Portfolio of Keith Elder

Announcing Devvie Days

by Keith Elder

devvie days logo

What are Devvie Days?

Devvie Days is a new concept where those that are going through the Dev Build Program, aka DevBuilders, get to spend the majority of a day shadowing a real software engineering team. Our team, PriceX, was fortunate to have three team members join our team who recently completed the Dev Build program a few months ago. We have had an enormous amount of fun mentoring and getting to know what we lovingly call our "Devvies".

In my mentoring sessions with our Devvies, the one thing I noticed early on was the mystery to them as to how software actually was built. When Linsey Lazarz, Special Projects Manager, posted a call out to leaders about DevBuilders possibly shadowing a team(s), I saw my opportunity to help close this knowledge gap for the next generation of DevBuilders. I believe it is important to connect those in the current program with those that have walked in those shoes to help fill these gaps. In order to give them a full experience I came up with the concept of "Devvie Days" - a day where DevBuilders get to spend the day shadowing a real software delivery team.

Schedule

On Friday's starting October, 22nd our team will be hosting groups of 5-6 DevBuilders that are in the current program. The DevBuilders will shadow our team meetings, pairings and join us in our virtual coding dojo. This should provide the DevBuilders with plenty of time to ask questions, get feedback and gather insights into what they need to focus on while completing the DevBuild program. Here's the schedule for the day.

  • 9:30-10:00 AM
    • PriceX standup and meet and greet
  • 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
    • AMA (ask me anything) with the PriceX team members that completed the DevBuild program
  • 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
    • PriceX Pairing (review pull requests, new features, feedback from existing work)
  • 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
    • Lunch
  • 1:00 - 3:00 PM
    • Virtual Coding Dojo - DevBuilders will join the PriceX team in our virtual coding dojo where we will have more Q&A, show and tells, and code reviews
  • 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
    • AMA (ask me anything) with PriceX Team Leader

Dates

The following are the dates our team will be hosting Devvie Days.

  • Oct. 22nd
  • Oct. 29th
  • Nov. 5th

We can't wait to host the DevBuilders on our team to help them with their journey of becoming a Software Engineer. Your team should host them next! Have a Devvie Day on your team. The more teams we can get involved, the better experience our DevBuilders will have.

Highlights

Here's a picture from DevvieDay standup on October 29th, 2021. We thought it would be fun to welcome them with custom backgrounds for our team and for them.

devvie day standup

And our November 5th Devvie Day!

devvie day nov52021

Questions the DevBuilders have asked our Devvies during their ask me anything sessions:

  • How long were you on the team before you were contributing?
  • Did you have a tech background prior to DevBuild?
  • How have you used AWS?
  • How did you choose your team?
  • How do the mentors work, do we shop around or is one assigned?
  • Are you remote or hybrid?
  • Whats transition week?
  • Would you say most of your day is meetings or how often are you actually doing work?
  • How hard was the final project for you?
  • How much of what you learned did you use on the final project?
  • How comfortable are you with HAL and CircleCi
  • Do you do unit testing for front end?