How Tech Twitter unironically made me a better developer
Why I joined Tech Twitter
Simple, to become a famous programmer…but in all honestly I’m way too stupid for that at the moment. The real reason is simply to grow my network in-case I get fired or something. I knew that, even though I don’t really enjoy social media that much, it was needed to get opportunities I otherwise wouldn’t have gotten, since I don’t live in “the west”, meaning US, EU, and other first world countries, my opportunities here are limited if you want to move outside of the financial space one day.
I saw this video of Jonathan blow saying if you want to grow as a developer, quit your job and go work at some place like SpaceX…well, we don’t have a SpaceX, or really a diverse technology sector - so while this advice might work in the US, this doesn’t work mostly anywhere else and other avenues need to be taken or made.
See people develop cool stuff in real-time
The first person I followed on Twitter was an oke named ThePrimagen, who lives on the Lord’s time of Montana and uses the Lord’s text editor of neovim. I followed while he built doom on the CLI and how he got twitch chat to effectively play the game. This was extremely niche but at the same time, it made me think “This is kinda neat, I wanne do things like this”. You can see more of how he did it here:
This was only the beginning, soon I found a guy named Kache, this was a mistake since he never shuts up…however, through all his yapping he does say some interesting things, I started following him when he was still working on his own app called Dingboard, which is an AI powered quick image editor that quite satisfying to use. This also make me want to just build stuff for the sake of building stuff, not really for money, but just for fun.
There are countless examples of this exact scenario playing out on twitter and it made me just want to get better at my craft and just make cool shit. Even if it is only for myself, I don’t really care.
Get news at the speed of thought
I cannot tell you how invaluable this aspect of tech twitter has been, I get the news extremely quick, crowdstrike issues…covered. Exploits in the linux subsystem…covered. Dumbass hot takes…also covered.
See cool new technologies that most devs don’t talk about or acknowledge
- HTMX
- ZIG
- NVIM