Mentoring Developers

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So how does a senior developer keeps his skills and interests diversified? Listen to David Ihnen from Cincinnati who is passionate about software development.

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This episode concludes the interview that started in the previous episode of Mentoring Developers.

Arsalan talks to Kasey Bonaficio and Divya Sasidharan who went through the mentorship and apprenticeship program by Ryan’s employer Sparkbox. Let’s hear, once again, from these amazingly talented and motivated ladies about their experiences as apprentices in a structured mentorship program and see if this model makes sense for other software shops to adopt.

Kasey’s Bio:

I’m Kasey Bonifacio and I’m a developer at Sparkbox where I started out as an apprentice. I’m passionate about web development and love constantly learning new ways to make the web more awesome. When I can pry myself away from the computer, I can be found spending time with family, cooking, or being crafty.

Divya’s Bio:

Divya is a developer at Sparkbox, a small web studio in oHIo. She is most happy when programming in Javascript and loves discussing best practices, testing, code architecture and design patterns. When she isn’t programming, she’s an avid rock climber, yogi and wannabe hardware tinkerer.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Divya: Getting your first job can be especially challenging because you almost have to prove to people that you can contribute to the team and be as useful as someone with a 4-year Computer Science degree and that, in a sense, takes a lot of confidence…

Kasey: If you’re a person that just wants to go in and do some work and not think about it, then there are other careers out there. If you want to go in and have to use your mind and think about things, then development is great.

Divya: I document the code and modules that I write and in some sense, I have to take a step back to be able to write things in a cogent enough way so that the next person who has no undersatnding of what I have written can read that and understand things …

Arsalan: If you’re writing code and I am reading it and I know the intent and I know what you’re trying to do here in a code review – or perhaps you are looking at your own code later on – and there’s a serious problem in the code, it’s obvious what your intention was. If that’s the case, it is very easy for me to redo that code… but I should never have to question the intention…

Arsalan: It’s really good to know that you have learned this pretty quickly…

Kasey: I find that when I can’t do something, I type in Google my question verbatim and I find someone asking the exact same thing so you’re never alone…

Important Links

• Spark Box
• Divya’s Website
• Kasey’s Website

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In this episode, Ryan Cromwell – who has his hands in many disparate technology jars – gives sage advice to new and aspiring developers and their managers to help everyone succeed and thrive. He is a mentor at a fantastic design shop and he talks about his experiences as a mentor and a technology-switching developer.

Ryan’s Bio:

Ryan Cromwell is a coder by trade with over 10 years of experience delivering solutions ranging from real-time customer loyalty systems and elegant user experiences to streamlined statistical process control software. Having worked with passionate, high-performing Agile teams, Ryan ventured into the world of Scrum.org training and Agile coaching to replicate those amazing experiences. Ryan’s passion remains delivering software as a member the Sparkbox Team in Dayton, OH. He is co-founder of Dayton Clean Coders, the Dayton Elixir virtual Meetup, co-organizer of Southwest Ohio GiveCamp, and all around software community ally. You can find Ryan at http://cromwellhaus.com.

Please say hi to Ryan on Twitter.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Ryan: I do enjoy being a part of creative processes and creative teams but I don’t know how creative I am on my own…

Ryan: I feel like I kinda floated through high school and college. I didn’t really know what was going on… but I knew I loved programming.

Ryan: I know a lot of people who have been incredibly successful without going through a formal degree at all. I think there are so many ways to get into this experience as a software developer… There are so many paths to get into this industry and it’s so accessible to so many people that it’s really changed the landscape of education.

Arsalan: The software development industry, as a whole, is bending over backwards to fill positions. They’re trying everything they can.

Arsalan: One of the challenges we face – people who have been in the industry for a while and new people – everybody faces the same challenge in the software industry: how do you keep your skills up to date?

Ryan: I use Code School. I go and jump on Pluralsight every once in a while. I have learned how to learn.

Arsalan: Are you learning things just in time – as you need them?

Ryan: We do some Ember work here and I need to know what’s going on there. I need to know what’s going in ES6 and Rails… We are a design studio so we do sometimes need to learn just in time and I have gotten pretty good at that…

Ryan: I do believe that if you can teach something, it shows that you really understand it…

Ryan: Even though I have been web development for a long time, half of these people are going to beat my pants off in our organization without any trouble in HTML and CSS. I don’t even try anymore with CSS… They’re smart and I am willing to learn from them…

Ryan: I think most people out there generally have the best interest in mind of the people that they work with and they hire. That said, we need to be explicitly looking for people that are going to diversify the types of teams that we are on.

Advice For New Developers

Find something you love and learn it really deeply.

Important Links

• Code School
• Plural Sight
• Ember
• Spark Box
• Ruby 5 podcast
• Giant Robots podcast
• 99% Invisible podcast
• Scott Hanselman
• Get Pocket

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We learn from a junior developer, Pavlo Grijincu, how to quickly ramp up our skills to get our first job. Is it necessary to have a Computer Science degree to get our first job as a Software Engineer? Where do we go to equip ourselves with the technical and soft skills to make it big in our cut-throat industry? Let’s listen to this interview to see what Pavlo has to say.

Pavlo’s Bio:

Pavlo Grijincu is currently a junior developer at Listrak, where he has been for three years. He graduated from Millersville University in 2012 with a BS in Computer Science, ending an official educational career in computer science that began in high school. Now he gets his education through books, code camps, and pre-recorded talks.

Please say hi to Pavlo on Twitter.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Pavlo: I prefer Computer Engineering… well, Application Engineering because the goal is to create an application that solves a problem the user has whereas Computer Science is more about understanding how languages work…

Pavlo: As a kid, I saw some kids had a computer and they would play games on it and I was like “I wanna play games”. I found out that I could do computer programming… I liked it. It’s been years since high school and I have kept going with it and now I am glad that I stumbled into it.

Pavlo: Companies are seeing that without software, they cannot be competitive… As a computer scientist and programmer, I see that many times I am approached with opportunities… there is so much demand for it.

Pavlo: A company uses frameworks which in school we don’t learn much about. In school, we make simple programs that satisfy the needs of the teacher – whatever the assignment was. At work, we have frameworks which are so complicated that experienced users do not understand them completely. As fresh developers, we just look at them and don’t know what to do.

Arsalan: You’re a new developer. You have your own background. Maybe, it is a bit different for everybody else. Was it easy for you to get accepted and for people to see you as valuable – to gain respect?

Pavlo: I think the greatest feeling of being accepted is when someone comes over to you and says “Could you look into this?” or “I have a question about this particular thing.” That means you have knowledge of something and they see that you are valuable.

Pavlo: I have a couple of blogs that I read. I mostly watch the YouTube videos from Simple Programmer. Those are very useful because he is another developer and his focus is on helping junior developers… I watch every YouTube video and I read most of John Sonmez’s blog posts. For a beginner, they are very useful.

Arsalan: Do you have any advice for employers looking to hire new developers?

Pavlo: Hire based on potential much more than skill.

Important Links

• Simple Programmer

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Hauwa Yousef is a model of success for young minority developers to come into their own in the field of software engineering.

Hauwa’s Bio:

Hauwa is a Montana State University graduate and technology enthusiast with an obsession for entrepreneurship. Also an avid world traveler, Hauwa’s direct experience “DropTripping” items across countries for those in dire need serves as her primary motivation and inspiration in seeing to DropTrip’s success.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Hauwa: My programming career begins a little bit in school… getting an internship. My sophomore year in college was very eye opening and that built up my skills to the point that when I graduated, I took a job as a software developer for a ski resort… I got to program new things every day, develop new concepts… and so working as a developer in that realm was a lot of fun but after about a year, it became monotonous – less adventurous. We started going into code maintenance mode and bug fixes after bug fixes…

Arsalan: So what did you do after that?

Hauwa: So I started a company!

Hauwa: Thankfully, there’s a lot of support on the Internet for whatever problems you run into… But in general, our industry is very collaborative and that’s how I met you. You were helping me solve a problem across the world! There is a lot of support…

Hauwa: Going into college, my intention was never to become a software developer. I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I just wanted the skill set but going through the process… the skills that you learn are fundamental in going through life – the critical thinking, the learning on your own, the working with others…

Hauwa: I try to go to conferences here and there. I participate in Startup Weekend. I think it’s a great avenue for anybody interested in the field to meet other people interested in the field, to bounce ideas off of each other. I actually met some of my partners at a Startup Weekend event.

Arsalan: Say, you want to create a minimum viable product… It could be something that’s built out or partially built out… It could be built using a proper web framework that you would normally use or it could be a WordPress website that you use as a representation of what you would build if you were doing it seriously… because you only have a weekend… is that why you think Startup Weekends work?

Hauwa: Given the 54 hours you have, it’s really hard to sit down and get deep into coding for 54 hours and do a business plan and, and, and… You get two kinds of people at a Startup Weekend event. You get the people who are like “alright I have the next million dollar idea… but there’s no path to it” and you get people who are developers who are like “I am going to use Python and this database and it’s going to be awesome” but then they end up building something that’s awesome but have no idea how to market it…

Hauwa: Probably, one of my biggest psychological blocks in general… I had a great idea for a company when I was abut 19 and I was like “I don’t have the skills to build this thing. I need senior developers to help me build thus stuff. I am 19. How do I get people who are probably 40 or 50 years old with a lot of skills to help me out?”

Hauwa: I speak up and I speak out…. Listening a lot to what people have to say and showing them respect and when I do have something to say, making sure I can back myself up… Recently, I went to a course and it was full of CEOs. I walked in and the first thing they said was “I think you’re in the wrong place!”. I said “No. I am in the right place. I paid for the course like you did.” For the first day, I didn’t say a whole lot… You can tell they were still really confused as to why I was there in the first place. I didn’t speak up until about the second day when I had something to say and it was something really profound questioning some theoretical assumptions that someone had made and I thought weren’t the right set of assumptions…

Hauwa: We can either change the way everyone works and thinks or we can change ourselves for the better…

• Drop Tripping
• Startup Weekend

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In this episode, Derick Bailey – who is not actually on fire (that would be quite hazardous) talks to Arsalan about the best way to get ahead in software development even with tough life situations and steep hurdles.

Derick’s Bio:

Derick Bailey is a developer, entrepreneur, author, speaker and technology leader in central Texas (north of Austin). He’s been a professional developer since the late 90’s and has been writing code since the late 80’s. In his spare time, he gets called a spamming marketer by people on Twitter, and blurts out all of the stupid / funny things he’s ever done in his career on his email newsletter.

Find him on Twitter @derickbailey

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Derick: I am a software developer and an entrepreneur but I am a human being first of all. It’s a side of me that most people never see. Most people out there that see my blog, se my video and see me at conferences, they see the highlight reel of my life. They see the parts of me that I want to show the rest of the world and there’s a lot of me behind the scenes that people never see and I do show some of this through my mailing list and through the stories that I write about my struggles and my failures in my career, but still there’s a lot of me that never gets shown to the public and a big part of that is because I am very much scared to expose those things and I don’t know how people are going to react and how they are going to take that.

Derick: I am certainly a software developer but I am also a father of a special needs child and I don’t talk about that very often out in the public world because I don’t want that to taint people’s perspective of why I do certain things…

Arsalan: People love that senior professionals like yourself – famous people – open up and show them that you are human. You’re like everybody else. I have girls. I have two daughters and I worry about them and I want them to be in a world where it’s good to be a woman and it’s not a challenge as it is today.

Arsalan: We’re human. We have issues. You have a child with special needs and you can’t just suspend that. We were reading this news story about Amazon on New York Times about how Amazon treats its employees. If you were an Amazon employee, I don’t know how contented you will be because their attitude is: we don’t care…

Derick: When I got out of college, I left college and moved to Dallas and I found a recruiting firm in Dallas and the person I was working with – right before the dot com bust – wasn’t steering me towards those startup companies. She was steering me more towards marketing organizations and organizations that needed web development in a marketing related capacity. I think she did that because I had experience in graphic design and art a nd a little bit of marketing from my college years abd previous part time work I had done. I got my first job in a manufacturing company and I was in the marketing department building their websites and doing marketing related things. I worked right next to graphic designers and copywriters and other people like that… and it was through a company reorganization that took the marketing manager and made him the head of IT over the parent organization and he brought me along to the IT department where we formalized me as a software developer…

• • Watch Me Code
  • Derick’s blog

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In this episode, Jay Bobo discusses his experiences as a mentor and recalls how he got his start in software development.

Jay’s Bio:

Jay Bobo is a software engineer & serial entrepreneur. He has 10+ years of experience in product development and strategy working with companies such as Microsoft (MSN), Nike-Pacific, State Farm and Coca-Cola. He currently works in healthcare building meaningful products for physicians, pharmacists and patients alike.

Find him on Twitter @jaybobo

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Jay: I am a student of life and a student of programming…

Jay: It was actually my intent to get a Computer Science degree but, like a lot of people, I felt like I wasn’t ready for that and I got scared…

Arsalan: We find that a lot of software developers in the industry are self taught… this is a big myth with high school students and people still thinking about their careers and every time I ask them about, perhaps, choosing software development or software engineering as a career, they always say, “Well, I don’t really have a degree or Computer Science scares me.” and it’s very difficult for me to communicate to them that you don’t actually need a degree! A lot of people that I work with – and they are fantastic developers – they never studied Computer Science formally and it doesn’t seem to matter in our industry because there are some skills that you can pick up and employers really don’t think about it as much as people think they do…

Jay: I started building websites for other people when I was in college full time for 6 or 7 years…

Jay: To level up your skills, meet new people and tackle challenges…

Arsalan: You don’t need a job. If you are a web developer, you can make a website very cheap or even free and tell people what you can do. If you are an app developer, for example, you could certainly build an app for the iPhone or Android… You can show people what you have with a very simple set of tools – usually just a computer and maybe some software and you’re not bound by your location. If you are in a place where there are no jobs, move where there are jobs. You have to be flexible in order to create that opportunity for yourself…

Arsalan: You don’t need to be a Math guru to be good at programming… All you need is passion and the attitude of not giving up. You have to enjoy the creative part of it, the constant learning and this career can be pretty rewarding…

Jay: Pair programming is a bit slower than one person working on a task but it helps prevent the silly mistakes that tend to happen when one person is working on a task. You have more ideas and more feedback when you run up against a problem…

Jay: Code every single day until you have a job!

• Ruby Tapas
• The Ruby Rogues
• The SysAdmin Casts
• LiveCoding.tv
• Twitch
• Cooper Press weekly newsletters
• Hacker News
• Pair Columbus

Thanks for Listening!

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

If you found this episode useful, please go ahead and share it with your friends and family. You can also listen directly and give your feedback on the website.

You can subscribe to Mentoring Developers via iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google Podcasts. 

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