Becoming Better Developers - A Retrospective on Season 21 of Our Developer Journey

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello everybody and welcome back. We are in the final episode of season 21. I lost track a long time ago, but we are on a steady march towards a thousand episodes. No, we're not going to hit that even this year, but we are on that march. It's a long march and we're just like marching along. Doesn't mean that we're going to stop then. Doesn't mean we're even going to get there. Who knows? The world could end tomorrow. I know that's a bad note to start an episode, but I will first just like, let's just like back that track up and I want to introduce myself. My name is Rob Broadhead. I am one of the founders of Develop an Order, Building Better Developers, where we get together and we just try to share our war stories in a sense from the front line, which has really been this season. And this episode, we want to talk about sort of like a summary of like lessons learned. Where are we at? How have we become better developers since we started way back, not that long ago, on season 21? And I'm going to go ahead and toss over so Michael can introduce himself. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Moulache. I'm another co-founder, developer and founder of Invision QA, where we help small to mid-sized businesses and healthcare clinicians build documentation or applications that they need to help better their business. So I'm going to start. I'll go first. And I think what I'm going to do is I'll give you just a couple. Here's a couple of, let's say bullet points of some things that I know, some things that I have adjusted in the last four months. And this is part of becoming a better developer. Now, the first one is really, it's one of these things that's part of becoming a better developer is building good habits and maintaining those habits. And sometimes those habits, and this goes back to actually our prior episodes, sometimes we fade away from those a little bit and we need to reel ourselves back in and get back on track. And so one of the things that has been a focus for me in the last few months, actually this year, is really going back to, I spent too much time working in my business and not on my business. And so it has really been me adjusting my schedule back to do regular working on my business, make stuff better, working on marketing and branding and all of the business development is a category that I use on a regular basis. And business development for me is a pretty broad thing, but it's things like finding potential customers, working on proposals, sales calls. It's all of the material related to that. And that includes the website, that includes any kind of newsletters that go out and emails and weekly status type things that go out to the customers that I have, follow ups that go to potential customers. All of that is in sort of this umbrella of business development that I had gotten away from. And I've sort of adjusted into, I think of it as sort of like the Google approach. They have, they did and I think they still do, they have a certain period of every week, certain amount of time that their employees were just told to go do stuff, do what you like but something like go pursue something within technology. So go work on your own app or play around with the tools that we have and find a way to create a better solution. And that's where a lot of, if you go to Google labs, there's a lot of stuff out there. That's what's culminated with years and years and years of all of these employees doing those things. So for me, I said, you know what, I'm going to take and I'm going to take a block of time every week and that's going to be my business development time. Now my problem is that I'm still working on that because I've had too many times that I've punted that, moved that, lost that, shifted that. I usually try to do like on a Friday afternoon, get me at least two or three hours. Early on I did better because I would just, I would go away from my office. I would go sit down at a Panera somewhere or something like that or a little coffee shop or somewhere or leave a little early and go over to the local bar for wings and beer and just get into that kind of development mode and work through some of this stuff. A lot of that was branding and automation and some of the tools. So it's the things that it's like, I'm struggling through with the week, but it's making sure I spend some time investing in doing those things better. So it's things like along those lines, I've built a, I've talked about like built a time reporting app for myself and my team. And then it also, the way we did it, make it easier to do daily standup statuses and weekly statuses and invoicing and keep stuff up. So that return to working on my business versus in my business is one of the things that has been an improvement. Now another thing, that's a second one is the brand focus. Michael started out working on a vision QA and he was sort of launching that. I think this was pre-launch was when we started this. And so in our discussions, a lot of this is while I'm sitting there on the outside looking in and saying, hey, you can do this or you can do that, or here's a recommendation or here's a suggestion. A lot of that is me looking, I reverse it to myself and I'm like, oh, I need to listen to that and I need to go do that or I need to adjust that. And it's things like, well, how do I adjust my brand? How do I adjust my vision? How do I adjust the spiel that I'm going to give when I'm trying to bring a customer in? And what are some of the tools or the approaches I need to take to better bring customers in and introduce to them and figure out what's out there and how we can help people in the best way that we can help people. So there's definitely that. Again, it's working on my business for the most part and it's figuring out how to better craft our sales strategy. I had a lead management group or a lead group that would go out there and find me leads for several months and they would feed stuff in and I would go through calls and I was working through all of these things like what's the message you want to do? What's the little thing that you want to put out there so that it'll drag them in? So they'll come in for a conversation or a Zoom conversation so you can find out, you get to know them and then figure out how you can help them. And then I guess I'll throw a third after I cough something up there. I'll throw in a third and it really is the, I touched on, I think it's one of our bonus materials. I think one of the things is we have grown, adjusted, shifted and I think in a good way, the whole developer podcast and YouTube experience. I would love to get back to, from a time point of view, I'd love to get back to our regular like code sit-ins and stuff like that and those are still out there. Some point we'll get those added back in but this has been, I think, really beneficial to us to talk through some of these things but it's also allowed us to really in a very easy way upgrade what Develop Manure provides to you. We've had the podcast forever but now we've shifted that a little bit and it hasn't changed as much but definitely the YouTube side, we've changed that and expanded in some new areas and we also did, I think we sort of, we clicked our wings in a couple areas as well and said, okay, we're not going to chase this stream because it just doesn't work for us. So we've made some house cleaning kinds of things and developed Develop Manure. We've built better Develop Manure people and processes and content and we're still working on that but I think those are a couple things that have been really, in the last few months, there have been some great advances. What are a couple of them that you've got? So before we started this season, at the end of last year, I decided to kind of blow up Milasch Consulting. I was kind of reached a point in that business where I was too spread out, too doing too many things for too many people, not having enough time to work on the business and at the beginning of the year, I started that co-starter class. I went through the whole rebranding model, really got back to understanding how to work on my business, not just in my business. I went through a lot of kind of soul-searching, trying to figure out who my core customer is going to be, how to serve these new customers and to really kind of prune the things of the consulting side of things that, well, I can do, it's not really something I want to do or something that, yes, I can do it to get a paycheck but is that really what I want to build as a brand? So I learned a little bit more about how to kind of refocus and push a brand of services instead of just a catch-all internet of things model. So that was kind of the beginning of this journey. Now, throughout this season of developing NUR, I have completed the course, I have launched Envision QA, I even have my first customer who hopefully within the next week or two, I will have the first assessment wrapped up and it's been going real well. I've actually been told by many people that my idea of fun is their idea of hell. So either I'm on the right path or I'm going to crash and burn. But hey, that's the whole point. That's the journey we go through as entrepreneurs. The second point is I've learned to be more organized. So at the start of the season, again, because I was kind of in that rebuilding mode, trying to figure out how to go from a company that had been running for 20 some years, what do I want to pull out of that? So I had to get more organized. I had to figure out, okay, what do I need to keep? How do I need to embed that into the new company? And it made me really have to go through old projects. I had to go through all my code repositories. Okay, what works for this? What doesn't work for this? Do I need to move this? Do I need to archive it? And I really had to spend a couple of weeks just going through file structures and projects and try to figure out what made sense to put together for a product base or for this new service I was offering within InVision QA. And that was kind of an interesting journey because it's like, oh, hey, this particular application, well, it works, is outdated. So I needed to kind of rewrite things like Rob was saying. So I have updated my test generation tool. It is now running, it builds Java application or Java test frameworks, but I've now rebuilt it in Python. And I also almost have it to a point now where it will not only generate you a Java framework test framework, but it will also do C sharp and Python. So it's kind of got me back into that code mindset of things. Also within the start of this journey, we at Develop a Nerd kind of made a shift. So Rob has kind of stepped back from the editing side of things, and I have now gotten back into doing video edits, audio edits, which I haven't done in a while. So it was kind of fun to dust off that hat and relearn these tools. So at the beginning of the season, these edits actually took me hours to get through because I was fighting the tools again, trying to remember how to do things, which tools were good again to do audio edits versus video edits. And it was frustrating at first, but now it's fun. Now I'm even looking at writing AI apps or automated apps to automate some of the processes. So it was kind of a fun journey. It's like, well, this is what it takes to do this. Now, how can I make it better? Or how can I streamline things? Now here we are at the end of the season and really to do a lot of our edits and that only takes a couple of hours. So I've gone from like a day or two to getting these edits out to just maybe a morning's coffee over a couple of days. This also got me back into writing again. So I had been out of the blog side of things for a while because we had done so many courses. We've been teaching for so long. We wrote our new courses for the School of Developer and I just kind of got burned out for a bit. It's like, if you are doing a side hustle or teaching or just blogging, you may reach a point where you get writer's block or you just burn out of what it is you're doing. And from the beginning of the season, I was kind of at that point. I was just like, okay, I don't want to write any more content for a while. I don't really want to write any new courses. I just need a break. But by doing this model, I was able to get back into writing blogs consistently every week, trying to get new material out. And it got me organized again. It got my juices flowing and I'm able to kind of refocus and we're knocking out content. Now we're not quite knocking out those video courses like we were before. Those are coming. So keep an eye out for those. But this was a fun journey. So hopefully a lot of the things we've talked about, like the organizational, the optimizing your code agnostic frameworks, these are all the things that we actually went through, all these challenges that we went through this season and we've talked about are things that we went through, we learned, and we've discussed the pros and cons with you. I do want to, you touched on a couple of things that I do want to bring up that I found the same thing is that sometimes there's an old phrase, sometimes it changes as good as a rest. Sometimes it's just doing something different is going to energize you and it's going to get you out of your doldrums or a rut or something like that. And even if you're doing stuff that you like, for example, I have enjoyed RB Consulting. I've been full-time RB Consulting for 10 years now and really pushing it and doing all of the different things that are involved in running a consulting company and bringing people in and finding work and all of those pieces. But recently I've had a couple of areas where I've been dragged back into, well, I'm not going to say dragged, but it has worked out good for me to be the primary developer and really run a project from start to stop and not had, it's been more individual, so it's been much more just like down coding, building that stuff out, the whole thing, the whole software development lifecycle. I've realized how much I really do enjoy that part of it. And so it's been refreshing to be able to get back into some of the things that are what gets us into our career in the first place. And it is something that even as we go through, there are our career, our professional life, there may be seasons that we do certain things, that we are in a certain role and it really works for us, but then maybe there's some point where that season changes and we've sort of either, sometimes as we've run sort of our course, it's run its course for whatever that skill set is or whatever it is that we want to do, think about it like some people, it's a second career or third career. Like if you're a professional sports person of some sort, you win some championships and then you get to a point where it's like, okay, I've sort of done that, now I want to go do something else. Sometimes that's what we do, but it's just, we don't have to change careers. We can just change a little bit our focus. Then it may be, for us, maybe it's like, hey, like Michael said, maybe it's like I'm in Java a lot and have been in Java for a couple of years and now I want to go back and spend some time in C-sharp or I want to go work on Ruby or Python or you name it. So these are the things, part of becoming a better developer and this, again, actually is something, one of the things we talked about in the book is finding ways to keep stuff fresh, figuring out what it is you like and while we really do focus early on about as you're starting a career, it's like, try a bunch of different stuff, figure out what you like and what you don't like. I would say, now as I'm looking back over a longer career period, I think you regularly need to go back to that. There are things now, for example, building out, I guess I've always sort of liked installing operating systems and putting stuff up and spinning things up and things like that, but it got out of hand and it was just, there's just not much I could do back when you go back 25, 30 years and I was just like, okay, you can dual, triple, quadruple boot operating systems and you can set those up and you can do some things, but moving data back and forth between them was a pain and all that. So it became much more efficient to just pick one and go with that. And then I ended up doing that and then I got into the Apple world, back world and I've just sort of like gotten away from dual boot almost completely, but then refound it several years later with Amazon and some of these cloud services and Azure and going in and building out a system and configuring it and installing stuff and getting your applications running. Now you've got a full web server and all of that kind of stuff, a whole solution and not just like a little app you're running on your machine. That's fun. It's something that's now fun again. So you check out what's out there. Maybe there's a language that you didn't like because, and I remember early days of Java, there was some stuff was very painful to do with because it just didn't have that. It wasn't refined. It wasn't there. It wasn't complete. And now as they've gone on, now there's a lot of things that you can do with it that it's very easy as long as you find the right library and it's like two or three commands and boom, you can do some cool stuff. So don't seal off stuff as options as you get further in your career. You may want to go back and touch some of those and say, and it may be something like, oh yeah, I really hate doing that. I don't ever want to go back. That's fine. You go take a little bit of time, look at it and say, no, I really, I still don't like doing that. Cool. Move on to the stuff that you do because there's so much stuff out there. I think we are not serving ourselves or our customers or our families or anybody else if we're not doing the stuff that we enjoy because that's what we're going to do best. That's what we were made to do. Unless it's sitting, sitting on a couch watching the binge watching Netflix, that look a little further, try a little harder than that. There's going to be something out there that is productive for other people, that is valuable to other people. You may be like, I've had the same thing with some of the stuff I do. Like Michael said, everybody else thinks this is their living hell. If that's your heaven, you're set because people will be more than willing to support you doing that for them because they're like, hey, I hate doing this. You love doing it. I will throw bags of money at you to get it done. That's maybe the best niche is to find the one that you love and you're the one person in the world loves to do it. Everybody that when they get to that job, they're like, I got to go find that person because they actually enjoy doing it. They're not going to complain them and moan the whole time that they do it. That's part of becoming a better developer is stuff like this. Periodically, do a little house cleaning, do a little retrospective, look back at what have you done? This is what I would put to you, each of you. Look back beginning this year, so look back just for you wherever you're at, look back say five months, five, six months. Where were you at five or six months ago? Where are you at now? What has transpired in that six month period? How have you changed? How have you grown? Have you changed and grown? If you're in the exact same place doing the exact same thing you were six months ago, unless this is absolutely what you want to do, then okay, maybe you need to look at a change. Also, maybe you look at that and go like, wow, I have accomplished a lot in that period of time. I can look at myself. I can look at my personal life. There's a whole lot of stuff. I got married. We changed our date. I've got kids that are graduating. I've got all kinds of stuff that's happened in such a short period of time that you look back and go, no wonder I'm tired. We got a lot done. Sometimes when you feel like maybe you're in a rut or that it's like you're spinning your wheels, you can look back and realize, oh no, wait, I'm not spinning my wheels. I am making progress. You can have that optimistic point of view of looking forward, but also that fulfillment of, hey, I have gotten some stuff done. I'm going to let Michael get something done right now because I'm going to just sit back and bask in my getting done, that little monologue. Your thoughts? Well, I'd like to continue getting it done. When you're doing those reviews of yourself and of what you've been working on or what you've accomplished, also look at what you haven't done and you haven't accomplished. These could be your check marks or your roadmap of things that, okay, I have not been focusing on these enough. I need to refocus, reprioritize, and move forward. Along with that, what came to my mind as you were recapping this, Robin, we haven't really touched on this enough, especially for those of you that aren't entrepreneurs yet, or even if you are, make sure you review your skills. Make sure that what you're doing is still relevant. You don't want to necessarily be working on a technology that in six months' time is going away. You don't want to be those people working on an AS400 that could die and go away and whoops, you have no job, no technology tomorrow. Always make sure you're pushing the boundaries. Make sure you're learning the skills and keeping up to date on things. That's a lot of what we did. Even within this season, I've gotten AWS certified again in cloud computing. I've relearned Python. I have gone from Java 9 to Java 17 and I'm starting to learn Java 21 again with the new stuff and even AI. You never stop learning. The trick is to make sure you're always kind of got your eye on the ball as to the direction you want to take things. With that, with these skill reviews, dust off your resume, dust off those profiles. If you're on Upwork or if you're applying for companies, look at your resume. Make sure that you are relevantly keeping up with your tasks. What are you working at? What is it that you've done this quarter? These are also things that you can do if you work for people at the end of the year or at the end of the quarter. You can go to your manager and say, I've done X, Y, Z. I've done this. I've performed at this. I've excelled at this. Now, even if there are negatives like, oh, you're struggling in this, you can turn that to a positive. When you go to those meetings, you can say, hey, I've noticed I'm struggling in this or I'm having problems in this. Can we add to my skills or my track to send me to some training courses or pay for some online training so that I can get the help I need so that I can become a better person, better coder, and a better employee for you so that at the end of the year, you can check all those boxes and say, hey, I've done this. That negative now turns into a positive. Now you're not necessarily getting a negative review. You're continually showing that you're growing and that you're willing to work through your problems. I think that's an approach we can always look at. How do you improve? You can either reduce your weaknesses or your negatives, or you can improve on your strengths and your positives. There's a lot of philosophies around what you should do more of and how all that works. Some of it does actually flow back into what do you... It's a personal thing. What do you do best or what do you want to do? Because some people, they really struggle to correct the negatives, or it's a negative that you... You don't like that anyway, so you're happy to keep it a negative. It may be something that you want to just work on that positive because that's what you enjoy, so you would rather strengthen that. Again, there's a lot of philosophies, so there is a diminishing point of return and some things like that to take into account, but that's all on an individual basis. It goes to where do you want to be? I think Michael made a perfect point is even if you work somewhere where you don't have six months or 12 months or 18-month reviews or something like that, it doesn't hurt to just initiate that anyways. It's go to your boss and just say, hey, I've been looking at what's been going on, and here's some things that have been going well, but here's some things that aren't, and here's where I want to improve. You can then drive that process, and then you can come back six months later or whenever it is, and you say, hey, look, I improved these things, and now here's some other things I want to improve. Over time, suddenly you have that track record of basically coming to your boss and saying, here's what I can do, here's what I'm going to learn, and you've shown that you will go learn that, and that will now erase negatives, so you are bringing them value. They are seeing returns on their investment in you, and even if you're not in that situation, you can look at it yourself. Let's go assess yourself, figure out where those negatives are, figure out what that time frame is to erase them, and then you can now see, oh, maybe it's worth it for me to invest some time to take a couple days off or to order that class or whatever it is, because I know that it will put me in a better situation in the future. We will be in a very different situation in the future because this is the last episode of season 21. Next episode you hear that we put out will be season 22, and we're still thinking about what that season is going to be as far as we know. Maybe we've figured it out, but I don't think we have. We're going to jump right in. We're always open to suggestions and recommendations and feedback and all that kind of goodness because we're doing this for you. We have a, we still have fun. We get a lot out of this. We are becoming better developers, as we've noted in this episode, as we're going through these things, but we also want to do that for you. We want to give back. We want to help out where we have learned to improve to make sure that we're helping others do the same. Of course, we're not lone gurus. We can learn from you as well. So love to have that feedback, whether it's info at developer.com, whether it's contact us on developer.com, our Facebook page. You can reach out on us on X, that thing that used to be called Twitter at developer. And again, D E V E L P R E N E U R this. Well, there we go. For the video people, it's like right here for your audio people. Sorry. It's out there. Look, it's probably written like six times in the, on the little show notes. So you should be okay with that. That being said, we want to wrap this one up. Thank you so much for hanging out with us for yet another season. And we look forward to the next one with more with you guys looking at where if we can erase our negatives, make more positives and do the same for you. 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 Develop-a-Nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.