Grow People, Not Just Products: Mentorship, Code, and Community with Anna Filina from Fwdays Tech Talks

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

1 hour 6 minutes Posted Oct 24, 2025 at 1:57 pm.

Intro

Anna Filina on her background and passion for programming

Key principles of mentoring junior engineers

What to expect from mentees: skills, mindset, and curiosity

Cultural differences in mentoring across countries

Open source as part of mentorship and learning

Can you make a living from open source work?

Real-world PHP open source examples and legacy projects

What it means to be a “legacy archeologist”

The state of PHP today: still powering most websites

Security and risks of outdated code

Using AI and LLMs in code maintenance

PHP versions and long-term support

How to encourage continuous refactoring and manage tech debt

Thoughts on gamification and motivation in mentoring

The power of tech communities and conferences

How the tech community supports Ukraine

Advice for new speakers and open source contributors

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Show notes

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/

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