Mentoring Developers

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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

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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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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