EducationSelf-Improvement

Develop Yourself

Brian Jenney

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.

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28 episodes
weekly
Avg 22 min
English

Episodes 28

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June 1 · 12 min
Just Cheat! (an anti-guide to cheating on interviews with AI)
A few spots left for Parsity's AI Engineer Cohort. Apply here I told candidates they could use Claude, Cursor, anything they wanted in their AI engineering interview. Half of them still cheated. Badly. I break down what cheating looked like and why you should re-consider it if you're thinking about it... even if you don't have any moral qualms against it 😅
May 25 · 15 min
Software Developer Layoff Survival Guide
Build AI engineering skills at Parsity. Spots filling fast. It's been a rough week. Meta just laid off 8,000 people, and then the CEO of ClickUp — a company most people have never heard of — went online to brag about cutting 20-something percent of his staff even though they're profitable. No financial pressure. Just vibes. Just "AI made our engineers 100X more capable" so we don't need these people anymore. Then he had the nerve to talk about million-dollar salary bands for the survivors while publicly dunking on the people he just fired. I'm not here to cover the Meta layoffs. There are a hundred channels doing that. I'm here to talk about the people nobody covers: the developer at the 50-person company who gets two weeks and a Slack message. The person who doesn't have a FAANG brand on their resume to fall back on. That's who I was when I got laid off in 2023. In this episode I get into what actually happened when I got canned - the Zoom call with the person you've never seen before, the access revocation, the immediate panic. What I did right after (not much). What I did wrong (a lot). The psychological damage that nobody talks about, and the things I wish somebody had told me before I spent weeks spiraling. This isn't a "5 tips to be layoff-proof" episode. I don't think layoff-proof exists. This is what it actually feels like, what actually helps, and what I'd do differently if it happened again tomorrow. Because it might. Your company doesn't have any loyalty to you, no matter how good things seem right now. If you're going through it, you're not alone.
May 18 · 13 min
The Pros and Cons of Being the Worst Developer on the Team... and the Best
8 spots left in the AI engineer cohort. Join here: https://parsity.io/ai-developer Ever get that feeling you're the worst developer on your team? And worse - that it's not in your head, you actually are the weakest link in the room? I've been on both ends. I've been the best developer on the team, and I've been objectively the worst And here's the thing nobody tells you: they're each worse than you'd expect, just in different ways. In this episode I get into what being the best actually cost me, why being the worst is psychologically brutal but might be the best thing for your career, and the one reframe that turned it around for me.
May 11 · 35 min
From Amazon Warehouse to Software Developer: Carter's 4-Year Grind
Free interview prep guide: ⁠https://www.parsity.io/interview-prep⁠ Free career roadmap for developers: ⁠https://www.parsity.io/career-roadmap⁠ Carter Nadain spent four years trying to break into software development. He started with a bootcamp in 2022, got his CS degree, worked at Amazon delivering packages, sent out thousands of applications, and went through every kind of setback you can imagine — including having to move back in with his mom at 25 and completely restart his life. In this episode, Carter shares what actually worked: the interview tip that landed his current job, why recording yourself talking through problems is the most underrated prep strategy, and how he stayed consistent for four years when most people quit after three months. We also get into imposter syndrome, what it's really like walking into your first dev job, and why this career rewards people who refuse to stop.
May 4 · 25 min
Our AI Engineering Curriculum Exposed
Join the free weekly live session: parsity.io/ai Hope I don't regret this. I'm giving away the exact AI engineering curriculum I teach at Parsity. The same stuff that helped change my own career trajectory and has recruiters sliding all in my DMs. How LLMs actually work (and why knowing this helps you push back on the hype) RAG from scratch — embeddings, vector databases, chunking strategies Building with Pinecone, Weaviate, or Qdrant Structured outputs with Zod + OpenAI/Anthropic SDKs Observability with LangSmith LLM-as-Judge evals so your agents don't silently degrade There's a free project linked below where you build a LinkedIn writing clone using my actual posts and articles as training data. No fluff, no theory. Just build the thing. 💅 Free RAG project: https://www.parsity.io/ai-with-rag
April 27 · 34 min
How to Land A Junior Developer Job in 2026 (LinkedIn, Side Project, Networking and Interviews)
Register for my live event on how you can build practical AI skills to give you an unfair advantage in the job market: parsity.io/ai I am so sick of the doom and gloom narrative. Things are tough, but not impossible. If you're treating the job market like it's 2019, you're setting yourself up for failure. Let's go over LinkedIn (so cringe, I know), interviews, networking without being weird and the side project you need to build. You can grab my FREE interview prep material here: https://parsity.io/interview-prep
April 20 · 14 min
The 3 AI Skills That'll Actually Get You Hired in 2026 (Level 1, 2, and 3)
A few years ago, my advice to developers would've been simple: learn the fundamentals, get good at system design, master your language of choice. And honestly? That advice still feels good to give. But it doesn't feel right anymore. Knowing how to code is table stakes now. It's not enough to get you hired. In this episode, I break down the three levels of AI skills I'd be investing in right now if I was a new grad, a bootcamp grad, or even a senior engineer looking to transition — and why the bar for "hireable" has shifted dramatically in the last few years. Level 1: Actually getting good at the tools. Not being a prompt monkey — having opinions on Claude, Cursor, git worktrees, and knowing why you accept or push back on what the agent gives you. Level 2: Building on top of AI. MCP servers, RAG pipelines, agents. This is where the biggest career opportunity is right now, and it's where the smallest pool of people actually know what they're doing. Level 3: The deep end: data engineering, pipelines, model hosting, fine-tuning. Less sexy, fewer positions, but massively defensible if you get in early. If you're trying to figure out where to put your time right now, this one's for you.
April 13 · 11 min
3 Javascript Concepts That Will Level You Up as a Developer
"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about, and the ones nobody uses." JavaScript gets a lot of hate—but it’s still everywhere for a reason. In this episode, I break down three underrated features: web workers, generator functions, and web components and how to use them in a practical way. Shameless plugs: Apply for our AI Engineer Cohort: https://parsity.io/ai-dev Apply for our software engineering program: https://parsity.io

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