Hi everyone. My name is Patrick aquiline for today's episode. I had Kyle Cook on from web dev simplified. We go over his journey on how he started more on the backend side and move this way to the front inside and out teaching full-time through YouTube. We go over how to start when you want to start in programming, as well as react. In the future of the ecosystem there, I'll put all his socials in the description below. Check him out. And with that being said, enjoy
the episode. I just kind of learned how to program did you because man, I always had trouble figuring out which projects to build, but you had no problem figuring out like little smaller projects to work on. I don't want to say I had no problem. I actually had the problem I had was the opposite of most people where I had like a thousand ideas of projects. I wanted to build an other. Okay, I want to build this.
I want to build this, I want to build this, and I realized I was like, okay, this is to advance, this is to advance, this is to advance and usually what I would end up doing is building something. I thought I could do realize it was to advance and I was just like, screw it. I'm just gonna do it anyway. And I would usually get it like 80% of the way done and then start something else. Like I never finished anything. I got almost everything, you know, 80 90 percent of the way there.
And then I would just jump to something else because it seemed more interesting at the time. Yeah, yeah. It was it I mean I'm assuming it was because you enjoyed it right now because you wanted to get like a portfolio and because of work I didn't even have an idea of a portfolio like I was in school. I was just like, I want to do this, this is cool, this is cool. I like this on Michael. I'm interested in this topic.
I'm going to build a Project based on that topic and then when it came time to like make my before, they'll I was like I have a lot of projects that percent complete. I got this very good on portfolios. I was like, oh I have like a back-end built for this cool project but that's not going to do anything on portfolio. Yeah. That's that's pretty admirable because I always was like Damn. I need I need a portfolio.
I don't know what projects to build on and when I'm like, okay cool project and let me write that down and never actually got to. Yeah, I mean I have a massive list of projects I never got to even now like I'm you know doing YouTube stuff and I'm like oh you know this would be a really cool project like build out but I'm like what am I going to have time to talk? Like all these cool project ideas on top of YouTube videos and all the other stuff.
It's like I just don't have time for most of them. You get that because I was wondering, you actually started out with like, a computer science background. Did I get that correct? Yes, I went School. So originally I applied to school as a mechanical engineer, because I was an engineering math science, that kind of stuff. And then my senior year of high school, I took an underwater robotics class, which is like
the weirdest thing ever. I moved to Delaware my senior year from like the Midwest. So I moved to the coast and have this underwater robotics class. I was like, that sounds awesome. I'm taking that and it was mostly mechanical engineering. You over like building this robot but they were the one week section of the class where we did programming and we programmed on this like microchip kind of thing. The programming language is literally called basic, I think.
But it was like It wasn't like Visual Basic, it was a different thing. It was like basic but it's like a chipset language and it was very basic, it was super simple but I was super enthralled. I was like wow, this is the coolest thing ever. I wrote like four lines of code in this robot moved. Like that's the coolest thing in the entire world. So as soon as that happened, I switched my major before I even went to school, I was like I'm doing computer engineering, instead of mechanical
engineering. That's still in that engineering mindset. I would have done computer science of, I knew, but I want Computer Engineering saw their business so cool. And yeah, that's pretty much what started me on the programme path. And then, when I was in school, you know, I've learned Computer Engineering, which is a lot of hard. And not as much software as I would have liked, you know, I don't care at all about the hardware side of things but I spent a ton of time learning about it.
Yeah, web development was the thing that really sparked my interest in school so I just taught myself on the side. I watched tons of YouTube videos from like you know Brad diversity and people like that and just learned how to become a web developer mostly from school because from online because there's only one class in my entire school. That was web development based. Yeah. And I couldn't take it until I think my senior year of college.
And at that point, I'd already learned all the stuff, the class taught me. So it was like the complete waste of time because I was like, oh, this is this. This, I've been doing this for years now, yeah, that's pretty cool. I've never. So, most of the people I talk to don't have a traditional, like, software engineering background and even Computer Engineering is more adjacent to. I would say a software
engineering background. It's more closer to that because you mentioned having web development in kind of a third
year. But if you think about your educational journey to like there's a lot of it come to practice in what you do now or is it just it's just education and from then you moved on. Yeah, I would say that what I learned in school, like the first year of my college degree was really useful because I learned like the fundamentals of programming, like we learn to see in Java and like, my first
semester. Yeah, and I was really useful in, like, teaching me just basic programming language, Concepts like for Loops, conditional statements. Like, all the things that every programming language has like, that was really useful and kind of learning some of the back end stuff of like, how memory works and stuff like that. I mean, I don't really use much of that because I write mostly in JavaScript and you don't have to worry about that kind of thing. But just knowing about, it was
helpful. But I would say every After like the first year, if not even just the first semester I felt was pretty much I want to say useless. But it wasn't that useful because a lot of it is like hardware-based or it's going to be you know, like things that I don't actually use in a day to day is like a web developer because I feel like hard core computer science. They focus a lot on like Theory and they focus a lot on my
algorithms. And those kind of things, just don't come into play, nearly, as much when you're doing web development, especially front-end web development. So, most of what I learned was from just using YouTube and blog articles in the actual School degree, Really only help me with that like initial jumpstart. I feel it but the rest of it, especially with what I do on YouTube, like, I don't use any of it anymore. Exactly.
I mean, I love that. You taught yourself through YouTube and through all the like, various free means that are out there, right? Blog posts, YouTube videos. What else do we have? Any podcaster there as well? Nowadays, a lot more? Yeah, podcaster. A big thing. Now, like I didn't even know about podcasting back when I was learning, it was mostly just like YouTube and lots and lots of Articles. That's pretty much how I learned mostly. Exactly. It's like there's something,
distinct with this. You need that we just take everything we know and just put it out there for free for others to share and to build upon, right? And through that, you kind of hone your skills as well and get better at your craft, which is really cool. Yeah, go ahead. Oh no. I was just going to say, like, a lot of people don't realize how much you can learn for free. I get asked all the time. Like, oh, what is the best course for X topic? Or is this course? Good.
Is this course good. And I always say, like, I don't know, like when I learned I didn't buy a single course. I just did it all for free online. Like sure I paid for Cool. Which helped with some of it but like I just learned it all online for free is like you can learn all that you need to online as long as you have the time that place. Like the biggest thing is you just need a lot of time to sift through everything.
Yeah, yeah, line. I aligned with that, like, there's a lot specially nowadays, content is like, there's a lot of quantity. You just have to find the call me in there. Yeah, definitely kind of coming out of University then or college. I don't know which one, or even the distinction in the US. But getting into your first job, was it in web dev as well or how
did that go? Yeah, so the thing that actually got me into web development, was it kind of had to jump back to when I was in school my sophomore year I went to the career fair and I was looking for an internship and I found an internship at a company and it was partially web development.
Partially like database related but we were doing like we were I think we're coding in Visual Basic actions, what we were working in so I cannot have super common language, but it was working on web development Concepts. So there's HTML CSS JavaScript and then Visual Basic for like the back end stuff. Yeah, and I really enjoyed that. And that's kind of what kick-started me on the bike. Front-end development, web development space.
And like I learned a lot about CSS back then like I'm super into CSS and that kind of stuff not as much. The rather stuffy I was really into it. So then when I was looking for jobs, I was really looking for jobs in that web development space. So I applied to like four or five jobs at the career fair when I went and other okay, here's some local web development companies that want to work at and the job.
I ended up getting was actually working in Ruby on Rails so they were in the web development space But as a little born back in focus and front-end Focus. Yeah, and it was like an agency style company and I ended up getting A job there and I was I really enjoyed it. So like straight out of college. I had a job in, you know, like that back-end ish, we did some front-end to, but as a pretty bad, can't heavy like agency style job. Yeah, very nice.
I like, I mean, the company I joined through, I wouldn't call it. An agency was more a consultancies the company I'm in now Xavier. But we had kind of an agency model in customers would come to us with kind of an idea or even a concept that they would like a product of our proof of concept of and we would help them through the ideation and the actual implementation.
In which I got to do a lot of kind of smaller projects even longer term but in a very short time period where I got the touch on a lot of different Technologies in all the different languages and through that Grogan exponentially, which is really cool. Yeah, that's something I really liked about like the agency experience. Like it's definitely not for everyone.
Yeah. Because it's kind of a different experience but it's nice because you get a touch on a lot of different projects, like I mostly worked on longer-term projects. Like I would say when I was there, I probably did like four different projects in the time I was there. So like almost one project a year essentially. Yeah, but it was just nice being able to jump between different things because it wasn't always
like okay. I was on one project for a year, then another for a year like I would sometimes have two different projects going or so. I kind of swap between them or I'd have like one going for a while and then it would take a break because it was a seasonal based product and Something else and then come back that seasonal project. So it's kind of just nice to have variety even it was in the
same language. Like we always did Ruby on Rails. It was just nice because even the same language you get a lot of differences between different projects and different, you know products that you're building. Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned Ruby on Rails and kind of the role was more oriented towards back end even though there were like front end components in there as well because I simply through your YouTube and what you're doing now is mainly I mean more so
front end practice, right? How is that transition? So so actually the main reason why I do mostly front end in JavaScript later content on my YouTube channel is because of when I was working in this company, I was doing your mostly back and stuff but we had front end stuff like I would work in react a little bit. I would work in JavaScript and CSS. And those are the things that I enjoyed most when I was learning web development.
Yeah, so I was like, you know what when I'm going to make this programming, you know YouTube channel, I could make it YouTube channel and cover Ruby on Rails, which I'm pretty good at or I could, you know, dive into JavaScript and reactant CSS, which I'm like not bad at but I'm not amazing at those things and I wanted to do those because those are the things that Trusted me the most and it was like, well, if I'm working on Ruby on Rails eight hours a day at my job, I don't really want
to spend four hours when I get home making YouTube videos on, or I'm gonna make YouTube videos on something else. That's interesting to me. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna do a lot of friends and stuff and like people would even ask me to like make Ruby on Rails content. I'm like, I don't want to do that. I do that all day at work. I don't want to do it anymore, like, it's fun, but I can only do so much in one day. So that's essentially why I do front-end development on my
channel. Just kind of just grew from there. Thus, with a quarter, I love they said no, no, that's that's some work stuff right there. Here, we're doing actually, what I Love ya basically kind of scary because I mean, through that process you were, you were allowing yourself to grow and learn and kind of evaluate Technologies in there, as well. But you immediately put it on YouTube, right? For others to consume and, to
learn from as well. But if you're not like as confident, I was assuming that you were more confident, maybe the Ruby on Rails stuff versus the more front-end related stuff. You didn't have a problem, like putting out any of the front-end stuff initially.
Yeah. So my friend knowledge, like when I worked at my previous company as an Turn we did jQuery exclusively I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, I didn't even know there was a difference between jQuery and JavaScript because I was throwing in straight to jQuery. Like that was the first thing I learned before I learned any JavaScript. So I thought they were just kind of the same thing. I thought, like one was built on top of the other, like, they were the same thing.
I didn't realize until years later that they were different things. So it was a little bit intimidating for me to jump into, you know, building these JavaScript videos because I had a jQuery Foundation, but I didn't have a solid JavaScript foundation. So I kind of had to learn a lot of those JavaScript skills. Even Oh, there's a lot of relation between jQuery and JavaScript. Just building things out, using pure JavaScript, was kind of a challenge for me at first and it
was nice. Being able to do these videos though because I would kind of have to learn these topics. I would figure them all out and then I could make a video on it.
And if you can make a video where you teach someone something, even if you just like write a blog article, anytime you teach someone something you have to understand it really well because as you're teaching it to someone they're going to have questions or if you're like making a pre-recorded video or blog article, you're going to think like okay they're probably going to ask why this thing happens or why?
This works this way. And you need to know why that works that way in order to explain it. So you really need to learn something, I think a fundamental level because I could do super basic JavaScript stuff before, but I didn't couldn't tell you why everything worked the way it did, until I started making videos on it and I had to ask myself. Okay, why does this work this way? People are going to ask that. I need to know why this works that way. Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense.
Right. You feel responsible in teaching in that way as well. So when questions come, you don't just want to be like, well, I don't know. And then that's the end of it, you still want to be able to help them with the questions that they have then But just and I think sorry, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say, I think one of the most important concepts with teaching is not necessarily waiting for people to ask you questions, but thinking of the questions they're going to ask ahead of
time. Because if you want to Be an Effective Teacher, you need to know the bike five. Most common questions someone's going to ask you. So when you're writing your content and making your content, you can already answer those questions before they even have a chance to answer or ask them to you and that really I think helps Elevate whatever you're teaching and it helps Elevate you because you have to learn those things yourself. Yeah that's a that's a great Point actually.
It doesn't matter in what you're teaching or even what you're presenting. If you can figure out what the audience is, going to ask anticipate and already answer that throughout your explanation and you're giving a great
explanation then. Yeah, that's why I think that people that are new to something, not like completely fresh, but people that are newer to something, are better at explaining it than experts because an expert doesn't remember what the questions they ask when they were learning were. So they explain it in a way that they're like, oh, well, of course, you already know what that means. I've known that for 20 years, you know, but most people don't, Know what that means right away.
So if you just learned something a week ago, you're probably better at explaining it to someone that's known it for months. Yeah, exactly. Right. If it's, if it's been something you've been doing year in year out, I mean it's kind of fitting in your routine, right things that might be obvious to, you might not be obvious to someone that's new or fresh, or just a
starter in that way. So you kind of obvious Kate that in the way, you communicate, with the way you explain things, and then things don't make quite as much sense for you, as it
does to someone else. Yeah, one thing when I was learning I found a lot of like, you know, YouTube channel and blog articles, they would use a lot of really big words and like I could understand some of these big words, I have that computer engineering background, so they pounded big complicated words into my mind for four years, but like, a lot of people are
learning this on their own. They don't have a dictionary definition for all the crazy complex, you know, like, you know, words like memoization, like what? That just sounds like memorization spelled wrong. You know, like, people don't know what that means that you have to be able to explain things in ways that are easy to understand for everyone. Not just people that have, you know, that strong background of Again yeah yeah, I completely
aligned with that. I wanted to touch on what you said earlier in jQuery JavaScript and even Java when I started out, I mean I had some programming courses in University but the one course that I was web development and it was teach yourself how to make this website, you can pick from these designs and that sort of stuff. So I looked online and everything kind of looks the same. And I was like, what is this? Different is Java different from JavaScript and even jQuery?
What is that like teaching yourself how to do those things is Really just diving down the rabbit hole, trying out things and figuring out yourself what the differences are. And when you, when you use a wall and what action was actually the distinction there, I'd love to know if you were to go back or even if you were to start.
Now with regards to teaching yourself I mean front-end or back-end you can pick a language but how will you start teaching yourself how to code if you were to start right now? I mean obviously I would just buy all of my own course look at that small plug no seriously. What I would I would do is I would I would try to experiment with lots of different like sectors, because first, I would do my research to figure out what are the fields in whatever case you care about?
Like, let's say you're interested in learning how to program but you don't know what you want to do. Like, maybe you want to do web development game development, desktop development, you don't really know. So, I would research what the different fields out there are. Try to figure out them just like watching explainer videos, there's a lot of them out there. And then think, okay, what are the things that most interest me like this?
One kind of sounds interesting or this one sounds interesting, then I would dive a little deeper. Okay, figure out what that topics all about. Like, okay, I'm interested in Web development or game development, wearing a little bit more about what those entail like, okay web development, you're going to be using JavaScript at some point in your web development Journey or css and game development. Maybe Unity like is the most popular game engine. So you kind of get these ideas
of what these tools are. And then just go ahead and start learning the very basics of them and try to just build something. See if you enjoy it. Like don't go super deep into it just like super basic game, development project. Build like pong for example or build, you know, like a two DUIs application. Something really basic and see. Is this something I even enjoy because To get a year into
learning web development. Only to realize, you know what game development sounded more interesting to me? I should I wish I knew that a year ago. So if you just kind of experiment spend, you know, a month, two months experimenting with like three or four different topics that really interest, you figure out what you do. You actually like doing and maybe you realize, okay, I like web development. Now, you have to figure out, do you want front-end or back-end?
And again, do that, experimentation phase. And it may take you longer to get to the point of being proficient as a developer, but you're going to know that you're in a field that you really enjoy because you may spend a year learning web development only to realize you really Like it that much. And that's a really like terrible feeling to think you wasted a year your life on something. You really don't even enjoy. Yeah, I get the I like that. You started with the domains
right? Whether it's game development or web development or like it even embedded stuff stuff like that. All you OT things it starts with that, right? Because you can jump into a technology and then figure out what you can do with that. But then you're very much technology focused and then the switch to a different technology is going to seem very daunting, right? Because you finally mastered or learned this, this technology became apt at it. So, starting with the In
figuring out from there. Okay. What do I do then? Need to learn from a technical level to be proficient with in this domain, right to get the stuff done but if I'm looking at myself and even my journey, it can be quite daunting, right. Let's say I want to start in the game industry or even web development. If I'm starting with a webpage and I have to build in like a login form, or even a to-do app, it can seem like quite a lot.
When you're starting out, this kind of big thing in our thing is kind of interrelated and everything is kind of has to make sense. Since together, how do you make things small enough for you to actually be able to start and and make progress in there as well? Yeah. So this is a great question. Probably one of the biggest problems I find that people run into and I teach a lot of people and a lot of them come to me. They're like I don't know how to get started.
Like I can follow along with every tutorial out there but as soon as I build a project my own, it's just a blank text editor. I just stare at it and I've no idea where to get started. Yeah. So I think the biggest thing is, once you learn like the super Basics programming, like, you know, variables conditionals like Loops, like the basic building blocks of programming. You are comfortable, you can Building projects. But you don't know where to get started.
I recommend always starting with a really small project. If you think it's doable make it 50% smaller because then it's actually probably going to be within your skill set. You always overestimate what you can do. But then on top of that, take this project look let's say it is a to-do list application and break it down into every single component. So I think if you're a user of this web application, what are the things that you can do so, on a to-do list application? You can add it to do.
You can check Market to do to say is complete, you can delete it to do, you can edit it to do. So, you have Like these different ways that a user can interact with your webpage and then think, okay, I want to build out all these different interactions. What do I need? So for someone to enter to do, I'm going to need to have an
input box on my page. So already you have an input element, you can add to your HTML page, you probably need a button so that they could submit that and create it and you're going to need some way to listen to when they create that. So you're going to need some type of form event listener to listen for when they create that to-do item. So you kind of have like a checklist of different things,
you need to do in your mind. And instead of immediately jumping in and starting to write code, I recommend writing out in like English pseudocode. Even what you think you need to do so right out all these steps in English. And then from there, it's really easy to plug in the actual different code elements because you have in your mind you're
like, okay I know what ifs are. I know what event listeners are, I know these different things so you can just read your English and you can say okay I need a way to enter data, boom input element. I needed a way to listen for when they submit that data, okay? I have an event listener for that.
So you have all these different things that you can kind of connect to those English words which are much easier than saying OK. I want to create a to-do list application, like that, super overwhelming but Need to add an input element to my page. Anyone can do that? Yeah, I really like that because I mean, I think back to my own journey and when I started out, I would jump right in right, just right, write code. See what works. What doesn't work trying to figure out how to make this
thing happen on the Fly? And I mean I started especially my job here. Actually, look at my colleagues and how they approach things because they would have kind of a feature that I would be like, how the hell do you do this? Or I have no clue, like, even starting out and they would write things on paper or they would And a high over explain to me. I'll get these things need to happen and it wasn't even cold and I was like okay that that
does make sense, right? Because if all of those things come together then we do have this kind of added feature in that way but that wasn't that had nothing to do with coding in and of its own, right? That's just kind of structuring your thoughts in a way that makes sense chronologically and even being able to explain that to someone else for them to
understand. And then also, to think it makes sense or even to kind of go back on things and discuss things and then we Implement because then the implementation is way. Way more smooth, we have kind of a checklist of things we want to go through. We do all of that and then it comes together. You have it. And that's my nose, a shift in thinking, at least for me. Yeah. Yeah. 100% agree. Like, I think that learning to program is like two parts.
There's the actual code, like learning, you know, ifs and for loops, and those kind of things. And then there's actually learning how to think like a developer, how to break down a big problem into a much smaller problem that I think is the skill that a lot of people skip over there. Like okay, I want to learn how to code. I'm going to learn the coding part but they skip over all of the actual thing. Part. And that's the part where they get stuck but like okay, how do
I build this project now? Because you never actually learned how to think like a developer and how to break these big problems down. And if you can break them down like you mentioned, it makes the implementation and absolute Breeze because all you're doing is just taking all this knowledge in your brain and just barfing it out onto a page following essentially a list of instructions. Yeah, I like I like that. You distinguish it in thinking,
like a developer. But for me what was really hard is when it actually clicked? When I saw the differences in thinking steps was always when I collaborated with someone else, right? Someone that was a bit more senior than me. Me and was educating me and guiding me through that journey in there as well.
I think when you're starting out on your own you're very much focus on how do I get this done before you try and figure out your own thoughts or even most often you don't even get a feedback on your approach and how you did things rather than what you actually did. Ya know, if you can find someone that is even just a week ahead of you in like learning to program. I think that's a really
important skill. I know, it's not always possible to find someone, but if you can find someone that really helps with accelerating your learning process because you kind of, you know, jump ideas off them be like, hey does this make sense?
Does this make sense? But even if you can't find that the idea of rubber duck in, which is essentially where you just talked to a rubber duck or to like a stuffed teddy bear or to the wall or to yourself and just explain the problem, you're having a lot of times, just the idea of verbally explaining what you're trying to You you can already see what the issue is that you're running into. Like if you don't know how to implement something explain what the different steps of the
problem are. And a lot of times that'll, you know, light Enlighten you on what the actual problem you're running into is. So I recommend doing that a lot for people that are stuck on something, just write it down or speak to it with someone or just know, nothing speak to yourself. And a lot of times that will actually fix the problem for you. Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting thing in. I love the things are in your head, right? And they can be very
unstructured. So for you to be able to communicate that to either someone else, or in your case, a Rubber duck or yourself, it doesn't even matter. The act of structuring your inner thoughts and being able to externalize them, right? Writing them down, or communicated them verbally, it helps with your thinking process and all of a sudden it will click and you will figure out kind of what the next steps are the missing pieces there.
Okay. Yeah. When I, when I worked at my last company, it was a small company. So like it was just me and my boss with the only two that worked in the office where I worked and there'd be many times where he'd be like, hey Kyle can you come over here for a second sidewalk over and he's like I got a question. You know, X y&z technology. I'm like I've never used this product anything about this, he's like, I don't care. You're just a rubber duck right now.
I just need to like talk to someone and have like, just a feedback. I just need to talk this out in, like, it's easier when there's someone there was like, okay, that's cool. I can do that can listen and not know anything and a half. The time he'd be talking to me and all of a sudden, like, mid-sentence. He'd be like, okay, I got it and that would be it, you know?
So it's just kind of funny to think that, you know, you can talk to someone who literally knows nothing about what you're trying to do and that may solve the problem for you. Yeah, there's a funny word in Dutch which I haven't really found that the right translation it's called Sparta. And it's similar to sparring in a kind of a boxing ring.
But you do that when you just need to kind of mirror information to someone either rubber ducking, or for them to actually also give you feedback in that way for you to structure your thoughts, right? And it doesn't have to be related to programming. It can be something that happened in real life that you just want to spar about. I still don't know the right translation, but we use that very often nice. Yeah, for sure.
I lost my train of thought actually because we started out kind of Ruby on Rails and Went to YouTube when you wanted to teach yourself or even educate others with regards to fronted Technologies. But when did you actually decide to do YouTube full time? Like did it just take off and you were like, this is my thing. We're going to do this full time. Yeah, when did, that's a good question. So it's kind of two parts. It almost happened at the very start and at the very end, it
kind of took off. So, when I started the YouTube channel, I in 100% intentionally was like, okay, I want to make this a business that eventually I can do as a full-time job. So in order to come up with my channel name actually this is kind of a funny. Three. I was like I want to have a.com domain name associated with my channel name. So instead of just creating a YouTube channel name having it, whatever it was, I went to like, you know, some domain website. I was just typing in different
things. That sounded interesting. I was like, web dev, web dev easy, web dev, this, web dev, whatever. I know, development, whatever was Glenn. Do I wanted to be web development based? And finally I've landed on web dev simplified. I was like, okay, that domain is not taken. It doesn't cost me a million dollars like every other domain. Every other one. Yeah, it's like, okay, that's why I'm going to do.
So that's the entire reason, my channel is called, web dev simplified because I was like, it makes sense because my goal Kind of like make things simple and easy to understand. So, like, I was already kind of on that like terminology but soon as I found that domain name wasn't taken, it only cost like 10 dollars. I was like, okay bye. That's exactly what I want. God, and my channel literally same day after I bought it and just the act of buying the
domain name. I mean, it was literally like ten dollars, but the act of putting down money, it made me more serious about the projects. I probably would have at some point quit, but having that $10 I put down as okay. I'm actually dedicated to doing this and that really helped push me through like the beginning stages because the beginning is so hard because you don't Don't know anything. It takes forever to build a video. You release a video and one person watches it and they down
vote. Until you. You suck metallic. It's super demoralized. Hard getting. Yeah, so that putting that $10 down really help because I was like, okay, I've put some skin in the game even though it's only $10 like my lizard brain was like, I've put something into this. I need to contribute to it. Yeah. And then from there, it started to slowly grow, you know, and after about a year, I think I was at about 10,000 subscribers so it was pretty good growth for a year.
And I had a little bit of, you know, spikes around that time. And then the big thing, One covid hit a lot of people, you know, they were at home. They had more time at home. They had either lost their job or they're worried about losing their job. So a lot of people came to YouTube for entertainment, but also, a lot of people came to
YouTube to learn a new skill. A skill that could be used for remote job and probably the easiest and best skill to learn for that is, you know, web development of some form. So I saw a huge growth in my channel around that time. You know, that April March time period.
I think those around 2020 when all that started and it started to continue to grow and I was already at a point where I was thinking about quitting my job because I was like, okay I can kind of As see this starting to. It doesn't overtake my income but I can see eventually maybe a year or two from now this would overtake my feel full time income at my job.
So I was like already on the fence and thinking about quitting and then covid came and might you know YouTube channel started skyrocketing even more than before. So I told my boss, I was like, Hey, how do you feel about me going part-time? Other? I want to go part-time for a few months. See if this continues to go in, then maybe I'll quit, is it? Yeah, that's fine. We'll support you like they were very supportive. So yeah.
That's 100% cool. So I went part-time and I was able to even keep my health benefits. For super useful, but I was only working like 20 hours a week. So I could dedicate a lot of time on YouTube and within just one month of being part time, I realized I was like, okay, this is way better. I need to do this full time so I told my boss, I was like I know I told you I'd be here for a few months part-time but like I think I need to be done at the
end of this month. Like I don't want to miss this opportunity so I was like I'm quitting and I think it was July 2020 when I quit. So it was yeah the very end of June. So started July, so almost exactly two years after I started my channel, I quit went full-time and yeah, I wasn't making my full-time income by, I wasn't making the same amount. I wasn't my full-time job, but I saw the potential like I was like, okay.
I think this can, you know, even overtake my full-time jobs, I need to jump on this now before, you know, the opportunity passes me. That's awesome man. That's pretty cool. I love the little start, the little investment that was also a huge investment in your mind. You would like I already invested like we have to make this through. We have to actually start like because I think starting in most cases, is the biggest obstacle
you have. Once you get the ball rolling, once you kind of found your routine, find your Rhythm. That is good, right? Then you're like, Okay, we have these kind of things x amount of things I already have thoughts aligned. I know how to make the video and how to structure it edit it. I actually have consistency in the days that I upload. So then you have a rhythm but the hardest thing, I think still starting and actually doing
things. Yeah. Yeah. I think another thing that really helps, this is for any skill. Again, starting a YouTube channel starting. Anything, even just learning to code is have some people that depend on you, one thing that really helped me was, I was part of a Discord channel for game development actually at the time, but there's a few people on That were interested in learning web development Aid, ask me questions because they knew I was, you know, skilled in that department.
So I started making videos and I was like, hey why don't you guys check out these videos? There's like five people or whatever. So I be able to get like five views on these videos and all these people were like oh you know it's you know it's really helped I really like that. Looking forward to the next one and just having that commitment where these people were like actually looking for it. Even it was only a couple people looking forward to a new video.
It really helped motivate me because I was like, man, it's been like two weeks since my last video. These people are really hoping for a new video, like I really need to get in there and just grind through. Like I remember one of the First videos I did. You like I don't know. And within the first 10 videos I did was the first video I ever did that did well. I was just it was a get tutorial and I was just grinding through
this video. I think it was like 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning when I finished the video because the editing process took so long and I just posted that video, I went to bed. The nice thing was that my job had flexible hours so I was like, I am sleeping in tomorrow. I don't normally stay up that late and I went to bed and the next morning I woke up and I looked at my phone to see how the video did it had 9,000 views and I was like my previous best
video was like eight views. So I was like what the heck? This is insane so that really helped Motivate me to, like, I got a decent number of subscribers like maybe 100 subscribers off of it, but they never came back and watch
another video essentially. But, like, just that little bit of motivation, like the fact that I was motivated to help these individual people, let me to grind, you know, into 2 a.m. to make this video and that video ended up doing really well, which help motivate me further. So just kind of like a Snowball Effect at that point. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've heard, this is well, Ken, Ken G said he came on my podcast and he says like motivation is pretty fickle and
it depends on the person. But once you feel responsible, also for others. And others, Expect something of you that can be one of the biggest motivators you can find, right? Because you feel accountable, you feel responsible? Not just for yourself because I mean, letting yourself down is way easier than letting others down. So eventually you'll deliver and you found your way in that that? Yeah. I think that always stuck with me.
Yeah, but really cool, man. I wonder if you've seen this as well because when I started on web development, I mean that was when like at a university and we did a lot of PHP, not so much even JavaScript, but HTML and CSS as well. So then I did mostly back and stuff, actually, almost exclusively a little bit of view because that was the framework
we used. But then I came into a roll and it was almost completely react, and I didn't actually start off understanding JavaScript, until after I did, most of the react components, and react functionality, and stuff like that because react was just a bit easier to understand. And I didn't really have to figure out what happens under
the hood. And I did enjoy it because it was component structure, a lot of things made sense, kind of conceptually in my head, I can understand How things fit together and you have some functionality here and there. So I never actually bothered with vanilla JavaScript until just recently where I have a project, which is a lot of static HTML templates, go as a back-end and go HTML and then just vanilla JavaScript over there when we need it.
But I think a lot of people start out with a framework, whether it's view, whether it's even angular, or mostly react is what I've seen. I think they started with that because I think I don't know, might be easier. What's your take on that? Yeah, I think a lot of people start with something like react because they see that jobs out.
There are all looking for reacts, they're like, okay, if I want a job, I need to learn to react together and they also see that like, all these YouTube videos coming out around, react, everybody's talking about react, everybody's doing react projects, like it just seems like react is the way to go and I think even some people don't even realize, like how much it's built on JavaScript. So they just kind of jump into react, or maybe they'll learn a little bit of JavaScript or
like. Okay, I learned the basics. Now, I'm jumping in to react because I want to be able to do cool real world things because I think, you know, in JavaScript is just the thing of the past. You know, it's like kind of like the jQuery of. Today's, I go. JQuery is a thing of the past people think JavaScript, I think of the past because react is replacing it. But I think it's really important that you understand the core of JavaScript. Like, I tell everyone that's
trying to learn reactor. Take my react course. I was like, I have a list of JavaScript Concepts. I was like, you need to learn all of these Concepts before you even bother with react because it's going to make your life so much easier. It's not a hard list. I mean, it'll probably take you a month. Two months to learn through all these different concepts.
But then, when you go to learn, react, react is going to be a breeze because Of people that get tripped up and react, get tripped up on JavaScript Concepts, not react concepts are like, oh, what is this import export stuff? Or why is it when you pass, you know, an arrow function to a component you like on click event? Like they kind of aren't really sure how passing functions work.
So they get confused by that kind of thing, like passing by reference versus value versus calling, the function versus just passing the name of the function, those kinds of things trip up. A lot of people that don't learn the fundamentals of JavaScript first. So I'm just like, one of these fundamentals. It's going to take you a month or two. It's probably not going to be the most fun thing in the world
because fundamentals always. Suck. Yeah, when you go to Lynn react, instead of taking four months to learn rack, it will take you one month to learn react because you're going to know, all the JavaScript stuff. All you need to learn as a react stuff and react is pretty small. You know, comparatively to JavaScript.
Yeah, exactly. I also had to backtrack because I was like, this doesn't make sense and then when I actually figured out how to do it, I was like none of this stuff is react based like these are more fundamental things that I just didn't know and I learned on the Fly, you can do that as well, but when you start out with a foundational base, it makes adding on top of that. I think a lot easier. Haven't really. That wasn't my journey.
Ya know, I've always found that learning something on the Fly. It's fun because you get to start building stuff immediately. Yeah, but I find it may seem really fast at first, because I like, oh, man, I got this to do list already. Like, this is crazy. If I spent two months learning JavaScript, I would not have this by now. Yeah, but then, as you go as the time compounds that you still keep skipping these fundamentals, you start to realize that.
Okay? Things are starting to take me longer than everyone around me. Like why is that? I feel like I have a good understanding of this. We were lacking those fundamentals. It's kind of the same thing about learning and Ancient that we talked about earlier. It's like if you're trying to learn an instrument to be able to play, You Know, music, you can skip the fundamentals and go straight into plain songs into, you're going to start to learn songs quicker than if you
started with the fundamentals. You're going to struggle with certain things because you don't have those fundamental skills in place. So if you learn those fundamentals first and then start going to learning songs, you'll be able to learn those songs faster. I think it's the exact same thing with, you know, learning Concepts versus learning how to build projects. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great example.
It's very similar to that and even that Kind of relatable to my own experience where I was like okay I get a lot of things done, right? And that is so satisfying getting the thing done that you need done. Except when you're a bit slower than other people and other people are like why is this guy taking so slow? Or what's wrong here or even internally? I'm like, okay, this should be simple yet.
I can't figure out this small thing and sure I can Google it here and there but at some point I'm like, I've googled this so many times that I should actually like, figure out how this works before continuing because this is something foundational. This is something recurring. And this is something that's lacking in my current skill set. So then you figure it out, think, and you, I think the sorry. Continue.
Go ahead. I was gonna say, I think the thing that a lot of people run into is like, it's fine to do this kind of stuff where you learn on the Fly and you're just like experimenting with things. But after you're done with the experiment and go back and think, what did I struggle with? What did I not really understand like you maybe look to the code, you copied it from stack Overflow, and it worked. But why did it work try to ask yourself why?
And if you can't answer go back and try to learn that thing and it may take a little longer at first. But by doing that, it'll make your future projects better. So you can kind of get the best of both worlds, where you can start with building something complex, and when you run into an issue, where you don't understand why something works, just look it up after the fact that, look it up later.
And that's going to really help build your concept based skills, as well as you'll be able to build projects. Yeah, I love that. I'd love to touch on stuff. That's a bit more. I don't know like more advanced maybe in react specifically because when you got the basics down what what do people struggle with next? Is it more like getting your components to render as efficiently as possible? Or state management or even kind
of lazy loading your stuff. What do you think are more advanced topics that people kind of struggle with? Yeah, I think some of the more advanced concepts people. Struggle with is just the conceptual model of react. So, react is very declarative while, you know, learning normal. JavaScript is not at all declarative. So kind of switching your mindset from this imperative mindset to a declarative mindset where you realize like, okay, when I change State, it's going
to re-render my component. And I don't have access to that new state until after my component rear Enders and like how the use effect Hook is going to work within all of these different State updates. And like, how the component life cycle works these things, I think are confusing for a lot of people because Learn normal JavaScript. Those are not Concepts you learned you don't care about declarative stuff. Everything is imperative.
Like you have an event listener. When you click on it, it fires this function and then you change the variables and then you have to manually update everything while with react you change your state and then everything reruns again all the way from the top which is 100% different than how normal JavaScript works. So I think we rewiring your brain in that way is what a lot of people struggle with because I find when I get asked questions a lot.
It's like hey updated a state variable and I tried to use it after that and it didn't update. It's like, well, you have to wait for your component to re-render or they look at their use affecting likewise. My use effect not working. Oh you forgot this dependency because you know when this thing changing you to make sure you count for that. So I think these are not quite like super advanced concepts.
It's more like that intermediate level like you understand react, but you don't understand why everything is working. I think those are the biggest problems people run into. Yeah. Now you get the good thoughts as well. I've seen a lot of stuff. I mean a lot of stuff is evolving very fast, especially in the JavaScript ecosystem, but also in the react ecosystem, I've played around with Gatsby and I've even done some next
year stuff as well. What's your take on the the Frameworks that are Yup. And that are kind of using elements of react to kind of enhance their own structure in there as well. I think they're great. Honestly, like my blog article, I used to have it written using Gatsby. I ended up switching over to Astro eventually because I had some problems with Gatsby that just wasn't working, right? I don't know if there's any
problem or Gatsby problem. I just was like, I'm switching to a straw, don't really care if figure this out. I spent too long trying to figure it out but like things like next JS and those even Frameworks like Redwood and Blitz. I think those are reactive paste as well or maybe their own am argue of leash. In of things. But like I really like this because it takes away some of the hard stuff, every act like, server-side, rendering, and Page routing.
Those kind of things just aren't fun to do, and they're very difficult to do sometimes. So, having these framers work next day, as they just take care of all that for you. I think is really useful and they're not so prescriptive like a Ruby on Rails where it's like you must do it this way. They're very open-ended like reactors. They just give you a few extra guide rails that make those decisions in those, you know, boilerplate code, things a
little bit easier to work with. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I really enjoyed Gatsby when it worked. And I think I mean we used images that were a bit too too big and then we had a plug-in that kind of Reform at all the images and then all of a sudden our bill took way too long and on that laughs I built didn't take it anymore and yet that it wasn't fun anymore. But when it works, it's great and I love using it. Additionally, with either verse
or net, laughs. I so even deploying your thing and giving it to users in the end, makes it so much easier. And I love that. We're getting more and more tools that make things simpler. I just wonder, Where it goes, is it eventually going to be one framework or how we always going to have choices and kind of opinionated Frameworks and you get to pick and choose from there? And is it going to be? I mean we have react we have you
angular Nieman, I don't know. Spelt is also their kind of popping up here and there there's there's one every day. I'm sure at least. So I just don't know where it's going. I'd love to have your take on that as well. I personally feel like it'll kind of end up like the, The View, react, front-end framework space, where there's going to be maybe one day. Probably more popular the rest like right now I would say.
Next JS is kind of that one where it's like it kind of does everything well enough and it's probably the most popular one out there. Yeah. Then I think there's going to be other options that a little bit more specialized like Astro or Gatsby. They're more specialized in what they do. Like they're more focused on building out like statically rendered Pages. Like they can do other things, but I'd say that's where they rear their specialized in.
Yeah. And then, on top of that, there's going to be even further things. Like next JS is kind of like built on top of react and then there's going to be things like Blitz and Redwood that are going to be built on. Sjs or like the next version of next Jazz. The things that really take it to the next step was like, okay we've thought of all the things for you, we're going to give you an opinionated way to do things.
I think that's actually the way that JavaScript is going to go because a lot of people are fed up with having to make all the decisions themselves are like, why does react not have routing building? Why does it not have this built-in? Like, why do I need to include all these libraries? I think people are getting to the point where they're like, okay, I just want to use next
gesture. I just want to use Blitz and it's going to just do all of this for me and I can just write my code and not worry about thinking about which one of the 74 different libraries. Am I going to use? Yeah. Yeah, I like that. I mean it's part of where I am fine of go because it's a language and all of the things are in that language that I usually would use. I really have to think of when I introduce a dependency because a lot of things are already
implemented through that. I can make API, is I can make my services, I can hook my front end to it and I can even do a lot of static HTML templating. I now have a stack where it's exactly like that. A lot of back-end static HTML, templates, a little bit of vanilla JavaScript in there and boom has a CSS framework and it runs like a train. Like, it does exactly what it needs to and it's super
performant. And everything kind of comes out of the box, but JavaScript in and of its own, wasn't quite like that react took it one step further and still, on top of that we're building. And now we have next year's and still on top of that we're building. So I like I like the thought of just getting the technology that is a tool and having enough Tools in that toolbox or the technology that is a toolbox and having enough Tools in that toolbox to do whatever you need to.
With regards to web development or pick a toolbox that is kind of Apt for whatever you need to do. Whether it's building an e-commerce or even building. Some other thing, I like having a toolbox that's kind of various various enough and I don't have to keep trying to figure out which tool fits in here and which one is maintained still? Which one can I use? And which one is not going to, like, break my shins on the long run?
Yeah. No. I honestly think that the future is going to be like a Ruby on Rails style JavaScript framework. I think something like that is going to happen. Like we're already starting to see that would like, woods and Redwood, their kind of like pushing themselves towards that territory and I think of something like that becomes good enough, that it's usable by people like, you know, becomes 1.0 and it's got a lot of features.
I think that could be the next big thing that really like takes over next. It doesn't maybe take it over but it's like, you know, another option. Besides next words like hey do you have you know just a basic crud application like everybody else is building use this framework because it's going to make it so easy. That was my favorite thing about Ruby on Rails. It's like if you're building just to basic Application which is 90% applications like it's so easy and so quick.
And I think if we get something like that for the front end as well with JavaScript and react, it's going to be a game-changer. Yeah, yeah I agree. I'd love to know your take on full stack development as well as kind of a final touch because you've done both back end as well as front end. And for me, coming out from a kind of a same Journey as you, I go into the front end and it was more as like a sink or swim I guess because I actually needed to deliver stuff and teach
myself on the fly as well. But In there. I was like, man people that are really have a good understanding of both Concepts, right? A lot of things back at related and a lot of things, front-end related, those are rare. Usually I find people that can make stuff happen on the front end or can make stuff happen on the back end and then her really
apt on the other side. But what I see on the market is a lot of people also ask for that, full stack role or even full stack with devops experience or even take it a step further and knowing a lot about cloud and security and Test development and everything like that. Like, it's a whole package and I get that if JavaScript and react in the Frameworks that we use are simpler and things are a bit more established than opinionated, then you don't really have as much choices anymore.
So I kind of becomes more tangible and and things are still within your grasp when you want to be effective. But as it is now I think it's it's a big ask sometimes to allow people or to ask from people to be apt in a lot of Technologies. And I feel like sometimes We even keep asking more on top of that, right?
Because you also companies also ask for years of experience, both in the front and both in the back end for technologies that are, for example years old, and they asked for 10 years of experience, in that technology, it's a bit ridiculous. Sometimes how that comes across because is a full stack developer still like a realistic thing. Your take. What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, so I would say, if you asked me this question, like, five ten years ago, I'd say, yeah, it's a reasonable thing to ask because your project is going to have a focus in. Way or the other most projects are either going to be more complex in the front end or more complex in the back end. Unless you get to like the scale of like Facebook where it's complex everywhere. But at that point, you don't have full stack Engineers. You have hundreds of each part.
You know, you have hundreds of friend and hundreds of a back-end developers. You don't have to worry about front end or full stack Engineers but on most of the projects that aren't massive projects. I feel like five ten years ago. It was 100% possible because you could be specialized in one area and you have enough knowledge in the other area to get the, you know, thing done. But I think now the front end has gotten a lot more complex than it. Has to be, it used to just be
JavaScript HTML CSS. Now you have react. Now you got next GS which pushes you even into the background a little bit. You have view, you have spelled, you have all these different Frameworks and they keep getting more. And more complex, I think it's harder and harder for someone to be specialized, like, in the back, end with enough, front and knowledge to get things done.
As these more complex framework come out, it's definitely possible, but I think if you're a company, you'd be better off hiring a dedicated back end and a dedicated front end developer. Then hiring you know one full stack developer to try to take both those roles because they're going to be better at one versus the other And they're just going to lack in that one Department. You can't be an expert in both because it takes so long to
learn all the skills needed. And even if you become an expert in back-end, an expert in front end, five years from now, whichever one you do more, you're going to become an expert in and then things in the other department are going to change. Especially if you know, black on front end, it's going to be way different in five years, and it is now so like you're no longer to be hung an expert in that area because you spent more time
on one specialty than other. I think it's important for people to have an understanding of both back-end and front-end if possible. It makes you more valuable developers, you can understand if you're a Developer. What the struggles of the back end are. And like, what is, and is not possible. Yep. You don't need to be an expert. You don't need to be the person, doing both the front end and the back end. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I like being apt to both to a point where I can be effective,
right? And if our if our front-end guy that's really specialized and knows a lot about the front-end ecosystem is gone, we can still continue as a team, right? Because we fill those gaps in that way, but if it comes to making our front-end application, very performant or the bundle size a lot smaller with a lot of he's shaking and different package management things in there as well.
I would love someone that specialized in that because that right now is not really what I'm what I'm comfortable in. But that's also where team comes in, right? Where you have those Specialties and they come together and you can make decisions as a team because in the end I think you're also responsible and accountable as a team for the
for the end result, right? So if you can align on your Specialties in that way or kind of fill those gaps, rather, I think you can be very effective in a way.
Yeah, I agree. Like when I worked at the agency, some of the projects I worked on were smaller projects so I may be the only developer on that project, so I had to fill both the backend and the front-end role and even sometimes the devops role, which I would always try my best to push off on someone because I hate that section of pipe. Come on, I'm so bad at it, like terraform. Config files of the worst thing I've ever seen in my entire
life. I always like, oh, I almost want to quit now to do the terraform but like I feel like if you want a small team like that in your working on a smaller project where it's small enough, you can be one developer. It's probably fine. If you do both the back and in the front, it is not going to be perfect in either section but it's going to be good enough and if you're the only developer, it probably doesn't matter as much because the project is probably
going to be small enough. It's okay if it's not 100% performance on the back under a hundred percent performance on the front end, but once you start to scale up beyond that kind of level, I think it's really important that you go and you become, you know, proficient in just one of those sectors which is why if you learn only front-end development, you can
still find a job. Even if places are asking for a full stack developer, I think they're trying to find something that doesn't exist in the kind of realize that they hire someone as a Stack developer that they're actually just you know a front end developer with some back and knowledge or back-end developers some front and knowledge and not a full full stack developer. Yeah. Yeah like that. I mean, the key thing there is you can get it working on a smaller scale.
But once you want to scale to, I mean, throw a number out there, hundreds of thousands of users, millions of users multitudes of millions of users, then it becomes a lot more preferable that you have people that are specialized in optimizing things, right? Well, It's front-end or back-end, or more of the devops side of things as well, your platform and your infrastructure, it makes more sense because those smaller optimizations.
Those smaller efficiencies will have huge effects on your actual applications or actual user experience in that way as well. And that is in the end, what you want to optimize. So optimizing your technology through that will optimize your user experience. And that's, I mean, that's what we're doing it for, right? For the people that love using whatever, we're building a hundred percent, like I think people focus too much on performance. Moments when the scale is small and not enough.
When the scale is large like when you're only serving 100 people, you don't need to have Facebook levels of performance, doesn't matter. If it takes him a little bit of time to access your website because it's so small, it's probably not going to, you know, make a big impact when you have a million people accessing your website every day.
Like every millisecond of performance is going to make a huge difference on like your server costs and your server load and the experience for the user. Like even if you can shave 10 milliseconds off a million requests, that's a huge amount of server costs, that you're saving because you don't have to Make those 10 million or it was 100 million Ms like that's a lot of time. I don't want to do the math but that's a lot of money.
You could be saving and also your users are going to see that difference completely aligned with that. I I really enjoyed this conversation. Kyle. Is there anything you still want to share in there? Um, I would say if you're just starting out learning, don't focus and worry too much about, you know, the Technologies and things like that learned, you know, the concepts like programming Concepts, how to think like a programmer. Those are the skills that you
can transfer anywhere. Like it doesn't matter if you learned react, JavaScript angular back-end stuff game development. If you understand how to think, like a developer and you understand the different programming Concepts, those are transferable between every language in between any different specialty. So learning those skills is the most important, I think. And most people flip it where they think those are less important. Written in learning how to actually code. Yeah, yeah.
I completely agree with us as well. Cool. Thanks, everyone. We're gonna round it off here. Call Cook, web dev. Simplified. I'm going to put all his links in the description below. Check him out. Let him know you came from our show. And with that being said, thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next one.