Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and today is a very special episode because it is the 100th episode of Developer Tea. It's been just over six months since I launched Developer Tea. I was January 5th that I launched Developer Tea. In those six months you all have listened to this show over 1.2 million times. That is unbelievable to me. I'm so thankful that each and every one of you spend some time with me each week. Developer Tea was also nominated for the Net Awards best podcast of the year. I'm recording this episode before I know the winner but you will know who the winner is. But quite honestly, it doesn't even matter. Being nominated is such an incredible honor and I'm just so thankful that Developer Teahas struck such a chord with the developer community and I can't wait to see it grow even more and hopefully continue to offer value to everyone who listens to this show. I want the next 100 shows to be better than the first 100 and that's because I always want to improve. I think that is the spirit of the always improving developer. Somebody who cares about their craft who is always wanting to become better at what they do. We've experimented with a variety of things on the show and really there are so many lessons to be learned in that experimentation. So I don't want to just celebrate. I want to give you something of value to go away from this episode with. So I'm going to give you four things you must do to become better. Number one, to become better you must be willing to challenge your assumptions. You must be willing to challenge your assumptions. When I started this podcast, I assumed that the short format of the podcast was the most important thing to keep intact and I made a few mistakes along the way and I recorded episodes that went a little bit longer than they needed to and I assumed that that was going to completely kill my audience to completely obliterate the number of people who listened to the podcast that I was going to get a ton of reviews talking about how the podcast breaks the rule of the five minutes. But in reality, I got very little pushback. So challenge your assumptions. Sometimes a longer episode is totally appreciated by you guys as an audience. Of course, the show is still prided on the fact that it fits in a T-break. It's short enough for you to listen to in between maybe on your commute. I've gotten a lot of people saying that they listen on their commute. If you don't have time to listen to this show, maybe try listening to it on your commute to or from work. The second tip that I have for you to become better is to know that you can't please everyone. You can't please everyone. And the truth of the matter is there are a lot of people who don't like everything that happens on Developer Tea. In fact, there's a lot of people who have listened to the show and have decided to turn it off. And there will always be people who don't like what you do. There will always be critics, especially when you're doing something that has subjective value in some way. Of course, if you were just doing math problems or if you were an accountant, then there is objective errors that you can make that people could give you negative reviews about. But if you're in a situation like I am with this podcast, you can't please everyone. So there are always going to be people who don't like the format. I've gotten some comments that ask me to talk less about the soft skills subjects and more about the code. And then I've also got comments that ask for me to talk more about the soft skills and less about the code. And so you can't please everyone and you shouldn't try. Instead, you should try to give value to someone, try to deliver value to someone, instead of trying to please everyone. I'm going to take a quick sponsor break and then I'm going to come back and give you two more things that you must do in order to improve to become better. And then I have a really exciting announcement to make at the very end of the episode. So stick around. I'm so excited. The 100th episode of Developer Tea. Stick around right after this sponsor break. I'll be back. What if you could learn to build anything in one month? Well, with one month.com, you can just ask any one of the 20,000 students who have learned to code on one month.com by building real websites and applications complete with payment systems, security solutions, and full stack deployment. 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Thank you so much to the sponsors of the show over the last 100 episodes. Of course, we didn't start out with sponsors. But when the sponsors decided to join on, they have been an incredible force and just such a big help to the show and the sustainability of what I do here on Developer Tea. So thank you to the sponsors. They're the ones that make this possible. So I've been talking about the things that you must do in order to become better. And of course, this is not a comprehensive list. As I say, about pretty much every list that I give you guys, it's not comprehensive. I don't have all of the answers here. These are just some ideas for you to think about. I want you to go and have conversations with your colleagues and with other developers about these ideas. And with quite honestly, you can have conversations with non-developers about these ideas. That's the beauty of what we talk about here on Developer Tea. So to become better, I've already said that you must be willing to challenge your assumptions. You must know that you're not going to please everyone. But instead, you should be focusing on delivering value to someone, right? To someone, whether that someone is a large audience or a small audience doesn't really matter. But you can't please everyone. So instead, focus on delivering value to someone. To become better, you also, and this is number three, to become better, you have to deliver consistently in order to practice and measure your own performance. You have to deliver consistently. This show launches three episodes per week. Now, we moved to four for a short time to see how that worked out. But quite honestly, it just took too much in the quality of the shows. I was starting to show itself. I had a few errors. And sometimes the editing wouldn't be up to par with the quality that I want Developer Teato always have for you guys. So I drop back down to three. And that consistent delivery has given me the ability to practice and to have a regular schedule for the output. And it gives you guys the opportunity to know when Developer Tea is going to launch. It launches Monday, Wednesday, Friday, unless something crazy happens and we have to move one of those episodes to a Tuesday or Thursday, which doesn't happen very often. So delivering consistently has given me the ability to measure what every single Monday launch looks like against each other. It gives me the ability to measure how long it takes me to do a given episode. All of these things are so important to being able to become a better craftsman because you must be able to measure your own performance on some objective scale in some objective way. And the only way to do that is to have consistency in how you are working and how you are outputting. Number four on this list, the last thing that I want to share with you that you must have in order to become better is that you must be willing to change what you are doing. You can't get stuck in a rut and just stick to what you are doing because it's what you know you must be willing to change what you are doing. Sometimes even when you see what you are doing is working because changing provides you the opportunity to find something that works better than what you've done before. Now this obviously must be balanced. You shouldn't be changing what you are doing constantly. But when you see a reason to change, when you see a potential benefit to changing, for example, I changed from four to three, as I said previously, I changed from four episodes a week to three episodes a week because I needed to see the quality of the show stay consistent. And I realized that I was spending all of the same amount of energy really on four episodes as I should be spending on three episodes. And that was showing through. So I had to be willing to change what I was doing, drop back down to three episodes per week in order to see that quality come back up to the level that it needed to be. So with that said, I want to continue becoming better. I want this podcast to continue delivering more and more value, even if that means some of you decide that you don't want to listen to this podcast anymore for those of you who do decide to listen to this podcast in the future, I want to continue delivering value all the time. The topics that we cover here on Developer Tea and the people we interview, they certainly can vary widely. And as we turn 100 episodes old, the show will continue to evolve and continue to have variation over time. And I can't wait to see what happens and who I get to talk with, who I get to interview here on the show. And the positive impact this podcast might have on the people who listen to it, you the audience. So shifting gears a little bit, I have this exciting announcement that I promised to make to you guys. And if you follow me on Twitter at at Developer Tea, you probably have already seen this. But if you haven't seen it yet, back on January 5th, when I started this show, Bryn Jackson and Brian Levin launched their podcast as well. In fact, it was literally on the same day. It's a pretty cool story there. The podcast is called Design Details. You can go check it out at designdetails.fm. We both built our websites. We posted to designer news. We frequented the same forums, trying to get the word out about both of our podcasts. So we decided to connect in a few months past. We started discussing how each of our shows were doing with each other, you know, getting tips and tricks from each other about how to record better, how to edit better, and how to do things more efficiently. We eventually decided that we align on so many things and that we might make a good team. So last week, we launched a brand new network called specfm Developer Tea and design details are the first podcast to join that network. And we're incredibly excited to see what the future holds there. More shows will join the network soon. We're excited to celebrate and create amazing content for designers and developers. That's exactly what spec is all about. Those guys have been super helpful and super supportive of Developer Tea. They are on my side and I'm on their side. Incredible people over at the design details podcast as well as the people working on spec. So thank you to Brian and Brynn and all of the other people working at spec. You guys are doing such an amazing job on your podcast and I'm so thankful that we have all decided to start spec together. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Developer Teaou the audience the 100th episode of Developer Tea. I can't wait for the next 100 and I can't wait to hear from each and every one of you. You can now email me. You can still email me at developertea@gmail.com but since we launched spec you can reach me at Jonathan at spec.fm go and check out spec.fm's new site to find out more about spec. There's going to be some resources launching on there so keep your eye out for those things as well. Normally I would ask for you to subscribe to Developer Teabut today I'd love for you to go instead and check out design details you can find that at spec.fm go and subscribe to design details you can also go directly to designdetails.fm of course that show is especially relevant if you are a designer. Thank you again for listening to Developer Tea and until next time enjoy your tea.