Image: USA Today
Makinde Adeagbo brought something truly special to his fireside chat with Udacity’s Ana Diaz-Hernandez during our Intersect 2016 Summit event. Warmth.
Which is funny, given that when host Kathleen Mullaney introduced the chat, her words were:
They’re here for a fireside chat. Sans fire!
They may have been sans fire, but they certainly weren’t lacking in warmth. Makinde is that rarest of public speakers, someone who carries with them impeccable credentials, deep experience, and unrivalled success, yet is able to communicate to an audience as naturally as if you were just neighbors chatting across the fence. This singular combination of gravitas and approachability is certainly why we were so excited to have him join our event, and for the attendees, I think this was a remarkable opportunity to really connect with someone who knew just where they were coming from, and just where they wanted to go. This was an audience who came ready to learn what it will take to make the leap from hireable to hired, and this was a speaker who was speaking their language.
If there was one word you could distill Makinde’s talk down to, it is this one: WORK. We noted the following in a previous post about Intersect:
Like Laura before him (Laura Gomez, who delivered the event’s first Keynote), Makinde’s talk was personal and universal both, and both speakers reiterated time and time again the importance of following your passions. Makinde’s advice was particularly resonant on this point given its grounding in real experience; to paraphrase, do good work! If you have a choice between two jobs and/or projects, don’t choose for money or prestige or advancement, choose the one for which you know you’ll do good work, for this will be your calling card going forward!
Makinde sounded this note early on, in reference to his own personal path. When asked by Ana Diaz-Hernandez how he got started as a developer, Makinde discussed the importance of doing real projects, and getting real, hands-on practice:
“There’s a whole group of technical skills that you can learn in classes, but then there’s a lot that I learned just by doing. And doing a lot.”
Mentorship was another recurring theme of the talk, and perhaps Makinde’s most engaging story was one he told of a mentor who proved quite influential to him in his early days. Essentially, in trying to complete a task he’d been assigned, Makinde got a bunch of code “on the internet,” believing it to be of quality. His future mentor, an engineer elsewhere in the company, noted otherwise. Fortunately, his way of communicating this failure was essentially to go line by line through the code, pointing out in great detail everything that was wrong. This was of course a goldmine of insight for Makinde, and he proceeded to barrage this individual with virtually every new piece of JavaScript he wrote. Each time, there were fewer and fewer comments, and eventually this engineer said, “Stop sending me code, you’re good!” And finally, the tables turned when this engineer started sending out emails to the rest of the company to the effect of, “If you need your code reviewed, Makinde is the expert, ask him!”
Between this story, and Makinde’s acknowledgement that “nobody knows what they are doing”:
it was clear that Makinde is someone who can embrace failure, and learn from it. Judging by audience responses to these delightful admissions, this was welcome perspective!
If you’d like to experience this wonderful chat firsthand, please watch our video below!
The chat proceeded, and while Ana and Makinde covered a lot of topical ground—from personal stories about unsuccessful interviews and invaluable mentors, to advice about writing code and choosing a company to work for—the underlying theme of the conversation was really a story about conviction, sticking to your principles, following your passions, and pursuing your dreams. Strip out references to start-ups and programming languages, and this could have been a talk for poets, or musicians, or painters, or, for that matter, teachers, doctors, athletes, or architects. The real wisdom here was: find good communities, connect with good people, and do good work. Which reminds me an awful lot of Garrison Keillor’s classic sign-off on The Writer’s Almanac:
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.
In the closing portion of the chat, Ana acknowledged all the now-legendary companies Makinde has worked for, and asked him for his advice on knowing how to spot the next Facebook, the next Pinterest, the next Dropbox, the next hot company where one would want to get in on the ground floor. Makinde responded with a story about one of his mentors, and by sharing advice this individual gave to him:
Go and do the thing that you’re most excited about, because that’s where you’ll do your best work. And that’s where you’ll really make a difference.
Clearly, Makinde took these words to heart. As, I’m sure, all who experienced this talk will do with Makinde’s words.
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To read more of the great advice Makinde offered our attendees, make sure to search #Intersect2016 on Twitter! Here are just a few wonderful examples:
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We want to take an additional moment to note that while Makinde is certainly a successful engineer, and also an influential mentor, he is something even more than all this—he is a leader, and a brave one at that. Back in October of 2015, USA Today ran an article with the following headline:
Black engineers join forces to boost diversity
In that article was written the following:
Over the summer Adeagbo founded /dev/color, a nonprofit group for African-American engineers that officially launched on Wednesday. The group brings together engineers from top companies such as Facebook, Uber and Airbnb to provide support and a voice to African Americans and give them the opportunity to raise up the next generation.
Of the impetus behind these efforts, Makinde was quoted as saying:
“Other black software engineers need to provide this for the black engineers coming behind them,” says Adeagbo, who is splitting his time between /dev/color and Pinterest. “We all need to work together to pull ourselves up and make sure we are accomplishing all that we can.”
We are so grateful that Makinde could join us for Intersect 2016, and we wish him continued success with /dev/color, and all the other great work he is doing. Thank you Makinde!
