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Jason Leow

Jason Leow

@jasonleow

Indie hacker | Creating a diverse portfolio of products + services to $10k monthly revenue. 🔌 plugins.carrd.co ✍️ golifelog.com 🏛 outsprint.io 📋 listskit.com
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Joined November 2022

We miss ya, Cat! More feral writing needed in the community haha.. please come back! 😊🙏

Hey Jamie, not sure if semi-public journaling is your thing, but that's what we do over at Lifelog - golifelog.com

Just 100 words a day. Streak tracking for daily writing. But most of us stay for the community - that's my fav part of running Lifelog too. Over time we're like a mastermind group

I was hoping to see you mention LifeLog here!! I really need to come back and participate more ❤️

We miss ya, Cat! More feral writing needed in the community haha.. please come back! 😊🙏

Then just learn scrappy, hotchpotch code together, build something small, and progress by doing. No need to worry about being thorough in knowledge and knowing all the fundamentals.

Maybe priorities best explains it. Code is secondary to me. It's just one piece out of many moving pieces. I don't care if I learn how to code comprehensively or not. I ship crappy code. I only care enough that it makes customers pay. For SWE, code is primary.

One is for enterprise, good to have CS credentials, fundamentals is a must, good to learn what companies are hiring for (like React). Indie hacker, you don't need to get CS cred, learn just enough coding to launch, also must learn business, learn what helps you ship fast.

I think this is a different question you're answering.
It's not about getting a job.
It's about learning to code: reasoning about the task at hand and solving it with the tools that the language provides.
The nuances come into play at a much later point: working at faang vs working at regular company vs working in body shop vs working in a startup vs indie maker.

Maybe priorities best explains it. Code is secondary to me. It's just one piece out of many moving pieces. I don't care if I learn how to code comprehensively or not. I ship crappy code. I only care enough that it makes customers pay. For SWE, code is primary.

@sandra So what's your answer

definitely to build my own products :)

Then just learn scrappy, hotchpotch code together, build something small, and progress by doing. No need to worry about being thorough in knowledge and knowing all the fundamentals.

The important question is.. are you learning coding to build your own products, or to be a professional software engineer? Very different paths

How so?

One is for enterprise, good to have CS credentials, fundamentals is a must, good to learn what companies are hiring for (like React). Indie hacker, you don't need to get CS cred, learn just enough coding to launch, also must learn business, learn what helps you ship fast.

I think this is a different question you're answering.
It's not about getting a job.
It's about learning to code: reasoning about the task at hand and solving it with the tools that the language provides.
The nuances come into play at a much later point: working at faang vs working at regular company vs working in body shop vs working in a startup vs indie maker.

Maybe priorities best explains it. Code is secondary to me. It's just one piece out of many moving pieces. I don't care if I learn how to code comprehensively or not. I ship crappy code. I only care enough that it makes customers pay. For SWE, code is primary.

yeah very curious on your take

@sandra So what's your answer

definitely to build my own products :)

Then just learn scrappy, hotchpotch code together, build something small, and progress by doing. No need to worry about being thorough in knowledge and knowing all the fundamentals.

I started with online bootcamps and udemy courses but never got anywhere. Then changed the learning style to learning by doing small mini projects I can code and deploy in a few days. That worked. It made me stay interested cos those are projects I like (not some random project by the instructor), and deploying means I could share it, learn/build in public, and others could join in the journey. If I were to start now I would use AI to learn alongside that approach. It would 10x the speed of progress I feel

this is an excellent advice. Thank you, Jason!