Preface

Skill Up: A Software Developer's Guide to Life and Career 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 and methodologies that you can use to improve the work you produce, and to give advice in your day-to-day career.

Focusing on your life skills and the key soft skills we need in the modern world, Skill Up: A Software Developer's Guide to Life and Career will help you find your path to being a better and a happier coder.

What this book covers

Part 1, Coder Skills, contains advice for people starting out in a coding career, or those who are already working as in a programming role but want to improve their general skills. It includes such subjects as how to study and understand complex topics, defining deep work and what it means for developers, and getting past skill plateaus when learning new languages.

Part 2, Freelancer Skills, contains advice for developers working as freelancers and trying to manage their careers and bid on new tenders. It includes such subjects as knowing when to fire a client, practical tips for taking over legacy applications, and a guide to automating client update messages.

Part 3, Career Skills, contains advice for having a successful career as a developer. It provides information on how to advance your career, and practical tips, such as interview guides. It includes such subjects as how to practice programming techniques and improve as a developer, how to balance best practice and creativity as a developer, and developer salary negotiation strategies.

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.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Returning to our case study of memorizing CSS elements, let's look at the border attributes available in CSS3: border."

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Here in the image I would move a task from being a To-Do, to being Assigned, to Working, to Under Review, and finally to Finished."

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