🎙 About the episode
Meet Trecia Kat 🇿🇦! Trecia is a new developer from South Africa who originally wanted to work in healthcare. She eventually decided to study IT, but she dropped out of college when it turned out that online resources were better! Today she's a front-end developer. She got her feet wet in the world of Developer Advocacy, she beat her social anxiety, and she even spoke at a conference!
In this episode, you'll learn why passion doesn't mean you'll be great at something - and how to recognize what you can actually be great at. Trecia tells us how she learned to code, overcame her fear of interacting with people she doesn't know, and landed her first developer job. Twitter was essential for Trecia's journey - she will teach you how to use it to get out of your comfort zone and what Tech Twitter tropes to ignore. You will also hear about Trecia's DevRel internship at Strapi and how she ended up speaking at a conference by trying not to speak at a conference.
🔗 Connect with Trecia
⏰ Timestamps
- How Trecia decided to learn to code, and should you be passionate about coding to do so (01:27)
- Trecia wanted to work in healthcare but eventually decided to study IT (02:52)
- Why Trecia dropped out of her studies (06:42)
- How Trecia decided to pick up front-end when her cousin needed a website (9:30)
- Resources Trecia used to learn to code (11:18)
- Break: Here’s what you’ve tweeted about the podcast. (13:54)
- The biggest challenge Trecia faced was wanting to learn too many things at once (16:13)
- Tech Twitter is useful… but don’t believe everything you read (17:41)
- How Trecia grew her Twitter following (18:52)
- How Trecia used Twitter to fight her social anxiety and connect with the community (20:05)
- Trecia got her first freelance gig because of Twitter! (26:15)
- How Trecia learned about DevRel and got a DevRel internship (27:29)
- Ad break: Next week, it’s Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann! (30:03)
- On Trecia’s DevRel internship at Strapi (32:10)
- How Trecia spoke at the Next.js conference by trying too hard not to speak at a conference at all (33:36)
- Why Trecia decided to drop being a developer advocate for the time being and focus on becoming a better developer (34:34)
- What Trecia wishes she knew when she was starting out as a coder: focus on yourself and break out of your comfort zone (37:15)
🧰 Resources Mentioned
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