designer mindset a little, because that's still still, uh, just problem solving and um, I mean, yeah, not to be doom and gloom either, but like wouldn't it be nice if you could just be your own boss? That couldn't lay yourself off, that would be cool. There's no reason why we all have to just give Jeff Bezos all the money, like I mean good for him, um, but you could have it too, it's not?

Don Hansen: 1:15:11

no, yeah, I 100% agree. Um, okay, cool, I feel like we fleshed out quite a bit in this episode. Um, if people wanted to reach out to you, you just shout yourself out. Where are you at?

Derek Wood: 1:15:25

Yep, I'm Sheriff Derek, so you should be able to find me in that way. I direct this company called Perpetual Education, which has changed a lot over the years. We're kind of a education consulting company right now, sort of shifting in many ways. So we have been helping some other companies build curriculums. We also help people kind of audit their courses Maybe you're building a course and you want someone to take a look at it early and kind of help. And then we also have like a network of people and past students who we used as testers to test different things.

Derek Wood: 1:15:59

We also have internal sessions that we do. I think we're doing one starting July, one group session for our curriculum called Design for the Web. So if you're interested in that, check it out. Yeah, and just in general, we're trying to create just a more active network of like web developers who are talking to each other in person and working together and trying to just fight some of this like anonymous stuff that kind of accidentally happens on the internet, like how can we create a community? You know like very much, like how you kind of have this community of people who can all talk and stuff like that.

Derek Wood: 1:16:35

Yeah, so that's what I'm doing, and you know I also do contracting on the side and stuff.

Don Hansen: 1:16:41

Okay, awesome, I'll put the links below. Let us know what you thought. I actually truly appreciate whether it was a positive, negative comment, neutral, like. I went through every single comment. I know Derek went through every single comment and I think the important thing is just to get this conversation happening, get it rolling. But yeah, if you have any strong opinions, it in the comments. We definitely love to hear it. Derek, thank you so much for coming on and doing this again yeah, my pleasure.