Episode 232: "Junior" developer and NDA'd

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. First I want to say thank you and I really love the show and all your helpful advice. I think it has made be become a better developer.

   I am a current junior in high school and the lead developer (intern) of the small non profit with approximately 10 college and graduate interns on it. School has recently started to push me away from the project (not enough time in the day) but I still want to be a source of help. I wrote a very significant portion of the code for the current application, however the founder wanted this to be shipped as quickly as possible and this led in a sense to a bit of a cobbled together mess of microservices and no documentation. My main problem is that although I feel I have the technical skills to lead the team, I really do not have much experience in terms of team management, especially in the case of leading a development team. During the main development of the application, it mainly consisted of me and this other developer writing the code. However now that they are gone, I am the only person (along with someone else who kind of has an understanding) with knowledge and familiarity of the code base. Sorry this is long, but I guess what I am asking is how can I (i) create a team structure that will not only prepare interns for real world development as well as making sure that the application remains after I move on and (ii) help build processes and structure that will allow people to meaningfully contribute to the code base.

   Also, just for more information, I have not yet added unit tests or code reviews. Most of this just usually became just as me.

2. I work in AI startup and planning to change my job. My contract is full of NDAs about pretty much everything. How do I talk with companies and recruiters about things I do when I’m not allowed to disclose project details like technologies or libraries used, algorithms for data manipulation, or even where we take data from, bought or downloaded. I can’t say anything more than “I work on AI and we do music manipulation in a programming language”. What do I say?

Episode source