What is your advice for the next generation of developers? (1/2)

At the end of each episode of the DevJourney podcast, I ask my guests for one advice. Can you guess which category is advised the most?

I first attempted to group those advice on a mindmap. It looks cool, but it's impossible to make sense of 🤣

So here are all the advice I got until episode 92 with Tracy Lee in March 2020.

Learning

Work on combining skills (Steven Schwenke)
Absorbe as much as you can (Mario Rogic)
Learn the fundamentals (Harry Roberts)
Invest in learning (Ignacio Anaya)
Knowledge is like a graph, focus on connecting the dots (Erik St Martin)
Keep your skills sharp, do Katas regularly (Magnus Stahre)
Develop a deeper T (Robby Russell)
Keep experimenting (Julie Moronuki)
Don‘t become a one trick poney (Guillermo Rauch)
Enjoy the babysteps (Katrina Owen)
Learn the big picture (Katrina Owen)
Know how your company makes money (Richard Campbell)
Learn the idiomatic way of the language you are coding into (Reuven Lerner)
Learn JavaScript thoroughly, you will need it (Lydia Hallie)

Learning is indeed the category what I would have expected to lead. No surprises here. But I was positively surprised by a few advice:

1. With Steven Schwenke's "combining skills" and Erik St Martin's "connecting the dots", you add layers on top of already acquired knowledge. This is a very effective way to reuse your current knowledge to create value. This is also an advice Reuven Lerner gave us: "trying to become the big fish in a small pond".
2. I love Julie Moronuki's advice of "experimenting". Too often I see learning interpreted as "acquiring existing knowledge" (ex through a book, a course, etc.). But a big part of learning is also stepping into the unknown!
3. Finally, I interpret Katrina Owen's "Enjoying the babysteps" as a call to enjoy digging deeper and learning small details one at a time. We rarely make big jumps in our learning. But when you sum up all the small things we learn everyday...

So it's not enough to learn everyday, it is crucial to be smart about it!

Communication

Communicate as much as you can (Mario Rogic)
Good communication is paramount: write and talk, often! (Emily Bache)
Develop your communication skills (Robby Russell)
Pair, always! (Llewellyn Falco)
Pair Programming!!! (Reuven Lerner)

Given that a large majority of the guests are public speakers, I would have expected more advice in the communication category. You may be surprised that I put pair-programming in this category though. Indeed, I see pair-programming as a brain-to-brain communication tool first. And in fact, the other 3 advice go in the same direction: work on your communication, often!

Community

Get involved earlier with communities (Ali Spittel)
Focus on the community (Yehuda Katz)
You become a combination of the 5 persons you spend the most time with (Greg Koberger)
Start working in public (Wes Bos)
Get involved with OpenSource, find an issue on a repo and fix it (Shedrack Akintayo)
Reverse Engineer how people around you got their jobs & do not cold apply (Jamisson Dance)
It's by talking to people that you can plan adventures like a coding tour (Harald Reingruber)

The underlying advice behind all those, is that by giving without restrain, you will receive even more. By being open about yourself, you help others more than you think. And as you can imagine, I adhere to this idea fully.

Publishing DevJourney has sometimes been an emotional rollercoaster, but I have received so much in return. I got inspiring stories, overwhelming feedback, regular contacts with fantastic people around the world... I couldn't have dreamt about this all.

Networking

You become a combination of the 5 persons you spend the most time with (Greg Koberger)
Build a support network that you can rely on (Patrick Kua)
Mentors pull you along (Elissa Shevinsky)
Be active in Networking (Stephanie Hurlburt)

I cannot agree more. Mentoring and pulling others around me has been a big part of my life. Those people you can rely on are paramount.

I find the advice from Greg Koberger "you become a combination of the 5 persons you spend the most time with" on one hand very true, but on the other hand deeply disturbing. I tried to mentally plot the time spent with others. My wife and children would land overwhelmingly ahead of everyone else and then... crickets... a bunch of friends, coworkers, mentors, mentees, online contacts... but those would amout for single % each. What does that say about me? 🤔

Was there an advice you particularly liked? Which one? And why?

Here you go to part 2 featuring "Mindset", "Focus" and "Trust".

Photo by Frame Harirak on Unsplash