Code & Tell Melbourne — February #ReHash
It’s 2019, and JuniorDev Code And Tell has started the year in a spectacular fashion! On the 20th of February, 100 excited and inquisitive Junior Devs gathered at Zendesk’s Engineering office in Melbourne (who are our amazing and super wonderful sponsors of Code & Tell for the 2nd year running)!
As per usual there was pizza, networking and, of course, three awesome talks from three awesome developers. First off, we had Amir Moghimi who talked about the importance of an ‘S Curve’ Career path. Amir showed us his 10+ year career journey, from Technical architect, back to Senior Developer, and now CTO for Ellenex, a startup working on IoT solutions.
Why was Amir’s story so important? He demonstrated that you may learn a lot being with a company after a few years, but if you wait too long and get to a point where you are no longer learning, it may be a sign to move on to your next opportunity. The more you expose yourself to different business domains, different sized teams, and different problems, the more overall knowledge you will have and you can use this to help others grow around you.
Our next speaker was Selena Small who took us on a rollercoaster ride with the ups and downs of her career. When Selena isn’t using vim and creating bin to hex converters written in assembly, she is a professional Muay Thai fighter!
She spoke of the challenges and hardships that she went through to get where she is today. From losing a job, losing a fight, and failing an exam to getting an AWS certification, winning a Muay Thai event, and becoming a Developer at Fresho! Inspiring stuff showing that perseverance through failure really is the best way to success.
Last but not least we had Aaron Job from Deloitte Digital giving us a deep dive into Dependency Inversion. Being one of the major principles from SOLID, Aaron demonstrated the importance of where to identify it within your code by providing a nice and easy to follow example involving a living room, a TV and painting! He outlined both the potential pros and cons with the approach, but it seems like its values are clear and something to keep in mind when writing Object Oriented code.
It was great to see a lot of our attendees swarm Aaron after his talk asking him further questions. You can find Aaron’s slides here or feel free to reach out to him @gravypower on the JuniorDev Slack!
Finally, we announced the winner of our feedback survey competition who was stoked to win a Google Home Mini!
The results from this survey really helped us understand our audience better and give us insight on what we need to do to give our attendees what they want. Some noteworthy points from the responses were:
- About 50% in Junior roles, 25% currently studying development and the rest are either new to development or in a mid to senior role.
- Most were either full stack or front end developers
- The popular talk topics were light touch technical talks, career/pathways talks and demos
Some interesting things we could improve on were things such as “frequency” and “more food”. Don’t worry — we will definitely be working on these logistical items to improve the meetup. Code and Tell currently runs bi-monthly, but did you know we also have the JuniorDev Social which runs every other month? If you’d like to attend either, keep an eye on both Twitter and our Meetup page. The next one is just around the corner!
There were also some very heartwarming responses about what we were doing right and what people enjoyed. A lot of this is definitely thanks to LJ Kenward and Luke Mesiti and what they have built with this community:
“Ego is left at the door”
“That there’s a female speaking”
“Relaxed and social atmosphere”
Thanks to the other organisers Ben Theunissen and Josh Parnham for ensuring the event ran smoothly. Thanks also to REA Group and Zendesk for helping out and hosting! Also thanks to Michael Milewski for the photos throughout this post.
We are always looking for speakers! Whether you have a technical talk, want to share your career journey, or just demo something you have been hacking away at, we would love to hear from you!
Thanks for reading, and see you at the next one! 👋
