The Developer Journey - Key Lessons for Career Growth and Consistency

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 and welcome back. We are continuing and concluding in the ultimate episode of our season on the developer journey. We're wrapping it up this time around. We are Building Better Developers. We are Develop-a-Noor. I am Rob Brodhead. I'm one of the founders of Develop-a-Noor. Also a founder of RB Consulting, where we help you find the best ways to utilize your technology through simplification, automation, integration. We do whatever we can to work with you, figure out where you're at, where you want to go, and we get in the car, build it, and drive there. Not the perfect analogy, but hey, good thing, bad thing. I'm going to go with the bad thing. As I started this morning, it had a little bit of work to do, and it's one of those things where it's just like the code does not want to do what it's supposed to do. It's like I would sit there. It was a database thing, and I could see the query go, and I would watch all the data change that's supposed to change, and then a second later, it would flip right back. There was a commit and a rollback somewhere, and I don't use rollbacks anywhere. Something was decommitting. Really fun to try to track that sucker down, and why it was like saying, nope, I'm not going to actually do that. That would be my bad thing. Good thing is I have gotten through a week of ... It was one of these weeks where it's just like you get up, and you're just like full day, and your day doesn't end until probably five minutes after you collapse into bed at the end of the day. It's just one of those just like a series of very busy days, and I got through it, and I'm still alive, so there's that going for me. The only else who is alive on the other side of this is Michael, and I'm going to let you go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Milosz. I am also one of the co-founders of Develop-a-Neur, Building Better Developers. I am also the founder of Envision QA. We are your software development and quality assurance partner. We build software tailored to meet the needs of healthcare professionals and small to mid-size e-commerce businesses. Whether you're a healthcare provider or an e-commerce entrepreneur, partnering with us means unlocking your software's true potential. Experience the confidence of knowing that your software meets the highest quality and compliance standards while driving success in your industry. Good and bad of the week. Good, wife is having some better days from her health issues. Bad, she's still having those health issues, so it's a flip of a coin as to what it's going to be like from day to day. As a conclusion of a season, I think we've always done, or I think always done, we just want to look back on the season a little bit. We'll talk a little bit about the developer journey. I think one of the things I want to do is highlight maybe a couple of things. Some things that have stuck out to me as we've gone back through this, themes or recurring ideas or things like that. I do go back to, I think, and we will talk about this I think into the next season. We're going to look at some of these things is making sure that you are keeping up, making sure that you are making some progress on a regular basis, making sure, and this is in so many different ways, this is an important part of what you do. This includes the other thing that we all hate to do but know is very important, which is communication. Things like status and documentation and things like that. Then dare I say technical debt is making sure that you keep up, that you are not letting stuff pile up or you're not missing the mark too many times. There's a book on a thing called Atomic Habits where he talks about very small things that are just little habits that are going to help you out. I think he's the one that said that when you're building a habit, you can miss a day, but make sure you never miss two in a row. It's one of those things where it's like we all struggle. Life occurs and you have things get in your way, but for a lot of these things that we want to do, Career Roadmap is definitely one of those, progressing on those. If we're in a side hustle or something like that, let's make sure that we are hitting our targets, whether it's a daily kind of a drum beat or maybe it's a weekly cadence or whatever it happens to be, is to make sure that we settle into these things that when we commit, we commit to that time that we say, hey, if I'm going to spend 15 minutes a day, then put it on your schedule, put it on your calendar or something like that. I literally have some of those kinds of things where I'm just like, all right, every morning at 6.30, I'm going to spend 15 minutes on that. Don't always make it at 6.30, but it's one of those and it's like I have that on my calendar every day and so I'll move it around. I'll do what I need to do to be like, I need to do this. I highly recommend the same for you. And I think throughout our developer journey, we've hit on that in several areas, whether it is things like going back to your Career Roadmap or how to learn new things or keeping up with technology and how it changes. So I think that's one of those that it's really interesting as we've gone through now 22 seasons of this stuff, that time and time again, one of the things that has gone back to that really I think should resonate and has really helped me is that whole idea of just keep the ball moving, just that daily touch, whatever it is, is keeping that momentum going. And once you've got the momentum going, it really does help you continue because that's what momentum does. What are some of your thoughts? And one of the things that kind of resonated with me this season is, you know, as we're talking about this developer journey, wherever you're at in your career, be it at the beginning, the middle, you're starting your own business or you're an owner. On top of communication, the other thing we kind of touched on that came up a lot is always continue to push yourself, always continue to keep your skills up to date or at least identify what you're working on. You know, don't get stale. Ironically enough, I actually had a couple of phone calls during this journey with different entrepreneurs, business owners and customers where it really resonated. It's like, hey, we need this or we're looking for this. What, you know, is this something you might want to do or do you know people that can do this? It's one of those where you have to kind of break out of your shell and talk to people. You know, you may be a developer, but you're not a developer. You know, you may be really good at one particular area, but your company might go under tomorrow or the company you work for could lay you off. What are you going to do next? And as we talked about those opportunities and what to look forward to in kind of areas to pivot and move forward, especially to enhance your skills, those were things that really stood out and really apply, especially in today's industry. I mean, just read a news article. You know, banks are laying off, you know, banks are being acquired. The game industry is in complete turmoil. You have production companies laying off left and right. Google is laying off Facebook. If you're in those groups, what are you going to do? And we talked about a lot of those things in this journey, how to pivot, how to maybe take on that next job role or better off. What is it that you're really passionate about, really good at and just go start your business? You know, we covered a lot of that and that really stuck with me, especially with what's been going on in the news lately. Yeah, I think that's it's that cliche is that the one thing that never changes is change. You know, where we're at is there's always going to be that change. But an interesting thing that sort of came on as you were going through that is I have often said that one of the most valuable, probably the most valuable thing that I learned when I went through my degree in college was I learned how to learn. I learned how to adopt to new things quickly. And this is something that if you if you look through that developer journey time and time and again, whether you're you're just starting out or you're just you're really starting to settle into your career or you're even you know, even on the senior end or the even in the twilight career, there still is these it's sort of like there's these like little sprints that you do in your career where you're going to have to learn something. And it is something that as you go through time and you do it over and over again, I think you also like all of us, you'll get better at it. Like when we do it over and over, we get better at doing it. And I think that's part of it is really spending the time and embracing that we we really don't have a choice. We're going to have to learn. We're going to have new things and getting ourselves to understand how we learn best and then set ourselves up for success when we walk into this. And it's it's something like I just went back, started with a new I've got a new customer that is a whole new world of stuff of all of their systems and all of the things that they've got out there. And that's part of what my sort of it's a it's a reset in a sense, because there's some of the things that I had zero knowledge of a few days ago, basically. And now I'm slowly gaining knowledge because that's what you do. As you you don't know what, you know, what custom application is in your job until you get into that. And that may be a departmental thing. So maybe you move to a new department and you don't realize that they maybe you don't know you didn't know before all of the things that that department did. Or you may go to a new employer. You may have a new, you know, a new gig if you're consulting or whatever it is. There's always that new stuff out there. And that's on top of things like, you know, brand new language versions and they'll put new stuff out there and all kinds of and they'll be within that. Which is another one. A fun language. Actually, too, I guess, if you look at C sharp and you look at Java, the progression of those over the years is they've taken all of these concepts that are programming concepts and slowly baked them into the language. There's things that early on didn't really exist or weren't supported well, but then have become much more like a staple of the language as it's grown. And of course, you know, you now have things you've gone from like way back in the day where it's just direct client server. Now you have web applications and mobile applications and phone applications and all these are watch application, all these things that didn't exist before. But now we're learning. So again, it's like, it's one of those things. Yes, the changes are always going to come. And I think one of the things you can do best to help yourself that we've seen through this is along with that momentum is a early on is figure out where your strengths are and be able to utilize those and apply those. As we talked about several times over the years, being able to apply what you know and how you do it in a new, you know, new situation in a new environment. Your thoughts? Yeah, that triggered one of the things I was thinking about where on the flip side, as you're going through this or as you're learning or you're in a business, one of the things we talked about a lot this season is documentation. Be it document, document what your daily tasks are, what your job is to document the code, document what you're working on. If you truly document your entire career, either be it through like Git repositories or code, you know, source safe. If you keep track of your stuff and you organize it and you manage it well, that is going to be your go-to for your food library for your next projects. Like Rob said, he just ran into something new. I guarantee you probably within a week or two, he's going to have a little wiki up somewhere keeping notes of what he's doing. He's probably going to have some code repositories for some snapshots or even a kitchen sink app. As we go through, this is the kind of maintenance in our journey that can be overlooked. And it's funny, as we went through the whole season, we kind of touched on it almost every other episode. It's like, make sure you document, make sure you keep track of your code. On the flip side of that, we also talked about the other thing that I'm bad at, I don't like doing, and that was working on your business or working on yourself. We have to take the time to better ourselves. We have to schedule those trainings. We have to pick up the book. We have to read new tech on new technologies. We also have to keep up with our business. You know, we got to pay the bills. We got to pay our personal bills. So basically you have to do the things in life that you don't like. You still have to do them. So as you go through and you're learning or you're building the business, make sure you don't neglect those because you don't want to be late on your bills. And then you find out, you know, your powers turn off or you can't pay your consultants. And next thing you know, you lose the contract because the code's not moving forward. Make sure you take the time and look at your tools periodically. Like Rob said at the beginning, build those good habits of 15 minutes a day, hour a week, once a week. But the other thing I want to stress too is in the working on yourself, working on your business, make sure to batch those. Make sure you give yourself enough time that you can actually put enough effort in that you're going to get the return on investment. You don't want to spend five minutes on it every day. And then the next thing you know, oops, what did I do five days ago? Give yourself enough time to absorb, learn, and give your business the time and effort it needs to grow. I see you came up with me, Rob. What are your thoughts? I was just going to say that there's a guy I ran into many, many years ago that was a developer that was, and I think he was junior to me at that time. I can't remember, but it was, he was sort of new. But one of the things that he did is he had a written journal every day. He would write down, you know, it's basically his daily status. He would write down, what did I do today? What was I working on today? And while, and it goes to the documentation side, but it's not just documenting for somebody else. I think it would be for me, and that's like, and now we have blogs and things like that. But for me, it would be really useful to be able to go back and look at what was I doing here. And some of it's like, yeah, it's, I guess it could be a little bit of a trip down memory lane, but it's really more about like how, so you can look at like how you've progressed through things or, you know, as Michael alluded to, is you can go figure like, how did I solve that problem? I remember I saw that problem. Where did I see that problem? And honestly, that's part of what we have with developer. There's a lot of those like scratch your own itch things where we were, we had a problem to solve, ended up writing a blog article about it and have gone back to it on multiple occasions since then to be like, how was it? Oh yeah, that's right. I can go and walk through my code and figure out how I did it. So there's, and I've mentioned some other things through this about, and some of it is it's like having your code repository, like I said, or a blog or something like that. So it's thinking through how can you sort of like track what you're doing and how can you measure it and how can you document it for your own help as well as somebody else? Because sometimes it is, it's things like, where did I put that? What was that tool that I was researching? What was that site that I went to? Or how was it I logged into that certain vendors specific portal and things like that? There's just so many of those things that it is, I think it is very valuable for us to keep a record of what we're doing so that we can go back to it because we do have just too much stuff in our head and it's really easy to get lost with that. Closing thoughts? You know, the last thought I had, which came out of a conversation yesterday with a friend of mine, is if you find yourself in a rut, and we talked through the season on this, but as you have your highs and lows, when you're in those lows, look at the things like your code repositories or the things that you're passionate about. And maybe data mine those or mind your own projects to build something new to sell to a customer or to even put out there as a new application. Everything we touched in this developer journey can lead you to launching your new product, especially if you're an employee. If you're already a vendor and business is getting slow, this might be a great opportunity to look at that and then look at your local customers, your global customers and figure out, hey, what is it that they really need that they don't have? And how can I scratch that itch? Yeah, I think that's one of those whenever you've you need a, I don't know, a muse or something like that. It's sort of an idea of, how do I, what's my next thing? It's really good to go back to that data, to that, those documents, those projects that you've worked on. And maybe find one that you didn't complete, maybe find one that got shelved at some point. It could be something that you, you may stumble across something that you worked on years ago with some company and they, you know, they've moved on. And now you've got something like, hey, maybe I can go take that and adjust it. Or move it or do something with it. That's not necessarily just stealing their idea and pushing it forward. But there's a lot of times you'll say, oh, I can take this. And now, you know, maybe it didn't work in the way you wanted it to in the past, but now I can, or I can take that concept or that general structure that I built and utilize it somewhere else. As always, as we wrap this sucker up, leave us an email, show us an email at info at development order.com. Check us out on development order.com. We've got a contact form. There's lots of different ways to get ahold of us. We are always happy to get information from you. And this is really going to help. We're going to look for, we'd love to get feedback as we go into the next season, because that's going to be the whole point basically is we're going to talk about every episode, except maybe the first. We'll see how that goes. We're going to have challenges. We're going to have action items and things like that to basically key take away is to say, okay, go with this. Whatever it is that we discuss on that episode, whatever that tool is, whatever that, you know, that skill is, or whatever it is, we're going to say, here's what you should do. And it's probably going to be a series of like, you know, seven day challenges, 10 day challenges, something like that, to just say, go do this for the next several days. And yeah, you go over 30 something episodes a couple of times a week. You may have three or four of these things going on at a time. So we're going to try to keep them bite-sized and manageable. But let's face it, we are all very busy. We all have a lot on our plate. So you should be used to like, you know, juggling a lot of balls at the same time. That being said, we're going to wrap this one up. So go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next season. And bonus material. Yeah. One of the things throughout the entire journey of this season, you know, if, depending upon where you jumped in on the season, go back and kind of listen to it from the beginning, go all the way through it. We have great material and links out on the podcast for each of the blogs. The videos are on YouTube. The other thing is look through the developer site. We've got tons and tons of material out there to help you jumpstart, reinvigorate, or, you know, invigorate your kind of, you know, your itch, your need to learn. We've got a lot of material out there. And one of the things we didn't really touch on with the documentation, which was kind of funny, I ran into this yesterday, is a lot of the AI tools are using ASCII doc notation. So we actually have some videos out on the site for ASCII docs. I will actually be adding some new ones here fairly recent or fairly soon. Excellent. I'm going to throw out some just random kind of bonus material because this just seems like a good time to do it. One thing that's interesting is I've had, when I started my podcast journey, when I was first getting introduced to podcasts, there were probably two that were mile markers of some sort for like very big milestones in my progression in the world of podcasts. One of the very first ones I got into was one called BOAG World, B-O-A-G World. It is about web, it was web development standards and designing and things like that. And they ran for a long time. BOAG is actually named after Paul BOAG. And then he's got Marcus Lowington as his co-host. And they paused it. Well, they ended it around, I can't remember, like 2019, 2020, 2021, somewhere in there. I think it was around 2020, somewhere like in the middle of the pandemic stuff. They're just like, look, we've been doing it for like 15 years. They said, we're done. Well, just recently, like a month or two ago, they said, you know what? We're going to relaunch it. So they're doing it again. And they're going back to like, then they did seasons, they did all kinds of stuff. And so they've relaunched. And now we're doing it, I think, like once, like twice a month or something like that. It's not as frequent, but it was a reboot. So that was really cool to see something that I thought was dead. And by the way, I was still catching up on some of their last, it died at some point and I was still way behind and was catching up episodes. So been able to listen to all along and it's sort of fun to see them reboot it. Also, because it's like a theme or something. Another milestone was called Dignation. It was when they went into from audio into the video world. And that one died. Well, it didn't die. They quit that one, closed that down and I don't know, 2014, 2015, something like that. And they have rebooted as well. So they've come back. You can go check them out. They're doing it randomly, like, you know, once or twice a month as well. But it's really interesting to see these, some of these podcasts that were, were successful to whatever measure they had. They did pretty good. They stopped and now they've come back. And I think it's basically in all those cases, it's just because these people enjoyed what they were doing and they've come back into it. But I also want to throw that out as just some props out to those guys. And in case you had any knowledge of them or anything, because there wasn't, unless you're really in the loop, you would not have probably known that these things have rebooted. I sort of stumbled across them and was, you know, pleasantly surprised when suddenly a dead podcast channel like popped up a new episode again. I was like, what the heck? What is going on? So that will wrap this one up. We're not done. We're not quitting. We're going to come back into our next season. So we will wrap this up, wrap the season up and we're going to come back into the building better developer season. I don't know exactly if that's what we're going to call it. We probably need to get a little bit better seasonal name, but you'll figure that out next time around. And until then have yourself a good one and we'll talk. Thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a newer 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.