Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Ryan Chenkie This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Ryan Chenkie (Canada). He is a developer who uses JavaScript with Angular and Node and he does screencasting at angularcasts.io. They talk about Ryan’s background, his current projects, and getting over imposter syndrome! Check it out! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:47 – Chuck: Today our guest is Ryan Chenkie! 0:55 – Guest: Hello! I’m excited! 1:02 – Chuck: What are you doing now? 1:10 – Guest: I spent 2.5 years at Auth0 and learned a ton there. I was doing some side work and then figured out I had to focus on one thing or the other. Now I have been a consultant fulltime and also teaching, too. AngularCast.io I teach there. 1:56 – Chuck: Sounds like people are excited about GraphQL. I’ve been there, too, and make a similar decision. 2:19 – Guest: It was a hard decision b/c I liked all of my colleagues there. I always had the itch to be self-employed. 2:42 – Chuck: You figure out of it’s for you or not. 2:51 – Guest: Yep! I am happy to be another year of it. 3:00 – Chuck: I went free-lanced about a year ago b/c the decision was made for me. 3:29 – Guest: I am grateful for it. 3:40 – Chuck: Yeah, we talk about this a lot on one of my podcast platforms. If you can make a connection with people then you’ll be god. 4:07 – Guest: Yeah I had to figure out if I would have to focus on the marketing side of things or not. Right now the projects are coming to me – right to my front door, which is great! It’s this ever-expanding web. 4:55 – Chuck: Yeah where people tend to show-up. Let’s talk about your story! How did you get into programming? 5:30 – Guest: It was a little less typically at the time. I was fully self-taught. I went to school for a somewhat Geography degree. It got boring for me at some point. I had to do one programming course while in school and it was in Java. I was terrible at it and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. It didn’t help that the instruction wasn’t great. I was terrible I didn’t understand a thing. I was scared that I was going to fail the course. I came out of there feeling like I didn’t have the chops to be a programmer. I was doing Geomantic-stuff. I learned that the further you get into this programming stuff you would make better money – better job, etc. I was trying to put this map/graph into a website and it said that I had to learn Java. This time, though, the material was taught to me in these small increments. I got into it more and I was more attracted to the idea of programming. 10:00 – Guest continues. 10:32 – Guest: I was learning Angular and JavaScript better. 10:35 – Chuck: Yeah it makes you think through it. You have to go deep. 10:47 – Guest: I would make a sample packet. I would get to certain points and get to a point and I couldn’t explain what I did. I would get to a roadblock and I couldn’t explain it. I would be on this tangent for a while and have to figure this out. I was working with the government, at this time, but I thought: maybe I could try this programming thing for a while. Did you go to NG Vegas conference? 12:20 – Chuck: Nope. 12:25 – Guest: There is this conference in Las Vegas – I am going to go and hang out with people. At this conference I met some important people. This company posted that they needed someone and I thought: this is the job for me. I sent an email – went to an interview – and did an example. I got the job and freaked out because I wasn’t a “real” programmer. I wrote some content for them and it’s been all good. 14:07 – Chuck: Let me back-up real quickly. How did you find Angular? 14:18 – Guest: It’s hard to pinpoint the “moment” I had found Angular. As I am