Hey, everyone, and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cottrell, and in today's episode, we continue our interview with Rita Rivera. Before today's episode starts, I wanted to let you know about a brand new show that's coming to the Spec Network starting tomorrow. That's July 7th. Orthogonal. It's about finance and freelance. If you are a freelancer, or if you're thinking about getting into freelancing, or if you're into finance, this might be a great show for you to check out. Go to spec.fm. And once again, the show is called Orthogonal, a brand new show releasing on the Spec Network starting tomorrow, July 7th. Today's episode is sponsored by Linode. With Linode, you can instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode cloud. You can get a server running in just seconds with your choice of Linux distribution, resources, and the node location. We'll talk more about what Linode has to offer to developers. Developer T listeners later on in today's episode. But first, I want to jump straight into the interview with Rita. If you missed out on the first part, make sure you go back and listen to that first, and then come back and join us here. I think the interesting thing that a lot of developers don't do, and the difference with a half marathon in development is, you know, you're looking at numbers on your GPS. When you're running, you know exactly how good you are, right? You know exactly. The numbers, the amount of time that it takes for you to hit a particular number of miles. And you're getting that feedback constantly. The hard part for developers, and I'm going to hopefully help some of you with this. The hard part for you is that a lot of the time, you're not actually doing any retrospect on what you know. You're not looking back and saying, wow, I've actually accomplished a lot. When I started, I couldn't write any code at all. And now I'm actually Googling things because I broke something. That's not good. It's progress. If you actually have gotten to the place where you're breaking things, then you've made progress because you've gone beyond, you know, you've taken a step out into a place where you haven't been before, right? It's like saying, you know, if you never make an error in your code, then you aren't coding. Because the moment you take a step out and you do something new, you're going to fail. Hopefully, you're going to fail unless you are, if you have, if you've written something, with code and you didn't fail, please contact me because we need to talk. I've been doing this for long enough now that most of the time I'm failing at something. And if you're not failing today and tomorrow and the next day, because Rita, like you mentioned, you know, you get out and you run, at some point, your body is going to fail you. And it's going to be well before 13.1, especially on day one. And the interesting thing that happens is, yes, you're going to fail every day, but every day, your failure is going to be further away from the previous failure. You're going to fail in mile one today, but tomorrow, you may fail in mile one and a half. And that's progress. No, and that's the most beautiful thing that I, you know, so one of the weird things about me is that I find beauty in things that are broken and failed. I probably should have been a developer if I would have thought about it sooner. But one of the most beautiful things about this particular endeavor as it pertains to a career, and I say this to my children, specifically my oldest, because I think he gets it a little bit more, is that you're on a track for success when you fail, when you break something, when something goes wrong, and then you're able to see it, fix it, correct it, and go forward. That actually makes you more. You're skilled. How magnificent is that to be able to be in a career that when you break something and fix it, it's perceived as genius? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it almost makes you want to go and write some bugs so that you can fix them, right? Which is almost quite literally what test-driven development is. You're writing failures so that you can convert them into successes. It is addictive. Extremely important. Test-driven development. And for any new developers out there who are trying to figure things out and are self-taught, run tests on everything that you do, because that in itself will set you apart from a lot of other developers. If you can test it, find the bugs, and fix it, that's what companies are really looking for. I see it all the time when companies say, hey, here's my new app. They go live, and then I test it, and boom, bug. It's not working. And then I'm sitting there writing my friend who happens to be the CTO or happens to be the developer on it saying, hey, this happened. But I mean, test. Test-driven development is key. It is extremely key. So for those of you who are self-taught, that's something that I would say is really important to learn because that will set you apart from developers that are coming out of a CS degree or coming out of a recent bootcamp. Your understanding of test-driven development is extremely important, specifically if you want to align yourself with a startup. Absolutely. And the reason... it's so important and the reason why when I hire someone, if I know that they know how to write tests, the reason I, in my opinion, that that's so important is because it trains you to respond to failure. Every single, every single moment that you're writing code, you're building something to move away from failure. You're not aimlessly creating, you're not aimlessly writing code and hoping that it works. You're very much so aware of what you're doing and, you know, that will absolutely drive up your confidence as well. You know, we're talking about imposter syndrome and one of the difficult things that developers face, especially if you're like me and you don't have a degree in computer science, maybe some of you didn't know that. I don't have a degree in computer science. I actually have a degree in digital media, which is similar, but it's not the same thing. You know, I never took an algorithms class. And so, you know, I have struggled with imposter syndrome at many stages in my career, but when I write tests and they pass and when I'm creating features that are actually bringing in revenue for the clients that I work for, then I don't need a CS degree. I can look at the validation sitting in front of me, the green lights on my tests and the green dollars that are coming into my clients and realize that the work that I'm doing is not going to be the same as what I'm doing in my career. And so, you know, I'm doing is valuable. Like it's objectively valuable. It's not just me, you know, looking and saying, oh, wow, I'm a good coder. No, it's actually creating value in front of my face. Right. And so if you're struggling with imposter syndrome, you don't have to go and make a bunch of money with code to get that sense of accomplishment. You just need to look at what you're doing and recognize the value that it's generating. And for a lot of people, that's going to be a lot of fun. And so I think that's a really good way to start. And I think that's an incredible feeling to see your code objectively working and doing what you wanted it to do. You know, it's interesting because before I got into technology, so as I mentioned, when we started, I was in legal staffing for a period of time. My background is in legal and technology staffing and, you know, legal staffing, as I mentioned earlier, or legal is very different. You can't shortcut to be a lawyer. You can't shortcut to be a doctor. And before I got into technology, I was very adamant about what I thought my children needed to do. I have three kids. What I thought my children needed to do to be successful. So I thought, you know, college track, I need to have Florida pupates. I need to have NJ best. I need to make sure that all this college is funded. And it's so amazing to me how silly, right? Cause I'm in staffing and I'm not a developer yet having being exposed to so many supremely intelligent genius level individuals that don't have college degrees that are awe inspiring. It's completely changed my thought process on what I need to have available to my children as resources. And I will tell you that college and CS degrees and all those things, although they're a great backup and I literally see them now. As a backup, not because of my upbringing, quite the opposite. I wanted them to have those pieces of paper so that they felt, um, solidified if you would. And what I've learned in being in this career and staffing in this career and seeing developers make North of six figures and beyond and do very well for themselves with limited, I'll say formal education, because I think the average education that a developer puts forward and learns is so much more than formal and us four degree style, just to be clear. Um, but being in this industry has taught me that that is not necessarily what I'm looking for for my children. I am more of, I want you to learn these, these skills and I want you to see what you can do with it. Whether you want to be an entrepreneur, whether you want to go full force into development and we can talk about it, but I think that's a really good thing to do. I think that's a really good thing to do. I think that's a really good thing to do. But the $40,000 investment in a CS degree is not necessarily lucrative at all. Actually. I would agree with that. I think, you know, there are, I've, I, one of the first episodes I did, uh, on developer T was about a design degree, getting a design degree. I talked to two of my coworkers and, uh, they both recently had gotten their degrees at the time that we talked about it. And we discussed a lot about this subject. You know, one of the things that I walked away, uh, with the knowledge of is, you know, a lot of the time, the degree is for the experience that you have, um, in getting that degree. So for example, the people that I met when I was at college, those are the people that I'm working with today. We all kind of started a company together. That's amazing. And it's, it's a unique experience. It's really awesome. I'm, I'm incredibly, I'm incredibly proud of that. I'm, I'm incredibly proud of that. I'm incredibly thankful, obviously incredibly humbled every single day. Um, because not everybody gets to do what we got to do. You know, it's a bunch of friends hanging out, making stuff together. Um, you know, that doesn't mean that when you go to college, you're going to get the same thing. In fact, a lot of people who go to college don't finish college. Number one, they end up with a bunch of debt. Number two, which can totally kill your career, by the way, because you'll take the first job that comes along. So that you're not, you know, totally buried in debt and having collectors, you know, knocking on your door every day. I'd like to speak to that. No colleagues agree. I have $57,000 in student loans and I have no degree. I'd like to speak to that for a moment, just for fun. Yeah, please, please do. Yeah. Uh, and, and, and the reality is, you know, if you have, um, like you're saying, Rita, you're a perfect example. You're sometimes people don't finish for whatever reason. Uh, you go in thinking that you're not going to get the same degree. You're going to study one thing and you end up wanting to study something else. And then by the time that you run out of money, you don't have a degree in your hand. Um, and so then you just pretty much all you're doing is paying off those loans because, you know, 95% of the value of going to college is the paper that you get. And the other 5% is the experience that you get. And that paper isn't really all that valuable, right? So, uh, you're, you're really looking at a pretty, um, the odds against this, right? I got lucky. I actually really enjoyed my college experience. I was lucky enough also to get, uh, quite a few scholarships, academic stuff. If you get an academic scholarship, I would recommend you go to college. It's free education, fantastic opportunity for you. Uh, you know, it's not a waste of time in that, in that case, but if, if you're going to get buried in debt, reconsider, think about going into the job market first. That's probably the first time that I've ever done that. And I think that's a really good way to get out of that I've ever said that on this show. Um, but I think Rita, you know, talking to you, it's an appropriate time to talk about this. Um, going into the job market first, that provides you with so many opportunities that you may or may not have otherwise. It's funny that you say that. So, um, I wanted to be the daughter of a legal secretary that went to law school. My mother was a legal secretary in a international law firm since ever. I can remember when I was a kid. Um, she was there for 26 years, worked in two different, um, states for that particular law firm. And we grew up, I'm going to say humble. It's a pretty way to put it. Um, so that's what I thought I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. And she sat there and said, you know what, you need to actually work in that field first and see what you think. And I had already invested roughly about 90 credits into towards that degree. And I worked in a law firm. I worked in a law firm for about a year and a half. And I was like, I'm going to do law firm for about a year and a half. And I, while going to school and I saw very quickly that it was a male dominated society and, um, it just wasn't for me. Yeah. So again, I, I changed and changed and changed and we've, we've chatted about that a little bit, but what I will say is that the degree perspective, it is important that said, it's not as, it's not as valid in this particular field. So what we're discussing today, I wouldn't say for someone who wants to be a CPA or, you know, again, you can't fast track it with a doctor or lawyer, but when it comes to technology, you know, one of the, one of the things that I love about this particular space and why I will never go back to legal staffing or finance staffing or any other type. One of the things that I love the most about being, in this space is that it's filled with the thinkers, the creatives, the solution driven individuals that don't adhere to status quo and make decisions on their own more than anything, solution driven individuals. And there is no degree in solutions. Yeah, that's true. Well, there probably is, but it's probably, it's probably pretty far behind the times at this point. I don't think there is, but you know, that's one of the things that's amazing about technology is that all are welcome. Anybody can make it there. You really can if you are driven. So there are some things that apply, you know, that are across the board. So work ethic, apply across the board, putting in the extra hours or apply across the board, soft skills aren't necessary. So if you're an, an introvert, it's important to be able to express your passion of technology. That's going to goes under the soft skills belt, but anybody can make it regardless of background, demographic, college education. If you know what you know, you are willing to learn something else. You can do this and, and, and have, have a great career, have a very decent salary and beyond. And more than anything, do something that is really interesting and thought provoking. It's amazing. Yeah, it is incredible. And you see people of all different, you're absolutely right. You see people of all different backgrounds, you know, every race. I love that about technology is that, and I hear it all the time, you know, there's a lack of women, you know, there's a lack of this. And, and one of the things that I was doing with answer cross was creating the large group of people that were able to do that. And I was targeting companies that had certain metrics that they were trying to meet and, and trying to further that cause that said across the board, at least in my experience as it pertains to finance, legal and technology, you know, technology is the most welcoming space. It's warm and fuzzy in comparison to those other industries where it doesn't, I I've, I've, I've had students at wind code that were 64 years old, go through a program and were placed as a developer. There was a student that was 18 finished high school realized that getting a four year degree was not for him. And he went through the program. Brainiac now works for one of the largest EMR EHR companies in South Africa. And he's a big fan of the program. And he's a big fan of the program. He signed up for the program and signed up for the program. And he signed up for the program. And he signed up for the program. Florida that is tripling revenue like day by day. It's ridiculous. That's incredible. And he's there as an associate engineer right now. Yeah. And he's 19. Today's episode is sponsored by Linode. With Linode, you can instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode cloud. That server is going to have two gigabytes of Ram for only $10 a month. That's their starting plan. It's an incredible deal. $10 a month. You can get a server running in under a minute and you choose your platform. your data center from eight separate data centers. They have hourly billing with a monthly cap on all their plans and their add-on services. And you have total control over these servers. You can SSHN as root. You can run a Docker container or an encrypted disk, VPN, whatever you want to do with it. You can run a private Git server even. They have native solid state drive storage on a 40 gigabit network running on Intel E5 processors. So speed is not a problem. And if you're worried about the price, well, Linode has a seven-day money-back guarantee. So if you're not happy, there's nothing to lose. But if that wasn't enough, on top of that, Linode is offering Developer T listeners $20 worth of credit for using the code DEVELOPERT20. Go to linode.com slash DEVELOPERT and use the code DEVELOPERT20 at checkout, and you'll get $20 for free. So go to linode.com slash DEVELOPERT20 today. Thanks again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode. Of course, we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. That link and the code can be found in the show notes at spec.fm. Like I said earlier in the show, one of my goals with this show is to empower people to create careers in this field, to join careers, create careers, build your own career in this field, because it's possible it's wide open for that. What it takes is understanding that the romance that you see on the screen about technology is not really the primary road towards actually becoming a developer, right? You're very unlikely to learn how to code in one week and then turn around and create the next Instagram and then get bought out by Facebook, and then all of a sudden you're a billionaire. Instead, adopt a love for the craft, right? Start there. Start by figuring out the things that you really love about technology, maybe the other fields that you like, the types of companies you want to work for, because as we said earlier in the show, once again, every company pretty much is on the table when it comes to technology, and you can pursue a career in technology working in pretty much any field you want to, right? Start by acquiring this infatuation with the craft. Rather than saying, I want to be an overnight success, that's probably not going to work very well for you. I like to create this metaphor for investing in your career. It's very similar to investing money. If you think that your long-term investment strategy is to buy a bunch of lottery tickets and hope that you're going to win the lottery one day and that's how you're going to create your wealth, then... You're probably listening to the wrong show, first of all. But secondly, you're very unlikely to actually succeed. That's just the reality of it. So, yeah, there are people who win the lottery. That is a valid way to achieve wealth, right? But it's not one that you can actually kind of craft the path towards. It's mostly based on things that you can't control. But there are things you can control, to create a path to wealth. And there are things that you can control to create a path towards a career in technology. Well, it's funny. Can somebody develop an app for that to trace the stats on how many people win the lottery with only buying one ticket? Because even with that analogy, I'm pretty sure each person plays the same number or buys the same ticket a hundred times. But yes, I mean, 100%, this isn't a get-rich-quick scheme. Overnight success, it's such an inappropriate nomenclature. Is that the correct word? Sure. Yeah, yeah. I think that makes sense. Because it's completely the opposite of what that actually means. If you talk to Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, people would consider him an overnight success. And there was no overnight about it. There is no overnight success. Now, what we see is the public and the media is very different. That said, if you're an entrepreneur and you have an idea and you want to develop it, do it all day. What I would tell you, though, is that what you probably want to do is find a job in a startup as a developer while you're developing your own idea and learn from the ground floor what it means to be in a startup. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Or, you know, coming from the agency world, I have to throw in the pitch for the agency here. You can learn so much by going and working for an agency. Oh, my goodness. I say it all the time. So it's interesting to me because I usually come across, you know, one of two type of students and, you know, probably one of two type of candidates, too. So you have the ones that, like, want to be working on something different every day. And I tell them, get into a dev shop. That's what you want to do. Get into a dev shop. So you're working on something new every day. You're focusing on a client for a short period of time. Your solution changes, you know, what you're doing. It's very problem solving. Or, you know, if you want to go, I get it all the time where developers say, well, I want to be in corporate. Well, to me, corporate and technology means you are working on one solution for one company. It doesn't mean that your Office Max or Office Depot, a corporate company, is going to be a company that you're working on. It doesn't mean that you're working on a corporation per se, but you are working on one solution for one and a client. That, to me, is corporate in tech. Yeah. Yeah, that totally makes sense. So, you know, it's kind of interesting, but I have these conversations on a day-to-day basis, and I love them because I find the technology field absolutely amazing. And I don't think there's a ceiling. And not necessarily when it comes to economics, but just because of the possibility of what's available. It's just absolutely amazing. I wish I could code. I've actually been trying to self-teach myself, but as a mother of three, working full-time with a fourth child, I've inherited a fourth. So, technically, mother of four, two dogs, and working full-time, kind of hard to figure out. I'm trying. I'm trying. Well, there's people just like you, Rita, right now who are out there, and, you know, maybe they have a job, but they're not going to be able to do it. And I think that's a good opportunity to coach those guys, because those guys may have a similar constraint on their time, or they're in a different career, and they're looking to get into development. And let me be the first to encourage those of you who think that you don't have enough time, including you, Rita. Thank you. There are ways that you can learn to code in those little moments. That's actually one of the reasons I started this show, for example. You know, the hope that these short episodes can people and maybe not give you hard skills in terms of code, but it can give you soft skills. And we talk about a lot of that kind of stuff here. I'm not trying to over pitch developer T right now. What I'm trying to say is, you know, there are so many little pieces and parts to the learning path for the developer that learning to code is only one of the many things that you have to learn to be a good developer. And I would say, Rita, people like you, you have a large number of the skills necessary to be a developer already. In many ways, you already are a developer, right? You have the mindset, you understand the technology overall in terms of its effect on the world, the power that it has in our culture. Those are fundamental things that you have to have to be a developer. The code is just kind of a byproduct of it. I agree with you. I agree with you 100%. So that's part of the reason why I put myself through coding. And funnily enough, the reason why, you know, I don't know if I'm giving too many plugs to Code Academy, but the reason why I did that was really to understand when I was at WinCode, to understand some of the challenges the students were going through, as well as to translate, you know, from, although I wasn't there as a recruiter per se, yet I was helping students get placed. And I was also teaching business skills to students. And I needed to kind of understand. They were going through this amazing, condensive nine-week course. When I started off with WinCode, I was there as a guest speaker. And then I actually joined the staff. And when I joined the staff, I was always awestruck. Like day one, I would ask the class, which was generally roughly anywhere between 20 to 30 students, I would ask the class, how many of those students quit jobs? Hmm. To start, embark on this career. And when I saw those hands go up, I was always floored. Because I just couldn't, I mean, it's just something that it would be very difficult for me to do. Yeah. It's a huge sacrifice. Huge sacrifice. And I mean, for lack of a better word choice, and I've tried to harness some of my colorful language, but the balls that that really takes, I mean, let's just, let's just call it. The balls that that takes is amazing. Amazing. And I always took that very personal, that in nine weeks, these students would be looking to me and myself and Yuhan, Joe for help. So that's part of the reason why I was inspired to figure out more about the process. Because if a lay person like me could figure it out, maybe I could help translate some information or just speak to potential companies that would be hiring students. I didn't progress as far as I would have or should have. But I will say that it was always very impressive to me as I, and as I started playing around in Code Academy and started trying to learn code in a different way, it was very interesting to me. And what I've seen the students go from like zero, not knowing anything to where they were at pitch day. And then when they got that first job, and, and that second job, it really proves to me that if someone has the right drive and the right attitude, they can have the amazing career in this field. And that's an opportunity that you don't get in, I can't think of any other field that you really get that. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is an incredible opportunity. And I would say, it's worth making some sacrifices for. Um, I'm working on, on developing some content around the idea of that career path for developers. I'm not going to, not going to release any more details just yet on that. But, uh, one of the things that I think is important, um, as you're going through this process is knowing what you are giving up and why. And if you're, if you're not careful, you know, some of those people who quit their jobs, um, they knew exactly, what they were giving up. They knew exactly the numbers, their income that they were, that they were trading for their learning experience. They knew the exact amount of time that they were going to spend each and every day, you know, moving towards this career. And it's, it's important to have that kind of last ditch moment, um, for things that you're passionate about. It's also important to understand how to manage those sacrifices, right? And if you don't, learn how to manage the sacrifices as a developer, for example, I have to know how to manage my schedule with developer T so that I don't get burnout and stop doing it altogether. If your goal is to create a career in this field and you go, uh, and hopefully none, none of the people at wing code actually, um, did this this way. But if you go and you quit your job because you're really excited, but then you get, you know, five months down the road, and you can't pay your rent, right? And, and you're in a situation where now, you know, the only thing that's, that's carrying you is your passion. But now you have people, um, knocking on your door, asking you for money that you don't have, right? Those are things that can kill your career just as much or more than a lack of passion. So I, I want the people who are listening to this show, I want you to get super passionate, super fired up. Case in point, you know, whether it's a coding bootcamp or a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, whether you're self-taught, whether you've been in the industry for 10 years, you know, passion is key. And I tell, I tell the students and candidates all the time. I mean, obviously I'm not with wing code anymore, but what I used to tell the students and what I tell candidates all the time is that passion is key, separate and apart from anything. So I can go get a CS degree, but if I do nothing with it after it means nothing. Mm-hmm. It's extremely important to maintain the passion, the drive and the commitment because there is no education, whether CS or otherwise or alternate or a bootcamp or anything that is going to engrave passion. That's something that only the individual can do. And commitment to practicing the cap, the craft is something that only an individual can do, regardless of where you go, regardless of what you do or how much you pay for the education, or you didn't pay for any of it. And you did it your own tweaking on playing around on whatever systems you were working with. Your passion is the only thing that guarantees your employment period. End of sentence. It's only you, what you can show your portfolio website, your constant committing your practicing of your craft. That is the only thing that will guarantee employment. Not a certificate, not a degree. That's absolutely true. I think that, you know, if you are, if you're getting into this for any other reason than, than you actually wanting to be in this industry, then unfortunately, it's probably not going to work out for you. But if you're getting into this because you understand why Rita and I are sitting here getting so excited about all of the possibilities, if that gets you excited as well, then it's likely that you can forge a career path in technology. It's likely that you can forge a career path as a developer. Agreed. I mean, the thing that I, that I would say beyond all of those things is that if you find yourself to be a person that is solution driven, if you like solving problems, if you solve problems, if you solve problems, if you solve problems, if you solve problems, if you see the errors and things and you say, Hey, I think you can fix it or I want to fix it. That's great advice. You should be a developer, period. End of sentence. It's the way that I see it because, because that's, that's what developers do. They develop solutions to a problem. That's what they do. I think people get very lost in all of the, I need to learn this language or any proficiency. And this, no, it, do you have a burning desire? Do you automatically identify problems and have a desire to fix them? If that's you, you are a developer at heart. So you either want to pursue an educational path, want to pursue a self-taught path. There are so many solutions to do self-taught. One does not make the difference. Some people need guided education to help them. Some people can do it on their own. All that you need to do is prove what you know. That's it. And you do that by building and breaking and building again. And that's, that is really what it comes down to. Practice is building things over and over and over and over and breaking them over and over and over and over and then learning how to fix them over and over and over. Right. So, so that's the charge for you as developers, especially those of you who are early in your career. Go and build a bunch of stuff. And I would say, go and build a bunch of small stuff. It doesn't, you don't have to go and make a bunch of money. You don't have to build a massive application in order to learn. Go and build a hundred small things in the next hundred days, right? That would be a great way to get a lot of experience under your belt. It's, you know, go and, go and build something and make it interesting to you and to other people. It doesn't have to make money. You can be resourceful. You can be resourceful. You can be resourceful. You can be resourceful. You can go and make, uh, a snake game or make, uh, the most obvious things that you can imagine making to-do lists, whatever it is. If you build a hundred of those things, once you get on the other side of that hundred days or of those hundred small things that you've built, I can't tell you how much you're going to understand that you didn't understand before you did that, how much you will have learned in that period of time. It's incredible how much you can learn by building small things. and iterating, iterating, iterating, going back and fixing things. It's an amazing experience that your brain goes through when you learn things like this. It's a form of magic, if you really think about it. It's really a form of magic. The ability to alter and create and break and then build again. It is somewhat magical. It's incredible. Rita, thank you so much for your time tonight. I have two more questions for you, and then we're going to have to cut it short. We've actually run over the normal time for Developer Tea. No, it's been a really good conversation. I'm really, really thankful that you came on the show. The first question, and these are the questions that I ask every guest that comes on Developer Tea. Question number one is, if you could give every developer 30 seconds of advice, what would you tell them? I would say work on the soft skill business side. If you're an introverted person, I would tell you go out to networking events, find the things that you're passionate about. If it's a Java networking event, go on to a Meetup, find a React networking event. It's extremely important that you find like-minded individuals in your particular area of interest. It will help you. It will help you develop yourself, and it will generally lead to opportunities for employment. That's great advice once again. And a quick plug for Developer Tea. This is what Developer Tea is all about, the soft skills. So I totally agree with you, Rita. Soft skills are not going away. It doesn't matter what the code looks like. The soft skills will be there to support it, and even more every day. Because as developers, because as programmers become more and more common, the ones that are uncommon are those who know how to deal with people really well. That's the skill that's going to set you apart every single time. Agreed. 100%. I've had tons of people interview for opportunities, and I will tell you 8 out of 10 times, and I'm probably being a little bit more conservative with that, 8 out of 10 times, the company will go with a person that is... least skilled, but more palatable, if you will. A person who has better business skills. Yeah, absolutely. So the second question that I have for you, and this is another one that I ask all of the guests on Developer Tea, what do you wish more people would ask you about? I wish more people would ask me about how to communicate their skill set in an interview. Okay. Can you tell me, maybe a couple of tips on how I would do that then? Yes. So I recommend, if you're a developer, you should go to every interview with your laptop, and you should be prepared to share what you're working on. Your own projects, your own thing, whatever you're building, breaking, whatever it is. I wish that more people would come to me and say, hey, should I show this? Yes, you should. It's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to make you stand apart if you can sit there and show your passion and interest. Your HR person isn't going to want that, but your techie, developer, engineer person is going to love it. Yeah, absolutely. As a developer who hires people, that's the stuff that I like to see, especially if you can give me a demo. Digging through your code, not as important to me, but if you can show me something cool that you've built, like something cool in person, you can actually demo that code. That's hugely valuable to me because it shows me what that final product actually looks like. Of course. Or even a bump that you hit in a road. Hey, I was trying to build this, and this is my stop gate, and I'm still trying to figure it out. That's amazing because that's developer language, and you want to communicate on the level of the person that wants to hire you. Yeah. Definitely. So, yeah, I love this advice. Take your computer, take the work you've been doing. In fact, be prepared specifically with things that you've been doing. Yes. Maybe even say, okay, I want to take in one problem, one thing that I've been working on that I think is cool, and a project that I'm looking at that I think I want to get involved in. And ask for advice. So, for example, let's say you're looking to learn React, and you're starting, you know, a project in React. Say, you know what? I'm looking to do this, and I'm not quite sure what way to go. Do you have any advice? That is an amazing tool for developing conversation. And it shows the person you're interviewing with that you are trainable, you're teachable, and you want to learn. Absolutely. Yeah. It also shows them a sense of respect. Right? If you come to me and you say, hey, I would love for your advice, that makes me feel great. Right? As, just from the psychological perspective, if somebody asks me for my advice, that's a sign that they trust me. And that's huge to me. Just from a human perspective. It doesn't matter if you're in technology or not. If you're in a totally different career, and you're listening to this episode just by chance, this applies to you too. Go and ask, you know, for someone's advice that you are applying to. Ask them, hey, what can I do to be the most attractive candidate? That's not faux pas. That's not weird. That's exactly what I want to hear from my interview candidates. What can I do to be, you know, the top candidate on your list? And then if I give you a list, go and do those things. Right? Like, it's not an incredibly hard equation. Right? No. All day, every day. I tell candidates all the time, they should inquire, how they measure against other candidates. How do I present as it pertains to this other group? Or what could I have done better? It's important that when you interview, or they interview you, you also interview them. And if you can walk away with any substantive information that can make you better on your next round, you know, take it. So what could I have learned better? What did I not know that if I knew more about, it would make me a more viable, viable candidate. That's extremely important. Extremely important. Yeah. That's great advice. Rita, thank you so much for coming on Developer Tea. And I really appreciate your time tonight. Thank you. It's been my sincere pleasure. I've really enjoyed this. It's been awesome. Awesome. I'm sure we will, we will have many people wanting to connect with you in some way or another on Twitter or through email or, you know, where can they find you online? So I'm on LinkedIn. Obviously, anybody can search me under my name, which is Rita, R-I-T-A, last name Rovira, R-O-V-I-R-A. They can follow me on Twitter under Rita Code 7. That said, if they want more of career advice, I would suggest they connect with me on LinkedIn. This has been awesome. I've really enjoyed it. I have to thank Don, which is one of the last students, that I had the pleasure of being involved with at WinCode. He was amazing. And he's the one that suggested that I connect with you. Absolutely. And I will include links in the show notes to Rita as well as Don. Don was the one who emailed and connected Rita and I. So thank you again to Don. Rita, thank you so much for your time. It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this. This has been awesome. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. And thank you again to Rita for coming on to the show. Thanks also again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. With Linode, you can instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode cloud. And as of July 1st, Linode offers two gigabytes of RAM on those servers for only $10 a month. Go and check it out. Linode.com slash Developer Tea. If you are enjoying Developer Tea, consider leaving a review on iTunes. This is the best way to help other developers. Just like you find Developer Tea. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.