My Book: Building a Career in Software

I’ve had the privilege in my career of mentoring dozens of talented junior colleagues. When I wrote Ten Principles for Growth as an Engineer based on those experiences, I was startled by how strongly other engineers responded; people reached out to me again and again for guidance about career, professionalism, and just about every flavor of engineering challenge. That hunger for advice solidified my belief that our industry has a wasteful gap in how we train software practitioners. Programmers leave universities and bootcamps equipped to write code, but they typically have only trial and error to teach them every other aspect of professional software engineering. In many cases — very much including my own — that means a lonely struggle to figure out how to navigate the real world of building software as a profession.

My book, Building a Career in Software, is now available; it aims to fill this gap. The book is a manual for the transition from training to industry, a guide to the essential skills that instructors don’t need and professionals never think to teach: landing jobs, choosing teams and projects, asking good questions, running meetings, on-call, debugging production systems, writing documents and emails, making the most of a mentor, leading projects, etc. etc. etc., as well as a small selection of industry-focused technical subjects.

I hope this work can help anyone trying to build a technical career in the software industry, from university students starting internships to bootcamp attendees applying for jobs to working engineers building momentum for the promotion to “Senior Engineer.”