Making technical decisions for your business when you don't have experience as a developer is difficult. It's scary to make decisions that you don't know the consequences of.Tracy got into development when at one point she had the freetime to take an HTML, CSS, JavaScript course online. Becoming a developer taught Tracy the importance of grouping her meetings so she could have uninterrupted blocks of time to get work done. Before, she didn't realize the impact that breaking people's flow had.A lot of people are trying to become developers. One of the more common routes now is attending a bootcamp. But be careful, not all bootcamps are equal. Graduates from some bootcamps struggle a lot harder in the hiring process than others. Make sure that you do your research and talk to people who graduated from the program.Transcript"Out With The 10x Developer And In With The 10x Mentor With Tracy Lee" TranscriptQuotes"I feel like if you're not technical, it's almost like you're scared to make the decision"". . . I group together all my meetings, because I used to be like, 'Oh, co-founder, you're not in a meeting. Oh, he's probably bored. Oh, he's not involved.' Like, my god, I was just killing his productivity the entire time.""You should be really promoting the idea of a 10x mentor. So, helping everybody within an organization, within a development organization, should be helping facilitate each other to be successful.""But unless you keep doing the same thing, the thing over and over and over again, and getting really good at it, then you're never going to actually grow"". . . do your research and find people that have gone to the bootcamp, and ask them directly what their experience was"ResourcesThinking in Systems: A PrimerThe Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy AnswersTracy LeeTwitterGithubWebsiteJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

To executives, new features mean more money, but even if you had terrific features, they wouldn't be worth a thing if they only worked half the time. Reliability isn't something you want to put off until later after the project has grown, it will save you a lot of time and money if you factor it in from day one. Everyone has adapted to a speedy internet these days. Users leave if the site is taking more than even a few seconds to load. It's easy to get overly focused on features while losing the context of the overall application. The first and foremost solid you can do future you is to keep things as simple as possible. Never get overly complicated, that's where you run into scaling troubles. Complexity also causes significant headaches when bringing other people on. In addition to keeping complexity low, make sure documentation gets written and that it's kept up to date. A solution that Molly's company has put in place to keep the docs fresh is to give every document an expiration date three months out from when it gets written. When someone references the docs, they check if it's past the expiration date, if it is they go through and make sure that the information is still current, and afterward extending the expiration date another three months. Transcript "Build Performant And Reliable Applications With Molly Struve" Transcript Quotes "To me, a site reliability engineer is a software engineer, but with their focus on performance and reliability." "So, it's a dev, but they've got a little bit of something extra in there that just helps them kind of step back and look at the whole system and ensure that it's performing and reliable." "There's only so much you can just attribute to the black box. Sometimes you actually got to go in there and figure out what's going on." "You can have all the great features in the world, but if they're only working 50% of the time, none of your clients are going to be happy." "A lot of times, if you're just focused on just the feature you're building, you'll lose the context of the overall application." Resources Making On-Call Not Suck What It Means To Be A Site Reliability Engineer Scaling Elasticsearch Part 1: How to Speed Up Indexing Scaling Elasticsearch Part 2: How to Speed Up Search Molly Struve Twitter Github Dev.to LinkedIn Website Joel Hooks Twitter Website

How many of us still almost exclusively use console.log() when trying to debug something? It's okay, plenty of us do it that way, but you could be saving yourself a lot of pain and suffering by using the debugger and stepping through the execution. There are several advantages to using a debugger, you get a tighter feedback loop, a lot more information, and it allows you to go into places you wouldn't have even thought about. Now debugging can take you far, but there are times when we need another human to help us. Asking questions is anxiety-inducing, "what if this is something I should already know?" "am I being annoying?" "am I interrupting them from doing something important?" The key is to remember that there is no such thing as a dumb question, but there are questions that haven't been thoroughly vetted. Stack overflow has an excellent wiki on asking good questions. Learn how to form good questions, and everything will end up being okay! Justin is doing good work in bringing awareness to Atlanta's rich culture and advocating for people who are under-represented in technology. Be sure to check out the Render(ATL) conference upcoming in May 2020. Transcript "Learn To Debug Properly And Ask Better Questions With Justin Samuels" Transcript Quotes "It's a good combo though. Computers, business, and teaching people, and passing on information. I think it's a trifecta, right? It's a killer combo." "But I loved React, because I already knew JavaScript. So it was like, 'Hey, here's some tools that you could just wrap around your JavaScript and you could make things better.'" "I feel like when you use the debugger, that invokes a curiosity. It allows you to go into places that you wouldn't have even thought about. It also gives you a sneak peek of what's going on underneath the hood." "So you'll always have three lanes, I call it. You either know what you do know, or you know what you don't know, or you don't know what you don't know. And I'm like, 'Okay, I could get past the first two.' But the last category of you don't really know what you don't know is scary all the time." "You have to learn how to formulate a question that engineers are going to be able to be like, 'Oh, here's your problem.'" Resources The Power of Habit Atomic Habits Render(ATL) Stack Overflow: How do I ask a good question? Justin Samuels Twitter Dev.to LinkedIn Stack Overflow Joel Hooks Twitter Website

Everything is a system, and every system is a box in another larger system. It's up to managers to think in systems to make choices and understand their consequences. The manager has an obligation to their team. The decisions of managers make a tremendous impact on folk's lives.But managers are only human."When we go into school there's kind of this sense that authorities are these all-knowing kind of perfect figures that are responsible for everything." The reality is that managers are humans that are dealing with their circumstances. It's easy to put all of the responsibility on them, but they need to be seen as people.People fail. Managers aren't the only people burdened with responsibility. There's the "10x Engineer" or "The Hero Programmer," that end up with severe burnout.Managing is an ethical and moral profession. Managers have to make ethical decisions in regards to deciding who gets promoted, fired, given a raise. How do we get justice and results? That's what makes management an elegant puzzle.Transcript"The Elegant System of Management - with Will Larson" TranscriptEpisode Quotes"At companies that are struggling there is a lot of opportunity. And sometimes it's not easy opportunity, and it's not structured super well it's not packaged up, or you just get to have an easy entry into management.""There's not someone teaching you there's not an easy path. You just have to go learn by trying, thinking, um going back to the principles and trying to figure out how to make it all come together.""When we go into school there's kind of this sense that authorities are these all-knowing kind of perfect figures that are responsible for everything.""Really any fast-growing company is the best place in the world to learn quickly about systems and how they work in reality.""if you get good at the cold email of asking one short, crisp question that's a good question you can meet anyone."ResourcesAn Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering ManagementThinking in Systems: A PrimerGreenhouse.ioWill LarsonTwitterWebsiteJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

Marisa Morby is a professional product manager. A common question she gets is "what's the difference between a product manager and a project manager?" There's a lot of overlap, but the difference is a product manager has to understand what needs to get done and why and be able to communicate that, and the project manager makes sure that everything stays on the rails and results in a cohesive product.Many teams put significant of focus on user outcomes. A user outcome is the ultimate goal of the user. It's what they need to happen. If we don't know what the user needs to happen, we'll end up focusing on the wrong thing.To figure out what a user wants user research needs to get conducted. No, you don't have to break out the lab coat. Research doesn't have to be so rigid. Just have conversations with your users and try to gain an understanding of their wants, needs, and frustrations. Make sure that you don't make assumptions about your user's needs. Ask questions that might seem painfully obvious to youMarisa also talks about working with all-remote team. We live in an amazing day and age that allows us to do our work wherever we want, but there are challenges we have to overcome for everyone to still be productive. We have lizard brains that make it challenging to build trust with people whose faces we never see. Regular video meetings that give some space for non-work conversations are essential in building that trust with people. Meeting people in person also has a substantial positive impact on communication; it gives you a lot of context with people's mannerisms!Transcript"Putting Emphasis on User Outcomes with Marisa Morby" TranscriptResourcesJust Enough ResearchMarisa MorbyTwitterWebsiteJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

When you are a consultant, you can't just learn a framework and then choose a place to work that uses it. Your clients will have their own needs and constraints that you're going to have to adapt to serve your client well.The constant learning can feel like a freefall. Constantly feeling dumb is panic-inducing. There's this trough of despair in software, where you swing between feeling like a genius and then going right back to despair.We can't just learn, but we have to learn well. It's critical to retain what you learned. Keep a developer journal, start a blog for yourself, discuss what you learned in a study group, etc. The less you have to relearn things, the less time you'll be spending in the trough of despair.The dreaded technical interview tends to have the problem of not testing you on anything that you should be learning. You have to spend your time cramming and hoping that the interviewer gives you problems that are still fresh in your mind. A one size fits all solution doesn't work and doesn't end up being objective. Candidates should get the opportunity to show off their skill and what they already know instead of figuring out what they don't know.Transcript"Escaping the Software Trough of Despair - With Laurie Barth" TranscriptLaurie BarthTwitterWebsiteJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

There are a few options for those trying to start a career in web development, teach yourself, join a bootcamp, or go to college. Veni chose the college route, she got a master's degree in computer science, which is awesome, but it didn't fully prepare her for web development. Computer science is primarily theory and it doesn't really prepare you for the engineering side of the job. There are only so many research positions where you'll get to applying your degree directly, the vast majority of us are facilitating commerce.When Veni was earning her degree the competition between her peers was fierce, but in order to grow she had to let go of that competition mentality. It becomes a puzzle for you to solve instead a competition between others. Having this kind of growth mindset is key to unlocking your learning potential.You hear about JavaScript fatigue everywhere and all the time. It's exhausting to try to keep up with the Joneses. Let go of the competition and do this for yourself. Each new technology is an interesting puzzle for you to solve.Veni is currently working towards increasing the diversity in the tech industry. She's building a community, figuring out what people need, and building awareness of opportunities. A lot of companies are trying to improve their diversity, but a lot of them aren't aware of how to do it in the best away.To work for diversity we need to realize that we all have biases, and figure out how to do something about them. We also need to understand that visibility and representation has a considerable impact. When you're a white male you get role models everywhere you look, people to look up to and help you realize that you too can get where they are. Underrepresented people don't have role models everywhere you look in every field you could possibly want to be in.Transcript"Embrace Challenges With A Growth Mindset - With Veni Kunche" TranscriptResourcesDiversify TechVeni KuncheTwittercodewithveni.comDev.toDiversify TechJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

You don't have to be passionate about code to have a successful career as a developer. Pariss Athena talks about how it isn't the code itself that motivates her to get better at understanding it. It's what being good at code provides that drives her.The financial freedom code gives Athena enables her to give more to the people and communities that are important to her. Success to her is freedom and helping others find success too. She is working on the Black Tech Pipeline, a platform to bring resources and exposure to the black tech community.What can those of us who are already established in this industry do to help underrepresented people? Athena says speak up, reach out to the community with opportunities for jobs, speaking engagements, podcasts, etc. Diversity doesn't just happen by default. Systemically we don't have a society that enables that. We have to be active and be a part of the team to make it happen.Transcript"Gaining Freedom and Helping Others Find Success - with Pariss Athena" TranscriptResources#BlackTechPipelinePariss AthenaTwitterJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

Vue has a reputation of being the most beginner-friendly framework, but that didn't just happen by accident. The Vue CLI is an excellent example. New developers often struggle with using the terminal and remembering all the commands. The Vue CLI provides a visual interface for the developer to generate a project. By making it easier for newcomers to make Vue projects, they've reduced the barriers to entry. Beginner-friendly doesn't mean basic. Many large-scale projects use Vue.Another example of something that fosters beginners and benefits established developers is how friendly, and inclusive the Vue community is. Natalia Tepluhina talks about gender mismatch in JavaScript and how the Vue Vixens are making efforts to make the gender ratio evener.The Vue Vixens are using free and accessible education as the primary means of getting more women into tech. Natalia Tepluhina goes on to share her two main ideas when it comes to designing a good workshop. Stay accessible to people of all skill levels; don't assume what people know. Stick to one stack and one concept. People have a finite amount of mental resources; trying to do too much can end up just overwhelming people.Transcript"How Vue Earns Its Beginner-Friendly Reputation - with Natalia Tepluhina" TranscriptResourcesVue VixensCognitive Load TheoryNatalia TepluhinaTwitterGithubDev.toJoel HooksTwitterWebsite

J.C. Hiatt put together the conference MagnoliaJS in the town of Jackson, Missouri to help his community and combat the growing problem of brain drain in his state.MagnoliaJS is not only for his community, but it was put together with the help of it too. J.C. put it together, publically by using Github issues, blogging, and posting about it on Twitter. The community responds well when you are genuine and trying to do something good, and bringing them in and giving them a sense of ownership is what J.C. attributes as the single most significant contributor to the conference's success.If you have the opportunity to do something like this for your city, go for it. Bring in as many people as possible, contact your city officials, plan it publically. Technology can have a significant positive impact on a community!Transcript"Organizing a Conference to Combat Brain Drain in His Hometown - with J.C. Hiatt" TranscriptResourcesTwitter - Shawn WangJ.C. HiattWebsiteTwitterJohn LindquistTwitteregghead.ioGithubWebsite