Shawn @swyx Wang

I do a bunch of personal and work-related writing, and recently published The Coding Career Handbook with the best of my nontechnical writing.

• Learn in Public: My most impactful essay, read by millions.
• How to Create Luck: Luck is random, but creating luck is a skill.
• Third Age of JavaScript: Documenting the changing of the guard in JavaScript.
• The Light and Dark Side of the API Economy: Economics, tech & society.
• Eating the Cloud from Outside In: AWS plays Chess, Cloudflare plays Go.
• The Part Time Creator Manifesto: Have a job, but don’t BE your job.
• Temporal - the iPhone of System Design: Why Temporal is a big deal.
• The Rise of the AI Engineer: Why AI Engineering will be come its own, possibly larger, discipline in contrast to ML Researchers/ML Engineers.
• About: My personal story, README , and podcast with Quincy Larson (2023 update now available!).

You can find all my writing on RSS or on the /ideas page.

I have done a bunch of talks and podcast appearances. There are different eras:

The modern era:

• The Operating System of You: The last chapter of my book, in talk form, as a closing keynote at CascadiaJS Confernce
• Paradigm Lost: My career covering the 4 most interesting trends in tech: Local-first, Async programming, Data Engineering, and AI Engineering.
• Mapping Developer Experience: a talk I did with Silas Sao of DataStax on how I think about devrel/devtools startups.

The JS/Beginner Era:

• Getting Closure on Hooks: My most well received technical talk, where I explain a mental model for React hooks by livecoding a React clone at JSConf Asia. Started as a tweet, then a blogpost.
• Why React is not Reactive: My first conference talk ever was at the biggest React venue in the world, React Rally. I spent a month writing my CFP on the most interesting React question I could think of.
• Contributing to React: My first meetup talk ever was at React NYC - this was accepted on to the React docs as a guide for other contributors!
• Learn In Public: My first verbal exposition on the Learn In Public philosophy. Video is frozen at the end, sorry.
• I Can Babel Macros and So Can You! (the Moana talk): My first JSConf appearance ever, at one of the most competitive JSConfs ever. This talk is where I first started experimenting with theming talks, and it came out really well with the Moana theme.

More of my speaking on the /ideas page.