S22:E3 - Demonstrating curiosity kindly with Matt Newkirk (Matt Newkirk)

Joining Saron today is Matt Newkirk, Engineering Director at Etsy. Matt talks about his coding journey, his current role at Etsy, leadership tips and advice for people on their coding journey. Matt's found a career in paying forward the help he received along the way, starting as a volunteer MUD developer and finding a path to becoming a director of engineering at Etsy. His engineering efforts cover Quality Engineering, Infrastructure and Operations, with the most value coming from finding improved collaboration across teams. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) Peer One-on-Ones LPC APIs Fullstack Asynchronous Calls PHP JavaScript C A+ CI System (continuous integration) Observability Tools Unit Tests AWS Selenium VoIP Telnet Multi User Dungeon (MUD) Apple 2C

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[00:00:05] SY: Welcome to the CodeNewbie Podcast where we talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I’m your host, Saron, and today we’re talking about demonstrating curiosity kindly with Matt Newkirk, Engineering Director at Etsy.

[00:00:21] MN: Developers demonstrating curiosity helps them build better things. It also helps in terms of collaboration and communication because so much of the job is about learning and learning from each other, and part of that is about learning how to ask each other for help and to ask each other for more insight. And how we demonstrate curiosity is a large part of that.

[00:00:43] SY: Matt talks about his coding journey, flunking out of high school and college to then go back to college and graduate with a computer science degree. He talks about his current role as engineering director at Etsy and leadership tips he’s picked up along the way and currently implements after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:01:04] SY: Thank you so much for being here.

[00:01:06] MN: Thanks for having me. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

[00:01:08] SY: So Matt, you currently have an incredible role as engineering director at Etsy, which sounds very important, very prestigious. But let’s take a step back. I’d love to learn about how you got your start in coding.

[00:01:22] MN: Yeah. My dad was a software engineer. Growing up, we had computers around the house and an Apple IIc was the first computer that I had in the house and did a lot of very basic games on that. And then over time, I started to do a lot of writing with word processors, and I didn’t really understand programming as a job for me. But when I was a teenager, I started to play these online games and I was playing one on AOL and it was great, but it was also expensive. And because I was a teenager with no money, I was not able to keep playing that. But a friend of mine mentioned to me that, “Hey, there are these things called MUDs, Multi-User Dungeon, and basically they’re free versions of the game that I’ve been paying for. And they were made by volunteers and there’s like tons of them. But I started playing this one MUD in particular that was Lord of the Rings based, and it was also created by a few people in college. And over time, they found actually a few hundred people that were regularly playing. And in order to scale themselves up, they started letting players volunteer to write for the game. And part of that was writing content, part of that was writing code. And so I became one of the coders for that game when I was almost 16. In that world, you started off in the newbie team and you had this newbie project, which was really anything you wanted, but you had to propose it, which was really a couple of page ReadMe text file. All this development happened in this game, which was all on Telnet. So I had a Telnet client and everything happened in that. And over time, I learned a lot more about software development through this volunteer opportunity., learning about quality control, learning about team management and distributed work. This was back before we had really even VoIP. There wasn’t really video chat or anything like that. So most of our chat happened in the game in these channels that were kind of like Discord or Slack or bulletin boards or an email. So I was working with people who are all over the world trying to build mostly our own separate little parts of this world and trying to make it into this coherent game. And I did that for like 15 or 16 years on and off before I realized like, “Oh, I could actually make money doing this,” paying kind of a job.

[00:04:05] SY: Wow!

[00:04:06] MN: But I learned a ton about quality through that opportunity and that turned into some contract quality assurance jobs in college. And when I finally tried to start my career at 30, I got my bachelor’s degree at 29 in computer science. I was not good at school, or at least I hadn’t figured out how to have the right coping mechanisms to help me get through it. So when I finally started my career, the job that I could get was as a quality assurance analyst at Electronic Arts for The Sims, and I ended up working on a team that was actually a web team within this game company. And because I had all this experience in quality assurance and because of the state of the project, I had this extra time and I told the team, “You know, I can write code if you have any things that I can help with.” And they took me up on it. And I was really lucky and privileged to have a team that gave me the opportunity to do more and they helped me figure out how to do a lot more automated testing, selenium testing, all of that, and then from there helped me figure out how to set up like AWS instances at a time where that was still feeling pretty new so that they could automatically test their code every time they push a new revision. And then from there taught me how to build a front end to manage all of that as well. And all of that experience led me to my first paid engineering job. And my official title was Quality Engineer for an education technology company. And that job was really interesting. It was still a relatively small company when I joined, and I was the only person focused on quality. And as a result, I was also focused a lot on just how things worked day to day. And so I ended up building a lot of kind of observability tools for the company. I ended up teaching a lot of engineers how to write unit tests, which meant I also had to learn more about how to write unit tests and build out their entire kind of CI system. At the time, the company, if I remember correctly, was deploying like once a week on a Saturday at midnight and had something like seven unit tests. And by the time I was done, we were running tests against every build, and I can’t remember the exact code coverage, but it was much, much higher, especially for a new code. And all of that was really interesting and gave me an opportunity to look at kind of the broad side of the code. But I also, because I was the only quality engineer, didn’t do a lot of things the way that I would recommend other people do them. I didn’t have as much of the kind of team collaborative peer programming code review kind of style in mind, and I didn’t really understand how to collaborate with folks as well as I do now at least. But all of that did teach me a little bit more about how to scale myself and an opportunity came to create a quality assurance team at the company. And I was asked if I would like to be a QA manager and head that team. And I had no idea what my career growth was going to look like as a quality engineer. And so I said, “Sure, let’s try it.” And it was really hard and I did a lot of things wrong. But I learned a lot along the way and I got to work with some really great people. I built up a couple of teams and got to see individuals become leaders of those teams. And all of that helped me see that where I found the most value wasn’t in writing code to solve specific problems, but was helping other people figure out how to solve their problems. So from there, my next job was as an engineering manager at Etsy.

[00:08:05] SY: And that’s where you are today. So I find it interesting that you’ve been in the tech space for quite some time, but how old were you when you first got your engineering job?

[00:08:17] MN: I think like 31.

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