The Entrepreneurial Coder Podcast

Joe is the CEO of Thinkster.io where he works to improve online learning for developers. He also organizes ng-conf, React Conf, and the Framework Summit. He gives a lot of talks and workshops, is a Google Developer Expert, and loves board games, Dungeons and Dragons, and Star Wars.

Joe's Links

Joe on Twitter
Thinkster
Joe on Pluralsight
ng-conf
10k-raise.dev

Noah is the CTO and cofounder of Veryable and the founder and CEO of Touchtap, a digital solutions studio. A tech veteran himself, he’s intimately familiar with the challenges, risks and rewards of introducing new tech into the world. Noah is also the host of CodeStory, a podcast featuring tech leaders, reflecting on their human story in creating world changing, disruptive digital products.

Noah's Links

Noah on LinkedIn
Noah's Website
Veryable
CodeStory

Helen is a full time project manager and helps out with support for MakerPad and TransistorFM. She’s the founder of NamesAce, PodWords and OfficeHourCards. Helen is a strong proponent of side-projects and helps makers understand how they can benefit from creating and selling their own side hustle.

Helen's Links

NamesAce
PodWords
OfficeHourCards
Helen on Twitter
Epic Twitter Thread
Helen's 2020 Side-Projects

Scott is the Senior Web Strategy Manager at Netlify and the bootstrapped founder of Plink. Plink makes smart podcast links that podcasters love and listeners deserve. Scott has been working remotely full-time in software and tech for over a decade, previously with Auth0 and onXmaps.

With a background in woodworking, audio production, songwriting, and far beyond, Scott's always creating and has been developing side projects, doing agency and consulting work, and much more throughout his career. He happily calls western Montana home with his wife, and they enjoy exploring/traveling around the Pacific Northwest and plan to eventually move to the Seattle area.

Scott's Links
Scott's Website
Scott on Twitter
Plink
Mathson Design Co
Makerviews

Randall is a senior software engineer and published O’Reilly author and has worked at companies such as Eventbrite and Pandora in the past. She’s currently finishing up her second book, a guide on helping developers land jobs.

Randall's Links

The Standout Developer
Randall on Twitter
Randall's Website
Smart Contract Development

Zeno Rocha is the Chief Product Officer at Liferay Cloud, a newly created Liferay, Inc division.

His lifelong appreciation for building software and sharing knowledge led him to speak in over 110 conferences all over the world. He’s now focused on bringing the cloud revolution to the enterprise market while also building and selling digital products on the side.

When he's not working, Zeno likes running, watching movies, and eating cheese. For this last one he even created an app for it.

Zeno's Links
Zeno on Twitter
14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers
Dracula Theme
Dracula Theme About
Launch - Jeff Walker

Philip is a developer, writer, and entrepreneur who focuses on where code and words intersect. He has written for the likes of CSS tricks, Smashing Magazine, and Twilio. He’s a very recent college grad and is the author of Writing for Software Developers which is available now.

Philip's Links
Writing for Software Developers
Who Pays Technical Writers
Philip's Website
Philip on Twitter
Philip on YouTube

Transcript
[0:00] [background music]

Ryan Chenkie: [0:08] Hello, and welcome back to "The Entrepreneurial Coder Podcast." This is a show where I talk to you developers who are in business of one form or another and I try to get a sense of how they got to where they are and how they do the things they do.

[0:21] If you're a developer and you want to get into business, or maybe if you're already into business and you want to see where to go next, then hopefully this show is of value to you.

[0:29] This is Episode 30 with Philip Kiely.

[0:42] Quick announcement. I have just launched my latest teaching focus, which is going to be on "Security for React Applications." You can find it at reactsecurity.io. If you're a React developer and you want to find out how to do things like add authentication and authorization to your app, if you want to find out how to harden your frontend react code, then I got some courses that will show you how to do just that.

[1:03] There are some free course offerings, there are some pro courses. Hopefully, you can find something that is useful for you. Head over to reactsecurity.io to check it out.

[1:21] My guest today is Philip Kiely. Philip is a developer, writer, and entrepreneur who focuses on where code and words intersect. He has written for the likes of CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and Twilio.

[1:33] He's a very recent college grad and is the author of "Writing for Software Developers" which is available now.

[1:39] Philip, welcome to the show.

Philip Kiely: [1:40] Hi, Ryan, thanks for having me on today.

Ryan: [1:43] It's a pleasure to have you here. I was really intrigued to talk to you because you recently launched a book called Writing for Software Developers. This is something that's super interesting to me because I've done a lot of writing, and I'm a software developer. I'm very fascinated about how these two things coincide and why it's important to be a good writer as a software developer.

[2:08] Maybe that's where we could even start. I'd love to get your thoughts on why you think it's important to be good with words when you are also good with codes. Maybe give us just a breakdown of why is that you think that's important to be a good writer as a software developer.

Philip: [2:25] Sure. Imagine you went and sat down in front of your computer and said, "Hey, Siri, make a website." It's not really going to do anything because you haven't been specific enough.

[2:36] [Siri speaks]

Siri: [2:38] I found this on the web for "Make a website..."

Ryan: [2:40] There goes Siri. [laughs]

Philip: [2:41] Sorry about that.

Ryan: [2:41] [laughs] That's OK.

Philip: [2:42] You instruct your computer to make a website and it's not going to do anything because it doesn't know what you want. You have to use the actual language, you have to use HTML, CSS, use some frontend, some backend. Writing is kind of the same way. If you just tell someone, "Hey, make a website," they're not going to really know what to do.

[3:05] You need to practice communicating with the same level of specificity and technical detail in a way that's readable to humans as you do when you're programming.

[3:18] Studying writing in this context, the book doesn't really talk about grammar, syntax, that sort of stuff. It's more about how you can define your audience, like, if I'm writing against the Python interpreter, I'm going to need to write Python 3 code.

[3:34] Similarly, I'm writing for an English-speaking audience, I'm going to need to write in English. My audience has a couple years of background in these topics, so I'm allowed to make certain assumptions about what they're already going to know coming to the article.

[3:48] It's taking the same approach to technical communication that you take with your computer and just translating it to a new language that happens to be, instead of a programming language, whatever human language you're writing in.

Ryan: [4:02] That makes sense. Have you found, in your experience, that software developers in particular aren't generally great writers at the same time? I sense that perhaps you found a need here with this book you've written, "Writing for Software Developers."

[4:23] Have you found it the case that -- and I've heard this from various people that I've spoken with, that if you got a really great software developer, chances are...Maybe not chances are, but there is a chance that they won't be that great of a writer at the same time. They may not know how to communicate with words to quite the same skill level that they can communicate with code.

[4:45] Have you found that to be true at all?

Philip: [4:48] I think that that can be true for a lot of people, but for the industry as a whole, I think that as more and more people are getting into software development, we are getting a broader range of backgrounds in the field, and thus a lot of people are coming in with more pre-existing communication skills.

Ryan: [5:07] Right.

Philip: [5:08] I think that there are a lot of reasons why this perception that software developers are inherently bad at writing exists. I've definitely seen some of my friends coming into college as international students struggling with writing, just due to having to write in their second or third language, and many of them gravitate towards software development.

[5:29] There are plenty of people who get into software development because they don't like writing. I think that overall, there's no inherent reason that someone who is good at programming can't also be good at writing.

[5:42] When people talk about, "You can be the best in the world at one thing or it's a lot easier to become really good at two things, find that intersection and be really effective operating there," I think that when you take two, especially disconnected things or apparently disconnected things, like writing code and writing words, and find that intersection, that's a very powerful place to operate.

Ryan: [6:09] If someone's out there and they're thinking, "Maybe my writing skills are all right. Maybe I don't even know if they're OK or not."

[6:16] If you were trying to convince them that they should take a look at the skills that they got, writing-wise right now, and try to improve upon them, and you were to try to give them some reasons why that's beneficial to do, what would you say? What are the benefits of being a better writer as a software developer?

Philip: [6:35] Being a writer can help you develop your expertise in anything. The first thing I would do is I would ask them what their goals were because I'm sure that writing could help them reach their goals. In order to tell them a specific path or give them specific reasons, I'd have to know exactly what they wanted.

[6:56] For me, I knew that I wanted to be able to teach a bunch of people the same stuff that I had struggled to learn myself. For me, practicing my writing was for the purpose of gaining access to large publications that would be able to magnify and amplify my voice t...

Christopher is an entrepreneur and investor and is the co-founder of Snappa, a self-funded SaaS app that helps non-designers create online graphics. Christopher left his day job in 2014 to work on startups full-time and has been focusing on business and investing ever since.

Christopher's Links
Snappa
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
Lean Customer Development
Christopher on Twitter
Christopher's Website

Saron is a developer, international tech speaker, and podcaster, and is the founder of the recently acquired CodeNewbie, the most supportive community around for people learning to code. She’s the host of the Command Line Heros podcast and you can find her online at saron.io.

Saron's Links
Codeland
Saron's Website
Saron on Twitter

Dan founded Wahlin Consulting which provides training and architecture services on front-end and back-end web technologies, Docker/Kubernetes, and Cloud technologies. He’s published multiple courses on Pluralsight.com and is a Docker Captain, Microsoft MVP/Regional Director, and Google GDE. Dan speaks at multiple conferences and runs the Code with Dan development newsletter.

Dan's Links
Code With Dan
Dan on Pluralsight
Pluralsight Author Programming
Dan on Udemy
Dan on Twitter