54. Building a Business by Teaching Developers

Mike Mondragon is interviewing Geoffrey Grosenbach, the Director of Product Education at Hashicorp. Before that, he launched PeepCode in 2006, a platform for developers to share and sell screencasts of programing tutorials. Over the years, he was able to grow the company until its acquisition by Pluralsight; he describes what the experience was like.

The conversation turns towards how to best learn new programming skills, after you've plateaued to being a "good" developer. Geoffrey suggests two things. First, writing about something you're working on is a good way to experience how you might express concepts to someone learning about them for the first time. He also recommends that developers step out of their comfort zone. For example, if you know how to git push to Heroku, perhaps you could try writing your own buildpack next.

Towards the end of the episode, Mike and Geoffrey discuss the effects of attention, particularly around social media. The more you produce helpful content—whether that's an article, a video, or an open source project—you're bound to attract others. Finding that balance of joy and sanity can be a difficult one.

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