Book Image

Skill Up: A Software Developer's Guide to Life and Career

By : Jordan Hudgens
3 (1)
Book Image

Skill Up: A Software Developer's Guide to Life and Career

3 (1)
By: Jordan Hudgens

Overview of this book

This is an all-purpose toolkit for your programming career. It has been built by Jordan Hudgens over a lifetime of coding and teaching coding. It helps you identify the key questions and stumbling blocks that programmers encounter, and gives you the answers to them! It is a comprehensive guide containing more than 50 insights that you can use to improve your work, and to give advice in your career. The book is split up into three topic areas: Coder Skills, Freelancer Skills, and Career Skills, each containing a wealth of practical advice. Coder Skills contains advice for people starting out, or those who are already working in a programming role but want to improve their skills. It includes such subjects as: how to study and understand complex topics, and getting past skill plateaus when learning new languages. Freelancer Skills contains advice for developers working as freelancers or with freelancers. It includes such subjects as: knowing when to fire a client, and tips for taking over legacy applications. Career Skills contains advice for building a successful career as a developer. It includes such subjects as: how to improve your programming techniques, and interview guides and developer salary negotiation strategies.
Table of Contents (5 chapters)
4
Index

To start off this part of the book that covers all about what it takes to have a successful career as a developer, I'm going to talk about the question: should I learn to code?

This question was sparked by the controversial post on TechCrunch by Basel Farag (https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/please-dont-learn-to-code/), where he urges people to not learn coding. As the founder of Rails bootcamp you may think that my reaction would be to spout off a full list of all the reasons why everyone should learn how to code, because that's good for business, right?

However, I went through his post in detail and I also reviewed a slew of response posts that called for Basel's head, denouncing him as a modern-day heretic.