A Major Career Pivot
I studied Computer Engineering (basically a combination of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering) in college in Canada, graduated in 1996. I began my career as a firmware developer after a brief stay at QNX doing technical support and “pre-sales engineering.” I enjoyed helping people and working on custom code for customers, but I didn’t spend 4 years learning the ins and outs of computers and hardware just to answer a support phone.
While working as a firmware developer near Ottawa, Ontario, I learned web development, taught some friends, and we started a business doing basic web development projects and small-scale web hosting. I started technical blogging to share what I was up to, and started building open-source software.
In the spring of 2000 I responded to a job post for a technical teaching position at a private college in downtown Ottawa. I had been a paid tutor at my college and had a few years of development experience, so I was confident in sharing what I knew and helping others learn.
I made it through several stages of interviews, and the final interview step was to actually teach a class made up of other teachers at the college. No pressure, right? But the timing was off and they couldn’t get enough teachers together, and so the college put the final interviews on hold for all candidates. While I waited months for an update, I took a small vacation to Florida which led to a job offer in California. Mid-June 2000 I packed everything I owned and left Ottawa.
My first 6 months in California I agonized whether I’d made the right move: to a new country, to a state where I only knew 2 or 3 people, in a job with a bad manager. Had I made the wrong decision about that teaching role?
That Christmas, while visiting family back in Canada, I interviewed for new work back in Ottawa. But then the dot-com bust happened in early 2001. My California job was at a startup which processed credit reports, so I suddenly had all kinds of job security. While at this job, I met my future wife and one of my favorite dating stories was hanging out in a lab where she was learning PHP and MySQL and I was able to help some folks in the lab who had questions. It brought back the idea of being a teacher. Elizabeth went on to become a college teacher herself.
I continued to share knowledge while at subsequent jobs: I blogged more, I started going to meetups, I kept releasing open-source projects and trying to contribute to other projects.
And then I ended up at SendGrid. My quickest and closest colleagues at work were the Developer Relations team. Elmer Thomas and Brandon West especially.
Wait, people actually get paid to travel, teach people things, and work on open-source?! Dream job!! But I was a Lead Engineer at SendGrid, and with a wife and kids at home I was happy to settle on “local” events, helping at conferences and hackathons and speaking at meetups. Don’t get me wrong, I like to travel, but there’s a reason why typical traveling DevRel reps only have an 18-month career span. I was content to “play” at Developer Relations.
This led to me doing more talks on non-SendGrid topics, I’m even scheduled to give a talk next week about using Agile in a startup environment for a small company in Boulder. I continue to find myself mentoring and teaching outside of work, usually for free. I had gone all-in on Linux in college (Slackware at the time), and the idea of open-source knowledge has never left me.
Share what you know.
A colleague at SendGrid suggested I get in touch with Jeff Casimir at the Turing School of Software and Design in Denver. They were two blocks from the SendGrid office and needed tutors and mentors. Rachel Warbelow and I chatted for a while and I joined Turing as a volunteer mentor. My mentorship theme quickly hyper-focused on career counseling and technical interview preparation. Turing had enough technical mentors but they needed external help on resume prep and career readiness.
My hour or two per week involvement grew from over the next three years to where I am today: volunteering about 20 hours a week on top of a full-time job. I run a free weekly technical interview preparation class. I have a free daily interview prep email series you can join. I do several mock interviews for Turing students and do resume reviews on weekends. I do technical coaching to folks who need unbiased advice. I co-organize a Denver-based CoderDojo class to teach kids about coding. I also co-organize an 1,100 member Python meetup group in Boulder.
My current role is Developer Relations at Stream. We’re a successful Techstars graduate company based in Boulder and Amsterdam providing an API for developers to quickly add activity feeds and social timelines into their applications. And I LOVE my job: all the cool stuff about DevRel like teaching and blogging and open-source and meetups, but almost none of the travel. (side note, we’re hiring!)
I realized this spring that, while Turing continues to grow, my time is not scalable. And when I was tired and needed a break, I’d take a night off, catch up on some TV or a movie, and my first instinct every time is “man, I could be helping someone right now.”
I began to reach out to other volunteer mentors to assist with mock interviews, and moved my one-on-one interview prep session to the Monday night group class. By sharing what I know, that advice can spread quicker through others.
“I made a difference to that one.”
My passion for teaching runs in a similar vein. As a developer, we all have some type of desire to “change the world.” The chances we’ll ever work on technology that ACTUALLY changes the world is slim at best.
As a mentor I’ve offered career and interview advice to about 350 alumni at Turing alone, as well as some of the teaching staff. I’ve helped them understand coding challenges. I’ve consoled them after bad interviews. I’ve sent notes of encouragement to never give up. I’ve reviewed hundreds of revisions of resumes and coached them on technical interview tips.
I may never change the actual world we live in. The chances I create a piece of software that transforms everyday life for 7 billion people is so remote as to be laughable. Few, if any, people will remember my name 100 years from now.
But I CAN change the world for you if you’re interested in learning how technology can help YOU change something about your world. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll follow my lead and mentor and teach others, too.
Share what you know, and we all win.
Make a difference in someone else’s world.
But do so out a genuine sense for just being helpful to someone else.
My Pivot
Jeff Casimir and I had chatted very casually in the past about joining Turing as a teacher, but there were hurdles at the time that made it impossible to join. This summer, though, Jeff surprised me with a message one day asking what it would take to join Turing and become a full-time teacher. I would later tell Jeff that my initial reaction was 50% imposter syndrome (could I actually do this full-time?) and 50% “it’s about freakin’ time you asked.”
I’m excited to start a new career as a full-time instructor at Turing beginning in October, 2017. I’ve got 21 years of experience to share, stories to tell, and laughable amounts of what NOT to do in certain scenarios. I’d be lying if I said imposter syndrome wasn’t nagging at me, though, or that I wasn’t scared at the enormity of this career change.
I’m enormously grateful to Jeff and the team at Turing for putting their trust in me, and I’m looking forward to the next phase of life as I step away from full time software development.
And to the alumni of Turing who are sending in messages of support, much love to all of you, especially those leaving these kinds of messages:
So what about Stream, you ask? We’re still working out the details, but all sides are hopeful that I can continue to contribute to Stream’s success in some way.
