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**Jerod Santo:** Happy to have you here. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Very excited to have you here. |
**Jerod Santo:** So tell us a little bit of your story, because I think it informs the rest of our conversation. We're gonna go somewhat deep into some of your ideas, some of the dots you've been connecting as you participate and watch the tech industry... But I think for this conversation it's probably useful to get t... |
**Shawn Wang:** For sure. For those who want the long history, I did a 2,5-hour podcast with [Quincy Larson](https://twitter.com/ossia) from [FreeCodeCamp](https://www.freecodecamp.org/), so you can go check that out if you want. The short version is I'm born and raised in Singapore, came to the States for college, and... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, tell that to Shopify... |
**Shawn Wang:** I know, exactly, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And GitLab. |
**Shawn Wang:** People do IPO and have significant growth after, but that's much more of a risk than at the early stage, where there's a playbook... And I realized that I'd much rather be value-creating than investing. So I changed careers at age 30, I did six months of FreeCodeCamp, and after six months of FreeCodeCam... |
\[04:13\] I joined AWS in early 2020, lasted a year... I actually was very keen on just learning the entire AWS ecosystem. You know, a frontend developer approaching AWS is a very intimidating task... But Temporal came along, and now I'm head of developer experience at Temporal. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's an interesting path. I love the -- we're obviously huge fans of FreeCodeCamp, and Quincy, and all the work he's done, and the rest of the team has done to make FreeCodeCamp literally free, globally... So I love to see -- it makes you super-happy inside just to know how that work impacts real pe... |
Like, you see things happen out there, and you think "Oh, that's impacting", but then you really meet somebody, and 1) you said you're a long-time listener, and now you're on the show, so it just really -- like, having been in the trenches so long, and just see all this over-time pay off just makes me really believe in... |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. There's an infinite game mentality to this. But I don't want to diminish the concept of free, so... It bothers me a little, because Quincy actually struggles a lot with the financial side of things. He supports millions of people on like a 300k budget. 300k. If every single one of us who graduated... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I mean, why not...? |
**Shawn Wang:** I'd also say one thing... The important part of being free is that I can do it on nights and weekends and take my time to decide if I want to change careers. So it's not just a free replacement to bootcamps, it actually is an async, self-guided, dip-your-toe-in-the-water, try-before-you-buy type of thin... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I like the \#payitbackwards hashtag. I wish it had more steam, I suppose. |
**Jerod Santo:** We should throw some weight behind that, Adam, and see if we can... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, you know, you think about Lambda School, for example - and I don't wanna throw any shade by any means, because I think what Austin has done with Lambda... He's been on Founders Talk before, and we talked deeply about this idea of making a CS degree cost nothing, and there's been a lot of... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. And Quincy is very dedicated to it being voluntary. He thinks that people have different financial situations. I don't have kids, so I can afford a bit more. People should have that sort of moral obligation rather than legal obligation. |
I should mention that Lambda School is currently being accused of some fairly substantial fraud against its students... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, really? |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah, it actually just came out like two days ago. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I saw that news too, on Monday. |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. It's not evidenced in the court of law, it's one guy digging up dirt; let's kind of put this in perspective. But still, it's very serious allegations, and it should be investigated. That said, the business of changing careers and the business of teaching people to code, and this innovation of Inco... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... |
**Jerod Santo:** So after FreeCodeCamp you didn't feel quite ready, so you did do a bootcamp... Did you feel ready after that? |
**Shawn Wang:** \[08:03\] Yeah. \[laughs\] I did a reflection, by the way, of my first year of learning to code, so people can look it up... It's called ["No zero days. My path to learning to code"](https://medium.com/hackernoon/no-zero-days-my-path-from-code-newbie-to-full-stack-developer-in-12-months-214122a8948f), a... |
**Jerod Santo:** So this other thing that you do, which not everybody does, is this Learning in Public idea... And you have this post, [Learn in Public](https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public/). You call it "The fastest way to learn", or the fastest way to build your expertise - networking, and second brain. I'm not sure ... |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. This is a reflection that came from me understanding the difference, qualitatively, between why I'm doing so well in my tech career versus my finance career. In finance, everything is private, meaning the investment memos that I wrote, the trade ideas that I had - they're just from a company; they... |
And I think when you're in tech, you should exploit that. I think that we have been trained our entire lives to be zero-sum, from just like the earliest days of our school, where we learn, we keep it to ourselves to try to pass the test, try to get the best scores, try to get the best jobs, the best colleges, and all t... |
I've been really fascinated by this, by what it is so effective. First of all, you have your skin in the game, meaning that a lot of times when your name is on the blog posts out there, or your name is on the talk that you gave, your face is there, and people can criticize you, you're just incentivized to learn better,... |
When you get something wrong in public, there are two effects that happen. First is people will climb over broken glass to correct you, because that's how the internet does. There's a famous XKCD comic where like "I can't go to bed yet." "Why?" "Someone's wrong on the internet. I have to correct them." |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Shawn Wang:** So people are incentivized to fix your flaws for you - and that's fantastic - if you have a small ego. |
**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say, that requires thick skin. |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah, exactly. So honestly -- and that's a barrier for a lot of people. They cannot get over this embarrassment. What I always say is you can learn so much on the internet, for the low, low price of your ego. If we can get over that, we can learn so much, just because you don't care. And the way to get ... |
And then the second part, which is that once you've gotten something wrong in public, it's just so embarrassing that you just remember it in a much clearer fashion. \[laughter\] This built a feedback loop, because once you started doing this, and you show people that you respond to feedback, then it builds a feedback a... |
So I really like that viral feedback loop. It helps you grow your reputation... Because this is not just useful for people who are behind you; a lot of people, when they blog, when they write, when they speak, they're talking down. They're like "I have five years experience in this. Here's the intro to whatever. Here's... |
\[12:17\] That's really good, by the way, for beginners; that's really important, that experts in the field share their knowledge. They don't see this blogging or this speaking as a way to level up in terms of speaking to their experts in their fields. But I think it's actually very helpful. You can be helpful to peopl... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I've heard it say that "Today is the tomorrow you hope for." |
**Shawn Wang:** Wow. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Because today is always tomorrow at some point, right? Like, today is the day, and today you were hoping for tomorrow to be better... |
**Jerod Santo:** I think by definition today is not tomorrow... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No, today is the tomorrow that you hoped for... Meaning like "Seize your moment. It's here." |
**Jerod Santo:** Carpe diem. Gotcha. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, kind of a thing like that. |
**Shawn Wang:** I feel a little shady -- obviously, I agree, but also, I feel a little shady whenever I venture into this territory, because then it becomes very motivational speaking-wise, and I'm not about that. \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Kind of... But I think you're in the right place; keep showing up where you need to be - that kind of thing. But I think your perspective though comes from the fact that you had this finance career, and a different perspective on the way work and the way a career progressed. And so you have a dichot... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. When you talk about finance as a zero-sum game, I feel like there's actually been moves now to actually open up about finance as well; I'm not sure if either of you have tracked the celebrity rise of Cathie Wood and Ark Invest, and a lot of the moves that she's doing in public. They're an investm... |
**Shawn Wang:** CNBC? |
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