James M Snell - System Engineer at CloudFlare

Junior to Senior with David Guttman

Talking Points:

• Building tools developers use
• Learning a new codebase
• The viability of open source careers
• What makes a good team member
• Avoiding burn out

Quotable Quotes:

• “Every line of code you change is going to have an impact somewhere and it's going to impact someone.” - JS
• “The amount of knowledge you have...will never define you, it's how you apply it, it’s how you recover from mistakes.” - JS
• “[How to learn faster] Figuring out what you don't know and knowing how to quickly identify the gaps in your own knowledge.” - JS
• “I don't mind helping...but I also want to see you putting in the effort yourself to figure it out.” - JS
• “[Learning new code bases] I fiddle and break things, and then figure out what broke.” - JS
• “If you're just spending all your time looking at code and thinking about code, you will burn out very quickly.” - JS
• “The people that I enjoy working with the most take a very humble approach to the code they write.” - JS

Notes:
James’ Twitter

https://twitter.com/jasnell

James’ Github

https://github.com/jasnell
Junior to Senior Community
community.juniortosenior.io