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

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

By : Jordan Hudgens
4 (2)
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Skill Up: A Software Developer's Guide to Life and Career

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

4 (2)
By: Jordan Hudgens

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (5 chapters)
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4
Index

Chapter 52. Is it Possible to Lose Your Coding Skills?

This topic was inspired by a Boing Boing article (http://boingboing.net/2016/06/08/coder-fired-after-6-years-for.html) that tells the story of a QA developer who spent 6 years working for a company and literally did nothing besides playing computer games, browsing Reddit, and wasting his time.

The Reddit user, FiletOfFish1066, posted his story to the site and it instantly became a supreme case study for what happens when you don't continue to develop your coding skills.

After not working for 6 years, he says that he has completely forgotten how to develop and now he's out of a job. The story goes that he started working as a software tester and realized that, by writing some scripts, he could fully automate his job. So, he worked for about 8 months building testing scripts and after that he simply let the tests run. He didn't have to do anything besides kick back and play video games all day. There are a number...

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