A tech educator roadmap

I’m working on a series of resources for people who want to become tech educators, based on everything I’ve learned growing my ramblings about vanilla JS into a $100k a year business.

Based on the responses I’ve gotten from folks, a lot of people just aren’t even sure where to start.

The first thing I’m working on is a roadmap, with a step-by-step process for getting started. Here it is…

Publish your thoughts, ideas, and stuff you learn as often as possible. Daily is best. Two to three times a week is ok. Once a week at a minimum. You want to get your thoughts in the wild as quickly as possible, so that you can get feedback and reactions and refine your thinking.
Create a small product. Once you start sharing your thoughts more frequently, you’ll start to get a sense for what ideas resonate with people, and stuff doesn’t have a lot of interest. After a month or two, you’ll likely start to notice some trends that you can turn into a small info product.
Refine. If the product does well, you can start to think about how to expand it. A cheatsheet might evolve into a small ebook, which turns into a series of ebooks, which turn into courses, which turn into workshops, and so on. If it didn’t do very well, repeat steps 1 and 2.

When I first started publishing my thoughts on web development, I was very focused on web performance.

At the time, web performance wasn’t a popular topic like it is now. Smart phones were new and weren’t ubiquitous, and everyone assumed desktop speeds were good enough.

I took at look at my analytics, and discovered that my articles on how to do jQuery things without jQuery were much more popular than anything else I wrote. So, I created a guide on Ditching jQuery.

If I hadn’t followed steps 1 and 2, I’d have written a book on web performance. And it would have flopped.

How do I know that? Because I did. And it did.

Just like learning to code, becoming a tech educator is about forming habits and repeating them often.