Hello. Welcome. I'm Juliane.
I am a software engineer, and a newly minted one at that! I went the bootcamp route to get here. In June 2023, I finished a year of self-study and 16 weeks at Rithm School.
Then the real work began.
Learning in Public
It was curiosity and the love of learning that drew me to software engineering in the first place. Luckily, with software engineering, there is no end to the amount of learning I get to do.
One of my cohort-mates at Rithm, Sean Oliver, introduced me to the idea of "learning in public". The author of the Medium post defines it simply as "sharing what you're working on with other people." For him, this means posting a tweet (are they still called tweets now?) or making a YouTube video simply discussing what he's learning.
Why I'm Taking a Learning in Public Approach to Software
This is a great idea for many reasons. You can get feedback on what your learning and suggestions for where to go next. It's an opportunity for that all important networking. You can build an audience and a group of supporters. Those are a few of the ideas in the article.
To those, I want to add, accountability. Ask anyone who knows me. Finishing projects is not my strong suit. Putting what you are working on in front makes it a little harder to abandon projects. (It's still very possible though so don't hold your breath waiting for anything I mention on here.)
I also want to add embracing vulnerability, which I've been told is a good thing despite the discomfort. Learning is already a vulnerable experience. You are, by default, bad at the subject you are pursuing. You have a high likelihood of failure, of saying something incorrect, of crashing a multi-million dollar company's website.
I'm learning 15 different things at any given time. Much of the time, I enjoy the vulnerability of learning. But I've noticed with software engineering, the imposter syndrome is loud.
So I will be learning in public because I can be louder.
Let's Get Started
These posts will be my learning in public catalog. I will, by default, be bad at a lot of this. I will probably say some things that are incorrect, or at least not the best way of doing things. I might even crash another multi-million dollar company's website. We'll just have to see how things go.
That said, consider this my disclaimer. I am no expert. If you follow any tutorials or advice I give here, you do so at your own risk. If you try to mock my experience, you're too late. I'm already laughing at myself.