The Monday Byte

Welcome to the Monday Byte where I send you 5 things each week so you can improve your English and land a remote dev job.

📖 Word/Phrase - WLB

Maybe you’ve seen this. Maybe not. WLB stands for work-life balance aka having a healthy balance between your work life and your personal life. Good acronym to adopt and know especially for when you work with other native speakers :)

💬 Pronunciation - How to improve your pronunciation 

Today, I want to share a short 8-min video with easy activities you can do to improve your pronunciation. The Refold team has a ton of fantastic advice around language learning so I’m sure you’ll enjoy this one 😄 

Want me to critique your English? Reply to this and let me know!

🗣️ Real World Conversation - Launching Side Projects

More on the “how to land a remote dev job” side of the conversation, I want to share a little tidbit about launching side projects. Obviously many of us have full-time jobs, families, kids, pets, etc. So finding extra time is pretty difficult.

But if/when you can, I highly recommend launching side projects as a way to help with you landing a remote dev job. Why? Multiple reasons:

• it helps you stand out amongst candidates

• it gives you something to talk about [in English]

  • blog post, video, etc

• it helps you catch friends 

For instance, I’m launching this calculator for indiehackers this week, which I’ve been working on here and there when my daughter sleeps. It’s not much, but maybe it’ll connect me with a new online friend!

Or the next time I’m job searching, it’ll give me something to talk about. You never know 🙂 

🔗 Content - Refold YouTube Channel

I realized almost all my previous content recommendations were related to programming. That’s good, but we should also leverage the expertise of the language learning community.

So today I want to recommend the YouTube channel from the wonderful folks over at Refold.

I’ve learned so much from this community but I often forget about their YouTube which is full of great tips and suggestions. Check it out!

Enjoy the week, we’ll talk again soon.

- Joe