Freek.dev

Iain Poulson wrote a good article on public speaking.

"But Speaking Is For Experts" This is a common fallacy that needs to be dispelled if you are to get up and start speaking. Conference speakers are not necessarily experts that know more than you. They are just people who have stood up! ... Anyone can do a talk, regardless of your background and skills – you have something to offer.

https://deliciousbrains.com/stop-worrying-love-giving-a-talk/

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Laravel employee #1, Mohammed Said, recently gave an interview at codeforaliving.io on his career and how he started with open source. Terrific story. A lot of what he says resonates with how I feel about working on open source.

Said believes many developers, in the Middle East and elsewhere, are interested in the open source community, but not sure how to get started: “They think they have to wait until they have something perfect.” That’s simply not the case, Said maintains. He encourages developers to dig deep into their favorite projects, especially into software they work with on a daily basis, and look for places they can offer “enhancements” to existing code.

Open source, he believes, is the best experience a developer can show in an interview. “Tech interviewers want one thing,” he says: “Show me your code.” You can share code you’ve written for your day job, but it’s probably impersonal or boring or even proprietary and closed source, so you can’t share it at all. Some code at work is done as part of a team and you can’t pick out what you did and what Jane down the hall did. Open source, on the other hand, is all you. It’s your passion, it’s publicly accessible, and it has your name on it.

http://www.codeforaliving.io/how-i-open-sourced-my-way-to-my-dream-job-mohamed-said

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Gregory Brown wrote an excellent article on how you can grow as a programmer.

Do you know what the difference between competence and proficiency is? ... Competence means having enough experience and knowledge to get stuff done; proficiency involves knowing why you are doing something in a certain way, and how it fits into the big picture. In other words, a proficient practitioner is always a competent practitioner, but the opposite may not be true.

https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-traits-of-a-proficient-programmer

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Eric L. Barnes asked this question to people with several backgrounds.

I love questions that can’t be answered with a simple yes or no. One question that I have been thinking about recently is, just what does it take to be a great developer?

I came up with tons of answers but felt like mine are all through my own lens, so I decided to reach out to a few people from different walks of life and just ask them. What follows is the answer by each person and their profession so you can compare and contrast.

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Adrian Kosmaczewski shares lessons learned on what truely are the important things in your career as a developer. Even if you're not even close to approaching 40 years of life on the planet you should read this.

I have often pondered about leaving the profession altogether. But somehow, code always calls me back after a while. I like to write apps, systems, software. To avoid burning out, I have had to develop strategies.

In this talk I will give you my secrets, so that you too can reach the glorious age of 40 as an experienced developer, willing to continue in this profession.

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As long as your heart tells you to keep on coding and building new things, you will be young, forever.

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Education. In a fast-changing environment such as the web industry, education is the single most important thing to survive. The things I learned about PHP when I started doing PHP 17 years ago would not even get me a job anymore today. Where traditional jobs mostly require just the standard education with a short course every once in a while, the web industry is vastly different.

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In this article I’ll go into some strategies and some ways to keep the knowledge of you and your team current.

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I have met hundreds of developers. The best ones always have a side project or two that they hack away on at night. As an employer I encourage that, but I have heard that a lot of workplaces ban personal projects.

So let's talk about why I think that side projects is a good thing, how I use them to get better and what you have to look out for.

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