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Denver's economy boomed in the 2010s, thanks in large part to a thriving community of local tech start-ups and entrepreneurs, which produced a handful of companies that have grown to rival some Silicon Valley giants — iBotta, HomeAdvisor, Guild Education, etc. But many of those success stories turned sour over the past 18 months, with layoffs, remote work, and cancelled downtown leases dominating the headlines. So, producer Paul Karolyi is sitting down with one of the city's most insightful tech analysts, Jeff Casimir of the Turing School of Software and Design, to talk about where he sees signs of life, the Elon Musk effect on the local scene, and what the new dynamics mean for all Denverites. For even more news from around the city, subscribe to our morning newsletter Hey Denver at denver.citycast.fm. Follow us on Instagram: @citycastdenver Chat with other listeners on reddit: r/CityCastDenver Support City Cast Denver by becoming a member: membership.citycast.fm What do you think? Text or leave us a voicemail with your name and neighborhood, and you might hear it on the show: 720-500-5418 Learn more about the sponsors of this February 3rd episode: Arvada Center Looking to advertise on City Cast Denver? Check out our options for podcast and newsletter ads at citycast.fm/advertise Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Join cohosts Jeannie & Bailey as we kickoff episode zero of the new Career Pathways series on the Hello Turing World podcast. In this series of shorts, we'll be chatting with Turing School alum & former staff whose resumes boast a variety of technical titles. From Data Engineer to UX Designer to Product Manager, we delve into the specifics of their roles and explore the skills that have contributed to their success. Listen in to episode 0 to learn the what and why behind this new series idea. If you or someone you know are code curious, we encourage you to attend a Turing Try Coding Event. You can register for a Try Coding class at turing.edu/try-coding.
Jeff Casimir, Executive Director at Turing School of Software & Design, takes this question head-on, laying out a roadmap to great opportunities for those considering a tech career by enrolling at Turing. Learn how Turing is iterating on its career support to ensure students are landing tech roles now, and Jeff's take on what AI could mean for future tech roles.
Three hosts and Turing Alumni Jeannie, Jesse & Marshall talk with EllenMary Hickmann, Managing Director at Turing School of Software about her path to Turing, her work building community, social justice, education, and other topics.
Three friends and Turing Alum talk about the Turing School, their experience as students and now software developers, the Turing community, and the future of the Hello Turing World Podcast Reading Recommendations: Marshall: Range by David Epstein Jesse: Mutual Aid by Dean Spade Mark: Riverside, a software for recording podcasts
After two years virtual, SXSW EDU 2022 was back in person in Austin earlier this month! It was an amazing four days of amazing conversations. By far, one of the most inspiring ones for me was the one I had on the Cognizant Foundation podcast stage with three women whose career paths have been changed by tech training programs that opened the doors for them in an industry that hasn't always been the most welcoming to women. Simply put: These women are amazing. These programs are amazing. In this episode – which we recorded live in front of an enthusiastic audience – you'll meet: Kate Nichols – a 32-year-old former teacher who packed up her bags in Austin and moved to Seattle to learn software programming at Ada Developers Academy. She got a paid internship at Zulily as part of the training. She loves education still and has been able to combine that love with her new career at Hello World.Sage Lee – a 26-year-old former retail food worker who went from stocking shelves to an intensive seven-month intensive software programming class in Denver's Turing School. Today, after a paid apprenticeship at Handshake, she's an associate junior programmer at the company. By the way, she went from barely making $40,000 to making more than $90,000 a year – that's a big jump from her salary at the grocery store.Maria Contreras – an Austin high school senior who started learning to code at 15 in a free Code2College afterschool program that landed her a paid internship at Indeed. We learned on stage that the now-18-year-old is headed to Rice University with a full scholarship to major in computer programming. What these young women have in common is their desire to move into an in-demand career, and that they were able to find free, or almost free, training programs geared toward young people who don't have the financial resources to do it on their own. We talk about how they did it, and how you can do it too! You can listen here – and I encourage you to listen all the way to the end – or you can download and listen from wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to Kristen Titus, Hannah Lee, and Kyle Gunnels and all the Cognizant Foundation team for inviting us to record the podcast on their stage! WorkingNation was a media partner with SXSW EDU for the fourth year in a row. Check out our interviews for our WorkingNation Overheard series for a flavor of the other conversations we had in Austin this year. Episode 224: Expanding Opportunities in Tech at SXSW EDUHost & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNationProducer: Larry BuhlExecutive Producers: Joan Lynch and Melissa PanzerTheme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0Download the transcript for this podcast here.You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts
Relicans host, Aaron Bassett, talks to Software Dev at Shopify and Turing School alum, Ryan Bahan about being comfortable being uncomfortable while figuring out what error messages mean, the application process when applying to a bootcamp and belonging to a post-pandemic remote cohort, and making important (& fun!) design decisions.Do you have ideas about how we can make our show better? Or would you like to be a guest on an upcoming episode? Reach out to our #devrel team at devrel@newrelic.com. We would LOVE to hear from you with any questions, curiosities, and/or feedback you have in hopes of making this the best show possible!Give us a follow: @PolyglotShow
01:01 - Ian's Superpower: Curiosity & Life-Long Learning * Discovering Computers * Sharing Knowledge 06:27 - Streaming and Mentorship: Becoming “The Career Development Guy” * The Turing School of Software and Design (https://turing.edu/) * techinterview.guide (https://techinterview.guide/) * twitch.tv/iandouglas736 (https://www.twitch.tv/iandouglas736) 12:01 - Tech Interviews (Are Broken) * techinterview.guide (https://techinterview.guide/) * Daily Email Series (https://techinterview.guide/daily-email-series/) * Tech vs Behavior Questions 16:43 - How do I even get a first job in the tech industry? * Tech Careers = Like Choose Your Own Adventure Book * Highlight What You Have: YOU ARE * Apply Anyway 24:25 - Interview Processes Don't Align with Skills Needed * FAANG Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech) Influence * LeetCode-Style Interviews (https://leetcode.com/explore/interview/card/top-interview-questions-medium/) * Dynamic Programing Problems (https://medium.com/techie-delight/top-10-dynamic-programming-problems-5da486eeb360) * People Can Learn 35:06 - Fixing Tech Interviews: Overhauling the Process * Idea: “Open Source Hiring Manifesto” Initiative * Analyzing Interviewing Experiences; Collect Antipatterns * Community/Candidate Input * Company Feedback (Stop Ghosting! Build Trust!) * Language Mapping Reflections: Mandy: Peoples' tech journeys are like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Keep acquiring skills over life-long learning. Arty: The importance of 1-on-1 genuine connections. Real change happens in the context of a relationship. Ian: Having these discussions, collaborating, and saying, “what if?” This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 260 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Thank you, Arty. And I'm here with our guest today, Ian Douglas. Ian has been in the tech industry for over 25 years and suggested we cue the Jurassic Park theme song for his introduction. Much of his career has been spent in early startups planning out architecture and helping everywhere and anywhere like a “Swiss army knife” engineer. He's currently livestreaming twice a week around the topic of tech industry interview preparation, and loves being involved in developer education. Welcome to the show, Ian. IAN: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. MANDY: Awesome. So we like to start the show with our famous question: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? IAN: Probably curiosity. I've always been kind of a very curious mindset of wanting to know how things work. Even as a little kid, I would tear things apart just to see how something worked. My parents would be like, “Okay, great. Put it back together.” I'm like, “I don't know how to put it back together.” So [chuckles] they would come home and I would just have stuff disassembled all over the house and yeah, we threw a lot of stuff out that way. But it was just a curiosity of how things work around me and that led into computer programming, learning how computers worked and that just made the light bulb go off in my mind as a little kid of, I get to tell this computer how to do something, it's always going to do it. And that just led of course, into the tech industry where you sign up for a career in the tech industry, you're signing up for lifelong learning and there's no shortage of trying to satiate that curiosity. I think it's just a never-ending journey, which is fantastic. ARTY: When did you first discover computers? What was that experience like for you? IAN: I was 8 years old. I think it was summer, or fall of 1982. I believe my dad came home with a Commodore 64. My dad was always kind of a gadget nut. Anything new and interesting on the market, he would find an excuse to buy and so he, brought home this Commodore 64 thinking family computer, but once he plunked it down in front of me, it sort of became mine. I didn't want to share. I grew up in Northern Canada way, way up in the Northwest territories and in the wintertime, we had two things to do. We could go play hockey, or we'd stay indoors and not freeze. So I spent a lot of time indoors when I wasn't playing hockey—played a lot of hockey as a kid. But when I was home, I was basically on this Commodore 64 all the time, playing games and learning how the computer itself worked and learning how the programming language of it worked. Thankfully, the computer was something I had never took apart. Otherwise, it would have been a pile of junk, but just spending a lot of time just learning all the ins and outs. Back then, the idea was you could load the software and then you type a run command and it would actually execute the program. But if you type a list, it would actually show you all the source code of the program as well and that raised my curiosity, like what is all this symbols and what all these words mean? In the back of the Commodore 64 book, it had several chapters about the basic programming language. So I started picking apart all these games and trying to learn how they worked and then well, what would happen if I change this instruction to that and started learning how to sort of hack my games, usually break the game completely. But trying to hack it a little bit; what if I got like an extra ship, an extra level, or what if I change the health of my character, or something along those lines? And it kind of snowballed from there, honestly. It was just this fascination of, oh, cool, I get to look at this thing. I get to change it. I get to apply it. And then of course, back in the day, you would go to a bookstore and you'd have these magazines with just pages and pages and pages of source code and you'd go home and you type it all in expecting something really cool. At the end of it, you run it and it's something bland like, oh, you just made a spreadsheet application. It's like, “Oh, I wanted a game.” Like, “Shucks.” [laughter] But as a little kid, that kind of thing wasn't very enticing, but I'm sure as an adult, it's like, oh cool, now I have a spreadsheet to track budgeting, or whatever at home. It was this whole notion of open source and just sharing knowledge and that really stuck with me, too and so, as I would try to satiate this innate curiosity in myself and learn something, I would go teach it to a friend and it's like, “Hey, hey, let me show you what I just did. I learned how to play this thing on the piano,” or “I learned how to sing this song,” or “I learned how to use a magnifying glass to cook an ant on the sidewalk.” [chuckles] Whatever I learned, I always wanted to turn around and teach it to somebody else. I would get sometimes more excitement and joy out of watching somebody else do it because I taught them than the fact that I was able to learn that and do it myself. And so, after a while it was working on the computer became kind of a, oh yeah, okay, I can work on the computer, I can do the thing. But if I could turn around and show somebody else how to do that and then watch them explore and you watch that light bulb go off over their head, then it's like, oh, they're going to go do something cool with that. Just the anticipation of how are they going to go use that knowledge, that really stuck with me my whole life. In high school doing little bits of tutoring here and there. I was a paid tutor in college. Once I got out of college and got into the workplace, again, just learning on my own and then turning around and teaching others led into running my own web development business where I was teaching some friends how to do web development because I was taking on so much work that I had to subcontract it the somebody where I wasn't going to meet deadlines and so, I subcontracted them. That meant that I got to pay my friends to help me work this business. And so, that kind of kicked off and then I started learning well, how to servers work and how does the internet work and how do I run an email server on all this stuff? So just never-ending stream of knowledge going on in the internet and then just turning around and sharing that knowledge and keeping that community side of things building up over time. MANDY: Very cool. So in your bio, it said you're streaming now so I'm guessing that's a big part of what you do today with the streaming. So what are you streaming? IAN: So let's see, back in 2014, I started getting involved in mentorship with a local code school here in Denver called The Turing School of Software and Design. It's the 7-month code program and they were looking for someone that could help just mentor students. They were teaching Ruby on Rails at the time. So I got involved with them. I was working in Ruby at SendGrid at the time where I was working, who was later acquired by Twilio. And I'm like, “Yeah, I got some extra time. I can help some people out.” I like giving back and I like the idea of tutoring and teaching. I started that mentorship and it quickly turned into hey, do any of our mentors know anything about resumes and the hiring and interviewing and things like that. And by that point, I had been the lead engineer. I had done hiring. I hired several dozen engineers at SendGrid, or helped hire several dozen people at SendGrid. And I'm like, “Yeah, I've looked at hundreds and thousands of resumes.” Like, “What can I help with?” So I quickly became the career development guy to help them out and over time, the school started developing their career development curriculum and I like to think I had a hand in developing some of that. 3 years later, they're like, “You just want a job here? Like you're helping so many students, you just want to come on staff?” And so, I joined them as an instructor, taught the backend program, had a blast, did that for almost 4 full years. And then when I left Turing in June of 2021, I thought, “Well, I still want to be able to share this knowledge,” and so, I took all these notes that I had been writing and I basically put it all onto a website called techinterview.guide. When I finished teaching, I'm like, “Well, I still miss sharing that knowledge with people,” and I thought, “How else can I get that knowledge out there in a way that is scalable and manageable by one human being?” And I thought, “Well, I'll just kind of see what other people are doing.” Fumbled around on YouTube, watched some YouTube videos, watched people doing livestreaming on LinkedIn, livestreaming on Facebook, livestreaming on YouTube and trying to think could I do that? Nah, I don't know if I could do that. A friend of mine named Jonan Scheffler, he currently works at New Relic, he does a live stream. So I was hanging out on his stream one night and it was just so much fun seeing people interact and chat and how they engage the people in the chat and answering questions for them. I'm like, “I wonder if I could do that.” The curiosity took over from there and you can imagine where that went; went way down some rabbit holes on how to set up a streaming computer. Started streaming and found out that I wasn't very good at audio routing, [chuckles] recording things, and marketing, all that kind of stuff. But I kind of fumbled my way through it and Jonan was very generous with his time to help me straighten some things out and it kind of took off from there. So I thought, “Well, now I've got a platform where I can share this career development advice having been in the industry now for 25 years. Now, I've been director of engineering. I'm currently the director of engineering learning at a company. I've got an education background now as an instructor for several years. I've been doing tons of mentoring.” I love to give back and I love to help other people learn a thing that's going to help improve their life. I think of it like a ripple effect, like I'm not going to go out and change the world, but I can change your world and that ripple effect is going to change somebody else's world and that's going to change somebody else's world. So that's how I see my part in all of this play out. I'm not looking to be the biggest name in anything. I'm just one person with a voice and I'm happy to share my ideas and my perspectives, but I'm also happy to have people on my stream that can share their ideas and perspectives as well. I think it's important to hear a lot of perspectives, especially when it comes to things like job hunt, interview prep, and how to build a resume. You're going to see so much conflicting advice out there like, “This is the way you should do it,” and someone else will be like, “No, this is the way you should do it.” Meanwhile, I'm on the sidelines going, “You can do it all of that way.” Just listen to everybody's advice and figure out how you want to build your resume and then that's your resume. It doesn't have to look like the way I want it, or the way that someone else wants it; it can look how you want it to look. This is just our advice kind of collectively. So the livestream took off from there and I've got only a couple of hundred followers, or so on Twitch, but it's been a lot of fun just engaging with chat and people are submitting questions to me all the time. So I do a lot of Q&A sessions, like ask me anything sessions and it's just been a ton of fun. ARTY: That's awesome. I love the idea of focusing on one person and how you can make a difference in that one person's life and how those differences can ripple outward. That one-on-one connection, I feel like if we try and just broadcast and forget about the individuals, it's easy for the message and stuff to just get lost in ether waves and not actually make that connection with one person. Ultimately, it's all those ones that add up to the many. IAN: Definitely. Yeah. ARTY: So can you tell us a little bit more about the Tech Interview Guide and what your philosophy is regarding tech interviews? IAN: The tech interview process in – well, I mean, just the interview process in general in the tech industry is pretty broken. It lends itself very well to people who come from position and privilege that they can afford expensive universities and have oodles and oodles of free time to go study algorithms for months and months and months to go jump through a whole bunch of hoops for companies that want four, or five, six rounds of interviews to try to determine whether you're the right fit for the company and it's super broken. There are a lot of companies out there that are trying to change things a little bit and I applaud them. It's going to be a tough journey, for sure. Trying to convince companies like hey, this is not working out well for us as candidates trying to apply for jobs. As a company, though I understand because I've been a hiring manager that you need to be able to trust the people that you're hiring. You need to trust that they can actually do the job. Unfortunately, a lot of the tech interview process does not adequately mimic what the day-to-day responsibility of that job is going to be. So the whole philosophy of me doing the Tech Interview Guide is just an education of, “Hey, here's my perspective on what you're likely to face as a technical interview. These are the different stages that you'll typically see.” I have a lot of notes on there about how to build a resume, how to build a cover letter, thoughts on building a really big resume and then how to trim it down to one page to go apply for a particular job. How to write a cover letter that's customized to the business to really position yourself as the best candidate for that role. And then some chapters that I have yet to write are going to be things like how do you negotiate once you get an offer, like what are some negotiation tips. I've shared some of them live on the stream and I've shared a growing amount of information as I learn from other people as well, then I'll turn around and I'll share that on the stream. The content that's actually on the website right now is probably 3, 4 years old, some of it at least and so, I'm constantly going back in and I'm trying to revamp that material a little bit to kind of be as modern as possible. I used to want to go a self-publish route where I actually made a book. Several of my friends have actually gone through the process of actually making a book and getting it published. I'm like, “Oh, I want to do that, too. My friends are doing that. I could do that, too,” and I got looking into it. It's like, okay, it's an expensive, really time-consuming process and by the time I get that book on a shelf somewhere, a lot of the information is going to be out of date because a lot of things in the tech industry change all the time. So I decided I would just self-publish an online book where I can just go in and I can just constantly refresh the information and people can go find whatever my current perspective is by going to the website. And then as part of the website, I also have a daily email series that people can sign up for. I'm about to split it into four mailing lists. But right now, it's a single mailing list where I'm presenting technical questions and behavioral questions that you're likely to get asked as a web developer getting into the business. But I don't spend time in the email telling you how to answer the question; what I do instead is I share from the interviewer's perspective. This is why I'm asking you this question. This is what I hope to hear. This is what's important for me to hear in your answer. Because there's so many resources out there already that are trying to tell you how to craft the perfect answer, where I'm trying to explain this is why this question is important to us in the first place. So I'm taking a little bit different perspective on how I present that information and to date I've sent out, I don't know, something like 80,000 emails over a couple of years to folks that have signed up for that, which has been really tremendous to see. I get a lot of good feedback from that. But again, that information it doesn't always age well and interview processes change. I'm actually going through the process right now in the month of November to rewrite a lot of that information, but then also break out into multiple lists and so, where right now it's kind of a combination of a little bit of technical questions, a little bit of behavioral questions, a little bit of procedural, like what is an interview and so on. Now I'm actually going to break them out into separate lists of this list is all just technical questions and this list is all just behavioral questions and this list is going to be general process and then the process of going through the interview and how to do research and so on. And then the last one is just general questions and answers and a lot of that is stemmed from the questions that people have submitted to me that I answered on the live stream. So it all kind of packages up together. MANDY: That's really cool. I'd like to get into some of the meat of the material that you're putting out here. IAN: Yeah. MANDY: So as far as what are some of the biggest questions that you get on your street? IAN: Probably the most popular question I get—because a lot of the people that come by the stream and find the daily email list are new in the industry and they're trying to find that first job. And so by far, the number one question is, how do I even get a job in the industry right now? I have no experience. I've got some amount of education, whether it's an actual CS degree, or something similar to a CS degree, or they've gone through a bootcamp of some kind. How do I even get that first job? How do I position myself? How do I differentiate myself? How do I even get a phone call from a company? That's a lot of what's broken in the industry. Everybody in the industry right now wants people with experience, or they're saying like, “Oh, this is a “entry-level role,” but you must have 3 to 4 years' experience.” It's like, well, it's not entry level if you're asking for experience; it can't be both. All they're really doing is they're calling it an entry-level role so they don't have to pay you as much. But if they want 3-, or 4-years' experience, then you should be paying somebody who has 3-, or 4-years' experience. So the people writing these job posts are off their rocker a little bit, but that's by far, the number one question I get is how do I even get that first job. Once you get that first job and you get a year, year and a half, 2 years' experience, it's much easier to get that second job, or third job. It's not like oh, I'm going to quit my job today and have a new job tomorrow. But the time to get that next job is usually much, much shorter than getting this first job. I know people that have gone months and months, or nearly a year just constantly trying to apply, getting ghosted, like not getting any contact whatsoever from companies where they're sending in resumes and trying to apply for these jobs. Again, it's just a big indication of what's really broken in our industry that I think could be improved. I think that there's a lot of room for improvement there. MANDY: So what do you tell them? What's your answer for that? How do they get their first job? How do you get your first job? IAN: That's a [chuckles] good question. And I hate to fall back on the it depends answer. It really does depend on the kind of career that you want to have. I tell people often in my coaching that the tech industry is really a choose your own adventure kind of book. Like, once you get that job a little bit better, what you want your next job to be and so, you get to choose. If you get your first job as a QA developer, or you get that first job as a technical writer, or you get that first job doing software development, or you get that first job in dev ops and then decide, you don't want to do that anymore, that's fine. You can position yourself to go get a job doing some other kind of technical job that doesn't have to be what your previous job was. Now, once you have that experience, though recruiters are going to be calling you and saying, “Hey, you had a QA role. I've also got a QA role,” and you just have to stand firm and say, “No, that's not the direction I'm taking my career anymore. I want to head in this direction. So I'm going to apply for a company where they're looking for people with that kind of direction.” It really comes down to how do you show the company what you bring to the company and how you're going to make the company better, how are you going to make the team better, what skill, experience, and background are you bringing to that job. A lot of people, when they apply for the job, they talk about what they don't have. Like, “Oh, I'm an entry level developer,” or “I only went to a bootcamp,” or “I don't know very much about some aspect of development like I don't know, test driven development,” or “I don't really understand object-oriented programming,” or “I don't know anything about Docker, but I want to apply for this job.” Well, now you're highlighting what you don't have and to get that first job, you have to highlight what you do have. So I often tell people on your resume, on your LinkedIn, don't call yourself a junior developer. Don't call yourself an entry level. Don't say you're aspiring to be. You are. You are a developer. If you have studied software development, you can write software, you're a software developer. Make that your own title and let the company figure out what level you are. So just call yourself a developer and start applying for those jobs. The other advice that I tend to give people is you don't have to feel like you meet a 100% of the requirements in any job posts. As a hiring manager, when I read those job posts often, it's like, this is my birthday wish list. I hope I can find this mythical unicorn that has all of these traits [laughter] and skills and characteristics and that person doesn't exist. In fact, if I ever got a resume where they claim to have all that stuff, I would immediately probably throw the resume in the bin because they're probably lying, because either they have all those skills and they're about to hit me up for double the salary, or they're just straight up lying that they really don't have all those skills. As a hiring manager, those are things that we have to discern over time as we're evaluating people and talking with them and so on. But I would say if you meet like 30 to 40% of those skills, you could probably still apply. The challenge then is when you get that phone call, how do you convince them that you're worth taking a shot, that you're worth them taking the risk of hiring you, helping train you up in the skills that you don't have. But on those calls, you still need to present this is what I do bring to the company. I'm bringing energy, I'm bringing passion, and I'm bringing other experience and background and perspectives on things, hopefully from – just increasing the diversity in tech, just as an example. You're coming from a background, or a walk of life that maybe we don't currently have on the team and that's great for us and great for our team because you're going to open our eyes to things that we might not have thought of. So I think apply anyway. If they're asking for a couple of years' experience and you don't have it, apply anyway. If they're asking for programming languages you don't know, apply anyway. The languages you do know, a lot of that skill is going to transfer into a new language anyway. And I think a lot of companies are really missing out on the malleability and how they can shape an entry-level developer into the kind of developer and kind of engineer that they want to have on the team. Now you use that person as an example and say, “Now we've trained them with the process that we want, with the language and the tools that we want. They know the company goals.” We've trained them. We've built them up. We've invested in them and now everybody else we hire, we're going to hold to that standard and say, “If we're going to hire from outside, this is what we want,” and if we hire someone who doesn't have that level of skill, we're going to bring them up to that skill. I think a lot of companies are missing out on that whole aspect of hiring, that is they can take a chance on somebody who's got the people skills and the collaboration skills and that background and the experiences of life and not necessarily the technical skills and just train them on the technical skills. I went on a rant on this on LinkedIn the other day, where I was saying the return on investment. If a company is spending months and months and months trying to hire somebody, that's expensive. You're paying a recruiter, you're paying engineers, you're paying managers to screen all these people, interview all these people, and you're not quite finding that 100% skill match. Well, what if you just hired somebody months ago, spend $5,000 training them on the skills they didn't have, and now you're months ahead of the game. You could have saved yourself so much money so much time. You would have had an engineer on the team now. And I think a lot of companies are kind of missing that point. Sorry, I know I get very soapbox-y on some of the stuff. ARTY: I think it's important just highlighting these dynamics and stuff that are broken in our industry and all of the hoops and challenges that come with trying to get a job. You mentioned a couple of things on the other side of one, is that the interview processes themselves don't align to what it is we actually need skill-wise day-to-day. What are the things that you think are driving the creation of interviews that don't align with the day-to-day stuff? Like what factors are bringing those things so far out of alignment? IAN: That's a great question. I would say I have my suspicions. So don't take this as gospel truth, but from my own perspective, this is what I think. The big, big tech companies out there, like the big FAANG companies, they have a very specific target in mind of the kind of engineers that they want on their team. They have studied very deep data structures and algorithms, the systems thinking and the system design, and all this stuff. Like, they've got that knowledge, they've got that background because those big companies need that level of knowledge for things like scaling to billions of users, highly performant, and resilient systems. Where the typical startup and typical small and mid-sized company, they don't typically need that. But those kinds of companies look at FAANG companies and go, “We want to be like them. Therefore, we must interview like them and we must ask the same questions that they ask.” I think this has this cascading effect where when FAANG companies do interviews in a particular way, we see that again, with this ripple effect idea and we see that ripple down in the industry. Back in the early 2000s, mid 2000s—well, I guess right around the time when Google was getting started—they were asking a lot of really oddball kinds of questions. Like how many golf balls fit in a school bus and those were their interview challenges. It's like, how do you actually go through the calculation of how many golf balls would fit in a school bus and after a while, I think by 2009, they published an article saying, “Yeah, we're going to stop asking those questions. We weren't getting good signals. Everybody's breaking down those problems the same way and it wasn't really helpful.” Well, leading up to that point, everyone else was like, “Oh, those are cool questions. We're going to ask those questions, too,” and then when Google published that paper, everyone else was like, “Yeah, those questions are dumb. We're not going to ask those questions either.” And then they started getting into what we now see as like the LeetCode, HackerRank type of technical challenges being asked within interviews. I think that there's a time and place for some of that, but I think that the types of challenges that they're asking candidates to do should still be aligned with what the company does. One criticism that I've got. For example, I was looking at a technical challenge from one particular company that they asked this one particular problem and it was using a data structure called Heap. It was, find a quantity of location points closest to a target. So you're given a list of latitude, longitude values, and you have to find the five latitude and longitude points that are closest to a target. It's like, okay and so, I'm thinking through the challenge, how would I solve that if I had to solve it? But then I got thinking that company has nothing to do with latitude and longitude. That company has nothing to do with geospatial work of any kind. Why are they even asking that problem? Like, it's so completely misaligned that anybody they interview, that's the first thing that's going to go through their mind as a candidate is like, “Why are they asking me this kind of question?” Like, “This has nothing to do with the job. It had nothing to do with the role. I don't study global positioning and things like that. I know what latitude and longitude are, but I've never done any kind of math to try to figure out what those things would be and how you would detect differences between them.” Like, I could kind of guess with simple math, but unless you've studied that stuff, it's not going to be this, “Oh yeah, sure, no problem. It's this formula, whatever.” We shouldn't have to expect that candidates coming to a business are going to have that a, formula memorized, especially when that's not what your company does. And a lot of companies are like, “Oh, we're got to interview somebody. Quick, go to LeetCode and find a problem to ask them.” All you're going to do is you're going to bias your interview process towards people that have studied those problems on LeetCode and you're not actually going to find people that can actually solve your day-to-day challenges that your company is actually facing. ARTY: And instead, you're selecting for people that are really good at things that you don't even need. [chuckles] It's like, all right! It totally skews who you end up hiring toward people that aren't even necessarily competent in the skills that they actually need day-to-day. Like you mentioned FAANG companies need these particular skills. I don't even think that for resilience, to be able to build these sort of systems, and even on super hardcore systems, it's very seldom that you end up writing algorithmic type code. Usually, most of the things that you deal with in scaling and working with other humans and stuff, it's a function of design and being able to organize things in conceptual ways that make sense so that you can deconstruct a complex, fuzzy problem into little pieces that make sense and can fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. I have a very visual geometric way of thinking, which I find actually is a core ability that makes me good at code because I can imagine it visually laid out and think about the dependencies between things as like tensors between geographically located little code bubbles, if you will. IAN: Sure. ARTY: Being able to think that way, it's fundamentally different than solving algorithm stuff. But that deconstruction capability of just problem breakdown, being able to break down problems, being able to organize things in ways that make sense, being able to communicate those concepts and come up with abstractions that are easy enough for other people on your team to understand, ideally, those are the kinds of engineers we want on the teams. Our interview processes ought to select for those day-to-day skills of things that are the common bread and butter. [chuckles] IAN: I agree. ARTY: What we need to succeed on a day-to-day basis. IAN: Yeah. We need the people skills more than we need the hard technical skills sometimes. I think if our interview process could somehow tap into that and focus more on how do you collaborate, how do you do code reviews, how do you evaluate someone else's code for quality, how do you make the tradeoff between readability and optimization—because those are typically very polarized, opposite ends of the scale—how do you function on a team, or do you prefer to go heads down and just kind of be by yourself and just tackle tasks on your own? I believe that there's a time and place for that, too and there are personality types where you prefer to go heads down and just have peace and quiet and just get your work done and there's nothing wrong with that. But I think if we can somehow tap into the collaborative process as part of the interview, I think it's going to open a lot of companies up to like, “Oh, this person's actually going to be a really great team member. They don't quite have this level of knowledge in database systems that we hope they'd have, but that's fine. We'll just send them on this one-week database training class that happens in a week, or two and now they'll be trained.” [overtalk] MANDY: Do they want to learn? IAN: Right. Do they want to learn? Are they eager to learn? Because if they don't want to learn, then that's a whole other thing, too. But again, that's something that you can screen for. Like, “Tell me what you're learning on the side, or “What kinds of concepts do you want to learn?” Or “In this role, we need you to learn this thing. Is that even of interest to you?” Of course, everyone's going to lie and say, “Yeah,” because they want the paycheck. But I think you can still narrow it down a little bit more what area of training does this person need. So we can just hire good people on the team and now our team is full of good people and collaborative, team-based folks that are willing to work together to solve problems together and then worry about the technical skills as a secondary thing. MANDY: Yeah. I firmly believe anybody can learn anything, if they want to. I mean, that's how I've gotten here. IAN: Yeah, for sure. Same with me. I'm mostly self-taught. I studied computer engineering in college, so I can tell you how all the little microchips in your computer work. I did that for the first 4 years of my career and then I threw all that out the window and I taught myself web development and taught myself how the internet works. And then every job I had, that innate curiosity in me is like, “Oh, I wonder how e-commerce works.” Well, I went and got an e-commerce job, it's like, okay, well now I wonder how education works and I got into the education sector. Now, I wonder how you know this, or that works and so, I got into financial systems and I got into whatever and it just kind of blew my mind. I was like, “Wow, this is how all these things kind of talk to each other,” and that for me was just fascinating, and then turning around and sharing that knowledge with other people. But some people are just very fixed mindset and they want to learn one thing, they want to do that thing, and that's all they know. But I think, like we kind of talked about early in the podcast, you sign up for a career in this industry and you're signing up for lifelong learning. There's no shortage to things that you can go learn, but you have to be willing to do it. MID-ROLL: Rarely does a day pass where a ransomware attack, data breach, or state sponsored espionage hits the news. It's hard to keep up with all this and also to know if you're protected. Don't worry, Kaspersky's got you covered. Each week their team looks at the latest news, stories, and topics you might have missed during the week on the Transatlantic Cable Podcast. Mixing in-depth discussion, expert guests from around the world, a pinch of humor, and all with an easy to consume style - be sure you check them out today. ARTY: What kind of things could we do to potentially influence the way hiring is done and these practices with unicorn skilled searches and just the dysfunctional aspects on the hiring side? Because you're teaching all these tech interview skills for what to expect in the system and how to navigate that and succeed, even though it's broken. But what can we do to influence the broken itself and help improve these things? IAN: That's a great question. Breaking it from the inside out is a good start. I think if we can collectively get enough people together within these, especially the bigger companies and say like, “Hey, collectively, as an industry, we need to do interviewing differently.” And then again, see that ripple effect of oh, well, the FAANG companies are doing it that way so we're going to do it that way, too. But I don't think that's going to be a fast change by any stretch. I think there are always going to be some types of roles where you do have to have a very dedicated, very deep knowledge of system internals and how to optimize things, and pure algorithmic types of thinking. I think those kinds of jobs are always going to be out there and so, there's no fully getting away from something like a LeetCode challenge style interview. But I think that for a lot of small, mid-sized, even some large-sized companies, they don't have to do interviewing that way. But I think we can all stand on our soapbox and yell and scream, “Do it differently, do it differently,” and it's not going to make any impact at all because those companies are watching other companies for how they're doing it. So I think gradually, over time, we can just start to do things differently within our own company. And I think for example, if the company that I was working at, if we completely overhauled our interview process that even if we don't hire somebody, if someone can walk away from that going, “Wow, that was a cool interview experience. I've got to tell my friends about this.” That's the experience that we want when you walk away from the company if we don't end up hiring. If we hire you, it's great. But even if we don't hire you, I want to make sure that you've still got a really cool interview experience that you enjoyed the process, that it didn't just feel like another, “Okay, well, I could have just grind on LeetCode for three months to get through that interview.” I don't ever want my interviews to feel like that. So I think as more of us come to this understanding of it's okay to do it differently and then collectively start talking about how could we do it differently—and there are companies out there that are doing it differently, by the way. I'm not saying everyone in the industry is doing all these LeetCode style interviews. There are definitely companies out there that are doing things differently and I applaud them for doing that. And I think as awful as it was to have the pandemic shut everything down to early 2020, where no hiring happened, or not a lot of hiring happened over the summer, it did give a lot of companies pause and go, “Well, hey, since we're not hiring, since we got nobody in the backlog, let's examine this whole interview process and let's see if this is really what we want as a company.” And some companies did. They took the time, they took several months and they were like, “You know what, let's burn this whole thing down and start over” as far as their interview process goes. Some of them completely reinvented what their interview process was and turned it into a really great process for candidates to go through. So even if they don't get the job, they still walk away going, “Wow, that was neat.” I think if enough of us start doing that to where candidates then can say, “You know what, I would really prefer not to go through five, or six rounds of interviews” because that's tiring and knowing that what you're kind of what you're in for, with all the LeetCode problems and panel after panel after panel. Like, nobody wants to sit through that. I think if enough candidates stand up for themselves and say, “You know what, I'm looking for a company that has an easier process. So I'm not even going to bother applying.” I think there are enough companies out there that are desperately trying to hire that if they start getting the feedback of like you know what, people don't want to interview with us because our process is lousy. They're going to change the process, but it's going to take time. Unfortunately, it's going to drag out because companies can be stubborn and candidates are also going to be stubborn and it's not going to change quickly. But I think as companies take the step to change their process and enough candidates also step up to say, “Nah, you know what, I was going to apply there,” or “Maybe I got through the first couple of rounds, but you're telling me there's like three more rounds to go through? Nah, I'm not going to bother.” Companies are now starting to see candidates ghost them and walk away from the interview process because they just don't want to be bothered. I think that's a good signal for a company to take a step back and go, “Okay, we need to change our process to make it better so the people do want to apply and enjoy that interview process as they come through.” But it's going to take a while to get there. ARTY: Makes me think about we were talking early on about open source and the power of open source. I wonder with this particular challenge, if you set up a open source hiring manifesto, perhaps of we're going to collaborate on figuring out how to make hiring better. Well, what does that mean? What is it we're aiming for? We took some time to actually clarify these are the things we ought to be aiming for with our hiring process and those are hard problems to figure out. How do we create this alignment between what it is we need to be able to do to be successful day-to-day versus what it is we're selecting for with our interview process? Those things are totally out of whack. I think we're at a point, at least in our industry, where it's generally accepted that how we do interviewing and hiring in these broken things—I think it's generally accepted that it's broken—so that perhaps it's actually a good opportunity right now to start an initiative like that, where we can start collaborating and putting our knowledge together on how we ought to go about doing things better. Even just by starting something, building a community around it, getting some companies together that are working on trying to improve their own hiring processes and learning together and willing to share their knowledge about things that are working better, such that everybody in the industry ultimately benefits from us getting better at these kinds of things. As you said, being able to have an interview process that even if you don't get the job, it's not a miserable experience for everyone involved. [chuckles] Like there's no reason for that. IAN: Yeah. MANDY: That's how we – I mean, what you just explained, Arty isn't that how we got code of conducts? Everybody's sitting down and being like, “Okay, this is broken. Conferences are broken. What are we going to all do together?” So now why don't we just do the same thing? I really like that idea of starting an open source initiative on interviewing. Like have these big FAANG companies be like, “I had a really great interview with such and such company.” Well, then it all spirals from there. I think that's super, super exciting. ARTY: Yeah. And what is it that made this experience great? You could just have people analyze their interview experiences that they did have, describe well, what are the things that made this great, that made this work and likewise, you could collect anti-patterns. Some of the things that you talked about of like, are we interviewing for geolocation skills when that actually has absolutely nothing to do with our business? We could collect these things as these funky anti-patterns of things so that people could recognize those things easier in there because it's always hard to see yourself. It's hard to see yourself swinging. IAN: An interesting idea along those lines is what if companies said like, “Hey, we want the community to help us fix our interview process. This is who we are, this is what our business does. What kinds of questions do you think we should be asking?” And I think that the community would definitely rally behind that and go, “Oh, well, you're an e-commerce platform so you should be asking people about shopping cart implementations and data security around credit cards and have the interview process be about what the company actually does.” I think that that would be an interesting thing to ask the community like, “What do you think we should be asking in these interviews?” Not that you're going to turn around and go, “Okay, that's exactly what we're going to do,” but I think it'll give a lot of companies ideas on yeah, okay, maybe we could do a take-home assignment where you build a little shopping cart and you submit that to us. We'll evaluate how you did, or what you changed, or we're going to give you some code to start with and we're going to ask you to fix a bug in it, or something like, I think that there's a bigger movement now, especially here in Canada, in the US of doing take-home assignments. But I think at the same time, there are pros and cons of doing take-home assignments versus the on-site technical challenges. But what if we gave the candidate a choice as part of that interview process, too and say, “Hey, cool. We want to interview you. Let's get through the phone screen and now that you've done the phone screen, we want to give you the option of, do you want to do a small take-home assignment and then do a couple of on-site technical challenges? Do you want to do a larger take-home and maybe fewer on-site technical challenges?” I think there's always going to be some level of “Okay, we need to see you code in front of us to really make sure that you're the one that wrote that code.” I got burned on that back in 2012 where I thought somebody wrote some code and they didn't. They had a friend write it as their take-home assignment and so, I brought them in for the interview and I'm like, “Cool, I want you to fix this bug,” and they had no idea what to do. They hadn't even looked at the code that their friend wrote for them it's like, why would you do that? So I think that there's always going to be some amount of risk and trust that needs to take place between the candidates and the companies. But then on the flip side of that, if it doesn't work out, I really wish companies would be better about giving feedback to people instead of just ghosting them, or like, “Oh, you didn't and pass that round. So we're just not even going to call you back and tell you no. We're just not ever just going to call.” The whole ghosting thing is, by far, the number one complaint in the tech industry right now is like, “I applied and I didn't even get a thanks for your resume. I got nothing,” or maybe you get some automated reply going, “We'll keep you in mind if you're a match for something.” But again, those apple looking at tracking systems are biased because the developers building them and the people reading the resumes are going to have their own inherent bias in the search terms and the things that they're looking for and so on. So there's bias all over the place that's going to be really hard to get rid of. But I think if companies were to take a first step and say like, “Okay, we're going to talk to the community about what they would like to see the interview process be,” and start having more of those conversations. And then I think as we see companies step up and make those changes, those are going to be the kinds of companies where people are going to rally behind them and go, “I really want to work there because that interview process is pretty cool.” And that means the company is – well, it doesn't guarantee the company's going to be cool, but it shows that they care about the people that are going to work there. If people know that the company is going to care about you as an employee, you're far more likely to want to work there. You're far more likely to be loyal and stay there for a long term as opposed to like oh, I just need to collect a paycheck for a year to get a little bit of experience and then job hop and go get a better title, better pay. So I think it can come down to company loyalty and stuff, too. MANDY: Yeah. Word of mouth travels fast in this industry. IAN: Absolutely. MANDY: And to bring up the code of conduct thing and now people are saying, “If straight up this conference doesn't have a code of conduct, I'm not going.” IAN: Yeah. I agree. It'll be interesting to see how something like this tech interview overhaul open source idea could pick up momentum and what kinds of companies would get behind it and go, “Hey, we think our interview process is pretty good already, but we're still going to be a part of this and watch other companies step up to.” When I talked earlier about that ripple effect where Google, for example, stopped asking how many golf balls fit in a school bus kind of thing and everyone else is like, “Yeah, those questions are dumb.” We actually saw this summer, Facebook and Amazon publicly say, “We're no longer going to ask dynamic programming problems in our interviews.” It's going to be interesting to see how long that takes to ripple out into the industry and go, “Yeah, we're not going to ask DP problems either,” because again, people want to be those big companies. They want to be billion- and trillion-dollar companies, too and so, they think they have to do everything the same way and that's not always the case. But there's also something broken in the system, too with hiring. It's not just the interview process itself, but it's also just the lack of training. I've been guilty of this myself, where I've got an interview with somebody and I've got back-to-back meetings. So I just pull someone on my team and be like, “Hey, Arty, can you come interview this person?” And you're like, “I've never interviewed before. I guess, I'll go to LeetCode and find a problem to give them.” You're walking in there just as nervous as the candidate is and you're just throwing some technical challenge at them, or you're giving them the technical challenge that you've done most recently, because you know the answer to it and you're like, “Okay, well, I guess they did all right on it. They passed,” or “I think they didn't do well.” But then companies aren't giving that feedback to people either. There's this thinking in the industry of oh, if we give them feedback, they're going to sue us and they're going to say it's discriminatory and they're going to sue us. Aline Lerner from interviewing.io did some research with her team and literally nobody in recent memory has been sued for giving feedback to candidates. If anything, I think that it would build trust between companies and the candidates to say, “Hey, this is what you did. Well, this is what we thought you did okay on. We weren't happy with the performance of the code that you wrote so we're not moving forward,” and now you know exactly what to go improve. I was talking to somebody who was interviewing at Amazon lately and they said, “Yeah, the recruiter at Amazon said that I would go through all these steps,” and they had like five, or six interviews, or something to go through. And they're like, “Yeah, and they told me at the end of it, we're not going to give you any feedback, but we will give you a yes, or no.” It's like so if I get a no, I don't even find out what I didn't do well. I don't know anything about how to improve to want to go apply there in the future. You're just going to tell me no and not tell me why? Why would I want to reapply there in the future if you're not going to tell me how I'm going to get better? I'm just going to do the same thing again and again. I'm going to be that little toy that just bangs into the wall and doesn't learn to steer away from the wall and go in a different direction. If you're not going to give me any feedback, I'm just going to keep banging my head against this wall of trying to apply for a job and you're not telling me why I'm not getting it. It's not helpful to the candidate and that's not helpful to the industry either. It starts affecting mental health and it starts affecting other things and I think it erodes a lot of trust between companies and candidates as well. ARTY: Yeah. The experience of just going through trying to get a job and going through the rejection, it's an emotional experience, an emotionally challenging experience. Of all things that affect our feels a lot, it's like that feeling of social rejection. So being able to have just healthier relationships and figuring out how to see another person as a human, help figure out how you can help guide and support them continuing on their journey so that the experience of the interview doesn't hurt so much even when the relationship doesn't work out, if we could get better at those kinds of things. There's all these things that if we got better at, it would help everybody. IAN: I agree. ARTY: And I think that's why a open source initiative kind of thing maybe make sense because this is one of those areas that if we got better at this as an industry, it would help everybody. It's worth putting time in to learn and figure out how we can do better and if we all get better at it and stuff, there's just so many benefits and stuff from getting better at doing this. Another thing I was thinking about. You were mentioning the language thing of how easy it is to map skills that we learned from one language over to another language, such that even if you don't know the language that they're coding in at a particular job, you should apply anyway. [chuckles] I wonder if we had some data around how long it takes somebody to ramp up on a new language when they already know similar-ish languages. If we had data points on those sort of things that we're like, “Okay, well, how long did it actually take you?” Because of the absence of that information, people just assume well, the only way we can move forward is if we have the unicorn skills. Maybe if it became common knowledge, that it really only takes say, a couple months to become relatively proficient so that you can be productive on the team in another language that you've never worked in before. Maybe if that was a common knowledge thing, that people wouldn't worry about it so much, that you wouldn't see these unicorn recruiting efforts and stuff. People would be more inclined to look for more multipurpose general software engineering kinds of skills that map to whatever language that you're are doing. That people will feel more comfortable applying to jobs and going, “Oh, cool. I get the opportunity to learn a new language! So I know that I may be struggling a bit for a couple months with this, but I know I'll get it and then I can feel confident knowing that it's okay to learn my way through those things.” I feel if maybe we just started collecting some data points around ramp up time on those kind of things, put a database together to collect people's experiences around certain kind of things, that maybe those kinds of things would help everyone to just make better decisions that weren't so goofy and out of alignment with reality. IAN: Yeah, and there are lots of cheat sheets out there like, I'm trying to remember the name of it. I used to have it bookmarked. But you could literally pull up two programming languages side by side in the same browser window and see oh, if this is how you do it in JavaScript, this is how you do it on Python, or if this is how you write this code in C++, here's how you do it in Java. It gives you a one-to-one correlation for dozens, or hundreds of different kinds of blocks of code. That's really all you need to get started and like you said, it will take time to come proficient to where you don't have to have that thing up on your screen all the time. But at the same time, I think the company could invest and say, “You know what, take a week and just pour everything you've got into learning C Sharp because that's the skill we want you to have for this job.” It's like, okay, if you are telling me you trust me and you're making me the job offer and you're going to pay me this salary and I get to work in tech, but I don't happen to have that skill, but you're willing to me in that skill, why would I not take that job? You're going to help me learn and grow. You're offering me that job with a salary. Those are all great signals to send. Again, I think that a lot of companies are missing out and they're like, “No, we're not going to hire that person. We're just going to hold out until we find the next person that's a little bit better.” I think that that's where some things really drop off in the process, for sure is companies hold out too long and next thing they know, months have gone by and they've wasted tons of money when they could have just hired somebody a long time ago and just trained them. I think the idea of an open source collective on something like this is pretty interesting. At the same time, it would be a little subjective on “how quickly could someone ramp up on a, or onboard on a particular technology.” Because everybody has different learning styles and unless you're finding somebody to curate – like if you're a Ruby programmer and you're trying to learn Python, this is the de facto resource that you need to look at. I think it could be a little bit subjective, but I think that there's still some opportunity there to get community input on what should the interview process be? How long should it really be? How many rounds of interviews should there be from, both the candidates experience as well as the company experience and say, as a business, this is why we have you doing these kinds of things. That's really what I've been to teach as part of the Tech Interview Guide and the daily email series is from my perspective in the business, this is why. This is why I have you do a certain number of rounds, or this is why I give you this kind of technical challenge, or this is why I'm asking you this kind of question. Because I'm trying to find these signals about you that tell me that you're someone that I can trust to bring on my team. It's a tough system when not many people are willing to talk about it because I think a lot of people are worried that others are going to try to game the system and go, “Oh, well, now that I know everything about your interview process, I know how to cheat my way through it and now you're going to give me that job and I really don't know what I'm doing.” But I think that at the same time, companies can also have the higher, slow fire, fast mentality of like, “All right, you're not cutting it.” Like you're out right away and just rehire for that position. Again, if you're willing to trust and willing to extend that offer to begin with. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's a business decision; it's not a personal thing. But it's still devastating to the person when they don't get the job, or if they get fired right away because they're not pulling their weight, but if they're cheating their way through it, then they get what they deserve to. MANDY: Awesome. Well, I think that's a great place to put a pin in this discussion. It is definitely not a great place to end it. I think we should head over to our reflection segment. For me, there were so many things I wrote down. I loved that you said that people's tech journey is like a choose your own adventure. You can learn one thing and then find yourself over here and then the next thing you know, you find yourself over here. But you've picked up all these skills along the way and that's the most important thing is that as you go along this journey, you keep acquiring these skills that ultimately will make you the best programmer that you can be. Also, I really like that you also said something about it being a lifelong learning. Tech is lifelong learning and not just the technical skills. It's the people skills. It's the behavioral skills. Those are the important skills. Those skills are what ultimately it comes down to being in this industry is, do you have the desire to learn? Do you have the desire to grow? I think that should be one of the most important things that companies are aware of when they are talking to candidates that it's not about can this person do a Fibonacci sequence. It's can they learn, are they a capable person? Are they going to show up? Are they going to be a good person to have in the office? Are they going to be a light? Are they going to be supportive? Are they going to be caring? That's the ultimate. That right there for me is the ultimate and thank you for all that insight. ARTY: Well, I really, really loved your story, Ian at the very beginning of just curiosity and how you started your journey, getting into programming and then ended up finding ways to give back and getting really excited about seeing people's light bulbs go off and how much joy you got from those experiences, connecting with another individual and making that happen. I know we've gotten on this long tangent of pretty abstract, big topics of just like, here's the brokenness in the industry and what are some strategies that we can solve these large-scale problems. But I think you said some really important things back of just the importance of these one-on-one connections and the real change happens in the context of a relationship. Although, we're thinking about these big things. To actually make those changes, to actually make that difference, it happens in our local context. It happens in our companies. It happens with the people that we interact with on a one-on-one basis and have a genuine relationship with. If we want to create change, it happens with those little ripples. It happens with affecting that one relationship and that person going and having their own ripple effects. We all have the power to influence these things through the relationships with the individuals around us. IAN: I think my big takeaway here is we have been chatting for an hour and just how easy it is to have conversation about hey, what if we did this? How quickly it can just turn into hey, as a community, what if? And just the willingness of people being in the community, wanting to make the community better,
This week we're joined by Brittany Dionigi, Director of Platform Engineering at Articulate, and we're talking about how organizations can take a more intentional approach to supporting the growth of their engineers through learning-focused engineering. Brittany has been a software engineer for more than 10 years, and learned formal educational and classroom-based learning strategies as a Technical Lead & Senior Instructor at Turing School of Software & Design. We talk through a ton of great topics; getting mentorship right, common coaching opportunities, classroom-based learning strategies like backwards planning, and ways to identify and maximize the learning opportunities for teams and org.
This week we're joined by Brittany Dionigi, Director of Platform Engineering at Articulate, and we're talking about how organizations can take a more intentional approach to supporting the growth of their engineers through learning-focused engineering. Brittany has been a software engineer for more than 10 years, and learned formal educational and classroom-based learning strategies as a Technical Lead & Senior Instructor at Turing School of Software & Design. We talk through a ton of great topics; getting mentorship right, common coaching opportunities, classroom-based learning strategies like backwards planning, and ways to identify and maximize the learning opportunities for teams and org.
This episode serves as a round-up of some of the special mini-features we have recorded throughout Season 6, where we'll hear from Tyler Clemens, Elom Amouzou, Elise Navarro, and Jeremy Neal about their work and experiences with Elixir. Our first segment is with Tyler, who is a software developer at Jackpocket, where he explains what he is currently busy with and how the company is offering access to the lottery in more safe and convenient ways. We then move on to Elom, who talks about transitioning from a life in public education, and what prompted him to learn functional programming. Elise, who works at Zingeroo, takes us through her relatively new career, why she is so excited about Elixir, and the interesting work that is being done at her company to educate the public about the stock market. Lastly, Jeremy talks to us about the socially conscious agenda at Clover Food Lab, his personal interests in cooking and baking, and how he came to work with Elixir. All of our guests share helpful resources for learning, and reflections on their time working within Elixir - make sure to join us to catch all this good stuff! Key Points From This Episode: Tyler's path into software engineering and the first language he learned. What Jackpocket offers its customers and how Elixir is used within the company. Tyler's thoughts on the perks and challenges associated with engineering with Elixir. The most helpful resources that Tyler uses when in need: Elixir Slack, books, and Elixir School! Onboarding and training in Elixir and the biggest challenges presented in this area. Tyler's passion for photography and imagining an alternative career path in this direction. Elom's first programming language and the subsequent transition into Elixir. How Elom moved into working in programming from his roots in education. Elom's perspective on the positives associated with adopting Elixir early on. Resource recommendations from Elom for early-stage developers. Considering the pros and cons of the small intimate Elixir community and its future. Elom's ideal alternative career path and favorite book! Elise's beginnings in programming and her move from a career in digital media. Comparing Elixir with other languages; Elise weighs in with her experiences. What Zingeroo does and how they use Elixir to make the stock market more accessible through the app. The benefits of using Elixir for a real-time app like Zingeroo. The resources that have been most valuable to Elise since joining the community. Elise's alternative career path, and her passion for teaching Pilates. Jeremy's educational and professional path into software engineering and working with Elixir. How Jeremy has been using LiveView in his work to get a functional UI up and running. What Clover Food Lab does and how Elixir is used at the company and online store. Jeremy's thoughts on a different career and why he would love to be a baker! Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/ Tyler Clemens — https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerclemens Jackpocket — https://jackpocket.com/ Elixir in Action — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38732242-elixir-in-action Elixir School — https://elixirschool.com/ Turing School — https://turing.edu/ Pragmatic Bookshelf — https://pragprog.com/ Code Flow Thinking Elixir — https://thinkingelixir.com/available-courses/code-flow/ Frantz Fanon — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Frantz-Fanon Peau Noire, Masques Blancs — https://www.amazon.com/Peau-Noire-Masques-Blancs-French/dp/2020006014 Elise Navarro — https://www.linkedin.com/in/elise-navarro Zingeroo — https://zingeroo.com/ Jeremy Neal — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-neal-59ba8b82 Clover Food Lab — https://www.cloverfoodlab.com/ Special Guests: Elise Navarro, Jeremy Neal, and Tyler Clemens.
I invited 3 graduates on to review Turing, a software engineering program. These reviews are honest, no-BS, reviews meant to get past the marketing that each coding school puts out there. All 3 went through the front end track and shared the pros and cons. 8 months is a certainly a long time for a full-time immersive program and the students' mental health was certainly one of my concerns. We covered all of it. Hopefully this helps you on your journey.Host/Guests:Don Hansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/donthedeveloperConnie Hong - https://www.linkedin.com/in/connie-h-hongAlexandria Sodemann - https://www.linkedin.com/in/asodemannJoshua Aragon - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-aragon-854275206---------------------------------------------------❤️ If you find my content helpful, support me on Patreon and get access to perks - https://www.patreon.com/donthedeveloper
What happens to Denver if every service worker leaving the industry learns to code? Turing School of Software & Design trains programmer newbs for entry level tech jobs, and at the height of the pandemic they decided to make remote learning permanent. City Cast producer Paul Karolyi sits down with Turing's executive director Jeff Casimir to talk through the data that led to that decision, what it says about the future of work, and how it's going to affect the non-techies who have to live with it. And if you haven't heard yesterday's episode with Elle Taylor of Amethyst Coffee about the so-called labor shortage, you can find it here. Looking for ways to get a little more City Cast Denver in your life? Subscribe to our weekday morning newsletter: https://denver.citycast.fm/newsletter/ And get the tweets @citycastdenver
The RailsConf Scholarship Program (https://railsconf.org/scholarships) 03:12 - Tram’s Superpower: Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Per Night! 04:08 - Leah’s Superpower: Being a Companion to Long-Distance Runners 04:55 - Stefanni’s Superpower: Doing Things She’s Terrified of Doing 05:34 - Being Afraid and Grappling with Self-Doubt * Asking Questions and Being Vulnerable * Call-Out Bad Behavior 12:34 - Team Psychological Safety 17:20 - Education & Learning Environments; Tech Journeys * Ada Developers Academy (https://adadevelopersacademy.org/) * The Turing School (https://turing.edu/) 27:52 - Making & Noticing Progress; Comparing Yourself to Others * The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance---What Women Should Know (https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Code-Science-Self-Assurance-What-Should/dp/006223062X) Reflections: John: Finding new ways to be of service to other people. Leah: What can we proactively do to make our space safer and more conducive to diverse thought? Mando: It’s okay to make mistakes and not be perfect. Steffani: How common it is to openly talk about these things in the Rails Community ❤️ Tram: Representation matters! Humanization and inclusivity. Calling people out. Lending Privilege -- Anjuan Simmons (https://anjuansimmons.com/talks/lending-privilege/) Transcript: JOHN: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 235. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mando Escamilla. MANDO: Thanks, John. And I'm here with three RailsConf scholars who are going to be joining us today, which I'll like to take turns introducing yourself, maybe starting with Leah? LEAH: My name is Leah Miller and I’m a Platform Engineer at Highwing, which is an insurtech startup based out of Denver. Before making over the switch to tech, I spent almost a decade in the insurance industry primarily working as a production underwriter. In my spare time, I enjoy running and craft beer and frequently, the careful combination of the two. I’m also a new dog mom to a rescue pup named Orla. MANDO: Great. Tram, you want to go next, please? TRAM: Yeah. So hi, everyone. I'm Tram Bui. I’m currently attending Ada Developers Academy, which is a tuition-free coding program for women and gender-diverse folks in Seattle. The program includes an internship match with a Seattle tech company. So currently, for my internship, I work as a Developer Relations engineer and what this means is that I try to make it easier for Rails developers to deploy their apps to the cloud. Outside of coding, I try to maintain it and improve my high school tennis skills. I also like to read books and also, thinking about my next great public transportation adventure and volunteering for local nonprofits. And then Stephanie, I can pass it on to you. STEPHANIE: Hi, I'm happy to be here. I'm Stephanie and I've been working with Rails for the past 4 years, but now I'm trying to transition from dev full-time to having my own projects. And besides software, I also like to talk about plant-based diet, financial independence, and mental health. Also, if you have noticed my accent, I'm from Brazil, but I live in Vancouver, BC and yeah, I'm really happy to be here. JOHN: Awesome. Welcome to the show, everyone. So this is just a little setup here. Not every year at RailsConf, but most years at RailsConf, we do have a special episode where sometimes, we've got many of the panelists are together and so, we can record in the same room, which is obviously very novel for us. This year of course, it's all online. One of the things we’ve also done is bringing in some of the people who are part of the RailsConf Scholar Program, which is the program to expand access to tech conferences to people that are underrepresented and to give them some guidance on how to make the most of their experience at the conference. We always think it's great to get the opinions of people that are brand new to this industry and see what their perspective is on everything. So we're going to start off with our usual question which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? We can go really in any order. Who would like to go first? TRAM: I can go first. So my superpower would be the ability to get 8 hours of sleep a night [chuckles] and I think I acquired this power – I think I was very just like, I loved nap time as a kid and I grew up knowing the importance of a good night's rest. I think for me to be my best self, that’s one of the big things that I need to have. I think growing up and going to college, it was very like, “Oh, sleep is not important,” but I always had noticed the importance of sleep and I think it does hustle economy, too. People are very fast to just cast aside and was like, “You can sleep when you're dead,” but I'm like, “No, if you don't sleep, you will die faster.” So I'm going to take every opportunity that I can do at least get a full night's rest. LEAH: I am so jealous of that superpower. [laughs] I think mine feeds into a little bit of the opposite of that, but my superpower is the ability to keep people company when they're running through the night during a 100-mile races, or ultra-marathons. So people running it 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM, getting really down, needing someone to lift them up, I can run alongside them and sing, or just be a companion to keep them motivated. I think I acquired this skill from being a middle child. I spent a lot of time just entertaining myself and being pretty independent and if you can entertain yourself, it's pretty easy to extrapolate that to others, keep people going, so. [chuckles] STEPHANIE: I would say that my superpower currently is a work in progress actually, but it's doing things even if I'm terrified of the way I always struggled a little bit with self-confidence. How I acquired that, I actually had to go to therapy first to build the foundation, but now I think I've been getting pretty good at it and the feeling of doing the things that you're scared at the end is a really good feeling. You feel like a superwoman. [chuckles] JOHN: Oh, those are all such great answers. I want to dive into each of them, I think oh, my thoughts are jumbling up because I want to ask questions to all of you. Well, I think I'll start with Stephanie. That's an amazing superpower and it's definitely going to serve you well. It's something that I've had to learn as I develop my speaking career at the same time. Even just thinking that it was possible for me to get up on stage and do that, that took a while to get there and then actually doing it also took a lot of practice. So certainly, that's going to be awesome. MANDO: Yeah. It's so easy to just keep doing the things that you're good at and try to ignore, or maybe push off the things that you're not so good at, or you don't have that confidence in, Stephanie, like you were saying. It's funny, I keep relearning this lesson over and over again, there's this project at work that I've been putting off and pushing the JIRA ticket over just because I kept telling myself that it wasn't important and that I could do – other things were higher priority. It's just because I was kind of scared, but I wasn't going to be able to do it as well as I could do the other things. I just had to sit down and do it and then I pushed up the PR and it got ripped to shreds by the other wonderful, [laughs] amazing engineers that I work with. But it's good. I didn't die. [laughs] So it’s funny how we have to keep learning these lessons over and over again sometimes, I think. JOHN: Yeah, that reminds me that there's a related skill in there also, which is realizing when you were afraid of something. Sometimes you think, “Oh, it's just not important that happened right now.” MANDO: Yeah. JOHN: As an excuse, but once you realize, “Oh, I'm actually afraid of how this is going to go.” It allows you to approach it differently. You can be like, “Oh, okay, well that's what this is. All right, then now I know how to like face it, head on rather than pretending it's some other reasons.” So I think that that's really important as well. MANDO: Absolutely. Yeah, and it took me a couple of days to [laughs] realize that that's what I was doing and it wasn't until that was the last thing I had to work on for the sprint after I had reshuffled and moved everything over and then looked at my other teammates, JIRA boards to see if they had any stuff that I could help out with [laughs] that finally I was like, “Well, okay, I guess I'll just do this one.” TRAM: Yeah. I think sometimes for me, the anticipation, or the thought of it is even scarier than actually doing the task itself. I've had this happen to me so many different times. For instance, with the podcast, I'm like, “Yeah, this is something that I want to do because I like listening to podcasts,” but I was like, the nervousness and the scariness of putting myself out there and just thinking about it leading up to this moment, it's so much scarier than actually being in the moment and talking with y'all. So yeah. LEAH: I think part of it, too is recognizing that your feelings are not existing in a vacuum. There's other people that experience the same insecurities, or just going through what you're going through. We were interviewing someone a couple weeks ago at my company and just talking about the stressors of being from a bootcamp and being hired into an engineering organization as either a junior developer, or a mid-level developer, or whatever level, but just knowing that your background isn't a CS degree, or it's just a little bit different than what other people have. And then having that insecurity of I'm pushing up a PR and then are 20 people going to make comments on this and then that gets pushed to Slack and everyone sees all 20 comments. Am I going to be laughed at, or looked at as less than? So it's just nice to express that to someone else and have them regurgitate the same feelings, or just reflect back to you that you're not the only one who's having self-doubt in that way. MANDO: Yeah, and it's tough for me at least to remember sometimes that I come from a very different place privilege wise than other folks on the team. So it can be a lot easier for me to do stuff like, just push this PR up and ask for comments because my experience may be very different than someone who doesn't have my same background, or the amount of experience that I have, or the kinds of relationships that I may have with other folks on the team. I strive to help create spaces whether at work, or wherever where people can feel comfortable asking questions and not worrying about people coming in and being overly critical, or negative, or whatever. But my lived experience is very different than others. That's something that I need to keep in mind that you can't always just assume good faith that everyone's going to treat you the way that you would maybe treat them and I have to actively work and actively communicate to people that this is that kind of place. JOHN: Do you find that there are specific things that you do to communicate that, or at least to make that ambiently knowledgeable to the other people in the team? MANDO: That's a good question. I think the easiest thing you can do is make sure that you're modeling both sides of that behavior like, asking a lot of questions, putting yourself in vulnerable situations, and then also, making sure that you always jump in and respond positively when others do that so that you can help set a baseline. I think of what the behavior should be and what behavior is expected, and then the second thing is always making sure to call out behavior that doesn't hit the bar. I can't remember where I first heard this, but my buddy, Jerry, he's the one who always drops the phrase to remind me, he says, “It's as simple as saying, ‘We don't do that here.’” It doesn't have to be a big deal. It doesn't have to be a huge problem, or anything. Just when there's behavior that you don't do here, you say, “We don't do that – [laughs] we don't do that here.” It's as simple as that. LEAH: I love that. MANDO: Yeah, Jerry's awesome. JOHN: I think this is a really interesting topic because I'm always looking for examples of ways to make that easily communicated in a team environment. So have any of you had experiences where maybe someone else on the team was able to communicate some thoughts of psychological safety, or things that made you more comfortable being who you were on the team? LEAH: So I can speak to the team where I work. We're a startup. We have about 15, I think maybe officially 16 people now and we have, I think just hired our fifth female to join the team, or a fifth non-male to join the team. We have created just a private channel for all non-males on the team in Slack where we can communicate with each other and we've set up a happy hour once a month where we can meet. You don't have to drink alcohol. You can just sit and chat and we just have an hour set aside where no conversation topic is off limits. It's just really helpful to just set aside that time where there's no outside influence and it's just the five, or six of us, or however many there are right now [chuckles] who can join and just chat through what's a win for the week, or what's a struggle for the week. I think part of it is giving each other the space to express what's going well and also, express what's going wrong, and then see if others of us on the team can be a champion for the other person and just offer support where possible, or step in when something's happening that we need to maybe put a stop to. Our private channel is lovingly called The Thundercats, [laughs] which I'm pretty fond of. MANDO: [laughs] That's fantastic. You make it almost sound like a union kind of [laughs] where y'all can have this place where you have this ability to do collective action, if necessary. I think that's just fantastic. That's amazing. LEAH: And I should say that the men on our team are fantastic. So this is not like a – [laughs] [overtalk] MANDO: Of course, yeah. LEAH: Escape hatch like, we're all upset about stuff, but it's just nice. Regardless of how wonderful the men on the team are, it's nice to have a space for not men. [chuckles] STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think that for me, from my experience, the one that I was more comfortable with was at my first Rails job. It was still in Brazil and the team was totally remote and they did lots of peer programming. They did a great job in onboarding people, but peer programming was way more than onboarding. It was a common practice and I was just like, “Wow, this is so cool.” You could learn so much more beyond just a code and besides that, I felt really comfortable in seeing that no one was scared of doing anything wrong like, there was a really good communication. So I think that the main thing that needs to be worked at, when you're working in a team, is to make sure that everyone feels safe to do their stuff and they don't feel like, “Oh, I'm going to be judged,” or “I don't want to try this because I don't want to have to handle with anything from management,” or whatever. So maybe having that feeling, “Oh, we make mistakes here. We are humans, but we try to make the best to learn from them.” That's a good way to improve this team behavior, I guess. [chuckles] JOHN: So you were able to see the other people on the team, that you were paired with, making mistakes and being okay with it and just that became obvious to you that that was the thing that happened all the time and it was fine. Right? STEPHANIE: Yeah, and especially because I was also self-taught. I actually went for computer science for one year, but I dropped out. I always had this idea that people with more experience, they know everything. [laughs] That was like a mindset that I changed and it made me feel way more human, more than anything at first, and that's when I started seeing how much it's important to think of your team and how much that affects everyone and in your company as well. MANDO: First of all, shout out to comp sci dropouts. I made it just a little bit farther than you, but I know exactly where you're coming from. I had that same thing in my head for a very long time that these folks with their degrees obviously must know so much more than me and I have no idea what I'm doing. That's one of the things that I've always loved about the programs, like the RailsConf Scholars, is that for me, one of the things that helps combat that imposter syndrome thinking is working with folks directly who are earlier in their careers, or have less experience. So not only do you get to help them, guide them, and show them things and stuff, but it really does help serve as a reminder of all the stuff that you do know. There's nothing better than talking about something with someone, being able to explain it to them and help them, and then you walk away and you're like, “Oh yeah, I do know some things, that's kind of nice.” TRAM: I think in talking about dropping out of a major, or switching majors, my experience and my journey into tech. In college, I was quite afraid. I had a requirement to take a CS class, but hearing all these horror stories from other people made me delay taking it. I actually took my first CS class, my junior year of college and while it was really challenging, I definitely enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. But since I took it too late in my college career, I couldn't switch my major, or couldn’t minor, or major in it and that really stuck with me because, I think going and finding the ADA Developers Academy, which is a coding program, it’s like it was my second chance at doing something that I wanted to do, but didn’t have the time, or didn't have the confidence to do in college. One thing that is nice, that I keep thinking about, is that even if I did do a CS major in college, that environment instilled with the competition of it and instilled with, I guess, people who may think that they know more than you may have not been conducive for my education. But what I really enjoy about the current coding program that I'm in is that it's all women, or gender diverse folks and we all come from all different walks of life. But one thing that we have in common is being really empathetic to each other and that environment, I think made all the difference in my ability to learn and to see that there is a community that would champion me and that would also try to uplift other people. JOHN: Yeah. I think that highlights the importance of that initial learning environment. If your first exposure to tech is a weed-out course when you’re trying taking CS in college, you're probably never coming back to it. But having an environment that's specifically designed to actually be supportive and actually get you through learning things can make all the difference, really. MANDO: Yeah. My oldest son is going through a computer science course, or computer science curriculum at UT Dallas here in Texas and his experience is a little bit different, I think because of the pandemic and he doesn't have that in-person structure. Everything's different. He's not having in-person classes. So it's forcing it to be a little more collaborative in nature and a little less kind of what you were saying, John, like waking up at 8 o'clock in the morning to go to some 300-person weed-out class. I think it has served him a little bit better having things be a little weird in that regard, but it is funny to see how little the curriculum and set up around getting a computer science college degree has changed in the 20 years since I took it. That's a shame and I think that that's why the places like ADA Developers Academy and other folks who are showing people and especially employers, that there's different ways for people to get these skills and get this knowledge as opposed to a strictly regimented 4-year, whatever you want to call it, degree program. Leah, you came into technology, you were saying, through a different path other than your traditional computer science degree? LEAH: Yeah. So I majored in math in college and wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do with that and when I graduated, it was 2009, to age myself. [chuckles] It was 2009 and the economy was not doing very well and a lot of my peers were really struggling to find jobs. I went for a leadership program at an insurance company and ended up staying there and moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, which I had no desire ever to go there, [laughs] but it worked out fine. I ended up in this insurance company for almost 10 years. Met some really wonderful people and I got to do a lot of really great things, but just kept having that question in my mind of if it hadn't been a poor economy and if it hadn't been whatever factors, could there have been another path for me? I just kept thinking about what I enjoy doing at my job had nothing to do with the insurance side of things. I found that I got really into writing Excel formulas, [chuckles] those were the days that I was having the most fun and I was working remotely, living in Charleston, South Carolina at the time. After chatting with a few friends, I found the Turing School of Software & Design out in Denver. So I quit my job and moved out to Denver and two days after I moved there, I started the bootcamp program. After an entire week of school, I still hadn't unpacked my bag of socks and several other things from my car. So it was just kind of a whirlwind, but I picked Turing because they had an emphasis on social justice and that was really important to me and I think it served me very well as far as being able to meet a lot of people who are like-minded—who also picked Turing for similar reasons—just wanting to better the community and be a force for good with technology. So yeah, that was my rambling answer. [laughs] MANDO: I know that I struggle a lot with knowing the “good programs” and the not-so-great bootcamp style programs. Like anything else, when stuff becomes something that's popular, it attracts folks who are speculators and usurious, I guess, for lack of a better word. [chuckles] So you hear these horror stories about people who go through and spend all this money on bootcamp programs and then can't find a job, don't really feel like they learned the things that they were supposed to learn, or were told they were going to learn. It's nice to hear good stories around those and some good shoutouts to solid programs. LEAH: It was definitely stressful and we had a hallway that we deemed “the crying hallway.” [laughs] But I think it did serve me well and has served many people well in the several iterations that Turing has had over the years. MANDO: Yeah. Just because it's a solid program, or a positive program doesn't mean that it's easy by any stretch. LEAH: Totally. MANDO: I remember one time I was talking with an old coworker and she was telling me about her experience going through the CS program at Carnegie Mellon. This woman, Andrea, she's easily one of the smartest people that I've ever met in my life and she's fantastic at everything that I've ever seen her do. So to hear her talk about going through this program and finding stairwells to cry in and stuff as she was a student really shook me and made me realize that the stuff's not easy and it's hard for everybody. Just because you see them years later being really, really fantastic at what they do doesn't mean that they spent years trying to build those skills through blood, sweat, and tears. LEAH: Yeah, I think one of the things that was hard, too is you have no idea what playing field everyone is starting from. It's easy to really get down on yourself when you're like, “This other person is getting this so much faster than I am,” and come to find out they've had internships, or have been working on random online courses teaching themselves for years, and then finally made the decision to go to a school versus other people who haven't had that same amount of experience. It's another lesson and [chuckles] just level setting yourself and running your own race and not worrying about what other people are doing. TRAM: I totally agree with that, Leah. I feel like sometimes I compare my starting point to someone's finish line and I'm like, “Oh, how did they finish already? I'm just starting.” It can be really hard to think about that comparison and not get down on yourself. But I think it's also really good to keep in mind that we only know our journey and our race and it's so hard to have all of the other information on other people, how they got there. So it's just like, I try to remind myself that and it's like, I think the only one that I'm trying to compare myself with is me a month ago, or me a year ago instead of someone else's journey. LEAH: Totally. JOHN: Yeah, that's actually something I'm trying to build into a conference talk because it's so hard to see your own progress unless someone points it out to you. Especially as you're grinding through a curriculum like that, where it's like you're always faced with something new and you're always looking ahead to all the things you don't know. Like, when am I going to learn that, when am I going to get to that, when am I getting to know all these things like everybody else? It takes extra work to stop and turn around and look at, like you said, where you were a month ago, where you were three months ago and be like, “Oh my God, I used to struggle with this every day and now it just flows out of my fingers when I need to do a git commit,” or whatever it is. Being able to notice that progress is so important to feeling like you're not completely swamped and struggling the whole time; that you're always looking to the things you don't yet know and never looking at the things you do know, because you don't have to struggle with those anymore. They don't take up any space in your mind. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I can relate to that as well. Something that I've been doing that it's working a lot is okay, I look to others, but I try to see what they did that I can try to look forward. Like, “Oh okay, so they did this and this looks like something that I want to do,” but I only compare myself to my past self because it can be really – I don't think it does a lot of good to anyone, in fact, when you compare yourself to others, just for the sake of comparing. But if you do see that as an inspiration, “Oh, look, this person is showing me that what I want to do is possible and that's great because I have now more proof that I'm going the right path.” It definitely takes some time to change this little key in your head, but once you do, it gets so much easier and so much lighter. You see even people in a different way because you start asking, “I wonder if this person is struggling with this as well because it's not easy.” [laughs] So this is something that it's helping me. MANDO: Yeah, that's something that I'm struggling with right now with my daughter. She plays high school softball. She's fantastic, she's an amazing athlete, and she's really, really good, but she's a freshman on the varsity team at the highest-level high school team. So she continually compares herself against these other girls who are like 2, 3, 4 years older than her and have a lot more playing time and playing experience and they're bigger and they're stronger. I keep trying to look for a way to help her understand that, like you said, Stephanie, she can compare herself to herself yesterday and she can look to these other players as inspiration as to what's possible. But what she can't do is get down on herself for not being there yet. That's just not fair at all and she may never get there. There are a lot of other factors, outside of how hard she works and what she does, that will contribute to how she's going to finally be. That's another thing that I have to [laughs] work on just me personally is that we all have our own built-in limitations and we all make choices that set us down only so far down a path. I choose to not keep my house completely spotless because there's only so many hours in a day and I would rather go watch my daughter's softball game than deep clean a bathroom. I'll eventually clean the bathroom, but today, [laughs] it's not going to be cleaned because that's the choice. But yet for some reason, I still get down on myself when I come home after the game and I'm like, “Ugh, why is this house so dirty?” STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think now that you mentioned that you have a daughter, I remember this chapter from this book called The Confidence Code. It’s a really, really good book and it talks about all the reasons women are the ones that more self-confidence and how we can put ourselves to compete. There is a chapter for parents and how you can help your daughters to not go through the normal route because it will happen. Not that much anymore, but we are still, in terms of society, expected to behave differently and the book brings you really good tips for parents. I think you would be nice for you. It looks like you want to learn more about that? MANDO: Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Stephanie so much. I'll take a look at that and we'll include a link in the show notes for that and some of the other stuff. Any and all help [chuckles] is very much appreciated. JOHN: We've come to the time on the show where we go into what we call reflections, which are just the takeaways, or the new thoughts, or the things we're going to be thinking about that we've talked about on this episode that really struck us. So for me, it's a couple of different things. First Leah, you were talking about being a companion to long distance runners, which is something I had never thought about being a thing, but of course, the moment you say it, I'm like, “Oh yeah, if you're running a 100 miles, it'd be nice to have someone keep you a company.” That sounds great and it's something you need to be suited to. You need to be able to run and talk and so, finding new ways to be of service to other people, I think is really interesting part of that. I think the other thing that struck me is we're discussing different ways of increasing psychological safety on the team and the ways that you can communicate that to the people that are there. Those are the things I'm always keeping an eye out for because I always want to be able to provide those to my team and so, hearing your examples is just always good for me just to have even more different ways of doing it in the back of my head. LEAH: Well, thanks, John. Yeah, I think the big takeaway for me is just what can we proactively do to make our space safer, or just more conducive to diverse thought? I think, Mando, maybe you asked the question of what we were explicitly doing at our companies, or if anyone had ever done something explicit to make us feel safer, or invite us to participate fully in the community of developers? I think there is a lot more that can be done to help people feel as though they're a part, or that their opinion matters, or their belief matters and their contribution will only make the team better and stronger. MANDO: Yeah. I think that was John who asked that and then I rambled on for about 20 minutes afterward, so. [laughter] LEAH: Sorry. MANDO: But that reminds me, or that that leads into my reflection. Stephanie was talking about the one of the things that helps reinforce that psychological safety for her was seeing people make mistakes and having it be okay, and having that general attitude that we're going to make mistakes and bad things are going to happen and that’s okay. It's something that Leah, like you, I work at a really, really small startup. There's five people at the company total. So the pressure to make sure that everything is done right the first time is pretty high, the pressure that I put on myself, and it can easily spiral out of control when I start thinking about how long I've been doing this and then the should start to come out. “You should know this,” “You should be able to do this,” You should get this stuff done quickly, or faster,” or “It should be perfect.” I need to keep reminding myself that it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to not have it be perfect the first time, it's okay to not be perfect. So thank you for that reminder, Stephanie. STEPHANIE: You're welcome. I have to remind myself every day as well. [chuckles] It is a daily practice, but I can guarantee you that it's so much better, things like life in general is so much better, so it is worth it. I think that my takeaway here, not only from this talk with everyone, but also from the RailsConf in general and the Rails community is how common it is to talk about these things at our community. Like, yesterday at the keynote, I saw the diversity numbers and I was like, “Whoa, wait a second. I think this is the first time that I go to a conference and someone is talking about this openly.” I think that's one of the reasons why the Rails community is so important to me and I want to continue the legacy. I think that talking about these names is what makes our community unique and I'm really grateful to be part of the community. TRAM: Yeah, I think my main takeaway is what I've been reflecting on the past few days and this conversation is one thing following the psychological safety theme of how can we have more inclusive and safe environments and like Leah said about representation matters. The people you see around you and the environments that you are in can help you to feel a certain way and when there's such a monolith of people in a certain company, that can make me feel very scared and open up to what I think, or my thoughts are. So I think the diversification of type is very, very important, but also just humanizing people and that's one thing that we can do today is highlight, be open about our mistakes, but also have an environment that is inclusive enough where people can speak up about their mistake and that inclusivity begets inclusivity. You're not going to just say that you're inclusive and don't have actions to back it up. Also, I think what Mando said about calling someone out. Sometimes being a newcomer to a company, I don't feel like I have the power to do that and sometimes, it's uncomfortable for me to do that. So having someone who is in upper management, or someone who has a little bit more power showcase that that's something that they have the power to do, but something that I can do also is really helpful. So that's something that I would try to reflect more on and act upon because it's been a really wholesome conversation and I'm glad to be a part of it. JOHN: Wonderful. Yeah, and to your point, Tram, there's a talk that was actually at RailsConf a couple of years ago by Anjuan Simmons called Lending Privilege. One of his points is that those of us who have the higher levels of privilege, we can wield it for good and we can do things like putting ourselves out there to say, “No, that's not okay on this team,” or to lift someone else up and say, “Hey, you just talked over, what's her name.” Like, “Please Stephanie, say what it was you were going to say,” or like, “Stephanie mentioned that idea tenured 10 minutes ago and we ignored it.” So using that privilege, or the position on the team. I've been at my company for 10 years so I have a lot of social capital; I can use that for a lot of good. I'll post a link to that talk as well in the show notes because I think it's really important concept. All right. Well, we've come to the end of our show. Thank you so much to all of our scholars who were able to join today, Leah, Stephanie, and Tram and thank you, Mando for being here. This was a wonderful conversation. MANDO: Yeah, thanks everyone. LEAH: Thank you. MANDO: It was fantastic. STEPHANIE: Thank you! TRAM: Thanks, ya’ll. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guests: Leah Miller, Stefanni Brasil, and Tram Bui.
We are thrilled to introduce Success is Subjective, a new podcast hosted by Joanna Lilley, brought to you currently by Lilley Consulting. Much like Lilley Consulting, Success is Subjective is dedicated to all things related to emerging adulthood stories and therapeutic resources for young adults. Music to your ears! This podcast is a work in progress. I will experiment with different formats, concepts, and interviewees until after working out the kinks we produce consistent high-quality interviews, advice, and entertainment that you have come to associate with Joanna Lilley. For this reason, your feedback is greatly appreciated. Please send your comments to joanna@lilleyconsulting.com. In this episode I interview Emma Byers of Turing School out of Denver, CO.Contact information: emmabyers1@gmail.comIn this episode, topics discussed include:Freshmen year was “too easy” and by Sophomore year she couldn’t get out bed due to mental health Shout out to Nancy Bristow, Jill Nealy-Moore, and Debbie Chee for being the “dream team” of supporters that she leaned heavily on! In hindsight, she said that taking a break could not have hurt, especially because college isn’t going anywhere What happens when you are misdiagnosed with depression and anxiety! She brought up this Maya Angelou’s quote, “I can be changed by what happens to be, but I refuse to be reduced by it,” saying that’s become nearly a mantra for her in her adult life. Follow us on Lilley Consulting on Instagram, Facebook, and www.lilleyconsulting.com. Sponsored by: www.ParentTrainers.com
Despite its welcoming character, the Elixir community struggles with diversity; as the 2020 ElixirConf community survey shows, only 2% of Elixirists are women. Today we speak with Blinker software engineer Alexandra Chakeres about her experience of the community, as well as what we can do to make it more inclusive. We open by exploring Alexandra’s background and coding career. After expressing her enthusiasm for the Turing School, we talk about Alexandra’s learn-by-doing approach to picking up Elixir. She shares how she landed her first Elixir job before we chat about her current role at Blinker. We discuss why the small size of the community means that Alexandra doesn’t recommend Elixir to coding beginners. We then dive into the topic of Elixir diversity, touching on factors that limit inclusivity, including how few Elixir positions are available for juniors. Alexandra unpacks solutions, like how organizations can shift their hiring pipeline and the need to approach diversity organizations with openings. Later, listeners will enjoy our mini-feature segment where we interview Instinct Science engineer Bill Peregoy about how their team uses Elixir. Tune in for more on what we can do to create a more diverse community. Key Points From This Episode: Hear how co-host Sundi Myint first met Alexandra. Alexandra shares details about her coding background. Why Alexandra feels so passionately about Turing Boot Camp. Details about Alexandra’s first Elixir job. What Alexandra’s current team builds in Elixir and her experience using umbrella apps. Comparing Ruby with Elixir and insights into what Elixir is missing. Why Alexandra doesn’t recommend that junior engineers first learn Elixir. How restricted Elixir hirings lead to a lack of diversity in the community. Exploring ways to make the Elixir community more diverse. What Alexandra most enjoys about coding in Elixir. Alexandra’s top advice for minorities in the Elixir community. Why it’s up to all of us to create a more inclusive community. We talk to Bill Peregoy about how the team at Instinct Science uses Elixir. Bill’s challenges and benefits to writing in Elixir. How Bill would help new hires learn Elixir. Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/ Elixir Wizards Email — podcast@smartlogic.io Alexandra Chakeres on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrachakeres/ Alexandra Chakeres on GitHub — https://github.com/chakeresa Blinker — https://www.blinker.com/ ElixirConf — https://elixirconf.com Brian Cardarella — https://twitter.com/bcardarella Turing School — https://turing.io/ Angelfire — https://www.angelfire.lycos.com/ Melvin Cedeno — https://twitter.com/thecraftedgem Weedmaps — https://weedmaps.com/ Denver Erlang and Elixir Meetup — https://www.meetup.com/Denver-Erlang-Elixir/ DC |> Elixir Meetup — https://www.meetup.com/DC-Elixir/ DispatchHealth — https://www.dispatchhealth.com/ Autotrader — https://www.autotrader.com/ José Valim - https://github.com/josevalim Diversified Tech — https://www.diversifytech.co/ Women Who Code D.C — https://www.womenwhocode.com/dc Bruce Tate — https://twitter.com/redrapids Bill Peregoy on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/billperegoy/ Instinct Science — https://www.instinct.vet/ AppSense — https://www.ivanti.com/company/history/appsense Special Guests: Alexandra Chakeres and Sundi Myint.
A graduate of the Turing School, JF Lalonde is a senior software engineer at TextUs. JF is passionate about writing clean, well-tested and well-documented code, mentoring others and maximizing productivity with asynchronicity.
A graduate of the Turing School, JF Lalonde is a senior software engineer at TextUs. JF is passionate about writing clean, well-tested and well-documented code, mentoring others and maximizing productivity with asynchronicity.
A graduate of the Turing School, JF Lalonde is a senior software engineer at TextUs. JF is passionate about writing clean, well-tested and well-documented code, mentoring others and maximizing productivity with asynchronicity.
A graduate of the Turing School, JF Lalonde is a senior software engineer at TextUs. JF is passionate about writing clean, well-tested and well-documented code, mentoring others and maximizing productivity with asynchronicity.
A graduate of the Turing School, JF Lalonde is a senior software engineer at TextUs. JF is passionate about writing clean, well-tested and well-documented code, mentoring others and maximizing productivity with asynchronicity.
In our best show yet we have Emily Freeman, a software engineer, author of DevOps for Dummies, principal cloud advocate at Microsoft, and a self-proclaimed human router. Emily brings us on her journey from PR writing to Turing School of Software to authoring a book on DevOps and joining Microsoft. She also loves paper to-do lists, Slack, Discord, Sharepoint, and Teams. > Never miss a video // SUBSCRIBE: https://bit.ly/2PzTqAI // About The Ops Show // #TheOpsShow is a weekly YouTube show and podcast hosted by Tristan Pollock and Kyle Campbell covering the wide world of #workflows in #DevOps and the greater developer experience. Watch ALL EPISODES: https://bit.ly/2WgD1F5 + https://w.cto.ai/theopsshow > Join the community // SHIP TOGETHER: https://bit.ly/3fTPKpe // About CTO.ai // CTO.ai provides end-to-end serverless infrastructure designed for the needs of fast-moving development teams who want to optimize what the business cares about. Easy to use like Heroku, and powerful like Kubernetes, CTO.ai gives you the tools you need to workflow smarter, not harder. > Try out the platform: https://cto.ai/platform > Or come say hello: https://github.com/cto-ai https://twitter.com/CTO_ai https://www.linkedin.com/company/cto-ai/ https://www.instagram.com/cto.ai/ https://www.facebook.com/CTOdotAI/ https://www.twitch.tv/cto_ai
In this episode, rachel, Kendall, and Ellen Mary talk about: * Group dynamics and being a younger sibling * Leadership in a classroom of 4th graders * Self care when there are no filters on what your students say and do * Moving into teaching reform work * The role of process and where it isn't enough * Being uncomfortable and why you had better get used to it * Identifying the "language of value" for your audience * Wearing many, MANY hats as a Senior Director * How managing and disciplining and firing teachers differs from other industries * Why an effective hiring process is crucial because of the above * How leadership in the classroom is different from just giving a lecture * Setting up a team to support addressing conflicts * How real leaders shouldn't need to 'wield' authority You can find Ellen Mary on LinkedIn as emhickmann :) Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music
Had a chance to sit down with Edilene. We talked about Ruby Rails, Turing School of Software & Design, and building a career as a software developer. It takes Grit! Web: https://sweetcode.io/developers-eating-the-world/ Youtube: https://youtu.be/xXmMg1HVhYk Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/devseatworld/ SC Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/sweetcodehq Chris Twitter: https://twitter.com/hoardinginfo Chris LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cloudproductandmarketing/
In this special episode of the Turing Podcast, we welcome our new hosts-- Kevin Simpson and Alex Rau from 1806 Front End! Join us as we dive into some conversations about the day-to-day life at Turing School. Alex Rau will be talking with Sarah Schnall, Student Success Coordinator, to learn more about how Turing aims to support new students before and during Module 1. Ruth Brand shares about the new extracurricular group, Turing Choir! Research shows that singing with others improves overall health and happiness and decreases stress levels. Finally, Kevin Simpson will interview Aram Anderson. Aram is a Full Stack Developer at Captain U, and a graduate of Turing Back End program. Find out what students can expect upon graduating from the program. This episode was recorded and produced by Nick Lindeberg, @NickLindyCodes on Twitter. Intro/Outro music credit: And So It Begins by Artificial.Music https://soundcloud.com/artificial-music Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/JpoEFiAJdxo _
What are the differences between the coding bootcamp and traditional K-12 or higher education models? In this episode, we’re talking about what it actually feels like and looks like to learn at a bootcamp. Guest Jeff Casimir from Turing School in Denver breaks down the differences between traditional education and a bootcamp, and how folks who didn’t do well in high school or college may really benefit from a bootcamp learning style. bit.ly/bootcamp-vs-traditional-edu
Which coding bootcamps are approved for the GI Bill, and what is the process of using it for your tuition? In this podcast we talk to Maggi Molina, who works with Operation Code, a nonprofit that helps veterans get into tech; Erin Frazier, the Director of Operations at The Software Guild, a coding bootcamp that was recently approved to offer VA benefits; and Eric Dowdy, a Turing School of Software and Design grad, and 8-year Air Force veteran. We look at the history of the GI Bill, what it’s like transitioning from the military to a coding bootcamp, why veterans excel at bootcamp, and the future of the GI Bill. bit.ly/GI-Bill-and-Bootcamps-Podcast
In this episode of Second Career Devs, I sit down with Sonia Gupta, a former lawyer turned Software Engineer. She shares her story about becoming an attorney, practicing law in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and what motivated her to make a career change. Noteworthy mentions in the episode: Turing School - @turingschool on Twitter Ibotta - @ibottaapp on Twitter
Developer Bootcamps and Computing Education with Jeff Casimir and Mark Guzdial Follow us on Twitter @techdoneright (https://twitter.com/tech_done_right), and please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-done-right/id1195695341?mt=2)! Guests Mark Guzdial (https://twitter.com/guzdial): Professor in Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech (http://home.cc.gatech.edu/guzdial) and Computer Science Education Researcher. Jeff Casimir (https://twitter.com/j3): Executive Director at The Turing School (https://www.turing.io/). Summary How do people learn computing? Who learns best from traditional computer science education and who from bootcamps? How can we teach people who are not developers but who need to learn some programming to do their jobs? Jeff Casimir, the founder of Turing academy, and Georgia Tech's Mark Guzdial, one of the founders of the International Computing Education Research conference, join Noel to answer these questions and also explain why Excel is both the best and the worst thing in the world. Notes 01:45 - “Computing Education” - Paul Krugman: The Excel Depression (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel-depression.html?mcubz=0) - The Language of Programming (https://temochka.com/blog/posts/2017/06/28/the-language-of-programming.html) 05:27 - Teaching Developers at The Turing School 09:53 - Measuring the Quality of Education 14:05 - The Graduation Rate of Women and Underrepresented Groups 16:19 - Skills Acquisition 20:20 - Why not Fix Traditional Computer Science? 24:05 - Computing and Contextualized Computer Education - “Cargo Culting” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming) 41:00 - Why Do Bootcamps Close? - Steve Lohr: As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check (New York Times Piece) (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/technology/coding-boot-camps-close.html?mcubz=0) - Audrey Watters: Why Are Coding Boot Camps Going Out of Business? (http://hackeducation.com/2017/07/22/bootcamp-bust) - The Problems with Coding Bootcamps: Allure with little Payoff (Mark’s Post) (https://computinged.wordpress.com/2017/08/28/the-problems-with-coding-bootcamps-allure-without-payoff/) - Barriers Faced by Coding Bootcamp Students by Kyle Thayer and Andrew J. Ko (http://www.kylethayer.com/assets/papers/BarriersFacedByCodingBootcampStudents-Thayer-Ko.pdf) - What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps by Kyle Thayer (https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/what-i-learned-from-researching-coding-bootcamps-f594c15bd9e0) 46:11 - Success Rates Between People Who Have Had a Career First vs People Who Skip College and Enter Bootcamps Special Guests: Jeff Casimir and Mark Guzdial.
Episode #5 - Jeff founded Turing School of Software and Design with the mission of training a diverse, inclusive student body to succeed in high-fulfillment technical careers and create a world powered by technology where the people building it are represented by the people using it. Welcome to episode 5 of Colorado TechCast. Colorado TechCast brings you interviews with entrepreneurs, thought leaders and technology pioneers from around the state. We provide a behind the scenes look at who’s doing what, why, and how you can get involved. Join us each episode to hear the exciting stories of technology happenings in our state. I want this show to be relevant to you, so please send me your thoughts and suggestions. My email address is trapper@coloradoTechCast.com. You can also hit me up on twitter @CoTechCast. I read and respond to all messages so drop me a line and tell me what you think. In this episode I interview Jeff Casimir, Co Founder and Executive Director of Turing School of Software and Design. Seeking a more diverse workforce than the software development industry had to offer, Jeff set off to build the kind of world that he wanted to work in. Turing believes that the status quo is not good enough. Their mission is to unlock human potential by training a diverse, inclusive student body to succeed in high-fulfillment technical careers and create a world powered by technology where the people building it are represented by the people using it. Links to things we talk about: Learn more about Turing School [Here] IF YOU LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR, PLEASE: Subscribe to our list Connect with us on twitter Email us and tell us what you think! I am always on the look out for future guests, so if you know anyone with an interesting story to tell, or you yourself would like to come on and talk about what you’re building, then send me an email. Thanks for tuning in, and join us next time when we bring you the story of another digital pioneer in from Colorado!
This episode starts off with Kathleen telling us a little about her history being a Microsoft MVP, traveling, and her C# workshops. We then get into a discussion on where her passion for community comes from. She talks about the programming languages she’s learned over the years, and even talks about programming with Clipper. Kathleen also shares with us how she’s been able to stay relevant in her career. We then get to hear about the lineage of programmers in Kathleen’s family. She also talks a bit about the Turing School for programmers and how her younger son’s reviews pull ...
Episode 128: George Hudson is a former United States Air Force sergeant turned software programmer. The military taught George leadership, organizational skills, and the importance of continuous professional training. He made the switch to computer programming to spend more time with his family and open the door for more opportunity. George launched Kids Who Code at the Turing School of Software and Design in 2015. - Kids that code - Teach for America Veterans - Scratch language my MIT to teach code - Ruby Language - We teach Agile Courses to produce the MVP - The waterfall approach https://www.turing.io/ Check out these free resources to get started coding: https://www.codecademy.com/ https://scratch.mit.edu/ http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/ Being a good software developer does not prepare you to teach development. The Turing staff blends computer programming experience with years of classroom instruction. No other team can match our depth of expertise and on-the-ground instructional experience. OUR TEAM Is skilled in education pedagogy with over 30 years of aggregate classroom experience. Builds on lessons learned from creating both Hungry Academy and gSchool. Trains professional development teams at top technology companies like LivingSocial, Boeing, Accenture, and Sony Playstation. Contributes to the community, presenting at and helping organize RubyConf, RailsConf, JSConf and dozens of smaller conferences. Is committed to making our program inviting and accessible to a broad range of people, regardless of academic background, professional background, age, race, gender, gender identification or sexual orientation. The Veteran On the Move podcast has published over 100 episodes giving listeners the opportunity to hear in-depth interviews conducted by host Joe Crane featuring the people, programs and resources to assist veterans in their transition to entrepreneurship: Marine Corps, Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard veterans, DOD, entrepreneurship, business, success, military spouse, transition, education, programs and resources. Veteran On the Move has garnered over 500,000 listens verified through Stitcher Radio, Sound Cloud, Itunes and RSS Feed Syndication making it one of the most popular Military Entrepreneur Shows on the Internet Today.
Jeff Casimir sits down with Luke and Danny to talk about Denver's Turing School of Software and Design. Jeff is the Executive Director of Turing School where he designs the overarching instructional program. Prior to this, Jeff started his teaching career with Teach for America in 2003 and has taught both high school and middle school.
We talk Ember on the desktop, the world debut of Turing School's Javascript curriculum, React vs Ember (they teach both), how to train hordes of highly skilled devs in a brutal 7-month program, and how famous is too famous for Real World Ember.
Jeff Casimir had aspirations of getting a Computer Science degree and working for a few years and retiring by 30 (based on sound logic in the height of the dot com boom). His world got changed quite a bit after going through school and being pulled toward Teach For America. He has since followed a career in teaching, currently running Turing School of Software in Denver Colorado. He has little patience for lazy students and that is an attitude he also has with his children. In the episode we talk about tech culture, government and raising children in a way that gives them perspective to the struggles of others. Jeff has some strong opinions on things particularly when it comes to parenting, his energy and passion are contagious. Notable Links Restorative Justice - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice How Jeff Brings Home the Bacon big cheese at Turing School of Software & Design (www.turing.io) Jeff’s Last Words of advice Chill out! Kids are tougher and smarter than we give them credit for, sometimes we need them to need us. Just pay attention and chill out.
Turing School of Software and Design is a seven-month program that teaches software development in Denver. Steve Kinney is the co-director of academics at Turing School of Software and Design. Continue reading… The post Turing School with Steve Kinney appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Don’t miss out! Sign up for Angular Remote Conf! 02:28 - Sean Griffin Introduction Twitter GitHub thoughtbot @thoughtbot 02:53 - Rails 5 Ship Estimate? 03:15 - What’s Coming in Rails 5? actioncable turbolinks 3 04:13 - Approachability For New Developers Turing School 05:49 - Making Decisions 06:46 - “Syntax” 07:40 - Adding or Matthew Draper 09:36 - The Attributes API 12:57 - Serialization & Deserialization 21:26 - Feature Proposal & Policies The Rails Core Mailing List The Rails Talk Mailing List Stack Overflow 22:46 - preload, eager_load, includes Robert Pankowecki: 3 ways to do eager loading (preloading) in Rails 3 & 4 23:59 - prepend Ruby 2 - Module#prepend 25:29 - Deconstructing/Constructing APIs or where Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) arel 28:27 - bound_attributes() 29:58 - Trying Ideas and Going About Development in Rails 32:01 - Legacy Code Yehuda Katz: Keynote: 10 Years! @ RailsConf 2014 33:43 - The Migration Path From Rails 4 => 5 34:59 - Other Changes Outside Active Record 39:19 - Performance 41:09 - Trying Rails 43:05 - Tests 43:52 - Are the guides and documentation up-to-date? Extras JavaScript Jabber Episode #161: Rust with David Herman The Bike Shed Podcast @_bikeshed RubyConf Portugal WindyCityRails Sean Griffin: Designing a Great Ruby API - How We're Simplifying Rails 5 Picks Maria Matveeva: Design sprints: what are they for? (Saron) LoneStarRuby (Saron) Support CodeNewbie! (Saron) Mockaroo (Coraline) Jim Kazanjian (Coraline) Mastermind Groups (Chuck) Planning (Chuck) The Rust Programming Language (Sean)
Don’t miss out! Sign up for Angular Remote Conf! 02:28 - Sean Griffin Introduction Twitter GitHub thoughtbot @thoughtbot 02:53 - Rails 5 Ship Estimate? 03:15 - What’s Coming in Rails 5? actioncable turbolinks 3 04:13 - Approachability For New Developers Turing School 05:49 - Making Decisions 06:46 - “Syntax” 07:40 - Adding or Matthew Draper 09:36 - The Attributes API 12:57 - Serialization & Deserialization 21:26 - Feature Proposal & Policies The Rails Core Mailing List The Rails Talk Mailing List Stack Overflow 22:46 - preload, eager_load, includes Robert Pankowecki: 3 ways to do eager loading (preloading) in Rails 3 & 4 23:59 - prepend Ruby 2 - Module#prepend 25:29 - Deconstructing/Constructing APIs or where Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) arel 28:27 - bound_attributes() 29:58 - Trying Ideas and Going About Development in Rails 32:01 - Legacy Code Yehuda Katz: Keynote: 10 Years! @ RailsConf 2014 33:43 - The Migration Path From Rails 4 => 5 34:59 - Other Changes Outside Active Record 39:19 - Performance 41:09 - Trying Rails 43:05 - Tests 43:52 - Are the guides and documentation up-to-date? Extras JavaScript Jabber Episode #161: Rust with David Herman The Bike Shed Podcast @_bikeshed RubyConf Portugal WindyCityRails Sean Griffin: Designing a Great Ruby API - How We're Simplifying Rails 5 Picks Maria Matveeva: Design sprints: what are they for? (Saron) LoneStarRuby (Saron) Support CodeNewbie! (Saron) Mockaroo (Coraline) Jim Kazanjian (Coraline) Mastermind Groups (Chuck) Planning (Chuck) The Rust Programming Language (Sean)
Don’t miss out! Sign up for Angular Remote Conf! 02:28 - Sean Griffin Introduction Twitter GitHub thoughtbot @thoughtbot 02:53 - Rails 5 Ship Estimate? 03:15 - What’s Coming in Rails 5? actioncable turbolinks 3 04:13 - Approachability For New Developers Turing School 05:49 - Making Decisions 06:46 - “Syntax” 07:40 - Adding or Matthew Draper 09:36 - The Attributes API 12:57 - Serialization & Deserialization 21:26 - Feature Proposal & Policies The Rails Core Mailing List The Rails Talk Mailing List Stack Overflow 22:46 - preload, eager_load, includes Robert Pankowecki: 3 ways to do eager loading (preloading) in Rails 3 & 4 23:59 - prepend Ruby 2 - Module#prepend 25:29 - Deconstructing/Constructing APIs or where Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) arel 28:27 - bound_attributes() 29:58 - Trying Ideas and Going About Development in Rails 32:01 - Legacy Code Yehuda Katz: Keynote: 10 Years! @ RailsConf 2014 33:43 - The Migration Path From Rails 4 => 5 34:59 - Other Changes Outside Active Record 39:19 - Performance 41:09 - Trying Rails 43:05 - Tests 43:52 - Are the guides and documentation up-to-date? Extras JavaScript Jabber Episode #161: Rust with David Herman The Bike Shed Podcast @_bikeshed RubyConf Portugal WindyCityRails Sean Griffin: Designing a Great Ruby API - How We're Simplifying Rails 5 Picks Maria Matveeva: Design sprints: what are they for? (Saron) LoneStarRuby (Saron) Support CodeNewbie! (Saron) Mockaroo (Coraline) Jim Kazanjian (Coraline) Mastermind Groups (Chuck) Planning (Chuck) The Rust Programming Language (Sean)
This week we talk with Jeff Casimir of Turing School about what it's like to go through their developer training program and some of the differences with developer bootcamps.
At a time when people are lining up to get accepted by a programming bootcamp, Jeff Casimir decided to start one that is non-profit. But he doesn't like the term bootcamp -- he prefers "program." We talk about why he decided to make the Turing School non-profit, the complications of quantifying students' skills, and how Turing School approaches its programming curriculum. Show Links Digital Ocean (sponsor) MongoDB (sponsor) Heroku (sponsor) TwilioQuest (sponsor) Teach for America Hungry Academy Turing School Github APIs Ruby Object Design front-end developer EmberJS FizzBuzz Source Control Automated testing Bubble sort Merge sort Quick sort Eclipse Visual Studio Codeland Conf Codeland 2019
Chad officially welcomes Ben back to the podcast, discuses the employer/employee ideology that can facilitate a successful sabbatical, and reveals some exclusives on the future of thoughtbot. Turing School Ben on the Healthy Hacker podcast Pogo-stick Chair Hound Upcase Rugby explained for Chad New thoughtbot Office Bath Ruby
Derek and Sean talk trade schools, sneaky bugs, bad method names, before_filters, and the Superbowl. Turing School and Metis trade schools. "Car Wash" by Rose Royce Sean introduces accessed_fields to the ActiveRecord Attributes API. Peek for insights into your rails app. Bullet for hunting down N+1 queries and unused eager loading. What does Faraday middleware look like? The Clearance redirect loop Derek introduced and fixed. before filter and its friends have been deprecated in Rails 5.0 The various ways people set instance variables in Rails controllers. read_attribute_before_typecast problems from _before_type_cast dirty checking causes errors RangeError s are hard (Sean's solution to the test placement problem was to not commit the test)
Ben & Chris Hunt catch up on their latest conference talks, podcasts, and things accomplished on their recent coding retreat. Service Oriented Architecture at Square Solving the Rubik's Cube in 20 Seconds Trailmix Turing School Spanulate Podcast You Should Take a Codecation Codcation on reddit Healthy Hacker Podcast trailmix repo Chris on Twitter
Live from RailsConf, Ben talks to Executive Director of The Turing School Jeff Casimir on Conf-stress, the lack of jobs in open source and the challenges of learning to run a business. Turing School of Software & Design Heartbleed Bug The E-Myth Revisited
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