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.
I just wanted to chat about the future, the industry and very complex high-level stuff. He spent a lot of time listening because there was quite a bit of context to baseline. Avdi is a great listener. He's a "reference spec" listener to me.
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 was really struggling with the Big Question of being a super-senior developer: Build a business of my own? Stick with my job? Become a consultant? Find a different job or role? I started to chase all of these, and so I made progress on none of them. And I was getting increasingly frustrated about it.
Working with Avdi helped guide my thinking. In a short conversation, he was not only able to help me find the confidence and clarity I needed, but was able to talk about each of the different possibilities in enough detail that, even after my personal situation changed, it was perfectly obvious which new path I should take.
More than anything else, Avdi helped me understand what I'd be best at and what would make me happiest, and which directions would likely make me unhappy. That's knowledge I'll be able to fall back on, no matter what comes next.
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.
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.