Timothée Bourguignon

Sara Vieira is opinionated per design... and other things I learned recording her DevJourney

Tim Bourguignon -

This week, I published Sara Vieira's #DevJourney story on my eponym Podcast: Software developer's Journey. Among many other things, here are my main personal takeaways:

  • Sara got her first computer subsidized by the government when she was a kid. That got her to practice with multimedia from a young age. But what propulsed her to learn Web-Development is her father making a website for himself and challenging her to do better.

  • Sara's first official job as an intern in an agency was to create Wordpress sites... in one day. This taught her what a "very fast paced environment" really is... from the get go.

  • During her first job, Sara wrote tech-articles for various websites. This was a great way for her to dive into new concepts and technologies, an excuse to learn even more.

  • Netlify and Zeit were big game changers in Sara's story. Those allowed her to concentrate on the coding part, and not on the deployment parts, while still shipping!

  • Sara wrote the "Opinionated Guide to React" book. React is a big framework, with many different ways to achive the same result. Thus the "opinionated" take on it. Angular or Vue are opinionated per definition. You can still missuse the frameworks, but they clearly define their opinions in their docs.

  • Sara wrote the book openly on Leanpub. This had two hidden goals: getting feedback early, and learning even more about React itself by tackling the questions her readers would eventually have.

  • Sara's dream is to get a caravan and drive across Europe and teach people how to code

Advice:

  • The imposter syndrom never goes away. Today may sound really hard, but sometime in the future, you will look at it and realize it is actually not that hard.

Quotes:

  • "When you start out the fact that you don't know something is expected, but after a while you feel like ou should know this or that"
  • "It's harder when people shit on your opinions then when they shit on your code... the latter is not real"
  • "You learn a lot by writing. Teaching others is the best way to learn"
  • "I don't mind showing my failures, but I mind failing"

Thanks Sara for sharing your story with us!

You can find the full episode and the shownotes on devjourney.info

Did you listen to her story?

  • What did you learn?
  • What are your personal takeaways?
  • What did you find particularly interesting?