Three principles for guiding your development career

Dear new developer,

I thought this article nicely laid out three principles to guide a developer’s career.

They were:

• follow your taste
• find community
• take risks

Each of these really resonated for me. The first because the wide world of software can lead to analysis paralysis, so you should really have some way of deciding what you want to work on. When you are starting out you don’t have too many ways of doing so. Taste is better than random choice.

I’ve already written about the benefits of finding community (online or offline) and how it can help you grow.

Risk is an area I haven’t covered much on this blog, but in my own career I have overvalued stability. If I had it all to do over again, I’d take more risks, because I fall prey to overestimating the impact of failure on my life. (Of course, that’s easy for me to say looking back.) An example of that is that I waited until I was in my 30s to really commit to a startup; I had the skills to do so earlier, when it would have been easier financially, but I was too afraid to give up the stability and money of the consulting I was doing.

Here’s an excerpt from the article about following your tastes:

The default path is to follow what’s popular or prestigious. That can lead to a bunch of problems: What’s prestigious is already highly competitive. When you compete with smart people in a game that has established rules, just keeping up will take most of your time. That leaves little time to explore what interests you. When you don’t explore what interests you, you won’t understand things as deeply, and that leaves you with an undifferentiated skillset.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Sincerely,

Dan