Developers seem to have an irrational love/hate relationship with programming languages. We tend to love the languages we use on a regular basis. And we seem to hate languages we don’t or no longer use. I’ve come to refer to this as Developer Stockholm Syndrome.
Category: Life
Pivoting Your Career
I recently found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to look for a new job. Thanks to the ‘alleged’ poor life decisions of a certain former leadership person, the company I had poured most of the last four years into was closing its doors. We’d limped along best we could for a time after the ‘event’, but it was not to be. It was time to put it out of its misery. Those of us that had survived that long suddenly found ourselves with a need to go job hunting.
Embrace Failure
For all of us, there will times, many times, when our efforts end in failure. Sometimes, they will be small failures. And sometimes, they will be spectacular failures. Sometimes, you will be at fault. And sometimes, despite all your best efforts, someone else will be at fault. It doesn’t matter. It’s just another opportunity.
My Advice: Finding a Developer Job
It’s a great time to be in the tech industry in general. Unemployment is down in most areas in the tech sector. You have the advantage. Use it. As with all things, times change. There were times it wasn’t good to be in tech. Those times will likely come again. But for now, you’ve got it good. If you’re not happy where you’re at right now, do something about it. Go and find a new job.
Take Time to Breathe – A Few Minutes to Better Code
In a previous blog post, I talked about taking time to unplug in order to avoid burnout. That’s not what this is about. This is about getting in the zone. It’s about those times when you are so deep into the code that you just keep going and going. This is about those times when you get an idea and you dive headlong in and don’t come up for air for hours. Stop it. Stop it right now. Take a step back. Take a moment to breathe.
Hey Devs, You Are Not Expected To Know Everything
It seems one of the most basic concepts. Yet it gets completely hidden by the developer community. It doesn’t matter how many years of experience you have in a particular language. There are still things you will have to look up EVERY SINGLE DAY. I really started to think about it. Why are we ashamed to admit that publicly? A couple of reasons came to me pretty quickly: Ego and envy.
Mentoring Junior Developers
One of the biggest struggles of the development community is the mentoring, encouragement and development of entry-level and junior developers. A couple of years ago when I was adding people to my team, two of those I hired were women essentially right out of college. I found myself faced with a struggle that many dev managers and leads have faced over the years: How do I encourage, train and develop junior developers?
Avoid Burnout: Take Time To Unplug
One of the biggest struggles that developers face is burnout. I’ve seen it happen time and time and time again. We do too much. We work 40, 50, 60 or more hours a week in an office doing development work, then come home and spend another 20, 30 or more hours at home working on our personal projects or side clients. Add to all that the various levels of personal commitments we might outside of development, be it family, church, charity work, and so forth. All that time takes its toll and, if we’re not careful, it overwhelms us and we burn out. It happened to me.
The Unroll.me Controversy – Its Our Fault
A tweet caught my attention yesterday afternoon that was related to the whole Unroll.me/Uber data collection situation. Users’ data is being anonymized and then sold by Unroll.me, with one of the buyers in this situation being Uber. The co-founder of Unroll.me posted a message to Medium which basically put the responsibility for the controversy on the end users of Unroll.me.