Announcer: You're listening to the Call Kent Podcast where Kent C. Dodds answers questions and gives insights to software engineers like you. Now let's hear the call. --- Sebastian: Hi Kent, I am a Colombian software engineer with four or five years of experience, and I have reached a point where I want to transition from building software to becoming a significant node of value for the community. I'm currently producing high-quality Spanish content on YouTube and Medium to empower the Hispanic ecosystem, and I have launched several SaaS platforms as well, but my goal is to bridge the gap toward becoming a recognized figure who speaks at meetups and conferences, but I am struggling to architect the actual path to get there. How do you strategically navigate the transition from a senior engineer to a recognized leader, and what are the milestones you would focus on today to build that authority without burning out? Thank you! --- Announcer: That was the call. Here's what Kent had to say. --- Kent: Hey, thanks so much for the question. Yeah, this is a good one. So a couple of things that I want to call out first is that having a couple of SaaS products that are kind of your proof of work is definitely a good idea. And this is something for myself as an educator with a pretty good following and somebody with good influence in the ecosystem, this is something that I value highly, is that the influence that I I have is not just because I have is not just because I am popular, but because I have proven through like building actual things that people actually use that I do have a really solid proof of work and technical foundation, which I think that is important. You're going to need to continue to do that over time as well. Yeah, so as far as like your desire to have a bigger impact impact on the ecosystem on the ecosystem, I think that's awesome. I think that's awesome. I think that's awesome. I think that's awesome. And especially in the Spanish-speaking part of the world too, that is an area that I cannot reach myself. And so we definitely need people like you who can reach folks who don't speak English or are more comfortable with Spanish. And so I appreciate what you're doing. I think that's awesome. Yeah, so as far as like what direction to go into it, I never really came up with an official strategy for myself. It was always just creating or sharing what I was doing as I was doing my regular work. And so, and like following my own interests. And so all of the courses that I've made over the years, the blog posts that I've written, all of that has been driven primarily by just my own interests. And the stuff that I was actually working on myself. And yeah, I do relate to your hesitation to jump into doing this sort of thing and not lose your hands-on engineering edge that makes your teaching credible. That is something that I was really concerned about for myself when I started in this industry as an educator, on the educator side of things. Is that I would lose touch with reality and what it's actually like. And you definitely will. In some respects, I haven't worked on a team of engineers in quite a while. I do get a little bit of that thanks to open source and that sort of thing. But yeah, for the most part, I don't. So you do have to acknowledge that you're not going to be able to have all the experience of all the things. But that's actually something that everybody goes through regardless of their working circumstance. Like if you're working at an enterprise, now you're losing touch with what it's like to work in a small company and vice versa. And so whatever you're doing, you are going to miss out on some experience. That said, if you make yourself highly available to people and you develop a good intuition for recommending things for like how people should do things and whatnot. And then you get a good feedback loop where people come back to you and tell you what their experience with your advice was. Then you can kind of have a bit of a proxy for that. You can kind of be an unofficial consultant. That's what I've gotten out of my office hours and the call can podcast and my students that I teach at workshop in my workshops and stuff. So anyway, what I would suggest is that you just continue to build out your offering to the community and the free stuff that you create and the content that you're producing and create a tight feedback loop. So make an ecosystem or community where people are coming to you with questions and where people can help each other and that can kind of guide what you're doing. And yeah, definitely use your proof of work, your SaaS products to guide the way that your software or guide the things that you are teaching people. I hope that's helpful. I hope that's helpful. Good luck to you. I think this is awesome for you and anybody listening. If you're looking for somebody to follow in the Spanish world, then yeah, give this person a look. You'll find the YouTube channel link and medium in the description of this podcast episode. All right. Have a nice day. --- Announcer: This has been the Call Kent Podcast. Learn more about Kent at kentcdodds.com and get your own questions answered at kentcdodds.com/calls.