Products and Learning and Reading

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our series of interview portions, little cutlets that have come out of our discussion with Timothy Stratton. We are going to focus this time around on products and learning and reading. How to get from the academic approach, a lifestyle that we start out with typically, come out of high school, go into college, or maybe a boot camp, and you're very academic, you're very study focused, you're doing a lot of reading that has been assigned to you, and now you get into your career, you're starting to get your feet underneath you, you've got a couple years under your belt, and then what do you do? Because technology has changed. And that's where we pick up this conversation. We talk about how to take those next steps and some of the things that you probably need to be aware of as you are out there and trying to find the next way, the best way to become a better developer. These are things we've discussed before, but I think it's always useful to have somebody that's living it, talk about it, what some of the challenges are. And of course, Timothy throws some nice little tidbits in here about some current sources of information and content that you might find very useful and helpful yourself. And with that being said, I think it's time to get started. So let's return to our discussion with Tim Stratton. So moving forward a little bit now, we've gotten, you know, talked about your early days, especially now, because I say you're, you know, you're in as a millennial, you're into a solid position where you're definitely not a neophyte in any way anymore. You're definitely into that, you know, firmly into that mid and sometimes senior level of a career or of your expertise. And in recent years, in particularly, what are some things that you've looked at, or maybe some goals you've set to continue to grow your career? Because I know that is something that you don't want to grow stagnant. And early on, you know, you can, it's simple in a way because you can say, hey, I need to, I want to understand more about a language or add a couple of languages or, you know, maybe solve a couple problems in code. As you've gotten a little further, how has that maybe changed? And what are some things that you look to now as ways to both to stay current, but also to advance your career and your and just your professional growth as well? Yeah. Thank you for that question. My biggest hurdle right now as a manager is the administration portion of the job. Technically, I feel like I can keep up and there's certainly many, many things that I need to learn, even still technically. But it's the ticketing of work. It's the tracking of work. It's the planning and strategically roadmapping out months and months of work for my team. That came, that realization came early on, I would say, because I searched when I first got the job, or at least the first started talking about the job. I searched for what were the job expectations for the manager? And I guess it's really any, any role that you may come into, you're going to search and say, well, what is expected of me? And I looked up the hurdles that may be in place for someone coming from a development background into a managerial position. And it didn't blindside me. It's kind of a known hurdle, a known struggle that a lot of people have had. And so that was one of the things that I should have wrote down your question because it was two part. But that was one of the things that I strove to do is to understand the issues that I would probably get our face within my within my role as a manager. When it comes to forgive me, can you repeat the second part of your question? Sorry, Rob? Oh, no, you're doing well as it's it because and I did, I guess this is a full disclosure to anybody listening is this, I did not throw these questions out at Timothy beforehand. So you know, give him a little grace is that some of these are, are things that maybe we don't think of in a regular basis. But it's, I think they're good for each of us to, you know, have either present, you know, have somebody ask us or we just ask ourselves. But really, it was the two parts were how have you how do you keep current? Really? And how do you, you know, now that you it's not just a matter of keeping up with a, you know, a new version of a language has come out, but there's definitely a, as you've expanded your skill set, that means also an expanded bundle of stuff to keep up with and to keep current. So how do you keep current, but then also, what are the things you're looking for, you know, now maybe are some things that you want to pursue or to try out to, to continue to grow your your career. And I guess I'll just maybe sort of add a third in there just to be just to really overload you a little bit, but because that's where I'm also leading to is and what you know, maybe some of this is talking about what maybe you're looking forward to now that you've, you know, we always sort of look at least there's got a little bit of a looking ahead of, oh, I want to get to this or I want to learn that. Well, now as you've, you know, you've solidly positioned yourself as a developer, you're, you're definitely getting your, you know, your feet under you and, and, oh, while there's still growth, but you're solidifying yourself as a manager. So it's, you know, gets to what are you, what are you doing to keep yourself current today? And what are you doing to grow? And what are you, maybe some goals that you're some, maybe even some stretch goals that you, you have, whether they've been from the start or whether they've, they've come into play as you've learned more about your career and the directions that can take. Yeah, thank you. That's that clears it up. How do I keep current? I kind of hinted at that with my first response and I'll reiterate it here. You have to read, you have to read, you have to speak to understand what you don't know. Because it's the things that you don't know that blindside you, at least from my limited experience, I hate getting blindsided. I was that student in school that started on the project the day it was assigned and finished two weeks before it was due. That that's how I try to keep even with the role that I'm in now, the the work is going to come. And the challenges are going to come. It's my goal to know those challenges, be they technical and administrative or otherwise, to know those challenges before they come. One, so that my team isn't blindsided, my team isn't frustrated. If they if there are frustrations to be had that I'm feeling in them, feeling them and not them. And so what do I look for? First things first, I'm talking to my my peers, talking certainly to my supervisor. He's going to know exactly how I'm feeling. And it's hand in glove. He's going to know exactly how I'm feeling. I'm going to be asking him for feedback, constant, constantly. How do I get past this? Or what can I do to make the things that we're doing more visible? That's a question I always ask. Are you clear on what we're doing? Because one of the things that I found in specifically in this role is that I could be leading the entire team's development effort, we've got a high throughput, we could be trekking down the wrong path at a very path at a very fast rate. And so I'm always rebasing and saying, are we on track with where you want us to be? And so one of the things I'm doing is not just looking ahead asking myself, where am I deficient? Where can I grow as a manager, be technical or administrative? I'm talking with my peers talking to my manager, but then there are plenty, plenty of good articles online. Again, this is to rehash reading. And the saying goes or the saying is that most people don't read very much at all throughout the day. Well, I tried my best to flip that on its head. And I don't look at much TV or screen throughout the day in terms of entertainment. Hop on to YouTube, but the TV doesn't come on. When I go home, I'm usually reading some. There are many different resources out there. Developpreneur being one of them, shameless plug. But then from there, digging into like Martin Fowler to understand some of the design patterns. And from there, I'm digging into a lot of articles, gotten into medium, medium is good, but they've got the pay to read type thing. And there are plenty of free things out there. But understanding what the industry is doing and then making sure that we're not blindsided again, blindsided by any changes that are coming. And so that's where I have found myself in terms of where I really want to go in my career. Now that I've gotten a little experience, I'm really excited to grow as a system architect, as a solution architect. It's kind of what the master's degree program was about, solutions and systems engineering. But I haven't really had that experience in the past. What I'm looking to do and grow in is understanding where all my tools are, what all my tools are from a cloud system standpoint, be it AWS, Google, Microsoft, whatever. Understand those tools. And then once I understand the tools, I'm trusting, hoping that my mind can come up with solutions to the problems using whatever tool is available to me, be it you know, IBM, I don't know. Just understanding the tools is the biggest portion. And so I've found myself researching, going through tutorials a lot so that I can understand even the nitty gritty of the tools. It may not be necessary for you to go and run tutorials day to day, but I find myself doing that as well. It's interesting. Well, there's a lot of good things in there. But just to sort of dovetail off of that, I ended up, it's now a couple years ago, just by the work I was doing, some of the consulting I was doing, and some of the customers I had, and then really just sort of getting the initial launch of developer and building out some content. I spent probably a good two years, maybe a little longer than that. And it just felt like I was always researching and demoing products. There's so many things that were either requested or that just were interesting, that you sort of, they're rabbit holes, basically, where you find a couple products, and then you realize that, oh, hey, here's some more products that do something that I didn't even know they existed. And it was one of the most fulfilling or rewarding times I've had professionally in a while. It's always fun to build new products and solve problems, but it was just such a, to me, it was surprising. I didn't realize how much I enjoyed finding out what was out there and how useful it was. It was amazing how often I would spend maybe a couple of weeks going through a bunch of different products and evaluating things. And I was building RFPs and a whole lot of other stuff. And then I'd come across somebody else that was sort of running into the same thing, or they would have a question about, you know, wow, I wonder if I can do this. And whereas, you know, beforehand, I may not have been able to give them much help other than, well, you could build something. I was able to say, oh, well, you know, there's a whole little industry of products that do exactly that or close enough to it. Here's five or six links, go out, you know, knock yourself out. And if you have a specific, some specific criteria, well, then maybe I can narrow that list down to one or two. And I think that is part of the, I think it probably is part of the solution architect kind of role is being able to, it's not just solving a problem, but being able to do it as often as possible without reinventing the wheel and doing it in a way, especially these days, it is that is timely and that is not cost prohibitive because there's, things are just moving so fast. It's hard to, you know, to basically even pitch a solution that's going to take a year, two years or five years to get done, which that was sort of the norm a couple of decades ago, but it's gotten to the point now that years are becoming months. And if it's a six month project is a long project, it seems like anymore. It doesn't, well, when they start out, usually six month project turns out to be an 18 month project by the time but, you know, pitch, you know, something's going to at the, at the very basis is going to be, you know, a year and a half. There's always this, you know, we talk a lot about MVPs and prototypes and proof of concepts and all these things that are ways to get some part of that solution, some piece of that solution into people's hands sooner rather than later. Yeah. I want to, I want to just piggyback on that. The thing that I can say really just changed my mindset on, you know, setting up MVPs or even POCs is just learning that there are tools to help you for that. And if I'm able to learn the tool, I can, you know, set those out really quickly. It's another thing about the communication. You know, you don't have to build out the entire application in order to pitch a solution to somebody. You've got to set up a wire frame or something even simpler than that just to show them or maybe even give them a little hands on experience so that they can, so I don't want to say when you because I don't want to say win them because it's not necessarily you trying to pitch or sell them on something. You're just saying this is the solution I have in mind. The tools to do that. There's so many quick and easy tools to stand up to help you solution out solutions or resolutions. So I would really impress that such good stuff. I agree. And that's, I guess that's another opportunity for a shameless plug in a sense, but I've found that that's part of why we created the idea of the nuggets in our mentor sessions that we come in and hopefully even when we, you know, some of us have a bad couple weeks or whatever and just can't find anything. And it seems like every time there's at least a couple of products that are out there. And I don't know how many times somebody has come in with some product that they've said, Hey, I just ran into this thing. This the other day. Here's what it does. We take a look at it and I ended up putting it on a list somewhere to say, I gotta, I've got to go back and take a look at that. That is, you know, a lot of them are in the lines of the tools. Like you mentioned, it's something I really need to do a demo or to spin up this kind of a sample environment or to, to get a little bit better vision into what it is I'm working on or working with. And yeah, it's, that's the thing is it's just not only is there so much technology out there, there's so many tools that are, these are very, especially with software as a service, very available and very price effective. You know, you can be just you and go use a tool or you can be an enterprise of tens of thousands of people and use that tool. So it really shifts the ability to have some very powerful tools into, you know, even a startup. And there you have it for this episode for this part of the conversation. We are not done yet. We have plenty of things to discuss still, some great examples. And yes, there may be a couple of shameless plugs in there again, because we've sort of grown together over a few years. And so it is one of those things where that is a common language of ours, essentially as the, the developer site and mentor and all of the tools that we use there to help each other, you know, help our, all of us in the, as part of that group grow. And as always, you're welcome to join us. You can just email at info at developer.com. I'm glad to roll you into the group and find some ways for maybe you to, to help out and contribute and grow as well. We're not done yet, as I mentioned, so we will come back next time around, continue to talk to Timothy, working through some of the things that he's, the challenges he's seeing and some of the, maybe some of the bits of wisdom that he can throw to people that are, you know, that he's closer to that beginning part of his, of his journey. And still some of those things are very fresh and very pertinent to these next steps he's taking. So as always, I'll wrap this up and just say, Hey, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer-Nor podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernor.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Develop-Nor. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Develop-Nor site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Brodhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our Mastermind Mentor Group. We meet roughly every other week. This is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time. We talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at Develop-Nor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.