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25:37 - Security and risks of outdated code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!