The Passionate Programmer

Introduction

• loving your work is the most important way to love your life

• think your career as if it is the life cycle of a product, that product is

• you and your skills.

• four facets: choose your market, invent in your product, execute, market!

1. Choose your market

• think of your career as a business, your “product” is make up of the

• services you have to offer.

• What are those services? Who are you going to sell to? Is demand going to

• grow or decline? How big of a gamble are you taking on these choices?

• Lead or bleed: how far out on the edges do you want to be

• Supply and demand: offshore work is for mainstream, either compete at higher

• tier or in niche market

• Coding doesn’t cut it anymore: understand the business

• Be the worst: work with the best people, be the worst person in a room

• Invest in your intelligence

• Don’t listen to your parents: take calculated risks, don’t let fear consume

• you

• Be a generalist, be a specialist: master something, but be good at most

• things

• Don’t put all your egges in someone else’s basket

• Love it or leave it

2. Investing in your product

• Learn to fish
• Learn how businesses really work
• Find a mentor
• Be a mentor
• Practice, practice, practice
• The way that you do it: process matters
• On the shoulders of giants: learn from existing code/books
• Automate yourself into a job: more productivity = faster people/more people/automate!

3. Executing

• Right now: treat your projects like a race
• Mind reader: find out what needs to be done without being told
• Daily hit: some kind of outstanding accomplishment to report
• Remember who you work for: are you impacting the bottom line?
• Be where you’re at: focus on the current job, not where you want to be
• How good a job can I do today? make boring tasks challenging, make it visible
• How much are you worth? make sure your work creates value for the company
• A pebbel in a bucket of water: you should be replaceable
• Learn to love maintenance: measure, improve, measure
• Eight-hour burn
• Learn how to fail: raise issue early, take the blame, offer solution, ask for help
• Say “No”: don’t overcommit
• Don’t panic:
• Say it, do it, show it: make and execute plans

4. Marketing

• Perceptions, perschmeptions
• Adventure tour guide: think of your customers as domain experts
• Me rite reel nice: communicate your work
• Being present: make casual, coffee-break conversations
• Suit speak: write down the business benefit of your recent accomplishments
• Change the world: have a mission, crusade a cause
• Let your voice be heard: blog, write a book
• Build your brand: guard your brand, protect it from yourself
• Release your code
• Remarkability: be remarkable
• Making the hang: hang out with great poeple

5. Maintaining your edge

• Already obsolete
• You’ve already lost your job
• Path with no destination: focus on how you traverse the path and not the destination
• Make yourself a map: map out where you want to go in your skills, career
• Watch the market
• The fat man in the mirror: do a 360 review, get external feedback
• The south Indian monkey trap: to believe in something so strongly without questioning it
• Avoid waterfall career planning:
• Better than yesterday: keep getting better
• Go indepdendent