Develop Yourself

Brian Jenney
  • 4.6 (10)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated Weekly

To change careers and land your first job as a Software Engineer, you need more than just great software development skills - you need to develop yourself. Welcome to the podcast that helps you develop your skills, your habits, your network and more, all in hopes of becoming a thriving Software Engineer.

  1. 11h ago

    I Let AI Write My Code. Then I Read It...

    Want to get into the top 10% of your engineering team by leveraging agentic engineering workflows? I'm planning a 2 day workshop here: https://form.typeform.com/to/EDuBEz4U I shipped a feature with AI in record time. Then I actually read the code. 60+ files. Weird abstractions. Tests that technically passed but proved almost nothing. Components rebuilt from scratch for no good reason. What looked like a finished feature was probably 70–80% of the way there. And the worst part? This wasn’t my first time doing this. I’ve also sat in a code review as a senior engineer and realized I couldn’t properly explain code that “I” had just written. I use Claude and Codex constantly. I’m not going back to hand-writing everything. But after using AI to build software at startups, inside my own business, and on large production systems, I think we’re learning the wrong lesson from how fast these tools can code. The question isn’t whether AI can write the code. It’s how much you need to understand before you’re willing to ship it.

    I Let AI Write My Code. Then I Read It...

  2. Sep 7

    The WORST AI Career Path: Meat Proxy

    I'm opening 12 spots for a weekend workshop in October for devs who want to ship quality software with agents. Sign up here: https://form.typeform.com/to/EDuBEz4U "You're absolutely right, I should have caught that" I'm one of the top 10% of AI users in a 1,000-person engineering org this year. I'm not an AI hater, I ship with these tools daily and I think they're genuinely fun to use. But I've also watched "customers don't care about the code" turn into an excuse for engineers to stop thinking entirely, and that's how you end up with 5,000 lines nobody can explain, a catastrophic bug in prod, and Claude cheerfully saying on the way down. Let's explore ways to maintain quality software without becoming a "meat proxy"

    The WORST AI Career Path: Meat Proxy

  3. Aug 31

    What Companies Hiring Forward-Deployed Engineers Actually Want

    Become an AI Engineer at parsity.io I recruit for AI roles on the side and I pulled real, live forward-deployed engineer postings and broke down exactly what they're screening for. Turns out it's not what most "learn AI" content tells you. What's actually in these postings: Real applied AI experience: shipped production agents, not tutorial chatbotsRAG, retrieval quality, evals, and agent-to-agent communicationSurprisingly low years-of-experience requirements compared to typical senior rolesThe ability to explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholdersVoice AI showing up more and more as a differentiator — mentioned in this episode: AI Voice Pioneers (https://www.skool.com/pioneers) and Retell AI (https://www.retellai.com)Degrees mattering a lot less than you'd think, at least in the Bay AreaWant to actually build one of these skills instead of just reading about it? Free RAG project: parsity.io/ai-with-rag If you're trying to reverse-engineer your way into one of these roles, this is what the actual postings are telling you to build toward.

    What Companies Hiring Forward-Deployed Engineers Actually Want

  4. Aug 24

    They Made Me Senior Because I Quit

    We teach AI systems engineering at Parsity: parsity.io In this one I get into why senior is mostly a comp band with a name on it, the three things every senior actually needs to know/have, the big fish / small pond strategy I've been running for seven years, and the single move that gets you promoted faster than getting better at your language. Also: why you should stop replaying that interview where somebody corrected you.

  5. Aug 17

    The 2 Skills That Will Keep You Employed as a Developer

    Become an AI engineer in 45 days. Join Parsity: https://parsity.io Being a "coder" is getting less and less about coding. I've been writing code for 12 years and I'm watching skills I worked hard for get automated. Counter-intuitively, I believe a new brand of software developer is going to be even more valuable and in demand going forward. Your existing skills aren't disappearing but the ones that matter the most certainly are. Book a call with me here: https://calendly.com/brianjenney83/15-minute-meeting-your-web-dev-roadmap-clone

    The 2 Skills That Will Keep You Employed as a Developer

  6. Aug 10

    Teacher to Software Engineer. Do Coding Bootcamps Still Work in 2026?

    No one is hiring. AI took your job. Junior developers aren't needed anymore. I can't tell you how sick I am of hearing this but there is some truth to it. Things aren't roses and candy canes but they're not all doom and gloom either. Tom graduated from Parsity's coding bootcamp in 2025 and got hired faster than you might expect. There's no secret to his success but there are clues. He's got nothing to sell you but a lot to tell you.

    Teacher to Software Engineer. Do Coding Bootcamps Still Work in 2026?

  7. Aug 3

    Former Yelp Eng Manager on Management, Mental Health, and the Move Most Devs Get Wrong

    Ryan Murphy spent five years as an engineering manager at Yelp on the team that owned the infrastructure behind every dollar moving through the company. He got the job the way a lot of people do, which is that his boss had no budget for a real engineering manager and asked if he'd try it. Most of this conversation is about the move from engineer to manager: what the job actually is, what he looks for before he'll move someone into it, and why he calls it a career change instead of a promotion. That last part is something I got told when I made the jump and completely ignored. I thought I was getting a bigger version of my old job. He also runs EM Accelerator, a training program for engineering managers, and Crying on the Sofa, a set of free mental health events for people in tech. He talks about the night that started the second one, sitting on his couch holding his newborn son. What we covered: The engineering manager archetypes, and how to spot which one a company is really hiring forWhat he watches during a production incident before he'll consider promoting youWhy the strongest engineer on the team is often the wrong pickWhy management is a career change, not a promotionWhy there's so little real training for new managers, and what he teaches instead of one-on-one templatesWhether a manager has to be regulated themselves to lead wellWhy he started Crying on the SofaWho should not become an engineering managerHis take on AI flattening orgs, and why he thinks people-focused managers matter more, not less Find Ryan: EM Accelerator: https://www.emaccelerator.com/Crying on the Sofa: https://www.cryingonthesofa.org/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryansmurphy1Newsletter: https://www.softwareengineeringtimes.com/

  8. Jul 27

    How To Become the AI Person on Your Team

    Most engineers have read a lot about AI and built almost nothing with it. That is not a character flaw. It is the default. Stanford's AI Index puts numbers on the gap: a tiny fraction of households actually pay for AI tools, while nearly every company claims to be using it. Somebody is lying, and it is not the people quietly getting on with their jobs. This episode is about closing that gap. Two levels of leverage, both available to you without permission from anyone. Level one is team strategy. Skills, plugins, and shared config so your team stops solving the same problem fifteen different ways. Level two is connecting these tools to things that actually matter at your company. Your data, your documentation, your internal systems, with a human still in the loop where it counts. Plus why running a hackathon is the fastest way to find the problem worth solving, and what happened when I did it. Want to build this stuff instead of reading about it? Parsity's AI engineering program: https://parsity.io/ai-dev

    How To Become the AI Person on Your Team
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4.6
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About

To change careers and land your first job as a Software Engineer, you need more than just great software development skills - you need to develop yourself. Welcome to the podcast that helps you develop your skills, your habits, your network and more, all in hopes of becoming a thriving Software Engineer.

Information

  • Creator
    Brian Jenney
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    343
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Brian Jenney
  • Show Website
    Develop Yourself

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