Susie Conley

Career advise from July Evans: Write a “brag” document. It’s useful in negotiation, in annual review & promo conversations, and when you least expect it. Why: you can’t expect your manager to know everything you’ve done. Plus you need to combat your own human cognitive issues (memory, recency bias, self depreciation, etc). What to do: maintain a... See more

8:05 - Building a public presence. Learning something. And then turning around and sharing that is learning in public. Essentially blogging got Shawn the job he has today… And also helped him transition from a front-end career to back-end. Became known for this essay: https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public/

23:00 - 31:00 Discussion of striking a balance between maintaining the status quo vs coming up with new ways of interacting with computers so we don’t get stuck in a rut trying to translate everything too directly.

• It goes back to first principles. By and large, the reality is that a lot of usability is driven by the cognitive architecture that... See more

About Cal Newport's book, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” (Cal debunks the long-held belief that “follow your passion” is good advice.) Career capital is the accumulation of specialization and skills, as well as reputation, network, and people who know you and your work well. Kevin Kwok, a tech investor applies a compelling P/E ratio analogy to... See more

0:00 - You want to achieve mastery in some sense in your life. So all these things come together and so for some people community becomes very addictive. I’ve certainly been in communities about products or games, where [those topics] became 2nd importance. Because the community became the main driver to come back to this group of people to nerd... See more

Shawn's tip for when to Specialize vs Generalize: Specialize in peace time and generalize in war time. Having a mastery of a domain is highest reward. Yet when you are on a small team, that's usually when you generalize, because no one else is there to do things.

Write about the most interesting problem in your domain. Problems are inherently more attractive than solutions. Inherently more timeless.

41:40 - The danger of developing on top of platforms is that you're basically always at risk of the platform eventually replicating their own version of your app. Take for example what Apple did with Sherlock app. It copied to create what is now Spotlight, a feature built into the platform. 42:30 developers on a platform should realize they are... See more