During 2021, I had the honor to help UST Australia’s program “Step IT Up Australia”, aimed at closing the gap of IT Industry participation for people from Australia’s Indigenous communities and women returning to work.
The project was run in cooperation with Macquarie Bank and Goanna Education. I was approached by the Goanna to help continue the 6-month bootcamp after the initial lead instructor had to deal with health concerns.

Here is an article by iTWire from around the time the project was announced/kicked off.

Teaching Java & Microservices (Spring Boot)

I was asked to be the students’ lead tutor for the second half of the program, teaching Java. First basics, then on to using Spring Boot to build microservices / micropages.

It was a great experience to see these brand new developers find their feet, the struggles they went through, the perseverance they showed to finally chew through all the tough problems almost through sheer willpower alone.
Make no mistake, they had some really rough days, but were incredibly motivated to just carry on until they succeeded.

Key takeaways for me

One of the key things I tried to instill and saw reinforced during the course of the program was that being successful as a developer has a lot to do with confidence in your ability to find answers to problems. Sure, you will find many on your own, but also, we must not be afraid to ask for help from our colleagues.

Most of us tend to fight some level of imposter syndrome (see Mike Cannon-Brookes’ talk about it), and asking for help can feel like you’re admitting defeat.
However, I strongly believe the opposite is true: It shows that you understand that your knowledge has limits, and that there is absolutely no shame in that. It makes you a more humble person willing to keep learning rather than stagnating where you are at.

So, TL;DR: Whenever you struggle to find an answer to a software dev/engineering/architecture problem, do not hesitate to ask those around you for help. People will not think less of you.
And the odd ones who do… well, they’ll think the same whether you ask or not. It’s not worth caring about their opinion as they’ll think the same thing about anyone who is not them.