One of my readers asked: How do you get started when you join a new company? How do you add features to a codebase that is massive, scary, and completely new to you? The first day at your new developer job is just like the first day at a new school. 🚸 A sea of stranger’s faces watching your every move. Unfamiliar smells in the hallway. Every chair is uncomfortable and makes weird noises when you sit....
Let’s say you’re learning how to paint. When you look at the famous paintings at the museum, you might start asking yourself: “Will I ever be this good? Is this for me? Will I ever understand all of this?” If these questions sound familiar, it’s because you’re not alone. It’s not just you. Believe it or not, the same questions can be applied to coding. Some things, like painting and learning how to code, are hard....
You show your GitHub project to people but they don’t understand what the code is about. Why should you take time to write a good README if they can simply “read the code”? They won’t even look at your code if you don’t explain what’s in it for them. Why should anyone care about it? What about making them curious about your project? It saves them time, it shows you care about good communication and that by writing good docs you probably write good code as well....
When you get stuck, it’s really easy to block yourself from creatively solving your problem. You start asking “why am I so dumb?”, or thinking that you don’t have a programmer’s brain, or feeling that you’ll never understand anything. How is that helpful? It isn’t. The way we talk to each other (even to ourselves) impacts our performance. It’s not self-help BS. It’s how our brain works....
You’re focusing on finding that first Ruby job. You’ve been practicing for months or years. You’ve been applying to entry-level jobs, even internships. You polish your resume. Tweak your portfolio. Attach your CV. Press Submit. Chirp, chirp, chirp 🦗 Nothing happens. Worse: you do an amazing interview, people loved you. But then they say they are moving forward with someone else that has more experience. Welp, next time is going to be different....
Are you looking for an opportunity to get more experience as a developer? Make meaningful connections with the community? Learn the best practices on how to maintain a large codebase? What if you could get that experience by contributing to an open source project like Rails? If that sounds scary, don’t worry! We can help you! By the end of this post, you’ll learn 5 ways to become a new Rails contributor, even if you are a beginner....
You have a technical blog but there is only one problem: no one is reading what you write. Why? Think about it: readers aren’t going through their day waiting for your tech tutorials. They’re busy dealing with whatever is going on in their day, just like you! They are thinking of how they are going finish their work before Friday, how they are going to fix the bug in production… you get the picture....
When you’re banging your head against the wall trying to fix a bug, the last thing you want is having to stop and learn how to use the debugging tool. The last time this happened, you added require 'pry' on a ruby file but quickly realized you didn’t know the available commands. If only there was a way for you to quickly learn how to use Pry… Well, there is now!...
Monica Lent is a software engineer and entrepreneur. She decided to quit her job and bootstrap Affilimate full-time. She also created Blogging for Devs, a paid community to help developers grow their technical blogs with SEO. Apple Podcasts | Spotify Show Notes Monica Lent’s website Affilimate Blogging for Devs Monica’s Income Report Amy Hoy’s post about content marketing Transcript Stefanni Brasil: [00:00:10] Our guest today is Monica Lent....
Brian David Hall is an expert in conversion optimization. He’s a software engineer by training, runs his own company, and is the host of the SaaS Experiments Podcast, where he talks to other experts in growth marketing. We talked about the unusual tech jobs he’s had that helped him learn other skills beyond coding. Apple Podcasts | Spotify You can use your skills in other areas like Marketing and Sales to transition to a tech job instead of throwing away your current expertise....