Organiser of the Edinburgh Language Exchange and The Edinburgh Open Tech Scene |
Full Snack Developer 🥪, Ramen guzzler 🍜, quiche murderer 🥧. A friendly cat.
Excellent "dev journey" post! It feels like there's much here to explain and inspire new generations of engineers!
The one remark/addition I would like to expand on is, how to start/where to ask?
My, very personal, experience is that if you want to make your ways in tech, a very good start is to enter just about anywhere - manual tester, IT shop floor runner, small-shop data entry... but to make sure you share your lunch breaks with people who know more and ask questions, show your interest, experiment and share your roadblocks.... There's nothing more responsive than a geek presented with a problem, and if you can get 5min of a colleague's time and ask them "but how does this actually work?" you could be the most junior nobody talking to an important senior engineer, and they will always have time.
You hinted at this actually when you interviewed through your sorority - perhaps the most salient advice from that section is, just remember to reach out and ask ! (yay for mentioning meetups!!!)
I've mentored a handful of people now, and the advice I always give is this: don't assume a Senior is too busy for your questions ever -- just respect when they are too busy for anybody at all!
On the other hand, self-learning is also important. I have my job not from just my previous work, but also from.... games. Specifcally, open source games, and modding scenes. I wanted to be a developer. I used to be active in Minetest, which allows addition of mods using an easy-to-learn language called Lua - many non-programmers could get some basics just by trial and error with this, which is the strength of the game as a "dev learning platform". I was exposed through there to pull request workflows, code cleanups, legacy code maintenance, code reviewing, and much more - all this during hobbyist activities...! It went ways to teach me a few strands of the ropes I needed.
So all in all.... well, I'm interested in mentoring, and your very extensive article and journey I found very inspiring and uplifiting. I guess I just wanted to share my penny for your two cents, and I will always feel strongly positive about advice to help new talent to find their first steps!
You are awesome, and keep being so!
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Excellent "dev journey" post! It feels like there's much here to explain and inspire new generations of engineers!
The one remark/addition I would like to expand on is, how to start/where to ask?
My, very personal, experience is that if you want to make your ways in tech, a very good start is to enter just about anywhere - manual tester, IT shop floor runner, small-shop data entry... but to make sure you share your lunch breaks with people who know more and ask questions, show your interest, experiment and share your roadblocks.... There's nothing more responsive than a geek presented with a problem, and if you can get 5min of a colleague's time and ask them "but how does this actually work?" you could be the most junior nobody talking to an important senior engineer, and they will always have time.
You hinted at this actually when you interviewed through your sorority - perhaps the most salient advice from that section is, just remember to reach out and ask ! (yay for mentioning meetups!!!)
I've mentored a handful of people now, and the advice I always give is this: don't assume a Senior is too busy for your questions ever -- just respect when they are too busy for anybody at all!
On the other hand, self-learning is also important. I have my job not from just my previous work, but also from.... games. Specifcally, open source games, and modding scenes. I wanted to be a developer. I used to be active in Minetest, which allows addition of mods using an easy-to-learn language called Lua - many non-programmers could get some basics just by trial and error with this, which is the strength of the game as a "dev learning platform". I was exposed through there to pull request workflows, code cleanups, legacy code maintenance, code reviewing, and much more - all this during hobbyist activities...! It went ways to teach me a few strands of the ropes I needed.
So all in all.... well, I'm interested in mentoring, and your very extensive article and journey I found very inspiring and uplifiting. I guess I just wanted to share my penny for your two cents, and I will always feel strongly positive about advice to help new talent to find their first steps!
You are awesome, and keep being so!