What’s standing in your way? Let’s talk about it.
We’ve all been there: frustrated, uncertain, struggling with the sense that you really ought to know the answer to this one. From debugging nightmares, to tough architecture decisions, to deciding what’s the next step to level up as a developer… there’s one thing that has always helped me when I’ve been at an impasse: a conversation with a trusted peer who’s been around the block a few more times than I.
Hi, I’m Avdi. I’m not a real duck, but I am a real programmer. I’ve been at it for twenty years, and along the way I’ve helped a lot of other developers become more effective at what they do. Book a consultation with me, and get un-stuck.
Avdi stepped in and validated what our development team was doing. As in technical founders, (flounders), he reassured us and gave us actionable ways to make sure our team was hitting milestones.
Avdi needs to be top of your list. The closer he is to your work and your team, the better.
In a word, excellent! Avdi was enthusiastic about making sure my questions were answered, as well as giving me design tips. At the end of the session he provided me with a list of notes and links that were relevant to the discussions I had with him during our time together.
[Afterwards] I was far more confident specing out systems with POROs and structs. Additionally I found myself thinking about the object design for a given project as a whole as opposed to a mish-mash of disparate entities.
We were replacing some MVP logic involving state machines, guards and callbacks at the time. Avdi asked poignant questions, shared his wisdom and helped to vet the direction I was taking. Years later, the solution has held up well and been easy to maintain and build upon.
While we only had one pair session, I reflect on it from time to time and believe that my time with Avdi did convince me to think more about what the patterns we chose give back to us over time.
Avdi was full of helpful advice with regards to refactoring, testing and TDD-ing. The gems he suggested I still use today (such as VCR).
I have, at various points, worked for the same company as Avdi, engaged him for remote pair-programming sessions after that because I missed his enthusiasm and insight, bought copies of “Exceptional Ruby“ and “Confident Code” for all the junior developers on a team because that seemed the quickest way to bring everybody up to speed and give them a common idiom, and had a prototype rubber duck session earlier this year. When it has been necessary to reignite enthusiasm or provide a lateral insight into an intractable problem, Avdi has at more than one point proven invaluable.
Brilliant. Two examples, six years apart, of things I would not have thought of but were evidently true once Avdi pointed them out were that Cucumber need not be restricted to integration tests but could usefully build unit tests where the SUT has sufficiently complex logic that expressing the behaviour in words as well as code would very likely result in a clearer understanding and therefore a clearer implementation, and that “marketing“, while not an obvious example of the Pragmatic Programmers’ “learn one new language a year”, was potentially the most important of all.
Do you:
- Need a second perspective on an architectural decision?
- Want suggestions (or moral support) for refactoring a big ball of mud?
- Want someone to help you hone a conference talk?
- Desire to get better at knowing what to test, and how?
- Want a third-party code review for yourself or your whole team?
- Want help deciding what to study next?
- Crave feedback on an API design?
- Want some company for a gnarly debugging session?
- Want to talk about making the transition from being “just a coder” to someone who teaches, mentors, and disseminates ideas?
I’ve helped programmers with all of these things and more, and I can probably help you too.