#63 - Being an Effective Generalist & Building Good Developer Experience - Deepu K Sasidharan

“If you’re a generalist, and if you’re good at multiple things, then you have a lot of options. You have a lot of career paths to choose from." Deepu K Sasidharan is a polyglot developer and a Senior Developer Advocate for DevOps at Okta. In this episode, Deepu shared why he consciously becomes a polyglot and generalist developer. He emphasized the importance of knowing more than one thing in the current rapidly changing tech industry. He gave practical tips for new engineers to start out and shared his technique to learn new stuffs, including languages, by building personal indexes. We then discussed the current interview practices trend and why he thinks it needs to change, especially to make it more inclusive and less biased. Towards the end, Deepu shared about developer experience, a topic that he is highly passionate about, on why it is becoming more important and some tips for building a good developer experience. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:21] Being a Polyglot Developer - [00:08:25] Should We Become Polyglot Developers? - [00:12:05] Tips for New Engineers - [00:15:14] Learning a New Language - [00:18:29] Building Index for Learning - [00:22:16] Broken Interview Practices - [00:25:27] Importance of Developer Experience - [00:28:50] Building a Good Developer Experience - [00:32:55] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:37:33] _____ Deepu K Sasidharan’s Bio Deepu is a polyglot developer and OSS aficionado. He mainly works with Java, JS, Rust, and Golang. He co-leads JHipster and created the JDL Studio and KDash. He’s a Senior Developer Advocate for DevOps at Okta. He is also an international speaker and published author. Deepu is an enthusiast of cloud & container technology, and he is passionate about developer experience and user experience. Follow Deepu: Website – https://deepu.tech/ Twitter – @deepu105 LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/deepu05/ GitHub – https://github.com/deepu105 Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/63.