Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Ryan Chenkie This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Ryan Chenkie (Canada). He is a developer who uses JavaScript with Angular and Node and he does screencasting at https://angularcasts.io They talk about Ryan’s background, his current projects, and getting over imposter syndrome! Check it out! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: https://devchat.tv/get-a-coder-job/ 0:47 – Chuck: Today our guest is Ryan Chenkie! 0:55 – Guest: Hello! I’m excited! 1:02 – Chuck: What are you doing now? 1:10 – Guest: I spent 2.5 years at https://auth0.com and learned a ton there. I was doing some side work and then figured out I had to focus on one thing or the other. Now I have been a consultant fulltime and also teaching, too. AngularCast.io I teach there. 1:56 – Chuck: Sounds like people are excited about GraphQL. I’ve been there, too, and make a similar decision. 2:19 – Guest: It was a hard decision b/c I liked all of my colleagues there. I always had the itch to be self-employed. 2:42 – Chuck: You figure out of it’s for you or not. 2:51 – Guest: Yep! I am happy to be another year of it. 3:00 – Chuck: I went free-lanced about a year ago b/c the decision was made for me. 3:29 – Guest: I am grateful for it. 3:40 – Chuck: Yeah, we talk about this a lot on one of my podcast platforms. If you can make a connection with people then you’ll be god. 4:07 – Guest: Yeah I had to figure out if I would have to focus on the marketing side of things or not. Right now the projects are coming to me – right to my front door, which is great! It’s this ever-expanding web. 4:55 – Chuck: Yeah where people tend to show-up. Let’s talk about your story! How did you get into programming? 5:30 – Guest: It was a little less typically at the time. I was fully self-taught. I went to school for a somewhat Geography degree. It got boring for me at some point. I had to do one programming course while in school and it was in Java. I was terrible at it and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. It didn’t help that the instruction wasn’t great. I was terrible I didn’t understand a thing. I was scared that I was going to fail the course. I came out of there feeling like I didn’t have the chops to be a programmer. I was doing Geomantic-stuff. I learned that the further you get into this programming stuff you would make better money – better job, etc. I was trying to put this map/graph into a website and it said that I had to learn Java. This time, though, the material was taught to me in these small increments. I got into it more and I was more attracted to the idea of programming. 10:00 – Guest continues. 10:32 – Guest: I was learning Angular and JavaScript better. 10:35 – Chuck: Yeah it makes you think through it. You have to go deep. 10:47 – Guest: I would make a sample packet. I would get to certain points and get to a point and I couldn’t explain what I did. I would get to a roadblock and I couldn’t explain it. I would be on this tangent for a while and have to figure this out. I was working with the government, at this time, but I thought: maybe I could try this programming thing for a while. Did you go to NG Vegas conference? 12:20 – Chuck: Nope. 12:25 – Guest: There is this conference in Las Vegas – I am going to go and hang out with people. At this conference I met some important people. This company posted that they needed someone and I thought: this is the job for me. I sent an email – went to an interview – and did an example. I got the job and freaked out because I wasn’t a “real” programmer. I wrote some content for them and it’s been all good. 14:07 – Chuck: Let me back-up real quickly. How did you find Angular? 14:18 – Guest: It’s hard to pinpoint the “moment” I had found Angular. As I am learning through...