DEV Community: Andy

Deep Thoughts on Denver Startup Week

Andy — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 16:24:09 +0000

Denver hosts Denver Startup Week (DSW) once a year and I was able to attend a couple sessions in September. A few folks asked me how the event went and here are my not-so-deep thoughts and notes.

Main takeaway: You shoulda been there.

And if that reminds you of Jack Handy's Deep Thoughts that's okay with me. 😄

DSW is a community event. Thanks to the sponsors, it's free for attendees. DSW is people powered, so they need you.
Attend the sessions, chat with others, meet and network with folks you don't normally see day to day.

If you're up for it, submit a talk and present. (I've presented in the past and am happy to help you brainstorm ideas or refine your talk.) Or volunteer and help organize. Reach out to folks like Lacey and other DSW folks and find out how you can help.
DSW is better with you involved.

Notes

DSW - YouTube

Here are notes from a few sessions I attended (in chronological order). It was great to meet a few folks for the first time and hang out downtown. Not every session was recorded, so check YouTube for those that were.

Neurodiversity in Entrepreneurial Endeavors

The first session I went to was a panel on Neurodiversity.
My main takeaways:

I appreciate the panelists vulnerability and honesty in sharing their personal challenges
Try things and get help! It's okay if something doesn't work for you. Learn from each other and how others are coping.
Give yourself grace
Celebrate differences - and seek to understand what they are going through

Panelists:

Sara Bates
Tiffany Feingold (Guiding Bright Minds)
Stephanie Cohen
Josh Schuler (MeFlow)

Host:

Holly Vezina

Slides

Ibotta - Decoding AI

Ibotta folks led a talk on using AI/ML to drive product growth. Unfortunately, the talk focused on a vague "educational product" versus a core-in-house challenge at Ibotta, but was still good to learn from their experiences.
Speaker list is in the link above.

My main takeaways:

Models and machine learning are only as good as the data they use (I heard this more than a few times during DSW)
If starting with ML, try batch predictions or model output instead of real time output
Include a model version column in the results (A neat idea that allows them to switch/test models behind the scenes)

And my favorite note:

If it doesn’t have automation, then it should not be in production

A really good point about code, whether AI/ML or not. Getting automation is place will pay off hundreds of times as you build and deploy your application going forward.

Keynote: Women of DSW | Build the Damn Thing with Kathryn Finney

Keynotes at DSW are a lot of fun - tons of excitement and energy in the room. This Q&A and with Kathryn Finney was really cool. She gave out signed books too.

It's on Youtube, so check it out.

Negotiating with OpenAI

This was a fun talk on building an app with OpenAI. The premise was "negotiation practice" and the app lets you negotiate a car sale with an AI bot. Fun idea!

The room was packed for this one (as you might expect). Great example of using good story telling to share knowledge.
Thanks Tyson!

My main takeaways:

"LLMs are a Swiss Army knife…but what we might need is scissors"
Embedding encodes the semantic information in a block of text and can be used to search (vector similarity)

Check out the GitHub project for the app

Spoiler alert: Tyson said the bot used to give away the price of the used car in negotiations until they came up with the right prompt. :money-with-wings:

Data Privacy & Security Related AI issues for the Early Stage Company

This talk was a panel on general privacy and data concerns at early stage companies, where you may not have a dedicated security/legal/trust and safety team. The panel list is in the link above.

Panels are often wide ranging, so gonna just dump my notes here. My main takeaway:

Security and data privacy issues affects M&A and deal price

You don't need every scenario covered, but you should have enough of a data security plan to provide answers and comfort.

Raw Notes

Need to have enough info to provide comfort
Instill discipline - where is data stored, who has access? Easier to do up front than in the middle of due diligence.
Start good habits early.

Weigh impact on engineers and product

Uplight - created an AI policy for engineers
Guidance document that explains why
Ask ChatGPT why you shouldn’t…

Mockeroo/Tonic - create mock data sets

Levels of data protection
Confidential - anything not on internet
Sensitive - info that is within company that not everyone has

Can I use ChatGPT?
Check all your terms of use, agreements. Make sure not violating existing terms.
Check for data addendums with providers
How to claw back data once it leaves?

Even if you can’t execute due to resources and budget, produce something tangible (a doc outlining what you decided or would do later on)

Ask people that are leaving - they have time on their hands. 95% of what you need is in Google or MS suite.

Don’t copy and paste terms - other companies may not have legal counsel themselves.
Don’t back yourself into a corner in your first privacy policy.

Building an AI Empowered Workforce

JP had a great overview of how to weave AI into your organization and day to day. He highlighted the potential "mass disruption" of AI tooling and how we can align our teams with what AI does well.

My main takeaways:

Leads should communicate: What are short and long term goals of using AI? Why should anyone care?
Ensure safety and solving real world problems
Do an internal audit. See what people need before throwing AI tooling at them.

More raw notes here

Experiment!
Make lightweight tools to solve real problems

3 camps - super fans, skeptical, apathetic
The hardware and investment is there - likely here to stay.
How to align with what AI can do well?

Do an internal audit. See what people need.
Group tasks into now / later / never

Are there tools that solve safely and effectively?

How does your org need to change?
Why is (a current problem) the case?
What could it look like?
How will you do it?

Resources for Writing Clearly

Andy — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 16:22:54 +0000

Cover Image: Yannick Pulver on Unsplash

How to write clearly can be unclear.

Brooks E. Scott - Executive Coach helped my writing with a "see one, do one" method during a coaching call. He and I took a look at a recent email I wrote and he edited for clarity. Then, I did the same.
It was an immediate 💡 moment. As a former sports editor and wanna be journalist, you might think I had that skill. I guess clear writing is "90% mental and the other half is physical" and I struggled with both. 😄

Here are a couple 🛠️ I've used to improve my writing. In case you don't have a coaching call with Brooks on the books. (If you don't, you should! Thanks Brooks. 💪 )

Know of other good resources? Let me know in the comments so we can ~~all be a lot less wordy, use simplistic terms and avoid long run on sentences filled with jargon~~ be more clear.

https://hemingwayapp.com/ - "Hemingway app makes your writing bold and clear" is their tagline. It's a very useful app for writing, from work docs to personal messages. See a brief example of improving a resume summary below. I owe Adam Long a country ham biscuit or three if I ever meet him in NC.

https://textio.com/ - Write inclusive and valuable job descriptions (and more) with Textio

https://developers.google.com/tech-writing - "Every engineer is also a writer." A set of courses that can help you improve technical writing.

5 Ways ChatGPT Can Improve, Not Replace, Your Writing - ChatGPT and other LLMs are helpful in starting ideas, summarizing long text, and giving you an editor-in-a-box like experience.

Your Tech Resume is Garbage: Here's How To Fix It - Harsh but fair focus from @anthonydmays on how to improve a tech resume. 📝 Remember your teachers writing feedback that filled your page with red ink? 🔴🖊 Reading this feels like that memory in all the good ways.

Note: This post is a cross post from my LinkedIn.

Using Hemingway to Improve Your Resume

When I'm updating my resume, I post snippets into Hemingway. I use their app to see if I can be succinct and clear.
Software engineering is full of acronyms and technical terms. You can't avoid them in a resume, but the rest of your text can improve.

Here's a screenshot of a few random "Summary" snippets that you might find in a resume. You'll see how Hemingway highlights them and gives you visual feedback on how to improve.

Learning SQL? Here's a grab bag of links.

Andy — Fri, 05 May 2023 19:44:13 +0000

Cover Photo: Windows on the side of a building that emulate columns and rows of a database via https://unsplash.com/@kenrick

I've collected a number of links and resources for learning SQL. Sharing here so that I can link to this in the future.

Hopefully one of these courses, books, or links helps you out in your journey of learning and building SQL skills!

I've broken them out at Online Courses and Tutorials and Other.

Online Courses and Tutorials

https://learnsql.com/track/sql-practice - paid course, but they do offer 70 free interactive coding challenges
https://app.bigmachine.io/courses/sql-orbit - a course that includes an ebook (see below). "You'll learn the basics of SQL and databases using PostgreSQL and you'll have the time of your life doing it. We use a real set of data: the analysis data from Cassini's flybys of Enceladus. There might actually be life up there and you're going to query the data to find out!"
https://wizardzines.com/zines/sql/ - Julia Evans has some great zines and this one is all about SQL. Includes an interactive SQL playground too.

https://sqlbolt.com/ - Welcome to SQLBolt, a series of interactive lessons and exercises designed to help you quickly learn SQL right in your browser.
https://www.ga4bigquery.com/course-query-ga4-data-in-google-bigquery/ - Broader than only SQL, this course will expose you to BigQuery, which you might run into as your SQL journey continues.

Query GA4 Data In Google BigQuery is a comprehensive zero-to-hero course designed to teach you everything you need to know about raw data access, query, and analysis.
https://planetscale.com/courses/mysql-for-developers/introduction/course-introduction - a online course on MySQL from @planetscaledata
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/sql-and-databases-full-course/ - “In this course, Mike Dane will teach you database management basics and SQL…If you've never studied databases or SQL before, this is a great starting point.” H/T to an old friend for sharing this one!

Other

https://dataschool.com/learn-sql/ - a PostgreSQL interactive SQL Tutorial! (Older and may not work since Atlassian bought Chartio, the org behind this book and site. Still useful information in the free ebook.)
https://bigmachine.io/products/a-curious-moon/ - a book about databases and all things data. From the SQL in Orbit course linked above.
https://dev.to/x-team/a-roadmap-for-learning-sql-4l99 - a nice post from @tdmoor that collects a set of learning SQL related resources.
https://sqlpd.com/ - Solve (pretend) crimes with SQL.

https://towardsdatascience.com/you-should-use-this-to-visualize-sql-joins-instead-of-venn-diagrams-ede15f9583fc?gi=94315293fa3f - SQL JOINs are confusing, here's another way to visualize them.
https://www.sql-practice.com/ - A series of SQL questions with an interactive SQL prompt to try and solve them.
https://nostarch.com/practical-sql-2nd-edition - "You’ll first cover the fundamentals of databases and the SQL language, then build skills by analyzing data from real-world datasets such as US Census demographics, New York City taxi rides, and earthquakes from US Geological Survey. Each chapter includes exercises and examples that teach even those who have never programmed before all the tools necessary to build powerful databases and access information quickly and efficiently."
https://twitter.com/pvergadia/status/1545085231840915459 - a SQL Cheatsheet from Priyanka Vergadia, who has other awesome cheat sheets, blog posts, and more.
https://use-the-index-luke.com/ - "A site explaining SQL indexing to developers —no crap about administration." Has an ebook component too.
https://sqlzoo.net/wiki/SQL_Tutorial - A series of SQL tutorials hosted in a wiki.
https://www.brittanybennett.com/post/how-to-land-a-job-in-progressive-data - A post about data and politics and how data is used in politics. Covers "getting a job in data" too. Has a ton of great data and SQL related resources at the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFiZx5NlzL4 - A more intermediate to advanced dive into SQL. "In this SQL workshop, hosted by The Operational Analytics Club & Census, Ergest teaches various SQL principles (patters) to help you take your SQL skills from intermediate to expert." Check out Ergest's site at https://bio.link/ergestx as it has lots of good blogs on data and SQL. He wrote a book on SQL patterns, too: https://ergestx.gumroad.com/l/sqlpatterns

Feature Handoff Checklist

Andy — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 18:39:52 +0000

Work long enough and your organization will change. Your organization grows and builds and new teams spring up to handle the work. Priorities shift and what you are working on needs to happen elsewhere. Your team now owns something new to them.

I wrote a checklist on how to handle features or products moving from one team to another. Maybe it will help you the next time you go through team responsibility changes.

What is this checklist?

A guide to feature handoffs. A feature handoff is when one team needs to take ownership of a feature, product, and/or service, from another team.

For example, say Team Y forms and now they are responsible for Features A, B and C that Team X originally built. How should Team Y ramp up on Team X's features?

Or, imagine that Team Z needs help completing Feature D in crunch time. How might Team Y collaborate and help Team Z?

This checklist helps you think through the timeline and plans.

Note: I use the term receiving team to describe the team getting a new feature. Original team describes the team transferring the work.

Checklist

Who is the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI)?
1. Identify the DRI from the receiving team. This person owns the handoff process and is responsible for a smooth transition. (Or as smooth as possible.) For example, the DRI should:
  1. Schedule kickoff or transfer meetings
  2. Make a decision on who needs to be involved going forward. For example, are you borrowing Team Y and want them to attend meetings on Team Z? The DRI is responsible for making sure that happens.
What is the timeline?
1. When will the receiving team own the feature? When will the receiving team need to start and complete the work?
2. Are there existing customer commitments / service level agreements (SLAs) with deadlines?
3. Is there enough time to complete the transfer? Once you decide to transfer a feature or move people around, there should be at least 24 hours for Engineering or Product Managers to inform the receiving team that priorities are changing.
Schedule a 1 hour Product focused handoff meeting. This meeting is costly for a reason - handing off a feature involves a lot of context. If a handoff is necessary the receiving team needs support.
1. The DRI should set up a handoff meeting with the following:
  1. Product Managers (receiving and original team)
  2. Designers (receiving and original team)
  3. DRIs and engineers from the _ original team_ that designed or built the feature
  4. DRIs and engineers from the receiving team
2. The meeting should cover the following:
  1. Background of Why this is a feature/need
  2. An high level product and feature overview
  3. Product Requirement Documents (PRDs), Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) and other documentation
  4. Existing commitments or SLAs
  5. Known issues, major bugs, or items left incomplete
  6. Future Roadmap
Schedule a 1 hour engineering focused follow up meeting. After covering the features at the product level, leave time for the team to investigate and think. The second meeting is a chance to dig deeper and look at code, metrics/dashboards, backlogs, etc.
1. This meeting should involve:
  1. DRIs and engineers from the original team
  2. DRIs and engineers from the receiving team
  3. Optional: Product Owners, Designers, Support Team
2. This meeting should cover:
  1. Where are the runbooks and documentation?
  2. How do we observe the system? What monitors or alerts exist and where are they?
  3. Where are the current major bugs or known issues?
  4. What have we knowingly skipped (i.e. we don’t support ____ for this feature)?
Do all parties understand the receiving teams’ processes and meetings?
1. How does the original team help in the future? What involvement will be required in the short and long term?
2. Optional: Invite relevant parties (Director of Engineering, Product Managers, etc) to the receiving teams stand ups and planning meetings?
Will this feature return to the original team? Is this a temporary transition (i.e. Team Y lends 2 members to Team Z for 2 months)?
1. If yes, identify the DRI of the original team who will handle the transfer. Repeat this checklist.

Needles, Haystacks and Early Career Job Resources

Andy — Fri, 27 May 2022 18:17:58 +0000

Photo by Zhifei Zhou on Unsplash

Long ago, you could throw a resume on Monster.com and hope for the best. I landed interviews that way in the early 2000s. I'd get a random email from a recruiter and go from there.
(The other was in person career fairs, which I didn't mind but they never led to much for me.)
My first "serious" tech interview was at IBM. I was working at IBM part time in technical support and got an email from a recruiter:

Recruiter: Would you like to work at IBM?
Me: I already do!

Talk about pure chance. But that lead to my first onsite interview and first software job offer.
Thankfully, Handshake and other companies exist to help folks coming out of school or starting their career.

Now that I'm deep into my software career and have been a hiring manager for a few years, my ❤️ goes out to folks trying to land their first gig. It must feel like a needle-in-a-haystack approach of applying to many jobs, rarely getting feedback, and lots of waiting.

(Shameless plug: if you are looking for a new job after starting your career, I'm hiring folks with 2+ years of experience for SRE and Software Developer roles at NinjaCat. Check us out!)

I have helped build an apprenticeship program and mentored folks transitioning from Support to Engineer roles. I try to mentor or coach folks early in their career. I don't have the answer but I do have some answers. In the last few months, I've wanted to compile a list of resources to help early career folks looking for technical roles. And here it is.

Credit goes to the creators of all this great content - the folks organizing supportive communities like VirtualCoffee.io and The Collab Lab, Danny Thompson, and more. And big thanks to the folks in virtualcoffee.io for compiling this list.

Early Software Career Resources

I'm categorizing these as Job Hunt, Community and Learning. Have anything to add or think it should be organized different? Did I get anything wrong? Respond and let me know and I'll adjust.

Job Hunt

Resources for landing a job, finding open roles, interviewing, etc.

100 Companies Hiring on Handshake - an updated list of companies hiring interns and entry level roles. IME, companies hiring for those roles are sometimes open to career switchers or trade school and bootcamp graduates
#techishiring - a newsletter / hashtag powered by @chad_r_stewart (@Chad_R_Stewart on Twitter) that connects companies and job posts to the larger community
How to Use LinkedIn to land a role in tech - a YouTube series from @DThompsonDev. Follow him on Twitter/LinkedIn for a ton of good advice. Like this thread on increasing your changes of getting your first dev job
Job Hunting as a Junior Developer - @caitlynfloyd's blog post on job hunting is awesome. And I'll include it below, but her Tips/Resources for Early-Career Devs is a massive and excellent resource. It's so nice I'm including it twice in the Learning section below too
De-Coding the Technical Interview Process - a book from Emma Bostian that covers technical interviews. Which will be part of your first, second or fortieth job hunt as an engineer.

Community

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

I've needed help in my job search as an experienced engineer and I think it's important to have support, encouragement, and guidance. Hopefully one of these communities can help you as you're searching for a role.

Denver Devs Discord - My hometown team, if you will. There's a Career Mentors and Career Juniors channel in here that are a good resource.
VirtualCoffee.io - One of the most friendly and sincere communities of developers and tech-adjacent folks on the web. Get involved and help out if you're interested too!
The Collab Lab - I have only heard amazing things about this group. "A place to work alongside your peers in a fully remote setting" as you learn is an excellent idea and gives folks great experience going into a full time remote position.

Learning

Everything else. Guides to starting your software career, landing your first role, more articles on interviewing, etc.

Guide to your first job in tech - a great read from @cassidoo. Check out Cassidy's newsletter and other resources like Getting a Gig too.
Tips/Resources for Early-Career Devs - A massive set of resources from @CaitlynFloyd. This Notion page (link? resource?) is an excellent set of links, articles and more. You'd do well to read through this and then come back to this post. Caitlyn recently recreated this on her own site too: https://advice.caitlinfloyd.com/
Reading List: The Early Career Edition - A set of recommended books from @bekahhw for those early in their careers.
Big-Ass List of Code Knowledge - @meg_gutshall (Twitter: meg_gutshall) has a great sense of humor and built another massive set of resources. Everything from Git & GitHub to SQL to Interview Prep & Practice. You'd also do well to scan through this and then come back to this post.
Learn in Public - @swyx has just a ton of resources, including The Coding Career Handbook that covers everything from job hunting, to growing as a developer.
Alternative Career Path - A nice overview of software-focused and software-adjacent roles from @KarlLHughes. It takes product owners, QA folks, technical support, marketers and more to power software companies. Maybe a related or developer adjacent role is a good place to start.
FreeCodeCamp- FreeCodeCamp and their forums are both a community and a place to learn.