Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrelln and today is episode we are talking about the developer career road map step five, part two, cross training. Let's jump straight in. Last time we talked about cross training, I said there are two basic areas, two overarching areas where you can actually do this cross training exercise that we've talked about. We discussed the idea that this comes from, the etymology of the word of cross training is really just talking about athletics, right? The athletic training to develop support and develop muscles that are otherwise going to be unbalanced as you go through your primary training as an athlete. This is true in pretty much any field too. You don't have to be an athlete to go through cross training and that's the idea behind developer career road map step five, cross training. In the last episode very briefly, we went over cross training in the workplace. The first type of cross training we talked about was learning a new language and we compared this to running upstairs as a sprinter. It's very similar to your primary kind of core exercises in your original language and learning a new language illuminates new things in the languages you already know. The second type of cross training in the workplace is learning about the support systems, the various things that support the language you already work with. For example, we mentioned PHP and Apache learning a little bit about how Apache works. The idea here is understanding the support systems that your chosen language, your primary language is built on top of or is surrounded by. And third and last, perhaps the most different out of this list was learning a little bit about your co-workers processes, particularly co-workers who are not developers if you work in an agency like environment, learning a little bit about the designer workflow or perhaps the business analyst workflow, their tool sets and the things that they're trying to solve on a daily basis. Some of the common problems they experience when they receive code from a developer. These are the kind of things that if you learn them, you become more flexible and more valuable in any company that you're working at. So that brings us to today. And in today's episode, we're talking about something that's completely different from the last episode. We're talking about cross training in your life beyond work. You might say that you don't have a life beyond work as an intern. It may feel like that because you're overwhelmed with the idea that you have so much yet to learn, but it is so important, once again, going back to the theme of cross training, it is so important to maintain balance. And if you are not maintaining balance, you have to implement this stuff as a priority. You have to start thinking about balance as a priority. So what does it mean to cross train in your life beyond your work? We're going to talk about that right after a quick sponsor break from our good friends over at Leno. Leno has been sponsoring Developer Teathroughout this year. And we're incredibly thankful for Leno. With Leno, you can instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Leno Cloud. You can get a server running in just a few seconds with your choice of Linux distribution, resources, and node location. You can pick from eight data centers and their plans started just $10 a month. And if you don't have a server in the cloud right now as a developer, you need one. Leno is a great option for this because it's totally flexible. It allows you to run a private Git server if you want to. And all of this is built on top of super fast tech. They have native SSD storage, a 40 gigabit internal network, Intel E5 processors. And on top of all that, they are offering two gigabytes of RAM for only $10 a month. Now if you sign up using our special link, which will be in the show notes at spec.fm, you can get $20 of credit. Now do the math here. You can get a year of Leno for $100. $100 to get a server up in the cloud. You can put anything on this, your personal website, or your entire code repository. Leno is totally fine with you doing any of those things. And they have monthly cap on all plans. So this includes their add-ons, their backup, no balancers, long view, all that stuff. So go and check it out. Spec.fm slash Leno. Once again, spec.fm slash Leno. To get $20 off, oh and by the way, you have a seven day money back guarantee. So they're giving you $20 and they're saying if you don't like it, we're going to give you all your money back. Thank you, Kendal Leno for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. Go and check it out. Spec.fm slash Leno. So we're talking about cross training in today's episode and in the last episode of Developer Tea. Cross training is the fifth step in the developer career roadmap. Once again, we struggled with trying to figure out exactly where the step should go. But because balance is so important, I believe that it should be put in that phase of going from internship and working on getting a longer term job. It's important to begin creating that balance, begin creating that extra value that comes from this cross training experience. And really in today's episode, we're talking about cross training in your life beyond work. But what you'll notice if you begin to do this, if you begin to have these external things that we're going to talk about in just a minute, you'll notice that this will feed your career both in terms of energy, right, in terms of excitement about development. But it will also feed it in giving you new knowledge, new skills that you can use to sharpen your other skills. Specifically, we talk about using metaphors a lot on this show. And that's because metaphors are an incredibly powerful tool for illuminating concepts. This is such an important thing. Don't miss this. Your skill sets in other areas, the things that you do outside of development can help increase your skill set as a developer. It doesn't feel like it in that moment, perhaps. And it may not seem like it from the outside looking in. But if you have ever stumbled across an effective metaphor, you know how illuminating those different systems can be. In the process of creating the developer career roadmap, I took a poll of developers who are currently employed in the industry. We asked a variety of questions. Of course, the survey was not performed under industry standards and it's not peer-reviewed and the people that answered it are only the people that were able to get the link from me. So there's probably a little bit of bias there. We can't guarantee that these results are going to speak for the larger audience. But in the survey, for what it's worth in the survey, four of five developers, I asked this question to said, yes. Now once you've paused this episode and using all of your deductive reasoning, what do you think the question was? Pause the episode and come up with that answer in your mind. Okay, so the question that I asked them, do you have any hobbies that you consider important to your identity or happiness? Let me say that again in case you missed it. We aren't talking about any kind of code here. Do you as a developer and employed developer working full-time, do you have any hobbies that you consider important to your identity or your happiness? And we had almost exactly 80% of everyone who responded to that question, 80% of them responded with yes. And I'll make a quick note here, 100% of those who are making over $200,000 a year who answered this survey. 100% of them said yes to this question. And there were different variances at different income levels. But the fundamental idea here is the vast majority of people who are currently employed as developers, they have hobbies. They have something that they do outside of work. They have hobbies that they participate in that they say are incredibly important to their identity or to their happiness. Now, here's the thing on the flip side of this, there are a ton of developers who are listening to this episode right now and you're tired of writing code today. Your burnt out, you no longer want to work on the same problem you've been working on and you're frustrated and maybe you're even considering whether or not you should continue being a software developer. And that's a good question to ask. And there are some people who arrive at the conclusion that they want to change to a different career. But for the vast majority of people, your happiness is not going to be dependent on stopping writing code and going and doing something else with your life. This is definitely not the silver bullet, one shot solution to fixing all of your problems with burnout. We've talked about burnout on the show. It happens to the best of developers. So this is not the one shot solution, but it certainly is a huge help to the idea of burnout, the variety that your external life, your life beyond work, as we said already, your life beyond work, having variety in that life beyond work can help with this idea of burnout, this problem that you have with burnout. So here's my recommendation. Here's what I'm saying about having a life beyond work. We aren't talking about having a social life necessarily. And a hobby or an interest that you can develop skill at. This is very, very broad. There are many things that would fit in this bucket, something you can develop skill at. This can be anything from going and becoming a marathon runner. You could decide that you want to go and become a movie reviewer and you're developing skill when you write your reviews. There are tons of things that will fit into this bucket, so don't limit your vision here. This ideally should be something that requires some level of personal investment, mental and physical energy, and that you enjoy doing. This is the criteria that I'm hoping you'll follow. Certainly in your life beyond work, try to do things that you enjoy doing. This is important for hobbies. If you're going to actually get value out of this hobby, remember going back to that question that was in the poll, important to your identity and to your happiness, it's very unlikely that developing a hobby that you really don't enjoy is going to be very valuable to you. Go and find something that you enjoy doing, but that also is challenging. That requires a little bit of investment, a little bit of practice, a little bit of mental and physical energy that you can become tired at doing. These are the kinds of things that are going to be a positive hobby for you. We're talking about something that requires a little bit of skill development. It requires you to pursue and develop the skill. This is something that actually drove you to become a developer in the first place. That same sense of inspiration that likely you came to development with, that same sense of wonder and appreciation for that skill development, that mastery concept, that is available to you in other areas. If you're not being fulfilled in your development work for that day, for example, this is when burnout occurs. When you don't feel challenged, when you don't feel like you're developing mastery, you can get the same type of appreciation in a hobby. You can develop the same type of mental triggers in a hobby. Not every hobby is going to be physically engaging. For example, I am a musician and I play guitar, I play piano. This is stuff that you do sitting down most of the time. This is really more for bonus points, but think about it this way. If you cultivate a hobby that is more like that, more like being a musician or perhaps the earlier example of watching and critiquing movies, pair exercise with that hobby when possible. For the watching and critiquing movies, perhaps you can make it a habit that every movie that you go and watch, you actually walk or you ride your bike to the movie instead of driving. The reason for this is quite simply based on research. Research shows that physical activity. First of all, it's overwhelming research that says that physical activity, regular physical activity, even at light and moderate levels, is incredibly positive for your overall health. More specifically, it's very positive for your ability to focus in your mental state. That's why I recommend including something that hopefully has some level of physical engagement, gets you active, gets you out of the house. These are the types of things, by the way, that also help with general anxiety, general depression. If you find yourself sitting on the couch and doing nothing when you're outside of work, getting a hobby, getting active, getting out of your house and going and doing something, that can be very, very helpful for those situations as well. Understand that cross-training is about developing balance. It's about developing perspective, giving yourself a more well-rounded way of looking at not only your work, but your life in general. The benefits to having something beyond your work, the benefits to doing something beyond what you do when you're on the job, that list is far too long to actually detail in today's episode. For example, you are much more likely to encounter other people who have similar interests to you. If you feel like you have a lack of relationship with other people, or if the social situation at your job is less than ideal, in other words, if you feel like you need more friends or more connections, then developing a hobby that is a great way to find those friends and those connections. Another obvious benefit is this requires you to learn how to manage your time better. When you are developing a secondary skill, you're doing this outside of work. You have new time to manage rather than simply throwing away all of your time by letting that time just happen to you, by going home and not really having a plan for what you want to do. Again, find something that you love to do and invest your time and your energy into it outside of work. There will be a period of your career, or perhaps multiple periods of your career, where you are genuinely invested and excited about learning a new programming language. In those times, you may find that the time that you have for hobbies is greatly reduced. That's totally fine. What I don't want to do on this podcast is prescribe every single minute that you need to spend time at work or spend time on your hobby. That's not the point of this. If your energy, if you're excited about learning a language and every single extra hour that you have for a period of time is devoted to learning that language, that can be an incredibly valuable period of time. That's kind of like a sabbatical, if you will, to learn that language by investing a bunch of extra time into it. That doesn't go for just learning new languages. It may also go for building something new, building a product, pouring a bunch of time into a couple of weeks or even a couple of months of your life to build that product or learn whatever it is that you're trying to learn. What I want to warn you against is not having any other interests so that when you do experience burnout, you have nothing to relieve that burnout. That's what I want to warn you against and hopefully help you avoid. Help a hobby, develop multiple hobbies and interests outside of your normal kind of routine of all of the things that you do at your job. This is hugely valuable and other developers just like you are finding new energy and new life in their careers each and every day by going and doing something completely irrelevant to code. So take some time and consider what your external interests are. Consider some of the things that you've thought about doing for maybe when you were a child, you thought about doing those things or perhaps their things that your friends are doing that you become jealous of. My recommendation is to really consider pouring some time into those external activities. Ultimately, it is your responsibility to do the things that you want to do in your life and taking the opportunity to spend time pursuing your interests is something that only you can do. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope I've convinced you to go out and find something that you are interested in beyond just the code you're writing. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Linode. You can get your Linode instance up and running in just a few minutes and you can get $20 credit in seven days, money back guarantee. Go and check it out, spec.fm slash Linode. Thank you so much for listening and if you don't want to miss out on future episodes of Developer Tea. Including step six of the Developer Career Roadmap, make sure you subscribe and whatever podcasting app you use. Until next time, enjoy your tea.