Introduction

Welcome to the JavaScript LifeStyles Podcast, the intersection between Software Engineering, and daily life!

Intro Music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iQNySgFiBo

Who I am

My name is Kyle Willard. I am a former Sales Rep, Sales Manager, and a former Administrator for an Automotive Dealer Association. I come from a varied career background but with a singular focus, keeping people happy, and taken care of. I have over a decade of Customer Service skills, including in the security industry at the largest college bar in my hometown. I bring a cool collected fact over feelings mentality to anything that I do.

My Outlook

My outlook is that you either complete a task or don't. That there is never a project too difficult to accomplish. I preach the motto of "Go Hard, or Go Home" both to my family, friends, coworkers, and employees.

My Stack

My Stack of choice consists of React, Redux, Apollo Client, Apollo Server, GraphQL, Express, Node, PostgreSQL or alternately mongoose, and mongoDB.

Vision

The vision for this podcast is to bring you a fresh take on a number of different software engineering topics, the software involved in current events, and to bring the best content possible week after week. We will be talking about non-software-related stuff as well so keep an ear out. I hope that this podcast is the hype that people need to continue learning, and building their skills!

College vs Bootcamp vs Self Taught

There have been a ton of different attempts throughout the last decade or so arguing the merits of different methods for learning software engineering, and there are great answers from a number of different angles. I am going to bring you my view after a number of terms in college, finishing up a bootcamp, and even spending some time being self taught.

Keys to consider

• What do employers look for Employers look for a ton of different things. They look for your experience, and yes some look for a degree, but I feel like ultimately it is a bit of a moving target as someone working on finding work. There are so many routes to being a software engineer, and there are so many different variables that come into play. Really you can never really with certainty, until you are in the industry for a good amount of time, know what an employer will use as a primary metric regarding your skills, your background, you education, or simply your body of work.
• What is best for you I think that this is a critical piece to the puzzle. How do you learn best? For some it is doing tons of tutorials until its literally burned into your brain, for others it is simply reading documentation on different libraries, or looking at docs for the language you are learning. And for still others it is all about diving into the muck and breaking things until you understand how to make it work. And lastly there is the mixture of learning from seeing, and doing which seems to be the most common route for folks to go, especially the ones who have no background with tech or programming.