Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Ryan Chenkie

This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Ryan Chenkie (Canada). He is a developer who uses JavaScript with Angular and Node and he does screencasting at angularcasts.io. They talk about Ryan’s background, his current projects, and getting over imposter syndrome! Check it out!

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

0:47 – Chuck: Today our guest is Ryan Chenkie!

0:55 – Guest: Hello! I’m excited!

1:02 – Chuck: What are you doing now?

1:10 – Guest: I spent 2.5 years at Auth0 and learned a ton there. I was doing some side work and then figured out I had to focus on one thing or the other. Now I have been a consultant fulltime and also teaching, too. AngularCast.io I teach there.

1:56 – Chuck: Sounds like people are excited about GraphQL. I’ve been there, too, and make a similar decision.

2:19 – Guest: It was a hard decision b/c I liked all of my colleagues there. I always had the itch to be self-employed.

2:42 – Chuck: You figure out of it’s for you or not.

2:51 – Guest: Yep! I am happy to be another year of it.

3:00 – Chuck: I went free-lanced about a year ago b/c the decision was made for me.

3:29 – Guest: I am grateful for it.

3:40 – Chuck: Yeah, we talk about this a lot on one of my podcast platforms. If you can make a connection with people then you’ll be god.

4:07 – Guest: Yeah I had to figure out if I would have to focus on the marketing side of things or not. Right now the projects are coming to me – right to my front door, which is great! It’s this ever-expanding web.

4:55 – Chuck: Yeah where people tend to show-up. Let’s talk about your story! How did you get into programming?

5:30 – Guest: It was a little less typically at the time. I was fully self-taught. I went to school for a somewhat Geography degree. It got boring for me at some point. I had to do one programming course while in school and it was in Java. I was terrible at it and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. It didn’t help that the instruction wasn’t great. I was terrible I didn’t understand a thing. I was scared that I was going to fail the course. I came out of there feeling like I didn’t have the chops to be a programmer. I was doing Geomantic-stuff. I learned that the further you get into this programming stuff you would make better money – better job, etc. I was trying to put this map/graph into a website and it said that I had to learn Java. This time, though, the material was taught to me in these small increments. I got into it more and I was more attracted to the idea of programming.

10:00 – Guest continues.

10:32 – Guest: I was learning Angular and JavaScript better.

10:35 – Chuck: Yeah it makes you think through it. You have to go deep.

10:47 – Guest: I would make a sample packet. I would get to certain points and get to a point and I couldn’t explain what I did. I would get to a roadblock and I couldn’t explain it. I would be on this tangent for a while and have to figure this out. I was working with the government, at this time, but I thought: maybe I could try this programming thing for a while. Did you go to NG Vegas conference?

12:20 – Chuck: Nope.

12:25 – Guest: There is this conference in Las Vegas – I am going to go and hang out with people. At this conference I met some important people. This company posted that they needed someone and I thought: this is the job for me. I sent an email – went to an interview – and did an example. I got the job and freaked out because I wasn’t a “real” programmer. I wrote some content for them and it’s been all good.

14:07 – Chuck: Let me back-up real quickly. How did you find Angular?

14:18 – Guest: It’s hard to pinpoint the “moment” I had found Angular. As I am learning through Code Academy I am reading articles and stuff. I heard about Angular.js and watched some online tutorials and watched all of the talks from the conference. I thought that I needed to learn it b/c it was pretty popular at the time. I knew how to write JavaScript, but made me clearly see with Angular.js app I had to back up and learn it.

15:34 – Chuck: Yep!

16:05 – The guest mentions Hacker News among other things. 

16:22 – Chuck: Angular and Electron is what we brought you on for – is that what you are doing?

16:36 – Guest: The guest talks about his experiences with Angular and Electron.

18:26 – Chuck: Let’s backup some more – didn’t sound like you worked with a lot of tech companies right?

18:51 – Guest: Yep that was my only one.

18:57 – Chuck: I hear a lot of complaints from people having this imposter syndrome. You only being in the industry for a short amount of time – how did you overcome the imposter syndrome?

19:34 – Guest: Imposter syndrome has been an issue for me – I wasn’t crippled – but it’s debilitating. “Who am I to teach on this subject?” – but I think I’ve made conscious efforts to ignore that and to use it as a little bit as fuel. I remember, man, of being scarred! I remember being terrified to see the online comments – b/c they are going to “know” that I don’t know what I am talking about. Funny thing is that I had a lot of positive comments. Little-by-little, those positive pieces of feedback were good for me. I thought: At least I am helping people (like I said, little-by-little!). I think there has been a part of a loop there. If you can look for that feedback it can help overcome imposter syndrome. The things of value are the things that scare you. 

22:41 – Chuck: Yeah, I talk about this all the time to people. I have been self-employed for 8.5 years. I am not going to starve. If I had to, I could go and find a “normal” job.

23:20 – Guest: I agree. One piece of feedback that I got from a colleague is that she said: you are very resourceful! Knowing that it helped b/c it was a boost of confidence. If I had this capacity of being resourceful that helped me make my decision. It wasn’t a good time in the sense that we just had a baby. If it went south then I could always go back and get a “normal” job.

24:43 – Chuck: Yeah we talk about that in Agile development – the further you go the more information you get.

24:58 – Guest. Yep

25:03 – Chuck: What are you doing now?

25:07 – Guest: I’ve had a few large clients these past few years. I have current projects going now one is with a museum. I am speaking at a few conferences – one of them was in San Francisco and Prague. Now I am planning for next year and figuring out what my teaching and speaking plans will be. It looks like I am focusing on Graph QL content. Lots of Angular, too!

26:32 – Chuck: You are web famous!

26:35 – Guest: I don’t know about that, but I do have some things out there.

26:42 – Chuck: How can people find you?

26:49 – Guest: Twitter! Website! GitHub!

27:18 – Chuck: Picks!

27:25 – Fresh Books!

END – CacheFly

Ryan

Chuck