Tag: meta

I’m writing the book I wished I’d read

Dear new developers,

Update July 5, 2020: I now have a launch date and a cover.

You may have noticed the pace of new letters has slowed down a bit. There have been some fantastic guest posts, but there’s only been one new letter per week for a while. There’s a reason for that.

I’m excited to announce that I’m writing a book. It’s the book I wished I’d had when I was beginning my development career.

It’s based on this blog, with ideas, text and guest posts drawn from it. The format is similar: letters covering a variety of topics. However, all the content has been thoroughly reviewed, organized and revised. You’ll also see new letters covering topics left untouched by this blog.

I just shipped off the first half of the book to the publisher. If you want to be in the loop, contact me to be put on the book announcement list.

– Dan

What Mitchell learned in his first two years as a software developer

Dear new developer,

It’s great to see what other developers have learned, especially when they are just starting out.

This is a post covering Mitchell Irvin’s lessons from his first two years as a software developer. Now, I don’t know Mitchell at all (but I guess I am connected to him in the third degree, according to his LinkedIn profile).

But his lessons resonated with me. Here are his lessons:

  • Your relationships with your coworkers (interpersonal/leadership skills) and your technical prowess (hard skills) are equally important
  • Your ability to influence others is most prominently determined by your ability to help them reach the same conclusion you did, on their own
  • It is the mark of a great problem solver to ask many questions before beginning to think about a solution

Each of these is worth a blog post, but I’ll let you click through to see how Mitchell arrived at each of these–some good anecdata.

However, I think that the bigger point is not what Mitchell said, though he has good points. There are two interesting meta points:

  • Mitchell reached me without me knowing him, or knowing anyone who knows him. This is the power of writing, especially a blog. You never know who you’ll connect with.
  • I checked his arguments against my experience and found it resonated. This is a great way to judge new data that comes at you (and, as a software engineer, a lot of information will flood toward you). But you also need to be aware of your innate biases, and think about how the points in any post or article could be false. You also should consider the source. Mitchell has worked at a couple of large companies and his experience may not be applicable at a different type of company.

Being an information consumer and producer is a key part of being a software developer. You should work on your writing to produce information. And you should be thoughtful about your information consumption.

Sincerely,

Dan