The Monday Byte

Welcome to the Monday Byte where I send you 4 things each week so you can improve your English and land a remote dev job.

📖 Word/Phrase - polymorphic

My mentor mentioned this the other day in our call and I was like, “Oh yeah! I know what that means!”

When something is polymorphic like a function, it accepts different types as arguments. Here’s an example of a polymorphic function in TypeScript

// Generated by ChatGPT
// Polymorphic function that accepts different types
function combineValues<T>(a: T, b: T): T {
    return a + b;
}

// Example usage
const resultString = combineValues("Hello, ", "world!");
const resultNumber = combineValues(5, 10);

console.log(resultString); // Output: Hello, world!
console.log(resultNumber); // Output: 15

💬 Pronunciation - Stop Procrastinating and Start Shadowing

One of the best things you can do for your pronunciation is imitating others. In the language learning community, there are two practices for doing this:

• chorusing

• shadowing

Chorusing is when you imitate someone in sentences i.e. you listen to them say a sentence or two, pause the video, and then repeat. Shadowing is when you try to imitate them in real-time.

Both are great ways to improve your pronunciation. Read this article I wrote to get started.

🗣️ Real World Conversation - Create Your Own Roadmap

Did you see the viral developer roadmap project a couple years ago? A lot of folks liked it because it gave them a specific roadmap, or skill tree, to follow to improve their craft.

Lucky for us, their team just rolled out a new tool - the roadmap editor! This lets you create your own roadmap!

I’m actively working on creating my own so that I can become a great product engineer. I’ll share it with you after I’m done. If you make your own, please share it with me! Would love to see 🙂 

🔗 Content - It’s all about Input

I haven’t been consuming as much programming content these days (mostly because I have my bases covered at work). But I haven’t been watching a lot of stuff related to language learning and I enjoyed this video.

It explains why language learning is all about input. While this newsletter is about English and programming, I recommend watching this as a reminder that you’ll reach your goals by consuming more in English.

Enjoy the week, we’ll talk again soon.

- Joe