There Aren't Any Shortcuts To Expertise With Sara Vieira

Kent C. Dodds: Hello friends, this is your friend, Kent C. Dodds and I am joined by my friend Sara Vieira. Say hi Sara.

Sara Vieira: Hi everyone.

Kent C. Dodds: So Sara's coming at us from Portugal. Super excited to chat with her. She is a fabulous person to interact with, whether- actually have we, we haven't met in person, have we?

Sara Vieira: No, I was a [inaudible 00:00:21] . The only time you came to Europe.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, that's, yeah, that was a bummer. I did come to Europe actually it was Amsterdam again like four years ago for an Angular JS conference. That was cool. But yeah, so I've only been in Europe twice. But anyway, hopefully one day we'll meet in person.

Sara Vieira: Yeah.

Kent C. Dodds: But interacting online it has been a pleasure and so I'm excited to chat with you today. One of the things that I really like about Sara is how she is very down to earth and practical and not willing to put up with fake people, I guess. It just really, I dunno, really enjoyable and yeah, down to earth I guess is a way to say that. So anyway, Sara, I'd like you to introduce yourself a little bit for people who don't know you. You don't have to tell us all about your developer career. If you don't want to, you can give us a little more who you are as a person, who you see yourself as. So can you give us a little intro to yourself?

Sara Vieira: Sure. So my name is Sara, as you said, I am a developer, a code sandbox. I live in Berlin for the past six months. I come from Portugal. There's only 10 million of us, so we got to enjoy every single one of this that we have. Yeah. What are those weird people that when we meet someone else from Portugal industry, we're like, oh my God. Oh my God. It's like there's like 10 of us. It's adorable. First of all, stuff I am really into horrible movies. I really like them for some godforsaken reason. I think it's because I've always liked horror and thriller movies, but most of them aren't crap. So I've watched so many crap movies that now I actually enjoyed them because of trying to watch good like thriller movies. I also play drums. And I don't know.

Kent C. Dodds: That's awesome.

Sara Vieira: Yeah. Thank you.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah. So all cool stuff. So how long have you been into the drums? Is that like a recent thing or have you always been into drums?

Sara Vieira: Well, actually I started learning when I was about, I think I was 16 and then when I moved to London about two years ago, I stopped and then bought a drum kit when I settled back here again. Yeah, I started learning when I was 16. I remember that I had to because my mom was like, that's not a girl thing, only boys play drums. And she was like, you have to tell me three girl drum players and to this day, do you remember Mika, that songwriter?

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Sara Vieira: Yeah. So like his songs were not really my style, but his drummer was a girl. So to this day, I thank Mika because he was the third, and my mom allowed me to play the drums.

Kent C. Dodds: You could have just said, you know what mom, I will be the third.

Sara Vieira: That didn't work for her.

Kent C. Dodds: No, no.

Sara Vieira: I was already in football and stuff like that and she was just like going down a slippery slope there Sara.

Kent C. Dodds: Well, I'm glad that you, you do what you want and I find that it's actually interesting, like lots of developers have some connection to music and there's gotta be something there between music and software programming because yeah, lots of people that I talked to have some like tangential connection to creating music, which is cool.

Sara Vieira: Yeah, I've actually heard of a lot of people that say that developers are usually just failed musicians. Jason Lengstorf, the developer of the [inaudible 00:03:58] Gatsby actually had an emo band back in the day. Which is honestly not bad because I-

Kent C. Dodds: That does not surprise me at all.

Sara Vieira: At all. But you need to look at this. I forgot the name. I will look it up on Spotify as I speak, but, and I have a friend of mine who used to be a hip hop artist. She's spoken React Amsterdam even. Elizabeth. She used to, she was actually signed by Sony or something. She actually used to be like...

Kent C. Dodds: She performed on stage at React Amsterdam. Her talk was awesome. It was very, very cool. She did like this a freestyle thing. It was very cool.

Sara Vieira: Yeah, but it was in Portuguese, I think it was, Ryan. Was it in English.

Kent C. Dodds: I'm pretty sure it was Portuguese. Yeah. So it was pretty cool. Cool. So I, I'm excited to chat with you about a couple of things we talked about in before the show started, what we want to kind of communicate to the audience. And one of those things that we kind of talked about a little bit was how easy it is to build software. Like so easy, like I don't know why people have a hard time and complain. Is that accurate, Sara?

Sara Vieira: Yes. I feel like you just really just need to install, create reactor and everything is fixed for you. I think this is mostly the people who grew up in harder times of software, who now... they can't, for their sake they can't understand that things may be hard for other people. And so we get a lot of people being like, you should just use Gatsby. It's super easy to do things with Gatsby. But it's not. Like it is easy if you have experience with React and Graph QL and I'm really like configs and it's just a bunch of stuff that you need to know beforehand, before Gatsby's easy. And I feel like there's this huge problem in like at the front end community, I'm not sure about the rest of the communities, where we diminish things and like we take the accomplishment out of learning something of people because that thing was always supposed to be easy. So people aren't actually as proud as they used to be to actually learn something because people are like, oh, you only learnt this now. Oh, I've known this for three years and I'm like, okay, cool. That's cool for you. Can you shut up now? That'd be great. Can you stop being.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah-

Sara Vieira: Damn it, I was like trying to look for a word, but I couldn't find any. That wasn't a curse word, Kent.

Kent C. Dodds: You're good. I totally agree with you. I think that it's like especially for these people who were working in software when things were legitimately like quite hard. I think that it's pretty, I guess easy for them to think that, oh wow. Like we've got it so easy now. Can you imagine like implementing code splitting before Webpack? Like are you kidding me? But like it's not easy to learn software at all. Like from the very beginning you have a lot of things and knowledge that you have to accumulate before you even could even have code splitting explained to you effectively. As, just as an example. And I love what you said about how like calling something easy kind of diminishes people's accomplishment at learning something new, which is not a nice thing. And it also, it demotivates people from learning the things that they want to learn. So I appreciate that you shared that.

Sara Vieira: There's also one thing they said about code splitting actually when we think that sometimes the analogies that people make don't really make a lot of sense because someone can come to us and be like, oh, imagine how hard it would be to implement code splitting 10 years ago. And you'd be like, you would all of you have JQuery 10 years ago, you would not need code splitting. Your entire app would have been PHP or Java. It will not have been... Java script. I mean you could have tried, but there was no point to it. But it's so much easier now. Just exists now because of necessity. And I feel like that is, I like, I've worked through the JQuery slums and I honestly, to this day I love JQuery because when JQuery said he would do something, you would just do it. It wouldn't lie to me. It wouldn't be, it wouldn't be weird about things. He would slide down and the thing would slide down and that would be it. It would install a plugin and it would work, sometimes. But I think the main issue is just that, is that we make assumptions that are not good. And we also sometimes make assumptions, for example, that if you know, React or Redox, which is just an example, but it's very, they're very coupled together. And if you put me in front of a Redox app right now, I haven't touched Redox in a long time. I won't know it, probably. I know how to use that and we should just try it and see where people have limitations or don't have limitations instead of sometimes assuming that if you know one thing, you will probably know the other. hDoes that make sense?

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's something to be said too, for like sometimes people will say, hey, I released this new library and it's super easy to use. What they mean instead of easy is actually familiar and so maybe it's easy for you because you've used libraries like this in the past, but it's not easy for me because I know nothing about observables or generators or whatever it is that this thing is. And so like, no, it's not easy. It's just familiar.

Sara Vieira: Yeah. One of the examples that I have is that I've never done a lot of animations that have not been with CSS, and now I'm doing the animation for the new front, for the new homepage of code sandbox, and I'm using G SAP, Yay. And G SAP is supposed to be the easiest one and I'm still staring at my computer like, what the hell am I doing? I have no idea what's going on. It doesn't mean that that one is hard, but I don't know any other ones. So to me it's all new and I'm just like, what?

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah.

Sara Vieira: I do not understand what this means.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, for real animations for me is like something that's way like I really struggle with.

Sara Vieira: Oh yeah.

Kent C. Dodds: Good luck with that.

Sara Vieira: Where is Sara Drasner when we need Sara Drasner?

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, for real. Like she doesn't meet your new website and that animation on the homepage. I think it's Sara.Dov. Yeah, like for real and it is outrageously cool.

Sara Vieira: Let me see. I haven't seen that.

Kent C. Dodds: She's an amazing person, and her animations they're just out of this world. Very cool.

Sara Vieira: See. I would not, I didn't... I don't even know how to start with this.

Kent C. Dodds: I know. It's crazy.

Sara Vieira: It's just one of those things that I'm like, that looks so cool. If I were to do this, I would do it. I don't know how. Yeah. Yeah. Is this actual text? Oh my God. If you, oh my God. This is so cool.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah.

Sara Vieira: I have no idea.

Kent C. Dodds: You hover over it and it like blasts out. It's outrageously cool. So yeah, like, and for Sara, like I'm going to guess that for Sara, that that took a fair amount of time. I'll just say that because it makes me feel better. But she's been doing this for a long time. And so I imagine that like it was relatively easy. Like, if I were to try that, it would be impossible. But I think that if I put as much. Actually this kind of works for me as an analogy. Like I remember hearing this story of this really famous piano player who was just like super, super good, been playing, you know, traveling and stuff. And somebody came to them and said, you know what, I would give like my life, like 10 years of my life or 20 years of my life to play as good as you play at the piano. And the piano player said, well, I did do that. I did give 20 years of my life so that I could be good at this. And I think that's the same for, like lots of people are really good at things is they just put in the time. And so like whether for musicians they're practicing a lot, for software developers who are really like build awesome animations or are able to create really cool APIs or whatever it is. It's because they've just, they've done it a lot. I don't think that there's anybody who just gets a special gene and they magically are super good at software development. I think everybody has to put in the time and build stuff.

Sara Vieira: I don't think there's a talent for software developments. I feel like most of it is like if you asked me to do something simple, I'm doing quotes but there's no video with a podcast, like a simple React app, I could maybe take 30 minutes and that's not because I have a talent because I have made a lot of React apps and if you tell me you need to make this Angular app, I would probably take the same app. I would take like three hours, because I've never used it because I put a long time on trying to learn the APIs of React and not a long time into learning the APIs of Angular. Think if you would stand right there in the middle, it took me like an hour. This also reminds me of a thing which is a, that you hire like an electrician to come to your house or something because something is broken and they charge you like a hundred dollars to fix, to just unplug a cable or something, and you ask them, "why are you changing me $100 to unplug a cable?" And you're like, okay, so $5 just for the cable and 95 is for all of the time that I had to spend to know which cable to unplug and I feel like it's the exact same thing. I think most of the biggest issues that I fixed over my life in code, I've been one line of code. One line of code makes everything work and it's not a talent, it's just staring at it, a lot of computers for a long time.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah. For real. I think there is really no shortcut to experience. It just comes naturally as you, yeah, as you work on it a lot. And actually your electrician story kind of reminds me of my talk at React Amsterdam. I told a story about how we had a faucet that was not working properly. Like the head would come out of the neck so that you could like direct the water where you want it to go and then it would automatically go back into the head. You're just like, oh it goes back into then. Well it stops going back into the head automatically and that was super annoying. You had to like help it go back up and we called a plumber, cause this was a brand faucet it, we'd never had this faucet before, we called a plumber in. And they were going to come and the day that they were going to come I was like, why is this not working? So I looked under the under the hood and there's this a hose that goes, you know, from the neck into like, you know, our plumbing or whatever and the hose has a weight on it and that weight pulls the head back into the neck. And it was, the hose was just twisted up and so the weight couldn't pull it down and so I just untwisted it and then boom, everything's working again and I saved myself like 50 bucks or something and, and like a crazy amount of embarrassment cause it was really easy to fix. But the reason I bring that up is because I think the things that we look at and we think they are really hard. Yes, it might take you a lot of time and some patience to get into it, but when you dig into it and take the time, you find out that it's not magic, it's just code. And when you dive into it and start to work with the abstractions that you're using, then it becomes more natural to you in it and it becomes familiar. And so you're able to use those kinds of abstractions more effectively.

Sara Vieira: That was, I think literally what happened to me when I started working on code sandbox as into me was completely magic. It was like the visual studio code part is still magic to me. But all of the fact that that app entirely existed was magic. And then I started looking at it and I was just like, oh, it's just one big eval. Everything is a form. And that's about it. And it's just a bunch of state, like every single app, but it's just bigger. And I think it's important that we look behind the magic. Yeah.

Kent C. Dodds: So one of the things that I like about kind of where our conversation has gone is how like building things is where you're going to get that experience. Like taking the time to dig into code sandbox or you know, spending the time so that you know what the one line of code change needs to be. And you build a lot of really interesting things kind of just for fun as well as like, you know, now you're working on code sandbox, so legit app that has changed my life in wonderful ways. So like not everybody can can just wake up in the morning and say, hey, I want to build code sandbox. Lots of the things that we get lots of pleasure and value out of are these kind of silly apps that we can build or simple things that we can create to make our lives a little easier. So one question that I get a lot cause I tell people, you know, build things. That's how you get your experience a lot. But I always get this question, how do I know what to build? And so as a purveyor of building many things, Sara, what advice would you give to people who want to just build stuff but they don't like they have a hard time finding ideas of what to build?

Sara Vieira: One of the things that I used a lot was this public list by Todd Motto, the our Anglo God. He has a list of public APIs, which most of them don't actually require authentication. And a good thing is that you will get, if you're just like public API get hub. I think you'll be the first one that shows up. So huge list of public APIs. Most of them don't require authentication. And the good thing about this, is that you'll get experienced with async javascript, which let's be honest, most javascript will continue to go into the direction of being async. So it's good that you get experienced with that and you also build something and there's always, one thing that I've realized, there's always some little thing that annoys you about something about just general life that you can probably fix in a weekend. Also build small things. One thing that before I started really making a lot of stuff, I would actually start making a lot of stuff, but I would never finish it. So I told myself that I only build things that would take a max of a weekend, not including nights. So it would be a Max of like 10 to 12 hours. So that way I could sit down and build the thing and get it, get it done with, instead of trying to build a huge thing, then never actually getting it accomplished. So I actually learned a lot by just making small things. Also just things that, for example, a really random thing about Portugal that is actually always, doesn't make it, and I will tell you the thing and you'll be like, that doesn't make any sense. And I'll be like, yes. So the open website is blocked, the app is not, but the website is, and Uber is legal. So there is Uber, it's completely legal, but the app is not blocked. But on Vodafone, which is a very common operator in Europe, the west side is blocked, which doesn't make any sense. Yeah. But the thing is, this was last year when I still lived in Port- this is still blocked. If I tried to access it on my mobile data, it still doesn't work. But last year when I traveled a lot, I kept searching if there's Uber somewhere and I couldn't check the website because it was blocked, which was just very frustrating. So once I went to, I don't even know where, I crawled the Uber website and I downloaded a JSON file and put it on the Internet and made a website called is there Uber in? And then you type of city. And you will tell you if there's Uber in that city without having to go to the API of, they have no API for this without having to go to Uber because I couldn't do it because the Uber website was blocked. So now we also had like Cabify and Lyft and a lot of others. But I also, that's how I learned how to scrape websites.

Kent C. Dodds: Hmm.

Sara Vieira: So that's good. Yeah. And like there's also always small things that you can go around it. I mean don't break the law. In this case, I'm not accessing the Uber website. In this case it's also stupid, but like don't find a way to watch illegal TV shows. But if there's something that you're like, I could fix this with just two hours. Try and fix that, because you will get a way huger boost out of doing that because it will also help yourself. And then just tell some friends, try to make it better over time. Posted on product hunt and weirdly enough, you don't have to have a huge app to put some product on. That app was on product hunt and it was like number three or four of the day, you can actually post small things on product hunt. Yeah. And you get like really good feedback from that, which is really nice.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah. You know the interesting thing about like cool products is how successful a product is, has nothing to do with how big that particular solution is and has everything to do with the amount of value that solution provides to the world. And the amount of value does not necessarily only correlate to the size of the solution.

Sara Vieira: And the money of the solution. I never made any money from this. But if you think about it, it's hosted on Netlify. I also don't pay anything for this.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah. Thank you. Netlify.

Sara Vieira: Thank you Netlify gods.

Kent C. Dodds: I love Netlify.

Sara Vieira: They're amazing.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah. So I think that's great advice, especially in the build small things. Cause I often find myself having ambitious ideas and exciting, you know, ideas for products that I want to build. And I, yeah, I definitely lose motivation after a little while, when it takes a long time to build and I got to move on to other stuff. But especially like if somebody wanted to learn green sock or something like that, then to do animations and they could do, I don't dunno, you could make a simple app that is like an index of you know, MDN articles or something, you know, something that's just totally not the, it's not technically hard to build and you just over-complicate one aspect of it for the purpose of learning that thing.

Sara Vieira: Also I think one good idea-

Kent C. Dodds: So I'm going to-

Sara Vieira: Sorry. I think one thing that I've started doing is to get huge tables out of Wikepedia. You get that you're stable, you make it into a JSON and you provided an offensive form to people and people get amazed by that. So I got a huge table at a competed that was just all the TLDs that exist in the world, made it into a website and made it like way nicer than Wikipedia for example. And you learn a lot by doing it. You just overcomplicate that JSON File, I think is honestly a good way of learning things is you get a JSON file and you're like, how can I make this super hard?

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah. And especially like it'd be... the nice thing about that too is you don't have to worry about a whole bunch of, you know, like giant architectural decisions for how am I going to build the app? How am I gonna structure the files?

Sara Vieira: What data am I going to use?

Kent C. Dodds: How am I gonna you know, whatever. I was like, what babble plugins do I need to include? Yeah, just take something really simple and then think about what is the thing I want to learn and over-complicate apart of simple thing so that you can learn that. Yeah.

Sara Vieira: Also, if you want to use a database, and if you want to be real fast, I will suggest a table.

Kent C. Dodds: Oh yeah, yeah. I used it. I tried to use it for something, didn't really work out, but I was very impressed. It's very, very cool.

Sara Vieira: Yeah. It's actually a pretty, their API is pretty decent. You can also do it by just [inaudible 00:24:04] instead of using their actual javascript API which is still callback based, so you can just use like normal axes or [inaudible 00:24:11] and you can just put things and get things and if you want a simple database just want to list of stuff and you want people to be able to add to that list of stuff. It's actually way nicer than having to set up your own database. I think. That's my opinion of what I used. For example, we use air table on [inaudible 00:24:32] but we use air table for the feedback form that we have, and there was a time when we only supported site one that we weren't sure how many people actually use. Site two we had a thing that said like for now we only support sites one. If you would like us to support site two please with the button below and that would basically just put your username or the timestamp, if you were not signed in, into an air table, it would count the number of records and tell you 271 people one side two. And when he reached like 300 I was like, okay, I guess I need to do this now. But it's also a nice way to get feedback from people is just to use an air table to do that.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, for sure.

Sara Vieira: You're looking confusion.

Kent C. Dodds: No, no, that makes total sense. Yeah. Air Table is is nice and definitely anything is better than setting up your own database. So for real, I mean maybe we've got some people-

Sara Vieira: Because you can't employ that on Netlify yet.

Kent C. Dodds: That is so true. Maybe that's why, you know what, I actually was using Hasura the other day to set up my own graph QL database and I was very impressed, really easy to set it up on Heroku. Just click a couple buttons and boom, I'm there and I've got this graph QL endpoints.

Sara Vieira: Super Nice.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, it was, I was pretty pleased with that. So anyway.

Sara Vieira: It's like the web is moving towards the button directly. There was like a long time where it was like, we made a CLI, and now it's moving towards let's just make a button.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah. For real.

Sara Vieira: And I'm like, oh my God, God bless. It's great.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah. For real. I think that that's maybe part of the familiar easy thing too is like people are like, oh yeah, I use the gets CLI all the time and it's way easy. I don't know why people don't `use that. Well yeah, maybe it's easy because you've been using it for like multiple years, but some people really want to have a UI because they don't even know what's possible. And, and the man page isn't isn't enough for them to, to figure out like what's the difference between fetch and pole and you know, and rebates and all of that stuff where if you just have a UI just simplifies things a lot. Which actually, like quite honestly, most of our jobs as software developers is a spreadsheet into a UI to make things easier.

Sara Vieira: Get that JSON file and make it real fancy.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah.

Sara Vieira: I had this guy in one of my workshops that it was doing good pole and good fetch like without touching the command line and it said like, I just don't need the command line. I NPM install and everything out of my the other windows computer. And I was just amazed by that. I was like, I sat down, I was like, I want to see how you do this because I feel forced to use the terminal sign on. I have anything against the terminal but it never uses it. And I find that amazing how people like... he was about my age. How people of the same age actually turned out in a completely different paths and end up doing the same thing.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah. For real. So as we come down on our time here, Sara, I just want to bring up a couple other things and then we can wrap up. So on every episode we like to have a call to action for folks to improve themselves personally or professionally. So we talked about this and our call to action for you all audience is build something new, using something new. So Sara, you mentioned using spelt three, which is kind of an interesting kind of newer framework as a compiler type thing. It's pretty cool. And actually we had a double dose here. Also remove the word easy from your vocabulary. Do you wanna say anything about either of those?

Sara Vieira: I want to say something that I think is very important is that if you think something is easy to try to teach it to a junior developer. If they say it's easy, like by junior I mean someone who just finished the bootcamp or college, something like that, try and teach them that and you will get.

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, that's a good-

Sara Vieira: Make sense?

Kent C. Dodds: Yeah. That's a good test for whether it's easy. If it's truly easy than it should be something that somebody can pick up really quickly, who's not at all familiar. And if it doesn't make sense to them, then it's familiar.

Sara Vieira: So stop trying to push the [inaudible 00:28:45]

Kent C. Dodds: Very good.

Sara Vieira: People into thinking that something is easy unless you've actually battled to us the fact that it's easy. Unless it's a button. If it's a button and you just click the button, then it's good.

Kent C. Dodds: Absolutely. Yeah. Cool. All Right Sara. So before we wrap up, is there anything else that we didn't talk about that you want to bring up and tell our audience to do or not to do in the world?

Sara Vieira: No, it's just be good humans. Be good humans, help the other human trying to understand things when the other human doesn't really understand the thing. Do not judge the other human. The other human is trying as hard as you are.

Kent C. Dodds: Yep. Absolutely. That's good advice. So Sara, how do people connect with you online if they want to follow up and keep up with what you're doing?

Sara Vieira: So I used Twitter a lot. Good amount. I don't know what a lot means, but a good amount. I am NikkitaFTW on Twitter with two k's. The first one was taken by the TV show, so that's something also, that's because my parents wanted to call me Nikita, but you can't name Portuguese children from names that are Portuguese, so that never turned out. And now my name's Sara. So you can follow me on Twitter at NikkitaFTW, and that's about it. I have all my links on Twitter so you can go from there.

Kent C. Dodds: Awesome. Sounds good. Thanks everybody. I hope that this was as fun for you as it was for me, and thank you, Sara for giving us some of your evening and I hope you enjoy the rest of it.

Sara Vieira: I'm going to watch the Avengers. It's going to be great.

Kent C. Dodds: Oh yeah, have fun.

Sara Vieira: Thank you so much for having me Kent.

Kent C. Dodds: All right. Yeah, you're welcome.

Sara Vieira: Bye.

Kent C. Dodds: Thank you. See everybody.