julienreszka / dev-career-tips

Career tips for new and experienced developers

dev-career-tips

If you found this list it's probably a friend or a colleague that recommended it.

A lot of companies are hiring developers, (my own included).

People often ask me what they need to know to fit. This list was designed to solve this problem.

Check whether you feel confident understanding each point. The list is ordered to help you gain in confidence. If you feel confident with one point you should feel more confident with the next point.

If you are new you should try to understand how each point fits with the other points, the understanding of how all points fit together makes the real difference between a newbie and an experience developer.

Experienced developers are confident with each point, well, they are confident that they will be able to go back to the documentation and have intuition to understand it quickly and know how to put it to use.

It is expected from you that you will research the subjects in greater depth. You should not expect this list to be exhaustive.

Almost everything is updated daily if not more often than that. Google is your friend.

You should test everything yourself. Don't always trust the docs.

Clone this list on your computer and start checking the boxes.

Prevent undesired effort

You will need to spend a lot of time focused every day, don't let your energy go to waste, control your environment. Put your energy in the direction of something with a greater impact.

• Prevent yourself from burning out by measuring how much time you are spending programming on a project in your text editor with Wakatime
• Prevent yourself from getting out of shape, keeping your physical fitness by measuring how much physical activity you're doing with Strava
• Prevent yourself from giving up because of lag by reducing latency between action and feedback
  • having a high speed network connection to internet
    • Test your internet speed with Google
    • Own a backup network access independent of your main network access
  • working on a powerful computer that you own or that you can rent
    • Shadow allows you to stream a fully featured gaming PC to all your devices. Whether you're on your old PC, Mac, smartphone or TV.
    • Own a backup machine in case the first dies, keep it up to date
• Prevent fatigue by getting a proper lighting in your working environment
• Prevent eye strain by always using a light theme in your text editor and everywhere else.
  • Dark mode is bad for your eyes
  • in Visual Studio Code settings.json edit those line : "workbench.colorTheme": "Default Light+","workbench.colorCustomizations": { "editor.background": "#e0ffec", },
  • We evolved to detect predators in greenery
• Prevent your working memory from going to waste switching windows by having one or two large monitors
• Prevent auditive noise distraction while typing by having a silent keyboard
• Prevent Repetitive strain injury by owning a vertical mouse
  • Anker 2.4G Wireless Vertical Ergonomic Optical Mouse, 800 / 1200 /1600 DPI, 5 Buttons for Laptop, Desktop, PC, Macbook - Black
• Prevent wasted keystrokes by learning all the shortcuts of your text editor
  • Key Bindings for Visual Studio Code
• Prevent multitasking by clearing your environment from interactive distractions
• Prevent people from interrupting your work flow by walling and door locking your environment
• Prevent auditive noise from distracting you by using Noise cancelling headphones
  • Parrot Zik 3
• Prevent yourself from repeating yourself by writing documentation
  • Learn to use markdown
• Prevent yourself from overconfidence
  • Evaluate the code coverage
• Prevent yourself from writing useless code by writing automated tests before writing any code
  • Learn Test Driven Development
• Prevent yourself from writing tests without clear specifications by learning to write feature specifications
  • Learn Behavior Driven development
• Prevent unintended consequences by graphing causal loop diagrams
  • make a list of causal links between a source event and a target event
  • create a force directed graph to visualise it
• Prevent system failure by assessing the status of each function of your system
  • Create a completion score where you sum the number of met criteria over the number of criterias
• Prevent yourself from irremediable damage by using version control
  • Get used to open source version control by Learning to use Github
• issues are assigned to Prevent duplicate work by asigning issues to a single assignee
  • https://guides.github.com/features/issues/#filtering

Get a developer reputation

• Create a profile on stackoverflow (10 min)

• Prevent someone from pretending they're you by buying and owning a domain name with firstnamelastname.com where you put links to profiles of yourself that you recognize on the web

Start projects

• Prototype your forms with Typeform

• Prototype your databases with airtable

• Find icon ideas with the noun project

• Connect apps and automate workflows with Zapier

• Connect Typeform and Airtable (20 min)

Setup your development environment

• Get used to the man

• Backup your git repositories online on Github (10 min)

• Write your code in a comfortable environment like Visual Studio Code (10 min)

• Manage your github local repositories with Github Desktop (10 min)

  • Nice tutorial to learn how to use GitHub Desktop

• Setup your development environment automatically by learning to use

  • Brew on mac
  • Chocolatey on windows

• Control the versions of your source code with Git

• Write javascript server side code with Node.js (20 min)

Get Peer reviews

• Learn what is important in a website by auditing websites with lighthouse

• Review your own code through Rubber duck debugging before asking for precious developer attention

• Show your work to other programmers by sharing your computer screen live with Zoom (10 min)

  • Always test your network ping before joining https://www.speedtest.net/

Learn the fundamentals

• Get the big picture of how the web works (13 min)

• Select data with Regular Expressions, REGEX (21 min)

• Challenge your Knowledge of REGEX with this interactive tutorial (60 min)

• Have a basic interaction with the file system thanks to Bash (60 min)

• Exchange data with the JSON format (12 min)

• Manipulate your data with Javascript Array Methods (11 min)

• Template your web pages and web application with html elements

• Learn to select dom elements with query Selectors (8 min)

• Display lightweight pictures by using SVG (120 min)

• Allow access to your server ressources from a different origin (20 min)

• Publish a first website with Github pages (20 min)

• Write less error prone code with TypeScript

Put your fundamental knowledge to action

• Get data from webpages automatically by scraping with JavaScript (9 min)

• Create an API by using express.js with node.js

• Secure your API with passport.js

• Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) data by learning to use node.js in conjuction with mysql or and mongodb (240 min)

• Create a real time chat system by using socket.io (60 min)

• Build user interfaces with a framework like Vue.js (240 min)

• Accelerate the development of your UI by using ready-made Vue.js components in the style of Material design thanks to Vuetify

Move From code monkey status to engineer

Comparison of monkey and human brains reveals the 'unique properties' of human attention

• Write your tests with Jest

• Write your tests with mocha and chai

• Automate your browser with Puppeteer

• Write end to end (E2E) tests with Cypress

• Prevent type errors by compiling typescript to javascript

Get paid for your work

• Protecting and growing the value of assets that you own or that are owned by other people

• Auditing and improving

  • Performance
  • Accessibility
  • SEO

• Bug bounty hunting

  • HackerOne

• Pentesting

• Advertising Products

  • Product Advertising API with Amazon Associates

• Working for a company by finding a job

  • stackoverflow.com/jobs