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Leveling up a new engineer
Healthy Sustainability
Gary Foster <[email protected]>Mercedes Coyle <[email protected]>
What we’re Going to Say
• New engineers are a precious commodity• Devops cultures need to be cultivated
• What is a “devops culture?”• Why devops cultures are important
• We have a responsibility to “pay it forward”• Mentoring is key to our success
Who Are we
• Company:• RealGravity
• Video Distribution• Owned by Scripps Networks
• Ever heard of the “Food Network?”
Who Are we
• People:• Gary:
• Senior Engineer• Grizzled Veteran• Tons of bad habits
• Mercedes:• New Engineer• Fresh out of Hackbright• No bad habits (yet)
Our Goals
• Hire a new engineer• Teach them “our way” of doing things• Inculcate a devops mindset from the beginning
• Add good practices and training to the local labor pool
• “pay it forward”
Our Process
• Identify our need• analytics, data and event processing
• Determine our desired outcome• Strong independent engineer• devops mindset (no “ivory tower” allowed)
• Identify our resources• Match a mentor to the protégé
Where is the talent?
• The new “hacking” culture• Hackathons etc• Academies and bootcamps• Incubator sponsored “meet and greets”
• “meet and greet” incubator mixer• Approximately fifty attendees• We interviewed thirty candidates
HACKBRIGHT Academy
• Focused developer bootcamp• We interviewed sixteen candidates
Who we Got
• Mercedes Coyle <[email protected]><@benzobot>
• Recent Hackbright graduate• Our newest backend engineer
What I was looking for
• An environment in which I could get up to speed and be productive quickly
• Lots of support and challenge, but no hand-holding
• Senior engineers who were excited about helping a new engineer grow.
What I brought to the table
• Willing to try new tools, ideas, and processes since I’m not yet specialized
• A solid foundation in the basics after Hackbright, from “hello world” to testing and deploying applications
• I had some vague ideas about devops as a role, less so as a culture
What is Devops?
• Only you can prevent forest fires! (you being dev and ops)
What are my responsibilities?
• Question anything I don’t understand
• Avoid perfectionism
• Speak up
What are a Mentor’s responsibilities?
• Patience. New engineers are going to ask a lot of questions, often multiple times.
• Give them the same level of responsibility as more seasoned engineers, and work on projects that will be useful and valued
• Ask them for their ideas
• Teach problem solving, not syntax, and don’t give away the answer.
What it’s really like
• Some days: I have no idea what I’m doing.
• Other days: I feel like I’m a coding machine!
• Engineering is a process over product environment
What it’s really like
• I might screw something up, and that’s OK.
• We’re encouraged to try new things, and sometimes new things fail. Failures are learning experiences.
redis production:6379> FLUSHDB
OK
What it’s really like
• We iterate frequently to improve our process and infrastructure
• I’m encouraged to research and try out new tools and approaches
• I’m responsible for being on call to fix things when they break, just like the rest of our dev team
What its really like
• Weekly team demos are good motivators to GTD
• “Make it work, then make it pretty”
What we Told you
• New engineers are a precious commodity• Devops cultures need to be cultivated
• What is a “devops culture?”• Why devops cultures are important
• We have a responsibility to “pay it forward”• Mentoring is key to our success
How this applies to you• You get to train them the way you want them to be
• Any bad habits are your responsibility• Got an engineer who’s afraid of the command line?
• Got an engineer who creates crazy complicated stuff no mere mortal can deploy, maintain or sustain?
• Only yourself to blame• Any good habits you instill helps the next team
• We all want to hire good people• We all hire from the same pool
Gary Foster <[email protected]>Mercedes Coyle <[email protected]>
