Networking

(electronic music) - Offer to give a talk at a meetup where they do presentations. And the thing that I tell people is, you'd be surprised, regardless of how mundane you think your job is, whether it's building software, testing software, just going through and adding features to some old piece of software, it doesn't matter, because you have some expertise that other people are dying to know more about. And the way that I say to think of it is, think of yourself as a tour guide. You're a tour guide on whatever. You're a tour guide on how to use Git in your daily life. Just giving a 30 minute, 60 minute presentation about little tips and tricks you found out about using Git, people will eat it up, people will love it. We, as engineers, tend to be introvert and sometimes that is to our detriment at work because we're the person that doesn't speak up. You're the person that's smart and has lots of ideas, but never puts them out there. But you can go to these meetups, give a presentation to probably the friendliest audience you'll ever meet, because everybody understands that hey, she took time out of her busy day to come down and share some knowledge about Git with us. Thank you, we appreciate it. It doesn't matter if you stutter a little bit, if you mess a few things up, people respect you because you're voluntarily giving up some information. And information is the most valuable thing out there. - Social media is a great contributor and tool to use in networking. We all know how important networking is, whether you're working with people down the hall or people around the world, making a personal connection though is vitally important to whatever networking tools you're using. It sort of reminds me of long ago when people were worried about the telephone and how the telephone was going to diminish people's ability to interact person-to-person. And we hear people now talking about, the only thing people know how to do is text, text and email, and they never talk to each other anymore. Using an older tool, using the telephone to maintain those connections, maintain getting together occasionally, talking with each other, is vitally important to strengthening the networks that you build electronically. - In terms of getting to know the developer more, some examples include doing a pair programming exercise with the developer, reviewing their code, and then talking about their code and areas where they did great and areas where you could see some improvements. It's providing some honest feedback on their code reviews. Just things like this. They don't cost time, they don't cost money, they're actionable. It really comes down to putting the effort to get to know these developers and collaborating with them and sharing your knowledge. - What I'm doing nowadays, and I find it's very effective, is for example, ReasonML. I'm joining their community. Some of the discussions that go on are way above my head because they're talking about the internals of the language, which I am not familiar with. But some of the discussions are from people who are using it, and knowing who these people are and what they're working on really helps to, again, get a feeling that you're part of the whole thing. (electronic music)