Publishing your work

Aaron Francis

I'm here in a different role. I'm here to convince you that publishing your work will increase your luck. I'm here to convince you, hopefully, that by doing work public-publicly, you can increase the odds of good things happening to you. I wanted to call this The Stupid Little Tweet That Changed My Life.

It's kinda catchy, but it's not quite professional enough. But we are gonna talk, we are gonna talk about the stupid little tweet that changed my life. Like Jake said, I'm a developer educator at PlanetScale. If you like this talk, you must buy databases from us. Those are the rules. Um, I created a video course called MySQL for Developers that teaches full stack developers a lot about MySQL.

I love databases. Um, so you can find that at planetscale.com/mysql, Laravel developer. And as I said earlier, I spend all of my time on Twitter. Unless my coworkers are listening, I spend all of my time on Twitter. So you can find me twitter.com/aarondfrancis. More important than that, and more important than anything I'm gonna say, are these two.

These are my two-year-old twins. You can tell they're twins because of how much they look alike. Um, so these are my two-year-old twins, and somehow this is the next set. Luckiest man in the world, and this may be the last time you see me in person for a very long time.

Um, we have a lot of great sponsors here. Um, my sponsor is better than all of them. My sponsor is my wife. My wife is not here. My wife is a full-time stay-at-home mom, and believe me when I tell you that there is a zero point zero percent chance I could do this without her.

She's at home with the kids, I'm here hanging out with y'all. Thank you, Jennifer, for sponsoring everything I do. Y'all buckle up. Um, publishing your work increases your luck. We're gonna break it down into three parts, publishing, work, and luck, and we're actually gonna start at the end and work our way back.

We're gonna start with luck. For the purposes of this conversation, I get to make everything up, so I am going to define luck as when something unexpected and good happens to you. So unexpected and good. Seems reasonable enough, right? In our corner of the internet, in our little part of the world, this can manifest itself a couple different ways.

Some of the common manifestations of luck in our world would be somebody reaching out to you and offering you a job. Could be someone reaching out to you and saying, "Hey, do you wanna come on my podcast?" Could be your open source library finally starts to gain some traction. Could be that you go to a conference and you make a lot of friends where historically you haven't really been connected in the community, right?

These things are lucky. They're unexpected, they're good. I think there's also a third thing. They're, they're outside of your control, right? No matter how hard you work, you cannot force someone to offer you a job. You cannot force a community to adopt your open source library, right? No matter how hard you work. That's frustrating.

I don't know about you, I kinda like being in control. Um, about to have four kids, so we'll see, but I like being in control. Um, but you can't control that. But my, my hypothesis is, my stipulation is, that by being a person who does work publicly, you start to build a reputation for yourself. You start to build a body of work that speaks on your behalf better than any resume could, and you start to have opportunities come your direction

because of that body of work. People start to associate you with that work that you've been doing publicly. People start to think, Aaron is the guy that's always talking about MySQL. We need somebody to come talk about MySQL at our company. Maybe we should hire Aaron, which is how I got my job. Okay?

So this is what I'm talking about, building a body of work that allows those opportunities to find you. Let's talk about work. I left this term intentionally vague. Um, work could be anything. That, that's kinda the beauty of it, is you get to decide what the work is going to look like for you. Your work is gonna look different than my work, is gonna look different than their work, right?

You get to decide what kinds of work you want to be public about. You get to decide the shape, the contents. You get to decide everything. It's totally up to you. I'm not gonna leave you high and dry, though. I can't make the decision for you, but I can help you maybe figure out a few things. We're gonna look at two places.

I think when, when it comes to, when it comes to figuring out what is the work I'm gonna be public about. You could follow your curiosity. Where does your curiosity pull you? Where does your curiosity pull you? Where do you stay up super late working on stuff just because you're into it? Where does your expertise compel you?

Where does your expertise drive you? So we're gonna look at curiosity and expertise. We'll start with curiosity. Your curiosity can pull you into some, into some truly wacky and bizarre and totally weird areas, and I'm going to beg you to please, please, please, please don't play it cool.

We need people who are passionately curious. We need people who are excited, and we need people, we need people who are positively tickled about the ridiculous things that they're working on. We need those people. We have enough people in the world, and especially on the Internet, we have enough people who are playing it cool. We have enough people that can't be bothered.

We've got enough people that are unimpressed by everything. What I want to see is the flourishing of the curious, the happy, the excited, the passionate person who is out there doing their thing. People play it cool 'cause they think being cool is a virtue. Being cool is not a virtue.

Patience is a virtue. Being cool, not a virtue. We've got enough of those. We need you to be curious and passionate. Let's talk about some of those people. Um, Andrew, friend of the community, is here somewhere.

He-- Yeah, here he is right here. Um, actually didn't know he was gonna be here. He doesn't know this is coming. Um, Andrew is in the Laravel community, like I just said, and he's got some open source packages, and he was having some trouble staying on top of his GitHub issues, which cast no stones because who among us, right?

So being, being the clever fellow that he is, he thought, "What if I did something fun? What if I bought a thermal receipt printer like they have at restaurants? Order up, the ticket comes out. What if I bought that and I hooked it up to the GitHub API, and now every time a new, every time a new ticket come-- or a new issue comes in, order up and a ticket comes out?" So now he's got this thermal receipt printer, and not only is it a thermal receipt printer, it's a developer's thermal

receipt printer. Right? So, so here, here's the deal. I love this. You know who else loved this? Literally everybody. Everybody loved this. Talked to him about it later. He put it on Twitter, unbelievable numbers. Went to Hacker News, sat at the top of Hacker News, and people were nice.

That tells you how much people loved it. He, he had a curiosity. He followed it through. It's ridiculous, and I love it to death. Let's talk about Steve. Steve is not here, I hope. I don't know Steve. I've never met Steve. I don't know Steve at all. Steve doesn't know me. Um, Steve is working on, Steve is working on a, like, a open source SVG whatever, whatever.

I don't need the thing that Steve is building. I don't need it. I don't need an SVG editing tool. I follow Steve because Steve loves the thing he's doing. Steve is curious about the project that he is working on, and Steve is excited about it. Steve is always posting videos of weird edge cases.

He's posting videos of these insane performance optimizations, and I'm following along happily, and I have no use for the thing that he's doing. Not too long ago, um, not too long ago, Steve tweeted this: "I'm taking the rest of the year off to work on tldraw," which is his thing, "full-time. Turns out there's a lot of enthusiasm for an open source hackable" SVG whatever, whatever, right?

I don't use it. Turns out there's a lot of enthusiasm. Maybe. Not a part of the community, maybe there is a lot of enthusiasm. Here's, here's my read on the Steve situation as an outsider. There's a lot of enthusiasm 'cause Steve's enthusiastic. People are following Steve and getting excited because Steve is excited, and he's not afraid to show it.

Steve is not afraid to be too cool. Steve is excited, and he's got this whole group of people around him now who are excited, me included. I'm up here talking about Steve and how great he is. I've never opened the tool. I have no idea what it does. I'm sure it's wonderful. Outside of work, um, can be a good place to explore curiosity, free time, nights and weekends, whatever.

Inside of work can be a great place to dive deeper into your expertise. We need people who are curious. We need deep, deep experts, and a lot of times, those are the same people. It's the same people that get to the deep level of expertise 'cause they are passionately curious. It is likely, it is likely that within the scope of your job, you are solving interesting problems.

We're developers. We do interesting things, and if anyone says we don't, they have no idea what we do. It is likely you're doing interesting things, right? This is your opportunity to repurpose, repackage, remix, reuse all of the things that you're learning at work. Yes, for the benefit of the community, absolutely, but also to build that public body of work such that opportunities start to find you.

And I know that you're thinking, "I can't share the stuff I'm working on at work." Granted, understood. I would say you can't share everything you're doing at work. That doesn't mean you can't share anything, right? So if you're learning things at work, I would not recommend exposing your proprietary code base to the Internet. I would recommend taking those learnings that you have learned from your hard, deep work and turning that into a, a conference talk or a blog post or a video or

an open source package, right? You are learning things at work. Reuse that. Dive deep into your expertise. We're gonna talk about me for this one. This is easy. I don't have to memorize anything. I just remember everything. Okay, we're gonna talk about me for this example. I told you early on, um, that I was always droning on and on about MySQL.

That is still true. There was a time when I thought, I'm pretty good at MySQL. I'm not very good. I'm not Tobias Petry good. I'm not Kai good. There are people in this developer community that are very good. I'm not very good. And so I bought a bunch of books. I bought a bunch of MySQL books. They're interesting. Talk to me about it later.

Um, I bought a bunch of MySQL books, and I printed out the MySQL documentation, and I read it because I wanted to know more. I was curious, and I was diving into that expertise, that thing that I needed at work, I was diving into it. I was reading this one book, um, and I came across this paragraph about a performance optimization technique for paginating large tables using limit offset.

Oh, quiet down, everybody. I'll tell you about it later. Everybody's going crazy. Um, I found it really interesting. I found it really interesting, and so I learned everything I could about this performance optimization technique from a book that was written in 2004. Still works. Um, so I learned everything I could. I put it together into a blog post, three thousand words.

Three thousand words on something that doesn't super matter. And I posted this. This weekend, I wrote three thousand words, yada, yada, yada. This is still one of the highest, maybe the highest blog posts on my site. Um, this went extremely-- this did extremely well on Twitter.

This also sat at the top of Hacker News. This is just something I was super into. Pagination, minuscule part of application development. I found it really interesting, so I wrote this. Now, um, getting, getting points on the Internet.

Let's talk about getting points on the Internet. Getting points on the Internet doesn't matter, right? So you're thinking, great, I get points on place-- I get points that are fake in places that don't matter. Why is this helpful? Um, tweets sitting at Ha-- on top of Hacker News is good signal. That helps me, that helps me know, like, oh, people are resonating with this. Vanity of vanities if I'm optimizing to get fake Internet points, right?

Waste of my time, waste of my life. I'm not optimizing to get fake Internet points. I'm optimizing for opportunities to find me. Somebody sent it to somebody, sent it to somebody, sent it to somebody, ended up on Hacker News, sent it to somebody. I get this DM. If you can't see the database hat, then you don't know the name.

Sam Lambert is the CEO of PlanetScale, and he sent me a DM, and was like, "Can we chat sometime?" August 2022. We chatted, and I work there, right? This is what happens. I can't make Sam, I can't make Sam hire me, but I can put some stuff out there and see what happens. There is likely a group of people here right now thinking, "That sounds really nice.

That sounds really nice, but I have nothing to say. Like, I buy your strategy. I just don't have anything to say." Okay. I think there are two things that could be true about you. The first thing is, it is possible that you have trained yourself to think that anything that you do is not valuable.

Anything that you have to say is not worth saying. And anything that you know, everybody else already knows. The stuff that other people do, valuable, interesting, worth sharing. The stuff that I do, not valuable. You might have trained yourself to believe that.

I'm going to challenge you. I am going to challenge you to reframe this work that you're doing. I want you to look around, look around at the community. This is, this is a very common problem for, um, high-- highly creative experts at the top of their game. They surround themselves with other experts, and they think everybody knows everything.

What do I have to say? Everybody knows everything. You have forgotten. You've forgotten the years of toil and struggle that it took to get to where you are today, and you have forgotten there are people behind you that would love just a little bit of what you know.

They would love it. We've got a lot of great voices. We've got a lot of great voices in the Laravel community. You know whose we're missing? Yours. We're missing yours. You've got something to say. You've got a point of view. You have a unique set of life circumstances. We need you. There are people that want to be you.

Let's bring them along. There's a second thing. There's a second thing that could be true. You may really, really want to be doing the work, but you just can't get started. You just can't get started, and to you, I would say that anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. You're never gonna come up, you're never gonna come up with the perfect, uh, blog post, the perfect article, the perfect YouTube video by standing still. You're never gonna start the perfect SaaS business, to Ben's point, by standing still. You gotta get in the game.

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Do a bad first version. If I know anything about us, you're not gonna stay there. Do a bad first version. That progress is gonna lead to progress. Motion's gonna lead to motion. Action's gonna lead to action. You're in the game. It is really intimidating to do something huge and perfect out of the gate.

It's not very intimidating to do something small and terrible. I could have anyone shout out a thing, and I could do a terrible job of it right here, but I'm in the game. What did you say?

Speaker 2

Juggler.

Aaron Francis

I'm actually a good juggler. Um, you're in the--you're in the game, right? So if your problem is, "Man, I just, I just think that I could build this perfect thing," Laravel's on version ten. Get in the game. Iterate. You can do this. Seems like, uh, seems like work should be the hard part, right?

So we're gonna talk about publishing now. You get to decide what work means. I don't know what you do. I don't know what you want to do. You get to decide. Curiosity, expertise, I trust you'll figure it out. Publishing, you get to decide. You get to decide what publishing means to you. To me, publishing means spending a lot of time on Twitter, um, writing a lot of blog posts, making a lot of YouTube videos.

That's what publishing means to me. I know that Twitter is sometimes terrible and is probably dead tomorrow. I'm going down with the ship. If you don't like Twitter, don't hang out on Twitter. Here, here's my, uh, here's my rule for publishing. It can be anywhere. It can be your blog. It can be the Laravel News blog.

They always need content. It can be your newsletter. It can be a podcast. It can be anything that's not your hard drive. When you publish to your hard drive, that's called saving a file, and that doesn't count . So it can, it can be anywhere. It seems like this should be the easy part, right?

You did all the hard work, like the coding, the designing, the, the, the doing the video. That's the hard work. Maybe. This is the hardest part for me. This has been and continues to be the hardest part for me, and it may be that way for you.

It is scary to put yourself out there. It is scary to open yourself up to criticism. It is scary to be vulnerable. It is scary to do all of that on the internet. The internet can be a cold, mean and horrible place.

It can be a place of delight and connection, or it can be cold, mean and horrible, and you never know which one you're gonna get. You never know. So what do we do? What do we do with the fear of putting yourself out there, of being vulnerable, of exposing yourself to criticism?

What do we do? Here's what I'm not gonna tell you to do. I'm not gonna tell you to get over it. I'm not gonna tell you to just get over it. I don't know if that's possible. I don't think it's helpful, and I don't know if it's healthy.

I don't know if it's healthy to have this strong emotion and say, "No, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna use my powerful brain to act as if this emotion doesn't exist." I don't know. That doesn't work for me, so I can't just get over it. Now, if there are parts of this talk, if there are parts of this talk that I can't do for you, boy, is this one of them.

Can't decide work, can't decide publishing, can't tell you how to get over your fear. What I can do is tell you a little bit of my story, what happened for me. Buckle up. About two years ago, the thing, um, the thing that I was most afraid of in the world was what other people thought of me.

I was so afraid of what other people thought of me that I never published anything. To be more specific, to be, to be more specific and more vulnerable, I did not want people to laugh at me. I didn't wanna be embarrassed.

I did not want to be embarrassed. That was my greatest fear. I didn't share anything 'cause I didn't wanna open myself up to criticism. I watched other people sharing things. I watched other people in the community sharing things, and I noticed something was starting to grow.

Something bad was starting to grow inside me. I was starting to grow bitter. I was starting to grow bitter. I was watching everyone else go to conferences and speak, get jobs, make friends, go on podcasts, and I thought, "Why not me? What about me?

I can do work like that. I have done work like that. What about me?" It's obvious. The answer is obvious. My fear was keeping me on the sidelines. I wasn't putting myself out there, and nobody knew, right? So I realized, I was thinking about it.

I, I, I was-- I had come to the realization that I was growing bitter, and I'd come to the realization of, of why things were happening for other people. And I remember, it was clear as day. I remember where I was sitting, I remember who I was talking to, I remember which direction the wind was blowing, and I remember that it struck me. And I knew that I had two options.

This bitterness was growing inside of me 'cause other people were getting things that I wanted, and I knew that I had two options. There were two paths forward, and I had to choose one of them. I could, I could lean into my fear. I could lean into my fear and never publish 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.

I looked, I looked to the end of my career down that path, and the overwhelming feeling that I felt was, "I wish you had cared less, and I wish you had tried more." That

day, switch flipped. There was a, there was a new reality, there was a new fear that made my old thing disappear. Being laughed at on the internet, not so bad compared to dying full of regret. Pretty good trade-off.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

It didn't seem so bad to be laughed at. It was no longer controlling me 'cause I knew what the alternative was. So I chose the second route. It was easy. It was an easy choice. I chose the second route. I started sharing everything I was doing.

Started sharing everything I was doing, and the world opened up before me. Opened up before me. It took work to let go of, of that fear. It took work to let go of that. As I started to let go of the fear of what other people thought of me, I started to think about other people more.

I was so concerned with what other people thought of me that I wasn't thinking, "How can I help these other people? How can I be the hype man that I wish I had had along the way?" Since then, the, um, the number of unexpected and good things that has happened to me is truly hard for me,

hard for me to believe. Um, March of twenty twenty-one, some dumb little tweet. I'm gonna show it to you. You'll see how dumb it is. I can draw a straight line to being here today, and we will. I'll show you the whole line. First, I'm gonna show you the tweet 'cause I want you to see... I, I want you to see it.

This is a reply, um, this is a reply to Jonathan Renick, um, about an-- getting Inertia SSR running on Vapor. I wrote this tweet, and I looked at it and thought, "That's a good tweet. Very good job, Aaron." Look at the number of jargon words. What is this guy talking about?

What does that even mean? So I, I replied to him, and I thought, "Good tweet, Aaron. This is very good." I was, I was so, like, into this expertise rabbit hole that I thought, "Oh, he knows what I'm talking about." You know what his response was? "What does this mean?" "I have no idea what this means, but maybe you can help us.

I've got no idea what you're talking about, man. Ah, that's awesome. Good tweet." What does it say? Can you help us? And I realized, hang on, maybe I know some things because of my curiosity in the areas that I've delved into my expertise. Maybe I know some things that aren't yet known by everyone.

And it took me putting myself out there and saying, "Hey, this is cool," to realize, like, "Wait, I can help here." After that, I started working on, um, a package for Laravel called Sidecar. Sidecar is that tweet, but in, in code form. Um, and so I, I started working on this package, and I finally open-sourced it, and while I was doing that, I was using my newfound sharing muscles to just tweet about it.

I was like, "Hey, I'm doing this thing. You can run, you know, Ruby from Lambda. It's kinda neat. I'm doing it." And, uh, Frank saw it, and he's like, "Hey, I've, I've seen what you're doing. I've seen what you're doing. I've seen what you're doing on Sidecar. I run a Larav-Laravel worldwide meetup.

Do you wanna come present Sidecar?" And y'all, I thought that was it. I thought that was the peak. I thought that was the pinnacle. I am speaking at Laravel Worldwide. I thought, "This is it." I took that video from that meetup, and I submitted it to Ian at Laracon Online.

And Ian took a chance and said, "Sure, let's do it." And y'all, I thought that was it. I thought, "I have arrived. I've made it." And I was thrilled to death about it. I thought, "This is incredible. What a, what a story." I thought the story was good, so I reached out to the GitHub README project through Caleb Porzio, put me in touch.

Um, and I said, "Hey, I know your project. I have something that I think might fit on your project. I wanna tell you a story about, um, letting go of my fears, embracing working in public, and there's this nice open source thread that runs through it. It'd be great for GitHub." And they said, "Sure.

Sure. Great. Let's do it." Thought I'd made it. Thought, "This is the peak of my career." They reached out to me after this and were like, "Hey, we did your developer story. Seems cool. Do you wanna write an article for us?" I wrote for them an article called Publishing Your Work Increases Your Luck.

I wrote an article for them, and it did great, and I thought I'd made it. I took that article, and I turned it into a talk, and I was on stage at Laracon EU, and I thought, "The pinnacle of my career. I have made it." Here I am today, and I think this is it. I think this is it, but I've thought that before.

So I don't know what happens next, but I'll tell you what, I'm not changing my strategy. I am gonna keep working, and I am gonna keep talking about it, and we'll see what happens. That's not my responsibility. My responsibility is to do the work and to talk about it. That's it. It's nice to put up a timeline of all your wins.

It's nice to put up a timeline of a couple years and be like, "Look at all the wins." We do not have time to talk about all the losses. We have time to talk about the wins. We do not have time to talk about all the losses. We have time to talk about this one. This is me at GitHub Universe looking very compelling, pointing at people.

Love to point at people. This is me at GitHub Universe. Love this picture. Very cool. Same jeans. This is, this is my Twitter header. Love it. Makes me look really professional, right? Good picture. Must be smart. There's something you need to know about this picture. That's not the full picture, literally.

That's the full picture. Does anybody notice anything about that picture? Does anybody notice that there are three people pictured out there? There's not a lot more off, off camera. There are zero more out of frame. These three people, event staff.

So we're down to zero people, okay? Down to zero. It gets worse. There are zero people listening to this talk who are not paid by GitHub to listen to the talks and make sure everything goes okay. This is so bad that people were taking chairs from the au- from where the humans should be and turning it around so that they could eat lunch together.

Imagine telling your friends, telling your family, telling your parents, telling your wife's parents- "I got a big thing coming. I got a conference called GitHub Universe. It's in California.

It's a big deal. It's gonna be live-streamed." And you get there, and your talk's not on the schedule. You're like, "That's fine. It'll be live-streamed. I'll tweet it out. No one will ever know the difference." You find out a few hours before it's not actually being live-streamed.

Everyone else's is. Yeah, there was no problem with the live-streaming equipment. There was a problem somewhere else. This talk, not live-streamed. "Hey, Mom, it's actually not gonna be live-streamed." "Hey, Jennifer, tell your parents it's not gonna be live-streamed. We'll get a, we'll, we'll get a recording later." Imagine giving this talk that you've just heard to nobody.

Imagine giving it to nobody, but there are people listening, but they're not part of your talk, and they're like, "What is going on with this guy?" Most embarrassing, most embarrassing thing that ever happened, I'm standing beside the stage, and the AV guy calls me up, "Please welcome to the stage, Aaron Francis." I'm like, "Who are you talking to?" "It's just me, man." I wish the earth had opened and swallowed me whole.

This is gonna happen to you. People aren't gonna read your blog posts. People aren't gonna watch your videos. This is going to happen to you. This is not your responsibility. Your responsibility is to do the work and tell people.

If this happens, not your problem. It sucks, but this is not your responsibility. You do the work, you put it out there, and nothing happens, you did your job. You gotta keep going. You've got to keep going. This remains my Twitter header.

I'm not shy about telling the story. Makes me look good, but I'm not shy about telling y'all the story. This is our-- This is, this is a shared secret. When you publish your blog post and nobody cares, when you upload your YouTube video and you get four views, I've been there, man. I've been there, and it sucks, and you gotta keep going.

Your responsibility is to do the work. Your responsibility is to try really hard and see what happens. You can always look at this Twitter header until I change it, and you can always look at this and remember, "Oh, man, doesn't always work.

Doesn't always work." The formula is, is very simple. You gotta do things, you gotta tell people. That's the formula. It's simple. You get to decide what you do. You get to decide who you tell. It's simple. It's straightforward. It's not easy. It's scary.

Scary to put yourself out there, scary to open yourself up to criticism, scary to be vulnerable. I encourage you, investigate that fear. Investigate that fear and decide if it's worth hanging on to. I don't know you. You gotta do that yourself. For me, wasn't worth keeping around.

Don't know about you. You will receive criticism. You're gonna put stuff out there, and there are gonna be people who well-actually you to death. "Well, actually... Well, have you thought about... Well, I did that one time." It's gonna happen. For every, for every vocal critic, for every person that says, "Well, actually," there are ten times as many people who

are following along quietly. There are ten times as many people that want you to succeed. There are ten times as many people that are proud of you. Yes, for the work you're doing, sure, but for your bravery to put yourself out there.

There are people on your team, and one day, one day, one of those people that's been quietly following along, that's been proud of you the whole time, one day, one of them is going to reach out with a potentially life-changing opportunity, and you're gonna think, "Wow, that was lucky.

That was really lucky." Thank you.