[Weekend Drop] GraphQL, Learning in Public, and AWS with Loren Sands-Ramshaw

Loren Sands-Ramshaw: https://lorensr.me/

The GraphQL Guide (coming soon): https://graphql.guide/

Transcript

Loren Sands-Ramshaw: [00:00:00] So welcome Shawn to the GraphQL Guide interview with Shawn Swyx Wang. Is that 

swyx: [00:00:04] it? I pronounce that, right. It's it's my Chinese and English initials. And it's just a branding that I'm leaned into because it's unique. Yeah. I think it's great. 

Loren Sands-Ramshaw: [00:00:11] Yeah, definitely unique. So for those of our readers who don't yet know you, 

swyx: [00:00:15] Who are you, what do you do?

Cool. I'm Shawn. I guess I work on developer experience at Temporal. I should be more assertive. I am head of developer experience at Temporal.io. It's a Small startup that does microservices orchestration, which is a very, very fancy name that basically runs an open-source framework spun out of Uber that we can go into more details, but really, I've done.

I sort of migrated from finances, which is my first career. Then I went into Front end. So I did a JavaScript bootcamp then went into front end D started doing some speaking and writing in 2017 and got noticed by Netlify. And that's how I got into developer education, which is what we're here to talk about, I guess, and then started getting into graph QR because it was all tied into the react world.

At the time. You could not ignore graph QL and Gatsby and Apollo and all the other ecosystem in, in, in place. I did. Then I then went to AWS to do the same job, essentially where they have amplify an app sync apps think is AWS has graph QL gateway as a service, which we can talk about. And I recently left to join Temporal.

Loren Sands-Ramshaw: [00:01:18] Going back to when you were getting noticed you were like writing blogs and doing talks and getting out a spot Netlify how did you decide to get into developer education? 

swyx: [00:01:25] I didn't, there wasn't actually a decision. It was just like, let's just try this. And see what happens. So that the context was that the boot, the first job I got out of bootcamp was at Two Sigma, which is a well-known Quant hedge fund in New York.

The problem was that I was in a, I didn't know it, but I got into a bad part of Two Sigma where they were severely underusing their engineers to the point where four days out of five, we were not doing anything like specifically not standing on our desk. Cause we had stand up desks. And.

Explicitly given to have the okay. To do whatever we wanted, whatever because we just didn't have work. And that was, it's a, it's an enviable position, right. For for a lot of people like, Oh yeah. Paid around and do whatever you want. That's that sounds like a great job, but I don't think it's a very good job for a junior.

Like someone just starting out. Right. You're not going to grow up very much. So it's like frustration. Really that I was like, okay, I'm not getting any learning at work. My, my team lead was like not doing his job. So I just started blogging and, making my own mentors, like, externally New York city has a pretty vibrant meetup scene.

So I just, started doing my own talks, even though I didn't feel like an expert. And then I started doing blogging and I think the first one that really picked up for me was. When react announced that it was working on async react like concurrent mode as it is known today, but back then it was async react.

So it was announced at a conference in JS conf on March in March, 2018. And I remember that night because it was a big shock to the react ecosystem and it was like a sweeping change. They touching every single part of react. So I just stayed up all night to write a walkthrough of the talk, the demo, and just really like went through everything at it.

And that was the first blog post that. We've got really some notice for me and that really still bald since then. And since then I've kind of enveloped everything into this principle I've learned in public. Like when you find something interesting write it up in your own words and share it with people.

And at least the people involved in working on the thing will probably read it. And if you're saving some work and if you have some unique perspective than other people will find it helpful as well. 

Loren Sands-Ramshaw: [00:03:26] Was there a moment where you were like, I'm going to write my own blog posts instead of reading other people's.

swyx: [00:03:32] I've been doing it, unsuccessfully for like the two years prior. So there was no one single moment. It was just like focusing it on something that people actually cared about. It turns out that, you want to write things that people want to read. And that's that was a pretty big insight for me.

It's not, it didn't seem like that big of an insight until you look at it. The vast quantities of developer blogs out there. And a lot of them are sort of very inward facing. They don't really answer the question of why should you care? And so I, I definitely had my mentality changed around like, okay.

Like it has to be an intersection of things you're very interested in and things that other people are interested in and you can't just have one or two. 

Loren Sands-Ramshaw: [00:04:07] Speaking of things that people are interested to read, you have a great book on the coding careers. That's called the coding career handbook.

One of your first. Customers really like the parts of it that I read. What was that like coming with the idea of the book and writing it and 

swyx: [00:04:20] publishing it. So there's a fun story for the reason the name is so awkward. I still don't like the name, but I just had to go with it because I didn't have anything of anything else.

The reason was the original name was cracking the coding career because there was a successful technical interviews book called cracking the coding interview. And the whole point was that it w I wanted it to be apparent in the title that once you're done with the interview, once you landed the job.

There's a huge gaping hole of what's next. And this th this book is targeted at the what's next. Unfortunately, Gail McDonald, the author cracking Cody career actually got in touch with me and mentioned lawyers. So I had to change the name before lunch. So, by the time, like I already had my Twitter handle up and all that, and I was just like, all right, I'll just stick with this thing.

But it is an acronym. Yeah the. Point I think is that people, I think my most successful writing, like it or not has been my non-technical writing which the learning public essay has reached, hundreds of thousands of people. And I constantly get shout outs every single day about people starting to own journeys.

And it's something that I really. Believe it, even though I hate, I'm not like the Tony Robbins type, I don't want to be like a lifetime life coach or anything. I just think that this worked for me and it will work for a lot more other people. So I was like, okay. I just, I should probably just write down some more advice on, on, on what I think that people need, because.

I think what really crystallized it for me was when you look at career ladder. So I did a study of every p...