4 Key Tips: Learning In Public For Software Engineers

so people keep telling you to learn in public and how valuable it is but how the heck do you do that and how is that going to actually help you get a job hi my name is Nick centino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft in this video I wanted to walk through four key tips of mine for learning in public and I can speak about this because that's exactly what Dev leader started as back in 2013 if that sounds interesting just a reminder to subscribe to the channel and check out that pin comment for my courses on D train stick around to the end because after I go through the tips for doing this I'll explain how this can potentially lead to job opportunities okay so the first point that I want to talk through is that for many people learning in public can actually serve as motivation or accountability and this is being created right at the start of 2025 so hopefully this is relevant for a lot of people but let me know if this sounds familiar you're eager to go learn something you've been telling yourself okay I'm going to jump into this I'm going to go learn JavaScript C I'm going to go learn how to go uh work with post grass or MySQL or something right here eager to go learn something and then you procrastinate a little bit right there's something else that comes up you're going to go start Monday and you just keep putting things off right learning in public and getting into a Cadence of being able to share things online can for some people actually be very helpful a comparison that I like to draw is that when I was really into bodybuilding I still paid a coach and that's not because I had no idea what I was doing it's just because being able to pay a coach meant that I had some accountability to this individual for me that was a tremendous help and I think that for some people being able to share what they're learning in public and talk about this kind of stuff can serve as some type of motivation or accountability and at the end of the day the goal is learning and if that can be something that's making you be more accountable that's going to help you learn the second thing that I think is very valuable when it comes to learning in public and I don't think a lot of people consider this but it's a great opportunity to practice communication I know what you're thinking who cares that sounds boring I just want to learn about some technology but if you you watched my other content or you see how much I talk about this kind of stuff your soft skills in software engineering cannot be overstated I think that so many people focus on just the technical aspects I mean the goal here is learning in public after all right we're going to be learning about something technology related but this is such a good opportunity to practice your communication this means when I think about learning in public that you have this opportunity to take something that you're trying to learn right so it's starting off at a spot that's probably prob a little bit complicated for you and what you're doing is digesting this information and now when it comes time to share this in public what did you learn now you're in this position where you need to go translate what you learned for other people to understand in my opinion it's a super cool opportunity to take a very technical concept you try to digest it and now you have to share it back out in a way that others can understand even if they're not technical if you're wondering why this is so relevant for software engineering well as it turns out when you're working in teams as software Engineers you're going to be working with people on other teams or non-technical stakeholders that's going to mean that often times you're finding that you're needing to discuss things that are Technical and they might not seem super technical to you or that complicated because you work with them all the time but to someone else someone that's either non-technical or someone that's technical just not in your domain they're not going to understand about anything you're talking about or maybe very little so having this as an opportunity for you to practice your communication considering your audience finding ways to explain things in a way that someone else will understand with very little experience in that domain can be incredibly valuable the next part that I want to dive into here is getting feedback so this is a really cool opportunity if you're like me and a lot of your close friends weren't computer nerds that wanted to program and build stuff who do you go talk to about this stuff right for me a lot of my friends maybe it was video games or other hobbies that we had but I couldn't go call up a buddy or mess meage them and say like hey like look at this cool code I'm writing they didn't care right so if you're like me and you don't have other people you can reach out to and you're not working someplace or you're not getting feedback from your colleagues having this opportunity to get feedback from other people about the things you're learning about can be a huge value ad for you think about it right if you're not working around other software Engineers how are you expecting to get that feedback how are you expecting to improve upon what you're doing if no one's helping give you some guidance from their experience when instead of not having that opportunity or just waiting for it you can instead create it by sharing what you're learning in public the other benefit to this is that when you start sharing and posting things you are going to have people giving you feedback not all of it's going to be super awesome and this is an opportunity for you to practice receiving feedback if you're not familiar with what this feels like because people aren't giving you feedback it might feel a little bit rough the first time you hear something that's not totally Stellar it might actually feel personal but often times when this is happening it's not meant to be personal people are just trying to help most of the time sometimes on the internet doesn't really feel that way as a content creator I know but at the end of the day we need to practice being able to take feedback regardless of how it's delivered some stuff you can ignore because people are just being rude other stuff if we dig into it and try to understand what someone's trying to convey at the end of the day it's a different perspective that we can consider so there's usually something positive that we can extract and I think that this is a great opportunity to practice receiving feedback now you might be wondering okay these sound like nice benefits to being able to learn in public right I get to actually practice learning maybe that's going to be something that motivates me I can practice communicating I can get feedback that's also going to help me learn new things but how the heck am I supposed to do this like where do I go to start learning in public but this can look different for many people right when I started Dev leader in 2013 I was writing on a WordPress blog I wrote there for a few months ultimately I gave up and had to revive it 10 years later and I started making YouTube videos instead but that's another option if you could write blogs maybe you want to make videos instead they don't have to be long form YouTube videos like this maybe you want to make short clips about what you're learning maybe you just want to write short posts on LinkedIn Twitter Blue Sky threads wherever right having some platform where you can start writing and sharing some ideas or taking small videos to be able to record what you're learning finding something works for you might look different than what someone else is using but I think we have so many options today that there are plenty of things that you could try out and see what works and see what you can stay consistent with personally if you're working in technology like you're learning about programming I think blogs work very well for that and then from there something that you can do is take your blog article that you wrote and you can use things like hash node dev.to medium there's platforms where you can write blogs totally for free no payment required they host everything for you you just get to write you can take those and you can post them to social media and share them and talk about them with other individuals you might even find forums and things like that where people are working in the technology space that you're interested in maybe uh a subreddit for JavaScript developers or something like that and you can go share this kind of stuff if it's allowed to be shared and discuss that with other developers now a Shameless plug here the SAS platform that I'm creating allows you as a Creator to be able to post different social media platforms very easily and it's totally free to do so just to be able to cross poost so there's no catch no strings attached if you just want to be able to take your content that you're creating and share it to all the different social media platforms you can leverage brand ghost totally for free to do that we have more paid for features that are more advanced for Content creators that are publishing a lot more content and if you get there someday maybe you'll consider that but if you just want to get started and learning in public and sharing things online free brand ghost is a great option for you there's one more benefit to learning in public that I want to talk about which is going to segue us into the last part here about how the heck are you going to get a job doing this kind of stuff but that's going to be networking it's a perfect segue because getting that job is going to be about networking when you're posting things and learning in public this is going to start creating that Network for you I mentioned that in the beginning when you don't really have people to get feedback from we can start to create that opportunity so being able to post things discuss them that's going to be the initial part of forming your network from there you might notice that you have people that are coming back to engage with the things you're talking about that's a cool opportunity as well but this is going to be something that you keep doing and keep building when we talk about networking the way that I like to frame this up for people is not to approach it like a Sprint you don't want to go say okay my goal is to network how do I reach out to as many people as I can I'm going to blast out my resume and say say please refer me to a job that might work for some people I just think it's a really bad strategy and what I recommend instead is thinking about networking as more of a long-term play how does that all fit into the learning and public thing and trying to get a job well like I said we're forming that Network and what you could start to do is find the people that are engaging with your posts start looking at what they are doing what are they posting about where are they working if you start to be curious and you start to be intentional with your interactions you can now take this sort of thin Network that you're creating and start to build more meaningful relationships that might also mean that you're exposed to other people at other jobs that are posting about things and you're going to say hey that sounds pretty interesting I wonder what this person is doing at work maybe you could go engage on their posts ask them questions about what they're posting about maybe you can send them a message and say hey I saw what you were posting about I was really curious what it's like to be an engineer in your position would you mind sharing any information with me but if you approach this kind of stuff genuinely intentionally and not just looking at it like a quick path to try and get a referral to a job I think that this can pay enormous dividends long term and I think for many people this feels kind of crappy because you're like okay well that's going to take a while I'm just looking for the the shortcut I want the short answer that's going to get me there that's going to get me the job I hate to break it to you but a lot of the stuff that we do in life is not really about shortcuts and I think that if we just accept that we can can be intentional about things that we can be purposeful and we can work at these things that good things happen when we put in the effort yes there will be exceptions yes there will be the person that happened to message someone send the resume over they got a referral like it can all it's possible right I'm not trying to say these things are impossible I'm just not recommending that as advice to the masses I don't think that makes sense I think that you can start to leverage your content creation if that's how you want to think about it your learning in public approach to start building that Network up and that way you can have more purposeful engagements with other Professionals in the industry you might even find other people that are learning in public as well and you can connect with them and see what their Journey's like I wanted to wrap up this conversation by bringing up something that I talked about with Scott Hanselman on an interview Scott is a very popular content creator he's also a VP at Microsoft that has a lot of focus on developer relations and I think that one of the really cool things that came out of our talk together was Scott talked about luck what do I mean by luck here why am I bringing this up the idea with luck here was that Scott was talking about having these opportunities that show up right but at the same time being prepared for them so I like to think about this as a surface area for luck and that means that if we're thinking about networking with people and having these potential opportunities come up what we're doing is actually proactively trying to increase the surface area for these good things to happen the reality is when it comes to networking you may have these situ situations where someone that you've been talking with for a while they're going to see something else pop up in their feed for a job position and they'll say hey I remember that Nick was talking about this kind of stuff I actually think this might be a good fit for Nick let me go send this job posting over to Nick or they might say hey I know this person that's hiring for this position let me go actually send this over to that person I'll send over Nick's profile and say maybe they're a good fit for this but these are things that seem like they're lucky but we can create more opportunities for luck by proactively practicing these things I thought that was a really cool way that Scott was trying to look at these different opportunities that he was creating for people in his career and I wanted to share that with you because I think that it's very relevant when it comes to learning in public and trying to create things and network with other people hopefully that was helpful and if you're interested in seeing that conversation with Scott you can check that out here next thanks and I'll see you next time