Mike Adolphs is an Operations expert. Previously automating infrastructure for nugg.ad and XING, he's now with GitHub making people's life a little easier. For the past 1 1/2 years he's been working on technical support for the GitHub Enterprise product - his first support-orientied role ever since - allowing him to deep dive into other people's code on a daily basis and levelling up his social skills.
In order to become a better developer you'll have to spend some time working in support! Here at GitHub almost everyone helps out with support on a regular basis, leading to a much better experience for our users. Some even work full time on both: half development, half support.
I'm going to show you why I think, customer support is completely underrated, misunderstood, how helping out with it makes you better at writing code and what personal benefits you'll gain from it.
I gave the talk at the Rubyslava user group meeting in Bratislava, Slovakia at the end of February and at the kod.io conference in Linz, Austria early March, both times in front of a developer audience. The slides from kod.io are available on Speaker Deck. Though the talk was very well received both times, I'm currently in the process of refining it. In April I'm also giving a slightly different version of the talk at the OSDC conference in front of operations people.