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Discussion on: I'm Junade Ali, author of multiple software books and working on a PhD in theoretical computer science. Ask me anything!

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Jason Maurer

What got you interested in development at such a young age, and how did you learn the necessary skills to land your first gig?

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Junade Ali

Largely tinkering and writing code from old software engineering books - like most developers, learning development the trial-and-error way. My first few jobs included a lot of technical debt and the book Refactoring by Martin Fowler was really important for me to learn those skills.

It was a culture shock moving into formal engineering environments (such as for the automotive industry or working on defence projects) as reliability became a key focus there and I quickly learnt about formal correctness of programs and TDD. My Masters degree was where I learnt about the academic process and basing knowledge of rigorous research of published work.

Anecdote: When I was doing a Cloudflare meet-up in Sydney a month or so ago; a 13 year old came to the meet-up and jokingly claimed he would achieve "world domination, one Google search at a time".

We're generally lucky that there's so much (mis)information around software development online, and there is so much content that will help you build basic websites and apps. When things get tougher, that's when you need to read deeper, gain more experience (and in my case, go back to school).