[Weekend Drop] swyx on Dev Community & Deep Work vs Learning in Public

Audio Source: https://share.transistor.fm/s/d717f16d

Follow Julia Che's work on Openess, her new open source funding/community startup.

Topics Discussed
 
in sequential order, but timestamps arent available bc the audio has been cleaned.

• Swyx shares about his background, previous career in finance, Gamestop & shorting it, transitioning to tech at age 30, community building.
• What it means to be a GitHub star, what’s so appealing about open-source & why participate?
• "Open-source sets tech apart from every other industry because we share so much.”
• Figma CTO Evan Wallace’s design tool, esbuild.
• The future of open-source, corporatization of open-source.
• The biggest pain points in open-source.
• GitHub sponsors, Patreon and HackerOne.
• Learning in public, React and the beginner's mind
• Deep work vs. learning in public, Andy Matuschak’s working with the garage door up.
• On creators being enslaved by their own structures and systems in producing creative content.
• Living your life in high-definition, idea velocity.
• Building a personal brand as a developer.
• The Developer’s Journey & community building.
• Diversity, equity & inclusion in open-source.
• Where open-source devs could use a helping hand.
• Governance
• “Ultimately software is an expression of values and if you fundamentally disagree with the values of the people running the project, then you will eventually disagree with the code as well because it will just encode the values over time. Having welcoming and inclusive values is important.”
• Swyx’s favorite open-source project: Svelte.
• Hawker markets in Singapore, “Food is the great equalizer in Singaporean society because rich & poor people eat the same things.”
• How to get started in open-source as a developer.
• Space in the community for non-technical contributors.

Transcript

swyx: [00:00:00] I was recently on the building openness podcasts with Julia Che. Julia is building a startup to solve open source funding and build open source communities. This is her first time doing a podcast interview, so there is a little bit of awkwardness here, but I thought it went off relatively well. We talked a little bit about learning in public, being a GitHub star and building developer community. 

So here it is! 

Julia Che: [00:00:26] Swyx I am so excited to chat with you today. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this inaugural interview of this podcast. You're my, literally my very first guest ever on the show. So I couldn't be more delighted, honestly, So you have a pretty strong following of dev community on Twitter.

And so they know who you are, but for others who might not have come across you before, can you share an overview about yourself, who Shawn Swyx Wang is and what you're currently up to? 

 swyx: [00:00:55] Sure. And thanks for having me. It's it's an honor to be considered and I'm happy to help launch your podcast, which is pretty exciting.

I'm Shawn. Aye. Work at Temporal is head of developer experience. And I'm originally from Singapore. Mostly work in New York previous career in finance, where I did everything from currency derivatives to treating GameStop in, shorting it and actually making money. But I transitioned to finance transition to tech at age 30, and then essentially did a bootcamp.

And since then I've been, I've worked at Netlify AWS and now at Temporal on the side, I do quite a bit of community work. So I used to be the moderator of our stature, BRGs, which is the subreddit for reactive Oliver's the largest JavaScript framework. And that, that grew from like something like 40,000.

When I joined to over 200,000 now  I recently left that to run my own paid community, which I run for my book. And that's available at learninpublic.org as well as a, another framer community, just cause I like it. But this time starting from zero, I literally started to, I think we just hit like 9,000 or something like that.

And we're going to launch our third conference this month. So, yeah. I like community stuff. I like blogging. Happy to talk about any of that. 

Julia Che: [00:02:10] Awesome. Yeah. I mean, you're a very active member in the open source community. You're even a good pub star. So I'd love to know what that means.

And furthermore, what open source means to you? 

swyx: [00:02:23] Honestly, it's just. Beta test slash super user program. Just like a lot of companies have like some kind of recognition for people who are  maybe prominence users. Also, they give you some swag. So this microphone that I'm using is what I'm good hub. And yeah they give you events, look at some of their upcoming features and it can ask you for feedback.

So it's a little bit of a status in recognition in exchange for some work, but every one of us love give up, get up so much that we don't mind. Cool. 

Julia Che: [00:02:54] And so what do you find appealing about open source and what makes you want to participate? 

swyx: [00:02:58] The source is one of the things that make makes tech.  So different from every other industry.

Particularly, I came from finance, sorry, let me turn off my discord because it's going to do that maybe in a few minutes. Well, opensource makes sets, sets tech apart from every other industry because we share so much. So there are two, there are a few benefits coming out of that. One is that we have to duplicate work a lot less.

Like we can just stand on the shoulders of giants a lot faster. And And build faster, in theory, the practice is that it's very messy, but in theory, if you find the right things that you can reuse, that you can use them forever and it's totally free and you can inspect the source, you can change it.

It's a really wonderful thing. The second thing is that you actually get a lot of scrutiny over the highly used open source. And I think some of the, I don't know who said this, but. No sunlight is the best disinfected. Whenever people write software there's bound to be bugs, especially security holes.

And when and more people looking at it, the better. So that's a very strong reason to open source. But me personally, coming into the industry, I think that the personal reason is that it's a great way to learn because that the code is a source of truth. And you can literally just open up the code and read what, what goes on under the hood.

Not a lot of people do it, but every time I do it, I find I learned something new and it really is a reliable way to level up very quickly. So I think I owe a lot of that. It's open source. Like when I. Was in finance. A lot of the way that we used to learn was like you go to college, you learning some textbook and then you pass some CFA exam and then you try to work on your investment thesis or your pricing model, and that's proprietary.

And you do not share that with any other banks or hedge funds.  And I realized that's fine, but it's very zero sum. We have to look at things like I win only if you lose.  Whereas in tech it's a fundamentally more positive som...