"Early in his software developer career, John Sonmez discovered that technical knowledge alone isn't enough to break through to the next income level - developers need "soft skills" like the ability to learn new technologies just in time, communicate clearly with management and consulting clients, negotiate a fair hourly rate, and unite teammates and coworkers in working toward a common goal. Today John helps more than 1.4 million programmers every year to increase their income by developing this unique blend of skills. Who Should Read This Book? Entry-Level Developers - This book will show you how to ensure you have the technical skills your future boss is looking for, create a resume that leaps off a hiring manager's desk, and escape the "no work experience" trap. Mid-Career Developers - You'll see how to find and fill in gaps in your technical knowledge, position yourself as the one team member your boss can't live without, and turn those dreaded annual reviews into chance to make an iron-clad case for your salary bump. Senior Developers - This book will show you how to become a specialist who can command above-market wages, how building a name for yourself can make opportunities come to you, and how to decide whether consulting or entrepreneurship are paths you should pursue. Brand New Developers - In this book you'll discover what it's like to be a professional software developer, how to go from "I know some code" to possessing the skills to work on a development team, how to speed along your learning by avoiding common beginner traps, and how to decide whether you should invest in a programming degree or 'bootcamp.'"--

Software developers and programmers are vital players in the realm of computers and information technology, building the programs and systems that drive much of what people do in today’s tech-intensive world. Whatever their role and work environment, software technologists are engaged in highly rewarding work in terms of both income and contributions to society. This guide introduces readers to some of the fascinating opportunities available in this cutting-edge field, outlining the skills and training necessary to become a top-notch software developer or programmer.

Software engineering education has a problem: universities and bootcamps teach aspiring engineers to write code, but they leave graduates to teach themselves the countless supporting tools required to thrive in real software companies. Building a Career in Software is the solution, a comprehensive guide to the essential skills that instructors don't need and professionals never think to teach: landing jobs, choosing teams and projects, asking good questions, running meetings, going on-call, debugging production problems, technical writing, making the most of a mentor, and much more. In over a decade building software at companies such as Apple and Uber, Daniel Heller has mentored and managed tens of engineers from a variety of training backgrounds, and those engineers inspired this book with their hundreds of questions about career issues and day-to-day problems. Designed for either random access or cover-to-cover reading, it offers concise treatments of virtually every non-technical challenge you will face in the first five years of your career—as well as a selection of industry-focused technical topics rarely covered in training. Whatever your education or technical specialty, Building a Career in Software can save you years of trial and error and help you succeed as a real-world software professional. What You Will Learn Discover every important nontechnical facet of professional programming as well as several key technical practices essential to the transition from student to professional Build relationships with your employer Improve your communication, including technical writing, asking good questions, and public speaking Who This Book is For Software engineers either early in their careers or about to transition to the professional world; that is, all graduates of computer science or software engineering university programs and all software engineering boot camp participants.

Success in today's IT environment requires you to view your career as a business endeavor. In this book, you'll learn how to become an entrepreneur, driving your career in the direction of your choosing. You'll learn how to build your software development career step by step, following the same path that you would follow if you were building, marketing, and selling a product. After all, your skills themselves are a product. The choices you make about which technologies to focus on and which business domains to master have at least as much impact on your success as your technical knowledge itself--don't let those choices be accidental. We'll walk through all aspects of the decision-making process, so you can ensure that you're investing your time and energy in the right areas. You'll develop a structured plan for keeping your mind engaged and your skills fresh. You'll learn how to assess your skills in terms of where they fit on the value chain, driving you away from commodity skills and toward those that are in high demand. Through a mix of high-level, thought-provoking essays and tactical "Act on It" sections, you will come away with concrete plans you can put into action immediately. You'll also get a chance to read the perspectives of several highly successful members of our industry from a variety of career paths. As with any product or service, if nobody knows what you're selling, nobody will buy. We'll walk through the often-neglected world of marketing, and you'll create a plan to market yourself both inside your company and to the industry in general. Above all, you'll see how you can set the direction of your career, leading to a more fulfilling and remarkable professional life.

For most software developers, coding is the fun part. The hard bits are dealing with clients, peers, and managers and staying productive, achieving financial security, keeping yourself in shape, and finding true love. This book is here to help. Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual is a guide to a well-rounded, satisfying life as a technology professional. In it, developer and life coach John Sonmez offers advice to developers on important subjects like career and productivity, personal finance and investing, and even fitness and relationships. Arranged as a collection of 71 short chapters, this fun listen invites you to dip in wherever you like. A "Taking Action" section at the end of each chapter tells you how to get quick results. Soft Skills will help make you a better programmer, a more valuable employee, and a happier, healthier person.

While there is a lot of appreciation for backend and distributed systems challenges, there tends to be less empathy for why mobile development is hard when done at scale. This book collects challenges engineers face when building iOS and Android apps at scale, and common ways to tackle these. By scale, we mean having numbers of users in the millions and being built by large engineering teams. For mobile engineers, this book is a blueprint for modern app engineering approaches. For non-mobile engineers and managers, it is a resource with which to build empathy and appreciation for the complexity of world-class mobile engineering. The book covers iOS and Android mobile app challenges on these dimensions: Challenges due to the unique nature of mobile applications compared to the web, and to the backend. App complexity challenges. How do you deal with increasingly complicated navigation patterns? What about non-deterministic event combinations? How do you localize across several languages, and how do you scale your automated and manual tests? Challenges due to large engineering teams. The larger the mobile team, the more challenging it becomes to ensure a consistent architecture. If your company builds multiple apps, how do you balance not rewriting everything from scratch while moving at a fast pace, over waiting on "centralized" teams? Cross-platform approaches. The tooling to build mobile apps keeps changing. New languages, frameworks, and approaches that all promise to address the pain points of mobile engineering keep appearing. But which approach should you choose? Flutter, React Native, Cordova? Native apps? Reuse business logic written in Kotlin, C#, C++ or other languages? What engineering approaches do "world-class" mobile engineering teams choose in non-functional aspects like code quality, compliance, privacy, compliance, or with experimentation, performance, or app size?

It’s been said that software is eating the planet. The modern economy—the world itself—relies on technology. Demand for the people who can produce it far outweighs the supply. So why do developers occupy largely subordinate roles in the corporate structure? Developer Hegemony explores the past, present, and future of the corporation and what it means for developers. While it outlines problems with the modern corporate structure, it’s ultimately a play-by-play of how to leave the corporate carnival and control your own destiny. And it’s an emboldening, specific vision of what software development looks like in the world of developer hegemony—one where developers band together into partner firms of “efficiencers,” finally able to command the pay, respect, and freedom that’s earned by solving problems no one else can. Developers, if you grow tired of being treated like geeks who can only be trusted to take orders and churn out code, consider this your call to arms. Bring about the autonomous future that’s rightfully yours. It’s time for developer hegemony.

Skills to grow from a solo coder into a productive member of a software development team, with seasoned advice on everything from refactoring to acing an interview. In Skills of a Successful Software Engineer you will learn: The skills you need to succeed on a software development team Best practices for writing maintainable code Testing and commenting code for others to read and use Refactoring code you didn’t write What to expect from a technical interview process How to be a tech leader Getting around gatekeeping in the tech community Skills of a Successful Software Engineer is a best practices guide for succeeding on a software development team. The book reveals how to optimize both your code and your career, from achieving a good work-life balance to writing the kind of bug-free code delivered by pros. You’ll master essential skills that you might not have learned as a solo coder, including meaningful code commenting, unit testing, and using refactoring to speed up feature delivery. Timeless advice on acing interviews and setting yourself up for leadership will help you throughout your career. Crack open this one-of-a-kind guide, and you’ll soon be working in the professional manner that software managers expect. About the technology Success as a software engineer requires technical knowledge, flexibility, and a lot of persistence. Knowing how to work effectively with other developers can be the difference between a fulfilling career and getting stuck in a life-sucking rut. This brilliant book guides you through the essential skills you need to survive and thrive on a software engineering team. About the book Skills of a Successful Software Engineer presents techniques for working on software projects collaboratively. In it, you’ll build technical skills, such as writing simple code, effective testing, and refactoring, that are essential to creating software on a team. You’ll also explore soft skills like how to keep your knowledge up to date, interacting with your team leader, and even how to get a job you’ll love. What's inside Best practices for writing and documenting maintainable code Testing and refactoring code you didn’t write What to expect in a technical interview How to thrive on a development team About the reader For working and aspiring software engineers. About the author Fernando Doglio has twenty years of experience in the software industry, where he has worked on everything from web development to big data. Table of Contents 1 Becoming a successful software engineer 2 Writing code everyone can read 3 Unit testing: delivering code that works 4 Refactoring existing code (or Refactoring doesn’t mean rewriting code) 5 Tackling the personal side of coding 6 Interviewing for your place on the team 7 Working as part of a team 8 Understanding team leadership

This unique book provides you with a wealth of tips, tricks, best practices, and answers to the day-to-day questions that programmers face in their careers. It is split into three parts: Coder Skills, Freelancer Skills, and Career Skills, providing the knowledge you need to get ahead in programming. About This Book Over 50 essays with practical advice on improving your programming career Practical focus gives solutions to common problems, and methods to become a better coder Includes advice for existing programmers and those wanting to begin a career in programming Who This Book Is For This book is useful for programmers of any ability or discipline. It has advice for those thinking about beginning a career in programming, those already working as a fully employed programmer, and for those working as freelance developers. What You Will Learn Improve your soft skills to become a better and happier coder Learn to be a better developer Grow your freelance development business Improve your development career Learn the best approaches to breaking down complex topics Have the confidence to charge what you're worth as a freelancer Succeed in developer job interviews In Detail 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. Style and approach This unique book provides over 50 insightful essays full of practical advice for improving your programming career. The book is split into three broad sections covering different aspects of a developer's career. Each essay is self-contained and can be read individually, or in chunks.

What others in the trenches say about The Pragmatic Programmer... “The cool thing about this book is that it’s great for keeping the programming process fresh. The book helps you to continue to grow and clearly comes from people who have been there.” — Kent Beck, author of Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change “I found this book to be a great mix of solid advice and wonderful analogies!” — Martin Fowler, author of Refactoring and UML Distilled “I would buy a copy, read it twice, then tell all my colleagues to run out and grab a copy. This is a book I would never loan because I would worry about it being lost.” — Kevin Ruland, Management Science, MSG-Logistics “The wisdom and practical experience of the authors is obvious. The topics presented are relevant and useful.... By far its greatest strength for me has been the outstanding analogies—tracer bullets, broken windows, and the fabulous helicopter-based explanation of the need for orthogonality, especially in a crisis situation. I have little doubt that this book will eventually become an excellent source of useful information for journeymen programmers and expert mentors alike.” — John Lakos, author of Large-Scale C++ Software Design “This is the sort of book I will buy a dozen copies of when it comes out so I can give it to my clients.” — Eric Vought, Software Engineer “Most modern books on software development fail to cover the basics of what makes a great software developer, instead spending their time on syntax or technology where in reality the greatest leverage possible for any software team is in having talented developers who really know their craft well. An excellent book.” — Pete McBreen, Independent Consultant “Since reading this book, I have implemented many of the practical suggestions and tips it contains. Across the board, they have saved my company time and money while helping me get my job done quicker! This should be a desktop reference for everyone who works with code for a living.” — Jared Richardson, Senior Software Developer, iRenaissance, Inc. “I would like to see this issued to every new employee at my company....” — Chris Cleeland, Senior Software Engineer, Object Computing, Inc. “If I’m putting together a project, it’s the authors of this book that I want. . . . And failing that I’d settle for people who’ve read their book.” — Ward Cunningham Straight from the programming trenches, The Pragmatic Programmer cuts through the increasing specialization and technicalities of modern software development to examine the core process--taking a requirement and producing working, maintainable code that delights its users. It covers topics ranging from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques for keeping your code flexible and easy to adapt and reuse. Read this book, and you'll learn how to Fight software rot; Avoid the trap of duplicating knowledge; Write flexible, dynamic, and adaptable code; Avoid programming by coincidence; Bullet-proof your code with contracts, assertions, and exceptions; Capture real requirements; Test ruthlessly and effectively; Delight your users; Build teams of pragmatic programmers; and Make your developments more precise with automation. Written as a series of self-contained sections and filled with entertaining anecdotes, thoughtful examples, and interesting analogies, The Pragmatic Programmer illustrates the best practices and major pitfalls of many different aspects of software development. Whether you're a new coder, an experienced programmer, or a manager responsible for software projects, use these lessons daily, and you'll quickly see improvements in personal productivity, accuracy, and job satisfaction. You'll learn skills and develop habits and attitudes that form the foundation for long-term success in your career. You'll become a Pragmatic Programmer.