Develop Yourself

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.

Develop Yourself is a education podcast hosted by Brian Jenney, with 321 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Brian Jenney hosts Develop Yourself, a education show with 321 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Develop Yourself

  The 2 Skills That Will Keep You Employed as a Developer

  Aug 17, 20267 min

  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

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  Develop Yourself

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

  Aug 10, 202644 min

  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.

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  Develop Yourself

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

  Aug 3, 202634 min

  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 for What he watches during a production incident before he'll consider promoting you Why the strongest engineer on the team is often the wrong pick Why management is a career change, not a promotion Why there's so little real training for new managers, and what he teaches instead of one-on-one templates Whether a manager has to be regulated themselves to lead well Why he started Crying on the Sofa Who should not become an engineering manager His 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/ryansmurphy1 Newsletter: https://www.softwareengineeringtimes.com/

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  Develop Yourself

  How To Become the AI Person on Your Team

  Jul 27, 202618 min

  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

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  Develop Yourself

  The Advice I'd Give My Own Kid About Getting Hired in Tech

  Jul 20, 202618 min

  Want to actually build agents and RAG systems like the ones I mention in this episode? That's exactly what we do inside Parsity's AI engineering program: https://parsity.io/ai-dev I've been coding for nearly 12 years, I own and operate a coding bootcamp, and I've done over 1,000 free phone calls with people trying to break into tech. So this is the harsh advice I'd give you if you were my own kid. The stuff I can't really say on LinkedIn without getting flamed by people who've never worked a day in tech. The market for juniors is rough right now. That part is true. But most people trying to break in are doing the exact same thing as everyone else: building the same to-do app, obsessing over green dots on their GitHub, slapping "passionate junior developer" on their resume, and smashing LinkedIn easy-apply 1,000 times. That's your competition. And it's beatable. In this episode: Why "look junior, act passionate, wait for someone to take a chance on you" is a losing strategy How to build real, verifiable experience when you have none (start an LLC, get actual users, stop building toy apps) The one skill that actually matters now, and why "I use Claude" is table stakes, not a differentiator Why agents and RAG are still wide open. Even senior and staff engineers mostly aren't doing this yet Where the jobs actually are (small businesses and startups are hiring, big tech is slashing) and how to find them off LinkedIn The LinkedIn search-ranking trick most people ignore Why your timeline might take 2, 3, even 4 years, and why the ROI math still makes it worth it Stop outsourcing your brain to ChatGPT before you've even built the skill Take it all with a grain of salt. It's one opinion. But I'll never tell you to do something I haven't done myself or seen work firsthand. Free resources I mention: Parsity AI Engineering Program: https://parsity.io/ai-dev Free 5-Day AI Advisory Board course (build agents + RAG hands-on): https://www.parsity.io/5-day-ai-advisory-board Free RAG project (better than most paid ones): https://www.parsity.io/ai-with-rag The agent project I mention: https://www.parsity.io/ai-agent Gusto Small Business Jobs Report (hundreds of thousands of net new small-business jobs this year): https://gusto.com/resources/gusto-insights/smb-jobs-report-june-2026 My video on the entry-level hiring collapse, "Entry-level jobs didn't disappear. They moved. Got a question or something you want me to cover? Drop it in the comments. I get tons on YouTube but almost none on Spotify, and this is where the hardcore Develop Yourself crew lives. Comment away, it genuinely helps the show get found.

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