#9 From Self-Taught Photographer to Principal Engineer with Keith Bingman from Unbounce

hexdevs

Keith Bingman is a Principal Engineer at Unbounce, where he leads frontend development. He learned javascript by himself 15 years ago when he was working as a photographer. He is originally from the US, lived in Germany, and now lives in Vancouver, Canada.

We talked about being self-taught and how to improve yourself as a developer by building personal projects.

He also talked about his experience of doing "big software rewrites" in the past and the present, moving a project from other technologies to React. We also talked about Elm, Rust and the future of frontend development.

According to him, you need to be very persistent when you want to introduce good practices to an established team and you need to lead by example. That helped him unlock the potential of the engineering team by introducing testing, pair-programming and mentoring. He has been a mentor for a very long time and is very passionate about it:

"Pair programming is mentoring just by itself. I always learn something new by pair-programming, it doesn't matter how experienced they are".

As a Principal Engineer, he tries to make sure he helps the team to unblock themselves and that everyone is mentoring others from the get-go.

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