Mentoring Arun : Volume 2

I had my second mentoring session with Arun yesterday.

We first talked about People Management and how to have potentially awkward conversations with co-workers on topics ranging from company culture to internal mentoring and work expectations. I pointed Arun to No Rules Rules, especially the parts of the book that talk about company culture and how it is important for everyone to feel like they are working with the best people. I feel incredibly lucky working at Enthought because I'm surrounded by people smarter than me every single day and I learn a ton from them. I discussed this book with my co-workers at our internal reading group and found it to be very stimulating. This felt especially important given that Arun is working at a very small startup and it isn't inconceivable that he will see the company grow 10x.

When it comes to awkward conversations around internal mentoring, I pointed him to Radical Candor, another book that I had discussed with my co-workers at our internal reading group. I like the central thesis that the book/author conveys. It isn't easy to have radical candor but it is extremely important if you want your co-workers and your company to succeed. I mentioned that this isn't easy and that it requires a lot of courage and practice. I asked him to pick small awkward conversations on a regular (weekly) basis to get himself used to having such conversations. If you don't have time to read the entire book, watch the O'Reilly talk that preceeds the book instead.

Arun then asked me about testing and why it is important. This time, I threw Test-Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck at him, a classic text for software testing. Given his scientific background, I mentioned how we (at Enthought) can think of testing as writing a short scientific paper. We establish what the experimental setup is, perform the experiment, record the results and verify that the results match what we expect from our theoretical models. This maps nicely to the Given/When/Then way of writing tests i.e. Given a set of conditions/When the software is used/Then verify that the expected results appear. We talked about regression-testing being a part of testing overall. Tests, like most useful things in life, take months to deliver their value so there is a certain blind trust that he needs to have in this concept and just continue writing tests and hope that the results will appear in time.

Given Aruns interest in understanding CPython internals, I pointed the recent book on CPython Internals by Real Python. I haven't read this book myself but I've heard good things about it so this might be a good place to start if he wants a structured/guided learning path to CPython internals. If you have read this book and don't like it or if you know of a better resource, please tell me about it. I pointed him to the list of Python-specific resources that I have collected on my website, which he might find useful to understand parts of CPython. I strongly recommended that he read Fluent Python because an engineer is only as good as the tools he uses and his understanding of the tools and Fluent Python is an excellent resource to understand Python better.

Finally, we talked about career progression and built up career capital. The Rethinking the Developer Career Path talk by Randall Koutnik heavily shaped my thinking on the topic of career progression. I love his breakup/ladder of Solution Implementer to Problem Solver to Problem Finder.

Taking a step back, I was surprised at how many relevant resources I was able to recollect and point him towards. It validated the time I have spent over the last few years reading further on these diverse topics.

Popular posts from this blog

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these
Read more

Farewell to Enthought

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage
Read more

Elementary (particle physics), my dear Watson

Ground Control to Major Tom:  Shruti Patel checking in. Since my dear friend and fellow-physicist Rahul Poruri is homeward bound, and shall remain there for a week, I'm stepping in to continue his tradition of daily posts to Astronut . Even as I write, I'm not quite sure what this post is going to be about, so please forgive me for occasional rants and digressions.  By the way Rahul, I totally resent you for the name of this blog- I'm never going to start my own blog because there's no way I'll come up with a name as cool as Astronut! For now, I shall try and be happy with being a guest writer! Before I begin, a little bit on who I am and what I do; so that you can trust that my general views on science- particle physics in particular- are not entirely baseless. I graduated with a masters in Physics from IIT Madras in July this year, and I'm currently working towards (an eventual) PhD with the Theory Group at the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY)
Read more