The software developer's life manual

Reading notes from the book Soft Skills: The software developer's life manual. It's not about teaching you how to polish your technical skills but to provide a list of useful suggestions that can benefit your development life in various aspects.

Think about your goals

• Every step you take without a clear direction is a wasted step. Don't randomly walk through life without a purpose for your career.
• Try to split you big goals into smaller goals. The smaller goals keep you on track and motivated so that you keep heading in the direction of your bigger goals.

Climbing the corporate ladder

• Taking responsibility: there is almost always some neglected area of business that you can find to contribute your talents to - you just have to dig to find it. One of the best places to search is in areas that no one else wants to get involved in. Another way to indrectly take on responsibility is to become a mentor for others on your team.
• Becoming visible: All of your hard work can easily go to waste if you can't find a way to let your boss and upper management know what you're doing.
  • Keep daily/weekly report.
  • Offer to give presentations or trainings.
  • Speak up - do this at meetings.
  • Be seen - set up regular meetings with your boss.

Being professional

• A professional is someone who takes their responsibilities and career seriously and is willing to make the tough choices that have to be made - often at their own expense - for the purpose of doing what they know is right. Set a high bar and stick to it, don't compromise for the shorcut.
• A real professional has high-quality standards for all areas of his or her work, because a professional knows that 'how you do anything is how you do everything.
• Find your gaps: anything you're doing repeatedly is worth a thorough examination to see if there's something you don't know that, if you did, might increase your efficiency.

Leaning - 10 steps

• Get the big picture
• Determine scope
• Define success
• Find Resource
• Create a learning plan
• Filter resources
• Learn enough to get started
• Play around
• Learn enough to do something useful (e.g. apply in real projects)
• TEACH !

Facing failure

• Failure isn't the same thing as defeat. Failure is temporary, defeat is permanent. If you want to succeed, you have to learn how to swallow your pride and get out there and not be afraid to make a fool of yourself.
• You could have all the skills in life that should make you successful, but if you lack one important skill, perseverance, it will all be worthless, because at the first sign of trouble, you'lll give up - and we all will face some amount of trouble in our lives.

Productivity

• Working like a machine on a tight schedule every single day isn't something that can be maintained in the long run. Make sure that you have some time off, best to save it for family.
• Pomodoro technique: the basic idea is that you plan out the work your're going to do for a day. Then you set a timer for 40 minutes and work on the first task you've planned. You work only on a single task at a time and give it your complete focus for the full 40 minutes. If you're are interrupted, there are various ways of handling the interruption, but generally you strive to not be interrupted at all. You never want to break focus.
• It's important to develop a sense of self-accountability to be productive. Without accountability, you're always dependent on external motivations to get you to perform.
• Get away from time wasters
  • Watching TV
  • Social media
  • Unnecessary meetings
  • Playing videogames(especially online games)
• Breaking down things
  • One of the main reasons for procrastination which is the bane of productivity is problem admiration: being so busy admiring the size of a problem that you dont actually try and solve it.
  • When faced with large problems we tend to spend more time thinking about the problem than taking steps to solve the problem. It's important to make wise decisions and to think things through, but often you dont have all the information you'd like to have and you have to just go ahead and make a choice - TAKE ACTION.

Reference

• Soft Skills: The software developer's life manual

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