Hey, it's me — your friend Alyssa

I’m a proud alum of Ada Developers Academy and a Sr. Software Development Engineer at Amazon. I am compulsively passionate about “beginners” of all kinds, but particularly underrepresented, minority, and marginalized beginner software engineers.

I believe that anyone can learn to do anything. If I know it, I will teach it. I employ Socratic questioning to teach critical thinking, and I live and breathe for the moment when a beginner says, “I figured it out all by myself!”

I believe that my purpose in life is to help others be the most capable versions of themselves that they can be.

I write a lot about professional software development practices and I occasionally record videos. If you came here for my Ada-famous “doc collection,” my five-hour git tutorial, or my talk on Extreme Mentorship, you’re in the right place.

This document was last updated on 21 SEPT 2023

The "doc collection"

• Terminal Basics — Do you feel trapped by the fact that you can't use your mouse in your terminal? Do you delete commands one character at a time? It's time to learn a few key bindings.
• Vim Crash Course — You have to have a baseline level of comfort using vim. Take the 10 minute crash course.
• Linux Basics — Do you copy and paste commands from the internet without understanding what they do? Learn how to learn about Linux commands by reading the "man" page.
• What the $PATH — Getting the error zsh: command not found? This guide's for you.
• Alyssa's Guide to a Good Terminal — I'm a tooling minimalist because I like to keep my development set-up as close to a beginner's set-up as possible. Here are the five tools I can't live without.
• Alyssa's Guide to Asking High-Quality Technical Questions — The way you ask questions directly impacts the likelihood that you'll get the help you need. Learn how to ask really good questions.
• Strategies for Staying Focused and Not Panicking — Have you ever caught yourself "panic staring in the void" because you were overwhelmed by or afraid of your assigned task? You're not alone. Let's talk about how to get past that.
• Alyssa's Guide to Surviving Internship — Originally written for Ada interns at Amazon, this guide is about taking ownership over your internship to increase your chances of getting a full-time offer.
• Code Review Culture — Code review is personal. If you're an experienced engineer, the way you review code for and in front of junior engineers really matters. Here are the rules for code review on my team.
• So You're Thinking About Going to a Coding Bootcamp — I've fielded dozens of coffee dates and phone calls with acquaintances who were considering doing a coding bootcamp. As you might imagine, I have thoughts on the subject.

Videos

• Your Friend Alyssa Teaches You Git — When I was a beginner, my introduction to git was fear-based: "You're probably going to do something wrong and break everything," and "Linus Torvalds (the original author of git) never expected anyone to use git, so that's why it's so complicated." Neither of these things is true. Git is powerful, logical, and honestly pretty fun. There's almost nothing you can do in git that you can't undo. Let me change your relationship with git
• Extreme Mentorship — People talk about the idea of a "10x engineer," where you somehow produce ten times as much work as your peers. The problem with this approach is that it stops the day you stop writing code. Learn how to teach two juniors engineers to be 2x engineers, then teach them each how to teach two more — a multi-level marketing scheme of mentorship. If you're really good at it, you can be 10x engineer after you're dead

Policy on corrections

I'm a human and I make mistakes. If you find an error that could cause confusion for future readers, email corrections@alyssahursh.com or open a pull request.

Before emailing, please examine your motivations. If you're compelled to police the correctness of women in order to validate your own masculinity, I respectfully request that you start a meditation practice instead.

Acknowledgements

Engineers aren't made in a vacuum. I owe my success as an engineer to many people, including but not limited to Professor Eric Grimson, MITx; instructor Chris McAnally at Ada Developers Academy; my technical mentors at Amazon: Maher Alhalabi, Johnny Bernardi, Kevin Garsjo, Chloe Perreira, Christy Beatty, and in particular Lochlan McIntosh; my Ada Cohort 6 "Parens" classmates (I love and miss you all); and every intern who ever let me try to explain a complex idea to them using a metaphor I hadn't quite fleshed out yet.

You are smart. You are capable. You have the right and the ability to understand anything.