benjaminmerchin/dev-career-tips

dev-career-tips

If you found this list it's probably a friend or a colleague that recommended it.

A lot of companies are hiring developers, (my own included).

People often ask me what they need to know to fit. This list was designed to solve this problem.

Check whether you feel confident understanding each point. The list is ordered to help you gain in confidence. If you feel confident with one point you should feel more confident with the next point.

If you are new you should try to understand how each point fits with the other points, the understanding of how all points fit together makes the real difference between a newbie and an experience developer.

Experienced developers are confident with each point, well, they are confident that they will be able to go back to the documentation and have intuition to understand it quickly and know how to put it to use.

It is expected from you that you will research the subjects in greater depth. You should not expect this list to be exhaustive.

Almost everything is updated daily if not more often than that. Google is your friend.

You should test everything yourself. Don't always trust the docs.

Clone this list on your computer and start checking the boxes.

Measure your desired effort

• Define Desirable Outcomes with Milestones

• Stay Focused by measuring how much time you spend working on a project with Wakatime

• Stay Fit by measuring how much time you spend running, or cycling

Prevent undesired effort

You will need to spend a lot of time focused every day, don't let your energy go to waste, control your environment. Put your energy in the direction of something with a greater impact.

• Prevent lag by working on a powerful computer
• Prevent fatigue by geting a proper lighting in your working environment
• Prevent eye strain by always using a light theme in your text editor and everywhere else. Dark themes are a sham.
• Prevent your working memory from going to waste switching windows by having one or two large monitors
• Prevent auditive noise distraction while typing by having a silent keyboard
• Prevent Repetitive strain injury by owning a vertical mouse
• Prevent wasted keystrokes by learning all the shortcuts of your text editor
• Prevent multitasking by clearing your environment from interactive distractions
• Prevent people from interrupting your work flow by walling and door locking your environment
• Prevent auditive noise from distracting you by using Noise cancelling headphones

Write living documentations

• Write README documents with Markdown (60 min)

• Get used to the man

• Write feature specifications with Bahavior Driven Development (BDD) (60 min)

• Write features with Test Driven Development (TDD) (60 min)

• Evaluate the confidence that you should put in your code thanks to Code Coverage

• Get used to open source version control by Learning to use Github

Get a developer reputation

• Create a profile on stackoverflow (10 min)

• Prevent someone from pretending they're you by buying and owning a domain name with firstnamelastname.com where you put links to profiles of yourself that you recognize on the web

Start projects

• Prototype your forms with Typeform

• Prototype your databases with airtable

• Find icon ideas with the noun project

• Connect apps and automate workflows with Zapier

• Connect Typeform and Airtable (20 min)

Setup your development environment

• Backup your git repositories online on Github (10 min)

• Write your code in a comfortable environment like Visual Studio Code (10 min)

• Manage your github local repositories with Github Desktop (10 min)

  • Nice tutorial to learn how to use GitHub Desktop

• Setup your development environment automatically by learning to use

  • Brew on mac
  • Chocolatey on windows

• Control the versions of your source code with Git

• Write javascript server side code with Node.js (20 min)

Get Peer reviews

• Learn what is important in a website by auditing websites with lighthouse

• Review your own code through Rubber duck debugging before asking for precious developer attention

• Show your work to other programmers by sharing your computer screen live with Zoom (10 min)

Learn the fundamentals

• Get the big picture of how the web works (13 min)

• Select data with Regular Expressions, REGEX (21 min)

• Challenge your Knowledge of REGEX with this interactive tutorial (60 min)

• Have a basic interaction with the file system thanks to Bash (60 min)

• Exchange data with the JSON format (12 min)

• Manipulate your data with Javascript Array Methods (11 min)

• Template your web pages and web application with html elements

• Learn to select dom elements with query Selectors (8 min)

• Display lightweight pictures by using SVG (120 min)

• Allow access to your server ressources from a different origin (20 min)

• Publish a first website with Github pages (20 min)

Put your fundamental knowledge to action

• Get data from webpages automatically by scraping with JavaScript (9 min)

• Create an API by using express.js with node.js

• Secure your API with passport.js

• Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) data by learning to use node.js in conjuction with mysql or and mongodb (240 min)

• Create a real time chat system by using socket.io (60 min)

• Build user interfaces with a framework like Vue.js (240 min)

• Accelerate the development of your UI by using ready-made Vue.js components in the style of Material design thanks to Vuetify

Move From code monkey status to engineer

• Write your tests with Jest

• Write your tests with mocha and chai

• Automate your browser with Puppeteer

• Write end to end (E2E) tests with Cypress

• Prevent type errors by compiling typescript to javascript

Get paid for your work

• Auditing and improving (Plenty of job opportunities)

  • Performance
  • Accessibility
  • SEO

• Bug bounty hunting (Rare job opportunities)

• Pentesting (Expensive in case of a fuck up)

• Working for a company by finding a job on stackoverflow.com/jobs