Niching Down

Photo by David Travis on Unsplash

I think I have finally decided what I want to pursue as a Developer and that is Developer Relations. I love helping others get to where they want to go and more than that I love telling them about things that will help them get there.

The Working Genius blog posts that I wrote a week or so ago are an example of that.

Why?

Well I know that I want to help others get to where they want to go. But in tech the best thing to teach is the thing that you just learned because it is fresh on you mind.

I graduated my coding bootcamp about a year ago and I believe I have a years worth of experience that can be incredibly beneficial to those changing careers to help them both choose what to learn and set themselves up to get a job.

I love coding and eventually we have to chose something that we are going to focus on, aka chose a niche.

So I want to help people who are changing careers into tech set themselves up for getting their first software job by teaching them the tech that I think will make them the best developer they can be.

What to Teach

I think it is important that these technologies help the learner understand fundamentals and standards so that whenever they are looking for and applying to a job they know foundational skills that transcend the technology they learned.

So I am looking at doing some series and blog posts on the following (not in order, just thoughts):

• hyper.io — Teaches Document Database Design. Basically hyper will teach users how to write well architected code. It is a Software Architect as a service. It is so good! I cannot wait for the world to get their hands on hyper.
• remix-run — Where hyper teaches clean architecture through use of the service, Remix will teach Web Fundamentals through use of the platform/framework. Remix boasts of spending more time on MDN than on their actual documentation website.
• Svelte & SvelteKit — Svelte has been described as glorified html. I would honestly teach svelte to a beginner before teaching html, css, and javascript separately because it does all three of those just in a single file. The only reason I would teach html, css, and javascript separately is so that the learner knows they are three separate things.
• MVC — This is not necessary a big deal but many larger companies use the Model, View, Controller architecture pattern for code. The primary reason for teaching this is to reinforce the teaching that you need to have a well defined architecture for your applications.
• Functional Programming — One Day in the far future haha. Occasionally I will go scuba diving into functional programming. I like this analogy. If I stay down for too long I run out of oxygen. But I can take it in doses and the more I learn the deeper I can go. I want to help people learn FP because I believe its benefits are enormous but I want to have a better understanding first.

So ultimately I am niching down by just making the decision that I want to teach beginners and help people change careers. Some of these technologies are ‘newer’ but they are based off of standards and best practices that I believe will last for a long time to come.