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How to Level Up Your Dev Game

Kim Arnett  on July 05, 2017

A year and a half ago, I was questioning my career as a developer. I love making things, don't get me wrong, but I was very disappointed with what ...
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martyhimmel profile image
Martin Himmel

I love this! A lot of great practical advice.

Personally, one of the areas I struggle with is immersing myself in the online community. I can't tell you how many times I started typing something out, only to delete it (ironically, I almost did that with this comment). I think it comes with the introverted nature. :)

Meetups and conferences are serious game changers. I probably wouldn't have made the career transition (15 years as a dental tech, turned web dev/aspiring game dev) if it weren't for a Ruby meetup I went to. I tinkered a little bit before then, but never seriously put the time into it. After the first meetup I went to, I went all in and made the career change less than a year later.

Teaching is another one of my favorite things to do. When I started working at my current job, I found out a few people were interested in learning JavaScript, so I volunteered to teach them. I think teaching has a lot of benefits - it reinforces what you know, makes you dig deeper into code and ideas, helps you realize you know more than you realize, helps you learn more, etc.

And getting away from the usual is incredibly important. I'm an avid gamer, so even away from the work related stuff, I'm still looking at a screen a lot. But I also love hiking, and I've recently taken up biking. I've also started a weekly blog that combines my love of video games and teaching/education - basically talking about life lessons learned from video games. For me, fun projects like that act as a creative outlet and are completely different from regular work, so it's much more relaxing.

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Kim Arnett 

Sounds like you've figured it out too :) I hear you on deleting things - this post also almost got deleted, and look at all the great feedback I've had on it. lol.
Introverting is hard, but sometimes you just have to swallow, close your eyes, and press the button. :)

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Ben Halpern

Hell yes. Great post. None of this is obvious. I remember a feeling of being pretty lost early on in my career, not really knowing "how to level up". I knew how to code, but I didn't really know how to develop software and I was actually working solo despite my junior status, so I was feeling quite directionless. I went to my first Ruby meetup and a few things kicked me in the right direction:

  1. Sandi Metz was speaking. I hadn't heard of her, but damn was her talk just what I needed in terms of thinking about writing object-oriented code.
  2. Someone recommended the Ruby Rogues podcast, before this I didn't know about developer podcasts.
  3. I could talk to people about what I was dealing with.

It's hard to imagine now how little I knew about any of these things, but this experience really hit on the value of several of the topics you mention.

Once you have hit on all the checkmarks in your post for the first time, I'd say a goal is to keep yourself from getting too jaded. Keep looking for opportunities to get excited about the technology. Repeated exposure to all of this will keep the fire burning. It's easy to get tired of meetups because you have other priorities, but if you take some time off, remember that you can always go back to this groove to become reinvigorated.

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kaydacode profile image
Kim Arnett 

Definitely! Thanks for sharing :)
Finding my second wind was how I came across robots! Best thing you can do for your career is keep learning, doesn't matter what it is. Glad you mentioned Podcasts, I forgot about them, eek.

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Marcelo Alves 🐙

This is great! Lately I've been feeling a bit stuck in my career and with being the only developer on a project I have no idea what I need to learn or where I need to improve. The biggest takeaway for me from your list is to really put yourself out there and look for people you can really learn from which both things scare the hell out of me! 🙂

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Kim Arnett 

Take it in small doses, it gets easier 😊 I didn't talk to anyone at my first conference, but by conference three I've made quite a few friends already.
I really like twitter for learning what other people are doing though- you reach a broader audience. Do some searches for senior dev's, dev's you respect, etc, look at the people they follow, follow them too. 😊

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Vincent Grovestine

Nearly 20 years in the business, I've lost a bit of my mojo. Was once an active backend web dev, but now largely a grunt in operational IT.

Thanks for taking the time to put in writing what I (and likely many others) already know but hardly practice. A needed kick in the pants, for the second half of my career! :)

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Kim Arnett 

We're all in this together! You can do it :D

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Adnan Rahić

Very insightful. I wholeheartedly agree! The biggest boost to my career was teaching. I started teaching courses and hosting meetups roughly a year ago. Nothing can compare to the learning process of teaching others. Really best explained through a quote I really like:

"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." - Guidon

Same goes for explaining programming concepts. Not until you explain it thoroughly to yourself can you explain it to someone else.

Thanks for the article, I genuinely enjoyed it. :)

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edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

Great tips.

The one I'd like to add is: "Make time to do something else."

Beyond just staving off burnout, it makes you a more interesting person. Even the most avid programmer gurus will occassionally veer off into other topics. By having non-technical hobbies you'll make moreself a more interesting person. It will also help you find the humanity in other technical people.

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Kim Arnett 

Absolutely- I forgot about this one. I'll add it when I get to an actual computer. This has been extremely important in my experience as well. Something people don't take the time to do because of all the social pressure of "hacking all night" and side projects. Thanks for sharing!

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Cyril Gips

Great post Kim, I think most of us have had a point where we have questioned our career .

I attended my first conference last week and it was great, there were so many inspiring talks and I had great discussions with people. It left me with some great new things to try and test.

I must agree that the whole "putting yourself out there" thing is hard, I have had half a blog post saved for over a month now and keep finding reasons to not finish it. But I'll get there, small steps and all that...

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Gerade Geldenhuys

Yes. This was me not more than 18 months ago. With my earlier 4 years of experience developing on the web, I felt “bored”. Don’t get me wrong, I will always love doing web development, but I needed to spice up the professional side of my life.

So I decided to add native mobile development to my bag of tricks, and that decision alone opened up all those aspects (you mention above) of being a software developer, which I knew existed, but never really paid any attention to.

I’m still working on doing the Blogging and attending conferences, but eh, all in due time.

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Kim Arnett 

Blogging is difficult. When I find time I try to write a couple, then queue them up for when I don't have time. Mostly a winter activity too. In Michigan we only have so much good weather, so I enjoy every bit I can!

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Edward Fernández

Hi Kim.

Nice post, I love it. It got me when you said "There's a lot of pressure to learn everything you can, and to have a thousand side projects going" and "It's a LOT of pressure. Make time for yourself". For so long I felt to be so bad on development that the only thing that I can do was crying because I felt so lost in my career.

I want to start blogging about Game Development or Software Development but, sometimes I feel that the only thing I can write is: "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I AM DOING... [Insert some cat meme]" haha.

What do you think about when you are new about something but you want to write about it?

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Niko 👩🏾‍💻

100% this!! I learned many of these lessons the hard way this year after realizing that something must be off about my approach. Recently started to expand my knowledge of design methods and questioning my practices, but I still need to work on the blogging bit :). Thanks for sharing!

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Julian 🌐

Great post & excellent writing! I was especially fond of one particular quote,
and thought I was the only user that had same experience when you described,
"trolls everywhere.. but find a community that will help fight them off with you, not join in on them. I deleted my reddit account (twice) just for this reason.."
Great advice and thank your for your column.

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Kim Arnett 

Thank you! One thing I've definitely learned is no matter the experience, you are never alone. That's one reason I love the DEV community so much, they've helped me realize that.

But really, some platforms are just a haven for people like that. Avoid like the plague. lol.

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Damien Cosset

Thanks for the tips. I'll try to attend a tech conference in the near future.

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xiaohuoni

In addition to,WeChat group。

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kaydacode profile image
Kim Arnett  • Edited

What's wechat?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

WeChat is an incredibly popular Chinese messaging app. I think it's the reason for the hype around messaging/chatbots in the states.

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Friben Tech

I love this post! This is the simplest post I've ever read that shows how to enter the tech world. Thank you very much and I will re-visit this post again in the future.

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Kim Arnett 

Glad you found value in it! Thanks for reading.

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Netanel Ravid

We all want to learn as much as we can but we forgot to take care to ourselves.
Delightful article!