With this book, we’ll introduce you to the variety of technical roles out there, the recruitment process, the positions that exist on the career ladder and make our way through an abundance of sought after technical languages, tools, libraries and frameworks that companies seek from candidates today. Print: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1707231079 Kindle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Software-engineers-do-what-now-ebook/dp/B08413XHS8 Leanpub: https://leanpub.com/softwareengineersdowhatnow Google Play: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about?id=lijLDwAAQBAJ Anyone can code if they put their mind to it. Yep, I said it. It’s always perceived as something really difficult. If you invest time to understand it, build things and identify problems early, you will grow, become less frustrated and eventually see the fun/rewarding side of it. Good skills to have Some good skills to have as a programmer: 1. Patience - Have the tenacity to keep working through challenges 2. Inventive - Thinking of better/faster ways to work effectively 3. Problem-solving - Think through solutions and choose the best one 4. Communication - To avoid mistakes, speed up development and increase morale 5. Collaboration - Innovation is so much better when working as a team 6. Persistence - Don’t let problems defeat you, keep going 7. Humility - Be receptive to criticism and other people’s ideas 8. Helpful - Help others having issues, even if they are obvious/overlooked 9. Adaptive - The tech world changes quite fast, keep learning 10. Respectful - Don’t rewrite your teammate’s code without a discussion beforehand Ways to learn to code There are two ways of learning, and both are equally as important. A - Reading about code When you open up a book on a train and flick through the pages of code examples and nod your head to say, ‘Aha, so that’s how you do that thing’, you’re building up your understanding of that language on an intellectual level only. Reading alone is not enough. If an employer sat you in front of a computer, you would not know what on earth to do, even if you had read ten books on the subject. Musicians can’t learn their instruments without playing the darn thing over and over again, and this brings us onto ‘acting on code.’ B - Acting on code When you are at home on a laptop or PC, and you have a text editor open, and you actively follow along by writing the code of a book or online course and confirm what you’ve written in the editor works, you are building up knowledge through the repetition of keystrokes. When something in your code fails and you are sitting there scratching your head in dismay, but you eventually work out what went wrong, if it happens again, you know how to tackle it, making you wiser and more experienced. This sums up my career in a nutshell, to be honest. In my experience, I tend to read books on theory. But any new programming languages or libraries I need to know, I will act on learning material by writing out the examples. Theory can be applied to any programming language. The games I’ve built in the past would introduce fresh new problems that I’d never come across before. The experience I’ve gained on personal projects on how to code is phenomenal.