# Benefits of learning in public and how to do it well | Shawn "swyx" Wang from Temporal

Channel: Codementor
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGUoKyXp8Lg
Duration: 46 min
Language: English
Words: 8296
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/xGUoKyXp8Lg

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[0:02] [Music] okay so i'm going to explain two concepts to you today uh learning in public and learning gears um i would say that in my career it has these have been to break through concepts that have really accelerated my career and it's not just about growing a network or [Music] getting jobs or improving your skills it's also about sort of intellectually and emotionally rewarding experiences of sharing what you know so let's just go let's just go right into it so uh does everyone know about the secret this is a very very famous book that came out maybe 10 years ago um this is a very famous book that

[0:53] tells you the secret to success and if you read through it the secret is basically uh they're talking about the law of attraction which claims that thoughts can change a person's life so if you want success you just got to think really really hard and you will be successful um and this is a pretty common school of thought they're not necessarily unique in that respect but it is very popular because then the only problem with you the only problem with why you're not successful is you just didn't believe in yourself hard enough obviously the flaw in this comes when you have two teams um playing in a competitive match and so

[1:33] they cannot both believe hard enough that they will win um if anything learning public is the opposite of the secret it is not about belief it is about actions and specifically the action of sharing learnings in public that will change your life it is not necessarily having a specific goal in mind to to have success because it recognizes the role of luck and complete random chance in the in how your career develops you don't necessarily know what you want and you don't necessarily know what's out there so how can you think hard enough to get the thing that you really want when you don't know what

[2:15] you want and you don't know what's up there right learning in public is designed for you to maximize your luck by taking concrete actions that can be seen by others that can be referred to by yourself but not to keep it to yourself essentially that is the main concept that i want to instill in you today because it's really changed my life so what is learning in public uh basically you can define it in opposition from learning in private so yeah darren in the chat says how do you think hard enough on something you don't know much about yet exactly especially when you're a beginner in a

[2:55] field there's so much you don't know so really you need a mental model of how to figure out what to know that you don't know figure those things out and then discover what else you don't know and what else does everybody not know and figure out what it is you really want anyway most of our lives we're taught to learn in private when we when we go to school we take notes we study them at home we take tests and we hope to do better than our peers it's all very zero-sum learning in public is something that is unique to us particularly in tech where we're encouraged to share our mistakes

[3:31] and our learnings in the hopes that everybody will get better but i don't want it to seem like it is a generous or an act of charity it's not a generous action you're doing this because it is genuinely a faster way to learn than learning on your own in private right it is a self-interested thing because that is the only way you will keep at it you don't you don't donate to charity that often you don't donate that much charity but you can work very very hard at improving yourself and if it happens to improve other people uh if you happen to get you a lot of friends then that's all the

[4:08] better right so what i'm trying to present is basically what they call a pareto optimal improvement whatever you're doing in private it can be that much better if you can figure out a sustainable way to do it in public so the origin of this idea for me um comes from a few sources um friend who is basically um i saw my internet connection is unstable did i disconnect from it can you still hear me darren uh i know i found that yes yeah i can just do here um i've been having in random internet issues anyway scott hanselman is basically the developer advocate for microsoft for azure for windows for c-sharp

[4:56] he is a very very senior guy in microsoft and has impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of developers and he came out of this blog post talking about the dark matter developers the unseen 99 it's kind of like the physics concept of dark matter you can infer their presence by their effects of gravity on stuff around them you can see their impact in downloads and um usage numbers but you can't really see them talking about stuff and this is a very common law of the internet most people lurk very very few people comment or post this is to your advantage because you stand out just by doing

[5:31] something anything in public the other source of inspiration comes from brad frost who is the inventor of atomic design and a lot of other core programming and design concepts brad frost gave a tedx talk talking about creative exhaust how when you do work is actually really interesting to spin out uh ideas along the way as you do stuff to make it a habit because it's a very sustainable way to create content about your work to get people interested in your work to share what you learn and get feedback that might improve your day-to-day work and so instead of creative exhaust because he's a designer and i'm not a designer i talk

[6:13] about learning exhaust how can you make it sustainable such that you're doing your day to day tasks you're learning about stuff but you're still blogging about it you're still writing it up without being a huge burden right you don't spend like a month away locked away in a cabin coming out with this elaborate medium blog post and uh having it be very disruptive to your life right so the concept of learning public is basically this you want to create learning exhaust you want to write for past you like write the post that you wish you had uh you know three to six months ago to benefit future you

[6:49] because invariably you're gonna forget whatever you learned and you're gonna need a reference point or in 10 years you want to look back and say oh how cute um you know there's so much that i didn't know or this is how i thought about things back then you document what you learned and the problems you solve and this is the most important thing try your best to be right but don't worry when you're wrong because if you try to be perfect try to have no mistakes whatsoever you will never publish anything because there's no such thing as having no mistakes there's no such thing as knowing

[7:19] everything you have to keep a regular schedule putting stuff out there um and that's something that is a very tricky balance right because obviously you want to be responsible you want to say i did my research i did my work here's everything i know and you know that when you put stuff out there that's wrong people are going to attack you because that's what they do online right but still if you're just honest about what you've done if you're very low ego if you tried your best to be right you will learn something people will see you learning something and they will organically want to help you

[7:52] and you will be better for them uh you'll be learned you'll be learning faster than you would by yourself so what are the forms of learning in public you can write speak ask code avoid and miscellaneous so let's talk about this you can write blogs and tutorials in chichi so that's the easiest form of writing of learning in public because it requires doesn't require your face dynamic voice doesn't require any media skills apart from putting letters together speaking takes a bit more presentation skills but some people are very good at presentation and make things making things interesting asking on stackoverflow and reddit even that the act of just putting stuff out there can

[8:30] just be asking um code you can contribute issues demos libraries you want to avoid some of the walled gardens i will say that my thoughts on discord in particular have moved a little bit um discord can be a nice testing ground before you put something in the broader population right so there's a concept of like a group chat where you test stuff before you get feedback on it before you blast it out to the broadcast audience and then the miscellaneous stuff are youtube twitch uh drawing cartoons if you if you can draw by the way that's a learning public superpower anyone can draw and illustrate concepts that are

[9:04] normally boring computer science abstract stuff and turn it into appealing concepts um i think is our superheroes so the two there are some examples that i will show you later one example of a talk which i really enjoyed was this talk at bang bang con in new york city called tail call optimization uh i'm very proud to call on geneva kilo a friend now but this is them explaining tco which is a very compiler which is compiler optimization this is one of those things where like it really doesn't matter until you're deep into the performance optimization but it's explaining that in terms of a disney musical and they wrote rhymes and

[9:43] songs and performed it and no one ever forget forgets this explanation after they're done so i highly recommend using whatever skills you have to make learning fun because they definitely learned everything that they could about tco before making this musical which i thought was really cool so i tried to do my version of it i also do moana parodies i do hamilton parodies my thing is musical as well so i try to talk about it but you know i think this is more entertainment i would not classify this as a lot of learning but i think it makes things accessible and interesting and people can actually have real conversations if

[10:25] you're highlighting a theme highlighting a effect that somebody some people didn't know and that talk this pitch on the left the thing about babel actually got me to speak at jsconf hawaii which is my second ever conference talk uh and i've still to this day very proud of it and i think it's something where people give you opportunities if you can demonstrate that you love the topic you um are getting you have you have creative ideas around it and you're not going to do the same thing that everyone else does you stand out a little bit

[11:04] okay so i talked about the cartoons are there two people look her cartoons are not that cartoony you know she's talking about linux networking tools unix protocols um it's really not that high skilled but it's presented in a friendly way that is very accessible and look at the number of engagement that she has and she's selling this as zines to support her independent work but i just think it's it's not that hard the bar is not that high for you to get out there and use your skills to explain programming concepts to the broader world and to get a lot of attention and notice and also to learn

[11:44] stuff i guarantee you in the process of compiling this she learned a ton of things that she didn't know because she was looking for a definitive list of all the tools that she was talking about and trying to explain it in simple words she use two to four words to explain every single concept right and that shows real mastery of something um because it it is it is more accessible than some of the very tough documentation to read lynn clark is the other one so lynn clark is i think she calls herself a code cartoonist and she explained web assembly using one of her cartoons she's also very famous

[12:21] for explaining reacts and redux using cartoons as well and again you may not be able to draw i cannot draw i cannot aspire to this i'm just showing you as this is one example of a general category of use your skills use your unfair advantages to try to learn in public to make things fun and interesting for yourself and for the people who think like you right you don't have to appeal to everyone in the whole world just the people who think like you another person i really like so this person probably cannot draw but she has some sense of visual design so this is samantha ming

[12:55] and she's she's demonstrating code concepts of simple code samples that are appealing that are nicely presented and she's built a giant twitter following just doing that and she actually got a job at gitlab because she did so much javascript work that they actually got her internet interview right so um i think this is a very fascinating this and by the way these are the easy ones right i'm about to show you much more advanced stuff if you think that this is very basic yes they're very basic but don't over focus on the level of programming that's being taught focus on the methods because the methods can be

[13:31] applied to whatever you are actually interested in so the other format the other problem that a lot of people come to me with is yeah i put stuff out there but nobody reads it so why bother right well there's some truth to that when you're starting out it's true that nobody knows who you are so i i don't if i don't know who you are i'm not going to spend that much time on it um so one it's a good thing because this is the time that you will suck the most so you want to get all the your crap out there you want to experiment with all

[14:03] your formats before you get big before you get famous before everybody knows your name because the bar becomes much higher once you are more established but if nobody knows you whatever experiment get weird get out there know your tools figure out your process try a few things and see what sticks it's also probably false that nobody will read it because if you're talking about someone else's work and if you're talking about my work i'll probably read it because i don't have i don't get the feedback of it um if if i'm your friend and if i'm your relative you know from your sibling or whatever i'll probably

[14:38] read it send it to your mom they'll read it they don't understand it but they'll read it and ultimately it doesn't matter it's for it's about you improving yourself right this is a learning public is a single player game that can go into a multiplayer game but you still win even if nobody else reads it right because you spent the effort writing stuff down explaining it to yourself putting it in your own words and putting it up on the internet so that future you can reference it in the future right a lot of the things that i do now i just punch it into google and i'm the first link

[15:12] that shows up because i use the words that i search for when i write up my solution and therefore i can use google as my personal search engine and that's amazing but also there are a lot of people who think like me that find it anyway right so it's not true that nobody will read it and anyway just get it out there and start getting better right you're not going to get better just by waiting for you to be famous and then to start writing stuff so they will read it people uh people that you're writing about they care there are that many people giving feedback

[15:44] um so my personal story about this is the one time the the first time that my blogging my writing got read by a wide range of people was in 2018 when danny vermont uh presented the future of react and gs confe iceland when he did that i was like this is huge so what i did was i stayed up all night going through line by line his demo and writing a blog post to explain that and walk through of it so of course when i'm the first person to write a response post about his talk he's going to read it he's going to find my mistakes and he's going to correct me

[16:20] and then he's going to help me share my work because that's the most extensive work that i've ever done uh that has been done on his post because i was the first to do it and so that that started a relationship with him that got me in front of uh his audience and that's how you get started picking up what others put down and that's a core principle that i stress a lot it's that's how you get started um to uh you know get attention pay attention to others right be interested in what other people are interested in and they'll be interested in your work alina says i just gave a talk on graphql

[16:56] you'll be on linkedin uh awesome you know and people who are working on graphql they'll probably care about it you know and you should get feedback from them as well all right so i put some links down in there if you want to check it out uh my blog post um that drove this story okay um then the second part the peanut gallery this is a fantastic phenomenon this is the xkcd fccd 386 one of the more famous xkcds are you coming a bit i can't this is important what someone is wrong on the internet and i have to correct them i have to tell them they're an idiot

[17:27] they're wrong they don't know anything here's the correct answer that's fantastic if you don't get offended right because when you're wrong online people will do this to you and they'll call you names and they'll be rude about it and that's okay because they're responding to something internally within themselves they should not be that mean and it's not okay to be that mean online but still if you're willing to keep your ego small and take the feedback to improve yourself because the only goal is to prove yourself not to look good on the internet not to look smart not to defend yourself just to improve your skills and your knowledge then

[18:03] these people are helping you right so this is called cunningham's law right which is um that they will try to they'll try to correct you as as quickly as possible online that's that's the fundamental law of the internet so bottom line is try your best to rewrite don't worry when you're wrong you want to always ship you want to understand that being wrong is fine and you want to keep your ego small there's a uh apocryphal story about the ceramics class where uh you know two groups of people uh whether it was the class split into two groups one group focused on quantity they just kept producing uh uh

[18:46] pottery every single day whereas one group focused on quality they just they just worked and worked and worked on a single uh example to try to get it perfect the people who produced much more quality actually got much more quality as a result so the real message of this parable is that quantity begets quality not the other way around you can't just sit around waiting for perfection and just hoping that it comes out right on on your first attempt so uh apologies for the fbalm here but this is a mentor of mine what i call this is the resilience persistence excellence loop right the cool thing about learning in public is

[19:29] getting comfortable with screwing up in public which then accelerates the tolerance for future screw-ups and then accelerates the learning process this is a very very positive uh virtual uh positive loop which i highly encourage right so it's not just about the single first attempt getting off the ground but it is the infinite loop of improving yourself and improving your response to feedback so there are a number of reasons why it works um i list them all in in the pdf that i'm going to send to you later um so here's here's a bunch of reasons so people will notice when you do work about them especially when you do good

[20:04] work there's a lot of laws of human psychology so for example there's conor muslim cunningness law that we talked about there's a commitment factor of saying all right i'm going to do this and then you actually do it you if you announce publicly something that you're committing to do something then you follow through like that is a commitment factor for you to follow through on what you promise positive reinforcement when you get likes when you get reshares when you get feedback on something that you did you're more likely to keep going right much more it's much more motivating than if you're working by yourself and just trying to motivate

[20:33] yourself with no feedback and then finally availability bias people often confuse the best at something with the person that first comes to mind right and a lot of marketers confuse this as well but you can take advantage of it right in other words if you want to be the best person uh for graphql right if you if you're if you said that you're you're you know you're probably watching talk about it you just do a lot of graphql stuff naturally your name will come up when people need a graphical person right and so that's an availability bias there's also a concept called inbound marketing i don't have the time

[21:12] to explain that to you today but google it it's a fascinating story of how one company changed the entire marketing field by inventing a term inbound marketing which is essentially getting permission for other people to uh to consume your content and then finally building portable capital uh this is a very fundamental story for me because it's intellectual property that will stay with you no matter what job you're at so imagine if if as the years go by you just accumulate this body of work that you can show that clearly belongs to you that you can take with you from job to job i think that is a really fascinating

[21:53] fundamental explanation of why learning the public works so well so um i think i'll have i have some stuff here so um what i yeah sorry all right everything i just explained was the getting off the ground the very basics you know then there's advanced versions which you should not feel like you need to do but i think when i started doing these things i really got to step up in terms of my profile my learning my network whatever you call it so there's teaching there's live coding it's double dipping which is essentially putting your content out in one medium and then recycling it for a different

[22:29] medium you know i blog and then i speak about it i speak about it in a podcast and podcast then i i don't know do a tic tac or something i don't actually do any tech talks pick up what they put down we talked about earlier and then mentoring others mentoring juniors and then basically understanding much more about the topic because you're trying to teach it rather than learning it for the first time so we talked about benefits i think one thing that i'm gonna focus on so you're connecting with with mentors you're connecting with friends you're building a track record i think one thing that i

[23:01] don't talk about enough is interviewing so one of my favorite stories is when i interviewed at amazon so i was at amazon in 2020 and um one of my favorite interviews ever was me going to the amazon headquarters i'm going through the super day which is like the last round it put you through through a whole bunch of software engineer interviews and the guy comes in he's holding his laptop and then he sits down and and i say hi he's never met me before and i say hi to him and start introducing myself and he was like don't bother i just i've been i've been reading your

[23:34] blog for the past 15 minutes i know this is this interview is just for formality um so basically i skipped the process just by proving um through my work that i was capable of the job or like i was interested enough and authentically able to explain things or to to uh to deliver more value in my blog or my public work than through a 45-minute interview and that's what interviewing really is you know the the process of hiring and process of interviewing is really risk reduction like i have to because you don't put enough out there in public all i have is your resume all i have is your linkedin

[24:12] then i have to interview you to figure out what else there is about you that i should know about but if your work is in public then i can just see that work right um i don't have to bet on like your the the very league they're very lossy serialization and deserialization algorithm i need to serialize all my user experience into a one-page resume and i hope that the other side has the right deserialization code to to unpack all that uh capability from from that one page of resume right like it's much better to be presenting your work in native platforms that people pay attention to like conference speaking

[24:48] blogging hacker news reddit whatever so that is the interviewing process and then finally of course giving back it is very rewarding um just yet just yesterday i had a person joined twitter for the first time talking about how she read my book and she was very she's very excited to learn in public and hundreds of people welcomed her i thought it was just fascinating i'll just show you i i don't i i would say like this is the one of the more unique examples i've ever seen um this person was not active on twitter uh before this [Laughter] so not active she registered in 2020 then she was like okay everyone i'm

[25:31] going to publicly uh you know i just just finished reading a book very convinced to learn in public and being active on twitter hundreds of people are just walking here saying yeah join us you know it's a very very welcoming community and now she has uh you know all these other examples where she can start really building it off this happened yesterday so she's still getting started i was just so inspired by her because i was like yeah like that's that's how welcoming the tech community can be if you phrase it right okay um so story time number two um i will say um getting into typescript from reacts yeah

[26:06] so so this is this is one example of this is probably the most effective example of me learning public that i've ever done uh i don't know if i can top this because it really went amazing so my first job i needed to write reactive type script and i didn't know it my my boss was like you know you know typescript right i was like no i don't um so i had i had to start to learn it on a very accelerated schedule and i found that the docs were missing the react stocks because they were promoting flow at the time they did not have good

[26:37] school documentation the typescript docs did not have good react support so i just created my subset of subset of a subset of react and typescript intersection right and and i created that and i just documented it i pasted it in everything i wish i knew and anything i didn't know i just i just researched it and i added it in and now that repo has 35 000 stars um which is insane i have taught people from airbnb microsoft uber whatever i've taught those kinds of people typescript and they've taught me every single time they filed an issue or a pr and like yeah yeah yeah you know

[27:14] like you're famous obviously you uh people would do that with you this was before anyone knew who i was um and i think if you basically just create a thing that people wish existed and you are just consistent about it people will join you in that mission find a good mission and people will join you so um yeah let's see people are asking for links so i'll just drop that in the chat right here you can find it easily okay um so yeah this is literally that was my announcement tweet um and then and then i just kept adding to it uh over the span of four years

[27:52] okay um what else do i have for you story time number three this is my most successful talk ever um and basically it's an attempt to explain things from first principles one is the form of first principles for software which is if you can take something complex that everybody knows and write your own mini clone of it from scratch from a blank file you can write every single piece and explain how everything works in a sufficient enough complexity right so basically i wrote react in 26 lines of code and people are like what you can do that um and then i got some feedback and then it became a

[28:34] workshop then it became a blog post then it became a talk uh and and to this day it's one of the best talks i've ever done um and so that is a form iterative form of learning in public um i think i blogged about it and i called it um so this is my blog i call it bottom up idea expirations at the bottom yeah here so if anyone is interested in the journey this from beginning to end took about a year from uh oh 18 months from 2019 to 2020 uh it started as a tweet and then went to a live stream a blog post lightning talk

[29:11] live code conference talk and then job interview i even presented it as part of a job interview as well i even forgot about that but really like that form of learning public is so easy to recycle and i highly encourage people to try doing some version of that i've seen people do this by the way for writing a css and js running react router writing webpack writing you know whatever whatever you're trying to explain if you can write it in a very simple way and explain that you have fundamentally understood the tool much better than reading through the entire documentation so i don't say that everybody should learn

[29:52] in public so people often view me as this like booster promoter whatever you call it um i think that there's it's learning probably is not for everyone there's a question of personal safety some people are more vulnerable especially if you're a minority and some people might attack you more sometimes you might feel like you are a content grind like you have to produce something every single week and it's you feel stressed you might feel like you're spamming people um other other people complain like oh my god all these learning public people your overnight experts you just read the docs yesterday you have zero years of experience shut up and you know

[30:32] and don't say anything until you're until you're 10 years of experience right so to them i think what you should say is yes like you are learning as you you should make it obvious you should not misrepresent yourself you should not misrepresent yourself as an expert but you should still try anyway because it's not their right to stop you from burning in public right and for people who are worried about their personal safety there there are ways to dissociate your online persona with your with your in-person identity and you can produce more polished work instead of more raw work because raw work is more likely you know a target of criticism whereas

[31:13] the more polished work is complete there's nothing to criticize because it is complete like a lot of times with samantha ming there's nothing else to add like it's it's just literally let me show let me show you some thumbing stuff what would you add to this uh there are three ways to clone objects there's not a fourth way right unless you literally made a mistake in one of these things then you can attack her but like she didn't even put her face there she's it's a cartoon avatar you're just you just really you just look really really dumb or misogynistic if you attack a cartoon avatar who's just trying to teach people

[31:42] javascript concepts right so that is the kind of thing that you can try to do there's a spectrum of learning in public and you choose how much public you want to be based on how comfortable you are in public how vulnerable you are uh in terms of personal safety okay sorry i'm just fasting through all this i feel like i've gone more more than 25 minutes already um sorry let me just skip through all this uh okay all right all right i'll end off with a concept of learning gears they're different modes of learning and learning in public should vary based on where you are what you're learning and and how

[32:21] quickly you're learning so essentially this answers the question of how do i start learning in public um and there are essentially three plus one gears i've actually added a fourth gear so let's talk about the the four gears the first gear is the explorer gear the problem that you're solving is you don't know what you don't know so you should only write notes to yourself you're not promising any output to anyone else it's just whenever you have time just to put out whatever it doesn't matter no one's expecting anything from you the commitment is very low whatever right and your goal is to just cover as much

[32:52] ground as possible to figure out what you don't know because right now you don't even know what you don't know right so you should explore as much as possible right and for me this is me in 2018. i was just blocking random and just putting it out there i knew that nobody was reading it and it's fine totally fine just making noise to myself that is exploring right and you shouldn't feel comfortable doing that because you're exercising a muscle this muscle will come will become very big later on but when you're just starting out don't hold yourself to the same standards of the big people out there

[33:23] that you that you're looking up to just start exercising in small ways right you're just exploring okay then we're going into cellular gear once you know what you don't know it's time to run up that learning curve right your exhaust now can be teaching stuff you just learned putting stuff you uh you learn into your own words you can write cheat sheets you can write progress reports we talked about the cheat sheets earlier you have commitment of weeks to months you should try to learn things on a structured curriculum read books cover to cover complete certification exercises complete courses udacity udami whatever whatever you you think about that is um i think the

[34:01] settler gear is basically what we've been trained to do in school right in school in college university there's a curriculum you start at the top you go down to the bottom you learn everything there is to know about it then you're good right um so i don't have a good example for that here but we'll like that is that is the uh learning gear then from settler we go to connector now the problem is you now know things because you finished the selling gear now you're settled now you're going to connect things from where you are to where you used to be so you now know

[34:33] things others don't so your exhaust is now meant for other people you're producing more polished work to explain things to others like teaching them formally you have some pet topics you don't have a grand theme that you're developing over the course of your career it's moderate you're putting yourself out there right um i find i think that sarah drastic is a it's a canonical example of my work she's also a former boss and mentor of mine uh and i uh i would say definitely check out check out her work if you're if you're interested because she's a very good connector teaches a lot of things for example

[35:04] design for developers is one of her top top top topics as well um adam weathen as well he's more of a full stack and now css tailwind guy but he's also you know trying to connect things things for people he talks about a lot of he steals a lot of ideas from the react community to implement in a view community steals ideas from the view communities who implemented laravel steals ideas from laravel to implement in css and so on and so forth i think this is a very very fruitful way and if anything you should try to default to the connector here because the connector gear is the most productive gear of your

[35:36] life right it's literally just take ideas from one place explain it to other people connect stuff together connect domains together that uh previously unrelated uh there's a lot of fruitful development and ideas from there finally there's the minor gear when you find you know everything that everyone else knows but there's something that's still too unknown out there that nobody knows humanity does not know something important is still too hard so now your exhaust is not blogs about you know uh how to install react it's r d it's infrastructure it's research it's built to last you're pushing the boundaries of human knowledge your output has one unifying theme you

[36:15] have a grand purpose a goal and everyone knows you as that person that's just working towards that goal so your commitment is high you're you're spending years on this thing it might define your entire career and when you have struck gold you'll know your short goal because you're both fascinated by it and other people are telling you that it's valuable when you have struck gold you should go into minor gear right some people like while i like this are even you from from djs he struck gold with view and and and people are just paying him uh to work on on it in open source um other people um they have interesting

[36:47] concepts that i don't have time to highlight but take a screenshot of this because each of these are interesting blog posts that i want to send you to chris coyer has working in public corey house has a fascinating talk called how to become an outlier ken c dodds calls it intentional career building jeff edward the founder of stack overflow calls it stopped sucking and be awesome all of these guys are basically trying to tell you different versions the same thing it's just to learn in public so i talk here's that's my talk about learning public and learning gears i also have a book version of this

[37:21] sorry let me let me just fast forward to the end i also have a book version of this you can read the free chapter on learning public at learningpublic.org and that's it that's my talk

[37:35] all right well thank you so much sean um for this great talk tonight i especially love the stories that he shared i think some of them just i put the emoji in there trying to find the the mind-blowing emoji crystal one about the typescript one where it was just just amazing um and so encouraging yeah i was listening to an old podcast uh of mine from 2019 and i was like wow this repo has reached 6 000 stars i was like this this might it's mind-blowing yeah yeah this is amazing like i'm sure you didn't expect things to go so big you know when you first started um but it's

[38:11] amazing how yeah how things can progress like that um i know we're a little bit over a lot of times so some of you need to go feel free but i still wanted to to to leave a little bit of time in case people have questions first for sean um yeah so if you have anything just pop in the chat right now yeah we'll we'll wait a couple minutes and see something video happy to do questions yeah yeah okay uh we got one for francis so what's the best way to learn react oh that's a fascinating question uh best way to learn react is to probably go

[38:48] through the beta docs beta.react.react.js.org you build as few sample projects i think the best the best exercise that i've come across is called seven guise um and basically don't stop until you know uh how to do all this um so seven tasks to build a to-do list i'm sorry build a counter uh you know understand how to build a basic counter then how to do bi-directional data flow then understand how to build a basic uh flight booker with some more complex mathematical logic then you build a timer with some side effects that are time dependent and you go all the way until you're building a spreadsheet

[39:38] and once you can do that i'm pretty sure you can say that you know react so this is seven guise seven gui okay awesome thanks for sharing that i'm actually trying to learn react myself so i might i might also steal that song that's good um another way you know when i was uh still running the react subreddit um um so we have a beginner's questions and answers thing here uh and this is something i started um to really try to help beginners let me see

[40:17] monthly beginner q a thread so essentially oh man this is the i think the search is broken so essentially you know there's hundreds of questions and answers here go in and answer other people's questions because a lot of times the way that you're learning is limited by the amount of questions that you can come up with but if you can answer all the other people's questions that you never thought about then you're learning at their rate so this is all about the algorithm for learning right why not increase the algorithm the number of n uh that you're learning at from n of one to n of like a hundred

[40:58] that's my answer wow yeah that's inside but i never saw it like that you're learning other people's rate that's that's what you do by answering all those questions thank you for that uh i think matthew what is your process for writing a blog post yeah um it really depends what kind of blog post um so there's some blog posts that i throw away so some for example um sometimes i had a meetup and then i had a really interesting conversation in the meetup then i'll just write it on the spot and that would just i took maybe half an hour to write this and sometimes i will have it in drafts

[41:35] so i actually have a draft uh second brain called uh obsidian um then i'll have all these examples of blogs blog posts i want to do so i incubate my blog post ideas here and sometimes i'll just like put in some notes put in some data points put in some relevant tweets and once it's ready once i feel like writing it then i'll fully bake it into a blog post so um here's uh here's one that i'm trying to uh develop right now into into a separate thing so i just break it out into a blog post uh so the way the what i called in this is called mise and plus writing

[42:16] uh essentially instead of writing one post at a time write 50 posts at a time right so um you separate your pre-writing process from your actual writing uh the idea for a blog post your research on bloggers your peer review testing on an audience reframing organizing illustration you should do all this simultaneously and then when you're writing you just write wow okay this this is cool i feel this is like a like a life hack dude to block who's writing because yeah because ideas research uh audience review all this arrives randomly right so this is called this is passive and serendipitous but actually writing requires active and focused time

[43:01] right so you can only do this one at a time but you're pre-writing you can just do it simultaneously a lot of it is when i'm walking when i'm listening to a podcast when i'm talking to people at a conference when i'm in the shower whatever it is have a system for capturing all that and just work on multiple posts at once whatever time is time is right or whenever you're ready then you just take it out to the writing process oh awesome all right any any other questions um yeah i don't want to take too much of john's time okay someone else do you use any tools

[43:34] uh obsidian it's just any markdown editor yeah yeah yeah simple i think it's nothing like crazy yeah that's great um these are this is how i draw from talks as well so original talk bullet point bullet point bullet point uh and then i turned it into a talk well okay yeah i think it'll be easy for anyone to get started which is obsidian um all right so okay yeah i'm glad you learned um yeah any last minute questions before we close up

[44:20] okay all right um yeah thank you so much uh for for joining and and sean what would be the best way to you people want to just follow you or even ask you follow-up questions after events yeah you can find me on that's fixed online uh or you can find my blog here six dot io okay let me yeah i have your twitter here i mean let me post it in the chat okay all right so yeah you can follow us on twitter here um yeah there's some information about future events um so feel free to check that out um yeah before we officially close i'm sean like do you

[45:04] have any last minute or like not last minute like final remarks or encouragement that you want to leave with your audience before you go um here i'll leave you with one abstract thing because i feel like i touched on it but i never really explained um explained what i mean so what we're really trying to do when we learn in public is to create luck is to expand our luck surface area for lucky things to happen to us by doing p by doing more things and telling people about it by this matter we are more lucky than other people who are not doing that [Music]

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