RWDevCon Inspiration Talk – Contributing by Ryan Nystrom

You Can Do It! – Writing

Let’s start with writing.

I’m going to preface with writing is super hard. It’s easy to just spew out words and fill up a page, but it’s really hard to actually write something and communicate effectively.

As engineers and developers, we’re stereotyped as introverts. We might be really logical with our brains but we might not be so eloquent with our words.

But think about how many emails you send, think about how many estimates or quotes you fill out, or how many times you have to explain to your manager, “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

Writing and practicing writing helps you communicate better.

A Writing Example

As an example, for me in my day-to-day work, if I run across something interesting, I usually will copy and paste some notes and keep moving on.

I’ll return to those notes and maybe put something … Maybe something will stand out and I’ll think, “You know, I should probably share that. That’s kind of interesting.” I’ll turn it into an outline and then I’ll eventually write it out as a real blog post.

For instance, when I was working on AsyncDisplayKit at Facebook, we ran into this really weird NSURLSessionTask issue, sort of like a iOS 7, iOS 8 compatibility thing. It’s really weird. The debugger had this in the output when I was done and fixed it.

I thought it was interesting. It was like a little weird class hierarchy difference between iOS 7 and iOS 8. Threw it into Day One, the app I use to take notes, and then I just moved on.

A week or 2 later, I came back to it. I saw this again and I was like, “Man, that was kind of cool.” This was useful. I whipped together a really simple outline and then after looking at that, I filled out all the bullet points into paragraphs and I published a blog post:

Attribution: whoisryannystrom.com

It’s not the most perfect blog post. It’s not even that super interesting, but it was kind of cool. A couple of people reached out and said, “Hey, thanks. That’s pretty neat.”

My process isn’t perfect, but it’s simple. If you decide to start writing, whatever process you use should be really simple too.

You Can Do It! – Tweeting

If writing is a little bit intimidating because filling up blog posts with words is kind of a lot and takes a lot of work, I want to tell you about this awesome place that limits everything that you say to just 140 characters.

Twitter’s awesome! I love Twitter. I can immediately get in touch with peers in my industry, chat, talk about new tools or trends.

I can find out about new conferences or upcoming conferences or when tickets go on sale, except not WWDC. If you use Twitter for WWDC, they’re already sold out. :P

Sometimes I’ll find out that somebody’s nearby and I’ll just invite them to grab a beer, or other sort of tools and technologies when they come out.

You Can Do It! – Stack Overflow

There’s other online communities too. I don’t know if you guys have heard of this one, but Stack Overflow is an awesome place. I’m sure that we’ve used it to just Google answers and that’s great, but the community, the online community here, is kind of awesome.

If you’re really good at answering questions, if you’re thorough, you can actually build a reputation, and I’m not talking like vanity internet points. I’m talking about being The Core Data Guy and that’s pretty cool.

Honestly, if you’ve never sifted through some of the unanswered questions on Stack Overflow, you should, because they’re all a bunch of 5,000 piece puzzles and all I want to do is solve them. If you’re a puzzle solver, get on here.

You Can Do It! – Conference Speaking

If you like actually talking to somebody or you’re stuck behind a computer too often, there’s what I’m doing, actually speaking.

Again, engineers and introverts and all that stuff, maybe we’re not that good at speaking, but I never liked getting up in front of people and speaking myself. It took me a while.

I started really small. At my last company, there’d be a group of four or five people, non-technical people, that were interested in iOS. They just want to learn how Apple works, how the App Store works, so I put together a 10 slide presentation and gave it to them.

I got interested in doing that and eventually moved on to meetup groups, where there’d be a group of industry peers. I would give my presentation to them and be able to get some really good, critical feedback.

Moving on from that, I decided to get in touch with some small conferences. I’m sure Ray can attest that conference organizers are probably a little bit busy, so when you reach out to them, you might not hear back immediately. Sometimes you might not be able to get a spot, but be persistent, build a relationship, and eventually you’ll be invited out to speak.

If you really need help with speaking and you want to be doing this, I can’t recommend this group enough. It’s a meetup group called Toastmasters.

They don’t really care about what you’re talking about. They’re just there to help you get better at talking and putting together presentations.

Speaking of meetups, there’s meetup.com. You can go on here, search for interests, and find local meetup groups. Usually they’re professionals and hobbyists that get together, really non-committal.

This is a picture of me with some of the guys from Ohio at 360|iDev last year.

I still keep in touch with these guys. I went to NSCoder and a CocoaHeads meetup group. It’s awesome, really good friends. I love just showing up and getting into arguments about Interface Builder versus code.

Sometimes I’ll bring my laptop and be like, “I can’t figure out this bug. I need some help,” or “Hey, I’ve made this really sweet animation.” Somebody will look at it.

One of the things I loved the most was inviting or introducing new people, either new to the area or new to iOS and getting them up to speed, because there’s nothing like face-to-face interaction.