The job of programmer is one of the high-paid jobs in the market and one of the coolest jobs people find to do. Learning to code and mastering it can take years for a beginner. Most people give up before they truly get started. In the beginning, we get very excited about the concept of learning to code, but later in most of cases students or beginners give up quickly because they find it difficult to continue, they get stuck and they face difficulty in finding the solution for a code. Learning to program isn’t an overnight journey but it’s also not as difficult as people think about it, all it just requires is dedication, passion, interest, and definitely patience.

There are so many online and offline resources available to learn to code easily, quickly, and effectively. Here we discuss some tips to learn programming effectively and faster.

1. Make Your Fundamentals Clear:

A common mistake that a student or beginner commit while learning programming is skipping the fundamentals or chapter 1 and directly jumping to the next chapter right away. To understand the advanced concepts of programming you need to be very clear about the fundamentals of programming. If you will be doing the same mistake then at some point, you will end up with lots of confusion and you will have to come back to your basics again. These fundamentals are Data Structures, variables, control structures, syntax, tools, or text editors. When you start doing programming pick one programming language, stick with it, and clear all the basics of programming first before going to the next level. Your overall time to learn coding will be definitely saved if you will follow this path.

2. Learn By Doing, Practicing and Not Just Reading:

A common mistake beginners do while learning programming is just reading a book or looking at the sample code on their desktop without practicing it. It’s easy to read about the loops, variables, and getting all the things in your head but actual programming doesn’t work in this way. You really need to get your hands dirty in coding and keep practicing it regularly. When you start programming you face a lot of problems, you get stuck there, you will be asked to implement the code practically and find the solution for a specific problem and there you will scratch your head while implementing the code. When you write the code, play with the code, change your code to see different results, optimize the code and try different solutions, your logical thinking ability get improves day by day and you eventually learn a lot of things that make you a better programmer. When you start coding, practice the same code or sample again and again until or unless you don’t need to refer to the same book or resource from where you have learned. Also build your own project, participate in coding challenges, play coding related games, practice it at your own end every single day.

3. Code By Hand:

When you start programming as a beginner you will be thinking that why should I code by hand. It’s a time-consuming process, I can’t run and check my code on paper and also if I actually need to implement something on my system then why should I use pen and paper. One of the biggest reasons is the interviews. When you will apply for jobs in programming, most of the time the technical evaluation process will include code by hand. You will be asked to write code using pen and paper or you might have to use a whiteboard. Coding by hand is something old-school technique but it actually involves a test for a programmer’s proficiency. Coding by hand can give you a clear understanding of syntax and algorithms, you make a deeper connection in your brain. Learning programming this way will make your work easier and faster later.

4. Share, Teach, Discuss and Ask For Help:

One of the best ways to understand programming easily and quickly is teaching. Teaching to someone, sharing your knowledge, doing discussions with other programmers will make you a better programmer quickly. Teaching to someone is teaching to yourself too, so if you are able to teach to somebody that means you truly understand the concepts. It is the best habit to learn something in-depth and you will realize that you don’t need to come back on the same topic.
You can also participate in open source projects, discuss your code with your co-programmers or contribute on Github, also you can take help from forum or discussion site. When you learn programming do not hesitate in asking for help. Beginners do this mistake and feel shy when they need to ask for help. It doesn’t matter if you ask silly questions and look stupid, it will help you in the long run and if you don’t do it you will be struggling in coding later. So it’s good to find a mentor or take help from fellow programmers to understand concepts easily and quickly. Your mentor or professional can guide you better because they have been already in your shoes before.

5. Use Online Resources:

There are plenty of online resources available paid or unpaid. You can take help from these online resources and start your programming journey. You can subscribe to youtube channels or try coding boot camps to learn programming quickly and effectively. GeeksforGeeks, Udemy, Coursera and plenty of resources available for guidance and to learn programming. Also make a habit of reading programming related blogs, and taking help from Stackoverflow, Reddit’s “learn programming” subreddit like site or online community.

6. Take Breaks:

If you want to learn programming it’s not good to sit in front of a computer for hours and hours and try to grasp everything in one go. You will be exhaust by doing this so it’s better to learn coding in chunks. Take some short breaks to get refreshed. You should also keep this thing in mind while debugging your code. Sometimes you spend hours and hours to find the bug but you don’t get the solution for your code so it’s good to take a short break, clear your mind and do something else. It will restore your focus and you may come up with the solution for your code where you were stuck. Also, try to eliminate all kinds of distractions. Turn off your phone notification, email notifications and try to isolate yourself to be focused. By doing this you will save your lot of time and will stay away from headache or frustration.

7. Learn to Use Debugger:

Making mistakes in coding is very common and it’s completely acceptable in programming. You will find a lot of errors in your code at the beginning so it’s good to use debuggers to find out errors, impacts on your result and check where you have made the mistake. You will save a lot of time using a debugger or a tool to fix the errors in your code. If you are good at debugging, it will be easier to learn to program. So learn to use some good debugging techniques or use tools to check your piece of code.

In the end, the last tip is not to quit when you start your journey in programming. You might be thinking in the middle that you are not smart enough to code but keep in mind that in order to think like a coder it takes some time and patience but to learn it quickly, you just need to follow the right path and be consistent. Follow everything step-by-step, make your fundamentals clear first, keep practicing it and once you are done with basics take the challenges and participate in competitive programming on different sites to get better at it, to build your logical ability, and to think like a coder. You will find yourself later how good a coder you have become by practicing it each and every single day.

source: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/7-tips-and-tricks-to-learn-programming-faster/

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With forward-thinking ideas and a combination of technologies, companies create and deliver unique value to their customers, optimize internal operations, gain a competitive advantage and improve business performance. So here are some biggest software development trends for 2021.

Cloud Storage

Pandemic has shifted many processes to remote, and there is a necessity in storing data in the cloud. The cloud is a forerunner industry that grows stronger than ever recently. No matter what industry you are in, plan to migrate to the cloud, as the whole world will sooner or later move to the cloud. In 2021 and beyond, there will be a high demand for cloud engineers.

VR, AR, and MR

No surprise these technologies will be in demand, as many processes are becoming virtual. Even the industry embraced VR technologies, bringing visitors the opportunity to visit events from anywhere. There will be more gadgets with VR, AR, and MR support in 2020. In particular, thanks to the release of more powerful smartphones: the emergence of new processors, folding screens, robust sensors, support for 5G. In the coming years, a new category of AR products will enter the market — holographic screens.

Artificial Intelligence

As one of the most popular technologies globally, AI has also made many breakthroughs in 2020. “AI for all” is a famous slogan that signifies how AI is becoming closer to all industries. AI can paint, talk, and more. In natural language processing, GPT-3 was the most significant breakthrough to come in May 2020. The American company OpenAI created GPT-3, which made it possible to develop human text using deep learning. Only four months later, the entire world was simultaneously amazed and shocked when the following Guardian article was written using GPT-3. In 2021, there will be a breakthrough in natural language processing when AI will write articles, paint, or write small programs.

Python and JavaScript

The landscape of programming languages ​​has also undergone significant changes in recent years. Traditional heavyweight programming languages ​​are losing market share in favor of simpler, developer-friendly programming languages. According to various reviews, the languages ​​in demand and ranked Python and JavaScript first and second, respectively.

Python is the number one programming language in data science and the number 2 or number 3 in almost every field other than low-level programming.

JavaScript is the undisputed number one language in web development and is becoming increasingly popular in other areas, including backend development. It is also the perfect language for beginners.

Cyber Threats

The more online activities we have, the more cyber threats we experience. Hackers will attack government networks more often. Organizations that do not have powerful cyber defense, but that valuable store data (access to state registries, databases) are becoming targets of criminals.

Cloud solutions are becoming a target for hackers. As services evolve, they are increasingly attacked by threats. Most decisions of large companies, such as Google, are automatically trusted by users, which increases the risk of being exposed to fraud.

Native apps will continue to dominate

The use of smartphones is increasing, and there are also trends in mobile app development.

There are four main areas in mobile app development:

● Native app development

● Cross-platform app development

● Hybrid app development

● Cloud-based app development

Developing your applications provides the most excellent flexibility while maximizing performance and usability. But it’s the most expensive to develop because businesses need to keep two separate teams.

Cross-platform app development is becoming more popular as almost the same codebase can be used to develop iOS and Android apps. Although the development cost is low, it is less flexible and not as productive as native applications.

Bottom line

These are the most common trends for software development, but the industry itself and its trends are hard to cover in one article. In few words, the main trends are cloud, data security, top-notch technologies like AI and VR, and native app development.

source: https://medium.com/predict/software-development-trends-and-predictions-in-2021-cd6b41ae3955

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Saskia spoke about how she thinks diversity has improved in the workplace, what made her want to work in the tech space and what she thinks businesses can do to help retain female tech talent.

Watch the full interview video below!

Third Republic (TR): Could you start by telling us how you got into your career in tech?

Saskia Menke (SM): I actually don’t have a tech background, I have a business background, and at that time, I was very much into what I was doing; I was actually about to start an internship at the inter American Development Bank. But when I was about to start the internship, I also realised I didn’t really like the job description and I was always interested in analytics and data science, and the opportunity presented itself that I could attend a boot camp.

My initial thought was ‘great, I’m going to do something where I learn some hard skills, maybe this is a small step for me to get into data analytics a bit more’. I wanted to explore the field because it sounded exciting, I wasn’t actually planning on becoming a software engineer but then being in the boot camp, I really enjoyed it and I quite surprised myself. After a while, I realised I wasn’t doing too bad either, so I was thinking afterwards, why not just give it a try? I started my first job as a software engineer and I have been enjoying it ever since.

TR: Why do you think there is such gender disparity within tech?

SM: I honestly think it’s probably not just about gender, but overall diversity. In my opinion, there is a pretty big stereotype about tech, especially development. When I look back at how I saw tech before, it’s always the stereotype of white men, who sit in a corner, maybe in a basement, just with their computer. Talking to other people, I know that stereotype still prevails, and it’s not really appealing and no one is really doing anything about it. However, it’s not true at all, in my experience.

There’s also just not much access to the industry. I remember from myself, during school for instance, coding or tech in general was never really something that was opened up as an opportunity to me.

TR: What do you think businesses and communities can do to encourage more women into a tech career?

SM: One of the biggest issues that needs tackling, something that I mentioned before if having early access into the industry. I think starting early is key, making it more accessible for women and people from other diversity groups.

For me, it’s definitely about tackling the stereotype because I think that still prevails and highlighting that it’s not presenting reality. I think you need to, especially when we’re talking about women, at least what I was missing is relatable role models. Having those role models present that you can orient yourself towards and say, ‘that’s what I want to become’, is also tackling the stereotype, right?

I think it starts with using gender neutral language in your job descriptions, that doesn’t only apply to the title, having it in every sort of document, in every sort of speech and talk and communication that you have. Have specific recruiting initiatives explicitly for women. But in order to retain women, it doesn’t really stop at recruiting you need to think long term; what is your strategy? Do you have any sort of flexible working schemes? You really need to ask yourself ‘so why are you doing that?’ Why is that a topic for you? Are you just doing it to look good? That’s just not enough. You need to really dig into why you want gender diversity?

It starts with unconscious bias training, it starts with management that’s diverse. I think if you have a completely white straight male management, maybe that’s something you need to think about.

TR: What have been some of the key challenges that you have faced whilst pursuing your career in software engineering?

SM: I think the biggest one is dealing with imposter syndrome. I think it is very common, and it never really goes away. It’s really about dealing with it, rather than getting rid of it.

Also, coming from a completely different background, for me, one challenge was building a social circle. You want to talk to your friends about your job, and if you don’t really have anyone besides your colleagues, especially when you just start that does the same thing as you, that can be challenging. For me, it was really important to get that social circle intact that I could talk to.

But then also, what I mentioned earlier, is really having female relatable role models. That’s not just women who are CTOs at amazing companies, but also role models of people who are just beginning in their career. Someone you can really orientate yourself towards now. Not just someone you think ‘maybe in 10 years time, that’s somewhere I can get to’, but role models that help you figure out how to get there. What are the next steps for me?

TR: What are your top three favourite things about working as a software engineer?

SM: This is probably cliché but it’s always challenging. You are always learning because tech is evolving so quickly. You never get to the point where you know it all and that just keeps being exciting.

But also, it’s really the people. I think that speaks against the stereotype; I really do enjoy working in tech – the environment that you have, and the people that you work with – it is challenging, we are pushing each other, but at the same time, it’s also very relaxed and chill. No matter where I’ve been there’s always somebody you can talk to who’s willing to help you out. There’s not that elbow fighting kind of culture that you have in other jobs or industries.

TR: What would you say is the best piece of advice you’ve received throughout your career?

SM: It’s two things. One, especially with regard to tech, is that everybody has imposter syndrome. It’s not really advice, per se, but it’s hopefully relaxing to know. Everybody has their own way, no matter what where they are in their career.

I think what really got me also to the point where I am right now, is that you can always create your own path; and you should. There’s not an existing career path that you need to follow and certain steps that you need to take. You can always reinvent yourself and create your own path. I think this is what led me into coding rather than continuing in the business field.

If you would like to join Saskia as part of our WomenInTechQA series, get in touch today!

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Ania also mentions how she joined the Geek Girl initiative and started her own YouTube channel.

To hear the full conversation, watch the video below!

Third Republic (TR): Your journey into tech is an interesting one, could you tell us a bit about how you got to where you are today within your career?

Ania Kubow (AK): Yeah, definitely! I’m a software developer and I also have my own YouTube channel. I wasn’t always a software developer I actually started out in finance, I was a derivates broker, started out in Singapore and then moved to London. Which was great, but it just wasn’t for me; there was something missing.

I then started my own company; an e-commerce website. This was back when WIX and Weebly and all these sites weren’t really around, I had to use other template websites which weren’t really that great, they were very limiting and I didn’t like that. So I took it upon myself to perfect the branding and the visual presence that we had online by altering the CHS, HTML, and then I was hooked. By accident I found my calling. I did a few JavaScript courses online and then decided to finally take the plunge after a while and do a bootcamp in London – General Assembly – which was really good. Now I am currently employed at Eurostar.

TR: There’s still a disparity within the tech industry when it comes to gender, why do you think there are fewer women working within the tech industry?

AK: I think tech is a very difficult one, especially something like software engineering. For me, for example, it just wasn’t really a career path that was spoken about. Even at universities they only offer computer science, where the software development aspect might not be as big. Software development is something that people discover later on in life. But I do think there is a bit more attention being put towards it now with all the bootcamps that are coming out, especially in London.

From my YouTube channel I can tell you that about 90% of my viewers are male – I’ve got 8% female and that’s apparently high. But I do think the times are changing.

TR: How do you think the industry could tackle the lack of female role models within tech?

AK: I think having role models is great and that’s something that should be celebrated, not just female role models but anyone from a different background.

There’s also a lot of unconscious bias. The company I currently work for are extremely good at making you aware of unconscious bias, with every new starter into the company there’s a whole course on it. Having those conversations is the first step and recognizing your own unconscious bias because everyone has them.

Then opening up a platform where people are welcome and encouraged to speak, actively seeking out people who aren’t just the ‘stereotypical developer’.

TR: You’re the Co-Organizer of a meetup group called Geek Girl, how do you think groups like this can improve diversity within tech?

AK: Geek Girl meetup is fantastic! It actually started in Sweden in 2006, it’s been going for a long time and they have boroughs all over the world – there’s even one in Dubai that’s been started up.

Magda is the girl who started the Geek Girl ‘tribe’ in London, and I was lucky enough to join as a Co-Organizer three years ago now. I really wanted to join because I was just starting out my career in tech, didn’t really know the community very well, and I really wanted to be involved. I guess, first of all, quite selfishly because I wanted to learn more about tech but then it quickly changed, and it was all about giving back to the community. If a community is so welcoming to you and so willing to help you out, you naturally just want to give back.

TR: What initiatives do you think businesses could implement to attract and retain female tech professionals into their teams? With that, what should they be avoiding?

AK: I know a couple of bootcamps offer scholarships, so I think that’s a good initiative. I think always making it easier for, not just women but people from more diverse backgrounds to get involved, is to offer scholarships because then the opportunity opens to a wider pool of people who perhaps couldn’t afford the rates before.

Of course, reaching out and giving more presentations at universities, at schools, to make younger people realise that this is a career path and highlight relatable role models. Simply things like that are most effective. Listening to someone talk about something passionately, that you can relate to, is so powerful.

TR: What’s the best piece of advice that you’ve received throughout your career?

AK: One piece of advice I did follow was to go out there and make a community for yourself. Create a space where you feel comfortable to ask questions. In software development I think there is a stigma around asking questions, where everyone feels they need to be the smartest person in the room. If you do feel uncomfortable asking a question at work, it’s nice to have that community that you’ve built, which is a safe space to ask questions. Asking questions is the only way to fast track your knowledge.

Someone also told me to start a YouTube channel and at first I wasn’t quite sure, but it is probably the best thing I have ever done for myself. Talking through a solution and actually having to explain to someone how to do something is a really strong skill to have. To be technically sound in explaining a problem, is something that I think has really helped me as well. In turn it became really rewarding. I’m able to help so many people.

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The theme of the evening focused on the future of software engineering and design patterns.

W.I.T. Republic’s Women in Software Engineering events were founded to connect, inspire and develop the careers of female technologists in order to make technology a more diverse and inclusive working environment for all. Don’t forget to check out our Eventbrite page for upcoming events!

Design Patterns for the Future of Software Engineering

After initial introductions, Software Engineer at Marley Spoon, Ana Schwendler, began the evening by speaking about design patterns for the future of software engineering.

Ana began by touching on why we use design patterns and how they can help to shape the future of software engineering. Design patterns are general and reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software design. Whilst not algorithms, design patterns give a general concept of how to solve a problem. Ana highlighted that knowing design patterns allows you to effectively communicate with other members of your tech team when developing a new feature, of refractoring processes, as everyone is aware of the idea behind the concept you are implementing.

Talking on topics that relate to the future of design patterns, Ana mentioned three things:

• Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) – enabling you to automate and assemble builds from developing to live, easily and in a reliable way
• Progressing Web Apps – guaranteeing that your project will be reliably available in all kinds of possible views
• Internet of Things – evolving software must be reusable and easily handed over when necessary so we need to have patterns in mind that will make this technology move forward

Design patterns are beyond programming language; therefore, you are not dependent on any structure to apply those ideas.

Ana went on to give an overview of the design patterns she has been studying recently, which fell into three categories:

• Creational: Abstract Factory, Builder, Factory Method, Object Pool, Prototype, Singleton
• Structural: Adaptor, Bridge, Composite, Decorator, Façade, Flyweight, Private Class Data, Proxy
• Behavioural: Chain of Responsibility, Command, Interpreter, Mediator, Memento, Strategy (to name a few)

To hear Ana talk more about these design patterns, watch the full video here!

A Digital Native Future: How Software Engineering is Changing

For the second talk of the event, Rania Mohamed, Cloud Solutions Architect at Google, spoke about how Software Engineering is changing.

The term ‘Digital Natives’ refers to people who were raised in the technology era. Rania emphasises how the digital native sector are changing the demands and expectations of technology; they want more accessibility and connectivity.

Digital Native is not to be confused with Digital Transformation. Digital Native is the goal, Digital Transformation is the process.

Prior to Digital Native, software developers and engineers were focused on time to business market, environment governance, business quality and B2B/B2C integration. Utilising agile methodologies, DevOps and Test Automation. Rania highlights that now this focus has shifted towards the customer experience and journey, to become proactive rather than responsive, and to build smart services. Utilising AI and Machine Learning, the Cloud, Edge Computing and the Internet of Things.

To hear Rania talk about this focus shift in depth, watch the full video here!

Thank You

We wanted to say a huge thank you to both Ana and Rania for their insightful and engaging talks, and the attendees for contributing to a great event.

If you are interested in speaking at our next event don’t hesitate to contact Women In Tech Republic directly! 

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The event was a huge success, with insights shared between all three speakers about how they started out in the tech world, and the experience they have gained, working within the software engineering field.

From Weekend projects to real customers

Catalina began her presentation by talking about her start-up business, mila.health, that she began back in April of this year with two other co-founders.

The talk continued on about how mila.health was created and designed to proactively help and support employees on their mental health, with the ability to have 1:1 sessions with health experts on video calls. The presentation guided us through how mila.health started, she began by using WordPress to create the website, in order to show the benefits and solutions that companies could get out of the app.

Catalina expressed how she knew that she needed to develop her skills in web development, as she felt her mobile development skills were not enough, she took a course to learn about React, to gain proper experience and not just guess work to develop.

Finally, Catalina ended the presentation with advice reassuring people that mistakes are there to be made, nobody gets the right solution from the start. Don’t be afraid to make big changes when it doesn’t feel right and start small so you can build on this.

Coding in the real world

The second talk from the event was given by Mabel Otto, Tech Lead at Zoomin.tv. Mabel started off talking about her background within tech, sharing her experience with operating systems, cloud, as well as her work with programming languages.

Starting with how code should read, Mabel mentioned how code should read like a novel, when writing code, it must be easy to recognise what you are writing, everything needs to be clear. Mabel goes on to ask, ‘will other people be able to understand my code?’ Mabel explains that if it is not clear, then your code needs to be corrected and checked. Mabel explained that by naming your code, this will aid you to see what the code is doing and will help to avoid making mistakes.

Throughout the talk, advice on other aspects of coding were given, such as interfaces, looking at when and why you should use them. As well as this, she also looked at the source control, focusing on why and when to submit to it.

Pair Programming: The bridge between communication and code

Our final speaker was by Ahsana Choudhury, Software Engineer at JP Morgan Chase & Co. The talk began by speaking about pair programming; a development methodology that involves two engineers, the navigator and the driver. It went on to explain that part of pair programming, its fundamental role is for both engineers to swap roles in order to get a fresher perspective on the product.

Next in the talk, Ahsana provided three important driving forces within cultivating pair programming, which aid the success of the product; these driving forces are:

• Improves quality of software design
• Enhances technical skills
• Improves team communication

These driving forces for two engineers, can help spot any areas within the product that could be improved, she also mentions how this is beneficial when looking at opportunities for growth within the product.

Towards the end of the talk, it was emphasised how soft skills are just as important as technical skills, stating that it is important for teams to understand and harness this for basic communication, Ahsana goes on to explain how these are some of the fundamentals and foundations of successful programming.

We would like to thank all our speakers, Catalina, Mabel and Ahsana for sharing their knowledge on each of their topics, and for everyone who attended the event, it was a huge success.

If you would like to get involved for our upcoming Women in Software Engineering events, please get in touch!

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Natalie, also talks about the current trends in tech, as well as the benefits and challenges of using both AWS and GCP.

Third Republic (TR): Thanks for joining me today, for our WomenInTechQA series, just to kick off, could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into a career in tech?

Natalie Godec (NG): I started when I was about 14 years old, and my parents asked who I wanted to be. Since my mom was in tech, she was a systems engineer, I thought she might help me if I go into the same industry. So I decided on tech and then she brought me to her workplace, to her office, and piled a bunch of circuits and computer details infront of me, and said, ‘Build a computer’. She helped me obviously, and I built it, and it didn’t work. It turned out, it wasn’t my fault, the memory card wasn’t functional. But that’s how it started. 

For the longest time, I wanted to be a network engineer, and I studied that for a long time. Then very randomly, I got into DevOps. The story is; I needed a project in the industry to do my master thesis, and the deadlines for the application were coming up, and I started applying to everything that was in the list of available projects, systems wise, because everything out there is for software developers, so systems is a bit more difficult to come by. I applied and I got an interview, it was in Switzerland, in Geneva, with a French speaking bank and my French was okay-ish. Then they were throwing all of these words during the interview, like, ‘You’re gonna do puppet and configuration management and we do a bit of OpenStack’, and I was like, ‘Sure, exciting’. I had no idea what any of that meant, but then I spoke to my best friend who had already worked in the industry, and he was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s so amazing, you should definitely do that’, and so I did. And I loved it. And I still do it.

TR: As a platform engineer, could you talk about the journey that you’ve been on from the moment you took that job to where you are today?

NG: I did a year and a half graduate programme in Switzerland, in a private bank, and there I changed teams every four months, doing all sorts of different stuff that is related to systems and automation and configuration management. Then I moved to London, and started working for Morgan Stanley, in their core infrastructure team as a Systems Engineer. There it was also about on-prem infrastructure and managing, I think, 70,000 servers with a configuration management tool. Building automation and building new environments, there was a lot of push on building more secure environments for more sensitive data. We were doing that and trying to bring in a little bit of Docker, bringing a little bit of Kubernetes if possible, because it’s a huge traditional bank, and so everything is kind of established. You need to be very careful about what you bring in and how you actually introduce it into the existing infrastructure.

I was there for two years and then I thought that I needed a different challenge. I wanted to do a little bit more of open source, a little bit more around the tools that are standard in the industry, because that’s where I started in this graduate programme in Switzerland. We were using LogStash and kibana grafana and puppet, which was back in 2015, the industry standard for configuration management. I wanted to go back to that open platform, go out and pick what the industry in the whole world is working on and try to implement it and build systems with that. So I joined Babylon Health as a platform engineer. I had never worked with Cloud in production. I had touched a little bit like we all do, a course there, a little lesson there, but I’ve never actually worked with it on a day-to-day basis. At Babylon Health, everything is in Cloud. So that was a learning journey, and it’s very interesting, we are building very exciting things. Every day is a challenge.

TR: How did you find that switch from going straight into Cloud, was it quite a steep learning journey?

NG: In terms of the learning journey, I’m still learning, there’s always new things to learn. Bits of infrastructure that I haven’t touched before. That’s always like that in our job. But at the end of the day, if you’re working with automation tools and configuration management, it’s just a different type of yaml file, pretty much DevOps engineering is yaml engineering. There are similarities in terms of how you manage infra, and how you try to have your platform consistent, and have everything tested and have different environments. The principles of working and methods of working, and how you try to design your system, stay the same.

One thing that was very difficult and very different, was changing the pace, because when you work for a huge organisation, and also when you work with on-prem infrastructure, things are slower than when you were in a startup with Cloud. I had gotten used to the pace of things that I had during two years at Morgan Stanley. Neither of those approaches is bad, or better, or worse than the other. It’s just different. So there I am joining the team at Babylon, where everyone is absolutely brilliant, and everyone is working so fast. It took me, I think, two months to get used to the pace of Cloud, of startup, of just ‘go and do it’.

TR: What would you say are some of the key skills that are needed for success in DevOps and Cloud infrastructure?

NG: You need to know how to Google. It’s a very creative industry, for me, being a DevOps engineer, because you’re faced with all sorts of problems every day, and it’s your job to find the solution to that problem. Especially if you work with open source tools, you have this whole world; CNCF, has this diagram, ‘the periodic table of open source tools’, and it’s massive, and it’s getting bigger and bigger every year. It’s quite an interesting place to look at, if you’re just starting out. 

You have all sorts of tools at your disposal, and you can also modify them to your needs. Or you can write your own scripts, because a lot of our job is automation. You do need to know how to write scripts in Bash or Python, regardless of what kind of infrastructure you work with. 

I would say knowing how to Google, knowing how to script, to simply automate, like, you need to deploy a change, run a command with 15,000 servers or delete 25 buckets from AWS. It’s all scriptable. It’s just the for loop. Nothing crazy, nothing like software development. But you do need to know how to script, and problem solve. Creative approach to problem solving, knowing where to look, how to look, how to approach a problem from all different angles, is very important.

TR: You’ve worked extensively with on-prem, and now you specialise in Cloud infrastructure, could you talk about the main differences that you’ve noticed?

NG: It’s often a very different skill set, technically, to work with on-prem and Cloud. For instance, when I worked with on-prem a lot of the skills that I had, and practised every day, were Linux, command line, Unix principles and debugging and administering Linux boxes. Now I think I haven’t debugged a Linux box in probably a year, maybe I restarted a Jenkins box once, but that’s it. 

With Cloud, you have loads of services that are available in a managed way, where you just order the service to work. You don’t have to think about the deepest ends of the infrastructure. That’s the main difference, when you work with on-prem. If you want to deploy, say, Kubernetes, you will have to know every single detail about how Kubernetes infrastructure works, how it’s installed, how different services interact with each other, how networking works, and even think about how you will deploy the network. You typically have a network team who deal with the switches and routers and all of the physical infrastructure of the network, and you have to sit down with them and talk about subnets and IP ranges and which kind of router will be on top of which rack, in order to provide this kind of functionality, or that kind of functionality that you will want to have in Kubernetes.

Whereas, when you’re in the Cloud, the likelihood of you being able to just say, ‘Oh, there is EKS, it’s a managed Kubernetes cluster, I’ll just do that,’ and everything is set up for you. Or equally GCP. For people that are into data analysis, airflow is a very popular open source tool, for data pipelines, and it’s, I think, quite painful to manage. I’ve never managed it myself on-prem. But I’ve heard and hence why we use Cloud Composer on Google Cloud, because it’s a managed service, and we just deploy it and everything is there.

To watch the rest of the interview, and to find out the current trends in tech that Natalie is excited about, click here.

If you’d like to be involved in our next Q&A, get in touch with us today!

The post Natalie Godec, Platform Engineer at Babylon Health appeared first on W.I.T. Republic.

You can learn more about Natalie’s journey into a career in tech, and her thoughts on AWS and GCP, as part of our WomenInTechQA here.

The event was a real success, with insights shared between both the speakers into the world of software engineering.

The Show Must Go On – Navigating a Career in Software Engineering

Jacquelyn began the event by talking about what she as learned during her career in the theatre and how that resonates with what she has also learned during her time in the tech industry.

The first piece of advice Jacquelyn gave was to ‘know your type’. Talking about her time in the theatre, Jacquelyn mentioned how she used to audition for every type of role and could not work out why she was not getting these parts. It came down to the fact that she wasn’t right for the roles. Knowing what genre of role suited her best; meant that she could practice her craft in that particular area, and progress within her career. Relating that to a career in the software engineering space, Jacquelyn emphasises that it is important to ‘know your type’, so that you can master it and then move on to another ‘type’ and repeat the process, so that you end up with multiple tools under your belt.

The second piece of advice was ‘Yes, and…’. This advice was centred around the concept of adlibbing, accepting what the other actors on stage with you are saying and going with the flow. When navigating a career in software engineering, Jacquelyn emphasises that it is important to led with ‘Yes and…’ in order to create new opportunities and grow within your career.

All the World is a stage. When directing a play, Jacquelyn uses techniques like the use of colour, in order to steer the audiences attention to where she would like it during the performance. This is similar to developing your user interface and the use of coloured buttons to grab your users attention. Jacquelyn highlights that is important to tell a story and focus the eye.

Always be audition ready. According to Jacquelyn theatre professionals are always looking for their next role, and as such need to be constantly prepared. This is a good mindset for software developers as well. Learn the skills that will get you hired, and practice; coding tests, interviews.

For the fourth piece of advice; make your own opportunities, Jacquelyn references her friend Sarah Cooper, who published her own books, started a blog, and is now getting her own Netflix special. Don’t wait for others and don’t ask for permission, make your own opportunities.

The final advice the Jacquelyn gave was around the premise of the show must go on. Rehearsals are important, they are where all the work gets done. The key points to this are: start with a good team, commit to the work that needs to be done, be professional and the magic will happen.

Opening the discussion to the floor, Jacquelyn talks about how teaching will develop your own development, as well as how the industry became exclusive to women.

How to Scale Your Cloud Without Breaking the Bank

The second talk of the event was given by Platform Engineer at Babylon Health, Natalie Godec. Natalie provided advice and a technical demo on how to scale your cloud without breaking the bank.

Talking about the main benefit of cloud, Natalie mentions how you can build fast, scale in seconds and only pay for what you use. Whilst this sounds amazing is it? Natalie goes on to discuss that when working in production and expanding into different areas a more accurate definition of the cloud is not that you pay for what you use, it’s how you pay for what you forgot to turn off. During her talk Natalie explains different methods that you can use when scaling your infrastructure, to avoid paying for what you aren’t using.

Natalie’s key take-aways for keeping costs down were:

• Tag everything
• Monitor your resource usage
• Monitor the cost per usage trends – some of the tools available to help with this are AWS Cost Explorer, GCP Billing, Grafana, Cloudability, during her talk, Natalie goes through how to utilise each of these tools to monitor costs.
• Consider using preemptible resource types
• Shut down your environments when they are not used

Whilst talking about monitoring your costs in Kubernetes, Natalie provided a technical demo of the commands that you could use to discover if your service needs the amount of memory that it requested.

Watch the full demo here.

During the networking session at the end of the event, Natalie talks about the use of service mesh’s for cost monitoring and discusses the benefits of AWS and GCP.

We’d like to thank everyone who attend the event, as well as our brilliant speakers Jacquelyn and Natalie for making the event such a success.

If you would like to get involved with our next Women In Software Engineering event, please get in touch!

The post Women In Software Engineering 2.0 appeared first on W.I.T. Republic.

The aim of these new meetups is to provide a platform for women working in engineering and cloud to tell their stories and offer others advice on the journey to success. We were joined by two incredibly successful women in the industry; Monica Sarbu, VP of Engineering at Giant Swarm and Founder at Tupu.io, and Madhu Sivasubramanian, Domain Architect at ING.

The event was a real success, with many interesting insights shared between our speakers and the women in tech community. 

The Move To Remote

After initial introductions, Monica kicked off the evening by talking about the challenges and benefits of distributed teams along with some tips on how to manage them – an extremely relevant topic given the current remote working environment that most organisations are working in, particularly in the tech space.

Monica highlighted and expanded on these benefits of distributed teams:

• Ability to work from home
• No commute time
• Flexible schedule
• Improved work-life balance 
• Opportunity to hire the best talent – no longer restricted by geographical location
• More diverse workforce

Alongside these advantages however, having distributed teams also comes with its own set of challenges:

• Communication – extra effort is needed to ensure that everyone is on the same page 
• Individuals need to work more independently
• Time zones
• Isolation
• Overwork – this was emphasised by a quote Monica shared: “It became impossible to “turn-off”. I’m connected 24/7/365.”

The Importance of Scheduling Your Day

When managing distributed teams, Monica highlighted the importance of ‘setting up your day’. For example, blocking out your calendar for personal activities will reduce the possibility of overworking, as you have given yourself time to relax.

The Microservices Ecosystem

Madhu began the second session discussing the microservices ecosystem. Madhu talked about the change from monolith to microservices, the unique challenges of microservices, the ecosystem around them and the patterns and tools that are available to use.

Monolith to Microservices

Using a hospital administration example, Madhu outlined the premises of the monolith: single application, shared database, shared overhead, communication by method calls, and the difficulty this causes when the monolith grows and becomes unmanageable. 

Which is where microservices comes in!

With the same hospital administration example Madhu illustrated how the microservices solve the same problem, but using multiple applications. 

Key Requirements

Madhu also summarised the main key requirements of microservices:

• Many moving parts more coordination needed
• Quick provisioning
• Fast automatic deploys
• Good mechanisms for security, observability and resilience

To hear more from Madhu’s talk, including API management, service discovery and load balancing and service mesh, watch the full video here.

We’d like to thank everyone who attended the event, as well as our fantastic speakers Monica and Madhu, for contributing to such a successful first event.

If you would like to get involved with our next Women In Software Engineering event, please get in touch!

The post Women In Software Engineering 1.0 appeared first on W.I.T. Republic.

Monica offers her advice to those managing distributed tech teams, the benefits and challenges that come with remote working and discusses the changes she is seeing in the industry in terms of diversity and women in tech.

Third Republic (TR): To kick-off could you explain a bit about your career journey and how you got into a career in tech?

Monica Sarbu (MS): As my parents were both engineers, I grew up surrounded by computers from an early age. I started with playing games like Prince of Persia. Then, being part of a computer science class in high school, I learned programming in Pascal and C. I even remember the vacation where I spent days and nights on my first graphical application written in Pascal. Then I decided to go to the computer science university that gave me a good start in my career in tech. 

TR: What advice would you give to those starting out their careers in engineering?

MS: Computer science theory and fundamentals might seem boring compared to coding a website or an app, but it does prepare you for a long career. The technology landscape is changing every few years, so the most important skill is to understand the fundamentals that don’t change and be ready to learn new things. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to go to university, but you should spend time understanding the fundamentals of the field you get into.

If your situation allows, I would recommend taking more risks at the beginning of your career and work for a small company or startup. In a startup, each engineer is responsible for a larger project than in a big company where each team has a specialised role. This means that in a startup you can get a broader experience.  Being in tech, especially in startups, can be quite stressful, so it’s important to work on things that you genuinely enjoy and motivate you.

Finally, always be kind and humble! Software engineering requires a surprising amount of soft skills. The people that have good communication skills, that know how to listen and have empathy for their colleagues tend to have a better and more enjoyable career.

TR: What are some of the benefits and challenges of a career in tech and/or engineering?

MS: A career in tech can bring you a lot of satisfaction. Software is changing the world and it’s up to us to make sure it’s changing it for the better. The tech landscape is changing all the time, and that means you won’t get bored into repetitive tasks. You will enjoy endless company perks and you’ll feel spoiled most of the time.

You will meet a lot of smart and kind people. You will also meet a few unkind people. Try not to let them define your career. If you find yourself in a toxic environment that you don’t have the power to challenge or change, find another company. I promise you there are better places. It sometimes takes courage to change jobs, but it’s usually worth it.

TR: Could you give some of your top tips on how to effectively manage distributed teams?

MS: Trust your team members. This is important in any team but especially in a geographically distributed one. Show people that you trust them to organise their schedule and prioritise their work. Rather than tracking their every move, look at their productivity and results over a longer period of time (e.g. 3 months). 

Hire more seniors. In a distributed team you typically want to have more senior engineers, who are used to driving projects independently and are efficient in communication. You can, and should, be mentoring juniors as well but be careful when adding too many junior engineers at the same time. Ensure you have the capacity to dedicate time and recourses to those new to the industry. When hiring, optimise and test for good communication skills, these are even more important in a distributed team than in a co-located team.

Favour async communication. Being distributed will force you to adopt more asynchronous means of communication (email, GitHub issues). This is a feature because it means you automatically document decisions and thought processes. This is generally more inclusive and future team members are going to be grateful. Be wary of chat services such as Slack. Decisions and conversations can easily get lost in them, and you’ll be missing the benefits of written communication.

Regular team meetings. Make sure your team is meeting at least once or twice per week on video. This gives the team time to brainstorm and explore ideas that would be otherwise hard to bring up over email. Try to meet as often as possible face-to-face, where the team gathers in the same physical location and spends time together.

TR: What are some of the benefits and challenges of your team working remotely?

MS: There’s a lot of benefits. For the company, it’s much easier to find talent when you are not bound to a physical location. Finding great people is currently one of the biggest bottlenecks for companies everywhere. There are a lot of great engineers that don’t like living in a hub or simply prefer working from home. The company can still provide offices in a few large cities for the engineers that prefer coming to an office. As long as everyone is having a distributed mindset, offices are not bad, they provide more options for the employees.

For the employees, it means they can build up their own schedule, they save time from not having to commute, they can spend more time with their families or hobbies, and they have more autonomy. If they miss socialising at work or just getting out of the house, they can visit one of the offices or go to a co-working space. The employees can choose to live and work in the country or state that they like, rather than the one where they can find interesting work. It’s now their choice and that makes them feel free. 

There are challenges as well. If the team spreads over multiple continents, time-zones become a serious problem. For example, if you have people in San Francisco and Berlin, there is very  little “business hours” overlap, so it’s hard to find meeting times. It’s important for everyone in Europe to have empathy for the people in the US that wake up very early to speak with them and the other way around.  

Another challenge for the employees is that with the flexible hours it’s sometimes hard to know when to stop working. When there’s enthusiasm in the team, people tend to work long hours but it’s the manager’s responsibility to make sure everyone is pacing themselves and not approaching burnout. As a manager, encourage people to block their calendars for family time, dinner, and other life events.

TR: Since your career in tech began, have you seen any changes to the industry in terms of diversity, particularly with women in tech?

MS: We are making progress against stereotypes and biases and there’s more awareness now, but it’s going slow. When I started 13-14 years ago, there was very little awareness of the unconscious biases that women in tech have to fight daily. Today, there are more and more people that understand it’s an issue and are making efforts to improve and give women more chances.

But we still have a long way to go. Quite often, a woman has to work twice as hard and be twice as knowledgeable as a man in order to be recognised the same. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of women are pushed away and give up their careers, which in turn reinforces the stereotypes. 

Today, there are leaders that understand that diversity and inclusion is their responsibility and take real steps in improving the diversity of their teams. But there are also a lot of leaders that pay lip service to diversity and inclusion but do nothing concrete about it. 

TR: What do you think businesses can do to ensure that their tech teams are becoming more diverse?

MS: If you want to attract more diverse candidates, you need to put in a bit of effort. Here are some tips: Make sure the job description is gender neutral and doesn’t use off-putting words like “rock star”, “10x developer” or “ninja”. Also, make sure you have at least one woman in the interview process. If you have all-men teams, make it clear to the team lead or manager that that is a problem and they need to improve. Collect feedback about the interview process from the women that you reject or that don’t choose your company. Pay special attention to the exit interviews for any woman that leaves the team.

Allow a flexible schedule that allows women to find the right work-life balance without the need to sacrifice one or another. Support them and encourage them to grow in their career. Whenever you organise a keynote or a company all-hands, make sure your presenters are diverse. Create a mentorship program for women where you engage women from different levels of the company. 

I don’t think any of the above is hard, and it makes the difference between just claiming you care about diversity and actually taking steps in the right direction.

TR: Finally, how do you think businesses can best attract top technical talent?

MS: In my experience, top engineers are looking for autonomy, for a diverse and pleasant work environment, for a healthy work-life balance, and a mission that they can associate with. They want to be recognised and compensated according to their contributions. They don’t care about things like ping-pong tables and catered lunches, they can get that anywhere, so don’t lead with that sort of thing in your job posts.

Being a fully distributed company and allowing engineers to work from wherever they are is a great way to attract top talent. If you can do that in your company, I recommend taking advantage of it.

If you’d like to be involved in our next Q&A, get in touch with us today!

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