Blending Technology, Education, and Mentorship - Ian Douglas #podcast

[Music] welcome to the my cium network podcast a podcast for early stage web developers and the mentors teachers and communities that helped him along the [Music] way welcome Yan and thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today yeah thanks for having me today I've been in the tech industry for about 26 years um I studied Computer Engineering in Canada and uh I moved to the United States in the year 2000 uh mostly to get into more professional web development work and uh moved to uh California Southern California lived there for a number of years moved out to Colorado uh about almost a decade ago and uh really love Colorado it's pretty great out here but I've spent most of my career as a a back-end developer but I've transitioned through various kinds of stages as a developer I've done devops duties I've done QA testing I've done everything from racking servers like actually putting them in the in the uh you know server racks all the way up to frontend development so when people talk about full stack development uh I I kind of Envision like I can literally do everything from running the network lines into the servers system administration on the servers installing all the software all the way up through through uh you know uh JavaScript in the browser and and everything in between I ran a web hosting business for a number of years for uh small startups and it really got my interest in working at startups so a lot of my career has been uh small early stage uh companies but for the last uh gosh eight or nine years now I've been doing career coaching for people and just helping them understand um how to get into the tech industry and how to find jobs in the tech industry and and focusing a lot on mentorship and education so over the last eight years or so I've I've really pivoted a lot of my role into more of the developer advocacy and developer education side of things and working on a lot of technical curriculum nice nice and that that fits perfectly for our audience both the people we speak to and the people who listen to the podcast um so I had a look at your G up profile and through that and you linked in I discovered that you are behind the website Tech interview. guu and this looks like an exceptionally good resource for our audience so for those who do not know about it um which includes me can you please um tell us more about this resource so about eight years ago when I started uh kind of down the Journey of becoming kind of a the idea of a career coach I was mentoring for a coach School in Colorado called the Turing School of software and design and I mentored for them for about three years mostly just career development how to build a resume how to get an interview how to how to uh um you know really stand out to a company throughout my career I kind of progressed from senior engineer into the management side and then back again so I've I've gone back and forth between management and Hands-On contributor um all the way up to like director of engineering type of roles and so I had a lot of perspective on how to really stand out to a hiring manager what I look for in resumés and things like that so I was turning around teaching that to other people and then uh the school turned around and offered me a job as an instructor and so I was actually teaching their backend uh software program for uh almost four years but also still helping with a lot of career development uh but by then they had hired a whole team of people to do the career development side and when I left there about a year ago I wanted to still do a lot more around just the scalability of making this information known to a wider audience so I put together the website Tech interview guide It's been up for quite a few years now um but I've been gradually adding content to it and a year ago I decided you know what I'm going to try live streaming so I live stream twice a week and you can find all that information on the on the website as far as when I live stream but I live stream just career advice we do resumé reviews we talk about what kinds of projects you should build um how to really stand out to companies um you know what what goes into a good resume or CV what should you leave out uh stuff like that and how to evaluate job postings all kinds of fun stuff on the on the live stream and um so yeah so the website is is kind of an it's it's a start of that information base and then I kind of Branch out from there into an email newsletter YouTube channel with lots of archive videos um as well as information to the live stream so however you want to consume content if you're a reader there's lots to read if you just want audio there's an audio podcast if you want video you can go to YouTube and if you want to interact live you can come over to live stream so I want to try to cater to everybody's learning style for however you want or need to consume that content um I try to make that available for you yeah I think that's absolutely critical like for me um as I slowly start pting toward the education um areas um that is something that I definitely have top of mind is that there are so many different ways that people like to learn um and often times you find a plat form would focus on only one specific thing so then you kind of have to supplement uh the one resource with another resource with another resource and then it becomes a little overwhelming I I find when I speak to people um that's often a thing that I mention is one I'm I'm I find it hard to find a resource that caters to how I like to learn and two there's so much that I don't know where to begin and once I started I quickly get lost in the forest and I I don't know I lose my way so that is that is really interesting I love that you do that um I also noticed on your link tree page that you have got a interview I think it maybe it's you that's running it or not sure but it's an interview prep Discord server yeah that's part of the tech interview dogu website as well so the the Discord server is really for the community to hang out talk about projects um I do resume reviews through the Discord server as well um but also I tell people if if you want to ask a question anonymously you can DM me on all these platforms LinkedIn Twitter you know Discord and so on and I put those questions in an anonymized way into a particular channel in that Discord server that I can draw from during a live stream so I can say hey things got a little quiet people aren't chatting or sometimes I'll start the stream while people are joining the stream and I'll just go grab a random question out of the uh out of that uh anonymous questions Channel and I'll answer that live on the stream and then I go back and I like clip those sections out and make smaller YouTube videos out of just the question and the answer and things like that um so the Discord server is really just a place to support one another in the job hunt um it's it's still a pretty small community but um at least on the Discord side we we have about a thousand people following on Twitch and we got several hundred on YouTube um and so more people are interacting kind of live on the live stream than than they do on the Discord server but that's okay um again I just want to make it available for people that want that Avenue of of extra help yeah that's awesome that's really great um I think it will be a great like place for the community that that I'm also fostering um to go for sure because uh on the my Network one we don't have specific like support for that part of of the um getting into Tech thing so I think it would be great for people to join that so we'll provide links to all these things in the show notes so um as a mentor as a teacher um what advice would you give to folks new to the industry like for early stage web developers maybe how they can you know what they should shouldn't do and how to keep themselves motivated because I find that people start off being super excited um and then they kind of it's like they hit molasses and they slow down what do you do when you hit those those those moments where it just feels like you're getting nowhere I think it's important to understand when you're becoming unproductive in that struggle when when I taught we would talk about productive struggle and unproductive struggle productive struggle is where you're trying different things and you're you're gradually making progress on a solution to something unproductive struggle is where you find yourself kind of working in circles where you you find yourself trying something over and over again that you've already tried and you're hoping for a different outcome this time or you're trying to change too many things and now it broke and you don't know why and you don't know which change made it so I think it's important to be patient with yourself you're still learning it's important to be patient it's important to give yourself um you know kind of Grace and flexibility of I'm still learning it's okay that this is not working but when you start facing that unproductive struggle that's the time to reach out to someone for help that's where you you need to come to a realization that trying this the way that I'm doing it and the the direction that I'm going I'm not making progress I really need to ask somebody for help and have a community that you can reach out to where you can ask for advice and say I've tried this I've tried this I've tried this none of this has worked what else can I do and I think that that's that's the important differentiation because especially with a lot of people that are trying to learn remotely right now they feel very alone and it's easy to give up when you feel alone and that's why it's important to have a community of people around you that can help you and and support you in your learning goals and what you're trying to learn and what you're trying to do and having that community be people who are also going through what you're going through so not just a community of people that can just hand you the answers but people that can work with you through the answer to try to understand why that's the answer that's the important part as an instructor I had to be careful not to just give my students the answer answer I had to sort of Coach them to find the answer themsel and say well what if you tried this or what if you tried you know this and just kind of like Point them in the right direction and kind of give them a bit of a push self-motivation is hard though especially when you're learning online and you're learning by yourself it can feel very hard to stay motivated because programming is hard the the initial learning curve is it can be difficult if you pick up those Concepts quickly it starts to feel easy but everybody's going to hit a struggle at some point I still struggle I've been doing this for 26 years and I still run into problems and I'm still Googling answers and looking up documentation on how do I do that date format thing again in this language or that language or you know we we all do we all do you know nobody's nobody's got everything memorized all the time and I think just understanding that things are constantly going to change in Tech and so what you learned this year could change next year it could change five years from now like the way that I did programming 25 26 you know even 30 years ago when I started college is completely different now we did a lot of low-level programming a lot of c and assembly and I haven't touched C or assembly in many many years um I've dabbled in it a little bit when it comes to internet of things for controlling things like the lights and and stuff behind me or little motor circuits and things like that but I don't have to program at such a low level anymore and especially with a lot of highle languages like python in JavaScript and c and so on that are out um it makes it a lot easier to get into coding and see some really quick progress because of the high level languages and what they offer but it's also very easy to get stuck if you don't understand the fundamentals so stick with it no when to reach out for help and then find a good community that can that can help guide you to An Answer not just hand you the answer yeah yeah that's good advice um I I have to constantly stop myself I when people struggle something it's it's almost as if you feel their pain and you just want it to go away so you're just like you just want to give them the answer but you know that in the long term that doesn't that's actually worse than than kind of guiding them into answering the question themselves and I think that um for me I had a somebody that's now a very good friend of mine who when um I started about 11 years ago or so would would do that like if I went to him for advice he would kind of hint at what the possible answer could be but vaguely enough that I'd have to figure it out but at the same time you would he would back that up with I know you can do this just you know just think about it a little more and then and then if you still get stuck come back to me but usually just that that little morsel and that encouragement um that like uh belief in me like that you can do this just think about it for a second those two things combined really made a difference and then when you find the answer it's that that moment when you just like want to jump up and show everybody look it works I did this thing look at this code and then you want to like tell everybody about how you did it and I think um those moments um I used to do that a lot more than I do these days and I want to get back to that is when you're in that moment where you're excited about this thing you struggled with and then figured out right about that put all that excitement and all that knowled down somewhere even if it's like really really rough because then you can go back and once you've calmed down and everything you can read over it and like format it nicely and put a blog post because I promise you this is going to help a bunch of other people that run into the same problem like talk through how you thought about this your thinking process I think that's what a lot of um instructional information misses from me is talking through the thinking process not just you know this is the code you need to type out to make this thing happen but how did I come up with this code that makes this thing happen how did I reason about it what was what thinking what did I try that doesn't work like that is also important so yeah I think it's great to like don't give the answer another good uh another good point about that about writing up your experience those make really good blog posts um you know on medium or dev2 like all those kinds of platforms where other people are also trying to learn and and being able to document your Journey also shows a good progression of your skill over time as well and sometimes that can be the self- encouragement of look how far I've gotten in the past year look at all the things that I've done or even the past you know several months look at the progress that I've made I think that that's important to do but from an employer's point of view it's also nice for us to be able to see your progress and how you've learned and what you've learned and so on but here's another tip if you really want to stand out to employers take those blog posts make a five minute lightning talk about it and go to a local Meetup and say this is my experience with such and such if you go to that Meetup and you give a talk that says here's how to use technology whatever you're going to get a 100 people telling you why you're wrong but if you go to that Meetup and say this was my experience learning this and this is how I applied it you're like no nobody can argue with experience at best they can come and say next time try this next time you know you could maybe try this or try that and they're going to give you encouragement and they're going to give you other ideas to kind of take that to the next uh sort of level and in next steps but that also makes really good exposure for what we call discoverability of you as someone in technology that's that's what employers are going to be looking for they want to find a way to find you and if they have an employee go back and say hey you know what I I heard this guy Ian talking to this meet up you know they're learning this and that and you know they seem kind of clever and they worked on a pretty interesting project now you've got people talking about you within a company or people are going to come up and introduce you and if you end that lightning talk with like by the way I'm looking for a job people are going to approach you and say like hey we've got openings right and now you've got people introducing you who have a potential opening at a company who can maybe submit your your application and so on um and so it's it makes for very good networking as well to try to get those jobs in Tech yeah know I totally agree and and that is definitely a good way to to get into it because I think in the beginning like um your CV is just going to drown in the pool of CVS like I know it's it's some of the clients that I that I've worked with when they've advertised a position I mean they get in the order of 3 400 applications like it's so hard to stand out in in such a large um coort but if somebody comes and says by the way um so and so is applied and I've personally seen them do some really good stuff on GitHub I would really you know be sure to interview that person that helps you a lot and I think that's where um contributing to open source is is also um can really be impactful I've had people contact me and say I saw this and that contribution you made on this and that open source project and it was really cool to see that are you open to changing roles because I currently see you're here and so that happens just naturally like I didn't even have to go look for an opportunity the opportunity came my way and that is rare in this world yeah another good point about CVS and resumés the way that you build your CV and resume that stand out is to find out what that company cares about and and customize your resume for them so a common piece of advice that I give on my live stream is make a CV like make a really really big CV put every project every technology give me lots of bullet points about all the things that you've done all the things that you learned in that project uh now you're not going to submit this big giant CV to anybody but you're going to document everything and this is going to kind of grow over time and so as you find work or you work on new projects you're going to continue to add to this yeah there's a riddle that I learned as a child that basically says how do you make a sculpture of an elephant you start with a giant block of stone and you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant and you can take the same approach with a CV where how do you look like the best candidate for a job you start with an enormous CV of all of this information and you chip away everything that doesn't make you look like the best candidate and so you take away the projects that that company doesn't care about you take away the technologies that that company doesn't care about you take away you know bullet points of previous jobs and so on so that you it's it's a lot easier to just go in and delete things and so you make a copy of that big resume and you start taking away everything that that company's not going to be impressed about or it's not going to stand out to them as much if they're looking for a python developer who knows Javas script and you know both of those Technologies but they're looking for a python developer who maybe also knows JavaScript then you're going to promote more python projects and you're going to list python as a primary skill you also know JavaScript and so you might include one JavaScript project to kind of back that up if you've got that range of of Technology now if you're new in Tech you're not going to have that breadth of knowledge and that's okay too but you can focus on the primary skills that they want and highly tailor that CV to the kinds of projects that that company is going to care about and and then you know you can bring that back down to like a one-page maybe at most a two-page CV um and and submit that because companies want to see in a hurry are you going to provide value and what kind of impact are you going to have at my company you want them to see that impact in a way that says oh I want that person on my team I want them to come here and do that too and so you have to be careful when you're writing out those bullet points of not just saying I did this I did this I did this it's like okay but what impact did that have tell me what the result of doing that was like I wrote you know certain number of software tests it's like okay but how did that help well that increased our test coverage by 15% um I did you know I refactored a bunch of code and that made it 5% faster tell me the impact of what you did because that kind of stuff is going to stand out a lot more to recruiters and hiring managers as well is is seeing that impact but that highly tailored resume is going to stand out much more than people who are just putting together a single CV and sending that to everybody hoping that you know it's like it's like casting the net and hoping you catch a fish right you want to you want to be very targeted with I want to apply at this company this is what they care about let me take all the stuff out of the CV make a customized CV for them and submit that you're way more likely to get a phone call especially then if you can also get people in the company to say hey I heard them talk at a Meetup or I saw Open Source by them and get them to say your name they're far more likely to call you and and get you into that interview and then it's up to you to actually pass the interview yeah yeah for sure I remember when I um applied for a job at Mozilla um I went as far as as uh using their branding um like their color scheme and the fonts and stuff they used I like made sure that I used the same color scheme and stuff like that and and they called it out like when when they said they said your cover letter was what made us look at you and then the rest pull it on from there but that it was like in this sea of CVS there was this one that was like oh wait that looks like something we made it's like oh wow this guy actually looked at us and did The Branding and everything yeah I saw someone do that uh just this past week uh somebody submitted a resume to look at and uh it was gray with light green you know accents and so on like it was it was kind of a medium gray with with a little bit of white but a lot of like green accents they were applying to Spotify and those are the colors that they use in their app and so it like stood out perfectly because it looked like the Spotify like they didn't they didn't lay it out to look like the Spotify app of course but they were using the same color scheme those kinds of things really stand out and and let a company know like I did this on purpose because I care about your company another tip that I often give people if you're unsure what kinds of projects to build to put on your CV if you can find those companies where you want to apply go see if they have a technology or an API or or something like that that you can build into your project and put that project on your resume because it looks a lot more impressive to say hey I built this with your tool or something it can also change that introduction a little bit from I'm Ian and I have these technical skills to I'm Ian I'm a user of your software and I like it so much I want to come work at your company and be a part of that it changes that introduction now as an entry-level developer you don't often have like a you know a huge amount of projects or a huge amount of time to just build dozens and dozen as the projects but if you can find these little bits of Technologies or libraries or something that a company builds and and uses thems something that they've open sourced see if you can add that to an existing project or you know a couple of existing projects and put those projects on your resume for or CV for that company it'll really stand out to them to to let them see like oh you built like the three projects that you put on your CV all incorporate our different Technologies that's great clearly you want to work work at this company because you're targeting that kind of stuff for us to see yeah that's great advice yeah so um like you said you've been in the tech industry for a very very long time um what keeps you motivated what keeps you in this industry I almost left Tech honestly back in uh 2010 I burned out pretty hard I was working at a startup where I was working a lot of hours and uh I was talking to management at the time about you know like hey I'm working on this really critical piece I'm the only one that knows it I need help on this so that I can like take time off and you know like stay recharged and whatever and I just wasn't getting the help and uh so I burned out really hard I almost left Tech but I think what keeps me going is just my curiosity of how does that work I want to know how that works I want to go build that myself and uh like even these you know I've for those that are just listening I've got a lot of Internet of Things lights kind of on a wall behind me and I've been learning how to program those through different apis and part of it is just diving in on like how does that work can I do that too like what would it take and just having that kind of curiosity of you know what even if I can't figure out how to control these lights over a Bluetooth kind of thing because the Bluetooth Library doesn't exist for this particular light I would have to like go write my own Bluetooth libraries like that's a lot of lowl code that I'm not sure I'm very well equipped to get into but but it's going to be fun just exploring the process a little bit just to find out like can I turn on or off with Bluetooth like that would be enough to satisfy that Curiosity and then I'll move on to the next thing but in Tech there's so much change like there's always going to be new new languages new Frameworks new libraries new ways of doing things everything from you know what's you know what's been happening over the past few years with web 3 and blockchain you know like things are drastically changing around the the tech industry and there's so much to learn all the time now it doesn't necessarily mean that every technology that comes out is going to be great and fantastic and you you know you go what we say you go all in learning a particular thing but you can dabble in it just to see do I like this or you know do I want to understand it just enough an an example with this is I've been primarily a backend developer I do consider myself full stack I'm not great at JavaScript on the front end so I wanted to take a course to learn react not because I want to become a react developer but I wanted to understand how does react work like what is a component like when I hear people talk about react I wanted to educate myself a little bit on what is this technology and what are these words that they're saying and so I took a a small react course just to learn about it and and do a couple of small projects and like I'm I'm not going to put react on my resume because I don't want a react job and I can't speak enough to it in depth to go get a job doing react development but now I understand some of the Technologies and some of the mechanisms of how it passes data around and uses these components and so for me what motivates me is knowing there's always something new right around the corner and so in six months time there's going to be something new in another six months time there's going to be something new that I can go explore just to learn a little bit just to see if I like that and over the course of my career I've actually pivoted my career a little bit based on the things that I wanted to go learn I'll dive in and I'll go explore that topic and then I might go find a job doing that I might go find a company doing that thing and explore what would it take to get a job at that company build out some projects that will stand out to that company and then I go get a job at that company and I'll work there for a year or two and until that curiosity is completely satisfied and then think about okay what else do I want to do like what do I want to do next and that's what I love about technology it's a it's a giant Choose Your Own Adventure where you get to choose what you do next and and you don't have to feel like you have to stay in any particular area um I I hear from a lot of people like well should I get a QA job just to get into a company and then how do I transition into a programmer job from there because some people think that once you're in QA you can only do QA it's like no what you do is you start in a QA role and then when you go apply for that software role you make it sound like I did that on purpose because now I can write better software I understand now how all of these systems talk and communicate and how to test things thoroughly I did that on purpose to make me a better developer and now I'm ready for a full-time developer job and you know you obviously need to still be programming and and stuff like that to show those skills but you can pivot from one thing to another you just have to have a story to tell about why you did that with intention to make you better for this next role and why that's going to help bring value to that company in that role yeah yeah it's good yeah I agree um talking about um career change and trajectories and all that kind of stuff um so in your career maybe it was early on maybe it was a key moment later on in your career um can you perhaps call out a person or event that happened that changed the trajectory that your career was going in I think the one piece of advice that stood out to me most and it didn't really change the trajectory of what I did but it it did to some degree and really got me into doing more mentorship when I was working at a company called srid which is now owned by twilio one of the founders of the company his named is Isaac Sana amazing guy really really friendly really fantastic person gave me a piece of advice because he saw that I was taking on too much work because I was so curious and I was so willing to jump in and dive in on different things he sat me down one day and said Ian humans are not scalable we build systems to be scalable we do automation to be scalable SC computers are scalable but humans are not you need to be careful with your time and you need to you know you need to teach other people what you know and this is basically what I learned from the conversation he didn't tell me like go Mentor people and go teach people but he's saying you as a person are are you have finite amount of hours in a day to get your work done so you need to find a way of like balancing what you do and I realized from that what I needed to do was kind of replicate what I know in other people so that they could help and learning to trust that when I teach someone else to do something that that I need to be okay with just trusting that they're going to do the best job they can and if something happens and needs to be cleaned up or whatever needs to be fixed or optimized or something then I can help optimize it beyond that but I need to at least give them the the space in what we call agency to actually go do that and so that really kind of kickstarted this whole idea of becoming a mentor and so that changed a lot of the trajectory of what I was doing at srid at the time uh which then got me interested in becoming a manager so I started exploring the management track uh more I had been a manager previously but this really got me into like okay I want to go explore full-time management so that I can help coach other people's career Direction and so on from within a company of this is how you're applying your knowledge but we also need your knowledge in this or that area and like really helping people kind of Define and refine what they wanted to do and it really s me on this journey about taking what I know and sharing it with other people and then finding joy in their success because as a manager you don't have that Hands-On contribution anymore of like look what I did you your Hands-On contribution is now look what my team did um and so you have to like motivate them and learn what it takes to motivate other people and that inherent motivation is very tricky sometimes and so being a people manager is a very different skill set than than being a Hands-On programmer and so I I went back and forth as I would do management I would miss programming so I got back into programming then I missed doing management so I got back into management so I I went back and forth and then when I got into education I'm like okay this is the best of both worlds because now I'm managing a room of Junior developers and I also get to coach them but I also get to do programming and teach them the programming Concepts and how to shape that career and that's what really set me on this on this track of like okay this is who I am I'm an educator this is who I am now um and and really help to find that in myself yeah that's great I I think that's a very very healthy um description of of a manager's role I think a lot of people um have the idea of what it means to be a manager completely wrong they they kind of see it more as a as a almost like a status thing like oh I'm manager so I get to boss people around it's like no no no no no right a true manager like um empowers others to be the best they can be um you're not trying to be the hero I think that that's also a thing that I've sometimes run into where people have a hard time handing over something or bringing somebody else in because they want to be the one that made the thing happen and it's like in sports often time the person who assists is way more important than the one who put the ball through the hoop you know it's it's important to be to work as a team sure sure to reach that angle so I think that's a very healthy approach and I wish more manag would would have that approach I sort of in line with that it's somebody said this and it's not 100% true um but they say don't make people who want to be a manager a manager look at what they do and if they inherently have managerial skills offer them the opportunity to explore the the position so I think sometimes people who want to manage do it from a place of you know good like like what you said um but sometimes you do get people who think getting into a manager role is a way to have like um I don't know a way to control people yeah it's like just more control so you have to be careful because that that creates quickly creates unhealthy working relationships so when you're not uh teaching and when you're not like writing code and solving problems what do you like to do like just in your free time um my free time right now I'm spending a lot of time honestly on the tech interview. guide website and rebuilding some of the content there I'm splitting a current newsletter that explores common questions that you'll face in an interview but explaining them from a hiring manager's point of view of why we ask those kinds of questions so it's not teaching you how to answer it perfectly but it does let you understand why that question is important to us there's a lot of content out there already on how to answer those things perfectly but I wanted to explore it from a perspective of this is why we ask these kinds of questions but I've had so many questions over the past year of live streaming around like how do I prepare for interviews how do I stand out in interviews um and just what is the interview process that I decided I was going to split the one newsletter into four different newsletters So currently my free time is is mostly en encompassing uh rebuilding a lot of that content but I also love video gaming um I'm a big fan of U you know exploratory kind of RPGs you know where you can just wander around a world and so on um I love video gaming with my kids um I've got a Labrador Retriever that I like to get outside with and uh and play with but yeah there a lot of family time uh water parks and there's lots to do in Colorado um lots of you know trips up to the mountains and things like that yeah yeah that's for sure I have a friend that also lives in Colorado and I um constantly like see his stuff on Twitter and uh Instagram and I'm like holy cow it's like you have like all the things you have like in some you have these beautiful hikes and winter you're like ice climbing and you canoeing and all these kind of things it's it's like like an amazing place to live uh a a cousin of mine also lived in Denver Colorado for a while she's in Hawaii now which is like Hawaii that's where you live now um great but yeah she as well she was like it's such a nice place to live the people are super nice and there's just so much variety like you can't get bored really yeah yeah it's really great here there's there's so much to do so yeah whether we're going out for like Family bikee Rides or just a trip up to the mountains or you know go on a road trip or something there's there's lots to see and do around here yeah for sure well uh thanks so much Ian for joining me today this is really great to talk to you I think in closing I'd like to know a little more about Postman I kind of I know what Postman is in like Essence but I've never had anybody really explain to me exactly what is Postman and how how do developers use Postman it's great question so Postman started as a way to test apis and specifically for restful apis it was meant to be well it started as a client of let me put in this URL let me go call that API and and see the response and so on just as a way of understanding how do I then go implement this in my code so it was a way to sort of test that out but over the years we've expanded it quite a bit uh we're up to version n of the software now um and it it does so much more now so we still have that testing component that's what we're most well known for but we're actually a whole API platform where you can go design and develop your API inside of the platform where you can go in and say I want to build a restful API that looks like this and you can Define all those endpoints and then it'll go build all those collections of requests that even if you haven't developed the actual API yet you can still plan and design what you want that developer experience or the user experience to be build out your documentation build out all that test code and now you can use all of that as a test driven approach or behavior driven approach to actually then go build the software yourself some of what the application will now do is actually generate some scaffold C code for you for um like python go Java and JavaScript backends where it'll get you started on how to go build that code but on the client side when you build out all the documentation it'll also build out client Snippets of lots of different languages lots of different uh you know Frameworks like there's three or four different ways of you know how to call this in JavaScript if you want to use fetch or if you want to use jQuery and so on or if you want to use Python do you want to use the request library and so on and so it'll also generate client side code if you want to go build like an SDK or something now you've got snipps of code to actually go call those endpoints um and so the platform does quite a lot um for both the consumer of the API but also the producer of the API and so a lot of what I'm doing is as curriculum development is teaching workshops about how to do these deeper Concepts within Postman and how to do these things so we have a whole program called Postman space camp where we dive into these more advanced topics of how to use the software at these deeper levels and how to understand you know what is contract validation testing you know within an API well to start with that you have to know what an API contract is but we've also done a lot of things around open API which is the newer version of swagger people are more familiar with the word with the terms Swagger uh open API is now like the new version of swagger basically and so just a lot of Education around you know what is open API what is what does it mean to be an API first company so we're doing a lot of Education around that so we've got lots of blog content lots of video content we also live stream as a team almost every week as a developer relations team just to help educate people on here's here's a problem that we want to solve how can we solve that in Postman and we explore different apis or we'll explore a technology like what are web hooks let's go explore what web hooks are and how we can use that inside a postman and uh and so we we often do a lot of partnership kinds of things you know uh with different companies on the live stream um just to kind of hear about their apis as well but as an application we have both a desktop app and a web app that you can use and they all do the the exact same thing uh as far as like building out the collections and so on there are different limitations on both that's why we have both um yeah we have uh we have quite a growing group of uh folks using it uh we just passed 20 million users on the platform uh you know a couple months ago so we're pretty excited about how many people are using postman on a regular basis now almost to the point where I'm I'm actually starting to see it show up on resumés as a skill of you know I use Postman for API consumption or API production um and starting to see that showing up now as as a skill on a resume that's very cool yeah I'm glad I asked because I had no idea about the production side I I thought it was just like oh it's a mock API thing it's like no no it's more to it than that that's awesome thanks so much for sharing this this is really useful um I will spread the word about Postman and that it's more than just a way to mock AP and thanks so much again for joining me on your Saturday um I really appreciate it I think You' you shared a whole ton of great information that our our listeners will really appreciate and will tell everybody please go to Tech interview. guu there's a lot of really great stuff there and we'll have links to everything in the show notes thanks so much Ian um have a great rest of your day yeah I appreciate the opportunity thanks for letting me share some thoughts and uh enjoy your weekend as well thank thank you for listening to the melium network podcast if you enjoyed this episode share it with your friends leave us a review on Apple podcast and Spotify as something to add continue the conversation on GitHub and join the community on slack until the next one keep making the web [Music] also

2023-12-31 10:14

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