Web of Tomorrow 44: How to Jumpstart Your Career - Kent C. Dodds

Kent C. Dodds has accomplished a lot in a short amount of time in his career.

Kent C. Dodds has accomplished a lot in a short amount of time in his career.

Takeaways

Teaching is one the way you solidify your understanding and find the gaps in your knowledge that you need to fill in.
You can read a book, and you can even build something, but you don't have a solid grasp on it until you've taught it to somebody else.

As soon as you've learned something new, you probably know something that lots of people don't know yet. You're not too inexperienced to teach something.

How do you know what to build? Think of things you want to exist.

When you get stuck, work on it for about 20 minutes. Then try to make a reproducible example separate from your app. You may found out that the problem isn't what you thought it was. If you can reproduce it in a small example, it should now be easier to debug. If you still can't figure it out, go to StackOverflow, or to the community somewhere online and share your reproducible example with somebody. If you ask your question well enough, you'll usually get a good response.

Meetups are constantly looking for speakers, so it's pretty easy to get a speaking spot at a meetup.

You can ask a meetup organizer if you can speak even for just 5 minutes or 20 minutes. It doesn't have to be a whole hour.