How to get a job as a web developer

In 2008 I moved to the UK after two years of teaching English in Japan. I was newly married with no job and little of my own money. While teaching English and in university I had done some freelance web development work, I didn’t feel confident that I could sell my…

Making mistakes as a programmer

A few months into my first job as a developer, I was tasked with updating the content on the website at a charity. There was no CMS. I had direct access to the database. At my first attempt, I copied the new text into the content field of the GUI for the database that I was…

Building technical self-reliance

There is no clear boundary between a “junior” and “senior” developer. One apparent difference however is the level of self-reliance developers display when solving technical problems.

Upgrade your technical skills with deliberate practice

If you build software you program every day. That doesn’t mean you get better at programming every day.

Improving your hard technical skills makes all the software you build better. It exposes you to new…

Reading for technical knowledge

Self-taught developers learn by doing. They build one project after another, make mistakes and slowly develop their sensibilities around software development. This is a familiar story if you taught yourself to code.

How to survive your first year as a programmer

The first year as a programmer is one of the most frustrating things a homo sapien can experience. You’re thrust from the world of ambiguous human communication into the icy waters of cold, hard correctness. There is no compromise with the machine…

Types of web developer jobs

I meet a lot of people who want to start a career as a web developer with no idea of what the trade-offs are of working at different sorts of jobs. This article aims to give you a rough idea of the sort of environments you could end up working in as a developer.

Giving your first technical talk

One of the best things you can do for increasing your credibility and visibility in a technical community is to give a talk or presentation.

Though we’d like to believe we’re rational agents, it turns out we’re basically chimps with Human Being…

Programmer’s complexity tolerance

Your tolerance for complexity is your ability to understand progressively more complicated systems. In our definition, complexity in systems means that the system has a large number of internal sub-systems that interact with each other in different ways.