Cast List: MAS 063: Ryan Chenkie

MAS 063: Ryan Chenkie

Adventures in Angular

Episode: MAS 063: Ryan Chenkie
Website: Adventures in Angular
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedwrench.com/AdventuresInAngular.rss
Duration: 00:32:46
Published: 2018-12-05 12:00

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Ryan Chenkie

This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Ryan Chenkie (Canada). He is a developer who uses JavaScript with Angular and Node and he does screencasting at angularcasts.io. They talk about Ryan’s background, his current projects, and getting over imposter syndrome! Check it out!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

0:47 – Chuck: Today our guest is Ryan Chenkie!

0:55 – Guest: Hello! I’m excited!

1:02 – Chuck: What are you doing now?

1:10 – Guest: I spent 2.5 years at Auth0 and learned a ton there. I was doing some side work and then figured out I had to focus on one thing or the other. Now I have been a consultant fulltime and also teaching, too. AngularCast.io I teach there.

1:56 – Chuck: Sounds like people are excited about GraphQL. I’ve been there, too, and make a similar decision.

2:19 – Guest: It was a hard decision b/c I liked all of my colleagues there. I always had the itch to be self-employed.

2:42 – Chuck: You figure out of it’s for you or not.

2:51 – Guest: Yep! I am happy to be another year of it.

3:00 – Chuck: I went free-lanced about a year ago b/c the decision was made for me.

3:29 – Guest: I am grateful for it.

3:40 – Chuck: Yeah, we talk about this a lot on one of my podcast platforms. If you can make a connection with people then you’ll be god.

4:07 – Guest: Yeah I had to figure out if I would have to focus on the marketing side of things or not. Right now the projects are coming to me – right to my front door, which is great! It’s this ever-expanding web.

4:55 – Chuck: Yeah where people tend to show-up. Let’s talk about your story! How did you get into programming?

5:30 – Guest: It was a little less typically at the time. I was fully self-taught. I went to school for a somewhat Geography degree. It got boring for me at some point. I had to do one programming course while in school and it was in Java. I was terrible at it and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. It didn’t help that the instruction wasn’t great. I was terrible I didn’t understand a thing. I was scared that I was going to fail the course. I came out of there feeling like I didn’t have the chops to be a programmer. I was doing Geomantic-stuff. I learned that the further you get into this programming stuff you would make better money – better job, etc. I was trying to put this map/graph into a website and it said that I had to learn Java. This time, though, the material was taught to me in these small increments. I got into it more and I was more attracted to the idea of programming.

10:00 – Guest continues.

10:32 – Guest: I was learning Angular and JavaScript better.

10:35 – Chuck: Yeah it makes you think through it. You have to go deep.

10:47 – Guest: I would make a sample packet. I would get to certain points and get to a point and I couldn’t explain what I did. I would get to a roadblock and I couldn’t explain it. I would be on this tangent for a while and have to figure this out. I was working with the government, at this time, but I thought: maybe I could try this programming thing for a while. Did you go to NG Vegas conference?

12:20 – Chuck: Nope.

12:25 – Guest: There is this conference in Las Vegas – I am going to go and hang out with people. At this conference I met some important people. This company posted that they needed someone and I thought: this is the job for me. I sent an email – went to an interview – and did an example. I got the job and freaked out because I wasn’t a “real” programmer. I wrote some content for them and it’s been all good.

14:07 – Chuck: Let me back-up real quickly. How did you find Angular?

14:18 – Guest: It’s hard to pinpoint the “moment” I had found Angular. As I am learning through Code Academy I am reading articles and stuff. I heard about Angular.js and watched some online tutorials and watched all of the talks from the conference. I thought that I needed to learn it b/c it was pretty popular at the time. I knew how to write JavaScript, but made me clearly see with Angular.js app I had to back up and learn it.

15:34 – Chuck: Yep!

16:05 – The guest mentions Hacker News among other things.

16:22 – Chuck: Angular and Electron is what we brought you on for – is that what you are doing?

16:36 – Guest: The guest talks about his experiences with Angular and Electron.

18:26 – Chuck: Let’s backup some more – didn’t sound like you worked with a lot of tech companies right?

18:51 – Guest: Yep that was my only one.

18:57 – Chuck: I hear a lot of complaints from people having this imposter syndrome. You only being in the industry for a short amount of time – how did you overcome the imposter syndrome?

19:34 – Guest: Imposter syndrome has been an issue for me – I wasn’t crippled – but it’s debilitating. “Who am I to teach on this subject?” – but I think I’ve made conscious efforts to ignore that and to use it as a little bit as fuel. I remember, man, of being scarred! I remember being terrified to see the online comments – b/c they are going to “know” that I don’t know what I am talking about. Funny thing is that I had a lot of positive comments. Little-by-little, those positive pieces of feedback were good for me. I thought: At least I am helping people (like I said, little-by-little!). I think there has been a part of a loop there. If you can look for that feedback it can help overcome imposter syndrome. The things of value are the things that scare you.

22:41 – Chuck: Yeah, I talk about this all the time to people. I have been self-employed for 8.5 years. I am not going to starve. If I had to, I could go and find a “normal” job.

23:20 – Guest: I agree. One piece of feedback that I got from a colleague is that she said: you are very resourceful! Knowing that it helped b/c it was a boost of confidence. If I had this capacity of being resourceful that helped me make my decision. It wasn’t a good time in the sense that we just had a baby. If it went south then I could always go back and get a “normal” job.

24:43 – Chuck: Yeah we talk about that in Agile development – the further you go the more information you get.

24:58 – Guest. Yep

25:03 – Chuck: What are you doing now?

25:07 – Guest: I’ve had a few large clients these past few years. I have current projects going now one is with a museum. I am speaking at a few conferences – one of them was in San Francisco and Prague. Now I am planning for next year and figuring out what my teaching and speaking plans will be. It looks like I am focusing on Graph QL content. Lots of Angular, too!

26:32 – Chuck: You are web famous!

26:35 – Guest: I don’t know about that, but I do have some things out there.

26:42 – Chuck: How can people find you?

26:49 – Guest: Twitter! Website! GitHub!

27:18 – Chuck: Picks!

27:25 – Fresh Books!

END – CacheFly

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