Student JPoint - happy ticket to the future
Who else does not know, April 24, 2016 in Moscow will be held JPoint Student Day - a conference for students studying Java-technology and JVM-languages. The gurus of the Java-world will give speeches with reports that are not at all like what they read in lectures and tell in practice. It will be a complete immersion in the world of this, combat development - for someone first, and for someone closer acquaintance with the profession. And it will not be a game with only one goal - it will be possible to ask questions to the speakers, to communicate with them during the breaks and any free time, talk about your projects and make useful contacts. Which, believe me, you will come in handy very soon. But first things first.
What technologies do you consider advanced and promising? Data science, Kotlin, the Internet of things, virtual reality? And what of these technologies are taught at your university? It's no secret that in terms of developing and using advanced tools of the university program, they quickly become obsolete - and the reason for this is, first of all, that education does not keep pace with the industry that is experimenting, choosing the best, immediately starts using it and immediately generates what something new. Therefore, in order to become a competitive specialist in the market, you need to dig deeper - and participation in conferences is one of the ways to be in the subject line and not fly past the profession.
At the JPoint student day there will be many interesting and very cool reports, some of which we have already written in the blog. Among the speakers at the JPoint student day are developer advocate at JFrog and Java world legend Baruch Sadogursky . We asked him to share the secrets of the developer’s adult life with Habr's student readers. During the conversation, it became clear that it would be interesting to everyone.
- Your report will be devoted to Continuous Delivery. Why is it to tell students, most of whom do not quite imagine what the project as a whole is and how does it relate to the development process?
“Firstly, it’s not really about Continuous Delivery, at least it doesn’t start with Continuous Delivery.” It begins with Project Automation. As you correctly noted, it is not entirely clear what a project is. And we begin, of course, with an explanation of the basics - of course, not what the project itself is, but at least from why the project needs to automate something: why build systems are needed, what level of automation is required, how to do it, and so on. d. Well, of course, the next step will be the actual answer to the question of why to automate - we will talk about continuous integration and continuous delivery (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery), what advantages it has, why it is needed, how to do it. In the end, we will return to the same conclusion we started with: nothing can be done without project automation. This is actually a review of what students will do in real work, hitting the big industry after graduation. This is the next stage of their development.
- What should a student do now, so that by the end of the training not to be left out of the career of a developer in the market and find a job in the desired companies?
- This problem has a place to be. Today, a student who enters the market who knows only what he was taught at the university is not very competitive. Just because all employers are now waiting, as they say, for both the Swedish, and the reaper, and the dummy to play. In spite of the fact that you have just graduated from a university, you are already required to have experience and some practical knowledge. The good news is that today in the Java world there is a great way to make it all right. And it is called Open Source . You go to GitHub, you find a project that you are interested in and like, you start using it, first you start to get bugs on them, then you start fixing bugs in it, then you start committing to it ...
And, in general, somewhere, roughly speaking, for the last year at the university (when you know what you are doing and how you can be useful), you can build yourself a good portfolio in an interesting Open Source project, more or less known (although, in fact, this is less important). To make it so that the employer was not ashamed to drop the link to your GitHub in the absence of a resume from a young university graduate. Here it is, the trump card! This is something that today definitely needs to be done, the thing that will give an advantage over their fellow students and is much more valued than any assessment. At least in my opinion.
“Well, well, a student went to GitHub, found a project in Java, got carried away and fired up objects not related to his practice, for example Haskell or Delphi. And now the average grade point is not 4.9, but 3.8. How should the employer relate to this situation?
- Most employers, despite the fact that they have listed in the job description the requirements to be able to know everything in the world, they take a person with a certain set of skills to a certain position. And of course, if a student has specific grades in this area and it’s clear that he understands the topic (because you can take a look at his code in a real project), this is an excellent candidate. He gives odds to any excellent student with a red diploma. If I’m looking for a backend developer, I’m not hot or cold from his Haskel five, but 100,500 of his commits to some open sorce project, especially if it really turned out to be more or less popular. Is priceless.
- It is clear with practice, but what to do with the theory, which is not enough from university lectures?
- Thanks to the Internet, there is no question of sources: books, video lectures, podcasts. It would be a desire to learn. As a result, the result is still important. You will not tell your employer that you have read a cool book and watched lectures online. You will be required to the result of this training.
- You work in the USA and you probably come across Russian and American students. Are there any serious differences?
- I also worked 25 years in Israel. There are differences, of course, and especially they are visible between the American and Russian mentality. Israeli students are somewhere in the middle of this scale. There are a lot of differences. For example, narrow specialization. In principle, narrow specialization is very much appreciated in America. This is considered an important aspect, because, of course, it is possible to achieve much greater heights if you specialize in a narrow area than if you take everything very widely. Even the concept of Full Stack Developer, which was fashionable for a while, was still quite narrow. Because, in fact, it meant Full Stack JavaScript Developer: just the backend is written in some JavaScript NPM, and the frontend is written in JavaScript Angular. In Russia, narrow specialization is not in high esteem, at least according to my observations. This is considered some kind of blindness, some kind of insufficiently broad outlook, and so on. And this difference, it is very visible and very much felt.
In addition, there is another very strong syndrome (again, I summarize, a thankless task, but since you asked) - not invented here or, as I freely translate it, God’s syndrome. It lies in the fact that the person who came to the project, looked at the code, and said: "Oh, this is some kind of hellish nonsense, now we will rewrite everything here in two weeks much better." This syndrome comes from a very right place - from the feeling that you know how to do it right and what you can do right. But more often than not, it does not end with anything good, because, firstly, it doesn’t take at all those terms that seemed right to you at the very beginning, and secondly, you spend time not at all on what you are paid for, and, thirdly, when you begin to understand these guts, you have to make some compromises, which ultimately do not guarantee that the result of what you reinvent again will be better than what you are trying to rewrite.
And this God’s syndrome is very characteristic of many Russian programmers, especially for beginners, precisely because of the rather deep self-confidence and knowledge that they have. But the Americans may, due to lack of self-confidence, or maybe because of their narrow specialization, the thought does not come first: “And now let's take it and rewrite everything here.” This difference is very interesting and very noticeable.
You know, Russian programmers, Russian engineers and the Russian technical school are, in principle, still very much respected here. It seems to me that it is fairly deserved that Russian programmers are very strong, especially in mathematics, algorithms, etc.
- Speaking of skills. What technology stack is in demand, where to look, where to develop?
- Now there are a lot of new interesting programming languages ​​in which they stopped being afraid to write. Many new companies and startups, which are now written in such languages, which a couple of years ago seemed experimental. For example, Rust, until recently Scala. Now we see a great interest in Kotlin, which quickly translates into demand for labor.
Java, despite all its stability, will still be in the first places for a long time in terms of demand, and this is, in fact, good for students. We have reached a level when curricula have caught up with industry demand. Today, it’s quite possible with a Java course and the baggage of practice that we talked about, go and find a fairly good job. We are not talking here about some superfashionable startups, but about large enterprise companies, where they are not afraid to hire people with less experience, because there is less risk for their products and their company.
- Why should students go to a JPoint student day?
- It seems to me that conferences are a very important aspect of the development of a programmer. And not so much because of the lectures and reports themselves (although the reports are very, very important and you can learn a lot of new things and, moreover, you can discover niches for yourself that you haven’t thought about before), but for experience, for social connections. Programmers are most often introverted people and not very social. However, social connections today are critical in terms of career development . I think it is no secret to anyone that the majority of good career moves in terms of new work occur through acquaintances. Most often, your ideal job does not come from the efforts of the hunting agencies, but from the fact that your friend reported to you about a vacancy and at the same time advised you personally to the team leader or development lead, who is trying to close the vacancy. This is undoubtedly a much better hiring than through a hunting agency. But these connections need to be made somehow and, naturally, it is especially difficult right after the university for graduates who have no experience and who simply are not invited to those meetings where you can meet. Conferences give a completely unique chance to somehow make these connections.
On the other hand, it is very difficult for a student to go to a full-profile JPoint: firstly, it is expensive for a student, and, secondly, it is difficult for the material. Reports are important, and if you come to a conference where you can understand little, it will pass you by. In this regard, the JPoint student day is a unique opportunity to attend a first-class, one of the best conferences in the Java world (I mean not only in the Java world, but also the geographic world), on the one hand, and on the other, to have a very large profit. for the student both in terms of first-class report materials, and in terms of very useful fouling with social connections.
- If a student approaches you, shows your project, asks questions ... What will be the reaction?
- The situation on the labor market is no secret to anyone: there are not enough good developers, they are ready to tear them off with their hands. In my situation, it is a bit more complicated, because we don’t have any development in Russia, but there are options and, of course, I will be happy to talk with anyone who has questions or ideas about how we can work together. Again, the very same social acquaintances — well, I myself am one of them.
Taking this opportunity, we ask Baruch to grab a bit of sun and heat from Cupertino at JPoint 2016, it will be useful to us. Interested students can get acquainted with the announcements of reports and register for participation in the conference on the site . By the way, we recommend that you prepare for the conference, think over the questions to the speakers and a short story about yourself and your projects. You never know?
What technologies do you consider advanced and promising? Data science, Kotlin, the Internet of things, virtual reality? And what of these technologies are taught at your university? It's no secret that in terms of developing and using advanced tools of the university program, they quickly become obsolete - and the reason for this is, first of all, that education does not keep pace with the industry that is experimenting, choosing the best, immediately starts using it and immediately generates what something new. Therefore, in order to become a competitive specialist in the market, you need to dig deeper - and participation in conferences is one of the ways to be in the subject line and not fly past the profession.
JPoint Student Day is:
- The opportunity to get an internship. For example, at the JPoint student day there are representatives of the "Classmates" who recruit students. Such a large company is a great place to first try yourself in actual development.
') - Meetings and conversations with company experts. You can ask them about what to pay attention to and how to develop in order to get a job in this organization or just to ask questions of interest and tell (and maybe show) about your own project.
- Job search dreams. Conference speakers are not just leading developers and experts in their field, but also hiring managers. You can try to interest the expert and get a proposal for practice or even teamwork. For example, among the speakers will be Roman Elizarov, a teacher and vice president of technology at Devexperts, which is constantly recruiting students. Alexander Matorin from Sbertech will be - the technological direction of Sberbank is constantly growing and there is every chance to try to join the team.
By the way, do not think that working for a student in a corporation is completely simple tasks and small assignments. Literally on March 19, a JBreak conference was held in Novosibirsk ; - there were two students who spoke on the peculiarities of Java implementation on the Elbrus processor. Both of them are employees of the company "Unipro". These guys have been working on their project for 4 years and are doing uniquely complex and rare things. In this case, one of the speakers had an internship at Intel and Microsoft. - Career guidance. By participating in the conference, you can choose a narrow specialization, which you will study thoroughly and get to know it. Communication with experts and other students will surely form the right professional reference point.
- Understanding of practice. The reports most often set out hardcore stories that have happened and are happening with teams of speakers months and even years. These are the discoveries, discoveries and techniques that developers use every day. You will really see how and where the knowledge that you have absorbed during the training is applied. For example, Roman Elizarov will talk about multithreading with theoretical calculations and examples - everyone has heard about it in high school, but for many it still remains a spherical horse in a vacuum. And then enlightenment is guaranteed.
- High-quality submission of information. Most speakers teach in various universities and, which is especially valuable, in corporate institutes and schools, which aim to “educate” employees for themselves. The advantage of such universities is precisely the practical orientation of the material presented.
Where to take practice and how to survive in the market?
At the JPoint student day there will be many interesting and very cool reports, some of which we have already written in the blog. Among the speakers at the JPoint student day are developer advocate at JFrog and Java world legend Baruch Sadogursky . We asked him to share the secrets of the developer’s adult life with Habr's student readers. During the conversation, it became clear that it would be interesting to everyone.
- Your report will be devoted to Continuous Delivery. Why is it to tell students, most of whom do not quite imagine what the project as a whole is and how does it relate to the development process?
“Firstly, it’s not really about Continuous Delivery, at least it doesn’t start with Continuous Delivery.” It begins with Project Automation. As you correctly noted, it is not entirely clear what a project is. And we begin, of course, with an explanation of the basics - of course, not what the project itself is, but at least from why the project needs to automate something: why build systems are needed, what level of automation is required, how to do it, and so on. d. Well, of course, the next step will be the actual answer to the question of why to automate - we will talk about continuous integration and continuous delivery (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery), what advantages it has, why it is needed, how to do it. In the end, we will return to the same conclusion we started with: nothing can be done without project automation. This is actually a review of what students will do in real work, hitting the big industry after graduation. This is the next stage of their development.
- What should a student do now, so that by the end of the training not to be left out of the career of a developer in the market and find a job in the desired companies?
- This problem has a place to be. Today, a student who enters the market who knows only what he was taught at the university is not very competitive. Just because all employers are now waiting, as they say, for both the Swedish, and the reaper, and the dummy to play. In spite of the fact that you have just graduated from a university, you are already required to have experience and some practical knowledge. The good news is that today in the Java world there is a great way to make it all right. And it is called Open Source . You go to GitHub, you find a project that you are interested in and like, you start using it, first you start to get bugs on them, then you start fixing bugs in it, then you start committing to it ...
And, in general, somewhere, roughly speaking, for the last year at the university (when you know what you are doing and how you can be useful), you can build yourself a good portfolio in an interesting Open Source project, more or less known (although, in fact, this is less important). To make it so that the employer was not ashamed to drop the link to your GitHub in the absence of a resume from a young university graduate. Here it is, the trump card! This is something that today definitely needs to be done, the thing that will give an advantage over their fellow students and is much more valued than any assessment. At least in my opinion.
“Well, well, a student went to GitHub, found a project in Java, got carried away and fired up objects not related to his practice, for example Haskell or Delphi. And now the average grade point is not 4.9, but 3.8. How should the employer relate to this situation?
- Most employers, despite the fact that they have listed in the job description the requirements to be able to know everything in the world, they take a person with a certain set of skills to a certain position. And of course, if a student has specific grades in this area and it’s clear that he understands the topic (because you can take a look at his code in a real project), this is an excellent candidate. He gives odds to any excellent student with a red diploma. If I’m looking for a backend developer, I’m not hot or cold from his Haskel five, but 100,500 of his commits to some open sorce project, especially if it really turned out to be more or less popular. Is priceless.
- It is clear with practice, but what to do with the theory, which is not enough from university lectures?
- Thanks to the Internet, there is no question of sources: books, video lectures, podcasts. It would be a desire to learn. As a result, the result is still important. You will not tell your employer that you have read a cool book and watched lectures online. You will be required to the result of this training.
- You work in the USA and you probably come across Russian and American students. Are there any serious differences?
- I also worked 25 years in Israel. There are differences, of course, and especially they are visible between the American and Russian mentality. Israeli students are somewhere in the middle of this scale. There are a lot of differences. For example, narrow specialization. In principle, narrow specialization is very much appreciated in America. This is considered an important aspect, because, of course, it is possible to achieve much greater heights if you specialize in a narrow area than if you take everything very widely. Even the concept of Full Stack Developer, which was fashionable for a while, was still quite narrow. Because, in fact, it meant Full Stack JavaScript Developer: just the backend is written in some JavaScript NPM, and the frontend is written in JavaScript Angular. In Russia, narrow specialization is not in high esteem, at least according to my observations. This is considered some kind of blindness, some kind of insufficiently broad outlook, and so on. And this difference, it is very visible and very much felt.
In addition, there is another very strong syndrome (again, I summarize, a thankless task, but since you asked) - not invented here or, as I freely translate it, God’s syndrome. It lies in the fact that the person who came to the project, looked at the code, and said: "Oh, this is some kind of hellish nonsense, now we will rewrite everything here in two weeks much better." This syndrome comes from a very right place - from the feeling that you know how to do it right and what you can do right. But more often than not, it does not end with anything good, because, firstly, it doesn’t take at all those terms that seemed right to you at the very beginning, and secondly, you spend time not at all on what you are paid for, and, thirdly, when you begin to understand these guts, you have to make some compromises, which ultimately do not guarantee that the result of what you reinvent again will be better than what you are trying to rewrite.
And this God’s syndrome is very characteristic of many Russian programmers, especially for beginners, precisely because of the rather deep self-confidence and knowledge that they have. But the Americans may, due to lack of self-confidence, or maybe because of their narrow specialization, the thought does not come first: “And now let's take it and rewrite everything here.” This difference is very interesting and very noticeable.
You know, Russian programmers, Russian engineers and the Russian technical school are, in principle, still very much respected here. It seems to me that it is fairly deserved that Russian programmers are very strong, especially in mathematics, algorithms, etc.
- Speaking of skills. What technology stack is in demand, where to look, where to develop?
- Now there are a lot of new interesting programming languages ​​in which they stopped being afraid to write. Many new companies and startups, which are now written in such languages, which a couple of years ago seemed experimental. For example, Rust, until recently Scala. Now we see a great interest in Kotlin, which quickly translates into demand for labor.
Java, despite all its stability, will still be in the first places for a long time in terms of demand, and this is, in fact, good for students. We have reached a level when curricula have caught up with industry demand. Today, it’s quite possible with a Java course and the baggage of practice that we talked about, go and find a fairly good job. We are not talking here about some superfashionable startups, but about large enterprise companies, where they are not afraid to hire people with less experience, because there is less risk for their products and their company.
- Why should students go to a JPoint student day?
- It seems to me that conferences are a very important aspect of the development of a programmer. And not so much because of the lectures and reports themselves (although the reports are very, very important and you can learn a lot of new things and, moreover, you can discover niches for yourself that you haven’t thought about before), but for experience, for social connections. Programmers are most often introverted people and not very social. However, social connections today are critical in terms of career development . I think it is no secret to anyone that the majority of good career moves in terms of new work occur through acquaintances. Most often, your ideal job does not come from the efforts of the hunting agencies, but from the fact that your friend reported to you about a vacancy and at the same time advised you personally to the team leader or development lead, who is trying to close the vacancy. This is undoubtedly a much better hiring than through a hunting agency. But these connections need to be made somehow and, naturally, it is especially difficult right after the university for graduates who have no experience and who simply are not invited to those meetings where you can meet. Conferences give a completely unique chance to somehow make these connections.
On the other hand, it is very difficult for a student to go to a full-profile JPoint: firstly, it is expensive for a student, and, secondly, it is difficult for the material. Reports are important, and if you come to a conference where you can understand little, it will pass you by. In this regard, the JPoint student day is a unique opportunity to attend a first-class, one of the best conferences in the Java world (I mean not only in the Java world, but also the geographic world), on the one hand, and on the other, to have a very large profit. for the student both in terms of first-class report materials, and in terms of very useful fouling with social connections.
- If a student approaches you, shows your project, asks questions ... What will be the reaction?
- The situation on the labor market is no secret to anyone: there are not enough good developers, they are ready to tear them off with their hands. In my situation, it is a bit more complicated, because we don’t have any development in Russia, but there are options and, of course, I will be happy to talk with anyone who has questions or ideas about how we can work together. Again, the very same social acquaintances — well, I myself am one of them.
Taking this opportunity, we ask Baruch to grab a bit of sun and heat from Cupertino at JPoint 2016, it will be useful to us. Interested students can get acquainted with the announcements of reports and register for participation in the conference on the site . By the way, we recommend that you prepare for the conference, think over the questions to the speakers and a short story about yourself and your projects. You never know?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/281092/
All Articles