Chats with Kent C. Dodds

How do you stay optimistic when being bombarded with negativity every day? Nader reminds us that, statistically, we are living in the safest and most prosperous period in human history. Nader went through a lot of hardship growing up, and it caused him to assume the entire world was that way, but in reality, it wasn't. Try to maintain perspective, and remember that your experiences aren't reflective of the world as a whole.The voice in your head talks about yourself in a way that you'd never treat another person. Be mindful of yourself and treat yourself with kindness; the way you talk about yourself can make a significant impact on your happiness.Kent shares his experience with seeing a therapist for the last year and explains how therapy isn't something not just for people who are experiencing trauma or mental illness. Everyone can benefit from having a neutral third party that helps you talk through the problems you are experiencing in life, no matter how big or small.Reducing the amount of media you consume can improve your headspace as well. That doesn't mean to turn a blind eye to any negativity. Instead, you should learn about the bad things that are happening within your sphere of influence. It doesn't do the world any good to take on pain from something that you have no control over. Your energy is better spent taking an active part in improving the parts of the world that you can influence.HomeworkFor a week, take at least a minute or so daily and write one thing that you're optimistic about.ResourcesTools of TitansFactfulnessThe Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has DeclinedSelf-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to YourselfA Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic JoyThe Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into TriumphGuest: Nader DabitTwitter: @dabit3GitHub: @dabit3Website: naderdabit.meHost: Kent C. DoddsWebsite: kentcdodds.comTwitter: @kentcdoddsGitHub: @kentcdoddsYouTube: Kent C. DoddsEpic React: epicreact.dev

Kelly got into personal finance while she was struggling financially in grad school. Your very first step to getting your money under control should be to know where your money is going. Sit down and look at the last three months of your bank statements and categorize your purchases.Being able to visualize and measure where your money is going is a fantastic first step for people wanting to at least see if you could make some changes to the way that you're spending your money.After you figure out where your money is going, your second step is to make a budget. Kelly uses the envelope system. Each category of spending gets an "envelope" of money, and once there's no more money from the envelope, you can't spend any more on that category.HomeworkFigure out where your money has been going the last three monthsCreate a budget using an app like You Need A Budget, a notebook, or a spreadsheetResourcesRachel Richards - Money HoneyDave Ramsey - Total Money MakeoverYNAB - You Need A BudgetMintteelaunchPrintifyPrintfulGuest: Kelly VaughnTwitter: @kvllyGitHub: @kellyvaughnWebsite: kvlly.comHost: Kent C. DoddsWebsite: kentcdodds.comTwitter: @kentcdoddsGitHub: @kentcdoddsYouTube: Kent C. DoddsEpic React: epicreact.dev

Jen puts knitting before the fact that she is a senior software engineer when she defines who she is; this doesn't make her a worse engineer than someone who eats, sleeps, and breathes code.With each new thing you learn, whether you're good or bad at it, you'll tend to discover something about it that teaches you something new. With everything Jen learns, she tries to bring it back into the ways she interacts with the world, whether that's through some art medium or programming.Technological progress has been an evolving process of standing on the shoulders of giants, one after another, learning how to take something they'd seen before and applied it to some new technology or new problem they were working on at the moment.The short version is that you can find inspiration virtually anywhere, and not to close off those points of inspiration just because you're focusing on a computing problem.HomeworkWatch at least one of the talks linked under resources!ResourcesTEDxBeaconStreet: Knitting is Coding; Lindiwe MatlaliTEDxRiga: Crocheting Hyperbolic Planes; Daina TaiminaTED: A delightful way to teach kids about computers; Linda LiukasGuest: Jen LukerTwitter: @knitcodemonkeyGitHub: @knitcodemonkeyWebsite: jenluker.comHost: Kent C. DoddsWebsite: kentcdodds.comTwitter: @kentcdoddsGitHub: @kentcdoddsYouTube: Kent C. DoddsEpic React: epicreact.dev

Henry Zhu's transition from a programing role to a more managerial role as Babel's maintainer has been hard. As programmers, we tend to value our work based on the number of commits or pushing features. When you are a manager, you're not writing much code anymore.There's still an expectation that maintainers should be writing code. Still, maintainers also have to triage and merge things, release process, onboard, market, write documentation, test, make videos, and give talks. Because of all this, a maintainer's time is best spent figuring out how to get more people involved with a project.To get people interested, the maintainer has to do the job of showing people what's possible. You have to be involved in the community, and you have to like it. At a fundamental level, open-source is about service, serving other people in the community, giving back, and not expecting anything in return.HomeworkWithout writing code, do one thing to contribute to open source!ResourcesAll ContributorsSourceMaintainers AnonymousChesterton's fenceGuest: Henry ZhuTwitter: @left_padGitHub: @hzooHost: Kent C. DoddsWebsite: kentcdodds.comTwitter: @kentcdoddsGitHub: @kentcdoddsYouTube: Kent C. DoddsEpic React: epicreact.dev

Jenn has been working with React since 0.13. She has a background in creative writing, and it melded well with React.One of her big early mistakes with React was focusing too hard on making components reusable. When you try to make your component one-hundred percent reusable, you end up with a massive stack of props. In our effort to make things reusable, we end up making it harder for ourselves and others.Sometimes it even makes sense to duplicate the component, change its name, and add your changes to it instead of adding more props to the existing component. Too many props on your component not only makes it hard to refactor but also difficult to even use.One of Jenn's rules for her codebase is that new engineers should be able to come in and get up to speed quickly. It is an overall rule that has to do with keeping the codebase consistent. Jenn puts rules in place like, "We consistently use this state management library." So if a person comes in, they aren't finding multiple ways of doing the same thing.HomeworkDocument it before you write your next component!ResourcesKent C. Dodds - When to break up a component into multiple componentsuseReactNYC MeetupGuest: Jenn CreightonTwitter: @gurlcodeNotist: jenncreightonGithub: @jcreightonLinkedIn: @jennifercreightonHost: Kent C. DoddsWebsiteTwitterGithubYoutubeTesting JavaScriptEpicReact.dev

We're all really busy but we are also ambitious and have goals, but a lot of the time those goals aren't defined so well.It's important that our goals are well defined and manageable, we're hard on ourselves when we aren't making progress towards them. You want to expend your energy on the things that are providing you with value, and when you expend your energy beating yourself up, it's worse than wasted energy because it's energy directed at making life worse for you.Bianca started Code and Coffee to take people through the process of refining and focussing their goals and breaking them down into achievable bite-sized chunks that they work on for 15 minutes a day during morning coffee. You can do this yourself too!HomeworkKeep a self-awareness journal for seven days. Every night, write down all of the feelings that you had that dayTake 15 minutes every day to work toward a goal. Try it for a week and see how you feelResourcesCode and Coffee with BiancaGuest: Bianca GandolfoTwitter: @biancagandoGitHub: @bgandoHost: Kent C. DoddsWebsite: kentcdodds.comTwitter: @kentcdoddsGitHub: @kentcdoddsYouTube: Kent C. DoddsEpic React: epicreact.dev

When Lindsey started, she didn't know what accessibility even meant. She would see that there was an "accessibility error" and fix it, but she didn't understand why she was fixing it. A11y clicked for her when she realized that the point of accessibility was to make the web usable for people with disabilities.Code, at its core, is about people, and it allows people to use and purchase products. Ultimately we code to make people's lives better, and if you aren't making your site accessible, then you are discriminating against the one in four people living with a disability. Accessibility is not an edge case.Doing the following will take you far!Make sure you have form labelsUse alt text in your imagesDon't leave buttons and links emptyUse buttons and links appropriatelyTest your site with a screenreaderNavigate your website with the tab keyHomeworkInstall and use the AXE Chrome extension!ResourcesWriting alternative text that mattersaxe on Google Chrome Extension storeGuest: Lindsey KopaczTwitter: @LittleKopeGitHub: @LittleKopeWebsite: a11ywithlindsey.comHost: Kent C. DoddsWebsite: kentcdodds.comTwitter: @kentcdoddsGitHub: @kentcdoddsYouTube: Kent C. DoddsEpic React: epicreact.dev

Shirley Wu has been freelancer since 2016, creating data visualizations for her clients. In this episode, Shirley talks about the four projects that had the most significant impact on her.In 2017 Shirley created an interactive visualization of the musical, Hamilton. It blew up on the internet. It was the first time a project of her's had a significant response. It made her realize that code could be beautiful, colorful, and inspiring. The audience might not remember the figures or the writeup, but they will remember the emotional response they had.Her next project was less fun and a lot more serious. She worked with The Guardian on an investigative journalism piece called Bussed Out. The project was meaningful to her. In the past, she shied away from more serious projects due to a fear of the backlash she'd receive if she didn't do it right. She got to work with a very talented team of journalists who taught her what she was capable of if she teamed up with the right people on important topics.On a less serious note, Shirley had the privilege of having a visualization be commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The project was to do something with the data from Send Me SFMOMA. This project caused her to reconnect with making art for its own sake.The most recent influential project was Legends. It was a personal project on the fifty-one female Nobel Prize winners since 1901. With her other digital projects, she is lucky only to get a few minutes of someone's time, but she wanted more than that, she wanted people to linger and be present. So Shirley is now pushing herself to break the boundaries of digital and make moving her visualization into physical space a reality.ResourcesHamiltonThe Guardian - Bussed OutJournal - Send Me LoveLegendsGuest: Shirley WuTwitter: @sxywuGithub: @sxywuWebsite: sxywu.comTwitch: @sxywuHost: Kent C. DoddsWebsite: kentcdodds.comTwitter: @kentcdoddsGitHub: @kentcdoddsYouTube: Kent C. DoddsEpic React: epicreact.dev

Suz started streaming because she wanted to show people that hardware coding is just like regular everyday coding, it's just for smaller, dumber computers. It's been two and a half years since she started streaming and her reasons have changed since then. Suz has a community of fourteen thousand that gathers around her stream now. Despite her now much busier schedule these days this community motivates her to keep coming back and getting open source work done.Suz talks about how you need to be doing it for the right reasons if you want to actually stick with it. Don't expect to make a salary off of your live-coding stream. Make sure that you go into it with a sustainable schedule for you, don't try to push it only to burn out after a month or two. Don't invest a ton of money upfront either, it's okay to just have a headset and a webcam for your first streams while you are testing the waters.Most of the people who watch you are interested in what you are doing and want you to succeed. The people who'd tell you how much you suck aren't going to spend the time to watch your live stream. We tend to be our own biggest critics, don't let the fear of criticism keep you from streaming!ResourcesSuz's Streaming SetupFree Music ArchiveBandcampLoopbackChrome BlocksiteAzure MaskGuest: Suz HintonTwitter: @noopkatGithub: @noopkatWebsite: noopkat.comBlog: meow.noopkat.comTwitch: @noopkatHost: Kent C. DoddsWebsite: kentcdodds.comTwitter: @kentcdoddsGitHub: @kentcdoddsYouTube: Kent C. DoddsEpic React: epicreact.dev

You can learn in private, or you can learn in public. 99% of developers work and learn privately in the shadows, so why shouldn't you? Something magical happened when Shawn started creating resources and sharing what he learned in public. More advanced people began to help him by correcting him when he was wrong. By learning publically, he was able to both teach and learn at the same time!"You can learn so much on the internet for the low, low price of your ego." If you keep your identity small, you can remain open to new ideas. If you make what you know a part of your identity, being receptive to new ideas and accepting that you were wrong becomes challenging.Go beyond writing blog posts, they are educational, but their lifespan is limited. Write the resource that you wish existed while you are learning something. Write documentation, create cheat-sheets, these things not only provide immense value to people who are learning, but they also connect you to the authors of the technology who didn't have the time to create those resources. People start to perceive you as an authority on the subject when you make these things, which makes people also want to hire you for your expertise on the subject.If you want to learn from professionals, then make it worth their time! Kent talks about how he'd record "tech chats" with developers and upload them to Youtube. Having an audience opens up the doors for opportunities!ResourcesZero to 60 in Software Development: How to Jumpstart Your CareerReact events in depth w/ Kent C. Dodds, Ben Alpert, & Dan AbramovGuest: Shawn WangTwitter: @swyxGitHub: @sw-yxWebsite: swyx.ioHost: Kent C. DoddsWebsite: kentcdodds.comTwitter: @kentcdoddsGitHub: @kentcdoddsYouTube: Kent C. DoddsEpic React: epicreact.dev