The Scrimba Podcast

🎙 About the episode

Meet Chad Stewart 🇯🇲! Chad is a Senior Front End Engineer and the founder of TechIsHiring - it's a hashtag, a community, and a transnational job listing channel helping great jobs and great engineers discover each other. 

In this episode, Chad talks about the inspiration behind TechIsHiring, plans for its future, and how he cultivated a community around it. More importantly, Chad will teach you how to cultivate community yourself! We all know we need to network, but networking can be daunting. Chad reveals how he networks, who he follows on Twitter, and why being part of a community can help you get jobs, grow as a programmer, and get help when you need it.

Chad and Alex also talk about different paths to getting into tech. Becoming a developer is not the only way, and we hope this interview gives you some ideas. Plus: computer bugs, the threat of AI, and water.

🔗 Connect with Chad
⏰ Timestamps
  • How Chad got interested in computers from a very young age (01:54)
  • There were literal bugs in his computer at times! (03:07)
  • Why do you eventually need to learn how to learn on your own so you can keep growing (04:35)
  • Also… Chad learned React using Scrimba! We had no idea. (05:32)
  • What is TechIsHiring, and how did it start? (07:36)
  • Community break! We’re highlighting tweets and LinkedIn comments from the past week. (09:27)
  • Starting a hashtag is not enough - here’s how Chad cultivates community and what the community says about it (10:57)
  • Becoming a developer is not the only way you can get into tech (13:28)
  • What TechIsHiring is about, and why Chad doesn’t want to branch out into other niches (18:51)
  • Quick-fire questions: Will AI replace software developers?
  • What is the most important thing that a new developer should focus on so they can get their first job? Leverage your connections to get jobs, but don’t forget to grow with your network (25:32)
  • How to create a network and get involved in communities if you’re not good at networking? (28:42)
  • Networking is a marathon, not a sprint (31:26)
🧰 Resources Mentioned
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Creators & Guests

Host
Alex Booker
Host of The Scrimba Podcast
Producer
Jan Gregory Arsenovic
Producer of the Scrimba Podcast

What is The Scrimba Podcast?

Learn from inspiring developers about how they found meaningful and fulfilling work that that also pays them well. On The Scrimba Podcast, you'll hear motivational advice and job-hunting strategies from developers who've been exactly where you are now. We talk to developers about their challenges, learnings, and switching industries in the hopes of inspiring YOU. This is the podcast that provides the inspiration, tools, and roadmaps to move from where you are to work that matters to you and uniquely fits your strengths and talents.

Chad Stewart (00:00):
You can't necessarily be an expert at everything, but you can leverage other people's expertise and interests and so you build that community that way.

Alex Booker (00:11):
Hello and welcome to the Scrimba podcast. This is a weekly show where one week I interview a recently hired junior dev, and then the next week an expert, like a senior dev or recruiter so you can learn how to break into tech from both sides. I'm your host Alex Booker, and today I'm joined by Chad Stewart, a senior front end developer, community building experts and creator of the TechIsHiring hashtag, maybe you've seen it floating around Twitter and LinkedIn. Follow about hashtag right now and you'll see a steady trickle of new and interesting jobs in tech. You can also post about what you are looking for. In this episode, you'll learn a bit about Chad's story breaking into Tech and the origin of the TechIsHiring hashtag, but also we're going to learn Chad's best advice to new developers learning to code based on his decade plus experience in tech.

(01:06):
Spoiler alerts, Chad believes strongly in the power of community and relationships, which yeah, sounds good, but how do you actually get involved and go beyond the awkward small talk or just lurking in online communities? You are listening to the Scrimba podcast, so rest assured I make sure to ask Chad to share actionable tips so that you can apply them on your journey. We'll get into it in just a second, but please remember to keep an ear out for your key takeaways from this episode. I would really encourage you to share those key takeaways on social media because it will help you remember them better while also promoting the show. We really appreciate that. Without any further ado, you are listening to the Scrimba podcast. Let's get into it.

Chad Stewart (01:54):
I got a computer at a really young age and it was just something I was very fascinated with. A particular memory I have is of a technician coming to fix the computer, ironically because an ant had found its way, this is Jamaica, so has found its way into it and burnt off the power supply and so he came to replace it or fix it. I just stood there and watched the entire time and I think that was one of the moments where I was really hooked. I was like, this is something that I want to do. I got more into programming as I got older and I started with C++. Well, to be fair, I really started with QBasic because I went to a summer camp and that's what they were teaching, but I started learning on my own with C++. I went to university for web design and interactive media, which is effectively a kind of web design degree. Got into HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and then I went to school proper and during that time I had freelance grows and yeah, I guess I got to it a little slower than most, but I've always been something of an interest for me.

Alex Booker (03:03):
That story about a fly getting into your power supply, is that true?

Chad Stewart (03:07):
A hundred percent every three months. At the time, this was way back in the mid-nineties, every three months some insect would decide that, "Oh, this place is a really warm place to go to." And then it would bridge a connection that it shouldn't be bridging and proceeded to die and burn that part of the machine out. We just didn't have a computer for months sometimes it's like, oh, well go find something else to do.

Alex Booker (03:34):
That is so funny because another word for insect is bug and it's like the original bug in your computer causing it to fail. I don't know how true this is. I've heard it as a kind of apocryphal story, but that's the origin of the word bug. A moth got trapped in a relay on an old computer and that's where the term bug came from. People always doubt it. Did that really happen? But now I'm hearing your story, I think it's very plausible.

Chad Stewart (04:03):
Computers filled up old rooms and so all manner of critters could get into it, I'm looking at my laptop now and it's the sizes of the vents and stuff like that is ridiculously small, but now you have these devices in the seventies that were so massive. I'm not surprised that things found its way into them and proceeded to just mess up all the madness that was in there.

Alex Booker (04:27):
So how did you actually go about learning to code? Did you get it all through that university course or did you have to teach yourself somehow on the side?

Chad Stewart (04:35):
One of the things that you kind of learn in software engineering is eventually you get to a point where you just have to teach yourself. You just have to sit down and learn, even if sit down and learn is really find a course and go through it yourself. So I would say my foundational web development skills I learned at school through my teachers and some of my schoolmates, but from there, you kind of have to find different tools or different resources to kind of continue growth. What I found is the things that were being taught at school weren't necessarily the things that I was the most interested in or if they were being taught at school, they weren't taught at the level that I wanted, so I would have to go out and ask questions and to be fair, it was a really long process. It's much easier to find resources now than even maybe seven years ago.

(05:32):
And funny enough, when I'm on the Scrimba podcast, one of the reasons why I'm so excited to be here is four years ago I was taking on a role and they were like, "You need to know React." And I was just like, "What is this React thing? What am I reacting to?" So I went looking for a way to learn React and I came across Scrimba and then I started poking around and-

Alex Booker (05:54):
Oh, you're kidding.

Chad Stewart (05:55):
Yeah, I really enjoyed the Scrimba course. I hope I pronounce his name correctly. Bob Ziroll is an amazing tea teacher.

Alex Booker (06:04):
Bob Ziroll. Yeah.

Chad Stewart (06:05):
Yeah. I really enjoyed the interactivity between the video and the editor. It just made connecting with the material so great. I had such a good time and I went back and I took another course, the Advanced React course, but you eventually have to figure out how to learn on your own and so you go from somebody kind of holding your hand and guiding you through to less of that. You kind of have to find more material and then eventually as you become more senior, you end up learning how to read technical documentation, understanding it and then leveraging it and also reaching out to other people to help you as well, so you build up that network of other educated people and you bounce ideas off of each other.

Alex Booker (06:52):
It has to be that way because there's always going to be something new to learn. New technologies are coming out and more likely you join a company, they have something proprietary or historical about their code that you couldn't have learned until you got there. Maybe you'll get some help, but you're going to have to go digging in the docs and understanding the public APIs and know when to ask for help. It's a really great point that you're just never done learning when you're learning to code. I want to make sure we segue the conversation to talk a little bit about a project that you are most well known for. It's called TechIsHiring, and you can often find tweets on Twitter under the hashtag TechIsHiring. I'll pass the microphone to you to tell people a little bit more about it.

Chad Stewart (07:36):
As of this recording today, I guess it would be April 19th, it's actually TechIsHiring's birthday today, this is the second year. I'm still taken aback by the growth of TechIsHiring and how many people have been following along with my journey and have benefited from this. I almost want to say countless people because there's like people who have benefited from this who I may not have necessarily known because they saw an opportunity and they followed up and they're in a position now and obviously they don't have to say anything, but it's been pretty humbling. But let me actually go back into the actual description. It's just a hashtag, right? There's hashtag on Twitter and LinkedIn at this point, if somebody has an opportunity or if they're looking for an opportunity, they can just make a post and add the hashtag to the post, and specifically on Twitter, I have a bot that retweets it to the account and so the account becomes the place that you can go to look for opportunities

Alex Booker (08:33):
You can follow the TechIsHiring accounts. I think there are maybe 16, 20K followers something in that region today and you'll constantly see new jobs as they're posted really. Did the Twitter bot survive the Twitter API changes and destruction that happened a few months ago?

Chad Stewart (08:49):
I mean, it's still there, but it may not be there. I'm just not saying anything. We have, I guess contingencies. We, I have contingencies for if or more I guess at this point when the APIs become unavailable, one of them is trying to generate funding to pay for the API, but that's one of a few other options. But yeah, I mean the bot's working right now unless something strange has happened.

Alex Booker (09:18):
No, no. It seems to be running smoothly from what I can say.

Jan Arsenovic (09:22):
Coming up on the podcast community is important, but how do you join one?

Chad Stewart (09:27):
You just say TypeScript rocks in Twitter and then you just talk to all the people that agree with you.

Alex Booker (09:33):
I'll be right back with Chad in just a moment, but first Jan, the producer and I wanted to read some of your posts about the show. Skulls or Arcots_9 on Twitter says, "I think every programmer newbie should listen to the Scrimba podcast because hearing from people that have gone through similar difficulties and making it big is a stress reliever. Thank you Scrimba." Thank you Skulls. What else have people been saying Jan?

Jan Arsenovic (09:59):
Blake Toliver also on Twitter says, "The Scrimba podcast episode with Saron Yitbarek and the comment about going from feeling like an idiot to feeling like a superhero really resonated with me. That's exactly what learning JavaScript feels like once it clicks. It's an incredible feeling." And over on LinkedIn, Don Hanson, aka DonTheDeveloper asks, "How often do you listen to audio podcasts?" It seems that most people listen to podcasts daily and Gina Russo left a comment saying, "I highly recommend the Scriba podcast with Alex Booker. There's always great advice and inspiration from both current and new web developers in the field." If you want to hear your comment or tweet on the show, join the conversation. If you're learning something from our show, why not post about it, like on Twitter or on LinkedIn. If you're feeling super supportive, you can also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, for example, and now we're back to the interview with Chad.

Alex Booker (10:57):
I got my first job as a developer because someone I followed shared a job ad. Luckily I was following them already, but maybe today they would've used the TechIsHiring hashtag and that's just really exciting. I know about it well, because I see it pop up in my feed sometimes and I know that you are sometimes doing Twitter spaces to promote the hashtag and get people involved. I'm sure you can't just start a hashtag from nothing and hope it blows up and I know you do a great job getting involved in the community to make sure people know about it and how to get the most from it. What kind of feedback have you been getting from your followers and people engaging with the hashtag? What do they seem to about it? Are people getting jobs because of it?

Chad Stewart (11:37):
Yeah, absolutely. People definitely reach out every so often to say, just kind of give their quick win is like, "Yo, I found something that was really interesting through the hashtag." I've met a lot of friends through that. You mentioned the Twitter spaces. One of the things that we try to do is we just try to be a little bit more informational. One of the things that I've been doing recently is kind of a day in the life of a particular type of role, so we did security engineer, we did UI UX designer, we did QA engineering. I just had a space on Monday about accessibility is very impromptu and then we recently did some work to just put the site up because we hadn't had a site up for a long time and actually even today I spent some time on, a feature that I want to add is just a basic kind of resources page because the spirit of TechIsHiring is really to have resources in a easy to find place.

(12:39):
If people are posting about jobs, the idea is that it depends on their network, so if they're really famous or they have a lot of Twitter followers, then they're fine, but generally a lot of people don't necessarily have that and so TechIsHiring is kind of a proxy for them to get that information out there. There's a lot of people being laid off and what I want the site to do is to be uneasy way to find resources to aid in your job search. That's something I'm literally working on. I'm putting together a design doc because for whatever reason I like writing and so I'm just kind of putting all my thoughts into something and then I'll just ask people's feedback and then the site's open source, so I'll ask for open source contribution, but it'll start development once in all things have been figured out.

Alex Booker (13:28):
It's interesting you mentioned a few different roles there, QA engineering, UX, accessibility, security. A lot of people when they think about getting a job in tech, they think coding, they think developer, but what I think I understand from you is that there are multiple paths into tech. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Chad Stewart (13:47):
A lot of people when they think about tech, they think about software engineering specifically, but that's not the only thing that exists. User experience is a really important thing, so you know have UI UX, I don't want to undersell it or sell it improperly, but I guess it's kind of a graphic design role, but it specifically focuses on getting your front end to be in a specific way so that your users are best served by your product, but there's multiple roles on our product engineering team and there's a lot of things you can do like documentation is a big thing, DevRel is a big thing, interfacing with the development community for a product or for tools. There's a lot of avenues to get into tech that isn't necessarily writing code.

(14:34):
What is being pushed in the open source space is the idea of people think of contributions as literally code that you contribute and it's just interacting with the community, like triaging issues, writing documentation, things like that. There's ways of how you can contribute to an open source project without necessarily having to write code. Open source is a really good example of how you can interface with a software project from multiple angles and I definitely recommend people following people on Twitter and just engaging in these conversations and being a part of Twitter spaces because you find out about all these ways that people got into tech. Just being a part of tech Twitter, you find out about all of these avenues to get into tech.

Alex Booker (15:28):
You mentioned a couple of good ones already, like DevRel and documentation. Another one that came to mind is community, like community management for example. I know that a lot of companies, they have roles like project managers or delivery managers who benefit a lot from being technical. There is also things like marketing ops I guess, which is where in companies you use technology, maybe it's code, maybe it's configuring software tools for example, HubSpots to enable sales and marketing teams.

(15:58):
There's also sales engineering I guess you could call it, where there are sales teams within companies selling a technical product. They either want to offer expert help to their customers so they can adopt the product or maybe if they're a really big customer, Salesforce is a good example of this, their customers spend so much money, it's a good investment for Salesforce to have people on their team who can help their customers migrate from one solution to another, move all their data over connect all the dots kind of thing, and it's fascinating because if you have this interest to work in tech and you're learning to code, there are so many possible ways you can package that scale of coding up and I think it can build into a bit of a job hunting strategy because for example, maybe you used to be a writer in a past life or a teacher or something, you'd be great at documentation and maybe even though you're not the best coder yet, you have that experience in writing, you are such a great candidate because you have some technical experience.

(16:55):
It's probably really hard to find people in those roles who are also technical and even if it's not what you ultimately want to do, it can be a really good strategy. For example, maybe you work in, IT supports for a little bit, you get the job because they see that you're great at dealing with customers and you have this knowledge of coding and tech, but you use that as your gateway to then get promoted later or meet people internally on different teams and get a transfer or maybe you just kind of parlay that experience when you apply for your next job in a company with a developer role. I think it's really important people know about all these paths into tech. Maybe there should be a resource with a list of all these different types of technologies. I'm thinking of a flow chart where it helps you pick maybe some potentially interesting avenues to work in. What do you think?

Chad Stewart (17:40):
Absolutely. I think one of the biggest problems we have in tech is just the lack of transparency in the opportunities that exist and to be fair, some of those opportunities are not, I don't want to say cookie cutter, but there isn't a straightforward path towards them. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do the kind of resources page, which is a very small project, but just having that clarity alone, just having the options there to okay, I can just go here and take all of these resources and it's like the resources and the people who wrote them or who provided them and then okay, there's people there say, I need more clarity, I can reach out to them. But I hundred percent agree, I would definitely for TechIsHiring to be more than that. To be fair, I'm trying to stay away from the kind of career advancement, getting better as an engineer only because the problem space that I'm already in, I haven't a hundred percent solved and so I don't want to dilute the efforts and there's other people doing excellent work there.

Alex Booker (18:51):
You are more interested in that first step, which is how to get the job in the first place less so how to level up at this point.

Chad Stewart (18:58):
Personally I'm interested, but again I don't want to dilute TechIsHiring's value. I think it would take away from what TechIsHiring is doing now and also there are really great services like Taro from Rahul Pandey and Alex Chiou. They are doing a lot for teaching people how to be like, you're already in the role, how do you get better as engineers? I'm a part of their community and they do an excellent job, so it's like I can just point people there it is like, "Oh, you already have the job? This is a really good avenue of getting better." And then you can also say there are other Discord communities with strong engineers that really cultivate community, I can point them there as well. I also want to kind of point people to places that are already there as opposed to kind of try to build it myself out of some level of arrogance. It's like, "Oh, I know better than these people."

Alex Booker (19:54):
That's such a developer trait as well. I think it's called not invented here syndrome where, as developers we often want to build it ourselves even though there's already a really good solution out there. I think it's wise everything you are saying and we can link to Taro in the show notes as well. I think people will enjoy checking that out if they're looking to level up a little bit. Chad, I want to get into your advice about how to get a job as a developer, but first how about we do a round of quickfire questions.

Chad Stewart (20:20):
Oh sure, go ahead.

Alex Booker (20:24):
What was officially your first coding language?

Chad Stewart (20:27):
So I'll say QBasic. I want to say C++, but I think I've wrote a QBasic first, so I'll say that.

Alex Booker (20:34):
And what about looking into the future? Are there any emerging or interesting technologies you want to learn next?

Chad Stewart (20:39):
I've been very much into system design. I guess it's less about technologies and more about techniques. I really interface more with how people think about delivering software and the tools that they kind of choose in terms of very specific technologies, I'm not as knowledgeable about bundlers as I would want to be, so I'm poking around Viat and stuff like that and I'm mostly JavaScript, TypeScript developer, but I'd like to spend more time in compiled languages I haven't put the effort into as yet, but I've been trying to move myself into learning Go and Rust because they're really interesting. I had a friend of mine from a community, he's a security engineer, I think he's good by doing PTR. On Twitter, he talked about this idea of, "I really hope I don't get this idea wrong." Because it's his idea, but the idea of Rust of expressing correctness through your code and that's something that's particularly interesting to me as JavaScript is a very wonky language, there's a lot of gotchas, there's a lot of ways that things fall apart.

Alex Booker (21:48):
What do you like to drink to fuel your coding sessions? Tea or coffee?

Chad Stewart (21:53):
Water. I drink a massive amount of water actually. When I was working, I would have two bottles of water right here. I would have three or four bottles of water, so I would get to work at seven o'clock and by 12 there's maybe a half a bottle left out of those. So water, a hundred percent water.

Alex Booker (22:09):
You got to stay hydrated. It's important. Do you follow or look up to anyone in the tech community we should know about maybe someone we can look up on Twitter or YouTube and follow and learn from after this episode?

Chad Stewart (22:21):
I would say the closest person is Angie Jones.

Alex Booker (22:24):
Angie Jones, are you kidding? Angie is coming on the podcast in a few weeks.

Chad Stewart (22:28):
I look up to her because to be honest with you, when I first joined Twitter, I didn't know too many people in tech and I think she was the first person that really welcomed me to tech Twitter. She's the person that kind of brought me in and she really hyped me up in the beginning. She's definitely the person who I would say a hundred percent followed. My entire career came from really following her because she would speak to people and it's like, "Oh that person's interesting." And then I would follow them. My tech Twitter journey really stems from following her and her reaching out and welcoming me to the community.

Alex Booker (23:08):
We'll link Angie in the show notes for people to check out and then make sure you're subscribed and check back in a few weeks because Angie's coming on the pod. I'm super excited to have her on. We've been trying to make it happen for a little while now. All right, Chad, last quick fire question. Do you think AI is going to take over coding? I

Chad Stewart (23:25):
Mean it's in such a weird state right now, but it's a tool that we're going to use and I think as our supplementary way of getting information instead of Stack Overflow. I think AI, ChatGPT, Copilot and stuff like that will definitely be there. How I see it is it would be kind of like VS Code is that killer app that everybody kind of leverages to up their productivity. The big scale right now is replacing engineers. It's definitely not going to be like that at all. It's just going to be a way of enhancing our own productivity. To be a hundred percent honest, I am not like the most knowledgeable. This is from my experience with having conversations with people that are more knowledgeable than me and just kind of how I interact with it and how I see other people interact with it. I think it's going to be a great supplementary tool. It's not going to replace the engineering field. You're not going to have some person off the street say build me an app in ChatGPT and give them how to structure the application deployment. You know what I mean? How to manage the application and stuff like that. So I don't think we're going to be replaced anytime soon, but it will be a great thing to have in your toolkit.

Alex Booker (24:37):
Definitely a tool that needs a knowledgeable programmer to equip and use. Chad, that's all for the quickfire questions. Thank you so much. I wanted to take the conversation in a slightly different direction with the time we have left. I mean how long have you been in software for now would you say? How many years?

Chad Stewart (24:54):
I started writing code professionally in 2009, 2010.

Alex Booker (25:00):
So you've been at this for over a decade now?

Chad Stewart (25:03):
Yes, yes. I mean had some times where I was more doing schooling than anything else, but I've been at this for a while, yeah.

Alex Booker (25:10):
What do you think are the most important things that a new developer should focus on if their goal is to get their first job as a developer?

Chad Stewart (25:19):
So you want to learn, you want to kind of get better, but the thing, I wrote an letter recently. You have the series Letters to a New Developer.

Alex Booker (25:28):
From Dan Moore, right? Dan's also been on the podcast. That's awesome.

Chad Stewart (25:32):
Yes, he reached out to have me write a letter and I'm very much moved by the idea of community, have build relationships and maintain those relationships. I have a friend, I feel like I've been saying that a lot during the podcast.

Alex Booker (25:46):
You're a popular guy, what can you say?

Chad Stewart (25:48):
Lots of friends. I had a friend who shared this idea with me. He is a [inaudible 00:25:54] from Twitter. He has kind of this idea of leveraging your relationships to grow your career but more from a technical knowledge standpoint where it's like you can't learn everything, right? There's just way too much stuff in software development. You can learn as much of the fundamentals as you want and kind of build from there using first principles, but you can't necessarily be an expert at everything, but you can leverage other people's expertise and interests and so you build that community that way. Say for instance, I'm not necessarily a security engineer, but I know people who are security engineers, I can reach out to them when I have a question and talk to them and I can leverage their expertise.

(26:42):
And another thing that I've been thinking about in terms of kind of community is one of the things that I find really interesting in a successful career is you tend to be around the same people, even if they go off in different directions, I don't want to say you tend to be around the same people, but you're in the same kind of generation of people and so when you're learning, you're learning with those people as well and you're growing with those people even if you're not necessarily talking to them. So maintaining those relationships, if they go off and say for instance they go to another organization, they go off and they become a senior at that organization. If you're looking for opportunities, if you have that relationship kind of maintained, you can reach out to them and that's an opportunity right there. And it's the same way. So you network along with them and you kind of grow with the same people. Again, you may not necessarily know them, but there's like a plethora of people that's growing with you.

(27:42):
Build relationships, maintain those relationships, leverage those relationships, contribute to those relationships. Having those relationships are extremely important. They're how you're going to learn new technologies, learn about the new technologies that exist. They're going to be the thing that kind of lets you get into those technologies quickly. They're going to allow you to leverage opportunities. There's so many things about having strong relationships and it doesn't have to be this networking thing where you go to an event and you say, "Hey, I'm Chad, I want to network." You know what I mean? Just talking to people. The example that I give is you just say TypeScript rocks in Twitter and then you just talk to all the people that agree with you and you just do that over and over again and that's networking, that's building relationships, you know what I mean? I think people undervalue the importance of relationships. So that's like the one thing that I would tell every person in the tech community to do.

Alex Booker (28:42):
Chad, I love seeing how fired up you get about community and relationships. I can tell we've touched on something very close to you. What is your advice to someone who is new at tech and wants to get more involved in communities? You really emphasize developing those deeper relationships rather than very transient ones where you just say "Hi, hello." It is a bit difficult I think to go past that small talk sometimes. I'm understanding from you it's so worth it, but how'd you bridge that gap between the small talk and the more meaningful relationships?

Chad Stewart (29:14):
One of the things, and to be fair, I hundred percent do this by accident, but one of the things that I've kind of learned is just being there, just being consistent in appearing in these spaces. If you find a space that you enjoy, just go there. I don't want to say you don't have to be memorable, but you don't have to do a lot to be memorable. You'd be surprised how memorable you are by saying, "Hi, I'm Chad." Five, 10 times and then all of a sudden people are like, "Hey, your name is Chad, right?" Clearly, you know what I mean? Just being consistent and going to those places. There's a few communities that I've been a part of, a community that I shout out all the time is the Virtual Coffee Community from Becca.

Alex Booker (29:58):
You were on that podcast quite recently, I think even?

Chad Stewart (30:00):
Yes, I was. I think it was a couple of months ago. If Angie Jones was the first person to introduce me to tech, the Virtual Coffee was the first community that I was really a part of and you just go there and you just say hi and you just interact. It doesn't have to be particularly elaborate, but you just go there and you just be consistent. That's the most important thing.

(30:23):
The problem is finding these communities in the first place. That's kind of part of why TechIsHiring exists. Obviously it's more for job searching, but it's kind of bridging these gaps because it's like that was the difficulty that I had finding communities to be a part of. And it's a little bit easier now, but that's always the big issue. So once you find these places, you find that you mesh well with the community members there and you just show up and you don't even have to have elaborate interactions, but just show up, say hello, participate one or two times and you'd be surprised over a couple of weeks, couple of months you're participating even more. You've learned so much. Just be passively in the room. There's another community I'm a part of that I'm just in the room half the time and they have deep conversations, deep, very deep technical conversations and just being there, you learn so much. So just show up, just go there.

Alex Booker (31:26):
I agree with everything you're saying I think is very good and impactful advice. A lot of people treat it like a sprint more than a marathon where they have to arrive with a bang. They have to meet everybody in that first meter. But no, it's a marathon. By showing up consistently, people tend to people they find familiar. It's kind of a strange thing honestly. And the biggest indicator of that I think is when you think back to your days in school, you probably don't really remember the day you met your friends that you now remember from school or still know at school. It just so happens when you're in the mixing pot together. There are even people who may be in the first year or two of school you never interacted with, but eventually you found your way to each other. And it's just to say that you can't always engineer that or predict it, but the first step is to show up and be there. So I think that's some brilliant advice right there. Chad, and actually a great note to end on. I really appreciated your time today. Thank you so much for coming on, chatting a bit about TechIsHiring, your journey into tech and your contagious enthusiasm for community and relationships. It's really cool to see.

Chad Stewart (32:32):
Thank you so much for having me again. I'm just really excited because it's like Scrimba was such an pivotal part of my growth, so I'm just really happy to be here.

Alex Booker (32:41):
I had no idea, but that's amazing to hear. Chad, thank you so much.

Jan Arsenovic (32:45):
If you want to know more about letters to a new developer, check out the show notes for the link to our interview with Dan Moore and don't forget to subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. We have a lot of great interviews coming up, including but not limited to an interview with Angie Jones. This was a Scrimba podcast, episode 112. The show is hosted by Alex Booker. You can also find his Twitter handle in the show notes. I've been Jan the producer and we'll be back next Tuesday.