Generalists, Specialists & Fly-Fishing
The reason why we’re starting an Axel Springer wide Developer Community TODAY 🙌🏻
Too lazy to read? Check out the announcement video below 👇🏻
50 developers from 5 countries, working for 18 companies, in one room for one day. That was our Developer Day 2019 — and it was magical.
A full day of peer-to-peer presentations & workshops and an awesome time hanging out over beers at the end of the day, made us realize one pretty surreal thing: We were all working for separate companies but for the same corporation. We liked this feeling of hanging out with each other and talking tech — we just hadn’t met before.
It was almost like you had this cousin — you never knew about — appear in your life and finding out you really bond over going fly-fishing. Only you wish you had met them sooner, to ask for advice on that new and very expensive fishing rod you just bought three weeks before.
Fly-fishing, Generalists & Specialists
Fly fishing probably sounds like a really stupid example — because if you’re like me, you’ve never went fishing in your life. But it illustrates an important point: Just like in fishing, in programming there’s the generic topics that a lot of developers can cover (e.g. many people know enough JavaScript to be productive with it), and then there’s specialized techniques (e.g. the intricate details of the state manager in use in your frontend project).
The majority of us considers themselves “full-stack” developers — which means that we’re rather generalists than specialists. Our tech-stacks however don’t magically loose their specialized complexities. In times where we’re all generalists in many topics and specialists in some, it’s important we can quickly talk to the people who are specialized in the same area as we are, to discuss incredibly specific questions. Vice versa, if we’re a rather a generalist in a certain area (for example frontend programming) and need an advice by a specialist that should be possible too .
Long story short: We’re wasting our collective money and mental energy when we’re not finding ways to have specialists be able to talk to specialists, and generalists ask specialists when they need to. That’s especially true for a large corporation like Axel Springer, where the collective specialist knowledge is immense.
An idea is born
Back at our Developer Day after-party, an idea was born: What if all of us developers at Axel Springer — spread around Europe and the US East Coast — could actually talk to each other? In our minds we imagined a chat where we could talk to each other through channels around shared interests.
We would know where to ask about fly-fishing — because ideally there would be a channel for that. Only now we wouldn’t be talking to the one or two people we’d always go to for advice in — let’s say fly-fishing — but actually be able to ask dozens or hundreds of people who knew this stuff. All of the sudden the likelihood is much higher to get good advice and get it fast.
Pretty simple at first glance, but to tell you the truth: Nobody even knows how many developers work at Axel Springer — let alone other basics — like what technologies we predominantly use, what Open Source projects are published by our own companies, or how many people actually still use Vim (least to most important obviously).
One year later…
Almost exactly one year after the Developer Day 2019, where the idea of an Axel Springer wide Developer Community was born, I’m finally able to start this project!
For the next year that’s what I’m going to focus on full-time: Build up an amazing developer community with all of you lovely people — all my colleagues at Axel Springer. I’m beyond excited that we finally get to create the vision we had over beers at the Developer Day in 2019:
Enable every developer at Axel Springer to talk to any of the other thousands of Developers at Axel Springer, to be #better #together.
If you’re a Developer working for an Axel Springer company, you can help bring this vision to life. Sign up to the project-newsletter to find out how you can become a part of this project:
📩 Subscribe to the project-newsletter (to help get this started)
And for the slightly more entertaining version of this post, check out the video below 👇🏻
—
Hi, I’m Jonas :) (tech@axelspringer.com)
I used to work as a JavaScript Developer at SPRING (Axel Springer) — I’m now working on building up a strong Global Developer Community at Axel Springer.
@aGuyNamedJonas on Twitter / YouTube / Instagram
