Mentoring Developers podcast

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Welcome to another episode of Mentoring Developers! In this engaging installment, host Arsalan Ahmed chats with Zain Mustafa, the founder of Geeks of Kolachi—a tech company that blossomed from humble freelancing beginnings into a thriving enterprise with a team of over a hundred professionals. Zain shares his remarkable journey from tweaking video game codes as a youngster to choosing programming over a potential cricket career, highlighting the passion that propelled him into the tech world. Together, they delve into the challenges and triumphs of starting a tech company, especially during the pandemic. Zain discusses the importance of community and networking, the evolution of remote and hybrid work models, and how his company embraced AI and cutting-edge technologies to stay ahead. Aspiring developers will find invaluable advice on continuous learning, staying curious, and navigating the ever-changing landscape of the tech industry. Zain’s Bio: Zain Mustafa is the CEO of Geeks of Kolachi, a forward-thinking software development agency. With over a decade of experience in the tech industry, Zain has led numerous successful projects, specialising in web and mobile application development. His expertise spans across full-stack development, UI/UX design, and digital transformation, making him a versatile leader in the field. Under his leadership, Geeks of Kolachi has become known for delivering innovative, high-quality solutions. Episode Highlights and Show Notes Introduction to Zain Mustafa Arsalan introduces the guest, Zain Mustafa, founder of a tech company started from freelancing. Growing from Freelancer to Employer Discussion about Zain expanding his team from freelancing to dozens of employees. Zain’s Greetings and Gratitude Zain expresses his appreciation for the opportunity to be on the show. The Catalyst for Diving into Tech Arsalan asks Zain about the moment he decided to pursue a career in technology. Early Love for Computers and First Coding Experience Zain shares how modifying games like Grand Theft Auto ignited his interest in coding. Choosing Between Cricket and Coding Zain discusses his decision to focus on programming over a potential cricket career. Do You Need a Computer Science Degree? Conversation about the necessity of formal education in starting a tech career. The Importance of Community in Learning The value of learning alongside others and building a supportive network. Working Remotely vs. In-Person Collaboration Arsalan and Zain discuss the pros and cons of remote work and personal space. Adapting to Hybrid Work Models Post-COVID How companies are balancing remote and in-office work in a post-pandemic world. Managing Remote Work Challenges at Home Strategies for setting up effective home workspaces despite family and space constraints. Blurring Lines Between Work and Personal Life Arsalan shares experiences of extended work hours and lack of boundaries while working from home. The Need for Social Interaction Zain talks about an employee’s desire to return to the office for human interaction. Starting Geeks of Kolachi: Overcoming Early Challenges Zain recounts the struggles faced when launching his company and pivoting strategies. Transition from Training to Development Services The shift from running a bootcamp to focusing on development due to financial constraints. Scaling the Company During COVID How Geeks of Kolachi grew from 8 to 30 employees amid the pandemic. Embracing Entrepreneurship Over Technical Roles Discussion on shifting focus from coding to managing and growing the business. Building a Client Base Through Referrals The role of client relationships and referrals in business growth. Establishing a Sales Team The realization of needing a sales team and learning from peers to structure it. The Power of Online Presence How maintaining an online profile can lead to unexpected job and business opportunities. Exciting Projects: AI-Powered Relocation Expert Zain describes working on an AI-driven platform to help users find optimal countries for relocation. Collaborating with Industry Leaders on the Audi Project Insights into developing virtual showrooms for Audi using Unreal Engine. Balancing Passion Projects and Business Needs The importance of guiding clients honestly, even if it means turning down projects. Diverse Clientele: Startups to Fortune 500 Geeks of Kolachi’s experience working with a range of clients across industries. Technical Evolution and Focus on AI Zain’s journey from working with Angular to diving into AI and LLMs. AI’s Impact Across Industries Discussion on how AI is revolutionizing various sectors and the surge in related projects. The Democratization of AI The accessibility of AI tools like ChatGPT to the general public. Advice for Aspiring Developers Zain emphasizes the importance of focused learning and community engagement. Cultivating Curiosity in Development Encouraging developers to remain curious and continuously explore new ideas. Services Offered by Geeks of Kolachi Overview of the company’s capabilities, including 24/7 availability and team structure. How to Connect with Zain and Geeks of Kolachi Contact information and social media presence for those interested in collaboration. Closing Remarks and Resources Final thoughts from Arsalan and information on where to find episode notes and links. Transcript [00:00:00] Arsalan Ahmed: Welcome everybody to another episode of Mentoring Developers. Today I am talking to Zain Mustafa, who is a co-founder—or just a founder, we’ll learn more about this—of a tech company that he started from scratch, starting from being a freelancer. [00:00:17] Arsalan Ahmed: Then from there, he was able to grow it and grow his team, his dozens of employees. He has some exciting stuff and it’s a lot of lessons that you can learn from his experience. So, welcome Zain. How are you? [00:00:30] Zain Mustafa: Thank you so much for this opportunity. We have been talking back and forth and finally, it’s happening, so I’m doing great. Thank you. [00:00:41] Arsalan Ahmed: Thanks a lot. So, we’re gonna get right into it. I know that in the past episodes we go into a lot of background about where our guests have come from. And we’re gonna get into that, but I think the most important thing is that you are successful, you are in tech, but what was a moment or experience that made you say, this is it, I am diving into tech? So was it a love for problem-solving, something you saw, a pretty cool gadget, or something else that you started, like, I need to be in tech. [00:01:13] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. So, from a very early time, I was learning to play with computers. Of course, everyone starts with gaming. So back in the time, like 2004 or 2005, I used to play a lot of games on the computer. That was the time I wrote my first code. It was me changing the possibilities of how the car reacts in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. So that was my first intro to how exactly the computer works. I would change the number for one car and try to change what are the possibilities. So that was actually my first intro to the tech field. Later on, I also developed a lot of different hobbies. A big one for me was cricket. So when I was doing my bachelor’s degree, I was given an opportunity to pursue a professional career in cricket. So I was like, why not? Let’s give it a shot. So I spent like a year playing cricket and I figured out that’s probably not for me. That was the moment when I picked just one thing that I love doing since the early times. Then I started giving more time to programming, and since then, I haven’t looked back to any other thing that I could have done better. [00:02:46] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. So everybody catches a bug at some point. It happens to everybody. The important thing is that when you get that itch, you know that you’re onto something important, and then you go for it and you don’t hold back because whenever you’re starting, you have difficulties. So I know many people who want to get into tech, who would love to learn software development, maybe do something cool with AI, but they have never done it, especially when they don’t have a computer science education. In your opinion, do you think you really need a computer science education to get started with making your own things on the computer, or maybe wait until you have a degree, or can they just get started? Maybe they’re 18 years old. [00:03:38] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. So I started learning programming in my high school times. That was the first course that I took. After that, I had to take literally three different courses—three back-to-back same courses—to learn programming. Same thing again and again for straight two years. And the fourth time when I was studying, I got a very good teacher who taught me the concepts of programming in a very funny way and also making sure that we do a lot of actual stuff. So the fourth time when I learned programming, that is when I got to know about exactly how things are working. Just the basic stuff was very difficult for me to catch. So I think most of the people who are starting, they might find it difficult. But yeah, that was the case with me as well. To answer your question, if the degree is important or anyone can learn to code: actually, the company that I run, Geeks of Kolachi, was actually a bootcamp training program for students. I was very inspired by the bootcamp programs in the States. They were like HackerRank, Flatiron School; they were teaching how to code to people who were in different fields. They got themselves into maybe accounting, finance, or electrical engineering and something like that. They lost their job and they put themselves into 16 weeks rigorous coding bootcamp program, and they were getting into Google. So it was really inspiring for me. So when I finally made it to my first internship and then to a job, after spending two years, we were like, we should give back to the community. We should start something like that. So we started a bootcamp. Unfortunately, we couldn’t generate that much funds, so we were like, let’s just make money, then we get back to this again. So for the last six to seven years, we have also been running a program on the weekends in collaboration with a local university that teaches students how to code. But again, that 16 weeks program—I could see a lot of institutes online that were doing those programs, and people who didn’t know how to code, they would start from HTML, CSS, and end up being hired by Google or FAANG companies. So yeah, that’s something that can be done. But again, the degree program actually gives you more than just the programming skills. It gives you a network that you can build on and also the confidence that you can carry throughout your life. [00:06:47] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. It’s good to have community. Once you have people around you who are also struggling, and you have your triumphs together, you have your successes together, it builds community. Obviously, it’s a lot easier to do things in a group. So, you know, in the last couple of years, everybody’s working remotely. [00:07:08] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. [00:07:09] Arsalan Ahmed: We are sort of all isolated, and sometimes it’s hard. Personally, I like it because I’ve been working remotely for a decade. So for me, it’s—I like it because I get to spend more time with my family and I get to have an office. One of the bad things about working in America, at least in the last 15 years, is that you don’t have any personal space. Generally, you’re just in a giant hall. Like you have maybe a huge space. I’ve worked in a company—it was a Fortune 500 financial services company; I won’t name it—but I was a consultant and it was massive. It could’ve been easily 300, 500 people on one floor in an open floor plan. Everybody together. It’s like a chicken coop. So you’re, you know, it’s massive. It takes you five minutes to go from one end to the other end of the floor. No offices. We have no—not even cubicles. It’s open. And this is somehow, this is the thing to do in America these days. But when I started, that was not the case. There were cubicles. [00:08:22] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. [00:08:23] Arsalan Ahmed: There were offices. And Microsoft, they still have offices. And so being able to close the door and have your private space to be able to do any creative work—if you’re doing anything that’s creative—I think you need a little space. You need to network. Yes, it’s important to have other collaborations, but you don’t always collaborate. Sometimes you just want to be in your space and do your thing. [00:08:44] Zain Mustafa: Totally. [00:08:46] Arsalan Ahmed: But I get to do that when I’m working from home. [00:08:49] Zain Mustafa: Yeah, it really goes hand in hand. We do have open space, and still people will go into the meeting rooms though they don’t have any meetings. So they would want to have their private space. So I can totally relate to that. So we go hybrid; two days a week we work remotely and three days a week we’re in the office. So we are just trying things out, how things are looking. Since COVID, every company—I think more than 80 percent of the companies are at least hybrid, if not fully remote. [00:09:21] Arsalan Ahmed: So I think—so you’re not in the States, and I know that it gets to be a problem—I mean, it’s a problem in the U.S. And I used to work for big companies. We would have—excuse me—we would mandate working from home because of COVID. And there were a lot of people that were not happy because they were not set up. They have a house, but they don’t like to work at home because they have family. And it’s very hard to find for them. They had to figure out a space, maybe in the kitchen, maybe in this living—in this part of the living room—because they don’t have a separate office. And this happened in the U.S. And I think it happens a lot more overseas when families are larger and spaces are more limited. So I wonder how you’re able to manage that. How do you manage people working from home? Is that because you just cut down all the meetings so they can just do their work, even if they’re in a noisy environment? [00:10:19] Zain Mustafa: I think after COVID, everyone has started to realize they need to have some sort of space in their house. Before COVID, it was not normal. It was just normal in States because they were already working with a lot of companies offshore or nearshore. So it was not normal for people here. But again, things started to change and a lot of people have their dedicated desk at their home. We actually help a lot of our people working with us to set up their personal space—their personal desk, everything that was required. Even they had to take chairs from our office to their home so they can sit for eight hours. That is what we have done as well. So I think it has become pretty normal here, working from home, and their families have also realized if the guy’s at home, he’s not available. [00:11:17] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. [00:11:17] Zain Mustafa: Previously it used to be if he’s home, so he’s available—we can go into his room, we can talk, we can ask him to bring something from the market. But now they have realized that on the laptop, he’s working. So sometimes they’re faking it just to avoid people, but yeah. [00:11:35] Arsalan Ahmed: I can understand that. It used to happen to me a lot, actually, because I was working from home all the time. Like, all the time. So when am I working and when am I not working? Because when I’m not working, I’m also on the computer. So when is—where is work? So what ended up happening to me was that two things happened. One is, my mother lives with me, so I go down to get some food and she thinks, “Oh, my son’s done. He’s done with his work.” And then, “No, I’m not. I’m still working. I’m just here to get some food and I need to go back.” But it was very hard even in the U.S. And then the second thing was I ended up working all the time. So I’ve—usually in large consulting companies, you work from Monday to Thursday at the client site. And then there, Friday, basically you—Thursday night you fly back home. So Thursday you work until about 3, 3:30, and then you take your flight back home. And then Friday, you’re at home, kind of relaxing, a little bit of work. But when travel stopped, so there was no such thing. There’s no Thursday night I have to catch a flight. There’s no Monday morning, oh, you know, coming in maybe at 10 or 10 a.m. from the flight. No, you have to start at 6, 7, 8 in the morning. And then you work all day, and then after that, stay late because you have to go somewhere. You don’t have any reason. So there were times on crunch projects that people would work nonstop. There was a time I worked three days without stopping. Three days. I’m not talking about three days and then go to sleep. Three days, just maybe an hour or two of napping here and there because it was a critical project. And not just me; it was like 20 people. Nobody’s sleeping. This happened. This could never happen if you were traveling because you’re in a hotel. You have to take a flight, which has a thing. So we did some ridiculous stuff—impossible. We did a two-month project in four days. That’s how it happened. [00:13:50] Zain Mustafa: Of course, it has its goods and bads. Of course, a lot of people have been more productive. [00:13:58] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. [00:13:58] Zain Mustafa: At the same time, I recently interviewed a guy. So he was working with Walmart as a quality assurance engineer. So I interviewed him why he is willing to join. So he was like, “I’ve been working remotely for the past two years now, and I am sick of my room. I just need to get out of that room, need to communicate, need to network with people, need to see more faces on a daily basis.” So yeah, for some people, it’s—they want to get back. They want to come on a lower salary. So he was like, “I can negotiate a bit on the salary. I can come on a lower salary. Just take me out of my room.” [00:14:40] Arsalan Ahmed: Wow. Yeah. Change is good. I like change. So let’s talk about your company. So you started this company. This was a training company in the beginning, then you started doing more services. And the question is, you were a co-founder, you had other founders. So you started this company. It’s not a small feat to start a company because it’s dangerous. It’s not dangerous; it’s scary. And people are like, okay, you are now responsible for your own income. So what was the craziest thing that happened when you started Geeks of Kolachi, moments where you thought, what have I gotten myself into? [00:15:25] Zain Mustafa: So, as I mentioned, we started as a training bootcamp company. We had three to four students who were coming on a daily basis, and into the third month of our training program, we had no money even for our internet use. So internet was cut off, and we were like, what are we doing exactly? We’re not even making money to make ends meet, let alone making profit out of it. So that was something—we realized teaching alone won’t work for us. So we were previously doing development. We were spending like two to four hours making good money. But when we got ourselves into training, a lot of our time would go into training those students, and no time, no energy left for the other work. And I was at the time also studying my last semester in university. Two or three things happening at the same time. So that is when we decided we’ll go into making money for ourselves, and of course then we’ll think about how we can contribute to the community. So the first two, three years, starting from 2017, we were adding two, three resources every quarter. And when COVID came, we had lost two of our main clients at the time because of COVID. And they were heavily e-commerce dependent products that we were working on. But luckily enough, we started receiving more and more requests after two or three weeks of that time. And the projects that were coming in were because of COVID. So some projects that we lost, but a lot more projects came in. So that is when we scaled from an eight-people company to a 30-people company. So the office that I’m sitting at this moment can accommodate a hundred people in one shift, and we work in two shifts mainly. The sales team usually works in the night as well. We do have some salespeople working in the daytime; mainly our developer team works in the regular hours. So yeah, the challenges have been changing throughout this time. The problems we had when we were a five-people company were different. We were different in age. I was 23, 24, had different responsibilities. So things have changed, and we try to accommodate and solve one problem at a time. So whatever we see, we saw the problems that’s there, we try to just solve that problem. Of course, in business, every day there is a new challenge, and you find yourself in a situation where you think, maybe I should opt for something else. Or you get thoughts of, this might end up not in a good place. But somehow or the other, if you are true with yourself, with your people that are working with us, and also to the clients especially that we are serving, somehow or the other, we were getting clients from left and right we didn’t know about. So that has happened quite a lot. And I think that’s the thing with business: you never know where your next client will be coming from. [00:18:47] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. I think that’s the sticking point—or let’s just say that’s the most important part of being successful. So as a software developer, you have two different paths: you can become an employee or you can become an employer, or you can be a freelancer. But either you’re an employee or an employer. I know a lot of companies in the States where they start as developers, and then they get two people, start a company, and they have projects, and now they have more work because the same company maybe wants another project, or maybe another company says, “Hey, can I do this too?” And so they get one more person, and then they grow like this, two to three to four. They stay very small, and obviously that is very organic, but they’re working the whole time. They are working as the core development team. They’re not managing as their primary concern; they’re consultants, they’re billing the clients themselves. And then they usually have partners. So two people together, they’re 50 percent partners, for example, and the four people, 25 percent partners. That kind of a thing happens a lot. I’ve seen it, but it doesn’t scale. At some point, your hours are limited. So it looks like you’re not going for that. You’re going for scaling out. You’re like, “Oh, I need a hundred people.” [00:20:06] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. [00:20:07] Arsalan Ahmed: Maybe I don’t need to do the core tech work or the actual billable work myself, but I want—because your main concern is not being a technologist. That’s what I’m understanding of it. Correct me if I’m wrong. [00:20:24] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. [00:20:25] Arsalan Ahmed: You’re trying to be an entrepreneur. [00:20:31] Zain Mustafa: Yeah, that’s kind of correct. The time when we started, we were like two friends just doing our freelancing work. And with time, we started to develop more client base; more people got to know about us, and the people we work for were getting back not only with their work but also giving referrals to their friends and family. So since we started getting more work, we first—for the first three, four years—we wanted to improve on the quality that we are providing and also the rate that we are offering our services on. So for the first three years, we were like a 10 to 15 people company just focusing on—like, it was early time for us as well. The time I started doing Geeks of Kolachi, I was two, three years into the industry. So I had to also build my experience. So when it was like two, three years old, we then thought about why not add more people if we are receiving more referrals? So why not just go for it, hire more people? So one of the interesting things that happened—and I heard it also happened a lot of times in Silicon Valley as well—so we were in an office, we had like 30 people capacity, actually 24, and we occupied 30 people in that office. And at that time, we were changing our office literally every year. So we would get an office for 10 people; it will fill out within a year to what we planned for two years. And then we’ll change to a 20-people office. So we changed to that, and that happened for the first four years. So we sat back and gave it a thought: every year we have this problem, let’s just solve this once and for all. So we built this beautiful office with glass rooms, meeting rooms, and an amazing town hall to play table tennis, and everything is there. And we planned for a hundred people. What happened was when we moved into the new office, things started to change. So that is when the market was settling in after the COVID breakthrough in technology. So everything was working out in technology in COVID times; everything wanted to go digital. But when it was getting normalized, a lot of people pulled their investments off the internet. And also we were heavily working on blockchain and NFT technologies, and NFT was down to 2 percent of the total market cap, and the clients that we were working with had no money left to pay us, let alone make their profits. We were having our office of a hundred people, only having 30 people in-house. We planned to add 70 more people within six months’ time, and we lost two of our main clients. And it was the great depression coming again. But somehow or the other, we tried to sail through that period as well for two, three months. Before that, we didn’t have a dedicated sales team. So we would get our clients through referrals and repeat work that we started off back in 2017. [00:24:12] Arsalan Ahmed: Right. [00:24:12] Zain Mustafa: So let’s suppose we worked with a client initially for two, three years, and the CTO—when the company exited, the company we were working for—the CTO started his own different company and the CEO started his own company. So we would get like two customers on board. So that is how we were getting our business. Everything was great. Whenever we used to talk with our friends, they were like, “How many salespeople do you have?” And we’ll be like, “What’s that, bro?” [00:24:43] Arsalan Ahmed: We don’t have any sales. [00:24:44] Zain Mustafa: We just have the great work to show to the people, and that’s how we’re getting sales. But when we lost our client, we were like, what to do? What process can we follow? So we were like talking to—going back to those friends and asking them, do you have a sales team and how is that structured? And I’m very thankful to the community here in Karachi especially, the friend circle that I have developed along that time. So we built a sales team that helped us sail through, and alhamdulillah, we have been growing since. [00:25:24] Arsalan Ahmed: That’s great. So what happens when you’re talking about sales, obviously talking about outbound sales. So you’re reaching out to people: “Hey, do you need my service?” And there’s obviously also the inbound where people are coming to you because they’ve heard about you or they found you on the internet or they googled you and they found you. So it’s for some people who are listening who may not be aware, they’re obviously trying to generate business for yourself. Now, obviously, you can also do the same thing if you’re an employee. So I like to always bring it back to our listeners because a lot of them might not know exactly how to use this information. If you have a profile online of your work, in the shape of a very good LinkedIn profile or a website that highlights your achievements, then it doesn’t have to be for sales in a business context. It could be to get a job. Employers—I have found, personally know people who have gotten jobs through people contacting them after seeing their profile and like, “Oh, you’ve done all this. We need somebody like you.” [00:26:47] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. [00:26:48] Arsalan Ahmed: This has happened, and they actually get jobs. So it’s relevant for both contexts. Okay, so without giving away too many secrets, what’s the most exciting project you’re working on right now? Anything that you’re excited about? [00:27:03] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. So that’s almost every project that we’re working on. We’re always excited to make things work out for our clients. So that’s a political statement. Honestly, there are a few. So there are two of our clients—same client—we’re developing two portals for them, AI-generated, AI-driven products. So one of them is an AI-generated relocation expert. So in Pakistan, there are a lot of people who are interested in relocating. So that product basically identifies which country is right for you and how you can get there. So all the process that is involved, which visa category more aligns with your degree, with your experience, and what else that you can achieve to make it more smooth. So that is one product, which is live, and we, I think, hit more than 50,000 users on the platform only last year. So that’s one interesting. Apart from that, we have had many experiences. Like one of the projects that I personally got myself attached to was one with Audi. So in COVID times, the dealership was closed, but they were still delivering their cars. And another problem was whenever there is a launch of a new car, what they’ll do, they’ll deliver that car into that market. So if they are launching Audi e-tron GT, they’ll send that car to San Francisco, to Dubai, to Tokyo, and then take the pictures of that car with the environment and then add into the brochures or social media marketing that needs to be done. So an interesting approach that Audi came up with was they’ll generate pictures and videos through Unreal Engine that will be streamed into a web application where the dealership can select their environment, be that Dubai, San Francisco, New York. And after selecting the environment, they can select the car they want brochures for or videos or pictures for, and they can select all the things that are there in the real environment. If they want nighttime and it’s raining, that can be done. And if you’re seeing Audi e-tron and the new cars that are coming in from Audi, you will probably be seeing that platform-generated content. So we were doing that in 2020-21, and it was really amazing. It was so uncanny in terms of how it looked. It was so real, and we could generate videos of like the doors open, the lights open, and from interior and exterior. And the impact of that software, like reaching millions and millions of people, the software that we worked on. So it was really a humble experience being able to contribute. On top, the developers that were working with us were the contributors of React.js, Vue.js—they were actually the creators of Vue.js. [00:30:32] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. [00:30:34] Zain Mustafa: To the people who are not very technical, it’s the library used to develop web applications. So we got to work with a lot of amazing talent in that project, and everything was right about that. And when we were closing that, the people who were working with me were—they just wanted to continue working, continue contributing to the project. So yeah. [00:30:58] Arsalan Ahmed: That is exciting. Was it AI-based generation? Because that’s pretty early for AI. [00:31:06] Zain Mustafa: Yeah, it was not really AI. It was like Unreal Engine. They would create the background, they’ll create the animation for the cars, and Unreal Engine already has a lot of things available in it. [00:31:25] Arsalan Ahmed: The assets, yeah. [00:31:26] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. [00:31:27] Arsalan Ahmed: The video assets or the actual images, they would obviously—Audi would provide the team. [00:31:35] Zain Mustafa: Exactly. [00:31:36] Arsalan Ahmed: And then— [00:31:36] Zain Mustafa: Exactly. [00:31:36] Arsalan Ahmed: Use that to— [00:31:37] Zain Mustafa: Exactly. [00:31:38] Arsalan Ahmed: Unreal Engine is—that’s pretty amazing. Yeah. Awesome. So here’s a question: Have you ever had to choose between a project you are really passionate about and it doesn’t make any money, or the other one, oh, that’s a lot of money but I hate it? Has that ever happened? [00:31:56] Zain Mustafa: In business terms, it always most likely be money since we are in services industry. Of course, budget matters a lot, but I have seen a lot of projects—I’ve personally gone through experiences where we didn’t like the client or maybe the idea on the project. So most of our clients who reach out to us, if the idea is something that will not work for them, period, we’ll let them know. It’s not something that you build MVP on; you’ll just be spending your money on it. Yeah, they understood this and they never came back—not a problem—but we wanted to make sure if we’re working on something, it actually made sense. So we let them know what will actually work in the market. Of course, we have been for the past seven to eight years have worked on more than a hundred mobile applications, maybe 200 web applications. So we do know which one worked for which industry. So with our experience, we try to make sure we deliver as much information in the ideating process as we can. [00:33:14] Arsalan Ahmed: So I’m getting the impression that you’re primarily working with startup companies, maybe some established companies as well, but starting companies. I know a lot of service providers, small service providers, in the Midwest where I’m at, they do that too. So is that your focus these days? [00:33:33] Zain Mustafa: We do work with the companies who are directly serving Fortune 500. They’re like a hundred-people company in the U.S. We are working with them, and the software that is generated by them is being directly used by a lot of Fortune 500 companies. So we are working with large-scale enterprise clients and also a lot of our client base—it’s actually true that we work with early-stage startups, helping them make their MVPs and doing the validation on their product ideas. [00:34:10] Arsalan Ahmed: And you’re working on, I’m assuming, JavaScript-based technology stacks, something like Node, React, Next, Vue—that’s pretty much where we’re at. [00:34:22] Zain Mustafa: Yeah, actually. So I started as an Angular MEAN stack developer back in 2015. So it was actually something very inspiring that was happening back in 2012. So a teacher who came from the States came back to Pakistan and started teaching the students of Pakistan the latest trends and technologies in the U.S. So back in 2012, Angular came into the market, I think in 2009, something like that. And at that time, everything was around PHP or .NET, and every institute was teaching that. I was fortunate enough to get introduced into the JavaScript world, actually Angular, and at that time we used to have Ionic to build mobile applications. One technology—Angular—can work on mobile and web, both the platforms. So it was quite new at the time. And when we started actually doing the development, there was a lot of work available because a lot of the people who started in 2005 or till 2010, they were working on PHP or .NET. So a lot less competition was there at that time. Speaking of 2024, it’s—the market again, the situation is PHP, WordPress, .NET of that time. So we now have our focus on LLMs. We have, I think, more than 10 projects that we did only last year on AI. So AI, of course, is the market shift that has happened. [00:36:08] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. [00:36:10] Zain Mustafa: And we are really trying to tap into that market as well. [00:36:15] Arsalan Ahmed: No, I think that’s the right approach because it’s still not prevalent. So there’s a first-mover advantage. You go in there, and if you have two years of AI experience, you’re one of—anybody, any company who has two years of solid AI experience, it’s very hard to top that. So starting early means you always have advantage. But the word AI is also— [00:36:42] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. [00:36:49] Arsalan Ahmed: Just by typing a prompt in ChatGPT, you can get really good at doing prompt engineering. So interesting. So I was actually doing some research to see, okay, what are the types of things that companies are working on. I’m not plugged into the companies for the last year or so. I’ve been traveling. I went to six or seven different countries last year, or a year ago, and was building my education platform, and I was exploring multiple countries. I had a good time; my kids had a great time. But when I came back, everything had changed. Because when I left, I had never heard of ChatGPT. ChatGPT blew up while I was away. So when I came back, I was like, what’s going on? So I had to really catch up. And then, of course, I learned about the generative AI, LLMs, and so many other companies are in the mix. So I have been keeping up now. I got the ChatGPT subscription recently. I use Claude, I use—Perspective, is it Perspective? Ah, forgetting. But I never use it. So I use ChatGPT, the 4.0 model; I use that. Now I’m learning about, okay, do you make your own models, all that stuff. But it’s a lot. [00:38:10] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. [00:38:10] Arsalan Ahmed: But when I do a search on the job boards that I see in the U.S. to see, okay, who’s hiring for this, who’s hiring for that, I almost see nothing. So at least established old companies, I haven’t heard a lot of work, but I know there is work that’s being done. So maybe it’s more constrained in companies, or maybe they’re startup companies. So if you worked at 10 AI—that’s a lot of projects, almost one every month. What is the type of work that you’re seeing that’s coming down? [00:38:41] Zain Mustafa: So almost every industry would want to know how AI can help them out. So that’s—we normally start off with a lot of companies. So companies in health tech have reached us out, companies in e-commerce space wanting to know how AI can help them out. So almost every industry, they literally want to know how AI can help them out. It’s exactly the situation how it used to be with blockchain back in 2017, 2018. Everyone wanted to know how blockchain can help them grow, help them make more money out of it. Mainly, we did SaaS products out of those more or less 10 products that we did last year. They were mainly SaaS—software as service—products. In terms of industries, one of the interesting things that is going to happen is in education, educational sector. So a cool project that we did was actually in the education space. So if you are someone who has two or three years of experience, or even if you’re in your university, you can upload your resume and the skills that you know at this moment. So the AI program will let you know how you can improve on the international scores where you are at. Zain Mustafa wants to upload his resume into that application. So that application will let me know where do I stand out of maybe out of five. And if I get a score of 3.5 or 4, how can I improve on this? So it will recommend me courses online according to the background, the skill set that I already have, and how I can improve on this. I think we got more than a hundred thousand users on this platform. It goes by the name skillscore.com . And in Pakistan, we have a lot of youth that is in university, and they really want to figure out which career they would want to choose. With the inception of AI, LLM is available for everyone. Blockchain was not exposed to the common man. [00:41:03] Arsalan Ahmed: Right. [00:41:04] Zain Mustafa: Through ChatGPT and LLMs, AI is in the hands of everyone. So that is the difference it has made. Coming from—we have been talking about AI since decades. [00:41:18] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. [00:41:18] Zain Mustafa: But this is the first time AI was so easy to use. For other technologies, they need to follow the same path to be able to reach that big numbers. So I think almost every sector will be impacted by AI. So every business—we’ll have three to four or maybe five meetings with some of our inbound queries or some of our existing clients. We’ll help them out, identify the options that they have in solving new and new problems. [00:41:57] Arsalan Ahmed: Okay, so imagine yourself a new developer. You’re somebody, maybe a 20-year-old, a 22-year-old person. Maybe you went to computer science university. Maybe you’re still at school, or maybe you’re just interested and you’re like, I want to do this AI thing, but I don’t know what it is because there’s so many things. As I’m getting into it, it’s down the rabbit hole. I’m discovering, oh my God, I need to spend several weeks, months actually learning because there’s so many things about, okay, you are going to write prompts. Yes, this is how you can actually get the information, but maybe the information is not in the right format. You have to do some fine-tuning, or maybe you have to do some custom model generation. The biggest thing that I hear is, hey, I want my data. I’m a professor, or I’m just—I generate all this data. It’s my proprietary information. I don’t want anybody to see it. I don’t want this to go into training ChatGPT. I don’t want this to be public. I would like to now infer some information out of that or do some data mining using some chatbots. So where do I start? I am somebody, I have two months to learn. I’m a new person or young person, and I want to learn something. So give them some cool advice. What can they learn in two months? [00:43:21] Zain Mustafa: So I think throughout my early career, I’ve had like, you know, maybe hundreds of MOOCs courses that were left in between. Like when you start doing one course, YouTube—if you’re on YouTube—it will recommend you another cool, like a clickbait. [00:43:42] Arsalan Ahmed: Something else. Thumbnail. Yeah. [00:43:43] Zain Mustafa: Let’s go on this tangent. And you’ll be figuring out, like, oh my God, I need to get this done as well. So you’ll go there, and YouTube does not stop. It’ll get you places where you didn’t even think about going there in the first place. So first recommendation from my side would be to pick a course on a dedicated online course website. Not only it’ll help you keep your focus on that, but also it is something that is only developed for students, for people who want to learn. So there are a lot of complementing things that’ll be there. So let’s say if you pick a course on Udemy, you’ll have relevant tests available after each video or each chapter that you do. So that’s something I figured along the lines when a few of the MOOCs courses, just to convince that I completed, they were on those websites. They were not on YouTube. So you’ll see a series of videos of nine—maybe nine-video playlists. The first video will have 10 million; the second will have five, and it drops down to maybe 50,000 for the last one. So yeah, that’s the issue. That’s the thing that you can see. So don’t consider yourself different from others. So you will get caught up—you will get caught up by the thumbnails, by the clickbait on YouTube. So figure out a platform that is available and pick just one thing. And try to make sure that you also talk to the community. So a lot of—on these websites, you will find forums, you will find community. So start talking to people who are new. So that’ll also help you get along, get moving every day. So in my early times when I was learning how to program the fourth time, I was about to quit. So a friend of mine was like, “If we’re coming here, if we’re coming to this place, at least we’re spending in a good environment. What else could we do? Instead of spending two hours here at the institute, we can spend this time maybe playing cricket or watching a movie back home. So why not just be here, even if we are not understanding a bit of what the teacher is teaching?” I just somehow managed to get convinced by that idea. So after two, three months, I really got serious about it because some of the topics really clicked. And that is how my journey began. So my suggestion, of course, will be to pick a platform independent of YouTube, spend some money—not a lot—a lot of cool options and cheap options available, and also try to talk to people, talk to community, be that the forums, be that groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, or maybe Discord channel. [00:46:41] Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah. So that’s good advice. We have to wrap up very, very soon. We’re a little bit over. The conversation is going really well. We may have to have you back for going a little bit deeper into some of the topics because I personally am very interested. I want to learn. We’ll just learn from each other, but I think there’s more to talk from the AI point of view because we need to get into what specific thing they can learn, what is the thing that they focus on. But again, this is maybe a topic for another time. But before we close, I just have one last thing. I’ll let you talk about how do people get in touch with you, and if they want to work with you, maybe they want to give you some business, or, “Hey, these are some cool people who’ll give you some good projects, and let’s work together.” We will go into that. But before that, this is something that I really wanted to know: If you could implant one mindset or habit into every developer’s brain—okay, let me just, I can just turn a switch on, and now they have this thing—what would it be? Because there’s some things that you wish developers had so you could hire more of them and they fit right into your team and they’re successful. They’re successful, and that means you’re successful. What is that one mindset or habit? [00:48:06] Zain Mustafa: So I have seen—I confess I was not really that good of a developer, but the good developers that I’ve seen or the good work—some of the good work that I did was only done through being curious. Like, what if I do it the other way? What if I search it online and see if there is any other approach available? What if I implement a different algorithm? Let’s just try it out. So being curious is the most common habit that I’ve seen in developers or the work that I did that I’m proud of where I was being able to produce that work only by being curious. So that’s something I’ve seen a lot of people doing that. And the people who do open source—that’s also out of their curiosity, like let’s just try to work on this idea, let’s see if I have some other people around the community who think likewise. In the conferences that I’ve attended worldwide, they’ll just discuss ideas in the technology space. Like, that’s how Angular came out. That’s how React.js was built by Facebook, and even they had React and Angular. That’s how the developers came up with the idea for Vue.js—I think the second most popular framework at this moment. So curiosity is a common thing that is a common trait that I’ve seen in good developers. [00:49:42] Arsalan Ahmed: Excellent. Yeah, always be curious, but don’t be so curious that you go and click on every link on YouTube. So don’t be so curious. Control your curiosity a little bit. Okay. All right, Zain. So it was excellent meeting you. And I think the audience would have greatly benefited from you, and maybe they can benefit more by working with you on—if they have any projects, especially in AI these days. Or you have a team, you have a team of a hundred-plus people or roughly a hundred people that are ready to work, and they’re working in all time zones, right? Two shifts means that if I’m in the U.S. and it’s nighttime for you, somebody could be there live working for you. [00:50:26] Zain Mustafa: Someone available to talk, someone available to work. [00:50:30] Arsalan Ahmed: That’s excellent. And it’s not just the workers but also people who are managing it. So you have people who can actually be the liaison, talk—you know, so you have people who have good English skills, they have good technical skills, and then it’s possible that if you want something quickly, someone could be working at night, then somebody else could pick up that work tomorrow. Because one thing that I was curious about—we have to wrap up—but the one thing that I was curious about is, are people getting—are you getting projects and just assigning it to people as you have them available? Or is it that you have somebody who’s maybe augmenting someone’s staff, staff-aug type thing that you could get—you have, “I have two developers here and one designer here for you.” [00:51:17] Zain Mustafa: Yeah. So it’s a combination. A lot of times we get requests for proposals to get a hint of the timeline, how the product will look like, and what the costs and estimations look like. So we do that. And what we prefer personally is to staff augment, or not individuals but a whole team that includes software architects, designers, developers, testers, and project managers. So the whole team is working on one idea. So that’s what we prefer, but a lot of time we do get some inputs or incoming queries for estimations. [00:52:02] Arsalan Ahmed: All right. You heard it here, folks. If you guys want to get in touch with Zain, how do they get in touch with you? [00:52:10] Zain Mustafa: So they can reach me at zain@geeksofkolachi.com or happy@geeksofkolachi.com . They can find us everywhere. We are on LinkedIn. We are on www.geeksofkolachi.com , Facebook, Instagram, like literally everywhere. You search the name, Geeks of K—that’s why it was picked. It’s so SEO-friendly. [00:52:34] Arsalan Ahmed: Nobody else has thought about that. Yeah. It’s so unique. No, you nailed that. You nailed that right on the head. It’s perfect. Yeah. One of the problems that I have with some of the projects that I work on is they’re so common. Like my podcast is Mentoring Developers. [00:52:55] Zain Mustafa: Yeah, I can imagine. [00:52:57] Arsalan Ahmed: There are so many of them. There are so many people that are doing something to do with mentoring and developers, and also developers could mean real estate developers. So it’s— [00:53:08] Zain Mustafa: Oh yes. [00:53:09] Arsalan Ahmed: That’s a problem with not having a unique name, but you know, I started many years ago and that’s what it is. Right, everybody, thank you very much, Zain. Stay on the call. We’ll keep talking. We’ll end the show here. To everybody who is watching, go to https://mentoringdevelopers. com/episode97 for show notes and bios and links and all that good stuff. All right, bye everybody! Thanks for Listening! Do you have some feedback or some advice for us or our audience? Please give us a review on iTunes, Spotify , YouTube, or Stitcher and share your thoughts. If you found this episode useful, please go ahead and share it with your friends and family. You can also listen directly and give your feedback on the website. You can subscribe to Mentoring Developers via iTunes , Spotify , or YouTube .…

Mentoring Developers

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Episode 96

1 year ago

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INTRO Stan is a goal-oriented professional with a historical record of providing IT project leadership, architectural solutions, and Agile/Scrum expertise to drive project initiatives. He has proven experience in leveraging internet and intranet, client and server, web development, and consumer-facing RIA application expertise to lead software development projects and technical transformations for diverse global clients. He is a demonstrated subject matter expert in Agile/Scrum, holding certifications as a Certified Agile/Scrum Master, Developer, and Trainer. He successfully streamlines project initiatives by practicing risk management, promoting Agile/Scrum adoption, and enhancing cross-functional stakeholder communications to achieve project objectives. Through the utilization of the off-shore delivery model, he can effectively lower resource costs for clients’ major projects. Furthermore, He is highly skilled at devising elegant technical solutions for challenging architectural problems. Stan’s Bio: “ Stan boasts extensive experience with Agile/Scrum since 2006, taking on roles like Agile Coach, Solution Architect, and Scrum Master across 10+ significant projects. He’s adept at offering technical leadership, and Scrum Master responsibilities, and has conducted East Coast client assessments to determine their readiness for transitioning to an Agile/Scrum setup List of topics 00:00:00 – Introduction 00:00:40 – What you do in Microsoft 00:03:55 – Microscope is free but not cheap 00:05:20 – How destinations work in Microsoft 00:09:10 -Why did you choose this field 00:11:40 -What was your first job 00:13:48 -Who did you manage being in tech 00:17:06 -Did you experienced mentorship 00:21:10 -You have to respect people’s time 00:22:00 – What do you see in someone to consider for your team, how do you manage people 00:26:00 -How some can get into the Microsoft 00:30:40 – How we can find him 00:31:45 – How you can get in touch with us Important Links Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/stanley.d.chatman/ Scrum.org: https://www.scrum.org/stanley-chatman Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanchatman/?trk=public_profile_browsemap LINKS YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xmSi1ytopsssR1i3kKveg Thanks for Listening! Do you have some feedback or some advice for us or our audience? Please give us a review on iTunes, Spotify , Google Podcasts, or Stitcher and share your thoughts. If you found this episode useful, please go ahead and share it with your friends and family. You can also listen directly and give your feedback on the website. You can subscribe to Mentoring Developers via iTunes , Stitcher Radio , Spotify , or Google Podcasts .…

Mentoring Developers

1
Episode 94

2 years ago

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INTRO “Richard Campbell spanned the computing industry both on the hardware and software sides, development, and operations. He was a co-founder of Strangeloop Networks and was on the board of directors of Telerik. Now he is the founder and chairman of Humanitarian Toolbox, Richard is also the host of two podcasts: .NET Rocks! and RunAs Radio.” Youtube: https://youtu.be/Ui2XmQgqvL0 Richard’s Bio: BIO Richard Campbell wrote his first line of code in 1977. His career has spanned the computing industry both on the hardware and software sides, development, and operations. He was a co-founder of Strangeloop Networks, acquired by Radware in 2013, and was on the board of directors of Telerik which was acquired by Progress Software in 2014. Today he is a consultant and advisor to a number of successful technology firms and is the founder and chairman of Humanitarian Toolbox, a public charity that builds open-source software for disaster relief. Richard is also the host of two podcasts: .NET Rocks! and RunAs Radio. Episode Highlights and Show Notes: List of topics 00:00 – Introduction 03:16 – Starting the courier 07:01 – Way of Success in tech 07:55 – The importance of degree 11:56 -Best job opportunities. 14:46 – Struggle faced in the first job 17:48 – Bootcamp 21:54 – What struggles you faced in the beginning 23:00 – What’s your position now 24:10 – What is android 25:48 – Number 1 problem 29:50 – A lesson to take from him 31:55 – Who do you work many hours? 32:45 – Why you chose Android? 38:56 – What are you doing right now? 41:23 – My biggest problem 42:15 – Biggest opportunities 43:00 – How to get in touch with you Important Links Github: https://shady-selim.github.io/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/ShadySelimTube YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xmSi1ytopsssR1i3kKveg Thanks for Listening! Do you have some feedback or some advice for us or our audience? Please give us a review on iTunes, Spotify , Google Podcasts, or Stitcher and share your thoughts. If you found this episode useful, please go ahead and share it with your friends and family. You can also listen directly and give your feedback on the website. You can subscribe to Mentoring Developers via iTunes , Stitcher Radio , Spotify , or Google Podcasts .…

Mentoring Developers

1
Episode 93

2 years ago

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“Shady Selim is the first Android Software Advocate in the Middle East. He is a Leading Mobile Developer of Android. He is a Google Speaker and AngelHack Ambassador. He is a Group Member of Flutter Egypt. He is a Leader of GDG & Kotlin Programming Languages” YouTube: https://youtu.be/qZY-LEzWfMI Shady’s Bio: Shady Selim’s career background includes mobile development, project management, and development advocate experience, with a history of successfully leading global teams on high-profile projects for industry giants such as IBM and Facebook. I am highly skilled as a team lead, development manager, and CTO, and I hold an M.Sc. in Business Information Technology from Middlesex University and an MBA from Cairo University. I am knowledgeable in many industry technologies including Android, Windows Phone 8x, iOS, Java, Kotlin, ASP .NET, Swift, jQuery, Angular JS, and JavaScript to develop application and design concepts. Episode Highlights: List of topics 00:00 – Introduction 03:16 – Starting the courier 07:01 – Way of Success in Tech 07:55 – The importance of degree 11:56 -Best job opportunities. 14:46 – Struggle faced in the first job 17:48 – Bootcamp 21:54 – What struggles you faced in the beginning 23:00 – What’s your position now 24:10 – What is android 25:48 – Number 1 problem 29:50 – A lesson to take from him 31:55 – Who do you work many hours? 32:45 – Why you chose Android? 38:56 – What are you doing right now? 41:23 – My biggest problem 42:15 – Biggest opportunities 43:00 – How to get in touch with you .. Important Links Github: https://shady-selim.github.io/ YouTube Channel:https://www.youtube.com/c/ShadySelimTube YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xmSi1ytopsssR1i3kKveg Thanks for Listening! Do you have some feedback or some advice for us or our audience? Please give us a review on iTunes, Spotify , Google Podcasts, or Stitcher and share your thoughts. If you found this episode useful, please go ahead and share it with your friends and family. You can also listen directly and give your feedback on the website. You can subscribe to Mentoring Developers via iTunes , Stitcher Radio , Spotify , or Google Podcasts .…

Mentoring Developers

1
Episode 92

2 years ago

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Guy Royse is a software developer with more than 25 years of programming experience and has been a part of a government program to teach computer programming to prisoners to enable them to live a normal and happy life after their prison terms. Now he goes out into developer communities and helps others build great software through cutting-edge technology solutions. He has much wisdom to share and we’re privileged to have him as our guest in this episode. Here we go YouTube: https://youtu.be/PGKIda7uZsA Guy’s Bio: Guy works for Redis Labs as a Developer Advocate. Combining his decades of experience in writing software with a passion for sharing what he has learned, Guy goes out into developer communities and helps others build great software. Episode Highlights : List of topics 0:38 -Went to prison to teach programming and software development. 2:00 -People are going to get off prison surely one day, when they come out we don’t want them to go back in. 2:47 – There is a great demand for developers in the world. 3:53 – If you’re making 40000 Dollars a year from a job, out of the prison that is a really great job out of the prison. 3:51 – It was really cool going into prison. 4:44 – Prisoners while doing programming, they think they are not in prison for a while. 5:06 – My father spend time in prison and I got my other family members to spend time in prison. 5:46 – I never feel safe there, which I think is interesting. 7:52 – I am being running software for about 25 years. 9:00 – Which languages you are teaching? 9:27 – We teach Java, and I came and started teaching Java script 12:30 – Government decides to recycle all the PCs. 17:20 – I was in the fifth standard and I decided to be a programmer. 24:45 – I learn Pascal. 28:10 – In 1944 it was really hard to get a job as a developer. 32:46 – I will say Do have anything to stand out among the people. 37:42 – When I am hiring a person, I care about three things, 1. Can you do things, 2. Will you do the thing, 3. Will you play well than the other? 39:44 – Jack of all trades and master of noon is often times better than master of one. 53:15 – Teaching is the best way to learn. 57:12 – Getting started is the most important thing GUEST Links: Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/guyroyse Twitter: https://twitter.com/guyroyse YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/guyroyse Website: http://guyroyse.com/ Redis: https://redis.io/ Redis commands: https://redis.io/commands RediSearch: https://oss.redislabs.com/redisearch/ Redis Cloud: https://redislabs.com/try-free/ Redis University Videos: https://www.youtube.com/redisuniversity Free courses: https://university.redislabs.com YouTube Channel: https://www. Youtube.com/channel/UC4xmSi1ytopsssR1i3kKveg Thanks for Listening! Do you have some feedback or some advice for us or our audience? Please give us a review on iTunes, Spotify , Google Podcasts, or Stitcher and share your thoughts. If you found this episode useful, please go ahead and share it with your friends and family. You can also listen directly and give your feedback on the website. You can subscribe to Mentoring Developers via iTunes , Stitcher Radio , Spotify , or Google Podcasts .…

Mentoring Developers

1
Episode 91

2 years ago

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Greg started his career in data science after not getting a proper job with his Ph.D. degree in physics. He joined a Data Science bootcamp and then got a job as a Data Scientist. Watch this interesting interview as he describes his experience. YouTube: https://youtu.be/vbSbKGwCUcA Greg’s Bio: Greg Damico is a Lecturer in Data Science at the Flatiron School and has been working there since March 2019. He hails originally from Columbus, OH, but has been in Seattle since 2013. He has an extensive background in academia and has taught and studied various subjects in addition to data science at a number of schools both in the Midwest and on the West Coast. He turned to data science for good in 2016. He is passionate about data science because of its ever-growing role in our daily lives, and he is passionate about education because of the way it empowers people to change their lives. Episode Highlights Audio Transcription Episode Announcement: You’re listening to Mentoring Developers, Episode 91, Let’s go. Intro: Welcome to Mentoring Developers, the podcast for new and aspiring software developers, where we discuss your struggles, anxieties, and career choices. And now, here’s your host, Arsalan Ahmed. Guest Biot: In this episode of Mentoring Developers, I’ll be talking to Greg D’Amico. Greg is a lecturer in data science at the Flatiron School, and he’s been there for a long time. This interview was recorded in 2021. He’s originally from the Midwest in Ohio. He’s been settled out West in Seattle. So he has experience in both the Midwest and the West Coast.He’s taught everywhere. His passion is data science. And today we’ll be talking to him about data science, about.Flat Iron.School and other boot camps, and what it’s like to be in a boot camp as a mentor, as. A teacher. Also as a student. I think that this is a great little interview for people who are interested in boot camps, who are interested in data science, and who’s interested to see. what it’s like to be in a boot camp and learning data science.Especially from the point of view of a person that’s on the other side of the aisle.I Think you’re going to enjoy this. Let’s get ready and get started. Arsalan Ahmed: How are you doing, Greg? Greg D’Amico: I’m doing well, Arslan. Thanks for having me on the show. Arsalan Ahmed: How did you decide to become a data scientist? Greg D’Amico: It turned out to be a very significant letter for me. I was in philosophy graduate school. I did finish my PhD, but I wasn’t finding the work that I wanted after that was done. It’s very difficult in academia to get the high power job that a lot of people are looking for. I moved to Seattle and after I got to Seattle, I decided that I wanted to go back to school. I did have an old physics degree rusting on my shelf somewhere. I thought, Well, I’ve got some math skills. I think I could go do this applied mathematics program at the University of Washington. Shortly after I started that, an old friend of mine from philosophy grad school, Mike, said, Hey, have you studied any R? I started looking into it and I thought, Wow, this R language looks really cool. I don’t have a lot of programming background. I’ve done a little bit here and there. But I started looking into R. I took a course on R. I realized immediately its potential for data analysis and data science. That was my entry. I started reading a bunch of things about data science. I jumped into a boot camp for data science.Before long, I had finished a boot camp and I was able to land a job teaching at flight iron school in data science. That was my entry into the tech world. It’s never too late to start. It’s never too late to jump into tech. I think sometimes people are scared to make that transition. Obviously, I meet a lot of people teaching a boot camp in data science who are scared. They’re making these large career changes. They’ve been doing one thing and they’re thinking, Well, data science seems like something I could do. Maybe my background is quite different and I’m scared to do it, but I feel like I’ve got a chance. They really do. There’s a lot you can learn in a short time. There are lots of resources about R, lots of resources about Python. Python is actually the language of choice at Flat Iron, so I work mostly in Python these days. But it’s one step at a time. There’s always a lot to learn, but you don’t have to learn a lot to be able to make some cool things, to be able to start on some cool projects. Once you can do that, well, then you can get in touch with other people who are working on things.You can share ideas, you can share your own work, and then you’re right there in the community. Arsalan Ahmed: A question that a lot of our listeners would have right now is, is it really that useful, data science? Why should I learn it?How did you decide to become a data scientist? Greg D’Amico: I think data science has arisen largely because of lots of technological improvements to do with data. We are now incredibly good at storing data, at producing data, at having accurate data recordings. You can look online and find stats about exactly how much data is produced every day. I think it’s on the order of quintillions of bytes or something like that, just huge amounts of data. Lots of companies have their own data these days to worry about. Amazon, for example, part of the reason that Amazon is successful is they have lots and lots and lots of data about their customers, about the things that they’ve bought, about other things that they’ve bought, about Here’s a bunch of things that people just like you have bought. Maybe you’re interested in that, too. If you have access to a bunch of data about your customers and you can access it quickly, then that proves its business value pretty quickly. I think of data science as having an immediate business angel, but there’s also this technological aspect to it. It’s just as all of these technologies have gotten better, it’s natural that we have a lot of data. We have to have some understanding of how we can store that data, how we can access it, how we can share it, all that stuff.Data science itself as a discipline, certainly, it helps to have some understanding of things like databases and where data lives and how to access it and so on. But it’s also a bit of coding, it’s a bit of mathematics, it’s a bit of statistics. When we do our boot camps, we try to cover all those bases, at least a little bit. Arsalan Ahmed: What does it take to be a data scientist? Can anyone be a data scientist? Do you need some certain skills, certain aptitudes? What do you think? Greg D’Amico: I think data science has arisen largely because of lots of technological improvements to do with data. We are now incredibly good at storing data, at producing data, at having accurate data recordings. You can look online and find stats about exactly how much data is produced every day. I think it’s on the order of quintillions of bytes or something like that, just huge amounts of data. Lots of companies have their own data these days to worry about. Amazon, for example, part of the reason that Amazon is successful is they have lots and lots and lots of data about their customers, about the things that they’ve bought, about other things that they’ve bought, about Here’s a bunch of things that people just like you have bought. Maybe you’re interested in that, too. If you have access to a bunch of data about your customers and you can access it quickly, then that proves its business value pretty quickly. I think of data science as having an immediate business angel, but there’s also this technological aspect to it. It’s just as all of these technologies have gotten better, it’s natural that we have a lot of data. We have to have some understanding of how we can store that data, how we can access it, how we can share it, all that stuff.Data science itself as a discipline, certainly, it helps to have some understanding of things like databases and where data lives and how to access it and so on. But it’s also a bit of coding, it’s a bit of mathematics, it’s a bit of statistics. When we do our boot camps, we try to cover all those bases, at least a little bit. Arsalan Ahmed: What I want to know about Data science is that data science is a separate discipline in its own right. And you’re talking about using data to get some results, get some meaningful results out of the data. So if, for instance, you’re a university and you have data about your students, the students themselves, the courses that they register for, how frequently they do it, and which semester, which course is more popular. If you wanted to say, I want to predict next fall, what are the courses that might actually exceed capacity, where I may need to have an extra teacher to teach this course because there’s so much demand, but I need to know ahead of time so I could schedule it. That’s a thing. So your data goes into some data warehouse where it’s stored in some structure, maybe tables that are probably not normalized would mean I would expect them to be lots and lots of columns and everything in there so you don’t have to do lots of joins because that’s faster to read. And then you would be able to actually ask your system some intelligent questions and it answers it. That’s one aspect that I can think of. The other one is, Hey, Mr.Data Scientist, I have these 100 terabytes of data. Go give me some insights. I don’t know what I’m looking for.Which way is it falling here, this data science? Greg D’Amico: I think it’s both things I think very often you know I think about data science very often as trying to solve problems with data you know and those problems can take lots of forms often they’re you know sometimes they’re just straightforwardly Financial things like how can our business make more money you know um and sometimes they’re really more investigative things like you know I’ve got a bunch of customers and I want to do some sort of customer segmentation because I want to you know have a sort of targeted marketing campaign I want you know some ads to go to some people who are likely to pay attention to those ads from other ads to go to other people who are likelier to pay attention to that sort of advertising you know so there are lots of different problems but very often what’s happening is the data scientists will build some sort of model some sort of predictor and you’re right very often the data that you start with has some sort of tabular form right maybe I’ve got a bunch of columns of data and a bunch of rows rows will represent one record one observation you know One customer maybe or one house up for sale Maybe and you know each of the columns will be some feature about each of those records you know so if I’ve got a bunch of houses for sale maybe I’ve got a column that represents number of bedrooms or a feature of my rows is you know students at a college then maybe one of my columns is you know grades for a particular quarter or something like that so the general idea is I’ve got all phase columns and one of my columns is sort of privileged one of my columns is the thing that I’m trying to predict the thing that I’m trying to model right and I’m going to use all my other columns all the information that I have there to try to make accurate predictions about what’s in the the column of Interest if I’ve got thousands of rows or millions of rows then it’s very difficult for a human being to sort of you know pick up on the patterns that might be there but a computer is really fast right if I just show a computer well here are the values that I get for these rows in these particular columns and here are the values that I get for the column of Interest and then I say okay now here are some rows that you haven’t seen before and they have these values in these columns what do you think it’s likely to have in the column of interest you know and the computer sort of builds a model and then is able to use that model to make predictions on the Unseen data that that is new and then you can sort of evaluate that model is it good is it accurate and so on that sort of thing is is very often what’s at the heart of a lot of data science problems okay Arsalan Ahmed: So if I have to build that model so some piece of software has to do that so are you as a data scientist are you writing custom code just start from scratch and just start building a model or do you use a tool and maybe script. Greg D’Amico: It a little bit there are lots of tools I think you know I think really python is as is probably the number one language right now for data science and much of the reason for that has to do with the fact that there are lots of well first of all it’s open source so it’s open source project lots of people contributing and there are lots of tools lots of libraries that you can just import into your own workspace that already do lots of really cool data science things right so if I want to build a you know a random forest model well there are random Forest tools that I can just import right into my own workspace introduce them to my own particular data and they’ll build predictions for me you know straight out of the box and I don’t have to sort of create the model from scratch and so because of all these different libraries that are available on python really powerful flexible tool and you can get models up and running with really just a few lines of code because of all the work that’s already been done. Arsalan Ahmed: That’s great yeah python is is a great language for beginners but also for for people who are doing data science but I wonder why python because I don’t know what python is doing that is so different than say Ruby or Java there must be something maybe there’s there’s some built-in libraries that do certain things I’m assuming some some math functions that others don’t. Greg D’Amico: Yeah I think that’s right um so for example there are certain libraries of python that we introduced to our students in the first week because they will use them all the time um so for example there’s a package called numpy numerical python right and it’s basically a tool for scientific computer it’s a tool for doing you know sophisticated mathematics but it’s really fast right you can do sort of these vectorized operations you can add arrays together lightning quick you can multiply them you can do if you want to you can do scientific notation if you want to you can do complex numbers you can do trigonometry you can do all sorts of stuff another tool is pandas and pandas is the name I think comes from something like panel data and it used to be this sort of object type kind of called a panel it’s not really used much anymore but anyway really powerful tool for manipulating tables of data the sort of technical term in pandas is a data Frame data frame is just a basically just a big table of data and lots of really powerful tools for manipulating them quickly adding columns is you know just a line multiplying a column by a number is just a line of code adding columns together whatever you want to do filtering your data you know I’m only interested in you know rows that have this value and so on just really fast through adorable. Arsalan Ahmed: Really good yeah no I can imagine there is a reason why everybody is gravitating towards python either you can do really good websites MVC websites in Python you could start off as your first programming language and it’s easy enough but it has these Advanced features like this numerical Library you’re referring to yeah that’s good and the good news is it’s all free if you want to get started it’s free to get started and the libraries are probably also free this is this is the beauty of this open source ecosystem okay that’s all good but what kind of jobs can I do because my because if I’m thinking if someone is listening right now and they’re thinking okay that sounds interesting but complicated and I don’t want to commit to something where I may not see the return so what’s the return here what kind of jobs are available in what kind of experience they need to have. Greg D’Amico: Yeah it’s a good question I so um you know because data science is still relatively young I think there are lots of job titles that might be relevant um so most obviously things like data analysts data scientists but maybe also business analysts maybe also data engineer maybe also you know quantitative researcher or something like that statistician applied statistician machine learning engineer right so there are lots of different titles that are available I think any boot camp that’s where the salt should at least prepare students for a data analyst role and if you’re tackling a data analyst role probably you’re looking at a healthy amount of data visualization a healthy amount of interacting with databases using SQL maybe some maybe some non-sql databases as well too if you have some unstructured data uh but you know all that stuff I think is really Within Reach it’s a matter of learning the fundamentals of some of these tools which you know I think you can do in 15 weeks you know If you’re sort of dedicated to the study of these things you know learning the fundamentals can go a long way and you can do it pretty fast Arsalan Ahmed: Really good yeah no I can imagine there is a reason why everybody is gravitating towards python either you can do really good websites MVC websites in Python you could start off as your first programming language and it’s easy enough but it has these Advanced features like this numerical Library you’re referring to yeah that’s good and the good news is it’s all free if you want to get started it’s free to get started and the libraries are probably also free this is this is the beauty of this open source ecosystem okay that’s all good but what kind of jobs can I do because my because if I’m thinking if someone is listening right now and they’re thinking okay that sounds interesting but complicated and I don’t want to commit to something where I may not see the return so what’s the return here what kind of jobs are available in what kind of experience they need to have. Greg D’Amico: Yeah it’s a good question I so um you know because data science is still relatively young I think there are lots of job titles that might be relevant um so most obviously things like data analysts data scientists but maybe also business analysts maybe also data engineer maybe also you know quantitative researcher or something like that statistician applied statistician machine learning engineer right so there are lots of different titles that are available I think any boot camp that’s where the salt should at least prepare students for a data analyst role and if you’re tackling a data analyst role probably you’re looking at a healthy amount of data visualization a healthy amount of interacting with databases using SQL maybe some maybe some non-sql databases as well too if you have some unstructured data uh but you know all that stuff I think is really Within Reach it’s a matter of learning the fundamentals of some of these tools which you know I think you can do in 15 weeks you know If you’re sort of dedicated to the study of these things you know learning the fundamentals can go a long way and you can do it pretty fast. Arsalan Ahmed: That’s good to know so in other words if I know databases if I know my way around basically I can write queries I can I’m comfortable with with SQL databases let’s say that an old SQL server or Oracle or postgres or my SQL one of those and I know a little bit about mongodb or nosql unstructured sort of databases which scale better but I kind of know both I’m not an expert but I know enough and then I learned python instead of just the ins and outs of just a few basic concepts the syntax the loops and and so on the how to make a function how to make a some make something reusable things like that and then I look at the numerical libraries and some other very data science specific libraries and how to call them and what types of Errors I get and and so on and so forth now I I know that you would probably do a lot more in an actual flat iron data science boot camp but I think overall that the you can get a few things in so now I’ve graduated I’ve done my 15 weeks can I actually get a job right now or do I need to do further work or do I need to work for free for a while internships how do I actually get a paid job Greg D’Amico: Yeah so you know I I certainly can’t report that everybody who graduates from Flatiron has a job within a few weeks you know that’s that’s not reality but I can say that we do see graduates getting jobs and you know usually it’s probably on the order of three months something like that maybe three to six months sometimes faster um sometimes students will get sort of a paid internship or they’ll get sort of um you know temporary work they’ll have sort of contract jobs that’s certainly always possible so I think it’s realistic we you know we have a slack Channel devoted to students getting jobs you know and we’re sort of constantly updating it and constantly remarking on it like hey it sounds like a job that’s really great it’s really it’s really sort of our North Star so you know we’re in the business of making sure students get jobs you know we’re not we’re not interested in you know giving students a hard time or giving them lots of work to do we’re interested in getting a job Arsalan Ahmed: So obviously there is demand for data science the reason we are even having this conversation and the reason you got the job as an instructor is because there are people that want to learn and it is very very very relevant in these days where we have data everywhere as you said and we want to get some insights out of that and some large large companies definitely use it but you know other small players probably could use it as well that’s why it’s growing because people are waking up to the reality that this could be useful or a competitive Advantage so they don’t want their competitors to have all the advantage so it’s going to grow it it has to grow but as a young person I know that there are jobs as software developers just rate Up full stack developers I know there are jobs in in infrastructure networking there are jobs in database management even testing lots of jobs are out there so what kind of a person or what type of a person or a young person should pick data science over let’s say full stack development or do you think it do you think you need to be a certain type of person who has a a certain way of working or learning that would succeed in data science. Greg D’Amico: Yeah I so I think I would say you know that there obviously is a quite a bit of overlap in the sort of skills required between data science and other types of software engineering roles or web development roles I think data science especially caters to people who are just have a sort of Natural Curiosity about things you know they’re interested in in solving problems um you know Netflix Works in part because it solved the problem you know how many people watch a TV show and then sort of Wonder well I finished that what should I watch next you know Netflix has a really good way of answering that right because they can say well here’s all these other people that we know about they watch that show that you just watched they also watched all these other things right probably you’d be interested in that too okay and then so it’s sort of easy for you to say oh well yeah I guess I’ll give that a shot and it’s really effective right because tastes are often you know not as fine-grained as the millions or thousands of movies and TV shows that exist it’s like I have a taste for westerns so if I like that Western all these other people watch that Western they also watched this other Western I should give that a shot so you know if you have a sort of interest in sympathy for solving that kind of problem working with that sort of issue then I think data science is for you. Arsalan Ahmed: Okay so good and I’m imagining a situation where someone starts off as a developer it’s getting boring not exciting anymore they can say let me try data science I know python already I know databases I don’t know anything about data science but I’ll just go study on the side the nights and weekends I’ll do some I’ll find some resources blogs books whatever and I’ll do something for six months and then I’ll try my luck maybe I’ll get a job as a data scientist and then or somebody started as a data scientist they just didn’t like the work and they would say well I know python now I know a little bit about databases let me see if I can be a full stack developer so you could switch between those right. Greg D’Amico: Definitely definitely I think you know again I do think there’s a fair bit of verbal out there certainly you know some of the lectures the data science students here would be useful for full stack students and vice versa so yeah I think once you’ve started opening your mind up to all the different tools that Tech has to offer then yeah it shouldn’t be a big deal to try to switch between the different levels well boot camps. Arsalan Ahmed: What they’re not the money right now but they are interested and they want to pursue this what are some free resources that they can use Greg D’Amico: yeah one of my favorites is called codewars.com okay I don’t know if people know this but it’s basically just coding practice. Arsalan Ahmed: I thought it was a first person shooter game, but not okay so it’s like lead code. Greg D’Amico: Yeah it’s it’s sort of got this kind of Asian martial arts theme to it ah but basically it’s a bunch of problems like write a function that does blah blah and you can do this in just about any language that you can think of I forget how many languages are supported but it’s you know I think it’s about 50 or something at this point so you can click on python you can click on R you can click on you know other data science languages or something else you know you could click on on C if you want to if you want to get deeper to the machine as it were lots of cool problems you know you can just sort of work on building up your understanding of syntax and you know it’ll show you if you don’t get it right it’ll show you what sort of problems you’re getting it’ll print out error messages for you so really useful really nice way to sort of level up your your coding ability I think there are also lots of um e-books and things online about about some uh resources like python um stack Overflow I probably everybody says this but stack Overflow is a really nice resource yeah lots of people post questions about hey I’m getting this sort of error or you know why is it that this seems to work and this thing doesn’t and lots of smart people answer you know lots of really good resources there too so you know I think if if somebody were really interested in data science and really wanted what was really starting from scratch you know you could really Google data science 101 or something like that and you would find some good resources you know there’s just there’s just so much out there on the web right now I think I think it’s pretty easy to get started. Arsalan Ahmed: Yeah I can imagine and one of the best ways of people switching careers or moving up or or having a kind of a sideways transition is to find perhaps something else that happening in your own company right now if you’re working you’re working for a large corporation and you’re doing QA which is fun but you want to do something more exciting maybe you want to go to data science go some do some research maybe there is a data science department and you will have I mean those people who already are working there they have an easier time getting in and a lot of times you may not be able to get the job that you really want but you could Shadow People you could make friends there you could start having lunches or coffee breaks over there and you can pick up things and they may be able to refer you to another company where they are hiring or you know maybe just let you work on something and put something on the resume because I think that would be the most important thing in general software development this is key you need lots of projects in your resume so that not only that it shows that you have done some work it shows that you have finished projects but it also shows that you you can handle it and so the problem with data science is it seems to be that you need big data and if I if you’re if you’re in high school you you don’t have big data right you’re not Procter Gamble that it needs to sell to uh consumers so that would be the problem I think it would not necessarily be super easy to get working on it and actually produce and show amazing results if unless you’re working in that kind of environment and I’m assuming I don’t really know but I’m assuming there might be some open source data sets or something that people can just use to hone their skills a little bit Greg D’Amico: Yeah there are there are some good projects that I’ve seen that were done on small data sets you know it’s still possible if the data sets are sort of interesting enough definitely so you know that’s that’s definitely a possibility there are also lots of uh cloud services that people can utilize to handle big data you know so maybe I can’t hold this whole data set on my machine and tap into virtual machines courtesy of Google or Amazon or something. Arsalan Ahmed: Do you think this is really tied to machine learning because I hear a lot about this where you can show a picture to a program and it can actually show you similar pictures because you have trained it using artificial intelligence neural networks and all of that good stuff but actually it can see patterns once it knows what you’re looking for once you train it then you can see patterns is that would you call that data science open source datasets or something that people can just use to hone their skills a little bit Greg D’Amico: Oh yeah yeah I’d say that’s a branch of it too because ultimately it’s really just another type of model you know a neural network is it’s a model really it’s just a really fancy sort of model right I’ve introduced the machine to thousands of images maybe millions of images there are networks like this around and if I feed it labels for different images you know I say I just gave you an image of a cat right that’s a cat image of a dog here’s 10 000 more images of cats here’s ten thousand limited Vlogs and airplanes and houses and whatever else well you know there are lots of ways that you could depict a cat right but if you have a nice diversity of cats some of them are standing up some of them are lying down some of them are awake some of them are asleep some of them are black some of them are white etc etc right well then what the computer is going to be learning to figure out what constitutes a cat is not you know it’s not just some particular arrangement of pixels uh it’s some very complicated pattern right it’s yeah well it might look sort of like that or maybe they’re more like this you know and if pixels of the image are basically themselves The Columns of data that I’m building my model on right and then it’s the same principles same principles apply pretty cool Arsalan Ahmed: Alright people want to get in touch with you so who can they do that. Greg D’Amico: Yeah you can certainly find me on LinkedIn um if you look for Greg damico at flatironmental LinkedIn I’m also G A b-a-m-i-c-o on GitHub so happy to happy to have people reach out to me yeah Arsalan Ahmed: Thank you so much for being part of the show and helping us Greg D’Amico: Thank you so much, appreciated. Arsalan Ahmed: So, I have been working on an online space Online Academy where you get mentorship, where you get a really good Technical and non-technical education. But also a caring environment where people care about you and feel safe. Where you feel like you will make it because there are people who actually have empathy toward you. They’re going to help you succeed because of all of being there. So stay tuned for that. This is going to be pretty big in 2023.Hopefully, we will start with a nice good cohort of people building up steam as we go. All right. People, this has been a pleasure, see you later. Outro: For show notes and transcripts visit us at mentoring Developers.com Show Notes: List of topics The reason behind the success of Amazon. How Data Science takes businesses to the next level. How Data Science helps to improve education for students. Which tools do Data Scientists use for their work? Why are people gravitating toward Python? Can a programmer become a Data Scientist Important Links Flatiron School: https://flatironschool.com/ Codewars: https://codewars.com My GitHub: https://github.com/gadamico My LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/greg-damico Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@itsarsalan Thanks for Listening! Do you have some feedback or some advice for us or our audience? Please give us a review on iTunes, Spotify , Google Podcasts, or Stitcher and share your thoughts. If you found this episode useful, please go ahead and share it with your friends and family. You can also listen directly and give your feedback on the website. You can subscribe to Mentoring Developers via iTunes , Stitcher Radio , Spotify , or Google Podcasts .…

Mentoring Developers

1
Episode 90

2 years ago

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“Kim started her software engineering career during the pandemic from scratch. She lost her job and started learning code from a bootcamp. In 4 months she got a job as a software engineer. Watch as she describes her experience. Kim Luu: BIO: My whole life’s purpose is to be helpful to other people. Originally, that desire led me to pursue a career in hospitality, where I could directly impact the one-to-one consumer experience through her attention to detail, clear communication, and forward thinking. After moving to the US, I regained touch with my innate curiosity. Through the perspectives of new friends I’ve made in the US, I realize that I had long ago shut off a valuable part of my mind – one that was more about seeking and exploring. But this led me to a career crossroads. I started looking into other options, harkening back to her childhood self, when her desire for answers sent her on interesting rabbit trails that led to even more questions. I was always looking for things and asking questions and making things that were crafty. I started thinking, what can bring me that sort of excitement again? A friend suggested me try coding but I brushed off the idea at first because I’d never worked with computers in any serious way. Then one day, I decided to try it on a whim, taught myself some Javascript and enrolled to Hack Reactor’s immersive program. I realized that with software engineering, I can make an even bigger impact because the world is changing so fast, only software can keep up. After the bootcamp, I landed her current job as a Software Engineer at Intellivision Entertainment, a company whose mission is to unite people through affordable, family-friendly entertainment. work on the infrastructure cloud team, doing backend work to build out services for consumers. I have a lot of autonomy on the job, but simultaneously feels like part of a passionate, supportive team with mentors and coworkers all working together toward common goals. Episode Transcription: Intro: This is the mentoring developer’s podcast. Episode 90. Welcome to mentoring developers. The podcast for new and aspiring software developers where we discuss your struggles anxieties and career choices. And now here’s your host Arsalan, Ahmed. In this episode of mentoring developers, Guest Bio: I’ll be talking to Kim. Lou, I think you’re going to love listening to, and hearing her story because Kim embodies everything. We talked about everything we’re about on this platform mentoring developers. So, if you’re a new developer, you want to be a developer, or you are a girl, or if you’re an immigrant, or, if you’re somebody who doesn’t have any background in Tech and you don’t know, a lot of people That can guide you in sort of help, you should listen to this episode. Kim came from the hospitality industry and she was also not born in the US. But after she moved to America she decided that she needed to have a fresh start. She loved helping people. So She got into a code, bootcamp coding boot camp. Folks, he went in there for, I guess, a few months, maybe three or four months but within four months of joining in the middle of this covid pandemic she found a job. She found a job, it’s a struggle look obviously. All first jobs are going to be a struggle, but she made it and she learned enough to get her foot in the door, which is Really the most important thing until it’s the neck. The next most important thing is to get your second job and your third job. And finally, establishing yourself and getting the first job is the hardest part. She did it. And now she is a software engineer, in television entertainment, been the company’s amazing. It’s a startup company that is doing some amazing things. We’re gonna pick this conversation from the time that she just started her new job. I think it was a month into it. This is in 2020. And now it’s 2021. So she has been doing this for a while and I checked up on her and she’s still doing great. So this is going to be a great episode for you if you’re not sure if you got it, if you can make it then. New updates about the style of the Podcast: Yeah. Listen to this episode. Oh, and if you have been a long-time listener of mentoring developers, your lord is the format is a little bit different. So is going to be some White’s over questions and we’re gonna cut right to her answers, keep it short and simple or we’re trying this new thing out and hope you like it. All right, we’re also on YouTube now and we’re on Spotify, we’re on iTunes, and Google podcast, and apple podcast, and everywhere you get Podcast. So check us out on all these platforms. All right, let’s go. Let’s get started. Kim Luu: Hi, I’m good. Thank you for having me. Arsalan Ahmed: Alright, let me ask you a few questions. So tell us the story of how you got your first job during the covid pandemic. Kim Luu: So the beginning of the bent pandemic, I lost my job because like all the hospitality and just to show employer-employee I was thinking about becoming a software engineer for a long time, but I didn’t have that encouragement to switch. Mike I just still feel like I will waste it on my own, for my effort, to what I already have pursued at the time. But my dependent happen and I lost my job. And I was thinking, I have to do my time to do something, and I was thinking, should I taught myself how to cope? And I was thinking, how can I do that? I could use Like, on my free platform, YouTube tutorials, or whatever to talk myself to take myself, but I feel like I’m looking better in a class environment. So we’re thinking, do I want to do a four-year degree in some University? And then I went to YouTube and I try to talk to myself. I try to teach myself a little bit and I found out that there’s something called bootcamp coding that you can learn how to code in three months and I found out there are a few of them that really good.So, I taught myself a little bit of squid to pass the interview into the boot camp. And then from there, I went into the program and thinnest it. And after two months after the boot camp, I got my first job. Arsalan Ahmed: Wow, that’s an incredible story. Was it like going to a demanding coding boot? Well, we work really hard in the boot camp, Kim Luu: We work sick days a week, 11 hours a day and we learn all those things to amend from compelling nothing. I didn’t even know what a parameter is, what a function is, or what a conditional statement is. I have nothing didn’t know anything and after three months, I can create a full stack application and that is just amazing to me during The Bootcamp, The Pack reactor really have a really good program but they don’t Hold Your Hand a lot. Do you have to learn a lot yourself and what they call it? They teach you to be a tournament and that is the most beneficial of a hack reactor to me. Because after that, I will have to learn things myself. But that is also the hardest thing is that from no background from know nothing about soft engineering. I have to cut a dick into the dig it out myself and learn myself based on whatever I was provided in the boot camp. Arsalan Ahmed: Which Technologies were you taught in your boot camp? Kim Luu: So, for the back end, And database, we learn SQL database or NoSQL database SQL database. We learn my SQL or post cacique or NoSQL in MongoDB. Mostly MongoDB for NoSQL from the server. We mostly Express server and in the front and we use React and I really like reaction in because it’s just really easy to work with and really They are two weeks in the cold for now. But in my job right now, I’m worth more in the back end, which creates servers and databases. Aw, F and that stuff. And I really miss working with React and the front end and seeing what the result came out. How the website looks like, Arsalan Ahmed: How did you approach looking for your first job out of bootcamp? Kim Luu: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, back to what you talk about, But the third job I plan on to be picky on my first job at all. I just want a job. Even if they don’t pay me, I was willing to work with for start-up which is share, that they gave me or whatever they gave me, but for the new boot camp grad or new people. Into entering into this software engineer Bill don’t be afraid and don’t be picky with your first job because if you learn something, if you want to learn something and learn from the guy and we can do whatever you want to work on their project I actually my first job is great and I love every bit of it. My company is in Astoria but I’m happy to start at work because I can learn. I can work on different parts of the project that taught those teeth me a lot and work with a lot of good, senior software engineers that you were really good at mentoring and great to work with at this company. Arsalan Ahmed: What is the cost of going to a really good coding bootcamp like hack react? Kim Luu: Yeah. hack reactor cough. I think about eighteen thousand dollars but do you can do they have a Financial option or can you do a share? They call an income share program where you only pay back the tuition after you get a job and they have to be a minimum payment of sixty thousand dollars a year. So, you have to know to Do a little bit of JavaScript before and you have to do the interview to play a technical interview with any company later to get a job. So, to get into a program, you have to do the technical interview and if they accept you, you can go between the Financial options that they provide Arsalan Ahmed: Where the classes are virtual during the pandemic, or In person? Kim Luu: Yes, it’s all both Shelley to lose zoom and it’s actually better like that because if I was happy if I Have to admit to the boot camp campers then it will be like two hours of the day that I have to Camille on this on the arrow, but I can do that to our to get some rest. Or to thank God or to keep coding because I need a lot of time to learn that’s our thing because it’s only three months and we work from. So the class starts from 9:00 to 8:00 p.m. but we actually walked past that APM to whatever time that we can fix that bug. That we can pass that problem. So that wrap is really intense for three months but it will be worth it. It’s it, if you really want it, I really recommend going to boot camp to buy a hack, reactor. Because for me, I not only learned technical skills. I learned a lot of talk to you in there too like pair programming and after that, they have a really good job placement program for you also talk to You about like making material, like, resume cover letters. Give you a few programs, and a few projects that you can put on your resume as on your LinkedIn. But if you like to work in my room, I mean that you’ll be yourself exploring things and learning. when the new technology of all whatever framework that you like is not a problem either and just in this symmetry really is exploring things in addition to classes at Simon’s. Do boot camps, and offer guidance and mentoring. And if they do, what does it look like? Yes. So they have. Yeah. So they have the resident. The mental is there to help you if you get stuck, we usually do pair programming during the day.So like it’s not only me on this project but I work with somebody and we would go out brainstorming, options throughout our ideas. And what if we do this, what I would do that? And if we get stuck for too long, then we can submit a ticket for somebody to jump in to help and it’s always good to try to learn it yourself. First, try to think about it really carefully. Try to use whatever source at that, you can like the internet YouTube or whatever you can use for you to submit a ticket to somebody, coming to help you. And that is also, what would look like when you get a real job, you will have to figure out yourself first before you come in and ask some senior engineer to help you out. Arsalan Ahmed: One of the things that I think is on the minds of a lot of listeners is, how hard is it to be accepted. Or is it hard at all to be accepted as a software engineer without many years of experience and education? Just going through a boot camp. Kim Luu: Well, I don’t, I really don’t. They asked me a lot of questions about, why I wanted to be a software engineer. Why I switched my career and do I like it or whatever like that? And it’s not surprising to me because I am in my resume and my LinkedIn shows that I don’t have any. Any background in computer science. And I just started, like, six months ago, four months ago, actually, and then but it is not a problem for them, actually, because The matter that the thing that matters most is that I have the ability to learn, and I have the attitude of the right attitude to work with this company and to be a part of a team. So they didn’t really expect much. I don’t think they expect much of my technical skills. But they did think that I could be a good asset to the team wagon. I can learn and evolve in my career later. Arsalan Ahmed: How did you prepare for your first interviews? Get your first job. Kim Luu: Yeah, this is interesting because of the jaw payment program from hack reactor. I learn a lot of things I did a lot of lead Coast problems and I learned all those things like they all do interview process like first, they would do in a phone interview and then the phone and then like a small coding problem and then they will do a bigger calling problem and then they will want. You to talk about like take-home problem or talk about your project, whatever like that. But because this company is a start-up, they didn’t really follow that pattern at all. The first interview lay on the first into the UI into it, with engineers in the and I ever watches the invitation which is 15. In minutes. So I thought it was just a phone screen when they get to know each other, you know but it wasn’t, they asked multiple question technical questions and all those things, and turn out. I did pretty good and I got to the second interview. This time was with Fi engineers. And this time they want me to talk about one of the Projects on my resume so I talking about it and show them my code. I was thinking before I got into the interview this time they definitely gonna make me do some kind of legal program problem, but they didn’t. And it turns out that the project that I’m working on a really close to what the job requirement was. So They make a decision to move me forward to the next interview, which is with the feel,And after the interview with the CEO about that job, Arsalan Ahmed: Did you find it overwhelming? In your first job when you started right out of a coding bootcamp opposed to going to college and Rigorous training putting bootcamp is sort of a shortcut but it has some advantages and disadvantages. it was it overwhelming a job? Kim Luu: It was really overwhelming. Well, this is during the pandemic. So we own work at home, work from home and it’s just a little bit different onboarding process because I didn’t go to work. And so we met up on zoom on a zoom call and my supervisor SI me to attack. I’m Gera the day before that, and I will looking at it and I was like, Oh my God. What is it? What? I freaked out and then they gave me a tour of the code base and I just said don’t I didn’t think I can do this. I was like, should I quit right now to save my face? And it’s a, it’s a really it’s a that my first size here is a server and my supervisor’s car showed me that he already will another server that was can look into it. And kind of learn and could copy something and then just need to modify some stuff. And at first, it just even though I know that they were already something that I can start from. But first I should I have to like to read through that code Bay and understand everything that only cost me like. That one really took me like two days or three days to do that and now I’m done I have to put on that all my configuration for the court to what? Probably for the test? What properties? And that takes a little bit more and but after one weekI starts to take it in and start to get used to the code base and everything. And after a week and a half, I finished that project, that Tascam jela, and that feel, who that feels great. Arsalan Ahmed: It is hard when you’re starting, especially, especially when you’re a new developer. You can through a coding bootcamp, but didn’t get easy after the first week or so as a new developer in your first job. Kim Luu: No, actually. Well the second thing that I got it sighs, I was a little trickier because I don’t have any like format to follow anymore. I have to kind of buy it myself and still I feel like learning right now and it’s great to have a good team that always be willing to answer your question. And as a new software engineer, I feel like if you’re afraid, Sometimes, but, but I have to tell myself every day that is good to ask questions and don’t be afraid to ask questions. If you don’t ask questions then there’s no way that you can learn. And I’m so, yeah, I’m so grateful to work with a team where my senior engineer always be very helpful and always be willing to answer my questions. Arsalan Ahmed: All right. So how long have you been working at your first job? Kim Luu: It’s actually only a month. Yeah, one month. Arsalan Ahmed : Is there anything at all? That you’re really passionate about Kim Luu: my passion right now. I don’t really do anything to say coding. I’m still new. So I try to spend a lot of our and engaged, to get things done because I know that would be evaluated based on how fast I can do things, but I’m still learning. So, I try to spend a lot of hours a day, to figure out what I’m doing now and the fact that I’m going to stick with my career for the rest of my life. Probably. Yeah. So I would really do encoding right now. That’s my one thing right now. Arsalan Ahmed: All right, Kim. So if people want to get in touch with you, how can they do that? Kim Luu: Oh, they can go to my LinkedIn can Kima h, l uu and yeah, if you need any advice, if you need, if you have any question, begin kid needs someone to talk to if you and the early stage of learning up switching careers. Yeah, hit me up and I’ll answer your question. Arsalan Ahmed: Thank you so much for being part of the show and helping us understand what it’s like to be a bootcamp graduate. What it’s like to struggle. All of us. Struggle, right? That’s a little secret. We all struggle. We all have struggled and we struggled, but we will overcome our struggles, through perseverance, through the guidance of podcasts, like these podcasts, and going through coding boot camps and college campuses. Mentors and talking to men surrounding yourself with people who care. Kim Luu: Thank you, and thank you for having me. I love to share my experience. And for the people out there, the one that switches careers that you grab from boot camp. Don’t be afraid of life. So apply for that job, and you get it. Arsalan Ahmed: So, I have been working on an online space Online Academy where you get mentorship, where you get really good Technical and non-technical education. But also a caring environment where people care about you and feel safe. Where you feel like you will make it because there are people actually have empathy toward you. They’re going to help you succeed because of all of being there. So stay tuned for that. This is going to be pretty big in 2023. Arsalan Ahmed: Hopefully, we will start with a nice good cohort of people building up steam as we go. All right. People this has been a pleasure to you later Outro: for show notes and transcripts visit us at mentoring Developers.com, Important Links LINKS Thanks for Listening! Do you have some feedback or some advice for us or our audience? Please give us a review on iTunes, Spotify , Google Podcasts, or Stitcher and share your thoughts. If you found this episode useful, please go ahead and share it with your friends and family. You can also listen directly and give your feedback on the website. You can subscribe to Mentoring Developers via iTunes , Stitcher Radio , Spotify , or Google Podcasts .…

Mentoring Developers

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Episode 89 – Burton on design systems and KickStand-UI

4 years ago

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We discuss why UI design systems are important and how can they help you. Also, Burton gives us a demo of Kickstand UI – a design system he created. Watch the video to see how it can consistently help you make usable and accessible websites. YouTube Demo: https://youtu.be/n-tuU-PlTvE Burton’s Bio: Burton Smith is a senior software engineer at Bunzl North America where he works with internal business stakeholders and external customers to build digital solutions. He is the creator of the Clarion style framework for design systems ( projectclarion.com ) as well as Kickstand UI which is a design system based on web components that can be used everywhere ( kickstand-ui.com ). In his free time, he loves spending time with his wife and three daughters, practicing martial arts, jamming on his ukulele, and learning new things (usually about software engineering). Important Links Burton Smith’s Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/stuffbreaker LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/burton-smith-48132a34/ E-Mailing: burton@breakstuff.io YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xmSi1ytopsssR1i3kKveg Thanks for Listening! Do you have some feedback or some advice for us or our audience? Please give us a review on iTunes, Spotify , Google Podcasts, or Stitcher and share your thoughts. If you found this episode useful, please go ahead and share it with your friends and family. You can also listen directly and give your feedback on the website. You can subscribe to Mentoring Developers via iTunes , Stitcher Radio , Spotify , or Google Podcasts .…

Mentoring Developers

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Episode 88 – Burton Smith: How To Breakthrough In Tech

4 years ago