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.
My experience pairing with Avdi was fantastic and I wholeheartedly recommend the opportunity to code with him. He was patient, interested, focused, and opinionated in all of the right ways. On top of that, he's nice! Which makes it all a lot easier. It was really great to see how fluid and clear his thought process was and having him able to work with me to catch up was great.
I had some general goals in terms of making certain parts of a Gem that I'm working on better as well as addressing some uncertainties I had around some API testing practices. Fantastically, his advice on testing and some specific refactoring helped make it apparent when you run into an opportunity for dependency injection.
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.
I needed a different perspective on improving the code structure and interactions for a few SOA Ruby apps.
The pairing experience was natural, well-paced, insightful and, most important, helpful. We explored multiple alternatives, and sure enough, the optimal changes became clear and simple. Pairing is all about communication, and Avdi is an excellent communicator, it was a pleasure exploring different ideas.
Pairing with Avdi helped me slow down, learn to entertain ideas more and not become too attached to intermediary iterations. It taught me that all understanding is temporal and it's most valuable to continue exploring and improving, in the most playful and easy-going way possible.
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).
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.