Becoming a Self-Taught Developer | Tips, Tricks, and Advice

[Music] three two one alright so today I have with me a very special guest and considering the events of this morning where is my first guest and his name is Mike Payne and Mike Payne and I have known each other for how long would you say we've known each other now since about 10 years 1100 12 yeah 12 yes we originally went to high school together ish and we have kind of taken similar paths career-wise so the main reason why I wanted to bring Mike on is he's been kind of a mentor to me and he's also kind of a self-taught developer kind of the same thing that I am so I figured we would talk a little bit about that today and just kind of you know maybe kind of divulge in East any any trade secrets or just kind of just what some of learnings that we've had over the years considering we have been developers for as long as we have but anyway yeah Mike tell us a little bit about yourself I am a creative technologist at a creative agency in San Diego called vitro that kind of just means that I cross paths between creative thinking concept Inc and developing historically I did a lot of my my coding and WordPress PhD a lot of front-end stuff over the years I've grown to be a lot more platform agnostic so I can jump in and work work with a label platform or a drupal system or WordPress or completely like from scratch whatever needs to be done I'm not too tied to like one specific tool which can help and hurt depending on the business case the pitch that you're trying to win go kind of either way as you said I've been developing for about twelve thirteen years and in a professional setting and uh yeah that's it's kind of like a rough yeah outline of Who I am yeah yeah no but yeah that's great yeah so you've been working in the kind of the programming sphere for about 12 years but what would you say kind of and kind of what I want to kind of focus on here is that you have gone from you know somebody I knew in high school to like being in the position you are now and it knowing what your educational backward background is ahead of time it's quite an amazing story so I want to kind of talk about that and I like spill the beans upfront like I I I dropped out of high school like zero actual education so whenever you look at like self-taught developers with no education a lot of times that's like no I I still have like a four-year degree or something but mine's like legitimately dropped out senior year started working and having gone to the class ends yeah that's that's one of my like favorite things that about your story is that you know from high school you've this is kind of like you found your passion right away and just like jumped in with both feet so let's kind of like take it from there so we tell me kind of like you know what your story is and why you decided to kind of you know what what drew you to web development and then kind of how went you ended up kind of cultivating your skills yeah web development is kind of like the perfect culmination for someone that's just generically interested in computers because it allowed me to dig into a bunch of smaller sub segments right so it involves obviously programming like writing code but it also involves multimedia so actually like you need to know design in order to actually translate it to code so you dig into Photoshop and illustrator and now there are systems that are like like sketch and and Zeppelin and systems that are much more designed for designing websites then what we used back in the day I think you and I even built a website and after effects once we had an After Effects element to it for that yes SkillsUSA thing which you probably wouldn't do anymore at least not in the same the same way oh we're not doing that anymore oh boy we can we can move back around to that direction Calista shadows and motion graphics with Wyatt oh yeah but anyway so there's coding the actual multimedia part of it and you also have to dig into like networking and how a computer works so that you understand you know if this asset that I'm trying to put on a website if it's a video file that's 30 Meg's I need to understand how that's going to translate it from the server to my laptop or my phone whenever I'm out on the go and that what kind of issues you're gonna run into it that I'm I'm full stack by nature so I I do a lot of back-end development too which means I I need to know how to like set up a server like spin up a new AWS instance or work with digital ocean droplets or in some cases I just have an SSH access into a client server so I need to know how to go in and and use those without screwing everything up I guess yeah that that's one thing that I find really interesting about kind of like the current role of a developer is because there used to be kind of this very hard line between front-end and back-end and now like nowadays you're kind of expected to do front end things back-end things and on other sides you're also like expected to know how to like you said kind of understand the connections between servers and make one yourself when needed that kind of stuff it's really interesting you might not be like a full back-end engineer an architect but you should know like even if you're a front-end developer you should know how to how to manage some of those things and it can feel overwhelming as I'm like saying all of these like verticals that you can drop into but I mean in most cases if you spent you know two or three weekends digging into some of the terminology and like really basic hello world examples of whatever goes discipline they're trying to attach yeah then those will be whittled bad boy quick I think by year three or four I had a pretty decent grasp on most things um now like 13 years and you just pick up way more as time goes on yeah that's one thing that you kind of alluded to is that like when you are wanting to be like a good friend and developer you kind of have to know about those other things you don't necessarily have to be an expert but at least being aware of those is goes a long way good mindset that goes along with that there's a really good advertiser by the name of oboe V who had this mentality that you need to be the second smartest person in the room except for when it comes to the discipline that you're dealing with in that case you need to be the most smartest person in the room so understanding that there's there's other people with with much more education in whatever discipline you're kind of touching you should still have like a pretty strong grasp on the fundamentals of whatever that is and that doesn't come overnight no one's expecting you as like a junior or sometimes even a senior developer it doesn't necessarily need to have you know decades and decades of computer science under their belts but yeah definitely an eclectic skill set is helpful yeah definitely so how do you feel about specializing then you kind of said that you kind of have a wide breadth of skills what what how do you feel about like you know those who just like you know I do Python and nothing else definitely a niche for it I've seen pitches all the time I'll be going up against a shop that specializes in exactly the one stack that that the client is requesting and I might be like somewhat familiar with it but they'll be like no we are that's all we do day in day out we've got one guy that just had kids to front and one guy that that's just that it's going to be a team that's just front-end a team that's just back-end and the people within those are pretty siloed into like doing the same exact thing day in day out and it it can help in that you you need to understand like the little intricacies of if we're going off with Python you need to understand like just the little intricacies of how that works on on a server if you're you know compiling it into an applet and even within those like specific rails that you're setting there's still a bunch more things to dig into within so like pythons like an entire language but then there's all the like libraries that you pull into it if we go off of like a wordpress developer there's still like subsets of like front-end back-end plug-in theme are you like selling things to mass mass deliver are you like selling your plugin or are you just spinning up a website kind of on its own side I'm not sure that there is really like a dedicated front-end back-end anymore I think it all kind of blurs together at at some point it's just kind of the degree at which you kind of blur those lines yeah no that makes a lot of sense I you definitely start to see that and like even if you do kind of specialize that further you dig into it the more you realize that you have no idea what's actually going on and like you just like or that you know the more that you realize that you don't know everything the rock that we like put a thunderbolt into and then like tricked it into thinking yeah it's all magic it's no point it's all magic at some point exactly that's what I tell everybody at work when they talk to us developers I don't know it's just like magic so yeah just learn how to push the right keys at the right time to make the website yep exactly and that kind of like the googling the right thing actually kind of brings me to kind of our next kind of point here is that kind of going back to your your formal education quote-unquote like how do you feel like that was advantageous or disadvantageous to you now looking back uh I was really paranoid early in my career that I wouldn't be able to get a job because I didn't have a degree or I mean even had a high school diploma but really quickly understood that no one ever really asks about that if you just leave your education off of your your CV or your resume and people look for other things on it and the primary thing they're gonna look for and in our industry is your portfolio the things that you've actually done before take a week they care way more about like what can you actually accomplish what can you do what can you prove to me as opposed to like what classes did you sit through a couple years ago and whether or not those may or may not be applicable so disadvantages it definitely like knocked my self-confidence in the beginning advantageous it's kind of opened the doors the position that I'm in now didn't exist ten years ago whenever you know we were getting into this industry so not really like setting those guardrails or having someone else set them for me if I went through like a boot camp or a deaf program at a university they have like structured like this is you know intro 101 this is 102 and that this is like the advanced class and the topics that are in there I think kind of like streamline you into a specific way of thinking whereas I think the successful developers that I know are much more like solutions oriented that like alright we've got a problem there may or may not even be an answer for this but are there other people out there are there resources that I can tap into how can I you know Google the solution in the best way to find a solution it might not even be like I need to find the solution right now it's like I need to find two more keywords to add into my google search in order to like find the next step I'm just making that little bit of progress that helps a lot so yeah advantageous it definitely build up that like Google foo mentality over the years just I can't rely on someone else to teach this to me right now I need to just find an answer yeah that is become makes it so you're kind of in charge of your own charge of your own sir and your surroundings at that point like you're kind of relying and you've built up this foundation of resources and you've built up this foundation of just kind of scrappy know-how and now all of a sudden you can tackle a lot more situations versus like you know they've never covered this in class okay I really don't know how to do that and it's not like you know that the classes are all about using your resources I mean there could be nowadays but I mean from the days that I've understood and the people that I've talked to it's like that's not really a thing you kind of you know you're you have a very structured way of kind of going throughout the degree and it covers very specific things and you know varies from college to college but it sounds like it's it's all about just kind of exposing you to a lot of different little things but it's still ultimately up to you to kind of dive into those and then you're kind of back to where you started where he is like all right well now I got to open up Google and learn more about this thing and how it applies to the real world so I feel like by you know kind of skipping that you've not only saved yourself a lot of money but you've also kind of jump-started kind of your learning I would say would you agree to that jumpstart might be a strong word I think in the beginning I definitely felt like it was slow learning and I'm not sure I would have felt that it was any faster if I had gone to like a structured program I think gonna be like you you're just always gonna totally get slow at the start that's a good point definitely given me more stamina through my career I guess that I can I can take those principles I learned early on and apply them to new projects to new technologies one thing I was really paranoid about you know ten years ago whenever I was intentionally avoiding school was this thought that they're running you through a program they've got a curriculum but it takes a while to put together a curriculum and it takes a while to get that approved and start teaching people and I've seen this time and time again someone goes through like a four year degree by the time you're done but the curriculum that you have is like at best four years out-of-date and technology moves so fast if they're covering like the core basics and you on your own or going out and digging into the like then you attack the new libraries that are coming out that's great but I can give you rely solely on just the curriculum if someone else puts together for you you're gonna fall flat yeah no I think that's kind of because of that exact reason I think that's why these boot camps started to emerge so kind of like I when I mean you and I were we're around learning all this kind of stuff boot camp and exist so going back we can't yeah we were we are pre boot camp so that really dates us for all those who are watching but how would would you like say you were kind of back it's at square one again how would you feel about those boot camps is that something that you would advise your past self to take advantage of um that's a great question so boot camps are a little weird they I've hired a few developers that have come out of boot camps and it just kind of highlights the the things that you can and cannot teach someone in such a short amount of time though a lot of these developers have come out of the boot camp and expect like oh I'm gonna make like 80 grand this year that's probably not gonna happen I might not have fur a long time but you can get a job and and the thing that like they really can't teach you is the desire to keep learning once the boot camps over so I've had some that come in and immediately slay it and and are they're fund that fundamentals the foundation is solid and they keep learning keep growing and then I've had over theirs they come in great foundation everything that was in the boot camp solid but that's just where they stopped they're like Aria I got the I got the boot camp sorry I'm I'm a developer now there's there's nothing else I can learn and they just kind of keep that mentality moving the Stagner yeah and you just kind of stagnate the benefit of boot camp is that it's really rushed at the beginning that it you just dive straight in you start writing code you start making errors early on and you fail quick you fail fast you fail often they'll hire you you you fell hard and you have to pick yourself up and keep going so I think they can work for the right people and I think for the wrong people on things that they could have googled themselves yeah I think that's really interesting and as I mean both of us have sat on kind of the other side at the table when it comes to you hiring developers and so yeah it's it's really interesting is that the the bootcamp only means so much it definitely shows like hey you know what I care about this I want to do specifically this and you know I invested my money and too into learning about this and Here I am I want to cash out on that but there's there's kind of that other layer to the whole interview process it's like all right yeah yeah yeah okay you've done that that's great but like what what where is your passion lie and where does where does that kind of like you said you're gonna have two identical candidates come out of the same boot camp but like one is going to be the kind of person that took what they learned and then like you know maybe went home and like created like an app out of something that wasn't part of a tutorial series or wasn't part of the curriculum itself they went the extra mile to like I like this stuff and I want to like keep doing it not a point where they're burning themselves out and they're like this is all I live and breathe but like there's definitely that where it's like you can definitely tell that somebody likes this and that's something that definitely will get somebody the job over somebody else yeah yeah there's a fine line between like passion and burnout I think you kind of touched on it there for a minute it's it's crucial that you actually like what you're doing because I mean with any luck you're gonna be doing it for the rest of your career and I can tell you right now though like angular library they were working with right now or view it's gonna be totally different in a year in six months they're gonna keep releasing it they're gonna a new library is going to come around we'll have the new Internet it's not even powered by JavaScript at some point and you have to keep learning like through your entire career you can't just like stop day one I'm gonna get on the web assembly train yeah but at the same time you you need other things in your life that you enjoy and that you can like mix it up with or you're gonna get burned out real real quick and if there's a way for you to like kind of merge those together try it a website about golf or about a make-out make an app that like tracks your golf scores or make a make a website that houses all of the like amazing cool videos that you love and you just have like a giant index of all of those try and like merge those together but I would never make that your soul like a point of income just do it as like a way it's it kind of makes things that you like together without the expectation that like I'm gonna retire off the money that I get from this cuz that that'll like expedite burnout yeah yep no that's exactly true like the yeah yeah it's a it's a it's a tightrope to walk and it's definitely like there's a lot to learn and people are like I mean my Twitter feed is full of people like you know posting new languages posting projects that they've published all this kind of stuff and it becomes overwhelming and it makes you feel like oh I have to do that too in order to be successful like these people and I think that it's kind of slow and steady wins the race a little bit is like if you can like you said find something that you like and kind of chip away at it I think there was a shoot the CEO of Shopify said that he never worked more than 40 hours a week he was just liked what he was doing and just kept it kind of within that that time frame and you know look at where it is today so it's it's definitely a good amount of time and if that's what you're getting paid to put in and you don't need to put in overtime then yeah it's that step away from the computer you're you're a better more well-rounded person if you have other interests in their life besides just staring at a screen all day yeah exactly one last thing that I wanted to touch on because we're running out of time is just kind of like some of the resources that you kind of might say somebody was brand new to this whole thing you know they're a self-taught developer maybe they you know have built a wordpress theme or two but kind of want to level up their skills you know kind of in the area of JavaScript HTML CSS PHP what kind of resources would you say those persons those people should take a look at if they're watching this video they're already on it watch it WP excellent that's all okay that's all folks that's the only resource you need there you go no like YouTube you're not alone there are hundreds of other developers other people other mentors digital mentors that are out there that are sharing all of the things they've learned over the years so yeah your stuff lynda.com they recently like in the last couple years acquired by LinkedIn so they've like really been pouring more resources into that egghead has a bunch of like great videos there's I mean there's there's probably 20 just like micro courses it depends on like the specifics of what you're trying to go after probably the biggest resource I think is that the documentation the the things that like people have written specifically for you to understand the language or the platform that your you're working with so for WordPress go read through the codex later every day just like take five random hooks in WordPress and look at like alright where is where is this hook is this in action this is a filter what is this doing within the larger picture of WordPress I don't need to do anything with it right now but just immerse yourself in like the all of the different ones that are out there and then a project might come along you're like alright I need I need this string to be serialized in a certain way before he hits the database I need this is the hook I need to use and I can I can just filter the response out and then I don't need to keep rewriting this function every time I do it I just add in that one hook and trust that it functions the same way with angular with you they've got documentation they've got a tutorial series but like provided by the actual developers that is like the starting point and I think a lot of it all over is just going to skip over that and go straight to like alright let's jump into a tutorial and like learn on the fly but like there's there's tons of documentation out there and alright yeah read read the gosh-dang documentation ya know that's actually like I'm surprised by your answer but I actually really like it because I think that's not something that people would normally think to spend a ton of time on because there is kind of this kind of culture right now where it's like everybody's teaching and they're selling courses and stuff like that and they're all kind of have this kind of fun hook to it like we're building a fish store or we're building like an API that our weather app or something like that and like you're kind of getting a very narrow view about everything that could be going on yes it's like a real world application so it can kind of tie things together for you but I think to your point that there is a lot of like underlying basics to this whole thing that you're completely like grazing over and I think that it's less important about like how would you accomplish this versus like why would you accomplish it this way versus some other way and you're only going to know that other way exists if you have read through the documentation and you've and you've kind of have a solid understanding of what you're working with yeah all right but I think that wraps it up for this again everybody this is Mike Payne a Twitter handle what is that the Mike Payne yeah the one and only just me Jess you want to know is me and then anything else you want to let anybody know about before we sign off no stay safe no handshakes got a fist bumps only or only inverted nerds are taking over the world now we can all be you know socially introverted from our own apartment so stay safe be happy read the documentation all right thanks man appreciate it [Music]

Channel: WPCasts

Views: 2,964

Rating: 4.9692307 out of 5

Keywords: self taught programmer, self-taught web developer, self-taught programmer, self-taught software developer, self-taught developer, self taught programmer first job, learn web development, software developer, software development, software engineering, programming education

Id: HVqUyrPvgt4

Length: 28min 14sec (1694 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/anonymousxo]

thanks