Learn in public
A way of thinking, learning and sharing.
Giving some context
I use to think the fact that I’m Brazilian was a huge factor that, deterministically, would prevent me to be an exceptional developer. Creating a wall from which I could not trespass. It’s true that being born at a first world country is a huge privilege, for staters the language barrier is non existent, but after this unfortunate pandemic :´( the process of globalization took a huge step in favor of remote working.
The ideia of this article, and to be fair this whole site, came from another article with the same title “Learn in public” from @swyx. At this article swyx mentions what he calls the #1 golden rule, Learning in public.
“You already know that you will never be done learning. But most people “learn in private”, and lurk. They consume content without creating any themselves.” (Shawn Wang, 2018)
Really Inspiring
Why do I think this is an incredible way of think? How many times you had forgotten something that you use to know? How many times you wish you had documented that acquired knowledge? If your answers were, like mine, multiple times, than you know what I’am talking about.
Also as a non native English speaker, my intent is to translate every blog post to make it accessible for Portuguese speakers. Adding an extra layer to the original proposal.
How can you do the same?
Find a path that works for you. Doesn’t matter what you do, but how you do it. Think about how hard it was for you to acquire that knowledge and how can you make easier for the next developer and the future you.
Shawn gives some examples to follow:
- Write blogs and tutorials and cheatsheets.
- Speak at meetups and conferences.
- Ask and answer things on Stackoverflow or Reddit. Avoid the walled gardens like Slack and Discord, they’re not public.
- Make Youtube videos or Twitch streams.
- Start a newsletter.
- Draw cartoons (people loooove cartoons!).
- Enjoyed a coding video? Reach out to the speaker/instructor and thank them, and ask questions.
- Make PR’s to libraries you use.
- Make your own libraries no one will ever use.
- Clone stuff you like, from scratch, to see how they work.
- Teach workshops.
- Go to conferences and summarize what you learned.
And remember, this is not for being famous is for ourself and maybe for people that will find your content useful.