Growing with Developer Tools
A few years back, I worked at a new company called Netlify. You may be aware of them, but it is a tool to deploy modern web applications if you are not continuously.
I became an early Netlify user while I was looking for a place to host my middleman blog. At the time, GitHub Pages only had instructions for Jekyll.
A year later, I joined Netlify as an employee. I was not aware of the term DevOps at the time and did not join to become an expert at spinning up web infrastructure. I was the model customer for a full year before joining the team.
I didn’t realize that a large number of engineers felt the same way as me, and today Netlify has over 1 million developers using their platform.
But this newsletter is not about Netlify’s user growth. And it is about you growing with the tools as they gain adoption.
Awesome developers are shipping several new tools every month, and the ones that stand the of test the time are the ones that growing their community and support. What I realize now is that I am now a Jamstack expert. Even though I have barely shipped more than one web app a year in the past three years, I understand how and why folks are choosing specific technologies and possibly where the industry is going.
I joined Netlify as an early customer, and I learned about the web in a way I could not do in my Bootcamp.
Thanks to my experience there, I learned Docker, Kubernetes, serverless functions, performance management, build tools, and so much more.
You see, while Netlify was growing a product looking for its market fit, they put out content educating folks how to limit their build size and how to deploy unique web apps with out servers for no money. I watched from the front lines an entire developer community shift from npm start to npm build.
I am grateful I took the plunge and tried out the new tool at the time. Without that experience, I would still be a decent developer, but I can sit here and say that I am an expert developer in something because of that choice.
If you are looking o grow as a developer, I encourage you to try a new tool and build a project with it. Leverage their support team and be willing to learn.
Angel Investment
If you are looking for a new tool to try, consider Supabase. I recently participated in their latest funding round as an angel investor and plan to share more on that in a future newsletter.
Podcast
Hear are more of my thoughts podcasts
- TDS 76 - Early Adoption Developer
- Ep. #70, JAMstack Consulting with Núria Soriano and Josep Jaume of Codegram
YouTube
My Desk - the Perfect Live Coding Setup - 2021 Office tour
I work, stream, and film professional YouTube videos from my desk. This is the video where I walk through the equipment that makes that happen.
In this stream Shy and Brian, from the GitHub DevRel Team. They checkout both the updates to the GitHub Marketplace and Actions. Brian shares some of his favourite actions, and then he and Shy spend some time adding them into Shy’s 11ty photo gallery.
How I got into DevRel This conversation is actually going to be about my first conference talk and sort of how it changed the trajectory of me becoming a junior to senior engineer, full time engineer in San Francisco and now being a developer advocate. And it really came down to one goal I had, which was giving my very first conference talk which is what this talk is going to be.
Live
Places to find bougie live
Join GitHub and panelists from Red Hat, Lightstep, and RedMonk as we explore DevOps’ future, from developer experience and automation to security and compliance.
Making Twitch Bots that talk to the GitHub API (APAC)
Join @mishmanners and @bdougie in building a chatbot for the GitHub Twitch channel.
Remember to join the Discord and say what’s up!