Cultivating Developer Leadership Habits- Lead, Mentor, and Teach for Success

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 our season of Building Better Habits. We're here building better developers. We have gotten past our holiday specials. I am still here and have some caffeine and all the good stuff that matters along with probably too much turkey in the last few days. My name is Rob Broadhead. I am one of the founders of Developanure, also a founder of RV Consulting, also a person that's like getting back on track here a little bit because it was a couple of days off. Let's talk about RV Consulting first. RV Consulting is a consulting company. We do what is called boutique consulting and we help you do a better job working with technology, whether that is a technology team or software applications, even hardware and stuff like that. Basically, we help you deal with your technology sprawl and get more out of your time invested and find a way to be productive with the technology that is out there today and prepared for tomorrow through integration, simplification, automation and all of the shuns that are out there that will help you do better as a business owner and a business leader. That being said, we can jump into our good thing, bad thing and we are back on our habits. So habits I want to hit up first. I cannot emphasize enough how much game changing it has been to do a couple of Pomodoro 30 minute sets, just make that part of every day. In the past it was always like I was just going to like pom-a-pom-a-pom-a-pomodoro my way through the day and now I don't. I just want to make sure there is a couple in there. Part of this may be because my day is often split with meeting things and managing things and project managing things and stuff like that. When I get down to coding, when I get down to solving problems, I need to get this feature in or something along those lines. Having two Pomodoros a day has really helped me. It really helps me with the things that I need to make sure that I touch at least on a regular basis, a daily basis and make some progress on it. So while I do it with coding, it may be something you want to do with something else you are working on like your side hustle or something like that. Very good way to make those things a part of every day and make sure that you advance them. Shut everything else out, go focus for 25 minutes or whatever your Pomodoro length is and make some progress. The listing thing is, I'm not going to lie, I've sort of drifted back off of that as I've got my huge list. I do, I have sort of gotten to like one or two things that pop to the top. I'm going back to, I'm really trying to build a habit of making sure every day that what is the thing that I want to get done? What is that, you know, eating the frog thing? What's the thing that has just been dragging that I want to attack? Life blows up a lot lately and so that's made it tough, but that has caused me to make some progress on those. Automation is a really good one to, you know, we did the seven days and then automate something. I think that is a really good repetitive thing to do simply because it will keep the automation idea in your head for whatever your daily weekly routine is. Help me, I've added a couple things here and there. They've not been big things necessarily, but they do save some time and they will, you know, they have, there's an advantage to them. And honestly, as a developer, these may end up being tools that I use elsewhere. Some of them I literally have used these tools elsewhere already to try to like clean some other things up. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing, I have survived Thanksgiving. Busy time, family stuff, all of the goodness that's out there, but also it's exhausting. So gotten through that. Bad thing is now I'm in the aftershocks of having all of these people over and setting up like the Christmas decorations and all that because we wait till after Thanksgiving. So now it looks like my house has been hit by a hurricane or something like that. So I got to work on that today. Somebody who does not have to work on my house at least, although he might have to work on his is Mike, how are you doing? And introduce yourself. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Milosh. I'm one of the founders of develop a nerd and I'm also the founder of Envision QA. If you're looking to improve the software within your business, be it healthcare, small businesses, e-commerce, we help you analyze what you currently have, help you identify pain points and figure out those processes that you've kind of moved off to a manual process of getting things done because your systems don't really do what you need them to do. So we help you build custom solutions and we do it in the mindset of test driven development so that we reduce the time it takes to implement software, release quality software and make sure that your users or your customers have the best experience with your product. Let's see, holidays kind of made things a little crazy for me. I've been still trying to work on the Pomodoro technique. I is actually helped me knock some things off my list. So I've been, I'm still that list driven person that for me has never really not been the case. I have had the slight problem though of list creep where I've had way too much on my list to really get done in the time, in the timely manner. So for good and bad, I will say the bad side is I am over prioritizing and under delivering at the moment and I'm working on tweaking that because the holidays, my house is also a bit of a mess because we did throw Christmas decorations yesterday. We also do that the day after. And also I've been working on the automation. I've been tweaking some of my automation tools as well as that kitchen sink gap. I really spent probably way too much time going down rabbit holes, putting together some nice little feature sets and HTML, CSS to kind of play around with some ideas I had for an application. So with that being said, I'll pass it back to you. So this episode, I want to dive right into something that's a little bit different from, it may feel similar, but it's a little different to when we were talking about personal branding and some of those kinds of things. What I want to talk about really is the best way to look at it is like leadership or mentoring. Being a leader or particularly as you get into your career and you move into your mid level and your senior level kind of stuff, leading, mentoring, being a senior a lot of times is making sure that you're passing on some of the information you know. Now, this is actually something that you can do even if you're beginning. If you're going to be two or three years into your career and already be at a point where it is useful for you to pass information on, which would be potentially leading or mentoring or training somebody on something that you have done. This can be as simple as let's say that you're working with somebody that does a lot of integrations and it's you basically walking through, hey, here's how you do the integration, the setup, the API calls for X, whatever it is happened. It could actually be X, the formerly known as Twitter, or it could be something like a lot of times you're going to see stuff like integrations with like QuickBooks or something with Salesforce or NetSuite depending on what your company is or HubSpot or those kinds of things that are out there or MailChimp or all the other fun things. And no, those aren't people that have sponsored us. But if any of you guys want to, well, I'll mention your name more often in the future. So the key to the thing about this leading and mentoring and training and teaching, which is something we've talked about ourselves, is that you get a lot out of it. It really, if you're going to pass information on to somebody else, it actually forces you to review the information for yourself to think through, okay, what is this really to really coalesce what you have in your head into something that now you can pass on to somebody else. And a lot of times because it's sort of like picking at the edges of these things, a lot of times it forces you to learn it better, to not necessarily master it, but definitely become much more comfortable with it. For example, let's say that I am, let's just use an integration with, let's say HubSpot. Let's say I'm writing an application and I'm going to get some information out of HubSpot via an API. The initial things that I did may have just been that I figured out how to connect. I figured out, I grabbed a token somewhere that I don't even remember how their API works, but let's assume there's some sort of token, some sort of authentication information. I grabbed that, I connected, I hit the one endpoint probably that I needed, grabbed the information back and spun through it. If I'm going to teach this to somebody else, I'm going to actually spend a little more time and talk about, all right, how do I get, how do I generate or get an API key? How do I set up permissions for it? How do I, where do I go to review the documentation for the API? What is the general results for an API as far as like, maybe there's, maybe I didn't even care about error handling and stuff like that. There may be things like that that they're going to do. So in doing this like handoff or introduction to somebody else, you're going to refine it a little bit and maybe a lot because you're going to think through some of it. What are the questions that people are going to ask? And if you actually go into some sort of a training session or leading them through stuff, they will ask those questions. And so now you've got to go answer them and that's going to help you learn it better as well. Now, as a growth, a career growth path, even if you are a technician, even if you're going to be technical all the way, never want to manage people or anything like that, there's still is a value in talking to the people is dealing with other people. Because if you're just somebody, you know, some mage in an ivory tower, then that doesn't really help the rest of the team. So you need to make sure that you are learning at least some of these soft skills about how to pass your information on, whether that is through a presentation, whether that is through we've talked about blogs and things like that, wiki pages, general documentation, how to's, read me's and things like that. These things are all important in essentially transitioning information to somebody else. Now, a lot of times it's seen as like a leading or a mentoring because you can, it's not just like here's a read me and go with it. It's helping somebody walk through getting started on whatever it is. And this may be as simple as, hey, I built this really cool component. Here's how you utilize it. So there's a lot of different ways that you may bump up against this particular habit that we're going to talk about and a lot of different ways that you can communicate that across the to whoever it is that needs to be, whether it's a person, a team or the rest of the world. Right now, I'm going to send it over to just a person and get your feedback and your thoughts on this before we get into our challenge. Go for it, Mike. Sure. Thanks, Rob. So the first thing that came to my mind when you were talking about, you know, that whole idea of mentoring, leading and training was back when Google first came out, a lot of people didn't know how to really use search engines or how to identify and find things to do their job. So one of the things that just kind of came to my mind was, you know, how to Google Google. You know, a lot of people even today still don't know how to use search engines properly to kind of narrow down their search like their search is very broad. They might. It's more scattershot than refine. And it's one of those things where it's like, you know, this is something that as you build these skill sets, you learn these things on the job or just over time. When you're working with individuals or other people and you start seeing that, oh, they're struggling trying to find an answer to a problem or solution. It may be as simple as, hey, write down the steps that you kind of go through to solve the problem. Like, hey, how did I go out? I have this ticket or this bug. What's the first step in my mind that I would do to troubleshoot? So sometimes just walking through with junior developers or any developers, even seniors, I've had to do this sometimes because there are some problems that we just have never seen or we tackle one way, but that's maybe not the best way to do it. And. I find myself learning as well. So not only do I try to help people when I see them struggling or it's like, oh, hey, if you try this or you work through these steps to solve a problem like Google, it may help them troubleshoot or be better at problem solving or working tickets. But you also need to be in the mindset, even with those junior developers, that sometimes they may have seen things or use newer technologies or tools that might be a better way. So sometimes when you're training and mentoring, listen to what they say because they may actually teach you something new within this process. So it's kind of a two way street. It's not always one way you have to be open up to kind of absorb or take in new information because you're not always your way is not always the right way. Also, this is very helpful, especially if you're in smaller organizations or even larger organizations. If you join a team. That has some documentation place, like how to set up environments, how to, you know, set up, deploy software, go through those. Or if you are on that team, you built the software, write that type of documentation because when you bring new people on, it's always nice to say, Hey, look at this documentation. Let me walk through it with you. You can have a checklist and you kind of want to go through those maybe once a quarter, maybe once a month, depending upon how fast the software is changing. But these types of things are very beneficial, not just to you, but to your teams and organizations as you kind of grow. Every everyone grows together. You're not just growing yourself. It's kind of a community effort, but as we grow, you know, I love teaching. I constantly it's like, Oh, hey, there's this cool new idea like AI and all to teach myself. I go through and read documentation, but then I try to do a project or write something down in a way that like a blog where I can go step by step, like, okay, here's how I would set it up. Here's the steps I need to do to go find some additional information. Here are some keywords on how to search AI, how to use like chat GPT or Claude AI. What are the specific commands I need to solve this problem? This gets back to that whole, how do you Google Google? Using the tools, there are many simple ways to use them, but there's also a lot of advanced ways to use that most general users don't use or know about. And these are very kind of very useful things to learn and use when you're kind of walking through that mentoring and teaching of others. So you look at this and there's a wide range of stuff that we can do. And you're going to probably sit there going, okay, well, what's your challenge for the week and how we're going to work with this? That's what I want to do to challenge you this time. And this is going to be an interesting one because I'm thinking about like doing it myself because we challenge ourselves with this. And this can sometimes be challenging to not overuse that word or maybe I did. I want you to do is find a venue of some sort to train, to lead, to share information. Now a venue, a lot of people are going to think of like, oh my gosh, I'm going to go like, you know, to the local auditorium and do a speech or something. It may be. You could possibly do that, but you don't have to. One of the best ways I think for you to go look is look for local user groups or meetups and see if there's somebody that is literally looking for somebody to speak in the next, you know, little bit next week or the next month. And a lot of times they're very open on the topics. A lot of places need them. So you can do that. Another place you can find is the internet. There is so much out there as far as you may find some Slack user groups, you may find news groups. There's a lot of different, just any kind of discussion type boards. Especially if they are topic specific. So for example, let's say you're a Java programmer. There are places out there like I think Java Ranch is still out there and some of those kinds of sites where people are regularly putting questions out there. You can even go to like your, you know, your Slashdots and some of those kinds of places. There's a lot of places that people are just asking questions. Like, how do I do this? And this is a perfect opportunity for you to say, hey, here's how you do it. Particularly if you use one of the sites where it's a community kind of thing and people sort of rate your, you know, they'll plus or minus your solution. And a lot of times they'll give you more information about like, oh yeah, your solution is good, except for you didn't do this or it breaks in this. Things like that that really do help refine a solution. So that is your challenge for the week is to post at least one place or to do something, schedule something where you're going to actually train people. Now, if you don't want to, if you want to do it in person, then the alternative to that would be listen as you're going through your work week. If you're in an office area or if you're on Slack or whatever communication is amongst your co-workers. And within the next week, put together something if people are asking about like, hey, can we do this or what's this about? Or how would this work? Or there's something that everybody uses that nobody really knows real well. For example, if you've got DevOps stuff, I know I've been a lot of organizations where somebody set up a really complex bunch of like Jenkins stuff years ago, and now nobody really knows how to do it. So spend a little bit of time and just do a little write-up. I'm like, hey, here's some features that may be useful to yourself and to others as well. Because this actually is a bonus that's going to push you to learn something, but it's also going to push you a little bit to learn it enough to teach somebody else. So basically every day for your habit is just spend five minutes thinking through where are some places where I could potentially help, and then maybe go like do a quick search or something like that. You don't have to go very deep in it, but by the end of the week, the big challenge is the full challenges present in some way, form, or fashion, whether it's in written form or something else. And then I would really love to hear what you present, like just sort of a title or summary. So like, what did you find? Where did you go? How did you go present this? I don't need a write-up, but I would love to hear just a sentence or two about your experience with this, because these are the kinds of things that I think we can really feed back into the community with. Is it's like, hey, here's a place where there is a, people are dying for knowledge of this kind, or these are great ways to share knowledge and do it quickly and easily and things like that. Because I would love to hear your experience. As always, one of the best ways to do that is to shoot us an email at info at developernor.com. We also have a contact us out on form out on developernor.com. You can leave us comments and feedback, whether you're checking out the YouTube Developing or Can't channel, whether you're wherever you're listening to podcasts, if you're listening to this as a podcast, just we're happy to get feedback. However you get it, we've got a Facebook page, we've got a developer at Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it. Someday we'll eventually just call it X, but it's still the place informally known as Twitter. We'd love to get your feedback and just sort of see where you're going with this. Now, where we are going with this is we are still going to be like chugging through this season. We will not finish up before the end of the year. So we'll have a couple more episodes. We'll have a couple holiday specials, and we'll come back in, which will probably be very helpful as we're wrapping up, getting to the end of a year and stepping in a new year to have a bunch of things that you can work with to build better habits. Because a lot of people, there's this thing called resolutions at the beginning of the year. A lot of people do those. If you can do that and build a habit instead of just a resolution that you forget about three days later, you will find that it will make a huge improvement on you becoming and building a better developer within yourself. That being said, go out there and build yourself a better day, 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.