In this episode of This Developing Story, I focus on my goals for 2021. Watch the full video on YouTube to hear all three of my goals. Moving forward all future podcast episodes will be recorded via YouTube. Subscribe there to see me live. Twitch 🎬 https://twitch.tv/bdougieYO GitHub 💻. https://github.com/bdougie/gitActionT... Community 👾 https://discord.com/invite/gZMKK5q Twitter 🐦 https://twitter.com/bdougieYO
Episode 75 of this developing story.
All right, real quick. I'm going to just say that it has been quite a few months since the last episode I've gone through a lot during 2020. And I thought I would have had the whole setup and system for getting a podcast up and running and reshipping. Out of the way over the summer, but it just never happened really doubled down and things like live streaming and creating YouTube videos.
So if you aren't already subscribing to me on Twitch or on YouTube, which is Ilikerobot or bdougie search there, what I will be doing moving forward. Is I've set up a bi-weekly stream on YouTube. And you definitely want to go ahead and subscribe to my YouTube channel just as I mentioned because every new podcast episode will be coming from that live stream.
I think that's probably the best way of moving forward. It'll be easiest because I can just set up a calendar event and it'd be like clockwork other than the fact that this excerpt had some issues. So you only have only a portion, a couple of minutes of my stream. Mainly because of the audio, but right.
The thing was kinda messed up. I'm still trying to figure out the YouTube live streaming side for whatever reason. The Twitch side is quite a bit different. Yeah. But yeah, I'll figure it out eventually, but for now, you'll hear an excerpt from me talking about my sort of doubling down on creating content. I've actually, this whole episode is just focused around my 20, 21 goals in the past year.
But without further ado, here's me this rambling about content and I'll come back and with the clumps,
If you look at the developer space, having a place to do content and have like a. As a personal developer, like you having a blog, I think that's enhanced out. People know that if you have a blog, that's a good situation to be in because you can then be able to validate herself. As in, if you wanted to submit a resume to get a job, you can submit your work and your content from your blog as like representation that you know, what you're talking about.
But I think one thing that a lot of people will miss is if you're able to, if are able to write code that's one thing. If you're able to prove that you can write code fast, that's great. But if you happen to be the only person who can write code fast and at all on a team then there's going to be some opportunity for the employer to not just get you to zip code, but also get you to encourage others to ship code.
And I think a lot of times, the way you can do that is by writing content. So whether this is good documentation or notes in your code, or just writing blog posts about your ideas and thoughts and experiences. You can't miss doing that because that's just you're basically underselling yourself when you approach getting your next job or your future job or your promotion at your current job.
And that's one thing I was really focused on the back when I first started programming back in 2013 was to get to the point where I can actually explain the concept and the code that I wanted to write get to that point so that I can share and encourage others. So with that being said, I think. If you're like hands down, if you're in the game, if you're writing code, you need to be doing content.
And whatever way you think is the best for you. So if you like doing podcasts, do a podcast, if you hate writing blog posts, I'll write blog posts. If you want to live code, cause you want to get better at that, do that, do whatever it is. You don't have to do everything I happened to be doing too much.
Don't use me as an example. But what I'm getting at is my hope is that. In the future. I've mentioned the project dinner people that I'll be hopefully working on in the next couple of weeks. I'm like, that's my opportunity to learn a subject that I haven't touched in four years, which is mobile development.
I shipped a couple of mobile apps. I've never got any mobile apps in the app store, mainly because I just never wanted to pay the money to do it. And I finally am at a point where in my career where I. I can pay money if I wanted to. So yeah, getting an Apple developer license paying for server usage, like those are things that I can figure out and this thing I could never, I could ever dream to actually do previously.
Cause I just didn't have that type. it's not that, I guess that wasn't at that level as far as pay goes to be able to throw money at a side project, but which I'm looking forward to basically shipping this side project, continuing the path of doing open source. So this year. Actually, if I zoom back a bit and I talked about goals, so I mentioned two, one being automation.
Like I'm definitely gonna pick up that quite a bit and learn everything I can about dev ops. The other thing is about creating content, primarily video. I think I had a lot of fun in the last year doing video and it was something that I just fell into is one year ago. I found out I didn't find out anything.
I just, discovered that I was running enough code. Like I was doing a lot of dev roles stuff was going on a lot of conferences doing a lot of workshops. Building like little small examples, but I had no projects that I was proud of, like at the end of the year, and what I did was I decided I was going to start live streaming myself, building open-sourced.
Cause I knew I wanted to build up that project, but also if I would live streaming, I could justify taking time out of my day, my daily job, or my day job writing code by live-streaming it. So that's what I did. I stream myself writing code, doing open source. And then that became a thing just being on Twitch and growing a community to the point where I just started creating more content, just organically, naturally things like exploring next JS to create a video next JS because it came up a lot this year.
Next year has had a lot of new features that were shipped and a lot of growth in the community. So I took time to. To do that this year. And I think I want to do, to continue down that path, just leveraging Twitch as a place for me to continue to explore and experiment and then create content, create projects, and then move on with that.
And the hope is that the reason for this, and this is like a goal that I don't have on my list. But I think what I want to eventually get to is building projects that make money. I've always. I've been writing code for seven years. I was a career switcher at sales prior to this.
So most of you probably know this already, if you watch any of my videos if you knew me outside of YouTube. But my goal really is to take my skillset my, my talent, if you want to call it talent and if I could make money from it. So like I'm not going to start charging for open source, but I think for projects like dinner people, I think it would be an opportunity for, too.
Offload, some of those costs for server usage and database, like clusters to be able to like, make it sustainable for me. And it also encouraged me to continue down that path. One thing I did, I talked about hustling the baseball app. I built that I was completely scared to even put that in the apps or anything like that because I knew if someone thought it was useful, then I would be like, Oh, now I have 10 people using this date and now I have to pay.
Once you, that's the thing about all these free tools is once you start actually getting users, did, it's Oh, thanks for getting users. Now here's your invoice. And that was something I was nervous about I've actually paid like proper S3 invoices, never more than 10 bucks.
But like when I started using S3 for hosting video or one of the projects I built for fun, That was the guy, you know what? This project is not worth it. I'm not paying, 50 bucks for the benefit of the 50 bucks for just like the S3 usage, but also 50 bucks for the domain because they happened to get a domain that was not a.com.
So like those things are like, I'm just, I don't know. Maybe it's my upbringing. Maybe it's because I didn't grow up with money that I'm just always avoiding. Spending money when it comes to things like dev related, like even training and videos and stuff like that. I have very rarely unless my work is paying for it.
I very rarely pay out of pocket to do training and stuff like that because, yeah. Again, I don't know how to explain this. I don't expect you all to be my therapy, but I think it just comes down to I'm just I just don't like spending money and even despite having a great, all right. So I hope you found that insightful bottom line. I'm just going to be creating more content. I'm really focused on databases. It's something I've had a lot of plans to use. I've never really put a lot of thought into it. And I ran down the set of Firebase no SQL route pretty quickly in my career.
I've only been in development for a few, a couple of years. So looking forward to getting back to relational database usage and try to figure out how to embed that into projects I'm already working on. So again, if you aren't subscribed, definitely subscribe on YouTube also. You should get your heart rate subscribed to this podcast.
I'm not really sure how you listen to it at this point. Cause I don't do a good job of tweeting this out, but yeah, episode 75 and I'll see you there.