Kent consumes as much information as he can about the thing that he's interested in, then he builds stuff with the things that he's consumed. The consumption process involves glancing over any related content or diving deep into a tutorial. But then you actually have to build something, and not just follow a tutorial, but actually build a thing that you made up in your mind. Don't follow a tutorial. Then, go off and teach the things that you learned through blogging, meetups, podcasts, conference talks, etc.  ..read more

People learn in different ways. By recording your content in multiple mediums you are enabling a larger portion of your audience to learn more effectively. But, creating content isn't just for brand-building, it is also an effective way to solidify knowledge for yourself. If you are asking yourself at what skill level should you start creating content then you should remember that creating content is for anyone who wants to learn and not forget stuff ..read more

Kent attributes a lot of his success in becoming independent to building his personal brand. He double dipped with the value he produced while employed by creating content to share publicly. Kent also made sure to interact with people and answer questions on twitter.  The key is not to try to get as many followers as possible, but instead to try to have an audience who is committed to you and your message. You can't do this by trying to force engagement with viral tweets, you have to produce real value and share it with people ..read more

The only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user. And, even though the user will never see your code, the quality of it actually affects them indirectly.  The reason that the user cares about how you write your code is that it affects how long it takes to get new features out the door. Something that takes three weeks might only take a few days if the code was written in a more maintainable way and optimized for changes. There are many patterns that we can use to make our code more maintainable, but the key is to know when to use them. If patterns are inappropriately ..read more

Kent amplified the impact of his work by making stuff he'd do on the job public. Instead of sending an email to engineers he would write a blog post and link them to it. He made a closed-source project open-source so he could work on open-source on the clock. And, he gave his workshops to PayPal employees so he could improve his workshops on the clock.  There are stages to the impact of value. You have some value in your head. Somebody asks you a question, and you communicate it to them. You've created some value. The impact of that value that was in your head has increased to that one pe ..read more

Open-source projects are great. You have complete control of the project, or so you think. It's very easy to find yourself losing control of the amount of time that you spend working on the project. It's also very easy to get caught up in the feature requests people are making.  Kent had to learn how to only spend just enough time on a project. Now, the only issues that he addresses are issues that he runs into that he is personally experiencing. Sometimes he will also work on stuff that he thinks will be fun. But, the point is is that he only works on things that he personally needs to b ..read more

One of the biggest myths is that being a 10x Developer is all you need to have a successful career. You can't just be good at coding, put in insane hours to achieve senior status, and be set for life. If you want to control your career, you have to realize that programming is not just about typing keywords on a keyboard. Programming is much more about communication and being effective at marketing yourself. Pay attention and listen to those who have a position that you want to have one day, even if their discussions aren't relevant to your current work. You will learn about the problems they f ..read more

When Kent was first looking into React, it was like it was what he was trying to make Angular do with Angular Formly, just without all of the framework getting in the way. React allowed Kent to use JavaScript to build his app rather than work around the framework to make it. He began to see the indication that Angular Two was not going to fix what he didn't like about AngularJS. It was at this point Kent started planning on switching to React at some point. Kent has been teaching React pretty much since he first learned it. He started by teaching it to co-workers and then at paid venues.   ..read more

Kent wasn't one of those who wrote their first HTML page when they were three years old. He didn't think he would be a developer. He wanted to be a video editor! Writing code for eight hours a day seemed like the worst thing ever to Kent. That is until Kent had a job where he had to take videos from a church's website and upload them onto their YouTube channel with all of the metadata. So Kent wrote a program that scraped the website, downloaded the videos, and uploaded them with the same title, keywords, and everything. It clicked for Kent that programming could be a tool and not just a chore ..read more