Writing your first tech eBook is no small endeavor. My friend Caitlyn Greffly is working on her first book, a "missing manual" for bootcamp grads. She had gotten through the initial "high motivation" phase and was facing some writer's block and feeling overwhelmed by all of the tools and processes. We sat down for a chat about how to finish a book, the writing and editing process, and the…
Do you ever feel like you have the same ideas or realizations repeatedly? Do you find yourself regularly trying to remember that article someone sent you or that tool you discovered? How about the pain of context-switching? Obsidian has solved all of these problems for me. I use Obsidian to: Link together ideas Build a personal knowledge wiki Collect notes and resources on a topic I'm learning or…
Many people tell me they consider developer relations their dream job, but they're not sure how to get started. In truth, you don't need a title to get started doing dev rel work and helping the community. In this article, I’m going to teach you how to build a personal dev rel strategy. You can use this in at least four different ways: You can start building a body of work that you can take into…
Hey there! Thanks for joining me for my talk The Counterintuitive Secret to Shipping Better Articles Faster . Here is the latest version of the slides . You can watch the video here: I've also got a bunch of resources to help you in your content creation journey: My article: How to Get Started with Technical Writing My article: Advice for New Speakers My article: How to Finish What You Start…
One of the readers of my Developer Microskills newsletter wrote in and asked me for advice for new speakers building a technical talk. I made a Twitter thread after writing an email response, but I thought I'd take my own advice and turn it into a blog article. I'm sure I'll continue to add to this over time. Here are some tips and my favorite resources, in no particular order. Of course, take…
Doing anything consistently is tough, whether it's practicing a new skill, learning to code, exercising, or even flossing. We tend to build up a lot motivation at the very beginning of those, but run out of steam after a while. Why is that? What can we do about it? Here are some lessons I've learned over the last few years that have helped me hack my brain into writing or creating content…
Whether you’re doing dev rel as a full time job or just building your career, writing is going to come up a lot: CFPs for conferences, blog articles, even your bio. Some of these are technical, some of them are actually sales copy (CFPs are a form of marketing yourself 🤯). Heck, even tweets are a form of writing. We’ll start with a great format to get you writing quickly, then we’ll talk about…
I hate most self-help and career advice out there because it always glosses over details and hides away important backstory. One thing you should know about my writing is that I'm never talking about these career or productivity topics from some ivory tower. My writing comes from my own frustrations and my seemingly endless war with my brain that is constantly trying to sabotage me. It's why you…
A few readers of Developer Microskills have written in and asked me about focus. They've asked questions like: Once you've picked something, how do you keep yourself from jumping to the next thing? How do you juggle projects that seem to have equal priority? How do you stay focused on the work that matters and not chase around the next shiny feature or topic? There are a lot of ways to slice the…
In the Tiny Experiments framework , the first step is to list and sort your ideas or unfinished projects into three categories: Drop it: It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's just not. Defer it: Possibly a good idea, but you don't have the time or resources to work on it right now. Do it: A good idea that also has the potential to either be profitable, build an audience, help a lot…
One of the steps of the Tiny Experiments framework is Reducing Your Scope 🔬. Once you Just Pick Something 🎯 you want to work on, whether it's a blog article, a new language to learn, or a health goal, you need to trim the dream down into an MVP you can deliver. Today I want to dive a little deeper into how to do this and why it's so important. Why Reducing Scope Works When I was in high school…
In my last article, I taught you a framework for finishing what you start that I like to call Tiny Experiments. Let's look at an example in this article. I recently asked my newsletter subscribers to send me goals they're working towards in 2021. A couple of them mentioned creating and selling their first video course, which is a subject near and dear to my heart. so let's use that as our…
Tell me you've done this before: Get an amazing idea Buy a sweet new domain Tweet about your awesome new project git init Um...uh...do some planning? You know what, I'm really busy right now. I really need to work on that... (Secretly abandons dreams) Why do we do this!? The simple answer is of course that having ideas is way more fun than seeing them through. That would be adequate if it wasn't…
We're creeping up on a new year, which means people are going to start writing retrospective blog articles about their year. If the idea of doing a huge review of your entire year sounds incredibly overwhelming to you, I don't blame you. This is therefore the perfect time to talk about the microskill of reviewing your progress . I've written previously about the value of documenting everything…
Do you ever feel totally lost? Do you ever feel unsure if you're making any progress? You're slogging along in your day job, or grinding away learning to code in the evenings, or putting in work on a side business, and you just have no idea if you're moving the needle towards any of your goals. This doesn't have to be work related, either. Maybe you're trying to lose weight or pay down debt and…
Over the years, I've often found myself wishing for a mentor, but have only had a proper mentor twice (both were senior co-workers). As I got started in developer relations, I again felt like I needed one, but I really had no options for that being remote and mostly autonomous (at the time, my job is a lot more collaborative now). Instead of throwing my hands up and hoping for the best, I decided…
One of the readers of my Developer Microskills newsletter sent me this request: One thing you wrote was “Ask for help and get feedback sooner than you think you need it.” I would love to read your thoughts about HOW to do this. This is a great question and “asking for feedback” is a perfect example of a microskill. Why Asking for Feedback Fails Most of the time, our experience with feedback goes…
In September 2020, I joined a Two Week Product Challenge led by Joe Previtte and inspired by Daniel Vassallo . During that time I wrote and published my first ebook called Getting Started in Developer Relations . I wanted to share the process I used as well as what I learned, what worked, and what didn't. Writing the Book Even though I wrote the book in two weeks, I already had a lot of the…
In What is a Developer Advocate? , I laid out the key responsibilities of a developer advocate, which is a person who works in developer relations . I broke this down into speaking and listening : Speaking: Awareness & Education : Content of all varieties, running or sponsoring events, and all of the marketing required for all of these things. Listening: Community & Feedback . Talking to…
In What is Developer Relations? , I described the broad areas that developer relations encompasses: Awareness Education Feedback Community The most common job title for a person working in developer relations is developer advocate . Let's look at the daily responsibilities of a developer advocate. The Developer Advocate Job Most of the time (though not all of the time), developer advocates come…
You might have heard of developer relations (often abbreviated to dev rel ) or developer evangelism before. Maybe you've met developer advocates at conferences, either tending to sponsor booths, speaking on stage, or running workshops. You may only think of them as glorified t-shirt and sticker dispensers. Maybe you think of them as “tech celebs” — that makes me cringe a little, but it's a…
Switching project contexts causes needless friction and opportunities for distraction as we try to pull up related tabs and applications. I learned a trick from David Sparks on how to use the Mac automation software Keyboard Maestro to create palettes of shortcuts grouped by context. I already love Keyboard Maestro and use it to automate my screencasting workflow . I have palettes set up for…
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is massive . At the time I'm writing this, there are 175 different services on AWS! This surface area is bigger than most things you might try to learn as a developer. So where do you get started? How do you start chipping away at this complex elephant, but do it in a way that's practical? I'm a few months in to my AWS journey and I wanted to share what concepts and…
I'm actively developing this article and my list of ambassadors programs. If you've got a program you'd like me to add to this list, feel free to send me a PR for review. Whether you're looking to grow your developer career through writing and speaking or trying to become a developer advocate, ambassadors programs can be fantastic tools. Ambassadors programs are "extended dev rel teams" for SaaS…
Hey there! Thanks for reading Getting Started in Developer Relations . I really hope you find it helpful. Rather than trying to keep an appendix in the book up to date, I've decided to make this supplementary page. That way I can add to it or update it whenever I need to and you'll always have the most recent version. Books 📕 The Business Value of Developer Relations by Mary Thengvall The…
Thanks for checking out my talk "Becoming a Secret Agent: Securing Your GraphQL APIs with JWTs." I hope you found it helpful! You can find the most recent (2021) version of the slides up on Speakerdeck here . Here's the recording of the previous version of this talk I gave at GraphQL Asia 2020 : I've also got a fullstack example of this using Apollo and Auth0 you can check out, too: Habit…
Thanks for attending my talk "Building a Learning System." I hope you found it helpful! Here's a recent recording of this talk from The Collab Lab : The most recent version of the slides are up on SpeakerDeck here . Here are some resources and references if you want to go deeper in anything I've mentioned here: My learning snapshots on Notion My book: Getting Started in Developer Relations My…
It's no secret that dulling or even losing your production development skills is perhaps the biggest risk of moving from a developer job to developer relations (abbreviated as dev rel , sometimes called developer advocacy or evangelism ). As I wrote in Managing Time as a Developer Advocate , dev rel requires sharpening many skills outside of coding: public speaking, writing, video production…
We often need to pass a parameter like an ID to a route and then access that ID in order to call an API to get some data. In this article, we'll look at how to define a route with a parameter, how to use params with the routerLink directive, and how to use the route snapshot to use a param in a component. We'll also learn about subscribing to route parameters with an observable. Check out the…
Once routing is set up, we can add a new route by adding a new component and adding a path to our routes array in app.module.ts . But how do we navigate between the two routes? In this lesson of Angular Basics, I'll show you how to use routerLink to switch between the routes without causing the page to refresh. Here's the video lesson: Add a New Component with the Angular CLI To create a new…
When we first create an Angular app with the Angular CLI using ng new , it gives us an option to add routing. Sometimes we don't know whether we want to add routing yet, so we say no. What do we do, though, if we decide to add routing later? There's no separate CLI command to set up the routing for you. In this lesson, I'll show you how to manually add routing to your Angular application. If you…
I wanted an easy way to pin articles to the front page of my website. It turns out Gatsby and GraphiQL make this process much easier than you'd think! First, I added a new pinned field to the frontmatter of the articles I wanted to put on the front page and set it equal to true . Frontmatter fields are great for splicing, dicing, and sorting your content however you'd like. I then fired up…
Migrating from AngularJS to Angular can be really overwhelming. How on earth do you figure out where to even begin? I have a talk called "Finding the Right Path from AngularJS to Angular" that goes over a decision tree you can use to determine this. The recording is available for free: You can also access the most recent slides for this talk . If you need more help with ngUpgrade, check out…
I moved from regular full stack web development (C# and JavaScript, mostly Angular) to the world of content, developer relations, and developer advocacy in August 2018 when I joined Auth0 . It's a lot of fun, but no one tells you just how much stuff there is to do. At any given time, I could be: Writing a blog post Answering questions on Twitter, Slack, Discord, or various Discourse forums…
One of the things that drove me crazy when I was first learning RxJS in Angular was how difficult it seemed to reload a collection of data after I added or deleted an item. With promises, I could just use .then() and be on my way. What do we do with observables? Should we just nest another subscription? Even if we do that, since we're using the async pipe, nothing will happen. There are better…
This week in the Angular Basics egghead collection , we're talking about proxying local servers for development. This was something that really baffled me when I was first getting started as a developer, so I'm excited to share it with you. When we first try to use a local server for our data in development, we get a rude error in the console and nothing works. What is that and why are we getting…
One question both Mike Ryan and I get asked often is whether NgRx is compatible with GraphQL . I think the confusion comes from the fact that many popular GraphQL clients can also handle local state management. The assumption is then that, since NgRx handles state management for you, you wouldn't use GraphQL alongside NgRx. In this stream, Mike and I walk through setting up a very basic GraphQL…
This week in the Angular Basics egghead collection we're talking about styling. In other frameworks, CSS modules and CSS-in-JS (sometimes referred to as JSS) are both quite popular. I've actually become a huge fan of using styled components in React (I'm using them with Emotion on this site!). One of the reasons for this is the ability to add scoped styling to your app. This prevents…
I wasn't really enjoying the boring monospace font for my code blocks on this site, so I decided to use Cascadia Code from Microsoft. I love it! It looks so much better! Here's how to do it using Typography.js in Gatsby. (That link also covers how to set up Typography; I won't be doing that here.) First, go to Cascadia's releases page and download the font (if you don't like the ligatures…
Historically, all of my previous talks and podcasts have been a big blob of markdown that I manually edit and add to. It's been that way for years. With the advent of Airtable , this can get a lot easier. I'm migrating all of my data over there so I can make the Talks page read in that data at build time. Airtable also allows me to add new talks or podcasts via their website, their iOS apps, or…
By default, the Angular CLI generates components with separate CSS and template files. If that works for you, great! If you don't like it, I have good news: it doesn't have to be this way! Let's learn how to use the CLI to generate single file components. Using Inline Style and Template in a Component The first opportunity to use single file components is in the component file itself. We can…
I love Angular . I'll admit that one reason I love it is because of the way it impacted my career, but that was only possible because of how amazing the Angular community is. It's friendly, supportive, and collaborative. I wrote more about that in my retro post about 2018 . Aside from the community, though, I do love the Angular framework for its power and scalability. You can build massive…
By request of Dan Vega , I did a stream on Twitch today on Keynote animation basics for developers. Check out the video below. We cover: Magic Move, the #1 animation tool you'll want to learn Shape and image animation basics Text and code animation Various pro tips along the way that I've learned Enjoy! If you've got other topics you'd like me to teach and/or learn on Twitch, hit me up on…
When I was recording the videos for Upgrading AngularJS , I was using a Windows 10 laptop. Every time I wanted to shoot a video, I had to remember to hide the taskbar, hide my other windows, open up my editor and browser, and probably other things I'm forgetting. It was really tedious. When I switched to Mac when joining Auth0, I started researching how to automate different pieces of my writing…
Thanks for joining Mike Ryan and I for GroupBy: RxJS' Secret Weapon ! We hope you learned a lot about the groupBy operator, as well as when to use exhaustMap , switchMap , and concatMap ! Here's the video from RxJS Live 2019 : Here are the slides: GroupBy: RxJS' Secret Weapon And here is the sample code: rxjs-groupby-basic There's a branch for mergeMap , concatMap , and switchMap by…
I hate “hand-waving” in technical articles. You know what I’m talking about. You try to learn how to build a prototype with a new framework, or use a new feature of a language, or set up the latest and greatest build system, and the tutorial says this: Do a couple of trivial things. ??? (“This is out of the scope of this tutorial…”) BAM finished! That drives me NUTS! The whole reason I’m on your…
2018 turned out to be the best year of my career so far: I released my first video course after a year of writing, editing, and filming over 200 videos. I was on several podcasts like Adventures in Angular , MS Dev Show , and RealTalk JavaScript . I spoke at my first conferences, like Angular Denver , AngularMix , and AngularConnect (my first trip to London!). I became a Google Developer…
Howdy! I now mostly write technical articles on other blogs and use this site for personal writing. You can also check out my talks page for interviews, podcasts, and conference talks. Reach out on Twitter any time if you can't find what you're looking for. Here's where to find some of my technical writing: Auth0 Upgrade Your AngularJS Authentication Service NgRx Authentication Tutorial…
Hello, beautiful humans! Welcome to QAs Doing Cool Things, Fourth Edition . This series features one of the members of my Super Cool Newsletter for the Quietly Ambitious with what they're doing and learning. SCNQA (and this series) is meant to be a cheery bright spot of positivity in the middle of the gray cloudy sky that your Social Media Overlords want you stare into hour after hour. (If you…
Welcome to QAs Doing Cool Things, Third Edition . This series features one of the members of my Super Cool Newsletter for the Quietly Ambitious with what they're doing and learning. SCNQA (and this series) is meant to be a delightful spot of positivity tea ( positivitea ) in the middle of the doom and gloom your Social Media Timeline wants you to live in. (If you're not getting the newsletter…
Welcome to QAs Doing Cool Things, Second Edition . This series features one of the members of my Super Cool Newsletter for the Quietly Ambitious with what they're doing and learning. SCNQA (and this series) is meant to be an oasis of useful positivity in the middle of the horrible desert of despair assaulting your eyeballs daily on the news and social media. (What? You're not getting the…
Welcome to the very first edition of my new series, QAs Doing Cool Things . This series features one of the members of my Super Cool Newsletter for the Quietly Ambitious with what they're up to and what lessons they're learning right now. We've got writers, teachers, moms, software developers, professional musicians, and more on this list, and we've all got tons we can learn from each other…
I began 2017 standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and making a decision to be wildly optimistic and obnoxiously grateful, both publicly and in my own mind. I let that dazzling beauty work its way into my heart and decided to let that moment dictate the rest of the year. It worked - but not just for my own well-being. I received lots of messages and kind words over this year about how badly…
Over the last few months, I've been burning through a lot of material by James Altucher, including two of his books , his Altucher Report newsletter , many of his special reports, and numerous episodes of his excellent podcast . The guy puts out an insane amount of content on a daily basis. James is by and large a pretty likeable guy. He's really big on vulnerability; in fact, I first heard of…
My friend Justin recently asked me about my experiences with Ramit Sethi and his courses. I was already planning on writing up an article about this stuff, but now I owe it to him to follow through on it. I've been following Ramit Sethi for six years, beginning with reading his book I Will Teach You to Be Rich in 2011. It was targeted at young, single people, but since I was working in…
I've had a dull, aching pain in my right knee for probably a decade. I always figured it was due to being overweight (it was), but I assumed that once I lost all that weight it would just go away (it didn't). I decided to see a doctor about it, and he referred me to a physical therapist. A really effective physical therapist. I've been spending a lot of time recently reflecting on how I've…
I don't care anymore about finding my purpose, finding "my passion." I don't think there is one monolithic "life work" I'm supposed to accomplish. Instead, I've shifted my focus to building side projects and businesses. Each of these side projects will help people in some different way by providing a service they need. It might be freelance work, video courses and screencasts, or writing a book…
Look, I get it. A bunch of web developers, recruiters, and vendors standing around in a room eating pizza or drinking beer and making small talk might sound like complete and utter death for you. There may be a million things you'd rather be doing. "Uhh, don't I have a dentist appointment that day? At least then I won't have to talk." I get it. I'm an introvert, too. I get drained by being around…
A bunch of people have asked me how I have lost so much weight, so I'm going to save some time and write it all down. I grew up a heavy kid and struggled with weight my entire life. Without boring you with my life story, I was always that kid who was teased relentlessly and avoided pool parties and beach days at all costs. The most annoying thing, though, was that I started trying to change that…
I've been working on hard on continuing to improve myself and design my ideal lifestyle (location independence + meaningful work that contributes to others). These days I've been doubling down on my day job work while also putting in time on side projects and businesses I'm building. To that end, I've been doing the following experiments to boost my productivity: Ditching as much stuff as possible…
Note from Present Day Sam: While the things I talked about in this recording in 2017 really were transformative for me, I feel like I didn't do a good job of acknowledging that addressing deep depression needs the guidance of a doctor and often medication. You should know that even at the time of this recording I had seen many doctors and used many medications in my life, so please never interpret…
It's New Year's Eve. I'm drinking champagne from my camping mug in front of a fire I built (gotta put those wilderness skills to good use). I'm roasting s'mores with Justin and Lexi, the young couple from San Diego staying at the campsite next door. Joanna, my friend from LA who has become my kid-sister-adventure-buddy, hands me a beer. We had gotten lucky - the previous night, a couple in the…
Last year, I did a couple of posts and several talks on IoT and functional reactive programming, and I always demo'd my little Arduino photoresistor theremin as a good example of how they work together. Up until now, all of my work on IoTReX has been using johnny-five , which sets up a client-host relationship between the computer running JavaScript and the device running the Firmata firmware…
So we're coming up to the end of 2016, which, I think, comes as a relief for a lot of people out there. Outside of the craziness of this year on a macro scale, I've been spending 2016 trying out a lot of new things and writing about them from time to time. I've started learning woodworking, welding, blacksmithing, and a bunch of outdoorsy skills. I got back into yoga and martial arts. This year…
In September, I started a nine month wilderness immersion program to learn more about bushcraft and living outdoors. Once a month, I go camping with about twenty-four other people on a property an hour outside of Portland. The culmination of the program is a week long trip in May where we only bring things we've made or traded for, nothing purchased. My original plan was to write about every month…
I spend a lot of time and energy running away from who I am - or who I might be if I fully embrace who I am. I'm always trying to measure myself against some arbitrary standard of where I should be in life, and feel the need to segregate different areas of my thought and writing. The more I live through contrasts of joy and pain, though, the more motivated I am to become a more integrated person…
Or: what to do in places where people can go outside without dying of heat exhaustion. Okay, so you want to get started with hiking or camping or something else outside of the four walls in which you eat and sleep and watch Game of Thrones (or Daniel Tiger, depending on your status in life). You start googling, you pull up some web sites, you get inundated with a barrage of information and…
Wow, somehow it is already mid-September. The summer completely flew by, but it was full of adventures. The above is a picture I took while backpacking and camping on Mount Hood. I started this year with the goal of shifting my focus and actions from consuming to making. So far, that thread has pulled me along through many corridors. It's made me contemplate a more minimal life, it's pushed me to…
Want to get into IoT development but not sure how? Got a shiny new Adafruit Feather HUZZAH with the amazing ESP8266 chip? Want to control it with JavaScript? Well, thanks to the fine folks on the Firmata team, now you can. I got my Feather HUZZAH from the kind people at Losant in one of their builder kits and got inspired to try to re-purpose their temperature sensor circuit with the stack I…
March brought with it a sort of turning point. A shift in perspective. I've had a fun and busy few months since I went all-in on my plan to turn my life into an adventure of crafting instead of consuming, but March was a whirlwind. After traveling for a week, I returned home to a visit from some good friends from New York and Seattle. The next day, I took a wild edible plants class (more on that…
Some of my neighbors keep plastic dinosaurs on display in their yard (because Portland). I was starting to type out a title for this and realized that with the combination of IoT and RxJS it would just be irresponsible of me not to title it IoTReX. Plus, look at that symmetry, it's beautiful. Back in January , I wrote that I realized reactive programming would pair really well with IoT when I…
It's been a while since my last update, but it certainly hasn't been for lack of stuff to talk about. In addition to seeing both Talib Kweli and Godspeed You! Black Emperor in the same weekend and taking a quick trip to LA, I made some good progress in the rest of January and February on all of my making and crafting endeavors. To start with, I finished up the blacksmithing basics course I was…
One thing I'm discovering is that transforming data is easier to think about than maintaining state. Dave Thomas A few months back, in the wake of wrapping my head around observables and RxJS (still a work in progress), I spent a bunch of time digging through resources on functional programming. I left this compilation sitting in my drafts folder for a while, but then last night I stumbled upon…
So I've been pretty busy since I posted my Crafting Manifesto a couple of weeks ago. I made a few more lights blink on my Arduino, this time in relation to temperature changes. The Makey Makey kit arrived and I started tinkering with it and seeing how I can make music with it. I took the safety orientation at ADX and got to use a chop saw and a table saw. Oh, and I started blacksmithing, and man…
I've been thinking a lot about crafting - making things, both in tech and in the real world. I went to Node Interactive here in Portland last month and was really inspired by the Internet of Things talks. I've begun to play with an Arduino Uno starter kit, which has given me all kinds of ideas. I've already made my silly little spaceship interface that makes lights blink, which, as I understand…
That image comes from this deck by Rob Wormald . At the end of September, I watched Rob Wormald give a talk on observables and RxJS entitled, "Everything is a Stream." This talk, along with some advice Rob's given me on an Angular Slack channel, sent me down a rabbit hole of learning about observables, reactive programming, and RxJS. I thought I'd share some of the resources I've found on the…
I'm glad you're here. This is my spot to chronicle and document for myself my life as a recovering Floridian in the magical PNW. I'm probably going to cover a wide swath of topics ranging from tech to hobbies to business to social justice. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
