Crafting your cocktail mixture to learning

Episode transcript

Ryan Burgess
Hello, everyone, welcome to a brand new episode of the front end happier podcasts. I want to stop. And thank you all for all of our listeners for continued listening to the podcasts. I've noticed we've actually continually been growing. So that's awesome. And so welcome to all our new listeners. I'm really excited about our topic today because we get so many questions around it. In this episode, we are joined by Lauren to talk with us about education paths for software engineers. There are so many options out there. And I feel like continually more options out there. So it's really hard to know what the right path is. So I'm excited for us to maybe provide some insights on that. Lauren, can you give us a brief introduction of who you are, what you do, and what your favorite happier beverages?

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
Sure. My name is Lauren sands ramshaw. And I'm an author and consultant. I just recently finished writing a book on Graph QL called the Graph QL guide with John Resig. And in consulting Currently, I'm working with temporal which is what I see is the best solution for micro service orchestration and cocktail. My go to is Margarita. Oh, that's a good choice.

Ryan Burgess
can't really go wrong with a margarita either. I've had like good and like not real bad. Like there's always varying degrees but can't really go wrong.

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
Yeah, sometimes I feel like they're way too sweet. But usually, usually I like them.

Ryan Burgess
Fair enough. Fair enough. I also like some that are like more spicy, and you can get great smoky. Yes. All right. Let's also give introduction of today's panelists. Jem,

Jem Young
you wanna start off Jem Young engineering manager at Netflix. And I'm Ryan Burgess. I'm

Ryan Burgess
a software engineering manager at Netflix. In each episode, the front end happier podcasts. We like to choose a keyword that if it's mentioned at all, in the episode, we will all take a drink. So what did we decide today's keyword is? books, books. All right. If we say the word books, which I mean, around education, I'm I feel like books apply. Maybe not so much in our new state of things. But if we say the word books, we'll take a drink. Let's hop right into the topic. I'm curious to hear. You know, there's a lot of options for engineers that to learn. What are some of the typical paths or areas that you all are familiar with for learning software development?

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
Yeah, so we've got college and trade schools and community colleges, we've got boot camps as something that traditionally ways people learn trade like, is apprenticeships like, if I want to be a carpenter, I'd go apprentice carpenter. And then and there's like a some some companies working in the apprenticeship space right now. And then self teaching, which, which has a lot of different avenues to go in.

Ryan Burgess
And of course, books like books can teach you many things. Here, one thing I've always been impressed with just where we are today, versus like when I would have started is the sheer volume of amazing content that is so readily available, where it's like how to how to create a React app, how to learn JavaScript, whatever it is, is you can look that up online, whether it be for a paid tutorial, or even just going on YouTube for free. There's some really solid videos out there or blog posts. There's a lot a lot of information. I know when I started, YouTube didn't even exist. So like that that wasn't a thing. So I think it's really cool that there are these different areas in which we can learn. But I think it it is hard, right? Like I think a lot of people are like, should I go to a boot camp? Should I go down the, you know, college degree path? There's all that I think is it's hard to know, how do you both think about that? Like, what what would you choose? Like? Actually, both Lauren? And Jem, you both have computer science degrees? I do not. So I'm curious if you were to do it all over again. Is that still the right path? Would you think about it differently?

Jem Young
Yeah, I still do a CS degree I one, it's nice to personally have that accomplishment. It's not an easy degree to get, I would say, no matter where you went to school, to I feel equipped to handle problems that I haven't seen before, which is a large part of software engineering. It's not there. I think there's different levels of software engineering, there's earliest problems you're gonna run across, there are the Stack Overflow problems, or it's like, I'm into this problem. It's very tactical, tangible. I can look this up. This has been solved before. And then you have the like, tier two problem, which is this a problem? I don't really know how to solve it, but I'm gonna lean on my experience and experience of others help solve it. Then there's tier three, which is I've never, I don't even know what the problem is. There's something wrong, but I'm not sure what it is. And I think to me, a CS degree prepares you for at least the tier two problems, which is the we kind of don't really know what the problem is. It's not as well defined, or I haven't seen it before, but I have that theory behind me. So yeah, I'd say for me, personally, I think getting a CS degree was worthwhile.

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
Yeah. Find the choice again, I definitely do college again, assuming I had the the access like resources time, money, ability to get in. And and but but I'd want to do it again mostly for social reasons like social education and enjoyment more so than then learning I found that like, I had a an intro to programming course that was object oriented and then I had a functional course. But and beyond those like I had more courses that involve programming, but nothing more teaching programming, and certainly not practical things like like web development or app development. So from that perspective, I felt like there's there's much more learning I had to do to be ready for a job. And the amount that I learned that was helpful for the profession of programming felt felt relatively little,

Jem Young
I think a CS degree prepares you to be a more advanced software engineer, but it does not help you become a, it doesn't help you the first job and probably your second job, and helps you later down the line. But like you really, no matter what you have to work with people, you can't you just you can learn how to code off of YouTube, you can learn how to code from books and tutorials, but it doesn't teach you how to be like a software engineer per se, that comes from like working with people understanding like you're good at this, you're good at this delegating that the joke amongst the CS people that I know is the your first software engineering course that is like a course where it's a group project. And you have to like output something by the end of semester, it doesn't teach you how to be a software engineer, it just teaches you how to hate other people, which is kind of the the end result. Some people didn't do any work. Some people did all the work. But that's kind of like how it is in real life. So I like the way you put that CS degree is useful, I think later in your career. But starting off a boot camp is probably more tangible, honestly, in like just getting those first couple jobs

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
in terms of skills. I definitely agree in terms of access like that. Much easier to get a job with with a CS degree, I think the third boot camp.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, it's interesting. Like, I like the way Lauren put it too. And so clearly, I don't have the CS degree. And when I think about there's times where I'm like, should I have gone that route, I went into a more web development, like the community college route, it was a two year program. And what I really liked about it was a lot more hands on, you didn't necessarily get the depth though. That was the one trade off is you weren't getting the depth on, you know, fundamentals. And so I was able to hack my way through certain things, get something to work and start to understand that, to Jem's point. It wasn't always necessarily when you hadn't seen the same problem, right? Like it's a brand new problem. And some of those Cs fundamentals is where it really helps you wrap your head around like a new problem set. And so what happened in that sense was, I felt like on the job, I went back and started learning, I didn't actually go and get a degree in computer science. But I was looking up those fundamentals to better understand so that I showed up better and better understood, just so that I could wrap my head around that more. And so I think that is really important. I don't know that I would ever go back though. Now I don't have four years. Like that was a beauty too is like, I was ahead of the game. I was two years and I was on a job right like and I feel I learn a lot more on the job than I do in school, I need to have be hands on. I don't really learn from books. Cheers,

Jem Young
cheers. If I could do it all again, just like the way you said I would get a job somehow do some software engineering for a year or two and then go to school to get my degree because at that point, I'd be like, Okay, this is how you apply it. Versus from what I can tell, I think it depends on the program. A lot of CS is just it's very theoretical, it's a lot of theory, you learn a lot of background and fundamentals, which is great. But fundamentals aren't terribly applicable in your day to day job. They're more like, Oh, it's good to know, in the long run, if I'm going to work and that's exactly how I do it. It's good for you.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, okay, I have a really good question. We're talking about computer science definitely is a pretty well known degree in our industry, I've even seen another one pop up is. So there's computer science and computer engineering, what is the difference? And I feel like there's like, even as you read some of them at various schools, there's overlap. Here's my interpretation of it. But I'd love to hear both of your thoughts. I saw it more as like computer science, more theoretical around software, theoretical fundamentals that we just talked about. And then Computer Engineering felt a little more hands on, but also more oriented around software to hardware. And that was my interpretation of it. And I'm curious to hear both of your thoughts on it. Yeah, I

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
think they both involve programming, I guess. Computer Engineering I see is more toward electrical engineering and and hardware and lower level. So things like designing and building circuits, embedded systems, networking, maybe robotics, since you're doing more and more hardware stuff versus and sort of more more applied and practical versus computer science. I see. It's like more the theoretical ideas. Yeah,

Jem Young
same. I think what's what's Computer Engineering, I think hardware or in processor level, like very, very low level, how they interrupt things that we suffer engineers take for granted that someone created like, instruction sets. Yeah, that's why I look at

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
it. For instance, in my computer science program,

Ryan Burgess
we had classes on networking and class on computer architecture where we built the processor, but we did so like in logic works in software, we never built anything out of physical matter. Yeah. And I think they're from the sense of it is like computer engineering, you are doing some of that physical like, this is the hardware and probably writing some of the software. But I think gem Lauren, you both said, like at that lower level, like firmware, yeah, there. That's the That's the word I wanted.

Jem Young
I've actually seen a lot of electrical engineers and in software engineering that make that jump over. So I think there is a lot of overlap it, I think it's anything that gets you comfortable around a computer and coding can do pretty well. Mathematics degrees, people with math degrees of some sort, like applied math, or even theoretical math, I see make the jump into software engineering, usually they tend to go like more data, data science side. But yeah, there's a lot of roads that lead into actually coding, but all of them are like, being comfortable around a computer being familiar with, like, what coding is, to some degree.

Ryan Burgess
So does art history, not work? I

Jem Young
think you're gonna have well,

Ryan Burgess
I've seen so many directions. Yeah,

Jem Young
yeah, I think it would work. Again, anything that gets you familiar with the computer is going to give you a leg up. But there, there's definitely people that are amazing software engineers that have degrees that are nothing to do with software engine. And they're just fantastic. I mean,

Ryan Burgess
we had David Cimarron here, I don't know, five or 10 episodes ago, I lose track already. But you know, he works with us at Netflix. And, you know, he he was, you know, second career he moved from like, being a chiropractor to an engineer, there's no computer in that aspect. And it's kind of cool that you can come at it from different angles.

Jem Young
I mean, one of the best software engineers that I have the privilege to work with has a degree in communications, nothing to do with computer science, they are fantastic to work with, because you know why? They can explain everything that they're doing and everything that's going on, and their thought process, which is critical to being a good software engineer at scale. And they just knock it out of the park. And I was like, Ha, that's a degree I would not have considered to be like, in line with software engineering, but it is. So I think, heck, educators. Music is a good one, too. It's just like, understanding how patterns work together. There's a lot I think I this is more of a spicy take. And I've shared this before. I don't think everybody can code. I think it takes a certain type of mindset to have to sit down and be like, I want to solve these problems and think about things logically. And that's okay. I think everybody can produce some sort of code. But I don't think everybody's like born to be a coder that said, I don't think you need a particular background that will determine if you're successful or not. I think anybody can be successful if you have the right mindset. So I guess that wasn't that spicy. The medium medium, to

Ryan Burgess
mild, mild, spicy. Yeah. I mean, we touched on a little bit, too, I think we have little bits and pieces here already. I think thinking about some of those options that, you know, Lauren, you listed off right at the heart, you know, what are some of the pros and cons as you start thinking about? Like, let's start with colleges, like we addressed. Like, my first one is like, well, your four years in, you know, like, it's not as hands on, but I'm curious, maybe, you know, pros and cons around colleges

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
are so there's like different criteria that where you can see does this learning method, have this have this criteria or not? For college particular with like a four year bachelor's or more, it's just a ton of time and an often a lot of money. And I guess, you can think about like, the different methods how effective they are. So College is great in that it's structured, and has assignments and group projects and deadlines. So you to some degree, don't need as much like motivation, because you're just being told what to do. And you don't need to figure out how to learn. You're being guided through the learning process,

Ryan Burgess
really like that point is like it there is like some more guided learning, but you're also learning how to learn to like, I think that that's something that I've even reflected on is not doing the CS degree and the full four year degree is, yeah, you're during that time. So showing your right out of hopefully, maybe you're going right out of high school is like you're learning how to learn and it's even that whether you're taking a communications degree or history, whatever it is, is you're also just learning how to learn and I think that that's, that's important and can apply to like, even if you went to a boot camp after

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
then you can also think about like the pros that are related to web deaf College as the social education social experience. It also helps some soft skills that are helpful in the workplace like teamwork and group projects or being accountable to deadlines.

Ryan Burgess
Can you get that in blue? camps. I've never attended one. So I'm curious, like, I know there's like, some project work. So is it like, are you I mean, you, you're attending it with people. So there's always the social aspect. But do you get enough of that, like hands on collaboration?

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
Yeah, the boot camps I'm familiar with, like that friends have gone to it and talk to me about definitely have a number of group projects and deadlines, pure pure, like a pair programming. So like peer mentoring,

Jem Young
I like what you said about the the structure nature of a, of a college. And I think the breadth of topics you're going to touch on is not something you're ever going to get in a real real job. Like, you're never gonna learn networking, database, AI, operating systems, I'm like your normal day to day job, unless you have no idea what you're doing. And you're just like, all over the place, I think it's a pro, the chance to network, again, can't be understated in I think any career but software engineering is one of them is a lot of it, it's who, who you know, especially in terms of hiring or roles, or even company culture, trying to understand that it's really helpful. The cons of college are the costs, you know, a four year most most CS degrees, I know are five years, just because they're they're pretty rigorous, at least mine was. So you're gonna graduate with a crap ton of student debt, which is a very American problem. And one issue I ran into was like theoretical versus real world is you spent so much time on theoretical, you're like, cool, this was software engineering is and then you get to the real world. And you're like, I know big toe, and I know like how to, I know red black trees and how to balance them. And you're like, cool, I need you to like build this pop up window in JavaScript, you like what that to me is the biggest problem in college is in a CS degree is like, it's very fundamental, very theoretical. A lot of professors hadn't, some professors, I had this don't talk to them. But like, hadn't actually been software engineers in a real company. They just for like, bachelor's, master's, doctorate, and Cs, I'm going to be a teacher, which is great for, you know, fundamentals. But like, my favorite professors were the ones who had real world experience, like telling us about like, Yeah, this is UML diagram, sometimes you need it, sometimes you don't, here's how things work in the real world, that's me was very, very helpful versus like, here's the theory of software engineering, which is great if you want to go on to get your Masters and your doctorate, but trying to get a first job not super helpful. So that's something to look out for. I think, if you're evaluating programs,

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
and other programs, say, for getting a CS degree would be easier access to jobs, like if you're, if you're self taught or coming out of even coming out of boot camp, it can often seem harder to get your first job.

Ryan Burgess
That's a big one. I think like, you know, ultimately, why someone's learning to do this as they want a job. And I think that that, to me, is a really good thing to think about is like what is going to get you ultimately to where you want to be. And that's important. I think about even some of the college aspect, I think, Jem you were touching on is the like breath that you get, I think that's really important is, when you're first starting out, even if you've identified I think I want to be a software engineer, that means a lot of things. I mean, we've talked about this on the podcast many times is that like even just front end engineering is like a sliver. And even in that there's slivers on slivers on slivers of things that people specialize in the front end world. And to me, you don't really know where you want to specialize, or if you want to specialize, and I think So long story short here is I think that college is a really great route to go to stay flexible, you get more breadth of understanding, and then you can start to say like, Oh, I really liked this networking area, or oh, that sounds terrible. I don't want to do that, or I love databases are I don't, and you get a little more exposure than you would necessarily some of the boot camps will be very focused on front end. And that's not a bad thing. If you already know that. That's the route you want to go. But it's less flexible. And so I think that's one thing I really wanted to highlight, too.

Jem Young
Yeah, I met someone and they just finished their CS degree last year. And I was like, front ends pretty cool. We do a lot of cool stuff up here. And they're like, Nah, you know, it really strikes my fancy. What I learned from school is like machine learning and natural language processing is like, much more exciting. And that's something I know very little about. But they got that because they got to try a lot of different things. Yeah, school, they got to find their focus area. And I like to call out that front engineering is like a small sliver of software engineering, but it's probably overweighted because we're allowed. And, you know, you use a front end. So it's like, naturally what a lot of people are gonna buy swords. But yeah, there's a ton of software engineering that has nothing to do with you eyes or at or JavaScript or anything like that.

Ryan Burgess
Absolutely. And I think that so having that breath, I think is something that you don't want to shy away from. You know, it's like I always remember my parents telling me even in schools like oh, you don't want to close doors, blah, blah, blah, like I say, blah, blah, because I didn't care at the time, but I'm like, yeah, they're they're probably right. It's like keeping those options open and flexibility is really good. It also helps on the job even when you are in the front end. Let's just say that is like we you're like I got a job in the front end. You Do I have a CS degree it's like, but now I have understanding of some of my peers that I'm working with, you know, enough to be dangerous, like you're not doing it day in, day out, but you can talk and understand what's happening on that side of the fence and work really closely. So I think there's benefits to it.

Jem Young
Another pro of college, which may not seem colleges, CST is difficult. I think anybody who got one will tell you, it's a lot of work. My program, I think started with, like 100 people, when I started in the undergrad program, I graduated with two people, including myself, the dropout rate is extremely high for the CS program. This sounds elitist, because I've been through but I think that's a good thing. Like, it should be difficult, because by the time you finish, you're like I for sure, after all this crap, and all these projects, know that I want to be a software engineer, you're probably going to be pretty good at it. Because like you whittle away people that were like, I'm unsure. I know, that's, that's not necessarily fair, because some people don't learn the same way. Some people have just, I don't know, it's not ideal state for them to pick these things up. But for the people that do finish, I think are going to be good software engineers, because like they went through it, that is contrast, in my opinion to boot camps, which there's different level boot camp somewhere like, you actually have to be able to code a little bit or have some fundamental understanding before we let you in, which again, is difficult because some people are like, I just want to change careers. I'm a teacher. Now I want to become a software engineer. But I can't get into boot camps. I don't know how to code because I'm trying to learn to code. So I get that inherent like tension. But I think it's a good thing for people to have you looked up something about coding and understanding a little bit before letting people in, because a lot of boot camps I see. Not a lot, but I think we can all this some that we feel are probably not great or more on the predatory side of things like Lauren, sign up, sign up today. For my bootcamp, I guarantee you a six figure job in six months by the time you graduate. And like, you know, we're shaking our heads. But a lot of there's plenty of those companies out there. And software engineering pays a lot of money relative to other fields. And you can dangle that in front of people and like anybody can be a software engineer will teach you to code bla bla bla bla bla, the problem is when you make it, I guess that easy. Or make it seem like it's that easy to become a software engineer and get these high paying jobs, then I don't know, it's disingenuous. It we, we all are experienced engineers, we know it's difficult. There's those times when you're late at night, sitting by yourself in a room trying to solve this problem that only you care about. And like those are the moments that make you like a great software engineer. If, if anybody is selling, selling you, like there's a shortcut to being really great. And we are selling the shortcut. They're lying to you that there's a certain point you got to put in the work and you have to put in the time. And I think there are there are there are boot camps out there that like tell you like we know the tricks, we know the secrets, we can shortcut this path for you. If you pass like honestly a lot of money and people get to the real world. They're like, I can code a tic tac toe game in JavaScript hire me as a great software engineering. I'm like, Well, no, that's not really proving me telling me anything. They're like, what the school told me this is give me a job. And it's like, no, I'll stop there. But there's like, I feel like there's some like school that just shut down and like pivoted and is like one of the bigger schools is because they were they were like telling all these promises to people that like they knew were not true.

Ryan Burgess
It's interesting to you mentioned even in college side of things that like the basically the I don't know if his dropout rate or just like success rate is like I'm curious to is like it'd be interesting to know of people like where they started to realize like computer science is not for me, or it was really like, I'm right to the end of the road, but I just couldn't cut it because I remember even in in my two year program that it was it was fairly intense like it was crammed a lot into like they were long days, like they were basically an eight hour day and I believe we had a month or two for summer break. And so they were really intense days. And I do remember now thinking Hearing you say that jam it I think we started around 40 people in the program and like seven maybe eight graduated so it's like so maybe that's it too as it starts to weed out people just like gave them a taste of like, this is the right or the wrong thing for them. Like maybe they just realize it like that's not something I want to do. It's the same thing as like having that breath you know what type of software engineering you want to do is maybe holy, I don't want to do it at all like you don't I mean, I wonder I guess like, I'd be curious to know why people like didn't make it I don't know if you know that Oh,

Jem Young
I think for a lot of people was the math like you just you think software you think computers you don't think pretty much what we're doing it's just a lot of math underneath the hood. To me the math was one of the hardest parts to get get through like getting through calc three, and like the calculus three and like the other maths were very difficult to meet. I was interested in programming. I didn't care about the math and I think that throws a lot of people out at least from what I saw. Lauren, I don't know how your program was.

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
I was surprised to hear your your rate People who who made it to the end, I think for for my computer science program, this is at Dartmouth College. I think most people who like got through the the first class, which was a hundreds of people a term, or at least 100 plus people that term I guess, and was pretty difficult. So So I'm sure that a lot of people who are interested in going to getting into the major decided not to after that, but out of the people who got through that class and declared computer science major, I think most of them in my class graduated still still in that major,

Jem Young
that's pretty good. I think for the the pivot point in my program was data structures. It was like a well known pivot point where people get there, they can't get through. And it just, it's separated out a lot of people, I think, from there, it like dropped off precipitously,

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
I guess, if the the major was known for being a lot of work. And there were maybe three classes where they had like problem sets or assignments once a week, and I set up like I pulled all nighters once a week for the entire term, which could be more about my time management than the difficulty, but they were certainly a lot of work

Ryan Burgess
on the CS side of things. Like I don't know if this is for all programs, like for mind. Two is there was internships. And I think that that's another thing to evaluate, too, is that some of the colleges will have some sort of internship program, where you get placed in companies, and I think that is, for me, a very positive thing to think about, is because then you are, to your point, Jem, you're you get to network with people, you get some real world experience. And actually, when you are going to apply for jobs, you can point to say like, Yes, I have this CS degree or have some sort of degree. Pos, I worked at x company, and this is the types of work I was doing. Even if it was a short term, it's some experience because at the end of the day, the hardest thing to get that first job is experience typical of CS programs to have internships. For mine, it definitely wasn't part of it. Like the the school didn't set it up for you. But there were companies that like came to career fairs who who both pitched internships and jobs,

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
I didn't wind up doing any internships I wish I had, I think for those who did it, it was it was very helpful for learning a lot and getting a better sense of what programming job is,

Jem Young
I think since we're specifically talking about a learning path for front engineers, I kind of feel like the I don't know what you call like a trade school or something even associate's degree, where it's more, it's gonna be more practical, less theoretical, and more focused, like you can kind of get rid of a lot of the math and other things that you may or may never use, and your CS career might be like the sweet spot, honestly, in terms of like costs, you have the structure, just like Lauren was saying, you have the breath of CS degree, you have some barrier to entry and some some difficulty, unlike some other programs, and then, like you graduate with some idea of like, how to be a software engineer and how to code. Yeah, I actually think that's a pretty good option. Combine that with the self learning options, or in books that people can read, chairs, chairs, between that YouTube books, courses, like front end, masters, and Udemy, and all these other things you can get pretty far honestly, I mean, I will say get pretty far you can be as successful as you want. Given these options. I think what we're talking about here is like, if you're unsure of what you want to do, you want to be a coder, you want to be software engineer, but you're unsure which one you want to do. These are some options for figuring that out. But specifically for front ends, you can do a lot of that a degree I think actually you can do most things I have to agree Sir certain level,

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
going back to the house important experiences, I see it as like, I guess an important step in in learning. Like if you're if you're just trying to do if you're trying to learn programming, just through book learning tears, or through tears, reading docs, or tutorials or videos or video courses, you're not getting like practical hands on experience. And that's why I think like something like an internship, or an apprenticeship is a really helpful for for finishing, or going further in the in the learning process. So there's, there's this company that does internships that I like, it's a late stage startup called multiverse. And they do three months of self study, like guide, guided study beforehand, and then a five week boot camp, and then 14 months of working at a company and then doing continuing education. And it's a free program. Like the company is paying multiverse to do this, and then you're getting paid by the company when you're doing the 14 month internship. So I really liked it and I hope it expands. Jem,

Ryan Burgess
you touched on the self taught learning aspect. Clearly all of us didn't really go down that exact direction. But I know for me that I took on more of that on myself and felt like, you know, I had to learn more as I went, which I'm assuming both of you've done too. It's like it's not like you're boom, I have a CS degree. I know everything And there are ways to continue that learning journey. And it's like, you know, maybe it's you've never touched TypeScript. And you're like, Well, they didn't teach me that in my CS degree. So I need to go look that up. How do you both try and like, decide what's like, what are good material out there? There's so much. So how do you really decide if it's worth your time, and it's going to be the worth that investment

Jem Young
I am in, I am so biased towards front end masters in terms of a learning platform only because one full disclaimer I have on it, I get residuals from my courses, I have a few courses on there. So I'm obviously biased towards them. But I know it's curated content from people who actually work in the industry thought, some random dude who like read a book, and is now teaching a course on it, which like, there's nothing wrong with that. But I think front of masters a bit more specific. We're like, these are people with real world experience in the subjects that are teaching in generally. So that's usually like my first place I go to if I'm trying to learn a new subject, but really, right now, it's about like what's applicable in my day to day job. Again, I'd love to learn machine learning. And I'd love to learn that area of computer science. However, I personally have a hard time learning things that I just have no application for, like learning just to learn is not something that is like I'm super passionate about, but practical learning. I'm a huge fan of it, I will dive in and learn everything about it. It's how I know so much about cars because I work on a lot of my piece of crap cars and put them back together that was very practical to learn all that stuff that that's usually when I only think about self taught how I think about is like what what is practical today, what what will actually give me an advantage in my day to day job, or in my future career ambitions, like where I want to go,

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
I see self teaching both as like an option for how to initially learn but also something that everyone in the industry needs to do in order to work. Because Technology is always changing. And we always need to learn new things in order to do our existing job, let alone switch jobs. I sort of grouped the different categories and self learning into like docs and tutorials, podcasts, videos and video courses. So from like just YouTube videos or courses, like the front masters or individual people, like, let's see level up tutorials, West boss can see Dodds and then interactive courses, which are a little different in that there. There's some sometimes videos, sometimes text, but then there's your coding in a browser, like Code Academy, Khan Academy, and getting real time feedback of like how you're doing, which I really like. And then books, cheers, cheers. And I see them all as, as doing doing different things. So like having having different pros and cons and also like entering your brain in different ways. So I guess like there's, you can combine reading things, whether it's books, or docs and tutorials, tears, chairs, with video or audio both is like different different ways of learning, I guess there's there's like the the problem of tutorial Hell, where if people are trying to learn just through reading tutorials, or even following along with tutorials, like typing, re typing the code and running it a step can you can get stuck in tutorial help, which is like I can do these tutorials, but I can't do my own project. And that's often I think, due to not being able to get through things when you get stuck. So if I do that tutorial, that's that's the golden path, like, I know all of like the versions of the software, and what exact code to write. But if I deviate from that, since it's programming, you're going to run into some bug. And if you haven't learned the skills of how to figure out what the bug is debugging, how to Google, how to ask questions on StackOverflow, or search through GitHub issues, you're probably gonna get stuck. And yeah, and I guess I really like learning materials that take that into account and help teach that skill in addition to whatever like direct topic they're teaching. So West boss in his video courses, he he includes the the bugs that he writes, and, and his thought process that he's narrating while he's debugging it. And something also doing my book, cheers, shares is when I was developing it, sometimes I ran into bugs. And sometimes I would like fix them, go back and fix so that we didn't get to them. But a lot of the times, I would leave them in and then say later on in the in the book, oh, look at this, when you do this, this happens. How do we fix that? And sort of narrate my thought process in prose, so that they can, my readers can get that experience,

Ryan Burgess
like having that debugging and like that constant feedback loop of like, and leaving it there and talking through the thinking, I think that's amazing.

Jem Young
I'm glad you highlighted that. That's the inherent problem with online learning. If you're following that, like you said, the golden path of tutorials, you don't learn anything off that path. And you never unless you're like, gonna go explore, which again, you explore, you might run into a situation you get stuck, but debugging is one of the most critical software engineering skills unless you happen to somebody be magic and never read a bug in your life and work in systems that are perfectly harmonious with well defined standards and all these things, you know, this utopia, you're gonna run into issues and debugging is a skill. And that's one thing you, you can lose if you're just following along a tutorial versus Hey, tutorials, good for learning how to do something initially, but I'm gonna go build this myself, because I'll learn all the edge cases. That to me is what makes the difference. And I think, all a lot of my success in software engineering, it's been attributed to like those late night coding sessions, where I was just curious, and I ran, I like dug myself in the holes, and I had to get back out of them. But I learned everything about particular systems. So yeah, I've definitely seen a lot of that. I've seen people who I thought were good software engineers, but the minute they run into an issue that they can't google, it just like falls apart. And they're just like, completely stuck, because they have no idea how to get out of that. And that's my fear. With a lot of boot camps slash tutorial, I think driven people is like, you have to step outside of that you have to work on your own independently, it's the only way you're gonna become good at software engineering. Other than that, you're just yeah, I'll stop there. I have more on that. But that's a different topic for a different day.

Ryan Burgess
Well, maybe that's a good way to like to, before we get into pics, I would love to hear you know, each of us giving just one piece of advice for people thinking about their career and the path that they may take. Like, I think we've unloaded a lot of different information and opinions on this episode. But, you know, if you were to give one piece of advice, what would it be?

Jem Young
I'd say Don't Don't feel bad, you don't you don't need a CS degree to be a successful front end engineer. I think even the the the peers I work with are proof of that, that some people have no degrees at all. Some people just graduated high school and they're just amazing engineers. So like some of the best sought, like being successful in software engineering is about like your mindset. And do you take the time to code do you take time to explore, it really, really is the the golden age of learning, like really like, think about all the knowledge that I want to become, I don't know, an expert horticulturist tomorrow, I could probably do that. Now maybe not an expert, but like I can become very good at it, thanks to the internet. And honestly, I think the biggest challenge is not being overwhelmed by all the options you have for learning. So my advice and all that was fun, near you're passionate about and learn, learn the crap out of it, learn everything there is to know about it, and build something. And building something on your own is the fastest way you're going to learn something, it doesn't matter CS degree boot, camp, trade, school, online learning path. All these are just functions of amplifying your own passion and your own skill. And you just need to find where that areas and just lean into it.

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
My piece of advice would be learning public with Swift says Hi, by the way, so we can we include a link in the show notes. But the idea is that like once you learn something, put something out about it like maybe answer a StackOverflow question or or add a GitHub issue, comment, or do a tweet I found that like teaching others or just like summarizing what you've learned is really helpful stage of learning of like consolidating or or coalescing your knowledge. And it's also can be really helpful in getting getting feedback from others on adding ideas or poking problems in, in what you think you've

Ryan Burgess
learned. All those, there's whole, both really good pieces of advice. I think I'd said this a little earlier, but I'm gonna say it again is, I think when you're starting out is to really be flexible. I think that too. Oftentimes, people get it in their head that they they want to do a certain thing and not the ideal state for them. And you can start to get tunnel vision on that. And and I think just being open that you may change your mind. I know I've changed my mind along the way, and probably sometimes was a little too narrow focus at times. And I think it is really helpful to expose yourself to a lot of different things. It is going to help you in the long run, and then it will start to help you to really define what's the most exciting thing for you to dive deep into. So stay flexible. All right, well, let's hop into pics. In each episode of the front end happier podcast, we'd like to share pics of things that we've found interesting want to share with all of you, Lauren, would you like to kick it off,

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
or have got a couple pics? The first is my book. Cheers. Cheers, cheers. This has been a pretty good keyword. So I wrote it on a Graph QL it's called the Graph QL guide. And you can check it out at Graph QL dot guide. That's the URL. It is pretty comprehensive at 886 pages. It teaches you everything you need to know about Graph QL and I think it's pretty pretty concise, efficient way of learning Graph QL and it's I tried to make my code and I tried to make it as approachable as possible to newbies or boot campers, as well as have a lot of advanced topics, whether it's a client side events, react stuff or node server stuff, or about the spec. So that's number one. And if you can't afford it, feel free to send me an email Lauren at Garfield guide and I'll send you a copy and then second pick is not techie at all, it is a book called Five personality patterns, which the name belies sort of the topic it's not really like a Personality Typing thing like Myers Briggs or Enneagram. It's about developmental psychology and developmental trauma, it talks about the five developmental tasks for each human growing up as a child. And I talked about like when you're unable to achieve a certain task, what your coping mechanisms are and how that impacts your personality. So I find it really helpful because it's it's very clear way of explaining each each thing and it also gives you actionable ways of healing so for me it's helpful for healing my trauma and it's also really helpful for parents raising kids and doing their best to not pass down the baggage they

Ryan Burgess
got I love that you highlighted the parents thing because that is exactly what was coming to my mind is like cool like how do I prevent like causing my kids to grow up with my own insecurities are issues that's awesome Jem picks you up for us to this episode

Jem Young
got to fix I you know, no one sent me anything interesting on a fairly silicon in a while there's been some some funny ones, but nothing that I feel is worth. That was like really egregious. So send your fix as always on Twitter, Jem Yong, hashtag Valley, silicon. Those outrageous things, I love to see them that like why is this exists was this $1,000 Toaster around? I love that sort of thing my two picks are. The first one is you know, in, in an effort to be more focused and improve my mental clarity, I decided to clean up my desk, which is surprising. The amount of like, I don't know if your if your room was messy, your your mind tends to be messy as well. And I'm saying I'm super orderly. I'm actually very disorganized. But I'm like facing forward. What can I see in my vision, I want that clean, and I want a nice clean area. So I got an anchor USBC hub. Because I was powering so many peripherals like my microphone, my camera lights, like all these things off my laptop, the Mac laptop couldn't couldn't handle it, it actually broke my last laptop like the battery is bulging. And it just had all these cords running on my laptop was just a mess. So I decided to clean up and I got a USBC hub. So it's just kind of a big box that everything plugs into. And then now I have just one cord running to my laptop. And it is glorious. It's so much cleaner. Like mentally as well as like physically, there's more space on my desk because of this thing. I can power everything without my battery dying on my laptop when I unplug it for a minute. In that I also upgraded to a wireless keyboard wireless mouse. So other than my camera and this microphone, I really don't have a lot of cords running around. So I recommend a powered USB C hub if you can get one. They are quite expensive. This one is about $250. So they're complex. But to me, it's worth the mental headspace spending a little money, because this is where I spend all my time every day. My second pick was is Narcos season three, I have been through it just about I'm on the last episode, I don't know there's something very compelling about the narco story because like now we're in the timeline that I am aware of. It's like growing up as a kid and like, oh, yeah, I remember these stories and like seeing them play out on screen. Plus, I don't know international non English television, it's like increasingly become better and better. Like you have squid game you have Narcos Narcos from the Pablo Escobar days down in Colombia. I don't know I'm really I'm grateful that we have access to these stories from around the world. And we get to hear about them and not just American English perspective of things. So those are my picks.

Ryan Burgess
Awesome. I have two picks as well. One is a TV series, just season one has recently I think it just finished but it's called dope sick. It's an excellent series on Hulu, not on Netflix, but it's based off true events around the Purdue pharma and oxy cotton The show is really well done, but extremely terrified. Like I maybe knew a sliver of like the things that happen now it's like I'm, I'm scared for the mess that oxy has caused in the United States and how just like a drug company like Purdue pharma can just get away with that. It's it's wild, I highly recommend it. It's like a good drama but also like pulling from real true events that have happened. So it's really well done. And then gem I may have the valley silicon pick for you. But it's not a valley silicon. I'm just gonna put that out there. So I mean, it's getting colder, right like in a winter time. It's always great to have a nice blanket, and I have a great blanket option for everyone. Now, it's super comfortable. It is a little on the pricey side. Like I said I don't really think Jem gets to call it a valley silicon pick because It's amazing and I mean, I live in Silicon Valley so I'm just gonna say I can purchase this, but it's it's an Ugg mammoth tipped throw blanket. It is so comfy. You will not regret this purchase. I believe it is like $150 blankets. So it is a pretty expensive blanket but so comfortable. I'm so thankful for having one. So that is my second pick. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your great insights. Where can people get in touch with you?

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
Twitter. I'm Lauren DSR or Lorena starr.me Is my portfolio. It's been a pleasure. Thanks a lot for having me on.

Ryan Burgess
Awesome. Well, and thank you all for listening today's episode. You can find front end Happy Hour on Twitter at front end age age. You can find gem and complain to him all the time at gem Young. I'm at @burgessdryan on Twitter. Any last words?

Loren Sands-Ramshaw
books, books,

Jem Young
loving cheers. Cheers.