How teaching others accelerated my software engineering career
If you are a software engineer, there are many things you can do that will benefit your career. The thing I found the most beneficial to my career is teaching others.
There are many ways you can do it. In today’s article, I will tell you how I did it and how exactly doing this benefited me. Perhaps, this is something you can replicate.
How I started
I decided to create my own website early in my software development career. At the time, I didn’t know anything about search engine optimization or any blogging best practices. To be honest, I didn’t even know what exactly I wanted to do with the website.
I didn’t have any strategy. I just thought that I would start and the strategy would develop itself later.
So, I just started writing about anything I could think of. The website was a soup of poorly written articles covering all sorts of topics under the sun, including tech, politics, personal philosophy, etc. Unsurprisingly, nobody was reading it. I didn’t even get many likes from my friends on Facebook.
Looking back, I am really surprised that I carried on posting new articles on an almost weekly basis for a few years. However, I am glad that I eventually came to my senses and stopped doing it aimlessly. I was also very close to giving at that point.
I couldn’t continue writing content that nobody was interested in. I needed to justify all this effort to myself and the reasons had to be good. And I am glad that I managed to come up with a reason that was so good it made the failure almost impossible.
How I found the reason to continue
Right from the beginning of my programming career, I have noticed that I wasn’t very good at learning things that I didn’t immediately have to use.
If I had to Google something that would help me understand the technology I was using at work, I had absolutely no problem with it. I could apply the information right away. I would also remember what I did and would have been able to apply the newly acquired knowledge to similar problems in the future.
However, when I tried to learn a new programming language or any other new concept by using online tutorials, I would forget everything almost immediately after the tutorial was completed. I’ve even been in situations where I went through the same tutorial more than once and still didn’t remember anything!
I realized that this was bad for my career. I’ve noticed that there were lucrative job openings that were looking for people with particular sets of skills. But how would I learn those skills if my current place of work didn’t use them?
This is when I realized that to learn these skills, I could use the same thing universities were doing. I could summarize what I learned in an essay and try my best to do it in such a way that the reader would understand what I am talking about.
So, I made my blog much more narrowly focused. I started posting articles explaining programming languages, libraries, frameworks, and other technologies that I was learning. I also started caring much more about the quality of its content.
I no longer cared that I didn’t have many readers, as getting readers was now a secondary matter to me. I now had a well-defined goal, which was to use my website to help me build in-depth technical knowledge that could directly improve my career.
With this attitude, I couldn’t fail even if no one read my articles. I wasn’t doing it for anyone. I was doing it for myself. And it eventually paid off. I was able to secure a good mid-level developer job that used some of the hottest technologies at the time. The job also paid the compensation that many recruiters I spoke to deemed to be “unrealistic”.
Eventually, I started thinking about monetizing my content. I started exploring the options and came across Udemy.
How Udemy courses made me visible as a content creator
For those of you who aren’t aware, Udemy is a huge marketplace of online courses. You can create a course about anything on this platform, including software engineering.
It also has a low barrier to entry. Since you are creating your own courses and the platform merely acts as the host, all you have to do is meet the minimal audio and video quality requirements, which aren’t very high at all.
So, I started filming videos for Udemy with the hope of earning extra cash. Long story short, I never managed to earn more than a few hundred dollars in any given month. For most months, it wasn’t even a hundred dollars.
However, there was another huge benefit. I started being recognized as a content creator. My Udemy profile started appearing in searches of various publishers of educational content. This is when I started receiving offers from them to create white-label content.
White-label content: The content you create for another organization to publish for a fixed fee. You get paid for producing this content while the organization retains all the copyrights. This concept is closely related to ghostwriting.
For example, I would be asked to create an hour-long video lecture for their platform. Or a publisher of technical books would ask me to create a series of short videos that would accompany one of their books.
This was an interesting period for me. While learning various technologies in enough depth to be able to produce those videos, I was now getting a fairly noticeable amount of side income.
However, soon another interesting event happened that took things to a completely new level. This was when I was approached not by one, but by two publishers to write a book.
Things accelerated when I started writing books
Until I wrote my first technical book, I thought it was an extremely hard thing to do and only the best developers could do it. However, once I wrote one, I realized that it’s not that much harder than writing blog posts.
For me, it was also significantly easier than filming video lectures. Video editing is a very tedious activity that takes a lot of time. For me, the time it takes to create a video is at least four times the length of the final video and that is in the best-case scenario! Sometimes, it can take 8 or 10 times that! A book, however, with tools like Grammarly, is easy to edit, just like any other text-based content.
I felt so privileged that a publisher I previously helped with a few videos approached me and offered to become an author for their upcoming book. This was what became Microservices Communication in .NET Using gRPC.
At the same time, I was also approached by people from a website where I previously wrote a couple of articles. I couldn’t say no to such a privilege and accepted this offer too. This turned into The Battle Hardened Developer, which even briefly became the number 1 bestseller in the Software Development category on Amazon.
When it rains it pours! I now turned from someone who thought he wasn’t good enough to ever become a book author into someone who was writing two books at the same time!
It took me roughly half a year to complete both books. Now, I was waiting for both of them to get published, which took far longer than I expected. However, I wasn’t just willing to sit and do nothing. Since I now knew that writing books wasn’t anywhere near as scary as I thought, I decided to find out how easy it would be to self-publish a book.
I was really surprised at how easy it was to become a self-published author. With websites like LeanPub, you don’t even have to worry about formatting. With sites like Amazon KDP, you can even self-publish paperbacks and hardcovers without paying a dime upfront!
Self-publishing appeared to be much easier to do and much more lucrative than using a mainstream publisher. I managed to earn quite a sizeable side income from my self-published books. If I see enough interest, I will tell you how I did it. But that’s a story for another day.
However, the indirect benefits of being a published book author were even larger than the direct income I earned from the books. Authors of technical books are perceived as experts with authority. Here are the things that I experienced as a direct result of being a book author:
Growth on social networks: For years, I struggled to get past the coveted 500+ connections on LinkedIn. I got to about 350 and I was gaining new followers very slowly. However, as soon as people started seeing posts about my books, I started receiving many connection requests and followers. I had over a thousand connections in just a couple of months.
Unique job opportunities: In my previous role, I worked for the fastest-growing Californian fintech scaleup while being based in the UK. The company didn’t even have a team in the UK but they hired me. I was approached by them after one of their top managers saw a LinkedIn post of me holding one of my books.
Skipped several technical interviews: I have been in several technical interviews where I didn’t have to do the actual technical challenge that everyone else had to do. The interviewers said something along these lines: “I’ve read your book. I know you can code. So let’s just have an informal conversation.”
Microsoft MVP award: I’ve been nominated for the Microsoft MVP title by an existing MVP who liked one of my books. For those who don’t know, MVP is awarded to those who are considered to be influential in the development community that uses Microsoft technology, such as C# language. Such a title never hurts one’s career!
My current situation
These days, I carry on creating a lot of educational content and occasionally write books. It’s not just for the financial opportunities. I am really enjoying the process of teaching others, especially when I receive really good feedback from those who benefited from my content.
Content creation became a proper part-time business. I no longer do occasional small projects for various publishers. I now do much bigger projects and I do them almost constantly. I spend between two and four hours on an almost daily basis creating content.
I mostly create white-label content for various online learning platforms and coding bootcamps. However, I still try my best to share as many useful insights as I can with the general public.
This is why I am committed to publishing this newsletter on a weekly basis (typically, on Sunday). If you find the information that I provided useful, please consider subscribing. I am also active on LinkedIn.
P.S. If you are curious about the books I’ve written up to date, you can visit this page. Also, this is where you can find my online courses.