Jess Stodola Comcast

Jess Stodola is a software engineer for Comcast working on a proxy/authentication/load balancing service. She has a combined 6 years of education from UW - Eau Claire with a BS in Environmental Geography and CVTC with a Software Developer degree. While she enjoys web design and learning about new technologies with her free time, she also likes getting outside, going camping and biking.

Twitter

@stodomay

Company

Comcast

Sessions

Mentoring Junior Developers through Pair Programming

Pair programming is being taken on as a standard practice in many large corporations all over the globe. The sharing of knowledge between senior engineers and junior engineers minimizes the siloing of skills by increasing the abilities of junior developers, making them productive much sooner.

Pair programming can be an emotional experience, for both for the mentor and the mentee. As seasoned software developers and engineers, mentoring takes a lot of time and patience. It can also be challenging for the mentee to work with someone peering over their shoulder, seeing their every mistake.

This session will go over some of the things that happen unintentionally while mentoring through pair programming and how they can negatively affect the learner, the learning process, and the relationship itself. More importantly, it’ll talk about what a mentor can do to improve the success of the learner by making adjustments to how they teach.

I have been a software engineer for a year and a half and have been pair programming as the mentee with over 15 different software engineers of varying levels. I’ve also had the opportunity to be a mentor to others both inside and outside of the software community with people of many different backgrounds.