egghead.io developer chats

Alex took spent the last year and a half creating his course, The Ultimate Guide to Understanding DOM Events, at egghead. Finding the time to work on a side-project like this isn't easy, and it requires one to examine their current priorities in life. Do they want to be a rockstar developer? Or do you want to have a lot of free time to spend with your family? No matter what sacrifices have to be made. But the best way to handle it is to have candid discussions with the people around you who...

Ryan’s background as a musician taught him many lessons that would eventually apply to his current career. As a musician, he learned about composition, sales, and even programming so he could build his band a website. Ryan also had an actual sales job where he learned that you can do something so well that you’ll be unable to do it anymore. In sales that meant being good at generating leads which lead to a lot of clients which lead to ceasing to generate leads. But, that eventually lead to...

Perhaps the most important skill that a software developer can have is the ability to ask good questions. Questions will lead to the answers that you actually need. Formulating good questions is key. Often, you'll find that you answered your own question in the process of forming it. Mentorships are a great learning and growth opportunity but it's important that you respect the person that you desire mentorship from. Don't just take up their time by asking questions regularly without being...

Programming might be the quickest path for someone to start earning six figures. But, it may be a quick path, it is not an easy path. You have to either be having fun or be interested in some way. You have to have some backing motivation that's going to keep you in this. Many people try to learn to code only to stop. They either decide that they don't want to sit in a chair for eight hours a day for the rest of their life, or they don't think they're smart enough, or somebody's telling them...

Getting a job as a web developer right out of the gate isn't easy. People often face rejection after rejection. But, you don't have to take the "front-door" to get a developer position. You can also take the "back-door" by taking a developer-adjacent role like a support engineer and then work to become a developer in the company. There are many disciplines and technologies for you to choose to learn. There is always the question of do you become really good in one area, or do you become...

Epic React is Kent's attempt at making the biggest impact on the world. It's Kent's philosophy that he can have a much larger impact by teaching other people to write excellent software instead of just doing it himself. Epic React has been in the making for a long time. Its methods are much more thought out than your average course. You can't just throw it on your Chromecast and 2x your way through all of the videos. You have to put in the work. Kent uses the proven methods from the book...

Tomasz highly recommends companies hire interns and train them because you can get some amazing engineers that you know are going to fit the company's needs. Another great advantage of training interns is that it levels up the senior engineers by giving them mentoring experience! But, what really is a senior engineer? Basically, a senior engineer isn't a person who programs more, faster, or better. They're a person who makes others better at what they do and a person who can solve...

Shirley Wu is a freelance data visualization expert. Data visualization, at its core, is when you take lots of data, and it's hard for you to look in Excel. You visualize that into some graph or chart, and the most simple could be a bar chart or some graph so that you can understand trends within it easier. In data visualization, there is an entire spectrum of approaches you can take with a dataset. You have to decide on the balance between art and the data. With clients, choosing where in...

"Indie Hacker" - An entrepreneur that is working to gain some form of independence. Courtland Allen is the founder of indiehackers.com. He didn't take the venture capital approach. He just wanted to make enough money to support what he was trying to do. Courtland was trying to build a community of indie hackers who would share their stories, help each other, and support one another. You can't force community growth. It takes good content, time, and consistency. At first, Courtland would...

Rosie Sherry is both an unschooling parent and the founder of the Ministry Of Testing. There's a disproportionate number of bootstrappers who homeschool their kids, and maybe it's for the same reason why they built something themself instead of fitting into the mold, they think they can do it better. Ministry of Testing is a company Rosie founded, officially as an online community in 2007, but then formally as a business in 2011. It's a community of software testers who geek out on testing,...

Design systems are your component library, documentation, tools, et cetera. And then there are the operations of it. So like an agile team uses agile methodology, a design system is about making your teams work better. After Bootstrap, we all ended up building our own Bootstraps. We all like to think that we're special and the problems we're solving are specific to our company, but the reality is the way that your system is built is probably not that special. It's the way that your system...

Segun Adebayo was turned off of web development after struggling with Wordpress' themes and plugins, and so he went straight into UI design entirely using Sketch and Figma for quite some time. It was React that brought him back into the development fold. The way React made it so easy to create components stuck with him. Segun is still a designer at heart, but his skillset goes beyond design. If he calls himself a designer, it limits what people want from him. By calling himself, a UX...

T7 Chicken was where it all began with Nick's journey into development. Nick had no development experience. Still, he wasn't satisfied with the websites and apps available for Tekken framerate data, so he took it upon himself to learn Android development to create his mobile app. Nick had the support of the Tekken community and received programming help from people online. Projects like these are so crucial for rapidly growing as a developer, and you won't get the same experience at work....

Monica Powell didn't have the most straightforward path to her first job as a developer. She took a couple of years of graphic design in college, took a computer science class, joined a student-led web development agency, and then joined a tech startup where she did email marketing and development. At that point, Monica knew that she wanted to be a developer, but she knew too much to attend a boot camp and not enough to get a job. So, she took classes, landed an internship, and then...

At first, React looked like it might have been a fad, and JSX seemed weird. But, it didn't take long for people to see the power and beauty of it. React makes reuse easy, which makes accessibility a lot easier. Every time you needed an input, you had to remember all of the accessibility attributes and write it all by hand. With React, you can make a reusable input with all of the accessibility built-in. You must make your components accessible. There's a broader range of people who need...

D3.js is the defacto library that people use to create custom data visualizations on the web today. It's powerful and flexible. You can do whatever you want with it. However, that kind of power and flexibility comes at the cost of complexity. You have to know what you're doing, and it takes a long time to learn. There's existing content written on D3, but there's always room for another voice. With the help of Newline, Amelia wrote the book of over 600 pages, Fullstack D3 and Data...

Hiro started coding HTML and CSS back in middle school so she could make internet friends and talk about anime. She never thought of coding as anything more than a hobby, and she stopped when she began college. She got her master's in special education, but due to a traumatic injury, she had to make a career pivot. She got a job as a helpdesk engineer and eventually worked her to a sysadmin position at a startup. Hiro quit the comfortable sysadmin job. She asked herself if ten years from...

Khalal's first language was Java, he learned his it in school. He didn't like coding in school because all they did was learn algorithms and data structures. How many people have completely turned away from this amazing career where you get to build cool things like dad jokes in text messages simply because classes get structured around data structures, algorithms, and Java? New coders should take a step back before jumping straight to a Bootcamp. Take time to learn on your own to make sure...

Making technical decisions for your business when you don't have experience as a developer is difficult. It's scary to make decisions that you don't know the consequences of. Tracy got into development when at one point she had the freetime to take an HTML, CSS, JavaScript course online. Becoming a developer taught Tracy the importance of grouping her meetings so she could have uninterrupted blocks of time to get work done. Before, she didn't realize the impact that breaking people's flow...

To executives, new features mean more money, but even if you had terrific features, they wouldn't be worth a thing if they only worked half the time. Reliability isn't something you want to put off until later after the project has grown, it will save you a lot of time and money if you factor it in from day one. Everyone has adapted to a speedy internet these days. Users leave if the site is taking more than even a few seconds to load. It's easy to get overly focused on features while...