This week, I published Jason Lengstorf's #DevJourney story on my eponym Podcast: Software developer's Journey. Among many other things, here are my main personal takeaways:

• Jason dipped his toes into Web-Development by "figuring it out" doing the marketing for his Rock-Band. This brought him to one of his core beliefs: there is no such thing as a true failure, only information gain. The only real failure is not to try.
• Jason realized that collaboration really pushes him. Thus, he surrounds himself with people that will complete and help him. "You are the sum of the 5 persons you spend the most time with" as they say. Jason makes sure he spends time where it matters. That's also why he created PartyCorgi with a Code-of-Conduct from the get-go. And since people tend to mirror each other, good conduct creates good conduct.
• Jason realized he is very good at reverse engineering things. So this is was and still is the base of his learning.
• At the moment he started to work in WebDev, Jason faced the question of taking the safe route of a salary, or the riskier but with more potential-route of freelancing. He took the freelancing one. He attributes this willingness to bet on himself, to the experience of a close friend of his who trusted himself and succeeded.
• His company grew steadily until he had 2 employees. But he had overshot and had to lay one off, worked way too long hours and came close to a burnout. That's when he decided to center back on himself, concentrate on one project only and on his work-life balance.
• In order to preserve this balance, Jason uses multiple tricks from regular retrospectives, a passive time tracker to keep an eye on where he spends his time, and first and foremost, trying to listen to himself!
• Jason has always used teaching/writing as a mean to check if he knows something. That's how he came to creating content, also for other sites. Combined with his lust for being on stage, his step toward public speaking was kind of logical. But what made him shine in developer relations is his ability to make others successful.

Advice:

• Don't give up, keep building things that make you laugh, get the boulder rolling, it will become unstoppable.

Thanks Jason for sharing your story with us!

You can find the full episode and the shownotes on devjourney.info or directly here on DEV

Did you listen to his story?

• What did you learn?
• What are your personal takeaways?
• What did you find particularly interesting?