A Day in the Life of a Developer with Myles Young

Well hello treehouse festival. 0:01 I'm Dr. Tony de Santo and director of learning here at treehouse, and 0:04 I'll be your cohost actually for this week. 0:08 It is my pleasure to introduce our next guest. 0:11 He is a young, junior engineer at a company here in Atlanta Georgia. 0:15 In his role he is responsible for enhancing user payment experience, 0:21 squashing bugs, [INAUDIBLE] please welcome Myles Young to the stage. 0:27 >> My name is Myles Young. 0:33 I'm a full stack developer over in Atlanta, Georgia. 0:34 I've been doing this for about a year now. 0:37 And it's been a great experience so far. 0:39 I'm just tell you a little bit of information about me. 0:42 I'm a son of a friend, so many boyfriend a brother. 0:44 I'm a bit younger than most people. 0:49 I'm 21 years old, so my favorite TV shows are Drake and Josh and Spongebob. 0:50 [LAUGH] Yeah, I'm always trying to learn something new, 0:55 just to be better than yesterday. 0:58 I'm constantly focused on that end-goal. 1:00 So, you can call me weird, but that's just how I do things. 1:03 [LAUGH] So, Just a little background about how I actually began coding. 1:08 I used to be a full time student taking 12 credit hours like in college. 1:13 I was a part time manager at a fortune 500 company and 1:18 I take it on treehouse as an extra initiative to try and better myself. 1:22 So if you wanna talk about no time to breathe, I'm the right guy to talk to. 1:26 So when I went through the tech degree program with treehouse, it took a lot 1:32 of studying and consistency just to be able to make it through that program. 1:38 Because for a person like me who barely has time for much, 1:43 I had to make sure that I was getting in these hours of studying and 1:47 working and asking for help. 1:52 And the value that I got out of that, was very critical in remaining 1:55 consistent with asking for help and also providing help to others. 1:59 Cuz if you can explain something to someone else it helps to 2:04 solidify that understanding in your own mind. 2:08 So, as far as working goes, I was working very constantly 2:12 just like your air conditioning in the summer. 2:16 [LAUGH] So, what is a full stack engineer? 2:20 That is someone who performs back end and front end related code. 2:24 And the difference between the two is front end is what the user is 2:30 going to see, like if I apply animation on the page like that's front end. 2:34 Back end is how I could get some specific user data from our database 2:39 to show up on the screen, is that communication between the two. 2:43 I've been doing this for about a year now and it's been a great experience. 2:48 Really, really great experience. 2:53 I do all types of things nowadays, 2:54 like I perform experiments to just test out new features. 2:57 Like let's see how users respond to something in particular. 3:02 I'll do some bug fixes. 3:06 Currently for the company I work for I'm in the payments, section, payments team. 3:09 And there's a lot of high intensity work over there, trust me. 3:15 And also just working collaboratively with my team to 3:20 help deliver solutions for the complex business problems. 3:24 So, what's dev life actually like, though? 3:29 That's simple, you just stare at code all day, end of story. 3:33 [LAUGH] I'm joking, I do a lot of cool things besides just coding, sometimes. 3:39 When you're a developer, 3:46 sometimes you can be placed in that kind of a high stress environment. 3:48 So, to be able to unwind, you just go have some fun like go go ride a bike, 3:52 go play some pool with somebody or like ping pong. 3:57 Just go hang out with your friends like during break. 4:00 And these things are really beneficial to helping, 4:03 like keep you focused on the goal. 4:08 But when I'm not having fun, I do have some day to day activities though. 4:11 So, I work on a scrum team. 4:16 Where we have an agile methodology for just completing a decent, 4:18 planned amount of work and a quick time. 4:24 So the sprint would be like two weeks, okay? 4:28 And we have standup meetings, 4:30 which is just a daily update about your progress like, what did you do yesterday? 4:32 What did you do today and do you have any blockers? 4:37 Is there a way that we can help you? 4:41 And we're having meetings constantly. 4:44 And these meetings could be on how do we implement a solution for 4:45 this user facing problem or what type of features are we trying to implement? 4:50 And things of that nature. 4:56 And if anybody's ever used GitHub before, 4:58 then you may be familiar with PR reviews, also known as pull requests. 5:01 And this is just you paying attention to what your peers are coding, 5:06 what they're trying to implement in the code base. 5:11 And you're gonna take a look at what they have and 5:15 make sure that we could safely merge that into the code base without any problems. 5:18 So this is one of the main things I do every day, it's PR reviews. 5:22 And it's very valuable because it helps you to understand other people's code and 5:27 other areas of code that you may not have seen before. 5:32 And it's so critical that you ask questions. 5:36 Ask questions a lot, collaborate with your peers, they have a wealth of 5:39 knowledge in their head, and they will share it with you gladly, right? 5:44 And just another thing that I do on a daily basis is we're 5:48 working to solve problems. 5:52 You should think of coding almost as like solving puzzles. 5:54 Most of the time, there's something that will be presented to you and 6:00 you'll have to figure it out. 6:04 And, it's great when you could collaborate with your team just to 6:06 understand the puzzle as a whole and 6:11 then figure out the individual pieces on how to form it together. 6:13 And just a quick overview about what Scrum Agile is, 6:18 because most of you when you get to a software tech company. 6:24 They'll probably be using Scrum and Agile methods. 6:31 And Scrum is just a framework for having meetings with your team, 6:34 you'll have something like a project manager, product manager. 6:38 You'll have your engineers and people who actually run the meetings. 6:43 And all of us work together to describe what is the problem. 6:47 What are we trying to do? 6:53 How will we do it? 6:55 When will it be done? 6:57 And things of that nature. 6:58 And Agile is just a method of getting things done. 7:00 And we wanna be fast, that's why it's called agile. 7:07 So, there are also challenges that you face as a developer. 7:12 There're also solutions. 7:18 So, one thing that you could be commonly faced with are deadlines. 7:19 We may have this marketing deadline that we've promised to people. 7:24 We wanna make sure that we meet that so sometimes, 7:28 you could feel a bit of a time crunch. 7:32 So, prioritization of work becomes very crucial in that moment. 7:35 Because you don't wanna spend too much time doing one thing where you could be 7:39 focusing your attention on something else. 7:44 So you wanna make sure you're divvying up your time fairly well, 7:47 to make sure that you could get the things done that you need to do. 7:50 And communication is so critical in the workplace when you work with the team. 7:53 Everybody should be in the loop about what's going on, you shouldn't 7:59 just be out here just slapping code out in the app and nobody knows about it. 8:04 So, making sure that you can effectively communicate what you're 8:09 doing to your team is not only just appreciated, but it's more than necessary. 8:14 And, I'm sure all of us have felt like this before, but 8:21 how in the world do I even do this? 8:25 You've given me some tasks I've never even seen this before, how do I do it? 8:28 You should take on the mindset of, okay, 8:34 I've never done this before, but I can do it, I definitely can do it. 8:38 It's gonna take me analyzing the situation, 8:44 trying to run through the code to see if I can understand it. 8:48 Speaking to people if I do not understand it. 8:52 And then at some point, after you've combined these methods together. 8:56 You could end up coming up with the solution a lot faster than you normally 9:02 would just working by yourself. 9:06 So, if you don't know how to do something, it's totally fine. 9:07 It's always like, 9:10 not too hard to figure out once you've just put in some thought process to it. 9:12 And write, write your stuff down, 9:18 it helps out a lot to put your thoughts in front of you. 9:20 So how do you actually stay relevant? 9:23 You got the job down, but how do you stay relevant? 9:26 How do you keep growing? 9:29 As a software engineer, I think all of us would agree that to be in this profession, 9:31 you should always seek to continue learning. 9:39 Learning is inevitable in this profession. 9:43 And you just have to get used to not knowing everything, but 9:48 seeking to know the things that you don't, I hope that makes sense. 9:52 Stay motivated, stay motivated. 9:57 Sometimes I may feel down in the dumps, but 10:01 I could look to some of the senior engineers on my team or 10:04 just the people who I helped to take care of my life. 10:09 I could look to them and 10:13 I could stay motivated just to continue pushing forward. 10:14 And it helps out a lot to have motivation, because if you don't have a why, 10:18 behind something, like what's the point, all right? 10:22 So you should always understand the why behind anything that you do. 10:26 Asking questions, this is a no brainer, you, if you think you know everything 10:33 you don't, you should ask questions to figure out what you don't know. 10:39 It'll be so beneficial to you, I promise. 10:43 I don't really teach people how to code but I can if they ask me questions. 10:47 And that's the same thing when I asked other people, I ask them questions so 10:54 they could teach me stuff. 10:57 So it's always a constant exchange of knowledge as it is really beautiful. 10:58 And look for opportunities to be lazy like dude, what are you talking about? 11:03 You just told us you work hard, you ask a lot of questions, 11:10 this that the third, what are you talking about lazy? 11:13 This is what I mean, if there's something that's already been implemented before. 11:17 You'd be better off just using that and 11:23 maybe making like a couple tweaks here and there. 11:25 But you want to be as efficient as possible by just taking 11:27 what already exists and just re-implementing it. 11:31 And if you have to reinvent the wheel, then you do so, 11:34 in a dynamic type of manner. 11:38 So quick example, if I had a function, it adds two numbers together. 11:40 One way that isn't as very efficient, I could just do function add. 11:47 And then it'll just take numbers one plus two equals and 11:53 they'll return the result three. 11:56 It'll do that every time. 11:58 But if you want to be more efficient and have it reusable over time, 12:00 then you put some parameters in that function. 12:05 So it's like, we're gonna return the sum of number one parameter one and 12:08 number two, that you can add anything. 12:14 You've put up the work beforehand, so you don't really have to do it later. 12:17 That's the gist of lazy coding, that's the gist of it, in time. 12:26 You just wanna make sure that you spend your time to really make sure 12:32 that you're spending it the way that will help you in the future. 12:39 You are what you do in your spare time, that's the bottom of the line. 12:45 So just make sure that you really take your time seriously, 12:51 it's one of the most important resources we have. 12:57 And I saw a question from someone earlier that said, 13:02 did you ever think about tech as a career when you were younger? 13:05 It's funny that you mentioned that. 13:09 I actually used to think I was gonna be a doctor, 13:12 I was gonna be an anaesthesiologist. 13:14 [LAUGH] And I get into school I didn't even like that, 13:16 I didn't even like that type of curriculum. 13:19 I knew that wasn't gonna be the life for me. 13:22 So, you can always change, but I feel like coding was definitely 13:25 a great opportunity for me after I started really diving into it. 13:31 Shout out to treehouse for that too. 13:36 I got another question. 13:39 Are most dev jobs strict in time utilization, 13:41 like taking breaks, time tracking, etc. 13:46 I can't speak for every organization, but I know that where I am, 13:52 things are a bit less strict. 13:57 And some of my colleagues, they work in places like Microsoft, and 13:59 they're not super strict on time or anything. 14:03 It's more of can you do work? 14:06 Can you get it done in a reasonable amount of time. 14:08 And, if you can do that, you go do whatever you want, it's not a big deal. 14:14 Just make sure you're around to be spoken to. 14:19 But wow, I just wanna say I feel so 14:23 blessed to be able to speak to you all today. 14:26 I hope what I've said that hopefully just stick with you in the future. 14:29 I'm about to log off right now, but 14:35 much love to you all I appreciate you very much. 14:37 Thank you for listening. 14:40