Public
Explicitly track everything learned : )
Iteration on ideas is just as important as having them to begin with
Always create while working!
[https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-public/]
The best beneficiary of you helping your past self is future you.
+ Make PRs to libraries you use
+ Make your own libraries
+ Clone stuff to see how it works
+ Summarize learning in the public
Do not spend time helping others on private forums.
There is nothing wrong with day jobs! Some really enjoy them.
If the job is right for you, that's wonderful.
If the day job is not right for you, learn on your own.
"It is in the employee's personal insterest to stop selling
hours of labor
and start renting access to his accumulated capital as soon as humanly
possible."
In other words, to become valuable, you must accumulate valuable
experience,
hard skills and trust, then leverage these to continue to be
constructive.
If you end the week with nothing, nothing about your life will change! No
matter how hard you work you'll come back the next week having built another
internal product or having worked with another internal system. This is not
valuable to you, and as a student you should prefer pursuing things you benefit
from.
This is not exactly the same as 'working in public'. Working in
public is working entirely on public projects, while working where people can
see you is working in spaces
where your work will be seen, recommended and commended.
+ Work on places and projects with above-average visibility.
You'll be most likely to be hired and more likely to be noticed.
+ Don't necessarily optimize for 'sexy' projects; most
engineering work isn't 'sexy'.
Optimize for *impact* and optimize for *visibility*.
Talk about things you create and show them to people!
one day at a conference talk, one day writing a good library and another
writing a blog post.
"Brick by brick, the wall gets higher."
You rarely get to keep ours, bank them in the future, etc.
Widespread employee ownership of the enterprice is an excellent
improvement,
but the work you produce concretely matters more than the shares and
stakes you hold.
Buying side projects with sweat equity may give you future financial
benefits, and there are real benefits to having an object that is *yours* to
curate.
Make a standalone web prescence for open source libraries to give others
a stake in them.
Reading is valuable, but actually shipping something is so much more
valuable.
"You'll learn so much more shipping a failure than you'll
learn from reading about a thousand successes. And you stand an excellent chance
of shipping a success -- people greatly overestimate how difficult it is.
Just don't end the week with nothing."
Continue to ask myself whether my contributions are valuable, whether
they are noticed, and whether they could be touched by others.
Learn in Public
Provide feedback
Do not end the week with nothing
Tips
Work where people can see you.
Work on things you can keep
Consumption can be valuable but creation moves you forward
Takeaways