Mentorship

- If I can build a team where I can help five or six people become even a little bit more productive, then that means that I've had a bigger impact than if I were just writing code by myself, regardless of how productive I could be as an individual. If I could go out into the world and I can identify six more women or six more people of color or six more pick your favorite under-represented group here and get them onto the speaker circuit and get them speaking, that will have a huge impact far beyond any code that I could possibly write. Even just, there are some guys working for me now who they're just starting to get into speaking. And if I can turn them into the next Neil Forbe, Garner Strustrip, whatever. Just by giving them room to grow and encouraging that growth. Who cares what code I wrote. That's not going to be the long-lasting impact. - I also get the opportunity to teach people how to do things, which is ... You know, just when you think about it what I tell them is going to influence how they do their jobs and how they create websites. And that's kind of really an awesome power to have. And then a couple of years ago, I started teaching and that's also an awesome power is just to shape people as they're starting their web development careers, and make sure they know the right way to do the work, that they're coming up with good products that have accessibility and usability and follow web standards. It's exciting to see how my students grow and people that have heard me speak at conferences, they'll come back and say, "I did that thing you told us about and I just worked awesome." And it's just exciting to have that happen. - You know, somebody asked me one time cause I was teaching junior developers to do my job. And they said, "Aren't you worried that you're going to teach yourself out of a job." (laughs) I said, no. Because I'm learning new things all the time. And so, then we're just making ... Now, our whole team is better together. And it's not me versus them. We're all together and we're learning. So, no, I don't worry about teaching myself out of a job. - I would say that other developers could mentor junior developers or even developers that don't have the same technology knowledge. I mean, without a one-upmanship, you're like trying to stay on the bleeding edge or anything. But what an every day developers use to make their career more successful. - Sometimes that's having a mentor or two, somebody that you can just bounce things off of. You know, you don't want to use that as your first line. You don't want to always going to the person next to you or somebody that you chat with and just say, "Hey, I ran into the problem. What do I do?" But when you've exhausted those avenues and you're really stumped, every so often being able to turn to a person and say, "Hey, this is what's going on. I'm just not seeing it." Now, the other thing that I've found really useful and I didn't know there was a name for this until recently, it's called rubber ducky programming. And the idea is that, if you have a problem, before you go to another person, you grab an inanimate object, and so often that's represented as a rubber duck but it can be anything, and you explain the problem to that inanimate object. And often we find that in the process of explaining the problem, we have to identify things that we maybe were ignoring while we were working on it. And the next step, at least, becomes obvious if not the solution.