Fall seems to be the season for broad changes to everything I have been doing since the last year. Here’s everything planned so far.
I’ll be referring to the SKILSTAK Beginner Boost everywhere I can as “Start Tech Job” instead since it hits better for search results. The only thing changing about it is that reference and the increased structure we keep adding every year through documentation and such. Eventually, I’ll put this into a Udemy course that people can use if they really want (optional) structure.
Recently I was reminded that I’ve never wanted to be a technologist as a profession. I sort of fell into it because of the financial needs of raising a family.
The fact is I’ve always wanted to be a journalist and writer. It’s the reason I majored in French and Russian. It’s why I became a cruise director, river guide, and mountain bike guide. I’ve been exploring my whole life and supporting myself (and my family) has always been my dream. I’m obsessed with people, understanding why and how they work, what drives them, and where there creativity comes from—especially musicians.
Ever since I started cycling slowly—with the intend to explore and discover—I’ve been having amazing experiences getting randomly embedded in all kinds of events and situations.
I don’t want that to stop.
In fact, I want that to take over my tech job at some point. I’ll keep my tech skills, but only so I can keep maintaining my own systems and stuff and pay the bills when things get tight.
Anyone working with a computer in any significant way should eventually learn all of the following languages. Any other languages besides these are nice to add, but none essential.
| Language | Main Usage |
|---|---|
| Bash (Shell) | Build scripts, powerful CLI one-liners, hacking, POCs |
| HTML/CSS/JS | Documentation generation, modern GUI applications |
| Go | Command-line tools, cloud-native microservices, hacking |
| Python | Configuration management, data-focused applications, AI |
| C | Understand computing, system calls, hacking |
Instead of including Go and Python coding in the Beginner Boost going to add it right after. The Boost already includes learning to code in shell/bash and basic web development.
Go is the next big language anyone wanting a job should learn.
Python is the undisputed leading language of data science, AI, and automation (Ansible).
C is the most significant language on the planet so understanding it helps understand everything there is to know about computing and all computer programming languages—especially system calls.
Other considerations about teaching coding through live streaming:
I’ve always wanted to teach English abroad and use it as a way to finance travel (a very common digital nomad strategy). It costs about 3000 dollars to get a CELTA certificate but after that, and developing your own curriculum, a person can get work pretty much instantly anywhere in the non-English speaking world. I have known many people to have done this directly out of college.
Getting a credential to teach English is better for me because I’m a native English speaker and will have better authority as opposed to teaching French or Russian (which I would also love to do).
One advantage of this is that I can (re)create all the software for language learning that I created for Sterling Scholastic Aides when I was a college student in the 90s—especially my flashcard system. The innovations in PWAs and mobile phones make learning and practicing languages amazingly easy these days. My curriculum could have modules for specific lessons related to topics and I would make the main stuff free.
At one point I was really keen on adding hacking back. In fact, I subbed for a year to HackTheBox and haven’t used it all this year.
Hacking, as great and fun and employable as it is, just doesn’t fit into the number of hours for things I want to do. I would much rather teach English to people in international communities struggling to make ends meet because of the world-wide separation of “haves” from the “have nots” than help some elite hackers become super rich. Plus, teaching hacking is always a crap-shoot because you never know who you are empowering with those skills. When I mentored hackers before I could vet the people and be sure they weren’t intent on becoming Sith lords.
Teaching English and Culture Journalism are much more appealing to a much larger audience and can do much more significant good for the world toward healing the world’s problems most of which would be dramatically improved if people would just communicate better. Not speaking native English is the single biggest obstacle to employment in tech or any other major field these days. Learning to hack isn’t stopping anyone from anything. Besides, hacking jobs are really lame. Most of the job is writing boring reports and running someone else’s code because you are too overworked to do anything fun. Hacking as a bug-bounty person is fun, but will almost never be enough for anyone to get a job doing it. It’s better to focus on skills that are universally valuable and fun, like using/deploying UNIX/Linux, using the terminal, and writing enterprise code as a platform engineer or developer.
I’ve found that making a dedicated time to talk about the chapters of a book every week keeps me reading the books I want and makes it more fun to get the insights of others. So for two hours a week on Sundays I’m going to keep reading whatever book has highest priority. Here’s a list of some that I want to do (some of which I’ve already read):
Since I do so much coworking where I don’t say anything and just DJ the music I need to add at least a couple hours of coding while talking through it. That will be the only time that I consider evaluating other people’s code as well (something I’ve never done for lack of time and interest).
The most significant streams I do will be on Saturdays and Sundays when the most people will be able to join in. I’ll keep the beginner stuff grouped together on Saturday, and the other stuff on Sunday. Sometimes I’ll have to cancel because of life conflicts, but the cycle will be pretty much the same. Considering I once dedicated 10 hours a day on both of those days to do one-on-one mentoring for SKILSTAK this is not that big of a sacrifice. Plus, this way I can cancel if I need to. I wasn’t really free to do that before.
Each is a 2-hour block.
I learned at SKILSTAK that the most time anyone should ever be expected to pay attention to anything is 90 minutes. Two hour blocks give enough padding for late and wrap-up comments to fit that in. I’ve been reminded while live streaming that this is really true for structured content where you want the people watching to keep up with what you are doing instead of just putting the stream up in the background and doing something else. For this reason, all the weekend structured content streams are divided into 2-hour blocks.
I fall asleep almost instantly after I get done showering and eating after a long Outdoor IRL stream. I’ve been waking up at 4AM because my body is still used to a dual cycle sleep schedule, but I want that to change. I want the Outdoor IRL streaming stuff at the end of the day to wake me up instead. I’ve noticed that when I am waning and wanting a nap that pushing through and getting on the bike really wakes me up. This is something that happened all the time when commuting from Nike 23 miles in the 90s. I was practically asleep getting on the bike for that slog and by the time I got home I was awake and able to do things with the family, sleep isn’t always needed when I’m tired.
I do have to be careful to get enough sleep to recover from whatever type of ride it was, which is another reason I’ll only be doing long and slow rides most of the time rather than strength, “sweet spot”, or interval training.
The SKILSTAK Beginner Boost might focus on stills all technologists need to get started with a tech career, whether it be a somewhat non-technical AI professional who mostly uses Python and Jupyter Lab to the highly technical platform engineers and hackers. But after the Boost I want to continue the learning for those who want to go deeper into the operations-focused careers (like mine) by going over how to create and maintain a home lab for learning and experimenting with operational tasks. I’ll call this “homelab init” but the marketing with be “build a tech lab” and will include a bunch of things that Boost will never cover:
kubeadm and everything involved (CNI, storage class, ingress, etc.)Since we are moving a bunch of stuff to other place the Boost should be freed up enough to be completed in under 32 weeks of 2-hour blocks. This leaves a lot of time for the other stuff. Both will be fresh every year since the landscape is constantly changing for this stuff.