Talking Success As A Developer, Conference Design & Development, and Much More:
Charles Max Wood is a coach and podcast host at Top End Devs. He's building a system to help developers advance their careers by building their skills, personal brands, and networks. He's been podcasting about programming since 2008. He lives in Utah with his wife and 5 children.
Chuck is also the author of “The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job.” The podcasts he produces reach more than 80,000 developers every week.
Today’s Top 3 Takeaways:
- Keep learning and keep practicing.
- Build your network beyond your local community.
- Growing into success with Conferences.
Today’s Guest & Resource Links:
Our Mentioned Influencers:
Watch us on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/W09mt6J6WHQ?si=iRoyZSd1X59nHOpz
Timestamped Show Notes:
00:30 - Introduction
03:30 - It was it was actually super fun. So the conferences were both in this old engine building factory that had been refurbished into like a venue for events. And so they have all of the old. Like the cranes in there and stuff. I mean, obviously, they're not moving it or using it. But yeah, you go in and they had a big screen down all the way at the end of the room. And they had speakers rooms upstairs. And anyway, it was it was very, very cool, then you a lot of the people that they had at the event, were some of the people that were kind of pushing the state of the art forward in JavaScript. And so and some of them I knew already, some of them we'd had on like JavaScript Jabber, which is our big podcast on JavaScript. And so yeah, so just meeting up with him in person, you know, getting to know him shaking hands. I recorded a handful of interviews.
10:00 - The difference is, and it's kind of the same thing that I did with Microsoft for five or six years, is if you go as a speaker or influencer, it's a different thing. If you're going as an attendee, sometimes even some of the conferences just going as a speaker, it's different than going as an influencer. If you're one of the people that they go out of their way to get to the conference, then a lot of times, they'll pull out all the stops.
19:30 - The other version of that is none of these technologies standstill. None of them do. So even if you're working in a place that is hey, we're going to stick on the version we're at, we're gonna use the technology we know. You find all kinds of opportunities learning the next thing in the technology you're already an expert in. Maybe you want to go with indie game development, which is one area that I want to branch into. It's super popular, and there's a ton of stuff going on, and it's getting easier. So if that's an area of interest for you, by all means, if you want to move into management, then you're talking about project management, people management and helping them do essentially what I'm doing just one on one.
22:20 - The video game standing in for real life for military applications, you know, where maybe you replicate a cockpit, or combat situations where you're carrying a weapon and things like that. With AR and VR opening it up, you don't even see the gun, you carry the prop, that is a game controller. But going beyond that, like office professionals these days, a lot of the stuff that they're doing, the interactive stuff that they're learning, that's all being done with game development technology. They're using Unity, which is an engine for building video games. So from there, it's not just watch a video and then click on the right answers in the quiz anymore, which is what I did in a past corporate life. But now it's literally you're working through a work function, or you're documenting and outlining some process that you have to do at work
31:20 - Final Words Shown Below…
Our Final Words of the Show:
The way that I got into the conference thing in the first place, was I had a listener to one of the shows, who wanted to have a Ruby track at a conference that he was helping organize. So he set it all up, they got us to come out, I actually lined up for a bunch of my friends to come out as speakers. We went up to Vancouver and while I was there, there was another podcast called .NET.
So .NET is Microsoft's technology stack. They were doing a series on agile development. It's a methodology, it's a set of principles for running a team. They asked me to join the panel, because I had a different take on things because I came from a different background. So I joined the panel got to know the guys that ran that show. It turned out that they were the ones that wound up one of those guys who ended up organizing the podcast setup at the Microsoft events. So sometimes it works to get to know the people directly involved. But sometimes it helps just to get to know people and empower people who eventually introduce you to those people.
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