Thanks for all the love.

This is so awesome. Way to find a great topic and do it justice.

Along the same lines, this book is amazing. It contains one of my favorite community building truths. What you do as the leader of a community is vital. Your actions (and mood and tone and all that) come back at you 100x.

Howdy!

I did a whole talk on staying up to date at one point that may be of interest. Mostly: I don't think it's all that important that you stay bleeding-edge up-to-date all the time.

I can't listen to music when I work. Or anything really. It's sad. I wish I could - it's just impossible for me to concentrate when I try.

Yep, still likin' Sublime Text. It's fast. Does the trick. I'm not even sure what would compel me to switch. Probably some awesome feature I can't even picture.

Zero script. Some people love it, some people hate it.

Next one hopefully tonight! Sorry they have been so slow, but rest assured I have a stockpile of ideas.

Hey Carlos,

Rather than trying to form a plan around what tech you should be learning, you form a plan on what websites you're going to work on next. It's real projects that really level you up.

Lots of conferences have calls for talk submissions. Like this. Definitely go for those when you see them.

My general advice for tech speaking is to not bite off too much in one talk. Talk about something YOU think is interesting, scope it down to something you know you understand well, and frame it with something relatable.

It doesn't hurt to kinda "be out there" in the community a bit as well. Maybe write blog posts about the topic you're interested in speaking about. That way you're known as the person who knows about THAT THING. You're chances of being asked to speak are a lot higher that way.

Live demos are huge.

Also, if you're having any trouble with content, feel free to do link posts. There isn't enough of that. I love a good links-with-commentary blog.

Content inspiration can come from anywhere. It could be a post here on Designer News. It could be through working on a site and solving a problem in a new way. It could be sitting at a conference and hearing something that triggers a spark.

The trick is to try and write everything down as quickly as it comes to you. Write down what made that little idea seem interesting. A little bit more than just a title idea. Maybe a few sentences and some relevant links. That way when you revisit the idea (sleeping on it is a good first step to seeing if it will be a good blog post or not) hopefully you have enough to re-ignite that spark. If not, it's probably not that interesting.

At the same time, don't discount an idea based on the scope. Here's an example of a blog post where there is absolutely nothing new about it and it's a tiny tiny idea that probably doesn't matter to most folks. But I just think it's interesting, and if I do, some other people probably do.

And don't discount an idea based on difficulty or obviousness either. I hear a lot of folks say they don't blog because if they know something, chances are everyone else already does. Definitely not. The things everybody knows, even in this niche industry, are super varied. Definitely don't assume anyone knows anything. Because they either don't (thus will learn) or do (and appreciated being validated).

1. Gettin' comfy with build tools and processes.
2. Extends will be the most useful. Everybody bitches about them in preprocessors, but only because emulating them with selectors sucks. A native implementation would be huge. It's being worked on, which is wonderful.