Hi HN! I have been writing since April, but this book has been years in the making. So glad to launch it today!
Since I switched careers from finance and started doing freeCodeCamp in 2017, I have been studying the principles, strategies, and tactics that make great developers successful and applying it to my own career. This has helped me get hired at a Senior level at AWS in just 3 years. While between jobs, I decided to take the time to write down everything I've learned about the tech industry - everything I wish I had known, everything I believe to be true, everything I think an individual contributor developer needs to build an exceptional career:
- Going from Junior to Senior
- Learning in Public
- Tech Strategy (the Business of Software)
- Why You Should Write (A Lot!)
- Engineering Career Ladders
- Developer's Guide to Twitter
- Marketing Yourself (without Being a Celebrity)
- and more!
Roughly 1/4 of the chapters are prior blogposts that have done super well - my greatest hits include https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-public/ and https://www.swyx.io/writing/marketing-yourself/ - and since publishing them I have loads of feedback and rewritten them for the book. The remaining 3/4 are brand new content I have applied for my own career, and market tested the messaging in tweets, talks and podcasts.
There's a launch discount applied to everything on the site; I hope you enjoy it!
---
Side note on tech stack - For the book, I am using https://softcover.io which is a Rails app that Michael Hartl uses to create the Rails tutorial. It's the best tool I found that generates PDF/EPUB/MOBI out of the box with decent customization by exposing LaTeX (and its also FOSS, with a paid option!). For my site I am using Begin.com for hosting and functions, Svelte for components, and Podia for payments. For Audiobook I am using Audacity and my trusty standard issue Egghead.io Instructor Shure mic! Putting this together was a good couple weeks of trial and error - Let me know if I can answer any tech stack questions alongside book questions!
Was 2017 the time you switched careers from finance and learned to code via freeCodeCamp? Or did you switch before 2017 but started learning new stuff (say a new language) on freeCodeCamp in 2017? If it is the former, that's great progress getting to Senior level in less than 3 years! Congrats
short form - i started doing FCC in nights and weekends from Nov 2016 - Mar 2017, then quit and went all in in Jun 2017 and went to an NYC bootcamp to top up my FCC knowledge and also get my first dev job.
here's the long form story - https://medium.com/hackernoon/no-zero-days-my-path-from-code... - ive been harangued over this before so i should be clear that i have done programming prior to starting FCC - just that it was basic self taught data munging stuff, not web dev. i definitely did not start from zero, but i also definitely felt very out of my depth learning the JS/Web stack in 2017 and it took me a year to get to the point where I could credibly apply for a frontend dev job.
This looks like a great resource, swyx. I'm considering buying but would strongly prefer to read a physical book. Do you plan to publish a print version?
thanks! I have no immediate plans but am open to the idea - if only for the fact that itd be freaking cool to give out my own book - any idea what the best way to do a small print run of books would be?
theres the added complication that i'm stuck here in Singapore due to coronavirus, whereas my target audience is all in the US. so i probably shouldnt do shipping myself.
thank you! yes in fact v0.1.x of the book was published thru leanpub. but i found their build process buggy and nondeterministic - the same exact source material would sometimes succeed in building and sometimes fail, with no stacktrace or helpful error message. The leanpub founders are aware of this, but to save my sanity after a 5 hour session randomly debugging from a distance i had to leave
Thanks for the insights! I've used leanpub a bit and have seen some bugs, but also found the owner really helpful in fixing these so I kept with them for now.
Since I switched careers from finance and started doing freeCodeCamp in 2017, I have been studying the principles, strategies, and tactics that make great developers successful and applying it to my own career. This has helped me get hired at a Senior level at AWS in just 3 years. While between jobs, I decided to take the time to write down everything I've learned about the tech industry - everything I wish I had known, everything I believe to be true, everything I think an individual contributor developer needs to build an exceptional career:
- Going from Junior to Senior
- Learning in Public
- Tech Strategy (the Business of Software)
- Why You Should Write (A Lot!)
- Engineering Career Ladders
- Developer's Guide to Twitter
- Marketing Yourself (without Being a Celebrity)
- and more!
Roughly 1/4 of the chapters are prior blogposts that have done super well - my greatest hits include https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-public/ and https://www.swyx.io/writing/marketing-yourself/ - and since publishing them I have loads of feedback and rewritten them for the book. The remaining 3/4 are brand new content I have applied for my own career, and market tested the messaging in tweets, talks and podcasts.
There's a launch discount applied to everything on the site; I hope you enjoy it!
---
Side note on tech stack - For the book, I am using https://softcover.io which is a Rails app that Michael Hartl uses to create the Rails tutorial. It's the best tool I found that generates PDF/EPUB/MOBI out of the box with decent customization by exposing LaTeX (and its also FOSS, with a paid option!). For my site I am using Begin.com for hosting and functions, Svelte for components, and Podia for payments. For Audiobook I am using Audacity and my trusty standard issue Egghead.io Instructor Shure mic! Putting this together was a good couple weeks of trial and error - Let me know if I can answer any tech stack questions alongside book questions!