Building Your Audience and Going Independent w/Josh Comeau

All right, it says we're live, but like no one's here yet, so.

Right.

And and Josh, where where where where are you out of? You're in Toronto, right?

Montreal.

Montreal.

Too close. Six hours down the road.

Close, close. Definitely, definitely. I love it. Um, uh, you know, there there's been some talk about going to Canada on the torque side of things, just for like some visits and some for client visits. So if if I'm in Montreal. I'll let you know. We need to grab lunch. Um, but good morning, everybody. Happy Friday, as they say. When I mean they, I mean just me. Um, but it's good to see y'all this morning. Uh, super pumped to hang out, uh, with the GOAT, Josh. Josh, listen, I, I, I have to— I'm gonna be honest with you, I butchered your name live the other day.

Last name.

I'm sorry. I'm very sorry.

That's okay.

I, I, I said live— I, I said live, I said, I really hope he doesn't See this. Uh, so it's, it's Como, right?

You got it.

I love it. Awesome. I tried to, I tried to make it super French and I was like, I don't think that's right. Um, so excited to hang out, uh, with Josh this morning and have a great conversation, um, on this Friday. I, I think, I think this conversation can be very applicable to a lot of people. Um, it really, really where anybody's at, whether you're a junior, whether a senior, I think this conversation is going to be very, very important to you. So Please say hey, would love to hear from you, and I know Josh will as well. Again, the reason why I tell, I tell people say hey is to engage. You know, one of the things we're going to talk about today is, is the importance of like being out there, like, like, like building and connecting, and we're going to talk about it with Josh. And, and I really truly think like the, the, the meetups that have changed and there's a lot more online, and I think you can absolutely really make a name for yourself, uh, online. You know, I, I, I, I feel crazy sometimes kind of saying the same thing over and over again. Um, but I know it works because basically, like, Theo put out his, like, chat app, um, the other day, and, and he made a YouTube video. And Theo was talking about basically just being in community and being in the zeitgeist of, like, communities and, like, always speaking up and always being engaged. And it was good to hear from him, um, because sometimes I just feel a little crazy saying the same thing over and over again. So, um, but please say hey, we'd love to hear from you. Let us know where you're tuning in from. Another thing too is I want to obviously give a shout out to, you know, obviously Torque, right? I mean, listen, you know, everyone's in my DMs like, what's Torque? What is Torque? Listen, Torque is kind of— we're a community-first jobs platform, right? So be a part of our community. We've almost hit 3,000 Discord members in 4 months. When I started, we were a little under 1,000. It was very quiet. Now we're sending hundreds, if not thousands of messages a week, and the community is really engaged. So we'd love to have you. But we also place people. So if you go join torque.dev, if you join our platform, platform, you have the opportunity to not only get placed by individuals at Torque, but Ronstadt, one of the world's largest staffing companies, bought Torque, and you have the opportunity to get placed by some Torque recruit— I mean, Ronstadt recruiters as well. So join torque.dev, um, you can get plugged in, um, we'd love to have you a part of the community as well. Um, but again, for those of you tuning in, Trey, it's good to see you. Ricardo, Marcus, Chris, it's great to see y'all this morning. Thanks again for tuning in. Um, and again, continue to say hey. Um, also shout out to Appwrite. Um, I am an Appwrite hero. I think it's a great little piece of software. Even though I don't code, I've been told it's great. So probably the only app right here that's non-technical, but love the crew over there. Check them out. They are fantastic. Sally, it's good to see you this morning. All right, let's go and dive in. Enough of me yapping this morning. Josh, let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And let's go from there.

Yeah. So my name is Josh. I'm a software developer. I've spent the last few years focusing mainly on teaching, so I have my own online courses. But for much longer than that, I've been blogging. I've been teaching at local coding bootcamps. And mostly I've just been, you know, I discovered many years ago that I really enjoyed coding. In 2014, I think I got my first full-time role, even though I had been doing sort of contract work and various things before that. And yeah, that's, that's been the ride I've been on ever since. Since 2020, I've been focusing on my own courses and blogging at joshwcombo.com.

I love it. And if people— so let's talk about your courses. I definitely want you to plug in a little bit. Where can people go?

I'm gonna throw up a banner right now.

Yeah.

So, the best place is joshwcomo.com. There's a little courses navigation link that will take you to either of my 2 courses. I have a course on CSS and a course on React.

I love it. Is that right? Is that right? Is that the live description? Awesome. Go check it out. Listen, I'm not technical. I met Josh at Render. A lot of people like Josh. Josh has a decent following. If you have a decent following, people like Josh, feel like Josh has a good product. So, if you want to go level up in React and then CSS, you said, right?

Yep.

Also, if you want to go check out some React, some CSS, and level up, go check out Josh. Uh, I, again, like I said, I think he's a fantastic individual. So Josh, let's go ahead and dive into the conversation today just around like going out on your own. I know you're building courses, you're not necessarily out here like freelancing and like hardcore like coding with clients, but you're still building, you're still doing your own thing. Um, can you just get— let's start super high level. Can you give just some words of encouragement or some thoughts for people who have maybe always worked full-time jobs but maybe has had some sort of like calling or some, some just kind of like, I should go, like maybe I do something on my own? Can you just give some words of encouragement for those folks?

Yeah, I mean, it was one of the best things I ever did, and, uh, my only real regret is that I didn't consider it sooner. Uh, it was one of those things that I had spent many, many years thinking of this as a thing I wanted to do, right? I had in the back of my mind, I saw what like Wes Bos, fellow Canadian, had done, has done with his courses.

Yeah.

And I just figured I had all the time in the world. I wound up hurting myself. I got a nerve injury in one arm and that spread to the other arm. And I spent like 6 months, 7 months where I couldn't type or use a mouse. And that experience—

That's crazy.

Well, really, yeah. I learned how to code using a microphone and an eye tracker. So I was still able to do some— yeah, that's a whole separate tangent. Uh, it's interesting stuff. Um, but the takeaway from that experience for me was the recognition, the recognition that like there isn't an infinite stretch of time that we have and that really like I realized I'm getting really dark for 10:30 in the morning.

Yeah, we're, we're diving in. We are 6 minutes in and Josh is going for it this morning.

Yeah, like I, I had this vision of everyone has a number floating above their heads and it's the number of keystrokes left in their life. So every time you depress a key on a keyboard, that number goes down by 1.

Of course.

It's like your bank balance in your bank account. It's like a currency. It's a resource that you should allocate strategically, right? If you're working a job that you're not super enthusiastic about and those keystrokes could be better spent doing something that you're really passionate about or that you've always wanted to try, that's not an infinite pool. You should consider— and I also want to be very clear that I was very privileged. I was in a position where I had a couple of years of savings in the bank. So in my mind, the worst case scenario was that I gave myself a year, I did it. If it didn't work, I could probably— and granted, this was, you know, 2019, 2020, so times were a little bit better then, but I figured it would be pretty easy for me to get back into the workforce if I wanted. So it really didn't seem like the, the pro-con trade-offs were so in the favor of trying it that, uh, I figured it would be silly not to. And once I had that realization, it's like, oh yeah, of course, this is obviously what I should be doing. Yeah, that's what I've been doing ever since.

So talk about— I mean, I, I do feel like people, um, really don't know where to get started, right? They're like, hey, listen, like, I want to go out on my own, I want to build something. I think there's a lot of— from a financial perspective, and that's one thing I really, from a Torque community, I want to empower people. I want to create these like PDFs of like how to get started financially, taxes, blah blah blah. And I know it's going to be kind of its own thing, but like, like when you started Like, did you always know that you wanted to do a course, or would— or did the course come later and you did some freelancing kind of development on your own first? Like, give me kind of that, uh, that, uh, that side of things.

Yeah, so like I mentioned, it had been in the back of my mind for quite a while, and I think the first like concrete step, although it wasn't really— it's hard to draw the line of like what is and is not intentional, but I started blogging in 2014, uh, and initially it was Mostly just a way for me to organize my thoughts. I was sick of having the feeling that I think a lot of developers can relate to where you get stuck on a problem, you spend 3 hours wrestling with it, you solve it, you move on with your life, and then a month later you hit the same problem, but you don't remember how you solved it and you have to go through the whole process again. So initially it's like when I solve these problems, I would spend the 15 minutes and write up a little blog post. That way, next time I run into this, I can reference it.

I love that.

And I made it public and I started blogging on Medium. And most of those Medium posts to this day have like 200 views. They were not popular, but it did sort of teach me how to blog. And I realized at some point down the line that this blog could be a really useful tool for whatever I wanted to do. In my mind, it was the courses were still the main idea, but regardless, whatever the goal you have, a blog is a great way to build a reputation and that reputation can serve a lot of different goals. So, when I had the whole nerve injury thing and I decided to go into this on my own, it was the— I didn't really— I did one freelance job, which was for Addy Osmani at Google. He was building his own—

Yeah.

He had this library of JavaScript patterns and he wanted to build a website for them. So, I did a little bit of work on that. Although really, Lydia and Addy did like 99% of that. So, I don't want to take any credit for it. But that was, even that was mostly because I really like Addy and thought it would be a fun project. I tried, I said no to many, many things because I really wanted to focus on the courses.

I love that. Talk about, I wanna talk about blogging, building in public. I know people are so tired of probably about hearing this, especially from me, like build in public, blah, blah, blah. And I think people, when they hear, when they hear people say build in public, I feel like they like think like MrBeast. Or like—

Right.

Content creator, like influencer, content creator. I love what you said about how you were just blogging really for you. So when you had that problem, like Barrett said, I have no memory of this code, you can come back and like go to it. I mean, I think that's so fundamentally simple and I think is what I try to preach. I'm not asking you to create an email newsletter A texting community, a livestream, any of this stuff. I'm just asking you to document. And so can you talk about just, just the importance of just documenting your journey? Yeah.

I mean, that's the, like, I, like, the reason I started was mainly for that purpose. Uh, but I quickly realized, like, I had these posts on Medium that had 200 views and I would get 2 comments from people like, oh shoot, I had that same problem too. And this was really helpful. And it's amazing, right? It's so cool that like the little bit of work that you do to document it has this profound impact. And it really does. It seems to me if your goal is to do anything in the realm of software development, it can only help you if like when you're applying to a job or when you're seeking out some sort of contract, if the person has seen one of your blog posts, you know, 3 years ago, it doesn't have to be recent. It doesn't have, they don't have to have like a, it didn't have to blow their mind, but if they remember that they've seen your name. It's like the reason that major companies will do all these like awareness marketing campaigns, right? Like they're not trying— the Nike ad in the subway isn't trying to like preach the value of the shoes. They're just trying to make you like have that name in your head when you go to the shoe store. So I think that there is so many benefits and you're right, it doesn't have to be like the influencer stuff, the toolkit that everyone has.

Yeah.

For certain goals, that's the way you have— that's beneficial to do it that way.

Correct.

But just if you're a developer and you're just trying to like build your reputation, of course, like all of that is superfluous. It's just about creating a body of work that shows that you know what you're talking about and that you can sort of use as proof when people are considering working with you.

Absolutely. I love that. And so this just popped in my head and I want to ask you this because I think people, they want to start out on their own. And full transparency, when I left my last company before I landed at Torque, I was thinking about just going out on my own. I, I fielded, uh, I texted some, um, uh, engineers that I really, really respect. Um, I was like, hey, what are your thoughts on this? They actually— most of them thought it was a good idea. But I was like, should I go course? Should I go courses? Should I just like sit myself in a studio and record how to find a job and Taylor's Playbook and all this stuff? Or I was like, or I could probably consult in terms of content creation, community building, all this stuff, kind of like what, uh, Tessa Crease was doing. Kind of with her work. What made you go coursework instead of like, like just straight up freelancing from like a development perspective? Because I think, because I think some people deal with that. Like, should you, should I go course? Should I go, you know, 10 to 9, you know, 10 to 9, do that thing? Like, should I start my own company? You know what I'm saying? Like, I think there's a lot there that people need to kind of break through.

Yeah, it's a great question. For me, it was mostly, it just seemed like the most obvious path for me with the skills that I had. I think one of the things too is I really like building stuff. And not only that, I really like building stuff where I'm the only stakeholder. I get to decide what I'm doing.

Yeah.

I don't want to have to present something to clients and get their approval. I mean, I've done some of that, but that was really like when I thought about what is the role that I want for myself? What do I want to spend my days doing? This just seemed like the nicest alternative because in my case, at least, I built my own course platform. My courses are really built around the idea of interactivity and experimentation and practice. So there are videos like any other course, but most of, I'd say half of my time is spent just building interactive widgets and creating exercises and it just is fun, right?

Right.

So I think that, and of course, that's what I consider fun. That's not what everybody considers fun.

Sure.

Sure. So it's really about figuring out what what exactly you would like. And I didn't really do this intentionally. So this is like, I'm sort of rewriting history here, but what I would suspect would work well is to ask yourself, like, what parts of my job do I like? What parts of my job do I not like? I think a lot of developers feel like their time is getting into flow and building stuff is the most fun. And then like the meetings are the least fun. So that's like, you know, trying to optimize for a clear calendar is one way to like consider, you know, that sort of rules some things out. Um, but, you know, there's plenty of different, uh, people have different things that they get energy from and enjoy. So, yeah.

100%. Did you, um, when, but when you like, did you field questions of people like before you rolled out your training course? Like, did you, like, did you like message people and you're like, hey, what, what are your thoughts on? Because, because I think too, some people are also too concerned about other people's opinions.

Right, right.

Like, like, like, you know, I, I, and I— but I do think there is some market research that needs to occur, you know, if you want to do something. Did you reach out to people like, hey, I want to do this, what are your thoughts? Or did you just like— did you just like, hey, block out the haters, I'm just, I'm just gonna do me and see if it works?

Yeah, this is— and this is— I should have mentioned, this is a good thing to, to hone in on. Um, I had spent a few years teaching, so I worked for a local coding boot camp. I would do evenings and weekends at the coding boot camp And that did sort of help me realize that like, oh, this is a thing that I enjoy. And not only that, it built up the skill of knowing how to do this. And I think that there's like 2 separate things, but they're sort of related. One is you wanna make sure that you understand, like for people that do wanna pursue courses, the creating the course is not step one. That's like step 7, right? Step one is get experience teaching. Like learn how to teach.

So, so good.

build an audience, right? Like the blog. And I think the 2 necessary ingredients for me were creating the blog and then teaching in person, or most of it was in person. With COVID it moved online, but, you know, still like in real time.

Sure.

And that does like, it helps you in so many ways teaching. In fact, just like as a general, like forget creating courses, teaching is a great way to level up as a developer because you'll work with students who are just starting and they'll ask you a question. And you'll open your mouth confidently and realize, oh, I don't know. One student asked me what the difference in JavaScript is between a statement and an expression. And this is like, I've worked with statements and expressions for 15 years and I couldn't put it into words. And this, I had to actually figure, I have a broad intuition. It's like going into a room with your eyes closed and feeling around for the shape of things. And then you can sort of see it, but if you turn the lights on, you'll have a much better more clarity, but I wouldn't have known that that was a hole in my knowledge without those questions. So fielding questions from aspiring developers is a great way to round out your own knowledge. But if you're creating courses, it has this other benefit of understanding where people are so you can meet them there.

Yeah.

I think if the thing that I see a lot of people do is they know exactly what they need to teach, they have the curriculum in mind and they create that. And if they haven't done the work of building the audience, then only their friends will buy it because there's 100,000 courses out there. But if they haven't done the work of teaching, maybe they have an audience, they'll launch it and students will hit the first exercise and be like, I don't know what this is. And the whole course is premised on the assumption of knowing a few things.

Yeah.

If people don't know that, then the entire course— So I think that that is— And then of course, another thing that I did is I created some of the content. I got a bunch of former students from the bootcamp to go through the content. I launched in sort of stages. Like I had this early test squad of people that I kind of knew at first. And then I expanded that to people that had reached out asking specifically if they could help test. And I had like 15, 20 people like that. So I added them. Then I did an early access launch, which was sort of a beta launch where it was open to the public, but only for a week. And people, I got my courses now. I've collected, actually, hold on. I'll tell you, 'cause it's kind of fun.

No, you're good. And then Henri, yes, this is live, brother. It's good to see you, man. Really, really, really good to see you.

Yeah, I've collected 10,500 pieces of feedback about my courses.

Holy smokes, are you serious?

I still have 1,600 that I haven't gone through, so I've gone through 9,000 pieces. Uh, so it's been a lot.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. That— all right, do you— does it ever— do you ever, uh, I'm trying to figure out, like, does it— do you, do you like live for the feedback, or does it kind of like bother you a little bit?

It depends. Uh, definitely what, first it was really useful and I was most appreciative of the people who were most critical because, you know, it was early enough then that I could do something about it. Uh, what winds up happening, and the other thing too is, and this is what I recommend, and this is very niche advice, but, uh, what I do now is I wait a few months, I let it accumulate, like I have 1,500 unread pieces, then I sort it by lesson so I can go through the 7 pieces of feedback for this one lesson. And if I don't see the same thing more than once, I usually ignore it because like a bunch of people have like their own sort of pet, you know, like this person doesn't understand this. But if it's only one person out of the like 15,000 people that have taken the course now, it's probably not something that is, and it's tricky because sometimes there is, the one person is voicing the thing that 15 people thought too. But what I've come to realize is like you do sort of build an intuition for like which pieces of feedback point to a serious problem and which pieces of feedback are more just someone's personal idiosyncrasies, and it doesn't— it doesn't work with the way their mind works. But it's broadly— because you're never going to be able to like teach something to 100%.

No, no, no, yeah, not at all. That's— that, man, that is fascinating stuff. Um, so let me ask you this, man. If you were to go back in time, would you do anything different?

That's a good question, because when you talk about Yeah.

Can you talk about building Medium? I don't know if you look back and you're like, man, I wish I went more all in on Twitter at the time, or I wish I went more in on LinkedIn, or wish I went more in on X, or not. I mean, like XYZ. I'm kind of curious because obviously you've built such a following. You have a name for yourself. I'm always curious for the guys and gals who have built a name for themselves if they were to go back and do something differently.

I mean, So I don't have any, I mean, the one thing I briefly mentioned was I could have started like a couple of years sooner. Like I put it off longer than I probably should have.

Yeah.

But at the same time, I built up, like I got a lot of useful knowledge in the work that I did during those years. So even that, my philosophy generally is if I'm happy with where I am, and I am, it feels almost like, you know, like, you know, the genie comes out of the bottle and they give you 3 wishes, but you forget to bring your lawyer. And so it goes totally backwards and like, you know, it's technically the way you wanted, Um, when I think about this, I think about like, there are things that maybe I could say if I could go back and change, I would, but who knows the consequences that would follow from that?

I know.

And maybe I would wind up in a situation that is less ideal than where I am now. And I'm pretty happy with how things are. So not really, which I realize isn't like the most helpful answer, but yeah.

No, that's fine.

Just like quickly, the, the thing I would say, cause I recognize the point of the question is to try to come up with like, You know, sharing things so that other people following the same path can avoid some of the mistakes. But I think like the, the, the bit of advice I would give there is I don't generally reconsider all of this. Like, I think there's actually value in just trying to look forward rather than back. So that's the way I generally do it.

I love that. Yeah, no, absolutely. People have asked me that question before. I was like, honestly, no, like it's all worked out. I do have to say, like, I would have wished I would have started sooner. Right. And I think like, and that's what I encourage people like, like, like, like, like if you really have, if you really feel the need to do something, um, everybody I've talked to that is pursuing exactly what they want to do, they wish they would have done it sooner.

Right.

And so, uh, let's, let's, let's just go with that. I love that. Um, as we obviously kind of last 10 minutes together, um, I, I do want to talk about You know, obviously your courses, you see a lot of feedback. Is there anything that you could share that maybe developers are kind of still missing or that you're seeing in the market where people are still missing the mark that they could get better at? Yeah, just from a technical perspective.

So it's CSS is my answer. I think that CSS and the reason I created my first course on CSS was I recognized from my own experience learning, but also from the developers I've worked with, So many of us, and it's kind of complicated, but so many of us focus exclusively on JavaScript because that is the thing employers value. And there's truth in that. JavaScript skills are the number one thing that employers, at least in like the frontend/full stack space, that's what they value.

Sure.

But I feel like if you can spend 20 extra hours on CSS, you can bring your CSS level from like a 3 to a 7 out of 10. It's like a massive improvement in a relatively small amount of time. And that's like a really helpful ancillary skill.

Yeah.

Whereas like those same 20 hours in JavaScript might take you from like an 8.1 to an 8.2. And like, is that really moving the needle? Right? So I think that there is, we've always focused so much on the highest priority thing that we think our employers are after. But there's secondary things that are still really important that we can really elevate in that same time. Same thing is true for accessibility. Building design skills as a frontend developer is super useful too. So there's like a bunch of like ancillary things that I think don't get the attention. And like you need JavaScript too. But yeah, that's, I think the CSS, and that's why I created the first course is I just saw how big of an impact I could have in a relatively small amount of time.

That's awesome. I love that. Yeah. 'Cause I'm always, you know, again, like being a traditional recruiter for so long, it was always JavaScript. It was Angular, then it was React and it was Node and just JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript. And I, and as somebody who's not, super technical, not technical at all. I just am aware of everything. Like, I'm always wondering, like, where does CSS come into play, right? Because, like, for me, it's like, I feel like right now, like, I'm definitely much more on the marketing side of things and, like, how things feel and look and stuff. And I feel like that's a lot of CSS. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but, like, just the way the market's going, I feel like anybody can build something now, but it's like, how is it used? How does it look? How does it feel? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that is CSS a little bit. Yeah.

Well, CSS is the visual language of the web. When I talk about building CSS skills, it's really more about implementation. You have a design, it looks a certain way, it's meant to respond a certain way to different screen sizes. JavaScript is more about implementation, features and behavior. CSS is like the styling, but also the responsiveness.

Okay.

And that is like, I see Trey in the comments saying they use Tailwind. The thing is, it's all CSS. Like Tailwind, the browser only understands CSS. Tailwind compiles, it doesn't even compile, it's just classes. And this is, and I also saw Barrett talk about how CSS is painful. Absolutely true. But the thing about CSS, and this is why I think a small amount of time can make such a big difference, is it's an extremely abstracted language. Like you write this little property, display flex, font-weight bold, right? These little things. And these massive machines behind the scenes pluck those values and assemble them in weird ways.

Yeah.

There's all these concepts. And this is like, for myself, I had been writing, building web applications for like 10 years. And like I mentioned earlier, like in the dark, feeling around. I never took the time to learn it. I just would experiment and see what works. And you get little snippets that you can copy paste, right? You figure, okay, these 5 properties together do this thing. But then the 30th time you do it after 29 successful attempts, it does something different. And you think, well, that's— did I make a mistake? No, it's the same chunk of CSS. But the thing is you're feeding these properties into this machine and the machine's considering the entire context of everything else and everything in CSS depends on everything else. And so there's these concepts like stacking context and containing blocks, things that you will never organically discover while writing CSS. But if you take the, like, you know, 20 minutes to learn what each of those things are, everything makes so much more sense. Because I promise you, like, a lot of people think CSS is just random or unpredictable or rickety. It's not. It's like any other software. It's, you know, the same inputs produce the same outputs 100% of the time.

Right.

The problem is that there's— the inputs are much broader. It's— you write this little bit of code and a bunch of other stuff happens. So that's where it can get confusing. And that's why I think it's such a valuable thing to spend some time learning.

I love that. No, I love that a ton. I like this, scale up in whatever helps the business needs the most. I love this from Jordan. I think there's a lot of what I call resume-driven development, which is like, like, you know, what's hot, you know, you know, what's, you know, what's the hot and the zeitgeist of the tech world. But listen, you know, and this is actually a conversation we've had at Torque a lot. about building community. We're actually redoing our marketing site. You know, we're talking about, 'cause what really we wanna do is Torque is like, we really wanna help people throughout their career, but we also know that some people don't want to do the latest and greatest. Some people just want to, you know, I joke about COBOL a lot 'cause I recruited a ton of COBOL and mainframe stuff. Like, there's still a lot of it. Like, it powers like a lot of enterprise clients. It's like, you know, I do think— And again, Josh, I would love to hear your thoughts. I think if you are starting out your journey and/or wanting to pivot in your journey, I do think talking to people, doing some research, and not always going after the hottest thing will probably benefit you maybe even more. Yeah.

I mean, I would say that it's always complicated. And it goes back a little bit to what I was saying about like everyone focuses on JavaScript. React is the most common frontend framework, which means everybody focuses on React. And it's simultaneously true that there are more React jobs than Angular or COBOL or anything else. But there's also more developers. So there is some, if you had perfect access to all information, you could figure out the biggest opportunities, right?

Sure.

Where is there the most demand and the least supply? I don't know how to do that logic. I don't have that data. But what I would say is, I start, my first software development job was as a Ruby developer on the backend.

Yeah.

It was fun. I enjoyed that. But I found I would get so much more energy out of the frontend tasks. And Ruby, you know, it's not a frontend framework. So eventually I sort of— it's like, it's just that's the way the pieces sort of fell. Like I wound up spending more of my time doing the thing that I liked. And that's where I wound up working. So I think a lot of the time, there's one— it's, you know, it can be a valuable strategy to figure out where is the biggest opportunity. If you're like really disciplined and really able or just like really broadly interested in things. But I think for most of us, like just take the thing that you enjoy the most. You'll be willing to work a lot harder. You'll get a lot further with it. Yeah. Within reason, right? Like if you're, I think that like a lot of us would rather just play the guitar all day and like, well, that's a different story.

Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. But within the scope of tech, I think that there is.

Yeah. And again, I would say right now too, the trend I've seen is like companies, like I think Last 2 years with COVID like, companies were fine with generalists. Like, if you touched a bunch of different technologies, like, you were good with that. I think we're definitely back to being a specialist. And so I think if you can, like, drill down in one skill set and be known as, like, the CSS person or, you know, the whatever, right? I, I, I think that carries a little bit more weight right now, um, in, in this market. Um, I love this. The amount of effort I've seen people taking avoiding plain CSS would have made them a CSS expert. Yeah, 100%. Steven, it's good to see you. All right. As we wrap up here again, thank you all for tuning in. Please go connect with Josh. Please go check out his course. I'll throw up his course here. So, Josh, I do kind of this rapid fire. You were on like, I think, a year ago, but we'll do it again. So first question I always ask, if I told you tomorrow that you can't wake up and do what you do, you can't be in tech anymore, but I'll pay the same amount of money, if not more, to pursue a hobby, essentially, what would it be?

Making music. I have a grand piano behind me, so I'm a concert pianist, maybe.

Oh, that's fantastic. I love that, man. All right. So then the next question, which kind of goes to the first question, is outside of that, what do you like to do outside of work?

Yeah, I mean, that's— I have been spending a lot more time recently making music, which is a lot of fun.

That's really cool.

And I wish I had an example on me. One of the things I spent most of my life doing was yo-yoing. So I really— and I find it's actually a really helpful skill for developers Because it's just enough, like it keeps your hands busy and it keeps your mind kind of busy. If you're ever like stuck on a hard problem and like, you know, the trick of like going for a walk and you come back and all of a sudden that the clarity you get, it's like a great tool for that. Not the only tool for that, but it's like a great way to get that same effect of taking yourself away from something. Yeah, it's a fun hobby, yo-yoing.

Dude, I was a big yo-yoer back in the day, man. I loved that.

That was fantastic.

The third question, Anything you've read, watched, consumed lately in the tech ecosystem that you have enjoyed or you're keeping an eye on or you're actually implementing from a day-to-day coding perspective? Is there just any content recommendations, I guess you could say, within the tech space?

That's a good question. The person I find myself nodding along to the most is Danny Thompson. Like every time he posts something on Bluesky, I'm like, oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I love him.

He's, I think, a great resource. For many years.

I think so too, man. He's great. He and I, uh, he and I go back to COVID. He did a kind of a call for people, I guess you could say, to do LinkedIn critiques, and I slid into his DMs, and ever since he's been a, he's been a dear friend. So yeah, I love Danny to death. I mean, he just popped into our Discord the other day too. Um, uh, last question as we wrap up here. Again, thank y'all for tuning in today. I appreciate it. We appreciate it. Um, uh, you know, the show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 for a reason. We had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now with adults, we don't really necessarily have a guidance counselor to turn to, ask for career advice, ask for help, general help, career stuff. What would— if you could go back in like in time and give Josh some career advice, young Josh, what would you tell him?

Yeah, and actually I'm gonna immediately contradict myself. The one thing Danny says that I don't agree with, um, is he really puts a strong emphasis on in-person meetups, going to meetups, meeting people in person, going to networking events. And that's great advice for many people. I took that advice, it did not work at all for me. Um, okay, I was in Toronto at the time getting started as a Ruby developer, and so there was something called Rails Pub Nights where developers would every one Wednesday every month, they'd go to a pub and they'd have beers and talk. And I don't like beer. I don't like drinking. So I'd go to these things and I would sit and feel awkward and not talk to many people and leave just thinking that this was a colossal waste of time and the imposter syndrome and what am I even doing here? Oh, 100%.

Yeah.

Yeah. This does not seem like the crowd that I can assimilate my way into. And that's just because that's not my jam. The way that I eventually found success was building stuff and showing that stuff online. I think that there's 1,001, like years ago I posted a tweet which was like, if you work as a software developer and you don't have a CS degree, how did you get in? And 500 people answered and it was 500 unique stories. And I tried my best to like categorize them.

Right, right.

Like, you know, what works for one person is, and again, I said this a little bit earlier, like playing to your strengths. I think that like if you are really charismatic or just really extroverted, meetups are a great way to go and meet people. If you're shy and introverted like me, that's not really the best advice because you're going to go and unless there is someone gregarious enough to pull you in, it's not comparable with—

It's hard.

Exactly. So I think that there's so many different ways in, and that would be my advice is just focus on your strengths. Do the stuff that you like doing. I love that. Be sure to share it, but don't try to follow the standard advice if you can tell that standard advice won't work for you.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, for me, like, absolutely retweet there. You know, I, you know, if people know me kind of in like the conference community, like, like, I don't stay out late. Like, you have me from 8 to 8. That's it. And I get tired. I kind of crash in the evenings. I'm a social sprinter is what they call it.

Right.

And so, you know, and so I've learned that I can scale myself better with social media and lives like this. I really crave one-on-one intentional time with people. And so this is one of my key ways to just hang out and catch up with folks in tech. But also too, like, I totally agree. Like, you know, you got like the James Quicks of the world who like stay out late and, you know, do the damn thing. And shout out to him and anybody else who can do it, but I just can't. And so I've just learned that. And I think the big thing is be present and be engaged. And I think however you can do that within a community setting, I think is fantastic. Josh, I love that. I love that. All right, y'all, thank you. Thank you again, Josh. Stay on backstage so I can say bye to you. But again, y'all have a great one. Have a great weekend. I'm gonna talk to Kent Dodds. I have Kent Dodds on Monday, but it's also Veterans Day, and I know a lot of people have off. So I'm gonna talk to Kent. We may go live on Monday depending on his schedule. We may reschedule, but Monday right now is Kent C. Dodds coming on the show. Uh, but anyways, y'all have a great one. We may see you Monday. If not, we'll definitely see you next week. Y'all have a good one. Peace.

Bye, y'all.