Josh Cirre is speaking at Epic Web Conf 2025

Hey, everybody, I'm so excited to be joined by my friend Josh. And actually, Josh, I didn't ask you how to pronounce your last name. Can you pronounce it for us? Yeah, it's Cirre, so just like the iPhone. I've heard all the jokes, I can hear them again. Yeah, I'm sure you have. All right, yeah, Josh Cirre.

And I'm so happy to have you join me for Epic Web Conf. This is going to be year two of Epic Web Conf, and I'm just thrilled to have you be a part of it. You're going to be giving a talk, Learning-Driven Development, that I think is a really... Just the title itself speaks to me very well.

So when I saw that submission, I was like, yeah, that one is going to be good for people. So, yeah, I'm excited to get to know you. We haven't actually... I think this is the first time we've talked, and we haven't actually met in person. So let's get to know you a little bit, Josh. Can you give us a little intro?

Yeah, yeah, super pumped to be able to have the opportunity to be at Epic Web Conf. I've been a huge fan of you, Kent, and just everything that you've done for the web development community as a whole. But, yeah, a little bit about me is, I have kind of been in the web development world, kind of adjacent world for a little bit of time,

maybe like eight, nine years or so, but really dove into the tech world, and most recently as a DevRel at Laravel in the last couple... DevRel at Laravel last year, but more recently like doing more content stuff in the last couple of years as well.

So kind of been in and around the tech world, but I come from Phoenix, Arizona, where I live. I'm a dad of two girls, and been married to my wife for five years, and that's a big part of who I am and what I do. And I just love being able to build things on the web,

and that's really why I have submitted this talk in a lot of places. It's what does it mean for me to build things and learn as I build? Yeah, love it. Before we get too much into that, I also want to call out that you had, in a previous life,

were in stage productions a lot. Do you want to tell us a little bit about some of that? Yeah, I feel like I'm one of those people that I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up, kind of thing. So I came, I had a lot of ideas of what I wanted to do. Through high school and college,

I did a lot of musical kind of stuff. I still do music on the sides, like I play music at my church every week, that kind of thing. But I do a lot of plays, or did a lot of plays in high school and college. And in college, after I did musicals, I went to school in Chicago, and then I thought I was going to be in SNL.

That was like what my dream was for the longest time. So I went the whole sketch comedy route of climbing the ranks of a place called Second City in Chicago, which is kind of like the breeding grounds, I guess, for a lot of SNL folks.

And then that didn't quite pan out, because there's a lot of who you know, how much are you willing to put in the work, and tech was a little bit easier to fall back into through all of that. But I still love plays. I still love acting.

And for the longest time, I was on the other side of the camera being an actor, and now I got to learn about, okay, what's on the other side of the camera, like actually filming myself and doing all this. Completely different, because you're not actually playing a character. So it's a lot of tough work to find, okay,

who am I as an actual person, rather than just pretend to be a developer telling you what to do. Yeah, yeah. That actually makes me just think of the character Shallan in Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive. I don't know if you've read any of those books. I have just started reading them.

I don't know if it was your tweets or something like that, but I hadn't heard the name of Brandon Sanderson. And about in the last year, I started reading through the series. Oh, okay, yeah, very cool. Yeah, she has not – this doesn't really spoil too much, but she kind of has this multiple personality thing that she goes through,

and it makes what you said, like, who am I? I've played other people so much, and trying to figure out your own voice and all of that, I think is – yeah, it's a fun challenge. Oh, yeah. For the longest time, my wife and just people who knew me personally,

when I would get on stage to do either just talks or just short talks and stuff like that, a lot of times they were like, it sounds like you're acting as someone, but you're not being yourself.

So it took a really long time both on video and on stage to be able to say, okay, I'm writing out this script, but it's not me writing out a script for a character. It's just me having a conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's tricky, but I love your background.

I also have a background in show choir and theater, not a lot of theater. You definitely did a lot more theater than I ever did, but I actually just this last Tuesday auditioned to be a part of a community choir in the area. That's awesome. I'm also in church choirs and things.

So, yeah, music is big for me. We'll have karaoke at the conference, and so maybe we can pull out some Broadway. That'd be fun. A little like a Broadway duet, we can do that. Yeah, yeah, like we could do confrontation from Les Mis. I don't know if you want to be Javert or Valjean.

Yeah, Javert is probably a little bit better for me. I'm more baritone. I feel like you're probably more like tenor, so that'd be a good mix of both of us. Yeah. Awesome. Hey, cool. So at the conference, you're going to be giving the talk Learning Driven Development.

Can you give us kind of a brief overview of what you're kind of thinking for that talk and what people can expect to get out of that? Yeah, Learning Driven Development really comes out of this process that I've eventually learned,

at least for myself, of like what is it, the idea of how do you learn? And I think that that's a huge concept that a lot of people don't really take time to think through, and I think it's important to really understand how you learn best in order to improve as a developer,

as a person, as a professional. A lot of times, you hear it all the time, but you don't necessarily know and put it into practice of like, oh, I should be learning something new every single day, or like in order to get that next job or in order to get that promotion

or in order to just be a better father, husband, person in general. Most of the times you have to learn how to do those things, and I think the key to that is actually knowing what works best for you in learning.

And I'm kind of like through this talk, I want to present the idea of what does it look like to learn not by having specific structures of, oh, I want to learn Rust or I want to learn Go. Those are great ideas and concepts, but at the same time, you don't really know where to start.

You get into, you know, a lot of people say like the tutorial hell kind of thing of like, I don't know how to escape all of this. And I think learning driven development comes from this concept of, well, instead of having this idea that you want to or instead of having this idea of I want to accomplish this

or I want to learn this or I want to be a better programmer, it really comes down to, well, I want to build this thing or I want to build a chat GPT clone.

Well, all of a sudden now you have this process to know, OK, well, how am I going to stream in answers? And then you learn, OK, well, what is streaming? And you take this step back of saying it's less about I want to learn how to do streaming and react.

No one kind of says, I'm just going to go about and learn streaming today. Right. But when you kind of pair it with I have this process or I have this end goal in mind or I have this idea

or I want to use this in my real life application or real life kind of like process or your daily life, all of a sudden it becomes more real to you and the learning sticks a lot better.

That resonates so well with me. And that is 100 percent the way that I recommend people do learning. You might even say that it's it's not so much learning driven development as it is development driven learning. Almost. Right. Yep. Exactly. But they kind of feed into each other as well.

Right. Like you, you decide, OK, I want to learn. Go. And so, like, let's find out, see what people say. Go is good for or maybe maybe I'm going to just bend it to my will and do something that it's not good for. But so like you just identify that's the thing I want to learn.

Now, let's find a project that I can use to force myself into scenarios where I need to learn it rather than just like going through tutorials. So, yeah, I I'm excited to see this talk and I think that it's going to be really excellent. Yeah. Yeah. I think just kind of just what you said.

Like, I think a lot of the tutorials that you put out, for example, are are kind of based around the idea of it's it's less about, you know, the end goal and more about what you've learned along the steps to get there.

And I think curiosity really is the core kindling to this fire of of of learning, driven development or development driven learning in a lot of ways, because it really stems down to, I think, to be a better learner, regardless of if you're a developer or just a professional.

A lot of ways comes down to like, oh, like, how does that work or someone else did that? How can I how can I do that? Like, I think most of the things I've learned, whether it's like music or or acting and improv or, you know,

how comedy works or just simple little development things like in Google Meet, for example, you can't when you maximize the screen or like in your another screen, it doesn't let you hide it.

Hide that screen in. Oh, yeah. It kind of like magnetizes to the corner of the screen. I'm like, oh, that'd be really cool to learn how to do. I don't know how to do it. That'd be really cool to learn how to do.

I think everything that I've learned about life, about cameras, about everything in between is just kind of like, oh, like, how does that work? Yeah. Yeah. That curiosity is key. So when we're at the at the conference, people are going to be curious about you, Josh.

So I and I'm actually curious, what is it that that motivates you to make the trip to go to conferences, to like prepare the talks or whatever? What what is it? Why is it important to you to meet people in person?

Like, why can't you just be content with being in your little office and recording videos? Why do you have to like go out into the world? Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. I think the answer lies in because like that curiosity drives into getting to know people better.

And it's one of those things where, you know, I felt like I knew you, for example, just from your tweets or just being able to like interact there, like your newsletter and even jumping into streams, stuff like that. But being able to jump onto this call is like another step and being able to be in person.

All of a sudden, the interactions that you then have after that of maybe it's just interactions on Twitter or maybe it's like interactions via email or streams or whatever that might be.

All of a sudden, they have a little bit more meaning because, you know, the personality is, you know, what drives that person, you know. Maybe it's even small little personal details of like they mentioned a book they were reading or something that like a TV show that really stood out to them.

All of a sudden, it has it carries more weight outside of in-person relationships. And that's why I think really I love about conferences specifically, but then also just being able to interact with people at conferences because it makes the world that we all live in of interacting online that much more valuable because we know what drives that person.

It's not just about what that person is learning anymore. It's why are they learning it? That is so good. I'm going to like take a snapshot of what you just said and post that by itself. That is exactly one of the major benefits of meeting people in person.

I often say there are some people in the world that I know online that I don't really get along with super well necessarily. Like we're not buds or anything. We're not. I try not to have enemies, but like there are people I just like don't really jive with, but I meet them in person.

And even if we continue to not jive with each other thereafter, I understand them so much better. And like when they say things, I can kind of hear it in their voice, even though like it's just text.

It just improves the relationship no matter what, whether the relationship is good or amazing or not good, the relationship is improved because we met in person. So I love that. Thank you. That's a great way to think about it is your relationships improved regardless of that.

Like just like you said, because I think there's so many things that we can disagree on so much, so much. But at the same time, there are going to be if you're at a conference, especially with someone, you probably have at least one similarity. Yeah.

And I think being able to find those things that excite you about each other means that you have the opportunity to interact with their personalities, their content, their musings outside of that even more because now you understand where they're coming from.

Yeah, yeah.

And actually you coming to my conference, which is primarily JavaScript full stack sort of conference and you being a DevRel at Laravel kind of speaks to that as well as you can kind of demonstrate how much we have that's similar and how much we can learn from each other, which I think is just it's awesome.

So I have one more one more question for you, Josh. When when you're standing around at the conference during the hallway track, we have extended breaks like the point of the conference is to get people together. What like people are going to want to come up and talk with you? What's something that they could talk with you about that would get you really excited to talk?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. I feel like I have a lot of different topics that we can talk about. Maybe I'll go for one developer related topic and then one non developer. Sure. People can take their pick.

One developer related topic, I would say is I love Svelte. Svelte is one of those things where I know this is like most of the people that are probably going to be like react based folks.

But I love the tech that is kind of like out outside of a lot of like the like the core development. So like whether it be Svelte, Solid or something like that, I love I love thinking through those ideas and kind of like what you said, what can we learn from what Svelte or what Solid is doing?

Like, I think there's so many things to learn from that. So like I guess that would be one tech conference or tech subject outside of that.

If you are a geek or a nerd about anything like videos, cameras, audio or music, I am willing to chat and geek out with you about specifics of a guitar or microphones or whatever that might be.

I'm always willing to chat about that. I guess a third topic would be like anything, anything kind of like movies or TV show related. I'm down to chat with that as well. Cool. Good. Super broad. Yeah. Yeah. You're a very approachable person. I can chat about anything.

You just tell me what your favorite topic is and I'll find I'll find a way to help you. That's great. So your people go and talk to Josh at Epic Web Conf in March. This is going to be so sweet. Thank you so much, Josh, for giving us some of your time and we'll see you all in Utah in March. Bye.

Josh Cirre

DevRel at Laravel

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