I'm Saron Yitbarek, Founder of CodeNewbie — Ask Me Anything!

I got interest in coding when I was working at startups and felt like what the developers were doing was so much more interesting than the business development stuff that I was doing. I also felt like as far as career planning, there was more of a future and job security in being a developer. But it took me a few years to ultimately make the switch and learn to code full-time. Before that, I tried a bit of the Intro to Programming course on MIT Open Courseware, which intimidated the hell out of me. It was really discouraging and delayed my entry to coding by a few years because it just made me feel like I couldn't do it and that coding wasn't for me. But I tried again, thanks to Codecademy and a few other platforms like Treehouse, that made it way more accessible. And now I'm here!

I also try to constantly develop professionally, for this I learn about experience and life hacks from a useful resource. There is also an opportunity to choose the necessary vector image, oak tree vector on the resource. Images can be searched by species, colors, locations, and orientations.

I love this fact too.

Does the t-shirt have any significance (a favorite design, a plain shirt, etc)?

lol I'm cheap and pride myself on being non-traditional so wearing a dress was out. And to be honest, the wedding just wasn't important to us. We'd been together six years, had already been living together, shared bank accounts, did all the serious adult relationship stuff, and getting married just felt like a formality. So it wasn't important enough to us to be worth fussing and getting dressed up over. My mother strongly disagrees lol

Spreadsheets! I love spreadsheets. They make me feel like my whole life is organized. I try to map out major milestones across projects and see where things overlap and might compete for my time and attention. Calendars are my second love. Seeing everything mapped out, including due dates for tasks, helps me manage multiple projects at once and makes me feel in control of the process.

Yup! I'd say it was a logical next step. I love audio and I love education and helping people move forward in their career and this felt like a great way to continue on that journey. I'd say the biggest hurdle getting the business off the ground was picking what community and what type of content to focus on. Producing audio courses means you can cover any topic, and I tried and tested a few that didn't work before I landed on machine learning and that one seemed to stick!

I've always loved audio. I grew up spending hours listening to books on tape and my first job out of school was working at NPR. When I think about interviews, audio is one of the first mediums I think of, so when I wanted to do something for CodeNewbie that involved interviewing devs, podcasting felt like the obvious choice!

Podcasts are tough. I think they're a really great medium as a consumer, but as a producer, it's really hard to grow and get discovered. I got lucky that I was invited to a bunch of other people's podcasts and had a bunch of speaking gigs that helped me get exposure. In fact, I actually launched the CodeNewbie Podcast while I was a panelist on someone else's show and they helped me promote it to their already huge audience. That helped me so much.

YouTube videos are way more work than a podcast, but the upside is the discoverability. Videos are easier to share, repost, they get tagged and indexed better, all making it easier to get viewers. If I was starting from scratch and didn't have much of an audience, I'd probably start with YouTube videos.

I don't really make YouTube videos, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but if I were going to do videos, I'd make short little videos that are super specific. I'd try and find topics that are commonly searched or errors that people are likely to look up. I'd also look at other coding videos that are super popular and see what works and how I might find things to either try out myself or identify things that are missing from their content that I can do. Hope that helps!

Yes, blog! Writing is one of the easiest ways to make content, way easier that trying to produce a podcast or make videos, and it's super accessible. CodeNewbie Community is a great place to write, so is DEV.to. And if you write and post it on twitter and tag us, we'll do our best to retweet it and help share what you write.

I think one of the hardest things about making your own content is overthinking it. People worry about whether it's new enough, interesting enough, if anyone will read it. Don't worry about those things! You're only job is to write, tweet then write, tweet then write, tweet. Just do those two things and you'll get better at writing and slowly get more readers. Hope that helps!

I think right now we're seeing a rise in audio outside of just podcasting. Podcasts are great, but as a business, it's tough. Podcasts are tough to discover, hard to build an audience around, especially nowadays when you're competing with all of these celebrity-driven shows, and you're pretty limited to advertising as a business model. People are starting to realize that there's much more to audio than just podcasting and we're going to start seeing other businesses pop up with that medium at the center. That's where Disco is -- we're using audio as our tool for education, starting with a focus on developers. And instead of relying on ads, we're implementing a content subscription model. Hope it works!

Ooo good question! I think it's hard to say without understanding the financial implications of waiting for the right job. If you can wait, I think it's probably safer to wait, but if you need the money, by all means, go and get paid! But if you take a less technical job, I'd make it clear to whoever is hiring you and who your manager will be that your ultimate goal is getting a junior developer position. I'd ask them if there are on-ramps to getting to that role, what support and resources they offer for that transition, how often they hire from within, and if there's a way you might be able to do some coding as part of your less technical role. If you see a path at the company where you can get to where you ultimately want to be, I think taking a less technical job can be a smart move.

Great question! Right now, we're for sure cross-posting so we can build up some momentum and kick-start the content creation process, but we're hoping that's more of a short-term thing. Dev.to and CodeNewbie definitely have some overlap but I think there's value in having a community that's explicitly for beginners. Having a safe space on the internet where everything is optimized for people just getting started with topics that are designed for their experience level, where there might be more stories as opposed to more technical content, is very valuable to new devs and people who may not quite be ready for the range and technical expertise that Dev.to offers, and that's what we aim to be.

I've always wanted CodeNewbie to have a home on the internet, and this is the first time I feel like we've had that, so it's definitely going in the direction that I'd hoped. Before this, we lived on a bunch of other people's platforms and now, we finally have a place of our own! I'm really excited to see all the awesome stuff people make and share here :) I hope that answers you question!

Nope, but happy to tell you about it! We use the Shure Beta 57a mic, the Mackie Onyx Blackjack, and we used to use Adobe Audition for our audio editing software and now use Pro Tools. If you're new to audio and do not plan on doing it full-time, I do not recommend learning Pro Tools. It's very powerful, but also difficult and confusing. Learning Audition is way easier. We also use izotope to clean our audio. I believe our producer, Levi Sharpe, also uses some additional plugins but I'm not sure what they are. Feel free to ping him for details!

The very, very first time I tried to learn coding, I think I was maybe 22 or 23. That lasted maybe a month or two. The second time I learned to code and actually stuck with it, I think I was 24. I'm not sure what you mean in the second half of your question, but feel free to elaborate and I'll respond. :)

I know mostly Ruby and a teeny bit of JavaScript, so by default, my favorite programming language is Ruby lol

Yup! I'm still hosting Command Line Heroes. To be honest, I don't know any other podcasts who are doing history type of content on coding, sorry!