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Become Intentional With Your Time With Scott Hanselman

Scott Hanselman talks about how to be intentional with your life.

Getting involved in the world of open-source isn't trivial, especially when we are new to this industry and don't a lot of technical experience. Those of us with the privilege of knowledge and expertise should lend it to others. Lift others, and one day they may do the same.

Scott Hanselman talks about how he isn't a "transactional networker," he doesn't keep score or expect something in return for helping others. Living this way is freeing and fulfilling, even if at times you get burned by someone.

It's hard to find fulfillment when we are always taking life as it comes and when you are always dealing with putting out the next fire. We play Tetris all week long trying to fit in time for meetings, catching up on email, spending time with family, and so on. Spend an hour to figure out your direction and figure out what needs to be fixed and let go of the things that can't be. Be intentional with your time.

The key takeaway of this episode is to be intentional with your time. Understand your boundaries. If you don't want to spend all your free-time on open source, or if you want to lurk on twitter without posting, then acknowledge it. Being left in undecided territory puts weight on yourself.

So you've intentionally decided what you want to do with your time, now what? The key is being consistent. Don't overreach with your goals, since it will just create a guilt system. Instead, schedule a small chunk of time each week where you'll spend time working towards your goal. It's a marathon, not a sprint!

Lastly, be kind to yourself. That voice in our head treats us in a way that we'd never treat others. If we aren't a total jerk to someone when they make a small mistake, then we shouldn't be one to ourself. We praise people when they do something good, even if it is small, so permit yourself to praise yourself!

Homework

  • Schedule a small chunk of time each work working toward a goal

  • Be kind to yourself

Guests

Scott Hanselman
Scott Hanselman

Transcript

Kent C. Dodds: Hey everyone, this is your friend Kent C. Dodds and I am joined here by my friend and hopefully yours too, Scott Hanselman. Say hi, Scott.

Scott Hanselman: Hi sir, how are you doing?

Kent C. Dodds: Doing super well. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm super excited to chat with you. We have known each other for, what was, maybe four or five years?

Scott Hanselman: At least, yeah.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, that was pretty early in my career, and I posted this blog post called First Timers Only, talks about being welcoming to first timers in Open Source. Why don't you tell us your side of the story of that, like when you saw that blog post you kind of were inspired a little bit.

Scott Hanselman: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm always trying to lend my privilege to people, and if someone's getting started I want to kind of help them out, right? We've all had that opportunity where someone's given us a ladder or a stepstool or something, and I've always felt that the on-ramp to Open Source has been nontrivial, and it's got bumps in it. And I've been thinking about that and trying to come up with ways to express it, and then I saw a blog post from you that expressed the same thing, except even more eloquently and better. And you were putting goodness out into the world and had this idea, and I said, "Oh yeah, we should team up. Let's try to do something here, let's collaborate and come up with a place that aggregates all the ways that people can get together."

Scott Hanselman: Now, this is not a unique idea, of course. Charlotte went and did Your First PR. Let me support her thing. And there are lots of other people who are coming up with different on-ramps, whether it be Up For Grabs, or First Timers Only, or Your First PR. But the goal here is for people to have that same sense of fulfillment that you and I have from doing Open Source and make it even easier, so their journey is easier or simpler than ours. So we teamed up and made firsttimersonly.com which is really just a piece of, bit of brochureware as a jumping off point for your first poll request.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah. I loved that, being able to create that with you, and I think that a lot of people have benefited from that, and I feel, at least in the Open Source community, I feel like there are a lot of people, as you mentioned, that are interested in improving that on- ramp experience, for sure.

Scott Hanselman: Absolutely.

Kent C. Dodds: So you mentioned one thing, and I've heard you say this before, this concept of lending your privilege, and I just, I love that idea. Can you talk a little bit about that a little bit? I feel like when I talk with people about privilege, I get some eye rolls and I get some people who almost like, it's like they disbelieve in the concept of privilege, or whatever. Can you talk a little bit about why, what lending your privilege really even means, and why it matters so much to you?

Scott Hanselman: Well, so the concept of lending privilege, or at least that phrase, is from my friend Anjuan Simmons, A-N-J-U-A-N, and you can go and google for Anjuan Simmons and see his excellent presentations that he's given around the world as a technologist on lending privilege. And he expresses it in such an interesting way, because he's actually a black man in tech who's been in tech for 20+ years, but he finds that even though he is black, he has a male privilege. He has privilege because he's very tall, he has a presence about him, and he then wants to allow other people to borrow his privilege, lend his privilege. And lending privilege can be something as simple as agreeing with someone in a meeting and then lifting them up. It's opening the door a bit and then allowing them to enter the room and kick it open, kind of speaking metaphorically.

Scott Hanselman: I think people wince at the idea of privilege when they feel that it discounts hard work, whether it be saying, "Pick yourself up by your own bootstraps", or, "I did it all by myself." Privilege, luck, when you asked me before we stated recording you said, "How are you, Scott?" And I said, "I'm well-blessed." All of these things are the same essence, this idea that without getting too religious, there but for the grace of God go I, right? This idea that, what a fortunate thing, I woke up vertical today. Yeah, you know, there's some stuff at work, blah, blah, blah, but who am I to complain? What a lucky person I am, I'm born in a first-world country, I have shoes, I ate today, I'm not worried about where dinner's coming from.

Scott Hanselman: You might think that this is bleeding heart left-wing, but this isn't political. This is simply a conscious, an intentional waking up and looking in the mirror and saying, "I'm here. How lucky is that? I wish that other people could be as fortunate as I." And then to apply it in all aspects of your life. So if I have any kind of privilege, then I will certainly try to lend it with a retweet or a forward or a warm introduction. And I believe very much in what I call "the transitive property of friendship", which is, what's the hypotenuse, right? I know you, and I've known you for years. You're cool. If you meet someone and you know them for years and you say they're cool. Man, any friend of Kent's is a friend of mine, thereby the transitive property of privilege and the hypotenuse, that's my friend, too. And I'll do the best I can to help them out and then therefore pay it forward.

Kent C. Dodds: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I really like that concept. What does that do for you as a person? Not that we should everything just for us, but what impact does that attitude have on your life?

Scott Hanselman: It will sound silly, but it simplifies things. Someone encouraged me once early on in my career to not be a transactional networker, and I thought, transactional networker. What an interesting word that is. He said, "Don't keep score. Don't ask for a referral fee, just share. And yeah, you're going to get burned. You're going to get nailed. You're going to get ripped off. Bad stuff will happen. But for the most part, if you give freely without keeping score, it actually frees you. And yeah, you might get burned, you might back off for a couple of months, and then you'll go and do it again. But it's a very open and light way of living, and I think it releases some psychic weight from that bump above your nose between your eyes where just the stress is there because you're keeping score.

Scott Hanselman: Just give of yourself, of your network, of your time, and, I don't know. Like as I said, I didn't mean to give you the impression I wasn't doing well. Little tired, but I am very lucky to be here today.

Kent C. Dodds: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, that's great. So Scott, you've been coding for over 20 years? How long, exactly, professionally?

Scott Hanselman: Okay, so professionally, I like to say W-2, right, or 1099, to put in an American, an ethnocentric perspective. We get a form from the government that says we've been a professional. I've been doing that since 1992, so 27 years.

Kent C. Dodds: Whoa.

Scott Hanselman: But the first time I ever coded would have been in 1985, and I probably was on an Apple II.

Kent C. Dodds: Whoa, man.

Scott Hanselman: Yeah, I'm old. Thank you for that, sir.

Kent C. Dodds: I mean, I'm not trying to make you feel old. I was not born by then.

Scott Hanselman: Yeah, well, I mean, to be clear, this was a four loop, probably, with a little robot that had a Sharpie on it. And I was probably writing logo on a big piece of butcher paper, and I made it do Spirographs on the butcher paper.

Kent C. Dodds: What? That's like the coolest thing I can think of. That's so cool. Wow, that sounds like a lot of fun. And you must have been a teenager at that point, right?

Scott Hanselman: Yeah, something like that. 12, 13, yeah.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah. Wow, very cool. So with all the time that you've been involved in all of this, I feel like you must have a wealth of experience and knowledge and wisdom that you can share with me about the things that you have experienced that really worked for you, and things that didn't work. And in particular I'm interested in, we can talk about getting paid more and getting the right projects and all that, and I feel like those are side effects, or those are important, I guess, but what I'm mostly interested in is, where do you find happiness and fulfillment out of life in general, and what can you do, not that our career is where we find happiness and fulfillment, but what, if you have a really bad job you'll have a hard time finding happiness and fulfillment.

Kent C. Dodds: So what do you do to, with regard to your career, to find that, yeah, happiness and fulfillment out of life?

Scott Hanselman: You know how we're all filling up our schedules and our Outlooks and our Google Calendars, and we're playing Tetris all week long trying to find these 15 minutes and these 20 minutes and these one hour slots to have meetings, to delete email, to have time with our family. But I think rarely do we schedule time to figure out what the heck we're doing. When was the last time you put aside an hour to just go, "Okay, what am I doing? What exactly, what am I doing?" Instead we find those times on the toilet or at a stoplight, or if you ever had a driveway moment where you've driven home, you're parked in the driveway, and you're just not ready to go inside right now.

Scott Hanselman: I like to be more intentional, rather than letting life happen by default. I like to schedule that time and say, "You know, I need an hour. I'm going to sit down and try to figure out, what are the three things I want to get done this week, or what are the three things I care about as a family, what my family cares, my children, my wife? I may not be right. I'm not saying I'm going to solve the world's mysteries, but I do get a sense of direction and a sense of, maybe this is the wrong direction, but at least I decided it, rather than it happened by default. I don't want to remove the spontaneity from life, certainly I want to be flexible. But I do want to know that, I don't want to blink and have it be 2020, and then 2022, and then I'm 50, and I'm 60, and whatever, and I didn't really plan at all.

Scott Hanselman: So I'm always looking for opportunities to fix things that I can fix, and then accept the things that I can't fix and let them go. So I'm very much kind of water off a duck's back if I can't fix it. But if I can fix it, solve a problem, then let's get it done. Let's do it. Let's write that little bit of code, let's give that laptop to that kid that needs a laptop. Let's forward that resume to someone who might have a job for that person who needs a job, as intentionally as I can. I hope that answers that. It's a little bit of a vagary.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, no, perfect.

Scott Hanselman: Maybe there's other questions that we can answer behind that, but that's how I try to live.

Kent C. Dodds: There's several questions I have in there. The last thing that you said, actually, maybe this is a little tangential, but I'm kind of interested. And I want to get back, certainly, to the idea of being intentional, but so there are a lot of good things that we can do with our time. There are a lot of people that we can help, and we can spend an entire day just focusing on helping other people and making connections. From myself, I get at least an email once a week at least, from somebody asking me to be their mentor. And I could say yes to every single one of them, and do each individual a great amount of good. And then also I'm pretty active in Open Source and I get lots of people asking me, "How do I use your library", and stuff like that. And so there are lots of opportunities, and Twitter and all that, too, to do that kind of service for people.

Kent C. Dodds: So I imagine I don't have quite the following that you do. I imagine you probably have a similar experience. What do you do to give of yourself in the way that brings that happiness that you're looking for, and also preserve your boundaries around your own time?

Scott Hanselman: I think that, there's a couple things there. First, you do have to say no. You can't just, if someone, I remember someone saying that if you become a vegan and then you become someone who cares about animals, and then you start caring about the bugs, and the bacteria, and then you stop breathing because you don't want to kill any bacteria. At some point you have to just call it and make a decision, otherwise you'll never step because you might step on something. So one doesn't want to get paralyzed with this perspective, but it is an issue if you go through your life, you do the things that you're ordinarily going to do, but you are conscious and aware, so when an opportunity presents itself that you can address that in a positive way as quickly as possible. Efficiently, but also with some amount of empathy.

Scott Hanselman: For example I've got a nontrivial number of Twitter followers. Someone says, "Can you DM me, I want to talk to you about something." You have to use your judgment, right? Do I know you, do you have three followers and you're an egg? Are you a bot? You can't answer every, you can't let everyone into your life.

Kent C. Dodds: Right.

Scott Hanselman: But you can do good judgment. Twitter gives you those tools. Ten different of my friends know this person, or this person comes from a geographic area that I'm familiar with, or they may be in crisis or in trouble. I may be able to help them in some way. But also, you have to accept that your keystrokes don't scale. I always like to say that there's a finite number of keystrokes left in your hands before you die, so if a random stranger sends me a question and I only have 2,000 keystrokes left, do I give them to that stranger? So what I try to do is scale through outreach. You can send me a question. It might be a question I've heard before. It's very likely a question I've heard before. If it's not, even better. You've given me a gift, a great question I've never answered before.

Scott Hanselman: But I'm not going to give you a direct 2,000 of my keystrokes. Instead, I will write a blog post about it, put it somewhere with a link, and then I will send you a link to that blog post. And then, of course, if you do that for 20 years you'll end up with a nice blog that looks prolific but is really just a big FAQ of you and your thoughts, and that scales. So if I sleep or if I get hit by an ice-cream truck tomorrow, people will google and they will find my answers, and hopefully that'll help them. So I think it's not only more efficient, it's also kind of karmically a good thing to put your thoughts out there, just like you're doing right now with your podcast.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, that's part of the goal, yeah. I think that's really super advice. I remember several years ago as I was still kind of building up some semblance of a following on Twitter, we were involved in a Twitter conversation, and it was getting a lot of attention. It probably had something to do with First Timers Only, and somebody was being a little bit antagonistic in the Twitter replies. And I was going back and forth with them for a little bit, and you sent me a direct message and you said, "I don't always engage." And I think that's really good advice, as well. As important as it is to be a good human and you care about people, I really like the idea of the finite number of keystrokes that you have left in your hands, and you have to make a decision about what is the impact of the value that I'm creating here, and can I increase that impact?

Kent C. Dodds: I actually have been doing that blog post thing and answer peoples' questions through blog posts, and it's been really effective. So people who are listening, I think, can really benefit from, and this kind of takes us back to the intentional aspect. When you were, pretty much everything you do is creating value, and so if you can take that value and present it in a format that reaches more people, then you have increased the impact of that value.

Scott Hanselman: Right, and you should create the value, the content, the thing, and this is important, in whatever way is most compatible with your life. If you're listening to us and you're saying, "Well, I'm a single parent. I don't have time", or "Well, I'm not a good writer", or, "Well, I really, I like YouTube instead." Do the thing that works for you that feeds your spirit, that makes you happy. If you can do a YouTube and turn that into a podcast automatically, and then turn that into a transcript, and that turns into a blog post, that'd be great. You've covered all your bases.

Scott Hanselman: But if you're doing a thing and it doesn't feel like it's work, if it's like, "Oh, I got to blog again. I told myself I was going to blog six times this week." Really? You've never blogged before and now you're setting yourself up for failure, you're creating a guilt system that will do nothing but make you feel bad about yourself. But if you set a goal that is reasonable, blog once a week, everybody can do that, right? Or one video a month, something that is reliable but not stressful.

Scott Hanselman: I've been podcasting now for, I don't know, 680 episodes divided by 52. I don't know what that is. 12, 13 years, right?

Kent C. Dodds: Wow.

Scott Hanselman: But it's every Thursday for the last 13 years, right? Blogging twice a week for the last 15 years, right? Not five days a week, not once a week. It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. So I hope that the people who are listening think about, what is a thing you can do that fits into your life? Don't feel like you have to be up on Stack Overflow from 10:00 to 2:00 in the evening and late into the morning because it'll help your career and you're doing this for the family. What works for you and for your lifestyle? It may not be the same as what works for me and Kent, et cetera, et cetera.

Kent C. Dodds: That's really helpful. I'm trying to apply this idea of being intentional to people who may not be super interested in gaining a big following and helping a ton of people, and they're mostly interested in experiences with their families. They go to work and they want to put in good stuff and then go home and spend time with their family. What intentional ideas can you offer us there?

Scott Hanselman: So I feel like you actually just called it out. They are intentionally spending time with their families. There's a wonderful tweet, I'll have to dig it up and give you the link for the show notes where a young lady said, "I've been a professional developer for many years. I use Vim, I use this, I use that, dah, dah, dah. And I've never seen Star Wars, and that's okay, and I'm just as valid of a developer as you are." And what she was basically saying is, "I do my job. I'm great at my job, and at 5:01 PM, I'm out." And it was a declaration, but it was also an assertion where people were like, "Me, too, me too", right?

Scott Hanselman: If you think you have to work 9:00 to 5:00 and then put the kids to bed and then do Open Source until 2:00 in the morning, that's not what you have to do. You can be whatever kind of developer [inaudible 00:19:31]. If you want to be a lurker, as long as you're a kind lurker, that's great. If you want to use Twitter as a blogging feed where you just or read-only Twitter because it feeds your spirit and it's happy and it's fun, that's what you should do. So the point is though, decide to do that. Decide to get involved, decide not to get involved. Make your decision and feel great about that and say, "That's what's needed. That's the self-care that I need."

Scott Hanselman: But if you're just, "I don't really know." That's okay. Figure it out and then say, "You know, the internet is not healthy for me. This is not where I need to be right now, I'm read-only." Or, "I'm going to turn off comments. I'm going to do a blog, but I'm not interested in comments. I'm not going to engage, there's no contact form." Or, "I don't want to put my real name online", or, "I don't want to have my avatar be my face, it's going to be Simpson's character", or whatever. As long as you do it intentionally, I think you will be happier and you will be safer, both mentally and physically.

Kent C. Dodds: I think that's such good advice. I feel like, so I have a therapist. I feel like everybody in the world should have a therapist. I didn't always feel that way until I got one. They are remarkably great, and the thing that I love so much about being able to meet with this individual is having some time to just reevaluate my life. Where am I right now, and how can I get to where I want to go? And just asking those questions makes a really big difference, and I think that kind of relates to what you're talking about is, let's take some time to decide, evaluate where we are, and evaluate how are we getting to our goals? How are we doing with that? And your goals don't have to be, I want a million Twitter followers, and I want to sell courses, and I want to make YouTube stuff, and all that stuff. It doesn't have to be that.

Kent C. Dodds: Your goals can be whatever you really want to be. Consider what is going to bring you happiness, and I think maybe in a way, it's a little bit of a selfish thing. For me, I selfishly create content because I selfishly want to help people. I really enjoy that process of bringing that help to other people, and so that's my goal. But for other people, maybe they enjoy that but maybe there are other things that they enjoy, as well.

Scott Hanselman: But what's exciting about what you just said and what's significant about what you just said is that you acknowledge that it's selfish. It makes you happy, and you acknowledge that it's okay. We need to tell ourselves that it's okay. "I want to be in tech to make lots of money", someone could say, "and I'm not interesting in doing a bunch of work for free." Well then, don't, you know what I mean? Then do it intentionally and don't, and feel okay about that, because you decided that it was okay to do that. And they'll be, we talked about privilege, there's inherent privileges that will enable some people to have more time than others. There are privileges that will allow people to go and enter spaces more fluently and more easily than others, and that's okay.

Scott Hanselman: But if you are ready to get involved, if you are ready to go into this kind of stuff, then find a tribe of people, whether it be you and I or the people that we hang out with, positive Twitter, we can call it, then we'll hopefully try to make it a little bit smoother of an entry for you. And it's also important to remember that you can do these things and you don't have to keep doing them forever. We see so many people who burn out in Open Source because they did it, and now it's just weighing on them. "Well, I got more issues." I've watched so much-

Kent C. Dodds: [inaudible 00:23:06].

Scott Hanselman: Someone stepped away from the Debbie in Open Source project recently, and it was a very, they said, "You know, I went to this user group and I realized that I don't want to do this anymore. So I have these projects that I work on, I'm going to transition container, committership to these other people. I'll do my best to be available for a half an hour a week, but that's, I want to hang out with my kids. I want to go hiking, I want to play Xbox", whatever. And for them to do that intentionally is really important and impressive, and we should all be given that gift to be able to do that.

Kent C. Dodds: I think that's wonderful. What advice do you have for the last couple minutes that we have here? What could you tell us about people who, yeah, I know what I want to do, and it is, I want to, maybe just about anything. We can use an example like, I want to become an influencer in the space or whatever the case may be. Now that they have intentionally decided what their goal is, what advice do you have about accomplishing those kinds of goals?

Scott Hanselman: I think putting a little bit of time into whatever the thing is, so that you're doing it consistently. We all want to learn a new language. I want to learn Spanish. And if people would put as much time into moving forward with their goal, I want to learn Spanish, as they do talking about doing that thing, put 15 minutes into the Duolingo app every day. Put an hour on Saturdays into it. Everyone's got an hour. They can find an hour a week. If you did that, that would be 50 hours a year. That's a nontrivial amount of work, right? You can become a black belt in a martial art with a couple of hours a week, every week, for two or three or four or five years, right? So the amount of time it's taken for me to podcast could have probably got a black belt or two, but that wasn't something-

Kent C. Dodds: Wow, what have you been doing? Come on.

Scott Hanselman: You see my point? I intentionally did not get a black belt and instead did podcasting. But the point is that we seem to intentionally binge-watch Netflix, right? What could we do that would feed our spirits? Now certainly Netflix is a consumptive action and requires less effort than studying, but maybe if you watched one less show a week, there's an hour, right? Or maybe you have the show off on the corner while you're studying or doing a quiz. Find those bits of times, and then chip away at your goal. Do it intentionally. I'm going to sit down for an hour and I'm going to read forums. I'm going to go on Twitter, I'm going to engage with people that are positive, I'm going to do Twitter chats on Code Newbies, I'm going to go to the Dev.2 group. I'm going to go and get a subscription to an online Frontend Masters or Pluralsight, or on and on and on.

Scott Hanselman: What are you going to do, as opposed to just, and this is the hard part and this is where, as opposed to just kind of collapsing at the end of the day, can you rally the troops, can you get that energy for half an hour, an hour, to move your goal forward? And then reflect at the end of the week and say, "You know, that week, that went pretty well. I'm going to give myself credit for that." And then Monday you do it all again. It's just like working out, right? The problem is with working out and with becoming a programmer, you don't really know if it's working until you look back at your progress. You know how people who work out take photographs of themselves. "Ah, here's my, I got a two-pack." And then they work out and they work out, "Now look, I got a four-pack, I got a six-pack." But you only see the before and the after, right?

Kent C. Dodds: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott Hanselman: Save all your crappy code. Save all your crappy workshops, and then in a week, or two weeks, or a month, look back and go, "Wow, look at that. I'm such a, I'm better now, I have a blog that has four blog posts. I have a podcast now, I've been doing it for a month." And give yourself some credit and then let that energy that you get from looking back on your accomplishments and say, "Yeah, I rock." And let that buoy you forward.

Kent C. Dodds: I love that, Scott. So I read this book or listened to this book, I don't read. I fall asleep when I read, but I listened to this book, it's called, Self Compassion, and there's a subtitle to it, but it talks about the fact that we, that self-talk that we do sometimes, we have this voice in our heads that talks to ourselves in a way that we would never talk to anybody else, in a very negative way.

Scott Hanselman: [inaudible 00:27:36].

Kent C. Dodds: "You're such a Dumbo for doing that thing", or whatever.

Scott Hanselman: Right. It's our internal monologue. In the '80s we used to call them "tapes". They're just running in the background telling you that you suck.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, yeah. Totally. And so I love that you mentioned, give yourself some praise for what you've accomplished. And I would add to that, too, be mindful of that little voice in your head, and anytime you hear that voice say something unkind to yourself, it could be right. You could have been a jerk to your coworker in that meeting. "Oh, I totally mansplained her", or something like. Acknowledge the things that you're doing wrong, but the way that you talk about those things, you wouldn't... I don't know. You wouldn't be a total jerk to somebody who made that kind of mistake. You would be encouraging to them and say, "Hey, you kind of made a mistake there. We're acknowledging that was not a good thing, so let's turn that around, and we'll do better next time." And that's the kind of conversation you could have.

Kent C. Dodds: And then like you said, look back every now and then. Look at how far you've come, and give yourself permission to give yourself praise. I think that really valuable piece of advice.

Scott Hanselman: And one other thing that you can do, and I'm actually going to do it right now because you had one of my favorite people on the show recently, Suze Hinton, who's just a fantastic person. You can go and send a positive something to them right now, an unsolicited, you rock, right? So you go, "Who's awesome? You're awesome." Animated gif. So that's a little bit, just sent that to my friend just to let them know, here's an unsolicited, you're doing great. You rock. And they'll go, "What's this for?" "Nothing. I just was thinking of you and just FYI, in case you didn't realize that you are awesome, just letting you know, you are awesome." And if you do a couple of those a week, get in the habits of letting people know that they're cool and that they're okay. And you might just catch them at a moment when they really needed that.

Kent C. Dodds: Oh, that's so good. And as much as I don't want to end the show I think that's a really great place to end our conversation here with the last couple seconds we have. So Scott, this is just so fantastic to chat with you about this. This conversation went in at the best possible direction, so thank you for that. Where can people find you online, and yeah, connect with you?

Scott Hanselman: You can go out and you can google for Scott. I'm in an epic battle right now with Scott brand toilet paper. I used to be on the first page because I've been on the internet for a very long time, but now if you scroll down, I'm on page two. Tragically, which is basically the end of the internet. There's no one, there's nothing else. If you're on page two or three of Google, you effectively don't exist, right? So it's Scott fly rods, Scott toilet paper, and then oh, this Hanselman guy, he's farther. It all depends on how your personalization settings are. But I'm definitely not on page one.

Scott Hanselman: But go find me, my last name is Hanselman, hanselman.com, you can find my podcast, my blogs, all the fun stuff that I'm doing. And then if you're interested in getting involved in tech, I would encourage you to check out getinvolvedintech.com which is actually a full feature-length documentary movie that I did with Rob Conery about getting involved in tech, whether it be Twitter, and Stack Overflow, and coming up with a personal brand, and just going to user groups, and what's it like in a user group. And we actually go to a user group, check it out. We meet people, we find that it's not as scary as you thought. Go to a meetup and check that out. It's totally free.

Kent C. Dodds: That's so cool. I love that. I've recently started thinking about, how can I reach these people who want to get started in this community, and that looks like a fantastic resource that I'll take a look at.

Scott Hanselman: Cool.

Kent C. Dodds: All right. Cool, Scott. Thank you so much. And yeah, we'll be in everybody else's ears next time. We'll see you later.

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