Learn In Public

Learning in public

What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust:

• Write blogs and tutorials and cheatsheets. • Speak at meetups and conferences. • Ask and answer things on Stackoverflow or Reddit. Avoid the walled gardens like Slack and Discord, they’re not public. • Make Youtube videos or Twitch streams. • Start a newsletter.

Whatever your thing is, make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning. Don’t judge your results by “claps” or retweets or stars or upvotes - just talk to yourself from 3 months ago. I keep an almost-daily dev blog written for no one else but me.

Try your best to be right, but don’t worry when you’re wrong. Repeatedly. If you feel uncomfortable, or like an impostor, good. You’re pushing yourself. Don’t assume you know everything, but try your best anyway, and let the internet correct you when you are inevitably wrong. Wear your noobyness on your sleeve

People think you suck? Good. You agree. Ask them to explain, in detail, why you suck. You want to just feel good or you want to be good? No objections, no hurt feelings. Then go away and prove them wrong. Of course, if they get abusive block them.

At some point people will start asking you for help because of all the stuff you put out. 80% of developers are “dark”, they dont write or speak or participate in public tech discourse. But you do. You must be an expert, right? Don’t tell them you aren’t. Answer best as you can, and when you’re stuck or wrong pass it up to your mentors.

Eventually you run out of mentors, and just solve things on your own. You’re still putting out content though. You see how this works?