Grow People, Not Just Products: Mentorship, Code, and Community with Anna Filina

Fwdays Tech Talks

Welcome to the second episode of Fwdays Tech Talks! In today’s podcast, our regular speakers — Inna Ivashchuk and Kyrylo Melnychuk — are joined by special guest Anna Filina to talk about mentorship, open source, and the art of keeping legacy code alive. They explore how good mentoring can shape stronger developers, why contributing to open source matters, and what it really takes to maintain and modernize long-lived software systems What you should subscribe to: – More interesting content for developers: https://fwdays.com/en/events – Fwdays Twitter: https://twitter.com/fwdays – Inna’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/inna-ivashchuk/ – Kyrylo’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyrylo-melnychuk/ – Anna’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-filina-43a8b3322/ Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 00:45 - Anna Filina on her background and passion for programming 02:25 - Key principles of mentoring junior engineers 04:12 - What to expect from mentees: skills, mindset, and curiosity 06:00 - Cultural differences in mentoring across countries 08:52 - Open source as part of mentorship and learning 15:01 - Can you make a living from open source work? 19:37 - Real-world PHP open source examples and legacy projects 21:19 - What it means to be a “legacy archeologist” 23:00 - The state of PHP today: still powering most websites 25:37 - Security and risks of outdated code 29:59 - Using AI and LLMs in code maintenance 34:58 - PHP versions and long-term support 37:02 - How to encourage continuous refactoring and manage tech debt 45:03 - Thoughts on gamification and motivation in mentoring 49:23 - The power of tech communities and conferences 54:32 - How the tech community supports Ukraine 59:28 - Advice for new speakers and open source contributors 01:05:12 - Don’t forget to subscribe and like!