9. Learn & Share

Written by Jenn Bailey

In the last chapter, you explored ways to share your hard-earned coding skills. Now, you’ll continue to use your skills to make an impact on your community while simultaneously building your resume and network.

You’ll learn how to learn and share by keeping your skills sharp, then sharing what you learned with your community. If you think that no one can learn from a developer at your experience level, remember that no matter where you are, others are striving to get as far as you’ve already come. You can give them a helping hand.

Now, it’s time to lift while you climb.

What You’ll Learn

• Why learning and sharing is a powerful strategy to boost your skills and network.
• How to determine the next valuable skill to learn to add to your resume.
• Simple tips to share knowledge with your community.
• How to share your knowledge through technical articles, tutorials and videos.
• Tips for giving presentations at conferences and other events.
• How to find or create mentoring opportunities.

First, you’ll look at why sharing what you learn through mentoring is so important.

How Learn-and-Share Helps Software Developers

Think back on your learning experiences in tech. Can you remember a time you struggled to learn a fundamental coding concept? Did someone help you out by walking you through the concepts you needed to understand? If not, do you wish someone had? Well, now you get to be that person.

Because of the ever-evolving nature of tech, one constant in your career is that you’ll always be learning. By being strategic about what you learn and how you share it, you can stand out from the crowd, regardless of your experience level.

Learning and sharing can boost your career in three important ways:

• It helps you internalize what you learn.
• You boost your resume and position yourself as a knowledgeable person in your field.
• Supporting other developers helps advance your industry as a whole.

You’ll take a quick look at each of these benefits next.

We Learn Better When We Teach Others

As the saying goes, to learn something, do it. To master something, teach it.

We often think that teachers have to be experts in their field. However, studies show that when students teach other students, they learn the subject better. Psychology Today calls this phenomenon the protege effect. This is true even in cases of grade-school students tutoring their classmates or older Montessori students teaching younger ones.

When people know they’ll be teaching a subject, they pay more attention, remember it better and apply it more effectively.

You can take advantage of the protege effect by sharing what you learn with other developers. Even if it’s not an advanced topic, there are other devs out there who can benefit. While helping those around you to achieve their goals, you’ll be learning skills and advancing your own career.

Building Your Resume by Teaching

As you learned in Chapter 1, “Evaluating Your Options”, eagerness to learn is an important hiring criterion, especially for junior devs. Demonstrating that you consistently learn new things and share your knowledge will impress potential employers. It’s a great way to flesh out your resume and gain exposure for your hard-earned skills.

Additionally, teaching demonstrates other highly valued skills, like a true mastery of a subject and the willingness to lead and assist a team.

Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to add a community of supportive learners to your network. It also feels good to pay forward the mentoring you’ve received, and you’ll set an excellent example for those who follow in your tracks.

Advancing Your Industry

As developers, it’s important to support one another in our communities so our platforms can keep moving forward. Mentorship is the opposite of gatekeeping knowledge, which is harmful to tech communities as a whole. By helping others learn, you promote diversity and inclusion, which can lead to a more robust platform.

Additionally, teaching at any level improves the overall level of technical proficiency within the community. This can lead to the creation of better-quality software, which attracts more users and developers to the platform.

Ready to get started? First, you’ll explore what topics you’d like to learn and share.

Selecting a Programming Topic to Learn and Share

So, what should you learn next? Start with the skills and platforms you already know. Have they had a recent update or feature? What’s up-and-coming in beta that the community is buzzing about? Have there been any announcements from the vendor? If so, these can be excellent topics to dive into.

What about the apps that are already in your portfolio? Can you augment them with a new trend in the platform? This will keep your portfolio evolving. In the case of iOS apps, including a new framework might even get your app featured in Apple’s App Store!

Consider the following as you brainstorm:

• Check job postings for required and recommended skills both at your level and the level above you. Popular skills like unit testing or debugging can be good topics to learn and share.
• Review recaps of the most recent vendor conferences for your tech stack, whether that’s WWDC, Google I/O or something else. You can find these on Kodeco and other trusted tech sites. See this chapter’s “Resources” section for links.
• Consider frameworks or other questions that come up frequently on developer Discords, Slacks or Meetup discussions.
• Think about what you learned from your most recent project or pull request, especially if you struggled a bit.
• Which features show promise of being popular in the future? Look around Reddit and platform communities to see what’s exciting developers right now.
• Dive into topics that interest you. Learning is easier when you’re excited about your topic.

Where to Research Tech Topics

When selecting a topic, check if it has good documentation. If not, that could be an opportunity for you. Look for tech blogs on Medium, code labs from Google and educational materials from Apple. A topic is more difficult to learn if it doesn’t have good documentation or code examples — but you’re also likely to get more attention.

Here are some other places to research:

• The canonical source for understanding a coding framework or concept is the implementation itself, so look at the code for the framework you’re learning.
• Going up one level of abstraction, read the developer documentation straight from Apple, Google or whoever created the framework.
• Look for tutorials and articles on respected tech learning sites like Kodeco.
• Search YouTube and Vimeo for conference talks and other videos on your topic.

Once you’ve selected a topic and started your research, it’s time to share with the world as you learn.

So, now that you know how to find the topic you want to learn, the next question is how to put yourself in a position to teach it. Even as a beginner, you have many options to share as you’re learning. In this chapter, you’ll cover:

• Sharing through the community.
• Teaching through online publications.
• In-person mentorship.

You’ll start with sharing what you know within your tech community.

Learning and Sharing With Your Community

Sharing what you’ve learned with your community doesn’t have to take a lot of time or effort. In fact, you might come across ways to do so as you research questions or study interesting topics.

Here are a few easy places to start:

• Answering questions on Stack Overflow: New features often have many questions about them that haven’t been answered yet. This gives you an opportunity to share what you’ve learned.
• Providing feedback about the platform: You can provide direct feedback about the feature to the company that maintains the platform. You can also post in forums if the vendor provides them, like Apple does at https://developer.apple.com/forums/.
• Conversing with the community: You can discuss the feature in platform-specific communities on Slack, Discord, Reddit, Mastodon, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can ask questions, provide support and find camaraderie among your peers.

Another powerful way to share what you’re learning and help others along the way is by publishing your takeaways. In the next section, you’ll learn some ways to do this.

Publishing What You’re Learning

Publishing what you’ve learned gets your name out there, attracts people to join your network and makes you more attractive for employers. Here are some ways that you can do this.

Creating a Tech Blog

One way to share is to create a blog, which is also a great place to house your portfolio. You can register a domain and purchase hosting with a company like Bluehost, then use a tool like WordPress to publish your blog.

There are also several free or affordable platforms you can use, like:

• Kodeco: If you have strong technical and writing chops, you can apply to be a writer at a tutorial site like Kodeco. You don’t have to build your own audience, and you get paid for sharing what you learn.

• Medium: Medium is free for writers, although you can choose whether to put articles behind a paywall for readers. It’s prominent in tech and comes with a built-in audience.

• LinkedIn: It’s not as obvious, but LinkedIn posts can be very much like a blog, and easy to attract an audience. To use LinkedIn as a blog, just create a post. This is a powerful place to write articles about what you’re learning.

• Wix: Wix is a wonderful way to create a free blog and website. It doesn’t come with an audience, but it requires no previous experience with building a blog. The free plan allows a significant amount of mileage.

• Publish: This static site generator lets Swift developers write websites in their favorite language. Learn more about how to use this for your blog in this chapter’s “Resources” section.

Be sure to post a professional profile on your blog along with technical articles about what you’re learning. This comes in handy if recruiters or anyone seeking tech talent stops by.

Note: Creating a blog can be the beginning of something great. Here’s the inspiring story of Ray Wenderlich, the Kodeco site founder who started by learning and sharing his mobile app knowledge on a blog!

Writing Influential Tech Articles

Once you’ve set up a blog, you can fill it with excellent tech articles. The beauty of having a blog is that you can use it however you like. You can create articles about what you’re learning currently, the problems you’ve encountered and how you solved them or an overview of a technology topic.

When writing a tech article, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Consider the audience: Imagine your ideal audience and write for them. This can be other developers in your sphere, juniors on your dev team and/or potential employers. Write the article specifically for them and keep in mind which topics they’d like to read about.

• Keep the language simple: Shorter sentences and simpler words help readers understand your writing. This will also help your article achieve higher SEO readability scores.

• Use screenshots, code snippets and illustrations: An article with examples, graphs and illustrations pops. It helps readers understand the concepts you’re demonstrating.

• Create an outline: Organize your thoughts by creating a simple outline. Write transitions between each section as you fill in the outline with paragraphs.

• Design for readability: Make sure the blog is accessible by filling in content tags on the images and ensuring it’s easy to navigate.

• Keep points concise: Each paragraph should contain one main point. The article doesn’t have to be wordy to impress. Avoid your writing being deemed Too Long; Didn’t Read (TL;DR).

You can go beyond articles by creating step-by-step tutorials by incorporating screenshots and using code formatting tags or gists from GitHub. Most blog tools include plugins for code formatting, like this one for WordPress. There’s also this interesting tool that can help you create a tutorial that looks like a Google Code Lab. You can also use a tool as simple as Keynote, Google Docs or PowerPoint.

The tool isn’t as important as the content, so don’t get too hung up on the formatting. The overall goals are to be able to distribute and share your tutorial and make it easy to read and navigate.

Some ways to make your step-by-step tutorials even more helpful include:

• Add images and highlighted code snippets.
• When possible, present the code snippets as text that can be cut and pasted.
• Attach a sample project or post a link to a sample project in GitHub so your readers can review the code.

Another way you can present a code tutorial is by recording videos.

Recording Tech Tutorial Videos

Few things capture the attention of a crowd more than a live coding demonstration. Today, it’s extremely easy to create interesting videos without a lot of extra investment in tools.

Here are some popular tools for recording video tutorials:

• YouTube: This is probably the simplest platform for publishing video tutorials.
• Screencast-O-Matic: A reasonably priced cross-platform tool for screen capture and hosting videos.
• QuickTime or iMovie: These let you do simple screen captures on a Mac.
• ScreenFlow: A more professional Mac video creation tool.
• OBS Studio: A free, cross-platform screen capture tool.

You don’t even need to appear onscreen to create good video tutorials. Any tool that allows you to record your voice while capturing the screen will do. If the tool allows simple editing like cropping segments, even better. Fancy features are nice, but a good video tutorial is more about the content, so a simple tool that’s easy to use will suffice.

Once you’ve decided on a tool, it’s a good idea to create an outline and a script. Create an outline first to decide how you’ll break down the tutorial into steps. If you have theory sections to explain concepts, creating some Google Slides or a Keynote presentation can be handy for illustrations.

Tip: You can use an AI like ChatGPT to help you create video scripts from a prompt quickly.

To make your video tutorial more professional, add free background music from the audio library within YouTube Studio or from a site like Free Music Archive.

Now that you’ve gathered the tools, you’re ready to record. A simple way to create a tutorial is to start building a project, pausing between steps. You can do this in a live code fashion if you can talk and code at the same time, or record the steps and add the audio separately from a script. You can make your tutorial as formal or informal as you like.

Instructional Video Tips

Some tips for creating a great video tutorial are:

• Follow an outline or script and build a project one step at a time, explaining each step after you’ve added the code.
• Clearly indicate where you’re adding or deleting code.
• Speed up the segments when you’re typing, but have a long pause when the code segment is complete so the viewer can easily pause the video.
• Rehearse building the project first.
• For easy navigation, clearly mark each step of the tutorial with a text slide. You can add chapters later in YouTube Studio.
• Be sure to show all the relevant code on the screen slowly enough that the viewer can pause the video to find the snippet they’re looking for.
• Avoid horizontal scrolling.
• Transcribe your videos.
• Build and run the tutorial after every milestone in the project.
• Use illustrations for theory sections. When explaining the theory, you can appear on camera.

Coding tutorials are helpful and engaging for the community. They’re a great way to illustrate your thought process, show your personality and help learners while building your portfolio.

Whether you choose to write or record, the number one ingredient to creating great tutorials is practice. Focus on the content and avoid perfectionism. The more you practice, the better your content will become over time!

Now that you’ve learned about sharing your content online, you’ll learn about presenting your learning in person.

Giving a Technical Presentation

Preparing a technical presentation is a great way to gain exposure while learning a new skill. It requires a degree of courage, but don’t worry, it gets easier over time — and there’s hardly a better motivator to learn a topic.

You don’t need to have prior experience to present a topic. The beauty of being a presenter is that it helps you look like an expert, even when you’re just learning, like everybody else.

The first step to becoming a great speaker is creating a presentation.

Creating a Useful Presentation

You’ll usually need to make a slide deck for your technical presentation. You can use tools like Keynote, PowerPoint or Google Slides to create your deck.

As a bonus, you can have a sample project ready and demonstrate some live code. Be sure to thoroughly test and rehearse any live demos so you are prepared to handle anything that goes wrong. It’s common to make an error while presenting or have your demo fail unexpectedly. If this does happen, just take it in stride and move on to your next slide or begin taking questions from the audience.

Building a Great Tech Talk Slide Deck

Consider the following when you’re preparing your slides:

• Keep your presentations to around 20 to 30 minutes, which works out to 10 to 15 slides.
• Clearly communicate the value of your topic and how it benefits the audience.
• Grab your audience’s attention with a question, an analogy or a joke.
• Cater to the least knowledgeable in your target audience.
• Use a large font and plenty of contrast on your slides.
• Provide your social media handles. Consider using QR codes so your audience can easily follow you.
• Have proof of concept in an app you can demo live. Provide a link to your GitHub project for those who’d like to experiment or learn more.

Delivering a Great Tech Talk

Some tips for creating and delivering a great presentation are:

• Elaborate on each point rather than just reading the slides.
• Use note cards or speaker notes to help you stay on track and hit all your main points.
• Make eye contact with the audience.
• Be prepared to answer questions. If you don’t know, refer audience members to where they can find more information.
• Speak authoritatively. Even if you don’t feel confident, act as though you are!
• Record your presentation to post on YouTube. Watch it later to learn what you did right and what you can improve.

Once you’re ready to deliver your presentation, practice makes perfect. A great place to start is delivering your presentation to a small audience.

Finding an Audience

To rehearse your presentation, reach out to local meetup groups and clubs. See Chapter 7, “Growing Your Professional Network”, for tips on finding these. You could also deliver your presentation to a local university, community college, code camp or even a high school. These venues often need speakers, and they provide a smaller audience to practice on.

Each time you deliver your presentation, incorporate feedback and make improvements. Your delivery will get smoother and easier every time.

Once you’ve mastered your topic and polished your presentation, it’s time to deliver it at a larger venue like a tech conference.

Writing a Conference Talk Proposal

To present at a tech conference, you’ll need to research the conference and watch for its call for papers, also known as a CFP. Refer to Chapter 7, “Growing Your Professional Network”, for more about conferences.

Once you know which conference you want to present at, research its audience and consider whether your topic is a good fit. Think of ways to tailor your presentation for that specific conference. Brainstorm how to engage the audience in a unique way.

Tip: For inspiration, watch technical presentations on YouTube and take note of what you liked best about each talk. Think about how to incorporate a similar style in your presentation.

When writing your proposal, look over the conference’s call for papers carefully. They’ll often provide the selection criteria along with the format and deadline to submit your proposal. Read these rules thoroughly and tailor your proposal accordingly.

The headline is the most important part of the proposal — it’s what will draw an audience to your talk, so be sure yours catches attention.

Provide your bio and background on the topic. Provide a link to your presentation, any associated code projects and a video of your talk from an earlier presentation or rehearsal. Because you’ve done your research, include how you plan to engage their specific audience.

Be sure to submit the proposal on time, then be prepared to wait. It takes some time for the selection process to play out.

Once you’ve written one proposal, you can modify it and submit it to multiple conferences. Don’t give up if you’re not selected — this process can take some practice and time.

By this point, you’ve learned a lot about how to share as you study. The last way you’ll explore to learn and share is through mentoring.

Teaching and Mentoring Junior Devs

Being a mentor is one of the most rewarding ways to learn and share. You can have a huge impact on someone’s life and career — and it feels terrific seeing someone you’ve mentored succeed. In the process, you’ll gain valuable skills and exposure for your own career.

There are endless ways to mentor and teach. If you’ve recently graduated from a bootcamp or educational program, you can start by seeking to be a mentor at your alma mater.

Assisting or Running a Coding Bootcamp

If you’ve graduated from a bootcamp, you’ve made it through the experience and curriculum. You’re in a great position to help the next generation of students.

Here are some ways you can use bootcamps as a way to learn and share:

• Volunteer to work as a bootcamp mentor.
• Create your own mini-bootcamp by teaching Android Code Labs or Apple’s app development curriculum.
• You can lead a book study for a beginner text like Android Apprentice or SwiftUI Apprentice.
• Set up a bootcamp for younger developers through Code.org.
• Ask community clubs, high schools, universities and community colleges if they’d be interested in a code camp or if they have activities where they need an instructor to lead one.

If you don’t have time to run an entire course or bootcamp, consider volunteering for a shorter event like a hackathon.

Judging or Volunteering at a Hackathon

In Chapter 7, “Growing Your Professional Network”, you learned how to find hackathons, which are usually run by volunteers. You can reach out to local hackathons to see if they need volunteers to mentor participants, run the event or be a judge.

Hackathons often also need panelists to help determine the winner. This is a great learning experience, as you’ll have to review ideas and projects as well as provide feedback to the participants.

Offering Online Office Hours

If you like to mentor from the comfort of your own home, try setting up a schedule on Calendly for online office hours. You can then share your calendar in your online communities and on LinkedIn. Tell learners in the community that you’re willing to answer their questions on certain topics or platforms or at a certain level, and allow them to come to you for help.

By doing this, you’re showing a willingness to lead and help your community. You’re also advertising the skills you have to offer.

You’ll be able to practice your skills by helping others and learning from them as well. You’re also making yourself available for individuals, including potential employers, to talk to you directly about your skills.

Teaching or Tutoring Coding at Schools

Depending on your education, you may be able to teach a course at a community college or high school. Generally, the Higher Learning Commission or similar authority for a state or region will dictate what qualifications teachers must have. However, for a part-time instructor or a programming teacher, the school might be able to obtain a credential, as coding teachers are in short supply.

Another option is to tutor students in programming skills. Reach out to local schools and ask if they have any part-time tutoring opportunities.

Congratulations on making it through this chapter on learning and sharing. At this point, you have a solid idea of how you can use your enthusiasm for learning new things about your chosen technology to give back to the community while making a name for yourself.

Key Takeaways

• Sharing while you learn helps build your skills while enhancing your portfolio.
• Mentoring strengthens your network.
• Presenting what you learn motivates you to learn new things.
• Teaching what you’ve learned solidifies your own understanding.
• You can build your portfolio while creating helpful resources for others in tech.

Resources

• Learn more about writing in 7 powerful tips to write tech articles.
• Check out Kodeco’s summaries of Google I/O and WWDC for tech topic ideas.
• Want to use Swift for your personal blog? Learn how in Danijela Vrzan’s How to Create a Personal Website in Swift using Publish.

Action Plan

• Start a developer blog and add a two- or three-paragraph career profile in a post or in an “about” section.
• Come up with a topic for a tech talk or workshop that you could create.
• Reach out to three clubs, communities or educational institutions to ask if they would allow you to present your talk or workshop.
• Find one question on the internet related to development and post an answer to it.
• Brainstorm three ways you could be a mentor in your community — either locally or online.

Reflect on what you’ve learned: Find this chapter’s worksheet (PDF) in this book’s GitHub materials repo.