EPISODE SUMMARY

On this episode I got the chance to chat with an 18 year veteran in the industry, Site Reliability engineer Josh Dewald. We cover things like how to identify and overcome impostor syndrome, finding a love for debugging and the problem solving process and the importance of finding mentors to guide you through your journey.

EPISODE NOTES

Key topics covered:

• Finding a love for the debugging process.
• The importance leadership that values exploration, communication and testing.
• It is ok to make mistakes. The key, learning from your mistakes. Humans are fallible, plan for that.
• Imposter syndrome is real, but it's ok, ask questions.
• Taking initiative to find the "interesting stuff" at your company, find your niche.
• Lean into admitting when you don't know something.
• Look for mentors & learn from them, often they'll love being able to share what they've learned.
• Our fundamental job is to solve problems, not to write code.
• Recognize design and systems patterns, what the key components of a system are & how they fit together.
• Observability → Figuring out key metrics that impact your team.
• Visualize and plan before diving in.

Three biggest takeaways

1. Find a mentor or mentors. Someone you can talk to and get advice from.
2. Learn to love troubleshooting and debugging. Don't think that your code should "work" the first time you learn it. Always question your assumptions.
3. Don't get bogged down by the impostor syndrome. remember you're an engineer and you're solving problems.

Featuring

Josh DeWald — Twitter, Github, Linkedin, gmail: [email protected]

Andrew Locke — Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Links

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