I'm Writing A Book!

TL;DR

I’m writing a Dev Career Advice book! It will have all my best thoughts for early career devs looking to go from Code Newbie to Senior Dev. I’m putting up 100 copies for presale for 50% off! You can now find the book on it’s own site at www.LearnInPublic.org!

If you’d like behind-the-scenes update of the book writing process, you can follow the Book’s Twitter account or the IndieHackers page.

A little about Me

Hi, I’m swyx! 👋

Deconstructing career success is a passion of mine. Throughout my own career change journey, I have been looking for common traits among top performers and trying to reverse engineer their formulas for success.

I’ve applied them to my own career with great results. I went from deciding to learn web development in 2017, to starting my first dev job in 2018, to getting hired as a senior dev at a top tech firm in 2020!

Why I’m Writing This Now

I have an extensive track record of technical and nontechnical blogging. Yet, my best received posts have been career advice pieces, helping hundreds of thousands of developers:

• Learn in Public
• The Ultimate Hack for Learning In Public: Pick Up What They Put Down
• How to Learn in Private

I could write a technical book for my first book, but somehow my gut tells me that a “soft skills” one would help a lot more people, especially those who have recently decided to start a dev career.

Topics Covered

Learning is just the tip of the iceberg as far as savvy career building goes. Here are some juicy topics I have planned:

• Dev Careers By the Numbers: An examination of the facts we have on dev careers
• The Operating System of You: We humans mostly run on the same hardware. It makes sense that performance differences are strongly influenced by the software we run - primarily our “operating system”!
• Tests Are Your Friend: In more ways than one…
• When Ignorance is Power: how to turn your impostor syndrome into a strength
• Marketing Yourself Without Being a Celebrity
• Know Your Tools: A poor craftsperson blames their tools. A rich craftsperson knows them inside out.
• Betting on Technologies: How to place your career bets (and cut your losses EARLY)
• Developer’s Guide to Twitter
• The Benefits of Writing A Lot For Your Software Career
• Don’t Go Home With Nothing
• You Need A Domain
• The Price of your Ego: You can learn so much on the Internet, for the low, low price of your Ego
• Startups vs BigCos: Interviewing, Financial Outcomes and Career Growth
• How and When to Go Remote: Advice for devs who want to succeed as remote devs!
• From Junior to Senior: How do you get to the next level?
• What else do you want me to cover? 🤗

A full Table of Contents is available on the Gumroad page.

That’s Great!… What’s it Called?

Believe it or not I spent hours agonizing over this question. I think I finally have an answer:

My new book will be called The Coding Career Handbook! 🎉

I am starting to write it today. So it’s definitely not ready for purchase yet, but if you’d like to show some support and win my undying gratitude, I’m putting up 100 copies for presale here with a 50% discount! you can buy a presale copy here!

I’ll keep posting excerpts on this blog, and take and respond to your questions as I go along.

It’s really hard to write career advice when I’m just one person. This is the scariest, most uncomfortable thing I’ve done in years. But I believe I can help those of you who choose to join me on this journey, and want to build exceptional dev careers!