Brad Garropy, by his own admission, is a lifelong learner. That fact emerges in a number of ways, no more so than during his time as a developer, building in public and writing across a range of topics such as his macbook setup or the correlation between motivation and boredom.
However, the well-versed developer and prolific content creator you see before you today was not built overnight. Brad’s current success couldn’t be achieved without many ups, downs, and critical work and life inflection points along the way.
Learning in public
For all intents and purposes, there are few (if any) similarities between electrical engineering and web development, maybe except for the fact that they’re both incredibly difficult. For Brad, attending the University of Texas at Austin as an electrical engineer challenged him in ways that would surely benefit his current career, but at the time was just simply a lesson in perseverance.
“It was a very hard degree. It really taught me how to buckle down, concentrate, and study. I was the guy always on the whiteboard, trying to figure stuff out,” he says. This experience also kindled his passion for teaching. He had to visualize complex concepts and explain them to others, a massive piece of being a successful content creator in the dev realm.
After graduating, Brad was able to land a role with Dell, where he was inspired to branch out and teach himself the ways of web development.. He spent his nights and weekends learning the fundamentals, seeing what many others at the time could not – the evolution that was taking place from jQuery and Backbone.js to frameworks like Angular and React.
Those long nights also exposed a hard truth: learning alone was, to put it nicely, kind of a drag. Brad says he longed for a community to interact with, ask questions of, and eventually, share answers that plagued him when he was a new developer.
“I started trying to learn React, but I had no idea how the web worked. And so it was very difficult to learn, but it forced me to join communities, be a little bit more active on Twitter, post projects to try to get feedback, and actually gain some mentors to help me along the way,” he says.
Not letting perfect be the enemy of good
The nights and weekends paid off: after two years of self-teaching and hard work, he had built a portfolio that helped him land a job at Adobe and then Atlassian, where he now helps solve problems for the very communities that supported him as a new web developer.
“We make a bunch of in-house products for each other as alphas and betas before we release them to the world, and we get so excited about it,” he says.
All the while, his professional and personal life started to intersect. Brad wanted to be intentional about creating a fulfilling life outside of work, and extend conversations he was having with his peers in the workplace to benefit the community outside of it. He began in a place of comfort: writing.
“I found that, initially, I liked writing blog posts because I could take a bunch of time to make them good before I publish them, whereas videos, the editing process was so time consuming,” he says.
In writing, he was able to find satisfaction in getting content out in the world faster than video, but still felt like it was an untapped medium. That led to the decision to not let the perfect video get in the way of good content.
“It's just more important to have a body of work out there that may be imperfect than nothing. And I found myself just wasting too much time making things perfect,” he says.
Reflections on the permanence — or lack thereof — in content
Brad quickly came to a realization many content creators take years to discover: keeping things interesting ensures that his passion does not become another job. That has also benefited his content creation — focusing on multiple income streams that intersect with his genuine interest in technology and teaching.
“It's hard [to build a website] because a lot of times it needs to answer questions like, ‘what do you want somebody to take out of this?’ or ‘what are you trying to sell?’”
One place of focus for Brad has been the gateway to his content – his personal website.
“It's hard [to build a website] because a lot of times it needs to answer questions like, ‘what do you want somebody to take out of this?’ or ‘what are you trying to sell?’” he says.
It was also during this process of building a website that Brad began to think about his presence online and permanency (or lack thereof) that can come with tying your content creation — or worse yet, identity — to a single platform.
“I think the thing that really started me thinking about this was this whole possible demise of Twitter,” he says, which led him to adopt an “own your own content” approach to his online presence.
“It’s not that I really post a whole ton on Twitter, but it is just the idea that content disappears or that it's not mine,” he adds. “I also think about this with Instagram. I like to post stories there, and a lot of times the stories have like my kids in it, or like memories that I might want to share or keep, but if Instagram goes away, so do all those posts.”
“Leaving little trails of knowledge behind”
In the end, whether it is his website or personal brand, everything ties back into his original goals – to be part of and nurture the type of community that helped him so much early in his career.
“I really don't define myself as a content creator. It's just me leaving little trails of knowledge behind because I wish somebody would've done the same for me,” he says.
When asked if he had any advice for others on content creation, he says he’s found there’s much less in your control than you think. It is your audience, he says, that ultimately defines your online presence.
“I really don't define myself as a content creator. It's just me leaving little trails of knowledge behind because I wish somebody would've done the same for me,” he says.
“There's a book by Seth Godin called The Practice…it talks about how you don't pick what you're known for. Like, you don't really pick your personal brand, your audience does. And so your audience kind of says, ‘oh no, I associate Brad with this topic.’ No matter how much I want to talk about something, maybe one video I did about a different topic just got picked up way better. And that's what people know me for. And so it's almost the audience that drives what you're known for, what you're recognized for.”