Publish your work, change your life

Okay. Okay, we're gonna get started. Right, right on time, we're gonna get started. Okay, welcome. Um, my name is Aaron Francis. I am going to, uh... It's, it's part, it's part descriptive. I'm gonna try to tell you how to publish your work, change your life, and it is part history of how this has actually happened to me.

Um, so we're gonna talk about a lot of stuff. First, who am I? I am a, um, historically, a Laravel developer, a developer educator. Yeah, Laravel. Thank you. Um, all right, better than I expected. Um, I primarily teach, uh, databases. So we have a course on Postgres, Mastering Postgres, uh, High Performance SQLite, and then I also teach a course on how to make really good videos.

My whole life is just making videos, and so you can find me, uh, all over the place, primarily on Twitter. I have moved to Blue Sky, and it's kinda nice over there. But I, I still spend a ton of time on Twitter. Oh, Blue Sky fans. Um, so you can find me there. More important, uh, than anything listed on that screen is this.

I'm a twin dad two times over. We have two sets of twins. So I have, uh, two three-year-olds and two one-year-olds. Um, so if you think that it's a miracle that I'm here, you are correct. Um, this is my wonderful family. Uh, I do not share pictures of kids' faces, but I want you to see, um, just what a nice, like...

We all look alike, so I may-- Just please don't tweet this one. Um, this is our family. So that, that is, uh, our beautiful family, and there are a lot of good, lot of good sponsors here. Um, I need to thank my sponsor that allows me to do everything, and that is my wife. Um, she's at home.

My wife is a stay-at-home mom, and there's a zero percent chance I would do any of this. Um, so thank you to Jennifer for, uh, being my sponsor for all things. Okay. This is what I'm gonna try to convince you of. This is, um, this is my hypothesis.

Publishing your work increases your luck. Each word was chosen very specifically. This is what I'm going to try to prove to you today. Hopefully, I will be successful, but I am going to try to prove to you that if you, um, are in the habit of doing work and talking about it, opportunities will come your way. Opportunities over which you have no control will come your way.

If you talk about something enough, you become known as the person who is really good at that thing. If you talk about databases enough, like I do, people start to think of you as the database guy. That's just how it works, and things start to come your way. So we're gonna break this down into three different parts: publishing, work, and luck.

And we're gonna start at the end and work backwards. We're gonna talk about luck here at the beginning. For the purposes of this conversation, I'm going to define luck as something unexpected and good. Unexpected and good. In our little world, unexpected and good can manifest itself in a bunch of different ways.

It could manifest itself as someone reaching out to you proactively and offering you a job, or reaching out to you and saying, "Hey, do you wanna be on my podcast?" Or it could be your open source library starts to gain traction out of nowhere. That's unexpected. That's good. It could be that you come to a conference and make a bunch of friends where you have previously felt pretty isolated.

That's unexpected. That's good. It's also outside of your control. I cannot force somebody to offer me a job. I cannot force somebody, um, to adopt my open source library, and that is frustrating. I like being in control. I am no longer in control because I have four children, but I like being in control, and it's frustrating that these things are outside of our control.

But my postulation is you can increase the odds of these things happening. Let's talk about work. So this word is-- I left this word intentionally, um, quite vague. Work, you get to decide. You get to decide what the work that you share with the world is.

My work happens to be a lot of, like, database stuff. That's gonna look different than your work, which is gonna look different than their work. It all looks different. You get to decide, but I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna leave you high and dry. So I'll give you a few places you can look, but it is ultimately up to you to decide. A few places when you're thinking, "Okay, I gotta publish my work.

What is my work? What does that mean? What is my body of work? What do I want to be known for?" You can consider your curiosity, and you can consider your expertise. Okay, so these are two places. As you're trying to decide, "What am I gonna put out there?" Let's talk about these two things. Let's talk about curiosity first. Your curiosity will pull you in directions that are totally wacky, that make no sense whatsoever, that are truly bizarre.

And I am begging you, please, please, please do not play it cool. Okay? We have enough people that are playing it cool. We have enough people that can't be bothered. We have enough people that don't care about anything. I don't want you to play it cool. I want you to be excited, I want you to be passionate, and I want you to show that publicly.

People play it cool because they think being cool is a virtue. Being cool is not a virtue. Patience is a virtue. Being cool, not a virtue. So when you are pulled by your curiosity into something that is truly bizarre, but you're excited about it- Don't go online and pretend to be cool. Go online and actually be excited.

Because you know what people want? They want to see people who are flourishing. They don't wanna see cool people. They wanna see people that are excited, that are passionate, that care about something, anything. So you follow your curiosity until it takes you into a very weird place, and then you go online, and you don't be afraid to share it. I wanna talk about my friend Andrew.

Um, Andrew, open source developer, has a bunch of projects. Um, fell a little bit behind on his GitHub issues. Cast no stones because who among us, right? So he fell a little bit behind on his issues, and being the curious fellow that he is, he thought, "What if I did something totally awesome?

What if I bought a thermal receipt printer like they have at restaurants, and I hooked it up to the GitHub API, and then any time a new issue was opened on the GitHub API, order up. A new ticket comes out. Yes, chef, we have a new issue," right? Delightful. Insane, but delightful.

And not just a thermal receipt printer, a developer's thermal receipt printer decorated with Wes Bos stickers. We must, right? I love this. Absolutely delightful. You know who else loved this? Literally everyone. Everyone loved this. Puts it on Twitter, goes crazy.

The tweet makes its way to Hacker News, sits at the top of Hacker News, and people were nice on Hacker News. That means everyone loved it. And all he did was think, "Man, I wonder what if?" Follow your curiosity. Do not be shy about it. People want to follow people that are excited.

Andrew was excited. I'm still talking about it today. Curiosity, nights and weekends, sometimes at work. Um, when you're at work, you are, you are going deep into your expertise, right? We need people that are curious. We need people that are experts. Oftentimes, those are the same people.

Oftentimes, that's how you end up an expert. You spend too much time going down a rabbit hole, and you come out the other side an expert. We need people with expertise. So inside of work is a great place to look for what, what am I an expert at? What am I an expert at that I could help other people understand? And I hear you say, "I can't share anything that I do at work." Understood.

Just because you can't share everything doesn't mean you can't share anything. You could share takeaways, patterns, things you learned, things you ran into. I'm not telling you to open source your work's repository. I'm telling you to look at the work that you're doing and consider, "What am I learning here? Where, where am I going deep into my expertise?" For this one, we're gonna talk about me. This is great.

I didn't have to memorize this part. I just have to remember it. This is easy. Um, so I told you early on that I talk a lot about databases. That is true. That has been true. That will remain true. I like databases. I was not, um... I was good at it. I wasn't great at databases. I enjoyed it, but I didn't have... I, I got my degree in accounting, for goodness sakes.

What do I know about databases, right? And so I didn't have that expertise, and I thought, "You know what exists? Books. Books exist. What if I bought a bunch of books? What if I bought a bunch of books, and I read everything that I could read about databases?" In one of those books, I found, um, a pattern for paginating records using limit offset without incurring the limit offset slowdown.

And I know the crowd's going wild. Everybody wants to hear about that. We'll talk later. But listen, I found it incredibly interesting, and so I wrote an article. I wrote three thousand words about something that doesn't really matter, but I was interested in it. I was super interested in it, and I wrote three thousand words about efficient pagination using deferred joins.

And if that's not thrilling, I don't know what is. But here's the thing. This is still-- I wrote this a few years ago. This is still the most trafficked blog post on my site because I spent a weekend diving into my expertise, and I came out the other side and thought, "Why is nobody talking about this? This book was written in two thousand and four, and it still works. Why is nobody talking about this?" So this tweet did great, sat at the top of Hacker News.

But here's the thing. I keep saying tweet and Hacker News. We're not, we're not optimizing to get fake internet points at places that don't matter. That is not the goal. Getting fake internet points is nice. Makes me feel good. More importantly, it shows me directionally what people are interested in.

That's helpful. But if I optimize my life for getting fake internet points at places that don't matter, I've wasted my life. Vanity of vanities to care about internet points. That is not what I'm optimizing for. Feels good, but that is not what I'm optimizing for. And if I do, I've wasted my life.

What I'm optimizing for is a body of work that speaks on my behalf, that brings these DMs to my inbox. This is what I'm optimizing for. I cannot make this person, Sam Lambert, who is the CEO of a company that until very recently I was employed at. And how do you think I got that job?

That DM from that article. Somebody sent it to somebody who put it on Hacker News, who saw it, who sent it to Sam, and Sam sent me a DM and said, "Can we chat?" I said, "Sure." And he said, "Do you wanna come do the exact same thing you've been doing, talking about databases, on our behalf?" That was unexpected. That was good.

I didn't control that. I increased the odds of it happening, but I didn't control it. But listen, it doesn't make you invincible Same job. We're not optimizing for invincibility. I got let go. Half the company got let go.

I am not invincible. You know what I am? I'm resilient. This is my calendar the next week. I got let go, and I put out one tweet and said, "Guys, I got let go and I'm embarrassed. I need to know what's next." And because I had been putting myself out there, there were people who were ready to help me.

I'm not invincible. I'm a lot more resilient because I have a body of work that speaks on my behalf. You may be thinking, um, "That's a great strategy. It's a great strategy, Aaron. I don't have anything to say. I would love to publish my work, but I don't have anything to say." I'm going to challenge you on that.

I think this is a very common thing for a lot of, um, creative people, and I believe that what we do is very creative. I believe this is a common thing for creative people at the top of their game to look around and say, "Everyone's an expert. The stuff that other people are saying is valuable. The stuff that other people are doing is valuable, but not me.

Whatever I do, everybody knows that. Oh yeah, I did a thing, but of course, everybody knows that." I'm gonna challenge you. I'm gonna challenge you to look around in your community, look around and see what other people are sharing. Did you already know that? Did you... Have you already learned these things that other people are sharing? Are people not sharing things that you're learning on a daily basis?

There's your opportunity. There's your objective proof people are hungry for what you have. Listen, you have forgotten the years of struggle that it took you to get to where you are today. And you have forgotten that there are people behind you that want just a little bit of what you know.

There are people that want to be you. They want your job. They want your career. They want your life. They want your knowledge. And you've forgotten that they're back there. People want what you have. The, um, the thing you might think is there are a lot of people talking.

There are a lot of people publishing. There are a lot of people talking. There are a lot of great voices. There are a ton of great voices. You know whose we're missing? Yours. We need yours. You have something to say. You have a unique set of life experiences. You have a unique background. You have a unique way of looking at things. We need your voice.

It seems like doing the work should be the hard part. You've done, you've, you've done the work, right? You wrote the blog post. You, you made the open source library. You designed the thing. You made the video. Now you just gotta push the button. Ah, what relief. Wrong. This is the hard part.

This is the hard part for me. This might be the hard part for you. It is easy for me to do the work. It is easy to sit alone in a quiet room and do the work. It is hard to put it out there. It is hard to expose yourself to criticism.

It is hard to be vulnerable. It is hard to open your work up for feedback, and it is hard to do that on the internet. The internet can be a cold, mean, and horrible place. It can be a delightful place full of connection. But you never know which one you're gonna get.

You put it out there and you have no idea. This is the hard part for me. So the question is, um, what do we do? Right? If, if we're afraid, what do we do? There, there are parts of... There... Every part of this talk I can't, I can't do for you, especially this one.

I will tell you, uh, I, I will tell you what I don't think is the answer, and I don't think the answer is just ignore it. I don't think the answer is use your powerful brain to act like the fear doesn't exist. That might work. I don't know if it's healthy. I, I don't know. It might work.

Doesn't work for me. I'll tell you what did work for me, and maybe it will be instructive for you. Until three years ago, four years ago, my greatest fear, my greatest fear was what other people thought of me. To be frank, I did not want people to laugh at me.

I did not want to be embarrassed. That was, that was my greatest fear. I didn't wanna be embarrassed. And so it kept me on the sidelines. I'm not sharing work because if I put work out, then people might say something. If they say something, that might be embarrassing. Therefore, I don't have to put anything out there. I started to realize, however, I was watching, um, friends get jobs, speak at conferences, go on podcasts, make other friends.

And I started to grow bitter. I was watching these people get the things that I wanted, and I thought, "Why not me? Why not me? I can do work like that. I've done it before, but nobody knew." Nobody ever knew because my fear was keeping me out of the game.

And so I realized, I remember where I was sitting. I remember who I was talking to. We were outside. I remember which way the wind was blowing, and I had a realization, and I had two, I had two paths. There were two paths forward. I was growing bitter, and I knew that I had two options. One, I could never share anything, and I knew that I would reach the end of my career with my ego fully intact.

Nobody ever laughed at me. I knew that I would reach the end of my career bitter and full of regret for things I had been too scared to try. And so suddenly, suddenly the options were literally be laughed at, potentially, on the internet, or die full of regret.

It's a pretty easy option at that point. The trade-off doesn't seem so bad. I do not want to reach the end of my career and have the overwhelming feeling as I look back, think, "I wish you had cared less. I wish you had tried more." So suddenly, it became very easy.

It became very easy because this, this other fear was way bigger than potentially being laughed at by people I don't even know. And so I took the second route, and I started sharing everything that I was working on. Literally that day, night and day, I started sharing everything, and the entire world opened up before me.

Every single thing that I have gotten since then has been a result of this, and every single thing has surprised me. I can draw a straight line, and I will, from March twenty twenty-one when I decided, "This ain't it. I gotta change," to where I am today. From March of twenty twenty-one when I was practicing putting myself out there and I made some dumb little tweet, and I'll show you what it is, to getting laid off and now successfully running our own

company. I can draw a straight line. This is the dumb little tweet, and I want you to, uh, note how dumb it is. Why is there so much jargon? What is this guy trying to say? What does any of this mean? And here's, here's my state of mind at the, at the time. I thought, "Ha, that's a pretty good tweet. Man, you really did it." This was a response to a guy called Jonathan Renick.

He was looking for some help for something, and I was like, brr, way down this expertise rabbit hole, and I came up and thought, "Oh, he knows exactly... I mean, this is probably not news to him, so I'm just... I don't need to explain it very well. I'll just tell him what he already knows." His response, "What does this mean? I have no idea what you're saying. But maybe could you help us?" And what?

Wait, I know something that other people don't know? This guy who I look up to is like, "I have no idea what that means, but will you help us figure it out?" Holy. Total perspective change here. And so that was the moment when I realized, "Wait, maybe I have something to say." So the dumb little tweet turned into an open source library.

Using my new practicing sharing muscles, everything I was doing with that, uh, open source library, I was tweeting about making little videos, writing blog posts, et cetera. Somebody that ran a meetup saw it. The package was called Sidecar, and he said, "Hey, I've seen what you're doing. Do you wanna come talk at a meetup?" And y'all, I thought I had made it.

I thought, "This is it. I have been invited to speak at a meetup. My dreams have come true. This is it." He saw what I was doing and reached out to me and gave me an opportunity that I had always wanted. I took the video from that meetup and submitted it to a conference, and the guys that ran the conference said, "Sure.

Come on, big guy." And y'all, I thought I had made it. I thought, "This is it. I have arrived." I thought, "This is such a good story. What if I reached out to GitHub? What if I reached out to the GitHub README project and said, 'I've got a good story. Do you wanna hear it?'" And they said, "Yeah, we wanna hear it." And so I did a, uh, developer profile with the GitHub README project, and I thought, "This is it.

I'm the king of the world, man. This is it." GitHub reached out to me after that and was like, "Hey, do you wanna write an article for us?" I was like, "Yeah, I wanna write an article for you. Of course I do." And I wrote an article called Publishing Your Work Increases Your Luck, and it killed. And I took that, I took that article, turned it into a talk at Laracon EU.

I'm on the stage at Laracon EU, and I think, "This is the peak of my career." Shortly after, I'm hosting Laracon US, and I'm hosting Laracon US again, and now, y'all, I think I've made it. I think this is it. But I've thought that before, so I don't know what's gonna happen next, but I'm not changing my strategy.

My job is to do the work and talk about it, and we'll see what happens. That's not my responsibility. My responsibility is to do the work. That's my job. Do the work, put it out there. We will see what happens. It's nice to put up a, um...

It's nice to put up a timeline of all your wins. It's fun. It's like, "Wow, I, I, I won a lot." This is a 25-minute talk. That's why there are no losses on there, because we do not have the days required to talk about the losses. We can talk about this one, though. That's me on stage at GitHub Universe. Notice, GitHub Universe wasn't on my timeline.

It's a good picture. I made it my Twitter header for a while. Makes me look very good. Very... I, I love to point at people. Very, very inspiring, very powerful. This is not the full picture, literally. This is the full picture. Those three people work for GitHub.

They're event staff. It's not bad cropping. That's all the people that were there. That's it. Nobody that wasn't paid to be there is there. It gets worse. This is out in what they call the garden stage.

People were taking chairs from the audience to turn it around to eat lunch with their friends in the middle of my talk. In the middle of this talk, where I'm baring my soul about my greatest fear in life, and people are like, "What's going on here?" Imagine a boy from Texas heading to California to do a big talk.

You tell your parents, "I got something big cooking." Tell your wife's parents, "Jennifer, tell your parents. Tell your dad." And you get there, and your talk is not on the schedule, and you think, "That's fine. It's live-streamed.

I'll tweet it, and nobody will ever know that nobody showed up." You find out an hour before that your talk, specifically, is not live-streamed. Everyone else's. And so I'm standing on, on the edge of the stage, and the AV guy says, "Please welcome to the stage, Aaron Francis." And I'm like, "Who are you talking to?

It's you and me, brother. That's it. There's no one else here." And at that moment, if the earth had opened and swallowed me whole, I would've been happier. This is going to happen to you, and it sucks. This is going to happen to you.

No one is gonna read your blog post. No one is gonna watch your videos. No one is gonna use your library. This is going to happen to you, and you have to keep going. You did your job. This is not your responsibility. If you did the work and you put it out there, you did your job.

Well done. If it flops, keep going. Do it again. Do it again. This is going to happen to you. You are not alone, but you did your job. You gotta keep going. You gotta keep going.

It's very simple. It's very simple. You have to do things, and you have to tell people. That's it. It's very simple, and it's not always easy. It's not always easy, but it is very straightforward. Every time you publish something, you're gonna be hit with a, with a barrage of "well, actuallys." "Well, actually, I've done this before." "Well, why didn't you just use..." That's one of my favorites.

"Why didn't you just use..." Man, 'cause I wanted to just use something else. You're gonna be hit with a wave of criticism every time you publish it. But listen, for every vocal critic, there are 10 times as many people that are just quietly following alo- along. There are 10 times as many people that are proud of you, sure, for the work you're doing, but proud of you for being brave enough to put it out there.

10 times as many people want your bravery to put yourself out there, and they're just quiet. They're just quieter. And one day, one day, one of those people that has been, um, quietly following along, hoping against hope for your success, somebody that is on your team, is gonna reach out to you with a potentially life-changing opportunity.

And you're gonna think, "Wow, that was lucky. That was really lucky." Thank you.