Behind the Scenes: Revealing Phil Nash’s Background and Passions

Get ready to be inspired by Phil Nash, on the Main Stage, but first let’s meet the person behind the speaker!

# Can you tell us more about your role as a Developer advocate at Sonar? 

 
At Sonar we have a mission to help developers and teams around the world to achieve the state of clean code. We do so with tools that perform static analysis on your projects to give you pointers that will make it more robust, more secure and more maintainable. 

As a developer advocate it's my job to serve developers around the world, through events, content and community, and help them on that journey towards clean code. That's why you'll always find me sharing things I've learned on stage, in blogs and on social media.  

# What is your favourite part of your job? 

 
While I like teaching things, either at in-person events or online through written or video content, my favourite part of the job is meeting other developers and finding out what they are working on and what they are excited about. It's funny that wherever you are in the world, every developer has something they are passionate about that they love talking about. It might be at their day job, shipping a new feature, refactoring a gnarly piece of code or mentoring other developers on their team, but it could also be a side project, maintaining open source code, or just digging into a new feature they learned about. Those conversations are my favourite part.  

# How has the industry changed in the last 5 years? 

 
This is an industry that's in a permanent state of change and keeping up can sometimes be the hardest part. I mostly work in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystems and it's been really interesting to see the swing from client heavy applications back to server-side rendering. People like to compare this to going back to writing applications in PHP, but what I think this really represents is the original dream of having JavaScript running on the server and the client and being able to take advantage of that to provide the best user experience. 
More broadly, the last couple of years has brought a revolution in AI and learning how to effectively use LLMs to our advantage has been something very new. As developers, we love new tools that make it easier to do our jobs, but this one has seemed to come with a more existential question. The good news is that as long as we treat generative AI as the tool that it is and keep our users in mind, then the industry as a whole has the potential to both improve our productivity and the products we work on, and that's a win for everyone. 

# If you had to sum up your career in one sentence, what would you say? 

 
Be open and share what you learn; the more you give back, the greater the opportunities arise. 

# What about your hobbies/passions outside your work? 

 
I love travel, which fits very well with being a developer advocate, as well as exploring food and drink around the world. Seeking out the best local beers is an important part of any trip. I think I might spend too much time with keyboards, as I like contributing to open source outside of work. And to keep my hands busy, I recently took up yoyo. Ask me to walk the dog and I'll show you something much more fun. 

# If you could invent any piece of technology that doesn't currently exist, what would it be and why? 

 
I'd love to invent working teleportation. I live in Australia, so on a personal level being able to visit other countries without somewhere between 8 and 24 hours of plane travel would be amazing. But could you imagine the effects of being able to transport anything from one place to another in no time at all? It could solve so many problems! And no doubt create some new ones too. 

# If you could time-travel to any point in history with a piece of modern technology, where would you go and what would you bring? 

 
This sounds dangerous, I'd hate to accidentally change something in the past and ruin the future! 

 
# If you could switch careers with anyone for a day, who would it be and why? 

 
It may sound boring, but I don't think I would switch, even for a day. There is so much to love about being a developer; with just a few lines of code we can change the world, we have built such incredible communities that support each other, and it's never been a better time to be a developer, we're inventing the future every day. Plus, if I switched for a day, when I got back there'd be a new JavaScript framework to catch up on already. 

# Short overview about what you will talk about at DevTalks 2023? 

 
I joined Sonar at the start of this year. We have tools that perform static analysis on thousands of projects and millions of lines of code to surface bugs, code smells, and security issues. I was immediately intrigued to find out what the most common issues in a codebase are, so I looked into the JavaScript and TypeScript areas and extracted the top 5. My talk is going to take a look through them all and see what we can learn from the mistakes everyone makes. 

 
# What is your message for our Romania IT community? 

 
Make the most of fantastic events like DevTalks! It is an opportunity to learn from the speakers, for sure, but also an opportunity to learn from each other. Embrace the chance to meet new people, try to meet those who work with different languages, on different problems, in different industries. The more we all build connections between each other, the stronger the community is and the more it will grow. 

Join him at DevTalks to learn more about „The top 5 JavaScript issues in all our codebases”!