I'm Writing A Book!

swyx 2020-04-10

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:

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!