Mentoring Developers

Mentoring Developers

Helping software developers thrive

Episode 60: Allan Kelly on Agile Development and what’s wrong with it

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If you are not new to software development, have you noticed that sometimes the workflow does not run as smoothly as it could? There are times in software development when the problem is with the workflow. Maybe with a few adjustments, it could run smoother. The problem is, not everyone is willing to make those adjustments because, after all, the current workflow has been in place for years and no one before you has seen the significance of it. What do you do? How do you make workflow more efficient so that you are making the most of your time? If you are a business owner or manager, perhaps it’s a matter of making the most of your company’s time? They say that time is money. So, efficiency matters. Our next guest knows all about efficiency in software development.

Meet our next guest, Allan Kelly. Allan began his career as a software developer but quickly moved into consulting. He has authored several books on software development and shares his love of tech and how to be more efficient in software development with others in the industry. Listen in to episode 60 and hear his story.

Say hello to Allan on Twitter!

Allan’s Bio:

Allan makes digital development teams more effective and improves delivery with continuous agile approaches to reduce delay and risk while increasing value delivered. He helps teams and smaller companies including start-ups and scale-ups with advice, coaching, and training. Managers, product, and technical staff are all involved in his improvements.

 

Allan is the originator of Retrospective Dialogue Sheets and Value Poker. He is also the author of four books, including “Xanpan -team-centric Agile Software Development” and “Business Patterns for Software Developers” and more recently “Continuous Digital: An agile alternative to project”. On Twitter he is @allankellynet.

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Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of mentoring developers. Today my guest is Allan Kelly. Allan, how are you?

Allan: I’m very well. Thank you for asking me, Arsalan.

Arsalan: I’m so happy to have you here. You are not in the US. You are in London. Is that correct?

Allan: Yes. I’m sitting here in sunny London. No rain today.

Arsalan: That is incredible. I am so sorry that I have to hold you in your home office right now instead of out there having fun on those rare sunny days in London. So the question is, who Allan is and you told me that you are an Agile coach and you coach people and teams about how to do better. You mentor people. You have so much that you have done in your life, and we really want to go into that. There is one story about your first proper programming job that you got. That was five years after you graduated, and it was supposed to be this amazing new opportunity where you do things and it didn’t go according to plan. What happened?

Allan: I had already been earning money for programming before college. When I went to college I learned how to do it properly. You know that thing when you ask users what they want and you write it all down, and you design it, and you build it, and everything’s cool? I learned all that in college and then I graduated. When I got to the real world, nobody does it like that. It’s all over the place. I do these jobs because you have to earn money, but I spent five years feeling guilty doing projects after projects. I was thinking that we don’t do these things the way we’re supposed to. I was thinking that it was all wrong because we don’t do it how I was taught in college.

Allan: I started working this job for the British railway system, and they were doing it properly. Everything was written down, and they have an ISO approval on all the rest of it. I was so happy to get this job. It was a nightmare. The documentation was as high as a five-year-old kid. I spent half my week writing documents. We got audited and we were coached on how to answer the auditor’s questions. We had these architects who came from a Cobalt background and we were writing in C++. They had no idea about the technology we were using. So, the code and the architecture were two completely different things.

Allan: One day at lunchtime, I wandered into a bookshop that was close to the office. I found this book by a guy called Jim McCarthy. He’s still around and he’s brilliant. He opened my eyes and I suddenly realized that the way I was taught in school was a bit wrong. It never works out like that. It can’t work out like that. Jim laid out how his team at Microsoft does things differently. I suddenly no longer felt alone or the odd one out. That was in the late 90s. That was the start of my journey to the thing we now call Agile. So, I got to do it properly and it just didn’t work.

Arsalan: I have a lot of listeners who are just starting out and who may not know about all these processes were talking about. There is this idea that exists in academia and a lot of other circles where you talk about with the best way is to build software reliably that will be maintainable and where the process that you follow is repeatable for high-quality software, just like you can do with other pieces of engineering. You can say do this and you will result in having a very high-quality piece of software with fewer bugs, fewer defects, and it will work as expected and everything will be great. Then we have this idealized notion of how to build software. We go into the real world and we see that has flaws. Tell me a little about the issues you faced.

Allan: We were doing software about trains and how trains move around the network. One problem we had was with a source control system, but when you check something and there’s a load of paperwork. So, you had to fill in these forms before you could check something in and you had to get a line manager to check in your code. It slowed everything down. Once your code was checked in, the form goes to the testing department who builds your code and they test it. So, one day we do this and it gets sent back to me with the book report that said that my train was doing this and it shouldn’t be doing that. I asked if they were sure. I went and talked to the testers.

Allan: We realized that what it said in the requirements department of what the train should do and what the trains actually do in real life are two different things. There’s this one station where the trains go in and come out in an odd way. According to the manual, it never happens. So I mentioned that we know that trains do this. So I was told to speak to one of the customs people. But I’m also told that I must find out what the trains do in real life, but not let on that the document says one thing when we think something else, because that’s a contract issue, and they have to escalate it.

Allan: This is a project where we are working six days a week. On the seventh day, you carry a pager back in the pager days because the testers are working seven days a week. So, were trying to do as much as we can and as fast as we can. Yet, we have all these paper forms flying around and all these conversations that don’t exist because you’re not allowed to talk honestly to your customers. There are all these barriers because we’re doing it properly. It was utterly crazy. The way you can write something down, and the way things happen in real life will never meet. The more you write it down, the more complicated it gets. The more you write it down, the lesser the people will remember if they do read it.

Arsalan: These things happen because as we discover that people don’t just turn up one day and they are enlightened software developers. They have a history. They have some baggage. In your case, there were some programmers who were perhaps coached and trained in a completely different coding paradigm. They are experienced, but they are not necessarily well-versed in this methodology and programming languages. Also, people have their quirks and software development is not an exact science, unfortunately. I believe it’s more like Ninja, Kung Fu stuff.

Allan: Yes. It’s a bit of everything, isn’t it? I believe software development is engineering. I also believe engineering requires a bit of inventiveness and a bit of art. I know there are people who argue about whether or not it’s engineering. I say were not good enough to be engineers. We had to get one haven’t quite mastered it. The thing is, most people who talk about software ring engineering don’t know much about engineering. There are lots of different types of engineering. I’m a 3rd generation engineer. My father was an engineer. My grandfather was an engineer. They really had oil under their fingernails. They were ship engineers. At times, they built ships. They spent most of their lives making ships work.

Allan: As a kid of seven or eight, I’d been down to ships’ engine rooms. I saw ship engines over hulls. That informed me. I know that when you’re engineering things, that’s how the engine should work, but it doesn’t always work like that when there’s a bit of dirty oil in there. Or, the ship has to sail but the guys haven’t finished the maintenance. The ship has to sail…there’s a commercial imperative there. The idea that many people have about engineering and why they think software is a form of engineering is because they aren’t really informed about actual engineering. Engineering is the art of the possible. Engineering is making things work within constraints. That is absolutely what we do in software and it does require some innovation and some imagination, blue sky thinking, call it what you will. There are a lot of different things in there. I think that’s all part of the engineering mix.

 Arsalan: Right. So, it’s not clearly defined and it’s somewhere in the middle. Let’s talk about you, Allan. We want to understand who you are and where you’re coming from. Tell me a little about yourself. Let’s let our listeners understand who you are.

Allan: Who I am? I am Allan Kelly. I live here in London. I used to be a programmer. I used to put my fingers on the keyboard and write code. I still think of myself as that kind of person, although, no one has paid me to code for many years. I still have my pet projects at home, but when I work with teams and developers I see in them many of the frustrations that I had as a programmer. I reached a point a few years after I turned 30 and realized that I could make the code fly. I could make the code do what I wanted it to do. The code wasn’t a challenge for me anymore. The challenge was the way we are asked do stuff and the way we are set on teams.

Allan: Once upon a time a guy in his bedroom could write a program and he could make a lot of money. As a teenager, I was that guy. I didn’t make a lot of money. I made a little bit of money. I never had a Saturday job. I never delivered papers or anything like that. I never worked in a shop. I used to write programs in my bedroom and I used to them to TV, magazines, BBC, and people. That was how I had money as a kid.

Allan: Code is still a problem for a lot of people. What makes it so much more difficult is the way they are expected to perform, the structures that are put in, the way they are managed, the way their teams are sorted out, and the way the needs and requirements reach them. So, when I work with teams and managers, I see the problems they are having and I know those problems. I have lived that life. I want to help them with that problem. Before we can fix the problem with their code, we have to rethink how they’re going about structuring the code. It’s the structures, the organization, the culture and everything around it. When you’re setting up a code, what are you thinking about? Can you think clearly about your code? Or, are you worried about something else? It’s all about the environment that you’re in.

Allan: I still think of myself as a software engineer, but I don’t write the code directly. I influence how the code is written by helping teams and organizations do a better job. So, that’s what I’d say about myself if I’d had a few drinks at a party.

Arsalan: What was your first encounter with programming? How did you even know that was the thing to do?

Allan: I grew up in Liverpool in the 80’s. It was when home computers were just coming in. One of our neighbors bought a Tandy TSR80 from Radio Shack. I’d watch him and his dad typing in programs. I wanted some of that. So, I persuaded my mom and dad to buy me a machine. It was a ZED X81. That was what we called them here. It was a ZED80 machine with 1K of RAM, which, after a few months we got a PAC with 16K, not megabytes, K.

Arsalan: That’s kilobytes, people.

Allan: That’s kilobytes, yes.

Arsalan: And people are wondering what a kilobyte is. I haven’t heard that in a long time.

Allan: That’s like a thousandth of an MB, not a thousandth of a GB. So with this machine, I had found my thing. I was just hitting my teenage years. The machine and I used to commune. I moved up from this one K machine to a 2K machine with a 6502 processor. I spent most of my money for it. I used a little of the money and bought a book on machine code. So, I used to write 6502 assembly stuff. When I got a bit more money I could afford a Pascal compiler. As a self-taught programmer, I had go-to’s all over the place, but there were no go-to’s in Pascal. So I had to relearn how to program in a proper fashion the way you’re supposed to. That has still stuck with me.

Allan: I’ll tell you a funny story. When I was 16, like most 16-year-olds here in England, you do your first proper school exams where they get marked and recorded forevermore. I was one of those kids who did computer studies back then. We had to do a programming project as part of our assignment. One of my teachers had it in as one of the examiners. He told me a year or two later that I scored 98% and the programming assessment. Do you know what I lost 2% for? I didn’t use a go-to.

Allan: The exam board had this list of things that you had to do to demonstrate that you could program. One of the things that you had to demonstrate was that you could use the go to. Had I known that, I could’ve put a go to in there somewhere.

Arsalan: That’s a problem with computer science education because the teachers themselves are not equipped or trained. We follow these checklists of things. It happens now as well. You have to do this because it’s in the curriculum even though the rest of the world has realized that it is bad practice to do it.

Allan: Yes, so this is a really key point. It was one of my first big moments when you realized that those experts aren’t necessarily right. It’s like where I’ve mentioned before that, on a project where we were doing it properly. Doing it properly was hell. What is happening is with our education system and the people who are coming out of our education system of certain models. But because our technology is racing ahead, our technology is already invalidating some of those models. So if you go back to the traditional model that we used to develop software, we call it the waterfall because you have to get out the requirements and do the analysis and do the design and on and on. That makes perfect sense if it’s 1970. That model comes from 1970. We’ve spent the 70s and 80s perfecting that model.

Allan: Let me remind you of something. I’ve read up on this and most of your readers could read up on this as well as they want. In 1970, we had teletypes to communicate with our computers. If you had a screen, it was a green screen. We programmed our computers in Cobalt on an IBM 360 OS mainframe. The IBM state-of-the-art mainframe had 4 GB of RAM and 10 MIPS of processing power. My eight-year-old has a Raspberry Pie and it has 4500 MIPS of processing power and 1 GB of RAM. It is 2017.

Allan: That traditional software process that we’ve been taught makes sense if you’re programming IBM mainframes in 1970. In 1970, CPU cycles were really expensive. Paper and desk time were cheap. In 2017, when you’re programming your Lenox or Android in Ruby or Closure or one of these other modern languages, CPU cycles are now so amazingly cheap. That machine in your pocket has spent more cycles than Neil Armstrong going to the moon. Now that CPU cycles are so cheap, paper and dust time are expensive. It’s far cheaper and we can try out new ideas and get a quicker feedback loop. But, many of the things that are still being taught stem from an earlier age wall we’re racing ahead. The trick is to spot what those earlier lessons we keep and which we move on from.

Arsalan: Okay. That’s very wise because we are constantly going to always be learning and evaluating our successes and failures. Over time, the software industry tends to get better. We tend to understand how this works better. I think you will agree that context is also very important. What works in a very rigid scientific environment or an environment where the requirements don’t change, your requirements as a software developer per or your methodology may be very different from something else where you don’t understand the problem that you are iterating.

Arsalan: We’ve talked about Agile. You’ve referred to it a few times and mentioned that we didn’t have this term Agile before. You’d also don’t necessarily like this term because it doesn’t encompass everything. So, tell us a little about what you mean by all this.

Allan: The only thing that you can really do wrong. If you claim to be Agile, is to do things the same way that you did them three months ago. You should constantly be experimenting, innovating, and trying new stuff. Some of it is going to work and some of it is going to fail. I say that in and Agile context, but really that applies to all software development. That’s because software is always changing. By definition, when we create software, we are creating something new and innovative. If it already exists, you’re going to reuse it, take it and download it from source Forge or somewhere. If you have some code that already does it, you aren’t going to write it again. Instead, you’re going to do control C and control V. You’re going to copy it.

Allan: When we’re writing code, we are always doing something new. We are always innovative. All software development is about learning. We are learning about our tools, our languages, and our options. That’s the most obvious thing. We are also learning about the problems we are solving. Whether you are creating medical equipment or train software or iPhones, you’re learning about the problem you’re trying to solve because we don’t really understand the problem that we’re trying to solve. We think we do. But the truth is that as we are creating the solution we view the problem in a different way. The next time you’re having trouble getting email on your phone, that’s a new problem. How many people 10 or 15 years ago knew that we would get email on a phone? How many people 10 years ago knew that they needed to send 140-character message to the world?

Allan: We are constantly doing new stuff. As we are doing this new stuff, we are thinking of new ways of approaching it. We redefine the problems we are approaching and addressing. We create new problems to solve. So, the second thing that we’re learning is about the thing that we’re creating. The third way that we are learning is about the processes and actions that we are going to use to go about doing this. To some degree, we are learning about learning. For me, all of our technology and software is a multi-layered learning process and we are constantly layering.

Allan: I think that the traditional model, the thing that we call waterfall, tried to freeze learning and tell us that we’ve learned all about the problem. We have written it down. We have now studied the architecture and we have written it all down. We will now give it to a simple programmer who will code something up and when he is done, that will pass the test. We try to put in boxes and freeze it, but what we see is that those boxes feedback to one another. Over time, as we’ve gotten faster, our cycles are getting faster and faster. Our chain cycles are getting faster and faster. So those boxes are interfering with each other at a faster rate. The big thing about Agile is that Agile suggest that we have a model that incorporates learning. It’s the kind of model where we do something and see what happens, we think about it, we reflect on it, and maybe that changes what happens.

 

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Episode 59 – How software developers can make the Web secure

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Internet security has come a long way. Now, we need passwords for everything we do and every website we visit. We’re told that we should have a different password for everything, but, what a pain! Why shouldn’t you use the same password and username for everything? It would make your life so much easier.

 

Special guest, David Gatti has returned to Mentoring Developers. This time, he discusses the importance of internet security and what he has to say may surprise you. Don’t miss episode 59! Arsalan and David talk about usernames, passwords, and the importance of proper authentication.

Say hello to David on Twitter!

 

David Gatti’s Bio:

David Gatti began his career in IT as a Systems Administrator. He learned how to code in PHP out of boredom, and made some simple internal tools to help him while managing the company network.

He then became a blogger and wrote about mobile technologies before the iPhone came into existence and PDAs had cellular modems. He also wrote the CMS for the website itself when WordPress was first starting. Then he began working as a web developer for a company that did simple Facebook games.

After this initial experience, he imported a Windows Mobile app to Android 2.3. He later became a Brand Manager for a mobile game company and a Marketing Director for another company, and at that company – he transitioned to Developer Relations Manager and worked for two companies with this title. It was a job that he fell in love with.

But, while hunting for his next opportunity, he struggled to find the right company. Out of frustration, he created Simpe.li (simply) so he could keep doing what he does best – Development Relations Management done right.

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Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. This is Arsalan Ahmed with David Gatti. David, how are you?

David: I’m fine. How are you?

Arsalan: I’m great and today we’re going to talk about security in the sense of how to keep our server secure, how to build websites that don’t get hacked. Those are important. We are going to talk about how to keep our users secure, how we can avoid becoming hacked ourselves, and how we can have secure practices as software developers. For someone who is starting out and learning these new programming languages and frameworks to build cool apps, they may not be thinking about security. They should pause and listen to this podcast and really think about what they’re doing to ensure they’re not skipping something that’s important.

Arsalan: You had a personal experience with that. You had a new website and it got into really big trouble. So tell us a little bit about that, David.

David: it was for a website that was built more than 10 years ago. I developed it myself. Back in the day, we used the technology called STP to transfer files to the server. I had this STP client. I decided to make my life easier by saving my password to the server. By doing that, I ran into the situation where I got a virus on my Windows machine which detected that I was using this STP client and it try to access every website that I had in my favorites. It found my website, which was gaining popularity with over 7000 views a day. So a bunch of people was visiting it. This virus then updated my index HTML file with a piece of JavaScript code and started infecting all of my visitors with a virus. I received a bunch of messages letting me know that something was wrong. I fixed it, but it took me a while to understand how someone accesses my server.

David: After a while of googling around, I realized that the STP client that I was using had a common line interface which allowed the virus to easily use this client from the common line. Just by making my life easier and saving the password I had compromised my security pretty badly. After that situation, I started taking security more seriously and I started to make my life a little more annoying by not remembering passwords.

Arsalan: So there are a lot of things that we can do to keep ourselves more secure at different levels. So, one thing is to not get hacked or get a virus and one of the ways to do that is to have long, difficult to generate passwords. If somebody just wants to randomly create numbers and letters and try to break your password, of them a hard time. If it’s a longer password, it’s going to be harder. If it’s a random password, it’s going to be harder. So, that’s one level.

Arsalan: One thing that we talked about earlier was that we shouldn’t have the same username and password combo for every website. You can. A lot of times we use email addresses. So, if you use email addresses, then often your password is going to be the same.

Arsalan: If someone cracks your password on one website, they can try to gain access to other websites using the same username and password combos. Sometimes I don’t even have to work hard for that because there is a way for them to send you an email the link to all these different websites. Maybe it’s a link to something else that triggers a call. Perhaps it’s a form submission to another website. They’re hoping that you’re still logged in. That’s another type of attack. It’s called C surf. They can go in there and get access. Or they can go in there themselves and use a password, so that if you are logged into Facebook. Their hope is that you may also use the same password for linked in, for example. Or, maybe you use the same username and password combo for Yahoo mail and Microsoft email or your Gmail. It depends on how you set it up.

Arsalan: The point is to keep everything separate. If you have different usernames and passwords for every website, keeping track of it becomes hard, but you really want to keep it separate. So, how do you do that?

David: Let’s go back for a moment to talk about using the same password for different websites. We’ve already had situations over the years where Yahoo was hacked and there were password leaks and people tried to use those passwords to access information on Facebook and other websites. It was working because everyone wanted to try to make their lives easier by using the same password for different places. So, I have a different password for every website. This is what I started doing. I started using passwords like Last Pass. It’s a nice app that allows you to store all the password security in one place and have one master password and auto fills the forms when you go to a website.

David: Nowadays I’m using Keychain on my Mac because it’s a built-in feature and it’s more convenient. The cool thing about this is that you don’t have to remember all the passwords. This way, even if someone stole my passwords from one system, it won’t work on another.

David: I go one step further than this by always trying to create a new email for each account that I have. So, I use Gmail and Gmail allows you to create aliases very quickly. So, I do that every time I add a new account. So even if you get my password, it won’t work in a different place because you need to know which email I used. So now suddenly you have two things that are different.

David: I also try to enable to factor identification on all the sites that support it. This way the email is different, the password is different, and you have a second device that you need to use to authenticate the account. People say that I’m crazy, but I’ve experienced this thing and I feel good because I’m secure about the technology and computers and I’m confident that I won’t have any problems. So after that last incident, I decided to make my life a little more annoying, but at least I’m trying to do the right thing.

Arsalan: The flip side of the equation is where we’re talking about people who are developing websites for users. We do want people to come to our websites and feel secure. Not only do we not want our passwords to be out in the open or have other people gain access to our accounts, but we also don’t want our users to lose access to their accounts. So there is one thing that we can absolutely do and a lot of companies and websites are doing it already.

Arsalan: So, for new or aspiring developers who are starting to build websites, let’s make sure that we force people to use secure practices – our users. How do we do that? We can make them use strong passwords and not allow passwords that are weak and can be easily hacked, guessed, or generated. So, the minimum password length should be pretty long. That’s one idea.

Arsalan: Another thing that I’m really surprised by is that a lot of websites that I visit do not allow spaces or special characters in passwords. That makes it very hard to randomize a password. A lot of people have talked about this XKCD comic where a guy was explaining that if you have a long phrase that’s easy for you to remember “I have a horse that is brown.” It might be an easy phrase to remember, but it’s a lot of words. If you can toss in a special character that isn’t used a lot that can throw them off a little bit, but some websites don’t allow that. So, one thing you can do is that when you build a website that you do allow it. You can also encourage people to have strong passwords. We also talked about two-factor authentication.

Arsalan: So, let’s talk about the two-factor authentication a little bit for people who don’t know.

David: Yes. So, two-factor authentication is a very simple thing to implement because there are modules and things that people have already written. This is an old standard where you generate a random string of whatever and you keep this string on your server and you send it to the user. The idea is to display a code on your page where the user can use an app like Google Authenticator and scanned the code, which has a secret. So, now the server has the secret. And your phone has the secret. There are two places that have it now. Then, based on the time, a six digit pin is going to be generated. So, every 50 seconds you get a new pin based on the secret key.

David: The cool thing is that the two devices do not have to communicate with each other. They can be off-line completely. This way there is nothing that someone can hack to the communication in any way. They might be able to see the pins on your page, but the pins would stop working after 30 seconds anyway. The flow is very simple. If you had this feature on your website, the user could go there and click enable and they would receive this code that they have to scan. Immediately there app is going to pick this up and display the first pin that is generated. Then they put the pin on the website to confirm that they are able to factor authentication correctly. If the pin is correct, the user is enabled.

David: Now, the next time they try to log in. They type their login and password. The page will ask for their six digit pin to verify they have access to the second device. The idea is to not send this piece of information to the same device that you are trying to log in from. So, if we were receiving an email with a pin, it’s kind of pointless because you would be using it on the same device that you are trying to log in from. That’s why it’s important to have the two factors on a completely different device, and ideally with zero communication with the Internet.

David: So, it’s a very simple thing to implement, especially with NodeJS. I don’t know for sure with different languages if they have the same libraries that you can just use.

Arsalan: It’s something that’s coming up. It’s not universally implemented. There are different ways of doing it. As you said, two-factor authentications basically mean that you don’t just rely on username and passwords. You have another way of authenticating. Usually, you enforce that. Sometimes, you have an option.

David: The thing to remember is that if people are not mindful about security, they will not know that anything even exists. So, that’s one sad part about the situation. The second thing is, they may think that the two-factor needs to be completed in a way like banks use them. For example, you were given a dongle that you had to carry with you that was generating those pin codes based on the secure string. So I think in people’s minds they may think that two-factor authentication is too complicated and they don’t have time for this or the knowledge to do it. In reality, it might take you three days to do it from start to finish. It’s very simple and easy. So, if you’ve heard of it and thought about doing it then just do it. I can guarantee that it’s very simple. It’s not complicated and the flow is very easy to follow.

. It’s not complicated and the flow is very easy to follow and adds a lot of security to your account.

Arsalan: Yes. It makes you look professional. A professional developer should think about the users and their own well-being and security. That is very easy. Now, these days because there is a very popular Google authenticator app that has a presumably easy API to use.

David: You don’t need an API. That’s the cool part. Completely off-line. The app just reads that secure string. You can either do it with a core code to make it easier for the user, but there is another option where you can type it in by hand. There’s no API or anything like that. The app is just there to make your life easier.

Arsalan: So essentially you have some kind of a string or a key as you mentioned. That key is using a known algorithm from which you can generate a token or a number with that. You can only do it if you have that random thing that you just generated. Since you are the website developer, you’re the one who generated it. So you have it. By the Google authenticator scanning that, they have it too. So, now only two entities in the world have it. Using the same algorithm, they are going to generate the same number. Once you’ve entered it, it’ll be very easy for the application to know. You don’t have to enter this because there are plug-ins and libraries and lots of other different ways of doing it. If you want to do it, you can, and it’s a very good idea to do it.

Arsalan: While were added, let’s also talk about HTTP and HTTPS, which is another thing that’s easy and even I’m guilty of doing that. If you go to mentoring developers.com, it’s on HTTP, not HTTPS. I didn’t get around to doing it, but it’s very easy to do these days. HTTPS is a secure version of your website. The way it works is that you use SSL or secure socket layer. Then you need a certificate on your website that tells everybody that you are a legitimate purveyor of website content. You are who you claim to be.

David: Yes. The point is to tell the website visitors that you are who you are pretending to be.

Arsalan: So, somebody has to trust somebody. There has to be some entity that we trust and that entity has to verify who we are. That entity provides us with a certificate, which we can then use to do encryption and the other entity will know for sure that we are who we claim to be because they also trust that other entity. Those entities are called certificate authorities and now there is a free one. It used to be that you had to pay a lot of money, but now you can go and get a free SSL certificate. So it’s very easy to do and it’s a reminder for me as well because I need to do it.

David: The good thing is that the free part is if you use Heroku, they have a built-in now. You can literally enable https for your website by using the automatic option and they use an encryption to do it. So, you just push one button and it’s done. You don’t even see your certificate. You don’t have to copy it. They just set it up automatically for you. Every three months. They will automatically generate a certificate for you because that’s how long those certificates last for you.

David: If you were to do it on your own server, then it’s a little bit of a pain in the butt. You have to run the script and set up everything. It’s a little more annoying. But if you use Heroku, then it’s one push of a button.

Arsalan: Right, and there are probably lots of people in the audience who are wondering right now what Heroku is. So, let’s just talk about it quickly. Heroku is a platform that allows you to deploy your Web servers, web services, websites, and whatever applications you have into their servers. It’s a cloud-based service.

Arsalan: So, if you were developing a program in NodeJS or Ruby on Rails or Python or whatever, it’s a website that you want people to access. You can have your own server deployed there and you can find a shared host or you can deploy a service like Heroku. Heroku allows you to deploy directly from your depository, such as your Getup account and once you’ve updated, it gets the new version and compiles it, runs a test and deploys it all for you. You save money because you only pay for the time that you use. This is very similar to what you can do on other platforms like Amazon, EC2, Azure, and some others. Heroku is very seamless from a development point of view. That’s why we talk about it and you can start for free. So, it’s very easy to get started.

David: The cool thing about it is Heroku uses EC2 machines. So, they’re using Amazon, but they’re putting a nice clean interface to interact with the craziness that Amazon is because the interface there is super crazy and complicated. When you have a lot of products like that. It’s not an easy thing. At Heroku, they just made it super simple to deploy and have it working. If you’re on that platform, it’s simple to enable SSL now. That’s especially important whenever you try to send any type of forms because if you don’t enable a secure connection everybody in the network is able to read everything that goes between the server and the client. So, the point is to make sure that you are not only connected to the website that you wanted to connect to but when you try to send information back to the server that stays private to the browser and the server. That way nobody else can see what is going on.

Arsalan: Excellent point. If you connect to a website that runs on https, which means that uses SSL certificates then all of that information is encrypted. So, only the person with the key that was negotiated during the SSL handshake can read it. That’s why Google is really pushing for it. Google at the search engine level likes to have all websites in https. It’s a good habit to have, but most websites today are not running on https, including mine. So it’s a reminder to me and everyone else to look into that. It’s very easy to do it.

David: I have it more for my private website which has no forms. It’s just the display with text on the page. I also enabled it just to do the right thing by default. Don’t even question it. It’s something that you might think is complicated because when you’re developing, you just want to develop something and you don’t want to think about this. But, sadly, many young developers forget about it. They don’t think about securities. This is not something that they are interested in for example. They just want to develop. If other people are going to use it, you need to start taking security seriously because other people’s lives are going to be impacted by what you create and how you created it.

Arsalan: There is a feeling that front end developers are not that interested in security. They don’t want to talk about it or think about it. They just want to build their functionality. So we’re going to talk a little bit about this. There’s a question on Stack overflow that caught my attention. I think we’re going to include the link in show notes. So, if you’re listening to this podcast right now, go to the website and the page for this episode. You’re going to find a link where there’s a nice answer with a whole bunch of bullet points.

Arsalan: The first point is to never trust any input. I think that’s a very good point, especially when it comes to front-end development. What’s your experience with that? You work with front end developers. What do you think about this, David?

David: The important part to realize is to never trust and input, but in the front end it’s not such a big deal because the front and is responsible for creating a good user experience. For example, let’s say you’re trying to enter your password and you have forgotten what it was. You should always check to make sure the inputs are all correct on the backend. The backend is where no one, in theory, has access. In the backend, you can ensure that the password is in place and is the right length. You can also ensure that the email is correct. You can also ensure the email is the right format. If you only make those checks in the front end, anyone who is visiting your page has access to that go to JavaScript code and can change anything on your website.

David: This is something that I realized a lot of people don’t think about. So, doing those checks on the front end is for user experience. Doing those checks on the backend is a security thing. The backend should be the last place to check and make sure that everything is correct.

Arsalan: So, we have different layers of security. When you have validation, you should have validation on the client and the browser because that’s fast and efficient. The ultimate validation and security is in the backend because that is where your data live. If you are user interface gets garbled because something happened, that’s okay. You can just reload the page or closure browser and start again as long as your data are good. You don’t want bad or untrustworthy data to get into your system.

Arsalan: So, let’s give an example of the different types of attacks or malicious content that can compromise your data or your application. There is something called SQL injection. SQL injection can be handled very easily. Let’s say you’re just starting out and you are building an application and you want to allow people to search for things. When you receive the text from the user, your plan is to use that to generate a SQL query to select something from a given table where this name, identity or field equals what you received from the user.

Arsalan: If you make a naïve query like that you are setting yourself up for an attack in the form of bad SQL input, which will run a random SQL query on your website and they can probably make a guess on what your data structure or database looks like. Not only would they be able to extract data, they would also be able to remove or insert things. They can wreak all kinds of havoc. This is something easily fixed if you use best practices, but you have to know best practices in order to use them. If you know that, then that problem goes away.

David: Yes, and it’s also a good idea to use forms as an added layer of your queries so you’re not writing low queries. Another good idea for ORM is to make sure you don’t have SQL injections. So even if this is not your strong suit, just by using one of those forms popular ones, you’re safe, at least in that regard.

Arsalan: Right, so let’s talk about some of those ORMS. ORMS are the software packages or pieces of software that take an idea or concept that you have in terms of data. You want to get and manipulate some data and convert that internally into commands for the database, like SQL. You don’t have to implement SQL in your own code. You write your idea. For example, let me get all these records that fulfill these criteria. You give that command in the ORM language, whatever the ORM uses. It could be text-based. It could be API, like a fluent API or whatever uses. Then, it internally converts it. When it does, converted it makes sure to prevent SQL injection.

Arsalan: What David is saying is that if we use those software packages, which are built into a lot of programming languages like Ruby on Rails and more, you can use them. They are very popular. If you follow the best practices, it will become very natural and just happen. But in a lot of cases when you’re first starting out, you may not know them or be intimidated by them. You may think that you need raw speed or just to get down to the metal and see how things work. So, it’s okay to create your own queries, but just make sure you use parameter-based queries.

Arsalan: I’ve been in situations where I’ve seen raw SQL all over the place. In the real world, raw SQL is used. Sometimes people think that gives them extra power. Some people don’t trust ORMs. It is sometimes the case where ORMs are very slow. In the .Net world there is a Microsoft sanction and Microsoft entity framework which is a very nice framework because it gives you a very nice API and you can type queries easily. It gives you a lot of ability, but it comes at the cost of speed of execution. It’s very slow.

Arsalan: You could pick another ORM that’s not sanctioned by or developed by your company of choice, like in the case of ASP.net. So then you could find another ORM that is like a micro ORM. It may be a very thin ORM that gives you some protection and some facility without being overbearing and it’s still pretty fast. So, there are some options.

Arsalan: If you’re listening to this podcast right now, and you’re wondering what kind of ORMS you can use for the framework or program language that you’re interested in, send me an email. My email address is us@mentoringdevelopers.com. I’ll help you out or I can get you in touch with people who can help you out. We’d love to know more about your problems and issues, what you’re dealing with at work. If you are interested in security, we’re going to have a follow-up episode. I think this is a good length. We’re going to conclude this episode right now, but were going to have but were going to have a follow-up episode where we will go more in depth on ‘are our application secure?’ I think you’re going to really enjoy that episode if you liked this one.

Arsalan: The show notes and links for this episode are going to be on www.mentoringdevelopers.com/episode 59 because this is episode 59. We are going to have to stop now and continue in the next part of this episode.

Arsalan: So, David, what do you think? Do you think we were able to cover some important security topics?

David: Yes, I think it’s a good start, especially if you never thought about this. Good topics are good for yourself. Do some research. Read articles. Learn more. There is one more thing that might help you out. It’s called Security Now! If you Google it, you’ll find it. It’s by Steve Gibson. It’s way more advanced than what we’ve just talked about. He goes into all the smallest ideas when it comes to security. So, at first it might be very scary and daunting, but it’s a good thing to at least listen every week to get a general idea of what is happening in the security world. That’s because there’s a lot of stuff happening. There are people hacking others and different accounts every day and every second. There’s always something happening. This will open your eyes to this world and what it is.

Arsalan: All right. So, this has been Arsalan Ahmed with David Gatti on security. We are going to be back with more security. Go back and check out episode 59 show notes again at www.mentoringdevelopers.com/episode 59. Send me an email at us@mentoringdevelopers.com. What’s your contact info, David?

David: You can hit me up on Twitter at @dawidgatti or on instant gray. Those are the two best places to get in touch with me.

Arsalan: Awesome, and our twitter handle is @mentoring devs. See you guys later!

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Episode 58 – Carlos is as Carlos does

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Starting a new career or adding a second career can seem like a daunting task to take on, but it doesn’t have to be. If you enjoy the kind of work that you are about to embark on, the opposite can be true. Sometimes in life, we make a career move that seems right at the moment only to learn later on that our initial intuition would’ve led us down the right path after all. Some might call it ‘living and learning’ and the learning often involves living with the path you currently have. But, if that path isn’t the right one, fear not! Sometimes in life, you have to take a chance to reach new heights that you never before thought possible. That’s what happened with our next guest, Carlos Munoz Kampff.

 

From the TI 84 calculator to music and back to tech, Carlos has done it all. Although music still tugs at his heartstrings, the overwhelming desire to code has been seeded there for years as well. But, Carlos never before considered tech as a potential for a career, until recently when he took a chance and enrolled in a code school. Now, he’s here to tell us his experiences that his path has created for him. Listen in to episode 58 while Arsalan chats with Carlos, a musical entrepreneur who turned to software development.

Carlos’s Bio:

Carlos Muñoz Kampff grew up in an entrepreneurial and musical family in Brazil, Mexico, and Germany. In 1999 Carlos moved to Boston to study audio production for video sync (aka film scoring). Since graduating, Carlos has been a rock and roll musician and circus music composer. He’s been on veggie oil bus national tours with the band Incus, reality TV shows with the ClownSnotBombs, and most recently started his own business and became an entrepreneur. He began Star Power Music School in 2011, developed Notabtion™ (his trademarked music notation and leveling system), and recently received a scholarship to participate in the Advanced Certificate for Entrepreneurial Leadership, of which he is now a graduate. He is currently in Portland and learning to code at Epicodus so that he can turn his innovative methodology and Notabtion™ into fun and engaging music apps.

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Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi, Everyone! Today my guest is Carlos Munoz Kampff. How are you, Carlos?

Carlos: I’m doing great. How are you, Arsalan?

Arsalan: I am awesome and it’s so good to have you here. We have discovered while we were talking that we have a lot in common, including the fact that you did something with your programmable calculator back in high school. You were cheating on an exam and you got away with it. Tell us a little about that.

Carlos: It’s kind of funny. Back then it seemed like a guilty pleasure, but now it’s becoming what my life is all about, which is kind of interesting. So, when I was in high school. They wanted us to use these TI 84 calculators and the thing about them was that they could do all kinds of mathematical computations, but they were also programmable. I hope my teachers aren’t listening right now, but they assume that if they didn’t teach us how to program that we wouldn’t just figure it out. As soon as I found out that you can program these I went through all the manuals and just created sheet programs for all my tests. So a lot of times I would have to twiddle my thumbs at the end of a test to pretend that I’m doing something because I’d be done already.

Carlos: So that got me curious about it. Then I went into different avenues. After that, and I started playing music. I joined the band and moved to the United States to study music and through that, I started to learn more about entrepreneurship. Years later I came back around to my interest in technology and coding.

Arsalan: So you’re currently in a coding boot camp in Portland, Oregon, right?

Carlos: Yes.

Arsalan: I was going to ask you to describe yourself because that’s one of the questions that we always start with. How do you describe yourself? Who is Carlos Kampff? But, I think it’s going to be hard because you have your legs in three or four different boats. But let’s see if you can. Who is Carlos? We want to see who you are.

Carlos: I’m trying to understand who I am as well. One thing I can really say is that I’m really a curious person. I like to learn about many different things. For example, I played music for a circus troupe that was on a reality TV show on truTV. That was an experience. I’ve toured with bands. I’ve started my own business. I’m always very curious and learning about different things. I’m an idea person. I think of ideas all the time, which has been hard in my life. It’s hard to describe ideas to people and not have people interact with you on that level or not be all about that idea as well. Until I found entrepreneurship and the coding community, that was the case. Now I’m really starting to feel like I’m finding my people because they are all about ideas too, and I find that really exciting.

Arsalan: That’s good. It’s good to have ambition and it’s good to have ideas. Yet it only matters and is beneficial when you put those ideas into action and actually produce results and you know that because you have your own business and you been working on it for years. We are going to talk about that, but first I want to know about your first encounter with programming. I know that you worked on that TI 84 calculator and that was pretty cool, but when we talk about programming we traditionally talk about sitting in front of a computer and typing on a keyboard and making stuff happen. So, what was your first encounter with programming?

Carlos: My first encounter with programming. More recently was just being curious about Swift and learning to make my own apps. I created a metronome app for my students to use.

Arsalan: Yes, we need more of those. We don’t have enough. Okay, that’s a joke, folks because there are 1 million metronome apps. But, if you make it without ads and it is fairly accurate and then a metronome is a very useful tool to have. So, tell me a little more about this app when you get a chance, maybe outside of the interview because I’ve been learning music and trying to play the guitar for a while and would love to know more about your metronome app.

Carlos: So, that was really just a project that I was coding. I don’t think I’m really going to take over the world with my metronome app, but I think there’s a switch that we can all choose to engage in which is whether or not we are consuming technology or are we creating technology? I think that when you’re creating technology, even if you’re just reinventing the wheel in your own way, it’s kind of magical to see how things work and to create new things in your own way. I notice every day when I’m going to coding school that I need to get on the bus on time. So, in Portland, there’s a Tri-Map API which we can use to get the exact time of the bus, so I made an alarm that tells me if the buses on time or late. The cool thing about coding is there’s always a niche. Maybe that Apple only work for people in Portland, but there are just so many problems and solutions out there. It’s really fascinating.

Arsalan: That’s true. Programming is like that superpower that can literally allow people to change the world. Sometimes it can make people’s lives better and it’s fun, but it’s also useful. There is also an opportunity that if you make something that is very useful, maybe somebody will pay you for that. So, that could turn into a product or business. So, programming, software development, and entrepreneurship are sort of tied together. As long as there are people making software, there will be entrepreneurs who are programmers.

Arsalan: Now, you didn’t study computer science in college?

Carlos: That’s correct.

Arsalan: Did you study something else in college? Did you go to college?

Carlos: I did go to college. I went to the Berkley College of music for film scoring which is music for movies. So, there is some technology involved. You’re learning about audio and interacting with video and whatnot. But, that’s only half the program. Most of it was learning about music and learning how to orchestrate and write music for different types of ensembles and arrangements and stuff.

Arsalan: I’ve heard that Berkeley’s entrance exams or auditions or whatever you have to do to get in are incredibly hard. Did you have to go through any of that?

Carlos: The thing about Berkeley is that it’s the biggest music school there is based on the number of music students that they have. Berkeley is a very tiered program. There are a bunch of different entry levels. It’s almost like a bunch of different conservatories altogether in the same place. So there’s this leveling system that kind of carries you through the whole thing and can give you different experiences. It’s been an inspiration for me. In my business, I’ve been implementing a leveling system as well because I felt like it was really effective.

Arsalan: When you’re talking about a leveling system, you’re talking about a kind of multi-tiered system where you can get more out of it if you invest more. So, help us explain what you mean by leveling system. I think what you mean is, you can either go to a level I or level II and level II is everything and level 1+ some more.

Carlos: Absolutely.

Arsalan: So, I would personally describe it as a multi-tiered system like tier 1, tier 2, or tier 3. I think people would understand that better.

Arsalan: Okay, so you didn’t study computer programming until you started this code camp.

Carlos: That’s correct.

Arsalan: That’s the first question. You have a business that you started back in 2011 and you were making money. Was it making money?

Carlos: Yes.

Arsalan: Was it making enough money for you to live on?

Carlos: Not in the bay area. It was definitely difficult to live in the bay area. It was a bootstrapped kind of business. We need to make money to be able to spend money. It’s been growing slowly and steadily and we try to keep our overhead to the minimum.

Arsalan: Tell us a little bit about this business. A lot of people would be curious by now. What business are you running and why are you doing this in the bay area? I know because you told me about your business, but the listeners don’t know. So let’s talk a little bit about what business it is and has it changed over time? Also, why did you do this business is not something else?

Carlos: The idea for this business came while I was in New Orleans. Have you ever been to New Orleans people?

Arsalan: I have.

Carlos: it’s an amazing cultural experience while you’re there. You can experience the best blues you’ve ever heard and then walk across the street and hear the best jazz you’ve ever heard and then down the street find the best southern rock you’ve ever heard. It’s just a really enlivening experience there. I was there visiting a friend, and that’s when I started crafting the business plan for the music school. The question was how can we give a little bit of the richness of the culture of that city to your city?

Carlos: With that mission, I started the business in Danville, California. I already had some connections they are and I started step-by-step having music students and then hiring other music teachers. I was also part of a group that started another business called JJ music camps, which does summer camps and puts kids in bands. I’m the music director for that program.

Carlos: Parallel to that I started Star Power Music and Star Power Music is all about the actual learning part about how to play your instrument and that’s where I started implementing the multi-tiered system. What we saw with that was immediately after I created and implemented it, the students sparked up. The reason is they all want to get to a certain point where they can feel really proud of how their playing music, but they’re generally confused as to how they’re ever going to get there.

Carlos: By creating that multi-tiered system, people light up because they can envision themselves taking each one of those steps. It’s kind of like a ladder, in a way, that students feel excited to climb. Some people might find offense to that because they see it as they just want to play their guitar without having to worry about the different levels, but most of the response to it has been great. The parents love it. The students love it, and they want to know that they’re making progress, and this allows them to have their small wins.

Carlos: Many things are hard to learn. So having those little wins really helps you stay motivated. There’s also the philosophy of doing community events and bringing the community together and getting people to meet each other because that’s the ultimate goal. You have to have something that you want to see you like the child improve playing music that’s improving, and pleasing to your ears because otherwise, you probably wouldn’t want to come. So that’s the fireplace, but you want people to come to that fireplace and meet each other and create friendships. That’s how you create a community kind of like the one that exists in New Orleans. In a way, I was trying to bring a little flavor of that to other communities.

Arsalan: I think that’s a really interesting idea, especially in music because music is something that a lot of us want to do, including myself. We would love to be able to play a certain kind of music and play efficiently and not suck. But, as soon as people start learning how to play a new instrument they realize that they do suck because it takes years of practice. It’s not like programming where you can potentially start from zero and in six months churn out a product which would look very good. It’s possible that within a few months of starting you can actually be hired to do this professionally, but it’s not the same with music. Music takes a lot of patience and a lot of practice.

Arsalan: As far as I can tell, you’re talking about assigning levels to people based on their proficiency. So, if I don’t know anything, maybe I’m level 0 and then I go and learn a few basics and a few chords and then maybe I progressed to level I. So, you can graduate from level 1 to 2 to 3 and it makes you feel like you’re actually making progress. It’s not like it’s a huge continuum. It’s not like 10 years later you’re either a professional or an amateur. There are levels in between. That’s a really good idea. So, I think people should check it out. We are going to have all the links in the show notes. So, if you’re listening to this podcast, and you’re not able to take notes, don’t worry about it. We’re going to have all the links in the show notes, so you can go check out his academy. You’ll need to be physically in the bay area, right?

Carlos: Yes, for now.

Arsalan: Okay, so if you are in the bay area, then I think this would be great. It looks like with this program that you’re targeting kids which I think is a good idea, but there are lots of adults who like to learn as well. So, maybe you should think about that, Carlos.

Carlos: Well, that is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot and it is part of why I am in coding school. What I found is that adults are very busy. So, for them to be able to meet at a certain time and be willing to spend money on something like this, it always ends up being on the chopping block with their other bills. So, what we’re trying to do is make it more accessible, especially for adults and young adults.

Arsalan: Like myself.

Carlos: Yes, Your 29, right?

Arsalan: I’m 19.

Carlos: So what I was going to say is that young adults often don’t have the money or the time to have a teacher come to their house or for them to even go to a school. So, I’m trying to introduce technology where I can stream lessons and have tools that would make it easy to do the lessons remotely because I see the technology getting better every day.

Arsalan: I think that’s an idea worth pursuing and hopefully you will find success. People who want to learn more about an instrument or become musicians who just never had a chance may be able to get in touch with you and I’m sure you’ll help them out.

Arsalan: So, you are in a code camp and the question is why? First of all, why do you want to be a developer? Lots of people just go online and read books and just hack their way through coding, but now you’ve decided to go through a code camp. The first question is why do you even want to be a software developer? The second question is why do you want to go to a code camp?

Carlos: The school year prior to this one. I went to an entrepreneurship boot camp where you learn all about starting or growing a small business. Constantly during the entrepreneurship program, they were referring to different types of technologies and what you find as a small business owner is you end up having 10 different accounts to 10 different things. So in the end, you have all these different services and they’re not speaking to each other and everything is disconnected. So what I’m hoping to do in learning to code is to create something that is more integrated and something that I can understand and have some level of ownership over. I want to be able to know what it’s for and how it works. So that if I want to go in and create a new feature than I can create a new feature. So it seems like a natural progression to learn about business and then learn the technology to actually implement a lot of these ideas.

Carlos: first, I started by self-learning like a lot of people, and used sources like Tree House and Udemy. I actually found the lessons very helpful and great, but the one issue is that you tend to run into a bug as soon as you are not doing exactly as they’re telling you and you and you try to do your own creative project. You run into bugs. So, then what do you do? You try to go to Stack Overflow or GitHub, but it’s confusing and it can be discouraging. So, I found that in a coding bootcamp, there’s that community. For example, last night I went out for beers with one of my cohorts. So, there’s just this sense of we’re all in this together and we understand each other and even though we are over beers and having snacks will still talk about coding and how to do certain things.

Just being around someone who understands these types of questions is incredibly valuable about being in a boot camp and learning with other people.

Arsalan: That’s very interesting. I think what a boot camp does for you is sort of create an artificial environment where we are all on this proverbial boat and we are all going together and you are all doing the same thing. I’m assuming that you are all doing similar, if not exactly the same projects. Is that correct?

Carlos: Yes, that’s true.

Arsalan: You’re given a project and everybody’s doing the same project just like in a college class, but in this case, you are forced to be together. So, you know that if you’re talking to the person next to you. They are also working on the same problem. That means that they will have empathy for your situation, first of all. They will also not have to learn what you are trying to do. For example, if you came to me with a problem or an issue and asked for help, I would first have to learn what it is you are trying to do. So I have to get some context. It’s going to take some time and I’m going to have to look at your code. It may take half an hour or an hour or two for me to really understand where you are coming from before I could even begin to help you. None of that happens while you are inside a cohort.

Arsalan: First of all, if you’re in a cohort, you probably don’t have kids. You’re probably not married because you probably got divorced. If I tried to join a code camp right now, I probably get divorced. There are certain times in your life when you just cannot do that. So, if you’re in a cohort than you probably don’t have a lot of responsibilities. I was just trying to say that in a funny way. If you are in a cohort and you are on campus, you’re not doing anything else. That’s all you’re doing.

Carlos: Right. It’s very demanding.

Arsalan: So, the barrier of entry for me to go in and asked somebody is low. That’s a really powerful concept that code boot camps bring that even colleges cannot do. When you’re in college, you’re taking multiple classes and doing multiple things and you might have jobs. But, if you are in a coding bootcamp, I don’t think you have the capacity to have a job on the side. That’s your job.

Carlos: Yes.

Carlos: Right. So, I’m going to Epicodus in Portland. The way they have us work is revolutionary. It’s a flipped classroom. You watch the tutorials at home and learn how things work and then while you’re there, you watch some tutorials on how to implement some things. Then you spent eight hours they are with a partner because you pair with a different person each day. So you spent eight hours trying to accomplish those things and meet those goals and lessons. You have tons of time with hands on coding, and that’s one of the most important things. Bill Gates even commented on the value in that. He even had time in the library where he was able to work on these computers and had tons of ours programming. It seems like it’s the most important piece. It’s the same in music, actually.

Carlos: You can learn a concept in music, but if you don’t know how to play it on your instrument, then it doesn’t matter. No one is going to come to the concert to watch you think about an idea. You need to be able to actually do it. I’m finding that at Epicodus I’m able to actually practice and learn all the key commands. It’s almost like a sport. You have to have a certain flow to it, and have certain good habits like copy and pasting certain names so that you get the spelling correct. You have to know how to check for common bugs. So, I’m finding boot camp very effective in that sense.

Arsalan: That’s good to know. It’s good that it’s helping somebody like you who has never really done any programming before. Did you ever write a program before this? Did you ever write a page with a function to do something? I know that you worked on your calculator for a little bit, but before you started Epicodus did you actually write a complete program? The metronome app was part of this, right?

Carlos: No, that was before. That was something that I learned from Udemy. They were teaching a tutorial on how to make a clock. I figured that I could make that into a metronome if I just added a sound to each time that there was a second and then I could change the duration.

Carlos: So, I’ve done a little bit before but there are plenty of people in the program who started from absolute scratch. One of my best friends there is a plumber. So give a shout out to Drew. He came from being a plumber in New Jersey, I believe. Now he’s doing amazingly well with coding. I won’t say that anybody can learn it because there may be some people who aren’t interested in learning it. But, anyone who’s really interested in and curious about it can really learn it because it’s a sequence of logical steps and if you can think logically, then I feel like you could build up the knowledge to understand it.

Arsalan: That’s really good to know. If you’re a plumber out there and you’re listening to this podcast and you never thought that you could be a programmer, now there is proof that you can. Anybody who is motivated enough to go through the difficult parts will be able to make it, I think. It’s hard when it’s hard. That’s what you were referring to when you said that we run into bugs as soon as we go off the script a little bit on a tutorial. It’s going to happen.

Arsalan: Let’s say that you go to a website and you find a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a certain type of application or a website and you start following that step-by-step. Invariably you will find that one of the steps does not produce the results that the tutorial said that you should expect. Sometimes it’s because you did something wrong, you typed something wrong, or you made a mistake in the way you set up your computer. Sometimes the underlying framework or software library has changed and you are now on a different version and it’s not compatible. It happens all the time. It happens to me all the time. Yet, since I’ve gone through this so many times over and over, I’ve come to expect it.

Carlos: Right.

Arsalan: It’s good to have somebody who you can lean on and it’s good to us have somebody who you can talk to. Even if they don’t help you, it’s good to know that what you are experiencing is normal and that you’ll get through this. Sometimes, you need somebody to actually work together with you on a problem to get at it or find a solution that works. Sometimes what happens is that there is an actual bug in the framework. It’s pretty common. For example, if you’re using Ruby on Rails to build a website and the new version of Ruby on Rails that you installed has a bug in it or has a problem, that’s not your problem. Yet, now you’re building on top of it. So, you’re going to have to find a workaround. That’s just how it goes and that’s okay. Eventually, at some point they might fix it. We just have to constantly adopt the changes and adapt our skills and know that there is never going to be a perfect solution. We just have to find a balance.

Arsalan: I studied engineering. Engineers kind of know that instinctively because engineering is all about finding the right compromise between different options to get to the result. You just want to have the finished result that is acceptable and it doesn’t really matter which approach you take. That’s a nice engineering concept that I think when you’re building software. You should think like an engineer a little bit. It’s like these Lego pieces. You need to put those Lego pieces together to come up with your building. If a certain piece doesn’t work, throw it out and find something else that works in its place.

 

Arsalan: What I’m curious about is the sets of technologies and frameworks and so on that you’re using. Do you have a choice in your coding bootcamp to pick the technology or is it given to you?

Carlos: We do have a choice. I could’ve gone into the C# or .Net path or the Java or Android path or the Ruby and Ruby on Rails path. I chose the PHP and Drupal path. Part of it is because I’m into education and a lot of the universities will use PHP and Drupal. All of those different tracts learn Ember and Angular as well. It’s been interesting because PHP is a much older language compared to Ember and Angular, which has positive son negatives. The exciting thing about angular is that they are constantly updating it, and you can work with Firebase and you can do different things, which is great. The downside of them always updating it with new features is they are constantly changing all the things that you are trying to learn. I’m just getting started with that, but I’m seeing that it’s a beast and I’m in a fast lane. Yet, if you’re working with PHP and Silex then my experience is that it is what it is. You get to know it and you get to work with it. So, it’s been a kind of interesting experience.

Arsalan: Learning Ember and Angular is a very humbling experience because you are never the man. You’re never really comfortable or on solid footing because the ground under you just keeps moving and it’s generally true for all the JavaScript frameworks. I think the good attitude to have is to never be comfortable and never have the I know all there is to know and I don’t need to learn anymore attitude. That’s something you could probably do in Java, maybe. Maybe you could do that, and PHP, to an extent as well. But you can’t do that if you’re working on modern web development frameworks like Ember, ReACT, Angular, and so on. But if you have somebody who does not want to constantly be in a place where they have to learn then you could say that they could learn a language or a framework that doesn’t change so much or even fall much in the world. Maybe the versions keep changing, but the industry as a whole doesn’t adopt new changes as frequently. So, you don’t then have to keep on that treadmill. That’s an interesting thought. However, the reality is a little mixed. It’s not always true because if you are working on PHP or C sharp, or Java, and you’re building web applications, then the chances are that you will need to build something that works with the modern times. It’s faster. It’s more fluid. It updates more frequently. It doesn’t have page refreshes as often. The chances are that you’re going to need to use some client side framework along with it. For instance, Angular is a very popular choice or Ember or React or something else.

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Episode 57: How to Sell Yourself and Find Work

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Do you need to have experience in software development in order to get a job in tech? The answer may surprise you. In a world where technology leads the way to new and exciting innovations and designs, finding a job in tech can seem like a dream. But too often you hear from others around you that entering the field of software development is tougher than it first appears. You must have the skills needed, but skill alone isn’t enough. You must also have experience under your belt. That’s the theory, anyway. So, let’s separate fact from fiction.

Returning to talk more about selling yourself and finding work in software development is David Gatti. David comes from a varied and global background in tech and more. Now, he’s here to confirm what’s true and what’s false about what you really need to do to get into tech. If you’re ready to hear more about it, listen in to episode 57. Be sure to leave us some comments about what you liked at the end.

Say hello to David on Twitter!

 

David’s Bio:

David Gatti began his career in IT as a Systems Administrator. He learned how to code in PHP out of boredom, and made some simple internal tools to help him while managing the company network.

He then became a blogger and wrote about mobile technologies before the iPhone came into existence and PDAs had cellular modems. He also wrote the CMS for the website itself when WordPress was first starting. Then he began working as a web developer for a company that did simple Facebook games.

After this initial experience, he imported a Windows Mobile app to Android 2.3. He later became a Brand Manager for a mobile game company and a Marketing Director for another company, and at that company – he transitioned to Developer Relations Manager and worked for two companies with this title. It was a job that he fell in love with.

But, while hunting for his next opportunity, he struggled to find the right company. Out of frustration, he created Simpe.li (simply) so he could keep doing what he does best – Development Relations Management done right.

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Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Mentoring Developers. My guest again today is David Gatti. David, how are you?

David: I’m good. How are you?

Arsalan: I’m doing fantastic. It was good to have you in the last episode and I’m excited to have you again because we’re going to talk about another really relevant topic. I’m going to let you describe it.

David: Thank you. I don’t have a platform for it, so let’s say this. I want to help you learn how to sell yourself to an employer.

Arsalan: That’s great! How to sell yourself or how to get a job and get ahead if you’re just starting out and are new to software development. If you’re wondering how you’re going to get noticed and how you’re going to get a job, you should be listening to this episode.

David: Correct. The first thing will require lots of work and patience. You are going to need to do a bunch of things before you can start looking for a job if you want to do this quickly and find someone who is going to like you. There are a lot of people online who are bombarding employers and companies trying to convince them that they are the perfect fit for the job. This is without them providing any proof that they are any good at what they do. You may be thinking to yourself that you just finished school and you don’t have any experience. Yet, in 2017 you don’t need any experience. You need to build your portfolio online. You can do this a couple of ways.

David: Start a topic that you’re passionate about and learn everything that there is to learn about it. Write something about it explaining what you just learned. If you’ve written five or six of these articles, then, while job searching, you can show that you understand what you learn, you can explain those topics, and that you can write interesting articles about that topic that are fun to read.

David: Spend some time writing small tools to help other developers. Now, many languages have package management systems. A couple of examples are NPM for NodeJS, PIP for Python, and many other tools. Find something that always annoyed you when you were developing something and perhaps no one wrote a tool or they did a poor job of creating a tool. Then, make a bunch of tools for yourself and publish them with links on your website. This gives you some proof that you are active and building things. Then when someone asks you for some examples of your work, you can include all the links to the things that you’ve created. You can show your GitHub profile is active by building something on there. You can also use GitHub as a blogging platform. That’s something that I do – publish my articles on GitHub. Basically, GitHub is like Facebook for developers. This is the way that GitHub is going after their last conference. They are understanding that developers are the most important part of their community rather than B2B, or businesses. So, they are going back to their roots and building new social features.

David: When I look for new developers and their GitHub profile is empty and they don’t have their own name or a photo, I tend to pass them up. It’s a very important part especially for someone who’s looking for a developer. One of the easiest ways to find a job would be through places like Upwork, Freelancer or a similar website. You may wonder why you should bother when there are so many people bombarding lawyers and companies with messages, but I would suggest to go and check the profiles of those people. There is literally nothing there. Those are people who are just looking to make a quick buck and work on a project. They don’t care about the code quality. You can easily stand out by showing what you’ve done.

David: If you’re young and you’ve just finished school, you could say to the employer that you are willing to work for less and prove yourself. And if you create clean, nice and well-organized code, the employer will take that into consideration and it will be to your benefit. The main thing that companies want is somebody that they can trust, someone who knows how to do a job, and someone who is writing clean and well-organized code. By being diligent in taking the time you can make it so that the company will not want to let you go. Then, you can more easily ask for more money.

David: This is something that I take the time to write in my own profile. I write out the codes and continue learning new things. I love writing articles. So, I take a complete idea and simplify it. People on twitter are starting to notice it, and are commenting on my articles. Then, if I need them while looking for a new job, I just point to my GitHub profile.

Arsalan: Yeah, a tip that I received from recruiters and from my own personal experience, is to always include your social media profile or all of the links where you maintain your social media presence in your resume. I don’t necessarily mean Facebook.

David: I would say that if they are a developer, then enter it. But, I wouldn’t be interested in what you ate yesterday.

Arsalan: Right. A lot of people think of their social media profiles as an extension of their resumes or an extension of their personality. So, they curate that. It’s all intentional. If they post something on Instagram or if they tweet something, they’re wondering to themselves “what do I want the world to see.” So, they include that in their LinkedIn profile and on their resume. It’s possible that some of their social media profiles will have content that is not very professional, but it doesn’t have to be unprofessional. If there’s something questionable in that content, then you should take it out. Otherwise, that tells you a few things as an employer or manager. Firstly, that person can communicate, even if the article is not technical. If you write about something and comment on things, it shows you as a real person, which most people are more comfortable with. If you have done work, then you can always create articles and you can write other pieces of software and you can post them on GitHub.

Arsalan: The other thing that you mentioned about GitHub was fantastic, but a lot of people who do work in enterprises or non-open source projects, which is the majority of people, they don’t have the liberty to share their work on GitHub. But, what they can do some work on their own or show snippets of something that they’ve built, and then they can share that.

David: Of course. It’s always personal stuff. Don’t share corporate code.

Arsalan: Yeah, don’t share corporate code, but a lot of people have worked on open source projects to begin with. Then, they can share it. That’s great if you can.

 

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Episode 56 – Working remotely overseas and loving it – with David Gatti

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Becoming a software developer and beginning your career with a small or large company can provide you with an abundance of opportunities, experience, skills, and sometimes even advancement. But, working in an office isn’t without its disadvantages. Regardless of which industry you work in, one thing always seems to be a constant: office politics. While working around office politics may be a reasonable solution for most people, what if you want something more? What if you want to be a software developer, but without the office politics? Is it possible to find a way to work as a developer outside of the office?

Our guest in this episode is a jet-setting remote developer David Gatti. David appeared on the show as part of a panel back in episode 31. Now he’s back and he has something special to share. David works as a remote software developer from outside the US and he is here in episode 56 to tell us all about it. Listen in to find out if doing remote software development is right for you.

 

Say hello to David on Twitter!

 

David Gatti’s Bio:

David Gatti began his career in IT as a Systems Administrator. He learned how to code in PHP out of boredom, and made some simple internal tools to help him while managing the company network.

He then became a blogger and wrote about mobile technologies before the iPhone came into existence and PDAs had cellular modems. He also wrote the CMS for the website itself when WordPress was first starting. Then he began working as a web developer for a company that did simple Facebook games.

After this initial experience, he imported a Windows Mobile app to Android 2.3. He later became a Brand Manager for a mobile game company and a Marketing Director for another company, and at that company – he transitioned to Developer Relations Manager and worked for two companies with this title. It was a job that he fell in love with.

But, while hunting for his next opportunity, he struggled to find the right company. Out of frustration, he created Simpe.li (simply) so he could keep doing what he does best – Development Relations Management done right.

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Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Mentoring Developers. In this episode I’ll be talking to David Gatti. David, how are you?

David: I’m good. How are you?

Arsalan: I’m great. You have been on the show before in discussion. So I know quite a lot about you, but my audience who is listening right now doesn’t know a lot about who David got today is. So, describe yourself a little.

David: so, I’m a human, born on earth. More precisely, though, I’m a software developer and project manager for two different companies. I was born in Sweden and then I moved to Italy, where I was raised. Then I look for a long time in Poland. When I became a little older I decided to start traveling the world. I ended up in China and Southeast Asia, so, China, Singapore and Bali. In Bali I stayed for about 10 months before I moved for a short bit to the states and then back to Poland. So, I’ve been a little bit of everywhere.

David: I became a software developer and at one point I became a blogger for four years. At that time I was working on the site itself. At that time WordPress was still starting out with version 1, if that tells you how long it was. I was building the whole website by myself because at the time WordPress wasn’t a thing. It was just starting. After that I became a web developer and then I took a break and became a brand manager. After failing with the blog website, I had to close it and go back to becoming a web developer.

David: I became very passionate in understanding why a company fails. As a result of that, I read a lot of books and different articles and even watch different movies about the topic. I became a brand manager because of that. I worked in the software development company where they were working on a lot of games. It was fun, but I eventually came back to just software development because I didn’t like the office politics within a company.

David: As a software developer, you can just sit down and do whatever you have to do. You punch the keyboard and cool stuff ends up at the other end. I also missed just being a developer. I became a project manager for one company because this allowed me to understand how to work with other developers. It also helped me to understand how to communicate over distance.

Arsalan: So, you are a globetrotting software developer who has live everywhere and who has experienced life in a way that most of us don’t get to do. Not only have you been developing, you’ve also dabbled in management and a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It’s interesting, but that gives you a perspective that a lot of us don’t have. That’s why you’re on this episode because we really want to learn from you and your experiences and to see what it is like for other developers who may not live in the US. Most of the audience for this podcast is based in the US and I’m based in the US. We really need to learn more about what it’s like for others, and perhaps the grass is greener on the other side. Maybe it is a great idea. What’s also very interesting about you is that you are working as a remote developer. Is that right?

David: Yes. Both companies that I work for are based in the US. I have a company in the US that I opened remotely. That’s like the ultimate remote thing. If you are a new developer who is just starting out, then maybe going remote right away is probably not the best option because you need to work with other people in a company and understand how the company works and what you like and don’t like about that.

David: The normal rule is that you go to college, you finish school and you go to work where you work, work, and work. Then, you buy a house; you have a family and all that other stuff. I’ve always understood that. First you need to understand the rules before you can break them. This is something that I learned.

David: I did everything that society expected me to do and then I decided that I didn’t like it, and I wanted to work remotely with the option to travel whenever and wherever I wanted. So lately, for example, I’ve spent a month in Spain, but the two companies that I work with don’t really know this. They just noticed that the background of my Skype looked different. So, on the plane I just continue to code and do my thing. So this is what’s great.

David: You can travel on the weekends and keep working during the week and nobody knows the difference. I think that managers and CEOs don’t get the position therein because they’re good people. They get the position that there in because they understand the corporate worth. By working remotely, you don’t get to see them and they don’t get to see you. So, they don’t get to see how you react to them. So if you react in a negative way, they don’t see that. So, working remotes gives you a way to work without being bothered by the whole office politics thing, which I like. In fact, I don’t even have contracts with the two companies that I work with.

David: We literally work together because we trust each other. I have two other friends who have their own companies here in Poland. They have contracts that are very strict. It’s like you having to pay me by this time and I have to work at this hour, and etc. I think that it seems like a very stressful thing. One of my clients, I know that if he doesn’t pay me it’s because he doesn’t have time. He’s running around doing a lot of other things. So I wait patiently and the next time we talk I’ll remind him about the payment. Then, by the weekend I get paid because he finds five minutes to just click on the button. So, this is how we try to understand each other. I’m flexible and their effect, flexible and it just works for us. That’s how I’d structure my life.

Arsalan: That’s nice, as long as you can trust people. But from experience…

David: Oh, from experience, you cannot just do this with anyone. It will not work. Nothing works like that. It takes time.

Arsalan: Even between friends, as a general rule, it’s a good idea to have contracts. But in your case, you don’t want that kind of stress in your life and you know these people.

David: I don’t do this with friends. That’s like the worst idea ever.

Arsalan: So, maybe it works for you because you are invoicing them or billing them regularly. You’re not waiting to or three months because I could be problematic.

David: I invoice them once a month, but with one guy, we were doing it every two weeks. I was getting annoyed with having to invoice him every two weeks, so I asked him if we could change it to monthly and he agreed. It all depends on how you approach this and what kind of deal you set up. Since we don’t have a literal contract, we can just have a conversation to discuss the new ideas. Contracts were invented because people were scamming each other. Yet, over the years, the contracts didn’t entirely solve the problem. You still have problems with people getting paid or doing what they need to do. So, I don’t think that’s the solution. For me, it’s a matter of finding someone I can trust and can have this conversation with and then everything works.

Arsalan: I think that is a good idea. In general, if I want to give advice to someone who is just starting out and once to be independent and work remotely, I would recommend more frequent billing than a month, like maybe once a week or every other week. That’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of overhead, but that protects you from the chance that somebody deciding that they don’t want to pay you. Maybe they ran out of money. Maybe their clients didn’t pay them. So, may be your only out for a week or two instead of one or two months. If you do it for a month and you don’t get paid for another month. Then you could be out two months of income.

David: That’s true.

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Episode 55 – How Leslie Chose The Right Code School

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You’ve finally made the biggest decision of your life. You want to plunge forward and get into software development. But where do you start? There are so many code schools out there. You could practically pick one at random and they’d let you in, but that’s not what you want. You want your introduction to software development to really mean something. For it to mean something, it can’t just be any dev boot camp. It needs to be a boot camp that you can afford, but one that is also selective. The more selective it is, the better. Yet, at the same time, are you good enough to jump through the hoops and pass the standards bar, yourself? That’s what our next guest did and she’s here to tell you all about it.

Meet Leslie Pajuelo! She comes from a background that combines computer science with geology. But Leslie wasn’t happy with her job. She wanted something more, something exciting, and something creative. She wanted to create software and realized that the fastest way to get there was through a code school or a coding boot camp. Nothing less than the best code school would do. This is her story.

Now that Leslie has graduated boot camp and is out in the tech industry, she is here to stay. In fact, she’s even preparing to give back to the community in an amazing way! Listen in to episode 55 and hear her story.

 

Leslie’s Bio:

Leslie Pajuelo began her career as a map geek for an Ag water district in rural California. That soon led to an opportunity to attend a Girl Develop It meetup, which changed Leslie’s course. Girl Develop It opened Leslie’s eyes to the world of software developing and she saw it as a step up. Instead of developing mapping software, Leslie now works on backend services for Walmart Labs. At night she is preparing to launch a new chapter of Women Who Code, which will be located in San Diego. Women Who Code is an organization that promotes the growth of women leadership in tech to inspire and provide a similar fulcrum point for other women in their careers.

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Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today my guest is Leslie Pajuelo. Leslie, how are you?

Leslie: I’m doing great.

Arsalan: Leslie, you have an interesting story. Tell us a little about how you came to the US and then you felt a certain way and then what happened?

Leslie: I moved to the US from Venezuela. Venezuela is one of the US. There’s a lot of great propaganda and there’s a lot of love between the countries. I moved here. When I was nine and it was a kind of a letdown. This is a land of opportunity and it feels like a lot of energy, but culturally, it doesn’t feel that way when you’re here until about 20 years later when I moved into software development. Then you have the energy and the opportunities and the community that really comes together to help each other out and it kind of felt like a fulfillment of the propaganda in this field.

Arsalan: So, when you started your life in the US, you were hoping that you would have a nice neighborhood with people coming over and a nice social setting like you will find in many other countries, especially in Venezuela. So, you are a little disappointed, but then you discovered software development and how people help each other. It’s amazing and it doesn’t happen in every industry. Yet you found yourself in the right place and at the right time. So, I congratulate you.

Leslie: Thank you.

Arsalan: Now you are working as a software engineer for a big company and were going to talk about all that. First I want to learn about Leslie. How do you describe yourself? Who is Leslie Pajuelo?

Leslie: in the last year. There’s been some transformation and when we talk about the opportunities that I’ve had, especially when I moved here, it is something that I am working to help create opportunities for others. I am energized right now and that is who I am.

Arsalan: If you live in sunny San Diego. You have a lot of opportunities to get out of the house. So how is San Diego?

Leslie: It’s great. I live three blocks away from the beach. There are a lot of outdoor opportunities. The quality of life is definitely high.

Arsalan: The rest of us are absolutely jealous right now.

Leslie: I was at the beach a couple of weeks ago.

Arsalan: That’s great. My experience in San Diego was not all that great, but I spent a day or two in the downtown area. I need to hang out at the beaches.

Arsalan: Now you are not someone who wanted to become a software developer. You are somebody who was probably trying to figure out what to do as you are getting older and going to high school, were you thinking about becoming a developer?

Leslie: Absolutely not. I wanted to be an astronaut. I originally went to college for aerospace engineering, but I dropped out. It wasn’t until much later that any software development came into my sphere.

Arsalan: So, why did you think about software development? Something that I have discovered when I’ve talked to a lot of my guests has been that they are just going down there paths and they are happy, but then all of a sudden they decide that they need to be doing software development. What’s your story?

Leslie: Sure, I was doing GIS which is database driven mapping. In a lot of the software that you work with, there are ways that you can automate things and you can do scripting. That’s something that I did for a few years, mostly for small water districts. That was all fine and good, but it was limiting. I thought I could become a GIS developer and help make these applications. It wasn’t until I went to a Girl Develop IT meet up that I realize that you don’t have to have a computer science degree, you can just develop it. You can just do it. From that meetup, I ended up finding Hack Reactor remote, which is one of the boot camps. I went through that and it really helped firm up my experience. Although I’ve done some database stuff, some scripting, and I had done some JavaScript maps on the front end with Jquery, hack reactor really gave me more breadth of experience and how to think about software development.

Arsalan: So, concerning your experience as a GIS database person, do you consider that as your first experience with programming? Or do you not consider it to be programming?

Leslie: I make the joke often that scripting and automation are the gateway drugs to programming because it’s sort of related but it’s not the same thing. I consider software development to include building a whole system.  The scripting and automation can help you learn the language, but that’s kind of like going to another country and learning how to say hello. It’s very limited. You don’t have a full grasp of the language to build out systems.

Arsalan: Right, when you decided to go to a code camp. You picked Hack Reactor. Some of my listeners might not be familiar with it. I just wonder why you picked that particular code school versus others because I know there are others in your area.

Leslie: I picked Hack Reactor because it was very hard to get into. They set a very low acceptance rate. Boot camps are unregulated. I had considered going to boot camp in Utah. They offered housing and a lot of other things for about $10,000. But when I talk to them, they said, “Yeah, sure, come on over.” I thought that was too easy. You need. I wanted someone to tell me no and that I needed to be better. I think it was the imposter syndrome speaking up to me and telling me that I needed to pass some sort of bar or standard. Hack Reactor touted their low acceptance rate and there were a lot of things on Quora about how hard it was and how people had gotten rejected. So I thought that if I go there and they tell me that I’m not good enough then I’ll go to the other one.

Leslie: So, I went for the interview and they told me that I was good enough and then they told me that there was this deferral so that I would have to pay them right away, not upfront. Then I realized that I could go to one of the better coding boot camps. I didn’t have to be a value shopper. I found that mostly people complained about them because they were unable to get in.

Arsalan: So, you needed someone to push you. And if they have a low acceptance rate that could mean that their quality is higher.

Leslie: I think the implication is that they are not taking just anyone; it’s not just for the money. They are not just growing to grow. They are not taking anyone just because you can pay them. It also gives you an idea of who else is going to be in your cohort because everyone else had to pass the bar. While in the group, there are a lot of differences in that level, but you don’t end up working with someone who is a complete beginner or four to six months behind you. You have people who have passed the bar.

Arsalan: Based on our conversation, I don’t know if you considered yourself a beginner. How did you know that you would pass?

Leslie: I didn’t. One of the first things I learned was from the stuff that they sent me for the interview prep. I learned concepts about the JavaScript language. I didn’t think I would pass the bar. I felt strong in the database things and I knew what variables were. So I had some familiarity with that and with the terminal from the scripting.

Arsalan: Tell me, how much does that cost? You don’t have to give me an exact figure. If you don’t want to, but I want to understand how these top ranked dev schools cost. I think people would love to know that.

Leslie: For the on-site program in San Francisco, they just raise the price and I think it is around $20,000. I did the remote campus from home and it was $17,780. So, it was sticker shock.

Arsalan: That is huge. So it is remote? What does that even mean? How can you have a cohort that is remote?

Leslie: There are a lot of great technologies. There is videoconferencing. Basically you work with a partner through Google hangouts the whole time. You have access to teachers much like how you were doing this interview. You have one-on-one appointments and you’re working just as hard. Just that the person is not sitting right next to you. You just have your headphones on all day. So you need to get a good pair.

Arsalan: That’s why when we started the interview I noticed that you had a good pair of headset, and now I know why. So, that’s very interesting. That’s a considerable amount of money. Obviously, a lot of people would not be able to pay that, but you said you were able to pay later after you got a job. Is that the kind of deal?

Leslie: Yes, and now they have scholarships.

Arsalan: Okay, that sounds promising. So, if you’re someone who’s looking to get into Hack Reactor, and if you’re listening to this podcast right now, even if you can’t afford it, you may want to talk to them because they may be able to work something out for you. So, that’s good to know.

Arsalan: Yet, you didn’t study computer programming and a formal learning environment. You did something else. You did go to college for an Associate’s degree. What was that all about?

Leslie: The associate’s degree was in computer science, but my bachelor’s degree was in geology. That’s how I ended up working in GIS. That was one of the requirements to do the GIS class and I received an internship. So that’s how that got started back in 2007. It wasn’t that I was looking to be a programmer. I was looking to be an IT person. I thought that seems more reasonable put for me.

Arsalan: So, you went through two years of computer science, and that’s pretty good. That happened before you went to Hack Reactor, right?

Leslie: Yes. At the junior college, we did things, and Java, and C, but it wasn’t very interesting or productive. It was not interesting.

Arsalan: It was not interesting because there were no projects to do?

Leslie: There were projects, but they ended up being more command lines. So, we never made a product. We would solve algorithmic problems or math problems. I never made a thing that I could show my mom or something. There was no end result. So it was unsatisfying in that way.

Arsalan: I think this is a problem with computer science education in general. The goal of college education and computer science is not to teach you how to build a product or how to do a real-world application. The goal is to give you the tools so that you can use it to do something interesting with that, or to work on other types of activities and tasks that are not product related. A lot of people who graduated with computer science degrees don’t do actual products. They just solve problems in a very targeted set of circumstances. They might be working on algorithms or concepts or the theory behind natural language processing. They might be doing a lot of different things. So, it’s not necessary that you build products, but if that’s what you want to do, then they are not going to teach you to do that. They are not even trying to.

Leslie: No, they’re not. That’s something that I didn’t think about at the time. I guess I didn’t have a perspective to realize that it was just a general training, and they were trying to teach me how to learn and not how to build a thing.

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Episode 54 – Creating Software Development from Chemistry

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Life has a funny way of throwing you a curveball and changing your path sometimes. One minute, you have your degree and are working in a field you first envisioned would be the career of your life, but it isn’t all that you imagined it would be. Something is lacking. That lackluster can be just enough to drive you to the point to say enough is enough, it’s time for a change. That is what happened to our next guest.

Meet Ken Luk. Ken graduated with a degree in biology and worked as an industrial chemist full time. But like many of us, his former job lacked the excitement and creativity that he so desired. In one fell swoop, Ken left his job and traveled halfway across the country to attend a coding bootcamp, where he fell in love with software development. Listen in to episode 54 to hear about Ken’s journey, why he made the change and how he feels about his decision.

 

Don’t forget to say hello to Ken on Twitter!

Ken Luk’s Bio:

After working as a math and science at Mason Academy, Ken Luk attended Dev Bootcamp and became a software developer in 2014. Less than a year later, he was working in mobile app development, where he currently works today. Ken helped bring three main projects to fruition since the start of his software development journey.

  • The Dev Bootcast podcast. Ken documenting his experiences with this coding bootcamp.
  • Survey Gorilla. This was modeled after Survey Monkey and allows people to create and take surveys, and view the aggregated survey results.
  • NodeHopper.  This is a recommendation engine that suggests new interests across movies, music, books, and more.

 

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Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today my guest is Ken Luk. Ken, how are you?

Ken: I’m doing pretty well. How are you doing, Arsalan?

Arsalan: I’m doing pretty good. Your path and your journey into software development are a little bit different from my other guests. This has become a trend now, but that’s what I love about these interviews. I get to me all these people. So, you’re now an android developer for an android consultancy company in Michigan, but before that, you were doing something completely different. What industry were you in?

Ken: I studied sciences and ended up working as an industrial chemist. So, it’s a pretty big change.

Arsalan: Is that what you studied in college?

Ken: No. I actually studied biology, but I took a ton of chemistry so I was able to work in that field.

Arsalan: Did you graduate with the degree?

Ken: Yes. I received a bachelor’s of science in biology from UCLA.

Arsalan: That’s a very good school and an interesting degree. You did that for a while, but that wasn’t cutting it for you. What was missing?

Ken: Prior to the chemistry job, I also worked as an EMT. Just as with that job, it was super interesting at first. But over time you start encountering the same scenarios over and over again and the job becomes pretty predictable. I wanted to find a job that has less of a ceiling in terms of what you’re going to see every day. Software development is what I ended up settling with.

Arsalan: Do you remember your first encounter with programming?

Ken: It was probably prior to considering software development as a career. I was trying to work on a personal website and trying to figure out how to modify some JavaScript to do something slightly different that I wanted on my website. That was my first exposure to programming.

Arsalan: How did that feel?

Ken: It was very confusing because I didn’t have the experience to really understand what the background code was doing. So, it was pretty much a bunch of guesswork trying to get it to work the way I wanted it to.

Arsalan: So, you were working on your personal website and you needed some JavaScript, and you figured that you’d better learn some. Yet, you weren’t really that interested in doing this full time or as a career. You just wanted to work on your website. Is that right?

Ken: Yes. I would say this was a couple of years before I considered software development as a career. I always thought the programming aspect is a little boring. I never thought I would want to stare at the screen, but now I love the problem-solving and logic aspects of it.

Arsalan: It does seem like that to outsiders. A lot of people don’t think that they want to be nerdy or geeky and be stuck typing at the computer. We do have stereotypes of those kinds of people. I think that is what is keeping a lot of women, girls, and other people who have multiple talents away. They want to be cool and until recently doing things like this on the computer wasn’t that cool. Yet now, I think a lot of people want to become software developers because now they see other people build incredible things and change the world in a small way. I think that is really empowering.

Arsalan: So, you were going through that. You had your degree and you were working, but then you decided that this was it and now you were going to jump ship. When you decided to go to the code camp, were you still working as an employee somewhere or did you just start over and quit your job? How did that go?

Ken: Once I got accepted, I quit my job and I moved to Chicago from California.

Arsalan: Wow! That’s a big change. How did Chicago feel to you?

Ken: It was nice. It was my first prolonged exposure to the Midwest. People seemed nice, but the weather was quite a shock. It was pretty cold.

Arsalan: I believe you were there in either late winter or early springtime. That’s when they would do the code camp. I’m guessing that you probably didn’t actually see the winter.

Ken: I think I did. I remember the lake being frozen over and there were a few days when they actually had to close down classes because it was so cold out.

Arsalan: I used to live in Chicago and I used to live near Lake Michigan. The lake does freeze over and it’s like Siberia out there, if you’re out on the lake. But you’ll see people running around the lake and along the side of the lake and acting like its all normal in the middle of winter. Yet, that’s just the way Chicago is. People are really tough. Coming from California, I can see why this would be a big shock for you.

Arsalan: Now you’re in this alien environment. You gave up everything you had and had worked for. You decided you were going to be a software developer and you also traveled all the way to Chicago. You had to find a place to live. I’m assuming you didn’t have relatives or friends living there. Did you know anyone in Chicago?

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Important Links

  • Dev Bootcast
  • Detroit Labs (Please note: Applications just opened.  It’s a paid 8-week apprenticeship for QA and it includes 4 weeks of programming and 4 weeks of QA training.  They try to place the graduates at companies after graduation.  Applications close on 1/20/16).
  • Find Ken on Quora
  • Dev Bootcamp

 

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Episode 53 – Poverty vs. Dedication – The Man With A Mission

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What does it take to make it in the world if you grew up in an underprivileged environment? Is less really more? Sometimes it is, but it all depends on the attitudes and influence of those around you as well as your own desire to rise above and find your own success. But, where do you start?

Meet our next guest, Andre Witt. Andre grew up in an area where the school did the best they could, but the hope upon finishing high school was to simply be able to gain a two-year college education and find a trade. That was not enough for Andre. He aspired to so much more. And he succeeded in reaching his dreams. Listen to his tale during episode 53 of Mentoring Developers and find out how Andre made it happen and how you can too.

 

Andre’s Bio:

Andre is a recent graduate of Tech Elevator coding bootcamp. Trained as a Mechanical Engineer before becoming a management consultant, he began his career at Accenture, a global professional services firm. He expanded his analytical background and gained broad experience in manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals while using data to support decision making across various metric driven organizations.

Andre has recently accepted a programming position at the Cleveland Water Department where he’s excited to combine his core-consulting foundation, passion for technology and his newly-acquired developer skills in a software development.

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Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today my guest is Andre Witt. How are you, Andre?

Andre: Doing very well. How are you?

Arsalan: Doing great and I’m really happy to have you because not only are you going to a code school, which is something that we can all learn from, but you also have a very interesting story. You grew up around adversity. You grew up in a situation where you didn’t have anybody else to look up to. You found your larger family in poverty. Moving ahead in life was hard and you didn’t know where to start. People were struggling all around you. Yet, you really wanted to be different. There was something pushing you to see yourself as not part of that system, but that you could do better than that. Tell us a little about that.

Andre: Absolutely. As you are saying I grew up interested in going to school and doing a little better than what my parents did and they were adamant about that. When I’m got the opportunity, I received a chance to go off to a university, where I studied engineering. From engineering, I went to work as a management consultant for a pretty large consulting firm. As I began to grow there, I discovered that I wanted to be in the technical realm. Programming and doing anything with the terminal or coding in the most basic sense, there is a fear in that and you immediately stop and don’t do anything in that regard. While I wanted to grow in that area, that’s what made me do a pivot at that end and enroll in a coding school.

Arsalan: What kind of adversity were you facing as a child?

Andre: If we go all the way back to being a child, my parents got me to a point where we were out of poverty. My appearance grew up in extreme poverty. They got me to a point of at least stability. Unfortunately, they did not know any of the steps to success that I was seeking. So, that really came from my observation of others, and by aligning yourself with those who reflect the kind of life that you want to have.

Arsalan: I think that’s really interesting. A lot of us have this kind of problem of not having role models. We don’t have our parents, uncles, aunts, older friends, or people who are successful and are on a path that we would like to tread. So, there’s no one for us to follow. Then, the circle continues from generation after generation. We don’t see a way out of our situation. Sometimes people are satisfied with the way things are, but there are also people like you who are not and they are looking for a way out and something better in life, a more purposeful life. How did you find it?

Andre: I hope this doesn’t sound dark but I’m an African-American male and I think you have to put that lens there because it has guided and directed so much of my life. What I realized as I was going from childhood to adolescence was that you learn about the differences and the expectations, specifically. That’s really the key difference. The expectations that are placed on you are so much different than so many others. They are lower. As I began to understand that, I began competing in the realms that I wasn’t expected to. That’s what led me into the field of engineering and science. So I wondered how to get over there. How do you get into those AP math and science classes? So, I just started asking questions. That’s what you have to do, you have to ask questions and align yourself in that direction. That’s how that goes as a child. That’s what I saw as a kid.

Arsalan: Do you think the school that you went to had a role to play in the lack of expectations or low expectations? I know that nobody around you has been to college or a lot of the people around you haven’t even finished high school.

Andre: Some.

Arsalan: So, some people didn’t finish high school and a lot of people didn’t finish college and you were not in a situation where you feel that there are all these people over there who seem to be doing well and why couldn’t you be like that. Did the school where you went help you to get the self-esteem that you needed or was it creating or adding to the problem?

Andre: I’ll give them credit. They did help me to reach a minimum baseline. The best thing that I can say for that is that the ceiling that they were helping me attain and get to was lower than the floor for other people. You can see that divide and begin to understand that there is a large divide there. They wanted to get me to the two-year college point, but I was aspiring for quite a bit more than that.

Arsalan: it’s interesting how people who love us and have our best interest in heart sometimes undermine us because they don’t want to see us fail. So, they might see you and think that the University is a very big leap for you and suggest you start with a baby step and go to college instead so that you can learn a trade and do some work to earn some kind of living. I’ve heard that from politicians before and I’ve heard that from a lot of people, but I think we’re doing a disservice to our nation and to people in general when we don’t let people dream. A dream as much as you want and dream as big as you dare to dream and aim for it. You might fail, but you might succeed half way. At least you will have a chance to compete and succeed and you are not inhibiting your own self.

Arsalan: It’s very inspiring for me to hear your story and the struggles that you went through. And obviously, you came through on the other side, which is great. You told me that people around you did not go to college. What made you think that you needed to go to a university?

Andre: I would say that my parents were the influencers. They would tell me that I was going to go to college. That was not even up for discussion. It was just the next step. So, that was always the expectation. What I saw, though, was that there was a difference between what people were being guided to, but that’s what I saw. Going to college in and of itself was an expectation since I was a child.

Arsalan: That’s great. You decided you wanted to make something of yourself and the most obvious way to do that was to go to college and get a good education because once you do that, it will allow you to apply for nice jobs and perhaps have some dignity. It’s not just about money. So, the question is, is that really true in your opinion, that if you do get a college degree, then you will get a job that has those qualities? After going through this experience, do you still believe that?

Andre: It would be unfair to just say no. That’s the best opportunity if you are directing a large group of people and you are trying to get them a base level of skills. That’s the best direction to send people. But as far as coming out of college and finding a job that’s going to give you dignity and happiness in your life, I wouldn’t be able to say that everyone is going to get that opportunity. I would say that probably the majority are not going to get that just by going to college, depending on the university that they go to.

Arsalan: Do you think that selecting a major is an important activity? A lot of people want to go to college but don’t know what they really want to do. So, they don’t select their major and they just take GE classes, and they take whatever classes that they can. They delayed selecting a major as late as possible because they’re not really sure. The question is, is it really important for you to have a very targeted college major and target your activities and career around it or is it just having a college degree in something?

Andre: The overall answer would be no. If you go to Oxford or one of the top three Ivey League institutions, then you could probably get just a degree in something and you’ll be okay because of what it takes to get into those institutions. Yet, I do believe that you do need to go to school and at the very least, regardless of your interests or what you want to do, you should be a to come out of college, and say I am a ‘blank.’ I have this skill set. I can do this. Otherwise, you’re in a position of extreme vulnerability where you’ve invested this time and money to go to school and there’s nothing tangible that you could go and do as a result. I’m an advocate of going to school and coming out with some particular skill set, but that’s me personally.

Arsalan: So, what the question in my mind about college is, it’s expensive. It costs a lot of money. From your background, your parents wouldn’t have had a lot of money. I know some of the answer that you’re going to give me, but I want you to think about it and let us know what you think. How would you finance a college education when you don’t have the means?

Andre: Well, there’s the obvious answer of mortgaging your future. You can always mortgage your future via student loans. That’s always an option, although it’s not the best option. If you can start out during 10th or 11th grade knowing that you don’t have the means to go to college, you can start taking steps to dictate your approach like starting out at a community college and then going to the university. It brings in additional barriers, but it’s better than mortgaging off your future. Another option is finding an alternative path like skills-based programs, like bootcamps. If you can’t finance your education, that should be at the front of your discussion.

Arsalan: Okay, so let me give you my take on this. There are a lot of colleges and universities that have very good scholarships. Sometimes you wouldn’t expect them to have it because they are private universities, but they have large endowments. If you have good grades and you can demonstrate that you have the financial need, you can get most of your tuition written off as long as you can show that you have the drive. A lot of universities like to have diversity on their campus. So if you are one of the more disadvantaged ethnic groups, you might have a shot at something, even if you don’t have the money. So don’t give up on college and university just because you don’t have money. After admission, you can talk to them about how they can help you.

Arsalan: That’s just an insight. College isn’t for everyone and it’s not fundamental to your being. We talk about this on this podcast a lot because we often know a lot of people who are very successful, but who have not gone to college or who did go to college but did not finish. It’s not a panacea, but it does give you the grounding for various different subjects. It gives you a moral compass. It allows you to interact with people from all over the world and it just makes you a better person overall just by going to college.

Arsalan: Going to college is not a ticket to anything specific. It is a goal in and of itself. So, you went to college and did something completely unrelated to programming. Was that biomedical sciences or biomedical engineering?

Andre: Engineering. It was the mechanical engineering track. That was my core education.

Arsalan: That’s hard-core engineering. That’s pretty good stuff. Then when you graduated, you got a job. Did you like that job?

Andre: I did. I actually liked the job that I was doing. It was management consulting and I enjoyed it.

Arsalan: But it wasn’t fulfilling.

Andre: Over time that was correct. I didn’t like what it took to remain competitive. You used that word earlier and I thought it was a really good word. Being competitive and learning what it means to not only be competitive, but to remain competitive led me to lose my passion for it. I was growing in a direction they couldn’t particularly dictate because consulting is client-based work and you are going in the direction of the market and what the clients are paying.

Arsalan: Okay. So, you did that for a couple of years?

Andre: A couple of years. It was three and a half or four years.

Arsalan: And after that you quit. And then what happened after that?

Andre: So, going back to your earlier question about skills-based training and having a specific skill, I decided that now that I had some work under me, I wanted to do something that was more skills-based. At the time I was growing more in the project management area. So, what happens to anyone who wants to do something different in this situation? One option is to try to develop the skills on your own. Another option is go to a university or some type of schooling, which is what I was looking at doing. Or, you could go to one of these boot camps, which is what I found and it is much shorter and more compressed. There’s a lot more work in a shorter span of time, but you have to get the skills that you need in order to move to the next step. I was stuck deciding between the University and the coding bootcamp. Those were my two options.

Arsalan: Why a coding bootcamp? Did you know about programming or software development? Is that something that you wanted to do?

Andre: The work that I was doing was data analytics. That was something that was interesting to me. I had gotten a little exposure to it and I wanted to do a little more. I liked the technical aspect of things and at the time I did not know that boot camps existed. I thought the only way to learn it was to go back to university, and I was kind of dreading that because the shortest programs there were one calendar year, or three semesters. Those were most of the masters programs, and you’re thinking about everything that you’re going to have to do to make it work, including living situation, finances, and everything else and whether or not you are going to get the skills that you need.

Andre: Every university program, even at the Masters level, has a lot of things that you may or may not be interested in. When I came across the bootcamp model and what it was designed to do, they used a comparison to a computer science degree, and showing you the aspects of the degree program that they are competitive with. In many cases, you are getting 15 to 20 hours more and that was very appealing to me.

Arsalan: That’s very interesting. Coding boot camps are very interesting in the way that they have just sprung up over the last few years. I’m a big fan of them, but this is not something for everyone. We should not think that if we go to a coding bootcamp or a code school that we will come out with a well-paying job at a great company where I would enjoy working. That’s not a given. You may or may not get there. So, buyers beware.

Arsalan: If you’re really dedicated to learning coding and you want to be a software developer, you have to have the commitment and the money, because most coding boot camps and code schools are not free and you have to pay out of your own pocket. They’re going to make you work really hard. You won’t be able to do this part-time. If you can do that and you can spend the next few months continuing on your own, then you have a very good chance to enter this industry. For some people it’s easier and for others, it’s harder, but everyone can get a start because there are so many positions available.

Arsalan: If you have a coding bootcamp education that is a lot better than nothing. If you are a recent biology major graduate and you are up lying for a coding position because you have some experience tinkering with programming, they might think twice about inviting you for an interview because they could probably get somebody with a formal education. Yet, if you are a recent biology degree graduate or someone who has recently graduated high school and you have graduated from a rigorous coding bootcamp, and you’ve demonstrated two or three different projects, they may see that you don’t have any background, but you at least have the basics covered. Everyone knows that coding boot camps are rigorous and many coding boot camps have a very good reputation.

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Important Links

Thanks for Listening!

Do you have some feedback or some advice for us or our audience? Please give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher and share your thoughts.

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Episode 52 – Code School Vs. 4-Year College

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The decision to learn to code is a big one and often a life-changing one. While you could opt to get a formal education at a local college or university, obtaining your degree in computer science is likely going to take you two to four years. Do you really want to wait that long?

Another option is to sift through the numerous code schools available in your area or online and find the one that makes the most sense for you, but what do you look for in a code school, and why? What are the most important factors to consider when choosing a code school?

Why program?

If you’re thinking about going to code school and learn software development, chances are, there’s a good reason why. So, what is that reason? Have you tinkered with code before and discovered that you like it? Perhaps you want to delve deeper into the tech field and gain a more enriched understanding and working knowledge of what it’s like to be a software developer? Maybe you want to change careers. Or, maybe you need to solve a problem and learning how to code something is the first step in finding that solution. Whatever the reason, you’ve reached a point where you’ve decided that it’s time to find out what coding is all about and get your feet wet in the high tech world of software development.

So, is software development for you? Only you can answer that question and to find the answer you should give it a try. Contrary to some misconceptions, software development is not reserved only for those with the highest intelligence. Anyone can do it, male or female, young or mature. There are no rules or restrictions, well, there is one rule. You must begin somewhere. You must find a starting point. Without that, there can be no finishing line. Taking that first step is the crucial starting point in your coding adventure and that means going back to the basics.

Build a strong foundation

As with anything else that you learn, you must start with the basics. It doesn’t matter which programming language you start with. You could start with CSS, HTML, or something more advanced like Python or Ruby. Regardless of which language you start with, you have to start somewhere and that somewhere is at ground level.

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Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Codeschool vs College

  1. Cost
    1. $0 (freecodecamp (https://www.freecodecamp.com/), appacademy (https://www.appacademy.io/) (C)) to $15K for code schools
    2. $40K to $100K for BS in Computer Science of Engineering. Some of that can be deferred and reduced by grants and loans
  2. Time to graduate
    1. 4 months for code schools. Ability to jump start a professional career within 6 months.
    2. 4 years for BS. More time to absorb more knowledge and work with different professors and students
  3. Technical grounding
    1. Solid practical grounding for code schools
    2. Solid theoretical grounding for BS.
  4. How fast can you get a job after you graduate
    1. 6 months for code schools
    2. 3 months for BS
  5. Salary
    1. $40 to $60K for code schools
    2. $50 to $75K for BS
  6. Industry connections
    1. Possible to get real industry introductions via mentors and teachers for code schools
    2. Some schools have industry connections and adjunct professors from the industry but overwhelmingly, BS does not give any connections
  7. Theoretical foundation
    1. Most foundational knowledge is iffy for code schools
    2. Solid foundation for deeper understanding of computing systems in BS. Some CS departments are far better at it than others.
  8. Advanced study options
    1. No real options for advanced studies for code schools
    2. Great opportunities to do advanced studies in graduate school for research and deep analysis in a CS program. Can get MS and PhD degrees and even beyond using Post Docs.
  9. professorship and teaching
    1. Unless you teach at a code school, little opportunity to teach at a formal educational institute for code schools
    2. Realistic opportunity to teach as an adjunct after a BS. The probability increases dramatically with an MS degree. With a PhD, you could potentially get a tenured position which has its benefits in terms of more free time, summers off, and time to pursue research and academic ambitions.
  10. credibility
    1. Starting out, not much in terms of credibility for code schools
    2. With a BS degree in CS, people generally give you the benefit of the doubt.
  11. Ability to get your foot in the door
    1. Depending on how connected a code school is to the industry, getting your first job may be easier or harder than with a BS degree. Without extraordinary connections, this may be a steep climb.
    2. For a lot of large corporations, using a BS degree as required qualification for a developer job makes it easier for them to whittle down the mountain of resumes they get for job postings. It doesn’t necessarily mean they think candidates with BS degrees are better. For a number of these types of companies, it is possible to get your foot in the door on the back of a decent GPA in a BS degree and a couple of school projects.
  12. Promotions and raises
    1. For most small and medium sized companies that have software developers on staff, once an employee has worked several years as a developer, his or her education does not matter at all. In some more regulated and larger organizations like state and federal governments, not having a 4-year degree could harm your chance of getting ahead and may even determine how much salary you are offered.
    2. Sometimes promotions are offered based on academic qualifications for newer employees. For developers with more than 4 of experience under their belt and with a good working relationship with management, academic excellence and degrees matters very little.
  13. Prestige
    1. Not much in terms of prestige at parties for code schools
    2. Some elite colleges will inject a sense of prestige among graduates which may propel them to aim higher and ultimately achieve more. Such academic institutions are rare but they do exist and you might choose these top schools if you like to rub shoulders with high achievers.

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Important Links

  • https://www.freecodecamp.com
  • https://www.appacademy.io
  • https://generalassemb.ly

Thanks for Listening!

Do you have some feedback or some advice for us or our audience? Please give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher and share your thoughts.

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Episode 51 – How to go from software boot camp student to instructor in no time

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Some of us buzz with excitement at the possibility of getting into tech while others find that same excitement through teaching. What do you do if you are drawn to both the tech industry and teaching? Both! But, what if you don’t know software development at all yet? What if you could learn tech via a coding bootcamp and in a short amount of time go from boot camp grad to tech teacher extraordinaire?

Meet our next guest, Adriana Castaneda. Adriana was initially taking a different career path. She was a biology major who had her sights on going into medical research, but something happened that changed her course. Her sister was a DeVry University student and Adriana accompanied her to some tech meetups. It didn’t take long before curiosity got the best of Adriana and she fell head over heels in love with software development. One short year after graduating from her coding boot camp, Adriana began teaching coding to others. Are you ready to hear her story? Give a listen and check it out!

Adriana’s Bio:

Adriana Castaneda is a Python Mentor at ChiPy Chicago, a Computer Science Instructor at The Latin School of Chicago, and a Front End Web Developer Instructor and Software Engineer Instructor at General Assembly. Before this, she was a junior web developer for Dev Bootcamp as well as Health Engine LLC. Before that, Adriana was a TA and Presenter for RailsBridge Conference.

 

Adriana is a 2015 Dev Bootcamp grad and has a BS in Biology from North Park University in 2014. She was initially planning on going into medical research but changed direction when she fell in love with coding.

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Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today my guest is Adriana Castaneda. How are you, Adriana?

Adriana: I’m fine. How are you, Arsalan?

Arsalan: I am fantastic. It’s so good to have you. I say that a lot because it’s so good to have all of my guests, but you are wonderful in a different way and the reason is because you did something remarkable in your career. You were going one way and getting a liberal arts education and probably going to go into history or some other type of humanities. Were you trying to get into one of the humanities? Were you trying to do something political? I’m not really sure. But by some accident in history, you found yourself not only in software development but also a software development instructor. That is something I’ve never seen before. Tell us a little more about that.

Adriana: I actually started my career in biology. The idea was to do medical research. During my senior year, my sister was going to high school at DeVry University. While she was going to high school I would have to take her to different meetups. Some of those meet ups were for HTML and CSS classes. That’s where I got started. Before that, the computer was a magical thing that some super geniuses had created, or so I thought. But once I learned how the Internet worked and how to create a small website, that kind of broke down the magic for me and I realized that this was something that people can do.

Adriana: Once I graduated from the University, I went into Dev Bootcamp and I learned backend as well as front and technologies there.

Arsalan: That’s really fascinating. So, you went from being someone who is not really interested in software development and had no idea how to be a software developer, but once you saw it, and you went to these meet ups your interest piqued. Perhaps you thought that it looked like fun and that anybody could do it. Do you think that it’s necessary to go to college for this?

Adriana: That’s actually an interesting topic. I feel like not a lot of people have that kind of perspective on it. Some of my students actually went to a college for this and they took a semester of it. They didn’t really like it. Then, they went to General Assembly, which is a boot camp that I teach at, and they like it because they feel that it teaches them more practical skills in the industry. But, it really depends on the individual. My sister has had the privilege to go to Dev Boot Camp and she’s currently studying at DePaul University getting her degree and software development. From her perspective, she also feels that in the college setting, you get to dive deeper into the theory behind it, and you actually learn how the computer works and different levels of abstraction. So, you realize that software today was made that software developers don’t really have to worry about a binary code in order to talk to the computer. In boot camp, you just learn software development in the sense that you learn Ruby and JavaScript instead of binary and Java.

Arsalan: How do you see yourself? Who is Adriana? How will you describe yourself? Do you consider yourself outgoing or maybe a little introverted or do you see yourself as someone who is really eager to learn and wanting to read every book that you find? Or are you somebody who takes things slowly? Help us to understand you.

Adriana: As far as I go, I’m more the type of person who likes to organize things. I’m very outgoing. I’m the type of person who likes to participate in a hackathon as well as plan the hackathon and bring more people in. I like helping people. So I do a lot of mentorships to.

Arsalan: That’s great. I don’t like to throw out terminology at people who might not know it. So, let’s define in one sentence what a hackathon is and what it isn’t.

Adriana: That’s a great idea. A hackathon is an event where a problem is presented and people come together and work in teams to try to solve that problem. At the end, they present the solution that they came up with for the problem.

Arsalan: Okay. So, when people get together, they are trying to solve a problem that may or may not be a hackathon because that’s what I did in college. I had a team and we worked on projects and in groups. We would solve a problem as a group and we would get graded as a group, but that was not a hackathon. So, in a hackathon, the idea is not that important or you’re not given an idea. You choose an idea based on what you are interested in and if you later decide that it’s not a good idea, then you can change that idea. The concept for what you are doing is not that important, but the fact is that you come together, you plan it and you execute it, and you finish it. Maybe that’s more important. What do you think?

Adriana: I think it really depends on the hack on that you’re working with. For example, I participated in many different hackathons, one of which was called the AEC hackathon. It was for the field of construction. When you think of construction, you don’t think of technology. Yet, you have a bunch of software developers come together and you come together and try to see how you can bring technology into this field of construction. It was very interesting because the problem that was presented was how do you bring technology into the construction field, which is very outdated as far as how they do things. For that hackathon, it was important to come up with an idea, not necessarily have a completed project. The goal was to come up with different ideas so that with time permitting, they could implement these solutions.

Arsalan: Okay. I’ve been to a few of those and a lot of them turn into mocked up software and word press websites to show what it would look like if we had done it, but what we were trying to prove was that it was a viable product. So, that’s fair enough. What was your first encounter with programming? I know that you went to these meet ups, but I don’t think you were sitting there coding. Do you remember your first time writing a program? People don’t call it programming anymore. It’s called coding now.

Adriana: My first time coding was for the Dev Bootcamp pre-work. So, it was to get into Dev Boot camp. That’s when I had to write my first program.

Arsalan: Your first time for writing a program was for an entrance exam?

Adriana: Yes.

Arsalan: Wow. How did that go?

Adriana: It was very interesting. In order to get into Dev Boot camp, you had to teach yourself programming first. When I look back at it, it was not elegant at all. It’s possible to teach yourself how to program, but as far as writing clean code goes, Dev Boot camp really helped me there.

Arsalan: Right. I think that the first step is to do it any which way you can and then you polish it. It’s just like with anything else. The first clay toy or sand castle that you make, you don’t try to make it a masterpiece, you just try to make one that doesn’t fall apart. Once you’ve done it a few times, you’ll realize that if you do it like this, it actually last longer. Maybe we can do it a little differently this way. These are things that you learn over time. This is a problem that we have where we are always comparing what we produce as a new developer with something that we see on the Internet that we’d like to use. This is a website. I want to make it exactly like that.

Arsalan: It’s hard because a lot of blood and sweat and time have gone into those productions, websites, and cool graphics and whatever else you are interested in. It’s not easy and it’s not even possible to make the first version of any website look like the finished article. In the modern software development paradigm, we don’t want to do that because if you polish your application a lot that means you probably released it too late. The reason we like to release early and in a state that is not finished is so that we can get feedback that will allow us to make any adjustments that we need to make. We’re not making it for ourselves. We’re making it for others to use.

Arsalan: Just recently we bought a new house and the other day I was installing new locks. Let’s say that when you’re screwing the handle in and you screw one of the screws in three turns and the other you screw all the way in. It’s not aligned and you’re going to have a very hard time putting the others in if the first one is not done right. It’s like anything else. If you need to align something around your home, you screw in the first one but leave a little space. Next, you screw and the rest all the way. Then you go back to the first to make sure it’s aligned and finish screwing it in. That’s how you do it normally. This is common sense. But, a lot of times in software, we don’t think like that. We want the first version to be the final version. Software always evolves. It’s never going to be perfect and it’s almost never going to be bug-free. It will always have quirks and we live with those quirks. What we do is say that this is acceptable at this point.

Arsalan: The first point of delivery is when it kind of works. When you do things this way and you don’t try to go outside the bounds, it will kind of sort of work. It proves the concept and you have to use your imagination to know that the finished project will work this way. It might not work right now, but just imagine that it does. In a professional software environment, we all understand that. In a large corporation or a startup, we all understand that because we do this internally. We usually do not expose it to the world, but I think that this is something that new developers should internalize. You’re not going to create a masterpiece the first time around. All you need to do is make sure that it works. It doesn’t even have to work all the way. It just needs a critical path, maybe 10% that you care about to work. Make sure that it works according to the needs of the customer or the user, and then you move onto the next 10% and so on. It’s incremental.

Arsalan: So the next time that you have a problem, you only need to undo the 10% to take care of it. And it’s much easier to do.

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