Kasey and Divya reveal how to succeed as an apprentice

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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…

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