Hello everyone. I've received a lot of

comments from people who were either

juniors, interns, or people just trying

to get into the industry. And so this

video is sort of my thoughts and my tips

and my advice on how to approach the

situation when you're less experienced

and you want to get better. To start off

with, I have been in the industry for

over 15 years and I am still constantly

learning. That's part of the reason why

I made this YouTube channel is so that I

could give myself the opportunity to

tick off multiple goals at once. With

those goals being to learn something, to

increase my learning and retention by

writing it down, to distill what I've

learned into something that I can

explain to someone else as a mark of my

own understanding. And at the same time

to drive some views towards my content.

Now obviously before I went viral, my

videos were only getting like less than

100 views. So on the content side it

wasn't going amazingly well. And I don't

really care about that because I still

get all of the other benefits when I

create a video like that. Some of the

topics that I learned like about NUMA

architecture and preemptive scheduling,

these are valuable things that I'll use

in my career and that's the whole point.

Now to give you sort of inspiration and

an idea of what I went through when I

was inexperienced junior blah blah blah,

I'm going to tell you the story of how I

got to my position because I think

that's going to be concrete and not

theoretical and I think that's probably

helpful in the situation. The summary is

that I think there's an element of luck

and I made lateral and upward movements

across roles skilling up each time when

the opportunities came up. That's it.

That's the whole video. You can stop now

if you want. But I'm going to continue

to explain off the notes that I wrote

down. Whenever I skilled up in my

career, it was always because I found

something that I was interested in and I

went all in on it. I built things, I

took risks, I pushed for adoption of the

things that I built. I wanted it to be

useful and even when people discouraged

me or disagreed or told me to slow down

or be more careful or any of that, I

just kept investing into that interest.

A few examples that I had and these are

in chronological order from

like the start of my career to to now. I

used to write Windows batch scripts in

helpdesk roles that I was in to do some

of the repetitive tasks, like just

running commands, running applications.

And people would treat me like I was

weird for doing that. Like they'd look

at my desktop and how I always had a

little terminal open and I had a

collection of

of batch scripts and whenever I needed

to do something that I did all the time,

I just ran one of them. They looked like

they looked at me like I was an alien.

Later on when I moved into a

sysadmin role uh for a managed services

provider, I started learning PowerShell

because we were running Windows Server.

And I did it to do stuff like process

log files and uh I tried to automate

things like uh scheduled restarts on

VMware machines and got in trouble for

that. Another thing I did was I went to

Stack Overflow and I answered as many

questions about regex as I could cuz I

was interested in regex and that's how I

learned regex. Actually, that's how I

became very skillful in regex. So, it's

kind of a shame that Stack Overflow is

losing a lot of the love that it used to

get and the traffic that it used to get.

I replaced a uh Windows DNS server with

uh Linux and BIND. At the time, that was

like very new to me. It was risky. I had

to convince people that it was a good

idea and then I read the book Flask web

development and I decided to take that

knowledge and apply it to create a web

interface in front of bind just for our

very basic usage where we would change a

zone and it would create a diff of the

changes and send them by email to

someone. And that person would hit

approve and there'd be a whole history

in the in the get history and whatnot.

So that was a very early on that was a

very basic Python app that I made. And

that was after I learned Python on

Codecademy. I completed their Python

course. It was free. It was very basic.

And then I just tried replacing some of

my PowerShell stuff with Python. After I

learned Python, I started to get really

interested in it. I thought it was quite

good. And it was one of those things

that became very interesting to me. I

started consuming as much content as I

could on on YouTube. Videos from people

like Raymond Hettinger, David Beazley,

Guido van Rossum. He doesn't do many,

but but the other core devs seem to do

more. Tech talks from, you know,

conferences like PyCon. Just trying to

learn

whatever I could about the language. A

few other things with that were quite

useful for me at the time were videos by

Jez Humble about the topic of continuous

delivery and books like The Phoenix

Project or DevOps and The Programmer's

Brain, but I read that much later. And

the goal with consuming these books and

videos was always to apply it

immediately. Otherwise, I just wouldn't

retain that information. And it's not

like I just read them once and never and

then remembered it forever. I had to

watch these videos over and over again

to come back and remember the lessons

again and again. So I've probably

watched Jez Humble's video called

Continuous Delivery Sounds nice, but

won't work here. I've probably watched

that at least a dozen times, at least.

I've watched videos by Raymond Hettinger

about

the super built-in function in Python.

And I've watched videos from David

Beazley about concurrency. I've watched

uh

you know, re- more Raymond Hettinger

videos about good APIs, like how to

design a you know, a Python module or a

library that's clean and and makes

sense. So, anyway, I mean, through all

of this effort uh and just learning and

taking an interest, eventually you get

recognized as someone who has

experience. That might sound kind of

weird and obvious, like uh you wake up

and suddenly you're uh you're good at

stuff because you've spent a long time

learning them. Well, seems kind of

obvious, but um

it's a weird feeling because, you know,

I still feel inadequate. I still have

imposter syndrome. I still get nervous

when I have to deal with a problem. But,

I digress. That is essentially how I I

built my career um up to the point of

getting hired at Atlassian. And then,

within Atlassian, I spent even more time

on the job learning, figuring stuff out,

and getting better. And I've gotten

tremendously better. I learned Rust

while I was at Atlassian. I learned

basically everything there is to know

about Envoy and a lot of other things.

And so, that's my journey. Some people

might hear that and think, "Well, maybe

I shouldn't go to university and I

should just learn everything myself,

like Vassily did." And I would say,

"Please don't do that." I would

recommend going to university and

picking uh a degree that is going to

challenge you and perhaps not too much,

but it's at least going to challenge

you. It's going to teach you how to

think and read and write. But, most

importantly, it's going to teach you

things that you find interesting, and

it's going to expose you to a broad

range of things that you maybe didn't

know that you liked. At least At least,

that's how I imagine university. I've

never been there. So, as for my actual

advice for anyone that is an intern or

new in a company, or a junior, or a

graduate. From my perspective, as

someone watching people come onto my

team, my biggest hope for them actually

is that they spend most of their time

understanding what's already there, and

not feeling the pressure to immediately

change things or deliver something. I'm

a lot more impressed by a distillation

of existing systems, finding where the

churn happens, finding where the core of

the business logic is expressed, asking

smart questions along the way, and maybe

writing a report on what you've

discovered, and how you think it could

be made better. It's my opinion that

that will immediately elevate you and

gain you the respect of your peers,

which I think is important. During the

process of that information consumption,

your unconscious mind will notice

patterns, and it will surface ideas and

opportunities, which you should write

down. Then, with those ideas, work on

them in silence. Don't tell anyone. Make

an MVP. Workshop it with someone that

you trust. Fix the problems that come

out of that workshop session. Take the

feedback, write documentation, create a

demo, and then showcase it to your

peers. The sad thing is that in some

workplace environments, doing this will

cause you to bump into resistance,

disagreements, and people that downplay

the thing that you built because it

doesn't seem necessary or valid to them.

Sometimes people just don't want things

to be better, and they will actively

undermine you. Regardless of this, I

still think it's worthwhile doing

because in the process, you get better

as a developer or an engineer. Sometimes

your ideas are just crap, though, and so

you should probably spend some time

proposing your idea to someone you

trust, or maybe if you have the

discipline, to yourself, and then attack

your own idea. And there's going to be

parts of your idea that cannot be

logically defended. Sometimes, those

parts of your idea are design choices.

So, you need to be able to determine

what trade-offs you've made and argue

for the pros and elaborate on why the

cons are acceptable. It occurs to me

that that advice can come across as

maybe bad advice. I'm not sure. I'm just

kind of describing what I value and what

I've done

in response to the experiences that I've

had. And I suppose one of my regrets is

that when people did disagree with me or

pushed back on my ideas, that I didn't

give up and that I just kept iterating

until they accepted it. So, right now it

makes sense for me to try to condense

everything I've just said into something

that's

uh short and actionable. With everything

that I know right now, if I was starting

from zero and I had to get back into a

company, a big tech company, this is

what I would do. It's going to be long.

I would go to university. I'd study

computer science. As my graduate As my

graduation is nearing, I would start

contacting uh tech companies that I

wanted to work at. Throughout my whole

university degree, I would be spending

extra time specifically solving problems

and building things. I would build a

home lab. I would test all of the modern

talked-about infrastructure tools. For

example, I'd run Kubernetes at home. I'd

run wasm cloud at home. I'd build

services, maybe even try to sell those

services for free on the internet. I

would actually be doing LeetCode. Some

people think that that's weird,

especially nowadays. They think that

practicing LeetCode is stupid,

especially with LLMs. Yes, you can get

an LLM to solve any LeetCode problem.

But, here's what you don't get. When

particular patterns of problems come up

and you need to solve them, you don't

even know the words to solve it. You

don't have the nomenclature to even

express your ideas and express what you

think the solution needs. And maybe the

LM can come to that the correct

conclusion for you, but how do you know?

Anyway, so let's say you studied your

degree, you're practicing in your free

time,

you're building projects, you're

learning things,

you're doing challenges. I probably also

want to share those things online in

much the same way as I'm doing with this

channel because it gets you exposed to

people in the industry. They take an

interest. I'd also try to attend meetups

and just meet people in person, ask them

what they work on,

ask them questions. People I think that

people like to talk about what they're

working on.

In fact, I think many people don't get

that opportunity.

And by providing that opportunity, you

kind of it's an easy way to make a

connection, especially if you're

genuinely curious and engaged with what

they're saying. It's

I think it's something that's

somewhat rare these days.

And then I I would just keep trying to

do that over and over again

until I get to the place that I want to

get.

Opportunities do come around. It's not

something that's going to be instant,

but they do pop up and

you have to be prepared for when they

pop up.

So, I'm going to wrap it up there. I

hope that this was useful and cheers for

watching.

See you later.