Lots to see, lots to do at the 2023 Reese's Senior Bowl with Coach Dave McGinnis and Rhett Bryant. I'm Mike Keith. All right, let's talk about some of the prospects that we've seen. You got a chance to stand next to Luke Musgrave, the tight end from Oregon State. Guy thought to be a top prospect. He passes the ITES. Oh, he passes the ITES very much. I enjoyed visiting with him. As I said, I interviewed his uncle Bill for an offensive coordinator job when I was a head coach, you know, at Arizona. The fact we've talked about that he got injured after two games. But what he is doing here, and I know that you interviewed him extensively, but I asked him when we were just standing here really quickly how the rehab was going. He seems very, very pleased with it. This is a big time for him now, between now and the end of the combine. I think this kid can elevate himself a lot, Mike. All right, so tight ends, a big focus of the 2023 Reese's Senior Bowl, running backs also a big focus. Rashon Johnson unfortunately breaks his hand, gone after the first day. A lot of good backs. Eric Gray still jumps out to me. Eric Gray had a fantastic first day. Really thick, thighs, lowers, explosion out of his stance. He had a really nice day. But you know, the other guy who had a good one is Tajé Spears, the running back from Tulane. He's the same guy that reeled off eight straight 100-yard games and had four touchdowns and 200-plus yards to beat the Southern Cal Trojans in the Cotton Bowl. That's a young man who is making a mark for himself this week. And he says he's working on his receiving skills out of the backfield, like so many backs are asked to do. That's a back to keep your eye on. All right, tight ends probably have a very good chance of finding an offensive lineman or two that will come out of the 2023 Reese's Senior Bowl. Coach Mack, who has jumped out to you during the course of this week? Well, first of all, when we talk about the offensive lineman jumping out, the thing that I really enjoy watching is how these kids are interacting when they come in here. I think that's very, very important to look at. Let's take a look overall at this group of players from other positions. Who's somebody else? Maybe a receiver, maybe a corner. Somebody else that you feel like has already helped themselves. How about Princeton's Andre Yesheviz? He is a heptathlete from Princeton. Ivy Leaguer, three time All-American in that spot. He's already had a good start to his week. You can see it doesn't have like the super explosive skill set, but he has some speed to build up at the top of those routes. Had a nice day so far. All right, so let's talk about what the Titans need, Coach Mack, matched up to what is here in Mobile as they head towards the game on Saturday. It seems like what Tennessee needs is here. And that's why the time for Rand Carthon, Mike Vrable, and staff has been very worthwhile. Offensive linemen, I mean, offensive linemen both at the tackle position and at the guard position. Those guys are here. The other thing, we just mentioned the tight end we talked to, you could always use another tight end. And the receivers, I mean, I'm going to go to Mingo from Ole Miss. This is a guy that might be able to fit into various positions. You can never have too many receivers. We know that our receiving corps got depleted throughout the year because of injury. You know, we've got Trillenbergs coming back, but the receiver corps still needs to look at. So I would say offensive line. The receiver corps is extremely, extremely important. I'm still not zeroed in on enough corners here yet to see what is down here. But the offensive linemen are clearly down here. There are tight ends down here. And then there are depth edge rushers down here. Coach Dave McGinnis, Rhett Bryant with me, Mike Keith, at the 2023 Reese's Senior Bowl for you at TennesseeTitans.com.


My name is Mark Jay Lehmann, and today I'm going to be talking with you about growing into a, from a junior dev into a beautiful coding butterfly. Before we get started, I just want to say thank you to all the organizers and the volunteers who are helping to put this great event on, and I also want to thank all the sponsors in the room who are making this possible, and definitely thank all the fellow speakers who have just been killing it all day, today and yesterday. Yeah, I'm seriously really humbled by everyone, kind of wondering how the heck I got picked to speak alongside all these super talented people, but anyway, today we're going to talk about what it means to grow from a junior dev into something more and why it matters. Specifically, we're going to discuss what it means to be a junior developer and what distinguishes junior from everyone else, as well as how to best manage and supervise junior developers. Then we're going to pick six of the most effective activities one can engage in to make discernable progress both in one's skills and career, and we're going to talk about how managers and supervisors can help junior devs reach their goals and become more productive members of the team. And lastly, we'll touch on a few other methods for growth, and time permitting will discuss any ideas from all of you that we might have missed. So by the end of our discussion, hopefully we'll come up with some good ideas and answers for what can a junior developer do to grow into that beautiful coding butterfly, and how can their manager help that process along. A little bit about me, I've been doing some very basic coding for years, starting with my first website, I built in ninth grade. On a hosting service, some of you may remember called Tripod. Writing my own, yeah, there we go. Writing my own version of Dope Wars for my T82 graphing calculator, came next. Followed by a couple of AP computer science courses and my first paid gig as a webmaster. Anyone remember when that was an actual job you could have? I thought it was pretty cool sounding job that I'll have in high school, but maybe that's because I'm a nerd. Anyway, I didn't really get into coding as a career until several years ago when I left the world of residential real estate and enrolled in a code school in Portland, Oregon.  There's a reason our unofficial city motto is keep Portland weird. Code school started in earnest but has so far been the most interesting, enjoyable and rewarding career I've had so far. I currently work at a really great company called Carista, building tools to help pathology labs, better manage their work and achieve more accurate results. So I'm not a household name in code circles. I don't maintain any large open source projects. And I haven't created any groundbreaking Shazam for Vood type apps. So if you're wondering why you should listen to anything I say, I really can't tell you more than this. I have put in a lot of legwork, talked to a lot of other developers and done a lot of research into this topic. So while I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, my hope is that you'll leave here today with a few more than you had when you arrived. That said, this topic does generate a lot of opinions. And while I believe I have some insight, maybe a little bit, and I'm sure the conference organizers hope I do as well. I don't really want to be talking at you for the next 45 minutes. So I'm gonna be asking for a little bit of audience participation from time to time.  But I do hope you're all interested in participating in this research. I'm gonna be doing several real time polls during the presentation, trying something a little new. I did hand raises last time and I think this will be a little bit better, but we'll see how it goes. So you don't need to install any apps or anything, just visit the link. And keep the page open throughout the presentation to participate. Also, I got that sweet QR code, anybody remember when those were, that thing? So you can use that if you're feeling adventurous or nostalgic or lazy. To start, I want to get a sense of everyone's background and experience. How many years of full time coding experience do you have? Not necessarily employed full time, but coding on a regular basis full time. What's that? Yeah, there's another, I don't know if you can see that. It's not the friendly URL that I had on the other one. It's also bit.ly slash coding butterfly, coding dash butterfly. Nope, everybody good? Everybody get a chance? We've got about four more, so okay, I'm gonna keep going. How would you classify yourself? Yeah, sure, okay, everybody good? Pretty good mix. Do you work alongside, supervise, or manage junior devs? Or would you like to some day soon? Just pick which one you want to answer, I guess. Pretty good. If you identify as a junior developer, how much full time experience do you have? Now for that same group, for the last question, does anyone feel like sharing what they think needs a change for themselves before they start identifying more as like a mid-level or just stop feeling like they're a junior developer? Definitely, confidence, anybody else? Yeah, okay, higher value of the company and less time from your fellow developers. Cool, if it feels like I'm picking on like the self-identified junior developers, I apologize, but what I'm really trying to get at is where exactly this kind of really highly subjective line is between a junior developer and a mid-level developer, because it is highly subjective. So with that in mind, does anyone else feel like sharing when maybe they stopped feeling like they were a junior developer, if there was like a moment in time you can pick out, or maybe a big project you finished or something? Okay, so helping more than asking for help, definitely. Yes, okay, definitely, yeah, first senior title for sure. Yes, and folks around me start taking your advice. Cool, thank you all for sharing. I did a survey of friends and colleagues and other coders and a few different user groups that I take part in and I asked all these people some of those same questions. How many years of full-time coding experience do you have and how would you classify yourself? And here are the results of those questions. So there's a lot to look at here, I'll leave this up for a minute. I'm not exactly sure what direct conclusions we can draw from these two charts, but hopefully it'll help inform us a little bit as we discuss all this today. I became interested in this subject because when I changed careers into code a few years back and graduated from the code school I attended, I felt like it was a great thing for me and I've definitely had a lot of success since. But I also know at least one colleague from my graduating class that was still identifying himself as a junior developer on LinkedIn more than three years after that. And so it just got me wondering, why is that? What could this person and their managers or supervisors do to change that? And why does it matter? Now I'm gonna try to answer that last question first because this seems like the most important. It matters because like it or not, in the tech world, many companies still think in terms of junior, mid-level, and senior. And these titles often come with different responsibilities, tasks of different complexity, and certainly different pay scales. So I'd wager that anyone who enjoys coding would like to see progress in their careers and the amount of responsibility, their complexity of tasks that they take on, and certainly in how much they get paid. And anybody who manages coders will want to see these same progressions in each of their team members so that the team as a whole becomes more effective. So that leaves the questions of what can a junior developer do to grow into that beautiful coding butterfly and how can their manager help their process along? This brings me to the next couple of questions I asked in my survey. But before I show you the results, I wanted to hear some of your thoughts on them. What is the most beneficial thing a junior developer can do to level up? Or what is the most beneficial activity a manager or supervisor of a junior developer can do to help them level up? And I know that's two questions, but feel free to answer whichever one you want. Yeah, different tasks or different experiences? Yeah, I'd say the- Teach someone else for sure. Yeah, yeah, either one. Automate yourself, okay? But the junior's on board, that's a good plan, yeah. So I think that it's okay to make mistakes that you don't have to be perfect all the time. Otherwise, you can't innovate and people don't learn in that kind of work. Cool, yeah, two very good points. Pairing and developing the good culture where it's okay to fail. Yes, okay. And then two, open this on expectations. If they're very clear with you of what they expect out of you, then you're allowed to grow, you're allowed to make mistakes. Yeah, definitely, cool, lots of great, did I miss anybody? Yeah, definitely, yeah, cool, okay, lots of great ideas on the script. Thanks for raising hands. Here's what the survey respondents from my survey had to say. So I know there's a lot to take in here. Don't worry about studying this too carefully. We're gonna be seeing these charts a few more times today. But as you can see, there was some overlap, though also a disparity of opinion. And that's one of the things that makes this topic so challenging to condense into such a short talk. So today I'm gonna be primarily discussing kind of the shared opinions between the two. Speaking of challenging, overwhelmingly the most suggested thing for both answers was to challenge yourself. So we're gonna start with that. Seeking challenge, when was the last time you learned something big or important or really difficult? And how did you do it? Do you have a short story that they wanna share? It's okay if not, I have one. One of the times that I learned something really difficult was a little while ago when I needed to build two different versions of a feature, one behind authentication, and one without any authentication. Other than that big difference though, both versions should behave basically the same. So I could have built the whole thing in one app and then painstakingly copy pasted all the code into the second. And it would have worked, probably, hopefully maybe. Of course, I'd then have to take an extra long shower every time I looked at the code because I would feel so gross and dirty about that approach. Another option, the one suggested by my team lead and the one I ended up choosing was to build an Ember add-on. So Ember.js was the framework we were using. And add-ons are the note packages basically just your average external library. It seems like a pretty obvious choice to most of you I'm assuming and it was for sure. But it was a special challenging to me for a few reasons. Even after working in and around Ember.js for the better part of a year, I still didn't feel very confident in it. And we heard a little bit about confidence from a lot of you. The second one, I didn't even know where to start when talking about developing an external package and hooking it into two separate apps. And the third one, Ember.js itself and add-ons in particular, had stabilized a lot but at the time it still seemed like they were undergoing a lot of change with regard to best practices. So, nevertheless, after a lot of time I spent scouring docs online and asking questions and pairing, lots of pairing. Oops, there we go. And banging my head against the wall. I got everything wired up and working together and now I have a ton more confidence with Ember and add-ons. So moral of the story, always stretch yourself. Volunteer to tackle things you've never done before. And especially things that you have no idea how to do. It's really important for junior developers, but it's also pretty critical, I think, for developers anywhere on the experience spectrum. Actually, I think it's pretty good advice for making progress in any career. It's pretty easy to understand why this is such a great way to grow. Because when you don't know the first thing about a problem, every single step that you take to solve it, you're gonna learn something new. So, the next thing I'd like to talk about is code review. We heard from that, about that from, nope, same URL. It should, if you had it open already, it should automatically update. Okay, ready good? Bit.ly slash coding dash butterfly. Do you work in a place where everything gets merged to matter as code reviewed first? Okay, that's good, that's what I like to see. And have you worked somewhere that did not do any code review? What's that? I don't like so.  But besides the other category, code review was the second most popular answer for how junior developers can level up. And it was in the top five for what managers and supervisors can do to help. I think it's awesome that so many of you folks out there are already practicing regular code review. So sorry if some of what follows may seem a little bit like reaching to the choir, but hopefully there's still a few good takeaways for you. So, in my first job out of code school, I was working remotely with just one other dev, the project lead. Whenever I finished a feature and opened a pull request, he would merge it. And I would assume it was all good. And I thought I was just doing awesome. Like junior dev, first job out of code school, getting branch after branch merged. That is, until we started getting bug reports for just really simple exceptions that should have easily been caught during code review. And then I thought about it and it dawned on me that I had never gotten a single comment on any of my pull requests. So they probably were not being reviewed. Now, for me, this wasn't really shocking because it was my first professional dev job and I didn't really have anything to compare it to. However, after trading war stories with some of my code school buddies a couple months in, I realized just how unsettling this was and kind of started explicitly asking for code review. And by this time, the team had brought on another developer who happened to be a colleague of mine and since our lead still wasn't providing hardly any feedback, my colleague and I just agreed to review all of each other's code. So not the most ideal scenario, but and since we were at very similar experience levels, it was a little bit of a blind leading the blind situation. But in result was we usually didn't go off the cliff together, but found our way more frequently than we would have on our own. So just point is review your code and your team members code as much as you can with whoever's willing. So code review, it's one of those things that tech managers who don't actually code may not understand the value of or need for. But code review is hugely important both to the code base and to the growth and learning of the developers. As a junior developer, you should have at least one other more experienced developer working on the same project and in the same stack. Hopefully, I've certainly been in the opposite situation before. But and if code reviews, particularly on pull requests, don't come standard at your company, I'd encourage you to ask another dev on your project to review your code and offer to review theirs and probably need to get management's approval before you start spending the time. But even if you feel like you don't have enough experience to do a good job, most developers will definitely make mistakes and overlook simple things like syntax stuff and typos. Also tunnel vision is definitely a thing and can occur pretty easily when working deeply into a feature or bug or issue. I think all developers, myself included, can get so wrapped up in trying to solve a problem. Once we finally solve it, our brains are just totally fried and we don't do any more development or refactoring. So takeaway is it's always good to have an extra set of eyeballs and a mouth to go with those eyeballs to ask questions like, why did you do it this way or couldn't we try this instead maybe? Now, I don't want to leave out any more experience tips here. It can be a huge help for them to have to explain complicated parts of the code to someone who doesn't understand. I would suggest encouraging and probing some of the less experienced developers for questions about parts of the code that don't make sense to them because often those types of discussions can actually lead to refactoring ideas to make the code clearer and easier to parse. And hopefully a lot more maintainable in the long run. And managers and supervisors, if your team does not practice regular code review, I would definitely encourage you to implement that. I don't think there's anything else in this talk that will be a bigger win for your team's growth and your apps reliability and maintainability than good and thorough code review. Now you may consider doing some more training on more effective code reviews. There's a lot of resources out there on that. I'm not going to talk too much about it. There is a really great article on Medium, like I called Joel Kemp that I found. Or you can also just Google, something like code review best practices. And it will spit out pages and pages of answers. Next up, practice. I'm not sure I have anything to share on that topic that isn't covered by sort of general common sense and wisdom. If you practice something, you will get better. A few quick ideas for where to practice in case you need them. Game like apps, like rubycoans.com is great. What was that? Coding game, yep, codinggame.com also good times, nkey.com. I'm sure there's a lot more that I don't even know about. They keep cropping up every day. Open source projects, including just building things on your own, can also be really rewarding. And they allow for a little bit more free form learning, which is good. I know when I was starting, I had trouble thinking of what kind of projects to start with, so there is a great form on Reddit, r slash beginner projects that has a lot of good ideas for that kind of thing. All right, next up is take the lead. This also featured in the top five responses about what junior desks can do to level up and what the managers can do to help. When was the last time you took on a solo task or led a project? Was it within the last month? Within the last six months? How is that different from working on a project someone else is leading? Does anyone want to share experience or story? Yeah, definitely. Anybody else want to share? There's a mindset that I've come across a few times, mostly in less experienced developers, but sometimes in others too, where they think this code I've written is good enough, someone more senior or someone who knows the app better will fix it if it breaks. And I myself have lapsed into that mindset on occasion. It's definitely easy to do when you're on a team working within a large app where you may not really be familiar with all the pieces. It's important to realize that the reason for thinking this, I think, in my experience, is that there's some lack of understanding about how the app as a whole works and how all the pieces are interconnected. And understanding that can be a daunting task. And in fact, it's something that some devs just never quite get to, because some apps are just too big to know everything. And I think this happens more frequently when the developer isn't given, or doesn't take responsibility for responding to unplanned site outages or critical time-sensitive bugs. So they're not invested in whether their code truly works. And I think we can get rid of this mindset by making sure that we're taking full ownership of our code. One great way to do this is to take the lead on a project, either with other developers or solo. And when I say take the lead, what I mean is work out the architecture, break up the project into manageable pieces, track the progress of the project, ensure adequate test coverage for haphaz and sad-paths in edge cases. QA thoroughly, be a bad user and deliberately try and break your app. Deploy, or help with deploy, and after the project is finished, be responsible for fixing any bugs that arise caused by your code. Now I know that's a lot to handle, but taking your project from start to finish like this is both a hugely rewarding experience and often a humbling one, because there will definitely be errors. Tests will miss edge cases, dev time will far exceed estimates. Sometimes a whole project will have to just be tossed out the window halfway through because the architecture just isn't flexible enough. All those have certainly happened to me. But in the end, there will be something built that functions properly and fulfills some need. And there will be a developer who has probably learned a lot of tips and tricks and lessons to get it there. When I started my career in code, my first professional full-time job was on a very small team, so everyone was expected to take on solo tests. I learned a lot during this period. And then six months later, our lead developer quit, leaving me and one other developer of equal experience responsible for the whole app. So that's when my learning kind of really skyrocketed. Suddenly we had to take ownership of this entire app, making sure that we knew every single piece of how it was wired together, squashing urgent and critical bugs, resolving server and memory issues, being dependent on to diagnose and fix literally everything and anything that went wrong. At times it felt a little bit like this. Now, I may not have learned the best way to accomplish all these things, but because my fellow junior Dev and I had no safety net and nobody was available to help us, figuring this stuff out on my own made this period in my career where I grew the most. All right, next, ask for help. Ask. Three letters that make up a powerful tool for learning and growth. Ask questions, ask for help, ask to pair, even if it's from people working in other languages and frameworks. And before you ask any real people for help, ask your imaginary friend. I'm not joking. Who here has heard the term rubber duck debugging? Okay, many of you. Who has had success with that method? Yeah. It really works. In my experience, more than half the time. So, for those who don't know, the rubber duck debugging method gets its name from how it works.  And in the process of explaining your code to your duck, you'll hopefully hit on the solution. Now, personally, I don't actually ask an imaginary friend or an inanimate object, but I do follow the underlying principle of the method. However, I call mine the Seeger method. Now, that's not to be confused with the lake great folk at Singer and social activist Pete Seeger, famous for such hits as if I had a hammer in the hammer song. Now, this is my Seeger method. When I spent about half an hour stuck to a problem, and when I say stuck, then I mean I've tried everything I could think of and everything that Google can think of to solve it. I start writing out my question. I try to be as detailed as possible in explaining the situation. What the end goal is, what things I've tried, what I've Googled to try to figure it out, what errors I've received, and what steps are needed to reproduce those errors. Now, usually in the process of writing all of that out, I realize something I've missed. And often that something I missed will actually be the key to my problem. Sometimes it's not. That's okay too. Every little bit helps. But at the end of that process I'll have a very clear description of the issue that I can easily use to ask someone for help. And when I do all this work before asking for help, the person helping is able to tell all the effort that I put forth to try to solve my own problem and be a lot more willing to help. I know I definitely am more willing to help when I can tell that. Just remember though, you do have to give as good as you get. So if someone asks you questions or asks for help or asks to pair, even if you don't want to or think you won't be able to help, at least give it the old college try. You'll be amazed at how much you can help out even if you're pairing in a language you're totally unfamiliar with. Sometimes just being the second set of eyeballs and asking clarifying questions can help get someone unstuck. I have another story but I'm running a little over so I'm going to skip this one. Before we move on, I want to bring up something about asking for help that a lot of people, myself included, struggle with. And that is at what point do you ask for help? Programmers more than many other people I have had experience with are a lot more likely to get stuck on a problem and remain stuck trying to figure it out all on their own. I think that's generally a good thing because frequently it's those types of problems that when you finally work them out on your own, the resolution sticks with you. I heard, I remember somebody mention that. You don't want to rob yourself of an opportunity to succeed at this really meaty challenge but at the same time there's obviously trade-offs between spending all day trying to solve a problem on your own or asking another developer for help and fixing it in like five minutes. Unfortunately there's no hard and fast answers I'm aware of about this. For me personally, if it's an architecture related question that could affect the whole project if it's been poorly at the outset, I often try to run my ideas by at least one other person before starting coding. However, if it's a situation like I just mentioned where I'm stuck on some problem, I'll ask myself these questions first before asking someone for help. Am I completely stalled and have not made any forward progress on the issue for at least 30 minutes and have I taken a short break away from the computer and then returned and still felt stuck? How many of you got stuck on something late in the day? Spent way too much time trying to figure it out, gave up, went to bed, and next morning just kind of figured it out immediately. Yeah, that's the reason for that second question. Excuse me, sorry, I'm still getting over a little cold. If I answer yes to both of those questions, it usually means it's time to start the Seeger method. Now before we move on in the spirit of this point, any questions? That's like a mildly amusing two-year-old pop culture reference to really liven things up. Okay, now get ready for some potential controversy or controversy. Para-program, who here believes para-programming is beneficial? Who believes it's a waste of time? Nobody, really? Okay, I usually get a couple people at least. Who isn't sure, anybody? Well, if you're in office, both people sitting at the same place working on the same problem together. Yeah, I would think of either of those as para-programming. Any time you're working... Yeah, I'm not necessarily talking about full time, like all the time. Yeah. In my conversations with Devs, it seems like there's no more polarizing topic than pairing, although that doesn't seem represented in this group, which is cool. But that is reflected in the, oops, that is reflected in the survey responses. Although pairing was near the top of the helpful activities, it was also near the top of the unhelpful activities. So granted those who said pairing was unhelpful frequently gave the caveat that they meant excessive pairing, which we just heard about, or pairing when there's an extreme mismatch of experience level. I've also heard from developers who believe pairing is helpful, but who hate doing it themselves because they feel like they learn a lot better on their own. And sometimes when pairing, you run into less than ideal situations like this. Anybody ever encountered a nostril whistler? For me, I don't really just subscribe to the extreme programming of every piece of code deployed to production should be written in pairs. But I have found that probably 90% of the pairing sessions I've done, I've learned at least one new trick, even if it's just an editor trick. And also in probably 90% of pairing sessions, one of us has caught a type of our syntax mistake, or an edge case that may not have been caught when soloing. So there's definitely best practices for pairing that make it a lot more worthwhile. Here are a few that I've come up with from asking that question from other developers across the experience spectrum. Have the less experienced person drive more often. On occasion, it can help to have the more experienced person type keyboard, but in those situations, make sure they explain clearly what they're doing and why. And the less experienced person needs to speak up when they don't understand. Work from only one computer and keep cell phones and tablets put away. This is both to keep distractions to a minimum and also to avoid situations where both people in the pair are looking at different solutions. The goal is, in my mind, is to talk through the problem and come up with a solution together. Now, this can definitely test the patience of either person in the pair. And when patient starts wearing thin, just switch up who's driving for a bit. I think this is a lot better than working on separate machines. Personally, I think it's one of the biggest benefits of pairing is seeing how other developers search for solutions and solve problems. Don't be afraid to ask a lot of clarifying questions. Like, why'd you do it that way? Or what's the advantage of this over that? Sometimes we all live in our own little code bubbles doing things in a particular way just because that's how we learned it. And so, asking these types of questions can lead to a better way. Discuss expectations up front, such as whether the pair wants to gain a deeper understanding of some piece of the app or just whether they just want to finish the task as quickly as possible. Now, pairing may not be for everybody, but in my experience, even those who find it to be a waste of time often get something out of it when they do it. So if you're in that group, I would encourage you to get pairing another shot and after the pairing session, write down a few of the things you learned. You might be surprised by what you write. All right, let's wrap up. We've talked in some detail about six great ways for developers to grow and their managers to help. Now, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that there are so many more. When I was developing this talk, one of the titles I almost used was 101 Ways to Grow as a Junior Dev. I thought at the time it was a facetious title and I was always also trying to be clever by saying 101 was binary for five. However, after talking with more and more developers, I actually don't think it would be impossible to come up with 101 different good ideas. So I want to touch briefly just a few more before we call it a day and I'm gonna kind of run through these quick. I've had a lot of great experience with working on well-maintained open source projects. Now, I almost didn't include this because I got so tired of hearing this advice when I first got started. But I mean, there's a reason why everyone spouts this line, it works. The growth for me has come from being able to jump and do a new code base and try to understand how it works and getting to review code by other people that I don't usually work with and have my code reviewed by them. And it's also great for practicing my get food and beefing up my Github strict read. Something I didn't touch on at all but that many survey respondents mentioned is networking. We've all heard about how great networking is. Like any other industry, building a personal professional network is a great way to advance your career. Meetups, hack nights, job fairs, conferences, all great ways to meet like-minded folks. If you don't work on a team or even if you're on a distributor or remote team, it's especially critical to find and immerse yourself in a good community to keep you motivated and have people available to help you when you succeed, when needed. Excuse me. My personal favorite type of networking has been volunteering at events because it provides a little bit more structure around networking besides just kind of, here's a swarm of people, go talk to them. I don't really do that well in those types of situations. This is from EmberConf this year. I got to be topster. Keeping notes of interesting things you've learned is something that wasn't mentioned much in the survey but that I personally have found very helpful. I maintain a blog, which unfortunately like many blogs is not updated very frequently. But I also have a nice long Gmail conversation with myself of about 100 messages with ideas for blog posts. I've also been on teams that have, today I learned Slack channels to get a few posts per week. On one of those teams, a lot of the posts were something snarky. Like, today I learned something else, terrible about Outlook for Mac. I'm glad you all liked that joke. I did this talk in Nashville, Tennessee where there is apparently a large Microsoft presence. And it didn't go over so well. And don't undervalue interpersonal or soft skills in your tech career. When I first started the path toward a career as a programmer, I was told pretty frequently that soft skills like the ability to communicate clearly and work well with people are in high demand in this industry. Now, I'm pretty grateful to say that I haven't had much negative experience in this regard in my tech job so far. But I have noticed a lack of people skills that many of the networking events that I've been to. And I'm very well aware of the importance of soft skills by hearing about the crazy stories that HR consultants help others handle. So I worked for a while at a fantastic company called Mammoth HR that offered HR consulting as a service. And one example I heard from one of our HR pros was this. And by the way, this is a real question received by a real client. So sorry in advance if you're offended. It's not too offensive, I don't think. All right, here's the question. We had an incident last Friday with two of our employees. A male employee walked into a female's office and asked if she had some lotion. When she gave him the lotion, according to the female, he dropped his pants and started applying the lotion. How should we handle this? I can't make this stuff up guys. So in this scenario, male employee could certainly improve his interpersonal skills among other things and how to appropriately interact with colleagues. Now clearly this is an extreme example but it's apparently very common for HR consultants to receive these types of questions. For many people it's difficult to realize they may be lacking in these types of interpersonal skills. So managers, I encourage you in particular to help point out soft skill areas where your devs can improve and resources to help with that improvement. And lastly, I wanna stress that if you're doing something that works for you, don't stop doing it just because we didn't talk about it today. So if you have thoughts that you wanna share about developer growth, we're kinda running out of time so I don't have time to kinda engage here. But please come talk to me after I love hearing about this stuff or find me online and shoot me a note. And I would also encourage you to continue these discussions with your programming colleagues or your tech team or even people you're meeting at conferences and networking. Before we go, I wanna circle back to one of the first questions I asked today. Why does a title junior developer matter? Seems to me the titles mean a lot less in the tech sector than they do in other industries. And in fact, seems to me they're almost arbitrary. A senior developer at one company could have skills and abilities on par with a junior developer at another. A colleague of mine suggested that the biggest reason it matters is that every organization will benefit greatly if they're able to develop their developers. And if a company defines a role as a junior developer, then odds are that that company is dedicated to helping that person in that role expand and evolve their skill set. And although we use the term junior developer many times over the course of today's discussion, it's also important to realize that a good developer, in my mind, junior, senior or otherwise is constantly learning and striving to improve. Hopefully the things we talked about in the last hour will help you regard this at your skill level. Thanks for coming, thanks for listening. Appreciate it. Thank you.


can start the program formally. Thank you. Everyone, please take your seats. Our ceremony is going to get underway right now. Thank you. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for coming out on this incredibly beautiful day to celebrate the opening of Bedford Greenhouse. Special thank you to our mayor, Eric Adams, for joining us, for Bronxboro president, Vanessa Gibson, HPD commissioner, Adolfo Carrion, DSS commissioner, Gary Jenkins, and from the state, OT-Doc commissioner, Dan Teetz. I hope I'm not missing anyone, if I am. Oh, Gustavo Rivera. Yes, thank you. OK. So this site was acquired by my predecessor in 2014, nearly eight years ago. What was here before was a house where the building is, and of course, this huge rock behind me. That rock prevented us, or anyone really, from building on the site because it was too expensive to blast it out. But there was a change in the zoning laws that allowed taller buildings like this to be built in locations near transit. And that and the brilliant idea to build around the rock instead of blasting it made it possible for us to create this building. With 117 brand new apartments, every one of which is deeply affordable or supportive for people who have been homeless or are at risk of homelessness here in the Bronx. And not just the building with apartments, but a children's playground right here, a rooftop greenhouse, which I hope you will all see on the tour, and offices with social services, psychiatry, and all of what it takes to make this place a community and not just an apartment building. And this fall, we will start construction on a lot in the back facing Jerome Avenue, and an additional 116 apartments that will also have a children's library and a street level primary care licensed primary care clinic that will offer health care not only to the residents of the building, but also to members of the community, regardless of ability to pay. So this is really the creation of a community and a community center. But this almost didn't happen. Three and a half years ago, the general contractor went bankrupt. The insurance company that was supposed to complete the project reneged on their commitment. And then the pandemic hit. Labor was in short supply. And then the supply chain crisis caused the cost of materials to go through the roof. So project renewal actually had to invest three and a half million dollars of our own money. And as you all know, nonprofits don't have a lot of money in the project in order to bring it to this place. And that's why I am so incredibly grateful for the support of HPD, of HDC, of New York State HHAP, who have really come together to help us try and close as much of that gap as possible. I also want to thank the development team that built the building. I want to call out our vice president of real estate development, Paul Woody, who's equanimity. And believe me, I was not always as calm as he was. Led the team to make this happen. Also, Katie Bauer, our chief housing and shelter officer, who designed the program and services that we have here. And Jasmine Cummings, who led the implementation. And Jasmine is unfortunately homesick today, so she can't be with us in person. Other parts of the development team. ESKW and Andrew Knox, architects, project management support from Jonathan Rose Company, and the fourth general contractor, and the one that finally built the place, Bruno Fristacci. So it's wonderful to celebrate the building and the physical space. But this is really about the people who are going to live here. And I want you to hear from one of our residents, Alexis Reed. Come on up. My name is Alexis Reed. And I'm here to tell you my story. So my son, Kyra, and I moved into Bedford Greenhouse five months ago. But however, I've known about Bedford Greenhouse much longer than that. You see, for a whole year before we moved in, Kyra and I have decided in a homeless shelter just two blocks from here, literally. I walk by this building every day as construction was winding down. And I would think to myself, it would be nice to live here. But I didn't actually think it would happen. Then one day, my case manager presented me with an opportunity to move here. I wasn't sure about the idea of living in supportive housing. I didn't know anything about it, so it made me a little bit hesitant. But I knew I needed a permanent home to make a better life for Kyra and myself, so I went for it. Here I am five months later, and I can tell you it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. I've never felt so supported and happy as I do at Bedford Greenhouse. I'm making great strides and working through my traumas I've experienced in my past. I'm able to do this because I have the stability of a home and I have all the services that I need right here. Through Project Renewal's Occupational Therapy Program, I participate in groups like art, music, mindfulness, and my favorite, The Gardening on the Rooftop. Growing fresh vegetables and herbs and cooking with them in my own kitchen, and they're amazing, is inspiring me to lead a healthier lifestyle. Through all the programs here and the support of the staff, my neighbors and I are building a strong caring community. My son, Kyra, is thriving as well. He has his own bedroom, he comes to all the group activities with me, and he loves playing on the playground right here in the courtyard. I spend a great deal of time there. I want to thank Project Renewal's staff. I honestly never met such a committed group of people. From the case managers to the therapists to the maintenance workers, they're more than just the staff at this building. They're an extension of my own family. I also want to express my gratitude to everyone here today who helped with Bedford Greenhouse Surveillance. It gives people like myself access to amenities and experiences that I might not have to do so before. You helped create something truly special that has honestly changed my life. And now I'd like to introduce someone who I was honored to meet this morning. He is a great leader for our city, and I'm so happy he is here today to support me and my neighbors. Please welcome Mr. Mayor, excuse me, Mayor Eric Adams. I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm going to do it. You know, Alexis is the symbol of the inspiration as we start the process of reclaiming lives and renewing hope. You know, there's so many communities in our city where hope goes to die. And I think nothing personifies that more than this beautiful place called the Bronx. With the leadership of the previous bar president and now a visionary, our current bar president, our president Gibson, there's a clear expectation of what we expect. And what you stated is so significant. That one rock got in the way of building new foundations in our community. We often look at the barriers and say, how could we get it done instead of looking at the barriers and say, we will get it done? This is going to be a city of yes. Because because we overcame that obstacle, you are now having your place, and you are going on to become a nurse to deal with our nursing shortage that we have in the city. So it feeds on itself. It feeds on itself. If we would have allowed that rock to stand away, we wouldn't have your baby enjoy this beautiful building. You wouldn't go into nursing school. We wouldn't deal with our nursing crises that we're having. So what you're doing is seeding your plant and it's producing not only harvest on the rooftop, but it's producing a harvest in our entire city. My team is on board. We have the HSS commissioner that's here, HBD commissioner that's here. My team wants to be a part of what you're doing. This is what we state when we could produce a good qualitative product here. I've been in the Bronx almost the last couple of weeks with the Bronx mayoral president. You have been ignored. You have been denied. You have been abandoned. That stopped January 1st, 2022, when I became the mayor of the city of New York. We're gonna partner with these great organizations. We're gonna allow you to go out and share your stories because there's so many people who are in our temporary housing or living in shelters who believe where they are is who they are and it's not. We know it's not. And then you said something else that's significant. You said, I've never even thought about living in housing of this magnitude that deals with supportive housing. You need to give your message to those who are yelling that we need more housing, but you stay safe, don't build on my block. Can't have it both ways. If we need more housing, do we need more housing of wraparound services on Park Avenue or so? We need it in all of these communities that are saying that people should not live on the street. They know what, then they need to live on your street.   And I wish you so much good fortune. Good luck to you and your son. Thank you, Project Renew, for what you have done. Thank you, Mayor. I said before that we were gonna build around the rock, but I lied a little bit. We had to chip away at it.  Love it. Vanessa, I'm taking Bronx with me. We have a few more of these and now I'd like to invite the Bronx Poro President, Vanessa Gibson, to say a few words. Good morning, everyone. What an honor and what a privilege to be here at the official ribbon cutting of Bedford Green. We are so grateful. We are so excited. Can we give a round of applause for the entire Project Renewal team? Thank you to Eric, our president, our board chair, the entire staff who pour so much love into projects like this. And Alexis, one of our newest residents here at Bedford, we are just so honored. And when you hear her story, that is the story of many Bronxites, Bronx families who have fallen on hard times, who have been devastated by the impacts of COVID-19, who feel hopeless. Guess what? We are building families every single day. And projects like this matter, we are investing with our time, our money, our labor of love, collaborations with our partners in the city government, state government, and we are creating hope for people who have felt hopeless. We are strengthening those families who have felt weak. And I want to say thank you. For many years, I've worked with Project Renewal as a former member of the city council and a former member of the state assembly, and they are not new to this work. They are true to this work. Every single project has been designed with a community-oriented approach. Supportive housing, affordable housing, wraparound services, primary care, mental health services, trauma-informed care, holistic services, making sure that every family is represented through counseling, through social services, which is critical in the backdrop of COVID-19. So I want to say thank you to Project Renewal because this project is not only transformative, but it's groundbreaking for the Bedford Park community. It is projects like this that will make a difference, that will stabilize our families, that will allow them to live in affordable, quality, and safe housing. That is a fundamental right that every New Yorker should be afforded. 117 units right here, and this is just phase one. This is just the beginning, but I'm very proud that we're going to be building on Jerome Avenue, and I want to announce today that in the adopted budget, we have been able to allocate $300,000 towards the Jerome project because we can't just talk about it. We have to be about it. We have to commit dollars where we know that we can invest in our families and our children, making sure that families assimilate and integrate into the community. When the mayor and I and Commissioner Jenkins and Commissioner Carrion and Commissioner Teetz, when we toured this building a few moments ago, what we appreciated is many of the apartments are already furnished. We took advantage of some of the refreshments too, air conditioning, bedding, and so many different things that families are not always afforded. There are welcome packages that provide a wealth of resources for the local schools, the parks, the playgrounds, the supermarkets, the grocery stores, so that families that are living here at Bedford Green have the ability to integrate into this community so they don't feel alone, they don't feel lost. So most importantly, I want to say thank you. Thank you for never giving up on all the possibilities that we represent here in the Bronx. Time and time again, we have been shortchanged and denied and so many opportunities that have passed us by, but with projects of this magnitude, we are truly giving hope to so many families in our borough. So I say thank you as your borough president. I look forward to even more groundbreaking and ribbon cuttings because at the end of the day, we have to realize the purpose that we have been given. We're turning our pain into purpose. We're turning our storm into strength and we are investing in our children and our families and our elders and we are giving them the services that they rightfully deserve. So many families don't believe that they deserve access to affordable housing, but this project not only magnifies that, but demonstrates the collaboration between city and state and truly getting stuff done. So congratulations, Project Renewal. Thank you to our partners at DHS, HPD and UltaDoc and all of our partners and the board. Thank you so much for all of your great help. Thank you. And I get a rock. Well, you have the whole Bronx, so I don't really need a rock from me, but. I'm really heavy too. Thank you, everyone, congratulations. And now HPD Commissioner Adolfo Carrion. Thank you, Eric. Good morning, everybody. I am so thrilled, so delighted. I'm gonna be super brief, which I'm sure the people standing in the sun will appreciate. We're in the shade. You know, I go back a long, long, long time back when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth in the early days of Project Renewal. I was at the time a district manager of Community Board 5 and I worked very, very closely to ensure that we were making investments with this amazing organization that reclaims, reclaims lives. What is it again? Renews hope. Renews hope, yeah, reclaims lives and renews hope. And the slogan is a very powerful slogan. The mayor said a couple of very important things. I referred to my successor as Borough President as number 14, I'm number 12. And she said some very important things. You're gonna hear Gary Jenkins and Dan talk about the investments we make, the partnerships, the important partnerships, all of this stuff, the complexity of the agency's work, the banks, the contractors, the architects, the engineers, the nonprofit, all of the process ultimately pours into a vessel. It pours into a vessel like Alexis and Cairo. And that's really what this work is all about. And the manifestation of this building is very powerful. You guys have tied together so many important elements of approaching our work in a holistic way. The nice unit, everybody needs a good home that's safe and environmentally comfortable and responsible for the occupants. But to add other elements, the support of housing, the supports that people need in their lives to deal with all the issues, all our mental health issues that we all deal with. The element of a rooftop garden, love the fish tanks and getting that fertilizer into the plants and all that good stuff, and the garden up there and being able to then have Alexis and Cairo put it on their table, the vegetables that come from their garden.  That's the holistic approach of this administration. And I'm proud to be a small partner in a very, very big partnership. Congratulations, Eric and the team here. This is wonderful, and let's do it again. All right, I've got a piece of the rock here. Senator Rivera, please come up. Good morning, everyone. A lot of it has been said, and I'll just say a couple of quick things. Project Renewal, the name of the organization speaks for itself. The effect that a renewal has, not only in an individual, on a family, but on a community.  It was nothing there. And we're all discussing how the thing was gonna look.  But ultimately, this is the type of development that can happen, and that I'm incredibly happy it is happening in my neighborhood. I just walked here this morning, and I was reminded as I'm walking by about what this used to look like. And then when I met Alexis, and I saw everything that they have here as all the amenities that are here, again, I am incredibly proud to partner with Project Renewal to make sure that the city, I'm thankful for the city to do what they're doing. I'm thankful that the state is doing their part to make sure that developments like this happen all over the city, but certainly here in the Bronx. Because we need to renew people. We need to give them the opportunity to do just what Alexis is doing with her family. She is doing something stronger for herself, for her family, and she's making the community stronger as an extension. Thank you, Project Renewal. Thank you for being here. Have a peace on the Bronx. It's the rock. Now, DSS Commissioner Gary Jenkins. Good morning, everyone. So any day we are announcing the completion of Affordable and Supportive Housing is a freaking great day. So today's a great day. We're so pleased to be here to announce the first phase, and the Borough President said it, it's the first phase, not the last phase, of completion of the Beffett Green House. This incredible project will bring 117 supportive units right here. Alexis, I am so proud of you.  Stay focused and be there for your daughter as you are and just take advantage of all of the services that's available to you. I am here to support you, whatever you need from the Department of Social Services, call on us. We're here to support you. And the Borough President said it and the Mayor said it, for far too long, the Bronx has been underserved. That stuff stops today, not in this administration. We're gonna be here for the Bronx. We're gonna be here for its residents. We're gonna make sure that the city is standing up and leading in that effort. So I'm not gonna take a long time speaking, I had a whole speech here, but I'm speaking from the heart. We are so proud of Project Renewal. We are so proud of our relationship and our partnership. We wanna continue to build on that area. So thank you. Thank you. All right. I'm from Brooklyn, but it starts with a B, so I hear the Bronx is good too. We've heard a lot from New York City, but I also want to invite ODoc Commissioner from New York State, Dan Thietz. Thank you. Thanks so much, Eric and Project Renewal, and many thanks to the mayor, commissioners, Bronx Borough President for your support for this important project. This project really exemplifies Governor Hockel's $25 billion, five-year affordable and supportive housing plan. This unprecedented investment includes the creation and preservation of 10,000 supportive housing units like these. Permanent supportive housing plays a vital and critical role in helping families and individuals to overcome the obstacles that may have contributed to their homelessness. OTDA's homeless housing and assistance program provides $128 million in capital funding each year to construct projects such as this. Bedford Green House will provide safe, stable and affordable homes for residents along with targeted support services to help these families and individuals live as independently as possible in their community. And we heard from someone who exemplifies that fully. I'm proud to say that our homeless housing and assistance program recently awarded $6 million for the second phase of the Bedford Green House development, so we're very pleased with that. Through collaborative efforts across state government, New York has taken a multifaceted approach to addressing homelessness, including increased capital funding for construction, improved service delivery and innovative policy approaches. Under Governor Hockel, New York recognizes that the causes of homelessness are complex and effectively addressing the challenges that lead to families and individual experiencing homelessness require a comprehensive approach. All of us at OTDA and the homeless housing and assistance program understand the importance of supportive housing and helping some who have experienced homelessness to stabilize their lives and to be full participants in their community. We wanna take this opportunity to prevent you, Eric, so before you give me the rock. So I like Commissioner Jenkins from Brooklyn. We don't have rocks like that. We have sandy beaches, I'm just saying. To join you, to present a plaque commemorating the completion of the project, well, the completion of the first phase. Yes, thank you. We'll come back and give you another one for the second phase. So I present you this wonderful plaque from all of us at AJJP. I also wanna invite some of the partners who have made this possible to speak. I wanna start with our financing partner, Bank of America, Fernando Nunez. Hey, good morning, everyone. Thrilled to be here and it's an absolute honor for me to be here. My name is Fernando Nunez. I am the region executive for Bank of America and I am from the Bronx. I went to high school in the South Bronx, Cardinal Hayes High School. Went to Mahan College in Kingsbridge Riverdale and I lived in the Kingsbridge area for many years and today I am joined by John and Maria from our community development team and financial center team mates who work and live in the Bronx. So we have Delixia, Mireya, Annette and Nicolino who support the Fordham Financial Center here and our 1620 Financial Center in Westchester Avenue and Annette and Delix are district managers for Bank of America from the Bronx. So great to see the career progression from homegrown talent in the Bronx. But hey, on behalf of Bank of America we wanted to congratulate everyone here and all the partners, Eric and Paul and Project Renewal. Thank you so much. You guys did a wonderful job here and we appreciate you incorporating us in this venture that we did here recently. And we also wanted to thank HPD and HTC for all their support. We appreciate you looping us in and being able to partner up with all of you. And at Bank of America, we ask our clients and our teammates, what would you like the power to do? And the response is always the same, especially here locally. We wanna empower our associates and our clients and improve the quality of life. And Project Renewal is one of those great examples that Bank of America will continue to remain committed to throughout our journey here. I wanted to share a couple of things too in terms of the investment we're making in the Bronx. Most recently we helped CityGrow create their new warehouse out in Hunts Point. And at the same time, we renewed our contract with the New York Yankees or the official Bank of the New York Yankees again. And at the same time, we will continue to support these programs like Project Renewal and we're supporting the Bronx Zoo with the dinosaur exhibit, which I encourage all of you to go. I took my kids there recently, they had a great time. But again, thank you so much for having us here. It's been an absolute pleasure. We appreciate it and great to see all the support and all this advocacy for the great borough of the Bronx. So thank you and congratulations for you as well. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to invite Jen Trapinski from the Corporation for Supportive Housing. Thank you, Eric. And congratulations to you and Paul and the entire Project Renewal team on the completion of phase one of Bedford Green. CSH was proud to be able to partner with you to provide the acquisition and pre-development funding back in 2015 when I was a lone officer. Now I'm overseeing our lending nationally. So it's really gratifying to see the progress, to see how New York City's agencies and elected officials came together to overcome the challenges, overcome the big rock, overcome the bankruptcy, overcome all of the challenges that faced this phase one because of the incredible vision that Project Renewal had so many years ago for this project. It really is one of the most innovative and inspirational projects where you can see Alexis and Cairo are great examples of what supportive housing is meant to be. It's not just meant to be a home. It's meant to be that foundation to provide a place where individuals and families can thrive. And that is really exemplified here with Alexis and Cairo and the residents of the phase one. And we look very much forward to in a few years coming back and celebrating the phase two opening as well. Thank you so much. So I wanna make sure that I acknowledge the board of directors of Project Renewal. And many of you are here today. I'm gonna name the ones I see and you're gonna follow me. You know, if I get anyone wrong. I first wanna acknowledge Claudia Rosen who was the board chair when this site was acquired. It took a lot of vision to do that. Thank you Claudia. Our vice chair, Marlene Zorak. Thank you so much. I'm Colleen Kavanaugh. Jean Felcus and Grace Chenema, Gail Weiss, and Shams DeBaron that I miss anymore. Mike Daugherty, I know Mike's here. Lula, Lula Oricard, yes. It's an incredible representation. It's a remarkable group of people who have been steadfast in their support through some really challenging times pulling this together. So I wanna thank you. And then all of the staff of Project Renewal who are here, and if you work for Project Renewal you will at least raise your hand so we can all thank you for doing everything that you do. We also have members of our associates and junior boards who are here. Raise your hands if you're supporting them. That's great, great. Thank you so much. There are, and I know there's some other partners here. I saw Andrew Knox from ESKW and Oliver Chase who has provided lots of legal support.  Is that, I'm doing good? Okay, all right. Well, thank you all so much for coming out. We have some food and refreshments here and we're offering tours of the building. So if you haven't seen this place, don't leave without seeing what we do here. Thank you all so much for your support for coming out. Very much appreciated.


okay guys week three update on the the onions and one tomato plant has came up out of all them little tiny seeds I planted one came up and it doesn't look that great we got these are growing good I know they're hard to see because of the other grass and these deer clover things whoops but they're doing really well and here's these yeah so this is week three they're doing well but we had some really hard wind and rain kind of bent them over some but they're still grown so that's good and then we've got these these five are still here that one looks like it got stunted for some reason but these ones are doing well so there we go there's your week three onion garden update so stick around for more videos she bears I met the man alleged I'm gone for now bye bye guys we'll see in the next one


Good morning everyone. Great energy in this room, what a great energy these days. For us it was such an incredible opportunity to contribute with organizing this conference. We are really, really happy to hear Gabriel that he lobbied the TDF to really choose us and bring Bucharest on the LibreOffice map. So we are really, really happy and thankful for this opportunity. Of course it was not an easy journey. I will tell you a little bit in the next slides about it. But yeah, I would like to start with thank you. I'm Veronica Ruxanda. In my main life I'm a mother of Valencia. She's a really strong-willed, young daughter, five years old. And we are struggling with kindergarten currently. So if you see me a little bit down, I'm wondering if she's still crying. But she's going to be fine, yeah. So I'm with one and one since 2006 for 14 years. I worked with one and one in different positions. Started from development, QA, and then occupied different leadership positions in all our segments. Roberto is going to tell you about our company and he'll tell you about the segments we are working in. So I was a leader in the domains business, in the hosting area, and currently I'm working for WebDE, GMX, and Mail.com. And we are happy to develop seven of the products of Mail and Media with full ownership here in Bucharest. So I will pass the microphone with Roberto. Thank you, Vera. I'm Roberto, I'm working with one and one since 2014. Before that I was working for a French company, but I'm working with open source since the beginning, since I started. First with Eclipse and then LibreOffice, WordPress, and so on. In the company in one and one, I had different roles from head of development and now I'm head of technical product management. And as Vera was saying, we had some issues with the slides. As Vera was saying, one and one Romania is part of the United Internet Group. The United Internet Group is a big multinational company in Germany. We have three main business directions. It's the one and one access, which is the phone company part with mobile phones, internet, and so on. Whoever is in Germany, they probably know about us. We also have the policy development t-shirt. If you watch soccer games. Then we have IONUS, which is the biggest hosting company in Europe and the second in the world after Boutedy. There we sell domains, we sell cloud, we do all of the things that all the big hosting companies do. Of course, more in Germany and Europe than the US and the other parts. But if you want domains or anything, you can go and try. We have excellent prices. And then Made in Media. From Made in Media, me and Vera, we are representing the email part of the group, so basically the two biggest email providers in Germany as brands. They are both in our group, is GMX and WebDE. We are also presenting international with mail.com. We have over 40 million customers. We are basically the European alternative for that. This is how we see ourselves, the European alternative for Google and Gmail and so on. So if you are interested in having data in Europe, we are only working with companies which guarantee that the data is in Europe. So if you are interested in GDP, you can check us out. In terms of customers, I said that for the minimum customers, we mainly have email, we also have partnerships with other companies, digital services. These are the ones most in the general market but we also find it in the international market like Switzerland and Austria. In terms of open source, we are a big company so of course we have a single open source and it's not only about using, but also contributing to a lot of communities. We are members of different communities related to email abuse and everything around email of course because that's only business but we are also part of LibreOffice. That's a great partnership for us. We are part of security organizations like OVAS and so on and by doing all the projects in OVAS which is a very good link started in the main media. It's called Security Red and it's a tool which helps development teams to develop in a secure way creating security requirements. It's free, you can do it all you can contribute, just try to do it. Regarding LibreOffice and our collaboration we are working together since 2018. We started LibreOffice then moved to Alapora. We integrated it in Alapora so all our customers would have a web space, a cloud space they can use. The one I'm working on is really great documents everything is based on LibreOffice. We have Gabi which is part of the community part of the work of directors and most of the steering committee for engineering. We have other people who are contributing actively as developers and in terms of the usage if you're interested we have three significant numbers we have around 330,000 unique customers per month we have around 440,000 open files and around 20,000 new files per day and this is what happens because of this project and the collaboration that we have together. So for me it's really great to be part of this conference and be part of this community. Of course not only with work we are also contributing with the organization of the events and the sonics of the work and that is what we are doing. So thank you very much. So where did we volunteer to organize this? You know in our normal work time we are all engineers or leaders or software architects or technical product managers who are developing different products like calendar, my office for all our friends we wanted to of course contribute more besides the hands-on that our developers are doing for the community and Gabrielle as well we wanted to help more to give more that was one of the motivations the other motivation was also to bring the power from Romania to TPM and the Libre Office so we wanted to show our country which probably you heard from Nihna we are providing lots of engineers and we have a big talent pool in Romania and Bucharest and we wanted to let them know about your community your great community and of course encourage them to contribute we are happy that in the workshop lots of students and engineers who are here to participate so at least some few developers or QAs or localizations especially so we're going to hopefully contribute from now on to tell you a little bit about the organizing team of course we wouldn't have been able to do this without the Sophie, Italo, Mike Uzein they were all great and kind to us because of course this was the first time we did this it was our first event so they were truly supporting us in all the challenges that we've had along the way and we had a few different journey because this way we learn about your culture we learn about the beautiful people you are and the fact that you're doing this to really bring great software to the mankind so in this organizing team we had our leader Idina she put on her network skills and she was really literally able to find supporters in any issue we were having so she connected us with the university with Idina as well with Rasmal from Rosedum we she tried to find some helpers for any challenges we had of course Gavriel was in the middle of everything he was of course part of he's of course part of the community since a few years he knows the community so he was all the time getting into all the details of the organization as well keeping in touch with you guys our solution architect Catalin we found out that he has the legal skills so he can easily be a lawyer but we prepared him our architect he definitely took care about the contract and he definitely supported with everything regarding this getting all the information about the visas about the invitations of course serving a lot of issues we had the support from Gavriel who created the beautiful we also had the support of Gavriel and Kosmin and of course they get Daniel who are also supporting with the workshop they are acting as assistants in the workshop so we are really really great for parties as mentioned we are already in Melnikna we also have Rasmal as today due to the fact that he is away he is traveling but he was really incredible signing contracts in the middle of the night paying him voices again in the middle of the night and organizing everything in the clouds so we are all organized with contracting voices and everything so he was providing he represented who was the NGO who helped us and of course Dan who connected us with the university and supported the different things so that's all from my side again thank you very much for letting us organize this beautiful event I hope you are going to enjoy it in case you need anything just let us know we are going to be here tonight we are going to have a nice dinner and also some menu dancing so I hope you are willing to learn to dance so and of course a hack hack thank you very much and have a beautiful time here