Hey SoS,
Last Friday, I didn’t send out my recap email for the week. It was the start of July 4th weekend and I did a very important thing instead - I took a break. Projects, job hunting, studying can take a toll, so it’s important to be fair to yourself during the process.
For those who missed last Thursday’s presentation, we’ve got it recorded:
A lot of the value of the meetings are actually after the presentations! After this session, we explored topics like DNS and CORS in our breakout groups - important ideas that might come up when working on your own projects:
And congrats to Avni!! Way to challenge yourself, deliver something, and apply new knowledge. That’s growth 🌱 and I was proud to read that message.
📣 Announcements
This week, we have an exciting announcement, and that’s that we’ll have a visitor to our Thursday session - none other than Mr. Learn in Public himself, @swyx:
We’re really excited that Shawn will be joining our small group and doing a Q&A. Come prepared with your questions, read up on his background and his essay “Learn in Public”. I’ve prepped a small list of questions to get the conversation started, but there will be a chance to ask your own.
I’m excited to have Shawn visit us, his techniques for rapid learning (of which Learn in Public is the most famous, but hardly his only strategy for getting good, fast) and career advice is unique and insightful. I’m excited and I hope you are too!
Shawn found out about us because we’ve been doing our best to build/learn in public. He stumbled upon a tweet about us and reached out. Isn’t that meta?
🏢 Interview Prep
I’ve refined SoS’s summer goals. It’s now three-fold, but still extremely simple:
Get an interview (aka get noticed)
[NEW] Pass the interview (aka, get the job)
Thrive on the job
Interview prep is now our answer to #2. It’ll get better as more people join us, so please try if you can!
Pedro is running these sessions and has them set for Tuesdays at 5PM PDT. See the #interview-prep discord channel for more information on how you can be a part of a safe space for practicing interviews!
Thank you Pedro!
📚 Study Groups
One thing that has come to my attention is that people are interested in studying together. I’d like to get the ball rolling on that.
I’m thinking we can form the following study groups to start:
Basic Data Structures and Algorithms (Great for DS/A interviews)
Reading “Designing Data Intensive Applications” (Great for System Design interviews)
Machine Learning (I know almost nothing on how to get an ML job, let alone thrive at one, but I know there’s a lot of interest)
I’ll make a reaction survey in Discord under #announcements so you can vote!
#30DaysOfShipping
We’ve begun a new version of #30DaysOfShipping for July! Instead of an intense “you must have a GitHub contribution to your name every day” kind of approach, we’re simply defining this as a “No Zero Days” mindset (another idea taken from @swyx).
Just get a tiny bit done - the smallest iota of work that still feels like work:
Create a boilerplate, placeholder React component which will represent a much more interesting component later
Add a “magic function” that doesn’t do anything yet, but represents the work that needs to be done
Clean up some comments
Add some documentation
Anything small!
A funny thing might even happen when you try this:
There we go! 💪
Alright, hope your projects are in a good rhythm. Totally ok if you took a small break, but check back in with the team today and see how everyone’s doing. If the project is dead, that’s totally ok too - just check in on your teammates and ask how they’re holding up. In times like these, small actions like those that matter so much.
See you Thursday/Friday*!
Phil
*swyx won’t be at our Friday meeting, but I’ll try my best to recap.