Publishing Your Work

00:00:00 I'm hearing a different role I'm here to convince you that publishing your work will increase your luck I'm here to convince you hopefully that by doing work public publicly you can increase the odds of good things happening to you I wanted to call this the stupid little tweet that changed my life it's kind of catchy but it's not quite professional enough but we are going to talk we are going to talk about the stupid little tweet that changed my life like Jake said I'm a developer educator at Planet scale if you like this talk

00:00:32 you must buy databases from us those are the rules um I created a video course called my sequel for developers that teaches full stack developers a lot about my sequel I love databases um so you can find that at planetscale.com MySQL laravel developer and as I said earlier I spend all of my time on Twitter unless my co-workers are listening I spend all of my time on Twitter so you can find me twitter.com Aaron D Francis more important than that and more important than anything I'm going to say are these two these are my

00:01:07 two-year-old twins you can tell they're twins because of how much they look alike um so these are my two-year-old Twins and somehow this is the next set luckiest man in the world and this may be the last time you see me in person for a very long time just here um my sponsor is better than all of them my sponsor is my wife [Applause] my wife is not here my wife is a full-time stay-at-home mom and believe me when I tell you that there is a zero point zero percent chance I could do this without her she's at

00:02:02 home with the kids I'm here hanging out with y'all thank you Jennifer for sponsoring everything I do y'all buckle up um publishing your work increases your luck we're going to break it down into three parts publishing work and luck and we're actually going to start at the end and work our way back we're going to start with luck for the purposes of this conversation I get to make everything up so I am going to Define luck as when something unexpected and good happens to you so unexpected and good seems

00:02:40 reasonable enough right in our corner of the internet in our little part of the world this can manifest itself a couple different ways some of the common manifestations of luck in our world would be somebody reaching out to you and offering you a job could be someone reaching out to you and saying hey do you want to come on my podcast could be your open source Library finally starts to gain some traction could be that you go to a conference and you make a lot of friends where historically you haven't really been

00:03:10 connected in the community right these things are lucky they're unexpected they're good I think there's also a third thing they're they're outside of your control right no matter how hard you work you cannot force someone to offer you a job you cannot force a community to adopt your open source library right no matter how hard you work that's frustrating I don't know about you I kind of like being in control about to have four kids so we'll see but I like being in control um but you can't control that but my my

00:03:45 hypothesis is my stipulation is that by being a person who does work publicly you start to build a reputation for yourself you start to build a body of work that speaks on your behalf better than any resume could and you start to have opportunities come your direction because of that body of work people start to associate you with that work that you've been doing publicly people start to think Aaron is the guy that's always talking about my sequel we need somebody to come talk about my sequel at our company maybe we should

00:04:21 hire Aaron which is how I got my job okay so this is what I'm talking about building a body of work that allows those opportunities to find you let's talk about work I left this term intentionally vague work could be anything that's kind of the beauty of it is you get to decide what the work is going to look like for you your work is going to look different than my work is going to look different than their work right you get to decide what kinds of work you want to be public about you get to decide the shape the

00:04:57 contents you get to decide everything it's totally up to you I'm not going to leave you high and dry though I can't make the decision for you but I can help you maybe figure out a few things we're going to look at two places I think when when it comes to when it comes to figuring out what is the work I'm going to be public about you could follow your curiosity where does your curiosity pull you where does your curiosity pull you where do you stay up super late working on stuff just because you're into it

00:05:30 where's your expertise compel you where does your expertise drive you so we're going to look at curiosity and expertise we'll start with curiosity your curiosity can pull you into some into some truly wacky and bizarre and totally weird areas and I'm going to beg you to please please please please please don't play it cool we need people who are passionately curious we need people who are excited and we need people we need people who are positively tickled about the ridiculous things that they're working on we need those people

00:06:08 we have enough people in the world and especially on the internet we have enough people who are playing it cool we have enough people that can't be bothered we've got enough people that are unimpressed by everything what I want to see is the flourishing of the Curious the happy The excited the passionate person who is out there doing their thing people play it cool because they think being cool is a virtue being cool is not a virtue patience is virtue being cool not a virtue we've got enough of those we need you to

00:06:47 be curious and passionate let's talk about some of those people um Andrew friend of the community is here somewhere yeah here he is right here um I actually didn't know he was going to be here he doesn't know this is coming um Andrew is in the laravel community like I just said and he's got some open source packages and he was having some trouble staying on top of his GitHub issues which cast no Stones because who Among Us right so being being the clever fellow that he is he thought what if I did something fun

00:07:30 what if I bought a thermal receipt printer like they have at restaurants order up the ticket comes out what if I bought that and I hooked it up to the GitHub API and now every time a new every time a new ticket comes our new issue comes in order up and a ticket comes out so now he's got this thermal receipt printer and not only is it a thermal receipt printer it's a developer's thermal receipt printer right so so here here's the deal I love this you know who else loved this literally everybody everybody loves this talk to

00:08:09 them about it later he put it on Twitter unbelievable numbers went to Hacker News sat at the top of Hacker News and people were nice that tells you how much people loved it he had a curiosity he followed it through it's ridiculous and I love it to death let's talk about Steve Steve is not here I hope I don't know Steve I've never met Steve I don't know Steve at all Steve doesn't know me um Steve is working on Steve is working on a like a open source SVG whatever whatever I don't need the thing that

00:08:45 Steve is building I don't need it I don't need an SVG editing tool I follow Steve because Steve loves the thing he's doing Steve is curious about the project that he is working on and Steve is excited about it Steve is always posting videos of weird edge cases he's posting videos of these insane performance optimizations and I'm following along happily and I have no use for the thing that he's doing not too long ago um not too long ago Steve tweeted this I'm taking the rest of the year off to work

00:09:26 on TL draw which is his thing full time turns out there's a lot of enthusiasm for an open source hackable system whatever whatever right I don't use it turns out there's a lot of enthusiasm maybe not a part of the community maybe there is a lot of enthusiasm here's here's my read on the Steve situation as an outsider there's a lot of enthusiasm because Steve's enthusiastic people are following Steve and getting excited because Steve is excited and he's not afraid to show it Steve is not afraid to be too cool Steve is excited

00:10:01 and he's got this whole group of people around him now who are excited me included I'm up here talking about Stephen how great he is I've never opened the tool I have no idea what it does I'm sure it's wonderful outside of work um can be a good place to explore curiosity free time nights and weekends whatever inside of work can be a great place to dive deeper into your expertise we need people who are curious we need deep deep experts and a lot of times those are the same people it's the same people that get to the

00:10:38 Deep level of expertise because they are passionately curious it is likely it is likely that within the scope of your job you are solving interesting problems we're developers we do interesting things and if anyone says we don't they have no idea what we do it's likely you're doing interesting things right this is your opportunity to repurpose repackage remix reuse all of the things that you're learning at work yes for the benefit of the community absolutely but also to build that public body of work such that opportunities

00:11:13 start to find you and I know that you're thinking I can't share the stuff I'm working on at work granted understood I would say you can't share everything you're doing at work that doesn't mean you can't share anything right so if you're learning things at work I would not recommend exposing your proprietary code base to the internet I would recommend taking those learnings that you have learned from your hard deep work and turning that into a conference talk or blog post or a video or an open source package right you are learning

00:11:49 things at work reuse that dive deep into your expertise we're going to talk about me for this one this is easy I don't have to memorize anything I just remember everything okay we're going to talk about me for this example I told you early on um that I was always droning on and on about my sequel that is still true there was a time when I thought I'm pretty good at my sequel I'm not very good I'm not Tobias Petri good I'm not Kai good there are people in this developer community that are very good

00:12:22 I'm not very good and so I bought a bunch of books I bought a bunch of my sequel books they're interesting talk to me about it later um I bought a bunch of my sequel books and I printed out the MySQL documentation and I read it because I wanted to know more I was curious and I was diving into that expertise that thing that I needed at work I was diving into it I was reading this one book um and I came across this paragraph about performance optimization technique for paginating large tables using limit

00:12:53 offset oh quiet down everybody I'll tell you about it later everybody's going crazy um I found it really interesting I found it really interesting and so I learned everything I could about this performance optimization technique from a book that was written in 2004 still works um so I learned everything I could I put it together into a blog post three thousand words three thousand words on something that doesn't super matter and I posted this weekend I wrote three thousand words yada yada this is still one of the highest maybe

00:13:30 the highest blog posts on my site um this went extremely this did extremely well on Twitter this also sat at the top of Hacker News this is just something I was super into pagination minuscule part of application development I found it really interesting so I wrote this now getting getting points on the internet let's talk about getting points on the internet getting points on the internet doesn't matter right so you're thinking great I get points on place I get points that are fake in places that don't

00:14:08 matter why is this helpful um tweets sitting at on top of Hacker News is good signal that helps me that helps me know like oh people are resonating with this vanity of vanities if I'm optimizing to get fake Internet points right waste of my time waste of my life I'm not optimizing to get fake Internet points I'm optimizing for opportunities to find me somebody sent it to somebody send it to somebody send it to somebody ended up on Hacker News send it to somebody I get this DM if you can't see the database hat then

00:14:42 you don't know the name Sam Lambert is the CEO of Planet scale and he sent me a DM I was like can we chat sometime August 2022. we chatted and I worked there right this is what happens I can't make Sam I can't make Sam hire me but I can put some stuff out there and see what happens there is likely a group of people here right now thinking that sounds really nice that sounds really nice but I have nothing to say like I buy your strategy I just don't have anything to say okay I think there are two things that could

00:15:25 be true about you the first thing is it is possible that you have trained yourself to think that anything that you do is not valuable anything that you have to say is not worth saying in anything that you know everybody else already knows the stuff that other people do valuable interesting worth sharing the stuff that I do not valuable you might have trained yourself to believe that I'm going to challenge you I am going to challenge you to reframe this work that you're doing I want you to look around

00:16:14 look around at the community this is this is a very common problem for um High highly creative experts at the top of their game they surround themselves with other experts and they think everybody knows everything what do I have to say everybody knows everything you have forgotten you've forgotten the years toil and struggle that it took to get to where you are today and you have forgotten there are people behind you that would love just a little bit of what you know love it we've got a lot of great voices we've

00:16:56 got a lot of great voices in the laravel community you know who's we're missing yours we're missing yours you've got something to say you've got a point of view you have a unique set of Life circumstances we need you there are people that want to be you bring them along there's a second thing there's a second thing that could be true you may really really want to be doing the work but you just can't get started you just can't get started into you I would say that anything worth doing is worth doing badly

00:17:39 anything worth doing is worth doing badly you're never going to come up you're never going to come up with the perfect blog post the perfect article the perfect YouTube video by standing still you're never going to start the perfect SAS business to Ben's Point by standing still you gotta get in the game anything worth doing is worth doing badly do a bad first version if I know anything about us you're not going to stay there do a bad first version that progress is going to lead to progress motion is

00:18:16 going to lead the motion action is going to lead to action you're in the game it is really intimidating to do something huge and perfect out of the gate it's not very intimidating to do something small and terrible I could have anyone shout out a thing and I could do a terrible job of it right here but I'm in the game what did you say I'm actually a good juggler um you're in the you're in the game right so if your problem is man I just I just think that I could build this perfect thing laravel's on version 10.

00:18:53 get in the game iterate you can do this seems like uh seems like work should be the hard part right so we're going to talk about publishing now you get to decide what work means I don't know what you do I don't know what you want to do you get to decide curiosity expertise I trust you'll figure it out publishing you get to decide you get to decide what publishing means to you to me publishing means spending a lot of time on Twitter um writing a lot of blog posts making a lot of YouTube videos that's what

00:19:28 publishing means to me I know that Twitter is sometimes terrible and is probably dead tomorrow I'm going down with the ship if you don't like Twitter don't hang out on Twitter here here's my uh here's my rule for publishing it can be anywhere it can be your blog it can be the laravel news blog they always need content it can be your newsletter it can be a podcast it can be anything that's not your hard drive when you publish to your hard drive that's called saving a file and that doesn't count so it can it can be anywhere

00:20:05 it seems like this should be the easy part right you did all the hard work like the coding the designing the the doing the video that's the hard work maybe this is the hardest part for me this has been and continues to be the hardest part for me and it may be that way for you it is scary to put yourself out there it is scary to open yourself up to criticism it is scary to be vulnerable it is scary to do all of that on the internet the internet can be a cold mean and horrible place it can be a place of delight and

00:21:02 connection or it can be cold mean and horrible and you never know which one you're gonna get you never know so what do we do what do we do with the fear of putting yourself out there of being vulnerable of exposing yourself to criticism what do we do here's what I'm not going to tell you to do I'm not going to tell you to get over it I'm not going to tell you to just get over it I don't know if that's possible I don't think it's helpful and I don't know if it's healthy I don't know if it's healthy to have

00:21:48 this strong emotion and say I'm just gonna I'm just gonna use my powerful brain to act as if this emotion doesn't exist now if there are parts of this talk if there are parts of this talk that I can't do for you boy is this one of them can't decide work can't decide publishing can't tell you how to get over your fear what I can do is tell you a little bit of my story what happened for me buckle up about two years ago the thing um the thing that I was most afraid of in the world was what other people thought

00:22:38 of me I was so afraid of what other people thought of me that I never published anything to be more specific to be to be more specific and more vulnerable I did not want people to laugh at me I didn't want to be embarrassed I did not want to be embarrassed that was my greatest fear I didn't share anything I didn't want to open myself up to criticism I watched other people sharing things I watched other people in the community sharing things and I noticed something was starting to grow something bad was

00:23:27 starting to grow inside me I was starting to grow bitter I was starting to grow bitter I was watching everyone else go to conferences and speak get jobs make friends go on podcasts and I thought why not me what about me I can do work like that I have done work like that what about me obvious the answer is obvious my fear was keeping me on the sidelines I wasn't putting myself out there and nobody knew right so I realized I was thinking about it I was I had come to the realization that I was growing bitter and I'd come to the

00:24:18 realization of why things were happening for other people and I remember it's clear as day I remember where I was sitting remember who I was talking to I remember which direction the wind was blowing and I remember that it struck me and I knew but I had two options this bitterness was growing inside of me because other people were getting things that I wanted I knew that I had two options there were two paths forward and I had to choose one of them I could I could lean into my fear I could lean into my fear

00:24:58 and never publish anything and I knew that I would reach the end of my career with my ego fully intact nobody ever laughed at me I knew that I would reach the end of my career bitter and full of regret for things I had been too scared to try I looked I looked to the end of my career down that path in the overwhelming feeling that I felt was I wish you had cared less and I wish you had tried more that day switch flipped there was a there was a new reality there was a new fear that made my old thing disappear being laughed at on the

00:26:19 internet not so bad compared to dying full of regret pretty good trade-off it didn't seem so bad to be laughed at it was no longer controlling me because I knew what the alternative was so I chose the second route it was easy it's easy choice I chose the second route I started sharing everything I was doing started sharing everything I was doing in the World opened up before me opened up before me foreign it took work to let go of of that fear it took work to let go of that as I started to let go of the fear of what

00:27:15 other people thought of me I started to think about other people more I was so concerned with what other people thought of me that I wasn't thinking how can I help these other people how can I be the hype man that I wish I had had along the way since then the um the number of unexpected and good things that has happened to me is truly hard for me hard for me to believe um March of 2021 some dumb little tweet I'm going to show it to you you'll see how dumb it is I can draw a straight line to being here today and we will I'll

00:28:11 show you the whole line first I'm going to show you the Tweet because I want you to see I want you to see it this is a reply um this is a reply to Jonathan renick um about and getting inertia SSR running on Vapor I wrote this tweet and I looked at it and thought that's a good tweet very good job Aaron look at the number of jargon words what is this guy talking about what does that even mean so I I replied to him and I thought good tweet Aaron this is very good I was I was so like into this expertise

00:28:55 rabbit hole that I thought oh he knows what I'm talking about you know what his response was what does this mean I have no idea what this means but maybe you can help us I've got no idea what you're talking about man that's awesome good tweet what does it say can you help us and I realized hang on maybe I know some things because of my curiosity in the areas that I've delved into my expertise maybe I know some things that aren't yet known by everyone and it took me putting myself out there and saying hey this is cool to realize

00:29:33 like wait I can help here after that I started working on um a package for laravel called Sidecar sidecar is that tweet but in in code form um and so I started working on this package and I finally open sourced it and while I was doing that I was using my new found sharing muscles so just tweet about it I was like hey I'm doing this thing you can run Ruby from Lambda it's kind of neat I'm doing it and uh Frank saw it he was like hey I've seen what you're doing I've seen what you're doing I've seen what you're doing on sidecar I

00:30:15 run uh laravel worldwide Meetup do you want to come present sidecar and y'all I thought that was it yeah I thought that was the peak I thought that was the Pinnacle I am speaking at laravel worldwide I thought this is it I took that video from that Meetup and I submitted it to Ian at laricon online and Ian took a chance and said sure let's do it and y'all I thought that was it I thought I have arrived I've made it and I was thrilled to death about it I thought this is incredible what is what a story

00:31:00 I thought the story was good so I reached out to the GitHub readme project through Caleb porzio put me in touch um and I said hey I know your project I have something that I think might fit on your project I want to tell you a story about um letting go of my fears embracing working in public and there's this nice open source thread that runs through it'd be great for GitHub and they said sure great let's do it thought I had made it thought this is the peak of my career they reached out to me after this and

00:31:40 we're like hey we did your developer story seems cool do you want to write an article for us I wrote for them an article called publishing your work increases your luck I wrote an article for them and it did great and I thought I'd made it I took that article and I turned it into a talk and I was on stage at laricon EU and I thought the Pinnacle of my career I have made it here I am today and I think this is it I think this is it but I've thought that before so I don't know what happens next but I'll tell you what I'm not changing

00:32:21 my strategy I'm going to keep working and I'm going to keep talking about it and we'll see what happens that's not my responsibility my responsibility is to do the work and to talk about it that's it it's nice to put up a timeline of all your wins it's nice to put up a timeline of a couple years and be like look at all the wins we do not have time to talk about all the losses we have time to talk about the wins we do not have time to talk about all the losses we have time to talk about this one

00:33:02 this is me at GitHub universe looking very compelling pointing at people love to point at people this is me at GitHub Universe love this picture very cool same genes this is this is my Twitter header love it makes me look really professional right good picture must be smart something you need to know about this picture that's not the full picture literally does anybody notice anything about that picture does anybody notice that there are three people pictured out there there's not a lot more off camera there

00:33:54 are zero more out of frame these three people event staff so we're down to zero people okay down to zero it gets worse there's zero people listening to this talk who are not paid by GitHub to listen to the talks and make sure everything goes okay this is so bad that people were taking chairs from the uh from where the humans should be and turning it around so that they could eat lunch together imagine telling your friends telling your family telling your parents telling your wife's parents I got a big thing coming I got a

00:34:58 conference called GitHub universe it's in California it's a big deal It's Gonna Be Live streamed and you get there and your Talk's not on the schedule you're like that's fine it'll be live streamed all tweeted out no one will ever know the difference you find out a few hours before it's not actually being live streamed everyone else's is yeah there was no problem with the live streaming equipment there was a problem somewhere else this talk not live streamed hey Mom it's actually not going to be

00:35:38 live streamed hey Jennifer tell your parents it's not going to be live streamed we'll get a we'll get a recording later imagine giving this talk nobody imagine giving it to nobody but there are people listening but they're not part of your talk and they're like what is going on with this guy most embarrassing most embarrassing thing that ever happened I'm standing beside the stage and the AV guy calls me up please welcome to the stage Aaron Francis I'm like who are you talking to it's just me man

00:36:21 I wish the Earth had opened and swallowed me whole this is going to happen to you people aren't going to read your blog posts people aren't going to watch your videos this is going to happen to you this is not your responsibility your responsibility is to do the work and tell people if this happens not your problem it sucks but this is not your responsibility you do the work you put it out there and nothing happens you did your job you gotta keep going going this remains my Twitter header I'm not

00:37:11 shy about telling the story makes me look good but I'm not shy about telling you all the story this is our this is this is a shared secret when you publish your blog post and nobody cares when you upload your YouTube video and you get four views I've been there man I've been there and it sucks and you got to keep going your responsibility is to do the work your responsibility is to try really hard let's see what happens you can always look at this Twitter header until I change it you can always

00:37:50 look at this and remember oh man doesn't always work doesn't always work the formula is is very simple you got to do things you got to tell people you get to decide what you do you get to decide who you tell it's simple it's straightforward it's not easy scary scary to put yourself out there scary to open yourself up to criticism scary to be vulnerable I encourage you investigate that fear investigate that fear and decide if it's worth hanging on to I don't know you you got to do that yourself for me wasn't worth keeping around

00:38:40 don't know about you you will receive criticism you're going to put stuff out there and they're going to be people who well actually you to death well actually well have you thought about well I did that one time it's gonna happen for every for every vocal critic for every person that says well actually there are 10 times as many people who are following along quietly there are 10 times as many people that want you to succeed there are 10 times as many people that are proud of you yes for the work you're

00:39:26 doing sure but for your bravery to put yourself out there there are people on your team and one day one day one of those people that's been quietly following along it's been proud of you the whole time one day one of them is going to reach out with a potentially life-changing opportunity and you're going to think wow that was lucky I was really lucky thank you [Applause] [Music]