Skill Up: A Software Developer’s Guide to Life and Career

Key Features

• Over 50 essays with practical advice on improving your programming career
• Practical focus gives solutions to common problems, and methods to become a better coder
• Includes advice for existing programmers and those wanting to begin a career in programming

Book Description

This is an all-purpose toolkit for your programming career. It has been built by Jordan Hudgens over a lifetime of coding and teaching coding. It helps you identify the key questions and stumbling blocks that programmers encounter, and gives you the answers to them! It is a comprehensive guide containing more than 50 insights that you can use to improve your work, and to give advice in your career.

The book is split up into three topic areas: Coder Skills, Freelancer Skills, and Career Skills, each containing a wealth of practical advice. Coder Skills contains advice for people starting out, or those who are already working in a programming role but want to improve their skills. It includes such subjects as: how to study and understand complex topics, and getting past skill plateaus when learning new languages. Freelancer Skills contains advice for developers working as freelancers or with freelancers. It includes such subjects as: knowing when to fire a client, and tips for taking over legacy applications. Career Skills contains advice for building a successful career as a developer. It includes such subjects as: how to improve your programming techniques, and interview guides and developer salary negotiation strategies.

What you will learn

• Improve your soft skills to become a better and happier coder
• Learn to be a better developer
• Grow your freelance development business
• Improve your development career
• Learn the best approaches to breaking down complex topics
• Have the confidence to charge what you’re worth as a freelancer
• Succeed in developer job interviews

About the Author

Jordan Hudgens is the CTO and founder of DevCamp, where he leads instruction and curriculum development for all the DevCamp and Bottega code schools around the US.

As a developer over the past decade, Jordan has traveled the world building applications and training individuals on a wide variety of topics, including Ruby development, big data analysis, and software engineering.

Jordan focuses on project-driven education as opposed to theory-based development. This style of teaching is conducive to learning how to build real-world products that adhere to industry best practices.

Additionally, Jordan has published multiple books on programming and computer science along with developing training curriculum for Learn.co, DevCamp, and AppDev on the topics, namely Ruby on Rails, Java, AngularJS, NoSQL, API development, and algorithms.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Coder Skills
Chapter 2. Freelancing Skills
Chapter 3. Career Skills