The Word Before Work

Shirley Wu is a freelance data visualization expert. Data visualization, at its core, is when you take lots of data, and it's hard for you to look in Excel. You visualize that into some graph or chart, and the most simple could be a bar chart or some graph so that you can understand trends within it easier. In data visualization, there is an entire spectrum of approaches you can take with a dataset. You have to decide on the balance between art and the data. With clients, choosing where in that spectrum is asking yourself, "What do I want for the end-user to experience?" The difference between a purely artistic piece and a visualization is that with data visualization, there's a goal to it. You're taking data, and you're trying to communicate something, or you're trying to build a tool to help people explore that data. Transcript"How Shirley Wu Built A Career As A Freelance Data Visualizer" TranscriptResourcesData Visualization SocietyData Stories Podcastscrollama.jsGreenSockShirley WuTwitterGithubYouTubeWebsiteMediumLinkedInFrontend MastersJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

Courtland Allen, founder of indiehackers.com, shares how he grew the indie hackers community through good content, time, and consistency. He emphasizes the value of learning from others and taking a thoughtful approach. Courtland also discusses the importance of enjoying the process and not being afraid of failures. The podcast explores the balance between acquiring knowledge and taking action, and the significance of money in sustaining a business.

Rosie Sherry is both an unschooling parent and the founder of the Ministry Of Testing. There's a disproportionate number of bootstrappers who homeschool their kids, and maybe it's for the same reason why they built something themself instead of fitting into the mold, they think they can do it better. Ministry of Testing is a company Rosie founded, officially as an online community in 2007, but then formally as a business in 2011. It's a community of software testers who geek out on testing, host conferences, have online talks, host trainings, and participate in an online community.You can't fake a community like that. You can growth hack numbers, members, et cetera. But, you can't fake community. A strong community has to have people who care, that's what it generally comes down to. The people who lead it have to care, show that they care, and care about the industry as a whole.Transcript"Real Community Can't Be Faked With Rosie Sherry" TranscriptResourcesMinistry Of TestingIndie HackersRosie SherryTwitterWebsiteJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

Design systems are your component library, documentation, tools, et cetera. And then there are the operations of it. So like an agile team uses agile methodology, a design system is about making your teams work better.After Bootstrap, we all ended up building our own Bootstraps. We all like to think that we're special and the problems we're solving are specific to our company, but the reality is the way that your system is built is probably not that special. It's the way that your system is used that's special.Everybody should be able to access your products, and you can't just make a bunch of accessible components, you have to give your users guidelines on how to use them. Sarah says that accessibility should be considered in every step of development. Transcript"Accessible Design Systems With Sarah Federman" TranscriptResourcesDistilling How We Think About Design SystemsSarah FedermanTwitterWebsiteJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

Segun Adebayo was turned off of web development after struggling with Wordpress' themes and plugins, and so he went straight into UI design entirely using Sketch and Figma for quite some time. It was React that brought him back into the development fold. The way React made it so easy to create components stuck with him.Segun is still a designer at heart, but his skillset goes beyond design. If he calls himself a designer, it limits what people want from him. By calling himself, a UX Engineer Segun can create higher expectations of his skills, and people come to him for a broader range of problems.One of the key reasons Segun started his side-project, Chakra UI, was to learn. One of his fundamental values is learning in public. Chakra UI is a passion project for Segun. It breaks his heart that most applications aren't accessible. Accessibility is one of the three core principles of Chakra UI along with composition, and being easy to style. Accessibility was one of the other key reasons for Segun starting Chakra UI. He wanted to create a design system that would make it easier for other developers to make the web accessible.Transcript"Why Segun Adebayo Calls Himself A UX Engineer Instead Of A Designer" TranscriptResourcesReact TrainingDesign For DevelopersRefactoring UIChakra UISegun AdebayoTwitterJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

T7 Chicken was where it all began with Nick's journey into development. Nick had no development experience. Still, he wasn't satisfied with the websites and apps available for Tekken framerate data, so he took it upon himself to learn Android development to create his mobile app. Nick had the support of the Tekken community and received programming help from people online. Projects like these are so crucial for rapidly growing as a developer, and you won't get the same experience at work. It's making something you need for your community. It's also a place where you are free to experiment with new technologies. Most of us wouldn't be where we are today in our careers without the help of the online programming community. Nick gives back through his work as a mentor at the Resilient Coders bootcamp. Resilient Coders is different from most bootcamps. They pay their students to learn to code! They are a non-profit and rely on donations from generous individuals and companies to operate. Paying their students allows them to be truly inclusive by providing an opportunity for people who don't have the privilege of being able to survive without some form of income. Transcript"Why do you do it? With Nick DeJesus" TranscriptResourcesResilient CodersT7 Chicken TwitteriOS: T7 ChickenAndroid: T7 ChickenApprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software CraftsmanNick DeJesusTwitterWebsiteJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

Monica Powell didn't have the most straightforward path to her first job as a developer. She took a couple of years of graphic design in college, took a computer science class, joined a student-led web development agency, and then joined a tech startup where she did email marketing and development. At that point, Monica knew that she wanted to be a developer, but she knew too much to attend a boot camp and not enough to get a job. So, she took classes, landed an internship, and then eventually got hired as a web developer. Meetups were an important part of Monica's development. When she was in college, she'd attend meet up events to get an opportunity to get off campus and see how people are using technology. She gravitates to women in tech events since she's always found those events to be safe places for her to learn new technologies and meet other people. As of November 2018, Monica is now organizing a meetup called "React Ladies" in NYC!Contributing to open-source was also important for Monica. Open-source de-mystifies the software that you use. You can look through the source-code of any package that you're using in your project. There's also plenty of opportunities to contribute, and it doesn't have to be code, many projects need contributions to their documentation as well.Transcript"Personal Growth From Open-Source And Meetups With Monica Powell" TranscriptResourcesaprilzero.comReact Ladies MeetupCode NewbieReact Conf 2019ToastmastersWrite/Speak/CodeGlobal Diversity CFP DayMonica PowellTwitterGithubDev.toWebsiteMediumLinkedInJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

At first, React looked like it might have been a fad, and JSX seemed weird. But, it didn't take long for people to see the power and beauty of it. React makes reuse easy, which makes accessibility a lot easier. Every time you needed an input, you had to remember all of the accessibility attributes and write it all by hand. With React, you can make a reusable input with all of the accessibility built-in. You must make your components accessible. There's a broader range of people who need accessible features than you might think. Most of us think of people with visual impairments, but they're also for people with cognitive, auditory, and motor skills issues. We also don't think about the temporary issues that nearly everyone faces at some point in their lives, such as broken limbs, and medication side-effects. Accessibility features are even helpful under certain environmental conditions like exceptionally bright or noisy places. Even internationalization can be seen as an accessibility issue if your site isn't supporting all languages and localizing all dates. Accessibility is very multifaceted.Try taking a test-driven approach when it comes to accessibility. Start with the low hanging fruit, static code analysis, and running a scan with a browser plugin. Then try to use your app with accessibility tools yourself, figure out how you can make it a better experience for your users. Finally, have real people with various disabilities test out your app and give you feedback.Transcript"Test Driven Accessibility with Erin Doyle" TranscriptResourcesAria in HTMLFirefox: Axe Developer ToolsChrome: Axe Developer ToolsChrome: LighthouseErin DoyleTwitterGithubJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

D3.js is the defacto library that people use to create custom data visualizations on the web today. It's powerful and flexible. You can do whatever you want with it. However, that kind of power and flexibility comes at the cost of complexity. You have to know what you're doing, and it takes a long time to learn. There's existing content written on D3, but there's always room for another voice. With the help of Newline, Amelia wrote the book of over 600 pages, Fullstack D3 and Data Visualization. In this book, she teaches all the theory and application you need to know to make badass visualizations using D3. Amelia also takes the unique approach of having you use your own dataset! Data that means something to you is going to be much more interesting than anything that could be provided.As a React developer, Amelia wrote the excellent blog post Thinking in React Hooks. She says that you have to make a paradigm shift with hooks. You can't keep thinking about your components in terms of lifecycle, but instead, think about them in terms of data synchronization. Transcript"Writing The Book On Data Visualization With Amelia Wattenberger" TranscriptResourcesFullstack D3 and Data VisualizationThe Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward TufteThinking in React HooksAmelia WattenbergerTwitterWebsiteJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

Hiro started coding HTML and CSS back in middle school so she could make internet friends and talk about anime. She never thought of coding as anything more than a hobby, and she stopped when she began college. She got her master's in special education, but due to a traumatic injury, she had to make a career pivot. She got a job as a helpdesk engineer and eventually worked her to a sysadmin position at a startup. Hiro quit the comfortable sysadmin job. She asked herself if ten years from now, if she'd be proud that she stuck with the company for another six months. The answer was no. Hiro quit her job to focus full-time on teaching technology. It was a huge leap, and yet again, she was in unfamiliar territory, but she's been able to find success. Hiro has released four intro-level AWS courses for non-engineers on LinkedIn, writes independent articles, and gets paid to write blog posts for small business owners. You don't have to be a specialist to find success. Yes, the world needs people who can go all-in on something and produce fantastic work, but it also needs people who can bridge the gaps and solve problems with the breadth of their experiences. Transcript"Making A Fufilling Career Out Of Multiple Interests With Hiro Nishimura" TranscriptResourcesAWS NewbiesStripe AtlasHiro NishimuraTwitterWebsiteLinkedInJoel HooksTwitterWebsite