The Developer Journey - Welcome to Season 22

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to season 22. You don't see me holding my little piece thingies up, but hey, that's where we're at. We have started a new season. We didn't even pause from season 21 to 22. I don't remember if we I think we did from 20 to 21 because we took a year and a half. We're trying to keep this down to, you know, get a couple seasons a year out. This season, this episode, we're going to talk about the season. This season is going to be the developer journey. We want to get a lot of the pieces in that are the things that are building a better It's also getting you to become a developer in the first place in a sense. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the foundational things and particularly some of the cases where we become developers from so many different areas. It's the different ways that we do it. And then how do we then fill out essentially and flesh out our resume? How do we fill out our skill set? Because you could be somebody came out of school and you need to get some certifications or maybe you came out of a boot camp and you want to get some foundational stuff or maybe you came from a different career and you want to be able to figure out like, where can I go? Yeah, maybe I, you know, I was a different career. I learned to say JavaScript can do a couple of web things, but I want to see what else is out there. So this is going to be in a way very all inclusive, but really what we want to do is sort of talk about the developer journey. How do you, it's not just building better developers, but it's like, what are some of the stops along the way? Some of the lessons that we've learned. And before I drone on too long, I will introduce myself, especially since it's a new season. I am Ron Broadhead. I am one of the founders of Develop-a-Nur. I'm also founder of RB Consulting. So the two things I do, we consult, we do integrations, we do simplification, we do automation. And then I use Develop-a-Nur to give back to the community. On the other side of the world, possibly, but definitely on the other side of the internet, but in a little box on my screen is Michael. And I'll let you go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Milosz. I'm one of the co-founders of Develop-a-Nur and I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where we help small to mid-sized businesses and clinicians build software to meet their custom needs as well as test software and support and maintenance. It is really tempting to after smitching that small screen is do like a little squishing your head thing, but it's, I guess I could do it here. I could squish my head, but it's a little different. Kids in the Hall, I think is what it was. Talking about the developer journey, we've come into this just sort of like, where do we want to go with our season? If you look back over 20 plus seasons, there are a lot of areas where we've touched on. How do you become a developer? How do you become a better developer? How do you do all the things that turn you into the helping to become a better entrepreneur? That Develop-a-Nur side of it as well. We've talked about branding. We've talked about marketing. We've talked about skills. We've talked about projects and interviews and all these different things, but it makes sense to have a little, hopefully we plan on having a little cohesiveness to this time around and more like a, not really a full punch list, but maybe a little bit of an outline of like, here's some things, some topics that you want to think about as you're growing that you may already have, but it's also things that you want to step back to. For example, we've talked, I think we've talked recently in these, as I know I've had these conversations, it is the idea of, we've talked about it more on a company level, rebranding, but even within yourself, particularly if you've been doing this for a few years, it's actually rebranding in the way of sense of like your resume or your personal website or your company's website, because there's going to be things that you did 10 years ago that really don't make sense right now. So if you were a, you could be a very, not even cutting edge, but like let's say just a leading edge developer. Years ago, you might've been a leading edge developer using Flash, that you had all these websites and you were using Adobe Air and all that kind of stuff. Basically, it doesn't exist anymore. No offense to those of you that do it on a daily basis. I know there's a few out there, but not a lot of it out there. So now you maybe have moved on to, let's say .NET or Java or something like that. You need then to upgrade your resume, your site. And one of the things we'll talk about is like, how do you handle that stuff? Because you are growing, you're becoming a better developer. So when do you sort of like cut back the stuff that you used to have? When do you drop DOS 3.0 or Windows or whatever off of your resume? When do you put like, you know, basic, not visual basic, but capital B-A-S-I-C, basic off of your list. Those kinds of things are what we're going to sort of get into. And a lot of it is really definitely not a science. This is going to be lessons learned. It's where we have seen some things that have confused us or that we've done that have confused others because we have worked both sides. We have interviewed people. We have been interviewed by a lot of people. We have been through tech screens. We have gone through with tech screened people. I want to just, I think we'll get a lot of that out there. It's like some of our experience and where we've seen things that we feel are done right and where we see some things that are done wrong. And now I say we all the time and I'm not speaking just in the Royal Weaves. So I want to have like, why don't you throw a couple of things like where you see this going as well, Michael, because we've got 30 plus episodes ahead of us. So obviously we're going to cover a lot of ground. Yeah. As we go through this journey, we're going to be talking or touching on a lot of the both pain points of our journeys, some of the things that we struggled with, as well as a lot of the things that we learned that, Oh, this is a great idea or how we excelled in some areas, how we struggled in certain areas and how we basically, uh, persevered through some hard times because in any developer's journey, you're going to run into situations where it's like, why the hell did I do this? Why am I doing this? And you kind of lose that kind of, you lose that emphasis. You lose that spirit of, Hey, this is awesome. I'm having fun. Let's do this. Especially like for those of you that are entrepreneurs and doing startups, you always start out with like, I have this great idea. I'm going to do it. And you, you know, you hit the accelerator, you go, go, go, go, and then you hit a wall. And then you're like, well, now what? I don't want to do this anymore. Or I burned out. And these are a lot of things that we have encountered through our development journey. And we're going to try to talk through some of these topics and, you know, help you guys on your journey of becoming better developers. I mean, you could be a junior, you could be a mid-level hell. You could be like us. You could be 20 plus years in this industry. And still we're always learning. This journey never ends until you either retire or basically you decide to throw your computer out the window and become a monk. And I think that's, it's important that this is not, uh, this is a journey that never ends where we're constantly having to update and keep going. And honestly, I don't have many times I've thrown my computer out the window, become a monk, and the next thing you know, I'm, I'm writing code in the monastery and then I'm back again. And so, you know, I think that's something else that we, you know, there's definitely another area we want to talk about is the, uh, you know, so I, I, I keep thinking of the Lion King circle of life, but there's a little bit of like, there's seasons of our development. I think that we, I know for me that I've been through where, and it does seem cyclical where it's like you get into a much like, you know, software development lifecycle, I think in general, it's you'll get into seasons where you're doing a lot of coding or you're doing a lot of, maybe you're doing some project management or some, some team management, maybe you're in a lot of agile, then maybe you're in a lot of, uh, like just straight web-based applications, maybe you're doing a lot of mobile, there's like, it's just those kinds of things that. I also want to talk about like what we do when we're in a certain season to make sure that that doesn't become a rut. Because a lot of this is about us looking at what, what do we accept? What do we have to accept basically as developers, because there's certain things that are just part and parcel of being a developer, your, whatever you know today is going to disappear. It doesn't matter how long it is. Now there are foundational things. And I do want to spend some time on that because I think that's something that has served me well is a very strong foundation in, in software development to start with. And by I'm talking about things like understanding what collections and the, you know, various patterns are and, and some of those like, you know, basic concepts of like, how do you do logic? Like what is the logical arithmetic and some of those kinds of things, and even like vectors and data stories, things that stuff that you may or may not know. Or you may have come into it in a, uh, a very specific way, you know, like a Lambda or something like that, that you may have a very different view of what that looks like from actual, you know, like bison and all those, and YAC and all those other kinds of things that are about building languages. So there's a lot out there. Uh, there's a lot that I want to talk about, and I think we're going to try to do it. You know, we'll try to do it like a sort of like a nugget at a time. We'll try to take off a good, chewable amount to say, here's something we've done. Here's some of our experience and throw some recommendations out there as well. Now, as always, we do want to get feedback from you. So if you've got some things, you know, something that's like maybe a, a big lesson learned in your career that you would love for us to share, you know, or a question like, Hey, I'm stuck. I'm sort of like, I've, I've hit a ceiling or, uh, the one that everybody runs into is there's sort of that fork in the road where there's some point where you can go. Much more, you can go into like management or you go into the higher end architecture stuff. Now, some companies don't even have that. Sometimes it's just like you top out and you're just going to write code, write code, write code, you just get to write more code or something like that, or write it faster versus hopefully it's a large enough organization that you're in that allows you to manage or design an architect solutions. I see you in the back with your hand up. So it's interesting with that as well. We can also talk about not just those kind of transitions, but also talk about when you're in a position or a role and you're starting to get into a rut or things become toxic, when to identify, when is it time to either shift gears and start looking for different positions or even start looking for different companies? Because there are times where, well, we're enjoying this journey. We are going to run into situations where we are not going to be happy. But we, as developers, a lot of times that we try to persevere because we like solving problems. You know, that's the whole thing about writing software. But sometimes the problem isn't us. The problem isn't something we can solve. And then it's time to like look at the door. Is it time to go somewhere else? So these are some of the things we can address this season as well. That's a great now granted, sometimes the problem's not me. It's always Michael, but for the rest of you, I think this is something, you know, that is something that we, I think they're like, boy, every season of, of development and progression that you're in, that is something that gets handled a little differently. And I think just to sort of to, to wrap this one up as I will, I will flash back a little looking back at some of the things that I did starting out. And I've seen this with a lot of other people as they start out. So it's sort of to give you like a, a slice of life of some of the kinds of things where I talk about. When I started out, I had a, I had a college degree. I had a bachelor's in computer science. So I knew some stuff about programming and I had just come out of school. So I knew some academic stuff about programming. Now you may say, I never went to school for it. I went to like maybe a bootcamp. Well, you're going to have the same thing. You're going to come out of that bootcamp with the, the bootcamp shine. You're going to have like this certain thing that you've now, you've done some work, you've built applications probably of some sort, but you've done it in a, a lot of times sort of like a pristine environment. You are, you are set up in your projects and you are graded on like, you've got to do it right the right way. And the right way is whatever that book or that professor or whatever, you know, and it's a lot of it is based on the, the goals they want to accomplish. What do they want you to understand coming out of that class? And when I came out, I had like, this is the stuff that I know. And I, at that point, object oriented, there was no agile. This was like way back. You didn't really have that yet. It was close to that time, but you did have object oriented. And object oriented was the thing that was like object oriented languages and inheritance and all this stuff. Everybody was just like in awe at what you could do with the object oriented cause they were, they come out of, at this point, everybody was functional based. So you had all this stuff. You had all this repetitive code. You had all this just crud that you had to sort through. So when I walked into the real world and walked out of my academic environment, that was in my head. And I will once again, apologize to anybody that worked with me at the time, because every problem to me, because the hammer that I had was object oriented. And that was the tool I had. So I use that on everything. It didn't matter if it was a aux script, if it didn't matter if it was batch programming, I tried to find a way to take that big square peg of object oriented and slam it into a round hole over and over again. And I'm going to claim, you know, ask for forgiveness and all that. And, and also claim that it's not my fault because everybody does that because we do. We, it's, it's affected my career ever since because I think we do, we get this thing that's a really shiny new tool. And then we really want to use it. Now, when we come out of school, we have one tool, so we don't really have a lot of choice or, you know, we have like a couple, but it's, we're really focused. But as you get further into your career, you'll find that you get that shiny tool again, and you're like, I really want to use this. It's like, if you go get a new coffee cup, you want to have that. You're like, I want coffee right now. Cause I want to use my new cup. That's, that's something that we struggle with, I think more than we would like to admit, and that's one of those things that we're going to get, we will come back to this at some point in this season and talk about such things, because we do have a struggle, there is a balance of, we don't want to lose it. We don't want to have something that we learned and then not use it. And then we lose it. But we also don't want to bore everybody with telling about how we've got this great new silver bullet solution. And then it, it doesn't work. And there's, there's a lot of those in the history of what I've worked through. So I'm sure we will, this is not going to be all about failures and mistakes. We did a season on that, but this is going to be about a little bit about lesson learned, but a really more about, you know, it's more like these are some things we've done. It's our experiences. So hopefully you'll be able to connect with where you, where you have done some of this stuff and some of it will be new. There'll be some things like, I've never done something that way. So I'm going to go give that a shot. Closing thoughts from you? Yeah, a lot of this is again, this is the development journey season. So we are going to be talking about journeys through the career of becoming a better developer. And our hope is that by the end of this season, you will have something to take away, even if it's small, but something like me that every day you look at what you're doing and you want to learn something new, you want to better yourself, you want to become better. I think that is well put in a perfect way to wrap up this first episode of season 22. It's just, I'm still getting my head around this, that we're like that far into this thing. I hope you come back and enjoy us on our journey. As we talk about the developer journey, as always, show us an email at info at developerneur.com. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, jokes, even if they're dad jokes, we'll take them all. May or may not share them. Cause if they're too punny, then it may just be a joke. Also have the YouTube channel. We have developerneur.com. We're out there on X, we are out there on LinkedIn, on Facebook, wherever you get your developerneur material, we're there. A podcast as well, wherever you consume your podcasts, you probably, hopefully right now you're listening to it, but subscribe wherever it is, get all of the latest stuff. We're cranking this out twice a week and they'll just make it easier for you to keep up with us. You can always ask us questions, we'll answer them. And they'll just make it easier for you to keep up with us. You can always ask the lady in the box, also known as Alexa at some point, just, Hey, give me the latest episode of building better developers. And you know what? You'll get to hear our dulcet tones come across the, whatever the devices you're listening on. That being said, we're going to wrap this one up. We're going to go take a break, come back. Season 22 episode two will be next. So we will catch you next time around. 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. 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.