Forem: Derrick Koon

Why I'm studying math at 39 years old.

Derrick Koon — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 14:31:59 +0000

I remember high school not fondly as most people do, but as a place where I was constantly under pressure. See, I was a terrible student and when I say terrible I mean C's D's and F's almost exclusively. The issue was not a learning disability, ADD or anything else it was that I was lazy. I wanted to do the things I wanted to do and homework wasn't it. I wanted to focus on the subjects that I found interesting. Unfortunately, mathematics was not on that list.

I ended up barely getting out of high school with a C average. I tried to go to college and for an entire year I tried to fake interest and ended up flunking out. Once again math was something that put the nail in the coffin so to speak on my college life.

So, how is it that you are reading this from a person who has been developing websites and applications for 10 years. 9 years after I flunked out of college I woke up one morning and was fired from my job in a warehouse stacking boxes. The lady who fired me had a 10th grade education and could barely read the invoices for the materials we were loading. I had two kids at the time.... and I was unemployed. The next day I realized what I needed to do.

I started by carving out 2 hours of my day and devoted it to learning. I had always been good with computers so I started there. I went online and found The New Boston and started watching his videos. I understood nothing.... and then I understood a little... and then a little more. And it finally clicked what my teachers were trying to get through to me years before. Any subject can be interesting if you study it and don't expect to know it immediately.

Flash forward to today. Yesterday on Hacker News a blurb about a new book caught my eye. Its called A Programmers Introduction to Mathematics and once again that feeling of regret at all the times I drooled on my notebook in Algebra came back to me. So I bought it.. and now I am sitting here in my big chair with a cup of coffee trying to grok polynomials. Something I should know have learned 20 years ago... But better late than never right?

The Imaginary Fear of Your Own Age

Derrick Koon — Sun, 26 Aug 2018 21:54:20 +0000

When I took my first project as a "professional"(whatever that means) developer I was 29 years old. I was already older than most of the workforce that I saw at the tech conferences around me. I heard stories of 16 year old wiz kids building whole libraries and people my age being forced out of the workforce by the younger crowd. I lived in fear of telling people my age even though I looked at the time at least 5 years older than what I was. My fear was that my capability had diminished, and stack that on top of an overwhelming case of Imposter Syndrome (Google it if you don't know...) and you have a recipe for a wallflower at any conference.

Flash forward a couple of years and I have started to see a trend, the number of gray hairs at the conferences as grown as the workforce in the US slowly accepts the march of technology. Career switchers, and bootcamp grads are a norm at the conferences. People have started to accept the "new kids" aren't always kids. I am not naive enough to think this is the case everywhere. I know there is still rampant ageism, sexism and bigotry running rampant in our field. But I still see the change happening, slowly.

Next year I turn 40, I have a wife and kids and we live a comfortable life on my salary as a developer. I still get anxious about my age sometimes. Especially when I attend conferences with my trusty Thinkpad under my arm while everybody else is carrying the newest MacBook Pro. But luckily my age and experience have taught me some things about the tech industry that set my mind at ease.

The first of these is that any industry values the young more. It's inevitable but not for the reasons you think. The main reason in my opinion is that young people are inexperienced when dealing with management. They often don't ask for enough money for their skills and they are more than willing to work long hours to "prove themselves". Some of the shadier businesses set expectations such as 80 hour work weeks and entice the young people to the door with promises of bean bag chairs and free pizza Friday. In exchange you are told to put aside anything resembling a life and soon find yourself at the end of the burnout cycle. A business's first priority is making a profit, everything else is secondary, please remember this. You are and always will be replaceable to them.

Next thing is that nobody has time to become an expert, the industry moves too fast. I knew lots of folks who were so called JQuery "experts" who now sit around wondering why they didn't jump on Angular when it came out. The reason is that all tech is going to become obsolete. If you are building something in ReactJS right now and using the latest and greatest technology I can guarantee you that in 5 years someone will open your files and go "ew, what idiot wrote this?" Why, because something better will have replaced it. Maybe an iteration, maybe a whole new framework or technology. And because of that everybody is on an even keel when it comes to learning things. Old and Young, as long as you can still learn you are on the same footing as the wiz kid. You just have to work for it.

So I can already hear the responses. What about getting hired, what about problems getting jobs. The easiest way to get around that is to be honest with the person hiring you. If you are 40 and walk into an interview in a hoodie and flip flops you can forget it. But if you look like your age (once again this is probably a controversial statement), you will be judged on that level. What about Google and Facebook? These places should be labeled what they are, the McDonalds of our industry, they take in brilliant young people and burn them to the ground. Then they dispose of the husk of a person and hire the next person proud to have a Google sticker on their laptop.

I leave you with this, I feel like age is seen in the industry not as a limiting factor so much as a question of money. A person who is 40 in my case is never gonna work at Google. But the fact is that I probably wouldn't want to, I would be out of place and more than willing to tell someone to kiss my A$$ if they asked me to miss my kids events to move a product out the door. Having never been a part of Google I may be off base. The industry has more work than people. That is a truth, and as long as you can learn you CAN make it.

Much love to the dev.to community for putting up with my rants.. I love this community.....

Real World Programming vs Academic Programming

Derrick Koon — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 20:42:18 +0000

I would love to tell you new developers that the rat race is full of inspiration and doing what you love, but that would be a lie. I work for a great company, I come to work each day full of energy and for the most part I enjoy everything I do. But it isn't like it was when I went to school. I went to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. It was a great school, and I fell in love with coding while I was there, but it didn't prepare me for the reality of being a full-time developer. So I am gonna go ahead and give you some advice. This all based on my experiences so mileage may vary on the advice, but I wish somebody had said at least a few of these things to me.

Your Teacher/Professor is not the same as a client
In college your professor set deadlines for you, they had concrete expectations and their primary goal was for you to learn the material. A client on the other hand doesn't care if you use JQuery or WebAssembly, Angular or React. They don't care about your desire to become a better developer by implementing Design Patterns nor do they care about anything other than what they are paying for you to do for them. So the impetus is on you to make sure that product is good and on time. No grades, no do-overs and no excuses.
Some Projects Are Going To Suck
Working as a developer means you sometimes have to do things that aren't as glamorous as building the next Snapchat or Facebook. 75% of my day is working on poorly documented legacy code written either by a much less experienced me, or some other poor slob who was handed the task long ago. From data entry to working with ancient Access DB's get used to not working with the latest and greatest tech.
Your Coworkers Are Extended Family
Everybody I see coming into the field these days wants to be the unicorn. They want to be the lynch-pin or the expert. And they behave like they are competing for the highest grade in the class. This approach is in my opinion harmful. Your co-workers are each a part of an extended family. You will on average spend more time with them than with your own biological family. It pays to see them as people you want to build up, not compete with. Anyone of my co-workers know that I am a fickle person, prone to fits of ignorance and incompetence. But they also know that if the beacon is lit and Gondor calls for aid I am the first Rider of Rohan topping the hillside for battle. This approach ensures that I don't become somebody else's wall they have to move past to be better.
You Are Going To Fail..... Hopefully
I say this with love. If you want to get better you will fail, sometimes it will be minor league, a build fail or a client request forgotten or lost in the email chain. Other times it will be colossal, db deleting, no backups, computer crashing, client screaming, Michael Bay explosions and fire and brimstone. It will happen sooner or later and you will live, and you will learn some fantastic lessons from these career killing mistakes. Usually you will learn immediately that you are the only one that thinks they are career killing.
You control your curriculum
Nobody is going to tell you the next thing to learn. There are no set in stone formulas for become a developer. No predetermined path is set from point A to B and it doesn't end at a diploma. You must take a shine to teaching yourself things. YouTube tutorials are great, books are great, but nothing beats getting in the code and changing things till they break and then fixing them.

I hope all this makes sense, and I hope it helps.

I went from PHP to a Senior C#/.NET Dev in 2 years.

Derrick Koon — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 15:53:18 +0000

So, two and half years ago I was happily working for a University here in my home town. I was maintaining their massive Wordpress based website and had a thriving side business as a Wordpress/PHP dev on the side. I built widgets and custom content types and life was peaceful and tranquil. I was a self taught PHP Developer.

Fast forward to today...

I no longer have time to do PHP side work. I miss it sometimes. I was hired by a company that was, unbeknownst to me about to transition to .NET shop using a CMS that is written in .NET. Over the past two years I have been forced into a world of compilation, nuget packages and website initialization. It has been a helluva ride but I will tell you, if you want something bad enough you can adapt to anything.

First Rule: Don't Panic

When the announcement came down that the transition was gonna happen I remember feeling a sense of overwhelming panic. The other developer who had been hired was in the same boat I was and was extremely upset. The company was gonna pay to allow us to retrain but we still were starting from 0 (at least that is what I thought).
After I sat down and allowed the shock to pass I began looking at learning supplies. Which brings me to rule 2.

Second Rule: Reach for what/who you know.

When I had worked at the university I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of talented individuals who were skilled in .NET development. I began reaching out to them with questions and started networking within the .NET community here. That lead me to more information and resources that I was able to use to get ahead. I also began looking at similarities between PHP and C#/.NET. On the surface they seem disparate. But if you look beneath the branding you start to see that most programming languages, beneath the mystique of community and touted benefits are basically the same set of statements with different ways of writing them. "if statements", "for loops", etc.. are all there.

Third Rule: Learn or Leave

After about a year of working I began to plateau. It seemed like my knowledge had peaked and I was struggling again to deal with the new hires who already had years of experience in the language. The other guy who was still hanging on from the start decided to leave. It was very messy and I hope he is happy where he is now. As for me I decided to dig in again. I ended up taking courses online, buying GOD KNOWS how many books and just simply putting in the hours. I ended up missing full seasons of my favorite shows, I did what was necessary to rise to what I needed to be. I was lucky that my work respected my efforts and was patient enough to allow me to learn and work at the same time.

tldr; Got hired as a PHP dev, was bamboozeled and handed .NET/C# instead. Rose to the challenge and made Senior Dev status after 2 years through realizing that programming languages are generally similar across the board and working my ass off to learn what few differences there were.