swyx (Shawn Wang) on infinite building

Shawn "swyx" Wang is an infinite builder, dual-class CFA, and Developer. Shawn currently works for Netlify.

Tune in to hear Shawn talk about what it means to be an infinite learner and builder and how he uses this approach to further his career.

Transcript

"swyx (Shawn Wang) on infinite building" Transcript

Topics:

• Infinite learning
• Infinite building
• Javascript fatigue
• Engagement
• Fighting feelings of inadequacy

Quotes:

“I changed myself from a financial career...I thought that was a stable thing...I realized that I needed to move on from that…” -Shawn Wang

“You should learn just in time, not just in case.” -Shawn Wang

“If you actively write stuff and put stuff out...that you are interested in, guess what? People come and engage with you…” -Shawn Wang

Shawn Wang:

• egghead
• Website
• Twitter

Joel Hooks:

• Twitter
• Website

Transcript

Joel Hooks: Hey Shawn. Despite our struggles on the internet, we're going to talk today about being an infinite learner and what that means to you. You're the first person I've encountered that described themselves as an infinite learner so I thought maybe you could tell us what that means to be an infinite learner.

Shawn Wang: Sure. I've actually started talking about myself as an infinite builder but we'll get there. The infinite learner term came from Reid Hoffman of Linkedin where he analyzes all the people that he invests in at Greylock, people like Mark Zuckerberg. He says that the most consistent thing about them is that they are infinite learners. There's never a point where they say they know enough and they stop learning. If you want to grow a lot as a person, you're always going to go into something, some area that you don't know well, and you have to have that infinite learner mindset to get yourself up to that next level. That's where I got it from and that's something that I think has become a core part of what I want to do. My growth strategy as well is what I want to do with my life. We can talk about the infinite builder part.

Joel Hooks: Yeah. I haven't heard that yet. I personally feel like I'm the same way. I've never framed myself like that. But you know, it's like I want to be an autodidact. I want to learn and grow over time, not restrict myself to what I know and not hold the same lever for 20 years. That's how it sounded like, not the way to be. It sounds to me this is a similar, right? Where we are just constantly working towards, not necessarily a specific goal but the goal that we're going to know and grow and do more and learn more as we progress and get older in our lives and career. Is that the same?

Shawn Wang: Yeah. Totally. I think it's also a big part of just being a Dev, especially a front end Dev, because it moves so quickly. There's always so much to keep on top of. It's a really great attitude to say that you should probably reexamine the things that you know every so often because the SD underlying assumptions which used to make it true may have shifted so that your beliefs are no longer true. This is a parallel between personal life philosophy and a philosophy of building a career in tech.

Joel Hooks: Yeah. You see the word like Java script fatigue get thrown around, which to me is almost like this depressingly negative way to look at this cornucopia we have of constant things that we can be learning and doing and growing on. I see it as a positive where I also see it framed as a negative. There's too much to learn. I can't keep up. For me it feels like the opposite. We can learn and grow and do more. The best practices of last year, they're gone and now we have new practices that we get to employ that might be better.

Shawn Wang: Yeah. Java script fatigue. I actually interviewed Sasha Griff about that. It's funny how it keeps coming back. I think that it's a two way street. We as an industry move very quickly. We were still in the early days, right? Kids who are 19 years old can come along and revolutionize the world of cold sandbox or something. That just doesn't happen in the physical sciences where the last time something happened like that was in 1905 when Albert Einstein just came out of nowhere with three papers that just changed physics. We're in the 1905 stage of tech where things move quickly. I'm sure people back then had physics fatigue where they're like, "Oh, there's so many papers coming out. I don't know how to keep up." That's a luxury. People are coming out with new stuff. We can learn at our own pace. We don't have to succumb to that fomo that everyone... There's a certain herd mentality of ,you want to keep up with the Joneses or the Kardashians. It's entirely uptrend. It's entirely free software. As long as you're achieving your end goal, it doesn't really matter what tech do you use to get there. Those are the healthy perspectives to deal with java script fatigue as far as I'm concerned.

Joel Hooks: Yeah. I actually had my general career pulled out from under me in 2011 so I'm always... The idea that I would stop learning and I can be content. I feel like I can do that for periods of time. But at the same time, when you have a complete technology removed by a vendor. It's what happened to me. I was doing Adobe and development with flash and whatnot. It's like a fear of not being able to eat more than missing out for me. I'm a little over it. I feel like, especially in this space and now, with the web and the state it is, that I can be pretty comfortable. But at the same time I'm like, what's coming up? What's going on and where are the dangers? That to me it was more like a proprietary situation anyway. You're right, the idea that you can't just relax every now and then or you have to constantly be spending your weekends and evenings learning new things. I don't think that's really true. But at the same time, being open to new ideas is super important. The idea that you can't just stop and that this is the final stop in your journey. It doesn't resonate.

Shawn Wang: Well, I mean, you and I have talked a few times about being career changers. I can relate a little bit to that because I changed myself from a financial career. I thought that was a stable thing for a long, long time. Like you, I realized that I needed to move on from that as well.

Joel Hooks: Yeah. What does it mean to be an infinite builder then? That's what I'm curious about.

Shawn Wang: Okay. I branded myself... I mean, branded myself is too much of a strong term for what I was doing. I was mentally in the mode of infinite learner for probably the first half of this year. There's so many things to learn and there's so many ways to learn. The more I experimented with those things... you do a lot of content consumption, right? Listening to podcasts, reading articles and blogs and keeping up on Twitter, stuff like that. But then, how much of that do you retain? Right? How much of that do you actually have a differentiated perspective on or a personal relationship with? How much of it is you being familiar with the headlines?

Shawn Wang: The more I was doing that, the more unsatisfied with my own learning I was. I think learning isn't that effective for me as much as building is. If I can just switch my mode from consumption to production, I can be more productive and I can learn. The other big principle that I like to share with people is that you should learn just in time and not just in case. Just in case learning was what I was doing. Read all the things and have an approximate knowledge of all of many things but no mastery of anything. I realized that that was the wrong path to go down. What I should really be doing is a path. Fix things I'm super interested in and build stuff and learn whatever I need to to get to that goal. Learning is a means to an end and not an end in itself. That's what I got wrong by focusing too much on being the infinite learner. I'm obviously still iterating on that, but I've started to focus on being an infinite builder instead.

Joel Hooks: Yeah. So just changing your personal mindset. For me anyway, the idea that I'm going to learn all the time and I need to learn all these things was important in the beginning. At some point, you reach the tipping point where you have to take what you know and apply it, right?

Shawn Wang: Yeah.

Joel Hooks: That's the building is when we apply things. I was reading your summary of like 80 books. Did you read all those in the first quarter of the year? Was that over a longer period?

Shawn Wang: Yeah. You see. Infinite learning. That was good and bad, right? Because good in sense I covered so much surface area. I don't have any personal relationship with it. I just read it, you know.

Joel Hooks: I mean, what I was reading was your notes. To me, is the notes actually part of the building or is that just part of the learning?

Shawn Wang: I think that was my initial getting into it. I think that's important. I think that learning in public is something that I championed a lot. That's what's currently pin to my Twitter profile. I think that if you produce output well... Am I still on? Okay. If you produce output while you learn, you're not only making those for your future self, but then you also enable other people to learn along with you.

Joel Hooks: Yeah, I know. I'll take notes or highlight and it ends up in the Kindle. Not only do I not really review it, but then it's locked there forever and nobody else can see it. I read through your... they were on dev.two and we'll link to it. You read these 80 books and then took notes and then gave us links to those books which to me was useful. I'd read a lot of them already, but then, not only do you give me a review but it was like eating your perspective and taking what you learned out of those. Remembering it or being able to think about those books. Even just as a book reviewed where I'd be like, "Oh, that sounds like something that's interesting to me." I thought that was a pretty cool technique. And then the fact that you put it out there for all of us to read was pretty awesome as well.

Shawn Wang: Oh. Well, thank you. The other thing that's an open secret about these kinds of books, which are all general, nonfiction, self-helpy kinds of things, is all of them ar, I don't know, 200 pages. They have one central idea which can be given in 15 minutes TED talk. Right? If you take nothing away, but this one thing, this is it. What if you just went through all of them and just took the one thing away. That's what the summary thing is. But then, I think there's also a point where you read too much. That's I think what I hit at the end of the first quarter.

Shawn Wang: What was I going to say? I think that a lot of people read, maybe even take notes on your kindle, which I don't even do because I need to type it out to take notes. That last mile, that last 10% of sharing it and making it so that other people can read it, that makes it so much more valuable because you can share it with people. They can benefit from your experience or they can discuss it with you. Passions McKenzie calls it a friend catcher. I liked this idea, although the name quirked me, where if you like actively write stuff and put stuff out on stuff you're interested in, guess what, people come and engage with you just like you're doing with me, on the things that you're interested in. That's so different from typical networking where you try to have a mutual exchange of values. In this form you, you just have a shared interest and you just talking about stuff.

Joel Hooks: Yeah, I like that. Have you read Derek Sivers? His reviews of books that he likes to read?

Shawn Wang: Yeah. Some of them. He's growing on me. I must have golden guy, but Derek Sivers is getting up there.

Joel Hooks: Yeah. I love his book reviews. He's usually spot on. He gives them a rating too, which I like as well. It's like a nice filter for what I might want to read.

Shawn Wang: That's so common about learning in public. They just have blogged for 20 something years and built up this whole backlog of things where people can connect with them on topics that they're interested in. He probably wrote some of those things 10 years ago, right? That's what was valued to you today.

Joel Hooks: Yeah. It's like you basically have assets at that point. I liked that. I like the idea. I've heard friend catcher before, but you're casting a net out there and pulling people into your sphere of interests and get a pre-connection. I don't know. It works as a filter, right?

Shawn Wang: Yeah.

Joel Hooks: I have the feeling somebody like Derek, the chairs like that, you get to know them a little bit. It's almost personal even though he's just broadcasting, on a one way basis.

Shawn Wang: It's unabashedly one way. That's amazing. Super selfish, right. Somehow, it has value because it's shared. It's like, take it or leave it. It's like open source. I have value in my little fork of react. You can take it if you want or just ignore me but it's here. Isn't that great?

Joel Hooks: Yeah, it's awesome. The idea of getting back to java script and it's constantly changing. To me it's like, this is my interest and this is my use case so I'm going to build a thing for me, but I'm also going to share it with you and if you share my interest then you can contribute back as well. That circle of sharing and learning and working in a global unit that the internet allows us to do has been really exciting. It's like watching it evolve over time. It's been super interesting.

Shawn Wang: The other thing I found is that by learning in public in that way where you're actively putting output, you are very likely to be taught by people smarter than you. Often that the authors of the thing themselves because, the best way to learn something on the internet is to just get it wrong publicly and let people correct you because they will correct you. They will crawl over broken glass to come and tell you that you're wrong. That is fantastic. If you have no problem being wrong, there's so much you can learn. All right. I try my hardest and my best to not be wrong because you should put in that level of work. But then, at the end of the day get something out. I talk with so many people who don't put anything out because they are like, "It's not perfect yet."

Shawn Wang: I'm like, yeah. Even the final product that you put out is not perfect. There's stuff that you don't know you don't know. Just get it out there and let people correct you. That's the other thing, I volunteer as well. I've actually talked with some of the authors of these books because I tagged them in my Twitter thread. They're like, yeah, you should really read this instead. People don't follow up, as a rule, even though some people who are super popular with like hundreds, thousands of readers and whatever. Very small percentage of them actually connects with the author. You can take that the opposite of learning public to actually do that and establish a connection with people that you might learn a lot more from.

Joel Hooks: I'm always amazed. If you email an author or tweeted them and then you get your response. It's like, wow! One year expressing interest in the thing that they've obviously put a lot of time into. A lot of them will actually respond to you. It's just been great. I've had that happen several times in my life. Every time, it has been amazing. Over time, if you establish some expertise people do that for you too. They'll send you a question or a note or a comment on something you've done or built and you get to reply back to them. Just thinking of the whole circle of the things. Pretty neat in terms of how we can learn and build and grow.

Shawn Wang: I've also started putting up repos where, I put up essentially my state of knowledge so that people can make PRS and correct me on stuff. I just learned from that. I have a reactive type scope cheat sheet, which I essentially... I've only done typescript for probably seven months and then I just put it up. People were just like, okay, this is wrong. There's a better way to do xyz. I have a log on my progress. They're just people teaching me stuff, same yours. That's really great. 90% of what I do on Twitter is that as well.

Joel Hooks: I'm always encouraging people to write and put it out there and learn in public just because I think in terms of a career boost. Like you mentioned earlier, developing a brand, if you're willing to get out there and put it out there, there's huge benefits. But I've often seen the objection that somebody has already said that or somebody said that better. Nobody wants to hear what I have to say. Or the excuse of not wanting to put it out there. I was wondering if that ever occurs to you and how you got over that if it had.

Shawn Wang: Yeah. You invited me to be an Aiken instructor and sometimes I don't even feel super knowledgeable about stuff. I look around the Aiken courses and I see that it's already been done. I automatically get discouraged. I would say, that attitude is mostly you looking for excuses to get out of it. You know, the arguments for it already. You have a unique voice. You should speak to people who are new learners, just like you. Multiple different ways to approach the same thing can be productive. All those things are true but most of the time is the brain looking for excuses to get out of it somehow.

Shawn Wang: I think we have to constantly fight that. I mean, I still fight that even though I know it, right? It's a human instinct to crave the new, to do the things that are undone and also to try to disqualify yourself from a club which you perceive to be more exclusive than it is. All that is bs, right? At the end of the day, what is your goal? Your goal is to the better, I don't know, xyz. To get there, you have to learn how to do the thing. The best way to learn it is to share it. Share what you've learned. It just builds up progressively from what is your end goal and being okay with doing your damn best to do the best work that you can, but being okay with it being imperfect.

Joel Hooks: Yeah. I mean, there's always the risk. This thing isn't going to be the correctest or the best. The idea that, I don't know, they were inadequate or our opinion doesn't matter. It's just more noise. I like constantly fight that. Right? The idea that your voice isn't going to add to the overall discussion, which I think is totally untrue. Like you said, everybody's perspective is unique and interesting and not necessarily that we want the same derivative or we're copying the same thing and we're trying to say the same thing. But in my experience, between people's writing and people's recording and screen casts, everybody has just a different viewpoint or a different way of looking at it.

Joel Hooks: I think what's really important to remember is that folks that are coming into this, they're learning the thing. That don't have a lot of experience or are following a similar path as you don't just want one perspective, right? They want multiple perspectives and they want to form their own opinions or they should, I think, want to form their own opinions from gathering from different sources. It's really doing a service to get out there and put your 2 cents and do this learning in public and do this constant putting stuff out there and taking those risks. I think it's a real benefit to our general peer group as a whole. And it makes it more welcoming and inviting to.

Shawn Wang: I will also say, since I put that out, there had been a total people who constantly checked back with me on how they're doing. I'll also say, don't worry about the fact that no one will read your stuff when you start learning in public. It doesn't matter. Your number one customer is you. This is your time to be terrible at things. It's probably a good thing that no one's reading your stuff anyway. But the few that will care about you, are investing in you early and you should try to nurture that relationship. It's fine. Multiple iterations is more important than just getting it right the first time.

Shawn Wang: I definitely struggle with that too, especially it's just like business stuff. You and I are pretty interested on business side of things. It gets not the first video course side around. A reasonable development would be, Pluralsight exists. It's been done right. There's no need for Aiken and that is so wrong because your unique spin is what has made Aiken such successful company. I'm a very philosophical person. I think you are too. All these things from coding to life philosophy to visits, it all sort of interrelated with the same ideas, just applied in different ways.

Joel Hooks: Yeah. I know. I love stoicism as a life philosophy. I even love things like agile and I apply it to, not the capital ATM [crosstalk 00:21:10]. It's like small iterations. I learned that from studying software but not on my part. This really applies to other things as well. It's like object oriented programming or even functional programming. It's just weird to me the way that everything intertwines. Studying, casting that wide net of learning and building things. It's like art, doing that, being creative. How does that come back and affect my ability to grow a business, for instance. I feel like it's all mesh together.

Shawn Wang: I thought so that. The first kind of throwaway, jokey odd is that, isn't it weird how everyone has annual goals? On January 1st you set this arbitrary goal for the end of the year. That's the most waterfall thing you can imagine, right? They'll have this big set of requirements and then fail to reach them because life happens. We could all probably do with a running our life in a more agile fashion. That's what he did, right? I did the whole read a book a day thing in perfectly for the first quarter, finished the first quarter and then, and then reexamined where I was going. Then I was like, all right, I need to build more shit. That's, you know, the agile approach, obviously. I'm not perfect with that. I like the agile philosophy as well.

Shawn Wang: The other thing about stoicism, I struggle with that recently and I posted about it recently too, which is, stoicism, you shouldn't let things that happen truly out to random chance to affect your internal state. That's fine. But I think you still have to be optimistic about stuff. That's what a lot of technology is. Being overly optimistic about whatever promising technology can be because that's where the really asymmetric payoffs come into play. I think that stoicism can get in your way and that's where it falls apart. You can go like, all right, I am not going to overreact to this because it could be, it could be gone the next day. That may well be true, right? You may get over excited about VR or bitcoin or I dunno, whatever. If you never take a bet or if you never take risks, then you're not going to grow with the potential of technology because it's all about the asymmetric risk.

Joel Hooks: Yeah. I mean, I don't even know whether that's necessarily incompatible either. Right? For me, I'll take risks, but at the same time I'm just zen or stoicism or whatever. Know that failure is an option and be cool with that. Right. That something that I've tried to incorporate. I saw it in your list, I think the seven habits of highly effective people.

Shawn Wang: Yeah.

Joel Hooks: It's one of those books that is a very... it's 200 pages, but the takeaway for me was, you can't get too stressed out about things that you can't control. If it's out of your control, then you can't worry about it too much. Life is like that, right? It's this constant swarm of variables that we are assaulted with on a daily basis and we have to filter that and figure out what's next and what's good right now. If we're too rigid in our planning or if you look at the beginning of the year, you set these major goals and something goes wrong and just wrecks you, right? It just shatters everything and you're barely even up versus okay, what did I learn? What can I do? What's the next smallest step that I can take to reach my larger goals that I might have? That sort of thing. Ultimately, it's played out pretty well. Applying that agile thought to my life. Things go wrong. You've got to stop. We've got to take notes and see what's next.

Shawn Wang: I think a lot about this in relation to media because that's such a big part of our lives, whether we like it or not. Especially like social media these days, can bring up a lot of outrage over things that you don't really have control over. Sure, you can get involved in politics or be environmentally conscious. But there's only so much that you as a person can do. I think it's healthy to give a proportionate amount of attention to that and not let it take over your life because there's this other things that you have to do with your time and your attention as well. That's my approach to Twitter, it is my approach to news and stuff.

Shawn Wang: I think that's a big part of how you spend your day is, do you want to be primarily affected by things which you have no control over? You just get upset and outraged by it. Or do you want to focus? You do your part on that front, but then you spend the most of your day on things which actually you have an impact on and have a positive impact on the people that you work with. Because you're not going to change the world on your own.

Joel Hooks: Yeah, we don't scale. Neither do we.

Shawn Wang: I love the ability to have a platform, have this business where I can... education is important to me. I really like to help people. I really love to see people go from zero to hero effectively for... there's probably better ways to phrase that. The idea that I can take folks that don't even know how to program and help them into a new career in lots of different ways, right? From the Broadway where we're just broadcasting videos on the internet too, a very personal way where I'm able to engage. Help them specifically. I can't express in words right now how much that is meaningful to me. To be able to wake up. I'm not trying to change the world. I'm just making my little dance in my little corner and have a little hammer and chisel. I'm able to do my part. I think that's the best any of us can do really. Try to carve out a little piece and make it better at a scale that-

Joel Hooks: I think you have changed the world, right? You have changed the world of people who-

Shawn Wang: Everyone who has come in touch, come into contact with are good. I think that's really what the fundamental insight comes down to is that there are many worlds and everyone lives in their own world. You should not try to impose your world on other people. That's probably a bad idea. Instead, you should probably create a world where people can participate with you. That whole friend catcher mentality. You've done that, right? People who identify with your values and your inner vision and mission can join you of their own choosing in improving themselves. Getting a better job, becoming cooler. These are all really fantastic goals. The best way to change the world is not have that be your goal. That's a side effect of the thing that you really want to see in the world. The world is not going to do this on its path. I have to be the one and this is what I really want out of it. Once you have that specific ask like that, people come out of the woodwork to help you achieve that goal.

Shawn Wang: It's really amazing to see that happen. Obviously you've done it a lot more than I have, but I really like this way of living because it feels like the happiest path of not being too affected by things you can't change but just having a really positive impact on the things that you can.

Joel Hooks: It's a product of learning in public too, right? If you learn in public, if you create this space, if you share what you know and work on creating that, when you express that, when you publicly express your values or your interests, it draws in folks that also share that. Like you said, you're growing this over time and snowballing a thing. Assuming you stick with it or it works out or other people are interested. I'm sure sometimes that doesn't work out. I know for sure it does. It doesn't always work out. Sometimes it does. You get that right by continuously doing this. This process of learning, growing, sharing, building, right? In creating the universe of your reality that you want to-

Shawn Wang: I think something that's really special about tech is that you're allowed to do this and even you're encouraged to do this, right? I just got a new job which I haven't started yet, but I'm going to start, which essentially, it lets me learn in public as part of my job. That's really fantastic, but in my former career in finance, you were explicitly, even by law, not allowed to learn in public. Everything you wrote was property of your employer. It probably was read by two people who couldn't care less about what you wrote. When you leave that place, it's gone forever. Even though I was a very good writer, none of that work ever mattered.

Shawn Wang: It made some money, lots of money whenever, but it didn't stay with me. It was a property of the company. It was definitely not in public. Therefore, those years I spent writing really good stuff will never see the light of day. Whereas in tech, you're actually encouraged to share and encouraged to learn in public. I think picking the industries that let you do that helps you do so many other things that are not possible in your own personal capacity. Networking is so much easier in tech. I would never have gotten connected to someone like you in the finance world. It's very much like, did you go to school with them? No. All right. You're out of luck for the rest of your life. This is great. I think picking the right game to play is also pretty key.

Joel Hooks: What are you building now? If you're an infinite builder, what are you working on?

Shawn Wang: I definitely want to build apps one day, but right now I'm building dev tools. I am working on a couple things which are not super [inaudible 00:31:12]. I'm not really ready to talk about it yet. One thing I'm building in public is the GraphQL Bubble plugin. I really want to learn how to write about plugin because I think that is some dark magic. I picked a used case which is GraphQL, which I think is growing in popularity and I think it's going to revolutionize the way the front end talks to the backend. I said, okay, how can I make this better with bubble. I wrote a plugin because I started posting about it as I wrote about it. As I wrote it, people started chipping in and contributing ideas. People that I respect who've built stuff way more complicated have started giving advice and feedback. I think that's a really good example of how to build in public. To me, that's the next level. Actually build a thing instead of just learning and consuming all the time.

Shawn Wang: I'm also working on my VR talk which is happening in a couple of weeks. So that should be exciting. It's my first big conference. Then I'll be starting my new job, which I will announce it at some point. That's it. I am building some courses for Aiken and those are mostly beginner friendly stuff on egghead where I think there may be some demands. It probably fills out the gap so that when people come into egghead and ask for beginner level stuff. It's really embarrassing. I think you shared with me in our first chat where you don't have anything on egghead to send them, you have to send them away to three houses or whatever. I try to play games where even if no one sees it or uses it or plays with it, I still benefit because I walk away with something that is a more fundamental, valuable understanding. That's what has been for me so far.

Joel Hooks: Nice. Yeah. I don't mind sending people to tree house or some other resource that I really like, but at the same time it's like, wow.

Shawn Wang: It would be nice.

Joel Hooks: Here's the thing in our fence. But luckily, it's like you said earlier, Pluralsight exists. Treehouse exists. There's good resources out there and where I don't feel the gap. I'm like, well, maybe this is the better product or this is a better fit for you right now, but we'll be here if you need. I think that's cool. How you talked about you want to learn bubble and you're thinking about where's the best place you can do that. When people are trying to figure out what to build, I always think that's the hard part. People like what should I write about? What should I build? What should I use for an example? Do you have any process for that? Or is it just kind of looking at the scope of what exists or what your interests are?

Shawn Wang: On picking what to build?

Joel Hooks: Yeah.

Shawn Wang: I'd say just the thing that you really want to use. The thing that you really want existing. I have some apps in mine which basically I would use and if no one else uses it's fine because I would use it. Stuff like that. I think that it helps to pick an area with some popular interest, but it's still relatively early. It's good to be early on something. It's that whole be optimistic in your actions but be so stoic in your emotions kind of philosophy on that front. Just like building in general, don't be too precious about it, right? It's fine. It's going to suck. No one's gonna use your first few things. It's okay because you're going to get good at building. You're going to get good at doing the polish and writing up the documentation and practicing all of that stuff in preparation for your eventual thing that's going to take the world by storm.

Shawn Wang: That's what you should be doing now, right? As a beginner infinite builder. That's the path that I'm following as I go along. I would say a really, really good way to get started, because it's always hard for people to walk away from things like this, what's that one actionable thing to to do is when you use a library or use a framework, things are going to fall off the wayside because documentation is not good enough. Right?

Shawn Wang: Whatever you're trying to do just document what you just did and send in the PR or put up a blog post because you just did it. You are the world's most recent expert in that and that has value. At a bare minimum, I wouldn't get so good at that. Writing docs is second nature. I can pump that out as I code. I think I've gotten to a level of that where I can turnout stuff relatively quickly, and that's good for my next thing and my next thing and my next thing. It's not about like building any individual thing as about just being a really, really good builder.

Joel Hooks: Yeah. I like it. Well, thanks Shawn. Really appreciate you sitting down and chatting with us and talking about being an infinite builder. I like that concept. Hopefully people pick it up and start building.

Shawn Wang: Thank you. It's been an honor.