Gary Hockin

Gary Hockin travels all over the world empowering developers as a Developer Evangelist for Twilio (fine purveyors of communication APIs). He is a talented and evocative speaker, a cultivated author of impressively entertaining blog posts, and records elegant and informative screencasts and videos. Gary’s also a contributor to the Zend Framework and is argumentative enough to be on the community review team.

twitter: @geeh

Articles

Community Corner: Top Five Tips for Successful Speaking

By Gary Hockin

Public speaking is an excellent way to advance your developer career. When you stand in front of your peers telling them what you know, you get recognized as an expert in that subject. Forcing yourself to think about things in a way that allows you to teach tho others makes you understand that topic in a more in-depth way.

Published in Coding Without Fear, October 2019

Community Corner: Why Soft Skills are Hard Skills

By Gary Hockin

In tech, we have a term that I despise. “Soft Skills” refers to skills that aren’t specific to hardware or software; they are skills that involve communication, social situations, and interacting with people. People usually think of soft skills as supplementary to our primary job of writing code. I’ve read and heard a lot of nonsense where they are secondary or complementary skills to the essential knowledge of design patterns or proficiency in unit testing.

Published in Renovating Applications with Symfony, August 2019