Software engineering is more than just coding — it’s a journey of growth, adaptability, and impact. When people ask me, “How did you build your career in software engineering?” I often reflect on the blend of challenges, opportunities, and deliberate learning that have shaped my path.

Starting as a trainee, I faced my share of hurdles: navigating interviews with tech giants, growing into leadership roles, and learning how to effectively lead teams as an Engineering Manager. Along the way, I’ve gathered valuable insights and lessons that I believe every aspiring software engineer should know.

This is why I wrote my first book, “Building a Career in Software Engineering: A Roadmap from Trainee to Engineering Manager.” It’s a practical guide designed to help you thrive at every stage of your career.

Why I Wrote This Book

As I moved from being a junior developer to managing teams, I realized that career growth isn’t just about mastering the latest tech stack. Success comes from understanding how to:

• Solve complex problems with clarity and precision.
• Collaborate effectively across teams.
• Build a mindset for continuous improvement.
• Transition into leadership roles with confidence.

These lessons weren’t just learned — they were earned through trial and error. Now, I’ve distilled them into a guide packed with actionable advice for software engineers at all levels.

What You’ll Learn

This book is more than a technical manual. It’s a comprehensive roadmap covering:

• How to excel as a junior engineer and prepare for mid-level roles.
• Transitioning into leadership positions while maintaining technical excellence.
• Mastering interviews, career planning, and personal branding.
• Building a career that evolves alongside the ever-changing tech industry.

Who Is This Book For?

Whether you’re a beginner, a mid-level engineer seeking growth, or a leader aiming to refine your skills, this book has something for you.

Ready to Learn More?

This Medium post offers just a glimpse. Dive into the full story, practical examples, and invaluable lessons by visiting the full article on ifeanyiokagbue.com.

👉 Click Here to Learn More About the Book and Grab Your Copy!

Invest in your career. Build the future.

Certain people and things are central to our lives, and the way we prioritize them shapes our choices and ultimately determines the course of our lives.

These include God, work, family, commitments (such as membership in organizations or clubs), friends, personal pursuits (such as personal development, social media, and self-care), and so on. If you are part of a couple, you may also have to consider your spouse, your spouse’s family, and any children you may have.

We cannot do without dedicating time to each of these various persons/things therefore, we have to divide our time across them. That is why in a work place you hear things like work-life balance because there must be a balance across these various things to properly function and live right.

It is essential that we prioritize these things in the correct order in order to maintain balance. For example, what happens to someone that gives all his/her time to their work and no time for God, family and friends. If the person loses their job or retires, who will they turn to? Also is this person living right? Would a man who is always busy and never makes time for his family feel distressed if his baby does not recognize him?

Now, there is something important we must note. There are three aspects to consider when prioritizing. They are:

1. How you want to prioritize things
2. How you are actually prioritizing things
3. How you need to prioritize things

Sometimes, it takes adversity for us to realize that we are neglecting our relationship with God or our family, but shouldn’t we be aware of this before things get to that point? So, going into this New Year 2023, take some time to find out what you are currently doing in terms of setting priorities and what you need to do to start prioritizing the persons/things in your life the right way (The way you need to and not the way you want to).

Here is what you can do:

1. Grab a piece of paper or a notepad.
2. Draw a table of three columns. ‘What I am doing’, ‘What I want to do’ and ‘What I need to do’
3. Fill the columns with the persons/things as stated above.
4. Underneath the third column, labeled ‘What I need to do,’ write ‘What you need to start doing’ to achieve the goals listed in that column.

While ultimately it is up to you to decide these things for yourself, I believe that God should be the top priority. If you are part of a couple, I think that your spouse should come next, followed by other priorities. For single people, your personal life should come next, followed by other things. Within your personal life, it is important to properly prioritize as well, with personal development as a top priority.

I hope this helps you to prioritize right and live rightly.

Happy New Year!

So, I have been a Developer for about 18yrs now from 2003 which was my first year in the university starting with Basic and then moving to Visual Basic 6.0 in 2004 and to VB.NET after School in 2008 during my compulsory National Youth Service Corps 1year program and then ASP.NET also during that period as well. I eventually started using C# sometime in 2017 up until Present. I have always wanted to learn another programming language and increase my tech stack but due to a combination of crazy deadlines and procrastination I haven’t really been able to do it. Thanks to two of my current bosses and the Udemy Course (Python for the .NET Developer) I had the perfect way to start the transition. After taking the course and getting my certification (lol), I understood the basics of Python and was able to test a few things.

So, why Python?

Python as far as I have known is the language mostly used for Data Science, Machine Learning and AI. It is a dynamically typed language meaning that the type checking is done at runtime which means you don’t have to declare variables so for example instead of

int Salary = 5000; in C# you just have

Salary = 5000 in Python.

You don’t even have to put the semi-colon at the end. Lol. You also don’t have to bother with curly braces like in C# that if you have so many functions and nested if statements it can getting a bit confusing or messy. It is easy to code, read, maintain and port. Python also has a huge set of libraries; This saves developers’ a lot of time as they do not have to code from scratch every time or even any time. This in turn makes development work much faster in Python. It is even said that to make changes to an existing legacy system, Python is the language to go for. So, all of this makes Python a very good language to learn especially as the world is already more on Data Science. You know the saying now Data is the new Oil.

Differences between C# and Python

Just wanted to highlight some other differences from what I already mentioned above. This is culled from hackr.io

Dapr and the Benefits

So, you can run your Python code on its own or your can also run it on dapr. So, I will briefly highlight what dapr is all about and its benefits.

What is Dapr? Dapr helps developers build event-driven, resilient distributed applications. Whether on-premises, in the cloud, or on an edge device, Dapr helps you tackle the challenges that come with building microservices and keeps your code platform agnostic. So typically if you were running a python web API endpoint you would have a URL like this http://127.0.0.1:5000/loans/request but with Dapr you have http://localhost:59097/v1.0/invoke/loanapplication/method/loans/request . With this last URI, we have invoked the Dapr sidecar but using the native invoke API built into Dapr. The format is http://localhost:<dapr-http-port>/v1.0/invoke/<app-id>/method/<method-name>. Using this way of calling services using the service invocation Dapr building block has gives you access to already built in

§ Service Discovery

§ Distributed tracing

§ Metrics

§ Error handling

§ Encryption

How to Setup your machine for Python (And also Dapr)

So, you need to install the following applications listed below:

1. Download the latest version of Python — This is important for running python.

2. Download and install Visual Studio Code — This is where you can write and run your python applications. You can also run python applications from the CLI.

3. Install the Python extension for Visual Studio Code from the Extensions Tab in Visual Studio. You can get a guide on how to do that here

4. Download Docker Desktop — This is important for running your applications on containers. Dapr also uses this.

5. On your CLI run dapr init to install and setup Dapr.

After this, you should be good to go. Next, I will take you through setting up a python REST API.

How to run a Python Application with an example of a Simple REST API using Python (and also Dapr)

Two very important things to note about running Python is:

1. Python runs on a Virtual Environment. A virtual environment usually used as virtualenv in Python is a Python environment such that the Python interpreter, libraries and scripts installed into it are isolated from those installed in other virtual environments, and (by default) any libraries installed in a “system” Python, i.e., one which is installed as part of your operating system.

2. Because Python uses a lot of libraries, you will need to install these libraries before you run your Python application and most of this is usually placed in a file some times called requirements.txt and then you install using that file and it will install all the libraries in that file. It looks like the screenshot below:

Now you run python by putting your codes in a [filename].py file. So, a simple script to print Hello World would be

print(“Hello World!”)

And to run it, you simply run Python [filename].py in CLI or terminal window if using Visual Studio Code. But once you begin to use other functions that are dependent on certain libraries like when running a REST API then you need to install the requirements, properly load them into a virtual environment and then run it. The steps to run your python application in the CLI or Terminal Window in Visual Studio Code are follows:

1. pip install virtualenv

2. virtualenv [applicationname]

3. [applicationname]\Scripts\activate — This creates something like you see in the screenshot below. You’ll notice ([applicationname]) before the folder path in the CLI or Terminal Window Where whenever you open this folder later on and you see this you should skip Step 1 to 3. You can also skip 1–2 the next time you are running the application and only go straight to run Step 3 if you don’t see what you have in the screenshot below.

4. pip install -r requirements.txt — This installs the libraries that you will need so you can import them at the top of your code in your [filename].py file. You can also install this one at a time e.g., pip install Flask. You can change the filename requirements.txt to any filename but this helps to show exactly what is in the file. This also prevents having errors like:

ImportError: No module named sqlalchemy

This is a very important tip that will save your life in Python. Phew! Once you get errors like this, then you know you are yet to install a particular library.

5. python [filename].py

if you want to run the application and if you want to run it with dapr. Make sure your Docker Desktop is up and running. Run the command below:

dapr run — app-id [applicationname] — app-port [appportnumber] — dapr-http-port [portnumber] — python [filename].py

e.g., is dapr run — app-id loanapplication — app-port 5000 — dapr-http-port 3500 — python app.py

REST API Code Sample (GET Endpoint)

In the screenshot above, the first two lines are to call the libraries that would be used in the application. The fourth line is to load the app using Flask. Line 6 -8 is the actual get endpoint code. It is to create a route using a function called other_page whilst Line 10 and 11 is to load and run the application in Python. You can run it without specifying the port and you can use any port as well. As long it is available and not in use by another application.

I hope you enjoyed this and you are able to understand and use Python and from this you can go ahead and do. I also hope you noticed the bonus I gave you on Dapr (You can find more info on dapr.io) I will come back again for more and may also add some more updates to this so watch out and stay tuned. From your C# guy who is now turning to a Snake (Python) lol.

It is a very common thing to see salary earners going broke most times before the end of the month and sometimes even at the beginning of the month and for a few early into the new month when salary has not been paid. Some will say it is because the salary is not enough. Others will say it is because there are too many commitments or too many things came up that month and so many other excuses. Even for people that are earning well and do not have too many responsibilities, there are always excuses as to why they go broke. In all of this, it’s interesting to note that there are people like family men (married men with kids) who earn not so much and are still able to feed their family or some who were able to build their houses with a little savings from their salary.

The hard truth is that it is a shame to earn salary and still go broke and this is as a result of bad management and/or not able to live according to your means or what you earn. Like someone said, leaving a champagne life on a beer salary. In this write-up, I will give a formula or a way to spend your salary to enable you never go broke. Before we go into the details of the formula, some principles or qualities are very necessary, without which we cannot even follow or use the formula that I will give.

Principles for Spending Salary

1. Discipline — This is very important because if you are not disciplined you will not be able to follow the formula. You will outline money for several things but if you are not disciplined you may end up using it for something else.

2. Self-Control — There are cases where you want something or you got something e.g. Ice Cream or Roasted Fish and Chips and it was very nice and you want to get it again. You have to be able to control yourself looking at your budget so as not to over spend. You must not go for everything you see. If not, you find yourself spending 10k for provisions when your budget is 5k. It makes no sense. You have to be able to have money with you and not spend it because it has been allocated for something.

3. Patience — You should also be able to give yourself time to get something that you want or need. You need to manage what you have at the moment and remind yourself that if you had no option you would live without that thing which you are craving for. So for example, if you need a phone that is worth 60k. You can save either 20k a month for 3 months or 30k a month for 2months and if possible 10k for 6 months or 15k for 4 months. Nobody will die if you do not get that phone. That is the truth.

Formula for Spending Salary

Spending + Giving + Saving = Salary

Yes, this is the formula for spending your salary. However, that is not all. We will go into the details and the recommended sharing formula.

For every salary you earn, you will have to spend it to do basic things for yourself. That is appreciating yourself for working for the money and giving yourself reasons on why you should work for another salary. You also and most importantly have to give. It is very necessary. The bible says the Lord loves a cheerful giver and even if you don’t believe in God am sure you know what goes around comes around so when you help people if you are in need, people will come to your help. Finally, and very importantly too, you need to save your money to be able to embark on big projects like House Rent, Buy TV and other big projects, which you have to save towards and cannot just buy from one month salary. The recommended formula is 50% for Spending, 25% for giving and 25% for saving. This is for people who just started working or started applying this formula and are not earning much (above N300,000). As you start earning more, you will have to reduce your Spending and increase your Savings and Giving. It is important you spend half of your salary since you worked for it. It is also it is important to spend just half so that if your salary is slashed you will still be able to cope and besides you also need to save a part of it and as well give out of it so that’s why 50% is recommended for spending in a month. From this spending, you draw out the money you spend weekly for the 4 weeks in a month. This is also very important you should know how much you spend in a day and then in a week and keep that money aside. It is a shame to look for transport money to go to work or beg for money for lunch when you are earning salary.

Breakdown & Example of Salary Formula

If someone is earning N100,000, based on my recommendation, below is how it should be broken down.

Single Man

32,000 — Weekly spending (4 weeks — 8k per week — Transport and Lunch)

5,000 — Bills

5,000 — Miscellaneous (Anything that might come up)

5,000 — Provisions & Food Stuffs & Toiletries

1,000 — Books

2,000 — Permanent Savings (You will not touch until you are about 40 or 50years — Invest in Low-Risk Investment)

15,000 — (Charity, Church Donation/Parents/Siblings/Friends)

10,000 — Tithe

25,000 — Savings (House Rent/TV/Other Big Projects — Invest in Low-Risk Investment)

100,000 — Total

Married Man

20,000 — Weekly spending (4 weeks — 5k per week — Transport and Lunch)

10,000 — Wife

5,000 — Bills

5,000 — Miscellaneous (Anything that might come up)

12,000 — Provisions & Food Stuffs & Toiletries (Give to wife)

1,000 — Books

2,000 — Permanent Savings (You will not touch until you are about 40 or 50years — Invest in Low-Risk Investment)

10,000 — (Charity, Church Donation/Parents/Siblings/Friends)

10,000 — Tithe

25,000 — Savings (House Rent/TV/Other Big Projects — Invest in Low-Risk Investment)

100,000 — Total

The above is just an example that explains how to breakdown a salary of 100,000. Using the formula of Spending — 50%, Savings — 25% and Giving — 25%. Of course, one can adjust the percentages to what works for you like saving of 30% or Giving of 20% etc. One has to also pay attention to the weekly spending and ensure that it is spent properly and as budgeted. You can do this by doing a daily financial reconciliation at the end of the day or early the next day to put yourself in check.

Finally, one must be very careful with their earnings so that at the end of the day you can look at things you have done with it and people you have helped with it. Most importantly, follow and adjust the principles and formulas stated above so you never go broke again. Don’t go broke trying to look rich, act your wage. Don’t also try to live a champagne life on a beer budget you are only setting yourself up for a disaster.