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shawn swyx wang Profile picture
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6 Mar, 4 tweets, 2 min read
A common question I get:

Is #LearnInPublic suitable for everyone?
What if I look dumb?

My answers below, but I'd love to hear yours too!

(DM shared w/ permission) Hi, Shawn 👋! My name is Choong Kyu and I've been wonderin
1/ Learning in Public is *not* “broadcasting everything”. Nobody wants that.

It is about realizing you have a choice to go from 0% to not-0% public. The stuff you do share, you will learn faster, while building a network. It’s up to you to set the boundaries of what you share.
2/ Understanding how to turn your ignorance into power is a key career skill. If you want to grow at all you must make ignorance an old friend, and make friends out of ignorance.

Lean into the discomfort. Become a professional (but responsible) ignoramus
3/ No matter what you do, you still need to learn to Learn in Private anyway. I have a whole chapter in @Coding_Career! 👇

I don’t have a problem w/ Learning in Private. I have a problem with people using pre-emptive fear as an excuse to not even *TRY* sharing anything in public

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More from @swyx

shawn swyx wang Profile picture
4 Mar
In the past week alone, I've had multiple chats with startups looking for developers who can build community.

I think this is a generational shift in how devtools startups approach their users

quick thread on why **Technical Community Builder is the hottest new job in Tech**👇 picture showing how communi...how community helps startup...Community is many-to-many. ...just a dumb community meme ...
Devs have always self organized community, but in the past couple decades companies arose where the dev community is **the competitive moat**:

- @StackOverflow serves 11m community Q&A's a day
- @github sells collaboration software to 56m devs
- Hacker News has >4m daily readers
If community can be such an advantage, who's in charge of community at startups?

Often the answer is: community managers handle forums, developer evangelists do outreach, marketing handles and events and mailing list.

Can we do better? How to take risks & break down silos?
Read 22 tweets
shawn swyx wang Profile picture
23 Feb
Your Calendar as Todo List:

(why I'm getting into time block planning)
We are besieged by todo lists: Open browser tabs, YouTube Watch Later, Podcast queue, Twitter bookmarks, unread emails, notifs, messages.

Todo lists aren't good enough.

They just solve the easy problem: storage.

Actual Hard Problems: Prioritization and Scheduling
Calendars are todo lists with prioritization and scheduling **built in**. You *have* to answer questions like: "what should I do first?" and "what's my time budget for this?"

Most people's cals only track meetings with others. But why shouldn't we make appointments w/ ourselves?
Read 8 tweets
shawn swyx wang Profile picture
13 Jan
Let's de-stigmatize changing your mind!

Quote tweet this with a strong opinion you used to have and no longer do.

I'll offer some in thread
"Time travel debugging is only for showing off in demos"

"HSL is better than RGB because you can control hue, saturation and lightness as independent variables."

Read 8 tweets
shawn swyx wang Profile picture
24 Nov 20
A reader asked about mental models that I learned from my finance days, that are still relevant for developers.

Here's a quick thread in no particular order, let me know what resonates or mystifies:
1. The Role of Confidence (Being a Con Man)

- People are attracted to confidence for interviews and promotions
- We aren't as objective as we think
- Jobs which traffic in confidence are prone to bullshit

I've actually written about this one already:
2. Opportunity Cost vs Sunk Cost

- Assess each choice relative to your other options.
- For employers: be great at finding and evaluating options in ways they care about
- For your self: Accumulating options = Building wealth
- "Making past mistakes look good" is not an option
Read 7 tweets
shawn swyx wang Profile picture
25 Oct 20
I was asked about why declarative programming is at the heart of "newer" trends in tech all the way up and down the stack, from React to Terraform.

I replied in an email but here it is as a quick thread:
DOM APIs are imperative, which encourages manual setup/teardown of event listeners, and intermingling of business and presentation logic.

At best this is just quite verbose and disorganized, at worst this creates runtime bugs and memory leaks. Lack of structure is painful.
We use React/Vue/Svelte to organize code into declarative components, help us organize the above and automate the boring parts. It also lets us *share code* much easier because the markup, state, and styles are scoped to the component, so they don't leak to the rest of the app.
Read 12 tweets
shawn swyx wang Profile picture
18 Jul 20
Resharing advice I gave to a friend:

**Don't play games you don't want to win.**

We often get caught up in other people's games. Ladders, likes, follows, points. Winning can bring a short-term rush, but feel empty after. These games are traps for competitive, ambitious people.
The primary beneficiary of you being #1 on Product Hunt is Product Hunt.

The primary beneficiary of you being Employee of the Month is your Employer.

The primary beneficiary of you going viral on Twitter is Twitter.

Youre surprised *everything* around you is designed this way?
"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." - @naval

Characteristics of stupid games:

- Zero sum
- Finite game
- Single number
- Regular schedule
- Costs them nothing
- Rules clearly stated
- Winner irrelevant in 1 year
- Timing matters
- Microcopy matters
- Social proof matters
Read 5 tweets

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