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34 - how to blow your interns mind

Chengchen started his Mobino internship this week and he has been totally overwhelmed by all the information and complexity of the system he needs to learn. I believe that throwing him into the cold water head first is a good thing, and he has been holding up really nicely those last 3 days, helping with navigating while I was driving the pair programming. We will soon put him into the drivers seat as well.

Today, he had his mind blown in another way though: We have been working through a number of bugs and test driven, tested and then deployed them to our production system. At noon, he was allowed to press the ENTER button to make a deployment. In the afternoon, I set him up with deploy access to our complete zoo of virtual machines. He looked at me, totally shocked and said that he learnt in university, that in the “real world” changes go through a program manager who approves the deployment. To which I answered something like: “In order to be fast, we can’t afford this. We deploy many times per day. If we break things, we will notice right away and we can roll-back, fix and deploy again. Releasing a whole bunch of code changes makes this a lot more difficult. Also - as a developer, you are responsible for your code: You break it, you fix. Remember Spiderman: With great power, comes great responsibility”

He looked at me, as if he couldn’t believe what he just hear, and he got really nervous, when I told him that I expected him to be able to deploy on his own as soon as possible.

So now I have witnessed first hand, when somebodies mind gets blown…

Jens-Christian Fischer

Maker. Musician