Real Talk with DeVaris Brown
Meet DeVaris Brown, CEO at Floodgate Academy and member of /dev/color.
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Education: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
A Quote to Live by: “Hustle Beats Talent” I have it tattooed on my forearm as a reminder to never let someone outwork me or become complacent with my talent.
Connect with DeVaris: on his LinkedIn
Tell us a bit about your early years.
I was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. My curiosity drove most of my childhood. I played sports, was in a band, and a did bunch of other things my mom would probably still ground me for :)
How did you get started in software?
I learned how to program BASIC on a V-Tech toy. I learned how to make sounds with it and could make it play original songs. Also my mom is in tech and had a job at a startup during the first dotcom boom that gave her a book allowance. She would let me get books and I taught myself how to program.
What are you focusing most of your time on now?
Floodgate Academy :) I’m trying to grow and scale the org to more locations and develop more curriculum that can provide Black and Brown folks opportunities in the software industry.
What is the most interesting technical challenge you’ve worked on recently?
Recently, I’ve been developing a drone technology I’m calling ForceWatch that listens to police bands and will deploy a drone to traffic stops to record what happens. I’m tired of non-functional body cameras being the deciding factor to people in our community receiving justice. Pretty cool mix of NLP, mapping tech, drone tech, video compression, and distributed services coming soon to a city near you.
Please state 2–3 of your current career goals? Why are these important to you?
One goal I have is to enable more folks to get jobs in the software industry by getting the FGA curriculum to a place where it can be open sourced. We can all do our part by training 1–2 people part time and getting them ready for this industry or helping them build their own ideas. The FGA curriculum can help give structure to that. Another goal I have is to take an idea from concept to market, blog about it, and open source the code. There are a lot of tutorials that cover trivial examples, but I haven’t seen anything out there that covers production quality code and the tradeoffs you need to make due to business needs.
Give an example of a recent time you’ve helped a fellow engineer. What lessons can be taken from their situation?
One of my squad members asked me about how to level up as a senior engineer. It’s hard to do that without context of her organization and how they review code. In the end, I gave her some general guidance and book recommendations(Refactoring, Code Complete, Clean Code, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Pragmatic Programmer)about writing good code and talked with her about how to approach someone to be her on the job mentor.
In what areas can /dev/color members reach out to you for help?
On the tech side, pretty much anything except PHP. On the non-tech side, I’m pretty good at networking and entrepreneurial things. If I can’t answer, I’m pretty certain I know someone who can help.
As a member of /dev/color you are also committed to developing yourself. Can you share some areas you are looking to improve?
I’m looking to develop my confidence in becoming a leader. I suffer from imposter syndrome quite a bit, but admittance is the first step. I’ve always been the tech guy who can implement, but over the next few years, I’m looking forward to developing the skills to lead organizations.
Can you speak about any passions outside of programming?
I love music. Probably the nicest member of /dev/color on the turntables and the MPC. Other than that traveling, cooking and eating food, photography, and playing/watching sports are some of my interests outside of work.
Why is being a part of an organization like /dev/color important to you?
It’s great to see accessible black excellence. I look at the membership of /dev/color and see a bunch of people that can be role models for the next generation. It’s also great to be around people that share the same experiences and I don’t have to code switch to explain.
Anything else you’d like to say/express?
We can’t keep begging people to change an established industry with very established power structures. Let’s figure out how we can hack our way in, learn best practices, and build our own legacy companies.
/dev/color is a non-profit organization whose mission is to empower Black software engineers to help one another grow into industry leaders. We create environments where Black software engineers can learn from one another and hold one another accountable for reaching ambitious career goals. To learn more, check out our website and follow our blog & twitter account.
