The Swyx Mixtape

I caught up with Jeff Escalante, who runs the Web Platform team at Hashicorp, and we talked about quite a few career related topics with breaking down ideas, making tech choices, content creation, and adversary strategy!

This is the audio-only public feed of the chat - Coding Career customers can find the video and more detailed notes on our Circle community.

• 00:40 - 1: Making Tech Choices vs Career Progression
• 13:50 - 2: Shortcodes vs MDX
• 23:00 -  Content Creation Process
• 29:30 - 3: Why did IaaS beat PaaS?
• 39:17 - 4: Progress Bars for Humans
• 50:30 - 5: Reactor Cores Wanted
• 1:06:30 - Bonus topic: Jeff on Adversary Strategy

Listener notes:

- Daniel Imfeld's summary of the Shape Up process

Clip source: Cautionary Tales on MLK and improvising speech

- Original draft of "Normalcy Never Again"
- Full text of "I Have A Dream" as spoken
- Dream turned to Nightmare

Brendan Eich was on the Lex Fridman podcast recently and gave some new perspective on what and why JavaScript borrowed from Java, and yet took from Scheme (his first love) - giving us the infamous JavaScript callback, which caused so much pain, and yet led to JavaScript ultimately winning in the browser.

Audio source (29 mins in): https://lexfridman.com/brendan-eich/

Examples from Mikael Cho, Khe Hy, and Howard Tayler:

Audio sources:

- Khe Hy on the Nathan Barry Podcast (22 mins in)
- Mikael Cho on the Creator Lab Podcast (1h24 mins in)
- Howard Taylor on the Writing Excuses Podcast (20 mins in)

Examples from: Justin Kan and Matt Arbesfeld

Audio clips:

- Justin Kan's origin story (26ish mins in)
- Matt Arbesfeld of LogRocket in Software Engineering Radio (19 mins in)
- Song: Shakira - Try Everything

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6A0jVDRymw

Here were the questions she sent me, though the audience asked a few others:

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you came to tech?

2. You had a different career before coding, can you tell us a bit about why you made the switch and how you did it? 

3. What was your biggest struggle when learning to code and how did you overcome it?

4. You’ve worked in the US and the UK - were those experiences very different? Did you need different skills?

5. You’ve mentioned that the Coding will always be the easiest part of a Coding Career. What other skills do people need to succeed in tech?

6. What tips do you have for people wanting to switch careers? 

7. You’re a big advocate for learning in public, can you tell us about this?

8. You mentioned that “chances are that by far the biggest beneficiary of you trying to help past you is future you.”  How has learning in public helped your career?

9. You’ve recently released the Coding Career Handbook - can you tell us a bit about what inspired this and what people can expect from it? 

10. You’ve written about the ‘quality vs consistency’ debate, can you tell us a bit about your thoughts on that? 

11. You have a policy of “no zero days” - how does that work and what benefits does it have?

12. You’ve mentioned that discipline is more important than motivation. I think a lot of people will find that encouraging. Can you tell us a bit more about that? 

Lady Gaga sang Million Reasons on the Howard Stern Show in 2016.

Audio Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av99SbpsNto&feature=youtu.be

Naval's old tweet featured 3 things: - "A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought - they must be earned."

Now he is adding a fourth: judgment - in picking experts and deciding who to trust.

Audio Sources:

- Naval Ravikant on Clubhouse
- Ben Horowitz on a16z Clubhouse

ARK ETFs have had a monster performance in the past few years, and core to their process is this obscure theory of General Purpose Technology.

They use it to identify technologies that have:

- steep cost declines
- cut across sectors
- platforms of innovation

So they arrive at 5 sectors:

- gene sequencing/editing
- AI (collaborative robots)
- energy storage
- biotechnology
- cryptocurrency

Audio source: The Odd Lots Podcast https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2021-02-10/ark-s-head-of-research-on-how-they-find-winners-podcast

Further reads:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_technology
- more notes: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1362333935322075139

The original song is More Spell on You by Eddie John (1979).

Audio source is from Tracklib: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QwOpRh-IfI