Tim Bourguignon 0:00
Hello and welcome to developer's journey, the podcast shining a light on Developers Live from all over the world. My name is Tim Bourguignon, and today I receive women

Tim Bourguignon 0:32
Merry Christmas, everyone. This is not going to be a normal episode, instead of having one guest. Today, I have plenty of guests for you.

Tim Bourguignon 0:48
Throughout the year, I asked one question, the very same question to all the guests I received.

Tim Bourguignon 1:03
And today, you finally get to hear the answers.

Tim Bourguignon 1:21
Hey, Emily, nice to hear you again. What is the most important thing you learned this year?

Emily Robinson 1:27
Well, I'm glad you asked that, because I'm pretty sure it's the technique of coaching mob programming. So being in a team of software developers who are working on their production code, and me as an outsider coming in and coaching them, and helping them to improve the design of their code, making it more testable, and to write unit tests for their code. And that technique of transferring skills via a mob to a whole to a whole team. That has been really valuable technique that I've learned this year from my friend, Llewellyn Falco

Tim Bourguignon 2:02
and how did you learn that? Did you learn it by by doing it by observing?

Emily Robinson 2:07
Yes, by I was asked by Llewellyn to join him when he was coaching some teams that his clients, so I observed him, I took part in the mob and programs and while he coached, and then we swapped roles, and he gave me feedback on my coaching techniques, so I learned the technique from him.

Tim Bourguignon 2:26
And how would you encourage the audience to, to get started with it?

Emily Robinson 2:31
So I encourage you to take part in one of the excellent workshops, that's like what diesel and global and Falco, run. Or if you can come to Gothenburg, you could perhaps you could perhaps shadow me and see what I'm doing. With my clients. It's, I think a skill, a practical skill that you learn by from somebody.

Tim Bourguignon 2:55
Awesome. Well, thank you very much.

Tim Bourguignon 3:05
Hey, Darren, nice talking to you again.

Darren Hoehna 3:08
You too. What's up?

Tim Bourguignon 3:10
So I have one more question for you. What is the most important thing you learn this year?

Darren Hoehna 3:16
i The most important thing I learned this year so I have to give a tad bit of background. So every Christmas I make my I make tyranny something our tradition is Christmas, we make something birthdays to buy something. So for the past eight years, I have made audiobooks. But basically, it's a book on tape up on CD. And I've recently gone to editing my audiobooks. So I will read two chapters. The next day, I'll edit one chapter the next day, I'll edit the other so if this coughs or sniffles or coughs, I'll edit it out. However, the process of editing is very tedious, not fun. So the most important thing I have found out is to not clear your throat. And to either drink water or swallow that way. There's less stuff I had to edit out because it's just silence. And also it's better on your throat because I've learned that once you clean your throat, you're basically pushing the phlegm back up into your throat and you're just scratching it and then you have to play your throat again. So the most important thing I only learned which saved me. Probably a good few hours of editing is to just swallow it. Take a break. Drink some water and actually it's not clear your throat.

Tim Bourguignon 4:30
Very approachable. Yes. And very pretty cool for me.

Darren Hoehna 4:36
Yeah, and that's actually what I've been doing on this podcast right now as it's like swallow, take a break, change some water and not actually clear my throat or not. Yeah, and on top of that, then yeah, you don't have to do the editing either. Cool.

Tim Bourguignon 4:50
Thank you very much. I am going to listen to the podcast with a different year now. Awesome, glad

Darren Hoehna 4:58
I'm glad you can Learn something too.

Tim Bourguignon 5:08
Hey, Mark was nice talking to you again. So what is the most important thing you learned this year? Well,

Markus Harrer 5:16
I think I had one thing that really influenced my behavior and my style of working. It was well, in a kind of a leadership workshop where I found out about my strengths. So we did a little questionnaire three, and there were some top five strengths that came out of this test. And they were, well, I would say, three aspects that were really interesting for me, that really helped me to progress. The first thing was that I will obviously find about a found out about my specs, the top five strengths of myself. And then we focused on here that we said, you just have to focus on strengths and not on your weaknesses. So I focused on improving myself based on the strengths that I found out. And the most important learning about this kind was that such strengths, these top five strengths, had also some kind of blind spots. So if you kind of overdrive one strength, it could be a negative thing. And the awareness that my thanks could also be some kind of, well, weakness was a really good learning this year. So that means that I can more compensate the negative influences of those strengths. And this helped me really to progress. For example, as you might think, as you might know, one of the strengths I have is analytical thinking. And if you our drive, analytics, or analytical thinking, it could mean that you are just only analyzing things, but you don't get anything real done in real life. So you have always to look at, what are the results I want to achieve with an analysis? How do I want to provide some new insights that lead to real, real world steps? And to know that, that you can well, overdrive such as strength was really an important learning for me at the school?

Tim Bourguignon 7:41
Is this questionnaire available for the public? Or is it something private, you get from a trainer and?

Markus Harrer 7:49
Yeah, this? Well, this is thing that you have to pay for. That's the negative side of this, but this was also sponsored by the company I was working for. So it was really cool to see this kind of result for me in this kind of leadership workshop. And other people have to, I think, pay you some kind of dollars 10 or 20, to get those strengths assessment. But you can also do it, I think on other sites, but the main message remains that you should care for your strength, but not try to over over write them or overdrive.

Tim Bourguignon 8:31
Okay. Sounds cool. Thank you very much.

Tim Bourguignon 8:43
Pages ago, nice hearing you again. Hello, Tim does what is the most important thing you learned this year?

Jessica Kerr 8:51
This year? The most startling, significant thing was that I learned that art like art with a capital A wasn't always a thing, that there was a time before people realize that stuff like painting, and music composition, and sculpture and poetry, that that was a creative endeavors. They didn't even have the word creative, as far as I can tell, because eventually they were like, there is some common essence that is indefinable and unnameable that runs through these activities. And before that, they thought they were a craft, right. I mean, you had painters, but but the painters were part of the painter Guild, and they just learned about painting, and that was it. And, and their job was to be competent at producing a facsimile of whatever someone asked them. It wasn't about expressing themselves. It wasn't about having an impact on the viewer or the listener or the reader. And I was like, Oh my gosh, how could that even be? And then And then, then I was like, holy cow. Now I get it. Now. I know what software is. Yeah. because I've been wondering for a long time, like, we make all these analogies, software's engineering. No, it isn't, we get a lot faster feedback than anyone building a bridge. software's architecture. No, it isn't. Again, we were not building buildings, and we get faster feedback on that software is a craft. No, it isn't. Okay, we don't do the same thing over and over and try to get our workmanship perfect. We're trying to have an impact on the world. And we do much more. So even then painters, or composers or sculptures, software, my favorite so far other than this is software is like, not a play. Yes, it is because it's doing something different every time and we do it as a group. And it's dynamic, and we react. But clearly, it's it's not actually applied. So now I understand that software is none of these things. It's nothing we have a name for yet. And if art wasn't always a thing, and art was new, and like, was a big part of what made the Renaissance the Renaissance was that they finally figured out that, that poets and painters and composers were thinkers. And then they associated some prestige with that, and they started talking all together. And then the Renaissance, like emerged out of the mixing of ideas that came in part from realizing art was a thing, okay, then software is something we don't have a name for yet. Awesome. And then if you want to hear more about that, and if you want to hear the closest I can come to put it in words, Google origins of opera and the future of programming, and you'll find my post on my talk about that. Thank you very much.

Tim Bourguignon 11:54
Ann so nice talking to you again,

Anne Cahalan 11:56
it's so great to talk to you today.

Tim Bourguignon 11:58
So tell us what is the most important thing you learned this year?

Anne Cahalan 12:02
I think the most important thing I've learned this year is adaptability. I've been an iOS developer for the last five years, it's been pretty much my entire career. in tech, at least. And this year, earlier in the year, I started working on a little bit of Kotlin, helping out with the Android side of a project that I was working on. Towards the end of the summer, I started learning React Native, and I got to work a little bit on a React Native project. And now I have gone like all the way back to my like boot camp routes five or six years ago, and I'm working on a Ruby and Rails project, realizing how much I have forgotten about Ruby on Rails to the west. But yeah, I spent a lot of time in the last couple of years, really digging into Swift getting into iOS and building some knowledge and experience in that language. And then now sort of changing, changing lanes a little bit. And changing lanes a couple of times has been really fun. Just the like sort of energy of discovering something new again. And then also figuring out what I can learn from each of these how these each sort of apply to each other. What I can learn from Kotlin that's that I can take into React Native and what I can find in Ruby on Rails that is a little bit Swifty and then going back to Swift and seeing what I what I can see now in there now that I've worked on a couple of other things. That's interesting. That's what I've been doing here.

Tim Bourguignon 13:36
Do you have some examples of things you took from one language and then realized this apply somewhere else? And you see this old language and this old language in a different light?

Anne Cahalan 13:48
Oh, yeah, there's a good example with Kotlin. And the the sort of similarities and differences between a swift optional, and a Kotlin nullable type. There's, they're almost the same thing, they're close enough, the same thing that that it can kind of carry you through, I can use how I think about optionals too, in Swift, to sort of help me along with nullable types in in Kotlin, but Kotlin and like, it's a different idea, a nullable type is different idea, then a swift optional. So So having that background sort of got me a little bit of the way there. But seeing sort of a little differences between how you think about those two ideas in the two different languages. Is helped me think about optionals a little differently in Swift as well. Does that make sense?

Tim Bourguignon 14:44
Yes, it does. Definitely. Um, last time we talked we were talking a lot about growing from from a junior or an apprentice position towards a more senior position. How did this new experience change? Just the way you see this, this this maybe coaching or mentoring, guiding someone, nowadays you have more tools in your tool belt.

Anne Cahalan 15:09
Well, that was that was one part of it was just having more tools in my tool belt. And one of my really good friends over here at Detroit labs. She's working with a new apprentice class over here at Detroit labs, and she posted something to the apprentices about the difference that she has noticed between people who are just starting out and people who are more senior, and how they approach problems. Whereas people who are just starting out, if they run into some kind of challenge, or something they don't know, can panic about it a little bit, and they see it as a sign of, I don't know, this thing, I'm lacking the knowledge of this thing, this is a problem. And more senior people approach it a little more calmly, and are like, Okay, well, now I guess I gotta go learn a thing. I know the answer is out there, I know, I can find it and I have the confidence to, to go pursue it and not panic a little. And after she posted that, I realized that that's kind of what I've been doing this year, as I've been switching lanes a little is that none of this is as terrifying to me, as learning Swift was at first. And even coming into something entirely new, like React Native, which is a whole, a whole new ball of wax for me. I was just sort of confident in the knowledge that I have, you know, I can figure this out. It's just making the time to do the research, and do the learning. But there was never that sense of panic that I had when I was first starting out in Swift to be like, Oh, God, I don't know this, I have to know this. Why don't I know this? I'm done. Because I don't know this. I've been trying to, in my own mentoring, make very visible, the struggles that I'm having learning something new. And also the sort of calm attitude I have about it. Or projecting a calm attitude, if I can actually have a calm attitude to people who I'm mentoring who are junior, I'm working with some of the apprentices I mentioned earlier, to just let them know that like this not knowing something, getting frustrated, sometimes it's not a big deal. It's part of the job. Everything's always new, everything's always changing. You don't have to put a ton of pressure on yourself to know everything. You just have to have a plan and figure out how you're going to find out what it is you need.

Tim Bourguignon 17:31
Awesome. Well, congratulations for learning all this and being able to verbalize it. It's even better. Thank you very much.

Anne Cahalan 17:37
All right. Thank you. It was great talking to you again.

Tim Bourguignon 17:47
Are you nice talking to you again? What is the most important thing you learned this year?

Mario Rogic 17:54
I think the most important thing I've learned this year is just how little I know about my own mind. And the question is that that's kind of opened up. I mean, given that our entire human experience is funneled through our minds and thoughts, it's seems crazy to me now that there isn't a greater focus on how our minds work, what limitations they have, what pitfalls you can fall into, how to train your mind, you know, in the education that we receive in our, in our kind of young and even adult lives, like a huge example would be happiness, you know, if I tell you, Hey, Tim, I'm really happy. The natural question might be, oh, why is that? You know, there's like this pervading idea that there needs to be a reason for that happiness, and maybe an idea that we've been taught to seek external things to make up and happiness and then, inevitably, always chasing this externality. A quote that's really stuck with me, and that I've shared with you before is, you know, digging with your bare hands is like thinking with your bare brain. And that's really stuck with me this year in terms of thinking, Well, what, what extra tools do I have in terms of my thinking, and my human experience, you know, how much how much things have freedom and happiness and security and love, respect, Trump's confidence change, meaning, all those kinds of things in my life? How much of those are me just digging with my bare hands, as opposed to having some sort of tooling and utilities in the way that I shaped my thinking? So yeah, the most important thing I've learned is actually something about how little I know how ignorant I am still in, in questions of my own mind. And that's kind of been really important for me.

Tim Bourguignon 19:28
Very interesting. Was there some kind of form of trigger? To to to get you into this, this way of thinking?

Mario Rogic 19:40
Yeah, definitely. So it was, I went on a leadership course this year, and that the coach that I had in particular, he kind of was very, very good at spotting I think certain traits and people and pushing that and buttons and getting things out of them and he kind of recommended a book to me, which Which kind of starts with things often me, which was the small things you can only notice when you slow down, I believe it was called. And, yeah, a really interesting book by a by a professor from the states who is a Buddhist as well, I believe, permits the States to study Christianity and just kind of read this book of a whole bunch of little questions and thoughts and things that kind of really made me feel like, Hold on this, this is perhaps something that I'm missing here or send certain things that you can kind of make sense to me. And that kind of tipped me off into a little bit of a rabbit hole of, of digging deeper. But yeah, definitely, definitely, that was an introspective kind of a set of circumstances in my life that allowed me to start asking certain questions that I never thought to ask myself before.

Tim Bourguignon 20:50
And was there something that pushed you into doing this leadership course in the first place?

Mario Rogic 20:58
I think it was a personal personal development kind of thing. I, I started doubting whether or not I was a good leader, and whether or not that was something that I wanted to continue in terms of my career path. So yeah, I think, initially, it was kind of like a Hail Mary, you know, like a hot girl, you know, why not? Let's just try. Let's just try a leadership course, again, I've done things in the past. And I thought, you know, maybe this one will be different, and something different will come out of it. And yeah, fortunately enough, it did. And it's been, it's been really, really cool.

Tim Bourguignon 21:31
You think it was? Because the course was different? Or because you were at a different place in your life, to be receptive to it?

Mario Rogic 21:38
I think it has to be a mixture of both. Certainly. Definitely, I was at a different different point in my career, and my personal development and, and my kind of, maybe my openness to receiving kind of new perspectives and new ideas. But at the same time, I think the course itself was very different to what I'd experienced before it was. Yeah, it was much more fundamental and much, much more deep reaching, as opposed to, you know, the classic, you know, his his 10, his 10 utilities go off and apply them and more kind of looking deeply into what it you know, what's the rhyme and reason behind those utilities? What's the what's the kind of fundamental basis of leadership and what does it mean, and why? Why do we want it? And I think that same kind of thinking made me kind of more open to applying the same kind of questions to our minds, you know, why? Why should why should we understand them? Like, why should we care? What what do we hope to benefit from from asking ourselves some of these deep questions? So yeah, in both regards, it's been maybe a similar approach, but on to kind of fundamentally different levels. Yeah.

Tim Bourguignon 22:48
Well, very deep. Thank you very much for sharing this.

Tim Bourguignon 22:53
Thanks for the question.

Tim Bourguignon 23:03
Hey, Richard, hey. So what is the one thing you learned in 2018,

Richard Rodger 23:09
the most important thing that I learned in 2018, I learned from the FBI. And this is relevant to software developers, and it's how to network at conferences. Most people hate networking, and find it really, really difficult. But it's one of those things that's really, really important for your career. And I happen to get a book recommendation written by this FBI agent, and his job was to recruit informers from criminal gangs. So he would have to figure out how to meet somebody in a cafe or a restaurant and connect with them in 30 seconds. And that was his job. And he wrote a little book about it. And I can give you, I can give you the link. Afterwards, I forget. I forget the exact name of the book. But the basic idea is, when you meet somebody at a conference, when when you're networking with them, your head is so full of your own ideas. So they say something interesting and you think that you have to say something interesting back. Otherwise, they'll find you boring. And the reason you but the reason you did that as well is because you want them to recognize you as a person. You want them to respect your ego. But if you really want to network, you have to leave your ego at home. Right? So your ego, your worth as a person is for your family and your friends. When you network. You have to just breathe it out and focus on the other person. If you if they say something and you ever Really brilliant technical example, a great story to tell. That's really entertaining and funny, even if they laugh, don't tell the story. Just shut up and keep listening. And if they say something, you know, you can kind of repeat the last thing they said. You know, people also call this active listening. But it's, it comes from a place of saying, I'm here at this conference to network, this is work, this is a business thing that I have to do. I'm not here to find people that aren't going to like me, I have my own friends that have the back. I'm not here to impress people, I'm here to get as much information from each person that I talk to as possible, because this person might be relevant to my career, or my company's goals, or whatever. So you have to let go of this need to impress people and talk about your own stuff. And just put yourself in, in the frame of listening to what the other person has to say. And it's really hard, right? Because you find yourself starting to interrupt. And I mean, I've found myself in the situation in sales meetings for someone starting to tell me something really critical to making the sale, but what some VP of Marketing wants to do. And I stupidly can't stop myself interrupting and telling them some clever technical thing. And then the moment is gone, bang, and you can't get back to it. And you lose that information. And okay, you maybe you told a great story that makes you look intelligent, but you know what, actually, you're stupid, because you didn't find out one piece of information that would make the sale. You can apply that principle to networking, you can apply it to dealing with project managers, you can apply it to listening to customers. It's really, really powerful technique. A, but you just have to, you just have to kind of set your mind up that a conference is about work. It's not about finding friends. Yeah, so that is the most useful thing, entertain 2018 for software.

Tim Bourguignon 27:09
And it's very powerful. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Tim Bourguignon 27:20
I used to even

Steven Schwenke 27:22
Hello, Tim, it's nice talking to you again,

Tim Bourguignon 27:25
what is the most important thing you learned this year? Actually,

Steven Schwenke 27:28
there are two things I learned in 2018. One of the top is a technical topic, and the other is with humans with other developers. So the first one, the technical topic is that I learned to program in Angular and entered a web development project. So I did this a couple of years ago. But it was a long time ago. And since then, I didn't have really much experience in developing with JavaScript or TypeScript or other web frameworks. And this changed a couple of months ago. So I'm having nice experiences and seeing that the technology and the tools developed a great deal. And this was the the technical topic I learned. And regarding this, I think it is a good idea. On an abstract thinking level, it's a good idea to learn topics, technical topics, kind of in batch. So in batches. So I not only developing mula but I learned about TypeScript, I learned about JavaScript, I learned about the deploying web applications, and also learn about CSS and of course, the frameworks involved. So the basic thing here that I learned is, if you are interested in learning something, make a topic family, and try to really get something done with that topic, family. That helped me a great deal. And the second thing I learned is much more complicated because it's not a technical one, but it's it concerns humans, other humans. And that is always a complicated thing. So I entered a new project team in a couple of months ago. And I'm working with every junior developers. So we are a team of four. And I am the technical lead in this team again, and the other three developers, they have really not much experience. So on the others. On the one side, my task is to have this project developed and to get this project going. And on the other hand, to teach those developers those young developers, my experiences and kind of provide a framework in which they can develop and Is is really, really interesting because I heavily underestimated the complexity of what we are doing in this project. This is not because the project is very complicated on a business logic level. And it's also not complicated on the technical logic on the technical level. But the sum of all those topics that that are software development in 2018, is really, really a huge topic, family. And what I learned is that when working with young developers try to really overestimate the complexity of modern software and engineering. So I, for example, I underestimated what it means to explain someone what real development in the real deployment is. So you have to think about what is the stage? Why do I have several stages? What are the technologies? What do I do on stage a? And what don't? What do I have to think of on stage B, and so on. So you get from one topic to the next and then to the next end? It is very, very, you can talk for months, and for weeks and months about each topic, and only scratched the surface. So in summary, in 2018, modern software engineering is a really, really complex drop. So try to overestimate this complexity.

Tim Bourguignon 31:31
Well, great, thank you very much for sharing this.

Steven Schwenke 31:34
Yes, it was a pleasure.

Tim Bourguignon 31:45
Hey, Rob, I have one more question. What is the most important thing you learned this year?

Rob Napier 31:52
Or this year, I think when leading open source projects, making sure that the contributors actually deliver the code that I want to see in the project in the way I want to see it, whilst not upsetting them, has proved quite tricky. I think I've got gotten better at it over this year. It's been a journey, most definitely to get my communication skills better as a project leader.

Tim Bourguignon 32:20
So I mean, not upsetting people by giving some really feedbacks and PR,

Rob Napier 32:28
not upsetting people, closing, closing pull requests that I do not want in the project whilst not taking that contributed and helping that contributor to stay in the project. It requires a lot more communication, a lot more empathy and a lot more care with my contributors than I would have ever believed possible.

Tim Bourguignon 32:49
And how much of that has to happen

Tim Bourguignon 32:53
in the forefront before people I mean, in terms of communicating strategy where you want this project to go etc.

Rob Napier 33:01
I think that's one of the things I've been learning in a now write what I'm looking for upfront, far more than than I ever did. So I'm far more likely to document what how I'm looking for a problem to be solved. The for someone comes along and actually tries to solve it. So my issue tickets aren't that much better documented as result. But that doesn't stop a contributor right in what they think they want to see. And their vision for the project doesn't necessarily match the project leads vision, a my vision, so persuading people to go my way. When they are volunteers is a key skill I've learned this year.

Tim Bourguignon 33:49
I can believe.

Tim Bourguignon 33:51
Well, thank you very much. You're very welcome.

Tim Bourguignon 34:03
dear listeners, this episode marks the end of season one of developer's journey, and he could not end without a proper Thank you. Yes, thank you very, very much all of you for your support and your feedback throughout this year. It is really things to you and to your accomplishments that I managed to get back on my horse and reboot this podcast in June. And that's thanks to you that I have been keeping up the pace bi weekly ever since. And I'm so glad I did. Hearing all these fantastic journeys and stories was really energizing season two, we'll start right on January 1 with ever more exciting guests. I'm sure you're gonna love it. So keep the good vibes coming and continue commenting and leaving reviews on Apple podcasts Stitcher and Google Play. They really, really help spread the good word. So I have to say talk unibit Merry Christmas to you all again. Tim out