Packt Publishing reached out to me and offered to do a book.
They pretty much want me to do any book and pre-agreed already. They gave me carte blanche on the topic.
(More or less, I doubt I can convince them to publish a vampire thriller set in a Silicon Valley startup.)
Funny thing is that I know the editor. He worked at Apress Media when I published my first book Practical Node.js with them.
I submitted to them my idea about a software engineering career book for junior developers. They liked it. It can become a book!
While thinking about the career in software engineering, I thought about top skills.
As in any profession, software engineers requires a combination of certain skills and techniques.
I’ve done software engineering for over 15 years.
I taught total beginners (in Hack Reactor) and professionals (in Fortune 500 companies).
The most important skill in a good software engineer is not smarts. No. It’s not how good he can write code.
It’s not soft skills either
This year, I chatted with some of the greatest minds in software engineering. It typically happens at conference speaker and sponsor dinners where none of the regular attendees are allowed. Some of the people you follow on Twitter, got to relax and share opinions and war stories (IE6 anyone?).
These casual talks, and my personal observations over the years, led me to believe there are certain that there certain secret traits of highly effective and successful programmers. Now, do you want to be kick-ass programmer, ship tons of great products people love, and don’t kill yourself in the process from various stresses? If not, then skip this article and try to figure out the stuff on your own.
Typing is everywhere right now. We type for work in emails and on IM clients, we type for personal relationships on Facebook (when was the last time you spoke with a friend on a phone?), and we type to have fun in Whatsapp or iMessages. Then of course, we code in editors and IDEs, and type commands in shells.
Imagine that you woke up tomorrow and weren’t able to use your keyboard. Maybe you would have broken both of your wrists skiing… Terrible, right? Even if you don’t write books or blog posts like I do, typing on a keyboard is how most of us live. And touch screen typing and voice dictation take only small roles. Let me tell you why you might be in danger of losing your ability to type and maybe even close to losing your job, career and relationships.
Most of the people outside of Capital One think of it as a bank with those visigoths commercials and the “What’s in your wallet?” slogan. Few people know that Capital One is a startup in the financial world if you compare it other big names such as Wells Fargo, Bank of America or Chase. Capital One started only a couple decades ago as a data driven technology company. Before it, there was only one type of credit card and people with less than stellar credit just weren’t eligible for it. Capital One revolutionized the credit card industry by analyzing risks and consumer profiles. It turned out to be a big success. Then came the visigoths, along with the acquisitions of traditional brink and mortar (such as Chevy Chase) and online banks (ING DIRECT which is Capital One 360).
The interest was higher than I expected, so instead of a single mentee, I accepted three people. Two of them are here in California, and one is in India.
I only wanted to test the water, and was surprised that I got over 20 requests. Therefore, I went ahead with the interview process in order to select one aspiring Node.js programmer…
If you do something for a living every day (i.e., you have a job) you have two choices:
Learn and become better: this is the default path for most people (it’s hard to do something over and over without getting better at it).
Stagnate and regress: this is actually harder than progress, and may require some subconscious proactive self-sabotage.
So everything is better if we automatically make progress, right? Not quite, because when we make progress, other people (including bosses) start to notice, and they then give/bring/order more of the same work—not a new type of work. Usually it’s the same stuff you’ve been doing already (and for the same money), because management doesn’t want to lose a good producer. I call this punishment for becoming better.
Last year, at about this same time, I discovered The Foundation podcast. I was vacationing in Mexico and stumbled on it via Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income—a hyper-popular online infopreneur. I downloaded and listened to many similar podcasts on online business, but The Foundation surprised me in the magnitude of its guests’ success stories. These weren’t the product of a few niche blogs, life coaching and ebooks, but six figures per month (and up) marketing and SaaS companies.
In the modern society, it’s not enough anymore just to graduate from a four-year college, and hope the skills and education acquired there will get you through the next 30–40 years of professional life. This is very prominent in software and technology fields, but applicable to many other industries as well.
In the age of the information workers, just to stay competitive on the market place, we constantly need to re-invent or jobs and ourselves. However, not everybody is happy about it. I often find people who don’t read professional books, magazines, blogs, and don’t learn outside of the job duties. Wake up people!
It’s so easy. MOOCs and online courses like Udemy and CreativeLive provide affordable interactive education. Free online ebooks are everywhere. Pick up a new language like Node.js or build something cool with React.
It’s no surprise that tomorrow, these people might be the first to be left on the outskirts of professional world . And when this happens, whom they’ll blame?
For those of you unfamiliar with DocuSign, it’s an industry leader in sending, signing and managing documents in the cloud. Contrary to its competitors (EchoSign, HelloSign and RightSignature), DocuSign is more enterprise oriented, the oldest (founded in 2003), and the most advanced in terms of security and number features. Continue reading “My First Week at DocuSign”
For almost a year I’ve been helping social media curation tool Storify as a software engineer with their Node.js apps, Backbone.js front-end development as well as supporting Storify API, implementing Twitter API v1.1 intergration, writing blog posts and answering Storify API questions. We had some great moments and a few weeks ago I summed them up in a post.
Over the past eight months, I’ve been juggling extremely demanding startup work at Storify, exceptionally fulfilling teaching assignments at Hack Reactor, General Assembly and Marakana, and writing my books and webapplog posts. By applying Yerkes–Dodson law, stress helped me to boost my productivity and I was happier than ever. However, in the last few weeks I slightly overestimated my capacity to endure the fast-paced startup life. Happily, I was able to take two weeks off and to spend them in Los Cabos, Baja California, Mexico.
The famous Los Cabos Arch at the Lands End
A passive quiet leisure time seemed like a great way to reflect, and to fill up my mental tanks for the future. I opted for Los Cabos due to its proximity to the Bay Area, convenience and friendliness of the local people. Indeed, there are plenty of English-speaking staff and my favorite chain stores, like Starbucks, Ruth’s Steakhouse, OXXO, Mega, Walmart and of course (not so favorite but still familiar) McDonald’s, and Burger King.
By the end of the vacation, I’d read a few good books and stumbled upon some amazingly fantastic podcasts about entrepreneurship:
I also started reading Smashing Node.js. It’s a very approachable beginner’s Node.js book. Nevertheless, I found there some gems such as answers to why we do things the way we do them at Storify, because the tech stack described in the book and JavaScript patterns are astonishingly similar to the ones that we have.
Pirate style party cruise ship
At the end of the break, I learned an important lesson that we need to be more realistic about our present (but unrealistic about our future), and step aside for a bit to take a look at a bigger picture. In addition, I pledged to myself to prioritize my life and the side-projects I undertake.
I’m just back from NodeConf 2013 summer camp at Walker Creek Ranch in Petaluma which is in Marin County, California just a half-hour north of San Francisco.
Recently, I’ve read two great books about habits and it struck me: the difference between senior and junior software engineers is not only in the size of their paycheck; most importantly it’s in their habits!
Recently, I’ve read two great books about habits and it struck me: the difference between senior and junior software engineers is not only in the size of their paycheck; most importantly it’s in their habits!
Time goes fast! It’s been six months since I’ve joined Storify in December 2012. Many cool things have happened, including a bunch of new releases, a company retreat and a hackweek.
Time goes fast! It’s been six months since I’ve joined Storify in December 2012. Many cool things have happened, including a bunch of new releases, a company retreat and a hackweek.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of life and our purpose on planet Earth. Just kidding! I was thinking why so many programmers are unhappy. Programming is fun and creative after all. The main reason for the unhappiness is that such engineers don’t believe in the software product they’re building. They don’t see how it can benefit end-users. Maybe they don’t even know who their end-users are.
This feeling was not unfamiliar to me at times when I was working for government agencies, but it’s foreign to me now. At Storify our team (myself included) love the product. We see the direct impact it brings to the users, e.g., The White House, ABC News and CBS News. Storify enables people to tell their stories which might otherwise get lost in the sea of social media noise. This contemplation brought me to the conclusion that it’s important to ship code that matters.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of life and our purpose on planet Earth. Just kidding! I was thinking why so many programmers are unhappy. Programming is fun and creative after all. The main reason for the unhappiness is that such engineers don’t believe in the software product they’re building. They don’t see how it can benefit end-users. Maybe they don’t even know who their end-users are.
On the sixth day six after departing from San Francisco, buspreneurs gathered to socialize and to let steam off at a happy hour organized by Twillio. GhostPost brought a projector to the bar to show their anonymous live chat. The funny story is that the projector was sold to them by of a fellow busmate (from the Grassroots.io team) whose Austin-based friend the Grassroots guy to handle the Craigslist projector ad. :-) Apparently the GhostPost team weren’t happy with their defeat (and who would be?) and hustled their way through the competition to become an All-Star wildcard — and by the evening they were indeed selected as a wildcard!
On the sixth day six after departing from San Francisco, buspreneurs gathered to socialize and to let steam off at a happy hour organized by Twillio. GhostPost brought a projector to the bar to show their anonymous live chat. The funny story is that the projector was sold to them by of a fellow busmate (from the Grassroots.io team) whose Austin-based friend the Grassroots guy to handle the Craigslist projector ad. :-) Apparently the GhostPost team weren’t happy with their defeat (and who would be?) and hustled their way through the competition to become an All-Star wildcard — and by the evening they were indeed selected as a wildcard!
StartupBus 2013 West Coast – random stop
Rackspace bought out the Champions sports bar in downtown Austin. GhostPost and other teams pitched during the evening to Dave McCure, Robert Scobler, and other important startup personas. The sound quality wasn’t very good. Every now and then somebody would shush the drunk, happy and tired crowd, but that didn’t help much. Despite it being very entertaining to watch Dave McClure rip apart startups and Robert (because he saw the evolution during the span of 3 days) explain and sometime defend them — in the end the decision was the same. They announced that the winner was CareerMob, and the runner up was NextChaptr.
StartupBus 2013 — Dave McClure and Rober Scoble
Summary of StartupBus 2013
Overall StartupBus is a great experience but I can’t say that it has changed my life. :-) There are similarities to a real startup life:
Scarcity of resources, balance of risks and trade-offs, ample creativity to solve problems
Building, motivating and selling the concept to your team while pitching your idea to judges
Human drama: communication issues, interactions among team members in close quarters, under stress, without enough sleep, etc.
Startup lifestyle: exhaustion, abundance of stress
But some things are far from the reality. Mainly, in an actual startup:
Founders can focus not only on consumer segment, but also on small business and/or enterprise customers. Obviously, due to the lack of time and resource constraints buspreneurs targeted consumer audience.
Team needs to be serious and to pick not just fun and sexy ideas to get the most buzz. Solid business models usually come from ugly and boring, though concrete and painful problems.
These days, anyone who wants to start up a business has full-time reliable and even speedy Internet access without having to get stranded in the middle of a desert or having your mobile hot-spot picking up Mexican cell phone carriers. :-)
My conclusion is that a StartupBus trip was a good experience, but it’s not exactly the same as building a real startup.
The competition was set up that there would be one winner and one runner up from the pitch competition, two winners from the alumni bus (NYC) and two winners from the score competition. They selected six out of twelve teams for the finals…
On day four of our StartupBus hackathon we arrived in San Antonio, Texas. Unlike on the previous days, we settled in a nice Four Points by Sheraton hotel. The West Coast bus came first, then right after us came the bus from Mexico City, representing the whole country of Mexico. Despite being exhausted, buspreneurs filled the hotel lobby with loud voices and cheers in English and Spanish. In a few hours, the rest of the buses arrived:
Chicago representing the Midwest,
Tampa representing the Southeast,
New York City representing the East Coast,
Alumni bus from NYC representing people who participated in the previous years competitions.
Because semi-finals and finals were supposed to take place on the next day, after the dinner pretty much all the teams kept on working till late at night.
The next day, after breakfast in the hotel, we (over 150 StartupBus participants) were transported to the Rackspace HQ, a.k.a. The Mothership. It is situated in San Antonio, and was just a short ride from the hotel. Although our driver managed to get lost due to roads blocked by construction. The Rackspace HQ building is a huge box-like structure resembling a shopping mall. It is surrounded by parking lots and construction (they moved here recently) in a suburban area. We were met like rockstars, but were told not to explore anything outside of the huge hangar-like room. Knowing that most hackers disrespect any rules, Rackspace management wisely put lots of employees and security guards around us. The lunch food was subpar. Elias Bizannes (the founder of StartupBus) and other judges listened to each of more than 40 teams pitch individually. Here is a list of the teams:
StartupBus 2013 North Americacs: facebook.com/startupbus
AdventureCo.de
BriefSkate
CareerMob
Chromatix
Cloudspotting
Coderswb
Deliverish
DrunkSpotting*
Dry Erase Web
Emplify
Eventee
ExVersion
Fitchallenge
FlightShuffle
Friends Judging Friends
GhostPost.io
Gifdme
Grassroots.io
InstaLodger (alumni)
Jobber.io
MyBestRx (alumni)
NextChaptr
Nomscription
Ovrviews
Payvine
Portioned
Producers
Readin.gs
RepCheck (alumni)
SkillMeUp
Storedrobe
TagSet
Thumbtrotter
uSupply.me
Wrong Credit Score
Yaank (alumni)
More information on each team is available at StartupBus.com LeaderBoard.
DrunkSpotting was formed after the main competition on the way from San Antonio to Austin.
The judges looked at a few criteria such as working prototypes (or the lack thereof) and team commitment, and chose twelve teams. Here is the list of the finalists and the descriptions of their projects/startups:
CareerMob (NYC): website that helps military professionals to find their civilian career
Usupply.me (Mexico): marketplace for construction industry)
NextChaptr (Chicago): book publisher with a kick starter model
Grassroots.io (SF): kick starter for activism campaigns (e.g., [FixTheDMCA.org]http://www.fixthedmca.org/)
Gifdme (Chicago): animated way to share emotions via GIFs.
Next, those twelve teams pitched on-stage to Robert Scoble of Rackspace, Nicholas Longo of CoffeeCup software and GeekDome, and other judges from sponsors such as Elance and Rackspace. That was probably the most entertaining part of the whole competition! GhostPost and Cloudspotting had killer presentations. The former had a live anonymous chat on huge screens with all the unfiltered messages from the audience shown in real-time. GhostPost grabbed everybody’s attention when Elias read a Cease and Desist email, and people fell in love with GhostPost’s beautifully crafted PAC-MAN-like avatars. The latter team spokesperson can easily perform stand-up comedy: e.g., he said that Cloudspotting is not the first company to make money on clouds (Google, Rackspace, Dropbox). To appreciate the joke, you need to know that Cloudspotting allows users to draw on pictures of clouds and share their creations. :-)
The competition was set up that there would be one winner and one runner up from the pitch competition, two winners from the alumni bus (NYC) and two winners from the score competition. They selected six out of twelve teams for the finals:
Tired but relieved (for most of the people the competition was over), we went on to celebrate. The six finalists kept on working for the second sleepless night.
Read more about the finals and the conclusion summary in my next blog post.
