Episode 67 – Jeremy Clark on Creating Your Own Success

Jeremy’s Bio:
Jeremy Clark makes developers better. By drawing on over 15 years of experience in application development, he helps developers take a step up in their skillset with a focus on making complex topics approachable regardless of skill level. He is a Microsoft MVP for .NET, and he has authored seven courses for Pluralsight, including “C# Interfaces”, a course aimed at giving developers a clear understanding of abstraction. He loves speaking and has delivered over 200 technical presentations in the last 7 years in the United States and Europe. Jeremy lives in northern Washington with 2 dogs, 2 cats, and a banjo.
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today my guest is Jeremy Clark how are you, Jeremy?
Jeremy: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.
Arsalan: It’s so good to have you. I was going to your profile, your website looking at some of the information that we found about you before this interview and I was really amazed that it seems that you’ve done a lot of quality work. You are also a teacher and a mentor. You’ve done a lot of different types of things. I really want our audience to get to know you and really understand where you’re coming from and how you manage all that. I’d also like to hear the story of how you got into independent consulting because that was not planned. You just fell into it. How did that happen?
Jeremy: Yeah. It was not planned at all. I spent the bulk of my development career as a corporate developer at the Disneyland resort and it was a great place to work. I never saw myself as someone who would do contracting or consulting work because I’m not a risk taker. I’m the type of person who needs that regular paycheck every week even though having a regular job is kind of an illusion of safety because we don’t know if the next paycheck is actually coming.
Jeremy: I always felt like I needed that security and I couldn’t go months between paychecks without knowing where my next meal was coming from and things like that. I always saw myself as sitting here and getting a regular paycheck and that’s the way it was going to be. Through a series of small steps, I ended up independent, which is kind of scary. Part of it was that I left that corporate job and workforce startup and part of it was that it was time to start something new. At one time, I managed to save up some money and live within my means, which is always a good challenge to do. I also kind of burnt myself out at that startup. I got to the end of my time there and I realize that I needed to move on to something new because I was burnt out and I needed to relax. I had a friend who said that I needed to quit my job without having a new job. I was like “what? You want me to quit my job without having a new job?” But at the time, I was a senior developer, which is always a good place to be, and there is a good demand for my kind of work. Plus, I did need to break before starting something new. During that time, I started to pursue teaching because get down that’s what I really love to do. I really love to help other developers and make developers better.
Jeremy: So, that’s what I decided to do. I pursued a couple of different paths and I got into cloud teaching and spent some time with that. That didn’t quite work out the way I planned, and I ended up taking a contract job in the meantime and patted the bank account a little more. Then, I ended up with an opportunity to do a Pluralsight course. This was a great opportunity for me because again I wanted to get into teaching. I figured this was a good way for me to show what I could do. I wasn’t really looking at it as a kind of financial solution. I was more looking at it as a marketing and brand building kind of thing because, in the Pluralsight catalog next to these famous people, there’s a little bit of street credit for me.
Jeremy: It turned out that my first course did unexpectedly well for...

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