[Now Offering] Professional Software Engineering Coaching
My own journey into a new era of more meaningful engineering work
Hello! I hope this finds you well as we wrap up what felt like an incredibly fast year, 2021! Seriously, did 12 months shrink into 6?
As I wrap up this year with quite a few changes occurring in my life, I want to write to you, my fantastic newsletter readers, with exciting news of a major new career development for me and an opportunity for you or someone you know who works as a software engineer.
So what am I starting exactly and why?
While working at various tech companies, I realized one of my favorite things about being an engineering manager and director has always been the times that I work directly with individual engineers and teams to help each person realize their best selves in their technical, communication and relational proficiencies. There’s so much potential in each engineer to grow and become as effective in these areas as they allow themselves to be. And I love helping stir up that imagination and accelerate engineers’ ability to reach those personal and professional growth goals.
With a much better understanding of my own longings, I’ve decided to launch my own business focused full time on coaching, mentoring and hands-on training of software engineers. This includes: software engineers of all levels, junior through staff/principal, client-facing engineers, engineers wanting to make the transition into management, and current engineering managers/directors.
My offering also includes working directly with companies to help accelerate and focus the growth that their engineers want to and need to realize to achieve increasingly better results. This fits particularly well for early startups that don’t yet have engineering managers to focus their energy on bettering their engineers.
Subscribe to the Relational Technologist newsletter so you don’t miss any future software engineering career advice, technical guides and training/workshop opportunities.
What does it look like to work with me as your coach?
For most of my clients, I offer two main options for working with me:
3 month term
6 month term
For both term lengths, I meet with you weekly for 1 hour. If you’d like to work with me for a different term length, I’m open to discussing that and what works best for your current needs.
We begin our work by getting clear on your goals and growth areas through a 13 question comprehensive self-assessment. It takes about an hour for most people to work through this on their own. The first three sessions with me are completely free of charge, giving us a chance to get to know one another and make sure my coaching is a good fit for you. I’m also looking to create a detailed and prioritized list of personal and professional goals and growth areas which largely come out of the self-assessment. The top priorities are set by you and I also help you understand how to get very clear and prioritize your growth.
Once we have agreed on your prioritized list of goals and growth areas, we’re ready to dive into the full coaching experience, directly tackling the 3 highest priority goals at a time.
Coaching sessions are primarily conversational in nature. I will ask you a lot of questions, listening closely, guiding and helping you with what you tell me is most important for you to achieve.
Sessions are hands-on - when you need me to help you learn something or help solve something situational, we spend our session doing so.
I also make myself available to you via email and texting for those immediate things you want help on that can’t wait for our next weekly session.
And as a client of mine, you have access to two exciting opportunities:
Application of everything that we’re working on with my guidance through an exciting open source project in a community called Rust Never Sleeps that contains embedded, web backend, and web frontend opportunities (at the time of writing, this is a young project with many opportunities to get involved and shape it).
First access to all specific training material and workshops that I’m developing that compliment some of the most important fundamentals of being a great software engineer (I’m working on developing a training program around software design and architecture, from early in your career to being a principal).
Ready to learn more?
Schedule your free 30 minute meeting with me to learn more about my professional software engineering coaching and how it can radically improve your career growth.
Two examples of good fits for coaching
Junior engineer
Let me give you an example of a fictional person who is a good fit for working with me. Meet Jen, someone just getting started in their software engineering career. Jen comes to me with a year of professional software experience working for a small tech company. She’s working on a product that has both an embedded device component as well as a cloud backend, and she contributes to both parts since the team is so small.
Jen is excited to grow and become a more senior engineer over the next few years but she’s unsure how to get there intentionally and feeling overwhelmed by how much she needs to master along with so many ways she wants to contribute more at her current company.
Jen is in a perfect position to work with me because she has a strong desire to grow and she understands the importance and advantage of guided learning from someone like myself with many years of professional experience.
Like any other practice, the field of software engineering has many key fundamentals to master, but there is a significant lack of guidance from our learning institutions and companies that we work in - and this lack of guidance is only becoming more pronounced. Working with me as her coach is a strong way Jen can significantly accelerate and bring focus to her goal of becoming a senior engineer. She doesn’t need to fumble around by herself through the vast landscape of things to learn in software engineering. I’ll help her get very clear on her goals, prioritize the top 3, and dive right into her coaching and practice.
Tech lead
Now let me introduce you to Simon. Simon works for a mid-sized company as a fairly experienced technical lead. He’s used to helping guide his team by running some of the technical discussions, software design decisions, and even pairing with his engineering manager to decide who’s right for working on certain user stories.
Simon really wants to become an engineering manager himself because he not only likes developing software, but increasingly he’s realizing that he likes helping his fellow engineers learn, grow and succeed more.
Simon is waiting for the right engineering manager opportunity to open up within his current company before applying for it. He feels like he already has some of the base skills to become a manager, but he also realizes there’s so much he doesn’t yet understand or have experience in that he’ll need to be an effective one. Just like Jen’s situation from above, Simon doesn’t quite know how to bring focus and acceleration to learning how to become a great engineering manager.
Working with me is a great way for Simon to discover, learn about and practice the most important fundamentals necessary to not only succeed in obtaining an engineering manager position, but start off with a significant leg up on day 1 when he starts his new role. With engineering managers, I take a very similar approach to working with an engineer but with more focus on mastering relational, communication, organizational and other more people and team-centric proficiencies.
What’s my professional experience and background?
I’ve been developing software since I was 10 years old, first introduced to me by my father. For a little bit of that story and how I got started at such a young age, check out my newsletter post that tells more of my story.
I’ve developed a lot of software over the years, from creating many home projects to learn various languages and tech stacks, to many different kinds of developer roles at various companies of all sizes - from 5 person startups to tens of thousands of people at long-established ones.
I studied electrical engineering and computer science during my time at university.
I’ve worked at a software consulting firm implementing straight client projects, worked on Ubuntu Linux and Ubuntu Phone OS at Canonical, the company behind the open source project. I’ve worked in client/server architectures, cloud software, embedded firmware, thick desktop applications, mobile frontends/backends, etc.
I’ve programmed in C, C++, Rust, Elixir, Ruby, Go, Python, PHP, Java, Javascript, BASIC, VHDL and probably some more that I’ve since forgotten.
I’ve gone through the whole career progression of a software engineer from being a junior engineer, senior engineer, technical lead, team Scrum master, and then into technical management as an engineering squad manager, full engineering manager and director of engineering.
I’ve also worked in technical sales both as a pre-sales engineer helping to sell Ubuntu Linux in the IoT and devices market, and then ultimately moving to managing a team of pre-sales engineers.
I’ve also had the privilege to work with some amazing people from around the world who gave me great examples of what being a truly excellent engineer is all about. I’m excited to pass along this experience to you and help you realize similar excellence.
Does this mean that I have experience in everything - certainly not! But I have extensive experience over many years of working on a lot of software with a lot of different engineers. The most useful part is that I am experience enough to know how to effectively lead you to reach your goals and focus on what’s most important, a little bit at a time.
Interested and wanting to find out more?
If you’re interested or know someone else who might be, and you’d like to meet with me to find out more, I encourage you to set up a free 30 minute introductory session with me. We’ll get to know one another a little bit, I’ll tell you more about my coaching services, and then we’ll figure out together whether working together makes sense for you. I work with engineers from all over the world.
I can’t wait to meet you, hear your story and the many ways you’re excited to grow!
If this interests you, schedule your free 30 minute meeting with me. It’s easy and it’s completely free to speak with me. I encourage you to invest in yourself and your engineering career whether that’s working with me or someone else.
I appreciate you reading and passing this along to anyone else that would find value from reading my Relational Technologist newsletter.
Happy Holidays and may you find more meaningful human connection as you complete 2021 and launch into a new year full of fresh starts and new possibilities!
Please enjoy!
Subscribe to the Relational Technologist newsletter so you don’t miss any future software engineering career advice, technical guides and training/workshop opportunities.