A Conversation With K
This post is about a conversation I had with a long-time Internet friend, that I’ll name “K” for the sake of anonymity.
Some background on my plan
I didn’t cover that yet, but I will in a future post; but my current goal is to build my network since I already have skill. I just lack the people required to monetize it to the maximum.
So, to achieve this goal, I decided to move back to Paris (from south-east asia where I’m spending most of the year) and enroll in 42 Paris, a programming school I tried but failed a few years ago.
Some reasons why it would help me:
- It would “restart” my learning drive – since taking a long-term programming freelance job three years ago, I lost most of my curiosity and willingness to learn. Doing 42 means grinding C 10 hours a day, which should make me want to learn more pretty soon.
- It would help me connect with people a lot. In the Piscine (the selection process for 42), people value other people with programming skills that help them. This means that it’s quite easy for skilled & pedagogic people to become well-liked by people with lower skill levels. It will also let me have a good excuse to talk with very skilled people and cling to them for as long as possible – they’ll naturally gravitate the people I need to have success.
- It would, hopefully, fix my work ethic. I don’t work nearly as much as I did before… Hopefully, this should fix that.
Who’s K?
K is a long-time internet friend I met on a dropshipping Discord server. I was crazy about replacing Shopify with a custom WooCommerce server to remove the % that Shopify takes on all transactions. This plan eventually failed (as well as my attempt to write custom funnels in VueJS).
But in the process, it made K want to do the same, and eventually, learn web development.
He’s now the most skilled frontend programmer that I know. He manages to actually understand the Kafkaesque world of XState but also of ts-effect! I would publish his website if I didn’t want to have some kind of anonymity going on there.
He stuck with me despite me ghosting him half the time and I’m grateful for that – I just happen to be very bad at texting…
(to K: sorry if I’m wrong on some stuff, I also happen to be on the left end of the episodic memory bell curve!)
A counter-argument from K
So, K had a visceral reaction to my idea – “that’s really stupid?!”.
(I’m not mad or anything like that about his opinion actually; I’m really curious if there are other ways to achive my end goal of having a crazy good network).
The reason is mostly that I’m also entertaining a job offer from a big tech company that’s gaining a lot of traction these days, that would both bring me money and status for the long term.
Between 42 and this big tech job, then, the choice is so obvious! No?
I’m not exactly sure about that; the problem is that working for other people seems to have a deleterious effect on me. Maybe I could give that company a try… They seem to be very hard workers, are really good at what they’re doing, and they work a lot, which means that there needs to be some kind of learning budget? (just asked them on Discord!)
I could do like K:
- Talk with people on Discord servers
- Have a call with them from time to time to help build genuine relationships
- Meet them at conferences from time to time.
My counter-argument: where to meet investors?
His counter-counter-argument: I don’t give a fuck about investors.
A possible change in direction
It makes me reflect a little bit on what worked for me in the past…
What worked a lot was helping people on Discord servers, that’s true.
As well, doing blog posts always attracts crazy good offers by sometimes quite influential people (got one a few months ago).
I think maybe I could have the same effect just by:
- Taking 3 days a week for learning
- Posting about what I learned
- Waiting for emails.
I think I would spend more time programming if I was learning again… But now, everything is about money :’(.
I just don’t feel happy producing stuff for money all the time. Maybe if I had a bigger learning budget (= actually dedicate days to exploring cool stuff), then, I could make interesting blog posts, and then, I would have a bigger network with more interesting opportunities.
So yeah, I’ll keep you updated, dear readers!