#153 How to get a Developer Job – even in this economy – with James Q Quick
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do things that make you uncomfortable.

And I think that's really stupid. What I think is like, you should do things that make you uncomfortable because you know, they provide value for the thing that you want to accomplish and having like reaching out coldly, asking to talk to people that may be awkward. Let's not pretend it's not, it may be a challenge. Let's not pretend it's not let's acknowledge that, but also just know those are the types of things, especially in where we are right now that you're going to have to do to give yourself the best opportunity to get to that milestone, which is a

a next role. It's a first role as a developer. It's a first role in tech. It's a salary that you've never had before. It's time off and vacation that you've never had before. It's the ability to prioritize work-life balance that you've had before. Welcome back to the free code camp podcast, your source for raw unedited interviews with devs this week's episode, how to get a developer job, even in this economy with James Q quick.

This week's musical intro with yours truly on the guitar, drums, bass, and keys, the 1987 arcade classic, Shinobi. ♪

Welcome back to the Free Code Camp Podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of FreeCodeCamp.org. Each week we're bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech. This week we're talking with James Q. Quick. He's

He's a developer, speaker, and teacher. James grew up in Memphis. He was an athlete who played violin and knew nothing about computer science but chose it as his college major. Since then, he's not only worked as a dev at Microsoft and FedEx and a whole lot of other startups, but he's also given more than 100 talks at conferences about technical topics. James, it's great to have you here, man.

Hey, super excited to be here. Long time fan. Yeah. And support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out of the box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at wixstudio.com. Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support Free Code Camp through a monthly donation.

Join these kind folks and help our mission at donate.freecodecamp.org. Right. It's a thrill to have you here, man. I'm a longtime fan of yours. And I think we published one of your talks on Free Code Camp, and it was very popular. It was like, I have no idea what I'm doing. I think it showed your confused face in the thumbnail. So a lot of people may recognize you from that. Or they may recognize you from Compressed FM, which is an excellent podcast.

podcast that you've done like 170 plus episodes, I think. Uh, but, but you're, and if they've attended any technical conference, there's a good chance they've probably seen one of your talks. Yeah. Yeah. There's, it's kind of funny listing, uh,

All the different activities. I don't know. This is something we'll definitely be able to dive into, but there's so many different ways to be involved in the community, so many ways to give back. And then also there's selfish reasons for those that can help benefit you in your career, which I think is going to be one of our talking points as well. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that one of the main things I hope that people get out of this, other than an appreciation for everything that James is doing for the developer community, is that there are lots of paths and there are still lots of opportunities that

it may be harder to get a job as a developer now that a lot of developers have been laid off and are like more mid-career people are competing for a lot of the roles that, uh, people fresh into the field are competing for. Like there's just more like a higher level of competition, but, uh, it's certainly possible. And there are, you know, the jobs have largely come back. Uh, it's just that it's, it's going to be a challenge and then combine that with the rising tide of like, uh,

sentiment, I'll say about like AI being able to partially replace what developers do and things like that. Tools are always improving and there's always that waterline that's climbing and you always have to climb a little higher. So maybe we can start by just talking a little bit about what, how you perceive the job market currently here as we're recording this November 13th, 2024. Yeah. I feel like it's harder than it's been in a long time, to be honest. There was kind of like

I guess maybe early COVID there was like kind of the golden age of, of bootcamps where it's like people were spending more time at home. They, they kind of wanted something to dive into and people, I think we're just looking more into career changes and bootcamps really exploded. I think, and you, you saw so many success stories of people completely changing the trajectory of their career. And I taught, um, one in-person round and one virtual round of a bootcamp in 2019 and then 2021, I think.

And I think there's no better place to be. I think being a developer, being in tech in general, the benefits, the salary, the time off, the culture, especially as you work towards younger companies, I think it's all really amazing. But I think right now it's tougher than it ever... Or it's tougher than it has been in several years, at least as far as I've seen. And so I think...

We're seeing people graduating from boot camps and they're having a harder time finding a job. We're seeing people self-teaching and having a harder time finding a job. We're seeing people either get laid off or looking for the next role and having a harder time finding that next job. And the one thing I do know is just blindly applying, just going to LinkedIn and seeing a job and clicking apply, that it just doesn't work anymore. If you find a job and get hired that way, I would consider yourself extremely lucky. I think so much of it comes from

A couple of different aspects. It's like having things out there that are validators of who you are and what you know. And I'm biased, but like content and speaking is a big validator for me. You think about like words on a resume. Hey, if I say I can communicate well, that's just a word that everybody puts like good communicator, right? Like that's just a random word you put on a resume. But if you can actually see me speak and especially speak on technical topics, like I think that is a validator to what that thing actually means.

So I think the like building up your validators of like who you are and what you know and what you can provide to a company. And then also I hate, I hate the word, but it's the, it's the best thing we have networking. Like I think it's cliche and I think networking is often used to be like cold and sterile.

So I like to say networking is just investing in your community. It's showing up in your community. It's participating in the community. It's showing up to conferences. It's watching people's content. It's commenting on people's content. It's helping answer people's questions on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it. I think just showing up and being a part of the community is huge because every job that I've gotten...

basically has had some, some impact with me knowing somebody at that company has been a significant indicator for me in my career. And for everyone that I work with and, and see, those are the types of connections that make the difference between finding that next role and really, really struggling to. Yeah. Yeah.

And would you say the importance of who, you know, has increased, uh, after the layoffs? Like, do you think that it's more about, uh, having a strong network as you said, uh, networking, like having invested a whole lot in your community? A hundred percent. I like,

I, I hear stories just over and over again of like, you know, I've applied to a hundred jobs and never hear anything back. I applied to jobs and you get ghosted. And I actually shared, I spoke at render ATL this summer and shared kind of a similar story of just kind of talking about careers and how to be more prepared to get hired. And I talked about even for me, like I've got tons of connections and I've gotten ghosted on job opportunities and I've had an interview and never heard back. Like these are things that just happen every day and it really, really sucks. And,

So I think those sort of connections, like it's just hard to get in at all if you don't have at least something. And for people who like don't have the background of like, I've been to, you know, a hundred conferences or whatever for people who don't have that background, you can also just start creating those relationships. You can do, you can message people on LinkedIn and say, Hey, like I see you have a cool job. Would you, would you do a coffee chat with me? And,

And just tell me about what you do and the company you work for. And if you then applied for a job at that company and you told that person, hey, I really enjoy the conversation, what you said about what you do and the culture at your company, that sounded really interesting and that resonated with me. If you tell them that and then tell them that you applied, there's a chance that they go and say like, oh, I got to talk to this person on the phone. And it was a reasonable person who seemed like they may be a good fit for a team. They could pass it on to a hiring manager. And it's not like...

Like in that 5, 10, 15-minute conversation, they're going to really go to bat for you. But you may be somebody who gets an interview because of having had that conversation because they can at least say you were competent enough to have the conversation. And I think that that just goes so much farther than you imagine because otherwise, they're just looking at a bunch of resumes and filtering out people automatically and

And then it's just overwhelming to have so many resumes even after being filtered to, to, to decide on like who's worth talking to. So yes, I would say like in my career, it's more important now more than ever, uh, your connections and your network. Yeah. And, uh, what would you say to somebody who is in the process of learning to code their self teaching and they're just doing like, you know, an hour a day in the morning before they go to their day job, you know,

driving a truck or, um, you know, working at a hotel or something like that. Or, or maybe they, uh, have a, uh, a job that they can actually apply their degree. If they have a degree, maybe they're working as an accountant or something like that, but they aspire to become a developer. They consider themselves to be more introverted. Like, what would you say to somebody like that? Who is, uh, kind of like not,

relishing the notion of reaching out to people blindly, not blindly, but cold outreach on LinkedIn? How would you hype that person up and reassure them that it will be worth the discomfort? Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good question. And for what it's worth, I consider myself to be extroverted.

But it's really interesting how many people in similar careers as mine, and I mean people that are speaking on stage, people that are running communities, people that are reaching out blindly, people that sit down at a table full of strangers and introduce themselves at conferences.

It's really interesting to me how many people I've seen in those situations that consider themselves to be introverts. And there's one that stands out or a couple that stand out to me specifically. Taylor Dessen is a recruiter. He's not technical, but goes to technical conferences because he's a recruiter for developers. And I remember the first time meeting him, he was social all day long.

And then at like 4.30, he was like, okay, I'm going to bed. I'm not going to dinner. I'm not going to after party. I'm not going anywhere else. Like this is it. And I was like, dude, you've been like, you're the most social person I know. How are you doing? How are you like missing out on all this time? And he was like, no, I'm actually very introverted. And that just exhausted me. And I need to go and be by myself. And I think the point of that was like,

he he's able to get out of it. Like he enjoys spending time with people, enjoys talking to people still introverted, but he, he recognizes the impact that's going to have. And he puts in that work to do that. But then also has to recognize his limits of like what he's capable of and what's going to like push him to the point of exhaustion and to protect himself as well. Another example that I've always thought about is when I was at Microsoft, we had like a big training for our organization of a hundred people or something and

And this guy was kind of leading this workshop, a day long workshop where he was on stage and he was leading us through activities and he was telling jokes and blah, blah, blah. And he was one of the best speakers I've ever seen. And he went through this whole thing of like, like, no, I'm, I'm super introverted. When I get on stage, I take on a persona that is not me. And I'm able to flip that switch and kind of disassociate who I really am with who I am on stage so that I can do this job.

And so there's a couple of different perspectives I can share with people. I think one is kind of the tough love perspective. Like I understand the things I'm saying may be more difficult for you than they are for me. Totally understand that you're a different person, different personality, different things drain you in different ways. Totally understand. Let's accept that. Let's acknowledge that.

But let's also acknowledge that like, Hey, if this is something you're serious about, there are some things that you have to do that are going to make you uncomfortable. And there's a really cliche saying of like, do things that make you uncomfortable. Um,

And I think that's really stupid. What I think is like, you should do things that make you uncomfortable because you know, they provide value for the thing that you want to accomplish and having like reaching out coldly, asking to talk to people that may be awkward. Let's not pretend it's not. It may be a challenge. Let's not pretend it's not. Let's acknowledge that. But also just know those are the types of things, especially in where we are right now that you're going to have to do to give yourself the best opportunity to get to that milestone, which is a

a next role. It's a first role as a developer. It's a first role in tech. It's a salary that you've never had before. It's time off and vacation that you've never had before. It's the ability to prioritize work-life balance that you've had before. Like remember what the long-term goal is and realize like, even though doing some of the things that I'm talking about that other people will tell you, they may be a challenge, but they are a challenge that's worth it. If you can get to that end goal that you're looking for.

I'm like taking so many notes here because I think that you really just encapsulated why it's a struggle and like why so many people do persist in learning the code. Like I always tell people, if you want a career where you can potentially, you know, have some degree of control in your life, the boss is not calling you in to work the drive-through at 2 a.m. Like I used to get called in Taco Bell. It's like till 4 a.m. So sometimes like somebody gets sick and you're like, all right,

All right. I'm going to go deal with all the stoners in the drive-thru for like two hours, right? For like five bucks an hour, which is what I was paid back then in the late 90s when I was doing that. If you want to actually have agency in your life and if you want to be able to go in and have negotiating power when you're talking with a hiring manager or the ability to switch companies fluidly and not feel all that fear...

There is a great deal of investment up front and it's investment in your career and in your skills that doesn't immediately have any payoff. Like what is the benefit of getting halfway to being a professional developer? Well, you have a lot of stuff that you can do and you have like a cool hobby and you probably expanded your mind in all kinds of ways that you wouldn't have had you not tried to learn to code and learn data structures, algorithms, computer science concepts, things like that.

But the real prize at the end of the rainbow, the real pot of gold, maybe that's a bad analogy because I think in theory there's not actually a pot of gold at the end of rainbows. I haven't ever followed a rainbow all the way to the end of it. No, I'm just joking. I'm pretty sure that's not physically possible. But for a lot of people, that pot of gold is...

you know why they even got into it, right? Like they don't really care that much about programming and technology. They may not even care that much about rebuilding their mind to be able to mimic that of a computer. Cause you have to kind of mimic a computer cause you're communicating with computers. That's what programming is telling a computer what to do in terms that it can understand. There are a lot of people out there who just want to go out and get a high paying job and be able to, um,

you know, switch jobs if they're, if their boss is harassing them or switch jobs, if they, uh, their boss suddenly is like, Hey, you've got to come back into the office. You've got to move halfway across the country, you know, to our, to our HQ, uh, because we spent, spent a bunch of money on this real estate and we're not using it for anything. Right. Um, you know, you, you want to be able to have some degree of control and agency in your life. Right. And, and

Frankly, money gives you a lot of optionality because you're not necessarily living paycheck to paycheck and you're not a car breakdown away from going into credit card debt. What would you say to people who don't really care that much about the technology but do want to have that lifestyle, that freedom associated with working as a developer? Yeah, I think...

I think that's a great question. I think there's been this conversation in the community and kind of a debate about the idea of passion. Like, should you be passionate or should you be required to be passionate? And I think a lot of people say no because they interpret somebody looking to hire someone that's passionate as someone that's going to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week. Like, they're going to put in extra work because they're passionate.

And that aside, like if that's a perspective, that's something I would want to shy away from. I wouldn't want someone to hire me because they want me to work 80 hours a week. Work-life balance is incredibly important for me. But I think passion and excitement about what I'm doing is very important for me in my life. And that is not at a sacrifice of money because I also want to make good money. And I also want to have vacation and work-life balance and those sort of things. I think it's just something that goes along with that.

And so the idea of like someone getting an attack because they want to make good money, like there's other reasons to like overall comp and all the things that you said. But if we just look at good money, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Just for me to fill the most fulfilled, um,

I want that to also be associated with something I'm excited about. And the cool thing about, I would say not just programming, but like being in tech is I think it's, it's more and more reasonable to combine those things. Like there's more and more opportunities to find something specific that you actually enjoy and get excited about that also makes really good money. And that's just for me, like, I don't want to wake up every day. It's not worth the sacrifice to make more money and do something that I hate. I want to make money.

still good money and maybe a little bit less, but still really good money to do something that I also enjoy because I think the overall balance of those two is what I'm looking for. But getting into like, again, just broadly tech is such a game changer for people, especially like if you haven't been able to make near the amount of money, if you haven't seen a modern work culture, if you haven't seen like respected time off, just like money, I think is the easy thing. I think for me,

Kind of the respect, the career opportunities, like after you get your foot in the door, there's kind of no limit to what you can do and where you can go. Again, work-life balance, vacation, all the things that come along with it, I think, especially if you find the right place, are just amazing. And I share this story a lot. My wife had worked in hospitality for years, and I think she was always really good at what she did. She was always respected for what she did.

But it's just very different culturally. And so she ended up moving to Osiro, which is we overlapped at Osiro for two months. She's still there doing events and sponsorships. But she now, I mean, makes two or three times what she ever made in her career in the past and has a limited vacation, gets to travel across the world, has a team that she loves working with. And it's just amazing. I think she's the perfect example for someone who was super talented, did a really good job, was respected, like,

reasonably for the culture and environment she was in, but that level of respect and what that means for her now is just completely different. And nothing makes me happier than for her to be in a position where she feels proud of what she does, respected for what she does, well compensated for what she does. And I think that's the kind of opportunity that's out there for anyone that's looking to get into. Yeah. And I will say like, there are a lot of kind of like

that you can climb. And there's this thing, this notion of like a hill climbing algorithm. And you may have reached like a local maxima, right? Where you're like on top of a hill. But if you can look at it and you can see higher hills, it's a lot of work to go down the hill and climb a new hill. Like I'm sure it wasn't easy for your wife to transition from working in just like more broad hospitality to working, doing events at a tech company. But,

you know, it sounds like she did go down the hill and she figured out a way to climb up a much higher hill. And now she's up there. And I think that a lot of people, certainly some people who are listening to this, who feel like they're doing all right, you can always do better. But a lot of times it takes going down and it takes the notion of like becoming a beginner again in some aspect or, or, you know, rebuilding your network in a different industry or something like that. And that can be daunting. But yeah,

From what I like, all the people I've talked to, it's almost always worth it. Like very worst case scenario. Like when I, when I was getting, when I was learning the code, I was already working as a school director. So, and you know, I've been to grad school and like I was coming from a position of relative privilege in terms of just having a broad array of knowledge worker type jobs I could do.

And I knew that I knew I could always kind of go back to directing schools if I scrubbed out and if I just wasn't like good enough at coding. And to some extent, that kind of handicapped me a little bit early on because I was like, you know, I'm already good at this. I would tell myself, oh, I'm really good at speaking Chinese. I'm really good at like, you know, running running a school. I'm really good at doing paperwork and like managing a team of teachers and stuff like that. Like I can always go back to that.

Uh, and to some extent that like that did make me feel like I was, um, you know, that it wasn't necessary for me to really perform at this. And, and that this was just like some kind of like, uh,

crazy, uh, ideal. Like this, this was a, what was it? What was a good term for it? This was kind of like a romp. This was like a spurious journey into code and I was going to come around and all my family would be relieved that I went back into the respectable job of, you know, running a school. But, uh, you're, if you're listening to this, you may have some skillset. You may already be thinking like, well, I'm doing all right here. Uh, but, uh,

you know, I think, I think your wife is a good example of there's always a higher hill that you can climb if you look around and if you're willing to put in the time and energy. Uh, so I, I hope you all take to heart what James is saying here, because for me, like it totally rings true. Like I think there, there are always plateaus. Everybody has plateaus in their life. I,

I could have in theory just stayed at Taco Bell. There was a guy that worked at Taco Bell named Duke who was like really old and, and Haggard. And he's probably about the same age that I am now, but he looked like he was like 70 or something. And he'd just been building burritos for like 20 plus years. Um,

and dealing with like, you know, stoned customers and stuff like that. And, you know, like that is a local maxima. Like I might have been promoted to store manager or something eventually, right? Like he was. He was like a store manager and stuff. But...

just, I encourage you all, however, uh, comfortable you may be in your position, assuming you're comfortable. A lot of people listening to this probably aren't comfortable at all. A lot of people may be trying to figure out how they're going to pay rent next month, you know, or, or a lot of people, you know, may be sleeping in their cars. I slept in my car for like a year when I left, when I dropped out of high school and just like, you know, was spent all of my days at the library and stuff like that. And, and I wasn't sure what the future held. I wasn't even sure if I had a future, but, uh, there is always, uh,

A hill somewhere that is probably within visual range that you can see like, Hey, if I climbed over that hill, I would be higher. Like, let's go try to climb that hill. And then when you get to the higher, you see the other high points and it's just hills all the way out, right? There's always a higher point that you can reach, right? Absolutely. And I think the, the, this is one of the number one pieces of career advice I have for people.

is to do your research and so if you if you kind of think about what you just said of like oh maybe there is a hill that people have seen or not the reality is like you're probably not going to see that hill if you don't put some intentional effort into finding it and and what that means in this scenario is having those conversations with people like if i'm throwing out random numbers this is doesn't mean anything but if you make forty thousand dollars a year and you feel pretty comfortable you're

And then all of a sudden at a dinner party, you meet somebody who's a developer and they make $150,000 a year. You may now be interested in what it's like to be a developer versus the job that you're in, whatever that is. And then, and then the way that escalates is then you have the deeper conversation to find out like, well, how long have you been in your career? Uh,

What did you do to get there? What did that look like? What did a first job look like? And as you start to do your research, you can find out what reasonable hills there are to climb and what reasonable plateaus are at different stages and then how to potentially go from one to the other. But I think you have to spend some time really kind of looking and asking questions, having conversations, doing your research.

And figuring out what those opportunities are. Cause you can, and I, again, I go back to my wife, like super, super talented, did a great job, but just in the industry she was in, just had this, this cap of what she was capable of, of being compensated and all these things. And so I, I've been really fortunate, I think in my career and, and life of being around people that are super, super talented and super, super smart and, and super motivated. And I, I go back to like my best friend, uh,

through high school, still my best friend today. This is annoying, but he's one of the smartest people I've ever known. His backup school was my dream school, and he got accepted into every Ivy League school. Just the smartest person I've ever met. And that can be really frustrating for me at times, but also I just see him do things that I never would have thought of as possible. And when I worked at Microsoft, especially fresh out of college and my first

job, professional job, I was working with startups and students from other universities and just developers in the community and seeing the things they were doing. I never imagined that those things were possible, but after you start to see them as a reality, as a possibility for someone else, you start to kind of wonder what is that, what does that potential look like for me? And then more strategically, what sort of research, what sort of conversations, what sort of questions can I ask to figure out how do I get there?

Yeah, 100%. And one of the things that, uh, I think there's a lot of negativity out there. A lot of people are going to potentially be watching this and saying like, Oh, so pull yourself up by your bootstraps is what you're saying. Like, like just, uh, that's a frequent comment that people will leave on, on these podcasts, for example, uh, because a lot of people, uh, have, it's easy for you and I to say from this position of relative success, uh, like you'll make it, uh,

but I'm here to say you won't necessarily make it. Not everybody's going to make it. A lot of people aren't going to make it. They're going to scrub out. And I just as easily could have scrubbed out. I quit programming several times. Right. Everybody probably quits at some point and gets frustrated. They can't get it. And they just take a few days off. And then eventually that like cooler heads prevail and maybe they come back. Maybe they don't. Maybe they're just like, Oh, I'm going to go take this real estate, you know, realtor license or something and go that route. Or one of the many other careers that you can do other than software development. But yeah,

um, like there is a lot of negativity out there and a lot of people are probably hearing, uh, things like it's doomed. It's over. You know, there's like, Hey, I was just going to take all our jobs. Uh, what would you say to somebody who is kind of like a developer doomer, if you will? And they, they think that like now the industry is over and there's, there's no way in. Yeah. I mean, I definitely don't agree with the idea of,

The industry is over and there's no way in. I think the reality is it's more difficult to break in than it was five years ago. I think we should all be honest about that. And again, we go back to layoffs. When you hear about layoffs at big companies happening every month, that means there's that many more people already in their careers that are looking for their next role as well. So the competition gets tighter. Salaries go down. I'm making less than I made in my full-time role at PlanetScale two and a half years ago, a little bit less.

And that was an expectation that just doing my research, I had and I expected because that's just how it is. It's like the idea of Doom. No, I don't think we're out of jobs. I don't think AI is taking jobs like we're using AI all the time. There's this interesting, I think it's called Devin's Paradox. They give a talk about the impact that AI is having on developer experience. Devin, AI being a tool that was...

you know, deceptively good at doing basic requests, right? Like they revealed that ultimately it wasn't nearly as good as the marketing said, and they used a lot of trickery. But I just want to fill people in what Devon is. Devon AI is, was, I don't know. It was some effort to essentially replace, sell this tool to a company like, hey, you don't need as many developers. Look, this will be your junior developer and all that stuff. So please go on. I just wanted to give people some context in what Devon is.

Yeah, that's actually great context. I actually misspoke because what I was referring to is Jevons paradox, which is obviously somewhere. But the idea is like people look at AI and they say like, okay, if AI can do these basic things way faster than me, the fear is like I get replaced, right, for those things.

But, but Jevin's paradox is the idea that like, okay, if AI can do these things for us, well then, then we're now capable of doing so much more. Maybe now we have time to tackle problems that we didn't have time to tackle before because we had to do some of the things that now AI takes on for us.

So I think you can look at it in two ways. You can be fearful of it taking my job. And I really don't think that that's been the case. I think it's been a tool that developers have adopted and adapted to using. And I think they're growing more and more popular every day, but I don't think they're replacing developers. But there's the Jevons paradox, which is like, okay, maybe we're just capable of doing more. Maybe we're capable of envisioning more because we have the time and capacity to do it because we're not spending our time doing the things that AI can take care of for us.

So I'm definitely not like a, I definitely don't think we're in a negative state of it's not worth considering getting into. What I do think though is there is always trade-offs of how much work does it take to break into the industry? And again, you find that out by doing as much research as you can, having conversations with people to see what their journeys are, see what companies are hiring in your area, see what requirements they have for people that they're hiring, building those relationships.

And then the thing that is probably most important in my life is work-life balance. We have a one and a half year old now. My wife and I, we're one of the cliche couples. We literally do everything together. We play soccer together multiple times a week. We play golf. You mentioned you don't play golf, but my wife and I play golf. We do everything together. And that's one of the things that is most important to me in my life is the ability to prioritize life outside of work.

And with that, you have to kind of figure out what you're willing to sacrifice to try to get to where you want to be. And it's totally okay if you decide it's not worth the sacrifice to get to that point of breaking into the industry or getting that next role. That's totally understandable because it's probably not going to be easy. And I think you have to be realistic about that. But I still advocate...

that there's so much worth it that if you put the time in and the effort there, there is your ability to get to a point in your career that's totally different than anything you've had in the past.

But you have to balance that with like, what does it take to get there? So I want to be honest. It's probably hard. I don't want to act like the success that I've maybe had or you've had or other people that have been guests that like that they happen overnight or it's just been easy. I mean, I'm sure you've had tons of people. Danny Thompson comes to mind of sharing his journey of like waking up at three, four in the morning to get coding work done before his son got up and then take him to school and then do other things. I think we have to be realistic about the work that it takes to that you have to put in to get there.

Yeah. Anybody who tells you learning to code is easy is trying to tell you something. Yeah. Cause it's not, it's very hard and it's a lot of work. It's a sustained, it's a sustained effort over years. And even once you become a dev, like you've worked at Microsoft, you've worked at FedEx, you've worked at tons of startups, but you're still probably learning new things all the time. Right? Absolutely. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think one, one other thing just to put out there to, uh,

I think you can kind of look at taking advantage of your time a little bit more, a little bit better. Being more, I don't know, more focused and intentional with time. I mean, if we're honest, hands up for everybody that's listening, how many people spend 30 minutes a day scrolling Instagram, TikTok, Twitter? My hand's by far up. I do that plenty. How many people...

Spend a bunch of time watching Netflix, right? Like TV shows or movies or whatever. My hands up. I do. I do all of those things. Yeah. I'm not saying you have to like kids. They have the entire one. It's like 1100. Yeah. It's 1100 episodes. We're on episode 300. My kids love it. Nice. Yeah. I didn't mean to derail you, but I am guilty of watching one piece with my kids.

You're good. And, and like, I don't, I don't want to sit here and say like, oh, you should prioritize every single minute of your life. Like I still love to have a stressful day and then come home and just watch TV. Right? Like that's, that's, that's a thing that we enjoy doing, but you can start to pay attention when you're, when you're really picky about your time. It's like, oh, did I, did I really have 30 minutes? I could have invested. Did I really have an hour? I could have invested. And instead I did something else.

And as you look at that, I think you start to find more capacity, even when we have busy schedules of family, kids, or just multiple jobs or whatever. And one of my favorite things to do is just listen to podcasts. Like you think about your commute to work, or maybe you take a 10 or 15 minute walk in the afternoon. If you listen to a podcast, you're hearing about tech related stuff like this one. You're hearing the conversations. You're hearing about what's going on in the industry. And I spent so many times hearing about technical buzzwords,

on podcasts that I didn't know at all. But eventually I got to the point where they had context and I had a little bit of previous context just from hearing about it in the past. And I think that's, that's a relatively easy way to be a part of the community and not take too much time away from anything else. Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. Like I think podcasts are one of the most obvious wins if you, even if you're busy. So, uh, I am well acquainted with the phenomenon of the working poor. I watched lots of documentaries about it. Uh, I myself used to be, you know, working poor, uh, if you will. Um, and, uh, despite having a middle class, you know, uh, upbringing, like I, I basically like left home and left school and just lived in my car for a year. And so like, uh,

Even though I'm pretty far divorced from that now, we have a home here in Plano. We have the kids go to school at a nice public school here and everything like that. And it's easy to forget. There was a time when I just had no idea, no plan for the future. And I think if podcasts had been a thing,

100% I would have been listening to as many podcasts as I could while I was, you know, assuming I was in the back room, just, you know, putting boxes into the giant trash compactor or mopping the floors, the grocery store, anything that anywhere where I could have potentially listened to headphones without somebody, some manager accosting me, I would have because I find that podcast just immersing yourself in conversations with people who've been successful in spite of setbacks like, like yourself. Uh, uh, I think that that is a big, uh,

a motivational boost. And also you just learn so much about, you know, tech through osmosis, almost just listening to people talk about their careers in tech, listening to people talk about like new emerging tools, listening to people talk about like different experiences they had, like solving bugs or,

You know, I just talked with Scott Talinsky about like he syntax FM has this like spooky Halloween episode that just came out recently. And they talk about some of the horror stories of like, you know, making a commit from Wi-Fi, like from the forest. And then suddenly like the Internet goes out and something broke or, you know, like those kinds of stories, those kinds of war stories.

every industry, like if you're a pilot, you're talking with other pilots all the time about like, oh yeah. And all of a sudden I went into the spin and X, Y, you know, I don't know anything about flying a plane, but, but basically like my understanding is like, uh, I talked to this pilot and he was like, yeah, it was crazy. Like I almost died. But then I remember some obscure conversation I had with another pilot and exactly how to address a specific situation. And I never would have, uh, thought of that. I never read that in a book or anything like that, but it was just some anecdote. Um,

So by listening to a lot of podcasts, you're kind of walking around just immersing yourself in anecdote from motivated people who put in the time, put in the reps at the keyboard, who do care about these topics and do engage in lifelong learning. And if you want to say that you are an average of your five closest friends...

Well, you know, when I was a kid, my, my five closest friends were all doing drugs and like, you know, committing crimes and just being general riffraff basically. Right. Like I didn't hang out with a good crowd and, and, uh,

If my five closest friends were the parasocial relationships I had with podcasters that were not trying to radicalize me or something, but just helped me improve my life and eventually achieve something and build a life for myself, I think that would have been a very profoundly positive influence. So don't do as I did. Do as I say. Listen to a lot of these podcasts. But anyway, I'll quit waxing poetically about this.

I do want to get into one thing that you said here, which was being laid off. You yourself were laid off as a dev and as a developer advocate, right? And you were working at a job that paid better than your current job right now, which is a phenomenon a lot of people are experiencing right now. Oh, by the way, one of the things I mentioned, the working poor. I just want to emphasize there are people who...

would struggle to find any time to code. Maybe they're working multiple jobs. Maybe they're raising kids. Maybe they have parents who are declining in health, whom they have to take care of. Like my heart goes out to people who are in those circumstances. And I realized that like, uh, we may, we're approaching this from a point of relative privilege in the sense that we do have like, uh,

40 hour a week ish day jobs. Uh, and we do have the luxury of having some additional time where you're probably getting a good amount of sleep every night. I slept like nine hours last night. Like, like we have that we were properly nourished. You and I were talking about like our crazy, you know, protein rich diets and stuff like that before we started the call. So, so we have a lot

of benefits and there are lots of people. Uh, so I just want to be sure that you all know that we're not taking for granted that there are plenty of people out there who are the working poor, who may be suffering from not enough food, uh, who may be suffering from like a horrible environment where they can't get a good night's sleep because there's like sirens all night, um, who might have any number of other considerations that are preventing them from really putting in a serious effort to expand their skills and learn to code. Um, and, uh,

There's not really anything I can say to those people. Just, just do your best and, and, uh, know that like we empathize with your plight, even if we can't directly understand what you're going through, uh, hang in there. Like what choice you have really just try your best to make the most of your circumstances, your situation.

So, um, I just want to make sure that you all don't think we're like callously speaking from this position of privilege and we don't acknowledge that there are people who are undergoing serious hardship and that's just here in the U S right? Like I grew up in middle America, lots of meth, lots of craziness. Um, and that's nothing compared to what a lot of my friends in Nigeria are going through right now. Right. Or,

Bangladesh, where there's just like this massive upheaval, you know, and people getting killed and stuff like that. Right. Like, like, or obviously one of the many active war zones in the world today. Right. Like, like just do your best with what you have and know that everybody's going to face varying levels of difficulty. And it's not just some uniform learn to code experience. And don't let anybody delude you into thinking like, oh, if you just work harder, it'll be okay. Cause it won't necessarily be okay. Right.

do what you can and know that we're here and that we're going to keep creating, uh,

free learning resources. James is going to keep creating his podcast, compressed FM. He's going to keep creating tutorials on his excellent YouTube channel. I'm going to keep creating these podcasts. I'm going to keep working with the free code camp community to create open learning resources to help you. So like our whole thing is trying our best to remove as many obstacles as we can, but there are fundamental obstacles that we can't touch that ultimately you will have to overcome yourself. If you're in one of those circumstances I described, yeah.

So let's talk about some hardship that you, you, unless you wanted to expand upon that. Just, just again, like the continuing acknowledgement of like the journey is very personal for everyone. Like you have to individual people have to gauge what you have going on in your life. And there's periods of time where you don't have the capacity to take any time at all or any mental focus. And that's understandable. Um, so yes, that varies every individual, every circumstance. Um,

whatever you can do, that's the plus. And especially if you're listening to the podcast now, that feels like a win by itself. So yeah, 100%, uh, keep listening and not just to this podcast, just go out and listen to as much as you can and take in as broad an array of voices and lived experiences as you can and figure out ways to learn. Like there are always insights somewhere, even somebody who you have like almost nothing in common with. You may be able to derive some actionable, uh,

from not necessarily what they're saying, but like what they're doing or what they're... There's always a lesson. Let's talk about...

Something that happened to you recently, James, uh, you were laid off and as you said, you lost access to pretty high income, higher than your current income is, is probably a pretty good job from what I read about on LinkedIn and stuff like that. And you know, a lot of people have been laid off as devs lately. Uh, and, and you were unfortunately one of them. Can you talk about that experience and how you got back?

Yeah. So this was two and a half years ago. I've been at PlanetScale for eight months as a developer advocate and just kind of wildly got an invite for a 15-minute meeting with the CEO the morning of. And I messaged him like, hey, anything I need to prepare? Not thinking anything of it. It's a relatively small company. So maybe he just wanted to talk to me about something really quickly. And I didn't get a response. And I showed up to the meeting and HR was there. And they said, oh, we should probably wait for the CEO to get here.

And at the time my wife and I were working in the same, uh, same room, same office. And I sent her a message. I was like, something's wrong. And I'd never thought about this scenario at all, but I was like, I think I'm going to get let go because HR and then waiting for a CEO. Anyway, he showed up. He said, I regret to inform you. This is your last day at planet scale. And as he said that, like I heard ding, ding, ding. And it was me being signed out of Slack and whatever else applications I had on my laptop. And it happened immediately. Um,

And that was kind of it. He was gone. And that was really it. And so I talked to my wife. And I didn't really know what would be next. I posted on Twitter and said, hey, I got let go. I don't know what's next for me. If you're hiring in these types of roles, let me know. And this is one of those things where...

there's the balance of sharing the story and acknowledging like people don't have the background that I did at that point. And I, I acknowledge that, but I do want to show, I do want to share this story because of the impact of what I had done in my career had on my career at that point. And what that was was as I shared this on Twitter, I got flooded with messages of my company's hiring. We have this role. We'd love to talk to you about this. And it was a lot of messages that weren't just like, Oh, we have a role. You can go apply. It was like those deeper connections. Like, Oh, we'd love for you to come work at our company.

And the reason I share that, and again, like with all understanding of like a lot of people that are in getting laid off situations are not in that situation.

is that was a testament to all the work that I had been putting in to the community. It was a testament to all the credibility that I had established in the community, all the value I had provided to the community, all the genuineness that I had poured into the community to the point where people and companies and brands trusted me from what I'd done and wanted to reach out to facilitate that conversation of potentially going and working with them.

And when I share that, again, I acknowledge most people don't have that background to lean onto. But I think right now, regardless of being let go or feeling comfortable in your role, right now is the time to start building those relationships and start building some of that credibility, again, pending availability and time and all the things. But if

But if you can start to do some of those things, showing up at conferences, reaching out for coffee chats, creating content, the tutorial, maybe giving a talk. A lot of people would love to give one when they see other people do it, but they think they're too scared and blah, blah, blah. That's a whole conversation I could have. I never thought I would be a speaker. I never, it was never something I was interested in. I got thrown into it in my career starting at Microsoft. And that's just what I had to do. And now I do it professionally.

So I think there's never a better time to start thinking about building that credibility, building those closer ties to the community, because you don't, you don't build your network when you need it. You build your network for when you need it in the future. So that it's there by the time it comes to it. So I was, I was very fortunate in that sense. And I was also fortunate enough to make the decision to,

I'd been doing content on the side. I'd been making good money doing it. I'd always dreamed of doing it full time. And that's what I ended up doing. And I talked to my wife. We had an idea of how much runway I had, gave myself kind of six months of kind of prove that I'll be able to continue to do this longer or not. And during that time, I did and ended up doing content

full-time for two years and just recently joined makes with as head of developer experience a little over a month ago to get back into a full-time role full-time stability salary benefits all the things

And there's trade-offs with both of those. I look back at doing content full-time, and that's one of the proudest things I've ever accomplished. Being able to look at that two-year span and say, everything I did during that span, that was me. I earned all the things that I did during that time period. I had complete ownership over all those things. And that's a really, really cool story. But there's also...

different aspects of getting back into a full-time role and working for a team and working with a team and a product and that sort of stuff that I think is also super, super valuable. And I'm super excited about that where I am now. Yeah, man, I'm so happy that you were able to, first of all, make it as a content creator, which is a term you and I don't particularly care for, but basically like a teacher on YouTube and a podcast creator and things like that. Can you talk about, uh, first of all, like the economics of that, like,

You gave yourself six months. You had six months runway, which is a luxury that many people do not have when they're laid off. Uh, but I take it you and your wife were saving your wife. Did your wife still have income at that point? She did. Yeah. And this was, this was a big part of this whole situation. Like she was already had a role at all zero making good money. She also had healthcare and that's a huge thing is like, I didn't have to have healthcare cause she could cover me. Yeah. Yeah. And, and for those of you outside the U S it, it,

It's difficult to imagine how like a, such a prosperous country economically, uh, could have such a broken healthcare system, but we do. And you gotta have healthcare. Otherwise you're screwed. Like something happens, you find out you have cancer, you find out you have some other sort of serious ailment that has to be treated. And next thing you know, you're a hundred thousand dollars in debt. Maybe, maybe a million. There are people with millions of dollars of medical debt that they will never pay off, but they will continue to be hounded until their death and

by creditors. And it's a tragedy. So, you know, having insurance, luckily we do have the ability to buy insurance on the market, which is what my wife and I use. We just do Obamacare, but it is like pretty scary to be without insurance just because there's that risk. You're like, you're basically rolling the dice every time you cross the street, you're not going to get hit by a bus or something. Right. You're yeah. So,

how did you make it work? How did like, let's talk about those six months where you're trying to prove out yourself. Cause I do think that there are probably a lot of people listening in the audience who would like to create tutorials. Uh, certainly like I think a vast majority of people would prefer to just work a job and have, uh, all those benefits you said earlier, have stable income, have a team, have projects they can work on so they can continue to sharpen their skills while getting paid to learn. Uh, but what did you do during the six months and what was it like where you went from, you know,

burning your runway, uh, to actually like being, you know, break even or even potentially positive. Yeah. So this was actually like a much smoother journey for me than you would expect. And the thing I want to get across to people is I didn't, I didn't take this leap of faith and say like, I, I know I'm going to be able to figure this out.

The reality was I'd already been making good money. And so I knew at the very least by making good money on the side and being able to invest more time into it, I was turning down sponsored relationships. For example, I was turning down the potential to do some consulting. I was turning down those things because I didn't have time. So I knew that I had the ability to generate income already. And I knew I had the ability to generate more income because

If I dedicated more time to it and did that as my full-time job. So I think this is an important call out because I'm, I'm pretty risk averse. I am not one of those people who's going to bet that I'm just going to figure out how to make money. That's not the case. I had been creating content and growing that as a revenue stream for three, four years at that point of really doing that consistently outside of a full-time role. So I had that to lean onto. Yeah. And the other thing was,

Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. I'll ask you the question after you finish. Okay. Yeah. The other thing for me was I didn't want to go full time for myself and do that longer term and not make good money. Cause I've talked about this before. Like my number one thing is work life balance, but making good money is an important aspect of that. My, my wife and I are very aggressive and saving and paying off extra towards the house and, and doing 401k and thinking towards the future. Like we're very serious about that.

And I didn't want to sacrifice those things to do content creation. I wanted to do content creation and do well financially to be able to continue all of those goals at the same time. Yeah. And when we talk about content, like these are programming tutorials on YouTube primarily, is that how would you describe the James Q quick public persona of teacher?

Yeah, that's the main thing. So I did a lot of sponsored content. And I think looking back, the thing I wish I had done a better job of is diversifying income. So the majority of my income was from sponsored relationships. I ended up kind of moving more to doing a long-term relationship with a few different companies that I really enjoyed a lot more than doing kind of one-off videos with companies. I think just...

There's so much overhead and kind of onboarding a partner and sponsor of learning the product and meeting the team and all those things. And then also there's just only so much you can do in a first initial video with a given product. So I kind of shifted towards doing more longer term relationships with a couple of companies. And I think that worked out really well. I also launched an Astro course.

During that time, I wish I had done another course or two, honestly. So that's one of the things I wish I'd done differently, but had a successful Astro course launch. I did some consulting on developer experience and content creation for a couple of companies. So that was another revenue source. And then did a little bit of paid speaking as well. So it's a combination of those things with the majority of it coming from sponsored content on YouTube.

Okay. Awesome. And maybe you can talk about how, like, obviously you've worked as a developer advocate, a developer slash developer evangelist. Those terms, I consider them to be equivalent. I don't use the evangelist one because as a, like religious connotations. But, but basically your role was going out and it was teaching people about technology.

And ultimately with the goal of getting them to adopt technology of the company, like Auth0, for example, is a tool that we use at Freecode Camp. And they have a very generous charity tier. Essentially, we pay nothing to Auth0. We haven't for like, I don't know, like seven years or something, but that we get their first, like their world-class authentication tool.

Um, and that's huge because authentication is one of the main ways that you have like security breaches and stuff like that. And, and they, somebody discovered some vulnerability and they're able to like do crazy stuff with your data and things like that. We've never been breached that we know of. Uh, and a huge part of that is thanks to author where your wife works. So, uh, for example, let's just use that as an example. Like, have you ever done any sponsored work with them or, uh,

Maybe you can give something that you can talk about without some NDA or something and talk about what a typical deal flow might look like. Yeah, absolutely. So I didn't actually do anything sponsored with Auth0. I think there's, especially early on, my wife was facilitating some of the sponsor relationships with content creators. And I think that would have been a little...

um, conflict of interest with going, going from spouse to spouse. But it's a great, um, yeah, yeah. But it did, it did matter that like I had an established reputation at, at all zero two and people knew me. So I think like it wasn't just her trying to anyway. Uh, but I didn't do anything with all zero specifically, but, uh, two of the brands that I worked with a lot were, uh, Zeta and century. And so Zeta is a database company. Uh, they, uh,

They have like a dashboard where you can manage your data, create tables, do all these things. They added features like branching and merging and eventually gave you direct access to Postgres. You could use it as like a regular Postgres database. And then also they have these other features like they have search built in and they have file storage built in. And it's just really an amazing product. And the cool thing about that was it was just amazing.

I like, I, you could use that for any demo, right? Cause almost any demo you do, you're probably going to need a database and you can incorporate them into that. And so I really enjoyed working with them. That was probably the longest term relationship that I had. And so what that would be, I think for them had like a monthly rate and that would include like,

kind of this like just building in public so do like a youtube video on a specific topic and then also building this thing where i would live stream a couple times a month and then also other videos of just teaching core concepts to developers would kind of reference the work that i'd done on that project that i was building in public so in theory it was all kind of tied together and they got to show up in different ways on my channel a couple times a month and i think that's sort of like i

I think one, that sort of longer term relationship works better for me because I'm not having to learn a new product, not having to onboard a new company, not having to meet new people all the time. And then also it gives me the ability to just go deeper with a product and then provide feedback. I think that's one of the things that gets missed in developer advocacy is the ability to advocate for product feedback of like, hey, this is what people are doing. Or in this case, like this is what I'm doing and what I'm seeing. I think we need this or we need to change that.

And so by going deeper, I had the ability to learn more about the product, had the ability to share more feedback about the product, had the ability to just get more comfortable with it and have that show up. And there's this idea, and I forget what the numbers are, but for people to actually remember who you are and what you do, it takes X number of contact points.

So if you follow me as a creator, you might see a YouTube video. Then maybe you see a tweet. Then maybe you see me in person at a conference. Then maybe you see another YouTube video. After those four different contact points, you maybe are like really paying attention to what I do now. But if you just see one video and don't see anything, you're probably not going out of your way to find the stuff that I do.

And so I think for the longer term relationships, they got to show up organically through the stuff that I was building and sharing. And you kind of hear that name show up on my channel. So if you're watching my videos, you hear like, oh, here's a demo. We're doing this and we're using Zeta. Oh, here's another thing. We're going to do remix and we're using Zeta. And anyway, I think that I think that that works out really well. Really enjoy that relationship with them. I think it was like a year and a half that we started.

um, maintain that and still have that kind of open in the future. If, if I have the time and the ability to do something like that, uh, again, so that was what, that was what, uh, that specific relationship, uh, look like, which was kind of, uh, I guess like a year and a half of that two years.

Yeah. So it sounds like building those relationships and then maintaining them by continuing to deliver value over time, you were able to have a long-term relationship. Would you say that most of your revenue was coming from a few long-term relationships with a few partners? Yeah. Early on, it was different. Early on, it was more kind of one-off things. And I think

YouTube audience kind of respond to that or notice that, which I think is fair. Like for me personally, if you, if you share something on a YouTube video, that's cool and like help solve a problem for you. I don't care if it's sponsored or not. I think a lot of people are skeptical of that. So especially as they see like, Oh, here's this product, here's this product, here's this product.

And the fact that I didn't have the longer term engagement to go deeper and to have that be a tool that I would naturally use more often. I think that kind of showed. And I think that was part of the transition to doing more of the longer term relationship as well. But that that ended up being especially for the last six months last year, the majority of income was from the longer term relationships. Awesome.

Yeah. Well, I want to talk about the process of going out and getting a job. You know, you've been working essentially for yourself, creating content and paying the bills through speaking engagements and things like that. When you...

Let's say hypothetically that, heaven forbid, like you were back on the job market today in November 2024, the era that everybody's complaining about being impossible to find a job, and it's certainly harder than it used to be. What are the steps you would take? Let's say hypothetically you do have maybe six months of runway again, and you have the intention of going out and getting a job. And let's talk about where you are currently in terms of

what you have, the resources you have at your disposal, your network, your skills, things like that. And then I'd like to hear how you would do it if you were approaching this as like, let's travel back in time.

Let's travel back to when you just got your computer science degree. And I realize a lot of people that don't, that are listening to this, don't have a computer science degree. I don't have a computer science degree. We have tons of interviews with people who don't have computer science degrees, but since we have James here and he does have a computer science degree and there are invariably lots of people listening who do have computer science degrees or, or are finishing them. I think it makes sense to just get your perspective, knowing what we know about you.

So again, the two part question one with your current situation, how would you approach the job search? And two, if you had to travel, like, let's say you just graduated this year into this job market, what you would do. Yeah. I don't, I don't know if we'll do a longer piece on this or not, but I do want to touch on like the, the computer science theory in general. Um, I very simply, I have learned infinitely more outside of my computer science degree just by building stuff.

than I ever did inside of my computer science degree. I think like I treated my degree like school. So I got good grades, but when it came down to what I actually understood and knew and being able to answer technical questions and interviews when I graduated, not very good because I didn't, I just treated it like I needed to answer questions on a test and complete homework. I've learned so much more

from just building things outside. And part of the reason I bring that up is like, if I were going back in time and trying to prepare for a job, one of the things that I would do is just build something, find something that you're interested in that solves a use case for you or a friend or blah, blah, blah, just trying to build something and then have them give feedback and then have them make a request for a feature that you have no idea how to do. And then go and figure out how to do that thing. Like you will learn infinitely by building

more so for me in my case than I ever did in a classroom. And I think that is super, super important. So that's one of the things that I would do is take that seriously, invest time in building, trying to solve real world use case, trying to add features, trying to iterate on a product or like the thing that you built, whatever that is, the portfolio project, like that should be a pretty intense thing that you invest some, some serious time in. Yeah. And let's put those other questions I asked kind of like on ice. We're going to get back to them. Let's talk about your Harry Potter story.

Yeah. This is an app that kind of took like the app store by storm created by somebody who was just doing a practice project essentially and got tens of thousands of downloads. Yeah. So this, this was in college, I think by summer going into the summer before junior year. And I heard about like, we had a mobile app developers group. This is something I'd never seen or heard of. And, and so I talked to the main guy who was really, really knowledgeable. And I said like, I'd like to learn Android. And so he gave me a book.

And I can't remember what it was, but it was like a beginner starter Android thing. And so I followed it and it was like building, building list of like grocery store items and that sort of stuff, like the basic stuff. And I realized like, I'm, I'm just, I'm kind of bored of following this. I want to build a thing that I'm interested in. And the thing at the time was the Harry Potter trivia app. And so I just started building it and had like very rudimentary, uh,

programming skills, didn't know anything about mobile, didn't know anything about design, didn't know anything about a database, didn't know anything about how to save high scores, didn't know anything, almost anything that you could think of other than like working with arrays. I didn't know how to do. I mean, like I just, I didn't know very much at all, but I, I had an idea. I had something I wanted to do and I just Googled every single day how to do it.

And I learned so much from building that project. And I talked about when I graduated with my degree, I still didn't know the amount that I should have known. I really didn't. I just didn't understand it. And some of it, I think, is just the difference between how things are taught in a classroom and what the real world is like. I think we could do a better job with

not just teaching something because it's a concept you should understand, but really experiencing it. There were things that I was exposed to at that point that I didn't really understand until four or five years later. And it's not that it was super complicated. I just didn't experience it to make it real for me. And that's, I think you get the experience by building and you see the pain points by building. And then when somebody shows you a different way, you're like, oh, that makes sense because of this problem I had. And so when I got, when I get an interviews and Microsoft was recruiting on campus, I

I actually, I had a software engineering interview and they asked me what I think is one of the stupidest questions I've ever had in my life in an interview. And it was like, what's the number of lines of code of the biggest project you've worked on? And I just remember thinking, like, I don't know how you, like, who is paying attention to that? Who is going through all the files and accumulating all the lines of code that you've written? And then, and then that, that having some sort of impact like that, that actually has zero impact.

And so I didn't have a good answer for that. And I remember having a question of like, how good of a programmer do you think you are? And I was like, oh, I would say like a six or seven. Like there's some really, really talented people around me. And I think they wanted like the nine or 10 answer, like the cliche, I'm the best. And that just wasn't me. And so anyway, I got turned down for the first role. I then had interviews for technical account manager, got flown out to DC, had final interviews with 30 different people. They were only hiring eight people.

including the people who got rejected, including myself, got sent back to the hotel in a limo together, which was super, super awkward. Not a time that you want to be in a limo with. In a limo with a whole bunch of other people that had been rejected? Yes. So it's like, it was like 10 of us at a time in a limo. Was there like champagne in there? Was it like, like the stretch, like kind of like everybody sitting, looking at each other awkwardly? Oh, it was awkward. It's super awkward. I don't know if they were champagne or not, but it was, it was definitely super awkward. Yeah, definitely super awkward. Yeah.

And so then talking about relationships, the recruiter that had recruited on campus,

thought that I would be a good fit for the company. And so Microsoft does one of three things. They either, when you interview, they say no, they say yes, or they say like, not for this role, but good fit for the company. And so my, my recruiter going back to personal connections and relationships, the guy that I met in person advocated for me. And you talked about this name earlier, asked me what I thought about a technical evangelist role, what, or if I would be interested. And I was like, well, that sounds ridiculous and made up, but it's Microsoft. So I'll, I'll definitely have the conversation.

And in those interviews, I didn't get technical, traditional technical questions. I got like, tell me about a thing that you built. And so in 90% of my conversations, I talked about how I built this Harry Potter trivia app. And I talked about how I learned how to do a database, like embedded in the application to stay, to save high scores and how I didn't know how to do a thing. And I did the research. And at the time I didn't realize this, but I was communicating semi-technical concepts to people in plain English in a way that

was strong enough. I was also then showing my excitement, right? I was showing them something I did outside of the classroom. Cause if you look at computer science degrees, everybody takes roughly the same classes. So that's not really special. It's what you do outside of that. So I was showing excitement. I was showing the ability to learn the ability to communicate. And little did I know that that role became the thing that like got me into public speaking, got me into creating content, got me to do all these things. But that Harry Potter trivia app,

was one of the biggest learning experiences I've had. It was one of the biggest talking points I had in my interviews. And it was one of the biggest going back to validators. That was a big validator to me for all those reasons that I mentioned for what was then a technical evangelist role at one of the biggest tech companies in the world in Microsoft. And so at the time, I also had an offer from FedEx. And I had told FedEx that I was still interviewing with Microsoft. And I told them, I'm going to turn this down because I want to know what's going to happen with Microsoft. And

to my, I interned with them to my former manager's credit. She told me, you don't know what's going to happen except this job now. And if something changes, take that and let us know. And most people you'll be hard pressed to find somebody that would have your interest, best interest at heart and like, be honest with you. Like she was with me. And that's what I did. And I ended up getting the Microsoft job and had to, uh,

I had to call them and tell them that I rescinded the offer and was gone with Microsoft. And that is one of the things in my career that's had by far the greatest impact. The people that I was around at Microsoft, the startups that I was around externally that I worked with, the students and just community members, learning about community, learning about speaking, learning the power of my voice, all those things have had

I mean, these are also things that I do today. And I think my career would have been totally different. And I could rant about like kind of the lack of positive culture. It's just old at FedEx versus working at Microsoft and I'll see row and all these places I've worked. My career just would have been absolutely different had I not been exposed to what I was exposed to at Microsoft. And I'm incredibly thankful for that. And I'm incredibly appreciative of that. But that really stemmed from me creating that Harry Potter trivia app.

Wow. Wow. Build apps, people. Build things. Put them on the Internet. So I want to read a quick quote because I agree that the question that the Microsoft interviewer asked was somewhat naive. This comes from Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. Quote, measuring programming process by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

You don't want your aircraft to be heavy. You don't want your code base to be gajillions of lines of code because it's impossible to make changes, right? You want to keep it lean, right? So, yeah. But I think that's...

it's really powerful that, uh, you were able to ultimately go work at FedEx and kind of, uh, fulfill that, that goal, but that you got this huge learning experience at Microsoft. And I've talked with a lot of people that worked at Microsoft, Joel Spolsky, uh, for example, uh, uh, founder of Stack Overflow. He worked at Microsoft for a while and he talks about like a lot of the things that he learned while he was there. And it sounds like it was incredibly, um, formative experience. Um,

And we've got lots of free code camp alums that work there whom I get to learn a lot about. So they still do have like a really serious engineering culture and it sounds like they've got a really good developer advocacy culture as well.

So let's talk about if you were going out to find a job today, like you're back where you started. Maybe you do have that Harry Potter app. We'll put that in your cap, even though people may be less interested in Harry Potter now than they were when you graduated. But let's say hypothetically you had a successful app in the app store that people were using. You were learning through building feature requests and things like that. And you were

Getting onto the job market, maybe you're applying. I don't know when people apply, when they're like a senior or something like they start applying for jobs. But how would you approach that today, knowing what you know about the job market, how technology has progressed, how there have been these massive layoffs, and there are a lot of mid-career people vying for more entry-level type jobs, and it is a little harder than it used to be. Yeah.

The billing part and the portfolio part, super, super important. I think you have to have something legitimate that you can talk to. If it has any sort of usage, like my app was downloaded thousands of times at a time, that's an immense validator. And one of my favorite examples of this is readme.so.

And it's a, it's a read me builder, like inside of the browser. And it was created as like a hobby project by Catherine Olsner. Hopefully I'm saying that right. And interviewed her several years ago. And by creating that project ended up like getting exposure from GitHub and then ended up going to work for GitHub, which is just such an incredible journey. So that's just another example of like the thing you build can have serious impact. And especially if people are using it, that's a significant validator for any conversations that you might have.

The other thing that, that I would start to doing starts to do. And I, I sound like a broken record because I talk about it all the time. It's just be doing community stuff. I remember when I was in college, um,

they, they shared with computer science students that there was a hackathon going on over the weekend. And like some of the people were really excited and I wasn't, cause I was like, I don't, I don't know how to hack anything. I've never hacked into a computer before. And so I didn't go and knowing now what a hackathon is. And if people don't know, it's like you get together usually over a weekend and you create a team and you build a project, you hack a project, like you hack together a project and having been around those as a mentor, um,

A lot of my career and seeing the learning that you can take from that. Like I talk about being a part of the community and hearing what's going on and hearing the story and learning from people around you. There's no better learning experience, especially in a concentrated amount of time, two, three day period than a hackathon. I think that would be a huge way to get some exposure if you went.

to get some learning from the people around you to get some ideas for other things out there that you didn't know about. I think that would be huge. I think looking into local meetups would be huge, especially like there's a lot of remote jobs, but there's also a lot of jobs that are not remote. And the more you're tapped into your local community to understand who the companies are, what the languages are, what the frameworks are that they use,

And kind of backtracking from there, everything I think about is like going back to doing your research. Like who are the companies? What are they hiring for? What are the backgrounds of the people that work there? What experience level are they looking for? What do you not have that they need for you to have to be able to get for you to be able to apply, et cetera?

And I think a big way that you do that is just going to meetups. And especially if you're in an area that has conferences, even better, um, a hack for going to conferences. If you, if you don't have the money to pay for it, totally understandable. Go volunteer, be a volunteer and you can work kind of like halftime and then like attend the conference. The rest of the half is usually like some, some sort of balance like that so that you get something out of it and you get to give back and just again, be around the conversations. I think that networking, showing up in your community, building stuff,

continuing to be immersed in the conversation that's happening, whether it's, whether it's X, whether it's discord, whether it's podcast, whatever that is, just continuing to stay engaged, um, or all the things that, that come to mind. If I was kind of either coming out of college or just looking for a first role, or even if I was looking for an X role. And I think the only thing that was really different for me when I was looking, um,

One, I was still in a good spot of doing content full-time. I wasn't rushing away from doing that. I was just kind of thinking I'm probably ready for something different at this stage. And so I got to be...

really selective. I got to share with people at particular companies. I got to have ideas of companies that I would be interested in working in. I got to talk to people at those companies. I got to mention to them like, Hey, if anything comes up, let me know type thing. And because I had the ability to be patient and had the ability to kind of be picky and, um, and just kind of take my time. I think I was able to make

a really good informed decision for myself and where I am now that I'm, I'm super excited about. A lot of people don't have that. All right. If you've gotten let go and you have severance or not, like you gotta, you gotta put food on the table. You gotta support a family. You gotta support yourself, right? Like you may not have that luxury and that's totally understandable. So if you have to go out there and kind of take,

that you're less excited about because you got to do what you got to do. I think that's like, that's what you have to do. I would also not lose sight of that doesn't have to be the forever job. Like that could be a six month job. It could be a year job. It could be a two year job. It could be longer while you're continuing to build skills and network and do all the things that I just said, thinking towards the role after that. And I never, I'm definitely not an advocate of like having no loyalty to companies. Like I, I, I give what I have, uh,

to companies that I work for. I also want to be like really honest with people of like one companies will always make the best decision for themselves. So if they think they need to let you go, they're going to let you go. And that like, they're going to do what's best for them. I think also the best way that you move up in terms of title, in terms of salary, in terms of a lot of different things is that you go from company to company. Cause a lot of people get in a situation at a given company and they're like, Oh, I can't

I think I deserve a raise or a promotion and they don't give it to you. And then you're just kind of stuck. And I think the way you combat that, the way you put yourself in the best position to take that next step, whatever that is, is to at least consider and be open to jobs at other companies. So even for people that are in current roles, there's no reason that you shouldn't be entertaining conversations and paying attention to what's going on to other companies and blah, blah, blah, because you never know when you need that opportunity.

You never know when it might make sense for you. And I will say the one thing I have learned as I've not job hopped a lot, but I've had a few different jobs. The one thing I have learned is

is I've never regretted a change. Even going to PlanetScale and getting let go, I got to work with some amazing people. I got to get some experience with database that I hadn't had before. I got to get some exposure that I hadn't had before. And it was one of those things that I was able to go from previous role at all zero and make a big jump in salary to PlanetScale. I was able to do that. And that was only by being open to opportunities as they came. And anyway, so even if you're in a position now where you're fine, you're

always be looking or at least always be open to having a conversation because you never know when you might need that relationship or when you, when you might just be ready. Man, that is just a fire hose of advice. And I'm going to do my best to recap it because I feel like you, you touched on so many important things that, uh, quick recap last time on the pre-coach camp podcast. Okay. So James, uh, you, you said that, uh, there's no better experience than a hackathon, 100%.

agreed, co-signed. Uh, if you want to learn about how the role that hackathons had in my development as a career and how they helped me get my first job, the free code camp, uh, book, uh,

that I published a couple of years ago, just Google learn to code book. It should be the top result, but, uh, you can also listen to me read the book episode 100 of this podcast, how to learn to code and get a developer job. And it's, it's a lot of like anecdotal experience. And also I have lots of stuff that I've learned from smart people like James over the many years. Um, but, uh, hackathons 100%. Uh, another thing you said is, um,

Going to conferences, potentially volunteering to go to a conference to get into... Conferences are expensive, right? Sometimes you can get like a...

some sort of subsidized ticket if you're a student or if you just ask for a discounted ticket. I know Saran Yiparak, who was doing Codeland, she would always have people could pay extra into a fund and they would use those funds to give people subsidized or free tickets. So there are ways to get to a conference. And I think volunteering at a conference, that's solid advice. The other thing you mentioned is the role. Companies are always going to make the best decisions for themselves.

I mean, we saw that like the CEO getting on real quick, shutting down all your accounts. Like they don't want you to be some bomb that's going to explode and say, screw this company. I can't believe I'm outraged. Right? Like they don't, they want to take away your, your ability to express your outrage or, or like contain the risk. Right? Like, and that makes, that sounds extremely cold and calculating, but that's how a lot of companies operate because they just don't want to PR a disaster. Um, that's crazy. But you know, I,

When you put things from the perspective of companies are always going to do what's in their own best interest. But at the same time, you're not totally mercenary. You're not totally cynical. You do want to express some degree of loyalty to your employer. And that's something that really comes through. I really enjoy your balanced take on that. And then jumping from company to company.

Um, there are obviously people who take this to the extreme and hiring managers notice these things. Oh, I noticed you've only been at each company for like six months. And yes, like the, the, I don't think many people would dispute this if you are the kind of person who can, uh, just always be interviewing and continually, um, like rationing up their income through like what I like to say, wall jumping from company to company. Um,

you know, yes, you can do that. And, and thank you for talking about that a little bit, James, but it's worth noting that you have historically been at employers for a long time. Like you were at,

Microsoft for like three years, four years. You were at FedEx for a while. You were at like a lot of your employers. You've been there for a long time. You're not like some total mercenary. But at the same time, you acknowledge the real politic of trying to maximize for your own interests because companies are frankly not looking out for your interests. They're looking out for their own.

Right. HR is not there to help you. It's there to help protect the company from you. Right. Little things like that that people will come to acknowledge. And you'll you walk into any bar in Silicon Valley or wherever and you can find some disgruntled industry veteran who will just spew vitriol about how all this stuff works. But then you can find people like James who are very pragmatic and they're just like, yep.

you know, don't hate the player, hate the game, you know, that kind of, uh, again, I, I apologize if any of this seems insensitive to people who have gone through all this and, but, but the reality is you do need to look out for number one to an extent and you should look out for your colleagues. You should look out for other people in your community, but you should maintain a healthy level of skepticism. Uh, you know,

The turkey, every single day leading up to Thanksgiving, thinks, oh, the farmer's so amazing. They're giving me this food. I've got this great area to walk around. It's awesome, right? Until one day, the farmer comes. That's it, right? Like that's a very macabre treatment of the situation. But, I mean –

advocate for yourself, right? Okay. So, uh, you know, you've job hopped a lot. I've never regretted it. You said, so I think that, that those are, these are words of wisdom. Uh, I have a few more quick questions for you. I want to be mindful of your time. Uh, but, uh, I'm learning so much and I hope you all are learning so much from this. Uh, so, uh,

In terms of learning in public, that's something you've been a big public advocate of learning in public. And, you know, your Harry Potter app is obviously a great example of you building something and getting feedback and operating in real time. And people know, Hey, this is just little James here. Uh, like not even graduated from college, building this app, maintaining it, putting it on the app store. Doesn't know what he's doing. You self admitted that you didn't necessarily know a lot about databases or web servers or any of these things when you set out to build this, but you learned in the process. Um,

What role has learning in public played in your progress as a developer? Yeah. You know, it's funny because I think about how I haven't done that near as well as I would like to at times. I think there's so many benefits to learning in public. There's getting feedback. So like there's an old meme or like joke of like, hey, if you want to know the right way to do something,

post on social media the wrong way and and people will be happy to tell you what the right way is right so i think one one of that like if you just share snippets of code that you write every day inevitably people are going to be like why'd you do that you shouldn't do that you blah blah and and some of it is just like unnecessary like we my thing with feedback is like all feedback should be considered all feedback does not warrant anything more than that it doesn't warrant me acting on anything so by considering i mean like if you give me feedback

I could say that's not worth my time. It doesn't make sense. Or I could say like, Oh, that's something I should actually consider and then act on. And so they kind of fall into two categories for me, but I try to pay attention when people share stuff. Anyway, just know like you'll get, you'll get a lot of stuff that's not super helpful and you have to learn to weed that out and be comfortable weeding that out. But people love to tell you how to do stuff or, or the good people love to tell you alternate ways to do stuff. And I think that's a huge learning opportunity.

I think there's also one of the things I don't feel like I've ever done as well as I would like to is building a brand around a specific thing. And I've done like a lot of JavaScript. I've done a lot of frameworks. I also like to talk about careers. I like to talk about a lot of things. I don't think I have just one thing that people definitively know about.

James is the guy for this. And like Matt Pocock is the perfect example of like, Matt is the TypeScript guy. And if people heard of him or if you haven't, like everything he talks about is TypeScript and he is a TypeScript guy. So anything he shares related to TypeScript, people pay attention because that's his thing. So I think that is one of the benefits if you're very like concentrated and intentional with the things that you share and build around a certain topic, building that reputation can be really huge. And the impact of that is like,

whether you've spoken before or not getting invited to speak on certain things, because you're a voice of authority that people have seen. I think also if like, if Matt Pocock, as an example, the TypeScript guy, if he goes and applies for a job that uses TypeScript, they're probably going to be really interested in hiring him because he's the voice of authority on types TypeScript. So if you, if you kind of backtrack of like, Hey,

people in my area are hiring for java and and for what it's worth like i'm sure you do a lot of javascript you talk about a lot of javascript i talk about a lot of javascript that's not the entire ecosystem there's a whole ecosystem of other languages and and frameworks and tools there's all these things and again it goes back to like do your research of what people are hiring for but let's say people in your area are hiring for java what better way to get on your radar than to start

building something in Java, sharing what you learn, getting feedback from the community about what you learned, staying consistent about sharing that, then giving a meetup talk about something that you built in Java, something that you learned in Java, then go into Spring Boot, the framework on top of Java. Like what better way to be seen as a more ideal candidate for roles that people are hiring for in your community than like taking,

taking that topic that they're hiring for and just going and building a brand around it. And people do this all the time, right? Like people do SEO research of like, what, what keywords should I hit on this blog post to blah, blah, blah, and then build content around that because there's availability for, for SEO around a certain topic. So,

I think you do your research and you kind of build around that. And so all the things that I said, getting feedback on the stuff that you're building so that you can learn, building a reputation for being a person that uses a certain tool or language or a framework or whatever. I think also the more you build and get something in the hands of people, again, it's this huge validator of like, it's not just a local project that I created on a portfolio. It's things that people are actually using. And I go back to...

Readme.so is the perfect example of this. She was building this thing and she was sharing about it and people would use it and she would get feedback and she would create new features and go through this whole cycle and then worked it. I don't know if she still is, but like got a job at GitHub, which is what an amazing place to be.

So there's so many benefits. I think, I think the number one thing to reap those benefits is consistency. So if, if you're approaching like, Oh, building a public is something I see value in, just know it's not something you do one day. And then all of a sudden, like people are coming to you with job offers. This is the kind of thing that you stay consistent over the course of months.

And are really intentional with that to then start to build their reputation and start to get some of the benefits that I'm talking about here. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll just like, not that people necessarily need to hear me mention yet another anecdote, but like this podcast for me is a way of learning in public, talking with smart people like you, talking with smart people, uh, like the many other, uh,

luminaries in many cases of software development whom I've talked to over the years and getting corrected, getting like learning about, uh, things that I've done wrong. All that stuff. Absolutely. Super helpful. So one last question, when you're putting yourself out there, you are invariably going to encounter negativity. You're going to encounter people who are like, Oh, you didn't even know that. Like you call yourself a JavaScript developer or you're just going to encounter people who are like, uh, just having a bad day for whatever reason. And I always, when people are, you know,

I always presumed that like they're just going through something and that's not necessarily how they are. Give the charitable explanation. They're not just some troll living under a bridge. They genuinely are just having a rough time and they're taking it out on you. But like, how do you address negativity? How do you power through that? Yeah. Like I've talked about that in the past and I think at times it was really easy for me because the people who say really negative things are so ridiculous that it's like easy to kind of cast aside.

I think when the biggest struggles I've had is like insecurities around like, oh, you're doing this wrong or you're explaining this wrong. And that's really hard when you're a public facing figure. I mean, like I am on podcasts and YouTube videos and at conferences and stuff. Like you're kind of looked at as one of the people that's supposed to teach.

the best way to do a thing. And, and the reality is like, none of us know everything. I think a personal struggle of mine is I only have three years at FedEx of doing actual software development. At the other times I've been a developer advocate, which is tight and cool, but it's, it's like doing demos and it's doing like YouTube videos and blog posts and stuff, which is not like building real world production software. There's just a difference. Yeah. And so that's one of the things that I'm, I'm self-conscious of at one point. And there was one, I think really good example of,

Or I got feedback. I was explaining something about the event loop in JavaScript in a video. And somebody called me out and said, oh, that's not right, blah, blah, blah. And I actually recorded a video that I published right after that in response to it that was like, oh, I was wrong. And then after I published that video and I was watching it again, I was like, I don't think that I was wrong to begin with. And I ended up taking that video down and publishing another video to clarify, okay, you asked me this question or challenged me on something.

I quickly thought I was wrong based on how confident that person was. And in reality, I really wasn't. And this is why. And just to clarify, like, here's what's going on. And that was a really good learning experience for me of like,

I talked about this earlier. Feedback is one of two categories. It's either something I need to act on or it's not. But I want to pay attention to all feedback. I can quickly throw stuff aside, right? Like I think that's something you have to do. But for stuff that's worth looking at, I really do want to invest in looking at it. And I think in that case, the one thing I didn't do...

was didn't take the time to really think through what the situation was, what my explanation was, what was wrong or not about it. And I didn't get kind of outside conversation to affirm one way or another or confirm one way or another. And I think that's one of the things that was a learning experience for me of like, Hey, sometimes I want to be too eager to make a change or to admit that I'm wrong. Cause I want, I want to be transparent. I think that's something valuable for people to like you hear West bosses talked about this, like he'll leave mistakes in his videos, some of them. So,

So that you see, like, I'm a regular developer, right? Like I make mistakes. Like you watch the Polish YouTube video and it's just do, do, do, do, do everything works. And that's cool. But it doesn't, it doesn't show the real world experience. So I think there's something is, there is something really genuine about having mistakes, about being honest about like, Hey, we're all developers. We're all learning. We all have things to learn. We all have blah, blah, blah. But in that, in that instance, I didn't really give myself credit enough to really think about it and confirm with other people. So that was one of the things that like,

What's kind of a learning experience for me. I get things that like I'm sensitive about that people comment on and it's kind of ridiculous. Like some people just are kind of terrible. I'm honestly like kind of, um, self-conscious about my thinning hair and people can see that I'm self-conscious about bags under my eyes. I sleep, you said like nine hours. I sleep well every night. I drink tons of water.

I always have bags under my eyes and I get comments about that all the time on YouTube videos. And that kind of sucks. And some of it is like, I could do a better job with lighting and different things. But there, there are like personal things that, um, that really there's no reason for people to take it there. Cause it's not relevant at all. Um, also one thing to understand too, sometimes it's a cultural thing.

Like sometimes different cultures are just much more comfortable saying what they're thinking and they don't, they don't mean it in a negative way. And I had lots of comments like that of like people like genuinely being, I think maybe concerned because of the bags under my eyes of like, oh my God, are you okay? Like it looks like you're having a rough time. And in my head, that's just the thing I'm sensitive about. I'm doing fine.

But anyway, so they're like, you have to understand, like putting yourself out there comes with you're open to you're open to criticism. You're open to suggestions. You're open to ridiculousness. And that happens too. And I think you have to kind of be prepared for that. I think you have to quickly decide, okay,

Everything that comes through falls into two buckets. Shit I don't care about and shit I should care about to try to get better at what I do. And that is a challenge and it's something that takes time to get more comfortable doing and it takes more time to be comfortable doing

taking ridiculous comments on the chin and just keep moving. Yeah. Yeah. Well, power to you for, uh, just like braving that. Like a lot of people, they get like even a little bit of negative feedback or something, or maybe they say something dumb and then they're like, Oh my goodness, I can't believe I said that my career is over. Nobody's ever going to respect me again. You know, like,

Just address it and move on and do your best. And there are some things you can't change. I mean, maybe you can go get plastic surgery in Korea and get your eyes not to have those things and people quit talking about it. One of the things people always tell me, they're always like, are you high right now? You look so high. And I'm like, no, this is just how I look.

I haven't drank a drink of alcohol in nine years. Certainly not smoking weed or anything, but people, people always think that like, because the way I laugh or the way I looked at that, I like I'm inebriated in some, some way. So, so, but, but I mean, that's kind of comical. Uh,

In a way, because if you're somebody who like, for example, like has like, you know, scars on their face from a childhood accidents or something like that, like you just constantly have to answer that sort of stuff. And, you know, we're both men. And like, that means that we have it like better off than like half the population as far as like random nasty comments on YouTube. So I don't want you all to think we're complaining about it, but, but negative comes. Well, we should also. Yeah. Yeah. I think just to your point, like,

So real quick, to your point, like they're, especially for women and people of diverse backgrounds, I think can significantly have it worse. And some of the things I've seen people share that are creators and they share like some of the comments and stuff that they get are absolutely appalling. Yeah. And that is something to consider. I think I always encourage people to,

Um, you know, it's, it's worked out for me. The positive comments outweigh the negative for me. I can't say that that's true for everyone. I can't say that that's true for a lot of people, but it is something that you have to consider when you, when you look at doing something public facing. Yeah. Well, um, I want to applaud you for putting yourself in the arena. You know, the old, um, quote from, uh,

The Roosevelt, uh, the older Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, uh, there's the whole man in the arena speech. And, uh, if you haven't read it, obviously, uh, it's really old. It's like a hundred plus years ago, but it's about being the person who goes out there and puts themselves out there and not just one of the spectators in the, in the Coliseum, but the actual person down in the arena, uh,

participating in the actual competition, right? And all the, you know, jeers you get from the crowd and the booze and all this stuff, you get along with the cheers, right? So I want to compliment you for continuing to do that, for doing more than 100 conference talks. That's so nerve-wracking when you're giving a conference talk. I mean, you're just exhibiting like an admirable level of courage.

And, uh, thank you for doing that. Thanks for doing everything you're doing. Uh, I encourage everyone to check out the compressed FM podcast. I'm linking to that in the show notes. I'm linking to some of James's other exciting stuff. Check that out. And, uh, thanks again for coming on the podcast, man. Yeah, I really appreciate it. This is, um, I'm a huge fan as well. I've followed, uh,

You and your journey and all the amazing things that Free Code Camp have done for a long time. Super personal for me with all the things that I do of trying to give back to the community and help people make career transitions and next steps in their career too. So really happy to be here. Awesome. Well, everybody who's listened this far, I hope you have a fantastic day. Until next week, happy coding.