Tag: side project

Plant a tree

Dear new developer,

Here’s a great quote:

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

Unknown

I spent a little bit of time trying to track down the original source, but my google skills failed me. But no matter the source of the quote, it is worthwhile advice.

What does this mean to you? It means that you should start a long play now. That is, an activity which will pay dividends in the future, but does not right now.

What is an example of a long play?

I think one successful long play for me is my blog. I have been blogging since 2003 and it has helped me in a number of ways. Both directly, in being a “proof of work” for employers, and indirectly, by helping raise my profile in the community. But the benefits didn’t accrue in the first 6 months or the first year. It was the continual effort of writing, at least once a month, which delivered the value.

Another example of the long play is this blog itself. I wrote for months before I had any appreciable traffic.

Other possible long plays:

I didn’t realize how many of these long plays I’d written about (or folks had guest posted about) on this blog until I put the above list together. The long play has obviously been a long running theme.

The common thread is that all of these activities accrete value over time. Slowly at first. Oh so slowly!

Here’s the thing, though. The long play can be scary to commit to. It doesn’t have immediate financial returns, just like planting a tree today won’t give you shade tomorrow. You only see the benefits years or decades from now. That makes it tough to invest time, at least for me.

How do you know what kind of long play makes sense for you? The only way I know to learn this is to try different things. Sure, you can read about them and try the activity in your mind. But there’s a world of difference between, say, thinking about contributing to an open source project and actually doing so. When you try a long play activity, you can see whether you enjoy it enough to keep doing it.

A few other fun facts about long plays:

  • Committing to a long play doesn’t mean you can’t stop. You can stop if you want. Knowing this makes it easier to start.
  • Starting small is wise. Don’t expect to, say, submit a PR to rails or another high profile open source project as your first contribution. Finding a typo or expanding the documentation is much more realistic.
  • Different long plays require different levels of effort.
  • Long plays can pay dividends in the short term, but that’s a side benefit, not the main one.
  • You probably don’t have energy to have a day job, enjoy a personal life, and do a bunch of long plays. I’d start with one or maybe two.
  • Pick something you enjoy. An analogy: when starting a two sided marketplace like AirBnB, you run into a chicken and egg problem. No supply means no demand, and vice versa. So you need to kickstart one side, and one way is to have your marketplace provide value for one type of party. This is called “single player mode”. In the same way, a long play is going to be hard, so pick something that gives you personal value and enjoyment. Even if no one else benefits, you still do.
  • The level of effort you put into a long play will change over time. I wrote a blog post every day for 100 days once. I now write one blog post on my professional blog every month because I less available effort and time.
  • You don’t have to know exactly how a long play will turn out. You won’t, in fact. It can change over time as you get a clearer vision of your goals.

However, there are two things you must do for a long play.

You must commit. No activity is fun all the time. Sure, it was a rush to publish a book based on this blog, but there was a ton of dreary activities leading up to that event. I’ll tell you what, I even started and stopped the proposal a few times and needed a kick from my SO to submit it.

You must start. Just start. Pick something from the above list (or another kind of activity which resonates with you) and block out time to do it.

Plant that tree today. I guarantee you won’t regret it.

Sincerely,

Dan

When is it time to quit my 9-5?

This is a guest post from Pariss Athena. Enjoy.

Dear new developer,

Honestly, I don’t think there’s one absolute answer. I believe the answer depends on you and the risk you’re comfortable taking. However, I do think there are things you should take into account before jumping the gun. This is how I personally knew it was time to give my notice and take my business full time…

Everyone’s situation is going to be different. This is my story.

I announced that I was launching Black Tech Pipeline (BTP) in June of 2020. Around this time is when everyone was really riding the Black Lives Matter train, and claiming their allyship after George Floyd’s murder.

This was not why I decided to launch. Weeks prior to the pandemic and quarantine, I was constantly tweeting about launching BTP “in the next weeks.” Those next few weeks just happened to fall during a tragic time.

But these two things did contribute to the eagerness of announcing my launch:

  1. I knew my performance at work was dropping. I stopped attending happy hours, and engaging in conversation. It wasn’t because there was something wrong with the company I worked for, my focus just shifted.
    I was rightfully distracted by social media and the flooding of content surrounding the injustices happening in the Black community. Knowing the work I should be doing full time vs the work I was actually doing full time made me annoyed with myself. I wanted to just help create impact in my community. That’s it.
  2. I was pissed the hell off.

I want to preface this by saying that I know I have the privilege of already having a platform and a following. I know that contributed to the traction my launch announcement received.

I had been writing newsletters surrounding Black Lives Matter a few weeks before announcing my launch, and those newsletters gained lots of traction on social media, which gained me more subscribers. I decided to announce the launch of BTP in my newsletter, and the response to the announcement was sign #1 that I was going to be on my way out of my job.

My calendar was flooded with calls. I had 15 minute breaks in between calls from morning to evening. I was talking to employer after employer wanting to take advantage of BTP’s services. Aside from calls, I received emails non-stop. Not just from employers, but from opportunity extenders of all sorts. It was tiring but good problems to have, especially before even launching.

On top of my performance dropping at work from being distracted by the political climate, I was now also distracted by BTP’s calendar being completely booked. Having so many calls booked seems promising, but until I had client agreements signed and invoices paid, I wasn’t going to leave my job, especially during a pandemic.

Plenty of employers expressed interest. They loved the origin story of #BlackTechTwitter and how it led to me building Black Tech Pipeline. There were lots of promising words, but you can’t go off of words of interest to determine your safety net.

The way I determined my safety net was by looking at my finances with my mentor, Leon Noel. I kept in mind what I was making annually at my 9-5. I already knew what I was charging for my services so I also used that to think about worst and best case scenario. He told me to ask myself:

  1. At the very least, how much do you need to make to pay your bills on time?
  2. Are you willing to give up your typical lifestyle?

I looked at my pricing model and mapped out how many clients I’d have to have per month to get by. And not just how many clients, but:

  1. Which services would those clients have to pay for in order for me to get by?
  2. And when those clients pay me, how much money do I have left over after putting 30-35% into savings for tax time and personal savings?
  3. And if I don’t want to live a life of just getting by, how much money do I need to make, with tax deductions in mind, to live the life that I want to live?
  4. How much money would I like to make annually? What will it take to get there? Can I project that?
  5. Is it possible that I can stay at my 9-5 and balance my business at the same time?
  6. Could I potentially hire someone to help me out so that I can do both?

Those numbers and questions are extremely important and it’s what you should think about before making the decision to bounce from your 9-5.

Sign #2: Personally, time was not on my side. It came to a point where something had to give. It wasn’t fair to continue working my 9-5 when I wasn’t giving it my all because I was busy prioritizing my own business. I also wasn’t willing to give up potential clients, miss calls, and wait to reply to business emails for the sake of my 9-5.

Sign #3: Potential clients turned into paying clients. Agreements were getting signed, and invoices were being paid. That sounds dope, but that’s not enough to say you’re secure. The question is,

  1. With the money you’ve been paid + your savings (if any), would you be able to quit your job and be able to pay your bills for the next 6 months, even if you got no other paying clients?
  2. How many signed/not yet paid clients do you currently have?
  3. What’s your projected paying client rate for the next month?
  4. What are you going to do if you don’t have any new business coming in?

These are the risk questions, and you have to be very real with yourself when you answer them. The last thing you want is give yourself optimistic answers and then be left with late payments, debt, and serious financial hardship.

My personal answers: I’d be fine. I determined this by the tangible money I had been paid. I didn’t count the client agreements signed because anyone can back out of an agreement before the work begins, something could delay the process on their end, etc. I made enough to feel confident in giving my job my notice, and to continue living the life I want to be able to live. I only considered signed agreements when I thought about future business expectations: “I have {x} many clients potentially secured for {x} services, which will keep me financially stable for {x months}. I also have {x} many potential client calls lined up for the next {x weeks/months}.”

I also double checked with my mentor, and when he approved, I felt even more confident in leaving.

It was bittersweet, but I gave my notice. It was time. ✨Shout out to G2i for being the best employer I’ve worked for since entering the tech industry. Amazing culture, dope people, and doing the work of solving the broken vetting process.

Now, I don’t know what’s going to happen with Black Tech Pipeline. Maybe things are only going well right now and we’ll struggle later down the line. I don’t know, I hope not. I will do everything in my power to make this company successful, but there’s only so much that I have control over. That’s the risk. That’s entrepreneurship for ya.

If I’m being totally honest, a job will always be there. Companies will always be hiring. I know- I’m a recruiter.

— Pariss

This post was originally published at Black Tech Pipeline.

Pariss Athena is the creator of the movement, hashtag, and community #BlackTechTwitter, and Founder of Black Tech Pipeline.

You Should Play (A Lot) More

This is a guest blog post from Zach Turner. Enjoy.

Dear New Developer,

Don’t forget to play. I spent the year after undergraduate working and learning. My goal  was to find a job at a company and eventually I succeeded. However my passion dwindled because it was always put second to finding a salaried position. As a result, my desire to play with and learn about new technologies simply because they are interesting has dwindled and my enjoyment of my job has suffered.

Allow yourself to approach the world as a kid again. Buy an electronics kit and only do
the first example experiment. Learn Hello World in 30 different languages. Start a passion project without worrying about finishing it. If you do finish it, try rewriting it in a new language. Think about a tool (software) that you would like to use, no matter how small or silly, and make it. There is so much pressure to know the newest and most popular languages and frameworks, and have a clean GitHub repo full of complete, relevant, and useful projects. That is especially appealing if you’re looking for a job. Yes, you should have a couple projects that are showcase worthy and speak to your desire to competently code. You should also be able to speak to your desire to learn and solve problems.

At the end of the day code is just a tool. No one faults a carpenter for having multiple hammers. I mean have you ever seen the garage of carpenter or maker, they are usually a glorious mess of projects in various states. Play and don’t fear clutter. Clean as you go and organize if you must. I’d rather have the GitHub of Doc Brown over Patrick Bateman any day. You can be a competent, intelligent adult and still play. If you don’t want work to become a chore, you must play.

From,
Zach Turner

During the day Zach Turner is a software engineer at Culture Foundry, a full service digital agency. At night he is a maker of things useful, useless, and everywhere in between.

Personal projects make you a better developer

Dear new developer,

I firmly believe that having a side project makes you a better developer. This kinda sucks, because when I get home from a day struggling at the office, I don’t want to sit in front of the computer for yet longer. But if you can make it happen, even if it is only an hour a week, you’ll learn so much from a side project.

This post covers some other great reasons for you to start up a personal project.

From the post:

[A side project] is like when you let kids color outside of the lines [because no one else need ever see the code]. You start to think and see things differently. Plus you get to try different things in the process. You could start learning a new framework and realize that you don’t like it and stop immediately. There aren’t any consequences in your personal projects.

I found a side project to be a great place to experiment with different tools and languages that I may not have used during my day job. For instance, I was able to play with a recommendation engine and a static site deployment tool.

The post also ends with tips on picking a side project, but my advice is: pick a problem that matters to you. When you are trying to find time to work on something between all the other demands on your time, you have to really want to do so, and the only way I’ve found to do that is to be really excited about the problem space.

Other tips from me:

  • You can start with a blog. If you don’t want to write code, you can just write prose. That can be a fun way to explore new technologies or business domains.
  • Don’t be pragmatic (unless you want to commercialize the project). At work you need to walk the line between beautiful code and delivery. Side projects let you focus on beautiful code.
  • Don’t be afraid to let the project go. I have done this. It’s painful, but if you aren’t enjoying the project, let it go. I’ve found a commitment of at least six months is good to ‘get over the hump’ that I encounter beginning anything, but if you’ve been doing a side project for at least that long and you find yourself avoiding it, give yourself a break of a month or two. If you aren’t interested after the break, let it go.
  • If you don’t have time for something yourself, find a project where you can help. Ask around on local slacks or meetups or check out codeforamerica.org for ideas.

The post I mentioned is worth a read in entirety.

Sincerely,

Dan