Show Notes
Coding Chats episode 62 - John Crickett engages in a deep conversation with James about personal branding, building in public, and the challenges of launching a product. James shares his journey of using LinkedIn to build his personal brand, emphasizing the importance of transparency and community feedback in his projects. He recounts how his social network gained 20,000 users in the first 24 hours due to his public approach, which not only helped him secure jobs but also fostered a sense of community around his work.
The discussion also touches on the significance of mental health awareness and the need for open conversations in the workplace, particularly in the tech industry.As they delve into James's latest project, Bearly Fit, they explore the balance between creating a minimum viable product and ensuring quality. James reflects on the expectations that come with building in public and how he has navigated the challenges of app development while maintaining a connection with his audience. The conversation wraps up with insights on the role of AI in coding and the importance of mentoring junior developers, highlighting the need for a supportive environment in tech.
Chapters 00:00 The Power of Personal Branding 06:35 Agility in Development: Lessons Learned 18:29 Building in Public: Success and Challenges 26:08 Streaming and Job Search: A Double-Edged Sword 35:36 The Importance of Mentoring New Developers 40:22 Building in Public: The Journey of Barely Fit 52:58 Challenges and Expectations in App Development 58:54 Leveraging AI in Development 01:05:39 Final Thoughts and Future Plans 01:06:06 Exploring Related Content
James's Links: https://linktr.ee/mahybe https://bearly.fit
John's Links: John's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncrickett/ John’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@johncrickett John's Twitter: https://x.com/johncrickett John's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/johncrickett.bsky.social
Check out John's software engineering related newsletters: Coding Challenges: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/ which shares real-world project ideas that you can use to level up your coding skills.
Developing Skills: https://read.developingskills.fyi/ covering everything from system design to soft skills, helping them progress their career from junior to staff+ or for those that want onto a management track.
Takeaways Building in public can lead to unexpected success. Transparency in struggles fosters community support. Personal branding is crucial for career advancement. Quality matters in app development, especially when building in public. Mentoring junior developers is an investment in the future.
More from Coding Chats
Coding Chats Episode 83 - In this episode, VB from OpenAI’s developer experience team explains why he thinks plan mode is obsolete and how coding agents have shifted from step-by-step instructions to outcome-driven, long-running work. We cover how to write a good agents.md, why tests still matter when agents write the code, spec-driven development, and why cloud agents may be the future of dev tooling.
Coding Chats Episode 82 - John talks with Dave Westgarth, head of delivery at a Databricks consultancy. Dave shares his path from a psychology degree and McDonald's into tech, and they discuss why the Scrum Master role is so misunderstood, how it differs from a delivery manager, and whether either needs to be technical.They also look at how AI is changing delivery work. Faster code just moves the bottleneck upstream, John argues there's no AI-specific skill you can't learn in a day, and engineering fundamentals are what make AI useful.
Coding Chats Episode 81 - Ben Howdle talks to John Crickett about being a first time CTO in a start-up. Ben, author of The First CTO, shares what changes when you move from building technology to leading a technical team: the pressure, the trade-offs, and the realization that writing code is only part of the job.Drawing on startup experience and lessons learned the hard way, Ben discusses how to balance quality against runway, manage people, and communicate technical decisions in terms that founders and other non-technical stakeholders can understand. He also explores why resourcefulness, resilience, and comfort with ambiguity matter so much—and why CTOs often spend more time selling ideas than they expect.Whether you’re stepping into your first CTO role or leading a technical team at an early-stage company, this conversation offers candid insights into the realities of technical leadership.
Coding Chats Episode 80 - start-up advisor Alexander Berkovich shares his expertise on building successful start-ups, hiring strategies, CTO roles, and the importance of communication between technical and business teams. Discover practical tips for navigating the challenges of early-stage companies and how to align technical excellence with business goals.
Coding Chats Episode 79 - Richmond Alake, Director of AI Developer Experience at Oracle, joins John to discuss agent memory — how AI agents store, retrieve, and adapt to information. He argues that developers building memory on flat files are naively reinventing the database, and that once you factor in concurrency, security, and scalability, a proper database is inevitable. The conversation covers the full memory stack and how Oracle's AI database keeps embeddings and data together without shipping sensitive information to external providers.