The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide


Book Description

"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.'"--




Lead Developer Career Guide


Book Description

Learn the skills you need to be a lead developer, with expert advice on mentoring teams, handling clients and project managers, and keeping your head in emergencies. In the Lead Developer Career Guide you’ll discover: What a lead developer does Writing effective technical documentation Improving development processes Communicating with non-technical clients Mentoring and inspiring a team Delivering negative feedback The Lead Developer Career Guide teaches you how to go from individual contributor to successful lead developer. It’s full of insider tips, tricks, and strategies taken from author Shelley Benhoff’s 20-year career in technology, with vital insights for navigating the challenges and expectations of the lead developer role. This one-of-a-kind book shows you how critical thinking and communication skills can upgrade your career. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology A successful lead developer is the tech expert responsible for mentoring fellow developers, making decisions about architecture, and ensuring that a team delivers quality software. This guide helps you grow from individual contributor into team leader. About the book Lead Developer Career Guide is filled with interviews and real-world case studies from industry professionals and esteemed tech experts. You’ll learn how to become the face for your development team, gathering feedback from your coworkers and communicating with clients and stakeholders. You’ll learn to reliably calculate project estimates and even plan a project from scratch. You’ll master mentoring techniques, learn how to maintain your mental health in stressful projects, and even battle imposter syndrome. By the time you’re finished, you’ll have a unique balance of soft skills and technical expertise. About the reader If you’re a junior developer, this guide will help you plan your career path to becoming a technical lead. If you’re a senior developer, you’ll master the leadership abilities that will turn your technical knowledge into an asset for your whole team. If you’re a team leader, hand this book to your best developer to help them mature into the role of lead. About the author Shelley Benhoff has over twenty years of experience in tech as a business owner, author, and speaker. She teaches leadership, communication, Docker, and Sitecore development. Shelley is currently a co-owner of HoffsTech, LLC.




Lead Developer Career Guide


Book Description

Learn the skills you need to be a lead developer, with expert advice on mentoring teams, handling clients and project managers, and keeping your head in emergencies. The Lead Developer Career Guide teaches you how to transition from an individual contributor to a thriving lead developer. It's packed with insider tips, tricks, and strategies drawn from author Shelley Benhoff's 25-year career in technology, providing vital insights for navigating the unique challenges and expectations of the lead developer role. This one-of-a-kind book demonstrates how critical thinking and communication skills can elevate your career. In the Lead Developer Career Guide you'll discover: • The key responsibilities of a lead developer • Techniques for writing effective technical documentation • Strategies for improving development processes • Best practices for communicating with non-technical clients • Methods for mentoring and inspiring a team • Approaches for delivering negative feedback constructively The Lead Developer Career Guide is filled with interviews and real-world case studies from industry professionals and esteemed tech experts. You'll learn how to become the public face for your development team, gathering feedback from your coworkers and communicating with clients and stakeholders. Plus, you'll find proven techniques to reliably calculate project estimates, plan a project from scratch, and mentor junior developers and peers alike. Foreword by Steve Buchanan. About the technology To be a successful Lead Developer you’ll need more than just technical expertise. You’ll be responsible for everything from facilitating architectural decisions that satisfy all stakeholders to mentoring your fellow developers. And you’ll be on the hook for delivering great software on time and under budget. Are you ready for the challenge? This book will help get you there! About the book The Lead Developer Career Guide provides the techniques and wisdom you need to transition from individual contributor to lead developer. You’ll learn how to collaborate effectively with executive leadership and project managers, present elegant solutions to clients, and think quickly in those inevitable emergencies. When all eyes are on you, this book will ensure you know exactly what to do. What's inside • Improving development processes • Mentoring and inspiring a team • Delivering negative feedback About the reader For aspiring lead developers. About the author Shelley Benhoff has over twenty-five years of experience in tech as a business owner, author, and speaker. The technical editor on this book was Stephen Mizell. Table of Contents 1 What is a lead developer? 2 Lead developer career trajectory 3 Learning lead developer skills 4 Learning any developer skill 5 Writing technical documentation 6 Optimizing the development process 7 Working with project teams 8 Speaking with clients 9 Being a mentor 10 Taking the lead 11 Leading with emotional intelligence 12 Being a successful lead developer




The Manager's Path


Book Description

Managing people is difficult wherever you work. But in the tech industry, where management is also a technical discipline, the learning curve can be brutal—especially when there are few tools, texts, and frameworks to help you. In this practical guide, author Camille Fournier (tech lead turned CTO) takes you through each stage in the journey from engineer to technical manager. From mentoring interns to working with senior staff, you’ll get actionable advice for approaching various obstacles in your path. This book is ideal whether you’re a new manager, a mentor, or a more experienced leader looking for fresh advice. Pick up this book and learn how to become a better manager and leader in your organization. Begin by exploring what you expect from a manager Understand what it takes to be a good mentor, and a good tech lead Learn how to manage individual members while remaining focused on the entire team Understand how to manage yourself and avoid common pitfalls that challenge many leaders Manage multiple teams and learn how to manage managers Learn how to build and bootstrap a unifying culture in teams




The Software Developer's Career Handbook


Book Description

At some point in your career, you'll realize there's more to being a software engineer than dealing with code. Is it time to become a manager? Or join a startup? In this insightful and entertaining book, Michael Lopp recalls his own make-or-break moments with Silicon Valley giants such as Apple, Slack, Pinterest, Palantir, Netscape, and Symantec to help you make better, more mindful career decisions. With more than 40 stand-alone stories, Lopp walks through a complete job lifecycle, starting with the interview and ending with the realization that it might be time to move on. You'll learn how to handle baffling circumstances in your job, understand what you want from your career, and discover how to thrive in your workplace. Learn how to navigate areas of your job that don't involve writing code Identify how the aspects you enjoy will affect your next career steps Build and maintain key relationships and interactions within your community Make choices that will help you have a "deliberate career" Recognize what's important to your manager and work on things that matter




Staff Engineer


Book Description

At most technology companies, you'll reach Senior Software Engineer, the career level for software engineers, in five to eight years. At that career level, you'll no longer be required to work towards the next pro? motion, and being promoted beyond it is exceptional rather than ex? pected. At that point your career path will branch, and you have to decide between remaining at your current level, continuing down the path of technical excellence to become a Staff Engineer, or switching into engineering management. Of course, the specific titles vary by company, and you can replace "Senior Engineer" and "Staff Engineer" with whatever titles your company prefers.Over the past few years we've seen a flurry of books unlocking the en? gineering management career path, like Camille Fournier's The Man? ager's Path, Julie Zhuo's The Making of a Manager, Lara Hogan's Re? silient Management and my own, An Elegant Puzzle. The manage? ment career isn't an easy one, but increasingly there are maps avail? able for navigating it.On the other hand, the transition into Staff Engineer, and its further evolutions like Principal and Distinguished Engineer, remains chal? lenging and undocumented. What are the skills you need to develop to reach Staff Engineer? Are technical abilities alone sufficient to reach and succeed in that role? How do most folks reach this role? What is your manager's role in helping you along the way? Will you enjoy being a Staff Engineer or you will toil for years to achieve a role that doesn't suit you?"Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track" is a pragmatic look at attaining and operate in these Staff-plus roles.




Building Mobile Apps at Scale


Book Description

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?




Team Geek


Book Description

In a perfect world, software engineers who produce the best code are the most successful. But in our perfectly messy world, success also depends on how you work with people to get your job done. In this highly entertaining book, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman cover basic patterns and anti-patterns for working with other people, teams, and users while trying to develop software. This is valuable information from two respected software engineers whose popular series of talks—including "Working with Poisonous People"—has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers. Writing software is a team sport, and human factors have as much influence on the outcome as technical factors. Even if you’ve spent decades learning the technical side of programming, this book teaches you about the often-overlooked human component. By learning to collaborate and investing in the "soft skills" of software engineering, you can have a much greater impact for the same amount of effort. Team Geek was named as a Finalist in the 2013 Jolt Awards from Dr. Dobb's Journal. The publication's panel of judges chose five notable books, published during a 12-month period ending June 30, that every serious programmer should read.




The Missing README


Book Description

Key concepts and best practices for new software engineers — stuff critical to your workplace success that you weren’t taught in school. For new software engineers, knowing how to program is only half the battle. You’ll quickly find that many of the skills and processes key to your success are not taught in any school or bootcamp. The Missing README fills in that gap—a distillation of workplace lessons, best practices, and engineering fundamentals that the authors have taught rookie developers at top companies for more than a decade. Early chapters explain what to expect when you begin your career at a company. The book’s middle section expands your technical education, teaching you how to work with existing codebases, address and prevent technical debt, write production-grade software, manage dependencies, test effectively, do code reviews, safely deploy software, design evolvable architectures, and handle incidents when you’re on-call. Additional chapters cover planning and interpersonal skills such as Agile planning, working effectively with your manager, and growing to senior levels and beyond. You’ll learn: How to use the legacy code change algorithm, and leave code cleaner than you found it How to write operable code with logging, metrics, configuration, and defensive programming How to write deterministic tests, submit code reviews, and give feedback on other people’s code The technical design process, including experiments, problem definition, documentation, and collaboration What to do when you are on-call, and how to navigate production incidents Architectural techniques that make code change easier Agile development practices like sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives This is the book your tech lead wishes every new engineer would read before they start. By the end, you’ll know what it takes to transition into the workplace–from CS classes or bootcamps to professional software engineering.




Talking with Tech Leads


Book Description

A book for Tech Leads, from Tech Leads. Discover how more than 35 Tech Leads find the delicate balance between the technical and non-technical worlds. Discover the challenges a Tech Lead faces and how to overcome them. You may be surprised by the lessons they have to share.