Leveling up

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We all want to move faster

In our work on coding projects, in our goals and in our careers, one thing remains the same for almost all of us. We want to move faster. We want more leverage so we can produce greater results with the same or even fewer resources.

It's not a new desire, either. As Archimedes of Syracuse once said:

"Give me a lever long enough

and a fulcrum on which to place it

and I shall move the world!"

Nobody wants to be stuck on a trivial bug for hours or days. Some secretly feel a fear that in the past twelve months, they've simply gotten a year older and made no clear progress.

I know I've felt that way at a lot of times.

Part of the magic of programming is that it promises leverage that Archimedes could only have dreamed of! We can create systems out of pure thought and write them down in a way that computers execute them. We can write a script that does in seconds what we'd have spent hours to do in Excel, or days to do by hand.

It feels amazing to get so much done with so little effort and it echos back to the great book, The Practice of Programming, where Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike cited automation and simplicity as key factors for a programmer. Those two words alone were enough to predict the rise of Ruby on Rails in the mid 2000s.

Investing in any tech stack involves unknowns

When it comes to making progress in a development career, it's complicated. One factor absolutely is core CS skills and work habits.

Another part is bets.

What do you choose to do with your time? What do you choose to learn? And what happens if you learn the wrong thing?

People who invested heavily in Objective C and Cocoa in the 90s probably felt great a decade later when those skills let them pounce upon the iOS App Store. But what about people who bet on BeOS, the operating system Apple chose not to buy?

Learning Backbone.js and CoffeeScript in 2013

I've certainly picked the "wrong" tech before. In 2012/2013, when I'd just recently moved back to the US from an iOS startup in Beijing, I really wanted to break into the Silicon Valley tech company career track. The problem was, I wasn't a Stanford grad, I only had an average resume and I didn't know anyone.

So, I chose to specialize. I chose to go all-in on newer, growing technologies, namely Node.js, Backbone.js and CoffeeScript. I spent $18,000 on a bootcamp to learn them, as quickly as possible and almost nobody uses Backbone or CoffeeScript on a new project these days.

But was it a bad bet? No. It still paid off. Learning a niche technology is a leverage point.

CoffeeScript did, in fact, offer some productivity benefits over JS (most but not 100% of which were rolled into JS in ES6+). Backbone.js was something there was surprisingly little talent for on the job market. The combination of those two skills (and a childhood love of math and whiteboard interview-style problem solving) were enough to get me into an SV unicorn—Groupon as a front-end engineer.

I made back most of the $18,000 in my signing bonus.

With that experience under my belt, both my subsequent jobs were at YC-funded startups where I worked with Node and React, until leaving FT roles for entrepreneurial pursuits, one of which lead me to learn Elixir and indirectly to starting Alchemist Camp!

Of course betting on a huge winner is the best of all. But even betting on a niche that doesn't win can be a significant leverage point to enter an industry or level up. It can also be a competitive advantage if you're running a startup.

Expectations

I can't possibly promise you that Elixir will grow to dominate startup tech the way Rails did a dozen years ago. I also can't promise any specific outcome for you. I've talked with people who have built Phoenix apps into very successful indie businesses, but there are never guarantees in the market.

However, I can say that Alchemist Camp is one of the largest and, as far as I know, the very largest solo-run Elixir screencast tutorial site & YouTube channel. Over 170 lessons are available to you and I can also claim a very happy following of students.

Alchemist Camp videos get over 98% positive votes on YouTube and my new mini-book on learning Elixir through games went kinda viral on Twitter, mostly due to goodwill built up over previous work.

Less than 24 hours are left

This is the final day of Black Friday / Cyber Monday discounts and it's the best promotion of the year each year. I very rarely run promotions.

In keeping in line with the theme of leverage, I've got some updates to share about Phoenix Igniter. Now it includes all the session/auth/oauth setup it had before, and it's upgraded to Tailwind 2.0, with a few examples added that you can use to see where to add your styles.

It's also got a "click to deploy to Render" button!

Other than creating an account on Render and setting up a Web Service and a Database through their GUI, you're good to go. I've also made a very short screencast to show how it works. So if saving 3-4 hours of work on your next project (or next several projects) is worth $60, then I'd say the starter kit is a pretty good deal!

Log into Alchemist Camp and then Get the screencasts! (Save $60)

Log into Gitlab and Get the starter kit! (Save $30)

Get the games ebook! (Save $7.50)

Have a great last month of the year!

Mark