Sam Sycamore joins the podcast to tell his story of transitioning into programming after listening to the podcast episode we recorded with Danny Thompson.

Danny told his story about how he went from gas station attendant to programmer in a very short timeframe.

Sam has now made a similar journey from landscape construction to programming and what inspired him to make the switch.

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Special Guest: Sam Sycamore .

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week on our panel, we have AJ O'Neill. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yo, yo, yo. Coming at you live from my garage. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Steve Edwards.

STEVE_EDWARDS: Hello from a very cool Portland, which is nice after 115 degrees last week. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Oh man. Amy Knight. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Hey, hey from Nashville. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Dan Shapir. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Hey from Tel Aviv where it's much cooler than Canada, apparently. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Weird. Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. That's me. I usually say I'm and I left that off. Anyway, go check out devinfluencers.com slash podcast. We have a special guest this week. That is Sam Sycamore. Sam, do you want to introduce yourself and tell everybody why you're awesome and famous and all that good stuff. The main character on Twitter. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Hopefully not. Yeah, thanks for having me, Sam Sycamore. Coming to you from a remote cabin in the woods, in the Santa Cruz mountains of California. It's really a pleasure to be here. I suppose the reason I'm here is because I learned to code in the last year and have managed to transition to a career in tech from pretty unconventional background. And it's been a wild ride and I'm excited to share more about my journey. 

 

This episode is sponsored by Sentry. Sentry is the thing that I put into all of my apps. First, I figure out how to I get them up on the web, then I run Sentry on them. And the reason why is because I need to know what's going on in my app all the time. Yeah, I'm kind of a control freak, what can I say? The other reason is, is that sometimes I miss stuff or I run things in development, you know, works on my machine, I've been there, right? And then it gets up in the cloud or up on a server and stuff happens and stuff breaks, right? I didn't configure it right, I'm an idiot, and I didn't put the AWS credential in, I didn't do that last week, right? That wasn't me back. Hey Chuck, I can't connect to AWS. The other thing is, is that this is something that my users often won't give me information on and that's, hey it's too slow, it's not performing right. And I need to know it's slowing down because I don't want them going off to Twitter when they're supposed to be using my app. And so they need to tell me it's not fast enough and Sentry does that right. I put Sentry in, it gives me all the performance data and I can go, hey that takes three seconds to load, that's way too long and I can go in and I can fix those issues and then I'm not losing users to Twitter. So if you have an app that's running slow, if you have an app that's having errors, or if you just have an app that you're getting started with and you wanna make sure that it's running properly all the time, then go check it out. They support all major languages and frameworks. They recently added support for Next.js, which is cool. You can go sign up at sentry.io slash sign up. That's easy to remember, right? If you use the promo code JSJABBER, you can get three free months on their base team plan. 

 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I have to say that I'm the one that got you on the show and I'm really excited about that. And the reason is that I don't even remember how it happened but I ran into a blog post that you posted about your entry into coding and this career that you're a trajectory that you're on and lo and behold, turns out that we had a small hand in your success which I'm really, really proud and excited about. And that's the fact that one of the things that started you on this journey is that you listened to our podcast episode with Danny Thompson. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yep. Yeah, that was September, I want to say, of 2020. I was pretty close to rock bottom, thinking about like any way I could do anything else in life other than what I was doing. Found that episode with Danny Thompson where he shared his story of how he learned to code and landed a job in tech. And it just kind of blew my mind. And I said, okay, if that guy can do it, there's no reason why I can't do it. And yeah, here I am, what, nine, 10 months later? It's pretty incredible. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, and Danny's a terrific guy and he helps so many people. So yeah, kudos to him.

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, for those of you who are interested in that episode specifically, it's episode 442. I put the link, it'll be in the show notes. And I totally agree with Chuck. It's an amazing episode and Danny's an amazing guy and he's helped so many people also in a very relatively short time period that it's pretty amazing. And it seems to me that you're also helping a lot of people on their way, like by kind of documenting your journey, I want to say. Would that be an accurate description? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. Danny was really the first person that sort of introduced me to that ethos in the tech industry, which I think is something that's really unique. And I've, I've seen it over and over again, you know, first on Twitter. And then as I got to know people in the industry individually, like so many people have just said like, Hey, I, I am willing to go out of my way to help you because some other people took a chance on me, helped me out when I was trying to get my foot in the door. And I feel that I owe it to the next cohort of people following behind me. And I just, I fell in love with that. And it's all that I want to do with my free time. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: So can you tell us a little bit about your background? What were you doing around September last year, which amazingly enough isn't even a year ago?

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, it's pretty incredible. So September 2020, I was working in landscape construction. I'd been doing carpentry, landscaping, farm work, horticulture for the last like five years or so. I really enjoyed the work. I love building stuff, creating things, being outside, working with nature in any capacity. But I sort of reached a point where I realized I had acquired all of these skills over time. I was doing really high quality work that I was really proud of. And I'm like five years into this career and I'm living paycheck to paycheck. And I can't afford health insurance that I now actually need in my 30s as this career is taking its toll on my body. And I sort of, I hit a low point in September when my dog got injured and needed a very expensive surgery that I couldn't afford. It was one of those, I think the average American has less than $1,000 in savings. And I was one of those people. I always have been one of those people. And suddenly I was faced with this emergency expense that was not only an amount of money that I have never had, but I couldn't even imagine saving up that amount of money to do this thing that my dog needed, right? Or else like his life is ruined basically. And it kind of broke something in me. Like I said, I'm in my 30s. I'm single. I don't have any kids. My dog is really the closest thing to a kid that I have. I couldn't afford to take care of him. And so it kind of like, it forced me to look around and say like, okay, I can't afford, I could barely afford to take care of myself. I can't afford to take care of this dog. How will I ever have a family in the future? Like that's just not a, it just seems so far beyond reach. And, and that kind of, yeah. And then like I said, I, I, for whatever reason, I just started toying around with this, this crazy idea. What if I could learn to code? I guess I probably heard like Joe Rogan or something like five years ago on a podcast randomly just being like, Oh yeah, just anybody could just learn to code and get a job in tech, right. And I don't know, for whatever reason, I was like, okay, maybe I should take that idea seriously. And then like I said, I started looking around the internet to find as many stories as I can. I could to like prove myself crazy. Like, oh, I must, I must be wrong about this. This must not be possible. Just looking, looking for any reason not to do it. Right. And then yeah, like I said, I heard that the episode with with Danny Thompson, where he shared his story of waking up at like, what, like two, three a.m. to teach himself how to code before he would go work doubles at a gas station. And I'm like, well, okay, I only work one job. So certainly I could find the time to teach myself. Right. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, that's an amazing attitude. By the way, did you have any affinity or like traction to coding before this happened, was this any something that you toyed with, I don't know, growing up in your teens in school or whatever, or this was something that was totally new for you. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, so one thing that was sort of unique about my story is I've spent the last 10 years or so freelancing on and off and self-publishing a lot as a writer. These days I say that I've worked a lot of odd jobs over the years to fund my hopeless addiction to writing. And so in that regard, I have a lot of experience with WordPress and Squarespace as a publisher that when I first started looking into coding, it was like, okay, which direction am I going to go? Should I learn Python? Should I learn Java? JavaScript? Where do I go? The more I looked into it, I'm like, okay, well, I've messed around with templates on Squarespace and rearranged the font sizes and colors and stuff. I guess I understand how that works. But yeah, I mean, in terms of coding, like I learned HTML in high school 20 years ago. I think it was not the newest, whatever the newest version of HTML is now. It was like the one before that. But, uh, 

DAN_SHAPPIR: yeah, you'd be surprised how HTML, the more things change, the more things stay the same, I guess, but, but yeah, I certainly appreciate where you're coming from. So if I'm like trying to put it in context, what you're saying is that you had a certain experience with certain well, let's call it web platforms or web publishing platforms, but not really any experience with actual programming or actual code writing. And that's something that you decided to try to get into. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Beyond like opening HTML and body tags was pretty much all new to me. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: So how did you go about it? I mean, you listened to the podcast that got you excited. I'm really glad about that. You I assume you listen to other stuff as well. What did you do next? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: I feel like step one was free code camp. I went through the HTML and CSS modules there. And that was sort of like my test for myself. I feel like that's really good beginner advice that I've heard echoed in a lot of places. It's like, if you think this is something you might want to do, just run through the modules on free code camp. See if it's something you actually care about want to keep going with. And so that's the approach that I took. And then I guess I found Udemy after that and a course by a fella named Jonas Schmetzman. Whatever his basic beginner learn HTML and CSS course, you build out a website. And basically, as soon as I built that first website, my test for myself was to rebuild it from scratch. I immediately started thinking about, like, oh, if I can build a website like this, I bet I could sell a website to a local business. And so when that idea crossed my mind, then I got really excited. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: It's funny that you mentioned that because I have a brother-in-law that I was talking to and he was talking about, well, I want to get into React and he works for a cabinetry company and I was like, oh, well, why don't you, you know, cause he'd been playing with React. He'd taken some online courses. I was like, well, why don't you build some local businesses, some websites, and that never materialized. And he still works at the cabinetry company, which is, it's fascinating to me just from the sense of how many people they kind of get as far as you've got, you explain that you've got, and then it gets a little uncomfortable. And they're like, eh, right. And so I'm kind of curious as we get through this and through your journey, what kept you going? Right. I mean, you know, you've got your, your issue with your dog. Hopefully that got all cleared up. But yeah, you know what, were you still trying to make that money or was there something else that was pushing you through? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, that's a really great question. And another thing that I recommend to new learners wholeheartedly like the thing that has made the difference for me was finding a community of other learners who are doing it at the same time as me. I was really so lucky to have stumbled upon this fellow this would have been in October. So about a month into my journey, I was just starting to dip my toes into JavaScript, looking at like really basic logic, being horrified by if-else statements, that kind of thing. I found this fellow on Reddit named Leon Noel, who was running a free seven-month, like free no strings attached bootcamp that he would be live streaming on Twitch. And he specifically set it up targeting people who were affected by the pandemic in some way, folks who'd been facing economic hardships as a result of the pandemic, and also marginalized people, people of color, that sort of thing. And I just thought that was so incredible. Not only this person was like, giving away this free education, but actually doing it for the express purpose of activism. For him, it's a form of activism to give this information away for free. And so- the idea that I could be a part of that community really hooked me. And so I signed up immediately and became like one of the biggest, loudest supporters of that community right away. And yeah, getting to know those people and being plugged into the routine of showing up to these classes, talking to people on the discord server, swimming through the trough of sorrow together. Right? Like that has really made all the difference. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. That's a question or that's a point that. I kind of raise always when we have the sort of discussions with people who went through, well every story is unique, but there's like this overarching similarity of people entering into tech at a relatively late stage and without the benefit of let's call it a structured form of education, where I ask myself, what do you do when you get stuck because an example that I give is that I have my eldest son is actually on the total other side of the spectrum. He's studying for a CS degree in the university, which happily is much as expensive here in Israel than it is in the States by an order of magnitude or two. And even though he's studying, you know, in a class with a professor teaching them and teaching teacher assistants and whatnot, He occasionally gets stuck with some problem or something that it's difficult for him to tackle on his own. So obviously he has his classmates that he can try to figure it out together with, but he also has me that he can fall back on some of the technical stuff. And I have to ask myself when you're like, you're on your own and you're studying, the material could be excellent. But we all have our mental roadblocks. And we all run into situations where something just doesn't immediately click. So my question is, how did you get through situations like that? What was the community or the people that you were able to lean on or get assistance from in order to overcome these challenges? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah. So the Leon Noel's 100 Dads learning community, like I said, was amazing was really the first place where I kind of found my footing and started connecting with other people who were learning the same stuff at the same time as me, which was, which was really crucial. And then, yeah, as I, as I continued out of my journey, I started becoming more active on Twitter because Leon really stressed the importance of networking throughout the bootcamp. He told us over and over again, like when you're looking for your first job, you're not going to get it because of your coding skills, because you don't have coding skills yet. You're going to get the job because people know who you are, and they like you and they want to work with you. And so I really took that to heart. They're like, okay, I have to treat networking as though it's a part of my learning also. And so I became a lot more active on Twitter, really just sharing what I was doing and what I was learning as I was going. I would post a ton of the questions and get really amazing answers from a lot of times like senior devs who would just show up to be nice. Then over time, I just started forming more individual relationships with some of those people who really stood out and who demonstrated to me that they wanted to go out of their way to help me, which again, just kind of blows my mind that those people are out there looking to do that. But yeah we're all in this together, right? I had a really eye-opening experience a few months ago when a fella, now a friend of mine, Nacho Yacovino, reached out to me with some questions about a thing that I was working on. At the time, you know, I was like six months into my coding journey, and here he is, this guy who's been at it for several years, and he's like asking me some questions about the specific technology. I was working with headless CMSs specifically. And he was asking me questions about like, oh, which one should I use? You know, do they have good docs? And I'm like, wait, you want help from me? And it really just like, what I realized is that like, we're all in this together, right? Like there are so many things that you could know and could go into. There's no way you could ever know all of it. And even if you looked at it a few months ago, there's a good chance you've forgotten it by now. And so that really like that conversation made me realize like, oh, right. Like if I see that somebody knows about something that I want to know about, I should just ask them about it. And I've, yeah, really that's, that's been a winning approach. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I'm going to play the old curmudgeon here and talk to you about how fortunate it is that you have the resources you have now. When I first started getting into web development about years ago in the, uh, in the jupy world, all I had, we had, the only chat we had was IRC if anybody still remembers that and uses that. And then we would have issues for different modules or where you could go back and forth. And I think Stack Overflow was starting to be a thing back then, but we had, you didn't have Udemy or Egghead or any of these online training sites of which there are many, there's few things on YouTube. It was really, there wasn't even any, some tech books out, not a lot, not near as many as there are now. It was just very limited. But to your point, the biggest thing for myself back then was just the community. Uh, back then IRC chat was where everybody went to help. We were using mailing lists, you know, email mailing lists. You know, there was no discord. There was no, no stuff like that. So the, the point being not that, uh, you know, I had to go uphill to school and three feet of snow, both ways type thing. It's just that for someone wanting to, to learn tech anymore, the there is just an embarrassment of riches out there in ways to learn. And similar to the number of JavaScript frameworks that were out there, you sort of got to pick and choose what you're going to focus on and then, you know, sort of dive in instead of trying to get something from everybody, otherwise you'll just overwhelm yourself again with, with learning resources and what you wanted to want to learn. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: So I wanted to ask you, so you were investing all this time and effort into learning into community building and so forth. How were you making ends meet? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Very precariously. So from September through December for about four months, I was working full time in landscape construction while I was learning. And so, yeah, so I would, I would wake up around 4 AM study for a couple hours and then go work my manual labor job and then come home maybe study for another hour or two if I could stand it. And then in January, I had to leave my landscaping job. I have what's called sesamoiditis, which is a really fun way of saying I have chronic inflammation in the ball of my foot, which was something, it's a pain, like chronic daily pain that I was kind of just tolerating for several months on the job because it's like, what am I gonna do about it? I can't just not be on my feet for a month while I recovered. And so yeah, around, it's basically like the beginning of the year, January, that injury just sort of reached a tipping point where I couldn't be on my feet. And if you can't be on your feet, you can't work a physical labor job. And so I had to resign. And that was my sink or swim moment back in January. Once again, I'm so extremely fortunate to have had this community to lean on and specifically said the instructor, Leon Noel, who really encouraged us all by this point, you know, a few months into the program, we knew HTML, CSS, we knew the basics of JavaScript. He's like, listen, like as a rite of passage, you need to go out into the world and find somebody to sell a website to, because you have the skills. And you will be amazed with yourself when you succeed. And they're really stoked about it. And you make good money doing it. And so, so yeah, I said, okay. This is now apparently the only way that I could potentially make any money. So I'm just going to go all in and see what happens. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And, and how did you do that? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Well, it started with cold emails. So I, I found a website for like lead generation where basically you would type in keyword like home remodelers or landscaper. So in my case, I specifically targeted businesses in my area that were relevant to my previous experiences because I figured I know how to speak the language of carpenters and landscapers and home remodelers. So it'll be that much easier for me to build a website for them and understand the kinds of problems that they deal with. And so I found a website to scrape leads from the internet. It would spit out an Excel spreadsheet with the names of the businesses, their contact info and their websites. And then I would sit down in front of my computer and look at every single website one by one, which took many, many hours. And I would basically just look and see if anything was broken, if it was super outdated. I was especially looking to see if their website wasn't mobile responsive because I figured that's an easy win that I can sell. And yeah, just like I said, many, many hours looking websites one by one. Probably looked at about 500 sites in my region and whittled it down to a hundred businesses that I contacted. And two of those turned into sales, which then replaced my landscaping income for almost two months. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Wow, that's amazing. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: It was pretty wild. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I'm guessing that your background in writing actually helped you kind of copyright the sites, right? I mean, a lot of, you know, it's interesting. So because we think about the tech, we think about HTML and CSS and JavaScript and whatnot, which is, which are obviously important. But what we were forgetting is that when you're looking to build a website for some business, then there's also the, it's probably even more important that you get the content right. And that you get the layout right and the design and to add the required features and capabilities. So I think it's an excellent idea that you went for businesses that you understood. I assume that that was really helpful. I'm not sure that you should have limited yourselves to the particular geography of your location. I think you could have looked across the entire States potentially. I mean, what does it really matter at the end of the day? But...But how did you go about that? I mean, in terms of the content, of the text, of the layout of the site, of the graphics and images and stuff like that, how did you go about that stuff? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, that's a great question. And I completely agree. I realized when I started pitching these websites that I really did have a competitive edge in the fact that I have a background as a writer. And so that's something that I could present as what separates me from the pack. And it's interesting to bring up the regional thing also because one of the things I noticed is that people who, almost everybody who responded to my cold email said that they especially liked the fact that I was somebody local and that they always said like, oh, if I'm going to hire some do my website, I want to hire something within my community. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Interesting. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, I thought that was a unique something unique that I really didn't expect to come out of it. I didn't expect to see that result. But yeah, in terms of how I actually pulled it off, one of the unique side effects or one of the beneficial effects of having audited 500 websites before I landed a sale is by that point, by the time I actually did have a website to build, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what works really just like complete and total eyesores, horrible user experiences, where it's like super obvious that the person who made it has no idea what they're trying to get the viewer to do on the site. And so yeah, but by the time I had audited so many hundreds of websites, I felt like, okay, I know enough about what's going on here to give them something that will be functional, at least. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: There are a couple of things here that I just wanted to call out. One is that when I started out freelancing myself, I had like three years experience, maybe four in writing software as a professional. But yeah, a number of the people that I worked with, they picked me specifically because they either lived in Utah or because they were here frequently for other things. So one in particular, he was out here all the time because he had business interests here for his main business. And because his...his daughter and grandkids lived out here. Right. And so he'd come out every few weeks and we'd go to lunch and talk through things. And people really appreciate that face to face. But it's not the only thing, right? I had plenty of clients that were all over the world over the six years that I was freelance. And so it works both ways. But yeah, there are definitely people that they like to be able to, you know, they call you up, they can buy you lunch, they can sit down with you and see you. And I think the other thing that I wanted to call out here was, yeah, the writing background is something that people see the value in. And I think also you picking people whose business you understood also made a lot of sense. And I just want to give people something to go off of if they're trying to take some of these same steps. If you can speak the lingo of your customers, if you can talk to them about what they really care about it makes it a whole lot easier for them to trust you to do what they need you to do. And so all of this stuff kind of comes together to give you enough in common with the people that you're trying to sell to that they feel like they know you and feel like you'll be able to do the kind of job that they want. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I can speak to that. I remember when I was at an agency a number of years ago and a bid or an RFP came across my email for a nonprofit that I had been a fan of for a few years. And so I jumped on it and bid in and actually got the project. And then later I ended up going and working for them for five years. But the reason I was told that the reason that I got that project was because I was a fan and I understood who they were and what they were about. And I wasn't just some web developer who's just doing something for money. I was into their organization that really can make a huge difference when you're when you're bidding on a project like that. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So one thing that I'm curious about, Sam is your portfolio. Do you do you have a portfolio that you reference or when you're is this really just you have a couple of messages back and forth on Twitter and email? Or do you send any sort of portfolio resume to your potential clients? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, so when I when I was pitching to those like first couple hundred through cold emails,I had basically a... We'll call it an aspirational portfolio. So I built a couple dummy websites, basically, for non-existent businesses that looked like sort of... So basically, I built a website for a fake landscaping company. And I built a website for a fake home remodeling company and just wrote some really generic copy. And then, yeah, and just presented it as, hey, here's what I...can do for you. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Does that count as fake news? 

AJ_O’NEAL: No, that that's legitimate. Well, unless you're telling them, unless you're telling them that you can, well, I guess you can landscape for them. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So it's a legitimate fake site, right? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: No, I think it's totally legitimate. I mean, if you tell them, look, here's a site that I actually sold to somebody when you actually didn't sell it. That's a problematic statement because that's an outright lie. But if you're telling them, look, here's an example of a website I built, it is a website that you built. So it's a perfectly honest response. I think it's totally legitimate, certainly when you're starting out. I don't see any issue with that. What I'm really curious about, though, is how, when you started, how did you price yourself? I mean people obviously have a tendency, at least certainly at the beginning, to underbid themselves. And I'm using story about that, Chuck. But you were literally breaking into the field having no experience about how much you should charge. I mean, I've never freelanced. If I start to freelance tomorrow, I have no idea how much I should charge for that. Literally none. So I'm really curious about what you did about that.

SAM_SYCAMORE: That's a, yeah, it's a tough one. It's a tough nut to crack when you're just getting started. Once again, that was another place where I was able to sort of lean on my, my prior experiences as a writer in the sense that, you know, I've done some freelancing in that capacity and had to go through the process of, of pricing a project. So even though maybe I didn't necessarily know how much to charge for a website, I was at least familiar with the process of determining a price. But yet, I guess another thing that I was doing when I was auditing all those websites is sometimes designers will or web developers will link to their agency site at the bottom of the page, like in the footer or something. And so whenever I would stumble on one of those, I would do some deep investigating with them. And I found in my area wherever I could find pricing information, I was seeing that most people were charging at least $2,000 to build a pretty basic landing page, online business card website, and then $3,000 or more if you wanted WordPress or some sort of content management system. And so I figured, okay, well, if $2,000 is what the established people are charging, I'll just propose a little bit less than that because the most important thing to me is to get some real clients so that I have a real portfolio. And so yeah, with the first client, I think I proposed $1,200. And they said yes right away with no friction. And so that was how I knew, okay, that's a little bit too low. So let's go a little higher next time. And so the next one I bid, I went for $2200 and that one received no friction at all whatsoever. So I figured, okay, I guess I can charge a little bit more. And that's sort of been my approach. It's like, it's one of the things about it is I don't want to charge an hourly rate, like, especially when I was getting started, I had absolutely no clue how long it was going to take me to build this stuff. And so I don't want to charge by the hour. Maybe it's going to take me 20 hours. Maybe it's going to take me 100 hours. I'm interested in is the value-based pricing. What is this going to do for the business? That's really tough to quantify, especially at the beginning. But yeah, all of that is to say that I am looking at it more as like, what sort of value is this thing going to provide to your business? And again, I know having come from remodeling, landscaping, carpentry, that if a business can land 50, $100,000. And so that $2,000 website is pennies compared to what they could be bringing in. And so I think it requires that sort of, you got to look at it from that perspective of how much value am I bringing. Right. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So just to play devil's advocate at the same time, you know, you're supporting yourself, right? So this is your, this is your income. This is providing for your taking your dog to the vet, you know, and, and paying your bills. So I understand your point, but I think just by devil's advocate, I think you sort of got to take that in consideration as well. My thought would be if you want to do the fixed price, what I've always done is figure out hourly rate, how many hours you think it's going to take you to do it in something that's reasonable, give that to them as a fixed price. Then obviously you're taking the risk that something comes up, maybe that they haven't told you and now you're eating out of your profits while you're addressing that. But at least some sort of reasonable dollar value that isn't based solely on what you're doing for them because you know, just like their business, your business as well. And so, you know, that's where the whole negotiation comes in and, you know, finding something that's agreeing agreeable to both of you. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So, yeah, the value based pricing is something that we talked about quite a bit on the freelancer show. So I'll put a few links to that, those episodes in as well. 

AJ_O’NEAL: And so Sam, I was wondering, have you found a good way to determine ahead of time now, what the value that is being brought to the table is, or have you just kind of stuck with the model of if I don't get friction, I raise a little more? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, that's basically been my entire approach up to this point. My hope is that as I, as I progressed, you know, I'm, I'm not doing these kinds of projects as much as I was a few months ago, but I'm hoping that I will get some sort of feedback from my prior clients that well, so after I built and launched my first site for a client, he said he immediately got a bunch of compliments from his existing clients, which was really sweet. And so then that's some real feedback that I can take, which boosts my confidence. Somebody who is not involved at all really liked the thing that I made. So yeah, it's really just been okay. So my approach to pricing is always like, I want to start with the highest price. I want to pitch the Corvette model to the client. And then I try to be very intentional about laying out, here's every single thing that the premium plan is going to get you. If the price is too high, we'll just start crossing things off the list and the price will go down from there. But I've always taken the approach of start at the top, work your way down if you have to. And I've almost never had to actually negotiate down people just accept the price that you give them if you present with authority. 

 

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AJ_O’NEAL: So one thing that I've done, and it'd be interested to hear other from the other panelists too. I've asked the question. If we could solve this problem for you, because the way the clients I worked with, they have different problems. It's not websites, it's they need some sort of thing built a lot of the stuff I've done has been in the Iot space. And so it's very custom per each. And so the thing I ask is, so if we could solve this problem for you, and just get it done tomorrow, what is the price that you would be happy to pay, you know, you could budget for it and for me, that's worked as a way that I can get them to go first with the pricing. Cause I might think like, ah, this is only going to cost me or $2,000 worth of time, you know, for, for what I want to do for it. But if they come back and they say, well, I mean, if we could, if we could get this thing done in a week, gosh, we could put down $5,000 on it and have it behind us. We'd be happy. And so then I can find out, okay, they, they know in their mind where the value lies for them not about what the hours it's going to take is, but what the real value is. And then conversely, sometimes they're like, well, yeah, I mean, if we could get this done for 500 bucks, and then I just have to be like, you know what, that's not realistic at all. And then, and then I'll push like the figure that I've got in my head and say, this, this is at least an X dollar project. So anybody else have experience with that or tips for what's worked? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I have a question about that, which is it’s both to you, AJ, and to you, Sam, although it's like the same sort of problem, but from a different perspective. In your case, AJ, I'm thinking that every project kind of sounds unique, that it's really difficult to estimate ahead of time how much effort would be involved. I think that in the context of websites they're generally once again and for Sam, I guess the initial problem was that he was really new in the field. So it was more difficult to estimate the amount of effort that would be required. But I'm guessing Sam that once you've got the ball rolling these days, you can pretty much in most cases, again, unless the customer has some surprising unique need, you can pretty much safely estimate how much effort would be involved which is still not the case, not the situation in your case, I'm guessing, AJ. So, so I think, I think that creates a difference. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: My experience with this is that it depends a lot on how much of it you've done. Right? So if it's, this is Sam's fifth or sixth or seventh website, you know, or AJ's fourth implementation of the same kind of solution, then you get a pretty good idea of how much time it's going to take. But typically the other thing that I'm going to throw in on the point that AJ's making. And Sam kind of made it too, right? Where he basically said, if they get three clients off of the website, right. Then I mean, that's, that's all gravy, right? Because they only put down 2000, they get a hundred thousand out of the deal. So typically I would just sit down and say, okay, like in the instance, you know, Sam's talking about it's like, okay, what's the average size of the job that you would get, you would expect to get off your website. And then you start talking to them about, okay, and how much, you know, what's your cost to do that job, right? Because it might be a $100,000 thing. But once you pay all the people that are involved and rent the equipment and all that stuff, maybe 50% of that is gone, right? And so it's like, okay, so you're looking at every contract that comes in is $25,000 to $50,000 in profit. So if I build you a website that can get you for clients, then that's $100,000 in profit after you pay for everything else, right? Yes. Okay. Well, so then would it be worth it to pay me $10,000 to get this done? Right? Because that's a 10X ROI. And most people are going to look at you and say a 10X ROI. Yeah, that's a no brainer. Right. And so, but the problem is, is that it doesn't always go that smoothly. Sometimes people don't want to give you that information because they know that you're going to peg to that number and negotiate from it. And so I'll either justify my numbers by throwing out the hypothetical numbers like that and say, let's imagine that you make that much. Or a lot of times I will just bid, and I usually bid two to three times higher than I think I would get just based on my own effort. And a lot of times then people will tell me your way out beyond what I was willing to pay or, and then you can start to negotiate from there. But if you can get them to throw out some kind of number first and you can get them to give you a number that you can use to determine the value, but not necessarily. Because if you ask people for their budget, they're not going to give it to you because they know that's a negotiating tactic. They may give you other information that you can use to then pull together some kind of offer that makes a lot of sense for their business situation. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So do you need a 10 X developer to get 10 X ROI? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Where's the mute button?

DAN_SHAPPIR: I'm curious, Sam, are you still working on these types of contracts or have you moved to beyond that? If I may ask, how are you making most of your income these days? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, absolutely. That sort of work has taken a backseat fairly recently. I about three weeks ago now in June accepted a full-time position with Hashnode as their new head of content strategy and marketing, which seems feels like it almost it came out of nowhere and is so perfectly aligned with my skills and abilities. It's really a dream. But I feel like so the way I got there, you know, we were talking about how I was able to sort of leverage my my writing skills when I was building websites for for, you know, small businesses. And that got me thinking about, okay, well, I have this experience as a writer, but how else could I, could I leverage this in the tech industry? And so I started looking into technical writing. I found a website called, I believe it's who pays technical writers.com. And it's, it's a list that is exactly that. It's a lot of like startups in the tech space who are looking at, you know, actively looking for content from, from writers. And yeah, so I just, I started contacting businesses on that list, found a couple leads there and started doing technical writing. And that in combination with my blogging along the way, got the interest of the Hashnode team. And they basically recruited me from among the ranks of enthusiastic bloggers on the site. And that's what I'm doing now. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: That's super cool. But before you went there and while you were still mostly doing freelancing, I mean, I assume that after you got those two initial customers, you weren't sifting through hundreds of websites anymore, or were you? I mean, how did you get the ball rolling at a certain point in time? And if so, how? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, I was really fortunate. So I did a few websites through the cold email approach, which was really exhausting. And then you know, all along the way, like I said, I was super active on Twitter. I was posting a lot about what I was up to, um, you know, uh, building and learning in public, right. And I sort of developed a, uh, a name for myself as this freelancer dude. Uh, and I probably like, gosh, by March or April. So a few months into this journey. I started getting unsolicited DMs from people on Twitter saying, hey, I've got a gig. We need somebody to do X, Y, and Z. Do you want it? A lot of times I was completely unqualified for the stuff people wanted me to try to do. But eventually, I landed with a really cool fellow named Chris who runs an agency called Prolific Digital. And he basically brought me on knowing full well that I had almost no experience, but I think he liked my attitude and saw that I was somebody who was really eager to do this stuff. And yeah, so he brought me on to his fledgling agency to do front-end development for a few sites. And so that was really the turning point, I think, for my journey in freelancing was, once I connected with him, he's doing all the legwork of finding the clients. He has the network, which is why he has an agency. And so I can just sit back, let the pro handle the big stuff and I can just play with HTML and CSS.

DAN_SHAPPIR: That's so great. I really love your story. And I really hope that these days you can take care of your dog. And more than that. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, I'm glad you bring that up. You know, I came full circle actually a few weeks ago. So last fall I was extremely fortunate to have friends and family I could lean on to cover my dog's surgery. He has what's called degenerative ligament disease, which means his knees are basically no good. So he had to have knee surgery last year on one leg. And then about a month ago, he had to have the same surgery on the other leg. The difference was now I work in the tech industry and I was able to afford his second surgery. It emptied out my savings account, but I had the money to do it because of working in tech and it's like a dream come true. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Amazing. I'm really loving it. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So what's coming next? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, I was about to ask that. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, so like I said, I just signed up with Hashnode a few weeks ago. I really, I think the company is super cool. And I feel like they, like I said, they recruited me from the ranks because they saw that I was somebody who was really into the thing that they were building. And I'm so thrilled that now I get to be a part of that too. And so yeah, in my new role as a content strategist and marketer, I basically, on the one hand, I get to create cool stuff for Hashtone. So I've been doing Twitter spaces where I talk about writing and blogging. We're looking into doing YouTube or podcasts. So I'm creating lots of cool content on behalf of Hashtag on the one hand, and then also I'm doing some really cool stuff sort of like taking a grassroots approach to outreach within the dev community. And so I'm having a lot of fun getting to reach out to a lot of some of my favorite content creators who really inspired me along my journey and say like, hey, I would love to now collaborate with you in a professional capacity. And so, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's been a ton of fun. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Very cool. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, I love your blog. I think, I mean, we went over a ton of this stuff while we were doing the podcast, but I totally recommend anybody listening check out. I think there's three different articles you've linked to here. That'll be in the show notes. And I think they actually linked to each other as well. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: AJ, that was going to be one of my picks.

AJ_O’NEAL: I picked this show. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, you know, I was running low on picks. What can I say? 

AJ_O’NEAL: I'll lend you a few. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: No, I totally agree with AJ. I mean, I was looking through, I was familiar with a few of your posts, but I was looking through your blog ahead of the show and I'm really liking the content that I'm seeing there. And, yeah it's a lot of useful stuff. And on that note, if you were to give out a piece of advice to yourself, let's say a year ago, what would it be or what would it have been? I don't know. Whatever tense would be correct. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, that's a really good question. I guess I feel like honestly, things went as good as they possibly could have for me. Like I don't know that I would have necessarily changed anything if I could. The only thing I would want to tell myself at the beginning is like, this is going to work. Like you can do this. You can make it to the other side. You know, I, one of the things I try to be really mindful of on, on social media, especially is like, we only see each other's wins, right? Like when I, when I post on Twitter, I'm celebrating something awesome that just happened to me a lot of times. Like those are the posts that are the most popular. The stuff that I don't post about is like, waking up in a cold sweat at 2 a.m., having a minor panic attack because I realize I'm planning to wake up at 3 30 a.m. to study computer programming and I'm a landscaper. And what am I doing with my life? Yeah. And so I would love to be able to go back to those moments and be like, hey, man, it's going to be okay. You're going to make it through this.

AIMEE_KNIGHT: One question I was going to ask, so it sounds like... And I've been in and out today, so I apologize, but it sounds like you're roughly pretty new to all of this, which is awesome. But one big question I have, because I feel like it is pretty darn competitive out there for newer developers. And I see a lot of them going to things like freelancing and stuff like that. How do you keep up to date? How do you get mentorship? How do you know the right ways to do more complex problems and things like that. Cause I feel like that's like the biggest barrier to newer dabs going this route. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah. I would credit almost a hundred percent of my success in tech to my Twitter network. Like I said, they've been responsible for most of the work that I've had up to this point. It's where I've met all of the people who I now, you know, feel really comfortable reaching out to anytime I have any kind of issues. And I know that's like an easier said than done kind of thing, right? Like, oh, just go make a thousand friends on social media. You'll never have a shortage of people to ask. But that's where I think the tech industry is so unique. It's just that ethos of people who are really eager to help you out. And now that I have made it to the other side, I'm one of those people. I really enjoy going out of my way to try to help people get a get a leg up wherever they can. And so I would just really encourage everybody to, yeah, just put yourself out there on social media, make it known what you're doing and what you're what you're trying to accomplish. And if you're persistent, people will find you and they will be excited to help you out. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I have a question about that, though, to get more specific. If you had if you ran into a problem or had a technical question, did you literally just shoot I mean, how, how, what did you do in order to get that question noticed? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: That's a really, yeah, that's, that's tough. I, I'm not really sure why it worked for me, but that was honestly my approach. For the first few months was just like, Hey, can anybody explain to me what the differences between an if-else statement and switch cases in JavaScript? And then like 20 people would show up and be like, oh, here's an explanation and 280 characters. And here's a link to the document that I think is most helpful for explaining this thing. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And here's the thing. There is no difference. It's just syntactic sugar in the case of JavaScript anyway. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: But yeah, it was it was really just like just shooting questions out into the ether, hoping that somebody would catch them and then, yeah, becoming friends with people who did show up. And now one of my favorite things to do, now that I have a pretty big audience on Twitter, is whenever I see somebody who is like posting a lot of questions on their timeline and not getting any traction, I'll just retweet one of their questions. And then suddenly they get like 30 answers to whatever they're working on. And then probably a bunch of new followers who will show up to answer their questions the next time.

DAN_SHAPPIR: But did you like add specific hashtags? I mean, were you, or were you like totally dependent on Twitter being helpful with its algorithm, you know, putting your tweets in other people's timeline or whatever, because it does sound seem like challenging to me to get your tweets noticed. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah, it's I, I leaned on hashtags for the first couple months. I'm not sure whether they really made a difference because I didn't notice anything change when I stopped using them. But I think what made the difference for me was not just like shooting questions off in the void, but also like being active in the community so that like people would have a reason to click on my profile and take a look at what I was posting. And so like I said, when I started taking networking really seriously as part of my journey. I would literally block off like an hour a day to be like, okay, I'm just going to go. I'm going to go make friends on Twitter. So I would just go look at the profiles of and try to find new people. I made friends with Jack Forge pretty early on in my Twitter career, a minor tech Twitter celebrity these days. And a few other people like that who I saw that were like really active in the community, I realized, oh, if I comment on the stuff that they're posting other people will see me and want to talk to me. And it's really just, I guess, snowballed from there. But I think it has to start with the... And this is something like, it's very true of marketing also, right? It's like, you can't continue to ask people to give you something. You need to be putting something out there. Even if, in my case, it was just showing up to make jokes on people's tweets and stuff. You have to give people something to make them want to reciprocate, I guess. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Chuck, maybe that's a topic for your freelancer's show at one point or another. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, I've been talking about a lot of this stuff on Dev Influencers podcast and in the Dev Influencers accelerator, which is essentially how to build relationships through a lot of the content and things like that. And this is right on with what I tell people right, is that you're not going to build these relationships unless you reach out to people. And then a lot of people respond to the what's in it for me, right? And so if you come along and you give them something to latch on to tell a story on, to work through, to be a part of, right, that's something that's in it for them. And then they will reciprocate in kind and share your stuff. It's similar with like, just getting on other people's podcasts or getting on. In fact, that's essentially how this worked, right? Is that Sam mentioned that he had gotten into things based on an episode that we did. And so, I mean, we're interested, but it also benefits us to talk about it, right? And at the same time, Sam gets exposed to our audience. I mean, there are a lot of things that go back and forth on this stuff. I know that that's not the primary motivation here, at least not on our end and not on his end either, because he wasn't looking to get on the show. But it's a reality that that's the way it works. And so we look at it and it's like, this is an opportunity for us to talk about something we wanna talk about, which is, hey, how do you get into tech? How do you make this journey work for you? And in the end, yeah, there's all of this trade-off that happens on both ends that's positive for us and positive for Sam. And so if you're looking to build those kinds of relationships, he's totally right, that that's the way that that works. And that's the way you build an audience. That's the way you build a following. And that's the way this all goes is by giving people what they want. They in turn are willing to give you something that you want. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yeah. I think that's a really good point. And then something that I think is worth pointing out, you know, since I've, I've, I've grown a big audience pretty quickly on Twitter and I've had a lot of people consequently reach out to me to ask, like, how have you done it and how do you build those relationships, right? Like, how do you find those people who want to help you? And I say this from the experience, like there are people, like the thing that you give them is they get to help you. Like that's what they want out of the relationship. I think a lot of people who are like new to learning to code, right? They show up on Twitter, they see all these like influencers giving like JavaScript or CSS tips and tricks. And they're like, well, I don't have anything to contribute to this conversation. I'm still just learning. But like, there are people out there who like, the thing that you give them is the opportunity to be meant to mentor you. Like they want to do that. And I say that as somebody who's had people say like, I want to help you because like, because that is the thing that I get out of it is the satisfaction of knowing that I've helped you. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. Just be aware of some fake accounts. That's what I have to say. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Definitely. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. Well, and that's the other thing too, is that because it's genuine, right? We invited Sam cause we wanted to hear his story that's the other part of it, right? If it feels like somebody's pushing something one way or the other, people will smell it. It, it doesn't work, but because we're interested in Sam's story and he's interested in telling it again, that's, I think that's the other key piece, right? Is Sam wasn't reaching out to people so that he could get famous or so that he could get, you know, whatever he was reaching out specifically, so he could build a relationship there. And because he was interested in what they were doing and knew that they could help him with some of the stuff he was doing. All right, well, anything else that we want to cover before we go to picks? It's a long episode, but it's a good one. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Totally. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right, let's do some picks. 

 

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CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Steve, why don't you start us off this time? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: All right, so I will keep everybody on edge waiting for the dad joke humor. I actually have a couple of legitimate picks. One is for those of us who develop on Macs, one of the more popular tools for installing your different libraries and items needed for development is Homebrew. And traditionally, it's been a command line application that you install and then run brew, doctor brew, install, uninstall, brew beer, you know, whatever. Well, now there is a GUI that somebody has come up with for homebrew and it's called Cakebrew. And it's really pretty simple. It's cakebrew.com is the URL for it. And you can download it, install it, or you can install it via homebrew, ironically enough, which is what I did. So it's pretty straightforward, pretty simple. It just shows your different formula and maybe what's outdated. And then you can run doctor and update on it. So it's pretty cool. And then my second pick is I'm curious to see if anybody has heard of the new AWS product called Infinidash. I saw this on, on hacker news and it's actually hysterical. It's had me laughing so hard. So there's an article in the register in the UK about it. And basically this guy put out a tweet. His name is Joe Nash. He says, I'm convinced that a small and dedicated group of Twitter devs could tweet hot takes about a completely made up AWS product. I don't know, AWS, Infinidash or something. And it would appear as a requirement on job specs within a week. And so people just took off with it and ran with it. And it was hysterical. Just reading the article. And then if you go look at the Infinidash hashtag on Twitter, oh, it's great. You know, Signal put out a tweet advertising for a job that they wanted something like five years of Infinidash experience, you know, which is sort of a take off on a famous IBM tweet, you know, that said they wanted 12 years of experience for something that has only been out for six years. Somebody put said, no, we've already forked it. We're calling open dash IO. Somebody came up with an O'Reilly book cover with a horse on debt called advanced Infinidash. And, but the two best things were the song videos put out a guy named B-R-A-Z-E-A-L. It's called an Ode to Infinidash. And it's a song he's playing on the piano and singing. He just made it up. And then there's another tweet by Cy Brand that explained Infinidash using a bubble machine, his cats, and he's got a shark stuffed shark toy in it. Just hilarious how people just took off and ran with this. And all this because, you know, some guys said, hey, let's try to make up some fake technology and see how people run with it. So I'll put the original article link in there, but it's just so good. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And now Amazon released it, didn't they? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I think so. There's a YouTube video too, called, there's a YouTube video called introducing AWS. Oh, it's so good. I spent at least an hour, way too much time just scrolling through everything and laughing at what people came up with and how creative they were on it. And then, uh, to the high point of the podcast, you know, the dad jokes. So my wife used to have for many, many years had cats and hasn't had them for the past couple of years, but one time I told one of the cats that I was going to teach him how to speak English and he looked at me and said, me? How? And then yesterday, so yesterday I went to my doctor because I'd been seeing him for something he says, I got bad news and worse news for you. The bad news is you have 24 hours to live. I said, geez, what can be worse than that? He said, I should have told you yesterday. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: So anyway those are my, uh, my, it reminds me of a variation about this guy who comes to the doctor and the doctor tells him that I've got some bad news and some good news. And he says, well, what's the, what's the bad news? He says, well, you've got advanced dementia. And then what's the good news. And by the time you leave, you won't remember. Um, but yeah, I probably shouldn't tell jokes like that, but anyway, 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: okay. Amy. What are your picks? I'm going to pick not having cats because they're driving me nuts today. Between work, I'm having something done in my car outside right now. My cats, one is sick, one is meowing. They're driving me nuts. But anyways, OK, no, for real, what am I going to pick? So I just started this this morning. Seems fitting for the conversation here. It's called Open Source Society University. It's a repo of like free computer science curriculum. So that'll be it for me.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right, AJ, what are your picks? 

AJ_O’NEAL: Okay, so have I got any good ones today? First of all, because of, I'm gonna go in a little reverse order here. I'm gonna pick the Turbo Cloud Encabulator because we were talking about Infinidash and the Cloud Encabulator is of course another product that everybody who is anybody needs to be familiar with. Absolutely something you should list in the skills section on your resume. If you are not familiar with the Cloud Encabulator, you need to become skilled with the Cloud Encabulator. I'm sure Sam will back me up on this. It's just, you can't get a job. You're not a techie if you're not in with, you know, if you, if you haven't cloud and calculated and Sam's laughing, but we can't hear it. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Yes. Yeah. The, the, and, and, and calculating that I've done so far has been pretty limited, but, uh, it's something that I looked, I'm hoping to expand as I continue. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yeah, of course. And then I am also any, anytime somebody mentions homebrew, I have to pick web install.dev, which is another thing, Sam, actually I'd love to get your take on this later. So follow up conversation there. But WebInstall.dev is if you hate brew because it takes 400 megabytes to install. And basically WebInstall.dev just installs the thing that you're trying to install. So if you want to install node, it just installs node. It uses the standard distribution that's available from nodejs.org. And likewise with the other tools, there's a very few things where it adds some very thin configuration because the default configuration is the thing doesn't work. For example, a bunch of Vim plugins. Literally do nothing unless you include the line in your Vim RC that tells it to load and do something so other than that, it's extremely extremely light and everything's sectioned off into Dot local so that it's not going to mess up any system settings doesn't require root access yada yada I've talked about it before but and and that is a shameless self-promotion that a couple of people Buddies and I've i've worked on then I’m also going to pick brave search because I haven't noticed that I've been using it. So with duck duck go, I, and it could just be this week, my search patterns have been different or maybe brave search is actually somehow tied into a anonymized Google search. I'm not really sure, but there have been once or twice where I've had to go to Google, but I feel like I've had to go to Google less often with brave search than I've had to with duck duck go again, you know, your mileage may vary based on your your behaviors and whatnot. And then other than that, 

DAN_SHAPPIR: but what about Bing? 

AJ_O’NEAL: So other than that, I think duck, duck, go is Bing. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And that's how I remember this talk. This guy gave a talk and he goes like how he searches for stuff. So he, he opens Bing, types in Google, and then he searches for whatever he wants. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yes. The best search engine for finding others. That's just silly. Anyway, and then if you want to follow for the code stuff that I'm doing, that's beyond code and I've got links to the Facebook, the YouTube and the Twitter. And then you can follow my regular channel if you want to see the raw unedited live streams. So that's that. Those are my picks. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. Dan, what are your picks? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, I was going to pick Sam's blog, but then that got stolen. But so instead I'm just going to pick two YouTube videos that I think are kind of pertinent to what we spoke about. So the first one is really pertinent. And that's an interesting talk by a really good speaker called getting comfortable being uncomfortable. For those who don't know, it's a talk by our own Amy Knight, which I thought is really relevant because some of the stuff that Sam was talking about was exactly about how to get outside your comfort zone, how to do cold calls how to pick up a new career that you're really unsure of, how to go out on a limb. So I think that it's, it's really relevant in this context. And the other YouTube video has to do with the comments that Steve made about how difficult things used to be. So it's a, it's an old Monty Python skit called the four Yorkshire men in which they, it's, it's like these four guys old older guys sitting around and talking about how bad things used to be when they were young about how their dad used to beat them with a whip and stab them in the morning every time they got up and how young people today don't realize how bad it used to be and so on and so forth. It's well it's an excellent Monty Python skip so it's worth it and Python is based on Monty Python so you know if you're into Python you have to watch it and 

STEVE_EDWARDS: those are thanks to Spanish Inquisition.

DAN_SHAPPIR: for sure. And yeah, they have for like, they have surprise going for them. And, and also the torture thing. Anyway, those would be my picks for today. Bring out the comfy chair. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right. I'm going to throw out some picks. No surprise. You'll probably pick a book. The one I'm reading now is called the Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. It's written by John Mark Comer and I just started it. So I've kind of read the, I think it was just the preface actually, not even there, the forward, not even the the actual book, but it talks about how hurry basically ruins things and how we part. Some of it's kind of related to minimalism, I guess, in the sense that you remove things from your life that you don't need or that are causing you stress. And at the same time, then you can take the time to do the things that matter the way you want to do them. So anyway, I'll probably pick it again next week and actually tell you what it's about when I finished it. But yeah, so far it's been pretty good. And then I think I picked last week, I think I mentioned that I'm also reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. And I'm still just really, really enjoying that book. I'm a little more than halfway through it at this point. And the audible reader on audible, he is awesome. He just does such a terrific job reading the book. And so anyway, I'm going to pick both of those. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Ian Rand is great as long as you don't take her too seriously. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I'm not sure exactly what you mean put forward the ideas in the book, I think are pretty much smack on. So, 

DAN_SHAPPIR: yeah, just be careful with how far you take it. That's all I'm saying. 

AJ_O’NEAL: To the extreme, always to the extreme. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Right. Sam, what are your picks? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Oh gosh. You know, I've kind of keeping with the theme of talking about freelancing, doing contract work, that sort of thing. There's a YouTube channel called the future F-U-T-U-R. I believe the fellow who runs it, his name is Chris. He's a designer by trade. He's made so much wealth of content around agency work, freelancing, contracting. How do you price things? How do you present a value-based proposition? How do you pitch to clients? He's done so much of like you call it. Yeah, just incredible workshops where he coaches people through all of these things. So I just learned so much from his YouTube channel. There's a lot of fluff out there when it comes to that kind of content where people just really want to sell you on a dream, but they don't actually want to tell you how to do it. But this guy really, it's the future. Super cool. And then I would also just love to plug once again, Leon Noel and his 100 Devs community. I think if you go to leonnoelle.com, you can find all the information about what he's up to and the community. I really, like I said, being a part of that community when I was first starting to learn made all the difference for me. And so anytime anybody asks me for my advice on getting started, I just say, go there, do what Leon says. He knows what he's talking about. He will tell you everything you need to know to learn web development and land a job. So yeah, just trust Leon.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. All right. Well, one more question. How do people find you online? I'm assuming, you know, we talked about Twitter. I'm assuming you're on GitHub. And then we mentioned your blog. Do you want to just give out those links and then any others that you want people to reach out on? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Absolutely. Yeah. Best place to find me is Twitter as we talked about. I am tanokesam over there. You can also just find me if you search my name. My blog is at blog.sickamore.design. That lives on Hashnode, which is super fun. And yeah, you can find me on GitHub over there. I'm Samuel Sycamore. And yeah, that's pretty much all the places you'll find me hanging out most frequently. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: You know, if you wanted to go to the biblical reference, you should have just called yourself Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus. Anyway, yeah, look it up in Matthew, Book of Matthew, I'll give you a reference. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Cool. 

AJ_O’NEAL: And Sycamore is spelled the same as the tree, right? 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Just like the tree, that's correct.

AJ_O’NEAL: Mighty, strong, easy to remember, hard to spell, but easy to Google. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Exactly. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right, Sam. Well, this was great. We'll go ahead and wrap up here and until next time folks, Max out. 

SAM_SYCAMORE: Bye everybody. Thank you guys so much. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Adios. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Take care. 

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