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

After the exciting liftoff stage of the developer learning curve, aspiring developers will enter the twilight zone:

The twilight zone

This is a challenging time for students and many students decide to quit programming entirely during this stage.

So why is this time so challenging? After seeing countless students go through it, I've discovered that there are a number of contributing factors:

During this next phase, students start learning how to build applications that can be used in real-world scenarios. This means that a student may spend five times longer to build an application with the identical feature of something they created during the launch stage.

This can be frustrating; however, the increased time spent implementing best practices allow the applications to be scalable and flexible enough to be used in production. This is in stark contrast to the apps created during the launch phase that don't adhere to industry standards.