Simon Grimm of Devdactic
24 Jul 2019
Today, we interview Simon, a developer, educator and consultant at Devdactic. He is the creator of the Ionic Academy - I have gone through some of his tutorials while learning the Ionic framework and they are just excellent!
Location: Münster, Germany.
Favorite gadget: Apple AirPods.
Start your day with: At 5am with the 5 Minute Journal, my Winners Bible and 10 minute meditation with the Headspace App.
Favorite time-saving trick: Stop and recognise that you procrastinate (e.g. watch YT), make a short pause and then focus 100% on work again.
Daily reading: I just put articles I want to read into the Pocket app and then forget about them. Only reading books before sleep right now!
Describe an average day at Devdactic? What does your morning routine look like?
I try to get up early for my morning routine, then I put in like 1.5 hrs of deep work while my wife and baby are still asleep. Then we have breakfast together and I get the morning to work on whatever tasks I have planned. We take lunch together, I get back into my tasks and end the day around 4pm. I have a “shutdown work” task to wrap up my day and I mentally sign off from my tasks (mostly) once I finish that task!
Because I work from home and am my own boss, I try to still have a regular workday so I can still have this great employee feeling on Friday when the work week is over. Weekends are mostly for my family and sometimes side projects if I find the time.
How do you juggle between being a founder (and creating courses) as well as being a developer?
I try to theme my week. Mon+Tue are my high energy days, I either create new courses, videos, content and feel like I already achieved something important early during the week. Wednesday is then for client work, and Thursday for my own projects and growth of the Ionic Academy that I ran.
For Friday I got all the administrative tasks and things like answering all YouTube comments and recording welcome videos for my new members. This also gives me some buffer at the end of the week if I still need to finish something else.
Finally, I try to balance being a teacher and being a developer as good as possible. I still experience real life problems in client projects that I can then use for my content creation work to show how things can be solved! This gives me a nice balance and I can stay relevant
How did you get into programming? Do you focus on a few languages or try to learn new things going along? Any tips for newbie programmers?
I started early (like with 13) with C++ because my big brother was into it and I wanted to learn these things as well. I basically followed everything he did so I also learned HTML and PHP back then. In school and university we learned Java but I never really liked it.
The change came when I learned ObjectiveC to build an iPhone app during my university time. From that time on I was sold to mobile!
This got me my first job, but I quickly also picked up the pretty new Ionic Framework and Angular back then, and I finally sticked with that until today.
I don't branch out into other languages at the moment because it’s really hard to have skills in all the frameworks like Vue, React and Angular at the same time.
However, when you get the basic idea of programming you can quickly pick up new languages. I can get into Python real quickly or understand what some Swift or Ruby code is doing. Once you are at a specific level, things really start to get easier!
My tip for newbies: Don’t fear to get deeper into problems. Look at the root of a problem, dive into Git repositories and see why something is failing. There is always a reason why, and you can find it out. It will teach you a lot and is a boost for your confidence and mentality.
What is your dev setup look like? What apps/tools do you use to help you aid in your development work?
I have an iMac in my home office and another MBP for downstairs/outside. I use Visual Studio Code for coding and besides that a bunch of apps like:
- SourceTree for my Git repository management
- Todoist for managing tasks
- Slack for communications
- Postman for API testing
- Bear (instead of Evernote) for taking all notes
What does your wind down routine look like?
I finish my shutdown task to know that I have wrapped up all open ends for the day. I get downstairs to my family, we grab a coffe together or go for a walk with the baby and then my mind get’s into a different mood quickly!
A big thanks to Simon for taking the time out to answer these questions! If you are a developer and love to be featured here please get in touch with me.