How I Learned to Code and Build an App — Ioniconf 2021

There are lots of things to memorize and calculate

In the recording: 3:51–4:09.

A lot of books I read were written by someone maybe in Michigan, and I live in Oklahoma, and the growing conditions are radically different. There are lots of things to memorize and calculate. There were bugs everywhere, and some of the bugs were good and some were bad, and trying to figure out which ones were which, there was just a lot of stuff going on.

I kept cycling through

In the recording: 8:31.78–8:59.90 · 9:01–9:18 · 9:57–10:16.

Pluralsight became all that I watched. What I would do is I started at the beginning. I'd make it through to like module three or four, and I was totally lost. So I would stop, step away, come back with fresh eyes, start again.

By the time I got to that three or four module that I was stuck at, now things made sense because I understood foundationally something better from the beginning. I was able to go farther into five and six, and then I kept cycling through until I made it all the way through. Then I kept going through until I feel like I really got it. That's basically what I did for three months.

This was our first prototype after about three months, and it was basically just a list of plants. It looked very much like a webpage.

Read body language

In the recording: 11:04.80–11:33.16 · 11:49–12:06.

We started going to local engagements like home and garden shows. As they use the app, I would watch and read body language, and I could see when stuff didn't make sense.

Instead of asking for a review on the first open, we wait for third or fifth open to ask, hey, would you like to review this? Then we also made it pretty conversational. It was like, hey, these really help us out and help us get noticed.

Knowing your weaknesses and building around them

In the recording: 13:44–13:55 · 13:55.02–14:04.34 · 14:36–15:06.

I think the most important part about building a team is knowing your weaknesses and building around them.

Early in my career I didn't know that because your ego can get in the way and you're oblivious to what you're not good at.

To find people and get them to join a project, I think what you got to do is you got to tell them your goals, like your big goals. You can't be shy about it. I think that's an important thing. Tell people your goals, and you got to own it and you've got to live it in order for people to join what you're doing, or they're not going to be convinced.

It is a marathon it's not a sprint

In the recording: 19:02–19:19 · 19:44.64–19:56.92 · 19:59–20:09.

It is a marathon. It's not a sprint. You can get burned out in a hurry, and I've burned myself up a few times in this project. I come back to it when I feel ready. You have to be okay with that. You can't work every day on a side project non-stop, in my experience.

Another important part is to automate and to delegate.

Mailchimp automatically pulls in blog posts, builds weekly newsletters. I'm not gonna have time to craft a weekly newsletter, so that does it for me.