 You have to jump back and forth on some of my slides versus my content. But I don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to get started. Okay, so is this working or not? At the point, is it? You can use. Is it on? Wait, it's on. It's on. It's on. Yeah, I'll just press the next button. Okay. All right. So my name is Sean. I go by strikes on the internet. I am very bad at using clickers. I'm just going to stay like this because I'm going to go back and forth. Ah, whoa. Where's all the animations? Ah. Okay, that was really weird. There's supposed to be more here, but I work as developer experience engineer at Netlify based out of New York. I also am a moderator of the RStash ReactJS subreddit. So if you're learning React or you're a React developer, there's over 150,000 of us talking and sharing and hiring each other in React. Please join us. And I'm also a major proponent of this philosophy of learning in public. I, a little bit about my own story, I'm also a career changer. I used to work in finance in the end of 2017. I went through a boot camp to January 2018 was my first dev job. A lot of people, when they look at my developer portfolio, they don't really realize this and realize how far I've come in the last two years. I also don't really believe it myself, but I think that this is some of the strongest advice that I have for career development, especially for junior devs. So that's why I'm here. And I'm going to talk to you today about two major sort of essays that I wrote and philosophies and just kind of explain them and just like be present and available for Q&A. It's mainly learning in public and then the follow-up is learning gears. So the, I kind of start this off with this, does anyone remember this book, The Secret? It was kind of popular about ten years ago as like this like life advice thing. It was very, it was a lot of like voodoo, like, and it basically claims that the law of attraction, which claims that thoughts can change a person's life directly. I kind of contrast learning in public as the opposite of The Secret. Instead of thoughts, I think that I assert that actions, specifically sharing things in public can change your life directly. And that's a, if you think about it, that's a lot of what developers do. We learn in private by default. Everything that we learn, we kind of stick in our memory and hope that, you know, we kind of retain it. And then every few years we like go for an interview and then we have to take our things out of memory and sort of prove that we know stuff. Whereas learning in public doesn't keep stuff in your thoughts. You actually take concrete actions to share them and be possibly improved by the people around you and just by your own past self. And this is a reference to Scott Hanselman, who is one of the very senior sort of C-Shop Microsoft developers. He talks about this as the dark meta-developers. A lot of people just kind of like, they exist. You know, they're downloading your packages and like writing software, but you don't really know who they are. And that's completely fine. I'm here to assert that there is a different way forward for the top 1% if you choose to opt in for that. Brad Frost, this designer, he's the creator of U.K. Coined Atomic Design and a bunch of other design trends, talks about this as creative exhaust. Like it's just as a function of you creating things, you just have to put stuff out there. And I think I want you to develop this as a habit of life, of the way you do things is just you just create stuff and you put it out there. So instead of creative exhaust, I actually kind of call it learning exhaust. Like as part of your learning, you start writing for yourself. And it doesn't have to be public at all. For a long time, I actually kept a daily journal just for myself. The stuff that you've written can actually benefit future you, especially if it turns up, you type something in Google and the first Google result is something that you wrote and you forgot. Then you would just be like, thanks, pass me, right? That's really cool. And then the last thing is the goal is to document what you learn and the problems that you solve. And that's it. You're not really going for anything more ambitious than like, let's just like, this is what I learned. I did not know this yesterday. Now I know this today. And forever on, I will know this for the future. Like your second brain on the internet can be much larger than your original natural brain. And notice that in none of this, I've said anything about other people. This is not about giving back. This is genuinely the fastest way for you to learn. And the other thing is also that you should try your best to be right, but don't worry when you're wrong because you're not an expert and you're not pretending to be an expert. That's fine. We'll talk about what that looks like. What are the different modes of learning in public? You can write, speak, ask in communities, contribute code, avoid closed gardens like Slack and Discord or in memory storage, as they say. And other interesting forms. I do want to particularly highlight speaking and especially celebrate Michael, who's really been such a huge part of the Singapore Tech Media. I'm going to give him a round of applause. Without him, there is no venue to speak in Singapore. And so it really is a strong moving factor for putting Singapore on the map. I was Singaporean at work in New York. I think for Singapore to keep growing, we have to reach beyond our own shores. And the way we do that is we take advantage of the skills that we have. The two things Singaporeans are really good at. We're natural English speakers, and we're the hardest working people on Earth. We can do a lot with that. OK, so let's talk a bit about the alternative form factors. You don't have to be blogging all the time. You don't have to be conference speaking all the time. This is one of my favorite speakers, Anjana Vakil. She actually wrote a musical teaching people about tail call optimization, a very, very nuanced sort of compilery topic in JavaScript. But she made it into a super entertaining talk. Highly recommend. And this really, you really master something where you can teach it well and simply and entertainingly. I don't have anywhere that's solid that talent. So I just write song parodies. This is my Moana and Hamilton parodies in JavaScript. And eventually, some of them will get picked up. For example, for this talk, I did at JSConf Hawaii. So I'm just trying to motivate you with some examples. If you can draw, it's also a superpower. I also don't have drawing skills. But you also don't need to draw super well. This is Julia Evans, a very senior engineer at Stripe. She just talks about Linux internals and other engineering topics. And it's not that advanced. But it simplifies complex topics and helps people learn. But she also definitely learns every single one of these things that she does. Lynn Clark is also another expert. Now she works on WebAssembly at Mozilla. But she also does code cartoons. This is just a shout out for people who can draw. I cannot draw, so it just doesn't apply to me. You don't have to be senior. Those people are very senior. You don't have to be senior to do that. This is Samantha Ming. She's just starting out learning JavaScript. And she's just making these colorful notes and putting them online. A lot of people are following her just for that. And you build these resources mainly to document these things. But you're definitely helping other people as well. So a lot of people, when they're like, OK, I'm going to put myself out there. But what if nobody reads it? Boohoo, right? Who cares? This is a good thing. It's actually a feature, not a bug. Because it'll probably suck the first few times you write some stuff. It's also probably false. There will be some small amount of people. This is your time to actually be bad. Because when you get a wider distribution in audience, then the bar for putting anything out will actually be higher. So this is your time to start putting it out there. And they will read it. Who is this day in this group? It's the people who are specialists in the thing that you're working on. If you're, for example, let's say you put out this blog post on GovTech. People who work at GovTech will read it. Because that's the thing that they work on day in and day out. And if you get it wrong, it's actually kind of not your fault. They actually kind of take upon themselves like, OK, we failed somewhere in our communication. And there are just not that many people who do this, who do this learning in public, and give feedback. A lot of content creation is putting stuff out into the void and you get crickets. Nobody gives feedback. So people who do give feedback actually get a disproportionate voice. Personal example time, I'm mostly focused on React. In March of last year, Danny Romoff, one of the core members of the React team, released one of the new APIs at JS Conf I sent talking about React Suspense. So I stayed up all night that night, took his demo, and then wrote it up and did a big walkthrough of the whole demo. So I just went through all the source code and just explained it to myself and explained it to everyone else who read it. And guess what? Of course, he doesn't know who I am. He doesn't really care. But because I was one of maybe four people who wrote it up, he went through and gave line-by-line code review on my stuff. So we cannot pay for this kind of thing. So there's the experts. And then there's also the detractors, the haters. I call them the peanut gallery. This is a very famous XCCD comic telling you, if you're wrong in internet, someone will come and correct you. You can choose to view this as a problem or actually the internet working to help you. If your ego is small and your ego is not attached to your current work and you're willing to be taught, you can turn even the most vicious hater into your mentor and your teacher. And I've had that happen to me. And it's called the Cunningham's Law. And the reason I know it's called Cunningham's Law is because I was on a podcast. And I called it Godwin's Law. And someone came and corrected me on the name of the law. So thanks for proving the law. So instead of viewing it as the peanut gallery, I also view it as free mentorship. Instead of asking for, hey, if I buy you a coffee, will you give me hundreds of thousands of dollars of free mentorship hours? That's just a really poor trade. Just engage in stuff that people are interested in and engage on a genuine level like that. Okay, so the other, the code answer that, right? It's like, try your best to be right and don't worry when you're wrong. And you're gonna be wrong a lot, so be fine. The goal is to keep shipping. Being wrong is fine and it's gonna be fine if you keep it, you go small. So I'm repeating myself about that. Here's some cursing, but I really do believe in this. For example, if you think about management, like when you're running a management, your goal is to not prevent mistakes, but to build, to work on the system such that you can recover from any mistake. So you're resilient in that sense. The same way in your own learning and in your own career progress, it's not about preventing any screw ups. It's being able to come back from any screw up. So learning public helps you do that and helps you shit more. So why does it work? These are all the reasons which I've sort of covered and I don't have time to cover everything, but I think mostly I've chalked it on in human psychology. This is just how we work, especially when you're working in public. There's a commitment mechanism and a positive reinforcement. Some people will start cheering you on, holding you accountable. And also when people are looking for experts and consultants and people to hire, they'll think of you first because there's a trick in human mentality. It's called availability bias. We tend to associate the people that we first recall as the best because the other people just don't exist in your mind. It's really tricky. It's kind of related to inbound marketing as well. So a lot of times when you do job hunts, you're sort of outbound marketing. You're sending your resume out, nobody who knows where you are. Whereas in sort of the learning public style, you're sort of planting a flag. You're putting out your bad signal and saying, like, this is my domain and people come to you. The last five to six of my past few job offers and conversations have all started in my Twitter DMs because people just know what I'm about and what I do well. So I think it's very, switching that mentality from outbound to inbound is just really powerful, both for business and for personal development. And lastly, it's building portable capital because all this is under your name, not type, your present employer. And I think as someone who used to work in finance, everything I ever did was that it's not property of that employer. I cannot take it with me. Whereas in tech, you have this unique opportunity to build assets and reputation in whatever capital, open source capital in particular, outside of your main work that you can take with you wherever you go. Very, very powerful. Okay, so there's advanced learning public stuff I don't have time to cover, but just come talk to me later. I talked a little bit about the benefits and in particular, building a track record. Like if those people are interested in like sort of working remotely, asynchronously, building like having an established track record, like why is the reason we interview, right? We interview in order to de-risk the meeting the person that you don't really know. But what is better than just like looking at an established record of someone working in public for a significant period of time, there's nothing left to prove, right? So I think that's a really, that's a really, really key benefit. Another story time, this one's very simple. My first dev job was assigned to write some code in TypeScript, which I didn't really know. So then I started writing a cheat sheet with all the tricks that I felt like I needed to remember. And then people started contributing and it became this whole thing with Chinese and Spanish translations and other co-maintainers. And it starts to snowball because you're building this reusable resource. And what's awesome about this is it's kind of like, you have open source code, but you can also open source knowledge. And every single time someone makes a PR, a thousand issue, they teach me as well as ask me and help me build this resource together. So I've been taught by people at Uber, Airbnb, Microsoft, Atlassian. It's a really, really powerful way of learning public. Okay, so let's keep going. Story time number three. Okay, then this is the story about how I developed a tweet into a talk. So first I started out into a tweet. I was just like really kind of messing around with React hooks after they were released. And I was like, oh, hey, you can sort of boil down the complicated concepts into 26 lines of code. That got a lot of traction. So I built that into a blog post and then just like published it on my company blog. And then I got invited to talk about it at GSConf Asia this year. So that's kind of like the progression, right? Of like, you like keep working at a thing, keep pushing stuff out in public. People notice, people work with you to develop stuff. That's how you sort of, you build it up. You cannot get there in one standing leap on day one, right? You have to sort of build up to it. So I highly recommend Junior Devs to do this kind of thing. Okay, so I also want to mention like why not learning public? It's not for everyone, especially if you're concerned about personal safety, if you have like some stalker situation which is real for people. There's also a challenge of like being on the content grind or being worried about being branded as like spammy or like being an overnight expert. I think as long as you're authentic about where you are and you try to do your best, you can stay clear of that. But it is not for everyone and I don't. And there's different levels of like how much stuff you want to do in public versus keep it to yourself. So that's it for learning public. And then the most common question, that was a fairly successful sort of philosophy. The most common question I get is how to start and learning gears is my answer. It really starts to give a framework around how people learn in public. And I went and just observed everyone that I'm inspired by and I came up with these three categories. It's Explorer, Connector, and Miner. And I'm just gonna briefly introduce what these things are. So when you're an explorer, the problem that you're trying to solve is you don't know what you don't know. And so you're just exploring, you're going a mile wide and an inch deep. And mostly you're just like making notes to yourself. Your output is episodic with no theme to it. And your commitment is low. It's like, today I feel like doing stuff, I'm just gonna do that. That's exploring. Connecting is a little bit more committed. Your problem is now, you know things that other people don't and you're sharing that with other people. So your exhaust, instead of being very self-oriented, you start polishing it up a little bit to be meant for others. So your output starts to consolidate it around a few pet topics. And you still don't have a grand theme, but you're exploring intersections. For example, my intersections with reactive typescript. And the commitment is more moderate. You're kind of putting yourself out there. It's weeks and months of commitment. For example, I commit to give a talk four months out. I'm preparing to build that talk all the way through and deliver that talk. That's a more sort of engage, connector type commitment. And then the minor is when you've actually hit on something that's super important, that's too hard, too unknown, too important. And you're just abnormally obsessed by it. So your exhaust is no longer like, you know, like blog posts or this junk. You're actually putting out R&D and infrastructure and code and just like making things that are built to last. And so the output has like one unifying theme. Like you are the something person, right? Like the points guy does points. The like, you know, right share guy does right share. The commitment of this is years on the order of years and careers, right? Like very, very high commitment. So reserve this one when you struggle. So these are sort of like, I kind of compare it to like by school gears. When you found something, when you're going uphill, step into high gear, when you're on flat ground, you step into low, actually the other way around. You know what I mean? So I also sort of crib from all these other people in the web development industry. They all have different versions of this philosophy. Definitely go check them out. And I can share the slides later on on my Twitter. So, but that's about it. These are the two talks. You can find out more information on my site, switch.io. And I can take questions now. Thank you. Oh, do I just? Yeah. OK. Thank you. OK. Thank you. I don't know, am I supposed to stand around or? So.