hey Ksenia! I dont specifically focus on data science/engineering, but I expect a lot of it to be relevant since it’s about the nontechnical side of technical careers anyway!
you can see for yourself - https://www.learninpublic.org/v1-principles-learn-in-public.pdf

hey Dustin! hmm, this is hard to answer because I dont know what you have in mind by “people in other roles”. We have unique challenges — a lot of the time the quality and productivity of coders is hard to measure, compared to say, a marketer or a recruiter — but also unique opportunities, eg working in popular open source

swyx indeed, that’s what I mean by other roles! Marketers, sales people, etc.

hey Ankush! yes this is a challenge especially for working parents. Some ideas:

• reuse your work - create reusable resources and blogposts out of the work that you are already doing. This will also save you time in future
  
• set aside 1-2 hours before work every day — this is consistently the best time to do this out of all the dev creators i interview
  
• take a codecation https://thoughtbot.com/blog/you-should-take-a-codecation
  
• scope down your ambitions and perfectionism
  when you talk about needing “extensive free time” to build public image i suspect you are viewing this as a lot of extra work. when you can see how to break it down and also see how it opens up so many opportunities, may not seem that way.

Thank you :)

hey Alex! same answers as to Ksenia!

well that is a huge part of my own journey… i career changed at age 30 — so its something i constantly think about throughout the whole thing 🙂

There is a whole chapter called “Negotiating”

not explicitly - this book lightly covers the job hunt and focuses on skills all devs need to level up. the most important thing that students with nontraditional background should think about is covering the CS fundamentals that they miss out compared to uni grads - i do recommend some resources for “building your own cs degree”. but in no way do i think it is necessary to build a successful career - just a nice to have

aww thanks CJ :heart: yes it was very important to me not to have a “Diversity chapter”, and I opted for sprinkling mentions and reminders throughout the whole book

hmm good question! a big part of why i wrote this is bc i saw a huge gap in the market between the “total beginner” oriented books (the kind that teach you to crack the coding interview) and the “high level” books (like pragmatic programmer) so this is challenging.
My goal is lasting principles that transcend specific technologies, so I think books like Deep Work and Tools of Titans are very central to my thinking so I’d recommend them — no opinion on whether to read before or after.

hey Glenn! thank you! well actually there were and since it was an impromptu list there were probably some that i came up with later that i regretted not including haha

unfortunately i seem to have deleted them… but happy to talk about any of the principles in the principles section of the book https://www.learninpublic.org/toc

Thanks! I’d love to hear a high-level overview of what this principle is about - “Pick Up What They Put Down”

https://www.swyx.io/PUWTPD

(book is 25% blogposts that have done well, expanded and elaborated, 75% new stuff)

yes, in fact i am currently a group mentor for Cohort 12 of BASB right now 🙂 i wrote the LIP essay 2 years before BASB, but the course has helped solidify my understanding of notetaking and helped me understand what pain points other people have.
i would say a big difference is that BASB is very inward facing - more focused on your notetaking system - whereas LIP is by nature more focused on public output.

Oh very cool! I just started using Obsidian last year and a lot of content related to it on YouTube mentions BASB. I need to build better note-taking habits with it, but being able to write in markdown and see how all the notes are connected in the graph view makes it a lot of fun

yes but very inward focused. i want people to produce produce produce 🙂

Very true! TBH like many others I’m terrified with the idea of learning in public, but I guess there “ain’t nothin to it but to do it”. I very much enjoy writing, but struggle with impostor syndrome. After re-reading your LIP essay this morning, I’m going to commit to writing something this week 🙌

Hehe, I will probably check the previous thread =)

yeah similar http://buildingasecondbrain.com/

second brain looks interesting but is very 💰💰 lol

yes lol my community is discount second brain haha

oh great question! two directions to explore here -

1. what do you really want to build and what helps you get there? (games, blog, mac utility, mobile app, hacker news clone, data scraper, SaaS app, whatever)
   
2. what do the interesting employers in your area seem to be hiring for?

oh i did finally write it up 🙂 https://www.swyx.io/svelte-sites-react-apps/

btw i did consciously play an active role in Svelte gaining more popularity - @SvelteSociety on twitter is me 🙂 i think a good skill to develop is betting on technologies just before they cross the chasm - something i touch on in the strategy chapters

I’d be interested in learning a little bit more about your process in choosing which technologies to bet on. I bet on SwiftUI pretty early and a couple of years ago, I switched from my company’s frontend team to iOS. React was more similar to SwiftUI than what my iOS teammates had ever worked on, so I was much more productive than all of my them out of the gate. I still think SwiftUI is the future, but I didn’t realize how slow the mobile space moves compared to web so sometimes I feel like I bet on it too early.

oh! it always feels like that i suspect. objc was clearly not going to vanish overnight the moment swiftui was launched, but you can see apple moving more and more over to it. i wouldnt be worried about it, as long as apple doesnt suddenly deprecate it overnight then you’re just playing a long game

hey Anika! well I have personally been able to skip some technical interviews because the interviewer has seen me livecode or attended a workshop of mine. however not all companies will do that.

still, almost everyone googles you or looks up your profile before interviewing you. if you can demonstrate proof of your expertise in a difficult field (eg speaking at a well known conference, publishing in a well regarded publication, repo with lots of stars) then it can help to reassure the interviewer.

at the end of the day the interview process is a risk minimization framework, people are looking for clear strengths and lack of critical weakness, and a public profile can help with both.

Thank you !

important question! make sure your resume reflects all the work that youve done towards the identity that you want to have, not what you used to have

then think about doing internal transfers rather than trying to go in by the “front door”. in other words - its much easier to join the company first and transition to that role internally (often by volunteering to do extra work for that role) than it is to pass the interview bar for the new role direclty

Thank you.

write more - documentation, internal design docs, sprint retrospective. document what you did and how you did it and make sure people know what you did (marketing) and you distill lessons from your experience (teaching, identifying core principles)

social media accounts are not necessary, but they can be great help to networking! so… highly recommended, so long as you dont get addicted to their worst properties.

That last part is the most difficult one! Thanks =)

It would be interesting to develop a system that takes your thoughts/notes and organizes them like a wiki for you. I used to do the same.

ohh.. here 🙂 https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/
i am a BASB mentor for the ongoing cohort right now

Thanks! Looks quite useful - I’ll give it a try!

thanks! it came out of a desire to illustrate why years of experience is a terrible metric to evaluate engineering skill/talent/progress. When you break down the factors and think in terms of scaling like with Big O, it then becomes quite obvious what kinds of behaviors scale better than others, and therefore what we should do over a long career 😄