April 6, 2016 at 20:01Student JPoint - a happy ticket to the future
Who else does not know, on April 24, 2016 in Moscow, JPoint Student Day will be held - a conference for students studying Java technologies and JVM languages. The gurus of the Java world will make presentations on it, which are completely different from what they read in lectures and talk in practice. It will be a complete immersion in the world of real, combat development - for someone first, but for someone a closer acquaintance with the profession. Moreover, this will not be a one-goal game - it will be possible to ask speakers questions, communicate with them during breaks and any free time, talk about your projects and make useful contacts. Which, believe me, will come in handy very soon. But first things first.
What technologies do you consider advanced and promising? Data science, Kotlin, Internet of things, virtual reality? And which of these technologies is taught at your university? It’s not a secret for anyone that in the development and use of advanced tools, university programs quickly become obsolete - and the reason for this, first of all, is that education does not keep pace with the industry that is experimenting, choosing the best, immediately starting to use it and immediately generating that something new. Therefore, in order to become a competitive specialist in the market, you need to dig deeper - and participation in conferences is one way to be in the subject and not to fly past the profession.
There will be many interesting and very cool reports on the student day of JPoint, some of which we already wrote on the blog. Among the speakers at JPoint's student day are developer advocates at JFrog and the Java world legend Baruch Sadogursky . We asked him to share the secrets of the adult life of the developer with student readers of Habr. During the conversation, it became clear that it would be interesting to everyone.
- Your report will be devoted to Continuous Delivery. Why tell this to students, most of whom are not quite sure what the project as a whole is and how it relates to the development process?
- Firstly, it’s not about Continuous Delivery, at least it doesn’t start with Continuous Delivery. It starts with Project Automation. As you rightly noted, it is not entirely clear what a project is. And we will begin, naturally, with an explanation of the basics - of course, not what the project itself is, but at least why we need to automate something in the project: what are the assembly systems for, what level of automation is required, how to do it, etc. 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 this has advantages, why it is needed, how to do it. In the end, we return to the same conclusion with which we started: without automation of the project, nothing can be. This is actually a review of what students will do at real work, once in a large industry after graduation. This is the next stage of their development.
- What should a student do now, so that by the end of his studies he doesn’t get overboard a developer’s career in the market and find jobs 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 expecting, as they say, both the Swiss, the reaper, and the dude to play. Despite the fact that you have just graduated from the university, both experience and some practical knowledge are required of you. The good news is that there is a great way in the Java world today to get it all done. And it's called open source. You go to GitHub, you find a project that is interesting to your liking, you start using it, first you start getting bugs on them, then you start fixing bugs in it, then you start committing to it ...
And, in general, somewhere, it’s rude saying, over 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 sure that the employer was not ashamed to drop a link to his GitHub in the absence of any resume from a young university graduate. Here it is, the trump card! This is something that definitely needs to be done today, the thing that will give an advantage over your fellow students and is much more appreciated than any assessments. At least in my opinion.
- Well, the student went to GitHub, found a Java project, got carried away and started items that were 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, in spite of the fact that they have the requirements to know and know everything in the world, are listed in the job description, they take a person with a certain set of skills for a certain position. And of course, if specifically in this area the student has good grades, and it is clear that he understands the topic (because you can take and look at his code in a real project), this is an excellent candidate. He gives odds to any honors student with honors. If I’m looking for a backend developer, it’s not hot and cold for his five from Haskell, but 100500 of his commits to some open sorce project, especially if it really happened in some more or less popular and by ear - is priceless.
- With practice it is clear, but what to do with the theory that is lacking from university lectures?
- Thanks to the Internet, the question of sources is not worth it: books, video lectures, podcasts. There would be a desire to learn. In the end, the result is still important. You will not tell the employer that you read a cool book and watched lectures online. The result of this training will be required of you.
- You work in the USA and, for sure, you come across both Russian and American students. Are there any major differences?
- I also worked in Israel for 25 years. Of course, there are differences, and they are especially visible between the American mentality and the Russian. Israeli students are somewhere in between on this scale. There are a lot of differences. For example, narrow specialization. Basically, in America, narrow specialization is very much appreciated. This is considered an important aspect, because, of course, you can achieve much greater heights if you specialize in a narrow field than if you take everything very broadly. Even the concept of Full Stack Developer, which was fashionable for some time, was still quite narrow. Because, in fact, it was referring to Full Stack JavaScript Developer: just the backend is written in some JavaScript NPM, and the frontend is in JavaScript Angular. In Russia, narrow specialization is not respected, 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 felt.
In addition, there is another very strong syndrome (again, I generalize, an ungrateful thing, but since you asked) - not invented here or, as I freely translate it, the syndrome of God. It consists in the fact that a person, as he entered the project, looked at the code, and said: “Oh, this is some hellish nonsense, now we will rewrite everything here much better in two weeks.” This syndrome comes from a very right place - from the feeling that you know how to do it right and that you can do it right. But more often than not, it does not end with anything good, because, firstly, it doesn’t take at all the time that seemed right to you at the very beginning, and secondly, you do not spend time at all for what you are paid for, and, thirdly, when you begin to understand these guts, you have to make some compromises, which in the end do not guarantee that
And this God’s syndrome is very characteristic for many Russian programmers, especially for beginners, just because of the rather deep self-confidence and knowledge that they have. And to Americans, maybe, because of self-doubt, or maybe because of narrow specialization, the thought doesn’t come first of all: “Well, let's get it now and rewrite everything here.” This difference is very interesting and very noticeable.
You know, Russian programmers, Russian engineers, and the Russian technical school, in principle, are still very respected here. It seems to me that it is fairly deservedly considered 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 are no longer afraid to write. Many new companies and startups are now writing in languages that seemed experimental a couple of years ago. For example, Rust, until recently Scala. Now we see a great interest in Kotlin, which quickly translates into demand for labor.
Java, in spite of all its stability, will remain in the first places on demand for a very long time, and this, in fact, is good specifically for students. We have reached the point where training programs have caught up with industry demand. Today it’s quite possible, with a Java course and the baggage of practice that we talked about, to go and find a good enough job. We are not talking here about some super-fashionable startups, but about large enterprise companies where they are not afraid to hire people with less experience, because the risk for their products and for their company is less.
- Why should students go on a student day at JPoint?
- 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 that you did not think about before), but for experience, for social connections. Programmers are most often introverted people and not very social. Nevertheless, social ties are critical today in terms of career development.. I think it’s not a secret to anyone that most good career moves in terms of new work occur through acquaintance. Most often, your ideal job does not come from the efforts of hunting agencies, but from the fact that your friend informed you of some kind of vacancy and at the same moment advised you personally to team leader or development leader who is trying to close this vacancy. This, of course, is 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 they can meet. Conferences give an absolutely unique chance to somehow develop these ties.
On the other hand, it’s very difficult for a student to go to a full-profile JPoint: firstly, it’s expensive for a student, and secondly, it’s difficult in material. The reports are important, and if you come to a conference where you can understand little, it will pass by you. In this regard, 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 in the geographic world), on the one hand, and on the other, to have a very big profit for the student both in terms of first-class presentation materials, and in terms of very useful fouling with social connections.
- If a student approaches you, shows his project, asks questions ... What will be the reaction?
- The situation on the labor market is not a secret for anyone: there are not enough good developers, they are ready to tear them off with their hands. In my situation, this is a little more complicated, because we do not have development in Russia, but options are possible and, of course, I will be happy to talk with everyone who has questions or ideas on how we can work together. Again, those same social acquaintances - well, I’m quite one of them.
Taking this opportunity, we ask Baruch to capture at JPoint 2016 a little sun and heat from Cupertino, we will come in handy. 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 out questions for 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, Internet of things, virtual reality? And which of these technologies is taught at your university? It’s not a secret for anyone that in the development and use of advanced tools, university programs quickly become obsolete - and the reason for this, first of all, is that education does not keep pace with the industry that is experimenting, choosing the best, immediately starting to use it and immediately generating that something new. Therefore, in order to become a competitive specialist in the market, you need to dig deeper - and participation in conferences is one way to be in the subject and not to fly past the profession.
JPoint Student Day is:
- The opportunity to get an internship. So, for example, at the student day of JPoint there are representatives of Odnoklassniki who are recruiting students. Such a large company is a great place for first trials of yourself in real 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 ask interesting questions and tell (or maybe show) about your own project.
- Dream job search. Speakers at conferences are not only leading developers and experts in their field, but also hiring managers. You can try to interest an expert and get an offer on practice or even teamwork. For example, the speakers will include Roman Elizarov, a teacher and vice president of technology at Devexperts, which is constantly recruiting students for work. There will be Alexander Matorin from Sbertekh - 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 work for a student in a corporation is entirely simple tasks and small assignments. On March 19, the JBreak conference was held in Novosibirsk ;- two students who made a presentation on the features of Java implementation on the Elbrus processor spoke at it. Both of them are employees of the Unipro company. These guys have been working on their project for 4 years now and are doing uniquely complex and rare things. At the same time, one of the speakers managed to get an internship at Intel and Microsoft. - Career guidance. Participating in the conference, you can choose a narrow specialization, which you will study thoroughly and get acquainted with it. Communication with experts and other students will surely form the right professional benchmark.
- Understanding of practice. The reports most often describe the hardcore stories that have been happening for months and even years with teams of speakers. These are the finds, discoveries and tricks that developers use every day. You will really see how and where the knowledge that you absorbed throughout your training is applied. For example, Roman Elizarov will talk about multithreading with theoretical calculations and examples - everyone has heard about it at the university, but for many it remains a spherical horse in a vacuum. And here enlightenment is guaranteed.
- High-quality presentation of information. Most of the lecturers teach at various universities and, which is especially valuable, at corporate institutes and schools, which set the goal of “educating” employees for themselves. The advantage of such universities is precisely in the practical orientation of the material presented.
Where to get practice and how to survive in the market?
There will be many interesting and very cool reports on the student day of JPoint, some of which we already wrote on the blog. Among the speakers at JPoint's student day are developer advocates at JFrog and the Java world legend Baruch Sadogursky . We asked him to share the secrets of the adult life of the developer with student readers of Habr. During the conversation, it became clear that it would be interesting to everyone.
- Your report will be devoted to Continuous Delivery. Why tell this to students, most of whom are not quite sure what the project as a whole is and how it relates to the development process?
- Firstly, it’s not about Continuous Delivery, at least it doesn’t start with Continuous Delivery. It starts with Project Automation. As you rightly noted, it is not entirely clear what a project is. And we will begin, naturally, with an explanation of the basics - of course, not what the project itself is, but at least why we need to automate something in the project: what are the assembly systems for, what level of automation is required, how to do it, etc. 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 this has advantages, why it is needed, how to do it. In the end, we return to the same conclusion with which we started: without automation of the project, nothing can be. This is actually a review of what students will do at real work, once in a large industry after graduation. This is the next stage of their development.
- What should a student do now, so that by the end of his studies he doesn’t get overboard a developer’s career in the market and find jobs 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 expecting, as they say, both the Swiss, the reaper, and the dude to play. Despite the fact that you have just graduated from the university, both experience and some practical knowledge are required of you. The good news is that there is a great way in the Java world today to get it all done. And it's called open source. You go to GitHub, you find a project that is interesting to your liking, you start using it, first you start getting bugs on them, then you start fixing bugs in it, then you start committing to it ...
And, in general, somewhere, it’s rude saying, over 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 sure that the employer was not ashamed to drop a link to his GitHub in the absence of any resume from a young university graduate. Here it is, the trump card! This is something that definitely needs to be done today, the thing that will give an advantage over your fellow students and is much more appreciated than any assessments. At least in my opinion.
- Well, the student went to GitHub, found a Java project, got carried away and started items that were 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, in spite of the fact that they have the requirements to know and know everything in the world, are listed in the job description, they take a person with a certain set of skills for a certain position. And of course, if specifically in this area the student has good grades, and it is clear that he understands the topic (because you can take and look at his code in a real project), this is an excellent candidate. He gives odds to any honors student with honors. If I’m looking for a backend developer, it’s not hot and cold for his five from Haskell, but 100500 of his commits to some open sorce project, especially if it really happened in some more or less popular and by ear - is priceless.
- With practice it is clear, but what to do with the theory that is lacking from university lectures?
- Thanks to the Internet, the question of sources is not worth it: books, video lectures, podcasts. There would be a desire to learn. In the end, the result is still important. You will not tell the employer that you read a cool book and watched lectures online. The result of this training will be required of you.
- You work in the USA and, for sure, you come across both Russian and American students. Are there any major differences?
- I also worked in Israel for 25 years. Of course, there are differences, and they are especially visible between the American mentality and the Russian. Israeli students are somewhere in between on this scale. There are a lot of differences. For example, narrow specialization. Basically, in America, narrow specialization is very much appreciated. This is considered an important aspect, because, of course, you can achieve much greater heights if you specialize in a narrow field than if you take everything very broadly. Even the concept of Full Stack Developer, which was fashionable for some time, was still quite narrow. Because, in fact, it was referring to Full Stack JavaScript Developer: just the backend is written in some JavaScript NPM, and the frontend is in JavaScript Angular. In Russia, narrow specialization is not respected, 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 felt.
In addition, there is another very strong syndrome (again, I generalize, an ungrateful thing, but since you asked) - not invented here or, as I freely translate it, the syndrome of God. It consists in the fact that a person, as he entered the project, looked at the code, and said: “Oh, this is some hellish nonsense, now we will rewrite everything here much better in two weeks.” This syndrome comes from a very right place - from the feeling that you know how to do it right and that you can do it right. But more often than not, it does not end with anything good, because, firstly, it doesn’t take at all the time that seemed right to you at the very beginning, and secondly, you do not spend time at all for what you are paid for, and, thirdly, when you begin to understand these guts, you have to make some compromises, which in the end do not guarantee that
And this God’s syndrome is very characteristic for many Russian programmers, especially for beginners, just because of the rather deep self-confidence and knowledge that they have. And to Americans, maybe, because of self-doubt, or maybe because of narrow specialization, the thought doesn’t come first of all: “Well, let's get it now and rewrite everything here.” This difference is very interesting and very noticeable.
You know, Russian programmers, Russian engineers, and the Russian technical school, in principle, are still very respected here. It seems to me that it is fairly deservedly considered 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 are no longer afraid to write. Many new companies and startups are now writing in languages that seemed experimental a couple of years ago. For example, Rust, until recently Scala. Now we see a great interest in Kotlin, which quickly translates into demand for labor.
Java, in spite of all its stability, will remain in the first places on demand for a very long time, and this, in fact, is good specifically for students. We have reached the point where training programs have caught up with industry demand. Today it’s quite possible, with a Java course and the baggage of practice that we talked about, to go and find a good enough job. We are not talking here about some super-fashionable startups, but about large enterprise companies where they are not afraid to hire people with less experience, because the risk for their products and for their company is less.
- Why should students go on a student day at JPoint?
- 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 that you did not think about before), but for experience, for social connections. Programmers are most often introverted people and not very social. Nevertheless, social ties are critical today in terms of career development.. I think it’s not a secret to anyone that most good career moves in terms of new work occur through acquaintance. Most often, your ideal job does not come from the efforts of hunting agencies, but from the fact that your friend informed you of some kind of vacancy and at the same moment advised you personally to team leader or development leader who is trying to close this vacancy. This, of course, is 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 they can meet. Conferences give an absolutely unique chance to somehow develop these ties.
On the other hand, it’s very difficult for a student to go to a full-profile JPoint: firstly, it’s expensive for a student, and secondly, it’s difficult in material. The reports are important, and if you come to a conference where you can understand little, it will pass by you. In this regard, 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 in the geographic world), on the one hand, and on the other, to have a very big profit for the student both in terms of first-class presentation materials, and in terms of very useful fouling with social connections.
- If a student approaches you, shows his project, asks questions ... What will be the reaction?
- The situation on the labor market is not a secret for anyone: there are not enough good developers, they are ready to tear them off with their hands. In my situation, this is a little more complicated, because we do not have development in Russia, but options are possible and, of course, I will be happy to talk with everyone who has questions or ideas on how we can work together. Again, those same social acquaintances - well, I’m quite one of them.
Taking this opportunity, we ask Baruch to capture at JPoint 2016 a little sun and heat from Cupertino, we will come in handy. 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 out questions for the speakers and a short story about yourself and your projects. You never know?