Paul: Hi there and welcome to PodRocket. Today we have Salma Alam-Naylor with us, who is a Staff Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. I'm your host Paul and today we're going to be talking about content, Twitch streaming, communicating and learning about development in the online space we have. Welcome to the podcast. Salma Alam-Naylor: Hi, Paul. Thank you for having me. Paul: Yeah, thanks for coming on. So Salma, one thing that you communicated over to us before the podcast is you have a very strong Twitch following and you like to make a lot of content and put it out there and educate people and communicate things about code. Would you say that wraps up what you do? You're a DevRel and educator? Salma Alam-Naylor: Yeah. So it's a funny story, I'm actually a qualified teacher in the UK, I actually used to teach music in classrooms. So I'm coming from a place of education and being trained in education and I got into tech about eight, nine years ago, switched from teaching. And so I use a lot of what I learned as a teacher in the classroom with a variety of different children aged 11 to 18. I use a lot of what I'd learned through that in what I do now in public. And yes, in developer relations, in content creation, it's a funny phrase to say content creation because actually the content is the product of the work I do in developer experience. So it's like a byproduct but also mostly what people see so I guess you could call it that. But yeah, I'm a teacher first and foremost and I use that to teach people about tech and the biggest part of my mission is to make tech accessible to as many people as possible and as inclusive as it can be. Paul: Right on. And one thing, if you're seeing a face you don't typically see in a tech setting... We had one TikTok creator come on, the Seattle Tech Bro and he was saying, my message is if you're of somebody that you're not used to seeing your face, go make TikTok videos, go make Shorts because it encourages people from all swats from everywhere. It's important because we have this platform now. Salma Alam-Naylor: That's it. I actually wanted to get into tech from a really early age. I didn't know what I was doing but I was writing code on a Commodore 64 when I was six years old. And that was in the '90s, it was 1991 and I wanted to get into tech from then but I couldn't because we didn't have the internet like we have it today, we didn't have tutorials, we didn't have communities online and I had no one around me at the time, in this small little place I grew up, who was anything remotely related to tech and that's why I went in the music route. So it was always something I'd wanted to do, but like you say, I didn't see anyone around me doing it. And even when I did look into this kind of thing when I got the internet in my teenage years, it was just men doing it, that was the people that were being talked about, the men that were creating the operating systems and the foundations of the internet that we know today. I mean yes, women were very involved in it at the beginning, but these aren't the people that were talked about when you first start to research this stuff. So I thought my place wasn't really there and then I went into music and teaching even more. So I guess as part of what I do and why I do what I do is because I want to course correct that a little bit and show people that there's a place for anyone and everyone and how much it can improve your lives with what you do. And I think diversity and representation is a huge part of what makes products and applications and other things accessible to other people because if you've just got one type of person making these products, you're only going to be able to cater for one type of person who are using these products. And diversity is all around the world and everyone's using tech all around the world so you need that representation and you need different types of people on teams and building things. Paul: You're an OG tech person if you were coding on a Commodore back in the '90s. And so it took lots of time to get back into the field, you strayed away. And because one thing that Kate was mentioning before the podcast is she tested her first computer when she was six years old, way back when. So you were in the game, but you didn't feel like you could approach it. But yeah, now you're doing great work. So one thing is looking at your YouTube channel, I was looking at your YouTube Shorts and some of them are trolly, you posted this one recently in your face was vibrating in a pop out sort of thing to music. I don't know, that got me and I'm like, "This is why people are here." People roll up for this stuff and they're like, "Wow, okay. I don't have to..." It can be a lot of pish-posh with especially longer form YouTube videos that I find out there about, the day in the life of a programmer and it feels very gate kept. Salma Alam-Naylor: You are so right. And at the end of the day, it's just a job, it's just code. And I think there're some parts of the industry that take itself far too seriously and let's have fun, let's build stupid stuff, let's build creative stuff, let's just go wild. And funny story as well, I actually used to be a comedian, I used to be a musical comedian and so I guess part of my teaching, part of the performer in me and the comedian in me likes to just infiltrate my tech work. But let's just have fun because it's really fun, tech is really fun when you are building stuff and learning things and making weird websites and doing weird stuff with CSS. That's the bottom line and it doesn't have to be so serious all the time, it doesn't have to be, I mean, it doesn't. And so I guess I try to communicate that a little bit as well. Paul: And that's a great mesh. And I mean, if you look at a lot of the people who are making the funky CSS libraries, they're not serious. These are the creative people that are degenerating at one in the morning and- Salma Alam-Naylor: That's it Paul: ... go way past their bedtime. Yeah, it's the creative minds having fun where we get all the good stuff. Salma Alam-Naylor: And as well tech is a lot about problem solving and you need to be creative to solve problems, you need to have different ways to solve problems, you need to experiment with different ways to solve problems. And a lot of the problem solving is sometimes about just wasting time and messing about and finding different ways to do things and it's a big journey and no time is wasted really. I mean, I always liken this kind of process to something I learned in music. So when I was doing my music degree, which was in composition, I spent nine years on... Not nine years, I spent nine months on a single section of a piece. It was for my third out of four years and I spent nine months on it and at the end of those nine months, me and my composition teacher had a chat and he said, "No, get rid of that section." And I was like, "What?" And he said, "Get rid of that section, it's fine." And it made the piece 100 times better, but I wouldn't have been able to finish it without going through that nine month journey, but it didn't need to be there anymore, but I learned a lot. And that's a lot of what happens in tech as well. Paul: It's not a waste as long as you have the right attitude though. Because if you have the attitude of, "Oh, I wasted my time." Then yeah, you're not going to iterate and learn on those last nine months. So it comes with- Salma Alam-Naylor: You need space for exploration in tech and I think one of the difficult parts about working in tech, not in my industry, but when you are working for a product or a company or an agency, one of the difficult parts is not having that time to experiment and play and iterate because of client demands, deadlines, blah, blah, blah ,blah. But I used to be a tech lead, I used to work for a variety of different companies before I got into DevRel and developer experience. And one of the most important things that I tried to facilitate in the team was that experimentation time and that playtime and, "Waste time." And it's incredibly important and I know it's not always feasible, but it's so crucial to the development of the individual and being able to work with other people and solve problems in a different way. Paul: And become friends with your co-workers, you're just riffing on stuff. Salma Alam-Naylor: I've made some great relationships bonding over solving weird problems and weird bugs and that's the kind of relationships that blossom out of difficult times. And relatively they're not that difficult, it's just a bug, it's just code, but actually it brings people closer together and the difficult times you go through. So that's what I love about tech as well. So when I do my live streaming on Twitch, it's real life, it's real development, it's not shiny, it's not polished, it's not prepared, I'm just coding and solving problems and coming up against bugs and sometimes- Paul: That's what people are here for. It's amazing. Salma Alam-Naylor: Yeah. And sometimes I have over 100 people in my chat pair programming with me, trying to debug and it brings people closer together and when we solve the problem, it's a big celebration and it's great fun. And that's one of my favorite things about doing what I do in public, to be honest. Speaker 3: Enjoy the podcast? Consider hitting that follow button for more great episodes. Paul: So get into the streaming stuff. There are so many people out there who say, "Oh I want to stream." I think DevRel is a very sought after idea by people, "Oh I can talk to people and I can do this." But actually materializing value for people who were involved, getting there can be difficult. So when you first started, you were mentioning you were a tech leader, right? Salma Alam-Naylor: Yes. Paul: Did you jump into the tech lead thing or did you slowly build up and then when and how did you flip that switch to hop into DevRel? Salma Alam-Naylor: So it was at the beginning of the pandemic, April 2020, when we all started working from home and I was still a tech lead at that point. And having that time to reflect on the world around me and not go out to an office and be trapped at my house made me realize that over the years as I'd developed my tech leadership career, I was doing less and less and less coding and I was building less and less. I was architecting stuff, I was facilitating team stuff, I was growing other developers, but I wasn't growing myself as a developer and that was the sole reason why I got into tech, to code and build things. So I felt like my skills were wasting away. And at that time, being stuck at home, I discovered that some people were streaming coding on Twitch and I'd never watched Twitch, but I don't know how I even discovered it and there I was watching programmers on Twitch. But the problem was that most of the people who were streaming, in fact all of them that I saw at the time, were men and streaming back-end stuff. And I'm a front-end developer and not a man. And so I thought, "I know, I can learn some stuff in public to solve the problem of my tech skills rotting away and also represent other people like me who do front-end, who are not men." So I started that in June 2020 so it's just over two years I've been doing it. And actually that's how I got into DevRel because I was streaming on Twitch and because of the pandemic, a lot of people who would talk at conferences and go to different events, DevRel had moved online onto Twitch. And through the nature of Twitch Reads and sharing community with people, I met the only other British woman who was streaming development at the time and through her, I got my first job in developer relations. Because I knew I wanted to explore this a little bit more and so I got it through her and then I got my next job at Netlify through basically being online and learning in public and creating content and things like that. So I understand it's a very unique situation, I feel like I got a bit lucky, but I did work very hard. But also it shows the power of building relationships in tech and creating those connections with people who have things in common with you. And I guess my approach of wanting to show representation helped as well because I feel like as I have spent time in this new industry, I feel like it's got more and more rich and more and more diverse. And I think one of the good things that came out of COVID was this, I got to meet loads and loads more people, I think the industry is growing and diversifying to an extent and I'm excited to see what comes next to be honest. Paul: Definitely a great side effect of COVID, if we're being honest. There's a lot of just culture and hygiene built around, how do we communicate online and effectively communicate better? I'm a way better Zoomer than I was before COVID. Salma Alam-Naylor: Funny story as well is that I always thought that I could never work from home, I could never work remotely, I needed the office, I needed to see people. And I work from home now and I worked from home in my previous job, my first one in developer relations and actually I would never go back to an office now. I love this way of life and it's cheaper, it's better for the environment, it takes less time out of my day and I feel very privileged to be in this position and I can't forget that I get to just stay at home all day and make fun stuff on the internet, but there's a lot of tech that goes into it too. But like you said before, it is a very coveted, trendy job that a lot of people want to do, but I think there's definitely a place for juniors and seniors and lots of different people from different walks of life. But I think it's based on technical skills, technical knowledge, technical approaches, problem solving. And so you do need a variety of different skills for DevRel, it's about the communication, it's about the performance, it's about being able to relate your content to a wide audience and be able to speak to developers who are at different stages in their career. And a lot of it is fun, but that's all on the surface and the work that goes in to creating content by all of these people that are in the spotlight is a lot. And you can get the Instagram effect in DevRel, it's like everyone's pumping out these blog posts and popping out these YouTube videos and doing all these talks, but there's so much that goes into that and it's tough. It's tough to see everybody around you sometimes pumping out all this stuff when you might be in a little bit of a content block, like my nine months of writing music when I had to hide myself away and then I actually had nothing really visible to show for it at the end. Sometimes it ebbs and flows and sometimes you have to hide away for a few weeks or months to really work on a big project or a product feature. Because at Netlify, I work on the product a lot, I guess, with other engineers, influencing the developer experience. That's where all my content comes from, all my content comes from working with engineers at Netlify to improve the product for developers because Netlify is a developer's product and there's a lot that goes into working with developers in the community to be informed about how they're using the product and how they want to use the product. And so it's very varied, I'll give developer relations that, it's extremely varied and my days can look extremely different as the weeks go on, depending on what's going on. And that keeps it exciting and I'm just extremely lucky that I just get to learn things as part of my job as well, which is what I've always loved doing and that's one of the best parts about my job. Emily: It's Emily again, producer for PodRocket and I want to talk to you. Yeah, you, the person who's listening, but won't stop talking about your new favorite front-end framework to your friends, even though they don't want to hear about it anymore. Well, I do want to hear about it because you are really important to us as a listener. So what do you think of PodRocket? What do you like best? What do you absolutely hate? What's the one thing in the entire world that you want to hear about? Edge computing, weird little component libraries, how to become a productive developer when your WiFi's out? I don't know and that's the point. If you get in contact with us, you can rant about how we haven't had your favorite dev advocate on or tell us we're doing great, whatever. And if you do, we'll give you a $25 gift card, that's pretty sweet, right? So reach out to us, links are in the description. $25 gift card. Paul: At Netlify, how do you keep the... I don't know, is there a line between your own personal stuff that you're pumping out to build your brand and what Netlify needs you to do? Salma Alam-Naylor: Interesting question. So I think one of the key parts to developer relations, developer experience is that you need to be authentic. You can't be a salesperson because sales doesn't work on developers. You can't really attach yourself to marketing 100%, even though that's part of it. Authenticity is a huge part of being effective and connecting with people in the community. And so there're blurry lines everywhere and actually anything that I do, do on my personal domains is still attached to Netlify because I work at Netlify and people will find me and discovery I work at Netlify and they might discover Netlify through that. And the thing is, I'm a big believer that if I'm just seen to be pumping out blog posts on Netlify or pumping out Netlify content, I'm blinkering myself and not staying aware of the bigger ecosystem. And at the end of the day, Netlify is committed to building a better web and that includes everything, not just Netlify. So by contributing to open source and by building my own products and projects and by maintaining my own community and my own Twitch stream that's not technically attached to Netlify because it's still mine. By doing that and building up my credibility, I'm automatically better at my job because of the need for authenticity to work for a company like Netlify. So the lines are blurry, sometimes I can feel like, "Oh, I'm doing too much of my own stuff," or, "Oh, I'm doing too much of Netlify stuff." But at the end of the day, they both compliment each other and it's about balance and there are some things that I write on my personal blog that wouldn't be a good fit for the Netlify blog. So I just publish them on my own domain, yet they still are connected and it still matters and it still goes towards my valuable output. So I know some companies don't think in that same way and I'm very lucky, again, to work for a company that values and sees the value of a personal brand and reputation and credibility. So it's always a balancing act, but first and foremost, I was hired at Netlify because of the stuff I was doing as Whitep4nth3r on Twitch and on YouTube really and they wanted that and they wanted me to bring that to Netlify and help enhance the output for developers there. So it's all connected for better or for worse, but also I think probably more for the better. Paul: Right. I mean, it's part of what you said, it's the breadth of what is this person's brand? Who are they reaching? If anything, they benefit off of having somebody that's, like you said, authentic, they're doing all sorts of different things and it's like, "Oh, they're also into Netlify? Okay." Instant value because that person's probably going to go visit it. Salma Alam-Naylor: Exactly. And funny story actually, when Netlify was first released and when I discovered it in 2017, 2018, I actually thought, "Oh, I'd love to work for Netlify one day, it's my dream job." But I always had Netlify as my goal and it was just very lucky that I was able to get a job at Netlify so soon, I thought it would be years. So I'm taking that opportunity and trying to make the best of it I can because it sounds really cheesy, but it's like a dream come true. And it's just a job, but also Netlify is at the cutting edge of the web, of the front-end ecosystem and of the technology that I was really interested in. And so I get to work on the web, which is a weird concept. I get to help inform the future of the web and how developers are developing, which is just mind blowing. I don't quite believe it sometimes. Paul: Yeah, these types of companies, I mean, Netlify or if we're looking at back-end companies, it's like the Red Hat, why are we moving in this industry standard way in what we're doing? It must be really... Yeah, congratulations. Salma Alam-Naylor: Thanks. And the connections that Netlify has to the rest of the ecosystem as well, such as the framework authors, the framework communities, there are new frameworks coming out all the time and the ecosystem is thriving with different approaches and something for everyone. And that's also really nice too, I get to meet so many nice people, so many clever people and I get to learn so much more through doing that as well, which again is why I'm here. So it's a win-win. Paul: So. When you create videos and they're not live or short videos or rendered out videos, has your workflow changed a lot through the years? Have you gotten more efficient, used different softwares? I think this is one thing that if people want to go create content, if you want to encourage people like, "Hey, if you're of a different sector of life, if you're from a different continent, go make videos, go make content." And people are like, "All right, how do I start?" And it's like there's a mountain of programs and products and how you get into that. So I'd love to hear a little bit about your workflow. Salma Alam-Naylor: See there's never enough time in the day, week, month, year to do what I really want to do. And so the biggest change to my workflow has been to repurpose existing content rather than creating new content every time that you want to create something, it's like, "Okay, so how can I take something from something that already exists? How can I turn a blog post into a TikTok?" I mean, my YouTube videos are mainly cut down live streams to try and tell a story and just to try to provide a snippet of what happened on the stream, if it's worth it. Most of them are not worth it. My TikToks are stream clips and my Twitter threads are condensed blog posts. So you can create 10 pieces of content from one piece of content and that's the biggest change. And I'm not sure I can recommend workflow people because everyone is different and tools, but I use ScreenFlow for my video editing and my TikTok editing. And I do a lot of stuff manually in terms of cross-posting stuff because it's the only real way that I can have some quality control over stuff. I have tried some of those tools where you automatically upload a Twitch clip somewhere or automatically use an RSS feed to publish something somewhere else, but I like control over the quality and sometimes the quality of those automatic tools aren't so good. Because I think quality is a big part of your credibility and your authenticity as well. But that's my biggest piece of advice is repurpose what you already have and find creative ways to adapt that to other platforms. That's the thing as well, if you want to be successful on multiple platforms or at least get the engagement numbers, you need to make content for that platform. So things such as reposting TikToks to YouTube Shorts doesn't work so well because platforms prefer native content. And that's why I don't just upload my Twitch streams in full to YouTube because they're three, four hours long and they've got all this specific Twitch stuff going on and no one wants to watch that. So I always make sure to try and tailor my content to the specific platform whilst at the same time repurposing it in a different format. Maybe I should write all of this down one day, there's a lot of stuff I guess that's in my head. I mean, I'm not like the most successful content creator there is out there, but I have a nice audience and that's all I can ask for really. Paul: I mean yeah, you could write a manual, this is a hard problem. I think a lot of content creators, if you go to any startup situation, what's the workflow? And it's a constant- Salma Alam-Naylor: It's in flux, yeah. Paul: Exactly. So any help you have as a content creator is valuable, even though if you're like, "Oh, I'm not the best." It's helpful. So ScreenFlow, do you use that to record your coding sessions? Salma Alam-Naylor: Yes, I do. So when I do proper coding tutorials mainly for the Netlify channel, I will screen record in ScreenFlow, I will use Audacity to do the voiceover and split it up and all sorts. It's a really great piece of software actually, it's really intuitive, it just levels up slightly from iMovie. There's some more cool stuff that you can do on it. But before that, what was I using before that? I think I was using iMovie before that and I don't think maybe I was using anything, but I've tried lots of different tools. I've tried tools that try and do it for you, but they haven't worked for me. There is a new one coming out, it's in very early beta, it's called Contender and it takes a talk or a blog post or something and it completely repurpose everything. And I'm really keen to try that because I've seen some demos and it's pretty neat. But I still don't believe that I would be happy with the results, but I'll believe it when I see it though. Let's wait and see for that. Paul: One last thing that I feel like really matters when I'm talking to you now is you're a very clear speaker and having a good microphone where people can understand, it's the last 5% of the wispy sounds your mouth makes, it makes a huge difference. There's people who maybe don't speak English as their first language, you talk slowly and people can latch onto what you're saying, that's huge too. Even if you're just in a Zoom meeting, just with your co-workers, having a good mic matters. Salma Alam-Naylor: Yeah, very true. Do you know? It's funny though, I'm never happy with my microphone sound because I'd love one of those deep, rich man sounds, but my voice doesn't have that frequency so it doesn't work. But yeah, it's true and I guess the whole teaching, standing up, talking, needing to communicate to people clearly because of the assumptions people would make about me by looking at me, I think it's just something I've automatically learned. But streaming is something that requires a lot of multitasking and a lot of constantly communicating whilst coding. So I think the more you do it, the more you practice it, the better be at it and the more it will come naturally. But yeah, you are right, it's how you communicate and how you speak just as much as what you're saying, I think, to enable people to build relationships with you and to form connections. And it's funny you say this, but I always hate what I do because I'm never happy. And so even now I'm analyzing, "Oh, am I speaking correctly now? What am I doing?" So there's a lot of doubt, but the biggest thing I keep in my head is if I can help one person through anything I do online or in- person, if I can just help one person with a bit of content, then I have done something good. So I keep that in my mind whenever I am putting stuff out there that I'm not happy with. I used to be a huge perfectionist and I guess I've dialed that down a bit for the sake of productivity. And if I can help one person, then I'm happy. Paul: Yeah. Feeling your content reaching people is huge. That's why I feel like most content creators do what you do, it feels great to have people say, "I consume this, I learn something." It's a great feeling. Salma Alam-Naylor: And one of the best feelings I ever had actually was someone came into my stream once and they said, "I did it, I got my first dev job and the things that you did in this stream really helped me." And I'll never forget that. And it was really nice and that can happen more and more as people are learning tech online and speaking to people. And I guess that is an important thing to keep in mind as well, if you are getting into tech and if you are trying to learn, is that tutorials can only get you so far. And talking to people who are also learning, but talking to people who are maybe a little bit more experienced as well is so beneficial. And it's very similar to how you solve problems with a team member and create those relationships through those debugging times. And advice to people out there would be try and find some people to talk to, any kind of community that shares your interests and you will exponentially grow as a developer. And I think Twitch has been really powerful for that over the last few years as live streaming coding has grown since the pandemic started. Paul: So if people wanted to watch your live streams, what is the Twitch name or YouTube channel? Salma Alam-Naylor: So it's Twitch.tv/whitep4nth3r, which is White, P-4-N-T-H-3-R. Just substitute the A and the E for a four and a three in panther and I am Whitep4nth3r everywhere on the internet as well. Twitter and YouTube and Polywork and anywhere, just Google me, White, P-4-N-T-H-3-R. Paul: And you have a website as well? Salma Alam-Naylor: Whitep4nth3r.com. That's where I try and collect everything together that I do, my blog posts, my events, talks, videos and you can find out all of my social links from there and my next Twitch stream and everything like that. Paul: Is there anything that you're going to be putting out that you're excited about, that people don't know about? Anything unique coming soon? Salma Alam-Naylor: Currently on my stream, I'm actually building something called WFT, What The Framework. And it's to solve a problem that I see a lot where people ask me, what front-end framework should I use? And before you can answer that, you need to find out a little bit more information about what they're trying to build and what functionality they need from the framework. And so this tool is trying to solve that problem by asking a couple of questions based on the type of website that you are building. And then it will recommend you some frameworks based on their features. So I'm hoping that when it's finished, I can just point people to that website where they ask me that question and it will help them hopefully. And then it hopefully will help people discover some new frameworks that exist, that they didn't know about because I've definitely discovered some new ones as I've built it. So Whattheframework.netlify.app, you can go and see it, though it's not finished whatsoever, but I don't care and I like to deploy unfinished websites just so people can see the progress that they take. So go and have a look and see how it looks today. Paul: Okay. That's how you're still developing, you're like, "I want people to see the progress. Go look at it, now's the time." Salma Alam-Naylor: Yeah. Go and tell me what's wrong with it and let's fix it together on my stream. Paul: Well Salma, thank you for your time coming on and sharing with us about content creation. I think it's an idea that people are really interested in, DevRel and how do I get there? So hopefully this helps some people and some people can go visit your stuff and learn about what you're doing. Yeah, thank you for your time. Salma Alam-Naylor: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Emily: Hey, this is Emily, one of the producers for PodRocket. I'm so glad you're enjoying this episode. You probably hear this from lots of other podcasts, but we really do appreciate our listeners, without you there would be no podcast. 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