The Tech Equivalent of Leg Day
Don’t Skip the Angular Experience Podcast @NgXP_Show
You ever heard the phrase, “Don’t skip leg day” and thought yeah, I really shouldn’t skip leg day? I’m referring to the day of the week when you focus on strengthening your many leg muscles through vigorous and often-times grueling exercise. Why do people skip leg day? Because our ideal body images are usually more focused on sculpting our upper bodies and trimming unwanted fat.
I’m really not an athletic person, yet I still try to keep healthy by eating right and exercising regularly. So please join me in pondering this short analogy for what Medium tells me is approximately 4 minutes of reading.
Listening to NgXP is Like Exercising Your Legs
If you skip leg day yet continue to work out your upper body and your core, you’ll have a weak foundation to stand upon. Your legs are like your tech-adjacent intelligence, and not just the soft skills — though those are crucial too! What I mean by tech-adjacent intelligence is the knowledge and abilities that some people at work have that make them excel in their career when paired with — or even in the absence of — shear technical intelligence.
Technical intelligence includes skills and knowledge that make you better at completing the technical tasks you accomplish on a daily basis. For some, that’s the code you write or the clusters you configure. If you’re like me, it might be all of the planning and strategy work you do to help advance the company’s goals. Sometimes it feels like an ocean of confluence/quip/word documents paired with a sky full of Jira tickets.
Either way, focusing on technical intelligence alone is a recipe for a mediocre career boost at best. Sadly, it’s often not until decades into your chosen career where you discover that fact. I’m a software engineer by trade, and I see a ton of value in letting all of you readers in on a little secret: your technical savvy can take you far, but it can only take you so far.
I repeat: technical savvy will only get you so far!
Technical-adjacent Intelligence is a handy little term encompassing the things that don’t get talked about and taught but are just as crucial to your career. Why doesn’t it get talked about? I honestly don’t think most folks are trying to keep it secret — though there may be some of that going around. I think it’s primarily because this kind of intelligence can’t be grokked in the same way as the technical skills you’ve been cultivating your entire career. These skills are only learned through story-telling by people who’ve been there before you. The stories of powerful and experienced individuals are the curriculum for greater success.
The main obstacle for you hearing these stories? It’s good ole Father Time! Highly successful individuals don’t have time to go sharing their stories with you all the time. Besides that, there is a serious lack of motivation for them to do so. There are, however, some generous thought leaders who have a lot they want to share with the each of us, yet due to time constraints, they must resolve to mentor us at scale.
What do I mean by mentoring at scale? It’s pretty straightforward actually! I can mentor one person at a time with the amount of free time remaining to me. However, it usually takes several months, or even years, to successfully mentor someone on how to become a software developer. So successful mentors for many people find ways to help a lot of people at once. The ways that they do this are through social media, videos, audio, and text such as this article. Not to say that I’m a successful thought leader, though I have successfully mentored people on a 1-on-1 basis several times. I have also taught people at scale before.
Here’s the deal, I’m offering free mentorship at scale here and I’m not doing it alone. I’ve recently launched a new podcast with my Co-Producer Brooke Avery! We are providing a platform for renowned voices from the Angular Community to mentor us all at scale. We ask questions that go well beyond the technical and help you understand these figures in new and much more personal ways. There are a thousand and one podcasts that attempt to teach you the technical skills and knowledge to be successful at your job. We are the first podcast in the Angular Community to focus 100% on the secrets beyond the technical, the technical-adjacent intelligence.
Our guests have included John Papa, Deborah Kurata, Jeff Cross, Sam Julien, Alyssa Nicoll, several members of the Angular team past and present and so many more. We don’t restrict ourselves to interviewing just the giants in the Angular Community, we also invite lesser-known guests and rising stars. Brooke and I are the embarrassingly unknown engineers who interview everyone we think has a powerful message or story you might want to hear or need to hear — even if you don’t realize it yet!
Subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts and more. Give us and our guests your attention and come see what you might be missing to give you that leg up in your career! Not sure if you can spare the time? Then don’t! Listen while you do your weekly chores. We drop a new episode every single Monday.
Now that you’ve read this article and learned a thing or two (or ten!), let’s kick things up another notch!
Take your skills to a whole new level by joining us in person for the world’s first MAJOR Angular conference in over 2 years! Not only will You be hearing from some of the industry’s foremost experts in Angular (including the Angular team themselves!), but you’ll also get access to:
- Expert panels and Q&A sessions with the speakers
- A friendly Hallway Track where you can network with 1,500 of your fellow Angular developers, sponsors, and speakers alike.
- Hands-on workshops
- Games, prizes, live entertainment, and be able to engage with them and a party you’ll never forget
We’ll see you there this August 29th-Sept 2nd, 2022. Online-only tickets are available as well.
