DEV Community: Ben Hong

Going Beyond the One Dimensional Resume

Ben Hong — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 06:14:23 +0000

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

A common question asked of children. Yet when we think about it, while it seems like a mere innocent question, the question is framed in a way that really is more accurately represented as:

"What is the one thing you want to be for a large portion of your life?"

We are more than our jobs

The truth is, we are more than our jobs. After all, in addition to working, we are often in pursuit of other things that make us unique and interesting (even if we might not think so).

In other words, though it may not seem that way at first glance, merely representing ourselves by our jobs presents us as one-dimensional. When in reality, our jobs often don't even begin to illustrate the rich tapestry that is our lives.

And though I've struggled with finding a way to illustrate this through resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and so forth, I wasn't able to do this properly until Polywork.

Show off all the cool things you do

When it comes to most professional resumes and profiles, you're often limited to singling out your job as the most important thing during a timeline. Yet, with Polywork, I'm able to show not only what my job is, but other activities as well.

This means that in addition to the standard boilerplate description of what one would expect a software engineer to have, I can illustrate other activities that make me unique such as:

Creating courses on various platforms
Speaking at conferences around the world
Teaching workshops to people of varying skill levels
Contributing to and maintaining a popular open source library

And those are just the activities related to my professional growth and development. If I had been using Polywork back in my go (i.e., baduk or weiqi) playing days, I would have loved to post all my go adventures and blog posts!

Looking towards the future

The best thing about all of this is that this is just the beginning! There are many more features that Polywork has planned and they've got a proven track record with listening to what the community needs. In fact, I've loved the work so much that I even joined as a Polynaut Advisor!

Anyhow, if you'd like to check it out, [sign up here] and use the VIP code bencodezen!

The One Where I Accidentally Ended up on a Podcast

Ben Hong — Sat, 29 Dec 2018 12:40:15 +0000

Prologue

I had just finished being a guest on my first podcast ever: My JavaScript Story #082. My nerves were pretty shot and my voice was still shaking even after I got off the call. And even though part of me was utterly terrified that the episode was going to be terrible, it was exhilarating to be able to check that off my dev bucket list.

✅ Be a guest on a dev podcast
⬜ Create a repo that earns over 1,000 stars
⬜ Get asked to be a keynote speaker at a conference
⬜ And many more...

After we had wrapped up recording, Charles had mentioned that I should sign up for a slot on the new podcast: Views on Vue. And for those that haven't followed me for long, I have been doing a lot of work with the Vue.js community and it did seem like the perfect fit. So in the midst of the excitement, I went ahead and signed up for a slot at 2:30PM in October.

Woot! I'm going to be on two podcasts before the end of the year? Sweet.

A Few Weeks Later

As I'm checking my email, I see a reminder from DevChatTV that my session is coming up in a couple of weeks and I should be ready with a topic and such. And even though this should not have been a huge surprise to me, all of a sudden I start panicking. For some reason I was under the impression that the topic would already be decided and I'd contribute the best I could as a guest panelist. But whoa, I have to choose the topic and lead the episode?

At this point, my inner self-doubt demon is going full force:

"But I'm not an expert at anything!"
"How could I stand on equal ground with these panelist I look up to and respect?"
"What if I say something stupid and the whole community shuns me after?!"

So I rationalized to myself that I simply wasn't ready and would schedule another slot when I felt I was "more qualified." With that, I declined the calendar invite and moved on with my work at the time.

The Day of Reckoning

It is Wednesday morning and my schedule is looking pretty clear. I'm thinking it'll be a quiet day where I can focus and get some work done. And for those that don't know me, I'm pretty diligent about my calendar and use it as my single source of truth for plans. So you can imagine my shock when I receive the following email at 1:41PM.

Hi Benjamin-

All of us except for John Papa are at Framework Summit in Park City, Utah. We may join a few minutes late and will all be recording from one computer. We'll see how it goes. I ask that you be a little patient while we join the call.

Remember now. The call was originally scheduled for 2:30PM, so I have less than hour to prepare for a call that I thought I cancelled out of sheer fear. And I would be lying if I said that I did not consider simply replying to the email informing them that I had cancelled.

However, at this point, the rational side of brain realized the following:

Multiple people had set aside time on this day, so cancelling would be a jerk move
Even though there wasn't much time, there was still time to prepare
Any doubts I was having were evidence of imposter syndrome and I needed to get over myself

And believe it or not, with less than an hour to go, I got ready and we ended up recording View on Vues #037: Vuex, VuePress, and Nuxt with Benjamin Hong!

Aftermath

While it was absolutely terrifying in the moment, I am actually really grateful that the cancellation never went through. And it's not because I got to record an episode on "View on Vues," but because it shocked me out of my self-doubts. More importantly, it was yet another reminder of how things are almost always worse in your head than in reality.

And so if you ever find yourself doubting whether you deserve to be on a podcast, remember this story and know that you absolutely deserve to be on a podcast too. Because at the end of the day, podcasts are about a group of people getting together to chat about a topic they're passionate about. As long as you're interested in the topic being discussed, that's all you need.

This post was originally published on https://www.bencodezen.io on December 27th, 2018.

Progress Over Perfection

Ben Hong — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 13:40:49 +0000

For those that have been following me for some time, this is approximately attempt #8 at establishing a solid writing ritual for my coding life. And while there's a part of me that feels ashamed of that fact, the fact this is yet another attempt at something I been failing at over the last two years encapsulates the essence of tonight's post.

Obstacles I Have Encountered

For each visible attempt you see here where I failed to establish a proper blogging habit, there were so many more false starts than I could possibly count. And while there are a number of reasons my efforts kept falling short, here are some of the biggest obstacles I encountered:

Fear of criticism: I was (and still am) concerned with the idea that I might write something that would draw criticism from the community or my peers. It is so easy for people to take things out of context these days and so many jump to conclusions without understanding the whole picture.
Someone else wrote about it: Every time I came up with a concept, I would see an article with a similar title or concept and give up on the idea since I felt like people would say that I copied that article or that I wasn't original.
But I need X feature on the site: The idea that my blog would be seen by my peers often paralyzed me because I was concerned it would be judged for:
- Design aesthetics
- Performance
- Accessibility
- Technical Architecture
- Frontend Specialty I am not an expert in

The obstacles I mentioned above are just three of the biggest ones that come to mind. Before I move on to how I deal with them, I want to emphasize that I still deal with it today. The battle for me is far from over.

Techniques to Deal with Those Obstacles

These techniques are by no means bulletproof, but I hope that they help to serve as a beacon of light in the event you are dealing with similar issues.

The concept of being "original" doesn't really exist. If you think about it from the perspective of writing a book, every story contains some element of some other book or story that existed at some point in the past.
What matters is your perspective. The one thing that is original and unique is you. And even though a concept may have been explained a hundred different ways, what you have to remember is that your way could resonate with an entirely different audience.
Remember the importance of zero to one. For those haven't read the book "Zero to One", the short version is that the impact of going from zero to one is incomparable to any other growth you could have. And so when you're faced with feature paralysis, the most important thing is to get your ideas out there. You can iterate on the rest as time goes on, but if your blog never goes up, there is zero chance that people can read your ideas.

And since I am still formalizing my techniques for dealing with the fear of criticism, I would just start by recommending that you turn off commenting on your blog posts. This has a number of benefits:

Comments on blog posts are hard to implement and those that are fairly easy to integrate like Disqus has some questionable tracking tactics that make me less than comfortable with subjecting my readers to.
You don't have to manage comments and random bots from spamming your comments
You avoid the trolls who want to hide behind their screens rather than engage you in meaningful conversation

Welcome to My Sketchbook

I believe I've written about this in some capacity before, but as Dave Rupert aptly put it, blogs are best treated as a "draft" folder. With the incredible amount of noise that we deal with, it's easy to feel like blog posts should be these perfectly edited articles that could be submitted for a Pulitzer Prize.

Maybe there are some who want to create the perfect blog, but speaking from personal experience, it usually leads to disappointment and frustration. Writing in itself is already difficult for most people, so to put pressure onto yourself to write magnificent works of art usually stops the idea from ever coming to fruition.

Frankly, I'm tired of having my ideas being killed off by the pursuit of some ideal version of the blog post. So I'm just going to follow my instinct and write as I'm inspired to. This means that:

There will probably be grammatical mistakes. And if there are, feel free to let me know! I welcome that kind of feedback since I would like to get better at writing!
Sometimes ideas will be half-baked. Similar to how an artist has a sketchbook for concepts that may one day become real works of art, treat the blog section of my site as my sketchbook.

And while there are some who may go on to write award-winning blog articles, what we have to remember is that practically no one ever starts there. So as a reminder more for myself than you, remember that:

The act of writing is more important than writing the perfect article

There will be a time and place for me to curate polished articles and tutorials, but this will not be the space for this. This is my place to write freely and share ideas. Looking forward to having you on this journey with me.

Cheers! 🥂